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The blueprints to make untraceable guns were expected to be available for download on Wednesday. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2O0Uivc

The government should set a date for turning off the copper network, says the Institute of Directors. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2O2filt

For the past few years, Apple has made early versions of its operating systems available to those willing to brave the bugs. Through its beta software program, anyone willing to deal with spotty battery life or a crash or three could load up pre-release builds of iOS, macOS, watchOS, or tvOS. Ever wonder how many actually take advantage of it? According to Tim Cook on today’s earnings call , over four million people are currently running on the betas. Alas, that’s as detailed as he got. He didn’t break down which platforms had the most beta users (though I’d bet iOS or macOS lead the way), nor what percentage of that beta group was developers (accessing the beta to debug their apps before the update) vs consumers (who just want to poke around the new goods early.) For reference: as of February of 2018, Apple had 1.3 billion active devices across Apple TV, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Mac. So if each of the users Tim Cook mentioned is running a beta OS on one device, that’s around

Twitter brings in anti-Trump academics to combat intolerance Twitter’s campaign to foster healthier conversations on its platform with the aid of academics is itself facing an allegation of anti-Trump bias.

Longtime Apple Pay holdout CVS will finally be adding support for Apple’s mobile payments platform this fall, along with 7-Eleven, Apple CEO Tim Cook said this afternoon on the company’s earnings call. The news is particularly notable because CVS was one of the first major retailers to snub Apple Pay, choosing instead to launch its own barcode-based mobile payments solution “CVS Pay” back in 2016, following the failure of the retailer-backed Apple Pay rival CurrentC. CVS Pay had become the first mobile payments solution the pharmacy chain adopted, after having purposefully avoided support for Apple Pay or any other rival NFC (tap to pay) technologies at its register. The company believed there was value in offering its own end-to-end solution to customers that combined both payments and loyalty, it had said . In addition, CVS had earlier backed an Apple Pay alternative called CurrentC , which was developed by the merchant consortium MCX led by major retailers like Walmart, Best Buy

Apple is inching closer and closer to becoming a $1 trillion company today after posting third quarter results that beat out what analysts were expecting and bumping the stock another few percentage points — which, by Apple standards, is tens of billions of dollars. The company’s stock is up around 2.5% this afternoon after the report, which at a prior market close with a market cap of around $935 billion, is adding nearly another $20-plus billion to its market cap. A few quarters ago we were talking about how Apple was in shooting distance of that $1 trillion mark, but now it seems more and more like Apple will  actually hit it. Apple is headed into its most important few quarters as we hit the back half of the year, with its usual new lineup of iPhones and other products and its accompanying critical holiday quarter. Here’s a quick breakdown of the numbers: Revenue:   $53.3 billion, up 17% year-over-year compared to analyst expectations of $52.34 billion. Earnings : $2.34 per

The tech giant has managed to beat forecasts thanks to sales of more expensive iPhones and services. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2v68CLV

By JACK NICAS from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2LISkms

Jeff Bezos' parents invested $245K, could be mindbogglingly rich Some parents buy extra boxes of Girl Scout cookies to support their kiddos.

By NELLIE BOWLES from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2Athkcf

For developers, the process of determining whether every new update is going to botch some core functionality can take up a lot of time and resources, and things get far more complicated when you’re managing a multitude of apps. Test.ai is building a comprehensive system for app testing that relies on bots, not human labor, to see whether an app is ready to start raking in the downloads. The startup has just closed an $11 million Series A round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. Also participating in the round were e.ventures, Uncork Capital and Zetta Venture Partners. Test.ai, which was founded in 2015, has raised $17.6 million to date. “Every advancement in training AI systems enables an advancement in user testing, and test.ai is the leader in AI-powered testing technology. We’re excited to help them supercharge their growth as they test every app in the world,” Gradient Ventures founder Anna Patterson said in a statement. “In a couple years, AI testing

Gusto , which sells payroll, benefits and human resources management and monitoring services to small businesses, has raised $140 million in its latest round of funding. The company said it will use the money to add new services to increase payment flexibility for employees. The company launched a new service called Flexible Pay, which gives employees a way to get paid no matter when a company’s pay schedule dictates. It seems sort of like a payday loan, where a percentage of the salary is taken by Gusto for providing money upfront. The late-stage round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates portfolio, MSD Capital (the family investment fund for Michael Dell), Dragoneer Investment Group and Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. Previous investors, including General Catalyst, CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins, 137 Ventures and Emergence Capital, also participated in the round. The company claims that it processes tens of billions of dollars in payroll and offers a range of benefits, including he

HP offers $10K reward for hacking its printers Any connected device is a potential security threat for businesses and individuals alike, and that's definitely the case for printers which are both connected and regularly used to produce potentially sensitive information.

Facebook finds 'sophisticated' efforts to disrupt US politics, removes 32 accounts Facebook said it has uncovered "sophisticated" efforts, possibly linked to Russia, to influence U.S. politics on its platforms.

Benjamin Joffe Contributor Benjamin Joffe is a partner at HAX . More posts by this contributor 70 years of VC innovation 2017 crowdfunding guide The dream of a startup founder can often be summarized by the following well-intentioned, and mostly delusional, quote:  “We’ll raise a few rounds and in a few years we’ll IPO on Nasdaq.” But a more likely scenario looks something like this: You invest a few years of hard work to build something of value. One day you receive an acquisition offer out of the blue. You’re elated. And you’re not prepared. You drop everything to focus on this opportunity. Exclusive due diligence starts. Your company is a mess (IP, contracts, burn). Days become weeks; weeks become months. You’ve neglected business and fundraising. You’re running out of money. M&A is now your one and only option. The buyer says they found a bunch of cockroaches in the walls and drops the price. Now what? Sounds unlikely? This is still a favorable situation: you

The social network has found evidence of a co-ordinated campaign to influence the US mid-term vote. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2LQwmx6

Twitter brings in anti-Trump academics to combat bias Twitter’s campaign to foster healthier conversations on its platform with the aid of academics is itself facing an allegation of anti-Trump bias.

Marc Piette had a revelation as he buzzed in and out of the Palo Alto Airport in pursuit of his pilot’s license. Instead of freedom, he saw restraint. He also saw potential. “It became pretty apparent that there were major issues with the general aviation industry with smaller aircraft,” Piette said in a recent interview with TechCrunch. “And yet it had enormous potential to change the way people moved around.” Now, Piette’s two-year-old autonomous-aviation startup Xwing is ramping up to unlock that potential. The company isn’t building autonomous helicopters and planes. Instead, it’s focused on the software stack that will enable pilotless flight of small passenger aircraft. The company announced Tuesday that it has raised $4 million in a seed round led by Eniac Ventures. Array Ventures, along with Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison and Nat Friedman of Xamarin, Microsoft and GitHub, also participated in the round. The funding will be used by the San Francisco-based company

Poland-based CallPage offers something other customer interaction apps don’t: the ability to call your website visitors as soon as they click on your page. In a world where the difference between a sale and a click past your site onto Facebook, this is a pretty cool little feature. CallPage began in 2015 when the founders, Ross Knap, Sergey Butko, and Andrew Tkachiv, tried to figure out why website visitors would leave their sites. They started out as a consultancy and the product was born out of some after-hours tinkering by the team. Instead of messaging users, they thought, why not let managers talk to them on the phone? “Our widget analyzes user behavior on your website,” said CEO Knap. “Then when it sees an interested visitor, it offers him a free callback in 28 seconds. The interested visitor leaves a phone number on your site, our widget calls to the first available manager’s mobile phone and then the next one if no one picks up. After the conversation client will receive an

In September of 2013, Jason Citron hopped on to the Disrupt Startup Battlefield stage to pitch Fates Forever , a multiplayer online battle arena game for the iPad. Now, five years later, Citron is gearing up to join us once again on the Disrupt stage to discuss the stellar growth of Discord . Though Fates Forever had all the components to be a great mobile game, users simply never took much interest. The company struggled to monetize, and like any good startup, the team began to reassess its own situation. The conversation turned to communication, where the space contained a few players with lack-luster products. “Can we make a 10X project?,” said CMO Eros Resmini, relaying the tale of the company’s pivot to TechCrunch . “Low-friction usage, no renting servers, beautiful design we took from mobile.” That’s how Discord was born. The platform launched in 2016, and has since grown to 90 million registered users, and has raised nearly $80 million in funding. Coming from the publishing

The technology company says sales of its phone were lower than expected, but has plans to fix the problem. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2LFFGob

Air Force brings AI to B-2, F-35 and F-15 The US Air Force is now accelerating a massive AI push to cyber-harden networks, improve weapons systems and transform functions of large combat air platforms such as the B-2, F-15 and F-35, service officials said.

By J. D. BIERSDORFER from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2ApKskx

Skyline AI founders Iri Amirav, Or Hiltch, Guy Zipori and Amir Leitersdorf A mere four months after coming out of stealth mode with $3 million in seed funding , real estate investment startup Skyline AI announced that it has raised an $18 million Series A. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, a returning investor, and TLV Partners, with participation from JLL Spark, a division of real estate investment management firm JLL. The strategic funding will allow Skyline AI to add more asset classes to its platform, which uses data science and machine learning algorithms to help institutional investors make better decisions about properties. Skyline AI says its technology is trained on what it claims is the most comprehensive data set in the industry, drawing from more than 100 sources, with market information covering the last 50 years. Its technology is meant to provide faster and more accurate analysis than traditional methods, so investors can react more quickly to changes in the rea

For those of us unlucky enough to be forced to accommodate mother nature’s whims on a monthly basis, you know that — in addition to cramps, headaches and mood swings — it can be a challenge to find time in your schedule to buy the period products you need. Desperate trips to the pharmacy when disaster hits can suffice, but the co-founders of the tampon subscription service Athena Club, Maria Markina and Allie Griswold, thought there had to be a better way to provide women the products they need in a cheap and empowering way. “We’ve both had our fair share of tampon war stories,” Griswold told TechCrunch. “It’s something that every woman goes through at some point in her life and it’s a universal problem that we wanted to make easier. There are so many other amazing things that women can and should be doing than worrying about [where to get tampons] every month.” Athena Club launches today after receiving $3.8 million in seed funding led by Henry Kravis of KKR. The company currently

"Virtual queues" on the Vue cinema website have left some customers struggling to see popular films. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2LFxFQp

“Happy to spend 10 minutes on our vision and the journey we’re on, but then, really, 15 minutes on what we’ve got today, what it is we’ve achieved, what it is our AI does,” says Tractable co-founder and CEO Alexandre Dalyac when I video called him a couple of weeks ago. “You can probably speed up all of that,” I quip back. The resulting conversation, lasting well over an hour, spanned all of the above and more, including what is required to build a successful AI business and why he and his team think they can help prevent another “AI winter.” Founded in 2014 by Dalyac, Adrien Cohen and Razvan Ranca after going through company builder Entrepreneur First , London-based Tractable is applying artificial intelligence to accident and disaster recovery. Specifically, through the use of deep learning to automate visual damage appraisal, and therefore help speed up insurance payouts and access to other types of financial aid. Our AI has already been trained on tens of millions of these cas

Legal action in eight US states seeks to ban the blueprints, published four days ahead of the planned date. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2v5llyh

The retailer says details of 10 million customers were affected by last year's data breach. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2OzhKRs

Amazon's profits dazzled this week - how Jeff Bezos brought it from bookstore to behemoth in 20 years. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2OoXhyv

The ride-hailing firm says it will now focus solely on the development of self-driving cars. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2NSiW0Q

Idaho inmates exploit tablet software flaw to steal $225G Tablet computers and a software vulnerability were enough to help 364 prison inmates in Idaho collectively steal $225,000.

As the economy has chugged along, so have retail sales, which last year capped their strongest year since 2014. Online sales have been especially brisk, growing  16 percent between 2016 and 2017 alone, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, which estimates that consumers spent $453.5 billion online last year. Of course, with every booming market comes supporting cast members that benefit. Such is the case with eight-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based Optoro , which itself just rang up $75 million in new funding. A logistics company, Optoro’s software helps retailers — both online and off — more easily re-sell inventory that has been returned by customers. That’s a big number. The overall amount of merchandise returned as a percent of total sales last year was 10 percent in 2017, according to the National Retail Federation. In dollars, that’s $351 billion. Right now, that includes sales from big box retailers and many other “legacy” companies that allow shoppers to buy items — a

Every artificial intelligence startup or corporate R&D lab has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how humans annotate training data to teach algorithms what to look for. Whether its doctors assessing the size of cancer from a scan or drivers circling street signs in self-driving car footage, all this labeling has to happen somewhere. Often that means wasting six months and as much as a million dollars just developing a training data system. With nearly every type of business racing to adopt AI, that spend in cash and time adds up. LabelBox builds artificial intelligence training data labeling software so nobody else has to. What Salesforce is to a sales team, LabelBox is to an AI engineering team. The software-as-a-service acts as the interface for human experts or crowdsourced labor to instruct computers how to spot relevant signals in data by themselves and continuously improve their algorithms’ accuracy. Today, LabelBox is emerging from six months in stealth with a $3.9 m

3D body scanning systems have hit the big time after years of stops and starts. Hot on the heels of Original Stitch’s Bodygram , another 3D scanner, 3DLOOK , has entered into the fray with a $1 million investment to measure bodies around the world. The founders, Vadim Rogovskiy, Ivan Makeev, and Alex Arapovd, created 3DLOOK when they found that they could measure a human body using just a smartphone. The team found that other solutions couldn’t let them measure fits with any precision and depended on expensive hardware. “After more than six years of building companies in the ad tech industry I wanted to build something new which was not a commodity,” said Rogovskiy. “I wanted to overcome growth obstacles and I learned that the apparel industry had mounting return problems in e-commerce. 3DLOOK’s co-founders spent over a year on pure R&D and testing new approaches and combinations of different technologies before creating SAIA (Scanning Artificial Intelligence for Apparel) in 2016

Facebook, tech giants creating 'crisis in democracy' and must be held liable, UK report says A scathing new report from the British parliament calls for technology companies to be held liable for “misleading” content on their platforms and says the world is facing a “democratic crisis” thanks to the spread of false information online.

The direct-to-consumer space has some stand-out players, both in newcomers like Brooklinen and old-timers like Warby Parker. But one company, Interior Define, has maintained a low profile over the four years of its existence . The company offers fully customizable furniture, including couches, dining sets and bed frames, to customers through an online showroom. But ID also has guide shops in Chicago (its home market), LA, New York, and Austin. Interior Define has also just opened up its biggest retail location yet, right in the middle of Hayes Valley in San Francisco. And this time, the store has a twist. In the back of the showroom, Interior Define has built out a fully furnished two-story home called Studio ID. Alongside its own pieces, Studio ID includes pieces and products from other digitally native partners including Wright Bedding, Gantri, Snowe Home, Barn & Willow, 57st Design, Revival Rugs, Minted, Fireclay Tile, and Sonos. The idea here is to show off ID’s pieces in

By MAE RYAN, CADE METZ and RUMSEY TAYLOR from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2M3207z

Social media helps solve mystery of skier who disappeared in the Alps in 1954 Social media has helped solve the mystery surrounding the identity of a skier who went missing in the Alps in 1954.

Idaho inmates exploit tablet software flaw to steal $225K Tablet computers and a software vulnerability were enough to help 364 prison inmates in Idaho collectively steal $225,000.

Fabric , a personal journaling app that emerged from Y Combinator’s 2016 batch of startups , is relaunching itself as a Facebook alternative. The app is giving itself a makeover in the wake of Facebook’s closure of the Moves location tracker, by offering its own tool to record your activities, photos, memories and other moments shared with friends and family. But unlike on Facebook, everything in Fabric is private by default and data isn’t shared with marketers. Instead, the startup hopes to build something users will eventually pay for, via premium features or subscriptions. The idea for the startup came from two people who helped create Facebook’s core features. Co-founders Arun Vijayvergiya and Nikolay Valtchanov worked for several years at the social network, where Vijayvergiya built the product that would later become Facebook Timeline at an internal hackathon. He also worked on products like Friendship Pages, Year in Review and On This Day, while Valtchanov developed integ