New privacy assistant Jumbo fixes your Facebook & Twitter settings

Jumbo could be a nightmare for the tech giants, but a savior for the victims of their shady privacy practices.

Jumbo saves you hours as well as embarrassment by automatically adjusting 30 Facebook privacy settings to give you more protection, and by deleting your old tweets after saving them to your phone. It can even erase your Google Search and Amazon Alexa history, with clean up features for Instagram and Tinder in the works.

The startup emerges from stealth today to launch its Jumbo privacy assistant app on iPhone (Android coming soon). What could take a ton of time and research to do manually can be properly handled by Jumbo with a few taps.

The question is whether tech’s biggest companies will allow Jumbo to operate, or squash its access. Facebook, Twitter, and the rest really should have built features like Jumbo’s themselves or made them easier to use, since they could boost people confidence and perception that might increase usage of their apps. But since their business models often rely on gathering and exploiting as much of your data as possible, and squeezing engagement from more widely visible content, the giants are incentivized to find excuses to block Jumbo.

“Privacy is something that people want, but at the same time it just takes too much time for you and me to act on it” explains Jumbo founder Pierre Valade, who formerly built beloved high-design calendar app Sunrise that he sold to Microsoft in 2015. “So you’re left with two options: you can leave Facebook, or do nothing.”

Jumbo makes it easy enough for even the lazy to protect themselves. “I’ve used Jumbo to clean my full Twitter, and my personal feeling is: I feel lighter. On Facebook, Jumbo changed my privacy settings, and I feel safer.”

Valade’s Sunrise pedigree and plan to follow Dropbox’s bottom-up freemium strategy by launching premium subscription and enterprise features has already attracted investors to Jumbo. It’s raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Thrive Capital’s Josh Miller and Nextview Ventures’ Rob Go, who “both believe that privacy is fundamental human right” Valade notes. Valade’s six-person team in New York will use the money to develop new features and try to start a privacy moment.

How Jumbo Works

First let’s look at Jumbo’s Facebook settings fixes. The app asks that you punch in your username and password through a mini-browser open to Facebook instead of using the traditional Facebook Connect feature. That immediately might get Jumbo blocked, and we’ve asked Facebook if it will be allowed. Then Jumbo can adjust your privacy settings to Weak, Medium, or Strong controls, though it never makes any privacy settings looser if you’ve already tightened them.

Valade details that since there are no APIs for changing Facebook settings, Jumbo will “act as ‘you’ on Facebook’s website and tap on the buttons, as a script, to make the changes you asked Jumbo to do for you.” He says he hopes Facebook makes an API for this, though it’s more likely to see his script as against policies.

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For example, Jumbo can change who can look you up using your phone number to Strong – Friends only, Medium – Friends of friends, or Weak – Jumbo doesn’t change the setting. Sometimes it takes a stronger stance. For the ability to show you ads based on contact info that advertisers have uploaded, both the Strong and Medium settings hide all ads of this type, while Weak keeps the setting as is.

The full list of what Jumbo can adjust includes Who can see your future posts?, Who can see the people, Pages and lists you follow?, Who can see your friends list?, Who can see your sexual preference?, Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos?, Who can post on your timeline?, and Review tags people add to your posts the tags appear on Facebook? The full list can be found here.

For Twitter, you can choose if you want to remove all tweets ever, or that are older than a day, week, month (recommended), or three months. Jumbo never sees the data, as everything is processed locally on your phone. Before deleting the tweets, it archives them to a Memories tab of its app. Unfortunately there’s currently no way to export the tweets from there, but Jumbo is building Dropbox and iCloud connectivity soon which will work retroactively to download your tweets. Twitter’s API limits mean it can only erase 3200 tweets of yours every few days, so prolific tweeters may require several rounds.

While there are other apps that can clean you tweets, nothing else is designed to be a full-fledged privacy assistant. Perhaps it’s a bit of idealism to think these tech giants will permit Jumbo to run as intended. Valade says he hopes if there’s enough user support, the privacy backlash would be too big if the tech giants blocked Jumbo. “If the social network blocks us, we will disable the integration in Jumbo until we can find a solution to make them work again.”

But even if it does get nixed by the platforms, Jumbo will have started a crucial conversation about how privacy should be handled offline. We’ve left control over privacy defaults to companies that earn money when we’re less protected. Now it’s time for that control to shift to the hands of the user.

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New privacy assistant Jumbo fixes your Facebook & Twitter settings

Jumbo could be a nightmare for the tech giants, but a savior for the victims of their shady privacy practices.

Jumbo saves you hours as well as embarrassment by automatically adjusting 30 Facebook privacy settings to give you more protection, and by deleting your old tweets after saving them to your phone. It can even erase your Google Search and Amazon Alexa history, with clean up features for Instagram and Tinder in the works.

The startup emerges from stealth today to launch its Jumbo privacy assistant app on iPhone. What could take a ton of time and research to do manually can be properly handled by Jumbo with a few taps.

The question is whether tech’s biggest companies will allow Jumbo to operate, or squash its access. Facebook, Twitter, and the rest really should have built features like Jumbo’s themselves or made them easier to use, since they could boost people confidence and perception that might increase usage of their apps. But since their business models often rely on gathering and exploiting as much of your data as possible, and squeezing engagement from more widely visible content, the giants are incentivized to find excuses to block Jumbo.

“Privacy is something that people want, but at the same time it just takes too much time for you and me to act on it” explains Jumbo founder Pierre Valade, who formerly built beloved high-design calendar app Sunrise that he sold to Microsoft in 2015. “So you’re left with two options: you can leave Facebook, or do nothing.”

Jumbo makes it easy enough for even the lazy to protect themselves. “I’ve used Jumbo to clean my full Twitter, and my personal feeling is: I feel lighter. On Facebook, Jumbo changed my privacy settings, and I feel safer.”

Valade’s Sunrise pedigree and plan to follow Dropbox’s bottom-up freemium strategy by launching premium subscription and enterprise features has already attracted investors to Jumbo. It’s raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Thrive Capital’s Josh Miller and Nextview Ventures’ Rob Go, who “both believe that privacy is fundamental human right” Valade notes. Valade’s six-person team in New York will use the money to develop new features and try to start a privacy moment.

How Jumbo Works

First let’s look at Jumbo’s Facebook settings fixes. The app asks that you punch in your username and password through a mini-browser open to Facebook instead of using the traditional Facebook Connect feature. That immediately might get Jumbo blocked, and we’ve asked Facebook if it will be allowed. Then Jumbo can adjust your privacy settings to Weak, Medium, or Strong controls, though it never makes any privacy settings looser if you’ve already tightened them.

Valade details that since there are no APIs for changing Facebook settings, Jumbo will “act as ‘you’ on Facebook’s website and tap on the buttons, as a script, to make the changes you asked Jumbo to do for you.” He says he hopes Facebook makes an API for this, though it’s more likely to see his script as against policies.

.

For example, Jumbo can change who can look you up using your phone number to Strong – Friends only, Medium – Friends of friends, or Weak – Jumbo doesn’t change the setting. Sometimes it takes a stronger stance. For the ability to show you ads based on contact info that advertisers have uploaded, both the Strong and Medium settings hide all ads of this type, while Weak keeps the setting as is.

The full list of what Jumbo can adjust includes Who can see your future posts?, Who can see the people, Pages and lists you follow?, Who can see your friends list?, Who can see your sexual preference?, Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos?, Who can post on your timeline?, and Review tags people add to your posts the tags appear on Facebook? The full list can be found here.

For Twitter, you can choose if you want to remove all tweets ever, or that are older than a day, week, month (recommended), or three months. Jumbo never sees the data, as everything is processed locally on your phone. Before deleting the tweets, it archives them to a Memories tab of its app. Unfortunately there’s currently no way to export the tweets from there, but Jumbo is building Dropbox and iCloud connectivity soon which will work retroactively to download your tweets. Twitter’s API limits mean it can only erase 3200 tweets of yours every few days, so prolific tweeters may require several rounds.

While there are other apps that can clean you tweets, nothing else is designed to be a full-fledged privacy assistant. Perhaps it’s a bit of idealism to think these tech giants will permit Jumbo to run as intended. Valade says he hopes if there’s enough user support, the privacy backlash would be too big if the tech giants blocked Jumbo. “If the social network blocks us, we will disable the integration in Jumbo until we can find a solution to make them work again.”

But even if it does get nixed by the platforms, Jumbo will have started a crucial conversation about how privacy should be handled offline. We’ve left control over privacy defaults to companies that earn money when we’re less protected. Now it’s time for that control to shift to the hands of the user.

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Talk key takeaways from Google Cloud Next with TechCrunch writers

Google’s Cloud Next conference is taking over the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week and TechCrunch is on the scene covering all the latest announcements.

Google Cloud already powers some of the world’s premier companies and startups, and now it’s poised to put even more pressure on cloud competitors like AWS with its newly-released products and services. TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois will be on the ground at the event, and Ron Miller will be covering from afar. Thursday at 10:00 am PT, Frederic and Ron will be sharing what they saw and what it all means with Extra Crunch members on a conference call.

Tune in to dig into what happened onstage and off and ask Frederic and Ron any and all things cloud or enterprise.

To listen to this and all future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.

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Google Cloud challenges AWS with new open-source integrations

Google today announced that it has partnered with a number of top open-source data management and analytics companies to integrate their products into its Google Cloud Platform and offer them as managed services operated by its partners. The partners here are Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs.

The idea here, Google says, is to provide users with a seamless user experience and the ability to easily leverage these open-source technologies in Google’s cloud. But there is a lot more at play here, even though Google never quite says so. That’s because Google’s move here is clearly meant to contrast its approach to open-source ecosystems with Amazon’s. It’s no secret that Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform has a reputation for taking some of the best open-source projects and then forking those and packaging them up under its own brand, often without giving back to the original project. There are some signs that this is changing, but a number of companies have recently taken action and changed their open-source licenses to explicitly prevent this from happening.

That’s where things get interesting, because those companies include Confluent, Elastic, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs — and those are all partnering with Google on this new project, though it’s worth noting that InfluxData is not taking this new licensing approach and that while DataStax uses lots of open-source technologies, its focus is very much on its enterprise edition.

“As you are aware, there has been a lot of debate in the industry about the best way of delivering these open-source technologies as services in the cloud,” Manvinder Singh, the head of infrastructure partnerships at Google Cloud, said in a press briefing. “Given Google’s DNA and the belief that we have in the open-source model, which is demonstrated by projects like Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Go and so forth, we believe the right way to solve this it to work closely together with companies that have invested their resources in developing these open-source technologies.”

So while AWS takes these projects and then makes them its own, Google has decided to partner with these companies. While Google and its partners declined to comment on the financial arrangements behind these deals, chances are we’re talking about some degree of profit-sharing here.

“Each of the major cloud players is trying to differentiate what it brings to the table for customers, and while we have a strong partnership with Microsoft and Amazon, it’s nice to see that Google has chosen to deepen its partnership with Atlas instead of launching an imitation service,” Sahir Azam, the senior VP of Cloud Products at MongoDB told me. “MongoDB and GCP have been working closely together for years, dating back to the development of Atlas on GCP in early 2017. Over the past two years running Atlas on GCP, our joint teams have developed a strong working relationship and support model for supporting our customers’ mission critical applications.”

As for the actual functionality, the core principle here is that Google will deeply integrate these services into its Cloud Console; for example, similar to what Microsoft did with Databricks on Azure. These will be managed services and Google Cloud will handle the invoicing and the billings will count toward a user’s Google Cloud spending commitments. Support will also run through Google, so users can use a single service to manage and log tickets across all of these services.

Redis Labs CEO and co-founder Ofer Bengal echoed this. “Through this partnership, Redis Labs and Google Cloud are bringing these innovations to enterprise customers, while giving them the choice of where to run their workloads in the cloud, he said. “Customers now have the flexibility to develop applications with Redis Enterprise using the fully integrated managed services on GCP. This will include the ability to manage Redis Enterprise from the GCP console, provisioning, billing, support, and other deep integrations with GCP.”

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Google’s hybrid cloud platform is coming to AWS and Azure

Google’s Cloud Services Platform for managing hybrid clouds that span on-premise data centers and the Google cloud, is coming out of beta today. The company is also changing the product’s name to Anthos, a name that either refers to a lost Greek tragedy, the name of an obscure god in the Marvel universe, or rosemary. That by itself would be interesting but minor news. What makes this interesting is that Google also today announced that Anthos will run on third-party clouds as well, including AWS and Azure.

“We will support Anthos and AWS and Azure as well, so people get one way to manage their application and that one way works across their on-premise environments and all other clouds,” Google’s senior VP for its technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, explained in a press conference ahead of today’s announcement.

So with Anthos, Google will offer a single managed service that will let you manage and deploy workloads across clouds, all without having to worry about the different environments and APIs. That’s a big deal and one that clearly delineates Google’s approach from its competitors’. This is Google, after all, managing your applications for you on AWS and Azure.

“You can use one consistent approach — one open-source based approach — across all environments,” Hölzle said. “I can’t really stress how big a change that is in the industry, because this is really the stack for the next 20 years, meaning that it’s not really about the three different clouds that are all randomly different in small ways. This is the way that makes these three cloud — and actually on-premise environments, too — look the same.”

Anthos/Google Cloud Services Platform is based on the Google Kubernetes Engine, as well as other open source projects like the Istio service mesh. It’s also hardware agnostic, meaning that users can take their current hardware and run the service on top of that without having to immediately invest in new servers.

Why is Google doing this? “We hear from our customers that multi-cloud and hybrid is really an acute pain point,” Hölzle said. He noted that containers are the enabling technology for this but that few enterprises have developed a unifying strategy to manage these deployments and that it takes expertise in all major clouds to get the most out of them.

Enterprises already have major investments in their infrastructure and created relationships with their vendors, though, so it’s no surprise that Google is launching Anthos with over 30 major hardware and software partners that range from Cisco to Dell EMC, HPE and VMWare, as well as application vendors like Confluent, Datastax, Elastic, Portworx, Tigera, Splunk, GitLab, MongoDB and others.

Anthos is a subscription-based service, with the list prices starting at $10,000/month per 100 vCPU block. Enterprise prices then to be up for negotiation, though, so many customers will likely pay less.

It’s one thing to use a service like this for new applications, but many enterprises already have plenty of line-of-business tools that they would like to bring to the cloud as well. For them, Google is launching the first beta of Anthos Migrate today. This service will auto-migrate VMs from on-premises or other clouds into containers in the Google Kubernetes Engine. The promise here is that this is essentially an automatic process and once the container is on Google’s platform, you’ll be able to use all of the other features that come with the Anthos platform, too.

Google’s Hölzle noted that the emphasis here was on making this migration as easy as possible. “There’s no manual effort there,” he said.

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Slack integration with Office 365 one more step toward total enterprise integration

Slack’s goal of integrating enterprise tools in the chat interface has been a major differentiator from the giant companies it’s competing with like Microsoft and Facebook. Last year, it bought Astro, specifically with the goal of integrating enterprise productivity tools inside Slack, and today it announced new integrations with Microsoft OneDrive and Outlook.

Specifically, Slack is integrating calendar, files and calls and bringing in integrations with other services including Box, Dropbox and Zoom.

Andy Pflaum, director of project management at Slack, came over in the Astro deal and he says one of the primary goals of the acquisition was to help build connections like this to Microsoft and Google productivity tools.

Slack acquires Astro to conquer email

“When we joined Slack, it was to build out the interoperability between Slack and Microsoft’s products, particularly Office and Office 365 products, and the comparable products from from Google, G Suite. We focused on deep integration with mail and calendar in Slack, as well as bringing in files and calls in from Microsoft, Google and other leading providers like Zoom, Box and Dropbox,” Pflaum, who was co-founder and CEO at Astro, told TechCrunch.

For starters, the company is announcing deep integration with Outlook that enables users to get and respond to invitations in Slack. You can also join a meeting with a click directly from Slack, whether that’s Zoom, WebEx or Skype for Business. What’s more, when you’re in a meeting your status will update automatically in Slack, saving users from manually doing this (or more likely forgetting to and getting a flurry of Slack questions in the middle of a meeting).

Another integration lets you share emails directly into Slack. Instead of copying and pasting or forwarding the email to a large group, you can click a Slack button in the Outlook interface share it as a direct message, with a group or to your personal Slack channel.

File sharing is not being left behind here either, whether from Microsoft, Box or Dropbox; users will be able to share files inside of Slack easily. Finally, users will be able to view full Office document previews inside of Slack, another step in avoiding tasking switching to get work done.

Screenshot: Slack

Mike Gotta, an analyst at Gartner who has been following the collaboration space for many years, says the integration has done a good job of preserving the user experience, while allowing for a seamless connection between email, calendar and files. He says that this could give them an edge in the highly competitive collaboration market, and more importantly allow users to maintain context.

“The collaboration market is highly fragmented with many vendors adding “just a little” collaboration to products designed for specific purposes. Buyers can find that this type of collaboration in context to the flow of work is more impactful than switching to a generalized tool that lacks situational awareness of the task at hand. Knowledge-based work often involves process and project related applications so the more we can handle transitions across tools the more productive the user experience becomes. More importantly there’s less context fragmentation for the individual and team,” Gotta told TechCrunch.

These updates are about staying one step ahead of the competition, and being able to run Microsoft tools inside of Slack gives customers another reason to stick with (or to buy) Slack instead of Microsoft’s competing product, Teams.

All of this new functionality is designed to work in both mobile and desktop versions of the product and is available today.

Someone could scoop up Slack before it IPOs

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Indian social commerce startup GlowRoad raises $10M Series B

Indian social commerce startup GlowRoad announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series B. The round was led by CDH Investments, a Chinese investment firm, with participation from returning investor Accel Partners.

GlowRoad’s last funding, a $2 million Series A led by Accel, was announced in September 2017, a few months after it launched. The startup’s founding team includes Sonal Verma, a physician who focused on community medicine before co-founding telemedicine company HealthcareMagic in 2008. During her medical work, Verma realized that many stay-at-home mothers and housewives resell products in their neighborhoods. GlowRoad was created to help them take their businesses online by drop-shipping products.

GlowRoad screens manufacturers before adding them to its platform, then GlowRoad’s sellers decide which items to add to their stores and how to market them. The company now claims more than 100,000 resellers, 20,000 suppliers and 300,000 buyers. One of its most notable competitors is reselling platform Meesho, which has raised a total of $65.2 million from investors, including Shunwei Capital, Sequoia Capital India, RPS Ventures, Y Combinator, Venture Highway, SAIF Partners and DST Partners, according to Crunchbase.

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Apple could release a 31.6-inch 6K external display this year

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has released a new report about future Apple products — 9to5mac obtained the report. The company could be working on a new 31.6-inch external display with a 6K resolution that could work particularly well with the Mac Pro. New iPad and MacBook Pro models with better displays are also in the works.

Apple used to sell external displays but stopped selling the latest model in 2016. The 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display had an aluminum case and an LED-backlit LCD display. It had four times less pixels than the 27-inch 5K iMac with a resolution of 2560×1440 pixels. And it never made the switch to Thunderbolt 3.

When Apple told TechCrunch that it was working on a Mac Pro, the company confirmed that there would be a new external display. “We want them to know we are going to work on a display for a modular system,” Apple SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller told Matthew Panzarino.

According to Ming-Chi Kuo’s report, the new display will come earlier rather than later. Apple plans to launch the device during the second or third quarter of this year. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an announcement on June 3 at WWDC.

As for new iPad and MacBook Pro models, Ming-Chi Kuo has learned that Apple will use mini-LED technology to improve color gamut, contrast ratios, etc. This new technology should also improve battery performance compared to traditional LED displays.

Those new devices with mini-LED displays will arrive on the market at the end of 2020 or at some point during the first half of 2021. It’s unclear if Apple plans to update the MacBook Pro before then.

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Customers in Australian capital can get food and coffee delivered via drone

Google X graduate Wing has begun making drone deliveries in a trio of suburbs just outside of Canberra, Australia’s capital city. The Alphabet owned company says it’s tested the service 3,000 times over the past 18 months and is set to start the roll out to “a limited set of eligible homes.”

The service will be open to the suburbs of Crace, Palmerston and Franklin, adding customers in nearby neighborhoods “in the coming weeks and months.” Deliveries are currently open for a limited range of objects, including food (including, one assumes, burritos), coffee and over the counter items.

To start, the company’s partnering with several key partners, including Kickstart Expresso, Capital Chemist, Pure Gelato, Jasper + Myrtle, Bakers Delight, Guzman Y Gomez and Drummond Golf, promising delivery “in a handful of minutes.”

Alphabet’s Project Wing now delivers burritos by drone in southeastern Australia

The company appears to be taking a very anti-Amazon approach to deliveries for the time being, looking to partner primarily with local businesses. There’s even a form for local merchants looking to take part in the early deliveries. Of course, given the small footprint of the program at the moment, it looks to be more of a publicity push for small businesses than anything else.

Wing says it’s also communicating with locals to make sure the thing goes as smoothly as possible. “Wing strongly believes that by working together with local policymakers, regulators, and communities, we can improve access to services, open up new economic opportunities, and better connect our cities,” the company writes. “We look forward to continuing this dialogue with the Canberra community as we expand Wing’s service.”

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Dote raises $12M and introduces livestreamed Shopping Parties

Mobile shopping startup Dote is announcing $12 million in new funding, as well as a new feature called Shopping Party.

Founder and CEO Lauren Farleigh said her initial goal was to create “a truly native mobile experience” that made it “easy to check out across a lot of different stores.”

Over time, recommendations from social media influencers have become a big part of the app. With Shopping Party, they’re taking center stage — the feature allows them to share live video while browsing different products on Dote and chatting with fans.

Farleigh said the idea came from a trip she took with Dote influencers to Fiji last fall. She described watching them shop and talk together at the airport, and in what she said was an “ah-ha moment,” she realized that there’s an experience that was “lost when we stopped going to the mall with our friends.”

She added that influencers embraced the idea, with some telling her, “We love going live on Instagram [but] it’s challenging because there’s no shared experience for us to have that meaningful interaction over. It usually turns into the same Q&A over and over again.”

Dote CEO Lauren Farleigh

Shopping Party offers one solution to that issue, because you’re actually browsing and talking about specific products in the a Dote app. Apparently this was a real technical challenge — Shopping Party is leveraging Apple’s ReplayKit 2 framework to deliver two livestreams (one from the phone camera, one from the Dote app) while also incorporating live chats.

Farleigh, who previously worked as a product manager at mobile gaming company Product Gems, also compared this to game streaming on Twitch, except for shopping.

To kick things off, Dote plans to host two Shopping Parties every hour from 6am to 10am Pacific time for the next two weeks. (The company says the average Shopping Party lasts about 15 minutes.) There will also be Shopping Parties sponsored by specific brands.

As for the funding, it was led by Goodwater Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Harrison Metal. Dote has now raised a total of $23 million.

“[Dote’s] customer-centric shopping platform uniquely blends innovative technologies such as live-streaming with relevant and fun social features, setting the standard for how all major brands and retailers will connect with Gen Z,” said Goodwater Managing Partner Eric Kim in a statement. “We’re thrilled to partner with them to accelerate this transformation.”

Dote raises $7.2 million for its mobile shopping app

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Dote raises $12M and introduces livestreamed Shopping Parties

Mobile shopping startup Dote is announcing $12 million in new funding, as well as a new feature called Shopping Party.

Founder and CEO Lauren Farleigh said her initial goal was to create “a truly native mobile experience” that made it “easy to check out across a lot of different stores.”

Over time, recommendations from social media influencers have become a big part of the app. With Shopping Party, they’re taking center stage — the feature allows them to share live video while browsing different products on Dote and chatting with fans.

Farleigh said the idea came from a trip she took with Dote influencers to Fiji last fall. She described watching them shop and talk together at the airport, and in what she said was an “ah-ha moment,” she realized that there’s an experience that was “lost when we stopped going to the mall with our friends.”

She added that influencers embraced the idea, with some telling her, “We love going live on Instagram [but] it’s challenging because there’s no shared experience for us to have that meaningful interaction over. It usually turns into the same Q&A over and over again.”

Dote CEO Lauren Farleigh

Shopping Party offers one solution to that issue, because you’re actually browsing and talking about specific products in the a Dote app. Apparently this was a real technical challenge — Shopping Party is leveraging Apple’s ReplayKit 2 framework to deliver two livestreams (one from the phone camera, one from the Dote app) while also incorporating live chats.

Farleigh, who previously worked as a product manager at mobile gaming company Product Gems, also compared this to game streaming on Twitch, except for shopping.

To kick things off, Dote plans to host two Shopping Parties every hour from 6am to 10am Pacific time for the next two weeks. (The company says the average Shopping Party lasts about 15 minutes.) There will also be Shopping Parties sponsored by specific brands.

As for the funding, it was led by Goodwater Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Harrison Metal. Dote has now raised a total of $23 million.

“[Dote’s] customer-centric shopping platform uniquely blends innovative technologies such as live-streaming with relevant and fun social features, setting the standard for how all major brands and retailers will connect with Gen Z,” said Goodwater Managing Partner Eric Kim in a statement. “We’re thrilled to partner with them to accelerate this transformation.”

Dote raises $7.2 million for its mobile shopping app

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Facebook’s AI team maps the whole population of Africa

A new map of nearly all of Africa shows exactly where the continent’s 1.3 billion people live down to the meter, which could help everyone from local governments to aid organizations. The map joins others like it from Facebook created by running satellite imagery through a machine learning model.

It’s not exactly that there was some mystery about where people live, but the degree of precision matters. You may know that a million people live in a given region, and that about half are in the bigger city and another quarter in assorted towns. But that leaves hundreds of thousands only accounted for in the vaguest way.

Fortunately you can always inspect satellite imagery and pick out the spots where small villages and isolated houses and communities are. The only problem is that Africa is big. Really big. Manually labeling the satellite imagery even from a single mid-sized country like Gabon or Malawi would take a huge amount of time and effort. And for many applications of the data, such as coordinating the response to a natural disaster or distributing vaccinations, time lost is lives lost.

Better to get it all done at once then, right? That’s the idea behind Facebook’s Population Density Maps project, which had already mapped several countries over the last couple years before the decision was made to take on the entire African continent.

Zoom in and you can see the difference between the new and old maps. It’s pretty significant.

“The maps from Facebook ensure we focus our volunteers’ time and resources on the places they’re most needed, improving the efficacy of our programs,” said Tyler Radford, executive director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, one of the project’s partners.

The core idea is straightforward: Match census data (how many people live in a region) with structure data derived from satellite imagery to get a much better idea of where those people are.

“With just the census data, the best you can do is assume that people live everywhere in the district – buildings, fields, and forests alike,” said Facebook engineer James Gill. ““But once you know the building locations, you can skip the fields and forests and only allocate the population to the buildings. This gives you very detailed 30 meter by 30 meter population maps.”

That’s several times more accurate than any extant population map of this size. The analysis is done by a machine learning agent trained on OpenStreetMap data from all over the world where people have labeled and outlined buildings and other features.

First the huge amount of Africa’s surface that obviously has no structure had to be removed from consideration, reducing the amount of space the team had to evaluate by a factor of a thousand or more. Then, using a region-specific algorithm (because things look a lot different in coastal Morocco than they do in central Chad), the model identifies patches that contain a building.

The map data, top left two images, is processed to find buildings, bottom left two; ultimately large tracts of land can be labeled as populated or not, as seen at right.

Throughout this process there’s a lot of double-checking by humans to make sure there are no regional biases or tendencies to mislabel in some way or another. The team has been doing it for some time, so it’s not their first rodeo, but the scale of “one country” vs. “all of Africa” is a bit different. Fortunately there have been some advances, the company’s AI team wrote in an explanatory blog post:

We’ve been able to simplify the problem to a straightforward binary classification task… Now, given an input image, a single neural net predicts whether the given image contains a building. This approach to classification is also significantly less computationally expensive than a segmentation-based approach because it allows us to use smaller neural nets and produce outputs with a smaller memory footprint.

With greater efficiency, in this case, also comes greater accuracy, since the algorithms will have learned from their previous attempts and more data is included to prevent false positives and negatives. The team found that of 1,000 patches labeled as containing buildings, 996 of them were correct. That kind of error rate sounds pretty acceptable to me, and is certainly better than the existing tools, which only gave you a vague “out there somewhere” when you asked about a small community or off-grid village.

If you’re wondering why Facebook is doing this in the first place, it has to do with their efforts over past years to identify populations with poor connectivity, so they can then beam internet down to them with lasers or the like. That’s all rather low priority right now, what with the company’s many problems right now, but the tools it was building clearly had humanitarian applications and it’s nice to see that the baby was not thrown out with the bathwater.

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PubNub nabs $23M as its IaaS network hits 1.3T messages sent each month

There’s been a huge boom in the last decade of applications and services that rely on on real-time notifications and other alerts as a core part of how they operate, and today one of the companies that powers those notifications is announcing a growth round. PubNub, an infrastructure-as-a-service provider that provides a real-time network to send and manage messaging traffic between companies, companies and apps, and betweeninternet-of-things devices — has raised $23 million in a Series D round of funding to ramp up its business internationally, with an emphasis on emerging markets.

The round adds another strategic investor to PubNub’s cap table: Hewlett Packard Enterprise is coming on as an investor, joining previous backers Sapphire Ventures (backed by SAP), Relay Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, Bosch and Ericsson in this round.

Todd Greene, the CEO of PubNub (who co-founded it with Stephen Blum), said the startup is not disclosing its valuation with this round except to say that “we are happy with it, and it’s a solid increase on where we were the last time.” That, according to PitchBook, was just under $155 million back in 2016 in a small extension to its Series C round. The company has raised around $70 million to date.

PubNub’s growth — along with that of competing companies and technologies, which includes the likes of Pusher, RabbitMQ, Google’s Firebase and others — has come alongside the emergence of a number of use cases built on the premise of real-time notifications. These include a multitude of apps, for example, for on-demand commerce (eg, ride hailing and online food ordering), medical services, entertainment services, IoT systems and more.

That’s pushed PubNub to a new milestone of enabling some 1.3 trillion messages per month for customers that include the likes of Peloton, Atlassian, athenahealth, JustEat, Swiggy, Yelp, the Sacramento Kings and Gett, who choose from some 70 SDKs to tailor what kinds of notifications and actions are triggered around their specific services.

Greene said that while some of the bigger services in the world have largely built their own messaging platforms to manage their notifications — Uber, for example, has taken this route — that process can result in “death by 1,000 paper cuts,” in Greene’s words. Others will opt for a PubNub-style alternative from the start.

“About 50 percent of our customers started by building themselves and then got to scale, and then decided to turn to PubNub,” Greene said.

It’s analogous to the same kind of decision businesses make regarding public cloud infrastructure: whether it makes sense to build and operate their own servers, or turn to a third-party provider — a decision that PubNub itself ironically is also in the process of contemplating.

Today the company runs its own business as an overlay on the public cloud, using a mixture of AWS and others, Greene said — the company has partnerships with Microsoft Azure, AWS, and IBM Watson — but “every year we evaluate the benefits of going into different kinds of data centres and interesting opportunities there. We are evaluating a cost and performance calculation,” he added.

And while he didn’t add it, that could potentially become an exit opportunity for PubNub down the line, too, aligning with a cloud provider that wanted to offer messaging infrastructure-as-a-service as an additional feature to customers.

The strategic relationship with its partners, in fact, is one of the engines for this latest investment. “Edge computing and realtime technologies will be at the heart of the next wave of technology innovation,” commented Vishal Lall, COO of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, said in a statement. “PubNub’s global Data Stream Network has demonstrated extensive accomplishments powering both enterprise and consumer solutions. HPE is thrilled to be investing in PubNub’s fast-growing success, and to accelerate the commercial and industrial applications of PubNub’s real time platform.”

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Facebook agrees to clearer T&Cs in Europe

Facebook has agreed to amend its terms and conditions under pressure from EU lawmakers.

The new terms will make it plain that free access to its service is contingent on users’ data being used to profile them to target with ads, the European Commission said today.

“The new terms detail what services, Facebook sells to third parties that are based on the use of their user’s data, how consumers can close their accounts and under what reasons accounts can be disabled,” it writes.

Although the exact wording of the new terms has not yet been published, and the company has until the end of June 2019 to comply — so it remains to be seen how clear is ‘clear’.

Nonetheless the Commission is couching the concession as a win for consumers, trumpeting the forthcoming changes to Facebook’s T&C in a press release in which Vera Jourová, commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality, writes:

Today Facebook finally shows commitment to more transparency and straight forward language in its terms of use. A company that wants to restore consumers trust after the Facebook/ Cambridge Analytica scandal should not hide behind complicated, legalistic jargon on how it is making billions on people’s data. Now, users will clearly understand that their data is used by the social network to sell targeted ads. By joining forces, the consumer authorities and the European Commission, stand up for the rights of EU consumers.

The change to Facebook’s T&Cs follows pressure applied to it in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, according to the Commission.

Along with national consumer protection authorities it says it asked Facebook to clearly inform consumers how the service gets financed and what revenues are derived from the use of consumer data as part of its response to the data-for-political-ads scandal.

“Facebook will introduce new text in its Terms and Services explaining that it does not charge users for its services in return for users’ agreement to share their data and to be exposed to commercial advertisements,” it writes. “Facebook’s terms will now clearly explain that their business model relies on selling targeted advertising services to traders by using the data from the profiles of its users.”

We reached out to Facebook with questions — including asking to see the wording of the new terms — but at the time of writing the company had declined to provide any response.

It’s also not clear whether the amended T&Cs will apply universally or only for Facebook users in Europe.

European commissioners have been squeezing social media platforms including Facebook over consumer rights issues since 2017 — when Facebook, Twitter and Google were warned the Commission was losing patience with their failure to comply with various consumer protection standards.

Aside from unclear language in their T&Cs, specific issues of concern for the Commission include terms that deprive consumers of their right to take a company to court in their own country or require consumers to waive mandatory rights (such as their right to withdraw from an online purchase).

Facebook has now agreed to several other T&Cs changes under pressure from the Commission, i.e. in addition to making it plainer that ‘if it’s free, you’re the product’.

Namely, the Commission says Facebook has agreed to: 1) amend its policy on limitation of liability — saying Facebook’s new T&Cs “acknowledges its responsibility in case of negligence, for instance in case data has been mishandled by third parties”; 2) amend its power to unilaterally change terms and conditions by “limiting it to cases where the changes are reasonable also taking into account the interest of the consumer”; 3) amend the rules concerning the temporary retention of content which has been deleted by consumers  — with content only able to be retained in “specific cases” (such as to comply with an enforcement request by an authority), and only for a maximum of 90 days when retained for “technical reasons”; and 4) amend the language clarifying the right to appeal of users when their content has been removed.

The Commission says it expects Facebook to make all the changes by the end of June at the latest — warning that the implementation will be closely monitored.

“If Facebook does not fulfil its commitments, national consumer authorities could decide to resort to enforcement measures, including sanctions,” it adds.

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8 Simple Ways to Customize the Android TV Home Screen

Like the smartphone version of the Android operating system, Android TV is a highly customizable platform. One of the areas where the customization options are most apparent is on the main home screen.

There are several settings you can play with. They include different ways to display your apps, recommended content lists, watch next lists, third-party launchers, and a whole lot more.

Here’s how to customize your Android TV home screen.

1. Select Your Favorite Apps

You might need to install several apps that you don’t use every day. For example, lots of people keep VLC or MX Player around as a third-party video playback tool for apps that don’t have their own native player.

Given that you’re unlikely to use these apps every day, there’s no point in letting them clutter up your Android TV home screen.

Thankfully, there’s a way to customize your favorite apps. Favorites are the ones that appear in the top row on the home screen. The list can include both regular apps and games.

To select your favorite apps, scroll to the right-hand side of the Apps row, select the Plus icon, then choose the app you want to add.

Note: You can access your non-favorite apps by using the Apps icon on the left end of the row.

2. Recommended Content From Specific Apps

When you scroll down on the Android TV home screen, you’ll see some of the apps that you have installed, along with recommended content within those apps.

Most mainstream video apps such as Netflix, Plex, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video can display recommended content. You have complete control over which are visible, and which are not.

Some apps even allow you to display multiple recommended channels from the same app. For example, if you’re a Plex user, you can view both news recommendations and regular video recommendations in separate rows. Similarly, YouTube offers rows for Recommended, Subscriptions, and Trending.

You can select different channels in each app on an à la carte basis; it’s not “all or nothing.”

To choose which apps and channels show recommended content on your home screen, either scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen and select Customize Channels or go to Settings > Preferences > Home Screen > Channels > Customize Channels. Slide the toggles next to the apps/channels you want to enable.

3. Customize the Play Next Channel

Directly below the Favorites row on your home screen is the Play Next channel. It sources content from across your apps to suggest the next video to watch. For example, you’ll find the next episode in a TV series you’re watching, or the sequel to a film you just watched.

You can choose which apps send content to the Play Next channel. To do so, scroll to the bottom of the home screen, select Customize Channels, then hit Customize your Play Next channel. Slide the toggles next to the apps you want to include.

4. Create Home Screen Shortcuts for Sideloaded Apps

One of the biggest frustrations with the Android TV operating system is how sideloaded apps do not necessarily automatically appear in the list of all your apps. That means you cannot add them to your favorites or even launch them easily.

There are a few ways to manage sideloaded apps on Android TV, but if you want to create shortcuts for sideloaded apps so they act like regular apps on your device, you need to install Tv App Repo.

This free tool lets you make Android TV home screen shortcuts with just a few clicks. The app is entirely free to download and use.

Download: Tv App Repo (Free)

5. Enable/Disable Video and Audio Previews

Again, not all apps support the feature, but some Android TV apps let you see audio and video previews on the home screen while you’re browsing for something to watch.

Some people will love this option; others will hate it. Luckily, Android TV lets you customize the setting to match your personal preferences.

To choose whether video and audio previews play automatically, head to Settings > Preferences > Home Screen > Channels and slide the toggles next to Enable video previews and Enable audio previews as needed.

6. Reorder App and Game Tiles

You can reorder your Android TV apps and games in all areas of the operating system. If you want to reorder the apps in your main Apps list, you have two methods available to you.

The first option is entirely menu-based; go to Settings > Preferences > Home Screen > Apps and select either Reorder apps or Reorder games.

You’ll see all your apps in a grid. To move apps, select an app’s thumbnail using your remote, then use the remote’s D-pad to move it to your preferred position. When you’ve finished, hit the Back button on your remote.

The second method lets you make the changes from the home screen. Select the Apps icon on the left-hand side of the Favorites row, then long-press on an app’s icon with your remote’s Select button. A context menu will appear. Select Move and drag the app to your preferred location.

The long-press approach also lets you reorder apps in the Favorites row. Again, highlight the app you want, long-press the Select button, and choose Move.

7. Reorder the Home Screen Channels

We previously discussed how to add channels of recommended content from specific Android TV apps. You can ralso eorder the sequence in which they appear on your Android TV home screen.

To change a channel’s position, scroll down until you find the channel you want to move, then highlight the app’s icon on the left side of the screen and press Left once on your remote. A new icon will appear with up/down arrows. Press the corresponding button on your remote to move the channel in the direction you want.

8. Use an Alternative Launcher

Finally, remember you can install an entirely new Android TV launcher. It will completely change the way your home screen looks, potentially adding or removing lots of features.

We’ve covered some of the best Android TV launchers if you want to learn more.

More Android TV Tips for You

Customizing your Android TV home screen is just a small part of getting the most out of your Android TV device.

If you would like more information, make sure you check out some essential Android TV apps and common Android TV questions.

Read the full article: 8 Simple Ways to Customize the Android TV Home Screen

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A Beginner’s Guide to Using Asana for Tracking Any Project

Asana is one of the best productivity tools that you can use for free, and it’s perfect for a creative professional looking to manage their schedule. It comes with a lot of customization options, but when you’re first learning the ropes its versatility might seem intimidating.

Let’s ease into it. Here’s how to create and keep track of a project using Asana.

Step 1: Log In and Get Familiar

Asana is web-based, so when you’re setting up your project you’ll need to log into your account. If you haven’t signed up yet, try the Basic free account first and see if you like it. For more advanced uses, Asana has different price tiers.

If you have tried to manage a project with Trello, we’ve already talked about how Asana compares to Trello as a project management tool.

Once you’re signed up, you’ll see a homepage similar to the screenshot above. Along the left side is your sidebar. In the center under Tasks Due Soon you’ll see a list of things you need to complete. Beneath that, you’ll see the icons for your recently opened projects.

Step 2: Create a New Project

To create a new project, go to your sidebar. Under Teams, click + > Add Project.

Once you do, you’ll be greeted with a new screen that gives you a list of templates to choose from. Let’s go with Blank Project. For keeping track of day-to-day tasks you won’t need more than that.

After you click on Blank Project, you’ll be prompted to add your details. This is where you’ll set up the “rules” that govern what your project looks like.

Because this project helps me with my day-to-day tasks, I’m going to set the privacy to Private to me. There’s no need for anyone else to see it.

Next, click Create project. Asana will generate this project under your Teams category in the sidebar.

Step 3: Change Your Project Color

Now that you’ve created your new project, you can customize the color of it. This makes it easier to see in your calendar.

To customize your color, click on the “…” beside your project’s name. Under Set Highlight Color, choose a swatch.

Step 4: Create a Repeating Task

The beauty of Asana is that you can create multiple tasks with different parameters inside of each project.

Any task can also be a repeating one. To create a repeating task, click on your project’s name—“Asana Tutorial”—under the Teams section in the sidebar. This ensures the project is active.

Under List, click Add Task. This will automatically add a task card on the right-hand side of your workspace. This is where you will fill in your details.

For this tutorial, I’m going to say this task is for posting art to Twitter.

To assign the task to someone, click on the person icon next to the Due Date. Type in their name. By clicking on their username the task is assigned to them.

Next, let’s give this task a deadline. To do that click on the Due Date icon. This brings up the calendar and a list of dates you can choose from.

For this task, I’m going to set the deadline to March 24. But I also want to make this task repeat once a day once I have finished creating it.

To turn on repeat, click Set to repeat. This will make a dropdown menu pop up, where you can choose daily, periodical, weekly, monthly, or yearly intervals.

You can also click Add due time to have the task due at a certain time each day. For this tutorial, I’m going to type in 11:00am.

After you’re finished, click Done. You’ll see your new task pop up with its name, due date and who it’s assigned to in the List.

That said—what if you want to create a task for a more complicated project? What if this task has a hard end date, or there are multiple steps that you need to complete?

Step 5: Create a Task With Subtasks

To create a task with a hard end date, follow the same process that we laid out in Step 4.

Click on Add Task, fill out the title, the assignee and due date, but when you get to Due Date don’t click Set to repeat. It’s not needed.

Under the title section, you’ll see a text box that says Description. By clicking on this box you can fill out the information on your project: who the client is, what they need, or any ideas you want to include in your design.

All these details side-by-side might get complicated. If your task requires multiple steps to finish, you can add subtasks to keep track of them.

To create a subtask, click on its icon at the top of your task card, seen here highlighted in red.

This will automatically create a subtask for you. Like the parent task, you can name it, give it a due date, or assign it to another person.

If the main task is set to private, the subtask will need to be assigned to you. To quickly assign the task, click on the person icon, then click Assign to Me.

Now that you’ve created one subtask, you can create additional subtasks within your task card.

You can also re-arrange the subtasks by clicking and dragging them using the six dots located on the left side of each check mark. This is useful if you create your subtasks out of order.

Step 6: Adding Tags

Once you’ve created your subtasks, you might want to tag this project so it’s easier for you to find. To tag it, press Tab + T to bring up your tag box. This box will appear above your subtasks.

I’m going to tag this project “tutorials”, but as you can see I don’t have a tag for that yet. To create one, click on the blue box that says NEW TAG. Asana will generate it for you.

Step 7: Completing a Task

So now that we’ve finished setting up repeating and one-time tasks, there’s not much more to do other than “complete” them.

When you finish a task or subtask, click on the checkmarks next to the item. They will turn green once they’re done.

Step 8: Deleting a Task

What if you want to delete a task that is no longer active? Click on the three dots in the top right-hand corner of your task and select Delete Task.

Once you do, Asana will prompt you: do you want to undo your last action, or get rid of the task for good? If you’re sure you don’t need the task again, click Delete Permanently and Asana will wipe it.

Use Asana to Organize Your Life

As you can see, Asana’s ability to manage your creative projects—and customize them—can be done with just a few simple steps.

It’s not the only tool that can help you with your time and projects, however, and if you’re looking for more info we’ve got a great list of free project management tools for you.

Read the full article: A Beginner’s Guide to Using Asana for Tracking Any Project

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