Electronics manufacturers are no doubt breathing a collective sigh of relief this morning at the news that the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has delayed tariffs on a number of categories.
A long list of exports, including livestock, foodstuff and clothing will have the additional 10 percent tariff imposed on September 1. Others, including “cell phones, laptop computers, video game consoles, certain toys, computer monitors, and certain items of footwear and clothing” have simply been delayed until December 15.
It seems the fees are an inevitability, but many might be able to scrape through just in time for the holidays.
“Certain products are being removed from the tariff list based on health, safety, national security and other factors and will not face additional tariffs of 10 percent,” the USTR writes. “Further, as part of USTR’s public comment and hearing process, it was determined that the tariff should be delayed to December 15 for certain articles.”
That list includes a wide range of electronics, from “telephones for cellular networks or for other wireless networks” to “telephone answering machines” and “cassette players (non‐recording) designed exclusively for motor‐vehicle installation.”
Stock prices for companies like Apple have already seen a positive bump following the news. The White House is expected to have additional trade talks with China next month in Washington, though Trump has since cast some doubt.
Asked by reporters whether he might cancel talks, the President answered, “Maybe. We’ll see what happens.”
Over the last couple of years, Spotify has made a big push into podcasts. The tip of the spear has been major investments, including acquisitions of companies like Gimlet and Anchor. It’s all part of the company’s attempt harness a massively growing category and build an audience beyond music.
The other great thing about podcasts for a company like Spotify is the access to a tremendous amount of free content created by third-party producers. They record it, edit it and host it, and all Spotify has to do is index the stuff. Spotify for Podcasters is a new platform for the company designed to give creators more control — or at least insight — into how that content is served up.
The feature came out of beta today and is available for all users, showing key analytics like listening time, number of listeners and episode streams. “With so many podcasts out there, it’s more important than ever that you have the data you need to help you understand and grow your audience,” the company writes. “That’s exactly what your dashboard is designed to provide.”
I’ve been playing around with the feature a bit this morning and am finding some interesting bits of demographic info based on the sample. My show RiYL is a mix of different interviews with subjects across a wide variety of different mediums.
No surprise, the ones with musical guests are doing far better than any other. I suspect many or most users are discovering episodes will searching for music on the service. That will likely be the case until Spotify becomes more known for podcast offerings.
Seems the show’s listeners are mostly male (disappointing, but perhaps not surprising), aged 35-44, located in the United States. The also listen to a lot of Beatles, Bon Iver, Velvet Underground and Radiohead. Go figure.
The feature follows the similar Spotify for Artists offering and promises additional information/insight as it matures.
The Roku Channel continues to expand beyond ad-supported movies and premium subscriptions, with today’s announcement of the addition of several more live TV channels available to anyone with a Roku streaming device or Roku TV. The company says today it’s adding five free live TV channels to this offering, including most notably, fubo’s Sports Network.
The fubo Sports Network is streaming service fuboTV’s first-ever TV channel designed for distribution outside its own platform.
Soft-launched this June, fubo produces content for the channel, including original programming, event coverage, behind-the-scenes, and other exclusives. The network is already available to a few streaming platforms, including XUMO, Samsung TV Plus, and LG Channels (powered by XUMO.)
However, distribution to Roku’s popular entertainment hub is a big win for the new channel, given that Roku is now the top streaming device platform in the U.S., with a 39% share of streaming boxes and sticks and a 33% share of smart TV operating systems.
Other new networks arriving to The Roku Channel today include the ACC Digital Network, USA Today, Now This (news), and Comedy Dynamics.
In addition, The Roku Channel now offers the Sports Illustrated streaming service, SI TV, to any interested subscribers through its Premium Subscription lineup.
Roku has been rapidly expanding its Roku Channel hub since it first launched in September 2017 with a focus on free, ad-supported movies — similar to Vudu’s “Movies on Us” or Tubi, for example. But shortly after, the channel began to roll out more content like news, sports, TV shows, and other entertainment offerings both from traditional studios and digital networks. This pushed the channel to become one of the most-watched on its platform.
And this year, Roku launched its own premium subscriptions alongside its free content, allowing The Roku Channel to become not just the place to find free entertainment, but where you tune in to your favorite shows as well. Today, its paid lineup includes top premium networks like HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Starz, EPIX, and many others.
The decision to invest in its own content hub gives Roku a powerful selling point for its devices — and that appears to be paying off with consumers and in terms of the company’s bottom line.
Roku recently closed out its second quarter with 30.5 million active accounts, up by 1.4 million from the prior quarter, and average revenue per user up from $19.06 in Q1 to $21.06 in Q2. Revenue was also up 45% year-over-year to $252.5 million.
Creating backups for massive enterprise deployments may feel like a solved problem, but for the most part, we’re still talking about complex hardware and software setups. Clumio, which is coming out of stealth today, wants to modernize enterprise data protection by eliminating the on-premise hardware in favor of a flexible, SaaS-style cloud-based backup solution.
For the first time, Clumio also today announced that it has raised a total of $51 million in a Series A and B round since it was founded in 2017. The $11 million Series A round closed in October 2017 and the Series B round in November 2018, Clumio founder Poojan Kumar told me. Kumar’s previous company, storage startup PernixData, was acquired by Nutanix in 2016. It doesn’t look like the investors made their money back, though.
Clumio is backed by investors like Sutter Hill Ventures, which led the Series A, and Index Ventures, which drove the Series B together with Sutter Hill. Other individual investors include Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas Technologies, and John Thompson, chairman of the board at Microsoft .
“Enterprise workloads are being ‘SaaS-ified’ because IT can no longer afford the time, complexity and expense of building and managing heavy on-prem hardware and software solutions if they are to successfully deliver against their digital transformation initiatives,” said Poojan Kumar, Clumio founder and CEO. “Unlike legacy backup vendors, Clumio SaaS is born in the cloud. We have leveraged the most secure and innovative cloud services available, now and in the future, within our service to ensure that we can meet customer requirements for backup, regardless of where the data is.”
In its current iteration, Clumio can be used to secure data from on-premise, VMware Cloud for AWS and native AWS service workloads. Given this list, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Clumio’s backend, too, makes extensive use of public cloud services.
The company says that it already has several customers, though it didn’t disclose any in today’s announcement.
Aaron Rasmussen, co-founder and former creative director of MasterClass, has a new startup called Outlier.org. Like MasterClass, Outlier is bringing education online, but with a key difference — these are college classes offering real college credit.
The startup is launching a pilot version of its first two courses, Calculus I and Introduction to Psychology, for the coming fall semester. Each course is available for $400. (That covers all costs, including textbooks.)
Despite the .org name and web address, Rasmussen said Outlier is very much a for-profit company, but he said, “We do want to make it clear that our goal is social impact. I believe in market solutions to problems. Coming up with a market solution to education, rather just relying on people’s charity, is far more durable.”
The problem in question is the cost of higher education. Rasmussen said that each year, 1 million students take a college-level Calculus I course in the United States, at an average cost of $2,500. And then 40% of them fail.
“That means we’re wasting $1 billion per year,” he said — and that’s just on a single class.
Rasmussen is hardly the first to point out this problem, which is one of the main factors in the growing push for online learning. But he also argued that there’s not “a great online college” yet, due to four main factors.
First, there’s the issue of prestige, which he’s trying to solve by partnering with the University of Pittsburgh — students who pass Outlier’s classes will receive transferable credits from the university (though you’ll want to check whether a specific institution will accept those credits).
Next, there’s the actual content and learning environment. Rather than simply filming classroom lectures (“which can be pretty tedious to watch”) and posting PDFs of the homework and tests, Outlier is shooting classes specifically for online presentation, with instructors speaking directly to the camera, and it’s also offering dynamically generating the problem sets and one-on-one tutoring.
In addition, students can choose from different instructors (the teachers for Calculus I, for example, include Hannah Fry of University College London, Tim Chartier of Davidson College and John Urschel of MIT), or even switch between them mid-semester. And there are smaller touches, like the fact that the website was created in dark mode, so Rasmussen said it doesn’t feel like you’re “staring into a lightbulb” as you’re learning.
Third, there’s the element of social interaction, which is why Outlier will break classes up into smaller study groups of four to five students who can connect over video chat. When I suggested that this may be the hardest part of the college experience to replicate online, Rasmussen said the startup will be trying out different approaches (which he wasn’t ready to specify), but he added, “Part of our approach to this is trying to stay nimble.”
Lastly, there’s the cost. Again, Outlier is charging an introductory price of $400, and while it sounds like the exact number could change, Rasmussen is committed to keeping the price tag at around this level.
He also said that the company is “flipping the philosophy of education” by offering refunds to any student who doesn’t pass. That means Outlier has an incentive to ensure its student’s success — but does it also create an incentive to simply pass every student?
“The real stopgap there is that we are overseen by the accrediting partner university,” Rasmussen said. “They literally have checked our midterms and finals and things like that … That puts a bit of a failsafe there.”
While Outlier is only offering two pilot courses this fall, the obvious goal is to add more classes over time. Students might take these classes during their summer break, or as a supplement to their in-person classes, or as a way to get college credit when life circumstances make it difficult for them to attend residential university.
Still, even as it grows, Rasmussen suggested that Outlier will remain focused on “the first 25 college-level courses,” rather than recreating an entire college curriculum.
“As far as the next couple years of college after that, there’s just a lot of benefit to going to a residential college for those upper-level courses,” he said. “We’re really focused on these first couple years [where we can] hack down a bunch of the student debt.”
GalaxyPlay Link got fleetingly little stage time at last week’s Unpacked event. It’s true that Samsung had a lot of information to jam into the hour-long press conference, but the offering was glazed over during a brief segment on mobile gaming — a surprising choice given how big of an industry the category has become.
We got a little more information from the company by way of a quick “hands-on” video served through Samsung’s Korean video channel, but that’s about all we’ve heard. Here’s what we know to date: GamePlay Live is a streaming service that makes it possible to stream PC games to the Note 10.
We can now add that the service will be available as a downloadable app (for Android and Windows 10) at some point during the first two weeks of September. The service is free and leverages technology created by Parsec, a New York-based cloud gaming startup that we covered way back in late 2017. The company’s technology is being used in the PlayGalaxy app, allowing users to stream titles from a Windows PC with limited latency.
“It’s humbling and exciting to us to be the chosen partner to provide the low latency streaming technology that powers the PlayGalaxy Link application,” Parsec’s CEO and co-founder Benjy Boxer says in a release. “This further demonstrates that our market leading technology can form the core of any game streaming product. Providing our ultra low latency high frame rate streaming software and our proprietary networking to other companies furthers our mission to democratize access to games.”
The offering arrives as some of tech’s most prominent names are taking more active — although often distinct — interests in mobile gaming. Apple will be launching its arcade mobile gaming subscription service, while Google is offering full-on remote game streaming through Stadia. Microsoft, which recently announced a major partnership with Samsung, will provide similar console-to-mobile streaming with the Xbox.
Parsec, meanwhile, will be offering developer tools through a newly released SDK.
Nvidia’s GPU-powered platform for developing and running conversational AI that understands and responds to natural language requests has achieved some key milestones and broken some records that have big implications for anyone building on their tech – which includes companies large and small, since much of the code they’ve used to achieve these advancements is open source, written in PyTorch and easy to run.
The biggest achievements Nvidia announced today include its breaking the hour mark in training BERT, one of the world’s most advanced AI language models and a state-of-the-art model widely considered a good standard for natural language processing. Nvidia’s AI platform was able to train the model in under an hour, a record-breaking achievement at just 53 minutes, and the trained model could then successfully infer (ie, actually applying the learned capability achieved through training to achieve results) in under 2 milliseconds (10 milliseconds is considered a high-water mark in the industry), another record.
Nvidia’s breakthroughs aren’t just cause for bragging rights – these advances scale and provide real-world benefits for anyone working with their NLP conversational AI and GPU hardware. Nvidia achieved its record-setting times for training on one of its SuperPOD systems which is made up of 92 Nvidia DGX-2H systems runnings 1,472 V100 GPUs, and managed the inference on Nvidia T4 GPUs running Nvidia TensorRT – which beat the performance of event highly optimized CPUs by many orders of magnitude. But it’s making available the BERT training code, and TensorRT optimized BERT Sample via GitHub for all to leverage.
Alongside these milestones, Nvidia’s Research wing also build and trained the largest ever language model based on ‘Transformers,’ which is the tech that underlies BERT, too. This custom model includes a massive 8.3 billion parameters, making it 24 times the size of BERT-Large, the largest current core BERT model. Nvidia has cheekily titled this model ‘Megatron,’ and also offered up the PyTorch code it used to train this model so that others can also train their own similar, massive Transformer-based language models.
As we noted last month, DJI’s camera stabilizer line began life as an offshoot of the company’s drone offerings. Since then, however, it’s grown into a pretty massive portfolio in its own right, spanning from SLR to standalone pocket offerings.
For obvious reasons, the Osmo Mobile has been one of the more popular models. Designed for smartphone users, the product is among the most accessible DJI offerings, with out of the box operation for both iOS and Android users.
The company says it “went back to the drawing board” for the latest version of the handheld gimbal, but the Osmo Mobile 3 is really more of an evolution. The company took some customer feedback to heart and provided a handful of key changes. The new device is smaller and foldable, so users can much more easily toss it in a backpack. A DJI rep I spoke with suggested that it might fit in a pocket, but that’s a bit ambitious.
The other big piece of the puzzle is that DJI has made it a lot easier to operate the system with one hand. Most of the functions are executed using the back trigger or a combination of the front thumb buttons. There’s a new Quick Roll feature, which switches between landscape and portrait with the click of a button, while triple-clicking the trigger flips it into selfie mode. The trigger is also used to recenter the camera or lock into place.
There’s a bunch of software features borrowed from the company’s drones and the higher-end Ronin line, including Story Mode, Gesture Control, ActiveTrack, TimeLapse and HyperLapse. I didn’t really get much hands-on time with those, but we’ll be getting a review unit into the hands of our video team soon.
All in all, it looks like a nice little update. It’s also a bit cheaper, starting at $119 for the standard version and $139 for a bundle that includes a tripod. The Osmo Mobile 3 is available starting today.
The notion of the corporate directory has been around for many years, but in a time of more frequent turnover and shifting responsibilities, the founders of Rimeto, a 3 year old San Francisco startup, wanted to update it to reflect those changes.
Today, the company announced a $10 million Series A investment from USVP, Bow Capital, Floodgate and Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates.
Co-founder Ted Zagat says that the founders observed shifting workplace demographics and changes in the way people work. They believed it required a better to way to locate people inside large organizations, which typically used homegrown methods or relied on Outlook or other corporate email systems.
“On one hand, we have people being asked to work much more collaboratively and cross-functionally. On the other, is an increasingly fragmented workplace. Employees really need help to be able to understand each other and work together effectively. That’s a real challenge for them,” Zagat explained.
Rimeto has developed a richer directory by sitting between various corporate systems like HR, CRM and other tools that contain additional details about the employee. It of course includes a name, title, email and phone like the basic corporate system, but it goes beyond that to find areas of expertise, projects the person is working on and other details that can help you find the right person when you’re searching the directory.
Rimeto directory on mobile and web. Screenshot: Rimeto
Zagat says that by connecting to these various corporate systems and layering on a quality search tool with a variety of filters to narrow the search, it can help employees connect to others inside an organization more easily, something that is often difficult to do in large companies.
The tool can be accessed via web or mobile app, or incorporated into a company intranet. It could also be accessed from a tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
The three founders — Zagat, Neville Bowers and Maxwell Hayman — all previously worked at Facebook. Unlike a lot of early stage startups, the company has paying customers (although it won’t share exactly how many) and reports that it’s cash-flow positive. Up to this point, the three founders had boot-strapped the company, but they wanted to go out and raise some capital to begin to expand more rapidly.
Snap has introduced a third generation of its Spectacles wearable sunglass cameras, and these include new 3D effects for use in Snapchat. You can capture 3D snaps, with a slight side-to-side depth effect thanks to dual angle cameras; 3D filters, which add AR graphics effects to captured video; 3D lenses, which add stickers and characters to your Snaps; and 3D viewing, which lets you use and included stereoscopic viewer to get the same perspective as someone who’s captured video using their Spectacles when viewing their Snaps.
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To achieve the 3D effects, this new hardware includes not one but two cameras, one at each outside top corner of the sunglass lenses. Both of these capture in HD, and record at 60 fps. Audio is captured using a four-microphone array, which Snap says helps improve the audio considerably on captured content. There’s a capture button to trigger photo or video shooting on either side.
The glasses themselves are constructed from a single sheet of stainless steel, and they’re designed to be lightweight for all-day wearing. They come in carbon black, and a “mineral” colorway that looks like a dusty rose. Each comes with a charging case for storage and powering up (which charges via includes USB C), and which folds completely flat when the glasses aren’t inside for easier carrying.
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Spectacles 3 are coming this fall, and going through the order flow for pre-orders reveals a shipping date of November. The new sunglasses retail for $380, which is more than their predecessors ($150 and $200 respectively for the original and Nico/Veronica Spectacles 2 variants) and they are not water resistant, unlike the gen 2 glasses. But that second camera definitely ups the game in terms of technical capabilities, so you can see where the additional cost comes from. Snap also says that these will indeed be a very limited edition production run, compared to previous generations.
The big changes here are clearly the 3D effects that are now possible in Snapchat, which should help tie these back more tightly to Snap’s software. Spectacles 2 offered better export formats for more general sharing, but it seems likely that the company is hoping to help showcase its AR filters and features with the unique capture capabilities of Spectacles 2. Point-of-view viewing is also unique to Snapchat, and should help Snap emphasize more Snapchat’s identify as the platform on which you feel most comfortable sharing with close friends.
