Category: UNCATEGORIZED

There are early adopters, and then there are early adopters. Anyone who bites the bullet and picks up Samsung’s $1,980 and up Galaxy Fold falls into the former category. And then there are those who’ll be the first to Samsung’s site when the company opens up pre-orders on its inaugural foldable tomorrow.

Samsung is really squeezing as much out of this as possible — and understandably so. This thing was a long time in the making. Yesterday, it announced that it had begun mass production on foldable OLEDs for the device. A couple of weeks back, it showed its fold testing in action via video.

As for the devices themselves, we haven’t seen much beyond what Samsung showed off on-stage at an event in San Francisco earlier this year. That includes the behind-glass debut at Mobile World Congress a week later — certainly not the same sort of confidence Huawei displayed with its own device announced at that show.

Not the kind of thing that lends a lot of confidence to such a pricey purchase, but such is the plight of the early early adopter.

The Galaxy S10 5G, meanwhile (a product we’ve actually seen in person, mind), will be available through the company’s site next month.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos challenged rival retailers to increase their minimum wages to $16 per hour, in his annual letter to shareholders released on Thursday. Amazon in November had raised its own minimum wage to $15 per hour, in response to the ongoing criticism around pay disparity and poor working conditions. Bezos suggested other retailers should follow Amazon’s lead, or push it to do even better.

“Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage,” Bezos wrote. “Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It’s a kind of competition that will benefit everyone.”

The company also said its wage hike benefitted more than 250,000 Amazon employees, as well as over 100,000 seasonal workers who worked at Amazon sites across the country during the 2018 holidays.

“We strongly believe that this will benefit our business as we invest in our employees. But that is not what drove the decision,” Bezos noted. “We had always offered competitive wages. But we decided it was time to lead – to offer wages that went beyond competitive. We did it because it seemed like the right thing to do.”

In actuality, there was a lot of external pressure on Amazon to do better by its lowest-wage earners – and, specifically its warehouse employees.

Last year, Senator Bernie Sanders collected input from Amazon workers across the U.S. in advance of legislation he was preparing to file in September, titled “BEZOS Act.” He found that the median salary for Amazon employees was around $28,000 per year, but about half of Amazon workers fell under that amount.

He also said that many workers were on public assistance, received Medicaid, foot stamps, or public housing.

The Senator pointed out that nothing that Amazon was doing was illegal, but it was effectively taking advantage of government subsidies to underpay its workers – knowing they would be able to use other means of assistance for things like food, housing and medical care. Meanwhile, Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos had become the richest person on earth.

The BEZOS Act, which was introduced by Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif), proposed to tax corporations for every dollar their low-wage workers received in government assistance, including health care and food stamps.

After Amazon announced it would raise the minimum wage for all U.S. employees to $15 per hour in November, Sanders applauded the move.

“I want to give credit where credit is due,” Sanders had said. “What Mr. Bezos has done today is not only enormously important for Amazon’s hundreds of thousands of employees, it could well be, and I think it will be, a shot heard around the world.”

Amazon is now not the only retailer raising its minimum wages.

Earlier this month, Target announced it would raise its minimum hourly wage to $13 per hour in June – well above the federal minimum wage of $7.25, which hasn’t been increased since 2009. It says it’s on track for a $15 per hour minimum wage by 2020. Costco also this year raised its hourly wage to $15 per hour, up from $14 per hour which it hit in June 2018.

Walmart, however,  still trails with a minimum wage of $11 per hour, despite an increase last year it credited to the tax law changes.

With his remarks – “you know who you are!” – Bezos is challenging Amazon’s rivals like Walmart and Target to do better, as their pay increases still have Amazon in the lead.

But to some extent, the focus on pay and corporate benefits detracts from some of the other criticism leveled against Amazon: the working conditions in its warehouses.

These conditions have been labeled “deadly and dehumanizing” by a New York labor union; have had workers pushing to unionize and protesting; and have been the subject of numerous reports in the press, including horror stories about constant surveillance, workers urinating in trash cans out of fear a break would have them missing targets, health concerns, and generally feeling they’re being treated as robots.

These issues weren’t addressed in the letter. Instead, Bezos focused on corporate perks, like Amazon’s Career Choice program, which pays up to 95 percent of tuition and fees towards a certificate or diploma in qualified fields of study; and its Amazon Future Engineer program, which support STEM and CS education in the U.S. for elementary, high school, and university students.

The letter also tries to make the case to antitrust regulators that Amazon shouldn’t be broken up, because , says Bezos, “third-party sellers are kicking our first party butt. Badly.” And because the company only represents a “low single-digit percentage of the retail market.”

The letter in full is available here.

Redpoint Ventures has led a $65 million Series B in Cityblock, a healthcare company focused on providing improved care to low-income neighborhoods.

The business launched roughly 18 months ago out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation incubator known for projects like mobility data startup Coord, which itself raised a $5 million round in October.

“We’re a tech-enabled services company focused on caring for a population that has been traditionally overlooked by the innovation community and generally underserved across healthcare,” co-founder and chief executive officer Iyah Romm told TechCrunch. “We believe we can fundamentally redefine the way that health services are built across the country for low-income populations. These are populations that have never been prioritized.”

Romm has spent his entire career in the public health sector. Prior to joining Sidewalk Labs as an entrepreneur-in-residence in 2017, he spent one year as the chief transformation officer of the Commonwealth Care Alliance, a nonprofit medical care delivery organization.

Cityblock provides personalized medical and behavioral health and social services across a growing number of clinics on the East Coast. The company will use the investment to open additional clinics and continue the development of its core platform, Commons. The electronic health record helps care workers collaborate and stay up to date on patients, with real-time hospital admission alerts to tools for tracking treatment progress.

Cityblock opened its first clinic, or “neighborhood hub,” in Brooklyn, New York after forging a partnership with EmblemHealth, a New York neighborhood health insurance business. They’ve since expanded to Connecticut via a partnership with ConnectiCare, a Connecticut insurance provider. Cityblock will open clinics in North Carolina later this year. Cityblock’s services come at no additional costs to members covered by partner insurance businesses.

The startup’s hope is to get these low-income demographics in the doctor’s office more often. Preventative care, after all, is a whole lot cheaper than emergency room visits.

“People end up going to the ER when problems are really bad, for conditions that can be managed,” Redpoint partner and newly appointed Cityblock board member Elliot Geidt told TechCrunch. “There are 75 million people on Medicaid alone and a good portion of these people are living in the inner cities. It’s a problem that has a scope larger than most things that we see in the venture community. The big problem with this population is the existing healthcare system doesn’t work for them, it falls short on so many levels.”

New investors 8VC, Echo Health Ventures and StartUp Health also participated in the latest round, as did existing investors including Sidewalk Labs, Thrive Capital, Maverick Ventures, Town Hall Ventures and EmblemHealth.

Yesterday, the Pentagon announced two finalists in the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI cloud contract process — and Oracle was not one of them. In spite of lawsuits, official protests and even back-channel complaining to the president, the two finalists are Microsoft and and Amazon.

“After evaluating all of the proposals received, the Department of Defense has made a competitive range determination for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud request for proposals, in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations. The two companies within the competitive range will participate further in the procurement process,” Elissa Smith, DoD spokesperson for Public Affairs Operations told TechCrunch. She added that those two finalists were in fact Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS, the cloud computing arm of Amazon).

This contract procurement process has caught the attention of the cloud computing market for a number of reasons. For starters, it’s a large amount of money, but perhaps the biggest reason it had cloud companies going nuts was that it is a winner-take-all proposition.

It is important to keep in mind that whether it’s Microsoft or Amazon who is ultimately chosen for this contract, the winner may never see $10 billion, and it may not last 10 years because there are a number of points where the DoD could back out, but the idea of a single winner has been irksome for participants in the process from the start.

Over the course of the last year, Google dropped out of the running, while IBM and Oracle have been complaining to anyone who will listen that the contract unfairly favored Amazon. Others have questioned the wisdom of even going with with a single-vendor approach. Even at $10 billion, an astronomical sum to be sure, we have pointed out that in the scheme of the cloud business, it’s not all that much money, but there is more at stake here than money.

There is a belief here that the winner could have an upper hand in other government contracts, that this is an entree into a much bigger pot of money. After all, if you are building the cloud for the Department of Defense and preparing it for a modern approach to computing in a highly secure way, you would be in a pretty good position to argue for other contracts with similar requirements.

In the end, in spite of the protests of the other companies involved, the Pentagon probably got this right. The two finalists are the most qualified to carry out the contract’s requirements. They are the top two cloud infrastructure vendors on the market, although Microsoft is far behind with around 13 or 14 percent marketshare. Amazon is far head with around 33 percent, according to several companies who track such things.

Microsoft in particular has tools and resources that would be very appealing, especially Azure Stack, a mini private version of Azure, that you can stand up anywhere, an approach that would have great appeal to the military, but both companies have experience with government contracts, and both bring strengths and weaknesses to the table. It will undoubtedly be a tough decision.

In February, the contract drama took yet another turn when the department reported it was investigating new evidence of conflict of interest by a former Amazon employee, who was involved in the RFP process for a time before returning to the company. Smith reports that the department found no such conflict, but there could be some ethical violations they are looking into.

“The department’s investigation has determined that there is no adverse impact on the integrity of the acquisition process. However, the investigation also uncovered potential ethical violations, which have been further referred to DOD IG,” Smith explained.

The DoD is supposed to announce the winner this month, but the drama has continued non-stop.

Conversational AI and the use of chatbots have been through multiple cycles of hype and disillusionment in the tech world. You know the story: first you get a launch from the likes of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google or any number of other companies, and then you get the many examples of how their services don’t work as intended at the slightest challenge. But time brings improvements and more focused expectations, and today a startup that has been harnessing all those learnings is announcing funding to take its own approach to conversational AI to the next level.

Rasa, which has built an open source platform for third parties to design and manage their own conversational (text or voice) AI chatbots, is today announcing that it has raised $13 million in a Series A round of funding led by Accel, with participation also from Basis Set Ventures, Greg Brockman (Co-founder & CTO OpenAI), Daniel Dines (Founder & CEO UiPath) and Mitchell Hashimoto (Co-founder & CTO Hashicorp). Rasa was founded in Berlin, but with this round, it be moving its headquarters to San Francisco with a plan to hire more people there in sales, marketing and business development; and to continue its tech development with its roadmap including plans to expand the platform to cover images, too.

The company was founded 2.5 years ago, by co-founder/CEO Alex Weidauer’s own admission “when chatbot hype was at its peak.” Rasa itself was not immune to it, too: “Everyone wanted to automate conversations, and so we set out to build something, too,” he said. “But we quickly realised it was extremely hard to do and that the developer tools were just not there yet.”

Rather than posing an insurmountable roadblock, the shortcomings of chatbots became the problem that Rasa set out to fix.

Alan Nichols, the co-founder who is now the CTO, is an AI PhD, but not in natural language as you might expect, but in machine learning. “What we do is more is address this as a mathematical, machine learning problem rather than one of language,” Weidauer said. Specifically, that means building a model that can be used by any company to tap its own resources to train their bots, in particular with unstructured information, which has been one of the trickier problems to solve in conversational AI.

At a time when many have raised concerns about who might “own” the progress of artificial intelligence, and specifically the data that goes into building these systems, Rasa’s approach is a refreshing one.

Typically, when an organization wants to build an AI chatbot either to interact with customers or to run something in the backend of their business, their developers most commonly opt for third-party cloud APIs that have restrictions on how they can be customized, or they build their own from scratch, but if the organization is not already a large tech company, it will be challenged to have the human or other resources to execute this.

Rasa underscores an emerging trend for a strong third contender. The company has built a stack of tools that it has open sourced, meaning that anyone (and thousands of developers do) use it for free, with a paid enterprise version including extra tools including customer support, testing and training tools, and production container deployment. (It’s priced depending on size of organization and usage.)

Importantly, whichever package is used, the tools run on a company’s own training data; and the company can ultimately host their bots wherever they choose, which have been some of the unique selling points for those using Rasa’s platform, when they are less interested in working with organizations that might also be competitors.

Adobe’s new AI assistant for searching on Adobe Stock, which has some 100 million images, was built on Rasa.

“We wanted to give our users an AI assistant that lets them search with natural language commands,” said Brett Butterfield, director of software development at Adobe, in a statement. “We looked at several online services, and, in the end, Rasa was the clear choice because we were able to host our own servers and protect our user’s data privacy. Being able to automate full conversations and the fact it is open source were key elements for us.” Other customers include Parallon and TalkSpace, Zurich and Allianz, Telekom, and UBS.

Open source has become big business in the last several years, and so a startup that’s built an AI platform that has a very direct application in the enterprise built on it presents an an obvious attraction for VCs.

“Automation is the next battleground for the enterprise, and while this is a very difficult space to win, especially for unstructured information like text and voice, we are confident Rasa has what it takes given their impressive adoption by developers,” said Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel, in a statement. “Existing solutions don’t let in-house developer teams control their own automation destiny. Rasa is applying commercial open source software solutions for AI environments similarly to what open source leaders such as Cloudera, Mulesoft, and Hashicorp have done for others.”

Armis is helping companies protect IoT devices on the network without using an agent, and it’s apparently a problem that is resonating with the market, as the startup reports 700 percent growth in the last year. That caught the attention of investors, who awarded them with a $65 million Series C investment to help keep accelerating that growth.

Sequoia Capital led the round with help from new investors Insight Venture Partners and Intermountain Ventures. Returning investors Bain Capital Ventures, Red Dot Capital Partners and Tenaya Capital also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $112 million, according to the company.

The company is solving a hard problem around device management on a network. If you have devices where you cannot apply an agent to track them, how do you manage them? Nadir Izrael, company co-founder and CTO, says you have to do it very carefully because even scanning for ports could be too much for older devices and they could shut down. Instead, he says that Armis takes a passive approach to security, watching and learning and understanding what normal device behavior looks like — a kind of behavioral fingerprinting.

“We observe what devices do on the network. We look at their behavior, and we figure out from that everything we need to know,” Izreal told TechCrunch. He adds, “Armis in a nutshell is a giant device behavior crowdsourcing engine. Basically, every client of Armis is constantly learning how devices behave. And those statistical models, those machine learning models, they get merged into master models.”

Whatever they are doing, they seem to have hit upon a security pain point. They announced a $30 million Series B almost exactly a year ago, and they went back for more because they were growing quickly and needed the capital to hire people to keep up.

That kind of growth is a challenge for any startup. The company expects to double its 125 person work force before the end of the year, but the company is working to put systems in place to incorporate those new people and service all of those new customers.

The company plans to hire more people in sales and marketing, of course, but they will concentrate on customer support and building out partnership programs to get some help from systems integrators, ISVs and MSPs, who can do some of the customer hand-holding for them.

Hanson Robotics announced this morning that it has hired Amit Kumar Pandey, Softbank Europe’s Chief Scientist, as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Science Officer (CSO). In his six years at Softbank, Pandey ran a various robotics initiatives, including the company’s Social Interaction and Intelligence of the Robot program.

At Hanson, he will be charged with leading the company’s commercial products and fostering its AI applications.

The Hong Kong-based robotics company is likely best known for Sophia, the uncanny humanoid robot with a see-through head designed to carry on a conversation. Earlier this year, the company took to Kickstarter to launch Little Sophia, a home version of the robot designed to help teach kids STEM.

“One of the greatest technological revolutions of the 21st century is the emergence of robotics and AI together as an innovative ecosystem,” Pandey said in a release tied to the news. With helpful AI and robotics, we hope to improve the quality of people’s lives, leading toward a healthier, safer, happier and better educated society. By joining Hanson Robotics, I am confident we are moving closer toward this greater innovative ecosystem.”

Prior to Softbank, Pandey focused on humanoid The French National Centre for Scientific Research (LAAS-CNRS).

In 2011, a group of early Facebook employees pooled together some capital, $1.25 million to be exact, and created a venture firm based on the idea that developing ideas and forming successful companies takes time. Slow Ventures, they called it, went on to back some of the buzziest unicorns at the seed-stage, including Slack, Casper, Postmates and Airtable.

Today, Slow is announcing its fourth big fundraise: $220 million for two funds. Specifically, the firm has attracted $165 million for its fourth flagship seed fund and an additional $55 million for its first follow-on fund.

“With our first Opportunity Fund, we’re excited to be able to invest additional capital in existing Slow portfolio companies as they scale, while also now being able to invest for the first time in more mature growth-stage companies that we missed earlier on,” the partners wrote in the fund announcement.

Slow co-founder Dave Morin, who helped build the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect during his tenure at the social media giant, and Scott Marlette, who joined Slow in 2016 after co-founding GoodRx, will be taking a step back from the fund.

Twitter’s new prototyping app twttr, which it created to test and get feedback on new features — and new approaches to old features — has been out in the wild for a month. Now, with Twitter taking in the first wave of responses from users, twttr is getting an update. The move highlights how Twitter continues to chip away at ongoing criticism that it is too confusing for most people to use, which has impacted overall growth for the social media platform.

The latest version of twttr is a decent step ahead in that mission. Updates include: the introduction of a swiping gesture, specifically in conversations to like or reply to a Tweet; new labels in threads indicating who is the original poster and who you follow and improved visibility with dark mode. Ironically — even as Twitter has shifted to putting experimental features into twttr — the latter app is also getting an import of new features from the main Twitter app, which has been getting updates that had yet to be rolled out to the prototype app. These include new versions of the Twitter camera, dark mode and profile previews that keep you in your timeline.

Note: neither I nor any of my colleagues using twttr seem to have gotten this update yet ourselves. So I will “update” this post with screenshots when Twitter actually pushes it to one of us on Test Flight…

Overall, those who are using twttr say they prefer it to the official Twitter app, says Sara Haider, Twitter’s head of product. That likely means certain features are sticking enough in the prototype app that they will be making their way into the permanent Twitter experience. But what form that will ultimately take is still in play.

One of the big areas that is still seeing some changes are engagement buttons — that is, the options to “like” a Tweet with a heart, to reply to it, or to retweet.

These are a cornerstone of how Twitter is used, but they are also potentially distracting and add to the noise in an often chaotic experience, since timelines and potentially conversations are more or less constantly on the move.

In the new build of twttr, engagements do not appear by default. Instead, you get to them by way of a swipe to the left or right on a Tweet.

This is not exactly new: it’s an iteration of what we saw in the first major build of twttr. There, the engagement buttons were also hidden away completely in conversations, and they only appeared when you tapped on a Tweet to begin engagement.

But it seems that design decision got very mixed reviews, said Haider, who said that while it was easier to focus without the distraction of metrics, it also made it harder to like and retweet since it required an extra tap.

My guess is that it also resulted in less engagement, even among the power users who signed up test twttr in the first place — which is likely not the end result that Twitter (or its advertisers, or others who measure and rely on engagement metrics) would want.

Replacing that tap with a swipe brings twttr in line with one of the most popular gestures in app user interfaces today, since the small touchscreens of smartphones are natural surfaces this gesture to make quick responses. My guess is that we will see yet more changes in how gestures are used in Twitter overall, since in the main Twitter app, currently a swipe to the left brings up the Camera, while a swipe to the right gets you to your Profile page.

Haider also said that early feedback, from those using twttr in English and Japanese, included a clear endorsement of the new threaded layout for conversations. This made them “easier to follow” and let readers see more replies.

The layout collapses side-conversations that branch out from the main Tweet, giving you the option either of expanding them to see more replies by way of a “show more” button, or continuing to scroll to see more replies to the main Tweet without confusing the two.

But some had complained that in an especially noisy conversation, the “show more” buttons appeared too much, serving the exact opposite of their intention: they ended up distracting from the flow of conversation. And if you were using the “dark mode” that was running in twttr, it was hard to follow the shading on replies (something we also highlighted in our initial review of the new app).

These are now getting addressed with more nuanced shading on replies that appears more clearly in dark mode, and it also seems that Twitter will be playing with the number of “show more” buttons that are coming up in threads.

Another interesting addition brings to light something that Twitter had already been experimenting with in its original app, the appearance of labels for “original Tweeter” and to indicate who you follow, to better organise what you might want to see or know as the reader.

We first saw these tags appearing in January, and indeed, even as they were appearing for some users as part of a test on the main app, the twttr app rolled out without them. Now that’s changing.

Parity between Twitter and twttr is something of a theme here, since Twitter has also made some other changes to bring features in the latter up to date with newer changes in the main app. That includes adding in updated, Snapchat-like camera features; and more nuanced Dark Mode that includes a darker, battery-saving black and other customizations. You are now also able to see profile previews in twttr without navigating away from the flow of conversation (something Twitter has been testing in the main iOS app).

All in all, the picture that this paints for Twitter (and twttr) is that the app and wider platform still remain very much in flux. The company says that it will be “many months” before anything goes from test to full launch, which is no bad thing when you’re on a mission not just to grow usage, but to keep people around for longer.

I’m still waiting (but not holding my breath) to see how and if twttr gets used for other kinds of changes that transcend user interface — such as as changing the mechanics around how to report abuse and manage your overall content experience on the app.

As more people flock to Twitter to get their opinions heard, and Twitter continues to sign up third parties to bring in a wider range of media into the app, transforming not just the application of its mechanics, but the whole reason you may be using Twitter in the first place, there is a lot of work to do in both.

In a fast-moving development since Julian Assange’s arrest inside the Ecuadorian embassy earlier today for breaching UK bail conditions, the Wikileaks founder has been rearrested on behalf of the U.S. — confirming that he will face extradition proceedings.

In an updated statement the Met Police said:

Julian Assange, 47, (03.07.71) has today, Thursday 11 April, been further arrested on behalf of the United States authorities, at 10:53hrs after his arrival at a central London police station. This is an extradition warrant under Section 73 of the Extradition Act. He will appear in custody at Westminster Magistrates’ Court as soon as possible.

Assange was rearrested while in custody of London’s Met Police, and is due in Westminster Magistrates court this afternoon, according to Wikileaks.

Wikileaks also tweeted that Assange has been arrested under a U.S. extradition warrant on a conspiracy charge for publishing classified information that was leaked to Wikileaks by former army intelligence analyst and whistleblower, Chelsea Manning .

Manning was pardoned by president Obama just before he left office at the start of 2017 and released from prison in May that year. However she was rearrested in March this year for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning remains in prison in the U.S.

The existence of a sealed charge against Assange in the U.S. was revealed inadvertently last year after an unrelated court filing was found to contain information on a sealed charge against the Wikileaks founder.