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When you enter the health tech industry as a new startup, an advisory board is a crucial foundational step. A board can guide you through industry-specific nuances, help you make important decisions and prove your legitimacy to investors looking for a strong industry background.

An advisory board will be able to give you strategic insights about both your company and the wider healthcare and technology industries.

In my experience of raising capital, the unpredictable financial situation at the beginning of the pandemic meant we nearly lost our $2 million round, but came through with a committed $250,000, which we used to bring in about $500,000 in revenue.

Something that helped this process was building our advisory board and starting small — we didn’t go for all of healthcare but instead focused on two healthcare verticals. This allowed us to prove our concept, build case studies and win contracts with specific teams in our customers’ companies.

It pays off to stay focused and prove your worth so that your advisory board members can champion you in niche markets, with the potential to expand in the future. For this reason, it’s important to identify the main intention behind your board, and exactly who should be on it.

Who to recruit

Three to five people is an ideal starting point for an advisory board, depending on the size and stage of your company. In health tech, you need more than just the healthcare perspective — you also need the insight of those who have already grown technology companies, perhaps outside of the industry. Our company’s board is an even split of two healthcare and two technology advisers, and, ideally, you want to find a fifth who is well versed in both industries.

An M.D., a Ph.D. from a respected institution or a thought leader in your relevant field of healthcare is the most important asset to an advisory board. These are the highly decorated physicians who have strong connections and act as a reference for their peers.

They provide instant credibility for your company, help you get into the minds of both patients and healthcare providers, and can outline how various health systems work.

Twitter is rolling out changes its newly rebuilt API that will allow third-party developers to build tools and other solutions specifically for its audio chatroom product, Twitter Spaces. The company today announced it’s shipping new endpoints to support Spaces on the Twitter API v2, with the initial focus on enabling discovery of live or scheduled Spaces. This may later be followed by an API update that will make it possible for developers to build out more tools for Spaces’ hosts.

The company first introduced its fully rebuilt API last year, with the goal of modernizing its developer platform while also making it easier to add support for Twitter’s newer features at a faster pace. The new support for Twitter Spaces in the API is one example of that plan now being put into action.

With the current API update, Twitter hopes developers will build new products that enable users — both on and off Twitter — to find Twitter Spaces more easily, the company says. This could potentially broaden the reach of Spaces and introduce its audio chats to more people, which could give Twitter a leg up in the increasingly competitive landscape for audio-based social networking. Today, Twitter Spaces isn’t only taking on Clubhouse, but also the audio chat experiences being offered by Facebook, Discord, Reddit, Public.com, Spotify, and smaller social apps.

According to Twitter, developers will gain access to two new endpoints, Spaces lookup and Spaces search, which allow them to lookup live and scheduled Spaces using specific criteria — like the Spaces ID, user ID, or keywords. The Spaces lookup endpoint also offers a way to begin to understand the public metadata and metrics associated with a Space, like the participant count, speaker count, host profile information, detected language being used, start time, scheduled start time, creation time, status, and whether the Space is ticketed or not, Twitter tells us.

To chose what Spaces functionality to build into its API first, Twitter says it spoke to developers who told the company they wanted functionality that could help people discover Spaces they may find interesting and set reminders for attending. Developers said they also want to build tools that would allow Spaces hosts to better understand how well their audio chats are performing. But most of these options are yet available with today’s API update. Twitter only said it’s “exploring” other functionality — like tools that would allow developers to integrate reminders into their products, as well as those that would be able to surface certain metrics fields available in the API or allow developers to build analytics dashboards.

These ideas for other endpoints haven’t yet gained a spot on Twitter’s Developer Platform Roadmap, either.

Twitter also told us it’s not working on any API endpoints that would allow developers to build standalone client apps for Twitter Spaces, as that’s not something it heard interest in from its developer community.

Several developers have been participating in a weekly Spaces hosted by Daniele Bernardi from Twitter’s Spaces team, and were already clued in to coming updates. Developers with access to the v2 API will be able to begin building with the new endpoints starting today, but none have new experiences ready to launch at this time. Twitter notes Bernardi will also host another Spaces event today at 12 PM PT to talk in more detail about the API update and what’s still to come.

Apple has encountered monumental backlash to a new child sexual abuse imagery (CSAM) detection technology it announced earlier this month. The system, which Apple calls NeuralHash, has yet to be activated for its billion-plus users, but the technology is already facing heat from security researchers who say the algorithm is producing flawed results.

NeuralHash is designed to identify known CSAM on a user’s device without having to possess the image or knowing the contents of the image. Because a user’s photos stored in iCloud are end-to-end encrypted so that even Apple can’t access the data, NeuralHash instead scans for known CSAM on a user’s device, which Apple claims is more privacy friendly as it limits the scanning to just photos rather than other companies which scan all of a user’s file.

Apple does this by looking for images on a user’s device that have the same hash — a string of letters and numbers that can uniquely identify an image — that are provided by child protection organizations like NCMEC. If NeuralHash finds 30 or more matching hashes, the images are flagged to Apple for a manual review before the account owner is reported to law enforcement. Apple says the chance of a false positive is about one in one trillion accounts.

But security experts and privacy advocates have expressed concern that the system could be abused by highly-resourced actors, like governments, to implicate innocent victims or to manipulate the system to detect other materials that authoritarian nation states find objectionable. NCMEC called critics the “screeching voices of the minority,” according to a leaked memo distributed internally to Apple staff.

Last night, Asuhariet Ygvar reverse-engineered Apple’s NeuralHash into a Python script and published code to GitHub, allowing anyone to test the technology regardless of whether they have an Apple device to test. In a Reddit post, Ygvar said NeuralHash “already exists” in iOS 14.3 as obfuscated code, but was able to reconstruct the technology to help other security researchers understand the algorithm better before it’s rolled out to iOS and macOS devices later this year.

It didn’t take long before others tinkered with the published code and soon came the first reported case of a “hash collision,” which in NeuralHash’s case is where two entirely different images produce the same hash. Cory Cornelius, a well-known research scientist at Intel Labs, discovered the hash collision. Ygvar confirmed the collision a short time later.

Hash collisions can be a death knell to systems that rely on cryptography to keep them secure, such as encryption. Over the years several well-known password hashing algorithms, like MD5 and SHA-1, were retired after collision attacks rendered them ineffective.

Kenneth White, a cryptography expert and founder of the Open Crypto Audit Project, said in a tweet: “I think some people aren’t grasping that the time between the iOS NeuralHash code being found and [the] first collision was not months or days, but a couple of hours.”

When reached, an Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the record. But in a background call where reporters were not allowed to quote executives directly or by name, Apple downplayed the hash collision and argued that the protections it puts in place — such as a manual review of photos before they are reported to law enforcement — are designed to prevent abuses. Apple also said that the version of NeuralHash that was reverse-engineered is a generic version, and not the complete version that will roll out later this year.

It’s not just civil liberties groups and security experts that are expressing concern about the technology. A senior lawmaker in the German parliament sent a letter to Apple chief executive Tim Cook this week saying that the company is walking down a “dangerous path” and urged Apple not to implement the system.

Sam Lessin’s post in The Information, “The End of Venture Capital as We Know It,” prompted heated debate in Silicon Valley. He argued that the arrival of new players with large amounts of capital is changing the landscape of late-stage investing for venture capitalists and forcing VCs to “enter the bigger pond as a fairly small fish, or go find another small pond.”

But there’s another important trend developing in venture capital that has even more significant consequences than whether VCs are being forced to fight with bigger, deeper pockets for late-stage investment opportunities. And that is the move away from what has always defined venture capital: taking risks on the earliest-stage companies.

The data indicates investing in early-stage companies is decreasing rapidly. According to data from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association, as a percentage of total U.S. venture capital dollars invested, angel/seed stage has reduced from 10.6% to 4.9% over the last three years, early-stage has reduced from 36.5% to 26.1% during the same time period, while late-stage has drastically increased from 52.9% to 69%, coming (as Lessin pointed out) from new players such as hedge funds and mutual funds.

This is happening at a time when there has been a record rate of new business creation. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, seasonally adjusted monthly business applications have been around 500,000 per month from the second half of 2020 to June 2021, compared with 300,000 per month in the year preceding the pandemic.

This data should be a red flag. Venture capital is about investing in risk to help the most innovative, transformative ideas get from concept to a flourishing enterprise. But the VC industry at large, instead of taking risks at inception and in the early stages, is investing in later-stage companies where the concept is proven and companies have momentum.

Here, the skill is more about finance to determine how much to invest and at what valuation to hit a certain return threshold rather than having the ability to spot a promising founder with a breakthrough idea. There’s an important role for late-stage investing, but if that’s where too much of the industry’s focus is applied, we’ll stifle innovation and limit the pipeline of companies to invest in Series B and beyond in the future.

The irony is that there’s never been a better time to be an inception investor given lower capital needs of getting from idea to Series A milestones. Startup costs have been driven down with access to cloud, social, mobile and open-source technologies, allowing entrepreneurs to test ideas and build momentum with small pools of capital.

This has spawned a golden age of innovation and many new trends are emerging, creating a large pool of companies that need money and support to take an idea and turn it into a flourishing business.

It’s also ironic that when we are judged for our prowess as VC investors, the only question that has ever mattered is who was the earliest investor, who had the genius to recognize a brilliant idea. It is not who led the last round(s) before an IPO.

This is not some esoteric argument about venture capital; there will be real consequences for our ability to innovate and invest in areas such as the renaissance of silicon, biology as technology, human-centered AI, unleashing the power of data, climate-friendly investing, saving lives, re-humanization of social media, blockchain and quantum computing.

The VC industry cannot forget its roots. In its early days, it served as the catalyst for the success of iconic companies such as Genentech, Apple, Microsoft, Netscape, Google, Salesforce, Amazon and Facebook. Without these companies, we would not have a biotech industry, the internet, the cloud, social media and mobile computing, all of which have dramatically changed how we live, play and work.

We can’t know the future, but with AI, machine learning and a new generation of semiconductors and materials, we certainly know profound change lies ahead. But it won’t happen if venture capital doesn’t play a major role at a company’s inception. We have to step up and do more to change the discouraging statistics above.

And it’s not just about individual firm glory: If we want the U.S. to maintain its leadership as the innovation engine of the world, the venture industry has to do more to support bold ideas at the earliest stages to give them a shot at succeeding. Maybe it’s time, as Lessin suggested, for VCs to “go find another small pond” or rather swim deeper in the one some of us are already in: the one that is full of inception-stage companies looking for investors who will partner with them throughout their journey.

Waze might have a way to keep your kids entertained during a drive without handing them a tablet: distract them with your navigation app. The company has added a PAW Patrol experience to Waze that has the TV show’s Ryder guide you to your destination with help from Chase, Marshall and Skye. You can also switch your Waze Mood to replace the usual icon with Chase’s police car, Marshall’s fire truck or Skye’s aircraft.

The feature is available for a “limited time” to English users through the My Waze section in the app. It’s available on both Android and iOS.

This is a not-so-subtle plug for the upcoming PAW Patrol movie, but it could be helpful for keeping your young ones engaged. It might even encourage them to take an interest in the drive and the world outside the car window. Of course, it’s also easy to see this going very badly — the last thing you want is to have your kids shouting at the phone while you’re listening for directions. This might be best for children who tend to watch the show in raptured silence.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.

Satellite operator Planet Labs is beefing up its existing partnership with Google Cloud. Under a new agreement, Planet customers can use Google Cloud to store and process data, and access Google’s other products such as its data analytics warehouse BigQuery.

The two companies’ collaboration stretches back to 2017, when Google sold its satellite imaging business, Terra Bella, to Planet. As part of the sale agreement, Google also signed a multi-year contract with Planet to license Earth-imaging for its use. Planet also uses Google Cloud service for its own internal data processing and hosting.

This latest agreement will let Planet customers use products like BigQuery to analyze large volumes of satellite imaging data, reflecting “a growing demand for planetary-scale satellite data analysis, powered by the cloud,” Planet said in a news release.

“Planet customers want scalable compute and storage,” Kevin Weil, Planet’s president of product and business said. “Google Cloud customers want broader access to satellite data and analytics. This partnership is a win-win for both, as it helps customers transform their operations and compete in a digital-first world, powered by Planet’s unique data set.”

Planet operates a network of around 200 satellites – more than any government – and provides analytics services on the data it gathers. Last month, the company joined a slew of other space companies by announcing it was going public via a $2.8 billion merger with blank-check firm dMY Technology Group IV. The deal is anticipated to inject Planet with $545 million in cash, including a $200 million private-investment-in-public-equity from BlackRock-managed funds, Koch Strategic Platforms, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures and Google.