Month: March 2019

Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos from its site within the first 24 hours after a shooter livestreamed his attack on two New Zealand mosques, killing 50 people.

In a series of tweets, Facebook’s Mia Garlick said a total of 1.2 million videos were blocked at the point of upload. Videos that included “praise or support” from the attack were also removed, she said, using a mix of automated technologies — like audio detection — and human content moderators.

Facebook did not say why the 300,000 videos were not caught at upload, representing a 20 percent failure rate.

The cherry-picked “vanity” statistics only account for the total number of uploaded videos that Facebook knows about. TechCrunch found several videos posted to Facebook more than 12 hours after the attack. Some are calling on Facebook to release the engagement figures — such as how many views, shares and reactions — were made before the videos were taken down, which critics say is a more accurate measure of how far the videos spread.

The attack on Friday targeted worshippers during morning prayers in Christchurch, New Zealand. Police said they apprehended the shooter about half an hour after reports of the first attack came in.

The 28-year old suspected shooter, charged with murder, livestreamed the video to Facebook using a head-mounted camera, typically used to record sporting events in first-person. Facebook closed the attacker’s account within an hour of the attack, but the video had already been shared across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The shooter described himself as a self-professed fascist, according to a “manifesto” he posted shortly before the attacks. The tech companies have faced criticism for not responding to the emerging threat of violence associated with white nationalism, compared to actions taken against content in support of the so-called Islamic State group and the spread of child abuse imagery,

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern said on Sunday that social media giants like Facebook had to face “further questions” about their response to the event. Facebook second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg reportedly reached out to Ardern following the attacks.

When reached, Facebook did not comment beyond Garlick’s tweeted comments.

Source: Tech Crunch

Last week the Cosmos Network launched, which I believe to be a major event. Yes, it’s a blockchain initiative — but definitely not just another one. If I’m right, its repercussions will one day reach your life too, though it’s sufficiently bleeding-edge that those ripples probably won’t hit you for a decade. Maybe five years, for a cutting-edge TechCrunch reader like you.

(Yes, those are bold words, but if I do say so myself, my track record is pretty good with this sort of thing. The last blockchain launch I wrote about was Ethereum, which you may have since heard of … and I was the only non-specialist commentator / journalist to cover it at the time.)

This launch is an abstruse and extremely technical achievement, currently only important to those who already live amid that tiny, weird subculture of humanity which reveres blockchains as the path to a better, decentralized, fairer future. (Not to be confused with the much larger number of who view cryptocurrencies primarily as an opportunity to get rich quick, never mind how sketchily.) But it’s a highly impressive technical feat, with every chance to ultimately become important to many more people.

Cosmos calls itself “the Internet of Blockchains,” and it is that, but it’s also something else important: it is one of the first major decentralized Proof-of-Stake networks to launch. (No, EOS doesn’t count.) In this model, instead of being secured by “miners” who solve computationally hard problems at the cost of gigawatts-and-counting of electricity, blockchains are verified by “validators” who purchase (or are delegated) cryptocurrency which they “stake.”

These validators, per the name, then ensure that the chain’s transactions are valid, knowing that they will earn rewards if honest and accurate … but if they are dishonest, or in error, or offline, their stakes will be “slashed” i.e. they will lose money. (At present there are 100 validators; this number is due to triple.) It has been shown, at least in theory, that even if validators dishonestly collude, as long as at least two-thirds of them remain honest, the chain remains secure.

This is a very big deal because the enormously better efficiency and speed of Proof-of-Stake open a pathway to decentralized systems which support many many more actions than Proof-of-Work chains like Bitcoin or (today’s) Ethereum, with a vastly vastly smaller ecological footprint. If Proof-of-Stake succeeds in the harsh, cruel real world — admittedly a big if; its implementation is complicated, and has a much larger attack surface, both social and technical, than Proof-of-Work — then blockchains may finally be able to seriously scale, with acceptable security, without consuming a noticeable fraction of the world’s electricity.

Cosmos’s ambitions go much further, though. Cosmos isn’t intended as Just Another Blockchain. We have more than enough of those already. It’s intended as a hub which connects other blockchains to one another — hence “The Internet of Blockchains.” What’s more, it provides tools which, in theory, make it far easier for any software engineer to build a brand-new, custom-designed blockchain … which in turn can interoperate with an arbitrary number of others.

Why does this matter? Because if blockchains are to matter at all beyond cryptocurrencies — if they are to be used for applications such as namespaces, file storage, digital collectibles, supply chains, self-sovereign identities, and decentralized social media, to trot out the usual laundry list of desirable decentralized apps — those applications would benefit greatly from being able to interact with one another.

To a certain extent they can already. One can perform “atomic swaps” which trade Bitcoin for Zcash in a single indivisible transaction. But this kind of interoperability is difficult and restricted by the host chain’s limitations, whatever they may be. Cosmos offers a compelling alternate vision: instead of a single “world computer” chain on which all decentralized applications run, it proposes many blockchains, one for each application, speaking to one another, and passing assets, collectibles, data, and cryptocurrencies to and from one another, via agreed-upon “hubs.”

This week’s actual launch was the first of those, the Cosmos Hub. In principle, in the future, anyone can run a hub, A lot of the Cosmos vision remains “in principle, in the future.” At present no other blockchains are connected; in principle, in the future, Cosmos’s validators will vote to start interoperating with them. (Cosmos also includes built-in “governance,” in the parlance of blockchainers, i.e. on-chain voting.)

Even then, only certain kinds of blockchains, those with an architecture similar to Cosmos itself — with “fast finality,” to be precise — can connect via a hub. In principle, in the future, adapters for other chains, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ZCash, can be constructed; this arguably makes Cosmos a Bitcoin “sidechain,” and/or a competitor / coopetitor to the Lightning Network, as if it wasn’t wearing enough hats and offering enough futures already.

Do I sound skeptical? Not moreso than usual: I’m just cautious about making pronouncements before vaporware becomes software. The Cosmos Hub which launched last week, though, is very much the latter not the former, and even if I’m wrong about its eventual real-world importance, it remains a major, significant technical achievement. Congratulations and kudos to its team. It may seem to investors and speculators that we remain in the grip of a seemingly endless crypto winter; but to engineers, the launch of Cosmos is a strong sign that spring is en route.

Source: Tech Crunch

PC gaming has grown to be a pretty wide niche of people with some far-flung similarities and differences, one thing they all share are souped-up rigs that rely on beefy GPUs. This is fine for those with dedicated machines but PC gaming isn’t too friendly to those trying to pull double-duty on their everyday machine.

Vectordash, launching out of the latest Y Combinator batch, wants to turn your Macbook Air or other underpowered rig into a formidable machine through their cloud gaming service.

The service is charging customers $28 per month to render their games on a cloud machine so that they can be run on non-gaming laptops. The idea of running Fortnite on any machine seems to be a somewhat central idea for the service, though you’ll just as easily be able to log-in to Steam and play through titles that you own.

Launching a cloud-gaming service seems like an expensive proposition, you need a bunch of server centers to host streamers and that’s a lot of upfront cost for an upstart, so Vectordash is cheating a bit and paying users with heavy GPU power to contribute to the gaming hive-mind over the cloud. The service says they’ll pay these GPU renters between $60 and $105 per month for the graphics processing real estate. The trick is, Vectordash is entering a bear cryptocurrency environment where there are tons of GPUs ready to be put to work, so the company will have a market as long as it can stay competitive with crypto mining returns.

Relying on third-party GPU power will leave some difficulty in scaling with such high upfront costs alright taking a steep bite out of margins, but the startup seems to be fine with the tradeoffs and believes that plenty of gamers will see the use of the $28/month service if it means being able to run GPU-hungry games on their Mac or otherwise lightweight laptops.

This does leave the startup in a tricky position where they can likely be undercut on price by a tech giant that is willing to shift some data center power towards the product. At the same time, Vectordash’s distributed model of turning GPUs into sharing economy workers is probably more scalable when it comes to reaching the far-flung corners of the globe.

That’s because a major limiting factor for the technology is that it’s highly dependent on geographic proximity between game streamers and host hardware. As opposed to other streaming services, latency demands are pretty brutal due to the real-time input being sent to the host machines via keystrokes and mouse movements. If users aren’t getting feedback within 20-30ms, the lag grows noticeable and quickly feels unplayable if you’re firing away in something like a first-person shooter, co-founder Sharif Shameem tells TechCrunch.

This means that Vectordash is going to have to be very targeted with the markets they expand to as a game streamer needs to be within about 300 miles from the host machine. They’re kicking things off in the Bay Area and will be focusing efforts on the East and West coasts of the U.S. early-on. Gameplay can max out at 4K 60FPS if your internet connection is solid and can scale things down to 1080p if you’re missing some megabits.

Users can sign up on Vectordash’s site to get early access to the service.

Source: Tech Crunch

Welcome back to this week’s transcribed edition of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast that unpacks the numbers behind the headlines. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts the words of our wildly popular venture capital podcast, Equity, in your eyes instead of your ears.

This week, along with guest Anu Duggal, the founder of Female Founders Fund, the team discussed Uber’s impending IPO, Q1’s IPO pace, Stash’s raise and more changes at Y Combinator that saw Sam Altman take a seat as the accelerator’s chairman.

So if you don’t like podcasts but still want the goodness that is Equity, you can have a read of this week’s episode below.

For access to the full transcription, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Connie Loizos:
Hello and welcome to Equity. I’m TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos. I’m joined today by Crunchbase News’s Alex Wilhelm.

Alex Wilhelm:
Hello.

Connie Loizos:
Hello. We also have a guest in studio today from New York. Anu Duggal, the co-founder of Female Founders Fund, which has backed a lot of really interesting companies from the wedding site platform Zola to the smartphone lending app Tala, which caters to people and underserved and emerging markets. Anu, thank you so much for swing by today.

Anu Duggal:
Thanks so much for having me.

Connie Loizos:
It’s really great to see you.

Anu Duggal:
You too.

Connie Loizos:
So we were going to talk about the week being sort of slow. In fact, until about an hour ago, we were sort of talking about discussing the fact that there’s been this … a lot of talk and no action yet on the IPO front. Then Reuters broke the news that Uber is planning to kick off its IPO in April, which is just next month. And it’s also just right on the heels of the expected IPO of Lyft, which apparently is coming out at the end of this month.

Alex Wilhelm:
Yes. And this is evidence that the news gods still hate this show because this is, every single week we get on and say well there was no, oh, all the news broke an hour ago. So Connie details here are that we expect the Uber IPO to hit the Road Show in April or to actually get live in April?

Connie Loizos:
I think it’s got an issue. It’s required public disclosure of the S-1 and launching its Investor Road Show. And after that, I’m not really sure how long it takes. Is it maybe like a week later?

Source: Tech Crunch

With Y Combinator’s Demo Day taking place at Pier 48 in San Francisco next week, its largest batch of companies ever is getting ready to present to an audience of select investors. Having taken Atrium through Demo Day myself, I have first-hand knowledge of the process. When the founders have finished their pitches, the time to talk numbers will closely follow. Chief among the many decisions founders will face during this time is whether to opt for the Pre-Money SAFE or the new Post-Money SAFE, the two standardized legal documents that YC has introduced in recent years.

Both versions are meant to make the process fast, easy and fair for both parties in the early-stage fundraising process. But there are crucial differences between the two that founders should examine carefully.

Essentially, the Pre-Money SAFE is exceptionally favorable to founders because it gets them pre-valuation funding like a convertible note, but debt-free. The Post-Money SAFE sweetens some of the terms for investors, like locking in their percentage ownership in a priced round later on.

Overall, we expect the Post-Money version to become more common, especially if the company is raising a round above $1 million or $2 million, and the investors have more leverage to ask for it in the negotiation.

(Note: This article is aimed at giving founders a general understanding of the changes from Pre-Money SAFEs to Post-Money SAFEs. The information provided is based on my professional experience and opinions, and should not be used without careful consideration and advice by qualified advisors and legal counsel. Also, to learn more and ask questions about Pre and Post-Money SAFEs, join me on April 16th for a webinar where I’ll dive in a bit deeper.)

Two structures for raising startup investment

Today there are two general ways of structuring a startup fundraising round. The first can be called a “priced equity round,” and is characterized by the sale of preferred stock with a fixed valuation.

Source: Tech Crunch

Apex Legends surprised the gaming world two months ago, bringing a new, frenetic dynamic to the Battle Royale genre of games that has already attracted 50 million players.

That first huge milestone didn’t come at a cheap price — EA reportedly paid Ninja $1 million to stream the game. But now the question concerns whether or not Respawn can keep and convert their new, voracious legion of players.

Luckily for Respawn, Fortnite has paved the way when it comes to monetizing this type of game, offering the game itself for free and generating revenue from a virtual items store and a Battle Pass. The Battle Pass concept lets users subscribe to level up and earn skins, camos and other cosmetic items.

Apex Legends, however, has a unique opportunity to make the Battle Pass even more attractive. For now, that opportunity is called Octane.

Octane is rumored to be the game’s Battle Pass character. We know nothing yet for certain, but a datamine and a few allegedly leaked photos have led folks to believe that Octane has a stim-shot style ability that lets him trade movement speed for his health, with another ability that lets him recover that health out of combat situations.

But his rumored ultimate is the one that people are excited about, should the rumors prove true. Octane’s ultimate ability is believed to be a launch pad, that would let the whole team (and enemies, one would assume) bounce around during a fight.

There’s one curious twist. As we wait for the launch of the Battle Pass, Respawn has placed a handful of the very same launchpads into the game around Marketplace on the map. These are static launchpads, but work nonetheless.

This begs the question: are the launchpads simply a static addition to the map itself, or is Respawn testing out the upcoming ultimate ability of Octane? In either case, Octane represents an interesting opportunity for Respawn and the Apex Battle Pass.

Because Apex Legends is built on a hero system, where individual characters bring unique skills, weapons and gear to the game, Apex can offer new hero characters as part of the Battle Pass. This deviates from Fortnite’s suite of virtual products that offer no in-game advantage and are only cosmetic.

A new character, complete with abilities and skills that could lead to your success, can brew up quite a bit of FOMO among folks undecided about the Battle Pass. New content and hopefully more enticing weapon camos should invite a new wave of growth as the core user base is re-invigorated. But balancing that urgency with the time needed to build a polished, beautiful season’s worth of content is a challenge.

Respawn arguably has work to do on the game it already launched. The explosive growth of the game led to serious server issues early on, and lag has continued to infuriate top players.

All that said, Respawn seems to be handling the pressure well, with some believing that the Battle Pass has already been delayed to ensure a polished launch. For now, it’s a waiting game.

Source: Tech Crunch

In recent years, data analysts have gone from optional to a career that holds great promise, but demand for quantitative skills applied in business decisions has raced ahead of supply as college curriculum often lags behind the fast-changing workplace.

CareerTu, a New York-based startup launched by a former marketing manager at Amazon, aims to close that talent gap. Think of it as Codecademy for digital marketing, data analytics, product design and a whole lot of other jobs that ask one to spot patterns from a sea of data that can potentially boost business efficiency. The six-year-old profitable business runs a flourishing community of 160,000 users and 500 recruiting patners including Amazon, Google and Alibaba, an achievement that has secured the startup a spot at Y Combinator’s latest batch plus a $150,000 check from the Mountain View-based accelerator.

In a way, CareerTu is helping fledgling tech startups on a tight budget train ready-to-use data experts. “American companies have a huge demand for digital marketing and data talents these days … but not all of them want to or can spend money on training, and that’s where we can come in,” said Xu, who made her way into Amazon after burying herself in online tutorials about digital marketing.

The gig was well paid, and Xu felt the urge to share her experience with people like her — Chinese workers and students seeking data jobs in the U.S. She took up blogging, and eventually grew it into an online school. CareerTu offers many of its classes for free while sets aside a handful of premium content for a fee. 6,000 of its users are actively paying, which translates to some $500,000 in revenue last year. The virtual academy continues to blossom as many students return to become mentors, helping their Chinese peers to chase the American dream.

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham (second left) with CareerTu founder Zhang Ruiwan (second right) and her team members / Photo: CareerTu

Securing a job in the U.S. could be a daunting task for international students, who must convince employers to invest the time and money in getting them a work visa. But when it comes to courting scare data talents, the visa trap becomes less relevant.

“Companies could have hired locals to do data work, but it’s very difficult to find the right candidate,” suggested Xu. LinkedIn estimated that in 2018 the U.S. had a shortage of more than 150,000 people with “data science skills,” which find application not just in tech but also traditional sectors like finance and logistics.

“Nationalities don’t matter in this case,” Xu continued. “Employers will happily apply a work visa or even a green card for the right candidate who can help them save money on marketing campaigns. And many Chinese people happen to have a really strong background in data and mathematics.”

A Chinese business in the US

Though most of CareerTu’s users live in the U.S., the business is largely built upon WeChat, Tencent’s messaging app ubiquitous among Chinese users. That CareerTu sticks to WeChat for content marketing, user acquisition and tutoring is telling of the super app’s user stickiness and how overseas Chinese are helping to extend its global footprint.

And it makes increasing sense to keep CareerTu within the WeChat ecosystem after Xu noticed a surge in inquiries coming from her homeland. In 2018, only 5 percent of CareerTu’s users were living in China, many of whom were export sellers on Amazon. By early 2019, the ratio has shot up to 12 percent.

Xu believes there are two forces at work. For one, Chinese exporters are leaving Amazon to set up independent ecommerce sites, efforts that are in part enabled by Shopify’s entry into China in 2018. The alternative path provides merchants more control over branding, margins and access to customer insights. Breaking up with the ecommerce titan, on the other hand, requires Chinese sellers to get savvier at reaching foreign shoppers, expertise that CareerTu prides itself on.

CareerTu offers online courses via WeChat / Photo: CareerTu

Next door, large Chinese tech firms are increasingly turning abroad to fuel growth. Bytedance is possibly the most aggressive adventurer among its peers in recent years, buying up media startups around the world including Musical.ly, which would later merge with TikTok. Indeed, some of CareerTu’s recent grads have gone on to work at the popular video app. Rising interest from China eventually paved Zhang’s way home as she recently set up her first Chinese office in her hometown Chengdu, the laid-back city known for its panda parks and witnessing a tech boom.

Just as foreign companies need crash courses on WeChat before entering China, Chinese firms going global must familiarize themselves with the marketing mechanisms of Facebook and Google despite China’s ban on the social network and search engine.

When American companies growth hack, they make long-term plans that involve “model building, A/B testing, and making discoveries from big data,” observed Xu. By comparison, Chinese companies fighting in a more competitive landscape are more agile and opportunist as they don’t have the time to ponder or test out the different variants in a campaign.

“Going abroad is a great thing for Chinese companies because it sets them against their American counterparts,” said Xu. “We are teaching Chinese the western way, but we are also learning the Chinese way of marketing from players like Bytedance. I’m excited to see in a few years whether any of these Chinese companies abroad will become a local favorite.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke has revealed he was a member of a notorious decades-old hacking group.

The former congressman was a member of the Texas-based hacker group, the Cult of the Dead Cow, known for inspiring early hacktivism in the internet age and building exploits and hacks for Microsoft Windows. The group used the internet as a platform in the 1990s to protest real-world events, often to promote human rights and denouncing censorship. Among its many releases, the Cult of the Dead Cow was best known for its Back Orifice program, a remote access and administration tool.

O’Rourke went by the handle “Psychedelic Warlord,” as revealed by Reuters, which broke the story.

But as he climbed the political ranks, first elected to the El Paso city council in 2005, he reportedly grew concerned that his membership with the group would harm his political aspirations. The group’s members kept O’Rourke’s secret safe until the ex-hacker confirmed to Reuters his association with the group.

Reuters described him as the “most prominent ex-hacker in American political history,” who on Thursday announced his candidacy for president of the United States.

If he wins the White House, he would become the first hacker president.

O’Rourke’s history sheds light on how the candidate approaches and understands the technological issues that face the U.S. today. He’s one of the few presidential candidates to run for the White House with more than a modicum of tech knowledge — and the crucial awareness of the good and the problems tech can bring at a policy level.

“I understand the democratizing power of the internet, and how transformative it was for me personally, and how it leveraged the extraordinary intelligence of these people all over the country who were sharing ideas and techniques,” O’Rourke told Reuters.

The 46-year-old has yet to address supporters about the new revelations.

Source: Tech Crunch