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EA became the subject of online scrutiny this week when it was discovered that the gaming giant deleted a reference to Colin Kaepernick on the soundtrack for Madden 19. The former 49ers quarterback was name-checked by rapper Big Sean on a verse of the YG song &Big Bank,& only to have the mention deleted. The track includes the line, &You boys all cap, I&m more Colin Kaepernick.&

The move was noted on Twitter this week and amplified by radio host (and Kaepernickgirlfriend) Nessa Diab, along with Big Sean himself. The latter said the reference was deleted &like it was a curse word,& adding, &henot a curse, hea gift! Nobody from my team approved any of this.&

Kaepernick became a leading figure in the Black Lives Matter movement after sitting and later kneeling during the National Anthem as a form of protest against black deaths at the hands of police officers. A number of NFL players have since followed suit, leading Donald Trump to call for the firing of players over on-field protests.

In a statement to TechCrunch, EA called the deletion &an unfortunate mistake,& chalking up the move to confusion of relating to player rights:

We made an unfortunate mistake with our Madden NFL soundtrack. Members of our team misunderstood the fact that while we don&t have rights to include Colin Kaepernick in the game, this doesn&t affect soundtracks.We messed up, and the edit should never have happened.We will make it right, with an update to Madden NFL 19 on August 6 that will include the reference again.We meant no disrespect, and we apologize to Colin, to YG and Big Sean, to the NFL, to all of their fans and our players for this mistake.

NBC Sports notes, however, that this is apparently not the first timeKaepernickname has been removed from a Madden soundtrack. While the playerlikeness appeared in last yearversion of the game, his name was apparently also removed from theMike WiLL Made-It track, &Bars of Soap.&

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GameFly, the video game rental company, will be shutting down its streaming service at the end of the month, Varietyreportedearlier this week. This closure comes just over three years after the streaming service launched in 2015.

GameFly, the no-console streaming service for gamers,offered packages for $7 and $10 per month that gave users unlimited access to titles — as long as they had a smart TV like an Amazon Fire or Samsung Smart TV, in addition to a controller and access to the internet. Just as GameFlyoriginal snail-mail rental service for games mimicked Netflixfrom days of yore, many touted the streaming service as the Netflix of gaming.

Support for the service will be maintained through the end of August and accounts will not be charged for the service after that date, according toVariety. But peoplecan still rent physical games (and movies) from the company for $9.50 per month (one rental at a time) or $13.50 per month (two rentals at a time.)

This news comes about three months after EA acquired the technology and team membersfromGameFlycloud gaming division — a division that helped make it possible to save your progress to the cloud while gaming on the streaming service. But the acquisition did not include GameFlystreaming service.

&We acquired the team in Israel and the technology they&ve developed, we did not acquire the Gamefly streaming service,& an EA spokesperson toldVariety.&We have not been involved in any decisions around the service.&

TechCrunch reached out to GameFly for comment but the company did not respond by the time of publication regarding the reasons behind this closure.

Meanwhile, the world of streaming games appears to be continuing on just fine. SonyPlayStation Now continues to add titles to its service,French startup Bladestreaming service is expanding availabilitythis week in the U.S. and EA itself announced at E3 this summer plans to start work on its own streaming service.

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A Y Combinator-backed startup, JetLenses, is taking on the major contact lens e-commerce sites, like 1-800-Contacts, Lens.com, and other online ordering systems offered by major retailers, such as Walmart. The startupgoal is to bring down the cost of prescription products by automating the overhead associated with these businesses, in areas like prescription verification, order tracking, compliance and fulfillment, then pass those savings on to customers.

The company also promises fair and transparent pricing, so there aren&t surprises at checkout, and offers customers free shipping on their orders.

JetLenses was founded byDhaivat Pandya, the son of an eye doctor who studied Statistics and Computer Science at Harvard. His background allowed him to identify the market inefficiencies in this business, in order to develop a new solution, he says.

&It was a space where doing this kind of work & engineering and data science & would have an immediate impact that I could see on a day-to-day basis,& Pandya explains as to why he decided to target the prescription lenses market. &A lot the reason why contact lenses are so expensive is just overhead,& he says.

JetLenses aims to save you a bunch of money on your contacts

Around 20 percent of the time, the online sites run into issues when verifying customer prescriptions. For example, the eye doctor may have relocated their practice, and their phone and fax numbers changed.

This ends up eating away a lot of time in terms of human labor, as staff has to research if the practice still exists and locate their new contact information before they can proceed with the verification. JetLenses, meanwhile, will instead try to first match the doctorinformation to a data set it maintains of existing practices to find a match, then locate the new phone number and fax automatically

It also automatically faxes the office to verify the prescription, and processes the doctoroffice response.

The company is leveraging data science around the logistics of order fulfillment, too, in order to determine which fulfillment partner to use for each incoming order.

These sorts of engineering tasks may already be common to larger e-commerce shopping sites, but haven&t really been put to work in the prescription lenses market, Pandya says.

He says JetLenses& lower pricing comes from these improvements & itnot just slashing prices to attract customers.

&Our margins are basically identical to others in the space,& he notes. &The goal is not to alter the business by just selling [lenses] for cheaper.&

While not a comprehensive review, I tried out online ordering on JetLenses before speaking to the company, to see how it compared with my usual site, 1800Contacts.com. I was fairly surprised to find that a 6-pack of my Acuvue Oasys for Astigmatism lenses were $32.99 on JetLenses, compared with the $51.99 I usually pay. (1800Contacts encourages shoppers to buy 4 boxes per eye at once, to get a $40 rebate on these lenses. But thata lot to spend all at once.)

JetLenses aims to save you a bunch of money on your contacts

JetLenses will honor the manufacturer rebates, too, and works with customers& vision insurance plans.

The website itself is a little wonky in parts, but itonly been online since the fall. You&ll need to know your lens brand and do a search rather than try to browse your way. as the site navigation is somewhat lacking, I found. But to save nearly $20 a box Worth it.

JetLenses isn&t the only contacts lens e-commerce startup out there right now. Another, Hubble, raised $73.7 millionlast year for its own brand of daily disposable lenses, sold on subscription. Thatthe not route JetLenses is going.

Instead, it aims to apply these data science techniques to other prescription businesses, like dental products or prescription creams.

For now, the startup is focused on raising a seed round following Y CombinatorDemo Day to scale the business more quickly.

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Sometimes smart contracts can be pretty dumb.

All of the benefits of a cryptographically secured, publicly verified, anonymized transaction system can be erased by errant code, malicious actors or poorly defined parameters of an executable agreement.

Hoping to beat back the tide of bad contracts, bad code and bad actors,Sagewise, a new Los Angeles-based startup, has raised $1.25 million to bring to market a service that basically hits pause on the execution of a contract so it can be arbitrated in the event that something goes wrong.

Co-founded by a longtime lawyer, Amy Wan, whose experience runs the gamut from the U.S. Department of Commerce to serving as counsel for a peer-to-peer real estate investment platform in Los Angeles, and Dan Rice, a longtime entrepreneur working with blockchain, Sagewise works with both Ethereum and the Hedera Hashgraph (a newer distributed ledger technology, which purports to solve some of the issues around transaction processing speed and security which have bedeviled platforms like Ethereum and Bitcoin).

The companytechnology works as a middleware, including an SDK and a contract notification and monitoring service. &The SDK is analogous to an arbitration clause in code form — when the smart contract executes a function, that execution is delayed for a pre-set amount of time (i.e. 24 hours) and users receive a text/email notification regarding the execution,& Wan wrote to me in an email. &If the execution is not the intent of the parties, they can freeze execution of the smart contract, giving them the luxury of time to fix whatever is wrong.&

Sagewise approaches the contract resolution process as a marketplace where priority is given to larger deals. &Once frozen, parties can fix coding bugs, patch up security vulnerabilities, or amend/terminate the smart contract, or self-resolve a dispute. If a dispute cannot be self-resolved, parties then graduate to a dispute resolution marketplace of third party vendors,& Wan writes. &After all, a $5 bar bet would be resolved differently from a $5M enterprise dispute. Thus, we are dispute process agnostic.&

Wavemaker Genesis led the round, which also included strategic investments from affiliates of Ari Paul (Blocktower Capital), Miko Matsumura (Gumi Cryptos), Youbi Capital, Maja Vujinovic (Cipher Principles), Jordan Clifford (Scalar Capital), Terrence Yang (Yang Ventures) and James Sowers.

&Smart contracts are coded by developers and audited by security auditing firms, but the quality of smart contract coding and auditing varies drastically among service providers,& said Wan, the chief executive of Sagewise, in a statement. &Inevitably, this discrepancy becomes the basis for smart contract disputes, which is where Sagewisesteps in to provide the infrastructure that allows the blockchain and smart contract industry to achieve transactional confidence.&

In an email, Wan elaborated on the thesis to me, writing that, &smart contracts may have coding errors, security vulnerabilities, or parties may need to amend or terminate their smart contracts due to changing situations.&

Contracts could also be disputed if their execution was triggered accidentally or due to the actions of attackers trying to hack a platform.

&Sagewise seeks to bring transactional confidence into the blockchain industry by building a smart contract safety net where smart contracts do not fulfill the original transactional intent,& Wan wrote.

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NASA has announced the names of the first astronauts who&ll fly to the International Space Station on American-made, commercial spacecraft.

The crews will fly to the space station on rockets built by NASA commercial partners Boeing and SpaceX. &Today, our countrydreams of greater achievements in space are within our grasp,& said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, in a statement. &Todayannouncement advances our great American vision and strengthens the nationleadership in space.&

Nine astronauts were selected to crew the first test flights and missions ofBoeingCST-100 StarlinerandSpaceXCrew Dragon.

&The men and women we assign to these first flights are at the forefront of this exciting new time for human spaceflight,& said Mark Geyer, director of NASAJohnson Space Center in Houston, in a statement.

After each company completes their crewed test flights successfully, NASA will start the process to finally certify the spacecraft and systems for regular crew missions to the space station.

So far, NASA has contracted for six missions with each company, with as many as four astronauts crewing each commercial spacecraft.

In the 18 years that NASA has had a presence on the space station, the space agency has conducted experiments in biology, biotechnology, physics and space science that have resulted in thousands of spin-off technologies, the agency said.

With the new spaceflight capabilities through Boeing and SpaceX (initially), NASA says it will maintain a crew of seven astronauts on the space station for continued scientific research and experimentation on understanding and mitigating the challenges of long-duration spaceflight.

Here are the astronauts who will be taking flight:

Starliner Test-Flight Astronauts

NASA names first astronauts for the inaugural commercial flights to the ISS

Eric Boe/ Photo courtesy of NASA

EricBoe:The Miami-born and Atlanta-raised Boe came to NASA from the Air Force, where he rose to the rank of colonel as a fighter pilot and test pilot. Boe was first selected as an astronaut in 2000 and piloted the space shuttle Endeavor.Boe was also on the final flight of the Discovery before the Space Shuttle Program was sunset.

NASA names first astronauts for the inaugural commercial flights to the ISS

Christopher Ferguson/Photo by Robin Marchant/FilmMagic

Christopher Ferguson:A retired Navy captain who hails from Philadelphia, Ferguson piloted space shuttle Atlantis, and commanded the shuttle Endeavour. Ferguson was on the Atlantis for its final flight with the Space Shuttle Program.

NASA names first astronauts for the inaugural commercial flights to the ISS

Nicole AunapuMann/ Photo courtesy of NASA

Nicole AunapuMann:A lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Nicole Aunapu Mann is an F/A-18 test pilot with more than 2,500 flight hours in more than 25 aircraft and was selected to be an astronaut in 2013. The test flight with Boeing will be her first trip to space.

The Starliner will launch aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, according to a NASA statement.

NASA names first astronauts for the inaugural commercial flights to the ISS

Crew Dragon Test-Flight Astronauts

NASA names first astronauts for the inaugural commercial flights to the ISS

Robert Behnken/Photo courtesy of NASA

Robert Behnken:Missouri native Robert Behnken has a doctorate in engineering and is a flight test engineer and colonel in the Air Force. Behnken first joined the astronaut corps in 2000 and flew aboard space shuttle Endeavour twice, performing six spacewalks that totaled 37 hours.

NASA names first astronauts for the inaugural commercial flights to the ISS

Douglas Hurley/ Photo courtesy of NASA

Douglas Hurley:Douglas Hurley joined the Marine Corps and served as a test pilot before joining NASA in 2000. The Apalachin, N.Y. native piloted both the space shuttle Endeavor and Atlantis.

According to NASA, SpaceXCrew Dragon will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA names first astronauts for the inaugural commercial flights to the ISS

Starliner First-Mission Astronauts

NASA names first astronauts for the inaugural commercial flights to the ISS

Josh Cassada/Photo courtesy NASA

Josh Cassada:From his home in Minnesota to a career in theNavy, commander and test pilot Josh Cassada has spent more than 3,500 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft. He was selected as an astronaut in 2013. His Starliner mission will be his first spaceflight.

NASA names first astronauts for the inaugural commercial flights to the ISS

Sunita Williams/Photo courtesy of NASA

SunitaWilliams:A Needham, Mass. by-way-of Euclid, Ohio naval test pilot, Williams was a captain in the Navy before her retirement. She was selected as an astronaut in 1998 and has spent 322 days on the International Space Station. Williams commanded the space station and has also performed seven spacewalks.

Crew Dragon First-Mission Astronauts

NASA names first astronauts for the inaugural commercial flights to the ISS

Victor Glover/ Photo courtesy NASA

VictorGlover:Pomona, Calif.-born Victor Glover is a Navy commander, aviator and test pilot who has flown more than 3,000 hours in more than 40 different aircraft. With 24 combat missions and 400 carrier landings, Glover was selected as part of the 2013 astronaut candidate class and will be making his first spaceflight aboard the Dragon.

NASA names first astronauts for the inaugural commercial flights to the ISS

Michael Hopkins/ Photo courtesy NASA

Michael Hopkins:A former farm boy who grew up near Richland, Mo., Michael Hopkins went on to be a colonel in the air force where he was a flight-test engineer before being selected to be a NASA astronaut in 2009. Hopkins spent 166 days on the International Space Station and has been on two space walks.

NASA said that additional crew members would be assigned by international partners at a later date.

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Shelling out your cold, tough money isn & t the only way you can score a ticket to Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. We & re looking for volunteers happy to trade their time to assist us produce our biggest, most enthusiastic Disrupt conference ever. And what do you get in return One complimentaryInnovator Pass that provides you access to all 3 days of Disrupt. Interested Apply here to volunteer today. This is an opportunity to participate in the show without spending a cent while getting an up-close-and-personal look at what it requires to produce one of the most iconic startup occasions of the year. Whether you desire be a startup founder, marketer or occasion coordinator, this is an excellent method to see how all of it gets done. We & ll put you to work at a range of jobs, which may consist of packing VIP goodie bags, helping with registration, scanning tickets, directing attendees, placing signs or helping with pre-marketing efforts —-- any number of things to help make Interrupt SF 2018 an outstanding experience for everyone. Herewhat you need to know (a.k.a., the small print):. The deadline for volunteer applications is August 15. You need to participate in an obligatory in-person orientation on Tuesday, September 4, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. at Moscone Center West. You must be offered to work up to 16 hours during the whole conference beginning with September 4 (theday before the conference begins) to September 7. You & ll discover volunteer shift schedule in the application. We may select you for some pre-event chances, which would count toward your hours. You should offer your own real estate and transportation. Due to the high volume of applications, we will alert only the picked candidates. There you have it. Work exchange is an awesome method to participate in Disrupt SF 2018 without spending cash, to see what goes into producing an occasion this size, and to experience three program-packed days of tech-startup goodness. The deadline for volunteer applications is August 15. Apply right here. We appreciate the assist!
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