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Raymond Zhong / New York Times:
How Taiwan's biggest chip maker TSMC is caught in a tough spot, forced to heed the dictates of Trump's tech policy, while trying to keep many customers in China — The island's biggest chip maker has been a coveted partner to both battling giants. But rising nationalism is making it harder to keep the middle ground.
Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE:
Solo.io, a cloud-based API infrastructure startup, raises $23M Series B led by Redpoint Ventures and True Ventures, bringing its total raised to $37M — Cloud-native software company Solo.io Inc. said today it has bagged $23 million in new funding. — The Series B round was led …
Christine Hall / Crunchbase News:
ScriptDrop, an on-demand service that partners with pharmacies to deliver prescription medications to patients, raises $15M Series A led by Ohio Innovation Fund — Medication access startup ScriptDrop closed on an oversubscribed $15 million round of Series A funding led by the Ohio Innovation Fund.
Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
Neuron Mobility, an e-scooter rental service operating in Australia, New Zealand, and SE Asia, adds $12M to its Series A, bringing the round's total to $30.5M — Neuron Mobility, a Singapore-based e-scooter rental startup, announced today that it has added $12 million to its Series A. Led by Square Peg …
Christine Hall / Crunchbase News:
Snappr raises $10M Series A led by Basis Set Ventures to develop its photographer and visual content on-demand marketplace, bringing its total raised to $13M — Snappr raised $10 million in Series A funding to further develop its photographer and visual content marketplace.
Aarian Marshall / Wired:
Library checkouts of ebooks are up 52% YoY since March as libraries pay an average of $40 per copy due to publisher restrictions limiting library lending — Checkouts of digital books from a popular service are up 52 percent since March. Publishers say their easy availability hurts sales.
FinSMEs:
Acin, a data analytics company that helps financial institutions manage their non-financial risk and controls, raises $12M Series A led by Notion Capital — Acin, a London, UK-based risk and control data standards, benchmarking and controls data analytics company, secured $12m in Series A funding.
Check Point Research:
Security researchers describe a way to fingerprint exploit writers' characteristics, which can then be used to identify other exploits written by same writers — In the past months, our Vulnerability and Malware Research teams joined efforts to focus on the exploits inside the malware and specifically …
ProPublica:
A look at Arise, which offers work-from-home call center contractors to companies like Disney, Airbnb, and Apple, and how it strips workers of legal protections — Arise Virtual Solutions, part of the secretive world of work-at-home customer service, helps large corporations shed costs at the expense of workers.
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
In a new filing, Epic accuses Google for causing “irreparable harm”, while Google says “any harm Epic has suffered is not irreparable and is of its own making” — Shortly after midnight Pacific Time, Epic Games and Google filed with the United States District Court …
John McCormick / Wall Street Journal:
AI-based tools are helping California firefighters to monitor fires, evacuate threatened areas, and judiciously steer resources to where they are most needed — Stretched by longer, deadlier fire seasons, officials are using artificial intelligence to more closely track blazes and more judiciously steer resources
Thomas Nicholson / WIRED UK:
YouTubers are using AI software like DeOldify to upscale and “enhance” historic footage into 4K, but historians say the result undermines the footage — YouTubers are using AI to bring history to life. But historians argue the process is nonsense
SPACs, or special purpose acquisition companies, are all the rage right now, and people are emerging from all corners to raise them.
Among the latest entrants — and someone who might be of interest to Silicon Valley watchers — is Emil Michael, a former Uber executive and top lieutenant to former CEO Travis Kalanick. Earlier today, Micheal registered plans with the SEC to raise $250 million in an IPO for a blank-check company that will broadly acquire a company in the tech sector.
IPO Edge had reported earlier today that the SPAC might be in the works.
The filing lists as special advisors Alphabet’s former executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and Betsy Atkins, a founder of Ascend Communications and investor who has served on so many boards that last year she wrote a book about it. Indeed, among her other roles currently, she’s on the boards of Volvo, Wynn Resorts, and Oyo Hotels.
Michael was as senior vice president of field operations at Tellme Networks, then later served as COO of the startup Klout before landing at Uber, where he was a senior vice president for business for nearly four years.
He gained prominence in the role, but also some disrepute after he publicly made comments about hiring opposition researchers to quite journalists critical of the company and following a later report that he had attended an “escort bar” in Seoul with other Uber executives, including Kalanick. Indeed, when he left the company in 2017, Uber declined to say if he left of his own accord.
Despite — or perhaps even because of — his trajectory at Uber, Michael was reportedly vetted at one point for the position of Secretary of Transportation after Donald Trump was elected president. Now, he apparently sees a way to jump back into tech by using a SPAC to take public a still privately held company.
Certainly, it’s happening with a small but growing number of tech companies, including electric vehicle makers, such as the troubled Nikola, and the electric-truck maker Hyliion, which revealed plans in August to go public through a reverse merger into a SPAC. (Nikola is already publicly traded; Hylion’s deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter.)
But many other sectors of the economy are seemingly up for grabs. Just yesterday, Hims, a direct-to-consumer company that sells health products and services targeted at young men and women, revealed that it will go going public by merging a SPAC sponsored by Oaktree Capital Management.
Last month, Opendoor, a home buying and selling platform, separately agreed to go public via a reverse merger with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp II, one of numerous SPACs that have been successfully raised by investor Chamath Palihapitiya.
And in late August, Desktop Metal, a Burlington, Ma.-based maker of 3D metal printing systems, agreed to go public via a reverse merger with a SPAC formed last year by veteran telecom investor Leo Hindery called Trine Acquisition Corp.
Michael has a bit more M&A experience than some who are beginning to take an interest in SPACs. For example, he was involved in selling Uber’s China business in 2016 to rival Didi Chiuxing in exchange for a stake in the company.
According to Kristi Marvin, a former investment banker who now runs the data site SPACInsider, she’s having and hearing about conversations with a much wider circle of people interested in launching SPACs than in past years — and not all of them are necessarily equipped to manage the vehicles.
“You ask, ‘Have you ever acquired a company for $500 million or more? Do you have operating experience in the vertical that you’re targeting? Do you understand the reporting requirements involved?’ Often the answers are no.”
Dan Seifert / The Verge:
Apple Watch SE review: excellent smartwatch at an attractive price offering same performance as the Series 4 but no always-on display and it does not have ECG — The new default Apple Watch is here — Apple's smartwatch lineup has gone from straightforward to surprisingly complex seemingly overnight.
Bloomberg:
The Tokyo Stock Exchange's day-long outage on Thursday was caused by a failover glitch after a critical data storage and distribution device had malfunctioned — - Data storage and distribution device brought down Tokyo market — Stock exchange forced to close trading for the entire day
Brandon Russell / XDA Developers:
Google launches Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative to improve the security of OEM devices and inform users about the security flaws affecting their device — We do more than ever on our smartphones these days, which makes device security incredibly important.
An aspect of video calls that many of us take for granted is the way they can switch between feeds to highlight whoever’s speaking. Great — if speaking is how you communicate. Silent speech like sign language doesn’t trigger those algorithms, unfortunately, but this research from Google might change that.
It’s a real-time sign language detection engine that can tell when someone is signing (as opposed to just moving around) and when they’re done. Of course it’s trivial for humans to tell this sort of thing, but it’s harder for a video call system that’s used to just pushing pixels.
A new paper from Google researchers, presented (virtually, of course) at ECCV, shows how it can be done efficiency and with very little latency. It would defeat the point if the sign language detection worked but it resulted in delayed or degraded video, so their goal was to make sure the model was both lightweight and reliable.
The system first runs the video through a model called PoseNet, which estimates the positions of the body and limbs in each frame. This simplified visual information (essentially a stick figure) is sent to a model trained on pose data from video of people using German Sign Language, and it compares the live image to what it thinks signing looks like.
Image Credits: Google
This simple process already produces 80 percent accuracy in predicting whether a person is signing or not, and with some additional optimizing gets up to 91.5 percent accuracy. Considering how the “active speaker” detection on most calls is only so-so at telling whether a person is talking or coughing, those numbers are pretty respectable.
In order to work without adding some new “a person is signing” signal to existing calls, the system pulls clever a little trick. It uses a virtual audio source to generate a 20 kHz tone, which is outside the range of human hearing, but noticed by computer audio systems. This signal is generated whenever the person is signing, making the speech detection algorithms think that they are speaking out loud.
Right now it’s just a demo, which you can try here, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason why it couldn’t be built right into existing video call systems or even as an app that piggybacks on them. You can read the full paper here.
