Month: March 2019

Automobili Pininfarina, the automaker brand infused with Pininfarina design house DNA and owned by India’s Mahindra Group, revealed its first production car this week at the Geneva International Motor Show. And it’s an audacious inaugural effort.

The Pininfarina Battista — a nod to design house founder Battista ‘Pinin’ Farina — is an all-electric beast of a hypercar that is faster than a current Formula 1 race car and can travel from 0 to 62 miles an hour in under two seconds. Automobili Pininfarina showcased three Battista design models at the show.

All of them have the same foundation: a carbon fiber monocoque chassis (meaning integrated into body) and carbon fiber body. The electric hypercar has four electric motors (one on each wheel) and a power output of 1,400 kW, or the equivalent of 1,900 horsepower and 2,300 Nm torque. The Battista will have a top speed of more than 223 miles per hour.

The 120 kilowatt-hour battery pack, which has a T-shape and is in the central tunnel and behind the seats, will give the vehicle an estimated range of nearly 280 miles. In the hands of its well-heeled owners, and considering the performance capabilities of this vehicle, the range will likely be much lower.

The interior has the kind of details expected in a multimillion-dollar vehicle. But vehicles like these are expected to be highly customizable, and the Battista is no different. 

The vehicle will be available in 2020. But not just for anyone. Only 150 will be made at the Pininfarina SpA atelier in Turin, Italy. The vehicles will be spread out equally with 50 designed to each major region of North America, Europe and Asia.

The automaker showed off the Battista back in August during Monterey Car Week to select potential customers and some media, including TechCrunch. The Battista, which was codenamed PFO at the time, was displayed in a luxurious home, a setting that befit the vehicle.

As an Italian design house Pininfarina SpA has a long history of partnerships — its relationship with Ferrari perhaps the most famous of them. Automobili Pininfarina appears to be taking the same approach. The automaker has partnered with Pirelli on the tires and Rimac Automobili, the Croatian hypercar and electric vehicle components company that Porsche took a 10 percent stake in last year. Rimac is the battery and drivetrain supplier for Pininfarina.

Rimac should be familiar to hypercar and EV enthusiats. The company, which was founded by Mate Rimac in 2009, brought a two-seater electric hypercar with 1,914-horsepower engine to Geneva last year. 

But it’s not just a small hypercar shop. Rimac also engineers and manufactures high-performance electric vehicle powertrain systems and battery systems. The company has already worked with Renault, Jaguar, and Aston Martin. 

 

Mahindra bought Pininfarina in 2015 for about $28 million. Three years later, and after additional investment, Mahindra announced the launch of Automobili-Pininfarina as a “new sustainable luxury car brand based in Europe.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a Far Right UK activist who was permanently banned from Facebook last week for repeatedly breaching its community standards on hate speech, was nonetheless able to use its platform to livestream harassment of an anti-fascist blogger whom he doorstepped at home last night.

UK-based blogger Mike Stuchbery detailed the intimidating incident in a series of tweets earlier today, writing that Yaxley-Lennon appeared to have used a friend’s Facebook account to circumvent the ban on his own Facebook and Instagram pages.

In recent years Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the moniker ‘Tommy Robinson’ on social media, has used online platforms to raise his profile and solicit donations to fund Far Right activism.

He has also, in the case of Facebook and Twitter, fallen foul of mainstream tech platforms’ community standards which prohibit use of their tools for hate speech and intimidation. Earning himself a couple of bans. (At the time of writing Yaxley-Lennon has not been banned from Google-owned YouTube .)

Though circumventing Facebook’s ban appears to have been trivially easy for Yaxley-Lennon, who, as well as selling himself as a Far Right activist called “Tommy Robinson”, previously co-founded the Islamophobic Far Right pressure group, the English Defence League.

Giving an account of being doorstepped by Yaxley-Lennon in today’s Independent, Stuchbery writes: “The first we knew of it was a loud, frantic rapping on my door at around quarter to 11 [in the evening]… That’s when notifications began to buzz on my phone — message requests on Facebook pouring in, full of abuse and vitriol. “Tommy” was obviously livestreaming his visit, using a friend’s Facebook account to circumvent his ban, and had tipped off his fans.”

A repost (to YouTube) of what appears to be a Facebook Live stream of the incident corroborates Stuchbery’s account, showing Yaxley-Lennon outside a house at night where can be seen shouting for “Mike” to come out and banging on doors and/or windows.

At another point in the same video Yaxley-Lennon can be seen walking away when he spots a passerby and engages them in conversation. During this portion of the video Yaxley-Lennon publicly reveals Stuchbery’s address — a harassment tactic that’s known as doxxing.

He can also be heard making insinuating remarks to the unidentified passerby about what he claims are Stuchbery’s “wrong” sexual interests.

In another tweet today Stuchbery describes the remarks are defamatory, adding that he now intends to sue Yaxley-Lennon.

Stuchbery has also posted several screengrabs to Twitter, showing a number of Facebook users who he is not connected to sending him abusive messages — presumably during the livestream.

During the video Yaxley-Lennon can also be heard making threats to return, saying: “Mike Stuchbery. See you soon mate, because I’m coming back and back and back and back.”

In a second livestream, also later reposted to YouTube, Yaxley-Lennon can be heard apparently having returned a second time to Stuchbery’s house, now at around 5am, to cause further disturbance.

Stuchbery writes that he called the police to report both visits. In another tweet he says they “eventually talked ‘Tommy’ into leaving, but not before he gave my full address, threatened to come back tomorrow, in addition to making a documentary ‘exposing me’”.

We reached out to Bedfordshire Police to ask what it could confirm about the incidents at Stuchbery’s house and the force’s press office told us it had received a number of enquiries about the matter. A spokeswoman added that it would be issuing a statement later today. We’ll update this post when we have it.  

Stuchbery also passed us details of the account he believes was used to livestream the harassment — suggesting it’s linked to another Far Right activist, known by the moniker ‘Danny Tommo’, who was also banned by Facebook last week.

Though the Facebook account in question was using a different moniker — ‘Jack Dawkins’. This suggests, if the account did indeed belong to the same banned Far Right activist, he was also easily able to circumvent Facebook’s ban by creating a new account with a different (fake) name and email.

We passed the details of the ‘Jack Dawkins’ account to Facebook and since then the company appears to have suspended the account. (A message posted to it earlier today claimed it had been hacked.)

The fact of Yaxley-Lennon being able to use Facebook to livestream harassment a few days after he was banned underlines quite how porous Facebook’s platform remains for organized purveyors of hate and harassment. Studies of Facebook’s platform have previously suggested as much.

Which makes high profile ‘Facebook bans’ of hate speech activists mostly a crisis PR exercise for the company. And indeed easy PR for Far Right activists who have been quick to seize on and trumpet social media bans as ‘evidence’ of mainstream censorship of their point of view — liberally ripping from the playbook of US hate speech peddlers, such as the (also ‘banned’) InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Such as by posting pictures of themselves with their mouths gagged with tape.

Such images are intended to make meme-able messages for their followers to share. But the reality for social media savvy hate speech activists like Jones and Yaxley-Lennon looks nothing like censorship — given how demonstrably easy it remains for them to circumvent platform bans and carry on campaigns of hate and harassment via mainstream platforms.

We reached out to Facebook for a response to Yaxley-Lennon’s use of its livestreaming platform to harass Stuchbery, and to ask how it intends to prevent banned Far Right activists from circumventing bans and carrying on making use of its platform.

The company declined to make a public statement, though it did confirm the livestream had been flagged as violating its community standards last night and was removed afterwards. It also said it had deleted one post by a user for bullying. It added that it has content and safety teams which work around the clock to monitor Live videos flagged for review by Facebook users.

It did not confirm how long Yaxley-Lennon’s livestream was visible on its platform.

Stuchbery, a former history teacher, has garnered attention online writing about how Far Right groups have been using social media to organize and crowdfund ‘direct action’ in the offline world, including by targeting immigrants, Muslims, politicians and journalists in the street or on their own doorsteps.

But the trigger for Stuchbery being personally targeted by Yaxley-Lennon appears to be a legal letter served to the latter’s family home at the weekend informing him he’s being sued for defamation.

Stuchbery has been involved in raising awareness about the legal action, including promoting a crowdjustice campaign to raise funds for the suit.

The litigation relates to allegations Yaxley-Lennon made online late last year about a 15-year-old Syrian refugee schoolboy called Jamal who was shown in a video that went viral being violently bullied by white pupils at his school in Northern England.

Yaxley-Lennon responded to the viral video by posting a vlog to social media in which he makes a series of allegations about Jamal. The schoolboy’s family have described the allegations as defamatory. And the crowdjustice campaign promoted by Stuchbery has since raised more than £10,000 to sue Yaxley-Lennon.

The legal team pursuing the defamation litigation has also written that it intends to explore “routes by which the social media platforms that provide a means of dissemination to Lennon can also be attached to this action”.

The video of Yaxley-Lennon making claims about Jamal can still be found on YouTube. As indeed can Yaxley-Lennon’s own channel — despite equivalent pages having been removed from Facebook and Twitter (the latter pulled the plug on Yaxley-Lennon’s account a year ago).

We asked YouTube why it continues to provide a platform for Yaxley-Lennon to amplify hate speech and solicit donations for campaigns of targeted harassment but the company declined to comment publicly on the matter.

It did point out it demonetized Yaxley-Lennon’s channel last month, having determined it breaches its advertising policies.

YouTube also told us that it removes any video content that violates its hate speech policies — which do prohibit the incitement of violence or hatred against members of a religious community.

But by ignoring the wider context here — i.e. Yaxley-Lennon’s activity as a Far Right activist — and allowing him to continue broadcasting on its platform YouTube is leaving the door open for dog whistle tactics to be used to signal to and stir up ‘in the know’ followers — as was the case with another Internet savvy operator, InfoWars’ Alex Jones (until YouTube eventually terminated his channel last year).

Until last week Facebook was also ignoring the wider context around Yaxley-Lennon’s Far Right activism — a decision that likely helped him reach a wider audience than he would otherwise have been able to. So now Facebook has another full-blown hate speech ‘influencer’ going rogue on its platform and being cheered by an audience of followers its tools helped amass.

There is, surely, a lesson here.

Yet it’s also clear mainstream platforms are unwilling to pro-actively and voluntarily adapt their rules to close down malicious users who seek to weaponize social media tools to spread hate and sew division via amplified harassment.

But if platforms won’t do it, it’ll be left to governments to curb social media’s antisocial impacts with regulation.

And in the UK there is now no shortage of appetite to try; the government has a White Paper on social media and safety coming this winter. While the official opposition has said it wants to create a new regulator to rein in online platforms and even look at breaking up tech giants. So watch this space.

Public attitudes to (anti)social media have certainly soured — and with livestreams of hate and harassment it’s little wonder.

“Perhaps the worst thing, in the cold light of day, is the near certainty that the “content” “Tommy” produced during his stunt will now be used as a fundraising tool,” writes Stuchbery, concluding his account of being on the receiving end of a Facebook Live spewing hate and harassment. “If you dare to call him out on his cavalcade of hate, he usually tries to monetize you. It is a cruel twist.

“But most of all, I wonder how we got in this mess. I wonder how we got to a place where those who try to speak out against hatred and those who peddle it are threatened at their homes. I despair at how social media has become a weapon wielded by some, seemingly with impunity, to silence.”

Source: Tech Crunch

As you may have gathered from our review of Samsung’s Galaxy S10, it’s a very solid phone with lots of advanced features. But one thing that’s especially difficult to test is the absolute quality of the displaymate — which is why we leave that part to the experts. And this expert says the S10’s screen is the best ever on a smartphone.

Ray Soneira has tested every major phone, tablet and laptop series for many a year, using all the cool color calibration, reflectance and brightness measurement and other gear that goes with the job. So when he says the S10’s display is “absolutely stunning and Beautiful,” with a capital B at that, it’s worth taking note.

OLED technology has advanced a great deal since the first one I encountered, on the Zune HD — which still works and looks great, by the way, thank you. But originally it had quite a few trade-offs compared with LCD panels, such as weird color casts or pixel layout issues. Samsung has progressed well beyond that and OLED has come into its own with a vengeance. As Ray puts it:

The Absolute Color Accuracy on the Galaxy S10 is the Most Color Accurate Display we have ever measured. It is Visually Indistinguishable From Perfect, and almost certainly considerably better than your existing Smartphone, living room HDTV, Tablet, Laptop, and computer monitor, as demonstrated in our extensive Absolute Color Accuracy Lab Measurements.

The very challenging set of DisplayMate Test and Calibration Photos that we use to evaluate picture quality looked absolutely stunning and Beautiful, even to my experienced hyper-critical eyes.

Make sure you switch the phone’s display to “natural mode,” which makes subtle changes to the color space depending on the content and ambient light.

And although he has enthused many times before about the quality of various displays and the advances they made over their predecessors, the above is certainly very different language from, for example, how he described the reigning champ until today — the iPhone X:

Apple has produced an impressive Smartphone display with excellent performance and accuracy, which we cover in extensive detail below. What makes the iPhone X the Best Smartphone Display is the impressive Precision Display Calibration Apple developed, which transforms the OLED hardware into a superbly accurate, high performance, and gorgeous display, with close to Text Book Perfect Calibration and Performance!!

High praise, but not quite falling all over himself, as he did with the S10. As you can see, I rate smartphone displays chiefly by the emotional response they evoke from Ray Soneira.

At this point, naturally, the gains from improving displays are fairly few, because, to be honest, not many people care or can even tell today’s flagship displays apart. But little touches like front and back sensors for ambient light detection, automatic calibration and brightness that take user preferences into account — these also improve the experience, and phone makers have been adding them at a good clip, as well.

No matter which flagship phone you buy today, it’s going to have a fantastic camera and screen — but if you like to see it all in black and white, read through the review and you’ll find your hopes justified.

Source: Tech Crunch

Late last week, we announced the schedule for April 18’s TC Sessions: Robotics + AI event at UC Berkeley, including some heavy hitters like Marc Raibert, Melonee Wise and Ken Goldberg. At the time, we noted we still had some big names left to reveal — and we weren’t joking.

Today we’re excited to announce that we’ll be joined by autonomous vehicle pioneer Anthony Levandowski.

Levandowski is the co-founder and CEO of Pronto, a new startup developing aftermarket kits for semi-trucks. The company is touting the safety potential of autonomous vehicle technologies for cross-country hauls. “We are not building technology that tells vehicles how to drive,” he wrote in a Medium post announcing Pronto’s launch. “Instead, our team of engineers is building tech that can learn how to drive the way people do.”

Before founding Pronto, Levandowski served as the head of Uber’s autonomous vehicle program and helped Google develop its own initiative that ultimately became Waymo. The engineer began his career by building the autonomous motorcycle Ghostrider for DARPA’s Grand Challenge.

Early-bird ticket sales end in less than two weeks. Grab your ticket for just $249 today and save $100. Student tickets are on sale for just $45 and can be purchased here.

Are you an early-stage startup in robotics or AI? Grab a $1,500 demo table at the event and get your company in front of 1,000+ tech enthusiasts and investors.

Source: Tech Crunch

The 2018 Holiday shopping season was the biggest on record for e-commerce, with nearly $126 billion in online sales. But as e-commerce continues to expand, the demand for warehouse workers is growing faster than the labor supply and creating an increased need for automation.

Given its dominance in e-commerce and the massive scale of its business, there’s no surprise that Amazon was one of the first companies to supplement their human workforce with robotics. Since the acquisition of Kiva in 2012, a growing army of robots performs an increasing variety of tasks at Amazon facilities. However, those tasks remain limited in their ability to displace their human counterparts entirely.

Today, robotics are more affordable to a broader array of companies, thanks to lower cost components, and advancements in technology have paved the way for the rise of the collaborative robot or “cobot”.

Cobots are more precise and increasingly flexible with advanced sensor technology, AI, Lidar/Radar, GPS, and connectivity. Machine learning has also made cobots more versatile—not just in their hardware, but in software that facilitates adaptation to a broad array of tasks. And because sensor-rich robots can adapt to a variety of new challenges on the fly, we see more use cases for real-world application.

Don’t expect a severe shift to collaborative robots — we are still in the early innings. The global industrial robot market, dominated by the “Big 4” (Kuka, ABB, Fanuc, and Yaskawa) was valued at more than $15 billion in 2017, while the market for cobots reached only $287 million. However, the digital transformation of warehouses presents a tremendous market opportunity for new companies to create value.

We draw connections to the shift we saw from legacy software to SaaS, where traditional sales and business models switched to recurring revenue streams and cloud-based subscription services. By combining domain-specific go-to-market with robust software management platforms, the next generation of robotics companies has the opportunity to avoid long integrator-led sales cycles and become highly sticky over time, much like the early SaaS providers.

Additionally, collaborative robotic technology allows robots to augment human labor, lowering the barriers to entry, while still providing clear payback arguments around efficiency. Like the shift to cloud software, best-in-class platforms are now available to the masses without significant upfront investment in infrastructure.

We believe that co-bots will unlock market verticals traditionally underserved by robotics, such as logistics, food, and security.  Companies that offer full-service solutions to these sectors provide attractive opportunities to build value. For example, 6 River Systems — whose cobots, known as Chucks, use cloud software to coordinate warehouse tasks and work side-by-side with human employees — are changing how we think about the human-robot dynamic.

Cobalt Robotics, in the security vertical, allows human security guards to remotely monitor offices, creating cost savings for the employer, and efficiencies for the security guard. And other companies like RightHand Robotics, inVia Robotics, Starship are poised to replace human labor in some commercial settings.

The rapid innovation in this industry promises to bring efficiency and growth to countless sectors in coming years. Robotics programs at esteemed universities such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgia Tech are churning out a pool of world-class entrepreneurs who are not only seizing a timely—and hopefully profitable opportunity—but boldly advancing the industry.

To quote my fellow partner at Menlo Ventures, Matt Murphy, “We are entering a golden era of robotics, where robotics will become mainstream, drive huge efficiencies, and in some cases make the impossible possible.”

Source: Tech Crunch