Technology

The main stage at Disrupt SF doesn&t make time for audience questions, but we know everyone has questions to ask our speakers. So we have a separate Q-A stage where many of our speakers appear a second time to take direct questions from Disrupt attendees, with the help of a moderator, of course.

Ask Sebastian Thrun about the details of Kitty Hawk. Ask Cindy Gallop and Brooke Hammerling for tips on media strategy. Go direct with VCs from Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Ventures, Trinity Ventures and more. Get the details on securing your startup from IOActiveJennifer Sunshine Steffens. See the full schedule below.

Italso worth noting that audience questions are also a feature for the Extra Crunch stage sessions, which focus heavily on founder &how-to& panels, like this one on growth hacking and product-market fit featuring experts from Okta, Instagram, Tinder and Uber. You can check out the full Extra Crunch stage agenda here.

The only way to get in on the learning is to snag a pass to Disrupt SF, which runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Passes are available here. (Note: Expo passes do not get access to the Q-A or any other live programming sessions.)

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2

11:30 am & 12:15 pm

How to Make Your Media Strategy with Cindy Gallop (MakeLoveNotPorn), Brooke Hammerling (Brew Media Relations) and others to be announced

2:30 pm & 3:15 pm

Winning Investors with Brian Hirsch (Tribeca Venture Partners), Patricia Nakache (Trinity Ventures) and others to be announced

4:15 pm & 5:00 pm

Getting into Fintech with Henrique Dubugras (Brex), Michele Romanow (Clearbanc) and Angela Strange (Andreessen Horowitz)

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3

10:30 am & 11:15 am

The Cutting Edge of Healthtech with Dr. Rajaie Batniji (Collective Health), Arvind Gupta (SOSV) and Rachel Haurwitz (Caribou Biosciences)

11:30 am & 12:00 pm

Collaborating with Corporates with Chris Bartlett (Verizon Ventures), Quinn Li (Qualcomm) and Leigh Radford (P-G Ventures)

12:00 pm & 12:30 pm

Remaking Mobility with Manik Gupta (Uber), Jesse Levinson (Zoox) and Sebastian Thrun (Kitty Hawk)

2:45 pm & 3:30 pm

Blasting into Space with Tess Hatch (Bessemer Venture Partners), Sara Spangelo (Swarm Technologies) and others to be announced

3:30 pm & 4:15 pm

Securing Your Startup with Jennifer Sunshine Steffens (IOActive), Dug Song (Duo Security) and Nadav Zafrir (Team8)

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4

10:30 am & 11:15 am

Investing in Africa with Wale Ayeni (IFC) and Marième Diop (Orange Digital Ventures)

1:30 pm & 2:15 pm

Empowering a Diverse Workforce with Tracy Chou (Block Party), Harry Glaser (Sisense) and others to be announced

Seems like everything is going to the cloud these days, so why should movie making be left out? Today, Walt Disney Studios announced a five-year partnership with Microsoft around an innovation lab to find ways to shift content production to the Azure cloud.

The project involves the Walt Disney StudioLAB, an innovation work space where Disney personnel can experiment with moving different workflows to the cloud. The movie production software company, Avid is also involved.

The hope is that by working together, the three parties can come up with creative, cloud-based workflows that can accelerate the innovation cycle at the prestigious movie maker. Every big company is looking for ways to innovate, regardless of their core business, and Disney is no different.

As movie making involves ever greater amounts of computing resources, the cloud is a perfect model for it, allowing them to scale up and down resources as needed, whether rendering scenes or adding special effects. As DisneyCTO Jamie Voris sees it, this could make these processes more efficient, which could help lower cost and time to production.

&Through this innovation partnership with Microsoft, we&re able to streamline many of our processes so our talented filmmakers can focus on what they do best,& Voris said in a statement. Itthe same kind of cloud value proposition that many large organizations are seeking. They want to speed time to market, while letting technology handle some of the more mundane tasks.

The partnership builds on an existing one that Microsoft already had with Avid, where the two companies have been working together to build cloud-based workflows for the film industry using Avid software solutions on Azure. Disney will add its unique requirements to the mix, and over the five years of the partnership, hopes to streamline some of its workflows in a more modern cloud context.

Even before the 2016 election, political polarization was increasing, with Americans so entrenched in the news sources they rely on that the Pew Research Center said &liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds.& Now SmartNews, the news aggregation app that recently hit unicorn funding status, wants to give users a way to step out of their bubbles with a feature called News From All Sides.

News From All Sides is an option located under the politics tab in SmartNews& app. A slider at the bottom allows users to see articles about a specific news event sorted into five groups, ranging from most liberal to most conservative. Now available for new users in the United States, the feature will gradually roll out as the company fine-tunes it.

News From All Sides was created for readers who want to see other points of view, but might be overwhelmed by an online search, says Jeannie Yang, SmartNews& senior vice president of product. It also aims to provide more transparency about news algorithms, which have been blamed for exacerbating political polarization.

Before developing the feature, the SmartNews team conducted research and focus groups in places including Minneapolis and cities in North Carolina to understand how people across the country consume political news online.

&We found that across the board, the last [presidential] election was not just a wake-up call about what news reporting is, but users also expressed that they are much, much more aware of algorithms running underneath what they see. They might not know how it works, but they know there is something else going on,& Yang says.

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The political leanings of publications that appear in News From All Sides were categorized by SmartNews& content team, which includes journalists who previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Fox News and other major news outlets. An AI-based algorithm decides which headlines appear in each category. As the feature goes through new iterations, Yang says SmartNews will make changes based on reader feedback. For example, future versions might look at the positions taken in specific articles and include more than five categories on the slider.

News From All Sides is an eye-opener along the lines of &Blue Feed, Red Feed,& an interactive feature (now archived) by The Wall Street Journal that demonstrated how much someonepolitical leanings can influence what Facebookalgorithms display on their News Feed.

Of course, there are many people who are content to be ensconced in their own news bubbles and may not be interested in News From All Sides, even with the upcoming presidential election. Features like it won&t fix political polarization, but for people who are curious about different points of view, even ones they strongly disagree with, News From All Sides gives them a simple way to explore more coverage.

&We definitely discussed that,& says Yang. &The feature is not initially targeted to everyone. It targets people who are more political news junkies, who are checking their phones for news multiple times a day and will actively seek out other sources, so they might go on Google News and go down a rabbit hole.&

&As more readers consider how they are going to vote, it will also help them with perspectives,& Yang adds. &Itnot something that will appeal to everyone broadly, but we hope that we will adjust a pain point for this core group and then iterate it to something more universal.&

SmartNews was founded in Japan, but the slider is currently only on its app for the U.S. because political polarization is a major issue there. Yang says the feature is one part of SmartNews& goal to improve discovery in all news topics.

&Our mission is to break people out of filter bubbles and personalize discovery with the idea that recommendation algorithms can expand interests, instead of narrowing your interests,& she says. &We&re thinking of how to create more transparency and also expose readers to something they might not usually see, but present it in a fun way, like a serendipitous discovery.&