Month: April 2018

Tap Systems, the developer of the Tap wearable keyboard and mouse, is releasing a developer SDK for interested programmers.

The software kit will let developers design applications that can integrate with the Tap wearable which answers the once unanswerable question: what’s the result of one hand tapping?

Resting on the finges of one hand, the Tap wearable provides a new way for users to interact with hardware. Finger taps are the input that the device uses to determine movement and keystrokes. Using Tap, the company says anyone can send messages, play games, point, click and scroll on almost any surface.

“Since Tap’s inception we’ve been contacted by everyone from mobile game and language input developers, to folks developing for accessibility use and even enterprise,” said Dovid Schick, the chief executive and founder of Tap Systems, in a statement.

The company sees applications for its technology in anything from mobile gaming, to virtual and augmented reality and language input developers who have struggled to translate character-based languages to existing user interfaces.

The toolkit includes SDKs for iOS and Android, and a plug-in for Unity — along with sample applications and documentation. There’s also an API for BLE enabled platforms.

Tap System’s released toolset includes SDKs for both iOS and Android, a plug-in for Unity, as well as example applications and documentation. The company has also released an API to enable any BLE enabled platform to interface directly with the Tap wearable.

The wearable costs $179, but the software development kit is royalty-free, open-source and available under the company’s terms of use.

It’s a big step for the Pasadena, Calif.-based company that first brought its product to market late last year. Founded by longtime technology developers Dovid Schick and Sabrina Kemeny, the company’s hardware is a response to a problem that Schick says bedeviled him for years. 

“What would be the problem of the future of inputs?,” Schick asked me. “As things get virtualized and more wearable….  I went through a lot of different scenarios and came up with the idea of tapping your fingers. Tapping your fingers is an incredibly natural and fast and intuitive movement.”

There’s a bit of training required as users get acclimated to a new way of typing, but the tapping mechanism is more efficient, Schick argues, and is certainly a boon for accessibility.

“A,e,i,o,u maps to a single finger tapping,” says Schick. “The hardest taps are done … mapped to the least frequent letters in the alphabet.”

While Schick admits that his company might not be the company that completes the ongoing quest for a new user interface, he is firmly convinced that tapping is the next big thing in hardware interfaces. “Taps will be a modality… whether my company will be the one that will survive and make it great.. Once you’ve tried it and seen it in action it just makes too much sense that this will not be something that is huge.”

The company began taking pre-orders earlier in the year and started shipping product about two months ago — and is now planning to go out to raise its first round of outside capital.

Source: Tech Crunch

While the press and public may have been denied a dramatic raise-your-right-hand moment in Congress this week, Facebook’s chief executive is still under legal obligation to tell the truth.

If it feels like Zuckerberg is bending the truth, know that making a false statement to Congress might be difficult to prove given the slippery nature of Congressional testimony, but it’s still illegal.

Since some corners of the internet appear to be floating a conspiracy theory that Zuckerberg can get away with lying because he did not take the oath, we clarified that point with the offices of some of the committee members questioning him.

“Lying to Congress is always a crime,” a representative for Senator Dianne Feinstein clarified to TechCrunch. “You don’t need to be sworn in.”

A witness who is not under oath cannot face perjury charges but they could face charges pertaining to making “false statements,” a broader statute that is not specific to lying under oath.

As Lawfare clarifies:

“By far the broadest federal statute criminalizing lying is 18 U.S.C. § 1001, which makes it a crime to “knowingly and willfully . . . make[] any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation” in the course of “any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch” of the federal government. There’s no requirement that the statement be under oath.”

Committees handle the matter of swearing in a witness a number of different ways, and there are three committees involved in Zuckerberg’s testimony this week: the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Senate committees banded together to form a joint hearing on Tuesday.

As a Republican Commerce committee aide told CNN, “By tradition, the Commerce Committee does not swear-in witnesses.”

As Slate reported in a piece exploring the tradition of the oath, “the judiciary committee requires an oath only sometimes, according to the procedural guidelines of the Senate select committee on ethics.” Where it is not required, the decision to require the oath can be made at the discretion of the committee chairman and that decision takes place during the hearing’s planning stage.

“Witnesses aren’t always sworn in before voluntarily providing testimony,” Chuck Grassley’s Senate Judiciary Committee press secretary told TechCrunch.

Still, it isn’t exactly random. It’s possible that Facebook stipulated that Zuckerberg not be made to take the oath as a condition of his appearance before Congress. The optics of Facebook’s founder with his right hand raised would likely be anathema to the feverishly PR-conscious company.

An aide to a prominent Senator not questioning Zuckerberg this week confirmed to TechCrunch that such a negotiation would be unusual but not impossible. Facebook did not respond to our questions on the topic.

While no one can legally outright lie in responding to Congress — under oath or not — witnesses go to great lengths to temper their speech so they don’t get into hot water. During his first Congressional testimony, Zuckerberg spoke in an extremely disciplined, well-practiced way that adhered closely to safe talking points established in advance.

A number of Zuckerberg’s statements could certainly be interpreted as lying by omission in an informal sense, but legally his testimony remains strategically vague enough to stay well within legal bounds.

Source: Tech Crunch

Artificial intelligence is about more than asking Alexa or Siri to turn on the lights at home and add a reminder to the calendar about getting some milk at the store later in the afternoon.

The true power of AI and machine learning is how it can democratize expertise, lowering the barriers to entry for tasks that once could only be performed by a small group of specialists. The result, one day, will be that your self-driving car drops you off at the supermarket, where you will find higher-quality foods available at prices lower than they’ve ever been.

It will happen through the use of machine learning algorithms that absorb a large volume of data, recognize patterns and apply statistical probabilities to choose the course of action most likely to result in a successful outcome.

For example, Google’s famous self-driving car used machine learning to catalog a number of interesting behaviors on the road. Whenever the car’s sensors recognized a garbage truck ahead, vehicles following behind tended to pull suddenly into the next lane to get around it — usually without signaling. So the Google car stored this pattern of behavior and adapted its position and speed to minimize the possibility that these “unexpected” lane changes would cause a collision.

For humans, this is a common defensive driving skill, but replicating this level of awareness in a machine would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Now, powerful algorithms can conquer the chaos of streets filled with drivers of all skill levels, including those paying more attention to their phones than the road ahead.

Artificial intelligence and agriculture

As amazing as that may be, the application of machine learning to the living fields of agriculture is an order of magnitude more complex. A road network is fixed, with a map that rarely changes and provides a solid foundation for the algorithm to make its decisions.

No matter how calm and peaceful a wind-swept field of wheat might appear to the casual observer, agricultural fields are truly chaotic places. There’s unpredictable weather, changes in soil quality and the ever-present possibility that pests and disease may pay a visit. Conditions in one part of a field may be totally different from another part. As a result, growers never really know until the last day whether they are going to have a successful harvest or not.

Take a seed and plant it in a field in Iowa. Then take the exact same seed and plant it in Brazil. The results will almost certainly not be the same, or, if they are, repeat the experiment again and the odds are that the yield of each will be different. That’s because thousands of interrelated variables are at play, from the amount of nutrients in the soil, to whether it’s sunny or cloudy, to rain levels, temperature, the presence of insects and so on.

That’s where machine learning can reap clarity from the chaos. Remote sensors placed in fields perceive the environment as statistical data. Algorithms process this data, adapting and learning to predict a range of outcomes.

Farmers can use these AI algorithms to make better field decisions that increase the chances of a successful harvest. Breeders also can use AI algorithms to make the plants themselves better. The combination of these uses will ultimately drive lower prices at the supermarket.

The democratization of farming expertise

This is a massive a shift in the way things have always been done in agriculture. Farmers have a proud tradition going back centuries of relying on instinct in growing crops. They have an intuition of what’s best based on long experience. It’s not that farmers didn’t want to use computers, it’s that they haven’t been particularly effective. Early machines, with their binary logic, were not well-suited to highly complex and variable field environments.

So a farm’s productivity often depended on having the most experienced growers on hand. But what if we could change that, and make the best decisions and growing techniques available even to novice farmers? This is particularly important for developing nations that might not have access to highly experienced growers.

The rise of precision agriculture has opened the possibility of spreading the benefit of machine expertise far and wide. Remote sensors, satellites and UAVs can gather information 24 hours a day over an entire field. These can monitor plant health, soil condition, temperature, humidity and so on. The amount of data these sensors can generate is overwhelming, but the algorithms of precision agriculture can process and interpret the data in a useful way.

The next big leap will come from deploying true artificial intelligence algorithms that learn from the data and interpret never-before-seen situations, allowing each harvest to become more and more certain. This will reduce wasted effort and lower the cost of growing, with much of the savings passed on to consumers.

AI builds better plants

Machine learning algorithms can also be applied to the centuries-old process of breeding plant varieties better able to resist drought or insect pressures. Breeders have long used conventional methods of selecting the “best” parent plants to create varieties with a more pleasing appearance, longer shelf life and a superior taste. Because of AI’s application in breeding, stronger plants are more likely to make their way to harvest, and yields will continue to increase.

As with farming techniques, machine learning helps with all aspects of the decision-making process of selecting plants and testing new varieties. Algorithms speed the process so that improvements in plant varieties make their way to the fields and the supermarkets faster than ever. This, again, helps lower costs while improving quality.

The potential for growth in agricultural AI systems is significant, and as the algorithms grow smarter, the benefits will continue to be seen every time you check out at the supermarket.

Source: Tech Crunch

The days of reading the small print to see whether a repair or new part for your ailing laptop will void its warranty may be coming to an end. The FTC has officially warned several companies that their policies of ceasing support when a user attempts “non-approved” repairs or servicing are likely illegal.

It’s the sort of thing where if you buy a device or car from a company, they inform you that unless you use approved, often internally branded parts, you’re voiding the warranty and your item will no longer be supported by the company.

The idea is that a company doesn’t want to be on the hook when a user replaces an old, perfectly good stick of RAM with a new, crappy one and then comes crying to them when the computer won’t boot. Or, in a more dire situation, replaces the brakes with some off-brand ones, which then fail and cause an accident. So there’s a reason these restrictions exist.

Unfortunately, they’ve come to encompass far more than these dangerous cases; perhaps you replace the RAM and then the power supply burns out — that’s not your fault, but because you didn’t use approved RAM the company takes no responsibility for the failure. The result is consumers end up having to buy components or servicing at inflated prices from “licensed” or “approved” dealers.

“Provisions that tie warranty coverage to the use of particular products or services harm both consumers who pay more for them as well as the small businesses who offer competing products and services,” explained Thomas Pahl, from the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in the announcement.

The agency gave several examples of offending language in customer agreements, blanking out the names of the companies. Ars Technica was quick to connect these with the major companies they correspond to: Hyundai, Nintendo and Sony. Here are the statements the FTC didn’t like, with the company names in bold where they were blank before.

• The use of Hyundai parts is required to keep your . . . manufacturer’s warranties and any extended warranties intact.
• This warranty shall not apply if this product . . . is used with products not sold or licensed by Nintendo.
• This warranty does not apply if this product . . . has had the warranty seal on the PS4 altered, defaced, or removed.

It’s one thing to say, don’t overclock your PS4 or we won’t cover it. It’s quite another to say if the warranty seal has been “defaced” then we won’t cover it.

“Such statements generally are prohibited by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act,” the FTC announcement reads, and in addition “may be deceptive under the FTC Act.” The companies have 30 days to modify their policies.

This could be a major win for consumers: more repairs and service locations would be allowed under warranty, and modders of game consoles may be able to indulge their hobby without trying to hide it from the manufacturer. That will depend on the new phrasing of the companies’ policies, but this attention from the FTC will at the very least nudge things in the right direction.

Source: Tech Crunch

Microsoft’s Twitch competitor, Mixer, is giving streamers a new way to customize their channels. The company has entered into a partnership with Lightstream Studio to allow Mixer streamers to add images, overlays, transitions, and text to their streams, or to switch between scenes. The goal is to make it easier for creators to give their streams a more professional look-and-feel, without requiring they have a lot of technical expertise.

Instead, the partnership will allow streamers to route their feed into the web-based Lightstream Studio, which can be accessed via a supported browser on a PC, Mac or tablet. On smartphones, the URL mixer.golightstream.com will allow streamers to use their phone as a remote control for changing their scenes.

For instance, gamers can use the Studio to create status screens like “Starting Soon,” or “Be Right Back,” then quickly rotate through them, as needed.

Streamers can direct their streams to Lightstream Studio from their mobile devices, PC, or their Xbox native broadcast.

The support for native Xbox streams is what’s got streamers most excited, however.

Microsoft says the integration will not impact the other third-party services Mixer streamers today use for alerts, like StreamLabs, StreamJar or Tipeeestream, as they can link those accounts within their Lightstream settings.

Microsoft has been rolling out a number of new features for Mixer in recent months, in an effort to bring its service more on par with Amazon-owned Twitch, the leader in game streaming in terms of both concurrent streamers and viewers, as well as rival YouTube Gaming.

This year, for example, Mixer introduced game sales as another means of helping streamers generate revenue from their channels, and it announced support for direct tipping. Many of these features are about Mixer playing catch-up, though, rather than coming out with something new.

Adding overlaid content to a stream to make it look more polished and professional is something that Twitch today supports through its extensions platform. It currently has over 150 different extensions, including things like stream schedules, countdowns, reminders, polls, and more. And some portion of those extensions became available on mobile just last month.

Lightstream Studio is not quite the same, as it a partnership with a third-party rather than a built-in offering, but it will give streamers some similar options thanks to its support of third-party tools for adding stream alerts. 

Lightstream Studio is first being offered in beta to Partners and Pro users to test, before rolling out more broadly.

Source: Tech Crunch

Facebook has previously officially noted that 470 accounts associated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency have been banned related to the 2016 election, plus 270 more in Russia just last week. But in today’s testimony Mark Zuckerberg also mentioned a much higher estimate of “tens of thousands,” though the confidence in this number would be also be much lower.

“In the IRA specifically, the ones we’ve pegged back to the IRA, we can identify 470 in the American elections, and the 270 that we went after in Russia last week,” he began in response to Senator Feinstein (D-), who had asked about the numbers of accounts associated with this type of coordinated disinformation campaign.

But then he continued:

“There are many others that our systems catch which are more difficult to attribute specifically to Russian intelligence, but the number would be in the tens of thousands of fake accounts…”

The tens of thousands number must be taken with a grain of salt, since clearly Facebook has not been able to definitively attribute more than the stated 740 or so to the IRA and Russian intel. But it is still significant; this is clearly different from the 30,000-odd accounts banned in relation to France’s election. That was a specific number and also not mentioned in connection with Russia specifically, as this estimate was.

It seems clear that Facebook is being conservative in its enumeration of Russian-linked accounts, and that very well may be the responsible thing to do. But Zuckerberg’s remarks today establish a ceiling in the tens of thousands in addition to the floor of several hundred. That’s worth keeping in mind.

Source: Tech Crunch

A $1 billion valuation was until recently a significant badge of honor for a technology company, marking it as an unusually successful outlier. Now, though, as membership of the club has swollen to as many as 200 globally (with an aggregate valuation in excess of $600 billion), the “unicorn” epithet given to these billion-dollar companies on account of their rarity has become less apt and attracted considerable skepticism as to whether they can justify their sky-high price tags.

I specialize in economics, corporate finance and credit risk, with a particular focus on venture capitalism. From my vantage point at Stanford, I’ve naturally become especially concerned with the goings-on of Silicon Valley. Along with my co-author Will Gornall, when preparing Squaring Venture Capital Valuations with Reality, I set out to see whether concerns about the potential overvaluation of unicorn companies was justified. What I discovered may shock you.

Overvaluation is endemic

One in 10 unicorns is overvalued by at least 100 percent, and on average a unicorn reports a valuation 50 percent above the fair value we calculated.

The problem is that companies apply an inappropriate valuation model. The standard method of calculating the market value of a publicly listed company is to multiply the number of shares outstanding by the current trading price of a single share. So pre-IPO companies typically use the amount of money raised in their latest funding round and the amount of equity they gave away in the round to arrive at their valuation. The resulting figure might be a useful shorthand for many purposes (not least juicy media headlines), but — as our research found — it can be wildly inaccurate.

Post-money valuations assume that — as would typically be the case post-IPO — all shares are created equal. They aren’t.

In order to attract funding, companies offer investors inducements and securities. They may guarantee a certain return on their investment at the time of IPO — if the company doesn’t reach a certain valuation at that point, it will issue the investor more shares until the difference between the achieved and promised valuation is made up. This can happen several times, with shares issued at each funding round having potentially very different rights. Effectively, common shareholders pay the price, in terms of both their influence and their returns.

This situation is not taken into account by standard post-money valuations. When it is — we scoured the relevant documentation for more than 130 unicorns to crunch the numbers — it emerges that common shares are overvalued by 58 percent on average, and for almost half of unicorns “fair valuation” dips below the billion-dollar threshold.

Let’s take a look at some examples.

Payments technology company Square went public in 2015 at a $2.9 billion valuation, less than half the $6 billion headlines following its 2014 Series E round. But Series E investors didn’t lose out. Having been guaranteed $18.56 per share, they were issued additional equity at IPO to make up the difference from the $9 float price. A last private valuation reflecting those special conditions would have been $2.2 billion, making much more sense of the subsequent IPO price.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, meanwhile, actually saw its fair valuation fall in 2008, while its reported valuation climbed. Investors in that round had been promised twice their money back should the company list, with seniority over all other shareholders.

Is overvaluation a deliberate tactic?

Former SEC chairman Mary Jo White highlighted this issue in March 2016, expressing concern about “whether the prestige associated with reaching a sky-high valuation fast drives companies to try to appear more valuable than they actually are.”

It’s impossible to say for sure whether companies are striking these deals with investors in a deliberate attempt to drive their valuations higher. But it’s not difficult to see how they benefit from those higher valuations. Aside from massaging egos and signaling success and attractiveness to future investors, they create a buzz that helps with marketing and, especially, hiring in a fiercely competitive talent market.

When we circulated an early version of our paper, plenty of companies’ general counsels got in touch, and we invited them to correct any factual errors or other mistakes in our working. We’ve not heard back from them.

Implications of overvaluation

The biggest effect of overvaluation is to drive up the value of shares issued in later funding rounds, as they come with greater control over the direction of the company and the return on the investment. Specifically, we found that 31 percent of unicorns give their most recent investors seniority over all previous backers, 20 percent empower them to block IPOs that don’t return a certain percentage of their investment and 14 percent provide guarantees of returns at IPO — all benefits for which investors will pay a premium.

The people most affected are employees with stock options. Many don’t understand that these options are disconnected from headline-grabbing post-money valuations and that their value falls as investors come on board with preferential deals. This further complicates employees’ decisions about how long to stick around to realize their options — especially considering that the longer they stay, the longer they take a hit on the salary they could earn elsewhere, where part of their compensation wouldn’t be tied up in stock.

The market is undoubtedly overheated, despite nine out of 10 VCs believing unicorn companies are overvalued (as I found in previous research). This is partly a result of non-traditional investors in Silicon Valley, such as Saudi Arabia and China, taking more of an interest in the area as low interest rates globally increase appetites for risk.

At some point, the market will demand either profitability or exits (both of which are becoming less common among unicorns), or valuations will start to fall. It’s hard to predict exactly when, though, as this depends on external macroeconomic trends.

Whether or not we will see a crash on anything like the scale of the bursting of the Dot Com bubble is similarly difficult to say with certainty, depending as it does on which dominoes fall first and how hard investor confidence is hit. But suffice it to say, there will be some major casualties.

Source: Tech Crunch

Today during Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the Senate, the Facebook CEO reiterated that “there will always be a version of Facebook that is free.”

In the midst of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the user data of up to 87 million people was sold by a third-party developer to Trump Campaign-linked firm Cambridge Analytica, there has been talk of Facebook potentially adding a subscription layer.

The scandal has brought to light the heart of a problem that many have been well aware of: if you’re not buying a product, you are the product.

Last week, when asked if there might be a way for users to opt out of being targeted for ads, Sandberg responded saying they’d have to pay for it.

“We have different forms of opt-out,” Sandberg replied. “We don’t have an opt-out at the highest level. That would be a paid product.”

Our own Josh Constine made an argument that ad-free subscriptions could save Facebook. And while there’s no word on an ad-free subscription, Zuckerberg did at least leave room for it in the future, noting that there will always be a version of Facebook that is free.

“How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” Senator Orrin Hatch asked Zuckerberg.

“Senator, we run ads.”

Source: Tech Crunch

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce, Science, and Transportation committees, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that his company did not notify the Federal Trade Commission about the initial user data leak that triggered its most recent privacy scandal.

“They considered it a ‘closed case’,”Zuckerberg said in response to a question over whether Facebook’s staff notified anyone at the FTC about the leak of consumer data in 2015 when Facebook claimed it learned about the data leak.

Cambridge Analytica’s access to Facebook user data, which it acquired improperly through a third party quiz app, is at the heart of Facebook’s latest scandal — and Facebook’s failure to notify the FTC of the data leak could have triggered the commission’s recent probe.

In a statement issued at the time about Facebook’s privacy controls, Tom Pahl, acting director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said:

The FTC is firmly and fully committed to using all of its tools to protect the privacy of consumers. Foremost among these tools is enforcement action against companies that fail to honor their privacy promises, including to comply with Privacy Shield, or that engage in unfair acts that cause substantial injury to consumers in violation of the FTC Act. Companies who have settled previous FTC actions must also comply with FTC order provisions imposing privacy and data security requirements. Accordingly, the FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook. Today, the FTC is confirming that it has an open non-public investigation into these practices.

The terms of the initial settlement deal that Facebook inked with the SEC in 2011 barred the company from making misrepresentations about the privacy or security of consumers’ personal information; and required the company to get the express consent before changing privacy preferences.

The agreement also included the following commitment from Facebook:

that it “establish and maintain a comprehensive privacy program designed to address privacy risks associated with the development and management of new and existing products and services, and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of consumers’ information; and required, within 180 days, and every two years after that for the next 20 years, to obtain independent, third-party audits certifying that it has a privacy program in place that meets or exceeds the requirements of the FTC order, and to ensure that the privacy of consumers’ information is protected.”

 

Source: Tech Crunch

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into interference in to 2016 election interference has interviewed at least one employee of Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed today during his testimony before the Senate. Zuckerberg confirmed that he himself had not been interviewed, then declined to elaborate, citing the confidentiality of the investigation.

Senator Leahy asked “I assume Facebook has been served with subpoenas from the special counsel’s office?” Zuckerberg replied “yes”, but then noted that “I have to clarify that I’m not sure that there are subpoenas, there may be.”

Leahy then asked if Zuckerberg or anyone at Facebook had been contacted by the special counsel, and Zuckerberg responded “Yes”. When asked if he specifically had been interviewed, the CEO replied “I have not”. Leahy followed up, asking “Others have?” Zuckerberg responded “I believe so.”

Zuckerberg then got cagey, explaining that “I want to be careful here because our work with the special counsel is confidential and I want to make sure that in an open session I’m not revealing something that’s confidential.”

You can watch this part of the testimony below:

Wired reported in January that at least one Facebook staffer employee had been interviewed by Mueller, and that they were associated with the Trump campaign. Facebook provided assistance to both the Trump and Clinton campaigns in using Facebook’s tools.

Now, given information that’s come to light about the Trump campaign working with Cambridge Analytica to optimize its campaigns, and about how Cambridge Analytica attained that data improperly from a Facebook app built by researcher Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, Mueller’s investigation may have been interested to know if the Facebook staffer was aware of the improperly-attained data. Alternatively, Mueller may have simply been interested in whether the Facebook staffer knew of any Russian connection to the campaign.

You can follow TechCrunch’s coverage of the Zuckerberg testimony here:

Source: Tech Crunch