Despite rumors of a slowdown in iPhone sales, Apple’s earnings report revealed record profits for the company.
Source: CNET
Ron Gutman, the cofounder and CEO of HealthTap, a venture-backed medical advice startup, was reportedly elbowed out today by his board of directors. The reason, the board said in a letter to employees, was that it had finally heard too many complaints about Gutman’s behavior inside the company.
Recode published the news of his termination earlier, along with excerpts of an explainer provided to Gutman that alleges he “committed acts of intimidation, abuse, and mistrust, and that [he] repeatedly mistreated, threatened, harassed and verbally abused employees.”
“This leaves us with no choice but to fire you,” reads the letter. “The toxicity you introduced into the workplace ends now.”
The development may seem curious to those who followed Gutman’s earlier career. Back in 2011, Gutman was on the TED speaking circuit, talking passionately about the power of smiling and attracting a great deal of publicity in the process. His 2011 presentation has been watched nearly five million times; it later spawned a book, published by TED, called Smile: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act.
Gutman, a Stanford grad, has denied that he abused his employees in a public statement that reads: “The actions of the VCs are harmful to the Company and in violation of their duties. I will not stand for their effort to take control of the Company unfairly and to the detriment of the Company. I will continue to fight for HealthTap and for all of our employees, our customers and our users all over the world. My team and I remain committed to saving lives and help people live healthier happier longer lives.”
It’s not the first time that Gutman has found himself at the center of a controversy.
Nine years ago, Gutman sold an earlier startup of his, Wellsphere, to a much larger (and, for a minute, publicly traded) rival called HealthCentral, which at the time was a collection of consumer health and wellness information.
Terms of the deal were never disclosed, but plenty of complaints surfaced after the sale, by bloggers who claimed that Wellsphere had tricked them into agreeing to an “irrevocable, perpetual license” to use, make or sell whatever content they had posted to the company’s website. Why they found this so galling: To grow its “well” of content into something sellable, Wellsphere reached out to more than 1,700 medical bloggers, appealing to their self-perception as “true medical experts” and inviting them to publish even their previously posted material to its platform.
Gutman founded HealthTap the very next year, in 2010.
What happens to the company now is a bit of a question mark. HealthTap has raised nearly $40 million over the years, including from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Mayfield, and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. But it hasn’t raised fresh funding in five years — a sign, oftentimes, that investors aren’t prepared to throw more money at a company.
For now, says Recode, Gutman is being replaced by Bill Gossman, a software CEO whose LinkedIn profile shows that he is also been a longtime venture partner with Mohr Davidow. In the board’s letter to employees, it calls Gossman “the right leader for the company at this time.”
You can read the board’s letter in its entirety below:
Dear HealthTap Team,
The Board of Directors has decided to make a change in company leadership. As of this morning, Ron Gutman is no longer the President and CEO of HealthTap, nor is he employed by the Company in any capacity. He is also no longer a member of the Board of Directors.
After receiving concerning reports by employees about Ron’s conduct as CEO, the Board of Directors hired an outside law firm to conduct an investigation into these allegations. What we learned left us with no choice but to make this change, and we did so after taking the necessary steps from a corporate governance perspective.
Last evening the Board voted to appoint Bill Gossman as CEO and also elected him to the Board of Directors. He begins his position immediately. Bill is a tenured executive with a wealth of experience in enterprise software, consumer internet and mobile applications. Those of us who have worked with Bill in the past have witnessed his transparent, empowering leadership style, and we firmly believe he is the right leader for the company at this time.
There will be an all-hands meeting this morning at 9:30AM in Palo Alto, where you will get to meet Bill and hear about his near-term plans for the Company. You will also hear from the Board. We ask that employees in the San Francisco office join by video conference if they are unable to attend the meeting in person.
We are confident this change is the right thing to do and in the best interests of the Company. We want HealthTap to offer an atmosphere where employees are treated professionally and respectfully – and where they are rewarded for their contributions. We believe that by working together under Bill’s leadership, we can achieve HealthTap’s full potential.
Thank you for your continued hard work and dedication to HealthTap.
Source: TechCrunch
These make your Android smartphone look like a party favor.
Source: CNET
The BBC will start running ads in its podcasts, thanks to a partnership with podcast publishing and monetization company Acast.
Acast CEO Ross Adams told me that ads will start running later this week, with the BBC including “bumpers” today announcing the imminent ad launch.
“Podcasts are one way we’re reinventing BBC radio to engage younger audiences with our world class content,” said Bob Shennan, Director of BBC Radio and Music, in the announcement. “We’re working with established and new talent to produce shows which are informative and entertaining as only the BBC can be. The BBC has been challenged to generate more commercial income to supplement the licence fee and this new deal will contribute to that.”
To be clear, the BBC will remain ad-free in the United Kingdom, where, it’s supported by the aforementioned license fee. Adams said one of the things Acast could offer was the ability to make sure ads were only served outside the U.K. (and to account for edge cases like U.K. military bases in other countries).
Adams said Acast will also be providing the BBC with new data about how the podcasts are performing.
“We give them the data and the dashboard to start really doubling down and focusing on podcasting as a medium,” he said.
According the announcement, this will apply to all BBC podcasts outside the U.K. (subject to rights restrictions), including Global News, The Assassination, World Business Report and Radio 4’s In Our Time. Most podcasts will have a single 30-second ad the beginning, and then another at the end.
Source: TechCrunch
Apple had its Q2 earnings call today and it was good news for stockholders, but not so much for Mac customers. The entire Mac lineup got the cold shoulder from Tim Cook when discussing revenue and plans for the future.
The post Apple neglects Macs on second-quarter earnings call, again appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
A couple of years ago I was eagerly expectant of an app that would identify anything you pointed it at. Turns out the problem was much harder than anyone expected — but that didn’t stop high school senior Michael Royzen from trying. His app, SmartLens, attempts to solve the problem of seeing something and wanting to identify and learn more about it — with mixed success, to be sure, but it’s something I don’t mind having in my pocket.
Royzen reached out to me a while back and I was curious — as well as skeptical — about the idea that where the likes of Google and Apple have so far failed (or at least failed to release anything good), a high schooler working in his spare time would succeed. I met him at a coffee shop to see the app in action and was pleasantly surprised, but a little baffled.
The idea is simple, of course: You point your phone’s camera at something and the app attempts to identify it using an enormous but highly optimized classification agent trained on tens of millions of images. It connects to Wikipedia and Amazon to let you immediately learn more about what you’ve ID’ed, or buy it.
It recognizes more than 17,000 objects — things like different species of fruit and flower, landmarks, tools and so on. The app had little trouble telling an apple from a (weird-looking) mango, a banana from a plantain and even identified the pistachios I’d ordered as a snack. Later, in my own testing, I found it quite useful for identifying the plants springing up in my neighborhood: periwinkles, anemones, wood sorrel, it got them all, though not without the occasional hesitation.
The kicker is that this all happens offline — it’s not sending an image over the cell network or Wi-Fi to a server somewhere to be analyzed. It all happens on-device and within a second or two. Royzen scraped his own image database from various sources and trained up multiple convolutional neural networks using days of AWS EC2 compute time.
Then there are far more than that number in products that it recognizes by reading the text of the item and querying the Amazon database. It ID’ed books, a bottle of pills and other packaged goods almost instantly, providing links to buy them. Wikipedia links pop up if you’re online as well, though a considerable amount of basic descriptions are kept on the device.
On that note, it must be said that SmartLens is a more than 500-megabyte download. Royzen’s model is huge, since it must keep all the recognition data and offline content right there on the phone. This is a much different approach to the problem than Amazon’s own product recognition engine on the Fire Phone (RIP) or Google Goggles (RIP) or the scan feature in Google Photos (which was pretty useless for things SmartLens reliably did in half a second).
“With the several past generations of smartphones containing desktop-class processors and the advent of native machine learning APIs that can harness them (and GPUs), the hardware exists for a blazing-fast visual search engine,” Royzen wrote in an email. But none of the large companies you would expect to create one has done so. Why?
The app size and toll on the processor is one thing, for sure, but the edge and on-device processing is where all this stuff will go eventually — Royzen is just getting an early start. The likely truth is twofold: it’s hard to make money and the quality of the search isn’t high enough.
It must be said at this point that SmartLens, while smart, is far from infallible. Its suggestions for what an item might be are almost always hilariously wrong for a moment before arriving at, as it often does, the correct answer.
It identified one book I had as “White Whale,” and no, it wasn’t Moby Dick. An actual whale paperweight it decided was a trowel. Many items briefly flashed guesses of “Human being” or “Product design” before getting to a guess with higher confidence. One flowering bush it identified as four or five different plants — including, of course, Human Being. My monitor was a “computer display,” “liquid crystal display,” “computer monitor,” “computer,” “computer screen,” “display device” and more. Game controllers were all “control.” A spatula was a wooden spoon (close enough), with the inexplicable subheading “booby prize.” What?!
This level of performance (and weirdness in general, however entertaining) wouldn’t be tolerated in a standalone product released by Google or Apple. Google Lens was slow and bad, but it’s just an optional feature in a working, useful app. If it put out a visual search app that identified flowers as people, the company would never hear the end of it.
And the other side of it is the monetization aspect. Although it’s theoretically convenient to be able to snap a picture of a book your friend has and instantly order it, it isn’t so much more convenient than taking a picture and searching for it later, or just typing the first few words into Google or Amazon, which will do the rest for you.
Meanwhile for the user there is still confusion. What can it identify? What can’t it identify? What do I need it to identify? It’s meant to ID many things, from dog breeds and storefronts, but it likely won’t identify, for example, a cool Bluetooth speaker or mechanical watch your friend has, or the creator of a painting at a local gallery (some paintings are recognized, though). As I used it I felt like I was only ever going to use it for a handful of tasks in which it had proven itself, like identifying flowers, but would be hesitant to try it on many other things when I might just be frustrated by some unknown incapability or unreliability.
And yet the idea that in the very near future there will not be something just like SmartLens is ridiculous to me. It seems so clearly something we will all take for granted in a few years. And it’ll be on-device, no need to upload your image to a server somewhere to be analyzed on your behalf.
Royzen’s app has its issues, but it works very well in many circumstances and has obvious utility. The idea that you could point your phone at the restaurant you’re across the street from and see Yelp reviews two seconds later — no need to open up a map or type in an address or name — is an extremely natural expansion of existing search paradigms.
“Visual search is still a niche, but my goal is to give people the taste of a future where one app can deliver useful information about anything around them — today,” wrote Royzen. “Still, it’s inevitable that big companies will launch their competing offerings eventually. My strategy is to beat them to market as the first universal visual search app and amass as many users as possible so I can stay ahead (or be acquired).”
My biggest gripe of all, however, is not the functionality of the app, but in how Royzen has decided to monetize it. Users can download it for free but upon opening it are immediately prompted to sign up for a $2/month subscription — before they can even see whether the app works or not. If I didn’t already know what the app did and didn’t do, I would delete it without a second thought upon seeing that dialog, and even knowing what I do, I’m not likely to pay in perpetuity for it.
A one-time fee to activate the app would be more than reasonable, and there’s always the option of referral codes for those Amazon purchases. But demanding rent from users who haven’t even tested the product is a non-starter. I’ve told Royzen my concerns and I hope he reconsiders.
It would also be nice to scan images you’ve already taken, or save images associated with searches. UI improvements like a confidence indicator or some kind of feedback to let you know it’s still working on identification would be nice as well — features that are at least theoretically on the way.
In the end I’m impressed with Royzen’s efforts — when I take a step back it’s amazing to me that it’s possible for a single person, let alone one in high school, to put together an app capable of completing such sophisticated computer vision tasks. It’s the kind of (over-) ambitious app-building one expects to come out of a big, playful company like the Google of a decade ago. This may be more of a curiosity than a tool right now, but so were the first text-based search engines.
SmartLens is in the App Store now — give it a shot.
Source: TechCrunch
Have you ever turned off Facebook’s notifications or even deleted the app entirely on your birthday, simply to avoid the non-stop barrage of alerts that someone had posted “Happy Birthday!” to your timeline? A fix may be in the works, as it turns out. An update to how Facebook will handle birthday notifications was given a brief mention during today’s keynote address at the company’s F8 developer conference, hinting at a new birthday feature yet to come.
The feature wasn’t one of Facebook’s demos, and the company is declining to share more details about its launch at this time.
However, the general idea is that Facebook could leverage the Stories format to create “birthday packages” that are sent once to users at the end of the day, instead of having users post messages to the friends’ timelines.
This was mentioned briefly alongside other ideas for how Stories will be expanded — like the upcoming launch of collaborative Stories, and a Stories option that allows video clipping, for example.
“And then birthdays,” added Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox in his keynote address. “Instead of all of us writing on your wall to wish you a ‘happy birthday,’ how about we pull together, over the course of the day, a photo and video reel, which you then receive as a package at the end, saying, ‘happy birthday.’”
It’s unclear when this feature will actually arrive, but we understand Facebook isn’t commenting publicly because the product team is still working on what this new “happy birthday” feature will look like.
It’s not likely to prevent anyone from writing on a friend’s timeline, we’d imagine — but it could be a change to how Facebook prompts you to remember your friend’s or family member’s birthday. (Today, Facebook prompts you to post to their timeline, but that could be tweaked to encourage users to leave messages via Stories instead.)
This isn’t the first time Facebook has attempted to fix the age-old Happy Birthday spam problem. It has also done things like group birthday posts together, and it has consistently tried to get people to use video with things like Birthday Cam in 2016, and later personalized but automated video messages.
It has also attempted to bundle birthday greetings into recap videos, which is the experience that sounds most similar to what Facebook is now teasing with this Happy Birthday Stories feature. Perhaps the recap video will make a comeback, but be presented not within your News Feed or Timeline, but as a personalized Story built for you.
Of course, if you really don’t like the birthday spam, you could just remove your birthday information from your Facebook profile ahead of the actual day.
Source: TechCrunch
A pesar de los impresionantes avances de la inteligencia artificial, su funcionamiento tiene una dependencia enorme del trabajo humano y sus aplicaciones más potentes están increíblemente limitadas. Además, carece de estándares y está sesgada
Source: MIT
Twist Bioscience ya tiene importantes acuerdos para ofrecer sus genes sintéticos. Sus siguientes pasos se centrarán en seguir abaratando la tecnología para que, algún día, toda la información del mundo se pueda guardar en un espacio del tamaño de una sala de conferencias
Source: MIT
Queremos poner mucho énfasis en ese “podrían”. Las cadenas de bloques aún están en plena infancia, pero no es difícil ver su potencial para mejorar el marketing y la publicidad, el sector de la energía, la gestión de datos sanitarios, las elecciones y hasta la industria alimentaria
Source: MIT