Month: April 2018

In 1983, Chuck Hall, the father of 3D printing, created something that was equal parts simple and earth-shattering. He manufactured the world’s first-ever 3D printer and used it to print a tiny eye wash cup.

It was just a cup. It was small and black and utterly ordinary looking. But that cup paved the way for a quiet revolution, one that today is changing the healthcare industry in dramatic ways.

As healthcare costs in America continue to skyrocket, with no political solution in sight, this technology could offer some direly needed relief.

Here are just some the ways in which 3D printing is already revolutionizing the healthcare industry.

Personalized prosthetics

I love to tell the story of Amanda Boxtel, who came to me a few years ago complaining that her robotic suit, a gorgeous piece of design from Ekso Bionics, was uncomfortable to wear. Amanda is paralyzed from the waist down, and while this suit gave her the gift of movement, it couldn’t give her the symmetry and freedom of range of motion that she, like all humans, craved.

Unlike traditional prosthetics, which are mass-manufactured like any other traditional factory-produced good, 3D-printed prosthetics are custom-tailored for each individual user. By digitally capturing Amanda’s unique measurements, I was able to build her a custom-fit suit, much like a tailor would, creating a beautiful, lightweight design that fit Amanda’s body down to each distinct millimeter. Today Amanda feels so limber and free in her suit that she is now learning how to walk in high heels.

This same technology is now being harnessed to create beautiful conformal ventilated scoliosis braces, supports for amputees and more.

Bioprinting and tissue engineering

Writing in a recent issue of the Medical Journal of Australia, the surgeon Jason Chuen alerted his colleagues to a major technological breakthrough that could eventually do away with the need for human organ transplants. Here’s how it works:

3D printing is performed by telling a computer to apply layer upon layer of a specific material (quite often plastic or metal powders), molding them one layer at a time until the final product — be it a toy, a pair of sunglasses or a scoliosis brace — is built. Medical technology is now harnessing this technology and building tiny organs, or “organoids,” using the same techniques, but with stem cells as the production material. These organoids, once built, will in the future be able to grow inside the body of a sick patient and take over when an organic organ, such as a kidney or liver, fails.

3D-printed skin for burn victims

It may sound like something out of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” but the implications — and cost savings — make this technological breakthrough in 3D printing particularly immense. For centuries, burn victims have had incredibly limited options for healing their disfigured skin. Skin grafts are painful and produce terrible aesthetics; hydrotherapy solutions offer limited results. But researchers in Spain have now taken the mechanics of 3D printing — that same careful layer-upon-layer approach in which we can make just about anything — and revealed a 3D bioprinter prototype that can produce human skin. The researchers, working with a biological ink that contains both human plasma as well as material extracts taken from skin biopsies, were able to print about 100 square centimeters of human skin in the span of about half an hour. The possibilities for this technology, and the life-changing implications for burn victims, are endless.

Pharmacology

Finally, 3D printing also has the potential to upend the pharmaceutical world and vastly simplify daily life for patients with multiple ailments. So many of us take dozens of pills each day or week, and the organization, timing and monitoring of these multiple medications and their diverse drug interactions and requirements (morning, night, with or without food) is utterly exhausting.

But 3D printing is the epitome of precision. A 3D-printed pill, unlike a traditionally manufactured capsule, can house multiple drugs at once, each with different release times. This so-called “polypill” concept has already been tested for patients with diabetes and is showing great promise.

The bottom line

The medical world, in which treatments, organs and devices are an integral part, stands to be revolutionized by the vast promises of 3D printing. With precision, speed and a major slash in cost, the way we treat and manage the health of our bodies will never be the same. And that’s something to celebrate.

Source: Tech Crunch

You only get one link on Instagram, but Tap Bio lets you point that to a customized landing page full of all the sites you want to share. Rather than constantly change your Instagram profile URL, you can easily add slides equipped with links to your Tap Bio corresponding to your latest Instagram posts. Tap Bio could be a powerful tool for social media stars, digital entrepreneurs, or anyone trying to market themselves via Instagram.

Tap Bio is About.me for the next generation.

It’s a deceptively simple idea, yet one that the big website creation platforms like Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly have missed. It’s dumbfounding that there’s no popular mobile-first site builder, though an app called Universe was one of the hottest companies that graduated from Y Combinator’s accelerator this month. But by starting with an obvious problem, the bootstrapped Tap Bio could gain a foothold in a business dominated by heavily funded startups, and angle to become the center of your online identity. People interested can sign up for the private beta here.

The whole reason for Tap Bio’s existence is a brilliant decision of Instagram’s. You can’t post links, and you get just one link in your profile. URLs in post captions don’t hyperlink and can’t be copied. That means the focus is on sharing beauty, not driving clicks. But promoters gonna promote, so the “Link in bio” trend began. Instagrammers change their profile link to where they want to send people, then mention that much-derided phrase hoping their followers will open their profile and click through. Unfortunately, though, anyone reading one of their older posts might be confused when the “link in bio” has changed to point somewhere unrelated.

“The fact that you can’t link from posts has contributed to the quality of the experience” says Tap Bio CEO Jesse Engle. “But it’s created a major pain point for people who are promoting something, which is a lot of people.”

Engle is experienced with filling social platform gaps. He co-founded Twitter scheduling and multi-account management app CoTweet in 2008, which sold to ExactTarget in 2010 and eventually became part of SalesForce. Over the past few years, him and Tap Bio co-founder Ryan Walker who just left Apple have been running Link In Profile, a more basic but similar tool that just recreates your Instagram profile but with links attached to each post.

With Tap Bio, you set it as your Instagram profile link, and then create a different cards to show on your mini-site. One can show two columns of your recent Instagram posts that instantly open whichever link you want to pair with each. Another offer’s a more visual full-screen profile with links to your other social media presences on like Twitter and YouTube. There’s a focused, single-link call to action page if you’ve got one big thing to promote. And Tap Bio is adding more card styles.

Tap Bio is “forever free” if you only want one profile card and one of any other card. $5 per month gets you three extra plus analytics, while $12 per month grants unlimited cards across up to three Instagram accounts — though there are discounts for yearly billing. It will compete with traditional site builders and less polished alternatives like Linkin.bio and Linktree.

But the biggest risk for Tap Bio isn’t competition, but its host platform. Instagram could always shut down links out to Tap Bio. After all, it did just suddenly kill off a big part of its API three months ahead of schedule as part of Facebook’s big data privacy crackdown. Luckily, Engle says “we’re mitigating this risk by building a close relationship with Instagram, openly sharing our plans and offering whatever value we can to them. They’ve been very helpful in sharing their plans, and we are confident that we’ll continue to play a role in this space well into the future.”

Tap Bio’s potential goes far beyond Instagram, though. It could become the hub for your web presence. About.me is outdated, Twitter’s too temporal, Facebook’s too personal, LinkedIn’s too formal, and Instagram’s too informal. Unless you have your own full-fledged website, it’s unclear what one link your should give people you meet online or off. If Tap Bio plays it right, it could become your digital calling card.

Source: Tech Crunch

YouTube TV is finding life inside a browser not built by Google.

The live TV service is now running on Firefox after previously being locked down to Chrome. The new development first spotted by YourTechExplained isn’t a massive shock, Google had promised support for other browsers would be coming, but it’s nice to see them hold true to that though you’re still out of luck if you’re a loyal Safari or Edge user.

The $40 per month streaming service lets users watch and record content from channels like NBA TV, MLB Network, Comedy Central, MTV and CNN. It’s still a bit of a pricey sell, but as the service continues to add more networks, more capabilities and more options for viewing, it’s slowly becoming a better buy for cord-cutters looking to get live TV on their devices.

Source: Tech Crunch

Montreal-based fashion site Ssense is acquiring Polyvore from Verizon’s Oath, but the site will not live on. Ssense has already shut down the Polyvore site, taking its user data and redirecting traffic from the site’s main URL.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Polyvore was previously owned by Oath, a Verizon subsidiary which also owns TechCrunch. Yahoo acquired the Pinterest-like social commerce site back in 2015 in the midst of Marissa Mayer’s tenure. According to Recode, Yahoo paid as much as $200 million for the fashion site. While things largely kept moving in the same general direction after the Yahoo acquisition, it appears that Ssense sees more value in redirecting the Polyvore community to the Ssense domain rather than continuing to deal with upkeep.

Ssense is a site largely focused on online retail for designer streetwear, though the site also seems to produce quite a bit of original content as well. Though they don’t seem to have a major tech component to their platform, the fast-growing fashion site will obviously benefit from having access to the data of an online community that kept fashion trends at the core of its product.

In a blog post, the Polyvore team noted that as of today, the company’s website will discontinue operations, redirecting to ssense.com and that the Polyvore apps will no longer be supported. Users can request to download their data from the service here, they’ll have until May 15, 2018 to download it or opt out of sharing it with Ssense. Otherwise, Ssense is going to gain access to the account info of Polyvore’s userbase.

This is a pretty rough ending for the fashion site, which joins a host of other Yahoo startup acquisitions that were mismanaged or ultimately just mistakes.

Source: Tech Crunch

AI research is increasingly being used by militaries around the world for offensive and defensive applications. This past week, groups of AI researchers began to fight back against two separate programs located halfway around the world from each other, generating tough questions about just how much engineers can affect the future uses of these technologies.

From Silicon Valley, The New York Times published an internal protest memo written by several thousand Google employees, which vociferously opposed Google’s work on a Defense Department-led initiative called Project Maven, which aims to use computer vision algorithms to analyze vast troves of image and video data.

As the department’s news service quoted Marine Corps Col. Drew Cukor last year about the initiative:

“You don’t buy AI like you buy ammunition,” he added. “There’s a deliberate workflow process and what the department has given us with its rapid acquisition authorities is an opportunity for about 36 months to explore what is governmental and [how] best to engage industry [to] advantage the taxpayer and the warfighter, who wants the best algorithms that exist to augment and complement the work he does.”

Google’s employees are demanding that the company step back from exactly that sort of partnership, writing in their memo:

Amid growing fears of biased and weaponized AI, Google is already struggling to keep the public’s trust. By entering into this contract, Google will join the ranks of companies like Palantir, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. The argument that other firms, like Microsoft and Amazon, are also participating doesn’t make this any less risky for Google. Google’s unique history, its motto Don’t Be Evil, and its direct reach into the lives of billions of users set it apart.

Meanwhile, in South Korea, there is growing outrage over a program to develop offensive robots jointly created by the country’s top engineering university KAIST — the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology — and Korean conglomerate Hanhwa, which among other product lines is one of the largest producers of munitions for the country. Dozens of AI academics around the world have initiated a protest of the collaboration, writing that:

At a time when the United Nations is discussing how to contain the threat posed to international security by autonomous weapons, it is regrettable that a prestigious institution like KAIST looks to accelerate the arms race to develop such weapons. We therefore publicly declare that we will boycott all collaborations with any part of KAIST until such time as the President of KAIST provides assurances, which we have sought but not received, that the Center will not develop autonomous weapons lacking meaningful human control.

Here’s the thing: These so-called “killer robots” are seriously the least of our concerns. Such offensive technology is patently obvious, and researchers are free to decide whether they want to participate or not participate in such endeavors.

The wider challenge for the field is that all artificial intelligence research is equally applicable to offensive technologies as it is to improving the human condition. The entire research program around AI is to create new capabilities for computers to perceive, predict, decide and act without human intervention. For researchers, the best algorithms are idealized and generalizable, meaning that they should apply to any new subject with some tweaks and maybe more training data.

Practically, there is no way to prevent these newfound capabilities from entering offensive weapons. Even if the best researchers in the world refused to work on technologies that abetted offensive weapons, others could easily take these proven models “off the shelf” and apply them relatively straightforwardly to new applications. That’s not to say that battlefield applications don’t have their own challenges that need to be figured out, but developing core AI capabilities is the critical block in launching these sorts of applications.

AI is a particularly vexing problem of dual-use — the ability of a technology to be used for both positive applications and negative ones. A good example is nuclear theory, which can be used to massively improve human healthcare through magnetic resonance imagery and power our societies with nuclear power reactors, or it can be used in a bomb to kill hundreds of thousands.

AI is challenging because unlike, say, nuclear weapons, which require unique hardware that signals their development to other powers, AI has no such requirements. For all the talk of Tensor Processing Units, the key innovations in AI are mathematical and software in origin, before hardware performance optimization. We could build an autonomous killing drone today with a consumer-grade drone, a robotic gun trigger and computer vision algorithms downloaded from GitHub. It may not be perfect, but it would “work.” In this way, it is similar to bioweapons, which can similarly be built with standard lab equipment.

Other than outright stopping development of artificial intelligence capabilities entirely, this technology is going to get built, which means it is absolutely possible to build these weapons and launch them against adversaries.

In other words, AI researchers are going to kill people, whether they like it or not.

Given that context, the right mode for organizing isn’t to stop Google from working with the Pentagon, it is to encourage Google, which is among the most effective lobbying forces in Washington, to push for more international negotiations to ban these sorts of offensive weapons in the first place. Former Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt chairs the Defense Innovation Board, and has a perfect perch from which to make these concerns known to the right policymakers. Such negotiations have been effective in limiting bioweapons, chemical warfare and weapons in outer space, even during the height of the Cold War. There is no reason to believe that success is out of reach.

That said, one challenge with this vision is competition from China. China has made autonomous warfare a priority, investing billions into the industry in pursuit of new tools to fight American military hegemony. Even if the U.S. and the world wanted to avoid these weapons, we may not have much of a choice. I, for one, would prefer to see the world’s largest dictatorship not acquire these weapons without any sort of countermeasure from the democratized world.

It’s important to note, though, that such fears about war and technology are hardly new. Computing power was at the heart of the “precision” bombing campaigns in Vietnam throughout the 1960s, and significant campus protests were focused on stopping newly founded computation centers from conducting their work. In many cases, classified research was banned from campus, and ROTC programs were similarly removed, only to be reinstated in recent years. The Pugwash conferences were conceived in the 1950s as a forum for scientists concerned about the global security implications of emerging technologies, namely nuclear energy.

These debates will continue, but we need to be aware that all AI developments will likely lead to better offensive weapons capabilities. Better to accept that reality today and work to protect the ethical norms of war than try to avoid it, only to discover that other adversaries have taken the AI lead — and international power with it.

Source: Tech Crunch

As the e-commerce industry continues to explode, one startup that’s benefitting is Boston-based 6 River Systems.

The business, which builds robots that speed up production in warehouses, has raised $25 million Series B financing in a round led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Eclipse Ventures and iRobot.

6 River says it has gained early traction with its robot, “Chuck.” Jerome Dubois, founder and CEO said that he believes 6 River has built “the first and only collaborative robot with the associates in the aisles doing the work.” In other words, 6 River aims to help humans be more efficient.

Chuck keeps warehouse employees on task by guiding them through the facility through each step of the packaging process. It can glide around the room and also has a touchscreen to help workers locate items. Chuck uses sensors to help detect worker productivity. It’s also been designed to help with employee training.

6 River isn’t worried about eliminating humans and instead believes that there is an opportunity to help industries that have a “massive labor shortage” for warehouse suppliers. “There aren’t enough people to fill the jobs,” Dubois claims.

Right now 6 River has deployed 600 robots to 30 sites. These robots have helped pack medical supplies, retail products and “nuts and bolts” in industrial spaces.

The team is comprised of former Kiva Systems executives. Kiva developed a different type of warehouse robot and was acquired by Amazon for $775 million in 2012.

There’s “been very little automation outside of conveyor belts,” said Matt Murphy, at Menlo Ventures, about why he invested. Murphy, who’s on the board at 6 River, “there needed to be a second generation robotics system to replace what Amazon started six years ago when they bought Kiva.”

6 River is particularly focused on building relationships with Fortune 100 businesses and offers its robots through SaaS licensing. They can also be rented for a one or two-year term.

The startup plans to use the funding to build out its own software. It also wants to expand to Europe.

 

It previously raised $21 million in funding over the past two years.

 

 

Source: Tech Crunch

Digital media company Fullscreen announced this morning that it has acquired Reelio .

The startup has described itself as “the Match.com of brands and creators on YouTube,” collecting data about video creators and connecting them with marketers who want to use their skills and reach their audience.

In the announcement, Fullscreen suggests that Reelio’s technology will allow the company to offer a more complete set of services around influencer marketing.

“The integration of Reelio’s platform into our network brings us one step closer to building a complete solution for the future of brand marketing, which we believe will be social-first and content-driven,” said Fullscreen General Manager Pete Stein in a statement. “The strength of Reelio’s data, technology, and team will be a huge asset to our company, and we’re excited to work alongside them as we continue to enhance our influencer marketing offerings.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Variety reports that the entire 50-person Reelio team (including co-founder and CEO Pete Borum) will be joining Fullscreen.

Reelio had raised $8 million in funding from investors including e.ventures, Tremor Video co-founders Jason Glickman and Andrew Reis and former Bertelsmann president Thomas Hesse. Fullscreen, meanwhile, is owned by Otter Media, the joint venture between AT&T and the Chernin Group.

Source: Tech Crunch

At the Amazon Summit in San Francisco today, the company announced a new cloud service that enables organizations to create and manage private certificates in the cloud.

While the Summit wasn’t chock full of announcements like the annual re:Invent conference, it did offer some new services like the beefing up the AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) with an all-new Private Certificate Authority (PCA). (Amazon does love its acronyms.)

Private certificates let you limit exactly who has access, giving you more control and hence greater security over them. Private certificates are usually confined to a defined group like a company or organization, but up until now it has been rather complex to create them.

As with any good cloud services, the Private Certificate Authority removes a layer of complexity involved in managing them. “ACM Private CA builds on ACM’s existing certificate capabilities to help you easily and securely manage the lifecycle of your private certificates with pay as you go pricing. This enables developers to provision certificates in just a few simple API calls while administrators have a central CA management console and fine grained access control through granular IAM policies,” Amazon’s Randall Hunt wrote in a blog post announcing the new service.

The new feature lets you provision and configure certificates, then import or export them after they’ve been created. The certificates are stored on “AWS managed hardware security modules (HSMs) that adhere to FIPS 140-2 Level 3 security standards. ACM Private CA automatically maintains certificate revocation lists (CRLs) in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3),” Hunt wrote. What’s more, admins can access reports to track certificate creation on the system.

The new service is available today and costs $400 per month per certificate authority you set up. For complete pricing details, see the blog post.

Source: Tech Crunch

Hired has released its annual pay equity report. Unsurprisingly, white men earn the most at $136,000 per year on average, followed by Asian men making a yearly average of $135,000.

Here are some other stats that highlight the pay discrepancies in tech:

• Companies offer women 4 percent less than men, on average, for the same role at the same company
• Black and Latinx women are offered 90 cents for every dollar white men earn
• LGBTQ+ women are offered more than their non-LGBTQ counterparts

Other fun (sad) facts:

• San Francisco has the smallest gender wage gap
• The gender wage gap gets worse as people get older
• More than half of women know they’ve been paid less than men in similar roles throughout their careers

Unfortunately, the wage gap hasn’t changed since Hired’s 2017 report. The silver lining, however, is that wage equality for tech workers in the U.S. is better than in Toronto, London and Paris. Anyway, you can check out the rest of the sad state of our society here.

Source: Tech Crunch

In the latest episode of how badly some branches of government are at cybersecurity, a new study by the cybersecurity outfit Global Cyber Alliance indicates that 95 percent of the email domains managed by the Executive Office of the President could be spoofed and potentially used in phishing attacks.

Of the domains that are managed by the Office of the President, only the max.gov email address has fully implemented the highest level of defense against spoofing and phishing emails.

Malicious actors often tweak metadata to trick targets into thinking they are receiving email from an official-sounding domain, like whitehouse.gov.

The Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) protocol — which verifies that an email was sent from the correct address (to prevent spoofing) and informs an email recipient that they likely received an email from a faked address — is used to prevent against these attacks. Last October, the Department of Homeland Security required that all federal agencies update their email policies to comply with the protocol.

So far, only seven White House email addresses have taken the basic step of setting up alerts to be notified when their addresses are used in phishing scams, according to the Global Cyber Alliance report. Another 18 haven’t started deploying DMARC.

Without DMARC in place, those email addresses can be spoofed by would-be scammers and recipients would have no idea they were receiving a fake email from a government account.

“Email domains managed by the EOP are crown jewels that criminals and foreign adversaries covet,” said Philip Reitinger, president and CEO of the Global Cyber Alliance, in a statement. “The lack of full DMARC deployment across nearly every EOP email address poses a national security risk that must be fixed. The good news is that four new domains have implemented DMARC at the lowest level, which I hope indicates that DMARC deployment is moving forward.”

Domains that have rolled out the lowest settings of DMARC are WhiteHouse.gov and EOP.gov. Other domains under the purview of the EOP include Budget.gov, OMB.gov, USTR.gov, OSTP.gov.

These security issues aren’t just academic concerns cooked up by bureaucrats to waste time and add red tape to operations. To see how significant these issues can be, look no further than the Atlanta cyberattack, which happened two weeks ago.

The city is still restoring systems after the attack — a ransomware assault that used SamSam malware to encrypt exposed files. Hackers offered to decrypt the files for a (relatively small) ransom (which it looks like the city has not paid, since systems are still offline).

At least Atlanta was able to restore some of its systems (way to back up those files, government officials), but the attack reveals how many critical systems are still vulnerable.

Now consider if hackers were using federal government addresses to distribute malware — that’s a problem everyone should be concerned about.

Source: Tech Crunch