Tech Blog - Page 1059 of 2384 - 1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support1010Computers

Celonis scores $50M Series B on $1B valuation

Published June 26, 2018

In the age of digital transformation, it’s important to understand your business processes and find improvements quickly, but it’s not always easy to do without bringing in expensive consultants to help. Celonis, a New York City enterprise startup, created a sophisticated software solution to help solve this problem, and today it announced a $50 million Series B investment from Accel and 83North on a $1 billion valuation.

It’s not typical for an enterprise startup to have such a lofty valuation so early in its funding cycle, but Celonis is not a typical enterprise startup. It launched in 2011 in Munich with this idea of helping companies understand their processes, which they call process mining.

“Celonis is an intelligent system using logs created by IT systems such as SAP, Salesforce, Oracle and Netsuite, and automatically understands how these processes work and then recommends intelligently how they can be improved,” Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke explained.

The software isn’t magic, but helps customers visualize each business process, and then looks at different ways of shifting how and where humans interact with the process or bringing in technology like robotics process automation (RPA) when it makes sense.

Celonis process flow. Photo: Celonis

Rinke says the software doesn’t simply find a solution and that’s the end of the story. It’s a continuous process loop of searching for ways to help customers operate more efficiently. This doesn’t have to be a big change, but often involves lots incremental ones.

“We tell them there are lots of answers. We don’t think there is one solution. All these little things don’t execute well. We point out these things. Typically we find it’s easy to implement, ” he said.

Screenshot: Celonis

It seems to be working. Customers include the likes of Exxon-Mobile, 3M, Merck, Lockheed-Martin and Uber. Rinke reports deals are often seven figures. The company has grown an astonishing 5,000 percent in the past 4 years and 300 percent in the past year alone. What’s more, it has been profitable every year since it started. (How many enterprise startups can say that?)

The company currently has 400 employees, but unlike most Series B investments, they aren’t looking at this money to grow operationally. They wanted to have the money for strategic purposes, so if the opportunity came along to make an acquisition or expand into a new market, they would be in a position to do that.

“I see the funding as a confirmation and commitment, a sign from our investors and an indicator about what we’ve built and the traction we have. But for us it’s more important, and our investors share this, what they really invested in was the future of the company,” Rinke said. He’s sees an on-going commitment to help his customers as far more important than a billion valuation.

But that doesn’t hurt either as it moves rapidly forward.

Ping Identity acquires stealthy API security startup Elastic Beam

Published June 26, 2018

At the Identiverse conference in Boston today, Ping Identity announced that it has acquired Elastic Beam, a pre-Series A startup that uses artificial intelligence to monitor APIs and help understand when they have been compromised.

Ping also announced a new product, PingIntelligence for APIs, based on the Elastic Beam technology. They did not disclose the sale price.

The product itself is a pretty nifty piece of technology. It automatically detects all the API IP addresses and URLs running inside a customer. It then uses artificial intelligence to search for anomalous behavior and report back when it finds it (or it can automatically shut down access depending on how it’s configured).

“APIs are defined either in the API gateway because that facilitates creation or implemented on an application server like node.js. We created a platform that could bring a level of protection to both,” company founder Bernard Harguindeguy told TechCrunch.

It may seem like an odd match for Ping, which after all, is an enterprise identity company, but there are reasonable connections here. Perhaps the biggest is that CEO Andre Durand wants to see his company making increasing use of AI and machine learning for identity security in general. It’s also worth noting that his company has had an API security product in its portfolio for over five years, so it’s not a huge stretch to buy Elastic Beam.

With this purchase, Ping has not only acquired some advanced technology, it has also acqui-hired a team of AI and machine learning experts that could help inject the entire Ping product line with AI and machine learning smarts. “Nobody should be surprised who has been watching that Ping will drive machine learning AI and general intelligence into our identity platform,” Durand said.

Harguindeguy certainly sees the potential here. “I think we can over time bring a high level of monitoring and intelligence to Ping to understand whether an identity may have been used by someone else or being misused somehow,” he said.

Elastic Beam interface. Photo: Elastic Beam website

Harguindeguy will join Ping Identity as Senior Vice President of Intelligence along with his entire team. Neither company would divulge the exact number of employees, but Durand did acknowledge it fell somewhere between the 11 and 50 mentioned in the company Crunchbase profile. The original team consisted of around 10 according to Harguindeguy and they have been hiring for some time, so fair to say more than 11, but less than 50.

Harguindeguy says they were pursued by more than one company (although he wouldn’t say who those other companies were), but he felt that Ping provided a good cultural match for his company and could take them where they wanted to go faster than they could on their own, even with Series A money.

“We realized this is going to be really big. How do we go after the market really strongly really fast? We saw that we could fuse this really fast with Ping and have strong go to market with them,” he said.

Durand acknowledged that Ping, which was itself acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $600 million two years ago, couldn’t have made such an acquisition without the backing of a larger firm like this. “There was there was no chance we could have done either UnboundID (which the company acquired in August 2016) or Elastic Beam on our own. This was purely an artifact of being part of the Vista family portfolio,” he said.

PingIntelligence for APIs, the product based on Elastic Beam’s technology, is currently in private preview. It should be generally available some time later this year.

EveryTeam raises $3M to create a living internal company lexicon

Published June 26, 2018

As companies get bigger and bigger, all the critical information about a company — even its mission and culture statements — can get lost in a massive pile of Google Docs or files strewn across dozens of collaboration tools, making it nearly impossible to find. That’s where the team behind EveryTeam hopes to step in and clean things up.

EveryTeam serves as a sort of hub for all of the documents and core information about a company — a kind of living library that adapts over time and can easily suck in new information as it comes about. The idea is that employees might not necessarily be going to the same internal portal for that information, or might not be updating that portal, and the information continues to sit across multiple different buckets within a company. The company came about from former GitHubbers Todd Berman, Connor Sears, and Scott Goldman, which are looking to bring that same level of collaboration and simplicity to access to internal employee information. The startup said it has raised $3 million in a seed round from Harrison Metal, Upside Partnership, Index Ventures and Greylock Partners.

“People end up creating content in them but struggling to maintain content in these [internal communications] tools,” CEO Todd Berman said. “Whether they’re using a combination of Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or Confluence, there’s tons of people trying to do a lot of different things here. A lot of these tools are focused on the creation, where people felt there was a lot of opportunity. But for our potential customers, the issue is that their content is all over the place. it’s not in one spot.”

EveryTeam works to surface up those kinds of critical employee documents that are probably fine to just exist in some Google Drive somewhere very early on — which might include the information for the WiFi or the schedule for office snacks. But as more and more docs flow in, EveryTeam has to parse through all of those and ensure that the right important ones are surfaced up in front of everyone, especially as they become more and more important over time. For larger and large companies, that content management can get out of control and devolve into a lot of messages across the organization just to find a single document. EveryTeam integrates with GitHub, Google Drive, Dropbox, Figma, and Airtable among others.

“It ends up looking in a lot of cases like how GitHub works — GitHub is a tool to maintain, curate and publish software. You’re publishing source code, but a lot of the workflows feel very natural and feel very similar. Ultimately, where we ended up from a product perspective is, it’s more about being a layer on top of these services [like Box] to provide a plane of organization.”

EveryTeam isn’t the only startup looking to rethink the internal employee wiki. Slite, another startup looking to create an intelligent internal notes tool that can serve as a hub of information for employees, also said it raised $4.4 million earlier this year. The idea there is to bring the Slack-like simplicity that has become popular among employees — at least, at the startup level — to a variety of different areas that haven’t changed in a while. Internal note-taking, and that Wiki functionality, is one. EveryTeam decided to work with the idea that content is just going to exist all over the place anyway, and try to fit into the employee workflow that way.

“You want to curate and expose content that exists in ten to 12 different tools you use every day,” Berman said. “Ultimately, that’s part of my day-to-day flow. I’m usually in four to five web apps. When [some tools] take the Slack model they often get very focused on recency, and that determines an arbiter of value.[You have to think], what is the desire path for a document that becomes load-bearing in the company. It starts off a little weird, people edit it, it ideates and matures, and it stands the test of time. How do you create an application that helps that happen.”

Aclima sucks in $24M to scale its air quality mapping platform

Published June 26, 2018

Aclima, a San Francisco-based company which builds Internet-connected air quality sensors and runs a software platform to analyze the extracted intel, has closed a $24 million Series A to grow the business including by expanding its headcount and securing more fleet partnerships to build out the reach and depth of its pollution maps.

The Series A is led by Social Capital which is joining the board. Also participating in the round: The Schmidt Family Foundation, Emerson Collective, Radicle Impact, Rethink Impact, Plum Alley, Kapor Capital and First Philippine Holdings.

Three years ago Aclima came out of stealth, detailing a collaboration with Google on mapping air quality in its offices and also outdoors, by putting sensors on StreetView cars.

Though it has actually been working on the core problem of environmental sensing and intelligence for about a decade at this point, according to co-founder Davida Herzl.

“What we’ve really been doing over the course of the last few years is solving the really difficult technical challenges in generating this kind of data. Which is a revolution of air quality and climate change emissions data that hasn’t existed before,” she tells TechCrunch.

“Last year we announced the results of our state-wide demonstration project in California where we mapped the Bay Area, the Central Valley, Los Angeles. And really demonstrated the power of the data to drive new science, decision making across the private and public sector.”

Also last year it published a study in collaboration with the University of Texas showing that pollution is hyperlocal — thereby supporting its thesis that effective air quality mapping requires dense networks of sensors if you’re going to truly reflect the variable reality on the ground.

“You can have the best air quality and the worst air quality on the same street,” says Herzl. “And that really gives us a new view — a new understanding of emissions but actually demonstrated the need for hyperlocal measurement to protect human health but also to manage those emissions.

“That data set has been applied across a variety of scientific research including studies that really showed the linkages between hyperlocal data and cardiovascular risk. In LA our black carbon data was used to support increased filtration in schools to protect school children.”

“Our technology is really a proof point for emerging and new legislation in California that’s going to require community based monitoring across the entire state,” she adds. “So all of that work in California has really demonstrated the power of our platform — and that has really set us up to scale, and the funding round is going to enable us to take this to a lot more cities and regions and users.”

Asked about potential international expansion — given the presence of strategic investors from southeast Asia backing the round — Herzl says Aclima has had a “global view” for the business from the beginning, even while much of its early work has focused on California, adding: “We definitely have global ambitions and we will be making more announcements about that soon.”

Its strategy for growing the reach and depth of its air quality maps is focused on increasing its partnerships with fleets — so there’s a slight irony there given the vehicles being repurposed as air quality sensing nodes might themselves be contributing to the problem (Herzl sidestepped a question of whether Uber might be an interesting fleet partner for it, given the company’s current attempts to reinvent itself as a socially responsible corporate — including encouraging its drivers to go electric).

“Our mapping capabilities are amplified through our partnerships with fleets,” she says, pointing to Google’s StreetView cars as one current example (though this is not an exclusive partnership arrangement; a London air quality mapping project involving StreetView cars which was announced earlier this month is using hardware from a rival UK air quality sensor company, called Air Monitors, for example).

But flush with fresh Series A funding Aclima will be working on getting its kit on board more fleets — relying on third parties to build out the utility of its software platform for policymakers and communities.

“There’s a number of fleets that we are going to be speaking about our partnerships with but our platform can be integrated with any fleet type and we believe that is an incredible advantage and position for the company in really achieving our vision of creating a global platform for environmental intelligence to help cities and entire countries really manage climate risk at a scale that really hasn’t been possible before,” she adds.

“Our technology provides 100,000x greater spacial resolution than existing approaches and we do it at 100-1,000x cost reduction so our vision is to be the GPS of the environment — a new layer of environmental awareness and intelligence that really informs day-to-day decisions.

“We’re really excited because it’s taken really years of work. I incorporated Aclima 10 years ago and started really working on the technology around 2010. So this has taken… a tremendous amount of technical development and scientific rigor with partners… to really have the technology at a place where it’s really set up to scale.”

It finances (or part finances) the deployment of its sensors on the vehicles of fleet partners — with Aclima’s business model focused on monetizing the interpretation of the data provided by its SaaS platform. So a chunk of the Series A will be going to help pay for more sensor rollouts.

In terms of what fleet partners get back from agreeing for their vehicles to become mobile air quality sensing nodes, Herzl says it’s dependent on the partner. And Aclima’s isn’t naming any additional names on that front yet.

“It’s specific to each fleet. But I can say that in the case of Google we’re working with Google Earth outreach and the team at StreetView… to really reflect their commitment to sustainability but also to expand access to this kind of information,” she says of the perks for fleets, adding: “We’ll be talking more about that as we make announcement about our other partners.”

The Series A financing will also go on funding continued product development, with Aclima hoping to keep adding to the tally of pollutants it can identify and map — building on a list which includes the likes of CO2, methane and particulate matter.

“We have a very ambitious roadmap. And our roadmap is expansive — ultimately our vision is to make the invisible visible, across all of the pollutants and factors in the invisible layer of air that supports life. We want to make all of that visible — that’s our long term vision,” she says.

“Today we’re measuring all of the core gaseous pollutants that are regulated as well as the core climate change gases… We are not only deploying and expanding our platform’s availability but in our R&D efforts investing in next generation sensing technologies, whether it’s the tiniest PM2.5 sensor in the world to on our roadmap really having the ability to speciate COC [chlorinated organic compounds].

“We can’t do that today but are working on it and that is an area that is really important for specific communities but for industry and for policy makers as well.”

A key part of its ongoing engineering work is focused on shrinking certain sensing technologies — both in size and cost. As that’s the key to the sought for ubiquity, says Herzl.

“There’s a lot of hard work happening there to shrink [sensors],” she notes. “We’re talking about sensors that are the size of a thumb tack. Traditional technologies for this are very large, very difficult to deploy… so it’s not that capabilities don’t exist today but we’re working on shrinking those capabilities down into really, really tiny components so that we can achieve ubiquity… You have to shrink down the size but also reduce the cost so that you can deploy thousands, millions of these things.”

Commenting on the funding round in a supporting statement, Jay Zaveri, partner at Social Capital, added: “Aclima has successfully opened up an entirely new market domain with their innovative approach, tackling one of the biggest global challenges of our time. With a proven ability to quantify emissions and human exposure to pollution at global resolutions previously impossible, Aclima creates enormous opportunities for industry, cities and society.”

Oh, the things I would do to get this cardboard-style Nintendo Switch

Published June 26, 2018

Nintendo is building on its strange but wonderful cardboard Labo platform with some sweet Mario Kart integration and a truly fabulous limited edition Switch with a faux-cardboard finish. It really is just the greatest thing and I would do terrible things to have it. Unfortunately some smart kid will probably get it, because you have to win it by designing something cool with Labo.

So, first the Mario Kart stuff. If you have Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Switch, and you really should because it’s excellent, you can now use the Toy-Con (buildable with the Labo Variety Kit) as a sort of real-world controller. You twist the right “handlebar” to accelerate and rotate the whole thing to turn.

This is the first game to get its own special Labo support, but the company says more are on the way. Splatoon 2, perhaps?

If you’re a creative type and you have a Labo set, you’re in luck. There are two new contests you can enter, and entry puts you in the running to win the amazing neutral-colored Switch shown up top. I really don’t know why I love it so much, but I do. And if you do too, you should enter. (If you’re in the U.S. or Canada. Sorry, world.)

The first challenge is to create a musical instrument with the Toy-Con pieces and “craft materials.” You’ll have to document its creation and show it working on video; it’ll be judged on “Quality, Creativity, Spirit, and Sound.” Caps Nintendo’s.

Nintendo Labo review

The second challenge is to create a game or game-like experience using Toy-Con Garage. Same judgment categories as before, minus Sound.

There will be one grand prize winner and four runners up per contest. Grand prize is that amazing Switch (approximate retail value $1,000?!), plus a cool (?) Labo jacket. Runners up get a pair of cardboard style Joy-Cons and a jacket. Respectable.

If you’ve been looking for a reason to pick up that Labo kit again or use some random pieces you never tried, this is surely that reason. Now get to work!

iOS 12 is all about making your phone work better

Published June 25, 2018

The pace of iOS innovation has been so intense that even Apple couldn’t keep up. In some ways, iOS 11’s main feature was that it was packed with bugs, with autocorrect bugs, messages arriving out of order and the Calculator app not calculating properly. iOS 12 is a nice change of pace.

“For iOS 12, we’re doubling down on performance,” Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said at WWDC.

While there are a few interesting new features, iOS 12 isn’t a splashy release like the ones that were released over the past few years. It doesn’t change the way you use an iPad and it doesn’t open up apps with new hooks across the board.

It’s clear that all the low-hanging fruit has been addressed. Now, Apple is mostly adding new frameworks for specific categories of apps instead of releasing major platform changes that affect all third-party apps.

And for the rest, it’s all about refinements, bug fixes and optimizations. Apple released the first public beta of iOS 12 today. I played a bit with early beta versions of iOS 12, so here’s what you should be looking for.

Operating system changes

Let’s start with the updates at the operating system level. iOS 12 should be faster than iOS 11, including on older devices.

You know that feeling of instant regret when you update your old iPhone or iPad to a new version of iOS. Everything seems much slower. Apple wants to reverse this trend and make iOS 12 faster for the iPhone 5s or the iPad mini 2.

Apps should launch faster, the keyboard should appear more quickly, the camera should be more reactive and more. It’s hard to feel that with a beta version of iOS 12, so we’ll have to look at that statement again in September.

Other than that, there is another major theme for iOS 12 — making you look at your phone less often. And this goal is reflected with three new features — Screen Time, better notifications and a more granular Do Not Disturb mode.

Screen Time is a brand new feature that lets you see how much time you wasted scrolling through feeds. You’ll get weekly reports and parents can set up app limits that sync across all your iOS devices.

Do Not Disturb is now more granular as you can set it up for an hour, until the end of an event or until you leave a location. Many people didn’t want to use this feature because they forgot to turn it off.

As for notifications, they are now grouped by default. In my experience, it takes a while to get used to it, but it’s a big improvement for noisy apps. You can also swipe on a notification to disable notifications from a specific app or turn them into silent notifications. You’ll feel more in control of your iPhone instead of feeling like your iPhone is controlling you.

App updates

Apple couldn’t stop at those improvements and had to release app updates for its own apps. Let’s look at the most memorable ones.

You can finally ditch Skype for good as FaceTime now supports group conversations — at least if all your friends are using iPhones. This feature alone will definitely increase iPhone stickiness, just like the fact that you can’t participate in iMessage conversations on Android.

Talking about Messages, most iPhone users won’t see a difference this year as Apple focused on the iPhone X. In addition to new Animojis, you can now create your own avatar using Memoji. I have to say that I really like Snap’s Bitmoji, so I’m quite excited to use it. The only issue is that it feels like a one-way conversation if you’re not messaging someone who is using an iPhone X. It’s the kind of features that will start to make sense after a few years when everybody has Face ID on their iPhone.

Four other Apple apps got an update. Stocks and Apple News received some design improvements. Voice Memos will now store your memos in iCloud and sync them with your iPad and Mac without using iTunes (finally). Lastly, iBooks is now called Apple Books, and it now looks more like the updated App Store.

Apple’s two bets

With iOS 12, Apple is pursuing its big bet on augmented reality and starting something new with Siri. Those platform changes could resonate well with developers and users or could become a distraction for everyone.

Apple’s augmented reality SDK is getting a major update. With ARKit 2, developers can create apps that share the same augmented reality world between multiple users. You can imagine multiplayer games and shareable worlds. Apple also worked on improving the overall performance of the framework.

But does it really matter? It feels like many geeks like you, TechCrunch readers, tested ARKit apps after the release of iOS 11. But there hasn’t been a mainstream hit so far. It’s still unclear if people actually want to use their iOS device to power an augmented reality experience.

And the second big thing is Siri Shortcuts. After Apple acquired Workflow, the automation app for iOS, many people wondered what it would mean for automation fans. The good news is that Apple is completely embracing Workflow with a set of features.

App developers can now configure Shortcuts to let users add to Siri a restaurant booking, a favorite Deliveroo order or a favorite sports team. On paper, it’s quite powerful and limited at the same time. It sounds like bookmarks for Siri.

Most users will stop at suggested shortcuts. But power users will be able to configure multi-step workflows in the new Shortcuts app. It’s just like Workflow, but with a new name and new home automation features.

This is great news if you’re a power user, but I wonder if Shortcuts will find a mainstream audience. I couldn’t test those features as it’s not yet available in the beta. Maybe Shortcuts will be added with iOS 12.1 or 12.2.

There are many small refinements in iOS 12 that I haven’t listed there. For instance, Portrait Mode has been improved and the Photos app is getting better at showing you personalized recommendations. Or if you have an iPhone X, you’ll be able to add a second face to unlock your phone.

iOS 12 looks especially promising if you consider your iPhone as infrastructure. Many people want a device that is as reliable as possible. And iOS 12 should stand out on this front.

Apple just released the first iOS 12 beta to everyone

Apple just released the first iOS 12 beta to everyone

Published June 25, 2018

This is your opportunity to get a glimpse of the future of iOS. Apple just released the first public beta of iOS 12, the next major version of the operating system for iPhone and iPad. Unlike developer betas, everyone can download it without a $99 developer account. But don’t forget, it’s a beta.

The company still plans to release the final version of iOS 12.0 this fall (usually September). But Apple is going to release betas every few weeks over the summer. It’s a good way to fix as many bugs as possible and gather data from a large group of users.

As always, Apple’s public betas closely follow the release cycle of developer betas. And Apple released the second developer beta of iOS 12 just last week. So it sounds like the first public beta is more or less the same build as the second developer build.

But remember, you shouldn’t install an iOS beta on your primary iPhone or iPad. The issue is not just bugs — some apps and features won’t work at all. In some rare cases, beta software can also brick your device and make it unusable. Proceed with extreme caution.

But if you have an iPad or iPhone you don’t need, here’s how to download it. Head over to Apple’s beta website and download the configuration profile. It’s a tiny file that tells your iOS device to update to public betas like it’s a normal software update.

You can either download the configuration profile from Safari on your iOS device directly, or transfer it to your device using AirDrop, for instance. Reboot your device, then head over to the Settings app. In September, your device should automatically update to the final version of iOS 12 and you’ll be able to delete the configuration profile.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new in iOS 12. The main feature of iOS 12 is a performance improvement, especially for older devices. If you have an iPhone 6 or an iPad Air for instance, you should see a big improvement when it comes to launching apps, triggering the camera and entering text.

The other big theme of the year is new features to help you spend less time using your phone. There’s a new Screen Time feature to see and control how much time you spend using each app. Notifications are now grouped and you can silence them from the lock screen. You also can turn on Do Not Disturb when you’re in a meeting, for a few hours or for longer.

Apple didn’t stop there, and added new power features as well. Developers will be able to take advantage of a new file format for augmented reality and new features in ARKit 2.0. Apple is releasing the Workflow app as a new Siri Shortcuts app. Developers will be able to add information to Siri, as well, so that you can add a boarding pass or a music playlist to Siri.

The Photos, News and Stocks apps have been improved, as well as Apple Books (the app formerly known as iBooks). Apple is introducing Memoji on the iPhone X. It’s a customized avatar that you can use in iMessage and FaceTime to represent you.

If you want to learn more, read my iOS 12 preview to get my thoughts on this release.

iOS 12 is all about making your phone work better

OpenAI’s ‘Dota 2’ neural nets are defeating human opponents

Published June 25, 2018

Artificially intelligent systems taking on human competitors is a grand tradition of computer science; thankfully, we’re still in the cute stages that don’t feel quite like War Games yet. For its part, OpenAI has been trying its hand at Dota 2 competitive play, and its bots are starting to win against some skilled opponents under certain conditions.

The Elon Musk co-founded venture is aiming to raise awareness for where AI technologies are now and how the tech industry can promote safe advances that benefit everyone in the future. While playing an unabashedly nerdy video game better than human opponents may seem to be a weird place to expend extensive resources, it’s all the continuation of where AlphaGo and Deep Blue have taken us before: building machines that can beat humans in seemingly simple games.

Unlike decidedly more turn-based games like chess or Go, Dota 2 is a title that requires plenty of real-time decision-making. While Google’s AlphaGo sometimes took minutes to decide how to respond to a particularly well-crafted move, OpenAI Five, as it’s called, does not have that luxury, as its opponent would be making moves in the meantime. These games are operating at 30 frames per second for an average of 45 minutes, OpenAI says, resulting in about 80,000 frames, of which the system analyzes one-quarter.

This blog post has plenty of the nitty-gritty technical details if you’re interested.

This is plenty resource-intensive — OpenAI Five is running on 124,000 cores on Google Cloud — and while this isn’t OpenAI’s first public experimentation playing Dota 2, what makes this interesting is that, compared to its previous efforts in 1v1 matches, this is a team of five distinct neural nets working together to best human opponents.

For its part, OpenAI gave some interesting data points about OpenAI Five, particularly how it learns by playing 180 years’ worth of Dota 2 games against itself every day.

OpenAI is understandably still tackling the parameters of the full game and is struggling in some aspects; as a result, there are certain rules by which both OpenAI and its human opponents must operate during matches, including not using certain characters, items and strategies. Even with these current restrictions, which the group fully outlines on the blog post, the team is aiming to compete at a Dota 2 esports world championship in August, where it will be fully tested.

OpenAI will be hosting a Twitch-streamed Dota 2 tourney next month to showcase what it has built as it competes against top players.

At the end of the day, a lot of this “Human versus AI” excitement is a bit over-exalted; these are games being approached by insanely powerful computer programs that can do one thing and only one thing. A lot of the media narrative around how artificial intelligence is already beating human experts is valid in a certain light, but kind of undermines the complex work being done by the people building these programs. This all probably plays into OpenAI’s interests, however, which seem to be focused quite a bit on driving home how quickly we’re progressing toward artificial general intelligence.

It’s going to probably be a bit before an AI-controlled system starts trouncing opponents in Fortnite, but for a fixed-perspective strategy game like Dota 2, there is room for boundary-pushing hyper-focused AI programs to bulk up on gameplay knowledge and perhaps deliver some wins.

An Overwatch hacker in South Korea just got sentenced to a year in prison

Published June 25, 2018

A 28-year-old man in South Korea faces a year in prison for hacking Overwatch . The sentence, reported by South Korea’s SBS News and Dot Esports, handed the hacker one year in prison and two years of probation for illicit activity related to the hit online multiplayer game. The particularly steep sentence is a result of both the ongoing nature of the activity and the fact that the individual generated 200 million Korean won (almost $180,000 USD) from Overwatch-related hacks.

The hacker’s charges stem from the violation of two Korean laws: the Game Industry Promotion Act and the Information and Communication Technology Protection Law. In the last year, Overwatch developer Blizzard Entertainment has worked with the Seoul National Police Agency’s cybersecurity department to crack down on hacks that compromise the integrity of the high-profile game, particularly due to its prominence in the esports world.

“Cheating on the Asian Overwatch server is endemic and widespread,” Kotaku reported in a story on Overwatch hacking last year. “On the Battle.net forums and Reddit, complaints about hacking South Korean players’ too-accurate headshots, immediate gun-downs and even DDOS attacks against winners in competitive mode are widespread.”

Hacks for a game like Overwatch can take many forms, including scripts that enable perfect aim, match-fixing and a rank manipulation practice known as boosting.

“Doing anything to manipulate your internal MMR or Skill Rating (i.e. Boosting or Throwing) is not fine,” Overwatch Creative Director Jeff Kaplan wrote in a forum post last year. “Penalties for boosting and throwing are about to increase dramatically.”

The new sentence isn’t the first to be handed down by the Korean government for game-related hacking, but given the fact that sentencing usually results in large fines, it is notably harsh. Laws meant to deter gaming hacks went into effect in the country last year and stipulate that violators may face up to $43,000 in fines and up to five years in prison.

Jay-Z has a new venture fund and a Silicon Valley partner

Published June 25, 2018

Jay-Z is behind a new venture fund called Marcy Venture Partners that is being launched with Walden Venture Capital managing director Larry Marcus and longtime business partner Roc Nation president Jay Brown, according to California regulatory filings.

The fund was first reported by Axios. Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter is no stranger to the venture world. The rap artist, producer and entrepreneur invested in Uber’s Series B round in 2011 when the company had a pre-money valuation of $300 million. Jay-Z has also invested in JetSmarter and Julep. Roc Nation backed Promise, a decarceration startup.

Jay-Z and Jay Brown were looking for a Silicon Valley partner for their fund last year. And at one time, it appeared they had landed on Sherpa Capital, a VC firm created by some of Uber’s other early investors. But that deal fell apart.

Now Walden Venture Capital’s Marcus will lead Marcy Venture Partners. Marcus has deep experience as an investor as an early backer of Pandora and Netflix. Marcus has also invested in sound and voice search startup SoundHound, retail tech company Skip and Terayon, which was acquired by Motorola.