Ideaforge

Turns out training a robotic arm to play Jenga is a surprisingly complex task. There are, so to speak, a lot of moving parts. Researchers at MIT are putting a modified ABB IRB 120 to work with the familiar tabletop game, utilizing a soft gripper, force-sensing wrist joint and external camera to design a bot that can remove a block without toppling the tower.

The robot was trained with 300 attempts, rather than the thousands it would traditionally take, learning to cluster different attempts into groups as a kind of shorthand similar to how humans teach themselves. With each attempt the robot is pushing against the block, testing for tactile feedback to determine whether it’s a safe bet.

“Unlike in more purely cognitive tasks or games such as chess or Go, playing the game of Jenga also requires mastery of physical skills such as probing, pushing, pulling, placing and aligning pieces. It requires interactive perception and manipulation, where you have to go and touch the tower to learn how and when to move blocks,” says MIT assistant professor Alberto Rodriguez. “This is very difficult to simulate, so the robot has to learn in the real world, by interacting with the real Jenga tower. The key challenge is to learn from a relatively small number of experiments by exploiting common sense about objects and physics.”

The robot has gotten pretty good at making attempts, but the team is quick to note that it’s not quite ready to take on experienced players. Among other things, the robot isn’t able to determine strategic blocks that can sabotage the tower’s strength for upcoming turns. 

Source: Tech Crunch

Free TV and movie streaming service Tubi is preparing to double down on content acquisitions this year, the company announced this morning. The service today offers over 12,000 movies and TV series, totaling 40,000 hours of content. All of this can be streamed for free as the content is paid for not via customer subscriptions, but rather by advertising. Now the company is preparing to invest more than $100 million to expand its library this year, after hitting profitability in Q4 2018, and tackle new markets.

Founded in 2014, Tubi has benefited from the trend toward cord cutting, as well as the increasing number of younger consumers who never opt to pay for cable or satellite TV in the first place — sometimes called the “cord nevers.”

The company claims that its viewership increased by more than 4.3 times from December 2017 to December 2018, which allowed it to hit the profitability milestone. In the fourth quarter alone, it saw more revenue than in all of 2017 combined, it also noted. And it grew revenues by 180+ percent in 2018.

On the advertising front, the company says it ran campaigns from more than 1,000 advertisers in 2018, including those from the majority of the top CPG and automotive companies.

However, several aspects of Tubi’s business aren’t being disclosed alongside today’s news — only the highlights. What the company won’t say is how many monthly active users it has, how many hours they watch or how many ad impressions take place across its platform. These sorts of metrics are critical to measuring success in ad-supported video.

According to estimates from Sensor Tower, Tubi has close to 51 million installs on mobile, with 1.7 million of those coming in December 2018, a 21 percent year-over-year increase. That could indicate that Tubi’s viewership growth is largely taking place on other platforms — like TVs through media players or deals with service providers, like Comcast, for instance.

Along with its plans to grow its library, Tubi is preparing to expand outside the U.S. and Canada, with the first market launching this quarter.

To help fund its growth and content acquisitions, Tubi closed on $25 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank in December.

These plans come at a time when Tubi’s business model has been seeing increased competition.

For example, Roku entered ad-supported programming with its own The Roku Channel launch in fall 2017, and said earlier this month it now has 27 million user accounts. Of course, Roku doesn’t break that down by how many use its platform for other services, versus those who specifically launch Roku’s own free content — but that is its ad-supported channel’s potential reach.

In addition to Roku, Tubi competes against Walmart’s ad-supported video on Vudu; Amazon-owned IMDb’s new service Freedive; Viacom’s latest acquisition, Pluto TV; Sinclair’s local broadcaster-focused service Stirr; and soon, Plex. Comcast will also launch a free streaming service for its pay TV customers in 2020.

Tubi, like many of these services, believes in its potential as consumers tire of being nickeled and dimed for video subscriptions.

“In 2018 we at Tubi saw tremendous growth as consumers, fatigued by SVOD subscriptions and services, sought alternative entertainment choices,” said Farhad Massoudi, CEO of Tubi, in a statement. “We will continue to use profits to make bigger bets on content, enhance the viewing experience, and continue to press ahead into new grounds in what is our core advantage: technology and data,” he added.

In reality, however, Tubi competes for attention among a growing streaming market, which includes those paid subscription video offerings. Today’s consumers are building out customized bundles that make sense for them — a little Netflix and HBO perhaps, fleshed out with some free content through services like Tubi, for example.

Tubi’s advantage, of course, is that it doesn’t have to spend the billions on content and originals that subscription video services like Netflix do to win users. Instead, it relies on titles that have mainstream appeal, but may not be winning any awards — like older movies, kids shows, B-flicks, horror films and reality TV.

At the end of the day, however, Tubi won’t necessarily gain from people tiring of subscription video, but from the growing influx of cord cutters who are searching for older or niche content not included in subscription libraries — or who just want to watch a free movie.

Source: Tech Crunch

As Slack reportedly readies itself for an entry to the public markets, the high-flying startup is ready to brag a little bit about what it has accomplished in the past year.

In a blog post, the company shared that it now has 10 million daily active users on the platform, up from 8 million DAUs in May. It’s not just tech companies in Silicon Valley using the service either, the company broke down the number a bit, clarifying that more than half of the DAUs are from outside the United States.

User numbers via Slack

We didn’t get an update on the number of paid users — the company also shared in May that it had 3 million paying users — but the company did say that the number of subscribers has grown to 85,000, a 50 percent over the past year. The company’s major challenge of the past couple years has been bringing on more big companies to its platform, it seems they’ve definitely had some success, detailing in the blog that 65 of the Fortune 100 companies were slacking away.

Even with its weird new logo, the company seems to be growing at a fairly consistent pace from a user standpoint. We got a look at how things were looking on the financial side via a recent report in The Information, which forecast its 2019 revenue at $640 million and detailed that the company had over $900 million in cash on its balance sheet.

The company was last valued at more than $7 billion.

Source: Tech Crunch

DrLupo, one of the biggest names and most recognizable voices in Fortnite streaming, has closed a sponsorship deal with State Farm.

Bejanmin “DrLupo” Lupo has nearly 3 million Twitch followers and often plays with the world’s most popular streamer, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. Beloved for his talent and his personality alike, Lupo has also worked as a caster for various Fortnite tournaments and events. Last year, DrLupo held a charity stream for St. Jude’s Research Hospital and raised $1.3 million.

State Farm Marketing Director Ed Gold had this to say:

DrLupo is one of the world’s most followed Fortnite streamers. His philanthropic efforts and massive fanbase make him an ideal partner as we continue to amplify our esports programming and efforts with the gaming community.

This marks State Farm’s first sponsorship of an esports athlete. The sponsorship will include support of the stream through branded replays, live in-stream stunts and product integration (here’s me trying to imagine integrating insurance products into a video game stream), event-based remote streams, sponsored giveaways, and social content.

DrLupo announced the partnership on his stream, saying that he and his family have worked with State Farm for a long time and that he’s very thankful for the opportunity.

Sponsorships are certainly not new in the esports world — Newzoo reported that some $359 million would be spent in 2018 on esports sponsorships. That said, this does mark a grown-up shift in an industry whose sponsors have traditionally included energy drink brands, Taco Bell and Totinos Pizza Rolls.

Part of that has to do with the fact that both the viewership and the popular content creators, particularly in Fortnite, have grown up. DrLupo is married with a child, and his family frequently appears on his stream. If his viewers aren’t already age appropriate for insurance products, they soon will be.

But more importantly, the relationship DrLupo (or any other popular streamer) has with his audience is very different from the one Sofia Vergara has with Modern Family fans/Head & Shoulders customers. Streamers spend anywhere from six to twelve hours a day with their audience, often simply shooting the shit. Moreover, viewers can interact through the chat, having actual conversations with the creator.

The potential for brands to harness and translate that influence through esports sponsorships could be quite powerful, but streamers will have to remain diligent to stay authentic considering their audience is a generation that has become entirely numb to and/or incredulous toward advertising.

Source: Tech Crunch

Mozilla has rolled out what it bills as enhanced and simplified controls for Firefox users to manage how they block trackers.

An update to its browser software, released today, offers a redesigned interface which includes new controls that let users choose from ‘standard’, ‘strict’ or ‘custom’ settings to help them control online trackers.

Trackers refer to content embedded on websites that surreptitiously harvests information about visitors’ browsing activity — often for ad targeting purposes.

Using a tracker blocker is therefore one way to claw back a little online privacy. Although trackers can be used for lots of functions. Hence you may not want to block ’em all.

With the latest version of the Firefox browser the ‘strict’ level of tracker blocking is “for people who want a bit more protection and don’t mind if some sites break”, according to Mozilla. This mode also blocks trackers in all Windows.

Whereas ‘standard’ is summed up as a “set it and forget it” mode that blocks known trackers — but only when the user is using Private Browsing mode.

The standard mode will also block third party tracking cookies “in the future”. Though Mozilla looks to still be tweaking and testing that.

The third option is a custom tracker blocker mode which it says is “for those who want complete control to pick and choose what trackers and cookies they want to block”. This mode lets users choose whether or not to block trackers in all windows, or only in Private Browsing windows; and also to select different block lists.

On cookies, the custom option also lets users pick from blocking third-party trackers; cookies from unvisited websites; all third-party cookies (which Mozilla warns “may” cause websites to break); and all cookies (which it says will cause websites to break).

Mozilla has updated Firefox with a redesigned interface for tracker blocking

The redesigned tracker blocking interface follows an announcement from Mozilla last summer, when it said it would expand its approach to privacy by introducing default settings that block trackers, as well as “offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites” — flagging the “harms of unchecked data collection”.

Concern over behavioral advertising has generally been stepping up in recent years, fuelled by a string of data misuse and security scandals which have encouraged policymakers to take a closer interest in how personal data is collected and where it flows.

Rising concern over creepy ads has also encouraged a rise in activity in the tracker blocking space. So the latest tweaks to Firefox are part of a wider privacy trend.

“We initially announced in October that we would roll out Enhanced Tracking Protection off-by-default. This was just one of the many steps we took to help prepare users when we turn this on by default this year,” Mozilla writes today, teeing up the redesigned tracker blocking interface.

“We continue to experiment and share our journey to ensure we balance these new preferences with the experiences our users want and expect. Before we roll this feature out by default, we plan to run a few more experiments and users can expect to hear more from us about it.”

Firefox users can view the redesigned Content Blocking section via the Preferences menu, clicking on Privacy & Security — which will offer a Content Blocking section option. Or by clicking on the small “i” icon in the address bar, and then the small gear displayed next to Content Blocking.

A full list of changes in Firefox Release 65.0 can also be viewed here.

Among other listed improvements are a better pop-up blocker (“to prevent multiple pop-up windows from being opened by websites at the same time”); improved performance and web compatibility; and a better experience for multilingual users as also being among the updates.

Source: Tech Crunch