Researchers at Facebook have created Habitat, which is a platform that enables rapid training for A.I. agents. They will receive thousands of hours of training in just a few minutes in the virtual homes.
Source: Digital trends
Commentary: What the latest iPod Touch lacks in screen and battery life, it makes up for in apps, games, AR and a headphone jack.
Source: CNET
TechCrunch columnist Jon Evans has an Extra Crunch-exclusive look on what it takes to get remote work working within an organization. Evans, who has been the remote CTO of technology consulting firm HappyFunCorp for many years, finds that “you need decisive confidence, clear direction, iterative targets, independent responsibilities, asynchronous communications, and cheerful chatter� to build out a harmonious remote work culture.
Decisive confidence. Suppose Vivek in Delhi, Diego in Rio, and Miles in Berlin are all on a project. (An example I’m drawing from my real life.) It’s late your time. You have to make a decision about the direction of their work. If you sleep on it, you’re writing off multiple developer-days of productivity.
Sometimes they have enough responsibilities to have other things to work on. (More on that below.) Sometimes you don’t have to make the decision because they have enough responsibility to do so themselves. (More on that below.) But sometimes you have to make the business-level decision based on scant information. In cases like this, remember the military maxim: “Any decision is better than no decision.�
Over the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of hundreds of strategic investors, typically large corporates with venture wings with the mission to invest in the next wave of startups targeting their existing business lines. While many of these funds are structured at least symbolically as traditional venture capital firms, their specific concerns during deal negotiation can be quite different.
Source: TechCrunch
Aggressive moves to implant malware are both a warning and an effort to enable crippling attacks if necessary, says The New York Times.
Source: CNET
Welcome back to this week’s transcribed edition of Equity.
This was a big week of news that the Equity duo had to cover. Kate was at the Code Conference, Fortnite maker, Epic Games bought Houseparty, and a bit more on the Bird-Scoot deal.
Then came talk of the CrowdStrike IPO, which gave way to a heated discussion about dual-class shares.
Alex Wilhelm: I think it’s honest. I think giving the public one vote per share, and giving yourself 10 so you retain greater than 50% of voting is a sop. I think it’s ridiculous. Just fly under your own flag. If you don’t want to share any control, then don’t. If you want to have a company with a functional governance, that adheres to historical norms for how this stuff works, then have votes. This 10 versus 1 thing is a fracking farce, because I can’t swear on this show, so you can fill that in yourself. If you want to look at a historical example of a company that didn’t have this setup, it was Amazon, which historically thinks far ahead, and has done fantastically well. It’s public company growing from a, I believe, under nine-figure revenue. The idea you can’t do it is trash. The idea that it always works is wrong. To me, it’s dishonest. If you’re going to sell shares, go public, and float, share the voting power with your shareholders. Don’t treat them like children, and you like a god. You’re not.
Kate Clark: Alex is getting really worked up, but I totally agree with you. That’s why I want to-
Wilhelm: I’m not worked up, I’m angry.
Clark: That’s why I wanted to talk about it though, because I think it’s important. I think what you just said is a perfect summary of why it’s messed up. The only thing I think that will really change this, is to see whether these dual-class stocks, versus single-class stocks, perform differently on the market. As far as I know, they’re not, which means that people don’t care. Or, people don’t know, I don’t know. If a company isn’t going to lose any money doing it … If they’re not going to have any consequences whatsoever, they’re not going to be up against any negative feedback from shareholders, then of course, they’re going to keep doing it. Like I said, it’s not really talked about very much.
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Source: TechCrunch
Commentary: Galaxy Fold and Mate X delays show that foldables aren’t ready yet.
Source: CNET
Some of the best real-time insights into Tesla and its global fleet of electric vehicles — outside the confines of its Silicon Valley headquarters — might be through the lens of TezLab, a tiny upstart in Brooklyn.
Now, a little more than two years after its founding, TezLab is on the verge of hitting what its founders believe is a tipping point of users, a milestone that could finally trigger a path to monetization. And it’s adding lots of new features to help accelerate that plan.
For the non-Tesla owner, the name TezLab is likely a foreign one. In certain circles though, namely Tesla owners obsessed with understanding how their electric vehicle performs, TezLab is a familiar friend.
Tezlab is a free app that’s like a Fitbit for a Tesla vehicle. Tesla owners who download the app can track their efficiency, total trip miles and use it to control certain functions of the vehicle, such as locking and unlocking the doors and heating and air conditioning. There’s even a gamification piece that lets users earn badges for hitting milestones or completing tasks.
The company has started to add new features as part of a longer term plan aimed at monetization.
One of these features, which crowdsources data like Waze to give insights and ratings on Tesla Supercharger stations, is rolling out now. The video below shows how this supercharger feature will function.
The Waze for supercharger feature is considered “phase one” of the company’s plans to broaden its crowdsourcing and social community.
The six-person team behind TezLab was born out of HappyFunCorp, a software engineering shop that builds apps for mobile, web, wearables and Internet of Things devices for clients that include Amazon, Facebook and Twitter, as well as an array of startups.
HFC’s engineers, including co-founders Ben Schippers and William Schenk, were attracted to Tesla largely because of its techcentric approach and one important detail: the Tesla API endpoints are accessible to outsiders.
The Tesla API is technically private. But it exists, allowing Tesla’s own first-party app to communicate with the cars to do things like read battery charge status and lock doors. When reverse-engineered, it’s possible for a third-party app to communicate directly with the API. (Tesla CEO Elon Musk has talked recently about opening up the API to third-party developers)
“Essentially, the plumbing is already built to connect to the server,” Schippers told TechCrunch recently. “This was the catalyst for us.”
A Tesla vehicle buying trend was triggered at HFC. Schippers, Schenk and a number of other software engineers and staffers at HFC bought, and still own, Tesla vehicles like the Model 3. The company’s HFC fund provided the initial $350,000 to build the first version of TezLab.
TezLab hasn’t captured anywhere near every Tesla owner. But Schippers believes they’re getting close to reaching a critical mass of users. More than 200 owners are downloading the app each week, and that rate is accelerating, he said.
TezLab has 16,000 total installs on the Apple App Store and Google Play, according to Sensor Tower . The figures are all unique, new installs. The firm doesn’t count re-installs or downloads to multiple devices belonging to the same user. However, that total install number is likely closer to 18,000 because many are listed under TestFlight, an online service used to test apps.
In comparison, Tesla delivered 245,506 vehicles globally in 2018. TezLab doesn’t expect every Tesla owner to download the app. Instead, Schippers is initially aiming for 10% of owners — a target he believes is within reach — and eventually higher.
Even at its current numbers, TezLab has become a massive repository of Tesla data. The company is storing between 850,000 to 1 million events a day, and that volume is growing. That translates to more than 1 GB of data a day, according to Schippers.
“We now have enough data in our system to start making large assumptions of what the fleet is doing and why,” said Schippers, who is CEO of HappyFunCorp and head of product at TezLab.
The data is aggregated and anonymous and isn’t shared publicly. And there are no plans to sell that data.
“I think we can create something really meaningful, without getting into the business of selling data,” Schippers told TechCrunch.
Of course, what Schippers and others at TezLab have built could, theoretically, end overnight if Tesla were to change access.
Tesla could do to us what Facebook did to Zynga, and we don’t want that,” Schippers said.
Tesla declined to comment on this topic.
What TezLab does provide publicly on its website are insights based on that crunched data. For instance, anyone visiting the site can get a breakdown of model ownership, the average trip length and average time between plugging in.
As the company adds more features to the app, an understanding of how people use their Tesla vehicles should deepen.
In the background, of course, TezLab knows more than what it shows on its website. It can quickly spot phantom drain issues, if the Tesla API goes offline or chart spikes in charging use. For instance, Tezlab was able to determine that visits to Tesla Supercharger stations were 84% higher on Memorial Day than on an average day in 2019.
Capturing and storing that data is at the core of TezLab’s plan to make money. The app will remain free even as more features are added.
The company plans to follow the business model of the social fitness network Strava, which is charge for storage, not features. That data could become a lot more valuable to owners as new features are added. TezLab is looking at tracking Autopilot miles and is looking into doing “interesting stuff with Sentry mode,” the security feature now live in Tesla vehicles.
This summer, the app will introduce clubs that Schippers hopes will build up the community. The feature will let Tesla owners join a specific club, say in Norway, Brooklyn or San Francisco. It will be designed so owners can easily find and converse with other owners. And Schippers added, only people who own Tesla are allowed in.
TezLab’s staff puts itself squarely in the “protector of the realm” category when it comes to Tesla. In the end, all of this is to help Tesla succeed, said Schippers.
“We look at what Fitbit did for walking and exercise and motivation,” he said. “And we’ll bring that to the space of electric vehicles.”
Source: TechCrunch
Less than six months after releasing the disappointing interactive experiment “Bandersnatch,” Netflix’s science fiction anthology series “Black Mirror” is back with three traditionally-structured episodes.
On the latest installment of the Original Content podcast, we weigh in with our thoughts on the new season. We didn’t entirely agree on which episodes were strongest, but we agreed that there wasn’t a real misfire in the bunch.
Darrell and Jordan were most impressed the season opener, “Striking Vipers” — which uses a VR fighting game as a launching point for a thorny exploration of sexuality and friendship — while Anthony preferred “Smithereens,” in which the the driver with an Uber-style app takes a social media intern hostage. And we also had a good time with “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” which stars as Miley Cyrus as a pop star who’s merchandised as a friendly AI assistant.
Not all of the new episodes end happily, but in general, the show’s penchant for bleakness seems to have lifted (or perhaps it was simply channeled into “Bandersnatch”), leaving room for more emotional complexity. If we had any complaints, they had more to do with the relatively abbreviated season length, and with our skepticism about some of the show’s near-future technology.
You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
And if you want to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
1:33 “Black Mirror” spoiler-free review
31:00 Spoiler discussion
Source: TechCrunch
A hacking group linked to the Russian government has attempted to breach the U.S. power grid. Security experts tracked the hackers, and warn that they were probing the grid for weaknesses.
Source: Digital trends
Plus: gamma rays, InSight’s claw, and the Milky Way’s chill black hole.
Source: Wired