Month: June 2018

Honk Technologies, a marketplace for towing services for consumers and insurance companies, has raised $18 million in a new round of funding a little over a year after inking a massive contract with the insurance company, Farmers.

The investment was led by Altpoint Ventures, with participation from existing investors Structure Capital and Venture 51.

The company said it would use the funds to build on its network of 75,000 tow truckers and roadside assisters; and add new services for insurers, fleet managers and manufacturers. 

Company chief executive Corey Brundage declined to comment on the company’s revenue, path to profitability, or valuation in an interview.

Honk basically applies the same technology ride-hailing uses to the towing business, making trucks more responsive and slashing the time that a customer waits to get help when they need it, according to Brundage.

As we wrote last year, roadside assistance is a huge, fragmented market. According to the market research firm, IBISWorld, customers spend roughly $6 billion on roadside assistance services.

Customers call for a tow directly from HONK via mobile web or the company’s app to find a nearby professional and track the location and estimated time of arrival of their tow truck in real-time. Insurance companies, auto OEMs, and fleets use the company’s transparent platform to reduce wait times by over 50%, improve customer satisfaction, harness their roadside assistance data and receive industry leading net promoter scores, according to a statement.

Source: Tech Crunch

Microsoft’s facial recognition tools just made some significant technological strides, though the timing probably couldn’t be worse.

On Tuesday, the company revealed in a blog post that its Face API, part of Azure Cognitive Services, can now identify men and women with darker skin far more successfully than previous iterations of the technology. The updates particularly improve the system’s recognition capabilities for women with darker skin tones, reducing error rates for darker-skinned men and women by as much as 20 times and reducing error rates for all women by nine times.

Microsoft stated that it was able to “significantly reduce accuracy differences across the demographics” by expanding facial recognition training data sets, initiating new data collection around the variables of skin tone, gender and age and improving its gender classification system by “focusing specifically on getting better results for all skin tones.”

“The higher error rates on females with darker skin highlights an industrywide challenge: Artificial intelligence technologies are only as good as the data used to train them. If a facial recognition system is to perform well across all people, the training dataset needs to represent a diversity of skin tones as well factors such as hairstyle, jewelry and eyewear.”

Microsoft notes that it incorporated bias training, spearheaded by Microsoft Senior Researcher Hanna Wallach, who specializes in AI fairness, accountability and transparency. Another senior researcher involved in the effort focuses on bias in training data that can result in biased systems, like the “underrepresentation of darker skinned women that may lead to AI systems with unacceptable error rates on gender classification tasks.”

While the eradication of bias in tech systems is a noble cause, the potential surveillance and policing applications of facial recognition in particular gives many critics pause. Microsoft is currently facing a backlash for its relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), though the company opposed the border separation policy being enacted by the agency.

In January, Microsoft announced its intentions to move forward in contracting with ICE after securing an Authority to Operate (ATO) from the agency. The Face API within Azure Cognitive Services is part of a suite of tools offered in Azure Government contracts.

“This ATO is a critical next step in enabling ICE to deliver such services as cloud-based identity and access, serving both employees and citizens from applications hosted in the cloud,” Microsoft wrote in January.

“This can help employees make more informed decisions faster, with Azure Government enabling them to process data on edge devices or utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Audi is turning to Israeli startup Cognata to help the automaker validate its autonomous vehicles in the virtual world before they head out on the road for testing.

Autonomous Intelligent Driving, Audi’s self-driving unit led by a team of former Microsoft, Tesla and internal Audi veterans, says it will use Cognata’s autonomous vehicle simulation platform to test and develop its technology.

AID says the multi-year partnership will help it bring its self-driving vehicles to market faster. The partnership illustrates the demand for advanced simulation technology as companies race to safely develop and deploy autonomous vehicles.

“At AID, we are convinced that simulation is a key tool to increase our development speed and a necessary one for the validation of our product and for proving it is safe,” according to AID CTO Alex Haag, who had a brief stint at secretive self-driving startup Zoox and as a senior manager on Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot team.

The deal also highlights the growing ecosystem of Israeli startups, many of which developed technology initially designed for military use, such as drones and other defense applications, only to find a hungry customer base within the autonomous vehicle industry.

Cognata, which raised $5 million last year from Airbus Ventures, Emerge and Maniv Mobility, recreates cities in its 3D simulation platform to give customers a variety of testing scenarios. The platform pulls in layers of data to help build these virtual environments. It starts with recreating real cities, then adds AI-based traffic models to simulate real-world conditions, as well as data from the vehicle’s sensors.

Source: Tech Crunch

As there’s clearly too much ad revenue potential to ignore, Facebook today announced it’s reversing its cryptocurrecy ad ban effective immediately. The decision comes with a few caveats, however. The company says it will allow ads and related content from “pre-approved advisers,” but will still not allow ads promoting binary options and initial coin offerings.

Facebook had first enacted the ban in January, saying at the time that too many companies in this space were “not currently operating in good faith.”

While it admitted that banning all crypto advertising was a broad change, the company said that its new policy would “improve the integrity and security of our ads, and to make it harder for scammers to profit from a presence on Facebook.”

But it had also said the policy would be revisited over time, as its ability to protect deceptive ads improved.

Fast forward six months, and apparently Facebook is ready for the crypto ad onslaught yet again.

This time around, it’s making advertisers go through an application process to determine their eligibility. Facebook will ask advertisers to include on their applications details like what licenses they’ve obtained, whether they’re a publicly traded company, and other relevant background information regarding their business.

How thoroughly this information is fact-checked by Facebook staff remains unclear.

The company reminded users in the same announcement that they should continue to flag ad content that violates its guidelines. In other words, expect some bad ads to get through.

Facebook explains its new requirements will keep some crypto advertisers from being able to hawk their businesses on the social network, but adds that its policy in this area continues to be a work in progress.

“…We’ll listen to feedback, look at how well this policy works and continue to study this technology so that, if necessary, we can revise it over time,” says Rob Leathern, Product Management Director, in Facebook’s announcement.

Facebook’s original decision to ban crypto ads was followed by Google in March, when the company cited the “unregulated” and “speculative” nature of many of the advertised products. Its new policy begin this month. Twitter and Snap also have some policies around crypto ads, with Twitter only showing ads for exchanges and wallets provided by publicly traded companies and Snap allowing crypto ads but banning those for ICOs.

The crypto industry is rife with scams, so it makes sense that these major platforms would need some rules around what’s allowed. According to the FTC, consumers lost $532 million to cryptocurrency-related scams in the first two months of 2018, Coindesk reported on Monday. And an agency official warned that consumers will lose more than $3 billion by the end of the year.

Facebook says the full crypto ad ban is lifted today for approved advertisers.

Source: Tech Crunch

CarBlip, a new car-buying mobile application that’s aiming to compete with services like Wyper, has raised $2 million in a new round of financing.

The investment was led by Nordic Eye Venture Capital with participation from the startup studio and seed investment firm, Science.

CarBlip chief executive Brian Johnson said that the company’s main purpose was to bring the car-buying experience online.

“One of the main things about why we started CarBlip is we wanted to circumvent the in-person negotiation process and avoid the influx of calls that a buyer gets,” says Johnson. 

The user just downloads an app and looks for the brands they want that are available in an already geo-located area, Johnson said. Shoppers can submit bids on a vehicle privately and receive counter-offers via the app. Then, when they’re ready, they can head down to a dealership to move forward with the purchase, Johnson said.

While Johnson doesn’t have much auto experience himself (outside of marketing), co-founders Eric Brooks and Kim Lane both spent time in the car business, Johnson said. Brooks founded LA Car Connection, a local car dealership, while Lane spent more than a decade at Ford, according to the company’s website.

Like Wyper, CarBlip touts a Tinder -like interface that lets users swipe to select vehicles they’re interested in; what Johnson says differentiates his business is the ability to negotiate on the platform for the vehicle. It’s a feature that’s bound to attract interest from dealerships because they’re pretty much assured a sale, Johnson said.

“We loved the value proposition that they were signing up dealers directly,” said Richard Sussman, the managing partner for Nordic Eye in the U.S.

This post has been updated to indicate that CarBlip is selling new cars and Kim Lane is an executive in charge of business development. 

Source: Tech Crunch

Silicon Valley powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz has some big, and bigger, news today. First, it closed a dedicated crypto fund late last week from a subset of its limited partners, who’ve provided the firm with $300 million in capital commitments. The fund had become the worst-kept secret in the venture industry, largely because so many other venture firms are trying to figure out their own related strategies and have been watching closely AH’s slow but growing number of investments in crypto-related startups over the past five years.

Nine-year-old Andreessen Horowitz has also, at long last, brought aboard its first female general partner: Katie Haun, whose star has quietly been rising in the Bay Area over for the past couple of years. Haun, who is leading Andreessen’s crypto fund with general partner Chris Dixon (an early and unwavering advocate for cryptocurrencies), is kind of a big deal, so it’s no surprise that AH nabbed her.

Among her other many accomplishments, Haun spent more than a decade as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, where she focused on fraud, cybercrime, and corporate compliance no-no’s alongside the SEC, FBI, and Treasury. According to Haun’s bio, she was also the DOJ’s first-ever coordinator for digital assets, and she led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and the task force that investigated and ultimately took down the online drug marketplace Silk Road. Haun is also a lecturer at Stanford Business School and she’s a director on the board of the digital exchange Coinbase, which was backed early on by AH and where Haun got to know Dixon, who is also on the board. (Both are keeping their seats.)

We talked with both Haun and Dixon earlier today to learn more about the fund, including how they’re thinking about “exits” in the cryptocurrency world when there haven’t been a whole bunch (yet). Our conversation has been edited lightly for length.

TC: You’ve raised $300 million from some of the same investors who fund Andreessen Horowitz’s flagship funds. Will this fund in any way impact the next flagship fund? Does the firm intend to spend more time on crypto and less on other, more traditional investments?

CD: No, we’re still full-speed ahead on all traditional areas. The fund is way for us to double down on crypto and not in any way reduce our commitment to enterprise, consumer, or bio investing.

TC: Can this new fund invest in other crypto funds, as Union Square has been actively doing?

CD: It could, but we don’t plan to. We invested in Polychain and a few others about one-and-a-half years ago when we were figuring out our new crypto strategy. Now, with the full fund and investing in both early-stage and later-stage in crypto projects, the mandate is to be investing directly, though [we] never say never to anything.

TC: How many crypto investments has the firm made over the years, and will any of them be tucked into this new fund?

CD: We’ve made about 20 crypto investments over the last five years. [Bitcoin competitor] Ripple was my first investment in January 2013 and Coinbase later in 2013, then we did  21.co, which became Earn [and sold earlier this year to Coinbase]. We few others — OpenBazaar and Mediachain —  then the space got a lot more interesting with the rise of Ethereum and talented entrepreneurs entering the space. Those [investments] will remain in the funds where we put them in.

TC: Have you made investments from this new fund?

CD: We’re in process with a few, but nothing that’s finalized.

TC: How have you been structuring these investments?

CD: Some are equity investments, but with token provisions in investments [meaning if they create a token, investors get access to them]. SAFTs are another thing we’ve done. We’ve also done direct, over-the-counter purchases of Bitcoin and Ethereum. But we were running into limits with what we could do out of the main fund. Now we’ll be able to do all sorts of things, as long as [we’re talking with] great entrepreneurs working on big and important projects with economic terms that make sense.

TC: What’s an exit going to look like with these deals?

CD: it’s a good question. To date, we’ve never sold any of our crypto assets. A lot of people in the market are day trading but we very much see this as investing. We’d expect any investment to have a five- to ten-year holding period. Some of these projects could have tokens that are freely tradable, so there’s the potential to have an exit that way. The most likely outcome is we invest in an early-stage project and we receive coins or tokens in exchange for [our commitment] and if the project becomes successful, those digital assets appreciate when thesis is played out. But if we invest in some project that will be used by hundreds of millions of people, we wouldn’t want to exit until that’s realized.

TC: And I assume you will not be paying your investors back in tokens?

CD: No. We have LPs who prefer fiat money.

TC: How do you think about ownership stakes in these companies?

CD: The traditional venture model of owning 10 to 20 percent of company isn’t realistic in this world. We do if a project is very early stage, the valuation should reflect that. But broadly, we’re thinking more in terms of value: can this investment be big enough that it returns the fund on its own? So we don’t think in terms of percentages but value. We think this next wave of companies could be 10 times as big [as their predecessors].

Source: Tech Crunch

A new report from the Intercept sheds light on the NSA’s close relationship with communications provider AT&T.

The Intercept identified eight facilities across the U.S. that function as hubs for AT&T’s efforts to collaborate with the intelligence agency. The site first identified one potential hub of this kind in 2017 in lower Manhattan.

The report reveals that eight AT&T data facilities in the U.S. are regarded are high value sites to the NSA for giving the agency direct “backbone” access to raw data that passes through, including emails, web browsing, social media and any other form of unencrypted online activity. The NSA uses the web of eight AT&T hubs for a surveillance operation code named FAIRVIEW, a program previously reported by the New York Times. The program, first established in 1985, “involves tapping into international telecommunications cables, routers, and switches” and only coordinates directly with AT&T and not the other major U.S. mobile carriers.

AT&T’s deep involvement with the NSA monitoring program operated under the codename SAGUARO. Messaging, email and other web traffic accessed through the program was made searchable through XKEYSCORE, one of the NSA’s more infamous search-powered surveillance tools.

The Intercept explains how those sites give the NSA access to data beyond just AT&T subscribers:

“The data exchange between AT&T and other networks initially takes place outside AT&T’s control, sources said, at third-party data centers that are owned and operated by companies such as California’s Equinix. But the data is then routed – in whole or in part – through the eight AT&T buildings, where the NSA taps into it. By monitoring what it calls the ‘peering circuits’ at the eight sites, the spy agency can collect ‘not only AT&T’s data, they get all the data that’s interchanged between AT&T’s network and other companies,’ according to Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician who worked with the company for 22 years.”

The NSA describes these locations as “peering link router complex” sites while AT&T calls them “Service Node Routing Complexes” (SNRCs). The eight complexes are spread across the nation’s major cities with locations in Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. The Intercept report identifies these facilities:

“Among the pinpointed buildings, there is a nuclear blast-resistant, windowless facility in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood; in Washington, D.C., a fortress-like, concrete structure less than half a mile south of the U.S. Capitol; in Chicago, an earthquake-resistant skyscraper in the West Loop Gate area; in Atlanta, a 429-foot art deco structure in the heart of the city’s downtown district; and in Dallas, a cube-like building with narrow windows and large vents on its exterior, located in the Old East district.

… in downtown Los Angeles, a striking concrete tower near the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Staples Center, two blocks from the most important internet exchange in the region; in Seattle, a 15-story building with blacked-out windows and reinforced concrete foundations, near the city’s waterfront; and in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, a building where it was previously claimed that the NSA was monitoring internet traffic from a secure room on the sixth floor.”

While these facilities could allow for the monitoring of domestic U.S. traffic, they also process vast quantities of international traffic as it moves across the globe — a fact that likely explains why the NSA would view these AT&T nodes as such high value sites. The original documents, part of the leaked files provided by Edward Snowden, are available in the original report.

Source: Tech Crunch

Daguerreotypes – photos made with a process that used mercury vapors on an iodine-sensitized silvered plate – break down quite easily. The result is a fogged plate that, more often that not, is completely ruined by time and mistreatment. However, researchers at Western University have created a system that uses synchrotrons and “rapid-scanning micro-X-ray fluorescence imaging” to scan the plates for eight hours. The system shot an X-ray 10×10 microns thick at “an energy most sensitive to mercury absorption.” This, in turn, showed the researchers where the mercury

Kozachuk used r to analyze the plates, which are about 7.5 cm wide, and identified where mercury was distributed on the plates. With an X-ray beam as small as 10×10 microns (a human scalp hair averages 75 microns across) and at an energy most sensitive to mercury absorption, the scan of each daguerreotype took about eight hours. The team published their findings in Scientific Reports.

“It’s somewhat haunting because they are anonymous and yet it is striking at the same time,” said Madalena Kozachuk, a PhD student in Western’s Department of Chemistry. “The image is totally unexpected because you don’t see it on the plate at all. It’s hidden behind time. But then we see it and we can see such fine details: the eyes, the folds of the clothing, the detailed embroidered patterns of the table cloth.”

The technology promises to improve the methods of conservation for old photographs and should bring many previously unusable daguerreotypes back to life.

Source: Tech Crunch

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

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

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

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

Source: Tech Crunch