Founders Factory out of London is a startup accelerator and incubator which has taken the older US-inspired startup acceleration model and put a European slant on it by going in deep with corporates, who often flounder in the space. After some success out of the UK you would expect them to expand to big markets like the US or Asia, but instead, they have skipped the obvious route and are now branching out into the emerging markets of the African continent.
It’s now partnering with Standard Bank, the largest African bank by assets across 20 African countries to bring the model to Africa.
Founders Factory Africa says it will design, build and scale 100 disruptive tech startups across the continent over the next five years, initially with five early stage startups and co-create two new companies every year within the incubator. To execute the project, they are partnering with Roo Rogers, a former partner of design agency Fuse Projects and CEO of the UK and US governments backed emerging market accelerator SPRING.
Standard Bank will not be the last partner. As FF has done before in the UK, it will bring in other corporates, where each invests several million pounds to grow the project across African markets.
Founders Factory, co-founded by Brent Hoberman and Henry Lane Fox in London in 2015, has so far secured over £100m in funding for its 70 startups and implemented 60 pilots with its corporate partners with 30% securing enterprise contracts and five closing direct investments, they say.
The accelerator will grow existing businesses through a bespoke six-month programme, whilst the incubator will build completely new businesses focused on addressing key issues on the continent. It will be based in Johannesburg and will hire over 40 full-time specialists locally, covering all aspects needed to scale its startups including product development, UX/UI, engineering, investment, business development and, growth marketing.
Henry Lane Fox, Co-Founder and CEO, Founders Factory, said: “The time for Africa is now. As the world’s best partner for founders, we are excited to help empower a new generation of African entrepreneurs to build market-defining technology products.”
Roo Rogers, Co-Founder & CEO Founders Factory Africa, said: “Having worked in Africa for over a decade, I believe success is underpinned by strong collaboration. By harnessing the resources of Africa’s greatest startup entrepreneurs and combining with the operational might of corporates, we will deliver scaled solutions to sub-Sahara’s 1 billion consumers and establish Africa as an attractive destination for global investment.
He told me by phone from Sout Africa that there were huge logistical and infrastructure issues which make Africa a tricky place to scale in, but that he is confident that the corporate-backed accelerator model will succeed where other attempts have failed. “You need existing incumbents here to partner with. But this is not going to be a top-down approach, we will build locally with local teams and local partners in every case.”
Started by Brent Hoberman and Henry Lane Fox, Founders Factory has received investment from Marks & Spencer, L’Oreal, easyJet, Guardian Media Group, Aviva, Holtzbrinck and CSC.
Source: TechCrunch
Tesla published a long blog post to announce the Tesla Model 3 is the best car the NHTSA has ever tested. The agency clarified that, while the Model 3 aced its crash test, its rating system doesn’t go above five stars.
The post After Tesla’s ‘best car’ boasts, the NHTSA stresses its scale only goes to five appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Accion Systems, the startup aiming to reinvent satellite propulsion with an innovative and tiny new thruster, has attracted significant investment from Boeing’s HorizonX Ventures. The $3 million round should give the company a bit of breathing room while it continues to prove and improve its technology.
“Investing in startups with next-generation concepts accelerates satellite innovation, unlocking new possibilities and economics in Earth orbit and deep space,” said HorizonX Ventures managing director Brian Schettler in a press release.
Accion, whose founder and CEO Natalya Bailey graced the stage of Disrupt just a few weeks ago, makes what’s called a “tiled ionic liquid electrospray” propulsion system, or TILE. This system is highly efficient and can be made the size of a postage stamp or much larger depending on the requirements of the satellite.
Example of a TILE attached to a satellite chassis.
The company has tested its tech in terrestrial facilities and in space, but it hasn’t been used for any missions just yet — though that may change soon. A pair of student-engineered cubesats equipped with TILE thrusters are scheduled to take off on RocketLab’s first big commercial payload launch, “It’s Business Time.” It’s been delayed a few times but early November is the next launch window, so everyone cross your fingers.
Another launch scheduled for November is the IRVINE 02 cubesat, which will sport TILEs and go up aboard a Falcon 9 loaded with supplies for the International Space Station.
The Boeing investment (Gettylab also participated in the round) doesn’t include any guarantees like equipping Boeing-built satellites with the thrusters. But the company is certainly already dedicated to this type of tech and the arrangement is characterized as a partnership — so it’s definitely a possibility.
Natalya Bailey and Rob Coneybeer (Shasta Ventures) at Disrupt Berlin 2017.
A Boeing representative told me that this is aimed to help Accion scale, and that the latter will have access to the former’s testing facilities and expertise. “We believe there will be many applications for Accion’s propulsion system, and will be monitoring and assessing the tech as it continues to mature,” they wrote in an email.
I asked Accion what the new funding will be directed towards, but a representative only indicated that it would be used for the usual things: research, operations, staff expenses, and so on. Not some big skunk works project, then. The company’s last big round was in 2016, when it raised $7.5 million.
Source: TechCrunch
Nvidia, together with partners like IBM, HPE, Oracle, Databricks and others, is launching a new open-source platform for data science and machine learning today. Rapids, as the company is calling it, is all about making it easier for large businesses to use the power of GPUs to quickly analyze massive amounts of data and then use that to build machine learning models.
“Businesses are increasingly data-driven,” Nvidia’s VP of Accelerated Computing Ian Buck told me. “They sense the market and the environment and the behavior and operations of their business through the data they’ve collected. We’ve just come through a decade of big data and the output of that data is using analytics and AI. But most it is still using traditional machine learning to recognize complex patterns, detect changes and make predictions that directly impact their bottom line.”
The idea behind Rapids then is to work with the existing popular open-source libraries and platforms that data scientists use today and accelerate them using GPUs. Rapids integrates with these libraries to provide accelerated analytics, machine learning and — in the future — visualization.
Rapids is based on Python, Buck noted; it has interfaces that are similar to Pandas and Scikit, two very popular machine learning and data analysis libraries, and it’s based on Apache Arrow for in-memory database processing. It can scale from a single GPU to multiple notes and IBM notes that the platform can achieve improvements of up to 50x for some specific use cases when compared to running the same algorithms on CPUs (though that’s not all that surprising, given what we’ve seen from other GPU-accelerated workloads in the past).
Buck noted that Rapids is the result of a multi-year effort to develop a rich enough set of libraries and algorithms, get them running well on GPUs and build the relationships with the open-source projects involved.
“It’s designed to accelerate data science end-to-end,” Buck explained. “From the data prep to machine learning and for those who want to take the next step, deep learning. Through Arrow, Spark users can easily move data into the Rapids platform for acceleration.”
Indeed, Spark is surely going to be one of the major use cases here, so it’s no wonder that Databricks, the company founded by the team behind Spark, is one of the early partners.
“We have multiple ongoing projects to integrate Spark better with native accelerators, including Apache Arrow support and GPU scheduling with Project Hydrogen,” said Spark founder Matei Zaharia in today’s announcement. “We believe that RAPIDS is an exciting new opportunity to scale our customers’ data science and AI workloads.”
Nvidia is also working with Anaconda, BlazingDB, PyData, Quansight and scikit-learn, as well as Wes McKinney, the head of Ursa Labs and the creator of Apache Arrow and Pandas.
Another partner is IBM, which plans to bring Rapids support to many of its services and platforms, including its PowerAI tools for running data science and AI workloads on GPU-accelerated Power9 servers, IBM Watson Studio and Watson Machine Learning and the IBM Cloud with its GPU-enabled machines. “At IBM, we’re very interested in anything that enables higher performance, better business outcomes for data science and machine learning — and we think Nvidia has something very unique here,” Rob Thomas, the GM of IBM Analytics told me.
“The main benefit to the community is that through an entirely free and open-source set of libraries that are directly compatible with the existing algorithms and subroutines that their used to — they now get access to GPU-accelerated versions of them,” Buck said. He also stressed that Rapids isn’t trying to compete with existing machine learning solutions. “Part of the reason why Rapids is open source is so that you can easily incorporate those machine learning subroutines into their software and get the benefits of it.”
Source: TechCrunch
Snapchat needs reasons for teens to come back every day as it struggles to grow amidst competition from Instagram, so it’s capitalizing on its Los Angeles roots. Today Snapchat unveiled its fall slate of a dozen “Original” video shows including its first scripted programs from top producers like Keeping Up With The Kardashians creator Bunim/Murray and Friday Night Lights writer Carter Harris. There’s the supernatural soap opera Dead Girls Detective Agency, college comedy Co-Ed, and a docuseries about the “cash me outside” girl Bringing Up Bhabie.
The Snapchat Originals will appear in Discover, which will soon have a dedicated section for Shows, as well as new permanent Show Profile pages available through Snapchat search where users can sign up for push notifications when each episode is released. Reaction lenses make it easy to post about a Show’s biggest moments. And with new Show Portal lenses, users can stick an augmented reality doorway in their Snaps that they can walk through to explore a scene from the Show and then tap to watch that Show, allowing them to spread virally.
“Time spent watching shows on Snapchat has tripled this year alone” Snap’s VP of Original Content Sean Mills tells me. The stats on Snap’s previous 60 shows from CBS, Viacom, the NFL and others since the project launched two years ago made it clear there was an opportunity to double down, especially as original mobile programming efforts like Facebook Watch and Instagram’s IGTV have stumbled. NBC News’ twice daily show Stay Tuned has doubled viewership in the past year to 5 million unique viewers per day, over half of which watch at least 3 days per week, while SportsCenter’s show reaches 17 million monthly viewers.
Portal lenses use augmented reality to let viewers step inside a scene of an Original show and send the experience to friends
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel telegraphed today’s announcement in a leaked memo, noting that the app sees “over 18 Shows reaching monthly audiences of over 10M unique viewers. 12 of which are Original productions” and that “We are also working to identify content that is performing well outside of Snapchat so that we can bring it into Discover.”
Snap Inc was cagey about sharing exactly how the deals to produce the shows work. Some Originals are funded entirely by Snapchat, some fully by production studios, and some are joint efforts. Mills claims “We’re not bidding on shows that are being shopped around town.” They’re always shot vertically for Snapchat and will at least be exclusive to the platform for a window of time. Snap says the shows are created with fast-paced mobile behavior patterns in mind, employing overlaid graphics, split screens, quick cuts, and other modern video elements.
One thing’s for sure: Snap doesn’t want to follow Facebook’s footsteps in funding original content. With Watch and Live, Facebook paid out big upfront sums to secure creators, but when that funding dried up, it was unclear how the unsubsidized shows would survive. “We want to set these things up for longer-term success” says Mills. “We’re not trying to just seed the market with huge investments and then hope it turns into something later. We’re very interested in the viability of this at the onset.”
Originals will be monetized through two or three six-second unskippable Commercial ads in each show sold by Snap, the producers, or again a combination. Snap will try to seduce advertisers by pimping out its new Originals at the NewFronts West conference today in LA. The company will also embark on perhaps its biggest marketing effort to date after focusing on minimalist yellow billboards and airport security tray ads. Snapchat will be running ads on Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube plus some outdoor marketing in LA to clue people into its revamped content lineup. The dedicated Shows carousel should also help the premium content rise above the news publisher clickbait and shoddy user generated content currently stuffed into Discover.
Snap can’t afford to spend too much on Original programming and not have it pay off with ad revenue. The company llost $353 million last quarter, and at this rate may have to raise more money in 2019 or it could run out. An analyst yesterday predicted they expected Snap would lose $1.5 billion in 2019, which dragged the share price to $7 — by far its lowest ever.
Snapchat’s forthcoming Shows channel in Discover and the new permanent profile pages for Shows
As I wrote 18 months ago, Snap’s big opportunity is to fashion itself as the HBO of smartphones and use that draw to get people hooked on its whimsical ephemeral messaging. Though the slate of Originals look higher quality than much of the reality-style and vlogger video content already made for mobile, Mills says Snap isn’t ready to commit the resources to forge its own tent pole Game Of Thrones. “We’re still in the phase of learning about what the audience wants. We’re not setting up for one premium epic show that’s going to bring in all the rest” Mills tells me. “It’s possible that in three months or six months we’ll start making bigger bets after learning what works.” So essentially, Snap is in the Sex In The City, pre-Sopranos stage of turning into the mobile box office, or it’s like a modern Netflix funding lots of experiments but that’s yet to find its House Of Cards.
After losing 3 million daily users and sinking to 188 million total last quarter, Snapchat needs something to reverse the growth trend. While Instagram and Facebook’s other apps have copied Snapchat’s Stories and visual messaging features, the Silicon Valley giant has yet to nail how to do premium mobile video content. If Snapchat can be the place for must-see TV on the go, it could lure in new and churned users looking for a relaxing escape from the competitive world of social media success theater.
Here’s the full list of new Snapchat Originals:
Source: TechCrunch
Not too long ago, the Cloud Foundry Foundation was all about Cloud Foundry, the open source platform as a service (PaaS) project that’s now in use by most of the Fortune 500 enterprises. This project is the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. A year ago, the Foundation also announced the Cloud Foundry Container Runtime that helps businesses run the Application Platform and their container-based applications in parallel. In addition, Cloud Foundry has also long been the force behind BOSH, a tool for building, deploying and managing cloud applications.
The addition of the Container Runtime a year go seemed to muddle the organization’s mission a bit, but now that the dust has settled, the intent here is starting to become clearer. As Cloud Foundry CTO Chip Childers told me, what enterprises are mostly using the Container Runtime for is for running the pre-packaged applications they get from their vendors. “The Container Runtime — or really any deployment of Kubernetes — when used next to or in conjunction with the App Runtime, that’s where people are largely landing packaged software being delivered by an independent software vendor,” he told me. “Containers are the new CD-ROM. You just want to land it in a good orchestration platform.”
Because the Application Runtime launched well before Kubernetes was a thing, the Cloud Foundry project built its own container service, called Diego.
Today, the Cloud Foundry foundation is launching two new Kubernetes-related projects that take the integration between the two to a new level. The first is Project Eirini, which was launched by IBM and is now being worked on by Suse and SAP as well. This project has been a long time in the making and it’s something that the community has expected for a while. It basically allows developers to choose between using the existing Diego orchestrator and Kubernetes when it comes to deploying applications written for the Application Runtime. That’s a big deal for Cloud Foundry.
“What Eirini does, is it takes that Cloud Foundry Application Runtime — that core PaaS experience that the [Cloud Foundry] brand is so tied to and it allows the underlying Diego scheduler to be replaced with Kubernetes as an option for those use cases that it can cover,” Childers explained. He added that there are still some use cases the Diego container management system is better suited for than Kubernetes. One of those is better Windows support — something that matters quite a bit to the enterprise companies that use Cloud Foundry. Childers also noted that the multi-tenancy guarantees of Kubernetes are a bit less stringent than Diego’s.
The second new project is ContainerizedCF, which was initially developed by Suse. Like the name implies, ContainerizedCF basically allows you to package the core Cloud Foundry Application Runtime and deploy it in Kubernetes clusters with the help of the BOSH deployment tool. This is pretty much what Suse is already using to ship its Cloud Foundry distribution.
Clearly then, Kubernetes is becoming part and parcel of what the Cloud Foundry PaaS service will sit on top of and what developers will use to deploy the applications they write for it in the near future. At first glance, this focus on Kubernetes may look like it’s going to make Cloud Foundry superfluous, but it’s worth remembering that, at its core, the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime isn’t about infrastructure but about a developer experience and methodology that aims to manage the whole lifecycle of the application development. If Kubernetes can be used to help manage that infrastructure, then the Cloud Foundry project can focus on what it does best, too.
Source: TechCrunch
An analysis of the impact of Europe’s new data protection framework, GDPR, on the adtech industry suggests the regulation has reduced the numbers of ad trackers that websites are hooking into EU visitors.
But it also implies that Google may have slightly increased its marketshare in the region — indicating the adtech giant could be winning at the compliance game at the expense of smaller advertising entities which the study also shows losing reach.
The research was carried out by the joint data privacy team of the anti-tracking browser Cliqz and the tracker blocker tool Ghostery (which merged via acquisition two years ago), using data from a service they jointly run, called WhoTracks.me — which they say is intended to provide greater transparency on the tracker market. (And therefore to encourage people to make use of their tracker blocker tools.)
For the GDPR analysis, the team compared the prevalence of trackers one month before and one month after the introduction of the regulation, looking at the top 2,000 domains visited by EU or US residents.
On the tracker numbers front, they found that the average number of trackers per page dropped by almost 4% for EU web users from April to July.
Whereas the opposite was true in the US, with the average number of trackers per page rose by more than 8 percent over the same period.
In Europe, they found that the reduction in trackers was nearly universal across website types, with adult sites showing almost no change and only banking sites actually increasing their use of trackers.
In the US, the reverse was again true — with banking sites the only category to reduce tracker numbers over the analyzed period.
“The effects of the GDPR on the tracker landscape in Europe can be observed across all website categories. The reduction seems more prevalent among categories of sites with a lot of trackers,” they write, discussing the findings in a blog post. “Most trackers per page are still located on news websites: On average, they embed 12.4 trackers. Compared to April, however, this represents a decline of 7.5%.
“On ecommerce sites, the average number of trackers decreased by 6.9% to 9.5 per page. For recreation websites, the decrease is 6.7%, which corresponds to 10.7 trackers per page. A similar trend is observed for almost all other website categories. The only exception are banking sites, on which 7.4% more trackers were active in July than in April. However, the average number of trackers per page is only 2.6.”
In the blog post they also argue that their snapshot comparison of tracker prevalence of April 2018 against July 2018 reveals “a clear picture” of GDPR’s impact on adtech marketshare — with “especially” smaller advertising trackers having “significantly” lost reach (which they are using as a proxy for marketshare).
In their analysis they found smaller tracker players lost between 18% and 31% reach/marketshare when comparing April (pre-GDPR) and July (post-GDPR).
They also found that Facebook suffered a decline of just under 7%.
Whereas adtech market leader Google was able to slightly increase its reach — by almost 1%.
Summing up their findings, Cliqz and Ghostery write: “For users this means that while the number of trackers asking for access to their data is decreasing, a tiny few (including Google) are getting even more of their data.”
The latter finding lends some weight to the argument that regulation can reinforce dominant players at the expense of smaller entities by further concentrating power — because big companies have greater resources to tackle compliance.
Although the data here is just a one-month snapshot. And the additional bump in marketshare being suggested for Google is not a huge one — whereas a nearly 7% drop in marketshare for Facebook is a more substantial impact.
Cliqz shared their findings with TechCrunch ahead of publication and we put several questions to them about the analysis, including whether or not the subsequent months (August, September) indicated this snapshot is a trend, i.e. whether or not Google sustained the additional marketshare.
However the company had not responded to our questions ahead of publication.
In the blog post Cliqz and Ghostery speculate that the larger adtech players might be winning (relatively speaking) the compliance game at the expense of smaller players because website owners are preferring to ‘play it safe’ and drop smaller entities vs big known platforms.
In the case of Google, they also flag up reports that suggest it has used its dominance of the adtech market to “encourage publishers to reduce the number of ad tech vendors and thus the number of trackers on their sites” — via a consent gathering tool that restricts the number of supply chain partners a publisher can share consent with to 12 vendors.
And we’ve certainly heard complaints of draconian Google GDPR compliance terms before.
They also point to the use of manipulative UX design (aka dark patterns) that are used to “nudge users towards particular choices and actions that may be against their own interests”, suggesting these essentially deliberately confusing consent flows have been successfully tricking users into clicking and accepting “any kind of data collection” just to get rid of cryptic choices they’re being asked to understand.
Given Google’s dominance of digital ad spending in Europe it stands to gain the most from websites’ use of manipulative consent flows.
However GDPR requires consent to be informed and freely given, not baffling and manipulative. So regulators should (hopefully) be getting a handle on any such transgressions and transgressors soon.
The continued existence of nightmarishly confused and convoluted consent flows is another complaint we’ve also heard before — much and often. (And one we have ourselves, frankly.)
Overall, according to the European Data Protection Board, a total of more than 42,000 complaints have been lodged so far with regulators, just four months into GDPR.
And just last week Europe’s data protection supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, told us to expect the first GDPR enforcement actions before the end of the year. So lots of EU consumers will already be warming up the popcorn.
But Cliqz and Ghostery argue that disingenuous attempts to manipulate consent might need additional regulatory tweaks to be beaten back — calling in their blog post for regulations to enforce machine-readable standards to help iron away flakey flows.
“The next opportunity for that would be the ePrivacy regulation,” they suggest, referencing the second big privacy rules update Europe is (still) working on. “It would be desirable, for example, if ePrivacy required that the privacy policies of websites, information on the type and scope of data collection by third parties, details of the Data Protection Officer and reports on data incidents must be machine-readable.
“This would increase transparency and create a market for privacy and compliance where industry players keep each other in check.”
It would also, of course, provide another opportunity for pro-privacy tools to make themselves even more useful to consumers.
Source: TechCrunch
Now Walmart will know exactly how thrilled you are by its prices.
Source: CNET
New research shows the people of Herculaneum near Mount Vesuvius died when their blood boiled and their heads exploded.
Source: CNET
Sir Richard Branson has been promising an imminent launch for 10 years, but this time he’s super serious.
Source: CNET