Category: UNCATEGORIZED

luckily, there was a an enterprising individual who was who was able to find a way to kill it and it didn’t impact the US as much.dddddddThe U.S. government may not be able to prevent another global cyberattack like WannaCry, a senior cybersecurity official has said.

Jeanette Manfra, the assistant director for cybersecurity for Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF that the 2017 WannaCry cyberattack, which saw hundreds of thousands of computers around the world infected with ransomware, was uniquely challenging because it spread so quickly.

“I don’t know that we could ever prevent something like that,” said Manfra, referring to another WannaCry-style attack. “We just have something that completely manifests itself as a worm. I think the original perpetrators didn’t expect probably that sort of impact,” she added.

The WannaCry cyberattack was the first major global security incident in years. Hackers believed to be associated with North Korea used a set of highly classified hacking tools that only weeks earlier had been stolen from the National Security Agency and published online. The tools allowed anyone who used them to infect thousands of vulnerable computers with a backdoor. That backdoor was used to deliver the WannaCry payload, which locked out users from their own files unless they paid a ransom.

Making matters worse, WannaCry had wormable properties, allowing it to spread across a network and making it difficult to contain.

Although the National Security Agency never publicly acknowledged the theft of its hacking tools, Homeland Security said at the time that users were “the first line of defense” against the threat of WannaCry. Microsoft released security fixes weeks earlier, but many had not installed the patches.

“Updating your patches would have prevented a fair amount of people from from being a victim,” said Manfra. Yet data shows that two years after the attacks, more than a million computers remained vulnerable to the ransomware.

Manfra said “bad things are going to happen,” but that efforts to mobilize government and the private sector can help combat cyberattacks as they emerge.

“Luckily, there was a an enterprising individual who was able to find a way to kill it and it didn’t impact the U.S. as much,” she said.

Marcus Hutchins, a malware reverse engineer and security researcher, registered a domain name found the ransomware’s code which when registered acted as a “kill switch,” stopping the ransomware from spreading. Hutchins was hailed as an “accidental hero” for his efforts. Hutchins and his colleague Jamie Hankins spent a week ensuring the kill switch stayed up, helping to prevent millions of further infections.

Manfra’s remarks came just weeks after her department warned of a new, emerging threat posed by BlueKeep, a vulnerability found in Windows 7 and earlier, which experts say has the capacity to trigger another global incident similar to the WannaCry attack. BlueKeep can be exploited to run malicious code — such as malware or ransomware — on an affected system.

Like WannaCry, BlueKeep also has wormable properties, allowing it to spread to other vulnerable computers on the same network.

It’s estimated that a million internet-connected devices are vulnerable to BlueKeep. Security researchers say it’s a matter of time before bad actors develop and use a working exploit to carry out a cyberattack.

Editor’s Note

This week, we hosted 23 panels on all aspects of building startups on the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Thanks to the thousands of attendees who attended those talks, as well as the workshops we held on the Breakout Stage — your enthusiasm was palpable.

We also had hundreds of new EC members join during the conference — to all of you: welcome!

This newsletter covers all of last week, and is a bit abbreviated thanks to Disrupt. Back to normal next week.

Where top VCs are investing in edtech

Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham interviewed almost a dozen leading venture capitalists about the state of edtech, including Jennifer Carolan of Reach Capital, Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, and Charles Birnbaum of Bessemer. There is still a lot of enthusiasm for the space, but the theses for these investors have diverged quite significantly.

Marlon Nichols , Managing Partner at MaC Venture Capital (a new LA-based seed fund with investments in Catalyte, Codeverse, and Wonderschool):

“Many education technology companies target individual teachers, which presents a long path to sizable revenue (requires too many customers) while others usually attempt to navigate the lengthy and bureaucratic sales cycle of selling to school districts. VCs prefer companies that have short sales cycles that can scale revenue quickly so in general, edtech companies are difficult investments for venture capital.

That said, education is a giant opportunity in the US because high quality education is not evenly distributed across communities or social classes. It’s a crisis. Companies that address this at scale are attractive if the revenue model makes sense. That’s why I led the first round into Wonderschool, which delivers high quality education and child care at costs relative to one’s zip code. The schools double as the educator’s home so there isn’t a need for real estate investment.”

Why is Dropbox reinventing itself? A chat with Dropbox VP of Product Adam Nash and CTO Quentin Clark

Dropbox may be known for its singular file storage product, but the company is adapting and changing as it seeks new customers and also learns more about what “file storage” really means to users.

The tech industry has won at capitalism. From America to China, from Amazon to Alibaba, from Alphabet to Tencent, the most valuable and most dynamic companies in the world are technology companies. But what kind of capitalism? Because there are really two different modes, two ways to get rich.

One is to claim a share of the wealth that already exists. This is the capitalism of Wall Street, of Russia¹, of cronies and rent-seekers, of the infamous “resource curse.” Obviously the more wealth there is around you, the more incentivized this approach becomes. Call it the siphon.

The other is to create new wealth; manufacture better goods, offer better services, design better hardware, write better software. This is — or is supposed to be — the capitalism of Silicon Valley, of China², of rocket ships and electric cars, of Moore’s Law. Obviously this is the purer, more idealistic form of capitalism. Call it the forge.

It seems apparent that public opinion has turned sharply agains the tech industry of late:

Isn’t that surprising? After all, Silicon Valley is building new and better things for us all, while Wall Street, having offered essentially no generally beneficial financial innovations in decades, is greedily siphoning off roughly a quarter of all American profits; the pharmaceutical industry is spending vastly more on marketing than on R&D; and the rest of the US health-care industry is basically a huge kludge of a bloodsucking siphon.

So why has tech, the forge of the modern world, found itself in the crosshairs of a backlash?

I put it to you that this is in part because while tech likes to portray itself as a forge, in many prominent cases, it is actually a siphon. Consider Facebook, Twitter, and Google. All are unquestionably forges, whose new products have done many good things. But that’s not their business model. Their business model, their original sin, is that siphon called advertising.

You could once have argued that advertising is a forge, in that is makes consumers aware of desirable products, just as you could once have argued Wall Street was a forge, in that it makes capitalism more efficient. No longer, in both cases. Online display / social-media advertising has become the tech equivalent of high-frequency trading: a pure siphon. (You can, however, make a good case for Google’s AdWords as a forge.)

People know when they’re being siphoned. What’s more, the industry being siphoned from is the media, which is unsurprisingly now inclined to train its own guns on tech as a result.

It’s not just ads. A more nuanced view is that “siphon” and “forge” are two ends of a spectrum, and numerous notable tech companies are closer to the former than the latter. Every app aimed at the wealthy-urbanite target market is essentially a siphon aimed at the wallets of the rich. (Yes, forge technology is often only affordable by the rich at first, too; but that’s very different from servants-as-a-service.) WeWork was, apparently, largely a siphon for SoftBank.

When people are angry at Amazon, Uber, and Lyft for how they treat warehouse workers, Whole Foods clerks, and drivers, it’s in large part because it seems to them like the wealthiest industry in the world is acting like a siphon geared to drain the minimal wealth of struggling workers, rather than a forge building new systems to empower and enrich us all.

Of course some of this criticism is unfair. And what almost every tech luminary really wants is to follow the Elon Musk model, wherein his stint at PayPal — which, like all payments companies³, is at least half siphon, albeit one largely aimed at even less appealing rivals — funded the forges of SpaceX and Tesla.

But all too often, the road to a siphon is paved with good intentions of a forge. Say what you want about Wall Street, at least they’re not hypocrites; high-frequency traders and hedge funds rarely pretend to be making the world a better place for anyone but themselves and their clients. This perceived hypocrisy is especially acute for companies like Facebook and Twitter, which offer “free” products from their forges … carefully engineered to optimize the siphons on which they survive.

In retrospect it’s surprising it took this long for the tension between the siphon and the forge to erupt into the cultural dissonance in which social media, and gig-economy apps, and indeed much of the publicly visible tech industry, now exists. While that tension continues, it’s hard to imagine this dissonance diminishing.

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¹ An oversimplification — again, it’s really more a spectrum than a binary — but not an invalid one.
² An oversimplification — again, it’s really more a spectrum than a binary — but not an invalid one.
³ Excepting those which create whole new kinds of payments, such as M-Pesa.

Hey everyone. Thank you for welcoming me into you inbox yet again.

Last week, I talked about Juul’s unraveling mission statement and the highly-valued startup’s new Big Tobacco CEO. I got some great email responses and plenty of a pro-Juul DMs.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

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The big story

This section might slowly turn into my grievance of the week, but this week the tale isn’t a screed against Juul, it’s a prolonged eye roll after the merger of two adtech companies responsible for pumping the internet full of garbage.

Taboola and Outbrain have merged forming a $2 billion adtech giant. Those startup names likely don’t mean much to you, but they’re both responsible for a lot of the publishing world’s junkiest ad units.

You’ve seen them. You’ve tried not to see them.

These startups grew their networks by sending traffic from one partner to another and incentivizing the flow of more traffic through them.

By adding a bit of Javascript, publications were able to bring in traffic and more importantly effortless cash. It’s been an irresistible sell to plenty of publishers, but it’s also been an eyesore for many of them and a race to the bottom in terms of selling the most salacious headlines. This has brought in revenues to publications that aren’t afraid to sell a bit of

Being an adtech “giant” is pretty relative these days. Taking on Google and Facebook’s overwhelming ad duopoly is an incredibly noble goal — I would love for a true competitor to emerge — but I have very little faith that a frankensteined fusion of these two crap ad companies is going to do much to halt a war path, I hope someone else can find a path.

Send me feedback
on Twitter @lucasmtny or email
lucas@techcrunch.com

On to the rest of the week’s news.

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:

• Microsoft’s dual screen unveil
  Microsoft dove headfirst into dual-screen folding displays at its hardware event this week. Take a peek at the Neo and Duo. Read more here.
• Tesla buys a startup
  Tesla has been arranging its efforts around robo taxies and its now making some acquisitions to bolster its presence. See them all here.

GAFA Gaffes

How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:

1. Facebook news can’t be trusted:
   [Facebook leads in news consumption among social feeds, but most don’t trust it]

 

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Did you miss the deadline to apply for Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Well don’t despair, founders. There’s more than one way to place your early-stage startup in front of thousands of influential technologists, investors and global media. Apply to be considered for our TC Top Picks program and the opportunity to exhibit in Startup Alley for free.

Deadline alert: You must apply to be a TC Top Pick by 18 October at 12 p.m. (PT). It’s simple to do and it’s free. Don’t let this opportunity slip through your time-strapped fingers.

TC Top Picks is a pre-conference competition. To be considered, your early-stage startup must fall within one of the following categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, CRM/Enterprise and Education.

Our TechCrunch editors — always on the hunt for the best early-stage startups — will vet each application and select up to five startups in each category. If you’re named a TC Top Pick, you’ll receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and a VIP experience at Disrupt Berlin.

What sort of startup catches TechCrunch’s discerning editorial eyes? Great question. Take a look at the list of TC Top Picks from Disrupt Berlin 2018.

The exclusive TC Top Pick cadre will exhibit in a prime location within Startup Alley and — thanks to plenty of pre-conference marketing — be on the receiving end of intense investor and media interest. One of the best perks is the live Showcase Stage interview. TechCrunch editors interview each Top Pick to showcase their company and product. We record the interview and promote the video across our social media platforms.

If you’re still kicking yourself for missing the Startup Battlefield deadline, here’s more good news. There’s always the possibility that you’ll compete as a Wild Card. Say what, now?

Out of all the startups exhibiting in Startup Alley, TechCrunch editors will choose one — the Wild Card — to compete in the Startup Battlefield. At Disrupt Berlin 2018, TC editors chose Legacy, and the feisty startup went on to win the Startup Battlefield and the $50,000 prize.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, and TC Top Picks is your chance to place your extraordinary startup in front of the people who can move your business forward. If you want to exhibit in Startup Alley for free, do not miss this deadline. Apply to be a TC Top Pick before 18 October at 12 p.m. (PT). We’ll see you in Berlin!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Several months back, we invited HTC cofounder and CEO Cher Wang to appear on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. Sometimes, however, life happens. Two weeks ago, the company announced that Wang would be stepping down from the role, which would immediately be filled by longtime telecom vet, Yves Maitres. Thankfully, the former Orange exec also agreed to appear on stage at this week’s event.

Maitres took the stage immediately following a one on one with OnePlus cofounder, Carl Pei. The contrast of the two companies couldn’t be more stark. In six short years of existence, OnePlus has managed to buck a number of industry trends with a controlled growth that flies in the face of wider industry smartphone trends.

HTC, meanwhile, has been struggling for years. In Q2, the Taiwanese hardware maker posted its fifth consecutive quarterly loss. Last July, it laid off around a quarter of its staff. It’s been a precipitous fall. In 2011, the company comprised around 11 percent of global smartphone sales, per analyst figures. Now its figures are routinely classified among the “Others” in those reports.

Speaking to Maitres at an event such as this offers a rare opportunity for insight from a newly minted exec who has spent years watching his new company from the outside. As such, he addressed HTC’s struggles with a refreshing candidness.

“HTC has stopped innovating in the hardware of the smartphone,” he told the audience. “And people like Apple, like Samsung and, most recently, Huawei, have done an incredible job investing in their hardware. We didn’t, because we have been investing in innovation on virtual reality. When I was young, somebody told me, ‘to be be right at the wrong time is to be wrong and to be wrong at the right time is right.’ I think we’ve been right at the wrong time and now we have to catch up. We made a timing mistake. It is very difficult to anticipate the time. HTC made a mistake in terms of timing. It is a difficult mistake and we are paying for that, but we still have so many assets in terms of innovation, team and balance sheets that I feel we are recovering from the timing mistake.”

‘Timing,’ here, is primarily a reference to the company’s decision to move much of its R&D money into XR (primarily VR through its Vive wing). Maitres said he anticipates that HTC’s XR offerings will overtake the mobile side in about five years.

“We’ll do our best to make it shorter, but customer adoption is key,” he explained. “How people are adopting your technology. And we all know know it is absolutely critical. And the end of the day, we have human beings in front of us, and they’re dealing with something total new and totally unusual, which is virtual.”

On the mobile side, Maitres sees 5G as the primary bottleneck to growth. Contrary to suggestions that the company’s best play is in developing nations, he says HTC’s play going forward will be more premium handset focused on “countries with higher GDP.”

“The competition is changing,” he says. “We’re all having a situation where worldwide marketshare is going down and the customer is disappointed in not being to have the latest Huawei phone anymore. How to give our customers the ability to come back to what they wish, in terms of best in class hardware and photography that HTC to will to solve in the next few months.”

While figures will largely be dependent on decisions Brough to HTC’s board, Maitres maintains optimistic projections when it comes to returning the company profitability.

“I truly believe that it is going to depend on the way carriers deploy 5G,” he says. “And you know that 2020 will bee the starting point for 5G. Usually it takes two years to deploy a network. So 2023 will have significant coverage. That’s why I believe that 2025, probably even earlier will be the turning point. We are dependent on carrier deployment speed.”

If you want to set your movie or game on the Moon, it’s not hard to find imagery of our photogenic satellite. But NASA has just released a useful and beautiful new set of data just for creators that includes not just imagery but depth data, making it simple to build an incredibly detailed 3D map of the Moon.

The CGI Moon Kit comes from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where science visualization expert Ernie Wright found that data he had assembled for other purposes was proving popular with 3D artists.

The data came from two instruments on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft that has been in orbit around the Moon for more than a decade, snapping pictures and taking measurements the whole time.

On board the LRO is a high-quality “traditional” camera (really a sophisticated multispectral imager), which it has been using to build an amazingly high-quality map of the lunar surface. It can only capture a small portion at a time, but it does so constantly and as its orbit has shifted, it has captured pretty much the entire visible area of the Moon, though some shadowy regions can’t be imaged even after passing over them thousands of times.

Great photographs are only one part of a map, though. If you really want to recreate the surface of the Moon you need information on the topology of its surface as well. And that’s what the LRO’s laser altimeter has been collecting.

The laser altimeter works like any typical orbital laser ranger you have around the house. It sends a pulsed laser towards the surface and tracks both how long it takes to come back and how strong it is. These tell the device how far away the surface is (and therefore its altitude) down to half a meter, and what that surface is like, for instance a hard rocky structure or soft powdered regolith.

That data is assembled into what’s called a displacement map, sort of like a topographic map where instead of the height actually changing, the color does. There are a couple varieties of this map, but the basic use case is the same: You overlay the displacement map on the photographic map, then wrap it all around a sphere — and you’ve got a virtual topographic globe.

Here’s a slower version of the GIF you see above.

This would be really interesting to explore in first person in a game where you build a lunar colony, or maybe have dogfights in spacecraft above a realistic lunar surface. Or maybe an artist could use it to create a model of the Moon like this one.

The CGI Moon Kit is free to download and all the assets are available with a few options that 3D artists will probably understand. You can learn more about it and get it here.

Adam Neumann may be out of the daily flow of WeWork, but he seemingly remains top of mind to some of the company’s bankers.

According to a new Business Insider piece, Neumann is working with JPMorgan, UBS, and Credit Suisse to consider new terms for a $500 loan that he took out before WeWork filed to go public, and from which Neumann has already drawn down $380 million. Since he can no longer pay the loan with proceeds from selling WeWork shares publicly (it yanked its S-1 earlier this week), he may have to put up some of his properties or other assets as collateral for the loan, according to one of BI’s sources.

“No terms have been set,” a spokeswoman for Neumann tells the outlet.

Per earlier reports, Neumann has plenty to offload if it comes to it, having acquired numerous residential and commercial properties over the years.

Among his reported investments is a $10.5 million Greenwich Village townhouse; a farm in Westchester, New York; a home in the Hamptons where he reportedly weathered the storm with his family ahead ahead of resigning as CEO; and a $21 million, 13,000-square-foot house in the Bay Area with a guitar-shaped room.

According to an earlier WSJ report, Neumann has also bought several properties through investor groups that he had leased back, in some cases, to WeWork.

WeWork, and Neumann, has enjoyed a cozy relationship with JPMorgan in recent years. As recently reported in the NYTimes,  JPMorgan “lent Mr. Neumann money personally (with his inflated shares as collateral), provided equity and debt for the company, served as a corporate adviser for the I.P.O. and secured nearly $6 billion in financing as part of the now scotched offering.”

At the very beginning, there were 20 startups. After two days of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner.

Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup.

After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: OmniVis, Orbit Fab, Render, StrattyX and Traptic.

These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included: Mamoon Hamid (Kleiner Perkins), Ashton Kutcher (Sound Ventures), Alfred Lin (Sequoia), Marissa Mayer (Lumi Labs), Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate Ventures) and Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch).

Winner: Render

Render has created a managed cloud platform. The company wants to provide an alternative to traditional cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure and GCP. And it starts with an infrastructure that is easier to manage thanks to automated deployments and a abstracted way to manage your application that is reminiscent of Heroku.

Read more about Render in our separate post.

Runner-Up: OmniVis

OmniVis aims to make detection of cholera and other pathogens as quick, simple and cheap as a pregnancy test. Its smartphone-powered detection platform could save thousands of lives.

Read more about OmniVis in our separate post.

NASA issues a new formal request for info from industry specifically around spacesuits. The agency is hoping to gather information in order to help it figure out a future path for acquisition of spacesuit production and services from external industry sources.

That doesn’t mean it’s outsourcing its spacesuit design and production immediately – NASA will build and certify its own spacesuits for use in the first Artemis missions, including Artemis III which is the one that’ll see the next American man and the first American woman take their trip to the lunar surface. But for Artemis missions after that, of which there are currently five more proposed (Artemis 4 through 8), four of which will have crew on board.

NASA has of course already worked with private industry, as well as academic institutions and researchers, on the technologies that will go into its own space suits. And the agency fully expects that the current exploration suit will form the basis of any future designs. It is however looking to fully transition their prouduction and testing to industry partners, and will additionally expect those partners to “facilitate the evolution of the suits” and also suggest improvements on the existing suit design.

On top of the suits, NASA is looking for input on tools and support hardware to be used with the suits, during extra-vehicular activities, or in making sure the suits work well with the vehicles that’ll be transporting them, as well as the lunar gateway that will act as the staging ground between Earth and the Moon’s surface.

Finally, NASA also would like to hear from companies about how to better commercialize spacesuits and spacewalks – making them available to customers outside of the agency itself, as well.

This isn’t surprising given how many signals NASA has been giving lately that it’s interesting in partnering with industry more deeply across both Artemis, future Mars exploration, and the ISS (and its potential commercial successor). The full RFI issued by NASA is available here, in case you’re interested in spinning up a spacesuit startup.