Can the startup building a Fortnite for VR become the Fortnite of VR?

Virtual reality hasn’t proven itself to be the lucrative escape of the every-man, but the medium has done a fairly good job enticing the gaming community and keeping that niche (mostly) happy. While a couple of big titles have gotten some halfway-decent ports to VR, for the most part VR users are confined to whatever indies can build or whatever Oculus can fund.

BigBox VR has been trying to capture attention in the space by not building solo adventures that lead users to find themselves, but instead by trying to match VR’s physicality and immersion with social gameplay that leads users to gain greater appreciation for the medium’s scale.

The company just closed a $5 million funding round led by Shasta Ventures with participation from GSR Ventures and Pioneer Square Labs Ventures. As part of the round, Shasta partner Jacob Mullins will be getting a seat on the board.

Venture cash for VR content hasn’t exactly been free-flowing in 2018, more so for startups that aren’t caught up in building out a “platform play.” Co-founders Chia Chin Lee and Gabe Brown are more interested in just building out titles and hopefully creating one so successful that they don’t have to stop evolving it. The team at BigBox VR got its start with a cartoonish shooter title called Smashbox Arena; the small team has been really interested in finding what VR enables when it comes to competitive online play.

The BigBox VR team

Funding rounds aren’t often about the achievements of the past; however, the company is currently going full-steam ahead with its next ambitious title, a battle royale title called “POPULATION: ONE.”

I had a chance to suit up in VR and dive-in with Jacob and the founding team. I got my ass kicked a couple times, but then they let me win at some point, which I admit I was pretty okay with.

To say the game shares some similarities with Fortnite is an understatement. Not only is it a battle royale title with a shrinking environment, but certain mechanics like gliding in at the beginning to scrounge for weapons and even Fortnite’s building feature are central to the gameplay. That being said, battle royale titles have exploded in the wake of PUBG and they seem to all share a lot among each other. For BigBox, VR is the distinguishing feature, with motion controls and the general feeling that everything is life-sized and in your control.

To be honest, a lot of it really does work. Every surface in the game is climbable (by physically grabbing surfaces with the controllers and then doing the arm-work to scale) but more central movements like turning and moving are left to buttons, a technique that ultimately isn’t for the faint of stomach but is a lot more fluid than teleporting around. There are certainly mechanics which could have felt smoother, but this is a private beta game with a lot of room to finesse.

One of the really powerful things about the game was what happened after I was repeatedly sniped and killed off early on in the first couple rounds. The spectator mode is great and it’s interesting how much the precise controls of VR lend to allowing you to get more actively enveloped in matches that you aren’t even competing in. There are companies in the VR space working exclusively on this, but for a gaming audience obsessed with streamers, adapting traditional games with a VR spectating workflow or doing so natively seems like a huge opportunity.

Battle royale games remain white-hot, and VR game studios have been trying to find the right way to get a slice of the pie. Perhaps the key is knowing where to innovate while also realizing that the multi-platform grandiose of Fortnite has yet to find its way to VR, so maybe finding a title that scratches that itch is the best place to start.

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Growing pains at venture-backed Moogsoft lead to layoffs

Eight months after bringing in a $40 million Series D, Moogsoft‘s co-founder and chief executive officer Phil Tee confirmed to TechCrunch that the IT incident management startup had shed 18 percent of its workforce or just over 30 employees.

The layoffs took place at the end of October; shortly after, Moogsoft announced two executive hires. Among the new additions is Amer Deeba, who recently resigned from Qualys after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged him with insider trading.

Founded in 2012, San Francisco-based Moogsoft provides artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) to help teams avoid outages and work more efficiently. The startup has raised $90 million in equity funding to date, garnering a $220 million valuation with its latest round, according to PitchBook. It’s backed by Goldman Sachs, Wing Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Dell’s corporate venture capital arm, Singtel Innov8, Northgate Capital and others. Wing VC founder and long-time Accel managing partner Peter Wagner and Redpoint partner John Walecka are among the investors currently sitting on Moogsoft’s board of directors.

Tee, the founder of two public companies in Micromuse and Riversoft, admitted the layoffs affected several teams across the company while emphasizing that the cuts were not a sign of a struggling business, but rather a right of passage for a startup seeking venture scale.

“We are a classic VC-backed startup that has sort of grown up,” Tee told TechCrunch earlier today. “In pretty much every successful company, there is a point in time where there’s an adjustment in strategy … Unfortunately, when you do that, it becomes a question of do we have the right people?”

Moogsoft doubled revenue last year and added 50 Fortune 200 companies as customers, according to a statement announcing its latest capital infusion. Tee said he’s “extremely chipper” about the road ahead and the company’s recent C-suite hires.

Moogsoft’s newest hires, CFO Raman Kapur (left) and COO Amer Deeba (right).

The company announced its latest executive hires on Nov. 2, only one week after completing the round of layoffs, a common strategy for companies looking to cast a shadow on less-than-stellar news, like major staff cuts. Moogsoft has brought on former Splunk vice president of finance Raman Kapur as its first-ever chief financial officer and Amer Deeba, a long-time Qualys executive, as its chief operating officer.

Deeba spent the last 17 years at Qualys, a publicly-traded provider of cloud-based security and compliance solutions. In August, he resigned amid allegations of insider trading. The SEC announced its charges against Deeba on Aug. 30, claiming he had notified his two brothers of Qualys’ missed revenue targets before the company publicly announced its financial results in the spring of 2015.

“Deeba informed his two brothers about the miss and contacted his brothers’ brokerage firm to coordinate the sale of all of his brothers’ Qualys stock,” the SEC wrote in a statement. “When Qualys publicly announced its financial results, it reported that it had missed its previously-announced first-quarter revenue guidance and that it was revising its full-year 2015 revenue guidance downward. On the same day, Deeba sent a message to one of his brothers saying, “We announced the bad news today.” The next day, Qualys’s stock price dropped 25%. Although Deeba made no profits from his conduct, Deeba’s brothers collectively avoided losses of $581,170 by selling their Qualys stock.”

Under the terms of Deeba’s settlement, he is ineligible to serve as an officer or director of any SEC-reporting company for two years and has been ordered to pay a $581,170 penalty.

Tee, for his part, said there was never any admission of guilt from Deeba and that he’s already had a positive impact on Moogsoft.

“Amer is a tremendously impressive individual and he has the full confidence of myself and the board,” Tee said.

Recent departures hint at turmoil at Quartet Health, a mental health startup backed by GV

 

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Limiting social media use reduced loneliness and depression in new experiment

{rss:content:encoded} Limiting social media use reduced loneliness and depression in new experiment https://ift.tt/2DtKpVP https://ift.tt/2qEhGVz November 09, 2018 at 11:52PM

The idea that social media can be harmful to our mental and emotional well-being is not a new one, but little has been done by researchers to directly measure the effect; surveys and correlative studies are at best suggestive. A new experimental study out of Penn State, however, directly links more social media use to worse emotional states, and less use to better.

To be clear on the terminology here, a simple survey might ask people to self-report that using Instagram makes them feel bad. A correlative study would, for example, find that people who report more social media use are more likely to also experience depression. An experimental study compares the results from an experimental group with their behavior systematically modified, and a control group that’s allowed to do whatever they want.

This study, led by Melissa Hunt at Penn State’s psychology department, is the latter — which despite intense interest in this field and phenomenon is quite rare. The researchers only identified two other experimental studies, both of which only addressed Facebook use.

Phone-addicted teens aren’t as happy as those who play sports and hang out IRL, new study suggests

143 students from the school were monitored for three weeks after being assigned to either limit their social media use to about ten minutes per app (Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram) per day or continue using it as they normally would. They were monitored for a baseline before the experimental period and assessed weekly on a variety of standard tests for depression, social support, and so on. Social media usage was monitored via the iOS battery use screen, which shows app use.

The results are clear. As the paper, published in the latest Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, puts it:

The limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group. Both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring.

Our findings strongly suggest that limiting social media use to approximately 30 minutes per day may lead to significant improvement in well-being.

It’s not the final word in this, however. Some scores did not see improvement, such as self-esteem and social support. And later follow-ups to see if feelings reverted or habit changes were less than temporary were limited because most of the subjects couldn’t be compelled to return. (Psychology, often summarized as “the study of undergraduates,” relies on student volunteers who have no reason to take part except for course credit, and once that’s given, they’re out.)

That said, it’s a straightforward causal link between limiting social media use and improving some aspects of emotional and social health. The exact nature of the link, however, is something at which Hunt could only speculate:

Some of the existing literature on social media suggests there’s an enormous amount of social comparison that happens. When you look at other people’s lives, particularly on Instagram, it’s easy to conclude that everyone else’s life is cooler or better than yours.

When you’re not busy getting sucked into clickbait social media, you’re actually spending more time on things that are more likely to make you feel better about your life.

The researchers acknowledge the limited nature of their study and suggest numerous directions for colleagues in the field to take it from here. A more diverse population, for instance, or including more social media platforms. Longer experimental times and comprehensive follow-ups well after the experiment would help as well.

The 30 minute limit was chosen as a conveniently measurable one but the team does not intend to say that it is by any means the “correct” amount. Perhaps half or twice as much time would yield similar or even better results, they suggest: “It may be that there is an optimal level of use (similar to a dose response curve) that could be determined.”

Until then, we can use common sense, Hunt suggested: “In general, I would say, put your phone down and be with the people in your life.”

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Limiting social media use reduced loneliness and depression in new experiment

The idea that social media can be harmful to our mental and emotional well-being is not a new one, but little has been done by researchers to directly measure the effect; surveys and correlative studies are at best suggestive. A new experimental study out of Penn State, however, directly links more social media use to worse emotional states, and less use to better.

To be clear on the terminology here, a simple survey might ask people to self-report that using Instagram makes them feel bad. A correlative study would, for example, find that people who report more social media use are more likely to also experience depression. An experimental study compares the results from an experimental group with their behavior systematically modified, and a control group that’s allowed to do whatever they want.

This study, led by Melissa Hunt at Penn State’s psychology department, is the latter — which despite intense interest in this field and phenomenon is quite rare. The researchers only identified two other experimental studies, both of which only addressed Facebook use.

Phone-addicted teens aren’t as happy as those who play sports and hang out IRL, new study suggests

143 students from the school were monitored for three weeks after being assigned to either limit their social media use to about ten minutes per app (Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram) per day or continue using it as they normally would. They were monitored for a baseline before the experimental period and assessed weekly on a variety of standard tests for depression, social support, and so on. Social media usage was monitored via the iOS battery use screen, which shows app use.

The results are clear. As the paper, published in the latest Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, puts it:

The limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group. Both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring.

Our findings strongly suggest that limiting social media use to approximately 30 minutes per day may lead to significant improvement in well-being.

It’s not the final word in this, however. Some scores did not see improvement, such as self-esteem and social support. And later follow-ups to see if feelings reverted or habit changes were less than temporary were limited because most of the subjects couldn’t be compelled to return. (Psychology, often summarized as “the study of undergraduates,” relies on student volunteers who have no reason to take part except for course credit, and once that’s given, they’re out.)

That said, it’s a straightforward causal link between limiting social media use and improving some aspects of emotional and social health. The exact nature of the link, however, is something at which Hunt could only speculate:

Some of the existing literature on social media suggests there’s an enormous amount of social comparison that happens. When you look at other people’s lives, particularly on Instagram, it’s easy to conclude that everyone else’s life is cooler or better than yours.

When you’re not busy getting sucked into clickbait social media, you’re actually spending more time on things that are more likely to make you feel better about your life.

The researchers acknowledge the limited nature of their study and suggest numerous directions for colleagues in the field to take it from here. A more diverse population, for instance, or including more social media platforms. Longer experimental times and comprehensive follow-ups well after the experiment would help as well.

The 30 minute limit was chosen as a conveniently measurable one but the team does not intend to say that it is by any means the “correct” amount. Perhaps half or twice as much time would yield similar or even better results, they suggest: “It may be that there is an optimal level of use (similar to a dose response curve) that could be determined.”

Until then, we can use common sense, Hunt suggested: “In general, I would say, put your phone down and be with the people in your life.”

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Limiting social media use reduced loneliness and depression in new experiment Devin Coldewey https://ift.tt/2DtKpVP
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Facebook launches Lasso, its music and video TikTok clone

Done cloning Snapchat, Facebook is now chasing Chinese short-form video sensation TikTok with the launch of its knock-off Lasso. Available now for iOS and Android, Lasso is Facebook’s answer to the zany mobile lipsyncing playground that’s gained ground with young users, both in China and in the West.

The release confirms TechCrunch’s scoop from last month that the company was building an app called Lasso to let people share short videos with soundtracks. With TikTok looking like the next big thing, it’s not surprising to see Facebook playing chase, much like it did, successfully, when Snapchat posed an existential threat.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that the launch of Lasso on iOS and Android is in the U.S. only for now, telling us “Lasso is a new standalone app for short-form, entertaining videos — from comedy to beauty to fitness and more. We’re excited about the potential here, and we’ll be gathering feedback from people and creators.” While Lasso was released under the Facebook umbrella, the company launched it informally and with relatively little fanfare via a tweet from a product manager on the team.

Facebook is building Lasso, a video music app to steal TikTok’s teens

Lasso lets you shoot up to 15-second long videos (no uploads allowed) and overlay popular songs. The app centers around an algorithmic feed of recommended videos, but also lets you tap through hashtags or a Browse page of themed collections.

Lasso app

The original slate of videos seeded by Lasso’s beta users look pretty good, making use of the millions of songs in its soundtrack catalog. There are no augmented reality effects or crazy filters like you’ll find in TikTok, but users are already taking advantage of the slo-mo and fast-forward recording features to make fun clips. Overall the app feels well constructed, and has that colorful and playful teen vibe.

Surprisingly, Facebook is releasing Lasso under its own name rather than trying to obscure the connection to its social network that younger users have largely abandoned. You can log in with Facebook or Instagram to get instant personalization, with the option to syndicate your Lassos to Facebook Stories with that option for Instagram is coming soon. Notably, all content and profiles on Lasso are public, which could cause some concern about older users leering at dancing teens.

Musical.ly had its own big problems with inappropriate underage content. Its leaderboard of top videos often included scantly clad pre-teens dancing to racy pop songs, seemingly flaunting the U.S. COPPA child protection laws. Lasso includes a report button, but it’s unclear where Facebook will draw the line on what’s allowed.

The big question is whether Lasso is too late. Musical.ly rose to over 200 million registered users before being acquired by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and rolled into its similar app TikTok. That app has been on an epic rise over the past few months, turning into a global phenomenon that surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube in downloads during October.

While Instagram and Facebook were massively successful at cloning Snapchat’s Stories, they had the advantage of building the feature into their already-popular apps. Lasso will have to start from scratch as a standalone app, and Facebook’s previous teen-focused standalones like Slingshot and Poke failed spectacularly with the same strategy. Facebook will have to hope its initial cadre of content creators will prove so compelling as to convince people to download a whole new app, which could be an uphill battle — even for Facebook.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2PmakF2 Facebook launches Lasso, its music and video TikTok clone Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2ROz5GT
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Pure Bit, a South Korean exchange, pulls a $2.8 million exit scam

Another day, another exit scam. This time it comes to us from South Korea where an exchange, Pure Bit, has completely shut down after raising $2.8 million in Ethereum from investors.

The exchange, which promised to deliver something call Pure Coin, was live yesterday and today is completely shut down after posting “Sorry” and “Thanks” to their communications channels.

According to a Reddit thread, the team was anonymous and that the process of building and pumping exchange tokens is a “popular trend in Korea.”

“They have gotten rid of every evidence,” wrote one reader. “Website hosted by fake name / out of Korea host / messenger / contacts were all fake too. Now their only hope is to keep on track with that ether and hope for the best.”

There is no proof yet that the team has pulled a full exit scam – there are examples of founders pretending to scam their investors to “teach them a lesson” – but given the abrupt movement of 13,000 ETH out of the collection wallet we can assume that the story ends here.

Even their chat room, hosted on their own site, is shut down.

It should be noted that South Korea has banned ICOs, giving scammers the perfect cover for absolute anonymity.

– New Korean exchange Pure Bit just pulled an exit scam claiming 13,000ETH from its investors as we speak. Kakao channels are emptying and the site has been pulled.

This is why we can’t have nice things. Karma comes back hard when you screw this many people over. pic.twitter.com/GDkjiz1gAq

— Korean Cryptocurrency & Blockchain News (@BlockchainROK) November 9, 2018

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Listen to the music of a Martian sunrise

Two researchers, Dr. Domenico Vicinanza of Anglia Ruskin University and Dr. Genevieve Williams, have “sonified” a video of the 5,000th Martian sunrise captured by the Mars rover, Opportunity. The music is a representation of the experience of seeing the sun rise over the red dunes as light pierces the planet’s atmosphere.

It’s beautiful.

From the release:

Researchers created the piece of music by scanning a picture from left to right, pixel by pixel, and looking at brightness and colour information and combining them with terrain elevation. They used algorithms to assign each element a specific pitch and melody.

The quiet, slow harmonies are a consequence of the dark background and the brighter, higher pitched sounds towards the middle of the piece are created by the sonification of the bright sun disk.

Given that you are literally watching the sun rise over the sands of Mars thanks to the efforts of a little multi-wheeled robot and you can now hear the musical equivalent of this amazing breakthrough, it’s pretty hard to feel that humanity is heading toward a dark place. The next breakthrough, I suspect, will happen when we’re able to send human orchestra up there to recreate it with real instruments.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Listen to the music of a Martian sunrise John Biggs https://ift.tt/2QxDAoM
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Everything you missed from the Startup Battlefield Latin America

The tech scene in São Paulo is an absolute delight, and we’re honored to have seen such an amazing turnout at the Startup Battlefield Latin America.

In case you missed it, we’ve put together a little recap of the event below.

Editor’s Note: We will embed videos from the event as soon as they’re available.

A China Twist to Brazil’s Mobility Revolution

Featuring Ariel Lambrecht (Yellow), Eduardo Musa (Yellow), Tony Qiu (Didi Chuxing), Hans Tung (GGV)

Mobility is a massive challenge for megacities around the world, including Sao Paulo. The first panel of the event featured notable founders and investors attempting to solve this problem in Brazil and throughout Latin America.

Eduardo Musa is the cofounder and CEO of Yellow and was joined on stage by his cofounder Ariel Lambrecht. Lambrecht also founded the mobility company 99, which is the only startup worth more than 1 billion USD in Brazil. Didi Chuxing recently invested and purchased 99, and current CEO and former investor Tony Qiu sat on the panel as well. Lastly, Hans Tung, managing partner at the Silicon Valley firm GGV and lead investor on 99’s latest round, joined the group. The panel was moderated by TechCrunch’s Managing Editor, Matt Burns.

Both Musa and Qiu acknowledged the crisis facing the Brazilian market and noted parallels with the Chinese market. Both markets have megacities with a diverse population, and there are countless opportunities for startups to address.

Throughout the panel, it was noted that Brazilian startups face several obstacles including finding enough talent and investment. The panelists agreed that often companies in Brazil are looking to Silicon Valley for both. For hiring, they said, there are not enough engineers locally, and to obtain funding, it’s best to show growth to local investors and the look tow Silicon Valley for additional investors.

Fireside Chat with Cristina Junquiera (Nubank) and David Velez (Nubank)

Any kind of partnership with a global internet giant is a big win for a startup. Nubank co-founders David Velez and Cristina Junquiera took the stage at Startup Battlefield Latin America to discuss Tencent’s $180M investment into their Sao Paulo-based digital banking company. Nubank is has raised over $700M from hard hitting investors like DST and Sequoia, valuing the company at over $4B, so it’s not about the money. While the invest to buy strategy is common for Chinese internet giants, Velez says that isn’t the goal for Nubank.
The founders are focused on the 20 million customers who have already applied for their credit card, and building culture from the ground up. There’s a lot wrong with Brazilian banks, and Nubank is taking a customer-focused approach to provide its digital banking service for Brazil’s huge population. When you’re one of the most successful companies in a region, you feel a responsibility to give back to the ecosystem. The best way to do that, say Velez and Junquiera, is to set an example of success.

Venture Investing In Latin America Today

Featuring Eric Acher (Monashees),Veronica Allende Serra (Innova Capital Consultoria Ltda), Hernan Kazah (Kaszek), Fernando Lelo de Larrea (ALLVP)

Latin American startup companies have hit an inflection point. No longer an afterthought for global investment firms the region is on pace to surpass $1 billion in committed capital for the second year in a row.

Driving that growth, according to investors Eric Acher, the co-founder of Monashees; Veronica Allende Serra, the founder of Innova Capital; Hernan Kazah of Kaszek Ventures and Fernando Lelo de Larrea of ALL VP; is a rash of exits like the public offering for the payment technology provider Stone and the sale of ride-hailing company, 99, to the Chinese global giant mobility company, DiDi.

Yet, as the market grows, entrepreneurs need to consider the partners they’re bringing on board as the aim for international growth. And while Brazil leads the pack in terms of committed capital — grabbing 73% of the total money invested in the region in the first half of the year — Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Chile are all emerging as important capital markets in their own right.

20 Years Ahead of the Curve

Featuring Fabricio Bloisi (Movile)

For Fabricio Bloisi, the journey to building a multi-billion dollar company in Movile wasn’t always easy. Building a business requires making tough decisions along the way and a commitment to constantly churning through ideas.

Over the first ten years of its existence, Movile struggled as a smaller content provider. It was once the company agreed to consolidate and control more of the market that it began to grow, Bloisi said.

Now, businesses like iFood, which brought in over $100 million in revenue in the month of October alone, and new payment businesses like Zoop and its delivery and logistics companies, are contributing to a powerhouse that Bloisi thinks could be a $10 billion company in a few years.

Bloisi believes in the region, and the promise it holds for local and international investors to build more multi-billion dollar businesses. The future belongs to the entrepreneurs in the audience, Bloisi said. And if they can make the tough decisions (and get the right investment partners) they could find themselves on the TechCrunch stage.

New Wave Latin Founders

Ana Lu McLaren (Enjoie), David Arana (Konfio), Sebastian Mejia (Rappi), Juan Pablo Bruzzo

A vast majority of startup and investment activity across Latin America is coming out of Brazil. But that doesn’t mean entrepreneurship doesn’t thrive in other parts of the region. Rappi co-founder Sebastian Mejia, Konfio’s David Arana, Moni’s Juan Pablo Bruzzo and Ana McLaren from Enjoie discussed the challenges of launching and scaling an early stage tech company in this new wave founder discussion. Volatile economies, scarce technical talent, and undercapitalized markets aren’t so much challenges, but opportunities for these founders.

Logistics, fintech and ecommerce sectors are getting shaken up by these founders, and the foreign investment dollars are following. Rappi just raised a $200M round to grow its last-mile delivery service, and

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Rakuten has SoftBank in its sights

{rss:content:encoded} Rakuten has SoftBank in its sights https://ift.tt/2RFjJ7e https://ift.tt/2DtcXOY November 09, 2018 at 05:14PM

This week, I’ve tried to do something new at TechCrunch with this experimental column — getting obsessed about a topic broadly in tech and writing a continuous stream of thoughts and analysis about it.

With my research consultant and contributor Arman Tabatabai, we’ve covered two topics: Form Ds, the filing that startups usually submit to the SEC after a venture round closes (although increasingly do not), and SoftBank, which faces all kinds of strategic pressure due to its debt binging. If you missed the other episodes, here are links to the editions from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the authors: Danny at danny@techcrunch.com or Arman at Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com if you like or hate something here.

Today, one final round of thoughts on SoftBank and Rakuten (heavily written by Arman) and a lengthy list of articles for your weekend reading.

The Rakuten factor complicates SoftBank’s strategy

BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images

Understanding SoftBank’s competitive strategy requires a bit of a deep dive into Japanese ecommence giant Rakuten.

Rakuten has been struggling to compete with Amazon and others like SoftBank’s Yahoo! Japan. So at the end of 2017, Rakuten announced it would be entering the telco space, hoping that operating its own network could generate user growth through better incentives around mobile shopping, streaming and payments.

Today, Japan’s telco space is a relatively cozy oligopoly dominated by NTT DoCoMo, au-KDDI and SoftBank. A major reason why Rakuten feels it can succeed where others have failed to break in is because it has the government on its side.

Rakuten’s plan to offer prices at least 30% lower than incumbent rates has led to favorable treatment from prime minister Shinzo Abe’s government, which has been looking for ways to stimulate market competition to force the country’s high phone prices lower.

Though a new entrant hasn’t been approved to enter the telco market since eAccess in 2007, Rakuten has already gotten the thumbs up to start operations in 2019. The government also instituted regulations that would make the new kid in town more competitive, such as banning telcos from limiting device portability.

Rakuten’s partnerships with key utilities and infrastructure players will also allow it to build out its network quickly, including one with Japan’s second largest mobile service provider, KDDI.

Just last week, Rakuten and KDDI announced an agreement where Rakuten will help KDDI utilize its payment and logistics infrastructure as KDDI turns its head towards e-commerce and payments, while KDDI will give Rakuten access to its network and nationwide roaming services, allowing Rakuten to provide nationwide service as its builds out its own infrastructure.

The agreement with KDDI is especially scary for SoftBank, the country’s third biggest telco and one of Rakuten’s e-commerce competitors, and whose customers seem most vulnerable to churn. The partnership also makes it seem even more likely that SoftBank’s competitors are looking to push it out of the market or turn its upcoming mobile segments IPO into a dud.

While Rakuten’s head-first dive into the market won’t ease investors into an IPO, it’s important we note that Rakuten is targeting a much smaller market share than the incumbents, targeting 10 million subscribers by 2028, a number lower than the company’s original 15 million subs goal and significantly lower than the 76 million, 52 million and 40 million subscribers NTT, KDDI and SoftBank hold currently. And even with its agreements, Rakuten faces a serious and expensive uphill battle in building out its network infrastructure quickly enough to compete.

Ultimately, Rakuten’s telco initiative is a splash, but one that seems like it will merely make its competitors wet and not drown them. For SoftBank, it is an annoying distraction on its telco IPO roadshow, but a distraction that is easily explained to potential investors.

SoftBank growth over the past two decades

Rajeev Misra. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Changing gears from Rakuten, emails from readers this week asked us to look deeper into SoftBank’s performance over the last two decades. As we did so, it became clear that SoftBank has had a long history of price competitions and new entrants across its businesses, and it has proven its ability to operate and consistently grow earnings.

Since 2000, SoftBank has grown earnings at a ~30% CAGR and experienced revenue growth in all but one year. When eAccess did enter the telco market and picked up four million subscribers, SoftBank bought it and integrated it into its own system.

As we discussed earlier this week, despite having always held on to a clunky amount of debt, SoftBank has managed to deliver consistent growth by making sure its revenue and operating growth outpaced the upticks in its debt and interest expense.

A great example of this came after SoftBank’s acquisition of Vodafone in 2006, when it saw a huge spike in its interest expense, but also in its operating income.

Over the following five years, SoftBank managed to reduce its interest expense at an annual rate of 12% while growing its operating income at 16%. And regardless of its debt balances, SoftBank has always seemingly been able to secure funding one way or another, as shown by its ability to raise $90+ billion for the Vision Fund in less than a year from when plans for the fund were first reported.

The Vision Fund itself started as a way for SoftBank to continue to invest while its balance sheet was tight due to nearly back-to-back massive acquisitions of Sprint and Arm. Just look at how Rajeev Misra, who oversees the Vision Fund, discussed its creation in an interview with The Economic Times:

We had just bought ARM in June for $32 billion and Masa felt we are on the cusp of a technology revolution over the next 5-10 years with machine learning, AI, robotics and the impact of that in disrupting every industry – from healthcare to financial services to manufacturing.

We felt the world was going through a new industrial revolution. We were constrained financially given that we just did a $32-billion acquisition.

SoftBank, historically over the last 20 years, has invested from its own balance sheet. So, we had two options.

Either monetise some of the gains we made in Alibaba which we decided has a lot more upside… Alibaba has more than doubled in the last 12 months. So we decided to keep it which turned out to be good decision. The second option was to go out and raise money and co-invest with others. We prepared a presentation, went out, and by god’s grace we raised the fund.

Even before the Vision Fund, SoftBank has always had a strategy to make big bets in industries of the future. And while many have failed, the several that have paid off, like its $20 million investment in Alibaba, had massive cash outs that have driven consistent earnings growth for decades. SoftBank seems to be banking its future on the same strategy and frankly, it’s unclear how much they even care about how competitive their telco is, as shown by this exchange in the same interview with Misra:

Question: What about sectors like telecom?

Misra: Let the dust settle.

What’s next

Our obsession with SoftBank this week is probably going to subside, and we are in the market for our next deep dive topic in tech and finance. Have ideas? Drop us a line at danny@techcrunch.com and arman.tabatabai@techcrunch.com

Thoughts on Articles (i.e. Weekend Reading)

Photo by Darren Johnson / EyeEm via Getty Images

The CIA’s communications suffered a catastrophic compromise. It started in Iran. — This is a great follow-up from Yahoo News’ Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin on one of the most important espionage stories this past decade. The CIA, using an internet-based communications system to connect with spies and sources in the field, failed to keep the security of the system intact, leading to the dismantling of its Iranian, Chinese, and potentially other espionage rings. This article advances the story as we know it from the New York Times’ original piece, and Foreign Policy’s excellent follow up also written by Zach Dorfman. Definitely worth a read from a security/technical audience. (3,200 words)

The $6 Trillion Barrier Holding Electric Cars Back – Don’t read — the answer is infrastructure. (1,000 words, but should be one)

The Rodney Brooks Rules for Predicting a Technology’s Commercial Success – a good reminder that some technologies are much closer to reality than others, and that the key difference between them is our collective experience handling the technology. Rodney Brooks is the right person to cover this subject, although one can’t help but feel that every example is Musk-inspired. (2,800 words)

Uber’s economics team is its secret weapon by Alison Griswold & Soon there may be more economists at tech companies than in policy schools by Roberta Holland, both in Quartz — Griswold does a great job giving an overview of how Uber is using economists not just to improve its product for end users, but also to shape the discussion of public policy around the company. Clearly, Uber is not alone; as Holland notes in her piece, academic economists are very popular in Silicon Valley right now, with salaries that can match the top machine learning experts. (2,750 words and 1,200 words, respectively)

The future’s so bright, I gotta wear blinders – a short piece by Nicholas Carr fighting back against the notion that computing is still “at the beginning.” Many of our devices and pieces of software are already decades old — if they haven’t had an effect on human behavior or productivity, when are they going to? A useful antidote to some ideas we hear from the Valley every single day. (900 words)

The future of photography is code – Yes, yes, I am very late to this – blame Pocket disease. TechCrunch’s own Devin Coldewey writes a candid essay on the transition from improving photography through hardware like lenses to improving photos through computation. The future is looking very bright for beautiful photos, indeed. (2,400 words)

Freedom on the Net 2018 | Freedom House – and if you are looking for some depressing news, Freedom House’s report (which I am also a bit late to) is dreary. China is now increasingly the source of authoritarian internet control technology, and countries across the world are backtracking on internet freedom (including the U.S.) Sobering, but with so much riding on the openness of the internet, we all need to pay attention and build the kind of future for this technology that we want. (32 page PDF with exec summary)

Reading docket

What we are reading (or at least, trying to read)

Articles

• Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer – Nellie Bowles writes about Yuval Noah Harari.
• The New Yorker piece called “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers” (which has been delayed since my paper copy of the New Yorker got eaten by the USPS).
• A new report about China’s military and its deep connections into American academic research

Books

• Eliot Peper’s new science fiction novel Borderless
• Daniel J Hopkins’ The Increasingly United States (about how U.S. elections are more national and less local than ever before).

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LinkedIn Learning now includes 3rd party content and Q&A interactive features

LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social network for the working world with some 580 million users, took a big step into professional development and education when it acquired Lynda.com for $1.5 billion and used it as the anchor for LinkedIn Learning. Now, with 13,000 courses on the platform, LinkedIn is announcing two new developments to get more people using the service. It will now offer videos, tutorials and courses from third parties such as Treehouse and the publishing division of Harvard Business School. And in a social twist, people who use LinkedIn learning — the students and teachers — will now be able to ask and answer questions around LinkedIn Learning sessions, as well as follow instructors on LinkedIn, and see others’ feedback on courses.

Unlimited access to LinkedIn Learning comes when a person pays for LinkedIn’s Premium Career tier which costs around $30/month, or when a company takes an enterprise team subscription for the Learning service. Today, LinkedIn tells me that it has around 11,000 enterprise customers, and it doesn’t break out how much traffic is has overall on LinkedIn, but says that there has been a 64 percent growth in paid learners since the start of 2017 — number that it’s clearly looking to boost with these new features.

James Raybould, the director of product for LinkedIn Learning, said that the third-party expansion will come slowly at first with a handful of partners getting access to integrate with LinkedIn Learning. Over time, this could expand to be a public API for anyone to integrate content, he added, but for now LinkedIn is doing the curating.

Notably, he also said that LinkedIn itself is not planning on curtailing the amount of content it will continue to produce for Learning: it’s currently adding on average more than 70 new courses each week on average, he said.

The content in this first wave of third-party providers feels like a natural extension of the Influencer-based content that LinkedIn has been running in its main newsfeed: it runs the gamut from actual courses to learn new skills in specific disciplines, to the more nebulous area of professional development.

The first group includes Harvard ManageMentor (leadership development courses from Harvard Business School’s publishing arm); getAbstract (a Blinkist-style service that provides 10,000+ non-fiction book summaries plus TED talks); Big Think: 500 short-form videos on topics of the day (these are not so much ‘courses’ as they are ‘life lessons’ — subjects include organising activism and an explainer on how to end bi-partisan politics); Treehouse with courses on coding and product design skills; and Creative Live with courses and tutorials for professionals in the creative industries to improve their skills and business acumen.

The fact that LinkedIn is adding in more learning material that’s a natural extension of the kind of content it already offers to users in their timelines is not the only parallel between main LinkedIn and LinkedIn Learning. Raybould said that to help users discover content that might be most interesting to them, it uses data about what users browse and click on in the regular site.

“We have rich information about the network, including on engagement,” he said, and that helps LinkedIn’s algorithms suggest what to populate in individual learning libraries.

This is also, presumably, one of the reasons why third parties will want to integrate: to get new audiences that are more targeted to the kind of content they are producing:

“At Harvard Business Publishing, we work to create the world best learning experiences to help organizations discover new ways to solve their most pressing leadership development challenges,” said Rich Gravelin, Director, Partnerships and Alliances, at Harvard Business Publishing, in a statement. “As an inaugural partner in the LinkedIn Learning Content Partner Program, we are bringing rich leadership development content to professionals across the globe, helping them navigate today’s complex business landscape. Thanks to the robust platform that LinkedIn Learning has built, we’re able to meet learners where they are and provide them with the unique and personalized learning experiences they need to succeed in their organizations.”

The social features also follow this model. Last year, LinkedIn rolled out a mentorship product across selected markets to pair users with people who can give them steers on their career development. That product set out a precedent for how LinkedIn might use its wider social network and communication features to engage users in different ways, in the name of professional development.

The new addition of Q&A features follows on from that, giving those taking courses or watching videos a way of interacting and following up with those who are doing the teaching. Adding that in could see more engagement across the whole of the Learning product.

It’s a surprise, in a way, that it’s taken this long for LinkedIn to add an interactive Q&A feature in, considering that direct messaging and users interacting with each other has been a cornerstone of the product. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see if it proves to be a compelling enough feature to bring in more users to LinkedIn, luring them away from Udemy’s and Skillsofts of the world.

 

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2QqTbGK LinkedIn Learning now includes 3rd party content and Q&A interactive features Ingrid Lunden https://ift.tt/2JSPqrc
via IFTTT

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Sneaker marketplace GOAT announces an AR-centric Black Friday giveaway

{rss:content:encoded} Sneaker marketplace GOAT announces an AR-centric Black Friday giveaway https://ift.tt/2OzBymk https://ift.tt/2yZvApM November 09, 2018 at 03:00PM

Black Friday giveaways have become a tradition for online sneaker marketplace GOAT. Today it’s announcing the details of this year’s campaign, which will be its first to incorporate augmented reality.

Director of Communications Liz Goodno described this as “the largest digital sneaker event of the year.” The company says it will be offering more than 1,000 prizes, including sneakers like the Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG Shattered Backboard, KAWSx Air Jordan 4 Retro Black, Pharrell x BBC x NMD Human Race Trail Heart/Mind, plus curated sneaker packs and up to $10,000 in GOAT credit.

You can enter the drawing anytime between now and 11:59pm Pacific on Thursday, November 22, with the winners notified at noon on Black Friday.

All participants will receive 100 tickets, but you can earn bonus tickets by visiting locations on an interactive GOAT map, which will highlight spots around the world that are tied to all-time great athletes and to sneaker history. Those locations really are global, and they include “Sneaker Street” in Hong Kong, San Francisco’s Moscone Center (where the iPhone debuted) and the location of Muhammad Ali’s historic victory over George Foreman in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Also on the list are the New York and Los Angeles locations of Flight Club, the famous sneaker retailer that GOAT merged with earlier this year. And you can earn even more tickets by sharing augmented reality graphics that superimpose a “Greatest of All Time” message, or a newspaper highlighting sneaker history, on real-world imagery.

IT Manager Clint Arndt, CEO Eddy Lu

GOAT showed off the AR capabilities at an event with Apple last week at Flight Club New York. The AR elements were built using Apple’s ARKit, and it sounds like the startup plans to do more with the technology in the future.

“We’ve always wanted to incorporate augmented reality technology,” Goodno said, but the challenge, until ARKit, was integrating the technology into the GOAT app. “As a sneaker marketplace there are so many use cases for AR.” (Nike has also been using AR to connect with sneakerheads through its SNKRS app.)

At the event, co-founder and CEO Eddy Lu also talked about the company’s plans beyond AR, saying that “next year, international is a huge thing for us” — which means it’ll be doing more to localize its apps. In addition, it’s getting ready to open its next Flight Club store, this time in Miami.

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Burgerbot startup Creator hires inventor of Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog

Disney Imagineering animatronics wizard Dr. Martin Buehler is a legend in the robotics world. His work leading development of the galloping Big Dog quadruped at Boston Dynamics both inspired and terrified a new generation of makers. But after playing in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction that consumers can’t buy, Buehler has been poached to work on something much more tangible. In fact, it’s edible. He’s joining burger-making robot startup Creator as VP of engineering.

“It was a great experience working on experimental validation [at Boston Dynamics]” Buehler tells me, “But one of the things I really value at Creator is the immediacy of real impact to real people. With burgers being such a big segment of the food market, we have the potential to touch millions of people.” Creator opened its first restaurant to the public in September, selling San Franciscans gourmet hamburgers at a surprisingly low $6 price tag by replacing a kitchen full of cooks with a massive, transparent robot.

Formerly known as Momentum Machines, Creator has raised over $24 million according to SEC filings. It hopes to make fast-food healthier, tastier, and cheaper by saving money on labor to replace preserved ingredients with premium, freshly cut beef, cheese, and veggies. Patrons can choose from several burger styles, and then get to watch their bun sliced and toasted as a conveyor belt slides it beneath dispensers for other fixins. Instead of cooking, the restaurant staff serves a concierge to customers while keeping the robot stocked.

With Buehler’s help, Creator could make the robot more efficient, flexible enough to handle more custom orders, and more delightful to watch…and Instagram. The whole restaurant industry is trying to become more shareable on social media with kitschy decor and plating. But the robot gives Creator natural virality by making the cooking process itself entertainment — like some futuristic Benihana.

Creator’s new VP of Engineering Dr. Martin Buehler

“At Disney I was in charge of robotics at Imagineering. We used advanced robotics and AI to bring walking and talking Disney characters to life so our guests who meet the characters on the silver screen first can meet and interact with them physically in the parks. What I really learned was to position technology as second fiddle to the guest experience” he tells me.

Buehler calls Creator “a stunning symphony of motion —  the visual experience supports the central culinary experience. The downfall of a lot of robotics companies is that they fall in love with the technology and they lose track of what it takes to deliver value to the customer.” Creator’s approach is working so far. The company claims to be hitting its revenue targets and have a higher net promoter score than fast-food favorite Chick-Fil-A.

But the success of the company will depend on its ability to scale. Creator co-founder and CEO Alex Vardakostas reveals that “the next announcement is going to be more burger stores.” That means the Creator contraption can’t be a one-off art piece. “Right now “Right now the task at hand is to make the current robot scalalable — make it cost less and more reliable — so we can provide robots to many more restaurants” Buehler says.

The concern, though, is that Creator could be the tip of the spear of automation decimating employment as food service workers are replaced by bots. Vardakostas grew up flipping burgers himself at his parents’ restaurant, and he believes machines can take care of the dirty and dangerous work that perhaps humans shouldn’t be doing in the first place. The company already pays its service workers $16 and hour, and offers ‘five percent time’ where they can take time to read or learn about the culinary arts. Eventually it hopes to retrain former fast-food cooks in robot maintenance to offer them a path get paid more.

“The basic mission of the founders is to build a company culture focused on learning and personal development. I like the aspect of the service of giving back” Buehler says. “All the team members get coaching to help them grow, not just technically but personally.”

In its pleasant restaurant, seemingly happy workers and its flashy robot team up to make some remarkably delicious burgers. With Buehler’s help, Creator could expand beyond the seemingly fictional world of Silicon Valley and pull people who care about food quality and flare away from McDonalds.

Taste test: Burger robot startup Creator opens first restaurant

https://ift.tt/2RFGwzU Burgerbot startup Creator hires inventor of Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog https://ift.tt/2FaV9da

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SoftBank’s debt, Ford buys Spin, and Chinese coffee is huge money

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week was a blast. Connie and I were in the studio with our guest, True Ventures’s Tony Conrad, while Danny repped the other side of the country, dialing in from New York.

It was another week shaped by news from Asia. Once we had sorted the sartorially expedient, we first turned to the world of SoftBank, this time taking a close look at its debt load. While SoftBank is currently famous for its investments through its Vision Fund, the company is picking up some notable, debt-powered investments into its vehicle that could add to its risk profile.

After all, who doesn’t want more risk as 2018 comes to a close?

Moving on, Ford is doubling-down on its wager that mobility means more than cars, this time picking up Spin for some sum of money between $40 and $100 million, with most figures coming in a bit light from the nine-figure range.

We care as it’s a fresh turn in the scooter skirmish, not to mention the greater micromobility wars. Bird and Lime have a new competitor that has, possibly, super-deep pockets.

Next, we took a peek at Luckin Coffe’s meteoric rise. This is where our guest selection really showed off; Conrad is a former investor in Blue Bottle, making him a functional caffeine expert. We dug through margins, growth, and why venture players are interested in Luckin at all.

And finally, a look at how recently-public companies are selling more shares after their initial debut. So, when it comes to money on the table, don’t fret it too much.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J SoftBank’s debt, Ford buys Spin, and Chinese coffee is huge money https://ift.tt/2zEjmmk

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Sneaker marketplace GOAT announces an AR-centric Black Friday giveaway

Black Friday giveaways have become a tradition for online sneaker marketplace GOAT. Today it’s announcing the details of this year’s campaign, which will be its first to incorporate augmented reality.

Director of Communications Liz Goodno described this as “the largest digital sneaker event of the year.” The company says it will be offering more than 1,000 prizes, including sneakers like the Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG Shattered Backboard, KAWSx Air Jordan 4 Retro Black, Pharrell x BBC x NMD Human Race Trail Heart/Mind, plus curated sneaker packs and up to $10,000 in GOAT credit.

You can enter the drawing anytime between now and 11:59pm Pacific on Thursday, November 22, with the winners notified at noon on Black Friday.

All participants will receive 100 tickets, but you can earn bonus tickets by visiting locations on an interactive GOAT map, which will highlight spots around the world that are tied to all-time great athletes and to sneaker history. Those locations really are global, and they include “Sneaker Street” in Hong Kong, San Francisco’s Moscone Center (where the iPhone debuted) and the location of Muhammad Ali’s historic victory over George Foreman in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Also on the list are the New York and Los Angeles locations of Flight Club, the famous sneaker retailer that GOAT merged with earlier this year. And you can earn even more tickets by sharing augmented reality graphics that superimpose a “Greatest of All Time” message, or a newspaper highlighting sneaker history, on real-world imagery.

IT Manager Clint Arndt, CEO Eddy Lu

GOAT showed off the AR capabilities at an event with Apple last week at Flight Club New York. The AR elements were built using Apple’s ARKit, and it sounds like the startup plans to do more with the technology in the future.

“We’ve always wanted to incorporate augmented reality technology,” Goodno said, but the challenge, until ARKit, was integrating the technology into the GOAT app. “As a sneaker marketplace there are so many use cases for AR.” (Nike has also been using AR to connect with sneakerheads through its SNKRS app.)

At the event, co-founder and CEO Eddy Lu also talked about the company’s plans beyond AR, saying that “next year, international is a huge thing for us” — which means it’ll be doing more to localize its apps. In addition, it’s getting ready to open its next Flight Club store, this time in Miami.

https://ift.tt/2yZvApM Sneaker marketplace GOAT announces an AR-centric Black Friday giveaway https://ift.tt/2OzBymk

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Children are being “datafied” before we’ve understood the risks, report warns

A report by England’s children’s commissioner has raised concerns about how kids’ data is being collected and shared across the board, in both the private and public sectors.

In the report, entitled Who knows what about me?, Anne Longfield urges society to “stop and think” about what big data means for children’s lives.

Big data practices could result in a data-disadvantaged generation whose life chances are shaped by their childhood data footprint, her report warns.

The long term impacts of profiling minors when these children become adults is simply not known, she writes.

“Children are being “datafied” – not just via social media, but in many aspects of their lives,” says Longfield.

“For children growing up today, and the generations that follow them, the impact of profiling will be even greater – simply because there is more data available about them.”

By the time a child is 13 their parents will have posted an average of 1,300 photos and videos of them on social media, according to the report. After which this data mountain “explodes” as children themselves start engaging on the platforms — posting to social media 26 times per day, on average, and amassing a total of nearly 70,000 posts by age 18.

“We need to stop and think about what this means for children’s lives now and how it may impact on their future lives as adults,” warns Longfield. “We simply do not know what the consequences of all this information about our children will be. In the light of this uncertainty, should we be happy to continue forever collecting and sharing children’s data?

“Children and parents need to be much more aware of what they share and consider the consequences. Companies that make apps, toys and other products used by children need to stop filling them with trackers, and put their terms and conditions in language that children understand. And crucially, the Government needs to monitor the situation and refine data protection legislation if needed, so that children are genuinely protected – especially as technology develops,” she adds.

The report looks at what types of data is being collected on kids; where and by whom; and how it might be used in the short and long term — both for the benefit of children but also considering potential risks.

On the benefits side, the report cites a variety of still fairly experimental ideas that might make positive use of children’s data — such as for targeted inspections of services for kids to focus on areas where data suggests there are problems; NLP technology to speed up analysis of large data-sets (such as the NSPCC’s national case review repository) to find common themes and understand “how to prevent harm and promote positive outcomes”; predictive analytics using data from children and adults to more cost-effectively flag “potential child safeguarding risks to social workers”; and digitizing children’s Personal Child Health Record to make the current paper-based record more widely accessible to professionals working with children.

But while Longfield describes the increasing availability of data as offering “enormous advantages”, she is also very clear on major risks unfolding — be it to safety and well-being; child development and social dynamics; identity theft and fraud; and the longer term impact on children’s opportunity and life chances.

“In effect [children] are the “canary in the coal mine for wider society, encountering the risks before many adults become aware of them or are able to develop strategies to mitigate them,” she warns. “It is crucial that we are mindful of the risks and mitigate them.”

Transparency is lacking

One clear takeaway from the report is there is still a lack of transparency about how children’s data is being collected and processed — which in itself acts as a barrier to better understanding the risks.

“If we better understood what happens to children’s data after it is given – who collects it, who it is shared with and how it is aggregated – then we would have a better understanding of what the likely implications might be in the future, but this transparency is lacking,” Longfield writes — noting that this is true despite ‘transparency’ being the first key principle set out in the EU’s tough new privacy framework, GDPR.

The updated data protection framework did beef up protections for children’s personal data in Europe — introducing a new provision setting a 16-year-old age limit on kids’ ability to consent to their data being processed when it came into force on May 25, for example. (Although EU Member States can choose to write a lower age limit into their laws, with a hard cap set at 13.)

And mainstream social media apps, such as Facebook and Snapchat, responded by tweaking their T&Cs and/or products in the region. (Although some of the parental consent systems that were introduced to claim compliance with GDPR appear trivially easy for kids to bypass, as we’ve pointed out before.)

But, as Longfield points out, Article 5 of the GDPR states that data must be “processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to individuals”.

Yet when it comes to children’s data the children’s commissioner says transparency is simply not there.

She also sees limitations with GDPR, from a children’s data protection perspective — pointing out that, for example, it does not prohibit the profiling of children entirely (stating only that it “should not be the norm”).

While another provision, Article 22 — which states that children have the right not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing (including profiling) if they have legal or similarly significant effects on them — also appears to be circumventable.

“They do not apply to decision-making where humans play some role, however minimal that role is,” she warns, which suggests another workaround for companies to exploit children’s data.

“Determining whether an automated decision-making process will have “similarly significant effects” is difficult to gauge given that we do not yet understand the full implications of these processes – and perhaps even more difficult to judge in the case of children,” Longfield also argues.

“There is still much uncertainty around how Article 22 will work in respect of children,” she adds. “The key area of concern will be in respect of any limitations in relation to advertising products and services and associated data protection practices.”

Recommendations

The report makes a series of recommendations for policymakers, with Longfield calling for schools to “teach children about how their data is collected and used, and what they can do to take control of their data footprints”.

She also presses the government to consider introducing an obligation on platforms that use “automated decision-making to be more transparent about the algorithms they use and the data fed into these algorithms” — where data collected from under 18s is used.

Which would essentially place additional requirements on all mainstream social media platforms to be far less opaque about the AI machinery they use to shape and distribute content on their platforms at vast scale. Given that few — if any — could claim not to have no under 18s using their platforms.

She also argues that companies targeting products at children have far more explaining to do, writing: 

Companies producing apps, toys and other products aimed at children should be more transparent about any trackers capturing information about children. In particular where a toy collects any video or audio generated by a child this should be made explicit in a prominent part of the packaging or its accompanying information. It should be clearly stated if any video or audio content is stored on the toy or elsewhere and whether or not it is transmitted over the internet. If it is transmitted, parents should also be told whether or not it will be encrypted during transmission or when stored, who might analyse or process it and for what purposes. Parents should ask if information is not given or unclear.

Another recommendation for companies is that terms and conditions should be written in a language children can understand.

(Albeit, as it stands, tech industry T&Cs can be hard enough for adults to scratch the surface of — let alone have enough hours in the day to actually read.)

Photo: SementsovaLesia/iStock

A recent U.S. study of kids apps, covered by BuzzFeed News, highlighted that mobile games aimed at kids can be highly manipulative, describing instances of apps making their cartoon characters cry if a child does not click on an in-app purchase, for example.

A key and contrasting problem with data processing is that it’s so murky; applied in the background so any harms are far less immediately visible because only the data processor truly knows what’s being done with people’s — and indeed children’s — information.

Yet concerns about exploitation of personal data are stepping up across the board. And essentially touch all sectors and segments of society now, even as risks where kids are concerned may look the most stark.

This summer the UK’s privacy watchdog called for an ethical pause on the use by political campaigns of online ad targeting tools, for example, citing a range of concerns that data practices have got ahead of what the public knows and would accept.

It also called for the government to come up with a Code of Practice for digital campaigning to ensure that long-standing democratic norms are not being undermined.

So the children’s commissioner’s appeal for a collective ‘stop and think’ where the use of data is concerned is just one of a growing number of raised voices policymakers are hearing.

One thing is clear: Calls to quantify what big data means for society — to ensure powerful data-mining technologies are being applied in ways that are ethical and fair for everyone — aren’t going anywhere.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2zEsw1T Children are being “datafied” before we’ve understood the risks, report warns Natasha Lomas https://ift.tt/2SVUsHw
via IFTTT

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Facebook removed 14 million pieces of terrorist content this year, and the numbers are rising

Facebook must exert constant vigilance to prevent its platform from being taken over by ne’er-do-wells, but how exactly it does that is only really known to itself. Today, however, the company has graced us with a bit of data on what tools it’s using and what results they’re getting — for instance, more than 14 million pieces of “terrorist content” removed this year so far.

More than half of that 14 million was old content posted before 2018, some of which had been sitting around for years. But as Facebook points out, that content may very well have also been unviewed that whole time. It’s hard to imagine a terrorist recruitment post going unreported for 970 days (the median age for content in Q1) if it was seeing any kind of traffic.

Perhaps more importantly, the numbers of newer content removed (with, to Facebook’s credit, a quickly shrinking delay) appear to be growing steadily. In Q1, 1.2 million items were removed; in Q2, 2.2 million; in Q3, 2.3 million. User-reported content removals are growing as well, though they are much smaller in number — around 16,000 in Q3. Indeed, 99 percent of it, Facebook proudly reports, is removed “proactively.”

Something worth noting: Facebook is careful to avoid positive or additive verbs when talking about this content, for instance it won’t say that “terrorists posted 2.3 million pieces of content,” but rather that was the number of “takedowns” or content “surfaced.” This type of phrasing is more conservative and technically correct, as they can really only be sure of their own actions, but it also serves to soften the fact that terrorists are posting hundreds of thousands of items monthly.

The numbers are hard to contextualize. Is this a lot or a little? Both, really. The amount of content posted to Facebook is so vast that almost any number looks small next to it, even a scary one like 14 million pieces of terrorist propaganda.

It is impressive, however, to hear that Facebook has greatly expanded the scope of its automated detection tools:

Our experiments to algorithmically identify violating text posts (what we refer to as “language understanding”) now work across 19 languages.

And it fixed a bug that was massively slowing down content removal:

In Q2 2018, the median time on platform for newly uploaded content surfaced with our standard tools was about 14 hours, a significant increase from Q1 2018, when the median time was less than 1 minute. The increase was prompted by multiple factors, including fixing a bug that prevented us from removing some content that violated our policies, and rolling out new detection and enforcement systems.

The Q3 number is two minutes. It’s a work in progress.

No doubt we all wish the company had applied this level of rigor somewhat earlier, but it’s good to know that the work is being done. Notable is that a great deal of this machinery is not focused on simply removing content, but on putting it in front of the constantly growing moderation team. So the most important bit is still, thankfully and heroically, done by people.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2OwyhEo Facebook removed 14 million pieces of terrorist content this year, and the numbers are rising Devin Coldewey https://ift.tt/2DuW3Qa
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