Month: April 2019

When it comes to planning for a potential asteroid strike on planet Earth, The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency don’t want to miss a thing.

Alongside international partners like the European Space Agency’s Space Situational Awareness-NEO Segment and the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office will participate in a “tabletop exercise” that will simulate a scenario for how to respond to an asteroid on an impact trajectory with the Earth (it’s unclear whether Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, or Liv Tyler will participate).

NASA and its partners have actually been on the lookout for potentially calamitous near earth objects (which are asteroids, comets, or unidentified objects that come within 30 million miles of Earth) for more than 20 years.

The tabletop exercise is a simulation used in disaster management planning to help inform organizations that would be relevant to mobilization and response of important aspects of a possible disaster and identify ways to respond.

Participants in the “Armageddon” exercise (not its official name), will use a scenario developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS).

“These exercises have really helped us in the planetary defense community to understand what our colleagues on the disaster management side need to know,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer, in a statement. “This exercise will help us develop more effective communications with each other and with our governments.”

Simulations like this are actually required by the government thanks to the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan.

The scenario these organizations are going to wrestle with involves the fictional identification of NEO that was identified on March 26, and that astronomers believe may be potentially hazardous to Earth. The scientists speculate that the asteroid could pose a 1 in 100 chance of hitting the Earth in 2027 (the 1 in 100 chance is actually the real threshold for initiating plans to respond to an asteroid strike by the global community).

From there, participants in the simulation will discuss potential preparations for reconnaissance and deflection missions — as well as planning to mitigate the potential impact from a strike.

“NASA and FEMA will continue to conduct periodic exercises with a continually widening community of U.S. government agencies and international partners,” said Johnson, in a statement. “They are a great way for us to learn how to work together and meet each other’s needs and the objectives laid out in the White House National NEO Preparedness Action Plan.”

This isn’t the first time NASA has joined a NEO impact exercise. So far, NASA has completed six impact exercises: three international exercises in 2013, 2015, and 2017 and another three with FEMA (those included representatives from the Department of Defense and the State Department as well).

“What emergency managers want to know is when, where and how an asteroid would impact, and the type and extent of damage that could occur,” said Leviticus Lewis of the Response Operations Division for FEMA.

NASA did not say whether it has put any contingency plans in place for an “Independence Day” scenario.

Source: Tech Crunch

Forty-one percent of voice assistant users are concerned about trust, privacy and passive listening, according to a new report from Microsoft focused on consumer adoption of voice and digital assistants. And perhaps people should be concerned — all the major voice assistants, including those from Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung as well as Microsoft, employ humans who review the voice data collected from end users.

But people didn’t seem to know that was the case. So when Bloomberg recently reported on the global team at Amazon who reviews audio clips from commands spoken to Alexa, some backlash occurred. In addition to the discovery that our A.I. helpers also have a human connection, there were concerns over the type of data the Amazon employees and contractors were hearing — criminal activity and even assaults in a few cases, as well as the otherwise odd, funny or embarrassing things the smart speakers picked up.

Today, Bloomberg again delves into the potential user privacy violations by Amazon’s Alexa team.

The report said the team auditing Alexa commands has had access to location data and, in some cases, can find a customer’s home address. This is because the team has access to the latitude and longitude coordinates associated with a voice clip, which can be easily pasted into Google Maps to tie the clip to where it came from. Bloomberg said it wasn’t clear how many people had access to the system where the location information was stored.

This is precisely the kind of privacy violation that could impact user trust in the popular Echo speakers and other Alexa devices — and, by extent, other voice assistant platforms.

While some users may not have realized the extent of human involvement on Alexa’s backend, Microsoft’s study indicates an overall wariness around the potential for privacy violations and abuse of trust that could occur on these digital assistant platforms.

For example, 52 percent of those surveyed by Microsoft said they worried their personal information or data was not secure, and 24 percent said they don’t know how it’s being used. 36 percent said they didn’t even want their personal information or data to be used at all.

These numbers indicate that the assistant platforms should offer all users the ability to easily and permanently opt out of the data collection practices — one click to say that their voice recording and private information will go nowhere, and will never be seen.

41 percent of people also worried their voice assistant was actively listening or recording them, and 31 percent believed the information the assistant collected from them was not private.

14 percent also said they didn’t trust the companies behind the voice assistant — meaning Amazon, Google and all the others.

“The onus is now on tech builders to respond, incorporate feedback and start building a foundation of trust,” the report warns. “It is up to today’s tech builders to create a secure conversational landscape where consumers feel safe.”

Though the study indicates people have worries about their personal information, it doesn’t necessarily mean people want to entirely shut off access to that data  — some may want to offer their email and home address so Amazon can ship an item to their home, when they order it by voice, for instance. Other people may even opt into sharing more information if offered a tangible reward of some kind, the report also notes.

Despite all these worries, people largely said they performed using voice instead of keyboards and touch screens. Even at this early stage, 57 percent said they would rather speak to a digital assistant; and 34 percent say they like to both type and speak, as needed.

A majority — 80 percent — said they were “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with their digital assistants. Over 66 percent said they used digital assistants weekly, and 19 percent used them daily. (This refers to not just voice, but any digital assistant, we should note).

These high satisfaction numbers mean digital and voice assistants are not likely going away, but the mistrust issues and potential for abuse could lead consumers to decrease their use — or even switch brands to one that offered more security in time.

Imagine, for example, if Amazon et al. failed to clamp down on employee access to data, as Apple launched a mass market voice device for the home, similar in functionality and pricing to a Google Home mini or Echo Dot. That could shift the voice landscape further down the road.

The full report, which also examines voice trends and adoption rates, is here.

 

Source: Tech Crunch

Last week, at TechCrunch’s robotics event at UC Berkeley, we sat down with four VCs who are making a range of bets on robotics companies, from drone technologies to robots whose immediate applications aren’t yet clear. Featuring Peter Barrett of Playground Global, Helen Liang of FoundersX Ventures, Eric Migicovsky of Y Combinator and Andy Wheeler of GV (pictured above), we covered a lot of terrain (no pun intended), including whether last-mile delivery robots make sense and how much robots should be expected to do without human intervention.

We also discussed climate change and how it factors into their bets, and why the many private enterprises focused on creating fully automated vehicles may need to do much more to empower the cities in which they plan to operate. You can find excerpts of our talk below. And for access to the full transcript, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.

TC: How do you think about investing in the here and now, versus the future (which is complicated for VCs, given that venture funds need to produce returns within a ten-year window, typically):

PB: One of the challenges with investing in robotics is that robotics companies do tend to take a lot longer to mature than your average enterprise SaaS company. There are some classes of investments that we know the technology works; it’s just a question of commercializing it and bringing it to market, and Canvas [a Playground-backed company that makes autonomous warehouse carts and was just acquired by Amazon] did an extraordinary job of finding a market that existed and had technology in hand that would solve that problem.

There’s other stuff like the amazing work that the folks are doing at Agility [Robotics] with a biped that can operate for many hours in unstructured human environments that today is really, candidly, a research robot, and to reach its long-term aspirations, there’s a whole other set of technologies that we’ll need to develop as the company matures.

We think about blending the stuff that’s very impactful but is going to take a long time because it’s fundamentally a new science and technology that needs to be created, [with] immediate applications of technologies that are proven today, that we’re deploying against real markets.

AW: As for whether we try to build a portfolio where there are exits at different stages, generally, when I’m looking to invest in a robotics thing, I understand that the timeframes can be fairly long, and so what we’re looking for are things that really are going to be very large opportunities — that can generate billion-dollar-plus exits.

TC: A growing number of small last-mile delivery robots has attracted funding. Helen, your firm is an investor in one of these startups, Robby. What’s the appeal?

HL: We look at where we see a pain point in the market. During our team meetings on Fridays, we always use DoorDash. It feels awkward when we order a $100 meal, and the delivery person has driven a long way. We’ll give him a $15, but it’s still [tricky for that person] in terms of economics. If you have a central station for the food delivery, and robots can handle that last-mile delivery, we think that’s a more cost-effective approach.

Robby has partnered with PepsiCo [to delivering snacks to students attending the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Ca.] that makes it more like a vending machine, and we think that’s an interesting market, too. We’ll see how fast adoption will happen.

EM: YC is an investor in Robby as well, and we think of this as kind of the perfect example of how hackers can get into a fairly complex industry. When you look at some robotics and specifically autonomous vehicles, you see extremely large investments going into some of the some of the big players, but then at the same time, you see groups and hackers that are able to use off-the-shelf technology to solve real problems that affect businesses or people, and build services or products that that are valuable. We’ve seen this over and over.

You don’t have to be looking for a large VC investment to compete in the space. It is possible to stay frugal stay nimble and build something on a small scale to demonstrate that you found a problem that people are willing to pay money to solve. Then, if you’re interested, [you can] pursue larger VC investment or not. It’s kind of open right now.

TC: VCs we’ve talked with in the past have suggested that in robotics, they often see cool ideas for which there isn’t necessarily a market or big market need. Is this also your experience?

PB: This is a common pattern where there was some mechanism, some capability of the robot, some feat of dexterity or something [and founders think, ‘That’s really cool, I’m going to make a company out of it.’ But we think about it in terms of, what do you want from the robots? What’s the outcome that everybody agrees is worthwhile? And then, how do you find and build companies to achieve those goals?

One thing we’re struggling with right now is that there’s no real hardware or software platforms. You think about 10 years hence [and] the kinds of things we’ll be investing in, [and it’s] robotics applications that are aggregates of neural networks and some explicit software bound together in some form that can be delivered, so a large enterprise can use an application and not have everybody start from first principles. Because right now, when you built a robotics application, you make all the hardware, you make all the software. All the intellectual and actual capital [money] gets dissipated, building and rebuilding those same things. So robotics applications over time will be investable, much more like the way we invest in software, and that will allow smaller units of creativity to produce useful products.

TC: Andy, how long do you think it’s going to take until we get there?

AW: I think I think we’re making we’re making steady progress on that front. To your earlier question, this space has a lot of folks that are building technology a bit in search of a problem. That’s a common thing in startups generally. I would encourage everybody who’s looking to build a startup in the space is to really find a burning business problem. In the course of solving those [problems], people will build these platforms that Peter was talking about, and we’ll eventually get there in terms of [founders] just having to focus on the application layer.

TC: There are so many buckets: delivery robots, self-driving trucks. Both relate in ways to the overarching problem for our age, which is climate change. How much do you factor climate change into the investing decisions that you make?

PB: When we look at applications and robotics in agricultural, a lot of [our questions are] around how do you deal with a minimum carbon footprint, [and] how you replace workers who are missing. And dealing with climate change will be increasingly be a central thought in what we want from our robots. [After all] what we want from them is the ability to maintain or improve the lifestyles we have without further unwinding the environment.

TC: We talked backstage, and you think we are over-indexing on autonomy as the answer.

PB: When we think about autonomy, it’s not clear how autonomy helps cities. . . There are absolutely applications for autonomy, [including] on a farm or in a logistics environment. I think we still really don’t know how to do Level 5 [which is complete automation, requiring zero human assistance]. And I don’t think we know whether it’s exponentially hard or asymptotically. I think it’s decades before there’s any significant Level 5.

[In the meantime, if] we cared about safety, we’d install roundabouts or lower the blood alcohol limit and not try and make a sentient vehicle that drives on the road the way we do, right?

I’d much rather see having the city collaborate with the vehicles and instrument the city to collaborate with clever vehicles for the benefit of everybody who lives there. But that’s not Level 5 autonomy as the way we think of it

EM: It’s slightly interesting that autonomous vehicles, specifically the individual passenger car, evolved in America, because it’s one of the countries that has the least public transport per capita. And that that’s one of the things that the industry has to acknowledge — that there are other options that can be blended into the transport solutions for cities.

It seems like it might be happening because it’s something that an individual can take somewhat control over. You can’t own a bus, but you can own or [rent] a self-driving car.

PB: Or [an electric] scooter or a bike, right. The future of mobility is going to be a blending of all of these things. But not taking advantage of a logistics platform in a city means you’re kind of doing it the hard way, trying to make a robot to have all the human priors required to drive safely. And it’s just not clear that we know how to do that yet.

TC: Andy, GV is a big investor in Uber. What what’s your thinking? Does the city need to be a kind of central brain in order for these private enterprises to work effectively?

AW: I don’t think it’s a strict requirement at all. We’ve seen success with with self-driving trials where the city is not super involved from an infrastructure perspective, I do think it makes it a lot easier if that’s the case, though.

Source: Tech Crunch

If you’re planning to attend TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 on July 10, then get ready to network like never before. And by that, we mean easily. TC’s day-long event — dedicated to the future of mobility and transportation — features discussions, demos and workshops with the brightest founders, technologists and investors in these industries.

With more than 1,000 people attending, a simple tool to help you connect with the right people would be awesome. We have just the thing for you. It’s called CrunchMatch and — even better news — it’s free.

CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s business match-making service, helps you find and network with people based on specific mutual business criteria, goals and interests. Connecting with lots of people may be interesting, but connecting with the right people produces results. CrunchMatch’s automated platform can help you make the most of your limited time.

If you’re not already familiar with CrunchMatch, here’s how it works. Watch for an email to all ticket holders when CrunchMatch goes live. Fill out your profile with your specific details — your role (technologist, founder, investor, etc.) and who you want to connect with. CrunchMatch will make meet-up suggestions, which you can approve or decline.

Wonder if CrunchMatch delivers? Read how CrunchMatch helped Yoolox increase distribution. Save time, save shoe leather and use CrunchMatch for easier, more effective networking.

We can’t wait to see you in San Jose. If you haven’t purchased your ticket yet, do it now before the prices go up. Early-Bird Tickets are available for $195 — you save $100. Students can book a ticket for just $45 here.

Listen up, because we have even more ways to participate in TC Sessions: Mobility 2019.

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TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 takes place in San Jose, Calif. on July 10. Join your community, explore the future of mobility and transportation and make productive connections with the influential people who can help you reach your goals.

Source: Tech Crunch

Airbnb is looking to book a place in the streaming media business. The company best known for its controversial marketplace of on-demand accommodations is now plotting a foray into becoming a production studio, according to a report in Reuters.

Tons of companies in Silicon Valley have taken to producing marketing features and print magazines as an exercise in branding, but Airbnb is reportedly looking to take this a step further.

The company already has a glossy magazine published by Hearst, and according to the Reuters report, that effort will be central to the company’s media plans going forward.

Video seems to be the next playground for big companies flush with cash that want to differentiate themselves in the market. Apple has a streaming service it intends to launch, Amazon already does, and Walmart has one, too.

With its built-in user base of 500 million travelers, the company told Reuters that it already has partners that want to partner on productions.

Airbnb has already made one series for Apple. It’s a documentary series called “Home” that features quirky homes from around the world and the owners that built them. It’s also got another documentary production in the works, “Gay Chorus Deep South,” which records the travels of San Francisco’s Gay Men’s Chorus as it takes a trip through the “Deep South,” Reuters reported.

“We’re very much in the R&D phase here. It’s not just limited to video. It could be audible. It could be physical,” Airbnb spokesperson Chris Lehane, told Reuters. “The more we put content out there, the more you’re going to bring people to the platform.”

If nothing else, the Airbnb shows could raise the visibility of the service among a new audience that’s reluctant to book time in strangers’ homes.

Just don’t expect to see any exposés about the company’s problem with hidden cameras or its complicated relationship with cities and the neighborhoods that have been transformed through its business.

Source: Tech Crunch

After a year of its user count shrinking or staying flat, Snapchat is finally growing again, and more growth is likely on the way. That’s because it’s finally completed the rollout of Project Mushroom aka a backend overhaul of its Android app that’s 25 percent smaller and 20 percent faster. Designed for India and other emerging markets where iPhones are too expensive, Snapchat saw an immediate 6 percent increase in the number of people on low-end devices sending Snaps within the first week of upgrading to the new Android app.

Snapchat grew from 186 million daily active users in Q4 2018 to 190 million in Q1 2019, adding 1 million in North America, 1 million in Europe, and 2 million in the Rest Of World where the Android app makes the biggest difference despite rolling out near the end of the quarter. It’s been a long wait, as Snap first announced the Android reengineering project in November 2017.

“As of the end of Q1, our new Android application is available to everyone” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in his prepared remarks for today’s estimate-beating earnings report. “While these early results are promising, improvements in performance and new user retention will take time to compound and meaningfully impact our top-line metrics. There are billions of Android devices in the world that now have access to an improved Snapchat experience, and we look forward to being able to grow our Snapchat community in new markets.”

Spiegel told me in a pre-earnings briefing call that some of the growth stemmed from tweaks to Snapchat’s ruinous redesign including better personalized ranking of Stories and Discover content, as well as new premium video Shows. Now with the Android app humming, though, we might see significant growth in the Rest Of World region in Q2.

Unfortunately, since Snapchat uses bandwidth and storage-heavy video, more usage also means more Amazon AWS and Google Cloud expenditures, Spiegel tells me. That’s partly why Snapchat is predicting a slight increase in adjusted EBITDA losses from $123 million in Q1 to between $125 million and $150 million in Q2.

We first highlighted Snap’s neglect of the international teen Android market when Instagram Stories launched in August 2016. Spiegel and Snap were too focused on cool American teens, squandering this market that was Snapped up by Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp. Now Snapchat will have a much harder time winning emerging markets since they’re not the first to bring Stories there. But if it can double-down on ephemeral messaging, premium video, and its augmented reality platform that are leagues ahead of Facebook’s offerings, it could finally creep towards that 200 million DAU milestone.

Source: Tech Crunch

Device addiction plagues us all — even Apple CEO Tim Cook. But children with phones and tablets are even more susceptible to the lures of apps and games, which often use psychological tricks keep users logging in and regularly returning. A new PSA from Sesame Workshop and advocacy organization Common Sense aims to address kids’ unhealthy use of mobile devices by focusing on one particular problem: devices at the dinner table.

This is not the first time the #DeviceFreeDinner campaign has run — previous years’ spots featured Will Ferrell as a “distracted dad” on his phone at the table, ignoring his family’s conversations.

But this time around, the organization is teaming up with Sesame Workshop, which is lending its characters to a new PSA. The spot will feature the Sesame Street muppets modeling healthy mobile phone behavior by putting their devices away.

Phones are shut up in drawers, tablets placed on shelves, other devices are put in handbags — and, you know, thrown into garbage cans and stashed in pumpkins, as the case may be.

The muppets then gather around a table and happily chatter until they notice Cookie Monster is still on his phone, texting. (Don’t worry, their disapproval sees him eating the device in the end.)

The idea, explains kids advocacy organization Common Sense, is to raise awareness around media balance and encourage families to make the most of their time together.

It comes at a time when now one-third of kids ages 0 to 8 “frequently” use mobile devices, the nonprofit explains. But taking a break from devices is shown to have positive benefits, ranging from better nutrition and focus at home to fewer problems at school, Common Sense says.

Plus, it notes, simply putting the phone down is not enough — it shouldn’t be at the table at all, as research has shown that even the presence of a phone on the table can hurt the quality of conversations.

While Common Sense puts out a lot of material for children and families like this, Sesame Workshop’s involvement on the new PSA is particularly interesting given the company’s recent connection with Apple.

A new Sesame Workshop-produced show set to air on Apple’s soon-to-launch streaming service will teach kids coding basics — an agenda Apple regularly pushes to get its programming language, Swift, into the hands of the next generation of coders. 

In the show, the same Sesame Street characters who today are telling kids to put down their phones will instead tout the joys of coding to the preschool set.

The juxtaposition of a programming-focused Apple kids’ show and the new PSA are a perfect example of how complicated the issues around kids on devices have become. On the one hand, parents want to encourage their children to pursue STEM subjects — which often requires kids to regularly use computers and other devices to practice new skills, like coding with MIT’s Scratch or building for Minecraft. But on the other hand, parents see that when kids are given devices, addiction soon follows.

The real question for parents may be, instead, whether kids should have devices at all — or whether they should take their cues from tech billionaires and Silicon Valley parents who are ripping devices from their own children’s’ hands like they’re the modern-day equivalent of sugary breakfast cereal.

Perhaps Sesame Workshop should have chosen a side on this issue, rather than teaming with the billion-dollar company that’s now trying to distance itself from fault with regard to the device addiction problem at the same time it runs PSAs about kids’ device addiction.

Or maybe it’s just as confused at the rest of us are over where to draw the line.

The new Sesame Street-themed PSAs will be distributed starting today across networks and platforms including NBC, Fox, Xfinity, Comcast, Charter, Cox, National Geographic, NCM, PBS, Univision, Telemundo, HITN, and Xfinity Latino.

Source: Tech Crunch

When it comes to working with journalists, so many people are, frankly, idiots. I have seen reporters yank stories because founders are assholes, play unfairly, or have PR firms that use ridiculous pressure tactics when they have already committed to a story.

There is so much bad behavior that I thought that it might be time to write up a list of “DON’Ts” on how not to work with journalists.

I compiled this list by polling TechCrunch’s entire writing staff for their pet peeves when it comes to working with PR folks and founders around startup pitches. The result was this list of 16 obnoxious annoyances.

The interesting thread that connects all of them is that these DON’Ts are almost universal across the staff — few of these annoyances seemed to be merely personal preference. Avoiding these behaviors won’t guarantee coverage of your startup, but they certainly will help you avoid killing your news story before it even gets considered for publication.

DON’T change the capitalization of your startup multiple times

SEO is important, and so there are rules about how to capitalize things to maximize your exposure on Google and DDG. That’s important to get right, but for the love of god, figure out what the hell you want your startup’s name to be before you reach out to the press.

Source: Tech Crunch

Startup growth comes from many places, but one option is through “earned media” — stories and mentions in the press. Earned media is great, because the channel is nominally free, and it can often get many more of the right eyeballs than advertising. Minus some sleazy behavior in the journalism world, you should never have to pay a dime to get a story into print other than the work it takes to manage PR (and yes, of course, that can be very expensive, although it doesn’t have to be).

For these reasons, startups pitch writers a lot on stories about everything from their latest fundraise to new features in their apps. Yet despite that frequency, some founders (and PR folks) are extraordinarily good at pitching and find great success, while others seem to never get the attention of even the most workaholic writers.

The job of writers is to write stories, but writing your story is not their job.

Therefore, learning how to pitch a journalist, how to build a relationship with writers covering your startup, and how not to mess up a story already in production is a critical skill for anyone looking to grow their business.

This guide is designed to help bridge the gap by covering relationship building, how to determine newsworthiness, and the logistics of exclusives and embargoes. In addition, we’ve published a companion piece lists and analyzes 16 DON’Ts that can suddenly find your committed story in the trash can.

Building relationships should always take precedent

The single greatest secret of building any venture, actually, the greatest secret of life is that relationships are everything. We live in a free world, and no one is obligated to do anything for anyone. Venture capitalists aren’t obligated to write a check, partners aren’t obligated to sign a deal, and customers never have to buy your product.

Source: Tech Crunch

Squarespace is announcing its first acquisition today, a 13-year-old company called Acuity that allows businesses to manage their online appointments.

Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena noted that the company has been expanding beyond website building already — he said he now wants to provide tools around online presence (i.e., building a website), commerce and marketing.

To do that, Squarespace has been building its own products, but in this case, Casalena said it made more sense to just bring Acuity on-board, particularly since the there already an integration between Acuity’s scheduling software and Squarespace’s page-building tools.

“What [CEO Gavin Zuchlinski] had built at Acuity is a great business,” he said. “It’s been growing pretty organically up until this point, with 45 employees who really understand the space and a very customer-centric culture. They have a great product. That would just be faster for us [to acquire them], versus building our own product.”

The plan is to build more integrations over time, while also continuing to support Acuity as a standalone product. The entire Acuity team is joining Squarespace, with Zuchlinski become vice president of Acuity within the larger company.

Asked whether this means we can expect Squarespace to make more acquisitions in the future, Casalena said, “I think we just are able to look at things that are going to be a little more meaningful right now … Our size kind opened our perspective to what’s possible.”

This also comes as the email marketing product that Squarespace launched last year is coming out of beta with new features like campaign scheduling and improved analytics.

Source: Tech Crunch