Monday, 30 April 2018

Twitter announces new video partnerships with NBCUniversal and ESPN

Twitter is hosting its Digital Content NewFronts tonight, where it’s unveiling 30 renewals and new content deals — the company says that’s nearly twice as many as it announced last year.

Those include partnerships with the big players in media — starting with NBCUniversal, which will be sharing live video and clips from properties including NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC and Telemundo.

Twitter also announced some of the shows it will be airing as part of the ESPN deal announced earlier today: SportsCenter Live (a Twitter version of the network’s flagship) and Fantasy Focus Live (a livestream of the fantasy sports podcast).

Plus, the company said it’s expanding its existing partnership with Viacom with shows like Comedy Central’s Creator’s Room, BET Breaks and MTV News.

During the NewFronts event, Twitter’s head of video Kayvon Beykpour said daily video views on the platform have nearly doubled in the past year.

“Twitter is the ultimate mobile platform where video and conversation share the same screen,” said Kay Madati, the company’s head of content partnerships.

As Twitter continues to invest in video content, it’s been emphasizing its advantage in live video, a theme that continued in this year’s announcement.

“Twitter is the only place where conversation is tied to video and the biggest live moments, giving brands the unique ability to connect with leaned in consumers who are shaping culture,” said Twitter Global VP of Revenue and Content Partnerships Matthew Derella in a statement. “That’s our superpower.”

On top of all the new content, Twitter is also announcing new ad programs. There are Creator Originals, a set of scripted series from influencers who will be paired up with sponsored brands. (The program is powered by Niche, the influencer marketing startup that Twitter acquired a few years ago.) And there’s a new Live Brand Studio — as the name suggests, it’s a team that works with marketers to create live video.

Here are some other highlights from the content announcements:

  • CELEBrate, a series where people get heartwarming messages from their idols from Ellen Digital Studios.
  • Delish Food Day and IRL from Heart Magazines Digital Media
  • Power Star Live, which is “inspired by the cultural phenomenon of Black Twitter” and livestreamed from he Atlanta University Center, from Will Packer Media.
  • BuzzFeed News is renewing AM to DM until the end of 2018.
  • Pattern, a new brand focused on weather- and science-related news.
  • Programming the Huffington Post (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon/Oath), History, Vox and BuzzFeed News that highlights women around the world.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/twitter-newfronts/



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WhatsApp Co-Founder Leaving Facebook’s Board Amid User Data Disputes

Jan Koum’s exit is the highest-profile departure from Facebook after months of controversy at the social network. A company executive said security of user data was behind Mr. Koum’s decision.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/technology/whatsapp-facebook-jan-koum.html?partner=rss&emc=rss



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Video: Larry Harvey and JP Barlow on Burning Man and tech culture

Larry Harvey, founder of the counterculture festival Burning Man, passed away this weekend. He was 70.

Harvey created a movement and contributed to the flowering both of counter-culture and, ultimately, of tech culture.

Both he and John Perry Barlow, who also passed in February this year after a long period of ill health, were huge advocates of free speech. Barlow wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, and then became a digital rights activist in later life.

In 2013 I caught up with both of them and recorded a joint 24 minute interview, just a short walk from the venue for the ‘Le Web London’ conference.

Amid the street noise and the traffic, they discussed some of the intellectual underpinnings of startup entrepreneurship and its parallels with Burning Man, in what might have been their first-ever joint interview.

We went over early computer culture, and how there was a “revolutionary zeal in the notion of intellectual empowerment” in Psychedelia which found common cause in tech culture.

We present for you once again, this iconic interview, in memory of these great men.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/video-larry-harvey-and-jp-barlow-on-burning-man-and-tech-culture/



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WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum confirms he’s quitting Facebook

“It is time for me to move on . . . I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee” WhatsApp co-founder, CEO, and Facebook board member Jan Koum wrote today. The announcement follows The Washington Post’s report that Koum would leave due to disagreements with Facebook management about WhatsApp user data privacy and weakened encryption. Koum obscured that motive in his note that says “I’ll still be cheering WhatsApp on – just from the outside.”

Koum sold WhatsApp to Facebook for in 2014 for a jaw-dropping $19 billion. But since then it’s more than tripled its user count to 1.5 billion, making the price to turn messaging into a one-horse race seem like a steal. But at the time, Koum and co-founder Brian Acton were assured that WhatsApp wouldn’t have to run ads or merge its data with Facebook’s. So were regulators in Europe where WhatsApp is most popular.

A year and a half later, though, Facebook pressured WhatsApp to change its terms of service and give users’ phone numbers to its parent company. That let Facebook target those users with more precise advertising, such as by letting businesses upload list of phone numbers to hit those people with promotions. Facebook was eventually fined $122 million by the European Union — a paltrey sum for a company earning over $4 billion in profit per quarte. But the perceived invasion of WhatsApp user privacy drove a wedge between Koum and the parent company.

You can read Koum’s full post below. We’ll have more analysis shortly.

It's been almost a decade since Brian and I started WhatsApp, and it's been an amazing journey with some of the best…

Posted by Jan Koum on Monday, April 30, 2018

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/jan-koum-quits-facebook/



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Covee uses blockchain to allow experts worldwide to collaborate

Solving complex data-driven problems requires a lot of teamwork. But, of course, teamwork is typically restricted to companies where everyone is working under there same roof. While distributed teams have become commonplace in tech startups, taking that to the next level by linking up disparate groups of people all working on the same problem (but not in the same company) has been all but impossible. However, in theory, you could use a blockchain to do such a thing, where the work generated was constantly accounted for on-chain.

That’s in theory. In practice, there’s now a startup that claims to have come up with this model. And it’s raised funding.

Covee, a startup out of Berlin has raised a modest EUR 1.35m, in a round led by LocalGlobe in London with Atlantic Labs in Berlin and a selection of Angels. Prior to this, the company was bootstrapped by CEO Dr Marcel Dietsch, who left his job at a London-based hedge fund, and his long-time friend, Dr Raphael Schoettler, COO, who had previously worked for Deutsche Bank. They are joined by Dr Jochen Krause, CTO, an early blockchain investor and bitcoin miner, and former quant developer and data scientist, respectively, at Scalable Capital and Valora.

What sort of things could this platform be used for? Well, it could be used to bring together people to use machine learning algorithms to improve cancer diagnosis through tumor detection, or perhaps develop a crypto trading algorithm.

There are obvious benefits to the work of scientists. They could work more flexibly, access a more diverse range of projects, choose their teammates, and have their work reviewed by peers.

The platform also means you could be rewarded fairly for your contribution.

The upside for corporates is that they can use distributed workers where there is no middleman platform to pay, no management consultancy fees, and access a talent pool (data engineers, statisticians, domain experts) which is difficult to bring inside the firm.

Now, there are indeed others doing this including Aragon (decentralised governance for everything), Colony (teamwork for everything), and Upwork (freelance jobs platform individuals). All are different and have their limitations of course.

Covee plans to make money by having users pay a transaction fee for using the network infrastructure. They plan to turn this into a fully open-source decentralised network, with this transaction fee attached. But Covee will also offer this as a service if clients prefer not to deal with blockchain tokens and the platform directly.

Dietsch says: “Covee was founded in the first half of 2017 in Berlin and relocated to Zurich, Switzerland late 2017 where we incorporated Covee Network. Moving to Switzerland was important for us because it has one of the oldest and strongest blockchain ecosystems in the world and an excellent pipeline of talent from institutions such as ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. The crypto-friendly stance of the country means it has all the necessary infrastructure as well as clear regulations for token economies.”

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/covee-uses-blockchain-to-allow-experts-worldwide-to-collaborate/



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Senate Democrats plan to push rollback of FCC’s new net neutrality rules in May

One of the several ways opponents of the FCC’s new net neutrality rules plan to push back is to use the Congressional Review Act to nix the Commission’s order before it has a chance to take effect. Although Democrats in the Senate are currently one vote short of success, they plan to force the vote soon anyway, perhaps as early as mid-May.

As explained in other posts about the steps that can be taken to combat the unpopular Restoring Internet Freedom order, the CRA allows for a quick vote on whether to roll back a recently established regulation. The current administration used it a great deal to undo later Obama-era rules, but now the shoe is on the other foot — partially, anyway.

So far Senate Democrats have a total of 50 votes, including that of Republican Susan Collins — much more than required to force a vote but one short of the 51 needed to pass the resolution. And even if it did passed, its chances of passing in the House are even smaller, and after that, it would be DOA on the President’s desk.

But as many have pointed out, the goal isn’t just to roll back the rules, but to get everyone on Congress to weigh in on the record whether they support the new rules or not. This will be critical to making net neutrality an issue in the 2018 midterms.

Hopes that another Republican Senator will voluntarily cross the aisle seem to have petered out, and so Democrats are reportedly planning to press the button on May 9, after which procedural step it could be as little as a week before the vote actually takes place. Politico and Fight for the Future reported the date, which was not disputed by a Senator’s aide I contacted. The latter is organizing a bit of online activism around the CRA, which you can follow here.

As for the rules themselves, it’s not clear when they’ll actually take effect — they did not, as I erroneously wrote a week ago and as some regulations would have, come into play on April 23. They are under consideration by the Office of Budget and Management and won’t be official until it has provided its stamp of approval.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/senate-democrats-plan-to-push-rollback-of-fccs-new-net-neutrality-rules-in-may/



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Discovering that deckhands make great waiters — and why this matters

Breakthroughs in HR tech are not only giving employers game-changing tools with which to enhance processes and attract the best talent, they’re also solving longstanding labor gremlins, such as gender pay parity and blind hiring. At the same time, they’re giving employees novel means by which to accrue and auto-tag prequalifying skill sets for job scenarios far beyond their current positions. But there are opportunities in matching current/future employee needs with what employers can offer.

In January, Gartner projected that HR tech would drive growth in worldwide IT spending in 2018. I’ve spent the last few months better understanding the landscape, so I’m better-positioned to gauge how the cards will fall. I interviewed 10 leaders in human resources — thanks to people like Jan Fiegel (SideWalk Labs), Parker Barille (former VP Product LinkedIn), Cindy Cordon (Policy Genius). Here’s what I gleaned.

First, let’s clarify misconceptions

HR tech is a huge space

Yes. It will be, but it is still not that big today. The global HR tech industry is estimated at $400 billion, but investments are sensitive to economic shifts. Deal activity in HR tech has increased steadily since 2012, or 175 percent from 2012 to 2016, as shown in the chart below. But investment dollars peaked at $2.4 billion in 2015. In 2016, there were 402 deals worth approximately $2.2 billion in funding, and 2017 closed out with about $1.1 billion in funding for HR tech companies.

Source: CB Insights

Diving in deeper, current spend on HR is small compared to most other functions within a company. For example, while the global HR software market is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.4 percent, reaching $9.2 billion by 2022, Gartner shows Customer Relationship Management (CRM) at a $36.5 billion worldwide market in 2017.

But, the venture opportunity with HR tech will grow over time, fueled by social pressures, by industry need for data and efficiency, and to rise above in a competition for top talent.

HR benefits platforms are the next big thing

A new workforce generation is driving exciting use cases for HR benefits platforms. Companies are hatching creative perks for employees, such as adopting progressive health plan “plus” platforms like Robin Care or LUCY, a service for employees with families, whose motto proclaims that it “helps employees love the family they grow and grow the career they love.”

But platforms like these could potentially be on the chopping block if recessions strike. A change of mindset and a saturation threshold will need to be reached for employers to accept these as “indispensable” employee needs and not just exotic perks for the millennial crowd. That said, I’m cautiously bullish on these platforms and would love to see them succeed.

We have some ways to go before HR benefits platforms prove sticky in the post-recession era. According to a Bloomberg BNA report, HR department budgets grew ~4-7 percent annually before the Great Recession, just 2 percent in 2009 and have only semi recovered to a 4 percent annual growth rate. Sustained market growth will be key to ensuring that value-added platforms become the new normal.

What still rings true

Companies still want better candidate assessment tools

LinkedIn only works for mid to senior-level hires. For fresh college grads and junior white-collar workers, it is hard to go off a traditional resumé because experience can be unconventional at best. It’s why companies like Portfolium and Strive Talent are finding creative ways to showcase skills and are boycotting traditional experience-based resumés. HireVue has a video-based assessment system that can literally read candidates’ faces and assess their honesty and the quality of their answers.

HR by VR (and AR) combines immersive experiences with efficiency, and there have already been significant investments in the space this year. Israeli startup ActiView, which has developed VR technology for assessing job applicants, raised $6.5 million in a Series A financing round from Teddy Sagi Group. AllyO, a provider of AI recruiting technology, raised a $14 million round.

Companies want to know what software to use

As the number of HR tech companies grows — just take a look at this HR tech landscape by Silicon & Salsa — companies at times struggle with the overabundance of choice. A platform to find your best tech solution, like the Salesforce AppExchange, is a gap in the market to help companies navigate options. TechnologyAdvice is a good start, but the UI is not friendly or intuitive.

Imagine an enviable world in which employees have all the support they need to achieve the pipe dream of work/life balance. 

Beyond just picking the best-in-class app, there needs to be a data sync across different platforms to improve predictors around candidate attributes and future churn. With companies targeting segments of HR tech, there’s a clear need for an overarching data record system that can enable big data analysis across platforms.

HR staff spend too much time recruiting new employees

On average, the interview process spans 24 days in the U.S. Automation is key to decreasing the amount of time existing employees spend courting a candidate and interviewing, and there are platforms addressing these time-intensive tasks, as well as others.

The recruiting landscape is crowded, but ripe for experimentation with feature/benefit creep. Companies like LearnUp are not only helping companies schedule interviews and prep for them, they’re also adding to their platform skills-building lessons and job-coaching resources. Taking it one step further, companies like madeBOS are creating economic mobility for entry-level workers in retail and adjacent sectors by empowering employees to drive their own development, saving valuable HR staff time.

Matching skills to jobs for blue-collar workers enables high performance

When a restaurant recruits wait staff, they typically look for people who have worked at other restaurants. The same is true in retail. In finance, we always caveat previous performance or experience by indicating that it is not indicative of future performance. And this reliance on the past couldn’t be more misguided in hiring hourly employees, because it is the skills that matter — speed, good interpersonal skills, memory (for orders), etc.

If you were able to match skill sets only, a deckhand makes a great waiter. LA-based Talytica boasts an ability to assess cognitive ability, personality, strong career interests and specific job skills in the hourly talent management space, theoretically resolving this critical disconnect.

Imagine an enviable world in which employees have all the support they need to achieve the pipe dream of work/life balance. Or one in which candidates are sifted by skill and not the biases associated with background, gender or ethnicity. These are just two of the tectonic benefits HR tech can deliver across the board, connecting dots and leaving bare why certain deckhands could make exquisite waiters. Having explored this vertical, it’s clear to me that HR tech platforms are the surest way to yield the unquestioned must-haves the market now demands on both sides. It now remains to be seen which companies can deliver on engagement and codify this season’s visionary investment choice into the industry’s “new normal.”

Are you an entrepreneur with a fresh take on HR tech? Reach out and tell me more.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/discovering-that-deckhands-make-great-waiters-and-why-this-matters/



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Spam filters and AI help figure out what animals do all day

The pond-dwelling Hydra is not a very complex little animal but it does have a complex repertoire of moves that aren’t clear until after extensive human observation. Examining these moves took a long time and scientists were never sure that they had seen all of them. Now, thanks to an algorithm used to catch spam, researchers have been able to catalog all of the Hydra’s various moves, allowing them to map those moves to the neurons firing in its weird little head.

“People have used machine learning algorithms to partly analyze how a fruit fly flies, and how a worm crawls, but this is the first systematic description of an animal’s behavior,” said Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. “Now that we can measure the entirety of Hydra’s behavior in real-time, we can see if it can learn, and if so, how its neurons respond.”

Luckily, the little Hydra was pretty predictable. From the report:

In the current study, the team went a step further by attempting to catalog Hydra’s complete set of behaviors. To do so, they applied the popular “bag of words” classification algorithm to hours of footage tracking Hydra’s every move. Just as the algorithm analyzes how often words appear in a body of text to pick out topics (and flag, for example, patterns resembling spam), it cycled through the Hydra video and identified repetitive movements.

Their algorithm recognized 10 previously described behaviors, and measured how six of those behaviors responded to varying environmental conditions. To the researchers’ surprise, Hydra’s behavior barely changed. “Whether you fed it or not, turned the light on or off, it did the same thing over and over again like an Energizer bunny,” said Yuste.

The system used to map the Hydra’s reactions can be used to map more complicated systems. The researchers essentially “reverse-engineered” the Hydra and may be able to use the technique to “maintain stability and precise control in machines, from ships to planes, navigating in highly variable conditions.”

“Reverse engineering Hydra has the potential to teach us so many things,” said Shuting Han, a graduate student at Columbia.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/spam-filters-and-ai-help-figure-out-what-animals-do-all-day/



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DNC launches tech marketplace for Democratic candidates

The Democratic National Committee is trying to help Democrats regain the pole position as the tech-savviest political party in the U.S.

After getting Trumped in the 2016 election (pwned on security, data analysis, and at the polls), the DNC is launching I Will Run a marketplace for software, services and training to upgrade the campaigns of Democratic candidates.

Announced today by Sally Marx, the tech program manager for the DNC, the new marketplace will have a host of tech tools that campaigns can use to get off the ground, manage their progress, and ensure easy outreach to voters.

A profusion of political services have sprung up in the months since Donald Trump took the Presidency. Energized technology developers (on the whole a pretty left-leaning bunch) tuned in to politics, turned on new services and (in some cases) dropped out of their careers at high profile shops like Google, Facebook, and other Bay Are behemoths to join the political circus — or at least build tools for it.

“[We’ve] heard repeatedly from candidates and campaign staff that they are unsure what tools are out there, and simultaneously feel as if they are being fed too much information by vendors,” says Marx. “On the other hand, many of these innovators are not always reaching campaigns effectively  –  some state parties and campaigns, therefore, are in the dark about some of the innovative new technology that they should know about. And, finally, we’ve been in touch with funders and supporters who want to boost the progressive tech ecosystem, but aren’t clear on where those opportunities are.”

The marketplace, which Marx writes is explicitly for Democratic campaigns is a curated compilation of tools used by campaigns and tools tested by DNC-funded case studies.

One of the companies already on the platform is the secure messaging service, Wickr, which has been working with campaigns from both parties to secure their communications. Wickr’s one of around 56 companies and non-profits that are listed on the site in one of six categories: digital (which is crazy general), finance, research, security, training organizations, and voter outreach.

The DNC tech team will also use the site to coordinate training, volunteers and pricing for Democratic campaigns. They’re piloting the program in states like Nevada, Arizona, Washington, Texas, Florida, Massachusetts and Iowa.

For campaigns interested in seeing what wares I Will Run has on offer, the DNC tech team is taking its show on the road with a whistle-stop tour at DNC events so state parties and campaigns can demo the tech.

 

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/dnc-launches-tech-marketplace-for-democratic-candidates/



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DealBook: Sprint and T-Mobile Try Again, but Antitrust Hurdles Remain the Same

The two wireless carriers argue that a merger would benefit customers, but analysts, and our columnist, are skeptical about the deal’s chances

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/business/dealbook/sprint-t-mobile-merger-approval.html?partner=rss&emc=rss



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Creepy or Not? Your Privacy Concerns Likely Reflect Your Politics

A new study on surveillance finds that Republicans tend to feel pleased about tracking, both online and in real life, while Democrats often feel bad about it.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/technology/privacy-concerns-politics.html?partner=rss&emc=rss



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There’s something called Bacoin now

To paraphrase a saying popularized by countless dorm room stoners: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you use the hype around decentralized crypto economies sell bacon.” The latest example of this age-old adage comes to us from Oscar Meyer and involves their exciting new cryp-faux-currency, Bacoin.

The currency can be redeemed for bacon and you “mine” it by sharing the good news of bacoin with your friends. Instead of taking up massive amounts of electricity, the production of the final store of value – pig parts – requires only a massive agricultural system dedicated to the wholesale destruction of mammals that are as smart as dogs and, in the right context, quite cute. The end product, bacon, is considered by many to be far more interesting than anything Vitalik created. In short, it’s a win-win.

How does it work? It’s basically a sweepstakes. From the rules and regulations:

The value of the Bacoin is tied to overall sharing meaning that the more people who share via the Website (as outlined above), the higher the value of the Bacoin. If overall sharing is slow, the value of the Bacoin will decrease. If sharing is slow and the value of the Bacoin is low, Sponsor may increase value of Bacoin in its sole discretion. The current value of the Bacoin will be displayed on the Website. Once the Bacoin is at a value you want, follow the instructions to “cash out” and you will receive a coupon with the corresponding value (all possible values of the Bacoin coupon are outlined in Section 4 below).

The current value of a single mined bacoin is about 28 slices of bacon and the more you share the more you mine. Given that is is in no way a decentralized cryptocurrency and has nothing to do with anything technical at all I’m hard pressed to find a reason to post this here except to admire the sheer chutzpah of a company who knows exactly what breed of Reddit-loving bacon eater will jump at a chance to Tweet about pork products. To paraphrase another saying by my friend Nicholas Deleon: I hope the asteroid they promised comes for us all soon.

Bacoin. Yeah.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/theres-something-called-bacoin-now/



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Chinese government admits collection of deleted WeChat messages

Chinese authorities revealed over the weekend that they have the capability of retrieving deleted messages from the almost universally used WeChat app. The admission doesn’t come as a surprise to many, but it’s rare for this type of questionable data collection tactic to be acknowledged publicly.

As noted by the South China Morning Post, an anti-corruption commission in Hefei province posted Saturday to social media that it has “retrieved a series of deleted WeChat conversations from a subject” as part of an investigation.

The post was deleted Sunday, but not before many had seen it and understood the ramifications. TenCent, which operates the WeChat service used by nearly a billion people (including myself), explained in a statement that “WeChat does not store any chat histories — they are only stored on users’ phones and computers.”

The technical details of this storage were not disclosed, but it seems clear from the commission’s post that they are accessible in some way to interested authorities, as many have suspected for years. The app does, of course, comply with other government requirements, such as censoring certain topics.

There are still plenty questions, the answers to which would help explain user vulnerability: Are messages effectively encrypted at rest? Does retrieval require the user’s password and login, or can it be forced with a “master key” or backdoor? Can users permanently and totally delete messages on the WeChat platform at all?

Fears over Chinese government access to data held or handled by Chinese companies has led to a global backlash against those companies, including some countries (including the U.S.) banning Chinese-made devices and services from sensitive applications or official use altogether.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/chinese-government-admits-collection-of-deleted-wechat-messages/



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Majority of U.S. adults still think the internet is ‘mostly’ good for society – but that number is falling

A growing number of U.S. adults no longer view the internet as a largely “good thing” for society, according to a new report from Pew Research Center out today. To be clear, a sizable majority –  70 percent – continue to believe the internet’s development has been mostly good. But that number has dropped by 6 percentage points since 2014, the study finds. Meanwhile, more adults now perceive the internet – perhaps more accurately – as something of a mixed bag. That number has climbed from 8 percent in 2014 to now 14 percent, Pew says.

However, the group of those who believe the internet is mostly a “bad thing” for society hasn’t changed much over the years. Those who can’t see the upside to global connectivity, has gone from 15 percent in 2014 down to 14 percent in 2018, which isn’t a notable difference, statistically.

Pew attributes the decline in the positive sentiment to the reactions from older Americans, and particularly seniors who have come online in growing numbers in recent years. According to data released by Pew last May, for example, Americans 65 and older now account for 15 percent of the overall U.S. population. And by 2050, 22 percent of those 65 and older will be online.

Like most Americans, the large majority of the senior group still feels the internet is mostly a good thing – but that number has dropped 14 points from 78 percent in 2014 to 64 percent today.

In addition to seniors, a smaller number of younger U.S. adults today believe that the internet is “mostly good.” While again, that sentiment is still held by the large majority by far – 74 percent say this is their opinion – that number has fallen from 79 percent in 2014.

 

Pew’s report didn’t detail why more U.S. adults are increasingly ambivalent about the internet. Instead, it focused on the reasons cited by the group who claims it’s “mostly bad.” (Presumably, these sentiments are shared by those who now believe the internet isn’t mostly good.)

The adults who think the internet is “mostly bad” had a large list of grievances, as it turned out. And their top concerns are somewhat surprising.

A quarter of the internet’s naysayers cited its paradoxical ability to isolate people even as it connects them – saying it leads to people spending more time with devices instead of with other people.

16 percent mentioned the problems related to the spread of misinformation and fake news, and 14 percent were concerned about the effect the internet has on children. Another 13 percent said it encourages illegal activity.

Only a small share – 5 percent – were worried about their privacy and their personal information being shared online.

That small percentage focused data privacy concerns is interesting – especially in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, where the personal data of some 87 million Facebook users was hijacked without their knowledge or consent. Instead, Pew’s data seems to imply that people are generally more upset about the cultural and emotional impacts attributed to the internet, rather than having their personal data stolen or misused.

Maybe that’s because personal data has already been stolen time and time again, through security breaches at places like Yahoo, Equifax, Target, Home Depot, JP Morgan Chase, Anthem, and others. Or maybe it’s because users have a hard time identifying or understanding the real-world impacts of personal data breaches, unless it leads to some concrete changes – like identity theft or targeted harassment. Or maybe people already assume the days of personal privacy online are long dead, and just shrug their shoulders at new reports of yet another breach of trust with a fatalistic, “oh, who was it this time?”

In any event, it’s already been observed that the fallout from the Facebook scandal has been minimal, in terms of user behavior. There have been no sizable changes on that front, including user-initiated changes to privacy settings and sharing, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. In addition, Facebook just surprised investors by reporting continued user growth and beating earnings expectations.

Pew’s data supports the idea that more users seem to think – despite everything that’s happened – the internet is still mostly a good thing. And if there are concerns, they’re around its ability to lessen our connections to others – because we’re spending too much time online, fighting about information because we read different sources, or because we’re worried how it’s impacting our kids.

Meanwhile, those with a more positive take on the internet cited reasons like how it makes information much easier and faster to access (62% said this). 23 percent saw its networking benefits as a largely good thing – including connecting with others, and keeping up with friends and family.

Unrelated to perceptions about the internet, Pew also reported today that one-in-five Americans (20%) are now “smartphone only” internet users at home – meaning, they don’t subscribe to broadband. This is up 7 percent from 2015.

The figure is associated with those living in low-income (<$30K/year) households and those who are less likely to have attended college – it’s not some sort of reaction to concerns about the internet’s impact.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/majority-of-u-s-adults-still-think-the-internet-is-mostly-good-for-society-but-that-number-is-falling/



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The Pentagon is working on a radio wave weapon that stops a speeding car in its tracks

Vehicular terrorism is on the rise, but technology under development by the U.S. Department of Defense could save lives by disabling a weaponized car before it ever reaches its target. The Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWD) is working on a device called a Radio Frequency Vehicle Stopper to address the prevalence of vehicle-based attacks targeting civilians, Defense One reports.

To prevent this kind of violence and other kinds of vehicular attacks (an unauthorized car rushing behind a military security gate, for instance), the Pentagon’s Radio Frequency Vehicle Stopper points high powered microwaves at a vehicle, disabling its electrical components via the engine control unit and making the engine stall out. You can watch the technology in action in the Department of Defense video below.

As Defense One reports, the group is developing two version of its technology, one with a 50-meter range small enough to fit in a truck bed and another larger version with a range of more than a hundred meters designed to remain in place. The latter would particularly be useful in the kind of open public spaces that lend themselves to violent vehicular attacks in popular urban areas like markets and shopping hubs. This kind of technology is only becoming possible now due to breakthroughs in powering the concentrated beams emitted in these kind of notoriously energy-hungry weapons.

While vehicle-based attacks were once rarely observed outside of war-zones, they’ve occurred with increasing frequency in high-density urban areas and tourist destinations in recent years. As the attack in Toronto last week proved, the results are effortlessly deadly to unsuspecting pedestrians. It’s unfortunate that such a device is necessary at all, but if they were to become readily available, these Radio Frequency Vehicle Stoppers could discourage the rising trend of vehicular attacks, protect victims when they do occur and help law enforcement obtain additional intelligence by apprehending suspects without resorting to lethal violence.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/pentagon-radio-frequency-vehicle-stopper/



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Amazon exec Charlie Kindel says he’s leaving to take a serious break from ‘work’

Amazon is famous for its hard-charging work culture, and Charlie Kindel, an Amazon executive who helped shape the rise of Alexa, is ready to hit the pause button after a five-year stint with the company and three years with the team at work on the company’s smart home division.

Writing on his personal blog earlier today, Kindel shared the memo that his colleagues received last week to explain his decision. In a nutshell, Kindel told them, he’s burnt.

“The pace of the past 5 years has finally gotten to me and I simply need to catch my breath. I’ve recently been joking with folks that “I used to get my adrenaline rush going heli-skiing. Now I just go into work.” I have a car restoration project that is two years behind schedule. My home automation system needs a complete revamp (it’s gotten a bit crusty since it was installed in 2001).

I was originally just going to take a temporary leave, but I like the idea of having total freedom of thought to decide what’s next in my life. By making a clean break from Amazon all options (including coming back to Amazon) are still on the table.”

Kindel, who held a director level role at Amazon, said on his blog that his last day with the e-commerce juggernaut was Friday.

Before joining Amazon, Kindel had held the role Microsoft Windows Phone general manager. He has also dabbled in the world of startups, including starting a company called FreeBusy whose tool used artificial intelligence to generate mileage logs using users’ cloud-based calendars. That outfit has more recently evolved to center around an AI scheduling assistant.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/amazon-exec-charlie-kindel-says-hes-leaving-to-take-a-serious-break-from-work/



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Check out the latest featurette for Star Wars: A Solo Story

On May 25, the latest installment of the Star Wars theatrical franchise will drop in theaters.

Shooting Star Wars: A Solo Story hasn’t been all roses, with Ron Howard stepping in to take over for directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller and reshooting many scenes. But the show must go on!

Yesterday, Lucasfilm released a featurette with interviews from the cast and crew talking about the making of the film and Han Solo as a character.

The featurette also includes some new footage beyond what we’ve seen in the trailers, such as Han fighting alongside Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and Val (Thandie Newton), alongside previously teased scenes like the train heist on Vandor and the scene where Han Solo wins the Millenium Falcon from Lando (Donald Glover).

Central to the featurette, and the film in general, is that the story takes place in a type of world we haven’t seen yet on Star Wars, where the galaxy is completely under the control of the Empire, Howard reminds us. These circumstances push Han Solo, already a free spirit, to become the character we’ve come to know and love.

Check out the featurette below:

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/star-wars-han-solo-story-featurette/



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SoFi founder Mike Cagney is back with a new startup and $50 million in funding, too

Mike Cagney, who was ousted last summer from the lending company he founded, is back with a new startup and a whole lot of funding from at least one of his previous investors.

According to new report in Bloomberg, Cagney who earlier this year formed a new lending startup called Figure, has raised $50 million to grow the company, which plans to use the blockchain to facilitate loan approvals in minutes instead of days.

According to the company’s site, its lending products will include home equity lines of credit, home improvement loans and home buy-lease back offerings for retirement.

The round was led by DCM Ventures and Ribbit Capital and included participation from Mithril Capital Management, Cagney confirmed to Bloomberg.

Ribbit Capital in Palo Alto, Ca., has been leading investments in the world of fintech and digital currencies from nearly its founding nearly six years ago. Others of its many bets include the online consumer lending company Affirm and Point, a startup that buys equity in U.S. homes.

Mithril, cofounded by Peter Thiel, prides itself on funding companies that take time to build, with funds that have longer investing timelines than do most traditional venture vehicles.

The cross-border firm DCM Ventures, meanwhile, is perhaps the most interesting participant in this round. The reason: Back in 2012 DMC began investing in Social Finance, or SoFi, the company that Cagney founded previously.

It isn’t uncommon for VCs to invest in founders with whom they’ve worked before, of course. And SoFi — which initially focused on refinancing student loans but today provides personal and mortgage loans and wealth management services and appears to be pushing further into bank-like services — has grown by leaps and bounds since its August 2011 launch.

But Cagney was forced out of the company last summer, not long after a sexual harassment lawsuit was filed by a former employee who claimed he’d witnessed female employees being harassed by managers and was fired after he reported it.

Another former employer who’d worked at the company’s office in Healdsburg, Ca., told the New York Times that her work environment had been akin to a “frat house,” with employees “having sex in their cars and in the parking lot.” That same story, based on conversations with 30 then-current and former employees, also reported that Cagney himself had raised questions with staff because of his own behavior, including bragging about his sexual conquests.

Evidently, DCM and Figure’s other backers were able to brush aside concerns about anything of the sort happening again at Figure. (We’ve reached out to Cagney and Figure’s investors for more information and hope to have more for you soon.)

Employees are also signing up for Figure with the belief, ostensibly, that Cagney is well-positioned to create another financial services juggernaut. According to Bloomberg, Figure has already quietly assembled a team of 56 people. Among its new hires is the former chief risk officer of LendingHome, Cynthia Chen, and the former chief legal counsel of PeerStreet, Sara Priola.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/sofi-founder-mike-cagney-is-back-with-a-new-startup-and-50-million-in-funding-too/



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Google teams with NBC to build VR content for its TV shows

Virtual reality has yet to hit the big time with the vast majority of consumers — headset sales are still in the single-digit millions — but today Google and NBC announced a deal to make programming that could help the medium pick up some more mainstream appeal. The two said that they will be working together to produce at least 10 multi-episode VR productions that will run as extra content alongside core programming on NBC itself and its network of other channels.

Users can watch in VR on Google Cardboard or Daydream View, and it will also be hosted on YouTube for those not immersively inclined. Google said that it will also down the line make some of the content available on the VR180 format for 4K, three-dimensional video.

Initial programs that will get the VR treatment include NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” (which has already produced a selection of VR productions here, here, and here); reality show “Vanderpump Rules” from Bravo; and content from SYFY WIRE, the website for the Syfy TV channel.

With VR still a relatively young industry, and Google continuing to develop its own internal capabilities, there are a number of routes that can be taken to capture the experience. In this case, it looks like Google will be using the deal with NBC to promote and use Jump, its own platform for VR video capture that it first launched back in 2015.

We’ve asked Google if it can give more details regarding the business relationship with NBC, and we will update this post as we learn more. For now, it’s another opportunity for Google to develop more premium content — creating a new set of videos against which to sell advertising — and working alongside NBC Universal to help it also update its content for new and different audiences.

This is not the first time that NBC Universal has tried out content on VR: as one example it also worked with Intel and Oculus to bring Olympic content to headsets.

It’s also become a very standard part of TV programming to develop additional content that can be watched by fans alongside the core TV show, to help extend touch-points with an audience who may otherwise only be seen for 22 minutes each week, at best. VR presents another opportunity for that, too.

“We are constantly looking for opportunities to bring consumers new ways to experience content from across the NBCUniversal portfolio,” said Ron Lamprecht, Executive Vice President, NBCUniversal Digital Enterprises, in a statement. “This partnership combines the creative expertise of NBCUniversal with Google’s VR capabilities to create these engaging experiences. We look forward to working with Google and YouTube on more collaborations like this in the future.”

Google has also been looking for more ways to cosy up to premium content companies to develop content for its platforms, partly to secure those relationships for a future where it might find itself competing for a content-hungry VR audience, and partly to help try to create that audience today. Other partnerships have included deals with HBO and Netflix.

“NBCUniversal’s networks and shows have a proven track record of high-quality storytelling that audiences can’t get enough of. Bringing them to VR lets fans connect with that content in a whole new way,” said Amit Singh, VP of business and operations for VR and AR at Google, in a statement. “NBCU’s teams were able to easily capture engaging VR content using the latest VR Jump cameras. And with YouTube, audiences can experience it on any device, bringing them closer to their favorite series.”

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/google-teams-with-nbc-to-build-vr-content-for-its-tv-shows/



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Want to talk about the future? Join me on Technotopia

Technotopia is a podcast about the future. It assumes the world won’t fall into a dystopia and therefore is optimistic about our chances for human success. I’m looking for cool people to talk to and I’d like for you to join me.

I love guests who are are excited about the future and technology but I do not require a technology background. I want artists, writers, programmers, makers, and thinkers. I want to ask smart people why we shouldn’t despair.

Want to join in? Fill this out to schedule a time. PR people fill it out as if you were your client so I can contact them directly. I usually record a few episodes a week so I have a nice buffer during the month.

Before you come on:
1. Listen to at least one episode. You can check it out here.
2. Understand you are not pitching your company or project. This is a discussion about the future. No CMOs or PR people unless you also play a mean theremin.
3. The only question I really ask is “What will the world look like in 20 years?” Everything else stems from that. Be prepared for a conversation.
4. I prefer doers to marketers.
5. Please be energetic. I feed off of your energy. The worst podcasts are the ones where I get your in-booth pitch from whatever conference you just attended. The best ones are when you are ready and excited to talk about the future.

If you have any questions email me at john@techcrunch.com. Otherwise I’m looking forward to chatting with you.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/want-to-talk-about-the-future-join-me-on-technotopia/



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Facebook is trying to block Schrems II privacy referral to EU top court

Facebook’s lawyers are attempting to block a High Court decision in Ireland, where its international business is headquartered, to refer a long-running legal challenge to the bloc’s top court.

The social media giant’s lawyers asked the court to stay the referral to the CJEU today, Reuters reports. Facebook is trying to appeal the referral by challenging Irish case law — and wants a stay granted in the meanwhile.

The case relates to a complaint filed by privacy campaigner and lawyer Max Schrems regarding a transfer mechanism that’s currently used by thousands of companies to authorize flows of personal data on EU citizens to the US for processing. Though Schrems was actually challenging the use of so-called Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) by Facebook, specifically, when he updated an earlier complaint on the same core data transfer issue — which relates to US government mass surveillance practices, as revealed by the 2013 Snowden disclosures — with Ireland’s data watchdog.

However the Irish Data Protection Commissioner decided to refer the issue to the High Court to consider the legality of SCCs as a whole. And earlier this month the High Court decided to refer a series questions relating to EU-US data transfers to Europe’s top court — seeking a preliminary ruling on a series of fundamental questions that could even unseat another data transfer mechanism, called the EU-US Privacy Shield, depending on what CJEU judges decide.

An earlier legal challenge by Schrems — which was also related to the clash between US mass surveillance programs (which harvest data from social media services) and EU fundamental rights (which mandate that web users’ privacy is protected) — resulted in the previous arrangement for transatlantic data flows being struck down by the CJEU in 2015, after standing for around 15 years.

Hence the current case being referred to by privacy watchers as ‘Schrems II’. You can also see why Facebook is keen to delay another CJEU referral if it can.

According to comments made by Schrems on Twitter the Irish High Court reserved judgement on Facebook’s request today, with a decision expected within a week…

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Facebook’s appeal is based on trying to argue against Irish case law — which Schrems says does not allow for an appeal against such a referral, hence he’s couching it as another delaying tactic by the company:

Stripe expands its Atlas startup kit to let founders form LLCs

Payments company Stripe is today taking another step to expand its operations into a wider set of business services, targeting the startups that form its core base of customers.

Today, the company is announcing that Atlas, the all-in-one service Stripe started two years ago to help founders incorporate in Delaware, can now be used to set up Delaware-based limited liability companies.

As with the C-Corp set-up, Atlas for LLCs costs $500, which includes forming new entity, getting a tax ID, getting a U.S. business bank account and Stripe account, access to expert tax and legal advice, tools for handling taxes, and credits with a number of services; as well as access to the Stripe Atlas Community for networking and extra resources.

Stripe is running a waiting list now for the beta, which should start in the next couple of weeks.

Alongside C-Corps, LLCs are another primary business format that technology founders use when building their companies. They are often the route that a company takes if it’s initially thinking that it will not raise money from outside investors or start small, or just doesn’t want to take the leap initially into a future scenario for the company where a C-Corp structure might be needed.

As Patrick McKenzie, who works on Atlas for Stripe, notes, the benefits for those who know they might not be raising externally right away is that founders have limited liability, there are less tax filings and other housekeeping needs. LLCs are used for holding companies, and small business like restaurants.

The idea here is that the LLC has now been optimised by Stripe specifically for the smaller tech company. This includes the ability to assign IP to the company, to be able to add team members after formation, and crucially to be able to convert the company to a C-Corp if and when you need to. (You can also use Stripe for this, and the cost again is kept low, starting at $500.)

“Startups are continuous creation machines, running experiments and rearchitecting themselves on the fly. Legal choices often force startups to predict the future: is this a side project or the next Google?” said McKenzie. “We think that some founders stop because they aren’t certain yet. So we sought to give founders more options to just get started.”

Stripe first launched Atlas two years ago as a toolkit for startups — initially those from outside the US, and then including US startups too — to set themselves up quickly as Delaware corporations, an essential first step before they can start to raise money. It eventually added more nuanced tools, such as the ability to issue shares.

Stripe does not release exact user numbers but estimates that 20 percent of technology companies that currently incorporate as C Corporations in Delaware are using Stripe Atlas to do so, underscoring how the company’s push into services adjacent to payments — an important way for Stripe to increase its margins and improve its loyalty with users — is coming good.

Stripe was valued at over $9 billion when it last raised money, a $150 million round 2016.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/stripe-expands-its-atlas-startup-kit-let-founders-form-llcs/



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Google brings Nvidia’s Tesla V100 GPUs to its cloud

Google today announced that Nvidia’s high-powered Tesla V100 GPUs are now available for workloads on both Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine. For now, this is only a public beta, but for those who need Google’s full support for their GPU workloads, the company also today announced that the slightly less powerful Nvidia P100 GPUs are now out of beta and publicly available.

The V100 GPUs remain the most powerful chips in Nvidia’s lineup for high-performance computing. They have been around for quite a while now and Google is actually a bit late to the game here. AWS and IBM already offer V100s to their customers and on Azure, they are currently in private preview.

While Google stresses that it also uses NVLink, Nvidia’s fast interconnect for multi-GPU processing, it’s worth noting that its competitors do this, too. NVLink promises GPU-to-GPU bandwidth that’s nine times faster than traditional PCIe connections, resulting in a performance boost of up to 40 percent for some workloads, according to Google.

All of that power comes at a price, of course. An hour of V100 usage costs $2.48, while the P100 will set you back $1.46 per hour (these are the standard prices, with the preemptible machines coming in at half that price). In addition, you’ll also need to pay Google to run your regular virtual machine or containers.

V100 machines are now available in two configurations with either one or eight GPUs, with support for two or four attached GPUs coming in the future. The P100 machines come with one, two or four attached GPUs.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/google-brings-nvidias-tesla-v100-gpus-to-its-cloud/



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Halide’s iOS camera app now lets you strip the location data from your photos

Halide, the premium iOS camera app from ex-Apple designer Sebastiaan de With and Twitter engineer Ben Sandofsky is today launching one of its biggest upgrades since its arrival last year. The updated app includes a Self-Timer, redesigned photo reviewer, accessibility improvements, and more. But perhaps its best feature is the ability to take better control over your photo privacy – by pulling the location information out of your photos’ metadata before you share.

What has made Halide stand out from others was its combination of an attractive, gesture-based interface designed to simply the use of pro camera features. This made the app a great option for casual photographers and pros alike.

The existing app includes features like a manual focus dial, an intelligent automatic mode for getting the sharpest shot, RAW and JPG capture support, a grid and level tool, and live histogram.

Now the app is gaining a handful of other useful additions, like the new Apple Watch companion.

With the Apple Watch app installed, photographers can do things like remotely frame their shots, trigger Halide’s shutter and set timers. That way you can position your shot and then snap it, right from your wrist.

However, users without an Apple Watch can use the new Self Timer function instead. With this, you can set a timer of 3, 10 or 30 seconds. When activated, the shutter button stays depressed and you’ll see a countdown in the icon around the button itself.

The updated app also introduces a new photo reviewer. Users can now scroll through a grid of their shots, then flip back to the camera to snap more.

Accessibility improvements rolling out today include the addition of Dynamic and Bold Type and VoiceOver support. Halide’s creators note, too, that the 30-second timer was built with accessibility in mind – allowing users with more limited mobility a better way to take photos.

However, one of the app’s bigger changes is around photo privacy.

Many people don’t know (or forget to think about the fact) that our personal photos contain a lot of private data. Hidden in the photo file’s metadata is information about the camera, lens and flash settings, date and time, and the geolocation of the photos. That’s information that you may not want to share – especially if you’re planning to post the photo publicly to the web or on social media.

Halide now makes it simple to remove location data from the photo with the flip of a new toggle switch. And it can aid you with limiting the location sharing with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, too.

The company isn’t talking about download numbers, but says its app is now being used by over 100,000 people on a monthly basis, according to Apple’s opt-in analytics. (Halide doesn’t use third-party tracking.) That’s fairly decent number for a paid application serving the more niche pro consumer crowd.

“Considering we don’t pursue growth tactics like emails or push notifications, we’re incredibly proud of this,” says Sandofsky of the usage. “We think we’ve solved a genuine need for many people,” he adds.

Halide is a paid download ($5.99) on the App Store.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/halides-ios-camera-app-now-lets-you-strip-the-location-data-from-your-photos/



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Safaricom rolls out Bonga social networking platform to augment M-Pesa

When it comes to monetizing digital social interactions, Kenya’s Safaricom has its own order. American tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter offered social networks first, then moved to commercialize them.

Through its M-Pesa mobile money product, Safaricom built one of Africa’s most robust commercial webs and now aims to leverage it as a social network.

The vehicle is the company’s new Bonga platform, something Kenya’s largest telco rolls out in pilot phase this week. An outgrowth of the Safaricom’s Alpha innovation incubator, “Bonga is a conversational and transactional social network,” Shikoh Gitau, Alpha’s Head of Products told TechCrunch.

“It’s focused on pay, play, and purpose…as the three main things our research found people do on our payment and mobile network,” she said. Gitau offered examples: pay could be using M-Pesa and SMS to coordinate anything from tuition payments to e-commerce, play spans online sports betting to gaming, and purpose includes SMS or WhatsApp chat groups that raise money for weddings, holidays, or Kenya’s informal investment groups.

“In our [Bonga] research we’ve said ‘what can we do to build upon those three network behaviors in our network that is Safaricom?,’” she said.

I recently sat in on an Alpha product development session in Nairobi and talked to Safaricom CIO Kamal Battacharya on his vision for the product late last year, as reported at TechCrunch.

“Safaricom’s unique in that we have telco services and a financial services platform that connect nearly every household in Kenya largely on the basis of trade,” he said.

“We’d actually like to move beyond M-Pesa by leveraging its power as a social network to connect people to other product solutions.”

As a telco, Safaricom­—still  has 69 percent of the Kenya’s mobile subscribers. Its M-Pesa fintech app―which generated $525 million of the company’s $2 billion annual revenues―boasts 27 million customers across a network of 136,000 agents.

Through in-house development and partnerships, the company continues to add consumer and small business-based products to its mobile and fintech network. These include digital TV, the M-Kopa solar-powered lighting kit, and Lipa-Na bill pay service.

This week Safaricom will offer Bonga to a test group of 600 users, before updating the product, allowing the initial group to refer it to friends, and then extending the platform in three phases.

Bonga Sasa will facilitate messaging and money transfer between individuals, “enabling users to send or receive money while conversing with each other,” according to a Safaricom release. For example, through Bonga Sasa a parent can send money to the child without having to leave the platform to access another money transfer tool.

Bonga Baraza, expected in mid-2018, will allow users to collect money for purpose driven events, including Kenya’s harambee collective fundraising drives.

Bonga Biashara will build on this use of social networks for commerce. Digitizing Kenya’s extensive informal trading commerce is at play here. Alpha’s research found roughly “2.5 million people doing side-hustles with a smartphone in Kenya” and 12.5 million total running small businesses on smart and USSD devices, according to Gitau.

Bonga will channel Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, PayPal, and eBay in one platform. Users will be able to create business profiles parallel to their personal social media profiles and M-Pesa accounts and sell online. Bonga will also include space for Kenya’s creative class to upload, shape, and distribute artistic products and content.

As for Safaricom’s Bonga monetization plan, it’s not an immediate priority, according to the Alpha team members I spoke to. “We’ll offer it for free for now, and it’s connected to M-Pesa, which is already monetized,” said Gitau. “The more these services grow and grow small businesses the more they grow M-Pesa..which is already profitable.”

Safaricom is exploring how to take Bonga beyond Kenya’s borders, which could include markets where both M-Pesa and Vodafone are present: currently 10 in Europe, Africa, and South Asia.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/WorldRemit

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/safaricom-rolls-out-bonga-social-networking-platform-to-augment-m-pesa/



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Disrupt SF ‘18 super early bird prices disappear in three days

Don’t let procrastination drain your time and productivity — or your wallet. You have exactly three days left to save up to $1,800 on Super Early Bird pricing for Disrupt San Francisco 2018 — the premiere tech conference related to all things startup. Disrupt SF takes place September 5-7 at Moscone Center West, and it’s one of the most productive ways early-stage startup founders, investors and technologists can spend their time. How much you spend to get there is up to you. Get your tickets today.

This year we’re building out Disrupt SF 2018 to be our biggest Disrupt ever. Our new venue offers three times the floor space, which will accommodate more than 10,000 attendees including over 1,200 startups and exhibitors. You can expect three jam-packed days of programming across 14 tech tracks and some of the top tech titans, movers, shakers and speakers to grace the Disrupt stage.

We’re still finalizing our list of speakers, but here’s a prime example. Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe, and John Riccitiello of Unity will be joining us. Wojcicki’s an expert at pivoting and navigating the tricky waters of regulatory approval. And, according to DFJ Growth partner Barry Schuler, an investor in Unity, Riccitiello’s mobile gaming software company stands to become one of the most important technology companies of the next decade.

So many great speakers can’t help but generate the desire for more conversation, and that’s why we created Q &A Sessions. These are smaller, moderated panel discussions with curated questions from the audience. It’s the perfect opportunity to follow-up on any questions that came up during Main Stage interviews.

We’re taking Startup Battlefield to new heights this year, too. The best little startup pitch competition for launching your company on a global stage now boasts a grand prize of $100,000. What stopping you from applying? Do it right here, right now. Even better, you can use the same application process for Startup Alley and TC Top Picks.

If you want to exhibit your company in Startup Alley — and really, why wouldn’t you — there are two ways to exhibit and both require an application.

You can buy a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, which includes one exhibit day, three Disrupt SF Founder passes, access to CrunchMatch (our platform that makes it easy for investors and founders to meet), use of the Startup Alley exhibitor lounge, access to the Disrupt press list and a chance to be voted as a Startup Battlefield Wildcard.

The other way to get in the Alley is to be chosen as a TC Top Pick and receive one free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. TechCrunch editors will select a total of 60 startups — five from each of these 12 tech tracks: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail or Robotics.

Here’s a big media-exposure bonus: TC Top Picks also get a three-minute Showcase Stage interview with a TechCrunch editor and coverage across our social media platforms.

Be sure to sign up for alerts about how you can participate in our Virtual Hackathon. Join forces with thousands of tech developers, designers and dreamers from around the world and build something new to solve real-world problems.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place September 5-7. Why pay more than you have to for all of this amazing startup goodness? Early bird pricing flies away on May 3 — just three short days away. Get your tickets right here.

from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/disrupt-sf-18-super-early-bird-prices-disappear-in-three-days/



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