Monthly Archives: December 2020

News: On encryption and counter-terrorism, EU lawmakers say they’ll work for “lawful” data access

• December 9, 2020
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EU lawmakers have just unveiled a wide-ranging counter terrorism agenda as they set out plans to beef up regional security. The plan touches on some key tech topics — the most keenly watched of which is encryption. Here, concerns have been mounting that the bloc could be moving toward legislating against end-to-end encryption — in

EU lawmakers have just unveiled a wide-ranging counter terrorism agenda as they set out plans to beef up regional security.

The plan touches on some key tech topics — the most keenly watched of which is encryption.

Here, concerns have been mounting that the bloc could be moving toward legislating against end-to-end encryption — in response to pressure from some Member States over law enforcement and security services’ access to encrypted data.

At the same time such pressure isn’t exactly new. Albeit, the rule of crypto wars history is the access issue must roll around afresh again and again. And last month a draft resolution from the Council of the European Union triggered a fresh wave of anxiety that an EU ban on e2e encryption might be in the works.

Today’s Commission agenda is unlikely to lay such fears to rest entirely.

Perhaps mostly for its tortured language — with oxymoronical talk of ‘improved access’ to encrypted information in a text that’s simultaneously peppered with caveats about “respecting the right to privacy”.

Here’s how the Commission answers its own impossible question [emphasis its]:

Encryption technology is one of the main building blocks in setting up and maintaining the Digital Single Market and in safeguarding fundamental rights, privacy and data protection of citizens. However, when used for criminal purposes, it masks the identity of criminals and hides the content of their communications. Today, a substantial part of investigations against all forms of crime and terrorism involve encrypted information. The Commission will work with Member States to identify possible legal, operational, and technical solutions for lawful access and promote an approach which both maintains the effectiveness of encryption in protecting privacy and security of communications, while providing an effective response to crime and terrorism.

Talk of EU lawmakers helping in a search for possible “technical solutions” for “lawful access” to encrypted data probably won’t reassure those worried the EU is headed on a dangerous path toward mandatory backdoors.

But it’s worth emphasizing that ‘lawful access’ under EU law has been shown time and again to mean targeted access. (To wit: In October the CJEU made it clear that national security concerns do not exclude EU Member States from the need to comply with general legal principles — such as proportionality and respect for fundamental rights to privacy, data protection and freedom of expression.)

Simply put: There’s no such thing as a targeted backdoor.

A backdoor is naturally a bulk intervention. It’s inherently disproportionate. There’s no one-time, single-user ‘backdoor’*. At that point you’re basically talking about legally sanctioned hacking of a target suspect. Which is a whole other kettle of security fish.

It’s also worth noting the Commission agenda commits EU lawmakers to maintaining “the effectiveness of encryption in protecting privacy and security of communications”.

Though, again, their tortuous need to display balance over seemingly opposing objectives, by giving a simultaneously pledge of “providing an effective response to crime and terrorism”, might slightly haze the quality of the reassurance. Except of course an effective response to crime and terrorism can be achieved in myriad ways — proper resourcing and training of agents, say, better knowledge sharing across EU borders and so on — all of which have nothing at all to do with breaking encryption.

And, indeed, the Commission’s agenda offers plenty such (non-encryption breaking) ideas for beefing up the bloc’s counter terrorism response — such as an “EU police cooperation code” to enhance cooperation between law enforcement authorities; strengthening Europol; and stepping up engagement with international organizations, to name a few.

Encryption is often a handy scapegoat for governments’ security failures. The Commission’s agenda looks alive to that risk — just without wanting to give a too-direct slap-down to any culpable Member States. Ergo ‘we’ll work to identify possibilities’ looks like a diplomatically way of saying ‘we won’t achieve the impossible’.

Elsewhere on the tech front, the Commission agenda is very keen that its 2018 legislative proposal to accelerate terrorism content takedowns is swiftly taken up by the other EU institutions so it can start being applied to platforms.

The proposal has attracted some controversy and concern — such as over its impact on smaller websites, and how terrorism content will be defined.

“To counter the spread of extremist ideologies online, it is important that the European Parliament and the Council adopt the rules on removing terrorist content online as a matter of urgency,” the Commission writes on this.

The EU Internet Forum will be tasked with developing “guidance on moderation for publicly available content for extremist material online”, it adds.

*Setting aside theoretical NOBUS security vulnerabilities

News: IonQ plans to launch a rack-mounted quantum computer for data centers in 2023

• December 9, 2020
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Quantum computing startup IonQ today announced its road map for the next few years — following a similar move from IBM in September — and it’s quite ambitious, to say the least. At our Disrupt event earlier this year, IonQ CEO and president Peter Chapman suggested that we were only five years away from having

Quantum computing startup IonQ today announced its road map for the next few years — following a similar move from IBM in September — and it’s quite ambitious, to say the least.

At our Disrupt event earlier this year, IonQ CEO and president Peter Chapman suggested that we were only five years away from having desktop quantum computers. That’s not something you’ll likely hear from the company’s competitors — who also often use a very different kind of quantum technology — but IonQ now says that it will be able to sell modular, rack-mounted quantum computers for the data center in 2023 and that by 2025, its systems will be powerful enough to achieve broad quantum advantage across a wide variety of use cases.

In an interview ahead of today’s announcement, Chapman showed me a prototype of the hardware the company is working on for 2021, which fits on a workbench. The actual quantum chip is currently the size of a half-dollar and the company is now working on essentially putting the core of its technology on a single chip, with all of the optics that make its system work integrated.

Image Credits: IonQ

“That’s the goal,” he said about the chip. “As soon as you get to 2023, then you get to go to scale in a different way, which is, I just tell somebody in Taiwan to start and give me 10,000 of those things. And you get to scale through manufacturing, as well. There’s nothing quantum in any of the things that in any of the hardware we’re doing,” he said, though IonQ co-founder and chief scientist Chris Monroe quickly jumped in and noted that that’s true, “except for the atoms.”

And that’s an important point, because thanks to betting on trapped ion quantum computing as the core technology for its machines, IonQ doesn’t have to contend with the low-temperatures that IBM and others need to run their machines. Some sceptics have argued that IonQ’s technology will be hard to scale, but that’s something Chapman and Monroe easily dismiss, and IonQ’s new road map points at systems with thousands of algorithmic qubits (which are made out of a factor of 10 or 20 more physical qubits for handling error corrections) by 2028.

“As soon as you hit about 40 qubits — algorithmic qubits — in the beginning of 2024, then you’ll start to see quantum advantage probably in machine learning,” Chapman explained. “And then, I think it’s pretty well accepted that at 72 qubits is roughly when you start to do quantum advantage fairly broadly. So that would be in 2025. When you start to get into 2027, you’re now getting into hundreds of qubits if not early 1000s of qubits in [2028]. And now you’re starting to get into full-scale fault tolerance.”

We’ll see slow growth in the number of additional algorithmic qubits — which is what IonQ calls a qubit that can be used in running a quantum algorithm. Others in the industry tend to talk about “logical qubits,” but IonQ’s definition is slightly different.

Talking about how to compare different quantum systems, Chapman noted that “fidelity is not good enough.” It doesn’t matter if you have 72 or 72 million qubits, he said, if only three of those are usable. “When you see a road map that says, ‘I’m going to have umpteen 1000 qubits, it’s kind of like, ‘I don’t care, right?’ On our side, since we’re using individual atoms, I could show you a little vial of gas and say, ‘look, I’ve got a trillion qubits, all ready to be do computation!’ But they’re not particularly useful. So what we tried to do in the road map, was to talk about useful qubits.”

He also argued that quantum volume, a measurement championed by IBM and others in the quantum ecosystem, isn’t particularly useful because at some point, the numbers just get far too high.” But essentially, IonQ is still using quantum volume, but it defines its algorithmic qubits as the of the quantum volume of a given system.

Once IonQ is able to get to 32 of these algorithmic qubits — its current systems have 22 — it’ll be able to achieve a quantum volume of 4.2 billion instead of the 4 million it claims for its current system.

As Monroe noted, the company’s definition of algorithmic qubits also takes variable error correction into account. Error correction remains a major research area in quantum computing, but for the time being, IonQ argues that its ability to keep gate fidelity high means it doesn’t yet have to worry about it and it has already demonstrated the first fault-tolerant error-corrected operations with an overhead of 13:1.

“Because our native errors are so low, we don’t need to do error correction today, with these 22 algorithmic qubits. But to get that [99.99%] of fidelity, we’re going to leak in a little bit of error correction — and we can sort of do it on the fly. It’s almost like a little bit of an adjustment. How much error correction do you want? It’s not all or nothing,” Monroe explained.

IonQ isn’t afraid to say that it believes that “other technologies, because of their poor gate fidelity and qubit connectivity, might need 1,000, 10,000 or even 1,000,000 qubits to create a single error-corrected qubit.”

To put all of this into practice, IonQ today launched an Algorithmic Qubit Calculator that it argues will make it easier to compare system.

For the near future, IonQ expects to use a 16:1 overhead for error correction — that is, it expects to use 16 physical qubits to create a high-fidelity algorithmic qubit. Once it hits about 1,000 logical qubits, it expects to use a 32:1 overhead. “As you add qubits, you need to increase your fidelity,” Chapman explained, and so for its 1,000-qubit machine in 2028, IonQ will need to control 32,000 physical qubits.

IonQ has long argued that scaling its technology doesn’t necessitate any technological breakthroughs. And indeed, the company argues that by packing a lot of its technology on a single chip, its system will become more stable by default (noise, after all, is the archenemy of qubits), in part because the laser beams won’t have to travel very far.

Chapman, who has never been afraid to push for a bit of publicity, even noted that the company wants to fly one of its quantum computers in a small plane one of these days to show how stable it is. It’s worth noting, though, that IonQ is far more bullish about scaling up its systems in the short term than any of its competitors. Monroe acknowledged as much, but argues that it’s basic physics at this point.

“Especially in the solid-state platforms, they’re doing wonderful physics,” Monroe said. “They’re making a little bit of progress every year, but a roadmap in 10 years, based on a solid-state qubit, relies on breakthroughs in material science. And maybe they’ll get there, it’s not clear. But, you know, the physics of the atom is all sewn up and we’re very confident on the engineering path forward because it’s engineering based on proven protocols and proven devices.”

“We don’t have a manufacturing problem. You want a million qubits? No problem. That’s easy,” Chapman quipped.

News: myInterview raises $5 million for its video-based job recruitment platform

• December 9, 2020
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Creating a resume is one of the most frustrating parts of job hunting. Though ubiquitous on social media, videos are still rare on job platforms, even though it’s difficult to capture your personality in a resume. Sydney, Australia-based myInterview wants to turn videos into an integral part of recruitment, with a platform that allows candidates

Creating a resume is one of the most frustrating parts of job hunting. Though ubiquitous on social media, videos are still rare on job platforms, even though it’s difficult to capture your personality in a resume. Sydney, Australia-based myInterview wants to turn videos into an integral part of recruitment, with a platform that allows candidates to upload video responses to questions. Recruiters also have the option of using myInterview Intelligence, or machine learning-based tools that create shortlists for competitive openings.

The startup announced today that it has raised a $5 million seed round led by Israeli early-stage venture firm Aleph, with participation from returning investors Entrée Capital and SeedIL Ventures. MyInterview previously raised $1.6 million in pre-seed funding, including from Cliff Rosenberg, the former managing director of LinkedIn’s Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand operations.

MyInterview has been used by more than 2,000 companies, mostly in the United States and United Kingdom. Some of its best-known clients include online supermarket Ocado, retailer B&M and P&O Ferries. It has also worked with Facebook Career Connections and has a strategic partnership with reed.co.uk, the largest job search site in the U.K. So far, more than two million candidates have used myInterview, and the company’s goal is to reach tens of millions of job seekers.

The new funding will be used to expand its sales, product and research and development teams.

MyInterview was founded in 2016 by Guy Abelsohn and Ben Gillman, after they became frustrated by how difficult it was to make their resumes stand out while job hunting. MyInterview started out by offering products for companies to integrate into their existing recruitment systems, but launched a standalone platform at the beginning of 2019, well before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“We already had very nice traction over 2019 and into the beginning of 2020,” Gillman told TechCrunch. “I like to say that the success we’ve been seeing is independent of COVID, but there’s definitely been an impact in people who are still hiring needing to adopt technology such as myInterview in order to do that more effectively and efficiently with social distancing and the number of applicants coming through because of the market, and the more general adoption of video across the space.”

Gillman said myInterview’s platform can be used to fill almost any kind of job, but it’s generally used for roles, like entry-level positions, that can get hundreds to thousands of applications.

To use myInterview, companies set up a portal with a list of questions and prompts for applicants to answer on video. Applicants have the option of playing back and re-recording their responses several times before they hit submit. Once submitted, myInterview generates a transcript with tags for recruiters to sort through.

Other startups that have recently raised funding to integrate video into the recruitment process include VCV.AI, JobUFO and Willo.

One of the main ways myInterview competes with its rival is myInterview Intelligence. If a recruiter uses myInterview Intelligence, the platform analyzes responses for key words, phrases and tone.

myInterview Intelligence screenshot

MyInterview’s AI tools are based on the Big Five Personality Model, one of the main frameworks used by personality researchers. Personality tests, especially ones based on the “Big 5,” have been used by recruiters for years; what myInterview does is automate the process based on video transcripts instead of making candidates to fill out traditional assessments.

By automatically creating candidate shortlists focused on workplace culture compatibility, myInterview’s founders say its machine learning-based tools can help recruiters surface applicants who might otherwise be overlooked. Gillman said the platform also tries to mitigate bias in the hiring process by using a diverse set of data to train its algorithms and working with behavioral psychologists to audit videos. (Other startups using AI to help overcome bias in hiring include RippleMatch, which also recently received funding).

Of course, what makes a group of coworkers click can be hard to define, as with any other kind of relationship. Gillman said myInterview’s team includes behavioral psychologists, machine learning engineers and general engineers, working together to crack the code of building a good team.

For example, some candidates might flourish in a large corporation, where there is a lot of hierarchy and structure, while others might work better in small companies with a family-like environment, he said. “These things are quite tangible, and these are the elements we help to identify, both to the candidate and the employer.”

News: WorkRamp raises $17M to ramp up its enterprise learning platform

• December 9, 2020
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Remote learning and training have become a large priority this year for organizations looking to keep employees engaged and up to date on work practices at a time when many of them are not working in an office — and, in the case of those who have joined in 2020, may have never met any

Remote learning and training have become a large priority this year for organizations looking to keep employees engaged and up to date on work practices at a time when many of them are not working in an office — and, in the case of those who have joined in 2020, may have never met any of their work colleagues in person, ever. Today one of the startups that’s built a new, more user-friendly approach to creating and provisioning those learning materials is announcing some funding as it experiences a boost in its growth.

WorkRamp, which has built a platform that helps organizations build their own training materials, and then distribute them both to their workforce and to partners, has raised $17 million, a Series B round of funding that’s being led by Omers Ventures with Bow Capital also participating.

Its big pitch is that it has built the tools to make it easy for companies to build their own training and learning materials, incorporating tests, videos, slide shows and more, and by making it easier for companies to build these themselves, the materials themselves become more engaging and less stiff.

“We’re disrupting the legacy LMS [learning management system] providers, the Cornerstones of the world, with our bite-size training platform,” said CEO and founder Ted Blosser in an interview. “We want to do what Peloton did for the exercise market, but with corporate training. We are aiming for a consumer-grade experience.”

The company, originally incubated in Y Combinator, has now raised $27 million.

The funding comes on the back of strong growth for WorkRamp . Blosser said that it now has around 250 customers, with 1 million courses collectively created on its platform. That list includes fast-growing tech companies like Zoom, Box, Reddit and Intercom, as well as Disney, GlobalData and PayPal. As it continues to expand, it will be interesting to see how and if it can also snag more legacy, late adopters who are not as focused on tech in their own DNA.

WorkRamp estimates that there is some $20 billion spent annually by organizations on corporate training. Unsurprisingly, that has meant the proliferation of a number of companies building tools to address that market.

Just Google WorkRamp and you’re likely to encounter a number of its competitors who have bought its name as a keyword to snag a little more attention, . There are both big and small players in the space, including Leapsome, Capterra, Lessonly, LearnUpon (which itself recently raised a big round), SuccessFactors and TalentLMS.

The interesting thing about what WorkRamp has built is that it plays on the idea of the “creator” which really has been a huge development in our digital world. YouTube may have kicked things off with the concept of “user-generated content” but today we have TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and so many more platforms — not to mention smartphones themselves, with their easy facilities to shoot videos and photos of others, or of yourself, and then share with others — which have made the idea of building your own work, and looking at that of others, extremely accessible.

That has effectively laid the groundwork for a new way of conceiving of even more prosaic things, like corporate training. (Can there really be anything more comedically prosaic than that?) Other startups like Kahoot have also played on this idea, by making it easy for enterprises to build their own games to help train their staff.

This is what WorkRamp has aimed to tap into with its own take on the learning market, to help its customers eschew the idea of hiring outside production companies to make training materials, or expect WorkRamp to build those materials for them: instead, the people who are going to use the training now have the control.

“I think it’s critical to be able to build your own customer education,” Blosser said. “That’s a big trend for clients that want both to rapidly onboard people but also reduce costs.”

The company’s platform includes user-friendly drag-and-drop functionality, which also lets people build slide shows, flip cards and questions that viewers can answer. The plan is to bring on more “Accenture” style consultants, Blosser said, for bigger customers who may not be as tech savvy to help them take better advantage of the tools. It also integrates with third-party packages like Salesforce.com, Workday, and Zoom both to build out training as well as to distribute it.

“Since 2000, we have seen three major technology shifts in the enterprise: the transition from on-premise to SaaS, the growth of mobile, and the most recent – sweeping digital transformation across almost every part of every business,” said Eugene Lee of OMERS Ventures, in a statement. “The pandemic has forced adoption of a digital-first approach towards customers and employees across virtually all industries. WorkRamp’s platform is foundational to empowering both of these important audiences today and in the future. We are bullish on the massive opportunity in front of the company and are excited to get involved.” Lee is joining the board with this round.

News: Career Karma raises $10M to connect students to coding bootcamps

• December 9, 2020
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As edtech churns out more and more MasterClass copycats and coding bootcamps, it’s becoming glaringly obvious that students need better ways to navigate the crowded world of online learning. Career Karma, founded in 2018 by Ruben Harris, Artur Meyster and Timur Meyster, wants to help. The startup is bringing a pick-and-shovel play to the coding

As edtech churns out more and more MasterClass copycats and coding bootcamps, it’s becoming glaringly obvious that students need better ways to navigate the crowded world of online learning.

Career Karma, founded in 2018 by Ruben Harris, Artur Meyster and Timur Meyster, wants to help. The startup is bringing a pick-and-shovel play to the coding bootcamp world: instead of creating its own up-skilling curriculum, the startup empowers students to find the best bootcamps for their price point and career goals.

In plain words: Career Karma is not competing with Lambda School, but instead it’s serving as a top of funnel student matchmaker to Lambda School and other bootcamps.

For as remote education drags on, students are unenrolling from school held on video conferencing software and opting for alternative programs. General Assembly, for example, saw enrollment in career-changing immersive programs is up 20% in the first half of 2020 versus the first half of 2019, as well as 330% growth in live online classes between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020.

Harris sees the shift toward short-term credentialing as positive news for the startup, since its customer base — coding bootcamps — are enjoying positive tailwinds. Despite early COVID-19 layoffs, Lambda School raised $74 million. Coursera, a massive open online course provider, raised $130 million for its short-term credentialing product. Other bootcamps Henry and Strive School launched and successfully raised seed rounds.

Career Karma’s next iteration will focus on becoming a “core habit that people use on a daily basis.” The roots are already in motion: Career Karma has been growing from a matching tool into a wraparound service over the past year.

After a student gets into a coding school, Career Karma puts coders into small peer mentorship groups, called Squads, to give students support during the program and into the job search process. Instead of acting as a teacher, it wants to be the upperclassmen that helps the younger students understand the right resources and paths to take.

Career Karma is working in one of coding bootcamps’ blind spots. A common critique of coding bootcamps is that while they help students get their first job, the credential might not do as good of a job as a degree in future career mobility. To offset this dynamic, coding bootcamps can invest in alumni programs or community features, such as Career Karma, to strengthen their pool.

Currently, Career Karma only makes money one way: it charges a fee to bootcamps when it successfully places a student in one of their programs. The fee is usually 10% of a placed-student’s tuition, which could range from $10,000 to $50,000, Harris says. It’s worth noting that a school pays Career Karma up front no matter what financing option the student chooses, taking money out of their marketing or admissions budgets.

The biggest hurdle for Career Karma was stress-tested in the early innings of the pandemic: Because the startup is so closely dependent on coding bootcamps doing well, what happens to coding bootcamps in a bear market? When unemployment was high, coding bootcamps were threatened because it took away their ability to successfully place graduates into jobs.

“It did affect us,” Harris said. “But now everybody is back to rapidly skilling their workforce,” given the nature of venture-backed startups. Career Karma’s customers have placed coders into jobs at Stitch Fix, Tesla and Gemini.

Despite only one way to monetize, Career Karma has been profitable for the past five months, and has grown revenue 20% monthly. While Harris declined to disclose specific figures, he did say that over the past year, Career Karma has placed more than 3,000 people into job-training programs. If I’m doing my math correctly, it means that Career Karma could have brought in between $3 million and $15 million in top-line revenue this year alone.

“Once we create a platform where workers regularly receive career advice to advance their career, no matter what skill set they want,” he said, “we’re able to charge more.”

Today marks Career Karma’s next big growth push. The startup announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A, led by Initialized Capital . Other investors include Lattice’s Jack Altman, Collab Capital’s Jewel Burks and Moz’s Amira Yahyaoui.

“Now we’re able to not just be a player that matches people to bootcamps, but also to trade schools, colleges, universities, and really build a community that goes beyond just a matching platform,” Harris tells TechCrunch.

The founding team behind Career Karma.

News: Google quietly acquires Dataform, the UK startup helping businesses manage data warehouses

• December 9, 2020
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Dataform, a startup in the U.K. that was building what it dubbed an “operating system” for data warehouses, has been quietly acquired by Google’s Google Cloud division. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, although I understand this is mostly an acqui-hire, albeit one where the founders — both ex-Googlers prior to founding Dataform —

Dataform, a startup in the U.K. that was building what it dubbed an “operating system” for data warehouses, has been quietly acquired by Google’s Google Cloud division.

Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, although I understand this is mostly an acqui-hire, albeit one where the founders — both ex-Googlers prior to founding Dataform — have done well out of. However, it isn’t just about talent; Google is said to have been very interested in the company’s product, too — in fact, “Dataform web” is now being offered for free going forward.

One source with knowledge of the deal described it as a very decent outcome for Dataform’s founders, Lewis Hemens and Guillaume-Henri Huon. I also understand that Dataform was well on its way to raising a Series A, so there were definitely other options.

An alumni of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator and backed by LocalGlobe, Dataform had set out to help data-rich companies draw insights from the data stored in their data warehouses. Mining data for insights and business intelligence typically requires a team of data engineers and analysts. Dataform wanted to simplify this task and in turn make it faster and cheaper for organisations to take full advantage of their data assets.

Joining Google Cloud should enable the team to continue that mission. More broadly, the space is hot right now, including Snowflake’s successful IPO.

“After several conversations with the Google Cloud team it became clear that we are deeply aligned on the importance of serving analysts with the right tools and technology in order to fill what we all perceive as a missed opportunity in existing solutions,” writes Guillaume-Henri Huon on Dataform’s website.

“At the same time, as a team of just 7, in a complex, competitive and rapidly changing market, we had more ideas than we had people or resources to accomplish. There has always been so much more we wanted to do each quarter than we could achieve. With the support of the BigQuery and Cloud Analytics teams and our combined thought leadership and efforts, we felt that together we could achieve something bigger than we could separately”.

News: Firebolt raises $37M to take on Snowflake, Amazon and Google with a new approach to data warehousing

• December 9, 2020
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For many organizations, the shift to cloud computing has played out more realistically as a shift to hybrid architectures, where a company’s data is just as likely to reside in one of a number of clouds, as it might in an on-premise deployment, in a data warehouse, or in a data lake. Today, a startup

For many organizations, the shift to cloud computing has played out more realistically as a shift to hybrid architectures, where a company’s data is just as likely to reside in one of a number of clouds, as it might in an on-premise deployment, in a data warehouse, or in a data lake. Today, a startup that has built a more comprehensive way to assess, analyse and use that data is announcing funding as it looks to take on Snowflake, Amazon, Google and others in the area of enterprise data analytics.

Firebolt, which has redesigned the concept of a data warehouse to work more efficiently and at a lower cost, is today announcing that it has raised $37 million from Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Angular Ventures. It plans to use the funding to continue developing its product and bring on more customers.

The company is officially “launching” today but — as is the case with so many enterprise startups these days operating in stealth — it has been around for two years already building its platform and signing commercial deals. It now has some 12 large enterprise customers and is “really busy” with new business, said CEO is Eldad Farkash in an interview.

The funding may sound like a large amount for a company that has not really been out in the open, but part of the reason is because of the track record of the founders. Farkash, was one of the founders of SiSense, the successful business intelligence startup, and he has co-founded Firebolt with two others who were on SiSense’s founding team, Saar Bitner as COO and Ariel Yaroshevich as CTO.

At SiSense, these three were coming up against an issue: when you are dealing in terabytes of data, cloud data warehouses were straining to deliver good performance to power its analytics and other tools, and the only way to potentially continue to mitigate that was by piling on more cloud capacity.

Farkash is something of a technical savant and said that he decided to move on and build Firebolt to see if he could tackle this, which he described as a new, difficult, and “meaningful” problem. “The only thing I know how to do is build startups,” he joked.

In his opinion, while data warehousing has been a big breakthrough in how to handle the mass of data that companies now amass and want to use better, it has started to feel like a dated solution.

“Data warehouses are solving yesterday’s problem, which was, ‘How do I migrate to the cloud and deal with scale?’” he said, citing Google’s BigQuery, Amazon’s RedShift and Snowflake as fitting answers for that issue. “We see Firebolt as the new entrant in that space, with a new take on design on technology. We change the discussion from one of scale to one of speed and efficiency.”

The startup claims that its performance is up to 182 times faster than that of other data warehouses. It’s a SQL-based system that works on principles that Farkash said came out of academic research that had yet to be applied anywhere, around how to handle data in a lighter way, using new techniques in compression and how data is parsed. Data lakes in turn can be connected up with a wider data ecosystem, and what it translates to is a much smaller requirement for cloud capacity.

This is not just a problem at SiSense. With enterprise data continuing to grow exponentially, cloud analytics is growing with it, and is estimated by 2025 to be a $65 billion market, Firebolt estimates.

Still, Farkash said the Firebolt concept was initially a challenging sell even to the engineers that it eventually hired to build out the business: it required building completely new warehouses from the ground up to run the platform, five of which exist today and will be augmented with more, on the back of this funding, he said.

And it should be pointed out that its competitors are not exactly sitting still either. Just yesterday, Dataform announced that it had been acquired by Google to help it build out and run better performance at BigQuery.

“Firebolt created a SaaS product that changes the analytics experience over big data sets” Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures said in a statement. “The pace of innovation in the big data space has lagged the explosion in data growth rendering most data warehousing solutions too slow, too expensive, or too complex to scale. Firebolt takes cloud data warehousing to the next level by offering the world’s most powerful analytical engine. This means companies can now analyze multi Terabyte / Petabyte data sets easily at significantly lower costs and provide a truly interactive user experience to their employees, customers or anyone who needs to access the data.”

News: Wikifactory has raised $4.5m for its ‘Github for hardware’ to make almost anything remotely

• December 9, 2020
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Karl Marx famously argued in ‘Das Kapital’ that to achieve freedom from the slavery of capitalism, the worker must own the means of production. Perhaps that day is edging closer. Today Wikifactory, billing itself as a ‘Github for hardware’, announces it has closed a $3 million funding round taking it to a total of $4.5m,

Karl Marx famously argued in ‘Das Kapital’ that to achieve freedom from the slavery of capitalism, the worker must own the means of production. Perhaps that day is edging closer. Today Wikifactory, billing itself as a ‘Github for hardware’, announces it has closed a $3 million funding round taking it to a total of $4.5m, pre-series A. The investors are unnamed, but characterized as “impact investors”. The collaboration platform claims it allows someone to make almost anything remotely.

The ‘impact’ aspect of Wikifactory’s playbook is that it involves less shipping and less costly inventories being required.

With the investment, the company will build a ‘quality-assured’ manufacturing marketplace, as well as mirrored servers in China to open up access to its hardware capital, Shenzhen . Wikifactory is available in four languages right now and is set to expand to 20 after it raised a Series A funding round next year.

In addition, its new Collaborative CAD Tool with in-built chat means designers, engineers, manufacturers and enterprises can collaborate remotely on virtually any CAD model, from concept through to finished prototype.

This allows product developers to review and discuss 3D models in over thirty file formats in real-time. The idea is to democratize access to normally expensive product lifecycle management (PLM) software.

The startup says that since May 2019 some 70,000 product developers in 190 countries have been using Wikifactory build robotics, electric vehicles and drones, agri-tech and sustainable energy appliances, lab equipment and 3D printers, smart furniture and biotech fashion materials as well as medical supplies including vital PPE and ventilators when there were global supply shortages.

Nicolai Peitersen, co-founder and executive chairman of Wikifactory said: “Wide-scale global collaboration to make physical things is happening both for open-source and for proprietary product development. The global manufacturing industry output, worth USD 35 trillion, is finally having its web moment. Online collaboration and distributed production is becoming mainstream. We’re calling it the internet of production.”

He added that with global supply chains stretched because of the pandemic, the need for a viable, alternative online infrastructure to prototype and produce products locally, to a high standard, and sustainably “has never been more relevant and necessary.”

News: OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei raises $7 million for his new venture

• December 9, 2020
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Carl Pei, the co-founder of OnePlus who left the company two months ago, has raised $7 million from a roster of high-profile investors for his new venture. The Swedish tech entrepreneur said on Wednesday he had secured $7 million in Seed financing round from friends and private investors including Tony Fadell (Principal at Future Shape

Carl Pei, the co-founder of OnePlus who left the company two months ago, has raised $7 million from a roster of high-profile investors for his new venture.

The Swedish tech entrepreneur said on Wednesday he had secured $7 million in Seed financing round from friends and private investors including Tony Fadell (Principal at Future Shape and inventor of the iPod), well known YouTuber Casey Neistat, Kevin Lin (co-founder of Twitch), Steve Huffman (chief executive of Reddit), Liam Casey (founder and chief executive of PCH), Paddy Cosgrave (founder of Web Summit) and Josh Buckley (chief executive of Product Hunt).

Pei remains tight lipped on what this new venture would be about, or what it is even called. A source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the venture will focus on audio-related hardware — at least to begin with. Pei said he plans to use the fresh capital to set up an office in London, hire talent and fund product research and development.

“I am deeply grateful and tremendously excited to have friends of this caliber supporting us in building what’s next,” said Carl Pei in a statement. “We plan on moving aggressively against our vision, and can’t wait to see how the market will react.”

Pei, who served as the public face of the Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus for years, surprised many when he announced in October that he would be leaving the company. He played an instrumental role in designing the OnePlus smartphone lineup over the years, and also how the company marketed them and itself.

“Carl spent the last decade making products that millions of people love. He deeply understands what consumers want, and I can’t wait for the world to see what he has in store next,” said Josh Buckley, chief executive of Product Hunt, in a statement.

News: TripAdvisor shares drop following China app ban

• December 9, 2020
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The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced it has banned 105 mobile apps for violating Chinese internet regulations. While almost all of the apps are made by Chinese developers, American travel booking and review site TripAdvisor is also on the list. TripAdvisor shares dipped on Nasdaq after the CAC’s announcement, but began recovering in after-hours

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced it has banned 105 mobile apps for violating Chinese internet regulations. While almost all of the apps are made by Chinese developers, American travel booking and review site TripAdvisor is also on the list.

TripAdvisor shares dipped on Nasdaq after the CAC’s announcement, but began recovering in after-hours trading.

While TripAdvisor is based in the United States, like other foreign tech companies, it struck a partnership with a local tech company for its Chinese operations. In TripAdvisor’s case, it entered into an agreement with Trip.com — the Nasdaq-listed Chinese travel titan formerly known as Ctrip — in November 2019 to operate a joint venture called TripAdvisor China. The deal made Trip.com subsidiary Ctrip Investment a majority shareholder in the JV, with TripAdvisor owning 40%.

As part of the deal, TripAdvisor agreed to share content with Trip.com brands, including Chinese travel platforms Ctrip and Qunar, which gained access to the American firm’s abundant overseas travel reviews. That put TripAdvisor in a race with regional players, including Alibaba-backed Qyer and Hong Kong-based Klook, to capture China’s increasingly affluent and savvy outbound tourists.

The CAC is the government agency in charge of overseeing internet regulations and censorship. In a brief statement, the bureau said it began taking action on November 5 to “clean up” China’s internet by removing apps that broke regulations. The 105 apps constituted the first group to be banned, and were targeted after users reported illegal activity or content, the agency said.

Though the CAC did not specify exactly what each app was banned for, the list of illegal activities included spreading pornography, incitements to violence or terrorism, fraud or gambling and prostitution.

In addition, eight app stores were taken down for not complying with review regulations or allowing the download of illegal content.

Such “app cleansing” takes place periodically in China where the government has a stranglehold on information flows. Internet services in China, especially those involving user-generated content, normally rely on armies of censors or filtering software to ensure their content is in line with government guidelines.

The Chinese internet is evolving so rapidly that regulations sometimes fall behind the development of industry players, so the authorities are constantly closing gaps. Apps and services could be pulled because regulators realize they are lacking essential government permits, or they might have published illegal or politically sensitive information.

Foreign tech firms operating in China often find themselves walking a fine line between the “internet freedom” celebrated in the West and adherence to Beijing’s requirements. The likes of Bing.com, LinkedIn, and Apple — the few remaining Western tech giants in China — have all drawn criticism for caving to China’s censorship pressure in the past.