Technology

Personalization technology can lead to better experiences as it allows apps to customize their content for each individual user. But it can also chip away at user privacy. A company called Canopy wants to change that. It has developed a personalization engine that works without requiring users to log in or even provide an email. Instead, it uses a combination of on-device machine learning and differential privacy to offer a personalized experience to an appusers. Now itdemonstrating how this works with the launch of the news reader app, Tonic.

The new app is designed to be completely private, while also learning what you like over time, in order to offer a customized experience. But unlike other personalization engines, all the raw interaction and behavioral data stays on your own device. That means the company itself never see it, nor does any content provider or partner it works with, it says.

As Canopy explains:

What we instead send over an encrypted connection to our server is adifferentially privateversion of your personal interaction and behavior model. The local model of you that goes to Canopy never has a direct connection to the things you&ve interacted with, but instead represents an aggregate set of preferences of people like you. Ita crucial difference for our approach: even in the worst case of the encryption failing, or our servers being hacked, no one could ever do anything with the private models because they do not represent any individual.

Another big differentiator is that Tonic puts you in control over your own personalization settings. This is not typical. If you&ve ever used an app powered by personalization technology, thereprobably been a point where you were recommended a song, video, or a news article, for example, that seemed to be entirely wrong and not representative of something you&d actually like. But you may have been at a loss as to why it was recommended, because most apps don&t detail this sort of information.

Tonic, on the other hand, lets you view, change and even reset your personalization settings whenever you want.

While Tonic is mainly meant to demonstrate of its engine in action — Canopy larger goal is to license the technology — the app itself has several other features that make it worth a look.

The company employs a human editorial team to help select the appnews content, to ensure that itnot offering a bunch of noise, like clickbait or &hate-reads.& It also avoids breaking news and &hot takes,& it says, as itnot designed to be an app you use to track the latest news with urgency.

Instead, Tonic pulls from a diversity of sources with its core focus on bringing you a curated, personalized selection of daily reads to inform and inspire. And in the spirit of digital well-being, ita finite list of articles — not an endless news feed.

&We made Tonic because we were tired of having to give up our digital selves to get great recommendations, and because we wanted to build an alternative to endless feeds optimized for maximum engagement, breaking news, and outrage,& the company explains in its announcement of the applaunch.

The technologyarrival comes at a time when big tech is being investigated for carelessness with user data, and thereincreased attention on user privacy in general. Apple, for example, has made its respect for user privacy a key selling point for its hardware and software.

The New York-based startup was founded by Brian Whitman, formerly the founder of The Echo Nest and a former principal scientist at Spotify. The team also includes several ex-Spotify, Instagram, Google and New York Times execs. Itseed-funded by Matrix Partners, and other investors from Spotify, WeWork, Splice, MIT Media Lab, Keybase, and more to the tune of $4.5 million dollars.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, the original tech startup conference, venture capitalists remain amongst the premier guests.

VCs are responsible for helping startups — the focus of the three-day event — get off the ground and as such, they are often the most familiar with trends in the startup ecosystem, ready to deliver insights, anecdotes and advice to our audience of entrepreneurs, investors, operators, managers and more.

In the first half of 2019, VCs spent $66 billion purchasing equity in promising upstarts, according to the latest data from PitchBook. At that pace, VC spending could surpass $100 billion for the second year in a row. We plan to welcome a slew of investors to TechCrunch Disrupt to discuss this major feat and the investing trends that have paved the way for recording funding.

Mega-funds and the promise of unicorn initial public offerings continue to drive investment. SoftBank, of course, began raising its second Vision Fund this year, a vehicle expected to exceed $100 billion. Meanwhile, more traditional VC outfits revisited limited partners to stay competitive with the Japanese telecom giant. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, collected $2.75 billion for two new funds earlier this year. We&ll have a16z general partners Chris Dixon, Angela Strange and Andrew Chen at Disrupt for insight into the firmlatest activity.

At the early-stage, the fight for seed deals continued, with larger funds moving downstream to muscle their way into seed and Series A financings. Pre-seed has risen to prominence, with new funds from Afore Capital and Bee Partners helping to legitimize the stage. Bolstering the early-stage further, Y Combinator admitted more than 400 companies across its two most recent batches,

We&ll welcome pre-seed and seed investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures and Redpoint Ventures general partner Annie Kadavy to give founders tips on how to raise VC. Plus, Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel and Ali Rowghani, the CEO of YCContinuity Fund, which invests in and advises growth-stage startups, will join us on the Disrupt Extra Crunch stage ready with tips on how to get accepted to the respected accelerator.

Moreover, activity in high-growth sectors, particularly enterprise SaaS, has permitted a series of outsized rounds across all stages of financing. Speaking on this trend, we&ll have AppDynamics founder and Unusual Ventures co-founder Jyoti Bansal and Battery Ventures general partner Neeraj Agrawal in conversation with TechCrunchenterprise reporter Ron Miller.

We would be remiss not to analyze activity on Wall Street in 2019, too. As top venture funds refueled with new capital, Silicon Valleyfavorite unicorns completed highly-anticipated IPOs, a critical step towards bringing a much needed bout of liquidity to their investors. Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Zoom, PagerDuty, Slack and several others went public this year and other well-financed companies, including Peloton, Postmates and WeWork have completed paperwork for upcoming public listings. To detail this yearventure activity and IPO extravaganza, David Krane, CEO and managing partner of Uber and Slack investor GV will be on deck, as will Sequoia general partner Jess Lee, FloodgateAnn Miura-Ko and Aspect Ventures& Theresia Gouw.

Theremore where that came from. In addition to the VCs already named, Disrupt attendees can expect to hear from Bessemer Venture Partners& Tess Hatch, who will provide her expertise on the growing &space economy.& Forerunner Ventures& Eurie Kim will give the Extra Crunch Stage audience tips on building a subscription product, Mithril CapitalAjay Royan will explore opportunities in the medical robotics field, SOSVArvind Gupta will dive deep into the cutting edge world of health tech and more.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 & 4 at the Moscone Center in the heart of San Francisco.Passes are available here.

Audio sharing is among the more delightful features arriving as part of AppleiOS 13 update. With it, users will be able to share songs across nearby devices — a sort of 2019 version of buying a headphone splitter or handing someone your earbud.

Beats pinged TechCrunch this morning to let us know that the new addition will be arriving on a number of its new headphones, in addition to AirPods. This is no surprise, really, given that the company was swallowed up by Apple some years ago. Ita nice little bonus for those who own H1 and W1-powered models, including Powerbeats Pro (my headphone of choice, of late), Studio3 Wireless, BeatsX, Powerbeats3 Wireless and Solo3 Wireless.

The feature works in one of two ways. Users can either put two iOS devices in close proximity and play music from a number of different sources. From there, a Share Audio dialogue box pops up, similar to the one you&ll see during the initial pairing process. Tapping Share Audio will do just that.

The other method involves pairing two pairs of headphones to a single device. Itthe better of the two options if you don&t have access to two devices, but even with Appletech, it can still be a bit of a pain switching between products. Either way, ita fun option for sharing playlists on a long commute.

The feature arrives on September 23.