Launch a fleet of robotic pizza vans and you’re going to get painted as the robotic pizza company. It’s a hard label to shake off — but as far as labels go, it’s a pretty cool one. Even so, Zume Pizza has long made it clear that has broader plans to move beyond pizza delivery, in order to serve the broader food industry as a whole.
The first step toward that more ambitious approach is today’s news that company is forming Zume Inc., a larger umbrella under which the Zume Pizza brand will continue to exist, and focus on that titular foodstuff. The broader company, on the other hand, will provide its technological know-how to any restaurants that want to get into the food truck game.
In an conversation with TechCrunch, CEO Alex Garden floated coffee, steamed buns and frozen yogurt as possibilities — though specific restaurants have yet to be announced. What is clear, however, is that Zume is now positioning itself as more of a platform, rather than any specific individual food or piece of kitchen hardware.
“Pizza was our prototype,” says Garden. “There’s no reason why this technology wouldn’t work for any restaurant or any food category. Any restaurant who wants to adopt our system can now easily do that. They don’t have to be experts in technology or appliance manufacturing. They can just be restauranteurs, who have a more flexible offering for customers.”
The company’s primary play is utilizing AI, automation and a host mobile kitchen technologies designed to predict food trends, in order to meet customers where they are, and offer them freshly cooked foodstuffs ready before they order them.
“The Zume magic is its ability to predict what people order before they do,” Garden explains. “And then, based on those signals, you can make and locate that inventory. Havig located it, you can bake it just in time without using any chemical tricks or processed foods. It’s about prediction and forward deployment.”
The startup is also announcing a partnership with Welbilt. The Tampa-based industrial appliance conglomerate will be designing hardware for version 2.0 of Zume’s trucks, designed to service a broader assortment of foods, moving forward. The company’s new version of the oven is cheaper and more versatile than the proprietary appliances Zume’s pizza trucks have been cruising around with, thus far.
All of this also comes with some key new hires. Former Comcast/Nike executive Chris Satchell will be coming on as CTO, Kira Druyan, who was previously at Starbucks, will be the company’s new General Counsel, and Tracey Forster, formerly of Johnson and Johnson is the new VP of marketing.
Source: TechCrunch
From its DVD burner and legacy ports to its discrete graphics and long battery life, this is one pretty great mainstream laptop.
Source: CNET
Dropbox is a critically important tool for more than 500 million people, which is why we’re so excited to have founder and CEO Drew Houston on the Disrupt stage in September.
Dropbox launched back in 2007 and Houston has spent the last decade growing Dropbox to the behemoth it is today.
During that time, Houston has made some tough decisions.
A few years ago, Houston decided to move the Dropbox infrastructure off of AWS. In 2014, Houston chose to raise $500 million in debt financing to keep up pace with Box, which was considering an IPO at the time. And in March 2017, Dropbox took another $600 million in debt financing from JP Morgan.
Houston also reportedly turned down a nine-figure acquisition offer from Apple.
All the while, Houston led Dropbox to be cash-flow positive and grew the company to see a $1 billion revenue run rate as of last year.
And, of course, we can’t forget the decision to go public early this year.
Interestingly, Houston first told his story to a TechCrunch audience at TC50 in 2008 as part of the Startup Battlefield. In fact, you can check out the original pitch from TC50 right here.
At Disrupt SF in September, we’re excited to sit down with Houston to discuss his journey thus far, the decision to go public, and the future of Dropbox.
The show runs from September 5 to Septmeber 7, and for the next week, our super early bird tickets are still available.
Source: TechCrunch
The European Union’s executive body, the EC, has taken a first pass at drawing up a strategy to respond to the myriad socio-economic challenges around artificial intelligence technology — including setting out steps intended to boost investment, support education and training, and draw up an ethical and legal framework for steering AI developments by the end of the year.
It says it’s hoping to be able to announce a “coordinated plan on AI” by the end of 2018, working with the bloc’s 28 Member States to get there.
“The main aim is to maximise the impact of investment at the EU and national levels, encourage cooperation across the EU, exchange best practices, and define the way forward together, so as to ensure the EU’s global competitiveness in this sector,” writes the Commission, noting it will also continue to invest in initiatives it views as “key” for AI (specifically name-checking the development of components, systems and chipsets designed to run AI operations; high-performance computers; projects related to quantum technologies; and ongoing work to map the human brain).
Commenting on the strategy in a statement, the EC VP for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip said: “Without data, we will not make the most of artificial intelligence, high-performance computing and other technological advances. These technologies can help us to improve healthcare and education, transport networks and make energy savings: this is what the smart use of data is all about.
“Our proposal will free up more public sector data for re-use, including for commercial purposes, driving down the cost of access to data and helping us to create a common data space in the EU that will stimulate our growth.”
Below is a breakdown of what the Commission is proposing in the various areas it’s focusing on.
Regional industry bodies’ response statements to the plan include the usual mix of welcoming platitudes combined with calls for “a cautious approach to regulation” to “allow AI to have the space to grow”, as tech advocacy association, the CCIA, puts it.
While consumer advocacy group, BEUC, criticizes the Commission for postponing what it dubs “hard decisions to later” — calling for it to make a clear commitment to update the bloc’s product safety and liability rules to ensure they are fit for the risks of the AI age.
On the investment front the Commission says its target is to increase investments in “AI research and innovation” in the bloc by at least €20BN between now and the end of 2020 — across both public and private sectors.
To support that it says it will increase its investment to €1.5BN for the period 2018-2020 under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program — and is expecting this to trigger an additional €2.5BN of funding from existing public-private partnerships, such as on big data and robotics.
“[This] will support the development of AI in key sectors, from transport to health; it will connect and strengthen AI research centres across Europe, and encourage testing and experimentation,” it writes.
The EC also says it will support the development of an “AI-on-demand platform” to “provide access to relevant AI resources in the EU for all users”.
And it says it intends to use the European Fund for Strategic Investments to provide companies and start-ups with “additional support” to invest in AI — aiming to, as it puts it, “mobilise more than €500M in total investments by 2020 across a range of key sectors”.
The Commission is also eyeing a range of ways to open up access to data — as a strategy to stimulate AI developments.
On this it’s proposing legislation to open up more data for re-use, including public sector data — proposing a review of the rules that govern this (aka the PSI Directive) — along with a package of other measures geared towards making data sharing easier; including a new set of recommendations for sharing scientific data; and guidance for the private sector on data sharing collaborations with the private sector; and for business-to-business data sharing (it says it will come out guidance to help companies on this front, and also says it will call for proposals to set up a support center this year, funded via the Connecting Europe Facility).
In a Communication entitled ‘Towards a common European data space’, the Commission writes that its intention is to build on the foundation provided by the incoming GDPR data protection framework — and move towards what it couches as “a seamless digital area with the scale that will enable the development of new products and services based on data”. So full marks for buzzwords.
The changes it’s proposing to the PSI Directive are intended to reduce market entry barriers (especially for SMEs) by lowering charges for the re-use of public sector info; increase the availability of data by bringing new types of public and publicly funded data into the scope of the Directive (specifically the utilities and transport sectors, and research data).
It also says it wants to “minimize the risk of excessive first-mover advantage” — arguing this benefits large companies — by “requiring a more transparent process for the establishment of public-private arrangements”.
Encouraging the publication of “dynamic data” and APIs is another intention — and another strategy to ramp up business opportunities around data.
It has a factsheet on these plans here, where it also writes: “Data is of utmost importance to the European economy” — citing a study which predicts the total direct economic value of public sector information to increase from €52BN in 2018 (across all Member States) to €194BN in 2030.
Yet another Communication published by the Commission today deals with health data specifically.
On this type of data the EC says it has three priorities:
In its eHealth communication the Commission enthuses about the potential for digital solutions to transform healthcare before lamenting: “Market fragmentation and lack of interoperability across health systems stand in the way of an integrated approach to disease prevention, care and cure better geared to people’s needs” — i.e. as a result of Member States retaining control over their own national healthcare systems.
Hence it’s focusing efforts here on encouraging Member States to “improve the complementarity of their health services cross-border”; putting money into “research and innovation in digital health and care solutions” (via the Horizon 2020 program); and “assist[ing] Member States in pursuing the reforms of their health and care systems”.
On the legal and ethical framework front, the Commission says it intends to publish ethical guidelines on AI development by the end of the year — which it says will be based on the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, “taking into account principles such as data protection and transparency, and building on the work of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies“.
In the UK the upper house of parliament recently published its own report into the economic, ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence — which urged action to avoid biases being baked into algorithms and recommended a cross-sector AI Code to try to steer AI developments in a positive, societally beneficial direction.
To draw up EU-wide guidelines, the EC says it will “bring together all relevant stakeholders in a European AI Alliance“.
“As with any transformative technology, artificial intelligence may raise new ethical and legal questions, related to liability or potentially biased decision-making. New technologies should not mean new values,” it also writes.
But it’s waiting until mid-2019 before issuing AI-related guidance on the interpretation of the EU’s Product Liability Directive — leaving consumers without legal clarity in the case of defective products for at least another year.
In terms of socio-economic prep for AI-fueled transformations coming to the job market the Commission says it’s encouraging Member States to “modernise their education and training systems and support labour market transitions, building on the European Pillar of Social Rights“.
More specifically it says it will support business-education partnerships to attract and keep more AI talent in Europe; set up dedicated training schemes with financial support from the European Social Fund; and support digital skills, competencies in STEM, entrepreneurship and creativity.
“Proposals under the EU’s next multiannual financial framework (2021-2027) will include strengthened support for training in advanced digital skills, including AI-specific expertise,” the Commission also adds.
So nothing very revolutionary on this front as yet, with the opportunity to expand available finance support for skills being put on ice until the bloc’s next major financing framework.
In another factsheet on its proposals the Commission flags some existing skills initiatives, such as the Digital Opportunity traineeship — saying this will provide cross-border traineeships for “up to 6,000 students and recent graduates as of summer 2018”. Although this is more broadly aimed at digital skills gaps.
The AI strategy comes in the same week as a group of EU-based scientists have warned in an open letter that the region is falling behind North American and China on AI research — proposed establishing a European AI research institute, linked to industry, to attract and retain AI talent, also arguing that “the distinction between academic research and industrial labs is vanishing”.
Albeit several of the academics who signed the letter also hold positions with tech giants — including Uber’s chief scientist, Zoubin Ghahramani; Google’s head of machine learning research, Olivier Bousquet; and Amazon’s director of machine learning, Ralf Herbrich.
Source: TechCrunch
Snapchat isn’t just introducing games. It’s building the next computing platform, one piece at a time.
Source: Wired
The new PlayStation 4 sequel is conflicted, both reveling in its star’s violence and trying to distance itself from it.
Source: Wired
Researchers didn’t have to hack Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant to use it for eavesdropping. They just took advantage of the system in place.
Source: Wired
Twitter is making good on its pledge to fight the persistent problems of spam, bots, harassment, and misinformation that have plagued the social platform for years. Today, in its generally positive Q1 earnings report, the company announced that changes that it has made related to TweetDeck and its API in in the past quarter have translated into real numbers that point to overall improvements in quality on the service.
In the company’s letter to investors, Twitter noted that there are now 90 percent fewer users relying on TweetDeck to create false information and automated engagement spam. It’s not clear if this is due to changes to TweetDeck itself, or simply because of a new and more proactive approach that Twitter is taking (we have asked and will update when we hear back).
In any case, Twitter has been engaged in both. In February, Twitter stopped allowing automating mass retweeting — or TweetDecking, as it’s been called by some — in which power users turned to TweetDeck to retweet posts across masses of accounts they managed, or across smaller user groups of people who managed masses of accounts — a technique that helps Tweet go viral. Some weeks later it moved to suspend a number of accounts that were guilty of the practice.
Policies and enforcement around the company’s API have also been tightened up. Twitter said that in Q1, it removed more than 142,000 applications connected to the API, which in turn were responsible for no less than 130 million “low-quality Tweets” in the quarter — a sizeable volume that spurred a number of interactions and retweets outside those spam accounts, perpetuated by individuals. As with TweetDeck, this was related to changes Twitter had made specifically to how the API was used for mass-actions.
It’s an interesting turn for the company: given that the mass-action Tweeting ability has been so hugely misused, it’s a wonder why Twitter ever allowed it in the first place. It may have been one of those badly-conceived moments where Twitter thought it would help with traffic and activity on the site at a time when it needed to demonstrate growth, and perhaps just to bring more activity to the platform when it was smaller.
In any case, this appears to be just the start of how Twitter hopes to raise the tone, and generally make its platform a safer and nicer place to be. “Our systems continue to identify and challenge millions of suspicious accounts globally per week as a result of our sustained investments in improving information quality on Twitter,” the company notes.
There are also some interesting plans in the pipeline. The company has been on a “health” kick of late, and is looking to crowdsource suggestions for how to improve trust and safety, and reduce abuse and spam, on the platform. An RFP that it issued to stakeholders — and anyone interested in helping — has so far yielded 230 responses from “global institutions”, the company said. “We expect to have meaningful updates in the second quarter, and we’re committed to continuing to share our progress along the way.”
We are listening to the earnings webcast and will update with more related to this as we hear it.
Source: TechCrunch
If you believe blockchains will proliferate in the coming years, it stands to reason that you will need some sort of mechanism to move information between them, a network of blockchains with bridges and processes for sharing information between entities. That is exactly what The Aion Network is providing with a new blockchain network released today.
The company wants to be the underlying infrastructure for a network of blockchains in a similar way that TCP/IP drove the proliferation of the internet. To that end, the company, which originally began as a for-profit startup called Nuco, has decided to become a not-for-profit organization with the goal of setting up protocols for a set of interconnected blockchains. They now see their role as something akin to the Linux Foundation, helping third party companies build products and creating an ecosystem around their base technology.
Graphic: Aion Networks
“The core design of network we have been building is to connect various networks, and route data and transactions through a public network. We are launching that network today. It allows you to build bridges to other blockchain networks. That public network acts as relayer between blockchains,” Matthew Spoke, CEO and co-founder at Aion Networks told TechCrunch.
While there clearly could be security concerns with a public by-way for blockchain data moving between systems, Spoke says that can be minimized. Instead of transmitting a medical record between a hospital and insurance company, you send a proof that the person had an operation, which the insurance company can check against the coverage rules it has created for that individual and vice versa.
The idea behind this venture is to provide the underlying plumbing to encourage more highly scalable blockchain use cases. Spoke and his team once ran the blockchain practice at Deloitte before starting this venture, and they saw roadblocks to scaling first-hand. “When we were doing enterprise projects, our biggest realization was that the plumbing wasn’t sophisticated enough. The scaling wasn’t meeting specs that enterprise companies would need long term. Because of that, we were not seeing anyone moving beyond proof of concept projects. What we are doing is trying to mature the possible use cases,” he said.
In order to drive adoption, the company is introducing a token or cryptocurrency to be used to move data across the network and build in a level of trust. Spoke believes if the users have skin in the game in the form of tokens, that could create a higher level of trust on the system.
“Instead of paying for infrastructure, you are going to pay to be part of a common trusted protocol. It comes down to the mechanism of consensus and being incentivized to do business in an honest way,” Spoke said
This is probably not something that will get adopted widely overnight. Just because they have built it, they still require a level of utilization for it to really take off, and that will require more blockchain projects. “We still need a few years of pure focus on infrastructure to make sure we are getting these layers right. Every time you move data of any kind there are security vulnerabilities and we need to make sure there are good specs and comfort in using it,” he said.
Source: TechCrunch
Unlocking on-demand listening for free users means Spotify is getting better at pin-pointing your preferences. That means the songs it picks for you hit closer to the bull’s-eye.
Source: CNET
