06 August 2019

Google Images on desktop adds a side panel and feels more purpose-driven


If you’re browsing Google Image search results today, you might notice a new interface element: A sticky side panel that displays any images you click on, providing a closer look at the specific image you want to see, including related images, additional info like ratings, price and in-stock status, ingredients and cooking times, depending on whether you’re searching for products, recipes or something else.

The new side bar replaces a full-width, in-column interface element, with the advantage that the new interface allows you to continue to browse the image result thumbnails returned on the left. Clicking on any other images will replace the one in the sidebar, but you can easily navigate back and forth with your browser’s built-in navigation features, or you can page through the results in sequence using the right and left arrow keys.

These work already for a lot of existing results and products, but developers who want to ensure their product image results likewise provide this info in a way that means Google’s search engine will pick them up can reference this developer documentation to find out how.

[gallery ids="1865212,1865213,1865214"]

Overall, even though this is not a massive change from what came before, it feels directionally like a big deal: Google has been iterating in a very Pinterest-like direction with image search in general, but this feels functionally like a mature product aimed squarely at comparison shopping, hobbyist cooks, decorators and designers. It’s a very different product from what Images used to be, and that probably affords Google a lot more opportunity in terms of how it monetizes image search in future.


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Twilio launches SendGrid Ads and new cross-channel messaging API


At its annual Signal developer conference, Twilio today announced a couple of new features for developers on its core messaging platform and users of its recently acquired SendGrid email service. The new Twilio tools now allow developers to create multi-channel messaging tools and to get real-time streams of conversations in order to run them through transcription services, a translation tool or other machine learning models.

The company’s $3 billion acquisition of SendGrid closed less than half a year ago, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that Twilio would use its biggest event of the year to showcase the service to its developer community.

It’s a bit of an odd one, though. See, SendGrid already announced the beta of SendGrid Ads back in November 2018. As best as I can tell, Twilio SendGrid Ads, which is now launching in beta, is the same product, but a Twilio representative tells me that the ads product is now more deeply integrated into SendGrid Marketing Campaigns, and also got a bit of a redesign. A form of this integration already existed in the previous version, though.

The general idea here is to allow SendGrid users to run multichannel display ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and Google from their SendGrid accounts. The advantage of this, the company argues, is that marketers will be able to use data from their email campaigns and website data to then retarget users on other channels. Similarly, they can use lead ads on Facebook to get potential customers to sign up for their SendGrid mailing list.

SendGrid Ads will cost $50 per month, plus the cost of the ads. SendGrid will also take its own cut of 5% of any media cost over $500.

Screen Shot 2018 11 13 at 8.52.55 AM 960x656

The new developer tools are pretty straightforward. Twilio Conversations, now in public beta, is a new API that allows developers to create solutions that integrate various messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp and other chat tools.

“Over the last two decades, we’ve watched businesses evolve their communications with customers from the phone call, to website chat, to native mobile apps,” said Chee Chew, chief product officer at Twilio. “Leading companies have figured out that the next evolution of great customer experience is through messaging. Twilio Conversations empowers businesses to build personal, long-lived connections with their customers on the channels they prefer.”

Twilio Media Streams does exactly what it promises to do. Previously, you could get a recording to a call. Now, you can tap into the real-time call to analyze that stream in real time. That’s useful for all kinds of AI tools that aim to help call center agents, for example. This service is now also in public beta and will cost $0.004 per minute, in addition to the rest of the fees associated with the call.


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EfficientNet-EdgeTPU: Creating Accelerator-Optimized Neural Networks with AutoML




For several decades, computer processors have doubled their performance every couple of years by reducing the size of the transistors inside each chip, as described by Moore’s Law. As reducing transistor size becomes more and more difficult, there is a renewed focus in the industry on developing domain-specific architectures — such as hardware accelerators — to continue advancing computational power. This is especially true for machine learning, where efforts are aimed at building specialized architectures for neural network (NN) acceleration. Ironically, while there has been a steady proliferation of these architectures in data centers and on edge computing platforms, the NNs that run on them are rarely customized to take advantage of the underlying hardware.

Today, we are happy to announce the release of EfficientNet-EdgeTPU, a family of image classification models derived from EfficientNets, but customized to run optimally on Google’s Edge TPU, a power-efficient hardware accelerator available to developers through the Coral Dev Board and a USB Accelerator. Through such model customizations, the Edge TPU is able to provide real-time image classification performance while simultaneously achieving accuracies typically seen only when running much larger, compute-heavy models in data centers.

Using AutoML to customize EfficientNets for Edge TPU
EfficientNets have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in image classification tasks while significantly reducing the model size and computational complexity. To build EfficientNets designed to leverage the Edge TPU’s accelerator architecture, we invoked the AutoML MNAS framework and augmented the original EfficientNet’s neural network architecture search space with building blocks that execute efficiently on the Edge TPU (discussed below). We also built and integrated a “latency predictor” module that provides an estimate of the model latency when executing on the Edge TPU, by running the models on a cycle-accurate architectural simulator. The AutoML MNAS controller implements a reinforcement learning algorithm to search this space while attempting to maximize the reward, which is a joint function of the predicted latency and model accuracy. From past experience, we know that Edge TPU’s power efficiency and performance tend to be maximized when the model fits within its on-chip memory. Hence we also modified the reward function to generate a higher reward for models that satisfy this constraint.
Overall AutoML flow for designing customized EfficientNet-EdgeTPU models.
Search Space Design
When performing the architecture search described above, one must consider that EfficientNets rely primarily on depthwise-separable convolutions, a type of neural network block that factorizes a regular convolution to reduce the number of parameters as well as the amount of computations. However, for certain configurations, a regular convolution utilizes the Edge TPU architecture more efficiently and executes faster, despite the much larger amount of compute. While it is possible, albeit tedious, to manually craft a network that uses an optimal combination of the different building blocks, augmenting the AutoML search space with these accelerator-optimal blocks is a more scalable approach.
A regular 3x3 convolution (right) has more compute (multiply-and-accumulate (mac) operations) than an depthwise-separable convolution (left), but for certain input/output shapes, executes faster on Edge TPU due to ~3x more effective hardware utilization.
In addition, removing certain operations from the search space that require modifications to the Edge TPU compiler to fully support, such swish non-linearity and squeeze-and-excitation block, naturally leads to models that are readily ported to the Edge TPU hardware. These operations tend to improve model quality slightly, so by eliminating them from the search space, we have effectively instructed AutoML to discover alternate network architectures that may compensate for any potential loss in quality.

Model Performance
The neural architecture search (NAS) described above produced a baseline model, EfficientNet-EdgeTPU-S, which is subsequently scaled up using EfficientNet's compound scaling method to produce the -M and -L models. The compound scaling approach selects an optimal combination of input image resolution scaling, network width, and depth scaling to construct larger, more accurate models. The -M, and -L models achieve higher accuracy at the cost of increased latency as shown in the figure below.
EfficientNet-EdgeTPU-S/M/L models achieve better latency and accuracy than existing EfficientNets (B1), ResNet, and Inception by specializing the network architecture for Edge TPU hardware. In particular, our EfficientNet-EdgeTPU-S achieves higher accuracy, yet runs 10x faster than ResNet-50.
Interestingly, the NAS-generated model employs the regular convolution quite extensively in the initial part of the network where the depthwise-separable convolution tends to be less effective than the regular convolution when executed on the accelerator. This clearly highlights the fact that trade-offs usually made while optimizing models for general purpose CPUs (reducing the total number of operations, for example) are not necessarily optimal for hardware accelerators. Also, these models achieve high accuracy even without the use of esoteric operations. Comparing with the other image classification models such as Inception-resnet-v2 and Resnet50, EfficientNet-EdgeTPU models are not only more accurate, but also run faster on Edge TPUs.

This work represents a first experiment in building accelerator-optimized models using AutoML. The AutoML-based model customization can be extended to not only a wide range of hardware accelerators, but also to several different applications that rely on neural networks.

From Cloud TPU training to Edge TPU deployment
We have released the training code and pretrained models for EfficientNet-EdgeTPU on our github repository. We employ tensorflow’s post-training quantization tool to convert a floating-point trained model to an Edge TPU-compatible integer-quantized model. For these models, the post-training quantization works remarkably well and produces only a very slight loss in accuracy (~0.5%). The script for exporting the quantized model from a training checkpoint can be found here. For an update on the Coral platform, see this post on the Google Developer’s Blog, and for full reference materials and detailed instructions, please refer to the Coral website.

Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Quoc Le, Hongkun Yu, Yunlu Li, Ruoming Pang, and Vijay Vasudevan from the Google Brain team; Bo Wu, Vikram Tank, and Ajay Nair from the Google Coral team; Han Vanholder, Ravi Narayanaswami, John Joseph, Dong Hyuk Woo, Raksit Ashok, Jason Jong Kyu Park, Jack Liu, Mohammadali Ghodrat, Cao Gao, Berkin Akin, Liang-Yun Wang, Chirag Gandhi, and Dongdong Li from the Google Edge TPU team.

Hardware startup North’s big pivot bet on wearable computing and platform shifts


Waterloo, Canada-based hardware startup North is a rare bird when it comes to the tech sector: It began life as an entirely different kind of hardware startup as Thalmic Labs in 2012, and launched a major pivot and re-brand in 2018.

The shift included a new name, and an entirely new product focus. It launched its Focals smart glasses last year, and earlier in 2019 sold the tech behind its original product a gesture control armband called Myo, to CTRL-labs.

This kind of system-shocking directional change can cause whiplash at even far less ambitious software startups, but when I spoke to co-founder and CEO Stephen Lake about the change and the company’s new focus, he spoke of the about-face more as a natural evolution long in the making than a late-stage shift.

“It goes way back when we started Thalmic in 2012,” Lake said. “Actually, we were working on our Myo product, which was an input for heads-up displays, VR headsets, etc. We realized back then, when we were pairing it up with the early versions of [Google] Glass and a whole variety of other displays and smart glasses, that the glasses were so far from being the consumer product that we actually wanted to wear and use. And we said, ‘We think directionally this is going to exist, we think there’s this future where we can bring technology with us into the world end up being less distracted, more present, but still get those benefits we get from computing today.’ Instead of the future of staring at screens, or being cut off in like Ready Player One world in the future, actually bringing technology and make it a seamless part of our world.”

Basically, Lake positions the problem as a kind of classic ‘cart before the horse’ dilemma: How could its interface device for a future class of devices achieve meaningful purchase if that class of devices was off to a slower start than anticipated? A less ambitious startup might’ve refocused on innovating accessories for an established device market, but Lake says his company instead took aim at pioneering an entirely new class of consumer device.


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Ambidexterity: Combining Exploration and Exploitation


Executives often feel a tremendous amount of pressure to reduce their costs by achieving operational efficiencies. At the same time, there is also continuous pressure to implement new ways of working: automation, innovation etc. The solution to such pressure internal (cut costs) & external (available innovation in market) requires being ambidextrous while building your short-term & long-term strategy.
By ambidextrous, I mean a structured road map with defined timelines, RACI matrix etc., which is aligned with the business vision to exploit operational efficiencies and scaling those (efficiencies), while exploring new technologies which can give you competitive advantage in the market. On a side note, I have penned down my thoughts on why it is better to invest in innovation & not in technology. You can read it here
Importance of Ambidexterity
Ambidexterity in planning & strategy becomes necessary when the external environment is diverse, competition is fierce, government regulations are unclear & there is disruptions in technologies (PEST analysis) – requiring enterprises to be flexible all the time and change the way they operate in delta time.
Building Ambidexterity
The plan & layout to integrate ambidexterity into your enterprise is one of the most crucial activities for your sustenance. It effectively boils down to how many parameters (both internal & external) can you study and how effectively can you map them into Termination or Transition.
By Termination, I mean identifying activities, processes, tasks that can be eliminated (which then maps to innovation). By Transition, I mean redesigning, refinement & renovating these activities, processes or tasks (which maps to scaling operational efficiencies).
Note of Caution
Ambidexterity, though, allows you to be flexible and nimble in your short-term or long-term strategies, it is very difficult to master.
The struggle to adopt ambidexterity is going to rise (as the analysis of PEST framework leads you with very uncertain results). The division of your enterprise into Termination & Transition is the stepping-stone towards facing the dynamism of the business environment. Acting now can be useful; else, your enterprise may risk being overtaken by an ambidextrous competitor.

Trump attacks Google and Sundar Pichai in morning tweets


The President of the United States of America kicked off the morning with a series of tweets criticizing one of the country’s largest corporations for alleged ties to election tampering and China’s military. In a thread that would have been regarded as a remarkable occurrence under any other administration, Donald J. Trump called out Google by name, tagging CEO Sundar Pichai for good measure.

“[Pichai] of Google was in the Oval Office working very hard to explain how much he liked me, what a great job the Administration is doing, that Google was not involved with China’s military, that they didn’t help Crooked Hillary over me in the 2016 Election,” the President tweeted, “and that they […] are NOT planning to illegally subvert the 2020 Election despite all that has been said to the contrary.”

Trump cited a Lou Dobbs Fox Business Network interview with Peter Schweizer, Breitbart editor and the president of conservative think tank, the Government Accountability Institute. “[Schweizer] stated with certainty that they suppressed negative stories on Hillary Clinton, and boosted negative stories on Donald Ttump [sic],” Trump tweeted. “All very illegal. We are watching Google very closely!”

The tweets are the latest in an on-going series of public criticisms of Google and other U.S.-based social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Trump and fellow republicans have long accused the services of a liberal bias, suggesting that they have “shadow banned” and otherwise repressed conservative voices.

The President’s latest salvo can be linked to comments from Kevin Cernekee a fired Google engineer who has been making the conservative news rounds this week. “They really want Trump to lose in 2020,” he recently told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. “That’s their agenda.”

Google vehemently denied Cernekee’s claims in a statement offered to TechCrunch this morning.

“The statements made by this disgruntled former employee are absolutely false,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We go to great lengths to build our products and enforce our policies in ways that don’t take political leanings into account. Distorting results for political purposes would harm our business and go against our mission of providing helpful content to all of our users.”

Conservative Google employees have claimed that Cernekee led conversations within the company tied to alt-right beliefs — claims he has since denied. “These are false and baseless smears from a jealous and vindictive ex-colleague,” the former Google engineer said in a statement. “I have always supported free speech and opposed white nationalism.”

Cernekee says he was fired from the company for his conservative views. Google maintains he was let go for violating multiple company policies, including downloading internal Google documents on a personal device.


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AT&T rolls out (limited) 5G in (parts of) New York City


Both Verizon and Sprint have been promising 5G coverage in the nation’s largest city for some time now. AT&T this morning, however, said it’s starting to do just that. The U.S.’s largest carrier by subscribers announced limited availability of 5G coverage in New York City.

The typical not-so-fine print applies to the news this morning. The service will be limited to business users at launch — and only available in a select number of areas. In other words, don’t go running out and buying a 5G phone just yet, if you’re an AT&T customer in the five boroughs.

On the plus side, 5G+ is the real deal, unlike the deceptively named 5GE that came before it. And AT&T’s being reasonably transparent about the limited nature of the roll out.

“As a densely-populated, global business and entertainment hub, New York City stands to benefit greatly from having access to 5G, and we’ve been eager to introduce the service here,” AT&T’s New York President Amy Kramer said in a release. “While our initial availability in NYC is a limited introduction at launch, we’re committed to working closely with the City to extend coverage to more neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs.”

Per CNET, the rollout is limited to a small section of Manhattan for the time being, including, “near and around East Village, Greenwich Village and Gramercy Park.” Business users can access the service using Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G on the carrier’s Business Unlimited Preferred plan.


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OnePlus’ first 5G handset is headed for Sprint


Sprint href="https://newsroom.sprint.com/sprint-to-launch-5g-smartphone-from-oneplus.htm"> this morning announced that it will be the first network to get its hands on OnePlus’s long-promised 5G handset [not pictured]. The Shenzhen-based manufacturer announced late last year that it was targeting 2019 for the device, bucking the trend of being slightly behind the curve on the latest smartphone technologies.

Sprint’s not offering much in the way of actual information here — no pricing or availability. Not even specs or a device name were made available via the press release. Rather, the carrier notes that this is its first 5G smartphone, joining three other non-phone 5G devices for the nascent network.

Last year OnePlus made a device available for the first time through a U.S. carrier, partnering with T-Mobile for the 6T. It’s made the jump to Sprint this time out, though given merger plans, that distinction may soon be moot regardless.


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Snap looks to raise $1 billion in private debt offering


Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, is looking to add some cash to its coffers via a new proposed private offering of $1 billion in convertible senior notes, with a due date for maturation of August 1, 2026. The debt offering will be used to cover the cost of general operating expenditures involved in running the business, Snap says, but also potentially to “acquire complementary businesses, products, services or technologies,” as well as possibly for future stock repurchase plans, though no such plans exist currently.

Raising debt to fund operations and acquisitions is not unusual for a publicly traded company – Netflix does this regularly to pick up more money to fund its increasingly expensive production budget for content, for instance. So far, the market seems to be reacting negatively to the news of Snap’s decision to seek this chunk of debt funding, however, as it’s down in pre-market trading.

Snap has generally been on a positive path in terms of its relationship with stockholders, however – its stock price rose on the back of a strong quarterly earnings report at the end of July, closing above its IPO price for the first time. It’s now dipped south of that mark again, but it’s still much-improved on a year-to-date timeline measure.


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Walmart-owned Flipkart bets on free video streaming service and Hindi support to win next 200 million internet users in India


India’s e-commerce giant Flipkart said on Tuesday that it is revamping its shopping app to add support for Hindi language, a video streaming service, and an audio-visual assistant, the latest in a series of recent efforts to expand its reach in the country.

The Walmart-owned company, which leads the local market, told TechCrunch that it has started to rollout the features on its shopping app and will push it to all its existing users in within next 20 days.

Only 10% of India’s 1.3 billion people speak English. Flipkart said it has been working to customize its entire platform for several months to add support for Hindi. As part of the revamp, the company is also introducing an “audio visual guided navigation” feature, also built in Hindi, that is aimed at first time internet users — and existing online users not comfortable with making transactions online — to make it easier for them to navigate the site and place orders.

As part of the accessibility push, Flipkart is also introducing an in-app video streaming feature dubbed ‘Flipkart Videos,’ that will syndicate movies, shows, and other long-form and short form content from a number of production houses and movie studios, the company said.

Its rival Amazon India added support for Hindi last year, though the feature is limited to basic text translation.

The inclusion of video streaming feature comes as Indians’ appetite for consuming media content on the internet has ballooned in the recent years. Hotstar, a Disney-owned video streaming service, has amassed more than 300 million monthly active users in the country.

Flipkart said the video streaming feature will enable it to invite a new segment of users to its platform who are online but don’t currently shop on the internet. Even as more than 500 million users are connected to the web in India, only tens of millions of them currently shop there. The streaming feature will be accessible to all users at no charge without any loyalty program, a company spokesperson said, refuting a recent media report that claimed the feature will be limited to loyalty customers.

“In the past 10 years our vision and ethos have been to solve for ‘Real India,’ create India specific tech solutions, here in India. What we are rolling out when it comes to addressing the needs of the next 200 million users in our country, is taking forward those founding principles of access and affordability,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Group CEO of Flipkart, in a statement.

“We strongly believe that the next phase of our growth is rooted in loyalty , democratizing e-commerce and the country will continue seeing more innovations that stem from our deep understanding of Indian consumers, especially middle India.”

Flipkart said it is also attempting to make it easier for users to discover items on its app. So it is introducing a feed called ‘Flipkart Ideas’ that will populate short form videos, animated images, polls and quizzes.

For instance, a user may see a short form video that shows a sportsperson wearing a pair of sneakers, a t-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a cap. If they tap on the video, they will see the exact items the person in the video is wearing and other similar items. One more tap, and the user would be able to purchase any of those items.

The company said it is working with more than 400 influencers and 30 brands to create content that will appear on the feed.

All of these features, as well as a gaming section that Flipkart introduced last year, will now appear at the bottom of the screen for easier navigation, the company said. More than half a million users in India play mini-games on Flipkart everyday. The company said it will introduce more games to boost engagement levels and offer loyalty points as incentive to customers.


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Squad, the ‘anti-bro startup,’ is creating a safe space for teenage girls online


When we go online to communicate, hang out or play, we’re typically logging on to platforms conceived of and built by men.

Mark Zuckerberg famously created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. Evan Spiegel and his frat brother Bobby Murphy devised a plan for the ephemeral messaging app Snapchat while the pair were still students at Stanford. Working out of a co-working space, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built Instagram and yes, they also went to Stanford.

Seldom have social tools created by women climbed the latter to mainstream success. Instead, women and girls have battled the lion’s share of digital harassment on popular social platforms — most of which failed early-on to incorporate security features tailored to minority user’s needs — and struggled to find a protected corner of the internet.

Squad, an app that allows you to video chat and share your phone screen with a friend in real-time, has tapped into a demographic clamoring for a safe space to gather online. Without any marketing, the startup has collected 450,000 registered users in eight months, 70% of which are teenage girls. So far this year, users have clocked in 1 million hours inside Squad calls.

“Completely accidentally we’ve developed this global audience of users and it’s girls all over the world,” Squad co-founder and chief executive officer Esther Crawford tells TechCrunch. “In India, it’s girls. In Saudia Arabia, it’s girls. In the U.S., it’s girls. Even without us localizing it, girls all over the world are finding it.”

Squad screens

Squad, the social screen sharing and group video chat app, has pulled together a $5 million investment led by First Round Capital.

Learn from the best but get rid of the shit

A remote team of six people led by Crawford, who’s a graduate of Oregon State University, Squad’s compelling founding story and organic growth helped them close a $5 million seed round led by First Round Capital general partner Hayley Barna, the only female partner at the historically all-male early-stage investment fund known for being the first institutional check in Uber.

Betaworks, Alpha Bridge Ventures, Day One Ventures, Jane VC, Mighty Networks CEO Gina Bianchini, early Snapchat employee Sebastian Gil and Y Combinator, the startup accelerator program Squad completed in the winter of 2018, have also participated in the funding round.

“We want to be a place where girls can come and hang out,” -Squad co-founder and CEO Esther Crawford.

Crawford describes Squad, which she’s built alongside her co-founder and chief technology officer Ethan Sutin, as the “anti-bro startup.” Not only because it’s led by a woman and boasts a cap table that’s 30% women and 30% people of color, but because she’s completely rewriting the consumer social startup playbook.

“We are trying to learn from the best in what they did but get rid of the shit,” Crawford said, referring to Snap, WhatsApp, Twitch and others. Twitch, a live-streaming platform for gamers, has become a social gathering place for Gen Z, she explains, but like many other communities on the internet, it’s failed its female users.

“Girls have been completely pushed off of Twitch,” she said. “The Twitch community didn’t want them there and they weren’t friendly to them. For boys, there are places you can go to consume content with other people, like Fortnite, but for girls there hasn’t been a place that’s really broken out. We want to be a place where girls can come and hang out.”

What Crawford and the small team at Squad have realized is that you don’t have to sacrifice growth for user safety and comfort. From the beginning, Squad has made sure users could easily block and report inappropriate behaviors and users, a feature that was an afterthought on many other social tools. They also made users unsearchable unless another user knows their exact username. By prioritizing the security of its primarily female audience, Squad is betting girls will continue coming back to the app and telling their friends about it.

“It’s possible to make girls feel safe and still have growth as a consumer product,” she said. “If people don’t feel safe on your app, they won’t stick around long-term.”

A new playbook

Squad quietly launched in January after pivoting away from building an information-sharing tool called Molly, which was backed with $1.5 million from BBG, Betaworks, CrunchFund and Halogen Ventures. Crawford’s now 14-year-old daughter unintentionally inspired the transition, when she proposed her mom create an app where she could peer into her best friend’s phones from afar.

IMG 2588

This reporter and Squad CEO Esther Crawford discuss the startup’s growth via Squad video chat.

Using Squad, people can browse memes, pore through DMs, plan a trip on Airbnb, peruse Tinder or a photo album with a friend via its video chat and screen share features. As Crawford describes it, it’s all the stuff you don’t want to post to Snap or Instagram but want to show your best friends. An app that may seem frivolous or non-essential seems to have quickly become a space online where girls can are opting to spend hours intimately engaged with their friends — without fear of stumbling into a troll.

“People can use this digital tech to hang out together instead of it being so performative,” Crawford said.

The downside of Squad’s screen sharing capabilities is a user can view another user’s Facebook friend’s profile, even if, say, they themselves were blocked from viewing that content. Most apps are available for viewing through screen share aside from premium video streaming apps like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, so its entirely possible someone could use Squad solely for the purpose of viewing social content they are otherwise barred from seeing. In response to this possibility, Crawford says they are considering alerting users when their Squad chat’s been screen-shotted. To avoid additional privacy issues, Squad users can’t record or save anything from their calls or replay what happened on Squad.

Like many early-stage startups, the company isn’t making any money yet because the app is free and without ads. As soon as next year, however, Squad plans to monetize the product with in-app purchasing, scraping another rule from the consumer social playbook that has long encouraged companies to expand their user base first before trying to profit off users at all. (See: The Snapchat Monetization Problem).

Techno-optimism

Crawford, a product marketing veteran, grew up in a cult in Oregon where girls were barred from wearing makeup and from watching television or listening to music. But because the internet was so early, the dangers of it were yet to be discovered and miraculously, she was allowed to go online. Quickly, she made connections with people all over the world thanks to everyone’s favorite messaging tool at the time, AOL Instant Messenger.

The experience planted in her a deep love for the internet and a desire to share her life online. After developing a community through AIM, Crawford became one of the very first original content creators on YouTube and garnered millions of views on her videos. Without trying, she became an influencer, long before the term entered the zeitgeist.

Squad Screensharing1

She used her newfound digital prowess to launch one of the first social marketing agencies, where her clients included Weight Watchers and K-Mart, legacy brands that had no idea how to tap into her native digital communities. Ultimately, Crawford landed in the tech startup world, hopping from Series A startup to Series A startup, offering up her product marketing skills before her daughter’s idea prompted her to go into business on her own again.

“I’m a techno-optimist and yet, so many of these tech companies we thought were going to connect people turned out to have accidentally made people more lonely,” she said. “With a different lense and approach, I thought there could be an app that built bridges.”

Now with a new bout of funding, Squad can implement strategic marketing campaigns, continue adding integrations with complementary platforms (the startup has just announced a new integration with YouTube) and hire product designers. The next few years will be critical to Squad’s success as it looks to young people to give them a permanent spot on their home screen.

For Crawford, what’s most important, aside from growing group of teenagers using Squad, is to make sure only good people see a big payday thanks to her great idea: “I am ready to do everything I can to make Squad successful and make sure our success has a positive downstream effect so that we have great people on our team that get rich off our success.”


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4 Over-Ear Wireless Headphones That Are Worth Your Money


Earbuds are great when you’re listening casually. But if you want to really hear your music, nothing beats the audio quality of over-ear headphones. Whether you love drum and bass or want to relax with some classical melodies, these wireless headphones should provide the perfect soundtrack — now with up to 75% off MSRP at MakeUseOf Deals.

Sennheiser PXC 550 Over-Ear Bluetooth ANC Headphones

These award-winning Sennheiser headphones deliver exceptional sound quality and 30 hours of battery life. They automatically switch on when you unfold them, and a touch-sensitive trackpad allows you to control playlists with ease. You can get the Sennheiser PXC 550 now for just $349.95.

 

Sennheiser PXC 550 Over-Ear Bluetooth ANC Headphones – $349.95

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TREBLAB Z2 Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones

With high-performance neodymium-backed 40mm speakers and 35 hours of battery life, it’s easy to see why the TREBLAB Z2s are an Amazon Choice Product. They also provide T-Quiet active noise-cancelling technology, and their ergonomic design is comfortable to wear all day. Worth $259.99, they are now just $78.99 on a double price-drop.

 

TREBLAB Z2 Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones – $78.99

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1Voice AXR Active Noise-Cancelling Bluetooth Headphones

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Cowin E7 Active Noise-Cancelling Bluetooth Headphones

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5 Free Google Games to Play and Learn, for Both Kids and Adults 


free-google-games

From a recreation of the popular Carmen Sandiego game to a PC game that teaches you to build your own game, here are five new Google games you should check out.

Google has always released hidden games and Easter Eggs throughout its range of products. For example, to celebrate Wimbledon 2019, the fine folks at Google search launched a hidden Wimbledon tennis game, much like the classic Pong. Search “Wimbledon 2019 scores” and in the search results page, scroll to the end of the scores box to find it.

Whether it’s a game to teach you a new skill or just a fun recreation of a classic, these are the new Google games you should try out.

1. Carmen Sandiego Trilogy (Web, Android, iOS): Geography Game on Google Earth

Play Google Earth's new remake of the classic Carmen Sandiego game for free

Google partnered with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, makers of the classic geography-based game Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, to create a new series of games. These games unfold on Google Earth.

Much like the original games, you are a detective whose job is to track renowned thief Carmen Sandiego. You will travel to different cities on Earth. In each city, you will have to visit different famous locations to ask the locals for clues about what Carmen did there. Based on their clues, you have to figure out which country she went to next.

It could be the colors of a flag Carmen enquired about or a famous landmark or animal that indicates a certain country. Check options for where you can fly to, figure out where she went, and follow her.

For those who are new to the Carmen Sandiego games, this will be a fun test. Fans of the classic series will love this modern recreation. The only thing missing is that iconic theme music.

Here are the direct links to the three chapters:

To play it on mobile, you’ll need the Google Earth app for Android or iOS. You can open the above links in it to play the games.

Download: Google Earth for Android | iOS (Free)

2. Morse Code Games (Android, iOS): Learn Morse Code and Play Games

Morse Code Training Game

One of the recent Google Experiments focused on teaching people how to use Morse Code, which uses dots and dashes to convey letters of the alphabet. It revolutionized telegraphs but is now part of assistive technology.

Developer Tania Finlayson partnered with Google to develop a Morse Code training game. The game is part of the GBoard mobile keyboard for Android and iOS. The game teaches you Morse Code by showing you the correct sequence of dots and dashes to indicate a letter and hl by associating it with an image. Once you think you’ve mastered it, try the little quiz to test yourself.

But the more fun part is the Hello, Emmett web-based game. You have to figure out the correct path to the exit through a maze, but at the same time, you also have to remember Morse Code. Each path has different letters. Type the correct letter’s Morse Code, or you’re going to get lost.

Download: GBoard for Android | iOS (Free)

3. Semantris (Web): Word Association with AI

Semantris is an AI based word association game by Google for people who love the English language

Semantris is a treat for people with a love for the English language. There are two versions of the game, both offering a whole new take on classic word association games.

Semantris, a part of Google’s AI experiments, shows you a collection of words on the screen. You must type a word that is related to the highlighted words. The closer the words are, the faster Semantris’s AI will connect the two and earn you points. These connections are based on how people often use certain words together in a sentence or a paragraph. In short, it’s word association, not synonyms.

The challenge is two-fold: either find words that the AI can quickly associate with, or find words that the AI can’t mix up with. And that’s why there are two games, Semantris Arcade and Semantris Blocks.

Semantris Arcade is a time-based game that’s all about speed. Be as fast as possible with the word association and remove the highlighted words before the stack of words reaches the top of the board.

Semantris Blocks is like Tetris. The blocks are already in place, and more are falling from the top. Remove the correct blocks—just remember that blocks connected by the same color are all removed together when you get one of them.

It’s more of a puzzle game than just word association alone.

4. Google Maps Snake (Web): Classic Snake on a Google Map

Play the classic Snake game as a new Google Maps version

For April Fool’s Day 2019, Google released a fun little game. It recreated the classic Snake game, but with a Google Maps twist.

The “snake” now is a form of public transport in a popular location, like the red buses of London, the trams of San Francisco, or the iconic trains of Tokyo. And instead of the snake eating food, your public transport is going to pick up passengers. Once in a while, you pick up landmarks too, upping your geography knowledge.

All of this happens on an 8-bit pixel map of the location. Pick up as many passengers as you can and avoid the sides. Use the arrow keys on desktop, and swipe in the desired direction on mobiles. There’s nothing more to it, but hey, who can resist a good game of snake.

5. Google Game Builder (Windows, macOS): Build a Game Without Coding

Google's Game Builder on Steam lets anyone build a game without any coding or design skills

Do you have an idea for a kickass video game, but don’t have the programming knowledge or design skills to make it happen? Google’s free Game Builder lets you get started without needing either of those.

You will immediately be familiar with Game Builder if you have played Minecraft or Fortnite. It’s a blocks-based building game where you construct your own world for anyone to play in. There is a tremendous variety of 3D characters and avatars available to populate the game, along with an even larger variety of material tools.

How the game will work depends upon you. You can add interactions through basic if-this-then-that mechanisms, such as a camera shake if a character crashes into something. Whether a child or an adult, it’s an easy game to get into and start building the game world you always imagined.

Google Game Builder is available for free through Steam on Windows and macOS. It does not work with Linux, for now.

Download: Google Game Builder for Windows | macOS (Free)

Have You Played These Secret Google Games?

Google has publicly acknowledged the launch of these aforementioned games to draw some interest among gamers. But that’s not always Google’s style. Like with the Wimbledon game, it sometimes lets people discover these Easter Eggs.

You’d be surprised by how often Google does this. Today, there are at least eight secret Google games worth playing, and that’s in Google Search alone. There are bound to be more if you search through YouTube and other Google products.

Read the full article: 5 Free Google Games to Play and Learn, for Both Kids and Adults 


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Avoid Distractions With 8 Android Apps That Help You Focus

9 Discord Tips and Tricks All Users Should Know


discord-tips-tricks

Discord has become one of the leading chat platforms on the web. However, the more you know about it the more you can get out of it. So here are our Discord tips and tricks.

Discord started life as a service for gamers, but its impressive list of features has helped it grow into other areas. Today, it’s used by everyone from businesses to crypto investors.

Using Discord is simple, but if you know where to look there is more to Discord than meets the eye. With that in mind, here are some Discord tips and tricks that all users should know.

1. Integrate Discord With Other Apps

discord connections options

Discord has some built-in integrations with other common apps. You just need to enable the connections to reap the benefits.

In total, 11 different apps are supported. They are Twitch, YouTube, Blizzard Entertainment, Skype, League of Legends, Steam, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, and Xbox Live.

The features of each integration vary from app-to-app. However, they all provide a way to sync the data from the linked app directly into your Discord server.

To set up Discord integrations from your desktop app, go to User Settings > Connections and click on the apps’ icons.

2. Control Your Discord Notifications

mute discord channel

If you are a member of lots of Discord servers, your notifications can quickly spiral out of control. Opening the app to discover thousands of unread messages isn’t helpful; you can’t possibly parse that amount of information.

Thankfully, Discord lets you take a granular level of control over your notifications. You can edit your preferences at the server level, the channel level, and the user level.

To edit your general notification settings (such as unread notification badges and desktop messages), go to User Settings > Notifications. If you want to turn off notifications for an entire server, right-click on the server’s icon and select Server Mute.

Finally, if you only want to turn off alerts for a particular channel, right-click on the channel’s name and choose Mute [Channel Name].

3. Use Server Folders in Discord

In July 2019, Discord added support for server folders; it was a feature that users had been requesting for years. By using server folders, you can organize your list of servers on the left-hand side of the screen into more manageable groups. For people who are members of dozens of different groups, the folders make the app much easier to use.

To create a new server folder, drag one server’s icon on top of another server’s icon. And if you right-click on the newly created folder, you can rename it, change its color, and tweak other settings.

4. Use Markdown in Discord

Discord lets you write in markdown to format your messages the way you want. For the uninitiated, Markdown is a lightweight markup language created in 2004. It has many applications, however, it is most commonly used to create rich text using a plain text editor.

Here are some of the most common markdown writing tips you should know about:

  • Bold: **[TEXT]**
  • Italics: *[TEXT]* or _[TEXT]_
  • Underscore: __[TEXT]__
  • Strikethrough: ~~Strikethrough~~
  • Code: `[TEXT]`
  • Hyperlink: [Hyperlink!]([URL])
  • Remove embeds: <[URL]>

Use these codes liberally, and you’ll be able to make your messages stand out from the crowd.

5. Set Up Keybinds in Discord

Keybinds let you set which keys activate certain in-app actions. You can either set up a single key or a combination of keys.

They are available for the following actions:

  • Activate Overlay Chat
  • Push to Talk (Normal)
  • Push to Talk (Priority)
  • Toggle Mute
  • Toggle Deafen
  • Toggle VAD
  • Toggle Streamer Mode
  • Toggle Overlay
  • Toggle Overlay Lock

To set up keybinds, go to User Settings > Keybinds. Click on Record Keybind to enter your preferred combinations.

6. Use Discord Keyboard Shortcuts

As you’d expect, Discord offers a bunch of keyboard shortcuts. Expert users rely on them a lot; if you’re involved in lots of simultaneous chats, you need to be able to bounce between them quickly.

Some Discord shortcuts that are worth knowing include:

  • Switch servers: Ctrl + Alt + Up/Down
  • Switch channels: Alt + Up/Down
  • Cycle through unread messages: Alt + Shift + Up/Down
  • Mark channel as read: Escape
  • Mark server as read: Shift + Escape
  • Jump to oldest unread message: Shift + Page Up
  • Toggle emoji window: Ctrl + E
  • Toggle deafen: Ctrl + Shift + D
  • Answer a call: Ctrl + Enter

Keyboard shortcuts differ from keybinds in that you cannot edit or remove them; they are hardcoded into the app.

7. Install Discord Bots

discord bot example

Bots play an increasingly important role in lots of communications apps. You’ll find them in everything from Facebook Messenger to Telegram.

Discord is no different. There are hundreds of community-developed bots available—each of which is designed to fulfill a specific role on the server. For example, GAwesome Bot can be used to conduct polls and giveaways, GameStats lets you rank gaming stats and profiles against your buddies, and there’s even a quiz-themed bot called TriviaBot.

The bots are almost all free to install and use. You will only be able to add new bots to a server if you’re an admin, but you can add as many as you want to your personal rooms.

8. Buy Discord Nitro

discord nitro games

If you find that the basic version of Discord is not meeting your needs, you should consider upgrading to the paid pro version, called Discord Nitro.

Discord Nitro introduces some cool additional features. For example, you can set up a custom Discord tag (for the duration of your subscription), share your screen in either 720p (60 FPS) or 1080p (30 FPS), see an increase in the maximum file upload size (from 8MB to 50MB), and enjoy support for global custom emojis.

Most appealingly, however, Discord Nitro has some benefits for gamers. Firstly, it gives you access to free games worth more than $1,000. Secondly, you’ll receive game perks such as skins, loot boxes, extra characters, and more.

Discord Nitro costs $99.99/year or $9.99/month. There’s also a cheaper version called Nitro Classic. It costs $49.99/year or $4.99/month, but you don’t get free games or gaming content.

9. Type Discord Chat Commands

Discord offers several in-app chat commands. They are only available on the desktop app and iOS; unfortunately, Android users are out of luck.

Check out some of these popular commands to get started:

  • /nick: Lets you change your server-specific nickname (assuming the permission is turned on). Enter your new nickname after the command.
  • /tenor and /giphy: Allow you to search the web for animated GIFs.
  • /spoiler: Hides your message so other users don’t see your spoilers for TV series and games.
  • /shrug: Gives the common ¯\_(?)_/¯ output in the chat window.
  • \[emoji]: Typing a \ before an emoji will enter the Unicode emoji picture rather than the Discord version.
  • s/[text]/[new text]: This command is a simple way to edit typos in your previous message. For example, s/bananna/banana would replace the misspelled word (bananna) with the correct version.

If you use any other Discord chat commands regularly please tell us about them in the comments below the article.

More Discord Tips and Tricks

In this article we’ve discussed some of the Discord tips and tricks that should help you squeeze more out of the app.

However, these are just the tip of iceberg. If you want to learn more about using Discord, here is how to find the best Discord servers and how to set up your own Discord server.

Read the full article: 9 Discord Tips and Tricks All Users Should Know


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13 Tips and Tricks to Master Your Samsung Galaxy Smartwatch

The 4 Best Free Form Makers for Android and iPhone

Google is shutting down its Trips app


Google is shutting down its Trips app for mobile phones, but incorporating many of the functionality from the service into its Maps app and Search features, according to a statement from the company.

Support for the Trips app ends today, but information like notes and saved places will be available in Search as long as a users signs into their Google account.

To find attractions, events, and popular places in a geography, users can search for “my trips” or go to the new-and-improved Travel page in Google.

Google announced changes to their Travel site in September 2018, which included many of the features that had been broken out into the Trips app. So now the focus will be on driving users back to Travel and to include more of the functionality in Google’s dominant mapping and navigation app.

Soon users will be able to add and edit notes from Google Trips in the Travel section on a browser and find saved attractions, flights and hotels for upcoming and past trips.

In Maps, searching a destination or finding specific iconic places, guide lists, events or restaurants can be done by swiping up on the “Explore” tab in the app.

Tapping the menu icon will now take users to places they’ve saved under the “Your Places” section. And soon the maps app will also include upcoming reservations organized by trip and those reservations will be available offline so a user won’t need to download them.

Screen Shot 2019 08 05 at 2.42.05 PM

 


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Tech stocks walloped as China retaliates in the latest salvo of its trade war with the U.S.


All U.S. stock markets were down severely today, and tech stocks were hit especially hard, as China retaliated to increasing U.S. tariffs by halting imports on U.S. agricultural goods and finally acceded to market pressures by letting the yuan slide in value against the dollar.

At one point, the Dow was down nearly 900 points before staging a late afternoon rally to close off by roughly 760 points. The Nasdaq, the marketplace which is home to a number of technology stocks, saw its value drop by 3.4% or 277.10 points.

Shares of Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, and Twitter were all down for the day. Indeed, as CNBC reported, the biggest tech stocks, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Alphabet lost a combined $162 billion in market value.

Declines came as China allowed its currency to fall below what was once considered to be a red-line in the country’s currency peg against the dollar. That means that Chinese goods start to look more attractive globally as their prices decline in relation to the dollar. It could also trigger a wave of currency devaluations and protectionist measures across the globe — further putting downward pressure on global economic growth.

Stocks also continued to feel the pinch from the threat that President Donald Trump would make good on his threat to impose new tariffs on goods from China beginning September 1, 2019. Those tariffs are expected to take a bite into every day consumer goods and clothing, which adversely affects tech companies.

The big concern for these tech companies is the looming threat of that tariff expansion from the U.S. If those tariffs go into effect it would have significant consequences in these companies’ home market. 

“Assuming smartphones, tablets, smart watches, and computer systems are not categorically excluded from the final $300B tranche, we expect there will be material impact to Apple hardware product earnings,” analysts from Cowen & Co. wrote in a note quoted by CNBC.


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8chan’s new internet host was kicked off its own host just hours later


The bottom-feeding forum 8chan, which grew popular by embracing fringe hateful internet cultures, is having trouble staying online. After Cloudflare dropped its protection of the site yesterday, 8chan adopted the services of Bitmitigate, but soon lost that too as the company providing Bitmitigate with services dropped them. Deplatforming works, but it can be complicated, so here’s a quick explanation of what these pieces are and why we’re witnessing this hot-potato act in the wake of the latest tragic mass shootings.

To put a website online, people generally need three things.

First, a name registrar. This is the company that officially owns and licenses to you the specific series of letters and numbers that make up your website’s name, like techcrunch.com.

Second, a domain name service. These do work in the background to turn requests, like putting facebook.com into their browser bar, into actions: finding the IP address where Facebook is and establishing a connection between that one and the user’s.

Third, an actual server. Your data has to physically be stored somewhere with a fat pipe to the internet so others can access it. Servers are usually “virtualized” in that you don’t really rent five computers somewhere but rather a certain amount of capacity on a huge shared server farm.

Increasingly a fourth piece is necessary: caching and denial-of-service attack protection. This is a service like Cloudflare’s, which sits in front of the website and sort of sifts the traffic so attacks are turned away and the website stays up even during other kinds of outages. It’s not required, but is highly recommended.

When 8chan lost Cloudflare, it was exposed to the full force of the internet, likely including DDoS and other attacks, and was brought offline. But it soon found a new caching service in Bitmitigate.

Bitmitigate is one of several related businesses that provide various hosting services, all flying under the banner of one Rob Monster. In a statement to TechCrunch, Monster said that his companies “fill the ever growing need for a neutral service provider that will not arbitrarily terminate accounts based on social or political pressure.”

As evidence of this, Monster’s Epik domain name and hosting service is the current refuge of Gab, the right-wing social network populated by those excommunicated from Facebook, Twitter and other services with robust hate speech and abuse rules. Same for Daily Stormer, the white supremacist news site and forum. If they aren’t breaking the law, Monster said, it’s up to the provider whether to host them, and he chose to host. That may change, though.

“We have also not made a definitive decision about whether to provide DDoS mitigation or Content Delivery services for them. We will evaluate this in the coming days,” Monster wrote.

So 8chan went to Bitmitigate, but it wasn’t long before the forum had that rug pulled out from under them as well. Turns out that Epik and Bitmitigate were purchasing services from a larger service provider called Voxility.

If this sounds over-complicated, just think of it this way: A cafe needs to provide internet to its customers, so it buys a high-speed connection from an ISP. Then it provides access to that connection to its customers using its own little portal or control method, maybe so you have to buy a coffee before you can get online. This is a bit like that: Epik was reselling the services of Voxility at a markup to a specific set of customers. It’s a common enough thing online, but as we saw today, a bit risky.

Turns out Voxility wants no part of hosting 8chan, and after being alerted (by former Facebook CSO Alex Stamos) that one of its clients had decided to do so, it simply pulled the plug on Epik’s services; right now Bitmitigate, Daily Stormer and 8chan are all down. They deplatformed the platform.

See, the problem with bigger service providers is they like to limit their exposure to things like 8chan, which are bad optics waiting to happen. If you’re the host of a service to which mass murderers frequently post their pre-shooting screeds to an adoring audience of conspiracy theorists and incels, people might just take their business elsewhere. There’s no shortage of options.

So the larger these services get, the more likely it is they will have something in place to give them carte blanche to kick off or refuse service to sites and actors they believe to be bad business. It’s a bit sad that deplatforming hate has to have a business case, but for now let’s just be happy that case exists.

A hate-promoting site doesn’t just have to find someone who will provide each of the critical services listed at the start, but will provide them to a high-risk client for a reasonable price. That’s getting to be rather difficult.

As of this writing, 8chan is still down and Bitmitigate is still recovering from having its services yanked by Voxility. Who will host the hosts? Increasingly few internet services companies want to be involved with toxic internet subcultures and even real-life toxic cultures like white supremacy.

While as many have pointed out this does create new problems, it also does a pretty good number on some of the problems we’ve already got. I’ll take that over inaction any day.


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