In an effort to resolve its licensing disputes, the chipmaker lowers by $100 the cap on the value of handsets, which is what its royalties are based on.
Source: CNET
Apple changed its gun emoji in 2016, and Google just made the move this week. Now Microsoft’s gun emoji is morphing into a water pistol as well.
Source: CNET
These extra-special supercars are blinged out with lights, gold and, in one case, Donald Trump.
Source: CNET
Got a household problem? Baking soda may be the solution. You can use it as an easy fix for a wide range of household problems.
Source: CNET
The culmination of 10 years and 18 movies is something that’s virtually impossible to repeat.
Source: Wired
Some small animals can produce bullet-like accelerations—could robots do it, too?
Source: Wired
A new search tool on Pinterest aims to surface more content showing people of all skin tones when you search for beauty tips and products.
Source: Wired
As Dropbox looks to woo larger and larger businesses with its strategy of building simpler collaboration tools than what’s on the market, it’s making some moves in its online document tool Paper to further reduce that friction today.
Dropbox said it was rolling out a new tool for Dropbox Paper that allows users to get a paper document up and running through a set of templates. It may seem like something that would be table stakes for a company looking to create an online document tool like Google Docs, but figuring out what Paper’s core use cases look like can take a lot of thinking and user research before finally pulling the trigger. Dropbox at its heart hopes to have a consumer feel for its products, so preserving that as it looks to build more robust tools presents a bigger challenge for the freshly-public company.
The templates tool behaves pretty much like other tools out there: you open Dropbox Paper, and you’ll get the option to create a document from a number of templates. Some common use cases for Dropbox Paper include continuous product development timelines and design specs, but it seems the company hopes to broaden that by continuing to integrate new features like document previews. Dropbox Paper started off as a blank slate, but given the number of options out there, it has to figure out a way to differentiate itself eventually.
The company said it’s also rolling out a number of other small features. That includes a way to pin documents, launch presentations, format text and insert docs and stickers. There’s also a new meeting widget and increased formatting options in the comments section in Paper. Finally, it’s adding a number of small quality-of-life updates like viewing recent Paper docs by alphabetical order and the ability to unsubscribe to comment notifications and archive docs on iOS, as well as aggregating to-do lists across docs.
Dropbox went public earlier this year to dramatic success, immediately getting that desired “pop” and more or less holding it throughout the past month or so as one of the first blockbuster IPOs of 2018. There have been a wave that have followed since, including DocuSign, and it’s one of a batch of several enterprise companies looking to get out the door now that it appears the window is open for investor demand for fresh IPOs.
Paper, to that end, appears to be a key piece of the puzzle for Dropbox. The company has always sought to be a company centered around simple collaboration tools, coming from its roots as a consumer company to start. It’s an approach that has served it — and others, like Slack — well as the company looks to expand more and more into larger enterprises. While it’s been able to snap up users thanks to its simpler approach, those enterprise deals are always more lucrative and serve as a stronger business line for Dropbox.
Dropbox will have to continue to not only differentiate itself from Google Docs and other tools, but also an emerging class of startups that’s looking to figure out ways to snap up some of the core use cases of online document tools. Slite, for example, hopes to capture the internal wiki and note-taking portion of an online doc system like Google Docs. That startup raised $4.4 million earlier this month. There’s also Coda, a startup that’s looking to rethink what a document looks altogether, which raised $60 million. Templates are one way of reducing that friction and keeping it feeling like a simple document tool and hopefully getting larger businesses excited about its products.
Source: TechCrunch
Most people tend to think of CRISPR as a groundbreaking gene-editing technology that can hunt down and snip away bits of DNA, like the cut and paste function on a keyboard. While many research projects tend to emphasize the potential of that process in replacing target bits of genetic material, for Mammoth Biosciences, the search function is the real game changer.
“Control + F is the exciting part,” Mammoth co-founder and CEO Trevor Martin told TechCrunch in an interview. “At core it’s just this amazing search engine that we can use to find things. The way that we search for things is just like Google.”
To conduct that search, one must enter a guide RNA and tell a CRISPR protein what to search for, any specific DNA or RNA sequence, from a malaria pathogen to a biomarker for leukemia. Mammoth’s novel technology uses a reporter molecule that exudes color when the sequence is located and snipped, indicating that the genetic search term was present in the sample and making the result of such a search viewable with the naked eye.
As the company’s documentation explains, the process would go like this:
“This could be as simple as a rapid test on a credit-card sized disposable paper strip that anyone could use at home… For at-home testing, once the user has completed the test, they will securely upload an anonymous photo of the strip to Mammoth’s corresponding application for remote analysis and then receive their confidential results and professional advice – all in under an hour.”
While the diagnostic element is big for the company, Mammoth is positioning itself as the platform for an “infinite number of tests” that the company and its partners could run. And while cancer is a massive application for CRISPR, the technology isn’t limited to health. Martin notes that it could be used in something like agriculture to identify a soil biome or to crack a forensic case gone cold.
Mammoth’s team is led by two Stanford PhDs, Trevor Martin and Ashley Tehranchi, CEO and CTO respectively. The research portion of the work will be helmed by Berkeley PhD students Janice Chen and Lucas Harrington. Notably, Mammoth also lists the legendary Jennifer Doudna, the scientist who discovered the CRISPR gene-editing mechanism, as a co-founder and chair of the company’s advisory board.
Doudna’s breakthrough is what makes Mammoth’s platform — and all things CRISPR — possible. “[That] really amazing work shows that you can build this kind of platform using CRISPR-based technology,” Martin said.
Mammoth Biosciences raised $120,000 from NFX Guild in 2017 and since then has pieced together capital from a variety of sources, including Mayfield, NFX, 8VC, AME Cloud, Wireframe, Kairos, and Boom Capital, though the company declined to disclose the amount it has raised.
“Because we have this really transformative platform for disease detection, it’s really allowing us to rethink the business models about building this type of biotech company,” Martin told TechCrunch. “Because the technology is so programmable, we’re really leveraging [to make] Mammoth a platform company for detection.”
Mammoth’s next big step is to search for partners like universities and corporations that have interesting biomarkers that could be plugged into its CRISPR platform. The ultimate goal, as Martin explains is to leverage its device-free system “to bring those biomarkers the last mile or even the last foot into the healthcare system.”
“We’re really excited to partner with these companies to use our platform,” Martin said. “[Mammoth] enables these awesome biomarkers to actually get used.”
Source: TechCrunch
Genetics pioneer Jennifer Doudna has launched the first commercial Crispr platform for detecting disease-causing DNA.
Source: Wired