Month: December 2018

One of Silicon Valley’s prominent billionaires is in hot water after funding deceptive social media campaigns with echoes of Russia’s own political playbook. Reid Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn in 2003 and is now a partner at Greylock, footed the bill for a small political project with the aim of getting Democrat Doug Jones elected in 2017’s special election. Now, Hoffman is sorry — but he also maintains that he didn’t know where his money ended up.

It’s not clear what impact the project had in successfully electing Jones, but internal documents reveal that the effort known as Project Birmingham “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.” Those tactics are now widely regarded as both politically and professionally toxic as tech companies — most notably Facebook — continue to face intense scrutiny over their role in facilitating the spread of disinformation meant to influence U.S. political behavior.

As The New York Times reported:

The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.

In a statement following reporting from The New York Times and The Washington Post, Hoffman did not dispute the assertion that he funded the efforts, but denied any knowledge of the controversial tactics themselves.

“I want to make it clear from the outset that I had never even heard of this project before reading about it in the Times’ coverage,” Hoffman said in the statement, published to Medium. “The Times articles imply that I had knowledge of it and that I endorsed its tactics. Let me be absolutely clear: I do not.”

Hoffman went on to disavow the use of political disinformation intended to influence the outcome of an election.

“I would not have knowingly funded a project planning to use such tactics, and would have refused to invest in any organization that I knew might conduct such a project,” Hoffman said. “Nevertheless, I do have an apology to make and have learned a lesson here.”

In his Medium post Hoffman describes how he became more politically active after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He recounts how he funded dozens of political and civic engagement organizations in conjunction with a group called Investing in Us. “Our goal is to identify promising organizations and provide them with resources to accelerate positive change,” Hoffman said.

Many of those investments appear to be uncontroversial, including contributions to the Center on Rural Innovation and an organization called Opportunity at Work which helps connect Americans with job opportunities. As Hoffman explains, his entanglement in the Alabama Senate race came about through his choice to fund a group called American Engagement Technologies (AET):

One of the early organizations that we supported was American Engagement Technologies (AET), a group which sought to develop technical solutions to counteract fake news, bot armies, and other kinds of digital manipulation and disinformation, and to use social media and data analytics to increase civic engagement and improve access to accurate information about candidates and issues.

AET, in turn, provided funding to a group called New Knowledge. Through AET or otherwise, I have never personally authorized or directed any funding to New Knowledge. I — regretfully — do not know why AET chose to support New Knowledge or for what specific purposes, if any, this funding was allocated.

To reiterate yet again, I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing. For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET — the organization I did support — more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would reject.

Though Hoffman’s post did not specify an amount, The Washington Post reported that Hoffman invested $750,000 in AET. The group is helmed by Mikey Dickerson, a former Google engineer who served as the founding director of the USDS during Obama’s presidency.

Earlier this week, Facebook suspended the account of Jonathon Morgan, the head of New Knowledge. Morgan previously acknowledged that he set up a misleading Facebook page to test his ability to engage with conservative voters and bought less than $10 worth of Twitter retweets for the same goal. Morgan characterized this undertaking as “small-scale” and told The Washington Post that these efforts were made only in “his own capacity as a researcher seeking to understand the mechanics of disinformation tactics, not as New Knowledge’s leader.”

Last week, Doug Jones articulated his support for a federal probe into the role the disinformation tactics could have played in his successful Senate bid. Hoffman also expressed his support for a federal investigation.

“We cannot permit dishonest campaign tactics to go unchecked in our democracy — no matter which side they purportedly help,” Hoffman said.

Source: Tech Crunch

The secondary luxury goods market has been growing wildly in recent years, with more shoppers opting to both sell their lightly used luxury goods like clothing and jewelry for cold, hard cash, as well as buying the pre-owned, authenticated luxury goods of others.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the trend is The RealReal, a nearly eight-year-old shopping destination for the growing population of people who might not be willing or able to purchase a new Hermes Birkin bag but are willing to buy one in like-new condition for considerably less. The idea — which seems to be working — is to create a virtuous cycle, wherein the bag’s original purchaser receives the bulk of that re-sale price, then uses the money to buy another new handbag (or a used one) that can be resold at a later point in time.

Another beneficiary of the trend: TrueFacet, a five-year-old, New York-based marketplace that claims to have more than 40,000 watches and 55,000 pieces of pre-owned authenticated watches and jewelry for sale at its site, and that has more recently begun offering pre-owned timepieces directly through brands like Fendi Timepieces, Raymond Weil and Roberto Coin that now partner with TrueFacet to carry their pre-owned timepieces with a manufacture warranty.

Apparently, shoppers are buying what they’re collectively selling. The company, which had previously raised $14.7 million in funding from investors, looks to be closing in on another $10 million round, judging by freshly filed SEC paperwork that shows it has so far raised $7 million in funding and is targeting $9.8 million altogether.

TrueFacet’s backers include Founders Co-op,  Freestyle Capital and Maveron, led by partner Jason Stoffer, who also happens to sit on the board of Dolls Kill, an edgy clothing marketplace that we wrote about on Monday.

TrueFacet has some tough competition in the space, including Crown & Caliber, a six-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based company that has never announced outside funding, and 15-year-old, Germany-based Chrono24, which has raised €21 million over the years. Both sell timepieces alone, however.

It also competes directly with The RealReal, which has raised nearly $300 million from investors and sells clothing and high-end home decor, as well as jewelry and watches. (The company doesn’t break out publicly which of these categories outpace the others in terms of sales.)

Interestingly, like The RealReal, which now operates permanent offline stores in both New York and L.A., TrueFacet is also crossing the chasm into the offline world, though it’s taking baby steps toward that end.

Specifically, earlier this month, it announced a partnership with Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry, which sells timepieces to many monied Bay Area VCs and other Silicon Valley bigs at stores in Redwood City and Menlo Park, Calif. For the time being at least, the jeweler will also sell pieces from TrueFacet’s collection.

Source: Tech Crunch

Elon Musk has filed a motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the British cave rescuer who sued the billionaire entrepreneur for calling him a pedophile.

Musk’s motion presents numerous reasons to dismiss the defamation lawsuit, all of which come back to a two main points: Twitter is “infamous for invective and hyperbole,” and therefore should not be considered fact and these “imaginative attacks,” even if offensive, “are by their nature opinion and protected by the First Amendment.” 

Musk’s lawyers ask a single question in the request: “Accepting Unsworth’s well-pleaded allegations as true, would a reasonable reader believe that Musk’s statements were supported by objective facts or were instead “nonactionable opinion?”

The list of arguments laid out in the motion to dismiss are:

1. Unsworth must prove that the reasonable reader would believe Musk possessed private facts implicating Unsworth as a pedophile.
2. In context, Musk’s statements cannot reasonably be read as asserting underlying knowledge that Unsworth was a pedophile
3. Statements on unmoderated Internet forums are presumptively opinion.
4. Musk’s underlying argument is that “his over-the-top insults are not statements of fact.”
5. Musk disclosed the basis for his personal opinion: Thailand’s documented problems with sex tourism
6. Musk’s over-the-top insults are not statements of fact
7. Musk’s colloquial statements are not reasonably interpreted as statements of facts
8. Musk’s expressions of uncertainty show that his statements did not have a concrete factual foundation and were therefore opinion
9. Readers did not interpret Musk’s statements as factual assertions

Whether these arguments will be enough to convince a judge to dismiss the lawsuit is unclear. However, it raises a different question. If the argument is to be believed, it would suggest that other claims and promises Musk puts on Twitter shouldn’t be trusted as fact either.

The whole “pedo guy” episode began over the summer after Musk and employees at his companies, SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company, became involved in an effort to extract 12 boys and their soccer coach from the Tham Luang Nang Non cave system located in Northern Thailand after flooding trapped the group for weeks. Musk’s team developed and then sent  mini submarine built out of rocket parts that he thought could help.

The team of divers who eventually rescued every person trapped in the cave didn’t use the mini-submarine, dubbed by Musk’s people as “Wild Boar.”

Unsworth, a British ex-pat who lives in Thailand, helped plan the rescue operation and recruited other cave diving experts. The fight began after Unsworth gave an interview on CNN International, in which he called the mini submarine a “PR stunt,” that it “had absolutely no chance of working” and that Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts.”

Musk subsequently lashed out on Twitter and insinuated that Unsworth was a pedophile. He later deleted the offending tweet and tried to backpedal — even offering an apology of sorts on Twitter. And it could have all ended there. But then Musk dug it all up again during a debate with ex-TechCrunch journalist Drew Olanoff — once again on Twitter. Olanoff had brought up the “pedo guy” attack as an example of Musk telling untruths.

Unsworth filed a lawsuit September in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against Musk for defamation. The lawsuit alleges that between July 15 and August 30, Musk periodically used Twitter and emails to the media to publish false and defamatory accusations against Unsworth, including accusations of pedophilia and child rape.

Read the entire motion here.

Source: Tech Crunch

Startups supporting startups are blazing a new trail with support from venture capitalists.

Co-working spaces like The Wing and The Riveter raked in funding rounds this year, as did Brex, the provider of a corporate card built specifically for startups. Now Carta, which helps companies manage their cap tables, valuations, portfolio investments and equity plans, has announced an $80 million Series D at a valuation of $800 million. The company, formerly known as eShares, raised the capital from lead investors Meritech and Tribe Capital, with support from existing investors.

The round brings Carta’s total funding to $147.8 million. Its existing investors include Spark Capital, Menlo Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Social Capital, though the latter didn’t participate in the Series D funding. Tribe Capital, however, is a new venture capital firm launched by Arjun Sethi, who previously led Social Capital’s investment in Carta, Jonathan Hsu and Ted Maidenberg, a trio of former Social Capital partners who exited the VC firm amid its transition from a traditional VC fund to a technology holding company. Tribe is said to be in the process of raising its own $200 million debut fund.

Founded in 2012 by Henry Ward (pictured), the Palo Alto-based company plans to use the latest investment to develop their transfer agent and equity administration products and services to better support startups transitioning into public companies. It also will launch additional products for investors to collect data from their portfolio companies and to manage their back office.

“We’ve come this far by changing how ownership management works for private companies—popularizing electronic securities and cap table software, combined with audit-ready 409As,” Ward wrote in an announcement. “But our ambitions go far beyond supporting privately-held, venture-backed companies.”

Carta, which counts Robinhood, Slack, Wealthfront, Squarespace, Coinbase and more as customers, currently manages $500 billion in equity. This year, Carta expanded its headcount from 310 employees to 450 employees, launched board management and portfolio insights products and completed a study in partnership with #Angels that highlighted the major equity gap female startup employees are victim to.

The study, released in September, revealed that women own just 9 percent of founder and employee startup equity, despite making up 35 percent of startup equity-holding employees. On top of that, women account for 13 percent of startup founders, but just 6 percent of founder equity — or $0.39 on the dollar.

Source: Tech Crunch

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is making some audacious promises again for the company’s network of electric fast chargers, known as Superchargers. This time, he’s aiming for 100 percent Tesla Supercharger coverage in Europe by next year.

In response to a question on Twitter, Musk said Tesla’s Supercharger coverage will extend to 100 percent of Europe in 2019. “From Ireland to Kiev, from Norway to Turkey,” Musk wrote.

A look at Tesla’s Supercharger map shows a high concentration of the fast chargers in Western Europe. Countries like Albania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia and Moldova don’t have any Superchargers.

Musk also laid out plans to focus on cities, specifically to work with landlords to add home charging units at apartment buildings.

Musk then went further, this time in response to a Twitter follower who noticed that Superchargers planned for San Antonio and Austin in 2018 had yet to be completed. The billionaire entrepreneur said “all major highways in Texas will have Superchargers, all the way to Brownsville and across Mexico.”

He even laid out plans, although less specific, to add Superchargers to Africa in 2020. There are no Superchargers on the African continent.

Tesla’s Supercharger network was launched in 2012 in an effort to encourage owners of its electric vehicles to travel longer distances. A Supercharger adds up to 170 miles of range in about 30 minutes (although TechCrunch has experienced slightly longer charge times depending on location).

Musk has made bold promises for the company’s Supercharger network before. And while the company has made substantial progress and investment in its Supercharger network, it’s still nowhere near its previously promised target. 

In April 2017, Tesla said it would double its global network of Superchargers from more than 5,400 to more than 10,000 by the end of the year. It fell short of that goal, with about 8,250 Superchargers.

Earlier this year, Musk laid out plans to have 18,000 superchargers globally by the end 2018. As of December 27, Tesla has 11,583 Superchargers (within 1,386 Supercharger stations) globally.

Source: Tech Crunch

Across the globe, a clutch of companies from Oxford, England to Redwood City, Calif. are working to commercialize a new solar technology that could further boost the adoption of renewable energy generation.

Earlier this year, Oxford PV, a startup working in tandem with Oxford University, received $3 million from the U.K. government to develop the technology, which uses a new kind of material to make solar cells. Two days ago, in the U.S., a company called Swift Solar raised $7 million to bring the same technology to market, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Called a perovskite cell, the new photovoltaic tech uses hybrid organic-inorganic lead or tin halide-based material as the light-harvesting active layer. It’s the first new technology to come along in years to offer the promise of better efficiency in the conversion of light to electric power at a lower cost than existing technologies.

“Perovskite has let us truly rethink what we can do with the silicon-based solar panels we see on roofs today,” said Sam Stranks, the lead scientific advisor and one of the co-founders of Swift Solar, in a Ted Talk. “Another aspect that really excites me: how cheaply these can be made. These thin crystalline films are made by mixing two inexpensive readily abundant salts to make an ink that can be deposited in many different ways… This means that perovskite solar panels could cost less than half of their silicon counterparts.”

First incorporated into solar cells by Japanese researchers in 2009, the perovskite solar cells suffered from low efficiencies and lacked stability to be broadly used in manufacturing. But over the past nine years researchers have steadily improved both the stability of the compounds used and the efficiency that these solar cells generate.

Oxford PV, in the U.K., is now working on developing solar cells that could achieve conversion efficiencies of 37 percent — much higher than existing polycrystalline photovoltaic or thin-film solar cells.

New chemistries for solar cell manufacturing have been touted in the past, but cost has been an obstacle to commercial rollout, given how cheaply solar panels became thanks in part to a massive push from the Chinese government to increase manufacturing capacity.

Many of those manufacturers eventually folded, but the survivors managed to maintain their dominant position in the industry by reducing the need for buyers to look to newer technologies for cost or efficiency savings.

There’s a risk that this new technology also faces, but the promise of radical improvements in efficiencies at costs that are low enough to attract buyers have investors once again putting money behind alternative solar chemistries.

Oxford PV has already set a world-leading efficiency mark for perovskite-based cells at 27.3 percent. That’s already 4 percent higher than the leading monocrystalline silicon panels available today.

“Today, commercial-sized perovskite-on-silicon tandem solar cells are in production at our pilot line and we are optimizing equipment and processes in preparation for commercial deployment,” said Oxford PV’s CTO Chris Case in a statement.

Source: Tech Crunch

A new app offers Apple Music subscribers a way to look back at their favorite music of the year and other streaming highlights, similar to Spotify’s annual “Wrapped” feature. The app, from developer NoiseHub, is simply called “Music Year in Review,” and its sole purpose is to offer Apple Music customers their own set of music streaming insights for 2018.

If you’re not familiar with “Wrapped,” it’s Spotify’s data-rich yearly review that allows you to find out things like your most-played artists and songs, top genres, minutes streamed, new music discoveries and more from the past year. The streaming service delivers these insights through a flashy, personalized website. It also puts your top 100 songs from the year into a playlist you can save to your own library.

NoiseHub’s new app, by comparison, is far more basic.

It only crunches the numbers across a few metrics: how many minutes you spent listening to your favorite artist this year on Apple Music, as well as your top five songs and artists, including which are your No. 1 favorites. It also will return your top genre of the year.

However, for Apple Music subscribers, there hasn’t been an easy way to access this data before now. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t offer a personalized, annual review feature like Spotify’s.

One caveat to using the new app is that NoiseHub asks for your email address to get started, which it says it uses to “save your data.”

There isn’t a further explanation as to whether or not that email will be used again in the future, nor is there a privacy policy link. If sharing your email makes you uncomfortable, you may want to just use a disposable address — it doesn’t impact the app’s ability to retrieve your data. (You can also skip email entry by tapping the arrow button.)

Instead, NoiseHub pops up a permissions dialog box to request access to Apple Music in order to do its work.

It then returns a set of three graphics, the first featuring the time you spent with your top artist, the second with your No. 1s for the year (genre, artist and song) and the third with your top five songs and top five artists.

The graphics are designed to be posted to Instagram or Twitter with a tap on the included sharing buttons, or can be downloaded to your Camera Roll for sharing elsewhere.

The app was developed by NoiseHub, a startup co-founded by Samir Shekhawat and Alex Santarelli, which was previously developing a social network for music lovers.

“For the past few years, we’ve been working on a social music app called NoiseHub. During that time, as we made mistakes, we iterated slowly,” explains Music Year in Review app’s creator, Samir Shekhawat. “This application is still internal – it’s been a side project for years – but when we heard about Spotify’s 2018 Wrapped, we decided to take a brief break on NoiseHub and dedicate a weekend during finals week to create an Apple Music Year in Review,” he says.

The app may become a part of NoiseHub’s experience in the future, if the team decides to work on that project again. (They’ve stopped indefinitely for now.) In the meantime, they want to flesh out the annual review app with more data and add more graphics.

The Music Year in Review app is a free download on the App Store.

It still seems to be a bit of an undiscovered gem — there aren’t any public posts to speak of, and its Dribbble page has just 155 views.

While some early testers experienced a bug that led to crashes, the app worked for us without error. The reports stem from those who don’t have much data in Apple Music, in many cases. The team believes they have a bug fix, but the App Store is closed for the holidays.

Source: Tech Crunch

With hundreds of millions of people home for the holidays, now is a better time than ever to spread good tidings and cheer, and — well, some much-needed security advice for all the family.

Security sounds complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Privacy is more important than ever. With an ever-changing and evolving landscape of threats and hacks, breaches and vulnerabilities, there’s no better time of the year to help your family navigate some of the most basic but effective security tips. (Let’s face it, you were bound to end up being called on for tech support at some point anyway.)

We’ve put together five how-to guides covering cybersecurity basics that anyone can learn — and everyone should learn, including:

• Why you need to use a password manager
• Two-factor authentication can save you from hackers
• How to protect your cell phone number and why you should care
• How to browse the web securely and privately
• How to get started with encrypted messaging apps

Source: Tech Crunch