Samsung and Huawei face off as the foldable phone wars heat up.
Source: CNET
Amazon’s deal to buy the Wi-Fi hardware maker is sealed, and Eero customers are concerned.
Source: CNET
Five new Galaxy phones. One decision. We’re here to help.
Source: CNET
The withdrawal will be complete in 2020.
Source: CNET
And it’s all happening in adorable little vans.
Source: CNET
One day last summer, Greta Thunberg skipped school, sat down outside the Swedish parliament—and launched a movement that’s still going strong.
Source: Wired
Artificial intelligence, or what passes for it, can be found in practically every major tech company and, increasingly, in government programs. A joint Harvard-MIT program just unloaded $750,000 on projects looking to keep such AI developments well understood and well reported.
The Ethics and Governance in AI Initiative is a combination research program and grant fund operated by MIT’s Media Lab and Harvard’s Berkman-Klein Center. The small projects selected by the initiative are generally speaking aimed at using technology to keep people informed, or informing people about technology.
AI is an enabler of both good and ill in the world of news and information gathering, as the initiative’s director, Tim Hwang, said in a news release:
“On one hand, the technology offers a tremendous opportunity to improve the way we work —
including helping journalists find key information buried in mountains of public records. Yet we
are also seeing a range of negative consequences as AI becomes intertwined with the spread of
misinformation and disinformation online.”
These grants are not the first the initiative has given out, but they are the first in response to an open call for ideas, Hwang noted.
The largest sum of the bunch, a $150K grant, went to MuckRock Foundation’s project Sidekick, which uses machine learning tools to help journalists scour thousands of pages of documents for interesting data. This is critical in a day and age when government and corporate records are so voluminous (for example, millions of emails leaked or revealed via FOIA) that it is basically impossible for a reporter or even team to analyze them without help.
Along the same lines is Legal Robot, which was awarded $100K for its plan to mass-request government contracts, then extract and organize the information within. This makes a lot of sense: People I’ve talked to in this sector have told me that the problem isn’t a lack of data but a surfeit of it, and poorly kept at that. Cleaning up messy data is going to be one of the first tasks any investigator or auditor of government systems will want to do.
Tattle is a project aiming to combat disinformation and false news spreading on WhatsApp, which as we’ve seen has been a major vector for it. It plans to use its $100K to establish channels for sourcing data from users, since of course much of WhatsApp is encrypted. Connecting this data with existing fact-checking efforts could help understand and mitigate harmful information going viral.
The Rochester Institute of Technology will be using its grant (also $100K) to look into detecting manipulated video, both designing its own techniques and evaluating existing ones. Close inspection of the media will render a confidence score that can be displayed via a browser extension.
Other grants are going to AI-focused reporting work by the Seattle Times and by newsrooms in Latin America, and to workshops training local media in reporting AI and how it affects their communities.
To be clear, the initiative isn’t investing in these projects — just funding them with a handful of stipulations, Hwang explained to TechCrunch over email.
“Generally, our approach is to give grantees the freedom to experiment and run with the support that we give them,” he wrote. “We do not take any ownership stake but the products of these grants are released under open licenses to ensure the widest possible distribution to the public.”
He characterized the initiative’s grants as a way to pick up the slack that larger companies seem are leaving behind as they focus on consumer-first applications like virtual assistants.
“It’s naive to believe that the big corporate leaders in AI will ensure that these technologies are being leveraged in the public interest,” wrong Hwang. “Philanthropic funding has an important role to play in filling in the gaps and supporting initiatives that envision the possibilities for AI outside the for-profit context.”
You can read more about the initiative and its grantees here.
Source: TechCrunch
Firefox Send, Mozilla’s free, encrypted file-transfer service, is officially launching to the public today following its debut as a “Test Pilot” experiment back in August 2017. The service allows web users to share files up to 2.5 GB in size through the browser, while protecting them with end-to-end encryption and a link that automatically expires to keep the shared files private.
When Mozilla first began testing the web-based Send tool, file shares were limited to 1 GB. Today, that remains the limitation until users sign up for a free Firefox account. They can then opt to share files up to 2.5 GB.
The system offers an alternative to email, where larger file attachments are more of an issue, as well as cloud storage sites, like Google Drive and Dropbox, which can be time-consuming when all you need to do is share a single file one time — not store the file, edit it or collaborate with others.
To use the service, the sender visits the Send website, uploads the files and sets an expiration period — a design choice seemingly inspired by Snapchat and its concepts around ephemerality. You also can opt to have the files protected with a password before sending.
Firefox Send then offers a link you can give to the recipient however you see fit, which they simply click to start the download. They will not need a Firefox account of their own to access the files, Mozilla notes.
The organization suggests that the new tool could be used for moving files around the web that you otherwise had worried about sharing — like financial information, for example.
However, security experts would still caution the use of any tool for sharing highly sensitive files through an online service, as there’s always the potential that something could go wrong with regard to unauthorized access.
That said, Mozilla is one of the more trustworthy organizations when it comes to things like this. Send, it says, is “Private By Design,” which means all files are protected. It designed Firefox accounts so users never send Firefox their passphrase, for example. It also says it stands by its mission to “handle your data privately and securely,” writes Mozilla in an announcement today. That speaks more to the organization’s ethos — that it believes privacy is a fundamental right.
Still, security experts need to test systems first-hand before signing off on their trustworthiness. As Send is only this morning debuting in its official, public iteration, that hasn’t yet been done.
The new tool could help Firefox attract a new audience to its web tools and services. Firefox was once a top web browser and household name, but its market share declined over the years as the built-in options from larger tech companies took hold — like IE, Safari and Chrome. However, with people’s increasing suspicion of big tech, as well as far-too-frequent data breaches, and the overall decline in online privacy, it’s the best time for Firefox to try to stage a comeback. Whether it will actually be able to deliver is another matter.
Firefox Send is launching today on the web at send.firefox.com and will be available as an Android app in beta later this week.
Source: TechCrunch
When the bubble burst in the year 2000, Tanya Van Court lost over $1 million in stock and options over the course of a few minutes. Then and there she vowed to never let something like that happen to her children.
Five years later, her daughter Gabrielle was born. At the time, she was a VP of Digital Product Dev at ESPN. She then went on to work as SVP of Digital Products, Parenting & Preschool for Nickelodeon and, in 2013, moved to SVP of Marketing at Discovery Education, leading the charge to roll out digital textbooks nationwide.
Today, she runs Goalsetter, an app that allows parents and their kids to replace gift-giving with goal-giving.
It started when her daughter Gabrielle was eight years old. Van Court told her daughter that if she could save $100, Van Court would match that $100 and start her an investment account. After learning how exactly an investment account works, Gabrielle decided all she wanted for her ninth birthday was a bike and an investment account.
“I thought that these are amazing things for a nine-year-old to want, but she was going to get all kinds of stuff she didn’t want or need instead,” said Van Court. “I realized how early consumerism starts. We all have more and more and more and value things less and less and less.”
After conversations with fellow moms, Van Court got to work on Goalsetter. The app has two main branches: a savings account for kids and a financial literacy learning center with fun quizzes.
Kids and parents together sign up for the app, where kids input some of their goals, from college tuition to a new bike or gaming console. Kids can then earn their allowance through the app, and can also receive ‘GoalCards’ (replacing a gift card) from parents and relatives to save towards their goals.
Moreover, parents can round-up their debit card swipes to go towards their kids bigger goals, such as college tuition or a first car. Parents can also set up auto-save to set aside a few dollars each month.
“Moms in particular all feel the pain of their kids having too much stuff,” said Van Court. “When they step on yet another lego in the house or go into the kids room to find 80 toys, only five of which they play with, these become daily pain points for moms. The idea of teaching kids how to save instead of teaching them how to acquire more stuff really resonates with moms.”
Goalsetter also offers a financial literacy quiz game called “It’s LIT” that is mapped to financial literacy standards for K – 12. The game uses pop culture memes, song lyrics, etc. to engage kids while teaching them the fundamentals of personal finance. Parents can choose to reward their kids with money toward their goals for each question they get right.
What’s more, Goalsetter has plans to launch “It’s LIT” as a curriculum to school districts, complete with lesson plan materials, quizzes and more.
Alongside the curriculum, Goalsetter makes money by charging a dollar for every GoalCard sent through the platform. Goalsetter donates 5 percent of its transaction fee to children’s related charities. The company also has a donation function that allows users to pay the company whatever amount they find appropriate for the features offered.
Gaolsetter skews a bit younger than some of its competitors, including Current, Greenlight, and Step.
Goalsetter currently has more than 20,000 users and was recently featured on Shark Tank — Van Court turned down Mr. Wonderful’s investment offer.
The company graduated from the Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable Accelerator in 2017 and has raised a total of $2.1 million, including investment from Morgan Stanley, CFSI sponsored by JP Morgan Chase, Pipeline Angels and Backstage Capital.
“When the bubble burst, I had to learn the hard way that what goes up can actually come down,” said Van Court. “Our mission is to teach children that money has real value that can go towards the things you want to accomplish in life, and to people who are in need of it.”
Source: TechCrunch
Venture capitalists’ latest on-demand delivery bet is in the pharmaceutical space.
Truepill, an online pharmacy powering delivery for the likes of Hims, Nurx, LemonAID and other direct-to-consumer healthcare brands, has nabbed a $10 million Series A from early-stage VC fund Initialized Capital. The investment brings the Y Combinator graduate’s total raised to $13.4 million. Y Combinator, Sound Ventures, Tuesday Capital and others participated in the round.
Founded in 2016, the San Mateo-based startup employs 150 workers and plans to expand its team and fulfillment facilities into the U.K. with the fresh funding. Truepill is currently active in all 50 states and has delivered 1 million subscriptions for birth control, erectile dysfunction medication, hair loss treatment and more.
It is, as co-founders Sid Viswanathan and Umar Afridi explained, Amazon Web Services for pharmacies.
“We are really only scratching the surface of where this telemedicine landscape is going to go,” Viswanathan, who became a product manager at LinkedIn after the social network acquired his transcription service CardMunch, told TechCrunch. “We are catering to this first wave of those companies and we want to be that pharmacy fulfillment service powering that entire shift … We want to build the next generation of pharmacy infrastructure.”
Afridi, for his part, previously spent more than a decade as a pharmacist at retail chains like CVS and Fred Meyer.
In addition to operating a prescription delivery service, Truepill provides a set of APIs that give its customers programmatic access to its pharmacy and allows brands to fully customize packaging.
Foundation Capital, Index Ventures, Social Capital, Box Group and Joe Montana are also Truepill stakeholders.
Source: TechCrunch