Technology

Synchronize your Apple watches and lock on to the fact that you have just three days — 72 hours — to save yourself up to $1,200 on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2018. Our biggest, boldest Disrupt takes place at Moscone Center West on September 5-7, and you&re running short on time to get the best possible price. Our early-bird pricing detonates at midnight PST on July 25, so stop procrastinatingand go buy your pass to the best tech startup show going.Get your ticket today.

We can list all sorts of reasons for you to go, and believe us, we will. But consider what one of your peers — Luke Heron, an early-stage founder and CEO of TestCard.com — thinks about the Disrupt experience.

&I&m a serial proselytizer when it comes to TechCrunch events. If you&re a startup founder or an entrepreneur, attending Disrupt is a no-brainer.&

Heron also took advantage of CrunchMatch, our free, curated business match-making service that helps connect founders with investors who share similar business goals.

&We used the CrunchMatch platform to schedule a bunch of meetings on our second day of the show. We met with six or seven VCs and, by and large, they were very positive meetings.&

If you&re an investor specializing in early-stage startups, Disrupt SF 2018 is an essential event. You&ll see an incredible cohort of pre-Series A companies go head-to-head in Startup Battlefield, where they&ll vie for $100,000 in non-equity cash and life-changing investor love.

Herewhat early-stage investor Michael Kocan of Trend Discovery had to say about his Disrupt experience.

&I get the most value at the intersection of CrunchMatch and Startup Battlefield. If I see an interesting company present on stage, I use CrunchMatch to quickly schedule a meeting with them for later that day. It makes vetting deals extremely efficient.&

Founders, investors, marketers and job-seekers alike will find more than 1,200 startups exhibiting in Startup Alley. Thatprime real estate for discovering a new partner, finding a job, engaging in creative networking or possibly even finding a unicorn-in-the-rough. Regardless of your motives, the depth and breadth of technology and talent on display is worth your serious time and attention.

On top of all that, Disrupt SF 2018 offers more than 40 presentations from world-class speakers and rising stars, interactive workshops andQ-A Sessions, ourVirtual Hackathon and the always-raucous TechCrunch After Party.

We&d love for you to join us at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. And why not get the best price you can July 25 will be here in a flash, so save some cash and buy your tickets now.

Itone thing to run machine learning models in the cloud, where you have plenty of resources. On mobile devices, you&re dealing with very finite compute resources, so if you want to run your models directly on the devices, they have to be highly optimized. Add to that that Apple and Google are taking somewhat different approaches and use different frameworks and you can see why this is all a bit of a nightmare for mobile developers.

Boston-based Fritz, which is opening its service to all developers today, wants to make all of this far easier. Itan end-to-end solution for adding machine learning models to mobile apps — and have them run natively on the device.

The company argues that as Apple and Google are both pushing their own frameworks, developers are left to work with whatat best suboptimal tooling. Fritz then wants to build better tools to simplifylife for developers.

&What we want the developers to do is build a model and then we take care of the rest,& the companyCEO and co-founder Jameson Toole told me.

Fritz is agnostic as to the runtime that the models are actually using. Developers can bring theirCore ML, TensorFlow Mobile and TensorFlow Lite models to Fritz and the SDK will monitor theirperformance and help developers push updated models to their apps without having to release a new version.

In addition, Fritz also offers a number of standardmodels for use cases like image labeling and object detection that the company has already optimizedto work offline and at high enough frame rates to support live video.

Among the apps that starting using Fritz during its private beta are PlantVillage, which uses on-device machine learning to detect evidence of crop diseases and gives farmers in East Africa advice for how to treat them;MDAcne, for detecting cases of acne; and the more lighthearted InstaSaber, which turns a piece of rolled-up paper into a virtual lightsaber.

All of Fritzfunctionality is available for free. Over time, Toole told me, the team plans to add to the platform a number of premium services, including more collaboration tooling for teams and more automation features for managing and tweaking models. It&ll also launch more machine learning features, includingstyle transfer and image segmentation.

In addition to its core service, Fritz also offers a number of tutorials and other resources for teaching developers about machine learning, as well as Alchemy, a tool for analyzing and benchmarking a custom modelperformance on mobile.

Toole also is open to going beyond smartphones and supporting other edge devices for IoT use cases, for example. Right now, the team is squarely focused on mobile, though.

Why do I write about tech For James Ball, itbecause I want to write &soap-bubble light coverage& and &glossy coverage& &to counterbalance the ‘serious& news of the day.& Ball, a former editor at The Guardian and the author of &Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World,& has a few choice words to say to reporters, columnists and analysts like me who cover the tech industry.

In a piece entitled &We need a new model for tech journalism,& Ball calls for nothing less than the dismantling of the current tech press, and its replacement by one far more critical of the corporate interests that dominate the industry.

Okay. But herethe challenge: The whole idea of a coherent &tech press& seems to miss that technology has completely taken over the world. Want to cover Washington Well, Alphabet is now the heaviest corporate spender on lobbying in DC. Want to cover foreign affairs Well, U.S./China relations are squarely focused on issues of tech industrial policies, like ChinaMade in China 2025 plan.

Every sector, every industry, heck, every decision is increasingly one in which technology either plays the prime role, or at least has major influence. Ball grasps that the work of a tech journalist is hard, writing that &Tech reporters are often expected to cover all facets of the industry.& Frankly, that was easier just a couple of years ago, before the iPhone and the global smartphone revolution made tech companies not just interesting, but powerful as well.

That to me is the burden of covering technology today. Tech now spans a spectrum from the proverbial two tinkerers in a garage to the most powerful corporations in the history of the planet. Most startup founders are broke, yet Jeff Bezos is worth $150 billion. Journalists need an incredible dynamic range to cover the range of these stories effectively.

Take startup coverage, which has always had a sort of effusive optimism that Ball clearly dislikes. Herethe reality: startup life is awful. Itstressful, emotionally draining and exhausting. And even after the founders make a total physical and mental commitment to a new product — a new way to see the world — the most common case is for literally nothing to happen. The average startup dies an anonymous death, without even a Medium &Itbeen an incredible journey& post.

Thatnot news. In fact, tech journalists could write &ambitious startup fails again!& stories pretty much every hour of the workweek and not run out of companies and founders to write about.

The reason people read about early-stage tech startups, indeed, why they want to read any news, is to peer into the exceptional and differentiate it from the mundane. They want to know why this startup succeeded when more than a thousand others fell by the wayside. Tens of thousands of high-growth startups are founded every year across the world, and yet, only a handful represents the complete economic value of the industry. Thatthe story. I remain unabashed about covering success over failure (although learning from defeat has its uses).

As startups grow, they should face more trenchant criticism about their effects on society. (Photo by Michele Tantussi/Getty Images)

Yet, our lenses need to change over time as these startups mature. Itone thing to cover Airbnb back in 2008, and discuss this startup where a couple of founders are trying to help people attend the Democratic National Convention in Denver that year. But Airbnb is now a multi-billion dollar valued company, and deserves far more critical analysis than it did a decade ago. We saw this sort of narrative adaptation over time with Uber, and obviously with Theranos. But there are at least a dozen other companies that deserve fairly strict scrutiny of their actions on a daily basis, but often get limited attention.

To me, a renewed &tech press& needs to have both optimistic and pessimistic angles. It needs to cover very early startups with soft gloves while also knowing when to throw a punch as those startups mature and gain power.

Perhaps even more importantly, we need to start appreciating the complexity of our current environment. Alphabet can face a multi-billion dollar fine from the Europeans for antitrust, while also fighting a tooth-and-nail war with ISPs like Verizon and AT-T over net neutrality. These companies are so big, and touching so many facets of our lives, that there are no brushstrokes that can paint a simple abstraction of these companies. Some of their actions may be &good& or &bad,& but only deeper analysis is going to get us any purchase on the effects of these companies on our lives.

Ball and I completely agree that the coverage of technology increasingly requires specialization. No one can be informed about what is happening across the industry anymore, let alone cover it all. Indeed, I am not even sure a single human being can truly cover companies like Alphabet and Facebook. I am not sure their executives and boards know the complete extent of what is happening at their companies. We need more depth, more focus and more quality criticism if we are to build an effective press.

I am reminded a bit of Sara M. Watsonwork around &constructive tech criticism.& She wrote in her report, &Acknowledging the realities of society and culture, constructive criticism offers readers the tools and framings for thinking about their relationship to technology and their relationship to power.& To me, thata great mission statement for what coverage should do today. It requires us to renew our focus: to inform, to simplify and complicate as necessary, and to bring attention to the most salient issues of the day. Thatwhy I write, and why we should all be writing.