Author : zebethcontrol

Disney+ becomes the international home for new seasons of ‘Doctor Who’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in BBC, Disney, Doctor Who, Media & Entertainment, streaming serviceNo Comments

Disney and the BBC announced today that Disney+ will be the new exclusive home outside of the U.K. and Ireland for the hit British sci-fi series “Doctor Who.” Beginning 2023, new episodes of the series will be released on the platform in over 150 markets, including the United States. BBC will continue to host the series in the U.K. and Ireland. It’s safe to say that the company is hoping Whovians, new and old, will flock to Disney+ to get their “Doctor Who” fix. Bringing the popular British show to the streamer is a smart move for Disney+ as it hopes to reach 215-245 million subscribers by 2024. Disney+ also plans to expand the streaming service to over 160 countries by next year. In June, the streaming service launched in 16 markets across the Middle East and North Africa. Disney+ president Alisa Bowen said in a statement, “We’re excited by the opportunity to bring new seasons of this beloved franchise exclusively to Disney+ and introduce the show to the next generation of audiences in more than 150 markets around the world. The series is a perfect addition to our ever-growing catalog of global content that continues to make Disney+ the home for exceptional storytelling.” “Doctor Who” will return in November 2023. To celebrate the show’s 60th anniversary, David Tennant, who was the 10th Doctor, will reprise his role as the 14th doctor, replacing the 13th doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker. The next Doctor will be played by “Sex Education” actor Ncuti Gatwa, who will take over after Tennant.

ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield alum Perygee helps secure building operations • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Ballistic Ventures, Battlefield alums, edge device security, Perygee, Security, StartupsNo Comments

While ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield 2022 is still fresh in our minds, Perygee, a member of the 2020 group, has been helping companies keep their building operations elements secure. It looks at things like HVAC, elevators and sensors; keeping patches up-to-date and searching for vulnerabilities. Today the company announced a $4.75 million seed round, and the general availability of its self-service tier, which lets companies get started with the product without interacting with a sales team. Mollie Breen, a former NSA employee, developed the idea for her startup while she was a student at Harvard Business School. “Perygee is a lightweight, complete platform for IoT (Internet of Things) and OT (operational technology) devices,” Breen told ZebethMedia. She sees one of the company’s key differentiators being time to value. “We’re measuring value in minutes, not months, and we’re complete, so we’re bringing together a lot of different security tools from anomaly detection to vulnerability detection across the entire security stack.” She says the devices her company looks to secure are tough to track because they are often out of the purview of the IT or security teams, yet they interact with the network, and they can be vulnerable to attack. It leads to security blind spots that Perygee is trying to shed some light on. “What we saw over the past 24 months is that that these blind spots aren’t unique to just HVAC devices and security cameras. It actually applies to all devices. So every IoT-OT device has a physical presence that is managed by some non-security stakeholder, whether it’s facilities or an operations team member like an industrial engineer on a manufacturing floor or a clinical engineer on the hospital floor,” she said. To help get going quickly, the company has created a no-code workflow tool to automate common security tasks like patching. The automation also helps facilitate coordination between these often disparate teams from building and facilities operations and the network and security teams to make sure that these tasks don’t fall between the cracks. Image Credits: Perygee Today, the product is managing 30,000 devices, and the startup has 7 employees. Breen says that as a female founder, she is particularly aware of building a diverse company from the cap table to the board to the workforce. When we spoke to her about her $1.75 million pre-seed round at the end of 2020, she said she was actively reaching out to diverse talent on LinkedIn, but she recognizes as the company grows that is not a scalable methodology. “We are looking at our pipeline and looking at the diversity metrics within it. And then I think having internally really honest conversations about where we might be biased around when we’re when we’re thinking about hires. I like to be in those rooms because I’d like to like to think of myself as someone who has a particular pulse on where biases, especially towards women candidates, can show up and how we make sure that we’re not we’re not applying those biases to our pipeline,” she said. Today’s seed round was led by Ballistic Ventures with help from BBG Ventures, a firm that backs early-stage startups with female founders, and several industry angels. The company has raised $6.35 million to-date.

Greener wants to help consumers and businesses be more sustainable • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Australia, Climate, funding, Greener, StartupsNo Comments

Many consumers and companies want to reduce their impact on the environment but may not know where to start or how to sustain the necessary changes. Founder of Greener, an Australian cleantech startup, Tom Ferrier, wants to help. He argues that sustainability and climate action doesn’t need to be complicated. His startup is geared towards simplifying the decision-making process to help consumers and businesses understand sustainability and reduce their emissions, such as by making different purchasing decisions — and he points to a statistic that suggests around 88% of consumers in the U.S. and the U.K want businesses to help them be more sustainable. For consumers, Greener offers an app that links to the user’s bank account, enabling customers to learn about their carbon impact and get suggestions to make better choices on shopping greener based on potential purchases for 250+ brands. “For consumers, it is as simple as downloading the app and securely connecting their bank account using our open banking technology partner Basiq, to start tracking their carbon footprint [of every dollar spent],” he said. “Once a new user signs up to Greener, open banking technology alongside data and expertise from the world’s leading climate scientists, enables the Greener app to instantly calculate the greenhouse gas emissions of the user’s spending.” When asked about users’ data privacy, Perrier explained that Basiq open banking makes it easy for Greener customers to sign up and connect their bank account. “Basiq open banking also allows us to securely pass anonymous, aggregated data back to businesses to provide them with insights that will help them build customer loyalty and attract even more climate-conscious customers,” Ferrier said. Offering a double-sided tech solution, Greener also provides tailored solutions for businesses of all sizes towards reducing their footprint based on business type, size, business model and current sustainable activities. Ferrier told ZebethMedia that a business can see where they are on the sustainability journey and is provided with personalized, clear advice on what they can do to reduce their carbon emissions and waste. From its consumer app trials, the company saw that it was able to help shoppers reduce the emissions of their purchases by 23%. The company also saw upwards of 10% of customer growth, with shoppers switching to greener businesses from non-green competition services. The startup is announcing a seed raise of 4 million AUD today ($2.5 million), led by NAB Ventures with participation from RealVC. It plans to use the funding to continue its product development, which is currently in beta, and ramp up to the public launch of its consumer app and Greener for Business solutions next year. “Although there are other carbon tracking and offset platforms in the market, no other business is tackling the climate solution from both sides – consumer and business,” Ferrier argued. Greener’s app is free for consumers, while businesses fund the model at a low margin and can be rewarded with new customers and personalized services, he told ZebethMedia. L-R: Co-founders of Greener, Tom Ferrier and Neil McVeigh (Image credits: Greener) Greener suggests the opportunity is enormous as 300g of CO2 is attached to every dollar spent, with $184 billion spent globally every day. The major challenge facing climate action is awareness, Ferrier continued. He added that the company sees education as the solution, closing the gap between motivation and know-how, and rewarding consumers and businesses for their efforts. The startup has partnered with a number of brands, such as Microsoft, T2 Tea, Scoop Wholefoods, Brew Dog, Huskee and Go for Zero, since its inception in 2019. Greener has also partnered with the City of Sydney and the Australian Retailer Association (ARA) to help their members accelerate net-zero strategies. Greener’s previous backers include Phil Vernon, former CEO of the managed investment fund Australian Ethical. “We all have a part to play in climate action and NAB certainly recognises our role,” said Todd Forest, managing director of NAB Ventures, in a statement. “We’re continuously looking at ways we can support our customers and colleagues to take action to reduce their carbon footprint and we think Greener’s product has great potential. Greener is an excellent fit for NAB Ventures and we look forward to working with them and exploring further opportunities together.”

AI saving whales, steadying gaits and banishing traffic • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in AI, artificial intelligence, Deep Science, machine learning, perceptron, research, 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. Over the past few weeks, researchers at MIT have detailed their work on a system to track the progression of Parkinson’s patients by continuously monitoring their gait speed. Elsewhere, Whale Safe, a project spearheaded by the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory and partners, launched buoys equipped with AI-powered sensors in an experiment to prevent ships from striking whales. Other aspects of ecology and academics also saw advances powered by machine learning. The MIT Parkinson’s-tracking effort aims to help clinicians overcome challenges in treating the estimated 10 million people afflicted by the disease globally. Typically, Parkinson’s patients’ motor skills and cognitive functions are evaluated during clinical visits, but these can be skewed by outside factors like tiredness. Add to that fact that commuting to an office is too overwhelming a prospect for many patients, and their situation grows starker. As an alternative, the MIT team proposes an at-home device that gathers data using radio signals reflecting off of a patient’s body as they move around their home. About the size of a Wi-Fi router, the device, which runs all day, uses an algorithm to pick out the signals even when there’s other people moving around the room. In study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the MIT researchers showed that their device was able to effectively track Parkinson’s progression and severity across dozens of participants during a pilot study. For instance, they showed that gait speed declined almost twice as fast for people with Parkinson’s compared to those without, and that daily fluctuations in a patient’s walking speed corresponded with how well they were responding to their medication. Moving from healthcare to the plight of whales, the Whale Safe project — whose stated mission is to “utilize best-in-class technology with best-practice conservation strategies to create a solution to reduce risk to whales” — in late September deployed buoys equipped with onboard computers that can record whale sounds using an underwater microphone. An AI system detects the sounds of particular species and relays the results to a researcher, so that the location of the animal — or animals — can be calculated by corroborating the data with water conditions and local records of whale sightings. The whales’ locations are then communicated to nearby ships so they can reroute as necessary. Collisions with ships are a major cause of death for whales — many species of which are endangered. According to research carried out by the nonprofit Friend of the Sea, ship strikes kill more than 20,000 whales every year. That’s destructive to local ecosystems, as whales play a significant role in capturing carbon from the atmosphere. A single great whale can sequester around 33 tons of carbon dioxide on average. Image Credits: Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory Whale Safe currently has buoys deployed in the Santa Barbara Channel near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. In the future, the project aims to install buoys in other American coastal areas including Seattle, Vancouver, and San Diego. Conserving forests is another area where technology is being brought into play. Surveys of forest land from above using lidar are helpful in estimating growth and other metrics, but the data they produce aren’t always easy to read. Point clouds from lidar are just undifferentiated height and distance maps — the forest is one big surface, not a bunch of individual trees. Those tend to have to be tracked by humans on the ground. Purdue researchers have built an algorithm (not quite AI but we’ll allow it this time) that turns a big lump of 3D lidar data into individually segmented trees, allowing not just canopy and growth data to be collected but a good estimate of actual trees. It does this by calculating the most efficient path from a given point to the ground, essentially the reverse of what nutrients would do in a tree. The results are quite accurate (after being checked with an in-person inventory) and could contribute to far better tracking of forests and resources in the future. Self-driving cars are appearing on our streets with more frequency these days, even if they’re still basically just beta tests. As their numbers grow, how should policy makers and civic engineers accommodate them? Carnegie Mellon researchers put together a policy brief that makes a few interesting arguments. Diagram showing how collaborative decision making in which a few cars opt for a longer route actually makes it faster for most. The key difference, they argue, is that autonomous vehicles drive “altruistically,” which is to say they deliberately accommodate other drivers — by, say, always allowing other drivers to merge ahead of them. This type of behavior can be taken advantage of, but at a policy level it should be rewarded, they argue, and AVs should be given access to things like toll roads and HOV and bus lanes, since they won’t use them “selfishly.” They also recommend that planning agencies take a real zoomed-out view when making decisions, involving other transportation types like bikes and scooters and looking at how inter-AV and inter-fleet communication should be required or augmented. You can read the full 23-page report here (PDF). Turning from traffic to translation, Meta this past week announced a new system, Universal Speech Translator, that’s designed to interpret unwritten languages like Hokkien. As an Engadget piece on the system notes, thousands of spoken languages don’t have a written component, posing a problem for most machine learning translation systems, which typically need to convert speech to written words before translating the new language and reverting the text back to speech. To get around the lack of labeled examples of language, Universal Speech Translator converts speech into “acoustic units”

Get a load o’ this guy! (There’s a new ghost dog Pokémon called Greavard) • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Gaming, Nintendo, pokemonNo Comments

I cannot feasibly write a new post on ZebethMedia dot com every time a new Pokémon is announced. I did skip over Bellibolt, the electric frog Pokémon that generates power from its big belly. But you know what’s even better than the partner Pokémon of a VTuber gym leader? Greavard. So here we are, writing a post to tell you about this haunting, good boy. I promise, any editor who is reading this, I did not spend more than twenty minutes on this important update in technology news. Coming to “Pokémon Scarlet and Violet,” Greavard is like a cross between a Litwick (the candle Pokémon that debuted in “Pokémon Black and White”) and a bearded collie, as one Twitter user delightfully illustrated for us here: In other words, Greavard is a ghost dog. In other other words, according to the Pokémon Company, Greavard is a “lovable subsurface lurker.” That’s either a really great or really terrible Tinder bio, and I can’t decide which, so don’t blame me if you scare off your future wife. Why “subsurface”? According to the video, it looks like Greavard appears in the wild like a little candle on the ground, submerging its body beneath the surface — maybe the name “Greavard” is supposed to combine “graveyard” and “grief,” and this ghost dog is trying to reunite with a new owner to shower with love? Let’s not dwell on that for too long. But when you approach the shining candle, Greavard will jump out of the ground while “letting out a spooky cry that would startle most unsuspecting people — though it doesn’t appear to do this with ill intent,” the Pokémon Company says. “Greavard has such a friendly and affectionate personality that paying it even the slightest bit of attention will make it so overjoyed that it will follow Trainers wherever they go. Of all the Pokémon residing in the Paldea region, it is known to be especially easy to befriend,” the press release reads. But of course, because Pokédex entries are haunting and horrifying, this ghost dog has some pretty dark undertones. “Greavard will slowly and inadvertently absorb the life-force of those around it, so it’s best not to play with it too much. What’s more, it also has powerful jaws that can shatter bones. A single bite from Greavard can be grievous—so Trainers are advised to approach it with caution,” it says. I don’t know what to make of that, but I’m definitely catching a Greavard who will become best friends with my Lechonk. I think he’s just a good boy who needs a belly rub in the afterlife. He cannot hurt me. “Pokémon Scarlet & Violet” will be released for the Nintendo Switch on November 18. We played a sneak preview of the game and wrote about it here.

Bilt Rewards’ valuation jumps to $1.5B following new $150M growth round • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Ankur Jain, bilt rewards, credit card, Fintech, Left Lane Capital, VentureNo Comments

Bilt Rewards, which works with some of the country’s largest multifamily owners and operators to create loyalty programs and a co-branded credit card for property renters, entered unicorn status after securing $150 million in a growth round led by Left Lane Capital. We previously covered Bilt a year ago when the company raised $60 million in growth funding on a $350 million valuation. Today’s investment raises that to $1.5 billion and gives the company about $213 million in total funding since the company launched in June 2021 out of Kairos, the startup studio led by Bilt founder and CEO Ankur Jain. The company’s loyalty program and payment platform was rolled out to more than 2.5 million apartment units across the country so far, Jain told ZebethMedia. Users can earn points and improve their credit by simply paying rent each month. Bilt’s points can be used in 12 loyalty programs, including major airlines, hotels, travel, fitness classes, Amazon.com purchases, credit toward rent or a future downpayment. Bilt has already processed over $3.5 billion in annualized rent payments and over $1.6 billion in annualized card spend to date. Both of those figures are ones that have grown significantly in just the last 90 days, Jain said. Also, there are more than half a million customers using Bilt between the loyalty program and credit card. In addition to the new investment, Bilt also announced a new program called Bilt Homes, which helps renters access homeownership. Here’s how it works: Using the member’s monthly rent payment, Bilt will show the member homes they can own in their area for that same payment. That payment includes real-time interest rates, taxes, income, credit profile and other personal data to determine mortgage qualification, Jain said. Members can also calculate how an improvement in credit rating will affect the mortgage interest rate they may qualify for, and should they need or want it, enroll in Bilt’s free rent reporting to help boost their credit history with every on-time rent payment. “It’s an opportunity for more renters to think about whether homeownership is the right thing for them at this moment in time,” Jain said. “It’s just so stupidly confusing to buy a home today, so we created the first tool where you can now just say, for $3,000 a month, what are the homes that I could buy today for the same amount?” Joining Left Lane in the investment was Wells Fargo, Greystar, Invitation Homes, Camber Creek, Fifth Wall, Smash Capital, Prosus Ventures and Kairos. Previous rounds were more strategic in nature, while this round was the first time Bilt had taken growth institutional capital, Jain said. He notes that the company wasn’t formally looking for new capital. In fact, it had hit profitability earlier this year. However, there was a lot of inbound interest in the company, and bringing on institutional investors like Left Lane Capital positioned Bilt to think more long-term, including a possible initial public offering or other future opportunities, for example, acquisitions. Also, having partners like Wells Fargo double down in this round “was a testament to the strength of the partnership,” as was attracting one of the largest multifamily owners, Greystar, and Invitation Homes, one of the largest single-family rental players, Jain added. Much of the new capital will be kept in reserves for now while the company is focused on aligning interests further with its core commercial partners. “Unlike a lot of the VC rat race businesses where you’re just chasing growth for the sake of chasing growth, we can just keep focusing on the core business and growth and think long-term here,” Jain said. “That’s our goal and a big reason why we raised the capital right now.”

AI chip startup Axelera lands $27M in capital to commercialize its hardware • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in AI chips, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

Several years ago, Fabrizio Del Maffeo and a core team from Imec, a Belgium-based nanotechnology lab, teamed up with Evangelos Eleftheriou and a group of researchers at IBM Zurich Lab to develop a computer chip. Unlike conventional chips, theirs was destined for devices at the edge, particularly those running AI workloads, because Del Maffeo and the rest of the team perceived that most offline, at-the-edge computing hardware was inefficient and expensive. After incubating a startup — Axelera AI — to commercialize their chip technology within the blockchain company Bitfury Group, Del Maffeo and team secured capital from VCs including Imec’s venture arm, Imex.xpand. Innovation Industries led a $27 million Series A in Axelera AI that closed this week with participation from Imec.xpand and the Federal Holding and Investment Company of Belgium. In addition, the Netherland Enterprise Agency awarded Axelera AI a $6.7 million loan commissioned by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy. “One of the main challenges we’re facing is the availability and accessibility of AI to different groups and industries. Some businesses would benefit from AI, but don’t have the knowledge or technical expertise to integrate its benefits into day-to-day operations,” Del Maffeo told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “We’re engineering the AI platform to help overcome this access barrier … [by] delivering a game-changing, user-friendly and scalable technology with superior performance and efficiency at a fraction of the cost of existing players to accelerate computing vision and natural language processing at the edge.” Axelera is working to develop AI acceleration cards and systems for use cases like security, retail and robotics that it plans to sell through partners in the business-to-business edge computing and Internet of Things sectors. The cards and systems pack Axelera’s Thetis Core chip, which employs in-memory computing for AI computations — “in-memory” referring to running calculations in RAM to reduce the latency introduced by storage devices. Axelera is also creating software to manage its chip, which Del Maffeo claims will be “fully integrated” with leading AI frameworks — e.g. PyTorch and TensorFlow — when it’s made available. Axelera’s test chip for accelerating AI and machine learning workloads. Image Credits: Axelera “We’re democratizing AI access,” Del Maffeo said. “When our product launches … we aim to [deliver] a chip that packs the power of an entire AI server.” Axelera has a ways to go before it reaches commercialization, however. The company only last December produced its very first testbench chip, and Alexea doesn’t expect to begin delivering to customers until sometime during the first half of 2023. It’s also not the first company pursuing an in-memory architecture for edge devices. NeuroBlade, which last October raised $83 million in capital, is developing chips that combine both compute and memory into a single hardware block for data processing. MemVerge, GigaSpaces, Hazelcast and H20.ai also offer in-memory solutions for AI, data analytics and machine learning applications. But despite the fact that Axelera is both pre-market and pre-revenue and considering venture debt rounds moving forward, Del Maffeo believes that the company is well-positioned to nab a foothold in the market for custom AI chips. He notes that Jonathan Ballon, the former VP and general manager of Intel’s edge AI and Internet of Things group, is joining Axelera as chairman. And Del Maffeo points out that Axelera continues to hire aggressively, with close to 85 employees based in Europe, remotely and across the company’s offices in Eindhoven and Milan and R&D centers in Leuven and Zurich. Following an expansion in the U.S. and Taiwan within the coming months, Del Maffeo expects Axelera will enter early 2023 with 130 to 140 employees. “While the pandemic led to several shortages in the chip industry, we’ve been fortunate to see significant growth since we launched in 2021,” Del Maffeo said. “While we don’t disclose our burn rate, we can share that we’re well-positioned to raise a new investment round in 2023, significantly larger than our Series A, and we’re already receiving interest, including from more American investors, to help us bring the company to the next stage … We’re carefully building our customer base and partner ecosystem with a curated cohort of companies who have already shown strong interest in our AI platform. Later this year, we’ll also open a unique collaboration opportunity for leading companies to become early adopters of our AI platform.” Assuming Axelera can deliver on its promises, it stands to make some serious cash. The edge AI hardware market is projected to grow from 920 million units in 2021 to 2.08 billion units by 2026 — a lucrative uptick. According to one estimate, the AI chips market alone is poised to be worth $73.49 billion by 2025.

Bolt launches virtual Shopper Assistant for easier access to personalized experiences • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Bolt, Commerce, Virtual shopper assistantNo Comments

Bolt, which is mostly known for its one-click checkout experience, now has a new virtual Shopper Assistant so that retailers can more easily turn guest shoppers into account-holding customers. Company CEO Maju Kuruvilla told ZebethMedia that rather than dealing with pop-ups or other disconnected methods of obtaining a customer’s email address, retailers, like its customer Tyler’s (an athletic and lifestyle apparel retailer), want a fully end-to-end connected experience for shoppers that would enable them to log in friction-free while also providing product recommendations and turning first-time customers into lifetime customers. “In working with a lot of retailers, one of the themes that has been coming lately is how do they connect with their shoppers?” Kuruvilla said. “Today, a lot of those experiences are controlled with a lot of disparate tools, but they are a fairly disconnected experience.” Enter the Shopper Assistant, which integrates natively into a retailer’s site and customers can simply check a box to subscribe to newsletters or utilize first-time shopper coupons at checkout without having to leave the site, log into email to find the code and copy and paste it at checkout. Tyler’s is, of course, one of the first customers to utilize Shopper Assistant, Kuruvilla said. Shortly after putting it in place, the company yielded results, including 16% increase in account registration, 14% increase in the retailer’s logged-in shopper rate and 6% additional increase in checkout conversion. “Tyler’s has been looking for a way to streamline account creation and checkout in order to increase our number of repeat shoppers, and we love that Bolt consistently innovates ahead of the market to help us stay competitive,” said Justin Dermit, director of e-commerce and marketing at Tyler’s, in a written statement. “We’re already seeing success in terms of increasing account registrations and logged-in shopping.” It’s not just for first-time shoppers to a site, though. Returning shoppers get a more streamlined login experience that includes secure sign-in using Bolt’s passwordless login. Once in, shoppers can easily see items like past order history, recently viewed products, product recommendations and reorders. Similar to using Amazon.com, they can also track live orders. On average, Bolt yields around 9.5% of shopping volume on a merchant’s site for its one-click experience, and that goes up to around 30% when merchants start using the platform for about six months, Kuruvilla said. The company started out targeting small- and medium-sized businesses with its checkout technology but is now providing an enterprise-grade product. With that, it has been able to secure new customers like online retailer Fanatics and shoe company Revolve. “We are very excited to continue to be a solution for merchants of our size and scale,” Kuruvilla added. “The enterprise product is helping large merchants gain a lot of great momentum.”

RapidSOS, a big data platform for emergency first responders, raises $75M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Enterprise, SecurityNo Comments

Emergency response services have had a big boost of data thanks to advances in connected technology, with watches that can detect when their wearers are falling down and are experiencing trauma, cars that can pinpoint where their drivers are located, and home systems that can transmit important data about fires when you cannot just a few of the innovations we’ve seen in recent years. Today, a startup called RapidSOS, which helps connect those data points with those who can turn them into action, is announcing some funding as it continues to grow. The startup has raised $75 million from a group of investors led by security and safety specialist VC NightDragon, with participation also from BAM Elevate, Insight Partners, Honeywell, Microsoft’s Venture Fund M12, Axon, Citi via the Citi Impact Fund, Highland Capital Partners, Playground Global, Forte Ventures, C5 Capital, and Avanta Venture. RapidSOS founder and CEO Michael Martin said that it is not disclosing valuation but it has now raised more than $250 million, and will be using this latest capital injection both expand its technology and its business overall. The two go hand-in-hand: RapidSOS works with major device and software makers, from whom it takes the data points that their services create; applies data science to them to make better sense of the information; and translates that into information that emergency response centers — using a wide variety of their own software — can then use to do their work in triaging and calling out response teams. Considering that emergencies are precisely the kinds of critical situations that need to work quickly and efficiently, the landscape of players involved is in reality huge and fragmented. RapidSOS currently counts 90 tech companies (covering more than 500,000 connected devices and buildings), over 50 public safety vendors, and 15,000+ first responder agencies as customers and users of its platform. So far this year, this has worked out to handling 130 million emergencies. All those numbers represent big growth for the company over last year, when RapidSOS announced $85 million in funding. But considering there are more than 14.4 billion connected devices globally (that includes IoT), and that data and information in the name of quick response can extend into even more areas like smart traffic routing, there is a lot of room to grow. The company’s business today is primarily in the U.S., with operations also in the U.K./Europe and South America, and services soon to be turned on in Japan (helped by a strategic partnership with one of its investors, NTT DoComo) and South Africa. The heart of RapidSOS’s business is a platform that provides APIs to technology, insurance and healthcare companies (the list of tech companies includes the likes of Apple, Google, Uber, SiriusXM and more), which can in turn be used both to channel data and direct voice connections between those companies’ users and emergency response centers. These work on the basis of continuous monitoring that might or might not have the proactive input of the users themselves, depending on the situation. So global events like the pandemic or a natural disaster might be front of mind as typical use cases (I first heard of the company when it went viral during a string of natural disasters years ago), but others include health monitoring for vulnerable individuals, vehicle crash detection, home security, fire, enterprise security, gunshot detection, personal safety, and critical event management. In addition to the tech that it has built to make those connections and parse the data that comes out of them, it’s proven to be a middle man in translating some of the newer innovations at the tech end into actions at the lower-tech responders’ end. “Before, 911 wouldn’t even know your name,” said Martin. “Now they have a live feed of the situation. It’s half a billion devices now working in harmony to save you.” That work has included RapidSOS giving some 20,000 hours of training each year for emergency response centers to “understand emergency workflows and identify technology solutions to solve hard challenges such as verification,” in the words of the company. Some of the triangulation that it’s devised in aid of that verification is showing up in the company’s IP: it has filed a patent on the use of social media as a channel for emergency management (RapidSOS has dozens of patent and patent applications overall). Martin said that the plan was not to raise so soon again after last year, but given the tricky funding climate, the decision was made to double down now, with NightDragon’s focus being a special draw. The firm has made many investments in cybersecurity, but also others working in the adjacent spaces of security and safety such as HawkEye 360, Kraus Hamdani Aerospace, Capalla Space, Premise Data and Interos. “When we look at building greater security and safety for people around the world, this requires greater and more accurate response services for emergencies,” said Dave DeWalt, NightDragon’s founder (and the former CEO of FireEye, McAfee and Documentum). “By leveraging technology, we can save lives and help people feel more secure. NightDragon feels RapidSOS is best positioned to deliver on this mission, and we look forward to working closely with the team to accelerate it.” NightDragon’s wider activity, and RapidSOS’s growth, both speak to a pretty salient point in the current market. Those building something that might be considered critical are faring the storm better than some others. “We have invested in now 13 companies out of our NightDragon Growth I fund, which we announced last July,” said DeWalt. “We have always been diligent around valuation and ensuring that we are investing at multiples that reflect the value that our team and platform bring to the table. For that reason, our investment strategy in our current market hasn’t changed much as we are still following those core principles.”

Shutterstock to integrate OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and launch fund for contributor artists • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in AI generated image systems, dall-e 2, OpenAI, Robotics & AI, shutterstockNo Comments

Stock image giant Shutterstock has announced a major push into AI generated imagery today in partnership with OpenAI, expanding on a strategic tie-up the pair announced last year. The partnership between Shutterstock and OpenAI will see the latter’s DALL-E 2 image-generating AI system integrating with Shutterstock content and made available to Shutterstock users worldwide — with the integration slated to launch “in the coming months”. AI generated imagery refers to machine learning technology that’s been trained on visual data so it can respond to text-based prompts with a picture reflecting the description. The quality of the results can vary wildly but these AI systems has been coming on in leaps and bounds lately — causing equal parts awe and anger; with many tech users celebrating the ‘democratization’ of art, while visual artists, whose work may have been appropriated as training fodder for these AIs, can be left feeling ripped off. Unsurprisingly, given these sensitivities, Shutterstock’s push into generative AI is being framed as an “ethical” action plan — which includes the launch of a fund to “compensate artists for their contributions”, as its press release puts it. It also says it will be focusing R&D efforts on “gathering and publishing insights related to AI-generated content” — with the goal of positioning itself “at the forefront of the emerging technology”. So, er, RIP stock photographers? Or will the work of stock photographers’ end up being largely redirected towards capturing training data for honing AI models? (‘AI doesn’t kill jobs it changes them’ is the usual mantra applied to the rise of automation — albeit, oftentimes AI replaces lots of jobs with fewer, more specialist jobs so the ratio of winners to losers isn’t necessarily equal, nor is the wealth typically equally distributed…) Shutterstock says contributors will be “compensated” for the role their content played in the development of this technology — which raises plenty of questions, such as how will contributors be identified and how much will they be paid; how will their contribution be quantified exactly; and how will they know if they’re getting fair payment for their contribution or not? Who will audit these compensation frameworks? And, er, where was the consent from artists to becoming contributors to these AI systems in the first place? “Shutterstock believes that AI-generated content is the cumulative effort of its contributing artists. In an effort to create a new industry standard and unlock new revenue streams for the Company’s artist community, Shutterstock has also created the framework to provide additional compensation for artists whose works have contributed to develop the AI models,” Shutterstock writes — dubbing its framework “ethical and equitable”; and saying it will also “aim” to compensate contributors (“in the form of royalties”) when their intellectual property is used. Commenting in a statement, Paul Hennessy, Shutterstock’s CEO, added: “The mediums to express creativity are constantly evolving and expanding. We recognize that it is our great responsibility to embrace this evolution and to ensure that the generative technology that drives innovation is grounded in ethical practices. We have a long history of integrating AI into every part of our business. This expert-level competency makes Shutterstock the ideal partner to help our creative community navigate this new technology. And we’re committed to developing best practices and experiences to deliver on our purpose, which is to empower the world to create with confidence.” “The data we licensed from Shutterstock was critical to the training of DALL-E,” confirmed Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, in another supporting statement, before adding: “We’re excited for Shutterstock to offer DALL-E images to its customers as one of the first deployments through our API, and we look forward to future collaborations as artificial intelligence becomes an integral part of artists’ creative workflows.” Shutterstock is operating a wait list for getting access to the forthcoming integration of its content with OpenAi’s DALL-E 2 image generator — the list is available on its website.