ExploreHouse

If you play hardcore and competitive games you want to win, so it would be useful to have someone leaning over your shoulder giving you tips on how to play better. Someone that knows all your moves and behaviors, for instance.

That’s the thinking behind Gosu.ai, which has developed an AI assistant to help gamers play smarter and improve their skills. It’s now raised a $1.9M funding round led by Runa Capital, with participation from Ventech and existing investor, Sistema_VC. Previously, the startup was backed by Gagarin Capital, a new Silicon Valley-based early stage VC firm focusing on AI investments, which invested in Prisma and MSQRD, which exited to Facebook and Google, respectively.

Gosu.ai uses provides tools and guidance for users to improve their skills in competitive games. It analyses their matches and makes personal recommendations. It also helps players prep, suggesting gear sets, starting items, and offering ideas on how to take on a particular opponent. The platform currently works with Dota 2, with plans to support CS:GO and PUBG in the near future.

The company was founded by Alisa Chumachenko (pictured), who was the creator and former CEO of Game Insight, a big gaming world player. She says: “There are 2 billion gamers in the world now and 600 million of them play hardcore games, such as MOBAs, Shooters, and MMOs. We can help those players reach their full potential with our AI assistants.”

Gosu.ai’s main competitors are Mobalytics, Dojomadness and Moremmr. But the main difference is that these competitors make analytics of raw statistics, and find the generalized weak spots in comparison with other players, giving general recommendations. Gosu.ai analyses the specific actions of each player, down to the movement of their mouse, to cater direct recommendations for the player. So it’s more like a virtual assistant than a training platform.

In addition, GOSU works in the B2B field, as well, by offering gaming companies a variety of AI tools, for example a predictive analytics.

For the visually impaired, there are lots of accessibility options if you want to browse the web — screen readers, podcast versions of articles, and so on. But it can still be a pain to keep up with your favorite publications the way sighted app users do. BrailleVoice is a project that puts the news in a touch-tone phone interface, reading you the latest news from your favorite publications (like this one) easily from anywhere you get signal.

It’s from SpaceNext, AKA Shan, who has a variety of useful little apps he’s developed over the years on his page — John wrote up one back in 2011. Several of them have an accessibility aspect to them, something that always piques my interest.

“Visually challenged users will find it difficult to navigate using apps,” he wrote in an email. “I thought with text to speech readily available… they would be able to make a call to a toll free number to listen to latest news from any site.”

All you do is dial 1-888-666-4013, then listen to the options on the menu. TechCrunch is the first outlet listed, so hit 1# and it’ll read out the headlines. Select one (of mine) and it’ll jump right in. That’s it! There are a couple dozen sites listed right now, from LifeHacker (hit 15#) to the Times of India (hit 26#). You can also suggest new sites to add, presumably as long as they have some kind of RSS feed. (This should be a reminder why you should keep your website or news service accessible in some like manner.)

“More importantly,” he continued, “this works even without internet even in the remotest of places. You can listen to your favorite news site without having to spend a dime or worry about internet.”

Assuming you can get a voice signal and you’ve got minutes, anyway. I quite like the idea of someone walking into the nearest town, pulling out their old Nokia, dialing this up, and keeping up to date with the most news-addicted of us.

The text to speech engine is pretty rudimentary, but it’s better than what we all had a few years back, and it’ll only get better as improved engines like Google’s and Apple’s trickle down for general purpose use. I’m going to ask them about that, actually.

It’s quite a basic service, but what more does it need to have, really? Shan is planning to integrate voice controls into the likes of Google Home and Alexa, so there’s that. But as is it may be enough to provide plenty of utility to the vision-impaired. Check out TextOnly too. I could use that for desktop.

Facebook is at the center of a dozen controversies, and outrage is peaking. The social network has failed again and again at expanding beyond a handful of core features. Doubts of its usefulness, and assertions of its uselessness, are multiplying. A crisis of confidence at multiple levels threatens the company’s structure and mission. Now is the time for Mark Zuckerberg to spare himself the infamy and resign — for Facebook’s sake and his own.

I’m not calling for his resignation, and I don’t say this out of any animus towards Zuckerberg; I personally believe him to be genuine and driven in his stated desire to connect the world — but likely increasingly frustrated by the unexpected consequences of this naive ambition and the haste with which he has pursued it. I just think that it has come to the point where the best way for him to advance that ambition is to leave.

There are three major reasons why.

Facebook has failed

Of course, it’s also true that Facebook has succeeded beyond every expectation. But its success arrived early and remains essentially a simple thing: being a broadly accessible, functioning social network. A single network of friends, a basic news feed from them, and a few adjunct capabilities were industry defining ideas and to a certain point were executed quite well. Beyond that admittedly towering success Facebook has accomplished remarkably little.

Attempts to make Facebook a ubiquitous social graph layer connecting all apps and services failed because consumers found it creepy, companies found it threatening to rely completely on the company for demographic data, and tech was moving too quickly for the data Facebook had to be universally applicable. (Except, of course, in advertising, where it is evergreen.)

Attempts to make Facebook a gaming platform failed partly because the social aspect of gaming is radioactive, and partly because the attention economy produces really bad games. Repurposing an established community into a gaming one was a non-starter, and what’s left of the brief Facebook gaming flash in the pan is just an oily residue clinging to the side of the newsfeed.

Attempts to make Facebook a VR/AR powerhouse are ongoing, but that entire segment of tech has proven incredibly disappointing and eye-wateringly expensive for everyone involved. So far they’re a market leader in a market that seems to only exist for the purpose of swindling money out of investors. It’s too early to call it a complete boondoggle with certainty since Facebook is supposedly playing a longer game here, but it sure isn’t promising.

Attempts to improve messaging beyond the basics have failed; chatbots are of poor quality and largely pointless, in-chat games are novelties at best, business applications are politely declined, and while aesthetic changes like stickers could make a little money in the short term, that’s not really the kind of thing that supports a global infrastructure.

Attempts to make Facebook a reliable news source ran into the many-headed hydra that is “objectivity” and everything that comes with it. Boy, they didn’t think that through. I’m not even going to get started on the ways it’s failed here.

Attempts to make Facebook an infrastructure provider have arguably so far failed as either abortive or fanciful. Free basics failed despite good intentions because the company has not earned the trust to be in that position. The laser-based Aquila internet glider is a wonderful science project but strikes me as something of a Spruce Goose situation: Underserved communities would be served better by, off the top of my head, grants offsetting large broadband providers’ advantages in infrastructure contracts, or just paying for laying fiber or building towers. (Later efforts at Internet.org have been more limited and practical and I applaud them.)

Attempts to make Facebook a media company failed (or are stumbling) for a multiplicity of reasons: strong and agile competitors, a lack of focus, too many ads, incompatibility with the like economy.

Attempts to branch out on mobile have failed, though none very spectacularly — which is almost a failure in itself. The main app is of course fabulously popular, as is Instagram. Only by paying a billion dollars, and literally subtracting a fundamental feature from the original app were they able to increase the number of icons on most phones.

Attempts to make Facebook cool have failed almost from the beginning. I hesitate to go so far as to define coolness, but I will say that it’s generally thought to be incompatible with ubiquity. They bought some cool with Instagram, but the shine is starting to wear off that one.

This litany of failures (by no means comprehensive, and of course there have been minor successes, too) is also conspicuously a list of things Zuckerberg has personally set his sights on. Over and over, he has said “this is what we’re going to do.” And then they don’t do it — not really. A cash infusion and a bit of borrowed momentum from the ongoing original success of the basic social network, and each effort begins with a semblance of self-propulsion. But all of them have lost steam as Facebook failed to follow through, mindlessly followed through on the wrong thing, or just moved on to the next target.

As founder and CEO, Zuckerberg should by all means take substantial credit for the initial success of the platform. But he also has to take responsibility for the laundry list of botched attempts to do much more than provide the basic service people valued since the earliest days.

By no means is he alone in this type of failure, by the way: All the tech giants have products and phases they’d rather not speak of or, though they might refuse to acknowledge it, have been crushing defeats. But Zuckerberg is on his own in the level of personal ownership he has tried to exert over these numerous misadventures.

Facebook is not about connecting the world

It’s become clear over the years that Facebook left its original mission statement behind a long, long time ago.

15 years back, perhaps even 10 or 5, Facebook was just what we needed. But the world has changed, the way we interact with technology and each other has changed, and Facebook hasn’t. The platform’s greatest failure isn’t any of those side projects listed above; it’s the failure to evolve its core product to succeed by its own metrics of quality time and meaningful connection.

Facebook started as a rough approximation of sharing your life with a group of friends. But as its scope has increased, this approximation has been found to be increasingly inadequate. What’s also become clear is that Facebook has been working hard to redefine how people interact online to fit better with its own limited capabilities. Faced with the square peg of human interactions and the round hole (the image of a pit is inescapable) of Facebook’s newsfeed and algorithms, they decided it was the former that needed modification.

The root of that is simple: Fitting Facebook to the people’s needs is not as lucrative as vice versa. Facebook runs on ads, and ads run on eyeballs. That’s the business model that has dominated the last decade or so — well, the last couple centuries really, but in its current form 10-15 years. Facebook has been one of the most successful practitioners of it because, as they never tire of telling their customers (that is to say, advertisers), they know things about us that others don’t. Important things. This is, as I mentioned earlier, the one place where its troves of seemingly trivial data add up.

Facebook is not a platform for connecting people, it’s a platform for monetizing the connections they make on their own. The company simply doesn’t prioritize the quality of these connections themselves in any meaningful way — nor, I think, can it. That’s probably a realization they reached early on. These flailing attempts to grow appendages were always just ways to multiply the number of superficial connections and train users to conflate constant, convenient updates with meaningful interactions.

The parallel track to this is on the sales and advertising side, where Facebook has repeatedly been cavalier with the data it has been entrusted with and selectively honest with the users from which it was sourced. People have stopped trusting it, if they ever really did. No one believes its executives when they say things about quality time, and respecting your data, and so on. Some of them may be sincere — but it doesn’t matter.

The work that needs to be done to connect the world can’t be done by an entity as compromised as Facebook; it’s just the wrong tool for the job. Zuckerberg’s mission to connect the world isn’t happening the way he planned and it isn’t going to happen. Ironically it was the success of his own vision that demonstrated the limits of that vision.

The time is right for him and for the company

Facebook has grown big enough that it was never going to be free from controversy. But for the last few years there seems to have been a constant hum of disappointment from practically every quarter, every demographic, every customer, every country and regulator.

During the tumultuous last year, the fundamental idea of advertising on Facebook based on hidden character traits has been shown to be an insidious, easily abused practice. It responded much as its big tech colleagues have: affect shock, assure users this was never intended, and promise action. Zuckerberg, who is politically active and of course deeply involved in all the operations at Facebook, has been almost completely silent.

He has occasionally addressed such controversies. But more often than not he has offered little more than lip service, lines so tired — “at Facebook we take this very seriously,” for instance — that they’ve become parody. As I was writing, in fact, he did exactly this. “I’m serious about doing what it takes to protect our community” were his exact words.

But not just those words!

“I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform,” he wrote.

The exact form this responsibility takes is not specified. But the best thing for him to do would be resign.

I don’t mean instantly — that would be chaos. But soon. Think about it: it’s really the best thing for everyone.

For Facebook, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card. Zuckerberg can easily take a lot of the heat being pointed at the company right now, since as he says he is responsible for what happened. He can shield loyal employees and executives who really were likely doing his bidding. He could do a junket of Congress, the FTC, a few courts, and so on to express his personal responsibility for the actions and to beg people to understand that Facebook should not be held to be synonymous with his mistakes of many years. Meanwhile at the company there would be carte blanche for reinvention, reversing years-old policies, admitting faults.

For users, it’s a nice clean break and a new hope for the platform. For a long time people have rolled their eyes at the promises of change, and seen mainly aimless algorithm tweaks and failed attempts to imitate competitors. The election debacle and this ongoing Cambridge Analytica situation are just the latest problem to appear; user faith is long since eroded, and many more would leave if not for some strong network effects binding them to the platform. For Zuckerberg, the avatar and origin of all of Facebook’s many mistakes (and of course successes) to personally step aside is meaningful change, and may lead to meaningful change at the platform level. At the very least even skeptical users like myself would be curious to see how it all plays out.

For Zuckerberg, this could be the best thing that ever happened to him. The optics are great — brave and idealistic young CEO sacrifices himself so that the company can live on. And it’s not like he doesn’t have another life waiting for him. How does retiring in your early 30s with billions in the bank, spending a year or two with your wife and young daughter, then reemerging to dedicate yourself full time to your philanthropic causes sound? The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and Internet.org could help more people in more meaningful ways than Facebook ever could. It might even be time to grow a nice beard.

I don’t think he’s really going to do it, of course (resign, that is — he may still grow a beard). At the risk of sounding like an armchair psychiatrist, his ego identifies too strongly with Facebook. Separating himself from it would be traumatic, perhaps impossible. Furthermore, my pessimistic view of Facebook’s works would be more than balanced by his own optimistic view. If he read this I doubt he would agree with much I’ve written.

All the same, I don’t think he will ever have a better chance to leave than this, and he may in the near future wish he had bowed out around now. Free of Zuckerberg, Facebook might blossom anew or it might wither; but most damningly of all, its users probably won’t care either way.

Twitter Chief Information Security Officer Michael Coates is leaving the company, The Verge first reported. Word on the street is that Coates is leaving to start his own company.

Coates has reportedly been replaced on an interim basis by Joseph Camileri, a senior manager for information security and risk.

This comes following the impending and rumored departures of other high-level security officers at Google and Facebook.

Yesterday, Google Director of Information Security Engineering Michael Zelewski announced his upcoming departure on Twitter. With Facebook, there were reports that CSO Alex Stamos was leaving his role, but that seems to not be true. Instead, Stamos said his role is simply changing to focus more on election security and emerging security risks.

I’ve reached out to Twitter and will update this story if I hear back.

We’ve described Burrow as a startup that brings a Casper-style approach to sofas, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the company has raised funding from one of Casper’s investors.

Burrow is announcing a $14 million Series A led by New Enterprise Associates. Correlation Ventures also participated in the round, as did previous investors Red & Blue Ventures and Y Combinator Continuity. (The startup went through the YC accelerator back in 2016.)

When Burrow raised a $4.3 million seed round at the end of last year, it said it was growing 20 percent each month, and its manufacturing facilities had just moved from from Mexico City to Mississippi.

Burrow’s Stephen Kuhl said that after a successful 2017, he and his co-founder Kabeer Chopra decided to start fundraising again at the end of January. One of their big goals was to enlist NEA’s Tony Florence — who also backed Casper and Jet.com. Now, Florence is joining Burrow’s board of directors.

“Direct-to-consumer commerce is an increasingly important category, particularly in verticals that have seen little innovation in the way products are built, marketed and distributed,” Florence said in an emailed statement. “The furniture market is ripe for disruption, and Burrow can deliver the quality, value, and convenience that consumers demand from ecommerce shopping experiences. We’re excited to partner with Stephen and his team as they tackle this tremendous opportunity.”

The startup’s main product is a sofa with a modular design, making it easy to move and adjust in different living spaces. (You can buy it in one- to four-seat configurations, with the three-seater currently priced at $1,095.) The modules are delivered in relatively compact boxes, and assembly is only supposed to take 10 minutes, with no tools required.

The lineup has expanded to include an ottoman and a chaise sectional couch, and Burrow also recently added the option to include wooden legs.

Kuhl told me the new funding will allow Burrow to hire aggressively, open additional factories and introduce new, non-sofa products — the plan is to turn the company into “an entire home lifestyle brand.”

“We want to be known for not making people compromise,” he added. “Whether it’s price, quality, convenience, experience, comfort — any of those things, we want to provide the best overall experience.”

Could this be just the beginning of a much bigger Cambridge Analytica scandal for Facebook? The answer rides on how transparent Facebook is actually being right now. CEO Mark Zuckerberg put forth a statement and plan to improve data privacy, but omitted some of the most greivous inquiries, and stopped short of apologizing.

Exactly how Facebook handled the multi-year fiasco could be core to whether the public forgets and goes back to scrolling their News Feed, or whether users leave en masse while government regulators swoop in. With journalists around the world digging in and government officials calling for Zuckerberg to testify, the truth is likely to trickle out. Here’s what we want to know:

1. To what exent did Facebook vigorously investigate whether Cambridge Analytica had actually deleted all its Facebook user data back in 2015 when it made it promise to do so, and why didn’t it inform the public of the situation? (When did Zuckerberg find out? Was Facebook concerned about appearing liberal and for investigating a conservative political organization?)
2. How could Facebook not know Cambridge Analytica was using ill-gotten Facebook data when Facebook employees worked directly with the Donald Trump campaign? (Facebook employees worked side-by-side with Cambridge Analytica in Trump’s San Antonio campaign office, so did they look the other way about suspicious data?)
3. Did Cambridge Analytica attain illicit Facebook data from any other sources besides Alexander Koger’s app, such as from other apps it operated, scraping Facebook group membership, or buying data from other developers? (Was the Trump campaign’s masterful use of Facebook and other social media powered by more than just this one data set, perhaps even from other social networks?)
4. Is there any evidence that data from Russian hackers or the governemnt was used by Cambridge Analytica to inform Trump’s campaign marketing? (If so, could Facebook be the smoking gun of potential collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign?)
5. Is Facebook retaining data, ads, or posts connected to Cambridge Analytica for further investigation? (If Cambridge Analytica did misuse data, what content was powered by that misuse, and who else pitched in?)
6. Why did Facebook try to suppress the stories about Cambridge Analytica from news outlets like The Observer with legal threats if it’s so serious about atoning for the scandal? (Who authorized or conducted those threats, and what’s happened to them since?)
7. How will Facebook ensure the security of user data attained by apps given that there could be tons of developers storing multiple separate copies of the data, beyond the big or suspicious ones Facebook plans to audit? (Should the public expect more news of app data misuse by other developers?)

We knew Jack Dorsey was bullish on bitcoin, but some new quotes reveal that he’s really really bullish.

In an interview with the Times of London, the Twitter and Square chief executive expressed a strong belief in bitcoin’s shot at outliving its growing pains in order to grow into a ubiquitous digital currency.

“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be bitcoin,” Dorsey said. He added that the timeline would play out “probably over ten years, but it could go faster.”

In spite of conceding that bitcoin “does not have the capabilities right now to become an effective currency,” Dorsey thinks that it will grow into a better one over time as improvements to the core technology roll out.

“It’s slow and it’s costly, but as more and more people have it, those things go away. There are newer technologies that build off of blockchain and make it more approachable,” Dorsey told the Times.

Just last week, Dorsey contributed to a $2.5 million seed round for Lightning Labs, a Bay Area startup focused on the Lightning Network, a protocol that layers on top of a cryptocurrency like bitcoin. That layer aims to speed things up by creating a secondary channel with its own mini digital ledger that keeps excess traffic off of a congested blockchain (you can read more about how that works in this helpful Coindesk explainer).

Dorsey also intends to continue supporting bitcoin through Square, his mobile payments company. Square Cash added support for bitcoin last year and the feature recently rolled out to all Square Cash users.

Uber appeared set to hire Assaf Ronen, the former vice president of Amazon’s voice and natural user interface shopping, to lead its products — but it looks like that isn’t going to happen due to a discrepancy in his working history, according to Recode.

Uber discovered a discrepancy related to his tenure at Amazon, where the company appeared to be under the assumption he was working at Amazon at the time of offering him the job, and rescinded its offer, according to Recode. Ronen had actually left Amazon at the very end of 2017 and was not actually working at Amazon at the time, according to Recode, which posted a memo of new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s explanation of what happened. Ronen was brought in to take over the lead product role following the departure of former Twitter product lead and Google Maps exec Daniel Graf.

Since taking over, Khosrowshahi has tried to distance himself from the Uber under former CEO Travis Kalanick. Often times, CEOs will tell you that their number-one job is recruiting. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has mentioned it on a quarterly earnings call at least once a year for the past three years, for example, usually something to the extent of “my primary focus is on recruiting.” That’s obviously going to be a big tenet that will determine Khosrowshahi’s vision for the company and, ultimately, his legacy.

Current product VP Manik Gupta will be running the company’s product operations in the mean time, according to the memo obtained by Recode. Ronen would have been a marquee hire for Uber, but as the company has gone through a myriad of blunders under Kalanick, in addition to one of its autonomous vehicles being involved in an accident with a pedestrian on Monday.

We reached out to Uber for additional comment and will update the story when we hear back.

It’s been almost eighteen months since the boards of AT&T and Time Warner unanimously voted to sign an agreement to merge their two companies together and create a content and distribution powerhouse. That deal, pegged at $108 billion including debt from Time Warner, would be among the largest corporate mergers in American history. The U.S. Department of Justice sued to block the deal this past November, and now after long last, the antitrust trial that will determine the deal’s fate is about to start tomorrow with opening statements, following a snow delay today in Washington DC.

This case is sprawling — the Justice Department intends to present 519 exhibits already — and much of the case will hinge on technical legal minutia. However, at its heart is a critical question on whether a combination of AT&T and Time Warner would help or hurt competition and thus ultimately consumer welfare.

This is a very important case to understand, because the court will have to reach a nuanced understanding of antitrust law in the complex and deeply interconnected world of video services. The decision rendered here could drastically affect consumer choice as well as the business practices of companies across the tech industry.

A framework to understand antitrust

Before getting into the specifics of AT&T-Time Warner though, we need to understand how antitrust works — which is quite a bit more nuanced than the media generally describes.

The essential goal of antitrust regulations is to protect consumers from predatory business practices driven by companies who hold outsized market power. While companies can grow market power over time (think a fast-growing startup eating more and more marketshare), the reality is that the U.S. government by and large avoids using antitrust to target a company in the normal operation of its business (Microsoft back in the 1990s being a notable exception).

Instead, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice directs its attention to mergers and acquisitions as key decision points where it can review a transaction and determine whether the combined company helps or hurts competition. Companies conducting transactions must submit documentation to antitrust bodies as part of what is known as the HSR process.

Mergers are generally divided into two categories. The first is a horizontal merger, which is when two direct competitors join forces and merge — think Uber and Lyft hypothetically. The other form is a vertical merger, which is when two companies with related businesses come together in order to offer a more comprehensive and synergistic set of services in their product market.

In reviewing these transactions, the FTC’s goal is to increase competition and improve consumer welfare in all industries. Horizontal mergers are generally placed under strong scrutiny, since by definition, removing a competitor from a marketplace reduces competition (although there are exceptions).

Here is where the nuance starts to become more pronounced. The FTC generally views vertical mergers more positively, since combining related companies can reduce costs, which ultimately improves consumer welfare.

Bruce Hoffman, the acting director of the Bureau of Competition at the FTC, explained vertical merger theory and why the FTC generally looks more favorably on the practice in a speech earlier this year:

As compared to arms-length contracting, a vertically integrated firm can more readily realize efficiencies in the form of lower costs or improved quality, conditions that greatly benefit customers of the firm. In addition, vertical mergers can eliminate the problem of “double markup,” which occurs when two firms, each with market power over a complementary product, set prices independently. Due to the problem of double markup, separate price setting leads to a higher prices and lower levels of output. A vertical merger of these two firms allows for joint price setting over the two products, which leads to higher profits but also increased output. These built-in effects, while not necessarily large or dispositive in all cases, render the starting point for our analysis of vertical mergers more challenging than horizontal mergers.

The FTC may look more favorably upon vertical mergers, but that doesn’t mean it always supports them. Hoffman noted in his speech that the FTC has fought 22 vertical mergers since 2000. He indicates three typical concerns: that the merged companies can block new competitors, that they can foreclose competitors from customers or key inputs, and that they may have confidential information that allows them to compete with competitors unfairly. Each of these may be a reason to either block a transaction, or to demand changes or on-going monitoring of a merger.

So to review, the FTC doesn’t care about size per se — it isn’t against consolidation, and in fact, may favor consolidation in cases where the newly merged company can be a more effective competitor in the marketplace and therefore increase consumer welfare.

Antitrust and AT&T-Time Warner

With that framework in mind, AT&T-Time Warner becomes much more complicated. The video production and distribution industry is oligopolistic — there are a handful of major studios, channels, distributors, and platforms in the industry that drive most of the value here. Balancing those competing interests against each other is the best route toward maximizing competition and therefore consumer welfare.

The players in this space are some of the largest companies in the world. Through DirecTV, AT&T is the largest multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) in the U.S. with 25 million subscribers, and of course, it is the largest telecom company in the world. Time Warner is one of the most powerful content producers in the U.S., owning channels like TBS and TNT, premium subscription services like HBO, as well as Warner Bros, which is one of the largest and most profitable movie studios.

The two companies may be powerful, and combining them will only heighten those powers. However, they are facing incredible headwinds from the technology industry, namely the so-called FAANG group of internet giants: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (and by extension, YouTube). Every single one of these companies has made video a top priority, and their war chests and valuations are similarly powerful.

As the counsel for AT&T-Time Warner pointed out in trial according to CNNMoney, “Petrocelli told Judge Leon that their estimates show FAANG is worth $3 trillion collectively, while an AT&T-Time Warner entity post-merger would be worth $300 billion. ‘We’re chasing their tail lights,’ Petrocelli said.”

Given that industry context, the critical question then is whether combining AT&T and Time Warner would help consumer choice in the video industry by allowing the two companies to more effectively compete as equals with the internet giants, or whether it would use its assets to leverage additional fees from competitors, and ultimately suck its competitors dry by forcing more customers on to its platforms, thereby limiting consumer choice.

The Department of Justice is clearly arguing the latter. There are a couple of considerations. In the government’s favor, Time Warner owns the assets to several critical live sports and news organizations including the NBA, MLB, NCAA men’s basketball tournament (i.e. March Madness), and the PGA, along with CNN and associated networks. This live programming is increasingly valuable for distirbutors, because viewers watch ads and also perceive the content to have scarcity.

Therefore, such programming is considered “must have” for distributors, so Time Warner is able to charge a premium for access. If AT&T and Time Warner merged, the fear is that they would raise prices on this sort of critical content, forcing its competitors to increase prices to retain carriage rights. AT&T could keep the prices of its own distribution level (they own the content after all), which would make its services more attractive to consumers. Ultimately, that limits consumer choice.

Another factor in favor of the government, particularly since December when the FCC repealed net neutrality, is that AT&T, as a major mobile telecom provider, will have significant power to control the quality of service that customers of the internet giants will experience. AT&T could throttle Netflix, for instance, unless Netflix buys Turner-produced content. A merger gives the company more market power, and that would likely cause price increases in the industry.

The government doesn’t have a simple case to make though. A factor in favor of AT&T-Time Warner is that its content costs are increasingly being dwarfed by the internet giants. Time Warner’s HBO segment spent $2.2 billion in 2017 according to the company’s 10-K form, compared to more than $6 billion dollars by Netflix in the same time period. Turner, the segment that includes TBS and TNT, spent $4.46 billion.

In other words, Netflix is spending almost as much money as Time Warner as a whole does, and also owns its customers through its streaming subscription model. Add in large original content budgets from Google, Apple, and Amazon, and suddenly Time Warner looks like a (relatively) small fish in a very large pond.

Another point in favor of the merger is that the government allowed Comcast’s acquisition of NBC to go through, albeit with restrictions on the deal and active monitoring. As Hoffman of the FTC said in January though, “…we prefer structural remedies—they eliminate both the incentive and the ability to engage in harmful conduct, which eliminates the need for ongoing intervention.” Structural remedies here means divestitures or an outright block, as opposed to active monitoring requiring the DoJ to continually work with a company to ensure compliance.

These are just some of the points that both sides are going to argue over the next six to eight weeks in district court. The court will have to decide how consumers are going to fare in a merger scenario and whether they are better off with or without it.

In my view, the merger is unlikely to be favorable to consumers, given the history of similar mergers in the past, AT&T’s business actions in recent years, and the generally positive business models of Netflix and other online streaming services with their convenience and efficiency for consumers.

The caveat is that the internet giants are just that — giants, and their continued growth means that fewer and fewer companies can compete with them in these markets. Allowing AT&T-Time Warner to go through may limit competition today, but that may already happen in the future if Time Warner falls behind its content competitors.

Unfortunately, markets are dynamic, while the conclusion of tomorrow’s case is a static decision in a point of time. While the future may be hard to predict, it seems unlikely that FAANG’s aspirations are going to diminish, and their consolidation may limit what little competition exists in this space. On balance, the court should probably say no, but that decision may well have been different a year or two from now.

As Judge Leon, who is overseeing the case, said this week quoted by CNNMoney, ”I always tell people at parties, I don’t have a crystal ball. In this case I have to get a crystal ball! Maybe at one of those second-hand stores somewhere!” Let’s hope that crystal ball is very good indeed.

“I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted after days of the public and government officials waiting for him to speak up about the Cambridge Analytica scandal since it broke Friday. “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.”

Zuckerberg laid out a slate of changes Facebook will make to prevent past and future abuses of user data by app developers. Those include:

1. Blocking data access of apps you haven’t used for three months or more
2. Auditing old apps that collected a lot of personal data
3. Reducing the amount of data apps can pull using Facebook Login without an additional permissions screen to just your name, profile photo, and email address
4. Requiring a signed contract from developers that want to pull your posts or private information
5. Surfacing Facebook’s privacy third-party app privacy settings tool atop the News Feed to help people repeal access to apps
6. Telling people if their data was misued by the app associated with Cambridge Analytica, or apps Facebook bans for misue in the future.

What’s missing from this response is any indication why Facebook didn’t do more to enforce its policy prohibiting apps from sharing user data, or why it took Cambridge Analytica at their word when they said they deleted the data without proper investigation.

The proposed solutions should help users take better control of their data while putting sensible friction and documentation in place for app developers that want people’s personal info or content. The audits of developers who pulled lots of friends’ data before the 2014 change that restricted that ability could root out some more bad actors.

But overall, the plan doesn’t address the fact that tons of developers pulled and may still be in possession of illicit Facebook data. Now off of Facebook’s servers, it has little control over it. Finding and deleting every copy of these data sets may be impossible. That could lead to future data scandals that may make people take Zuckerberg up on his assertion that if Facebook can’t keep people’s data safe, they shouldn’t use it.

You can read Zuckerberg’s full post below:

It’s moved beyond tradition and into the realm of meme that Apple manages to dominate the news cycle around major industry events all while not actually participating in said events. CES rolls around and every story is about HomeKit or its competitors, another tech giant has a conference and the news is that Apple updated some random subsystem of its ever-larger ecosystem of devices and software.

This is, undoubtedly planned by Apple in many instances. And why not? Why shouldn’t it own the cycle when it can, it’s only strategically sound.

This week, the 2018 Game Developer’s Conference is going on and there’s a bunch of news coverage about various aspects of the show. There are all of the pre-written embargo bits about big titles and high-profile indies, there are the trend pieces and, of course, there’s the traditional ennui-laden ‘who is this event even for’ post that accompanies any industry event that achieves critical mass.

But the absolute biggest story of the event wasn’t even at the event. It was the launch of Fortnite and, shortly thereafter, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on mobile devices. Specifically, both were launched on iOS and PUBG hit Android simultaneously.

The launch of Fortnite, especially, resonates across the larger gaming spectrum in several unique ways. It’s the full and complete game as present on consoles, it’s iOS-first and it supports cross-platform play with console and PC players.

This has, essentially, never happened before. There have been stabs at one or more of those conditions on experimental levels but it really marks a watershed in the games industry that could serve to change the psychology around the platform discussion in major ways. 

For one, though the shape of GDC has changed over the years as it relates to mobile gaming – it’s only recently that the conference has become dominated by indie titles that are mobile centric. The big players and triple-A console titles still take up a lot of air, but the long tail is very long and mobile is not synonymous with “casual gamers” as it once was.

“I remember the GDC before we launched Monument Valley,” says Dan Gray of Monument Valley 2 studio ustwo. “We were fortunate enough that Unity offered us a place on their stand. Nobody had heard of us or our game and we were begging journalists to come say hello, it’s crazy how things have changed in four years. We’ve now got three speakers at the conference this year, people stop you in the street (within a two block radius) and we’re asked to be part of interviews like this about the future of mobile.”

Zach Gage, the creator of SpellTower, and my wife’s favorite game of all time, Flip Flip Solitaire, says that things feel like they have calmed down a bit. “It seems like that might be boring, but actually I think it’s quite exciting, because a consequence of it is that playing games has become just a normal thing that everyone does… which frankly, is wild. Games have never had the cultural reach that they do now, and it’s largely because of the App Store and these magical devices that are in everyones pockets.”

Alto’s Odyssey is the followup to Snowman’s 2015 endless boarder Alto’s Adventure. If you look at these two titles, three years apart, you can see the encapsulation of the growth and maturity of gaming on iOS. The original game was fun, but the newer title is beyond fun and into a realm where you can see the form being elevated into art. And it’s happening blazingly fast.

“There’s a real and continually growing sense that mobile is a platform to launch compelling, artful experiences,” says Snowman’s Ryan Cash. “This has always been the sentiment among the really amazing community of developers we’ve been lucky enough to meet. What’s most exciting to me, now, though, is hearing this acknowledged by representatives of major console platforms. Having conversations with people about their favorite games from the past year, and seeing that many of them are titles tailor-made for mobile platforms, is really gratifying. I definitely don’t want to paint the picture that mobile gaming has ever been some sort of pariah, but there’s a definite sense that more people are realizing how unique an experience it is to play games on these deeply personal devices.”

Mobile gaming as a whole has fought since the beginning against the depiction that it was for wasting time only, not making ‘true art’, which was reserved for consoles or dedicated gaming platforms. Aside from the ‘casual’ vs. ‘hardcore’ debate, which is more about mechanics, there was a general stigma that mobile gaming was a sidecar bet to the main functions of these devices, and that their depth would always reflect that. But the narratives and themes being tackled on the platform beyond just clever mechanics are really incredible.

Playing Monument Valley 2 together with my daughter really just blew my doors off, and I think it changed a lot of people’s minds in this regard. The interplay between the characters and environment and a surprisingly emotional undercurrent for a puzzle game made it a breakout that was also a breakthrough of sorts.

“There’s so many things about games that are so awesome that the average person on the street doesn’t even know about,” says Gray. “As small developers right now we have the chance to make somebody feel a range of emotions about a video game for the first time, it’s not often you’re in the right place at the right time for this and to do it with the most personal device that sits in your pocket is the perfect opportunity.”

The fact that so many of the highest profile titles are launching on iOS first is a constant source of consternation for Android users, but it’s largely a function of addressable audience.

I spoke to Apple VP Greg Joswiak about Apple’s place in the industry. “Gaming has always been one of the most popular categories on the App Store,” he says. A recent relaunch of the App Store put gaming into its own section and introduced a Today tab that tells stories about the games and about their developers.

That redesign, he says, has been effective. “Traffic to the App Store is up significantly, and with higher traffic, of course, comes higher sales.”

“One thing I think smaller developers appreciate from this is the ability to show the people behind the games,” says ustwo’s Gray about the new gaming and Today sections in the App Store. “Previously customers would just see an icon and assume a corporation of 200 made the game, but now it’s great we can show this really is a labour of love for a small group of people who’re trying to make something special. Hopefully this leads to players seeing the value in paying up front for games in the future once they can see the craft that goes into something.”

Snowman’s Cash agrees. “It’s often hard to communicate the why behind the games you’re making — not just what your game is and does, but how much went into making it, and what it could mean to your players. The stories that now sit on the Today tab are a really exciting way to do this; as an example, when Alto’s Odyssey released for pre-order, we saw a really positive player response to the discussion of the game’s development. I think the variety that the new App Store encourages as well, through rotational stories and regularly refreshed sections, infuses a sense of variety that’s great for both players and developers. There’s a real sense I’m hearing that this setup is equipped to help apps and games surface, and stayed surfaced, in a longer term and more sustainable way.”

In addition, there are some technical advantages that keep Apple ahead of Android in this arena. Plenty of Android devices are very performant and capable in individual ways, but Apple has a deep holistic grasp of its hardware that allow it to push platform advantages in introducing new frameworks like ARKit. Google’s efforts in the area with AR Core are just getting started with the first batch of 1.0 apps coming online now, but Google will always be hamstrung by the platform fragmentation that forces developers to target a huge array of possible software and hardware limitations that their apps and games will run up against.

This makes shipping technically ambitious projects like Fortnite on Android as well as iOS a daunting task. “There’s a very wide range of Android devices that we want to support,” Epic Games’ Nick Chester told Forbes. “We want to make sure Android players have a great experience, so we’re taking more time to get it right.“

That wide range of devices includes an insane differential in GPU capability, processing power, Android version and update status.

“We bring a very homogenous customer base to developers where 90% of [devices] are on the current versions of iOS,” says Joswiak. Apple’s customers embrace those changes and updates quickly, he says, and this allows developers to target new features and the full capabilities of the devices more quickly.

Ryan Cash sees these launches on iOS of ‘full games’ as they exist elsewhere as a touchstone of sorts that could legitimize the idea of mobile as a parity platform.

“We have a few die-hard Fortnite players on the team, and the mobile version has them extremely excited,” says Cash. “I think more than the completeness of these games (which is in of itself a technical feat worth celebrating!), things like Epic’s dedication to cross-platform play are massive. Creating these linked ecosystems where players who prefer gaming on their iPhones can enjoy huge cultural touchstone titles like Fortnite alongside console players is massive. That brings us one step closer to an industry attitude which focuses more on accessibility, and less on siloing off experiences and separating them into tiers of perceived quality.”

“I think what is happening is people are starting to recognize that ios devices are everywhere, and they are the primary computers of many people,” says Zach Gage. “When people watch a game on Twitch, they take their iPhone out of their pocket and download it. Not because they want to know if there’s a mobile version, but because they just want the game. It’s natural to assume that these games available for a computer or a playstation, and it’s now natural to assume that it would be available for your phone.”

Ustwo’s Gray says that it’s great that the big games are transitioning, but also cautions that there needs to be a sustainable environment for mid-priced games on iOS that specifically use the new capabilities of these devices.

“It’s great that such huge games are transitioning this way, but for me I’d really like to see more $30+ titles designed and developed specifically for iPhone and iPad as new IP, really taking advantage of of how these devices are used,” he says. “It’s definitely going to benefit the AppStore as a whole, but It does need to be acknowledged however that the way players interact with console/PC platforms and mobile are inherently different and should be designed accordingly. Session lengths and the interaction vocabulary of players are two of the main things to consider, but if a game manages to somehow satisfy the benefits of all those platforms then great, but I think it’s hard.”

Apple may not be an official sponsor of GDC, but it is hosting two sessions at the show including an introduction to Metal 2, its rendering pipeline, and ARKit, its hope for the future of gaming on mobile. This presence is exciting for a number of reasons, as it shows a greater willingness by Apple to engage the community that has grown around its platforms, but also that the industry is becoming truly integrated, with mobile taking its rightful place alongside console and portable gaming as a viable target for the industry’s most capable and interesting talent.

“They’re bringing the current generation of console games to iOS,” Joswiak says, of launches like Fortnite and PUBG and notes that he believes we’re at a tipping point when it comes to mobile gaming, because mobile platforms like the iPhone and iOS offer completely unique combinations of hardware and software features that are iterated on quickly.

“Every year we are able to amp up the tech that we bring to developers,” he says, comparing it to the 4-5 year cycle in console gaming hardware. “Before the industry knew it, we were blowing people away [with the tech]. The full gameplay of these titles has woken a lot of people up.”

It might be a snow day in Washington, but the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on election system security continued as planned. During Wednesday’s hearing, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and her predecessor Jeh Johnson appeared with a panel of state election officials to hash out the recommendations issued by the committee on Tuesday.

“This issue is urgent,” said Senate Intel Chairman Richard Burr in his opening statements. “If we start to fix these problems tomorrow, we still might not be in time to save the system for [2018] and 2020.”

The hearing often turned to what broke down during the 2016 election, describing the kind of measures and policies that need to be put in place to allow federal and state officials to communicate smoothly around future threats, including the established threat from Russia. We learned last year that Russia targeted election systems in at least 21 states. Many members of the committee expect other U.S. adversaries to adopt that same model around known vulnerabilities.

“Despite evidence of interference, the federal government and the states had barely communicated about strengthening our defenses,” said Senate Intel Vice Chair Mark Warner. “It was not until the fall of 2017 that DHS even fully notified the states they had been potential targets.”

So what’s changing?

For one, Homeland Security won’t let coordinating the security clearances for as many as 150 relevant state election officials get in the way of handing down important election system intelligence. Only 20 officials out of that 150 number have that clearance now.

“We’ve worked out the processes whereby if we have actionable information we will provide it to the state and local officials on a day read-in so we are not letting the lack of clearance hold us back,” Nielsen said. “If we have information to share with them in respect to a real threat, we will do so.”

According to Amy Cohen, Executive Director of the National Association of State Election Directors, an organization that brings together election officials in all 50 states, states have made “great strides” since the former DHS secretary designated all election systems as critical infrastructure in January of 2017.

States that may have been nervous about federal overreach after the critical infrastructure designation (which applied to all aspects of federal state and local elections including polling places, storage facilities, voter registration databases, and the voting machines themselves) seem to be warming up to and opting into the “technical resources” that Homeland Security has on offer. As of today, more than half of the states have signed up for Homeland Security’s optional cybersecurity audits. That program helps states identify potential system vulnerabilities and makes recommendations based on its findings.

“To be clear there has been a learning curve on the sharing of information,” Nielsen said. One challenge is understanding how states vary in operating and organizing their elections. For example, an election that would be run by a county in one state might be the domain of the governor or the secretary of state’s office in another.

“Today I can say with confidence that we know whom to contact in every state to share threat information,” Nielsen said. “That did not exist in 2016.”

While Homeland Security and the states have made progress since the 2016 election, those improvements are incremental and uneven. State budgets vary and some rely more heavily on federal funds for required steps for securing their elections, like purging insecure election machines and purchasing new machines that leave an auditable paper trail. Many states are currently undertaking the steps necessary to get their election systems up to Homeland Security’s recommended standards, even as U.S. adversaries likely continue to probe existing systems for cyber weaknesses.

“The threat of interference remains,” Nielsen admitted. “We recognize that the 2018 midterm and future elections are clearly potential targets for Russian hacking attempts.”

Last August, we told you about Laura Deming, a New Zealand native who was home schooled before moving halfway around the world as a 12-year-old to work alongside Cynthia Kenyon, a renowned molecular biologist who specializes in the genetics of aging.

At age 14, she began studying at M.I.T. When she turned 16, she dropped out to join Peter Thiel’s two-year-old Thiel Fellowship program, which gives $100,000 to young people “who want to build new things.” By last August, when we profiled Deming, she had closed on $22 million in commitments for her second venture fund, which supports aging-related startups. She was 23.

Because Deming has always had an intriguing relationship with time, we weren’t all that surprised when she reached out to us late last week to let us know her San Francisco-based venture firm, The Longevity Fund, has now established a new accelerator program — one with backing from famed investor Marc Andreessen, the early-stage venture firm Felicis Ventures, and other, unnamed investors.

Deming isn’t disclosing how much money will be invested through the accelerator, called Age 1, but she does say the pool of capital is distinct from the money she’s investing with Longevity Fund. She also says that Andreessen, Felicis, and her other backers will serve as mentors to the companies that pass through the program.

Other notable details about Age 1: Deming says that she and her advisors — including serial entrepreneur Elad Gil, who most recently cofounded the genomics testing company Color Genomics — will be “quite flexible” when it comes to the stage of applicants. She says the bigger idea is to help them get to a significant “value inflection point” within four months, which is how long the program runs.

Instead of accepting startups serially, Age 1 will work with small batches of startups — between three and five at a time — and it’s accepting them right now on a rolling basis, though it’s already planning to present them to an invite-only group of investors on October 5 in the Bay Area. (Startups can apply here.)

Though there’s not necessarily a headquarters for the program, Age 1 will provide co-working space for companies that need it. It is also, very notably, providing them with $500,000 — more than more accelerators will plug into a startup.

What we don’t know: at what cost to each company. Asked about the ownership stake that Age 1 expects for its checks, Deming, over email, declines to say.

As what Deming and company are looking for, she suggests the program is particularly interested in working with startups that are committed to addressing late-onset medical conditions relating to Alzheimer’s, heart disease, diabetes and more. Though they’re casting a wide net, she adds that “one of hundreds of things we’d be interested in seeing is more work on the role of the circadian or other developmental clocks in longevity.”

Whether Deming’s ability to nurture startups is as promising as her prodigious understanding of biology remains to be seen, but her venture record to date is certainly encouraging. Though Longevity has a fairly limited number of portfolio companies thus far, one of them, the genome editing technology company Precision Biosciences, secured a partnership last month with food giant Cargill; the two are now working together on a new product to reduce saturated fat in canola oil.

Another portfolio company — Unity Biotechnology, a company that’s trying to reverse aging through therapeutics — meanwhile closed on $55 million in Series C funding on Monday. It has raised more than $200 million at this point, including from Thiel’s Founders Fund, Jeff Bezos, Fidelity, and ARCH Venture Partners. 

To learn more about Deming, you might check out this TED talk she gave back in 2013.

Some of us have been on Facebook for more than a decade, but all good things come to an end. Over the past eighteen months, Facebook has been in a downward spiral. The social network is in the eye of a controversy storm, with fake news, Russia’s meddling in the 2016 Presidential election, and misuse of personal data by Cambridge Analytica swirling around Menlo Park.

Meanwhile, the company has lost billions in value, all coming down to the fact that the public’s trust in Facebook has been eroded, perhaps beyond repair.

If you’re ready to jump ship, the process isn’t all that difficult.

The first step is to make sure you have a copy of all your Facebook information. Facebook makes it relatively simple to download an archive of your account, which includes your Timeline info, posts you have shared, messages, photos, as well as more hidden information like ads you have clicked on, the IP addresses that are logged when you log into or out of Facebook, and more.

You can learn all about Downloading your Archive here.

To go ahead and download, just go to the Settings page once you’re logged in to Facebook and click “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”

Remember, you can’t go back and download your archive once you’ve deleted your account, so if you want that info at your fingertips, make sure to download the archive first.

Before you delete your account, know this: once your account is deleted, it can’t be recovered. If ever you want to rejoin Facebook, you’ll be starting from scratch.

Oddly, finding the button to delete your Facebook account isn’t available in the settings or menu. It lives on an outside page, which you can find by clicking right here.

Important note: It takes a few days from the time you click the Delete button to the time that your account is actually terminated. If you sign on during that period, the account will no longer be marked for termination and you’ll have to start over. It will take up to 90 days for your account to be fully deleted.

Moreover, some information like log records are stored in Facebook’s database after the account is fully deleted, but the company says that information is not personally identifiable. Information like messages you’ve sent to friends will still be accessible to them.

Keep in mind, Facebook still likely has access to a good deal of your data long after you’ve deleted your account. Plus, Facebook owns WhatsApp and Instagram. So if you really want to stop feeding data into the Facebook machine, you likely need to go ahead and delete those apps as well.

Omega has just announced a new version of their iconic Moonwatch, the chronograph that was worn most notably by Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon. Their new model, the Dark Side of the Moon Apollo 8, features the traditional Moonwatch design with a few unique tweaks.

The has an exhibition back – you can see the movement through a glass crystal – as well as a skeletonized face. The bridges – the pieces that hold the gears in place – are laser etched with a representation of the lunar surface and blackened for effect. It contains a manual wind mechanical movement and, while there is no pricing yet, should come in at about $9,000.

The back of the case features an interesting quote. From the release:

“WE’LL SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE” – the special words engraved on the caseback – were spoken by Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell on board the Apollo 8 mission at the start of the crew’s pioneering orbit to the dark side of the moon – a mysterious hemisphere never seen before by human eyes. Seconds before the spacecraft disappeared beyond the range of radio contact, Lovell spoke these final assuring words to ground control.

Why is this fancy and particularly expensive watch interesting? First, it’s a nice riff on the original Moonwatch, the first mechanical watch on the moon. Omega has been flogging the Moonwatch brand for decades and now they’re expanding to other space missions, including the Apollo 8. It’s a beautiful homage to the Golden Age of space exploration and it’s a bit more modern-looking than the original, austere black-and-white Speedmaster.

French startup Molotov has built the best TV streaming service in its home country. Unfortunately, if you tried using the service in other European countries, Molotov would simply stop working. The startup now lets you stream your content when you’re traveling across the European Union.

The European Union has been working hard on creating a digital single market across Europe. And the Council recently adopted a regulation to ban geoblocking across the European Union. European countries and online services have nine months to comply with the regulation.

And it looks like Molotov is complying as quickly as possible. You can expect a bunch of similar announcements in the coming months.

Molotov now has 5 million users. You can watch up to 80 different channels live, and on most channels, you can start over at the beginning of a program. Molotov also lets you search and watch content on catchup platforms. And finally, there’s a cloud recorder to store all your favorite shows. The service works on phones, tablets, laptops, smart TVs, Apple TV, Android TV and more.

The startup now wants to expand beyond France and partner with local TV channels in other European countries. Today’s news is just step one of a much bigger European play.

YouTube just became the Top Grossing iPhone app in the U.S. for the first time on Tuesday, after flirting with the top spot a number of times over the years, but never reaching higher than No. 3. The milestone was first spotted by the app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower, which notes that the U.S. is the only country where YouTube’s iPhone app has ever hit number one.

The app has been climbing up the Top Grossing charts for years, however, thanks to the launch of YouTube Red in-app subscriptions in fall 2015. In fact, YouTube Red’s arrival almost immediately pushed the app into the Top Grossing charts. The month after Red’s launch, the YouTube iPhone app jumped all the way up to No. 6, we noted at the time. It was then estimated to be bringing in over $100,000 per day – and perhaps as high as $300,000, excluding iPad.

YouTube’s iOS revenue has grown remarkably since then, of course, as YouTube Red itself grew in popularity, combined with other trends, like the rise of cord-cutting, YouTube’s youngest users finally getting their own phones, streaming plans from mobile carriers that don’t count YouTube’s data or those offering cheap unlimited data, the growth of live streaming, and the launch of other features to engage YouTube viewers – like messaging, Community, Reels, and more.

It’s unclear what may have pushed YouTube to No. 1, though. And it may have not been anything remarkable, just a steady climb upwards finally being rewarded, or maybe even a small tweak to Apple’s ranking algorithm.

According to Sensor Tower, gross user spending to date is more than $200 million worldwide on iOS since the start of YouTube’s in-app monetization in 2015. Last month it grossed approximately $14 million, a 133 percent year-over-year increase from February 2017. Though this month has not yet ended, YouTube’s worldwide iOS revenue is up 150 percent year-over-year to more than $12 million.

YouTube’s revenue comes largely from YouTube Red subscriptions, but it now includes Super Chat purchases as well – YouTube’s virtual tipping mechanism.

Although it’s obvious, we should point out that this revenue figure doesn’t include other sources, like YouTube Music or YouTube Gaming, which both also include in-app purchases. It also doesn’t Google Play, nor does it take into account the money YouTube makes in other ways, like rentals, purchases, and, of course, advertising.

The Top Grossing chart was removed from Apple’s App Store with its big makeover in iOS 11, but app store intelligence firms like App Annie and Sensor Tower still have access to this data. 

YouTube has not commented on Sensor Tower’s data. We’ll update if that changes.

During a recent interview with Forbes I was asked to reflect on the “Imposter Syndrome” and whether or not I was affected by it. My answer was “All the time, actually!” I came to realize that the insecurities attendant to being a first-generation college grad never really go away, and that their myriad visits continue to bedevil one’s sense of belonging.

I began to vaguely sense this after business school. I held three MIT degrees and yet the homogeneity of my workplace caused doubt to creep into my mind. The official recognition and naming of this syndrome changed me, because it made clear that I’d always have to remain on guard and proactively shore up feared shortcomings.

As investors, we constantly remind entrepreneurs that they’ll hear many nos and will have to power through them to get to the yesses. This is easier said than done for those whose insecurities are not held at bay by centuries of generational success. But, having been on the other side of this exchange while fundraising for the last two years, I’ve gained an appreciation for the process, and this will serve to help me de-personalize any future “nos” that come my way. More importantly, it’s helped me understand that to allow fear to cow me into less of an informed risk-taker is to be party to the dismantling of my own confidence.

Remaining an effective leader in the midst of the imposter syndrome is paramount, as is remaining active and on task, especially in the service of a greater good. For me, trepidation is best diffused by doing something for someone else. Being of service is an evergreen reminder that we have value, irrespective of extrinsics. The validation then cascades into a sense of belonging and worth, and the resultant bolstering of spirit conveniently spills over into energy applicable to the “regular” work ecosystem.

There’s a shared reality that applies to first-generation college grads and/or immigrants and/or underserved communities: beyond the drag of imposterism, risk taking is also inhibited by socioeconomic Swords of Damocles, such as income that can’t be gambled because it’s earmarked for food, health, family or other essentials. Invoking Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, financial brittleness inexorably dislevels one’s ability to propose and contend with unconstrained entrepreneurs. The struggle related to the twin bears of personal and financial fear is real, and it informs my passion to foster diversity through activism and venture capital.

MIT CSAIL just revealed footage of SoFi, the lab’s robotic fish, which looks right at home swimming amongst the coral reefs of Fiji. The project is an attempt to create an autonomous underwater vehicle that looks as close to a real fish as possible, in hopes of studying marine life without disturbing them in the process.

The system is built around a soft robotic muscle, designed to operate similarly to a real-life fish tail. “We developed a system that takes silicone elastomer and placed hollow cavities in such a way that can equally distribute pressure on the skin of the body,” the study’s lead author Robert Katzschmann told TechCrunch. “We have two balloon chambers and flow water back and forth. That change in pressure causes the tail to undulate back and forth.”

It’s a principle that works similarly to existing soft robotics, many of which utilize shifting pneumatics to create motion in their joints. Here, it allows for the fish to be in constant motion, emitting less sound as it travels through the water.

The team did, however, use sound in other ways. A diver, equipped with a waterproofed Super Nintendo employed a custom acoustic system to help guide SoFi from afar.

“One challenge is that radio signals are absorbed really quickly in water, so something like WiFi or Bluetooth would only work within a few feet,” explained grad student, Joseph DelPreto. “Sound travels really well underwater, so we used that instead. The remote control sends out sounds that are too high-pitched for humans to hear, but the robot can decode them. Using this, we can send high-level commands to the robot.”

For now, the system is a cool video, but the team hopes access provided by Sofi’s on-board camera and fisheye lens could ultimately give marine biologists unprecedented access to their subjects.

“The fish could potentially do extraordinary things for our understanding of whales,” expand CSAIL head Daniel Rus, adding that whale births have been an extremely difficult phenomenon to capture on video. “Imagine using our fish as a non-threatening observer that is able to capture images and scenes that have never been seen before. We can learn so much about marine life.”

Sketchfab has built a huge library of 3D models. Some of them are available under a Creative Common license, others can be purchased. The startup now wants to help you do stuff with all this content. You can now download and import 3D models into your favorite 3D app.

Behind the scenes, Sketchfab has built a download API and some integrations with popular 3D tools. After that, you’ll find a Sketchfab search bar in a third-party app. You can type a few keywords, filter by quality, preview and then download a 3D model into your current work.

Sketchfab uses the glTF format. Eventually, the startup will let you store your own 3D models so you can access them from all Sketchfab-enabled apps. You’ll also find your purchased model in there, too.

Sketchfab has developed plugins for Unity, Unreal and Godot. Game developers are going to love this integration, especially if you want to put together a quick prototype before building your own 3D models.

You also can use Sketchfab in Torch3D, Minsight, Spatial stories, Selerio, StellarX, Holobeam, AnimVR, Plattar, Sketchbox3D and Looking Glass.

And the company is also working on integrations for Amazon Sumerian, Blender, Substance, Modo, Cinema 4D, Octane, HighFidelity, Aframe, Houdini, Sansar, Mimesys, The Wave VR, Masterpiece VR, Artomatix, Flipside VR, Blend Media, NormalVR, Vectary, Streem, and Meta glasses.

As you can see, Sketchfab covers a wide range of 3D software, as well as VR and AR platforms. There are more than 2.5 million 3D files on Sketchfab. So it makes sense to provide a download API that works just like Giphy integrations in messaging apps.

Netflix announced in a Medium post today that it is opening a public bug bounty program on the Bugcrowd bug bounty platform.

The roots of the company’s bug hunting concept go back to 2013 when Netflix launched what it called a,”responsible vulnerability disclosure program.” The idea continued to develop over the years and they launched a private bug bounty program on Bugcrowd in 2016. They started small with 100 researchers and today at the launch of the public program they have increased that number to 700, according to the blog post.

They report since inception they have been able to solve 145 issues, paying out a variety of bounties with the highest being $15,000. “We have attempted to fine tune things like triage quality, response time and researcher interactions to build a quality program that researchers like to participate in,” the company wrote in the blog post announcing the program.

Netflix is far from alone in running these kinds of programs. Many big organizations like Facebook, Google and many others use bug bounty programs to pay researchers to find security holes on their platforms before black-hat hackers do. The idea is to provide financial incentive to find the bugs, rather than going in and exploiting the vulnerability for personal gain.

There is generally a leader board, so in addition to financial remuneration, the researcher also gets bragging rights and public acclaim for tracking down bugs. And it’s not just traditional tech companies running these programs. General Motors has one running on the HackerOne platform and MasterCard has one on Bugcrowd.

Bugcrowd and other bug bounty platforms like HackerOne provide a way to administer the program, providing a way to recruit researchers, then letting them know which vulnerabilities they are looking for and how much they are willing to pay. To give you a sense of how lucrative these programs can be to hackers, Google released a report last month indicating it paid out almost $3 million in bounties last year with rewards ranging from $500 to $100,000.

Netflix is hoping to attract people who can similarly help them track bugs and keep their systems secure. A bug bounty program is a proven way to achieve that.

Elon Musk raised a significant chunk of money for his tunnel boring venture, the aptly named Boring Company, via sales of a heavily marked up ‘flamethrower’ with Boring Co. branding. Those pre-sales are all concluded, but now people who put down cash to reserve one are finding out when they can get their flame on.

In an email to pre-order buyers, The Boring Company noted that the technically “not-a-flamethrower” production run should be wrapping up this spring, which means deliveries can be expected at least in time for “summer party” time. That’s good because people definitely need this fire generating device in time for the dry summer months, when forest fire risks are highest.

Another tidbit from the note to buyers: Customers can expect terms and conditions to be signed off ahead of shipments, which should be heading out in the next couple of weeks according to the company. The Boring Co. notes that these will be “rhyming,” and I presume they mean that literally – but they probably also have the serious purpose of making sure Elon’s corporate lawyers can once again enjoy something resembling sleep when these go out to customers.

Based on the shipping schedule of The Boring Company hat, which (full disclosure) I did buy (I did not buy the ‘not flamethrower’ flamethrower), if you ordered these you can probably still expect to wait a few more weeks if not months.