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Mumford & Sons beware! An AI can now write indie music
A fascinating project called Amadeus Code promises to out-Tay-Tay Tay Tay and out-Bon Bon Iver. The AI-based system uses data from previous musical hits to create entirely new compositions on the fly — and darn if these crazy robot-songs aren’t pretty good.
The app, which is available from the iTunes Store but doesn’t seem to be working properly, creates song sketches in minutes, freeing you up to create beautiful lyrics and a bit of accordion accompaniment.
The video above is a MIDI version of an AI-produced song and the video below shows the song full-produced using non-AI human musicians. The results, while a little odd, are very impressive.
Jun Inoue, Gyo Kitagawa and Taishi Fukuyama created Amadeus Code and all have experience in music and music production. Inoue is a renowned Japanese music producer and he has sold 10 million singles. Fukuyama worked at Echo Next and launched the first Music Hack Day in Tokyo. Fukuyama is the director of the Hit Song Research Lab and went to Berklee College of Music.
“We have analyzed decades of contemporary songs and classical music, songs of economic and/or social impact, and have created a proprietary songwriting technology that is specialized to create top line melodies of songs. We have recently released Harmony Library, which gives users direct access to the songs that power the songwriting AI for Amadeus Code,” said Inoue. “We uniquely specialize in creating top line melodies for songs that can be a source of high-quality inspiration for music professionals. We also do have plans that may overlap with other music AI companies in the market today in terms of offering hobbyists a service to quickly create completed audio tracks.”
When asked if AI will ever replace his favorite musicians, folks like Michael and Janet Jackson or George Gershwin, Inoue laughed.
“Absolutely not. This AI will not tell you about its struggles and illuminate your inner worlds through real human storytelling, which is ultimately what makes music so intimate and compelling. Similarly to how the sampler, drum machine, multitrack recorder and many other creative technologies have done in the past, we see AI to be a creative tool for artists to push the boundaries of popular music. When these AI tools eventually find their place in the right creative hands, it will have the potential to create a new entire economy of opportunities,” he said.
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Boom’s chief test pilot on the thrill and challenge of going supersonic (again)
“There’s nothing like it out there,” says Commander Bill “Doc” Shoemaker (Ret.), chief test pilot for Boom Supersonic, the startup aiming to make a passenger airliner for transoceanic flights at speeds (as you might guess from the name) faster than sound. Shoemaker, a former Navy aviator, fighter pilot and aeronautics engineer, will have the daunting privilege of being the first to fly the company’s proof of concept single-seater during tests next year.
That there’s nothing like Boom is not exactly a controversial opinion — there aren’t a lot of companies out there trying to resurrect supersonic flight. The Concorde is, after all, so well known a cautionary tale of engineering ambition exceeding the constraints of reality that it verges on hackneyed. But Shoemaker isn’t a Silicon Valley startup commentator, he’s a test pilot, and his perspective is that of someone who has worked on and flown dozens of aircraft, including supersonic ones, over his decades-long career.
The first question I asked (though not entirely a serious one) when I had a chance to chat with Shoemaker was whether it was a bit premature to have a chief pilot at a company that doesn’t yet have a plane to fly.
“There’s a good reason to have a pilot at this point,” Shoemaker said. As he delicately put it: “Among the team, the pilots are… uniquely committed to the outcome.”
Among other things, test pilots seem to have a knack for understatement. But it’s certainly true.
“You want the operator’s perspective, like how to build the cockpit, how you’ll operate the aircraft. The designer will come to me for that perspective — he’ll say, ‘how can I tweak the design to be more suitable for you?’ You want that cross-industry expertise.”
Boom is making a supersonic airliner, but it’s still mostly a paper plane, if you will. The company’s test craft, the XB-1, however, is being built and should be taking to the air about a year from now. That’s where many of the components, materials and design choices will be flight-proven. Interestingly, however, actually flying the test craft is a rather analog affair.
“The aircraft is definitely designed around a philosophy, which is ‘keep it simple.’ We’re not trying to introduce any more tech than we really need to. The flight controls are not fly-by-wire, they’re mechanical,” explained Shoemaker. “It’s going to be an interesting airplane to fly. It goes from 150 knots up to Mach 2.2, and up to 45,000 feet. It’ll be a challenge because of that mechanical stuff, but with what we’re trying to do, keeping it simple makes a lot of sense.”
That’s not to say nothing has changed over the last few decades of aeronautics, a topic in which, if you’ll recall, Shoemaker has a doctorate. Although he said he considers his role as being separate from the flight test engineers who put together the craft he’s flown, he’s still an important part of the team.
He suggested a few areas where he’s seen or expects improvements to the aircraft creation and testing process.
“One is composite materials. That’s huge,” he said, referring to things like carbon fiber and more exotic weaves and alloys that combine a number of desirable characteristics. “The strength and weight improvements offer new opportunities. You know, the Concorde would contract like a foot during flight temperatures, then expand again. Composites don’t do that. All these things make the aircraft lighter, faster and stronger.”
Second, he briefly noted, engine technology these days is “brisk,” especially combined with the materials advances.
“Last,” he said, “the Concorde design was wind-tunnel based, but a lot of the work we do is computation. We can do all the testing they did for the Concorde in a couple days.”
Wind tunnels are still involved, of course, but the models are so good that it’s more for verification than testing. But it also lets designers speed through ideas, evaluating but skipping wild ones without wasting time: “You can look at all these weird corner cases, and explore those very quickly.”
Basic advances in tech mean the team can avoid quirks like the Concorde’s drooping nose, which was there so that pilots could see the runway. “You can imagine all the mechanical complexity that comes with that,” said Shoemaker. “For us we’ll be going with a direct camera or some kind of vision system that’s integrated with all the systems.”
“The airliner itself,” he said, “will be highly augmented [compared to the test jet]. It’ll be fly-by-wire. Its handling qualities are really quite benign across the envelope. It’s surprising, but the way the aircraft handles on one side of the speed of sound isn’t so different from how it handles on the other side.”
Ultimately Shoemaker was optimistic about the whole enterprise, both the company and the prospect of supersonic passenger flight.
“As far as an ambitious project with an ambitious goal, there’s nothing like it out there,” he said. “That’s the value and reward of working with a team this size, a team that really believes they can reinvent and do it better. And it’s well within what we can do with technology — we can do it better than Concorde did, possibly by orders of magnitude.”
As for his part, the test flights set to take place next year, he’s more than a little excited.
“It’ll be a challenge to fly for sure — but it’ll be nice to go that fast again.”
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Blippar picks up $37 million hoping to become profitable in the next year
Blippar, the AR startup that launched in 2011, has today announced the close of a $37 million financing led by Candy Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures.
The company started out by offering AR experiences for brand marketers through publishers and other real-world products, letting users unlock AR content by scanning a tag called a “Blipp”.
Blippar then transitioned to a number of different AR products, but took a particular focus on computer vision, launching a consumer-facing visual search engine that would let users identify cars, plants, and other real-world objects.
Most recently, Blippar has introduced an indoor positioning system that lets commercial real estate owners implement AR mapping and other content from within their buildings.
The AR industry has been in a state of evolution for the past few years, and Blippar has constantly reshifted and re-positioned to try and take advantage of the blossoming market. Unfortunately, several pivots have put the company in a tough spot financially.
BI reports that Blippar posted revenue of £8.5 million ($11.2 million) in the 16-month period up to March 31 2016, with losses of £24 million ($31.5 million). These latest rounds have essentially let Blippar keep the lights on while trying to pick up the pace on revenues.
The company says that this latest round is meant to fuel the company’s race to reach profitability in the next 12 months. Blippar has raised more than $137 million to date.
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Zortrax launches a new high-speed, high-resolution printer, the Inkspire
Zortrax has launched a new printer, the Inkspire, that prints using an LCD to create objects in high-quality resin in minutes. The printer – essentially an upgrade to traditional stereolithography (SLA) printers – uses a single frame of light to create layers of 25 microns.
Most SLA printers use a laser or DLP to shine a pattern on the resin. The light hardens the resin instantly, creating a layer of material that the printer then pulls up and out as the object grows. The UV LCD in the $2,699 Inkspire throws an entire layer at a time and is nine times more precise than standard SLA systems. It can print 20 to 36 millimeters per hour and the system can print objects in serial, allowing you to print hundreds of thousands of small objects per month.
“The printer is also perfect for rapid prototyping of tiny yet incredibly detailed products like jewelry or dental prostheses. But there are more possible applications,” said co-founder Marcin Olchanowski. “Working with relatively small models like HDMI cover caps, one Zortrax Inkspire can 3D print 77 of them in 1h 30min. 30 printers working together in a 3D printing farm can offer an approximate monthly output of 360,000 to over 500,000 parts (depending on how many shifts per day are scheduled). This is how Zortrax Inkspire can take a business way into medium or even high scale production territory.”
The printer company, which is now one of the largest in Central Europe, explored multiple technologies before settling on this form of SLA printing.
“At the early stage of this project we were investigating the technology itself, and it seemed very unlikely we were able to create such a device,” said Olchanowski. “We tried SLA and DLP but we were not happy with these technologies. We perceived them undeveloped. But, step by step, we succeeded. We see huge prospects of development for resin 3D printing technology, because nowadays customers expect the higher quality of printed models.”
The company sells 6,500 printers yearly and will see $13.7 million in revenue this year. They are also selling resins for their new printers and they will ship in about two months.
Printers like the Inkspire are a bit harder to use than traditional extruder-based printers like Makerbots. However, the quality and print speed is far better and paves the way to truly 3D-printed production runs for one-off parts.
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Logistics startup Freightos raises $44.4M Series C led by Singapore Exchange
Freightos, a marketplace for logistics providers, announced today that it has raised a $44.4 million Series C led by Singapore Exchange. Returning investors including General Electric Ventures (the lead investor of Freightos’ Series B extension last year), ICV and Aleph also participated in the round, which brings Freightos’ total funding so far to $94.4 million.
Launched in 2016 as a price comparison service for freight forwarders—the agents that organize shipments from a supplier or manufacturer to their final destination—Freightos now also lets users book, manage and track shipments with more than 1,200 logistics providers.
In an email, founder and CEO Zvi Schreiber said its online freight marketplace will continue to be Freightos’ flagship product, but the company also wants to find ways to make the industry more efficient by building a global digital infrastructure.
The company claims to process more than one million instant freight quote requests each month using its patent-pending routing and pricing engines. Its database of global shipping rates also underpins the Freightos Baltic Index (FBX), an industry-specific index created to provide more pricing transparency.
Developed in partnership with the Baltic Exchange, a market information provider for the maritime transportation industry, the FBX tracks freight pricing from 12 major routes around the world and also combines them into one index to serve as the freight industry’s equivalent of the S&P 500.
“Nearly every major global industry, from jet fuel to livestock, leverages dynamic pricing based on real-time metrics to make smarter, automated decisions. We’re excited to explore how our global freight index, the Freightos Baltic Index, can reduce pricing risks and improve stability, and are already exploring implementation with major multinational corporations,” Schreiber said.
He added that Freightos is also looking at more ways to connect airlines with logistics providers to sell cargo space on passenger flights.
Freightos will partner with the Singapore Exchange, which owns the Baltic Exchange, to develop new financial instruments. It will start by launching daily reporting on the FBX, which is currently updated weekly.
In a press statement, SGX head of derivatives Michael Syn said, “Freightos is at the forefront of a new wave of solutions for price discovery and digital marketplaces in global freight – an industry at the heart of the global economy. SGX is excited by the potential to develop risk management tools and services and build on Singapore’s unique position in the trade ecosystem, to bridge the physical and financial markets.”
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Uber fires up its own traffic estimates to fuel demand beyond cars
If the whole map is red and it’s a short ride, maybe you’d prefer taking an Uber JUMP Bike instead of an UberX. Or at least if you do end up stuck bumper-to-bumper, the warning could make you less likely to get mad mid-ride and take it out on the driver’s rating.
This week TechCrunch spotted Uber overlaying blue, yellow, and red traffic condition bars on your route map before you hail. Responding to TechCrunch’s inquiry, Uber confirmed that traffic estimates have been quietly testing for riders on Android over the past few months and the pilot program recently expanded to a subset of iOS users. It’s already live for all drivers.
The congestion indicators are based on Uber’s own traffic information pulled from its historic trip data about 10 billion rides plus real-time data from its drivers’ phones, rather than estimates from Google that already power Uber’s maps.
If traffic estimates do roll out, they could make users more tolerant of longer ETAs and less likely to check a competing app since they’ll know their driver might take longer to pick them up because congestion is to blame rather than Uber’s algorithm. During the ride they might be more patient amidst the clogged streets.
Uber’s research into traffic in India
But most interestingly, seeing traffic conditions could help users choose when it’s time to take one of Uber’s non-car choices. They could sail past traffic in one of Uber’s new electric JUMP Bikes, or buy a public transportation ticket from inside Uber thanks to its new partnership with Masabi for access to New York’s MTA plus buses and trains in other cities. Cheaper and less labor intensive for Uber, these options make more sense to riders the more traffic there is. It’s to the company’s advantage to steer users towards the most satisfying mode of transportation, and traffic info could point them in the right direction.
Through a program called Uber Movement, the company began sharing its traffic data with city governments early last year. The goal was to give urban planners the proof they need to make their streets more efficient. Uber has long claimed that it can help reduce traffic by getting people into shared rides and eliminating circling in search of parking. But a new study showed that for each mile of personal driving Uber and Lyft eliminated, they added 2.8 miles of professional driving for an 180 percent increase in total traffic.
Uber is still learning whether users find traffic estimates helpful before it considers rolling them out permanently to everyone. Right now they only appear on unshared UberX, Black, XL, SUV, and Taxi routes before you hail to a small percentage of users. But Uber’s spokesperson verified that the company’s long-term goal is to be able to tell users that the cheapest way to get there is option X, the quickest is option Y, and the most comfortable is option Z. Traffic estimates are key to that. And now that it’s had so many cars on the road for so long, it has the signals necessary to predict which streets will be smooth and which will be jammed at a given hour.
For years, Uber called itself a logistics company, not a ride sharing company. Most people gave it a knowing wink. Every Silicon Valley company tries to trump up its importance by claiming to conquer a higher level of abstraction. But with advent of personal transportation modes like on-demand bikes and scooters, Uber is poised to earn the title by getting us from point A to point B however we prefer.
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Why the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI deal has cloud companies going nuts
By now you’ve probably heard of the Defense Department’s massive winner-take-all $10 billion cloud contract dubbed the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (or JEDI for short).
Star Wars references aside, this contract is huge, even by government standards.The Pentagon would like a single cloud vendor to build out its enterprise cloud, believing rightly or wrongly that this is the best approach to maintain focus and control of their cloud strategy.
Department of Defense (DOD) spokesperson Heather Babb tells TechCrunch the department sees a lot of upside by going this route. “Single award is advantageous because, among other things, it improves security, improves data accessibility and simplifies the Department’s ability to adopt and use cloud services,” she said.
Whatever company they choose to fill this contract, this is about modernizing their computing infrastructure and their combat forces for a world of IoT, artificial intelligence and big data analysis, while consolidating some of their older infrastructure. “The DOD Cloud Initiative is part of a much larger effort to modernize the Department’s information technology enterprise. The foundation of this effort is rationalizing the number of networks, data centers and clouds that currently exist in the Department,” Babb said.
Setting the stage
It’s possible that whoever wins this DOD contract could have a leg up on other similar projects in the government. After all it’s not easy to pass muster around security and reliability with the military and if one company can prove that they are capable in this regard, they could be set up well beyond this one deal.
As Babb explains it though, it’s really about figuring out the cloud long-term. “JEDI Cloud is a pathfinder effort to help DOD learn how to put in place an enterprise cloud solution and a critical first step that enables data-driven decision making and allows DOD to take full advantage of applications and data resources,” she said.
Photo: Mischa Keijser for Getty Images
The single vendor component, however, could explain why the various cloud vendors who are bidding, have lost their minds a bit over it — everyone except Amazon, that is, which has been mostly silent, happy apparently to let the process play out.
The belief amongst the various other players, is that Amazon is in the driver’s seat for this bid, possibly because they delivered a $600 million cloud contract for the government in 2013, standing up a private cloud for the CIA. It was a big deal back in the day on a couple of levels. First of all, it was the first large-scale example of an intelligence agency using a public cloud provider. And of course the amount of money was pretty impressive for the time, not $10 billion impressive, but a nice contract.
For what it’s worth, Babb dismisses such talk, saying that the process is open and no vendor has an advantage. “The JEDI Cloud final RFP reflects the unique and critical needs of DOD, employing the best practices of competitive pricing and security. No vendors have been pre-selected,” she said.
Complaining loudly
As the Pentagon moves toward selecting its primary cloud vendor for the next decade, Oracle in particular has been complaining to anyone who will listen that Amazon has an unfair advantage in the deal, going so far as to file a formal complaint last month, even before bids were in and long before the Pentagon made its choice.
Photo: mrdoomits for Getty Images (cropped)
Somewhat ironically, given their own past business model, Oracle complained among other things that the deal would lock the department into a single platform over the long term. They also questioned whether the bidding process adhered to procurement regulations for this kind of deal, according to a report in the Washington Post. In April, Bloomberg reported that co-CEO Safra Catz complained directly to the president that the deal was tailor made for Amazon.
Microsoft hasn’t been happy about the one-vendor idea either, pointing out that by limiting itself to a single vendor, the Pentagon could be missing out on innovation from the other companies in the back and forth world of the cloud market, especially when we’re talking about a contract that stretches out for so long.
As Microsoft’s Leigh Madden told TechCrunch in April, the company is prepared to compete, but doesn’t necessarily see a single vendor approach as the best way to go. “If the DOD goes with a single award path, we are in it to win, but having said that, it’s counter to what we are seeing across the globe where 80 percent of customers are adopting a multi-cloud solution,” he said at the time.
He has a valid point, but the Pentagon seems hell bent on going forward with the single vendor idea, even though the cloud offers much greater interoperability than proprietary stacks of the 1990s (for which Oracle and Microsoft were prime examples at the time).
Microsoft has its own large DOD contract in place for almost a billion dollars, although this deal from 2016 was for Windows 10 and related hardware for DOD employees, rather than a pure cloud contract like Amazon has with the CIA.
It also recently released Azure Stack for government, a product that lets government customers install a private version of Azure with all the same tools and technologies you find in the public version, and could prove attractive as part of its JEDI bid.
Cloud market dynamics
It’s also possible that the fact that Amazon controls the largest chunk of the cloud infrastructure market, might play here at some level. While Microsoft has been coming fast, it’s still about a third of Amazon in terms of market size, as Synergy Research’s Q42017 data clearly shows.
The market hasn’t shifted dramatically since this data came out. While market share alone wouldn’t be a deciding factor, Amazon came to market first and it is much bigger in terms of market than the next four combined, according to Synergy. That could explain why the other players are lobbying so hard and seeing Amazon as the biggest threat here, because it’s probably the biggest threat in almost every deal where they come up against each other, due to its sheer size.
Consider also that Oracle, which seems to be complaining the loudest, was rather late to the cloud after years of dismissing it. They could see JEDI as a chance to establish a foothold in government that they could use to build out their cloud business in the private sector too.
10 years might not be 10 years
It’s worth pointing out that the actual deal has the complexity and opt-out clauses of a sports contract with just an initial two-year deal guaranteed. A couple of three-year options follow, with a final two-year option closing things out. The idea being, that if this turns out to be a bad idea, the Pentagon has various points where they can back out.
Photo: Henrik Sorensen for Getty Images (cropped)
In spite of the winner-take-all approach of JEDI, Babb indicated that the agency will continue to work with multiple cloud vendors no matter what happens. “DOD has and will continue to operate multiple clouds and the JEDI Cloud will be a key component of the department’s overall cloud strategy. The scale of our missions will require DOD to have multiple clouds from multiple vendors,” she said.
The DOD accepted final bids in August, then extended the deadline for Requests for Proposal to October 9th. Unless the deadline gets extended again, we’re probably going to finally hear who the lucky company is sometime in the coming weeks, and chances are there is going to be lot of whining and continued maneuvering from the losers when that happens.
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California is ‘launching our own damn satellite’ to track pollution, with help from Planet
California plans to launch a satellite to monitor pollution in the state and contribute to climate science, Governor Jerry Brown announced today. The state is partnering with satellite imagery purveyor Planet to create a custom craft to “pinpoint – and stop – destructive emissions with unprecedented precision, on a scale that’s never been done before.”
Governor Brown made the announcement in the closing remarks of the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, echoing a pledge made two years ago to scientists at the American Geophysical Union’s 2016 meeting.
“With science still under attack and the climate threat growing, we’re launching our own damn satellite,” Brown said today.
Planet, which has launched hundreds of satellites in the last few years in order to provide near-real-time imagery of practically anywhere on Earth, will develop and operate the satellite. The plan is to equip it with sensors that can detect pollutants at their point sources, be they artificial or natural. That kind of direct observation enables direct action.
Technical details of the satellite are to be announced as the project solidifies. We can probably expect something like a 6U CubeSat loaded with instruments focused on detecting certain gases and particulates. An orbit with the satellite passing across the whole state along its north/south axis seems most likely; a single craft sitting in one place probably wouldn’t offer adequate coverage. That said, multiple satellites are also a stated possibility.
“These satellite technologies are part of a new era of environmental innovation that is supercharging our ability to solve problems,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. “They won’t cut emissions by themselves, but they will make invisible pollution visible and generate the transparent, actionable, data we need to protect our health, our environment and our economies.”
The EDF is launching its own satellite to that end (MethaneSAT), but will also be collaborating with California in the creation of a shared Climate Data Partnership to make sure the data from these platforms is widely accessible.
More partners are expected to join up now that the endeavor is public, though none were named in the press release or in response to my questions on the topic to Planet. The funding, too, is something of an open question.
The effort is still a ways off from launch — these things take time — but Planet has certainly proven capable of designing and launching on a relatively short timeframe. In fact, it just opened up a brand new facility in San Francisco dedicated to pumping out new satellites.
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Twitch updates security for its TwitchCon event following the Jacksonville esports shooting
Twitch is today announcing changes to its security procedures for its TwitchCon event taking place in San Jose, California on October 26-28. The update follows news of the tragic shooting at an esports event in Jacksonville, Florida last month where three people died, including the shooter, and 11 were injured. Twitch said it would review its procedures as a result, and would soon have more information about what it’s doing to keep attendees safe.
Today, the company shared those plans.
Our highest priority at TwitchCon is attendee safety and security. We want to assure you that we are adding additional security measures on top of past event measures. We will have more detailed information on TwitchCon security in the coming days so stay tuned!
— TwitchCon 2018 (@TwitchCon) September 12, 2018
According to Twitch, it’s working with San Jose’s local law enforcement, convention staff and additional security services on the event.
The conference will include bag searches and screenings at designated entrance points, and attendees will be limited to carrying just one bag.
The bag can be no larger than 12” x 15” x 6”, the company says.
Backpacks, luggage, large bags and bulky clothing will not be allowed. In addition, backpacks acquired at the show — even those that are Twitch-branded — will not be eligible for re-entry. There will be an on-site bag check available, but the company suggests that larger bags be left at home as space will be limited.
It says small fanny packs or clear bags will help attendees move through the security checkpoints faster.
Meanwhile, exhibitors will only be able to hand-carry their products and display materials in oversized bags and rollers before 8 AM on show days — that way there won’t be a way for people to bring in large bags when the event is underway.
Press will also have to wear their press badges, and crews that need to carry their large camera equipment will need to be approved.
Of course, the event has a no weapons policy as well, and anyone in violation will be removed without refund.
Badges must be worn at all times, and an ID or passport needs to be on hand, as well.
At first glance, the updated procedures don’t seem remarkably different from Twitch’s earlier policies.
The company’s security plan before Jacksonville had also included bag searches, walk-through or hand-held scanners, the use of uniformed guards, ID checks and the wearing of badges.
The biggest on-record change appears to be the backpack ban.
However, we understand the reference to Twitch’s closer work with law enforcement services and the “additional security services” is a reference to other changes that may not have been fully detailed. (We’d guess this is likely because Twitch doesn’t want to provide too much information to anyone trying to workaround its security procedures.)
The annual TwitchCon event brings together the Twitch community to play games, watch live esports, participate in hackathons and cosplay contests, attend sessions and hear from the company about what’s next for the live game-streaming service.
Last fall, for example, Twitch unveiled a new set of tools at TwitchCon that would allow creators to make money from their online channels.
However, the events in Jacksonville have had many of TwitchCon’s regular attendees concerned about event safety.
After all, the video game competition, taking place at the GLHF Game Bar in Jacksonville, Florida, had been live-streamed on Twitch when the shooting happened. Would a copycat try to get into Twitch’s conference?, some have wondered.
According to reports, the Florida shooter had been upset about losing two games of Madden earlier in the tournament, even refusing to shake hands with the winner after one game. Despite a history of mental illness, the shooter had been able to legally acquire his weapons. It wasn’t clear how he got them into the Jacksonville bar.
Sadly, mass shootings in the U.S. have now taken place at schools, movie theaters, churches, concerts, workplaces — even at YouTube — and elsewhere. But they had not yet before occurred at an esports event.
The tragic event brought attention on the esports industry as a whole, which still sits somewhere outside of mainstream attention, despite Twitch having more than 2 million broadcasters and 15 million viewers who tune in daily to watch.
We are shocked and saddened by the tragedy that took place in Jacksonville today. Twitch and all its staff send our deepest sympathies to the victims, their loved ones, and everyone in our community who’s grieving today.
— Twitch (@Twitch) August 26, 2018
Shortly after the tragedy, Twitch said it would make changes.
“Security at TwitchCon is our top priority and is something we take very seriously at all our events,” the company told TechCrunch in August. “We regularly review and iterate on our policies and approach in order to provide a safe and positive experience for staff, attendees, and exhibitors. In the wake of yesterday’s tragedy we will be re-reviewing our plans and updating them accordingly,” a spokesperson had said at the time.
The updated plans for TwitchCon are detailed on Twitch’s blog and its FAQ.
Image credit: Twitch
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Drone startup Airware crashes, will shut down after burning $118M
Drone operating system startup Airware today suddenly informed employees it will cease operations immediately despite having raised $118 million from top investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Google’s GV, and Kleiner Perkins. The startup ran out of money after trying to manufacture its own hardware that couldn’t compete with drone giants like China’s DJI. The company at one point had as many as 140 employees, all of which are now out of a job.
A source sent TechCrunch screenshots from the Airware alumni Slack channel detailing how the staff was told this morning that Airware would shut down.
Airware makes a cloud sofware system that helps enterprise customers like construction companies, mining operations, and insurance companies reviewing equipment for damages to use drones to collect and analyze aerial data. That allowed companies to avoid using expensive helicopters or dangerous rigs with humans on harnesses to make inspections and gauge work progress.
One ex-employee asked “How do I get my options sent to me on paper so I can burn them all in a fire?
”
Founded in 2011 by Jonathan Downey, the son of two pilots, Airware first built an autopilot system for programming drones to follow certain routes to collect data. It could help businesses check rooftops for damage, see how much of a raw material was coming out of a mine, or build constantly-updated maps of construction sites. Later it tried to build its own drones before pivoting to consult clients on how to most efficiently apply unmanned aerial vehicles.
While flying high, Airware launched its own Commercial Drone Fund for investing in the market in 2015, and acquired 38-person drone analytics startup Redbird in 2016. In this pre-crypto, pre-AI boom, Airware scored a ton of hype from us and others as tried to prove drones could be more than war machines. But over time, the software that shipped with commercial drone hardware from other manufacturers was good enough to make Airware irrelevant, and a downward spiral of layoffs began over the past two years, culminating in today’s shutdown. Demonstating how sudden the shut down is, Airware opened a Tokyo headquarters alongside an investment and partnership from Mitsubishi just four days ago.
“Airware was ahead of the game trying to build their software. So far ahead that the drone hardware on the market wasn’t sophisticated enough to actually produce the granularity of data they needed to test out their software/train their algorithms” an ex-employee told TechCrunch (emphasis ours). “So they spent shitloads of money designing bespoke hardware, including two drones in-house, one multi-rotor called an AT-28, and one fixed-wing called Cygnet. Both projects were scuttled as hardware from DJI and Ebee caught up to needs, after sinking tons of engineering time and manufacturing into them.”
Following TechCrunch’s inquiry about the unnannounced news, Airware confirmed the shut down to us with this statement:
“History has taught us how hard it can be to call the timing of a market transition. We have seen this play out first hand in the commercial drone marketplace. We were the pioneers in this market and one of the first to see the power drones could have in the commercial sector. Unfortunately, the market took longer to mature than we expected. As we worked through the various required pivots to position ourselves for long term success, we ran out of financial runway. As a result, it is with a heavy heart that we notified our team, customers, and partners that we will wind down the business.
This is not the business outcome we had worked so hard for over the years and yet we are deeply proud of our company’s accomplishments and our leadership in driving the adoption of drone powered analytics to improve productivity, mitigate risks, and take workers out of harm’s way.
As we close the book of Airware; we want to thank the partners and customers who believed in us and helped us along the way. And, while it is difficult to say goodbye to our team, we want to thank them for all they have contributed to Airware and the industry. We look forward to seeing how they will take their learnings from Airware to fuel continued innovations in the world around us.”
[Update: Since we broke the news, Airware has put up a “thank you” note about the shutdown informing clients that “A representative from the Airware team will be in touch.”]
An Airware-hardware equipped drone
Employees will get one week’s severance, COBRA insurance until November, and payouts for unused paid time off. It appears the startup wasn’t able to raise necessary funding to save the company or secure an acquisition from one of its strategic partners like Catepillar.
Airware will serve as cautionary tale of startup overspending in hopes of finding product-market fit. Had it been more frugal, saved cash to extend its runway, and given corporate clients more time to figure out how to use drones, Airware might have stayed afloat. Sometimes, even having the most prestigious investors can’t save a startup from mismanagement.
Our ex-employee source concludes that “I think having $118M in the bank led Airware to charge ahead and sink tons of money into force-it-to-work methods rather than exercise a bit of patience and wait for the inevitable advance of hardware to catch up. They had a knack for hiring extremely talented and expensive people from places like Google, Autodesk, there was even SpaceX and NASA alumni there.
They spared no expense ever.”
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