Sunday, September 30, 2018

Some Huawei Mate 10 Pro units start receiving Android Pie

Huawei teased the new EMUI 9.0 last month, and we expected the user interface, based on Android Pie, to arrive with the Huawei Mate 20 in two weeks. Looks like the company can't wait anymore and is already pushing the update to some Huawei Mate 10 Pro units with a stable version of Oreo and model numbers BLA-L09 and BLA-L29 which are sold mostly in Europe. According to our source, EMUI 9.0 brings new gesture setup for multi-task switching between apps and a new improved 2.0 version of GPU Turbo. Since Android Pie promotes digital health and wellbeing with a new feature, available in...



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Trump administration sues California over its brand-new net neutrality law

The Department of Justice announced on Sunday that it has filed a lawsuit against California to block its new net neutrality law, just hours after it was signed by governor Jerry Brown. The lawsuit was first reported by the Washington Post. Senior Justice Department officials told the newspaper it is filing the lawsuit because only the federal government can regulate net neutrality and that the Federal Communications Commission had been granted that authority by Congress to ensure states don’t write conflicting legislation.

In its announcement, the Justice Department stated that by signing California’s Senate Bill 822 into law, the state is “attempting to subvert the Federal Government’s deregulatory approach by imposing burdensome state regulations on the free Internet, which is unlawful and anti-consumer.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said “under the Constitution, states do not regulate interstate commerce—the federal government does. Once again the California legislature has enacted an extreme and illegal state law attempting to frustrate federal policy. The Justice Department should not have to spend valuable time and resources to file this suit today, but we have a duty to defend the prerogatives of the federal government and protect our Constitutional order.”

This is the latest of several legal showdowns between the Trump administration and California, the largest blue state.

Under Attorney General Sessions, the Justice Department has already filed separate lawsuits against California over immigrant sanctuary laws and a law meant to stop the Trump administration from selling or transferring federal land to private corporations. The Trump administration is also clashing with the state over environmental protection regulations.

Senate Bill 822 was introduced by Democratic Senator Scott Wiener to reinstate Obama-era net neutrality protections tossed out by the FCC last year.

Even though Washington and Oregon have also passed their own net neutrality laws, the outcome of the federal government’s battle with California will have ramifications throughout the country because the state’s new net neutrality law is the most stringent one so far, banning most kinds of zero-rating, which allows telecoms to offer services from certain providers for free.

As such, it has been the target of fierce lobbying by telecoms like AT&T and Comcast. While the FCC’s chairman Ajit Pai and telecoms argue that zero-rating allows them to offer better deals (Pai claimed in the Justice Department’s statement today that they have proven popular “especially among lower-income Americans,”) net neutrality advocates say it gives Internet service providers too much power by forcing users to rely on certain services, stifling consumer options and freedom of information.



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The best gear for starting a small business

Editor’s note: This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch may earn affiliate commissions.

When you’re ready to start a small business, having some helpful essentials will make the process a bit easier. Whether you need to print your own business cards or you’re ready to process orders on a reliable laptop, we’ve put together a few of our recommendations that will cover the basics.

Photo: Michael Hession                                                                                   

Business Card Printing Service: Vistaprint

Vistaprint has the best print quality of all the services we tested, and its website offers the best ordering and design experience. If you don’t need a large quantity of business cards, Vistaprint will allow you to order batches as small as 100. You can choose from thousands of templates and a variety of finishes. During printing testing, we were able to read small type and we found that the service’s colors and trimming were accurate.

Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

Website Builder for Small Businesses: Wix

For an easy-to-use website builder that makes editing, creating, and finding your business’ site manageable, we recommend Wix. Compared to other site builders we tested, Wix’s template-editing tools get a working site up and running fastest. The platform offers a broad range of plug-ins for integrating tools like Google Maps and OpenTable. Adding plug-ins for things like contact forms, menus and reservations is also painless. There aren’t an overwhelming number of website templates, but the ones that are available offer a good mix. Plus Wix has an intuitive editing interface and built-in SEO tools.

Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

 Windows Ultrabook: Dell XPS 13

The Dell XPS 13 is a powerful laptop that can be used on the go or with your home office setup. It’s light, has a durable build, plus it’s equipped with an impressive 13.3-inch screen. Previous versions of the XPS 13 have been our top pick for over three years, because it offers the best balance of features and performance of any ultrabook we’ve tested. We like that it’s compact, comes with a good trackpad and keyboard, and that it has a mix of new and old ports. We recommend the configuration that has 8GB of RAM, a 256 GB PCIe solid-state drive, and an Intel Core i7-8550U processor.

Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald                                                                                                               

All-in-one Printer: HP OfficeJet Pro 8720

Having your own all-in-one printer will let you print and scan important documents whenever you need to. The HP OfficeJet Pro 8720 offers simple installation and it’s paired with intuitive software and ink that’s affordable. It has a durable build and a large, responsive touchscreen. In addition to handling everyday printing tasks, the OfficeJet Pro can produce colorful graphics and high-quality photos. You can connect to and operate the printer from a computer, tablet, mobile device or the printer control panel. In our tests over Wi-Fi, we didn’t experience any connectivity issues.                          

Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

VPN Service: IVPN

A trusted virtual private network provides more online protection beyond device encryption, secure passwords and privacy plug-ins while using a home network or public Wi-Fi. After spending over 130 hours testing 32 VPN services, we chose IVPN as the best VPN provider for most people. It’s easy to set up, has easy-to-use apps, and can be used with most any device running macOS, Windows, iOS or Android. Overall, IVPN offers solid performance and doesn’t cut corners on security nor transparency. You don’t have to worry about your activity or logins being monitored. It’s pricier than competitors but worth the investment because it’s fast, stable, integrates with all major platforms, and comes with features that block data on unsecured connections.

These picks may have been updated by WirecutterWhen readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch may earn affiliate commissions.



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Sunday debate: Are phones getting too big?

Ro: Smartphones are getting out of hand. Literally. It almost feels like makers these days are shoving the new trends down our throats these days. First, it was the headphone jack. Apple started it and users rioted. That didn't stop the rest of the OEMs from following suit without giving any real excuse. Then it was the notch. Once again Apple started it, people hated it, but Android manufacturers were fast to jump on the bandwagon. The same goes for the custom launchers and the compact flagships - the results from our polls speak for themselves. All of these aren't...



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Unbiased algorithms can still be problematic

Creating unbiased, accurate algorithms isn’t impossible — it’s just time consuming.

“It actually is mathematically possible,” facial recognition startup Kairos CEO Brian Brackeen told me on a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.

Algorithms are sets of rules that computers follow in order to solve problems and make decisions about a particular course of action. Whether it’s the type of information we receive, the information people see about us, the jobs we get hired to do, the credit cards we get approved for, and, down the road, the driverless cars that either see us or don’t, algorithms are increasingly becoming a big part of our lives. But there is an inherent problem with algorithms that begins at the most base level and persists throughout its adaption: human bias that is baked into these machine-based decision-makers.

Creating unbiased algorithms is a matter of having enough accurate data. It’s not about just having enough “pale males” in the model, but about having enough images of people from various racial backgrounds, genders, abilities, heights, weights and so forth.

Kairos CEO Brian Brackeen

“In our world, facial recognition is all about human biases, right?” Brackeen said. “And so you think about AI, it’s learning, it’s like a child and you teach it things and then it learns more and more. What we call right down the middle, right down the fair way is ‘pale males.’ It’s very, very good. Very, very good at identifying somebody who meets that classification.”

But the further you get from pale males — adding women, people from different ethnicities, and so forth — “the harder it is for AI systems to get it right, or at least the confidence to get it right,” Brackeen said.

Still, there are cons to even a one hundred percent accurate model. On the pro side, a good facial recognition use case for a completely accurate algorithm would be in a convention center, where you use the system to quickly identity and verify people are who they say they are. That’s one type of use case Kairos, which works with corporate businesses around authentication, addresses.

“So if we’re wrong, at worst case, maybe you have to do a transfer again to your bank account,” he said. “If we’re wrong, maybe you don’t see a picture accrued during a cruise liner. But when the government is wrong about facial recognition, and someone’s life or liberty is at stake, they can be putting you in a lineup that you shouldn’t be in. They could be saying that this person is a criminal when they’re not.”

But in the case of law enforcement, no matter how accurate and unbiased these algorithms are, facial recognition software has no business in law enforcement, Brackeen said. That’s because of the potential for unlawful, excessive surveillance of citizens.

Given the government already has our passport photos and identification photos, “they could put a camera on Main Street and know every single person driving by,” Brackeen said.

And that’s a real possibility. In the last month, Brackeen said Kairos turned down a government request from Homeland Security, seeking facial recognition software for people behind moving cars.

“For us, that’s completely unacceptable,” Brackeen said.

Another issue with 100 percent perfect mathematical predictions is that it comes down to what the model is predicting, Human Rights Data Analysis Group lead statistician Kristian Lum said on the panel.

Human Rights Data Analysis Group lead statistician Kristian Lum

“Usually, the thing you’re trying to predict in a lot of these cases is something like rearrest,” Lum said. “So even if we are perfectly able to predict that, we’re still left with the problem that the human or systemic or institutional biases are generating biased arrests. And so, you still have to contextualize even your 100 percent accuracy with is the data really measuring what you think it’s measuring? Is the data itself generated by a fair process?”

HRDAG Director of Research Patrick Ball, in agreement with Lum, argued that it’s perhaps more practical to move it away from bias at the individual level and instead call it bias at the institutional or structural level. If a police department, for example, is convinced it needs to police one neighborhood more than another, it’s not as relevant if that officer is a racist individual, he said.

HRDAG Director of Research Patrick Ball

“What’s relevant is that the police department has made an institutional decision to over-police that neighborhood, thereby generating more police interactions in that neighborhood, thereby making people with that ZIP code more likely to be classified as dangerous if they are classified by risk assessment algorithms,” Ball said.

And even if the police were to have perfect information about every crime committed, in order to build a fair machine learning system, “we would need to live in a society of perfect surveillance so that there is absolute police knowledge about every single crime so that nothing is excluded,” he said. “So that there would be no bias. Let me suggest to you that that’s way worse even than a bunch of crimes going free. So maybe we should just work on reforming police practice and forget about all of the machine learning distractions because they’re really making things worse, not better.”

He added, “For fair predictions, you first need a fair criminal justice system. And we have a ways to go.”



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The war over music copyrights

VC firms haven’t been the only ones raising hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in a booming market. After 15+ years of being the last industry anyone wanted to invest in, the music industry is coming back, and money is flooding in to buy up the rights to popular songs.

As paid streaming subscriptions get mainstream adoption, the big music streaming services – namely Spotify, Apple Music, and Tencent Music, but also Pandora, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, and others – have entered their prime. There are now over 51 million paid subscription accounts among music streaming services in the US. The music industry grew 8% last year globally to $17.3 billion, driven by a 41% increase in streaming revenue and 45% increase in paid streaming revenue.

The surge in music streaming means a surge in income for those who own the copyrights to songs, and the growth of entertainment in emerging markets, growing use in digital videos, and potential use of music in new content formats like VR only expand this further. Unsurprisingly, private equity firms, family offices, corporates, and pension funds want a piece of the action.

There are two general types of copyrights for a song: the publishing rights and the master rights. The musical composition of a song – the lyrics, melodies, etc. – comes from songwriters who own the publishing right (though generally they sign a publishing deal and their publisher gets ownership of it in addition to half the royalties). Meanwhile, the version of a song being performed comes from the recording artist who owns the master right (though usually they sign a record deal and the record label gets ownership of the masters and most of the royalties).

Popular songs are valuable to own because of all the royalties they collect: whenever the song is played on a streaming service, downloaded from iTunes, or covered on YouTube (a mechanical license), played over radio or in a grocery store (a performance license), played as soundtrack over a movie or TV show (a sync license), and for other uses. More royalty income from a song goes to the master owner since they took on more financial risk marketing it, but publishers collect royalties from some channels that master owners don’t (like radio play, for instance).

For a songwriter behind popular songs, these royalties form a predictable revenue stream that can amount to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars per year. Of course, most songs that are written or recorded don’t make any money: creating a track that breaks out in a crowded industry is hard. This scarcity – there are only so many thousands of popular musicians and a limited number of legendary artists whose music stays relevant for decades – means copyrights for successful musicians command a premium when they or their publisher decide to sell them.

Investing in streaming economics

In 2017, revenue from streaming services accounted for 38% of worldwide music industry revenue, finally overtaking revenue from traditional album sales and song downloads. Subscription streaming services hit a pivot point in gaining mainstream adoption, but they still have far to go. Goldman Sachs media sector analyst Lisa Yang predicted that by 2030, the global music industry will reach $41 billion in market size as the global streaming market multiplies in size to $34 billion (nearly all of it from paid subscriptions).

Merck Mercuriadis is seen on the left. (Photo by KMazur/WireImage for Conde Nast media group)

Earlier this week, I spoke with Merck Mercuriadis who has managed icons like Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, and Beyoncé and raised £200 million ($260 million) on the London Stock Exchange in June for an investment vehicle (Hipgnosis Songs) to acquire the catalogues of top songwriters. His plan is to raise and invest £1 billion over the next three to five years, arguing that the shift to passive consumers paying for music will take the industry to heights it has never seen before.

Indeed, streaming music is a paradigm shift from the past. With all the world’s music available in one interface for free (with ads) or for an affordable subscription (without ads), consumers no longer have to actively choose which specific songs to buy (or even which to download illegally).

With it all in front of them and all included in the price, people are listening to a broader range of music: they’re exploring more genres, discovering more musicians who aren’t stars on traditional radio, and going back to music from past decades. Consumers who weren’t previously buying a lot of music are now subscribing for $120 per year and spreading it across more artists.

Retail businesses are doing the same: through streaming offerings like Soundtrack Your Brand (which spun out of Spotify), they’re using commercial licenses – which are more expensive – to stream a broader array of music in stores rather than putting on the radio or playing the same few CDs.

Much of the music industry’s market growth is happening in China, India, Latin America, and emerging markets like Nigeria where subscription apps are replacing widespread music piracy or non-consumption. Tencent Music Entertainment, whose three streaming services have roughly 75% market share in China (a music market that expanded by 34% last year), is preparing for an IPO that could give it roughly the same $29 billion valuation Spotify received in its IPO in April. Meanwhile, music industry revenue from Latin America grew 18% last year.

Western music is infused in pop culture worldwide, so as these countries enter the streaming era they are monetizing hundreds of millions of additional listeners, through ad revenue at a minimum but increasingly through paid subscriptions as well.

At the talent management, publishing, and production firm Primary Wave, founder Larry Mestel is seeing emerging markets drive more revenue to his clients (like Smokey Robinson, Alice Cooper, Melissa Etheridge, and the estate of Bob Marley) as new fan bases engage with their music online. He raised a new $300 million fund (backed by Blackrock and other institutions) in 2016 to acquire rights in music catalogues amid a market he says has improved substantially due to growth opportunities stemming from the streaming model.

It’s not just streaming music platforms that are driving growth either. Streaming video has exploded, whether it’s from short YouTube videos or the growing number of shows on platforms like Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, and with that comes growing sync licensing of songs for their soundtracks; global sync licensing revenue was up 10% year-over-year in 2017 alone. Over the last year, Facebook signed licenses with every large publisher to cover use of song clips by its users in Instagram Stories and Facebook videos as well.

The inflating valuations of songs catalogues

Catalogues are commonly valued based on the “net publisher’s share,” which is the average amount of annual royalty money left over after paying out any percentages owed to others (like a partial stake in the royalties still held by the artist).

When Round Hill Music acquired Carlin for $245 million in January to gain ownership in the catalogues of Elvis Presley, James Brown, AC/DC, and others, it paid a 16x multiple on net publisher share, which is high but not uncommon in the current market when trading catalogues of legendary artists. Just three years ago, multiples anchored in the 10-12 range (or less for newer or smaller artists whose music has not yet shown the same longevity).

Avid Larizadeh Duggan left her role as a general partner at GV to become Chief Strategy & Business Officer of Kobalt

Kobalt, which raised $205 million from VC firms like GV and Balderton Capital to become a technology-centric publisher and label services powerhouse, has also become an active player in the space. Aside from its core operating business (where it stands out from traditional publishers and labels for not taking control of clients’ copyrights), it has raised two funds ($600M for the most recent one) to help institutional investors like the Railpen pension fund in the UK gain exposure to music copyrights as an asset class. In December, their fund acquired the catalogue of publisher SONGS Music Publishing for a reported $160M in a sale process against 13 other bidders looking to buy ownership in songs by Lorde, The Weeknd, and other young pop and hip-hop artists.

Too high a price?

The natural question to ask when there’s a rapid surge of money (and a corresponding surge in prices) in an asset class is whether there’s a bubble. After all, last year’s industry revenues were still only 68% of those in 1999 and the rate of growth will inevitably slow once streaming has captured the early majority of consumers.

But the fundamentals driving this capital are in line with a secular shift – it’s evident that music streaming still has a lot of room to grow in a few short years, especially as a large portion of the human population is just coming online (and doing so over mobile first). Plus as new content formats like augmented and virtual reality come to fruition, new categories of music sync licensing will inevitably accompany them for their soundtracks.

Each catalogue is its own case, of course. As Shamrock Capital managing director Jason Sklar emphasized to me, the rising tide isn’t lifting all boats equally. The streaming revolution appears to be disproportionately benefiting hip-hop, rap, and pop given the youth skew of streaming service users and the digital-native social media engagement of the artists in those genres.

Beyond the purchase price, the critical variable for evaluating a deal in this market is also the operational value a potential buyer can provide to the catalogue: their ability to actively promote songs from the past by pitching them to new TV shows, ad campaigns, and any number of other projects that will keep them culturally relevant. This is where strategic investors have an advantage over purely financial investors in publishing rights, especially when it comes to the longer tail of middle-tier artist’s whose music doesn’t naturally get the inbound demand that the Beatles or Prince catalogues do.

With strong long-term market growth and a wide range of possible niches and strategies, music copyrights are an asset class where we’ll see a number of major new players develop.



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Week 39 in review: Realme 2 Pro and Xiaomi Redmi Note 6 Pro debut

A couple of phones debuted this week, but you don't have to look further than our top 10 trending chart to know which one was more interesting - the Realme 2 Pro debut is easily the event of week 39. Meanwhile Xiaomi unveiled the Redmi Note 6 Pro, which is hardly a great improvement over its predecessor. It does bring the notch trend to the Xiaomi Note lineup, so it has that going for it, we guess. Meanwhile as an announcement-filled October is on our doorstep we are getting all sorts of teasers and leaks. OnePlus 6T, Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL as well as Nokia 7.1 all made headlines. We...



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Until data is misused, Facebook’s breach will be forgotten

We cared about Cambridge Analytica because it could have helped elect Trump. We ignored LocationSmart because even the though the company was selling and exposing the real-time GPS coordinates of our phones, it was never clear exactly if or how that data was misused.

This idea, that privacy issues are abstract concepts for most people until they become security or ideological problems, is important to understanding Facebook’s massive breach revealed this week. 

The social network’s engineering was sloppy, allowing three bugs to be combined to steal the access tokens of 50 million people. In pursuit of rapid growth at affordable efficiency, Facebook failed to protect its users. This assessment doesn’t discount that. Facebook screwed up big time.

But despite the potential that those access tokens could have let the attackers take over user accounts, act as them, and scrape their personal info, it’s unclear how much users really care. That’s because for now, Facebook and it’s watchdogs aren’t sure exactly what data was stolen or how it was wrongly used.

The Hack That Broke The Camel’s Back?

This could all change tomorrow. If Facebook discovers the hack was perpetrated by a foreign government to interfere with elections, by criminals to bypass identity theft security checkpoints and steal people’s bank accounts or social media profiles, or to target individuals for physical harm, out will come the pitchforks and torches. 

Given a sufficiently scary application for the data, the breach could finish the job of destroying Facebook’s brand. If users start clearing their profile data, reducing their feed browsing, and ceasing to share, the breach could have significant financial and network effect consequences for Facebook. After years of scandals, this could be the hack that’s broke the camel’s back.

Yet in the absence of that evil utilization of the hacked data, the breach could fade into the background for users. Similar to the tension-filled departures of the founders of Facebook’s acquisitions Instagram and WhatsApp, the brunt of the backlash may not come from the public.

The hack could hasten regulation of social media. Senator Warner called on Congress to “step up” following the hack. He’s previously advocated for privacy laws similar to Europe’s GDPR. That includes data portability and interoperability rules that could make it easier to switch social networks. That threat of people moving to competing apps could succeed in compelling Facebook to treat user privacy and security better.

One of the biggest questions about the attack is whether the tokens were used to access other services like Airbnb or Spotify that rely on Facebook Login. The breach could steer potential partners away from building atop Facebook’s identity platform. But at least you don’t have to worry about changing all your passwords. Unlike hacks that steal usernames and passwords, the lasting danger of the Facebook breach is limited. The access tokens have already been invalidated, whereas password reuse can lead people to have their other apps hacked long after the initial breach.

Desensitized

If government investigators, journalists, or anti-Facebook activists want to make the company pay for its negligence, they’ll need to connect it to some concrete threat to how we live or what we believe.

For now, without a nefarious application of the breached data, this scandal could blend into the rest of Facebook’s troubles. Every week, sometimes multiple times a week, Facebook has some headline grabbing problem. Over time, those are adding up to deter usage of Facebook and spur more users to delete it. But without an independent general purpose social network they can easily switch to, many users have endured Facebook’s stumbles in exchange for the connective utility it provides. 

As breaches become more common, the public may be desensitized. Between Equifax, Yahoo, and the cell phone companies, we’re growing accustomed to letting out a deep sigh with maybe some expletives, and moving on with our lives. The ones we’ll remember will be those where the danger metastasized from the digital world into our offline lives.



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Carpooling service Klaxit partners with Uber for last-minute changes

French startup Klaxit connects drivers with riders so that you don’t have to take your car to work every day. And the company recently announced a new feature with the help of Uber. If your driver cancels your ride home, Klaxit will book an Uber for you.

Klaxit is a ride-sharing startup that focuses on one thing — commuting to work. And this problem is more complicated than you might think. You can’t just go to work with the same person every day because you don’t always go to work at the same time. Similarly, sometimes your driver has to leave work early, leaving you at the office with no alternative.

As a driver, you want to take the quickest route to work. So you want to be matched with riders who are exactly on the way to work.

Klaxit currently handles 300,000 rides per day. In particular, the company has partnered with 150 companies, including big French companies such as BNP Paribas, Veolia, Vinci and Sodexo.

Klaxit can be particularly useful for companies with large office buildings outside of big cities. Promoting Klaxit instantly fosters supply and demand from and to this office. But you don’t have to work for one of those companies to use Klaxit.

Local governments can also financially support Klaxit to improve traffic conditions and mobility for users who don’t have a car or a driver’s license. “Subsidizing rides on Klaxit is 8 to 10 times cheaper than building a bus line,” co-founder and CEO Julien Honnart told me.

One of the biggest concerns as a rider is that you’re going to be stuck at work in the evening. Klaxit is now asking its users to request a ride with two other drivers. If they both decline your request, Klaxit will book you an Uber ride to go back home.

You don’t have to pay the Uber ride and then get reimbursed, Klaxit pays Uber directly. You don’t need an Uber account either as Klaxit is using Uber for Business. MAIF is the insurance company behind this insurance feature, and also one of Klaxit’s investors. This is a neat feature to convince new users that they can trust Klaxit.

Klaxit competes with other French startups on this market, such as Karos and BlaBlaCar’s BlaBlaLines.



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Relike lets you turn a Facebook page into a newsletter

French startup Ownpage has recently released a new product called Relike. Relike is one of the easiest ways to get started with email newsletters. You enter the web address of your Facebook page and that’s about it.

The company automatically pulls your most recent posts from your Facebook page and lets you set up an emailing campaign in a few clicks. You can either automatically pick your most popular Facebook posts or manually select a few posts.

Just like any emailing service, you can choose between multiple templates, decide the day of the week and time of the day, import a database of email addresses and more. If you’ve used Mailchimp in the past, you’ll feel right at home.

But the idea isn’t to compete directly with newsletter services. Many social media managers, media organizations, small companies, nonprofits and sports teams already have a Facebook page but aren’t doing anything on the email front.

Relike is free if you send less than 2,000 emails per month and don’t need advanced features. If you want to get open rates, click-through rates and other features, you’ll need to pay €5 per month and €0.50 every time you send 1,000 emails.

The company’s other product Ownpage is a bit different. Ownpage has been working with media organizations to optimize their email newsletters. The company is tracking reading habits on a news site and sending personalized email newsletters.

This way, readers will get tailored news and will more likely come back to your site. Many big French news sites use Ownpage for their newsletters, such as Les Echos, L’Express, 20 Minutes, BFM TV, Le Parisien, etc.

Ownpage founder and CEO Stéphane Cambon told me that Relike was the obvious second act. Using browsing data for customized newsletters is one thing, but many talented social media managers know how to contextualize stories and maximize clicks (even if it means clickbait, sure).

The startup was looking at a way to get this data, and ended up creating Relike, which could appeal to customers beyond news organizations. For now, both products will stick around. In the future, the company plans to add Twitter and Instagram integrations as well as better signup flows for newsletter subscribers.



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Top 10 trending phones of week 39

These are turbulent times in our top 10 trending chart as we see our fourth leader in as many weeks - the newly announced Realme 2 immediately shooting to the top. Funnily enough the leaders of the past three weeks complete the top four. The Galaxy A7 (2018) steps down to second, ahead of the Xiaomi Pocophone F1. The iPhone XS Max, in fourth, is the only remaining Apple smartphone in the top 10 after the company got a clean sweep of the podium just two weeks ago. The yet to be announced Huawei Mate 20 Pro is already capturing your interest and you made it the fifth most popular...



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What the heck is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

I looked at the TIOBE index today, as I do every so often, as most of the software pros I know do every so often. It purports to measure the popularity of the world’s programming languages, and its popularity-over-time chart tells a simple story: Java and C are, and have been since time immemorial, by some distance the co-kings of language.

But wait. Not so fast. The rival “PYPL Index” (PopularitY of Programming Languages) says that Python and Java are co-kings, and C (which is lumped in with C++, surprisingly) is way down the list. What’s going on here?

What’s going on is that the two indexes have very different methodologies … although what their methodologies have in common is both are very questionable, if the objective is to measure the popularity of programming languages. TIOBE measures the sheer quantity of search engine hits. PYPL measures how often language tutorials are Googled.

Both are bad measures. We can expect the availability of online resources to be an extremely lagging indicator; a once-dominant dead language would probably still have millions of relict web pages devoted to it, zombie sites and blog posts unread for years. And the frequency of tutorial searches will be very heavily biased towards languages taught en masse to students. That’s not a meaningful measure of which languages are actually in use by practitioners.

There are lots of weird anomalies when you look harder at the numbers. According to TIOBE, last C went from its all-time lowest rating to Programming Language Of The Year in five months. I can buy that C has had a resurgence in embedded systems. But I can also easily envision this being an artifact of a highly imperfect measure.

The more flagrant anomaly, though, in both of those measures, is the relative performance of Objective-C and Swift, the two languages used to write native iOS apps. I can certainly believe that, combined, they have recently seen a decline in the face of the popularity of cross-platform alternatives such as Xamarin and React Native. But I have a lot of trouble believing that, after four years of Apple pushing Swift — to my mind, an objectively far superior language — Objective-C is still more popular / widely used. In my day job I deal with a lot of iOS/tvOS/watchOS apps, and interview a lot of iOS developers. It’s extremely rare to find someone who hasn’t already moved from Objective-C to Swift.

But hey, anecdotes are not data, right? If the only available measures conflict with my own personal experience, I should probably conclude that the latter is tainted by selection bias. And I’d be perfectly willing to do that …

… except there is another measure of programming language popularity out there. I’m referring to GitHub’s annual reports of the fifteen most popular programming languages on its platform. Those numbers are basically a perfect match for my own experience … and they are way disjoint from the claims of both both TIOBE and PYPL.

According to GitHub’s 2016 and 2017 reports, the world’s most popular programming language, by a considerable distance, is Javascript. Python is second. Java is third, and Ruby a close fourth. This is in stark contrast to TIOBE, which has Java and C, then a big gap, then Python and C++ (Javascript is eighth) — and also to PYPL, which claims the order is: Python and Java, a huge gap, then Javascript and PHP.

Obviously the GitHub numbers are not representative of the entire field either; their sample size is very large, but only considers open-source projects. But I note that GitHub is the only measure which counts Swift as more popular than Objective-C. That makes it a lot more convincing, to me … but its open-source selection bias means it’s still far from definitive.

These statistics do actually matter, beyond being an entertaining curiosity and/or snapshot of the industry. Languages aren’t all-important, but they’re not irrelevant either. People determine what languages to study, and sometimes even what jobs to seek and accept, based on their popularity and their (related) projected future value. So it’s a little upsetting that these three measures are so starkly, radically different. Sadly, though, we seem to still be stuck with tea leaves rather than hard numbers.



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Counterclockwise: Huawei bets on Android early and grows big quickly

Huawei is currently the largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, but it is a very young company - it was only founded in 1987. And it didn't start making phones until 2003, but it already has ambitions to be the largest smartphone maker in the world, just like in conquered the networking hardware field. The first phone to come out of Huawei's handset division was the C300 in 2004. It was a simple feature phone for CDMA networks. Then came the U626, the company's first 3G-enabled phone (the history of China's mobile networks is quite interesting, but here's not the...



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Weekly poll: Realme 2 Pro, love it or hate it?

Realme is going in for the kill - the 2 Pro targets Xiaomi, Huawei, OnePlus and even Oppo's own phones with what could be described as great specs at an insanely low price. It starts at INR 14,000 ($192/€165) for the 4/64GB model. That buys you a capable Snapdragon 660, 6.3" 1080p+ screen with teardrop notch, a 16+2MP dual rear camera and 16MP selfie cam. The 3,500mAh battery sounds good too. Let's compare that to the Xiaomi Redmi Note 6 Pro. The screen is similar (though with a chunkier notch), the chipset is the lower-end S636, the camera story is better (larger pixels on the rear...



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Saturday, September 29, 2018

LG TONE Platinum SE review

Introduction Headsets and audio equipment reviews are hardly a daily occurrence here at GSMArena, but most of us have deep personal interest in the area. That's why the TONE Platinum SE caused quite a lot of excitement here at HQ and I was nominated to share some of that with it. Heads-up this is going to be more of a personal experience review than a benchmark-filled test. First things first, then. We have used and even reviewed LG Tone headsets in the past, like the LG Tone Infinim HBS-900 and the HSB-730 Tone+. And the basic design concept and form factor are pretty much...



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Weekly poll results: Galaxy A7 (2018) and its triple camera get the thumbs up

It seems that Samsung has brought in a winning mid-fielder - the Galaxy A7 (2018) got a 74% approval rating. This is a phone built around its Infinity Display and triple camera and the early response to them is a positive one. As expected, some people wished for more features - a tele camera and a faster chipset were the most commonly requested. We suspect those will be present on the Galaxy S10 instead, so there won't be any in fighting in Samsung's lineup. Plus, this A7 is a €350 phone, so it can get away with those. Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018) One warranted criticism was...



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Never mind the ugly notch, the Pixel 3 XL is going to be a big deal

In less than three weeks, on October 9, Google will unveil the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL to the world. I've marked that day on my calendar and I can't wait. Here's why I think the Pixel 3 XL, in particular, will be a big deal (and likely my next phone). Before we start, a few introductory words. I'm an avid Google Pixel fan and former Pixel 2 XL owner. I like the camera, the software experience, the feel and the stereo speakers (in that order) of the Pixel phones. And I've always found they have that special X factor that most other phones lack. The Google Pixel 3 XL will almost certainly...



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Solve, MIT’s take on social innovation challenges, may be different enough to work

Since McKinsey released a report on how best to use prizes to incentivize innovation nearly a decade ago, an entire industry has grown around social innovation challenges. The formula for these “save the world” competitions has become standard. Drum up a lot of buzz around an award. Partner with big names to get funding and high-profile judges. Try and get as many submissions as possible from across the world. Whittle down the submissions and come up with a list of finalists that get to pitch at a glitzy event with a lot of media attention.

On the final stage, based on pitches that last for mere minutes, judges typically pick one winner that can get upwards of millions in prize funding. Don’t have a software platform to run a challenge of this kind? No worries, numerous for-profit vendors have sprung up that can do all the work for you—for anywhere from ten to a few hundred thousand dollars. The growth has been so exponential that prizes awarded through competitions has grown from less than $20 million in 1970 to a whopping $375 million just four decades later.

But do these prizes get the sort of world-saving results they aim for? There’s little quantified evidence to back that, and some leaders in philanthropy are broadly skeptical.

For its part, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is trying a different approach to innovation challenges with Solve, taking some of what’s worked in these challenges and fusing it with elements of tech accelerator programs, including a post-award training program that focuses on results.

Solve is entering an already crowded field of innovation challenges. Many of these prizes overlap, with each vying to be the “Nobel” of its field. More prizes means more noise—which has led to a race to offer more money to get attention.

But even private-sector riches do not guarantee that prize money for innovation gets good results. In 2004, Bigelow Enterprises sponsored a $50 million Space Prize but it failed to capture the imagination of space researchers and eventually folded. Back in 2009, Netflix invited outside teams to improve it movie recommendation algorithm by 10% for a $1 million reward. The Netflix Prize led to a race among programmers, only for Netflix to eventually kill the entire plan because it was getting better results in-house.

Overall, the social innovation competitions tend to reward presentation, glitz and charisma, and penalize speaking English as a second language, introversion and inability to make flashy slides.

Now let’s take a look at Solve, which held its third annual finalists event on Sunday September 23 in New York.

Unlike other contests where questions are internally decided, Solve crowdsources the questions to begin with. Its team takes months to run hackathons and workshops around the world to decide on the four most pressing questions to become the focus of that year’s challenge. This year, the questions focused on teachers and educators, workforce of the future, frontlines of health and coastal communities.

The competition is then opened up to participants from around the world with relatively low barriers to entry, resulting in 1,150 submissions from 110 countries in the last competition round. (That’s at least one submission from nearly 60 percent of all countries in the world.)

The prize recipients of the GM Prize for Advanced Technology. Photo: Adam Schultz | MIT Solve

To qualify, though, participants need to have more than just an idea. They must have a prototype that works, be either in the growth, pilot or scale stage, and be tech-driven. Submissions are then evaluated by judges from across industry, intergovernmental organizations and academia to get to 15 finalists for each of the four challenge questions. These 60 finalists get a full day with judges to be asked in-depth questions and have their ideas evaluated.

The day after, with all the preparations completed, the finalists get three minutes apiece to present on stage. Crucially, instead of one winner, eight finalists are chosen for each of the challenge questions.

Each finalist receives an initial $10,000 prize, plus a pool of hundreds of thousands of dollars provided by partners including General Motors, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Consensys, and RISE.

This year, for example, Ugandan health care startup Neopenda brought in an additional $30,000 in funding through Solve, from a UN program sponsored by Citi. An intelligent messaging app called TalkingPoints, meanwhile, received backing from General Motors and Save the Children to develop its personalized coaching technology for parents and educators. (You can see more details on this year’s winners and prizes here.)

As opposed to being a “one and done competition” where winning the prize money marks the end of the competition, managing director of community Hala Hanna tells me that the real work begins once the Solver teams are selected. Each qualifying Solver team gets 12 months of engagement and support from the organization. “Our value-add is providing a network, from MIT and beyond, and then brokering partnerships,” she explains.

Solve also produces a series of co-branded programs with other educational and nonprofit organizations around the world. As a result, the Australian government uses the platform to run a smaller-scale challenge focused on issues in APAC, while the Mohammed Bin Rashid Foundation is using it for a larger scale Global Maker Challenge.

Perhaps the biggest testament to the Solve method getting traction is its funders putting in even more cash in support. At the closing event on Sunday, an upbeat Matthew Minor, Solve’s director for international programs, took to the stage decked out in Solve-branded socks and a broad smile. He announced the winning finalists—and more funding opportunities. Two of Solve’s original backers, the Atlassian Foundation and the Australian government, are continuing to invest out of a standing $2.6 million budget for companies in the workforce track. RISE, a global impact investing fund, is putting an additional $1 million into companies focused on coastal communities.

The Australians have already put in funding to help past winners scale after the program. One of them is Ruangguru, a digital boot camp in Indonesia that gives youth dropouts resources they need to earn graduation certificates. The startup had reached nearly a million Indonesians prior to participating in Solve; through the program and the additional funding, it assisted more than 3 million Indonesian youth by the end of last year. Iman Usman, one of Ruangguru’s founders, tells me that Solve enabled them to enter into partnerships that helped them scale across Indonesia in a way they would have never been able to do on their own.

Solve has also been unequivocally good at ensuring diversity, both in its own staffing and—perhaps for related reasons—in those that are chosen as finalists. Of Solve’s 20 full-time staff, 14 are women, as are six out of the seven leadership team members and—by my count—at least seven nationalities from four continents are represented on staff.

The 33 Solver teams selected at the finals this year hail from 28 different countries, with 61 percent of them being women-led. At a time when the tech industry is struggling to increase diversity, Solve’s emphasis on diversity in challenge design and promotion has led to applicants and finalists that reflect the world Solve aims to help.

Hanna noted that increasing diversity is not as difficult as it’s made out to be. “Honestly, we’re not even trying that hard,” she explained. “So whoever says there are no women in tech, I say, crazy talk.”

The view from the Apella at Solve Challenge Finals on Sept. 23. Photo: Adam Schulz | MIT Solve

Still, Solve does have a few kinks to work out. By taking on extremely broad topics, the competition can sometimes lack focus. Lofty questions mean you can get very disparate answers, making it hard to compare them in a way that feels fair. The work of the future challenge, for example, had one team pitching on adding jobs related to knitting in Brazil, while another managed to fit in every possible buzzword (artificial intelligence, crypto and automation) in three minutes without quite explaining what it does.

And while it’s great that the award monies are not all given to a single winner, it is not quite clear how funders pick the teams that do get funding. 15 qualifying finalists this year ended up winning money awards, some winning more than one, while the remaining 18 qualifying teams went home with the minimum amount. This is because Solve funders get to pick which of the teams that qualify at the finals get their respective monetary prizes. Of course, all 33 qualifying teams equally get to be a part of the Solve class with all the support and training that includes.

Another kink is the audience choice award—selected through open online voting prior to the finals—but not tied to any clear concrete benefit. Take the example of Science for Sharing (Sci4S), a Mexico-based startup that trains teachers to better engage students in STEM and has already reached nearly a million children across Latin America. It garnered 419 community votes in the Education Challenge, more votes than any other participant in the category, and handedly won the audience choice award, but ultimately was not selected as a Solver team. Another education startup, Kenya-based Moringa School, only got two votes but was selected. While Moringa and others were compelling and qualified in their own right, but it’s still hard not to think that Sci4S should have focused all of its time on its presentation and ignored the audience vote.

All in all, Solve does get a number of things right where other innovation challenges have failed. Instead of anointing one winner for the entire competition, it selects a class of dozens—reflecting the simple fact that the world’s most intractable problems are not going to be solved by any singular idea. Unlike many challenges put on by educational institutions and open only to their own students, Solve opens its doors wide. And winning at the finals doesn’t end your connection with MIT, it only starts it, with all qualifying finalists getting a year of individualized support, training and mentorship.

Done right, prizes can be effective at incentivizing startups to focus on pressing societal issues that can truly benefit from tech-drive solutions. But prizes for the sake of prizes can add to the noise and dissipate scarce public resources and entrepreneur attention. In the increasingly crowded world of innovation challenges promising to change the world, MIT’s Solve is a step away from the noise and towards effective prize granting.



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Ne-Yo wants to make Silicon Valley more diverse one investment at a time

Dressed in a Naruto t-shirt and a hat emblazoned with the phrase “lone wolf,” Ne-Yo slouches over in a chair inside a Holberton School classroom. The Grammy-winning recording artist is struggling to remember the name of “that actor,” the one who’s had a successful career in both the entertainment industry and tech investing.

“I learned about all the things he was doing and I thought it was great for him,” Ne-Yo told TechCrunch. “But I didn’t really know what my place in tech would be.”

It turns out “that actor” is Ashton Kutcher, widely known in Hollywood and beyond for his role in several blockbusters and the TV sitcom That ’70s Show, and respected in Silicon Valley for his investments via Sound Ventures and A-Grade in Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, Bird and several others.

Ne-Yo, for his part, is known for a string of R&B hits including So Sick, One in a Million and Because of You. His latest album, Good Man, came out in June.

Ne-Yo, like Kutcher, is interested in pursuing a side gig in investing but he doesn’t want to waste time chasing down the next big thing. His goal, he explained, is to use his wealth to encourage people like him to view software engineering and other technical careers as viable options.

“Little black kids growing up don’t say things like ‘I want to be a coder when I grow up,’ because it’s not real to them, they don’t see people that look like me doing it,” Ne-Yo said. “But tech is changing the world, like literally by the day, by the second, so I feel like it just makes the most sense to have it accessible to everyone.”

Last year, Ne-Yo finally made the leap into venture capital investing: his first deal, an investment in Holberton School, a two-year coding academy founded by Julien Barbier and Sylvain Kalache that trains full-stack engineers. The singer returned to San Francisco earlier this month for the grand opening of Holberton’s remodeled headquarters on Mission Street in the city’s SoMa neighborhood.

[gallery ids="1722954,1722952,1722953,1722955"]

Holberton, a proposed alternative to a computer science degree, is free to students until they graduate and land a job, at which point they are asked to pay 17 percent of their salaries during their first three years in the workforce.

It has a different teaching philosophy than your average coding academy or four-year university. It relies on project-based and peer learning, i.e. students helping and teaching each other; there are no formal teachers or lecturers. The concept appears to be working. Holberton says their former students are now employed at Apple, NASA, LinkedIn, Facebook, Dropbox and Tesla.

Ne-Yo participated in Holberton’s $2.3 million round in February 2017 alongside Reach Capital and Insight Venture Partners, as well as Trinity Ventures, the VC firm that introduced Ne-Yo to the edtech startup. Holberton has since raised an additional $8 million from existing and new investors like daphni, Omidyar Network, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and Slideshare co-founder Jonathan Boutelle.

Holberton has used that capital to expand beyond the Bay Area. A school in New Haven, Conn., where the company hopes to reach students who can’t afford to live in tech’s hubs, is in development.

The startup’s emphasis on diversity is what attracted Ne-Yo to the project and why he signed on as a member of the board of trustees. More than half of Holberton’s students are people of color and 35 percent are women. Since Ne-Yo got involved, the number of African American applicants has doubled from roughly 5 percent to 11.5 percent.

“I didn’t really know what my place in tech would be.”

Before Ne-Yo’s preliminary meetings with Holberton’s founders, he says he wasn’t aware of the racial and gender diversity problem in tech.

“When it was brought to my attention, I was like ‘ok, this is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed,'” he said. “It makes no sense that this thing that affects us all isn’t available to us all. If you don’t have the money or you don’t have the schooling, it’s not available to you, however, it’s affecting their lives the same way it’s affecting the rich guys’ lives.”

Holberton’s founders joked with TechCrunch that Ne-Yo has actually been more supportive and helpful in the last year than many of the venture capitalists who back Holberton. He’s very “hands-on,” they said. Despite the fact that he’s balancing a successful music career and doesn’t exactly have a lot of free time, he’s made sure to attend events at Holberton, like the recent grand opening, and will Skype with students occasionally.

“I wanted it to be grassroots and authentic.”

Ne-Yo was very careful to explain that he didn’t put money in Holberton for the good optics.

“This isn’t something I just wanted to put my name on,” he said. “I wanted to make sure [the founders] knew this was something I was going to be serious about and not just do the celebrity thing. I wanted it to be grassroots and authentic so we dropped whatever we were doing and came down, met these guys, hung out with the students and hung out at the school to see what it’s really about.”

What’s next for Ne-Yo? A career in venture capital, perhaps? He’s definitely interested and will definitely be making more investments soon, but a full pivot into VC is unlikely.

At the end of the day, Silicon Valley doesn’t need more people with fat wallets and a hankering for the billionaire lifestyle. What it needs are people who have the money and resources necessary to bolster the right businesses and who care enough to prioritize diversity and inclusivity over yet another payday.

“Not to toot the horn or brag, but I’m not missing any meals,” Ne-Yo said. “So, if I’m going to do it, let it mean something.”



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Elon Musk agrees to resign as Tesla chairman in settlement with SEC

This is a developing story

Tesla CEO Elon Musk will step down as chairman of the electric automaker and pay a $20 million fine under a settlement reached with the U.S Securities and Exchange commission. Musk will remain CEO.

Musk will resign from his role as chairman of the Tesla board within 45 days of the agreement, which was filed Saturday. He has agreed to not seek reelection or accept an appointment as chairman for three years.

The SEC filed a complaint Thursday in federal district court alleged that Musk lied when he tweeted on August 7 that he had “funding secured” for a private takeover of the company at $420 per share. Federal securities regulators reportedly served Tesla with a subpoena just a week after the tweet. Investigations can take years before any action is taken, if at all.

The SEC said in the complaint that Musk violated anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws. The commission has asked the court to fine Musk and bar the billionaire entrepreneur from serving as an officer or director of a public company.

Musk described fraud charges an “unjustified action” that has left him “deeply saddened and disappointed.”

Tesla and the board later issued a joint statement supporting Musk.



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Best Buy stocked an unannounced Chromecast ahead of Google’s hardware event

Google’s big hardware event, scheduled for October 9, is expected to feature the new Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL phones. But now we know that Google will probably reveal a third-generation model of Chromecast, thanks to one recent Best Buy customer who discovered the device on store shelves.

Whoops.

“GroveStreetHomie” detailed his experience on a Reddit post entitled “I think I bought the 3rd gen Chromecast too early.”

According to the Reddit post, the customer went to Best Buy earlier to pick up a Chromecast for a new TV. That’s when “GroveStreetHomie” noticed the packaging and design was different from an earlier version.

The cashier wasn’t able to scan the item because it wasn’t in the system yet. The release date was labeled October 9 — the same day as the 2018 Google hardware event.

“But since I already had it in my hand and was the same price as the 2nd generation Chromecast, they let me have it under the old SKU,” the post read.

This new unannounced Chromecast is apparently thicker than the second-generation model. The Chrome logo has been replaced with Google one. The new device still has a micro-USB. The HDMI connector on the tip and base has been removed, according to the user.



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The 2019 BMW i3 now has 153 miles of range thanks to a bigger battery

The BMW i3 is getting an upgraded battery — plus a bunch of other improvements —that will give the 2019 model about 153 miles of range. That’s roughly a 30% improvement from the previous model.

The boost in range is noteworthy, yet it still lags behind the Chevy Bolt and the Tesla Model S, Model X and Model 3 vehicles. And it’s only a smidge better than the much cheaper Nissan Leaf.

The upshot: it’s a steady improvement that expresses some continued investment and interest in the i3 brand. But will it be enough to keep this city car in the EV mix?

When the BMW i3 first went into production in 2013 it had a 22.6-kilowatt hour battery pack containing 60 ampere hours (Ah) batteries. That first i3 had range of 81 miles, according to EPA estimates. The company’s second-generation battery, introduced in 2016, grew to 33 kwh of gross energy (94 amp hours) and had a range of about 115 miles under the EPA cycle.

2019 BMW i3-new

Now the 2019 model, which will comes with 120 Ah batteries in a 42.2-kWh-battery pack, will be able to travel about 153 miles on a single charge, BMW said.

The upgraded battery will be available in both the i3 and the i3s. Pricing was not announced. Previous i3 model year is priced at about $45,000 for the base model.

Power hasn’t changed in the new 2019 models, which will go into production this November. The standard i3 comes with a 170-horsepower electric motor that will take it from zero to 60 miles per hour in 7.2 seconds. The sportier i3s will have a 181-horsepower motor that can go from zero to 60 in 6.8 seconds.

 

2019 BMW i3

The automaker is giving the i3 a few other improvements as well, including a new exterior color called Jucaro Beige metallic and adaptive LED headlights with automatic high beams. The exterior paint finishes Mineral Grey metallic, Imperial Blue metallic, Melbourne Red metallic, Capparis White and Fluid Black are still available.

Wireless charging and a Wi-Fi hotspot that can accommodate up to 10 devices will also be available for the BMW i3 and BMW i3s, the company said.

Customers will also new options for the sports package, which will include black wheel arch surrounds and a suspension with specific dampers, springs and stabilizers, lowered suspension, a widened track and 20-inch light alloy wheels.



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Autonomous shuttle startup May Mobility expands to a third U.S. city

May Mobility launched its first low-speed autonomous shuttle service in Detroit this summer. By March, the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company will be operating in at least three U.S. cities.

The company, which just announced plans to expand to Columbus, Ohio, is planning to add another route in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

May Mobility is different from other companies racing to deploy autonomous vehicles at a commercial scale. The startup, which was founded by veterans in the self-driving and automotive industry, has developed low-speed autonomous shuttles that are designed to run along a specific route in business districts or corporate and college campuses.

The company said it will bring four of its six-seat electric shuttles to Grand Rapids. The one-year pilot will begin March 2019.

This latest shuttle launch is part of a broader effort called the Grand Rapids Autonomous Mobility Initiative, a coalition of companies that includes Consumers Energy, French automotive supplier Faurecia, Gentex, Rockford Construction, Seamless and furniture maker Steelcase.

The aim of the program is to study how mobility impacts city infrastructure and prepare the community for autonomous vehicles. The program will also focus on how these autonomous vehicles improve or affect the mobility of elderly and disabled people.

The fleet will operate on a 3.2-mile section of an existing bus route that provides access to downtown and two of the city’s business districts. The route includes 22 stops, 30 traffic lights and 12 turns, including three left turns, according to the initiative.

Shuttles, which will be free for riders, will run complementary to the city’s existing DASH transportation fleet.

Fleet operations for the May Mobility vehicles will be housed at Rockford Construction’s
West Side offices within Circuit West, an area that boasts an innovative electric generation and distribution system.

May Mobility raised $11.5 million in seed funding in 2018 from BMW iVentures, Toyota AI and others. Trucks, Maven Venture and Tandem Ventures are also investors in the company.



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Bots replacing office workers drive big valuations

A lot of people still get paid to sit in offices and do repetitive tasks. In recent years, however, employers have been pushing harder to find ways to outsource that work to machines.

Venture and growth investors are doing a lot to speed up the rise of these worker-bots. So far this year, they’ve poured hundreds of millions into developers of robotic process automation technology, the term to describe software used for performing a series of tasks previously carried out by humans.

Process automation funding activity spiked last week with a $225 million Series C round for one of the category leaders, New York-based UiPath. Sequoia Capital and Alphabet’s CapitalG led the financing, which brings total capital raised by the 13-year-old company to more than $400 million, with a most recent valuation of $3 billion.

A Crunchbase News analysis of funding for startups and growth companies involved in robotic process automation indicates this has been a busy year overall for the space, with more than $600 million in aggregate investment across at least seven sizable deals.

Below, we spotlight some of the largest 2018 rounds in the space:1

UiPath, for its part, has a grand vision and an impressive growth rate. Its broad goal, laid out to incoming employees, involves “liberating the human workforce from tedious, repetitive tasks.”

And employers are willing to pay handsomely to liberate their employees. UiPath said that in one 21-month period, it went from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, an absolutely astounding growth rate for an enterprise software company.

The other big unicorn in the process automation space, Automation Anywhere, is also in rapid expansion mode. The company said customers have been using its tools across a broad range of industries for tasks including integrating data in electronic medical records, streamlining mortgage applications and completing complex purchase orders.

One might ask: What are employees to do all day now that the bots have freed them of their tiresome tasks? The general refrain from UiPath and others in the process automation space is that their software doesn’t eliminate jobs so much as it gives workers time to focus on higher-value projects.

That may be broadly true, but there is a significant body of employment trend forecasting that predicts widespread job losses stemming from this kind of automation. It could take the form of layoffs, or it might not. Companies may indeed transition bot-displaced existing employees to other, higher-value roles. Even if they do that, however, process automation could enable reduced hiring for future jobs.

That said, there’s plenty of funding and hiring happening at the handful of high-growth companies that could determine whether the rest of us have a job in our futures.

  1. Providing comprehensive funding numbers for robotic process automation proved challenging because many startups list automation as part of a broader suite of offerings, rather than a core focus area. 


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Best Buy accidentally sold a 3rd generation Chromecast to a customer

We all know Reddit is a source of pretty strange stuff. This one we came across isn't exactly strange, but it's a rare one indeed. A customer walked into Best Buy with the intention of buying a second-gen Chromecast but walked out with a still unreleased third generation. The OP (original poster) as redditors like to call it, clarifies that Best Buy must have put out the new device by mistake. When the cashier tried to scan the item, the Chromecast didn't appear in the database, but since the customer already had it in his hand and the price was identical to the second generation...



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Facebook is weaponizing security to erode privacy

At a Senate hearing this week in which US lawmakers quizzed tech giants on how they should go about drawing up comprehensive Federal consumer privacy protection legislation, Apple’s VP of software technology described privacy as a “core value” for the company.

“We want your device to know everything about you but we don’t think we should,” Bud Tribble told them in his opening remarks.

Facebook was not at the commerce committee hearing which, as well as Apple, included reps from Amazon, AT&T, Charter Communications, Google and Twitter.

But the company could hardly have made such a claim had it been in the room, given that its business is based on trying to know everything about you in order to dart you with ads.

You could say Facebook has ‘hostility to privacy‘ as a core value.

Earlier this year one US senator wondered of Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook could run its service given it doesn’t charge users for access. “Senator we run ads,” was the almost startled response, as if the Facebook founder couldn’t believe his luck at the not-even-surface-level political probing his platform was getting.

But there have been tougher moments of scrutiny for Zuckerberg and his company in 2018, as public awareness about how people’s data is being ceaselessly sucked out of platforms and passed around in the background, as fuel for a certain slice of the digital economy, has grown and grown — fuelled by a steady parade of data breaches and privacy scandals which provide a glimpse behind the curtain.

On the data scandal front Facebook has reigned supreme, whether it’s as an ‘oops we just didn’t think of that’ spreader of socially divisive ads paid for by Kremlin agents (sometimes with roubles!); or as a carefree host for third party apps to party at its users’ expense by silently hovering up info on their friends, in the multi-millions.

Facebook’s response to the Cambridge Analytica debacle was to loudly claim it was ‘locking the platform down‘. And try to paint everyone else as the rogue data sucker — to avoid the obvious and awkward fact that its own business functions in much the same way.

All this scandalabra has kept Facebook execs very busy with year, with policy staffers and execs being grilled by lawmakers on an increasing number of fronts and issues — from election interference and data misuse, to ad transparencyhate speech and abuse, and also directly, and at times closely, on consumer privacy and control

Facebook shielded its founder from one sought for grilling on data misuse, as UK MPs investigated online disinformation vs democracy, as well as examining wider issues around consumer control and privacy. (They’ve since recommended a social media levy to safeguard society from platform power.) 

The DCMS committee wanted Zuckerberg to testify to unpick how Facebook’s platform contributes to the spread of disinformation online. The company sent various reps to face questions (including its CTO) — but never the founder (not even via video link). And committee chair Damian Collins was withering and public in his criticism of Facebook sidestepping close questioning — saying the company had displayed a “pattern” of uncooperative behaviour, and “an unwillingness to engage, and a desire to hold onto information and not disclose it.”

As a result, Zuckerberg’s tally of public appearances before lawmakers this year stands at just two domestic hearings, in the US Senate and Congress, and one at a meeting of the EU parliament’s conference of presidents (which switched from a behind closed doors format to being streamed online after a revolt by parliamentarians) — and where he was heckled by MEPs for avoiding their questions.

But three sessions in a handful of months is still a lot more political grillings than Zuckerberg has ever faced before.

He’s going to need to get used to awkward questions now that lawmakers have woken up to the power and risk of his platform.

Security, weaponized 

What has become increasingly clear from the growing sound and fury over privacy and Facebook (and Facebook and privacy), is that a key plank of the company’s strategy to fight against the rise of consumer privacy as a mainstream concern is misdirection and cynical exploitation of valid security concerns.

Simply put, Facebook is weaponizing security to shield its erosion of privacy.

Privacy legislation is perhaps the only thing that could pose an existential threat to a business that’s entirely powered by watching and recording what people do at vast scale. And relying on that scale (and its own dark pattern design) to manipulate consent flows to acquire the private data it needs to profit.

Only robust privacy laws could bring Facebook’s self-serving house of cards tumbling down. User growth on its main service isn’t what it was but the company has shown itself very adept at picking up (and picking off) potential competitors — applying its surveillance practices to crushing competition too.

In Europe lawmakers have already tightened privacy oversight on digital businesses and massively beefed up penalties for data misuse. Under the region’s new GDPR framework compliance violations can attract fines as high as 4% of a company’s global annual turnover.

Which would mean billions of dollars in Facebook’s case — vs the pinprick penalties it has been dealing with for data abuse up to now.

Though fines aren’t the real point; if Facebook is forced to change its processes, so how it harvests and mines people’s data, that could knock a major, major hole right through its profit-center.

Hence the existential nature of the threat.

The GDPR came into force in May and multiple investigations are already underway. This summer the EU’s data protection supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, told the Washington Post to expect the first results by the end of the year.

Which means 2018 could result in some very well known tech giants being hit with major fines. And — more interestingly — being forced to change how they approach privacy.

One target for GDPR complainants is so-called ‘forced consent‘ — where consumers are told by platforms leveraging powerful network effects that they must accept giving up their privacy as the ‘take it or leave it’ price of accessing the service. Which doesn’t exactly smell like the ‘free choice’ EU law actually requires.

It’s not just Europe, either. Regulators across the globe are paying greater attention than ever to the use and abuse of people’s data. And also, therefore, to Facebook’s business — which profits, so very handsomely, by exploiting privacy to build profiles on literally billions of people in order to dart them with ads.

US lawmakers are now directly asking tech firms whether they should implement GDPR style legislation at home.

Unsurprisingly, tech giants are not at all keen — arguing, as they did at this week’s hearing, for the need to “balance” individual privacy rights against “freedom to innovate”.

So a lobbying joint-front to try to water down any US privacy clampdown is in full effect. (Though also asked this week whether they would leave Europe or California as a result of tougher-than-they’d-like privacy laws none of the tech giants said they would.)

The state of California passed its own robust privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act, this summer, which is due to come into force in 2020. And the tech industry is not a fan. So its engagement with federal lawmakers now is a clear attempt to secure a weaker federal framework to ride over any more stringent state laws.

Europe and its GDPR obviously can’t be rolled over like that, though. Even as tech giants like Facebook have certainly been seeing how much they can get away with — to force a expensive and time-consuming legal fight.

While ‘innovation’ is one oft-trotted angle tech firms use to argue against consumer privacy protections, Facebook included, the company has another tactic too: Deploying the ‘S’ word — security — both to fend off increasingly tricky questions from lawmakers, as they finally get up to speed and start to grapple with what it’s actually doing; and — more broadly — to keep its people-mining, ad-targeting business steamrollering on by greasing the pipe that keeps the personal data flowing in.

In recent years multiple major data misuse scandals have undoubtedly raised consumer awareness about privacy, and put greater emphasis on the value of robustly securing personal data. Scandals that even seem to have begun to impact how some Facebook users Facebook. So the risks for its business are clear.

Part of its strategic response, then, looks like an attempt to collapse the distinction between security and privacy — by using security concerns to shield privacy hostile practices from critical scrutiny, specifically by chain-linking its data-harvesting activities to some vaguely invoked “security purposes”, whether that’s security for all Facebook users against malicious non-users trying to hack them; or, wider still, for every engaged citizen who wants democracy to be protected from fake accounts spreading malicious propaganda.

So the game Facebook is here playing is to use security as a very broad-brush to try to defang legislation that could radically shrink its access to people’s data.

Here, for example, is Zuckerberg responding to a question from an MEP in the EU parliament asking for answers on so-called ‘shadow profiles’ (aka the personal data the company collects on non-users) — emphasis mine:

It’s very important that we don’t have people who aren’t Facebook users that are coming to our service and trying to scrape the public data that’s available. And one of the ways that we do that is people use our service and even if they’re not signed in we need to understand how they’re using the service to prevent bad activity.

At this point in the meeting Zuckerberg also suggestively referenced MEPs’ concerns about election interference — to better play on a security fear that’s inexorably close to their hearts. (With the spectre of re-election looming next spring.) So he’s making good use of his psychology major.

“On the security side we think it’s important to keep it to protect people in our community,” he also said when pressed by MEPs to answer how a person who isn’t a Facebook user could delete its shadow profile of them.

He was also questioned about shadow profiles by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in April. And used the same security justification for harvesting data on people who aren’t Facebook users.

“Congressman, in general we collect data on people who have not signed up for Facebook for security purposes to prevent the kind of scraping you were just referring to [reverse searches based on public info like phone numbers],” he said. “In order to prevent people from scraping public information… we need to know when someone is repeatedly trying to access our services.”

He claimed not to know “off the top of my head” how many data points Facebook holds on non-users (nor even on users, which the congressman had also asked for, for comparative purposes).

These sorts of exchanges are very telling because for years Facebook has relied upon people not knowing or really understanding how its platform works to keep what are clearly ethically questionable practices from closer scrutiny.

But, as political attention has dialled up around privacy, and its become harder for the company to simply deny or fog what it’s actually doing, Facebook appears to be evolving its defence strategy — by defiantly arguing it simply must profile everyone, including non-users, for user security.

No matter this is the same company which, despite maintaining all those shadow profiles on its servers, famously failed to spot Kremlin election interference going on at massive scale in its own back yard — and thus failed to protect its users from malicious propaganda.

TechCrunch/Bryce Durbin

Nor was Facebook capable of preventing its platform from being repurposed as a conduit for accelerating ethnic hate in a country such as Myanmar — with some truly tragic consequences. Yet it must, presumably, hold shadow profiles on non-users there too. Yet was seemingly unable (or unwilling) to use that intelligence to help protect actual lives…

So when Zuckerberg invokes overarching “security purposes” as a justification for violating people’s privacy en masse it pays to ask critical questions about what kind of security it’s actually purporting to be able deliver. Beyond, y’know, continued security for its own business model as it comes under increasing attack.

What Facebook indisputably does do with ‘shadow contact information’, acquired about people via other means than the person themselves handing it over, is to use it to target people with ads. So it uses intelligence harvested without consent to make money.

Facebook confirmed as much this week, when Gizmodo asked it to respond to a study by some US academics that showed how a piece of personal data that had never been knowingly provided to Facebook by its owner could still be used to target an ad at that person.

Responding to the study, Facebook admitted it was “likely” the academic had been shown the ad “because someone else uploaded his contact information via contact importer”.

“People own their address books. We understand that in some cases this may mean that another person may not be able to control the contact information someone else uploads about them,” it told Gizmodo.

So essentially Facebook has finally admitted that consentless scraped contact information is a core part of its ad targeting apparatus.

Safe to say, that’s not going to play at all well in Europe.

Basically Facebook is saying you own and control your personal data until it can acquire it from someone else — and then, er, nope!

Yet given the reach of its network, the chances of your data not sitting on its servers somewhere seems very, very slim. So Facebook is essentially invading the privacy of pretty much everyone in the world who has ever used a mobile phone. (Something like two-thirds of the global population then.)

In other contexts this would be called spying — or, well, ‘mass surveillance’.

It’s also how Facebook makes money.

And yet when called in front of lawmakers to asking about the ethics of spying on the majority of the people on the planet, the company seeks to justify this supermassive privacy intrusion by suggesting that gathering data about every phone user without their consent is necessary for some fuzzily-defined “security purposes” — even as its own record on security really isn’t looking so shiny these days.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 11: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. This is the second day of testimony before Congress by Zuckerberg, 33, after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

It’s as if Facebook is trying to lift a page out of national intelligence agency playbooks — when governments claim ‘mass surveillance’ of populations is necessary for security purposes like counterterrorism.

Except Facebook is a commercial company, not the NSA.

So it’s only fighting to keep being able to carpet-bomb the planet with ads.

Profiting from shadow profiles

Another example of Facebook weaponizing security to erode privacy was also confirmed via Gizmodo’s reportage. The same academics found the company uses phone numbers provided to it by users for the specific (security) purpose of enabling two-factor authentication, which is a technique intended to make it harder for a hacker to take over an account, to also target them with ads.

In a nutshell, Facebook is exploiting its users’ valid security fears about being hacked in order to make itself more money.

Any security expert worth their salt will have spent long years encouraging web users to turn on two factor authentication for as many of their accounts as possible in order to reduce the risk of being hacked. So Facebook exploiting that security vector to boost its profits is truly awful. Because it works against those valiant infosec efforts — so risks eroding users’ security as well as trampling all over their privacy.

It’s just a double whammy of awful, awful behavior.

And of course, there’s more.

A third example of how Facebook seeks to play on people’s security fears to enable deeper privacy intrusion comes by way of the recent rollout of its facial recognition technology in Europe.

In this region the company had previously been forced to pull the plug on facial recognition after being leaned on by privacy conscious regulators. But after having to redesign its consent flows to come up with its version of ‘GDPR compliance’ in time for May 25, Facebook used this opportunity to revisit a rollout of the technology on Europeans — by asking users there to consent to switching it on.

Now you might think that asking for consent sounds okay on the surface. But it pays to remember that Facebook is a master of dark pattern design.

Which means it’s expert at extracting outcomes from people by applying these manipulative dark arts. (Don’t forget, it has even directly experimented in manipulating users’ emotions.)

So can it be a free consent if ‘individual choice’ is set against a powerful technology platform that’s both in charge of the consent wording, button placement and button design, and which can also data-mine the behavior of its 2BN+ users to further inform and tweak (via A/B testing) the design of the aforementioned ‘consent flow’? (Or, to put it another way, is it still ‘yes’ if the tiny greyscale ‘no’ button fades away when your cursor approaches while the big ‘YES’ button pops and blinks suggestively?)

In the case of facial recognition, Facebook used a manipulative consent flow that included a couple of self-serving ‘examples’ — selling the ‘benefits’ of the technology to users before they landed on the screen where they could choose either yes switch it on, or no leave it off.

One of which explicitly played on people’s security fears — by suggesting that without the technology enabled users were at risk of being impersonated by strangers. Whereas, by agreeing to do what Facebook wanted you to do, Facebook said it would help “protect you from a stranger using your photo to impersonate you”…

That example shows the company is not above actively jerking on the chain of people’s security fears, as well as passively exploiting similar security worries when it jerkily repurposes 2FA digits for ad targeting.

There’s even more too; Facebook has been positioning itself to pull off what is arguably the greatest (in the ‘largest’ sense of the word) appropriation of security concerns yet to shield its behind-the-scenes trampling of user privacy — when, from next year, it will begin injecting ads into the WhatsApp messaging platform.

These will be targeted ads, because Facebook has already changed the WhatsApp T&Cs to link Facebook and WhatsApp accounts — via phone number matching and other technical means that enable it to connect distinct accounts across two otherwise entirely separate social services.

Thing is, WhatsApp got fat on its founders promise of 100% ad-free messaging. The founders were also privacy and security champions, pushing to roll e2e encryption right across the platform — even after selling their app to the adtech giant in 2014.

WhatsApp’s robust e2e encryption means Facebook literally cannot read the messages users are sending each other. But that does not mean Facebook is respecting WhatsApp users’ privacy.

On the contrary; The company has given itself broader rights to user data by changing the WhatsApp T&Cs and by matching accounts.

So, really, it’s all just one big Facebook profile now — whichever of its products you do (or don’t) use.

This means that even without literally reading your WhatsApps, Facebook can still know plenty about a WhatsApp user, thanks to any other Facebook Group profiles they have ever had and any shadow profiles it maintains in parallel. WhatsApp users will soon become 1.5BN+ bullseyes for yet more creepily intrusive Facebook ads to seek their target.

No private spaces, then, in Facebook’s empire as the company capitalizes on people’s fears to shift the debate away from personal privacy and onto the self-serving notion of ‘secured by Facebook spaces’ — in order that it can keep sucking up people’s personal data.

Yet this is a very dangerous strategy, though.

Because if Facebook can’t even deliver security for its users, thereby undermining those “security purposes” it keeps banging on about, it might find it difficult to sell the world on going naked just so Facebook Inc can keep turning a profit.

What’s the best security practice of all? That’s super simple: Not holding data in the first place.



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