Technology

Microsoft is following Apple and Googlelead with todaylaunch of per-app and per-game time limits in its parental control software. Already, the company allows parents to limit screen time across Windows 10, Xbox One and Android via the Microsoft Launcher. However, it hadn&t yet allowed parents to limit the amount of time a child could spend in a specific app or game, as its competitors do.

Instead, its existing controls allowed parents only to dole out a set amount of hours of screen time. Parents could choose to either leave the time up to the kids to manage, or limit it at the device level — like, only allowing one hour of Xbox time but permitting more screen time on the PC, for example.

However, the current trend in screen time management is not to approach all screen time as unproductive and unhealthy. Instead, itabout configuring limits on the more addictive apps and games that eat up increasing amounts of childrentime, while permitting educational tools to have fewer limits.

For older kids and teens, social media apps like TikTok or Instagram could be the culprit, while younger kids may just be spending too much time &hanging out& in virtual worlds like Roblox and Fortnite. Problems on this front have gotten pretty bad. Mobile games are under fire for using gambling tactics like loot boxes to engage children. And Fortnite is now the subject of a lawsuit that claims that, in part, the gameaddictive nature is due to its use slot machine-like mechanics and variable reward systems, which manipulate childrenbrains.

Without being able to limit these apps directly, kids may end up using all of their allotted screen time on just the one app or game they&re obsessed with at the moment.

Apple had already allowed per-app time limits with the launch of its screen time controls in iOS 12. And Google more recently updated its own Family Link software, now preinstalled on new Android devices, to include a similar feature.

With todayupdate, Microsoft is now on board, too.

The new app and game limits parents set will apply across Windows 10, Xbox and Android devices running Microsoft Launcher. In other words, kids can&t get more game time just by switching devices.

The controls also allow parents to offer more screen time on certain days — like weekends, for instance — than others.

To use this feature, parents will need to create a family group and make Microsoft accounts for all the kids.

Once enabled, kids will get a warning about their screen time 15 minutes before the limit is reached, and then again at five minutes. Because kids will often beg for a few more minutes, Microsoft made it easy for parents to grant or deny more time via email or via a Microsoft Launcher notification on their own Android phone.

The per-app time limits are launching today in preview within Microsoftexisting family settings.

&Ultimately, our goal is for the app and game limits feature to provide flexible and customizable tools to meet each familyunique needs,& the company explains in an announcement. &You as parents know whatbest for your children — no technology can ever replace that — but we&re hoping these tools can help you to strike the right balance,& it says.

European startup studio eFounders has shared some metrics about its portfolio companies. The startup studio has launched 23 companies with a focus on software-as-a-service enterprise products.

While eFounders might not be a familiar name, some of the companies in its portfolio have become promising startups with impressive growth, such as Front, Aircall, Forest, Spendesk, Mailjet and others. Front is also company No. 85 in Y Combinatorlist of top 101 companies of all time.

And the big new metric is that the total valuation of all 23 companies has now reached $1 billion. Of course, eFounders is just a shareholder in those 23 companies, so eFounders itself isn&t a unicorn. But itstill an impressive number.

At the end of 2018, eFounders& portfolio valuation was at $541 million. At the end of 2017, the same metric was at $385 million.

Overall, eFounders companies have raised $254 million from VC funds and business angels, and employ 1,000 people, mostly in Paris, San Francisco and New York. And when you add up the annual recurring revenue of all those startups, they generate $107 million in ARR together.

If you don&t know the eFounders model, itquite simple. At first, the core eFounders team comes up with an idea and hires a founding team. In exchange for financial and human resources, the startup studio keeps a significant stake in its startups.

After a year or two, startups should have proven that they can raise a seed round and operate on their own. This way, eFounders can move on to the next project and start new companies. Up next, eFounders is already working on five new companies.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, delivering the keynote at the Microsoft Government Leaders Summit in Washington, DC today, had a message for attendees to maintain user trust in their tools technologies above all else.

He said it is essential to earn user trust, regardless of your business. &Now, of course, the power law here is all around trust because one of the keys for us, as providers of platforms and tools, trust is everything,& he said today. But he says it doesn&t stop with the platform providers like Microsoft. Institutions using those tools also have to keep trust top of mind or risk alienating their users.

&That means you need to also ensure that there is trust in the technology that you adopt, and the technology that you create, and thatwhatgoing to really define the power law on this equation. If you have trust, you will have exponential benefit. If you erode trust it will exponentially decay,& he said.

He says Microsoft sees trust along three dimensions: privacy, security and ethical use of artificial intelligence. All of these come together in his view to build a basis of trust with your customers.

Nadella said he sees privacy as a human right, pure and simple, and itup to vendors to ensure that privacy or lose the trust of their customers. &The investments around data governance is whatgoing to define whether you&re serious about privacy or not,& he said. For Microsoft, they look at how transparent they are about how they use the data, their terms of service and how they use technology to ensure thatbeing carried out at runtime.

He reiterated the call he made last year for a federal privacy law. With GDPR in Europe and CaliforniaCCPA coming on line in January, he sees a centralized federal law as a way to streamline regulations for business.

As for security, as you might expect, he defined it in terms of how Microsoft was implementing it, but the message was clear that you needed security as part of your approach to trust, regardless of how you implement that. He asked several key questions of attendees.

&Cyber is the second area where we not only have to do our work, but you have to [ask], whatyour operational security posture, how have you thought about having the best security technology deployed across the entire chain, whether iton the application side, the infrastructure side or on the endpoint, side, and most importantly, around identity,& Nadella said.

The final piece, one which he said was just coming into play, was how you use artificial intelligence ethically, a sensitive topic for a government audience, but one he wasn&t afraid to broach. &One of the things people say is, ‘Oh, this AI thing is so unexplainable, especially deep learning.& But guess what, you created that deep learning [model]. In fact, the data on top of which you train the model, the parameters and the number of parameters you use — a lot of things are in your control. So we should not abdicate our responsibility when creating AI,& he said.

Whether Microsoft or the U.S. government can adhere to these lofty goals is unclear, but Nadella was careful to outline them both for his companybenefit and this particular audience. Itup to both of them to follow through.