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Rumors of commercial quantum computing systems have been coming hot and heavy these past few years but there are still a number of issues to work out in the technology. For example, researchers at the Moscow Institute Of Physics And Technology have begun using silicon carbine to create a system to release single photons in ambient i.e. room temperature conditions. To maintain security quantum computers need to output quantum bits – essentially single photons. This currently requires a supercooled material that proves to be unworkable in the real world. From the release:

Photons — the quanta of light — are the best carriers for quantum bits. It is important to emphasize that only single photons can be used, otherwise an eavesdropper might intercept one of the transmitted photons and thus get a copy of the message. The principle of single-photon generation is quite simple: An excited quantum system can relax into the ground state by emitting exactly one photon. From an engineering standpoint, one needs a real-world physical system that reliably generates single photons under ambient conditions. However, such a system is not easy to find. For example, quantum dots could be a good option, but they only work well when cooled below -200 degrees Celsius, while the newly emerged two-dimensional materials, such as graphene, are simply unable to generate single-photons at a high repetition rate under electrical excitation.

Researchers used silicon carbide in early LEDs and has been used to create electroluminescent electronics in the past. This new system will allow manufacturers to place silicon carbide emitters right on the quantum computer chips, a massive improvement over the complex systems used today.

“Using their theory, the researchers have shown how a single-photon emitting diode based on silicon carbide can be improved to emit up to several billion photons per second. That is exactly what one needs to implement quantum cryptography protocols at data transfer rates on the order of 1 Gbps,” the researchers write. “Silicon carbide-based single-photon sources are compatible with the CMOS technology, which is a standard for manufacturing electronic integrated circuits. This makes silicon carbide by far the most promising material for building practical ultrawide-bandwidth unconditionally secure data communication lines.”

There is no timeline for commercialization of the technology but given the interest in quantum computing we can expect these little chips to shoot out single photons sometime soon.

For a long time, we’ve heard that VR is three to five years from becoming mainstream. While that premise remains questionable, HBO’s Silicon Valley is celebrating its fifth season with the launch of a VR experience called Silicon Valley: Inside the Hacker Hostel.

The experience will be available on the HTC Vive, and will offer users more than 700 interactive experiences, from playing foosball to taking bong rips.

The Silicon Valley VR experience takes place inside the same house where the cast has lived and worked to build a successful company for the past five years, and it all looks eerily similar to the set we’ve seen on the show, from the sloppy kitchen to the bunkbeds in the bedroom.

But it’s not just a bunch of wandering around. Silicon Valley: Inside the Hacker Hostel also includes challenges from Dinesh and Gilfoyle, as well as the opportunity to help Richard with a coding conundrum. And no Silicon Valley experience is complete without Jared, who will have a secret message that users need to track down.

The attention to detail is comes down to the fact that Rewind, the developers of the experience, took 360-degree video of the show’s real set, and worked with set blueprints, according to Fast Company.

The advanced universal remote market is not a very crowded market. In fact, for a while now, Logitech’s Harmony line has been pretty much the only game in town. Newcomer NEEO wants to upset that monopoly with its new NEEO Remote and NEEO Brain combo ($369), which is a system that can connect to just about any AV system, along with a smorgasbord of connected smart devices including Nest, Philips Hue, Sonos and more.

NEEO’s two-part system includes the Brain, which, true to its name, handles all of the heavy lifting. This is a puck-shaped device with 360-degree IR blasters dotting its outside perimeter, and which has one IR extender out (there’s one in the box) for connecting devices held within a closed AV cabinet, for instance. This central hub also connects to your Wi-Fi network, and setup requires plugging it into your router via Ethernet to get everything squared away, similar to how you initially set up Sonos speakers, if you’re familiar with that process.

Most of the setup work you need to do to get NEEO working happens on your phone, and that’s where it becomes apparent that this smart remote was designed for a modern context. Logitech’s Harmony software has come a long way, and now you can do everything you need to do from the iOS and Android app, but it’s still somewhat apparent that its legacy is as something you initially setup using a desktop and somewhat awkward web-based software. The NEEO feels at home on mobile, and it makes the setup and configuration process much better overall.

The other core component of the NEEO system is the NEEO Remote. This is a fantastic piece of industrial design, first of all. It’s a sleek rectangle crafted from aerospace-grade aluminum that oozes charm, in a way that nothing in the current Logitech Harmony lineup can come close to matching. The minimalist design still doesn’t suffer from the ‘which way is up?’ problem that the Apple Remote faces, because of subtle design cues including bottom weighting and the presence of ample physical buttons.

A NEEO Remote isn’t necessary for the system to work – you can just use the Brain along with the companion app for iPhone or Android, but the remote is a joy to hold and use, thanks to its unique design, and it features a super high density display that’s extremely responsive to touch input and pleasingly responsive to touch. NEEO took a lot of time to get this touchscreen experience right, and it pays off, delivering a clear and simple control interface that shifts to suit the needs of whatever activity you’re running at the time.

The NEEO Remote also has an “SOS” feature so that you can locate it if you happen to misplace it, and it can even be configured to recognize different hands if you want to set profiles for distinct members of the household, or set parental control profiles limiting access to certain content or devices. This kind of thing is where NEEO’s feature set exceeds the competition, and shows a particular attention to modern device use cases.

One NEEO Remote can also control multiple NEEO Brains, which is another limitation of the completion. That means you can set up NEEO Brains in each room where you have devices to control, and carry your remote from place to place instead of having to have multiple. The NEEO Brain is still $200 on its own, however, so it’s definitely still a barrier to entry.

NEEO otherwise does pretty much everything you’d expect a smart remote to do in 2018: You can set recipes on the deice itself, including with triggers like time-based alarms or motion detection (without using IFTTT). You can connect it to Alexa, though that functionality is limited at the moment, with more updates promised in future to make this better.

The bottom line is that NEEO offers a competent, intelligent alternative the big dog on the block, Logitech’s Harmony system. Logitech’s offering is still more robust and mature in terms of delivering Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility, as well as rock solid performance, but NEEO has some clever ideas and unique takes that will serve more patient and tech-forward users better over time.

Yet another price drop for MoviePass . Following statements that the app was tracking customers’ location, which CEO Mitch Lowe quickly backtracked on, the company is again dropping its pricing in an effort to attract more sign-ups in the wake of the bad press. Today, the cost of MoviePass annual subscription has dropped again to $89.95, which works out to be $6.95 per month, plus a one-time processing fee of $6.55.

Typically, the MoviePass monthly subscription is $9.95.

This is not the first time MoviePass has tried this tactic to lure in new customers to its all-you-can-watch moviegoing service with over 2 million subscribers. The company previously ran the same promotion back in November 2017. And as with that earlier sale, MoviePass is again not saying when this promotion will end – only that it’s for a “limited time.”

The company has come under fire for a series of misleading statements, which has left some customers wary about using the service. At the Entertainment Finance Forum earlier this month, Lowe had told the crowd that MoviePass knows what customers were doing both before and after they go to the movies. But he later rescinded those remarks, saying that it was the company’s “future vision” he was discussing, and not where it is today.

That’s still not all that comforting to customers who are waking up to the fact that their personal data is what will make MoviePass affordable in the long-term – if it ever gets there, that is. The cost of users’ movie tickets are going to be subsidized by their data, and the ability for studios to target them with ads.

However, buying an annual subscription to MoviePass is a bit of risk for another reason, as well – the company is burning through cash extremely fast, and has only been able to hang on through continued investments from majority owner Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc. It expects to reach break-even early next year, Lowe recently told TechCrunch. But of course, that could be excited bluster about the future, too.

Some of the biggest names in music, movies and social media are plotting an Instagram takeover in support of Saturday’s #MarchForOurLives.

At noon Pacific today, celebrities including Snoop Dogg, A$AP Ferg, Bebe Rexha, Julia Michaels, Maroon 5, Imagine Dragons, The Chainsmokers and more will post the following message across their social media channels.

Protect kids, not guns! Use your voice, share this picture and march in your city on Saturday, March 24th. #IWillMarch #MarchForOurLives

Marches are taking place across the world. As of publication there are 831 March For Our Lives events and interested attendees can register to attend marches here: marchforourlives.com/events

The initiative, called SPARK THE MARCH is an attempt by a community of entertainers — brought together under the banner of the Venice Beach, California-based social media hub, Winston House — to mobilize in support of the audiences that have supported them.

“Our mission is to help spread their message to as many people as possible through a mass social media campaign on an important date, March 23rd, the day before the march on the capital,” reads a message on the campaign’s website.

“Athletes and entertainers are not ‘sub-Americans’ that have no opinion on things that affect all our lives. When a shooting happens in a school or some tragedy takes place, we are all affected. We are humans first.” wrote the 29-year-old Darold D. Brown Ferguson, Jr. — better known as A$AP Ferg — in an email. “I want to lend my voice to amplify the other voices that share my opinion. I have a platform and I will use it.”

The Harlem-born rapper views social media as the perfect platform to support the movement and Winston House as a perfect vehicle to drum up support. “Social Media needs to be used for good, not just fun. It’s just like my music, I make fun party songs but sometimes I sprinkle in a social message. I loved this idea the minutes my guys at Winston House called me,” he wrote.

Behind the scenes, the SPARKTHEMARCH initiative relied on Winston House founder, Corey McGuire and Universal Music Publishing chief Evan Lamberg to muster the musicians and influencers joining the call to action (which is open to anyone).

“I think in my truth a lot of this is to build with [Winston House]. They brought the idea to my attention. Corey showed me the video of kids speaking. I’m inspired by the movement and how I can help. I think it’s a great cause and it’s a powerful thing to get involved in,” wrote Shameik Moore in an email. “I want to touch people with my work, I want to make a difference. My music and acting is one way to do that, this is another important way.”

“There was a shooting on my college campus in 2014. I had already graduated, but my sister and many friends were there. I know the sickening feeling of frantically calling and texting to see if my loved ones are OK. It’s heartbreaking to think of every young life cut short and every family member/friend who was never able to reach their loved one,” McGuire wrote in an email.

Watching the mobilization of students around the country in a grassroots movement fostered by their peers in response to the February 14 mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., McGuire felt that the entertainment community could unite to amplify the students’ own message.

As a vehicle for mobilization, there are few better than the creative living, working and performance space that is Winston House. Built by McGuire and a host of supporters to be a hub for creative expression and live music in Venice Beach, the house has grown into a movement of its own supporting up and coming talent across the broad terrain of current popular culture.

“It’s a no brainer that our schools should be a safe place and it’s heart breaking that they aren’t. It’s a no brainer to throw our collective resources and network behind supporting this important movement,” McGuire wrote. “The children are leaders of the MARCH FOR OUR LIVES movement. On March 24, they will take to the streets of Washington DC to demand that their lives and safety become a priority and that we end gun violence and mass shootings in our schools today….Their bravery and persistence in speaking up has caused an important narrative shift in the gun-control conversation away from politics and towards people. All of a sudden there is hope and progress being made. I feel a little bit less helpless.”

Welcome to “Equity,” TechCrunch’s venture capital and tech business podcast. For this week, we talked about the wave of enterprise IPOs. And we were joined by Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures. He was the perfect guest because he specializes in enterprise and Battery is pretty good at it.  We also talked about Facebook’s privacy debacle.

First up, we talked about Dropbox pricing its long-awaited IPO. It priced at $21 per share, which was better than what the company was initially hoping for. Valued at $8.2 billion, it’s still below that $10 billion last private round (which only impacts a small subset investors directly, but is an indication of valuations for the broader ecosystem). However, if it “pops,” it could push back that milestone on day one.

Then we talked about other upcoming IPOs, like e-signature business DocuSign. I broke the news that it filed confidentially.

We also talked about cloud security business ZScaler which doubled following its debut. I broke the news of that one, too. (If you know of any other upcoming IPOs, please contact me).

There’s also Zuora, the subscription software business, which unveiled its IPO filing this week.

And MuleSoft, one of last year’s IPOs that now got purchased for $6.5 billion by SalesForce.

But we also saved time to talk about Facebook’s big privacy mess. And Travis Kalanick’s new job (again).

And our co-host Alex Wilhelm was off, which is unacceptable. Fine, I guess being sick is an ok excuse. Get well soon!

Our podcast drops every Friday at 6:00am PT. Check us out on iTunes and pretty much all the other podcast platforms.

As we enter the third age of crypto – the first being Satoshi’s White Paper phase and the second being the exchange phase – we find ourselves in a maze of twisty tokens, all different. Enter Saga.

Created by Israeli VC Ido Sadeh Man and investor Moshe Hogeg, Saga a token connected to a cash reserve and can initially only be owned by accredited and identified investors, creating a sort of hybrid non-anonymous cryptocurrency that should appeal to the risk-averse.

The team sees three kinds of cryptocurrencies in the future.

“Hyper-volatile currencies, which lack a monetary policy, are usually anonymous,” said Hogeg. “Stablecoins are pegged to other assets thus preventing their organic growth and major players in this space are opaque concerning their funds. Saga’s economy model is designed to allow growth. Participants are obliged to undergo a Know Your Customer process, assuring Saga’s economy is compatible with traditional financial institutions.”

In other words, buying Saga is like buying into a “stable currency,” a goal that has thus far been elusive in the cryptocurrency industry. “Creating a currency is about striking a delicate balance between prospect and stability. Saga aims to provide a moderate, sensible middle way,” the team wrote. “When designing the funding scheme, we decided not to conduct an ICO. We are happy to find ourselves addressing the public, asking for trust – only when we have value to show for it – once the Saga currency is ready and launched.”

The team has raised a $30 million “seed round” from personal funds, Mangrove Capital Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners .

They also have a deep-thinking back bench with Jacob A. Frenkel, PhD, chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, and Prof. Emin Gün Sirer, a blockchain researcher, on the advisory. They’ve also added Nobel Laureate in Economics, Prof. Myron Scholes, just in case.

“Technology is not enough,” said Hogeg. “The design of a currency requires a broad, interdisciplinary effort. While technology provides the tools, the essence resides in solid monetary policy. Saga has assembled a team of world leaders, combining expertise from several fields: Economics, Mathematics, the Humanities and Social Sciences, to establish the new currency.”

They will launch the currency in Q4 2018. Saga’s currency will be connected to a reserve and “Saga’s smart contract adjusts the money supply to meet market demand. Therefore, the reserve acts as a buffer, limiting the impact of market fluctuations,” he said.

“In practice, when the economy expands, the contract increases SGA supply, slowing price appreciation. Conversely, when Saga’s economy shrinks, the contract reduces the money supply, thereby curbing any large drops in SGA price.”

A stable cryptocurrency has always been a dream for the average crypto investor and maybe there have been plenty of brain – and brainless – solutions. While creating reserve variable fractional reserve-backed cryptocurrencies is nothing new in theory, putting it into practice is far harder. Saga, which prides itself on not being a technology company but instead a more multi-disciplinary solution, may be poised to crack the code.

Nissan is hoping to achieve a target of selling 1 million electrified vehicles across its portfolio by its fiscal 2022, the automaker announced today. The target is part of its overarching strategic mid-term plan leading up to 2022. To be included in the sales total, models sold by Nissan need to either be pure electric or e-POWER vehicles (Nissan’s hybrid system that delivers the performance benefits of a fully electric powertrain with the range and refuelling benefits of an internal combustion engine).

The overall strategy to help get Nissan to that milestone also includes the release of eight new purely electric vehicle, to follow the LEAF, and a multi brand launch of EVs specific to China. There’s also a new electric mini-car coming to Japan, and a plan to electrify all new Infiniti vehicles by 2021.

Alongside its EV targets, Nissan is also looking to build out its autonomous driving portfolio, with specific goals to ramp up its ProPILOT advanced driver assistance system sales by 2022. Nissan says it’s also aiming to sell 1 million models per year equipped with ProPILOT (which is similar to Tesla’s Autopilot) by that time. ProPILOT should grow more capable, too, with automated multilane driving and destination picking hopefully rolling out in the next couple of years.

Another usage milestone for messaging platform Telegram: It’s announced passing 200M monthly active users “within the last 30 days”.

The platform passed 100M MAUs back in February 2016, when it held a lavish party at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona to celebrate the metric. At the time it said it was adding 350k new users daily and that there were 15 billion messages generated daily.

Since then Telegram has kept its powder fairly dry on the usage metrics front — presumably waiting to be able to announce 200M.

Its blog post is not revealing of any other details about usage. Rather founder Pavel Durov uses the space to give thanks to Telegram users for getting the company to the milestone, and takes a sideswipe at other “popular apps” which he says — unlike Telegram — monetize via advertising and/or pass data on to third parties.

Safe to say, it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out who he might be thinking of…

“Since the day we launched in August 2013 we haven’t disclosed a single byte of our users’ private data to third parties,” he writes (emphasis his). “We operate this way because we don’t regard Telegram as an organization or an app. For us, Telegram is an idea; it is the idea that everyone on this planet has a right to be free.”

We’ve reached out to Durov to see if he’ll give up any more Telegram usage tidbits and will update this post if so.

While he writes confidently now that “Telegram doesn’t… do deals with marketers, data miners or government agencies”, it’s not clear how much longer he’ll be able to stand up that claim — given the legal pressure being applied, for example, in Russia to hand over encryption keys or face being blocked. Telegram has also faced restrictions in Iran.

It told Bloomberg it plans to appeal the Russian ruling in a process that may last into the summer, according to company lawyer, Ramil Akhmetgaliev.

Durov also tweeted that: “Threats to block Telegram unless it gives up private data of its users won’t bear fruit. Telegram will stand for freedom and privacy.”

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple could be unveiling a new version of its entry-level iPad at its event next week. The company is holding a press event on March 27 in Chicago. And the only thing that we know is that the event is going to be focused on the education market.

Apple launched a cheap iPad in March 2017 without any press conference. This iPad looks like the iPad Air 2 with a 9.7-inch retina display and an A9 chip — the chip that first appeared in the iPhone 6S. More importantly, the entry-level iPad that is simply called “iPad” only costs $320 for the 32GB version.

And it sounds like Apple is ready to introduce an updated version of this iPad. Maybe you can expect a True Tone display and faster components for instance. Hardware is just one part as Bloomberg also says that there will be new iOS features for the classroom.

While the iPad seems to be a great device for the classroom, Google has convinced many schools with its Chromebooks. These laptops are cheap, secure and easy to maintain. You can currently buy Lenovo Chromebooks for $179 without taking into account educational discounts.

Even if Apple chooses to reduce its margins with its new entry-level iPad, this could be a smart bet. Tech companies rely more than ever on the ecosystem of services and devices that they created.

Chances are you’ll like Android phones and Google services if you’ve spent years using Google Docs and Gmail on a Chromebook. Students who use an iPad every day could then become loyal Apple customers in the future.

Rumor has it that Apple is also working on an updated MacBook Air with an affordable price. But Bloomberg thinks the new laptop won’t be ready in time for next week’s event.