Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Warehouse automation is all the rage in robotics these days. No surprise then, that another emerging player just got a healthy slice of venture funding. Massachusetts-based Locus Robotics this week announced that it’s secured a $26 million Series C. The round, led by Zebra Ventures and Scale Venture Partners, brings the startup’s total funding up to around $66 million.

The five year old company produces robotic shelving designed to transfer bins inside of warehouse. Founder Bruce E. Welty was on stage at our robotics event back in 2017 demonstrating the technology.

It’s a similar principle to many other players in the space, including Amazon’s Kiva and Bay Area-based Fetch. And like those companies, Locus has garnered interest from some big players — most notably delivery giant, DHL.

The robotics automation space has heated up quite a bit in 2019. Colorado-based Canvas, which makes autonomous warehouse delivery carts, was acquired by Amazon last week. Even Boston Dynamics is looking at the category as a way forward for its own impressive technologies, putting its robot Handle to work in a fulfillment center.

“We have seen a massive uptick in demand for the flexible automation incorporated into Locus’s multi-bot solution, which is uniquely suited to address these challenges,” CEO Rick Faulk says in a release tied to the news. “Not only is our solution proven to dramatically improve productivity and drive down costs, but it is also a source of scalable labor that can be adapted to meet the demands of numerous product and customer profiles. This new funding will enable us to scale to meet growing demand for our revolutionary solution worldwide.”

Wing Aviation, the drone-based delivery startup born out of Google’s X labs, has received the first FAA certification in the country for commercial carriage of goods. It might not be long before you’re getting your burritos sent par avion.

The company has been performing tests for years, making thousands of flights and supervised deliveries to show that its drones are safe and effective. Many of those flights were in Australia, where in suburban Canberra the company recently began its first commercial operations. Finland and other countries are also in the works..

Wing’s first operations, starting later this year, will be in Blackburg and Christiansburg, VA; obviously an operation like this requires close coordination with municipal authorities as well as federal ones. You can’t just get a permission slip from the FAA and start flying over everyone’s houses.

“Wing plans to reach out to the local community before it begins food delivery, to gather feedback to inform its future operations,” the FAA writes in a press release. Here’s hoping that means you can choose whether or not these loud little aircraft will be able to pass through your airspace.

Although the obvious application is getting a meal delivered quick even when traffic is bad, there are plenty of other applications. One imagines quick delivery of medications ahead of EMTs, or blood being transferred quickly between medical centers.

I’ve asked Wing for more details on its plans to roll this out elsewhere in the U.S., and will update this story if I hear back.

The Chinese government has been using a private company jointly owned by a U.S. investment firm and its Chinese counterpart to expand its surveillance and telecommunications capabilities using American technology, The Wall Street Journal reports.

At the center of the Journal’s reporting is a company called Asia Satellite Telecommunications (AsiaSat). It’s a satellite operating company acquired back in 2015 by U.S. private equity firm The Carlyle Group and Chinese private equity firm CITIC Group. Both Carlyle and CITIC are known for their ties to government in their respective home nations.

While the U.S. government basically bans American companies from exporting satellite technology to foreign governments like China, there have been no controls put in place on how bandwidth from launched satellites is used once those satellites are in orbit.

Based in Hong Kong, AsiaSat isn’t subject to the same sort of export controls and regulations that the U.S. places on companies headquartered in mainland China, which has allowed the company to acquire U.S. satellites.

The Chinese government, through its connections with CITIC, has leveraged that loophole to bolster its surveillance and telecommunications capabilities for security activities, the Journal reports.

At issue are satellites bought by AsiaSat from Boeing and Maxar Technologies subsidiary SSL, a Palo Alto, Calif. We’ve reached out to Maxar and AsiaSat for comment.

“Boeing follows the lead of the U.S. Government with respect to the use of export controlled items,” the company said in a statement to TechCrunch.

The U.S. and China are in a highly public contest over who will control the future of networking technologies — with the U.S. accusing China’s leading commercial telecommunications vendors of collaborating with the Chinese government to spy on partners.

U.S. officials also accuse their counterparts in Beijing of using physical and cyber espionage to acquire American technology. However, in this case, China was able to use corporate interests and profit-seeking to gain access to core U.S. satellite technologies, the Journal reports.

Since at least 2011, Citic has touted Chinese intelligence branches and armed services as customers of its satellite company’s services, according to the Journal’s reporting.

In other marketing materials, Citic’s satellite company has touted its link to government agencies — as a tool to link national broadcasters to far flung towns and cities across the sprawling nation. Meanwhile, China’s Ministry of Public Security has documented how it used AsiaSat 5 — a satellite made by SSL — to develop rapid-response forces with audio and video capabilities provided in real-time, the Journal is reporting.

Citic’s ownership stake in AsiaSat predates the Carlyle Group’s acquisition. The company previously was a joint venture between the Chinese private equity firm and General Electric and its surveillance activities extend back to that period as well.

In 2008 and 2009, AsiaSat assets were used to help authorities communicate and coordinate efforts to put down antigovernment protests over religious and ethnic persecution in Tibet and Xinjiang — a mineral-rich region in Northwestern China populated mainly by an ethnic minority called Uighurs, a group comprised predominantly of practicing Muslims.

In a statement provided to the Journal, AsiaSat disputed the company’s reporting, saying that the Chinese military wasn’t a direct customer, but used capacity for disaster relief. Several cities in the Chinese province of Sichuan were decimated by an earthquake that hit in 2008.

AsiaSat also declined to comment on whether its bandwidth was being used in Xinjiang currently or whether it had been used in the Tibet and Xinjiang uprisings that occurred roughly ten years ago. In the past few years, Chinese authorities have built a pervasive surveillance network in Xinjiang and sent as many as one million ethnic Uighurs to internment camps, according to multiple reports.

In statements to The Wall Street Journal Carlyle said that AsiaSat’s equipment supports internet and phone communications for Chinese telecommunications carriers.

“It is effectively a pipe,” Carlyle said in a statement to the Journal, “and AsiaSat, because of privacy issues, doesn’t monitor or regulate the content that flows through it.”

Tim Cook thinks people should get off their iPhones and decrease their engagement with apps. The Apple CEO, speaking at the TIME 100 Summit today, was discussing the addictive nature of our mobile devices and Apple’s role in the matter when he made these comments. He said the company hadn’t intended for people to be constantly using their iPhones, and noted he himself has silenced his push notifications in recent months.

“Apple never wanted to maximize user time. We’ve never been about that,” Cook explained.

It’s certainly an interesting claim, given that Apple designed a platform that allowed app developers to constantly ping their users with the most inane notifications — from getting a new follower on a social app to a sale in a shopping app to a new level added to a game and so much more.

The very idea behind the notification platform, opt-in as it may be, is that developers should actively — and in real-time — try to capture users’ attention and redirect them back to their apps.

This is not how such an alert mechanism had to be designed.

An app notification platform could have instead been crafted to allow app developers to notify users in batches, at designed intervals within users’ control. For example, users could have specified that every day at noon they’d like to check in on the latest from their apps.

Or, in building out the iOS App Store, Apple could have implemented a “news feed” of sorts — somewhere users could opt to check in on all the latest news from the installed apps in a dedicated channel.

Or perhaps Apple could have structured a notification platform that would have allowed users to pick between different classes of notifications. Urgent messages — like alerts about a security breach — could have been a top-level tier; while general information could have been sent as a different type of notification. Users could have selected which types of alerts they wanted, depending on how important the app was to them.

These are just a few of many possible iterations. A company like Apple could have easily come up with even more ideas.

But the fact of the matter is that Apple’s notification platform was built with the idea of increasing engagement in mind. It’s disingenuous to say it was not.

At the very least, Apple could admit that it was a different era back then, and didn’t realize the potential damage to our collective psyche that a continually buzzing iPhone would cause. It could point out how it’s now working to fix this problem by putting users back in control, and plans to do more in the future.

Instead, it created a situation where users had to turn to the only defense left to them: switching off push notifications entirely. Today, when users install new apps they often say “No” to push notifications. And with Apple’s new tools to control notifications, users are now actively triaging which apps can get in touch.

In fact, that’s what Tim Cook says he did, too.

“If you guys aren’t doing this — if you have an iPhone and you’re not doing it, I would encourage you to really do this —  monitor these [push notifications],” the CEO suggested to the audience.

“What it what has done for me personally is I’ve gone in and gutted the number of notifications,” Cook said. “Because I asked myself: do I really need to be getting thousands of notifications a day? It’s not something that is adding value to my life, or is making me a better person. And so I went in and chopped that.”

Yep. Even Apple’s CEO is done with all the spammy and noisy iPhone apps.

The comment, of course, was supposed to be a veiled reference to the addictive nature of some apps — social media apps in particular, and especially Facebook. Today, Apple throws barbs at Facebook any time it can, now that the company has fallen out of public favor due to its ongoing data privacy violations and constant scandals.

But a more truthful telling of the iPhone’s past would recall that Facebook’s app — and all its many notifications — was originally a big selling point for Apple’s mobile device.

When the App Store first launched in 2008, Facebook proudly sat in the top row in a featured position. It was heavily promoted to users because it was a prime example of the iPhone’s utility: here was this popular social network you could now get to right from your phone. Amazing! 

The fact that Facebook — and every other app — later leveraged the iOS push notification platform to better its own business without regard to how that would impact users, isn’t entirely app developers’ collective fault. The notification platform itself had left the door wide open for that sort of psychological abuse, simply due to its lack of user-configured, user-friendly controls.

 

A decade after the App Store launched, Apple finally started to dial back on the free-for-all on user attention.

It announced its suite of digital wellness tools at WWDC 2018, which included Screen Time (a dashboard for tracking and limiting usage); increased parental controls; and finally a way to silence the barrage of notifications, without having to dig around in iOS Settings.

Now Tim Cook wants to have us believe that Apple had never wanted to cause any of this addiction and distraction.

But isn’t it telling that the exec has had to silence his own iPhone using these new tools? Isn’t that something of an admission of culpability here?

“Every time you pick up your phone, it means you’re taking your eyes off whoever you’re dealing with are talking with, right?,” Cook continued. “And if you’re if you’re looking at your phone more than you’re looking at somebody else’s eyes, you’re doing the wrong thing,” he said.  “We want to educate people on what they’re doing. This thing will improve through time, just like everything else that we do. We’ll innovate there as we do in other areas.”

“But basically, we don’t want people using their phones all the time. This has never been an objective for us,” said Cook.

Except, of course, for those 10 years when it was.

Facebook has quietly removed three far right networks that were engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior intended to spread politically divisive content in Spain ahead of a general election in the country which takes place on Sunday.

The networks had a total reach of almost 1.7M followers and had generated close to 7.4M interactions in the past three months alone, according to analysis by the independent group that identified the bogus activity on Facebook’s platform.

The fake far right activity was apparently not picked up by Facebook.

Instead activist not-for-profit Avaaz unearthed the inauthentic content, and presented its findings to the social networking giant earlier this month, on April 12. In a press release issued today the campaigning organization said Facebook has now removed the fakes — apparently vindicating its findings.

“Facebook did a great job in acting fast, but these networks are likely just the tip of the disinformation iceberg — and if Facebook doesn’t scale up, such operations could sink democracy across the continent,” said Christoph Schott, campaign director at Avaaz, in a statement.

“This is how hate goes viral. A bunch of extremists use fake and duplicate accounts to create entire networks to fake public support for their divisive agenda. It’s how voters were misled in the U.S., and it happened again in Spain,” he added.

We reached out to Facebook for comment but at the time of writing the company had not responded to the request or several questions we also put to it.

Avaaz said the networks it found comprised around thirty pages and groups spreading far right propaganda — including anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-feminist and anti-Islam content.

Examples of the inauthentic content can be viewed in Avaaz’s executive summary of the report. They include fake data about foreigners committing the majority of rapes in Spain; fake news about Catalonia’s pro independence leader; and various posts targeting leftwing political party Podemos — including an image superimposing the head of its leader onto the body of Hitler performing a nazi salute.

One of the networks — which Avaaz calls Unidad ​Nacional Española (after the most popular page in the network) — was apparently created and co-ordinated by an individual called ​Javier Ramón Capdevila Grau, who had multiple personal Facebook accounts (also) in contravention of Facebook’s community standards. 

This network, which had a reach of more than 1.2M followers, comprised at least 10 pages that Avaaz identified as working in a coordinated fashion to spread “politically divisive content”.

Its report details how word-for-word identical posts were published across multiple Facebook pages and groups in the network just minutes apart, with nothing to indicate they weren’t original postings on each page. 

Here’s an example post it found copy-pasted across the bogus network:

Avaaz found another smaller network targeting leftwing views, called Todos Contra Podemos, which included seven pages and groups with around 114,000 followers — also apparently run by a single individual (in this case using the name Antonio Leal Felix Aguilar) who also operated multiple Facebook profiles. 

A third network, Lucha por España​, comprised 12 pages and groups with around 378,000 followers.

Avaaz said it was unable to identify the individual/s behind that network. 

While Facebook has not publicized the removals of these particular political disinformation networks, despite its now steady habit of issuing PR when it finds and removes ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior‘ on its platform (though of course there’s no way to be sure it’s disclosing everything it finds), test searches for the main pages identified by Avaaz returned either no results or what appear to be other unrelated Facebook pages using the same name.

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election was (infamously) targeted by divisive Kremlin propaganda seeded and amplified via social media, Facebook has launched what it markets as “election security” initiatives in a handful of countries around the world — such as searchable ad archives and political ad authentication and/or disclosure requirements.

However these efforts continue to face criticism for being patchy, piecemeal and, even in countries where they have been applied to its platform, weak and trivially easy to workaround.

Its political ads transparency measures do not always apply to issue-based ads (and/or content), for instance, which punches a democracy-denting hole in the self-styled ‘guardrails’ by allowing divisive propaganda to continue to flow.

In Spain Facebook has not even launched a system of political ad transparency, let alone launched systems addressing issue-based political ads — despite the country’s looming general election on April 28; its third in four years. (Since 2015 elections in Spain have yielded heavily fragmented parliaments — making another imminent election not at all unlikely.)

In February, when we asked Facebook whether it would commit to launching ad transparency tools in Spain before the April 28 election, it offered no such commitment — saying instead that it sets up internal cross-functional teams for elections in every market to assess the biggest risks, and make contact with the relevant electoral commission and other key stakeholders.

Again, it’s not possible for outsiders to assess the efficacy of such internal efforts. But Avaaz’s findings suggest Facebook’s risk assessment of Spain’s general election has had a pretty hefty blindspot when it comes to proactively picking up malicious attempts to inflate far right propaganda.

Yet, at the same time, a regional election in Andalusia late last year returned a shock result and warning signs — with the tiny (and previously unelected) far right party, Vox, gaining around 10 per cent of the vote to take 12 seats.

Avaaz’s findings vis-a-vis the three bogus far right networks suggest that as well as seeking to slur leftwing/liberal political views and parties some of the inauthentic pages were involved in actively trying to amplify Vox — with one bogus page, Orgullo Nacional España, sharing a pro-Vox Facebook page 155 times in a three month period. 

Avaaz used the Facebook-owned social media monitoring tool Crowdtangle to get a read on how much impact the fake networks might have had. And it found that while the three inauthentic far right Facebook networks produced just 3.7% of the posts in its Spanish elections dataset, they garnered an impressive 12.6% of total engagement over the three month period it pulled data on (between January 5 and April 8) — despite consisting of just 27 Facebook pages and groups out of a total of 910 in the full dataset. 

Or, to put it another way, a handful of bad actors managed to generate enough divisive politically charged noise that more than one in ten of those engaging in Spanish election chatter on Facebook at very least took note.

It’s a finding that neatly illustrates that divisive content being more clickable is not at all a crazy idea — whatever the founder of Facebook previously said.

Less than a month after rebranding as Canoo, the startup electric vehicle company formerly known as Evelozcity is on the hunt for $200 million in new capital.

The startup, which is backed by a clutch of private individuals and family offices hailing from China, Germany, and Taiwan, is hoping to line up the new capital from some more recognizable names as it finalizes supply deals with vendors, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s plans.

Canoo is locking in final contracts with its vendors and is going to be in production with prototypes before the end of the year. The company, which will make its vehicles available through a subscription-based model, already has 400 employees and just announced new key hires along with its rebranding.

It’s a quick ramp for a company that only two years ago was struggling to extricate itself from the morass that was Faraday Future.

Canoo began life as EVelozcity back in 2017. It was formed after Stefan Krause, a former executive at BMW and Deutsche Bank, and another former BMW executive Ulrich Kranz absconded from Faraday Future amid that company’s struggles.

Reportedly, Krause and Kranz left over repeated clashes with the Faraday’s founding team of Jia Yueting, the main investor and shareholder, and Chaoying Deng, according to the Verge.

The situation at EVelozcity became so toxic that after the two men left, Jia accused them of “malfeasance and dereliction of duty”.

The company was launched in secret, but news of its existence came to light after Faraday Future filed a lawsuit accusing the new company of the theft of trade secrets.

Now, Canoo is rounding out its executive team and pushing forward with plans to bring prototype vehicles to market by the end of the year.

Olivier Bellin joined the company as its head of operations from STMicroelectronics, a Geneva-based semiconductor company where he served as chief financial officer of the company’s U.S. operations.

Former President of BMW manufacturing, Clemens Schmitz-Justen also joined the company as its head of manufacturing — overseeing the contract manufacturing strategy, which will see the company outsource production of vehicles in the U.S. and China.

Canoo said that it intends to use a modular “skateboard” approach to its vehicle design where different form factors can rest atop its chassis. The company touts that its different cabins can be tailored to suit the needs of different customers — ranging from commuter vehicles, public or group transportation, delivery vehicles, and private cars.

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The company is also crafting its user interface and subscription services around its passengers and renters. To that end, Canoo has brought on James Cox, a former Uber executive in charge of product operations for the ride-hailing business’ rider application, who will be developing digital products for the company’s initial customers, according to a March statement.

Initially, Canoo will target customers in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, with additional plans to expand to San Diego and Seattle when the company brings its commercial vehicles to market in 2021.

Canoo plans to use blockchain technology to secure its subscription services and ensure an asset light approach to development by outsourcing its manufacturing in the U.S. and China, according to one person with knowledge of the company’s plans.

With the development of that subscription model, the car company is taking a page from the playbook other automakers are beginning to toy with. Despite the fact that Cadillac cancelled its Book subscription service late last year, companies like BMW, Volvo and Porsche have all pressed on with their experiments with subscriptions.

As it rolls out its subscription service, Canoo is targeting a lower pricepoint than its competitors for its fully electric and “autonomous-ready” vehicles.

At the end of the day the company believes that there are more than 35 cities around the world that are suitable for its offering.

And now that the lawsuits are now over and Faraday Future continues to wobble, it seems that plans for Canoo are gathering steam.

The rebranding effort, and the company’s new name itself is indicative of its goals.

“We picked Canoo because it sounds distinctive, looks cool and creates a feeling of both relaxation and movement,” said Krause, in a statement. “For thousands of years, a canoe has been a simple, sustainable transportation device used all over the world.”

Waymo, the self-driving vehicle technology startup under Alphabet, is setting up shop in a Detroit factory on American Axle & Manufacturing’s campus.

Waymo said Tuesday it will partner with American Axle & Manufacturing to repurpose the existing facility, which was most recently used as a sequencing center for a local parts supplier. The goal is to begin moving into the facility by mid-2019 and begin preparing the site for manufacturing Level 4 autonomous vehicles. Level 4 is a designation by SAE that means the vehicle handles all of the driving under certain conditions.

“By choosing to establish its new facility in Detroit, Waymo is continuing the city’s momentum and further cementing Michigan as a leader in mobility and the epicenter of advanced automotive manufacturing,” Governor Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement.

In January, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation voted to approve Waymo’s plan to set up a manufacturing facility in the state to build its self-driving vehicles. The MEDC approved an $8 million grant for the project.

Waymo has partnered with Magna to build thousands of self-driving cars at the factory, including autonomous versions of the all-electric Jaguar I-PACE and Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan, in a bid to deploy its ride-hailing service at scale.

In December, Waymo launched a limited commercial robotaxi service in the Phoenix area, dubbed Waymo One.

The Waymo One self-driving car service, and accompanying app, still has Waymo-trained test drivers behind the wheel. The safety driver will eventually be removed from the vehicle. The service has slowly opened up to more people.

It’s one thing to be able to get everything delivered to your doorstep, it’s another to then have to actually have to leave your home, brace the elements and return those things that just didn’t work out (or work at all). Typically, that means a run to your local FedEx or UPS store. For the last two years, Amazon and department store chain Kohl’s had a limited partnership that allowed you to bring your return to 100 Kohl’s stores across the country. Today, the two companies announced that they’d expand this program to all 1,150 Kohl’s locations in the U.S.

Only last month, Kohl’s and Amazon also announced that the store would start carrying Amazon products in about 200 of its stores. In a few stores, Kohl’s also features a special “Amazon Smart Home Experience.” If Amazon ever bought Kohl’s, nobody would be all that surprised, I guess.

One nice feature of this program is that the returns are free and that nobody will ask you why you returned an item. These regretful Amazon purchases also don’t have to be packaged. Kohl’s employees will handle all that for you.

What’s in it for Kohl’s? As people walk into Kohl’s to return the Bluetooth speaker they finally decided they really didn’t need, they’ll not only become familiar with the brand but maybe pick up a shirt or an Amazon Echo, too. Since it started taking Amazon returns, foot traffic to the stores that participated in its test is up and revenue in those stores increased as well (and well beyond what the company experienced in other stores), so this concept seems to be working out alright for Kohl’s.

Casino Group and Amazon announced that they're expanding their partnership in France. In particular, there will be Amazon lockers in 1,000 supermarkets and smaller grocery stores across France.

Casino Group partnered with Amazon last year to launch Monoprix on Amazon Prime Now. Prime members in Paris can order groceries and other products you'd regularly find in Monoprix supermarkets and get them delivered in just a couple of hours.

And it sounds like this offering is working well as you'll find Monoprix on Prime Now in other big cities in France.

In addition to Monoprix, Casino Group is adding Casino-branded items to Amazon as well as wine sourced by Casino. It's unclear if those products will be limited to Prime Now or not.

Amazon will take advantage of Casino Group’s large network of stores to add Amazon lockers in 1,000 locations. If you live near a Monoprix, Monop’, Géant, Hyper Casino, Casino Supermarché, Leader Price, Casino shop, Vival or Spar, you can expect to see a locker pretty soon.

Surprisingly, Franprix is not part of the deal even though they have a ton of stores in dense urban areas.