Month: April 2018

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Arrington XRP Capital founder (and TechCrunch founder) Michael Arrington will be joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September to talk money.

Garlinghouse has had a long and storied career in the tech industry, serving as a Senior Vice President at Yahoo!, President of Consumer Applications at AOL, and CEO of the file collaboration service Hightail. But in 2016, Garlinghouse was promoted from COO to CEO at payment services company Ripple.

Ripple’s goal is to try to make it as easy as possible to transfer money between two stores of value. Right now, that process is incredibly tedious, with no unifying structure to send money overseas or to underbanked communities. The notion of a unifying ledger is not a new one, but it’s one that’s transformed Ripple into a full-fledged company.

But Ripple also created the world’s third-largest digital token, XRP. The token has a current total market cap around $30 billion, and the company is working to expand the use cases for XRP, which has primarily been marketed as a tool for banks but has only attracted cross-border payment services.

As cryptocurrencies continue to evolve and gain mainstream attention, questions continue to mount around how these tokens will revolutionize the economy and gain utility.

TechCrunch founder and former Editor-In-Chief Michael Arrington will join Garlinghouse on stage to discuss the evolution of cryptocurrencies. Arrington left TechCrunch in 2011 and went on to start CrunchFund, which has invested in big name startups such as Uber, Airbnb, and Yammer.

In 2016, Arrington reduced his role at CrunchFund and has since started Arrington XRP Capital, a $100 million digital asset management firm in blockchain-based capital markets. Ripple is one of the first portfolio companies for Arrington XRP Capital.

This comes at a time when the SEC is doing everything it can to learn more about cryptocurrencies, sending out subpoenas to crypto funds far and wide, including Arrington XRP Capital.

This conversation is sure to be an interesting one, and one you won’t want to miss. Tickets to Disrupt SF (September 5 to September 7) are available now.

Source: Tech Crunch

A long-running legal battle between the U.S. government and Microsoft has been dismissed by the Supreme Court (PDF) after the crux of the conflict was mooted by recent legislation. The company will now be forced to provide data stored on servers in Ireland that it had previously said should be obtained through that country’s authorities.

The case dates to 2013 and has become a sort of landmark on the frontier between global politics and tech. American law enforcement sought data on a user of Microsoft services in relation to a drug trafficking case; Microsoft said that the data in question was located exclusively in a datacenter in Ireland, and as such they must work out access with Irish authorities.

The U.S., of course, took issue with that since Microsoft is an American company, and the argument has gone back and forth for years. So far Microsoft has maintained a slight edge, to the delight of privacy advocates everywhere, who dislike the idea that global tech services should be so vulnerable to a single country’s whims.

It was on its way to a judgment by the Supreme Court, but legislators decided to intervene. The CLOUD Act, tacked onto thousands of pages of mixed bills and budgets pushed forward in a “too big to veto” omnibus spending package, changes the law so Microsoft’s arguments essentially cease to exist.

Under the CLOUD Act, companies must provide information properly requested by law enforcement “regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States.”

Microsoft itself supported this bill, along with other tech companies like Google and Apple, so this outcome won’t be a surprise. And although the CLOUD Act has its shortcomings, privacy and human rights advocates have offered cautious praise for the way it streamlines the global data exchanges that are so common now in cross-border investigations of major crimes.

The company issued the following statement on the decision:

We welcome the Supreme Court’s ruling ending our case in light of the CLOUD Act being signed into to law. Our goal has always been a new law and international agreements with strong privacy protections that govern how law enforcement gathers digital evidence across borders. As the governments of the UK and Australia have recognized, the CLOUD Act encourages these types of agreements, and we urge the US government to move quickly to negotiate them.

It would be premature and simplistic to say that this is a good or bad thing in the world of privacy — it depends a lot on who you trust and the shifting sands of courts and regulations. Its effects will likely be mixed and will provoke new legal battles while settling others, like this one. Lawmakers, tech companies, and advocacy organizations will all be watching closely.

Source: Tech Crunch

This year, artificial intelligence will further elevate the enterprise by transforming the way we work, securing digital assets, increasing collaboration and ushering in a new era of AI-powered innovation. Enterprise AI is rapidly moving beyond hype and into reality, and is primed to become one of the most consequential technological segments. Although startups have already realized AI’s power in redefining industries, enterprise executives are still in the process of understanding how it will transform their business and reshape their teams across all departments.

Throughout the past year, early adopting businesses of all sizes and industries began to reap benefits. AI applications with AI-powered capabilities introduced opportunities to change the way the enterprise engaged customers, segmented markets, assessed sales leads and engaged influencers. Enterprises are on the edge of taking this a step further because of the amount of knowledge and tools leveraging the potential of AI within their entire organization.

“New breakthroughs in AI, enabled by new hardware architectures, will create new intelligent business models for enterprises,” says Nigel Toon, co-founder and CEO at U.K.-based Graphcore. “Companies that can build an initial knowledge model and launch an initial intelligent service or product, then use this first product to capture new data and improve the knowledge model on a continuing basis, will quickly create clear class-leading products and services that competitors will struggle to keep up with.”

The category is evolving, and large companies are finding distinct ways to innovate. They can uniquely tap into decades of industry experience to develop horizontal AI, built for specific industries like healthcare, financial services, automotive, retail and more. These implementations, though, require deep industry expertise and industry-specific design, training, monitoring, security and implementation to meet the high-stakes IT requirements of global organizations.

“In 2018, AI is entering the enterprise. I believe we will see many enterprises adopt AI technology, but the (few) leaders will be those that can align AI with their strategic business goals,” says Ronny Fehling, associate director of Gamma Artificial Intelligence at BCG.

2018: AI will start separating the winners from the losers

Early industry successes (and failures) proved AI’s inevitability, but also the reality that wide-scale adoption would come through incremental progress only. This year, we’ll see AI move from influencing product or business functions to an organization-wide AI strategy. Expect the winners to move fast and remain nimble to keep implementing off-the-shelf and proprietary AI.

Hans-Christian Boos, CEO and founder of Germany-based Arago, adds: “2018 will be a make or break year for enterprise and the established economy in general. I believe AI is the only viable path for innovation, new business models and digital disruption in companies from the industrial era. General AI can enable these enterprises to finally make use of the only advantage they have in the battle against new business models and giants from the Silicon Valley, or rather giants from the new age of knowledge based business models.”

The AI talent challenge

A boon in enterprise AI will also mean a further shortage of talent. Industries like telecommunications, financial services and manufacturing will feel the talent squeeze the most. The companies that win the AI talent war will gain exponential advantages, given the category’s rapid growth.

Hence, enterprises will try to attract talent by offering a powerful vision, a track record of product success, a bench of early client implementations and the potential to impact the masses. It’s about developing high-functioning and reliable solutions that become a new foundation for clients.

Developers and data scientists, however, are only the beginning. Winning enterprises must adopt their organizational structures that attract a new generation of product managers, sales, marketing, communications and other delivery teams that understand AI. This requires an informed, passionate and forward-thinking group of professionals that will help customers understand the future of work and customer engagement powered by AI.

AI adoption and employee training

Digital transformation, powered in large part by new AI capabilities, requires enterprises to understand how to extract data and utilize data-driven intelligence. Data is one of the greatest assets and essentials in maximizing the value in an AI application, yet data is often underutilized and misunderstood. Executives must establish teams and hold individuals across departments accountable for the successful and ongoing implementation of digital tools that extract full value from available internal and external data.

This transformation into an AI-native organization requires it to hire, train and re-skill all levels of employees, and provide the resources for individuals to adopt AI-powered disciplines that enhance their performance. Most workforce, from top to bottom, should be encouraged to rethink and evolve their role by incorporating new digital tools, often enabled by AI itself.

Expect AI and other digital technologies to become more prevalent in all business disciplines, not only at the application layer, as Vishal Chatrath, co-founder and CEO of U.K.-based Prowler.io emphasises. “Decision-making in enterprise is dominated by expert-systems that are born obsolete. The AI tools available till now that rely on deep-neural nets which are great for classification problems (identifying cats, dogs, words etc.) are not really fit for purpose for decision-making in large, complex and dynamic environments, because they are very data inefficient (needs millions of data points) and effectively act like black-boxes. 2018 will see Enterprise AI move beyond classification to decision-making.”

What’s next

However, the spotlight will shine on data governance as businesses adjust entire departments and workflows around data. In turn, data management and integrity will be an essential component of success as consumers and enterprises gain greater awareness about how companies use customers’ data. This opens a large field of opportunities, but also will require transparency in how companies are using, sharing and building applications on top of customer data to ensure trust.

“Every single industry will be enhanced with AI in the coming years. In the last years there was a lot of foundation work on gathering standardized data and now we can start to use some of the advanced AI techniques to bring huge efficiency and quality gains to enterprise companies,” says Rasmus Rothe, co-founder and CTO of Germany-based research lab and venture builder Merantix. “Enterprises should therefore thoroughly analyze their business units to understand how AI can help them to improve. Partnering with external AI experts instead of trying to build everything yourself is often more capital efficient and also leads to better results.”

The shift toward AI-native enterprises is in a defining phase. The pie of the AI-enabled market will continue to grow and everyone has an opportunity to take a slice. Enterprises need to quickly leverage their assets and extract the value of their data as AI algorithms themselves will become the most valuable part when data has become a commodity. The question is, who will move first, and who will have the biggest appetite.

Source: Tech Crunch

Amazon has quietly launched an Android web browser app for emerging markets, where access to mobile data and high-speed connectivity is more limited. The browser has the rather generic name of: “Internet: fast, lite and private” on Google Play, and promises to be “lighter than the competition.”

The app first appeared on the Play Store in March, and has fewer than 1,000 downloads, according to data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

It’s only available to users in India for the time being, and is supported on devices running Android 5.0 or higher.

Like most “lite” apps, the new browser is a small download – it’s under 2 MB in size. That’s much smaller than other browsers, including Chrome (21MB), Edge (54.5MB), Firefox (19.9MB), and Opera (14.7MB), according to an analysis by appFigures.

The browser’s Google Play description also notes that it’s “private,” as it doesn’t ask for extra permissions or collect private data like other browsers do. This seems to indicate that it’s meant to be something of a competitor to other private mobile browsers, like Firefox, which blocks website trackers.

The browser additionally supports Private tabs, so you can browse without saving visits to your history, plus other features like tab previews, an automatic fullscreen mode, and integrated news reader of sorts.

In fact, the news reading experience is another telling indication that the browser is only meant for Indian users. The app’s description notes the browser homepage is designed to keep you up-to-date with news, cricket, and entertainment from top sources. Yep, cricket – the most popular sport in India.

And finally, the “feedback” email on Google Play points to Amazon India, which indicates it was built by that team.

In addition to the new browser, Amazon also offers a Kindle Lite app in India.

The company is not alone in building lightweight mobile apps for emerging markets.

Facebook also offers “lite” versions of its apps, like Facebook Lite and Messenger Lite, to reach users with limited connectivity and access to data. Google has also rolled out a suite of lightweight mobile apps under the “Go” branding. Some of these, like Gmail Go, only come pre-installed on select devices. Others, meanwhile, are available through Google Play for anyone to download, like YouTube Go, Files Go, Google Go, Google Maps, and Google Assistant Go.

It is interesting, however, that Amazon didn’t adopt a similar strategy by offering a “lite” version of its existing Silk browser, but has instead built something new.

And if its goal is to offer an alternative to Silk on the Fire tablets it sells in India, it’s odd that the browser isn’t yet available in the Amazon Appstore in India.

Amazon has not yet returned a request for comment about the new app.

Source: Tech Crunch

Just in time for the annual RSA conference in San Francisco, Microsoft today announced a number of new security tools for its business users that range from new tools to prevent phishing attacks to a new service that only allows you to access certain online services if your device also has a clean bill of health.

Attackers know that humans are typically the weakest link in any company’s security protocols and the rise of phishing attacks bears witness to that. Some larger companies have long run simulated phishing exercises that test their employee’s responses. Here at Oath, we all regularly get notices about speeding in the company parking lot, for example. Most small and medium businesses don’t have the resources to do this, but Microsoft is now making this easier with the launch of a new phishing attack simulator that allows IT to easily create a fake phishing email to see if employees fall for them. If they do, it’s probably time for some extra security training.

Andrew Conway, Microsoft’s general manager for Microsoft 365 Security, told me that about 80 to 90 percent of the data breaches that his team sees go the phishing route. While Microsoft and others are taking steps to detect these attacks before they ever hit a user’s inbox, algorithms can’t catch all of them — and then it’s up to the user to know what to do.

Many of the other new security features the company is launching today rely on the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, the company’s main tools for tracking and mitigation attacks across platforms and services. Conway described it as the “central nervous system for our security solutions.” Using AI and other tools, Microsoft uses the data it gets from analyzing web pages, emails and malware threats on Windows 10 and the cloud to warn users of existing and new threats. “This is something that maybe, in the past, if I were a large customer, I could afford to run my own security center,” said Conway. “What we see is that we are trying to make this capability more broadly available.”

One of the new feature that’s based on the Security Graph is an extension of the existing Office 365 Conditional Access service. Conditional Access, in its existing form, ensures that only users who have been authenticated and use an authenticated and compliant device get access to Office 365 service. With this update, Microsoft will combine this information with data from the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) security scanner to ensure that you can only access a given SaaS service if your device is healthy. This feature is now in preview and will become generally available with the launch of the next Windows 10 update. When that update will go live is anyone’s guess.

In that next version of Windows 10, Defender ATP also will get the capability to automatically apply remediation, a new feature that relies at least partly on the technology Microsoft acquired when it bought the Israeli security firm Hexadite.

For IT admins, Microsoft is also launching a new tool that gives them a better overview of their overall security posture: the Microsoft Secure Score. This is an expansion of the existing Office 365 Secure Score tool and gives admins a single measure for evaluating their risk profile across Office 365 service and their users’ devices.

Source: Tech Crunch

“The percentage of Top 40 music made with our platform blows my mind” says Splice co-founder Steve Martocci. He tells me about some bedroom music producers who were “working at Olive Garden until they put sounds on Splice.” Soon they quit their jobs since they were earning enough from artists downloading those sounds to use in their songs. That led them to collaborate with famous DJ Zedd, resulting in the Billboard #12 hit “Starving”.

Splice has attracted $47 million in funding to power this all-new music economy. That might be a shock considering Martocci estimates that 95% of digital instruments and sample packs are pirated since they’re often expensive with no try-before-you-buy option. Even Kanye West got caught stealing the trendy Serum digital synthesizer.

But Splice lets artists pay $7.99 per month to download up to 100 samples they can use royalty-free to create music. That’s cheaper than it costs to listen to music on Spotify. Splice then compensates artists based on how frequently their sounds are downloaded, and has already paid out over $7 million.

Splice Sounds is like an iTunes Store for samples

“We try to make more seats at the table in the music business” says Martocci, who previously founded messaging app GroupMe which sold to Skype for between $50 million and $80 million in 2011. “GroupMe was made to go to concerts with our friends. Music has always been my motivator, but code is my canvas. Artists come up to me and hug me because I’m changing the creative process.”

Splice co-founder Steve Martocci

But now he’s getting some big name assistance, attracted by Splice’s success in the stubborn musician community and its $35 million Series B from December. Splice has just hired former Facebook product manager Matt Pake as VP of product to lead core teams in New York, and former Secret co-founder Chrys Bader to build out a new squad in Los Angeles. [Disclosure: I knew both from before they moved out of the SF social scene]

Splice now has 100 staffers, mostly hobbyist musicians themselves, but “I don’t think I have one bay area employee” says Martocci. He wants his offices where the artists live. “Everyone has a genuine passion for music. It doesn’t feel like a tech company as much” says Bader. Martocci apparently takes feedback well, which is different because “I’ve had some pretty fucking hard people to work with in the past…” Bader notes, likely referring to disagreements with his co-founder at Secret. “I have zero tolerance for bullshit at this point in my life and there’s zero bullshit on this team.”

While the Sounds marketplace has blown up recently, pushing Splice to 1.5 million users, the startup has a grander vision for software to eat instruments. That means creating the same kind of tools that help programmers code apps, but for musicians to compose songs. Splice Studio integrates with composition software like GarageBand, Logic, and Ableton to offer cloud-synced version control.

This might sound nerdy, but it’s a lifesaver. Splice Studio automatically backs up the artist’s work-in-progress song after every single edit so they can always reverse changes and safely work with collaborators without having to nervously save manually and fret about keeping all the copies organized.

Splice saves every edit to a song-in-progress so you can experiment but always reverse changes

Since Splice’s staffers actually make music themselves rather than parachuting into a foreign space, they intimately understand the frustrations they’re trying to solve. Knowing income can be unpredictable, Splice lets musicians access plugins, software, and instruments on a rent-to-own basis where they can pause payment and resume later. That’s the kind of convenience that Bader says makes Splice “easier than piracy”, echoing Spotify director Sean Parker’s plan to beat bootleg MP3s with a simple streaming service. “I wanted to build something even Reddit couldn’t complain about”, Martocci laughs.

But where Splice goes next could addresses the biggest, most insidious barrier to creative output: writer’s block. Ask most modern musicians, and they’ll tell you about their giant folders of unfinished songs. Getting from a melody rattling around in you head to a few tracks laid out in your preferred composition software is the easy part. Polishing those parts, ditching the unnecessary ones, finding the rights sounds, and tieing it all together into something listenable can be agonizingly difficult.

Creative Companion is Splice’s solution. Currently being built by Bader’s LA team, it’s a songwriting assistant that can suggest a next step and surface samples that fit well with those you’re already using. Martocci explains how Splice uses “cool machine learning stuff” to recommend ‘Hey, you should add a bass line. You should add some mastering.”

Splice just hired Chrys Bader, previously the co-founder of Secret

The question for Splice will be how many music producers out there are willing to pay. “There’s an upper bound. This is not a consumer product” Bader admits. Citing internal research, he says there 30 million music producers in the world. Many might not even know about Splice, “but at $8 a month, that’s not really breaking the bank. You might pay $200 for a plugin or $700 for Ableton. That’s insane. Musicans can’t afford that. Yet a musician friend tells me all the time ‘I’m broke, I’m broke…but I live or die by Splice.’”

Splice’s heavy-duty funding from Union Square Ventures, True Ventures, and DFJ could also attract competition. It might awake the interest of big creative services corporations like Adobe, or more established music production tool companies like Native Instruments which just launched a direct competitor called Sounds.com. But Splice is digging in for a long fight, giving away Splice Studio to lure in users and commissioning exclusive sample packs from top creators. In that sense, Splice is almost like a record label.

“I want to see a world with more transcendent musical highs” where “you have more music that’s ready for moment” Martocci opines. “If we build something that makes musicians lives better, that makes our lives better because a lot of us are musicians, what else is there in life?” Bader explains.

Computers democratized music-making, leading to a flood of amateurs sharing their content with the world. But all good democratizations necessitate layers of curation to sort through all the output, which social networks have become, and tools to let the most talented artists create what’s worth everyone’s attention.

Martocci concludes “Software is a great instrument. One-third of the world tries to make music at some point. They’re not going to pick up guitars and recorders any more.” Whatever app they choose, Splice wants to keep them in the creative flow.

Source: Tech Crunch

Following the passage of a new cybersecurity law and the removal of term limits from Chinese president Xi Jinping, China’s government is conducting a comprehensive crackdown on online discussions and content, with few companies spared the rod by the central government.

Among the casualties has been Bytedance, the extremely high-flying $20 billion media unicorn startup which was forced to publicly apologize for content that degraded the character of the nation. The government forced the company to shut down its popular Neihan Duanzi comedy app, as well as to remove its headline news app, Jinri Toutiao, for three weeks. The company announced that it would expand the number of human censors from 6,000 to 10,000.

Another high-flying media unicorn, Kuaishou, has been under fire for allowing teenage moms to be depicted in a positive light. The app is unique among China’s top social networks in focusing on ordinary Chinese, and is known for its focus on people outside of large cities like Beijing and Shanghai. The company has faced public criticism from central television channel CCTV, as well as from regulators who have demanded the company act more aggressively in removing the content, a demand the company has acquiesced to.

Meanwhile, over at Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service, the company announced on Friday that it would ban violent and gay content from its service, following instructions from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television. LGBT content has been in the crosshairs of the country’s media regulators for years; for example, censors banned “abnormal sexual behaviors” from being depicted in any media or mobile apps in 2017, a term which includes homosexuality.

However, in a rare about-face for corporate China and internet censors, the company announced that it would reverse its ban of LGBT-themed content, following thousands of comments and discussions online by gay Chinese citizens. The company’s crackdown on other content though is expected to continue though.

There are other forms of censorship underway these days in China. China’s soccer players were banned from having tattoos a few weeks ago, since it depicts a “dispirited culture,” which is banned on all media. Perhaps most importantly, the government has banned the use of private VPNs, in order to better control online discourse.

China’s censorship regime is certainly not new, but its intensity around culture and how it is depicted is relatively novel. While the Chinese government has generally kept a tight lid on political dissent, particularly since the Tiananmen Protests in 1989, it has generally used a lighter touch on non-political subjects.

However, the Communist Party of China is now attempting to control the culture much more directly, not just on broadcast media like television, but also on apps and devices throughout the Middle Kingdom.

Following the National People’s Congress in March, the regulation of China’s media has been reassigned from the government to the party’s Central Propaganda Department. Since then, the party has been working in overdrive to tamp down content that it deems to be foreign, crude, vulgar, or not in the best spirit of the Chinese people.

While China’s media startups generally focus heavily on the mainland, their apps are also located in the app stores in other countries. Bytedance, which was forced to shut down its news app, also owns musical.ly, the popular music video app used by approximately 14% of American teenagers, according to some estimates. China’s censorship regime doesn’t stop at the nation’s borders then, but can extend its influence far wider.

Another example is Grindr, the popular gay dating app, which sold a majority share of its ownership to Beijing Kunlun Tech Company in early 2016.

The crackdown on speech is expected to continue over the coming weeks as the new rules are applied uniformly across the country. The situation is a reminder of the challenges of Chinese companies operating in the heavily-controlled country.

Although there are many trade tensions between the U.S. and China these days, a key issue has been access to the Chinese market for American technology companies. Even if China were to open its borders though, it remains unclear how U.S. companies could faithfully apply the law of China while maintaining their own moral standards.

Source: Tech Crunch