Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Millions of people have been signing up to receive what they think is a $125 cash reimbursement from Equifax for its criminal mishandling and exposure of their personal and financial data. But the FTC warns that you may see only a small fraction of that, if any, because of the way the $575 million settlement with the company actually breaks down.

In the settlement, Equifax set aside $300M to pay for credit monitoring for everyone affected by the historic hack (rivaled perhaps only by this week’s of Capital One), and you’re due that if you want it.

But say you already had credit monitoring set up because of, say, yet another of the various hacks and leaks that have plagued the careless stewards of our data in recent years. In that case you can state this is the case and receive up to $125 as an alternative claim.

There’s just one problem: Equifax only set aside a paltry sum of $31M for these cases, which is just enough for about a quarter of a million people to receive that $125 — well under the millions that are now submitting claims. So the pie, already a small one, gets sliced even thinner than before.

If even 1 in 10 of the victims asks for the alternative payout method, that nets them about two bucks each. Meanwhile the CEO received a $20 million (conservatively) golden parachute after overseeing one of the largest and most damaging hacks in history, which was called “entirely preventable.” He wasn’t fired, you know — he retired. Overall the company is in pretty good shape!

There is more money set aside for people who have out-of-pocket expenses for hack-related issues, like identity theft that resulted in the loss of a loan and such. You’ll need to document that, though, and relatively few people will be able to take advantage of it.

The FTC’s Robert Schoshinski explains that the credit monitoring is the more valuable option anyway:

If you haven’t submitted your claim yet, think about opting for the free credit monitoring instead. Frankly, the free credit monitoring is worth a lot more – the market value would be hundreds of dollars a year. And this monitoring service is probably stronger and more helpful than any you may have already, because it monitors your credit report at all three nationwide credit reporting agencies, and it comes with up to $1 million in identity theft insurance and individualized identity restoration services.

Fair point, and given the ongoing failure of financial institutions, social networks, and other companies to protect your data, it might be nice to know that you’re protected.

Of course, the credit monitoring is provided by Equifax. But don’t worry, I’m sure they learned their lesson.

Hyperloop, the futuristic and still theoretical transportation system that could someday propel people and packages at speeds of more than 600 miles per hour, has been designated a “public infrastructure project” by India lawmakers in the state of Maharashtra.

Wrapped in that government jargon is a valuable and notable outcome. The upshot: hyperloop is being treated like any other public infrastructure project such as bridges, roads and railways. In other words, hyperloop has been plucked out of niche, futuristic obscurity and given a government stamp of approval.

That’s remarkable, considering that the idea for hyperloop was first proposed by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in a nearly 60-page public white paper just five years ago.

It also kicks off a process that could bring hyperloop to a 93-mile stretch of India between the cities of Mumbai and Pune. The Pune Metropolitan Regional Development Authority will begin the procurement process in mid-August when it starts accepting proposals from companies hoping to land the hyperloop contract.

The frontrunner is likely Virgin Hyperloop One -DP World, a consortium between the hyperloop company and its biggest backer that pitched the original project to India. The MahaIDEA Committee earlier approved Virgin Hyperloop One-DP World Consortium as the Original Project Proponent.

Under the VHO-DPW proposal, a hyperloop capable of transporting 200 million people every year would be built between Pune and Mumbai. That stretch of road now takes more than three hours by car; VHO says its hyperloop would reduce it to a 35-minute trip.

“This is history in the making. The race is on to host the first hyperloop transportation system in the world, and today’s announcement puts India firmly in the lead. This is a significant milestone and the first of many important steps toward bringing hyperloop to the masses,” Virgin Hyperloop One CEO Jay Walder said in a statement Wednesday.

The hope is that India’s government will award the contract by the end of 2019, a VHO executive told TechCrunch. If that occurs, Phase 1 of the project — an 11.8 kilometer (or 7.3 mile) section — would begin in 2020.

The cost of building Phase 1 will be covered by DP World, which has committed $500 million to this section. The government is covering the cost and logistics of acquiring the land for the hyperloop.

Phase 1 will initially act as a certification track, which will be used to certify the hyperloop technology for passenger operations. VHO wants this certification track built and operating by 2024. If this section meets safety standards it will become part of the larger hyperloop line between Pune and Mumbai.

There is a lot of work to do, and technical milestones to meet, before hyperloop is whisking people in pods through a tunnel. But if it works and is built, the region’s economy could be transformed, supporters insist.

Once commercialized, the hyperloop will transform the Pune-Mumbai corridor into a mega-economic region, according to Harj Dhaliwal, managing director of India and Middle East at Virgin Hyperloop One.

Today, some 75 million people travel between Pune and Mumbai each year, and forecasts suggest that number could rise to 130 million annually by 2026. The VHO-DPW consortium says its hyperloop will have the capacity to handle 16,000 passengers day, or about 200 million people annually.

Get ready to dive into the fiercely competitive waters of enterprise software. Join more than 1,000 attendees for TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 on September 5 to navigate this rapidly evolving category with the industry’s brightest minds, biggest names and exciting startups.

Our $249 early-bird ticket price remains in play, which saves you $100. But one is the loneliest number, so why not take advantage of our group discount, buy in bulk and bring your whole team? Save an extra 20% when you buy four or more tickets at once.

We’ve packed this day-long conference with an outstanding lineup of presentations, interviews, panel discussions, demos, breakout sessions and, of course, networking. Check out the agenda, which includes both industry titans and boundary-pushing startups eager to disrupt the status quo.

We’ll add more surprises along the way, but these sessions provide a taste of what to expect — and why you’ll need your posse to absorb as much intel as possible.

Talking Developer Tools
Scott Farquhar (Atlassian)

With tools like Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence, few companies influence how developers work as much as Atlassian. The company’s co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar will join us to talk about growing his company, how it is bringing its tools to enterprises and what the future of software development in and for the enterprise will look like.

Keeping the Enterprise Secure
Martin Casado (Andreessen Horowitz), Wendy Nather (Duo Security), Emily Heath (United Airlines)

Enterprises face a litany of threats from both inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, enterprises have it tough. How can you secure the enterprise without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern CSO and how to move fast — without breaking things.

Keeping an Enterprise Behemoth on Course
Bill McDermott (SAP)

With over $166 billion in market cap, Germany-based SAP is one of the most valuable tech companies in the world today. Bill McDermott took the leadership in 2014, becoming the first American to hold this position. Since then, he has quickly grown the company, in part thanks to a number of $1 billion-plus acquisitions. We’ll talk to him about his approach to these acquisitions, his strategy for growing the company in a quickly changing market and the state of enterprise software in general.

The Quantum Enterprise
Jim Clarke (Intel), Jay Gambetta (IBM) and Krysta Svore (Microsoft)
4:20 PM – 4:45 PM

While we’re still a few years away from having quantum computers that will fulfill the full promise of this technology, many companies are already starting to experiment with what’s available today. We’ll talk about what startups and enterprises should know about quantum computing today to prepare for tomorrow.

TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 takes place on September 5. You can’t be everywhere at once, so bring your team, cover more ground and increase your ROI. Get your group discount tickets and save.

The dreaded 10x, or, how to handle exceptional employees

The reality (myth?) is that there are engineers who are ten times more productive than other engineers (some would argue 100x, but okay). Jon Evans, who is CTO at HappyFunCorp, dives into the strengths and weaknesses of these vaunted people and how to manage them and their relationships with other team members.

The anti-10x squad raises many important and valid — frankly, obvious and inarguable — points. Go down that Twitter thread and you’ll find that 10x engineers are identified as: people who eschew meetings, work alone, rarely look at documentation, don’t write much themselves, are poor mentors, and view process, meetings, or training as reasons to abandon their employer. In short, they are unbelievably terrible team members.

Is software a field like the arts, or sports, in which exceptional performers can exist? Sure. Absolutely. Software is Extremistan, not Mediocristan, as Nassim Taleb puts it.

A guide to Virtual Beings and how they impact our world

If your 10x engineers are too annoying to deal with, maybe consider just getting virtual beings instead. The inaugural Virtual Beings Summit was held recently in San Francisco, a conference designed to bring together storyline editors, virtual reality engineers, influencer marketers and more to consider the future of “virtual beings.”

CRV, formerly known as Charles River Ventures, has hired Anna Khan as its 10th general partner. Khan joins from Bessemer Venture Partners where she’s served as a vice president since 2016.

CRV invests across industries, with a portfolio that includes Bird and Airtable, among others. The venture capital firm is currently investing out of its 17th fund, a $600 million vehicle that closed in 2018.

Founded in 1970, CRV is amongst the older VC firms. While Khan isn’t the firm’s first female GP — Annie Kadavy, now a general partner at Redpoint Ventures, joined CRV as a GP in 2012 — she will be the firm’s only current female GP.

Despite, an increasing number of firms tapping female talent, less than 10% of “decision-makers” at U.S. venture capital firms are female, according to Axios. Female founders, meanwhile, attract just over 2% of venture capital dollars.

Khan joins CRV alongside another new hire, former Social Capital partner Kristin Baker Spohn. Both Khan and Spohn, a venture partner, will focus on CRV’s enterprise practice, where they’ll work with Airtable, Drift, Iterable, SignalFx and more.

CRV’s newest venture partner Kristin Baker Spohn

“As is often the case, we were introduced to both [Khan and Spohn] through friends of CRV, and from our earliest conversations knew they would add tremendously to the firm,” CRV general partner Murat Bicer said in a statement. “Kristin brings an impressive depth of knowledge in healthcare and a charisma that speaks to early entrepreneurs and seasoned executives alike, while Anna has an immense understanding of the SaaS world and an energy that has seen her accomplish so much in a relatively short period of time.”

Khan, an investor in ScaleFactor, NewVoiceMedia and Intercom, previously founded Launch X, an accelerator that helps female entrepreneurs learn how to raise capital for their businesses.

Spohn’s been an active angel investor since leaving Social Capital. She exited the once high-flying venture capital fund last year following Social Capital co-founder Chamath Palihapitiya’s decision to no longer raise outside capital.

Space exploration non-profit The Planetary Society is celebrating a stack of wins today, after announcing that its LightSail 2 spacecraft, which was funded in part through a crowdfunding campaign, has managed to successfully fly on the power of sunlight alone. It’s raised its orbit after initially being put into position by a Falcon Heavy launch and its own conventional thrusters, climbing by about two kilometres (about 1.2 miles) from its initial orbit using on the force exerted by photos from the sun bouncing off the surface of its mylar sail.

This is a huge achievement, which successfully demonstrates that the idea of flying CubeSats, or small satellites, in orbit with altitude adjustments powered by light alone is indeed a viable option. LightSail 2 is the first spacecraft to show that solar sailing works in EArth’s orbit, and only the second solar sail spacecraft flown ever, after 2010’s Ikaros which was operated by Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on a very different mission.

This is indeed primary mission success, but LightSail 2’s voyage isn’t over – it’ll now continue to raise its orbit using the solar sail, with a goal of raising the overall apogee (or high point) of the spacecraft’s orbit over time. It’ll also seek to improve overall performance of solar sailing, by optimizing a required process called “desaturation” that temporarily takes the craft out of its target solar sailing orientation in order to bleed off accumulated momentum.

In around a year from now, LightSail 2 will perform its planned deorbit and entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, at which point it’ll burn up.

This a also a big achievement for crowdfunded space exploration – around 50,000 people contributed to the LightSail funding campaign, from acrosss 100 countries, and contributed along with various foundations and corporate sponsor to raise the $7 million used to fund the spacecraft development project and launch.

“For me, it’s very romantic to be sailing on sunbeams,” said Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye at an event on Wednesday to announce the achievement.

Data collected from LightSail 2 will be shared with other organizations including NASA, which intends to launch its own solar sail-powered small satellite on a mission to explore a near-Earth asteroid sometime in the near future.

Amazon’s Alexa AI team had developed a new training method for the virtual assistant that could greatly improve its ability to handle tricky questions. In a blog post, team lead Abdalghani Abujabal details the new method, which combines both text-based search and a custom-built knowledge graph, two methods which normally compete.

Abujabal suggests the following scenario: You ask Alexa “Which Nolan films won an Oscar but missed a Golden Globe?” The answer to this question asks a lot – you need to identify that the ‘Nolan’ referred to is director Christopher Nolan, figure out which movie he’s directed (even his role as ‘director’ for the resulting list needs to be inferred) and then cross-reference those which have one an Oscar with a list of those which have also won a Golden Globe, and identify those that are present on List A but not on List B.

Amazon’s method to provide a better answer to this difficult question opts for first gathering the most complete data set possible, and then automatically building a curated knowledge graph out of an initially high volume and very noisy (ie., filled with unnecessary data) data set using algorithms that the research team custom-created to deal with cutting the chaff and arriving at mostly meaningful results.

The system devised by Amazon is actually relatively simple on its face – or rather, it combines two relatively simple methods, including a basic web search, that essentially just crawls the web for results using the full text of the question asked – just like if you’d typed “Which Nolan films won an Oscar but missed a Golden Globe?” into Google, for instance (researchers used multiple web engines in reality). The system then grabs the top ten ranked pages and breaks them down into identified names and grammar units.

On top of that resulting data set, Alexa AI’s approach then looks for clues in the structure of sentences to flag and weight significant sentences in the top texts, like “Nolan directed Inception,” and discounts the rest. This builds the ad-hoc knowledge graph, which they then asses to identify “cornerstones” within. A cornerstone is basically dead ringers for words in the original search string (ie., “Which Nolan films won an Oscar but missed a Golden Globe?”) and take those out, focusing instead of looking at the information in between as the source fo the actual answers to that question.

With some final weighting and sorting of the remaining data, the algorithm correctly returns “Inception” as the answer, and Amazon’s team found that this method actually beat out state-of-the-art approaches that were much more involved but that focused on just text search, or just building a curated knowledge graph in isolation. Still, they think they can tweak their approach to be even better, which is good news for Alexa users hoping their smart speakers will be able to settle heated debates about advanced Trival Pursuit questions.

The data breach at Capital One may be the “tip of the iceberg” and may affect other major companies, according to security researchers.

Israeli security firm CyberInt said Vodafone, Ford, Michigan State University and the Ohio Department of Transportation may have also fallen victim to the same data breach that saw over 106 million credit applications and files stolen from a cloud server run by Capital One by an alleged hacker, Paige Thompson, a Seattle resident, who was taken into FBI custody earlier this week.

Reports from Forbes and security reporter Brian Krebs indicating that Capital One may not have been the only company affected, pointing to “one of the world’s biggest telecom providers, an Ohio government body, and a major U.S. university,” according to Slack messages sent by the alleged hacker.

Krebs posted a screenshot of a list of files purportedly stolen by the alleged hacker. The stolen data contained filenames including car maker “Ford” and Italian financial services company “Unicredit.”

The Justice Department said Thompson may face additional charges — suggesting other companies may have been involved.

We reached out to several of those named by CyberInt with mixed results. Only the Ohio Department of Transportation confirmed it had data stolen, and was working with the FBI. “At this point, however, we can confirm that the information in the referenced file contained only publicly available data and no private information was stored there,” said spokesperson Erica Hawkins.

Ford spokesperson Monique Brentley told TechCrunch that it’s “investigating the situation to determine if Ford information is involved.”

Meanwhile, Vodafone spokesperson Adam Liversage said the telecom giant was “not aware” of its data stolen in the Capital One breach.

And a spokesperson for Michigan State University said it receives “hundreds of threats and attacks on our system” and said it was “hard to know if one recently was the alleged hacker from the Capital One situation.”

“Our teams are looking into but at this point we have no information to share,” said spokesperson Emily Guerrant.

The hack of Capital One is the most significant data breach this year. Data was stolen from an Amazon Web Services-based storage bucket, which included more than 140,000 Social Security numbers and over a million Canadian Social Insurance numbers, as well as other personal information.

Capital One said it learned of the breach through a third-party who reportedly saw the alleged hacker’s claims and boasts about the thefts.

Security researcher John Wethington told TechCrunch that that based on public information — including the Slack channel the alleged hacker was a member — likely other companies had data stolen.

“Based on the information gathered from publicly available information on the alleged hackers Github and Gitlab accounts as well as public information from the Slack channel it’s clear that organizations including Ford, Vodafone and others are possible victims of what appears to be a massive sensitive data hacking spree,” he said.

As of the time of writing, Thompson faces five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

A few years ago, Silicon Valley couldn’t stop using a trendy buzzword — the sharing economy. The good old top-down economic model with a clear separation between service providers and clients was falling apart. And huge tech companies disrupted entire industries, from Airbnb to Taskrabbit, Uber, Etsy and Getaround.

When you retrospectively look at the sharing economy boom of the early 2010s, many of the principles that defined that generation of startups have slowly disappeared. Instead of a huge societal shift, the sharing economy is slowly fading away.

What is the sharing economy?

In the past, if you wanted to buy a good or a service, you would ask a company or a professional to provide it.

You’d buy something from a company in particular because you knew it would be the exact thing you need. That’s why plenty of companies spent huge amounts of money to build a brand and a reputation. If you just bought a car, chances are you’ll see thousands of ads for cars before you buy your next car.

And that’s also why distribution channels have been key, especially in commoditized markets with low brand differentiation. For instance, when you buy a new printer, chances are you just head to an electronics store or type “printer” on your favorite e-commerce website. If HP doesn’t have a distribution deal with those stores, you’ll just buy an Epson printer.

If your neighbor wants a new printer in a couple of years, you might recommend the same printer, but you may have forgotten where you bought it. There’s little differentiation between distribution channels in that case.

The marketplace model

The sharing economy happened because a group of entrepreneurs wanted to invent new distribution channels. Sure, some traditional distribution channels secured exclusive rights to sell specific products.

But those startups made a radical change. They wanted to work on a completely new inventory of goods or services.

A few years ago, Silicon Valley couldn’t stop using a trendy buzzword — the sharing economy. The good old top-down economic model with a clear separation between service providers and clients was falling apart. And huge tech companies disrupted entire industries, from Airbnb to Taskrabbit, Uber, Etsy and Getaround.

When you retrospectively look at the sharing economy boom of the early 2010s, many of the principles that defined that generation of startups have slowly disappeared. Instead of a huge societal shift, the sharing economy is slowly fading away.

What is the sharing economy?

In the past, if you wanted to buy a good or a service, you would ask a company or a professional to provide it.

You’d buy something from a company in particular because you knew it would be the exact thing you need. That’s why plenty of companies spent huge amounts of money to build a brand and a reputation. If you just bought a car, chances are you’ll see thousands of ads for cars before you buy your next car.

And that’s also why distribution channels have been key, especially in commoditized markets with low brand differentiation. For instance, when you buy a new printer, chances are you just head to an electronics store or type “printer” on your favorite e-commerce website. If HP doesn’t have a distribution deal with those stores, you’ll just buy an Epson printer.

If your neighbor wants a new printer in a couple of years, you might recommend the same printer, but you may have forgotten where you bought it. There’s little differentiation between distribution channels in that case.

The marketplace model

The sharing economy happened because a group of entrepreneurs wanted to invent new distribution channels. Sure, some traditional distribution channels secured exclusive rights to sell specific products.

But those startups made a radical change. They wanted to work on a completely new inventory of goods or services.