Tech Blog - Page 1095 of 2384 - 1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support1010Computers

Apple invests $10M in greenhouse gas-free aluminum smelting

Published May 10, 2018

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard joined key execs from Apple and industrial manufacturers Alcoa and Rio Tinto to announce a new process for smelting aluminum that removes greenhouse gases from the equation.

Alcoa and Rio Tinto are creating a joint venture in based in Montreal called Elysis, to help mainstream the process, with plans to make it commercially available by 2024. Along with swapping carbon for oxygen as a byproduct of the production process, the technology is also expected to reduce costs by around 15 percent.

It’s easy to see why Apple jumped at investing into tech here, pumping $13 million CAD ($10 million USD) into the venture. The company has been making a big push over the past couple of years to reduce its carbon footprint across the board. This time last month, Apple announced that it had moved to 100-percent clean energy for its global facilitates.

“Apple is committed to advancing technologies that are good for the planet and help protect it for generations to come,” Tim Cook said in a release tied to today’s news. “We are proud to be part of this ambitious new project, and look forward to one day being able to use aluminum produced without direct greenhouse gas emissions in the manufacturing of our products.”

Those companies, along with the Governments of Canada and Quebec have combined to invest a full $188 million CAD in the forward looking tech. While the new business will be headquartered in Montreal, U.S. manufacturing will also get a piece of the pie. Alcoa has been smelting metal through the process at a smaller scale in a plant outside of Pittsburgh since 2009.

Necto looks to help individuals get their own local ISP businesses off the ground

Published May 10, 2018

If you live in a city, you’re probably deciding between a handful of major broadband or wireless carriers — maybe something like Comcast or AT&T. But there’s a good chance that there are a bunch of local carriers that are looking to get off the ground, and Benjamin Huang wants to help make sure there are even more options/.

That’s the idea behind Necto, a startup looking to create a sort of ISP school to help people get started with their own internet service provider founded by Huang and Adam Montgomery. Typically that’s a pretty tall order, but Necto works with individuals to learn how to build a network, get the right equipment, and deploy it in order to get consumers access to a new internet service provider that’s an alternative to the larger carriers. There are already emerging providers like Sonic in San Francisco, which aims to offer quick internet for a cheaper price, but there’s a whole group of individuals waiting in the wings that are trying to build their own ISP and the associated business behind it, Huang said. Necto is launching out of Y Combinator’s winter 2018 class.

“Ultimately, we want to see so many ISPs that net neutrality isn’t an issue,” Montgomery said. “It’s cheaper than ever and easier to start an internet service provider. People didn’t know they could do this, and networking engineering is the highest cost. You have to have a lot of stuff to build out. We remove that and bundle it as an ISP starter kit service. We give guidance to the operators, these are the customers you have, this is the equipment you need buy, here’s how to construct them. It’s more like constructing Ikea furniture. The hard part we remove which is automatically configuring these routers.”

Necto started off as its own attempt at an internet service provider, but Huang and Montgomery found that trying to get wholesale fiber was a high barrier to entry. The pair started looking into wholesale wireless, and Huang said that technology is getting to the point where it’s just as fast as typical broadband and an option for resale. The challenge then is getting the equipment into the hands of individuals that want to ramp up their own ISP and showing them how to get started. Then, they’re off to the races and work to build a business around that, including customer service and other facets of it.

Necto essentially charges for the guidance of how to start an ISP, including a class that individuals go through in order to get one off the ground. Then the company continues to ship software to ensure that it’s not as difficult to keep the equipment up and running, as well as provide ongoing support for those individuals. The equipment is all off the shelf, Huang said, in order to lower the barrier to entry for these providers.

The challenge here, however, will be ensuring that not only individuals know they can get an ISP off the ground, but getting their — and consumers’ — attention in the first place. Necto hopes to take a hyper-local strategy, Montgomery said, like traveling to farmers’ markets and working with local operators to ensure they can track down the right people that are looking to build a business around ISPs. There are still going to be plenty of challenges as it continues to work with wholesale wireless providers in order to get these businesses off the ground.

For ScopeAR, the market is finally catching up with the technology

Published May 10, 2018

ScopeAR, a graduate of the Y Combinator Summer 2015 class, came to the augmented reality game very early, launching in 2011 when there was very little hardware and most people didn’t understand the technology. But it has managed to hang around long enough for the market and the hardware to finally catch with the founders’ vision of using AR as an advanced training tool in the enterprise.

Today, the company offers a pair of tools. First of all, there is RemoteAR, which CEO and company co-founder Scott Montgomerie describes as “Facetime with AR on top of it.” It allows a technician to virtually look over the shoulder at what a local person is seeing and provide directions and feedback in real time remotely. For example, the expert could circle the cover the technician needs to remove and point to the screws with two virtual arrows.

This could have great utility in any situation where you have an experienced person in the office, who doesn’t want to go on the road on anymore, but can still provide detailed instructions to a novice, acting as a trainer and helper. This is an actual problem in many industries with aging workforces.

Technician working with RemoteAR. Photo: ScopeAR

The second product, called WorkLink, lets you import a 3D CAD model, then associate that model with real equipment. When you put on hardware like Microsoft Hololens, you can see the 3D representation of the equipment and follow along with instructions on how to repair it. It also works with iOS, Android and Windows devices.

One big change since the company was established in 2011 is the variety of platforms you can use for augmented reality. “Last year was the thing where AR took off. Apple got into it with ARKit and Google with ARCore and awareness happened and people saw it was viable,” Montgomerie said.

By creating enterprise use cases like remote assistance and work instructions, the company has been gaining momentum over the last year, and reports tripling its revenue in 2017. Although they aren’t sharing a specific number, it’s fair to say they are growing quickly.

They developed an augmented reality training product early on that resonated with a mining company, and that along with consulting working with the likes of NASA, Boeing and Toyota, helped them stay afloat until things began to really click around AR in recent years, Montgomerie explained.

They also took some time to be part of the Y Combinator Summer 2015 class, and even scored a spot on TechCrunch’s list of favorite Demo Day 2 startups. During the YC experience, they developed the first version of RemoteAR. WorkLink followed a year later.

So far the company has taken on a fairly modest amount of investment with Montgomerie reporting three seed rounds including $2 million right after Y Combinator, $1.7 million last May and another $2 million this past December. If the company continues to grow at this rate, it’s a good bet they will be looking for a Series A at some point to help scale the company further.

Free stock trading app Robinhood rockets to a $5.6B valuation with new funding round

Published May 10, 2018

Robinhood started off as a dead-simple stock trading application that had no transaction fees — but since it’s continued to grow, and especially as it starts to dive into cryptocurrency, investors are getting pretty excited about its prospects and are pouring a ton of new funding into it.

And it’s that tantalizing prospect of creating a next generation way of trading assets and cryptocurrency that is now sending Robinhood to a $5.6 billion valuation in a new financing round that the company is announcing today. Robinhood says it’s closed a $363 million Series D financing round; DST Global led this new round and Iconiq, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Capital G participated. Robinhood had a $1.3 billion valuation last year when it had around 2 million users, and the company says it now has 4 million users and has passed $150 billion in transaction volume.

“It’s the only place right now where you can trade crypto, stocks, and options all in one place,” CEO Vlad Tenev said. “For us to construct an experience that feels seamless and natural for customers, that for example want to sell an equity and use the proceeds to buy crypto, seamlessly, that’s been challenging not just from a product and design standpoint, but also infrastructure standpoint. There’s complexity under the hood, and our goal is to make it as seamless as possible in the process and make that complexity go away.”

Those 4 million users — and that valuation — indicates that Robinhood has clearly exposed a lot of demand for an easier way for users to dip their toes into financial services without having to work with firms that have trading fees like Scottrade or E*Trade. And while there are a lot of services that offer robo-advisory services like Betterment and Wealthront, which make it easier to start investing small amounts of money, Robinhood offers users the opportunity to do these things at a more granular level.

And, of course, there’s the cryptocurrency aspect that is clearly spurring a lot of interest in the company. At the time, 1 million users waitlisted for access in just the five days after Robinhood Crypto was announced. Robinhood has premium services like Robinhood Gold, where the company can find additional ways to generate revenue that offset the requirements of running a system that allows users to trade stocks for free. Robinhood has raised $539 million to date, as diving into financial services can be an expensive prospect, as well as getting enough users on board to the point that it can scale to a level that the business starts to increasingly make sense.

Robinhood’s crypto trading service came out in February and by today, the company says it’s available in 10 states. The company also rolled out a web version and stock option trading, trying to become a more robust financial services company that’s still tuned to a younger generation that wants an easier way to get into investing without needing a big balance to invest. Most of Robinhood’s users, too, aren’t so-called “day traders” and are instead holding stocks for a while after they buy them.

“If you look at the data and the statistics, people that are active day traders are actually a very small percentage of our space,” Tenev said. “People that are actually transacting on that cadence are the minority of our customers. Most of our customers engage in more of these buy and hold accumulation strategies. We really see a lot of unique things because we don’t charge trading commissions. There are customers that deposit money regularly twice or once a month and then buy stocks as soon as those deposits come in. We don’t see a lot of customers that are doing rapid buying and selling.”

Still, as it tries to further expand — especially into products like crypto and new regions — it’s going to increasingly find itself trying to jump hurdles that financial services companies find when going abroad. And there’s always a chance that the trading platforms will try to become a little more competitive (and companies like Square are even getting into Bitcoin trading). That’s going to require a robust amount of funding to try to outmaneuver well-capitalized companies that might already have those relationships in place to more easily expand.

“The political climate is uncertain, it sort of affects everyone, it doesn’t affect us uniquely,” Tenev said. “We’re a crypto business now. Not a lot of people have a ton of clarity on what that’s gonna look like in the future, it’s a new space that’s evolving really rapidly. I think that we’re confident we can adapt and evolve, and we’re operating the business in a responsible way. There’s only so much you can do, but I feel like we’ve done a lot to address any concerns.”

Nintendo’s $20 charging stand finally fixes the Switch’s kickstand problem

Published May 10, 2018

Versatility has also been on of the Switch’s best features. The latest Nintendo system is a fascinating hybrid device that skirts the line between home and portable gaming. Still, there are some in-between scenarios the console didn’t get quite right out of the box.

The kickstand problem has plagued the otherwise well-received device since its earliest days. It falls over often, it’s puts the device at a weird angle, and worst of all, the charging port is on the bottom, so you can’t play the system in table top mode while it’s plugged it.

Just ahead of E3, the company’s showing off a $20 solution. The simply named Adjustable Charging Stand props the system, while keeping it plugged in, via an AC adapter port on the side.

An adjustable kickstand on the back, meanwhile, means you can change the viewing angle, depending on the height of the surface it’s on. That’s good news for those times when you don’t have a TV set to plug into, but still want to pull out the Joy-Cons to get the full experience — be it on a desk or an airport tray table.

The peripheral hits stores July 13.

Tailor Brands raises $15.5M for AI-driven logo creation and more

Published May 9, 2018

Tailor Brands, a startup that automates parts of the branding and marketing process for small businesses, announced this morning that it has raised $15.5 million in Series B funding.

CEO Yali Saar has said the company sits at the intersection of design and machine learning. The idea is to create technology that understands the best practices of logo design, copywriting and social media strategy.

It’s the automated design that’s most immediately eye-catching, and that’s the big feature highlighted on the Tailor Brands website. You’ll need to pay to get access to high-quality image files, but before that, you can actually try creating a logo for free, just by entering some basic information about your company and identifying the designs you prefer.

Related: What do you guys think of the new TechCrunch logo?

techcrunch tailor brands

Tailor Brands, which launched at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in 2014, said the technology has already been used to create 45 million logos. The company says it had 3.86 million customers last year, and is adding half a million new businesses to the platform each month.

The new funding was led by Pitango Venture Capital Growth Fund and British Armat Group, with participation from Disruptive Technologies and Mangrove Capital Partners. The company has now raised a total of $20.6 million and says it will use the money to expand globally, add more languages and introduce more tools to its full branding suite.

MoviePass parent drops another 46%

Published May 9, 2018

There’s been another bomb at the box office, and it isn’t a movie.

MoviePass parent Helios & Matheson lost nearly half of its remaining value today as investors continued to flee the cash-burning movie service. That drop followed a 31 percent dive yesterday, after the company filed a statement with the SEC warning that it would have to sell equity in the coming weeks for it to remain solvent. Since Thursday’s opening bell last week, the stock has moved from $2.13 to $0.79, a drop of 63 percent. The company’s market cap is now $51.44 million.

MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe said in a written statement that “Our burn rate has been slashed by 35-40% by the implementations and abuse prevention measures we have put in place over the last few weeks. We have always known, from when MoviePass took off in August, that it was going to be a high cash burn business model. We are not changing our guidance on 5 million subscribers by the end of this year – which should make us profitable/cash flow positive according to our business model. We have access in capital markets to over $300 million. So there is plenty of cash available to sustain the subscriber growth and movie-going habits of our users.”

Those are the facts as we know them, but let’s consider some of the options the company has now.

Even if you believe the market demand for Helios’ stock (I, for one, find them incredulous), there is an enormous challenge of converting that money into equity now. The envelope math looks like this: A month ago when the stock closed at $4.21, buying 20 percent of the company would have cost roughly $55 million. At the company’s current average burn rate of $21.7 million per month, that cash would have lasted approximately 2.5 months.

Now though, with the stock price so low, getting cash on the balance sheet today is a much harder proposition. That same $55 million that bought an investor a fifth of the company last month would be a complete buyout today. Buying 20 percent only costs a bit more than $10 million now, or roughly two weeks of burn.

So what’s the trick here that will save the company?

The obvious option is to radically control burn. The company could offer pricier tiers for heavy users of MoviePass, and could put a ceiling on the number of films a customer can watch per month as it did temporarily a few weeks ago. Lowe seems deeply committed to overall subscriber growth though, and that makes any sort of constraints on the product unlikely. The reason is that subscribers are the leverage Lowe needs to negotiate better partnership arrangements with theater chains, so he has to keep trying to grow users rapidly.

One theory is that the company could be negotiating equity deals with theater chains like AMC, which could be enticed by the low price of the stock to “buy in” to MoviePass’ popularity. Such media equity partnerships are not unusual — Sony, for instance, was a major shareholder in Spotify, as was Warner Music group, although both have since sold off large percentages of their holdings. Given the reliance of MoviePass on theater chains, building an equity partnership could prove to be the service’s savior.

A well-publicized partnership — including discounted movie tickets for MoviePass — could boost the stock significantly since the cost savings would improve the company’s burn rate. That could be an enticing proposition for the chains, since they could realize an almost immediate gain on their investment, plus the ongoing proceeds of a partnership going forward.

The other tactic would be to sign up more MoviePass subscribers who watch limited films. This is what might be called the “gym membership model” of trying to identify customers who want to buy a membership as an aspirational purchase, but who won’t actually use the facilities often. The challenge, beyond the incredibly short time period to try to build that marketing funnel, is that MoviePass appears to lose money on the very first ticket a customer purchases. The question isn’t how much revenue each customer generates, but how much the losses can be minimized.

The situation is a high-wire act, and the company will either hit the ground in the next few weeks, or it will right the ship, limit expenses and get enough equity investors to give it some cash to burn and keep on growing. I’d say use your MoviePass while you have it, but then again, that’s exactly why the company is faltering to begin with.

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, now lets you pay ‘Nearby Friends’

Published May 9, 2018

Monzo, one of a plethora of U.K. fintech startups aiming to re-invent current account banking, has launched a new feature that makes it even more frictionless to transfer money to friends. Dubbed ‘Nearby Friends’, the new geolocation functionality uses Bluetooth to let you see anyone else that uses Monzo who is nearby so that you can initiate a payment without needing their phone number to be in your contact book first.

One of the ways Monzo has increased its virality from the get-go is by making friend-to-friend payments easy, either to people who already bank with the startup, or via the Monzo.me service, which gives users a payment link to share with friends. The idea, as Monzo co-founder often explains, is that unlike traditional incumbent banks that basically have zero network effects (perhaps beyond joint accounts), the challenger bank is designed to become more useful the more people who join it.

Revolut has a similar feature called ‘Near Me’

“Thanks to the magic of Bluetooth, you can see anyone else that uses Monzo nearby. To protect people’s privacy, you’ll only find people who also have the feature open at the same time. With just a couple of taps, you can send people money, without the need to swap numbers or do any other admin,” writes Andy Smart, iOS Platform Lead at Monzo, on the company’s blog.

Under the hood, Monzo’s ‘Nearby Friends’ uses Google Nearby, Google’s peer-to-peer networking API that allows apps to “easily discover, connect to, and exchange data with nearby devices in real-time, regardless of network connectivity”. Specifically, here is how Monzo says its implementation works:

When you open Nearby Friends, we send an anonymous token (a random string of text) to Google

That token is broadcast via Bluetooth to devices nearby

At the same time, your Monzo app starts searching for other devices near you

When your Monzo app discovers a device nearby, it receives the device’s token. Using the Monzo API, it exchanges that token for your friend’s name and profile picture

We also receive an identifier which we can use to work out who to make the payment to

The token does not identify you personally outside of Monzo’s systems, which means we don’t share any of your personal information with third parties during the process. The token we send to Google expires after a short period of time, meaning your personal data is unidentifiable.

Meanwhile, competitor Revolut recently — and relatively quietly by its standards — rolled out a very similar feature, as it is wont to do. Called ‘Near Me’, I understand it will be formally unannounced in a company blog post as soon as tomorrow and is another clear sign of how fast the $1.7B valued banking startup is moving.

Google to acquire cloud migration startup Velostrata

Published May 9, 2018

Google announced today it was going to acquire Israeli cloud migration startup, Velostrata. The companies did not share the purchase price.

Velostrata helps companies migrate from on-premises datacenters to the cloud, a common requirement today as companies try to shift more workloads to the cloud. It’s not always a simple matter though to transfer those legacy applications, and that’s where Velostrata could help Google Cloud customers.

As I wrote in 2014 about their debut, the startup figured out a way to decouple storage and compute and that had wide usage and appeal. “The company has a sophisticated hybrid cloud solution that decouples storage from compute resources, leaving the storage in place on-premises while running a virtual machine in the cloud,” I wrote at the time.

But more than that, in a hybrid world where customer applications and data can live in the public cloud or on prem (or a combination), Velostrata gives them control to move and adapt the workloads as needed and prepare it for delivery on cloud virtual machines.

“This means [customers] can easily and quickly migrate virtual machine-based workloads like large databases, enterprise applications, DevOps, and large batch processing to and from the cloud,” Eyal Manor VP of engineering at Google Cloud wrote in the blog post announcing the acquisition.

This of course takes Velostrata from being a general purpose cloud migration tool to one tuned specifically for Google Cloud in the future, but one that gives Google a valuable tool in its battle to gain cloud marketshare.

In the past, Google Cloud head Diane Greene has talked about the business opportunities they have seen in simply “lifting and shifting” data loads to the cloud. This acquisition gives them a key service to help customers who want to do that with the Google Cloud.

Velostrata was founded in 2014. It has raised over $31 million from investors including Intel Capital and Norwest Venture partners.

Fantasmo is a decentralized map for robots and augmented reality

Published May 9, 2018

“Whether for AR or robots, anytime you have software interacting with the world, it needs a 3D model of the globe. We think that map will look a lot more like the decentralized internet than a version of Apple Maps or Google Maps.” That’s the idea behind new startup Fantasmo, according to co-founder Jameson Detweiler. Coming out of stealth today, Fantasmo wants to let any developer contribute to and draw from a sub-centimeter accuracy map for robot navigation or anchoring AR experiences.

Fantasmo plans to launch a free Camera Positioning Standard (CPS) that developers can use to collect and organize 3D mapping data. The startup will charge for commercial access and premium features in its TerraOS, an open-sourced operating system that helps property owners keep their maps up to date and supply them for use by robots, AR and other software equipped with Fantasmo’s SDK.

With $2 million in funding led by TenOneTen Ventures, Fantasmo is now accepting developers and property owners to its private beta.

Directly competing with Google’s own Visual Positioning System is an audacious move. Fantasmo is betting that private property owners won’t want big corporations snooping around to map their indoor spaces, and instead will want to retain control of this data so they can dictate how it’s used. With Fantasmo, they’ll be able to map spaces themselves and choose where robots can roam or if the next Pokémon GO can be played there.

“Only Apple, Google, and HERE Maps want this centralized. If this data sits on one of the big tech company’s servers, they could basically spy on anyone at any time,” says Detweiler. The prospect gets scarier when you imagine everyone wearing camera-equipped AR glasses in the future. “The AR cloud on a central server is Big Brother. It’s the end of privacy.”

Detweiler and his co-founder Dr. Ryan Measel first had the spark for Fantasmo as best friends at Drexel University. “We need to build Pokémon in real life! That was the genesis of the company,” says Detweiler. In the meantime he founded and sold LaunchRock, a 500 Startups company for creating “Coming Soon” sign-up pages for internet services.

After Measel finished his PhD, the pair started Fantasmo Studios to build augmented reality games like Trash Collectors From Space, which they took through the Techstars accelerator in 2015. “Trash Collectors was the first time we actually created a spatial map and used that to sync multiple people’s precise position up,” says Detweiler. But while building the infrastructure tools to power the game, they realized there was a much bigger opportunity to build the underlying maps for everyone’s games. Now the Santa Monica-based Fantasmo has 11 employees.

“It’s the internet of the real world,” says Detweiler. Fantasmo now collects geo-referenced photos, scans them for identifying features like walls and objects, and imports them into its point cloud model. Apps and robots equipped with the Fantasmo SDK can then pull in the spatial map for a specific location that’s more accurate than federally run GPS. That lets them peg AR objects to precise spots in your environment while making sure robots don’t run into things.

Fantasmo identifies objects in geo-referenced photos to build a 3D model of the world

“I think this is the most important piece of infrastructure to be built during the next decade,” Detweiler declares. That potential attracted funding from TenOneTen, Freestyle Capital, LDV, NoName Ventures, Locke Mountain Ventures and some angel investors. But it’s also attracted competitors like Escher Reality, which was acquired by Pokémon GO parent company Niantic, and Ubiquity6, which has investment from top-tier VCs like Kleiner Perkins and First Round.

Google is the biggest threat, though. With its industry-leading traditional Google Maps, experience with indoor mapping through Tango, new VPS initiative and near limitless resources. Just yesterday, Google showed off using an AR fox in Google Maps that you can follow for walking directions.

Fantasmo is hoping that Google’s size works against it. The startup sees a path to victory through interoperability and privacy. The big corporations want to control and preference their own platforms’ access to maps while owning the data about private property. Fantasmo wants to empower property owners to oversee that data and decide what happens to it. Measel concludes, “The world would be worse off if GPS was proprietary. The next evolution shouldn’t be any different.”