Technology

A prominent figure that helped shape Facebook public perception over the course of the last decade is on the way out. In a Facebook post today, Elliot Schrage, vice president of communications and public policy, announced his departure.

Schrage joined the company in 2008 after leaving his position in the same role at Google. He had come under fire over the last year at Facebook for his influence in shaping Facebookhighly criticized public reaction to a series of scandals that began with the platformpolicies during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In response to questions about Facebookpotential unwitting role in influencing the outcome of the election, Mark Zuckerberg famously dismissed such concerns as a &pretty crazy idea.&

via Facebook/Elliot Schrage

In a Facebook post, Schrage elaborates:

After more than a decade at Facebook, I&ve decided ittime to start a new chapter in my life. Leading policy and communications for hyper growth technology companies is a joy — but italso intense and leaves little room for much else. Mark, Sheryl and I have been discussing this for a while. I&ll lead the search to identify someone new to oversee our communications and policy teams. We expect to find someone with the same passion, integrity, determination and energy that our teams bring to Facebook every day. Mark and Sheryl have asked me to stay to manage the transition and then to stay on as an advisor to help on particular projects & and I&m happy to help.

Earlier this week, Schrage reportedly apologized for comments made in response to questions from Arjuna Capital Managing Partner Natasha Lamb during an investor meeting. Lamb inquired about Facebookplans to correct its gender pay gap among other uncomfortable lines of questioning for the company. Schrage reportedly told Lamb that the company would not answer her questions because she was ¬ nice.& Itnot clear if that event influenced the timing of Schragedeparture.

You&ve heard howTechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018is going to bethe biggest, most ambitious Disrupt ever— and we&re serious. So serious, in fact, that we&re super-sizing the Hackathon, taking it online and making it global. Thousands of the worldmost talented developers, programmers, hackers and tech makers can participate and submit their hacks from anywhere in the world.The clock starts now — you have a little less than 6 weeksto build your team and start creating your projects — so sign up today to get started.

We&re asking you to show us how you&d creatively produce and apply technology to solve various challenges. Judges will review all eligible submitted hacks and rate them on a scale of 1-5 based on the quality of the idea, technical implementation of the idea and the productpotential impact. The 100 top-scoring teams will receive up to 5 Innovator Passes for their team to attend TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018.

Plus, the 30 highest-scoring teams will advance to the semi-finals, where they get to demo their newly created product at Disrupt SF. From there, we&ll choose 10 of those teams to pitch their hack on The Next Stage in front of thousands of Disrupt SF attendees. One of those 10 teams will win the $10,000 grand prize and be the first-ever TechCrunch Disrupt Virtual Hackathon champ.

But thatnot all! We&ll also have some fantastic sponsor contests already announced from BYTON, TomTom and Viond:

BYTON

What can AI do for you while on the move

What will people want to do in a car that has a 49& screen and drives autonomously How can we create an enjoyable time with a vehicle thatable to communicate with other vehicles on the road or smart city infrastructure We challenge you to think creatively and develop unique solutions to give people their &time to be& while on the move. Smart agendas, recommendations and digital assistants are only some of the ways we&re thinking about doing artificial intelligence during the age of autonomy.

AtBYTONwe define ourselves by giving customers their &time to be& while in our cars through a unique user experience, interior design, and autonomous driving. The BYTON Concept is designed to make technology benefit life, providing an enjoyable time for people on the move. BYTON Life is the core of that experience. It is an open digital cloud platform that connects applications, data and smart devices. When integrated with innovative human-vehicle interaction, it takes the intelligent experience with the vehicle to a whole new level.

Sponsor Prizes: $5,000 and an invitation to a BYTON Co-creation Event to meet the creators of BYTON Life will be awarded to the top team that utilizes existing technology and APIs of their choice to develop a unique and creative solution. Awards for second prize will be $2,000 and third prize will be $1,000.

TomTom

TomTom created the easy-to-use navigation device, one of the most influential inventions of all time. Since then, our software and navigation technologies have been powering hundreds of millions of applications globally. From industry-leading location-based products, mapmaking technologies, innovative apps and connected car services. We continue to shape the future, leading the way with autonomous driving, smart mobility and smarter cities.

Location-based AR app on GitHub — Build an augmented reality (AR) application that demonstrates how the TomTom Maps APIs can be combined with AR technology to generate custom 3D worlds, enable location annotations or incorporate traffic-enabled directions and travel times in applications. The TomTom Maps APIs are already enabling developers to create location-aware applications that can display maps and traffic information, search for locations and points of interest and calculate traffic-aware routes and travel times. With this challenge, we want developers to enhance their solutions by combining TomTom location technology with AR technology in a mobile or web application. Creativity and innovation will be highly valued and rewarded!

Sponsor Prize: $5,000.

Viond

Viond allows creatives, agencies and businesses to create interactive 360° / VR experiences with drag-and-drop capabilities without the need for VR programming skills. Viond significantly reduces the effort and cost of creating 360° /VR experiences providing creatives with the tool and platform to explore this new medium.

Viond provides an authoring tool to create interactive 360° experiences. The authoring tool can be downloaded on the Viond Hackathon site and is available for Mac and PC. Experiences can then be published via the Viond Cloud to the Viond player available for iOS, Android and Oculus.

Sponsor Prize: First place: $1,000 US + 12-month Viond Enterprise license + the chance to win the TechCrunch hackathon. Second Place: $500 US + 12-month Viond Professional license. Third Place: $250 US + 12-month Viond Professional license.

Itfree to participate in our virtual hackathon and you can participate from anywhere! So what are you waiting for Gather up a group of your closest developer friends and sign up today!

Google has released its first diversity report since the infamous James Damore memo and the fallout that resulted from it. Those are both long stories but the TL;DR is that Damore said some sexist things in a memo that went viral. He got fired and then sued Google for firing him. That lawsuit, however, was shot down by the National Labor Relations Board in February. Then, it turned out another employee, Tim Chevalier, alleges he was fired for advocating for diversity, as reported by Gizmodo later that month. Now,Chevalier is suing Google.

&I was retaliated against for pointing out white privilege and sexism as they exist in the workplace at Google and I think thatwrong,& Chevalier told TechCrunchfew months ago about why he decided to sue. &I wanted to be public about it so that the public would know about whatgoing on with treatment of minorities at Google.&

In court, Google is trying to move the case into arbitration. Earlier this month, Googleattorney said Chevalier previously &agreed in writing to arbitrate the claims asserted& in his original complaint, according to court documents filed June 11, 2018.

Now that I&ve briefly laid out the state of diversity and inclusion at Google, herethe actual report, which is Googlefifth diversity report to date and by far the most comprehensive. For the first time, Google has provided information around employee retention and intersectionality.

First, here are some high-level numbers:

• 30.9 percent female globally
• 2.5 percent black in U.S.
• 3.6 percent Latinx In U.S.
• 0.3 percent Native American in U.S.
• 4.2 percent two or more races in U.S.

Google also recognizes its gender reporting is ¬ inclusive of our non-binary population& and is looking for the best way to measure gender moving forward.As Google itself notes, representation for women, black and Latinx people has barely increased. Last year, Google was 30.8 percent female, 2.4 percent black and 3.5 percent Latinx.

At the leadership level, Google has made some progress year over year, but the companyhigher ranks are still 74.5 percent male and 66.9 percent white. So, congrats on the progress but please do better next time because this is not good enough.

Moving forward, Google says its goal is to reach or exceed the available talent pool in terms of underrepresented talent. But what that would actually look like is not clear. In an interview withTechCrunch,Google VP of Diversity and Inclusion Danielle Brown told me Google looks at skills, jobs and census data around underrepresented groups graduating with relevant degrees. Still, she said shenot sure what the representation numbers would look like if Google achieved that. In response to what a job well done would look like, Brown said:

You know as well as we do that ita long game. Do we ever get to good I don&t know. I&m optimistic we&ll continue to make progress. Itnot a challenge we&ll solve over night. Itquite systemic. Despite doing it for a long time, my team and I remain really optimistic that this is possible.

As noted above, Google has also provided data around attrition for the first time. Itno surprise — to me, at least — that attrition rates for black and Latinx employees were the highest in 2017. To be clear, attrition rates are an indicator of how many people leave a company. When one works at a company that has so few black and brown people in leadership positions, and at the company as a whole, the unfortunate opportunity to be the unwelcome recipient of othering, micro-aggressions, discrimination and so forth are plentiful.

&A clear low light, obviously, in the data is the attrition for black and Latinx men and women in the U.S.,& Brown told TechCrunch. &Thatan area where we&re going to be laser-focused.&

She added that some of Googleinternal survey data shows employees are more likely to leave when they report feeling like they&re not included. Thatwhy Google is doing some work around ally training and &what it means to be a good ally,& Brown told me.

&One thing we&ve all learned is that if you stop with unconscious bias training and don&t get to conscious action, you&re not going to get the type of action you need,& she said.

From an attrition stand point, where Google is doing well is around the retention of women versus men. It turns out women are staying at Google at higher rates than men, across both technical and non-technical areas.Meanwhile, Brown has provided bi-weekly attrition numbers toGoogle CEO Sundar Pichai and his leadership team since January in an attempt to intervene in potential issues before they become bigger problems, she said.

via Google: Attrition figures have been weighted to account for seniority differences across demographic groups to ensure a consistent baseline for comparison.

As noted above, Google for the first time broke out information around intersectionality. According to the companydata, women of all races are less represented than men of the same race. That&s, again, not surprising. While Google is 3 percent black, just 1.2 percent of its black population is female. And Latinx women make up just 1.7 percent of Google5.3 percent Latinx employee base. That means, as Google notes, the companygains in representation of women has &largely been driven by& white and Asian women.

Since joining Google last June from Intel, Brown has had a full plate.Shortly after the Damore memo went viral in August — just a couple of months after Brown joined — Brown said &part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.&

Brown also said the document is ¬ a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.&

Today, Brown told me the whole anti-diversity memo was &an interesting learning opportunity for me to understand the culture and how some Googlers view this work.&

&I hope what this report underscores is our commitment to this work,& Brown told me. &That we know we have a systemic and persistent challenge to solve at Google and in the tech industry.&

Brown said she learned ¬ every employee is going to agree with Googleviewpoint.& Still, she does want employees to feel empowered to discuss either positive or negative views. But &just like any workplace, that does not mean anything goes.&

When someone doesn&t follow Googlecode of conduct, she said, &we have to take it very seriously& and &try to make those decisions without regard to political views.&

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