USA TODAY |
Northern California, reeling from Camp Fire devastation, evacuates from flash floods
USA TODAY As if the devastation from the recent wildfires wasn't enough, Northern California had another battle brewing with Mother Nature on Thursday: flash flooding. Three weeks after the devastating Camp Fire began, flooding closed part of California Route 99 ... |
Chicago Tribune |
Ald. Ed Burke and the feds
Chicago Tribune Anywhere else, sheets of brown paper taped to a window would signal a remodeling project. Construction underway. Pardon our dust. But the postal paper taped to the window of Ald. Ed Burke's City Hall office early Thursday set off a storm of speculation. |
fox5sandiego.com |
2 San Diego teens tortured, killed execution-style in Tijuana
fox5sandiego.com TIJUANA, Mexico -- Two San Diego teenagers who took a Black Friday trip to Ensenada were shot and killed execution-style in a triple homicide Sunday morning at a Tijuana apartment complex, according to family members, school officials and Mexican ... |
New York Magazine |
4 St. Louis Police Officers Indicted for Violating Civil Rights of Police Shooting Protesters
New York Magazine During the latter stages of the struggle to end Jim Crow and beyond, federal civil rights laws often proved essential in seeking justice for African-Americans when local law enforcement officials (or in some cases, juries) refused to take action ... |
HuffPost |
James Comey Asks Judge To Block GOP Efforts For Closed-Door Testimony
HuffPost James Comey, the former director of the FBI, asked a federal judge Thursday to block a subpoena from Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight Committee. Both Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch ... Comey asks judge to stop congressional committees' bid to compel his private testimony Comey asks court to quash House subpoena Comey challenges House GOP subpoena in federal court |
The Mercury News |
Butte County: 35 families sue PG&E for Camp Fire losses
The Mercury News BUTTE COUNTY — As Walter Heard raced home under dark skies and past a field on fire next to his house in Paradise the morning of Nov. 8, he thought, “Oh no, not again.” He had lost the same residence to a blaze in 2014, one he alleges was the fault of ... Powerful storm triggers flooding, evacuations and warnings in the Camp Fire region Paradise families sue PG&E over Camp Fire destruction Authorities End Search Efforts in Paradise, Calif. |
Newsweek |
Two American Teens Killed Execution-Style in Mexico
Newsweek Two American teenagers from California and their friend from Mexico were reportedly tortured and killed execution-style on Sunday at an apartment complex in Tijuana, Mexico. Authorities are unclear why the three teens were killed. Christopher Alexis ... |
Reuters |
Merkel protege and old rival battle to lead Germany's ruling party
Reuters DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) - The race to succeed Angela Merkel as leader of Germany's ruling conservatives, and take pole position to succeed her as chancellor, is going down to the wire. FILE PHOTO: Christian Democratic Union (CDU) ... Merkel's plane makes unscheduled landing after technical hitch The race to succeed Angela Merkel |
Vox |
Paul Ryan really wishes the House speaker would fix immigration and the debt
Vox Paul Ryan has regrets. The retiring Republican House speaker who spent the last two years ignoring almost everything President Donald Trump has said and done to get a massive corporate tax cut passed, says leaving immigration and the national debt ... Dear Paul Ryan, California's voting system is only 'bizarre' if you don't want people to vote Paul Ryan isn't saying there was voter fraud in California. But . . . |
USA TODAY |
'Destined for failure': Evangelicals question John Chau's sincere, ill-advised plan
USA TODAY When John Chau landed on North Sentinel Island, he brought gifts for the tribespeople he hoped to reach for Jesus: Fish, safety pins, some cord. They shot an arrow into his Bible in response, he later wrote. “Please do not be angry at them or at God if ... |
ESPN |
Saints' 10-game winning streak ends as offense falls flat vs. Cowboys
ESPN ARLINGTON, Texas -- Drew Brees and the historic New Orleans Saints offense came crashing back down to earth Thursday night as their 10-game win streak was snapped by the Dallas Cowboys in a 13-10 slugfest. The Cowboys take control of the NFC East while the Saints lose their grip on the No. 1 seed NFL - AP News Jerry Jones: Cowboys need to treat matchup with Saints like it's the Super Bowl |
Fortune |
FBI Raids Trump's Former Chicago Tax Attorney Who Saved the President $14 Million in Property Taxes
Fortune The FBI raided the offices in Chicago of one of President Donald Trump's former attorneys, Edward Burke, who is a member of the city council. Burke's small firm represented Trump in Chicago over tax matters, obtaining $14 million in relief from ... |
USA TODAY |
Ex-Colombia drug lord 'Chupeta' testifies against alleged Mexican counterpart 'El Chapo'
USA TODAY NEW YORK — It may have been one of the rare times when two of the world's top alleged drug lords were in the same room without a mega-kilo narcotics deal going down. Juan Carlos Ramírez-Abadía a former leader of Colombia's Norte Valle cocaine cartel, ... |
Yahoo News |
US police charged with beating undercover officer during protest
Yahoo News Chicago (AFP) - Several police officers in the US city of St Louis were charged Thursday with illegally beating an undercover officer posing as a protester and then attempting to cover up their actions. The charges stem from a widely-criticized police ... |
In a regulatory filing today, SoftBank Group said it has set an indicative price of 1,500 yen ($13.22) per share for the initial public offering of its domestic telecoms unit next month. This means the offering is potentially worth 2.4 trillion yen (about $21.16 billion), making it one of the largest IPOs ever. The price is the same as the tentative one SoftBank disclosed in a previous filing earlier this month.
The IPO is set for Dec. 19 on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and its final price will be determined on Dec. 10. The record for the largest IPO is currently held by Alibaba Group, which raised a total of $25 billion in 2014. If there is enough demand for SoftBank Group’s shares, a overallotment can potentially increase its offering’s total by 240.6 billion yen (or about $2.12 billion), bringing it closer to the amount Alibaba raised.
One interesting aspect of this initial public offering is SoftBank Group’s efforts to reach retail investors. For example, brokerages have run television ads for the offering in Japan.
SoftBank’s brand recognition may appeal to individual investors, but at the same time it may also have to answer questions about how investments by its Vision Fund are performing, as well as the $100 billion fund’s reliance on Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Its biggest backer, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) put $45 billion in the Vision Fund and may put the same amount into the second Vision Fund. The PIF is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been implicated by the Central Intelligence Agency and Turkish officials the planning of Khashoggi’s death.
Sorry folks. If you wanted to buy a ticket to Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 you’re out of luck. We’re sold out. However, you could be one of the lucky few to score a free ticket to our day-long startup-pitch extravaganza in Lagos, Nigeria on 11 December. We have a limited number of tickets available, so apply for your free ticket here — before they’re all gone.
Don’t miss 15 of the continent’s top early-stage startup founders as they launch their companies on a global stage in front of a live, enthusiastic audience. Choosing the Startup Battlefield competitors from hundreds of applications was no easy feat — a testament to the depth and creativity of the region’s growing startup scene.
A quick reminder of how Startup Battlefield works. The 15 teams compete in three preliminary rounds — five startups per round. They get only six minutes to pitch and present a live demo to a panel of expert technologists and VC investors. After each pitch, the judges have six minutes to grill the team with tough questions. That’s when all the free pitch-coaching they received from TechCrunch editors will come in handy.
If you’re curious about the judges, here are just a few of the many experts we’ve tapped to pick the Startup Battlefield champion.
And if you’re curious about the stakes, the winning founders receive the Battlefield Cup, US$25,000 in no-equity cash plus a trip for two and the opportunity to compete in Startup Battlefield at a TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019.
While the Startup Battlefield is the crown jewel, it’s by no means the only event of the day. We’ve scheduled an impressive agenda filled with presentations from the region’s leading experts discussing a range of topics. For example, Kola Aina, CEO and founder of Lagos-based Ventures Platform, will be on hand to discuss venture capital investing. And Flutterwave’s IIyinoluwa Aboyeji will share his take on blockchain.
The competitors are busy preparing for battle, the speakers are ready to dive deep on their respective topics. You’re the remaining piece of the puzzle. Apply now for a free ticket to Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 and join us on 11 December in Lagos, Nigeria to celebrate these exceptional African startups.
Despite strong reviews and a fan petition, Netflix said today that it is cancelling “Daredevil” after three seasons. This is the latest Marvel series, after “Luke Cage” and “Iron Fist,” that Netflix has cancelled recently, and is a sign that Marvel TV and Netflix’s multi-series agreement, signed in 2013, may be hitting some bumps.
Centered around a blind lawyer-turned-superhero in New York City, played by Charlie Cox, “Daredevil” was the first series released as part of the Marvel-Netflix deal in 2015. This leaves “Jessica Jones” and “The Punisher” as the two remaining Marvel series on Netflix.
Netflix said in a statement sent to Deadline, which first broke the news, that “we are tremendously proud of the show’s last and final season and although it’s painful for the fans, we feel it best to close this chapter on a high note. We are thankful to our partners at Marvel, showrunner Erik Oleson, the show’s writers, stellar crew, and incredible cast including Charlie Cox as Daredevil himself, and we’re grateful to the fans who have supported the show over the years.”
The streaming service added that the three seasons will remain on Netflix for years, while “the Daredevil will live on in future projects for Marvel,” leaving open the possibility that the character might appear in “Jessica Jones” or “The Punisher.” Another possibility is the series moving to Disney’s upcoming streaming service, Disney+, expected to launch late next year (the Walt Disney Company owns Marvel Entertainment).
The abrupt cancellations of three Marvel series over the last new months may point to hiccups in the partnership between Netflix and Marvel TV. Potential conflicts between the two include the cost of producing Marvel-Netflix shows, the success of Netflix’s own original content, and disagreements about the length of seasons. The Marvel seasons had 13 episodes each, but newer Netflix shows are only 10 episodes per season.
A flurry of digital-first insurers are betting they can surpass industry incumbents with a little help from technology and a lot of help from venture capitalists.
The latest to land a massive check is Bright Health, a Minneapolis-headquartered provider of affordable individual, family and Medicare Advantage healthcare plans in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, New York City, Ohio and Tennessee. The company, founded by the former chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare Bob Sheehy; Kyle Rolfing, the former CEO of UnitedHealth-acquired Definity Health; and Tom Valdivia, another former Definity Health executive, has brought in a $200 million Series C.
The funding values Bright Health at $950 million, according to PitchBook — more than double the $400 million valuation it garnered with its $160 million Series B in June 2017. Sheehy, Bright Health’s CEO, declined to comment on the valuation. New investors Declaration Partners and Meritech Capital participated in the round, with backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, Greycroft, NEA, Redpoint Ventures and others. Bright Health has raised a total of $440 million since early 2016.
VCs have deployed significantly more capital to the insurance technology (insurtech) space in recent years. Startups in the industry, long-known for a serious dearth of innovation, have raked in nearly $3 billion in private capital this year. U.S.-based insurtech startups have raised $2 billion in 2018, a record year for the sector and more than double last year’s total.
Deal count, meanwhile, is swelling. In 2016, there were 72 deals conducted in the space, followed by 86 in 2017 and 94 so far this year, again, according to PitchBook’s data.
Oscar Health, the health insurance provider led by Josh Kushner, is responsible for about 25 percent of the capital invested in U.S. insurtech startups this year. The company has raised a total of $540 million across two notable deals in 2018. The first saw Oscar pulling in $165 million at a $3 billion valuation and the second, announced in August, had Alphabet investing a whopping $375 million. Devoted Health, a Waltham, Mass.-based Medicare Advantage startup, followed up with a massive round of its own. The company nabbed $300 million and announced that it would begin enrolling members to its Medicare Advantage plan in eight Florida counties. Devoted is led by Todd Park, the co-founder of Athenahealth and Castlight Health.
Bright Health co-founders Bob Sheehy, CEO; Tom Valdivia, chief medical officer; and Kyle Rolfing, president
VC’s interest in insurtech isn’t limited to healthcare.
Hippo, which sells home insurance plans at lower premiums, officially launched in 2017 and has brought in $109 million to date. Earlier this month the company announced a $70 million Series C funding round led by Felicis Ventures and Lennar Corporation. Lemonade, which is similarly an insurer focused on homeowners, raised $120 million in a SoftBank-led round late last year. And Root Insurance, an app-based car insurance company founded in 2015, itself raised a $100 million Series D led by Tiger Global Management in August. The financing valued the company at $1 billion.
Together, these companies have raised well over $1 billion this year alone. Why? Because building a health insurance platform is incredibly cash-intensive and particularly difficult given the breadth of incumbents like Aetna or UnitedHealth. Sheehy, considering his 20-year tenure at UnitedHealthcare, may be especially well-positioned to disrupt the industry.
The opportunity here for investors and startups alike is huge; the health insurance market alone is forecasted to be worth more than $1 trillion by 2023. Companies that can leverage technology to create consumer-friendly, efficient and, most importantly, reasonably priced insurance options stand to win big.
As for Bright Health, the company plans to use its $200 million infusion to rapidly expand into new markets, planning to triple its geographic footprint in 2019.
“Bright Health has continued to execute at a fast pace towards our goal of disrupting the old health care model that places insurers at odds with providers,” Sheehy said in a statement. “[Its] current high re-enrollment rate shows that consumers are ready for this improved healthcare experience – especially when it is priced competitively.”
NASA is ready to send astronauts back to the moon for the first time in more than 40 years. It won’t be doing it alone, however. The agency is enlisting nine companies, large and small, to compete for a combined maximum contract value of $2.6 billion over the next 10 years.
NASA released the list of names today, including aerospace stalwart Lockheed Martin, along with Astrobotic Technology, Deep Space Systems, Draper, Firefly Aerospace, Texas Intuitive Machines, LLC, Masten Space Systems, Inc., Moon Express and Orbit Beyond — all American companies.
“Today’s announcement marks tangible progress in America’s return to the Moon’s surface to stay,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a press release. “The innovation of America’s aerospace companies, wedded with our big goals in science and human exploration, are going to help us achieve amazing things on the Moon and feed forward to Mars.”
Baby steps. The teams will start with lunar payload missions, which could kick off as early as next year. Learnings from that first crop will be used to inform future missions to the moon and, eventually, Mars.
Since 2015, AWS has had a team of solution architects working with customers to make sure they are using AWS services in a way that meets best practices around a set of defined criteria. Today, the company announced a new Well Architected tool that helps customers do this themselves in an automated way without the help of a human consultant.
As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said in his keynote address at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, it’s hard to scale a human team inside the company to meet the needs of thousands of customers, especially when so many want to be sure they are complying with these best practices. He indicated that they even brought on a network of certified partners to help, but it still has not been enough to meet demand.
In typical AWS fashion, they decided to create a service to help customers measure how well they are doing in terms of operations, security, reliability, cost optimization and performance efficiency. Customers can run this tool against the AWS services they are using and get a full report of how they measure up against these five factors.
“I think of it as a way to make sure that you are using the cloud right, and that you are using it well,” Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post introducing the new service.
Instead of working with a human to analyze your systems, you answer a series of questions and then generate a report based on those answers. When the process is complete you generate a pdf report with all the recommendations for your particular situation.
Image: AWS
While it’s doubtful that such an approach can be as comprehensive as a conversation between client and consultant, it is a starting point to at least get you on the road to thinking about such things, and as a free service, you have little to lose by at least trying the tool and seeing what it tells you.
It’s now common in tech to describe data as “the new oil or electricity” — a fuel that will power innovation and company growth for the foreseeable future. However, data is far from a novel industry. In fact, it’s a decades-old market, and many successful data companies, such as Bloomberg, LiveRamp (now Axciom), Oracle Data Cloud and Nielsen have been built in the past and serve as industry leaders… for the time being.
Still, a few characteristics separate today’s world of data businesses from those in the past. The market for data is increasing in size at a rapid rate, mostly due to new methods of measurement (like mobile phones, IoT sensors and satellite imagery) that generate new forms of information, as well as new, prevalent use cases like AI, which rely on huge quantities of high-quality data to work (emphasis on the high-quality).
These changes have led to unprecedented demand for data outside of traditionally data-hungry markets, like finance, marketing and real estate. They have also led to an iteration of data company that’s being classified as Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) — companies like Datanyze (acquired by ZoomInfo), Safegraph, Clearbit, PredictHQ and DataFox. DaaS stresses higher velocity, higher-quality, near real-time data that can support more rigorous needs, such as training machine learning algorithms. Non-financial corporations are more than happy to ingest external data that will help them streamline their operations, supply chain and marketing.
In this evolving world of Data as a Service, there are a few attributes that lead to a successful company:
DaaS must serve a big enough market. This seems like an obvious point, but too many entrepreneurs assume they can easily sell large volumes of high-quality data. Even though data is in higher demand than ever, the ability to use it and integrate it into general customer workflows has not been democratized. Music downloads and charts, for example, is valuable data, but the customer segment is not large enough at this point and a few players dominate the market. Social media or influencer ranking data, like Klout, is similar. There are many categories of real-time data that does not have the size or impact necessary to sustain a large-scale DaaS business.
DaaS is not about disruption, it’s about empowerment. Many startups want to “disrupt” a space, but DaaS companies need to focus on integrating into existing workflows rather than demanding customers change how they do business. This requires deep customer knowledge, easy integration and data that immediately provide value to the business. Potential customers have seen the buzz around Big Data, Hadoop and business intelligence, but the only thing they talk about is dashboard fatigue. It’s important that DaaS companies focus on seamless integration and solving a well-defined customer problem.
DaaS should have increasing incremental margin. Data businesses often have significant COGS, particularly at small scale. However, as a data business gets larger, the gross margins can improve dramatically. So it’s really important to understand whether the cost of acquiring or generating data changes as you bring on new customers. I call this incremental margin; the change in the difference between cost of producing data and how much that data can be sold for. If your gross margin is significantly higher for your fiftieth customer than it was for your first, then you are on your way to building a venture-backable business (or, if the margin is high enough, you may not even need VC backing at all). This increasing margin is a key pillar in building out a large, sustainable DaaS company.
It is data quality, velocity and margins that will decide whether or not a startup is successful in the long run.
DaaS must be machine readable. Today, data accuracy is increasingly powering company innovation, and quality becomes more important as data is used for AI training purposes. If a company is using data for something like a marketing campaign, it’s not critical if the data is of poor quality. Moreover, people have accepted a rock-bottom level to date — often 80 percent of marketing data may be erroneous. However, when data is being used to power AI applications and machine learning algorithms, low data quality could be disastrous. In other words, DaaS must be machine readable. Some data may need to be cleaned up; Trifacta is an example of a company that provides the tools to ensure higher-quality data. Other companies, such as Crowdflower (now Figure Eight), Mighty AI and Samasource label data and clean it up for algorithmic use.
DaaS must have continuous movement. In other words, there should be continuous value in data getting refreshed. A successful DaaS company does not provide data to serve a one-time use case; rather, the data should have a combination of velocity (change over time; days or hours) and inherent value in knowing the changes that are occurring. The higher the data velocity, the more value potential exists within that company’s data. Real estate or stock market data are good examples of value increasing with greater velocity.
DaaS must tell a story. Numbers are no longer enough. DaaS companies must provide the tools and analytics or AI to unlock data, identify trends and then provide context around those trends. AI is particularly useful in finding correlations across data sets that humans would never know to look for. Safegraph, which produces granular location data, provides us with some great examples of this. Location data is far more than the sum of its parts when it contains enough velocity and accuracy. For example, when paired with ZIP Code-based income data, location data can tell us quite a bit about food deserts and their disproportionate effect on poorer households that have to travel three times farther to get to a grocery store. Or, location data can tell us about the vast differences in travel patterns across different cities — information that is critical in the development of autonomous vehicles, where different vehicle types and considerations will be necessary for different use cases.
The above attributes are ones that differentiate DaaS businesses from more traditional data companies. Startups looking to build sustainable, high-growth companies should heed these critical elements. As the need for AI-enhanced products grows, DaaS will only grow with it — but it is data quality, velocity and margins that will decide whether or not a startup is successful in the long run. As demand for DaaS increases, I expect we’ll also see an entire industry of data marketplaces and data cleaning products and services built around it.
Top tech executives from Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Oracle will head to the White House next Thursday to discuss “bold, transformational ideas” focused on U.S. innovation.
The meeting, framed as a “roundtable discussion” by The Wall Street Journal, is expected to cover a broad range of emerging tech topics, from 5G to AI to quantum computing, which “can help ensure U.S. leadership in industries of the future,” according to a White House email.
The meeting follows longstanding tensions between the Trump administration and many large tech firms over policy decisions, ranging from social issues like LGBTQ rights and immigration to trade tariffs.
Notably absent is Amazon, which participated in early White House meetings, but has grown increasingly at odds with the administration as Trump has specifically targeted Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos. Twitter, Facebook and Google have all also been in the president’s cross-hairs over accusations of media bias and “shadow banning.”
Along with CEOs like Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai (who is also scheduled to testify in front of the House a day prior), Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian and private equity firm Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman will also be in attendance.
AWS launched Lambda in 2015 and with it helped popularize serverless computing. You simply write code (event triggers) and AWS deals with whatever compute, memory and storage you need to make that work. Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced several new features to make it more developer friendly, while acknowledging that even while serverless reduced complexity, it still requires more sophisticated tools as it matures.
It’s called serverless because you don’t have to worry about the underlying servers. The cloud vendors take care of all that for you, serving whatever resources you need to run your event and no more. It means you no longer have to worry about coding for all your infrastructure and you only pay for the computing you need at any given moment to make the application work.
The way AWS works is that it tends to release something, then builds more functionality on top of a base service as it sees increasing requirements as customers use it. As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels pointed out in his keynote on Thursday, developers debate about tools and everyone has their own idea of what tools they bring to the task every day.
For starters, they decided to please the language folks introducing support for new languages. Those developers who use Ruby can now use Ruby Support for AWS Lambda. “Now it’s possible to write Lambda functions as idiomatic Ruby code, and run them on AWS. The AWS SDK for Ruby is included in the Lambda execution environment by default,” Chris Munns from AWS wrote in a blog post introducing the new language support.
If C++ is your thing, AWS announced C++ Lambda Runtime. If neither of those match your programming language tastes, AWS opened it up for just about any language with the new Lambda Runtime API, which Danilo Poccia from AWS described in a blog post as “a simple interface to use any programming language, or a specific language version, for developing your functions.”
For folks who have different tastes in IDEs (integrated development environments), AWS announced Lambda support for several popular ones including PyCharm and IntelliJ in preview and Visual Studio.
AWS didn’t want to stop with languages though. They also recognize that even though Lambda (and serverless in general) is designed to remove a level of complexity for developers, that doesn’t mean that all serverless applications consist of simple event triggers. As developers build more sophisticated serverless apps, they have to bring in system components and compose multiple pieces together, as Vogels explained in his keynote today.
To address this requirement, the company introduced Lambda Layers, which they describe as “a way to centrally manage code and data that is shared across multiple functions.” This could be custom code used by multiple functions or a way to share code used to simplify business logic.
They also announced the Step Functions Service Integration, which allows developers to define a set of steps and triggers, which can connect to other Amazon services such as Sagemaker, DynamoDB and Fargate. This could enable developers to build much more complex serverless applications that not only perform an action, but trigger other Amazon services.
As Lambda matures, developer requirements growl; these announcements and others are part of trying to meet those needs.
Thirteen companies took the stage today at Disrupt Berlin, delivering six-minute pitches and demos, then answering free-for-all questions from expert judges. Now that the judges have given us their feedback, we’ve chosen five finalists.
These finalists will all take the stage again tomorrow afternoon to present in front of a new set of judges, who will have time to ask more in-depth questions. Then one winner will be chosen to take home the Disrupt Cup — not to mention $50,000, equity-free.
Here are the finalists. The competition will be live-streamed on TechCrunch starting at 2:05pm Berlin time on Friday.
Imago AI is applying AI to help feed the world’s growing population by increasing crop yields and reducing food waste. To accomplish this, it’s using computer vision and machine learning technology to fully automate the laborious task of measuring crop output and quality.
Read more about Imago AI here.
Kalepso says it can do better than other database offerings out there by melding strong security with high reliability, while filling in the spots where sensitive data can be accessed or obtained in the clear. Its Harvard-educated founders argued that all the existing database services out there are either slow or insecure.
Legacy is tackling an interesting problem: the reduction of sperm motility as we age. By freezing men’s sperm, this Swiss-based company promises to keep our boys safe and potent as we get older, a consideration that many find vital as we marry and have kids later.
Polyteia is building a platform that would allow city leaders to unify and analyze the data that represents the constituents they serve. The problem, the company says, is that local governments collect a lot of data, but they aren’t always great at organizing and using it efficiently.
Read more about Polyteia here.
Spike lets family and doctors lend a hand to diabetes patients by sending them real-time alerts about their stats. And the app’s artificial intelligence features can even send helpful reminders or suggest the most diabetes-friendly meals when you walk into a restaurant.
Read more about Spike Diabetes here.
The Switch has been a monster hit for Nintendo by nearly every measure. The convertible console is precisely the success the company needed after a few years in the wilderness following the Wii U flop and smartphone foot-dragging.
Strategy Analytics predicts more good things for the platform, predicting that Nintendo will surpass Sony in console sales next year. The margins are admittedly pretty thin, with Nintendo selling 17.3 million Switches to Sony’s 17.1 million PS4/PS4 Pro (Microsoft’s in a distant third here at an even 10 million), but if it holds, it will be an impressive feat nonetheless.
That number would put Nintendo ahead of the pack for the first time in 10 years, back in the Wii/PS3/Xbox 360 days. The company’s gearing up to release one of the console’s biggest titles yet, with the new Super Smash Bros. due out next week, and rumors have been swirling around update hardware for 2019, which would be pretty standard fare for Nintendo.
While those sales would propel the company to the front of the pack, Sony’s still got a much larger overall user base, accounting for around half of consoles currently in use — an impressive 84 percent of which are PS4s.
Prosecutors in South Korea have indicted the chief executive and eight other employees of Toptec Co for allegedly selling information about Samsung’s flexible OLED displays to a Chinese company. The charges detail that the company received more than $13.8 million for the information, Bloomberg reports.
Toptec, a Samsung supplier that manufactures display-related equipment, has denied the charges in a statement. “Our company has never provided Samsung Display’s industrial technology or business secrets to a Chinese client. Our company will fully cooperate with legal proceedings to find the truth in court.” The company’s share price is down 20 percent at the time of writing.
Samsung’s flexible display tech probably makes you think of their weird and yet-to-be-released foldable phone that they just showed off earlier this month. Samsung’s been deep in the flexible display business for a while though even if their bends have been less acute like the designs of much older handsets like the Galaxy S6 Edge.
The Chinese company was not named in the suit though there are a number of companies working to produce flexible displays for smartphones.
South Korea’s national interests are deeply intertwined with the business dealings of Samsung, and the threat of intellectual property theft to China is one which they seem to be taking very seriously. We have reached out to Samsung for comment.
In September, Hulu and Discovery announced a partnership for live and on-demand programming that would see Discovery’s content coming to Hulu’s streaming service. Today, as promised, those channels are going live with the launch of Discovery Networks programming across all of Hulu with Live TV packages.
That means Hulu with Live TV subscribers will now have access to five new channels in the core package, including Discovery, TLC, Motor Trend, Animal Planet and ID. This is the first time the content from these networks has been available live on Hulu’s service.
Hulu’s on-demand service subscription plan, however, offers a number of library episodes from the networks, including shows from Food Network, TLC and HGTV.
In addition to the expansion of the core package, Hulu’s new add-on bundles focused on Entertainment and Spanish programming are being expanded with Discovery Networks content, as well.
Earlier this month, Hulu announced the launch of these two new add-ons, which are small bundles of channels subscribers can opt to add on top of their core package. The $4.99 per month “Español” add-on, for example, offers live news and sports networks, including ESPN Deportes, NBC Universo, CNN En Español and History Channel En Español.
Now, it will include Discovery en Español and Discovery Familia as a result of the Hulu-Discovery partnership.
Meanwhile, the $7.99 per month Entertainment add-on has been offering live network feeds of LMN (Lifetime Movie Network), FYI, DIY Network, Cooking Channel and CNBC World.
It now gains Destination America, Discovery Family, Science, Discovery Life and AHC thanks to the deal.
Combined, the new channels bring a variety of popular lifestyle content to Hulu’s Live TV service, including shows like Fixer Upper, Chopped, 90 Day Fiancé, Naked and Afraid, Cupcake Wars, Deadliest Catch, Property Brothers, Alaskan Bush People and House Hunters, for example.
These sorts of home improvement shows and other light reality fare is something that on-demand services, like Netflix, haven’t quite caught up to. Netflix more recently has been rolling out originals like Nailed It! and Sugar Rush in the competition cooking space to help engage the reality TV audience, but hasn’t really had a breakout hit in the home improvement space.
Not doing more in reality TV could be to Netflix’s disadvantage. Hulu’s data has shown this content is often heavily binged, with one-third of Alaskan Bush People’s audience binge-watching the entire series, for instance.
And on Sundays, viewers are streaming multiple episodes of the other titles, it says, including 90 Day Fiancé, Property Brothers, House Hunters, Fixer Upper, Deadliest Catch, Naked and Afraid, Chopped and Cupcake Wars. The latter, Cupcake Wars, also saw its audience streaming 50 percent more hours this year than the last, the company noted.
Kafka is an open-source tool for handling incoming streams of data. Like virtually all powerful tools, it’s somewhat hard to set up and manage. Today, Amazon’s AWS is making this all a bit easier for its users with the launch of Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka. That’s a mouthful, but it’s essentially Kafka as a fully managed, highly available service on AWS. It’s now available on AWS as a public preview.
As AWS CTO Werner Vogels noted in his AWS re:Invent keynote, Kafka users traditionally had to do a lot of heavy lifting to set up a cluster on AWS and to ensure that it could scale and handle failures. “It’s a nightmare having to restart all the cluster and the main nodes,” he said. “This is what I would call the traditional heavy lifting that AWS is really good at solving for you.”
It’s interesting to see AWS launch this service, given that it already offers a very similar tool in Kinesis, a tool that also focuses on ingesting streaming data. There are plenty of applications on the market today that already use Kafka, and AWS is clearly interested in giving those users a pathway to either move to a managed Kafka service or to AWS in general.
As with all things AWS, the pricing is a bit complicated, but a basic Kafka instance will start at $0.21 per hour. You’re not likely to just use one instance, so for a somewhat useful setup with three brokers and a good amount of storage and some other fees, you’ll quickly pay well over $500 per month.
New numbers from Gartner this morning show solid projections for the wearable market, in spite of a few relatively lackluster years following the category’s initial explosion. The drivers for the projected growth should be no surprise to anyone who has been following it of late — namely smartwatches and ear-worn devices (the unfortunately named hearables).
Overall, Gartner his predicting a jump in shipments in excess of 25 percent in 2019, up to 225 million, from 179 million. That number is expected to continue to increase all the way up to 453 million by 2022.
Smartwatches — led by Apple, Samsung and relatively recent entrant Fitbit — are a key factor, growing from 53 million units shipped to 74 million, and then up to 115 million by 2022. Impressive, if it plays out accordingly, though interestingly, average selling price is expected to drop over that time frame by ~$11 per device.
That’s a product of lower-priced competition for the industry-leading Apple Watch. We’ve already seen Fitbit undercut the competition pretty dramatically with the $150 Versa. How that will square with costlier health components like Apple’s ECG, however, remains to be seen.
Ear-worn devices — namely Bluetooth earbuds like Apple’s AirPods and Samsung’s IconX — are the other big driver. Gartner suggests they’ll account for nearly one-third of the wearables market by 2022.
Cruise Automation, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM, is getting a new CEO.
The autonomous vehicle company, which was acquired by GM in 2016 and became subsidiary GM Cruise, has tapped Dan Ammann as CEO. Ammann (shown on the right in the photo above) will step down as GM’s president, a role he’s held since January 2014.
Kyle Vogt, a Cruise co-founder who was CEO and also unofficially handled the chief technology officer position, is staying with the company. Vogt will now become president and CTO. The changes take effect January 1, 2019.
The executive-level shuffling makes sense for Cruise, which has transformed from a small startup with 40 employees to more than 1,000 today at its San Francisco headquarters. And it continues to expand as the company prepares to launch a commercial robotaxi business in 2019.
Cruise recently announced plans to open an office in Seattle and staff it with up to 200 engineers. And with the recent investments by SoftBank and Honda, which has pushed Cruise’s valuation to $14.6 billion, it has the runway to get even bigger. Vogt can focus on the tech and Ammann can build out and manage the business.
Ammann was at the center of GM’s initial investment and acquisition of Cruise. He oversaw GM’s relationship with Cruise. And he’s a person with whom Vogt has regular contact, something he mentioned while onstage at SF Disrupt in September.
Ammann also comes with a specific skill set. When Ammann first joined GM in 2010 as vice president of finance and treasurer, his first task was to manage GM’s initial public offering. This could signal a future move by the company.
“Dan’s been my partner since General Motors’ initial investment in Cruise and I am thrilled he has agreed to join us full-time,” said Vogt. “Dan’s thorough understanding of our mission and his operational expertise make him the perfect fit to lead Cruise into commercial deployment.”
“I’m excited to dedicate 100 percent of my time and energy to helping Kyle and the entire team realize our mission of deploying this technology at scale,” Ammann said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.
GM’s global regions and GM Financial will now report directly to GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra.
Lyft has finally given us a glimpse of its forthcoming line of shareable bikes, which the ridesharing company says will be available to rent within its mobile app in select cities “soon.”
The news comes as the $15 billion company announces the final close of its acquisition of Motivate, the New York City-based mobility startup that owns a number of bike-rental services, like Citi Bike, Ford GoBike, Divvy, Blue Bikes and Capital Bikeshare. The transaction was reportedly worth some $250 million.
Lyft brought in $600 million in fresh funding in June from backers Fidelity Research & Management, AllianceBernstein, Baillie Gifford, KKR, CapitalG, Rakuten and others.
Now that its bike deal is complete, Lyft becomes the largest bike service provider in the U.S. That’s a big leap forward for a company that hopes to have the largest dockless bike fleet in the world — outside of China, of course, where companies like Mobike have deployed millions of bikes.
[gallery ids="1752664,1752665,1752666"]As part of the deal, Lyft will invest $100 million in New York’s Citi Bike, tripling the number of bikes available to 40,000 by 2023.
Lyft launched its first fleet of scooters earlier this year in Denver, hot off the heels of scooter-mania, which saw companies like Bird and Lime garner billion-dollar valuations and complete launches all over the world.
The company says the scooters have been a success thus far. In Denver, for example, 15 percent of Lyft rides in 2018 were taken on scooters. The company has also made scooters available to rent within its app in Santa Monica and Washington, DC — a list that will undoubtedly swell in 2019.
Here’s hoping Lyft’s bike wheels are actually pink. If not, I will be gravely disappointed.
There’s a dark cloud on the horizon. The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon, threatens the viability of open source. I first wrote about this problem in a prior piece on TechCrunch. In 2018, thankfully, several leaders have mobilized (amid controversy) to propose multiple solutions to the problem. Here’s what’s happened in the last month.
Go to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and hover over the Products menu at the top. You will see numerous open-source projects that Amazon did not create, but run as-a-service. These provide Amazon with billions of dollars of revenue per year. To be clear, this is not illegal. But it is not conducive to sustainable open-source communities, and especially commercial open-source innovation.
In early 2018, I gathered together the creators, CEOs or general counsels of two dozen at-scale open-source companies, along with respected open-source lawyer Heather Meeker, to talk about what to do.
We wished to define a license that prevents cloud infrastructure providers from running certain software as a commercial service, while at the same time making that software effectively open source for everyone else, i.e. everyone not running that software as a commercial service.
With our first proposal, Commons Clause, we took the most straightforward approach: we constructed one clause, which can be added to any liberal open-source license, preventing the licensee from “Selling” the software — where “Selling” includes running it as a commercial service. (Selling other software made with Commons Clause software is allowed, of course.) Applying Commons Clause transitions a project from open source to source-available.
We also love the proposal being spearheaded by another participant, MongoDB, called the Server Side Public License (SSPL). Rather than prohibit the software from being run as a service, SSPL requires that you open-source all programs that you use to make the software available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service. This is known as a “copyleft.”
These two licenses are two different solutions to exactly the same problem. Heather Meeker wrote both solutions, supported by feedback organized by FOSSA.
The initial uproar and accusations that these efforts were trying to “trick” the community fortunately gave way to understanding and acknowledgement from the open-source community that there is a real problem to be solved here, that it is time for the open-source community to get real and that it is time for the net giants to pay fairly for the open source on which they depend.
In October, one of the board members of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) reached out to me and suggested working together to create a modern open-source license that solves the industry’s needs.
Further kudos are owed to MondoDB for definitively stating that they will be using SSPL, submitting SSPL in parallel to an organization called Open Source Initiative (OSI) for endorsement as an open-source license, but not waiting for OSI’s endorsement to start releasing software under the SSPL.
OSI, which has somehow anointed itself as the body that will “decide” whether a license is open source, has a habit of myopically debating what’s open source and what’s not. With the submission of SSPL to OSI, MongoDB has put the ball in OSI’s court to either step up and help solve an industry problem, or put their heads back in the sand.
In fact, MongoDB has done OSI a huge favor. MongoDB has gone and solved the problem and handed a perfectly serviceable open-source license to OSI on a silver platter.
The public archives of OSI’s debate over SSPL are at times informative and at times amusing, bordering on comical. After MongoDB’s original submission, there were rah-rah rally cries amongst the members to find reasons to deem SSPL not an open-source license, followed by some +1’s. Member John Cowan reminded the group that just because OSI does not endorse a license as open source, does not mean that it is not open source:
As far as I know (which is pretty far), the OSI doesn’t do that. They have never publicly said “License X is not open source.” People on various mailing lists have done so, but not the OSI as such. And they certainly don’t say “Any license not on our OSI Certified ™ list is not open source”, because that would be false. It’s easy to write a license that is obviously open source that the OSI would never certify for any of a variety of reasons.
Eliot Horowitz (CTO and co-founder of MongoDB) responded cogently to questions, comments and objections, concluding with:
In short, we believe that in today’s world, linking has been superseded by the provision of programs as services and the connection of programs over networks as the main form of program combination. It is unclear whether existing copyleft licenses clearly apply to this form of program combination, and we intend the SSPL to be an option for developers to address this uncertainty.
Much discussion ensued about the purpose, role and relevance of OSI. Various sundry legal issues were raised or addressed by Van Lindberg, McCoy Smith and Bruce Perens.
Heather Meeker (the lawyer who drafted both Commons Clause and SSPL) stepped in and completely addressed the legal issues that had been raised thus far. Various other clarifications were made by Eliot Horowitz, and he also conveyed willingness to change the wording of the license if it would help.
Discussion amongst the members continued about the role, relevance and purpose of OSI, with one member astutely noting that there were a lot of “free software” wonks in the group, attempting to bastardize open source to advocate their own agenda:
If, instead, OSI has decided that they are now a Free Software organization, and that Free Software is what “we” do, and that “our” focus is on “Free software” then, then let’s change the name to the Free Software Initiative and open the gates for some other entity, who is all about Open Source, to take on that job, and do it proudly. :-)
There was debate over whether SSPL discriminates against types of users, which would disqualify it from being open source. Eliot Horowitz provided a convincing explanation that it did not, which seemed to quiet the crowd.
Heather Meeker dropped some more legal knowledge on the group, which seemed to sufficiently address outstanding issues. Bruce Perens, the author of item 6 of the so-called open-source definition, acknowledged that SSPL does not violate item 6 or item 9 of the definition, and subsequently suggested revising item 9 such that SSPL would violate it:
We’re not falling on our swords because of this. And we can fix OSD #9 with a two word addition “or performed” as soon as the board can meet. But it’s annoying.
Kyle Mitchell, himself an accomplished open-source lawyer, opposed such a tactic. Larry Rosen pointed out that some members’ assertion (that “it is fundamental to open source that everyone can use a program for any purpose”) is untrue. Still more entertaining discussion ensued about the purpose of OSI and the meaning of open source.
Carlos Piana succinctly stated why SSPL was indeed open source. Kyle Mitchell added that if licenses were to be judged in the manner that the group was judging SSPL, then GPL v2 was not open source either.
Meanwhile Dor Lior, the founder of database company ScyllaDB, compared SSPL and AGPL side-to-side and argued that “MongoDB would have been better off with Commons Clause or just swallowed a hard pill and stayed with APGL.” Player.FM released their service based on Commons Clause-licensed RediSearch, after in-memory database company Redis Labs placed RediSearch and four other specific add-on modules (but not Redis itself) under Commons Clause, and graph database company Neo4J placed its entire codebase under Commons Clause and raised an $80 million Series E.
Then Michael DeHaan, creator of Red Hat Ansible, chose Commons Clause for his new project. When asked why he did not choose any of the existing licenses that OSI has “endorsed” to be open source, he said:
This groundswell in 2018 should be ample indication that there is an industry problem that needs to be fixed.
Eliot Horowitz summarized and addressed all the issues, dropped the mic and left for a while. When it seemed like SSPL was indeed following all the rules of open-source licenses, and was garnering support of the members, Brad Kuhn put forward a clumsy argument for why OSI should change the rules as necessary to prevent SSPL from being deemed open source, concluding:
It’s likely the entire “license evaluation process” that we use is inherently flawed.
Mitchell clinched the argument that SSPL is open source with definitive points. Horowitz thanked the members for their comments and offered to address any concerns in a revision, and returned a few days later with a revised SSPL.
OSI has 60 days since MongoDB’s new submission to make a choice:
“Wonk” here is meant in the best possible way.
Importantly, MongoDB is proceeding to use the SSPL regardless. If MongoDB were going to wait until OSI’s decision, or if OSI were more relevant, we might wait with bated breath to hear whether OSI would endorse SSPL as an open-source license.
As it stands, OSI’s decision is more important to OSI itself than to the industry. It signals whether OSI wants to remain relevant and help solve industry problems or whether it has become too myopic to be useful. Fearful of the latter, we looked to other groups for leadership and engaged with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) when they reached out in the hopes of creating a modern open-source license that solves the industry’s needs.
OSI should realize that while it would be nice if they deemed SSPL to be open source, it is not critical. Again in the words of John Cowan, just because OSI has not endorsed a license as open source, does not mean it’s not open source. While we greatly respect almost all members of industry associations and the work they do in their fields, it is becoming difficult to respect the purpose and process of any group that anoints itself as the body that will “decide” whether a license is open source — it is arbitrary and obsolete.
In my zest to urge the industry to solve this problem, in an earlier piece, I had said that “if one takes open source software that someone else has built and offers it verbatim as a commercial service for one’s own profit” (as cloud infrastructure providers do) that’s “not in the spirit” of open source. That’s an overstatement and thus, frankly, incorrect. Open source policy wonks pointed this out. I obviously don’t mind rattling their cages but I should have stayed away from making statements about “what’s in the spirit” so as to not detract from my main argument.
The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers poses an existential threat to open source. Cloud infrastructure providers are not evil. Current open-source licenses allow them to take open-source software verbatim and offer it as a commercial service without giving back to the open-source projects or their commercial shepherds. The problem is that developers do not have open-source licensing alternatives that prevent cloud infrastructure providers from doing so. Open-source standards groups should help, rather than get in the way. We must ensure that authors of open-source software can not only survive, but thrive. And if that means taking a stronger stance against cloud infrastructure providers, then authors should have licenses available to allow for that. The open-source community should make this an urgent priority.
I have not invested directly or indirectly in MongoDB. I have invested directly or indirectly in the companies behind the open source projects Spring, Mule, DynaTrace, Ruby Rails, Groovy Grails, Maven, Gradle, Chef, Redis, SysDig, Prometheus, Hazelcast, Akka, Scala, Cassandra, Spinnaker, FOSSA, and… in Amazon.
