Month: October 2018

Good news!

California has passed a law banning default passwords like “admin,” “123456” and the old classic “password” in all new consumer electronics starting in 2020.

Every new gadget built in the state from routers to smart home tech will have to come with “reasonable” security features out of the box. The law specifically calls for each device to come with a preprogrammed password “unique to each device.”

It also mandates that any new device “contains a security feature that requires a user to generate a new means of authentication before access is granted to the device for the first time,” forcing users to change the unique password to something new as soon as it’s switched on for the first time.

For years, botnets have utilized the power of badly secured connected devices to pummel sites with huge amounts of internet traffic — so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Botnets typically rely on default passwords that are hardcoded into devices when they’re built that aren’t later changed by the user. Malware breaks into the devices using publicly available default passwords, hijacks the device and ensnares the device into conducting cyberattacks without the user’s knowledge.

Two years ago, the notorious Mirai botnet dragged thousands of devices together to target Dyn, a networking company that provides domain name service to major sites. By knocking Dyn offline, other sites that relied on its services were also inaccessible — like Twitter, Spotify and SoundCloud.

Mirai was a relatively rudimentary, albeit powerful botnet that relied on default passwords. This law is a step in the right direction to prevent these kinds of botnets, but falls short on wider security issues.

Other, more advanced botnets don’t need to guess a password because they instead exploit known vulnerabilities in Internet of Things devices — like smart bulbs, alarms and home electronics.

As noted by others, the law as signed does not mandate device makers to update their software when bugs are found. The big device makers, like Amazon, Apple and Google, do update their software, but many of the lesser-known brands do not.

Still, as it stands, the law is better than nothing — even if there’s room for improvement in the future.

Source: Tech Crunch

Longtime venture capitalist Shirish Sathaye has quietly joined early-stage investor Cervin Ventures as a general partner.

Most recently, Sathaye was a general partner at Formation 8, the embattled venture firm co-founded by Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, Brian Koo (a scion of the Koo family, owners of the electronics giant LG) and former Khosla GP Jim Kim. Formation 8 announced in 2015 that it would not raise a third fund and would begin winding down operations.

Sathaye, who’s been in the VC business since 2001 as a GP at Matrix Partners, then at Khosla Ventures, remains a partner in Formation 8’s sophomore fund. His previous investments include Nutanix, Samsung-acquired Grandis, McAfee-acquired Solidcore Systems, cybersecurity startup Vectra Networks and data storage provider Panzura.

He’d only been at Formation 8 for one year when the firm began to crumble. As we now know, conflict between the firm’s founding partners led to its demise. Lonsdale quickly raised $425 million for a spin-off fund called 8VC; Koo, in a similar fashion, brought in $357 million for Formation Group and Kim followed up with a $200 million fund called Builders.

Sathaye, for his part, had grown tired of the “bigger is better” mentality and opted to leave the business of big VC for good.

He began making angel investments and advising startups at Cervin Ventures, a pre-Series A VC fund focused on the enterprise. It closed a $56 million fund in 2017, its largest vehicle to date.

“Smaller funds, in general, make better decisions,” Sathaye told TechCrunch. “At a larger fund, there are more people around the table to make decisions. I think returns are better when there are fewer people making those decisions.”

Watching funds swell past the billion-dollar mark and investors deploy the “spray and pray” strategy was a turn-off, Sathaye said. Startups have more access to capital than ever before, yet most companies can get off the ground with very little funding, thanks to recent innovations like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.

“With AWS, companies can bring products to market quickly and they can reach their customers with much less money,” Sathaye said. “If you look at it just from a returns profile, the smaller funds will get better cash-on-cash returns simply because companies don’t need that much money to be successful.”

Palo Alto-based Cervin is led by two other GPs, Preetish Nijhawan and Neeraj Gupta. It invests $1 million to $2 million in early-stage startups. Sathaye says he’ll be focused specifically on the security, mobile, cloud and data verticals.

Source: Tech Crunch

2018 has been a good year for ridiculous, gargantuan LEGO builds. Just weeks ago, there was that life size, driveable LEGO Bugatti.

Now someone has gone and built a mega-sized recreation of Apple’s new Cupertino “spaceship” campus – otherwise known as Apple Park.

Coming in at roughly 85,000 pieces, the build took designer Spencer_R a little over two years to complete, with many of those hours spent poring over drone footage of the campus’ construction. At 6.8×4.5 ft, it’s bigger than most kitchen tables. Spencer says it weighs around 78 pounds.

Beyond the massive circular building that serves as the build’s primary feature, tons and tons of tiny details accent the brick canvas: its got the glass-walled Steve Jobs Theater, the hundred-year old Glendenning Barn that was disassembled and rebuilt on the property, the employee parking garages, the visitor center, and even some tiny employee basketball/tennis courts for good measure.

Oh, and trees. Lots, and lots, and lots of trees. 1,646 trees in all, by Spencer’s count.

This is hardly Spencer’s first time recreating a mega building — he’s done custom creations of everything from the Eiffel Tower to the Rockefeller Center. With that said, he notes that Apple Park is “nearly as large as all of [his] other LEGO skyscraper builds combined”

For more build details, you can tap through Spencer_R’s gallery/build notes here. Thank you to Fabrizio Costantini for letting us use these photos.

Source: Tech Crunch

Tesla’s Autopilot is often touted as the most capable and advanced driver assistance system available on the market today. But in Consumer Reports’ view that honor actually goes to Cadillac’s Super Cruise.

The consumer organization gave Super Cruise the top spot in its first-ever ranking of partially automated driving systems because it is the best striking a balance between technical capabilities and ensuring drivers are paying attention and operating the vehicle safely.

That’s an important distinction that means CR is considering a lot more than simply the technical capabilities of any one system.

CR evaluated four systems: Super Cruise on the Cadillac CT6, Autopilot on Tesla Model S, X and 3 models, ProPilot Assist on Infiniti QX50 and Nissan Leaf, and Pilot Assist on Volvo XC40 and XC60 vehicles. The organization said it picked these systems because they’re considered the most capable and well known in the industry.

Testers looked at the capability and performance of the tech, how easy the system is to use, and how well it monitored and kept the driver engaged. Testers also looked at how the system responded if the driver ignored warnings.

Tesla Autopilot scored higher than any other system for capability and ease of use. But Cadillac did a better job of making it clear when it’s safe to use, keeping drivers engaged and reacting when someone is unresponsive to the warnings.

A partially automated driving system — some use the term semi-autonomous — typically uses sensors such as cameras and radar as well as mapping data combined with software to assist with some driving tasks in certain conditions and wi . For instance, these systems might provide lane keeping and adaptive cruise control on highways.

The ProPilot Assist system used by Nissan and Infiniti fell to third place and Volvo’s system brought up the rear with poor marks (compared to its competitors) in nearly every category.

The consumer organization is particularly wary of how these systems are marketed and believe that automakers can send “mixed messages” that suggest these systems have autonomous or self-driving capabilities.

CR’s tests appear to have already had an affect, in at least how these systems are marketed. CR said that Volvo changed the language used to describe Pilot Assist, which was listed on its website under autonomous driving. Volvo no longer connects Pilot Assist to autonomous driving.

Source: Tech Crunch

Between 2013 and last year, the number of boot camp schools tripled to more than 90 in the U.S. alone, according to Course Report, an outfit that tracks the industry. Some — including The Iron Yard and Dev Bootcamp — have since folded, unable to find enough eager recruits willing to pay top dollar to learn coding skills. (The average cost of a 14-week program last year was $11,400.)

At the same time, it has become apparent that when it comes to massive open online courses, a very high percentage of students don’t stay the course.

New York-based Codecademy, which began offering free coding courses at its outset, has managed to keep plugging away — and grow — despite these headwinds. In fact, the company today employs 85 people, up from 45 when we last sat down with cofounder and CEO Zach Sims in 2016. Its revenue is also up 65 percent year over year.

None of it has been a walk in the park, admits Sims, who dropped out of Columbia University in 2011 to start the company. “There’s been a ton of ups and downs,” he says, explaining that the company struggled for years with how to produce meaningful revenue before introducing two premium products in the last couple of years, both of which are affordable by design.

One of these is Codecademy Pro, meant to help users learn the fundamentals of coding, as well as develop a deeper knowledge (and receive certification from Codecademy) in up to 10 areas, including machine learning and data analysis. The cost is $20 per month, money that Pro users often see back in the form of a a $5,000 to $10,000 raise from their employer, insists Sims. He says the course “isn’t so much for those who are transition to full-time jobs but people who are learning skills to level up in their existing career.”

A second offering is Codecademy Pro Intensive, which is designed to immerse learners from six to 10 weeks (depending on the coursework), in either website development, programming, or data science. Students follow a structured, detailed syllabus that’s broken into focused units to organize the learning experience, which is synchronous but collaborative. To wit, users are placed in a moderated Slack group and can chat with people who are learning the same materials at the same time. They also receive unlimited access to a pool of 200 mentors who work with Codecademy, some of them “graduates” of Codecademy themselves.

Sims declines to talk about what percentage of the 45 million people who’ve taken a Codecademy course has paid the company, but he notes that the “macro trends in the market are going our way. People still need to find jobs, and tech is still an important skill to get them there.” Indeed, according to Code.org, a nonprofit that seeks to expand computer-science instruction in schools, there are more than 540,000 open computing jobs. At the same time, fewer than 50,000 computer-science majors graduated from school last year.

Sims also stresses the importance to Codecademy of ensuring its offerings remain “free and low cost everywhere in the world.” Toward that end, the company is today rolling out its newest product, a mobile app that enables users to learn on the go, though it is accessible to paying customers only after a seven-day trial for everyone. (No credit card is required.)

The idea, says Sims: “Lots of people use mobile phones, and we should be letting them practice whenever and whereve they want. They end doing twice as many exercises if they can learn on the subway, then pick up where they left off on the desktop later.”

How much of an accelerant the app will be remains to be seen, but certainly, Codecademy’s approach — catering to people who can’t take or aren’t interesting in expensive offline programs — seems as relevant as ever as some of its competitors fade into the distance.

“When we first started,” says Sims, “the skills gap was just making itself evident. There were tons of tech reports about tech jobs and not a lot of people to fill them. A lot of boot camps and other options emerged to fill that vacuum because, at the time, colleges weren’t equipped to handle [the knowledge gap]. Plus, student debt continued to be an issue, which made [underprivileged] students particularly ill-prepared for the workforce.”

What has changed since then is, well, not much, argues Sims. He notes that aside from a glut of hyped offerings to come and go, people still need ways to adapt to rapid-fire technological change, and with college costs as high as they’ve ever been — prices have soared upwards of 200 percent over the last 20 years —  they need affordable alternatives in particular.

If Codecademy requires more capital to continue providing as much, it isn’t saying. Asked about fundraising — Codecademy has raised $42.5 million to date, including Union Square Ventures and Naspers — Sims says it isn’t talking currently with VCs. “We’re pretty capital efficient. We still have the majority of our last round (raised in 2016) in the bank. And we’ve been able to grow pretty sustainably.

“If we see opportunities to accelerate growth down the line,” he adds, “we’ll go raise it.”

Asked if it can see a day where it works more closely with enterprise customers that want to help employees burnish their skills, he says that’s a high likelihood, too. But “so far,” he says, “we’ve seen pretty good consumer growth. It kind of comes down to how many things can you focus on.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Helping friends meet up offline has been a massive missed opportunity for Facebook . Whether because the brand is too creepy or the politely opt-in 2015 rollout of its location sharing feature wasn’t creepy enough, Facebook Nearby Friends never quite took off. Only 103 of my 1120 friends in San Francisco have it turned on.

It’s not the only one struggling with “The quest to cure loneliness”. Foursquare Swarm, Glympse, Apple’s Find My Friends, and Google Maps’ real-time coordinate sharing option have all failed to become a ubiquitous standard.

The redesigned map homescreen of Facebook Nearby Friends

But last year, Snapchat launched a different take on the idea based on its biggest acquisition ever, French app Zenly. With Snap Map, it wasn’t just about the utility of seeing a list of friends’ locations like on Facebook, but also splayed them out across map that you could dive into to see their latest geo-tagged Stories. It was as much about fun and content as it was about actually hanging out with people in person.

Now Facebook is testing a significant redesign of Nearby Friends that looks a lot more like Snap Map. It replaces the list view of the neighborhoods and cities friends are in with a map that groups friends together by city. A “view list” button opens up the former homescreen, though in both views you still can only see a friend’s approximate location in a neighborhood or city, not their exact coordinates. Facebook confirms to TechCrunch that “We’re testing a new design for Nearby Friends, a tool people have used for the past four years to meet with their friends in person. People have complete control over whether to use Nearby Friends or not. They can turn it on in the Nearby Friends bookmark.”

That statement both subtly promotes Facebook’s opt-in privacy setting for Nearby Friends while urging people to actually go back and activate it. The screenshot was generated from the code of Facebook’s Android app by mobile researcher and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong. Interestingly, after TechCrunch’s inquiry, Wong tells me Facebook appears to have deactivated server-side the ability to access the map feature.

The reason this matters is that Facebook is desperate for engagement, especially amongst younger users who are slipping away from it to Snapchat and Instagram. If revamped with this map and other improvements, Nearby Friends could become a more popular utility that keeps people opening Facebook. Getting more people to share their real-time location could open new opportunities for local ad targeting. And Facebook could benefit from showing it unlocks meaningful offline connection given its recent brand troubles following election interference and calls that it’s the opposite of “time well spent”.

The existing design of Facebook Nearby Friends

Snap Map was smart, but it’s sadly buried behind an awkward pinch gesture from Snapchat’s homescreen, or inside the search bar where some users wouldn’t expect it. Internal Snapchat usage data scored by Taylor Lorenz for The Daily Beast revealed that Snap Map had sunk from a high of 35 million daily unique viewers after its June 2017 launch to just 19 million by that September — merely 11 percent of Snapchat’s users at the time. Users never seemed to cease on it as a method of browsing Snapchat’s geo-tagged content.

Unfortunately, none of these location apps have figured out that meeting up isn’t all about location. It’s about availability. It doesn’t matter if I see my best friend is at a coffee shop right away if they’re not actually available to hang out. They could be on date, having a business meeting, or trying to get some work done. If I drop in just because I see they’re close by, it could be awkward. You’d have to first message them, but you can come off seeming desperate if they can’t or don’t want to meet up with you.

Location apps need an availability indicator similar to the green “online” dot used by many chat apps. You could toggle that on if you wanted to show you’re interested in some spontaneous friend time.

Facebook’s actually spent the last year trying to build this into Messenger in the form of “Your Emoji” status. It lets you pick an emoji like a martini, fork and knife, or barbell that’s temporarily overlaid on your profile pic thumbnail to let people know you’re down for drinking, getting dinner, or working out. The feature is yet to be widely tested, indicating that Facebook hasn’t quite cracked the nut of encouraging online meetups.

Ideally, Facebook would combine Nearby Friends and Your Emoji to help users share both approximately where they are and whether they want to hang out. The next step would be making it easy to watch a friend’s geo-tagged Facebook Story from wherever they are. And then, Facebook could further copy Snap Map by making public Stories and other location-based content accessible from the map so you could browse it for fun instead of the News Feed or Stories tray.

Still, making Nearby Friends work could require Facebook to rethink the privacy element. The friend graph has bloated to include family, co-workers, bosses, and distant acquaintances that users might not want to share their real-time location with. Finding a better way to let you share where you are with just your closest friends could make more people comfortable with the feature.

Facebook needs to rethink its entire product stack to embrace the high-definition cameras, big phone screens, and fast network connections that make it easier to convey information through imagery than text. Visual communication is the future and that goes far beyond Stories.

Source: Tech Crunch

An updated version of the Twitter mobile app will allow users to gain more control over their data usage – similar to how the Twitter Lite app designed for emerging markets works. Now, instead of having to download a separate app in order to limit data consumption or manually adjust various settings, users will be able to turn on a new ‘Data Saver’ option available in Twitter’s Settings.

Until today, Twitter offered Data Saver in Twitter for Windows, Twitter Lite, and its mobile website. Some users may have also seen the Data Saver option on iOS or Android, as well as on Twitter’s desktop website, because of a test Twitter had underway.

That desktop web test had also included moving other elements and features around, like putting Trends underneath the “Who To Follow” suggestions, for example, or making “Night Mode” a more visible option.

But with the launch today, the Data Saver feature is broadly available to all iOS and Android users, a company spokesperson confirmed.

To take advantage of Data Saver, you’ll visit the Data Usage settings in the iOS or Android mobile app and toggle the option on or off. When enabled, images will load in lower quality and videos won’t autoplay. If you’re browsing Twitter and want to see an image appear in higher quality, you can tap on the three-top menu and pick “Load High Quality” to change the setting on that particular piece of content.

The updated version includes a few other tweaks as well, including a change to make it easier to manage who’s in your group chats, plus VoiceOver improvements in polls, and better labels for some types of Twitter ads, according to the app’s update text in the App Store.

For those who really need to conserve, however, Twitter Lite is still the better option. While Data Saver will consume less data when turned on, Twitter Lite takes up less space on your phone, too.

The new Twitter app is live now, but the features themselves may still be rolling out at this time.

Twitter tells us its @TwitterSupport account will tweet the news later today as Data Saver rolls out to everyone.

Source: Tech Crunch

On the heels of Tinder’s launch of a Bumble-like feature in India, which allows women to initiative the conversations, Bumble is today formally announcing its plans for an expansion into India. The company says it has been building up a local team in the region over the past nine months and defining its strategy. The app will be available later this fall, with marketing spend focused on major metropolitan regions.

Given that it’s already October, Bumble’s Indian arrival is only a matter of weeks at this point. While Bumble won’t commit to an exact launch date, it would say that the launch is planned for sometime before the end of the year.

The Indian market is a critical one, given the sizable population of over 1.3 billion and their rapid adoption of mobile devices. It’s been a battleground for device makers, like Apple, Samsung and Chinese brands, and bumped the U.S. to become the world’s second largest smartphone market last fall. All major tech companies are addressing the market as well, with “lite” versions  of apps designed to save data, and other India-specific offerings.

In the dating space, it’s been more challenging for apps like Tinder and others, because of India’s traditional approach to dating and courtships, which in the past has involved concerns around parental acceptance, class differences and pre-arranged marriages. But India is changing. The country’s Supreme Court has been overturning colonial-era laws, and recently decriminalized same-sex relations and adultery, for example.

That’s paved the way for a number of dating apps including an extramarital affairs app Gleeden, matchmaking app Wingman, and LGBTQ dating app Grindr, The Economic Times reported.

Tinder, meanwhile, has established itself in the country to become the highest-grossing Android app, according to App Annie data.

For Bumble’s Indian launch, the company is partnering with actor, philanthropist and entrepreneur Priyanka Chopra (who also recently became engaged to Nick Jonas.) Chopra had worked with Bumble on the launch of Bumble Bizz, its business networking feature, which arrived last October.

“It’s rare to see a brand with this level of reach and relevance maintain a commitment to their values and mission in a manner that has global impact,” said Chopra, in a statement about her involvement in the Indian launch. “I’ve always believed that investing in women is key to social transformation and economic growth, and in working with Whitney and her team over the past year, I’m inspired by the real, positive change Bumble is creating and I’m proud to have the opportunity to contribute to this movement as a partner,” she added.

The Indian version of Bumble will be available in both Hinglish and Hindi for iOS and Android and will include yet-to-be-announced security features, beyond the photo verification and profile moderation offered today.

The move to launch in India comes at a time when Bumble and Tinder are head-to-head in a bitter rivalry. Bumble is now suing Tinder parent Match Group over fraudulently obtaining trade secrets, and Match is suing Bumble over patent infringement. The two companies have been unable to work out these differences and are headed to court.

Source: Tech Crunch