NY-based Wahed Invest, which describes itself as the world's first "halal robo adviser", raises $25M led by Saudi Aramco, bringing its total raised to $40M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:
NY-based Wahed Invest, which describes itself as the world's first “halal robo adviser”, raises $25M led by Saudi Aramco, bringing its total raised to $40M  —  Wahed Invest, a New York-based fintech startup that describes itself as the world's first halal robo adviser …

Google Maps is getting new features to alert users

The update would allow users to check how crowded a train station might be at a particular time, or if buses on a certain route are running on a limited schedule, Google said. https://ift.tt/37c6Rid

IBM to exit facial recognition business, says aids racial profiling

The company will stop offering facial recognition software and oppose any use of such technology for purposes of mass surveillance and racial profiling. https://ift.tt/2XIqWcL

Coronavirus-related searches see a drop, people back to Googling for films, weather

According to Google search trends, the search volume for coronavirus in May was half of that in April. https://ift.tt/2MDUlhS https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

BTS label Big Hit Entertainment inks broad partnership with streaming tech company Kiswe

The town of New Providence, N.J. may seem like an unlikely home for a company that’s just inked a new deal with Big Hit Entertainment (the label behind the global K-pop supergroup BTS) and raised tens of millions of dollars from some of the largest venture capital firms in the United States, but Kiswe Mobile is proof that valuable startups can come from anywhere.

Founded in 2013 and led by chief executive, Mike Schabel, Kiswe Mobile is now extending its relationship with Big Hit from a one-time show in early December to an agreement that will extend well beyond the next BTS gig in what the two companies described as a “global partnership”.

Schabel declined to disclose any terms of the partnership agreement but said that it was more than a simple business contract between the two entities.

For the past seven years Kiswe has worked with some of the biggest sports and entertainment leagues in the U.S., including the National Basketball Association, Major League Soccer and the Professional Golf Association on streaming live events. In recent years the company has added eSports  to its roster — and live events including that December BTS show.

Founded by former President of Bell Labs, Jeong Kim, along with Wim Sweldens and Jimmy Lynn back in 2013, Kiswe Mobile offers a streaming service that has four different components that live entertainment needs to get back on track in the post-COVID era of social distancing.

The company’s technology offers a central production system for concert producers to process video and audio,  multi-camera and interactive viewing options for fans watching the show to communicate with the live performers and each other, and presenting it exclusively by either geo-location or through ticketing.

“This MOU opens the possibility for diversified innovation in the global market by combining Big Hit’s content planning know-how and Kiswe’s technology, said Big Hit chief executive Lenzo Yoon, in a statement.

Behind all of this technology are a number of high profile investors including New Enterprise Associates, the multi-billion venture capital firm based outside of Balitmore. Other investors include Revolution, the Washington, DC-based investment firm founded by Steve Case; Ted Leonsis, a co-founder of Revolution and the founder of Monumental Sports Group, and company founder Jeong Kim.

The company has raised well over $20 million in financing since its launch in 2013, but Schabel declined to disclose the total amount the company raised.

The Big Hit deal is meant to serve a precursor to the launch of a new BTS Concert and convention called “BANG BANG CON The Live” later this month.

That show is, itself, a prelude to more interactive events from Big Hit’s roster of talent powered by Kiswe Mobile.

Technologies like Kiswe’s are arriving at a time when live events need them the most. The recent Travis Scott Fortnite experience, and Marshmello’s earlier turn behind the virtual wheels of steel in Epic Games’ breakout hit are among a number of new technologies that are looking to bring at least some of the magic of shared experiences and entertainment to fans that are hungry for it.

Several startups are taking this moment to push interactive live experiences for audiences. They include the virtual concert design and distribution platform, WaveXR; the interactive streaming service, Caffeine, and development firms like Zoan, which created a virtual concert experience for Helsinki’s May Day celebrations that brought a crowd of 1 million.

Kiswe’s deal with Big Hit arguably taps into the biggest, and most rabid fo the music industry’s fanbases by reaching the members of the BTS Army.

As Schabel acknowledged in a statement, “Kiswe’s relationship with Big Hit Entertainment expands our huge global sports and media footprint into the music sector and allows Kiswe and Big Hit to explore new ventures in the industry.”

Didi Chuxing CEO says its ride sharing orders in China are recovering to pre-pandemic levels, with peak daily car-hailing orders currently surpassing 30M (Reuters)

Reuters:
Didi Chuxing CEO says its ride sharing orders in China are recovering to pre-pandemic levels, with peak daily car-hailing orders currently surpassing 30M  —  BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Didi Chuxing, China's biggest ride-hailing company which counts SoftBank as a backer …

Trai's blockchain solution to tackle pesky calls, messages runs into legal hurdle

Regulator gets time till June 15 to reply as telemarketer Venets Media files plea in Delhi HC https://ift.tt/2AVlvxW https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Kevin Bacon is a writer with a dark secret in You Should Have Left trailer

Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried start in the forthcoming psychological horror film You Should Have Left.

Kevin Bacon achieved cult success with 1990's Tremors, but he also starred in another film that somehow didn't achieve the same lasting success, despite being one of his strongest performances. That film is Stir of Echoes (1999), an unjustly ignored supernatural thriller adapted from a novel by by Richard Matheson. It had the misfortune to hit theaters the same year as The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project.

Now Bacon is reuniting with Stir of Echoes writer and director David Koepp in You Should Have Left, a forthcoming psychological horror film from Universal, co-produced by Jason Blum and Blumhouse Productions. The official trailer just dropped, and we're getting some strong The Others meets The Shining vibes from this tale of a haunted house that doesn't want to let its occupants leave, which bodes well for the final film.

The film is adapted from a 2017 German novella of the same name by bestselling author Daniel Kehlman. It's written in the first-person style of a diary belonging to an unnamed screenwriter attempting to write a sequel to an earlier hit film. With the studio pressuring him for a draft, he rents a house and takes his wife—an aging actress for whom work is becoming scarce—and four-year-old daughter on a long vacation in hopes of finishing the script.

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South Korean court denies prosecutors’ arrest warrant request for Samsung heir Jay Lee

A South Korean court denied an arrest warrant request for Samsung Group heir apparent Jay Y. Lee, saying that although prosecutors’ secured “a considerable amount of evidence,” it was still not enough to detain Lee. Prosecutors filed for the warrant last week, accusing Lee of accounting fraud and stock manipulation.

Prosecutors allege that the value of electronics materials provider Cheil Industries was artificially inflated before its 2015 merger with Samsung C&T, Samsung’s de facto holding company, to create a more favorable rate for Lee, who was then the largest shareholder in Cheil.

Lee served nearly a year in jail between 2017 and 2018 after he was charged with bribing former President Park Geun-hye to secure support for the merger. The scandal eventually led to Park’s impeachment in 2017 and a 25-year prison term for bribery, abuse of power and embezzlement.

According to Nikkei Asian Review, Seoul Central District Court said in a statement, “It appears that prosecutors have secured a considerable amount of evidence through their investigation, but they fell short of explaining the validity to detain Lee.”

Prosecutors said the investigation would continue and they may apply again for an arrest warrant, or bring Lee to trial without an arrest. Lee’s attorneys said they want the case to be reviewed by an outside panel to decide if an indictment is justified.

TechCrunch has contacted Samsung for comment.

Singapore says the wearable device it is developing for COVID-19 contact tracing will not have GPS, Wi-Fi, or cellular connectivity to ease privacy fears (Eileen Yu/ZDNet)

Eileen Yu / ZDNet:
Singapore says the wearable device it is developing for COVID-19 contact tracing will not have GPS, Wi-Fi, or cellular connectivity to ease privacy fears  —  Slated to be ready for rollout later this month, wearable devices the country is developing for COVID-19 contact tracing will not have GPS …

The Motorola Fusion+ is a pop-up camera phone with a blemish free display

• 

  The Motorola Fusion+. [credit: Motorola ]

Pop-up camera phones aren't dead yet. After the release of the Motorola One Hyper, Motorola's next pop-up camera phone is the dramatically-named Motorola One Fusion+.

For specs, you have a 6.5-inch LCD. Thanks to the pop-up camera, the LCD has a glorious blemish-free design, with no camera holes or notches. There's a 2.2 GHz Snapdragon 730, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 5000mAh battery. The body is actually plastic, instead of the usual glass. There's a headphone jack, a rear capacitive fingerprint reader, a USB-C port, and a Micro SD slot. The pop-up camera is 16MP, and you get four rear cameras: a 64MP main, 8MP wide-angle, 5MP Macro, and a 2MP depth camera.

As we've seen with so many Motorola phones, the company must have something against NFC in 2020. This phone doesn't have it, and neither do the Moto G Fast, G Power, G Stylus, and Moto E. To get NFC on a Motorola phone, you've got to spend at least as much as the One Hyper, which is $400.

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IBM ends all facial recognition business as CEO calls out bias and inequality

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced today that the company would no longer sell facial recognition services, calling for a “national dialogue” on whether it should be used at all. He also voiced support for a new bill aiming to reduce police violence and increase accountability.

In a letter reported by CNBC, written in support of the Justice in Policing Act introduced today, Krishna explains the company’s exit from the controversial business of facial identification as a service.

IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency. We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.

This careful approach to developing and deploying the technology is not a new one: IBM last year emphasized it with a new database of face data that was more diverse than anything available at the time. After all, like any program, these systems are only as good as the information you feed into them.

IBM builds a more diverse million-face data set to help reduce bias in AI

However, facial recognition does not seem to have been making the company much money, if any. To be fair the technology is really in its infancy and there are few applications where an enterprise vendor like IBM makes sense. Amazon’s controversial Rekognition service, while it has been tested by quite a few law enforcement entities, is not well thought of in the field. It would not benefit IBM much to attempt to compete with a product that is similarly just barely good enough to use.

Krishna’s letter also says that “vendors and users of Al systems have a shared responsibility to ensure that Al is tested for bias, particularly when used in law enforcement, and that such bias testing is audited and reported.” This is something of a parting shot to those in the field, Amazon in particular, that have been called out for the poor quality of facial recognition systems but have not ceased to market them.

It’s unclear whether or how the company will continue to perform AI research along these lines.

The bill that Krishna writes in support of has dozens of co-sponsors in the House and Senate, and addresses a wide variety of issues faced by police departments and those they police. Among other things, it expands requirements for body cameras but limits the use of facial recognition in connection with them. It would provide grants for the hardware, but only if they are used under protocols publicly developed and listed.

The ACLU, in a statement issued regarding the bill, seemed to concur with its approach: “We need to invest in technologies that can help eliminate the digital divide, not technologies that create a surveillance infrastructure that exacerbates policing abuses and structural racism.”

Nextdoor's reliance on untrained volunteer moderators has raised concerns over censorship and targeting of people of color, an issue amplified by recent events (Makena Kelly/The Verge)

Makena Kelly / The Verge:
Nextdoor's reliance on untrained volunteer moderators has raised concerns over censorship and targeting of people of color, an issue amplified by recent events  —  Kalkidan G. moved to Rancho Santa Fe because it was one of the nicer neighborhoods in San Diego.

Reflecting on DuckDuckGo's rise as the privacy-focused search engine and the possibility of increased market share because of EU regulatory pressure (Matt Burgess/WIRED UK)

Matt Burgess / WIRED UK:
Reflecting on DuckDuckGo's rise as the privacy-focused search engine and the possibility of increased market share because of EU regulatory pressure  —  In July 2018, Google was fined €4.34 billion for limiting search on Android phones.  Almost two years later, its rivals claim little …

Facebook's Android App May Soon Get Dark Mode, Coronavirus Tracker, More

Facebook is reportedly working on a few new features for its main Android app. According to a new report, features like dark mode, a coronavirus tracker, and a refreshed UI for 'Time on Facebook'... https://ift.tt/3h3hOXK