Ideaforge

When humanity’s back is against the wall and the robots have us cornered I’d say I’m all for whanging a few with a baseball bat. However, until then, we must be kind to our mechanical brethren and this robotic tortoise will help our kids learn that robot abuse is a bad idea.

Researchers at Naver Labs, KAIST, and Seoul National University created this robot to show kids the consequences of their actions when it comes to robots. Called Shelly, the robot reacts to touches and smacks. When it gets scared it changes color and retracts into its shell. Children learn that if they hit Shelly she will be upset and the only thing missing is a set of bitey jaws.

“When Shelly stops its interaction due to a child’s abusive behavior, the others in the group who wanted to keep playing with Shelly often complained about it, eventually restraining each other’s abusive behavior,” Naver Labs’ Jason J. Choi told IEEE. The study found that Shelly’s reactions reduced the amount of abuse the robot took from angry toddlers.

The researchers showed off Shelly at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction last week.

Source: Tech Crunch

Instagram’s next big Stories feature could let you compliment or trash talk other people’s feed posts, or embed a “see post” button to promote your own. A TechCrunch reader sent us these screenshots of the new feature, which Instagram confirmed to us is appearing to a small subset of users. “We’re always testing ways to make it easier to share any moment with friends on Instagram” a spokesperson wrote. Now those moments can include dunking on people. 

Instagram has never had a true “regram” feature with the feed, just slews of unofficial and sometimes scammy apps, but this is perhaps the closest thing. Users often screenshot feed posts and share them in Stories with overlaid commentary, but this limited the cropping and commentary options. Making an official “reshare could unlock all sorts of new user behaviors, from meme curation to burn book shade throwing to social stars teasing their feed posts in their Stories. Brands might love it for using their Stories to cross-promote a big ad campaign. Employing Stories to drive extra Likes and comments to permanent posts could help them gain more visibility in Instagram’s feed ranking algorithm.

Here’s how the feed post to Instagram Stories sharing feature works. You pick any public, permanent Instagram post and tap a button to embed it in your Story. You can tap to change the design to highlight or downplay the post’s author, move and resize it within your Story post, and add commentary or imagery using Instagram’s creative tools. When people view the story, they can tap on the post embed to bring up a “see post” button which opens the permanent feed post.

Users who don’t want their posts to be “quote-Storied” can turn off the option in their settings, and only public posts can be reshared. Facebook says it doesn’t have details about a wider potential rollout beyond the small percentage of users currently with access. But given the popularity of apps like Repost For Instagram, I expect the feature to be popular and eventually open to everyone.

Quote-Storying could help keep the feed relevant as more users spend their time sharing to the little bubbles that sit above it. And it offers a powerful viral discover mechanism for creators who can now ask fans to quickly reshare their post rather than having to awkwardly screenshot and upload them.

While both Instagram and Snapchat have let people privately send other people’s posts to friends as private messages, Snapchat lacks a way to embed other Stories or Discover content in your Story. Snapchat may have pioneered the Stories format, but Instagram has been rapidly iterating with features like Super Zoom and Highlights to extend its user count lead over the app it cloned.

The move by Instagram further ties together the three parts of its app: the permanent feed, ephemeral Stories, and private Direct messaging. You can imagine someone finding a post in the feed, resharing it their story, then joking about it with friends over Direct. It’s this multi-modal social media usage that turns casual users into loyal, ad revenue-generating ‘Grammers.

Source: Tech Crunch

The National Electoral Commission Sierra Leone has come out with a clarification – and, to , an outright condemnation – of the news that their’s was one of the first elections recorded to the blockchain. While the blockchain voting company Agora claimed to have run the first blockchain-based election, it appears that the company did little more than observe the voting and store some of the results.

“The NEC [National Electoral Commission] has not used and is not using blockchain technology in any part of the electoral process,” said NEC head Mohamed Conteh. Why he is adamant about this fact is unclear – questions I asked went unanswered – but he and his team have created a set of machine readable election results and posted the following clarification:

“Anonymized votes/ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate,” said Agora’s Leonardo Gammar. “This is the first time a government election is using blockchain technology.”

In Africa the reactions were mixed. “It would be like me showing up to the UK election with my computer and saying, ‘let me enter your counting room, let me plug-in and count your results,’” said Morris Marah to RFI.

“Agora’s results for the two districts they tallied differed considerably from the official results, according to an analysis of the two sets of statistics carried out by RFI,” wrote RFI’s Daniel Finnan.

Clearly the technology is controversial, especially in election law and vote-counting. Established players are already trying mightily to avoid fraud and corruption and Agora’s claim, no matter how plausible, further muddies those waters. Was Agora simply attempting a PR stunt in support of its upcoming token sale. That’s unclear. What is clear is the disappointment in Sierra Leone regarding their efforts.

UPDATE – Sierra Leone’s electoral committee responded:

Source: Tech Crunch

In a week when all eyes are on Facebook and the subject of how data about us on social media platforms gets used without us knowing, there’s been some consolidation afoot in the world of media-based big data services. DataSift, the London-based company that pulls data from conversations across social, news and blog platforms, anonymises it, and then parses it for insights for third party organizations, is being acquired by Meltwater, the company originally out of Norway but now based in San Francisco that provides business intelligence services such as media monitoring and AI analytics on internal business communications.

Financial terms are not being disclosed for the deal but it includes technology, employees and DataSift’s customer base. DataSift had raised about $72 million in funding from investors that include Insight Venture Partners, Scale Ventures and Upfront Ventures and the company had never disclosed its valuation. Meltwater is bootstrapped and has never raised outside funding, but it has also been described as a “unicorn” with a billion-dollar valuation — a description that the company would not confirm but also does not contest.

DataSift’s CEO Tim Barker, who is taking on a role at Meltwater leading his team there, said that it’s business as usual for DataSift’s existing customers, while the two will also work on integrating their platforms together. Combined, the customer base includes media companies, brands and educational and other organizations that make use of the data. Disclosed customer names include Viacom, Ogilvy, Air France, Vans, Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School.

The news comes at an interesting time in the world of social media, and more specifically the data that swirls around it. Over the weekend, we saw a huge story break about how the analytics firm Cambridge Analytica was involved in what has amounted to a data scandal: an affiliate working with the firm had used an innocuous-looking research survey to in turn tap into the social graphs and the related data of respondents, by way of Facebook’s API, netting tens of millions of profiles in the process. The fallout is likely to be felt for a long time to come, and may well bring about a new kind of regulation and scrutiny over how personal data is harnessed and used in social networks.

While this is raising a lot of questions already about personal data and social media, DataSift and Meltwater, to be clear, sit at a different section of the data and media continuum. While Meltwater focuses on what’s produced either internally at a business, or by publications and other media companies, DataSift’s currency is the movement of information that’s already being put out onto social networks in public posts, rather than personal details or attributes of users. As Barker describes it, the company has taken an approach that it calls “privacy by design,” in which it works only with anonymised data to reach its insights, and that work is not focused on how to use that data to rebuild profiles or “types” that can be used to match people back up with ads or other marketing.

The idea will be to bring that together with Meltwater’s existing business to enhance it.

“By combining advances in machine learning and the vast amount of publicly available information on the internet, you can today understand and track Porter’s Five Forces,” — a framework for analysing a business’ competitors —  “in real time to understand strategic opportunities and threats for your business. Executives that take advantage of this new opportunity create an unfair information advantage over those who don’t,” said Jorn Lyseggen, CEO and founder of Meltwater in a statement.

“DataSift has built a scalable platform that lets developers build data science-driven insights from social firehoses while protecting the privacy of an individual’s data. When combined with the data Meltwater captures and our AI capabilities, developers can disrupt the Business Intelligence space by either building new applications or complementing existing ones with unique signal that can be only derived from external data.”

All the same, it will be interesting to see what the affects are on businesses like these. For one, DataSift currently is built on the cooperation (and by the grace) of social networks — by way of APIs and access to firehoses of data that DataSift and companies like it use to feed their analytics engines. Whether the social media companies decide they would like to try their hands at some of that business themselves, or perhaps get told by regulators that they simply can no longer share information in this way, this leaves companies that are built on that access in a precarious position.

And that’s before you consider the effects of existing legislation like GDPR, which Meltwater says is something the company is built to handle.

“DataSift’s advanced analytics platform is a great compliment to what we have in house, at a time of growing privacy concerns and regulation such as GDPR,” said Aditya Jami, Senior Director of Engineering and Head of AI at Meltwater. “DataSift’s technology will be instrumental… to deliver next generation insights.”

DataSift in its past had a very notable instance of getting cut off from one of those feeds, and feeling the strong after effects: after years of working closely together and being the main users of Twitter’s firehose of Tweets — access that was brokered when DataSift handed over to Twitter the first third-party website “retweet” button to Twitter, created when DataSift was called TweetMeme — Twitter cut off DataSift from its firehose in the wake of a move to beef up its own big-data analytics business.

DataSift eventually regrouped and now works with around 15 partners, including Facebook, LinkedIn and WordPress, but given that its original premise was based around the kind of real-time data that Twitter uniquely provides, it was a big shift for the startup.

Meltwater has had its own scuffles in the past with the third-party services it relies on to make the wheels of its business model turn. Both have moved on from those more spiky years, it seems.

Fast forward to today, the combination of Meltwater and DataSift makes some sense when you think about the evolution of media. The rise of social networking has created another playing field for businesses: they now have a new set of platforms where they can pick up chatter about themselves, and it’s become the hot new place to communicate with customers.

Whether Facebook wants to admit it or not, social networking has become the modern-day descendent of the old-school media industry, and this is one aspect of that. While DataSift was built on trying to better harness and parse chatter from the former, Meltwater was built on the back of media monitoring to essentially provide the same services on the latter.

 

Source: Tech Crunch

Over the weekend, the Information Technology Industry Council and 44 other trade associations banded together and published a letter demanding that the Trump administration take “measured” steps to stop China’s unfair trade practices and voiced its opposition to unilateral tariffs that could damage industries as diverse as electronics and agriculture.

As we have been covering on TechCrunch, the Trump administration is readying a comprehensive “all of the above” series of policies to fight China, including tariffs that might reach above $100 billion, visa restrictions on Chinese nationals, and prohibitions on Chinese capital from buying or investing in American companies. The Trump administration is expected to develop a policy here shortly as part of the conclusion of its section 301 trade investigation into China.

The letter warns that tariffs in particular could lead to “a chain reaction of negative consequences for the U.S. economy, provoking retaliation; stifling U.S. agriculture, goods, and services exports; and raising costs for businesses and consumers.”

Interestingly, the letter leaves open the door for tariffs. From the letter:

In particular, it is critically important that the Administration work with like-minded partners to address common concerns with China’s trade and investment policies. Imposition of unilateral tariffs by the Administration would only serve to split the United States from its allies, hinder joint action to effectively address shared challenges, and ensure that foreign companies take the place of markets that American companies, farmers and ranchers must vacate when China retaliates against U.S. tariffs.

Considering the wide variety of organizations that signed onto this letter, it is interesting to note that free trade arguments are not being used here forcefully, but rather that the United States should only implement trade restrictions with the cooperation of other nations.

The letter from the trade association in many ways mirrors a letter released by House Republicans two weeks ago that similarly urged the administration against imposing unilateral tariffs on aluminum and steel, tariffs that the Trump administration had already announced that it is implementing.

Outside ITI, the signatories of the trade association letter included a spate of tech industry-affiliated associations, including Allied for Startups, CompTIA, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, the Consumer Technology Association, the Developers Alliance, the Internet Association, the Software & Information Industry Association, TechNet, and the Telecommunications Industry Association.

Source: Tech Crunch

There’s no shortage of ideas being backed when it comes to direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies that are cultivating their own brands. We’ve seen everything from slippers to toothbrushes to, perhaps most famously, razor blades.

Among the newer frontiers being funded right now: ingredient-conscious perfumes. For example, the  New York-based, venture-backed cosmetics company Glossier began marketing a proprietary perfume called You last October that’s designed to change in character on the skin over time. (“You” complete the product, it says.)

Late last year, an L.A. based called Skylar that uses only natural ingredients raised also attracted venture funding: $3 million from Upfront Ventures and serial entrepreneur Brian Lee, who also founded The Honest Company. (Skylar’s founder previously worked at Honest.)

Now another new entrant, Austin, Tex.-based Phlur, appears to be shaking the trees for venture capital. The company — which was launched publicly less than two years ago by Eric Korman, a former president of global e-commerce for Ralph Lauren — is targeting up to $8 million in venture funding, according to an SEC filing that shows it has raised at least $2.4 million toward that end. Among its backers is local venture firm Next Coast Ventures.

The money follows $6 million that Phlur has already raised, including from Next Coast, for what it describes as scents for both men and women that are made with “responsibly sourced” ingredients.

Its packaging is also environmentally friendly, it says; it’s made with 20 percent recycled glass.

We reached out to Korman yesterday to learn more and we’ll update this post if we hear back. But certainly, it’s easy to understand why consumers might appreciate companies that promise that they needn’t visit a fragrance counter ever again.

It’s easy to appreciate investor enthusiasm for perfumes, too. Three giants — L’Oréal Groupe, Coty, and Estée Lauder — still make up the bulk of fragrance sales, and millennials are looking for new options that don’t necessarily remind them of their parents. There’s been a spate of M&A in the beauty sector — and not yet in the fragrance sector, meaning there’s still opportunity there. Not last, the beauty industry is a very big business, with one estimate projecting the global fragrance market alone will be worth about $92 billion by 2024.

These new brands are simply playing into a years-long trend of consumers caring much more about everything that touches them, from their food to their house-cleaning products. As startups provide them with more transparency into how fragrances are made — and at far less cost than companies that pay for counter space at retail stores — expect to see many more next-gen fragrances, as well.

Source: Tech Crunch

The American South may not be the first region that comes to mind when you hear the phrase “hotbed of tech entrepreneurship,” but, slightly misguided perceptions aside, it’s home to a diverse and growing collection of startups.

Here, we’re going to take a deep dive into the startup funding data for the region.

What is “the South?”

Just like it’s a common pastime for many city dwellers to argue about the precise boundaries of neighborhoods, there’s often some disagreement about the exact contours of the U.S.’s various regions. To quash rabble-rousing from the get-go, we’re using the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of “the South” on its official map of the United States. Below, we display a map of the states we’re going to look at today.

Much like barbecue, the South is not a monolithic concept. So to incorporate some regional flavor into the following analysis, we’re also going to use the same regional divisions that the U.S. Census Bureau uses.

By doing this, we’ll be able to get a better idea of the relative contribution states from each sub-region make to startup activity in the South overall.

The ebb and flow of deal and dollar volume

As is the case with most of the country, the South appears to be experiencing a shift in startup funding as we move toward the latter half of a bull run in entrepreneurial activity. The chart below shows a divergence in overall deal and dollar volume over time.

Much like in the rest of the U.S., reported deal and dollar volume are heading in different directions. Part of this may be due to reporting delays — it can sometimes take a few years for seed and early-stage rounds to get added to databases like Crunchbase’s . Nonetheless, there is a slow and generally upward creep in round sizes at most stages of funding. And that’s not just a Southern thing; it’s a country-wide trend.

Let’s disaggregate these figures a bit. We’ll start with deal counts and move on to dollar volume from there.

A closer look at southern venture deal and dollar volume

In the chart below, you’ll see venture deal volume broken out by sub-region.

Over the past several years, reported venture deal volume has been on the downswing. From a local maximum in 2014 through the end of 2017, it’s down almost 35 percent overall. But that’s not the whole picture. The relative share of deal volume has changed, as well.

Although it’s not immediately clear just by looking at the chart above, startups in the South Atlantic sub-region have accounted for an increasingly large share of the funding rounds. For example, in 2012, South Atlantic startups attracted 54 percent of the deal volume. In 2017, that grows to 64 percent. Startups in the West South Central sub-region have pretty consistently pulled in between 28 and 30 percent of the deals, so where’s the loss coming from? Startups headquartered in Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama pulled in just 8 percent of deals in 2017, compared to 18 percent in 2012.

It’s a similar story with dollar volume.

In general, dollar volume follows the same pattern, albeit with a bit more variability. Regardless, startups in the South Atlantic sub-region are hoovering up an ever-larger share of venture dollars, and there’s little to indicate that trend will reverse itself any time soon.

Where are the regional hotspots for deal-making in the south?

Let’s see which states accounted for most of the deal volume. The chart below shows the geographic distribution of deal-making activity by startups in each Southern state from the beginning of 2017 through time of writing. It should come as no surprise that much of the activity is concentrated in states with higher populations.

And here’s the distribution of dollar volume among southern states.

Despite some variation in which states are at the top of the ranks, the share of deal and dollar volume raised by startups in the top three states is remarkably similar, coming in at between 52 and 53 percent for both metrics.

The top startup cities in the south

We started by looking at the South as a whole and then drilled into its sub regions and states. But there’s one layer deeper we can go here, and that’s to rank the top startup cities in the South.

In the interest of keeping our rankings fresh and timely, we’re covering activity from the past 15 months or so, from the start of 2017 through mid-March 2018. But before highlighting some of the more notable hubs, let’s take a look at the numbers.

In the chart below, you’ll find the top 10 metropolitan areas where Southern startups closed the most funding rounds.

The chart below shows reported dollar volume over the same period of time.

Much like we saw at the state level, the top five startup cities — ranked by both deal and dollar volume — are the same, although there’s some variation between where each one ranks. In order, the D.C., Austin and Atlanta metro areas rank in the top three for each metric, while Dallas and Raleigh, NC switch off between fourth and fifth place.

Startups capitalize on the nation’s capital

To be frank, Washington, D.C.’s top-shelf ranking was a bit of a surprise. It may be the fact that Austin, TX plays host to South By Southwest, a somewhat more relaxed culture and/or a preponderance of excellent breakfast taco and barbecue joints, but to many — ourselves included — the city feels like it would have a more active startup scene than the nation’s capital. But that’s not exactly the case. The D.C. metro area had more venture deal and dollar volume than Austin for seven out of the last 10 years, and startups based in the nation’s capital have raised more than twice as much money so far in 2018.

D.C.-area startups have recently raised some notable rounds. Just a couple of weeks prior to the time of writing, Viela Bio raised $250 million in a Series A round (in late February 2018) to continue funding research and testing of its treatments for severe inflammation and autoimmune diseases. And on the later-stage end of things, education technology company Everfi raised $190 million in a Series D round that had participation from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, former Alphabet executive Eric Schmidt and Medium CEO Ev Williams. Other D.C. companies, including Mapbox, Upside.com, Afiniti and ThreatQuotient, have all raised late-stage rounds within the past 15 months.

Startup ecosystems in Southern cities may pale in comparison to places like New York and San Francisco, but it wouldn’t be wise to discount the region entirely. A large number of interesting companies call the lower half of the Lower 48 home, and as the cost of living continues to rise on the east and west coasts, don’t be surprised if many current and would-be founders opt to stay down home in the South.

Source: Tech Crunch