Author : zebethcontrol

Reddit’s latest feature lets you mute entire communities • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Apps, Reddit, Social, subredditNo Comments

Reddit is rolling out a new “community muting” feature to give users more control over what they do and don’t want to see on the platform. The new feature is launching on Reddit’s mobile apps over the next few weeks. Reddit plans to expand the feature to the desktop version of its platform in the coming months. You can use the new feature to mute an entire community, after which posts from that specific community will be removed from your notifications, Home feed and Popular feed. Users have to ability to mute up to 1,000 communities. Reddit notes that muting a community doesn’t restrict you from visiting or taking part in it, as you will still be able to view, post and comment in communities you have muted. If you change your mind, you can unmute a community at any time in your Settings, where you can also manage community notifications and other preferences. Reddit says it plans to incorporate muting into other feeds after bringing the feature to desktop in the future, such as the All and Discover pages. The company says it sees muting as part of a larger effort to give users more control over their Reddit experience. There are three ways you can go about muting a community. You can do so through your settings, via the three dots menu in the top right of a community page or through the three dots menu on the top right corner of your Popular and Home feeds. The company says that although muting allows users to create a more curated experience, it’s not a replacement for reporting content that breaks its policies. The new feature is a welcome addition to the platform, as it will help users filter out content they don’t want to see on their popular and home feeds. The launch of the new feature isn’t exactly a surprise, given that Reddit teased the roll out a few months ago. At the time, Reddit said it had heard feedback from users regarding community muting and was working on ways to give users more control over their feeds.

Twitter chief information security officer Lea Kissner departs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in chief information security officer, Elon Musk, Security, TwitterNo Comments

Twitter’s most senior cybersecurity staffer Lea Kissner has departed the social media giant. Kissner announced the move in a tweet on Thursday, saying they made the “hard decision” to leave Twitter, but did not say for what reason they resigned. Elon Musk completed a $44 billion takeover of Twitter two weeks ago, resulting in layoffs affecting more than half of the company and the departure of senior executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, general counsel Sean Edgett, and legal policy chief Vijaya Gadde. News of Kissner’s departure was first reported by Casey Newton. Twitter’s chief compliance officer and chief privacy officer also resigned on Wednesday, Newton said. It’s not immediately clear who is responsible for Twitter’s day-to-day security operations following Kissner’s departure. A spokesperson for Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. I’ve made the hard decision to leave Twitter. I’ve had the opportunity to work with amazing people and I’m so proud of the privacy, security, and IT teams and the work we’ve done. I’m looking forward to figuring out what’s next, starting with my reviews for @USENIXSecurity 😁 — Lea Kissner (@LeaKissner) November 10, 2022 Kissner, who previously served as Twitter’s head of privacy engineering, was appointed Twitter’s chief information security officer (CISO) in January 2022 following the departure of security head Peiter “Mudge” Zatko and then-CISO Rinki Sethi. Mudge went on to blow the whistle to federal regulators claiming security mismanagement and lax access controls that put users’ data at risk. Twitter is currently under a 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission which accused Twitter of cybersecurity failings that allowed cybercriminals to access internal systems and user data. The decree mandates that Twitter “establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program” to be audited every decade. It’s not clear how Twitter maintains that compliance with the FTC without a company security lead in place. One employee said in a company Slack that it was for Twitter engineers to “self-certify” compliance with the FTC. Earlier this year, Twitter was fined $150 million for violating that 2011 consent decree for misusing email addresses and phone numbers provided by users to set up two-factor authentication for targeted advertising.

Pinterest launches its collage-making app Shuffles to the general public • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Apps, SocialNo Comments

Pinterest’s new collage-making app Shuffles is now available to the general public, after entering an invite-only test phase earlier this summer. The app grew in popularity with Gen Z users, who used the creative expression tool to make “aesthetic” collages, sometimes set to music and posted to TikTok, or shared privately with friends or the Shuffles community. This resulted in Shuffles surging to become the No. 1 Lifestyle app on the U.S. App Store in August. The app’s popularity has since declined. While Pinterest’s flagship app remains the No. 1 Lifestyle app in the U.S. at this time, Shuffles has sunk to No. 228, according to data from Sensor Tower. Last month, Shuffles was downloaded 20,000 times, a big drop from the 211,000 iOS installs it saw in its first month on the App Store in July 2022. In part, Shuffles’ adoption could be suffering because the app remained invite-only even as it was gaining traction through viral videos. In order to access the app, you’d have to get an invite code from an existing user or join a waitlist. This exclusivity did create some initial demand among young people, but it’s not a long-term strategy to generate interest in a new product. At some point, an app has to launch and see if it can stand on its own. That’s now the plan. The app itself was built by Pinterest’s TwoTwenty team, whose goal is to foster more internal experimentation at the social network and increase its pace of innovation. This team was also behind the launch of Pinterest’s live shopping feature, Pinterest TV. Shuffles, however, was the first standalone app to emerge from this group. To use Shuffles, users build collages using Pinterest’s own photo library or by snapping photos of objects they want to include with their iPhone’s camera. Pinterest also built a technology that allows users to cut out objects from their own photos, their Pinterest boards or by searching for new Pins. This works similarly to iOS 16’s image cutout feature, where you can copy and paste an object from a photo into other apps. Shuffles makes this cut-out process a bit easier as it automatically identifies the object in the photos to make them available for pasting into your collages. You can also choose to add effects and motion to your images to make them shake, spin, pulse, swivel and more. These effects can be applied to individual items, as well. For example, you could add an image of a record player, then animate it so it actually spins. The photo collage could then be saved to your phone or shared to the Shuffles community, with friends, or elsewhere on social media. The app is tied to Pinterest, and not only as a source for imagery. The objects in the collages are linked back to Pinterest, so users can tap on items they like and then view them directly in Pinterest’s app where they can even be purchased if they’re for sale on a retailer’s website. Shuffles had initially caught fire as it targeted a younger demographic who often uses social media for creative, self-expression, not only for networking. In September 2020, Pinterest itself had captured the interest of this crowd as it became the go-to tool to help create custom iPhone Home Screens, after Apple launched the ability for users to add widgets in iOS 14. This led to an explosion of Home Screen designs with widgets, custom icons and matching wallpapers. More recently, a startup called Landing has created a digital platform for crafting vision boards, which has also gained traction with Gen Z users and may have inspired the idea for Shuffles. With Shuffles’ public launch, Pinterest is now dropping the requirement to sign up for a waitlist or have an invite code to get in. However, the company says it still considers Shuffles in a “test phase.” The iOS-only app will be available in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

With $7M raised, Keyo launches a biometric palm verification network • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in biometrics, Enterprise, Gadgets, Hardware, KeyoNo Comments

Maybe you’ve heard of Keyo. Perhaps you saw the initial round of press the firm did in 2017 — roughly two years after its founding. Or maybe you saw it pop back in 2020, riding the wave of news around Amazon’s lukewarmly received hand-scanner tech. You may have wondered precisely what’s been going on with the Chicago-based firm in the interim. “I think we were probably a bit naïve in the beginning to underestimate the true complexity of this undertaking,” admits co-founder/CEO Jaxon Klein. “There’s a lot involved in building a global scale identity solution. We’ve been in deep engineering mode for several years now. We’ve put the last five years and millions of dollars into building what we really view as the first global scale biometric identity ecosystem.” It’s not a unique case, in that respect. And may well mean that your organization is on the right track, if members of the press are willing to discuss your technologies at such an early stage. But the kind of technology Keyo has been working on is the sort of thing it’s important to get exactly right, given the security, privacy and financial implications of its biometrics. Image Credits: Keyo “That early press coverage was us prematurely saying ‘hey, look what we’re doing,’” Klein adds. “It settled in what we were really doing and the reasons that no other companies were competing for the space and how just how long and hard the road were heading down. We then retreated from that and said, ‘okay, we have a lot to build and we need to go actually deploy this into the real world, work with real customers work with real users and make sure we’re doing it right.” This week, the company’s got something to show for that work. Fueled by an aggregate $7 million in seed funding, the Keyo Network had previously been in beta. It’s a combination of hardware and software designed to bring palm scanning to a broad range of different markets and services. Today it’s announcing the Keyo Wave hand-scanner hardware, Keyo mobile app, third-party partner program and the Keyo Identify Cloud, which “enables users to instantly and privately identify themselves based on a simple scan of their hand at any business participating in the Keyo network.” The Keyo team remains small, with 33 remote employees, though Klein says the firm has been hiring around an employee a week. Not huge growth, though he winkingly notes that at least the startup is bucking the current brutal trend in startup land. Image Credits: Keyo “One of the things we’ve gotten really good at is scalable supply chain deployment. We’ve deployed 15,000 devices just recently, and we manage our supply chain internally. Even pre-pandemic, we’ve been building out our supply chain in North America — largely in the U.S. We’ve built a lot of institutional knowledge and capabilities around operating and expanding supply chains. We are really unique in the hardware space — or part of a very small cohort — that designs and builds their own devices, that’s entirely distributed.” The notion of replacing more traditional payment methods like cards — or even phones — with hand scanning will continue to attract its share of critics. That will only increase as massive corporations like Amazon adopt such technologies, but there’s little doubt the interest is there, at least with the corporations fueling such change.

Perfekto bags $1.1M to find homes for imperfect produce in Mexico • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Commerce, imperfect produce, Jan Heinvirta, Mexico, Perfekto, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Over a third of food ends up wasted across the globe, with 6% of that occurring in the Latin America and Caribbean regions. Among that waste, the majority of it, around 70%, occurs prior to the consumer stage. This is where Perfekto believes its subscription box of imperfect food can help. Launched in 2021, the Mexico-based company works with over 70 producers to “rescue” food and delivers it to consumers. Subscribers used to get a “surprise box,” but can now personalize their box and choose how much of each type of produce they want. On the backend, the company developed software that automates routing and logistics. In the past year, the company was part of Y Combinator’s summer 2021 batch, grew to over 3,000 active monthly subscribers and reached $1 million in annual run rate, Jan Heinvirta, co-founder and CEO, told ZebethMedia. Subscribers average two boxes per month. “We saw an expensive problem that needed urgent solution,” he added. “We felt like it’s time to do this because no more time should be wasted. We also saw a trend going in the direction of consumers being more responsible.” It’s an expensive problem indeed, with the cost of food waste estimated to be around $940 billion each year. And that’s while 9.7 million people across Latin America have food insecurity. Add to that, grocery delivery businesses in the business-to-consumer space are traditionally a capital-intensive business. Even highly venture-backed companies find it difficult to reach profitability. Heinvirta said it is possible to build a grocery delivery business with positive unit economics. Since December, Perfekto also grew over 10x across all key performance indicators and rescued 1 million pounds of produce. “We have been very capital efficient, reaching $1 million in ARR having spent less than $1 million,” he added. “This is possible thanks to our subscription model, efficient logistics model and strong organic growth.” Heinvirta, who grew up in a Swiss farmer village and has a background in financial services, moved to Mexico and met Anahí Sosa, the daughter of a citrus producer who told ZebethMedia that she saw how imperfections affected her father’s business. She went on to lead Uber’s grocery initiative in Latin America and later helped launch Cornershop in Costa Rica. Together Heinvirta and Sosa, chief operating officer, started Perfekto. They recently brought on Juan Andrade as the third co-founder and chief supply chain officer. Andrade was a logistics advisor to the company since it started and previously led Walmart’s e-commerce logistics operations in Mexico. Perfekto co-founders Jan Heinvirta, Anahí Sosa, and Juan Andrade (Image credit: Perfekto) The company is among a group of startups that want to save produce and other food from ending up in landfills. Today, it announces $1.1 million in pre-seed funding to expand its program across Mexico City. Over the past year we’ve seen a number of them also get venture capital backing for their approaches. For example, Full Harvest raised $23 million in Series B funding at the end of 2021 for its business-to-business marketplace that connects produce buyers and sellers so they can quickly close deals on surplus or imperfect crops. “We have a lot of interest from other cities, and I can certainly plan our international expansion, but we’re focused on Mexico City right now because it is so big,” Heinvirta said. “We plan to reach $2 million in annual run rate within the next six to eight months, and there is an opportunity to grow as much as we can.” Perfekto is also looking at some new opportunities beyond fruits and vegetables and is working with large consumer packaged goods companies that are interested in partnering to reduce food waste for other items that have a short shelf life or damaged packaging. There is also increased interest coming from businesses that are subscribing to a box of fruit each week, he added. The company just launched a crowdfunding campaign, but in the meantime, Heinvirta intends to plug the new capital into three areas: improve operations and technology, expand its catalog of products to offer customers more variety and growth in the B2B space.

SoundHound, the voice AI platform, lays off 10% of staff citing ‘challenging market conditions’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Layoffs, Robotics & AI, SoundHoundNo Comments

SoundHound — maker of the voice AI technology used by Mercedes-Benz, Deutsche Telecom, Snap and Mastercard and more — has laid off about 10% of its workforce amid ongoing economic turmoil across global markets. The Santa Clara-headquartered company — which went public via a SPAC in April of this year — announced the decision to its employees on Wednesday. Alongside that, it also imposed salary cuts for some of those not laid off. The company did not specify the details of the salary cuts, nor how many were affected. “Yesterday, we announced to our SoundHounders that we are taking actions to streamline our company, including an approximate 10% reduction in workforce. We don’t take this lightly, but in the face of challenging market conditions, we must channel our investments into the areas that continue to drive growth and allow us to best serve our customers. We’re extremely grateful to the departing colleagues that have contributed to our success as a leading voice AI platform,” said Fiona J McEvoy, a director of corporate communications at SoundHound, in a statement emailed to ZebethMedia. SoundHound has a total headcount of 450 employees — meaning that the layoff has impacted around 45 people. The company will likely share more details during its Q3 earnings call later today. Founded in 2005, SoundHound offers its voice AI platform in 25 languages. It powers voice-enabled experiences in a number of the cars provided by Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Honda. Earlier this month, the company also tied up with Samsung’s Harman International to offer fully OEM-owned and branded in-vehicle voice experience to several vehicles. Alongside offering its standalone platform to companies, SoundHound has two mobile apps, namely SoundHound Music that works similar to Apple’s Shazam and lets users discover music playing around them and Hound that offers voice-based search and assistance. In November last year, SoundHound announced it would go public via a SPAC transaction with blank check company Archimedes Tech SPAC Partners at a nearly $2.1 billion valuation. It was over 5x what Apple paid for its competitor Shazam, a $400 million announced in December 2017 and closed in September 2018. But its fortunes as a public company have been mixed. In its last quarterly results for the second quarter that ended on June 30, SoundHound reported a 26% year-on-year revenue drop to $6.2 million, while Q2 net loss spiked to nearly $31 million, compared to $15 million in the same quarter a year before. And its market cap, like that of many tech companies at the moment, is not doing very well. It’s currently trading at around $2/share with a market cap of $406 million. SoundHound has become another tech company to take the layoff route during this economic slowdown. In addition to recent layoffs announced by Facebook owner Meta and Twitter, others including Netflix, Salesforce, Spotify and Tencent and many others have cut collectively tens of thousands of jobs in the last several months. Indian startups such as Byju’s, Ola and Unacademy have also laid off hundreds of employees to reduce their operating expenses amid dip in funding and investments.

Web Design & Development News: Collective #737

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in UncategorizedNo Comments

Would you like to send us some news? The Collective features the latest news and resources from the web design & web development community. If you have spotted or created something that you’d like see published in the next issue, just submit the resource or article here.

Sam Bankman-Fried says Alameda Research to wind down trading, FTX attempting to raise capital • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Alameda Research, Binance, Crypto, FTXNo Comments

Sam Bankman-Fried said on Thursday that he will be winding down his trading firm Alameda Research, and is attempting to raise liquidity for the troubled FTX International exchange, as he scrambles to keep the world’s second largest crypto exchange alive after a bailout deal with Binance failed earlier this week. Bankman-Fried said he is engaging with a “number of players” and discussions are at various stages including letter of intents and termsheets. He also said that FTX’s U.S. business is “fine” and “100% liquid.” The 30-year-old entrepreneur, hailed as a wunderkind, said he assumes all responsibility for the mess FTX’s at and any raise for FTX International unit will be first used to do right by the customers. (Developing story)

Colorado-based SpringTime Ventures pivots its focus for new $25 million fund

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in emerging manager, Software, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

There are a lot of changes afoot for SpringTime Ventures as it looks to deploy its freshly closed second fund. For one, the Denver-based firm is pivoting away from its original focus on its home state of Colorado, despite being the only local fund in two of the state’s 10 unicorn companies. It’s also now able to expand its team thanks to raising three times as much money for Fund II, giving SpringTime enough cash on hand to allow its partners to finally pay themselves a real salary. So far, these changes have proved positive. SpringTime is announcing a $25 million second fund to cut checks ranging from $400,000 to $600,000 into U.S.-based seed-stage software companies. The fund was raised from an LP base of 120 entities that largely consisted of high-net-worth individuals. This latest fund allows SpringTime managing partners Matt Blomstedt and Rich Maloy to ditch their consulting work to focus on investing full-time, and actually get paid for doing so, overcoming a financial hurdle that plagues many first-time fund managers but isn’t spoken about often. The firm was also able to add a principal and two additional partners. The new pool of capital will be invested across startups in sectors including fintech, insurtech, healthcare, logistics and supply chain. While Fund I largely was deployed into companies across these same sectors, Fund II’s thesis represents a deviation from where the firm first focused: filling a funding void for startups in Colorado. Blomstedt told ZebethMedia that he originally got the idea for SpringTime after moving to Colorado in 2015 after a career in the energy business in Texas. He started attending happy hours to get to know people in his new community and met a bunch of startup founders who all shared the same problem. Blomstedt saw an opportunity. “At the time, there just wasn’t a dedicated seed fund really in Colorado and the consistent theme was [local founders] were having to go to the coast or maybe to Austin, Texas, or Chicago to raise seed capital,” Blomstedt said. “I started to become pretty convicted in kind of an opportunity and the need for a seed fund in Colorado.” He decided to raise a proof-of-concept fund to back these startups. The first fund was a slog to raise, he said. He garnered $8 million, which the firm invested in 35 companies including future Colorado unicorns SonderMind (telehealth) and Veho (logistics). While the fund isn’t sticking to its original thesis of backing companies in the Centennial State, Blomstedt said that most of their existing portfolio company would fall under this new strategy anyway. The above two examples back that up. Plus, he thinks this distinction will help them better leverage their LP network — 77% of Fund I’s LPs reupped for the new approach. “They send deal flow or they help us evaluate deals, so we started just kind of gravitating toward those industries,” Blomstedt said. “It also just made us better; we can make quicker, sound decisions in a much shorter period of time by having this focus and this network around us.” He added that they can be a value add later to the firm’s portfolio companies. SpringTime also brought on a handful of operating partners for Fund II for the same reason. Now, after raising across two very different market conditions — Blomstedt said it took about the same time to raise the first $22 million and the final couple million — it’s time to deploy.

Apple pledges $450M toward expanding the satellite infrastructure powering Emergency SOS • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Apple, Apps, Hardware, infrastructure, iOS, iPhone, satelliteNo Comments

As a part of its Advanced Manufacturing Fund, Apple will invest $450 million in satellite network and ground stations to power Emergency SOS, its service for the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro lineups that uses satellite to route emergency calls, the company announced today. The majority of the funding will go to Globalstar, the satellite provider with which Apple has an existing partnership to deliver Emergency SOS when it launches later this month. In part, Apple’s capital infusion will fund the installation of new custom-designed antennas manufactured by California-based company Cobham Satcom. Designed to receive signals transmitted by Globalstar’s satellite constellation, the antennas have already be installed in the satellite provider’s existing ground stations including facilities in Nevada, Hawaii, Texas, Alaska, Florida and Puerto Rico. “The launch of Emergency SOS via satellite direct to iPhone is a generational advancement in satellite communications, and we are proud that Globalstar’s satellites and spectrum assets will play a central role in saving lives,” Globalstart executive chairman Jay Monroe said in a statement. “With Apple’s infrastructure investment, we’ve grown our teams in California and elsewhere to construct, expand, and upgrade our ground stations, and we look forward to the next chapter in Globalstar’s lifesaving technology.” As CNBC notes, Apple’s investment — one of the largest to date out of its Advanced Manufacturing Fund, through which the company has furnished U.S.-based suppliers including Corning, Finisar, XPO Logistics and Copan Diagnostics with over $1.4 billion dollars combined — underscores the costly nature of satellite-based communications. In addition to substantial technical and communications infrastructure, Emergency SOS requires human-staffed call centers. Apple says that over 300 Globalstar employees will work on the service. Emergency SOS doesn’t support ordinary data, voice or text. But it alerts emergency services with a location and other key information. Once users point their phone at a satellite using an orientation guide in iOS, they can choose between preset messages to be sent along with the phone’s battery level and medical info to local EMS. If supported in the region where the emergency call is placed, iPhone users can have a two-way conversation with first responders. If not, Emergency SOS will route communications through Apple-operated local relay stations that act as intermediaries with emergency services. Emergency SOS will remain free for two years to Phone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro owners when it goes live in late November in the U.S. and Canada. But Apple has left open the possibility of charging for it after that.