Category: StartUps

A new technology by MIT researchers can sense depression by analyzing the written and spoken responses by a patient. The system, pioneered by MIT’s CSAIL group, uses “a neural-network model that can be unleashed on raw text and audio data from interviews to discover speech patterns indicative of depression.”

“Given a new subject, it can accurately predict if the individual is depressed, without needing any other information about the questions and answers,” the researchers write.

The most important part of the system is that it is context-free. This means that it doesn’t require specific questions or types of responses. It simply uses day-to-day interactions as the source data.

“We call it ‘context-free,’ because you’re not putting any constraints into the types of questions you’re looking for and the type of responses to those questions,” said researcher Tuka Alhanai.

“Every patient will talk differently, and if the model sees changes maybe it will be a flag to the doctors,” said study co-author James Glass. “This is a step forward in seeing if we can do something assistive to help clinicians.”

From the release:

The researchers trained and tested their model on a dataset of 142 interactions from the Distress Analysis Interview Corpus that contains audio, text, and video interviews of patients with mental-health issues and virtual agents controlled by humans. Each subject is rated in terms of depression on a scale between 0 to 27, using the Personal Health Questionnaire. Scores above a cutoff between moderate (10 to 14) and moderately severe (15 to 19) are considered depressed, while all others below that threshold are considered not depressed. Out of all the subjects in the dataset, 28 (20 percent) are labeled as depressed.

In experiments, the model was evaluated using metrics of precision and recall. Precision measures which of the depressed subjects identified by the model were diagnosed as depressed. Recall measures the accuracy of the model in detecting all subjects who were diagnosed as depressed in the entire dataset. In precision, the model scored 71 percent and, on recall, scored 83 percent. The averaged combined score for those metrics, considering any errors, was 77 percent. In the majority of tests, the researchers’ model outperformed nearly all other models.

Obviously detection is only part of the process but this robo-therapist could help real therapists find and isolate issues automatically versus the long process of analysis. It’s a fascinating step forward in mental health.

Source: Tech Crunch

HTC is cozying up to its main competitor in the VR space, Facebook-owned Oculus as it looks to find a business model that will wrestle it out of the VR market doldrums.

Today, the Taiwanese hardware company announced that its Viveport VR subscription service has opened up shop on a non-HTC headset, namely Facebook’s Oculus Rift. The product allows gamers to download a few titles per month from its store on a rolling basis.

HTC has had a rough time finding where it can compete as a VR hardware company in a competitive landscape that is pulling in little to no hardware margins. Its answer has been to focus on enterprise customers with a high-end, overpriced headset and point consumers to a content subscription model that gives headset owners access to a library of titles and gives it the cut of developers’ VR revenues that have been going to its headset-partner Valve.

In theory this isn’t an awful idea considering that a lot of the VR owners right now operate firmly within the early adopter arena and would theoretically be very open to a model like this. The problem is that a lot of the people with Vive headsets purchased it because they liked the deep integration with Valve’s SteamVR, both its superb tracking system and its familiar Steam store. Most of the Vive owners I talk with think of Viveport as little more than buggy bloatware.

Because the software isn’t a huge asset to the Vive platform or at least one that could move systems, there’s no reason for HTC not to open it to other headsets and try to court some interests from VR users looking to power through some of the quite good indie titles that are on the store. A Viveport subscription costs $8.99 per month.

One of the big problems with buying VR content has been that some smaller studios are charging a lot for their early titles because it’s incredibly daunting to make money as an indie VR developer, this does lead to a lot of consumers being a bit dissatisfied with what they get though. This was one of Viveport’s big selling points, “try before you buy!” This doesn’t hold on the Oculus store as much after the company announced a pretty relaxed return policy last year.

Without headset-level integration, it’s not all that clear how the company plans on gaining a footing on the Oculus platform. Of the 1400 titles in the Viveport library, about 200 of them have been tested to work well with the Rift, HTC says.

Source: Tech Crunch

When you’re primarily a storage company with enterprise aspirations, as Dropbox is, you need a layer to to help people use the content in your system beyond simple file sharing. That’s why Dropbox created Paper, to act as that missing collaboration layer. They announced some enhancements to Paper to keep people working in their collaboration tool without having to switch programs.

“Paper is Dropbox’s collaborative workspace for teams. It includes features where users can work together, assign owners to tasks with due dates and embed rich content like video, sound, photos from Youtube, SoundCloud, Pinterest and others,” a Dropbox spokesperson told TechCrunch.

With today’s enhancements you can paste a number of elements into Paper and get live previews. For starters, they are letting you link to a Dropbox folder in Paper, where you can view the files inside the folder, even navigating any sub-folders. When the documents in the folder change, Paper updates the preview automatically because the folder is actually a live link to the Dropbox folder. This one seems like a table stakes feature for a company like Dropbox.

In addition, Dropbox now supports Airtables, a kind of souped up spreadsheet. With the new enhancement, you just grab an Airtable embed code and drop it into Paper. From there, you can see a preview in whatever Airtable view you’ve saved the table.

Finally, Paper now supports LucidCharts. As with Airtables and folders, you simply paste the link and you can see a live preview inside Paper. If the original chart changes, updates are reflected automatically in the Paper preview.

By now, it’s clear that workers want to maintain focus and not be constantly switching between programs. It’s why Box created the recently announced Activity Stream and Recommended Apps. It’s why Slack has become so popular inside enterprises. These tools provide a way to share content from different enterprise apps without having to open a bunch of tabs or separate apps.

Dropbox Paper is also about giving workers a central place to do their work where you can pull live content previews from different apps without having to work in a bunch of content silos. Dropbox is trying to push that idea along for its enterprise customers with today’s enhancements.

Source: Tech Crunch

Just about a month after the merger of the short-form video apps Musical.ly and TikTok, the app is introducing a new social feature, allowing users to post their reactions to the videos that they watch.

Instead of text comments, these reactions will take the form of videos that are essentially superimposed on top of existing clips. The idea of a reaction video should be familiar to anyone who’s spent some time on YouTube, but TikTok is incorporating the concept in way that looks like a pretty seamless.

To post a reaction, users just need to choose the React option in the Share menu for a given video. The app will then record your audio and video as the clip plays. You can also decide where on the screen you want your reaction video to appear.

If you don’t recognize the TikTok name, that’s probably because the app only launched in the United States at the beginning of August, but it’s been available in China for a couple of years.

Back in 2017, Bytedance — the Chinese company behind TikTok as well as news aggregator Toutia — acquired Musical.ly for around $1 billion. It eventually merged the two apps to combine their audiences and features; Musical.ly users were moved over with their existing videos and settings.

The company says Reactions will be available in the updated app on Google Play and the Apple App Store over the next day or two.

Source: Tech Crunch

Looks like Sujeet Kumar, Amod Malviya and Vaibhav Gupta’s decision to jump ship from Flipkart to focus on their own venture is paying off.

The trio announced this morning that their B2B e-commerce startup Udaan had raised $225 million in Series C funding co-led by DST Global and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with capital coming out of the latter’s growth fund. The cash infusion, according to Indian media reports, makes Udaan the fastest-ever Indian startup to be valued at over $1 billion.

Flipkart, one of the most successful e-commerce platforms out of India, sold to Walmart in a $16 billion deal earlier this year. Kumar, Malviya and Gupta, which were the former president of operations, CTO and SVP of business finance and analytics at Flipkart, respectively, departed the company in 2016.

Shortly after setting up the B2B marketplace, the three raised $10 million in a Series A led by Lightspeed in late 2016—then another $50 million earlier this year, also led by Lightspeed, with participation from the venture capital firm’s India office.

Bejul Somaia, a managing director at Lightspeed India that’s been on the Bengaluru-based company’s board since that A round, confirmed the latest funding to TechCrunch.

“We have been fortunate to see the company scale very rapidly from close quarters,” Somaia told me via email. “We’re drawn to the company’s first-principles approach to solving significant problems that are unique in the Indian context.”

Udaan’s mobile app connects 150,000 traders, wholesalers and retailers in India, enabling small- and medium-sized businesses to do business directly with manufacturers. Right now, electronics and consumer goods are for sale on the app, with plans for the company to make industrial goods, fresh fruits and vegetables, office supplies and more available soon.

At just 26 months of age, there are few companies that have raced—or shall we say trotted—into the unicorn club at such a speed. Recent examples include the 3D printing company Desktop Metal, which crossed the threshold 21 months after its founding. Plus, there’s the Craigslist competitor Letgo; it became a unicorn in just two years.

Indian startup unicorns, of which there are fewer, have historically taken longer to earn their unicorn horns.

On-demand delivery platform Swiggy, for example, became a unicorn earlier this year, about four years after it was founded. Zomato, another delivery app, garnered a $1.4 billion valuation in 2017 after nearly 10 years in business.

Source: Tech Crunch

Audi began production of its first all-electric SUV on Monday, three years after the German automaker unveiled a concept version of the vehicle at the International Motor Show in Frankfurt.

The company won’t reveal the production-version of the Audi e-tron SUV until Sept. 17, in a what promises to be a splashy event in San Francisco.

Audi, which is owned by Volkswagen Group, has been working towards mass production of the e-tron quattro for years now, offering periodic updates and teasers on the pricing, range, and interior design. The Audi e-tron is being produced at Audi’s factory in Brussels, which has been undergoing an extensive renovation since 2016 to prepare for the new vehicle. The Brussels factor has become the cornerstone of Volkswagen Group’s electric vehicle plans.

Audi rebuilt the body shop, paint shop and assembly line at the Brussels factory, the company said. It also set up its own battery production there.

The five-seater SUV will have DC fast-charging capability of up 150 kilowatts. The company has previously said the SUV would have a 95 kwh battery with a range of more than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles). That range has since been adjusted to somewhere around 250 miles, although the global reveal later this month should provide finalized numbers. Sales of the e-tron SUV are expected to begin by the end of the year.

Source: Tech Crunch

The VoCore2 is a Wi-Fi capable computer with a 580 MHz CPU and 128 RAM that supports video, USB, and Ethernet. And it plays Doom. That’s right: this is a computer you can easily swallow and allow your biome flora to play a hard core FPS while you slowly digest the package.

The product started life on Indiegogo where it raised $100,000. Now it’s available for $17 for the barebones unit or $24 for the unit with USB and MicroSD card. You can also buy a four inch display for it that lets you display video at 25fps.

What is this thing good for? Well, like all single board computers it pushes the limits on what computing means in the 21st century. A computer the size of a Euro coin could fit in all sorts of places and for all sorts of weird projects and even if you don’t use it to build the next unmanned Red-Tailed Hawk nest surveillance drone it could be cool to blast some demons on a computer the size of a joystick button.

The VoCore2 is shipping soon and is available for purchase here.

Source: Tech Crunch

Few would equate human life with battery life, but for many migrants escaping war or famine, a single percentage point of battery can mean getting the right information at the right time – or not surviving at all.

Smartphones today have become an integral part of a forced migrant’s journey. From navigating mountains in Central Asia using Google Maps to staying connected with family back home via WhatsApp, smartphones have transformed the migrant experience – though not always for the better.

No electron spared

In Eastern Europe, many migrants pushed back from Hungary stay along the border on the Serbian side in abandoned buildings. Volunteers visit these sites to bring supplies, including repurposed car batteries that migrants use to charge their phones.

At one abandoned building less than a mile from the Hungarian border, migrants huddle around one car battery to charge their phones, and they all agree about the importance of battery life to them. Many asked for a power bank to enable them to charge their phone when outlets are not available. Between each other, they constantly compare notes on what apps use up the most battery power, and remind each other to close apps when not in use.

Nashid, a migrant from Pakistan taking shelter in this building, says one of his primary needs at this remote outpost is for a way to charge his phone. With no regular access to electricity, he depends on the visits of volunteers to be able to charge his battery, concocting all sorts of ways to keep it alive until their next visit. Some of his strategies include making sure his phone is turned off when he sleeps at night or if he naps during the day, as well as using the lowest brightness level possible. He swears that taking out a dead battery and shaking it repeatedly provides him with a few extra minutes of phone use.

For many migrants traversing Eastern Europe to get to Western Europe, the Hungarian-Serbian border presents the final frontier. Once in Hungary, migrants will have entered the Schengen Area, the 26 EU-member zone with no border controls, making their destination countries in Western Europe significantly easier to reach. Increased security though has made this border crossing significantly harder – with many migrants being beaten and pushed back into Serbia dozens of times before they eventually make it across.

Nashid has been trying to cross into Hungary from Serbia for the past eight months. He left his family, including a wife and two kids, back in Pakistan before setting out to Europe. He says he uses WhatsApp to keep in touch with them and to stay connected to his cousin in Paris – his ultimate destination. He admits, battery constraints aside, that his phone also provides him with a reprieve from long hours spent idly waiting every day. He tries to sneak a song or two, or watch a couple of Urdu-language videos on YouTube.

One journey, a million apps

Over the last few years, Serbia has taken on the role of a major transit point for migrants trying to make it to Western Europe. The Refugee Aid Miksalište Center in the Serbian capital Belgrade, a drop-in center open 24 hours a day, is staffed by NGOs that provide services to migrants in transit. As soon as you enter the Center, you again see migrants gathered around extension cords, charging their phones and using the Center’s free Wi-Fi to access their social media and Skype with friends and family back home.

The same scene seems to repeat wherever migrants congregate. The nearly 70 million forced migrants across the world today have had to travel thousands of miles to get to a place of refuge. More than half of these migrants come from just three countries: Syria, Afghanistan, and South Sudan. Syrians, the single largest forcibly displaced population, have to traverse on average more than 1,400 miles just to get to Serbia’s border with Hungary on their long trek from Aleppo to Western Europe.

From getting directions, to learning languages, to simply accessing entertainment, smartphones have become vital for migrants on these grueling journeys that can last for months – if at the very least to get some emotional support by talking to loved ones they leave behind.

At the height of the European refugee crisis in the summer of 2015, when nearly a million Syrian refugees crossed into Europe to escape a brutal civil war, Facebook and WhatsApp chat groups sprung up to let migrants know of real-time developments on the road, which smugglers to trust, and what rates to negotiate. Dropped GPS pins and Google Maps turn directions into practical routes migrants can take. In some cases, migrants on sinking boats in the Mediterranean have helped coast guards find them by sending GPS signals from their smartphones.

Migrants download German, French, English, and other language learning apps on their phones to aid them in acculturating to their eventual destination while they’re still on the move. They use Google Translate to understand road signs in Bulgarian, Serbian, and Hungarian. And with migrant journeys breaking up families, smartphones have become migrants’ only way to stay connected.

In recognition of the importance of connectivity to forcibly-displaced migrants, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) – launched “Connectivity for Refugees” in mid-2016. The initiative advocates for migrants’ right to connectivity; enables access through negotiated data rates for refugees, subsidized device prices, and internet access centers; and provides training to ensure migrants are able to fully take advantage of their smartphones. Two years in, the UNHCR plans to increase the initiative’s staffing and roll out connectivity programs beyond the current pilot countries of Jordan, Greece, Chad, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Startups, for their part, have also been ramping up efforts to help migrants. Two Columbia architecture students, Anna Stork and Andrea Sreshta, cofounded LuminAid. A startup that makes the PackLite Max 2-in-1 Phone Charger, a solar-powered phone charger and light source that the cofounders have given away to displaced migrants. With the UNHCR estimating that up to a third of a forced migrant’s income is spent on connectivity, Phone Credit for Refugees has taken on providing migrants with free data access. Others, like GeeCycle, have instead focused on collecting used smartphones from around the world and distributing them to refugees fleeing conflict.

The challenge of misinformation

For all of their benefits though, smartphones have not always improved the journeys of forced migrants. The reliance on anonymous sources on social media to navigate routes has left migrants vulnerable to smugglers and traffickers looking to take advantage of their misfortune. Even information obtained from relatives can turn out to be erroneous – with heart-wrenching consequences.

Jelena Besedic, an Advocacy Manager for Save the Children Serbia, says that the spread of misinformation has been part of the reason for the rise of unaccompanied children traversing the Balkans from Afghanistan. Parents of kids as young as eight now stuck in Serbia were falsely told that, if their kids arrive safely in Western Europe, they’re entitled to bring their parents.

Misinformation of this sort about the ease of the asylum process can lead migrants to take on increasingly dangerous journeys, only to be disappointed with the reality once they reach their destination countries. This misinformation has led organizations, like the International Organization for Migration, to start information campaigns at source countries to better educate would be migrants about the dangers of setting out west. In addition, increasingly nationalist governments, like Hungary and Italy, have started campaigns targeting the smartphones of migrants with text messages and online ads to dissuade them from coming to their countries in the first place.

Familial pressure on migrants may have always been a reality, but access to smartphones has made that pressure incessant and instantaneous. Stuck at the border between Serbia and Hungary, Nashid says he would never have made the trek if he knew what he would have to face on his more than 4,000-mile journey from Pakistan to France. But while he was still in Pakistan, he had received messages non-stop from his cousin in Paris telling him how easy it was for him to get there and how plentiful jobs are in France. Once Nashid left Pakistan, messages from his wife and two kids constantly asking whether he’d arrived in Paris have made the idea of going back home impossible.

Nashid ends our conversation by asking me to confirm a rumor he’s heard on WhatsApp. Is it true, he asks, that there are now personal battery banks that one can charge like a phone that extend a smartphone’s battery life by up to 100 hours? A charger like that, he stresses, would make a world of a difference to him out here miles away from the nearest plug.

Source: Tech Crunch

JD.com’s billionaire CEO Richard Liu was arrested by Minneapolis police late Friday night on suspicion of alleged sexual misconduct. He was released yesterday afternoon around 4 p.m.

Today, JD.com, one of China’s largest online retailers, issued the following statement: “During a business trip to the United States, Mr. Liu was questioned by police in Minnesota in relation to an unsubstantiated accusation. The local police quickly determined there was no substance to the claim against Mr. Liu, and he was subsequently able to resume his business activities as originally planned.”

John Elder, public information officer for the Minneapolis Police Department, tells us the investigation remains active but he wasn’t able to share many further details, telling us he isn’t aware of when Liu arrived into the Minneapolis metropolitan area and that he isn’t authorized to say when the complaint against Liu was received. As for why Liu was detained for 16 hours instead of the 36 hours the local police department is authorized to hold a person before charging them or releasing them and continuing an investigation, Elder said the investigator “decided it wasn’t necessary to hold onto him, that we can conduct a fair and thorough investigation” without having Liu in custody. Elder added that more people are typically held the duration than released, but that it’s “not uncommon.”

According Minnesota’s state statute,  sexual misconduct is defined as a range of things that can lead to anything from a felony charge to a gross misdemeanor charge. Among these is a sexual act with a person under 13 years of age, if the actor is more than three years older than the complainant; a sexual act between someone who is under 16 years of age with an actor who is more than four years older; circumstances at the time of a sexual act that cause the complainant to have a reasonable fear of imminent great bodily harm; an accomplice who uses force or coercion to induce an act with the complainant; and if the actor knows or has reason to know that the complainant is mentally impaired, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless.

Asked if JD’s statement in any way interferes with the police department’s investigation, Elder says it does not. “People can say whatever they’d like. As with any investigation, this is a case and we’ll bring it through to fruition just like we do every other case.” This means deciding whether or not, based on the police department’s investigation, to refer the case for charge to either the city attorney’s office or the Hennepin County attorney’s office, which would then file paperwork through a district court.

JD.com’s rise in China has largely been unstoppable, though its newest quarterly earnings report fell short of Wall Street expectations, owing in part to heightened competition from rival Alibaba. The company, which claims to have more than 300 million customers, is regularly profiled by local and international media outlets, with the love life of Liu a particular point of fascination.

Not all of that attention has been desirable. Liu, who was married in  2015 and has two children, reportedly tried to distance himself from a sexual assault that was alleged to have taken place the same year at his penthouse in Australia. According to the New York Times, one of his guests, a property development professional, was found guilty of seven charges, including having sex with his accuser without her consent. Though Liu wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing, the Times reports that he asked an Australian court to prevent the release of his name by citing damage to his marriage and business. Last month, a judge rejected that request.

Like many of China’s new titans, Liu grew up poor. In a sit-down last fall with the Financial Times, he said he’d only tasted meat once or twice a year before going to college at age 18, instead eating corn-based products for months at a time, including “cornmeal porridge for breakfast, corn pancakes for lunch and dry cornbread for dinner — cornbread so tough it made your throat bleed.” The rest of the year they ate sweet potatoes. Today, the 45-year-old is reportedly worth nearly $8 billion.

In talking with the FT, Liu acknowledged JD.com’s fierce battle for customers with Alibaba without referring to the company by name. “Within five years I’m 100 percent sure we will be the largest B2C [business to consumer] platform in China — we will surpass any competitor.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Starry wants to change the way the home internet is delivered. Founded in 2014, the Boston-based startup takes an innovative approach to the space by beaming broadband speed internet through the air, using millimeter waves.

The company’s novel technique has drummed up great interest during its four years of existence, offering the potential to circumvent the need to lay down fiber-optics and shake up ISP lockdowns. Investors have certainly been paying attention. In July, the startup raised another $100 million, bringing its total up to $163 million.

The company has been piloting its service for a couple of years now, starting in its native Boston and rolling out to a handful of other American metropolitan areas, including testing in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, both of which arrived this year. In January, Starry teamed up with networking manufacturing giant Marvell to help distribute the startup’s technology across the globe.

Starry CEO Chaitanya “Chet” Kanojia will be joining us next week at Disrupt San Francisco to discuss his company’s growth and the future of its cutting edge internet technology. Prior to founding Starry, Kanojia also served as the founder and CEO of TV streaming platform Aero and media advertising company Navic Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Source: Tech Crunch