By Guest Author Marylene Delbourg-Delphis Almost every company pledges to value innovation, a topic that lends itself to all sorts of grand planning strategies and methodologies as well as lyrical...
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The more than year-long dance between cities and Amazon for its second headquarters is finally over, with New York City and Washington, DC, capturing the big prize. With one of the largest economic development windfalls in a generation on the line, 238 cities used every tactic in the book to court the company — including offering to rename a city “Amazon” and appointing Jeff Bezos “mayor for life.”
Now that the process, and hysteria, are over, and cities have stopped asking “how can we get Amazon,” we’d like to ask a different question: How can cities build stronger startup ecosystems for the Amazon yet to be built?
In September 2017, Amazon announced that it would seek a second headquarters. But rather than being the typical site-selection process, this became a highly publicized Hunger Games-esque scenario.
An RFP was proffered on what the company sought, and it included everything any good urbanist would want, with walkability, transportation and cultural characteristics on the docket. But, of course, incentives were also high on the list.
Amazon could have been a transformational catalyst for a plethora of cities throughout the U.S., but instead, it chose two superstar cities: the number one and five metro areas by GDP which, combined, amounts to a nearly $2 trillion GDP. These two metro areas also have some of the highest real estate prices in the country, a swath of high-paying jobs and, of course power — financial and political — close at hand.
Perhaps the take-away for cities isn’t that we should all be so focused on hooking that big fish from afar, but instead that we should be growing it in our own waters. Amazon itself is a great example of this. It’s worth remembering that over the course of a quarter century, Amazon went from a garage in Seattle’s suburbs to consuming 16 percent — or 81 million square feet — of the city’s downtown. On the other end of the spectrum, the largest global technology company in 1994 (the year of Amazon’s birth) was Netscape, which no longer exists.
The upshot is that cities that rely only on attracting massive technology companies are usually too late.
At the National League of Cities, we think there are ways to expand the pie that don’t reinforce existing spatial inequalities. This is exactly the idea behind the launch of our city innovation ecosystems commitments process. With support from the Schmidt Futures Foundation, 50 cities, ranging from rural townships, college towns and major metros, have joined with more than 200 local partners and leveraged over $100 million in regional and national resources to support young businesses, leverage technology and expand STEM education and workforce training for all.
The investments these cities are making today may in fact be the precursor to some of the largest tech companies of the future.
With that idea in mind, here are seven cities that didn’t win HQ2 bids, but are ensuring their cities will be prepared to create the next tranche of high-growth startups.
Austin
Austin just built a medical school adjacent to a tier-one research university, the University of Texas. It’s the first such project to be completed in America in more than 50 years. To ensure the addition translates into economic opportunity for the city, Austin’s public, private and civic leaders have come together to create Capital City Innovation to launch the city’s first Innovation District at the new medical school. This will help expand the city’s already world-class startup ecosystem into the health and wellness markets.
Baltimore
Baltimore is home to more than $2 billion in academic research, ranking it third in the nation behind Boston and Philadelphia. In order to ensure everyone participates in the expanding research-based startup ecosystem, the city is transforming community recreation centers into maker and technology training centers to connect disadvantaged youth and families to new skills and careers in technology. The Rec-to-Tech Initiative will begin with community design sessions at four recreation centers, in partnership with the Digital Harbor Foundation, to create a feasibility study and implementation plan to review for further expansion.
The 120-acre Buffalo Niagara Medical Center (BNMC) is home to eight academic institutions and hospitals and more than 150 private technology and health companies. To ensure Buffalo’s startups reflect the diversity of its population, the Innovation Center at BNMC has just announced a new program to provide free space and mentorship to 10 high-potential minority- and/or women-owned startups.
Denver
Like Seattle, real estate development in Denver is growing at a feverish rate. And while the growth is bringing new opportunity, the city is expanding faster than the workforce can keep pace. To ensure a sustainable growth trajectory, Denver has recruited the Next Generation City Builders to train students and retrain existing workers to fill high-demand jobs in architecture, design, construction and transportation.
Providence
With a population of 180,000, Providence is home to eight higher-education institutions — including Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design — making it a hub for both technical and creative talent. The city of Providence, in collaboration with its higher education institutions and two hospital systems, has created a new public-private-university partnership, the Urban Innovation Partnership, to collectively contribute and support the city’s growing innovation economy.
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh may have once been known as a steel town, but today it is a global mecca for robotics research, with more than 4.5 times the national average robotics R&D within its borders. Like Baltimore, Pittsburgh is creating a more inclusive innovation economy through a Rec-to-Tech program that will re-invest in the city’s 10 recreational centers, connecting students and parents to the skills needed to participate in the economy of the future.
Tampa
Tampa is already home to 30,000 technical and scientific consultant and computer design jobs — and that number is growing. To meet future demand and ensure the region has an inclusive growth strategy, the city of Tampa, with 13 university, civic and private sector partners, has announced “Future Innovators of Tampa Bay.” The new six-year initiative seeks to provide the opportunity for every one of the Tampa Bay Region’s 600,000 K-12 students to be trained in digital creativity, invention and entrepreneurship.
These seven cities help demonstrate the innovation we are seeing on the ground now, all throughout the country. The seeds of success have been planted with people, partnerships and public leadership at the fore. Perhaps they didn’t land HQ2 this time, but when we fast-forward to 2038 — and the search for Argo AI, SparkCognition or Welltok’s new headquarters is well underway — the groundwork will have been laid for cities with strong ecosystems already in place to compete on an even playing field.
Microsoft announced plans to shut down HockeyApp and replace it with Visual Studio App Center. The company acquired the startup behind HockeyApp back in 2014. And if you’re still using HockeyApp, the service will officially shut down on November 16, 2019.
HockeyApp was a service that let you distribute beta versions of your app, get crash reports and analytics. There are other similar SDKs, such as Google’s Crashlytics, TestFairy, Appaloosa, DeployGate and native beta distribution channels (Apple’s TestFlight and Google Play Store’s beta feature).
Microsoft hasn’t really been hiding its plans to shut down the service. Last year, the company called App Center “the future of HockeyApp”. The company has also been cloning your HockeyApp projects into App Center for a while.
It doesn’t mean that you’ll find the same features in App Center just yet. The company has put up a page with a feature roadmap. Let’s hope that Microsoft has enough time to release everything before HockeyApp shuts down.
A steep and rapid rise in tourism has left behind a wake of economic and environmental damage in cities around the globe. In response, governments have been responding with policies that attempt to limit the number of visitors who come in. We’ve decided to spare you from any more Amazon HQ2 talk and instead focus on why cities should shy away from reactive policies and should instead utilize their growing set of technological capabilities to change how they manage tourists within city lines.
Consider this an ongoing discussion about Urban Tech, its intersection with regulation, issues of public service, and other complexities that people have full PHDs on. I’m just a bitter, born-and-bred New Yorker trying to figure out why I’ve been stuck in between subway stops for the last 15 minutes, so please reach out with your take on any of these thoughts: @
Well – it didn’t take long for the phrase “overtourism” to get overused. The popular buzzword describes the influx of tourists who flood a location and damage the quality of life for full-time residents. The term has become such a common topic of debate in recent months that it was even featured this past week on Oxford Dictionaries’ annual “Words of the Year” list.
But the expression’s frequent appearance in headlines highlights the growing number of cities plagued by the externalities of rising tourism.
In the last decade, travel has become easier and more accessible than ever. Low-cost ticketing services and apartment-rental companies have brought down the costs of transportation and lodging; the ubiquity of social media has ticked up tourism marketing efforts and consumer demand for travel; economic globalization has increased the frequency of business travel; and rising incomes in emerging markets have opened up travel to many who previously couldn’t afford it.
Now, unsurprisingly, tourism has spiked dramatically, with the UN’s World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) reporting that tourist arrivals grew an estimated 7% in 2017 – materially above the roughly 4% seen consistently since 2010. The sudden and rapid increase of visitors has left many cities and residents overwhelmed, dealing with issues like overcrowding, pollution, and rising costs of goods and housing.
The problems cities face with rising tourism are only set to intensify. And while it’s hard for me to imagine when walking shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers on tight New York streets, the number of tourists in major cities might very possibly double over the next 10 to 15 years.
China and other emerging markets have already seen significant growth in the middle-class and have long runway ahead. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the global middle class is expected to rise from the 1.8 billion observed in 2009 to 3.2 billion by 2020 and 4.9 billion by 2030. The new money brings with it a new wave of travelers looking to catch a selfie with the Eiffel Tower, with the UNWTO forecasting international tourist arrivals to increase from 1.3 billion to 1.8 billion by 2030.
With a growing sense of urgency around managing their guests, more and more cities have been implementing policies focused on limiting the number of tourists that visit altogether by imposing hard visitor limits, tourist taxes or otherwise.
But as the UNWTO points out in its report on overtourism, the negative effects from inflating tourism are not solely tied to the number of visitors in a city but are also largely driven by touristy seasonality, tourist behavior, the behavior of the resident population, and the functionality of city infrastructure. We’ve seen cities with few tourists, for example, have experienced similar issues to those experienced in cities with millions.
While many cities have focused on reactive policies that are meant to quell tourism, they should instead focus on technology-driven solutions that can help manage tourist behavior, create structural changes to city tourism infrastructure, while allowing cities to continue capturing the significant revenue stream that tourism provides.
THOMAS COEX/AFP/Getty Images
Yes, cities are faced with the headwind of a growing tourism population, but city policymakers also benefit from the tailwind of having more technological capabilities than their predecessors. With the rise of smart city and Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives, many cities are equipped with tools such as connected infrastructure, lidar-sensors, high-quality broadband, and troves of data that make it easier to manage issues around congestion, infrastructure, or otherwise.
On the congestion side, we have already seen companies using geo-tracking and other smart city technologies to manage congestion around event venues, roads, and stores. Cities can apply the same strategies to manage the flow of tourist and resident movement.
And while you can’t necessarily prevent people from people visiting the Louvre or the Coliseum, cities are using a variety of methods to incentivize the use of less congested space or disperse the times in which people flock to highly-trafficked locations by using tools such as real-time congestion notifications, data-driven ticketing schedules for museums and landmarks, or digitally-guided tours through uncontested routes.
Companies and municipalities in cities like London and Antwerp are already working on using tourist movement tracking to manage crowds and help notify and guide tourists to certain locations at the most efficient times. Other cities have developed augmented reality tours that can guide tourists in real-time to less congested spaces by dynamically adjusting their routes.
A number of startups are also working with cities to use collected movement data to help reshape infrastructure to better fit the long-term needs and changing demographics of its occupants. Companies like Stae or Calthorpe Analytics use analytics on movement, permitting, business trends or otherwise to help cities implement more effective zoning and land use plans. City planners can use the same technology to help effectively design street structure to increase usable sidewalk space and to better allocate zoning for hotels, retail or other tourist-friendly attractions.
Focusing counter-overtourism efforts on smart city technologies can help adjust the behavior and movement of travelers in a city through a number of avenues, in a way tourist caps or tourist taxes do not.
And at the end of the day, tourism is one of the largest sources of city income, meaning it also plays a vital role in determining the budgets cities have to plow back into transit, roads, digital infrastructure, the energy grid, and other pain points that plague residents and travelers alike year-round. And by disallowing or disincentivizing tourism, cities can lose valuable capital for infrastructure, which can subsequently exacerbate congestion problems in the long-run.
Some cities have justified tourist taxes by saying the revenue stream would be invested into improving the issues overtourism has caused. But daily or upon-entry tourist taxes we’ve seen so far haven’t come close to offsetting the lost revenue from disincentivized tourists, who at the start of 2017 spent all-in nearly $700 per day in the US on transportation, souvenirs and other expenses according to the U.S. National Travel and Tourism Office.
In 2017, international tourism alone drove to $1.6 trillion in earnings and in 2016, travel & tourism accounted for roughly 1 in 10 jobs in the global economy according to the World Travel and Tourism Council. And the benefits of travel are not only economic, with cross-border tourism promoting transfers of culture, knowledge and experience.
But to be clear, I don’t mean to say smart city technology initiatives alone are going to solve overtourism. The significant wave of growth in the number of global travelers is a serious challenge and many of the issues that result from spiking tourism, like housing affordability, are incredibly complex and come down to more than just data. However, I do believe cities should be focused less on tourist reduction and more on solutions that enable tourist management.
Utilizing and allocating more resources to smart city technologies can not only more effectively and structurally limit the negative impacts from overtourism, but it also allows cities to benefit from a significant and high growth tourism revenue stream. Cities can then create a virtuous cycle of reinvestment where they plow investment back into its infrastructure to better manage visitor growth, resident growth, and quality of life over the long-term. Cities can have their cake and eat it too.
Sramana Mitra: What was the stage at which you got involved? Waikit Lau: In this case, I was the third or the fourth check. I was very early. There was no lead. They had raised a little bit of angel...
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SparkLabs Taipei, part of SparkLabs Group, the global network of accelerator programs and funds that works with emerging startup ecosystems, has raised $4.25 million in an initial close led by CTBC Group, along with individual investors, for its first venture capital fund. SparkLabs Taipei also announced today that it has added Atlanta Hawks player Jeremy Lin, who sparked “Linsanity” as the first player of Chinese- or Taiwanese-descent in the NBA, to its board of advisors.
The funding was first disclosed in a Form D filed with the SEC this week that says SparkLabs Taipei’s ultimate goal for the fund is to raise $10 million.
In a prepared statement, Lin said “SparkLabs Taipei is an innovative fund offering support and guidance for entrepreneurs in Taiwan. Being a trailblazer is challenging and having a strong support is critical to your success. I’m excited to join a strong team of partners and advisors at SparkLabs Taipei and look forward to meeting some great entrepreneurs.”
Other SparkLabs Taipei advisors include YouTube co-founder Steve Chen; Kabam co-founder and CEO Kevin Chou; and RedOctane (the producer of Guitar Hero) co-founders Charles and Kai Huang.
SparkLabs Taipei was launched last year under the leadership of Edgar Chiu, the former COO of Taipei-based app developer Gogolook (acquired by Korean Internet giant Naver in 2013) and founding general manager of Camp Mobile Taiwan, part of Naver’s mobile app development subsidiary. In an interview with TechCrunch at the time, Chiu said SparkLabs Taipei’s goal is to help prepare Taiwanese startups to enter global markets.
In a press statement, Chiu said “Jeremy Lin embodies what we look for in our entrepreneurs. Persistence, dedication, and hard work. Our team is extremely excited and proud to have him on board and join an already stellar board of advisors. Plus I’ve been a big fan when he first joined the NBA, through the craziness of ‘Linsanity’ and his continued excellence in the NBA.”
While the SparkLabs network backs tech companies from around the world, it is known in particular for its work with Asian startups. SparkLabs launched in South Korea in 2012, and since then has opened accelerator programs across the Asia-Pacific region and in Washington, D.C., including programs dedicated to financial technology, agriculture, cybersecurity and blockchain startups, and energy.
Todd Greene: In my view, there are only two kinds of startups. There are startups that are building a new product in an existing market. There are companies that are building new products in a new...
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This is a preview of a research report bundle from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Intelligence, click here.
Artificial intelligence (AI) isn't a part of the future of technology. AI is the future of technology.
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have even publicly debated whether or not that will turn out to be a good thing.
Voice assistants like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa have become more and more prominent in our lives, and that will only increase as they learn more skills.
These voice assistants are set to explode as more devices powered by AI enter the market. Most of the major technology players have some sort of smart home hub, usually in the form of a smart speaker. These speakers, like the Amazon Echo or Apple HomePod, are capable of communicating with a majority of WiFi-enabled devices throughout the home.
While AI is having an enormous impact on individuals and the smart home, perhaps its largest impact can be felt in the e-commerce space. In the increasingly cluttered e-commerce space, personalization is one of the key differentiators retailers can turn towards to stand out to consumers. In fact, retailers that have implemented personalization strategies see sales gains of 6-10%, at a rate two to three times faster than other retailers, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group.
This can be accomplished by leveraging machine learning technology to sift through customer data to present the relevant information in front of that consumer as soon as they hit the page.
With hundreds of hours of research condensed into three in-depth reports, Business Intelligence is here to help get you caught up on what you need to know on how AI is disrupting your business or your life.
Below you can find more details on the three reports that make up the AI Disruption Bundle, including proprietary insights from the 16,000-member BI Insiders Panel:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most commonly referenced terms by financial institutions (FIs) and payments firms when describing their vision for the future of financial services.
AI can be applied in almost every area of financial services, but the combination of its potential and complexity has made AI a buzzword, and led to its inclusion in many descriptions of new software, solutions, and systems.
This report cuts through the hype to offer an overview of different types of AI, and where they have potential applications within banking and payments. It also emphasizes which applications are most mature, provides recommendations of how FIs should approach using the technology, and offers examples of where FIs and payments firms are already leveraging AI. The report draws on executive interviews Business Intelligence conducted with leading financial services providers, such as Bank of America, Capital One, and Mastercard, as well as top AI vendors like Feedzai, Expert System, and Kasisto.
Major logistics providers have long relied on analytics and research teams to make sense of the data they generate from their operations.
AI's ability to streamline so many supply chain and logistics functions is already delivering a competitive advantage for early adopters by cutting shipping times and costs. A cross-industry study on AI adoption conducted in early 2017 by McKinsey found that early adopters with a proactive AI strategy in the transportation and logistics sector enjoyed profit margins greater than 5%. Meanwhile, respondents in the sector that had not adopted AI were in the red.
However, these crucial benefits have yet to drive widespread adoption. Only 21% of the transportation and logistics firms in McKinsey's survey had moved beyond the initial testing phase to deploy AI solutions at scale or in a core part of their business. The challenges to AI adoption in the field of supply chain and logistics are numerous and require major capital investments and organizational changes to overcome.
explores the vast impact that AI techniques like machine learning will have on the supply chain and logistics space. We detail the myriad applications for these computational techniques in the industry, and the adoption of those different applications. We also share some examples of companies that have demonstrated success with AI in their supply chain and logistics operations. Lastly, we break down the many factors that are holding organizations back from implementing AI projects and gaining the full benefits of this disruptive technology.
One of retailers' top priorities is to figure out how to gain an edge over Amazon. To do this, many retailers are attempting to differentiate themselves by creating highly curated experiences that combine the personal feel of in-store shopping with the convenience of online portals.
These personalized online experiences are powered by artificial intelligence (AI). This is the technology that enables e-commerce websites to recommend products uniquely suited to shoppers, and enables people to search for products using conversational language, or just images, as though they were interacting with a person.
Using AI to personalize the customer journey could be a huge value-add to retailers. Retailers that have implemented personalization strategies see sales gains of 6-10%, a rate two to three times faster than other retailers, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG). It could also boost profitability rates 59% in the wholesale and retail industries by 2035, according to Accenture.
This report illustrates the various applications of AI in retail and use case studies to show how this technology has benefited retailers. It assesses the challenges that retailers may face as they implement AI, specifically focusing on technical and organizational challenges. Finally, the report weighs the pros and cons of strategies retailers can take to successfully execute AI technologies in their organization.
If thousands of years of human storytelling is anything to go by, waking the dead is rarely a good idea. From ancient Greece to "Black Mirror," fiction tells us that there are drawbacks in summoning loved ones from the grave.
But one tech entrepreneur is working to turn these tales on their head. Marius Ursache wants to make digital copies of the dead.
The 41-year-old grew up in Romania where he studied to be a doctor. He set up his own web design company while at medical school and dipped his toe in fintech, but quit because he hated working with banks.
He started taking courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is where he got the inspiration for a grander venture: Eternime.
The company was founded in 2014, and hopes to make people "virtually immortal" by creating a digital avatar of people after they die. Soon after founding Eternime, personal tragedy gave the project new meaning when Ursache lost his best friend in a car accident.
He repetitively watched footage of his friend's TEDx talk after his death. "It made me remember how important that person was to my life and how lucky I was for having him in my life and learning so many things from him," he said. He hopes Eternime could have a similar effect.
Marius Ursache, Eternime CEO and cofounder. Eternime
At the moment, Eternime takes the form of an app which collects data about you. It does this in two ways: Automatically harvesting heaps of smartphone data, and by asking you questions through a chatbot.
The goal is to collect enough data about you so that when the technology catches up, it will be able to create a chatbot "avatar" of you after you die, which your loved ones can then interact with.
"We collect geolocation, motion, activity, health app data, sleep data, photos, messages that users put in the app. We also collect Facebook data from external sources," Ursache told Business Insider. This is all done, of course, with your explicit permission.
A prototype demo of Eternime was recently on display in London's Victoria and Albert Museum, showing its user interface and how it amasses data from its users' digital lives.
Ursache has been funding the project with his cofounder and CTO Claudiu Baciu, who he met working at his first company. In the future, Ursache hopes to release Eternime as a free service with premium account options, but said he would never run ads.
"Even basic things like profiling would be a breach of privacy and confidence, so we're going to try to support basically the free plans through subscription fees from other users," he said.
A promotional image of Eternime's chatbot which learns about you so it can make an "avatar" of you after death. Eternime
The beta test has more than 40,000 signups, according to Eternime's website, but is so far only in the hands of around 40 people. The test involves users chronicling their day-to-day lives. Business Insider spoke to one of Eternime's beta testers, Claudiu Jojatu, who has been using the app for about a year.
"For me it's very important, and I am using it every day as a personal journal. I input a lot of data on how was my day and how I felt that day. And then it's very cool that it synchronises with my Facebook account and with my pictures from the phone," Jojatu said.
Eternime feels like having a "digital alter-ego," he added, and although the afterlife functionality of Eternime is a while off, Jojatu is relishing the prospect.
"Probably 99% of our memories get lost, and it's kind of awesome to know that you can actually leave something behind," he said.
That same thought struck Eugenia Kuyda when her close friend Roman Mazurenko died in a car accident in 2015. He was just 32. Kuyda missed Roman so much, she created a chatbot of him.
"Roman was a close friend and a special one," Kuyda told Business Insider over email. "I wanted to tell a story about him and tell him some things I hadn't been able to. I put together around 10,000 of his text messages and together with a brilliant AI engineer on our team, Artem, we made a bot that could replicate the way Roman used to speak."
Eugenia Kuyda (left) and her friend Roman. Eugenia Kuyda
From Roman, Replika was born. Replika is an app in which you confide in an AI-powered chatbot that learns about you as you chat to it. The app has more than 200,000 monthly active users, and has raised $11 million from investors including Y Combinator and All Turtles, the incubator run by former Evernote CEO Phil Libin.
Ursache recognizes the crossover with Eternime. "I think in terms of approach and mindset and surprisingly even personal stories, Replika is our closest competitor that we have," he said.
Creating Roman was a personal project and a memorial for a friend, but Kuyda points out that building chatbots like Roman's on a commercial scale poses a myriad technical and ethical challenges. For example: At what age do you wish to be immortalised?
"This is especially true for older people or people that have Alzheimer's and other diseases that change the way they act and talk a lot. Do you want to talk to your grandpa in his 20s? Or the grandpa you remember when you were a kid?" she said.
She also pointed out that a chatbot might accidentally divulge information the deceased would not otherwise disclose to their loved ones. "Think for example if you're building a bot for your best friend and she was gay and her brother doesn't know â will you program it to understand who the bot is talking to it? It's not an easy problem ethically and technically."
Ursache recognised that this is a challenge Eternime will have to overcome, especially if family members feel uncomfortable with the idea a chatbot that could potentially say anything.
There are many other moral quandaries to consider. Researcher Carl Ãhman, of the Oxford Internet Institute, explored the potential problems with "re-creation services" in a paper published in Nature, which named Eternime and Replika.
"The main problem as I see it is the updating of software," he told Business Insider. If you sign up to have your chatbot stored forever by a company, you won't be able to sign off on any software updates that might change the way that bot functions after you die.
Microsoft's Tay chatbot started churning out alarming comments on Twitter in 2016. Twitter
He also warned that algorithms have been known to act unpredictably. "Just look at what happened to Microsoft's Twitter chatbot Tay â it turned into a racist, Holocaust-denying, bigot within a matter of hours. How can we guarantee this doesn't happen with chatbots claiming to portray a real person?"
"The crucial thing is that consumers understand how the data is to be used after their death, this is difficult to guarantee when you use complex algorithms fed with many different data sources," Ãhman added.
Ursache admits that the bots responding to stimuli poses an ethical conundrum. "There's tonnes of things to think of ethically and technically and behaviorally," he said.
Another big question Eternime throws up is whether it's healthy for living people to interact with a digital alter-ego of their deceased loved ones.
Another tech entrepreneur looking to break into death care is concerned by this. Mark Alhermizi is the CEO of Everdays, a company which creates pop-up social networks when a person dies. These networks are used to notify people of that person's death, and thus far have been set up via funeral homes, although Everdays has recently launched a consumer app.
Everdays generates a pop-up social network when someone dies. Everdays
Alhermizi is optimistic about the potential tech has to improve the death care sector, but the thought of a legacy chatbot like Eternime's troubles him.
"The problem ethically allowing this to exist... is that you get stuck living a false reality," he told Business Insider. Alhermizi referred to the "Black Mirror" episode "Be Right Back," in which a bereaved woman resurrects her partner using his data but it quickly turns sour.
He is not worried about the immediate future, because the tech isn't yet good enough to make an AI chatbot that convincingly imitates a person.
"But one day they will be good, and I think about what the consequences are for people using them. Forget about ethics, it's about them living in a false reality. Not just not moving on with grief, but not moving on with their lives," he added.
Ursache said he collaborated with psychologists when designing Eternime, but admits there could be unforeseen consequences, like people isolating themselves because they become too involved with a chatbot.
"Black Mirror" explored the idea of using tech to recreate the dead. Netflix
For the moment at least, he said Eternime is beneficial because people can use it to reflect. "We had people from the beta programmes who said it's like having an imaginary friend and it's providing some comfort," he said.
Ultimately, Ursache and Alhermizi think tech needs to move into death care in earnest. "This is one area of human life that I don't think has been improved or touched by technology," said Ursache.
But researcher Carl Ãhman thinks regulation needs to be set up before "digital afterlife services" become commonplace. "As a society, we should think twice before we leave the nature of our afterlives entirely to an unregulated market," he said.
We may be getting closer to making thousands of years of human storytelling about speaking to the the dead a reality, but it will not be without its dangers.
First, let's correct a myth: Ev Williams definitely has a desk.
Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that Williams â the billionaire entrepreneur who founded Twitter and Blogger â runs his new company, Medium, from an office that has no desk. The article included a photo of Williams resting on a sofa at his headquarters, no desk in sight.
It conjured an image of a mercurial Silicon Valley mogul, controlling his minions from an iPad or a phone. Maybe, I thought, he had discovered a disruptively unencumbered new style of leadership. Perhaps "no desk" was the natural evolution from "standing desk," another Silicon Valley efficiency cliche. So I went to Lisbon, where Williams was addressing the Web Summit tech conference, to ask him about the future. Will we all eventually find ourselves in a desk-less work environment, sprawling around on office sofas, like Williams?
I first saw him at a party hosted by Brooke Hammerling. Her Brew PR agency has long been a one-stop shop for high-level Silicon Valley connections, and her annual Web Summit party did not disappoint: It was at the Chinese Pavilion, in Lisbon's trendy Principe Real neighbourhood, near a clifftop park that has a spectacular view of the castle that dominates the city's skyline.
Williams didn't stay very long, although he talked to former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who was also at the bar, along with Juliet de Baubigny, the senior partner who just left Kleiner Perkins to join Mary Meeker's new VC firm. Rachel Dodes-Wortman, the former New York Times and Wall Street Journal writer who became head of film partnerships at Twitter (but now runs communications at Knotel), was also there. It was more of a work meeting than a party, and Williams left at around midnight, after summoning a car on his phone.
The next day, I found Williams in a conference room backstage at Lisbon's vast Altice Arena. He is tall, skinny, and his face now carries a middle-aged beard, highlighted with grey. He is, at 46, literally one of tech's legendary greybeards. He does not appear to particularly enjoy talking to the media. So he picks his words carefully, and talks in a thoughtful, deliberate way.
He is, conspicuously, sitting at a table that he is clearly using as a desk.
And he is baffled by my question.
"I have a desk!" he says.
He looks over at his PR staff. "Did that get reported, that I don't have a desk?" They remind him that it was indeed reported last year that he has no desk.
A light goes on.
"I didn't have a dedicated desk," he says, meaning that he had a desk, but not like an official desk in a stereotypical corner office, or something like that.
Free-desking didn't last long. "I got a desk in the meanwhile. I needed somewhere to put my computer."
This is disappointing.
Williams has not discovered a magical new way to run a company. He's a normal human being, with a normal desk, just like the rest of us.
Williams prepares his microphone backstage at the Altice Arena in Lisbon.Diarmuid Greene/Web Summit via Sportsfile
Well, not quite normal.
Unlike the rest of us, Williams' thoughts have had a surprisingly large impact on the way we all think.
This is the man who invented Blogger, in 1999. At the time â the early days of the internet, really â it was not obvious that there would be a vast marketplace for people who wanted to comment on news coverage originally published elsewhere. Or that billions of people would want to read summarised aggregations rather than the original reporting on which it was based. His realisation that the internet needed high-quality publishing tools for amateurs made blogging into the oxygen of the media environment. There are now 173 million blogs on the internet.
And then, in 2006, he did it again. It was equally not-obvious that anyone might want a micro-blogging platform which constrained authors' thoughts to just 140 characters. Yet now we live in a world where much of our news is delivered first on Twitter. There are 326 million Twitter users out there. It's the president of the United States' favourite bully pulpit.
Williams' thinking has made him rich. He owned 43.7 million shares of Twitter when it went public at $26 a share in 2015, making him an instant billionaire. (He has since sold at least 30% of his stake.) Not bad for the boy who grew up on a farm in Clarks, Nebraska.
If you're distressed at the volume of digital media noise funnelled at you each day, and the way Twitter reduces everything to a shallow take, shorn of detail, context or nuance ... then Williams accepts much of the blame.
He once said of President Trump's use of Twitter, "It's a very bad thing, Twitter's role in that ... If it's true that he wouldn't be president if it weren't for Twitter, then yeah, I'm sorry." He had believed that Twitter's ability to let anyone say anything, to a wide audience, would mean that "the world is automatically going to be a better place." But, "I was wrong about that," he said.
Williams has all but given up on social media. "I've pretty much weaned myself off of being addicted to social media for instance, which I was at one time," he says.Diarmuid Greene/Web Summit via Sportsfile
Later, on the 20,000-seat centre stage at Web Summit, he was asked, How do we get out of the "attention economy" feedback-loop cesspool? His reply is incredibly insightful, and it's worth reproducing in full:
"The fundamental problem that we're focused on is a microcosm of one of the biggest problems in society, which is simply that we have created a world in which attention is rewarded in quantity. Meaning it's not the quality of the attention, it's not how you make people feel. It's whether you get their attention. And we've optimized these systems â traditional media, social media, online and offline â where attention is rewarded, and what we can measure is rewarded. And we can measure whether people are paying attention by what page their browser is on, or what social media they're liking, but we can't actually measure how they feel, we can't measure if they're getting smarter, we can't measure if they're understanding the world better. So we've really created this system in society where the class clown, the disruptive kid in school who is very effective at getting attention, but not effective at helping people, that becomes the winning play. ⦠Obviously, if you create a system that rewards attention, the easiest way to get attention is to be a bad actor. That underlies our media ecosystem, that underlies our political system, and it's degrading society in so many ways."
Today, Williams has all but given up on social media, he tells Business Insider. "I've pretty much weaned myself off of being addicted to social media for instance, which I was at one time," he says.
That's an astonishing thing for the founder, former CEO, and current board member of Twitter to say. It is akin to Mark Zuckerberg announcing that he tries to not spend time on Facebook.
Now he limits â or tries to â how much time he spends looking at his phone.
"The kids are the biggest forcing function, and I'm faulty on this as well, but I'll usually make my kids breakfast and try not to be on my phone while doing that, so that's good, and then they're gone and then I'm like in work mode," he says. "I'll look at my email before I leave the house and when I'm walking to the train."
The good news is, Williams does, in fact, believe he can fix this. So it's worth exploring the evolution of his thinking. Twice he has been ahead of the curve and created media tools that altered our universe.
Now he is trying a third time.
By audience size alone, Medium is already in the same league as The New York Times.Diarmuid Greene/Web Summit via Sportsfile
If Blogger was an iteration of the "traditional" digital publishing done by news organisations, and Twitter was an iteration of blogging done by amateurs, then Medium is a further iteration of both. It's a publishing platform that specialises in long, thoughtful, one-off posts by writers who are not producing a stream of frequently updated content.
And it is huge.
Twenty-thousand articles are published on Medium every day, there are 20 million stories in the archive, and the site has 90 million unique readers per month. That's roughly the same as the New York Times, according to ComScore, but with only about 100 employees.
The addition of subscribers to Medium is the new innovation that is being most closely watched by competitors in the media. You can read three articles on Medium for free, every month, before you encounter a paywall. Normally, companies that charge subscriptions are offering a high-quality stream of useful, fact-checked, niche-themed content, so you know what you are getting. (The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider both want you to pay for business news, for instance.)
But Medium's content is random. On November 14, Medium's front page had articles such as, "How I Got My Husband to Actually Do His Share of the Housework," "Where Do Our Sex Dolls Go After We Die?" and "The Books That Saved My Life in Prison." It has also published a lengthy, impressive dissection of the sham behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.
Will people want to pay for a product that consists entirely of surprises, of varying quality, from writers who don't work full-time? Williams says yes. "The whole system is growing, both topline uniques, visits, posts, and subscribers," Williams says. He declines to talk about revenues, however.
Growth is not the same as profit, either. Williams has so far taken $134 million from investors since 2012, and he confirmed to Business Insider that the company remains unprofitable. The investment is a massive sum for what is, in many ways, a magazine-format media company. And six years is a long time to run without finding a way to sell your product for more money than it costs to make.
Williams says he will be seeking more investment soon. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that he did the media tour at Web Summit in November. Good publicity often helps companies persuade VC investors to part with cash.
Medium abandoned its previous business model, advertising, over a year ago. Advertising could have been good for Medium. With 90 million users, even if the site ran only automated "programmatic" ads, it would have generated revenues in the millions of dollars. But Williams didn't go programmatic. Instead, he offered sponsored content â handcrafted stories written specifically to please brands â which Medium then promoted around its unsponsored articles.
Williams has a bewildering explanation of how this worked:
"Sponsored content is a particular type of content that we could charge to have created. So what we did was package creation, hosting, and distribution. And so the creation of that content isn't the creation of other content, it's the creation of sponsored content. So the only way for that to pay for non-sponsored content is by advertising the sponsored content on the non-sponsored content. Meaning, we could get paid for creating sponsored content but we couldn't pay someone who was creating non-sponsored content, except by putting ads on the non-sponsored for the sponsored content, and then that is being monetised. So our company is being monetized with sponsored content, the content that is not sponsored is being monetised with an ad."
He pauses for a beat, and adds, "We stopped all that."
"Iâve screwed up in many, many, many ways in terms of managing people," Williams admitted in 2010.Diarmuid Greene/Web Summit via Sportsfile
"We stopped all that" are four words that cover a tough period inside Medium. Fifty people â one-third of the workforce â were laid off in 2017 as Medium pivoted away from advertising. He cut ties with a number of publishing partners. He made a lot of people angry. Sources told Business Insider at the time that they regarded Medium as a "s---show" and a disorganised "vanity startup."
The episode also burnished Williams' reputation as not-the-best-CEO-who-ever-walked-the-Earth. In addition to being Twitter's creator, he was also the CEO from 2008 to 2010, a time remembered for infighting between the founders. Current Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey â who still sits on the board with Williams â was once asked by The New Yorker what he was thinking in 2010 when he helped persuade the board to force Williams out of the chief executive's chair in favour of Dick Costolo. "Was I thinking, Screw Ev? Emotionally, was I asking that? I don't know. Maybe," he said.
"I've screwed up in many, many, many ways in terms of managing people," Williams admitted in 2010. Even his girlfriend agreed: "It was bitter, horrible and tough. He's not CEO material. It doesn't play to his strengths. He's a better inventor; he's better at coming up with ideas," Meg Hourihan told the Times.
But that was eight years ago. Things have changed. Williams has evolved.
Williams wants to reward the best content â financially.Diarmuid Greene/Web Summit via Sportsfile
The real problem with advertising on Medium, Williams says now, is that "I didn't think it would ultimately create the incentive structure we were trying to do, which was to really reward the best content. You can build a business around it, but it doesn't directly support great content."
That bit about "reward the best content"?
That is key to understanding why Williams has eschewed the simplest, most lucrative way â advertising â of monetising his site. To make advertising pay, sites need to rack up huge audiences. The problem is that the content that gets the most traffic is often the most awful content on the net: Porn. Clickbait. Politically biased news. That's how a bunch of teenagers in Macedonia got rich in 2016, by pumping out fake pro-Trump stories for gullible Americans to click on, such as "Michelle was caught cheating with Eric Holder â OBAMA IS FURIOUS!!!"
And that's why Williams regards the internet as being like a "car crash." Everyone stares at car crashes. But the internet interprets this as a demand for car-crash content, and supplies ever more of it. Williams wants to turn that on its head and create a virtuous cycle in which people are rewarded for supplying only the highest-quality content. People are happy to tolerate advertising alongside free porn. But they are generally only willing to pay to read reliable, helpful material.
He is rewarding that content financially, too. A team of editors now assigns paid freelance articles, just like a magazine. And anyone can sign up to Medium's "Partner Program," which gives writers a slice of each $5 subscription based on how deep a subscriber's engagement went.
"Our content spend in 2018 will be more than $5 million. We are budgeting multiples of that for next year," Williams says.
As an example, Williams talks about a recent article on how to set up your iPhone for minimal distraction. "It was a 73-minute read. It was deep, meaningful content but it can be curiosity driven, it can be utility driven, it can be every topic under the sun."
Williams regards himself as a former social media addict.Diarmuid Greene/Web Summit via Sportsfile
"Minimal distraction" is a subject close to Williams' heart. As an ex-social media addict, he is trying not to use his iPhone. He has switched off many of its notifications and tries not to take it with him to events with friends or children.
"I'm still just obsessed about how I use my time," he says.
And does he really wear a wristwatch so that he isn't tempted to look at his phone to see the time?
"I do wear a watch. It's a regular old-fashioned wind-y watch." Then he gestures to the watch with his free hand, in a jokey way, as if he's trying to sell it on a cable TV shopping channel, and says, "It's a Vacheron. A Swiss watch. It's very nice. I sometimes wear a Swatch, but this is my fancy watch." And we all laugh.
He doesn't know which model of Vacheron Constantin he is wearing â "It's the very thin one?" â but a cheap Vacheron retails for £16,500 ($21,000) and an expensive one will run you to £69,300 ($89,000).
Williams says he has not been successful in leading a distraction-free life.
"I try to but just like all of us, I'm faulty."
That obsession with time well-spent recently reared its head inside Medium's HQ. Williams was trying to solve a problem regarding Medium's recommendation system. Readers who like what they find on Medium can offer "claps" (similar to likes), or share it on social media (like Twitter), or respond with a comment. Every website has something similar.
Read more: Here's how the other Twitter cofounders reacted to Jack Dorsey becoming CEO.
But Williams believes that Medium's comments ecosystem has a unique advantage. On Medium, comments are called "responses," and they don't thread like other comments sections. It suppresses trolls and insults, and promotes positive, helpful responses. Comments don't get shown to other readers unless the author approves them and if the reader follows the commenter. The author has control over what responses are elevated above the rest, by either clapping or responding to the conversation. Other comments â negative criticisms, random bulls--t â can be removed by the author, or are otherwise "buried" a click away from the story itself. At the same time, writing a comment on Medium involves creating something that looks like a separate post, making the writer feel self-conscious about using the format for a quick insult. When you log in, other users reward you with notifications if they think your comments are good.
Put those two things together: A revenue system that rewards high-quality work; and a recommendation ecosystem that suppresses trolls and promotes constructive behaviour: That's Williams' latest evolution.
He also likes really long meetings.Diarmuid Greene/Web Summit via Sportsfile
Williams got to this place in part by instituting his favourite new management trick: Meetings that last as long as an entire working day.
"Here's a thing I believe in and want do more: Have fewer but longer meetings," he says.
Most people hate meetings. There's a whole management school ideology around holding meetings while standing up, or walking outside, or banning PowerPoint, to make them shorter and more focused. Is he serious?
"Longer meetings, yes," he says.
"This is a counterintuitive thing," he says. "Often there's complex problems. You have a series of meetings, you never make progress because it's like cleaning out a closet. You actually have to get everything out, and get organised, and dedicate a significant amount of time to actually crack the nut of a complex problem rather than chip away at it incrementally and when you identify those problems it's actually a lot more productive to get everyone together for half a day, or a day, and actually figure something out, than to do it in your regularly scheduled meeting. That's a trick I am a fan of."
"We had one of those ... last week." It was a half-day meeting on the recommendation system, and it brought in engineers and product managers, after months of development. Staff were asked, "OK, what have we learned, what do we know? Rather than just the weekly 'what are we doing next?' It's complex, it's big, and we made a lot more progress in that meeting than we had for a while," Williams says.
"As we started focusing on subscriptions, rather than just engagement, we found that the quality of stories mattered, not just whether someone was interested in it (or even whether they read it). Quality is, of course, still hard for machines to determine, so in the last year we started doing a lot more human curation, which has driven a change in our machine-based recommendations," he says.
"This year, we built a new recommendations engine from scratch. It's doing better than the old system, but we think it can be a lot better. There are many ways we might go about this â from focusing more on topics, to various NLP [natural language processing] techniques, to author-follow relationships, to collaborative filtering, and other [machine learning]-based techniques. We have tried a whole bunch of things, some which have worked, some which have not."
"It takes time to get up to speed on what we've done and what we've learned recently, it wouldn't have worked to have a regular one-hour meeting. And if we'd had a series of shorter meetings instead, we would have had to reboot the discussion each time," he says.
Williams has developed a content recommendation system that promotes useful feedback and suppresses trolls. Diarmuid Greene/Web Summit via Sportsfile
But do his staff like it? Or are they thinking, "Oh my god, Ev wants another one of his endless meetings"?
He laughs, "As a CEO you never really know the truth, but they said they liked it! I'll have to get the anonymous feedback."
That is another way that Williams has evolved. Now, he is more determined to learn from his mistakes. He receives regular, anonymous "360-degree" feedback from staff on what he is like as a boss.
"I did one just recently," he told us. "There was some bad stuff so I assume there's a least some truth. But it was super helpful. The last one I did was probably a year and half ago [right after the layoffs and the pivot from advertising] and then I just did another one. It gets interesting when you actually see change."
"The first one that I really took to heart was that I say I am interested in the bad news and negative feedback but I don't actually act like it, so â¦" he tails off, laughing at himself.
"The bad tendency was to dismiss people's concerns if I didn't believe they were valid. Before, I dismissed it. So now it's about listening better and acknowledging the concern, making sure I acknowledge the validity of the concern even if I disagreed that it was a problem."
He has also committed to listening more to his staff.Diarmuid Greene/Web Summit via Sportsfile
Since the Times' "no desk" story ran, Williams has become increasingly deskbound, in part because he wants to listen more to his staff.
"We rearranged the office. I kind of wasn't talking with my executives enough so we put our desks altogether, so we have a place just to have casual conversations. It's in the open. I also have a dedicated conference room that I call 'my office.' There is this Silicon Valley image of, you just don't have an office, and you are mixed in with the people. But I need a place to meet [privately] with people, also. It's helpful to be able to close the door and have conversations. I also make a lot of phone calls."
On any given day, "I'm barely at my desk. I'm often in my conference room," he says.
At one level, the no-desk thing is trivial. He tried an office without a desk, but now he uses a desk to help him communicate with his people. So what? Big deal.
But it typifies the evolving, layered way Williams thinks. A desk is just a thing you put your computer on, sure. But its position also determines who gets to talk to you, and who does not; what information reaches you, and what does not. (Pretty much like the positioning of a publishing platform in a media ecosystem.)
Right now, Williams is trying to listen more. He thinks he is succeeding. In the anonymous HR review he got recently, he tells me: "There was less bad stuff. So either people are less truthful or I made progress!"
On Thursday MoviePass' parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, disclosed it lost $130 million last quarter, and suffered a "significant decline" in MoviePass subscribers.
The following morning, MoviePass staff came to work to a startling discovery. MoviePass' two-person HR department had been fired, a source at the company told Business Insider.
Now some at MoviePass are wondering if they could be next on the chopping block, according to the source.
To top it all off, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe has been hard to find, according to the source.
Lowe has not been on an all-hands call in two months, which the source said was a sign of his lack of involvement in the day-to-day operations of the company. Some of Lowe's duties, including running the all-hands, are being done by Khalid Itum, MoviePass' VP of Business Development.
"Mitch has been and continues to be involved in the day-to-day operations of the company," MoviePass told Business Insider in a statement.
Shortly after Business Insider called MoviePass for comment, another all hands was called to inform staff of a forthcoming story, according to the source.
On a call Monday, Itum told the staff the company was "not going anywhere." In fact, MoviePass plans to make a big splash soon by unveiling a three-tier pricing plan for subscribers, the company source said.
This would include the current pricing level of $9.95 for three titles per month as the bottom-tier option, and a top-tier price that would be similar to what AMC is offering with its AMC Stubs A-List, at $19.95 a month for three movies per week.
"We have been listening closely to our subscribers," MoviePass also told Business Insider in a statement. "While we can't share specifics at the moment, we're looking forward to releasing our new programs intended to maximize positive member experience."
The last official subscriber count the public got from MoviePass was when it crossed three million subscribers in June. The company source told Business Insider that tens of thousands of subscribers canceled in October.
Fortnite, the free multi-player survival game, has earned an astonishing $1 billion from in-game virtual purchases alone. Now, others in the gaming industry are experimenting with how they too can capitalize on new trends in gaming.
Mythical Games, a startup out of stealth today with $16 million in Series A funding, is embracing a future in gaming where user-generated content and intimate ties between players, content creators, brands and developers is the norm. Mythical is using its infusion of venture capital to develop a line of PC, mobile and console games on the EOSIO blockchain, which will also be open to developers to build games with “player-owned economies.”
The company says an announcement regarding its initial lineup of games is on the way.
Mythical is led by a group of gaming industry veterans. Its chief executive officer is John Linden, a former studio head at Activision and president of the Niantic-acquired Seismic Games. The rest of its C-suite includes chief compliance officer Jamie Jackson, another former studio head at Activision; chief product officer Stephan Cunningham, a former director of product management at Yahoo; and head of blockchain Rudy Kock, a former senior producer at Blizzard — the Activision subsidiary known for World of Warcraft. Together, the team has worked on games including Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, Marvel Strike Force and Skylanders.
Galaxy Digital’s EOS VC Fund has led the round for Mythical. The $325 million fund, launched earlier this year, is focused on expanding the EOSIO ecosystem via strategic investments in startups building on EOSIO blockchain software. Javelin Venture Partners, Divergence Digital Currency, cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin and others also participated in the round.
It’s no surprise investors are getting excited about the booming gaming business given the success of Epic Games, Twitch, Discord and others in the space.
Epic Games raised a $1.25 billion round late last month thanks to the cultural phenomenon that its game, Fortnite, has become. KKR, Iconiq Capital, Smash Ventures,Vulcan Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners and others participated in that round. Discord, a chat application for gamers, raised a $50 million financing in April at a $1.65 billion valuation from Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, IVP, Spark Capital and Tencent. And Dapper Labs, best known for the blockchain-based game CryptoKitties, even raised a VC round this year — a $15 million financing led by Venrock, with participation from GV and Samsung NEXT.
In total, VCs have invested $1.8 billion in gaming startups this year, per PitchBook.
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Black Friday is still a week away, but Amazon couldn't help itself and has started releasing great lead-up deals.
Right now you can get an eight-piece home security bundle from Ring, which includes a base station, keypad, three contact sensors, two motion detectors, and range extender for $189, which is $80 cheaper than buying each item individually. It's also, interestingly, $10 cheaper than Ring's five-piece home security system right now.
Each piece of Ring's kit is designed to protect a different part of your house. The contact sensors detect when windows and doors are opened or closed; the motion detectors use infrared beams to sense movement and heat in a room; the keypad lets you arm and disarm the system; the base station keeps the system online, and has a 110-decibel siren that sounds when motion is detected; and the range extender keeps the sensors connected to the base station. Both the base station and range extender have a 24-hour battery backup that will keep the system online in case of a power outage.
When the system is triggered, the alarm from the base station will sound, and you'll receive a notification on your phone so you can investigate the situation or call the police. If you subscribe to a Nest Protect plan for $10 a month, a professional home security service will monitor your home and check in on you when the system is triggered.
This bundle is a pretty comprehensive home security system, but the one thing it doesn't include is a camera. You can add Ring Video Doorbell or Ring Spotlight Cam to it, and both will integrate seamlessly with the pieces in this kit. The motion sensors in Ring's cameras will trigger the alarm in the base station, while also giving you video evidence in case of a break-in.
Home security isn't something most people want to think about, but Ring's Alarm Home Security System can help put your mind at ease when you go to sleep, or leave town for a vacation.
The turmoil continues at facial recognition startup Kairos . Last night, Kairos founder Brian Brackeen filed a counter lawsuit against Kairos and its interim CEO Melissa Doval that seeks $10 million in damages.
Kairos is a facial recognition startup that has become well-known for its stance to never sell to law enforcement. At Disrupt SF 2018, Brackeen showed his technology and spoke on a panel about the hazards of facial recognition and algorithmic bias.
This countersuit comes after Kairos terminated Brackeen from his role as chief executive officer, citing Brackeen misled shareholders and potential investors, misappropriated corporate funds, did not report to the board of directors and created a divisive atmosphere. Kairos followed that up with a lawsuit, alleging theft and breach of fiduciary duties — among other things.
In a countersuit, Brackeen now “seeks to hold Kairos and Doval accountable for intentionally destroying his reputation and livelihood through fraudulent conduct, the publication of malicious falsehoods, and the commission of illegal corporate acts.” The suit also alleges Kairos refused to pay him the compensation to which he was entitled.
In one example, Brackeen alleges Kairos, under the leadership of board chairperson Stephen O’Hara, did not pay him a salary for 34 weeks in order for Kairos to have a better cash flow.
“We’ve come to expect this behavior on his behalf,” Doval said in an email to TechCrunch. “We stand firmly with our original complaint and the courts will rule in our favor once they are presented with the evidence for the case. Our fiduciary duty is to our stakeholders, and we remain dedicated to doing right by them.”
The lawsuit alleges O’Hara also did not share Brackeen’s commitment to ensuring Kairos’ technology did not contribute to racial bias and other social injustices. It also alleges O’Hara pressured Brackeen to retract his promise to never sell the technology to law enforcement. That clash, the lawsuit alleges, resulted in O’Hara seeking to push Brackeen out of the company. O’Hara, in an email to TechCrunch, denies those claims.
“Of note, as far as I know as chairman of the board, we are not trying to sell this to law enforcement and have no plans to do so until such time we can insure [sic] any biases of facial recognition are solved and all privacy issues addressed,” O’Hara wrote. “Frankly, we are focused on much more attractive opportunities now.”
In the coming weeks, Kairos will hold a meeting of the shareholders, where Brackeen hopes they will vote to remove the board and reinstate him as CEO. That meeting was supposed to happen last week, but has since been rescheduled. Brackeen says he’s currently trying to get enough shareholders on his side to force a vote. In the last week, however, the company presented an offering to shareholders that was fully subscribed.
“Meanwhile, thanks to a vote of support from all classes of shareholders this past week, Kairos under Melissa Doval is focused on building its business behind its new on-premise product,” O’Hara wrote. In a follow-up email, O’Hara said, “Shareholders voted to approve the Rights offering which was fully subscribed, and included ratification of the Board and Ms. Doval.”
That offering valued the company at $1.5 million — a significant drop from Kairos’ previous $120 million valuation. That means shareholders were able to purchase 43,366,780 shares at a price of just $0.01153 per share.
“Though the emergency nature of this offering and the Company’s precarious financial position have led the Company to offer common stock in this offering at a price well below that received in prior fundraising transactions, the structure of the offering as a rights offering to all existing investors in the Company will allow the Company to raise needed capital without subjecting participating investors to dilution of their ownership stakes in the Company,” the memo, obtained by TechCrunch, states.
One of the conditions of that offering is to reconstitute the Kairos board of directors as a three-person board that consists of O’Hara, Kairos Director Mike Gardner and Doval.
The point of this offering is to raise $500,019 in “emergency capital” to be able to pay its employees and continue operating into 2019. As O’Hara noted, the offering was fully subscribed.
Thanks to this current legal situation, which Brackeen refers to as a “cram down,” his ownership in the company has decreased by 90 percent, which “shows a disrespect for founders.”
Kairos is pretty cash-strapped right now. Even with the emergency capital in place, Kairos is only set up to be able to operate through Q1 2019, “by the end of which management believes that revenue growth through sales either will enable the Company to become financially self-sustaining or will place the Company on a more sound financial footing that allows it to conduct further capital-raising,” the memo states.
Meanwhile, however, Brackeen says he has been able to raise $3.5 million in venture funding, and is targeting a total of $5 million. This funding, he hopes, will be successful in convincing shareholders to vote to replace the board. Brackeen raised this funding from Beyond Capital Markets, an impact investment fund. Though, that money is contingent upon Brackeen rejoining the company as CEO and the board resigns.
But convincing BCM to invest given the current state of Kairos was quite the feat, Brackeen said.
“It’s like riding a bike backwards with one arm — and blind,” he told me.
The lesson for founders, Brackeen told me, is “when you’re taking those first investments and you’re really excited, you need to have callouts for the founder versus the current CEO.”
He added that “angel groups shouldn’t have that kind of power too late in a company’s lifecycle.” Additionally, once founders are starting to raise a Series A, “you need to make sure your lawyers are not meeting them halfway on docs and not necessarily playing nice.”
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If you've ever wanted to own an Amazon device, be it a Kindle e-reader, Echo speaker, or Fire TV Stick, then you should know that the best times of the year to buy one â if you want to enjoy the lowest prices, anyway â are Prime Day, and Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Historically, Amazon has offered discounts of $15 to $50 off its popular gadgets on both holidays, and each year the deals just get better.
Now that it's moving on to new and improved versions of its devices, you'll be able to save on certified refurbished units of the older models and double (or even triple) up on new devices to save more.
Below, we've rounded up all the Amazon device deals in one place for you to shop. We've also provided easy comparisons among options within the same family so you don't waste time going back and forth between pages trying to distinguish their differences.
Many Echo devices are on sale today, from the simple Echo Dot to the features-packed Echo Show. Each one uses Alexa to accomplish any number of tasks, from answering questions to reordering supplies on Amazon. Depending on your budget and preferences, you'll probably prefer one model over another. Here's a quick comparison:
Echo Dot (2nd Gen, Certified Refurbished), $29.99 (originally $39.99) [You save $10]: A small, compact way to add Alexa to any room. Echo Dot Kids, 3 for $99.97 (originally $209.97) [You save $110]: Features a kid-friendly version of Alexa, parental controls, and a year of FreeTime Unlimited (Amazon's educational content subscription). Echo (2nd Gen, Certified Refurbished), $59.99 (originally $79.99) [You save $20]: All the functionalities of the Echo Dot, but with room-filling dual speakers. Echo Spot, 2 for $159.98 (originally $259.98) [You save $100]: Has a small screen to let you video-chat, watch videos, and see content at a glance. NEW Echo Show (2nd Gen), 2 for $339.98 (originally $459.98) [You save $120]: Combines the speaker quality of the Echo and Echo Plus with the visual capabilities of the Echo Spot. Has a larger (10") HD display and eight mic array than the 1st generation model. Echo Look (Certified Refurbished), $89.99 (originally $169.99) [You save $80]: A style assistant that helps you discover, decide on, and share outfits.Fire tablets are optimized for the best portable entertainment experience, whether you like to watch movies or play games. There are three main types, and the number refers to the display size. All are available in bright colors and have high-quality video recording features, so their main differences come down to resolution, storage size, battery life, and audio capabilities. The following tablets are on sale:
Fire 7 Kids Edition Tablet 2-Pack, $119.98 (originally $199.98) [You save $80]: 1024 x 600 (171 ppi) resolution, built-in Alexa function, 16 GB storage, eight-hour battery life, mono speaker. Includes one year of FreeTime Unlimited, two-year worry-free guarantee, and a kid-proof case. Fire HD 8 Kids Edition Tablet 2-Pack, $149.98 (originally $259.98) [You save $110]: 1280 x 800 (189 ppi) resolution, built-in Alexa function, 16 or 32 GB storage, 12-hour battery life, Dolby dual speakers. Includes one year of FreeTime Unlimited, two-year worry-free guarantee, and a kid-proof case. Fire HD 10 Tablet, $99.99 (originally $149.99) [You save $50]: 1920 x 1200 (224 ppi) resolution, built-in Alexa function, 32 or 64 GB, 10-hour battery life, Dolby dual speakers. Fire HD 10 Kids Edition Tablet 2-Pack, $249.98 (originally $399.98) [You save $150]: Same specs as the 10 above, but does not include Alexa. Includes one year of FreeTime Unlimited, two-year worry-free guarantee, and a kid-proof case.Armed with a Fire TV device and your favorite streaming subscriptions, including Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video, you'll feel like traditional cable is truly a thing of the past. It's a great tool for would be cord cutters. Fire TV devices also use Alexa for convenient hands-free control, so you don't have to juggle or manage yet another remote control. These Fire TV devices are on sale today:
If you love reading, you won't regret getting a Kindle, which makes it that much easier to enjoy the pastime. The e-readers are light and comfortable to hold, give you the ability to download millions of books with the click of a button, and let you make highlights and notes. They're also easy to read in bright light, unlike your phone.
These security cameras keep your home safe when you're not there by giving you live notifications and video clips of the scene.
The midway point of the 2018 World Chess Championship in London has arrived. For the first time since Norway's Magnus Carlsen took the title in 2013, the two highest-rated players on the planet are competing for the win.
Carlsen, 27, is taking on Fabiano Caruana, 26, and the latter is the first American to make it to the championship match since Bobby Fischer in 1972. The players are well-prepared contestants who have faced each other numerous times over the past few years. Before Game 6 of the match, Carlsen's FIDE rating was 2835, Caruana's 2832, but Carlsen has a career edge in wins, with a lead on decisive results against Caruana.
In Game 1, Caruana showed some nerves with the white pieces, as Carlsen played the Sicilian Defence against Caruana's 1. e4 opening, avoiding the drawish Berlin Defence in the Ruy Lopez. The Rossolimo variation of the Sicilian quickly developed, and Carlsen developed an edge before Caruana was able to wrangle a hard-fought draw after 115 moves and seven hours.
Game 2 led to another draw, after 49 moves. Game 3 saw the Rossolimo Sicilian again appear, this time with some befuddlements created by Caruana, who also missed chances to sharpen the position despite better preparation than Carlsen. Nonetheless, the result was another draw.
In Game 4, Carlsen opened with 1. c4, the English game, a move essayed by Fischer at times, but infrequently seen in recent World Championship play. It manifested a theme for the 2018 WCC: an intriguing opening that peters out into draws. This time, the bloodless result occurred after 34 moves.
Game 5 was another Rossolimo Sicilian, but this time Caruana uncorked the obscure Gurgenidze variation, a gambit with the b pawn. A new theme crystallized: Caruana's deeper opening preparation versus Carlsen's oft-touted ability to ignore complicated opening theory and find the best analysis of nearly any position.
And still, a draw after 34 moves. The WCC consists of 12 classical games, followed by rapid/blitz tiebreaks. This was how the 2016 Championship match, played between Carlsen and Russia's Sergey Karjakin, ended. Karjakin and Carlsen won games, but a deadlocked score after 12 games gave Carlsen an advantage given his superior rapid and blitz skills. This led to speculation that Carlsen was looking to draw the classical games against Caruana and again throw the Championship to faster chess, where he's also better by his results that Caruana.
Caruana grabbed a slim advantage in Game 6. Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for World Chess
Another wrinkle was that by starting with the white pieces, Caruana had to deal with two games in a row with black after Game 6. And so in Game 6, things got a bit crazy. Carlsen opened with 1. d4, the Queen's Pawn game, and Caruana was at last able to use the Petroff Defence, at which he's considered an expert. Carlsen dealt with it by moving a knight an almost absurd number of times in the opening, a violation of a fundamental chess principle.
Caruana wasn't confused by the gonzo tactic, and by the endgame, Caruana had found a slight edge, after Carlsen sacrificed a knight in exchange for two extra pawns. By move 54, Caruana was winning. For the first time in the 2018 Championship match, Carlsen found himself fighting for a draw rather than pressing for a win. Ten moves later, Carlsen's king was cornered, and the World Champ was trying to salvage an analytically lost position.
But Caruana couldn't delve 30 or 40 moves into the position, finding a very esoteric plan, and was unable to move in for the kill. Regrettably, for the challenger, another draw was agreed to after 80 moves. However, Caruana headed into the second half of the match having notched his strongest game to date in World Championship Play.
After a rest day on Saturday, the match will resume Sunday, tied 3-3, after both players have collected 0.5 points for each draw.
The next version of the Xbox One may forgo a disc-drive entirely, based on a new report from Thurrott.com. The site is reporting that Microsoft has created a new SKU for another Xbox One model launching next year, and Microsoft will let Xbox owners trade in their discs for digital copies at Microsoft Stores.
Getting rid of the console's disc drive would allow Microsoft to lower the price of entry into the Xbox family even further. Microsoft currently offers two different models of the console; the more powerful Xbox One X for $499, and the $250 Xbox One S.
A time frame for the release of disc-less Xbox has not been set, though Thurrott reports that the console was first targeted for Spring 2019. The Xbox One X was released in November 2017, while the Xbox One S launched in August 2016. The original Xbox One model launched in 2013 but has since been discontinued.
Microsoft has recently been working to make Xbox digital content more appetizing to users with new subscription services and sales models that align more closely with what's offered on PC. This includes the launch of the Xbox Game Pass program, a digital subscription service that offers a library of more than 100 games on both Windows and Xbox for $15 a month.
Thurrott also reports that Microsoft will offer a trade-in program for Xbox owners to bring their physical games into Microsoft stores and exchange them for digital downloads if they choose to opt for a console without a disc-drive.
Read more:The next Xbox is codenamed 'Scarlett' and said to arrive in 2020
While Microsoft is still revising the Xbox One hardware, the company's next-generation console is already in the works, going by the codename "Scarlett." However, the new Xbox consoles aren't expected until 2020. Xbox executive Phil Spencer has suggested that the Scarlett line of consoles will make use of cloud-gaming technology, allowing users to stream video games directly from Microsoft's servers. Streaming games would require a strong internet connection, but would greatly reduce the amount of power and storage space needed to deliver a premium gaming experience.
Game streaming won't be exclusive to new consoles either; the company has promised that their recently announced cloud-gaming service, Project xCloud, would be capable of streaming Xbox games to smartphones and computers across the world. Project xCloud is expected to enter beta testing next year.
If Microsoft is indeed willing to create an Xbox without a disc-drive, it could spell the end of an era for video games as publishers continue to promote more digital content. However, there's still a healthy market for physical game sales and stores like GameStop rely heavily on the purchase and sale of used games to support their business model.
Why are meteor showers like the Perseids so common? Turns out, space isn't as empty as you might think. It's littered with debris that forms those spectacular meteor shower we look forward to each year.
Following is a transcript of the video.
Solar eclipses are rare and you can never predict when an aurora will illuminate the sky. But there's one cosmic light show we can always count on. Meteor showers. They happen around the same time each year and have been doing so for centuries. But despite their brilliance and beauty it doesn't take much to make a meteor shower. You just need three ingredients, the sun, Earth and a comet.
Comets have been around since the dawn of our solar system over four-and-a-half billion years ago. They formed out of the same disc of gas and dust that created earth and the other seven planets. And like the other planets they too orbit the sun but that's where the similarities end. Most planets orbit the sun on fairly circular orbits whereas comets take a more elliptical path through our solar system. Check out Halley's Comet for example. Right now it's beyond the orbit of the furthest planet Neptune. But over the next 50 years it will travel about three billion miles toward the inner reaches of our solar system. Eventually flying past Earth in the year 2061.
And it's encounters like this that make meteor showers possible. Because as a comet approaches the inner solar system, the sun's radiation heats up ice under the surface and as that ice turns to a vapor it generates powerful outbursts of gas and dust, sometimes ejecting hundreds of tons of material into space per second. The result is a brilliant stream of debris called the comet tail or coma, which can stretch hundreds to thousands of miles across. In fact, space is littered with comet tail debris that our planet passes through each year. And when that happens, the debris strikes our atmosphere at over 100,000 miles an hour, incinerating the four-and-a-half billion year old fragments in seconds. This produces brilliant flashes of light that we call a meteor shower.
Now some meteor showers are more spectacular than others, giving us anywhere from a few to over a hundred meteors an hour. And even the same meteor shower can vary from year to year. It all depends on how much debris we scoop up as we pass through the tail. Regardless, comet tails tend to follow the same path as the comet itself, which means they pass through the same spot along Earth's orbit. That's why we get the same meteor showers around the same time each year. At the end of October for example, we pass through the tale of Halley's Comet which gives us the Orionids meteor shower. And every August, we pass through comet Swift-Tuttle's tail which we see as the Perseids meteor shower. But it's not just October and August, meteor showers occur year-round. So check your calendar to see when the next one will be coming to a sky near you.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This post was originally published on August 10, 2018.
When Thomas Kurian, formerly of Oracle, takes over as CEO of Google Cloud in January, he's going to have his work cut out for him.
Diane Greene, the outgoing CEO, was seen as the company's trump card in the ongoing cloud computing platform wars between Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Google Cloud encompasses G Suite, the company's productivity suite, and a major rival to Microsoft's Office 365, as well as the Google Cloud Platform, which lets customers rent supercomputing power from the Silicon Valley giant's own data centers.
As a seasoned veteran of the enterprise software space, and the cofounder of tech giant VMware, Greene was supposed to help Google Cloud reach new, lucrative big-business customers customers â and, in so doing, reach its pie-in-the-sky goal of supplanting advertising as Google's biggest source of revenue by 2020.
That was the plan, anyway.
A little under three years later, though, Google Cloud is still not living up to expectations. Make no mistake, Greene led Google Cloud to some key wins: Target, Apple, and other big customers all signed on under her watch. Wall Street has lauded her strategy, with one analyst expecting Google Cloud to do $8 billion in revenue this year.
At the same time, Google Cloud is still a distant third place to the market-leading Amazon Web Services and its chief rival, Microsoft Azure. Those same Wall Street analysts who say that Google Cloud is on the right track acknowledge that there's a tremendous gap between Google's cloud business and Microsoft's, let alone Amazon's.
Amazon Web Services launched years before either of its main competitors, and has aggressively gobbled up the lion's share of the market since. Microsoft, for its part, has turned its existing relationships with enterprise customers into its greatest strength, as it slowly but surely transitions them to the cloud.
Outgoing Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene Greg Sandoval/Business Insider
While Google Cloud is often seen as the furthest ahead in terms of pure technology, it doesn't have the business advantages of its rivals. This is where Greene was intended to help: Her pedigree in enterprise technology was intended to help Google Cloud close deals with deep-pocketed global-scale companies.
That's worked, to a large extent â but Google ultimately has to share some of its biggest wins with its competitors. Apple, for example, uses both Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services to power its iCloud service. It's still a win for Google, to be sure, but it's not the kind of clean victory that shows inarguable dominance.
At the same time, Google has tried to make this so-called "multi-cloud" approach a cornerstone of its strategy, and when Google Cloud pulled out of contention for the Pentagon's $10 billion JEDI contract, it chided the Department of Defense for only wanting to bank on one cloud platform (which will probably be Amazon's).
And even years into the Greene years, Google Cloud had become known for poor customer service. Over the summer, Google Cloud infamously threatened to permanently and automatically shut down an energy management company's critical app unless the right forms were filed. The company vowed reform, but some damage was done to its brand.
Cloud is unlikely to replace advertising as Google's chief business any time soon, either. Google generated some $22.6 billion in advertising revenue in the last quarter alone â almost four times what that analyst believes Google Cloud will bring in over the entire year.
At the same time, Google Cloud has some real opportunity ahead of it. Backed by the engineering might of Google, its cloud platform is seen by many developers as the most future-looking option out there.
Technologies like Kubernetes and Tensorflow were invented by Google for its own use, but have since become smash hits with developers in Silicon Valley and beyond. While the other platforms generally support these and other Google-born tools, Google Cloud has a reputation as being the first and best place to run them. Over the years, Google has underlined these advantages by aggressively adding new technologies and capabilities to its cloud.
Kurian himself seems to have a good handle on what real users actually want, too, judging by the reported circumstances of his departure from Oracle. He is said to have pushed hard against Oracle founder Larry Ellison to have the database giant support Amazon's and Microsoft's clouds, rather than focus solely on its own.
This would indicate that Kurian is of a mind to focus on the customer experience â to "meet the customer where they are," to borrow a Silicon Valley chestnut of wisdom. It's a similar mindset as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose embrace of rival technology has only improved the positioning of its overall cloud business.
Still, it won't be easy for Kurian.
"I'm not sure Thomas will be any better a fit than Diane was with the young, disruptive, and energized employees of Google," says Dave Bartoletti, VP and principal analyst with research firm Gartner.
Kurian has the potential to bring his Oracle chops to bear at Google â but remember that Oracle, one of the most established enterprise companies in the world, is very different than Google, which still makes its money from search advertising.
"If he can bring sales and strategic rigor to the enterprise selling motion, it will help Google penetrate the enterprise cloud market further," says Bartoletti. "But it's going to be quite a culture clash from his days at Oracle."
The only sure things in this life, according to Ben Franklin, are death and taxes. And a new startup called Visor has just raised $9 million in financing to make one of them as painless as possible.
Unlike Nectome, Visor isn’t “100% fatal“*, but it may ring the death knell for the high-end tax advisors that most Americans can’t even access to get help filing and paying their taxes. It’s like having a personalized accountant for the cost of a high-end do-it-yourself tax-prep service.
The $9 million Visor raised came from the venture capital firm Defy, with participation from Unusual Ventures, SVB Capital and existing investors like Obvious Ventures, Fika Ventures and Boxgroup, which had put a previous $6.5 million into the company.
The idea for the company had been percolating for co-founder and chief executive Gernot Zacke since he settled in the U.S.
Growing up in Sweden, Zacke was exposed to a much different process for paying taxes. “The experience of filing taxes in Sweden is that you receive a message from the government that stated how much you made and how much you were withholding. That’s it,” said Zacke. “Taxes should be as easy as ordering a cab.”
That’s the service that Visor aims to provide.
“If you think about the market there are two ways to get your taxes done. There’s the DIY space and then there are other online services but it requires the tax payer to fill out the forms and it leaves the tax payer with a little bit of anxiety,” said Zacke. “We’re delivering the CPA experience through the convenience of a web app and a mobile app.”
On average, Americans spend about 13 hours each year dealing with taxes, and the average American doesn’t have the benefits of a professional advisor who can help optimize the process. That’s what Visor wants to provide.
“You provide the same amount of information you provide to a CPA or TurboTax… we make sure that that information is filed securely on AWS and shared between the docs and the backend,” said Zacke.
The target customers for Zacke’s services are folks who have had a change to their tax situation — whether moving, buying a home or any other life event; or folks who have had a CPA and don’t want to pay the higher fees, he said.
Visor currently has an operations team of around 34 people split between San Francisco and Atlanta.
For Zacke, the pain point he’s solving with the Visor service is very real. A former employee of the European investment firm Atomico, Zacke bounced between the U.S. and Europe — eventually running U.S. investments for the firm before leaving to launch Visor.
Other co-founders and senior executives hail from the tax advisory world, and from employee benefits outsourcing services company Zenefits, along with former Venmo and Square developers.
“Taxpayers spend $20 billion a year to get their taxes prepared and are stuck between spending hours filling out DIY tax software and hiring an expensive CPA,” said Zacke, in a statement. “
*After a lengthy conversation with Nectome’s public relations rep, it’s worth noting that the company is apparently not working with human subjects (or is no longer working with human subjects?). It has taken deposits totaling $200,000 from people who want to use its services, according to multiple reports.
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