Thursday’s live stream will likely give us the title and cast.
Source: CNET
Today’s major tech headlines include an iFixit teardown that reveals a major flaw in the Galaxy Fold’s design, two possible new AirPod versions coming soon and a Twitter feature rolling out that’s designed to protect elections.
Source: CNET
How the latest Avengers movie compares with the 21 previous movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Source: CNET
Our current ranking of most powerful gaming laptops shows the strength of Nvidia’s new RTX line.
Source: CNET
All our years spent with Earth’s mightiest heroes meant something more than one movie could contain. Endgame tries to do it anyway.
Source: Wired
Microsoft and The Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ) unveiled the TrialWatch app Thursday morning, a new tool in CFJ’s ongoing TrialWatch effort to shine a light on injustice in courts around the globe – which too often are simply barbaric.
The post Microsoft wants to change the world. George Clooney wants to help appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Artificial intelligence and other tech for automating some of the more repetitive aspects of human jobs continues to be a growing category of software, and today a company that builds tools to address this need for salespeople has raised a tidy sum to grow its business.
SalesLoft, an Atlanta-based startup that has built a platform for salespeople to help them engage with their clients — providing communications tools, supporting data, and finally analytics to ‘coach’ salespeople to improve their processes — has raised $70 million in a Series D round of funding led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from HarbourVest.
Kyle Porter, SalesLoft’s co-founder and CEO, would not disclose the amount of funding in an interview but he did confirm that it is more than double its valuation from the previous round — a $50 million Series C that included LinkedIn among the investors (more on that below) — but under $1 billion. That round was just over a year ago and would have valued the firm at $250 million. That would put SalesLoft’s current valuation at more than $500 million, and a source close to the company notes that it’s around $600 million.
While there are a number of CRM and sales tools out in the market today, Porter believes that many of the big ones might better be described as “dumb databases or repositories” of information rather than natively aimed at helping source and utilise data more effectively.
“They are not focused on improving how to connect buyers to sales teams in sincere ways,” he said. “And anytime a company like Salesforce has moved into tangential areas like these, they haven’t built from the ground up, but through acquisitions. It’s just hard to move giant aircraft carriers.”
SalesLoft is not the only one that has spotted this opportunity, of course. There are dozens of others that are either competing on single or all aspects of the same services that SalesLoft provides, including the likes of Clari, Chorus.ai, Gong, Conversica, Afiniti and not least Outreach — which is seen as a direct competitor on sales engagement and itself raised $114 million on a $1.1 billion valuation earlier this month.
One of the notable distinctions for SalesLoft is that one of its strategic investors is LinkedIn, which participated in its Series C. Before Microsoft acquired it, LinkedIn was seen as a potential competitor to SalesForce, and many thought that Microsoft’s acquisition was made squarely to help it compete against the CRM giant.
These days, Porter said that his company and LinkedIn have a tight integration by way of LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator product, which SalesLoft users can access and utilise directly within SalesLoft, and they have a hotline to be apprised of and help shape LinkedIn’s API developments. SalesLoft is also increasingly building links into Microsoft Dynamics, the company’s CRM business.
“We are seeing the highest usage in our LinkedIn integration among all the other integrations we provide,” Porter told me. “Our customers find that it’s the third most important behind email and phone calls.” Email, for all its cons, remains the first.
The fact that this is a crowded area of the market does speak to the opportunity and need for something effective, however, and the fact that SalesLoft has grown revenues 100 percent in each of the last two years, according to Porter, makes it a particularly attractive horse to bet on.
“So many software companies build a product to meet a market need and then focus purely on selling. SalesLoft is different. This team is continually innovating, pushing the boundaries, and changing the face of sales,” said Jeff Horing, co-founder and MD of Insight Venture Partners, in a statement. “This is one reason the company’s customers are so devoted to them. We are privileged to partner with this innovative company on their mission to improve selling experiences all over the world.”
Going forward, Porter said that in addition to expanding its footprint globally — recent openings include a new office in London — the company is going to go big on more AI and “intelligence” tools. The company already offers something it calls its “coaching network” which is not human but AI-based and analyses calls as they happen to provide pointers and feedback after the fact (similar to others like Gong and Chorus, I should note).
“We want to give people a better way to deliver an authentic but ultimately human way to sell,” he said.
Source: TechCrunch
Two years after highly classified exploits built by the National Security Agency were stolen and published, hackers are still using the tools for nefarious reasons.
Security researchers at Symantec say they’ve seen a recent spike in a new malware, dubbed Beapy, which uses the leaked hacking tools to spread like wildfire across corporate networks to enslave computers into running mining code to generate cryptocurrency.
Beapy was first spotted in January but rocketed to more than 12,000 unique infection across 732 organizations since March, said Alan Neville, Symantec’s lead researcher on Beapy, in an email to TechCrunch. The malware almost exclusively targets enterprises, host to large numbers of computers, which when infected with cryptocurrency mining malware can generate sizable sums of money.
The malware relies on someone in the company opening a malicious email. Once opened, the malware drops the NSA-developed DoublePulsar malware to create a persistent backdoor on the infected computer, and uses the NSA’s EternalBlue exploit to spread laterally throughout the network. These are the same exploits that helped spread the WannaCry ransomware in 2017. Once the computers on the network are backdoored, the Beapy malware is pulled from the hacker’s command and control server to infect each computer with the mining software.
Not only does Beapy use the NSA’s exploits to spread, it also uses Mimikatz, an open-source credential stealer, to collect and use passwords from infected computers to navigate its way across the network.
According to the researchers, more than 80 percent of Beapy’s infections are in China.
Hijacking computers to mine for cryptocurrency — known as cryptojacking — has been on the decline in recent months, partially following the shutdown of Coinhive, a popular mining tool. Hackers are finding the rewards fluctuate greatly depending on the value of the cryptocurrency. But cryptojacking remains a more stable source of revenue than the hit-and-miss results of ransomware.
In September, some 919,000 computers were vulnerable to EternalBlue attacks — many of which were exploited for mining cryptocurrency. Today, that figure has risen to more than a million.
Typically cryptojackers exploit vulnerabilities in websites, which, when opened on a user’s browser, uses the computer’s processing power to generate cryptocurrency. But file-based cryptojacking is far more efficient and faster, allowing the hackers to make more money.
In a single month, file-based mining can generate up to $750,000, Symantec researchers estimate, compared to just $30,000 from a browser-based mining operation.
Cryptojacking might seem like a victimless crime — no data is stolen and files aren’t encrypted, but Symantec says the mining campaigns can slow down computers and cause device degradation.
Source: TechCrunch
In a small Minnesota town, an IT technician found his way to the darkest corner of the web. Then he made a deadly plan.
Source: Wired
The recent global campaign showing Malaria survivors speaking through David Beckham to help raise awareness around the Malaria Must Die initiative spooked a lot of people:
The campaign has already exceeded 400 million impressions globally.
But a behind-the-scenes video explains how the video was made:
The campaign was a joint collaboration between RG/A, Ridley Scott Associates and the clever video startup Synthesia, for Malaria No More.
And it turns out there’s a huge commercial imperative over this cool technology.
Video production today is highly unscaleable. It’s a physical process with many cameras, many studios and many actors. Once a marketing, product or entertainment video has been shot it’s very difficult to quickly and affordably edit the creative or translate into different languages.
As co-founder Victor Riparbelli Rasmussen tells me: “We believe generating semi or fully artificial video is more efficient. This digital creation process is already the industry standard with images through applications like PhotoShop. We’re enabling the same for video.”
Synthesia says it can reduce the need to go on set to produce video content. Rather than shooting a new video, it can edit existing assets to create derivative international and personalized videos.
Rasmussen says: “Our solution allows companies to 10x their video output for a tenth of the costs of conventional production. A simple interview-style video can easily involve many people and extensive production costs across the organization. With our solution, a marketing manager at an Advertising Agency, a Fortune 1000 company or small business can create a new video from behind her screen and have it delivered back within 48 hrs.”
The UK based startup has now raised $3.1 million, with the financing led by LDV Capital, early investor Mark Cuban, and new investors MMC Ventures, Seedcamp, Martin Varsavsky’s VAS Ventures, TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, Tiny VC, and advertising executive Nigel Morris.
“Video production is exponentially increasing but it is extremely challenging to internationalize and easily personalize advertising, marketing, and e-learning videos across cultures,” says Evan Nisselson, General Partner at LDV Capital. “Synthesia is leveraging computer vision and artificial intelligence to revolutionize video production for brands and creators.”
Synthesia was founded by a team of researchers and entrepreneurs from UCL, Stanford, TUM and Foundry. Notably, Prof Matthias Niessner, one of the co-founders of the company, is behind some of the most well-recognized research projects in the field Deep Video Portraits and Face2Face.
The London based startup came out of stealth in November 2018, airing their first public demo with the BBC, showcasing Synthesia technology by enabling newsreader Matthew Amroliwala speak three different languages.
Their customers already include global brands such as Accenture, McCann Worldgroup, Dallas Mavericks and Axiata Group.
But what about deep fakes and the potential for disinformation?
Synthesia says it has strong ethical guidelines and aims to ensure that all the content created is consensual and that actors are in control of their likeness.
So this is not software that you can just download from the web and apply to Bernie Saunder’s face.
Rasmussen says the company is actively working with governments and media organizations to create public awareness and develop technological security mechanisms to ensure that society gets to harness the benefits and reduce potential negative effects from synthetic media technologies.
Well, let’s hope so…
Source: TechCrunch