Analogue takes on the TurboGrafx-16 with its Duo retro console

Analogue’s beautiful, functional retro gaming consoles provide a sort of “archival quality” alternative to the cheap mini-consoles proliferating these days. The latest system to be resurrected by the company is the ill-fated, but still well-thought-of TurboGrafx-16 or PC Engine.

The Duo, as Analogue’s device is called, is named after a later version of the TurboGrafx-16 that included its expensive CD-ROM add-on — and indeed the new Duo supports both game cards and CDs, provided they have survived all this time without getting scratched.

Like the rest of Analogue’s consoles, and unlike the popular SNES and NES Classic Editions from Nintendo (and indeed the new TurboGrafx-16 Mini), the Duo does not use emulation in any way. Instead, it’s a painstaking recreation of the original hardware, with tweaks to introduce modern conveniences like high-definition video, wireless controllers, and improvements to reliability and so on.

Image Credits: Analogue

As a bonus, it’s all done in FPGA, which implies that this hardware is truly one of a kind in service of remaking the console accurately. Games should play exactly as they would have on the original hardware down to the annoying glitches and slowdowns of that era of consoles.

And what games! Well, actually, few of them ever reached the status of their competitors on Nintendo and Sega consoles here in the U.S., where the TurboGrafx-16 sold poorly. But titles like Bonk’s Adventure, Bomberman ’93, Ninja Spirit, Splatterhouse, and Devil’s Crush should be played more widely. Shmup fans like myself were spoiled with originals and arcade ports like R-Type and Blazing Lazers. The Ys series ( also got its start on the PC Engine (if you could afford the CD attachment). Here’s a good retrospective.

I wouldn’t mind having an HDMI port on the back of my SNES. Oh, Analogue makes one…

Analogue’s consoles are made for collectors who would prefer not to have to baby their original hardware, or want to upscale the signal and play wirelessly without too much fuss. I still have my original SNES, but 240p just doesn’t look as crisp as it did on a 15-inch CRT in the ’90s.

At $199, it’s more expensive than finding one at a garage sale, but good luck with that. The original and its CD add-on cost a fortune, so if you think about it from that perspective, this is a real bargain. Analogue says limited quantities are available, and will be shipping in 2021.

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EU’s Google-Fitbit antitrust decision deadline pushed into 2021

The deadline for Europe to make a call on the Google-Fitbit merger has been pushed out again — with EU regulators now having until January 8, 2021, to take a decision.

The latest change to the provisional deadline, spotted earlier by Reuters, could be the result of one of the parties asking for more time.

Last month the deadline for a decision was extended until December 23 — potentially pushing the decision out beyond a year after Google announced its intention to buy Fitbit, back in November 2019. So if the tech giant was hoping for a simple and swift regulatory rubberstamping its hopes have been diminishing since August when the Commission announced it was going to dig into the detail. Once bitten and all that.

The proposed Fitbit acquisition also comes as Alphabet, Google’s parent, is under intense antitrust scrutiny on multiple fronts on home turf.

Google featured prominently in a report by the House Judiciary Committee on big tech antitrust concerns earlier this month, with US lawmakers recommending a range of remedies — including breaking up platform giants.

European lawmakers are also in the process of drawing up new rules to regulate so-called ‘gatekeeper’ platforms — which would almost certainly apply to Google. A legislative proposal on that is expected before the end of this year, which means it may appear before EU regulators have taken a decision on the Google-Fitbit deal. (And one imagines Google isn’t exactly stoked about that possibility.)

Both competition and privacy concerns have been raised against allowing Google get its hands on Fitbit users’ data.

The tech giant has responded by offering a number of pledges to try to convince regulators — saying it would not use Fitbit health and wellness data for ads and offering to have data separation requirements monitored. It has also said it would commit to maintain third parties’/rivals’ access to its Android ecosystem and Fitbit’s APIs.

However rival wearable makers have continued to criticize the proposed merger. And, earlier this week, consumer protection and human rights groups issued a joint letter — urging regulators to only approve the takeover if “merger remedies can effectively prevent [competition and privacy] harms in the short and long term”.

One thing is clear: With antitrust concerns now writ large against ‘big tech’ the era of ‘friction-free’ acquisitions looks to be behind Google et al.

Big tech blows a collective raspberry at the House’s antitrust report

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We need universal digital ad transparency now

Laura Edelson Contributor

Laura Edelson is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and is a team member on The Online Political Transparency Project.

Erika Franklin Fowler Contributor

Erika Franklin Fowler is Professor of Government at Wesleyan University where she directs the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP), which tracks and analyzes political advertising in real-time during elections.

Jason Chuang Contributor

Jason Chuang is a researcher at Mozilla.

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Dorsey, Mr. Pichai and Mr. Spiegel: We need universal digital ad transparency now!

The negative social impacts of discriminatory ad targeting and delivery are well-known, as are the social costs of disinformation and exploitative ad content. The prevalence of these harms has been demonstrated repeatedly by our research. At the same time, the vast majority of digital advertisers are responsible actors who are only seeking to connect with their customers and grow their businesses.

Many advertising platforms acknowledge the seriousness of the problems with digital ads, but they have taken different approaches to confronting those problems. While we believe that platforms need to continue to strengthen their vetting procedures for advertisers and ads, it is clear that this is not a problem advertising platforms can solve by themselves, as they themselves acknowledge. The vetting being done by the platforms alone is not working; public transparency of all ads, including ad spend and targeting information, is needed so that advertisers can be held accountable when they mislead or manipulate users.

Our research has shown:

• Advertising platform system design allows advertisers to discriminate against users based on their gender, race and other sensitive attributes.
• Platform ad delivery optimization can be discriminatory, regardless of whether advertisers attempt to set inclusive ad audience preferences.
• Ad delivery algorithms may be causing polarization and make it difficult for political campaigns to reach voters with diverse political views.
• Sponsors spent more than $1.3 billion dollars on digital political ads, yet disclosure is vastly inadequate. Current voluntary archives do not prevent intentional or accidental deception of users.

While it doesn’t take the place of strong policies and rigorous enforcement, we believe transparency of ad content, targeting and delivery can effectively mitigate many of the potential harms of digital ads. Many of the largest advertising platforms agree; Facebook, Google, Twitter and Snapchat all have some form of an ad archive. The problem is that many of these archives are incomplete, poorly implemented, hard to access by researchers and have very different formats and modes of access. We propose a new standard for universal ad disclosure that should be met by every platform that publishes digital ads. If all platforms commit to the universal ad transparency standard we propose, it will mean a level playing field for platforms and advertisers, data for researchers and a safer internet for everyone.

The public deserves full transparency of all digital advertising. We want to acknowledge that what we propose will be a major undertaking for platforms and advertisers. However, we believe that the social harms currently being borne by users everywhere vastly outweigh the burden universal ad transparency would place on ad platforms and advertisers. Users deserve real transparency about all ads they are bombarded with every day. We have created a detailed description of what data should be made transparent that you can find here.

We researchers stand ready to do our part. The time for universal ad transparency is now.

Signed by:

Jason Chuang, Mozilla
Kate Dommett, University of Sheffield
Laura Edelson, New York University
Erika Franklin Fowler, Wesleyan University
Michael Franz, Bowdoin College
Archon Fung, Harvard University
Sheila Krumholz, Center for Responsive Politics
Ben Lyons, University of Utah
Gregory Martin, Stanford University
Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College
Nate Persily, Stanford University
Travis Ridout, Washington State University
Kathleen Searles, Louisiana State University
Rebekah Tromble, George Washington University
Abby Wood, University of Southern California

If the ad industry is serious about transparency, let’s open-source our SDKs

We need universal digital ad transparency now

Laura Edelson Contributor

Laura Edelson is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and is a team member on The Online Political Transparency Project.

Erika Franklin Fowler Contributor

Erika Franklin Fowler is Professor of Government at Wesleyan University where she directs the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP), which tracks and analyzes political advertising in real-time during elections.

Jason Chuang Contributor

Jason Chuang is a researcher at Mozilla.

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Dorsey, Mr. Pichai and Mr. Spiegel: We need universal digital ad transparency now!

The negative social impacts of discriminatory ad targeting and delivery are well-known, as are the social costs of disinformation and exploitative ad content. The prevalence of these harms has been demonstrated repeatedly by our research. At the same time, the vast majority of digital advertisers are responsible actors who are only seeking to connect with their customers and grow their businesses.

Many advertising platforms acknowledge the seriousness of the problems with digital ads, but they have taken different approaches to confronting those problems. While we believe that platforms need to continue to strengthen their vetting procedures for advertisers and ads, it is clear that this is not a problem advertising platforms can solve by themselves, as they themselves acknowledge. The vetting being done by the platforms alone is not working; public transparency of all ads, including ad spend and targeting information, is needed so that advertisers can be held accountable when they mislead or manipulate users.

Our research has shown:

• Advertising platform system design allows advertisers to discriminate against users based on their gender, race and other sensitive attributes.
• Platform ad delivery optimization can be discriminatory, regardless of whether advertisers attempt to set inclusive ad audience preferences.
• Ad delivery algorithms may be causing polarization and make it difficult for political campaigns to reach voters with diverse political views.
• Sponsors spent more than $1.3 billion dollars on digital political ads, yet disclosure is vastly inadequate. Current voluntary archives do not prevent intentional or accidental deception of users.

While it doesn’t take the place of strong policies and rigorous enforcement, we believe transparency of ad content, targeting and delivery can effectively mitigate many of the potential harms of digital ads. Many of the largest advertising platforms agree; Facebook, Google, Twitter and Snapchat all have some form of an ad archive. The problem is that many of these archives are incomplete, poorly implemented, hard to access by researchers and have very different formats and modes of access. We propose a new standard for universal ad disclosure that should be met by every platform that publishes digital ads. If all platforms commit to the universal ad transparency standard we propose, it will mean a level playing field for platforms and advertisers, data for researchers and a safer internet for everyone.

The public deserves full transparency of all digital advertising. We want to acknowledge that what we propose will be a major undertaking for platforms and advertisers. However, we believe that the social harms currently being borne by users everywhere vastly outweigh the burden universal ad transparency would place on ad platforms and advertisers. Users deserve real transparency about all ads they are bombarded with every day. We have created a detailed description of what data should be made transparent that you can find here.

We researchers stand ready to do our part. The time for universal ad transparency is now.

Signed by:

Jason Chuang, Mozilla
Kate Dommett, University of Sheffield
Laura Edelson, New York University
Erika Franklin Fowler, Wesleyan University
Michael Franz, Bowdoin College
Archon Fung, Harvard University
Sheila Krumholz, Center for Responsive Politics
Ben Lyons, University of Utah
Gregory Martin, Stanford University
Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College
Nate Persily, Stanford University
Travis Ridout, Washington State University
Kathleen Searles, Louisiana State University
Rebekah Tromble, George Washington University
Abby Wood, University of Southern California

If the ad industry is serious about transparency, let’s open-source our SDKs

EU’s Google-Fitbit antitrust decision deadline pushed into 2021

The deadline for Europe to make a call on the Google-Fitbit merger has been pushed out again — with EU regulators now having until January 8, 2021, to take a decision.

The latest change to the provisional deadline, spotted earlier by Reuters, could be the result of one of the parties asking for more time.

Last month the deadline for a decision was extended until December 23 — potentially pushing the decision out beyond a year after Google announced its intention to buy Fitbit, back in November 2019. So if the tech giant was hoping for a simple and swift regulatory rubberstamping its hopes have been diminishing since August when the Commission announced it was going to dig into the detail. Once bitten and all that.

The proposed Fitbit acquisition also comes as Alphabet, Google’s parent, is under intense antitrust scrutiny on multiple fronts on home turf.

Google featured prominently in a report by the House Judiciary Committee on big tech antitrust concerns earlier this month, with US lawmakers recommending a range of remedies — including breaking up platform giants.

European lawmakers are also in the process of drawing up new rules to regulate so-called ‘gatekeeper’ platforms — which would almost certainly apply to Google. A legislative proposal on that is expected before the end of this year, which means it may appear before EU regulators have taken a decision on the Google-Fitbit deal. (And one imagines Google isn’t exactly stoked about that possibility.)

Both competition and privacy concerns have been raised against allowing Google get its hands on Fitbit users’ data.

The tech giant has responded by offering a number of pledges to try to convince regulators — saying it would not use Fitbit health and wellness data for ads and offering to have data separation requirements monitored. It has also said it would commit to maintain third parties’/rivals’ access to its Android ecosystem and Fitbit’s APIs.

However rival wearable makers have continued to criticize the proposed merger. And, earlier this week, consumer protection and human rights groups issued a joint letter — urging regulators to only approve the takeover if “merger remedies can effectively prevent [competition and privacy] harms in the short and long term”.

One thing is clear: With antitrust concerns now writ large against ‘big tech’ the era of ‘friction-free’ acquisitions looks to be behind Google et al.

Big tech blows a collective raspberry at the House’s antitrust report

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Marshall Major IV wireless headphones offer great sound, plus 80+ hours of battery life and wireless charging

Marshall’s new Major IV headphones ($149.99) combine lightweight comfort with wireless charging, and up to 80 hours of playback for an iconic headset that’s affordable and flexible. At home or on the go, these are a great option with unique features that you won’t find anywhere else in the headphone market.

Basics

This is the fourth iteration of Marshall’s Major on-ear wireless headphones, and they offer a number of improvements new to the lineup, including a new folding clip design that makes them even more compact when packed for travel – and that allows them to rest comfortably on a charging pad to enable another new feature, wireless charging using the Qi standard.

Marshall has also greatly improved battery life, advertising an insane 80 hours of usage time on these, way up from the 30+ promised in the last generation. They still feature square earcups with that iconic Marshall look, but the detail on each is flat instead of pebbled faux leather (that remains on the headband). The multi-directional control knob is also carried over from past Major designs, and there’s a 3.5mm socket for wired sound, and for sharing your audio connection out to another headset.

In the box, there’s a coiled 3.5mm for that vintage Marshall amp feel, as well as a USB-C cable for wired charging, which will provide a full 80+ hours of use from 3 hours – or 15 hours from just 15 minutes with a new quick charge feature.

Design and performance

The design of the Major IV is classic Marshall aesthetic – which is great news. They look fantastic, with the iconic logo in script on both earcups. As mentioned, the earcup face is now smooth and matte, which looks great, and there’s a silicone edge on each which helps keep the right earcup in place when placed on a wireless charger.

Image Credits: Marshall

These are compact, over-ear headsets that rest comfortably, and that comfort is helped by the lightweight materials used in their construction. Despite feeling very light, they feel like they’re made of quality materials thoughtfully constructed, and should last a long time in terms of durability.

Marshall’s multi-directional controller is both an attractive cosmetic detail in gold, and a smart control interface that offers intuitive manipulation of audio playback and volume.

Sound-wise, the Major IV provides great audio quality for a headset in this price range. The bass is rich, and the highs are clear. There’s no noise cancelling at work here, so you will get a decent amount of audio bleed-in from your surroundings, but they do a decent job of sound isolation for an over-hear set. And the sound quality is made all the better because of the class-leading battery life Marshall has managed to pack into the Major IV. 80+ hours is just astounding, and it means you’ll likely be able to go at least a week or two without even thinking about a charger while using these actively.

Bottom line

Marshall has really delivered an amazing value with the new Major IV. Combining style, performance and quality into a headset that also has amazing battery life and unique wireless charging capabilities is a true achievement – and perks like 3.5mm wired audio sharing just round out the package. These are a great everyday wear headset that you won’t want to go anywhere without.

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How Ikea is growing its business while shrinking emissions | Jesper Brodin and Pia Heidenmark Cook

How Ikea is growing its business while shrinking emissions | Jesper Brodin and Pia Heidenmark Cook

IKEA currently makes up 0.1 percent of all global carbon emissions -- but by 2030, they're planning to be carbon negative across their business. Discussing new thinking about the lifespan of their products, from the forest to the landfill, Jesper Brodin and Pia Heidenmark Cook of Ingka Group (IKEA) share their company's steps towards sustainably sourcing materials like cotton and wood and redesigning products to extend their use without compromising on quality or affordability. (Narrated by Rosa Howard)

https://ift.tt/3lZ8t57

Click this link to view the TED Talk

Shure’s Aonic 50 wireless noise cancelling headphones offer best-in-class audio quality

The noise-cancelling over-ear headphone category is an increasingly competitive one, and consumers have never been more spoiled for choice. Shure entered the market this year with the Aonic 50, a premium-priced headset ($399) that offers active noise cancelling, Bluetooth connectivity and USB-C charging. Shure’s reputation for delivering top-quality sound is definitely part of the package, and there’s a lot more to recommend the Aonic 50 as well.

Basics

Shure offers the Aonic 50 in either black or brown finishes, and they have physical controls on the right ear cup for volume, turning noise cancellation on and off, power, activating voice assistances and skipping tracks. There’s a USB-C port for charging, and a 2.5mm stereo connector on the left ear cup for using the included cable to connect via wire, which allows you to use them even while the internal battery is depleted or the headset is powered down (albeit without active noise cancelling obviously).

The Aonic 50 also comes with a round, flat carrying case – the ear cups swivel to fit in the zippered storage compartment. This takes up more of a footprint than the typical folding design of these kind of ANC headphones, but it’s less bulky, too, so it depends on how you’re packing them whether this is good or bad.

Shure offers a mobile app for iOS and Android called ShurePlus Play that can provide EQ controls, as well as more specific tuning of both the active noise cancelling, and the environmental mode that pipes in outside sound. This allows for a lot of customization, but with one major caveat – EQ settings only apply when playing music via the app itself, which is an unusual and disappointing choice.

Design and performance

Shure’s Aonic 50 excel in a couple of areas where the company has a proven track record: Sound quality and comfort/wearability. The ample faux leather-wrapped padding on both the headband and the ear cups make them very comfortable to wear, even for longer sessions, which is great for work for home practicality. I often forgot I had them on while moving around the house, which gives you an idea of how well they fit.

As for sound, Shure has aimed for a relatively neutral, flat tone that provides an accurate recreation of what the original producer intended for any track, and the results are great. Music detail is clear, and they’re neither too heavy on bass or overemphatic on treble. This is a sound profile that audiophiles will appreciate, though it might not be the best for anyone who’s looking for a bass-heavy soundstage. That said, bass-favoring headphones are easy to find in this category, so Shure’s offering, with its clear highs, stands apart from the field in the ANC arena. To be clear, the bass is excellent, but overall the market has moved towards muddy, artificially enhanced bass vs. true rendering, which the Aonic 50 delivers.

The button controls on the Aonic 50 are well-placed and cover the spectrum in terms of what you’d want to be able to control right from the headset. USB-C charging is much-appreciated in an era where that’s far and away the standard for most of the mobile devices in your life, as well as many computers. The included stereo cable is a great addition for when the battery runs out – but Shure’s advertised 20-hour or so battery life estimate is accurate, so it’ll be quite a while before you have to resort to that as long as you remember to charge once in a while.

If there’s one place where Shure’s performance falls a bit short, it’s in noise cancellation. The ANC does a decent job of blocking out unwanted environmental sound, but it’s not quite up to the standard of the like of Bose or Sony’s top-end ANC headphones. It still gets the job done most of the time, and the trade-off is better sound.

Bottom line

As I said above, people looking for active noise cancelling headphones are spoiled for choice these days. But the Shure Aonic 50 offers something that discerning audio pros won’t be able to find from alternatives including those from Bose or Sony, and that’s an excellent soundstage and sound quality that just can’t be beat. Wearability is also tops, which makes these a great options for audiophiles who want a wire-free, sound-blocking solution for a home office.

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Twitter changes its hacked materials policy in wake of New York Post controversy

Twitter has announced an update to its hacked materials policy — saying it will no longer remove hacked content unless it’s directly shared by hackers or those “acting in concert with them”.

Instead of blocking such content/links from being shared on its service it says it will label tweets to “provide context”.

Wider Twitter rules against posting private information, synthetic and manipulated media, and non-consensual nudity all still apply — so it could still, for example, remove links to hacked material if the content being linked to violates other policies. But just tweeting a link to hacked materials isn’t an automatic takedown anymore.

Over the last 24 hours, we’ve received significant feedback (from critical to supportive) about how we enforced our Hacked Materials Policy yesterday. After reflecting on this feedback, we have decided to make changes to the policy and how we enforce it.

— Vijaya Gadde (@vijaya) October 16, 2020

The move comes hard on the heels of the company’s decision to restrict sharing of a New York Post article this week — which reported on claims that laptop hardware left at a repair shop contained emails and other data belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The decision by Twitter to restrict sharing of the Post article attracted vicious criticism from high profile Republican voices — with the likes of senator Josh Hawley tweeting that the company is “now censoring journalists”.

Twitter’s hacked materials policy do explicitly allow “reporting on a hack, or sharing press coverage of hacking” but the company subsequently clarified that it had acted because the Post article contained “personal and private information — like email addresses and phone numbers — which violate our rules”. (Plus the Post wasn’t reporting on a hack; but rather on the claim of the discovery of a cache of emails and the emails themselves.)

At the same time the Post article itself is highly controversial. The scenario of how the data came to be in the hands of a random laptop repair shop which then chose to hand it over to a key Trump ally stretches credibility — bearing the hallmarks of an election-targeting disops operation, as we explained on Wednesday.

Given questions over the quality of the Post’s fact-checking and journalistic standards in this case, Twitter’s decision to restrict sharing of the article actually appears to have helped reduce the spread of disinformation — even as it attracted flak to the company for censoring ‘journalism’.

(It has also since emerged that the harddrive in question was manufactured shortly before the laptop was claimed to have been dropped off at the shop. So the most likely scenario is Hunter Biden’s iCloud was hacked and doctored emails planted on the drive where the data could be ‘discovered’ and leaked to the press in a ham-fisted attempt to influence the U.S. presidential election. But Twitter is clearly uncomfortable that enforcing its policy led to accusations of censoring journalists.)

In a tweet thread explaining the change to its policy, Twitter’s legal, policy and trust & safety lead, Vijaya Gadde, writes: “We want to address the concerns that there could be many unintended consequences to journalists, whistleblowers and others in ways that are contrary to Twitter’s purpose of serving the public conversation.”

She also notes that when the hacked materials policy was first introduced, in 2018, Twitter had fewer tools for policy enforcement than it does now, saying: “We’ve recently added new product capabilities, such as labels to provide people with additional context. We are no longer limited to Tweet removal as an enforcement action.”

Twitter began adding contextual labels to policy-breaching tweets by US president Donald Trump earlier this year, rather than remove his tweets altogether. It has continued to expand usage of these contextual signals — such as by adding fact-checking labels to certain conspiracy theory tweets — giving itself a ‘more speech to counteract bad speech’ enforcement tool vs the blunt instrument of tweet takedowns/account bans (which it has also applied recently to the toxic conspiracy theory group, QAnon).

“We believe that labeling Tweets and empowering people to assess content for themselves better serves the public interest and public conversation. The Hacked Material Policy is being updated to reflect these new enforcement capabilities,” Gadde also says, adding: “Content moderation is incredibly difficult, especially in the critical context of an election. We are trying to act responsibly & quickly to prevent harms, but we’re still learning along the way.”

The updated policy is clearly not a free-for-all, given all other Twitter Rules against hacked material apply (such as doxxing). Though there’s a question of whether tweets linking to the Post article would still be taken down under the updated policy if the story did indeed contain personal info (which remains against Twitter’s policy).

At the same time, the new ‘third way’ policy for hacked materials does leave Twitter’s platform to be a conduit for the spread of political disinformation (just with a little contextual friction) — in instances where it’s been credulously laundered by the press. (Albeit, Twitter can justifiably point the finger of blame at poor journalist standards at that point.)

The new policy also raises the question of how Twitter will determine whether or not a person is working ‘in concert’ with hackers? Just spitballing here but if — say — on the poll’s eve, Trump were to share some highly dubious information that smeared his key political rival and which he said he’d been handed by Russian president, Vladimir Putin, would Twitter step in and remove it?

We can only hope we don’t have to find out.

Suspect provenance of Hunter Biden data cache prompts skepticism and social media bans

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Daily Crunch: Zoom launches its events marketplace

Zoom has a new marketplace and new integrations, Spotify gets a new format and we review Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Go. This is your Daily Crunch for October 14, 2020.

The big story: Zoom launches its events marketplace

Zoom’s new OnZoom marketplace allows anyone to host and sell tickets for virtual events. It’s also integrating the ability for nonprofits to accept donations.

The company made a couple other announcements at its Zoomtopia user conference. For one thing, it’s also integrating with a starting lineup of 35 third-party “Zapps,” allowing products like Asana and Dropbox to integrate directly into the Zoom experience.

In addition, Zoom said it will begin rolling out end-to-end encryption (a feature it’s been promising since acquiring Keybase in May) to users next week.

The tech giants

Spotify introduces a new music-and-spoken word format, open to all creators — The new format is designed to reproduce the radio-like experience of listening to a DJ talk about the music, and it also enables the creation of music-filled podcasts.

Microsoft reverse engineers a budget computer with the Surface Laptop Go — Brian Heater writes that the Laptop Go is a strange and sometimes successful mix of Surface design and budget decisions.

Google launches a suite of tech-powered tools for reporters, Journalist Studio — The suite includes a host of existing tools as well as two new products aimed at helping reporters search across large documents and visualizing data.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Getaround raises a $140M Series E amid rebound in short-distance travel — The rebound is real: I took my first Getaround this weekend.

Augury taps $55M for tech that predicts machine faults from vibration, sound and temperature — The startup works with large enterprises like Colgate and Heineken to maintain machines in their production and distribution lines.

Plenty has raised over $500M to grow fruits and veggies indoors — The funding was led by existing investor SoftBank Vision Fund and included the berry farming giant Driscoll’s.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

What the iPhone 12 tells us about the state of the smartphone industry in 2020 — While the iPhone 12 was no doubt in development long before the current pandemic, the pandemic’s global shutdown has only exacerbated many existing problems for smartphone makers.

Databricks crossed $350M run rate in Q3, up from $200M one year ago — The data analytics company scaled rapidly to put itself on an obvious IPO path.

Dear Sophie: I came on a B-1 visa, then COVID-19 happened. How can I stay? — The latest advice from immigration lawyer Sophie Alcorn.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. And we’re having a fall sale!)

Everything else

NASA loads 14 companies with $370M for ‘tipping point’ technologies — NASA has announced more than a third of a billion dollars’ worth of “Tipping Point” contracts awarded to over a dozen companies pursuing potentially transformative space technologies.

Harley-Davidson should keep making e-motorcycles — That’s Jake Bright’s takeaway after three weeks with the LiveWire e-motorcycle.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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WizVille Local Monitor helps small shops track Google Maps ratings of competitors

French startup WizVille is launching a new product called Local Monitor to help restaurant owners, haircut places, bakeries and all kinds of small shops track their Google Maps ratings and the ratings of their competitors.

While there are plenty of ratings services to compare places around you, such as Foursquare, Yelp and Tripadvisor, Google Maps has slowly been showcasing ratings more prominently. And chances are you’re now checking ratings on Google Maps more than ever before.

“I’ve been working for 10 years in customer ratings. There’s something huge happening right now — Google and Google Maps are taking over the customer relationship with small shops,” co-founder and CEO Timothée de Laitre told me.

And yet, many small business owners don’t pay attention to their Google My Business rating that customers can see on Google Maps and above Google search results. WizVille thinks this is the most important metric you can track. And it’s also important to know how your competitors are doing.

When you add your business to WizVille Local Monitor, the company displays other places around you that provide the same products and services. You can choose up to five competitors from that list.

After that, you receive a report with your rating, your competitors’ ratings and the evolution over time. This way, you know how you rank compared to your competitors. The service sends you a new report every month so you can track your progress.

Google Maps gets a COVID-19 layer

Google Maps ratings are really not that smart, as the company is calculating the average of all your ratings to determine your overall rating. You could have opened your business 10 days ago or 10 years ago — all your reviews will matter.

If you have more than one shop or you need more features, you have to switch to the full-fledged WizVille customer experience management service, and more specifically WizVille Local Insight. For that service, the startup works with bigger clients, such as Total, Etam, Naturalia and Schmidt.

Image Credits: WizVille

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YouTube bans videos promoting conspiracy theories like QAnon that target individuals

YouTube today joined social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter in taking more direct action to prohibit the distribution of conspiracy theories like QAnon.

The company announced that it is expanding its hate and harassment policies to ban videos “that [target] an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence,” according to a statement.

Facebook says it will ban QAnon across its platforms

YouTube specifically pointed to videos that harass or threaten someone by claiming they are complicit in the false conspiracy theories promulgated by adherents to QAnon.

YouTube isn’t going as far as either of the other major social media outlets in establishing an outright ban on videos or articles that promote the outlandish conspiracies, instead focusing on the material that targets individuals.

“As always, context matters, so news coverage on these issues or content discussing them without targeting individuals or protected groups may stay up,” the company said in a statement. “We will begin enforcing this updated policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come.”

It’s the latest step in social media platforms’ efforts to combat the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories that are increasingly linked to violence and terrorism in the real world.

In 2019, the FBI for the first time identified as a domestic terrorist threat fringe conspiracy theories like QAnon, as well as adherents to the conspiracy theory that falsely claims famous celebrities and Democratic politicians are part of a secret, Satanic, child-molesting cabal plotting to undermine Donald Trump.

In July, Twitter banned 7,000 accounts associated with the conspiracy theory, and last week Facebook announced a ban on the distribution of QAnon related materials or propaganda across its platforms.

Twitter cracks down on QAnon conspiracy theory, banning 7,000 accounts

These actions by the social media platforms may be too little, too late, considering how widely the conspiracy theories have spread… and the damage they’ve already done thanks to incidents like the attack on a pizza parlor in Washington, DC that landed the gunman in prison.

The recent steps at YouTube followed earlier efforts to stem the distribution of conspiracy theories by making changes to its recommendation algorithm to avoid promoting conspiracy-related materials.

However, as TechCrunch noted previously, it was over the course of 2018 and the last year that QAnon conspiracies really took root.

As TechCrunch noted previously, it’s now a shockingly mainstream political belief system that has its own Congressional candidates.

So much for YouTube’s vaunted 70% drop in views coming from the company’s search and discovery systems. The company said that when it looked at QAnon content, it saw the number of views coming from non-subscribed recommendations dropping by more than 80% since January 2019.

YouTube noted that it may take additional steps going forward as it looks to combat conspiracy theories that lead to real-world violence.

“Due to the evolving nature and shifting tactics of groups promoting these conspiracy theories, we’ll continue to adapt our policies to stay current and remain committed to taking the steps needed to live up to this responsibility,” the company said.

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Duplex, Google’s conversational A.I, has updated 3M+ business listings since pandemic

Google today offered an update on the status of Duplex, its A.I. technology that uses natural conversations to get things done — like making restaurant reservations, booking appointments, or updating a Google Business listing, for example. When the pandemic began, Google expanded its use of Duplex for business updates to eight countries, and has since made over 3 million updates to business listings — including pharmacies, restaurants and grocery stores.

These updates have been seen over 20 billion times across Maps and Search, the company says.

The A.I. technology, first introduced at the Google I/O developer conference in 2018, is able to place calls to businesses and interact with the people who answer the phone. In the case of reservations or appointment setting, it can request dates and times, respond to questions, and even make sounds to make the A.I. seem more like a person. For instance, it can insert subtle vocal breaks, like “mm-hm” and “um,” into its conversations.

Since launching, Duplex in Google Assistant has completed over a million bookings, Google announced today.

The company also noted it began to use Duplex to automatically update business information on Google Maps and Search in the U.S. last year, saving business owners from having to manually update details like store hours, or whether they offer takeout, among other things.

Last year, Google also brought Duplex to the web in the U.S., to help users book things like movie tickets and rental cars. Today, Google says it will begin piloting the same experience with other things, like shopping and ordering food for a faster checkout experience.

Just a few weeks ago, Google also introduced another Duplex-powered feature, “Hold for Me,” which lets you use Google Assistant to wait on hold on your phone call, then alert you when someone joins the line.

Thanks to advances in neural speech recognition and synthesis, and in Google’s own new language understanding models, the company says today that 99% of Duplex calls are entirely automated.

The Duplex update was one of several announcements Google made today at its Search On 2020 event, where it introduced a number of search improvements, including the ability to search for songs by humming, better guess at misspellings, point users to the correct part of a page to answer their question, tag key moments in videos, and more.

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Google introduces song matching via humming, whistling or singing

Google has added a new feature that lets you figure out what song is stuck in your head by humming, whistling or singing – a much more useful version of the kind of song-matching audio feature that it and competitors like Apple’s Shazam have offered previously. As of today, users will be able to open either the latest version of the mobile Google app, or the Google Search widget, and then tap the microphone icon, and either verbally ask to search a song or hit the ‘Search a song button’ and start making noises.

The feature should be available to anyone using Google in English on iOS, or across over 20 languages already on Android, and the company says it will be growing that user group to more languages on both platforms in the future. Unsurprisingly, it’s powered behind the scenes by machine learning algorithms developed by the company.

Google says that it’s matching tech won’t require you to be a Broadway star or even a choir member – it has built-in abilities to accommodate for various degrees of musical sensibility, and will provide a confidence score as a percentage alongside a number of possible matches. Clicking on any match will return more info about both artist and track, as well as music videos, and links that let you listen to the full song in the music app of your choice.

Google explains in a blog post announcing the feature that it’s able to do this because it basically ignores the fluff that is the quality of your voice, any accompanying instruments, tone and other details. The algorithm is basically boiling the song down to its essence, and coming up with a numerical pattern that represents its essence, or what Google calls its ‘fingerprint.’

This is an evolution of how Google’s existing music recognition tech works, which is present in the passive ‘Now Playing’ feature that’s available on its Pixel smartphones. That feature will listen passively in the background for music, and provide a match when it finds one in its offline database (all done locally). That same technology is at work in the SoundSearch feature that Google later introduced via its app.

Google isn’t the first to do this – SoundHound’s Midomi offers music matching via singing or humming. But Google is obviously much more widely used, so it’ll be interesting to see if it can achieve better hit rates, and overall usage.

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Google launches a slew of Search updates

Google today announced a number of improvements to its core search engine, with a strong focus on how the company is using AI to help its users. These include the ability to better answer questions with very specific answers, very broad questions and a new algorithm to better handle the typos in your queries. The company also announced updates to Google Lens and other Search-related tools.

Most of these are meant to be useful but some are also just fun. You will now be able to hum a song and the Google Assistant will try to find the right song for you, for example.

As Google noted, 1 in 10 search queries is misspelled. The company already does a pretty good job dealing with those through its ‘did you mean’ feature. Now, the company is launching an improvement to this algorithm that uses a deep neural net with 680 million parameters to better understand the context of your search query.

Image Credits: Google

Another nifty new feature is an integration with various data sources, which were previously only available as part of Google’s Open Data Commons, into Search. Now, if you ask questions about something like “employment in Chicago,” Google’s Knowledge Graph will trigger and show you graphs with this data right on the Search results page.

Image Credits: Google

Another update the company announced today in its systems ability to index parts of pages to better answer niche queries like “how do I determine if my windows have UV glass?” The system can now point you right to a paragraph on a DIY forum. In total, this new system will improve about 7% of queries, Google said.

For broader questions, Google is now also using its AI system to better understand the nuances of what a page is about to better answer these queries.

Image Credits: Google

These days, a lot of content can be found in videos, too. Google is now using advanced computer recognition and speech recognition to tag key moments in videos — that’s something you can already find in Search these days, but this new algorithm should make that even easier, especially for videos where the creators haven’t already tagged the content.

Other updates include an update to Google Lens that lets you ask the app to read out a passage from a photo of a book — no matter the language. Lens can now also understand math formulas — and then show you step-by-step guides and videos to solve it. This doesn’t just work for math, but also chemistry, biology and physics.

Image Credits: Google

Given that the holiday shopping season is coming up, it’s maybe no surprise that Google also launched a number of updates to its shopping services. Specifically, the company is launching a new feature in Chrome and the Google App where you can now long-tap on any image and then find related products. And for the fashion-challenged, the service will also show you related items that tend to show up in related images.

If you’re shopping for a car, you will now also be able to get an AR view of them so you can see what they look like in your driveway.

Image Credits: Google

In Google Maps, you will now also be able to point at a restaurant or other local business when you are using the AR walking directions to see their opening hours, for example.

Another new Maps feature is that Google will now also show live busyness information right on the map, so you don’t have to specifically search for a place to see how busy it currently is. That’s a useful feature in 2020.

Image Credits: Google

During the event (or really, video premiere, because this is 2020), which was set to the most calming of music, Google’s head of search, Prabhakar Raghavan, also noted that its 2019 BERT update to the natural language understanding part of its Search system is now used for almost every query and available in more languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Arabic, German and Amharic. That’s part of the more than 3,600 updates the company made to its search product in 2019.

All of these announcements are happening against the backdrop of various governments looking into Google’s business practices, so it’s probably no surprise that the event also put an emphasis on Google’s privacy practices and that Raghavan regularly talked about “open access” and that Google Search is free for everyone and everywhere, with ranking policies applied “fairly” to all websites. I’m sure Yelp and other Google competitors wouldn’t quite agree with this last assertion.

Google introduces song matching via humming, whistling or singing

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Brazil’s Black Silicon Valley could be an epicenter of innovation in Latin America

Paulo Rogério Nunes Contributor

Paulo is the co-founder of Vale do Dendê (Dende Valley) and AFAR Ventures, a global diversity and inclusion creative and consulting agency that identifies opportunities for multinational brands, corporations and investors in emerging markets.

Tara Sabre Collier Contributor

Tara Sabre Collier is an early-stage impact investor with more than 15 years of experience at the intersection of economic development, social entrepreneurship and impact investment. She is a Visiting Fellow of Oxford University where she teaches and writes about impact investing, diversity and equity.

Over the last five years, Brazil has witnessed a startup boom.

The main startups hubs in the country have traditionally been São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, but now a new wave of cities are building their own thriving local startup ecosystems, including Recife with Porto Digital hub and Florianópolis with Acate. More recently, a “Black Silicon Valley” is beginning to take shape in Salvador da Bahia.

While finance and media are typically concentrated in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, a city of three million in the state of Bahia, is considered one of Brazil’s cultural capitals.

With an 84% Afro-Brazilian population, there are deep, rich and visible roots of Africa in the city’s history, music, cuisine and culture. The state of Bahia is almost the size of France and has 15 million people. Bahia’s creative legacy is quite clear, given that almost all the big Brazilian cultural patrimonies have their roots here, from samba and capoeira to various regional delicacies.

Many people are unaware that Brazil has the largest Black population in any country outside of Africa. Like counterparts in the U.S. and across the Americas, Afro-Brazilians have long struggled for socio-economic equity. As with counterparts in the United States, Brazil’s Black founders have less access to capital.

According to research by professor Marcelo Paixão for the Inter-American Development Bank, Afro-Brazilians are three times more likely to have their credit denied than their white counterparts. Afro-Brazilians also have over twice the poverty rates of white Brazilians and only a handful of Afro-Brazilians have held legislative positions, despite comprising more than 50% of the population. Not to mention, they make up less than 5% of the top level of the top 500 companies. Compared with countries like the United States or the United Kingdom, the racial funding gap is even more stark as more than 50% of  Brazil’s population is classified as Afro-Brazilian.

Bahia could be an epicenter of innovation in Latin America

Salvador (Bahia’s capital) is the natural birthplace of Brazil’s Black Silicon Valley, which largely centers around a local ecosystem hub, Vale do Dendê.

Vale do Dendê coordinates with local startups, investors and government agencies to support entrepreneurship and innovation and runs startup acceleration programs specifically focusing on supporting Afro-Brazilian founders. The Vale do Dendê Accelerator organization has already been in the spotlight at international and national publications because of its innovative work in bringing startup and tech education from mainstream to traditionally underserved communities.

In almost three years, the accelerator has supported 90 companies directly that cut across various industries, with high representation from the creative and social impact sectors. Almost all of the companies have achieved double-digit growth and various companies have gone on to raise further funding or corporate backing. One of the first portfolio companies, TrazFavela, a delivery app that focuses on linking customers and goods from traditionally marginalized communities, was supported by the accelerator in 2019. Despite the lockdown, the business grew 230% between the period of March and May after incubation and recently signed an agreement for further support and investment from Google Brasil.

There is a clear recognition of the business case for Afro-Brazilian businesses. Another company supported in the beginning with mentoring by Vale do Dendê is Diaspora Black (which focuses on Black culture in the tourism sectors). It attracted backing from Facebook Brasil and grew 770% in 2020.

The same is true for AfroSaúde, a health tech company focused on low-income communities with a new service to prevent COVID-19 in favelas (urban slums, which incidentally have high Black representation). The app now has more than 1,000 Black health professionals on its platform, creating jobs while addressing a health crisis that had been tremendously racialized.

We’re at the brink of a renaissance here in Bahia

Despite Brazil’s challenging economic situation, large national and global companies and investors are taking notice of this startup boom. Major IT company Qintess has come on board as a major sponsor to help Salvador become the leading Black tech hub in Latin America.

The company announced an investment of around 10 million reais (nearly $2 million USD) over the next five years in Black startups, including a collaboration with Vale do Dendê to train around 2,000 people in tech and accelerate more than 500 startups led by Black founders. Also, in September, Google launched a 5 million reais (around $1 million USD) Black Founders Fund with the support of Vale do Dendê to boost the Afro-Brazilian startup ecosystem.

There is no doubt that the new wave of innovation will come from the emerging markets, and the African Diaspora can play an important role. With the world’s largest African diaspora population in the hemisphere, Brazil can be a major leader on this. Vale do Dendê is keen to build partnerships to make Brazil and Latin America a more representative startup and creative economy ecosystem.

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