Apple keeps adding autonomous vehicles to its test fleet in California, boosting its ranks 27% since May, according to records from the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

The company now has 70 autonomous vehicles permitted to test on public roads, Mac Reports first reported. The permits, which are issued by CA DMV, require a safety driver to be behind the wheel.

Over the past 18 months, Apple has gone from just three autonomous vehicles to 27 by January, 55 by May, and now 70. GM Cruise has the most permitted autonomous test vehicles at 175, followed by Waymo with 88. Apple has the third-largest fleet.

The number of permitted test vehicles is one of the only ways to track what Apple is up to. The company doesn’t talk about its self-driving vehicle program.

The tech company’s permit with the CA DMV, the agency responsible for monitoring AVs in the state, is the only official acknowledgment that it even has a program. Apple’s self-driving program has been considered an open secret in Silicon Valley. CEO Tim Cook  has more recently made references to the company’s interest in autonomous systems.

Last month, the company disclosed its first accident, according to a report filed with the CA DMV. The low speed accident occurred August 24. The number of accidents involving autonomous vehicles have become more common as companies put more of these self-driving cars on public roads. The vast majority are minor, low-speed incidents.

There was just one accident involving a self-driving vehicle (that one was owned by Delphi) reported to the DMV in 2014. So far this year, there have been more than 40 accidents involving self-driving cars reported to CA DMV.

Source: Tech Crunch

The sophisticated head-tracking system like the one built into the iPhone X may have been intended for AR and security purposes, but it may also turn out to be very useful for people with disabilities. A proof of concept app from an eBay intern shows how someone with very little motor function can navigate the site with nothing but head movements.

Muratcan Çiçek is one such person, and relies on assistive technology every day to read, work and get around. This year he was interning at eBay and decided to create a tool that would help people with motor impairments like his to shop online. Turns out there are lots of general-purpose tools for accessibility, like letting a user control a cursor with their eyes or a joystick, but nothing made just for navigating a site like eBay or Amazon.

His creation, HeadGaze, relies on the iPhone X’s front-facing sensor array (via ARKit) to track the user’s head movements. Different movements correspond to different actions in a demonstration app that shows the online retailer’s daily deals: navigate through categories and products by tilting your head all the way in various directions, or tilt partway down to buy, save or share.

You can see it in action in the short video below:

It’s not that this is some huge revolution in interface — there are some apps and services that do this, though perhaps not in such a straightforward and extensible way as this.

But it’s easy to underestimate the cognitive load created when someone has to navigate a UI that’s designed around senses or limbs they don’t have. To create something like this isn’t necessarily simple, but it’s useful and relatively straightforward, and the benefits to a person like Çiçek are substantial.

That’s probably why he made the HeadGaze project open source — you can get all the code and documentation at GitHub; it’s all in Swift and currently only works on the iPhone X, but it’s a start.

Considering this was a summer project by an intern, there’s not much of an excuse for companies with thousands of developers to not have something like it available for their apps or storefronts. And it’s not like you couldn’t think of other ways to use it. As Çiçek writes:

HeadGaze enables you to scroll and interact on your phone with only subtle head movements. Think of all the ways that this could be brought to life. Tired of trying to scroll through a recipe on your phone screen with greasy fingers while cooking? Too messy to follow the how-to manual on your cell phone while you’re tinkering with the car engine under the hood? Too cold to remove your gloves to use your phone?

He and his colleagues are also looking into actual gaze-tracking to augment the head movements, but that’s still a ways off. Maybe you can help.

Source: Tech Crunch

Twilio, a company best known for supplying a communications APIs for developers has a product called Twilio Flex for building sophisticated customer service applications on top of Twilio’s APIs. Today, it announced it was acquiring Ytica (pronounced Why-tica) to provide an operational and analytical layer on top of the customer service solution.

The companies would not discuss the purchase price, but Twilio indicated it does not expect the acquisition to have a material impact on its “results, operations or financial condition.” In other words, it probably didn’t cost much.

Ytica, which is based in Prague, has actually been a partner with Twilio for some time, so coming together in this fashion really made a lot of sense, especially as Twilio has been developing Flex.

Twilio Flex is an app platform for contact centers, which offers a full stack of applications and allows users to deliver customer support over multiple channels, Al Cook, general manager of Twilio Flex explained. “Flex deploys like SaaS, but because it’s built on top of APIs, you can reach in and change how Flex works,” he said. That is very appealing, especially for larger operations looking for a flexible, cloud-based solution without the baggage of on-prem legacy products.

What the product was lacking, however, was a native way to manage customer service representatives from within the application, and understand through analytics and dashboards, how well or poorly the team was doing. Having that ability to measure the effectiveness of the team becomes even more critical the larger the group becomes, and Cook indicated some Flex users are managing enormous groups with 10,000-20,000 employees.

Ytica provides a way to measure the performance of customer service staff, allowing management to monitor and intervene and coach when necessary. “It made so much sense to join together as one team. They have huge experience in the contact center, and a similar philosophy to build something customizable and programmable in the cloud,” Cook said.

While Ytica works with other vendors beyond Twilio, CEO Simon Vostrý says that they will continue to support those customers, even as they join the Twilio family. “We can run Flex and can continue to run this separately. We have customers running on other SaaS platforms, and we will continue to support them,” he said.

The company will remain in Prague and become a Twilio satellite office. All 14 employees are expected to join the Twilio team and Cook says plans are already in the works to expand the Prague team.

Source: Tech Crunch

A recent user survey sent out by Dropbox confirms the company is considering the addition of an electronic signature feature to its Dropbox Professional product, which it refers to simply as “E-Signature from Dropbox.” The point of the survey is to solicit feedback about how likely users are to use such a product, how often, and if they believe it would add value to the Dropbox experience, among other things.

While a survey alone doesn’t confirm the feature is in the works, it does indicate how Dropbox is thinking about its professional product.

According to the company’s description of E-Signature, the feature would offer “a simple, intuitive electronic signature experience for you and your clients” where documents could be sent to others to sign in “just a few clicks.”

The clients also wouldn’t have to be Dropbox users to sign, the survey notes. And the product would offer updates on every step of the signature workflow, including notifications and alerts about the document being opened, whether the client had questions, and when the document was signed. After the signed document is returned, the user would receive the executed copy saved right in their Dropbox account for easy access, the company says.

In addition to soliciting general feedback about the product, Dropbox also asked survey respondents about their usage of other e-signature brands, like Adobe e-Sign, DocuSign, HelloSign, and PandaDoc, as well as their usage other more traditional methods, like in-person signing and documents sent over mail.

Given the numerous choices on the market today, it’s unclear if Dropbox will choose to move forward and launch such a product. However, if it did, the benefit of having its own E-Signature service would be its ability to be more tightly integrated into Dropbox’s overall product experience. It could also push more business users to upgrade from a basic consumer account to the Professional tier.

This kind of direct integration would make sense in the context of Dropbox’s business workflows. If, for instance, a company is working on a contract workflow, being able to move to the signature phase without changing context (or to share with a user who doesn’t use Dropbox) could add tremendous value over and above simply storing the document.

Companies like Dropbox have been looking for ways to move beyond pure storage to give customers the ability to collaborate and share that content, particularly without forcing them to leave the application to complete a job. This ability to do work without task switching is something that Dropbox has been working on with Dropbox Paper.

While it remains to be seen how they would implement such a solution, it might be a case where it would make more sense to partner with existing vendors or buy a smaller player than it would be build such functionality from scratch — although it’s not clear from a simple survey what their ultimate goal would be at this point.

Dropbox has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Source: Tech Crunch

Snapdragon’s been talking up its new wearable chip architecture since Google I/O back in May. The component giant finally took the wraps off the product at an event earlier today in San Francisco.

As one imagines from the I/O partnership, Wear 3100 has Google’s smartwatch operating system firmly in its sites. And not a moment too soon, really. In spite of a handful of updates, Wear OS has felt pretty stagnant for some time. Not even the rebrand from Android Wear could help shake loose the cobwebs.

The new architecture replaces the 2100. Qualcomm’s chips are currently shipping in more than 100 different Wear OS watches by 25 different brands, according to the company. Honestly, I’m mostly surprised to hear that Wear OS devices have hit the triple digits. After all, category leaders like Apple, Fitbit and Samsung have all opted to invest in their own software ecosystem, rather than embracing Google.

Interestingly, the first three partners for the new chip are luxury watch makers, rather than tech companies like LG or Huawei. Fossil Group, Louis Vuitton and Montblanc have all signed up to use the tech, perhaps marking the perceived way forward for the operating system. A Pixel Watch launching at Google’s fall event also seems like a very likely possibility, given the timing of the news.

Extended battery life is the main thing here — that, after all, has long been the bane of smartwatch makers. The new chip also brings new modes, include a “Traditional Watch Mode” to cut down on battery use and a “Rich Interactive Mode” for a more robust experience.

The new chip starts shipping for mass production today.

Source: Tech Crunch

While many lament the death of local news, a small army of tech startups have been developing a new set of tools to figure out how to save it. In one of the latest developments, Hoodline — which has built a platform to ingest and analyse hundreds of terabytes of data to find and then write local news stories — has raised $10 million in a Series A round to help take its effort nationwide.

“We want to cover the news deserts that no one else is covering,” said Hoodline’s founder and CEO Razmig Hovaghimian. “It’s filling a gap. It’s filling a need.”

The San Francisco startup had once been called Ripple News (in reference to the news that “ripples out” from one event) but then took the name of a hyperlocal news blog network that it acquired in 2016 after another Ripple began to make waves.

It is currently generating stories in 20 cities, with ABC, MSN, Yahoo, Hearst and CBS among the publishers that are partnering with it to use its content.

This latest Series A round was led by Neoteny, a seed and early stage investment firm out of Boston whose founder and lead partner, MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito, is also joining Hoodline’s board.

Sound Ventures, Dentsu Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors also participated, among other investors who asked not to be named.

Hoodline had been a part of Disney’s accelerator in 2017, so it too has backed the company, as has Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce behemoth that acquired Hovaghimian’s previous startup, the crowdsourced online video subtitling startup Viki.

Hoodline is not disclosing its valuation, but from what we understand, it’s around $75 million and a bump up from its previous valuation.

Hoodline’s platform today has two parts: a local data wire producing local news stories; and a recommendation module that is somewhat similar to the likes of Outbrain and Taboola. Rather than recirculating stories from a wider network of clickable sites, however, it suggests stories from Hoodline’s inventory of stories, alongside a publication’s own inventory to keep people engaged on a site for longer.

The first of these inks partnerships with media platforms to supply content but currently is provided free to them; the second runs ads alongside the recommended articles.

One of the big issues with local news and its decline is that, as more traditional publishers have moved to the internet to cut the costs of producing printed newspapers, they’ve found that the revenues and margins that they generated from the older activities have not translated to the newer medium and the issues that even exist for large, world-famous publications are only compounded for smaller ones: they have a hard time getting the economies of scale needed to make the ad-based model work, and then when they club together they have to contend with the fact that their readership has moved on to other forms of infotainment.

But as it turns out, there is still an appetite for local information.

“There are so many good stories that go uncovered,” Hovaghimian said. “Plus, forty percent of all searches have local intent.” Facebook’s new interest in local news and Google’s own experiments with local journalism aren’t simple good-will attempts at fostering more community; they reflect interests that these companies have observed among their user bases.

So now, while tech has arguably “killed” the local news business in that way, it’s also been trying to save it be — namely in the form of providing more intelligent ways to run its business, from the advertising technology and/or paywalls to fund it, through to disrupting and improving the means of producing it.

Hoodline is part of the guard of companies that have been looking at how the rise of new kinds of computing technology, such as AI and big data analytics, can be used to help with the latter of these.

“Hoodline is bringing pioneering technology to the world of hyper-local news and content, while layering in editorial expertise and perspective.  This uniquely allows them to craft dynamic stories across a wide range of verticals and outlets,” said Ito in a statement. “We’re incredibly excited to be partnering with Hoodline and Razmig as they continue to deliver consumers content that they want, but was previously not available to them.”

Hoodline is not the only one exploring how to tap into big data to build stories; there are many. Among them, in the UK, the Press Association is working with a startup called Urbs to develop AI systems that can help surface interesting stories for (human) journalists to write. In the US, Automated Insights has been developing “robot” reporters to cover local sports and quarterly earnings beats. Other efforts like LiveStories is also tackling a trove of publicly available information — in its case civic data — to visualise and shape narratives from it, products that potentially also make their way into the news.

Hovaghimian said that Hoodline’s system ingests around 250 terabytes of data from a pretty diverse range of sources, spanning from hyperlocal listings services like Yelp and Foursquare through to things like feeds of local high school football sports results, and organises it and passes it through its algorithms to surface interesting items that can be used in stories. Editors, meanwhile, write templates that can be used for different types of stories, such as local food events, job trends in a particular city, or sports results from a local team. One person at the company described the templates as “advanced Madlibs.”

And for now, it’s as basic as this, too. Hoodline has bylined content written by journalists, but the content that is bylined to Hoodline is created by the company’s big data platform, and those articles, it has to be said, are more anodyne than earth-shattering. But Hovaghimian says this is almost intentional, it’s to clear the way for more serious work.

“We are filling a gap and covering news that is not being covered, even if it’s just to test what audiences want to read,” he said. “This frees up resources for more journalistic pursuits.”

Whether or not publications dedicate resources to more journalistic pursuits to complement the Hoodline work, of course, is another matter.

Meanwhile, Hoodline also has journalists to work on original content and to build these templates. The company currently has a ratio of around two engineers to one editor, Hovaghimian said, but believes that as it scales it will be bringing in fewer editors and more engineers: “At this point it’s about growth now that we have figured out what our bottlenecks are,” he said.

As for what comes next, Hovaghimian said that the ambition is to bring this to more than just the US eventually, and to work with different kinds of partners beyond news organizations. Facebook and Google’s own interests in this area haven’t gone unnoticed and the company has thought about how it could partner with them, too.

Source: Tech Crunch

You can’t really blame Epic for captilizing on Fortnite’s massive and largely unexpected success. And really, you’ve got to strike while the iron’s still hot on this one. The gaming company announced a partnership with toy giant Hasbro this week that while give the world a Fortnite-branded Monopoly game and Nerf Blasters.

Monopoly: Fortnite Edition launches October 1 — just in time to be a little too early for the holiday season. That one is arriving in both the U.S. and U.K. this fall, with more markets coming in 2019. It promises to “bring a a battle building twist to the iconic Fast Dealing Property Trading game,” because nothing says real estate mogul like a survival game.

The Nerf partnership is a bit more of a natural from a licensed content perspective. No specifics to speak of at the moment, but given that there are, you know, guns in Fornite, you can really just use your imagination. Hasbro says they’ll “emulate the amazing onscreen battles Fortnite is known for,” which could imply a laser tag element here.

Those are due out some time next year.

Source: Tech Crunch