16 May 2018

Watch every panel from TC Sessions: Robotics


Last week at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, TechCrunch held its second TC Sessions: Robotics event. It was a full day of panels and demos, featuring the top minds in robotics, artificial intelligence and venture capital, along with some of the most cutting-edge demonstrations around.

If you weren’t able to attend, though, no worries; we’ve got the full event recorded for posterity, along with breakdowns of what you missed below.

Getting A Grip on Reality: Deep Learning and Robot Grasping

It turns out grasping objects is really hard for a robot. According to Ken Goldberg, professor and chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department, it’s about forces and torques. He and TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Matthew Panzarino also discussed what Goldberg calls “fog robotics.” Goldberg differentiates it from “cloud robotics” in that “you don’t want to do everything in the cloud because of latency issues and bandwidth limitations, quality of service – and there are also very interesting issues about privacy and security with robotics.”

The Future of the Robot Operating System

Fetch Robotics CEO Melonee Wise joined fellow Willow Garage ex-pats Brian Gerkey and Morgan Quigley to discuss Open Robotics’ Robot Operating System (ROS) efforts. The team is working to design and maintain an open and consistent framework for a broad range of different robotic systems.

Eyes, Ears, and Data: Robot Sensors and GPUs

NVIDIA Vice President Deepu Talla discussed how the chipmaker is making a central play in the AI and deep learning technologies that will drive robots, drones and autonomous vehicles of the future.

The Best Robots on Four Legs

Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert announced onstage that the company’s 66-pound SpotMini robot will be available for purchase by the normals in 2019. Yes, one day you, too, will be able to have a dog robot perform services for you at the office or home.

Old MacDonald Needs a Robot

Agriculture is one of the next major fields for robotics, and we brought together some of the top startups in the field. Dan Steere of Abundant Robotics, Brandon Alexander of Iron Ox, Sébastien Boyer of Farmwise and Willy Pell of John Deere-owned Blue River Technology joined us on stage to discuss the ways in which robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems will transform farm work in fields and orchards.

Teaching Robots New Tricks with AI

Pieter Abbeel is the Director of the UC Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and the co-founder of AI software company, covariant.ai. In a broad ranging discussion, Abbeel described the techniques his lab is using to teach robots how to better interact in human settings through repetition, simulation and learning from their own trial and error.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Ayanna Howard of Georgia Tech, Leila Takayama of UC Santa Cruz and Patrick Sobalvarro of Veo Robotics took part in an exploration of the ways in which humans and robots can collaborate in work and home settings. Getting there is a mix of safety and education on both the humans’ and robots’ behalf.

Demos from 254 Lockdown, 1678 Citrus Circuit, Pi Competition: Hercules

Robotics teams from Bellarmine College Preparatory, Davis High School and Hercules High School took to the stage before lunch time to show us what they have been working on. Each team built robots designed to tackle various tasks and the results are impressive.

Venture Investing in Robotics

Renata Quintini of Lux Capital, Rob Coneybeer of Shasta Ventures, and Chris Evdemon of Sinovation Ventures all discussed the excitement around startups venturing into the robotics industry, but were also quite candid about the difficulty robotics founders face who are unfamiliar with a particular industry that they hope could reshape their innovation.

Betting Big on Robotics

Andy Rubin has had a lifelong fascination with robotics. In fact, it was his nickname during his time at Apple that gave the Android operating system its name. After a stint heading a robotics initiative at Google, Rubin is using his role as a cofounder of Playground Global to fund some of the most fascinating robotics startups around. In a one-on-one discussion, Rubin talked about why robotics are a good long- and short-term investment, and why one particular long-legged robot could be the future of package delivery.

From the Lab Bench to Term Sheet

This cute little robot from Mayfield Robotics can blink, play music, turn its head and recharge itself. It can also just stay put to take pictures of you and live-stream your daily life. Yep. It watches you. Its name is Kuri and it can be your little buddy to always remind you that you never have to be alone.

Agility Robotics demonstration of Cassie

Agility Robotics’ bipedal humanoid robot was designed with bird legs in mind. But it wasn’t yet designed with arms. The company’s CTO Jonathan Hurst says those are to come. It’ll cost you $35,000 when it’s in full production mode. Custom deliveries started in August 2017 to a select few universities — University of Michigan, Harvard and Caltech, and Berkeley just bought its own. Although we didn’t see an example of this application, Cassie can apparently hold the body weight of a reasonably sized human.

Autonomous Systems

Safety has long been the focus of the push toward self-driving systems. Recent news stories, however, have cast a pall on the technology, leading many to suggest that companies have pushed to introduce it too quickly on public streets. Oliver Cameron of Voyage and Alex Rodrigues of Embark Trucks joined us to discuss these concerns and setbacks, as well as how the self-driving industry moves forward from here.

Teaching Intelligent Machines

NVIDIA is working to help developers create robots and artificial intelligent systems. Vice president of Engineering Claire Delaunay discussed how the company is creating the tools to help democratize the creation of future robotics.

The Future of Transportation

Chris Urmson has been in the self-driving car game for a long time. He joined Google’s self-driving car team in 2009, becoming head of the project four years later. These days, he’s the CEO of Aurora, a startup that has logged a lot of hours testing its own self-driving tech on the roads. Urmson discussed the safety concerns around the technology and how far out we are from self-driving ubiquity.

Demos of RoMeLa’s NABi and ALPHRED

Humans are bipedal, so why is it so hard to replicate that in a robot, asks Dennis Hong, professor and founding director of RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Library) of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA. One of the reasons he said is because the distance between the left and right legs creates a twisting movement that renders forward and backward movement difficult. The resolution is to have them walk sideways. No twisting. So the team developed NABi (non-anthropomorphic biped), a bipedal locomotion robot with no “feet” or “shins.” To extend the admittedly limited functionality of NABi, the team then created ALPHRED (Autonomous Legged Personal Helper Robot with Enhanced Dynamics). ALPHRED’s limbs, as the team calls them (“not legs, not arms”), form to create multimodal locomotion, because of its multiple types of formations.

Building Stronger Humans

The BackX, LegX and ShoulderX from SuitX serve to minimize the stress we humans tend to place on our joints. We saw the application of these modules onstage. But infinitely more impressive during the conversation with company co-founder Homayoon Kazerooni was the application the audience saw of the company’s exoskeleton. Arash Bayatmakou fell from a balcony in 2012 which resulted in paralysis. He was told he would never walk again. Five years later, Arash connected with SuitX, and he has been working with a physical therapist to use the device to perform four functions: stand, sit and walk forward and backward. You can follow his recovery here.


Read Full Article

Smart Compose: Using Neural Networks to Help Write Emails




Last week at Google I/O, we introduced Smart Compose, a new feature in Gmail that uses machine learning to interactively offer sentence completion suggestions as you type, allowing you to draft emails faster. Building upon technology developed for Smart Reply, Smart Compose offers a new way to help you compose messages — whether you are responding to an incoming email or drafting a new one from scratch.
In developing Smart Compose, there were a number of key challenges to face, including:
  • Latency: Since Smart Compose provides predictions on a per-keystroke basis, it must respond ideally within 100ms for the user not to notice any delays. Balancing model complexity and inference speed was a critical issue.
  • Scale: Gmail is used by more than 1.4 billion diverse users. In order to provide auto completions that are useful for all Gmail users, the model has to have enough modeling capacity so that it is able to make tailored suggestions in subtly different contexts.
  • Fairness and Privacy: In developing Smart Compose, we needed to address sources of potential bias in the training process, and had to adhere to the same rigorous user privacy standards as Smart Reply, making sure that our models never expose user’s private information. Furthermore, researchers had no access to emails, which meant they had to develop and train a machine learning system to work on a dataset that they themselves cannot read.
Finding the Right Model
Typical language generation models, such as ngramneural bag-of-words (BoW) and RNN language (RNN-LM) models, learn to predict the next word conditioned on the prefix word sequence. In an email, however, the words a user has typed in the current email composing session is only one “signal” a model can use to predict the next word. In order to incorporate more context about what the user wants to say, our model is also conditioned on the email subject and the previous email body (if the user is replying to an incoming email).

One approach to include this additional context is to cast the problem as a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) machine translation task, where the source sequence is the concatenation of the subject and the previous email body (if there is one), and the target sequence is the current email the user is composing. While this approach worked well in terms of prediction quality, it failed to meet our strict latency constraints by orders of magnitude.

To improve on this, we combined a BoW model with an RNN-LM, which is faster than the seq2seq models with only a slight sacrifice to model prediction quality. In this hybrid approach, we encode the subject and previous email by averaging the word embeddings in each field. We then join those averaged embeddings, and feed them to the target sequence RNN-LM at every decoding step, as the model diagram below shows.
Smart Compose RNN-LM model architecture. Subject and previous email message are encoded by averaging the word embeddings in each field. The averaged embeddings are then fed to the RNN-LM at each decoding step.
Accelerated Model Training & Serving
Of course, once we decided on this modeling approach we still had to tune various model hyperparameters and train the models over billions of examples, all of which can be very time-intensive. To speed things up, we used a full TPUv2 Pod to perform experiments. In doing so, we’re able to train a model to convergence in less than a day.

Even after training our faster hybrid model, our initial version of Smart Compose running on a standard CPU had an average serving latency of hundreds of milliseconds, which is still unacceptable for a feature that is trying to save users' time. Fortunately, TPUs can also be used at inference time to greatly speed up the user experience. By offloading the bulk of the computation onto TPUs, we improved the average latency to tens of milliseconds while also greatly increasing the number of requests that can be served by a single machine.

Fairness and Privacy
Fairness in machine learning is very important, as language understanding models can reflect human cognitive biases resulting in unwanted word associations and sentence completions. As Caliskan et al. point out in their recent paper “Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases”, these associations are deeply entangled in natural language data, which presents a considerable challenge to building any language model. We are actively researching ways to continue to reduce potential biases in our training procedures. Also, since Smart Compose is trained on billions of phrases and sentences, similar to the way spam machine learning models are trained, we have done extensive testing to make sure that only common phrases used by multiple users are memorized by our model, using findings from this paper.

Future work
We are constantly working on improving the suggestion quality of the language generation model by following state-of-the-art architectures (e.g., Transformer, RNMT+, etc.) and experimenting with most recent and advanced training techniques. We will deploy those more advanced models to production once our strict latency constraints can be met. We are also working on incorporating personal language models, designed to more accurately emulate an individual’s style of writing into our system.

Acknowledgements
Smart Compose language generation model was developed by Benjamin Lee, Mia Chen, Gagan Bansal, Justin Lu, Jackie Tsay, Kaushik Roy, Tobias Bosch, Yinan Wang, Matthew Dierker, Katherine Evans, Thomas Jablin, Dehao Chen, Vinu Rajashekhar, Akshay Agrawal, Yuan Cao, Shuyuan Zhang, Xiaobing Liu, Noam Shazeer, Andrew Dai, Zhifeng Chen, Rami Al-Rfou, DK Choe, Yunhsuan Sung, Brian Strope, Timothy Sohn, Yonghui Wu, and many others.

5 Industries the Internet Is Going to Kill by 2025 (And How It Affects You)

Gfycat starts rolling out 360 degree GIF content


GIFs offer a way to compress a ton of information into a small amount of space, and while Gfycat has positioned itself as more of a short-form video centric platform, it’s going to take a step further to see what a step beyond a standard GIF looks like.

The company today said it would be rolling out 360 degree GIF-like short form videos, which will allow users to plant themselves in the middle of what is effectively a looping video like a GIF. While that presents much more of a challenge to users for generating content, CEO Richard Rabbat said the proliferation of tools like 3D cameras and content from the actual producers like video studios would make it an increasingly popular way to interact with short-form content in a compact form factor.

“We’ve always thought that GIFs are amazing from many perspectives,” Rabbat said. “That goes beyond whether you’re looking at the content to use it in messaging, or you’re consuming it for entertainment value, or you’re using it for decoration in the case of the augmented reality effort we’re working on. We want people to really get excited about how they consume the content to the point where they can see the subjects of the content in a much more lifelike way, and really get excited about that.”

It’s not going to be all that unfamiliar from 360 degree videos you might find on Facebook or other platforms. Users on desktop can use their mouse to move a GIF around, while on mobile devices users can pan their phone around in order to see different parts of the GIF. The idea is to give users a way to have a more robust interaction with a piece of content like a GIF in a compact experience without having to strap on a VR headset or anything along those lines.

The company is starting off by rolling out some 360 degree content from Paramount, which is producing 360 degree content around its Mission Impossible films. And while a lot of content on Gfycat — or other platforms — comes from shows, movies or games along those lines, it makes more sense for those studios to use these kinds of tools to increase awareness for their shows or movies.

via Gfycat

There are a lot of companies working on figuring out the best messaging experiences around GIFs. But Google acquiring Tenor, a GIF search tool that works across multiple platforms, may have set a bare minimum bar for the value of companies that are looking to help users share GIFs with their friends. Gfycat positions itself as something that’s geared toward more creator tools, and recently said it hit 180 million monthly active users.

“We’re creating experiences that we think are going to enable others and inspire others to create that same kind of content,” Rabbat said.” We expect it’s going to be a subset of what people do with 2D, but a much more immersive experience where people will spend more time looking at the content. From a consumption perspective, by not requiring people to put on VR headsets, we’re making it much more consumer friendly.”


Read Full Article

8 Nifty Tips for Managing Your Spotify Playlists


Playlists are a core component of Spotify. Not only does the music streaming service have curated collections of songs to suit specific moods, you can also make playlists of your favorite songs too.

However, managing your Spotify playlists isn’t as simple or straightforward as it could be, so we’ve put together a list of tips to help. Note that most of these tips pertain mainly to Spotify’s desktop apps.

Using these tips, along with our in-depth guide to Spotify, means you should enjoy the music streaming service more than you ever did before.

1. Move or Delete Playlist Songs in Bulk

Manage Spotify Delete Songs from Playlist

There may be times when you want to get rid of songs you no longer like. It’s also convenient to be able to move them around a playlist in batches.

To accomplish this, hold down Ctrl—or Cmd on a Mac—to select multiple songs. Then, drag and drop them to move them. Otherwise, right-click on one chosen track and click Remove From This Playlist.

You can also work with several songs listed consecutively on a playlist. Click the first one, then hold down Shift while you select the last one. That action highlights all tracks between the two. After that, delete or move the block of songs using the steps above.

2. Import an iTunes Playlist Into Spotify

Spotify Playlist Add Source

When using the Spotify desktop app, you can transfer iTunes playlists to Spotify by importing them. First, copy the desired iTunes songs and put them in a desktop folder. Then, launch Spotify and go to Preferences, then Settings. From there, choose Add a Source.

From the file window, choose the folder of iTunes songs from your desktop and click Open. Notice the folder showing in the Spotify source list? Uncheck every other source besides the newly imported folder. While in Spotify, choose File, then New Playlist.

Look in the left-hand pane of Spotify and select the Local Files option. All of your songs recently copied from iTunes and imported into Spotify are there. Select all of them with the Ctrl + A command if you’re using Windows, or Cmd + A if you’re a Mac user. Then paste them into the new playlist. Finally, re-check all of the items in the Spotify source list.

3. Identify the Current Playlist

Spotify Playlist Art

Sometimes, you might hear a tune on Spotify and want to know which playlist features that song. When using the Spotify desktop app, click on the mini album art in the bottom left-hand corner.

Be careful to only click in the bottom half of that picture and not on the upward arrow icon—which only makes the playlist image larger. Clicking in the appropriate section of the playlist image opens that list in Spotify’s main pane, allowing further perusal.

4. Duplicate a Playlist

You can customize your Spotify experience even more by duplicating your playlists. Doing this moves the most recently created one to the top of Spotify’s left-hand panel, which is handy if you want to make that playlist easy to find. Then, you can either delete the original playlist to avoid excess clutter in Spotify, or keep it around if you plan to make significant changes to the duplicate playlist.

To duplicate a playlist, go to File, then New Playlist on the desktop app. Then, find the playlist to duplicate. Click the first song title to select (but not play) the track.

Press Ctrl + A in Windows, or Cmd + A in Mac to select all songs. Finally, click and drag the highlighted songs to the new playlist in the left pane.

5. Quickly Put All Songs Into One Playlist

Playlist Spotify

Most people segment Spotify songs into multiple playlists. However, you can also add all of them into one massive list.

In the Spotify desktop app, go to File, then New Playlist. Next, choose Songs from the Your Music section of the left pane. Click on one track in that section to highlight it. Press the Ctrl + A command in Windows or Cmd + A in Mac to select all songs after that. Finally, drag all of them, while you still have them selected, to your new playlist.

6. Transfer a Playlist to Someone Else

Share Spotify Playlist

Spotify’s Family plan allows up to six household members to get Premium for $14.99/month. And if you have Spotify Family, there’s an easy way for members of a family account to share playlists. It simply requires each person to have WhatsApp or an email account.

First, go to Spotify’s left-hand pane and choose the playlist to share. Click the three-dots icon and select Share. Next, pick either WhatsApp or an email account to send it to the recipient. Once the person gets the playlist, they can use the Download toggle switch associated with the playlist to transfer the songs to their account.

7. Drag Single Songs to Different Parts of Playlists

Spotify Moving Songs Playlist

Amongst the many helpful Spotify tips in this post, you’v learned how to move or delete songs in bulk. However, it’s also possible to move individual songs. By doing that, you can group them by artist, genre, album, or other shared characteristics.

From the Spotify desktop app, click on one song in a playlist to select it. Then, click and drag up or down. Watch for a neon green line that appears. It indicates you can insert the song and rearrange the playlist order. The song you move always appears below the green line in the playlist. Release the mouse or trackpad button when the song is where you want it.

8. Edit a Playlist’s Image

Edit Spotify Playlist Image

The picture associated with a playlist is often an album cover or a band group shot. It may also include other relevant imagery. You might see the image of a waterfall on a nature songs playlist, for example. However, it’s easy to change that image to anything you wish.

Hover your cursor over the existing playlist image and click the Pencil icon. Doing that opens up an Edit Playlist Details box. Click the Choose Image button on the picture on the left. Then, pick a file from your computer and click Open to confirm the selection. Finally, click the green Save button in the Edit Playlist Details box.

If you want to make your Spotify playlists look amazing you can even create your own artwork.

How Do You Manage Your Spotify Playlists?

These simple but effective tips should help you manage your Spotify playlists without any hassle. So, if you have family or friends who regularly use Spotify, consider sharing these tips with them too.

And if you want to learn more about the Premium version of Spotify you should check out our article detailing everything you need to know about Spotify Premium.


Read Full Article

To make Stories global, Facebook adds Archive and audio posts


Facebook’s future rests on convincing the developing world to adopt Stories. But just because the slideshow format will soon surpass feed sharing doesn’t mean people use them the same way everywhere. So late last year, Facebook sent a team to India to learn what features they’d need to embrace Stories across a variety of local languages on phones without much storage.

Today, Facebook will start rolling out three big Stories features in India, which will come to the rest of the world shortly after. First, to lure posts from users who don’t want to type or have a non-native language keyboard, as well as micropodcasters, Facebook Stories will allow audio posts combining a voice message with a colored background or photo.

Facebook Stories will get an Archive similar to Instagram Stories that automatically saves your clips privately after they expire so you can go back to check them out or re-share the content to the News Feed. And finally, Facebook will let Stories users privately Save their clips from the Facebook Camera directly to the social network instead of their phone in case they don’t have enough space.

Facebook Stories Archive

“We know that the performance and reliability of viewing and posting Stories is extremely important to people around the world, especially those with slower connections” Facebook’s director of Stories Connor Hayes tells me. “We are always working on ways to improve the experience of viewing Stories on all types of connections, and have been investing here — especially on our FB Lite app.”

Facebook has a big opportunity to capitalize on Snapchat’s failure to focus on the international market. Plagued by Android engineering problems and initial reluctance to court users beyond U.S. teens, Snapchat left the door open for Facebook’s Stories products to win the globe. Now Snapchat has sunk to its slowest growth rate ever, hitting 191 million daily users despite shrinking in March. Meanwhile, WhatsApp Status, its clone of Snapchat Stories has 450 million daily users, while Instagram Stories has over 300 million.

As for Facebook Stories, it was initially seen as a bit of a ghost town but more and more of my friends are posting there, in part thanks to the ability to syndicate you Instagram Stories there. Facebook Stories has never announced a user count, and Hayes says “We don’t have anything to share yet, but performance of Facebook Stories is encouraging, and we’ve learned a lot about how we can make the experience even better.” Facebook is hell-bent on making Stories work on its own app after launching the in mid-2017, and seems to believe users who find them needless or redundant will come around eventually.

My concern about the global rise of Stories is that instead of only recording the biggest highlights of our lives to capture with our phones, we’re increasingly interrupting all our activities and exiting the present to thrust our phone in the air.

That’s one thing Facebook hopes to fix here, Facebook’s director of Stories Connor Hayes tells me. “Saving photos and videos can be used to save what you might want to post later – So you don’t have to edit or post them while you’re out with your friends, and instead enjoy the moment at the concert and share them later.” You’re still injecting technology into your experience, though, so I hope we can all learn to record as subtly as possible without disturbing the memory for those around us.

Facebook Camera’s Save feature

The new Save to Facebook Camera feature creates a private tab in the Stories creation interface where you can access and post the imagery you’ve stored, and you’ll also find a Saved tab in your profile’s Photos section. Unlike Facebook’s discontinued Photo Sync feature, here you’ll choose to save imagery one at a time. It will be a big help to users lacking free space on their phone, as Facebook says many people around the world have to delete a photo just to save a new one.

Facebook wants to encourage people to invest more time decorating Stories, and learned that some people want to re-live or re-share their clips that expire after 24 hours. That’s why its built the Archive, a hedge against the potentially short-sighted trend of ephemerality.

On the team’s journey to India, they heard that photos and videos aren’t always the easiest way to share. If you’re camera-shy, have a low-quality camera, or don’t have cool scenes to capture, audio posts could get you sharing more. In fact, Facebook started testing voice clips as feed status updates in March. “With this week’s update, you will have options to add a voice message to a colorful background or a photo from your camera gallery or saved gallery. You can also add stickers, text, or doodles” says Hayes. With 22 official languages in India and over 100 spoken, recording voice can often be easier than typing.

Facebook Audio Stories

Some users will still hate Stories, which are getting more and more prominence atop Facebook’s feed. But Facebook can’t afford to retreat here. Stories are social media bedrock — the most full-screen and immersive content medium we can record and consume with just our phones. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself said that Facebook must make sure that “ads are as good in Stories as they are in feeds. If we don’t do this well, then as more sharing shifts to Stories, that could hurt our business.” That means Facebook Stories needs India’s hundreds of millions of users.

There will always be room for text, yet if people want to achieve an emotional impact, they’ll eventually wade into Storytelling. But social networks must remember low-bandwidth users, or we’ll only get windows into the developed world.

For more on Facebook Stories, check out our recent coverage:


Read Full Article

To make Stories global, Facebook adds Archive and audio posts


Facebook’s future rests on convincing the developing world to adopt Stories. But just because the slideshow format will soon surpass feed sharing doesn’t mean people use them the same way everywhere. So late last year, Facebook sent a team to India to learn what features they’d need to embrace Stories across a variety of local languages on phones without much storage.

Today, Facebook will start rolling out three big Stories features in India, which will come to the rest of the world shortly after. First, to lure posts from users who don’t want to type or have a non-native language keyboard, as well as micropodcasters, Facebook Stories will allow audio posts combining a voice message with a colored background or photo.

Facebook Stories will get an Archive similar to Instagram Stories that automatically saves your clips privately after they expire so you can go back to check them out or re-share the content to the News Feed. And finally, Facebook will let Stories users privately Save their clips from the Facebook Camera directly to the social network instead of their phone in case they don’t have enough space.

Facebook Stories Archive

“We know that the performance and reliability of viewing and posting Stories is extremely important to people around the world, especially those with slower connections” Facebook’s director of Stories Connor Hayes tells me. “We are always working on ways to improve the experience of viewing Stories on all types of connections, and have been investing here — especially on our FB Lite app.”

Facebook has a big opportunity to capitalize on Snapchat’s failure to focus on the international market. Plagued by Android engineering problems and initial reluctance to court users beyond U.S. teens, Snapchat left the door open for Facebook’s Stories products to win the globe. Now Snapchat has sunk to its slowest growth rate ever, hitting 191 million daily users despite shrinking in March. Meanwhile, WhatsApp Status, its clone of Snapchat Stories has 450 million daily users, while Instagram Stories has over 300 million.

As for Facebook Stories, it was initially seen as a bit of a ghost town but more and more of my friends are posting there, in part thanks to the ability to syndicate you Instagram Stories there. Facebook Stories has never announced a user count, and Hayes says “We don’t have anything to share yet, but performance of Facebook Stories is encouraging, and we’ve learned a lot about how we can make the experience even better.” Facebook is hell-bent on making Stories work on its own app after launching the in mid-2017, and seems to believe users who find them needless or redundant will come around eventually.

My concern about the global rise of Stories is that instead of only recording the biggest highlights of our lives to capture with our phones, we’re increasingly interrupting all our activities and exiting the present to thrust our phone in the air.

That’s one thing Facebook hopes to fix here, Facebook’s director of Stories Connor Hayes tells me. “Saving photos and videos can be used to save what you might want to post later – So you don’t have to edit or post them while you’re out with your friends, and instead enjoy the moment at the concert and share them later.” You’re still injecting technology into your experience, though, so I hope we can all learn to record as subtly as possible without disturbing the memory for those around us.

Facebook Camera’s Save feature

The new Save to Facebook Camera feature creates a private tab in the Stories creation interface where you can access and post the imagery you’ve stored, and you’ll also find a Saved tab in your profile’s Photos section. Unlike Facebook’s discontinued Photo Sync feature, here you’ll choose to save imagery one at a time. It will be a big help to users lacking free space on their phone, as Facebook says many people around the world have to delete a photo just to save a new one.

Facebook wants to encourage people to invest more time decorating Stories, and learned that some people want to re-live or re-share their clips that expire after 24 hours. That’s why its built the Archive, a hedge against the potentially short-sighted trend of ephemerality.

On the team’s journey to India, they heard that photos and videos aren’t always the easiest way to share. If you’re camera-shy, have a low-quality camera, or don’t have cool scenes to capture, audio posts could get you sharing more. In fact, Facebook started testing voice clips as feed status updates in March. “With this week’s update, you will have options to add a voice message to a colorful background or a photo from your camera gallery or saved gallery. You can also add stickers, text, or doodles” says Hayes. With 22 official languages in India and over 100 spoken, recording voice can often be easier than typing.

Facebook Audio Stories

Some users will still hate Stories, which are getting more and more prominence atop Facebook’s feed. But Facebook can’t afford to retreat here. Stories are social media bedrock — the most full-screen and immersive content medium we can record and consume with just our phones. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself said that Facebook must make sure that “ads are as good in Stories as they are in feeds. If we don’t do this well, then as more sharing shifts to Stories, that could hurt our business.” That means Facebook Stories needs India’s hundreds of millions of users.

There will always be room for text, yet if people want to achieve an emotional impact, they’ll eventually wade into Storytelling. But social networks must remember low-bandwidth users, or we’ll only get windows into the developed world.

For more on Facebook Stories, check out our recent coverage:


Read Full Article

Parsable secures $40M investment to bring digital to industrial workers


As we increasingly hear about automation, artificial intelligence and robots taking away industrial jobs, Parsable, a San Francisco-based startup sees a different reality, one with millions of workers who for the most part have been left behind when it comes to bringing digital transformation to their jobs.

Parsable has developed a Connected Worker platform to help bring high tech solutions to deskless industrial workers who have been working mostly with paper-based processes. Today, it announced a $40 million Series C cash injection to keep building on that idea.

The round was led by Future Fund with help from B37 and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Airbus Ventures and Aramco Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total to nearly $70 million.

The Parsable solution works on almost any smartphone or tablet and is designed to enter information while walking around in environments where a desktop PC or laptop simply wouldn’t be practical. That means being able to tap, swipe and select easily in a mobile context.

Photo: Parsable

The challenge the company faced was the perception these workers didn’t deal well with technology. Parsable CEO Lawrence Whittle says the company, which launched in 2013, took its time building its first product because it wanted to give industrial workers something they actually needed, not what engineers thought they needed. This meant a long period of primary research.

The company learned, it had to be dead simple to allow the industry vets who had been on the job for 25 or more years to feel comfortable using it out of the box, while also appealing to younger more tech-savvy workers. The goal was making it feel as familiar as Facebook or texting, common applications even older workers were used to using.

“What we are doing is getting rid of [paper] notebooks for quality, safety and maintenance and providing a digital guide on how to capture work with the objective of increasing efficiency, reducing safety incidents and increasing quality,” Whittle explained.

He likens this to the idea of putting a sensor on a machine, but instead they are putting that instrumentation into the hands of the human worker. “We are effectively putting a sensor on humans to give them connectivity and data to execute work in the same way as machines,” he says.

The company has also made the decision to make the platform flexible to add new technology over time. As an example they support smart glasses, which Whittle says accounts for about 10 percent of its business today. But the founders recognized that reality could change and they wanted to make the platform open enough to take on new technologies as they become available.

Today the company has 30 enterprise customers with 30,000 registered users on the platform. Customers include Ecolab, Schlumberger, Silgan and Shell. They have around 80 employees, but expect to hit 100 by the end of Q3 this year, Whittle says.


Read Full Article

Gfycat starts rolling out 360 degree GIF content


GIFs offer a way to compress a ton of information into a small amount of space, and while Gfycat has positioned itself as more of a short-form video centric platform, it’s going to take a step further to see what a step beyond a standard GIF looks like.

The company today said it would be rolling out 360 degree GIF-like short form videos, which will allow users to plant themselves in the middle of what is effectively a looping video like a GIF. While that presents much more of a challenge to users for generating content, CEO Richard Rabbat said the proliferation of tools like 3D cameras and content from the actual producers like video studios would make it an increasingly popular way to interact with short-form content in a compact form factor.

“We’ve always thought that GIFs are amazing from many perspectives,” Rabbat said. “That goes beyond whether you’re looking at the content to use it in messaging, or you’re consuming it for entertainment value, or you’re using it for decoration in the case of the augmented reality effort we’re working on. We want people to really get excited about how they consume the content to the point where they can see the subjects of the content in a much more lifelike way, and really get excited about that.”

It’s not going to be all that unfamiliar from 360 degree videos you might find on Facebook or other platforms. Users on desktop can use their mouse to move a GIF around, while on mobile devices users can pan their phone around in order to see different parts of the GIF. The idea is to give users a way to have a more robust interaction with a piece of content like a GIF in a compact experience without having to strap on a VR headset or anything along those lines.

The company is starting off by rolling out some 360 degree content from Paramount, which is producing 360 degree content around its Mission Impossible films. And while a lot of content on Gfycat — or other platforms — comes from shows, movies or games along those lines, it makes more sense for those studios to use these kinds of tools to increase awareness for their shows or movies.

via Gfycat

There are a lot of companies working on figuring out the best messaging experiences around GIFs. But Google acquiring Tenor, a GIF search tool that works across multiple platforms, may have set a bare minimum bar for the value of companies that are looking to help users share GIFs with their friends. Gfycat positions itself as something that’s geared toward more creator tools, and recently said it hit 180 million monthly active users.

“We’re creating experiences that we think are going to enable others and inspire others to create that same kind of content,” Rabbat said.” We expect it’s going to be a subset of what people do with 2D, but a much more immersive experience where people will spend more time looking at the content. From a consumption perspective, by not requiring people to put on VR headsets, we’re making it much more consumer friendly.”


Read Full Article

How to Organize and Improve Your Downloads Folder in 3 Easy Steps


By default, everything you grab from the web gets thrown into your Downloads folder. This means that it can quickly become a jumbled mess.

If your Downloads folder is out of control, here are three tips that can help you improve management and keep it straight. Don’t forget that you can also set a specific download folder by file type.

1. Change the Default Download Location

If you’d like to save downloaded files somewhere else, like your desktop or an external drive, it’s easy to make that change in any browser.

To do it in Chrome, go to Menu > Settings. Scroll to the bottom and choose Advanced. Under the Downloads header, click the Change button next to the Location field to pick a default spot. If you check Ask where to save each file, Chrome lets you pick where each file goes.

Chrome Downloads Location

In Firefox, visit Menu > Options. On the General tab, scroll down to the Files and Applications header. Next to Save files to, select a new folder with the Browse button. You can also check Always ask you where to save files to decide each time.

Deciding where to save files each time lets you separate them by type, thus keeping your Downloads folder cleaner.

2. Save Downloads to Cloud Storage

If you save downloads to your local PC, you might want to think about saving to cloud storage by default. Placing the files in Dropbox, Google Drive, or similar folders on your PC means you’ll have a backup copy of the file shortly after downloading it.

This comes in handy for backing up program installers, which might disappear. It also makes it easy to keep the installers for you favorite software handy—this could help when setting up a new computer. However, note that if you frequently download large files, this could use up your space quickly.

3. Sort Downloads by Date, Not Name

Most file explorers sort files by name by default. While this is useful for many cases, it’s far more useful to sort your Downloads folder by date. This keeps your recently downloaded files at the top for easy access.

To do so, just click the Date header to sort from newest to oldest files.

Windows Sort Downloads By Name

For more, check out some great ideas for managing your PC’s files.

Image Credit: Faithie/Depositphotos


Read Full Article

Index and Atomico back Teatime Games, a stealthy new startup from QuizUp founders


Teatime Games, a new Icelandic “social games” startup from the same team behind the hugely popular QuizUp (acquired in by Glu Mobile), is disclosing $9 million in funding, made up of seed and Series A rounds.

Index Ventures led both, but have been joined by Atomico, the European VC fund founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, for the $7.5 million Series A round. I understand this is the first time the two VC firms have done a Series A deal together in over a decade.

Both VCs have a decent track record in gaming. Index counts King, Roblox and Supercell as previous gaming investments, whilst Atomico also backed Supercell, along with Rovio, and most recently Bossa Studios.

As part of the round, Guzman Diaz of Index Ventures, Mattias Ljungman of Atomico, and David Helgason, founder of Unity, have joined the Teatime Games board of directors.

Meanwhile, Teatime Games is keeping shtum publicly on exactly what the stealthy startup is working on, except that it plays broadly in the social and mobile gaming space. In a call with co-founder and CEO Thor Fridriksson yesterday, he said a little more off the record and on condition that I don’t write about it yet.

What he was willing to describe publicly, however, is the general problem the company has set out to solve, which is how to make mobile games more social and personalised. Specifically, in a way that any social features — including communicating with friends and other players in real-time — enhances the gameplay rather than gets in its way or is simply bolted on as an adjunct to the game itself.

The company’s macro thesis is that games have always been inherently social throughout different eras (e.g. card games, board games, arcades, and consoles), and that most games truly come to life “through the interaction between people, opponents, and the audience”. However, in many respects this has been lost in the age of mobile gaming, which can feel like quite a solitary experience. That’s either because they are single player games or turn-based and played against invisible opponents.

Teatime plans to use the newly-disclosed investment to double the size of its team in Iceland, with a particular focus on software engineers, and to further develop its social gaming offering for third party developers. Yes, that’s right, this is clearly a developer platform play, as much as anything else.

On that note, Atomico Partner Mattias Ljungman says the next “breakout opportunity” in games will see a move beyond individual studios and titles to what he describes as fundamental enabling technologies. Linked to this he argues that the next generation of games companies being developed will “become ever more mass market and socially connected”. You can read much more on Ljungman and Atomico’s gaming thesis in a blog post recently published by the VC firm.


Read Full Article

Index and Atomico back Teatime Games, a stealthy new startup from QuizUp founders


Teatime Games, a new Icelandic “social games” startup from the same team behind the hugely popular QuizUp (acquired in by Glu Mobile), is disclosing $9 million in funding, made up of seed and Series A rounds.

Index Ventures led both, but have been joined by Atomico, the European VC fund founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, for the $7.5 million Series A round. I understand this is the first time the two VC firms have done a Series A deal together in over a decade.

Both VCs have a decent track record in gaming. Index counts King, Roblox and Supercell as previous gaming investments, whilst Atomico also backed Supercell, along with Rovio, and most recently Bossa Studios.

As part of the round, Guzman Diaz of Index Ventures, Mattias Ljungman of Atomico, and David Helgason, founder of Unity, have joined the Teatime Games board of directors.

Meanwhile, Teatime Games is keeping shtum publicly on exactly what the stealthy startup is working on, except that it plays broadly in the social and mobile gaming space. In a call with co-founder and CEO Thor Fridriksson yesterday, he said a little more off the record and on condition that I don’t write about it yet.

What he was willing to describe publicly, however, is the general problem the company has set out to solve, which is how to make mobile games more social and personalised. Specifically, in a way that any social features — including communicating with friends and other players in real-time — enhances the gameplay rather than gets in its way or is simply bolted on as an adjunct to the game itself.

The company’s macro thesis is that games have always been inherently social throughout different eras (e.g. card games, board games, arcades, and consoles), and that most games truly come to life “through the interaction between people, opponents, and the audience”. However, in many respects this has been lost in the age of mobile gaming, which can feel like quite a solitary experience. That’s either because they are single player games or turn-based and played against invisible opponents.

Teatime plans to use the newly-disclosed investment to double the size of its team in Iceland, with a particular focus on software engineers, and to further develop its social gaming offering for third party developers. Yes, that’s right, this is clearly a developer platform play, as much as anything else.

On that note, Atomico Partner Mattias Ljungman says the next “breakout opportunity” in games will see a move beyond individual studios and titles to what he describes as fundamental enabling technologies. Linked to this he argues that the next generation of games companies being developed will “become ever more mass market and socially connected”. You can read much more on Ljungman and Atomico’s gaming thesis in a blog post recently published by the VC firm.


Read Full Article

How to Selectively Apply Color to Black-and-White Photos


Have you seen a photo which was completely black-and-white except for a small splash of color? I am sure the colored area against the black-and-white drew your eye in. The technique is called Selective Coloring, and in this article we’ll use Snapseed (Android, iOS) to selectively apply color to a small area of a black-and-white photo.

Selectively Apply Color to Black-and-White Photos

Selective coloring helps to isolate the main subject of a photo. The contrast of color with black and white seems complicated but it can be done in a few easy steps. Adobe Photoshop uses a mask and Snapseed also follows a similar but easier approach. Let’s start with a colored photo in Snapseed.

You can finetune the photo with the other image editing tools in Snapseed (For e.g. Tools > Tune Image). But if it is perfect, then proceed to the first step of the process:

  1. Tap on Tools > Black & White.
    Apply Black and White Filter
    You can choose from the six effects and also finetune (tap the Tune Image icon) each effect to optimize the difference between color and black and white. Apply the filter with a tap on the Tick icon.
  2. Tap the Layer Settings icon and the View Edits on the menu which opens up.
    Go to Layer Settings
    The Layer Settings icon (the cube with an arrow) is one of the three icons on the top right of the screen. The other two are the Info icon (Circle with i) and App Settings icon (three vertical dots).
  3. A small View Edits window will appear on the bottom right corner of the screen.
    Stacks Brush
    Tap on the Black & White filter and select the Stacks Brush icon in the middle. The Stacks Brush selectively saturates a desaturated image.
  4. In the Brush settings click the Invert icon. Then decrease the black & white parameter to 0 (zero) and then tap on the Mask icon to mask the entire image with a red tint.
    Snapseed Mask
  5. Use your finger as a brush to selectively color the part of the photo you want.

    Zoom in and out of the image to change the size of the brush. For instance, zoom in to reduce the brush size and paint a smaller area. You can also use the blue navigation rectangle on the side to move around the image.
  6. Colored an area by mistake? Increase the Black & White parameter and paint back the red tint of the mask.
  7. Tap the Tick/Check icon to finish. Save the image to your gallery with a tap on Export > Save from the menu.

The best photo editing apps on your mobile can also achieve the same effect, but few do it with the versatility and ease of Snapseed.


Read Full Article

How to Buy Movie Tickets Using Google Assistant


Fandango is probably one of the best apps out there for checking movie times and buying tickets. And now thanks to a new Google Assistant feature, it’s easier than ever to purchase tickets, using almost nothing more than your voice.

The new feature works with Google Assistant enabled phones, as well as working with Google Home (to a certain extent). If you want to purchase tickets using your voice, here’s what you need to do:

  1. Start by saying, “Ok Google, buy me tickets for [movie title].”
  2. Google Assistant will display showtimes at nearby movie theaters.
  3. Say “Buy tickets for [time and movie theater]” or just tap on the selection in the app.
  4. Google will ask you to confirm to buy tickets. You can say how many tickets you want or tap from the available selections: 1 adult, 2 adults, 1 adult and 1 child.
  5. Google will offer up an order summary, including their cost.
  6. Either say or tap “Place order” and then you’ll need to scan your fingerprint to confirm the purchase.

Before step 4, Google will prompt you if you have something else on your calendar scheduled for the same time, and will also prompt you if the theater you’ve selected has reserved seating. If you start the process on Google Home, you’ll still have to complete the purchase on your phone.

The feature is rolling out to Android users, but if it hasn’t hit your phone yet, you can still go through the process up until step 3. At that point, Google Assistant will recommend places you can purchase the tickets: Fandango (if you have the app installed, it will open up), MovieTickets.com, Atom Tickets, and the theater’s website itself.

And if you don’t feel like going out to watch a movie, don’t forget that Fandango is also one of plenty of streaming services for watching movies and TV shows from the comfort of your home.


Read Full Article

The new AI-powered Google News app is now available for iOS


Google teased a new version of its News app with AI smarts at its I/O event last week, and today that revamped app landed for iOS and Android devices in 127 countries. The redesigned app replaces the previous Google Play Newsstand app.

The idea is to make finding and consuming news easier than ever, whilst providing an experience that’s customized to each reader and supportive of media publications. The AI element is designed to learn from what you read to help serve you a better selection of content over time, while the app is presented with a clear and clean layout.

Opening the app brings up the tailored ‘For You’ tab which acts as a quick briefing, serving up the top five stories “of the moment” and a tailored selection of opinion articles and longer reads below it.

The next section — ‘Headlines’ — dives more deeply into the latest news, covering global, U.S., business, technology, entertainment, sports, science and health segments. Clicking a story pulls up ‘Full Coverage’ mode, which surfaces a range of content around a topic including editorial and opinion pieces, tweets, videos and a timeline of events.

 

[gallery ids="1640666,1640660,1640661"]

Favorites is a tab that allows customization set by the user — without AI. It works as you’d imagine, letting you mark out preferred topics, news sources and locations to filter your reads. There’s also an option for saved searches and stories which can be quickly summoned.

The final section is ‘Newsstand’ which, as the name suggests aggregates media. Google said last week that it plans to offer over 1,0000 magazine titles you can follow by tapping a star icon or subscribing to. It currently looks a little sparse without specific magazine titles, but we expect that’ll come soon.

As part of that, another feature coming soon is “Subscribe with Google, which lets publications offer subscription-based content. The process of subscribing will use a user’s Google account, and the payment information they already have on file. Then, the paid content becomes available across Google platforms, including Google News, Google Search and publishers’ own websites.


Read Full Article

Twitter algorithm changes will hide more bad tweets and trolls


Twitter’s latest effort to curb trolling and abuse on the site takes some of the burden off users and places it on the company’s algorithms.

If you tap on a Twitter or real-world celebrity’s tweet, more often than not there’s a bot as one of the first replies. This has been an issue for so long it’s a bit ridiculous, but it all has to do with the fact that Twitter really only arranges tweets by quality inside search results and in back-and-forth conversations.

Twitter is making some new changes that calls on how the collective Twitterverse is responding to tweets to influence how often people see them. With these upcoming changes, tweets in conversations and search will be ranked based on a greater variety of data that takes into account things like the number of accounts registered to that user, whether that tweet prompted people to block the accounts and the IP address.

Tweets that are determined to most likely be bad aren’t just automatically deleted, but they’ll get cast down into the “Show more replies” section where fewer eyes will encounter them. The welcome change is likely to cut down on tweets that you don’t want to see in your timeline. Twitter says that abuse reports were down 8 percent in conversations where this feature was being tested.

Much like your average unfiltered commenting platform, Twitter abuse problems have seemed to slowly devolve. On one hand it’s been upsetting to users who have been personally targeted, on the other hand it’s just taken away the utility of poring through the conversations that Twitter enables in the first place.

It’s certainly been a tough problem to solve, but they’ve understandably seemed reluctant to build out changes that take down tweets without a user report and a human review. This is, however, a very 2014 way to look at content moderation and I think it’s grown pretty apparent as of late that Twitter needs to lean on its algorithmic intelligence to solve this rather than putting the burden entirely on users hitting the report button.


Read Full Article

Lynq is a dead-simple gadget for finding your friends outdoors


If you’ve ever been hiking or skiing, gone to a music festival or state fair, you know how easy it is to lose track of your friends, and the usually ridiculous exchange of “I’m by the big thing”-type messages. Lynq is a gadget that fixes this problem with an ultra-simple premise: it simply tells you how far and in what direction your friends are, no data connection required.

Apart from a couple extra little features, that’s really all it does, and I love it. I got a chance to play with a prototype at CES and it worked like a charm.

The peanut-shaped devices use a combination of GPS and kinetic positioning to tell where you are and where any linked Lynqs are, and on the screen all you see is: Ben, 240 feet that way.

Or Ellie.

No pins on a map, no coordinates, no turn-by-turn directions. Just a vector accurate to within a couple feet that works anywhere outdoors. The little blob that points in their direction moves around as quick as a compass, and gets smaller as they get farther away, broadening out to a full circle as you get within a few feet.

Up to 12 can pair up, and they should work up to 3 miles from each other (more under some circumstances). The single button switches between people you’re tracking and activates the device’s few features. You can create a “home” location that linked devices can point towards, and also set a safe zone (a radius from your device) that warns you if the other one leaves it. And you can send basic preset messages like “meet up” or “help.”

It’s great for outdoors activities with friends, but think about how helpful it could be for tracking kids or pets, for rescue workers, for making sure dementia sufferers don’t wander too far.

The military seems to have liked it as well; U.S. Pacific Command did some testing with the Thai Ministry of Defence and found that it helped soldiers find each other much faster while radio silent, and also helped them get into formation for a search mission quicker. All the officers involved were impressed.

Having played with one for half an hour or so, I can say with confidence that it’s a dandy little device, super intuitive to operate, and was totally accurate and responsive. It’s clear the team put a lot of effort into making it simple but effective — there’s been a lot of work behind the scenes.

Since the devices send their GPS coordinates directly to each other, the team created a special compression algorithm just for that data — because if you want fine GPS, that’s actually quite a few digits that need to be sent along. But after compression it’s just a couple bytes, making it possible to send it more frequently and reliably than if you’d just blasted out the original data.

The display turns off automatically when you let it go to hang by its little clip, saving battery, but it’s always receiving the data, so there’s no lag when you flip it up — the screen comes on and boom, there’s Betty, 450 feet thataway.

The only real issue I had is that the single-button interface, while great for normal usage, is pretty annoying for stuff like entering names and navigating menus. I understand why they kept it simple, and usually it won’t be a problem, but there you go.

Lynq is doing a pre-order campaign on Indiegogo, which I tend to avoid, but I can tell you for sure that this is a real, working thing that anyone who spends much time with friends outdoors will find extremely useful. They’re selling for $154 per pair, which is pretty reasonable, and since that price will probably jump significantly later, I’d say go for it now.


Read Full Article