For better or worse, there is nothing in this world quite like a Hideo Kojima game.
Source: CNET
AMD’s next-generation graphics chip code named Navi 23 will reportedly feature hardware ray tracing. That’s an important ingredient missing in AMD’s current GPU lineup.
Source: Digital trends
Chris Cox’s motivational speeches were at the heart of Facebook’s new employee orientation. But after 14 years at the social network, the Chief Product Officer left in March amidst an executive shake-up and Facebook’s new plan to prioritize privacy by moving to encrypt its messaging apps. No details on his next projects were revealed.
Now the 37-year-old leader will be putting his inspirational demeanor and keen strategy sense to work to protect the environment and improve the government. Today at Wired25 conference, Cox finally shared more about his work advising political technology developer for progressives Acronym, and climate change-tracking satellite startup Planet Labs. He also explained more about the circumstances of his departure from social network’s C-suite.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – NOVEMBER 08: Chris Cox speaks onstage at the WIRED25 Summit 2019 – Day 1 at Commonwealth Club on November 08, 2019 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED)
On how he felt leaving Facebook, Cox said “part of the reason I was okay leaving was that after 2016 I’d spent a couple years building out a bunch of the teams that I felt were most important to sort of take the lessons that we learned through some of 2016 and start to put in place institutions that can help the company, be more responsible and be a better communicator on some of the key issues.”
As for what specifically drove him to leave, Cox explained that “It wasn’t something where I felt I wanted to spend another 13 years on social media. Mark and I saw things a little bit differently . . . I think we are still investigating as an industry, how do you balance protecting the privacy of people’s information and continuing to keep people safe” Cox said.
On whether moving towards encryption was part of that, he said he thinks encryption is “great: and that “It offers an enormous amount of protection” but noted “it certainly makes some of those things more complicated” on the privacy vs safety balance. He complemented Facebook’s efforts to build ways of catching bad actors even if they’re shielded by encryption. That includes digital literacy initiatives in Brazil and India ahead of elections, and offering forwarding systems for sending questionable information to fact checkers. “I think there are pros and cons with these systems and I’m not a hard-liner on any one of them” Cox said, and noted that what Facebook is building is “resonant with what people want.”
Cox was asked about the major debate about whether Facebook should allow political advertising. “We think political advertising can be good and helpful. It often favors up and comers versus incumbents.” Still, on fact-checking, he said “I’m a big fan” even though Facebook isn’t applying that to political ads. He did note that “I think the company should investigate and is investigating micro targeting . . . if there’s hundreds of variants being run of the creative then it’s tricky to get your arms around what’s being said.” He also advocated for more context in the user interface distinguishing political ads.Â
Chris Cox speaks at Wired25
Since leaving Facebook, Cox has joined the advisory board of a group called Acronym which is helping to build out the campaign and messaging technology stack for progressive candidates. “This is an area where my perception is that the progressives have been behind on the ability to develop and use as a team infrastructure that helps you have a good voter file, how to develop messaging —Â just basic politics in 2019.”
Wired’s Lauren Goode asked if he was aligning himself with progressives, taking a political stance, and whether he could do that while still at Facebook. “Absolutely not” Cox responded. “And why is that I think when you’re in a very senior role at a platform, you have a duty to be much more neutral in your politics.”
He then came out with a bold statement enabled by his independence. “I think Trump should not be our President. The other thing I care a lot about right now is climate change and he’s not going to help us there.”
That led to Cox discussing that he’s also been working to advise San Francisco startup Planet Labs which is using satellite imagery to track climate change. “The vision was to build these small, about shoebox-size satellites with solar panel panel wings and have a fleet of them in space, which is real-time imaging the earth.”
With that data, Cox explained you can track wildfires, deforestation, coal power plants, methane gas, and more. Then, “You can start to contribute to having a health system, where you basically imaging the earth every hour, and then you’re creating some public data set with tools that plug into decision makers banks, insurance companies, policymakers, investors, journalists, students…”
Asked about big tech’s responsibility for addressing climate change, Cox said “I think at the very least it’s making a commitment to being carbon-negative.”
Acronym and Planet Labs’ work intertwines, as Cox believes climate data proves the need for someone new in the Oval Office. While Cox didn’t discuss it on stage, Wired listed him as part of Shasta Group, which is Cox’s own vehicle for contributing to these projects. Still, he’s not ready to launch a full-fledged company of his own in politics and climate. “I’m still so young at this field that I don’t have enough confidence in my own mental model of the world.”
Cox concluded that by harnessing big company’s employees and having team leaders put more attention on climate change, “I do think tech can lead.”Â
Source: TechCrunch
Joshua Luber runs a sneaker empire valued at more than $1 billion, but he thinks they’re just now scratching the surface. The consumer marketplace recently expanded to include a fifth category (collectibles). “It’s an evolution of eBay that works similar to the stock market,â€� Luber states, “but at the core, it’s around the concept of true market price.â€�Â
We visited StockX’s 15,000-square-foot facility in Detroit to get a peek into their authentication process, and sat down with Luber to chat about humble beginnings, business expansion and sneakers.
Source: TechCrunch
At WIRED25, the startup founder talks about her “new privacy paradigm� and how it could protect personal data, and keep it anonymous.
Source: Wired
The crowded landscape of programs teaching non-technical people to become software developers has been a proving ground for a new model of education financing: income share agreements (ISAs). With an ISA, students avoid paying tuition upfront or taking out private loans, instead paying a percentage of their income for a time after graduation after they’re earning a minimum income.
The model aligns education providers with students’ career outcomes, and one startup is staking a claim to be the leader in the space; Kenzie Academy, a year-long program with a physical campus in Indianapolis — and a student body that’s 66 percent online — announced a partnership with Community Investment Management (CIM) earlier this week that provides $100 million in debt to cover the operating costs associated with students who defer payment through ISAs.
Kenzie co-founder and CEO Chok Ooi says that core to Kenzie’s mission is the goal that its graduates “can stay in the heartland and attract more jobs so that someone coming out of the Midwest no longer has to move to Silicon Valley or New York to have a successful career in tech.” This $100 million is one of the largest commitments yet to financing ISAs and Kenzie is using it to recruit a more diverse population of students who may not be able to afford tuition or qualify for student loans otherwise.
I interviewed Ooi to understand how Kenzie differentiates itself from competitors, how it has iterated its model to improve retention and job placement and how he expects the ISA market to evolve over the next couple years. Here’s the transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity:
Eric Peckham: The landscape of software developer training programs is crowded. Where did you see an opportunity to do something different, and how do you position Kenzie relative to others in the market?
Chok Ooi: My co-founder came from Galvanize, so we observed firsthand the proliferation of tech and coding boot camps. These are typically short-term, three-to-five month programs and they tend to do well serving people with college degrees. I would say that they are disrupting the masters’ program space. We saw a major gap in programs that serve a much larger demographic of people who are much earlier in their development. People who never went to college, or did a little bit of college and dropped out, or just never had a professional work experience. A three-month training is insufficient to get them to a point where they could land a technical job and be successful.
We saw an opportunity to bring high-quality tech education to the American heartland that is 12 months in length. For about two-thirds of our students, this is their first post-secondary credential training.
We are giving them not just the technical skills, but elements from a traditional four-year college as well, like critical thinking, problem-solving and communication skills.
Compared to those other bootcamps or training programs, is Kenzie targeting different job outcomes for its graduates?
We did a survey of our students that asked them to name the top five tech companies they desired to work for. None of the Silicon Valley companies made the list other than Salesforce. Indianapolis is the second largest Salesforce office outside of San Francisco. The rest of the companies our students named were companies like DMI and Zylo that people in Silicon Valley don’t hear about but are doing very well in the Midwest. Their friends work there. They’re a fabric of the community. If we really want to create job opportunities for the rest of America, we cannot adopt the Silicon Valley mindset.
Kenzie Academy co-founder and CEO Chok Ooi.
So how do you evaluate technical aptitude and critical thinking in the admissions process? What’s that process look like, and how has it evolved over the last couple of years? What have you learned in order to make that more effective?
Prior to founding Kenzie, I started a company nine years ago called AglityIO. The model for AgilityIO was similar to companies like Andela. We were trying to solve the talent crunch in the Bay Area by recruiting and training people with the raw talent in Vietnam. Today, that company works with Google, Uber, NerdWallet, Meetup.com and 150 other tech companies. So I’ve experience in developing processes to identify raw talent in this context.
As people are doing the online assessments, we collect data points of how long it takes for them to solve the problem, what their different decision points are and things like that. Then as they get enrolled in Kenzie, we continue to collect attendance data, grades, and then placement data and use that to look at success and failure cases. We constantly refine our assessment.
Are you seeing any particular pattern or cluster in the applications you’re receiving or the candidates you’re accepting in terms of prior field of employment or aspect of their background?
Source: TechCrunch
In a conversation at WIRED25, the online payments CEO talks about cryptocurrency, government regulation, the housing crisis, and doing business in China.
Source: Wired
We won’t bury the lead on this news, startup fans. We’re giving all you professional procrastinators and time-delayed decision makers an extra week to pull yourselves together and score early-bird savings on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019 (11-12 December).
Early-bird pricing remains in play until 15 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Don’t let this last-chance clock run out. Beat the deadline, buy an early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin and keep up to €500 in your wallet.
One of the many awesome aspects of Disrupt is the opportunity to learn from a range of experts in the startup community. Here are just three examples of the knowledge you can absorb at Disrupt. Want more? Check out the full event agenda.
Series A financing is a tricky beast and one of the hardest deals to close. If this hot topic speaks to you, don’t miss this panel discussion going down on the Extra Crunch Stage.
What does it take to raise a Series A with Jessica Holzbach (founder, Penta) and Louise Samet (partner, Blossom Capital). Venture capital funds have boomed this decade, but raising money is still hard for young companies. What are investors today looking for in teams, metrics and products?
Climate change is arguably the biggest issue of our time. Learn how one founder turned sustainability into her business.
How to build sustainability as a business with Benjamina Bollag (founder/CEO, Higher Steaks). As climate change and the impacts of a warming world become more important for the consumers who are exposed to it, hear from a developer of lab-grown meat and others on how to build sustainability as a business.
Who wouldn’t love a crystal ball to divine investment trends for the coming year? We have the next best thing — minus the hocus pocus.
Investing in 2020 with Carolina Brochado (investment director, SoftBank Vision Fund) and Tom Hulme (general partner, GV). Nothing changes quite as rapidly as investment trends. Brochado and Hulme will offer perspectives from their experience both on the ground in Europe and from 50,000 feet to talk about what 2020 has in store for startups.
There’s plenty more knowledge and opportunity packed into two short days. Don’t miss the Startup Battlefield pitch competition. Be there as 15-20 stellar startups vie for the Disrupt Cup, investor love, media attention and the $50,000 prize.
Looking for skilled coders to help bring your vision to life? Head to the Extra Crunch Stage and watch the Hackathon finalists pitch working products they designed and built in 24 pressure-filled hours. Who will win the $5,000 prize for best overall hack?
Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. This is it — one extra week. You have until 15 November at 11:59 (CEST) — an extra week to buy an early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin. Get ‘er done!
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Source: TechCrunch
This July, Facebook announced a new division called NPE Team which would build experimental consumer-facing apps, allowing the company to try out new ideas and features to see how people would react. It soon thereafter tapped former Vine GM Jason Toff to join the team as a product manager. The first apps to emerge from the NPE Team have now quietly launched. One, Bump, is a chat app that aims to help people make new friends through conversations, not appearances. Another, Aux, is a social music listening app.
Aux seems a bit reminiscent of an older startup, Turntable.fm, that closed its doors in 2013. As in Turntable.fm, the idea with Aux is that of a virtual DJ’ing experience where people instead of algorithms are programming the music. This concept of crowdsourced DJ’ing also caught on in years past with radio stations that put their audiences in control of the playlist through their mobile app.
Later, streaming music apps like Spotify experimented with party playlists, and various startups launched their own guest-controlled playlists.
The NPE Team’s Aux app is a slightly different take on this general idea of people-powered playlists.
The app is aimed at school-aged kids and teens who join a party in the app every day at 9 PM. They then choose the songs they want to play and compete for the “AUX” to get theirs played first. At the end of the night, a winner is chosen based on how many “claps” are received.
As the app describes it, Aux is a “DJ for Your School” — a title that’s a bit confusing, as it brings to mind music being played over the school’s intercom system, as opposed to a social app for kids who attend school to use in the evenings.
Aux launched on August 8, 2019 in Canada, and has less than 500 downloads on iOS, according to data from Sensor Tower. It’s not available on Android. It briefly ranked No. 38 among all Music apps on the Canadian App Store on October 22, which may point to some sort of short campaign to juice the downloads.
The other new NPE Team app is Bump, which aims to help people “make new friends.”
Essentially an anonymous chat app, the idea here is that Bump can help people connect by giving them icebreakers to respond to using text. There are no images, videos or links in Bump — just chats.
Based on the App Store screenshots, the app seems to be intended for college students. The screenshots show questions about “the coolest place” on campus and where to find cheap food. A sample chat shown in the screenshots mentions things like classes and roommate troubles.Â
There could be a dating component to the app, as well, as it stresses that Bump helps people make a connection through “dialog versus appearances.” That levels the playing field a bit, compared with other social apps — and certainly dating apps — where the most attractive users with the best photos tend to receive the most attention.
Chats in Bump take place in real time, and you can only message in one chat at a time. There’s also a time limit of 30 seconds to respond to messages, which keeps the chat active. When the chat ends, the app will ask you if you want to keep in touch with the other person. Only if both people say yes will you be able to chat with them again.
Bump is available on both iOS and Android and is live in Canada and the Philippines. Bump once ranked as high as No. 252 in Social Networking on the Canadian App Store on September 1, 2019, according to Sensor Tower. However, it’s not ranking at all right now.
What’s interesting is that only one of these NPE Team apps, Bump, discloses in its App Store description that the NPE Team is from Facebook. The other, Aux, doesn’t mention this. However, both do point to an App privacy policy that’s hosted on Facebook.com for those who go digging.
That’s not too different from how Google’s in-house app incubator, Area 120, behaves. Some of its apps aren’t clear about their affiliation with Google, save for a link to Google’s privacy policy. It seems these companies want to see if the apps succeed or fail on their own merit, not because of their parent company’s brand name recognition.
Facebook hasn’t said much about its plans for the NPE Team beyond the fact that they will focus on new ways of building community and may be shut down quickly if they’re not useful.
Facebook has been asked for comment about the new apps and we’ll update if one is provided.
Source: TechCrunch
With HoloLens 2, Microsoft wants you to interact with digital assets and holograms in a natural way. Microsoft is fusing all of your natural inputs into what it calls “collaborative visualization.”
Source: Digital trends