paragraphs
stringlengths 1
7.71k
⌀ | category
stringclasses 55
values |
|---|---|
But by packing these actuators into bundles, the researchers have made simple robots that act as a credible analogue to human muscles.
Sure, you could use them to create super-strong workers or punching machines, but the Swiss aren’t like us. | Gadgets |
They’re taking a more humanitarian path.
“We are working with physical therapists from the University Hospital of Lausanne who are treating stroke victims,” said EPFL’s Matthew Robertson in a university news release. Several of the robotic muscles are arranged on a belt and stretch up the lower back. | Gadgets |
“The belt is designed to support the patient’s torso and restore some of the person’s motor sensitivity.”
It combines the best of rigid electronics with soft passive assistance like compression garments. They’re powerful enough to help, but not so much that anyone needs to worry about being injured by them. | Gadgets |
And there are plenty other applications envisioned for the tech.
The team published their work in Nature Scientific Reports, and has kindly made the hardware design and software tools open for anyone to download and use.. | Gadgets |
A few days ago we revealed an automotive product from Anker called Roav. At the time, it seemed the Roav was an in-vehicle heads-up display that looked a lot like the Navdy. | Gadgets |
Today, Anker reached out with additional details.
Roav, when it launches in November, will be Anker’s automotive brand, with the Roav Dashtop as the flagship product.
Anker tells TechCrunch the Roav Dashtop connects to the vehicle and driver’s smartphone and displays relevant information from both such as gas level, navigation details, caller information, and thanks to a 4G connection, traffic information. | Gadgets |
The device also connects to dash and rear cams, which will alert the driver, through the HUD, of physical objects around the vehicle.
The device seems to be controlled through voice commands and a controller mounted on the steering wheel.
The Roav Dashtop still feels like a clone of Navdy’s device. | Gadgets |
The core functions are similar and the design is similar in look and feel, though with the addition of cameras and cellular connectivity, the Roav Dashtop could have more functions. | Gadgets |
And according to an image provided to us by Anker, the Dashtop looks to have an app store of sorts.
Anker says the Roav Dashtop will be available starting in November and, shortly before the release, the company will make an official announcement with a complete list of product details and specs.. | Gadgets |
Skagen is a Danish watch company famous for its minimalist designs and affordable prices. Now, for $215, you can add a little smarts to your minimalist wrist, a welcome bit of news for those who think the flat black slab of an Apple Watch is too flamboyant.
The Skagen Hagen is basically an activity watch similar to the Withings Activite and the watches containing smart movements from MMT. | Gadgets |
The watch can measure your steps and sleep patterns and vibrates when you get a notification on your phone. The battery lasts four to six months and you can easily swap it out for a new one by opening the back case.
Why is this watch interesting? First it’s surprisingly light. Made of titanium this particular piece could pass for a modern minimalist mechanical. | Gadgets |
Skagen also has a steel version on a mesh strap and a rose gold model but this one is the nicest, I think. The three buttons on the side control the various functions including music playback on your phone or other device. The sub-dial at nine o’clock displays the percentage of steps taken and a separate iOS or Android app lets you see your progress.
The Skagen Hagen is a really nice watch. | Gadgets |
As a timepiece I’m quite pleased with the soft leather band and handsome case. As an activity tracker I could see it replacing a non heart-rate-sensing Fitbit in, well, a heartbeat. This is also not Fossil’s first smartwatch effort. I still have their original Palm watch – an amazing little bit of technology – and they’ve been mucking about with Android Wear over the past few months as well. | Gadgets |
This sort of watch – pared down, simple, and usable – is just another arrow in their smartwatch quiver.
For $215 the Hagen is a pretty solid deal. It doesn’t do much, but if you’re primarily interested in your steps and some minor notification controls then this does exactly what you need it to. | Gadgets |
Sure it doesn’t have a passcode, weather readouts, and a way to send little hearts to your friends, but who needs that when you have minimalism?. | Gadgets |
Since 1956, when computer science researchers gathered in the small town of Hanover, N.H. at Dartmouth College to talk about the field’s nascent investigations into artificial intelligence, both government and industry in the U.S. | Artificial Intelligence |
have grappled with how to structure a systematic approach to research and development in the newly important field.
From the government’s perspective, this is increasingly important. | Artificial Intelligence |
With both federal research institutions and private companies pursuing artificial intelligence breakthroughs at breakneck speed, the federal government is frankly having a bit of an existential crisis about its role in research efforts and the priorities it has for what AI research should look like.
To wit, in 2015 government spending on unclassified research and development in AI-related technologies was around $1.1 billion, according to one of the twin reports released today. | Artificial Intelligence |
But in the last five years alone, mergers and acquisitions among private companies vying for dominance in the AI market have far outstripped that figure, according to data from CB Insights.
Google’s acquistion of DeepMind was reportedly $600 million, and that’s one of over one hundred acquisitions made by companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter since 2011.
So The White House has released a new pair of reports, offering a framework for how government-backed research into artificial intelligence should be approached and what those research initiatives should look like (basically, the government wants to avoid a Skynet scenario).
The main paper, entitled “Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence,” focuses on the general state of and challenges faced by AI, and both of those things have a constant presence on our front page.
Google, for instance, addressed the possibility of bias tainting the results of AI systems, which know not what they do. | Artificial Intelligence |
This is merely irritating when it’s an image recognition error, but what if it’s for “predictive policing”?
Google’s solution, at least for now, is what they call the “equality of opportunity” method, which ensures a system doesn’t accidentally discriminate based on sensitive, non-relevant data, for instance race or religion, when calculating something not directly related to them. | Artificial Intelligence |
As for understanding the models created by machine learning — that’s a bigger problem.
As AI and AI-like systems proliferate, they begin to overlap with highly regulated areas, as we’ve seen with autonomous vehicles and drones. | Artificial Intelligence |
This creates a sort of wild west compared with the traditional sides of those industries, and things like reporting and risk management aren’t anywhere near formalized.
How detailed should Google’s self-driving car accident reports be? Can NTSB officials inspect Autopilot code? Where do federal and state authority interface?
To make informed decisions, the White House suggests more and better data is required:
Furthermore, as AI systems infiltrate our infrastructure, the cowboys of private AI research should look to old school civil engineers for help, as little as they might like the idea:
You’ve got to get them while they’re young, according to the White House. | Artificial Intelligence |
And we agree, of course: STEM education should start early — with an emphasis on the T, in this case.
Of course, a data-literate citizenry implies a literate citizenry, and the ethics of all this stuff won’t be learned in CS class, so we can’t neglect the humanities, either.
The report also calls for pushes for diversity, highlighting comments solicited from experts regarding “the importance of AI being produced by and for diverse populations.”
The goal with both papers is to establish what an effective approach to artificial intelligence looks like from a government perspective. | Artificial Intelligence |
There’s an understanding that corporate interests will pursue corporate interests, but a range of issues exist in the development of artificial intelligence technologies that businesses are not necessarily equipped to deal with. | Artificial Intelligence |
And they don’t have any incentives to try and grapple with some of these issues anyway.
The report on the government’s strategic investment plan states:
Alongside this emphasis on artificial intelligence for the public good, is an acknowledgement that these innovations could lead to job insecurity as the robots take over. | Artificial Intelligence |
That’s why one of the main thrusts of the government’s research is in how to make artificial intelligence work with humans rather than exclusively work for humans, or work instead of humans.
The meat of the government’s strategy, outlined in the bullet points below, deals with the human cost of artificial intelligence.
It’s also worth mentioning that these reports aren’t the last word (or even the first word) on the U.S. | Artificial Intelligence |
approach to artificial intelligence. There are at least seven other (probably very long) research and development strategic plans that deal with aspects of the government’s approach to AI research.
That’s a good thing, too because, as the White House report acknowledges, we’re no longer necessarily the leader in the field. Research from China has outstripped the U.S. | Artificial Intelligence |
(at least in terms of papers published on the subject).
Now’s the time for a more invigorated policy, which perhaps these papers will help charge.. | Artificial Intelligence |
HoloLens, Microsoft’s $3,000 mixed-reality goggles (or “the world’s first self-contained holographic computer” in Microsoft’s parlance), was only available in the U.S. and Canada so far. Today, however, the company announced that it will also start selling the devices in Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. | Europe |
Preorders start today and the devices will ship in late November.
We hear that Microsoft’s yield for producing HoloLenses is higher than it expected, so the company is now also able to bring it to new regions faster than it expected. | Europe |
What’s gating an even wider rollout, though, is that Microsoft still needs to get its certifications from the international equivalents of the U.S.’s FCC as it enters new markets. It’s worth noting that even though it’s officially only rolling out in a few European countries, the single European market pretty much means anybody in Europe will be able to get a HoloLens now.
Like in the U.S. | Europe |
and Canada, potential buyers will be able to choose between the standard $3,000 Development Edition or the $5,000 Commercial Suite that includes better support, as well as added security and device management features for enterprise users.
“When we set out to pioneer the mixed reality category we knew that many of the best innovations would be discovered when others got their hands on the technology,” wrote Alex Kipman, Technical Fellow, Microsoft Windows and Devices Group, in today’s announcement. | Europe |
“It has been quite inspiring to see what our partners have built and what individual developers have created. Together, we have only scratched the surface for what mixed reality can do. | Europe |
I can’t wait to see what happens next as we welcome these new countries to our holographic landscape.”
It’s worth remembering that HoloLens is only one aspect of what Microsoft calls “Windows Holographic.” The overall idea here is to also enable third-party manufacturers to use Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system to build their own mixed reality — or even virtual reality — headsets and peripherals over time.. | Europe |
The promise of 3D printing has been kind of a dud. Aside from a few cool Yoda heads and some small plastic pieces, there have been no “indie” players doing much interesting in the space except Markforged. Markforged is a Boston company we featured last year that makes carbon-fiber reinforced plastic parts using traditional 3D-printing techniques. | Gadgets |
This means the objects they print are stronger, lighter and more resilient than steel.
Now they’ve added “more precise” to that list. The Markforged Mark X is a unique 3D printer that uses laser scanning to ensure pieces that come off the machine are precisely as ordered. | Gadgets |
In other words, you can send objects that will get the “the strength and quality you’re expecting,” says founder Greg Mark, an aerospace engineer and MIT grad.
“We invented Continuous fiber reinforcement (10 issued patents), and in-process laser-micrometer quality control,” he said. “We’ve also pushed the surface finish of plastic extrusion to approach the surface finish of SLA. | Gadgets |
Now there’s one machine that combines the strength, surface finish, and quality control to enable end use parts. Supply chains will never be the same.”
Essentially the system prints very fine, very strong objects and constantly tests them for structural accuracy. | Gadgets |
When you send an object to the $68,000 printer, it ejects exactly the part you requested with exactly the right measurements.
“The in-process quality control is based off a laser micrometer integrated into the print head. | Gadgets |
With 1 micron Z axis resolution, and 50 micron X/Y resolution, you get high-resolution scans of your part, which you can pull dimensions off of in real time or use to check the accuracy of the part,” said Mark.
The system has two print heads, one for plastic and one for carbon fiber. | Gadgets |
You can set the hardness of the object while you manufacture it and, more importantly, you can control how light the object is. I’ve seen many Markforged products and they’re as solid as steel but as light as plastic. They’re surprisingly cool. | Gadgets |
Thanks to the measurement system you can basically send objects to a printer in your office or a thousand miles away and ensure that the object that comes out is exactly as you designed it and has unrivaled strength. | Gadgets |
In other words, instead of sending a milled piece of steel you can send and print a digital file.
Current Markforged owners will get a discount on the Mark X but, given this thing is almost $70,000, I doubt many hobbyists will pick one up. It’s still one of the coolest implementations of 3D printing I’ve seen, however, and it’s pretty darn close to teleportation.. | Gadgets |
VMware signed deals with Microsoft, Google and IBM earlier this year as it has shifted firmly to a hybrid cloud strategy, but it was the deal it signed with AWS this week that has had everybody talking.
The cloud infrastructure market breaks down to AWS with around a third of the market — and everybody else. Microsoft is the closest competitor with around 10 percent. | Cloud |
While VMware has had deals in place with other major players, the one with AWS matters more because it gives AWS even greater advantage in the cloud market.
The traditional vendors have taken a hybrid approach with Microsoft and IBM arguing that most large organizations, bogged down in legacy hardware and software, can’t afford to go whole hog into the cloud. | Cloud |
It’s an argument that makes sense, especially for their customer bases.
AWS on the other hand has argued that the future is the cloud, and while it welcomed any customers, it made its bet with the companies moving to the cloud or who were born there. | Cloud |
That approach has clearly worked with the company on an $11.5 billion run rate this year.
Meanwhile, in spite of those strategic deals with other larger IT vendors, VMware has struggled with the cloud market. It boasts almost 100 percent penetration inside the data center. | Cloud |
It was and remains the go-to company for server virtualization, and while that worked fine in a data center-centric world, that world is changing rapidly.
What VMware did was provide a way to make use of all the resources in a machine in a much more efficient way, letting you break down that single server into multiple virtual machines. | Cloud |
That was great for its time in the early 2000s when servers were expensive and finding ways to use them as efficiently as possible was a prime objective for IT.
The cloud changed all of that, moving the virtual machine to the cloud where you could spin up whatever resources you needed whenever you wanted and only pay for the resources you were actually using. | Cloud |
If you needed more, you simply spun up more. If you needed less, you could take them down. That put the data center model — and VMware — at a distinct disadvantage.
You couldn’t just go out and buy more servers every time your work loads demanded it. | Cloud |
There was a procurement process and it took weeks or months, while the cloud let you satisfy your needs almost instantly.
VMware has actually been dabbling in the cloud since around 2010 starting with an early Platform as a Service play called VMforce, which was supposed to work with Salesforce. | Cloud |
It also began flirting with partnerships at around the same time with an early partnership with Google to take on the fledgling Microsoft Azure.
It made another hybrid cloud attempt in 2013 with the launch of vCloud Hybrid Service. | Cloud |
It even originally launched CloudFoundry, the open source private cloud platform, which eventually became part of Pivotal, the company that EMC, VMware and GE spun out in 2012.
None of these gained much traction for VMware, however as the company was competing with all of these other vendors including AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM — and there was little to separate itself from the pack. | Cloud |
That brings us to the present day where the company is taking a new stab at the hybrid model and partnering like crazy with its former competitors.
Teaming with AWS is a different matter than the previous announcements because with AWS it gets the top player in the market, which could help salvage its cloud business (and indeed its entire business) after so many false starts.
As for AWS, it gets to play in the hybrid playground where it has had limited access until now. | Cloud |
That gives the cloud infrastructure giant a way to go after Microsoft and IBM right in their prime markets and possibly gain even more marketshare.
People were talking because it was the biggest deal for VMware by far, and as for AWS, well it was a case of the rich getting richer. | Cloud |
That has to have the competitors feeling pretty nervous today as AWS puts a stake in the ground right in their territory — and VMware gets to come along for the ride.. | Cloud |
It’s been an open secret that Amazon’s AWS division and VMware were going to announce a partnership at a press conference in San Francisco later today. | Cloud |
Thanks to VMware mistakenly posting its announcement early, we didn’t have to wait for the afternoon to know what the two companies will announce.
In what is surely a play to get more enterprises to move to AWS over its competitors — and to protect VMware’s leadership around virtual machines, VMware and AWS are bringing VMware’s software-defined data center software to AWS under the ‘VMware Cloud on AWS‘ moniker.
This means that all of VMware’s infrastructure software like vSphere, VSAN and NSX will soon run on AWS. | Cloud |
The service is currently in its technology preview phase and an invite-only beta will start in early 2017 and the service will likely come out of beta in mid-2017.
The service will be operated, sold and supported by VMware (not AWS) but integrate with the rest of AWS’ cloud portfolio (think storage, database, analytics and more).
“Our customers continue to ask us to make it easier for them to run their existing data center investments alongside AWS,” wrote Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS, in today’s announcement. | Cloud |
“Most enterprises are already virtualized using VMware, and now with VMware Cloud on AWS, for the first time, it will be easy for customers to operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment using their existing VMware tools on AWS, and without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite their applications, or modify their operating model.”
At their event today, the two companies introduced a number of early customers. | Cloud |
These include Western Digital and Sysco.
The companies stress that this is a jointly architected service that “represents a significant investment in engineering, operations, support and sales resources from both companies.” It will run on a dedicated AWS infrastructure that was “purpose-built for this offering.” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger also today stressed the fact that AWS and VMware worked very closely together to create this service and stressed that this will become VMware’ primary public cloud solution.
“Currently in Technology Preview, VMware Cloud on AWS, will bring VMware’s enterprise class Software-Defined Data Center software to the AWS cloud, and will enable customers to run any application across vSphere-based private, public and hybrid cloud environments,” VMware’s Mark Lohmeyer writes in today’s (currently deleted) announcement. | Cloud |
“It will be operated, managed and sold by VMware as an on-demand, elastically scalable service and customers will be able to leverage AWS services such as developer tools, analytics, databases, and more.”
While Microsoft, IBM and others have strongly focused on the idea of the “hybrid cloud” (that is, a setup where an enterprise uses both its own data centers and public cloud services like Azure, Google Cloud or AWS), Amazon has mostly ignored this market.
Given that VMware already dominates in many of these enterprise’s own on-premises data centers but doesn’t own a public cloud service to give these users a hybrid option — and that AWS doesn’t offer an on-premises version of its services — it makes sense for these two companies to team up now.
VMware also stressed in its announcement the hybrid capabilities this partnership enables and notes that it will bring “full VM compatibility and total workload portability between the datacenter and the AWS cloud.”
It’s worth noting that AWS already offered some support for VMware’s vCenter for managing virtual machines. | Cloud |
Thanks to this, vCenter admins have long been able to manage their AWS EC2 cloud computing instances using the same software they use for managing their VMware virtual machines. | Cloud |
That service, too, made it relatively easy to move existing virtual machines to EC2.
As IBM kindly pointed out in a series of emails meant to preempt today’s announcement, VMware and IBM already teamed up and announced a partnership back in February. | Cloud |
This deal with AWS seems to go quite a bit further, though.
Update: we updated this post to reflect AWS’ and VMware’s comments at their press conference today.
Here is full blog post that VMware has now deleted but that I expect will go up again around 1:30pm PT today when the AWS press conference starts:. | Cloud |
null | Developer |
Atlassian wants the best of both the cloud and data center worlds, and it announced at the Atlassian Summit today that it was expanding its data center-cloud strategy with new products.
At a time when companies are shifting their business to the cloud, it may seem like an odd approach to offer both cloud and on-prem products, but Atlassian sees it as hedging its bets in a world that remains very much hybrid.
The company makes a variety of tools designed to help development (and other department) teams work together including HipChat, Jira, Confluence and BitBucket. | Developer |
Over the years they have seen the size of deployments rise dramatically with as high as 50,000 users running on Jira, according to Atlassian president Jay Simons. | Developer |
Some customers weren’t comfortable running these massive deployments in the cloud.
To meet that demand, the company introduced its data center product line a few years ago, and today it’s expanding that line to include HipChat Data Center in Beta. | Developer |
HipChat is the chat tool that competes with Slack (and now Workplace by Facebook) in the enterprise messaging space.
Simons says like the other data center products, they created HipChat Data Center for companies that prefer to run their software on their own infrastructure.
The company also announced the ability to upgrade Jira Software Data Center without taking the system down. | Developer |
This is particularly important to customers because they often use Jira to manage mission critical projects and downtime can mean lost business.
“Part of challenge behind on prem is that when you upgrade, you need to take it offline. | Developer |
We’ve added features to let you upgrade without taking the system offline,” Simons explained.
And for those who want to deploy to cloud infrastructure instead of the data center, Atlassian announced improved support for companies deploying their data center products on Amazon Web Services.
While the company acknowledges, it’s challenging to maintain a cloud and on-prem product set, it believes it’s providing customers a choice to deploy wherever and however they want.
Atlassian has the distinction of being profitable for 10 straight years. | Developer |
They tend to sell over the web (although that would seem to be more difficult with on-prem products than those in the cloud). It went public last December after raising $210 million. Today it has a market cap of over $6 billion.
. | Developer |
Serverless offers developers an open source framework that allows them to more easily write applications for platform like AWS Lambda and — in the near future — Microsoft’s Azure Functions and Google’s Cloud Functions. | Cloud |
The company today announced that its framework is now out of beta and that it has raised a $3 million seed round led by Trinity Ventures.
The serverless movement that gives Serverless its name is, of course, a bit of a misnomer. | Cloud |
The overall idea here is to abstract all of the actual infrastructure away so developers can deploy their code for what are usually event-driven compute services like Lambda. Those services then execute that code when it’s triggered — and all of that code then runs on AWS’ servers, of course.
Still, the name works and Serverless founder and CEO Austen Collins was one of the first to see the potential for building a framework that would allow enterprises and startups to more easily develop for this new compute model. | Cloud |
“I thought it was fun and something that — while not technically accurate because it takes lots of servers to power a serverless platform — is a very efficient term in describing the holy grail for developers,” Collins said.
Before founding Serverless, Collins was an AWS consultant and saw how companies are now being pushed to deliver and deploy new applications faster than ever before. | Cloud |
“And this is why Lambda spoke to me in particular,” Collins told me. | Cloud |
He especially liked Lambda because it allowed developers to easily tie in the rest of AWS’s features. With an increased interest in microservices — that is, splitting complex applications into small parts that are connected by APIs — even relatively conservative enterprise companies are now looking at Lambda and similar platforms to help them speed up their development cycles.
Serverless is part of Heavybit’s program that helps startups take their developers products to market (others that have gone through the process before include the likes of Stripe, PagerDuty and CircleCI). The company now has twelve employees and Collins plans to use the funding to put more resources behind the development of the framework and to add support other cloud computing services beyond AWS.
One thing Serverless hasn’t quite decided on yet, though, is how it will monetize its service. | Cloud |
Collins admitted that this is something the team is still working on, but as an open source company, there are some obvious avenues the Serverless can try (offering paid consulting services and paid proprietary features among those). | Cloud |
Both Heavybit and Trinity Ventures (which previously invested in Docker and similar developer-centric companies) also have a lot of experience in how to monetize this kind of company. On GitHub, the project has received more than 11,000 stars and Serverless already counts the Coca-Cola Company among its users, so there is clearly demand and interest in its framework, even if the serverless movement itself is still very young.. | Cloud |
null | Education |
Noodle Partners Inc., a new education venture from the founder of The Princeton Review and 2U Inc., John Katzman, has raised $4 million in venture funding to help colleges and universities deliver high-quality certificate and degree programs online.
Philadelphia-based Osage Venture Partners led the investment in Noodle Partners and was joined by New Markets Venture Partners, 500 Startups and others.
Katzman tells TechCrunch that the challenge in delivering online education at the college and university level has changed dramatically over the last decade, and not just because of the rise of smartphones.
“People did not believe that higher ed could be as good online as a campus-based program. | Education |
That’s because the first wave was full of for-profits that were just not very good schools. Today, there are many great schools online and we know the problem is not the medium. The new challenge is building and offering programs that are great, but also lower the cost of higher education,” Katzman said in 2008, when he co-founded 2U Inc. | Education |
with Chip Paucek and Jeremy Johnson.
Trump University, and the University of Phoenix (owned by Apollo Education) are two famous examples of unscrupulous, for-profit online schools in that earlier wave. These organizations sold students on useless degrees and costly seminars that would leave them more in debt than anything else.
College enrollment in the U.S. | Education |
has declined for five straight years, according to the most recent available data from the National Center for Education Statistics. | Education |
That correlates with a 34% increase in the cost for undergraduate tuition, fees, room, and board at public colleges and universities, and a 25% increase at private non-profit institutions between 2004 and 2014.
Katzman believes that offering more of their degree programs online, and at a higher quality than ever before, will help colleges reverse that trend.
New York-based Noodle Partners offers colleges and universities help setting up an online degree program, instructional design for courses within the program, recruiting, tech support, and measuring student engagement along the way to course completion. The startup charges for setup and a flat fee per student.
Other companies doing this work (called “online program management”) will typically take a large percent of tuition they help schools generate from their online offerings, cutting into the school’s already challenged margins.
Competitors to Noodle Partners include 2U, the company Katzman started but with which he is no longer affiliated, Academic Partnerships, HotChalk, Keypath, Pearson Embanet, Wiley Education Solution and others.
Osage Venture Partners’ Nate Lentz said he backed Noodle Partners believing, “Something needs to change the cost curve in higher ed.”
The investor expects Noodle Partners to use its funding to roll out its OPM services and technology to top colleges and universities in the U.S., and expand enrollment in online programs at the schools where the company is already working today.. | Education |
DroneDeploy wants businesses to be able to find a drone services provider as easily as anyone can find a place to eat dinner, anywhere in the world. | Enterprise |
So today, the company unveiled a new free Drone Mapping Directory.
Take, for example, a real estate developer who needs a finely detailed map of land where it may soon build a giant, corporate campus.
Instead of buying drones equipped to scan that property, then training or hiring pilots to fly them, the developer could just flip through the profiles on the Drone Mapping Directory, look at examples of maps they’d created in the past, then connect with the most desirable vendors in their area.
DroneDeploy developed this directory at the behest of its users, said CEO Mike Winn. | Enterprise |
Of course, helping professional drone operators tap into unmet demand in the market will also lead to increased use of DroneDeploy’s technology.
For the unfamiliar, DroneDeploy makes cloud-based software for drone operators which allows them to plan flights, then rapidly gather, store, analyze and create visualizations using data gathered from those flights.
DroneDeploy users have mapped and analyzed over 6 million acres in over 130 countries to-date, the company says.
Its systems are available on a freemium basis. | Enterprise |
Paying users get more storage capacity and professional features. They can, for example, create co-branded DroneDeploy maps to include in portfolios or deliver as final projects to their own clients.
Winn said that since the U.S. | Enterprise |
Federal Aviation Administration released its Part 107 rule, making it easier for individuals to become certified, commercial drone operators, small businesses providing drone services have been proliferating in the U.S.
More than 12,000 individuals have been certified as remote pilots under the rule since it went into effect in late summer, the CEO said.
Rather than building and flying their own proprietary drones, drone services providers use state of the art, available technologies to do things like shoot aerial videos for media and entertainment, conduct aerial surveys of farms, construction sites, or critical infrastructure, gather property damage information for insurance providers, or fly drones to gather data for scientific research.
Other directories and marketplaces exist for booking drone service providers, of course, including JobforDrones.com, or for aerial photography, Dronebase, and Airstoc.
The global market for commercial applications of drone technology is expected to exceed $127 billion in revenue by 2020, according to estimates from PwC. | Enterprise |
. | Enterprise |
null | Enterprise |
According to a new study published today from the American Civil Liberties Union, major social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have recently provided user data access to Geofeedia, the location-based, social media surveillance system used by government offices, private security firms, marketers and others.
As TechCrunch previously reported, Geofeedia is one of a bevy of technologies used, secretly, by police to monitor activists and the contents of their discussions online.
The ACLU said in a blog post that both Twitter and Facebook (which owns Instagram) made some immediate changes in response to their study’s findings.
“Instagram cut off Geofeedia’s access to public user posts, and Facebook cut its access to a topic-based feed of public user posts,” the ACLU said.
The ACLU also noted in their post:
“Neither Facebook nor Instagram has a public policy specifically prohibiting developers from exploiting user data for surveillance purposes. | Enterprise |
Twitter does have a ‘longstanding rule’ prohibiting the sale of user data for surveillance as well as a Developer Policy that bans the use of Twitter data ‘to investigate, track or surveil Twitter users.’”
On Tuesday, following the publication of the ACLU findings, Twitter announced that it would “immediately suspend Geofeedia’s commercial access to Twitter data.”
A Facebook spokesperson tells TechCrunch:
“[Geofeedia] only had access to data that people chose to make public. | Enterprise |
Its access was subject to the limitations in our Platform Policy, which outlines what we expect from developers that receive data using the Facebook Platform. | Enterprise |
If a developer uses our APIs in a way that has not been authorized, we will take swift action to stop them and we will end our relationship altogether if necessary.”
It’s worth noting that Facebook’s platform policy generically limits developers.
For example, it says developers are not permitted to “sell, license, or purchase any data obtained” from Facebook or its services. | Enterprise |
And they can’t transfer data they get from Facebook, including “anonymous, aggregate, or derived data,” to any data brokers. | Enterprise |
Finally, developers are not permitted to put Facebook data into any search engines or directories without the social network’s explicit permission.
We have reached out to Geofeedia for comment but executives were not immediately available for an interview.
A public relations consultant for Geofeedia sent a lengthy statement, attributed to Geofeedia CEO Phil Harris, defending the company’s practices in general. | Enterprise |