Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The growing popularity of 3D printing machines and companies like Thingiverse and Shapeways have given previously unimaginable powers to makers, enabling them to create everything from cosplay accessories to replacement parts. But even though 3D printing has created a new world of customized objects, most of us are still buying clothes off the rack. Now researchers at MIT are working on software that will allow anyone to customize or design their own knitwear, even if they have never picked up a ball of yarn.

A team of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), led by computer scientist Alexandre Kaspar, released two new papers describing the software today. One is about a system called InverseKnit that automatically creates patterns from photos of knitted items. The other one introduces new design software, called CADKnit, that allows people with no knitting or design experience to quickly customize templates, adjusting the size, final shape and decorative details (like the gloves shown below).

The final patterns can be used with a knitting machine, which have been available to home knitters for years, but still require a fair amount of technical knowledge in order to design patterns for.

Gloves made using CADknit

Both CADKnit and InverseKnit want to make designing and making machine-knitted garments as accessible as 3D printing is now. Once the software is commercialized, Kaspar envisions “knitting as a service” for consumers who want to order customized garments. It can also enable clothing designers to spend less time learning how to write knitwear patterns for machines and reduce waste in the prototyping and manufacturing process. Another target audience for the software are hand-knitters who want to try a new way of working with yarn.

“If you think about it like 3D printing, a lot of people have been using 3D printers or hacking 3D printers, so they are great potential users for our system, because they can do that with knitting,” says Kaspar.

One potential partner for CADKnit and InverseKnit is Kniterate, a company that makes a digital knitting machine for hobbyists, makerspaces and small businesses. Kaspar says he has been talking to Kniterate’s team about making knitwear customization more accessible.

To develop InverseKnit, researchers first created a dataset of knitting patterns with matching images that were used to train a deep neural network to generate machine knitting patterns. The team says that during InverseKnit’s testing, the system produced accurate instructions 94% of the time. There is still some work to do before InverseKnit can be commercialized. For example, the machine was tested using one specific type of acrylic yarn, so it needs to be trained to work with other fibers.

CADKnit, on the other hand, combines 2D images with CAD and photo-editing software to create customizable templates. It was tested with knitting newbies, who despite having little machine knitting experience were still able to create relatively complex garments like gloves and effects, including lace motifs and color patterns.

“3D printing took a while before people were comfortable enough to think they could do something with it,” says Kaspar. “It will be the same thing with what we do.”

Didi Chuxing’s autonomous driving unit is now an independent company, the Chinese ride-sharing and transportation giant said today. Didi’s autonomous driving team was created in 2016 and now has more than 200 employees in China and the United States. Didi’s announcement comes about a month after The Information reported that Didi was in talks with investors including SoftBank, its largest shareholder, to raise money for the unit.

In its announcement, Didi said the new company “will integrate the resources and technological advantages of Didi’s platform, continue to increase investment in R&D of core innovative technologies, and deepen collaboration with upstream and downstream auto industry partners” and also promote self-driving technology to transportation authorities.

The Financial Times reported last year that Didi had been approved to test self-driving vehicles in California, where it has a research facility in Mountain View. But Didi has to catch up with other companies that have been testing autonomous cars both in the U.S. and China. In California, it was the 53rd company to get a permit to test self-driving vehicles, behind technology rivals like Uber and Waymo.

Didi has already been testing autonomous vehicles, developed in partnership with car manufacturers and suppliers, in China, but its testing lagged far behind Baidu last year, which registered 140,000 kilometers in Beijing, or about 91 percent of the 153,600 miles test-driven by autonomous fleets owned by eight companies, including Didi, Pony.ai, Tencent and automakers NIO, Audi, Daimler AG and BAIC Group.

Aside from being able to license its technology to other transportation and vehicle companies, the launch of robo-taxis may help Didi’s ride-sharing service make up for a shortage in drivers. Stricter screening criteria was put into place after two female passengers were murdered by drivers on Didi’s ride-sharing platform and Didi said last month that it had removed more than 300,000 drivers who didn’t meet its standards since its safety overhaul began last year.

The CEO of the new autonomous driving company will be Zhang Bo, who is also the CTO of Didi. Meng Xing, former executive director of Shunwei China Internet Fund, is its COO, while software engineers Jia Zhaoyin, the head of its technical efforts for Didi’s smart-driving project, and Zheng Jianqiang will head its research and development teams in the U.S. and China.

Website infrastructure and security services provider Cloudflare will stop providing service to 8chan, wrote Matthew Prince in a blog post, describing the site as a “cesspool of hate.” Service will be terminated as of midnight Pacific Time.

“The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths,” wrote Prince. “Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.

The decision was made after the suspect in this weekend’s mass shooting at El Paso, who has since been charged with domestic terrorism, posted a lengthy racist and anti-immigration “manifesto” to 8chan almost immediately before the attack, which killed at least 20 people. Federal authorities are treating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism and the Justice Department is also considering bringing federal hate crime and firearm charges, which both potentially carry the death penalty, against the shooter.

8chan was also used by the perpetrator in March’s terrorist attacks on two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques, as well as the suspect in the April shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California.

“The El Paso shooter specifically referenced the Christchurch incident and appears to have been inspired by the largely unmoderated discussions on 8chan which glorified the previous massacre,” wrote Prince. “In a separate tragedy, the suspected killer in the Poway, California synagogue shooting also posted a hate-filled ‘open letter’ on 8chan. 8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.”

Before Cloudflare announced its decision to terminate service to 8chan, Prince spoke to reporters from the Guardian and the New York Times, telling the Guardian that he wanted to “kick 8chan off our network,” but also (in the later interview with the New York Times), expressing hesitation because terminating service may make it harder for law enforcement officials to access information on the site.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says that his decision is not about free speech or making money. Instead, he says keeping 8chan within Cloudflare’s network facilitates monitoring of the site and cooperation with law enforcement. https://t.co/PVnnu6LFxM pic.twitter.com/4ffQ8AWLfC

— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) August 4, 2019

Update: I talked to Cloudflare CEO @eastdakota, who said he is undecided about whether or not to allow 8chan to continue using its DDOS protection service (which effectively allows the site to stay online) https://t.co/tewgBEqYeF pic.twitter.com/WkU1NYBm6g

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) August 4, 2019

In his blog post, Prince explained Cloudflare’s ultimate decision to cut service, writing that more than 19 million Internet properties use Cloudflare’s services and the company “[did] not take this decision lightly.”

“We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line,” he wrote.” It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services.”

This is not the first time Cloudflare has cut off service to a site for enabling the spread of racism and violence. Cloudflare previously terminated service to white supremacist site Daily Stormer in August 2017, but noted that the site went back online after switching to a Cloudflare competitor. “Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever. They are no longer Cloudflare’s problem, but they remain the Internet’s problem,” Prince wrote.

Prince says he sees the situation with 8chan playing out in a similar way. Since terminating service to the Daily Stormer, Prince says Cloudflare has worked with law enforcement and civil society organizations, resulting in the company “cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained a legal process to share information when we can hopefully prevent horrific acts of violence.”

But Prince added that the company “continue[s] to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often,” adding that this is not “due to some conception of the United States’ First Amendment,” since Cloudflare is a private company (and most of its customers, and more than half of its revenue, are outside the United States).

Instead, Cloudflare “will continue to engage with lawmakers around the world as they set the boundaries of what is acceptable in those countries through due process of law. And we will comply with those boundaries when and where they are set.”

Cloudflare’s decision may increase scrutiny on Amazon, since the 8chan’s operator Jim Watkins sells audiobooks on Amazon.com and Audible, creating what the Daily Beast refers to as “his financial lifeline to the outside world.”

A $28 million financing has made SmartNews, an AI-powered news aggregation app, a unicorn.

Japan Post Capital has led the Series E round, which brings the company’s total investment to $116 million and pushes its valuation to $1.1 billion. Existing investors in SmartNews include Development Bank of Japan, SMBC Venture Capital and Japan Co-Invest L.P.

The company, founded in Tokyo in 2012, boasts 20 million monthly active users in the U.S. and Japan. Growing at a rate of 500% per year, its audience checks into the app for a mix of political, sports, global and entertainment news curated for each individual reader. To make money, the company sells inline advertising, video ads and deals with publishers to sell ads against “SmartViews,” its equivalent of Google’s AMP or Facebook’s Instant Articles

Users reported issues with Instagram and Facebook Sunday morning.

The mobile apps wouldn’t load for many users beginning in the early hours of the morning, prompting thousands to take to Twitter to complain about the outage. #facebookdown and #instagramdown are both trending on Twitter at time of publish.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information and when they are expecting services to come back online. We’ll update this story when we hear back.

We spend a lot of time around here covering the latest startup fundraises, and for good reason. While capital is certainly an input and not an output, there is nothing quite like the closing of a round of several million in venture capital to prove that yes, the startup I’m working on is at least interesting to someone other than me. External validation shouldn’t be your motivating principle, but it is motivating. Plus, it’s a great milestone to reach out to the press and start talking up the story.

And so week after week, we cover the latest rounds. This company raised $4.5 million in a seed round, and this company raised $16 million in a series A. These stories — and the narratives behind them — are crisp, clean, and precise. A proverbial founder walked up and down South Park in SoMa, explained their story, collected a couple of term sheets, picked one, locked in the due diligence, and is now announcing their round. The VCs are excited, the founder(s) are excited, the employees are excited (and sometimes even the customers are excited!)

The reality for founders though is far more messy and gritty than those headlines would indicate. When I get founders off the record and out for drinks, the true story starts to emerge. That $4.5 million seed fundraise took eight months of maniacal scheduling with two hundred investors just to find a lead. And that lead didn’t lead lead, but took only 20% of the round. In the meantime, they raised twelve times across convertible notes and SAFEs, each one giving the company just a bit more gas in the tank to continue.

When I wrote that a startup raised $4.5 million in one slam dunk, what I really should have written was that they raised $150k, $300k, a few more $50k investments from randos, a couple of thousand from that startup competition, wow $500k from that amazing angel, a $750k SBIR grant from the government that took nine months too long to process, some credits from Brex, and finally at some point that lead investor showed up who gets $3-3.5 million in news value credit on their wimpy $900k check.

As an editor and a writer who covers these aggregate rounds, I struggle with how to approach them. Founders regularly tell me that they would love more transparency and less bravado around fundraises. They want to read how other founders handle the messy complexity of their fundraises, if only because they can compare their own hellish experiences with those of others.

More fundamentally, our readers deserve to read the truth. A $4.5 million round led by a single venture firm writing a $3.5 million check is a very different construct than a bricolage of a random assortment of angel investors. That difference in investor and round quality does indicate something about the startup under examination, and so offering more of those details would better inform our readers as well.

All that is well and good, but no one really wants to hear about these difficulties. Certainly users and customers don’t want to hear about how the software they use or purchased is run by a company that is constantly days away from death. Some early-stage employees probably have the focus to ignore such morbid considerations while carrying out their functions, but many need their paychecks to come from a black box. Somehow, the checks always arrive, and that lowers the stress for everyone.

And even just in terms of the craft of writing, do we really want to exchange the standard funding sentence (“blah blah blah raised blah from blah with participation from blah blah blah”) with a multi-paragraph exegesis of a fundraise?

Writing is about choosing which details are salient and which to pass over. It would be exhausting every morning to read tomes of fundraise detail. Yet, our consistency in depicting fundraises as efficient and precise can create an atmosphere where if you didn’t find a lead in a few weeks and lock down the whole round, you are a failure.

That’s not really a depiction I want to support.

And so, take this as someone who talks to dozens of founders a year off the record about their fundraises, and also sat on the other side of the table as a VC for years. Fundraises are almost always really, really, tough. Very few people get commits in the first meeting, or even in the subsequent meetings. Half the investor introductions during a fundraise are often a complete waste of time if not outright damaging, psychologically or materially. There are a lot of sharks out there. It is much more common today to aggregate a bunch of mini-rounds than it was a couple of years ago.

This is not failure, but just the path of the entrepreneur today in 2019. And at the end of that whole long and windy road, after all of those hundreds of hours of coffee meetings and PowerPoint strategy sessions and skeptical investor convos, all of that work will boil down to twenty words about how the fundraise closed, X dollars were raised, and money was seemingly wired magically to your bank account.

You, me, and really everyone can and should know the truth. But perhaps just rejoice in that headline, and get back to the next slog.

Following a failed attempt in July, French inventor Franky Zapata successfully crossed the Channel on top of a hoverboard this weekend. Starting his trek in Sangatte in northern France, the journey took 20 minutes, before landing in St. Margarets Bay, England.

“For the last five to six kilometers I just really enjoyed it,” Zapata told Reuters and other reports on landing near Dover. “Whether this is a historic event or not, I’m not the one to decide that, time will tell.”

Zapata, a former jet ski racer, developed the Flyboard Air some three years back. On July 14, Zapata took part in France’s Bastille Day military parade, riding the Air. That same month, he attempted the feat a first time, only to fall into the water when attempting to land on a boat-mounted platform in order to refuel.

He stopped again to refuel midway, but did so without incident this time out. Three helicopters were along for the ride and a crowd of dozens of well wishers were on-hand to cheer to him upon landing.

Roblox is big. Bigger than Minecraft big. The massively multiple online title has been around since 2006, but the game has been achieving a crazy amount of momentum of late. On Friday, it announced via blog post that it’s grown past 100 million monthly active users, pushing past Minecraft, which is currently in the (still impressive) low-90s.

Here’s a recent piece detailing the service’s dizzying growth since February 2016, who it was hovering around 9 million players. That’s more than 10x growth in a three and a half year span. User-Generated content is a big part of that number, and the company notes that it has around 40 million user created experiences in the game at present.

Sources: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Roblox

“We started Roblox over a decade ago with a vision to bring people from all over the world together through play,” founder and CEO David Baszucki said of the big new round number. “Roblox began with just 100 players and a handful of creators who inspired one another, unlocking this groundswell of creativity, collaboration, and imagination that continues to grow.”

The company behind the game has also been pumping some big money into development. It paid $30 million in 2017 and $60 million in 2018. Next week, it will be hosting hundreds of attendees at its fifth Roblox Developer Conference.

Per the new numbers, around 40 percent Roblox users are female, with players spread out across 200 countries.

Last year, “Amazon employees met with ICE officials … to market the company’s facial recognition technology,” the ACLU informs us. Amazon VP Brad Huseman later said “We believe the government should have the best available technology.” Then, last month, Motherboard revealed Amazon has partnered with police departments around the country to create “a self-perpetuating surveillance network” of Ring products.

Allow me to be the umpteenth to say: what the hell, Amazon?

Amazon shareholders, tech employees, warehouse employees, and customers are all protesting this marketing of Rekognition to ICE, as well with the services provided by Amazon to infamous Palantir. More than 500 Amazon tech employees, in particular, have signed a letter of protest — but Amazon’s leadership does not yet seem to be willing to engage with them in good faith.

Instead, Amazon has defended itself with a “Facts on Facial Recognition with Artificial Intelligence” page, in which they seem to think the only possible problem with their technology is the possibility of false positives, and offer halfhearted half-measures as “In all public safety and law enforcement scenarios, technology like Amazon Rekognition should only be used to narrow the field of potential matches … facial recognition software should not be used autonomously.”

The technical concerns are real enough, as shown by Orlando’s cancellation of their pilot Rekognition program. But I’m tired of tech companies acting as if they have no responsibility to the public beyond fixing their bugs and getting their tech working as intended. Sometimes the intent itself is the problem.

“I feel that society develops an immune response eventually to the bad uses of new technology, but it takes time,” Jeff Bezos has said. Which is true as far as it goes. But a corollary is that, in the interim, while society hasn’t developed immune responses, we should be especially cautious about abuses. Another is that the world’s wealthiest man should not abdicate his own nontrivial part in optimizing society’s immune response. With great power, they say, comes great responsibility.

The question is not really whether Rekognition’s technical problems will be solved. The question is whether marketing it to governments and law enforcement in order to enable ubiquitous panopticon surveillance is good for any society in the world. It’s dangerously intellectually lazy to say “if it’s legal it must be OK” or “the institutions of democracy will protect us from harm, therefore as a tech maven I don’t need to think or worry about any consequences.”

In reality the law is extremely slow to react to new technologies, and our institutions are increasingly sclerotic and paralyzed — as much the tech industry will be all too eager to tell you in other contexts. Relying on them for our “immune response” is wilful negligence. Yes, technology is like fire, in that it always can be used for both good and bad; but we are rightfully far more cautious about fire in tinderbox conditions than we are during the rainy season, and we adjust our risk assessment accordingly. The unwillingness of tech companies to accept their responsibility for the risks they create is beyond worrying.

As I’ve said before, the only real, or at least real-time, check on tech companies is their own employees. So it’s heartening to see AWS employees push back against company policies — and worrying, at best, to see Amazon refuse to engage with them in good faith. The world expects better of Bezos and Amazon than dodging important questions about the risks of their technologies and passing them off as someone else’s department.

Facebook provides another cautionary tale. Hard as it may be to believe now, not all long ago they were widely respected, trusted, and even beloved. A backlash against companies like Amazon and Facebook seems at first like few minor cavils from an extremist fringe … but sometimes the pebbles of complaint suddenly accumulate into a landslide of contempt. Let’s hope Amazon sees the light before the techlash turns yet another erstwhile hero into a thoroughly modern villain.

Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries is acquiring 87.6% stake in Fynd, a seven-year-old Mumbai-based startup that connects brick and mortar retailers with online stores and consumers, for 2.95 billion Indian rupees ($42.33 million), the two said in a brief statement late Saturday.

Fynd, which was founded in 2012, helps offline retailers sell their products to consumers directly through its online store, and also enables them to connect with other “demand channels” such as third-party e-commerce platforms Amazon India and Walmart-owned Flipkart.

More than 600 brands including Nike, Raymond, Global Desi, and Being Human, and 9,000 stores are connected through Fynd’s platform, Harsh Shah, co-founder of Fynd, told TechCrunch in an interview. Many brands use Fynd’s products to also ramp up sales in their own respective e-commerce businesses.

Since Fynd works directly with brands, it offers a wider selection of items and newer inventories to consumers, as well as faster delivery, Shah claimed.

Fynd’s website

Reliance Industries, which owns the nation’s biggest physical retail chain Reliance Retail, has been a customer of Fynd for more than six years, Shah said. “Reliance runs a few major brands in the country. 25 of our existing brands are owned by them. Our Find Store product has helped their stores plug a lot of sales,” he said.

Fynd, which counts Google as one of its early investors, will continue to operate its existing business and has an option to secure an additional 1 billion India rupees ($14 million) by end of 2021 from Reliance Industries, Shah said. He declined to reveal how much capital his startup had raised prior to this week’s announcement. According to Crunchbase, Fynd has raised about $7.3 million.

“Reliance is taking the majority stake in Fynd, but at the end of the day, for us it is like any other investor coming in. We will still continue to work separately, we have our own independent roadmap, and we have own clients and products that we plan to grow. So things continue as it is,” he said.

Fynd, which takes a small commission on each transaction that occurs online, is already profitable on an operating level and expects to be fully profitable in the coming quarters, Shah said.

It will continue to build and scale its existing products, including OpenAPI that allows merchants to quickly list their products on either their own stores or third-party sites and manage their inventories and sales.

Despite tens of billions of dollars of investment in India’s e-commerce market in recent years by Amazon India and Flipkart, physical retail dominates the sales in the country. But e-commerce businesses in India are growing, too.

The nation’s e-commerce space is estimated to scale to $84 billion by 2021, up from $24 billion in 2017; compared to India’s overall retail market that is estimated to be worth $1.2 trillion by 2021, according to a recent study by Deloitte India and Retail Association of India.

Reliance Industries, run by Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani (pictured above), additionally has its own plan to enter the e-commerce business. Earlier this year, Ambani announced that his telecom operator Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail are working on an e-commerce platform.

Reliance Jio, which began its commercial operations in the second half of 2016, recently became the nation’s biggest telecom operator with more than 331 million subscribers at the end of June.

Separately, Amazon in talks with Reliance Industries to buy more than a quarter stake in Reliance Retail, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. News outlets Reuters and Economic Times were first to report this development.