He went so far as to call for the preconceptions surrounding crypto to be demystified.
CEO Brian Armstrong and other managers at the San Francisco-based crypto exchange told employees in company- wide meetings that Armstrong had been planning this move for six months.
Read more Bitcoin price has proved resilient in the face of bad news but traders expect crypto volatility ahead.
Read more Binance, Gemini, and Kraken have become the biggest winners since US regulators’ charges against BitMEX on Thursday.
Read more Miners generated an estimated $328 million in September.
Read more Crypto legal experts join NLW to discuss the U.S. government’s case against BitMEX and its implications for the broader ecosystem.
Read more An aspect of video calls that many of us take for granted is the way they can switch between feeds to highlight whoever’s speaking. Great — if speaking is how you communicate. Silent speech like sign language doesn’t trigger those algorithms, unfortunately, but this research from Google might change that.
It’s a real-time sign language detection engine that can tell when someone is signing (as opposed to just moving around) and when they’re done. Of course it’s trivial for humans to tell this sort of thing, but it’s harder for a video call system that’s used to just pushing pixels.
A new paper from Google researchers, presented (virtually, of course) at ECCV, shows how it can be done efficiency and with very little latency. It would defeat the point if the sign language detection worked but it resulted in delayed or degraded video, so their goal was to make sure the model was both lightweight and reliable.
The system first runs the video through a model called PoseNet, which estimates the positions of the body and limbs in each frame. This simplified visual information (essentially a stick figure) is sent to a model trained on pose data from video of people using German Sign Language, and it compares the live image to what it thinks signing looks like.
Image Credits: Google
This simple process already produces 80 percent accuracy in predicting whether a person is signing or not, and with some additional optimizing gets up to 91.5 percent accuracy. Considering how the “active speaker” detection on most calls is only so-so at telling whether a person is talking or coughing, those numbers are pretty respectable.
In order to work without adding some new “a person is signing” signal to existing calls, the system pulls clever a little trick. It uses a virtual audio source to generate a 20 kHz tone, which is outside the range of human hearing, but noticed by computer audio systems. This signal is generated whenever the person is signing, making the speech detection algorithms think that they are speaking out loud.
Right now it’s just a demo, which you can try here, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason why it couldn’t be built right into existing video call systems or even as an app that piggybacks on them. You can read the full paper here.
A day after the Senate Commerce Committee moved forward with plans to subpoena the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google, it looks like some of the most powerful leaders in tech will testify willingly.
Twitter announced late Friday that Jack Dorsey would appear virtually before the committee on October 28, just days before the U.S. election. While Twitter is the only company that’s openly agreed to the hearing so far, Politico reports that Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg also plan to appear.
Members of both parties on the committee planned to use the hearings to examine Section 230, the key legal shield that protects online platforms from liability from the content their users create.
As we’ve discussed previously, the political parties are approaching Section 230 from very different perspectives. Democrats see threatening changes to Section 230 as a way to force platforms to take more seriously toxic content like misinformation and harassment.
Many Republicans believe tech companies should be stripped of Section 230 protections because platforms have an anti-conservative bias — a claim that the facts don’t bear out.
Twitter had some choice words about that perspective, calling claims of political bias an “unsubstantiated allegation that we have refuted on many occasions to Congress,” and noting that those accusations have been “widely disproven” by researchers.
“We do not enforce our policies on the basis of political ideology,” the company added.
It sounds like the company and members of the Senate have very different agendas. Twitter indicated that it plans to use the hearing’s timing to steer the conversation toward the election. Politico also reports that the scope of the hearing will be broadened to include “data privacy and media consolidation” — not just Section 230.
A spokesperson tweeting on the company’s public policy account insisted that the hearing “must be constructive,” addressing how tech companies can protect the integrity of the vote.
“At this critical time, we’re committed to keeping our focus squarely on what matters the most to our company: joint efforts to protect our shared democratic conversation from harm — from both foreign and domestic threats,” a Twitter spokesperson wrote.
Regardless of the approach, dismantling Section 230 could prove potentially catastrophic for the way the internet as we know it works, so the stakes are high, both for tech companies and for regular internet users.
President Donald Trump’s positive COVID-19 result has made Twitter a busy place in the past 24 hours, including some tweets that have publicly wished — some subtly and others more directly — that he die from the disease caused by coronavirus.
Twitter put out a reminder to folks that it doesn’t allow tweets that wish or hope for death or serious bodily harm or fatal disease against anyone. Tweets that violate this policy will need to be removed, Twitter said Friday. However, it also clarified that this does not automatically mean suspension. Several news outlets misreported that users would be suspended automatically. Of course, that doesn’t mean users won’t be suspended.
Motherboard reported that users would be suspended, citing a statement from Twitter. That runs slightly counter to Twitter’s public statement on its own platform.
On Thursday evening, Trump tweeted that he and his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, had tested positive for COVID-19. White House physician Sean Conley issued a memo Friday confirming the positive results of SAR-Cov-2 virus, which often is more commonly known as COVID-19. Trump was seen boarding a helicopter Friday evening that was bound for Walter Reed Medical Center for several days of treatment.
The diagnosis sent shares tumbling Friday on the key exchanges, including Nasdaq. The news put downward pressure on all major American indices, but heaviest on tech shares.
Kindred Capital, the London-based VC that backs early-stage founders in Europe and Israel, recently closed its second seed fund at £81 million.
Out if its first fund raised in 2018, the firm has backed 29 companies. They include Five, which is building software for autonomous vehicles; Paddle, SaaS for software e-commerce; Pollen, a peer-to-peer marketplace for experiences and travel; and Farewill, which lets users create a will online.
However, what sets Kindred apart from most other seed VCs is its “equitable venture” model that sees the founders it backs get carry in the fund, effectively becoming co-owners of Kindred. Once the VC’s LPs have their investment returned, along with the firm’s partners, the portfolio founders share any subsequent fund profits.
To learn more about Kindred’s investment focus going forward and how its equitable venture model works in practice, I caught up with partners Leila Rastegar Zegna and Chrys Chrysanthou. We also discussed closing deals remotely and how the VC approaches diversity and inclusion.
TechCrunch: Kindred Capital backs seed-stage startups across Europe and in Israel. Can you elaborate a bit more on the fund’s remit, such as sector or specific technologies, and what you look for in founders and startups at such an early stage?
Rastegar Zegna: As a fund, we are very focused on the founder(s), so everything starts there. We try to drill down and get to know them as people and leaders, first and foremost. Do they have what it takes to get the company off the ground, the resilience to get through the inevitable ups and downs of startup life and through the scaling years to make this a massive outcome for the team and the investors?
The second element we spend time thinking about is the market itself and how big the company can grow within the constraints of that market. We also think deeply about the timing of the business, especially if they are trying to create a new market, such as in quantum computing, for example.
Chrysanthou: It’s also worth mentioning that many investors talk about product-market fit, but we are also great believers in founder-market fit. In other words, a founder who might be successful in one market, might well fail in another, as different skills are required and even different personality types might be better suited. One way we assess this is to look for deep insights they have to the problem they’re trying to solve and how they think about their market.
After that, we are fairly sector-agnostic, which is why we have such a diverse portfolio, ranging from consumer products through to deep science.
How has the coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns and social distancing affected the way you source and close deals?
Rastegar Zegna: Initially, we moved everything to video calls, like pretty much everyone else in the industry. Upon reflection, however, we realized that we were just using a new tool (e.g. Zoom) but in the old way — meaning, any meeting we used to have at Kindred HQ, we just transitioned onto Zoom. The interesting transition we’re going through now is to create a new way of working around the tool. That means for some meetings, Zoom will be the most effective medium of communication. For others it may be an audio call, and for a third category of discussion, a walking meeting in the park may be what’s called for. But the opportunity is to throw out the playbook written by inertia and generally accepted industry working norms, and create a first principles approach to the way in which we do business to optimize for the best outcome.