Sunday, July 14, 2019
Apple stops selling iPhone SE, 6, 6 Plus, 6s Plus in India
Amazon Prime Day 2019 Kicks Off: Here Are All the Best Deals
Realme X, Realme 3i to Launch in India Today: How to Watch Live Stream
Microsoft Word for Android has been installed over 1B times; Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and OneDrive each have 500M+ installs on Android, and Outlook has 100M+ (Andrew Liptak/The Verge)
Microsoft Word for Android has been installed over 1B times; Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and OneDrive each have 500M+ installs on Android, and Outlook has 100M+ — Other Microsoft Apps have hit 500 million installs — Microsoft recently hit a particularly notable milestone …
RSS wing calls for TikTok, Helo ban
SoftBank's investment in Piramal group will hinge on it moving to a consumer finance play
After Mumbai, Bengaluru & Delhi courier terminals stop clearing 'gift' parcels
Swiggy in talks with Korean funds to raise up to $500M
Sources: Vista Equity Partners raises $850M for a second fund focused on early-stage enterprise software companies (Joshua Franklin/Reuters)
Sources: Vista Equity Partners raises $850M for a second fund focused on early-stage enterprise software companies — (Reuters) - U.S. private equity firm Vista Equity Partners has raised $850 million for a second fund dedicated to investing in early-stage enterprise software companies …
A look at Rockdale, Texas, where Bitmain planned to build the world's largest bitcoin mining facility, and how it all went wrong after bitcoin prices plunged (Mark Dent/Wired)
A look at Rockdale, Texas, where Bitmain planned to build the world's largest bitcoin mining facility, and how it all went wrong after bitcoin prices plunged — In 1952, The Saturday Evening Post christened Rockdale, Texas, “The Town Where It Rains Money.”
Chandrayaan-2 Mission Launch: How to Watch Live Stream Tonight
Kibus is like a Keurig for your pet
In a pitch during a recent meeting at Brinc’s Hong Kong headquarters, the Barcelona-based team behind Kibus Petcare was quick to point out that most millennials consider pets “a member of the family.” That sort of statement manifests itself in various ways, of course, but for many, that means preparing home cooked meals for their dogs and cats.
As a rabbit owner myself, that fortunately mostly just means rinsing off some arugula in the sink once a day. For those other pet owners, however, the prospect is a fair bit more complex, putting the same or even more work into prepping meals for their furry companions.
The pitch behind Kibus is an attempt to split the difference. The company’s appliance is designed to offer something like a home cooked meal for a dog or cat with a fraction of the required effort. The system accepts plastic cartons filled with freeze dried pet food. Pour in some water and the system will heat it up, cooking the foodstuffs in the process.
The company is going to be launching a Kickstarter campaign to sell the product, which is currently in prototype form. At launch, it will run around €199. That initial version will include user refillable pods, but in the future, they company plans to limit these to the pre-made variety, clearly going after a kind of ink cartridge approach to monetizing the system.
The pods will work out to around €1 a day, with the machine rationing out food to pets one to five times a day. Each should last about a week for an average pet, or somewhere in the neighborhood of three days for the largest dog. To start, the company is offering up five different food options (two for cats, three for dogs), with more coming down the road.
Users can monitor the system remotely and program in the sound of their own voice to call the pet over when it’s feeding time. The second version of the device will also include a camera for monitoring pets from afar.
Don’t blame flawed Silicon Valley for the rot of Wall Street and Washington
The techlash is well underway. Blame Facebook! Blame Google! Blame Amazon! (Apple and Microsoft still seem relatively immune, for now.) And, I mean, there’s a lot of objectively blameworthy behavior there, especially in that first case. But I find myself wondering: why does the ire go beyond that, into irrational territory? What is it about the tech industry that makes it such a particular target?
There are a sizable number of people out there who think — no, who don’t just think, who take as a given, as something no right-thinking person would ever dispute — that the most recent US presidential election went the way it did purely because of Facebook. Russians! Cambridge Analytica! This is of course nonsense. (Hello, James Comey. Hello, Citizens United. Hello, mass media who trumped up Hillary Clinton’s email non-scandal for months.) Why is that?
I think it’s obvious that media treatment of Facebook and Google has grown much harsher since they have begun to realize that Facebook and Google are rapidly devouring the advertising money on which the media feed. I’m not suggesting that publishers are telling journalists to be critical; I’m suggesting that journalists are individually well aware of what’s going in their industry and are individually, but en masse, aligning against the threats to their collective livelihood.
But it’s not just that. There’s an odd tinge of betrayal, and also of hope, to the techlash. I say “odd” but it makes perfect sense. People are especially angry at the tech industry because they view it as the last engine of power which actually might change. It’s the old story about the drunk looking under the lamppost for his keys, writ large.
My theory is that people no longer believe that there is any hope of meaningfully changing the venal rentier systems of Wall Street or Washington. A learned helplessness has set in. It is understood that those titanic forces are beyond all hope; that the system which is meant to control them has been corrupted, by regulatory capture, gerrymandering, court-packing, and so forth.
No vitriol or protest will affect Goldman Sachs or Mitch McConnell. People vent fury, and come together to fight individual horrors like the border camps, but they don’t seriously think the overall system can meaningfully change.
Technology, though — we’re all about change. …Right? We’re the shapers of the future. We’re the hope for a meaningfully better world. …Right?
But as the tech industry has become more powerful, it has also grown more cautious, and more conservative. Over the last decade its influence has attracted an influx of the kind of people who in another era would have gone to Wall Street or Washington; establishment scions who may take on the mantle of subversion, because it’s fashionable in California, but don’t actually intend any.
(This is why I like the blockchain / cryptocurrency world; it’s full of people who want to change the established system, believe it’s possible, have a vision of a new and better order, and think they’re implementing it. Sure, this also means they attract all kinds of charlatans, cheats, and lunatic fringes — but whether they’re right or not, compared to the sclerotic mainstream, their approach is hugely appealing.)
I’m not saying mainstream change is impossible; just that the system has bred learned helplessness to that effect. I’m not saying tech is now a bastion of conservatism; just that it’s less quietly subversive than it used to be.
And I’m by no means saying that Silicon Valley doesn’t deserve criticism. I am, however, saying that raging at it for the absence of outcomes that only Wall Street and Washington can bring is pretty counterproductive. Better to remember that often the fault lies not in our social media, Horatio, but in our elected representatives; and if that system of representation itself has gone awry, there’s may not be a lot that technology itself can do about it.
Week-in-Review: Google’s never-ending autonomous road trip
Hello, weekend readers. This is Week-in-Review where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.
Last week, I talked about how Alexa wasn’t forgetting what you requested because that data was more valuable than one might think.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The big story
In thinking about what to highlight in this week’s newsletter, I was tempted to talk about Zoom and Apple and Superhuman and the idea that secure communications can get screwed up when consent is bypassed, and I’m sure that’s something I’ll dig more into down the road, but what intrigued me most this week was single factoid from Google’s self-driving unit.
Waymo’s CTO told TechCrunch this week that the company has logged 10 billion miles of autonomous driving in simulation. That means that while you might have seen a physical Waymo vehicle driving past you, the real ground work has been laid in digital spaces that are governed by the laws of game engines.
The idea of simulation-training is hardly new, it’s how we’re building plenty of computer vision-navigated machines right now, hell, plenty of self-driving projects have been built leveraging systems like the traffic patterns in games like Grand Theft Auto. These billions of logged miles are just another type of training data but they’re also a pretty clear presentation of where self-supervised learning systems could theoretically move, creating the boundaries for a model while letting the system adjust its own rules of operation.
“I think what makes it a good simulator, and what makes it powerful is two things,” Waymo’s CTO Dmitri Dolgov told us. “One [is] fidelity. And by fidelity, I mean, not how good it looks. It’s how well it behaves, and how representative it is of what you will encounter in the real world. And then second is scale.”
Robotics and AV efforts are going to rely more and more on learning the rules of how the laws of the universe operate but those advances are going to be accompanied by other startups’ desires to build more high visual fidelity understanding of the world
There are plenty of pressures to create copies of Earth. Apple is building more detailed maps with sensor-laden vehicles, AR startups like are actively 3D-mapping cities using crowd-sourced data and game engine companies like Unity and Epic Games are building engines that replicate nature’s laws in digital spaces.
This is all to say that we’re racing to recreate our spatial world digitally, but we might just be scratching the surface of the relationship between AI and 3D worlds.
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On to the rest of the week’s news.
(Photo: by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Trends of the week
Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context.
- Trump must unblock his Twitter critics
Twitter is a consumer product, so politicians using it might feel like its their own personal account, but when they use it for political announcements it becomes an official communications channel and using features like blocking stifles national free speech. So says an NY-based appeals court this week of President Trump’s habit of blocking critics. It’s undoubtedly a ruling that’s going to have far-reaching implications for U.S. political figures that use social media. Read more here. - Nintendo switches up the Switch
The Nintendo Switch arrived on the scene with the bizarre notoriety of being a handheld system that was also a home console, but it’s not enough for the Japanese game co to capture the hybrid market, it’s looking to revisit the success it had back in the peak Nintendo DS days. The company announced the Switch Lite this week, which strips away a number of features for the sake of making a smaller, simpler version of the Nintendo Switch which is handheld-only and sports a longer battery life. Read more here. - Google and Amazon bury the home-streaming hatchet
At long last, one of the stranger passive aggressive fights in the smart home has come to a close. Amazon’s Prime Video is finally available on Google’s Chromecast and YouTube is now on Fire TV after a years-long turf war between the two platforms. Read more here. - AT&T maxes out its HBO ambitions
When AT&T bought HBO, via its Time Warner acquisition, execs made clear that they had acquired a premium product and planned to shift its standing in the market. The company announced this week that it will be launching a new service called HBO Max next year that will bring in new content including “Friends.” Read more here.
GAFA Gaffes
How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:
- Apple nips a security nightmare in the bud:
[Apple disables Walkie Talkie app due to vulnerability] - Amazon warehouse workers plan strike:
[Amazon warehouse workers in Minnesota plan to strike on Prime Day over labor practices]
Extra Crunch
Our premium subscription service had another great week of deep dives. My colleague Zack Whittaker revisited the WannaCry ransomware that hit in 2017 with a lengthy profile and interviews with the researchers that stopped the malware dead in its tracks. After you dig into that profile, you can check out his Extra Crunch piece that digs further into how security execs and startups can learn from the saga.
What CISOs need to learn from WannaCry
“…There is a good chance that your networks are infected with WannaCry — even if your systems haven’t yet been encrypted. Hankins told TechCrunch that there were 60 million attempted “detonations” of the WannaCry ransomware in June alone. So long as there’s a connection between the infected device and the kill switch domain, affected computers will not be encrypted….”
Here are some of our other top reads this week for premium subscribers. This week, we talked a bit about the future of car ownership and “innovation banking.”
- The future of car ownership: cars-as-a-service
- Grasshopper’s Judith Erwin leaps into innovation banking
- How Roblox avoided the gaming graveyard and grew into a $2.5 billion company
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TSMC says it will raise 2025 capital spending to $38B-$40B, an over 30% increase after three years of stagnation (Kathrin Hille/Financial Times)
Kathrin Hille / Financial Times : TSMC says it will raise 2025 capital spending to $38B-$40B, an over 30% increase after three years of s...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
