Archivo del Autor: Belen De Leon

AI Can Pass Standardized Tests—But It Would Fail Preschool

Opinion: Sure, an AI aced an 8th-grade science test, but the method it used highlights its lack of common sense or anything resembling human understanding.
Source: Wired

InMobi’s Glance raises $45M to expand outside of India

Glance, a subsidiary of Indian mobile ad business firm InMobi, said today it has raised $45 million as it prepares to scale its business outside of India and bulk up its product offerings.

The unnamed, maiden financing round for Glance was funded by Mithril Capital, a growth stage investment firm co-founded by Silicon Valley investors Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi Group, said the current round has not closed and could bag another $30 million to $55 million in the next two months.

Glance operates an eponymous service that shows media content in local languages on the lock screen of Android-powered smartphones. InMobi has partnered with a number of top smartphone vendors including Xiaomi, Samsung, and Gionee to integrate Glance into their respective operating systems.

Glance, which was launched in September last year and supports English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, has amassed 50 million monthly active users in India, its primary market. Users are spending an average of 22 minutes with Glance each day, he said.

“All the new smartphone models launched by Samsung, Xiaomi, and a handful of other vendors have launched with Glance on them,� Tiwari said.

In a statement, Mithril Capital’s Rohan, said, “We share Glance’s global vision of breaking through the constraints of application architectures and linguistic markets to deliver rich, frictionless, and engaging experiences across a myriad of cultures and languages.” As part of the financing round, he is joining Glance’s board.

Glance does not show traditional ads, something it intends to never change, but shows a certain kind of content to drive engagement for brands.

In the months to come, Glance plans to expand the platform and bring short-form videos (Glance TV), and mini games (Glance Games) to the lock screen. It is also working on a feature dubbed Glance Location that will enable brands to court users in their vicinity, and Glance Shopping to explore ways to build commerce around content.

As of today, InMobi Group is not monetizing Glance platform, but plans to explore ways to make money from it early next year, Tiwari said.

The 12-year-old firm said it plans to expand footprints of Glance outside of India. The company plans to take Glance to some Southeast Asian markets like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. InMobi’s Tiwari said the Glance has already started to find users in these markets.

InMobi Group, which had raised $320 million prior to today’s financing round, has been profitable for several years, but the company decided to raise outside funding to accelerate Glance’s growth, Tiwari said.

The firm, which has three subsidiaries including its marquee marketing cloud division, plans to go public in the next few years. But instead of taking the entire group public, Tiwari said the firm is thinking of publicly listing each division as they mature. The marketing cloud division, which brings in the vast majority of revenue for the firm, will go public first, he said.

“The IPO plans remain, and we will evaluate them as we go along. The reality, however, is that the market is so big and there is so much room that we can continue to be private for a few more years,” he said.

Source: TechCrunch

Pento raises $2.8M seed round for its payroll SaaS

Pento, a Danish startup working on a better payroll experience for companies and employees, has raised $2.8 million in seed funding.

Leading the round is Point Nine Capital and Seedcamp, with participation from a number of smaller funds and angel investors, including departing Atomico Partner Mattias Ljungman. The company had previously raised $700,000 from the likes of Preseed Ventures, and Futuristic.vc.

Founded by Jonas Bøgh Larsen (CEO) and Emil Hagbarth (CTO) in 2016, Pento offers a SaaS for companies wanting to automate their payroll and offer complementary features to employees, such as user-friendly access to pay history and personal pay-related data. The startup is live in Denmark with over 400 customers and says a U.K. launch is happening soon.

“Payroll is a very manual process for most companies, which causes errors and is super time-consuming,” Larsen tells me. “The process usually includes a lot of manual tasks like updating spreadsheets, sending emails with personal information, making manual bank transfers, manually keying in data from HR software, and much more. We have built a SaaS product that automates all of this”.

The current feature set of Pento include things like tax reporting, pension reporting, payslip generation, payouts to employees and tax authorities, and bookkeeping. “[This] means payroll admins can run the whole payroll process in one single product, usually in a matter of minutes rather than hours,” claims Larsen.

Typical Pento customers are companies with 1-150 employees, although the startup is also seeing quite a lot of demand from bigger companies too. It operates a classic SaaS model, charging a monthly subscription per seat.

“We currently charge £3 per employee per month for our basic plan, and charge £7 per employee per month for more support and more features,” explains the Pento CEO.

Meanwhile, competitors are said to fall into three camps: Traditional payroll outsourcing; older payroll software products like Sage, Brightpay and MoneySoft; and newer competitors like Payfit and Xero Payroll. (There’s also Duane Jackson’s latest upstart, Staffology Payroll, which looks to be similar to Pento on the pure SaaS side.)

“Contrary to other newer payroll products like Payfit and Xero, Pento has a 100% focus on payroll, not HR or accounting, and we will much rather integrate to other products in the ecosystem than try to build it all ourselves,” adds Larsen.

Source: TechCrunch

SimShine raises $8 million for home security cameras that use edge computing

SimShine, a computer vision startup based in Shenzhen, has raised $8 million in pre-Series A funding for SimCam, its line of home security cameras that use edge computing to keep data on-device. The funding was led by Cheetah Mobile, with participation from Skychee, Skyview Fund and Oak Pacific Investment.

Earlier this year, SimShine raised $310,095 in a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. It will use its pre-Series A round for product development and hiring.

SimShine’s team started off developing computer vision and edge computing software, spending five years working with enterprise clients before launching SimCam.

The company plans to release more smart home products that use edge computing with the ultimate goal of building a IoT platform to connect different devices, co-founder and chief marketing officer Joe Pham tells TechCrunch. SimCam currently integrates with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, with support for Apple Homekit in the works.

Pham says edge computing protects users’ privacy by keeping data, including face recognition data, on device, while also decreasing latency and false alarms, because calculations are performed continuously on the device (cameras connect to Wi-Fi so customers can watch surveillance video on their smartphones). It also means customers don’t have to sign up for the subscription plans that many cloud-based home security cameras require and reduces the price of each device since SimCam does not have to maintain cloud servers.

Source: TechCrunch

Huawei drops lawsuit over equipment seized by the U.S. government

Huawei has dropped a lawsuit against the Commerce Department and other agencies after the U.S. government released telecommunications equipment seized in September 2017. The suit was filed by the Chinese company’s U.S. subsidiary, Huawei Technologies USA, in June. In a statement, Huawei said it considers the return of the equipment, including servers and Ethernet switches, “as a tacit admission that the seizure itself was unlawful and arbitrary.�

The equipment was confiscated by U.S. officials in Alaska as it was on its way back to China after testing in California. Huawei said the U.S. government determined after an investigation that no export license was needed for the shipment, but did not give the company an explanation for why it had been withheld for two years.

The dropped lawsuit is separate from the one Huawei filed against the U.S. government in March, claiming that a ban on the use of its products by federal agencies and contractors violated due process and is unconstitutional.

Huawei has been on the U.S. government’s entity list since May over concerns that it poses a threat to national security and its equipment may be used for espionage, allegations the company has denied. The trade blacklist prevents it from purchasing from U.S. suppliers without getting clearance from the government first.

Along with ZTE, Huawei has been on the U.S. government’s radar since the House Intelligence Committee identified the companies as potential security threats. Scrutiny has intensified since the U.S.-China trade war began last year, however, and the U.S. government has put more legal pressure on Huawei, which the company described earlier this month as a “malign, concerted effort by the U.S. government to discredit Huawei and curb its leadership position in the industry.â€�

Source: TechCrunch

Target’s personalized loyalty program launches nationwide next month

Target today announced its new, data-driven loyalty program, Target Circle, will launch nationwide on October, 6th, following a year and a half of beta testing in select markets. The program combines a variety of features including 1% back on purchases, birthday rewards, and personalized offers and savings designed to make the program more attractive to consumers.

It also includes a way for customers to vote on Target’s community giving initiatives, which helps directs Target’s giving to around 800 nonprofits in the U.S.

The new program is designed to lure in customers who have yet to adopt Target’s store card, REDcard. While REDcard penetration today is around 23%, that number has remained fairly consistent over time — in fact, it’s down about one percentage point from a year ago.

With Target Circle, however, the retailer has another means of generating loyalty and establishing a connection with its customers on a more individualized basis.

A big part of that is the personalized aspect of the Target Circle program. In addition to the “birthday perks” (an easy way to grab some demographic data), customers will also get special discounts on the categories they “shop most often” — meaning, Target will be tapping into its treasure trove of customer purchase history to make recommendations from both in-store and online purchases along with other signals.

“As guests shop, Target leverages information about their shopping behaviors and purchases to share relevant offers that create an even more personalized, seamless shopping experience,” a company spokesperson explained, when asked for details about the data being used. “For example, a guest who frequently shops Target for baby products may receive a special offer on their next purchase of baby items.”

According to a recent retail study from Avionos, 78% of consumers are more likely to purchase from retailers that better personalize their experiences and 63% are more open to sharing personal information if retailers can better anticipate needs.

And as some may recall, Target is already scary good at personalization.

In one notable case, the retailer figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did, and sent her coupons for baby items. The dad, understandably, was angry — until he found out that Target was right.

That story was a high-profile example of the data collection and analysis big retailers are doing all the time, though. Target Circle simply formalizes this into an opt-in program instead of an opt-out experience.

As part of the changes, Target’s Cartwheel savings are rolling into Target Circle where they’ll be rebranded as Target Circle offers. 

Circle members will also get early access to special sales throughout the year — that is, the events people line up for, like they did for the Lilly Pulitzer fashion line or more recently, the quickly sold out Vineyard Vines collection.

Target says, in time, it will come up with “even more personalized, relevant ways” to make shopping easier for its customers.

The new program is meant to complement the REDcard, which will increase the cashback to 5% when used. But REDcard holders can still join Circle to take advantage of the other perks.

“Our guests are at the center of everything we do, and we’re always looking for ways to create even easier, more rewarding shopping experiences that give them another reason to choose Target,” said Rick Gomez, Target executive vice president, and chief marketing and digital officer, in a statement. “We worked directly with guests to develop Target Circle, and the program includes the benefits and perks they told us were most important to them, from earning on every trip to having the opportunity to help Target make a positive impact in their local communities,” he said.

The loyalty program had been in testing in Dallas-Ft. Worth, Charlotte, Denver, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Phoenix over the past 18 months.

Though not having Amazon’s scale, Target has done well at quickly innovating to keep up with today’s pace of e-commerce. In short order, it has made over its stores to make more room for order pickups and online grocery, and has launched and expanded new services like Target Restock (next-day), Shipt (same day delivery) and Drive Up (same day pickup). The changes have been paying off with Target beating on its latest earnings with $18.42 billion in revenue and profits of $938 million.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Tom Hanks reportedly will play toy astronaut Major Matt Mason in a movie – CNET

1960s kids will remember the space-age action figure from Mattel.
Source: CNET

Apple iPhone 11 Pro event: How to watch, start time, livestream and what to expect – CNET

The next iPhone will very likely be announced on Sept. 10.
Source: CNET

Astronauts make cement in space for the first time – CNET

Concrete could provide humans in space with better protection from radiation and extreme temperatures than many other materials.
Source: CNET