Category: UNCATEGORIZED

9to5mac’s Guilherme Rambo managed to obtain screenshots of iOS 13. While it still looks like iOS, there’s a twist — there will be a system-wide dark mode to make your apps look better at night. Apple is expected to announce the new version of iOS at its WWDC keynote on Monday.

With iOS 13, users can enable dark mode in the Settings app or with a toggle in Control Center — you may have to add the Control Center button in the Settings app first.

And here’s what it’ll look like according to 9to5mac’s screenshots:

As you can see, the home screen doesn’t change much except the dock at the bottom. But the Music app looks completely different with white text on top of a black background. The tab bar at the bottom also switches from transparent white to transparent black. Apple still uses red for buttons and links, which makes the app slightly less readable.

Enabling dark mode also affects user interface elements at the operating system level. When you take a screenshot and tap on the screenshot thumbnail, top and bottom menus are dark for instance. Developers should be able to support dark mode in third-party apps as well.

In other news, Rambo also shares a screenshot of the new version of the Reminders app. It now features four different menus — today, scheduled, all and flagged. The user interface has been refreshed as well.

Finally, 9to5mac also confirms a previous scoop with the icon of a new app called “Find My”. Apple plans to merge Find My Friends and Find My iPhone into a single app on both the iPhone and iPad.

Rumor has it that there will be more fundamental changes with iOS 13. Apple plans to let you open multiple windows of the same app. This way, users will be able to work on multiple documents or see multiple conversations at the same time. This will be a key new feature for iPad users in particular.

You can also expect smaller updates to Safari, Mail, font management, the volume indicator, the keyboard, etc.

There is a tendency at any conference to get lost in the message. Spending several days immersed in any subject tends to do that. The purpose of such gatherings is, after all, to sell the company or technologies being featured.

Against the beautiful backdrop of the city of Barcelona last week, we got the full cloud native message at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which houses Kubernetes and related cloud native projects, had certainly honed the message along with the community who came to celebrate its five-year anniversary. The large crowds that wandered the long hallways of the Fira Gran Via conference center proved it was getting through, at least to a specific group.

Cloud native computing involves a combination of software containerization along with Kubernetes and a growing set of adjacent technologies to manage and understand those containers. It also involves the idea of breaking down applications into discrete parts known as microservices, which in turn leads to a continuous delivery model, where developers can create and deliver software more quickly and efficiently. At the center of all this is the notion of writing code once and being able to deliver it on any public cloud, or even on-prem. These approaches were front and center last week.

At five years old, many developers have embraced these concepts, but cloud native projects have reached a size and scale where they need to move beyond the early adopters and true believers and make their way deep into the enterprise. It turns out that it might be a bit harder for larger companies with hardened systems to make wholesale changes in the way they develop applications, just as it is difficult for large organizations to take on any type of substantive change.

Putting up stop signs

Last week Modsy, a San Francisco-based startup raised a large amount of funding – $37 million in C-round funding to be precise. And that followed a $23 million series B round in December 2017.

Why the large amounts I hear you ask? Well, Modsy is developing a platform that lets property owners create virtual renderings of rooms and restyle them in real time. So that means 3D automation, plus virtually positioning furniture items, combined with a marketplace where you can buy the items. Modsy’s tech replicates rooms in 360 degrees, with furniture from dozens of well-known brands. It’s a powerful combination.

The move shows that AR/VR technologies are now finding their place, not in a ‘Ready Player One’ style future but in the more mundane, but lucrative area of interior design.

But there’s another company out there that claims to have reached 40 million users with far more modest funding.

Planner 5D is a design tool that lets you create floor plans and interior designs using VR and AR. But its approach is different.

It first learns about how the house is used and then automatically creates a design. The startup claims its users have already designed more than 80 million projects without requiring any special design or software skills.

The software allows users to add rooms and floors in 3D, choose furniture and other objects from a catalog of over 4,500 items, and customize the materials, colors, and dimensions of the interior items and rooms. The AR aspect is used for capturing the dimensions of real rooms, while switching to VR lets you walk through the interiors virtually.

But homes are just the start. Founded in 2011 by Alexey Sheremetyev and Sergey Nosyrev in Lithuania, with backing from investor Igor Matsanyuk and Farminers Academy, Planner 5D plans to apply its AI features to home planning, robotics, scene-understanding, and more.

In the meantime, it’s easy to see why apps like this are taking off. The average interior design costs for a US homeowner are between $2000 and $8300, so using these apps can be a huge cost saving.

While Modsy and Planner 5D battle it out in this space, they are not the only apps available.

Users have a bewildering range to try. Pottery Barn’s 3D Room View app lets you put new furniture items in your home, while companies like Wayfair, IKEA and Houzz also have augmented reality solutions to allow customers to try out furniture in situ.

But while retailers try to lift sales with these apps, the likelihood is that the average consumer will not want several branded apps on their phone, when one app can do most of the heavy lifting and give direct access to furniture brands or retailers.

Then there is also the different approaches taken by these apps. Typically, retailer apps will just place an item of furniture in a room. Modsy will render an entire room, but take a couple of days to do it, though it’s latest funding will help speed that up. Planner 3D doesn’t render the room, but builds a scene based on dimensions, in a faster process.

Whatever methodology a tech company uses, all of these apps are sure to benefit. A survey Modsy took of its customers found that 80% plan to buy based on the rendered design.

When apps are connected with marketplaces, as Planner 3D and Modsy are, this means potentially huge revenues for these startups, and of course, the large rounds of venture funding we’ve seen to date.

Last year IBM and Danish shipping conglomerate Maersk announced the limited availability of a blockchain-based shipping tool called TradeLens. Today, the two partners announced that a couple of other major shippers have come on board.

The partners announced that CMA CGM and MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company have joined TradeLens. When you include these companies together with Maersk, the TradeLens consortium now encompasses almost half of the world’s cargo container shipments, according to data supplied by IBM .

That’s important because shipping has traditionally been a paper-intensive and largely manual process. It’s still challenging to track where a container might be in the world and which government agency might be holding it up. When it comes to auditing, it can take weeks of intensive effort to gather the paperwork generated throughout a journey from factory or field to market. Suffice to say, cargo touches a lot of hands along the way.

It’s been clear for years that shipping could benefit from digitization, but to this point previous attempts like EDI have not been terribly successful. The hope is that by using blockchain to solve the problem, all the participants can easily follow the flow of shipments along the chain and trust that the immutable record has not been altered at any point.

As Marie Wieck, general manager for IBM Blockchain told TechCrunch at the time of last year’s announcement, the blockchain brings some key benefits to the shipping workflow.

“The blockchain provides a couple of obvious advantages over previous methods. For starters, [Wieck said] it’s safer because data is distributed, making it much more secure with digital encryption built in. The greatest advantage though is the visibility it provides. Every participant can check any aspect of the flow in real time, or an auditor or other authority can easily track the entire process from start to finish by clicking on a block in the blockchain instead of requesting data from each entity manually.”

The TradeLens partners certainly see the benefits of digitizing the process. “We believe that TradeLens, with its commitment to open standards and open governance, is a key platform to help usher in this digital transformation,” Rajesh Krishnamurthy, executive vice president for IT & Transformations at CMA CGM Group said in a statement.

Today’s announcement is a big step toward gaining more adoption for this approach. While there are many companies working on supply chain products on the blockchain, the more shipping companies and adjacent entities like customs agencies who join TradeLens, the more effective it’s going to be.

MacKenzie Bezos, the world’s third-richest woman following her divorce from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, has signed the Giving Pledge — a commitment that will see her giving away more than half her wealth to philanthropy or charitable causes, either during her lifetime or in her will.

Bezos recently made headlines when she gave ex-husband Jeff 75 percent of their joint Amazon stock and voting control in their divorce, along with their interests in The Washington Post and Blue Origin. However, that still left her with an at least $35.6 billion stake in Amazon. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index now estimates her net worth at $36.6 billion.

“We each come by the gifts we have to offer by an infinite series of influences and lucky breaks we can never fully understand,” wrote MacKenzie Bezos, in a letter published by the Giving Pledge today, announcing her intention to give away her wealth.

“In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share. My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful. It will take time and effort and care. But I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty,” she said.

Ex-husband Jeff Bezos tweeted praise for MacKenzie’s pledge this morning:

Jeff Bezos has not signed the Giving Pledge himself.

Founded in 2010 by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, the Giving Pledge encourages the world’s richest people to give away over half their wealth. Other notable names who have previously signed the pledge include Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Larry Ellison, Michael R. Bloomberg, Pierre Omidyar and many more.

Today, the program announced 19 more philanthropists have signed their names to the pledge, bringing the total number of signatories to 204.

In addition to Bezos, other tech industry additions announced today include: Tegan and Brian Acton — the latter who co-founded WhatsApp, the messaging app bought by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion; Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong; co-founder of bitcoin trading platform BitMEX Ben Delo; Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson and Erica Lawson; Lowercase Capital partners Chris and Crystal Sacca; and Pinterest co-founder Paul Sciarra and Jennifer Sciarra.

Globally, there are now signatories from 23 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Cyprus, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Monaco, Norway, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, South Africa, Switzerland, Tanzania, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the U.S., the largest contingents are from New York and California.

Bezos’ full letter detailing her plans is below:

May 25, 2019

Thinking about the Giving Pledge, my mind kept searching its folds for a passage I once read about writing, something about not saving our best ideas for later chapters, about using them now.

I found it this morning on a shelf of my books from college, toward the end of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. It was underlined and starred like all of the words that have inspired me most over the years, words that felt true in context, and also true in life:

“Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book… The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better… Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

I have no doubt that tremendous value comes when people act quickly on the impulse to give. No drive has more positive ripple effects than the desire to be of service. There are lots of resources each of us can pull from our safes to share with others — time, attention, knowledge, patience, creativity, talent, effort, humor, compassion. And sure enough, something greater rises up every time we give: the easy breathing of a friend we sit with when we had other plans, the relief on our child’s face when we share the story of our own mistake, laughter at the well-timed joke we tell to someone who is crying, the excitement of the kids in the school we send books to, the safety of the families who sleep in the shelters we fund. These immediate results are only the beginning. Their value keeps multiplying and spreading in ways we may never know.

We each come by the gifts we have to offer by an infinite series of influences and lucky breaks we can never fully understand. In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share. My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful. It will take time and effort and care. But I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.

MacKenzie Bezos

 

Spanish on-demand delivery startup Glovo is facing angry protests from couriers on its platform following the death of a 22-year-old rider on Saturday in Barcelona where the business is headquartered.

Local press reports that the man, a Nepalese national called Pujan Koirala, had been substituting for a registered Glovo courier at the time he was struck and killed by a garbage truck. It does not appear that Koirala had a visa to work legally in Spain.

After Koirala’s death, a number of Glovo couriers held protests in front of the company’s office, burning the signature yellow delivery backpacks and criticising it for ignoring long-standing safety concerns — using hashtags #glovonosmata #glovomata on social media — aka, ‘Glovo kills us’, ‘Glovo kills’.

In Barcelona Glovo couriers are a more common sight than on-demand rivals such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo — typically to be found thronging eateries waiting to collect take-away orders and/or biking at speed to a drop off. The city is one of the Glovo’s best markets, though it also operates in other countries in Europe, as well as in LatAm and Africa.

The tragedy highlights persistent safety concerns attached to conditions for service providers on so-called gig economy’ platforms which rely on scores of individuals to deliver the core platform proposition who are classified as ‘self-employed’, rather than employed as workers with all the rights and protections that would entail — while also often having their work rate tightly controlled and managed remotely via location-tracking algorithms.

In the case of Glovo the platform appears to weight delivery speed and availability between specific hours as key factors in distributing jobs. So, in other words, if a rider doesn’t make themselves available when the app demands, and get each delivery done quickly enough, they risk future work on the platform drying up.

A critical report last year by a UK politician, which examined conditions for couriers using the rival Deliveroo on-demand delivery platform, found a dual market in operation which encourages a surplus of labour that results in a winner takes all outcome where the best riders get rewarded with more stable work, while another group is left at a disadvantage to compete for whatever is left. (Deliveroo disputed the report’s findings.)

Hence both the safety concerns attached to gig economy platforms’ algorithmic management; and the practice of registered riders substituting themselves — i.e. in order to try to keep up with the work rate being demanded by sharing their account with a non-registered rider, as appears to be the case in Koirala’s case.

In a statement yesterday Glovo confirmed that Koirala had not been officially registered, writing that “the fact that he carried a Glovo backpack suggests that he could be using a third party’s account”.

It does not officially authorize this type of unregistered account sharing. But whether the pressures of working on its platform encourage unofficial substituting is quite another matter. (In its statement Glovo also writes that it tries to prevent unregistered substituting by offering riders and users mechanisms where they can report suspected cases, after which it says it may immediately and permanently cancel the account in question.)

Undocumented, unregistered platform service providers plying a black economy, cash-in-hand trade entirely off the platform’s books are clearly another, even more precarious tier of ‘gig’ workers — given they are working illegally, meaning they risk exploitation by those they are substituting for, as well as falling entirely outside any insurance benefits that a platform may offer to officially registered workers. (Glovo does offer riders a level of insurance.)

El Espanol reports that on the fateful day Koirala had agreed to do a delivery for his roommate. In such cases the paper suggests a substitute rider expects to be paid as little as €5 (~$5.60) for fulfilling the job on the registered user’s behalf.

Glovo, meanwhile, has raised more than $346M in VC funding since being founded just over four years ago, per Crunchbase — including a $169M Series D just last month. Investors include Seaya Ventures, Rakuten, Lakestar, Cathay Innovation, Antai Venture Builder and others.

We reached out to Glovo with questions about the safety and legal risks of using algorithms to manage a distributed ‘self-employed’ workforce at scale. At the time of writing we’re waiting for a response and will update this report when we have it.

Glovo investor Seaya Ventures did not respond to a request for comment about how it priced such a level of risk into its valuation of the startup.

In its statement yesterday Glovo said it would pay to cover the expenses of the private insurance that Koirala would have been entitled to had he been working legally and able to officially register on the platform.

It’s not clear how many similarly undocumented workers are gigging on Glovo’s platform.

Huawei is understandably reexamining a number of relationships in the wake of a recent U.S. trade ban. While various component and software providers including Google and ARM have suspended dealings with the Chinese hardware giant, the latest issue comes from an altogether different source. 

The company told Reuters this week that it’s reassessing its relationship with FedEx after the delivery company misrouted a handful of packages. Huawei says the packages contained documents, rather than specific technologies covered by the current Trump ban.

“The recent experiences where important commercial documents sent via FedEx were not delivered to their destination, and instead were either diverted to, or were requested to be diverted to, FedEx in the United States, undermines our confidence,” a rep for the company said. “We will now have to review our logistics and document delivery support requirements as a direct result of these incidents.”

FedEx has since apologized for the error on Chinese social media, stating its “regret” over the “inadvertently misrouted” packages. The company went on to explain that the issue was not the result of external pressure — no doubt addressing concern that the U.S. government may have played a role in the issue.

It remains to be seen whether Huawei will accept the apology. The company, which has long denied its own ties to the Chinese government that have put it under international scrutiny, is no doubt skeptical of its remaining relationships with U.S.-based corporations.

The role of Product Manager can mean very different things at various companies. Should a product manager be technical? Scientific? Opinionated?

J Crowley has run product at three big-name companies. At Foursquare, he led the rebuild of Swarm after a rocky initial launch and eventually became Head of Product. He then moved on to Blue Apron as Head of Product, overseeing growth and monetization. This was right before Blue Apron went public, which ushered in a turbulent time for the company but one that yielded a wealth of life lessons for Crowley.

Now, he serves as Head of Product for Airbnb Lux.

I hopped on the phone with J to talk about what makes a great product manager, some of the lessons he’s learned, and how he’s made difficult decisions and communicated that to his team.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jordan: How did you get into the tech world in the first place? You used to work in TV, right?

J Crowley: I worked in the television industry for about 10 years. Many years at NBC for a bunch of different departments. Started in the Page Program, and worked on everything from late night comedy, to sports, news, election coverage, digital programming.

I ended up leaving NBC to start my own company, which was a small digital studio here in New York City. We made hundreds of digital shorts and web series. It was probably the most challenging, but most fun three years of my career.

I eventually packed it up to join Foursquare as their Director of Business Development in 2010. There, I helped them grow their brand by securing hundreds of media partnerships with major publishers, sports leagues, TV networks, musicians, etc. That was actually my first job in tech. It wasn’t a product role. It was business development.

In emergency situations, minutes can mean the difference between life and death. Paladin Drones, a company launching out of Y Combinator, wants to use technology to minimize the amount of time between a 911 call and a response through autonomous drones.

The company today announced the close of a $1.3 million seed round with participation from Khosla Ventures and Paul Bechheit.

Paladin’s software allows a drone — right now the software works with DJI drones — to deploy to the location of an incident and let first responders scope out the area beforehand. For example, a Paladin Drone might be deployed to the site of the fire, where it will arrive before first responders in an attempt to map out any dangers and locate hot spots of the fire inside the building.

The hope is to do as much data gathering and analysis as possible before any first responder gets on site. This allows them to jump straight into the process of saving lives and preventing further damage as soon as they arrive as opposed to taking the time to map out the situation.

According to Paladin, one of the big issues in emergency situations is lack of information. Usually, the only information that first responders have when they get on site is what was gleaned from a 911 call. Because people placing 911 calls are usually in a state of panic, that information can be unreliable.

In fact, that’s how Paladin came to be. Cofounder and CEO Divyaditya Shrivastava had a conversation with firefighters after his friend’s house had burned down while the family was on vacation. The 911 call was placed by a neighbor walking by. The firefighters told Shrivastava that they originally didn’t have the right location of the emergency due to an unreliable 911 call.

“They said that this actually happens about 70 percent of the time because whenever there is an emergency, generally, the person calling 911 is panicking and can only give so much information,” he said. “That’s when I realized this is a huge problem. These are firefighters trying to save lives and they don’t have good information.”

As a recreational drone pilot, Shrivastava realized there was an opportunity to give firefighters and other first-responders a real-time view of the scene to close the information gap. And so Paladin was born.

Shrivastava and his cofounder Trevor Pennypacker recently graduated out of Y Combinator and are running a pilot program with Memorial Village police department just outside of Houston, TX.

The Paladin Drone technology offers clear benefits to first responders — the average response time for an emergency ranges from 8 to 15 minutes, whereas a Paladin-powered drone can get there in 30 to 90 seconds. That said, there are looming concerns about the invasiveness of this type of surveillance technology.

But Paladin has thought ahead. Not only does the company plan to work with local, state and federal government to ensure that its platform is compliant, but it has also built software to ensure that Paladin Drones record the sky when they’re en route to an emergency, only panning down to the ground when they’re on site.

Remember that future we were promised where our vehicle magically tells us that we’re about to break down? Or actually never does? Or that the pick-up truck arrives before the driver even knows something wrong? That future is arriving. But like many things, the practical reality is that this technology starts to arrive in the fleet management industry before it arrives for consumers.

The market for maintenance of fleets of buses and trucks is worth $200B in annual expenditure, so as you can imagine, it’s a juicy sector to get into. Down in Portugal, a tea of entrepreneurs and scientists assembled to look into this and came up with a fascinating startup that is now attracting the attention of investors.

Today, Stratio is emerging from stealth to help OEMs, Distributors and Fleets benefit from AI-driven predictive intelligence.

The idea is to apply machine learning models that retrieve and analyze millions of data points per vehicle per day to vehicles both in development and on the road. It turns out that if you compare the real vs. the expected behaviour of the actual vehicle components themselves, you can improve automated testing and predictive intelligence that can assess the vehicle’s condition. Then you can detect early anomalies and failure. This is exactly what Stratio does.

It does this by putting a sensor box-of-tricks under a vehicle, like a bus. This box connects with existing sensors in the vehicle using the existing API – something crucial for OEMs. Using proprietary machine learning it can predict when something will break, days ahead of time. Most existing boxes like this only track location, not analytics.

Stratio also works with OEMs during the vehicle testing phase to identify issues and their root cause to get more reliable vehicles to market faster, lower the potential for warranty claim fraud costs and expand the aftersales revenues. It’s a triple whammy in cost savings.

Stratio has now attracted a $3.5m VC round from London-based Crane VC, with participation from fellow London VC, Localglobe.

The round is one of the largest ever seed deals in Portugal and potentially the largest enterprise/deep tech first investment in the country.

It has a proprietary AI engine, Stratio CortexTM, and technology support from the European Space Agency. Ultimately the aim is to apply machine learning models and enable the so-called “zero downtime” future.

Rui Sales and Ricardo Margalho, co-founders of Stratio say the idea for Stratio came to them when their bus broke down and they missed what could have been a career-changing meeting in New York: “Knowing that today’s existing vehicles produce a massive amount of data, we set out to build a machine learning product suite that analyses high-density vehicle data in real time to predict and prevent vehicles from breaking down.”

Stratio launched in 2017, after receiving technological support from the European Space Agency and earning recognition from the EU Commission.

Alongside the co-founders is Rune Prytz, a former Volvo Trucks Research Engineer in machine learning and big data, who now leads all of Stratio’s efforts in AI. Stratio now counts MAN, DAF Trucks and VECTIA as customers, among others.

Krishna Visvanathan, Partner at Crane Venture Partners, commented “Stratio Automotive is one of the most exciting companies in our portfolio of data-driven enterprise software businesses. It has the trifecta of a super product, a deep data moat coupled with AI expertise and great customer traction.”

So far, Stratio has attracted customers and operations in over 10 key markets
across Europe, the UK, US, India and Singapore.