Technology

Pilot fish gets a new assignment: responsibility for a mainframe application that prints a monthly report listing all the employees who use the company's tuition-reimbursement program.

"The problem we had that made it a recurring programming problem was that, at some point, someone had decided to send the raw data to an outside vendor, which accumulated it and created a data tape that was then sent back to us to be used to print the monthly report," says fish.

"The outside vendor hired a series of temps to do the actual data entry -- all of them with zero experience on this particular job."

That means each month fish has to take the tape from the outside vendor and copy the data into a raw "dump" format to discover just how that month's temp has decided to format the data.

Since blockchain technology appeared, there has been a persistent problem in its development: how to make it scale to billions of users. Bitcoin was famously never really designed for this, and today other platforms like Ethereum are also struggling. If you could crack this problem, the thinking goes, you&d end up with the hottest property in blockchain right now.

That, a very healthy dose of ambition, and a bench of strong computer science talent are some of the big reasons why investors are gathering aroundDFINITY,a startup based out of Zug, Switzerland and Palo Alto that is also a foundation, and has a very lofty goal to build what it calls the &Internet Computer&: a blockchain-based, decentralised and non-proprietary network to run the next generation of mega-applications.DFINITY aims to launch an initial version of its public network — which it has also dubbed &Cloud 3.0& — towards the end of the year.

Today, DFINITY is announcing that it has raised $102 million in funding, in a round jointly led by Andreessen Horowitz (via its crypto fund a16z crypto) and Polychain Capital. Both were previous investors in a $61 million round DFINITY announced earlier this year — which has been a blockbuster for blockchain, with at least $1.3 billion being invested into the technology in the first half of 2018 alone. DFINITY has now raised just over $195 million to date since being founded in 2015.

Other investors in this latest round include SV Angel, Aspect Ventures, Village Global, Multicoin Capital, Scalar Capital, and Amino Capital, as well as DFINITY community members.

DFINITYapproach to the scalability problem is to resolve the dilemma between full decentralization (where every miner runs every instruction of every computation) versus delegating the mechanics to nodes or super nodes (so therefore more centralisation). DFINITY says it has tested its network to the point where it can finalize software computations in under 5 seconds, which is extremely fast. Bitcoin by contrasts takes 3600 seconds, and Ethereum 600 seconds.

DFINITY conducted an airdropin May of 35 million Swiss Francs worth of tokens to DFINITY community members to help them become early users.Now DFINITY has followed the newer approach of raising a private sale for its token, without going to a public sale.

You can also watch a test demo of the network here:

While a lot of blockchain projects are tied up with currency (an area that DFINITY has also developed, as you can see), whatnotable about what this startup is doing is that its wider focus is on building a platform that could be used across a significantly wider set of applications.

The Internet Computer, as described by founder and chief scientist Dominic Williams, &is a public infrastructure that aims to host the worldnext generation of software and services.& The belief is that by making it open source and non-proprietary, itsignificantly more secure and less costly to maintain. DFINITY claims that R-D on such an architecture is 90 percent lower.

&We are excited to back DFINITYInternet Computer and their vision to host the worldnext generation of software and services on a public network,& said Chris Dixon, Partner at a16z crypto. &The Internet Computer is on track to become a critical piece of the future technology stack. This is groundbreaking and a real testament to Dominic and the incredible team at DFINITY.&

In addition to Williams, that team is impressive indeed.

It includes Timo Hanke as head of engineering, who is a former mathematics and cryptography professor who createdAsicBoost to increase the efficiency of Bitcoin mining; Mahnush Movahedi, who joined as a senior researcher from Yale where heworked on &scalable and fault-tolerant distributed algorithms for consensus and secure multi-party computation, secret sharing, and interactive communication over noisy channels&; ex-Googler Ben Lynn, who is the &L& from BLS cryptography, used in Threshold Relay to &generate randomness and achieve security, speed and scale in public networks&; and Adreas Rossberg, another ex-Googler who had co-designed theWebAssembly virtual machine, which is also used at DFINITY.

While Internet networks and the largest players online today are proprietary entities with their own commercial and strategic agendas, the vision behind DFINITY is that it can be used to run &autonomous software& that will run in a more independent way. These will exist as running open source software that updates itself using inbuilt governance that can provide hard guarantees to users in the form of &smart contracts& (computing and other transactions that can be made without third parties). These can cover how data might be used, or provide guarantees to startups wishing to build functionality without the precarious worry of a platform access getting revoked. You can read more about the technology in its white paper.

DFINITY has not disclosed its valuation with this round.

Natural Cycles, a Swedish startup which touts its body temperature-based algorithmic method for tracking individual fertility as an effective alternative to hormonal birth control, has been wrapped by the UK advertising regulator which today upheld three complaints that an advert the company ran last year via Facebookplatform was misleading.

The regulator has banned Natural Cycles from running the advert again, and warned it against exaggerating the efficacy of its product.

The ad had stated that &Natural Cycles is a highly accurate, certified, contraceptive app that adapts to every womanunique menstrual cycle. Sign up to get to know your body and prevent pregnancies naturally&, and in a video below the text it had also stated: &Natural Cycles officially offers a new, clinically tested alternative to birth control methods&.

The company has leaned heavily on social media marketing to target its ‘digital contraception& app at young women.

&We told Natural Cycles Nordic AB Sweden not to state or imply that the app was a highly accurate method of contraception and to take care not to exaggerate the efficacy of the app in preventing pregnancies,& said the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) handing down its decision.

While Natural Cycles gained EU certification for its app as a contraceptive in February 2017, and most recently FDA clearance for marketing the app as a contraception in the US (with the regulator granting itsDe Novo classification request this month), those regulatory clearances come with plenty of caveats about the complexity of the product.

The FDA, for example, warns that: &Users must be aware that even with consistent use of the device, there is still a possibility of unintended pregnancy.&

At the same time, Natural Cycles has yet to back up the efficacy claims it makes for the product with the scientific ‘gold standard& of a randomized control trial. So users wanting to be able to compare the productefficacy against other more tried and tested birth control methods (such as the pill or condoms) are not able to do so.

No birth control method (barring abstention) is 100% effective of course but, as we&ve reported previously, Natural Cycles& aggressive marketing and PR has lacked nuance and attempted to downplay concerns about the complexity of its system and the chance of failure even though the productperformance is impacted by multiple individual factors — from illness, to irregular periods. Which risks being irresponsible.

In the ruling, the ASA flags up the relative complexity of Natural Cycles& system vs more established forms of contraception — pointing out that:

The Natural Cycles app required considerably more user input than most forms of contraception, with the need to take and input body temperature measurements several times a week, recording when intercourse had taken place, supplemented with LH measurements, abstention or alternative methods of contraception during the fertile period.

The company also remains under investigation in Sweden by the medical regulator after a local hospital reported a number of unwanted pregnancies among users of the app.

Despite all that, Natural Cycles&website bills its product as &effective contraception&, claiming the app is &93% effective under typical use& and making the further (and confusingly worded) claim that: &With using the app perfectly, i.e. if you never have unprotected intercourse on red days, Natural Cycles is 99% effective, which means 1 woman out of 100 get pregnant during one year of use.&

Perfect use of the app actually means a woman would accurately perform daily measurement of her body temperature without fail or fault, and before sheeven sat up in bed, at least several times a week, correctly inputting the data. Forgetting to do so once because — say — you got up to go to the toilet or were otherwise interrupted before taking or inputting a reading could constitute imperfect use.

The BBC spoke to a women who says she made the decision to use the app after seeing that 99% effective claim in Natural Cycles& marketing on Instagram — and subsequently fell pregnant while using it. &I was sort of sucked into this &99% effective& [claim],& she told the broadcaster. &You know &even more effective than the pill&… What could possibly go wrong&

In its ruling, the regulator said it investigated two issues related to the advert run by Natural Cycles on Facebook on July 20, 2017, and both issues were upheld.

The complaints were that Natural Cycles& advert included misleading and unsubstantiated claims — specifically that the product was: 1. &Highly accurate contraceptive app&; and 2. &Clinically tested alternative to birth control methods&.

Natural Cycles told the ASA that the latter claim is in fact a quote from a Business Insider article which it &considered to be correct& and had thus reproduced in its marketing.

After taking expert evidence, and reviewing three published papers on accumulated data obtained from the app, the regulator deemed the combination of the two claims to be misleading.

It writes:

We considered that in isolation, the claim &clinically tested alternative to birth control methods& was unlikely to mislead. However, when presented alongside the accompanying claim &Highly accurate contraceptive app&, it further contributed to the impression that the app was a precise and reliable method of preventing pregnancies which could be used in place of other established birth control methods, including those which were highly reliable in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Because the evidence did not demonstrate that in typical-use it was &highly accurate& and because it was significantly less effective than the most reliable birth control methods, we considered that in the context of the ad the claim was likely to mislead.

The ASA also found the advert to have breached rules for substantiation and exaggeration of marketing messages in the Medicines, medical devices, health-related products and beauty products category, as well as being misleading.

At the time of writing Natural Cycles had not responded to requests for comment.