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“Confidential Mode” feature in Gmail is misleading because the emails are not end-to-end encrypted and “expired” messages can be retrieved via the sent folder — With Gmail's new design rolled out to more and more users, many have had a chance to try out its new “Confidential Mode.”
Banks are increasingly looking to mobile-only offerings to grab market share among younger, lower-income consumers and to boost their presence in new cities — - U.S. Bancorp, JPMorgan among firms with mobile-only offerings — Lenders are no longer bound by geography, an executive says
Tel Aviv-based AI startup AnyVision, which is working on face, body, and object recognition tech, has closed $28M Series A led by Bosch — As image recognition advances continue to accelerate, startups with a mind towards security applications are seeing some major interest to turn surveillance systems more intelligent.
Android malware authors have been increasingly using “droppers”, which use a multiple-stage infection process, to sneak malicious apps into the Play Store — For the past year, Android malware authors have been increasingly relying on a solid trick for bypassing Google's security scans …
Mikhail Kokorich, the founder of Momentus, a new Y Combinator-backed propulsion technology developer for space flight, hadn’t always dreamed of going to the moon.
A physicist who graduated from Russia’s top-ranked Novosibirsk University, Kokorich was a serial entrepreneur in who grew up in Siberia and made his name and his first fortunes in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The heart of Momentus’ technology is a new propulsion system that uses water as a propellant instead of chemicals.
Image courtesy Momentus
Using water has several benefits, Kokorich says. One, it’s a fuel source that’s abundant in outer space, and it’s ultimately better and more efficient fuel for flight beyond low earth orbit. “If you move something with a chemical booster stage to the moon. Chemical propulsion is good when you need to have a very high thrust,” according to Kokorich. Once a ship gets beyond gravity’s pull, water simply works better, he says.
Some companies are trying to guide micro-satellites with technologies like Phase 4 which use ionized gases like Xenon, but according to Kokorich those are more expensive and slower. “When ionized propulsion is used for geostationary satellites to orbit, it takes months,” says Kokorich, using water can half the time.
“We can carry ten tons to geostationary orbit and it’s much faster,” says Kokorich.
The company has already signed an agreement with ECM Space, a European launch services provider, which will provide the initial trip for the company’s first test of its propulsion system on a micro-satellite — slated for early 2019.
That first product, “Zeal,” has specific impulses of 150 to 180 seconds and power up to 30 watts.
Kokorich started his first business, Dauria, in the mid-90s amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, selling explosives and engineering services to mining companies in Siberia. Kokorich sold that business and went into retail, eventually building a network of stores that sold home goods and housewares across Russia.
That raked in more millions for Kokorich, who then said he diversified into electronics by buying Russia’s BestBuy chain out bankruptcy. But space was never far from his mind, and, eventually he returned to it.
“In 2011 I hit my middle-aged crisis,” Korkorich says. “So I founded the first private Russian aerospace company.”
That company, Dauria Aerospace, was initially feted by the government, garnering the entrepreneur a place in Skolkovo, and its inaugural cohort of space companies. In an announcement of the successes the space program had achieved in 2014 Kokorich co-authored a piece with the Russian cosmonaut Sergey Zhukov, who remains the executive director of the networking and aerospace programs at the multi-billion-dollar boondoggle startup incubator.
Utilis detects water leaks underground using satellite imagery.
A few months later Kokorich would be in the U.S. working to back the first of what’s now a triumvirate of startups focused on space.
“With all the problems with Russia in the Western world, I moved to the U.S.,” says Kokorich. Dauria had quickly raised $30 million for its work, but as this Moscow Times article notes, stiff competition from U.S. firms and the sanctions leveled against Russia in the wake of its invasion and annexation of Crimea were taking their toll on the entrepreneur’s business. “It was a purely political immigration,” Korkorich says. “I don’t have purely business opportunities, because you have to work with the government [and] because the government would not like me.”
For all of his protestations, Kokorich has maintained several economic ties with partners in Russia. It’s through an investment firm called Oden Holdings Ltd. that Kokorich took an investment stake in the Canadian company Helios Wire, which was one of his first forays into space entrepreneurship outside of Russia. That company makes cryptographically secured applications for the transmission and reception of data from internet-enabled devices.
The second space company that the co-founder has built since moving to the U.S. is the satellite company Astra Digital, which processes data from satellites to make that information more accessible.
Now, with Momentus, Kokorich is turning to the problem of propulsion. “When transportation costs decrease, many business models emerge” Kokorich says. And Kokorich sees Momentus’ propulsion technology driving down the costs of traveling further into space — opening up opportunities for new businesses like asteroid mining and lunar transit.
The Momentus team is already thinking well beyond the initial launch. The company’s eyes are on a prize well beyond geostationary orbit.
Indeed, with water as a power source, the company says it will lay the groundwork for future cislunar and interplanetary rides. The company envisions a future where it will power water prospecting and delivery throughout the solar system, solar power stations, in-space manufacturing and space tourism.
Eventbrite, the 12-year-old, San Francisco-based event-planning company, has filed an initial public offering confidentially with the SEC and plans to go public later this year, according to a new report in the WSJ. The company’s lead underwriters are Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase & Co., it says.
The offering must seem a long time in coming for Eventbrite founders Julia Hartz; her husband, Kevin Hartz; and the company’s technical cofounder and CTO, Renaud Visage. Created for individuals wanting to host smaller events and private parties but who faced few few options aside creating Excel spreadsheets — it’s hard to remember, but the ticketing world was largely centered around stadiums and major sporting events — Eventbrite has grown steadily over the years into a global giant . It now powers ticketing for millions of events in more than 180 countries and has rung up more than $10 billion in cumulative tickets sales since its founding. According to Forbes, in 2017 alone, Eventbrite processed more than three million tickets per week to events, including conferences and festivals.
Part of its growth has come through acquisitions. Last year, for example, Eventbrite acquired Ticketfly, ticketing company that focused largely on the live entertainment industry that had originally sold to the streaming music company Pandora in 2015 for a reported $335 million but that Eventbrite was able to nab last year for $200 million.
Eventbrite has also made a broader international push in recent years, acquiring Ticketea, one of Spain’s leading ticketing providers, back in April, and acquiring Amsterdam-based Ticketscript back in January of last year. And those deals followed roughly half a dozen others.San Francisco-based Eventbrite was co-founded in 2006 by Julia Hartz, Kevin Hartz and Renaud Visage. Ms. Hartz serves as its chief executive.
In the meantime, the company — which has raised roughly $330 over the years, including from Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, and DAG Ventures — has long been expected to go public, thanks in large part to its fairly turnkey and (we’d guess) lucrative business model.
Though we won’t see its numbers until closer to its IPO apparently, the company makes money off every transaction. For event organizers charging for ticket sales, Eventbrite’s fees vary by package, but one of its most popular packages collects 1 percent of the ticket price and $0.99 per paid ticket, plus another 3 percent for payment processing per transaction. It also sells a “professional package” wherein it collects 2.5 percent of the ticket price and $1.99 per paid ticket, plus a 3 percent payment processing fee per transaction. Last but not least, Eventbrite sells “premium package” with customized pricing.
Eventbrite is led by Julia Hartz, who took over the position of CEO in 2016, roughly six months after her husband, Kevin Hartz, stepped down from his chief executive duties owing to a “non-life-threatening medical condition.” Until that point, Hartz had primarily been tasked with overseeing marketing, customer support, sales, and human resources.
Both appeared earlier this month at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, an event that attracts many of the wealthiest and most powerful people in U.S. media, technology, and sports, and whose attendees are often on the cusp of taking their companies public — if they haven’t already.
When Eventbrite does complete its IPO, Hartz will join a tiny but growing list of female founders to take their tech companies public.
Last October, when founder and CEO Katrina Lake took public her mail-ordering clothing service Stitch Fix , she became the first woman to take an internet company public in all of 2017.
When Shonda Rhimes left ABC last August for Netflix, both she and the studio kept a tight lid on their plans. We could only imagine where the twists and turns that her future stories would take us. Well, now we know.
This week, Rhimes’s production company Shondaland and Netflix announced seven projects that she will make for the streaming platform with her production partner Betsy Beers who also made the move to Netflix. The projects tell stories of women of color, talented kids, important and routinely overlooked American history, fancy English relationships and pre-2017 White House doings.
Ellen Pao’s memoir Reset, published last fall, details her life and career, which includes the gender discrimination lawsuit she brought against her former employer Kleiner Perkins in 2015. Even though she lost the suit, Pao felt the battle was worth it, saying at the time: “If I’ve helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it.” She continues to work for inclusion in tech as founder and CEO of Project Include, an organization dedicated to making careers in tech accessible to everyone.
Julia Quinn’s best-selling Bridgerton series of novels will jump off the page and onto our screens, because we all need to be flies on the proverbial walls of “the wealthy, sexual, painful, funny and sometimes lonely lives in London’s high society marriage mart.” Mmhmm. Scandal writer Chris Van Dusen will be responsible for the adaptation.
“The Warmth of Other Suns,” published in 2010 by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson, tells the story of the African-American migration out of the South between 1916-1970. According to her website, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people and uncovered archival works over 15 years in order to bring these stories to light. Actor, solo performer, playwright and professor Anna Deavere Smith is signed on to adapt the piece for a viewing audience.
And for some more history, “Pico & Sepulveda” is set in the 1840s when California wasn’t quite California yet. According to Netflix, it will track “the end of an idyllic ear there as American forces threaten brutality and war at the border to claim the breathtaking land for its own.”
“The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House” is a non-fiction tale told by Kate Andersen Brower that details the relationship between White House staffers and First Families in an upstairs/downstairs kind of way. The book was published in the spring of 2016 so, well, you know.
Debbie Allen’s Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, an award-winning reimagining of the Tchaikovsky ballet, will get the documentary treatment by Shondaland and Netflix, behind-the-scenes style.
“Sunshine Scouts” will be a half-hour dark comedy that follows a group of teenage girls who survived an apocalyptic-level disaster while they were at sleep-away camp.
These seven projects join the previously announced adaptation of a New York Magazine article about how Anna Delvey duped people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by posing as a German heiress. Rhimes is set to write this one.
If you want to hear Rhimes talk about her move to Netflix, you’re in luck, because she was the first guest of TechCrunch Mixtape (formerly CTRL+T), my podcast with senior reporter Megan Rose Dickey. Check it out below.
As Google translates nonsensical messages into garbled religious prophecies, researchers blame AI algorithm trained on religious texts as some users see demons — Google Translate is moonlighting as a deranged oracle—and experts say it's likely because of the spooky nature of neural networks.
Today at Comic-Con, Warner Bros. gave fans a first peek at the first DC Comics films post-Justice League.
Warner Bros. and DC had a bumpy 2017. There was the astonishing critical and commercial success of Wonder Woman, followed by the box office disappointment of Justice League — leading to an executive shakeup and a general rethinking of its movie strategy.
Will Aquaman, which stars Jason Momoa as the titular superhero and is due out on December 21, turn things around? Director James Wan (who’s best-known for horror titles like Saw and The Conjuring but also directed Furious 7) told the Comic-Con audience that his goal is to create a movie that “plays more like a science-fiction fantasy film than a traditional super hero movie.”
Wan previously said there’s been a long wait for the trailer because he wanted to ensure the visual effects were ready — and after watching this footage, you can see what he was talking about.
The trailer does spend some time establishing the relationships between Aquaman, his love interest Mera (Amber Heard), his mother Atlanna (Nicole Kidman) and his half-brother/rival Orm (Patrick Wilson). My real takeaway, though, is that this is going to be a spectacular, effects-filled movie with plenty of undersea action.
Then there’s Shazam!, which looks like it could be DC’s first outright comedy.
With the film’s release date (April 5, 2019) still nearly a year away, this trailer seems to focus on a few key scenes setting up the premise, with young Billy Batson (Asher Angel) gifted by a mysterious stranger with the ability to turn into a big red superhero (Zachary Levi) by just calling out the word “Shazam!” (The character was originally known as Captain Marvel, but I assume that they’ll stick with the Shazam name in the movie.)
Like Wan, director David F. Sandberg has previously helmed horror movies (specifically Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation), but the trailer makes it clear that he’s taking a light-hearted approach to the material. Despite his appearance as an invulnerable superhero, this version of Shazam is still a goofy kid.
And if you were hoping for a glimpse at Wonder Woman 1984, it sounds like the filmmakers did show off footage at Comic-Con, but they don’t have a polished trailer yet to put online.
Director Patty Jenkins said she looks at the movie as less of a sequel and more a standalone story with the same character: “We can make a whole new movie that’s as strong and unique as the first. It’s not more of anything; it’s its own thing.”
With EU Android fine, some see futile effort to curb Google's dominance; others see first steps to check Google's data hoovering and guaranteed ad distribution — The tightly knit package of services Google has assembled around its Android smartphone software has supported one of the tech world's most profitable businesses.
Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company, Blue Origin, performed its most critical test to date, Prime Day had some ups and downs but ultimately broke records and major tech companies are uniting to help you move data across apps.
Here’s your weekly roundup of the top stories from the tech world:
1. Blue Origin successfully lands both booster and crew capsule after test launch
Blue Origin crossed a major milestone on Wednesday as it successfully executed a live separation test. This sent the rocket’s crew capsule higher than it’s ever gone before, while the rocket’s booster coasted back down to earth unscathed. The critical achievement marks a big win for Jeff Bezos’ company and the prospect of commercial space flights.
2. What Amazon lost (and made) on Prime Day
Widespread glitches on Amazon’s site during the first two hours of Prime Day are estimated to have cost the e-commerce giant $1.2 million per minute. The total loss is difficult to nail down, in part because the exact span of the outage varied; however, multiple reports put the loss in the $90 million range. And yet, these setbacks didn’t dampen the day. Prime Day broke a number of records, making it the biggest sales day in Amazon history, beating out Cyber Monday, Black Friday and the previous Prime Day in 2017.
3. Google gets slapped with $5 billion EU fine for Android antitrust abuse
Google has been fined a record-breaking €4.34 billion (~$5 billion) by European antitrust regulators for abusing the dominance of its Android mobile operating system. The European Commission is arguing the tech giant dominates markets for general internet search services, licensable smart mobile operating systems and app stores for the Android mobile operating system. Google responded stating it will appeal the fine and argued Android brings more choice to the market, not less.
4. Living with the new 15-inch MacBook Pro
After spending some quality time with the latest MacBook Pro, it’s obvious Apple is tipping its cap to its core user base of creative professionals. The 2018 model is the most substantial upgrade (at least regarding performance) since the introduction of quad-core processors in the 2011 MacBook Pro.
Emerging venture capital firms in smaller American cities are increasingly attracting larger funding as investors see opportunities for returns beyond the coasts. But the Midwestern investment scene isn’t just defined by Valley transplants, and many success stories are home-grown.
6.Facebook, Google and more unite to let you transfer data between apps
The Data Transfer Project is a new team-up between tech giants to let you move your content, contacts and more across apps. Founded by Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft, the DTP today revealed its plans for an open source data portability platform any online service can join. Creating an industry standard for data portability could force companies to compete on utility instead of being protected by data lock-in that traps users because it’s tough to switch services.
7. Microsoft caps off a fine fiscal year seemingly without any major missteps in its last quarter
In the past year, Microsoft’s stock has gone up more than 40 percent. In the past two years, it’s nearly doubled. In addition, Microsoft passed $100 billion in revenue for a fiscal year. That Microsoft is even in the discussion of being one of the companies chasing a $1 trillion market cap is likely something we wouldn’t have been talking about just three or four years ago.
