Author : zebethcontrol

Warner Bros. teams up with web3 startup Eluvio to launch ‘Lord of the Rings’ NFTs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in blockchain, Media & Entertainment, NFTs, Warner Bros, Warner Bros Discovery, web3No Comments

Warner Bros. Discovery has partnered with blockchain company Eluvio to launch tomorrow “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (Extended Version) web3 movie experience, with limited-edition multimedia non-fungible token (NFT) versions of the movie. “The Fellowship of the Ring” NFTs feature a 4K UHD, 3-hour-and-48-minute extended version of the 2001 film, over eight hours of bonus footage and commentary, image galleries and hidden AR collectibles. There are two editions that fans can choose from. Warner Bros. and Eluvio are minting 10,000 copies of the Mystery Edition, priced at $30 each, which comes with one of three location-based navigation menus modeled after a location in the film. There will be 999 copies of the Epic Edition, which are $100 each, and include all three location menus — The Shire, Rivendell and Mines of Moria. The Epic Edition will also come with exclusive bonus image galleries. Image Credits: Warner Bros./Eluvio Eluvio is rolling out the NFTs via its Ethereum-compatible blockchain. On Friday, October 21 at 9 a.m. PDT/ 12 p.m. EDT, “Lord of the Rings” fans can head to web3.wb.com/warnermedia/movieverse and create an Eluvio media wallet. The “Fellowship of the Ring” NFTs will be available to purchase with credit cards, debit or cryptocurrency. Once purchased, you can launch the web3 movie experience and stream the extended movie from the media wallet. This is the first set of NFTs available in the company’s new “WB Movieverse,” which Warner Bros. and Eluvio call a “multimedia living movie experience.” According to the website, two more NFT experiences are “coming soon.” “Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is setting a new bar for innovation in the distribution of home movies by demonstrating the potential of web3 for consumer engagement, digital supply chain transformation, and new business opportunities,” said Michelle Munson, CEO and co-founder of Eluvio, in a statement. Updated 10/20/22 at 2:03 p.m. ET with a statement from Eluvio.

Generally Intelligent secures cash from OpenAI vets to build capable AI systems • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in robotics, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

A new AI research company is launching out of stealth today with an ambitious goal: to research the fundamentals of human intelligence that machines currently lack. Called Generally Intelligent, it plans to do this by turning these fundamentals into an array of tasks to be solved and by designing and testing different systems’ ability to learn to solve them in highly complex 3D worlds built by their team. “We believe that generally intelligent computers will someday unlock extraordinary potential for human creativity and insight,” CEO Kanjun Qiu told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “However, today’s AI models are missing several key elements of human intelligence, which inhibits the development of general-purpose AI systems that can be deployed safely … Generally Intelligent’s work aims to understand the fundamentals of human intelligence in order to engineer safe AI systems that can learn and understand the way humans do.” Qiu, the former chief of staff at Dropbox and the co-founder of Ember Hardware, which designed laser displays for VR headsets, co-founded Generally Intelligent in 2021 after shutting down her previous startup, Sourceress, a recruiting company that used AI to scour the web. (Qiu blamed the high-churn nature of the leads-sourcing business.) Generally Intelligent’s second co-founder is Josh Albrecht, who co-launched a number of companies, including BitBlinder (a privacy-preserving torrenting tool) and CloudFab (a 3D-printing services company). While Generally Intelligent’s co-founders might not have traditional AI research backgrounds — Qiu was an algorithmic trader for two years — they’ve managed to secure support from several luminaries in the field. Among those contributing to the company’s $20 million in initial funding (plus over $100 million in options) is Tom Brown, former engineering lead for OpenAI’s GPT-3; former OpenAI robotics lead Jonas Schneider; Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi; and the Astera Institute. Qiu said that the unusual funding structure reflects the capital-intensive nature of the problems Generally Intelligent is attempting to solve. “The ambition for Avalon to build hundreds or thousands of tasks is an intensive process — it requires a lot of evaluation and assessment. Our funding is set up to ensure that we’re making progress against the encyclopedia of problems we expect Avalon to become as we continue to build it out,” she said. “We have an agreement in place for $100 million — that money is guaranteed through a drawdown setup which allows us to fund the company for the long term. We have established a framework that will trigger additional funding from that drawdown, but we’re not going to disclose that funding framework as it is akin to disclosing our roadmap.” Image Credits: Generally Intelligent What convinced them? Qiu says it’s Generally Intelligent’s approach to the problem of AI systems that struggle to learn from others, extrapolate safely, or learn continuously from small amounts of data. Generally Intelligent built a simulated research environment where AI agents — entities that act upon the environment — train by completing increasingly harder, more complex tasks inspired by animal evolution and infant development cognitive milestones. The goal, Qiu says, is to train lots of different agents powered by different AI technologies under the hood in order to understand what the different components of each are doing. “We believe such [agents] could empower humans across a wide range of fields, including scientific discovery, materials design, personal assistants and tutors and many other applications we can’t yet fathom,” Qiu said. “Using complex, open-ended research environments to test the performance of agents on a significant battery of intelligence tests is the approach most likely to help us identify and fill in those aspects of human intelligence that are missing from machines. [A] structured battery of tests facilitates the development of a real understanding of the workings of [AI], which is essential for engineering safe systems.” Currently, Generally Intelligent is primarily focused on studying how agents deal with object occlusion (i.e., when an object becomes visually blocked by another object) and persistence and understanding what’s actively happening in a scene. Among the more challenging areas the lab’s investigating is whether agents can internalize the rules of physics, like gravity. Generally Intelligent’s work brings to mind earlier work from Alphabet’s DeepMind and OpenAI, which sought to study the interactions of AI agents in gamelike 3D environments. For example, OpenAI in 2019 explored how how hordes of AI-controlled agents set loose in a virtual environment could learn increasingly sophisticated ways to hide from and seek each other. DeepMind, meanwhile, last year trained agents with the ability to succeed at problems and challenges, including hide-and-seek, capture the flag and finding objects, some of which they didn’t encounter during training. Game-playing agents might not sound like a technical breakthrough, but it’s the assertion of experts at DeepMind, OpenAI and now Generally Intelligent that such agents are a step toward more general, adaptive AI capable of physically grounded and human-relevant behaviors — like AI that can power a food-preparing robot or an automatic package-sorting machine. “In the same way that you can’t build safe bridges or engineer safe chemicals without understanding the theory and components that comprise them, it’ll be difficult to make safe and capable AI systems without theoretical and practical understanding of how the components impact the system,” Qiu said. “Generally Intelligent’s goal is to develop general-purpose AI agents with human-like intelligence in order to solve problems in the real world.” Image Credits: Generally Intelligent Indeed, some researchers have questioned whether efforts to date toward “safe” AI systems are truly effective. For instance, in 2019, OpenAI released Safety Gym, a suite of tools designed to develop AI models that respect certain “constraints.” But constraints as defined in Safety Gym wouldn’t preclude, say, an autonomous car programmed to avoid collisions from driving two centimeters away from other cars at all times or doing any number of other unsafe things in order to optimize for the “avoid collisions” constraint. Safety-focused systems aside, a host of startups are pursuing AI that can accomplish a vast range of diverse tasks. Adept is developing what

Uils wants to lend LatAm’s rideshare drivers cash based on their driving record • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Fintech, LATAM, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Transportation, UilsNo Comments

When Uils launched in 2021, it was a car rental service for rideshare drivers. But after the founders realized that many rideshare drivers don’t have access to credit, particularly in Latin America, the Buenos Aires-based company pivoted to fintech, offering financial services to drivers through a behavioral scoring engine based entirely on a person’s driving history. Rideshare vehicle lending is a crowded market. Both Uber and Lyft host marketplaces where approved vehicle rental companies can show their wares; Uber has piloted a short-term credit program offering up to $500 to drivers. One of the largest ridesharing companies in China, Didi, started offering loans to drivers in 2019. Meanwhile, lenders like Giggle Finance have long extended credit lines for ridesharing vehicle purchases, maintenance and upkeep. But Costanzo argues Uils (pronounced “wheels”), which is one of the Battlefield 200 at ZebethMedia Disrupt, stands apart in its ability to give a “360-degree” view of drivers in the mobility gig economy. “Being integrated with all the mobility applications available in Latin America, we have a total vision of the driver’s work activities, being able to determine a credit offer that is more adjusted to reality,” he told ZebethMedia in an interview. To use Uils, drivers download an app, fill out an application, and connect the app to the ridesharing platforms for which they drive via an API (e.g., Uber). Uils analyzes their history using a machine learning model to determine whether they qualify for a “micro” or consumer loan, considering various factors. The interest rates range from 0% for the micro loans (for a weekly subscription of $1 to $2) to 145% for the consumer loans. That’s quite a wide range — and sounds sky-high — but Costanzo says it’s reflective of the equally high inflation rate in Argentina, the country where Uils first launched. “The app has an embedded banking account where drivers collect their earnings from mobility apps,” Costanzo explained. “In that same account, they receive loan funds and pay their installments every week. We have a collection process that runs every 15 seconds so as soon as the mobility app sends the money, we will collect the pending installments before the driver notices … The rent-to-own loans are a leasing, so technically we can get the car back as soon as the driver goes into delinquency, therefore there is a tendency to 0% default.” It’s a relatively new idea in the lending domain, although services that track driver behavior to offer discounts and benefits have been around for some time. For example, Zendrive collects data about driving habits and awards drivers for making safe decisions. Root Insurance calculates car insurance premiums based on driving patterns, and Avinew rewards customers for using autonomous safety features. But there are obvious surveillance — and bias — implications. It’s unlikely every driver would be comfortable with the idea of sharing driving histories with Uils, particularly given that the company uses that data to create a risk profile of them. And where algorithms are involved, there’s always the possibility that flaws in the model could lead some drivers to be treated unfairly or poorly. Consider traffic in a driver’s area that forces them to make frequent, sudden stops that under normal circumstances might be considered reckless. There’s another risk to consider: the challenge of paying back loans in a downtrending economy, especially as interest rates climb and inflation impacts the price of fuel. An April poll from The Rideshare Guy, a ridesharing blog and forum, found that nearly half of rideshare workers quit or starting driving less that month because of spikes in gas prices. Image Credits: Uils For its part, Uils says that it requires customers to reauthorize the connections between the app and ridesharing platforms every month, so that tracking doesn’t continue indefinitely. (The company does require customers verify their identity to receive loans, however.) Uils is keeping the details of its algorithm close to the chest, save for revealing 70% of users who’ve applied for loans through the platform have received them. The company also isn’t saying exactly how many of those users have failed to make payments, if any. “The scoring engine has more than 200 data points for each driver. We have variables like their work schedule, how many trips per day, how many apps do they use, how many cars they have used, among others,” Costanzo said. “After processing the driving history, we will get a score from one to 1,000. Based on our current lending policies, that score will let us know what is the maximum that a driver can receive as a loan.” After that, Uils has the second layer that’s based on earnings. Depending on how much money the driver makes, they’re able to allocate up to 30% to loan repayment. But opaqueness aside, Uils’ terms and approach might be less onerous than, for example, those around rentals from Lyft or Uber — which some drivers say make achieving a profit nearly impossible. A 2019 investigative piece found that Lyft paid drivers participating in its Express Drive rental program less per mile than drivers who used cars leased through dealerships. The program imposed restrictions on drivers as well, prohibiting them from making money using their vehicles to work for other services. Costanzo stresses, again, that these are drivers without access to traditional credit — making their financial situations particularly precarious. “The biggest competitive advantage is that we apply a matching fund strategy around the installments amount,” Costanzo said. “Drivers will pay the same amount that he pays to rent the car in the informal market, offering a frictionless solution. On top of that, we are the only fintech in Latin America that offers major consumer loans and rent-to-own loans without consulting credit bureaus or asking for a credit card or any other guarantees.” Image Credits: Uils Uils is currently raising its second round funding round — totaling $1 million — through a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE), which grants the investors the right to purchase

Operator Collective was early to bring on operators as LPs. Now it’s doubling down

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in fundraising, Operator Collective, Startups, VentureNo Comments

When Operator Collective started in 2018, its idea of cultivating a community of operators as LPs to serve as a resource to its portfolio companies was unique. Now, it’s de rigueur as many firms build out their operator teams. But Operator Collective looks to prove that its model still rises above the rest with its second fund. The San Francisco-based organization raised $92 million for its second fund to invest in early-stage enterprise companies. The fund was backed by an LP base of 152 operators, in addition to a few institutions, and comes three years after the firm raised $51 million for its first fund. Operator Collective founder and CEO Mallun Yen said while there are a few changes for Fund II, the goal and structure are largely the same: Creating a community where startups and operators can help each other. Yen, a former operator (defined as someone with experience building a company) herself, got the idea for the model back in 2018 when she realized a gap in the market. She had sold her startup and wanted to potentially make some investments, but she didn’t think she had the right network to do so and wasn’t really sure where to start. Then it clicked: She realized she was likely not the only operator who had money to invest but not enough to write meaningful angel checks or have the time to vet potential investments. She decided to pitch her idea to Erica Schultz, whom she considered to be her target demographic. Schultz was working as the chief revenue officer and head of go-to-market at New Relic at the time. For Schultz, the pitch sounded perfect. “I was a busy operator. I didn’t have time to really diligence companies on my own,” Schultz said. “Once in a while a few came my way but the ability to invest through a fund specifically into enterprise tech was super attractive to me.” But Operator Collective will be deploying Fund II in a very different environment than Fund I. Having operating partners or teams of operators has become almost table stakes in recent years, and many firms now look to raise LP capital from operators, too. Yen thinks that their model still rises above because of its intentionality. “This was not build and then build a community,” she said about how the model differs from older firms changing their strategy. “We tore apart the venture model and built it from the bottom up to be optimized for operators. It’s not as afterthought. It’s front and center with Operator Collective.” She said that unlike other firms that maybe have one retired operator who was a CMO or one person just focused on hiring, Operator Collective’s network has multiple professionals from each area with a focus on underrepresented operators. Yen said this allows portfolio companies the chance to get access to an operator better suited to their company, and operators get to be involved without being overwhelmed. Fund II also includes a pilot program of 25 LPs that are all earlier in their career, which Yen said has seen great traction thus far. This type of model allowed operators to bring in deal flow while also helping diligence companies and has even fostered some members to join startups in C-suite roles. In a world where advice for founders comes from all angles and seemingly everyone is a an expert, Operator Collective thinks the connections it can foster between its portfolio companies and operator network can cut through the noise and keep its relevance as more firms look to offer a similar value-add. “I think what’s been super exiting is the reaction from the entrepreneurs and the market,” Yen said. “The feedback is not only that Operator Collective is incredibly valuable but brings so much advice to the table for entrepreneurs. It’s also really rewarding for them to tap into a diverse set of operators on their cap table and get to know a really diverse set of talent.”

And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2022 is … Minerva Lithium • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Minerva Lithium, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022 — the first in-person Disrupt in three years — is in the books. And as always, we end it by crowning the winner of Startup Battlefield. It began with 20: As seasoned ZebethMedia readers will know, startups participating in the Startup Battlefield were hand-picked to compete in the event. During the first two days of Disrupt, the companies pitched before judges — multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders — for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Battlefield Cup. After much deliberation, the ZebethMedia editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: Advanced Ionics, AppMap, Intropic Materials, Minerva Lithium and Swap Robotics. They pitched in front of the final panel of judges today, which included Mar Hershenson (Pear VC), Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone, Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), ZebethMedia editor in chief Matthew Panzarino, David Tisch (BoxGroup) and Richard Wong (Accel). One startup emerged victorious. Without further ado! Winner: Minerva Lithium Minerva Lithium has produced Nano Mosaic, a coordinated polymer framework that looks a bit like black gravel and extracts critical materials from brine in just three days. Minerva says that it can extract one metric ton of lithium using just 30,000 gallons of water, and it can do it in three days. Evaporative brine processing needs to evaporate 500,000 gallons of water to get to the same amount of lithium. Just one gram of this absorbent material has a surface area equal to that of a soccer pitch, which should give you an idea of just how little you’d need to extract a large amount of minerals. Read our coverage on Minerva Lithium here. Runner-Up: Intropic Materials Plastics are great for so many things, but they stay around for an awfully long time. Intropic leaps to the rescue with a set of enzymes that can be added to plastics at the very beginning of their life cycle, before it is even turned into products. The additives the company makes have been proof-of-concept tested and it wants to upend how plastics are made and disposed of. Intropic’s additives make many of the most commonly used plastics biodegradable in normal commercial composting. The enzymes are added to the pellets or powders that are used in the normal course of plastic production. This gives plastics new, biodegradable capabilities without changing the manufacturing processes used to create plastic products. At the end of the lifecycle, when it’s time to get rid of the material, the products can be composted into their component parts. Read our coverage on Intropic here.

Katakem’s ‘robot chef’ speeds up drug development with reliable chemistry • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Katakem, Robotics & AI, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Organic chemist Manuela Oliverio was working on a new drug when he noticed that test results on mice weren’t consistent, because the molecule being administered was always different depending on the chemist who produced it. It occurred to him that automation and robotics could make the drug development process more predictable, and so he founded Katakem, one of the startups in the ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield 200. With Katakem, Oliverio aims to develop what he calls a “robot chef” for chemists — a device that makes chemical reactions more consistently reproducible while accelerating the experimental process. He claims that the current prototype, dubbed OnePot, can collect data about chemical processes 150 times every second and automate repetitive, mundane tasks like heating, cooling and mixing different molecules. “The production of a chemical product is strictly regulated and standardized. [But] the development phase between discovery and production is still carried out manually and no significant data is extracted,” Oliverio told ZebethMedia in an interview. “Through data, we can help companies develop new life-saving drugs faster and, of course, this means higher revenues and better margins for them … Data [from OnePot] is reliable, clean and immediately usable.” To Oliverio’s point, drug development today is a lengthy and expensive endeavor. Only about 12% of drugs entering clinical trials are ultimately approved for introduction by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And estimates of the average R&D cost per drug range from less than $1 billion to over $2 billion, with errors and mistakes adding to the price tag. Katakem developed OnePot over the course of three years, designing both the mechanical and electrical components in-house. The company is seeking chemists to beta test the device, particularly those in corporate and academic settings, to collect data that it plans to use to train an algorithm that can recommend “faster and more sustainable” ways to develop molecules. Image Credits: Katakem Image Credits: Katakem Given the size of the problem — and addressable market — it’s not surprising that Katakem has competition. Automata is also creating a robot to handle basic lab tasks, and it recently raised $50 million to do so. There’s Kebotix, a startup developing AI and robotics tools to expedite the discovery of chemicals, and Artificial, which sells a lab automation platform aimed at life sciences R&D. But while Katakem has the dual challenges of proving its technology works and overcoming rivals, Oliverio isn’t concerned. Based on existing commitments, he expects Katakem’s annual recurring revenue to hit $350,000 by the end of the year and $3 million by the end of 2023. Presumably, those projections assume Katakem finds success with its early customers and demonstrates that OnePot does all the company says it can do. “As our clients — chemical companies — are key to economies, we are not subject to high variability in demand,” Oliverio said. “The robot is ready to be commercialized.” To date, Calabria, Italy-based Katakem has raised €1.3 million ($1.27 million) in capital from undisclosed seed investors, according to Crunchbase data.

EV maker Arrival cutting jobs again in pivot away from UK to the US • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Arrival, SPAC, TransportationNo Comments

Commercial EV company Arrival is restructuring its business for the second time in six months as it tries to squeeze the most out of its remaining capital. The company said in a regulatory filing posted Thursday that it is shifting its focus towards the to the United States and away from the UK market, where it is headquartered and the first EV vans were supposed to be delivered. Arrival, which went from stealthy electric vehicle startup to a publicly traded company via a SPAC merger, said it will now put the bulk of its remaining resources towards producing a “family of van products” for the U.S. market. It will also put funds towards related technologies such as core components, composite materials, mobile robotics and what it describes as software-defined factories. The move is going to cause considerable pain across the company, namely job cuts. The company said it plans to further “right-size the organization and cut cash intensive activities” to extend its cash runway, which at the end of third quarter, was $330 million. The company didn’t provide specific details on how many jobs it plans to cut. The language the company uses in its regulatory filing suggests it will be significant. Arrival said the restructuring is “expected to have a sizable impact on the company’s global workforce, predominantly in the UK.” The company said it will provide more information at its third-quarter earnings call November 8. Arrival said it will also try to raise more capital to fund the commercialization of these vehicle programs in the U.S. and is “exploring all funding and strategic opportunities” needed to bring the vans designed for the country into production at the company’s second microfactory in Charlotte, North Carolina. Arrival isn’t leaving the UK altogether. The company said it will continue to produce a small number of vans at its Bicester microfactory to support trials with customers. The major factors in the Company’s decision to shift focus to developing its US business included the tax credit recently announced as part of the Inflation Reduction Act – expected to offer between $7,500 to $40,000 for commercial vehicles, the large addressable market size, and substantially better margins. In June, Arrival said it would slash costs and cut as much as 30% of its workforce in an attempt to protect the business from a challenging economic environment while meeting its production targets. At the time, Arrival said the plan would allow the company to meet its targets through late 2023 using the $513 million of cash it has on hand. In August, Arrival lowered its delivery plans from 400 vehicles to 20 and postponed development of its battery-electric buses to focus on vans. Now it appears those cuts were not enough. Arrival had planned to use its existing cash on hand of $513 million plus funds available through a $300 million “At the Market Platform” to deliver the first vehicles to UK customers this year, invest in hard tooling and launch the Charlotte microfactory next year. However, the company’s low share price, which today closed at $0.72, coupled with daily trading volumes meant the ATM was an unreliable source of capital.

A bug in Abode’s home security system could let hackers remotely switch off cameras • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Internet of Things, Security, security camera, vulnerabilityNo Comments

A security vulnerability in Abode’s all-in-one home security system could allow malicious actors to remotely switch off customers’ security cameras. Abode’s Iota All-In-One Security Kit is a DIY home security system that includes a main security camera, motion sensors that can be attached to windows and doors, and a hub that can alert users of unwanted movement in their homes. It also integrates with third-party smart hubs like Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple HomeKit. Researchers at Cisco’s Talos cybersecurity unit this week disclosed several vulnerabilities in Abode’s security system, including a critical-rated authentication bypass flaw that could allow anyone to remotely trigger several sensitive device functions without needing a password by bypassing the authentication mechanism of the devices. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-27805 and given a vulnerability severity rating of 9.8 out of 10, sits in the UDP service — a communications protocol used to establish low-latency connections between applications on the internet — responsible for handling remote configuration changes. As explained by Matt Wiseman, a senior security researcher at Cisco Talos, a lack of authorization checks means an attacker can remotely execute commands through Abode’s mobile and web applications, such as rebooting the device, changing the admin password and completely disarming the security system. Wiseman told ZebethMedia that, in general, the affected device would be deployed in a local network and wouldn’t be directly accessible over the internet. “The more likely attack is from someone on the local network or if someone has access to the device through Abode’s network — for example, if they have the username and password for the mobile application.” “That being said, it could be deployed in a situation where it’s directly accessible over the internet or where someone specifically routes traffic to certain services,” added Wiseman. Talos on Thursday disclosed several other vulnerabilities in Abode’s security system. This includes several 10-rated vulnerabilities that could be exploited by sending a series of malicious payloads to execute arbitrary system commands with the highest privileges and a second authentication bypass flaw that could allow an attacker to access several sensitive functions on the device, including triggering a factory reset, simply by setting a particular HTTP header to a hard-coded value. Cisco initially disclosed the vulnerability to Abode in July and publicly disclosed the flaws this week after patches were made available. Users are advised to update their Iota All-In-One Security Kit to the latest version as soon as possible. In a statement given to ZebethMedia, Chris Carney, Abode’s founder and CEO said: “As a security-first company, we promptly worked to fix, address and patch their findings. This work has already been done, completed and pushed as an update to customers. Additionally, there have been zero reports from Abode customers related to these findings.” Carney confirmed Abode worked with Talos to resolve the security issues. News of flaws in Abode’s internet-connected home security system comes after the U.S. government this week shared more details about its plans to launch a cybersecurity labeling program for consumer Internet of Things devices to better protect Americans from “significant national security risks.” The initiative will launch next year for the “highest-risk” devices — including home security cameras.

Ambr wants to solve the billion-dollar burnout problem by tracking employees’ working habits • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Ambr, Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, burnout, Disrupt, Enterprise, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Worker burnout is real. Reports suggest that work-related chronic stress could be costing businesses up to $190 billion annually in reduced output and sick days, not to mention the much-discussed “Great Resignation” where workers are jumping ship in search of a greater work-life balance. In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared burnout an “occupational phenomenon,” adding it to its International Classification of Diseases. This is a problem that Ambr is setting out solve, with a platform that promises to address worker burnout preventatively. The company is demoing its wares at TC Disrupt this week as part of the Battlefield 200, and we caught up with the founders before and during the event to take a closer look at an early iteration of its product. Ambr was founded in February this year by Zoe Stones, Steph Newton and Jamie Wood, a trio of former Uber managers who witnessed the impact of worker burnout firsthand. “Burnout was a problem across our teams, and as managers and individuals, we didn’t know what to do to prevent it,” Chief Product Officer Wood explained. “We researched the causes of burnout and learnt that burnout is primarily the result of workplace factors like poor relationships, unmanageable workloads, poor time boundaries and a lack of control.” The founders, who are all based in London, are in the process of making their first hires and raising a pre-seed round of funding, which it said it expects to close “in the coming weeks.” Burnout data Ambr’s technology currently relies on self-reported check-in data from Slack, with a configurable survey-like system for gathering feedback from workers. Worker feedback. Image Credits: Ambr But while this kind of in-app survey functionality isn’t exactly unique, the company is in the process of developing additional tools to proactively figure out whether a workforce is at a higher risk of hitting burnout. This includes using natural language processing (NLP) to identify whether workers are happy to talk about what they’re doing outside of work or whether they always talk shop. This will mean using data from an open-ended question in the daily Slack check-in survey, which asks “What’s on your mind today? Share any work or non-work topics.” The idea here is that if a worker only ever mentions work stuff, then they may be at risk of burnout, though in reality it’s probably an imperfect indication given that people are less inclined to talk about personal things with an automated survey than they would be with a human work colleague. Worker feedback. Image Credits: Ambr While all NLP analysis is apparently anonymized, with the resulting aggregated data only accessible to management, it would be better applied to more organic conversations within public Slack channels or Zoom calls, though this would obviously raise greater privacy concerns even if the data is anonymized. At any rate, this gives some indication as to the types of things that Ambr are working on as it looks to automate the process of assessing burnout risk. “We’re investigating other features and integrations in the future that may leverage NLP but nothing yet on our product roadmap,” CEO Zoe Stones said. Elsewhere, the company is exploring using anonymized data from other workplace tools such as email and calendar software. This could work in a number of ways. For example, it could detect whether someone is emailing excessively in the evening or on weekends, or perhaps they have wall-to-wall meetings for 90% of the week — a scenario that could force someone to work far more than their allotted hours to keep their head above water. Wood also said that there’s potential farther down the road to integrate with human resource information systems (HRIS) to identify workers not taking their full vacation allowance. Ultimately, this gives companies valuable data on work culture, helping them address smaller issues before they escalate into full-blown problems. Ambr analytics. Image Credits: Ambr “Nudges, not nags” But spotting risk factors is just one element of this. Ambr is also working on “nudges” that serve workers gentle reminders inside their core workplace tools, perhaps suggesting ways they could cut down on out-of-hours work. “Initially, we’re delivering nudges through Slack, but we plan to rapidly expand into using Microsoft Teams and also a Google Workspace add-on,” Wood explained. “It is important to highlight that nudges are used sparingly — only when we think they can have a meaningful positive impact on behavior. Our principle is nudges, not nags.” Ambr’s ethos can perhaps be juxtaposed against the myriad meditative, mental health and well-being apps that have raised bucketloads of cash in recent years. Indeed, Ambr’s approach is more along the lines of, “why fix something when you can stop it from happening in the first place?” “We are beginning to transition to a world of work where employees are demanding more from their employers — Ambr will enable companies to adapt to this new reality, particularly as hybrid and remote working becomes the norm and as more Gen Zers enter the workforce in the coming years,” Wood said. Beyond the usual health and well-being players which, according to Wood, typically have lower adoption rates given that they’re not integrated into workers’ day-to-day tools, there are a number of startups with a similar approach to Ambr. These include Humu, which uses nudges to encourage behavioral changes, though it’s not specifically focused on countering burnout. And then there is Quan, which issues well-being recommendations to users based on self-reported assessments. Ambr’s closed beta went live in June this year, and it said that it has been gradually onboarding new customers from its waitlist, including startups and “later-stage growth companies” globally. It expects to launch publicly in early 2023. In terms of pricing, Ambr is pursuing a standard SaaS model with customers paying a monthly per-employee fee.