Category: UNCATEGORIZED

What happens when two former spies meet the startup world? We’re about to find out.

We’re pleased to announce former National Security Agency director Adm. Mike Rogers will be at Disrupt SF on October 2-4. The former U.S. intelligence head oversaw the shadowy agency during one of its most tumultuous times in its history in the aftermath of the massive leak of classified documents by whistleblower Edward Snowden. He also oversaw the Pentagon’s cyberwar-fighting division, U.S. Cyber Command, amid Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election.

Since leaving the world of intelligence, Rogers became a senior advisor at Team8, a leading cybersecurity think tank and company creation platform, which helps to build cybersecurity companies from the ground up.

We’re also thrilled to announce Team8 founder Nadav Zafrir will join Rogers onstage at Disrupt, where both will discuss what they can bring to the world of security startups from their extensive intelligence and cybersecurity backgrounds.

Zafrir served as the commander of the elite technology and intelligence division Unit 8200, Israel’s equivalent of the NSA. Since leaving the unit, Zafrir founded Team8 to help cybersecurity companies go from idea to execution.

Team8 recently opened a New York headquarters, with Rogers serving as a key part of the U.S. expansion. To date, the think tank has enlisted several major investors, including Microsoft, Walmart and SoftBank.

Rogers and Zafrir will discuss what they learned from their time working in the intelligence space and what they bring to the startup world, and they’ll look ahead at the cybersecurity landscape and discuss what comes next.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 – October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here!

A new report from The Wall Street Journal could be another damning piece of evidence for a company already under a good deal of international scrutiny. The paper is reporting that technicians working for Huawei helped members of government in Uganda and Zambia spy on political opponents.

The report cites unnamed senior surveillance officers. The paper adds that an investigation didn’t confirm a direct tie between the Chinese government or Huawei executives. It did, however, appear to confirm that employees for the tech giant played a part in intercepting communications.

The list includes encrypted messages, the use of apps like WhatsApp and Skype and tracking opponents using cellular data.

A representative for Zambia’s ruling party confirmed with the paper that Huawei technicians have helped in the fight against news sites with opposing stances in the country, stating, “Whenever we want to track down perpetrators of fake news, we ask Zicta, which is the lead agency. They work with Huawei to ensure that people don’t use our telecommunications space to spread fake news.”

Huawei has, naturally, denied any involvement, stating that it has “never been engaged in ‘hacking’ activities. Huawei rejects completely these unfounded and inaccurate allegations against our business operations. Our internal investigation shows clearly that Huawei and its employees have not been engaged in any of the activities alleged. We have neither the contracts, nor the capabilities, to do so.”

The company has, of course, been under international scrutiny in places like the U.S. and Europe over concerns that its telecommunications technologies could be used for spying on behalf of the Chinese government, allegations Huawei has strongly and often rebuffed.

Last year Broadcom, a chipmaker, raised eyebrows when it acquired CA Technologies, an enterprise software company with a broad portfolio of products, including a sizable mainframe software tools business. It paid close to $19 billion for the privilege.

Then last week, the company opened up its wallet again and forked over $10.7 billion for Symantec’s enterprise security business. That’s almost $30 billion for two aging enterprise software companies. There has to be some sound strategy behind these purchases, right? Maybe.

Here’s the thing about older software companies. They may not out-innovate the competition anymore, but what they have going for them is a backlog of licensing revenue that appears to have value.

Facebook’s leadership made a pretty heavy-handed indications this year that it believes Facebook Groups are the future of the app, they announced all of this alongside their odd declaration that “The future is private.” Now, Facebook is changing the language describing the visibility of privacy of groups.

As the Groups feature comes front-and-center in recent redesigns, Facebook has decided that the language they have been using to describe the visibility of “Public,” “Closed,” and “Secret” Groups isn’t as clear as it should be, so the company is switching it up. Groups will now be labeled either “Public” or “Private.”

That means that groups that were previously “Closed” or “Secret” will now share the designation of “Private” meaning that only members of the group can see who’s in the group or what has been posted. The distinction is that there’s now a second metric, whether or not the group is “Visible,” which denoted if the group can be found via search. For groups that were previously “Closed,” the migration to the classification will leave them “Visible” while “Secret” groups will remain “Hidden.”

In a way, this is kind of just Facebook throwing more privacy-related labels in their app to change perceptions while the feature sets stay the same, but denoting the visibility of a “closed” group in search was probably the biggest point of confusion here that Facebook was aiming to rectify. There’s a clear editorial message with Facebook conveying that there are shades and nuances to what “Private” means on Facebook compared to “Public” which is unwavering and defaulted.

The battle for podcasters among music streaming services continues. A day after Spotify announced the launch of its podcast analytics dashboard, Pandora is today expanding its own podcasting efforts with the arrival of a self-service online hub for creators. The new Pandora for Podcasters will allow creators to submit their shows for inclusion on the streaming service, where they can be discovered through Pandora’s show and episode-level recommendation system.

Pandora’s entry into the podcast market began late last year, when it brought its “Genome” technology to podcast recommendations. Similar to how Pandora’s Music Genome is capable of classifying songs across hundreds of different attributes, the new Podcast Genome Project does the same for audio programs.

The system uses over 1,500 attributes — like MPAA ratings, production style, content type, host profile and more, as well as listener signals, like thumbs, skips, replays and more — combined with machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, and collaborative filtering methods to help determine user preferences.

An additional layer of human curation is also involved in making the final recommendations.

The end result is a system that is able to suggest not just shows a listener may like, but also individual episodes, based on their likes, dislikes and other insights gained from their listening history.

When podcasts launched on Pandora in December 2018, the service offered hundreds of shows and over 100,000 episodes. There are now thousands of shows and over 500,000 episodes, the company now claims.

Pandora parent SiriusXM has also played a role in expanding the streamer’s podcast offerings, by bringing dozens of SiriusXM talk shows to Pandora as podcasts, and leveraging SiriusXM’s guests to narrate for Pandora’s music-and-audio product called Pandora Stories.

Now, podcast creators both large and small will be able to submit their own shows for inclusion into Pandora’s catalog. To do so, they’ll submit their show’s RSS feed URL to Pandora directly and answer a few questions about the podcast. If approved, the show will be available to allow of Pandora’s 65 million monthly active listeners and their future episodes will be added automatically.

This self-serve hub’s launch follows a similar move by Spotify nearly a year ago, when it opened up podcast submissions to all creators. Today, Spotify’s pitch to podcasters is to submit their shows in exchange for robust listener data. The company says it now has over 450,000 shows on its platform, with around 100,000 signing up for inclusion through its own self-submission process.

Interested podcast creators can now submit their shows to Pandora here after first registering for a Pandora account.

Just in time for the new school year, Google’s educational arm, Google for Education, today announced the launch of new tools aimed at helping teachers fight plagiarism. The company this morning is unveiling Assignments, an updated version of the software previously known as CourseKit, which will ship with new features that help instructors check students’ work to ensure it’s properly cited — not stolen from another source.

Students can also take advantage of the new tools, notes Google, as the feature will allow them to run these “originality reports” up to three times before submitting their final work to their teacher.

This gives students the chance to catch and fix any errors, while also saving the teacher time in grading, the company says.

The updated Google Assignments program does more than help catch cheaters, however.

The software combines aspects of Google Docs, Google Drive and Google Search into a new tool that’s focused on the creation and management of schoolwork, including the collection, grading, and feedback process — and now, the ability to check for plagiarism, as well.

Other features include a comment bank to save teachers from typing the same feedback over and over; the ability to assign files to students without having to use the copier; the ability to grade assignments for a class with a student switcher and rubric included, and more.

With the plagiarism checker — the feature called “Originality Reports” — teachers can check for missed citations and other issues. When the work is turned in and locked, the feature will check the student’s text against “hundreds of billions of web pages” and “tens of millions of books,” says Google.

Once the feature is enabled on a given assignment, students can only run the check three times. This allows them the chance to fix oversights, but doesn’t let them abuse the feature to rewrite multiple pieces within a longer report to avoid detection.

Teachers will receive an Originality Report attached to the assignments that detail any missed citations and note the source — like a book or a web page.

“Today’s students face a tricky challenge: In an age when they can explore every idea imaginable on the internet, how do they balance outside inspiration with authenticity in their own work? Students have to learn to navigate the line between other people’s ideas and their own, and how and when to properly cite sources,” explains Brian Hendricks, a Product Manager for G Suite for Education, in an announcement.

The plagiarism-checking feature is launching into beta testing today, with invites rolling out to schools and teachers over the next few weeks. Assignments is a free part addition to G Suite for Education.

The software can be also used either as a companion to a school’s Learning Management System (LMS) or a school admin can opt to integrate it with the existing LMS, notes Google.

Call the rollers of big rounds,
The well-capitalized ones, and have them back
makers of rooms themed like concupiscent curds.

Let the influencers gather in the styles
they love to wear, and let other startups
throw away their term sheets like last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only museum is the Museum of Ice Cream.

Take from the dresser of deal
a term sheet for $40 million,
to give a $200 million valuation to Figure8
“an experience-first development company”
created to commercialize backdrop boudoirs.

Museums displayed art once
But now that achievement is
a backdrop for a human face.
All aesthetics ignored, they come
To show how bold they are, and stunned.

Let investors like
Elizabeth Street Ventures, Maywic Select Investment, and OCV Partners beam.
The only museum will be the Museum of Ice Cream.

Two major U.S. carriers, AT&T and T-Mobile, announced this morning a plan to team up to protect their respective customer bases from the scourge of scam robocalls. The two companies will today begin to roll out new cross-network call authentication technology based on the SHAKEN/STIR standards — a sort of universal caller ID system designed to stop illegal caller ID spoofing.

Robocalls have become a national epidemic. In 2018, U.S. mobile users received nearly 48 million robocalls — or more than 150 calls per adult, the carriers noted.

A huge part of the problem is that these calls now often come in with a spoofed phone number, making it hard for consumers to screen out unwanted calls on their own. That’s led to a rise in robocall blocking and screening apps. Even technology companies have gotten involved, with Google introducing a new A.I. call screener in Android and Apple rolling out Siri-powered spam call detection with iOS 13.

To help fight the call spoofing problem, the industry put together a set of standards called SHAKEN/STIR (Secure Telephony Identity Revisited / Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs), which effectively signs calls as “legitimate” as they travel through the interconnected phone networks.

However, the industry has been slow to roll out the system, which prompted the FCC to finally step in.

In November 2018, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai wrote to U.S. mobile operators, asking them to outline their plans around the implementation of the SHAKEN/STIR standards. The regulator also said that it would step in to mandate the implementation if the carriers didn’t meet an end-of-2019 deadline to get their call authentication systems in place.

Today’s news from AT&T and T-Mobile explains how the two will work together to authenticate calls across their networks. By implementing SHAKEN/STIR, calls will have their Called ID signed as legitimate by the originating carrier, then validated by other carriers before they reach the consumer. Spoofed calls would fail this authentication process, and not be marked as “verified.”

As more carriers participate in this sort of authentication, more calls can be authenticated.

However, this system alone won’t actually block the spam calls — it just gives the recipient more information. In addition, devices will have to support the technology, as well, in order to display the new “verification” information.

T-Mobile earlier this year was first to launch a caller verification system on the Samsung Galaxy Note9, and today it still only works with select Android handsets from Samsung and LG. AT&T meanwhile, announced in March it was working with Comcast to exchange authenticated calls between two separate networks — a milestone in terms of cooperation between two carriers. T-Mobile and Comcast announced their own agreement in April.

Ajit Pai has long signaled that he would approve a T-Mobile/ class="crunchbase-link" href="https://crunchbase.com/organization/sprint-nextel" target="_blank" data-type="organization" data-entity="sprint-nextel">Sprint merger, but today the FCC Chairman made it official. In spite of widespread opposition suggesting that the combining of the country’s third and fourth largest carriers would reduce competition in the marketplace, Pai takes the stance that such a move would actual promote competition.

“After one of the most exhaustive merger reviews in Commission history, the evidence conclusively demonstrates that this transaction will bring fast 5G wireless service to many more Americans and help close the digital divide in rural areas,” Pai said in a statement. “Moreover, with the conditions included in this draft Order, the merger will promote robust competition in mobile broadband, put critical mid-band spectrum to use, and bring new competition to the fixed broadband market. I thank our transaction team for the thorough and careful analysis reflected in this draft Order and hope that my colleagues will vote to approve it.”

Pai’s statement echoes that of many conservatives on the topic. While T-Mobile and Sprint are third and fourth place, respectively, AT&T and Verizon are significantly ahead in terms of subscriber bases. Pai and other have suggested that combining the two under the T-Mobile umbrella would help the carriers get a leg up when it comes to competing on a 5G roll out.

Developing…

Indian budget hotel booking startup Oyo will invest 300 million euros ($335 million) in its vacation home rental business, it said Wednesday, as it looks to expand its footprint in Europe and possibly closely compete with global giant Airbnb, one of its investors.

The Gurgaon-based startup, which acquired Amsterdam-based holiday rental company Leisure in May this year and rebranded it to Oyo Vacation Homes, said it aims to turn Oyo Vacation Homes into the destination for “top-notch” holiday experience and the partner of choice for homeowners.

The new capital will go into “strengthening the relationship with homeowners and enabling them with the resources required to deliver chic hospitality experiences,” and building the largest vacation rental management service business in Europe, managed under OYO Home, Belvilla, Danland, and Dancenter brands.

“We are focusing on enhancing our customer proposition to not just families but new age millennials and young executives, traveling for business or leisure, including consumers from newer geographies who travel to Europe from across the world including US, Asia, China and the Middle East,” Tobias Wann, CEO of OYO Vacation Homes, said in a prepared statement.

OYO, which claims to be the world’s third-biggest and fastest-growing hotel chain, operates more than 23,000 hotels and 125,000 vacation homes, with over 1 million rooms in more than 80 countries, the company said. It claimed that Oyo Vacation Homes has “doubled its growth” since the acquisition of Leisure in May.

@Leisure sees traffic and business from some 2.8 million travelers annually from across 118 countries. Its European footprint covers some 115,000 homes, and some 300,000 rooms globally. Europe’s vacation rental market will be worth some $18.6 billion this year, according to estimates, growing at between four and eight percent annually.

Oyo, which is increasingly expanding its business and recently entered the co-working spaces, recently said it will invest $300 million in expanding its footprint in the U.S.

The announcement today comes weeks after Ritesh Agarwal, the founder and CEO of Oyo, raised his stake in the startup with $2 billion buyback. The move was highly praised by local entrepreneurs in the nation.