This hydrothermal field in Dallol puts on a hell of a show.
Source: Wired
Can’t fit studio lighting gear in your pocket? Relonch Alfred is an A.I.-powered app that helps correct bad lighting in smartphone shots by automatically making localized adjustments based on exposure and color maps of the image.
The post Away from the studio? Alfred A.I. fixes bad lighting on phone photos appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Facebook issued its first report on objectionable content, showing the prevalence of graphic violence is rising, as is Facebook’s ability to detect it.
Source: Wired
The Adobe XD CC Starter Plan is a free version of the company’s popular user experience design software. Made for students, beginners, or non-designers that are collaborating on a team project, it makes UX design more accessible.
The post New Adobe XD Starter Plan opens user experience design to all appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Sex doll maker RealBotix is betting that that AI can help its latest creation offer an extra layer of companionship that goes beyond sex.
Source: Wired
It’s the first robo-fly that doesn’t need to be tethered to a power supply.
Source: Wired
Facebook is at the center of a new privacy scandal involving a further three million users who took part in a personality quiz several years ago. Their data was discovered on a website that was far too easily accessible.
The post Another Facebook privacy scandal — 3 million users’ data exposed by quiz appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
TechCrunch Tel Aviv, our inaugural one-day conference centered on boundary-pushing mobile technology, takes place on June 7, 2018. There’s amazing mobile tech coming out of Israel; we’re excited to dive in, and we want you to join us. But here’s the thing. You have just 48 hours left to score the early-bird ticket price — 265 ILS. Don’t waste another minute. Buy your tickets now.
We’re thrilled that drone masters Yariv Bash of Flytrex (the world’s first on-demand drone delivery service) and Ran Krauss of Airobotics (a pilotless drone solution), will grace the TC stage to discuss the future of commercial drones. That’s some leading-edge technology right there, and it’s just a one example of the great speakers you can expect to hear at TC Tel Aviv.
Want a few more? We’ve got you covered.
Drum roll, please — for the first time ever, Startup Alley makes an appearance in Tel Aviv, and you don’t want to miss the broad range of tech on display. The Alley goes beyond mobile tech and includes more than 200 early-stage startups working on products and services in cybersecurity, AR/VR, robotics, fintech, biotech, artificial intelligence, blockchain and more.
But hold on now. Why not consider exhibiting in Startup Alley? It’s the perfect way to place your company in front of influential tech leaders, prospective customers, investors and media. The day-long Startup Demo ticket costs 1,700 ILS and includes two tickets to TechCrunch Tel Aviv 2018, a demo table, Wi-Fi, power, linens and a branded table-top sign. You can secure your exhibit table right here.
TechCrunch Tel Aviv takes place on June 7, 2018 at the Tel Aviv Convention Center, Pavilion 10. That sound you hear is the 48-hour clock ticking. Get your early-bird tickets today.
Source: TechCrunch
Veridium Labs has been trying to solve a hard problem about how to trade carbon offset credits in an open market. The trouble is that more complex credits don’t have a simple value like a stock, and there hasn’t been a formula to determine their individual value. That has made accounting for them and selling them on open exchanges difficult or impossible. It’s a problem Veridium believes they can finally solve with tokens and the blockchain.
This week the company announced a partnership with IBM to sell carbon offset tokens on the Stellar blockchain. Each company has a role here with Veridium setting up the structure and determining the value formula. Stellar acts as the digital ledger for the transactions and IBM will handle the nuts and bolts of the trade activity of buying, selling and managing the tokens.
Todd Lemons, CEO and cofounder of Veridium Labs, which is part of a larger environmental company called EnVision Corporation, says that even companies with the best of intentions have struggled with how to account for the complex carbon credits. There are simpler offset credits that are sold on exchanges, but ones that seek to measure the impact of a product through the entire supply chain are much more difficult to determine. As one example, how does a company making a candy bar source its cocoa and sugar. It’s not always easy to determine through a web of suppliers and sellers.
To partly solve this problem, another Envision company, InfiniteEARTH developed a way to account for them called the Redd+ forest carbon accounting methodology. It is widely accepted to the point that it has been incorporated in the Paris Climate Agreement, but it doesn’t provide a way to turn the credits into what are called fungible assets, that is an easily tradable one. The problem is the value of a given credit shifts according to the overall environmental impact of producing a good and getting it to market. That value can change according to the product.
Jared Klee, blockchain manager for token initiatives at IBM, says that buying and accounting for Redd+ credits on the company balance sheet has been a huge challenge for organizations. “It’s a major pain point. Today Redd+ credits are over the counter assets and there is no central exchange,” he said. That means they are essentially one-off transactions and the company is forced to hold these assets on the books with no easy way to account for their actual value. That often results in a big loss, he says, and companies are looking for ways to comply in a more cost-efficient way.
The three companies — Veridium, IBM and Stellar — have come together to solve this problem by creating a digital token that acts as a layer on top of the carbon credit to give it a value and make it easier to account for. In addition, the tokens can be bought and sold on the blockchain.
The blockchain provides all the usual advantages of a decentralized record keeping system, immutable records and encrypted transactions.
Veridium is working on the underlying formula for token valuation that measures “carbon density per dollar times product group,” Lemons explained. “That can be coded into a token and carried out automatically,” he added. They are working with various world bodies like the United Nations and The World Resource Institute to help figure out the values for each product group.
All of the details are still being worked out as the idea works its way through the various regulatory bodies, but the companies hope to be making the tokens available for sale some time later this year.
Ultimately this is about finding ways to help businesses comply with environmental initiatives and remove some of the complexity inherent in that process today. “We hope the tokens will provide less friction and a much higher adoption rate,” Lemons said.
Source: TechCrunch
Jyoti Bansal, the founder of AppDynamics, which he sold for $3.7 billion just as it was about to go public, and John Vrionis, a former venture partner at Lightspeed, where he invested in companies like MuleSoft, Nimble Storage and Bansal’s AppDynamics, today announced the launch of Unusual Ventures, a new $160 million seed fund.
Vrionis will take board seats and handle the day-to-day activities of the fund while Bansal will focus on mentoring the startups (and his own startups).
According to Bansal and Vrionis, early-stage investing is at an interesting stage. They argue that many of the larger funds have moved to larger investments and many of the seed-stage investors aren’t necessarily in a position to really help fledgling entrepreneurs through the hardest few years of building their companies. And when larger funds make seed investments, they often can’t provide the right kind of resources to help these companies.
“If you look at the mega-funds today, the model has really changed over the last years,” Vrionis told me. “Now the funds say they do everything from pre-seed to pre-IPO rounds.” But while VCs tell founders to focus, the VCs themselves don’t.
So to better help entrepreneurs, Bansal and Vrionis decided to tackle the issue from first principles. They concluded that what founders really need is help to learn fast. “In a two-year period, you have to learn so much,” Bansal explained. “How to lead people, how to inspire people, how to define product/market fit, packaging, pricing.”
To tackle this issue, Unusual Ventures will offer regular classes for its entrepreneurs, something that many accelerators also do, but with a few twists. The so-called Unusual Ventures Academy will consist of two cohorts a year, with eight companies each. The plan is to bring a group of master practitioners who, once a week, will lead three- or four-hour in-person sessions over the course of a six-week span. Vrionis noted that the focus of every session will be on one particular kind of challenge that startups face and that founders will have to create their own solutions — and then teach them to the other participants.
Unusual Ventures will also offer its startups a lot of hands-on support. The fund will have its own recruitment team, for example, to help founders hire the right engineers right from the get-go, and offer legal help and other infrastructure services so that founders can focus on building the product.
One other interesting twist here is about how the fund itself is funded. Bansal and Vrionis told me they were fortunate enough to be able to rethink this model, too. So the fund’s partners aren’t the traditional insurance companies and pension plans, but nonprofits. Most of these are historically black colleges and universities, foundations, endowments and health-related institutions. When a company has a successful exit, “who does the funding go to in the end?,” Bansal asked. “We want it to go to causes that we care about. We want to give it to those who don’t usually participate in the Silicon Valley wealth creation.”
The two co-founders also stressed they are looking for unusual funders, too. “We really encourage and welcome unusual backgrounds, histories, mindsets, ideas, people,” Bansal said.
So far, the fund has made four investments (two in the enterprise space, one consumer marketplace play, and one company in the crypto space). They are still at a very early stage and it looks like they aren’t quite ready for the limelight yet.
Source: TechCrunch