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At its annual Surface hardware event, Microsoft today announced the long-rumored ARM-based Surface, the first time Microsoft itself has launched a device with an ARM-based processor inside. The 13-inch device will use Microsoft’s own custom SQ1 chip, based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and an AI accelerator, making it the first Surface with an integrated AI engine. Microsoft and Qualcomm also worked on building custom-designed GPU cores for the Pro X, which will run Microsoft’s version of Windows 10 for ARM.

Microsoft started its flirtation with ARM-based devices a few years ago and that work culminated in the launch of a number of ARM-powered devices from HP, Asus and others, promising all-day battery life, the ability to still run almost every Windows application, and performance comparable to a lower-end Intel chip. To do this, Microsoft is using a binary translator that converts X86 instructions into ARM64 as necessary, while still compiling almost all of the native Windows 10 libraries for the ARM architecture.

Like Microsoft’s other new Surface devices, the 13-inch ARM-based Pro X will feature USB-C ports. The screen features a 1400:1 contrast ratio and a 2880×1920 resolution and can be extended to a 4k screen. At its thinnest point, the Pro x is 5.3mm thin and weighs 1.68 pounds. There’s also a removable hard-drive, a first for the Surface line.

Together with Qualcomm, Microsoft designed its own custom processor for this, the SQ1. Microsoft stressed the work the team did on building an AI engine into the chipset.

Microsoft also launched a new, slimmer Surface pen for the Pro X, which will feature its own storage space on the new Type Cover for the device.

It’s no secret that ARM itself has worked hard to bring its chip designed to laptops, desktops and servers. With every new generation of its design, the company talks about how it wants to get more of its chips into these machines, especially now that their performance is often more than adequate for many use cases. With this Microsoft partnership, it’s definitely getting a bit closer to this.

Microsoft just introduced the followup to its good Surface headphones — and get this, they’re designed specifically to work with Office. Priced at lofty $249, the wireless earbuds have a number of onboard productivity features, including Powerpoint slide forwarding, voice transcription and live translation (in 60 languages).

The earbuds are, in a word, huge. They look big in the sizzle reel and downright huge when demoed on stage. You can’t say Microsoft didn’t at least try something new — while the charging case looks almost identical to Samsung’s earbuds, the Surface are big and perfectly round.

Like other first-party earbuds, there’s easy one click pairing with Microsoft devices. Along with productivity features, they also work with your standard music streaming apps, including, most notably, Spotify.

 

As Facebook prepares to launch a “news tab” this month featuring news stories curated by humans to complement the headlines that appear in your social feed generated by your friends’ shares, paid promotions and algorithms, a new report paints a damning picture of how social media is viewed as a news platform today.

A survey from the Pew Research Center found that more than half of the US adults surveyed by the group this past July — some 52% — already get their news from Facebook, making it the most popular social platform for news sourcing, with YouTube and Twitter respectively the second- and third-most popular at 28% and 17%, and a variety of other platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit and Snapchat also making smaller but notable appearances.

Overall, a full 88% of all those surveyed believed that social media has “at least some control” over the news people see.

But sentiments about that control are poor.

A majority — 62% — of respondents believe social media has “too much control” over the mix of news we see on their platforms, and 55% said they believed that this results in a worse mix of news. A full 53% identified one-sided news and 51% named inaccurate news as “very big problems” on social media.

The findings are unsettling: they underscore an already-huge amount of power that the likes of Facebook have when it comes to news consumption, but they also underscore how people seem to have already determined that the effect of that has been bad.

They also come on the heels of disturbing stories about how much those platforms get manipulated by bad actors. The stories of how political groups and state actors hiding their identities have promoted misleading stories on social platforms stretch back years at this point, but even as the platforms work to try identify and take down these accounts, other misuse that is less hidden continues to arise.

Just last month, it was found that those promoting stories through paid channels (advertising, that is) can rewrite news headlines to fit their own political agendas, shifting the tone of the news for the vast majority of people who never click through to stories and only read the summary headlines as they scroll to see the latest pictures of their friends’ kids.

And it’s not just bad news for consumers. Publishers have long lamented that they don’t get a cut of any kind on the revenues that social platforms make from sharing their stories and turning them into monetizing traffic, and there have been some thinking that this would soon change as a result of increased regulatory scrutiny. However, a report in the WSJ this week implies that this might not be changing anytime soon. It claims that Facebook will only be paying a small handful of the publishers whose content will get shared in its human-curated news tab.

Drilling into some of the more interesting details, Pew found that Republicans are more cynical about the effect of social media on news than Democrats, with 75% of those on the right believing that social media has too much control, versus 53% of those on the left. Ironically, these numbers appear to run counter to the assumption that social media is an echo chamber of your own opinions.

Pew also notes that 48% of social media news consumers — recall that more Republicans than Democrats believe social media sites have too much control — believe the news they see is “liberal or very liberal.” That compares to 14% believing news is conservative or very conservative. This would support the feeling among many on the right that the media is too liberal, but also that they are being fed news that is not in keeping with their own political leanings.

The survey also puts paid to the recent report about how only a handful of publishers will get paid by Facebook: 82% of respondents feel that not all news sources are treated equally by social media now — meaning some get more circulation than others. Some 88% believe that those publishing “attention-grabbing” articles, otherwise known as “click bait”, are more likely to appear in feed. 84% believe that social media following plays an important role, and 79% believe that the political leaning of the story affects how much it appears in your feeds.

On the division between male and female readers, the report’s findings are not unsurprising and follow much of the same lines we’ve seen in other social media surveys: the likes of Reddit lean heavily to male readers, while Facebook leans female.

Lastly, while the report is more about bias in news and sentiment around that, it’s interesting also to note which platforms are appearing here and in what concentration. TikTok — which many think could be the next big juggernaut in social — is at less than one percent when it comes to being a platform for getting news. Snapchat, meanwhile, also is languishing at a mere 6% for news delivery.

Given their heavy concentration on younger users, this points to the fact that younger people are not really using any social channels to get news, but also that they are not particularly interested in reading news. Social platforms may currently be positioned as pariahs in the news landscape, but they don’t have to be: these could also be opportunities to change the conversation, bringing in more people who traditionally are not being cut in.

Pew surveyed 5,107 respondents from its American Trends research panel from July 8 to July 21.

Today at its special hardware event, Microsoft unveiled the new Surface Pro 7. The new Surface Pro finally brings USB-C to the convertible laptop category of Microsoft hardware, which will be a welcome addition for fans who’ve been waiting for the company to adopt this now-prevalent connection technology.

The latest generation Surface Pro starts at $749, preorders start today, and it’s available on October 22.

Like its predecessors, the Surface consists of a 12-inch tablet component with a folding kickstand for adjustable angle viewing. There’s also a detachable keyboard cover accessory, and a Surface Pen stylus that allows for writing, drawing, note-taking and more.

The Surface Pro also features ‘studio mics,’ new microphone array builds into the new Surface Laptop as well.

“Studio mics are optimized for your voice their place perfectly tuned, so that we capture what’s coming from your mouth rather than all the background sounds around you,” said Robin Seiler, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Devices who presented the new device on stage at the event. They’ll also be used for Microsoft’s Your Phone app, which is a recently released Windows feature that connects your smartphone to your computer for calls, messaging and more.

Surface Pro is the most popular two-in-one on the market, according to Microsoft, with over 75% of Fortune 500 companies purchasing Surface devices, according to Seiler.

Microsoft emphasized the creative potential of the Surface Pro in a video featuring an artist named Connie using the Pen for digital painting, and Seiler showed off the productivity angle via a live demo of various features of Office on the two-in-one.

 

The UK Court of Appeal has unanimously overturned a block on a class-action style lawsuit brought on behalf of four million iPhone users against Google — meaning the case can now proceed to be heard.

The High Court tossed the suit a year ago on legal grounds. However the claimants sought permission to appeal — and today that’s been granted.

The case pertains to allegations Google used tracking cookies to override iPhone users’ privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser between 2011 and 2012. Specifically that Google developed a workaround for browser settings that allowed it to set its DoubleClick Ad cookie without iPhone users’ knowledge or consent.

In 2012 the tech giant settled with the FTC over the same issue — agreeing to pay $22.5M to resolve the charge that it bypassed Safari’s privacy settings to serve targeted ads to consumers. Although Google’s settlement with the FTC did not include an admission of any legal wrongdoing.

Several class action lawsuits were also filed in the US and later consolidated. And in 2016 Google agreed to settle those by paying $5.5M to educational institutions or non-profits that campaign to raise public awareness of online security and privacy. Though terms of the settlement remain under legal challenge.

UK law does not have a direct equivalent to a US style class action. But in 2017 a veteran consumer rights campaigner, Richard Lloyd, filed a collective lawsuit over the Safari workaround, seeking to represent millions of UK iPhone users whose browser settings his complaint alleges were ignored by Google’s tracking technologies.

The decision a High Court judge last year to block the action boiled down to the judge not being convinced claimants could demonstrate a basis for bringing a compensation claim. Historically there’s been a high legal bar for that as UK law has required that claimants are able to demonstrate they suffered damage as a result of data protection violation.

The High Court judge was also not persuaded the complaint met the requirements for a representative action.

However the Appeals Court has taken a different view.

The three legal questions it considered were whether a claimant could recover damages for loss of control of their data under section 13 of the UK’s Data Protection Act 1998 “without proving pecuniary loss or distress”; whether the members of the class had the same interest as one another and were identifiable; and whether the judge ought to have exercised discretion to allow the case to proceed.

The court rejected Google’s main argument that UK and EU law require “proof of causation and consequential damage”.

It also took the view that the claim can stand as a representative procedure.

In concluding the judgment, the chancellor of the High Court writes:

… the judge ought to have held: (a) that a claimant can recover damages for loss of control of their data under section 13 of DPA, without proving pecuniary loss or distress, and (b) that the members of the class that Mr Lloyd seeks to represent did have the same interest under CPR Part 19.6(1) and were identifiable.

The judge exercised his discretion as to whether the action should proceed as a representative action on the wrong basis and this court can exercise it afresh. If the other members of the court agree, I would exercise our discretion so as to allow the action to proceed.

I would, therefore, allow the appeal, and make an order granting Mr Lloyd permission to serve the proceedings on Google outside the jurisdiction of the court.

Mishcon de Reya, the law firm representing Lloyd, has described the decision as “groundbreaking” — saying it could establish “a new procedural framework for the conduct of mass data breach claims” under UK civil procedure rules governing group litigations.

In a statement, partner and case lead, James Oldnall, said: “This decision is significant not only for the millions of consumers affected by Google’s activity but also for the collective action landscape more broadly. The Court of Appeal has confirmed our view that representative actions are essential for holding corporate giants to account. In doing so it has established an avenue to redress for consumers.”

Mishcon de Reya argues that the decision has confirmed a number of key legal principles around UK data protection law and representative actions, including that:

• An individual’s personal data has an economic value and loss of control of that data is a violation of their right to privacy which can, in principle, constitute damage under s.13 of the DPA, without the need to demonstrate pecuniary loss or distress. The Court, can therefore, award a uniform per capita sum to members of the class in representative actions for the loss of control of their personal data
• That individuals who have lost control of their personal data have suffered the same loss and therefore share the “same interest” under CPR 19.6
• That representative actions are, in practice, the only way that claims such as this can be pursued

Responding to the judgement, a Google spokesperson told us: “Protecting the privacy and security of our users has always been our number one priority. This case relates to events that took place nearly a decade ago and that we addressed at the time. We believe it has no merit and should be dismissed.”

The rumors for this morning’s Microsoft event are one-for-one. The first piece of hardware shown off this morning in New York is the latest version of the company’s very good Surface Laptop — arguably the strongest entry in the line.

As per earlier leaks, the Surface Laptop 3 arrives in 13.5 and 15 inch versions. Interestingly, Chief Product Officer Panos Panay spent much of the preamble discussing the product’s keyboard — seemingly a dig a Apple’s recent issues with MacBook Hardware. The top of the keyboard is easily removable, as well, for quick repair and access to the device’s components.

Inside, you’ll find a 10th gen quad-core Intel processor — which Panay claims is three times more powerful than the latest version of the MacBook Air. There’s also an AMD Ryzen GPU inside. 

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The Surface Laptop 3 arrives October 22, priced at $999 for the 13-inch and $1,199 for the 15 inch.

 

 

In October of 2018, Y Combinator published a mega list of the top 101 companies to have gone through the accelerator, as sorted by each company’s valuation.

This morning they updated the list.

Valuation as a ranking metric has its faults, of course. It’s a measurement largely of perception; a projection of a company’s perceived potential, rather than a direct indication of how much a company is actually making at a given moment. When publishing last year’s list, YC openly admitted that “valuation is a poor way to measure a company’s value in the short term.”

But it still provides some rather interesting insights into which of YC’s 2,000+ investments have grown the most, which have held strong over time, and which sectors perform the best. YC says that all of the companies that made this year’s list are each currently valued at $150M or more, with a cumulative valuation of $155 billion.

The new “Top 101”, according to YC:

1. Stripe
2. Airbnb
3. Cruise
4. DoorDash
5. Coinbase
6. Instacart
7. Dropbox
8. Ginkgo Bioworks
9. Gusto
10.   Flexport
11.   Rappi
12.   Brex
13.   Reddit
14.   Gitlab
15.   PagerDuty
16.   Checkr
17.   Segment
18.   Docker
19.   Scale
20.   Faire
21.   Twitch
22.   PlanGrid
23.   MixPanel
24.   Amplitude
25.   Optimizely
26.   Boom Supersonic
27.   Grin
28.   Meesho
29.   Algolia
30.   GOAT
31.   Zapier
32.   MessageBird
33.   Standard Cognition
34.   Memebox
35.   Embark
36.   Helion Energy
37.   EquipmentShare
38.   SendBird
39.   Rescale
40.   GoCardless
41.   Rigetti Computing
42.   Razorpay
43.   North
44.   Relativity Space
45.   Podium
46.   Benchling
47.   Ironclad
48.   Newfront
49.   InfluxData
50.   Webflow
51.   People.ai
52.   Weebly
53.   Xendit
54.   Matterport
55.   EasyPost
56.   Sift
57.   The Athletic
58.   Mattermost
59.   WePay
60.   Vidyard
61.   Weave
62.   Nurx
63.   Proxy
64.   Heap
65.   Payfazz
66.   memsql
67.   Fivetran
68.   Rippling
69.   Clever
70.   Heroku
71.   Fivestars
72.   CoreOS
73.   ClearTax
74.   Quero Education
75.   Ridecell
76.   HelloSign
77.   GrubMarket
78.   Lattice
79.   Unbabel
80.   Athelas Inc.
81.   Oh My Green
82.   Lever
83.   Atrium
84.   Zeus
85.   Front
86.   Le Tote
87.   ShipBob
88.   Snapdocs
89.   GitPrime
90.   Scribd
91.   Guesty
92.   Axoni
93.   Lob
94.   Notable
95.   Atomwise
96.   Flutterwave
97.   Panorama Education
98.   FutureAdvisor
99.   SFOX
100.     Lambda School
101.     ZeroDown

While the top ten companies remain largely the same from 2018, a few of them have danced around a bit while others have disappeared entirely. Airbnb was #1 last year, while Stripe was #2; in 2019, they’ve swapped places. Machine Zone, creators of the once wildly popular mobile game Game of War and the number 7 company in 2018, doesn’t appear on the list at all — nor does last year’s number 9, Zenefits. YC notes that this list isn’t necessarily exhaustive, as they “allowed alumni to opt out of being listed for any reason.”

Most of the companies on the list are at least 4 or 5 years old, which makes sense — it’s pretty uncommon for companies to hit massive, record breaking valuations right out of the gate. There are, of course, exceptions: Grin, a Latin American scooter rental company that sits at number 27 on this years list, just went through YC in Summer of 2018. Atrium, the tech-driven startup law firm founded by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, sits at number 83 and was part of the Winter 2018 class. ZeroDown, a company that aims to help people buy homes without a down payment, squeezed onto the list at number 101 after launching just months ago.

The Summer 2016 batch, meanwhile, has more appearances on the list than any other group, with the one class alone accounting for 10% of the list. The oldest company on the list is Reddit, which was part of YC’s Summer 2005 class, at number 13.

Sorted by sector, B2B Software/Services just absolutely dominates YC’s Top 101, accounting for 52% of the list. The next closest sector is FinTech at 15%, followed closely by consumer goods/services at 11%.

The vast majority (71%) of the list calls the Bay Area home, with 63% of the Top 101 companies hosting their headquarters in San Francisco. Four companies on the list, meanwhile, call no one physical place home — GitLab, Zapier, Mattermost, and SFOX all consider themselves primarily remote.

Want to poke around the list some more? You can find YC’s full list here.

Sidecar is great. It’s my favorite software thing Apple has introduced in years. I’m using it right now, as I type this, in fact. For a handle of app developers, however, the feature’s arrival with macOS Catalina was an expected, but still potentially devastating piece of news. We spoke to Duet Display and Astropad about the phenomenon of “Sherlock” that would profoundly impact their respective models. 

“We actually have a couple of other big product launches that are not connected to the space this summer,” Duet Founder and CEO Rahul Dewan said at the time. “We should be fairly diverse.” It seems Android tablet compatibility was pretty high on that list. Today the company announced a release for Google’s operating system, after several months of beta testing.

“Our users have frequently asked us to bring our product to Android, and since early this year, we have been working on an Android release of Duet so that we can expand our technology to new platforms,” Duet writes. “We have privately been beta testing with hundreds of users, working hard to create a robust product that performs well across as many Android devices as possible.”The app operates similarly to the iPad version, making it possible to use an Android tablet as a second display. That means, among other things, a much more affordable way to get a second screen for your laptop. The connection will work both wired and wireless. Current users will have to update the latest version of the Mac or Windows desktop version of the app.

It’s tough not to feel bad for a small developer effectively getting sidelined by native support (and really solid implementation in the case of Sidecar), but it’s nice to see Duet continuing to fight.

Fresh of its recent raise of $135 million, Lightricks, the maker of popular selfie editor Facetune and several other top consumer-focused photo editing applications, is branching out. The company this morning announced the launch of a suite of new mobile apps aimed at small businesses that want professional content creation tools to help them with their social media marketing campaigns.

Together, the new suite of apps is known as “BoostApps,” and includes StoryBoost for creating unique stories for Instagram; VideoBoost for making videos using your own clips, stock footage or both; and PosterBoost, which lets you turn photos into engaging posts for your business.

The move to serve the needs of small businesses was directed by how Lightricks saw its users taking advantage of its existing products, like Enlight Videoleap and Enlight Photofox, the company says.

When Lightricks surveyed its Videoleap subscriber base, for example, it found that roughly 30% were already using the app for business purposes.

“We understood then, that our next product had to be a tool specifically for businesses. Businesses are results-driven, and that’s the basis of the BoostApps — empowering and enabling businesses to create social media marketing materials that are not only beautiful, but also effective,” says Zeev Farbman, Lightricks Co-Founder and CEO.

Like its consumer line of apps, the BoostApps are designed to be easy to use — even if you’re not a photo-editing professional or have a social media marketing background.

Instead, they’re for people who consider themselves a small business owner, Farbman says. That could be a yoga teacher, startup entrepreneur, influencer, or anyone else.

“The common denominator is that they started their business because they were passionate about something, and then needed to become full-fledged marketers in addition to building their businesses,” he explains. “They know that social media can get them to their marketing goals, but they don’t know how to get results without investing too much time and money.”

Like the rest of the Lightricks line, the apps are subscription-based. StoryBoost and PosterBoost are $7.99 per month, and VideoBoost is $9.99 per month. There are also annual discounts ($44.99 or $59.99, respectively) and the option for a lifetime purchase ($99.99 or $119.99). And you can subscribe to all three in a bundle for $95.99 per year. 

Also like other Lightricks apps, the new BoostApps rely heavily on the company’s technology investments and A.I. Lightricks has a dedicated team whose job it is to figure out ways to integrate their most advanced and innovative research into their apps.

For example, it created a camera motion effect that can be used on every image, using A.I. technology to build a depth map that turns the images into engaging posters, says Farbman. They also created a video engine capable of producing a range of composition effects. And the results render in real-time on the device, to make the editing process feel fast.

While there are plenty of other companies offering creative tools for marketers, Lightricks brings its own knowledge of digital marketing to the table — something it credits with its own success, in fact.

The launch of the SMB-focused suite doesn’t mean Lightricks is pivoting to pro tools, however, Farbman clarified. It’s more of an expansion.

Case in point: the company today is also partnering with subscription beauty service BoxyCharm on a collaboration with Facetune2, which will allow users to virtually “try on” products in the October box using AR filters.

That said, Lightricks does plan to further expand BoostApps further down the road with more tools that will integrate scheduling, smart algorithms, and post optimization features.

The Jerusalem-headquartered company, which recently achieved unicorn status, is growing quickly. It now has over 300 employees, and expects to reach at least 500 by 2020. And despite the sizable funding round, Lightricks says it tries to stay profitable or as close to profitable as possible, even when launching new products.

Combined, its suite of apps has seen nearly 200 million downloads and has 3 million paying subscribers.

To date, Lightricks has raised $205 million.

BoostApps will be available today on iOS devices. (iOS 11 or higher).

 

Multiplayer games are more fun when you get to play with the same crew regularly. Playing with the same people means better cooperation, deeper strategies, and, if all goes well, more wins.

But what if none of your friends play the game you want to play?

Rune, a company out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 class, wants to use AI to help you find the right people to play with, connecting you via voice chat. And they’ve just closed a $2M seed round to get it done.

The round was led by the gaming-focused firm Makers Fund, and backed by byFounders, E14 Fund, VentureSouq, and Gmail creator Paul Buchheit.

The first game they’re supporting is Brawl Stars, the popular free-to-play mobile game built by Clash of Clans creator Supercell. It’s a pretty perfect game for something like this — it’s a game where strategic teams have a solid advantage, but where building such a team from scratch can be tough. Brawl Stars will automatically match you with teammates if you’re playing alone, but in-game communication is limited and random players tend to only hang around for a game or two.

When you first sign up, Rune asks you a handful of questions to start tuning their matchmaking algorithm. Which language(s) do you speak? How much Brawl Stars have you played (how many “trophies” have you earned?) What sort of gameplay are you looking for right now — are you just messing around, or are you looking for nothing but wins? Push a button, and the matchmaking system starts its search.

The more you play, the better the algorithm is tuned. If you seem to have longer play sessions with certain players, for example, it can prioritize matchmaking you with players their algorithms see as similar. (For the curious: while they will tune the matchmaking algorithms based on metadata like who you’re chatting with and for how long, Rune co-founder Sanjay Guruprasad tells me that they don’t store or analyze the actual voice communication in any way.)

The company says that players have collectively spent around 50,000 hours chatting through the app since launching in March of 2019.

Rune’s matchmaking and voice chat systems are currently limited to two players. Since Brawl Stars (and plenty of other Battle Royale/arena style games) have game modes that support up to three players per team, Sanjay tells me that 3-player matchmaking and voice chat are “both in the pipeline and will come out soon.”

Rune plans to support other games beyond Brawl Stars in the future — in fact, driving traffic to other games is part of their plans to monetize the free app. Once you’ve befriended someone, you’re free to use Rune for voice chat with whatever game you want; it just runs in the background, so what you’re playing doesn’t matter too much.

Rune is available for free on iOS here, and on Android here.