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“Bill Gates to Apple: Help investigators access phones or risk regulation” plus 29 more VentureBeat

“Bill Gates to Apple: Help investigators access phones or risk regulation” plus 29 more VentureBeat

Bill Gates to Apple: Help investigators access phones or risk regulation

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 01:20 PM PST

Bill Gates rarely shied away from confronting Apple when he was Microsoft’s CEO, and new comments to Axios today suggest that he has a new issue with Cupertino: Unbreakable encryption. Without mentioning Apple’s name, Gates raised the prospect that the company might be on the wrong side of the encryption debate, specifically when it comes to investigating criminals, and could face government regulation if it doesn’t cooperate with investigations.

Offered during a discussion of “big trends” that scare the technologist-turned-philanthropist, Gates’s premise is somewhat nuanced: Even if technology companies are moving society forward, they shouldn’t impede traditional governmental functions. “The companies need to be careful,” said Gates, “that they’re not… advocating things that would prevent government from being able to, under appropriate review, perform the type of functions that we’ve come to count on.”

One example? Taking a “view that even a clear mass-murdering criminal’s communication should never be available to the government.” When asked whether he was referring to Apple being able to unlock an iPhone, Gates said, “There’s no question of ability; it’s the question of willingness.” Some might read that as requiring a universal iOS backdoor that government actors could open with a court order, but offering case-by-case assistance to investigators could have the same effect.

Apple has described itself as unable to decrypt content stored on iOS devices, and unwilling “to add a backdoor into any of our products.” Even facing FBI demands for assistance unlocking the iPhone of a gunman in San Bernardino, California, CEO Tim Cook refused to budge, touting Apple’s commitment to user privacy as more important. More recently, however, Apple has apparently offered to help the FBI in ways that don’t compromise its encryption system as a whole.

In the interview, Gates appears to be concerned about technology’s empowerment of “a small group of people to cause damage,” including anything from nuclear to bioterror to cyber weapons, which could impact billions of people. To that end, he also questioned tech companies’ “enthusiasm about making financial transactions anonymous and invisible,” presumably allowing money to flow to dark places without consequence.

While Gates may appear to be focusing heavily on Apple, he’s correct in noting that the U.S. government has historically had the ability to trace transactions and examine individuals’ communications during investigations. These data points have been the foundations of numerous criminal prosecutions, and if a company tries to impede reasonable investigations, it may actually be overstepping historic privacy rights. “The tech companies have to be … careful that they’re not trying to think their view is more important than the government’s view,” said Gates, “or than the government being able to function in some key areas.”

Gates is currently a full-time philanthropist, heading up the charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife. Under his watch, Microsoft developed a monopoly on PC operating systems, eventually losing a historic antitrust case that forced the company to assist third-party competitors, and limit its web browser development.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bring heroes in a half-shell to Injustice 2

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 01:10 PM PST

NetherRealm Studios’ fighting game Injustice 2 is serving up some half-shell power in its newest DLC. Folks who own Injustice 2 Ultimate Edition, Injustice 2 Ultimate Pack, or Fighter Pack #3 can play as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles today on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. All other players will be able to add the the new heroes to their roster on February 20 for $10.

Injustice 2 launched in May and remained in the top 10 best-selling games of the year until being pushed out in December. It’s the followup to 2013’s Injustice: Gods Among Us, featuring various DC Entertainment characters such as Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman. NetherRealm has teamed up with other companies before to do crossovers, such as its Mortal Kombat DLC with Midway Games.

This isn’t the first time Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's green heroes have encountered DC’s characters. The 2015 comic series Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles saw the four team up with the Dark Knight against Shredder and the rogues gallery in Gotham City. It was a successful run that spawned spin-offs and a sequel series in 2017 featuring Bane as the primary antagonist.

It’s a little surreal to see the turtles slamming skateboards into people’s heads, but Injustice 2 seems to have kept their signature attitude. Their in-game dialogue is peppered with classic catchphrases like “Cowabunga” and the trailer calls back to the old ’80s cartoon show opening with Raphael flinging a half-eaten pizza at the camera.

The last time the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have had their own fighting game was in 2009’s four-player Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up, which featured Super Smash Bros.-esque gameplay. Before that, the 1993 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighter pitted the characters against each other in 1-on-1 fights.

Evolutionary algorithms are the living, breathing AI of the future

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 12:20 PM PST

GUEST:

AI is no longer some abstract dream for the future. It is here, now and bringing change across industries. According to the Forrester AI Readiness Study, 40 percent of the 717 businesses surveyed said they were planning to use intelligent recommendation solutions and 43 percent were planning to use AI-enhanced advanced analytics.

With breakthroughs coming thick and fast in machine learning, especially deep learning models, the AI advantage is becoming far more compelling and is spanning across a wider set of applications. However, there are still several roadblocks to wide-scale implementation of AI which are important to recognize as the appetite within the industry to integrate the technology continues to grow.

Issues with industrializing AI

Today, AI enablement is difficult and very costly. Why? First, there is no turnkey, one-size-fits-all solution for industries looking to implement AI into their systems. Companies need to custom build, train, and fine-tune their AI solutions. Building custom AI systems requires several PhDs and experts applying a mixture of experience, engineering, philosophy of mind, and maybe a little bit of voodoo to come up with elaborate configurations of deep networks. Add this to the need for custom-built processing capacity and it seems that building custom AI is something only large, well-funded companies can afford.

Second, because custom machine learning models using deep learning require such an intense training process, the cost of retraining the models becomes prohibitive. Hence, while the custom models are robust, they have limited reusability and have the tendency to become stale once the system updates. These models are “static,” in that they are pre-programmed to function in one certain way and will eventually become obsolete as the environment around them changes.

Third, companies often create models using very large datasets that need to be collected, curated, and labeled. This is not only costly in time and money resources, but also very limiting, since AI based on past data has limited applicability in an ever-changing world.

So what are we missing? How can we industrialize this promising technology to help it meet its cross-industry disruptive potential? This is a difficult problem, and scientists are hard at work tackling it.

The solution: Creating adaptive models

The biggest missing component in wide-scale AI implementation is adaptation. An AI system built on robust machine learning models should be able to adapt to changing domains, since the world is always in a state of change. There needs to be a heavier reliance on evolutionary algorithms — models that shift and change to the context where they are needed. This will help the AI system adapt to the times and be able to capitalize on each different context without having to spend time and money on retraining the models.

Evolutionary algorithms are especially important in cases where a company uses the AI to augment or drive an online user experience. In online retail, for instance, companies are employing AI-backed solutions to personalize product recommendations in real time as the user clicks through the catalog and selects different items. Without needing any historical data on the user (such as what he or she bought in the past), the AI solution can shift and change the product recommendations based on the user’s present interactions with the site. Judging present actions on the site is much more effective than using historical data to predict what the user will want next.

Why not use AI to build and design AI?

If machine-built models are more efficient and robust than human-built models, why not train AI to build AI? Many scientists are now considering using AI to come up with parameters and configurations, and basically design their own AI systems.

Researchers have used population-based and evolutionary techniques, inspired by biological evolution, to come up with designs that exceed AI designed by humans. For instance, in the world of website optimization, AI-backed solutions can “evolve” website designs and, in a process similar to natural selection, combine the best performing elements and features to produce the most optimal website for conversions.

Evolution can be paired with neural networks to substitute the slow and intensive process of back-propagation training with an online adaptation of the network weights. This means researchers train the neural network in real time, as opposed to offline over historical data. This approach is surprisingly powerful for many online problems, such as autosegmentation and hyperpersonalization of online digital media. Reinforcement learning systems are also making headway in terms of adaptation. Reinforcement learning is a form of online learning that allows the system to weight its decisions based on the most immediate context.

The future is now

Good models alone are not sufficient for the wide-scale adoption of AI. Effective AI-enablement requires breakthroughs in machine adaptation and creativity, both of which we can achieve using evolutionary algorithms, or models that can adapt to each appropriate context and train other algorithmic models to process similar information as needed. This is the future — a world where AI can build AI. Replace any human-created model with machine-generated models and your system becomes much more robust and efficient. Hence, evolutionary algorithms are an example of the “living and breathing AI” — intelligent algorithms that can adapt with the times and think outside the box.

Welcome to the future.

Babak Hodjat is the cofounder and CEO of Sentient Technologies, an AI platform.

eBay hires Jan Pedersen from Twitter to spearhead its AI efforts

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 12:06 PM PST

eBay has announced a major new hire in its push to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) across its ecommerce platform.

The company announced that it has lured Jan Pedersen from Twitter as its new VP and chief scientist for AI, and he will soon lead the company’s strategy across natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision. He officially starts on February 20.

Pedersen has a long and distinguished engineering career in the technology industry according to his LinkedIn profile, serving in various chief scientist roles at AltaVista, Yahoo, and Amazon’s A9 before joining Microsoft in 2009. Then in January 2017, he announced he was joining Twitter as VP for data science, where he has spearheaded “Twitter’s investment in machine learning infrastructure and data analytics” for the past 12 months.

That he has left Twitter so soon may hint at broader problems at Twitter, which has lost a number of key executives in recent years, including COO Anthony Noto just a few weeks ago.

At any rate, eBay has been doubling down on its AI efforts, introducing new computer vision search features that lets users search for items using existing photos, while a few months back it revealed support for voice-shopping through Google Assistant.

“If you’re not doing AI today, don’t expect to be around in a few years,” said Japjit Tulsi, VP of engineering at eBay, in an interview with VentureBeat last year. “It really is that important for companies to invest in — especially commerce companies.”

Pedersen, who has a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University, will be tasked with mapping out eBay’s AI strategy, which will include leading a team of scientists across various disciplines and “setting the agenda” for its AI efforts, according to a statement.

“Jan is a true pioneer in the industry, with over thirty years developing search, deep learning, machine learning, and AI technologies at scale,” said eBay president and CEO Devin Wenig. “He joins us at a pivotal moment when AI sciences including computer vision and deep learning are now capable of transforming personalized, immersive shopping experiences.”

Zendesk’s Tiffany Apczynski to discuss finding Heartland talent at VentureBeat’s Blueprint event

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 11:45 AM PST

VB EVENT:

Zendesk VP of public policy and social impact Tiffany Apczynski is one of the speakers at VentureBeat’s inaugural Blueprint conference, taking place on March 5-7 in Reno, Nevada. At Blueprint, speakers including Apczynski will discuss how tech companies can create higher paying jobs across the U.S. and expand economic opportunity for all.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Zendesk is one of a number of companies that are turning to distributed teams to keep their business profitable as costs continue to rise. Zendesk has approximately 2,000 employees around the globe, including about 250 employees at their Madison, Wisconsin office.

Ahead of the conference, VentureBeat spoke to Apczynski about her work at Zendesk, where she’s overseen a number of corporate social responsibility initiatives. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

VentureBeat: Why did Zendesk decide to open an office in Madison? 

Tiffany Apczynski: Madison was appealing because of its time zone and affordability, but most of all, because of its culture.

When we began researching cities to expand our North American presence, we knew from the get-go that the purpose of opening a second office would be to expand our customer support team and thus the coverage we could offer our customers. We needed these agents to cover an additional time zone in North America, so looking to the Midwest was critical.

Above: Tiffany Apczynski

Zendesk moved to San Francisco in 2010 and opened its office in Madison in 2014, after we had hired a few remote employees to provide the coverage we needed in that time zone to help us achieve around-the-clock support for our customers. We were impressed with the small group of employees we were able to hire, all recent graduates from the University of Madison-Wisconsin. And then once we visited Madison, it was clear that this was a city that had values and the rich culture that reminded us of San Francisco. We knew we’d continue to get a good pipeline of candidates from the university.

What’s more, Madison’s affordability means we can continue to grow there as a business. Even more importantly, it means our employees can thrive there. The fact that employees can afford to buy or rent homes and still have a high quality of life means that we will have better retention and less disruption in our organization.

VB: You helped draft a Community Benefits Agreement after Zendesk moved into San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. Can you tell our readers what the agreement is and how it came to be?

Apczynski: In 2011, Zendesk moved its headquarters from a cushy suite located near AT&T Park, a newly developed part of San Francisco, to the Tenderloin, one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. We moved to the Tenderloin because real estate at the time was incredibly affordable — it was one of the most affordable neighborhoods, with several vacant multi-level office buildings. We were able to take advantage of the Mid-Market Payroll Tax Exclusion, a payroll tax break for tech companies willing to move their operations to this neighborhood and grow their workforce. It was written for Twitter and is better known as the Twitter Tax Break.

Because we were the first tech company in the neighborhood, we were responsible for drafting the city’s first-ever Community Benefits Agreement. This was a section in the tax break that required companies to invest back into the Tenderloin. Our approach to drafting it was to host a meeting with several community stakeholders. Our local district supervisor’s office was able to pull together a list of folks to invite from the neighborhood, as well as the Citizens Advisory Committee that was established to oversee the progress and implementation of the Community Benefits Agreements. This Citizens Advisory Committee would come to approve all CBAs and would host monthly meetings so tech companies receiving the tax break could report regularly on what resources they were funneling back into the neighborhood.

Since we were new to the Tenderloin, we thought it was critical to have the community stakeholders design the CBA. We had brainstorm sessions with this key leadership and asked them to outline what they would like us to prioritize in terms of giving back. We revised the agreement every year according to the Citizen Advisory Committee’s feedback.

VB: What advice do you have for tech companies that want to find more ways to be better neighbors?

Apczynski: Just get involved. Being a good neighbor is an incredibly easy thing to do and it will build the caring, community-driven culture you will want for your company.

First, find an organization that is near and dear to the CEO’s heart and ask the organization to come in and talk with employees. From there, set up a volunteer opportunity to get to know the organization more closely. Or find an organization with which you resonate that is close by to the office. Engagement will be more consistent across employees if the organizations with which you work are close by.

VB: What stakeholders in the community should they reach out to?

Apczynski: Local elected leaders are a great starting point. Find your local city councilor or alderperson. They can help you understand the landscape of both the economics and social welfare of their communities. They will also have all of the contact information you need to expand your network. It’s also not a bad idea to set up meetings with a couple of nonprofits in the area, as the employees there will have an understanding of the needs of the local community.

VB: What are some of the policy initiatives that you think might have the biggest impact on Silicon Valley in 2018?

Apczynski: The repeal of the net neutrality rules is definitely weighing heavily on most tech companies these days. It greatly threatens Silicon Valley’s startup ecosystem, which means companies with a large startup customer population will feel the ripple effects. We need new, emerging businesses to be nipping at the heels of established legacy companies so we can build something that outlives us.

Other policy initiatives impacting Silicon Valley specifically have a lot to do with housing and transportation. The Bay Area continues to be wishy-washy when it comes to passing major transportation infrastructure measures that could make Silicon Valley a more well-connected region. While cities like London have been successful in passing transportation measures upwards of $3 billion, Bay Area voters continue to be leery of such expensive measures. Locally, as cities and communities try to preserve their local character while the populations around them grow, the consistent NIMBY-ism (“Not In My Back Yard”) we see impacting San Francisco, Palo Alto, and other cities means less housing stock, rising rent prices, and less permanent affordable housing. It’s a pressure-cooker situation that can only last so long.

GamesBeat Decides: January 2018’s best game

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 11:06 AM PST

For the GamesBeat Decides podcast this week, we kicked off a new monthly segment where we pick the best game of the month. January had some incredible new releases, and hosts Jeffrey Grubb and Mike Minotti talk about the big three during this episode.

You can listen to our discussion in the video above or in the full audio episode below. Scroll down to see our selection.

January 2018’s game of the month is … Celeste

Runners-up: Monster Hunter: World, Dragon Ball FighterZ

That was one of the best opening months for a year ever. Dragon Ball FighterZ is an accessible and gorgeous fighter, and Monster Hunter: World‘s satisfying gameplay loop is catching on with mainstream gamers for the first time in its long history. But as the calendar clicked over to February, it was the difficult indie platformer Celeste that stood above everything else.

Celeste is the latest game from developer Matt Makes Games, which made the pixel brawler Towerfall for Ouya (ports hit other platforms). It has you playing as Madeline, a young girl who is climbing Celeste Mountain because … well, she doesn’t really know or explain when you start. But as you progress, you learn that she’s doing this because she hates a part of herself that is riddled with doubt and anxiety. You also learn that Celeste has some of the sharpest platforming in any game ever made.

Madeline has only a handful of moves. She can run, jump, climb, and dash. You get one dash early on, and you can only climb as long as your stamina meter holds out. Matt Makes Games throws one obstacle after another at you to keep things fresh despite a limited set of moves.

The studio built each world around a new platform or powerup that augments Madeline’s capabilities. In one stage, you might discover platforms that respond to your dashes that enable you to build up a lot of momentum. Another world may have turning into a ball of light that can fly around freely for a few seconds.

But while everything around Madeline is changing, one thing remains constant: the difficulty. Every room in every stage is challenging. And that means you constantly feel accomplished as you progress. Of course, the game is so hard that it might turn off some people, so Matt Makes Games made an assist mode that lets you change how Celeste works. You can add infinite dashes or slow down time or turn the spikes into harmless bouncy springs. So I can enjoy the game as it’s intended (and scream in frustration in the process), and others can also enjoy it but on their own terms.

Celeste is special. The gameplay is tight and delightful, the story is thoughtful, and it is visually striking. This is easily the best game of January.

Strict radiation standards may delay 5G rollout in EU capital Brussels

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 10:11 AM PST

Despite serving as Europe’s capital, the Belgian city of Brussels expects to miss the continent’s planned 2020 rollout of 5G due to overly strict radiation rules, according to new reports this week. The reports come months after Europe attempted to position itself as the “global lead market for 5G,” and hint at the regional regulatory issues still faced by the European Union as it attempts to adopt major new technologies.

Working under the 5G Action Plan for a Digital Single Market, the European Commission has asked each member state to specify one city to be 5G-ready by 2020, so that by 2025 every European household will have access to at least 100Mbps downloads and every urban area, major road, and railway will have uninterrupted 5G coverage. While Brussels would normally be Belgium’s top choice, the city’s radiation standards are more restrictive than in neighboring cities, and 50 times stricter than international standards set by the World Health Organization.

As a result of the radiation caps, carriers have been able to offer only weak connections and poor network capacity in Brussels. And ironically, despite their potential for protecting the public from radiation, the strict standards have been blamed for creating hazards of their own, such as the collapse of Brussels’ mobile phone network during 2016 terror attacks. The regional government later decided to relax the radiation restrictions, but only during times of crisis.

Whether Brussels can change its regulations in time to hit the 2020 milestone is unclear. “Rolling out 4G already was problematic in Brussels,” noted a spokesperson for Alexander De Croo, Belgium’s Minister of Telecom. “We don't want this to happen a second time as this would have severe economic consequences.” De Croo is working to advance the issue with three regional governments, explaining that “Brussels cannot miss any chances and has to be one of the first European cities with 5G.”

It’s unclear whether strict radiation standards will be viewed as wise or short-sighted decades from now. Each generation of telecommunications growth has been met by questions over potential biological damage from wireless emissions, though numerous studies have claimed that radio waves — the core of cellular technology — are a safe, non-ionizing form of radiation. Unlike X-rays and cosmic rays, which are known to increase the risk of cancer, radio waves are generally believed to cause no short-term and almost no mid-term health effects, though their long-term effects are unknown.

Regardless of the scientific research, cell phones have been blamed for causing certain cancers, leading U.S. states including California to consider their health risks, reconsider public health guidelines, and leave control over new cell towers in the hands of cities and counties. Further debates are likely as 5G begins to roll out across the world.

Adam Draper’s Boost VC closes new fund to become the ‘Y Combinator of sci-fi startups’

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 10:03 AM PST

EXCLUSIVE:

Sentiments about cryptocurrencies are as fickle as the price of a token. But everyone can agree on one thing: Cryptocurrency is a hot topic. A year ago, however, before initial coin offerings (ICOs) became a thing, it wasn’t an easy task to draw crowds around crypto startups. This is something Adam Draper (the son of renowned venture capitalist Tim Draper) has been working on via Boost VC, the accelerator he cofounded in June 2012 and is now managing.

The concept behind it? Being the Y Combinator of sci-fi startups. The San Mateo, California-based accelerator kicked off its eleventh “tribe” this week with a cohort of 20 startups, and announced the close of its third fund of $38.6 million.

Even though Boost VC initially focused on Bitcoin, it has now expanded to include other verticals, such as virtual reality (VR), jetpacks, and space startups. Draper, who is a fan of science fiction and comic books, wants to nurture futuristic startups that aren’t part of an established market.

Above: Boost VC cofounder and managing director Adam Draper

Image Credit: Boost VC

“We chose Bitcoin as an initial focus, and that gave us a brand,” said Draper, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “People knew why to come to Boost. We were able to incubate the leaders of the market. Now we’re exploring new sectors.”

The accelerator says it currently has 220 portfolio companies, which include Ripio, Kubos, Roam, Etherscan, and Aragon. One of the more notable startups in Boost VC’s portfolio is Coinbase, which Draper had invested in early on as an angel. This has certainly paid off, as the digital currency exchange is now valued at over $1 billion.

Boost VC provides housing and office space to startups during its three-month program. About 30 percent of its companies are based outside of the U.S., according to Draper. From Argentina to India, Brazil, Belarus, and Australia, the “tribes” are indeed exotic — something that isn’t surprising, seeing as how blockchain and cryptocurrencies are a way for many emerging markets to bypass government-controlled fiat currencies.

The accelerator invests between $50,000 and $500,000 in its startups — depending on the size and stage — taking six to eight percent equity in exchange.

“Our companies have now raised more than $1 billion,” said Draper. “Now this includes a lot of startups that ended up doing ICOs. But the majority of crypto startups weren’t being funded by VCs, so they had to go an alternative route … and it worked.”

Some countries, however, aren’t as excited about ICOs — China made this very clear when it decided to ban them last September. Draper isn’t worried, though.

“You know what they say: Investing in whatever China bans is a good idea,” he told VentureBeat. “More seriously, though, every government on the planet has to have the conversation of what crypto is. And every time the governments come out with rules, the market’s gone up because it legitimizes the space more and more.”

Top-tier VCs in the Valley are now hopping on the crypto bandwagon. Those that have been actively investing in the sector include Union Square Ventures, Draper Associates, and Andreessen Horowitz (Marc Andreessen is a limited partner of Boost VC).

But the cryptocurrency space isn’t only about raising capital, argues Draper. Over the past five years, he and cofounder Brayton Williams have been trying to create a crypto community through network effects, which Draper says is key.

“The community supporting the startup before it launches its product is an important metric,” he explained. “Having a consistent GitHub update repository, a solid group of people chatting on Telegram, or tweeting about it … because at the end of the day, you need your end user or token owner to become your ambassador.”

Whether Boost VC can replicate its success with cryptocurrency in new verticals like VR and jetpacks remains to be seen. But betting on Bitcoin early on certainly gave the team a good boost.

LendingHome Earns Coveted Spot on Forbes FinTech 50 List

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 09:25 AM PST

PRESS RELEASE:

Prestigious Honor Validates Company’s Use of Technology to Re-engineer Homebuying

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–February 13, 2018–

LendingHome – the largest, fastest-growing mortgage marketplace lender – today announced its debut on the Forbes FinTech 50 list, which spotlights “the top companies shaping the future of your money.” This is the magazine’s third FinTech 50 list, and the Forbes staff spent months pouring over nominations, interviewing hundreds of executives, and “then winnowing our choices down to the best.”

In 2013, LendingHome set out to modernize an antiquated industry in which mortgages are still processed by hand, requiring stacks of paper and hours of human labor. LendingHome created a proprietary technology platform that makes getting a mortgage simple, fast, and entirely online. As a result, LendingHome mortgages are significantly less expensive to originate, and those savings are passed on to homebuyers in the form of no hidden charges, and lower rates and fees.

“We are so honored to receive this recognition from Forbes,” said Matt Humphrey, LendingHome co-founder and CEO. “When Forbes first introduced the FinTech 50 in 2015, I knew we could earn a spot on this list. Our goals were audacious, but I had every confidence we were building a world-class company that could stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the biggest fintech startups.”

In the past year, LendingHome has been on a tear. Humphrey secured $57 million in venture capital funding, which brings LendingHome’s total equity to $166 million raised from prominent fintech investors including Foundation Capital, Ribbit Capital, and Renren. Also in 2017, LendingHome surpassed the $2 billion mark in total loan originations.

Mortgage origination aside, LendingHome is also a marketplace for institutional and accredited investors who purchase whole or fractional loans through borrower dependent notes. These investors have already received returns of over $960 million in principal and earned more than $86 million in interest.

The full Forbes FinTech 50 list can be viewed at www.forbes.com/fintech. For more information on Lendinghome, please click here.

About LendingHome:

LendingHome has designed a better way for people to buy a home. Its built-from-scratch technology has transformed a slow, painful, paper-based process into a fast, transparent, online experience. At the same time, LendingHome is a marketplace lender: institutional and individual investors have access to attractive, high-yield real estate assets. Since it started lending in mid-2014, LendingHome has funded more than $2 billion in mortgage loans. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has offices in Columbus, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. To learn more, go to www.lendinghome.com or www.lendinghome.com/careers.

LendingHome
Nora Murray, 419-250-0016
nora.murray@lendinghome.com

Kerbal Space Program’s ‘Build Fly Dream’ video is still the best fan-made trailer ever

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 09:10 AM PST

Almost five years ago, Kerbal Space Program mod creator Shaun Esau uploaded his own trailer for the space-flight simulator. The video recently hit 1 million views on YouTube, and I still consider it one of the best gaming videos on the internet.

Kerbal Space Program is a physics-accurate rocket-science game where players must build vehicles to leave a planet to complete missions. It debuted as an unfinished beta on developer Squad’s website in 2011 before launching into a 1.0 release state in 2015. Last year, publisher Take-Two acquired Squad and Kerbal, and now the game is about to get its first expansion. But through all of that history, no video has captured the story of Kerbal’s gameplay better than Esau’s “Build Fly Dream.”

Watch it right here:

I asked Esau, who now works as an IT consultant in Edmonton, to reflect on the trailer and his time spent on Kerbal all these years later. He revealed that he first started working on “Build Fly Dream” after seeing the trailer for Cloud Atlas. Esau pointed out that the two videos share M83’s “Outro” soundtrack as well as a lot of the same visual language.

I also asked if he ever imagined hitting 1 million views.

“I had hoped that it would at least get some decent number of views so that it would feel more like the time I'd put into creating it was somewhat worthwhile,” Esau told GamesBeat. “But I never anticipated that the video would become anywhere near as popular as it did. Once I posted it on Reddit, it took on a life of its own.”

Esau is the primary developer responsible for the Kerbal Multi Player mod. He got it up and running, and then he worked with a number contributors to squash bugs and improve features. The KMP mod is now defunct, however, as the Dark Multi Player mod has replaced it. That new mod came along at the right time — Esau had burned out on maintaining it.

“I've stopped playing KSP daily, but it's one of those games that's hard to put down forever,” he said. “I still come back to it every few weeks just to try some new arbitrary challenge, or just to take a new approach to something I've managed to do before. KSP is one of the deepest sandboxes out there — the list of things you haven't done yet is always infinitely long.”

What makes ‘Build Fly Dream’ so great

The last thing I asked Esau was why he thought the trailer has caught on with so many people.

“I have no doubt that M83's amazing ‘Outro’ is no small factor, but I also think that Build Fly Dream does a good job of capturing some of the things that most excite people about KSP, or even spaceflight in general,” he said. “There's rockets and explosions, glorious achievements and glorious failures, and a multitude of beautiful & serene views on offer as well.”

I think he is exactly right. It’s easy to watch “Build Fly Dream” and assume that the music is doing all of the heavy lifting, and yes — it’s a really great song. It’s majestic and soaring, but Esau deserves just as much credit for the trailer.

The key to “Build Fly Dream” is its motion. Each shot has at least some sense of movement in it, and that kinetic energy tells the story of space flight and Kerbal.

It opens on a number of beautiful vistas and views that are only possible in space. A sunrise over Earth and on Mars, a satellite hanging precariously between two celestial bodies, and a lonely rover crawling across the dunes of some forbidden world. In each of these shots, the camera pans slowly — but you almost always have a smaller object framed by something much larger to portray a sense of velocity.

Next, the music fades from its early notes into the main melody, and we start to see what it looks like to piece these ships together. Then we see a lonely Kerbal floating through space. And then as the instrumentation returns, Esau shows us our first launch. It’s a multi-booster rocket that vibrates through the atmosphere and into space, and as it enters orbit, the Earth pans by in the background as the capsule separates from its large center core booster.

Esau then cuts back to another launch, but this time we get a closer look. The camera zooms in on the thrusters firing and shaking violently under their own power as they leave the Earth behind and then begin to explode in every direction.

This is the best part of the trailer. That shot of the rocket taking off and breaking apart as the untameable forces of nature rip it in every conceivable direction, that is the story of space flight. Rocket science is the idea of making an explosion that directs all of its energy like a focused laser. But explosions and lasers are on the opposite end of a spectrum of energy. And yet, right after this moment and as the music begins to crescendo, Esau hits us with one shot after another of flawless launches and impossibly complex space stations some how floating in perfect orbit.

Then as the drums come crashing in, Esau smashes these two ideas together with a rapid-fire succession of shots showing rockets working and rockets exploding along with the first flash of text: “BUILD” in 500 pt. font. More images of disaster and discovery. “FLY.” And then even more destruction and daring success. “Dream.”

By the time the music begins to peter out with a trailing solo piano progression, I find it hard not to get emotional as Esau finishes with a lander module setting down softly on the soil of another world and then cutting to a trio of Kerbals bouncing around and gazing up at another planet from this strange new place.

They braved every danger and failure, and they made it. And it’s damn powerful.

Grand Theft Auto Online celebrates Valentine’s Day with a hot ride

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 08:40 AM PST

Grand Theft Auto Online has introduced a new car, the Vapid Hustler, to help celebrate Valentine’s Day. The multiplayer open-world game is also offering double in-game currency bonuses (GTA$ and RP) in select modes from today until February 19.

Grand Theft Auto Online is the multiplayer component of Grand Theft Auto V. Rockstar Games releases weekly updates for GTA Online with things like new vehicles, clothes, and game modes. Players can use in-game currency to buy new cars and fashions, but they can also boost their in-game wallet with real money. While other single-player games include multiplayer components, GTA Online stands out for giving players access to a connected open-world where they can do as they please or engage in specific activities like races.

Grand Theft Auto V came out back in 2013, but its PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC versions are still big hits. GTA V was still the third best-selling game in the U.S. in 2017, according to publisher Take-Two. Lifetime sales are now past 90 million copies. The popularity and continued support for GTA Online has helped give the game longevity past its single-player experience.

You can earn double in-game currency from the Till Death Do Us Part, Slasher, Resurrection, Deadline, and Lost vs. Damned game modes.

Okta Strengthens and Deepens Executive Team With Hires and Promotions Across People, Partnerships and Corporate Development Teams

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 08:25 AM PST

PRESS RELEASE:

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–February 13, 2018–

Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ:OKTA), the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise, today announced the hiring of Monty Gray as senior vice president of Corporate Development, Patrick McCue as senior vice president of Worldwide Partners, and the promotions of Kristina Johnson to Chief People Officer, and Angela Grady to executive vice president and Chief of Staff. Gray and McCue bring a combined 40+ years of experience working in enterprise software and identity and access management, serving in roles across corporate development, strategic partnerships and alliances, and mergers and acquisitions. Johnson has more than 20 years of experience in human resources, change management and building global teams, and Grady has over 25 years of experience in global business operations, data and analytics and scaling large organizations.

Details on Executive Hires + Promotions

  • Gray will report directly to Frederic Kerrest, co-founder and COO. He will be responsible for strategy and execution across the Okta Integration Network (OIN), corporate development and strategic partners.
  • McCue will report to Charles Race, president of Worldwide Field Operations at Okta. He will be responsible for forging new partnerships for Okta in a broad array of verticals and geographies while expanding and empowering existing partners.
  • Grady will report directly to Todd McKinnon, co-founder and CEO. She will be responsible for driving the company’s strategy and planning process and have oversight for all company execution.
  • Johnson will also report directly to McKinnon. She will be responsible for global talent acquisition, people operations and development of people.

Comments on the News

Frederic Kerrest, co-founder and COO of Okta

“Our long-term vision to build Okta into an iconic technology company won’t be possible unless we recognize, recruit, retain and reward an amazing leadership team. Monty and Patrick bring the deep expertise and executive leadership needed to grow our corporate footprint and expand the way we partner with other organizations. I’m sure they will both immediately build on the strong foundation and proven strategy we’ve executed to date. Not only are our new hires critical, we’re also recognizing Kristina and Angela, who have helped us build and empower the incredible leadership team we have today. Our leadership team is stronger than ever, with a shared commitment to customers and passion to win.”

Angela Grady, executive vice president and Chief of Staff

“We’ve surpassed some incredible milestones throughout my four years at Okta, but I’ve never been more bullish about the direction of the company,” said Grady. “Between the increasing market opportunity for identity management and the stellar team we’ve put in place, we’re well-positioned to take on new strategic opportunities across geographies and verticals.”

Monty Gray, senior vice president of Corporate Development

“The trends and tailwinds in the industry today are all driving toward the fact that identity is a strategic layer in the enterprise stack,” said Gray. “Okta has demonstrated clear leadership in identity, and corporate development can play a strategic role in helping maintain and grow that leadership position. I’m looking forward to working with Okta’s awesome leadership team to build on the company’s success.”

Kristina Johnson, Chief People Officer

“You can’t build a great company without great people,” said Johnson. “Okta continues to put its people first, a strategy that has helped us build a successful and collaborative company, which in turn benefits our customers. I’m looking forward to continuing to focus on expanding, empowering and mentoring the great team at Okta.”

Patrick McCue, senior vice president of Worldwide Partners

“Okta’s commitment to building a better company and product through partnerships directly benefits its customers, and is completely in-line with what I’ve focused on throughout my career,” said McCue. “I couldn’t agree more with Okta’s vision to secure the ‘extended enterprise,’ across customers, partners, employees and any other audience that needs to access technology. I can’t wait to get started working with Charles and the rest of the top-notch leadership team at Okta.”

Background on Hires + Promotions

  • Angela Grady, executive vice president and Chief of Staff: Grady has been with Okta since 2014, formerly serving as the senior vice president of Global Operations and Chief of Staff. She was previously the senior vice president, Operations and Chief of Staff for Marketing Cloud & Data.com at Salesforce.
  • Monty Gray, senior vice president of corporate development: Gray most recently led corporate development at SAP where he was responsible for some of their most transformative acquisitions, including Concur, SuccessFactors, Ariba and most recently Callidus. Under Gray’s leadership, the corporate development team successfully completed approximately 45 acquisitions and targeted strategic investments.
  • Kristina Johnson, Chief People Officer: Kristina Johnson has been with Okta since 2015, formerly serving as vice president of people. Before Okta, Kristina led international human resources at EnerNOC and was a strategic business partner at the University of California, Berkeley.
  • Patrick McCue, senior vice president of worldwide partnerships: Before joining Okta, McCue was at customer identity and access management company Gigya, where he was responsible for the strategy, development and management of Gigya’s Partner Program, as well as the company’s channels and alliances partners. Before that, he served as the VP of Channels at QlikTech and ExactTarget.

About Okta

Okta is the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise. The Okta Identity Cloud connects and protects employees of many of the world’s largest enterprises. It also securely connects enterprises to their partners, suppliers and customers. With over 5,000 integrations, the Okta Identity Cloud enables simple and secure access from any device. Thousands of customers, including Experian, 20th Century Fox, LinkedIn, Flex, News Corp, Dish Networks, and Adobe trust Okta to work faster, boost revenue and stay secure. Okta helps customers fulfill their missions faster by making it safe and easy to use the technologies they need to do their most significant work.

Okta, Inc.
Jenna Kozel King
press@okta.com

Snapchat’s Marketing API is now available to all developers

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 08:00 AM PST

Snap is opening its Marketing API for all developers to use, the company announced today.

Snapchat first opened its API to a limited number of advertisers back in 2016, enabling third-party technology and creative companies to deliver ads on behalf of brands and agencies. It represented Snapchat’s first moves in the programmatic advertising realm, meaning that ads could be bought and sold automatically, and advertisers could experiment with different kinds of ads through A/B testing to see what works best. Or, for example, a retailer could optimize their ads based on their inventory — if stock runs low on one product, they could automatically switch ads to promote another product.

Snap’s transition to programmatic advertising is now pretty much complete, and the company revealed last week that the vast majority of its ads were bought programmatically in Q4 2017.

“Our advertising business changed profoundly over the past year as we migrated the sale of our Snap Ads to an automated auction,” said Snap’s cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel during its recent earnings call. “Over 90 percent of Snap Ads were bought programmatically during Q4, which means that the auction transition for Snap Ads is largely behind us.”

Snap’s shares soared last week when it announced its daily active users rose from 178 million to 187 million from Q3 to Q4, while its fourth quarter revenue jumped 72 percent to $285.7 million, with the company’s shift to programmatic advertising seemingly playing a part in increased ad revenue.

By opening its Marketing API to all developers, this should go some way toward opening Snapchat to even more advertisers, given that any agency, brand, or technology company will now be able to leverage Snapchat’s targeted marketing smarts.

“We’ve been listening closely to third-party developers as we transition Snapchat ad products onto our self-serve platform,” said James Borow, director of revenue programs at Snap. “Today we’re opening up our Marketing API to give every developer tools to build the Snapchat ad solutions that perform best for them and their customers.”

Vainglory 5v5: Mobile esports won’t be a stepchild to PC MOBAs anymore

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 07:30 AM PST

Vainglory is launching its free update for five-versus-five multiplayer play in its multiplayer online battle arena game today. Before now, the mobile game could only handle three-versus-three multiplayer combat, but now developer and publisher Super Evil Megacorp is releasing a “no compromise” version of the MOBA that matches the 5v5 play of PC games for the first time.

Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of Super Evil Megacorp, hosted an event last Thursday in San Francisco where esports athletes gave the 5v5 play a dry run. He hopes the new mode will give Vainglory more legs as a true esport, and one of the few that is aimed at the billions of mobile game players. I interviewed Segerstrale, and he thinks the time has come for mobile esports, which will no longer be a stepchild to esports on the PC or consoles.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Kristian Segerstrale is CEO of Super Evil Megacorp, maker of Vainglory. He is at the company’s 5v5 preview event in San Francisco.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: It sounded like a lot of preparation went into getting to this point. Has it been years? Did you always feel like you needed to get to 5v5?

Kristian Segerstrale: It's been a really long process. The company is founded on the core principle of bringing uncompromising multiplayer experiences to the touch screen generation. Right or wrong, the MOBA category and multiplayer in general, over years of evolution on other platforms, has gravitated toward a 5v5 format.

When we initially launched with 3v3, that was really about constraints, both from the devices that were available and what we could do with our own technology to bring it at the quality level we wanted. It also had to do with concern about gamer culture. Back when we started development of Vainglory in 2012, 2013, mobile was the land of Candy Crush. This was before Clash of Clans. You hardly even had mid-core. It felt important to us to create an experience that was a bit more approachable from the initial perspective.

If you'd never played a multiplayer game, learning in an environment where the map is roughly shaped like your phone, where you have only two teammates to worry about, where you have a smaller map, while still focusing on the tactical and strategic depth – creating something that was viable to play for thousands of hours – that was important. We're really proud of where Vainglory 3v3 got to.

GamesBeat: But that was just the start.

Segerstrale: Since then, optimizing the tech, watching devices get more powerful, watching game culture move on—now you have games like Clash Royale. We're even seeing the survivor genre come to mobile, and a lot of simplified 5v5 MOBAs. We feel like the culture and the hardware have moved on to a point where we can finally evolve this game to the way it needs to be, to the canon format. In soccer terms, it's like we started with five on a side, and now we're unveiling the official 11 on a side format that's seen as the real thing.

Above: Vainglory 5v5 preview event in San Francisco.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: Was it simply the maturity of the devices, the Razer phone and things like it that are more capable now? Or did you have to do a lot of software advancement to make this happen?

Segerstrale: It's a mix of both. The lowest-end devices on the market now are a lot more advanced than the lowest-end devices from a few years ago. When we launched, it was important for us to support the iPhone 4S and that style of 3.5-inch screens. Those screens don't exist much anymore. From a screen real estate perspective, the minimum spec has gotten a bit bigger.

But anything today that plays Vainglory 3v3 will play Vainglory 5v5. There's a lot of tech trickery and optimization that's gone into creating things like line-of-sight fog of war in the game, which creates a real sense of depth and dynamism to the graphics. The 3v3 map has about 1.3 million polygons, while the 5v5 map has about 3 million polygons. You go from 100 moving actors to 200 moving actors. If you look at the dragons, the big bosses, they have about 130 bones and they're fully animated. All of those things still run on the same devices as with 3v3. A lot of is tech, evolving our engine tech.

Engines take a long time to write, though. Some of the engines you see right now — if you talk to our CTO, Tommy, he was one of the original architects on the Killzone 2 and Killzone 3 engine that ultimately forms the core of Horizon: Zero Dawn. These things take years to get where they need to be. We think that in the next five years it will be incredibly important to be able to deliver –expectations in mobile will only go up. We'll have to be able to deliver incredible control fidelity, graphics, and networking. Those are all core components of what gamers will expect.

We're excited that with 5v5, we're not just able to bring a new game mode to life, but bring it to life at a level of polish and quality and framerate that we as gamers ourselves would expect on any platform. That's important to us. Hopefully it's a milestone for the industry as well. We feel like it sets a bar for other game-makers to be pushing toward. No single game can evolve gaming culture. Gaming culture evolves through many games. Mobile gamers deserve better than what they have today. The people who've grown up with mobile devices as their primary computing platforms, they're just as core as those of us who grew up with PC and console. We want to build for that, build an experience that respects those gamers.

Above: Vainglory’s upcoming 5v5 MOBA map.

Image Credit: Super Evil Megacorp

GamesBeat: How far has Vainglory progressed as an esport?

Segerstrale: It's surpassed our own expectations. Clearly esports — a lot of people say it's pretty niche still, let alone mobile esports. But with that said, two years ago, when we had our world championships, I think we had 5,000 or 6,000 simultaneous viewers tuning in to watch it. A year and a bit ago we had 25,000 or 30,000 simultaneous viewers. It was an incredible leap. Then, in December, we had 100,000 simultaneous viewers.

We're proud of how far it's come, but at the same time it's still incredibly early. It's still the early adopters of the mobile generation. We feel like there's enormous potential as more games come in, as more mobile players get attuned to this culture around playing and watching the game being played, tuning in to content creators and following teams and all of that stuff. The sky's the limit as to how far it might grow.

GamesBeat: Are the top players making a living yet?

Segerstrale: It's actually scary how many people have, at least for some time, had Vainglory as their main job. You feel a certain level of responsibility there. Of course it's important that the game does well so we can pay our own salaries, but the minute that you have to do well so the community can pay their own way, you feel a different level of responsibility. There are some dozens of people who make a living either creating content or playing professionally. That said, I think the esports market in general is very volatile. Any time a kid asks us, "Should I skip school for this?" You should absolutely not skip school. [laughs]

We love that everyone is playing. We love the people who are part of our competitive community. Esports teaches kids as much about teamwork as a traditional sport, and all of the personal growth that comes with it. We're proud of how many professional organizations are part of the scene and how quickly the audiences are growing. At the same time, our real focus is to create a super fun game for everyone to play together. I think the world championships altogether had more than 15 million views globally. That's an incredible vote of confidence. It says that a lot of people care about the game. That's the most important part.

Above: Riley “DNZio” Haghian is a member of Tribe and the top-ranked Vainglory player in North America. He is 14.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: Do you have anything coming soon after this?

Segerstrale: We have our partnerships with Razer and ESP Gaming. Those are both big deals for us, because it shows that a respected gamer hardware company sees what we're seeing: mobile gamer expectations are on their way up. Gamers care about this. With ESP, we have a company that's cut its teeth on World Series of Poker and more traditional broadcasts going all in on esports. Both of those deals are good news for our player base globally.

Cytobank and the FDA Collaborate to Improve Immunotherapy Development

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 07:25 AM PST

PRESS RELEASE:

Results from their machine learning-based research to be presented at The Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference in San Francisco.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–February 13, 2018–

Cytobank and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are collaborating to develop machine learning-based methods for characterizing the morphology of multipotent mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs). These methods could be used in cellular manufacturing processes to characterize cellular preparations with desired immunotherapeutic properties.

The collaboration demonstrates the ability of Cytobank’s cloud-based informatics platform to identify specific subpopulations from a mixed population of MSCs and builds on work done by Steve R. Bauer and colleagues from the FDA and published in PNAS, “The Morphological features of IFN-γ–stimulated mesenchymal stromal cells predict overall immunosuppressive capacity.” This paper discusses how an improved understanding of the morphological features of MSCs will supplement current methods for characterizing these types of cell preparations, which are used in clinical applications involving immunomodulation.

“Machine learning-based approaches like these we are developing with the FDA have been used by our research customers for years to build their understanding of the immune system at the single cell level. We are excited by the potential to apply our proven research approaches in more development related applications, including cell characterization,” said David Craford, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cytobank.

Human MSCs are utilized for multiple clinical applications in regenerative medicine including heart, bone, and neurological conditions. There are approximately 650 clinical trials underway globally. According to Grand View Research the global stem cell market revenue is currently estimated at USD $7B and expected to reach $15B by 2025.

Dr. Katherine Drake, Director of Informatics at Cytobank, will present results from the research in her presentation entitled “Uncovering Hidden Single Cell Biomarkers with Machine Learning” at the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference Symposium on Single Cell Analysis in San Francisco on February 15, 2018 at 3:00 PM.

About the FDA

The FDA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, protects the public health by assuring the safety, effectiveness, and security of human and veterinary drugs, vaccines, and other biological products for human use, and medical devices. The agency also is responsible for the safety and security of our nation’s food supply, cosmetics, dietary supplements, products that give off electronic radiation, and for regulating tobacco products.

About Cytobank

Cytobank Inc. is the leading cloud-based analysis platform utilizing machine learning algorithms for collaborative biomedical research. Prominent pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic researchers around the world use their SaaS solution to develop deep understandings of complex biology at the single cell level. For more information, please visit https://www.cytobank.org/.

Cytobank
Liz Johannesen, 415-613-2497
liz@cytobank.org

AI, cloud, and IoT will drive 2018 growth, say chip makers

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 07:00 AM PST

Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the internet of things (IoT) will have bigger impacts on the revenues of chip makers in 2018, according to accounting firm KPMG‘s survey of 150 semiconductor industry leaders.

Two-thirds of the leaders cited IoT as one of the top revenue drivers, up from 56 percent in last year’s survey. Cloud computing and AI were each cited by 43 percent of leaders, compared to 27 percent last year for cloud and 18 percent for AI. Wireless communications was at the top of the list, but it was cited by fewer respondents this year.

"The increasing demand for IoT, AI, and cloud applications is driven by their individual value and their value to each other. Cloud infrastructure is critical to enabling AI and capturing IoT-produced data. AI will enable better analysis and use of the data," said KPMG global semiconductor industry leader Lincoln Clark, in a statement. "Though the number one revenue driver remains wireless applications, its importance fell slightly in 2018, though we do anticipate growth as 5G begins to roll out in future periods."

Above: The most important applications driving semiconductor revenue in 2018.

Image Credit: KPMG

The leaders said that disruptive technology and cybersecurity are rising as strategic priorities.

Asked to list their top three strategic priorities over the next three years, respondents this year again placed diversifying into new businesses areas at the top of their list, followed by M&A and joint ventures, and talent development or management. Implementing disruptive technology made a significant jump to fourth.

Minimizing cybersecurity risk cracked the top 10 in the outlook, and KPMG said that it likely would have been higher had the survey been taken after the Meltdown and Spectre news hit in early January.

The survey also found that semiconductor leaders were more optimistic this year than last year when asked about their outlook on profitability, revenue growth, capital spending, research and development spending, and workforce growth.

"Given the industry's historically strong performance in 2017, we interpret these responses as tempered optimism," said Clark. "It's unlikely we'll see a repeat of 2017's growth rate for global semiconductor revenues, but 2018 should be another successful year in its own right as more than one-quarter of the respondents expect their revenue to grow at least six percent."

Tax reform is expected to impact the chip makers.

"While the survey was conducted before the passage of U.S. tax reform regulation, we are starting to see the impact of tax reform reflected in the recent earnings announcements by semiconductor companies," said Tim Zanni, KPMG’s global and U.S. technology sector leader, in a statement. "We anticipate that the access to offshore funds will increase the speed and intensity of activities such as capital equipment investments, M&A, and the reassessment of buybacks and other capital management strategies."

Asked to rate which region of the world is most important to their company's semiconductor revenue over the next three years, 47 percent of those surveyed said the United States, which was followed by China, Europe, Taiwan, and Japan. The latter two countries were more widely cited this year compared to last, while the first three dipped in importance.

Fitbit pushes into employee health care and coaching with Twine Health acquisition

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 06:48 AM PST

Global wearables juggernaut Fitbit has announced plans to acquire Twine Health, a health coaching platform aimed at helping employers manage chronic disease in the workforce. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded out of Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2014, Twine Health is a cloud-based platform that connects clinicians with patients so they can create plans and collaborate through synchronized apps toward meeting designated goals. It’s also designed to help employers cut down on their in-house health care costs.

Above: Twine Health: iPad app

Twine Health had raised around $10 million in equity funding, so it’s unlikely this acquisition broke the bank for Fitbit. Moreover, the move signals Fitbit’s continued push into the corporate wellness market, which it has been targeting through various initiatives in recent years.

Fitbit may be better known as a consumer technology brand, but it has long partnered with big businesses, including BP, Barclays, and Target, which have sought to encourage employee fitness by giving workers activity trackers for free. This effort has been underpinned by gamification of various aspects of companies’ health-promotion programs.

Fitbit had made around five acquisitions before now, including a startup called Switch2Health that developed a wellness platform for tracking employees’ fitness efforts and rewarding them for maintaining healthy levels of activity. So it’s clear Fitbit has seen the potential of the business market for some time, and this latest deal fits neatly into that scheme.

“Twine Health has delivered powerful results for patients managing conditions like diabetes and hypertension — two key focus areas for Fitbit, which together affect approximately 105 million people in the U.S. alone,” said Fitbit cofounder and CEO James Park. “When combined with our decade-plus of experience empowering millions of consumers to take control of their health and wellness, we believe we can help build stronger connections between people and their care teams by removing some of the most difficult barriers to behavior change.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), up to $2.5 trillion is spent on chronic disease care in the U.S. each year. Indeed, 40 percent of U.S. adults are considered obese, while more than 70 percent are overweight. Additionally, 10 percent of the U.S. population (29.1 million people) have diabetes, and more than a third (86 million people) are on their way to developing diabetes. It’s against this backdrop that Fitbit is looking to merge its established presence in the fitness realm with Twine Health’s identity as a corporate wellness platform.

Indeed, Fitbit said the deal lays the foundation for expansion into employer health plans while giving the company significant leverage to increase its subscription-based revenue. Looking further into the future, Fitbit said that it also plans to cross-sell Twine Health’s benefits to its existing users as it expands “into new condition areas,” according to a press release.

“Together, we can help health care providers better support patients beyond the walls of the clinical environment, which can lead to better health outcomes and ultimately, lower medical costs,” added Park.

The acquisition is expected to close in Q1 2018.

Pipeline Among 18 Startups Participating in Salesforce Accelerate Program

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 06:25 AM PST

PRESS RELEASE:

Pipeline is one of the first gender equity platforms and first Colorado company accepted into the program

DENVER–(BUSINESS WIRE)–February 13, 2018–

Colorado-based startup Pipeline, an artificial intelligence (AI) SaaS platform engineered to stop unconscious bias in the workplace, today announced it has joined the Salesforce Accelerate program. The program includes 18 startups in total and kicked off on January 31, 2018.

“For Salesforce Accelerate, we look for organizations with visionary leaders who not only define the business opportunity, but who also see the cultural or market need for change. Pipeline’s platform addresses a true market need by developing a solution that aims to close the gender equity gap,” said Ludovic Ulrich, head of Salesforce for Startups.

Salesforce Accelerate is a three-month program to inspire startups and partners across the globe to accelerate market introduction of AppExchange apps. As a Salesforce Accelerate participant, Pipeline will benefit from regular virtual programming and in-person workshops at key points in the journey. Additionally, the program is designed to share expert insights, development and go-to-market best practices for the AppExchange and provide the necessary support to help onboard a new partner into the Salesforce ecosystem.

“By participating in Accelerate, Pipeline has a unique opportunity to collaborate with Salesforce to aim to fix workplaces plagued by gender inequity,” said Katica Roy, CEO, Pipeline. “Salesforce not only set one of the first examples of understanding and addressing the complex issue of workplace gender inequity from an internal standpoint, it also created an accelerator program that is flexible and accommodating to varying schedules and situations – which means it’s both inclusive and accessible. Entrepreneurs with great ideas come in all genders, have diverse personal experiences and hail from a wide range of locations and backgrounds – and all deserve the opportunity to learn, grow and succeed. Salesforce is empowering us to do just that.”

As the first Colorado startup accepted to the Salesforce Accelerate program, Pipeline has been recognized by Colorado state government and business leaders as an asset to the local community and economy.

“Pipeline is helping to create a cultural shift in Colorado by disrupting the status quo of workforce management and meaningfully quantifying the gender equity of businesses,” said Erik Mitisek, Chief Innovation Officer, State of Colorado. “We are proud that this great company was founded right here in Colorado, a state that embraces the values that Pipeline embodies.”

Pipeline enables companies to realize the economic gains from closing the gender equity gap. The platform interfaces with Human Capital Management (HCM) and CRM systems to intercept human capital decisions – such as hiring and pay – before they’re made. At these decision points, Pipeline’s solution makes a recommendation toward gender equity, measuring the projected increase in revenue of the recommendation and tracking that value over time. Pipeline has determined that this economic value is significant, based on their original and soon-to-be released research across over 4,000 companies in 29 countries. The research indicates that for every 10 percent increase in an organization’s gender equity, there is a one to two percent increase in revenue – an insight that is expected to be a changemaker for the global economy.

However, while the potential for a one to two percent increase in revenue fortifies the existing case for gender equity in the workplace, many businesses still have the opportunity to take further decisive action.

“According to Salesforce’s research, only 25 percent of business professionals believe their employers care about closing the gender pay gap, and only 36 percent believe their employers are actively working to be more diverse,” said Roy. “With Salesforce in our corner, Pipeline will change those numbers.”

Additional information about the Salesforce Accelerate program and a full list of 2018 startups included alongside Pipeline can be found here. To learn more about Pipeline, please visit www.pipelineequity.com.

Salesforce, Salesforce Accelerate, and others are trademarks of Salesforce.com, inc.

About Pipeline

Pipeline is a Denver-based technology company that increases financial performance of companies through closing the gender equity gap. Pipeline’s proprietary SaaS platform uses artificial intelligence to assess, address and action against the gender biases costing the U.S. alone $2 trillion. This issue is not just about good sense, this is about dollars. Big dollars that turn heads to create social change. For more information, visit PipelineEquity.com, like PipelineEquity on Facebook, follow @PipelineEquity on Twitter, and follow @PipelineEquity on LinkedIn.

Pipeline
Rhiannon Hendrickson, 303-630-9527
rhiannon@orapinmarketing.com

Broadcom now seeks simple majority on Qualcomm’s board as part of hostile takeover

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 06:05 AM PST

Broadcom has announced that it will seek to elect a majority of just six members to Qualcomm’s board of directors at the latter’s annual shareholder meeting on March 6.

This follows Broadcom’s original declaration from early December when it revealed it was looking to replace all 11 Qualcomm board members with its own candidates.

By way of a quick recap, Broadcom has been trying to acquire its chip maker rival since November, though Qualcomm rejected the original $103 billion offer. Things went hostile in December, when Broadcom revealed it would head straight to Qualcomm’s shareholders and ask them to elect an entire slate of new directors chosen by Broadcom. Last week, Broadcom submitted a revised $121 billion bid — consisting of cash and stock — to try to push the deal through. However, Qualcomm once again rejected the deal, arguing that the figure significantly undervalues the company and that the deal would likely face significant regulatory hurdles anyway.

Yesterday, Broadcom revealed it had all the funding in place via a gargantuan credit facility spanning multiple financiers, and rumors abound that the two companies are scheduled to meet this week to discuss the proposed transaction.

By lowering its proposed nominees from 11 to six members, Broadcom is still pushing for a majority presence on the Qualcomm board, but it will now be able to claim a more balanced approach to pushing the merger through, one that benefits from “continuity” and a more seamless transition.

“Qualcomm stockholders have consistently communicated to us their support for our $82 per share cash and stock offer,” noted Broadcom president and CEO Hock Tan, in a press release. “In addition, they have welcomed our willingness to provide for appropriate continuity on the Qualcomm board, and have also expressed a desire for a definitive mechanism of achieving such continuity. Reducing the number of nominees we are seeking to a simple majority provides precisely that mechanism.”

Broadcom has stressed that its $82/share offer will be withdrawn unless its proposed nominees are accepted at the March meeting or Qualcomm agrees to its offer.

Mulaka’s dive into Mexican myths will launch February 27 on PC and PS4

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 06:04 AM PST

Mexican indie studio Lienzo is launching its debut title Mulaka on PC and PlayStation 4 on February 27. The adventure game will roll out to Nintendo Switch and Xbox One a few days later on March 1 and March 2 respectively. The studio has also announced that part of the game’s revenue will be donated to NGOs who are doing work in the northwestern region of Mexico.

Mulaka is based on the folklore of Tarahumara, indigenous people in northwestern Mexico. The protagonist is a shaman, or sukurúame, who must stop the gods from destroying the world. All of Mulaka’s creatures and abilities are based off real mythology, which Lienzo has delved into in a three-part video series.

The studio was inspired not only by the rich world and unique creatures in the indigenous stories. It also wanted to create a game that would act as a cultural ambassador to folks who are unfamiliar with the Tarahumara people — as well as help a younger generation connect with their roots.

Mulaka is part of Nintendo’s slate of indie games that it highlighted during its Nindies showcase last year.

ARM unveils mobile machine learning processor Project Trillium

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 06:02 AM PST

ARM is unveiling its ambitious new machine learning processor platform, dubbed Project Trillium. The platform includes processors and sensors for improving artificial intelligence operations in mobile devices at the edge of networks, rather than in data centers.

ARM has created a high-end processor to handle machine learning calculations, or those that enable computers to learn without explicitly being programmed to perform certain tasks.

“Project Trillium is a whole new class of product with hardware and software,” said Jem Davies, vice president, fellow, and general manager of ARM’s Machine Learning Group. “We looked at GPUs (graphics processing units) and CPUs (central processing units), but it became clear that executing with the best efficiency required a ground-up design specific to machine learning.”

Above: Why machine learning has to happen at the edge.

Image Credit: ARM

ARM believes that putting machine learning into mobile devices is the best computing solution for the future. If we kept much of the AI in the cloud, or web-connected data centers, then we would have to send too much data through the Internet to feed those AI processors, Davies said.

“You have to do more of the processing locally, in your mobile device,” Davies said. “If you sent video to the cloud, there isn’t enough bandwidth in the world to handle it. You can’t afford the power to keep those data centers going. It has cost, latency, reliability, and security problems. That is why machine learning is moving to the edge. We believe that machine learning processors will significantly outperform GPUs and CPUs.”

ARM will provide the first designs to its partners in mid-2018, and the first chips could debut late this year or next year.

ARM has also created an object detection processor, for detecting people and patterns in images and videos. And it has created neural network software libraries.

ARM is targeting mobile markets, which have 1.7 billion to 2.2 billion units, according to market researcher Strategy Analytics. Smart internet-connected cameras are expected to grow from 160 million units now to 1.3 billion units within 10 years, and AI-enabled devices are expected to grow from 300 million to 3.2 billion by 2028, according to market researcher Gartner.

ARM kept those trends in mind as it designed a processor that could be scalable to both low-end and high-end machine learning applications, depending on the number of cores being used.

Above: ARM sees a whole spectrum of machine learning applications and processors.

Image Credit: ARM

“To hit the levels of power or thermals in a constrained environment, machine learning has to be done with a high level of power efficiency,” Davies said.

ARM expects to have a family of machine learning processors, with the first one targeting mobile devices. It will operate at an estimated 4.6 trillion operations per second. Software optimizations could provide uplift of two to four times more performance in real-world applications.

ARM is targeting the chips for 7-nanometer manufacturing. Consumer products could come out by mid-2019.

Above: ARM’s object-detection processor can identify faces in a scene.

Image Credit: ARM

ARM’s second-generation object-detection processor can detect in real time at full high-definition resolutions and 60 frames per second. It can identify objects as small as 50 pixels by 60 pixels, and it operates about 80 times faster than a rival digital signal processor. It can figure out which direction people are facing.

“We can track people in real time at a fast frame rate,” Davies said.

The machine learning processor will sit alongside another ARM CPU in a system. And it could do amazing things, like identifying the fish around you when you take a camera underwater while diving or snorkeling.

Above: ARM’s machine learning processors could identify fish underwater.

Image Credit: ARM

The smartphone processors need to operate at around 1.5 to 2 watts. Internet of Things applications at the low end could include cameras that recognize when a trash can is full and needs pickup service, Davies said.

“So much can be done when you have smart processing,” he said. “Maybe you can detect if a small child walking around on their own is lost.”

Davies foresees the day when phone makers, eager to differentiate themselves, will talk about better machine learning applications rather than other hardware specs.

Sliver.tv raises $20 million in ICO presale to improve esports streaming

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 06:01 AM PST

Sliver.tv has raised $20 million in a public initial coin offering (ICO) for a cryptocurrency that is aimed at improving the bandwidth available for esports streams. Sliver.tv wants to use the untapped bandwidth of computer users when their machines are idle. It will then use that bandwidth to provide streams to local viewers.

Those viewers will enjoy improved video quality, and the computer users will earn a cryptocurrency dubbed Theta tokens. The more bandwidth you deliver, the more you earn. you can use those tokens to send gifts to your favorite esports streamers, unlock premium content, or buy and gift virtual items.

Cupertino, California-based Sliver.tv said previously it had raised $12 million in a private presale of tokens back in December. But now it has extended the total amount raised through presale of tokens to qualified investors to $20 million.

Above: Sliver.tv

Image Credit: Sliver.tv

"Our vision is to create the next generation esports and video streaming ecosystem by democratizing today's centralized content delivery networks," said Sliver.tv CEO Mitch Liu, in a statement. "We're thrilled to have the support of so many blockchain and esports experts, we truly believe blockchain technology will disrupt esports and the broader video and media industries. Video content accounts for nearly 80% of all internet data, it's a huge problem and a multi-billion dollar opportunity that Theta is looking to democratize."

The token buyers included DHVC, I Blockchain Capital, Nirvana Capital, Aelf, Synapse Capital, and Silicon Valley venture capital firms DCM, Sierra Ventures and the Venture Reality Fund.

The token presale was led by Danhua Capital and advised by Steve Chen, cofounder of YouTube and Justin Kan, cofounder of Twitch. The private token presale had overwhelming interest and was three times oversubscribed. It sold out in 48 hours.

The company is also announcing that the Theta ERC20-compliant tokens launched in December 2017 on Sliver.tv platform attracted over four million visits in January from esports viewers around the world.

Theta tokens are earned by fans for daily login on the platform, used as gifts for their favorite influencers, and, soon, to buy virtual goods for their favorite games. Since launch, over one million Theta tokens have been earned and gifted to two dozen top esports streamers by over 980,000 Sliver.tv users. In the future, tokens can also be utilized by advertisers and brand sponsors to fund ad campaigns and support key content creators.

Above: Sliver.tv

Image Credit: Sliver.tv

Sliver.tv’s Theta Labs subsidiary plans to launch its Theta content-streaming platform via a decentralized, user-power mesh network in late 2018. The goal is to provide higher-quality streaming, lower costs for content delivery for publishers and broadcasters, and help content creators capture more of their ad revenue.

"We've been impressed working with Mitch and the entire Sliver.tv team since we led the company's [first round] round of financing. It's clear they're on an exponential growth trajectory and getting huge traction in the esports streaming community, their underlying video delivery technology under development makes all this possible," said Dovey Wan, managing director of Danhua Capital, in a statement. "We've been in the crypto space since 2013 and are among the earliest supporters of Dfinity, Brave and Orchid Labs.”

He added, “Content delivery networks by nature can leverage decentralization and blockchain technology very well. Today's blockchain technology is like the internet in 1996, I think Theta has the opportunity to become the dominant decentralized network that powers all video streaming for the next 20 years."

Besides Chen and Kan, Theta Labs advisors include Fan Zhang, founding member of Sequoia Capital China; Rajeev Surati, a video compression and streaming expert; Cliff Morgan, CEO of Gfuel; Sam Wick, head of UTA Ventures, and Dennis Fong, CEO of Plays.tv.

Before the ICO, Sliver.tv raised$17 million in venture capital from Danhua Capital, DCM, Sierra Ventures, Venture Reality Fund, leading Hollywood/media investors including Creative Artists Agency, BDMI, Greycroft GC Tracker, Advancit Capital and top Japanese mobile gaming firms including Gree and Colopl.

Warriors of Waterdeep is Dungeons & Dragons’ return to mobile gaming

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 06:00 AM PST

Dungeons & Dragons is coming back to mobile thanks to a new partnership between Wizards of the Coast and Ludia. The two companies announced Warriors of Waterdeep today. It’s a free-to-play turn-based role-playing game coming this spring that uses card packs and centers on the Waterdeep, the gem of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting’s Sword Coast. Your party of adventurers uses the city as its base as it takes on missions.

Ludia’s first D&D game features a new narrative — unlike Neverwinter, Tales of Candlekeep, or Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms (some of the other D&D video games that aren’t from Beamdog’s enhanced lineup), Warriors of Waterdeep won’t hew as closely to the annual storylines such as Tomb of Annihilation or Storm King’s Thunder. Instead, you’ll take on missions from Larael Silverhand (one of the Seven Sisters that are also the Chosen of Mystra, the goddess of magic), the open lord of Waterdeep. Mirt the Moneylender, one of Waterdeep’s renowned rascals, handles card-trading. Durnan (the famous proprietor of the The Yawning Portal Inn, which sits above an entrance to the famous Undermountain megadungeon), runs the in-game shop.

“The game follows a plot that runs in parallel with the established 5th edition storylines, but does not cross over directly,” Ludia brand manager Stephen David Wark said over email. He’s also a narrative designer for the project. “Eagle-eyed players will have fun spotting references to familiar settings.”

Wizards worked with DeNA on Arena of War in 2013, but that game shut down in 2014 after its mix of D&D and Angry Birds-style combat failed to catch on. Market research firm Newzoo estimated that mobile gaming brought in more than $50 billion in 2017, and right now, the only D&D game on mobile is the digital adaptation of the Lords of Waterdeep board game.

D&D itself is also experiencing a boom, in part thanks to the streaming of gameplay. Twitch told GamesBeat that people streamed more than 625,000 hours of D&D gaming on the site in 2017. It’s natural that Wizards would want to get some of those players into a mobile game.

Warriors of Waterdeep’s turn-based combat is on a grid, as you can see in the video. Ludia is using an adaptation, and it will include classic aspects of D&D combat, such as spells and monsters like the gelatinous cube (it’s a monster that’s basically a giant cube of Jell-O, and it eats everything in its path). Players choose a character from one of 12 classes and nine races. Wark said the roster right now includes:

  1. Shevarith — Human Wizard
  2. Halbenet — Elf Cleric
  3. Tommus — Halfling Fighter
  4. Naomlen — Dwarf Rogue
  5. Saarvin — Dragonborn Ranger
  6. Farideh — Tiefling Warlock
  7. Raika — Half-orc Barbarian

And yes, fans of the Brimstone Angels books, that is indeed Farideh, the warlock hero of author Erin Evans’ stories. Wark said she’s a loose adaptation of Farideh from after The Devil You Know, the series finale.

Warriors of Waterdeep will make money off selling players packs of cards. However, this isn’t a card-battler such as Hearthstone (which leads its $1 billion-plus market). You use cards to customize characters and upgrade equipment. You do earn packs from completing chapters in the Story Mode, Wark said, as well as from beating leaders and bosses and from “certain level-up thresholds.” You can also merge duplicate cards for better effects. Characters have up to six weapons, 12 different pieces of armor, four class items, and four wondrous items, which Wark said players can select “to create individual and team synergies.”

You can’t break cards down for crafting materials, but Wark said you can trade extra cards or those you don’t want for new packs.

Durnan’s inclusion, sadly, doesn’t mean that Larael will be sending adventurers down into Undermountain, one of the most infamous dungeons in the Realms. At least not at launch.

“The Yawning Portal is indeed the home base. It’s the heart of adventuring action in Waterdeep, and the perfect place for Laeral to find the heroes she needs to rally to the city’s defense. There are no plans to explore Undermountain at this time,” Wark said.

Ludia is a mobile game publisher in Montreal. It works on a number of licenses, and it’s made games for brands such as How to Train Your Dragon, Jurassic World, Battlestar Galactica, and game shows such as The Price Is Right and Press Your Luck (which also, in my judgment, are the two best game shows on TV).

Google launches AMP for email to bring web-like actionable content to Gmail

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 06:00 AM PST

The accelerated mobile pages (AMP) project has come a long way since Google first announced the initiative to the world back in 2015. The open source AMP framework, which is designed to enable blazing-fast and efficient mobile web pages, is now used by 31 million domains. Today, Google announced an extension of the AMP program to include another popular communications medium.

The internet giant unveiled the Gmail developer preview of AMP for email, a web-like experience designed to make emails more engaging and interactive. One of the key benefits of AMP for email will be that content within an email can be updated, and recipients will be able to browse email content much like they would a web page.

So an email from Pinterest, for example, could contain actionable content, allowing users to Pin content to their own Pinterest account without leaving Gmail. Or they could complete a form to arrange a meeting, fill in a questionnaire, and do just about anything — all from within the email itself. It’s clear that marketers will be a major target audience here.

Above: AMP for Email

Third-party companies will, of course, need to sign up to AMP for email to use this product. But Google naturally holds a lot of sway and said that it already has a handful of companies on board — in addition to Pinterest — including Doodle and Booking.com.

The launch comes on the same day as Google unveiled the AMP story format, which brings a Snapchat-like interactive format to the mobile web and features slides, graphics, videos, and more.

It’s true that email has been challenged by the rise of mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp, but it remains healthy across such realms as business, commerce, and marketing. Indeed, reports indicate that some 270 billion emails were sent each day in 2017, up from 205 billion in 2015. So AMP for email could find a rather sizable niche.

“Many people rely on email for information about flights, events, news, purchases, and beyond,” noted Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney. “With AMP for Email, it's easy for information in email messages to be dynamic, up-to-date, and actionable.

AMP for email will be rolling out for Gmail later this year, once it graduates the developer preview. But, as with the broader AMP initiative, Google is eager to stress that this isn’t a purely Google-focused product — the company wants other email client providers to embrace it.

“Because AMP for email is an open spec, we look forward to seeing how other email clients will adopt it, too,” added Sahney.

Millionaire dating app Luxy now accepts Bitcoin as payment

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 06:00 AM PST

Dating apps are part of our everyday lives, for better or worse, and there is room for everyone — even millionaires. Luxy, which matches business individuals who share a luxurious lifestyle, announced today that it will now accept cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, as a form of payment.

The Hong Kong-based startup claims to have 3 million users around the globe, a number that pales in comparison to Tinder's 50 million or so users. But the target audience is drastically different, as Luxy focuses on the one percent “elite.”

Individuals from this demographic can sign up and start using Luxy if and when they have been approved. After registering, new users can verify their income to join immediately — a minimum yearly salary of $200,000 is required, whether you’re a man or a woman. 41 percent of income-verified Luxy members earn more than $1 million per year, according to the startup's website.

Above: Luxy app

Image Credit: Luxy

If users choose not to disclose the number of zeros on their bank accounts, they enter a vouching process, which allows members to screen applicants and vote them in or out. Through this option, more than 50 percent of new applicants are refused by existing members, according to Luxy. If you have under 50 percent approval after 24 hours, you are unable to join. An additional 20 percent of applicants are rejected by Luxy's staff to ensure only qualified people are using the site.

Even though you basically need to be a millionaire to access Luxy's network, the app is free. But like many other dating apps out there, there are upgrades and paid memberships that provide extra perks, like the ability to message any user or get your very own personal matchmaker to help you find what you're looking for.

"The main purpose of introducing crypto was to align ourselves with the current lifestyles of the successful entrepreneurs and business people within our community," wrote Luxy cofounder and CEO Tim.T, in an email to VentureBeat.

According to a spokesperson, Luxy's CEO does not want to publicize his full name, or any personal information, due to some of the criticism the app has received. Bitcoin believers will revel in this mystery as it echoes Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto’s desire to remain anonymous.

Luxy users can continue to pay for the app with traditional currencies, but they now have the option to pay with Bitcoin, as well. This new feature also allows users to view the net worth of individuals in cryptocurrency.

Founded in 2014, Luxy claims to have received no outside capital, to date. It currently has 50 employees.

Other exclusive dating apps include Raya, The League, and Beautiful People.

On whether allowing the use of cryptocurrencies is a ploy to lure more engineers and data scientists onto the platform, Tim T. said: "As people are becoming increasingly successful by means of investment in crypto and involvement in blockchain, we may well see an increase in highly skilled engineers and scientists who have found success as a result of blockchain."

Owners of Bitcoin can buy a Lamborghini with their cherished tokens. So why not look for that special someone to share the $170,000 ride with?

Facebook Messenger to give couples special status starting on Valentine’s Day

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 05:00 AM PST

Facebook is changing how couples are connected on its Messenger chat app. From February 14 onward, whenever a couple declares they’re in a relationship, Facebook Messenger will open with a shower of hearts, then invite the couple to customize text color, emoji, and nickname. Your significant other will sit atop your contact list, alongside your most frequently contacted friends or family. The heart eyes emoji 😍 will be set as your custom emoji.

To be clear: This isn’t a Valentine’s Day promotion. This is what each couple that says they’re in a relationship will see going forward, a company representative told VentureBeat in an email.

The change in Facebook Messenger will occur each time a couple is declared "In a Relationship," "Engaged," "Married," "In a Civil Union," "In a Domestic Partnership," or "In an Open Relationship.”

The change in how couples connect on Facebook Messenger comes one month after Messenger chief David Marcus promised to “massively simplify” the chat app’s user experience.

The choice of 😍 as your custom emoji appears to have been made after analysis of 2 billion emojis shared daily with the chat app. As you can see, a list of the most popular emojis around the world includes quite a few hearts.

 

Above: Most popular emojis by use on Facebook Messenger

New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day are ranked among the most active days for Messenger activity.

Californians trust tech companies but want regulations to rein them in

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 05:00 AM PST

The tech industry is the most-trusted sector in California, but two-thirds of residents in the Bay Area — home of Silicon Valley — think it has been underregulated, according to a survey by public relations firm Edelman.

There’s an apparent paradox between trust in the tech industry and a desire for more regulation as thorny issues such as privacy become increasingly important. The survey is meant to gauge the mood of the nation’s most populous state when it comes to tech, government, the economy, and the workplace.

For the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, the firm interviewed 1,502 people living in California, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percent. The group interviewed 500 people in the Bay Area and 500 in Los Angeles, with the rest coming from other parts of the state.The margin of error was plus or minus 4.4 percent in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Edelman also surveyed more than 33,000 people across the nation.

A few highlights? More than 70 percent of California women believe core local industries have not done enough for gender quality at work. And more than seven in 10 Californians believe that industry can and should advocate for societal good.

Looking specifically at the tech industry, 79 percent of Californians (83 percent of Bay Area residents and 77 percent of LA area residents) believe tech companies have an obligation to speak out against policies that may hurt their employees or customers, yet 66 percent say the tech industry is reactive, rather than proactive.

Above: Californians know the big tech firms but aren’t as familiar with social media companies.

Image Credit: Edelman

Within the Bay Area, 62 percent of those surveyed say they trust the tech industry, yet only 38 percent believe the growth of technology has benefited them personally, underscoring the potential for the public to turn on the tech industry. In fact, 62 percent of Bay Area residents say "the tech industry makes the wealthy even wealthier, but doesn't really help the rest of California."

More than two-thirds of Bay Area residents (67 percent) think the tech industry has been given too much freedom and needs more regulation. According to Bay Area respondents, these regulations should include making tech companies more financially liable for data breaches (89 percent support), taxing companies that move their manufacturing overseas (82 percent), taxing companies that replace workers with machines (66 percent), reducing the number of skilled workers from abroad (66 percent) and preventing tech monopolies (56 percent).

"In the battle to protect its license to innovate around the world, the industry must first deal with perception at home. All politics is local," said Kristine Boyden, president of Edelman's Western Region, in a statement.

The survey also found that the public distrusts social media. While 62 percent of Californians trust the tech industry overall, just 37 percent said they trust social media companies. In the Bay Area, social media is even less trusted, with roughly a third (35 percent) of residents saying they trust the industry, making it the least-trusted industry that Edelman tested.

When it comes to what companies comprise the tech industry, Apple is the top company that comes to mind, followed by Google, Microsoft, and Samsung, with social media companies lagging far behind.

More than 77 percent of Californians blame social media for the problem of fake news, and by a 58- to 42-point margin (61 to 39 in the Bay Area) Californians maintain that social media spreads misinformation rather than helping people become more informed about issues. It’s therefore not surprising that more than seven in 10 support a variety of regulations, including 86 percent supporting requirements of the same standards for political ads on social media as on TV, 78 percent supporting fines on social media companies that host, publicize, or repeat fake news, 75 percent supporting fines against social media companies when people use their platforms to violate the law, and 74 percent supporting a requirement that social media companies review all content posted on their platform for accuracy.

Above: Map of Silicon Valley

Image Credit: Shutterstock

More than 70 percent of California women believe the media, entertainment, and technology industries have not done enough to improve gender equality and fair treatment in the workplace. One-third of California women (32 percent) reported that they had been sexually harassed at work, with 38 percent having experienced unfair treatment at work because of their gender. That number goes up significantly for Bay Area women (46 percent) and California's college-educated women (49 percent).

Sixty-five percent of respondents said that women in positions of power are more trustworthy than men, a seven-percentage point increase since 2017. The perception that women in power are more truthful than men holds across both genders, with 52 percent of men and 77 percent of women citing female leaders as more trustworthy. That’s not a surprise, given the #MeToo movement and the steady stream of harassment scandals coming out of Silicon Valley.

"Clear actions, grounded in well-articulated values, are a must for companies to build trust from the inside out. Beginning with their own employees, then shifting toward the communities in which they work and into society at large, there is both expectation and opportunity for business to lead," said Stacey Zolt Hara, managing director of corporate and public affairs for Edelman Bay Area, in a statement.

Above: Social media isn’t trusted as much as tech as a whole in California.

Image Credit: Edelman

Housing costs remain a huge issue, with 71 percent of Californians (77 percent Bay Area, 70 percent Los Angeles) reporting that the cost and availability of housing is a "very serious" concern. This group far outpaces the 43 percent who consider the lack of high-paying jobs a very serious concern.

More than half of Californians (57 percent) said they don't believe their children will have a better life than they do. And because of the high cost of living, Edelman found that there has been an increase among millennials (58 percent) and parents (65 percent) who are considering leaving California, up seven and 12 percentage points respectively in the last year.

Interviews were conducted online from January 12 to January 22.

GV leads $25 million investment in Ujet’s customer support platform

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 04:30 AM PST

Ujet today announced a $25 million funding round to grow its services for voice and chat support in apps, websites, and phone calls. The money will be used to ramp up research and development around AI services and to open offices in New York City and Munich later this year.

The funds will also be used to give customers additional backend CRM client integrations, like Microsoft Dynamics, to surface customer information for call agents and expand to additional mediums, like video calls and augmented reality.

The series B round was led by GV, formerly Google Ventures, with participation from Citi Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and DCM Ventures.

As part of the round, GV partner Karim Faris will join the Ujet board of directors.

Ujet provides holistic AI solutions based on a multi-modal approach, including services that rely on machine learning to do things like understand a customer’s peak hours or identify patterns such as what kind of person calls on the way home from work.

The goal is to create AI from "impactful data, not just buzzwords," Ujet CEO and founder Anand Janefalkar told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

"Having a piecemeal solution or just doing the front end or backend and just kind of throwing the ball over to the next person in the equation doesn't really help anyone to do a true AI product," Janefalkar said. "Here I'm saying what is the best way that you can craft a customer journey depending on the complexity of the problem and validate that based on data that you're pulling from 100,000 conversations, then make that kind of workflow."

Ujet headquarters are in San Francisco. The company has almost 70 employees, and with the closure of today’s round has raised a total $45 million since launching in 2015.

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How strategic VCs prime health care startups for success (VB Live)

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 04:10 AM PST

VB LIVE:

Health care is being disrupted by innovative tech solutions — but having the right venture capital partner can make or break success. Join this VB Live event to learn how VC partnerships can help you navigate through the regulations and complicated nature of health care, and get your startup thriving.

Register here for free.

The health care market is changing constantly, and the broad-sweeping challenges are stacking up for all stakeholders, from patients in the waiting rooms to health care providers, administrators, and institutions. It’s a highly regulated ecosystem, fragmented across providers and hampered by misaligned solutions. But every one of these changes and challenges presents opportunity.

Health care tech innovators are poised to profoundly transform the health and welfare of every partner and participant they touch — and realize huge returns for every success. Health care is an industry ripe for disruption.

But in health care, there can be a big fat chasm between a pilot proof-of-concept and broad deployment at scale. And the complexity of large health systems, which are slow-moving and burdened with dated technology, means that entrepreneurs are navigating very specific health care barriers and minefields.

Health care VCs are becoming increasingly valuable partners for entrepreneurs. A strategic VC will help uncover the value a potential health care solution will bring to caregivers and patients, and how that solution can support improved clinical outcomes, workflow challenges, and economic obstacles. Potential adoption barriers can be assessed — and addressed. And an ongoing partnership means that the right metrics are being monitored, the right executive decision-makers are being brought to the table, and there will a plan in place to continue to optimize, scale, and drive value.

If you think your startup has what it takes to solve the biggest problems in health care, you need to know more about what it takes to succeed in the increasingly complex, competitive, very regulated health care industry — so don’t miss this VB Live event.

You’ll join a roundtable of established health care CTOs and active health care venture capitalists as they discuss what it takes to get noticed in the biggest health care and health tech categories, successfully navigate the health care system maze, and more.

Don’t miss out!

Registration here for free.

By attending this VB Live event, you'll:

  • Learn what it takes for a startup to be successful in the highly complex and regulated health care industry
  • Gain perspective from established health tech CEOs
  • Understand the importance of having a strategic VC in an industry like health care
  • See what VCs are looking for in the health care and health tech categories

Speakers:

  • Christiana DelloRusso, Partner, Providence Ventures, Board Member, Omada Health & N-Of-One
  • Sean Duffy, Co-Founder and CEO, Omada Health
  • Christine Cournoye, CEO, N-of-One
  • Stewart Rogers, Analyst-at-Large, VentureBeat
  • Rachael Brownell, Moderator, VentureBeat

Sponsored by Providence Ventures

Fear Effect Sedna launches mix of franchise revival and Inuit mythology March 6

Posted: 13 Feb 2018 04:00 AM PST

Sushee’s grim tactical adventure Fear Effect Sedna is debuting on March 6 for PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. Square Enix Collective is publishing the title.

The sequel to the 1999 Fear Effect raised funds through a Kickstarter campaign in 2016. It features an isometric view of the world and real-time tactical play, where players can slow down time to take out enemies. The story is co-written by Fear Effect’s writer and delves into Inuit mythology, starring characters Hana, Rain, Glas and Deke from the first game.

Fear Effect was one of the first games to use cel shading, giving it a unique aesthetic. The now defunct studio Kronos Digital Entertainment developed the original game and a prequel Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix. It was working on a third game as well, but it never came to fruition. Sushee has licensed the IP from Square Enix to revive the franchise, catering to fan demand. The studio has previously worked with Square Enix Collective on its original title Goetia.

"When Square Enix launched Collective, one of the goals was to see if opening up some of our established IP to benefit indie studios, and it's great to see how Sushee have gone about the task,” said Square Enix West’s director of indie publishing Phil Elliott in a statement.

Fear Effect Sedna is launching ahead of Fear Effect Reinvented, a remaster of the first game that’s slated to also release this year.
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