Specializing in Computer Repair, Networking, Internet Solutions, Web Designing, Hybrid App Designing and Windows Operating systems.
David Pierce / Protocol:
A profile of Discord, which lies at the center of the gaming world with 100M+ MAUs, as it pushes to turn into a communication tool for everyone, not just gamers — Most longtime Discord users have a similar origin story. They liked playing video games, and liked playing with their friends …
Christine Hall / Crunchbase News:
Cloud video surveillance company Eagle Eye Networks raises $40M Series E from Accel to invest in new AI projects such as license plate recognition — Eagle Eye Networks, a cloud video surveillance company, raised $40 million in Series E funding from Accel to advance its platform.
Nick Greenhalgh / Denver Business Journal:
StackHawk, whose tech helps developers find application security vulnerabilities before they get into production, raises $10M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures — With a successful beta at its back and paying customers onboard, Denver application security startup StackHawk announced Tuesday …
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Wise, a fintech startup that partners with other companies so that they can offer business bank accounts to their own customers, raises $12M Series A — Fintech startup Wise has raised a $12 million Series A round. The company offers business bank accounts with an interesting go-to-market strategy.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Skan, which helps enterprises automate repetitive business processes by combining data engineering with computer vision, raises $14M Series A — Skan.ai, an AI-enabled process discovery and operational intelligence platform, today closed $14 million in funding.
FinSMEs:
DriveWealth raises $56.7M Series C for its digital brokerage services that help broker-dealers and its global online partners access the US securities market — DriveWealth, LLC, a Chatam, N.J.-based global digital trading technology company, raised $56.7m in Series C funding.
Mark Graham / Internet Archive Blogs:
The Internet Archive starts adding banners on some Wayback Machine pages with links that provide contextual information from fact-checking organizations — Fact checking organizations and origin websites sometimes have information about pages archived in the Wayback Machine.
Nandita Mathur / Livemint:
Forty-six top US companies including Apple, Google, and Twitter have filed an amicus brief supporting a legal challenge to block Trump admin's H-1B visa changes — - The move comes in the wake of the US administration's proposal to scrap the computerized lottery system to grant H-1B work visas …
Annie Musgrove / Tech.eu:
Odaseva, a France-based data protection services provider for large-scale Salesforce customers, raises $25M Series B led by Eight Roads Ventures — French SaaS company Odaseva has raised $25 million in Series B funding to continue growing its data governance platform for enterprise.
Elliott Ackerman / Wired:
Profile of Shield AI, which raised money from a16z and others to develop autonomous military drones that scan buildings to help soldiers clear them — On the battlefield, any doorway can be a death trap. A special ops vet, and his businessman brother, have built an AI to solve that problem.
New York Times:
Misinformation on social media, alongside Trump's lies, is overwhelming local election officials across the US as they shoot down rumors via phone and email — From Philadelphia to Sonoma County, Calif., election officials said they were working marathon hours to fight a flood of falsehoods.
Last month’s report that there may be phosphine gas in the Venusian clouds came with a stunning implication: extraterrestrial life. On Earth, phosphine is a chemical produced by some kinds of bacteria that live in oxygen-poor conditions. Its presence on Venus, announced by a team led by Cardiff University’s Jane Greaves, raised the possibility that there could be life in what has long been thought one of the most inhospitable environments in the solar system: a planet that’s covered in thick clouds of sulfuric acid, with an atmosphere that’s 96% carbon dioxide, and where the pressure at the surface is 100 times greater than Earth’s. Oh, and it experiences temperatures up to 471 °C—well above the melting point of lead.
Since the initial report, though, doubt about the finding has crept in. Three different preprint papers (none of which have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, although one has been accepted) were unable to find the same evidence of phosphine on Venus.
On the surface, the new reports might seem to suggest the team behind the initial findings messed up badly, or is suffering a backlash from overhyping the results. But it was a solid study. The original detections were announced after Greaves and her team found phosphine signals in infrared-to-microwave readings of the Venusian atmosphere made with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. “The authors were super clear. They did a fantastic job of saying that they did not find life—that they found something associated with life on Earth that they cannot explain on Venus,” says Stephanie Olson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University who was not involved with any of these studies. The team went so far as to publish a paper in the journal Astrobiology investigating—and ruling out—known natural causes for phosphine in Venus.
The truth is, the story of Venus’s putative phosphine is not a simple case of a sensational finding being shot down upon further scrutiny. In fact, the rush of follow-up research is welcomed; science is doing its thing. This is especially true when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial life—after all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
“I think this is a perfect example of how the scientific process works,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University, who also wasn’t involved in the studies. “It certainly makes sense that there would be other studies that would try and get at this question.”
The first preprint paper to cast doubt on the original was actually written in part by Greaves herself. After failing to secure more time on telescopes to verify her team’s initial finding—the pandemic has made telescope access difficult and in some cases impossible—she and her colleagues turned to an archive of infrared observations made in 2015 and couldn’t find any sign of phosphine.
This is frustrating, of course, but as Byrne says, “the absence of proof of a given detection is not proof of absence. It just might mean the problem is more complex than we’d like.” Maybe phosphine doesn’t actually exist on Venus, or maybe it varies over time. Or perhaps the archival observations Greaves analyzed didn’t probe deeply enough into the clouds.
Replicability is actually a common problem when it comes to these kinds of investigations. Our current characterization of methane on Mars, for example, is under intense debate: NASA’s Curiosity rover has a has a history of detecting enormous spikes of methane on the planet, while ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter, designed to study the gas on Mars with far more sensitive instruments than Curiosity, has found bupkis. The same goes for the detection of water plumes on Europa by the Hubble Space Telescope: subsequent investigations have struggled to find them.
Another problem that plagues the phosphine findings is data processing. The two other preprints were written by teams that tried to reprocess the original data used by Greaves and her team, suspecting that the original analysis was flawed. It’s often a challenge to pull signals out of the massive amounts of noise found in telescopic data. Researchers in the original study used a technique called polynomial fitting, which is supposed to remove background noise around the spectral region where phosphine signals should pop up. But as National Geographic reports, the way they went about it might actually have introduced false phosphine signals.
Both of these new preprints reprocessed the data from scratch, without using Greaves’s method. One focused solely on the ALMA data and failed to find phosphine. The other paper looked at both the ALMA and JCMT data. Researchers found no phosphine signal in the ALMA data and detected a signal in the JCMT set that might be explained by sulfur dioxide gas.
Moreover, the ALMA observatory recently found an error in its calibration system used to collect the data Greaves and her team worked with. That doesn’t mean they had things wrong in the first place. “Even if the ALMA data are found to be erroneous, there’s still an explanation required for whether or not the [JCMT] data are correct,” says Byrne. “I don’t think this is all that clear cut in saying ‘Yes, there’s phosphine’ or ‘No, there is not.’”
Nor is it clear cut whose methodology is more “correct.” “There’s no official recipe or set of rules for how this is supposed to be done in studying biosignatures,” says Olson. Indeed, many advances in science come from the fact that different groups approach problems differently, revealing insights and clues that others didn’t notice.
The key is transparency. “Whatever method one uses, as long as it’s well documented and accessible—which is what we’ve seen with the Greaves paper and the follow-up preprint investigations—as long as it’s reproducible, that’s what matters,” says Byrne. Disagreements are fine, and as long as they can be discussed openly, that’s good science.
Should researchers even reach a consensus that phosphine does exist on Venus, that doesn’t mean there’s life on the planet. “Phosphine is definitely a potential biosignature, but it’s not only a biosignature,” says Byrne. Phosphine is produced on Earth by bacteria living in sewage, swamps, marshlands, rice fields, and animal intestines—but we know it’s also produced in some industrial applications, and on gaseous planets like Saturn and Jupiter where it’s thought life can’t survive. As for what’s going on in the case of Venus, we don’t know enough about the planet to totally rule out some strange chemistry we’ve never seen before.
The same applies to other potential biosignatures we’ve discovered in the solar system. “I can’t think of a single compound that we can easily measure that would only definitively indicate life,” says Byrne. Methane is produced by many kinds of bacteria on Earth (including those living in cattle), but it’s also spewed by volcanoes. Breathable oxygen (in the form of O2) was created by Earth’s first cyanobacteria, but strange reactions involving sunlight and a mineral called titania also produce it on other worlds.
When it comes to Venus, “this will be a debate that we’ll be having for years to come,” says Olson. And that’s because no single clue can be concrete proof of life unless we send a mission to make direct observations.
“There are things we can do in the meantime,” says Byrne. “But until we go there, it’s basically academic. The only way to answer these questions is to go there.”
Rest of World:
Filipino activists and journalists want Facebook to tackle deadly disinformation coming from the government, resulting in enemies being “red-tagged” and killed — Targeted by government misinformation, activists are asking Facebook to do more to tackle a deadly epidemic of “red-tagging.”
For years — decades, even — there was little question about whether you could become a venture capitalist if you weren’t comfortable financially. You couldn’t. The people and institutions that invest in venture funds want to know that fund managers have their own “skin in the game,” so they’ve long required a sizable check from the investor’s own pocket before jumping aboard. Think 2% to 3% of the fund’s total assets, which often equates to millions of dollars.
In fact, five years ago, I wrote that the real obstacle to becoming a venture capitalist has less to do with gender than with financial inequality. I focused then on women, who are paid less (especially Black and Hispanic women), and who possess less wealth. But the same is true of anyone of lesser means.
LPs: The ≧1% of a fund capital commitment you expect from GPs makes it hard for POCs to raise funds.
Consider that “for a $20M fund, a 2% commitment with 2 GPs is still a $200K commitment for each partner.” This is out of reach for many of us. https://t.co/bguXpa3CiY
— lolitataub (@lolitataub) October 29, 2020
Thankfully, things are changing, with more ways to help aspiring VCs raise that initial capital commitment. None of these approaches can guarantee success in raising a fund, but they’re paths that other VCs have effectively used in the past when starting out.
1.) Find investors, i.e. limited partners, who are willing to take less than 3% and maybe even less than 1% of the overall fund size being targeted. You’ll likely find fewer investors as that “commit” shrinks. But for example Joanna Rupp, who runs the $1.1 billion private equity portfolio for the University of Chicago’s endowment, suggests that both she and other managers she knows are willing to be flexible based on the “specific situation of the GP.”
Says Rupp, “I think there are industry ‘norms,’ but we haven’t required a [general partner] commitment from younger GPs when we have felt that they don’t have the financial means.”
Bob Raynard, founder of the fund administration firm Standish Management, echoes the sentiment, saying that a smaller general partner commitment in exchange for special investor economics is also fairly common. “You might see a reduced management fee for the LP for helping them or reduced carry or both, and that has been done for years.”
2.) Explore management fee offsets, which investors in venture funds often determine to be reasonable. These aren’t uncommon, says Michael Kim of Cendana Capital, a firm that has stakes in dozens of seed stage funds, because they also offer tax advantages (though the IRS has talked about doing away with these).
How do these work? Say your “commit” was $1 million over 10 years (the standard life of a fund). Instead of trying to come up with $1 million that you presumably don’t have, you can offset up to 80% of that, putting in $200,000 instead but reducing your management fees by that same amount over time so that it’s a wash and you’re still getting credit for the entire $1 million. You’re basically converting fee income into the investment you’re supposed to make.
3.) Use your existing portfolio companies as collateral. Kim had at least two highly regarded managers launch a fund not with a “commit” but rather by bringing to the table ownership stakes in startups they’d funded as angel investors.
In both of these cases, it was a great deal for Kim, who says the companies were quickly marked up. For the fund managers’ part, it meant not having to put more of their own money into the funds.
4.) Make a deal with wealthier friends if you can. When Kim launched his fund of funds to invest in venture managers after working for years as a VC himself, he raised $1 million in working capital from six friends to get it off the ground. The money gave Kim, who had a mortgage at the time and young children, enough runway for two years. Obviously, your friends have to be willing to gamble on you, but sweeteners certainly help, too. In Kim’s case, he gave his friends a percentage of Cendana’s economics in perpetuity.
5.) Get a bank loan. Rupp said she would be uncomfortable if a GP funded his or her commit through a bank loan for several reasons. There’s no guarantee a fund manager will make money from a fund, a loan adds risk on top of risk, and should a manager need liquidity related to that loan, he or she might sell a strongly performing position too early.
That said, loans aren’t uncommon, says Raynard. He says banks with venture capital relationships like Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic are typically happy to lend a fund manager a line of credit to help him or her make capital calls, though he says it does depend on who else is involved with the fund. “As long as it’s a diverse group of LPs,” the banks are comfortable moving forward in exchange for winning over a new fund’s business, he suggests.
6.) Consider the merits of so-called front loading. This is a technique with which “more creative LPs can sometimes get comfortable,” says Kim. It’s also how investor Chris Sacca, now a billionaire, got started when he first turned to fund management. How does it work? Some beginning managers blend their annual management fee of 2.5% of assets under management and pay themselves a higher percentage — say 5% for each of its first three years — until by the end of the fund’s life, the manager is receiving no management fee at all.
That could mean no income if you aren’t yet seeing profits from your investments. But presumably — especially given pacing in recent years — you, the general partner, have raised another fund by the time that happens so have resources coming in from a second fund.
These are just a few of the ways to get started. There are other paths to take, too, notes Lo Toney of Plexo Capital — which, like Cendana Capital — has stakes in many venture funds. One of these is to use a self-directed IRA to finance that GP commit. Another is to sell a portion of the management company or sell a greater percentage of your carry and use those proceeds to pay your commit. (VCs Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures and Eva Ho of Fika Ventures avoided that path and suggested that first-time managers do the same if they can.)
Either way, suggests Toney, a former partner with Alphabet’s venture arm, GV, it’s important to keep in mind that there’s no one right way to raise a fund and that it’s no disadvantage in using these strategies to raise a fund. Said Toney via email this week: “I have not seen any data on the front end of a VC’s career that wealth indicates future success.”
Joseph Marks / Washington Post:
A look at CISA's wide-ranging operation to secure the 2020 election against hacking, which includes the launch of a 24/7 virtual war room on Election Day — A 24/7 war room will operate from Election Day until local officials are confident in the results. It shows just how far DHS's cybersecurity agency has come since 2016.
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
CISA, FBI say an Iran-linked APT targeted unsecured state election websites to harvest US voter info used to send threatening emails to some Democratic voters — DHS CISA and the FBI today shared more info on how an Iranian state-sponsored hacking group was able to harvest voter registration info …
Jeremy Horwitz / VentureBeat:
Hands-on with the Dash Cart at an Amazon Fresh store: cart sensors worked fine, but a two-bag limit, bag fill limit, and real-world hassles hinder experience — There were no lines outside Irvine, California's new Amazon Fresh grocery store on its opening day last week …
Mikey Campbell / AppleInsider:
Apple rejects an app designed to verify a person's ballot status in PA, says the app violates its guideline which forbids compiling user data without consent — Apple on Friday rejected an app designed to ensure ballots are being correctly counted in Pennsylvania, saying the software violates App Store privacy guidelines.
Reuters:
Sources: Italy's biggest payments company Nexi is leading negotiations to buy its Nordic rival Nets in an all-stock deal worth around $10B — LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Italian payments technology firm Nexi NEXII.MI is leading negotiations to buy Nordic rival Nets in an all-stock deal worth …
