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Amazon has “failed to provide sufficient answers” about its controversial facial recognition software, Rekognition — and lawmakers won’t take the company’s usual silent treatment for an answer.
The letter, signed by eight lawmakers — including Sen. Edward Markey and Reps. John Lewis and Judy Chu — called on Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos to explain how the company’s technology works — and where it will be used.
It comes after the cloud and retail giant secured several high-profile contracts with the U.S. government and at least one major metropolitan city — including Orlando, Florida — for surveillance.
The lawmakers said that they expressed a “heightened concern given recent reports that Amazon is actively marketing its biometric technology to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as other reports of pilot programs lacking any hands-on training from Amazon for participating law enforcement officers.”
They also said that the system suffers from accuracy issues — which could lead to racial bias, and could harm citizens’ constitutional rights to free expression.
“However, at this time, we have serious concerns that this type of product has significant accuracy issues, places disproportionate burdens on communities of color, and could stifle Americans’ willingness to exercise their First Amendment rights in public,” the letter said.
The lawmakers want Amazon to explain how Amazon tests for accuracy and if those tests have been independently verified — and how the company tests for bias.
It comes after the ACLU found that the software failed to facially recognize 28 members of Congress, with a higher failure rate towards people of color.
The facial recognition software has been controversial from the start. Even after concerns from its own employees, Amazon said it would push ahead and sell the technology regardless.
Amazon has a little over two weeks to respond to the lawmakers. A spokesperson for Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Starting mid-December, Amazon Echo devices will be able to stream songs from Apple Music. A bit of a surprise, perhaps, given that Apple’s been a competitor in the space since launching the HomePod back in 2017.
Amazon’s had its own music service for some time as well, but the company appears to have given up on the dream of being a series competitor in the space — for now, at least. Instead, Echo smart speakers offer native support for a decent cross section of streaming services, including Pandora, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.
The new skill lets users play specifics songs, genres, playlists and the Beats 1 station through the smart speakers. Adding Apple Music will help the popular smart home products tap into a rapidly growing service.
The company cracked 50 million subscribers earlier this year. That’s still well behind the 83 million paid subscribers Spotify announced back in July, but this addition should help give Amazon an added advantage against Google’s Home devices, particularly here in the States, where the bulk of Apple Music subscribers reside.
For Apple’s part, the offering brings Music to much more accessible hardware. The HomePod currently runs $349 — several times the price of the entry-level Echo Dot. The new skill arrives on Echos the week of December 17.
UrbanClap, a four-year-old startup that offers home services across in India, has closed a $50 million Series D round for expansion.
The round was led by Steadview Capital, a hedge fund with over $1 billion under management, and existing investor Vy Capital. It takes UrbanClap to $110 million raised to date, according to data from Crunchbase.
UrbanClap matches service people, such as cleaners, repair staff or beauticians, with customers across 10 cities in India via its platform. Co-founder and CEO Abhiraj Bhal told TechCrunch that the business supports 15,000 “micro-franchisees” with around 450,000 transactions taking place each month.
“Micro-franchisees” is an interesting term — I’ve not heard it used much, even in the buzzword-heavy world of tech startups — but Bhal explained his vision to enable service workers to earn more and enjoy greater control of their work and, consequently, overall life.
For example, he said, the typical salary for an offline service worker might be in the region of 10-15,000 INR (up to $215) while, for those operating independently, their flow of work would be tied to a middleman, store or word of mouth networks. UrbanClap offers a more direct model, with workers keeping 80 percent of the cost of their jobs. That, Bhal said, means workers can earn multiples more and manage their own working hours.
“The UrbanClap model really allows them to become service entrepreneurs,” he said. “Their earnings will shoot up two or three-fold, and it isn’t uncommon to see it rise as much as 8X — it’s a life-changing experience.”
Beyond helping workers with their job, UrbanClap also provides training, credit, basic banking and more. Bhal said that around 20-25 percent of applicants are accepted into the platform, that’s a decision based on in-person meetings, background and criminal checks, as well as a “skills” test. Workers are encouraged to work exclusively — though it isn’t a requirement — and they wear UrbanClap outfits and represent the brand with customers.
While there is encouragement, there is also a level of monitoring. If a worker’s average review for their last 30/50 jobs (dependent on vertical) drops below 4.0, the system stops sending them work. They is an opportunity to appeal, retrain and return to the platform, except in cases of poor attitude, misconduct and other serious misdemeanors, Bhal said. He declined to provide numbers for dropouts but said that the retention rate is “healthy.”
UrbanClap founders (left to right) Abhiraj Bhal, Raghav Chandra and Varun Khaitan started the business in 2014
UrbanClap expanded to Dubai, the capital of the UAE, six months ago so it would be logical to think this new capital will go towards further expansions. No so, according to Bhal. The company is instead going after tier-two cities in India and working to deepen its position in its existing locations. In short, there’s no additional overseas plan at this point.
“In many ways, we think about the Dubai move as an extension of India [Dubai has a strong presence of Indian and South Asia nationals] rather than an international expansion — a little like a U.S. company going into Canada,” Bhal explained. “We believe we have enough headroom to grow in India and Dubai, these are fairly unpenetrated markets.”
Elaborating on that thinking, Bhal said that online is just a small component of all local service jobs in India.
“We need to get to double digital penetration of the offline market,” he said. “We think we could grow 10, 20 or 100 times from where we are right now.”
The company isn’t profitable yet and Bhal isn’t sharing revenue details, other than the fairly hazy detail that revenue is growing 3X per year. Rival Housejoy, which includes Amazon among its shareholders, went through some fairly well-publicized issues this year resulting in layoffs and, according to reports, efforts to sell the business.
Bhal didn’t comment directly on those reports, but he did say that if the company did do an acquisition, it would be focused on “adjacent spaces we aren’t in yet” as opposed to a direct competitor for growth.
He was somewhat more forthcoming on the future exit plan for UrbanClap, which did allow some secondary sales within this Series D round. Bhal said he fully intends to take the company public but he said that there’s no firm plan on when, or indeed where, that might happen.
“Eventually we will look to go public,” he said. “But we’re a few years away from that — we need to earn the right which means being a scalable and profitable company.”
We come up lots of reasons to work with jerks.
We take an investment from a jerk investor instead of a kind one.
We accept a job from a bully instead of someone who will nurture and challenge us with worthwhile work.
And we take on a customer who denigrates our team and our work instead of embracing the good ones…
The most common reason is that they pay us more. A better valuation, a better hourly rate.
That’s not a good enough reason. We pay for it many more times than we get paid for it.
You can’t build a good machine learning model without good training data. But building those training sets is hard, often manual work, that involves labeling thousand and thousands of images, for example. With SageMaker, AWS has been working on a service that makes building machine learning models a lot easier. But until today, that labeling task was still up to the user. Now, however, the company is launching SageMaker Ground Truth, a training set labeling service.
Using Ground Truth, developers can point the service at the storage buckets that hold the data and allow the service to automatically label it. What’s nifty here is that you can both set a confidence level for the fully automatic service or you can send the data to human laborers. Those human labelers, who probably have the most mind-numbing job in tech, can either be the company’s Mechanical Turk users or third-party service. If you really hate your employees, you can have them do the labeling, too.
Currently the service supports text classification, image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation. Users can also create their own tasks.
As the labeling data comes in, Ground Truth then pulls some of the objects and sends them to human labelers to build a new custom model for the user.
“This is a total game changer in being able to label your data,” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy. “So you can build those types of models that before were really difficult or nearly impossible or too expensive to do.”
AWS is not content to cede any part of any market to any company. When it comes to machine learning chips, names like Nvidia or Google come to mind, but today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced a new dedicated machine learning chip of its own called Inferentia.
“Inferentia will be a very high-throughput, low-latency, sustained-performance very cost-effective processor,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained during the announcement.
Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research, says that while Amazon is far behind, this is a good step for them as companies try to differentiate their machine learning approaches in the future.
“The speed and cost of running machine learning operations — ideally in deep learning — are a competitive differentiator for enterprises. Speed advantages will make or break success of enterprises (and nations when you think of warfare). That speed can only be achieved with custom hardware, and Inferentia is AWS’s first step to get in to this game,” Mueller told TechCrunch. As he pointed out, Google has a 2-3 year head start with its TPU infrastructure.
Inferentia supports popular frameworks like INT8, FP16 and mixed precision. What’s more, it supports multiple machine learning frameworks, including TensorFlow, Caffe2 and ONNX.
Of course, being an Amazon product, it also supports data from popular AWS products such as EC2, SageMaker and the new Elastic Inference Engine announced today.
While the chip was announced today, AWS CEO Andy Jassy indicated it won’t actually be available until next year.
AWS announced a new time series database today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. The new product called Amazon Timestream is a fully managed database designed to track items over time, which can be particularly useful for Internet of Things scenarios.
“With time series data, each data point consists of a timestamp and one or more attributes and it really measures how things change over time and helps drive real time decisions,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained.
He sees a problem though with existing open source and commercial solutions, which he says don’t scale well and are hard to manage. This is of course a problem that a cloud service like AWS often helps solve.
Not surprising as their customers were looking for a good time series database solution, AWS decided to create one themselves. Jassy said that they built Amazon Timestream from the ground up with an architecture that organizes data by time intervals and enables time series specific data compression, which leads to less scanning and faster performance.
“Timestream automates rollups, retention, tiering and compression, so time-series data can be efficiently stored and processed. Timestream’s query engine adapts to the location and format of data making it easier and faster to query time-series data,” AWS’s Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post summarizing several new announcements including Timestream.
AWS claims Timestream will be a thousand times faster at a tenth of cost of a relational database, and of course it scales up and down as required and includes all of the analytics capabilities you need to understand all of the data you are tracking.
Top tech executives from Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Oracle will head to the White House next Thursday to discuss “bold, transformational ideas” focused on U.S. innovation.
The meeting, framed as a “roundtable discussion” by The Wall Street Journal, is expected to cover a broad range of emerging tech topics, from 5G to AI to quantum computing, which “can help ensure U.S. leadership in industries of the future,” according to a White House email.
The meeting follows longstanding tensions between the Trump administration and many large tech firms over policy decisions, ranging from social issues like LGBTQ rights and immigration to trade tariffs.
Notably absent is Amazon, which participated in early White House meetings, but has grown increasingly at odds with the administration as Trump has specifically targeted Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos. Twitter, Facebook and Google have all also been in the president’s cross-hairs over accusations of media bias and “shadow banning.”
Along with CEOs like Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai (who is also scheduled to testify in front of the House a day prior), Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian and private equity firm Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman will also be in attendance.
AWS launched Lambda in 2015 and with it helped popularize serverless computing. You simply write code (event triggers) and AWS deals with whatever compute, memory and storage you need to make that work. Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced several new features to make it more developer friendly, while acknowledging that even while serverless reduced complexity, it still requires more sophisticated tools as it matures
It’s called serverless because you don’t have to worry about the underlying servers. The cloud vendors take care of all that for you, serving whatever resources you need to run your event and no more. It means you no longer have to worry about coding for all your infrastructure and you only pay for the computing you need at any given moment to make the application work.
The way AWS works is that it tends to release something, then builds more functionality on top of a base service as it sees increasing requirements as customers use it. As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels pointed out in his keynote on Thursday, developers debate about tools and everyone has their own idea of what tools they bring to the task every day.
For starters, they decided to please the language folks introducing support for new languages. Those developers who use Ruby can now use Ruby Support for AWS Lambda. “Now it’s possible to write Lambda functions as idiomatic Ruby code, and run them on AWS. The AWS SDK for Ruby is included in the Lambda execution environment by default,” Chris Munns from AWS wrote in a blog post introducing the new language support.
If C++ is your thing, AWS announced C++ Lambda Runtime. If neither of those match your programming language tastes, AWS opened it up for just about any language with the new Lambda Runtime API, which Danilo Poccia from AWS described in a blog post as “a simple interface to use any programming language, or a specific language version, for developing your functions.”
AWS didn’t want to stop with languages though. They also recognize that even though Lambda (and serverless in general) is designed to remove a level of complexity for developers, that doesn’t mean that all serverless applications consist of simple event triggers. As developers build more sophisticated serverless apps, they have to bring in system components and compose multiple pieces together, as Vogels explained in his keynote today.
To address this requirement, the company introduced Lambda Layers, which they describe as “a way to centrally manage code and data that is shared across multiple functions.” This could be custom code used by multiple functions or a way to share code used to simplify business logic.
As Lambda matures, developer requirements grow and these announcements and others are part of trying to meet those needs.
There’s a dark cloud on the horizon. The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon, threatens the viability of open source. I first wrote about this problem in a prior piece on TechCrunch. In 2018, thankfully, several leaders have mobilized (amid controversy) to propose multiple solutions to the problem. Here’s what’s happened in the last month.
Go to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and hover over the Products menu at the top. You will see numerous open-source projects that Amazon did not create, but runs as-a-service. These provide Amazon with billions of dollars of revenue per year. To be clear, this is not illegal. But it is not conducive to sustainable open-source communities, and especially commercial open-source innovation.
In early 2018, I gathered together the creators, CEOs or general counsels of two dozen at-scale open-source companies, along with respected open source lawyer Heather Meeker, to talk about what to do.
We wished to define a license that prevents cloud infrastructure providers from running certain software as a commercial service, while at the same time making that software effectively open source for everyone else, i.e., everyone not running that software as a commercial service.
With our first proposal, Commons Clause, we took the most straightforward approach: we constructed one clause, which can be added to any liberal open source license, preventing the licensee from “Selling” the software — where “Selling” includes running it as a commercial service. (Selling other software made with Commons Clause software is allowed, of course.) Applying Commons Clause transitions a project from open source to source-available.
We also love the proposal being spearheaded by another participant, MongoDB, called the Server Side Public License (SSPL). Rather than prohibit the software from being run as a service, SSPL requires that you open-source all programs that you use to make the software available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service. This is known as a “copyleft.”
These two licenses are two different solutions to exactly the same problem. Heather Meeker wrote both solutions, supported by feedback organized by FOSSA.
The initial uproar and accusations that these efforts were trying to “trick” the community fortunately gave way to understanding and acknowledgement from the open source community that there is a real problem to be solved here, that it is time for the open source community to get real, and that it is time for the net giants to pay fairly for the open source on which they depend.
In October, one of the board members of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) reached out to me and suggested working together to create a modern open source license that solves the industry’s needs.
Further kudos are owed to MondoDB for definitively stating that they will be using SSPL, submitting SSPL in parallel to an organization called Open Source Initiative (OSI) for endorsement as an open source license, but not waiting for OSI’s endorsement to start releasing software under the SSPL.
OSI, which has somehow anointed itself as the body that will “decide” whether a license is open source, has a habit of myopically debating what’s open source and what’s not. With the submission of SSPL to OSI, MongoDB has put the ball in OSI’s court to either step up and help solve an industry problem, or put their heads back in the sand.
In fact, MongoDB has done OSI a huge favor. MongoDB has gone and solved the problem and handed a perfectly serviceable open source license to OSI on a silver platter.
The public archives of OSI’s debate over SSPL are at times informative and at times amusing, bordering on comical. After MongoDB’s original submission, there were rah-rah rally cries amongst the members to find reasons to deem SSPL not an open source license, followed by some +1’s. Member John Cowan reminded the group that just because OSI does not endorse a license as open source, does not mean that it is not open source:
As far as I know (which is pretty far), the OSI doesn’t do that. They have never publicly said “License X is not open source.” People on various mailing lists have done so, but not the OSI as such. And they certainly don’t say “Any license not on our OSI Certified ™ list is not open source”, because that would be false. It’s easy to write a license that is obviously open source that the OSI would never certify for any of a variety of reasons.
Eliot Horowitz (CTO and co-founder of MongoDB) responded cogently to questions, comments and objections, concluding with:
In short, we believe that in today’s world, linking has been superseded by the provision of programs as services and the connection of programs over networks as the main form of program combination. It is unclear whether existing copyleft licenses clearly apply to this form of program combination, and we intend the SSPL to be an option for developers to address this uncertainty.
Much discussion ensued about the purpose, role and relevance of OSI. Various sundry legal issues were raised or addressed by Van Lindberg, McCoy Smith, and Bruce Perens.
Heather Meeker (the lawyer who drafted both Commons Clause and SSPL) stepped in and completely addressed the legal issues that had been raised thus far. Various other clarifications were made by Eliot Horowitz, and he also conveyed willingness to change the wording of the license if it would help.
Discussion amongst the members continued about the role, relevance and purpose of OSI, with one member astutely noting that there were a lot of “free software” wonks in the group, attempting to bastardize open source to advocate their own agenda:
If, instead, OSI has decided that they are now a Free Software organization, and that Free Software is what “we” do, and that “our” focus is on “Free software” then, then let’s change the name to the Free Software Initiative and open the gates for some other entity, who is all about Open Source, to take on that job, and do it proudly. :-)
There was debate over whether SSPL discriminates against types of users, which would disqualify it from being open source. Eliot Horowitz provided a convincing explanation that it did not, which seemed to quiet the crowd.
Heather Meeker dropped some more legal knowledge on the group, which seemed to sufficently address outstanding issues. Bruce Perens, the author of item 6 of the so-called open source definition, acknowledged that SSPL does not violate item 6 or item 9 of the definition, and subsequently suggested revising item 9 such that SSPL would violate it:
We’re not falling on our swords because of this. And we can fix OSD #9 with a two word addition “or performed” as soon as the board can meet. But it’s annoying.
Kyle Mitchell, himself an accomplished open source lawyer, opposed such a tactic. Larry Rosen pointed out that some members’ assertion (that “it is fundamental to open source that everyone can use a program for any purpose”) is untrue. Still more entertaining discussion ensued about the purpose of OSI and the meaning of open source.
Carlos Piana succinctly stated why SSPL was indeed open source. Kyle Mitchell added that if licenses were to be judged in the manner that the group was judging SSPL, then GPL v2 was not open source either.
Meanwhile Dor Lior, the founder of database company ScyllaDB compared SSPL and AGPL side-to-side and argued that “MongoDB would have been better off with Commons Clause or just swallowed a hard pill and stayed with APGL.” Player.FM released their service based on Commons Clause licensed RediSearch, after in-memory database company Redis Labs placed RediSearch and four other specific add-on modules (but not Redis itself) under Commons Clause, and graph database company Neo4J placed its entire codebase under Commons Clause and raised an $80M Series E.
Then Michael DeHaan, creator of Red Hat Ansible, chose Commons Clause for his new project. When asked why he did not choose any of the existing licenses that OSI has “endorsed” to be open source, he said:
This groundswell in 2018 should be ample indication that there is an industry problem that needs to be fixed.
Eliot Horowitz summarized and addressed all the issues, dropped the mic, and left for a while. When it seemed like SSPL was indeed following all the rules of open source licenses, and was garnering support of the members, Brad Kuhn put forward a clumsy argument for why OSI should change the rules as necessary to prevent SSPL from being deemed open source, concluding:
It’s likely the entire “license evaluation process” that we use is inherently flawed.
Mitchell clinched the argument that SSPL is open source with definitive points. Horowitz thanked the members for their comments and offered to address any concerns in a revision, and returned a few days later with a revised SSPL.
OSI has 60 days since MongoDB’s new submission to make a choice:
“Wonk” here is meant in the best possible way.
Importantly, MongoDB is proceeding to use the SSPL regardless. If MongoDB were going to wait until OSI’s decision, or if OSI were more relevant, we might wait with bated breath to hear whether OSI would endorse SSPL as an open source license.
As it stands, OSI’s decision is more important to OSI itself, than to the industry. It signals whether OSI wants to remain relevant and help solve industry problems or whether it has become too myopic to be useful. Fearful of the latter, we looked to other groups for leadership and engaged with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) when they reached out in the hopes of creating a modern open source license that solves the industry’s needs.
OSI should realize that while it would be nice if they deemed SSPL to be open source, it is not critical. Again in the words of John Cowan, just because OSI has not endorsed a license as open source, does not mean it’s not open source. While we greatly respect almost all members of industry associations and the work they do in their fields, it is becoming difficult to respect the purpose and process of any group that anoints itself as the body that will “decide” whether a license is open source — it is arbitrary and obsolete.
In my zest to urge the industry to solve this problem, in an earlier piece, I had said that “if one takes open source software that someone else has built and offers it verbatim as a commercial service for one’s own profit” (as cloud infrastructure providers do) that’s “not in the spirit” of open-source. That’s an overstatement and thus, frankly, incorrect. Open source policy wonks pointed this out. I obviously don’t mind rattling their cages but I should have stayed away from making statements about “what’s in the spirt” so as to not detract from my main argument.
The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers poses an existential threat to open source. Cloud infrastructure providers are not evil. Current open source licenses allow them to take open source software verbatim and offer it as a commercial service without giving back to the open source projects or their commercial shepherds. The problem is that developers do not have open source licensing alternatives that prevent cloud infrastructure providers from doing so. Open source standards groups should help, rather than get in the way. We must ensure that authors of open source software can not only survive, but thrive. And if that means taking a stronger stance against cloud infrastructure providers, then authors should have licenses available to allow for that. The open source community should make this an urgent priority.
I have not invested directly or indirectly in MongoDB. I have invested directly or indirectly in the companies behind the open source projects Spring, Mule, DynaTrace, Ruby Rails, Groovy Grails, Maven, Gradle, Chef, Redis, SysDig, Prometheus, Hazelcast, Akka, Scala, Cassandra, Spinnaker, FOSSA, and… in Amazon.
Robinhood’s human resources department is keeping busy this month, announcing this morning that the zero-fee stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange has tapped CapitalG partner Gretchen Howard (pictured) to lead operations.
The news comes two days after the well-funded startup hired Jason Warnick, a long-time Amazon executive, as its chief financial officer. Warnick, Amazon’s former VP of finance, joins Robinhood amid speculation the fintech ‘unicorn’ is gearing up for an eventual initial public offering.
Howard, who’s joining as a vice president, has been a partner at Alphabet’s growth investing arm since 2014. Before that, she was a vice president at Fidelity Investments.
Earlier this year, Howard helped source CapitalG’s first investment in Robinhood, though another partner, David Lawee, lead the deal. In addition to Robinhood, she’s worked closely with CapitalG portfolio companies CreditKarma, Lyft, Airbnb and Gusto.
Robinhood brought in a $363 million Series D funding round led by DST Global in May. The company raised the capital at a more than $5 billion valuation — a 4x increase from its valuation one year prior. In total, Robinhood has secured $539 million in equity funding from ICONIQ Capital, Thrive Capital, NEA, Sound Ventures and several others since it was founded in 2013.
“I’ve been inspired by the velocity with which Robinhood builds and launches high-quality products and share their passion for democratizing financial services,” Howard said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “While it’s bittersweet to leave Alphabet … I’m excited to remain in the Alphabet family and work closely with the CapitalG team from the portfolio side.”
While it seems to be more common for former operators to transition into venture investing, VCs, too, opt to switch sides of the table from time to time. Howard is a great example of this, as are two former Andreessen Horowitz investors Balaji Srinivasan and Asiff Hirji, who currently serve as Coinbase’s chief technology officer and chief operating officer, respectively. Coinbase is an A16z portfolio company.
As Roborace accelerates its plans to build an autonomous racing league, the company is finding that its toughest competition are still human drivers.
In this version of the John Henry story, the humans clearly are still winning, but the robots are catching up.
“We’re going to call it a singularity event when an autonomous racing car is faster than any racing driver,” says Lucas Di Grassi, Roborace’s chief executive and one of the world’s best Formula One racecar drivers. “We started the year 20% slower and we are now 6% slower.”
For the company’s long-term vision, the cars need to be better than any human, because part of the company’s pitch is to be the proving ground for autonomous technologies and a platform to put automakers’ best innovations through their paces in extreme conditions.
“We think when the car reaches a level that is better than any human this will create a layer of trust on the roads,” says Di Grassi.
It’s a vision that has attracted the attention of some of the world’s biggest companies. Earlier this week, Amazon announced its own initiative for autonomous racing cars. And if Amazon is interested, you can be sure other large technology companies are also angling for a pole position in this proving ground for technology’s latest moonshot.
Amazon’s version of autonomous race cars are smaller than Roborace’s full-sized vehicles — and at $399 are far cheaper than the $1 million vehicles that Roborace is planning on putting on tracks.
Beyond the potential corporate competitors, the company’s human competition is more than just a technical obstacle for Roborace. It’s also a critical unknown when it comes to predicting whether anyone actually will want to watch the races.
When asked whether he thinks Roborace can find an audience for races that are divorced of any element of human risk or drama, Di Grassi says “We don’t know.”
To integrate the two worlds of robot racing and human Formula One (or the increasingly popular Formula E series), Roborace has tweaked its competitive model. Earlier this year, the company unveiled a new model of its car that has room for a human driver behind the wheel.
Roborace car at Disrupt Berlin 2018
That human driver is critical to Di Grassi’s new vision for how Roborace competition will now work. In the latest iteration of the company’s races, which will see their first flag waved in April or May of 2019, human drivers will play a larger role in the race.
“We are trying to combine humans and computers in a sport,” says Di Grassi. “The races next year will be a combination of drivers racing for the first part of the race and in a pit stop the driver jumps out and the autonomous vehicle will take over. We want to create this reality that the human and the machine are working together for a better outcome.”
Di Grassi hopes that this integration of the human element and autonomy will be enough to attract viewers, but there are other ways that the company plans to bring an audience to the wild world of autonomous robot racing.
“People want to interact,” says Di Grassi. And with the company’s planned robot races, there will be ways for audiences in the stands to shape the course of the race, potentially by throwing augmented reality obstacles onto the track for the autonomous cars to avoid — creating new challenges for technology to be put through its paces.
“We’re going to try and engage and we’re going to try and get different forms of engagement,” Di Grassi says. Including developing an open source platform that would enable viewers to interact with simulated races in virtual reality — encouraging audience participation and competition in virtual racing leagues that could mirror the action among actual racing teams.
Like traditional Formula One racing, Roborace is serving two audiences. One is the company’s actual customers — the automakers and vendors that are building the software and hardware for electric and autonomous vehicles — and the audience that ideally will be around to see the fruit of all that labor.
Right now, no automakers have signed up as partners, in part, Di Grassi says, because they’re not confident with their technology. “The automakers are afraid because the software is not ready,” says Di Grassi. But the company’s chief executive is undeterred, because of the profusion of technologies required to make autonomous vehicles work. “Autonomous cars are a combination of a lot of different technology segments — sensors, electric motors, batteries. Our customers are sensor processing companies [and] companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm, Intel,” DiGrassi says.
However, at some point Roborace needs that audience so vendors can prove that their technology works, and people can become more comfortable with the safety and capabilities of autonomous vehicles.
“Nobody’s using high precision vehicle model like drifting and sliding and these situations will be very real. There is a whole different segment that we can develop faster in a controlled environment,” says DiGrassi. “The pitch is to compete against each other to develop technology faster and you develop trust among consumers… this will give trust to people to jump into autonomous taxi in the future.”
Headphone maker Sennheiser has patched its software after the company admitted a serious vulnerability that made it easy for hackers to impersonate any website — even encrypted pages.
The software, which helps Mac and Windows users to connects their headphones to other devices, also installed a self-signed root certificates with an easily obtainable private key. Because the key was stored in the operating system’s certificate store and the same key was used on every installation, it was easy for anyone to create their own certificate on a website to look like the original website — even when it isn’t.
That makes it easy for phishing, credential stealing, or spreading malware and disinformation when it looks like it’s coming from the original, legitimate source.
“The victim would have to inspect the HTTPS server certificate respectively code signing certificate in a detail level that shows the root certificate to which the certificate in question is linked,” said the report by Secorvo’s Hans-Joachim Knobloch and André Domnick, published this week.
But most people never do — they see a green padlock and assume the best.
To prove their point, the researchers created a wildcard certificate that spoofed Google’s homepage, making it look almost impossible to distinguish rom the real site.
An example of Chrome accepting the attacker’s certificate. (Image: Secorvo)
Make no mistake: this was a monumental security flaw that put every Sennheiser software user at risk. But what made matters worse is that removing the software wouldn’t remove the certificate — leaving them still vulnerable to spoofing and impersonation attacks.
“Since the certificate is not removed from the trusted root certificate store during update or removal of the software, every system on which HeadSetup 7.3 was installed at any time in the past – and every user on such a system – remains vulnerable,” said the report.
Sennheiser later released a software update that remediated the vulnerability by updating the root store with a new certificate that omitted the private key.
Microsoft also released its own advisory this week, warning users of the inadvertently disclosed certificate and private key. The software giant updated its own certificate trust list to protect Windows users from certificate spoofing by throwing an error.
Cast your mind back to 2015 and you might remember a similar security scandal: the Superfish adware, which shipped preinstalled in Lenovo PCs.
Like Sennheiser, Superfish contained a certificate that effectively allowed the company to man-in-the-middle the user’s connection and inject ads — even when the connection is encrypted and believed to be “secure.” The key was made public, allowing anyone to take advantage of the weakness while on the same network.
Lenovo was later fined $3.5 million for the security lapse.
Germany’s competition regulator (Bundeskartellamt) is opening an investigation against Amazon. In particular, the regulator is going to look at the relationship between Amazon and third-party sellers on the platform.
“Its double role as the largest retailer and largest marketplace has the potential to hinder other sellers on its platform,” Bundeskartellamt president Andreas Mundt wrote in the announcement. “Because of the many complaints we have received we will examine whether Amazon is abusing its market position to the detriment of sellers active on its marketplace”
And it’s true that Amazon is in a difficult position when it comes to anti-trust investigations. The company sells products directly to consumers — you can even buy Amazon-branded items. But many sellers list items on the platform directly and send them directly to customers.
Some of them choose to ship items from their own warehouses, while others participate in the “Fulfillment by Amazon” program. This program has become increasingly important to the company’s bottomline.
German regulators want to look at “product reviews, the non-transparent termination and blocking of sellers’ accounts, withholding or delaying payment, clauses assigning rights to use the information material which a seller has to provide with regard to the products offered and terms of business on pan-European despatch.”
French regulators also fined Amazon back in December 2017, according to Le Parisien — a $11.4 million fine (€10 million). Once again, regulators didn’t like the terms between Amazon and third-party companies. Sellers have to comply to unfair rules and Amazon can terminate relationships whenever they want.
Amazon has to tread carefully as it acts as a gateway between customers and sellers. Let’s see if those investigations in France and Germany could lead to tougher rules at the European level.
Uncaring mediocrity, in which employees have given up trying to make things better
Focused mediocrity, in which the organization is intentionally average
Accidental mediocrity, in which people don’t even realize that they’re not delivering excellence.
Uncaring mediocrity is the most common form, and it often accompanies scale. It’s the accidental outcome that comes from trying to emulate an organization that’s focused on its mediocrity.
The mechanization and industrialization of cottage industries (like hotels, restaurants and healthcare) has led to a convenient homogenization for many. It means you can travel around the world and find better than decent accommodations and safe food, all at a fair price.
But it also means that most of the people working in these entities are treated like interchangeable cogs. They have no say at all about how things are done (or at least feel that way) and so they’ve emotionally checked out. It’s easier that way.
The products and services revert to the mean, sucking the humanity out of not just the people who work there, but from the interactions the customers have as well.
If you have a lousy meal at a real restaurant, the owner could hear from you and, it’s likely, not only fix it, but get back to you. Have a lousy experience with a Host, a Taco Bell, or a JW Marriott, though, and the odds are that the individual who reads your review has never even visited the place you’re talking about, and certainly doesn’t care enough to do anything about it.
One of the promises of the worldwide behemoth corporation was that reliability and quality was assured. The downside is that the chances that an internal insurgent can make things better go down.
As we see so many organizations seek to emulate the scale, influence and profits of the Fortune 100, it’s worth remembering that uncaring mediocrity shouldn’t be a north star.
Focused mediocrity is different. It’s intentional. It’s the act of chasing the banal, so that the largest possible number of people will be satisfied enough not to complain. This is the sieve of deliverability and the sword of mass.
The third kind of mediocrity happens when someone is uninformed. When they’re too busy or too lazy to pay attention to the taste of those they seek to serve or they don’t care enough to deliver it with quality and humanity.
At least have the guts to be mediocre on purpose.
Easyship, a Hong Kong-based startup that aims to make international shipping for e-commerce as easy as payments, has closed a $4 million Series A round.
The company was founded in 2015 by former Lazada duo Tommaso Tamburnotti and Augustin Ceyrac, and ex-banker Paul Lugagne Delpon. From their time with Lazada, the then-Rocket Internet-owned e-commerce site in Southeast Asia that was later bought by Alibaba, Tamburnotti and Ceyrac came to realize that there was no ‘plug in’ solution for shipping in the same way that Stripe and others enable payments online.
In Lazada’s case, that was crucial. The company was trying to enable cross-border commerce in Southeast Asia and, as a part of that, seek out retailers in more mature markets like China. But, if sending product to Indonesia — Southeast Asia’s largest country with a population of over 250 million — was fraught with challengers, then both retailers and consumers would be put off using the service.
That’s how Easyship was born. Today, the startup works with over 250 services from some 50-plus couriers, it also deals with the likes of Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Etsy, Magento and more. Its team of more than 50 people is spread across offices in New York, Singapore, the Netherlands, Australia, and Hong Kong.
Its service adds shipment options to e-commerce pages to make it simple for retailers to offer overseas shipping, and customers to receive product in any market. They simply input a line of code, which then offers international shipping options for customer when they check out. Not only does it simplify shipping routes but Easyship claims it can help cut shipping costs by up to 60 percent. Its base of 40,000 SMBs have seen their overall sales increase by 40 percent on average.
“We saw there was an opportunity when we couldn’t find a solution that was a gateway for international
shipping,” Ceyrac said in a statement. “For example, it’s easy for sellers to find payment gateways that can be activated in minutes so they can start accepting all major forms of payment. Yet, there was no equivalent tool for logistics, where you could just mobilize on global sales.”
“At the time, the only choices for small business owners were to use large enterprise solutions that were meant for Fortune 500 companies, or to integrate with multiple players to achieve a truly global solution,’ he added.
Easyship founders (left to right) Paul Lugagne Delpon, Tommaso Tamburnotti and Augustin Ceyrac
Tamburnotti told TechCrunch that the new funds will go towards developing the company’s technology — which helps to find cost-effective shipping routes — as well as adding more shipment and logistics partners, and reaching more customers, particularly in the U.S.
The sources of the round are interesting in themselves, too. Maximilian Bittner, who founded Lazada and was its long-time CEO, led the deal alongside Richard Lepeu, the former CEO of luxury firm Richemont and a board member of Yoox Net-A-Porter Group. Existing investor Lamivoie Capital Partners and funds Rubicon Venture Capital, One Way Ventures, Kima Ventures and Picus Capital also joined the round. 500 Startups is another investor in the business.
Easyship’s solution is so logical it almost seems obvious, but it is a business that has been created because it is outside of the U.S. and Silicon Valley. U.S. e-commerce firms have woken up to overseas opportunities, but they tend to be focused on obvious and huge markets like China. Logistics to other parts of the world are fiddling (it’s hugely fragmented) and likely not worth the initial investment unless the investment in a patient one.
But, for Easyship’s founders, the issue of fragmented logistics in Asia became such a critical one that they jumped ship from their full-time jobs — with the blessing of their CEO, Bittner — to tackle the problem. The firm is making ambitious moves in the U.S., having opened a New York office this year, and it’ll be a company to watch. The company has already fielded acquisition offers, but it is aiming to stay independent and grow its share of the U.S. market by enabling retailers, and particularly smaller players, to expand their sales globally.
Microsoft is readying its HoloLens augmented reality tech for combat. The company just won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring AR headset tech into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers.
The two-year contract may result in follow-on orders of more than 100,000 headsets according to documentation describing the bidding process. One of the contract’s tag lines for the AR tech seems to be its ability to enable “25 bloodless battles before the 1st battle,” suggesting that actual combat training is going to be an essential aspect of the AR headset capabilities.
“Augmented reality technology will provide troops with more and better information to make decisions. This new work extends our longstanding, trusted relationship with the Department of Defense to this new area,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement sent to TechCrunch.
Magic Leap was also pursuing the contract according to the report in Bloomberg. The military contract bid was perhaps a bit more of a stretch for the company which has previously maintained that its company’s efforts are focused centrally on consumers. The startup has only recently released its first development kit, while Microsoft’s tech has been in developer hands for more than two years.
Some of the documentation (PDF download) surrounding this bid is intensely interesting and really showcases how extensively the military has researched how augmented reality tech can alter the training and combat environments of soldiers.
Obviously, Microsoft wouldn’t just be planning to take what it’s been selling to factory workers and put it onto a battlefield, but the system requirements outlined in the contract already seem to eclipse what the current generation HoloLens optics are capable of, including items like the device’s FoV which will have a requirement of between 55 and 110 degrees.
Other stipulations include the device being no heavier than 1.5 pounds and being compatible with existing military helmets. The head-worn device would specifically track weapons and allow soldiers to see simulated fire from their real weapons while offering offering training with weapons like Javelin missile systems in a completely simulated environment.
These are all just early frameworks, but Microsoft now will be developing technologies that keep the U.S. military at the forefront of augmented reality tech, something that will probably be a boon to their enterprise focused solutions as well.
My new book launched about two weeks ago. Thanks to you, it went to #1 on the Wall Street Journal business bestseller list, made the New York Times list and best of all, has led to an ever-growing series of conversations about the ideas inside. The collectible multiplies that by eight.
One of the best reasons to create a print book is that it becomes a direct way to establish what people like us are talking about. And a third of our sales are in the audio edition, which is a fascinating insight into how people are consuming ideas now.
Thank you to every single person who contributed, who shared, who took a leap. I appreciate it. Can’t wait to see what you do with the ideas inside.
Amazon today announced AWS DeepRacer, a fully autonomous 1/18th scale race car that aims to help developers learn machine learning. Priced at $399 but currently offered for $249, the race car lets developers to get hands-on – literally – with a machine learning technique called reinforcement learning (RL).
RL takes a different approach to training models than other machine learning techniques, Amazon explained.
It’s a type of machine learning that works when an “agent” is allowed to act on a trial-and-error basis within an interactive environment. It does so using feedback from those actions to learn over time in order to reach a predetermined goal or to maximize some type of score or reward.
This makes it different from other machine learning techniques – like Supervised Learning, for example – as it doesn’t require any labeled training data to get started, and it can make short-term decisions while optimizing for a long-term goal.
The new race car lets developers experiment with RL by learning through autonomous driving.
Developers first get started using a virtual car and tracks in a cloud-based 3D racing simulator, powered by AWS RoboMaker. Here, they can train an autonomous driving model against a collection of predefined race tracks included with the simulator, then evaluate them virtually or choose to download them to the real-world AWS DeepRacer car.
They can also opt to participate in the first AWS DeepRacer League at the re:Invent conference, where the car was announced. This event will take place over the next 24 hours in the AWS DeepRacer workshops and at the MGM Speedway and will involve using Amazon SageMaker, AWS RoboMaker, and other AWS services.
There are 6 main tracks each with a pit area, a hacker garage, and two extra tracks developers can use for training and experimentation. There will also be a DJ.
The League will continue after the event as well, with a series of live racing events starting in 2019 at AWS Global Summits worldwide. Virtual tournaments will also be hosted throughout the year, Amazon said, with the goal of winning the AWS DeepRacer 2019 Championship Cup at re:invent 2019.
As for the car’s hardware itself, it’s a 1/18th scale, radio-controlled, four-wheel drive vehicle powered by an Intel Atom processor. The processor runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, ROS (Robot Operating System), and the Intel OpenVino computer vision toolkit.
The car also includes a 4 megapixel camera with 1080p resolution, 802.11ac WiFi, multiple USB ports, and battery power that will last for about 2 hours.
It’s available for sale on Amazon here.
Amazon Web Services today announced Amazon Elastic Inference, a new service that lets customers attach GPU-powered inference acceleration to any Amazon EC2 instance and reduces deep learning costs by up to 75 percent.
“What we see typically is that the average utilization of these P3 instances GPUs are about 10 to 30 percent, which is pretty wasteful with elastic inference. You don’t have to waste all that costs and all that GPU,” AWS chief executive Andy Jassy said on stage at the AWS re:Invent conference earlier today. “[Amazon Elastic Inference] is a pretty significant game changer in being able to run inference much more cost-effectively.”
Amazon Elastic Inference will also be available for Amazon SageMaker notebook instances and endpoints, “bringing acceleration to built-in algorithms and to deep learning environments” the company wrote in a blog post. It will support machine learning frameworks TensorFlow, Apache MXNet and ONNX.
It’s available in three sizes:
Dive deeper into the new service here.
