Xilinx has posted record revenues of $2.54 billion for the fiscal year 2018, an increase of 8% from last year. Revenues were $673 million for Q4 of FY 2018, up 7% from the prior quarter and up 10% from Q4 FY 2017. CEO Victor Peng attributes the growth to :a three-pronged approach”, focusing on data ...
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Technotopia is a podcast about the future. It assumes the world won’t fall into a dystopia and therefore is optimistic about our chances for human success. I’m looking for cool people to talk to and I’d like for you to join me.
I love guests who are excited about the future and technology but I do not require a technology background. I want artists, writers, programmers, makers, and thinkers. I want to ask smart people why we shouldn’t despair.
Want to join in? Fill this out to schedule a time. PR people fill it out as if you were your client so I can contact them directly. I usually record a few episodes a week so I have a nice buffer during the month.
Before you come on:
1. Listen to at least one episode. You can check it out here.
2. Understand you are not pitching your company or project. This is a discussion about the future. No CMOs or PR people unless you also play a mean theremin.
3. The only question I really ask is “What will the world look like in 20 years?” Everything else stems from that. Be prepared for a conversation.
4. I prefer doers to marketers.
5. Please be energetic. I feed off of your energy. The worst podcasts are the ones where I get your in-booth pitch from whatever conference you just attended. The best ones are when you are ready and excited to talk about the future.
If you have any questions email me at john@techcrunch.com. Otherwise I’m looking forward to chatting with you.
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Andes has adopted UltraSoC’s embedded analytics technology for use in its AndesCore range of RISC-V processors. “We are collaborating with mutual customers on implementations which utilise the V5 AndeStar architecture with the support of UltraSoC’s SoC analytics and debug IP, and processor trace, ” says UltraSoC CEO Rupert Baines (pictured). Andes will leverage UltraSoC IP ...
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While streaming and bingeing seem increasingly synonymous, Hulu’s biggest hit The Handmaid’s Tale actually feels like an anti-binge.
Some of that is just Hulu’s release strategy, where it doesn’t release an entire season at once, but instead comes out of the gate with a handful of new episodes (two this week for the launch of The Handmaid’s Tale season two), then reverts to a more traditional episode-per-week schedule.
But there’s also the fact that as good as it is, The Handmaid’s Tale is a tough show to watch. After each episode, you may want to relax a bit before returning to the dystopian future of Gilead, which is run by religious reactionaries who have stripped most women of their rights.
Season one introduced us to Gilead, and to our main character June (played by Elisabeth Moss), who’s been enslaved because she’s one of the few remaining women who can bear children. With season two, the plot gets moving right away, which makes it hard to offer our thoughts without giving away crucial details. Still, we gave it a shot in the latest episode of the Original Content podcast.
We also cover all the new shows and movies that Netflix has coming in May, the expansion of CBS’ streaming service to Canada and Anthony’s initial impressions of Avengers: Infinity War.
You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly.
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Visiting the Immersive arcade at the Tribeca Film Festival is always challenging. Every year, there are way more virtual reality and augmented reality experiences to try out (not to mention creators to interview) than I can squeeze into just a couple of hours.
This year, as always, I was only able to check out a handful of projects. They ranged from the serious and political to the playful and colorful — though even the playful projects were still exploring some ideas about creativity and human connection.
Terminal 3, for example, uses augmented reality to put the viewer in the position of an interrogator with airport security: You meet and interview a Muslim traveler, and you get to choose from different questions before ultimately deciding whether or not they should be allowed into the country.
Artist Asad J. Malik told me that as someone who grew in Pakistan, “I’m an expert on [airport] screenings, because I get screened a lot.” For Terminal 3, Malik interviewed real people (one of the options is an interview with Malik himself), though the person you see in front of you doesn’t appear photorealistic. Instead, they’re almost like a digital ghost who might gradually become more lifelike, depending on the questions you ask.
Malik said that he’s not trying to promote a specific political message about Muslims, except to illustrate the enormous variety of personalities, backgrounds and viewpoints among people who may or may not identify themselves as Muslims, but “who the world would identify as Muslims.”
Terminal 3 was created with support from Unity for Humanity and RYOT (a virtual reality-focused studio that, like TechCrunch, is part of Verizon subsidiary Oath). It’s built for Microsoft Hololens — not exactly the most popular platform at Tribeca, but Malik said it was crucial to his approach, because it allows the interview to take place against the background of the real room: “Suddenly this story, this person, it’s in your real space.”
Meanwhile, Lambchild Superstar: Making Music in the Menagerie of the Holy Cow makes no attempt to replicate a real environment. Instead, it takes place in a virtual world of dazzlingly bright colors, populated by animals who can be manipulated to make music — for example, a cow whose tail you can grab and reposition to change the sound made by his farts.
Lambchild Superstar is a collaboration between filmmaker Chris Milk and the band OK Go. OK Go’s Damian Kulash said they initially started out with the question, “What is an OK Go video in VR?” before deciding that was the wrong approach.
Something like the “Upside Down & Inside Out” video (which shows the band flying weightlessly) might seem like a good candidate for 360-degree video, but Kulash said it actually turns out to be “not really about the environment.” Instead, it’s presenting you with an experience in “a very controlled rectangle.”
So Kulash and Milk decided to explore a different direction, namely allowing users to make create their own music.
“I got into my ridiculous rant about the kind of alchemy of music,” Kulash recalled. “You add one sound to another sound. and you come out the other side with this ball of joy and emotion. It’s just crazy: Where did that thing come from?”
But Milk noted that if you give most people a guitar or a piano, they might get intimidated, because they don’t know how to play it: “There’s a barrier there.” Hence the funny environment and animals; it feels more like playing a game than performing music, but you emerge at the end with a unique song.
And it’s a song that you’ve created with another user, which Kulash said was also a key part of the experience.
“Chris is a zealot about that, and for good reason,” he said. “VR can be an extremely isolating technology … but is there a way we can use that, rather than to isolate, to let you have the closeness of a more human experience? It’s a weird thing that we had to remove all the human iconography to do that.”
This year’s Tribeca Immersive is also unusual for being the first to include a couple of games, like Star Child, a platform adventure game from Playful Corp. Playful’s Paul Bettner said that like the company’s previous game Super Lucky’s Tale, Star Child uses 3D and virtual reality to try to breathe new life into a classic gaming genre, namely the platformers like Abe’s Oddysee.
Today is the final day of the Tribeca Immersive, so New Yorkers have one last chance to experience all these projects. But while you might have a hard time finding some of these projects outside a festival environment, Bettner intends to release Star Child as a mobile game as well. It might sound really tough to squeeze a VR experience onto a smaller screen, but apparently for Bettner’s team, it’s not.
“What I’m finding in VR is if we build the content a certain way, with a focus on doing third person VR, and we focus the entire project on just making it stand out and take advantage of what VR can do, then bringing it to what we call flatscreen platform is a much easier transition than the other way around,” he said.
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Most dating apps are aimed at a general population, but people of color and immigrants are rarely well-represented. CultureCrush wants to fix that. This app, created by a team led by former attorney Amanda Spann, lets you search the dating pool by nationality, ethnicity and tribe in an effort to help fish out of water find a match.
“We have 24,000 users, 5% of which are premium paid users, and the app has generated revenue every month since its existence. Upon our relaunch, we anticipate this number to rapidly accelerate,” said Spann. “CultureCrush is the only app of its kind that enables you to search by nationality, ethnicity, and tribe. We have nearly 1,000 tribes from across the continent of Africa. Akin to JDate, CultureCrush allows users to connect with others from specific ethnic or national backgrounds. Anyone who grew up in a specific culture understands the magic of connecting with others from the same or similar background. CultureCrush improves upon the JDate model by establishing an inclusive ecosystem where all cultures can find and date each other, or any other culture they like.”
The app also supports friend-to-friend matchmaking and has a three-day message countdown that dumps matches after 72 hours. The app is similar to other niche dating services like BlackPeopleMeet, PlentyOfGeeks and even Trump.Dating. There’s someone for everyone, the thinking goes, but sometimes you have to shrink the pool.
Spann created the app in Chicago after talking with a friend of hers from Nigeria. She said her friend found it difficult to date especially because of the cultural divide she experienced on traditional dating apps. Further, Spann and her friend felt uncomfortable on traditional dating apps after getting fetish comments like “Hi Chocolate Goddess.” For her, enough was enough.
“It’s predicted that by the end of this year African-Americans will be the most represented out of any ethnic group online. Pairing this with the fact that African-Americans are currently spending nearly 48 billion on travel annually and 8.7 percent of the overall US black population is comprised of immigrants, we believe that 2018 is ripe with opportunity for CultureCrush,” she said. “We’re excited to see how our users respond to the new features and we are looking forward to focusing our energy and attention back into growing our user base after our initial setbacks.”
“We decided to pursue the project after observing that mainstream dating apps often fail to account for cultural preferences and rarely yield positive experiences for users of color,” said Spann. “Imagine being a Nigerian man who just moved from Lagos to Chicago for med school, it might be nice to meet a local woman from your tribe. Or being a Jamaican woman spending a week in Copenhagen for work who wants to grab a drink with someone of Caribbean descent. Or what if you are an African-American who lives in a predominately white community, having difficulty meeting other people of color,” she said.
The app is available now and you can sign up to be notified when the new app hits the stores.
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Real estate-focused MetaProp NYC has been adding new programs on top of its core accelerator. The latest: The MetaProp Bridge at Columbia University.
It’s an international accelerator designed specifically for real estate and property tech-related startups from Europe, the Middle East and Africa that are looking to expand into North America. Participants get access to MetaProp mentors, advisory services and up to $250,000 in financing.
The 14-week program begins with eight weeks in London before moving to New York City and concluding with a two-week, five-city roadshow across North America.
“From our first days on the ground in London, it was clear that this is a critical time for PropTech in EMEA,” said MetaProp’s Leila Collins in a statement. “There is an abundance of compelling technology for the real estate industry emerging from the region. We are happy to now have the infrastructure to partner with and support some of the most promising EMEA PropTech startups as they launch in North America.”
MetaProp says that less than 4 percent of applicants were admitted to this inaugural cohort. Here are the four participating startups:
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If you’ve ever painted a room you know that getting every nook and cranny is pretty difficult and Tim Allen help you if you have hardwood or carpet. The tarp alone costs more than the paint. Now, thanks to MIST, your robot can manage the entire job, slapping paint up like a robotic Jackson Pollock.
The robot uses mapping technology and a sort of elevator-like neck to spray up and down walls. The team, which hails from the University of Waterloo, has finished their prototype and it’s called Maverick. The team has experience working at multiple big names including Apple and Facebook. It includes Shubham Aggarwal, Utkarsh Saini, Baraa Hamodi, Hammad Mirza, and Dhruv Sharma.
This is just the beginning for Maverick. The team plans on adding other features that make it easier to use.
“We actually plan on mounting a camera behind the sprayer so that it follows the sprayer up and down, and hence can use image processing to make decisions about whether to actuate the spray or not. We’ve already implemented this logic in software and even have a paint quality detection algorithm. That being said, we haven’t mounted the camera just yet as seen in this video,” the team said.
As you can see below the project involves a platform, arm, and spray system. The robot maps the room and then rolls around, hitting spots that are supposed to be painted and avoiding spots that aren’t. Obviously you’re going to want to tape up some spots but for the most part Maverick will blast your walls with a few layers of paint in the time it would take you to go down to the paint store.
I’ve reached out to the team for more information on their project but until then enjoy their jaunty video below. I, for one, welcome our robotic spraying overlords.
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Imperial Innovations, the technology commercialisation partner for Imperial College London, announces the launch of Imperial College London spinout, GraphicsFuzz, a software company which has developed a testing solution for graphics drivers. GraphicsFuzz was founded by Imperial researchers in the Multicore Programming Group at Imperial College London and is led by Alastair Donaldson, Hugues Evrard and ...
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Toshiba has announced a 256GB USB 3.0 flash drive with a maximum read speed of 150MB/s in a retractable form factor. Four variants are available, with 32, 64 128 and 256GB of storage. The 256GB model can hold approximately 5 hours of 4K video or 715 five-minute songs of high-resolution 192 kHz/24bit stream audio. U365’s cap-less ...
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What is believed to be the world’s first demonstration for cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) direct communications technology operating across vehicles from different manufacturers took place in Washington DC, USA this week. Using Qualcomm’s C-V2X chipset in Audi and Ford vehicles, demonstrations showed how C-V2X communications can alert nearby vehicles to potential hazards when the driver’s view ...
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Square just announced that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Weebly for $365 million in cash and stock.
While Square is best known for its payment software and hardware, it’s also been expanding into other areas; for example, with the acquisition of food delivery service Caviar and corporate catering startup Zesty.
Weebly, meanwhile, offers easy-to-use website-building tools. While those tools can be used by individuals (my personal website is built on Weebly), the company has increasingly focused on serving small businesses and e-commerce companies.
Meanwhile, competitor Squarespace raised $200 million at a $1.7 billion valuation at the end of last year.
Square says that by acquiring Weebly, it can create “one cohesive solution” for entrepreneurs looking to build an online and offline business. And because 40 percent of Weebly’s 625,000 paid subscribers are outside the U.S., the deal will help Square expand globally.
“Square and Weebly share a passion for empowering and celebrating entrepreneurs,” said Square CEO Jack Dorsey in the acquisition release. “Square began its journey with in-person solutions while Weebly began its journey online. Since then, we’ve both been building services to bridge these channels, and we can go even further and faster together.”
Weebly was founded in 2007 by David Rusenko, Chris Fanini and Dan Veltr. (Rusenko, who’s still the company’s CEO, is pictured above.) According to Crunchbase, the company raised $35.7 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Tencent Holdings, Baseline Ventures, Floodgate, Felicis, Ron Conway and Y Combinator.
Square says the acquisition price includes stock for Weebly founders and employees that will vest over a four-year period.
Update: During a conference call with reporters, Square executives were asked whether the company is becoming more acquisitive. CFO Sarah Friar said it was more a case of “serendipity.” In this instance, Square and Weebly had been working together for years now, and she said, “We love the way David and the company talk about the entrepreneur. Culturally, we feel very aligned.”
Friar cautioned against into reading this as a situation where Square “decided to wake up … and do a bunch of acquisitions.” For the most part, she said the company will stick to “a build path and a partner path.”
Most of the Weebly team will be joining Square. Rusenko added that he just finished the all-hands meeting where he announced the acquisition.
“There’s just a tremendous amount of excitement … a true shared and mutual respect,” he said. He also recalled telling his team, “I am very excited to continue working on this mission for a very long time.”
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MoviePass is known for a pricing model that sounds too good to be true — in exchange for paying $9.95 per month, subscribers get up to one movie ticket per day.
At least, they used to: If you try to sign up now, that isn’t quite what you’re offered. Instead, there’s a bundle that combines a three-month trial for iHeartRadio All Access with four tickets per month on MoviePass — still a pretty good deal (especially since MoviePass says 88 percent of users see fewer than two movies per month), but not quite as irresistible as the old plan.
Does this represent a permanent change in the MoviePass business model? Well, the company has experimented with bundling before, but when The Hollywood Reporter asked CEO Mitch Lowe whether the movie-per-day-plan might return, he replied, “I don’t know.”
“We just always try different things,” Lowe said. “Every time we try a new promotion, we never put a deadline on it.”
We reached out to a MoviePass spokesperson who confirmed that The Hollywood Reporter story is accurate. They also said that this doesn’t affect any of the subscribers who signed up under the old plan.
MoviePass’ parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics sold additional stock last week in what seemed like a move to raise money for the service. (TechCrunch’s own parent company Verizon/Oath recently sold Moviefone for a stake in MoviePass.) At the same time, filings revealed that an independent auditor had raised “substantial doubt” about whether MoviePass would be able to continue operating as “a going concern.”
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Zurich-based DeepCode claims that their system — essentially a tool for analyzing and improving code — is like Grammarly for programmers. The system, which uses a corpus of 250,000 rules, reads your public and private GitHub repositories and tells you how to fix problems, remain compatible and generally improve your programs.
Founded by Veselin Raychev, advisor Martin Vechev and Boris Paskalev, the team has extensive experience in machine learning and AI research. This project is a spin-off from ETH in Switzerland and is a standalone research project turned programming utility.
How does it work? Pretty well. I ran one of my public repositories through the system and received 49 suggestions in 449 files. The fixes range from literal code changes — changing name: String, to name: {type: String}, — to suggestions for code that might be actually missing in function calls. It’s an interesting tool, especially if you need help finding hidden bugs in your code. The advice this tool gives is also surprisingly precise. Because it can build its own recommendations based on large amounts of code it finds things humans might miss.
“We built a platform that understands the intent of the code,” said Paskalev. “We autonomously understand millions of repositories and note the changes developers are making. Then we train our AI engine with those changes and can provide unique suggestions to every single line of code analyzed by our platform.”
“Today we have more than 250K rules and growing daily,” said Paskalev. “Our competition has to manually create rules and the biggest competitor has 3-4,000 rules and they’ve been working for years.
The company is self-funded and recently raised $1.1 million from btov. The founders are serial entrepreneurs. Paskalev worked at VistaPrint and PPAG and Raychev worked for Google and is a researcher in the field of machine learning in programming language semantics.
More than a simple debugger, DeepCode “reads” and tries to compare code to other implementations, giving you best-of-class performance from every line. Now the team just has to get programmers to use it.
“We have a unique platform that understands software code the same way Grammarly understands written language,” Paskalev said. “This unique proposition is positioned us save billions of dollars within the software development community with our first service and then to be on the front end of transforming the industry towards fully autonomous code synthesis.”
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While the ONE Smart Keyboard Pro doesn’t have a sweet demo tune nor can it play barking dog Jingle Bells without some help, it can teach you or your kids how to play piano. The elegant keyboard has 88 weighted keys that simulate a true mechanical piano and connects to your phone so you can learn to play at your own pace.
The Keyboard Pro costs $799 and is essentially a compact teaching keyboard. It can connect to your iOS or Android devices via an oddly shaped USB B cable and once it’s paired with the app you can run through simple songs – think Greensleeves – and more complex sheet music. This keyboard is weighted but not progressively which means that each key offers the same resistance, a consideration that might be important to some more experienced players. Further, you can connect a USB cable and connect the keyboard to your computer to use it as a MIDI controller.
Again, this is a very austere keyboard. It doesn’t do much aside from teach you how to play which, in the end, is what most of us need. Because it doesn’t have the expansive bells and whistles of a Casio and because most of the smarts are in the app itself, it’s a bit of a hard sell for most people. However, if you’re looking to learn, the ONE works.
This larger and more complete version of the One Smart Keyboard offers quality workmanship and design. The entire system is surprisingly sparse with nothing but a power button and volume on the front of the keyboard. There is an input for a sustain pedal as well as a few output jacks for headphones and that’s about it. Don’t expect to pick out instruments or pitch shift with this keyboard. Once you fire up the app you have access to teaching exercises and games that let you follow along on the LED-lit keyboard as you run through songs and scales. Finally, you can buy sheet music for $3.99 or so that you can learn to play on the ONE. There is also free sheet music available for those who want to play a little classical.
[gallery ids="1629054,1629055,1629053"]I found the entire system to be quite usable and my kids, once they figured out how to slow down the music, jumped right in learning little songs. Nothing can quite teach you how to play piano like a human teacher – there aren’t enough smarts in this app to make adjustments based on your skill – but it’s the electronic equivalent of buying a Teach Yourself Piano book and sitting down in front of grandma’s old upright. I’m especially pleased with the quality of the keyboard. I’ve already had a few MIDI keyboards over the years including models from Casio and Yamaha and this one is on par with those. The teaching feature is the main draw here, as I noted before, because there is little else you can do with this keyboard right out of the box. However, if that’s what you’re looking for in a keyboard and you don’t want to sample bodily noises so you can play Farting Clair De Lune at the school talent show, this might be the model for you.
[gallery ids="1629027,1629020,1629017,1629016,1629015"]
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US researchers have used memristors to create a copy-proof hardware security block for integrated circuits. The particular block is a ‘physically uncloneable function’ (PU) – a block with logic inputs and outputs that can be mass produced, with each individual item always booting-up with the same numerical characteristics, that are statistically unrelated to the numerical ...
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A new material could sustain a quantum spin liquid, and be useful in quantum computing, according to Oregon State University wher it was invented. Lithium osmium oxide is the compound, where the osmium atoms form a honeycomb-like lattice, enforcing a phenomenon called ‘magnetic frustration’ that could lead to a quantum spin liquid predicted by condensed ...
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Harting has upgraded its MICA industrial computer range to include the MICA 2, which offers three to five times the computing power of the MICA Basic for demanding data acquisition and processing. It has also introduced the MICA Wireless with 2G/3G/4G, 802.11a/b/g/n and Glonass for data acquisition and communication and the MICA Energy, which allows ...
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Arrow Electronics has added a development board which uses the NXP Semiconductors Kinetis KW41Z multi-protocol wireless MCU for low-power design of connected devices. Dubbed the Tiger board, it is likely to be used for design of products like smart door locks, portable healthcare technology, wearable sports monitors and RF remote controls. The Kinetis KW41Z’s integrated ...
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According to research by GlobalData, the global solar PV inverter market will decline from $6.3bn in 2017 to $3.7bn by 2022. The report Solar PV inverters – Update 2018 says that Asia Pacific, currently the leading market for solar inverters, with a market valued at £3.75b in 2017, will suffer the most and see its market share fall ...
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Fractus Antennas has focussed on antennas for NB-IoT, LoRa, Zigbe and SigFox IoT with an application note. The note studies the effect on ground plane size (across 40×20 to 75x54mm) on the effectiveness of its 3x12mm (2.4mm high) FR01-S4-224 surface-mount antenna, operating in this case in the 863-928MHz band. “IoT could be anything around and the challenge ...
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Wilma, the AI system developed by Shropshire agritech start-up Small Robot Company, is a finalist for Computing’s Big Data Excellence Awards. The Small Robot Company harnesses the power and precision of robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve the way that food is produced and minimise chemical usage. Wilma will work alongside Small Robot Company’s ...
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It looks like Digg has found a new owner: digital advertising company BuySellAds, which has acquired a majority stake in the news aggregator.
It seems that last month’s shut down of Digg Reader was a sign that there were changes in the works. BuySellAds CEO Todd Garland confirmed the acquisition to Fast Company, and a company spokesperson told me, “It’s true.”
Garland seems very aware that Digg readers may be skeptical about a company called BuySellAds, but he told Fast Company, “Don’t pay attention to the name, people.” He also said, “Our plan with Digg is to not screw it up.”
Digg was previously acquired by Betaworks in 2012. The startup studio’s CEO John Borthwick said the Digg media business (namely, Digg.com) is now a joint venture, with Betaworks and all of Digg’s previous shareholders retaining a stake in the company. (Digg took on additional funding from Gannett a couple of years ago.)
In a related move, eight members of Digg’s technical team have joined Civil, a startup building a blockchain-based journalism marketplace. In a statement, the company said:
Civil recently hired eight former members of Digg’s tech team. It’s a unique opportunity for us as we explore a larger partnership with Betaworks ahead of the launch of our decentralized marketplace for sustainable journalism.
Update: An earlier version of this article did not mention Betaworks and other shareholders retaining a stake in Digg, nor did it include the information about the company’s tech team joining Civil. Both the headline and story have been updated for accuracy.
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Netflix and BuzzFeed News are teaming up for a 20-episode documentary series called Follow This.
According to Variety, the show will be less focused on breaking news and more on taking us behind the scenes to show how BuzzFeed News reporters put together specific stories. For example, in the clip below, BuzzFeed’s Scaachi Koul talks about her reporting around ASMR.
Follow This will be produced by BuzzFeed News, with Jessica Harrop serving as showrunner and one of its executive producers. When it premieres on July 9, it won’t follow Netflix’s standard release strategy. Instead, a new 15-minute episode will come out every week.
Netflix executives have been emphatic about wanting to stay out of the live news business, but the streaming service has introduced more news- and reality-based programming over the past few years, including documentaries (like an upcoming film from Vice Media’s Motherboard) and talk shows.
BuzzFeed, meanwhile, has been creating video series for a variety of channels, including its AM to DM series for Twitter. The company told Variety it’s also pitching cable networks on a nightly news show.
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Bulgin has extended its 4000 series of miniature circular power connectors, adding 2, 4, 6 and 10-pole versions to the existing 3, 8 and 12-pole types. “These additions to our 4000 series connectors give designers more options when selecting rugged connectors for their designs,” said Bulgin engineering team leader Christian Taylor. “Not only does having the exact ...
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The University of Warwick’s Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) will contribute connected, autonomous driving systems skills to the AutopleX project to develop autonomous vehicles that can “see” around corners and through obstacles. The £4.7m project is funded by Innovate UK and led by Jaguar Land Rover, to combine connected and live mapping technology for fully- and semi-automated vehicle technologies. As ...
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Rockerbox has acquired Eventable, bringing two digital marketing startups together.
Rockerbox’s technology includes attribution measurement to determine which ads are driving sales, as well as what it calls a Recency Marketing Platform, which targets advertising based on users’ most recent browsing behavior.
Eventable, meanwhile, is focused on bringing marketing to your calendar — its technology can be embedded in display ads, introducing an “add to calendar” button that allows marketers to send updates and personalized notifications to consumers who opt in.
Rockerbox founder and CEO Ron Jacobson said he connected with Eventable because both companies participated in the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (albeit in different years). When they started testing out ways to bring their services together, and Jacobson said it became clear this was a “one plus one equals three situation.”
“Using the calendar as a marketing channel made perfect sense,” Jacobson said. “And on the attribution side, the calendar is another touch point.”
He added that Eventable co-founders Sameen Karim and Akash Malhotra are joining Rockerbox, along with their entire team.
The plan is for Eventable to continue operating as a separate brand and product. At the same time, the team will look for ways to integrate their products and to sell Eventable customers on Rockerbox’s broader marketing suite.
“It allows us to give our customers a more complete marketing solution,” Karim said.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Eventable had raised $1.2 million in funding from investors including Alchemist Accelerator, Right Side Capital, Steelhead Ventures, Russ Holdstein and Howard Love.
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A recently discovered programming error can make some crypto tokens susceptible to hackers. The exploit allows a hacker to pass an unusually high value to the exchange and get a ridiculous number of tokens in exchange, a problem that has caused the Okex exchange shut down all token trading including one called BeautyChain (BEC).
What’s really interesting is how the hack worked. As you can see above a line in the smart contract creates another value – amount – by multiplying cnt and _value. The hackers made a transfer and set the value to eight vigintillion – an eight with 63 zeroes. When this value is passed, the code overflows allowing the hacker to gain a massive number of tokens. Thanks to the smart contract’s “code-is-law” principal, each of these transfers are technically legitimate.
“There is no traditional well-known security response mechanism in place to remedy these vulnerable contracts!” wrote one researcher on Medium. “With that, we further run our system to scan and analyze other contracts. Our results show that more than a dozen of ERC20 contracts are also vulnerable to batchOverflow.”
In response Okex shut down all ERC-20 tokens but there are other exchanges and tokens susceptible to the hack.
“To protect public interest, we have decided to suspend the deposits of all ERC-20 tokens until the bug is fixed. Also, we have contacted the affected token teams to conduct investigation and take necessary measures to prevent the attack,” Okex wrote.
Image via MelisaDrucker who makes some unusually cool subway token earrings.
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A single UM33A digital indicator from Yokogawa can receive, process, and sequentially display data from up to eight RS-485 Modbus RTU field sensors. “In recent years, there has been a growing need to strengthen the monitoring of data from field sensors,” said the firm. “For safety and other reasons, operators need the ability to remotely ...
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Researchers developed a fast nanoscale oxide semiconductor-based TFT.
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Fraunhofer IMS has developed a way to build pressure sensors on top of finished CMOS wafers, saving chip area over the alternative side-by-side approach, claimed the institute. “Due to the specially developed sensor process steps, which run at temperatures below 400°C, the circuit and sensor production can be decoupled from each other,” said the Fraunhofer, ...
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Power choke coils and conductive polymer hybrid aluminium surface mount capacitors from Panasonic are now available in Europe from TTI. The LP-series power choke coils and ZE series capacitors (pictured) have a high ripple current (up to 2.0A) and a low ESR value. The rugged LP power choke coils offer inductance stability over a broad temperature range, have low ...
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At this year’s Hannover Fair, Harting announced new models for its MICA (Modular Industry Computing Architecture) industrial computer platform. The first is MICA 2, which offers three to five times the computing power of the Basic version to meet data acquisition and processing demands for industry 4.0 and other computing applications. There is also MICA ...
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Amplicon has introduced as Cisco premier partner the IE 4010, an industrial rackmount Ethernet switch designed for extreme industrial environments. The ethernet switch offers 24Gbit PoE/PoE+ capable ports, making it suitable for use as access switches in industrial environments to connect high definition IP cameras, Access Points and IP phones. These switches provide high-bandwidth switching (Layer ...
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Würth Elektronik eiSos has expanded its range of power modules with a high power density step-down converter with variable output voltage. Called the MagI³C-VDMM (variable step down micro-module), it comes in a small LGA-6EP package with dimensions of 3.2 × 2.5 × 1.6mm. The input voltage range VIN for the step-down converters extends from 2.75 ...
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A new millimetre-wave research lab at Queen’s University Belfast has been equipped by test system supplier Keysight Technologies. The lab, which can accommodate 60 researchers, students and engineers, is located in the Centre for Wireless Innovation at the University’s Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT). Professor Vincent Fusco, Chief Technical Officer of ECIT and ...
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Teledyne e2v has released its most advanced ADC yet, with four 12bit 1.5Gsample/s converters that can be mixed and matched across one to four inputs – allowing single-channel 6Gsample/s operation. Called EV12AQ600, it is offered in a radiation-tolerant version, “making it the first quad-channel ADC suitable for space applications”, said the firm. “Customers can design systems ...
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Bourns has introduced a series of miniature resettable thermal cut-off (TCO) devices for dense, high capacity lithium-ion battery packs. The Model AC series offers five trip temperatures: 72, 77, 82, 85 or 90°C (all +/-5°C) – the latter of which “is capable of carrying up to 20A at 60°C, making it the highest current-carrying TCO ...
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A co-founder and partner in Canyon Bridge, the China-backed private equity firm which took over Imagination, has been convicted of insider trading by a New York federal court. The insider trading relates to Canyon Bridge’s failed attempt to buy Lattice Semiconductor in 2016. Benjamin Chow was found guilty of passing details of the proposed deal ...
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When I saw the first trailer for Avengers: Infinity War, I was really excited and really worried.
Excited because, holy crap, there were so many characters. Iron Man! Captain America! Thor! Black Panther! Black Widow! The Vision! The Guardians of the Galaxy! And they were all going to be in a movie together!
Worried because, holy crap, there so many characters. How could you squeeze all of them into a single film?
The answer is, with great difficulty. To be fair, Infinity War isn’t the giant mess that it could have been — in fact, it’s a lot of fun. But there’s simply not enough movie to do justice to the enormous cast.
Marvel Studios’ AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. L to R: Spider-Man/Peter Parker (Tom Holland), Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), Drax (Dave Bautista), Star-Lord/Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and Mantis (Pom Klementieff). Photo: Film Frame. ©Marvel Studios 2018
Some of those characters fare better than others. For most of Infinity War, the “cosmic” side of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is well-represented by Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and the Guardians of the Galaxy (Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana and team), who end up working together. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely are more willing to spend time with them, even when they’re not involved in a giant battle, and that pays off with the movie’s funniest moments — as well as scenes with real weight and melancholy.
Meanwhile, Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Spider-Man (Tom Holland) also get some good jokes in, recapturing the fun of their relationship in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Everyone else? Well, they’re usually introduced with a nice quip or a bad-ass moment, designed to remind you of how much you liked them in their own movies. But afterwards, they tend to fade into the background, becoming just another moving part in the big action set pieces (and yes, this includes Marvel’s new MVP Black Panther). That’s probably about as good as any filmmaker could do when trying to stuff the entire Marvel Universe into a single movie, but it’s still a little disappointing after the first Avengers film managed to give us five distinct and memorable heroes (sorry, Hawkeye), and it got so much mileage out of throwing those heroes together.
Marvel Studios’ AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. Thanos (Josh Brolin). Photo: Film Frame. ©Marvel Studios 2018
Luckily, the film’s real strength isn’t on the heroic side. Instead, as in Black Panther (and virtually no other Marvel movie), Infinity War‘s most memorable character is actually the villain, Thanos.
Previous films have reduced Thanos to a purple guy who utters a few threatening lines while sitting in his silly looking space throne. In Infinity War, Thanos is at the center of the action. His quest to acquire the super-powered Infinity Stones drives the story, as all of Marvel’s heroes scramble to stop him, giving the film a constant feeling of crisis and leading fairly quickly to spectacular fights on Earth and in space. He even gets to kill off a surprisingly large number of those heroes (though I don’t expect all of those deaths to stick).
Over the course of the film, Thanos emerges as a dangerous and powerful alien who’s absolutely devoted to his mission of destroying half the life in the universe — kind of a weird goal, but as Walter Sobchak once said, at least it’s an ethos. And as portrayed by Josh Brolin (via voice acting and motion capture), he doesn’t come off as a cackling villain. Instead, he’s a weary soldier at the end of a long quest.
I shouldn’t say too much about where that quest leads, but I will note that Infinity War feels very much like the first half of a two-part film, with an ending that sets up the still-untitled Avengers 4 (due May 3, 2019).
I do think Infinity War falls a little short of Marvel’s best movies, like Black Panther and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (which, like Infinity War, was directed by Anthony and Joe Russo). But here’s one simple measure of the film’s success: Despite my reservations, that cliffhanger worked, and I really, really want to know what happens next.
It’s going to be a long wait till 2019.
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A new — and theoretical — system for blockchain-based data storage could ensure that hackers will not be able to crack cryptocurrencies once the quantum era starts. The idea, proposed by researchers at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, would secure cryptocurrency futures for decades using a blockchain technology that is like a time machine.
You can check out their findings here.
To understand what’s going on here we have to define some terms. A blockchain stores every transaction in a system on what amounts to an immutable record of events. The work necessary for maintaining and confirming this immutable record is what is commonly known as mining. But this technology — which the paper’s co-author Del Rajan claims will make up “10 percent of global GDP… by 2027” — will become insecure in an era of quantum computers.
Therefore the solution to store a blockchain in a quantum era requires a quantum blockchain using a series of entangled photons. Further, Spectrum writes: “Essentially, current records in a quantum blockchain are not merely linked to a record of the past, but rather a record in the past, one that does not exist anymore.”
Yeah, it’s weird.
From the paper intro:
Our method involves encoding the blockchain into a temporal GHZ (Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger) state of photons that do not simultaneously coexist. It is shown that the entanglement in time, as opposed to an entanglement in space, provides the crucial quantum advantage. All the subcomponents of this system have already been shown to be experimentally realized. Perhaps more shockingly, our encoding procedure can be interpreted as non-classically influencing the past; hence this decentralized quantum blockchain can be viewed as a quantum networked time machine.
In short, the quantum blockchain is immutable because the photons that it contains do not exist at the current time but are still extant and readable. This means the entire blockchain is visible but cannot be “touched” and the only entry you would be able to try to tamper with is the most recent one. In fact, the researchers write, “In this spatial entanglement case, if an attacker tries to tamper with any photon, the full blockchain would be invalidated immediately.”
Is this possible? The researchers note that the technology already exists.
“Our novel methodology encodes a blockchain into these temporally entangled states, which can then be integrated into a quantum network for further useful operations. We will also show that entanglement in time, as opposed to entanglement in space, plays the pivotal role for the quantum benefit over a classical blockchain,” the authors write. “As discussed below, all the subsystems of this design have already been shown to be experimentally realized. Furthermore, if such a quantum blockchain were to be constructed, we will show that it could be viewed as a quantum networked time machine.”
Don’t worry about having to update your Bitcoin wallet, though. This process is still theoretical and not at all available to mere mortals. That said, it’s nice to know someone is looking out for our quantum future, however weird it may be.
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Researchers at the University of Michigan have found a way to stack solution-processed organic solar cells on top of vacuum-processed cells, creating an tandem solar cell with 15% efficiency. “For the last couple of years, efficiency for organic photo-voltaics was stuck around 11 to 12%,” said Michigan physicist Xiaozhou Che. The top solution-processed non-fullerene-acceptor cell ...
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The University of Manchester has made a 1GHz thin-film transistor from amorphous IGZO – indium gallium zinc oxide. The devices, created with Shandong University in China, are made on a high-resistance silicon substrate using Ta2O5 gate dielectric. The material is 80% transparent, opening the door to display applications. “Making a high performance device, like our GHz ...
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With recent changes, Flipboard has been placing a big emphasis on allowing readers to go deep on their interests. Now it’s adding even more features around one particular interest, in the Technology section of the Flipboard website and app.
“We want to make Flipboard definitive for tech insiders and enthusiasts,” said CEO Mike McCue.
This positions Flipboard as more of a direct competitor to a tech news aggregator like Techmeme, but with more curation from partners and from readers themselves.
The most immediately noticeable change is what the company describes as a “newspaper-like, high-density layout.” Basically, it moves away from the image-heavy look that Flipboard is known for, towards a layout that places a bigger emphasis on headlines and text, designed for quick scanning.
While McCue said the new look is “really meant for the desktop,” Flipboard has also created a version for the mobile web, and the app will also vary between a high-density and low-density layout depending on the stories. (If it seems strange for Flipboard to be prioritizing its web experience, remember that the company has also been shifting its focus away from its own native article formats towards the mobile web.)
Regardless of which layout you’re seeing, the section will also have new content. Some of it will be curated by Flipboard publishers, with The Verge creating roundups for Gadgets News and Artificial Intelligence, the Wirecutter offering Deals of the Week and the team here at TechCrunch curating our latest Features.
“Flipboard has really become more of an ecosystem,” McCue said. “Publishers and curators are curating stories around all sorts of different topics. We want to provide access to that ecosystem on any platform, with or without the app.”
Teams can also create their own magazines, which are basically private collections of stories. So if you’re at a startup and want all of your colleagues to be up-to-date on the latest headlines about your industry and competitors, you can curate a magazine that’s only visible to them.
Flipboard will also be asking experts and influencers for book recommendations, starting with Wired Editor in Chief Nick Thompson’s roundup of “Five Books I’ve Recently Read About the Future.”
And all of this will be rounded up in a daily email, which will include the latest tech headlines as well as selections from any team magazine you contribute to. On Saturday, the newsletter will focus on those book recommendations, with links to buy the titles on Amazon.
McCue suggested that if all this new content is embraced by readers, we might see Flipboard start to pursue a similar strategy around other topics, with a focus on reaching professional readers. Next up: Advertising.
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Every year your faithful friends at TechCrunch spend an entire week looking at bags. Why? Because bags – often ignored but full of our important electronics – are the outward representations of our techie styles and we put far too little thought into where we keep our most prized possessions.
To that end we need your help. Do you have a favorite bag we should check out? Do you make a bag we should check out? Is there a bag we should avoid? We’ve created this form to gather bag and bag-related information. If you’re a manufacturer just add a link to your wares and we’ll be in touch. If you are a civilian and simply love a bag (or hate it) add as much info as you’d like and include a rating. We’ll pick a few brand new backs and some old standbys you recommend.
Considering we spend months carrying around our laptop and gear bags they deserve a closer look. That’s what Bag Week is about and we hope you can help us out with some recommendations. Our back and shoulders will thank you.
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The theme for this year’s PA Consulting’s Raspberry Pi Competition 2018 was Sustainability. More than 100 schools were challenged to build projects around the credit card-sized computer that could help to ‘save the planet’. And these entries were whittled down to the nine finalists judged at the IET, at Savoy Place, last week. The imaginative ...
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A professor at the University of Sussex has been given the job of making the UK a world-leader in sound shaping technology. Professor Sriram Subramanian has been named a Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) chair for the development of novel acoustic interfaces. This is one of a ten areas of development emerging technology being created ...
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Allegro MicroSystems precision programmable Hall sensor IC that includes differential Hall elements and an internal rare-earth magnet to allow it to detect ferrous targets that are not themselves magnetic. Called ATS344, it is intended for automotive applications requiring high resolution detection of long stroke (>5 mm) linear motion. “The ATS344 is well-suited for applications that require ...
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Cambridge-based Blighter Surveillance Systems has made its first sale into India for its Blighter B400 series ground surveillance radar. The contract was awarded by system integrator Tata Power following a trial organised by India’s border management organisation in Gwalior in 2016. Blighter radars will be deployed by Tata during 2018 as part of the Indian ...
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Designed with a whisper-quiet noise floor – <30μV (130dB SNR), 1200AS is a family of high power Class-D audio amplifiers from ICEpower of Copenhagen. Intended for PA speakers, line arrays and professional single or dual sub-woofers, they are based on the firm’s own ICEedge chip-set and include a universal mains switch mode power supply with ...
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Hooch, the subscription startup that allows members to claim one free drink per day from hundreds of different bars and restaurants, is adding a new membership level called Hooch Black.
Signing up for Hooch Black will cost you significantly more than the regular subscription — instead of $9.99 per month, it’s $295 per year. And you don’t just get in automatically; you actually need to fill out an application.
But in exchange for that money and work, Hooch Black members get access to a variety of perks (on top of the standard drink-a-day option), including deals at more than 100,000 hotels worldwide — co-founder and CEO Lin Dai said that because they’re are only visible to members, Hooch gets access to lower “unpublished” prices that you won’t find elsewhere online, with discounts as high as 60 percent.
It also offers preferred reservations, discounts and free champagne at select restaurants. And there are other giveaways, too — in New York City, the launch offerings include Hamilton and Governor’s Ball tickets.
Dai suggested that Hooch has always been meant as an antidote to apps that “facilitate a couch economy” — instead of delivering stuff to your home, Hooch convinces you to go out to bars. Dai said Hooch Black “continues the concept” with all additional perks tied to real-world experiences. (There’s some couch-centric stuff too, like a $100 Postmates credit.)
In addition, Hooch Black members will get access to what Dai described as an “concierge who can make travel arrangements and dining reservations for you.” (Those reservations don’t have to be with Hooch partners, by the way.) He compared the experience to an American Express concierge, but with the advantage that the communication is handled in the Hooch app: “No one wants to pick up the phone anymore.”
About that application: Dai said he wants to limit the initial membership to around 295 people in the three launch cities of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. He hopes to bring in more people eventually, but at first, having thousands of members would “dilute the experience,” particularly since some of the benefits (like access to celeb-hosted parties) don’t really scale.
At the same time, Dai said the application is “not about income or job title.” Instead, he sees the service as appealing to the same audience of “young professionals or millennial hustlers” as Hooch itself. So the application is focused on your bigger ambitions and “how hard you want to work to get there.”
Dai also noted that Hooch’s current membership is roughly even between men and women, something he’s hoping to continue with Hooch Black.
“We want to build a very inclusive community,” he added. “The primary criteria is, I would say, aspiration. We’re not just catering to a specific income level or race or gender.”
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The first thing to understand about media-sharing app Rapchat is that co-founder Seth Miller is not a rapper and his other co-founder, Pat Gibson, is. Together they created Rapchat, a service for making and sharing raps, and the conjunction of rapper and nerd seems to be really taking off.
Since we last looked at the app in 2016 (you can see Tito’s review below), a lot has changed. The team has raised $1.6 million in funding from investors out of Oakland and the Midwest. Their app, which is sort of a musical.ly for rap, is a top 50 music app on iOS and Android and hit 100 million listens since launch. In short, their little social network/sharing platform is a “millionaire in the making, boss of [its] team, bringin home the bacon.”
The pair’s rap bona fides are genuine. Gibson has opened or performed with Big Sean, Wiz Khalifa and Machine Gun Kelly, and he’s sold beats to MTV. “My music has garnered over 20M+ plays across YouTube, SoundCloud and more,” he wrote me, boasting in the semi-churlish manner of a rapper with a “beef.” Miller, on the other hand, likes to freestyle.
“I grew up loving to freestyle with friends at OU and I noticed lots of other millennials did this too (even if most suck lol) … at any party at 3am – there would always be a group of people in the corner freestyling,” he said. “At the same time Snapchat was blowing up on campus and just thought you should be able to do the same exact thing for rap.”
Gibson, on the other hand, saw it as a serious tool to help him with his music.
“I spent a lot of time, energy and resources making music,” he said. “I was producing the beats, writing the songs, recording/mixing the vocals, mastering the project, then distributing & promoting the music all by myself. With Rapchat, there’s a library of 1,000+ beats from top producers, an instant recording studio in your pocket, and the network to distribute your music worldwide and be discovered…. all from a free app. Rapchat is disrupting the creation, collaboration, distribution, & discovery of music via mobile.”
“We have a much bigger but also more active community than any other music creation app,” said Miller.
While it’s clear the world needs another sharing platform like it needs a hole in the head, thanks to a rabid fan base and a great idea, the team has ensured that Rapchat is not, as they say, wicka-wicka-whack. That, in the end, is all that matters.
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Amol Sarva has done some amazing stuff. The founder of Virgin Mobile, Sarva went on to create the Peek email device created back when cheap, ubiquitous mobile devices were nowhere to be found. Now he runs Knotel, a unique workspace aimed at up and coming startups.
In this episode of Technotopia I asked Sarva about his thoughts on work, interaction and the future of offices. In his vision we are all working together remotely using tools that could allow us to all directly interact simply by using our brains. It’s an odd — and cool — idea, and he’s a fun interview subject.
Technotopia is a podcast by John Biggs about a better future. You can subscribe in Stitcher, RSS or iTunes and listen to the MP3 here.
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I’ll be helping build a larger meetup focused on pre-ICO companies in New York on April 23 and I’d love to see you there. It will be held at Knotel on April 23 at 7pm and will feature a pitch-off with eight startups — I will write about the best ones — and two panels with some yet-unnamed stars in the space.
I’d love to see you there, so please sign up here. We’ll have some beers and pizza for the attendees.
The event will be held at 551 Fifth Avenue on the 9th Floor. See you tonight!
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This year Queen’s Awards for Enterprise as usual feature many electronics companies. One such is Cambridge IC, maker of rotary and linear position sensing chips, which was awarded a ‘Queen’s Awards for Enterprise – International Trade’. “Our international trade has increased 5x over the last four years,” founder David Ely told Electronics Weekly. “Almost all ...
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Ikalogic has introduced four-channel USB logic analysers, primarily for debugging serial data busses. Protocol decoding for 30 busses including I2C, SPI, RS232, CAN or 1-Wire are available. Called ScanaQuad, the devices are 50x50mm in size and operate with the firm’s ScanaStudio software running on a host Windows PC, Linux PC or Mac. “The software lets ...
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