Consumer surveillance cameras are everywhere now, and they’re capturing moments we otherwise would never know have happened.
Source: Wired
Researchers want to reduce the noise from planes approaching a runway. The key is a smooth descent.
Source: Wired
Calling all code poets. It’s time to strut your stuff at the TC Hackathon at Disrupt Berlin 2019. Are you ready to test your physical, mental and technical limits in this intense, high-pressure code-a-thon for cash, prizes and bragging rights? Then apply to compete right here.
How does the Hackathon work? First of all, it’s free. And we give each participant a free Innovator pass. The Hackathon takes place during the Disrupt conference in a dedicated section of Arena Berlin. We’re limiting participation to 500 participants who will have just 36 hours to form teams, choose one of several sponsored contest hacks and complete their project.
We’ll announce the specific sponsors and challenges in the coming weeks. But you’ll get a good sense of what to expect by looking at the sponsored contests, prizes and winners from the Hackathon at Disrupt SF 2018.
Your skill and talent will be put to good use because, regardless of which hack challenge you select, sponsors are looking for working products that address real-world problems. Do your very best to impress, and you could take home thousands of dollars.
Judges will review the completed projects science-fair style, and they’ll choose 10 teams for the final round on day two. Each (very) tired team gets two minutes to present and pitch their project on the Extra Crunch Stage.
In addition to the cash and prizes from individual sponsors, TechCrunch’s panel of judges will select one team for the best overall hack — and they’ll take home a $5,000 cash prize.
Cash, prizes, bragging rights, free food, drink, caffeine and a free Innovator’s pass — yowza! Need more reasons to apply? Think networking. If you’re this good under pressure, imagine the impression you’ll make on potential partners or employers.
TC Hackathon takes place during Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Don’t miss your chance to dazzle us with your physical, mental and technical capabilities — and build something great in the process. Apply to the Hackathon today.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Source: TechCrunch
Despite the inexorable rise of social media influencers, several problems remain when it comes to brands trying to use these stars to push their products. The marketing tools and processes are fragmented (read: chaotic). Attaining some level of authenticity, quality and creativity in influencer-driven campaigns is tough, to say the least. And the whole thing has to look like the influencers are only promoting brands that they truly believe in, whether they are or not.
Perhaps that’s unkind? Some social influencers really do try and ‘curate’ the products they are charing to push. Plenty just do it only for the money, and it shows. The whole thing is largely a shitshow, to use a technical term. Some startups are trying to bring order to this tedious state of affairs.
Influencer, is a social media influencer marketing platform, which has now announced the close of a £3million (± $3.6million) Series A round led by Puma Private Equity.
Its platform claims to simplify the influencer marketing process for both advertisers and creators, giving advertisers access to a network of “macro and micro creatorsâ€� pre-vetted for authenticity, quality and creativity based on first-party data. This unites “creator discovery, creator relationship management, campaign management and campaign reporting along with actionable insightsâ€� they say.
Key competitors include Whalar, Tribe, Takumi, Influential.co and FameBit.
But Influencer says it differentiates from these companies in that it puts a lot of the elements needed onto one platform for self-service and managed campaigns. It also has a white label solution.
Influencer has so far worked with brands including Boohoo, Alibaba, Pepsi, Starbucks, Pantene, Uber Eats, PrettyLittleThing and Apple Music, to get them in front of audiences via social media influencers.
The startup was launched in 2017 by 23 year old Ben Jeffries who leads the company as CEO, and 25 year old YouTuber and creator Caspar Lee.
It’s now brought on Adam Ludwin, co-founder of search intelligence company Captify and growth marketing agency Inflecto Media as Director of the Board.
The company will open its first US office in New York, led by CEO Ben Jeffries, with expansion planned to the West Coast over the next year.
It’s also released a mobile app, which “allows brands and content creators to create meaningful relationships claims Jeffries.
Caspar Lee says: “At Influencer we pride ourselves in being by creators, for creators, with a team who embody this new era of creativity and enjoy unrivaled relationships with the world’s leading creators.�
Source: TechCrunch
$1.5 trillion. That’s the amount of outstanding student loan debt held by American citizens according to the New York Fed. It is an astronomical sum, and has led to much hand-wringing about whether there is a coming bubble in U.S. higher education.
What’s even worse than the scale of the debt load though is the fact that for millions of borrowers, they literally don’t have to pay some of those dollars. Thanks to the complexity of the loan system in the U.S., borrowers often qualify for repayment programs that can lead to loan forgiveness, that is, if they can figure out the terms, apply correctly, and actively follow the rules to net the write-off.
Enter Summer. The public benefit corporation is on a mission to act as a “trusted advisor� to student loan borrowers. Through its platform, borrowers can get a full 360-degree view of their current student loan situation, and begin exploring options for how to repay it in the most financially efficient way possible.
Summer’s program helps users identify possible forgiveness options. Photo via Summer.
The company’s early traction has brought it a new round of venture capital. The company announced this morning that QED Investors, one of the leading early-stage fintech investors out there, led a $10 million series A round in the company. Recent partner addition Matt Burton led the deal, who joined QED about a year ago after selling his lending data startup Orchard to Kabbage.
Co-founder and CEO Will Sealy analogized Summer to how tax accountants help filers handle the complexities of doing their taxes. “We’re trying to create the software that democratizes [student loan] expertise, that gets the expertise into the hands of the end consumer, who might not be able to afford an accountant that doesn’t even unfortunately exist in the student loan space at this current moment,â€� he said.
He noted that the company is building out support for 120 loan forgiveness programs and their complicated rules, and has its eyes on more than a hundred other student loan proposals that are sitting in state legislatures across the country.
The company was started at Yale by Sealy and co-founders Paul Joo and Vincent Tran, and the trio eventually migrated to New York City while building the team to 13 according to its staffing page. Sealy previously worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in DC in the Office of Students, where he worked on precisely the challenges of getting students better access to quality information around student loan programs.
Summer’s team. Photo via Summer.
So far, Summer, which launched in 2017, has helped 10,000 borrowers to date, and “just in this year, we have helped borrowers save $8 million,â€� Sealy said. “A critical metric is not just how many people we are engaging, but how much money we’re saving them.â€�
Summer does not charge end users to use its product. Instead, it sells through enterprises and other types of organizations to offer the product as a benefit to employees. Sealy gave the example of medical associations, who could offer Summer to recent medical school graduates, or companies who want to entice recent grads with a simple tool that can improve their financial lives.
Summer currently works retrospectively, in that it targets users who are post-grads. I asked why Summer didn’t focus prospectively on helping borrowers think through their student loan products before they take them on. Sealy replied that “In many ways, it feels like the house is on fire. So before we would ever go about trying to create a better smoke detector and build a new home, we want to save the people who are currently struggling.�
Burton of QED explained his rationale for leading the round. “QED, like the rest of the investors like General Catalyst and Story Ventures, we put a pretty big round into this company on the belief that there’s an urgent problem facing these student loan borrowers and we’re working hard to … scale to meet the needs of tens of millions of student borrowers.� With 10,000 users and $8 million saved, you can start to project out the potential impact Summer could have for many borrowers.
In addition to QED, the round had participation from General Catalyst, Greycroft, NextView Ventures, and Story Ventures.
Source: TechCrunch
Audio Sharing works with AirPods and Beats.
Source: CNET
The stalwart Honda Civic gets a few updates for 2019 that make it better than ever.
Source: CNET
The Civic has always been really good, but this year’s model gets a few well-placed tweaks.
Source: CNET
If you’re a cricket fan, you will be visiting Facebook way more often in the coming months and years. The social juggernaut announced on Thursday it has partnered with the International Cricket Council (ICC), the global governing body of cricket, to secure exclusive digital content rights until 2023 for global ICC events in the Indian subcontinent.
As part of the four-year deal, financial details of which were not disclosed, Facebook will show post-match recaps and in-play key moments and other “feature content” of the matches in the Indian subcontinent. The exclusive rights are limited to the Indian subcontinent, elsewhere the company will carry post-match recaps. Facebook said it hopes to serve “hundreds of millions of cricket fans” through this “unprecedented” and “ground-breaking” deal.
A Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company won’t be live streaming the matches in any market.
In a statement, Ajit Mohan, VP and Managing Director Facebook India, said, “with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, the ICC has an exceptional opportunity to leverage our family of apps to serve current sports fans as well as bring in an entirely new generation of fans. Every day, people come to our platforms to talk about, and form friendships around, cricket. With this partnership, we will be able to serve these fans with the kind of premium content that can ignite new conversations, new connections and new followership.”
Though not as popular in the U.S., cricket is one of the most celebrated sporting events in many key Facebook markets including the UK, India, and Australia. How popular? Hotstar, a streaming service in India owned by Disney, has set global record for most concurrent views on a live streaming event thanks to cricket.
Facebook is well aware. In 2017, the company bid $600 million for online streaming rights of IPL, a popular cricket tournament in India, for a period of five years. It lost the bid to Star India, which operates Hotstar. Last year, the company tested the waters after it acquired streaming rights to show La Liga games in India.
The recently concluded ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup garnered 4.6 billion video views across ICC’s digital and social media platforms, ICC said.
Today’s deal includes coverage of following events: ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2020, ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2020, ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup 2021, ICC World Test Championship Final 2021, ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2021, ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2022, ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023, ICC World Test Championship Final 2023, ICC Men’s T20 World Cup Qualifier 2019, ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup Qualifier 2022, ICC U19 Cricket World Cup 2020, and ICC U19 Cricket World Cup 2022.
Last year, Star India acquired digital and TV rights to live-stream and broadcast all of Indian cricket team’s matches globally for a sum of $944 million.
Facebook’s Mohan, who served as the chief executive of Hotstar prior to joining the social juggernaut, added, “the future of AR and VR is being charted by Facebook and we are excited about the possibility of bringing the best of our innovations to fans around the world.”
Source: TechCrunch
Law firms have to parse thousands of pages a week to figure out if everything makes sense and there’s no anomaly. And Luminance wants to make that work much less tedious by using artificial intelligence to review documents and minutes instead of hours. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Luminance CEO Emily Foges will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.
If you know someone who has ever done an internship for a law firm, they may have told your horrific stories about endless nights working on an important contract.
Instead, Luminance clients can start by uploading a document to the platform. Luminance then tries to understand the contract or legal document. It can pick up the most obvious anomalies and surface important information, which should help you save time.
The goal isn’t necessarily to replace lawyers altogether — you need a human behind the machine to understand what Luminance tells you after all. But it can greatly enhance their productivity.
And it’s been working incredibly well. There are now 150 law firms across 40 countries using the product. Some of them are among the biggest law firms in the world.
Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion — and many others. The conference will take place December 11-12.
In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.
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Source: TechCrunch