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.

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.

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.