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A look back at Amazon’s 1997 IPO http://ift.tt/2t1ogWx Alex Wilhelm is the editor-in-chief of Crunchbase News and co-host of Equity, TechCrunch's venture capital-focused podcast. More posts by this contributor: Amid tech’s current rally, Seattle is enjoying the updraft. Amazon, one of the area’s two critical tech companies, is busy setting records. Shares of Amazon, the e-commerce and cloud computing leader, have busily risen, recently cresting the $1,000 per-share mark. That per-share price is up from Amazon’s 52-week low of $682 and change. Driving that valuation is continued growth, improved cash flow, and widespread adoption of its cloud computing unit. As the company reported in its first-quarter earnings, its revenue grew 23 percent to $35.7 billion, and its trailing operational cash flow grew to $17.6 billion, up from $11.6 billion in the year-ago period. In that same first quarter, AWS grew its revenue from $2.6 billion to $3.7 billion. All that and Amazon is said to have an appetite for Slack, the popular business chat startup, and has made overtures concerning Whole Foods, for which it has bid $13.7 billion. Even for today’s platform ecosystem, Amazon’s footprint is broad. Today and back thenBut it wasn’t always so. Today, let’s turn back the clock and peek at Amazon’s S-1 document it filed in 1997. What did Amazon look like back then, and if you could go back in time, could you convince yourself to bet the house on the tiny company? Perhaps, but we’re looking backward for more reason than curiosity. Instead, just as it’s interesting to read pitch decks from companies that have since become behemoths, it’s worth our time to examine the S-1 documents of the now-giants. What can we see in their numbers that might help us better understand later offerings? To that end, let’s go back a few decades, to the year in which the first Harry Potter book was published, and Metallica released Reload. 1997Before Alexa, Prime, and reasonably quick internet, Amazon filed to go public. Back then, Amazon was a simpler entity. Its S-1 is plain about what it did back then: “Amazon.com is the leading online retailer of books.” To underscore that “leading” status, Amazon included some metrics in the following paragraph so small that they feel quaint by today’s standards: “Average daily visits (not “hits”) have grown from approximately 2,200 in December 1995 to approximately 80,000 in March 1997[.]” The company explained its market by detailing the scale of the book market. To wit:
Notably, Amazon’s quarterly revenue is now larger than the United States’ book industry was per year back in those days. Back in 1997, Amazon was tiny, with just 256 employees listed at the end of its most-recently completed quarter. That figure, however, was up from 11 in the fourth quarter of 1995. But despite its modest employee scale, and its tailored industry focus, Amazon successfully went public at a young age. How? Let’s take a look at the numbers. Efficient growthWhile many companies spent dot-com money on comically silly things, when Amazon went public it was a surprisingly efficient shop. Here, in screenshot form, are its performance notes from its S-1: In case the format isn’t suited for reading, we can translate a little bit. In 1996, Amazon grew its revenue from $511,000 to $15.75 million, or about 2,982 percent. Returning to our point concerning efficiency, Amazon did lose more money in 1996 than it did in 1995. Its losses grew from $303,000 to $5.78 million. But when we stack that next to a modern rule, say, the Rule of 40 — that a company’s growth rate plus its profit margin should equal 40 — Amazon was destroying benchmarks. And during its period of hyper-growth to boot. That Amazon was so not-unprofitable at its then-young age at that particular pace of growth is impressive. The company was certainly riding a secular shift in the economy toward digital commerce, but the company, at the time of its IPO, was in solid shape. Even more so, Amazon’s growth was hardly seasonal. As you can see in the above set of statistics, Amazon grew its revenue from $4.17 million in the third quarter of 1996 to $8.47 million in the fourth quarter of that year. But the first quarter of 1997 effectively doubled the holiday quarter’s tally with $16 million in top line. Or, more simply, in the quarter before its IPO, Amazon posted more revenue than it had in the preceding year. At that pace of growth, Amazon must have been worth billions, and in the process of raising hundreds of millions in its IPO, right? Wrong. A modest offeringSomething fun about covering 1997 news is that we get to quote 1997 news. So here’s CNet covering Amazon’s IPO in that year, after noting that its debut had “[s]ilenc[ed] any doubts about its chances on the public market”:
Amazon closed at, again quoting CNet, “23-1/2.” It was a good result for the internet shop, which would go on to split several times before the dot-com boom went dot-com bust. Today, decades later, Amazon is worth around 1,000 times as much as it was at the time of its IPO. Google Finance pegs the current value of Amazon at $463.55 billion, making it one of the smaller two of the Big 5, but it is still impressively up from its initial public valuation. The scale of its IPO, however, shouldn’t be viewed as humility. In a great look at Amazon’s run-up to its IPO, CNBC reported that Amazon’s prep was incredibly accelerated:
CNBC goes on to note that Amazon and its hired hands then got its S-1 together in 12 days. CompetitionWe could talk about a host of other points from its S-1 and IPO, including the company’s cash position, high cost of revenue (compared to the software companies we spend too much time observing), and even its declining net loss as a percent of revenue. But its competition is the most interesting. Remember how quickly Amazon was growing at the time of its IPO? The firm put some of the credit for that on its nascent industry:
In that “new, rapidly evolving” climate, Amazon saw its competition in three buckets:
Amazon goes on to note that both the two physical booksellers had, at the time, “announced their intention to devote substantial resources to online commerce in the near future.” Oops! But recall that, at the time, Amazon was a mote of dust in terms of scale. In sumIncredibly fast revenue expansion, efficient growth, and an early IPO would make Amazon an oddity in today’s market, where companies wait longer to go public while pursuing less profitable paths to growth by the time they file. That’s likely the most useful thing to keep in mind: What about Amazon is different than what we see today? And do those differences highlight a weakness in modern tech shops looking to go public, or do the underscore why Amazon was an outlier after its flotation? Featured Image: Li-Anne DiasDigital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com June 28, 2017 at 12:31PM
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Samsung Wants to Sell Refurbished Note 7s With the Silliest Possible Name http://ift.tt/2sibhTr Samsung caught a whole mess of bad press last year after numerous reports of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone exploding. The company, however, apparently believes there’s still a rabid fanbase demanding a defused version of its mobile time bomb. So a refurbished version of the phone is going back on shelves next month—bearing what might be the most delusional name possible. On July 7th, Samsung will release the Galaxy Note 7 FE, which, improbably enough, stands for “Fandom Edition,” unnamed sources tell The Wall Street Journal. Rumors that Samsung was considering selling refurbished Note 7 devices broke back in March. The company later confirmed its plans to deal with the returned devices in “an environmentally friendly way,” which included selling refurbished devices as a possibility. A Samsung spokesperson told Gizmodo at the time that the device would not be coming to the United States. According to the WSJ, the Note 7 FE will have new components which presumably won’t cause it to overheat and spontaneously combust. Samsung first recalled the Note 7 in September of last year following hundreds of reports of explosions, and ultimately pulled some 3 million units. About 93 percent of US Note 7 handsets were recovered. As for the other 7 percent, the company has tried to get the devices out of users’ hands by pushing out updates that cause the phone to stop charging. All told, the debacle has cost Samsung billions. Advertisement According to the WSJ, the Note 7 FE is only scheduled for release in South Korea so far, but it seems other countries might be getting a release as well. Samsung has yet to publicly confirm these plans. Even if Samsung has managed to make the Note 7 safe, it seems impossibly silly for the company to keep dredging up the ghost of last year’s spectacular failure. Rumor has it that the follow up device—the Note 8?—is on the way sometime soon. In the meantime, Samsung should ride the coat tails of its very successful (and so far not-explodey) Galaxy S8. [WSJ] Digital Trends via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com June 28, 2017 at 12:24PM
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How a Chlorine 'Freak Accident' in a Pool Hospitalized Five Kids http://ift.tt/2s2IM7O You can finally add “swimming pools” to your running list of seemingly mundane-but-murderous-pastimes. At around 7pm EDT on Monday, local authorities in Tampa responded to an emergency call involving five sick children at a local pool. As reported by ABC News and others, a “cloud of chlorine gas” appeared in the Calypso Pool hours after a thunderstorm had caused one of the water pumps to spontaneously switch off. The children were rushed to the hospital after expressing stomach discomfort and nausea. Thankfully, it seems like no one was seriously injured. How a cloud of chlorine suddenly appeared in an indoor pool is troubling to say the least. According to the Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, the pump that malfunctioned after the thunderstorm “pushed the chemical mix into the pool causing a small cloud of chlorine gas.” Though representatives from Calypso Pool told ABC News the incident was a “freak accident,” similar outbreaks have occurred before. In 2012, eight swimmers at a public pool in Topeka, Kansas were hospitalized after being hit in the face—and elsewhere—by a cloud of chlorine. Possibly the most severe case was in 2014, when a small chlorine gas cloud appeared at a water park in Michigan. The incident caused roughly 50 people to receive treatment after they reported breathing problems. Advertisement In this latest case, a malfunction with the equipment does indeed appear to have been responsible for the chlorine cloud. “What’s happening here is they’re using some type of hypochloride or another chemical as a disinfectant,” Frankie Wood-Black, principal of Sophic Pursuits, Inc. and an instructor at Northern Oklahoma College, told Gizmodo. “Looking at this story, [it] appears they’ve had a malfunction in their disinfecting equipment and that it actually caused a buildup of whatever chemical they were using. Because of that, they pushed a slug.” Basically, once the pump restarted, it appears to have pushed out a horrible nightmare cloud of toxic gas. While chlorine clouds in public pools receive the most media attention, Wood-Black explained that incidents like this happen in people’s home pools fairly frequently. Advertisement “There are a lot of residential poisonings that occur because somebody has mixed bleach improperly with another chemical,” she said. “That gas that you get when you mix bleach improperly is chlorine gas. Unforunately it is not all that uncommon, because people don’t understand what they’re mixing.” So how can a responsible pool owner prevent chlorine clouds from bubbling up? “Read and follow the label,” Wood-Black said. Advertisement Advertisement [ABC] Digital Trends via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com June 28, 2017 at 12:12PM
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Petya Ransomware Could Hide State-Sponsored Attacks, Say Ukrainian Analysts http://ift.tt/2tltS0g When a ransomware outbreak exploded from Ukraine across Europe yesterday, disrupting companies, government agencies, and critical infrastructure, it at first appeared to be just another profit-focused cybercriminal scheme—albeit a particularly vicious and damaging one. But its origins in Ukraine raised deeper questions: After all, shadowy hackers have waged a cyberwar there for years, likely at Russia's bidding. As more details come to light, Ukrainian cybersecurity firms and government agencies argue that the hackers behind the ransomware called Petya (also known as NotPetya or Nyetya) are no mere thieves. Rather, they pin the attacks on political operatives seeking to disrupt Ukrainian institutions yet again, using a massive ransom scheme to hide their true motive. And some Western cybersecurity analysts tracking the Petya plague have come to the same conclusion. Targeted ApproachOn Tuesday morning, Ukrainian media was the first to widely report the Petya infections, as it hit targets including Ukrainian banks, Kiev's Borispol airport, and energy firms Kyivenergo and Ukrenergo. Plenty of others fell victim to Petya as well. It struck the Danish shipping firm Maersk, Russian oil company Rosneft, and even the American pharmaceutical giant Merck. But Ukrainian cybersecurity analysts view Ukraine as the primary target, the Petya outbreak just another strike in their ongoing cyberwar with organized and relentless hackers that the Ukrainian government has publicly linked to Russian state actors. "I think this was directed at us," says Roman Boyarchuk, the head of the Center for Cyber Protection within Ukraine's State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection. "This is definitely not criminal. It is more likely state-sponsored." As for whether that state sponsor was Russia: "It’s difficult to imagine anyone else would want to do this," Boyarchuk added. Boyarchuk points to the the timing of the attack, coming just before Ukraine's Constitution Day, which celebrates its post-Soviet independence. Ukraine also suffered a targeted act of physical violence on Tuesday, when a car bomb assassinated a special forces official in Kiev. More technical clues support that theory, some Ukrainian security researchers say. Kiev-based Information Systems Security Partners, which has acted as a first responder for several recent waves of the cyberattacks on Ukrainian companies and government agencies, says it has found evidence that sophisticated hackers quietly infiltrated the networks of at least some Ukrainian targets two to three months before they triggered the ransomware that paralyzed those organizations. "According to the obtained intermediate data of our analysis, our analysts concluded that the destructive effects in the infrastructures of the organizations studied were carried out with the help of [ransomware], but also with direct involvement of intruders who already had some time in the infrastructure," says ISSP forensic analyst Oleksii Yasinsky in an email to WIRED. ISSP declined to provide more details about the evidence of those prolonged intrusions, but argues that the attackers' techniques match the "handwriting" of previous attacks in 2015 and 2016 that Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has called acts of "cyberwar," waged by Russia's intelligence and military services. Yasinsky declined to name the exact Petya victims whose networks had shown those fingerprints, but he notes that they include one major Ukrainian bank and a critical infrastructure company. ISSP says it also found that Petya doesn't act solely as ransomware. Rather than just encrypting infected hard drives and demanding $300 in bitcoin for the decryption key, in some cases it simply wiped machines on the same network instead, deleting a victim computer's deep-seated "master boot record," which tells it how to load its operating system. Yasinsky argues that behavior indicates the attackers weren't, in fact, trying to extort payments from those victims, but instead wanted to cause maximum disruption. The hackers also, Yasinsky speculates, could have been attempting a "cleanup" of previous operations, preventing investigators from learning the full extent of their intrusions by deleting data wholesale from target networks. Wiping the master boot record of victim machines is also a calling card of a group of attackers, known to the cybersecurity industry as Sandworm, that has plagued Ukraine for years. Starting in October 2015 and continuing through the end of last year, the group struck targets across Ukraine's media, transportation infrastructure, and government ministries, and twice caused blackouts by attacking Ukrainian electric facilities. Security firm FireEye has tied those attackers to Russia, based in part on analysis of an openly accessible command and control server it used that contained Russian-language documents explaining how to use a piece of malware it had planted on target computers. Uncommon CriminalsThe theory that Petya targeted Ukraine specifically remains far from confirmed. And it doesn't fully explain why the malware would have spread so far beyond Ukraine's borders, hitting Russian targets too. But Ukrainians aren't the only ones leaning toward the hypothesis that Petya originated as a state-sponsored, Ukraine-focused disruption campaign rather than a moneymaking venture. Symantec's data shows that as of Tuesday morning US time, more than 60 percent of infections they saw were in Ukraine, implying that the attack likely began there. And cybersecurity analysts on Tuesday found that in many cases, Petya infected victims by hijacking the update mechanism of a piece of Ukrainian accounting software called MeDoc. Companies filing taxes or engaged in financial dealings with Ukraine widely use MeDoc, says Cisco's Talos research team lead Craig Williams, which could in part explain the ransomware's reach beyond Ukraine's borders. That tactic also signals that Petya "has a very clear idea who it wants to effect, and it’s businesses associated with the Ukrainian government," Williams says. "It’s very obvious this is a political statement." In addition to MeDoc software, Ukrainian police have also noted that phishing emails also helped spread Petya, which would imply careful targeting of the ransomware based on victims' languages rather than a randomly spreading worm. But other cybersecurity analysts have been unable to corroborate those claims.
Though the attackers' motives remain murky, many in the cybersecurity community are coming to the consensus that they weren't ordinary criminals. Aside from the MeDoc update trick, Petya also spreads within networks using a variety of automated tools that exploited obscure Microsoft protocols like Windows Management Instrumentation, PSExec, and Server Message Block, all hallmarks of sophistication. But meanwhile, the perpetrators showed surprising disregard for the money-making part of a ransomware scheme. They used a hardcoded bitcoin address that's far easier to track, and an email address for communicating with victims that was taken down by its host within 12 hours of the attack's launch. Partly as a result, the new Petya variant has earned a piddling $10,000. That mismatch suggests an ulterior motive, says Nick Weaver, a computer security researcher at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. "This looks like a malicious payload designed to make systems unusable disguised as ransomware," Weaver says. "Either they just screwed up on the ransomware side inexplicably, or the real goal was to disrupt machines, launched in a way that’s very biased against Ukraine." All of that provides another hint, as bizarre as it may seem, that the damage to companies from the US to Spain and even Russia may have just been collateral. Hackers may instead have been continuing on a long-running assault against Ukraine. But this time, the rest of the world feels their pain, too. Digital Trends via Wired https://www.wired.com June 28, 2017 at 12:09PM
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Western Digital’s 96 layer 3D NAND will lead to terabit memory chips http://ift.tt/2smEffS Why it matters to you Western Digital's new 3D NAND will lead to larger solid-state drives and flash-storage solutions, but they won't enter mass production until 2018. Although there is some legal scuffling ongoing between Toshiba and Western Digital, the two technology giants have co-developed a new standard of 3D NAND flash memory known as BiCS4, featuring 96 layers of vertical storage. This is a 50 percent increase in layers over the previous 64-layer BiCS3 technology and will offer a 40 percent boost in storage capacity for drives that make use of it but do not expect the full capabilities of the technology anytime soon. One way that storage manufacturers have been able to increase the size of solid-state drives (SSD) and other flash storage mediums, is through 3D NAND. By stacking information vertically, the footprint on the PCB is much reduced and enables the use of more memory chips in the same form factor. This Western Digital development is the latest incarnation of that and could lead to much larger SSDs in the future. The key word here is future though. While the earliest iterations of this BiCS4 technology will be shipped out to original equipment manufacturers and Western Digital partners in the latter half of 2017, they will only be in the 256-gigabit chip range. This technology is said to be capable of creating one terabit chips, though they are unlikely to appear for at least another year. Mass production of any of these chips won’t begin until 2018, either. BiCS4 technology is expected to see Western Digital through to 2020, during which time it will continually evolve and improve, before being replaced by its eventual successor around that time, Anandtech reports. That means that the existing 64-layer BiCS3 chips will continue to be manufactured and Western Digital suggested that this recent development will not slow down production on the older technology. It claimed that 2017 will see it and its partner, Toshiba, produce more 64-layer 3D NAND than ever before — more than any other industry supplier throughout the year. Along with praising Western Digital’s ability to stick to its roadmap for intended release dates of the new BiCS4 hardware, Western Digital’s executive vice president of memory production, Siva Sivaram, said: “BiCS4 will be available in 3-bits-per-cell and 4-bits-per-cell architectures, and it contains technology and manufacturing innovations to provide the highest 3D NAND storage capacity, performance and reliability at an attractive cost for our customers. Western Digital’s 3D NAND portfolio is designed to address the full range of end markets spanning consumer, mobile, computing and data center.” Not all is rosy at Western Digital, though. It was revealed by anonymous sources only last week that its WDLabs division was being shut down. Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/2p4eJdC June 28, 2017 at 12:08PM
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Redspace combines tennis with guns to produce ‘Gunball’ http://ift.tt/2uiN6R7 Why it matters to you Gunball looks to be a great game to introduce new users to virtual reality, having been designed with a pick-up-and-play ethos in mind. Over the past few years, the enormous success of Rocket League has prompted a host of other multiplayer titles that offer their own spin on competitive sports. Now, Redspace has launched Gunball, an explosive new take on tennis that has been designed with the HTC Vive headset in mind. As with tennis, Gunball players will be serving up balls — but in this case, they’re using guns in place of rackets. Propelling these balls through goal rings is the name of the game, although that might be easier said than done given the carnage that plays out in any given round. With goal rings moving around the arena, and score multipliers tied to skillful serves, there’s a degree of complexity to Gunball that should make its online leaderboards rather competitive. Players will need to use every one of their balls efficiently to garner a sufficiently impressive score over the span of each timed session. The game is set to launch with two themed environments; Stadium, which apes the look and feel of a traditional sports arena, and Rainbow Volcano, which is as zany as its name suggests. Both stages have five different goal ring layouts, giving players various different configurations to come to grips with. Gunball looks set to be a great high-score game for dedicated players to dive into, competing for bragging rights with their friends. However, the concept is straightforward enough that the development team at Redspace has high hopes for its capacity to introduce novices to VR. “With Gunball, we feel we’ve created the ideal ‘jumping in’ point for new VR users,” says Jeremy McCurdy, Redspace’s games technical lead. “Built around a comfortable experience but with a deep level of skill underneath it, we feel this game is great to show off VR to friends who may have never experienced it. But it’s also an amazing skill-based exercise for VR veterans as well.” Gunball is available now via Steam for gamers will access to a VR headset. It’s priced at $15, but its creators are running a launch promotion that offers the game for just $9.75 from now until July 5, as part of the Steam Summer Sale. Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/2p4eJdC June 28, 2017 at 12:08PM
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What a bargain! These are our three favorite Amazon tech deals of the day http://ift.tt/2tlhzBf Wednesday’s Gold Box deals of the day feature a D-Link range extender and access point, a TaoTronics car dash cam, and a compact monocular telescope. Score savings up to $74 and discounts as deep as 74 percent. Read on to browse today’s best Amazon tech deals. D-Link Wireless AC1200 Dual Band Wi-Fi Gigabit Range Extender & Access PointExtend the range of your Wi-Fi home coverage with a D-Link Wireless AC1200 Dual Band Wi-Fi Gigabit Range Extender & Access Point, which is currently 14 percent off on Amzaon. Like many of the best range extenders, this D-Link model takes your coverage to new levels with next-generation AC1200 technology. The range extender and access point has Dual Band connectivity giving you greater flexibility and reduced interference. It also provides backward compatibility with older wireless allowing you to enjoy a reliable wireless connection. The next generation AC1200 technology provides increased speed, range, and reliability to ensure coverage throughout your home. No more worrying about dead spots and weak signal problems such as buffering. Easily extend your broadband internet connection to all of your computers and mobile devices. Connect them wirelessly or use the four Gigabit LAN ports for high-speed wired connections. Multiple internal antennas help to eliminate dead zones in any environment. The D-Link Wireless AC1200 Dual Band Wi-Fi Gigabit Range Extender & Access Point normally retails for $70 but is currently on sale for $60 on Amazon, saving you $10 (14 percent). TaoTronics TT-CD06-N 2 inches Car Dash CamRecord everything in front of your car using this TaoTronics TT-CD06-N 2 inches Car Dash Cam, which is currently 25 percent off on Amazon. The dash cam combines an industrial image sensor and can record in 2K or 1080 pixel resolution. Like many of the best dash cams, it helps you protect yourself and everyone in your car while driving. More specifically, the camera supports 2K video at 30 fps and 1080 pixel video at 45 fps, providing high-quality images even in low-light conditions. The nighttime image is more sensitive, giving you better performance at night, with no more blurred video. Instead, every pixel is razor-sharp no matter what time you are driving. The 160-degrees wide angle lens records better side views and captures more of what is going on in front of your vehicle. A two-inch color LCD screen displays large icons making it easy to operate. The DVR also automatically starts and stops with the car ignition. The TaoTronics TT-CD06-N 2 inches Car Dash Cam regularly retails for $100 but is currently on sale for $75 on Amazon, providing a $25 (25-percent) discount. Cvlife 12-by-50 Compact Monocular Telescope Pocket Mono Spotting ScopeSee more so you can experience more with a Cvlife 12-by-50 Compact Monocular Telescope Pocket Mono Spotting Scope, which is currently 74 percent off on Amazon. The telescope is portable and comes with a compass and carrying pouch. The pocket scope is ideal for enjoying the great outdoors, whether just to enjoy the scenery or for activities such as hunting. It’s designed to give you 12 times the magnification you would normally get with your naked eyes. It has a high definition optical glass with a premium fully multi-coated all-glass lens, that provides a closer, clearer, and brighter view. The outdoor telescope has an adjustable eyecup that twists up and down for comfortable viewing. You can use it with or without eyeglasses, which makes the mono spotting scope suitable for everyone. Additionally, a durable rubber armor provides a secure, non-slip grip and durable external protection. The Cvlife 12-by-50 Compact Monocular Telescope Pocket Mono Spotting Scope normally retails for $50 but is marked down to $13 on Amazon, saving you $37 or 74 percent. Looking for more great deals on tech and electronics? Check out our deals page to score some extra savings on our favorite gadgets.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/2p4eJdC June 28, 2017 at 12:08PM
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Scientists Push Back Against Controversial Paper Claiming a Limit To Human Lifespans http://ift.tt/2t1BZMY Humans don’t like dying, they don’t like the idea of dying, and most have made not dying an important part of their life. Lots of folks are interested in making us not die for longer, so it was a real bummer last year when a team of researchers said that the maximum human lifespan has plateaued at around 115 years of age. Some folks might live to be older, but those oldies are outliers. When the scientists behind this idea published their research in Nature last October, it sparked a whole lot of press coverage. It also brought debate, accusations that the study was flawed, and questions as to whether it was based on enough data. Today, the journal Nature is publishing five rebuttals from researchers who have problems with the original study—who think that a harder look at the data is warranted, and that the authors’ original conclusions might be incorrect. One researcher who reviewed the first Nature paper thinks the controversy misses the point. “The authors of the rebuttals quibble about how to deal with the mathematics of small numbers at extreme old age,” S. Jay Olshansky from the School of Public Health University of Illinois at Chicago wrote in an email to Gizmodo. One of the points they fail to realize, he thought, was “if only they would look up long enough from their mathematical formulas attempting to model trends in small numbers, they would realize that... death always occurs, and it does so in a consistent fashion in humans because there is a limit to the duration of life.” Advertisement Essentially, last year, researchers from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York collected the ages of the single oldest people to die in a given year in the United States, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom, based on information in the International Database on Longevity. When they crunched all the data, it appeared to them that the maximum reported age of death increased until the 1990s, and has plateaued since then, averaging out at 115. They did other analyses looking at the second through fifth oldest ages at death, and added data from other sources. The paper’s authors concluded we may be hovering around the limit to human longevity. What followed, naturally, was loud press coverage. The study’s principal investigator Jan Vijg told me that he didn’t mean for it to sound like there was an absolute limit to human longevity, but rather that we’d reached a limit that advancements in his own field, the genetics of aging, or medicine might eventually surpass. “I can never rule out that we’ll see this ceiling broken,” he told Gizmodo. “Maybe we can be successful in generating new drugs that work against diseases. Work against the aging process overall deserves way more publicity.” Others didn’t see it that way. All of the popular press “allows people to say that Uncle Jack can’t live past 115. That was the impression everybody got. There’s a limit to how much you can say you didn’t mean to give the impression that” there’s a hard age limit, one of the rebuttals authors, Nick Brown from the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands told Gizmodo. “It seemed to me that the people didn’t try hard to correct that impression.” So Brown’s team, as well as four other teams, re-analyzed the Nature paper and found lots of problems. Brown’s own analysis found that the existence of the plateau at 115 years depends on the age and death date of the oldest person ever, France’s Jeanne Louise Calment, who lived to be 122. Others mentioned the increase in the number of people living past 100 will make it more likely to see more folks live past 115, or even 122. Still others found problems with the statistics and methods used to analyze such small sample sizes or argued that we don’t have enough data to be sure. One paper noted that breaking the data up into individual years that people died in is arbitrary, since years are an arbitrary division of time. Maybe the presence of a 25-year plateau is itself a statistical fluctuation. Advertisement On top of all that, an investigation from Dutch journalist Hester van Santen found that the acceptance of the original paper into the journal Nature itself was fishy. It was rejected, but the editors later changed their mind and accepted it with revisions. The paper, van Santen reports, barged into a battle between demographers over the same question, whether there was a limit to the human lifespan. She commented that given Olshansky’s professional career, he might not have been able to make an independent assessment as someone on one side of the debate. And she interviewed demographers who felt the analysis was done incorrectly by folks not familiar with the field, who then received coaching to improve a paper with a flawed analysis but a sexy title. None of this means that Vijg’s team’s conclusions were wrong, just that people didn’t agree with their methods. One of the authors of one of the rebuttals, Jim Vaupel, director of Germany’s Max Planck Institut für Demografische Forschung, eviscerated Vijg in van Santen’s article (he said that “They just shoveled the data into their computer like you’d shovel food into a cow.”). He’s the one on the other side of the demographer debate from Olshansky. But despite his criticisms, Vaupel himself put his name on a paper that analyzed the data on the lifespan of centenarians, those living past 100, in Sweden and Denmark using a different statistical method and came to the exact same conclusion. “It also appears that the maximum life span, measured as the age of the oldest person to die, is currently not increasing,” he wrote in the article published last month in the Journal of Internal Medicine. He declined Gizmodo’s request for comment. Advertisement So, here’s the thing—scientists often argue about the best way to do science. But you’re going to die. On top of that, the average human lifespan is much less than 100 years old, and these 115-year-old people are still statistical outliers, looking at the general population. It’s hard to get any information about humanity as a whole by looking at this small sample of extremes. And Vijg’s team didn’t offer a reason for what might cause a hard or soft age limit—this is all just a numbers game. With all of that in mind and the argument behind us, I suppose we should just end with what the October round of coverage probably missed. There are problems with peer review, and lots of ways to look at data. But on the other side, while you will, statistically, not be one of the oldest people ever, people really want to figure out ways to break through whatever limit there might be on the oldest people. And in Vijg’s opinion, “the real important thing is we need to put more money into drugs and interventions that really work against aging—no longer [just] against individual diseases.” Advertisement That we can probably agree with. Digital Trends via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com June 28, 2017 at 12:06PM
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LendUp gets strategic investment from PayPal and adds to its executive team http://ift.tt/2tlurHx LendUp has built business providing personal loans to customers that traditional financial institutions wouldn’t touch. As it looks to expand into credit cards and other services, the company has raised some strategic funding from PayPal and also has expanded its executive ranks. LendUp wants to provide better financial products for the people who most need them, serving a demographic that most banks ignore, or worse, charge exorbitant fees to use their services. It’s a group the LendUp team likes to call “the emerging middle class,” and the company hopes to give them tools to help them get out of debt, save money, and overall just become more financially successful. Its message and methods resonated with PayPal, which according to LendUp CEO Sasha Orloff, shares a lot of the same vision and also serves many of the same customers. Orloff says the funding came as a result of his relationship with PayPal CEO Dan Shulman, who he got to know while Shulman was at American Express. “We liken this a lot to what amex did for wealthy business traveler, [LendUp] could do for different customer,” Orloff said, adding that Shulman has a passion for financial inclusion and LendUp’s approach. On the investment front, PayPal has become more active in the last year or so. The company made a strategic bet on retail investing app Acorns, as well as Pulsate and Viva Republica. In addition to the funding, LendUp is announcing a series of additions and promotions within its management team. Leading that list is the announcement that Carrie Dolan, CFO of Metromile and former CFO of LendingClub, is joining as a board advisor. Dolan also served as treasurer of Charles Schwab Corp and was CFO of Schwab Bank, which she helped launch in 2003. The company promoted Vijesh Iyer, who had previously spent 15 years at PayPal and Capital One, to its COO position. It also hired former PayPal exec Mandeep Walia as its Chief Compliance Officer, added former Lending Club and Schwab exec Jordan Olivier as VP of Finance, and brought on former PwC and Schwab exec Karry Bryan as VP and Controller. So that’s a lot of people from traditional banking institutions. What would make them want to work for a startup, and more importantly, one that’s actually doing good in the world? “I think the common theme amongst everybody is… when you’ve built a career in financial services, you realize the change that software can do,” Orloff told me. Add in a mission-driven streak, and he believes LendUp is recruiting people who want to see better financial services in the world. After all, as Orloff said, “We pay more than a non-profit and much less than a bank, so it takes the right type of person.” Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com June 28, 2017 at 12:00PM
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Google unveils Advr, an experimental Area 120 project for advertising in VR http://ift.tt/2s2y7KE Google today is more formally taking the wraps off its internal incubator, Area 120, with the launch of a dedicated website, alongside the launch of one of the program’s more interesting projects to date: a way to advertise within VR. The new experiment, which is simply called Advr, involves a cube-like ad format which allows video ads to run in a 3D/VR environment. Area 120 was launched at Google in March, 2016, as a way to retain entrepreneurial-minded talent at the company, as well as give teams the ability to test new ideas that could eventually become Google products, or be integrated with existing products. That hasn’t happened yet, as the R&D program is still fairly new. Much is already known about Area 120, whose name references a famous aspect of Google culture – allowing employees to work on passion projects on the side, using 20 percent of their time. It was often more an idea, than policy though. Area 120, however, refocuses the concept into a more structured, formal program. Google isn’t the only major tech giant to run its own internal incubator these days. Microsoft today has its Garage program; while Apple in 2012 tried something similar with Blue Sky. Google’s Area 120 works a lot like a startup accelerator inside the company. Employees apply to the program during a set period, then Google selects a handful of teams to join. Each “class,” so to speak, has roughly 15 teams who work to prove out their ideas over the course of the next six months. During this time, the employees no longer work their day jobs – they exclusively focus on their Area 120 projects instead. If projects are successful, Googlers will be allowed to continue to work on them; if not, they’re invited to return to work at Google, in a different role. Two classes have already been invited into Area 120 since its launch, and Google is taking applications for its third now. The program is so new that even Google itself doesn’t yet know what the fate of its Area 120 projects will be, or even, more broadly, if the program is worth the investment. It’s possible that some might actually become standalone Google products one day, or be merged with existing ones. Many more will likely be closed, after failing to find traction – as is common with startups, too. Not all Area 120 projects are public-facing. Some are used internally, or only with select testers on an invite-only basis. Only a few have seen any media coverage. Of those available publicly, Uptime is the most promising. The app, which officially launched this month as the invite requirement was dropped, allows for a YouTube co-watching experience among friends. Other Area 120 projects include personal stylist Tailor; learn to code app Grasshopper; emoji messenger Supersonic (which is closing down). There are also some projects that aren’t broadly available, like a job-matching service in Bangalore, and a yet-to-launch booking tool called Appointments. Google hasn’t promoted any of the projects until now, however. But it’s giving Advr a push, with an announcement on the Google Developer blog today. Advr: Video Advertising in VR The new project is an experiment focused on figuring out if video ads could work in VR, and if so, how they would function. The team has developed a plug-in for Unity that can show ads in VR environments. Explains the post, developers aren’t interested in disruptive or hard-to-implement ad experiences in VR, which is how the Advr team came up with the idea for a simple cube. VR users can optionally engage with the cube either by tapping on it or gazing at it for a few seconds, which then pops open a video player to display the ad. The user can choose to watch the ad or close the player at this point. The goal is to enable this functionality across a variety of VR platforms, including Google’s own Daydream, Cardboard, and Samsung’s Gear VR, for starters. This launch doesn’t mean that Advr is how Google thinks advertising in VR should work, it’s just an idea at this point. But it’s not the only tech company with plans for this space – Adobe, too, has been developing VR ad solutions, as have several others. If Advr were to be successful, though, it would be an example of an Area 120 project that could translate directly to Google’s bottom line. Advr has already begun running tests with some VR game developers, but Google isn’t disclosing which ones. It is today inviting other VR developers to apply to try out the ad format through an invite-only program that will provide access to the early-stage SDK for Advr. Interested developers can sign up here. Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com June 28, 2017 at 12:00PM |
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