Author : zebethcontrol

Y42 wants to become mission control for your data pipelines • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in business intelligence, data integration, data pipelines, Enterprise, managed service, Startups, y42No Comments

When Berlin-based Y42 launched in 2020, its focus was mostly on orchestrating data pipelines for business intelligence. That mission has expanded quite a bit over the course of the last couple of years and today, Y42 announced the launch of what it calls its “Modern DataOps Cloud.” Built on top of data warehousing service Snowflake and Google’s BigQuery engine, Y42‘s new fully managed service aims to provide businesses with more of the tools to make their data stack easily accessible for more users while also providing additional collaboration tools and improved data governance services. “The use case for data has moved beyond ad hoc reporting to become the very lifeblood of a company. However, data pipelines built ad hoc are inherently brittle and inevitably break over time, leading to an overflow of fire-fighting requests and, ultimately, mistrust in business data. For organizations that rely on data to make mission-critical decisions, this can be fatal,” said Y42 founder and CEO Hung Dang. Image Credits: Y42 He argues that Y42’s new DataOps Cloud will allow organizations to more easily create and run production-ready pipelines and consume the data that comes through them. Like before, Y42 fully manages the data stack, using open source tools like Airbyte to integrate the different services and dbt Core for transformations. For advanced users and data teams, Y42 offers Git-based version control (though non-technical users can leverage this through the service’s web app, too) and with this new platform, the company also now offers enhanced governance tools like a data catalog, asset ownership assignments, data contracts and multi-level access controls. “Our vision is for every organization — whether it has one single data engineer, data analyst or a whole data team — to be able to create and run production-ready data pipelines efficiently and consume data in any downstream application to make better business decisions. The Y42 Modern DataOps Cloud makes this vision a reality — today,” said Dang. In addition to the new managed service, Y42 also today announced that it has brought on Jules Cantwell as its president. Before Y42, Cantwell was the COO of Qualtrics EMEA. “The tech industry is at a tipping point where the breadth and volume of data that companies are gathering is rapidly outpacing their ability to manage it effectively. The need for a Modern DataOps Cloud to manage data pipelines in a scalable manner has become mission-critical,” said Cantwell. “Y42 has the product vision, customer proof points and passionate team to truly transform the data management space.” The company also recently brought on Max Herrmann, the former CMO of data integration platform Cask (which Google acquired in 2018) and most recently the CMO at Swim.ai, as its senior VP of Marketing.

Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO announce plans for ‘Game of Thrones’ NFTs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in game of thrones, Media & Entertainment, NFTs, Warner Bros DiscoveryNo Comments

“Game of Thrones” NFTs are coming this winter. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and HBO have teamed up with NFT platform Nifty’s to launch digital-collectible non-fungible tokens based on the hit series. An official launch date is not yet confirmed, but fans can expect “Game of Thrones” NFTs in late 2022. The NFT experience, “Game of Thrones: Build Your Realm,” will allow fans to build a realm by collecting customizable avatars inspired by characters from the series as well as assorted packs with various collectibles like “equipable” items to “strengthen” their avatars such as weapons, companions and gear, Nifty’s wrote in its blog. “Throughout the program, varying themed packs will also be available,” WBD noted in its announcement. Other NFTs will include special moments from the series, “Game of Thrones” characters and locations. The experience will also have “thematic activities [and] on-site engagement” for fans to enjoy, WBD said. The company didn’t reveal pricing details. “Our goal, as always, with the fans, is to create new ways for them to interact with the stories and characters they love,” Josh Hackbarth, Head of NFT Commercial Development for Warner Bros Discovery, said in a statement. “We’re excited to expand the ‘Game of Thrones’ fandom and franchise with this unique digital collectible program that’ll engage fans on a deeper level, allowing them to immerse into the world of Westeros, and enhance the overall fan experience.” WBD is likely looking to generate additional revenue with the launch of “Game of Thrones” NFTs, arguably one of HBO’s most popular franchises. The company is in need of money after experiencing a net loss of $3.4 million last quarter. Plus, WBD has a debt load of about $53 billion. The company will report its Q3 results tomorrow, November 3. “Every so often, a film or television series comes along that pushes the boundaries of its genre so far it forever changes the creative landscape, becoming a part of our collective cultural identity. ‘Game of Thrones’ is that series for this generation,” added Jeff Marsilio, CEO and co-founder of Nifty’s. “Nifty’s is thrilled to be working alongside Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products to keep pushing the bounds of creativity and imagination through a new kind of digital collectible that will allow fans of the franchise to connect in ways they never have before.” Also, 3D-content company Daz 3D will collaborate with the companies on the design, development and production of the NFT experience. This isn’t the first time the media company has collaborated with Nifty’s as it launched “Looney Tunes” NFTs in June. Separately, WBD also partnered with Funko on various NFT drops. And last month, Warner Bros. partnered with blockchain company Eluvio to release “The Lord of the Rings” web3 movie experience, with NFT versions of the film.

Google Play revamp to highlight higher-quality apps, offer new promotional capabilities • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Android, Apps, developers, Google, play storeNo Comments

Google today announced it’s making several changes to the Google Play Store that will impact Android apps’ discoverability, how developers can market their apps to consumers, and various trust and safety concerns. Most importantly, Google is now advising developers that the Play Store will begin to prioritize apps that deliver on both technical and in-app quality by promoting them in more places across the Play Store where they can be discovered by consumers. The changes hint at Google’s intent to take a more editorial eye as to how apps are featured and distributed on the Play Store. That’s an area that’s typically been a heavier focus for Apple in prior years — especially following its own App Store revamp in 2017, which saw it separating games and apps into their own tabs and the introduction of editorial content, including articles and tips, on the store’s main page. The Play Store isn’t going quite that far, however. Instead, Google says it will now begin to steer consumers away from lower-quality apps by changing how it determines which apps will be made more visible on the platform. Specifically, it’s implementing new quality thresholds that will exclude apps that exceed certain crash rates and “app not responsive” (ANR) rates, both on an overall and per-phone model basis. Google says the apps that don’t meet these thresholds will be excluded from some areas of the Play Store, including recommendations, while others may even include a warning on their store listing to set appropriate user expectations. Image Credits: Google Beyond technical quality, Play Store editors will also look at a range of factors, like whether or not the app or game has a polished design, if the content keeps users engaged, if the onboarding process is clear, if the ads are well-integrated, if the app is accessible, and if the navigation, controls and menus are easy to use, among other things. They’ll also check to see if the app meets Android’s quality guidelines and best practices, detailed on the Android Developers website. In addition, the company will roll out to developers new promotional content formats and a new type of Custom Store Listing designed to help place apps in front of more users. In the case of the former, developers will be able to leverage LiveOps — the special merchandising units for promoting apps on the Play Store. Today, these are used to promote discounts and offers, major app updates, in-app events, pre-registration announcements, and more. Apple has a similar feature, launched last year. The sorts of marketing units give app stores a more real-time feel as they can market on reasons to download and launch apps now, instead of just serving as a general promotion. Image Credits: Google Google notes that developers using LiveOps have seen a 3.6% increase in revenue and 5.1% increase in 28-day daily active users versus similar titles that don’t take advantage of the offering. Now, it will rename LiveOps to “Promotional Content” to reflect longer-term plans to expand the feature to support new content types — including those which will see the promotional units appearing more deeply integrated within the Play Store across users’ homepages, in search and discovery areas, in title listings, and directly in apps via deeplinks. Developers will also soon be able to create a new type of listing that will allow them to specifically target churned users (people who tried the app or game, then abandoned it). This “Churned-user Custom Store Listings” format, which will roll out closer to year-end, will be able to display a specific message designed to re-acquire prior users. Two other changes are focused on app safety and protecting developers — and the consumers downloading their apps — from coordinated attacks. Google will update the Play Integrity API, which helps protect against risky and fraudulent traffic, with more features. Developers will be able to customize API responses, set up tests in the Play Console, and use new reporting to analyze their API responses. They’ll also be able to debug API responses from the Play Store app’s developer settings on any device. Plus, Google says it’s launching a new program designed to address coordinated attacks on app ratings and reviews. The company didn’t offer much information on how this program would work, but it would give developers a way to fight back if their app was being unfairly targeted with fake reviews either by users or their competitors, presumably. This is an area of concern that recently made the news, in fact, when a top-ranked new social app, Gas, suddenly became the target of a hoax that claimed it was being used for human trafficking, leading users to delete their accounts. The changes follow earlier updates to the Play Store designed to help consumers better discover non-smartphone apps that run on their smartwatches, TV, or tablets. Earlier this year, Google also warned developers it would hide and block downloads for outdated apps. Google alerted developers they must now, as of Nov. 1, 2022, target API level 30 (Android 11) or above if they want their app to be discoverable on the play Store by new users running newer versions of the Android OS.

Meta to ditch human-curated Facebook News stories globally • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Facebook, facebook news, Media & Entertainment, meta, SocialNo Comments

Some three years after first introducing a curated news section for publishers, Meta has confirmed that it’s ditching the humans and leaning entirely on algorithms for Facebook News in all markets where it’s available. Meta, then known simply as Facebook, introduced Facebook News back in 2019, kicking off initially to a small subset of users in the U.S. before eventually expanding nationwide and into international markets starting with the U.K., Germany, Australia and France. Facebook News, essentially, is a dedicated tab inside Facebook that surfaces notable local and international news relevant to each market. Although most of the surfaced articles were already determined algorithmically, there was a “top stories” section curated by humans. Soon, this section will also be determined by algorithms. Image Credits: Facebook News As per a report in U.K. trade publication Press Gazette today, Meta is ending a contract it had with Axel Springer-owned Upday, which provided the freelance workforce that powered news curation in the U.K. market, albeit with heavy direction from the powers-that-be at Meta. As an aside, this followed shortly after a negative report from Press Gazette detailing some of the working conditions the freelancers had to contend with. “We are always evaluating our global curation partnerships based on user and product needs,” a Meta spokesperson said in a stock statement. The changes will come into effect in the U.K. some time in early 2023. However, the Meta spokesperson confirmed to ZebethMedia that it will in fact be ending human-curated stories in all markets where Facebook News operates. As noted by Press Gazette, Upday originally curated the German news tab, but due to conflict-of-interest concerns owing to parent company Axel Springer’s association with the news industry, Meta gave the curation contract to a local press agency called the Deutschen Presse-Agentur (DPA) earlier this year. But in the wake of this latest news from Meta, it seems the DPA’s role in curating the top stories in Facebook News will be limited to the duration of its remaining contract. Bad news While news-sharing has been a cornerstone of the Facebook platform almost since its inception, it’s clear the company has been making moves to deprioritize this aspect of the social network in favor of the so-called creator economy. Part of this has also involved renaming the trusty ol’ news feed simply as “feed.” But this shift has been driven, perhaps, by a broader industrial pushback that has led to new legislation in countries such as Australia that now stipulate that online platforms such as Facebook compensate publishers for their content. Similar mandates are working their way toward fruition in other markets too, including the U.S. While Meta is seemingly reducing its investment in news — from a human perspective, at least — there is no indication that Facebook News itself is going the way of the dodo any time soon. But that is one potential outcome here, given the company claims that creator-driven content is what its users are most interested in — both on Facebook and on Instagram. The Meta spokesperson said that it makes little sense to over-invest in areas that most of its users are not interested in.

Momento launches out of stealth with a serverless cache • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in bain capital ventures, Enterprise, momento, Serverless, Startups, The General PartnershipNo Comments

After working at NASA as a rover roboticist, Khawaja Shams underwent something of a career pivot, joining AWS to team up with engineer Daniela Miao on DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service. Not content to stop there, Shams and Miao left AWS to co-found Momento, a Seattle-based startup that’s today emerging from stealth with a “serverless cache” optimized for cloud computing. What’s a serverless cache, you ask? Well, Shams describes it as an elastic, “highly available” cache that delivers commonly used data to apps and databases faster. He claims that Momento’s platform lets developers add a cache to their cloud stack with around five lines of code, accelerating databases that run in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. “Legacy caching providers offer a different model that requires customers to provision and pay for their peak capacity. These inelastic services are highly inefficient, expensive, require a lot of work to get right, and simply do not scale,” Shams told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Momento allows customers to provision a secure cache, capable of handling millions of transactions per second, with a single API call.” Shams makes the case that legacy caching services are complicated and inefficient, forcing engineering teams to waste time tinkering around with too many configurations. Moreover, he says, because they don’t automatically scale, they require engineers to provision for peak usage — leading to wasteful spending. By contrast, Momento handles load spikes while abstracting away configuration. The platform automatically optimizes, scales and manages caches, also securing caches with end-to-end encryption and audit log support. Image Credits: Momento “Cloud computing made it easier than ever for customers to rapidly provision resources. Unfortunately, during the growth-focused phases in the recent years, customers have ended up massively over-provisioning capacity and are struggling with large bills from their cloud providers,” Shams said. “Momento is helping customers optimize one of the top line items on their cloud bills.” To Shams’ point, cloud costs for some enterprises skyrocketed during the pandemic as digital transformation efforts accelerated. A 2022 survey from Anodot, an analytics platform, shows that nearly half of businesses (49%) are finding it difficult to get their cloud costs under control. According to a separate poll by Flexera, more than 50% of companies now spend over $2.4 million on the public cloud each year. Momento claims to have closed “multiple six-figure deals” with customers including CBS, NTT Docomo and smart home company Wyze Labs. The startup got an early vote of confidence from VCs including Bain Capital Ventures, which led Momento’s $15 million seed funding round that closed this week. The General Partnership participated alongside Flickr CEO Don MacAskill, former Mozilla CEO John Lilly and other angels. Shams says that the funding will be used to expand 25-employee Momento’s engineering team, build a “full-cycle” go-to-market team, grow the Momento platform and add support for additional public clouds. “Due to the recent economic downturn, organizations are actively seeking cost savings and efficiency. Caching tends to be among the top line items on their cloud bills, and Momento’s ability to save on their caching is appealing,” Shams said.

How can students work or launch a startup while maintaining their immigration status? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Column, Dear Sophie, EC Column, EC DEI, F-1 visa, Government & Policy, immigration law, Sophie Alcorn, Startups, Verified Expert - lawyerNo Comments

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: How can early-stage startups improve their chances of getting H-1Bs? Dear Sophie: How can I launch a startup while on OPT? Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.” ZebethMedia+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off. Dear Sophie, I’m studying bioinformatics at a university in the U.S. What options do I have to work before and after graduation on my student visa? Do any of these options allow me to launch my own startup? — Wanting to Work Dear Wanting, I applaud your enthusiasm to get to work! The opportunity to work and get training in your field is one of the draws of studying in the U.S. Complex immigration rules and regulations for international students — not to mention processing delays and time limits — can make things challenging, but all you need is a little planning to overcome those challenges! Your ability to work in your area of study — and for how long — depends on what type of student visa you hold: F-1 student visa. J-1 educational and cultural exchange visa. M-1 student visa. F-1 offers the most flexible work options Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window) The F-1 student visa offers the most options for working both before you graduate and after. Two types of training programs are available to most international students who hold an F-1 visa, making them eligible to work in their field of study: Curricular Practical Training (CPT) is available to students at some colleges and universities. Optional Practical Training (OPT) is available either before or after graduation. STEM OPT is a 24-month extension of OPT available to students who graduated with a STEM degree designated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Working under CPT If CPT is available at a university or college, then students on F-1 visas are eligible if they have been enrolled full time for at least one academic year and have not yet graduated. Some graduate programs allow or even require students to apply for CPT at the very beginning of their program.

What’s going on with NFT royalties? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Creators, Crypto, EC Blockchain, EC Cryptocurrency, looksrare, NFTs, raribleNo Comments

In recent months, conversations around NFT creator royalties shifted as some platforms abandoned royalties for other alternatives. Not everyone is happy about it. “Every platform had royalties about a year ago,” Alex Salnikov, chief strategy officer and co-founder of NFT marketplace Rarible, said to ZebethMedia. Then half a year passed and some marketplaces stopped implementing them, he added. Creator royalties were originally introduced across the NFT community as a way to pay artists for their work in both primary and secondary sales. In general, the content creator royalty is 2.5% to 10% of an item’s purchase price. Most royalties average about 5%, Salnikov said. A lot of creators’ initial income comes from primary sales, but over time, secondary sales can build out their income through royalties, Alex Fleseriu, CEO of fine-art-focused Solana NFT marketplace Exchange.ART, told ZebethMedia. “It holds up their success and it’s very important for them to make a living.” “Let’s pick one of these ways and get all of the NFT marketplaces behind it. We’re cursing the market by fighting over market share.” Rarible co-founder Alex Salnikov Royalties and rewarding creators are the foundations for building long-term value, Shiti Manghani, COO of web3 gaming and development studio Find Satoshi Lab, said to ZebethMedia. “The creators and artists will work with platforms that value their work, stop their exploitation and consequently empower them to create their best work.” Find Satoshi Lab launched a multichain NFT marketplace on Tuesday that enforces royalties. “Web3 was born in many ways to solve for the challenges faced by creators with centralized institutions that did not allow for fair rewards to be awarded,” Manghani said. “[We] would like to stay true to that ethos.” Separately, Exchange.ART on Wednesday launched its “Royalties Protection Standard,” which enforces creator royalties on secondary sales of NFTs on its platform. This means that new NFT collections on its marketplace can utilize the standard to ensure artists that their work won’t be traded on marketplaces without their consent. “We’ve seen royalties come under a lot of pressure lately,” Fleseriu said. “We’ve seen marketplaces, protocols, basically allow buyers and sellers to circumvent those royalties, which intensifies this predatory nature of the NFT ecosystem overall, especially in the [profile picture] market.”

Trio of Brown University grads think elder care needs a helping hand with data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, Brown University, Deerfield Management, elder care, Intus Care, StartupsNo Comments

As a young boy growing up in Michigan, Robbie Felton went on home visits with his geriatric social worker mother. Seeing low-income, elderly and disabled patients so vulnerable stuck with Felton. As a student at Brown University, he became interested in how Medicare and Medicaid integrate to take care of these patient populations — so much so that he even left school for a while to work full time across the long-term care continuum and learn as much as he could about “very integrated high-touch models of care for seniors.” Serendipitously, while studying at Brown, he realized he wasn’t alone in his desire to help this population when he, Evan Jackson and Alex Rothberg wound up in the same class pitching the same idea — separately — to their teacher. Jackson had been introduced to the senior care space when in high school as he worked alongside a mentor in private equity who invested in and acquired elderly care facilities. Recalls Rothberg: “We had to apply to the class with an idea. The three of us basically submitted the same idea.” That idea ended up being the genesis of what is today Intus Care, a healthcare analytics startup that aims to synthesize financial, clinical and administrative data to identify trends in long-term care facilities by integrating with electronic health record, claims and accounting software to highlight clinical risks in elderly patients. If you’ve ever had an elderly relative in long-term care you can see firsthand how difficult it is for everyone involved in a patient’s care — especially with all the staffing shortages that are prevalent today — to have the time or ability to go through all of a patient’s clinical history to truly understand how to better care for them or prevent future illnesses or falls from happening. “We’re trying to address some of the core issues surrounding the way health care has been built,” Felton said. “And the fact that it’s disparate in nature makes the process of managing and caring for our loved ones so difficult.” In summary, Intus’ mission is “to catalyze data-driven change” in the care of older adults. “At the base layer, we’ve created a solution that integrates with all of an organization’s data and surfaces the insights most important for them to tangibly push the needle on outcomes related to the quality of care that they’re providing,” Felton, who serves as the company’s CEO, told ZebethMedia. “We want to help them scale a high-quality, high-value model of care to as many participants as efficiently and effectively as possible, nationwide.” Image Credits: The trio — who just graduated five months ago — raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding for their venture in March of 2020 and then another $1.6 million in May of 2021 from some angel investors and smaller institutional investors. They raised another $3 million in May of this year and today Intus is announcing a $14 million Series A financing led by Deerfield Managementm, with participation from existing backers Jumpstart, Nova and Collab Capital. The startup operates as a SaaS business and its customers are the organizations providing care. “Our end users are the care coordinators — the individuals who are on the ground providing care services to the patients,” said COO Jackson. “We want to enable them with data so they can make more informed decisions.” But really, anyone who is making proactive decisions — whether it be care coordinators, facility managers or social workers — can use Intus’ offering. “You can use our tool at two levels,” Rothberg, CTO, explained. “One being very individual in terms of how do we get a snapshot of a person’s health in a much more comprehensive way than any other technology will let you.” “And then zooming out a little bit — how do we plan for this person’s health over a six- and 12-month period…not just oh, someone fell yesterday. But more of ‘How do we prevent that?’ So if our data shows there’s a pattern of falls and every single time it’s between 4 and 6 am.” The end goal is to not only recognize the patterns, Rothberg added, but let clinicians make plans going forward. Intus plans to use its capital primarily toward hiring people experienced in scaling healthcare ventures, with a focus on engineers and product folks. It also wants to hire sales and marketing staff because thus far, the three founders and one other person have been working to acquire customers. Even with that small crew, Intus says it has experienced 50% revenue growth quarter-over-quarter this year. Julian Harris, operating partner at Deerfield Management, said his firm invests across the healthcare industry and believes that Intus has built “elegant, intuitive tools to serve a range of users…in ways that impact cost and quality outcomes.” “We believe they have incredible account management infrastructure, and they leverage insights from their customers to drive enhancements to the platform faster than any incumbents in the space,” Harris wrote via email. “They also have deep regulatory and compliance expertise on their team, enabling them to infuse their tools and services with these insights. And, the founders are among the best sales leaders I’ve encountered in my career.”

Hear the VC perspective at iMerit ML DataOps Summit • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Robotics & AINo Comments

Don’t miss the investor-focused session “Current and Future State of ML DataOps Landscape” at the iMerit ML DataOps Summit on November 8. As enterprises dive deeper into commercializing AI applications to improve business efficiencies, many realize the massive transformation and increasing complexity of the machine learning data operations landscape. Join our panelists as they dig into those complexities and share their perspectives. You’ll hear from Alfred Chuang, founder and general partner at Race Capital; Andy Pavlo, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and the CEO and co-founder of OtterTune, and Pavan Tripathi, partner at Bregal Sagemount. Alfred Chuang — recognized by Andreessen Horowitz as the “Silicon Valley CEO’s CEO” — is an accomplished entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Before joining Race, Chuang co-founded and took BEA Systems public. He also became BEA’s chairman of the board where he remained until 2008 when Oracle acquired the company for $8.6 billion. Prior to BEA, Chuang led product development, network infrastructure, systems architecture at Sun Microsystems, Inc. During his tenure, Sun grew from less than 1,000 to 60,000 people with revenue over $6 billion. Andy Pavlo is an associate professor of Databaseology in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His (unnatural) infatuation with database systems has inadvertently caused him to incur several distinctions, such as VLDB Early Career Award, NSF CAREER, Sloan Fellowship and the ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Best Dissertation Award. He is also the CEO and co-founder of the OtterTune database tuning start-up. Pavan Tripathi is a partner and co-founder at Bregal Sagemount. Prior to Bregal Sagemount, Pavan was an investment banker and private equity investor at Goldman Sachs. Most recently, he was a member of the growth equity team in Goldman Sachs’ Merchant Banking Division. Pavan graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles with a BS in Electrical Engineering and a BA in Economics, and received an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. These are just three of the many leading AI/ML game-changers you’ll find featured in our power-packed agenda. Take a look at the other sessions, and then join us for the iMerit ML DataOps Summit on November 8. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from some of the best minds in AI, data science and ML. Register for free today!

DJI’s latest Mavic drone starts at $1,469 • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in DJI, drone, Gadgets, Hardware, MavicNo Comments

Affordability is fairly malleable concept when it comes to consumer drones. We’ve seen plenty of systems positioned as affordable – or even cheap – over the years, but lowering the price point generally comes with its share of tradeoffs. It’s something DJI itself has flirted with a bit itself, with some more basic and entry-level systems. But the Mavic has long been a kind of gold standard, in terms of accessibility and build quality. Certainly its always been more affordable than many non-consumer systems, but you’d have to go out on long limb to position it as “cheap.” In this era of component shortages, inflation and just general economic headwinds, DJI’s positioning the Mavic 3 Classic as its most accessible drone to date. The system, which was announced at an event this morning, runs $1,469. That’s for the drone only. As ever, the company’s got all sorts of additional packages with added batteries, carrying cases and other accessories you can opt into (or not) and quickly drive that price up. The system is built around the 4/3 CMOS 20-megapixel Hasselblad camera as the standard Mavic 3, along with that base system’s stated 46 minutes max flight time. Image Credits: DJI The Classic is part of a growing trend in consumer electronics that finds companies cutting some features for a lower cost iteration of a flagship device. The company effectively brings the product price down by around $400, dropping the telephoto lens, but otherwise not sacrificing a ton to hopefully attract some new customers who were edged out by the price point by just a bit. It’s not an altogether trivial cut, of course. Imaging has long been the core of the line. But if a single (very good) camera is enough for your needs, the Classic ought to cushion the landing a bit. The drone is available starting today.