Ideaforge

It’s been painful, the silence of Silicon Valley with regards to Saudi Arabia, whose shifting accounts about the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi have nearly veered into slapstick.

He freely walked out the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Actually, rogue killers got to him. No, he was in a fist-fight and was subdued to death by Saudi officials. Fine. We did set out to brutally murder him, just as Turkish officials said at the outset.

It isn’t hard to understand why the story of Khashoggi’s final moments has finally come full circle. Why not just tell the truth when the world — including everyone in technology who has taken the region’s money — is too cowardly or greedy to take a stand against it?

In fairness, breaking up with Saudi Arabia, which has drenched the Bay Area in capital, is easier said than done. Forcing an investor to sell is practically impossible if it has a contractual right to be involved and isn’t interested in selling to other shareholders for a higher price. No doubt, too, many see little to gain by speaking ill of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, or MBS, who is running the show and may be more menacing than they’d realized. In fact, while some in tech are using this moment to win points for not raising money from murderous regimes, nary a recipient of MBS’s capital has spoken publicly about why he or she won’t again accept funding from Saudi Arabia until MBS is removed from his powerful position. Not a single person.

From what we’re hearing, even SoftBank —  whose $93 billion Vision Fund is anchored by a $45 billion commitment from MBS — looks likely to move forward with its relationship with the desert country. Indeed, comments made last week by SoftBank’s COO Marcelo Claure, who said there was “no certainty” that SoftBank will launch another Vision Fund, were probably overblown. Many will be relieved if that second fund materializes, too. Still, if we were running a unicorn company, we wouldn’t get too comfortable.

Even assuming that the Vision Fund continues to deploy billions of dollars with the help of MBS, it will take time to get his scent off future rounds. As analyst Chris Lane of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. told Bloomberg earlier today, likely SoftBank will have to pause three to six months before starting to again cut major deals, owing to its ties to the prince.

In the meantime, the Khashoggi ordeal looks increasingly like part of a series of shocks that are bound to have a systemic effect —  and make burn rates more important than ever to control.

Consider: While we’re busy obsessing over MBS, longer-term frictions with China — which has also soaked Silicon Valley in capital — grow more concerning by the day, from an ongoing trade war with the U.S., to allegations of intellectual property theft, to Beijing’s continued militarization of disputed islands in the South China Sea, to newer concerns over currency manipulation.

There’s also the performance of the U.S. stock market, which is reacting to these various pressures. Tech shares are pushing U.S. benchmark indexes back into positive territory today — one day after the year’s stock market gains were completely wiped out. But these zigs and zags have U.S. endowments, foundations and pension fund managers feeling nervous. More worrying, these traditional “limited partners” to venture firms are already over allocated to venture as an asset class because the cadence of fundraising has been faster than ever in recent years while exits have been comparatively slow.

“We keep stuffing the snake,” says Chris Douvos, an LP who has helped fund numerous seed-stage firms over the years, including First Round Capital. “But not as much is coming out the back end as coming in the front end. That’s left everyone with a huge bubble” with which to contend.

Douvos isn’t sure how big an impact tech’s suddenly strained relationship with Saudi Arabia could have, but he thinks — as we do — that it could be the first shoe to drop. He thinks that’s not necessarily a terrible thing, either. While a flood of capital from around the world has changed how Silicon Valley builds companies, it might be time to rethink that process anew.

“Maybe being cash-flow negative until you’re a $100 billion company isn’t sustainable. Maybe you start building toward earlier profitability,” says a hopeful Douvos. “That’s very much at odds with the traditional Silicon Valley ethos, but it starts to untangle the web of all this trapped capital.”

It would also give public shareholders an earlier crack at fast-growing companies and perhaps help Silicon Valley find its backbone.

More realistically, such headwinds may see U.S. companies that can’t stand on their own run even faster to Saudi Arabia. And what they’re likely to find is a more emboldened young prince — his terms more cutthroat.

Above: Salah Khashoggi, a son of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who has been banned from leaving Saudi Arabia and who was forced on Monday to visit the royal court and accept the condolences of MBS.

Source: Tech Crunch

The White House has issued a memorandum outlining the need for a new national wireless connectivity strategy; the document doesn’t really establish anything new, but does request lots of reports on how things are going. Strangely, what it proposes sounds a lot like what the FCC already does.

The memorandum, heralded by a separate post announcing that “America Will Win the Global Race to 5G,” is not exactly a statement of policy, though it does put a few things out there. It’s actually more of a request for information on which to base a future policy — apparently one that will win us a global race that began years ago.

In fact, the U.S. has been pursuing a broad 5G policy for quite a while now, and under President Obama we were the first country to allocate spectrum to the nascent standard. But since then progress has stalled and we have been overtaken by the likes of South Korea and Spain in policy steps like spectrum auctions.

After some talk about the “insatiable demand” for wireless spectrum and the economic importance of wireless communications, the memo gets to business. Reports are requested within 180 days from various Executive branch departments and agencies on “their anticipated future spectrum requirements,” as well as reviews of their current spectrum usage.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy is asked to report in the same time period on how emerging tech (smart homes and grids, for instance) could affect spectrum demand, and how research and development spending should be guided to improve spectrum access.

Another report from the Secretary of Commerce will explain “existing efforts and planned near- to mid-term spectrum repurposing initiatives.”

270 days from today the various entities involved here, including the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the FCC, will deliver a “long-term National Spectrum Strategy” that hits a number of targets:

• Increase spectrum access, security and transparency
• Create flexible spectrum management models, including standards, incentives, and enforcement mechanisms
• “Develop advanced technologies” to improve spectrum access and sharing
• Improve the global competitiveness of U.S. “terrestrial and space-related industries” (which seems to encompass all of them)

It’s not exactly ambitious; the terms are vague enough that one would expect any new legislation or rules to accomplish or accommodate these things. One would hardly want a spectrum policy that decreased access and transparency. In fact, the previous administration issued spectrum memos much like these, years ago.

Meanwhile this fresh start may frustrate those in government who are already doing this work. The FCC has been pursuing 5G and new spectrum policy for years, and it’s been a particular focus of Chairman Ajit Pai. He proposed a bunch of rules months ago, and just yesterday there was a proposal to bring Wi-Fi up to a more compatible and future-proof state. It’s entirely possible that the agency may have to justify and re-propose things it’s already doing, or see those actions and rules questioned or altered by committees over the next year.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel was not enthusiastic about the memo.

“We are ripping up what came before and starting with a new wireless policy sometime late next year. But the world isn’t going to wait for us,” she said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “Other nations are moving ahead with strategies they are implementing now while we’re headed to study hall — and in the interim we’re slapping big tariffs on the most essential elements of 5G networks. If you stand back and survey what is happening, you see that we’re not expediting our 5G wireless leadership, we’re making choices that slow us down.”

Whether this new effort will yield worthwhile results, we’ll know in 270 days. Until then the authorities already attempting to make the U.S. the leader in 5G will continue doing what they’re doing.

Source: Tech Crunch

Last year, Amazon announced a new initiative, Alexa for Business, designed to introduce its voice assistant technology and Echo devices into a corporate setting. Today, it’s giving the platform a big upgrade by opening it up to device makers who are building their own solutions that have Alexa built-in.

The change came about based on feedback from the existing organizations where Alexa for Business is today being used, Amazon says. The company claims thousands of businesses have added an Amazon Echo alongside their existing office equipment since the program’s debut last year, including companies like Express Trucking, Fender and Propel Insurance, for example.

But it heard from businesses that they want to have Alexa built in to existing devices, to minimize the amount of technology they need to manage and monitor.

The update will allow device makers building with the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) SDK can now create products that can be registered with Alexa for Business, and managed as shared devices across the organization.

The device management capabilities include the ability to configure things like the room designation, location and monitor the device’s health, as well as manage which public and private skills are assigned to the shared devices.

A part of Alexa for Business is the ability for organizations to create their own internal – and practical – skills for a business setting, like voice search for employee directories, Salesforce data, or company calendar information.

Amazon also recently launched its own feature for Alexa for Business users that offers the ability for staff to book conference rooms.

Amazon says it’s already working with several brands on integrating Alexa into their own devices including Plantronics, iHome, and BlackBerry. And it’s working with solution providers like Linkplay and Extron, it says. (Citrix has also begun to integrate with the ‘for Business’ platform.)

“We’ve been using Alexa for Business since its launch by pairing Echo devices with existing Polycom equipment,” noted Laura Marx, VP of Alliance Marketing at Plantronics, in a statement about its plans to make equipment that works with Alexa. “Integrating those experiences directly into products like Polycom Trio will take our customer experience to the next level of convenience and ease of use,” she said.

Plantronics provided an early look at the Alexa experience earlier this year, and iHome has an existing device with Alexa built-in – the iAVS16. However, it has not yet announced which product will be offered through Alexa for Business.

It’s still too soon to see how well any of Amazon’s business initiatives with Alexa pay off – after all, Echo devices today are often used for consumer-orientated purposes like playing music, getting news and information, setting kitchen timers, and making shopping lists. But if Amazon is able to penetrate businesses with Echo speakers and other Alexa-powered business equipment, it could make inroads into a profitable voice market, beyond the smart home.

But not everyone believes Alexa in the workplace is a good idea. Hackers envision how the devices could be used for corporate espionage and hacks, and warn that companies with trade secrets shouldn’t have listening devices set around their offices.

Amazon, however, is plodding ahead. It has even integrated with Microsoft’s Cortana so Alexa can gain access to Cortana’s knowledge of productivity features like calendar management, day at a glance, and customer email.

The Alexa for Business capabilities are provided as an extension to the AVS Device SDK, starting with version 1.10, available to download from Github.

Source: Tech Crunch

Chinese AI company Mobvoi has consistently been one of the best also-rans in the smartwatch game, which remains dominated by Apple. Today, it launched a sequel to its 2016 TicWatch, which was a viral hit raising over $2 million on Kickstarter, and it unveiled a cheaper take on Apple’s AirPods.

The new TicWatch C2 was outed at a London event and is priced at $199.99. Unlike its predecessor, it has shifted from Mobvoi’s own OS to Google’s Wear OS. That isn’t a huge surprise, though, since Mobvoi’s newer budget watches and ‘pro’ watch have both already made that jump.

The C2 — which stands for classic 2 — packs NFC, Bluetooth, NFC and a voice assistant. It comes in black, platinum and rose gold. The latter color option — shown below — is thinner so presumably it is designed for female wrists.

However, there’s a compromise since the watch isn’t shipping with Qualcomm’s newest Snapdragon Wear 3100 chip. Mobvoi has instead picked the older 2100 processor. That might explain the price, but it will mean that newer Android Wear watches shipping in the company months have better performance, particularly around battery life. As it stands, the TicWatch C2 claims a day-two life but the processor should be a consideration for would-be buyers.

Mobvoi also outed TicPods Free, its take on Apple’s wireless AirPods. They are priced at $129.99 and available in red, white and blue.

The earbuds already raised over $2.8 million from Indiegogo — Mobvoi typically uses crowdfunding to gather feedback and assess customer interest — and early reviews have been positive.

They work on Android and iOS and include support for Alex and Google Assistant. They also include gesture-based controls beyond the Apple-style taps for skipping music, etc. Battery life without the case, which doubles as a charger, is estimated at 18 hours, or four hours of listening time.

The TicPods are available to buy online now. The TicWatch C2 is up for pre-sale ahead of a “wide” launch that’s planned for December 6.

Mobvoi specializes in AI and it includes Google among its investors. It also has a joint venture with VW that is focused on bringing Ai into the automotive industry. In China it is best known for AI services but globally, in the consumer space, it also offers a Google Assistant speaker called TicHome Mini.

Source: Tech Crunch

Cathay Pacific, one of the main airlines in Hong Kong, says records on as many as 9.4 million passengers may have been stolen in a data breach.

The airline said in a statement Wednesday that there was “no evidence” that passenger data had been misused, but warned that passenger names, dates of birth, nationalities, phone numbers, email and postal addresses, and passport and identity card numbers may have been taken. Historical travel information and remarks made by customer service was also accessed.

A little over 400 expired credit card numbers were accessed, including 27 credit card numbers without verification numbers.

No passwords were taken in the breach, the company said.

The company said that it first identified unauthorized access to its systems in March, but didn’t say why it took more than six months to reveal the breach publicly. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment outside business hours. That might be a problem for the company in Europe, where the recently introduced General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now requires organizations to notify the authorities and customers of a breach within three days. Companies flouting the law can face fines of up to four percent of their global annual revenue.

The company didn’t say if European authorities were notified, but Hong Kong police are investigating the breach.

Chief executive Rupert Hogg apologized for the breach. “We acted immediately to contain the event, commence a thorough investigation with the assistance of a leading cybersecurity firm, and to further strengthen our IT security measures,” he said.

The airline is one of the largest and oldest airlines around, jetting more than 30 million passengers around the world each year.

It’s the second airline security incident this year. British Airways admitted a website and app breach earlier this year, which security researchers later found was caused by credit card skimming malware injected on its site.

Source: Tech Crunch

Two years ago, Kickstarter acquired Drip, an indie musician crowdfunding platform, on the eve of the service’s untimely demise. After relaunching Drip last year, Kickstarter is again reinventing the Patreon-like artist platform. This time, by placing it under the stewardship of two guys who love indie creators so much they dreamed up a whole festival about it.

The idea grew out of conversations between Kickstarter principal founder Perry Chen and Andy Baio, Kickstarter’s former (and first) Chief Technology Officer and one half of XOXO Fest, a sometimes annual, very beloved celebration of independent artists and creators. XOXO co-founder Andy McMillan will join Baio on the project, with an undisclosed round of seed funding provided by Kickstarter.

“Andy [McMillan] and I had been thinking about this for some time,” Baio said in an interview with TechCrunch. “The whole thing being about celebrating independent artists, bringing them together to talk about difficult things… So much of what we’ve focused on was that: helping independent artists who use the internet to make a living.”

The two Andys (as they’re known at XOXO) maintain a very active year-round Slack comprised of former XOXO attendees, a responsibility that’s seen them grow into their role as stewards of a community that’s taken on a life of its own, both online and off.

For their new project — the evolution of Drip into a yet-to-be-named community and crowdfunding hub — Baio and McMillan have formed a public-benefit corporation to reflect their values and those of Kickstarter, also a public-benefit corporation. Chen clarifies that the new site is separate from Kickstarter and will “not be a subsidiary in any way, wholly its own thing [with] its own leadership.”

It’s too early to say if Baio and McMillan plan to weave the new platform into XOXO Fest, but the two projects are “really closely aligned in mission,” Baio said. Some of Drip’s existing creators are XOXO Fest regulars and the event itself grew out of a successful Kickstarter that raised $175,511 back in 2012. 

“I think we’re all used to seeing at this point how the platforms that we use have failed,” Baio said. “The challenges that independent artists face are so profound already — to then have the tools and the platforms that you’re using work against you has been a painful thing.”

That pain was a central theme at XOXO Fest this year, which I attended. (Full disclosure: I was also an early member of the XOXO Outpost, a year-round creative space that grew out of the festival.) Across genres, writers, musicians and developers alike expressed concerns that unaddressed harassment, racism and misogyny had turned once well-loved social platforms against some of the users who need them most.

“We really hope that we can show people that this platform reflects the values and care we have for the artists that we care about,” Baio said. “We want it to be sustainable and independent for a long time.”

Source: Tech Crunch

NBC is looking to reach a younger audience with today’s announcement of a new streaming news network, NBC News Signal. Instead of airing on traditional pay TV platforms, Signal will be available through NBC’s news mobile and over-the-top apps, as well as on other services including PlutoTV, YouTube, and Twitter. The focus will be on the “political and social issues in America,” the company says.

The service will include an evening show hosted by Simone Boyce at 7 PM ET on weekdays. At launch, this program is available on Thursdays at 7 PM ET only. Other programming consists of a morning and afternoon show and hourly news updates called “Brieflies,” which launches later this quarter and in early 2019.

There will also be a Steve Kornacki-hosted digital show “218: Race for the House” which will air daily at 12pm ET and on Election Day, November 6th; as well as a Katy Tur-hosted pre-show on the network from 7-9pm ET.

The channel will have 24/7 news coverage starting in mid-2019, NBC says.

“There is a growing segment of people who have never had a cable subscription, but who are just as hungry for smart news as the prior generations of news watchers who have consumed NBC News for decades,” said Nick Ascheim, SVP of digital at NBC News Group, about the launch. “These consumers – who are up-to-date on the headlines but are seeking a deeper understanding of the news of the moment – are increasingly turning to OTT devices for ‘lean back’ news consumption or an on-the-go informative experience and that’s exactly what NBC News Signal will deliver,” he added.

The streaming network isn’t NBC’s only attempt at wooing millennial viewers. The company also operates a Snapchat show called “Stay Tuned.”

However, it is now one of many digital-first initiatives in the news industry, aimed to reach the younger, cord cutter crowd.

CBS last year added streaming news from CBSN to its offering for cord cutters, CBS All Access, which it plans on augmenting with local news from CBS stations.

Fox News will soon launch its own over-the-top streaming service, Fox Nation. ABC’s new streaming network ABC News Live partnered with Roku to be featured on its devices’ free channel.

Meanwhile, Cheddar has been doing deals left-and-right with various streaming TV services for inclusion in their lineups.

There’s also VICE News Tonight on HBO, and others, like Plex’s news service, based on its Watchup acquisition.

Plus, today’s youngest users – like many of us – get a lot of their news from social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter. That means NBC’s Signal will have a lot of competition fresh out of the gate.

Erica Fink and Christine Cataldi are the executive producers for the network. Rashida Jones, SVP of specials for NBC News and MSNBC, is the executive in charge of programming for NBC News Signal.

The service is available here, and across the above-mentioned platforms.

Source: Tech Crunch

SOSV, a twenty-year-old fund with $500M in assets under management, has been running accelerators for years. Their oldest one, HAX, is the premier hardware accelerator in San Francisco and Shenzhen and they’ve recently launched a food accelerator in New York and a pair of biology accelerators. Now, however, they’ve just announced dLab, a crypto accelerator that is paired with Cardano to build out distributed apps and solutions.

It is led by Nick Plante, a programmer integral in drafting the JOBS Act and who co-founded Wefunder, a successful crowdfunding platform.

“We can only make this sort of commitment to ecosystems we feel are incredibly compelling; it takes a substantial amount of dedication, education, staffing, and of course the long term financial commitment to support the space and the companies,” said Plante. “We invest in ecosystems that we identify as ‘macro trends’ like disruptive food, life sciences and synthetic biology, Chinese market entry, IoT and robotics… things that will fundamentally alter the way that we live in the next 100 years.”

“Decentralization is clearly a macro trend, in the macro sense. What’s happening with blockchain and digital ledger technologies has the potential to upend some of the most basic economic incentives that lie beneath the things we do every day; to affect the ways that humans collaborate, identify, trust, govern, and bring new ideas to life… it underlies all of it,” he said.

Dlab supplies up to $200,000 in pre-seed funding as well as perks from the SOSV global network of accelerators. They are also offering fellowships in partnership with Cardano to work with projects that would further blockchain research.

“Through last year and the start of this year we kept watching the blockchain ecosystem do some amazing things – along with some criminal things. The surveys and reports about the fraud rates of ICOs and other unpleasantness kept underlining our concerns report after report. The potential for the big economic shifts I mentioned earlier were clearly here but there were so, so many problems; there was a real need for education, for curation, and for proper governance and incentive structures to be put in place,” said Plante.

The group is accepting applications now for a January cohort. The group invests in 150 startups per year, a heady number in these cash-poor times.

Source: Tech Crunch