Amazon’s Prime Air drone delivery fleet gains FAA approval for trial commercial flights

Amazon has been granted an approval by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that will allow it to start trialling commercial deliveries via drone, Bloomberg reports. This certification is the same one granted to UPS and a handful of other companies, and while it doesn’t mean that Amazon can immediately start operating a consumer drone delivery service for everyone, it does allow them to make progress towards that goal.

Amazon has said it’ll kick off its own delivery tests, though it hasn’t shared any details on when and where exactly those will begin. The FAA clearance for these trials is adapted from the safety rules and regulations it imposes for companies operating a commercial airline service, with special exceptions allowing for companies to bypass the requirements that specifically deal with onboard crew and staff working the aircraft, since the drones don’t have any.

These guidelines are at best a patchwork solution designed by the agency and its commercial partners to help provide a way for them to get underway with crucial systems development and safety testing and design, but the FAA is working towards a more fit-for-purpose set of regulations to govern drone airline operation for later this year. That will mostly be related to authorizing flights over crowds – but any drone flights will still require constant human observation.

Ultimately, any actual viable and practical system of drone delivery will require fully autonomous operation, without direct line-of-sight observation. Amazon has plans for its MK27 drones, which have a maximum 5 lb carrying capacity, to do just that, but it’ll still likely be many years before the regulatory and air traffic control infrastructure is updated to the point where that can happen regularly.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/31/amazons-prime-air-drone-delivery-fleet-gains-faa-approval-for-trial-commercial-flights/

Famous colleges

Parents can do their kids a favor if, from an early age, they hear them say “famous college” instead of “good college.”

Because there’s very little data that shows that colleges with big football programs or lots of Nobel prize winners are actually good at doing what a college should do for an undergraduate.

If you want to spend the time and the money and the debt to go to a famous college, that’s your choice.

But don’t be confused into believing that a famous one is a good one.

And in this back-to-school moment, it’s smart to not only consider a gap year filled with intention as a way to engage with the world, but to think about what we’re actually buying when we buy a degree from a famous college.

Education and learning continue to diverge. In-person, real-time learning is too expensive, too scarce and rarely as effective as it could be, and we’re discovering that a commitment to life-long learning is more important than a four-year sabbatical that costs too much and delivers too little. And good colleges are in a position to do something about this, while the ones that are merely famous will fight hard to maintain their status quo.

Scarcity isn’t always needed to create value.

The pandemic has created a significant shift in perception, and the repercussions are going to be felt by colleges for years to come–many of them are going to be refactored, restructured or disappear.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/634830284/0/sethsblog~Famous-colleges/

Date certain

One of the most expensive things a service business or freelancer can do is promise that work will be done by a certain day. Which is something we need to do, of course, but we should charge appropriately. “It’ll be done soon,” should be way cheaper than, “It’ll be done at exactly 11 am on Tuesday.”

And one of the most important things we can do to focus our energy and commitment is be prepared to promise a date certain. It sharpens everything.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/634786040/0/sethsblog~Date-certain/

Walmart-exclusive TrillerTok will run on Azure, or Oracle, or something

If you can’t keep up with the latest rumor mill on TikTok’s impending doom acquisition, my suggestion is simple: don’t. Or instead, enjoy it for what it is: one of the most absurd bakeoff deals in investment banking history.

Walmart and its always low prices are in the fray. Oracle is looking to find synergies to make enterprise resource planning software more enticing to Gen Z workers. Triller — who the hell are they again? — is supposedly teaming up with an asset management firm (and a planet near the Hoth system) called Centricus according to Bloomberg (to which TikTok responded nah). Twitter is in — maybe? — with key corporate strategic advice from Beyoncé on the social network’s debt underwriting strategy.

SoftBank is apparently looking, and also just happened to announce yesterday its intention to sell off $14 billion of its core Japanese mobile services business to net cash quickly. (The upshot is that at least TikTok lost most of its value before SoftBank’s investment!)

Everything here is absurd. TikTok is absurd. The videos of people doing what they are doing on TikTok are absurd. TikTok’s growth is absurd. A president setting a deadline on the sale of a company is absurd. This process is absurd. Selling a company as large as TikTok in 45 days is absurd. Walmart is absurd (and also a mirage, since they are still banned from New York City lest someone gets discounted soap in a pandemic).

I warned a few weeks ago to “beware bankers” peddling TikTok rumors. And that’s still the right answer, in the sense that of course we are going to get to the furthest reaches of the M&A universe as bankers try to salvage TikTok’s final sale price (“We’re approaching the Centricus system, sir!”). But that approach is so much more boring than just assuming that every rumor is true and trying to imagine Wall Street advisors trundling through this morass of bids.

My advice here is simple: let’s all take our analyst hats off for a week and put on our clown costumes, since — and it’s key you don’t work at TikTok for this or have money at stake in the company — this story is actually enjoyable.

COVID-19 is serious, the U.S. presidential election is weeks away, social justice in our cities is critically important. Just in the past few hours, T’Challa passed away, Hurricane Laura ripped up the Gulf Coast, and the longest continuously-serving Japanese prime minister of the post-war era (yes, I know, that’s a lot of qualifiers) just resigned due to health issues. It can get weighty on the front pages of the newspapers these days.

So it’s just nice to know that you can flip to the business pages and get some farce.

Maybe this whole story will eventually turn into the next great business book à la Barbarians at the Gate. But at least the barbarians then knew how to destroy a company with the proper levels of debt leverage. Here, you’ve got the pre-smoldered detritus of a business being bid on by the company that brought us The Greeter.

Whatever this saga brings next (hint: Microsoft buying the company), I’ll just say this: the warmth and cheeriness that TikTok provided millions of teenagers though short videos of awakward dance routines is the same mirth that it provides acerbic financial analysts with a caustic eye on the markets. In what has been a miserable year for all of us, for that small twinkle of amusement, I’m thankful.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/29/what-is-going-on-anymore/

Systemic problems

… demand systemic solutions.

First, we have to pay attention.

Then we need to acknowledge that a solution is possible.

And then we need to commit. To the long, persistent road to altering the status quo.

The world is forcing us to pay attention to lingering problems more urgently than ever before. Real change on issues of dignity, justice and health are long overdue

Urgent problems are too important to earn only a moment of our attention. Important projects demand that we keep showing up to make the change we seek. Showing up and showing up, at the root and at every turn, consistently working toward systemic solutions.

When we think about the problems we’ve solved as a community, this is the way it always happens. Making things better, over time, with focus. Persistent commitment doesn’t lower the urgency of the moment, it acknowledges it.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/634742882/0/sethsblog~Systemic-problems/

Destinations, risks and journeys

Where are you headed? The choices you’re making, the effort, the sacrifices—where is the destination?

We make choices every day about our destination. And because of those choices, we go on a journey.

Along that journey, we take risks but we also experience an internal narrative about those risks.

And so, destinations, risks (perceived and actual) and journeys define our lives.

It’s possible you’ve come to the conclusion that the destination you’ve chosen isn’t for you. That being a pop star, a successful VP of accounting or a receptionist with a secure position isn’t a life you’d like to lead.

But don’t confuse that with the journey. Maybe you’d be happy with the pot of gold at the end of your rainbow, but it’s entirely possible you don’t want to suffer the discomfort and indignities and effort it will take to get to that destination, that you’d like an easier path. You’ll happily take the destination but the truth is, the journey is too arduous.

And don’t confuse that with your imagining of the risks along the way. It might be that you want the destination, that you are willing to put up with (or even delight in) the journey but your narrative of the risks and dangers are just too much to handle.

When we conflate the destination with the journey with the narrative of the risks, we have no hope of improving any of the three. Instead, we often pushed to throw out all three at once or embrace them all. But it’s possible, with effort and planning, to make the journey more palatable or the risks feel more tolerable.

The destination isn’t the journey. And our narrative of the actual risks is up to us.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/634684614/0/sethsblog~Destinations-risks-and-journeys/

The reMarkable 2 improves on the original in every way, but remains firmly in its niche

I’d been asking for something like the reMarkable for a long time before it showed up out of the blue a few years ago. The device was a real treat, but had a few problems and an eye-popping price tag. The reMarkable 2 builds on the first, with a more beautiful, streamlined device and several key new features, but keeps many of the limitations — some deliberate, some not so much — that make it a refreshingly specialty device. Costs a lot less this time around, too.

The reMarkable is intended to be a tablet for consuming and creating black and white (and grey) content: PDFs, sketches, jotted notes, that sort of thing — without all the distractions and complications of a full-on tablet or laptop. I certainly found that when I had a lot of content to get through and annotate, the device helped me focus, and it was useful for light note-taking and and other purposes, like DMing a D&D game or sketching out a woodworking project.

With $15M round and 100K tablets sold, reMarkable CEO wants to make tech ‘more human’

The rM2, as I’ll call it, really is an improvement in pretty much every possible way. I’m honestly a bit baffled as to how they could make it thinner, faster, more battery efficient, better at pretty much everything, and yet drop the price from $600 to $400. Usually there’s some kind of trade-off. Not this time!

Specifically, the rM2 has the following major improvements:

• Thinner (an already svelte 6.7mm reduced to 4.7mm; for comparison, an iPad is about 6mm)
• Faster, dual-core ARM CPU (mainly for power savings)
• Double the RAM (a gig, up from 512 MB)
• Display response time halved to 21ms (comparable to LCDs)
• Battery life more than tripled (a couple weeks, or months on standby, instead of a couple days)
• Eraser on other end of stylus. Thank you!

What hasn’t been changed is the screen itself (that is, the resolution and contrast), the OS and the general purpose of the thing.

The new device, left, and old one. Image Credits: reMarkable

Let’s start with the new design. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t taken with it at first. The original’s softer white plastic case felt more organic, while the new one’s asymmetric chrome is more gadgety.

But it’s grown on me as also being more purposeful and focused, though of course it also now is rather more suitable for a right-handed person than a left. The original’s three enormous buttons always seemed far too prominent for the amount of utility they offered. I did sometimes wish for a home button on the rM2, but a new gesture (swipe from the top) takes care of that.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The power button at the top of the chrome strip is tiny, perhaps too tiny, but at least you won’t hit it by accident. The USB-C charge port is opposite the power button, on the bottom, and well out of the way of anywhere you’ll hold it, making charging while using easy (though you probably won’t need to).

Powerful magnets on the right side hold the stylus with a tight grip but no visible markings. Said stylus, I should add, is a very nice one indeed, with a weighty feel and rubberized finish. The new eraser function works great — definitely spring for it if you’re thinking about getting one of these.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

On the back are four tiny rubberized feet that serve to prevent it scooting across the table while naked, and which help align the tablet perfectly in its folio case. Projections like these on such a thin, smooth device bother me on some level — I tried to peel them off first thing — but I understand they’re practical.

Overall the rM2 is extremely streamlined, and while it’s significantly heavier than the first (about 400 grams, or .89 lb, versus 350g, both lighter than the lightest iPad), it isn’t heavy by any stretch of the imagination. The bezel is big enough you can grip or reposition the device easily but not so large it takes over. I could have done with maybe a little less, but I’m picky that way.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m just a real stickler for industrial design. The flaws I’ve mentioned here are nothing compared with, say, the straight-up-ugly iPhone 11. The rM2 is a striking device, more so than the first, and it does a great job of both disappearing and showing strong design choices.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The display is the same as the first, and as such is not quite at today’s e-reader levels when it comes to pixel density and contrast. E-readers from Kobo and Amazon hit 300 pixels per inch, and reMarkable’s is down at 226. Sometimes this matters, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve found that certain fonts and pen marks show lots of aliasing, but mostly it isn’t noticeable because as a larger device one tends to hold it farther from their face.

There’s no frontlight, which I understand is a deliberate choice — you’re supposed to work with this thing under the same lighting you’d use for a paper document. Still, I felt its absence occasionally when reading.

I can vouch for the new battery lasting much, much longer. I’ve only had the device for a week or so, meaning I can’t speak to the months of standby, but I was always disappointed by the original’s need for frequent charging, and this one has been far better.

It is also much faster to turn on and off. The original went to sleep and shut down after rather too short a delay and took a while to start up. The rM2 turns on instantly from sleep and takes about 20 seconds to boot from a full off state. Fortunately it doesn’t need to be turned off, or turn itself off, anywhere near as often as its predecessor. Removing these on/off and battery worries really goes a long way toward making this a practical device for a lot of people.

An excellent endless legal pad and PDF tool

You can write neatly, I just don’t. Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

Where the rM2 succeeds best is as a reader for full-page documents like scientific papers, legal documents and reports, and as a rough sketchpad and notebook with the chief benefit of having effectively unlimited pages.

For reading, the experience is not very different from the original device. It works with fairly few formats and PDF the best. You can skim through pages, annotate with the pen and highlight text — though annoyingly you’re still just painting the text with a translucent layer, not digitally selecting/highlighting the text itself.

You can search for text easily and navigation is straightforward, though I’d like the option to tap and go to the next page rather than swipe. Changes are synced to the document in the reMarkable app, where you can easily export a modified version, though, again, you can’t directly select text.

Writing and drawing on the screen feels great — better than before, and it was already the best among e-paper devices. The iPad Pro beats it for full-color illustration, naturally, but the idea isn’t to meet the capabilities of other tablets, it’s to provide the intended features well.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The feel of the screen is smoother than the first reMarkable, but the texture change isn’t necessarily bad — one thing I could never quite get away from on the first was, due to its texture, the feeling that I was scratching the screen when I wrote. Nothing like that here, though the tactility is slightly less. As for the lower latency, it’s noticeable and unnoticeable at the same time: Certainly it’s better than all the other e-paper devices I’ve tested, including the first reMarkable. But even 21ms is noticeable and affects the way you write or draw. It isn’t “just like paper,” but it is pretty awesome.

I would never try to replace the small pocket notepad I use during interviews, but at a meeting or brainstorm session I would much rather use this. The space you have for making little groups of names, flowcharts, random things to look up later, doodles of your boss and so on is so vast and so easily accessible that it almost makes me wish I went to more meetings. Almost!

I realize showing this on video would be helpful to some, but the truth is even on video it’s hard to get a sense of how it looks and feels when you’re actually doing it. It feels more responsive than it looks.

A clutch new feature for writing and drawing is the integration of an eraser tip on the other side of the stylus. It works automatically, feels rubbery like a real eraser and saves you a trip to the pen menu. Unfortunately, you still have to open that menu to get to “undo,” which is sometimes preferable to erasing. Given the whole screen is multi-touch capacitive, I don’t see any reason why something like a two-finger leftward swipe can’t be mapped to undo, or double-tapping the eraser in an empty space.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

Handwriting recognition is helpful, not that I have taken a whole lot of notes with the rM2, but it’s easy to see how it saves time when transferring mixed-media pages to your computer. It’s not like it would take you that much time to spell out the email address or name someone mentioned, it’s just nicer to be able to hit a button and it’s ready to copy and paste.

I definitely experienced transcription errors, but honestly, even I can’t tell my “u” and “n” or “r” and “v” apart all the time. I have a draggy style of longhand so I needed to focus a bit on picking up the pen from the surface rather than letting it trail at the lowest level of pressure.

A so-so e-reader

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

One aspect of the original reMarkable that didn’t thrill me was the handling and display of e-books and other pure text content. The rM2 improves on this and adds a very useful new time-shifting feature, but it still falls behind the competition.

The fact is that the reMarkable isn’t really intended for reading books. It’s formatted for content that’s already meant to be displayed as a full page, and it does that well. When it has to do its own text formatting the options are a little thinner.

With six fonts and six sizes per font, and three options each for margins and spacing, room for customization is low. The two most book-like text sizes seem to be “slightly too large” and “slightly too small,” while the others are comically huge, appearing larger than even a large-print book would have them.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

Several epub books I loaded onto the tablet failed in various ways. Initial tabs on paragraphs didn’t render; in-text links didn’t work; line spacing is uneven; large white spaces appeared rather than partial paragraphs. The team needs to take a serious look at their e-book renderer and text options, and I’m told that they are in fact doing so, but that writing, drawing and, of course, the new hardware have taken up their resources.

It’s less of an issue with articles gleaned from the web with the new Chrome extension. These are more consistently formatted and make articles read more like magazine pages, which is perfectly fine. I do wish there were options for a two-column view or other ways to customize how the pages are transcoded. I give reMarkable a pass on this because it’s a new feature they’re still building out and it works pretty well.

No chance, unfortunately, for integration with Pocket, Simplenote, Evernote or any of the other common services along these lines. For better or worse, reMarkable has chosen to go it alone. Indeed, reMarkable as a company is wary of making the device too complex and too integrated with other things, since the entire philosophy is one of removing distractions. That makes for a unified experience, but it hurts when a feature is simply not as good as the competition with which the company has voluntarily entered competition.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

One serious gripe I have, and one which will surely bother reMarkable’s existing customers, is that you can only have one device active at a time per account. Yes: If you bought the first, you essentially have to disable it in order to set up the second.

This is a huge problem and a missed opportunity as well. For one thing, it’s a bit cruel to essentially throw their oldest customers under the bus. You could probably figure out a workaround, but the simple fact that the old device has to be kicked off the account is bad. Because it could so easily have been very useful to have two of these things. Imagine keeping one at work and one at home, and they stay in sync, or sharing an account with a partner and sending documents or handwriting back and forth.

I asked the company about this and it seems that it is a technical limitation at this time, and that multiple devices are on the roadmap to support. But for anyone planning on buying an rM2 now, it’s a material consideration that your original device will no longer be usable by you, or at least not in the same way — it isn’t bricked or anything, it just won’t sync with your account.

Hope and dreams (and hacks)

As before, what is exciting about the reMarkable 2 is not just what it does, but what it could do. The company has significantly expanded what the ecosystem supports over the last couple years, improved performance and responded to user requests. Most of my complaints are things the team is already aware of, since they have an engaged and outspoken community, and are somewhere on the roadmap to be fixed or added.

There is also a healthy hacking community putting together new ways to take advantage of such promising hardware — though of course with the usual caveat that you could brick it if you’re not careful. If reMarkable doesn’t want to build an RSS reader into the device because of their fundamental philosophy against such a thing, someone will probably make one anyway. I look forward to experimenting with the device not as a carefully tuned platform but as an all-purpose greyscale computer.

The previous reMarkable was a very interesting device but one that was rather difficult to recommend widely at launch. But the company has proven itself over the last couple years and the device has grown and solidified. This upgraded version, better in nearly every way yet a third cheaper, is much, much easier to recommend. If you are interested in exploring a more paperless world, or want to force yourself to focus better, or just think this thing sounds cool, the reMarkable 2 is a great device to do it with.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/27/the-remarkable-2-improves-on-the-original-in-every-way-but-remains-firmly-in-its-niche/

LA gets a big SAAS exit as Fastly nabs the Culver City-based Signal Sciences for $775M

Los Angeles was always more than a one industry town, even when it comes to technology startups, but media and entertainment (and social networking) were always the big draws in tinseltown.

Now the city’s enterprise tech scene can claim a really big winner with Signal Sciences, the security monitoring and management company that is getting bought by Fastly, a provider of content delivery networking services, for $775 million.

“Our team couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to join Fastly to continue to drive forward security protections that empower developers. But we also believe this is a great moment to showcase the diversity of the LA technology scene,” wrote Signal Sciences chief executive, Andrew Peterson, in a direct message. “Being the largest enterprise tech outcome ever here, we’re just one of so many great deep technology companies who are paving the way for the next generation of SoCal based start ups. We’re thrilled to help lead the way for the broader tech community in Los Angeles.”

Content delivery and security go hand-in-hand and some of the biggest companies online use businesses like Fastly and its competitor, Cloudflare, to ensure that their online presence doesn’t go offline — and that browsers can quickly download and deliver websites.

Fastly said that the acquisition of Signal Sciences’ business will boost its ability to provide better security for applications and APIs — the connective fabric between different services that knit different technologies together behind the scenes.

With the acquisition, Fastly is planting a flag as a new competitor in the cybersecurity market, even as companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google offer a wider array of services under their Internet as a service business lines.

Application security is a higher value piece of the services stack and it takes advantage of the natural position that a company like Fastly has as a content distribution network.

“Fastly was founded to meet developers’ need for greater visibility and control. Now, as the digital transformation movement continues to accelerate, DevOps teams are struggling with inadequate and inflexible security tools,” said Joshua Bixby, Chief Executive Officer of Fastly, in a statement. “Together with Signal Sciences, we will give developers modern security tools designed for the way they work.”

Los Angeles, California, USA – March 23, 2016: Aerial view of the Hollywood sign at dusk in Los Angeles. The image has been taken from an helicopter flying over LA. Image Credit: Getty Images/franckreporter

Under the terms of the agreement Fastly is buying Signal Sciences for $200 million in cash and approximately $575 million worth of stock, subject to customary adjustments for transactions, according to a statement.

Fastly is also setting up a $50 million retention pool of restricted stock units to give out to Signal Sciences employees.

Signal Sciences employees aren’t the only winners in the deal. The company raised $63 million in venture financing from investors including CRV, Harrison Metal, Index Ventures, Oreilly Alphatech Ventures, Lead Edge Capital, and individual investors including former Facebook security officer Alex Stamos, and Etsy chief executive Chad Dickerson.

The company’s last round was a $35 million investment raised about two years ago, and one investor with knowledge of the company’s cap table called it a “pretty efficient exit” for its backers.

Signal Sciences secures $35 million investment to protect web apps

Morgan Stanley & Co. and Union Square Advisors are acting as financial advisors to Fastly, and Cooley LLP is acting as its legal advisor with regard to the transaction, according to a statement. Qatalyst Partners is acting as financial advisor to Signal Sciences, while Goodwin Procter was the company’s lawyer.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/27/la-gets-a-big-saas-exit-as-fastly-nabs-the-culver-city-based-signal-sciences-for-775m/

LA gets a big SAAS exit as Fastly nabs the Culver City-based Signal Sciences for $775M

Los Angeles was always more than a one industry town, even when it comes to technology startups, but media and entertainment (and social networking) were always the big draws in tinseltown.

Now the city’s enterprise tech scene can claim a really big winner with Signal Sciences, the security monitoring and management company that is getting bought by Fastly, a provider of content delivery networking services, for $775 million.

“Our team couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to join Fastly to continue to drive forward security protections that empower developers. But we also believe this is a great moment to showcase the diversity of the LA technology scene,” wrote Signal Sciences chief executive, Andrew Peterson, in a direct message. “Being the largest enterprise tech outcome ever here, we’re just one of so many great deep technology companies who are paving the way for the next generation of SoCal based start ups. We’re thrilled to help lead the way for the broader tech community in Los Angeles.”

Content delivery and security go hand-in-hand and some of the biggest companies online use businesses like Fastly and its competitor, Cloudflare, to ensure that their online presence doesn’t go offline — and that browsers can quickly download and deliver websites.

Fastly said that the acquisition of Signal Sciences’ business will boost its ability to provide better security for applications and APIs — the connective fabric between different services that knit different technologies together behind the scenes.

With the acquisition, Fastly is planting a flag as a new competitor in the cybersecurity market, even as companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google offer a wider array of services under their Internet as a service business lines.

Application security is a higher value piece of the services stack and it takes advantage of the natural position that a company like Fastly has as a content distribution network.

“Fastly was founded to meet developers’ need for greater visibility and control. Now, as the digital transformation movement continues to accelerate, DevOps teams are struggling with inadequate and inflexible security tools,” said Joshua Bixby, Chief Executive Officer of Fastly, in a statement. “Together with Signal Sciences, we will give developers modern security tools designed for the way they work.”

Los Angeles, California, USA – March 23, 2016: Aerial view of the Hollywood sign at dusk in Los Angeles. The image has been taken from an helicopter flying over LA. Image Credit: Getty Images/franckreporter

Under the terms of the agreement Fastly is buying Signal Sciences for $200 million in cash and approximately $575 million worth of stock, subject to customary adjustments for transactions, according to a statement.

Fastly is also setting up a $50 million retention pool of restricted stock units to give out to Signal Sciences employees.

Signal Sciences employees aren’t the only winners in the deal. The company raised $63 million in venture financing from investors including CRV, Harrison Metal, Index Ventures, Oreilly Alphatech Ventures, Lead Edge Capital, and individual investors including former Facebook security officer Alex Stamos, and Etsy chief executive Chad Dickerson.

The company’s last round was a $35 million investment raised about two years ago, and one investor with knowledge of the company’s cap table called it a “pretty efficient exit” for its backers.

Signal Sciences secures $35 million investment to protect web apps

Morgan Stanley & Co. and Union Square Advisors are acting as financial advisors to Fastly, and Cooley LLP is acting as its legal advisor with regard to the transaction, according to a statement. Qatalyst Partners is acting as financial advisor to Signal Sciences, while Goodwin Procter was the company’s lawyer.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/27/la-gets-a-big-saas-exit-as-fastly-nabs-the-culver-city-based-signal-sciences-for-775m/

Amazon debuts Halo smart health subscription service and Halo Band wearable activity tracker

Amazon has introduced an entirely new membership program called Halo today that aims to provide comprehensive personal health and wellness monitoring and advice. The Halo service, which is opening to early access by special request today, includes both the service and a new Amazon Halo Band wristworn activity tracker for $64.99 for a six-month membership. Amazon says that the standard public price of the same will be $99.99 once it’s more generally available.

Halo looks to offer more than your standard health tracking gadget/app combo, by taking a comprehensive look at various measures of health, including body fat percentage, as measured at home with just your smartphone’s own camera and the Amazon Halo app. The company says that it was able to make this possible using its own advances in computer vision and machine learning. Amazon employes deep neural network-based processing of your uploaded photos to separate your body from its surroundings, analyze so-called body fat “hot spots” where it’s easier to measure body fat percentage, and then generates a 3D model of your body. You can then use a slider to adjust your body fat percentage up or down to see what kind of impact gaining or losing body fat would actually have on your physique.

Image Credits: Amazon

Amazon claims that its technology is able to provide accuracy up to the standards of what a doctor would be able to determine in a clinical setting – and as much as twice as accurate as is currently possible using other at-home methods, including smart scales.

Meanwhile, the Amazon Halo Band is a small, sleek wristworn device that can capture other measures of health, including activity, skin temperature, sleep states (including REM, light and deep sleep). It has an accelerometer, a heart rate monitor, two microphones, and it’s water resistant. The built-in battery can last up to a fully week on a 90 minute charge, and it’s compatible with a range of different band accessories for switching style.

Another unique vector that Amazon is measuring on top of activity, sleep and body fat percentage is wha tit’s calling “Tone” – that’s why there are microphones on board the Halo Band. That monitors your voice, and applies machine learning to determine factors including “energy and positivity.” Amazon says this will allow them to provide unique insights like whether “a difficult work call leads to less positivity in communication with a customer’s family,” for instance.

Image Credits: Amazon

The blatant, obvious concern here is that Amazon Halo seeks unprecedented access to a person’s personal data in order to derive its insights. Amazon is looking to collect information about the time, lengthy and quality of your sleep; biometric data including your heart rate and body temperature; information about when you exercise and where; and even highly accurate and detailed info about your body’s physical makeup – not to mention how your voice sounds and what that might indicate about your mental state.

Amazon says in a release about Halo that both Halo and Body were built with “privacy in mind,” and that body scans are automatically deleted from any servers where they’re stored after they’re processed. They’re then stored only locally on your phone, and Amazon says this means “no one but you ever sees them” unless you opt to share them. Further, it says all health data “is encrypted in transit and in the cloud,” with customers able to delete their data at any time. As for voice and speech data, Amazon says that these are analyzed locally on the phone itself and then immediately deleted after processing, so that no one ever hears them – including them customer themselves.

Image Credits: Amazon

Even so, this is handing a lot of trust and information to Amazon, and while the raw data may be protected, the insights gathered, even if anonymized, obviously stand to offer Amazon a lot more value in terms of its ability to tune its overall product offerings and create additional opportunities for things like its bourgeoning healthcare business. That said, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant and ecosystem hasn’t seemed to deter customers, so it’ll be interesting to see how many are open to sharing even more info with Amazon in exchange for guided health and wellness advice.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/27/amazon-debuts-halo-smart-health-subscription-service-and-halo-band-wearable-activity-tracker/

Amazon opens its first Amazon Fresh physical grocery store, in LA

The shift to online shopping has accelerated in the COVID-19 pandemic, but today Amazon made a bold move that underscores its belief that physical stores will remain a key component of how consumers shop. In the Los Angeles neighborhood of Woodland Hills, the e-commerce giant today opened its first Amazon Fresh supermarket, the first of seven Amazon Fresh that it plans to set up in California and Illinois in the coming weeks and months.

A blog post from James Helbling, the head of Amazon Fresh, notes that the store will open initially invitation-only, based emails it will be sending out to locals, from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. PT. It will update more on opening hours and capacity over time here.

You might be thinking to yourself, but Amazon already has Whole Foods and smaller Amazon Go stores? The idea here will be to build a new grocery store experience from the ground up targeting a different customer. Indeed, this is par for the course with all consumer packaged goods plays: own a wide variety of brands targeting all demographics, and you will own the space.

It’s also an essential part of the playbook for Amazon in its wider bid to compete more squarely against the likes of Walmart, which dominates the world of physical (and therefore, all) shopping in the US. Walmart was estimated to have about a 26% market share of grocery sales in the US, in what is still quite a fragmented market, according to this graphic from Statista. The data puts Amazon’s Whole Foods share at just 1.6%, although Amazon itself estimates that it is closer to about 4%, including its other channels, including online. Still pretty small, nevertheless.

While Whole Foods focuses mainly on organic and health foods (and has rightly earned the nickname “Whole Paycheck” because of how expensive a shopping trip can be there), and Go is smaller and about catering to early adopters with its no-human, all-automation, AI and camera approach, Amazon Fresh will bring in a bunch of recognised, mainstream big brands alongside Amazon’s own burgeoning own-label lines, along with a lot of pre-prepared items.

That’s not to say it won’t also be very tech-heavy. The store will have a new feature called the Amazon Dash Cart so that people can build lists of items before going into the store, and then use that to select and pay for things to cut waiting time to ring up and pay with a human cashier. And there will be Echo Show devices set up around the store to give people advice on where to find products. (But I don’t think they will be fully operational devices: ie no ability to change the music playing in the store through these… not yet at least.)

It will also offer free delivery to people who shop at the store, which essentially will also become a depot of sorts for the wider Amazon Fresh operation — which had been entirely online until now (and which had started to offer free delivery some time back to sharpen competition with the wide plethora of other grocery delivery options out in the market now).

By building the whole store from the ground up, it will give Amazon to integrate more tech into the experience more easily, too.

The arrival, spread, and persistent existence of the novel coronavirus has played out in a tricky way when it comes to physical stores. Depending on where you live, you will have different sets of regulations to comply with when shopping, which might range from requiring face masks or limiting entry or movement within stores, through to stores operating with other limitations and in some extreme cases not being opened at all.

Amazon said it plans to take its own set of guidelines into how the stores will be run, basing it on how Whole Foods has been working. Employees will have temperature checks daily; both workers and customers will have to wear face masks; it will offer free disposable masks to people who need one; and stores will be limited to a maximum capacity of 50%.

The opening of this store in LA should not come as a huge surprise to those who have been following the company’s moves: it has been slowly picking up large retail locations to develop them into Fresh depots for a while now, including sites in LA, but a number of other signals including hiring patterns have led many to guess that the bigger plan was to build them into retail operations.

The company has reportedly also been looking to develop physical grocery stores in other markets outside of the US as well. There have been rumors swirling for years now in the UK — which like the US has a pretty fragmented and somewhat tumultuous grocery industry, dominated in its case by Tesco — that Amazon has been eyeing up retail locations that have come up for sale as big retail chains have found themselves in financial dire straights.

That predicament, ironically, has been partly the result of the shift to people shopping online, on sites like (you guessed it) Amazon.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/27/amazon-opens-its-first-amazon-fresh-physical-grocery-store-in-la/

Small adjustments

Even better than buying a new bicycle is adjusting the seat on your existing bike properly.

That’s because the height of the seat changes your power. It’s the point of maximum leverage, responsible for aligning all of the forces you bring to bear on the process.

When we begin to think about our work, we tend to focus on the largest structures–what it looks like from the outside. But as we engage with the problem at hand, it turns out that our impact changes based on how we stand, what we believe and the ways we interact with the systems right in front of us.

Get the strategy right, then implement small changes, repeated with persistence and generosity.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/634584558/0/sethsblog~Small-adjustments/

Here’s the Surface Duo

I can’t remember the last time I did a hands-on with a device prior to powering it on. The idea of basing posts entirely around glamour shots without really interfacing with the product feels like a relic of an early era of gadget blogging. But every so often a device comes along that warrants the approach.

There will be a far more in-depth review of the Surface Duo. I will write a lot of words on this website about the experience of using the software and living with the device as my go-to handset. For now, however, you and I both are going to have to settle for a handful of photos and a few choice words about the form factor.

Microsoft’s dual-screen Surface Duo arrives September 10 for $1,399

But if any product deserves a little bit of pre-review love, it’s the Surface Duo. It’s been a while since I’ve seen so many fellow TechCrunch editors this excited about a new device. The earliest foldables are probably the closest comparison. And at first glance, at least, the Duo seems to be more solidly constructed than some of those earliest foldable units. No surprise, really, given that the weak link was the foldable screen itself.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Microsoft’s approach to increased real estate arrives by way of two independent but connected screens. It’s far from the first product to take the approach, but out of the box, it seems to be a far more solid approach. There’s no fragile, glass-less display to be damaged and no way to accidentally get debris trapped under the screen. The downside, however, is the gap between the displays. Again, more on that in the upcoming review.

What really jumped out at me the most upon unboxing is how compact the device is. I’d seen it in videos and demos, but somehow expected the device to be larger. It’s not small by any means (in fact, it’s wider than the Note 20), but depending on how tall you are, you should probably be able to stick it in your pants pocket without too much trouble.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Microsoft has made it clear that — as far as hardware is concerned — the hinge is very much the thing. It does a double duty both in terms of maintaining the connection between the displays (including the dual-batteries and offering a fluid experience) and allowing the product to conform to a variety of different angles. How a majority of users interact with it remains to be seen, given that it’s a new form factor in some key ways, so the device has to be good in any configuration. As such, the 360-degree swiveling has to be smooth, while remaining rigid enough to keep one screen propped up.

[gallery ids="2036817,2036816,2036815,2036814,2036813,2036812,2036811,2036810"]

So far, so good. The Duo hardware feels truly premium, as one would hope/expect from a $1,400 device. The new Surface arrives September 10. Expect a much deeper and satisfactory review of the product soon.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/26/heres-the-surface-duo/

Microsoft researcher Dr. Cecily Morrison will discuss keeping AI ‘personal’ at Sight Tech Global

For Dr. Cecily Morrison, research into how AI can help people who are blind or visually disabled is deeply personal. It’s not only that the Microsoft Principal Researcher has a 7-year-old son who is blind, she also believes that the powerful AI-related technologies that will help people must themselves be personal, tailored to the circumstances and abilities of the people they support.

We will see new AI techniques that will enable users to personalize experiences for themselves,” says Dr. Morrison, who is based at Microsoft Research Cambridge and whose work is centered on human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. “Everyone is different. Having a disability label does not mean a person has the same needs as another with the same label. New techniques will allow people to teach AI technologies about their information needs with just a few examples in order to get a personalized experience suited to their particular needs. Tech will become about personal needs rather than disability labels.”

Image Credits: Cecily Morrison

Dr. Morrison will speak at Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event on Dec. 2-3 that will explore how AI-related technologies will shape the future of accessibility for people who are blind and visually impaired. The event, which launched on TechCrunch, takes place on Dec. 2-3 and is free to attendees. Pre-register here.

Dr. Morrison is currently involved in several research projects that explore the potential of AI to enable people who are blind or low vision. Project Tokyo, for example, is exploring ways to provide information about the immediate social environment to enhance people’s existing sense-making skills and abilities.

The team works closely with people who are blind or low vision to ensure that the research is grounded in their experience and needs. “It is critical that we imagine what the technologies do for people who are blind and low vision in a way that is empowering. Many blind and low vision people have well developed strategies for making sense of their environments. AI technology must augment these acute sense-making skills, covering information gaps. It is important that technology is not seen as replacing vision, but rather augmenting the information a person already has  when going about their lives.”

As the mother to a blind child, Dr. Morrison believes she has gotten “to see the world in a different perspective, taken part in communities that I wouldn’t otherwise have seen or taken part.” That has definitely driven her research.  An inclusive design project, Torino, was inspired by the need of blind children to learn to code. What resulted was a physical programming language designed to teach computational thinking and basic programming to children ages 7–11, regardless of their level of vision. The effort led to a spin out project called Code Jumper, which is now commercially available from the American Printing House for the Blind.

That success came from working very closely through trial and error with blind 7-11-year-olds, which is also where Dr. Morrison deepened her understanding of how critical it is for researchers to work closely with the people they aim to help. Then too, she points out, people with vision limitations are outstanding early technology adopters in general.

“In the agent space,” Dr. Morrison says, “we have done some work with people who are blind and low vision because, at the time we started working with agents, typical people were not heavy users of agents. In fact, most people thought they were toys. Whereas for people who are blind and low vision were early adopters and heavy users of agent technologies. They really could help push the boundaries of what these technologies can do. If you’re not using technology regularly, you can’t really imagine what the next steps are. So, it’s a great example of inclusive design where we can work with this cohort of very able blind people to help us think about what agents of the future are going to look like for all of us.”

Dr. Morrison holds a PhD in Computer Science from University of Cambridge and an undergraduate degree in Ethnomusicology from Barnard College, Columbia University. She shares life with her partner and two children, one of whom is blind.

Pre-registration for Sight Tech Global is open. And the event is free.

Sight Tech Global is a sponsor-driven event, and our partners so far include Waymo, Google, Wells Fargo, TechCrunch and Verizon Media. All proceeds go to the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired 501 (c)(3). For more information on sponsorship, please contact us at sponsor@sighttechglobal.com.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/26/microsoft-researcher-dr-cecily-morrison-will-discuss-keeping-ai-personal-at-sight-tech-global/

Far away is difficult

Humans are bad at understanding things that are very far away in scale or time.

Atoms aren’t actually made up of tiny particles that are like rocks, but smaller. And planets aren’t simply very large billiard balls. We can only understand the behavior of things big and small by realizing that they’re not actually different versions of something of the size that we can easily see.

Things that happened a million years ago are hard to visualize, and we can’t reliably make many guesses about how the world is going to be a thousand years from now (and even fifty is difficult–lately, four weeks is a stretch).

Physics is straightforward–except when it comes to things that are very small and those that are very large, when it all gets weird. Different rules apply.

Extrapolation is far easier to claim than it is to do. That person across the counter or the web from you probably has very different experiences, beliefs and expectations than you do. Starting with your experience and assuming it matches their own is a trap.

Most everyone is very far away. And most feelings act like they are very small (or very large).

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/634478956/0/sethsblog~Far-away-is-difficult/

Azure’s Immersive Reader is now generally available

Microsoft today announced that Immersive Reader, its service for developers who want to add text-to-speech and reading comprehension tools to their applications, is now generally available.

Immersive Reader, which is part of the Azure Cognitive Services suite of AI products, developers get access to a text-to-speech engine, but just as importantly, the service offers tools that help readers improve their reading comprehension, be that through displaying pictures over commonly used words or separating out syllables and parts of speech of a given sentence.

It also offers a distraction-free reading view, similar to what you will find in modern browsers. Indeed, if you use Microsoft’s Edge browser, Immersive Reader is already included there as part of the distraction-free article view, together with its other accessibility features. Microsoft also bundled its translation service with Immersive Reader.

Image Credits: Microsoft

With today’s launch, Microsoft is adding support for fifteen of its neural text-to-speech voices to the service, as well as five new languages (Odia, Kurdish (Northern), Kurdish (Central), Pashto and Dari) from its translation service. In total, Immersive Reader now supports 70 languages.

As Microsoft also announced today, the company has partnered with Code.org and SAFARI Montage to bring Immersive Reader to their learning solutions.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Microsoft to bring Immersive Reader to the Code.org community,” said Hadi Partovi, Founder and CEO of Code.org. “The inclusive capabilities of Immersive Reader to improve reading fluency and comprehension in learners of varied backgrounds, abilities, and learning styles directly aligns with our mission to ensure every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science.”

Microsoft says it saw a 560% increase in use of Immersive Reader from February to May, likely because a lot of people were starting to look for new online education tools as the COVID-19 pandemic started. Today, more than 23 million people use it every month and Microsoft expects that number to go up once again in the fall, as the new school year starts.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/25/azures-immersive-reader-is-now-generally-available/

Microsoft brings transcriptions to Word

Microsoft today launched Transcribe in Word, its new transcription service for Microsoft 365 subscribers, into general availability. It’s now available in the online version of Word, with other platforms launching later. In addition, Word is also getting new dictation features, which now allow you to use your voice to format and edit your text, for example.

As the name implies, this new feature lets you transcribe conversations, both live and pre-recorded, and then edit those transcripts right inside of Word. With this, the company goes head-to-head with startups like Otter and Google’s Recorder app, though they all have their own pros and cons.

Image Credits: Microsoft

To get started with Transcribe in Word, you simply head for the dictate button in the menu bar and click on ‘transcribe.’ From there, you can record a conversation as it happens — by recording it directly through a speakerphone and your laptop’s microphone, for example — or by recording it in some other way and then uploading that file. The service accepts .mp3, .wav, .m4a and .mp4 files.

As Microsoft Principal Group PM Manager for Natural User Interface & Incubation, Dan Parish, noted in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement, when you record a call live, the transcription actually runs in the background while you conduct your interview, for example. The team purposely decided not to show you the live transcript, though, because its user research showed that it was distracting. I admit that I like to see the live transcript in Otter and Recorder, but maybe I’m alone in that.

Like with other services, Transcribe in Word lets you click on individual paragraphs in the transcript and then listen to that at a variety of speeds. Since the automated transcript will inevitably have errors in it, that’s a must-have feature. Sadly, though, Transcribe doesn’t let you click on individual words.

One major limitation of the service right now is that if you like to record offline and then upload your files, you’ll be limited to 300 minutes, without the ability to extend this for an extra fee, for example. I know I often transcribe far more than 5 hours of interviews in any given month, so that limit seems low, especially given that Otter provides me with 6,000 minutes on its cheapest paid plan. The max length for a transcript on Otter is 4 hours while Microsoft’s only limit for is a 200MB file upload limit, with no limits on live recordings.

Another issue I noticed here is that if you mistakenly exit the tab with Word in it, the transcription process will stop and there doesn’t seem to be a way to restart it.

It also takes quite a while for the uploaded files to be transcribed. It takes roughly as long as the conversations I’ve tried to transcribe), but the results are very good — and often better than those of competing services. Transcribe for Word also does a nice job separating out the different speakers in a conversation. For privacy reasons, you must assign your own names to those — even when you regularly record the same people.

It’d be nice to get the same feature in something like OneNote, for example, and my guess is Microsoft may expand this to its note-taking app over time. To me, that’s the more natural place for it.

Image Credits: Microsoft

The new dictation features in Word now let you give commands like “bold the last sentence,” for example, and say “percentage sign” or “ampersand” if you need to add those symbols to a text (or “smiley face,” if those are the kinds of texts you write in Word).

Even if you don’t often need to transcribe text, this new feature shows how Microsoft is now using its subscription service to launch new premium features to convert free users to paying ones. I’d be surprised if tools like the Microsoft Editor (which offers more features for paying users), this transcription service, as well as some of the new AI features in the likes of Excel and PowerPoint, didn’t help to convert some users into paying ones, especially now that the company has combined Office 365 and Microsoft 365 for consumers into a single bundle. After all, just a subscription to something like Grammarly and Otter would be significantly more expensive than a Microsoft 365 subscription.

 

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/25/microsoft-brings-transcriptions-to-word/