Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Pixeom, a startup that offers a software-defined edge computing platform to enterprises, today announced that it has raised a $15M funding round from Intel Capital, National Grid Partners and previous investor Samsung Catalyst Fund. The company plans to use the new funding to expands its go-to-market capacity and invest in product development.

If the Pixeom name sounds familiar, that may be because you remember it as a Raspberry Pie-based personal cloud platform. Indeed, that’s the service the company first launched back in 2014. It quickly pivoted to an enterprise model, though. As Pixeom CEO Sam Nagar told me, that pivot came about after a conversation the company had with Samsung about adopting its product for that company’s needs. In addition, it was also hard to find venture funding. The original Pixeom device allowed users to set up their own personal cloud storage and other applications at home. While there is surely a market for these devices, especially among privacy conscious tech enthusiasts, it’s not massive, especially as users became more comfortable with storing their data in the cloud. “One of the major drivers [for the pivot] was that it was actually very difficult to get VC funding in an industry where the market trends were all skewing towards the cloud,” Nagar told me.

At the time of its launch, Pixeom also based its technology on OpenStack, the massive open source project that helps enterprises manage their own data centers, which isn’t exactly known as a service that can easily be run on a single machine, let alone a low-powered one. Today, Pixeom uses containers to ship and manage its software on the edge.

What sets Pixeom apart from other edge computing platforms is that it can run on commodity hardware. There’s no need to buy a specific hardware configuration to run the software, unlike Microsoft’s Azure Stack or similar services. That makes it significantly more affordable to get started and allows potential customers to reuse some of their existing hardware investments.

Pixeom brands this capability as ‘software-defined edge computing’ and there is clearly a market for this kind of service. While the company hasn’t made a lot of waves in the press, more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies now use its services. With that, the company now has revenues in the double-digit millions and its software manages more than a million devices worldwide.

As is so often the case in the enterprise software world, these clients don’t want to be named, but Nagar tells me that they include one of the world’s largest fast food chains, for example, which uses the Pixeom platform in its stores.

On the software side, Pixeom is relatively cloud agnostic. One nifty feature of the platform is that it is API-compatible with Google Cloud Platform, AWS and Azure and offers an extensive subset of those platforms’ core storage and compute services, including a set of machine learning tools. Pixeom’s implementation may be different, but for an app, the edge endpoint on a Pixeom machine reacts the same way as its equivalent endpoint on AWS, for example.

Until now, Pixeom mostly financed its expansion — and the salary of its over 90 employees — from its revenue. It only took a small funding round when it first launched the original device (together with a Kickstarter campaign). Technically, this new funding round is part of this, so depending on how you want to look at this, we’re either talking about a very large seed round or a Series A round.

According to a new report from reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and shared by MacRumors, the next-generation iPhone should likely feature two-way wireless charging. This feature would let you charge other devices using your iPhone.

Other flagship smartphones already feature two-way wireless charging, such as the Samsung Galaxy S10, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and the Huawei P30 Pro.

Samsung released new Bluetooth earbuds to justify such a feature. Thanks to PowerShare, you can place the Galaxy Buds case on the back of your Samsung Galaxy S10 to charge them. But you can also use it with another phone or another accessory — it should work with any Qi-compatible device.

And now that Apple sells AirPods with a wireless charging case, chances are Apple will also showcase the new case sitting on top of the next iPhone.

According to Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple could include the new feature across the lineup. Updates to the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR should get two-way wireless charging.

Apple could also increase battery sizes to mitigate the impact of this new feature. The next iPhone XS could receive a 20 to 25 percent bump, the next iPhone XS Max could get a 10 to 15 percent bump. The iPhone XR, which already has the longest battery life, should more or less keep the same battery.

Cloud Foundry, the open source platform-as-a-service project that more than half of the Fortune 500 companies use to help them build, test and deploy their applications, launched well before Kubernetes existed. Because of this, the team ended up building Diego, its own container management service. Unsurprisingly, given the popularity of Kubernetes, which has become somewhat of the de facto standard for container orchestration, a number of companies in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem starting looking into how they could use Kubernetes to replace Diego.

The result of this is Project Eirini, which was first proposed by IBM. As the Cloud Foundry Foundation announced today, Project Eirini now passes the core functional tests the team runs to validate the software releases of its application runtime, the core Cloud Foundry service that deploys and manages applications (if that’s a bit confusing, don’t even think about the fact that there’s also a Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, which already uses Kubernetes, but which is mostly meant to give enterprise a single platform for running their own applications and pre-built containers from third-party vendors).

“That’s a pretty big milestone,” Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers told me. “The project team now gets to shift to a mode where they’re focused on hardening the solution and making it a bit more production-ready. But at this point, early adopters are also starting to deploy that [new] architecture.”

Childers stressed that while the project was incubated by IBM, which has been a long-time backer of overall Cloud Foundry project, Google, Pivotal and others are now also contributing and have dedicated full-time engineers working on the project. In addition, SUSE, SAP and IBM are also active in developing Eirini.

Eirini started out as an incubation project, and while few doubted that this would be a successful project, there was a bit of confusion around how Cloud Foundry would move forward now that it essentially had two container engines for running its core service. At the time, there was even some concern that the project could fork. “I pushed back at the time and said: no, this is the natural exploration process that open source communities need to go through,” Childers said. “What we’re seeing now is that with Pivotal and Google stepping in, that’s a very clear sign that this is going to be the go-forward architecture for the future of the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime.”

A few months ago, by the way, Kubernetes was still missing a few crucial pieces the Cloud Foundry ecosystem needed to make this move. Childers specifically noted that Windows support — something the project’s enterprise users really need — was still problematic and lacked some important features. In recent releases, though, the Kubernetes team fixed most of these issues and improved its Windows support, rendering those issues moot.

What does all of this mean for Diego? Childers noted that the community isn’t at a point where it’ll hold developing that tool. At some point, though, it seems likely that the community will decide that it’s time to start the transition period and make the move to Kubernetes official.

It’s worth noting that IBM today announced its own preview of Eirini in its Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment and that the latest version of SUSE’s Cloud Foundry-based Application Platform includes a similar preview as well.

In addition, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which is hosting its semi-annual developer conference in Philadelphia this week, also announced that it has certified its first to systems integrators, Accenture and HCL, as part of its recently launched certification program for companies that work in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem and have at least ten certified developers on their teams.

LittleBits, Disney and UC Davis announced this morning that they’ve joined forces for the launch of Snap the Gap. The program is designed to give girls a jumpstart into the ever-important world of STEM learning with an online program, littleBits starter pack and a one-year mentorship with a STEM professional.

Snap the Gap will begin as a one-year pilot program, focused on 15,000 10-year-old girls based in California. Participant and mentor recruitment will be managed by UC Davis, the school behind the California Million Women Mentors program.

The program certainly makes sense for the New York-based littleBits. The startup has long been focused on hooking young minds on STEM, both in and out of the classroom. “It was always part of littleBits’ mission to inspire more girls to get into STEM,” CEO Ayah Bdeir tells TechCrunch. “We’ve had lots of initiatives leading to it, but this is the biggest and boldest thing that we’ve done.”

Disney, meanwhile, has been a partner with littleBits since 2016, when the startup joined its tech accelerator. The move has resulted in a number of branded kits featuring IP like The Avengers and Star Wars. Ultimately, however, littleBits was forced to scale back that licensing in order to focus on its educational initiatives.

A wide-scale program like Snap the Gap, however, will afford the company the ability to continue appealing to young minds outside of the classroom. After the first year, the program will expand beyond California.

“Our goal is to add five new states every year, so that we can reach all of the United States by 2023,” Bdeir explains.

Those interested in participating as student or mentor should check out the official Snap the Gap site.

San Diego-based Edgybees today announced the launch of Argus, its API-based developer platform that makes it easy to add augmented reality features to live video feeds.

The service has long used this capability to run its own drone platform for first responders and enterprise customers, which allows its users to tag and track objects and people in emergency situations, for example, to create better situational awareness for first responders.

I first saw a demo of the service a year ago, when the team walked a group of journalists through a simulated emergency, with live drone footage and an overlay of a street map and the location of ambulances and other emergency personnel. It’s clear how these features could be used in other situations as well, given that few companies have the expertise to combine the video footage, GPS data and other information, including geographic information systems, for their own custom projects.

Indeed, that’s what inspired the team to open up its platform. As the Edgybees team told me during an interview at the Ourcrowd Summit last month, it’s impossible for the company to build a new solution for every vertical that could make use of it. So instead of even trying (though it’ll keep refining its existing products), it’s now opening up its platform.

“The potential for augmented reality beyond the entertainment sector is endless, especially as video becomes an essential medium for organizations relying on drone footage or CCTV,” said Adam Kaplan, CEO and co-founder of Edgybees. “As forward-thinking industries look to make sense of all the data at their fingertips, we’re giving developers a way to tailor our offering and set them up for success.”

In the run-up to today’s launch, the company already worked with organizations like the PGA to use its software to enhance the live coverage of its golf tournaments.

Since it was founded in 2009, Okta has been focused on protecting identity — first for individuals in the cloud, and later at the device level. Today at its Oktane customer conference, the company announced a new level of identity protection at the server level.

The new tool, called Advanced Server Access, provides identity management for Windows and Linux Servers, whether they are in a datacenter or the cloud. The product supports major cloud infrastructure vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and gives IT the ability to protect access to servers, reduce the likelihood of identity theft and bring a level of automation the server credential process.

As company founder and CEO Todd McKinnon points out, as every organization becomes a technology company building out their own applications, protecting servers becomes increasingly critical. “Identity is getting more and more important because there is more technology and zero trust in the network. You need to manage identity not just for users or devices. We are now applying our identity [experience] to the most critical resources for these emerging tech companies, their servers,” he said.

McKinnon explained that developers typically communicate with Linux servers via the SSH protocol. It required logging in of course, even before today’s announcement, but what Okta is doing is simplifying that in the same it simplified logging into cloud applications for individuals.

People’s roles change over time, but instead of changing those roles at the identity layer to allow access to the server, in a typical shop the development or operations team creates an admin account with a superset of permissions and simply shares that. “That means the admin account has all the permissions, and also means they are sharing these credentials,” he said. If those credentials get stolen, the thief potentially has access to the entire universe of servers inside a company.

Okta’s idea is to bring a level of automation to the server identity management process, so that users maintain their own individual credentials and permissions in a more automated fashion, even as roles change, across the entire server infrastructure a company manages. “It’s continuous, automatic, real-time checking of the state of the machine, and the state of the user and the permissions that makes it far more secure,” he said.

The tool is continuously monitoring this information to make sure nothing has changed such as another machine has taken over, avoiding man-in-the-middle attacks. It’s also making sure that there is no virus or malware, and that the person who is using the machine is who they say they are and has access at the level they are using it.

Okta went public almost exactly two years ago, and it needs to keep finding ways to expand its core identity services. Bringing it to the server level as this new product does moves the idea of identity management deeper into a technology stack, and McKinnon hinted the company isn’t done yet.

“You might not think of server access is an identity opportunity, but the way we do it will make it clear that it really is an opportunity, and the same can be said for the next several innovations we will have after this,” he said.

Facebook -owned messaging platform WhatsApp has launched a fact-checking tipline for users in India ahead of elections in the country.

The fact-checking service consists of a phone number (+91-9643-000-888) where users can send dubious messages if they think they might not be true or otherwise want them verified.

The messaging giant is working with a local media skilling startup, Proto, to run the fact-checking service — in conjunction with digital strategy consultancy Dig Deeper Media and San Francisco-based Meedan, which builds tools for journalists, to provide the platform for verifying submitted content, per TNW.

We’ve reached out to Proto and WhatsApp with questions.

The Economic Times of India reports that the startup intends to use the submitted messages to build a database to help study misinformation during elections for a research project commissioned and supported by WhatsApp.

“The goal of this project is to study the misinformation phenomenon at scale. As more data flows in, we will be able to identify the most susceptible or affected issues, locations, languages, regions, and more,” said Proto’s co-founders Ritvvij Parrikh and Nasr ul Hadi in a statement quoted by Reuters.

WhatsApp also told the news agency: “The challenge of viral misinformation requires more collaborative efforts and cannot be solved by any one organisation alone.”

According to local press reports, suspicious messages can be shared to the WhatsApp tipline in four regional languages, with the fact-checking service covering videos and pictures, as well as text. The submitter is also to confirm they want a fact-check and, on doing so, will get a subsequent response indicating if the shared message is classified as true, false, misleading, disputed or out of scope.

Other related information may also be provided, the Economic Times reports.

WhatsApp has faced major issues with fakes being spread on its end-to-end encrypted platform — a robust security technology that makes the presence of bogus and/or maliciously misleading content harder to spot and harder to manage since the platform itself does not have access to it.

The spread of fakes has become a huge problem for social media platforms generally. One that’s arguably most acute in markets where literacy (and digital literacy) rates can vary substantially. And in India WhatsApp fakes have led to some truly tragic outcomes — with multiple reports in recent years detailing how fast-spreading digital rumors sparked or fuelled mob violence that’s led to death and injury.

India’s general election, which is due to take place in several phases starting later this month until mid next, presents a more clearly defined threat — with the risk of a democratic process and outcome being manipulated by weaponized political disinformation.

WhatsApp’s platform is squarely in the frame given the app’s popularity in India.

It has also been accused of fuelling damaging political fakes during elections in Brazil last year, with Reuters reporting that the platform was flooded with falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

An outsized presence on social media appears to have aided the election of right winger Jair Bolsonaro. While the leftwing candidate he beat in a presidential runoff later claimed businessmen backing Bolsonaro paid to flood WhatsApp with misleading propaganda.

In India local press reports that politicians across the spectrum are being accused of seeking to manipulate the forthcoming elections by seeding fakes on the popular encrypted messaging platform.

It’s clear that WhatsApp offers a conduit for spreading unregulated and unaccountable propaganda at scale with even limited resources. So whether a tipline can offer a robust check against weaponized political disinformation very much remains to be seen.

There certainly look to be limitations to this approach. Though it could also be developed and enhanced — such as if it gets more fully baked into the platform.

For now it looks like WhatsApp is testing the water and trying to gather more data to shape a more robust response.

The most obvious issue with the tipline is it requires a message recipient to request a check — an active step that means the person must know about the fact-check service, have the number available in their contacts, and trust the judgements of those running it.

Many WhatsApp users will fall outside those opt-in bounds.

It also doesn’t take much effort to imagine purveyors of malicious rumors spreading fresh fakes claiming the fact-checks/checkers are biased or manipulated to try to turn WhatsApp users against it.

This is likely why local grassroots political organizations are also being encouraged to submit any rumors they see circulating across the different regions during the election period. And why WhatsApp is talking about the need for collective action to combat the disinformation problem.

It will certainly need engagement across the political spectrum to counter any bias charges and plug gaps resulting from limited participation by WhatsApp users themselves.

How information on debunked fakes can be credibly and widely fed back to Indian voters in a way that broadly reaches the electorate is what’s really key though.

There’s no suggestion, here and now, that’s going to happen via WhatsApp itself — only those who request a check are set to get a response.

Although that could change in future. But, equally, the company may be wary of being seen to accept a role in  centralized distribution of (even fake) political propaganda. That way more accusations of bias likely lie.

In recent years Facebook has taken out adverts in traditional India media to warn about fakes. It has also experimented with other tactics to try to combat damaging WhatsApp rumors — such as using actors to role-plays fakes in public to warn against false messages.

So the company looks to be hoping to develop a multi-stakeholder, multi-format information network off of its own platform to help get the message out about fakes spreading on WhatsApp.

Albeit, that’s clearly going to take time and effort. It’s also still not clear whether it will be effective vs an app that’s always on hand and capable of feeding in fresh fakes. 

The tipline also, inevitably, looks slow and painstaking beside the wildfire spread of digital fakes. And it’s not clear how much of a check on spread and amplification it can offer in this form. Certainly initially — given the fact-checking process itself necessarily takes time.

While a startup, even one that’s being actively supported by WhatsApp, is unlikely to have the resources to speedily fact-check the volume of fakes that will be distributed across such a large market, fuelled by election interests. Yet timely intervention is critical to prevent fakes going viral.

So, again, this initiative looks unlikely to stop the majority of bogus WhatsApp messages from being swallowed and shared. But the data-set derived from the research project which underpins the tipline may help the company fashion a more responsive and proactive approach to contextualizing and debunking malicious rumors in future.

Proto says it plans to submit its learnings to the International Center for Journalists to help other organizations learn from its efforts.

The Economic Times also quotes Fergus Bell, founder and CEO of Dig Deeper Media, suggesting the research will help create “global benchmarks” for those wishing to tackle misinformation in their own markets.

In the meantime, though, the votes go on.

Spark has managed to attract one million users on iOS and macOS over the years. But every time I’ve written about Spark, I’ve received many comments asking when the app would be available on Android. The answer is today.

Spark is an email client developed by Readdle, the company behind many popular productivity apps, such as PDF Expert, Scanner Pro, Calendars 5 and Documents. With email, the company is tackling a much bigger industry dominated by giants, such as Gmail and Microsoft Outlook.

That’s why Spark focuses on power-user features, customization and collaboration. The app is available for free and you can optionally pay to unlock more collaborative features.

The timing of the release is perfect as Google Inbox is shutting down this week. If you’re into smart email clients that automatically sort your inbox based on multiple criteria, Spark could fit the bill.

It starts with smart notifications. You can let Spark ignore non-relevant emails and notify you on important threads. Similarly, the Smart Inbox view puts newsletters and less important emails in separate categories so that you can focus on what’s important.

When it comes to dealing with individual threads, you can snooze them, schedule an email to send it at a later time and date, set up reminders and more. Many of those actions are now available in major email clients, so it’s important to know that you can find the same features in Spark.

Spark also lets you turn your inbox into a collaborative experience with your team, like Front. You can assign threads to other team members, comment on an email and @-mention your coworkers. You can also write a draft together pretty much like in Google Docs. Advanced features cost $6.39 per user per month.

Some features aren’t yet available on Android. The company is working on quick replies, email templates, email delegation for teams, the calendar view and third-party app integrations.

Chef, the popular automation service, today announced that it is open sourcing all of its software under the Apache 2 license. Until now, Chef used an open core model with a number of proprietary products that complemented its open-source tools. Most of these proprietary tools focused on enterprise users and their security and deployment needs. Now, all of these tools, which represent somewhere between a third and half of Chef’s total code base, are open source, too.

“We’re moving away from our open core model,” Chef SVP of products and engineering Corey Scobie told me. “We’re now moving to exclusively open source software development.”

He added that this also includes open product development. Going forward, the company plans to share far more details about its roadmap, feature backlogs and other product development details. All of Chef’s commercial offerings will also be built from the same open source code that everybody now has access to.

Scobie noted that there are a number of reasons why the company is doing this. He believes, for example, that the best way to build software is to collaborate in public with those who are actually using it.

“With that philosophy in mind, it was really easy to justify how we’d take the remainder of the software that we product and make it open source,” Scobie said. “We believe that that’s the best way to build software that works for people — real people in the real world.”

Another reason, Scobie said, is that it was becoming increasingly difficult for Chef to explain which parts of the software were open source and which were not. “We wanted to make that conversation easier, to be perfectly honest.”

Chef’s decision comes during a bit of a tumultuous time in the open source world. A number of companies like Redis, MongoDB and Elasic have recently moved to licenses that explicitly disallow the commercial use of their open source products by large cloud vendors like AWS unless they also buy a commercial license.

But here is Chef, open sourcing everything. Chef co-founder and board member Adam Jacob doesn’t think that’s a problem. “In the open core model, you’re saying that the value is in this proprietary sliver. The part you pay me for is this sliver of its value. And I think that’s incorrect,” he said. “I think, in fact, the value was always in the totality of the product.”

Jacob also argues that those companies that are moving to these new, more restrictive licenses, are only hurting themselves. “It turns out that the product was what mattered in the first place,” he said. “They continue to produce great enterprise software for their customers and their customers continue to be happy and continue to buy it, which is what they always would’ve done.” He also noted that he doesn’t think AWS will ever be better at running Elasticsearch than Elastic or, for that matter, at running Chef better than Chef.

It’s worth noting that Chef also today announced the launch of its Enterprise Automation Stack, which brings together all of Chef’s tools (Chef Automate, Infra, InSpec, Habitat and Workstation) under a unified umbrella.

“Chef is fully committed to enabling organizations to eliminate friction across the lifecycle of all of their applications, ensuring that, whether they build their solutions from our open source code or license our commercial distribution, they can benefit from collaboration as code,” said Chef CEO Barry Crist. “Chef Enterprise Automation Stack lets teams establish and maintain a consistent path to production for any application, in order to increase velocity and improve efficiency, so deployment and updates of mission-critical software become easier, move faster and work flawlessly.”

After raising $37 million to bring its on-the-spot stock market analytics tools to a wider range of publishers and other internet partners, TradingView today has announced its first acquisition to supercharge the services that it offers to investors, wherever they happen to be online. The startup has acquired TradeIt, which has built an API for on-the-spot trading on any site that uses it.

The terms of deal were not disclosed, but we understand from sources close to the deal that it was under $20 million, more specifically in the “high teens.” TradeIt, which used to be called Trading Ticket, had raised about $12 million from investors that included Peter Thiel’s mostly-fintech fund Valar Ventures, Citi Ventures and others. TradingView had raised just over $40 million with investors including Insight Partners, TechStars and others.

The deal is a big move for consolidation: together the two say they will serve more than 10 million monthly active users in 150 countries, covering some $70 billion in linked assets. But also, better economies of scale, and better margins for companies that provide services that touch consumers not necessarily from a “home” of their own.

The latter is a growing trend that has mirrored the rise of social media and other services that aggregate content from multiple sources; and also the bigger trend of instant, on-demand everything, where consumers are happier with the convenience of buying or engaging with something right when they want to, rather than shopping around, delaying or navigating to another place to do it.

That has also seen the rise of commerce APIs to buy things instantly, not to mention the emergence of a wide range of commerce applications that let people easily buy goods and services on the spot. (And in line with that, TradingView says that nearly half of its user base today is millennials, with an additional 13 percent even younger, Gen Z. “The groups are particularly drawn to [our] extensive charting expertise,” the company says.)

In fintech, and in the world of investing specifically, that’s a trend that has also helped the growth of cryptocurrency, which has opened up the world of investing and thinking about investing to a whole new class of consumers who — for better or worse — are hearing about investing opportunities via viral social media campaigns and other new kinds of channels. Whether cryptocurrency speculation bears out longer term, it is depositing a new class of people into the world of thinking about companies and investing in them.

That taps into the sweet spot where TradeIt and TradingView are building their business.

“TradeIt’s secure and compliant relationships with established U.S. retail brokerages, coupled with their robust integrations with top investing apps, allows TradingView to be part of the backbone of the investing ecosystem,” said Denis Globa, TradingView founder and CEO, in a statement.

TradingView’s partners today include Crunchbase, Investopedia, SeekingAlpha, Zacks, Binance, CME Group and Entrepreneur, where users are able to access a premium tier of TradingView tools by way of a subscription in order to do some instant data and price modelling of a company that they might be reading about. The thinking is that now they will also be able to go one step further by trading stocks related to that information. TradingView, meanwhile, can use that extra feature to make a little more money and sell its service to partners as more sticky, to the tune of 80 percent more time spent with publishers as a result of integrating TradingView’s tools.

That’s something that the two companies can already attest to doing well in partnership.

“TradingView’s vision aligns strongly with our view of the distributed financial networks of the future,” said Nathan Richardson, TradeIt CEO, in a statement. “We’ve worked with TradingView for several years now, and always felt our complementary products and shared retail investing users makes us stronger together.”

Richardson and his cofounder Betsy Eisenberg — who are both joining TradingView — had together built Yahoo Finance — so they are already well experienced in how to leverage the potential of bringing together content with utility.

“Nathan Richardson and Betsy Eisenberg are fintech pioneers who led the development of Yahoo! Finance from scratch. With them on board, we’re extremely excited about the growth potential,” Globa said.