State media has reported that Russia will attempt to disconnect from the global internet this spring. That’s going to be tricky.
Source: Wired
Hasta ahora, ‘Montezuma’s Revenge’ y ‘Pitfall!’ se habían escapado al control de los algoritmos, ya que ninguno ofrece claras de recompensa identificables por el aprendizaje reforzado. Así que Uber ha diseñado un nuevo enfoque que podría ser muy útil en el mundo real
Source: MIT
Asi lo afirma un estudio que revela que el 96 % del tráfico nacional de los sistemas de control industrial viaja por internet sin ningún tipo de protección. Entre las empresas vulnerables figura una consultora de energía solar, una empresa de construcción y otra de comercio y transporte
Source: MIT
Estas son las cinco razones que explican la gran importancia que esta tecnología va a ir adquiriendo a nivel mundial, la posición líder del gigante chino Huawei y el recelo de Estados Unidos a quedarse fuera del juego. Estas nuevas redes prometen conectarlo todo a internet y cumplir el sueño del IoT
Source: MIT
I’m not in the habit of getting naked during meetings at startup offices, but this time it felt appropriate.
Nebia, a shower startup that has attracted investments from the likes of Apple CEO Tim Cook and former Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s foundation is back with some new cash (though it won’t divulge how much) and a new generation of its thoughtfully designed shower heads that aim to dramatically reduce the amount of water people use while cleaning up.
After a lengthy chat with Nebia CEO Philip Winter, who discussed all of the nuances of the Nebia’s second-gen “Spa Shower” for which they just launched a crowdfunding campaign today, he asked whether I’d like to try it out. With a couple hours of empty space in my calendar, I said “Why not?” and wandered over to the startup office’s shower showroom.
This was probably the most analytical thinking I’ve done in the shower about the process of showering itself.
The shower head in my bathroom at home is pretty standard and basically concentrates the water into a couple dozen streams organized in a circle that are firing at an even pace. It’s nothing fancy, and I couldn’t tell you the brand, but I can say that I spend at least 20-30 minutes in there everyday without exception.
Nebia’s shower is wildly more complicated — as a $499 shower should be — but it’s the combination of different techniques that leads to a shower that feels full and refreshing but is using significantly less water than you’re used to. The customer for this is probably placing a healthier premium on the fact that it’s great for the environment rather than that it’s a spa-type experience; the shower head uses 65 percent less water than your average shower head, the company says.
The Nebia shower is all a very strange feat of engineering and involves the water being “atomized” as they called it, with water droplets being significantly smaller when it exits some nozzles, leading to an enveloping mist, and larger and warmer jets being shot out of the shower head’s center. The big improvement in this generation is that the water is about 29 percent warmer.
How does the shower head even control warmth? Isn’t all the water coming from the same heater? As Winter explained to me, things are a lot more complicated when it comes to how Nebia handles thermodynamics. Smaller water droplets means increased surface area exposed to the room temperature, which means greatly sped up heat dissipation. In practice, this means that the distance the water can travel from the shower head before getting chilly is a much shorter journey than your current shower. To adjust that, Nebia fires the water droplets three times quicker and maintains some larger droplet streams to maintain the heat for longer.
Nebia does a bit of cheating by also having a second shower head firing from the hip. The wand adds to the water being used but still keeps the system using about half of the amount of water that the average shower head uses.
Thankfully, there was also room for a side-by-side comparison as I was able to try out both the gen-1 and gen-2 Spa Shower in the same bathroom. The shower experience didn’t feel wildly distinct, but the difference in water heat when cranked to full blast was notable; my own temperature sensing isn’t quite finely tuned enough to confirm the 29 percent figure, but that doesn’t seem off.
Ultimately, it was the best shower I’ve had in a startup’s office to date, but it was also a shower that didn’t feel as though I was resting my head under a light trickle of cold water like other low-flow showers. It’s a real product, though at this point it’s also a decidedly premium product, even with the $100 crowdfunding discount of the $499 retail price. Beyond the warmer water, the new shower’s easy-install system is now compatible with about 95 percent of American homes, the company says. There’s also a new matte black color option and a little matching shower shelf you can add to keep that high-design look.
The company, which launched out of Y Combinator, has attracted some top investors who seem to be intrigued by the water-saving impact. The company says they’ve already shipped more than 16,000 shower heads and that more than 100 million gallons of water have been saved.
This Series A investment was led by Moen, the faucet and shower head maker that also announced a partnership with the startup. The latest round also boasts follow-on investment from Tim Cook and The Schmidt Family Foundation, as well as some new investors like Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, Starwood Hotels co-founder Barry Sternlicht, Fitbit co-founder James Park and Stanford StartX.
The crowdfunding campaign kicked off today and has already blown past $300,000 in pre-orders (they’ve already sold most of the $349 early-bird deals); the company hopes to ship the first 2.0 shower heads in June.
Source: TechCrunch
Google for Startups has expanded a partnership with startup training program Founder Gym to better serve underrepresented founders through a new scholarship program.
The program typically charges $396 to participate, but thanks to this partnership with Google for Startups, Google will cover the costs for select scholarship recipients to participate in the six-week program. This partnership is an extension of a pilot program that started last March.
“Google for Startups took an early bet on Founder Gym when we were less than six months old, and as any founder knows, you never forget the first people to say ‘yes’ to your dream,” Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon said in a statement.
“Our team at Founder Gym has used that early vote of confidence to help fuel our efforts to train a groundbreaking number of founders around the world in our inaugural year.”
Founder Gym, co-founded by Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon and Gabriela Zamudio,* unveiled its online platform in November 2017 to support and train underrepresented founders building tech startups.
“We are deeply committed to supporting the growth and success of underrepresented founders,” Google for Startups VP Lisa Gevelber said in a statement. “At Google we know that innovation can come from anywhere, but the resources needed to succeed are not evenly distributed. Founder Gym is truly moving the needle in this space – their unique program delivers the tangible resources necessary to level the playing field for founders and help them grow their businesses.”
Instead of describing it as a school, bootcamp or incubator, Founder Gym describes itself as a topical, six-week training program that covers topics like fundraising, pitching, user growth and problem validation. In Founder Gym’s first 12 months of operation, its cohort has collectively raised $35 million in funding.
“As we enter year two of this journey, we couldn’t be more excited to expand our partnership with Google for Startups, an organization that has a long history of supporting the entrepreneur’s journey,” Schumacher-Hodge Dixon said. “There is no doubt in my mind, this partnership will help us achieve our mission of developing the next generation of great innovators and leaders.”
Update 3:14 pm: This story has been edited to reflect the fact that Zamudio is no longer at Founder Gym.
Source: TechCrunch
A screenshot showing a missing product alert from a preview of the newest Windows 10 build may indicate that Microsoft might not get rid of MS Paint after all. There’s a chance that the beloved image editor may avoid a Microsoft Store exile.
The post So there’s a chance Microsoft may not remove MS Paint after all appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
When it comes to the cloud market, there are few known knowns. For instance, we know that AWS is the market leader with around 32 percent of market share. We know Microsoft is far back in second place with around 14 percent, the only other company in double digits. We also know that IBM and Google are wallowing in third or fourth place, depending on whose numbers you look at, stuck in single digits. The market keeps expanding, but these two major companies never seem to get a much bigger piece of the pie.
Neither company is satisfied with that, of course. Google so much so that it moved on from Diane Greene at the end of last year, bringing in Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian to lead the division out of the doldrums. Meanwhile, IBM made an even bigger splash, plucking Red Hat from the market for $34 billion in October.
This week, the two companies made some more noise, letting the cloud market know that they are not ceding the market to anyone. For IBM, which is holding its big IBM Think conference this week in San Francisco, it involved opening up Watson to competitor clouds. For a company like IBM, this was a huge move, akin to when Microsoft started building apps for iOS. It was an acknowledgement that working across platforms matters, and that if you want to gain market share, you had better start thinking outside the box.
While becoming cross-platform compatible isn’t exactly a radical notion in general, it most certainly is for a company like IBM, which if it had its druthers and a bit more market share, would probably have been content to maintain the status quo. But if the majority of your customers are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy, it might be a good idea for you to jump on the bandwagon — and that’s precisely what IBM has done by opening up access to Watson across clouds in this fashion.
Clearly buying Red Hat was about a hybrid cloud play, and if IBM is serious about that approach, and for $34 billion, it had better be — it would have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. As IBM Watson CTO and chief architect Ruchir Puri told my colleague Frederic Lardinois about the move, “It’s in these hybrid environments, they’ve got multiple cloud implementations, they have data in their private cloud as well. They have been struggling because the providers of AI have been trying to lock them into a particular implementation that is not suitable to this hybrid cloud environment.” This plays right into the Red Hat strategy, and I’m betting you’ll see more of this approach in other parts of the product line from IBM this year. (Google also acknowledged this when it announced a hybrid strategy of its own last year.)
Meanwhile, Thomas Kurian had his coming-out party at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco earlier today. Bloomberg reports that he announced a plan to increase the number of salespeople and train them to understand specific verticals, ripping a page straight from the playbook of his former employer, Oracle.
He suggested that his company would be more aggressive in pursuing traditional enterprise customers, although I’m sure his predecessor, Diane Greene, wasn’t exactly sitting around counting on inbound marketing interest to grow sales. In fact, rumor had it that she wanted to pursue government contracts much more aggressively than the company was willing to do. Now it’s up to Kurian to grow sales. Of course, given that Google doesn’t report cloud revenue it’s hard to know what growth would look like, but perhaps if it has more success it will be more forthcoming.
As Bloomberg’s Shira Ovide tweeted today, it’s one thing to turn to the tried and true enterprise playbook, but that doesn’t mean that executing on that approach is going to be simple, or that Google will be successful in the end.
These two companies obviously desperately want to alter their cloud fortunes, which have been fairly dismal to this point. The moves announced today are clearly part of a broader strategy to move the market share needle, but whether they can or the market positions have long ago hardened remains to be seen.
Source: TechCrunch
In August 2016, the Australian government released to the public a data set containing the medical billing history of nearly three million persons: every procedure they had undergone or prescription they had received. Needless to say, their names and all other identifying features had been redacted.
Nevertheless, within a few weeks a group of researchers at the University of Melbourne discovered how easy it was to re-identify the individuals in this ostensibly anonymous data set and extract their medical history. The researchers did this by using information readily available on the internet.
The media coverage of their paper bordered on hysteria; the Australian government was forced to remove the data set from its website — but not before it had been downloaded nearly 1,500 times.
In Israel in March 2018, the government decided to adopt a National Digital Health plan in order to exploit a rare Israeli asset — an extraordinary volume of computerized healthcare information, on a scale available in very few countries. Over the next five years, the Israeli government intends to invest more than 250 million dollars on collaboration between the Israeli healthcare system and corporations, startups and international investors.
The use of big data and its analysis by machine learning and artificial intelligence offer unparalleled prospects for improving medical care: first of all, in the area of predictive medicine, including early diagnosis and disease prevention; second, with regard to decision-support systems that produce more accurate diagnoses than human physicians can; and third — precision medicine. There is good reason why this market has become a goldmine, with annual revenues of billions of dollars.
What is surprising is that the government’s decision, despite its broad economic implications and the significant questions it raises, passed without almost any public discussion of the issue.
It is true that the resolution includes the explicit stipulation that all uses of health-related information must comply with statutory provisions and maintain medical privacy and confidentiality. It seems, however, that this decision and the report on the National Digital Health plan appended to it, which refers to the conclusions of a Health Ministry committee that considered the secondary uses of health-related information, view privacy mainly as a legal impediment to be bypassed.
The working assumption of the policy documents is that as long as we are dealing with an anonymized data set, there is no need to require the active consent of individuals whose data is contained in it, but only to allow deletion from the data set upon explicit request. Let’s face it: Most of us are not experts in this domain, will not be aware of the dangers involved and will not be interested in something that seems to be complicated. How convenient…
The ability to take an anonymized data set of cellphone locations, for example, and use it to identify individuals was already demonstrated in 2013 in an article published in Nature. In Germany, researchers discovered that an anonymous internet search history could be linked to an actual identity. An extensive investigation by The New York Times recently showed how it is possible to reconstruct identifying information from anonymous smartphone app data. As the trail of digital crumbs we leave behind grows longer, the ability to re-identify “anonymous” data sets increases.
What validity can there be to a promise of anonymity in a world of ready re-identification?
In the best-case scenario, those who extract information about us will be our bosses, who want to know if we were really home with the flu the day we called in sick; or law-enforcement agencies searching for a criminal. In the worst, politicians seeking to embarrass an opponent, insurance agents or advertising executives who want to convince us to buy a specific product or change our views of a candidate for office.
To put it bluntly, anyone who releases a medical database today without obtaining individuals’ consent for the use of their health records, with the excuse that the information is anonymous, is conning us. What validity can there be to a promise of anonymity in a world of ready re-identification? Decision-makers need to re-evaluate the risks involved, weighing the costs against the benefits, while considering privacy to be an immutable value, a basic human right and a precondition for the ability to realize one’s autonomy, independent thought and the democratic process — not a constraint.
How can we explain what is going on here? One possibility is that startup nation advocates pushed hard to ratify the plan as soon as possible, because of its contribution to innovation; these advocates view considerations of privacy as obstacles. Or maybe decision-makers simply lack an adequate understanding of the implications of this assault on privacy.
Also, the fact that those who draft new legislation are dragging their feet has made them seem incapable of providing a relevant response in real time, so it is simply better to circumvent them.
We can assume that no one in the government intends to grant anyone the right to traffic in our most sensitive personal data. The question is whether there is an adequate supervision mechanism to ensure that this will not happen. Has there been a public discussion of the serious ramifications of re-identification of medical data sets? Has a decision been made about the need for legislation on this matter? Has there been a national campaign to educate the public about it? The answer is no.
The re-identification of personal medical data sets is not some wild dystopian nightmare, but a real and rational fear. Such re-identification will not only generate social problems at the macro level, but will also introduce a significant element of distrust into the healthcare system, mainly at the level of the doctor-patient relationship.
The day we can no longer consult our family physician and tell him or her that we are suffering from delirium and hallucinations will be a sad day indeed. At that point, no slogan about a startup nation will help Israel.
Source: TechCrunch
Donde Search has just closed a $6 million Series A investment led by Matrix Partners, with participation from previous investors such as senior leaders from AliExpress, Google and Waze.
Donde first launched in 2014 as a consumer-facing app that helped users search and discover apparel items based on visual characteristics rather than text-based searches. In early 2018, the company pivoted to the enterprise space, helping retailers power suggestions and related items on their websites.
Here’s how it works:
Retailers partnered with Donde hand over their product catalog and run it through the Donde algorithm, which identifies all the visual features associated with each product. Retailers can then add a widget to their site to let users search based on those features (like sleeve length or type, color or material).
As users interact with the products, the website adapts to that behavior to offer personalized product recommendations and related items.
Moreover, Donde offers an analytics dashboard that not only provides insights on the customer’s own website, but a look into trends being featured on competing e-commerce websites to understand the industry in general.
Donde was founded by Liat Zakay, who previously served as a software engineer and R&D team manager in the Israeli intelligence unit 8200. Using her technical expertise, she built Donde to solve her own problem of not having the time or energy to go through the tedious process of online shopping.
Zakay told TechCrunch that Donde is focused on apparel for now, but that the technology can be applied to almost any vertical.
“One of the interesting pieces about Donde is that it’s language agnostic,” said Zakay. “You don’t need to know what it’s called and it doesn’t matter what language you speak, you can still find what you want based on visual features. Which makes us extremely relevant to global retailers.”
The new funding, which will be used to expand the product and the team, came shortly after the announcement of Donde’s partnership with Forever 21. The fast-fashion retailer tested out the Donde platform on its mobile app and, after a month, saw a 20 percent increase in average purchase value and higher conversions. Forever 21 has now expanded the program, putting Donde on the web, as well.
Donde said it is working on pilot programs with several other retailers across the U.S. and Europe.
Fast fashion, in particular, represents a big opportunity for Donde. Because product turnover is so fast, retailers rarely have reliable data around a certain SKU, with the website being run on outdated data from last “season.”
This latest round brings Donde’s total funding to $9.5 million, with backing from UpWest, Afterdox and Golden Seeds.
Source: TechCrunch