Ideaforge

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced Saqib Shaikh on stage at BUILD in 2016, he was obviously moved by the engineer’s “passion and empathy,” which Nadella said, “is going to change the world.”

That assessment was on the mark because Shaikh went on to co-found the mobile app Seeing AI, which is a showcase for the power of AI applied to the needs of people who are blind or visually impaired. Using the camera on a phone, the Seeing AI app can describe a physical scene, identify persons and their demeanor, read documents (including handwritten ones), read currency values and tell colors. The latest version uses haptic technology to help the user discover the position of objects and people in an image. The app has been used 20 million times since launch nearly three years ago, and today it works in eight languages.

It’s exciting to announce that Shaikh will be speaking at Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event that addresses how rapid advances in technology, many of them AI-related, will influence the development of accessibility and assistive technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. The show, which is a project for the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired Silicon Valley, launched recently on TechCrunch. The virtual event is Dec. 2-3 and free to the public. Pre-register here. 

Shaikh lost his vision at the age of 7, and attended a school for blind students, where he was intrigued by computers that could “talk” to students. He went on to study computer science at the U.K.’s University of Sussex. “One of the things I had always dreamt of since university,” he says, “was something that could tell you at any moment who and what’s going on around you.”  That dream turned into his destiny.

After he joined Microsoft in 2006, Shaikh participated in Microsoft’s annual, week-long hackathons in 2014 and 2015 to develop the idea of applying AI in ways that could help people who are blind or visually impaired. Not long after, Seeing AI became an official project and Shaikh’s full-time job at Microsoft. The company’s Cognitive Services APIs have been critical to his work, and he now leads a team of engineers who are leveraging emerging technology to empower people who are blind.

“When it comes to AI,” says Shaikh, “I consider disabled people to be really good early adopters. We can point to history where  blind people have been using talking books for decades and so on, all the way through to OCR text-to-speech, which is early AI. Today, this idea that a computer can look at an image and turn it into a sentence has many use-cases but probably the most compelling is to describe that image to a blind person. For blind people this is incredibly empowering.” Below is a video Microsoft released in 2016 about Shaikh and the Seeing AI project. 

The Seeing AI project is an early example of a tool that taps various AI technologies in ways that produce an almost “intelligent” experience. Seeing AI doesn’t just read the text, for example, it also tells the user how to move the phone so the document is in the viewfinder. It doesn’t just tell you there are people in front of you, it tells you something about them, including who they are (if you have named them in the past) and their general appearance.

At Sight Tech Global, Shaikh will speak about the future of Seeing AI and his views on how accessibility will unfold in a world more richly enabled by cloud compute, low latency networks and ever more sophisticated AI algorithms and data sets. 

To pre-register for a free pass, please visit Sight Tech Global.

Please follow the event on Twitter @Globalsight.

Sponsors are welcome, and there are opportunities available ranging from branding support to content integration. Please email sponsor@sighttechglobal.com for more information.

Source: Tech Crunch

Lucid Motors said Wednesday that its upcoming all-electric Air sedan will have fast-charging capability that will let owners add 300 miles of range to the battery in 20 minutes and a home-charging unit that will allow owners to send energy from their car to their home.

Lucid said it is able to hit this benchmark because the vehicle has a 900-volt electrical architecture that when combined with its lithium-ion cells, battery and thermal management system and powertrain efficiency. Most electric vehicles — with the exception of the Porsche Taycan and future Kia EVs—  have a 400-volt architecture.

There are limitations to this speedy charging; a driver would need to access the correct DC fast charger, which are not exactly abundant at the moment. However, this capability does check an important box for EV owners. While the Lucid Air will have an eye-popping range of more than 500 miles — if its estimates are verified by EPA — the fast charging capability helps remove any lingering range anxiety and make long-distance travel more desirable.

The company revealed a number of other details surrounding charging, including that the Air will use the universal CCS (combined charging system) connector standard, which makes it compatible to public chargers. The vehicle will have a peak charging rate of over 300kW and a 19.2kW AC onboard charger that can support AC charging speeds up to 80 miles per hour.

Lucid also announced a partnership with Electrify America, VW Group’s U.S.-based charging network. Owners of the Air will be given three years of free charging at Electrify America chargers, which includes DC fast charging.

Lucid also has built out a number of home-based charging features, including a partnership with Qmerit on installation of its connected home charging station. But perhaps the most interesting feature is that Lucid has built in “vehicle-to-everything” charging capabilities into the Air and home charging unit. This means that the vehicle will be able to execute bi-directional charging between vehicles and even from the Air back to the owner’s home. Lucid specifically mentioned that it would allow owners to provide a temporary energy reserve for their homes, including “off grid vacation properties,” a weirdly specific detail that must be popular with the luxury EV owner demographic. Lucid told TechCrunch that this capability will become available in mid 2021.

Lucid said it also plans to repurpose older batteries for energy storage. The first prototype is already installed at Lucid’s Silicon Valley headquarters, where a team is working on producing a range of energy storage products.

Source: Tech Crunch

Arizona -based high-altitude balloon startup World View has a new partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to help the latter collect data to help it deepen its study of the Earth’s stratosphere, the second layer of the Earth’s atmosphere that spans between 4.3 and 12 miles above the surface depending on where you are in the world.

NOAA will be sending up miniaturized instrument hardware that can measure atmospheric particles, or aerosols, in the stratosphere. Studying these can help scientists better understand how the atmospheric layer, and the ozone e that it contains, and human impact on both can affect the transmission of ultraviolet radiation and what kind of chemical interactions are incurring that could present a risk to humans on the surface.

World View’s ‘Stratollites’ balloons will be able to host these instruments at altitudes higher than 55,000 feet (over 10 miles) above the Earth, for trips that can span multiple weeks at a time. Traditional NOAA research has relied on sensors carried by weather balloons, and aircraft, which can’t make those kinds of long-duration data-gathering excursions; or on satellites, which operate at a completely different altitude and can’t provide the same quality of data as an an instrument actually located within the stratosphere itself.

To get a sense of what kind of difference NOAA could realize from using World View’s stratollites, consider that the Administration says that while current weather balloon flights provide around 11 days’ worth of data from a full year of flights, while just a single flight of World View’s vehicle could provide 40 days’ worth of data.

The first Wold View and NOAA flights should take place sometime next year, and the data gathered from the excursions will be made available to the public for general research use after a period of six months, as is standard for the agency.

Source: Tech Crunch

Twitter has given its biannual transparency reports a new home with today’s launch of the Twitter Transparency Center, which the company says was designed to make the reporting more easily understood and accessible. The launch was timed alongside the belated release of Twitter’s latest transparency report covering the second half of 2019. The company attributed the delay to the COVID-19 health crisis and its work in getting the new Transparency Center up and running. The report touts Twitter’s increasing efforts in enforcing its policies, including a 95% increase in accounts actioned for violating its abuse policy, a 47% increase in account locks and suspensions, and a 54% increase in accounts actioned for violating hateful conduct policies, among others.

The company claims its ability to “proactively” surface content violations for human review has helped it increase enforcement of its rules, along with more detailed policies, improved reporting tools, and other factors.

As a result, this period saw the largest increase in the number of accounts actioned under Twitter’s abuse policies — a metric that could speak to better technology, as Twitter claims, but also perhaps hints at the devolving nature of online discourse.

Meanwhile, Twitter attributed the increase in actions taken on accounts demonstrating hateful conduct, in part, to its new “dehumanization policy” announced on July 9, 2019.

Twitter increased enforcement of its rules in other areas during this reporting period, including the posting of sensitive media/adult content (enforcement actions were up 39%), suicide & self-harm (enforcement actions up 29%), doxxing (enforcement actions up 41%), and non-consensual nudity (enforcement actions up 109%). The only area to see a decline was violent threats, which saw a 5% decrease in the number of accounts actioned for policy violations.

Twitter also actioned 60,807 accounts for violating policies around regulated goods or services.

Online harassment has been a significant challenge for Twitter as it has grown. The social network now encompasses a wider swath of the general public, compared with its early days when tech enthusiasts knew it as twttr, a sort of public-facing SMS. Today, Twitter’s idealistic goal of being an “online public town square” is bumping up against the limitations of that model, which is also increasingly criticized as a flawed or even delusional sort of analogy for what Twitter has become.

Twitter, like much of social media, can over-amplify fringe beliefs, controversy, and toxic content, to the detriment of conversation health. It can help polarize users’ opinions. And it serves as a breeding ground for cancel culture.

The company itself, as of late, seems to be waking up to the problem of putting the world together in one room to debate ideas, and the ramifications of amplifying misinformation that results in.

It suspended accounts from the fringe conspiracy movement, QAnon, in July. It has also flagged and screened Trump’s tweets and briefly froze his ability to share misinformation. On the product side, Twitter rolled out a tool that let users hide replies that don’t add value to conversations and, just last week, publicly launched a feature that lets users only tweet with friends and followers, instead of with the general public.

Abuse policy enforcement isn’t the only big change that took place in the last half of 2019. Government requests for user data also increased, Twitter found.

Twitter says that the U.S. made up the highest percentage of legal requests for information during the reporting period, accounting for 26% of all global requests. Japan was second, comprising 22% of information requests. Overall, government requests grew 21% in the period July 1 to December 31, 2019, and the aggregate number of accounts specified in the requests grew 63%.

Both metrics were the largest Twitter has seen since it began transparency reporting in 2012, it noted.

Twitter also saw 27,538 legal demands to remove content specifying 98,595 accounts — again, the largest number to date. 86% of these demands came from Japan, Russia, and Turkey.

“Our work to increase transparency efforts across the company is tireless and constant. We will continue to work on increasing awareness and understanding about how our policies work and our practices around content moderation, data disclosures and other critical areas,” the company blog post about the new center explained. “In addition, we will take every opportunity to highlight the actions of law enforcement, governments, and other organizations that impact Twitter and the people who use our service across the world,” it noted.

More metrics, including those focused on spam, terrorism, child exploitation and extremism, are available on the new Twitter Transparency Center.

Source: Tech Crunch

Max Levchin needs little introduction in the world of tech. As an entrepreneur, he’s been the co-founder of PayPal (now public), Slide (acquired by Google) and Affirm (reportedly about to go public), some of the hottest startups to have come out of Silicon Valley. And as an investor, he’s applied his power of observation and execution also towards helping many others build huge technology businesses.

We sat down with Levchin for a recent session of Extra Crunch Live, where he spoke at length about what he sees as some of the big opportunities in fintech. Here’s an edited version of the conversation. You can watch and listen to the whole discussion — which includes stories about Levchin’s coffee and cycling habits, and how many times he’s seen “The Seven Samurai” (hint: more than once) — here, also embedded below, and you can check out the rest of the pretty cool ECL program here.

How e-commerce failed to evolve since his days at PayPal

Even going as far back as PayPal I think the industry has devolved. I think fintech had the promise of really bringing simplicity, honesty and transparency to the customer. Instead, we ended up putting a really nice user interface on products that are not designed with the user’s best interest in mind. I’m a big fan of throwing shade on credit cards, because I think fundamentally, their business model is remarkably similar to that of payday loans. You are allowed to borrow some money and don’t really know exactly what the terms are. It’s all in the fine print, don’t worry about it and then you just make the minimum payments and you stay in debt. Potentially forever.

Source: Tech Crunch

A good brand is hard to kill. Over the past several years, the smartphone space has seen a resurgence of once-mighty mobile brands making a comeback with various degrees of success. HMD’s Nokia phones are probably the best and most successful example, but even Palm had a brief moment in the sun.

And then there’s the case of BlackBerry. TCL surprised the mobile world by bringing the brand raring back with an Android handset that re-embraced the QWERTY keyboard. That, in and of itself, wasn’t enough, of course. But TCL has the chops to deliver quality hardware, and certainly did so with the KeyOne. I know I was surprised the first time I saw one in person behind the scenes at CES a few years back.

Early this year, TCL announced the end of the partnership, noting, “We… regret to share… that as of August 31, 2020, TCL Communication will no longer be selling BlackBerry-branded mobile devices.” From its phrasing, it seemed like a less than amicable end for the deal. But TCL has already moved on to producing devices under its own brand name after years of subsidiaries and branded deals.

All of which brings us to this week’s announcement that a company you’ve never heard of, called OnwardMobility, is bringing the BlackBerry name to hardware for North America and Europe (other branding deals have existed in other markets). It’s a strange deal for starters, due to the fact that OnwardMobility is hardly a household name. It’s based in Austin, Texas, has fewer than 50 employees and was founded in March of last year, perhaps with such a partnership in mind.

After all, while a branding deal is far from a guaranteed recipe for success, it is, at least, a way of getting that first foot through the door. I’m not really sure I would be writing anything about OnwardMobility for TechCrunch dot com at the moment, were it not for the promise of reviving the BlackBerry name yet again. So that’s something. The company’s staff also notably involves some former TCL folk, as well as people involved with the BlackBerry software side of things. Another name that pops up a lot is Sonim Technologies, another Austin-based company that is a subsidiary of a Shenzhen-based brand of the same name. They largely specialize in rugged devices for first responders.

CEO Peter Franklin has both Microsoft and Zynga on his resume, and produced this fairly low-fi YouTube video to explain the company’s mission:

OnwardMobility says it’s a standalone startup. No word yet on investments or investors, though it will certainly be interesting to find out who’s backing this latest push to make the BlackBerry name relevant again. Notably, the company’s not sharing renders yet, either, but says it’s bringing a 5G device to market in 2021, with a physical keyboard and the focus on security that’s long been a key differentiator for the BlackBerry brand.

BlackBerry (the software company) certainly seems to be on board with its new partner here. CEO John Chen had this to say about the deal:

BlackBerry is thrilled OnwardMobility will deliver a BlackBerry 5G smartphone device with physical keyboard leveraging our high standards of trust and security synonymous with our brand. We are excited that customers will experience the enterprise and government level security and mobile productivity the new BlackBerry 5G smartphone will offer.

More or less what you’d anticipate on that front. For now, the news is basically OnwardMobility’s entry onto the scene and announcement of its BlackBerry licensing deal. I’m honestly not sure how much clout the BlackBerry name holds in 2020 — nor do I necessarily believe there’s a critical mass of consumers clamoring to return to the physical keyboard. So OnwardMobility has a lot to prove in an extremely crowded mobile market. I guess we’ll see what it has to offer next year. Stay tuned.

Source: Tech Crunch

Commercial electric vehicle startup Xos Trucks has raised $20 million, funding it will use to ramp up production ahead of potential new demand fueled by a landmark emissions rule adopted by California that will require more than half of all trucks sold in the state to be zero-emissions by 2035.

The startup, which was formerly known as Thor Trucking, raised the funds from a group of investors including Proeza Ventures, a mobility-focused VC firm backed by Metalsa’s holding company, and BUILD Capital Group. Xos also gained a few new board members along with the capital. Rodolfo Elias Dieck of Proeza Ventures and Mark Lampert, a former Daimler executive who is now at Build Capital, have joined the board. Xos has beefed up its executive ranks as well, including hiring Kingsley Afemikhe as its CFO and Rob Ferber, employee number one and science director at Tesla, as its CTO.

“We’re excited to continue growing our operations to provide best-in-class last-mile electric vehicles for our customers,” said Dakota Semler, co-founder and CEO of Xos Trucks. “It’s our goal to provide reliable, affordable, and sustainable transportation as the volume of e-commerce demands are increasing, and have accelerated during the pandemic.”

Funding will be used to expand operations and scale up production of its electric skateboard chassis that is designed for Class 6 trucks, the medium-duty commercial vehicles that are often used in last-mile delivery in dense urban areas. This skateboard, known as the X-Platform, was designed to accommodate a variety of medium-duty bodies, wheelbases and range requirements up to 200 miles. Metalsa, the Mexico-based automotive supplier, helped Xos with the design and is providing components to the chassis.

Xos vehicles have been used by UPS on customer routes in the Los Angeles area for the past eight months, according to the company. Loomis, an existing customer of Xos, has order another 20 trucks following a pilot program in 2019.

Source: Tech Crunch

TikTok is right in the jaws of a thorny situation with the U.S. Government regarding its ownership, but it’s sending a clear message today that it is not sitting on its heels with big deals. Yesterday, it announced a deal with UnitedMasters to allow artists on TikTok to distribute their songs directly to streaming services and other partners directly.

UnitedMasters is the un-record-label label — in fact a direct distribution company founded by former president of Interscope Records, Steve Stoute. The firm allows musicians (especially budding ones) to pay a competitive distribution rate to get access to Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, Apple Music and other services. It also gets them access to analytics, retargeting, CRM tools and individual deals that UM makes with brands like ESPN and the NBA.

Normally, the path between an artist being able to go viral on TikTok and be included in the next NBA 2k or before an official game on the air would be a long one involving a lot of knives out for pieces of the pie. UnitedMasters shortcuts all of this.

The simple scenario is this:

• An aspiring artist or songwriter puts out a song or riff on TikTok (likely one of many).
• This one has something and it catches on the algorithm and generates numbers.
• The creator opts in to participating in UnitedMasters’ program.
• They give up a cut of 10% but get direct distribution into the major streaming buckets and potential A-grade partners. (There’s also a $5/mo subscription option.)
• They can also market things like tickets, merch and more directly to fans using UM’s customer tools.
• The artist keeps 100% of their royalties.

Which is why a tie up with TikTok makes a hell of a lot of sense. One of the biggest issues with viral social platforms has been the way that they reward creators. Twitter’s Vine, of course, squandered their opportunity there. Even YouTube has had major problems providing consistent revenue to many of its top creators, with a long trend towards big hitters monetizing off platform in order to earn consistent, durable money.

TikTok has already announced a creators fund with a significant purse, but it needs to go beyond that. We’ve seen over and over how young creators on the platform create viral waves of attention for TikTok and millions of re-enactments and remixes. Often, though, those creators are offered little recourse to monetize or benefit from their creations. Dance creators and musical talents, often young Black women, are literally crafting culture in real-time on TikTok and the pathways for them to benefit materially are very rare. Sure, it’s great when an originator gets called out by a Times reporter willing to do the work to trace the source, but what about the thousands of others being minted as a real voice on the platform every month?

It’s beyond time for the creators of The Culture to benefit from that culture. That’s why I find this UnitedMasters deal so interesting. Offering a direct pipeline to audiences without the attendant vulture-ism of the recording industry apparatus is really well aligned with a platform like TikTok, which encourages and enables ‘viral sounds’ with collaborative performances. Traditional deal structures are not well suited to capturing viral hype, which can rise and fall within weeks without additional fuel.

In terms of overall platforms, TikTok clearly has the highest concentration of incredible and un-tapped musical talent on the market. It’s just wild how many creators I see on there that are just flat out as good if not better than what you hear on the radio. Opera, rap, soul, folk, comedy, songwriting, it runs the gamut.

TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer came to the company after a long stint at Disney ending with a very successful Disney+ launch. Almost immediately, he was dropped into a political firestorm between China and the U.S. government. Parent company ByteDance must sell within 90 days, says Trump, or get shut down. Microsoft might buy them. Other tech companies are circling. This deal is a pretty crisp forward-looking signal that TikTok sees a way through this and is not waiting to innovate on one of the trickier components of this era of user generated businesses.

And on top of that, it charts a course for how user generated platforms should look to service creators and keep them in their universe. All UGC plays garner significant value from the creative energies of their users, but few have found a way to make that relationship reciprocal in a way that feels sustainable.

This UnitedMasters deal feels different, and the start of a larger trend that could pay big dividends to platforms and, finally, creators.

Source: Tech Crunch

If, like me, you can’t afford a full-sized Tesla because your life has been a series of bad investments (one day my early Fyre Festival backing will pay off) then Radio Flyer’s newest product might be just the thing for you. It’s a scaled down Model Y, designed for use by kids aged 18 months to four years old – but I can play pretend and yell ‘vroooommm’ just as well, if not better, than they can.

Dubbed ‘My First Model Y,’ this is a collaborative effort between the Tesla Design Studio and Radio Flyer’s product team. It’s a ride-on version, which is not true of the standard Model Y, and it includes a honking horn, as well as black induction wheels (an upgrade option on the real car) and a functional steering wheel, with a price point of $99. There’s only one trim level.

Unlike the first collaboration between Radio Flyer and Tesla, the Tesla Model S for Kids, this one doesn’t have a built-in battery – it requires kid power to function. That means a lot more affordability, and makes it suitable for much younger kids.

I might pick up one of these instead of just continuing to scrawl “Tesla” in block letters on the rear window of my 1998 Toyota Camry in grease pencil.

Source: Tech Crunch