Geek Trivia: The Ability To Smell What Is Genetically Determined?

The Ability To Smell What Is Genetically Determined?

Asparagus Urine Dog Fur Pregnancy Citrus Oils Think you know the answer?

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Profile of Rodney Brooks, the Australian roboticist who in 1990 co-founded iRobot, which used to make robots for US army and is now popular for Roomba vacuums (Brian Bergstein/MIT Technology Review)

Brian Bergstein / MIT Technology Review:
Profile of Rodney Brooks, the Australian roboticist who in 1990 co-founded iRobot, which used to make robots for US army and is now popular for Roomba vacuums  —  The professor who got robots zipping through the world—and cleaning house—by challenging conventional wisdom in AI.

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Driving Volkswagen’s all-electric ID Buggy concept

The VW electric ID Buggy concept is delightful and bright, stout and smiling. It’s a vehicle fit for the sunshine and sand dunes, or perhaps a less committing slow roll along the beach.

And so my first drive in a prototype of the all-electric buggy — along the coast near Spanish Bay in Monterey, Calif., — was tinged with sadness. After all, the ID Buggy is just a concept. It’s not meant for this world. At least not right now.

There is still a chance that the ID Buggy will make it to production. VW is already in talks with “at least one company” to bring the buggy into production, TechCrunch confirmed.

The global debut of the ID Buggy concept at the 89th Geneva International Motor Show in March was meant to showcase VW’s electric future and demonstrate the versatility of its modular electric drive toolkit chassis, or MEB. The MEB, which was introduced in 2016, is a flexible modular system — really a matrix of common parts — for producing electric vehicles that VW says make it more efficient and cost-effective.

The first vehicles to use this MEB platform will be under the ID brand, although this platform can and will be used for electric vehicles under other VW Group brands such as Skoda and Seat. (The MEB won’t be used by VW brands Audi or Porsche, which are developing their own platform for electric vehicles.)

VW has shown off several ID concepts. Some of these, like the ID Crozz and ID Buzz are going into production. A production version of the Crozz is coming to the U.S. at the end of 2020. Others, like this buggy, are not currently on the production track.

Driving the ID Buggy Drive

The ID Buggy is simple, and that’s exactly what it should be. No clutter or whiz-bang creature comforts. Instead, this leisure vehicle inspired by the 1960s era Meyers Manx has no roof or doors — although a tarpaulin can be stretched between the windscreen frame and the Targa bar as a sun sail or light weather protection. Without doors, the driver climbs in, and with relative ease, depending on one’s general fitness and flexibility.

The ID Buggy towers over its inspiration — the iconic Meyers Manx buggy that became popular among the California beach-and-surf culture of the 1960s.

The ID Buggy was also a quieter, smoother ride than the Meyers Manx. I also spent some time in a classic bright red buggy with a four-speed manual transmission and gas engine that might have been a touch carbureted. While the Manx roared as I shifted into first and peeled away, the electric ID Buggy was silent and smooth as it rolled out of the sandy parking lot.

The main detail inside the ID Buggy is the lack of features and do-dads. The hexagonal steering wheel, shown above, isn’t littered with toggles; there are just a couple of controls on the crossbar. A small integrated stock to the right side of the steering wheel allows the driver to move the vehicle into drive, reverse and park. A digital instrument cluster provides the basic information like speed.

Even the brake and accelerator pedals continue this stripped-down design story. 

The dashboard and the passenger area are just as void of features. This lack of “stuff” is more about function than form, although the matte green and textured grey blue at the bottom does make a visual statement. The ID Buggy is meant to be driven in the elements, rain or shine. And so designers made the interior waterproof.

Under the ID Buggy’s body is where the good stuff lives.

The rear-wheel drive buggy is outfitted with an electric motor that produces 201 horsepower and a maximum torque of 228 pound-feet. It has a 62-kilowatt-hour battery that can travel 155 miles (under the WLTP standard) on a single charge. There is not an EPA estimate for the range. It can accelerate from a standstill to 62 miles per hour in 7.2 seconds.

Unfortunately, this prototype had a kill-the-thrill speed limiter on it, scuttling my plans for a zippy ride along the coast.

Still, the ID Buggy offered a fun and easy, breezy ride. It handled the curves of the roads with ease and its wide body and higher rear end provided a sense of security even while driving amid other much larger passenger cars.

Building the ID Buggy

It’s unclear what company, or companies, are in talks to produce the buggy. VW wouldn’t give names; not even the ocean breeze and cloudless sky or the endless supercar eye candy were enough to loosen the lips of VW employees during Monterey Car Week.

It’s possible that this unnamed company is e.Go Mobile. VW announced in March that e.Go Mobile would be its first external partner to use its MEB electric platform to launch other EVs in addition to Volkswagen’s model range. A dedicated vehicle project is already being planned, VW said at the time.

A VW spokesperson told TechCrunch there’s no decision about which car will be produced under this partnership with e.Go Mobile. It could be the buggy; it could also be some other vehicle.

And then there’s Ford. Earlier this year, the two automakers announced a partnership that includes Ford producing electric cars based on the MEB developed by Volkswagen.

The VW folks on the ground in Monterey did express hope that a third party does build the buggy, or a modified version of it. As one spokesperson later told TechCrunch, “As the drive in Monterey showed, the Buggy is a great ambassador for Volkswagen and for e-mobility. I am sure it would find a lot of customers.”

In the end, the ID Buggy is a sleek cruiser rather than a beach bomber like the 1960s original. It successfully demonstrates the versatility around VW’s electric platform. After all, Volkswagen foresees critical parts in the ID Buggy used to power multiple consumer electric vehicles in the near future. And it’s a fair assumption the ID Buggy’s production cousins will have a bit more gadgets, including silly things like doors.

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Startups Weekly: Diamond-encrusted disruption

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about the flurry of IPO filings. Before that, I noted the differences between raising cash from angels vs. traditional venture capitalists.

Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.

What’s new

Venture capitalists look for companies poised to disrupt markets untouched by innovative technology. Believe it or not, a very small percentage of jewelry shopping is done online, which means there’s a big opportunity — for the right team — to bring jewelry buyers and sellers to the 21st century.

Enter Pietra, a new startup that’s just raised $4 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen (Substack & Hipcamp investor). Robert Downey Jr.’s VC fund Downey Ventures and Will Smith’s fund Dreamers Fund also participated, as did Hollywood manager Scooter Braun, Michael Ovitz and supermodel Joan Smalls.

I spoke to the founding team, which includes Uber alum Ronak Trivedi and Ashley Bryan, who hails from fashion e-commerce site Moda Operandi. The pair bring a healthy mix of technology and fashion expertise to the mix. Trivedi tells TechCrunch he’s drawn on his Uber experience to recruit engineers from top tech companies and to advocate for fast growth. Meanwhile, Bryan has leveraged her fashion industry connections to establish relationships with luxury designers.

 “Fashion is typically really under-resourced in terms of tech,” Bryan tells TechCrunch. “[The fashion industry] is great at the creativity part but it’s tough, especially with jewelry because you really have to put up a lot of capital.”

Pietra’s plan is to create a high-end marketplace for consumers to connect with jewelry designers. To do this, the team has adopted the standard marketplace approach, taking a 30% marketplace fee from sellers, as well as a 7% fee from buyers commissioning jewelry on the platform.

“Whether you do custom jewelry or engagement jewelry or you do jewelry for celebrities like Drake, you can come on Pietra and connect with a global marketplace,” says Trivedi.

The jewelry market is expected to be worth more than $250 billion by 2020, according to McKinsey research. And where there’s a billion-dollar market, there are VCs. 

“Even though gemstones and jewelry have been at the center of art, commerce, and culture since the dawn of human civilization — going from stone jewelry created 40,000 years ago in Africa to the trade routes between East and West to Fifth Avenue in New York to the Instagram feed on your phone — the technology for discovering, designing, and purchasing jewelry online hasn’t evolved much at all,” writes a16z’s Chen, who overlapped with Trivedi during his Uber tenure.

Pietra completed its official launch this week. It has 100 designers on the platform and counting, along with what the founders say is a lengthy waitlist.

In other news

This week I published a long feature on the state of seed investing in the Bay Area. The TL;DR? Mega-funds are increasingly battling seed-stage investors for access to the hottest companies. As a result, seed investors are getting a little more creative about how they source deals. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and everyone wants a stake in The Next Big Thing. Read the story here.

Demo Day

Y Combinator graduated another batch of 200 companies this week. We were there both days, taking notes on each and every company. To make things easy on you, I’ve put together the ultimate YC reading list:

• All 84 startups from Y Combinator’s Demo Day 1
• All 82 startups from Y Combinator’s Demo Day 2
• The 11 best startups from YC’s Demo Day 1 (Extra Crunch membership required.)
• Our 12 favorite startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2 (Extra Crunch membership required.)
• YC’s Michael Seibel on building startups and early-stage deal-making
• YC is doubling down on these investment theses in its latest batch

Here’s a look at some of the profiles we’ve written on the S19 companies:

• Fresh out of YC, Tandem lands millions from a16z
• Stoic is a journaling app with a focus on understanding your feelings
• Narrator wants to become the operating system for data science
• This startup is building a weed breathalyzer for cops 
• Lokal wants to bring local news to 900M Indians in their regional languages
• Holy Grail is using machine learning to build better batteries
• YC’s latest bet is building a cyberpunk anime MMO
• Rent the Backyard wants to build a studio apartment in your yard
• Shiru is developing a protein replacement for food additives
• Lumineye helps first responders identify people through walls
• GradJoy is a fintech startup to help you knock out your student loans
• Traces AI is creating a less invasive alternative to facial recognition tracking

Listen

We recorded two great episodes of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital podcast, this week. The first was with YC CEO Michael Seibel, in which he speaks to trends at the seed stage of investing, changes at the accelerator program, including its move to San Francisco and more. You can listen to that one here. Plus, we had on Unusual Ventures co-founder and partner John Vrionis, who talked to us about direct listings versus IPOs and the future of DoorDash and Airbnb. You can listen to that one here.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast and Spotify.

Tips for B2B startups

Contributors Tyler Elliston and Kevin Barry share advice for B2B companies: “Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of B2B companies apply ineffective demand generation strategies to their startup. If you’re a B2B founder trying to grow your business, this guide is for you. Rule #1: B2B is not B2C. We are often dealing with considered purchases, multiple stakeholders, long decision cycles, and massive LTVs. These unique attributes matter when developing a growth strategy. We’ll share B2B best practices we’ve employed while working with awesome B2B companies like Zenefits, Crunchbase, Segment, OnDeck, Yelp, Kabbage, Farmers Business Network, and many more.” Read the full story here. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

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Graphcore founder Nigel Toon to talk about AI chips at Disrupt Berlin

It’s easy to forget that Silicon Valley starts with ‘silicon’, and that there would be no technology innovation without innovation at the silicon level. And Graphcore is well aware of that as the Bristol-based company is designing its own dedicated AI chipset. That’s why I’m glad to announce that Graphcore co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

Graphcore has managed to attract a ton of attention from day one. Originally founded in 2016, the startup has raised more than $300 million from top investors, such as Sequoia Capital, BMW, Microsoft, Samsung and a ton of others.

The company last raised a $200 million Series D round led by Atomico and Sofina. It values the company at $1.7 billion.

So what is the magic product behind Graphcore? The startup’s flagship product is an Intelligence Processor Unit (IPU) PCIe processor card combined with a software framework. Essentially, it lets you build your own AI applications more efficiently. Those dedidacted AI chips should perform better than repurposed GPUs.

Tobias Jahn, principal at BMW i Ventures, summed it up pretty well in a statement for the Series D round: “The versatility of Graphcore’s IPU – which supports multiple machine learning techniques with high efficiency – is well-suited for a wide variety of applications from intelligent voice assistants to self-driving vehicles. With the flexibility to use the same processor in both a data centre and a vehicle, Graphcore’s IPU also presents the possibility of reduction in development times and complexity.”

It seems crazy that a tiny startup is competing directly with giant chip companies, such as Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, etc. But this isn’t Nigel Toon’s first company. He has been the CEO of Picochip and Icera, two companies that have been sold to Intel and Nvidia.

Graphcore believes that there’s an underserved niche with a lot of potential. And it feels like there’s a race to create the most efficient AI chip. So I can’t wait to hear Nigel Toon’s take on that race.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

---

Graphcore (graphcore.ai) is a new silicon and systems company based in Bristol, UK and Palo Alto, USA that has developed a new type of processor, the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), to accelerate machine learning and AI applications. Since its founding in 2016, Nigel has secured over $300m in funding and support for the company from some of the world’s leading venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital, Foundation Capital and Atomico, from major corporations including BMW, Bosch, Dell, Microsoft and Samsung and from eminent Artificial Intelligence innovators.

Nigel has a background as a technology business leader, entrepreneur and engineer having been CEO at two successful VC-backed processor companies XMOS and Picochip (sold to Nasdaq:MSPD, now Intel), a founder at Icera (sold to Nasdaq: NVDA) and VP/GM at Altera (Nasdaq: ALTR, sold to Intel for $17Bn) where he spent over 13 years and was responsible for establishing and building the European business unit that he grew to over $400m in annual revenues. Nigel was a non-executive director at Imagination Technologies PLC until itsacquisition in 2017 and is the author on 3 patents.

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Court filing: AT&T and FTC reached a settlement agreement in a 2014 mobile data throttling lawsuit, which still needs to be reviewed and voted on by FTC (Nivedita Balu/Reuters)

Nivedita Balu / Reuters:
Court filing: AT&T and FTC reached a settlement agreement in a 2014 mobile data throttling lawsuit, which still needs to be reviewed and voted on by FTC  —  (Reuters) - The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and AT&T Inc (T.N) reached a settlement agreement on a 2014 case that accused …

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A graphic look at a columnist's web activity during a typical workday shows how websites and tech firms track users via tracking scripts, unique IDs, and more (Farhad Manjoo/New York Times)

Farhad Manjoo / New York Times:
A graphic look at a columnist's web activity during a typical workday shows how websites and tech firms track users via tracking scripts, unique IDs, and more  —  Earlier this year, an editor working on The Times's Privacy Project asked me whether I'd be interested in having all my digital activity tracked …

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A look at the changing landscape of seed funding as more big VCs compete there, and pros and cons of raising a seed round led by a big VC vs a seed-focused fund (Kate Clark/TechCrunch)

Kate Clark / TechCrunch:
A look at the changing landscape of seed funding as more big VCs compete there, and pros and cons of raising a seed round led by a big VC vs a seed-focused fund  —  When every fund is a seed fund  —  When Mike Fitzsimmons went out to raise his seed round, he negotiated with all the usual suspects.

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The Only Problem with Cloud Cameras Is the Cloud

How to Enable Google Chrome’s New Extensions Menu

Are too many Chrome extensions cluttering up your toolbar and menu? Google’s working on a solution for that. The new Extensions menu provides a place for all your extensions in one combined toolbar icon. It’s available today behind a flag.

How to Enable Chrome’s New Extensions Menu

This Extensions menu will likely be enabled by default in the future, moving all extensions from Chrome’s standard “3-dot menu” to this new menu. But you don’t have to wait—you can enable it today in the current stable version of the browser, Chrome 76.

To do so, type “chrome://flags” into Chrome’s Omnibox, also known as the address bar, and press Enter. Search for “Extensions toolbar” using the search box here. You can also copy-paste this text into Chrome’s Omnibox and press Enter: chrome://flags/#extensions-toolbar-menu

Click the box to the right of the “Extensions Toolbar Menu” option and select “Enabled.”

You’ll have to relaunch Chrome before your settings take effect. Click the “Relaunch Now” button to restart your web browser. Chrome will reopen all your open tabs, but be sure to save your work first.

How to Use Chrome’s New Extensions Menu

Read the remaining 12 paragraphs

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Why we shouldn’t let AI write for us

Imposters are making as much as $10K in royalties at a time by uploading copyright-infringing content to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music (Noah Yoo/Pitchfork)

Noah Yoo / Pitchfork:
Imposters are making as much as $10K in royalties at a time by uploading copyright-infringing content to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music  —  When songs leak on Spotify and Apple Music, illegal uploads can generate substantial royalty payments—but for whom?

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5 Tools to Understand Facebook’s Privacy Violations and Defeat It

Facebook is waging a war on many fronts today. It is misleading users into thinking their information is more secure than it is. It is using powerful political lobbies to influence government policies. And you can’t be anywhere on the internet without being tracked by Facebook.

If you don’t know how bad the situation is, you need to find out before it’s too late. These websites and apps explain why Facebook is a security and privacy nightmare, and suggest ways to take back control over your data.

1. Stop Using Facebook (Web): Why You Should Quit FB

Digital rights activist Joel Hernández wanted a single place where people could understand, in simple words, what Facebook was doing wrong. Stop Using Facebook is the weekend project he put together.

Go through the series of 15 bullet points. You’ll learn about the different ways in which Facebook is being immoral or unethical. Also, you will realize how badly it deals with the responsibility of being the world’s largest social network. These revelations include how Facebook is manipulating your emotions by showing specific content, to how some of its employees openly say they care more about money than ethics.

Each point is ably backed up by a link to a reputed source like news media, analysts, or fact-checkers. Then, Hernández lists “how” you can quit Facebook, providing alternatives to popular Facebook apps as recommended by Ethical.net.

2. Pretty Zucky (Web): Timeline of Facebook’s Privacy Misdeeds

If you thought that the problems with Facebook are cropping up just now, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook has always been problematic, as you can see with this timeline of its misdeeds with privacy-related matters.

Pretty Zucky tracks news about the social network from the time Zuckerberg left Harvard to work on it full-time. You’ll see that even back in 2006, users found the News Feed creepy, that Wired pointed out private profiles aren’t private, that it faced a class action suit in 2008, and that it first hired lobbyists back in 2009 to push its privacy agenda.

Each item on the timeline is a placard with a headline, a brief description or extract of the relevant information, and a link to the original source. From November 2005 to June 2019, you’ll see the growth of Facebook and how it pushed the boundaries of privacy.

3. Block FB (Chrome): Simple Extension to Block Facebook

There are some excellent websites and apps to find out what Facebook knows about you and block it. Firefox users can grab Mozilla’s own Facebook Container to thwart the social network, but there isn’t a Google Chrome version of it. For now, Block FB is one of the simplest ways for Chrome users to stop Facebook in its tracks.

The extension launches a two-pronged attack on Facebook. First, it blocks common Facebook URLs, such as the homepage, apps, developer pages, and so on. If you try to visit it, it simply won’t work.

Next, it also stops all Facebook tracking through elements like the Share button on a web page. By stopping a Facebook pixel from firing on a third-party’s page, the social network cannot create records of your browsing activity.

Download: Block FB for Chrome (Free)

4. Replace Facebook by SaaSHub (Web): Alternatives for Every Facebook App

It’s great if you’ve decided to end your dependence on Facebook. But once you see Facebook owns several different services that you depend on, you might wonder if it’s possible to quit Facebook. SaaSHub created a handy page of all major Facebook products and its alternatives.

Each app has at least three alternatives, with their salient features. While the four big ones (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram) deserve dedicated articles on them, it’s the smaller Facebook apps that matter.

This isn’t a list of privacy-centric apps alone. You will find apps from other companies which aren’t squeaky clean and even some that are as notorious as Facebook. The idea is to give you options and let you choose.

5. SocialVault (Web): Store and Re-Browse Your Facebook Data

If you delete your Facebook account, all the data you uploaded on it is going to be gone forever. Facebook lets you download all that data to your computer, but it’s likely going to be a large file and you can’t really browse it easily. SocialVault is a quick-fix solution to these problems.

SocialVault is built on Blockstack, the decentralized internet ecosystem, so you’ll need a Blockstack account to use it. Once you download all your Facebook information, follow SocialVault’s instructions to upload it all to the decentralized Gaia server, which is also automatically encrypted so that the app developer can’t see your data, while you get a backup.

Once the upload is finished, you’ll find an easy interface to browse the history of your Facebook data, such as posts, photos, and so on. There are currently some issues with large files and messages, but the developer intends to fix those soon.

Should You Deactivate or Delete Facebook?

These warnings and advice about Facebook make it clear that using the social network is detrimental to anyone who cares about their privacy and digital activity. If you think you can do away with Facebook entirely, it might be better to cut the cord for good.

But there’s a difference between deactivating and deleting Facebook. Deactivating your account still lets Facebook store your personal data on its servers. If you delete your account, that data will be erased after 30 days. But your privacy is still not entirely protected, as the article suggests.

Read the full article: 5 Tools to Understand Facebook’s Privacy Violations and Defeat It

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Misinformation, spread by exploiting our eagerness to share content without thinking, has created a "new world disorder" that we need to safeguard against (Claire Wardle/Scientific American)

Claire Wardle / Scientific American:
Misinformation, spread by exploiting our eagerness to share content without thinking, has created a “new world disorder” that we need to safeguard against  —  Our willingness to share content without thinking is exploited to spread disinformation By Claire Wardle |

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