Technology

Observant has found a new way to use the fancy infrared depth sensors included on the iPhone X, XS and XR: analyzing peoplefacial expression in order to understand how they&re responding to a product or a piece of content.

Observant was part of the winter batch of startups at accelerator Y Combinator, but was still in stealth mode on Demo Day. It was created by the same company behind bug-reporting product Buglife, and CEO Dave Schukin said his team created it because they wanted to find better ways to capture user reactions.

We&ve written about other startups that try to do something similar using webcams and eye tracking, but Schukin (who co-founded the company with CTO DanielDeCovnick) argued that those approaches are less accurate than Observant— in particular, he argued that they don&t capture subtler µexpressions,& and they don&t do as well in low-light settings.

In contrast, he said the infrared depth sensors can map your face in high levels of detail regardless of lighting, and Observant has also created deep learning technology to translate the facial data into emotions in real time.

Observant has created an SDK that can be installed in any iOS app, and it can provide either a full, real-time stream of emotional analysis, or individual snapshots of user responses tied to specific in-app events. The product is currently invite-only, but Schukin said italready live in some retail and e-commerce apps, and italso being used in focus group testing.

Of course, the idea of your iPhone capturing all your facial expressions might sound a little creepy, so he emphasized that as Observant brings on new customers, itworking with them to ensure that when the data is collected, &users are crystal clear how itbeing used.& Plus, all the analysis actually happens on the users& device, so no facial footage or biometric data gets uploaded.

Eventually, Schukin suggested that the technology could be applied more broadly, whether thatby helping companies provide better recommendations, introduce more &emotional intelligence& to their chatbots or even detect sleepy driving.

As for whether Observant can achieve those goals when itonly working on three phones, Schukin said, &When we started working on this almost a year go, the iPhone X was the only iPhone [with these depth sensors]. Our thinking at the time was, we know how Apple works, we know how this technology propagates over time, so we&re going to place a bet that eventually these depth sensors will be on every iPhone and every iPad, and they&ll be emulated and replicated on Android.&

So while ittoo early to say whether Observantbet will pay off, Schukin pointed to the fact that these sensors have expanded from one to three iPhone modelsas a sign that things are moving in the right direction.

Mytaxi, the Daimler-owned Uber competitor, announced today it would launch an electric scooter pilot in Southern Europe later this year, with a full international roll-out planned for 2019.

Daimler initially took a 15 percent stake in Hamburg-basedmytaxi in 2012, adding the company to its portfolio of ridesharing businesses that also includesChauffeur Privé,Careem, Flinc, car2go and Hailo, which merged with mytaxi in 2016.

The company has yet to unveil its scooters& brand name, but says it will use the Segway ES4 Sharing Scooter.

&The E-scooter market is highly dynamic and the interest from users is booming in a lot of international cities,& mytaxi chief executive officer Eckart Diepenhorst said in a statement. &We see a significant growth potential for mytaxi here and a perfect complement to our existing taxi business as E-scooters are mostly used for short tours of around one to two kilometers. Although ride lengths strongly vary between taxi and scooter business, we think about potential combinations of both areas.&

Mytaxi was founded in 2009 and says it has since transported 10 million passengers via 100,000 registered drivers. Before Daimler acquired the remaining stake in the startup in 2014, mytaxi had raised some $13 million from Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, T-Venture,Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, car2go and others.

Lime and Bird, a pair of well-funded e-scooter startups, have emerged as the front-runners of the already over-crowded e-scooter market. Still, it seems all ride-hailing and bike-sharing businesses are going to try their hand at scooters.

Taxify, another European Uber competitor, is one of the most recent companies to announce plans to release scooters in Europe.

A U.S. government network was infected with malware thanks to one employee&extensive history& of watching porn on his work computer, investigators have found.

The audit, carried out by the U.S. Department of the Interiorinspector general, found that a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) network at the EROS Center, a satellite imaging facility in South Dakota, was infected after an unnamed employee visited thousands of porn pages that contained malware, which downloaded to his laptop and &exploited the USGS& network.& Investigators found that many of the porn images were &subsequently saved to an unauthorized USB device and personal Android cell phone,& which was connected to the employeegovernment-issued computer.

Investigators found that his Android cell phone &was also infected with malware.&

The findings were made public ina reportearlier this month but buried on the U.S. governmentoversight website and went largely unreported.

Itbad enough in this day and age that a government watchdog has to remind civil servants to not watch porn at work — let alone on their work laptop. The inspector general didn&t say what the employeefate was, but ripped into the Department of the Interiorpolicies for letting him get that far in the first place.

&We identified two vulnerabilities in the USGS& IT security posture: web-site access and open USB ports,& the report said.

There is a (slightly) bright side. The EROS Center, which monitors and archives images of the planetland surface, doesn&t operate any classified networks, a spokesperson for Interiorinspector general told TechCrunch in an email, ruling out any significant harm to national security. But the spokesperson wouldn&t say what kind of malware used — only that, &the malware helps enable data exfiltration and is also associated with ransomware attacks.&

Investigators recommended that USGS enforce a &strong blacklist policy& of known unauthorized websites and ®ularly monitor employee web usage history.&

The report also said the agency should lock down its USB drive policy, restricting employees from using removable media on government devices, but itnot known if the recommendations have yet gone into place. USGS did not return a request for comment.