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Take a look at your Twitter timeline 10 years ago

25 May 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

❤ How innocent we were.

⏳ Twitter advanced search lets you go back in time! Here’s your current feed, but 10 years ago (works even if you weren’t on Twitter 10 years ago!):

Here’s a fun thing for a Friday: go back and see what your Twitter timeline looked like 10 years ago.

Twitter has pretty powerful search settings, but Andy Baio — of Kickstarter fame and more — did the heavy-lifting for us all by sharing a link that let’s you look at your timeline exactly a decade ago, assuming you followed the same people.

Try it here. (The search will work even if you didn’t have an account 10 years ago.)

Want to see what your Twitter timeline would’ve looked like 10 years ago today, if you followed all the same people you do now? https://t.co/41a6iQcYhc

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) May 24, 2018

The mix is eerily quiet, with far fewer retweets and likes than the current time — Twitter hadn’t yet introduced the ‘automatic’ retweet, people were still doing it manually — and no nested replies or link previews, while there are ghosts of once-major social media services, such as TwitPic, TinyURL.

Certainly, it’s a fun way to see how Twitter has morphed, both in terms of features and the actual dialogue of users. The latter, in my experience at least, seems more driven by status update-style tweets …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Disrupt Berlin 2-for-1 passes go live next week: Sign up today

24 May 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Leslie Hitchcock

Achtung, meine Damen und Herren! Dust off your German, hop on a plane, a train or the Autobahn and join us, along with thousands of tech founders, makers, innovators, investors and early-stage startups, at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. Better yet, join us at our most affordable price. On May 30 at 12pm CEST / 6am EDT we’re offering a limited number of two Innovator passes for just €695. Sign up for our newsletter, and we’ll send you an email letting you know when they are available for purchase. You’ll want to act quick as we are only releasing a limited quantity of these passes.

Disrupt Berlin features two program-packed days focused on the latest technology innovations, rising-star startups and world-class networking opportunities. As always, you’ll get to hear a phenomenal group of European and international speakers talking about the critical issues facing technology, venture capital strategies and what it takes to build a successful startup. We’re still finalizing the list, so if you have someone you’d like to hear speak, head on over to our Disrupt Berlin speaker nomination page.

Watch a curated cohort of pre-Series A companies compete for the $50,000 grand prize in the <a target=_blank …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Luminaries from across Israel’s tech ecosystem are joining us onstage in Tel Aviv

23 May 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jonathan Shieber

Tickets are going fast for our inaugural Tel Aviv event and no one should miss out on the opportunity to see some the nation’s rising stars discuss the challenges and opportunities ahead for mobility technologies.

Hear from some of the architects and creators of Israel’s latest technology marvels like Orit Nissan Messing, the co-founder and Chief Architect of Iguazio. And government officials like Anat Lea Bonshtien, the chairman and director of the Fuel Choices and Smart Mobility Initiative in the Prime Minister’s Office, who are driving mobility technologies forward.

Fiona Darmon, the Chief Operating Officer of one of Israel’s pre-eminent venture funds, JVP, will join us alongside Natalie Refuah, a partner with the growth capital investment firm Viola Growth, to discuss how businesses can scale and make the right moves as they navigate their inevitable international expansion.

They’re all part of a stellar line up that we’ve put together to take the pulse of one of the hottest trends in tech and one that’s increasingly reliant on Israeli technology companies to fulfill the promise of its potential.

These phenomenal speakers will be sharing insights that no one would want to miss, and they’ll be exclusively …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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U.S. and China reportedly working on a deal to save ZTE

22 May 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

The United States and China are said to be working on a deal that would keep ZTE from going out of business. According to the Wall Street Journal, the two countries have agreed on a “broad outline” of a deal to settle a trade dispute sparked when the Commerce Department banned American companies from selling to ZTE for seven years after it violated sanctions against Iran and North Korea.

If the deal goes through, the U.S. would lift the ban. In return, ZTE would have to make major leadership changes and also potentially face heavy fines. The deal would enable its business to survive, however, since many of its most important suppliers, including Qualcomm, are American and the ban has the potential to cause irreversible damage to its business. ZTE is also the fourth-largest vendor of mobile phones in the U.S.

As part of the deal, China reportedly offered to remove tariffs that impact billions of dollars in U.S. farm products, though one of the WSJ’s sources said “the White House was meticulous in affirming that the case is a law enforcement matter and not a bargaining chip in negotiations.”

Talk of the deal isn’t a complete …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Microsoft acquires conversational AI startup Semantic Machines to help bots sound more lifelike

21 May 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

Microsoft announced today that it has acquired Semantic Machines, a Berkeley-based startup that wants to solve one of the biggest challenges in conversational AI: making chatbots sound more human and less like, well, bots.

In a blog post, Microsoft AI & Research chief technology officer David Ku wrote that “with the acquisition of Semantic Machines, we will establish a conversational AI center of excellence in Berkeley to push forward the boundaries of what is possible in language interfaces.”

According to Crunchbase, Semantic Machines was founded in 2014 and raised about $20.9 million in funding from investors including General Catalyst and Bain Capital Ventures.

In a 2016 profile, co-founder and chief scientist Dan Klein told TechCrunch that “today’s dialog technology is mostly orthogonal. You want a conversational system to be contextual so when you interpret a sentence things don’t stand in isolation.” By focusing on memory, Semantic Machines’ AI can produce conversations that not only answer or predict questions more accurately, but also flow naturally.

Instead of building its own consumer products, Semantic Machines focused on enterprise customers. This means it will fit in well with Microsoft’s conversational AI-based products, including Microsoft …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Shared housing startups are taking off

19 May 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Joanna Glasner

When young adults leave the parental nest, they often follow a predictable pattern. First, move in with roommates. Then graduate to a single or couple’s pad. After that comes the big purchase of a single-family home. A lawnmower might be next.

Looking at the new home construction industry, one would have good reason to presume those norms were holding steady. About two-thirds of new homes being built in the U.S. this year are single-family dwellings, complete with tidy yards and plentiful parking.

In startup-land, however, the presumptions about where housing demand is going looks a bit different. Home sharing is on the rise, along with more temporary lease options, high-touch service and smaller spaces in sought-after urban locations.

Seeking roommates and venture capital

A Crunchbase News analysis of residential-focused real estate startups uncovered a raft of companies with a shared and temporary housing focus that have raised funding in the past year or so.

This isn’t a U.S.-specific phenomenon. Funded shared and short-term housing startups are cropping up across the globe, from China to Europe to Southeast Asia. For this article, however, we’ll focus on U.S. startups. In the chart below, we feature several that have raised recent rounds.

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NASA’s newest planet-hunting satellite takes a stellar first test image

18 May 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Devin Coldewey

TESS, the satellite launched by NASA last month that will search thousands of stars for Earth-like exoplanets, has just sent back its first test image. It’s just a quick one, not “science-quality,” but it does give you an idea of the scale of the mission: the area TESS will eventually document is 400 times the area covered by this shot.

What you see above is the star field around the constellation Centaurus; this 2-second exposure captured more than 200,000 stars. That’s just in one image from one of the four cameras on board; the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will employ all four during its mission, watching individual regions of space for 27 days straight over the course of two orbits.

Here’s a crop from the center:

Repeated high-resolution imagery of these star fields will let the team on the ground watch for any that dim briefly, indicating that a planet may be passing in between the star and our solar system. This will let it watch far, far more stars than the otherwise similar Kepler mission, which even by looking at only dim stars with a relatively narrow field of view, found evidence of thousands of exoplanets for scientists to …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Ucare.ai is using AI to make healthcare more efficient in Southeast Asia

18 May 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

AI is being applied across the board in many industries worldwide, and its scope of influence is only likely to continue to expand as Kaifu Lee, a noted AI expert who was formerly head of Google China, recently told TechCrunch.

The main battle appears to be between companies in the U.S. and China, but this week a startup in Southeast Asia came out of stealth mode to show that innovation is present elsewhere in the world.

Ucare.ai is focused on applying AI on the healthcare system to increase efficiencies and help patient coverage. It focuses on three distinct audiences: patients, health providers and those who pay the bills.

In particular, the company uses deep learning and neural network algorithms to predict healthcare patterns in patients, and beyond, to reduce preventable hospitalization, and, in turn, save on costs and hassles. That also allows medical professionals and insurers to focus on the more obvious risk patients, Ucare.ai said.

The company was founded in 2016 by Neal Liu, an MIT graduate who career includes five years with Google and stints with Microsoft, eBay and others. The company picked up seed funding in 2016, finance executive Christina Teo came on board as CEO (Liu is CTO) …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Pick up some moving insights into the future of mobility with Gett chief executive Dave Waiser in Tel Aviv

17 May 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jonathan Shieber

Dave Waiser has been at the forefront of the mobility technology revolution in Israel for the past eight years, ever since he launched Gett in 2010.

One of the last companies standing in the ultra-competitive global ride-sharing market, Gett has withstood competition from Didi Chuxing, Grab, Ola, Lyft and Uber and kept pace with those rivals as it claims a share of a worldwide market worth billions.

Through direct operations and partnerships with companies like the chauffeur and logistics business Carey International, Gett has managed to achieve a footprint of 1,000 cities that span the globe. It operates directly in 100 cities in four countries (including a competitive position in New York) and has raised some $640 million in venture funding — including a $300 million investment from the Volkswagen Group.

For Waiser, Gett’s success is only the latest in a string of endeavors which the enterprising entrepreneur has undertaken since the early days of the new millennium. One of Waiser’s first jobs, back in 2000, was to launch the Russian entity of the publicly traded early telecommunications software vendor, Comverse.

In Tel Aviv, Waiser will …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Hear from the executives of Innoviz and Oryx Vision about the eyes and ears of the new automobile in Tel Aviv

16 May 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jonathan Shieber

The success of the autonomous vehicle revolution relies on complicated systems of sophisticated sensors working in harmony to provide the magic of sight to machines.

OmerKeilaf, chief executive, Innoviz

In Tel Aviv, we’ll hear from experts in the field as they discuss the technological marvels that are the driving force behind the transformation of mobility in the modern world.

Omer David Keilaf, the chief executive of Innoviz, comes to us with some significant recent wins under his company’s belt. The Innoviz LIDAR technology has been selected by BMW to power its Level 3 to Level 5 autonomous vehicle systems.

The company’s solid-state LiDAR sensor, available as a built-in device beginning next year, is much smaller than traditional LIDAR and is stationary.

Before founding Innoviz, Keilaf led the system and product definition efforts at the world’s first handheld molecular sensor for mobile devices with ConsumerPhysics. Previous roles include leading the system architecture and engineering teams at bTendo (acquired by ST Micro) and Anobit (acquired by Apple) .

Rani Wellingstein, chief executive, Oryx Vision

No less impressive is the work of fellow panelist Rani Wellingstein of Oryx Vision, whose company is developing its own novel LIDAR technology. …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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