Month: September 2018

Few would equate human life with battery life, but for many migrants escaping war or famine, a single percentage point of battery can mean getting the right information at the right time – or not surviving at all.

Smartphones today have become an integral part of a forced migrant’s journey. From navigating mountains in Central Asia using Google Maps to staying connected with family back home via WhatsApp, smartphones have transformed the migrant experience – though not always for the better.

No electron spared

In Eastern Europe, many migrants pushed back from Hungary stay along the border on the Serbian side in abandoned buildings. Volunteers visit these sites to bring supplies, including repurposed car batteries that migrants use to charge their phones.

At one abandoned building less than a mile from the Hungarian border, migrants huddle around one car battery to charge their phones, and they all agree about the importance of battery life to them. Many asked for a power bank to enable them to charge their phone when outlets are not available. Between each other, they constantly compare notes on what apps use up the most battery power, and remind each other to close apps when not in use.

Nashid, a migrant from Pakistan taking shelter in this building, says one of his primary needs at this remote outpost is for a way to charge his phone. With no regular access to electricity, he depends on the visits of volunteers to be able to charge his battery, concocting all sorts of ways to keep it alive until their next visit. Some of his strategies include making sure his phone is turned off when he sleeps at night or if he naps during the day, as well as using the lowest brightness level possible. He swears that taking out a dead battery and shaking it repeatedly provides him with a few extra minutes of phone use.

For many migrants traversing Eastern Europe to get to Western Europe, the Hungarian-Serbian border presents the final frontier. Once in Hungary, migrants will have entered the Schengen Area, the 26 EU-member zone with no border controls, making their destination countries in Western Europe significantly easier to reach. Increased security though has made this border crossing significantly harder – with many migrants being beaten and pushed back into Serbia dozens of times before they eventually make it across.

Nashid has been trying to cross into Hungary from Serbia for the past eight months. He left his family, including a wife and two kids, back in Pakistan before setting out to Europe. He says he uses WhatsApp to keep in touch with them and to stay connected to his cousin in Paris – his ultimate destination. He admits, battery constraints aside, that his phone also provides him with a reprieve from long hours spent idly waiting every day. He tries to sneak a song or two, or watch a couple of Urdu-language videos on YouTube.

One journey, a million apps

Over the last few years, Serbia has taken on the role of a major transit point for migrants trying to make it to Western Europe. The Refugee Aid Miksalište Center in the Serbian capital Belgrade, a drop-in center open 24 hours a day, is staffed by NGOs that provide services to migrants in transit. As soon as you enter the Center, you again see migrants gathered around extension cords, charging their phones and using the Center’s free Wi-Fi to access their social media and Skype with friends and family back home.

Migrants in Serbia huddle around a power strip to charge their smartphones (Photo by Ziad Reslan)

The same scene seems to repeat wherever migrants congregate. The nearly 70 million forced migrants across the world today have had to travel thousands of miles to get to a place of refuge. More than half of these migrants come from just three countries: Syria, Afghanistan, and South Sudan. Syrians, the single largest forcibly displaced population, have to traverse on average more than 1,400 miles just to get to Serbia’s border with Hungary on their long trek from Aleppo to Western Europe.

From getting directions, to learning languages, to simply accessing entertainment, smartphones have become vital for migrants on these grueling journeys that can last for months – if at the very least to get some emotional support by talking to loved ones they leave behind.

At the height of the European refugee crisis in the summer of 2015, when nearly a million Syrian refugees crossed into Europe to escape a brutal civil war, Facebook and WhatsApp chat groups sprung up to let migrants know of real-time developments on the road, which smugglers to trust, and what rates to negotiate. Dropped GPS pins and Google Maps turn directions into practical routes migrants can take. In some cases, migrants on sinking boats in the Mediterranean have helped coast guards find them by sending GPS signals from their smartphones.

Migrants download German, French, English, and other language learning apps on their phones to aid them in acculturating to their eventual destination while they’re still on the move. They use Google Translate to understand road signs in Bulgarian, Serbian, and Hungarian. And with migrant journeys breaking up families, smartphones have become migrants’ only way to stay connected.

In recognition of the importance of connectivity to forcibly-displaced migrants, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) – launched “Connectivity for Refugees” in mid-2016. The initiative advocates for migrants’ right to connectivity; enables access through negotiated data rates for refugees, subsidized device prices, and internet access centers; and provides training to ensure migrants are able to fully take advantage of their smartphones. Two years in, the UNHCR plans to increase the initiative’s staffing and roll out connectivity programs beyond the current pilot countries of Jordan, Greece, Chad, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Startups, for their part, have also been ramping up efforts to help migrants. Two Columbia architecture students, Anna Stork and Andrea Sreshta, cofounded LuminAid. A startup that makes the PackLite Max 2-in-1 Phone Charger, a solar-powered phone charger and light source that the cofounders have given away to displaced migrants. With the UNHCR estimating that up to a third of a forced migrant’s income is spent on connectivity, Phone Credit for Refugees has taken on providing migrants with free data access. Others, like GeeCycle, have instead focused on collecting used smartphones from around the world and distributing them to refugees fleeing conflict.

The challenge of misinformation

NGOs like Save the Children Serbia operate out of the Refugee Aid Miksalište, a drop in center with free WIFi and available plugs. (Photo by Ziad Reslan)

For all of their benefits though, smartphones have not always improved the journeys of forced migrants. The reliance on anonymous sources on social media to navigate routes has left migrants vulnerable to smugglers and traffickers looking to take advantage of their misfortune. Even information obtained from relatives can turn out to be erroneous – with heart-wrenching consequences.

Jelena Besedic, an Advocacy Manager for Save the Children Serbia, says that the spread of misinformation has been part of the reason for the rise of unaccompanied children traversing the Balkans from Afghanistan. Parents of kids as young as eight now stuck in Serbia were falsely told that, if their kids arrive safely in Western Europe, they’re entitled to bring their parents.

Misinformation of this sort about the ease of the asylum process can lead migrants to take on increasingly dangerous journeys, only to be disappointed with the reality once they reach their destination countries. This misinformation has led organizations, like the International Organization for Migration, to start information campaigns at source countries to better educate would be migrants about the dangers of setting out west. In addition, increasingly nationalist governments, like Hungary and Italy, have started campaigns targeting the smartphones of migrants with text messages and online ads to dissuade them from coming to their countries in the first place.

Familial pressure on migrants may have always been a reality, but access to smartphones has made that pressure incessant and instantaneous. Stuck at the border between Serbia and Hungary, Nashid says he would never have made the trek if he knew what he would have to face on his more than 4,000-mile journey from Pakistan to France. But while he was still in Pakistan, he had received messages non-stop from his cousin in Paris telling him how easy it was for him to get there and how plentiful jobs are in France. Once Nashid left Pakistan, messages from his wife and two kids constantly asking whether he’d arrived in Paris have made the idea of going back home impossible.

Nashid ends our conversation by asking me to confirm a rumor he’s heard on WhatsApp. Is it true, he asks, that there are now personal battery banks that one can charge like a phone that extend a smartphone’s battery life by up to 100 hours? A charger like that, he stresses, would make a world of a difference to him out here miles away from the nearest plug.

Source: Tech Crunch

JD.com’s billionaire CEO Richard Liu was arrested by Minneapolis police late Friday night on suspicion of alleged sexual misconduct. He was released yesterday afternoon around 4 p.m.

Today, JD.com, one of China’s largest online retailers, issued the following statement: “During a business trip to the United States, Mr. Liu was questioned by police in Minnesota in relation to an unsubstantiated accusation. The local police quickly determined there was no substance to the claim against Mr. Liu, and he was subsequently able to resume his business activities as originally planned.”

John Elder, public information officer for the Minneapolis Police Department, tells us the investigation remains active but he wasn’t able to share many further details, telling us he isn’t aware of when Liu arrived into the Minneapolis metropolitan area and that he isn’t authorized to say when the complaint against Liu was received. As for why Liu was detained for 16 hours instead of the 36 hours the local police department is authorized to hold a person before charging them or releasing them and continuing an investigation, Elder said the investigator “decided it wasn’t necessary to hold onto him, that we can conduct a fair and thorough investigation” without having Liu in custody. Elder added that more people are typically held the duration than released, but that it’s “not uncommon.”

According Minnesota’s state statute,  sexual misconduct is defined as a range of things that can lead to anything from a felony charge to a gross misdemeanor charge. Among these is a sexual act with a person under 13 years of age, if the actor is more than three years older than the complainant; a sexual act between someone who is under 16 years of age with an actor who is more than four years older; circumstances at the time of a sexual act that cause the complainant to have a reasonable fear of imminent great bodily harm; an accomplice who uses force or coercion to induce an act with the complainant; and if the actor knows or has reason to know that the complainant is mentally impaired, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless.

Asked if JD’s statement in any way interferes with the police department’s investigation, Elder says it does not. “People can say whatever they’d like. As with any investigation, this is a case and we’ll bring it through to fruition just like we do every other case.” This means deciding whether or not, based on the police department’s investigation, to refer the case for charge to either the city attorney’s office or the Hennepin County attorney’s office, which would then file paperwork through a district court.

JD.com’s rise in China has largely been unstoppable, though its newest quarterly earnings report fell short of Wall Street expectations, owing in part to heightened competition from rival Alibaba. The company, which claims to have more than 300 million customers, is regularly profiled by local and international media outlets, with the love life of Liu a particular point of fascination.

Not all of that attention has been desirable. Liu, who was married in  2015 and has two children, reportedly tried to distance himself from a sexual assault that was alleged to have taken place the same year at his penthouse in Australia. According to the New York Times, one of his guests, a property development professional, was found guilty of seven charges, including having sex with his accuser without her consent. Though Liu wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing, the Times reports that he asked an Australian court to prevent the release of his name by citing damage to his marriage and business. Last month, a judge rejected that request.

Like many of China’s new titans, Liu grew up poor. In a sit-down last fall with the Financial Times, he said he’d only tasted meat once or twice a year before going to college at age 18, instead eating corn-based products for months at a time, including “cornmeal porridge for breakfast, corn pancakes for lunch and dry cornbread for dinner — cornbread so tough it made your throat bleed.” The rest of the year they ate sweet potatoes. Today, the 45-year-old is reportedly worth nearly $8 billion.

In talking with the FT, Liu acknowledged JD.com’s fierce battle for customers with Alibaba without referring to the company by name. “Within five years I’m 100 percent sure we will be the largest B2C [business to consumer] platform in China — we will surpass any competitor.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Starry wants to change the way the home internet is delivered. Founded in 2014, the Boston-based startup takes an innovative approach to the space by beaming broadband speed internet through the air, using millimeter waves.

The company’s novel technique has drummed up great interest during its four years of existence, offering the potential to circumvent the need to lay down fiber-optics and shake up ISP lockdowns. Investors have certainly been paying attention. In July, the startup raised another $100 million, bringing its total up to $163 million.

The company has been piloting its service for a couple of years now, starting in its native Boston and rolling out to a handful of other American metropolitan areas, including testing in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, both of which arrived this year. In January, Starry teamed up with networking manufacturing giant Marvell to help distribute the startup’s technology across the globe.

Starry CEO Chaitanya “Chet” Kanojia will be joining us next week at Disrupt San Francisco to discuss his company’s growth and the future of its cutting edge internet technology. Prior to founding Starry, Kanojia also served as the founder and CEO of TV streaming platform Aero and media advertising company Navic Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Source: Tech Crunch

Labor Day is a holiday that just doesn’t fit Silicon Valley. It’s purported purpose is to celebrate working men and women and their — our — progress toward better working conditions and fairer workplaces. Yet, few regions in recent times have supposedly done more to “destroy” quality working conditions than the Valley, from the entire creation of the precarious 1099 economy to automation of labor itself.

My colleague John Chen offered the received wisdom on this discrepancy this weekend, arguing that Valley entrepreneurs should take the traditional message of Labor Day to heart, encouraging them to create more equitable, fair, and secure workplaces not just for their own employees, but also for all the workers that power the platforms we create and operate every day.

It’s a nice sentiment that I agree with, but I think he misses the mark.

What Silicon Valley needs — now more than ever before — is to double down on the kind of ambitious, hard-charging, change-the-world labor that created our modern knowledge economy in the first place. We can’t and shouldn’t slow down. We need more technological progress, not less. We need more automation of labor, not less. And we need as much of this innovation to happen in the United States as possible.

The tech industry may have become a dominant force by some metrics, but we are only just getting started. Entire industries like freight have little to no automation. Several billion people lack access to the internet, to say nothing of critical, basic infrastructure. Our drug pipeline is anemic, and costs for education, health care, construction, and government are continuing to skyrocket.

In short, we have barely scratched the surface of what we can achieve with software, with hardware, with better business models and better automation. These aren’t table scraps, but trillions dollar opportunities lying in wait for entrepreneurs to seize them.

And yet, we keep hearing persistent claims that overwork is a problem in the Valley. Discussions of work-life balance are practically de rigueur for startups these days, as are free meals and massages and unlimited vacation time. These demands are coming at a time when some of the most fertile opportunities for innovation in areas as diverse as robotics, space, biotech, cancer, and construction remain ripe for the taking.

It’s a hustlers world out there, and the message that those who want to shape that world should be hearing this Labor Day is simple: work harder. Hell, work today.

Certainly that’s the message ingrained in most places competing with the Valley these days. Mike Moritz wrote a column in the Financial Times earlier this year, comparing the hard-charging work ethic of Chinese tech entrepreneurs and workers with their Silicon Valley brethren. He didn’t mince words, and the piece ignited a firestorm of criticism.

But he’s right, and not just about Chinese founders. Entrepreneurs in developing and middle-income countries from India and South Korea to Brazil and Nigeria now have access to the same tools that top Valley startups use, with experience to boot. And they are hungry to transform their lot in life into something much more ambitious, much more grand.

We need to re-inject their level of urgency back into the Valley ethos and compete ferociously. We can’t rest on companies from the 1990s like Google, or the 1970s like Apple and Microsoft as the final wave of innovative companies. We need the next massive tech companies to be built, and they’re not going to be created 20-hour workweeks at a time.

Entrepreneurship is a rough and solitary life. Hustling isn’t fun, losing deals isn’t enjoyable, and working around the clock under intense pressure is not for the faint of heart. For those who want the easy road, there are many, many pathways today in the modern American economy that will guarantee it, whether that is a big tech giant, or some other Fortune 100 company.

Yet, the spirit of America is always choosing the bigger gamble, the bolder vision. And it is the people who stand up and demand that we make huge strides today — not tomorrow — that are going to own the future.

Of course, founding a company has to be a voluntary choice. No one should have to work for a pittance, or feel coerced into a high-pressure lifestyle when they aren’t ready and willing. No one should be locked into an economic system where they can’t improve their own income and status through tenacity and strategy. Our tech companies should absolutely be more diverse, and fairer to all people. Equity can and should be more widely distributed.

But when it comes to the true meaning of Labor Day in the American sense, we should celebrate the hard-working founders and entrepreneurs who are taking on the biggest challenges and focusing all of their talents on solving these critical human problems. That’s what made Silicon Valley what it is, and it’s the meaning of Labor Day that every founder and dreamer should center on.

Source: Tech Crunch

There’s no lack of creative innovators, makers and technical entrepreneurs throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, and that’s why we’re bringing Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 — our world-renowned startup pitch competition — to Lagos, Nigeria on December 11.

We want to give every innovative early-stage startup in the region the chance to compete, which is why we’re extending the application deadline another week. We encourage tech startup founders (yes, we’re looking at YOU) to apply and join us for what may very well be a life-changing journey. You now have until September 10 at 5 p.m. PT to fill out and submit your application right here.

We’re not kidding around when we say Startup Battlefield can change your life. Since 2007, more than 750 companies have competed in our startup pitch competition. Our alumni community includes the likes of Dropbox, Mint, TripIt, Vurb and many others. Collectively, they’ve raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced 102 exits. And we can’t wait to add up to 15 amazing founders from across Sub-Saharan Africa to our ranks.

The benefits of competing go beyond the prizes bestowed upon the winning founders. Every participating team receives invaluable exposure — not to mention invaluable connections — that lasts far beyond the initial day of competition. Plus, competing in Startup Battlefield is 100 percent free. That exposure comes with some mighty fine ROI attached to it.

Our experienced TechCrunch editors will scrutinize every eligible application and choose up to 10 startups to compete, and those founders will receive free pitch coaching from Battlefield-tested editors. When the day comes, and you step on stage to make your pitch, you’ll be ready to handle whatever the judges throw at you.

In three preliminary rounds (up to five startups per round), teams have six minutes to pitch and present their demo to a panel of judges composed of distinguished entrepreneurs, technologists and investors (recruited by our editors). After each pitch, the judges pose tough questions in a six-minute Q&A. Five startups will move on to pitch again — to a different set of judges with another round of questions.

One company will earn the title of the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 champion and the best startup in Sub-Saharan Africa. Now, about those prizes we mentioned earlier. The winning founders receive $25,000 in no-equity cash and a trip for two to compete in Startup Battlefield in San Francisco at our flagship event, TechCrunch Disrupt 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).

Here’s what you need to know about eligibility. Startups should:

• Be early-stage companies in “launch” stage
• Be headquartered in one of our eligible countries*
• Have a fully working product/beta that’s reasonably close to, or in, production
• Have received limited press or publicity to date
• Have no known intellectual property conflicts
• Apply by September 10, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST

Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 takes place in Lagos, Nigeria on December 11. We’ve extended the application deadline as far as we can go. You have until September 10 at 5 p.m. PT — but don’t delay. Submit your application right here.

*Residents in the following countries may apply:

Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Comoros, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in the foregoing language, the “Applicable Countries” does not include any country to or on which the United States has embargoed goods or imposed targeted sanctions.

Source: Tech Crunch

That large number comes courtesy of Amazon’s press event at IFA in Berlin this week. It’s an impressive jump, given that the company was only boasting around 4,000 the last time it reported a number at the beginning of the year.

“Just this year,” exec Daniel Rausch told the crowd, as reported by CNET. “Alexa has sung Happy Birthday millions of times to customers, and she’s told over 100 million jokes.”

That’s a lot jokes — at least one or two of them must have been good, right?

Alexa confirmed the number with TechCrunch, noting that Alexa is on “20k+ devices you can control with Alexa, from 3500+ brands.”

Amazon’s own devices only make up a small portion of the overall number, of course. There just aren’t that many Echo smart speakers, the Fire TV and Fire tablets. But the company has been making an extremely aggressive push to get the assistant on as many third-party devices as possible.

In many cases working closely with manufacturers on integration, both as partnerships and part of the company’s Alexa Fund, designed to invest in hardware startups. These days, the list of categories Alexa access is big and only getting bigger, from phones to thermostats to TVs to cars. At IFA this week, both Huawei and Netgear brought the assistant to home routers.

Google, too, has been pushing hard on manufacturers for third-party integration with its own offering — though it’s not hitting Alexa-type numbers just yet. In May, the company announced that 5,000 devices supported Assistant, up from 1,500 in January.

Source: Tech Crunch

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2018, Uber’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Bo Young Lee will be joining us to talk about the ride-sharing company’s efforts to put detoxify its corporate culture and promote a more inclusive environment for employees.

Lee was hired as the company’s first chief diversity and inclusion officer this past January, after leaving insurance company Marsh LLC where she held a similar role.

Uber has obviously had its fair share of issues with fostering an inclusive culture, they’ve made some public efforts to showcase that the company was making active efforts to promote internal change and they seem to at least be having a more peaceful 2018 than 2017 — in terms of news surrounding the company’s culture. Nevertheless, there has still been plenty of movement surrounding diversity at the company even after Lee’s hire.

In April, the company released its first diversity report under new Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi showing some slight improvements with the percentage of female employees (38 percent) at the company, while there was a slight drop in black representation and a bump in Latinx representation.

In June, the company’s Chief Brand Officer Bozoma Saint John left the company, noting in an interview with TechCrunch that Uber had made some improvements but still had work to do. “I’m not saying the corporate culture has righted itself 100 percent,” John said. “Or it’s where it needs to be today. It isn’t. There’s still a lot to be done in that regard.”

In July, the company’s Chief People Officer Liane Hornsey, whom Lee reported to, resigned from the company following a racial discrimination investigation that targeted how the executive was handling complaints.

There’s obviously plenty to talk about in terms of the company’s own diversity efforts, we’re also looking forward to picking Lee’s brain about broader trends around inclusion in the tech industry and where her cautious optimism lies.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Source: Tech Crunch

It has the feel of a science fiction plot. A young man heads online to look up deals on things he likes.

Slowly, the tables turn. Now, it’s the computer that starts telling him what he wants. Buy these pants. Play this song. Eat this pizza. Date this girl. Read news with this political spin…

OK, I lied. This isn’t sci-fi at all. It’s the current reality. And it’s the kind of thing venture capitalists seem keen on funding.

An analysis of Crunchbase data shows that global venture funding for personalization and recommendation platforms has surged in recent quarters. Investors are pouring billions into the space, creating a string of newly minted unicorns relying on algorithms to customize music streams, news feeds and much more.

Exits are also riding high for software-driven tastemakers. Recent ones include Spotify’s smash IPO, along with China-based news aggregator Qutoutiao, which is poised to go public at a multi-billion-dollar valuation.

Herein we take a look at where the money is going, how it could accelerate and the changing nature of how we find new things to like.

Getting personal

Before we go further, let’s define the personalization category. Essentially, we’re looking at business models that involve using software to match humans with things they might want to consume. This could be music, news, handbags, wine, other humans and lots more.*

Personalization isn’t generally considered a discrete sector. To use a cooking metaphor, it’s sort of like chicken. It’s not a cuisine so much as an ingredient you can dress up in almost any culinary style. Likewise, you can add software-driven personalization and recommendations to a wide variety of businesses focused on e-commerce, digital media, food delivery and so on.

It’s apparently a useful ingredient for driving up valuations. In the table below, we lay out some of the recent and most significant funding rounds for companies in a range of sectors that are deploying software-driven personalization and recommendation models.

The list represents more a sampling than a comprehensive data set, as a significant number of companies incorporate some form of software-driven personalization. We also mostly left out the enormous and heavily funded set of startups that rely on a combination of software and actual humans to deliver recommendations.

As you can see from the selected list above, those securing the largest rounds are a globally diverse bunch. Having a computer tell you what you want is a market niche that transcends national boundaries.

News and entertainment

Lately, the biggest chunk of funding is going to China-based news and entertainment aggregators.

Six-year-old Toutiao is climbing the unicorn ranks at a remarkable pace. Its parent company, Beijing-based Bytedance, has raised more than $3 billion to date and is reportedly seeking new funding at a $75 billion valuation. With active users in the hundreds of millions, its success stems from the use of machine learning to figure out people’s interests and offer up content they’ll click on.

At least three other China-based news and entertainment aggregators have raised $50 million or more in fresh funding since last year, including public market-bound Qutoutiao, loosely translated as “fun headlines.” The company describes its value add as providing technology-based “content personalization” to help users navigate the exponential growth in online offerings.

And then there’s iQiyi, the company sometimes called the Netflix of China. It scored one the year’s largest IPOs, and it was recently trading at around a $21 billion valuation.

Mature markets for personalization

For the U.S. market, meanwhile, the companies most closely associated with software-driven personalization have been public for quite some time.

Netflix, now valued at around $160 billion, went public 16 years ago. Google acquired YouTube back in 2006. And Amazon.com has been serving up algorithm-driven suggestions of what to buy for two decades.

Articles on the oddities of software-driven video recommendations date back to at least 2002. By now, Americans are pretty used to apps attempting to make our shopping and binge-watching selections. While occasionally creepy, it can also be convenient.

So what’s next on the personalization horizon? Looking at funded startups, it’s apparent there’s an ongoing drive among retailers other than Amazon to take back some market share by offering a more customized shopping experience.

One startup working in the area is New York-based Dynamic Yield, which has raised $63 million since last summer to scale a machine learning-based platform used by retailers like Stitch Fix and Urban Outfitters to match shoppers with things to buy. Another is True Fit, which has raised more than $110 million to work with prominent apparel brands and retailers to match consumers with styles that fit and flatter.

There’s a lot at stake. Research firm Boston Consulting Group predicts that personalization will push a revenue shift of some $800 billion to the 15 percent of companies that get it right.

That’s a big number, and it underscores a rapidly changing shift in consumer behavior. Call it the age of the tasteful machine.

Of course, it’s still possible to cultivate personal style and taste on your own. However, startup entrepreneurs, tech giants and venture capitalists seem to share a unified vision of software making a much bigger contribution to that effort.

As a result, what was once science fiction is now just becoming the way we shop.

* We decided not to include recommendation engines for financial services products and insurance. These are generally not so much tastemaking as matching products to an existing credit history and questionnaire answers.

Source: Tech Crunch

Yes I am very late to this. But I am also very annoyed so I am adding my voice to the now sustained chorus of complaints about Apple’s redesigned Mac keyboard: How very much it sucks. Truly, madly, deeply.

This is the keyboard that Apple “completely redesigned” in 2015, in its quest for size zero hardware, switching from a scissor mechanism for the keys to what it described then as the “new Apple-designed butterfly mechanism” — touting this as 40% thinner and 4x more stable.

Reader, there is nothing remotely beautiful and butterfly-esque about the experience of depressing these keys. Scattershot staccato clattering, as your fingers are simultaneously sucked in and involuntarily hammer out a grapeshot of key strikes, is what actually happens. It’s brutalist and unforgiving. Most egregiously it’s not reliably functional.

The redesigned mechanism has resulted in keys that not only feel different when pressed vs the prior MacBook keyboard — which was more spongey for sure but that meant keys were at reduced risk of generating accidental strikes vs their barely-there trigger-sensitive replacements (which feel like they have a 40% smaller margin for keystrike error) — but have also turned out to be fail prone, as particles of dust can find their way in between the keys, as dust is wont to do, and mess with the smooth functioning of key presses — requiring an official Apple repair.

Yes, just a bit of dust! Move over ‘the princess and the pea’: Apple and the dust mote is here! ‘Just use it in a vacuum’ shouldn’t be an acceptable usability requirement for a very expensive laptop.

Apple has also had to make these keyboards quieter. Because, as I say, the act of using the keyboard results in audible clackclackery. It’s like mobile phone keyclicks suddenly got dizzingly back in fashion. (Or, well, Apple designers got to overindulge their blue-sky thinking around the idea that ‘in space no one can hear you type’.)

Several colleagues have garnered dagger glances and been told to dial it down at conferences on account of all the key clattering as they worked. Yet a keyboard is made for working. It’s a writing tool. Or it should be. Instead, Apple has made a keyboard for making audible typos. It’s shockingly bad.

As design snafus go, this is up there with antenna-gate. Except actually it’s much worst. You can’t not ‘hold it in that way’. You can’t press keys on a keyboard radically differently. I guess you could type really slowly to try to avoid making all these high speed typos. But that would have an obvious impact on your ability to work by slowing down your ability to write. So, again, an abject mess.

I’ve only had this Oath-issued 2017 MacBook Pro (in long-held-off exchange for my trusty MacBook Air, whose admittedly grimy and paint-worn keys were nonetheless 100% functional after years of writerly service) for about a month but the keys appear to have a will of their own, whipping themselves into a possessive frenzy almost every time they’re pressed, and spewing out all manner of odd typos, mis-strikes and mistakes.

This demonic keyboard has summoned Siri unasked. (Thanks stupidly pointless Touch Bar!)  It has also somehow nearly delivered an ‘I’m not interested’ auto-response to a stranger who wrote me at length on LinkedIn to thoughtfully thank me for an earlier article. (Fortunately I didn’t have auto-send enabled so I could catch that unintended slapdown in the act before it was delivered. No thanks to the technologies involved.)

At the same time Caps Lock routinely fails to engage when pressed, as if it’s practising for when it’ll be broken. It equally countlessly fails to disengage when re-pressed. ‘Craps Out Lock’ more like. I fear it’s beset by dust motes already. Which is hard to avoid because, y’know, everything in the world is made of dust.

The keyboard also frustrates because of the jarring juxtaposition of having individual keys that depress too willingly, seeming to suck the typos from your fingers as letters get snatched out of sequence (and even whole words coaxed out of line), coupled with a backspace key that refuses to perform quickly enough (I’ve had to crank it right up to the very fastest setting) so it can’t gobble up the multiple erroneous strikes quickly enough to edit out all the BS the keyboard is continually spewing.

The result? A laptop that’s lightning quick at creating a typo-ridden mess, and slow as hell to clean it up.

In short, it’s a mess. A horrible mess that makes a mockery of the Apple catchphrase of yore (‘it just works’) by actively degrading the productivity of writing — interrupting your work with pointless sound and an alphabetic soup of fury.

The redesigned keyboard has been denounced by Apple loyalists such as John Gruber — who in April called it “one of the biggest design screwups in Apple history“.

He precision-hammered his point home with this second economical sentence: “Everyone who buys a MacBook depends upon the keyboard and this keyboard is undependable.”

Though it was Casey Johnson, writing for The Outline, who raised the profile of the problem last year, kicking up a major stink over her MacBook keys acting up (or dead) after a brush with invisible dust.

Since then keyboard-related problems have garnered Apple at least one class action lawsuit.

Meanwhile, the company has responded to this hardware headache of its own design like the proverbial thief in the night, quietly fiddling with the internals when no one was looking. Most notably it slotted in a repair earlier this year, when it added a sort of silicon gum shield to wrap the offending butterfly mechanism, which is presumably supposed to prevent dust from wreaking its terribly quotidian havoc. (Though it’s no use to me, right here, right now, with my corporate provisioned 2017 MBP.)

We know this thanks to the excellent work done by iFixit this summer, when it took apart one of Apple’s redesigned redesigned keyboards and found a thin rubberized film had been added under the keycaps. (Looking at this translucent addition, I am reminded of Alien designer HR Giger’s biomechanical concoctions. And of Ash’s robotic hard-on for poking around inside the disemboweled facehugger. But I digress.)

Shamelessly Apple tried to sell this tweak to journalists as solely a fix for those noisy key clicks. iFixit was not at all convinced.

“This flexible enclosure is quite obviously an ingress-proofing measure to cover up the mechanism from the daily onslaught of microscopic dust. Not — to our eyes — a silencing measure,” it wrote in July. “In fact, Apple has a patent for this exact tech designed to “prevent and/or alleviate contaminant ingress.”

And the date on Apple’s ingress-proofing key-cap condom patent? September 8, 2016. Read that and weep, MacBook Pro second-half 2016, 2017 and first half 2018 owners.

So if, like me, you’re saddled with a 2017 (or earlier) MBP there’s sweet F.A. you can do about this fatal design flaw in the core interfacing mechanism you must daily touch. Abstention is not an option. We must typo and wait for the inexorable, dust-based doom to strike the space bar or the ‘E’ key — which will then make the typing experience even more miserable (and require a trip to an Apple store to swaddle the misbehaving keys in rubber — leaving us computerless, most probably, in the meanwhile).

There is an entire novel written without the letter E. I propose that Apple’s failed keyboard redesign be christened the ‘Gadsby‘ in its honor — because, ye gads, it’s awful.

This is especially, especially frustrating because the MacBook Air keyboard was so very, very good.

Not good — it was great. It was as close to typing perfection I’ve come across in a computer. And I’ve been typing on keyboards for a very long time.

Why mess with such a good thing?! Marginally thinner than what was already exceptionally thin hardware is hardly something consumers clamour for.

People are far more interested in having the thing they bought and/or use actually doing the job they need it for. And definitely not letting them down.

(Or “defienmtely nort letting them down” as the keyboard just reworked the line. I really should have saved every typo and posted a mutant mirror text beneath this one, containing all the thousands of organic instances of ‘found poetry’ churned out by the keyboard’s inner life/poet/drunk.)

If shaving 40% off the profile of the key mechanism transforms an incredible reliable keyboard into a dust-prone, typo-spewing monster that’s not progress; it’s folly of the highest order.

Offering free repairs to affected users, as Apple finally did in June, doesn’t even begin to fix this fuck up.

Not least because that’s only a fix for dust-based death; There isn’t a rubber film in the universe that could make typing on these keys a pleasing experience.

What does it tell us when a company starts making the quality of its premium products worse? Especially a company famed for high-end design and high quality hardware? (Moreover, a company now worth a staggering $1tr+ in market capitalization?)

It smacks of complacency, misaligned priorities and worrying blindspots — at the very least, if not a wider lack of perspective outside the donut-shaped mothership. (Perhaps there’s been a little too much gathering around indoors in Cupertino lately, and not enough looking out critically at a flaking user experience… )

Or else, well, it smacks of cynical profiteering.

Clearly it’s not a good look. Apple’s reputation rests in large part on its hardware being perceived as reliable. On the famous Steve Jobs’ sales pitch that ‘it just works’. So Apple designing a keyboard that’s great at breaking for no reason at all and lighting fast at churning out typos is a truly epic fail.

Of course consumer electronic designs won’t always work out. Some failure is to be expected — and will be understood. But what makes the keyboard situation so much worse is Apple’s failure to recognise and accept the problem so that it could promptly clean up the mess.

Its apparent inability (for so long) to acknowledge there even was a problem is a particularly worrying sign. Having to sneak in a late fix because you didn’t have the courage to publicly admit you screwed up is not a good look for any company — let alone a company with such a long, rich and storied history as Apple.

More cynical folks out there might whisper it’s design flaw by design; A strategic fault-line intended to push users towards an upgrade faster than they might have otherwise have unzipped their wallets. Though Apple offering free keyboard repairs (also, albeit, tardily) contradicts that conspiracy theory.

Yet the notion of ‘built in obsolescence’ persists where consumer computing hardware is concerned, given how corporate profits do tend to be locked to upgrade cycles.

In Apple’s case it’s an easy charge to level at the company given its business model is still, in very large part, driven by hardware sales. So Apple doing anything that risks encouraging consumers to feel it’s intentionally making its products worse is also folly of the highest order.

Apple does have some active accusations to deal with on that front too. For example, a consumer group filed a complaint of planned obsolescence in France late last year — on account of Apple performance throttling older iPhones — something the company has faced multiple complaints over and some regulatory scrutiny. So again, it really needs to tread carefully.

Tim Cook’s Apple cannot afford to be slipshod in its designs nor its communication. Jobs got more latitude on the latter front because he was such a charismatic persona. Cook is lots of good things but he’s not that; he’s closer to ‘safe pair of hands’ — so company comms should really reflect that.

Apple may be richer than Croesus and king of the premium heap but it can’t risk tarnishing the brand. The mobile space is littered with the toppled monuments of past giants. And the markets where Apple plays are increasingly fiercely fought. Chinese device makers especially are building momentum with lower priced and highly capable consumer hardware. (Huawei displaced Apple in second place in the global smartphone rankings in Q2, for example).

Apple’s rivals have mercilessly cloned its slender laptop designs and copypasted the look and feel of the iPhone. Reliability and usability are the bedrock of the price premium its brand commands, with privacy a more recent bolt-on. So failing on those fundamentals would be beyond foolish, with so many rivals now pushing cheaper priced yet very similarly packaged (and shiny) alternatives at consumers — which also often offer equal or even greater feature utility for less money (assuming you’re willing to compromise on privacy).

When it comes to the Mac specifically, it clearly has not been Apple’s priority for a long time. The iPhone has been its star performer of the past decade, while growing its services business is the fresh focus for Cook. Yet when Cook’s Apple has paid a little attention to the Mac category it’s often been to fiddle unnecessarily — such as by clumsily reworking a great keyboard for purely cosmetic reasons, or to add a silly strip of touchscreen that’s at best distracting and (in my experience) just serves up even more unwanted keystrikes. So thrice blighted and the opposite of useful: A fiddly gimmick.

This is worrying.

Apple is a company founded with the word ‘Computer’ in its name. Computing is its DNA. And, even now, while smartphones and tablets are great for lots of things they are not great for sustained writing. For writing — and indeed working — at any length a laptop remains the perfect tool.

There’s no touchscreen in the world that can beat a well-designed keyboard for speed, comfort and typing convenience. To a writer, using a great keyboard almost feels like flying.

You wouldn’t have had to explain that to Jobs. He honed his Mac sales pitch to the point of poetry — famously dubbing the Mac a ‘bicycle for the mind’.

Now, sadly, saddled with this flatfooted and frustratingly flawed mechanic, it’s like Apple shipped a bicycle with a pair of needles where the pedals should be.

Not so much thinking different as failing to understand what the machine is for.

Source: Tech Crunch