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Technology
In a series of late night/early morning tweets, Elon Musk offered up engineers from Space X and the Boring Company to help the soccer team trapped in a Thailand cave.
Musk began by suggesting a potential solution to help rescue the team and their coach who went missing late last month. As he noted, the Boring Company in particular has quite a bit of experience digging holes and working with ground penetrating radar. He then announced that he would be offer up help in the form of engineers from two of his companies.
&SpaceX - Boring Co engineers headed to Thailand tomorrow to see if we can be helpful to govt,& Musk tweeted. &There are probably many complexities that are hard to appreciate without being there in person.&
A spokesperson for the latter confirmed the plan, writing,
We are speaking with the Thai government to see how we can help, and we are sending SpaceX/Boring Company people from the US to Thailand today to offer support on the ground.&Once we confirm what exactly will be helpful to send or do, we will. We are getting feedback and guidance from the people on the ground in Chiang Rai to determine the best way for us to assist their efforts.&
The attempted rescue from the Tham Luang cave complex has proven difficult and deadly. Just last night, it was revealed that a form Thai Navy SEAL diver died bringing tanks of air to the 12 boys and their coach.
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Read more: Space X/Boring Company engineers are being sent to help with Thai cave rescue
Write comment (94 Comments)Have you felt a disconnect with your Alexa and wished she could share more of your sense of humor or tell you anactuallyscary ghost story Startup Storyline makes designing your own Alexa skills as easy and dragging and dropping speech blocks, and has just raised $770,000 in a funding round led by Boost VC to help grow its skill builder API.
The company launched in 2017 to help bridge the gap between creators and the tricky voice recognition software powering smart speakers like Alexa. With its new funding, CEO and co-founderVasili Shynkarenkasays that Storyline is hoping to expand its team and its interface to other smart speakers, like Google Home, as well work on integrating monetization and third-party services into the interface.
Storylineuser friendly interface lets users drag-and-drop speech commands and responses to customize userinteractions with their smart speaker devices. Users can choose between templates for a skill or a flash briefing, and test the voice recognition and logic of the design live in their browser window.
Since its launch, over 12,000 Storyline users have published 2,500 skills in the Alexa Skills Store — more than 6% of all skills in the store. The interface has also been used by the grand-prize winners of AmazondeveloperAlexa Skills Challenge: Kids and the publication Slate.
For Shynkarenka, the creation of these skills is vastly different from the creation of a typical smartphone app.
&Most people think of Alexa as another software platform, like a smartphone or the web, and thatnot [actually] true,& he said. &The most popular apps on Alexa are not the apps that let you chat with friends or browse your social networks. The most popular apps are content apps — the apps that you can use to play trivia games with your family over dinner.&
Just as YouTube has video creators,Shynkarenka says he wants Storyline to become the home for smart speaker content across devices. The startup has already cultivated an active online community of 2,500 creators excited about creating and sharing this content.
Storyline is not alone in this space however, Amazon itself released Amazon Blueprints in April that allows users to create customized Amazon skills using several different available templates.
As the smart speaker space, and subsequent skill creation one, continue to heat up, the creation of your perfectly customized new smart speaker family member may be closer than you think.
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Read more: Boost VC backs Storyline’s Alexa skill builder
Write comment (99 Comments)Felicity Conrad and Kristen Sonday were on very different paths until three years ago. Conrad was an associateat the powerhouse law firm Skadden Arps. Meanwhile, Kristen Sonday, a Princeton grad and the first person in her family to go to college, was reflecting on the several years she&d spent with the U.S. Department of Justice in Mexico City, working to extradite fugitives.
As it happens, both were coming to similar conclusions about the U.S. legal system, including that itespecially challenging for people who don&t speak English. For Conrad, an opportunity to litigate a pro bono asylum case would set her on a path of wanting to do more for people fleeing persecution from their own countries. For Sonday, the experience of working with foreign governments had a similar impact.
Perhaps itno wonder that soon after they were introduced by a mutual friend, they decided to create Paladin, a New York-based SaaS business that today helps legal teams sign up for pro bono opportunities, enables coordinators to track the lawyers& work, and which captures some of the stories and impact that the lawyers are making through their efforts. This last piece is particularly important as the software helps legal departments see the return on investment for their attorneys& donated time.
The companyoffering is timely, including for legal departments like that of Verizon, which has 900 attorneys and a global pro bono program that it uses Paladin to help manage. (Verizon owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch.) Lyft, a newer client, has a 50-person legal department and recently launched its own pro bono team.
Given how quickly immigration and other policies are being changed under the Trump administration and uneven guidance from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the need for legal help is growing by the day.
For example, Lyft — which is among a long line of tech companies to speak out in support of immigrants& rights — is committing some of its lawyers to reuniting families that have been separated at the Southern U.S. border, says Conrad.
One question is how scalable Paladinoffering is. The biggest challenge for the outfit right now would seem to be that few corporate lawyers do the kind of pro bono work thatoften most needed but involves litigation matters outside the scope of what they practice, including around immigration laws, social security benefits, and criminal and domestic abuse matters.
Sonday says Paladin has the solution to that, explaining that the seven-person company has raised $1.1 million from investors —Mark Cuban, Hyde Park Ventures, Backstage Capital, R2 Ventures, MergeLane and Chaac Ventures, among them — toward that end.
What it plans to build, exactly: infrastructure thatconnects organizations on the ground with legal services and law firms all over the world, no matter their size. Basically, it will begin acting as a matchmaker for legal departments, helping lawyers find the pro bono work about which they can feel most passionately.
Ultimately, Conrad and Sonday are betting that anything that makes the process of finding pro bono work a lot easier than it is today will increase the numbers of attorneys who give back to society. They also think that when law firms can better track the impact their employees are making, we&ll see more, and bigger, pro bono programs.
Says Sonday, &Right now, just 10 to 20 percent of law firms have someone in-house to manage that pro bono work. If we can help the other 80 to 90 percent of lawyers& connect with the people who need them most — and who they feel good about helping — ita win-win all around.
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Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is the go-to place for buying and exchanging cryptocurrencies — as long as you&re fine sticking to Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash. But Coinbase is actively looking at adding support for additional cryptocurrencies, Coinbase CTOBalaji Srinivasan said at TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain today in Zug, Switzerland.
In June, Coinbase announced it would expand its support for just four cryptocurrencies to five, to include Ethereum Classic (ETC) &in the coming months.& Earlier this year, Coinbase also announced its intent to add some ERC 20 tokens.
And more is coming. While Srinivasan wouldn&t say which other cryptocurrency support is on Coinbasehorizon, he said to &look for a lot of announcements over the months to come.&
Srinivasan also compared Coinbase to the mullet hairstyle — business in the front, party in the back.
&Coinbase is a mullet in the sense we interface with banks and governments and then therethe crypto space,& Srinivasan said.
Coinbasegeneral strategy with adding new cryptocurrencies to its platform is to maintain good relationships with banks, governments, and those in the crypto and blockchain spaces. In a sentence, Srinivasan said, Coinbasegoal is &to mainstream cryptocurrency, to mainstream blockchain.&
In order to achieve that, he said, that requires maintaining good relationships on all sides. So before Coinbase begins support for a new cryptocurrency, he said, there needs to be notable growth and adoption.
&We&ll never be the earliest adopter, but we will be early adopters,& he said.
Ultimately, Srinivasan envisions Coinbase operating more algorithmically so that it will be easier to duplicate its processes for adding additional cryptocurrencies.
Srinivasan joined Coinbase in April as the cryptocurrency exchangefirst CTO following Coinbase$120 million+ acquisition of Earn.com, a blockchain-based paid email service co-founded by Srinivasan. Srinivasan is also a board member at Andreessen Horowitz.
Before selling to Coinbase, Srinivasan led Earn.com to profitability after turning it into a service that rewards people for answering emails and completing tasks. At the time of the acquisition, Earn.com was profitable with revenues at an eight-digit annual run rate.
As CTO, Srinivasan is also focused on educating the masses about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Thatbecause thereno formal K-12 or undergraduate education around this space thattotally revolutionary, he said.
In terms of core fundamentals,Srinivasan said, hevery bullish on blockchain technology. He noted how itten times better than gold, international wire transfer and crowdfunding, and ten times better for the incorporation of a company and more.
&Combine all of those 10xes and you&ve improved these fundamental primitives and made them programmable and automatable.&
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Read more: Coinbase CTO says the company is like a mullet
Write comment (95 Comments)The Securities - Exchange Commission, the federal agency responsible for protecting investors and maintaining fair and orderly functioning of our securities markets, has 11 regional offices, including in Miami, New York, Boston, and Chicago,
None has quite the workload as the SECSan Francisco regional office, where a major area of focus in recent years has been investor fraud in pre-IPO companies, particularly the many startups that in an earlier era wouldhave either have gone public or else out of business, but which today linger as privately held outfits because thereso much money sloshing around.
Among the companies to find themselves in the SECsights in recent years is HR software outfit Zenefits and its founder, Parker Conrad; they were fined $1 million last October as part of a settlement over charges that they&d misled investors. In March, the online personal finance company Credit Karma alsosettled SEC charges; it had been accused of unlawfully offering securities to its employees — then failing to provide them with timely financial statements and risk disclosures.
Of course, the best-known SEC case to date has centered on the blood-testing company Theranos, which was charged with massive fraud in March, along with companyfounder, Elizabeth Holmes, and its former president, Sunny Balwani.
Leading the charge in each of these cases and many more: Jina Choi, a graduate of Oberlin and Yale Law School who worked as a lawyer for the Justice Department in Washington before heading to San Francisco and the SECenforcement division in 2000.
Five years ago, Choi was promoted to director of that office, where she has since overseen enforcement and examinations in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, despite critics who believe the SEC should keep its eye on public companies alone. (&If no one is policing private markets, thata problem,& Choi said at a public forum in May.)
In an age of initial coin offerings, cryptocurrencies, and mushrooming numbers of blockchain-related projects, Choi and her colleagues have their hands particularly full, so you can imagine how excited we are that Choi is coming to Disrupt to discuss some of those challenges, as well as the agencyvictories. We&re also looking forward to learning more about how decisions are made in Choioffice and back in Washington.
If you&re interested in learning more about the SECever-evolving approach to Silicon Valley startups — and why you shouldn&t expect its interest to dissipate any time soon — you really won&t want to miss this conversation.
You can buy tickets to the show, taking place in San Francisco September 5th through September 7th, righthere.
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Read more: Jina Choi, SF Regional Director of the SEC, is coming to Disrupt to talk ICOs and more
Write comment (91 Comments)Once a mainstay of the service, Netflixuser reviews are going away. The movie streaming giant has shifted away from the feature over the last few years, and by the end of the summer, they&ll be gone from the site altogether.
If you still got something to get off your chest about the new season of Kimmy Schmidt, you&ll still be able to do so through the end of the month. It won&t do much good, however — by the middle of August, no one will actually be able to read the thing.
A spokesperson for the company acknowledged as much in an email this week, stating, &We have notified members who have used the feature recently.&
Netflix has been weaning users off of the crowdsourced rating system for a while now, of course. Back in April of last year, the site dumped the familiar five-star rating system in favor of the more straight forward thumbs up/down, in an attempt to offer a more personalized recommendation system.
&A thumbs-down lets us know you aren&t interested in watching that title and we should stop suggesting it to you,& Netflix wrote at the time. &You can still search for it, but we&ve heard what you were trying to tell us — you aren&t a fan — and it will no longer show up on your homepage. In either case, using thumbs helps us learn even more about your unique tastes so we can do a better job suggesting stories we think you&ll love.&
The review system has only been available via the desktop version of the service — and from most accounts, itbeen fairly under used of late. Once itgone, however, the thumbs up/down will remain in tact. If you still need to world to know what you thought about that powerful new Hannah Gadsby standup special, on the other hand, thatwhat social media is for, I guess.
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Read more: Netflix is ditching user reviews
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