Author : zebethcontrol

Foxconn invests another $170M into EV SPAC Lordstown Motors • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in EV, Foxconn, Lordstown Motors, TransportationNo Comments

Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn is increasing its investment in EV startup Lordstown Motors by buying $170 million in common stock and newly created preferred shares. Once the deal is complete, Foxconn will hold all of Lordstown’s outstanding preferred stock and 18.3% of its common stock on a pro forma basis. Foxconn will also have the right to two board seats, the companies said Monday. The additional investment comes a year after the electric light-duty truck manufacturer sold its 6.2-million-square-foot Lordstown, Ohio, factory to Foxconn. As part of that $230 million deal, which included a direct investment of $50 million, Foxconn agreed to help Lordstown Motors manufacture its Endurance pickup truck. Production of the electric pickup truck began in September 2022. This latest deal, specifically the $100 million direct preferred stock investment, replaces the joint venture funding announced last year by Foxconn and Lordstown Motors. The investment will occur in tranches and is subject to a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. An initial closing is expected to be held later this month. Foxconn will purchase about 12.9 million shares of common stock at a purchase price of $1.76 per share, resulting in total proceeds of $22.7 million. Foxconn will also buy 300,000 shares of preferred stock at $100 per share, resulting in total proceeds of $30 million. The remaining shares of preferred stock will be purchased by Foxconn as Lordstown Motors achieves based certain milestones. After receiving approval from CFIUS, Foxconn will buy an additional 26.9 million shares of common stock at a purchase price of $1.76 per share, resulting in total proceeds of about $47.3 million. “Since announcing our first transaction with Foxconn more than a year ago, it has been our objective to develop a broad strategic partnership that leverages the capabilities of both companies. Foxconn’s latest investment is another step in that direction,” Lordstown Motors Executive Chairman Daniel Ninivaggi said in a statement. The companies said the fresh injection of capital will be used to fund development and design activities for a new electric vehicle program in collaboration with Foxconn, a manufacturing company best known for making Apple’s iPhone. Lordstown Motors is one of several companies that went public over the past two years by merging with a special purpose acquisition company DiamondPeak Holdings Corp., with a market value of $1.6 billion. The company struggled almost from the get-go, its demise fueled by a damning report by short-seller firm Hindenburg Research that accused the EV SPAC of misleading investors on both its demand and production capabilities. Hindenburg disputed that the company booked 100,000 pre-orders for its electric pickup truck, a stat shared by Lordstown Motors in January 2021. The company later cut its forecast and CEO Steve Burns and CFO Julio Rodriguez resigned, just a few weeks after was reassuring investors of the company’s bright future. The missteps continued and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice opened investigations into the EV startup. Even after receiving a $400 million lifeline in from a hedge fund managed by investment firm Yorkville Advisors, Lordstown had its struggles, including losing GM as an investor. Its deal with Foxconn has been its best chance at survival even as supply chain issues limit production of its EV pickup.

Max Q: Ocean splashdown • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in ispace, Max Q, Rocket Lab, SpaceNo Comments

Hello and welcome back to Max Q. TC’s in-person Space event is almost upon us. Will you be there? Learn more about the event here. In this issue: Rocket Lab’s helicopter catch attempt ends in ocean splashdown ispace wants to stake its claim to the moon News from the FCC, Constellr and more Rocket Lab’s second attempt to catch a rocket booster mid-air using a helicopter was aborted, though it’s unclear at the time of writing what exactly went wrong. Rocket Lab aims to recover its rocket boosters using a parachute and a helicopter — a bit different than SpaceX, whose boosters return to Earth by vertically landing on a pad. Instead, Rocket Lab’s technique is to equip the booster with a parachute to slow its descent, and keep a helicopter waiting nearby to snag it out of midair. From there, the plan is for the helicopter to carry the booster straight back to the company’s production complex. But alas, we did not see a catch after this launch. Here’s what we know: After a nominal launch and payload deployment, the company’s Sikorsky S-92 helicopter did not make the catch attempt. Instead, the company recovered the booster from the ocean after it splashed down. We’ll be looking out for more information on what went wrong in the days ahead. Tokyo-based startup ispace’s lunar ambitions will soon be put to the test, as the company gears up for its first launch at the end of this month. The startup will attempt to send its “Hakuto-R” lander to the moon’s surface, kicking off an ambitious lunar exploration program of the same name. Founded in 2010, ispace is one of many emerging companies that want to foster new markets on and around the moon; on its website, it describes its goal as becoming “a gateway for private sector companies to bring their business to the moon.” Being the middle- and last-mile delivery partner of the moon could prove to be lucrative, given the intensifying interest from both government space agencies and private companies in lunar exploration. But there’s more than far-off revenues at stake in this first launch; recent reporting suggested that ispace is preparing to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange as early as this fiscal year. While the company was previously targeting a launch window of November 9-15, ispace said Monday it was now aiming to launch no earlier than November 22. The new date was chosen “in careful coordination” with launch partner SpaceX, the startup said in a statement. Indeed, ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada confirmed that the lander had arrived in Cape Canaveral, Florida, via cargo plane in advance of launch. The ispace M1 Hakuto-R lander. Image Credits: ispace More news from TC and beyond Arkisys is launching a new program called “Embark” for on-orbit payload services for SBIR and STTR Phase I entrants. (Arkisys) Blue Origin delivered its set of two BE-4 rocket engines to United Launch Alliance, which will be used on ULA’s heavy-lift Vulcan Centaur rocket as early as next year. (Blue Origin) China is releasing things into orbit using spaceplanes, and we don’t know what they are! (SpaceNews) China launched the third and final module for its Tiangong Space Station, and the rocket booster that carried it to orbit began its uncontrolled reentry back to Earth. (The New York Times/USSC) Constellr raised $10 million in seed funding for its space-based water monitoring system. (ZebethMedia) Exotrail, a company developing last-mile satellite transportation, signed a launch services agreement with German launch startup Isar Aerospace. (Payload) Firefly Aerospace is seeking to raise up to $300 million in private funding at an undisclosed valuation. (Reuters) NASA’s Space Launch System rocket was rolled back out to the launch pad in advance of the next launch attempt on November 14. (CNN) NASA’s Psyche mission was delayed and an independent review board was assembled to investigate why. The report is back, and it’s not good: The review board identified multiple staffing issues at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Lab, including burnout and a lack of technical expertise in key positions. (NASA) Orbex, a small rocket startup based in Scotland, will oversee construction of the first spaceport for vertical rocket launches on the U.K. mainland. (Orbex) Rocket Lab was contracted by Inmarsat to develop and manufacture an L-band radio for NASA; it also delivered the final solar panels to Maxar that will end up on the space agency’s lunar Gateway orbital platform. (Rocket Lab/Rocket Lab) Sierra Space and Blue Origin will be participating in Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s feasibility study exploring g opportunities for Japan to participate in commercializing low Earth orbit. (Baker McKenzie) SpaceX is tentatively targeting early December for Starship’s first test flight, a NASA official said. The company is also now building seven Raptor 2 rocket engines a week. (!) (Ars Technica) SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy for the fourth time ever in a mission for the United States Space Force. The double booster landing made more than a few jaws drop. (ZebethMedia) Spire won a DARPA contract for a preliminary design of a satellite that would carry sensors to measure the ionosphere. (Spire) Terran Orbital landed an additional $100 million investment from Lockheed Martin, and announced it built its massive spacecraft manufacturing facility in California, rather than Florida as originally announced. (ZebethMedia) The U.S. Federal Communications Division will undergo a major organizational shakeup in response to the explosion of activity in commercial space by establishing a Space Bureau to separate satellite policy issues from the overall “International Bureau,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. (FCC) Virgin Galactic released its quarterly financial report and released details on how it plans to kickstart its space tourism service. (Space) Wyvern, a startup building satellites that capture hyperspectral imagery using telescopes that unfold in space, has raised $7 million in a seed plus round. (Wyvern) Photo of the week Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine. Image Credits: Blue Origin Max Q is brought to you by me, Aria Alamalhodaei. If you enjoy reading Max Q, consider forwarding it to a friend.

Say ‘fromage’! French startup PhotoRoom captures $19M Series A • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Daily Crunch, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello, dear crunchers! We hope you’ve had a peaceful weekend and that you were able to stay clear of social media for a few days. LOL Who are we kidding? We’ve all been glued to the slow-moving, painful, Elon-catalyzed bird crash over at Twitter. Now, if only Mastodon would call its posts something other than “toots,” we might be able to get behind those. In the meantime, come say hello to us on Mastodon! Much love from Christine (@ChristineHall@mastodon.social) and Haje (@Haje@mastodon.social). And, given that those social handles don’t exactly roll off the tongue, we’ll probably go back to linking to our Twitter accounts tomorrow. We are nothing if not creatures of habit, after all. The ZebethMedia Top 3 Get ready for your close-up: PhotoRoom, a photo-editing app for e-commerce sellers that enables users to remove the background behind objects, has attracted 40 million app downloads and now raised $19 million, Romain reports. Twitter wants you back: If you were recently laid off from Twitter, would you return? Ivan writes that after laying off half of its staff, the social media giant is reportedly compiling a list of people who could be asked to come back. Better read the fine print on that rehiring contract. Putting the “super” in super app: Organizing all the facets of your life in one app seems to be quite popular, and Yassir is proof of that. The Africa-based super app, offering ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery and payments, grabbed $150 million. Tage has more. Startups and VC Evidently, the downturn hasn’t soured investors on the travel industry. Travel booking startup Hopper today announced that it closed a $96 million follow-on investment from Capital One, bringing the company’s total raised to close to $730 million, Kyle reports. The fresh cash will be put toward several efforts, CEO and co-founder Frederic Lalonde said in a press release, including supporting Hopper’s new social commerce initiatives. Want to start a DAO? It’s not that hard. Want to join a DAO? It’s even easier, but there are several steps to get connected. Some of those steps are daunting. Matt is here to help, and he’s invited Alex Taub and one of his investors to learn more about how starting and onboarding for a DAO is about to become a lot easier, at least if they have something to do with it. Tune in to our next episode of ZebethMedia Live on Wednesday to hear from Alex and investor Karin Klein from Bloomberg Beta. A smattering more: Dear Sophie: How can I stay in the US if I’ve been laid off? Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/ZebethMedia Dear Sophie, I was laid off and I’m on an H-1B. I have enough savings to survive for a while. What should I do if I have been let go from my job? I am on an H-1B, have an approved I-140, and an I-797 that expires in March 2024. If I have to leave the U.S., can my current I-797 be transferred to my next employer? Are there any issues I should be aware of? — Upended & Unemployed Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. Romain has your look at the Devialet Mania, a $790 high-end portable speaker. And he actually uses the term “portable” lightly because it weighs five pounds, so more like a speaker you can pick up and change rooms with, not one you carry around in a backpack. Business marriage is in the air, with Ouster and Velodyne agreeing to merge. Rebecca writes that this move “signals consolidation in the lidar industry” and also describes the background and what led up to this. Ready for five more? That’s a lot of cryptocurrency: The U.S. Department of Justice said it seized $3.36 billion in cryptocurrency from James Zhong, who Jacquelyn reports is accused of unlawfully obtaining that large chunk from the dark web. Game on: Paul updates us on the completion of the $4.4 billion merger of Unity and ironSource. Together, the companies are building a platform for the development and monetization of games. Flocking to something new: Boosted by all the Twitter drama over the past week, people have been on the lookout for another place to enjoy social media. Mastodon has been one of the benefactors, reaching 1 million active monthly users, Kyle reports. All the prices that are fit to post: Airbnb is tweaking its search so that it will soon show prices inclusive of all fees in search results, Ivan writes. Say farewell: Over the weekend, Lauren had a story about HBO canceling “Westworld.”

Elon Musk’s Twitter faces US midterm elections, his first high-stakes test • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in misinformation, Social, social platformsNo Comments

As the U.S. braces for midterm elections, the first major voting cycle since the violence on January 6, Elon Musk’s intensely chaotic Twitter takeover adds more uncertainty to an already tense time. While other major platforms pull out their dusty playbooks for dealing with viral misinformation, coordinated attacks and misleading claims about election results, Twitter’s new owner just slashed the company in half, sending some teams tasked with handling elections and misinformation packing in the process. Twitter is a relatively small social network but it plays an outsized role in politics due to its superiority as a breaking news source and the fact that most elected leaders (and many other government officials) spend time there. With Musk in charge and half the company gone, including some people who weren’t supposed to be eliminated — oops, Twitter’s policies and likely even its products are about to be put to the test. One day before the U.S. midterm elections, Musk inexplicably waded into the political fray, throwing his weight behind Republicans. “Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” Musk wrote. Musk isn’t the first tech CEO to hold political beliefs, but his last-minute advocacy shows that he isn’t interested in being “politically neutral,” no matter how he frames it. For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2022 Like almost everything he’s tweeted since taking over at Twitter, Musk’s shallowly-reasoned last minute political endorsement only undermines trust in his ability to run the platform. The political message isn’t particularly surprising given recent spats with high profile Democrats on Twitter, but it’s still alarming that these are the issues Twitter’s new owner is frittering away his (and our) time with. Since buying the company, Musk has clashed with both Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hillary Clinton, and the latter interaction offered a particularly alarming glimpse at just how little Twitter’s new owner understands or cares about trustworthy information, particularly when it doesn’t suit his worldview. With a week until Election Day, Musk demonstrated his seriousness on the subject by replying to Clinton with an easily debunked conspiracy theory from a known misinformation source offering a false narrative about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s violent assault. Musk has since deleted the tweet, demonstrating that at least one of the sycophants in his inner circle must have flagged the reply as a risk on some level, likely to advertisers. Twitter’s new owner quickly moved on to sowing discord around other topics without taking any accountability — or a sorely needed news literacy course. Not great. There’s a lot that can go wrong when it comes to election misinformation, both on Election Day and in the vote-tallying days that follow. It’s not just about the big calls — which party takes the House and the Senate, for example — but the thousands of critical little calls coming from state and local election administrators. Two years after the January 6 insurrection, election deniers in states like Arizona continue to spread false narratives about past election results while making efforts to seize oversight for local elections for themselves. Will Twitter have the staff or the political will to quickly fact-check conspiracy theories this time around? We’re surely in for a wave of unsubstantiated claims about voting irregularities, mail-in ballots and political fates that shift over time as more votes are counted. Musk hasn’t yet rewritten Twitter’s policies, but he’s already sent the platform into a critical situation with a skeleton crew. The company’s layoffs were so haphazard and so fast that it’s likely some core knowledge about how to operate the company and respond to threats walked out the door along with half of its workforce. In spite of reassurances from Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Head of Safety and Integrity who apparently has Musk’s ear at the moment, the company cut more than one team that touched election integrity. That includes Twitter’s curation team, which provided context, monitored for misinformation and curated Twitter’s trending and moments modules during live events — like elections. The curation team topped different parts of the platform with fact-checked updates that filled information voids and served as counter-programming for misinformation, which spreads quickly in fast-moving news environments. “With early voting underway in the US, our efforts on election integrity — including harmful misinformation that can suppress the vote and combatting state-backed information operations — remain a top priority” Roth said. Here are the facts about where Twitter’s Trust & Safety and moderation capacity stands today: tl;dr: While we said goodbye to incredibly talented friends and colleagues yesterday, our core moderation capabilities remain in place. — Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 4, 2022 Twitter also reportedly cut half of its public policy team, including a former director of public policy and elections who worked to prepare the platform for the U.S. midterms. NBC reports that the Twitter layoffs also significantly reduced its the engineering team focused on “user health,” which plays an active role in content moderation. The only positive news is that someone at Twitter convinced Musk to pump the brakes on his pay-for-play verification plan, so the platform just barely dodged the absolute chaos that a flood of newly verified accounts gifted with algorithmic priority would have created on Election Day. Open season Misinformation with domestic origins is a massive concern this election cycle, but Putin allies in Russia are proactively scaremongering around their own efforts to undermine U.S. elections. Russian entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin boasted that “we have interfered, are interfering and will interfere” in U.S. politics, though ominous statements are certainly cheaper than the hiring necessary to see that agenda through, likely to similar effect. Meta’s Head of Security Policy Nathaniel Gleicher made some good points on that front: 3/ Threat actors try perception hacking to trick the public & the media into doing the

Harmonic helps investors query the startup searches of their wildest dreams • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in CrunchBase, harmonic, pitchbook, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Siri, show me fintech companies, founded in the last two years, that haven’t raised over the past year but have grown headcount by 100% in the same time frame; and can it be founded by Stanford alumni whose Twitter traction has grown by at least 50% in the last six months? This is Harmonic’s vision; well, only if you swap out Siri for Harmonic’s text-based startup search query tool. The data platform, built by co-founders Bryan Casey and Max Ruderman, thinks it can help executives discover the next big startups without hundreds of hours of manual sourcing and research. Harmonic is a more specific version of its largest competitors, Crunchbase and Pitchbook, which aggregate and organize private startup data. “We go out and look at every nook and cranny of the web where there might be information about companies and we take that structured and unstructured data and figure out how to merge it all together into some canonical representation of a company,” Ruderman told ZebethMedia. Harmonic’s aggregation differentiation, per Ruderman, is the intelligence it uses to help recognize which public data is more accurate for certain feels, and then merge those sources to develop the “most accurate, fresh representation at any point in time.” Harmonic joins a flock of other startups trying to make venture more data-driven, transparent and equitable. In theory, algorithmic investing hedges against investors’ preconceived notions and pushes emotions to the side. Fintech unicorn Clearco and venture firm SignalFire have spent years implementing data-focused investment processes, joined by AngelList and Hum Capital. In a landscape where investors are re-learning discipline, data feels safe. But, as other solutions have matured, the cleanliness and reliability of said data has come into question. (One founder even played a prank once, listing that Andreessen Horowitz was an investor in his startup on Crunchbase; when other investors piled on looking to put money into his upstart, he explained it was a joke to show the poor quality of data on the platform, reports Bloomberg). Ruderman admitted that data reliability and consistency is one of the hardest problems to get right – and that their strategy is a big differentiator for them. “We’re able to keep data up-to-date at scale, and merge together fragmented bits of structured and unstructured data from all over the web with confidence,” Ruderman said, adding that its main measure of success is an internal score they use that captures freshness, inventory and taxonomy. When asked for more specifics on how they gain an upper edge on freshness, Ruderman didn’t share many specifics (and given that it’s a competitive moat, I’m not too surprised by this). He also said that pricing will evolve as the product evolves, but currently the startup charges licensing and API usage fees. Ruderman’s background adds some color to why he is confident in a better way to search. The co-founder was at Google for around 6 and a half years – with his last role being a senior software engineer on a team in Search that was all about building tools to help Google do UX research and design at scale. Before that, he spent time learning about behavioral economics in the people operations department, technical infrastructure on the business intelligence team, machine learning on the finance team, and ultimately Search. So far, his direction and the company behind him has landed Harmonic at least 150 customers, including SaaS startups such as Brex, Vouch, Notion and Carta, and venture firms such as Floodgate, A16z and Accel. Some of those early adopters have even turned into the startup’s largest investors. Harmonic announced today that it closed a $20 million Series A round led by Sozo Ventures, with participation from Craft Ventures, which led its $10 million seed round last year. Floodgate, another customer, was Harmonic’s first investor ever. “By creating a really powerful discovery tool in venture, it lets capital flow out to more innovation in a more efficient way…if we bring this to sales teams, it lets teams bring their service and push forward at the right time,” Ruderman said. “And then eventually, we want to make it the case that talent can find startups to match their talents, driving startups forward.”

AI that sees with sound, learns to walk, and predicts seismic physics • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Deep Science, machine learning, perceptron, Robotics & AINo Comments

Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron, aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter. This month, engineers at Meta detailed two recent innovations from the depths of the company’s research labs: an AI system that compresses audio files and an algorithm that can accelerate protein-folding AI performance by 60x. Elsewhere, scientists at MIT revealed that they’re using spatial acoustic information to help machines better envision their environments, simulating how a listener would hear a sound from any point in a room. Meta’s compression work doesn’t exactly reach unexplored territory. Last year, Google announced Lyra, a neural audio codec trained to compress low-bitrate speech. But Meta claims that its system is the first to work for CD-quality, stereo audio, making it useful for commercial applications like voice calls. Image Credits: An architectural drawing of Meta’s AI audio compression model. Using AI, Meta’s compression system, called Encodec, can compress and decompress audio in real time on a single CPU core at rates of around 1.5 kbps to 12 kbps. Compared to MP3, Encodec can achieve a roughly 10x compression rate at 64 kbps without a perceptible loss in quality. The researchers behind Encodec say that human evaluators preferred the quality of audio processed by Encodec versus Lyra-processed audio, suggesting that Encodec could eventually be used to deliver better-quality audio in situations where bandwidth is constrained or at a premium. As for Meta’s protein folding work, it has less immediate commercial potential. But it could lay the groundwork for important scientific research in the field of biology. Protein structures predicted by Meta’s system. Meta says its AI system, ESMFold, predicted the structures of around 600 million proteins from bacteria, viruses and other microbes that haven’t yet been characterized. That’s more than triple the 220 million structures that Alphabet-backed DeepMind managed to predict earlier this year, which covered nearly every protein from known organisms in DNA databases. Meta’s system isn’t as accurate as DeepMind’s. Of the ~600 million proteins it generated, only a third were “high quality.” But it’s 60 times faster at predicting structures, enabling it to scale structure prediction to much larger databases of proteins. Not to give Meta outsize attention, the company’s AI division also this month detailed a system designed to mathematically reason. Researchers at the company say that their “neural problem solver” learned from a data set of successful mathematical proofs to generalize to new, different kinds of problems. Meta isn’t the first to build such a system. OpenAI developed its own, called Lean, that it announced in February. Separately, DeepMind has experimented with systems that can solve challenging mathematical problems in the studies of symmetries and knots. But Meta claims that its neural problem solver was able to solve five times more International Math Olympiad than any previous AI system and bested other systems on widely-used math benchmarks. Meta notes that math-solving AI could benefit the the fields of software verification, cryptography and even aerospace. Turning our attention to MIT’s work, research scientists there developed a machine learning model that can capture how sounds in a room will propagate through the space. By modeling the acoustics, the system can learn a room’s geometry from sound recordings, which can then be used to build visual renderings of a room. The researchers say the tech could be applied to virtual and augmented reality software or robots that have to navigate complex environments. In the future, they plan to enhance the system so that it can generalize to new and larger scenes, such as entire buildings or even whole towns and cities. At Berkeley’s robotics department, two separate teams are accelerating the rate at which a quadrupedal robot can learn to walk and do other tricks. One team looked to combine the best-of-breed work out of numerous other advances in reinforcement learning to allow a robot to go from blank slate to robust walking on uncertain terrain in just 20 minutes real-time. “Perhaps surprisingly, we find that with several careful design decisions in terms of the task setup and algorithm implementation, it is possible for a quadrupedal robot to learn to walk from scratch with deep RL in under 20 minutes, across a range of different environments and surface types. Crucially, this does not require novel algorithmic components or any other unexpected innovation,” write the researchers. Instead, they select and combine some state-of-the-art approaches and get amazing results. You can read the paper here. Robot dog demo from EECS professor Pieter AbbeelÕs lab in Berkeley, Calif. in 2022. (Photo courtesy Philipp Wu/Berkeley Engineering) Another locomotion learning project, from (ZebethMedia’s pal) Pieter Abbeel’s lab, was described as “training an imagination.” They set up the robot with the ability to attempt predictions of how its actions will work out, and though it starts out pretty helpless, it quickly gains more knowledge about the world and how it works. This leads to a better prediction process, which leads to better knowledge, and so on in feedback until it’s walking in under an hour. It learns just as quickly to recover from being pushed or otherwise “purturbed,” as the lingo has it. Their work is documented here. Work with a potentially more immediate application came earlier this month out of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where researchers developed a machine learning technique to predict the friction that occurs during earthquakes — providing a way to forecast earthquakes. Using a language model, the team says that they were able to analyze the statistical features of seismic signals emitted from a fault in a laboratory earthquake machine to project the timing of a next quake. “The model is not constrained with physics, but it predicts the physics, the actual behavior of the system,” said Chris Johnson. one of the research leads on the

Truveta’s big data healthcare project is pretty cool • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in healthcare data, Startups, Terry Myerson, truveta, VentureNo Comments

A few weeks back, ZebethMedia caught up with Terry Myerson and others from the Truveta team to chat through an important product update from the company. This publication has covered Truveta for some time now, curious about its objectives as a business that has a strong public-health component, and because Myerson was a longtime Microsoft denizen that we were familiar with from covering Windows for years and years. Our interest was also piqued late last year when Truveta raised $100 million, slightly more than doubling its capital base. With around $200 million in backing, Truveta had a roster of folks with whom we were familiar, and enough cash to bring to bear whatever it was dreaming up. The Truveta concept is simple: Work with different healthcare groups to collect anonymized patient data, pool the information, and make it available to third parties so that they can see what’s actually going on in terms of patient outcomes in a more holistic sense. The potential public health and commercial applications are reasonably apparent, but what struck your scribe when chatting with Myerson and the team was that this sort of aggregated database of depersonalized information was not already in existence. While having a private-public healthcare system has some advantages, centralized data is seemingly not one of them. Back to the recent: Truveta has expanded the roster of health systems contributing to its dataset from a handful toward the end of 2021 to 25 today. More data is good when it comes to this sort of “healthcare analytics” work, so the additional 11 providers matter. But more notably, Truveta’s software product launched earlier this month. Back in 2021, the company made a bit of a splash when it rolled out a COVID-focused product. Now, Truveta Studio is out, and I got a tour. Something that Truveta has to handle is harmonizing information from disparate systems. This is something it’s tackling, allowing users to set up definitions in a computable format, and then collect results and graph them. The resulting wall of charts and graphs is exciting to look at if you, like myself, are a huge dork for data visualization. The service is not something, from my run-through of it, that anyone with a passing interest in healthcare outcomes could use. But for an expert, it could pay off — our tour guide explained that, in his prior research environment, he would spend weeks executing what he can do in minutes with Truveta. That’s more than an order of magnitude of time savings. Provided that the service is sufficiently user-friendly for professionals, the company could be onto something. The question now is how much people — customers — want to use it. Truveta’s early goals — getting its data ingestion set up, raising money, building a team, and then a product for regular use — have been met. Now we are down to the business brass-tacks of the effort. And there are nine figures of capital wagered that it will succeed. Given that healthcare in the United States is exorbitantly expensive, opaque, and full of inequitable outcomes, folks working to make it a bit less impossible to parse are fine by me.

Signal is the latest app to roll out a Stories feature • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Apps, signal, Social, storiesNo Comments

End-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal is rolling out a new Stories feature to all users on Android and iOS, the company announced on Monday. The official launch comes a few weeks after the company first began beta testing the feature with select users. Signal plans to release its Stories feature on desktop soon. As with other platforms’ Stories features, Signal Stories allow users to create and share images, videos and texts that automatically disappear after 24 hours. Signal notes that like everything else in its app, Stories are end-to-end encrypted. Signal users have the option to choose who can see their Stories by navigating to their settings. From there, you can choose to share your Stories with everyone in your phone’s contact list who uses Signal, anyone you’ve had a one-on-one conversation with in Signal or anyone whose message request you’ve accepted. You also have the option to manually hide your Story from specific people. If you would rather choose to share your Stories with a smaller subset of people, you can create a custom Story. In addition, you have the option to share Stories to existing group chats. Like with read receipts for chats, you can decide if you want to send view receipts for Stories you look at and whether you see who’s seen your Stories. You can turn view receipts on or off in the Settings menu. You may be wondering why a messaging app like Signal is adding Stories, but the company says Stories “happen to be one of the most common feature requests” among users, which is why it decided to add them to its platform. Image Credits: Signal “Stories have emerged to serve these specific functions and others in the broader communications landscape, and many of us have integrated them as one of the ways that we connect with one another,” the company said in a blog post. “That’s why they have a natural place in any messaging app, including Signal. People use them, people want them, so we’re providing a way to do stories privately. And without having to wade through a sea of ads.” Signal is aware that not everyone will see Stories as a welcome addition to the app, which is why it’s offering an opt-out setting for the feature. If you’re not interested in seeing or posting Stories, you can opt out by going into your settings and selecting the “Turn of stories” option. The company says although the addition of Stories may seem like a “big shift” for the app, they’re just another way for users to privately communicate with people. Signal notes that its Stories feature isn’t designed to help people build a following or amplify content for engagement, and that it instead sees Stories as a way to facilitate intimate conversations. Signal is a little late to game when it comes to Stories, which first rose to popularity through Snapchat. Over the years, the ephemeral feature has been adopted by nearly every popular platform, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Here’s the rundown on the Binance and FTX fiasco • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Binance, Crypto, crypto markets, cryptocurrency, EC Blockchain, EC Cryptocurrency, FTX, marketsNo Comments

The largest crypto exchange by volume (Binance) and the third largest crypto exchange by volume (FTX) faced off in recent days after Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao tweeted that his exchange would slowly withdraw billions of its holdings in FTX’s native token, FTT, “due to recent revelations that have came to light.” But first, let’s take a few steps back. Concerns surrounding FTX’s liquidity grew following a Thursday report from CoinDesk about the balance sheet of Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm once run by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Alameda holds $14.6 billion in assets with $8 billion in liabilities as of June 30, CoinDesk reported. The report showed Alameda’s largest asset was about $3.66 billion of “unlocked FTT” and $2.16 billion of “FTT collateral.” (FTT is the token behind FTX.) This means the $5.82 billion in total FTT that Alameda owns is equal to 193% of the total known FTT market cap, which is about $3 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data. Image Credits: CryptoQuant (opens in a new window) “The issue is that Alameda cannot sell even small amounts of their FTT holdings without heavily impacting the price,” Marcus Sotiriou, an analyst at the publicly listed digital asset broker GlobalBlock, said in a note. “Data from CryptoQuant […] tells us that there are only around 200-300 active addresses trading the FTT token, which is very small in comparison to many other large caps. Hence, large sell orders would crash the FTT price, due to being illiquid.”

GIPHY comes to connected TVs with launch of a GIPHY Arts app for Roku • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in giphy, Media & Entertainment, roku, short-form videoNo Comments

GIPHY Arts, the Giphy division dedicated to GIF art and artists, launched a free exclusive app on Roku today that allows users in select regions to view GIPHY Clips–30-second original short clips with audio—with their Roku devices. The new “Public Axis” channel is Giphy’s first app for connected TVs and brings short-form video content made by artists from mobile to the TV screen. It arrives on the same day that YouTube introduced its own plan to bring short-form video to TV viewers to challenge TikTok. At launch, “Public Axis” is available to Roku users in the U.S., the UK, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Ireland, France, Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Australia, El Salvador, Peru, Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, and Brazil. It’s free to download in the Roku Channel Store and doesn’t have ads. Users have access to various shorts, clips or “episodes” made by a commissioned artist. For instance, ListenMi released a three-episode series, “Remote Work Tales,” that feature relatable animated shorts about the work-from-home experience. Viewers can also check out Public Axis content on publicaxis.giphy.com. GIPHY Arts launched the Public Axis app on Roku devices to help promote artists to “an even broader audience,” the company wrote in its blog. Roku reported a net add of 2.3 million active accounts for the third quarter, bringing the total to 65.4 million. Roku, meanwhile, has recently embraced the short-form video trend, as well. The streaming media platform rolled out a new short-form video feature, “The Buzz,” to give users access to short content like trailers, interviews and images from AMC+, Apple TV+, BET+, SHOWTIME, Starz, and other partners. Giphy has been in the short-form video space a bit longer. It made its first step into this market in 2019 when it launched “GIPHY Video,” which has since been renamed “GIPHY Clips.” Today’s announcement comes eight months after TikTok integrated GIPHY Clips into the new TikTok Library, an in-app creation tool. Also, the company revealed a new 30-second ad last week, which is currently playing in movie theaters across New York City and Los Angeles.