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Mira launches a device for more accurate fertility testing in the home
Mira, launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, is a new device that aims to help women who are struggling to conceive. The Mira Fertility system offers personalized cycle prediction by measuring fertility hormone concentrations in urine samples, telling women which days they’re fertile. The system is more advanced and accurate than the existing home test kits, the company claims, which can be hard to read and aren’t personalized to the individual.
The company behind Mira, Quanovate, was founded in late 2015 by a group of scientists, engineers, OBGYN doctors, and business execs to solve the problem of the unavailability of advanced home health testing.
“I have a lot of friends who, like me, [prioritized] their career advancement and higher education, and they tended to delay their maternal age,” explains Mira co-founder and CEO Sylvia Kang. “But there’s no education for them about when to try for a baby, and they have no awareness about their fertility health,” she says.
Kang received an MBA at Cornell Johnson, went to Columbia for an MS in Biomedical engineering and received at PhD in Biophysics from University of Pittsburgh, before working as a Business Director at Corning where she was responsible for $100 million in global P&L, which she left to start Mira.
She says that women’s hormones are changing daily, and everyone’s profiles differ due to their lifestyle, stress levels and other factors. The only way to accurately track fertile days, then, is through continuous testing – something that’s been difficult to do at home.
To solve this problem, the team worked to develop the Mira system, which includes a small home analyzer, urine test strips, and an accompanying mobile application. The home analyzer miniaturizes lab equipment for home use, and brings down the cost.
To use the system, the woman places the test strip into the device which then uses immunofluorescence technology to read the results. Currently, the device tests for the presence of luteinizing hormone (LH), which is an indicator of ovulation. However, the company has already has plans to update the device so it can test for other hormones in the near future. (It’s FDA-cleared to detect estrogen, for example, but that won’t be available at launch.)
The system instead is $199 and ships with 10 test strips. After analyzing the strip, information about the hormone levels is displayed on the screen and sent to the Mira app via Bluetooth.
The app offers women more information about what this data means – like whether they should attempt to conceive today or wait. A subscription service will also offer them access to doctors so they can ask questions, but this will be free at launch.
“This technology is completely different from all the test strips on the market. It’s more accurate, but more importantly, this one is quantitative – that means we give you your actual, formal concentrations,” says Kang. “The [existing] tests strips only give you positive or negative. Since we have your numbers, our A.I. can do pattern recognition. Our algorithm prediction is based on your pattern specifically, not the average of all the population.”
What this means, in practice, is that women struggling to conceive will have more accurate, more actionable, and more personalized results with Mira. During a clinical trial with 400 patient samples, Mira reached 99 percent accuracy, compared with lab equipment, the company says. They also have 18 IPs covering hardware, software, database management and more, including utility patents and models, design patents, trademarks and copyrights.
The company is now working on a portal for doctors, so they could access their own patients’ data for further analysis. Mira may also eventually make its collected data, once anonymized, available to researchers, as well. But Kang says no formal decisions have been made on that front yet.
Longer-term, Kang explains that the same system can be adapted to track pregnancy and menopause, and eventually similar technology could be put to use for analyzing other conditions, like those related to kidney problems or the thyroid.
The Pleasanton, Calif.-based company, is currently a team of 36 and has raised $4.5 million from investors including Gopher Ventures, and two other cross-border investors Mira doesn’t want to disclose publicly.
At Disrupt, the company announced the Mira device is now available for pre-order and will begin shipping in October 2018.
It’s sold online via the Mira website, but is in discussions with doctors and retailers to broaden its availability going forward.
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Kadho debuts Kidsense A.I., offline speech-recognition tech that understand kids
Kadho, a company building automatic speech recognition technology to help children communicate with voice-powered devices, is officially exiting stealth today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 where it’s launching its new technology, Kidsense Edge voice A.I. The company claims its technology can better decode kids’ speech as it was built using speech data from 150,000 children’s voices. The COPPA-compliant solution, which is initially targeting the voice-enabled devices and voice-enabled toys market, is already being used by paying customers.
As anyone with an Echo smart speaker or Google Home can tell you, today’s devices often struggle to understand children’s voices. That’s because current automatic speech recognition technology has been built for adults and was trained on adult voice data.
Kidsense.ai, meanwhile, was built for kids using voices of children from different age groups and speaking different languages. By doing so, it believes it can outperform the big players in the market like Google, Samsung, Baidu, Amazon, and Microsoft, when it comes to understanding children’s speech, the company says.
The company behind the Kidsense AI technology, Kadho, has been around since 2014, and was originally founded by PhDs with backgrounds in A.I. and neuroscience, Kaveh Azartash (CEO) and Dhonam Pemba (Chief Scientist). Chief Revenue Officer, Jock Thompson, is a third co-founder today.
Initially, the company’s focus was on building conversational-based language learning applications for kids.
“But the biggest pain point that we encountered…was that the devices that we were using or apps on – either mobile phones, tablets, robotics, or smart speakers – they’re not built to understand kids,” explains Azartash. He means the speech recognition technology wasn’t built on kids’ data. “They’re not designed to communicate or understand kids.”
The team realized there was a bigger problem to solve. Teaching kids new language using conversational techniques couldn’t work until devices could actually understand the kids. The company shifted to focus instead on speech recognition technology, using a data set of kids voices (which it did with parents’ consent, we’re told), to build Kidsense.
The initial product was a server-based solution called Kidsense cloud AI in late 2017. But more recently, it’s been working on an embedded version of the same platform, where no audio data from kids is collected, and no data is sent to cloud-based servers. This allows the solution to be both COPPA and GDPR-compliant.
This also means it could address the needs of device makers who have been previously come under fire for their less than secure toys and robotics, like Mattel’s Hello Barbie, or its canceled A.I. speaker Aristotle. The idea today is that toy makers, smart speaker manufacturers, and others catering to the kids’ market will need to be compliant with more stringent privacy laws and, to do so, the processing has to be done on the device, not the cloud.
“All the decoding, all the processing is one on the device,” says Azartash. “So we’re able to offer better efficacy and better accuracy in converting speech to text…the technology does not send any speech data to the server.”
“We’ve figured out how to put this all onto the device in an efficient way using minimal processing power,” adds Thompson. “And because we’re embedded we can charge a flat fee depending on the product anywhere to a subscription model.”
For example, a toy company working with thin margins on a product with a really small lifespan might want a flat fee. But another company may have a product with a longer lifespan that they charge their own customers for on subscription. They may want to be able to update their product’s voice tech capabilities over-the-air. That’s also possible here.
The company says its technology is in several toys, robotics, and A.I. speaker products around the world, but some of its customers are under NDA.
It’s also testing its technology with chip makers and big-name kids’ brands here in the U.S.
On stage, the company also showed off its latest development – dual language speech recognition technology. This is the first technology that can decode two languages in one sentence, when spoken by kids. This is an area smart speakers and their related voice technology are only now entering, within the adult market that is. For example, Google Assistant is preparing to become multilingual in English, French and German this year.
Currently, the company has approximately $1.2 million in revenue from customers on annual contracts and its SaaS model. It’s been operating in stealth mode, but is now preparing to reach more customers.
To date, Kadho has raised $2.5 million from investors including Plug and Play Tech Center, Beam Capital, Skywood Capital, SFK Investment, Sparks Lab, and other angel investors. It’s preparing to raise an additional $3 million before moving to a Series A.
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Lori Systems is launching a service with the Kenyan government for last-mile haulage from railroads
For Lori Systems chief executive and co-founder Josh Sandler, deals like the one between his company and the Kenyan government to solve last-mile solutions around the national railroad are about far more than just logistics.
Sandler, whose family battled apartheid in South Africa as social workers, township doctors and (more dangerously) as financiers for the Spear of the Nation (the armed wing of the African National Congress), looks at logistics as an economic cornerstone for building more stable and democratic societies in sub-Saharan Africa.
His parents had immigrated to the U.S. in 1990 when Sandler was still a young child to escape the violence that accompanied the negotiations to dissolve South Africa’s apartheid state. Sandler’s father had worked as a doctor in township hospitals, while his mother was a social worker who was setting up a support network for abused children.
“A lot of the family was getting arrested and the country was breaking up and people feared a civil war and my dad got a fellowship in America and moved to Florida,” Sandler says.
But South Africa remained the touchstone for Sandler’s family life and he would often return to visit those activist relatives who remained to help shepherd the country through its early years as a democracy. It was during one visit to the country — when Sandler was working in a refugee camp — that the need for better economic solutions to the region’s problems became clear.
In the aftermath of the economic collapse of Zimbabwe and the long-simmering civil war in the Congo in 2008, refugees from the region were flooding into South Africa — and it triggered a response in the country’s citizens. Xenophobic violence resulted in rioting, looting and the murder of immigrants at camps — and Sandler had gone to volunteer at the shelters that were caring for these refugees.
“I had been debating between investment banking and the peace corps and went with investment banking because there needs to be a macroeconomic solution for this,” Sandler said. “Finding the core challenges from a macro perspective and preventing this from occurring by establishing strong systems and an economy that can prevent… all of these crises.”
So Sandler studied development economics. His work focused on supply chains — specifically working with the Kenyan government to analyze what went into the dramatic cost increases that are attendant with the sale of every good and service in the country. “When you buy a mango on a farm, it’s half a penny and then in the supermarket it’s 80 cents,” said Sandler.
From Kenya, Sandler moved to study Nigeria and worked on problems with supply chain management in pharmaceuticals. “I did a lot of trips and treks back to the continent and what I kept seeing is challenges in the supply chain — part of it is middlemen and part of it is haulage.” Sandler said. “That’s a big issue that’s due to a lack of flexibility and coordination in the system.”
After seeing the elegance of the marketplace model that Uber had set up for ride-hailing and given the penetration of smart and feature phones in Africa, Sandler thought he could do something to create a marketplace for the trucking industry.
“Before, providers were managing individual trucking companies with a difficult marketplace and no transparency,” says Sandler. “By driving that through our system and having more pricing visibility we’re able to bring down the cost of bringing bulk grains to Uganda by 17.3 percent.”
Lori Systems first launched in Kenya and started working with a network of trucking companies. Around that time the company also came to the attention of TechCrunch.
Yes, Lori Systems has been on a TechCrunch stage before — as competitors (and eventual winners) of our inaugural TechCrunch Battlefield competition in Nairobi.
Since appearing on stage at our Nairobi event, Lori has grown quickly. The company counts 70 employees on staff — up from 20 — and now has 70 cargo operators responsible for a network of 2,500 trucks using its service.
The staffing changes at Lori include some big new executive hires, including Andrew Musoke, who has come on board as director of commercial products, and a former director of Maersk, Mehul Bhaat, who will be running operations in East Africa for Lori, Sandler says.
Lori has also expanded internationally — working with fleets in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa while also increasing the types of cargo that its fleet operators are transporting. “We went from just doing grain and fertilizer to now we do all freight bulk,” says Sandler.
Not everything about the TechCrunch experience was positive for Sandler and the company. After their victory, Lori, and Sandler, were subjected to criticism from some African press. “There were really bizarre implications with the underlying tone being white male privilege,” says Sandler. “It’s an important conversation to have around white male privilege… [but] it was coming out on a very personal level on a gossip column.”
The accusations aside, Sandler said the victory in the Startup Battlefield Africa competition validated the company with potential new hires.
As for the opportunity, Sandler says there’s $180 billion in hauling income across the African continent, and very little of it has been optimized with software. Ultimately, if Lori succeeds it will mean lower prices and increased spending power for consumers across Africa.
“If you’re earning a dollar a day and 40 percent or 60 percent is going to logistics that could be going somewhere else, that’s a problem,” Sandler said. It’s exactly the problem that Lori is setting out to solve.
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Robinhood aims at IPO as the fintech startup seeks CFO
Now valued at $5.6 billion, zero-fee stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange Robinhood is starting preparations to go public. Just a year and a half ago, it was still largely under the radar. But then it raised a $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation in April 2017 and then just a year later scored a $363 million Series D, both led by Russian firm DST Global. Combined with the growth of its premium subscription for trading on margin called Robinhood Gold, the startup now has the firepower and revenue to make a viable Wall Street debut.
Today during Robinhood CEO Baiju Bhatt’s talk at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, he revealed that his company is on the path to an IPO and has begun its search for a chief financial officer. It’s also undergoing constant audits from the SEC, FINRA and its security team to make sure everything is kosher and locked up tight.
The CFO hire could help the five-year-old Silicon Valley startup pitch itself as the cheaper youthful alternative to E*Trade and traditional stock brokers. They’d also have to convince potential investors that even though cryptocurrency prices are in a downturn, allowing people to trade them for cheaper than competitors like Coinbase is a powerful user acquisition funnel.
Robinhood now has 5 million customers tracking, buying and selling stocks, options, ETFs, American depositary slips receipts of international companies and cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum. That’s twice as many customers as its incumbent competitor E*Trade despite it having 4,000 employees compared to Robinhood’s 250.
The startup has raised a total of $539 million to date from prestigious investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Google’s Capital G, allowing it to rapidly roll out products before its rivals can react. This rapid rise in valuation can go to some founders’ heads, or crush them under the pressure, but Bhatt cited “friendship” with his co-CEO Vlad Tenev as what keeps him sane.
The startup has three main monetization streams. First, it earns interest on money users keep in their Robinhood account. Second, it sells order flow to stock exchanges that want more liquidity for their traders. And it sells Robinhood Gold subscriptions which range from $10 per month for $2,000 in extra buying power to $200 per month for $50,000 in margin trading, with a 5 percent APR charged for borrowing over that. Gold was growing its subscriber count at 17 percent per month earlier this year, showing the potential of giving trades away for free and then charging for extra services.
But Robinhood is also encountering renewed competition as both startups and incumbents wise up. European banking app Revolut is building a commission-free stock trading, and Y Combinator startup Titan just launched its app that lets you buy into a managed portfolio of top stocks. Finance giant JP Morgan now gives customers 100 free trades in hopes of not being undercut by Robinhood.
Over on the crypto side, Coinbase continues to grow in popularity despite its 1.4 percent to 4 percent fees on trades. It’s rapidly expanding its product offering and the two fintech startups are destined to keep clashing. Robinhood may also be suffering from the crypto downturn, which is likely dissuading the mainstream public from dumping cash into tokens after seeing people lose fortunes as Bitcoin and Ethereum’s prices tumbled this year.
There’s also the persistent risk of a security breach that could tank Robinhood’s brand. Meanwhile, the startup uses both human and third-party software-based systems to moderate its crypto chat rooms to make sure pump and dump schemes aren’t running rampant. Bhatt says he’s proud of making cryptocurrency more accessible, though he didn’t say he felt responsible for prices plummeting, which could mean many of Robinhood Crypto’s users have lost money.
Fundamentally, Robinhood is using software to make the common but expensive behavior of stock trading much cheaper and more accessible to a wider audience. Traditional banks and brokers have big costs for offices and branches, trading execs and TV commercials. Robinhood has managed to replace much of that with a lean engineering team and viral app that grows itself. Once it finds its CFO, that could give it an efficiency and growth rate that has Wall Street seeing green.
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CB Therapeutics’ lab-grown cannabinoids could unlock new medicines and make others affordable
Marijuana may still be on shaky legal ground, but the therapeutic benefits of the psychoactive molecules — cannabinoids — inside the plant are solidly established. Unfortunately, cultivation of that plant is resource-intensive and yields only tiny amounts of some useful medicines. CB Therapeutics, a new biotech company launching today at the Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, aims to change the game with cannabinoids produced cleanly and cheaply in the lab — out of sugar.
Co-founder and CEO Sher Ali Butt says the idea struck him when he was working at cannabis testing lab Steep Hill. CBD, a compound found in the plant but in much lower concentrations than THC, the primary intoxicant, was producing extremely helpful pain and anxiety alleviation for some people without a high. The medicinal possibilities were obvious, but high-CBD strains of cannabis are not only uncommon, but a pain to cultivate and process for that purpose.
“CBD had all these applications, and I just thought that there’s got to be a better way to do this. The idea just stuck in my brain,” he told me.
After working on the problem on and off for years he decided to pursue it in earnest. Serendipitously, around this time he ran into Jacob Vogan, an old friend from college who was working in the field of bioengineering. It seemed like a natural fit to them to start the company together.
What CB Therapeutics has done is bioengineer microorganisms — specifically yeast — to manufacture cannabinoids out of plain-old sugars. This type of bioreactor isn’t a new idea; yeast and other organisms are used to create and isolate lots of drugs and substances.
“The vitamin C that we take in tablets, for instance — they didn’t squeeze oranges and lemons to get that,” Butt points out. “There isn’t enough agriculture to supply the global demand. It was produced synthetically and put in a box.”
CB Therapeutics is just doing the same thing for cannabinoids, and not just CBD.
“There are 118 cannabinoids, and only five have been studied,” Butt says. “These compounds are like .1, .01, even .001 percent in the cannabis bud. When you want to extract these, a kilogram can be like $100,000 to $350,000. How is someone supposed to do research with that?”
But the yeast don’t care. They take in sugar and output whatever molecule their biosynthesis pathway has been modified to produce — within reason, of course. You couldn’t output large, complex non-organics, but cannabinoids — even the rare ones — are well within their capabilities.
“The only thing we need to add is sugar — that’s the beauty of what we’ve done,” Butt beamed. “The yeast platform is agnostic, it makes everything for the same price.”
This has several benefits. First, it can bring down the price of a known and useful cannabinoid like CBD. Second, it allows the rarer ones to be studied for a reasonable price, and eventually distributed as well. And third, it takes pressure off the agricultural component of the cannabis industry.
That last is not only good from an ecological perspective, since demand is growing and these plants require a lot of water and land, but from the health side as well. Butt points out that a huge majority of cannabis products tested are found to be contaminated to some degree with pesticides and other unwanted compounds.
It’s getting better as the marijuana industry becomes an above-board one, but the problem is far from eliminated, and at any rate pesticides and other potentially harmful chemicals don’t cease to be a nuisance just because something is legal. The risk is there for the foreseeable future that, ironically, the “natural” option of using the plant itself is going to produce more impurities in the product, not less. But the yeast don’t — can’t, really — taint the product. So what comes out of the bioreactor should theoretically be as pure as the driven snow. (CB Therapeutics does test it, of course.)
It’s worth noting that the company’s main intellectual property is is the cannabinoid biosynthesis pathway it has developed. That hadn’t been fully documented or explored, Butt says, until their work.
Butt sees this change as more or less just the latest example of a useful class of molecules going from difficult to relatively easy to acquire.
“When you aren’t able to provide for the demand, that makes prices artificially high. People are going out and spending tens of thousands on CBD, for medical applications,” he said. “Insulin used to be harvested from pig pancreases, then Genentech solved that. Aspirin used to come from tree bark. This is inevitable for many compounds. We need to bring the cannabis price down to where anybody can use it.”
The pricing and volume are still somewhat of a question mark — once testing and the regulatory hurdles are taken care of, like any pharmaceutical it’s going to be a moving target. But scaling production shouldn’t be hard should the demand grow, and the backlog of new cannabinoids to isolate for testing should provide a source of income as well.
Medicine can be a risky sector for startups but CB Therapeutics seems to have it as close to sewn up as one can reasonably expect; in a way it’s almost alchemical, this ability to cheaply produce something so valuable. But really, it’s just science.
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You can now use Alexa and Cortana to control your Xbox
You can now control the Xbox from Alexa and Cortana. Microsoft announced his morning it’s introducing a new way to interact with Xbox One using voice commands, by way of an Xbox Skill that works with both Alexa and Cortana, across platforms. The skill will allow users to launch games, adjust the volume, start and stop their broadcasts to Mixer, capture screenshots and more.
For example, players will be able to say to their Echo speaker, “Alexa, start Rocket League,” and the console would power on, sign them in, and launch the game.
To use the new feature with Alexa, players will first have to sign in with their Amazon account then link their Microsoft account to the skill. With Cortana, users will instead have to first sign into the Xbox they want to control, then sign in with their Microsoft account to link the skill on their Windows 10 PC.
They could then say something like “Hey Cortana, tell Xbox to open Netflix.”
Microsoft says the skill will work across a range of voice-powered devices, including Windows 10 PC, Amazon Echo devices, Harman Kardon Invoke, Sonos One, or the Cortana and Alexa apps for iOS and Android.
A full list of its commands will be posted to the Xbox Insiders Reddit.
The Xbox Skill, at launch, will be rolling out gradually to U.S. Xbox Insider rings (Alpha Skip Ahead, Alpha, Beta) as the company takes in feedback from its early adopters. To see if you have the option available, you’ll need to look in Settings –> Devices on your console to see if the “Digital Assistant” setting is visible.
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Fido Alliance adds a biometrics certification program to help fight spoofing
In a move aimed at upping standards across biometric user verification systems, the industry consortium, Fido Alliance, has launched a certification program for biometrics systems.
“The goal of the Biometric Certification Component Program is to provide a framework for the certification of biometric subsystems that can in turn be integrated into FIDO Certified authenticators,” it writes on its website.
While biometric verification systems such as fingerprint readers have been pretty widely adopted in the mobile space already — with Apple introducing its fingerprint biometric, Touch ID, to the iPhone a full five years ago; followed, last fall, by a facial recognition biometric (Face ID) for its high end iPhone X — the Alliance says that, up to now, there hasn’t been a standardized way to validate the accuracy and reliability of biometric recognition systems in the commercial marketplace. Which is where it’s intending the new certification program to come in.
While few would doubt the robustness of Apple’s biometrics components (and testing regime), the sprawlingly diverse Android marketplace hosts all sorts of OEM players — which inevitably raises the risk of some lesser quality components (and/or processes) slipping in.
And in recent years there have been plenty of examples of poorly implemented biometrics, especially in the mobile space — with hackers easily able to crack into various Android devices that were using facial or iris recognition technology in trivially bypassable ways.
In 2017, for example, Chaos Computer Club members used a print out of an eye combined with a contact lens to fox iris scanners on the Samsung Galaxy S8. And that was one of the most sophisticated biometric hacks. Others have just required a selfie of the person to be held up in front of a ‘face unlock’ system to get an easy open sesame.
Where the not-for-profit Alliance comes in — an industry group whose board includes security exec reps from the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, among others — is it’s on a mission to reduce reliance on passwords for digital security because they inject friction into the online experience.
And biometrics do tend to be convenient, given they are attached to each person. Which is why they have been increasingly finding their way into smartphones and all sorts of other consumer electronics — from wearables to car tech, helped by component costs shrinking as biometrics adoption grows.
But it’s no good trying to speed up ID verification if the alternatives being reached for are badly implemented — and end up actively damaging security.
It certainly doesn’t have to be that way.
Apple’s biometrics are not so easily mocked. And while Touch ID is vulnerable to spoofing, like pretty much any fingerprint reader, its depth-mapping Face ID tech is by far the most sophisticated biometric implementation in the consumer electronics space to date. And hasn’t been meaningfully hacked (well, barring attacks by identical twins/strikingly similar looking family members).
So there’s clearly a world of difference (and, well, cost) between a well architected biometric recognition system which puts security considerations front and center, vs the awful sloppy stuff we’ve seen in recent years — where OEMs were just rushing to compete.
Biometrics has certainly often been treated more as a convenience gimmick for device marketing purposes, rather than viewed as a route to evolve (and even potentially enhance) device security.
The Alliance’s certification program is using accredited independent labs to test that biometric subcomponents meet what it dubs “globally recognized performance standards for biometric recognition performance and Presentation Attack Detection (PAD)” — and thus that they are “fit for commercial use”.
PAD refers to various methods that can be used to try to attack and circumvent biometric systems, such as using silicon or gelatine fingerprints, or deploying harvested facial or video imagery of the device owner.
So it looks like the Alliance’s hope for the program is to ‘upskill’ biometric implementations — or at least weed out the really stupid stuff.
“For customers, such as regulated online service providers, OEMs and enterprises, it provides a standardized way to trust that the biometric systems they are relying upon for fingerprint, iris, face and/or voice recognition can reliably identify users and detect presentation attacks,” it writes.
Speed is another goal too, as it says prior to this certification program due diligence was carried out by enterprise customers (or at least by those “who had the capacity to conduct such reviews”) — which required biometric vendors to repeatedly prove performance for each customer.
Whereas going forward vendors can use the program to test and certify just once to validate their system’s performance and re-use that third-party validation across the market — gaining what the Alliance bills as” substantial time and cost savings”.
Commenting in a statement, Brett McDowell, executive director of the Alliance, said: “While border control and law enforcement markets have mature assessment programs for their biometric systems, we were surprised that no such program existed for this rapidly growing consumer market.”
“With biometrics being a popular option for mobile and web applications implementing Fido Authentication, there is a growing need for those service providers to appropriately assess the risk of fraud from lost or stolen devices,” he added.
Asked whether the program had been introduced in response to particular concerns about weak consumer biometrics — given some of the aforementioned examples of poor implementations — McDowell also told us: “With the rise of any new technology, there’s a risk that some suppliers may over emphasize visible features at the expense of security considerations as they rush to market.
“This program, motivated by our online services community, mitigates that risk for mobile and desktop biometrics by providing a commercial-grade benchmark and independent lab assessment for performance features and spoof attack detection security considerations. Another benefit of the program is a clear way for service providers to prove compliance with strong authentication regulation, which is becoming the norm for financial services. This trend is expected to expand to other sectors as passwords continue to be exploited at increasingly alarming rates.”
Currently only one lab has been accredited to perform components testing for the program.
The lab, iBeta, is located in the U.S. but a spokeswoman for the Fido Alliance told us: “The Alliance is actively working to bring in additional labs.”
She added that the Alliance will update this list as more are added.
This post was updated with additional comment from McDowell
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Microsoft commits to fixing custom apps broken by Windows 10 upgrades
Microsoft wants to make life easier for enterprise customers. Starting today, it is committing to fix any custom applications that may break as a result of updates to Windows 10 or the Office 365 product suite.
Most large companies have a series of custom applications that play a crucial role inside their organizations. When you update Windows and Office 365, Murphy’s Law of updates says one or more of those applications is going to break.
Up until this announcement when that inevitably happened, it was entirely the problem of the customer. Microsoft has taken a huge step today by promising to help companies understand which applications will likely break when you install updates, and working to help fix them if it ultimately happens anyway.
One of the reasons the company can afford to be so generous is they have data that suggests the vast majority of applications won’t break when customers move from Windows 7 to Windows 10. “Using millions of data points from customer diagnostic data and the Windows Insider validation process, we’ve found that 99 percent of apps are compatible with new Windows updates,” Microsoft’s Jared Spataro wrote in a blog post announcing these programs.
To that end, they have a new tool called Desktop Deployment Analytics, which creates a map of your applications and predicts using artificial intelligence which of them are most likely to have problems with the update.
“You now have the ability with the cloud to have intelligence in how you manage these end points and get smart recommendations around how you deploy Windows,” Spataro, who is corporate vice president of Microsoft 365, told TechCrunch.
Even with that kind of intelligence-driven preventive approach, things still break, and that’s where the next program, Desktop App Assure, comes into play. It’s a service designed to address any application compatibility issues with Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus. In fact, Microsoft has promised to assign an engineer to a company to fix anything that breaks, even if it’s unique to a particular organization.
That’s quite a commitment, and Spataro recognizes that there will be plenty of skeptics where this program in particular is concerned. He says that it’s up to Microsoft to deliver what it’s promised.
Over the years, organizations have spent countless resources getting applications to work after Windows updates, sometimes leaving older versions in place for years to avoid incompatibility problems. These programs theoretically completely remove that pain point from the equation, placing the burden to fix the applications squarely on Microsoft.
“We will look to make changes in Windows or Office before we ask you to make changes in your custom application,” Spataro says, but if that doesn’t solve it, they have committed to helping you fix it.
Finally, the company heard a lot of complaints from customers when they announced they were ending extended support for Windows 7 in 2020. Spataro said Microsoft listened to its customers, and has now extended paid support until 2024, letting companies change at their own pace. Theoretically, however, if they can assure customers that updating won’t break things, and they will commit to fixing them if that happens, it should help move customers to Windows 10, which appears to be the company’s goal here.
They also made changes to the standard support and update cadence for Windows 10 and Office 365:
All of these programs appear to be a major shift in how Microsoft has traditionally done business, showing a much stronger commitment to servicing the requirements of enterprise customers, while shifting the cost of fixing custom applications from the customer to Microsoft when updates to its core products cause issues. But they have done so knowing that they can help prevent a lot of those incompatibility problems before they happen, making it easier to commit to this type of program.
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Origami Labs shows off its voice-powered smart ring
Origami Labs wants to bring voice assistants right to your ear without requiring you to wear a device like a Bluetooth headset or Apple AirPods. Instead, the startup is using a ring on your finger combined with bone conduction technology to allow you to use your smartphone’s built-in assistant – whether that’s Google Assistant or Siri – in an all-new way.
Origami Labs’ device is the Orii, a smart ring that works with an app on your phone, allowing you to physically touch your finger to your ear to either speak to or listen to your voice assistant.
This involves the use of bone conduction technology, which allows you to hear sounds through the vibration of bones in your face, bypassing the outer and middle ears to stimulate the inner ear directly.
That means you can use Orii to do things like listen to your text messages, send a WhatsApp message to a friend, take a phone call, get information like the time or weather, use reminders, or anything else that Siri or Google Assistant could do.
The ring alerts you with a vibration, then you listen (or speak to its microphone) by raising your finger to your ear.
The company presented its device on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 today, after winning a “wildcard” spot that allowed it to enter the Startup Battlefield competition.
The Hong Kong-based startup was founded by Marcus Leung-Shea and Kevin Wong in 2015.
Wong’s father is visually impaired, which makes using a smartphone more difficult.
“That’s where we got started – just to create a device that helps visually impaired people,” Marcus explains. “But through building the product and launching a Kickstarter, it became clear that this screen-free way of interacting with technology is something that actually a lot of people are looking for. It taps into this sense that we’re spending too much time looking at our devices,” he says.
With other Bluetooth devices, like AirPods, there’s a limit to how long they can be worn comfortably.
Plus, there’s the aesthetics to consider – not everyone wants to be seen wearing their AirPods all the time, out of a sense of style. AirPods and other Bluetooth devices in the ear are also often used as a signal others that you don’t want to be bothered.
Meanwhile, using the assistant through the speaker on the phone isn’t very private.
The startup ran crowdfunding campaigns last year to raise its initial seed round. On Kickstarter, the Orii had 4,000 backers – enough to prove there’s at least some consumer interest in this kind of product, the founders believe.
The first version of the Orii is shipping to its early backers who paid $99 to $150 for the device. It’s a bit large, in comparison to even costume rings, but that’s a solvable problem at scale. A second version of the device, shipping in Q2 2019, will be about 25 percent to 30 percent smaller, Marcus says. This one will come in different colors and enable new features. The company is also working on Alexa integration.
Orii has generated some interest from businesses and consumers. Specifically, luxury hotels and retailers want to test the product as a team communication system because they don’t want their staff looking at screens, which could come across as rude.
Mobile operators in Hong Kong, where the 14-person team is based, are also interested in selling Orii as a bundle with their phones. But all these discussions are in the early stages, Marcus notes.
Origami Labs is backed by its crowdfunding and seed investment from the Alibaba Entrepreneurs Seed Fund.
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Secretive semiconductor startup Groq raises $52M from Social Capital
Groq has raised $52.3 million of a $60 million round, per an SEC filing. Social Capital co-founder and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, who’s listed on the filing, has participated in the funding.
Presumably, Palihapitiya’s investment came from Social Capital; the firm, which has been experiencing a boatload of personnel changes as of late, led Groq’s $10 million investment in April 2017.
Groq is developing a tensor processing unit — which is an integrated circuit developed for machine learning specifically. There’s not much other info out there; the company doesn’t have much of a website or any promotional materials available for public viewing.
In addition to Palihapitiya, two other names are listed on the most recent filing. That’s the company’s CTO Jonathan Ross, who spent about five years as a hardware engineer at Google and co-founded the search giant’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which is responsible for its custom ML chip.
The other name is Douglas Wightman, a former software engineer at Google. His LinkedIn profile says he’s Groq’s CEO.
Palihapitiya has spoken publicly about the project before, telling CNBC last year that he was “really excited about Groq.”
“It’s too early to talk specifics, but we think what they’re building could become a fundamental building block for the next generation of computing,” he said.
The company has reportedly poached several people from Google’s TPU team.
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