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Uber is partially banned in Tel Aviv

11/27/2017

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Uber is partially banned in Tel Aviv

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A Tel Aviv district court has banned two of Uber’s services in the city following a court ruling in a case between the transportation company, the Ministry of Transportation and the Taxi Driver Union, Reuters reports.

The court specifically banned UberDay and UberNight, the company’s private-car services in Tel Aviv. UberTaxi, which enables passengers to request rides via licensed taxi drivers, is not affected.

In the court, lawyers on behalf of The Ministry and Taxi Driver Union brought up concerns around insurance coverage for riders who choose UberDay or UberNight. The ruling comes after the Ministry of Transportation issued an indictment against Uber in May, alleging Uber was operating without a government license.

UberX, the service that enables everyday people to drive their own cars and pickup passengers for a fee, had already been deemed illegal in Tel Aviv. That’s why Uber launched pilot services UberNight and UberDay, which required passengers to pay the private drivers reimbursement fees for expenses including fuel.

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

Featured Image: (Photo by Doug Patricio/Brazil Photo Press/LatinContent/Getty Images)/Getty Images

Digital Trends

via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com

November 27, 2017 at 11:24AM

That 'Town Crier' Who Made the Royal Engagement Announcement Is Totally Fake

11/27/2017

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That 'Town Crier' Who Made the Royal Engagement Announcement Is Totally Fake

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(AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File)

Did you see that video of the town crier announcing the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle? Yes, the happy couple are really going to have a royal wedding. But that “town crier” is just a random guy dressed in goofy clothes and has nothing to do with Buckingham Palace.

The self-appointed town crier, whose real name is Tony Appleton, has been around for years. He announced that a royal baby was on its wayin 2013, and popped up again in 2015 when the baby was born. But again, he has nothing to do with the royal family, despite what some American news outlets might have you believe.

ABC News posted an uncritical video of the dude and Business Insider did the same before changing its headline and story to acknowledge that Appleton has nothing to do with the royal family.

And he’s fooled plenty of others in the past. So why does Appleton do it?

“I’m a royalist. I love the royal family,” Appleton told the Associated Press in 2013 while admitting that he hasno official royal duties. “I came unannounced.”

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Many people are wise to Appleton’s fakery, but that doesn’t stop plenty of American news outlets from seeing a guy in a tricorn hat and thinking, yeah this seems normal. And from there, it spreads like wildfire across social media.

But I suppose it’s not entirely our fault. The idea of royalty is about as silly as this over-the-top town crier is anyway—though I guess no less silly than having a reality TV star as your president. Now that we mention it, the real danger might be President Trump seeing this goofball on the news and wanting a town crier for his own purposes.

Hear ye, hear ye, fake news! Sad! I guess things could be worse.

Digital Trends

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

November 27, 2017 at 11:24AM

Distracted Pokémon Go players may have caused billions in damages

11/26/2017

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Distracted ‘Pokémon Go’ players may have caused billions in damages

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Last summer, Pokémon Go brought the Pokémon franchise a level of popularity and media attention it had not seen since its debut in the 1990s. Unfortunately, that level of popularity also had some unintended (and dangerous) consequences. A new study, titled Death by Pokémon Go, shows that the popular augmented reality game was partially responsible for an increase in traffic accidents and traffic-related deaths.

Economists at Purdue University analyzed traffic accident reports from Tippecanoe County, Indiana during the game’s first 148 days and found an increase in traffic accidents related to the game. Mara Faccio and John McConnell found that during the months in which their study took place, Tippecanoe County had two-traffic related deaths and an increased number of accidents and injuries valued between $5.2 million and $25.5 million. From there, the two researchers estimated that if you apply this data to the U.S. as a whole, you’d find that the country lost between $2 billion to $7.3 billion.

An increase in traffic accidents doesn’t necessarily mean that it due to people playing Pokémon Go while driving. It is possible that the higher number of accidents stemmed from the increased traffic the game brought. When looking at the number of crashes in close proximity to Pokémon Gyms and Pokéstops, the team found something rather interesting, however.

First of all, it’s important to understand what Gyms and Pokéstops are used for. In short, Pokéstops are businesses or other locations that players can stop by to get free items and gyms are where players do battle. Pokémon Go is designed around players walking to these locations. Unsurprisingly, not everyone is going to do that. Some players, especially those outside of larger cities, were more likely to drive to those locations. That, in and of itself, is fine, but it turns out that some people were playing the game while driving or recklessly or getting out of moving cars.

In order to prevent the rather obvious accidents this could have caused, Niantic disabled the ability for the game to be played if you were moving at high speeds. However, this wasn’t implemented universally. The team found that the high-speed restrictions were not in place for some Pokéstops and they noticed that accidents were much higher in areas close proximity to Pokéstops. This is how the researchers determined that Pokémon Go was, in fact, contributing to traffic accidents.

Digital Trends

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November 26, 2017 at 12:39PM

Amazon Has Coats For Everyone and Every Kind of Weather

11/26/2017

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Amazon Has Coats For Everyone and Every Kind of Weather

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Up to 50% off coats | Amazon

It’s no surprise that Amazon stocks a ton of coats, but right now, they’re discounted to prices you don’t want to miss. Outerwear from Columbia, Alpha Industries, Levi’s, Tommy Hilfinger, Calvin Klein, and more are included in the sale, so outfit yourself and your family for less.

Digital Trends

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

November 26, 2017 at 12:12PM

Makers or breakers?

11/26/2017

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Makers or breakers?

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Makers or breakers? | TechCrunch

Makers or breakers? | TechCrunch

For decades technology companies have enjoyed a near-unbroken run of great publicity. Products and services are lauded as shiny and covetable. Adoption is couched as inevitable. Direction goes unquestioned. Engineering genius is assumed. And a generous margin is indefinitely applied to gloss over day-to-day errors (‘oh, just a few bugs!’) — allowing problematic functioning to be normalized and sanctioned in all but a handful of outlier instances.

The worst label these companies have generally had to worry about is being called ‘boring’. Or, at a push, overly addictive.

Tech giants have been given space to trumpet their products as revolutionary! Break through! Cutting-edge agents of mass behavioral change! To, on the one hand, tell us their tools are actively restructuring our societies. Yet also fade into the background of the conversation the moment any negative impact gets raised.

Then they prefer to stay silent.

When forced, they might put out a blog post — claiming their tools are impartial, their platforms neutral, their role mere ‘blameless intermediary’.

The not so subtle subtext is: The responsibility for any problems caused by our products is all yours, dear users.

Or at least that was the playbook, until very recently.

What’s changed is that lately the weight of problems being demonstrably attached to heavily used tech services has acquired such a gravitational and political pull that it’s becoming harder and harder for these businesses to sidestep the concept of wider societal and civic responsibilities.

Whether it’s Facebook and election disinformation. Google’s questionable choices in information ranking and ad monetization. Amazon’s appetite for crushing traditional retail and evading tax. Airbnb diluting local neighborhoods and pushing up rents. Uber being outted as a rule-breaker and a bully — again and again. Or Twitter providing a safe place for nazis to spread violent hate speech and misogynists to harass women.

Libertarians are unlikely to object to any of this, of course, but it really is long overdue that the rose-tinted glasses came off the liberal view of tech companies.

The warning signs have been there for some years now. Few apparently cottoned on.

The honeymoon is over

Silicon Valley’s creativity may have been seeded in the 1960s by hippy counterculture but the technological powerhouse its community constructed has graduated from hanging around in communes to churning out some of the most fervent capitalists in human history.

Growth is its icon, now. Power the preferred trip. And free love became voyeuristic data capture.

You may champion capitalism and believe, of all available systems, it alone delivers the best and widest societal benefits — albeit trickle down economics is a desiccating theory still in dire need of a flood… (And that’s before you even start to factor in advancing automation destroying lower skilled jobs).

But the messages tech giants have used to sell their services have hardly amounted to an honest summary of their product propositions. That would require their marketing to confess to something more like this: ‘Hi! We’re here to asset strip your personal data and/or public infrastructure to maximize our revenues and profits any way we can — but at least you’re getting to use our convenient service!’

Instead they’ve stood behind grand statements about making the world more open and connected. Organizing information and making it universally accessible. Living like a local. Having a global mission. And so on and on.

They’ve continued to channel hippyish, feel good vibes. Silicon Valley still stuck on claims of utopianism.

This of course is the slippery lie called marketing. But tech’s disingenuous messages have generally been allowed to pass with far less critical scrutiny than gets applied to companies in all sorts of other industries and sectors.

And as a consequence of, what? On some level it seems to be the result of an uncritical awe of gadgetry and ‘techno-newness’ — coupled with a fetishization of the future that’s greased by ‘association attachment’ to sci-fi themes that are in turn psychologically plugged into childhood nostalgia (and/or fueled by big Hollywood marketing budgets).

On the other hand it may well also be a measure of the quantity of VC funding that has been pumped into digital businesses — and made available for polishing marketing messages and accelerating uptake of products through cost subsidization.

Uber rides, for example, are unsustainably cheap because Uber has raised and is burning through billions of VC dollars.

You don’t see — say — big pharma being put on the kind of pedestal that tech giants have enjoyed. And there the products are often literally saving lives.

Meanwhile technologists of the modern era have enjoyed an extended honeymoon in publicity and public perception terms.

Perhaps, though, that’s finally coming to an end.

And if it is, that will be a good thing. Because you can’t have mature, informed debate about the pros and cons of software powered societal change if critical commentary gets shouted down by a bunch of rabid fanboys the moment anyone raises a concern.

Money for monopolizing attention

The long legacy of near zero critical debate around the de-formative societal pressures of tech platforms — whose core priority remains continued growth and market(s) dominance, delivered at a speed and scale that outstrips even the huge upheavals of the industrial revolution — has helped entrench a small group of tech companies as some of the most powerful and wealthiest businesses the world has ever known.

Indeed, the race is on between tech’s big hitters to see who can become the first trillion dollar company. Apple almost managed it earlier this month, after the launch of its latest iPhone. But Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are all considered contenders in this insane valuation game.

At the same time, these companies have been disrupting all sorts of other structures and enterprises — as a consequence of their dominance and power.

Like the free Internet. Now people who spend time online spend the majority of their time in a series of corporate walled gardens that are ceaselessly sucking up their input signals to order to continuously micro-target content and advertising.

Social media behemoth Facebook also owns Instagram, also owns WhatsApp. It doesn’t own your phone’s OS but Facebook probably pwns your phone’s battery usage because of how much time you’re spending inside its apps.

The commercially owned social web is a far cry from the vision of academically minded knowledge exchange envisaged by the World Wide Web’s inventor. (Tim Berners-Lee’s view now is that the system is failing. “People are being distorted by very finely trained AIs that figure out how to distract them,” he told The Guardian earlier this month.)

It’s also a seismic shift in media terms. Mass media used to mean everyone in the society watching the same television programs. Or reading news in the same handful of national or local newspapers.

Those days are long gone. And media consumption is increasingly shifting online because a few tech platforms have got so expert at dominating the attention economy.

More importantly, media content is increasingly being encountered via algorithmically driven tech platforms — whose AIs apparently can’t distinguish between deliberately skewed disinformation and genuine reportage. Because it’s just not in their business interests to do so.

Engagement is their overriding intent. And the tool they use to keep eyeballs hooked is micro-targeted content at the individual level. So, given our human tendency to be triggered by provocative and sensationalist content, it’s provocative and sensationalist content the algorithms prefer to serve. Even if it’s fake. Even if it’s out-and-out malicious. Even if it’s hateful.

An alternative less sensationalist interpretation or a boring truth just doesn’t get as much airplay. And easily gets buried under all the other more clickable stuff.

These algorithms don’t have an editorial or a civic agenda. Their mission is to optimize revenue. They are unburdened by considerations of morality — because they’re not human.

Meanwhile their human masters have spent years shrugging off editorial and civic responsibilities which they see as a risk to their business models — by claiming the platform is just a pipe. No matter if the pipe is pumping sewage and people are consuming it.

Traditional media has its own problems with skewed agendas and bias, of course. But the growing role and power of tech platforms as media distributors suggests the communal consensus represented by the notion of ‘mass media’ is dissolving precisely because algorithmic priorities are so singleminded in their pursuit of engaged eyeballs.

Tech giants have perfected automated, big data fueled content customization and personalization engines that are able to pander to each individual and their peculiar tastes — regardless of the type of content that means they end up pushing.

None of us know what stuff another person eyeing one of these tech platforms is seeing in any given moment. We’re all in the dark as to what’s going on beyond our own feeds.

Many less techie people won’t even realize that what they see isn’t the same as what everyone else sees. Or isn’t just the sum of all the content their friends are sharing, in the case of Facebook’s platform.

The recipes underpinning these individual information hierarchies are only abstractly alluded to. They are certainly not publicly shared. The full gamut of targeting factors are never disclosed. The algorithms are not open sourced. Calls to open up their black boxes have been studiously ignored.

What self-regulation there is tends to be piecemeal. After the outraged fact — of YouTube being shown monetizing extremism, for example, or (a more recent accusation) pandering to pedophiles.

But now some politicians are talking openly about regulating the Internet — apparently emboldened by growing public disquiet. That’s how bad it’s got.

After the love is gone

If we allow social consensus to be edited out by a tiny number of massively dominate content distribution platforms which are algorithmically bent on accelerating a kind of totalitarian individualism, the existential question that raises is how can we hope to maintain social cohesion?

The risk seems to be that social media’s game of micro-targeted fragmentation ends up ripping us apart along our myriad fault lines — by playing to our prejudices and filtering out differences of opinion. Russian agents are just taking what’s there and running with it — via the medium of Facebook ads or Twitter bots.

Were they able to swing a vote or two? Even worse: Were they so successful at amplifying prejudice they’ve been able to drive an uptick in hate crime?

Even if you set aside directly hostile foreign agents using tech tools with the malicious intent of sewing political division and undermining democratic processes, the commercial lure of online disinformation is a potent distorting force in its own right.

This pull spun up a cottage industry of viral content generating teens in Macedonia — thousands of miles away from the US presidential election — financially encouraging them to pen provocative yet fake political news stories designed to catch the attention of Facebook’s algorithm, go viral and rack up revenue thanks to Google’s undiscriminating ad network.

The incentives on these platforms are the same: It’s about capturing attention — at any cost.

Another example where algorithmic incentives can be seen warping content is the truly awful stuff that’s made for (and uploaded at scale to) YouTube — with the sole and cynical intention of ad display monetization via children’s non-discerning eyeballs. No matter the harm it might cause. The incentives of the medium form content into whatever is necessary to generate the click.

In the past decade we even coined a new word for this phenomenon: ‘Clickbait’. Bait meaning something that looks tasty when glimpsed, yet once you grab it you’re suddenly the thing that’s being consumed.

Where algorithmic platforms have been allowed to dominate media distribution what’s happened is the grand shared narratives that traditionally bring people together in societies have come under concealed yet sustained attack.

Both as a consequence of algorithmic micro-targeting priorities; and, in many cases, by intentional trolling (be that hostile foreign agents, hateful groups or just destructive lolzseekers) — those agents and groups who have got so good at understanding and gamifying tech platforms’ algorithms they’ve been able to “weaponize information” as the UK Prime Minister put it earlier this month — when she publicly accused Russia of using the Internet to try to disrupt Western democracies.

And tech platforms gaining so much power over media distribution seems to have resulted in a splintering of public debate into smaller and angrier factions, with groups swelling in polarized opposition over the dividing lines of multiple divisive issues.

Some of the heated debate has been fake, clearly (seeded on the platforms by Kremlin trolls). But the point is fake opinions can help form real ones. And again it’s the tech pipes channeling and fueling these divisive views which work to fracture social consensus and undo compromise.

Really the result looks to be the opposite of those feel-good social media marketing claims about ‘bringing people closer together’.

Cashing out

A few massively powerful tech platforms controlling so much public debate is not just terrible news for social cohesion and media pluralism, given their algorithms have no interest in sifting fake from real news (au contraire). Nor even in airing alternative minority perspectives (unless they’ve divisively clickable).

It’s also bad news if you’re an entrepreneur hoping to build something disruptive of your own.

Unseating a Google or a Facebook is hardly conceived of as a possibility in the startup space these days. Instead many startups are being founded and funded to build a specific feature or technology in the explicit hope of selling it to Google or Facebook or Amazon or Apple as a quick feature bolt-on for their platforms. Or else to flash them with relevant talent and encourage an acquihire.

These startups are effectively already working as unpaid outsourcers within tech giants’ product dev departments, bootstrapping or raising a little early funding for their IP and feature idea in the hopes of cashing out with a swift exit and a quick win.

But the real winners are still the tech giants. Their platforms are the rule and the rulers now.

Sure, in the social space Snapchat stood its ground against big acquisition offers. And managed to claw its way to an IPO. Yet Facebook has responded by systematically cloning its rival’s ideas — copy-pasting key features across its own social platforms to amplify its own growth — and successfully boxing Snap’s momentum.

If Facebook had not been allowed to acquire additional social networks it might be a different story. Instead it’s been able to pay to maintain and extend its category dominance.

Just last month it acquired a social startup, tbh, which had got a little bit popular with teens. And because it already owns or can buy any potentially popular rival network, network effects work to seal its category dominance in place. The exception is China — which has its own massively dominant homegrown social giants as a consequence of actively walling out Western tech giants.

In the West, the only shade darkening the platform giants’ victory parade is the specter of regulators and regulation. Google, for example, was fined a record-breaking $2.73BN this September by the EU for antitrust violations around how it displays price comparison information in search results. The Commission judged it had both demoted rival search comparison services in organic search results, and prominently placed its own.

In Europe, where Google has a circa 90 per cent share of the Internet search market, it has been named a dominant company in that category — putting it under special obligation not to abuse its power to try to harm existing competitors or block new entrants.

This obligation applies both in a market where a company is judged to be dominant and in any other markets it may be seeking to enter — which perhaps raises wider competition questions over, for example, Alphabet/Google’s new push, via its DeepMind division, into the digital health sector.

You could even argue that the overturning of net neutrality in the US could have the potential to challenge tech platform power. Except that’s far more likely to end up penalizing smaller players who don’t have the resources to pay for their services to be prioritized by ISPs — while tech giants have deep pockets and can just cough up to continue their ability to dominate the online conversation.

Even the European Commission’s record-breaking antitrust fine against Google Shopping shrinks beside a company whose dominance of online advertising has brought it staggering wealth: Its parent entity, Alphabet, posted annual revenues of more than $90BN in 2016.

That said, the Commission has other antitrust irons in the fire where Google is concerned — including a formal investigation looking at how other Google services are bundled with its dominant Android mobile OS. And it has suggested more fines are on the way.

The EC has also gone after Amazon over e-book pricing and publisher contracts — forcing a change to its practices to settle that antitrust probe.

European regulators’ willingness to question and even attempt to check tech platform power may be inspiring others to take action — earlier this month, for example, the state of Missouri launched an investigation into whether Google has broken its consumer protection and antitrust laws.

Meanwhile Silicon Valley darling, Uber, got a big shock this September when the local transport regulator in its most important European market — London — said it would not be renewing its license to operate in the city, citing concerns about its corporate behavior and its attitude to passenger safety. (A decision that’s since been validated by the news which broke this month that Uber had concealed a massive data breach affecting 57M of its users and drivers for a full year.)

Next year incoming European data protection regulation will bring in a requirement for companies to disclose data breaches within 72 hours — or face large fines of up to 4% of their annual global turnover (or €20M, whichever is greater).

These much stiffer penalties for data mishandling are intended, by European lawmakers, to rework how digital businesses view information generated by and around their users.

The change they’re seeking is for digital data to no longer be seen as a limitless resource to be siphoned off, stored and ceaselessly data-mined; but as a potential liability to be collected sparingly, applied carefully and deleted the moment it’s no longer needed — because the financial risk of holding on to it has suddenly, drastically inflated.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can really be seen as a reaction to the kinds of behaviors that have enabled and entrenched a few tech giants at the top of the pile.

Another example: Google’s AI division, DeepMind, has had its fingers burnt in the UK this summer after a data-sharing partnership it inked with a London National Health Service Trust was judged to have violated data protection law.

The rules around sharing medical data are already subject to multiple layers of regulation, ethics and information governance. Nonetheless DeepMind was handed access to the non-anonymized medical records of 1.6M patients without their knowledge or consent, and under loosely defined contract terms that failed to firmly lock down what the company might be able to do with highly sensitive medical data.

Was the NHS Trust suffering from an overly shiny perception of technologists’ intentions when it agreed to hand millions of people’s medical records to an ad-targeting giant in exchange for a little free app development assistance and a few years’ unpaid access to the resulting service? You really do have to wonder.

It had been DeepMind’s intention to apply AI to the same data-set. Before it presumably grasped the extent of legal minefield it was careening into — and apparently backed away from feeding the medical records to its AI models (it has claimed the AI research it had intended to conduct on this data-set “has not taken place”).

In the wake of this controversy, the data-sharing contracts DeepMind has been able to ink with other NHS Trusts (most recently Yeovil) have been considerably tighter than the terms applied to its initial data grab. And none of these data-sharing arrangements enable DeepMind to use its data access to develop AI. (A research partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital is the sole exception.)

The long and short of all that is that — at least in Europe — regulators are responding to tech giants’ moves into sensitive spaces rather faster than they might have done in years past. (Even if still a little after the fact.) And as the sheen comes off tech’s marketing, it’s arguably getting easier for politicians to challenge and stand up to big tech’s unchecked claims.

More and more politicians are also wondering aloud how society can place checks and balances on tech platform power. And as the next sets of rules get forged, they are being written with eyes opened to the disruptive power of software.

Think different

It may be that we’ve reached the end of the road for tech businesses being able to get such an easy and uncritical ride — and that means tech businesses of all stripes, large or small, established or just starting up.

If so, it’ll be because a few tech giants got so good at selling their one-sided stories they were able to crush competition and entrench themselves as the default. For search. For social. For shopping. For media. For capturing and monopolizing attention.

And because no one thought to question what would happen if — for example — a dominant communication platform allows anyone with a few dollars to spend to micro-target any kind of advertising they choose. Anyone — or any government or hostile actor with a divisive agenda to push.

Facebook has defended its failure to anticipate misuse of its tools by saying ‘we just didn’t think of that’. Which suggests the company’s management was either drunk on its own Kool Aid. Or deliberately chose not to be responsible for anything outside the narrow scope of business growth.

But if they’re not taking responsibility for negative civic and societal impacts, regulators are going to have to make them act with more care.

No one also apparently thought to question what would happen to the quality of information being surfaced and made mainstream if a dominant tech platform’s information sorting algorithms were chained directly to its revenue generating mechanism.

Pulling up the most clickable stuff might be great for business growth but it’s really not so edifying for the eyeballs and minds encountering the base stuff your tech ends up pushing.

A lot of people have spent a lot of time warning about what’s lost when you allow hateful speech to dominate and drown out constructive opinions.

But Twitter ignored them anyway. Because its platform apparently gets more engagement by giving trolls a soapbox. And now abusive behavior accounts for the vast majority of government complaints the company receives.

While people in popular tourist destinations have increasingly been asking what happens to local communities and neighborhoods if you throw open the door to short term rental opportunism without considering the impact on long-term residents and rents.

You still won’t read anything about those downsides in Airbnb’s marketing, though.

And what about the people who fought for better background checks for the self-employed contractors that were being placed in positions of trust on ride-hailing platforms just because it lowered the barrier to faster business expansion if they didn’t have to run fingerprint checks.

Do those people feel vindicated now that Uber is facing regulatory backlash in London over safety and corporate responsibility issues as well as a class action lawsuit in the US alleging it endangered thousands of female passengers?

Or do they just feel really, really angry?

Whose fault is it that software has been given such a free ride to eat the world no matter the wider human and societal costs?

It’s especially egregious when you consider that just a tiny bit of critical thought could have helped steer off so many of these bad outcomes.

A little more critical thinking, for example, and it would have been obvious that requiring tech platforms to disclose who’s paying for digital political ads is a good idea. TV and print ads already do it. Why on earth should digital ads be any different?

Had that rule been in place last year, Russian agents would at least have had to be a bit more creative about their election disruption. As it was they were able to pay in Rubles — and using their known ‘troll farm’ name.

It beggars belief how the power of tech platforms has passed under the political radar for so long. And likely speaks to how tech illiterate so many politicians still are.

But again, they’re waking up. And boy is it a rude awakening.

Critical analysis of technologies to consider their wider impacts — on politics, on relationships, on emotional and mental wellbeing, on local and global environments — is what’s been sorely lacking in the tech narrative for years.

So really it’s hardly surprising that civic and societal considerations have been systematically de-prioritized by tech algorithms and omitted from the one-sided conversations technologists love to have.

But maybe the backlash is finally coming.

And instead of mindless cheerleading accompanying every startup pitch we’ll get a lot more Bodega fury wake-up calls.

Certainly we will if tech entrepreneurs keep making ‘disruption’ a clarion call for destruction and exploitation.

So founders, ask yourselves this: What might break because of what I’m trying to make?

And then: What am I going to do about it?

Featured Image: Arielle Calderon/Flickr UNDER A CC BY 2.0 LICENSE

Digital Trends

via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com

November 26, 2017 at 11:54AM

The top 10 tech companies with the best fertility benefits

11/26/2017

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The top 10 tech companies with the best fertility benefits

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The top 10 tech companies with the best fertility benefits | TechCrunch

Thinking of starting a family but need a little help from science? IVF costs alone can be exorbitant, ranging from $12,000 to $20,000 per cycle, depending on where you live — and most couples will need to do two or three cycles just to get a baby.

The good news is, Facebook, Apple and Google paved the way for fertility perks a couple of years ago in an effort to entice more women to work for them.

Now several tech companies have followed with some pretty good IVF and other benefits to help you out. Here are the top 10 tech companies and the fertility benefits they offer.

*IVF data compiled courtesy of Fertility IQ Family Builder Index 2017-2018 and verified, where possible, with the company.

*Maternity and paternity leave verified with the company or, as noted where appropriate, courtesy of employee reporting on FairyGodboss.

Digital Trends

via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com

November 26, 2017 at 11:51AM

Dash through the snow in the GMC Sierra All Mountain concept

11/26/2017

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Dash through the snow in the GMC Sierra All Mountain concept

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Dash through the snow in the GMC Sierra All Mountain concept

When it comes to conquering winter, it’s hard to argue with a heavy-duty pickup truck equipped with tank tracks. That’s what GMC just unleashed on Colorado’s Vail Mountain.

The GMC Sierra All Mountain concept is a modified Sierra 2500HD Denali crew-cab pickup truck. It left the factory with four-wheel drive, but the description is no longer accurate. That’s because the wheels were replaced with tracks from Mattracks, a company that specializes in tank-like tracks that can be retrofitted to regular vehicles.

The tracks fit around the stock wheel hubs, so as long as the stock wheel wells provide enough clearance, there is no need for any other modifications. GMC isn’t the first automaker to fit these tracks to a show vehicle to attract attention and, given how straightforward the conversion is, the General Motors division probably won’t be the last.

The All Mountain concept is powered by the same 6.6-liter Duramax turbodiesel V8 found in stock Sierra HD trucks. This muscular motor produces 445 horsepower and 910 pound-feet of torque, which is channeled to the ground through an Allison six-speed automatic transmission. Introduced for the 2017 model year and shared with the Chevrolet Silverado HD, the Duramax V8 is GM’s latest salvo in pickup truck wars. While it does have five more hp than the 6.7-liter Power Stroke turbodiesel V8 in the Ford Super Duty, it can’t match Ford’s 925 lb-ft of torque.

Since the All Mountain concept is based on GMC’s glitzy Denali trim, it also gets niceties like leather seats and a high-end Bose audio system so you can go Bigfoot hunting in comfort. As a bonus, the big shiny grille that differentiates Denali models from lesser GMCs should make a good reflector for signaling rescuers if you get stranded.

GMC won’t be offering tank tracks as a factory option on the Sierra anytime soon. The Sierra All Mountain concept was built just for show, and to highlight GMC’s relationship with Vail Resorts. The original truck will be displayed in Vail over the winter. A second vehicle, based on the Sierra All Terrain X trim level, will be displayed at the 2017 Los Angeles Auto Show, which kicks off later this month.

Digital Trends

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November 26, 2017 at 11:42AM

Awesome tech you cant buy yet: Heated coats folding ebikes and more

11/26/2017

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Awesome tech you can’t buy yet: Heated coats, folding ebikes, and more

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At any given moment, there are approximately a zillion different crowdfunding campaigns happening on the web. Take a stroll through Kickstarter or Indiegogo and you’ll find no shortage of weird, useless, and downright stupid projects out there – alongside some real gems. We’ve cut through the fidget spinners and janky iPhone cases to round up the most unusual, ambitious, and exciting new crowdfunding projects out there this week. That said, keep in mind that any crowdfunding project — even the best intentioned — can fail, so do your homework before cutting a check for the gadget of your dreams.

Ravean Rugged — durable heated jacket

A good, warm coat is a must for the colder months — but if you need more warmth than normal insulation can provide, you should check out Ravean’s newest gizmo on Kickstarter: Ravean Rugged. “Like its predecessors, Rugged features multi-zone, on-demand heat that can be directed when you need it and where you need it most,” Ravean co-founder Bryce Fisher claims. “But it also includes new features including the world’s first patented heated thumb-hole cuffs, designed to keep your hands warm while your fingers and thumbs are free to handle intricate work.”

This new jacket is heated in both the core and back (as well as the cuffs), so you’ll be enveloped in a cozy cocoon the moment you slip it on. Rugged features three different temperature settings, and depending on which one you choose, can provide heat for anywhere between 2.2 to 6.5 hours — all thanks to its built-in 10,050mAh battery. And if you ever run out of juice, the jacket is compatible with most major power tool batteries, so it should be pretty easy to find a replacement power pack.

Rubbee — ebike add-on

If you’re looking to upgrade your traditional bicycle to an ebike, then you generally have two options: either install a complicated retrofit kit, or ditch your analog bike altogether and buy a ready-made electric one. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an easier option? Well, thanks to Austrian startup Rubbee, there finally is. Unlike most of other retrofittable ebike kits out there right now, the Rubbee is designed to be installed in just a few minutes. Using basic hand tools, the device can be affixed to just about any bicycle. Once you’ve got the mounts on, the electric drive module can be clipped on or off in seconds.

“Rubbee X works by providing electric assist directly to the rear tire via an electric friction roller,” Gediminas Nemanis, CEO of Rubbee, told Digital Trends’ Luke Dormehl in an interview. “It has modular batteries to extend the rides, regenerative braking, and not a single wire. We track the pedaling pattern by attaching a small wireless sensor to the pedal crank. This way, we know when and how much additional support to provide to the rider in real time. There are no buttons to push; just pedal and your power will be multiplied 2 to 3 times. It’s a pure electric assist system.”

Pluto — ultracompact SLA 3D printer

Back when 3D printing was just beginning to make its way into the mainstream, the only printers available to consumers relied on more or less the same technique to create parts — a process known as filament deposition modeling, or FDM. It’s the type of 3D printing you’ve probably seen before: a printer feeds a strand of plastic filament through a hot nozzle, then carefully deposits the molten goo onto a build plate, layer by layer, to create a 3D object. This is by far the most popular kind of 3D printer, but lately, a technology known as stereolithography has moved in to steal some of the spotlight.

Stereolithography, or SLA, creates objects by flashing a laser up into a pool of photo-reactive resin, which hardens when struck by UV light. Due to the precision of this technique, SLA printers typically create much better parts than FDM printers do. The only problem, however, is that these kinds of printers have been prohibitively expensive for the past few years, so most people haven’t had access to them — but that’s beginning to change. Right now, you can get the Pluto for around $800 on Kickstarter — which is pretty amazing.

Plankpad — gamified balance board

Let’s face it: for those of us not named Brock Lesnar or Arnold Schwarzenegger, working out can be kind of dull. That’s an issue that a new Kickstarter campaign hopes to solve. Hailing itself as “the world’s first interactive core trainer,” the Plank Pad is a home gym device that promises to sculpt you some killer abs by letting you play interactive fitness games on your smartphone. This should make the whole experience less of a drag, and hopefully make it easier to get in the habit of working out on a regular basis.

Here’s how it works. You start by downloading the accompanying Plankpad app on your smartphone and choosing a game. After that, just place your phone in the Plankpad’s recessed phone holder and start planking! As you play, you need to tilt and lean to move your character around, which helps target different muscles and provides a fuller workout. The board can also be used as a traditional balance board, allowing you to play games while standing up. You can even sync the app to your TV screen if you prefer to play games on a bigger display.

X1 Explorer — folding electric commuter bike

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: humanity is living in the golden age of rideable technology right now. In the past few years, electric motors have become smaller and more powerful, and batteries have begun to last longer — two trends that have coalesced and kicked off a renaissance in personal mobility devices. There are almost too many rideables to keep track of anymore, and they seem to get crazier and more advanced with each passing month. The latest addition to this burgeoning trend is the X1 Explorer — a folding, ultracompact electric bike designed for commuters.

Small and relatively lightweight, the X1 Explorer weighs just 44 pounds, making it more portable than most other ebikes on the market. In its standard riding mode, it resembles a compact bike with 10-inch wheels, a suspension system for smoothing out the ride, and a built-in LED light. Despite its svelte size, the Explorer boasts some admirable specs. The bike’s standard battery offers a range of up to 25 miles, while an optional larger battery pack can extend that distance out to as much as 37 miles. Both batteries allow the bike to cruise along at speeds approaching 19 miles per hour. When the Explorer runs out of juice, you won’t have to wait long to get back out on the road, as the included wall adapter can allegedly recharge the bike in less than four hours.

Digital Trends

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November 26, 2017 at 11:42AM

Bitcoin Blows Past $9000

11/26/2017

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Bitcoin Blows Past $9,000

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Photo: Getty Images

The Bitcoin bubble continues to stretch to even more grotesque proportions, clearing a value of at least $9,143 per bitcoin and attaining a market cap of $152 billion on Sunday, TechCrunch reported. The strong gains more or less put Bitcoin on a path to clear a value of $10,000 by the end of calendar year 2017, and potentially even more.

While doomsayers have been predicting a massive crash in the cryptocurrency market for years, Bitcoin has largely continued its trend of explosive growth—for now. What might have cost a pittance a few years ago could be worth tens of millions of dollars today.

Image: Screengrab via CoinDesk

Other cryptocurrencies like ether have also become very valuable, and the initial coin offering sector—a more or less totally unregulated form of investment vehicle for crypto-backed startups--took in billions of dollars in 2017. Per the Chicago Tribune, even a few high-ranking members of Donald Trump’s administration like “budget director Mick Mulvaney and vice president Mike Pence’s chief economist Mark Calabria” are Bitcoin boosters.

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However, adoption of cryptocurrency by the public at large (or for that matter, by retailers and other firms) has been limited, meaning that most of the growth in bitcoin’s value has been driven by speculation and investors looking to get rich quick. The crypto markets in general are littered with shady companies and scams, and bitcoin has a tendency to implode in value every now and then due to occurrences like the crash of trading exchange Mt. Gox, so it’s possible something could quickly knock the value back down a peg.

But as TechCrunch noted, Bitcoin shows no signs of slowing down in the immediate future to the point where “news of clearing these incremental price hurdles are going to get old.” One wonders how long these good times could possibly last.

Digital Trends

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November 26, 2017 at 11:36AM

If You Want a Roomba Now's the Time to Buy It

11/26/2017

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If You Want a Roomba, Now's the Time to Buy It

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If You Want a Roomba, Now's the Time to Buy It

Deals Week is the best time of the year to buy a Roomba, and four different models are down to all-time low prices for the occasion today.

The entry-level Roomba 650 doesn’t have too many bells or whistles, but it’s still an excellent little vacuum that cleans well, and is good at finding its way back to its charger, in my experience, even if it looks a little stupid ping-ponging around your house.

For $25 more, you can upgrade to the Roomba 690, which is basically identical to the 650 in use, but with the addition of Wi-Fi so you can control and schedule it from your phone, or even with your voice via an Amazon Echo.

Newly added today is the 860, which does not have Wi-Fi, but claims five times the suction of the 600 line, and easier-to-clean brushes. $350 is an all-time low, and $150 less than usual.

And on the high end, the 980 is even more powerful than the 860, and includes a suite of advanced sensors that map your house to help it clean more efficiently, and let you know which rooms still need attention. $799's a lot of money, but it’s $100 less than usual, and an all-time low.

Digital Trends

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November 26, 2017 at 11:30AM