One Minute into the Future

Macron's Pick of Encrypted Messaging App Isn't What You'd Think

French President Emmanuel Macron uses the same encrypted iPhone messaging app once favored by the so-called Islamic State.

Telegram Messenger, the chatting software that’s backed by Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov and attracts consumers with features such as messages that self-destruct, is also the go-to for French officials including the president, people familiar with the matter said.

Cryptic Russian Crusader Says His $5 Billion App Can’t Be Bought

Macron and his circle of advisers started using Telegram in 2016, in the early days of his bid for the top office, and they’ve stuck with it for day-to-day exchanges about work planning and practical matters, the people said, asking not to be named discussing private operations.

Along with Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp in some cases, key officials interviewed by Bloomberg News said ease of use, habit and no extra cost are reasons for using Telegram. They also insist on being cautious about the kind of data they share there: only information they say is neither sensitive, classified, nor posing a security risk. Exchanges would otherwise go through high-security hardware like cryptophones specifically built for government, a French official said, asking not to be named as per government policy.

A government official said the messaging services are never used to exchange strategic or confidential information, but only used for logistics and technical information.

But even when it’s used to discuss seemingly trivial things, there are questions about whether instant-messaging software made for the greater public is the most appropriate for people running a country. The U.S. debated that matter last year regarding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state, while revelations that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone conversations were tapped prompted a surge in products and services built to boost telecommunications privacy.

Telegram also holds a controversial place in the pantheon of messaging apps that includes WhatsApp, iMessenger and Signal. In October Telegram was fined 800,000 rubles ($14,000) for not providing the Russian Federal Security Service with data necessary to decode messages, Interfax reported citing a court ruling.

Islamic State also used the encrypted Telegram Messenger service to connect with supporters, prompting the app to remove multi-user “channels” that members complained were promoting the terrorist group.

“There’s a natural arbitrage between cost, risk and ease of use, depending on the kind of information that’s being communicated and the level of potential threats,” said Herve Debar, a professor at Telecom SudParis and head of the University’s networks and telecommunications department. “In the case of high-level government, it can be difficult for those involved to distinguish sensitive data from information that doesn’t need extra protection.”

Telegram and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

Baby Pandas

While there are times when secrecy is an obvious requirement --things that fall into the utmost confidential categories still warrant using hard copies and physical vaults at France’s key posts-- there are also trickier cases. The logistics of the first lady’s visit this month to a baby panda at a zoo in the Loire Valley were sorted out over Telegram by government teams, the people said. The data, while trivial to some, could attract unwanted attention insofar as public figures like the president and his spouse are concerned.

“Politicians should use certified tools for work communications -- tools that are made by security experts, not companies like Facebook whose business relies on advertising and data collection,” said Laurent Delaporte, Chief Executive Officer of cybersecurity adviser Akerva.

To cater to the privacy needs of government members, but also corporate executives and others handling sensitive data at work, security companies are joining a heap of developers building messaging tools tailored to professionals. They’re going after a market already crowded by the likes of Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. to Slack Technologies Inc., by trying to differentiate with added security layers.

French state-backed defense company Thales SE has an encrypted instant-messaging app called Citadel, which it launched this year and it’s been pitching to customers with selling points including the company’s military expertise, a seal of approval from France’s national cybersecurity agency, and storing data locally. It has added about a dozen paying customers in about a year and has several tens of thousands of users. Some groups in the French army are currently trying out the software as part of a test phase, according to the defense minister’s office.

FCC Plans December Vote to Kill Net Neutrality Rules

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission under its Republican chairman plans to vote in December to kill the net neutrality rules passed during the Obama era, said two people briefed on the plans.

Chairman Ajit Pai in April proposed gutting the rules that he blamed for depressing investment in broadband, and said he intended to “finish the job” this year.

The chairman has decided to put his proposal to a vote at the FCC next month, said the people. The agency’s monthly meeting is to be held Dec. 14. The people asked not to be identified because the plan hasn’t been made public.

“We don’t have anything to report at this point,” said Tina Pelkey, a spokeswoman for the commission.

It’s not clear what language Pai will offer to replace the rules that passed with only Democratic votes at the FCC in 2015. He has proposed that the FCC end the designation of broadband companies such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. as common carriers. That would remove the legal authority that underpins the net neutrality rules.

One of the people said Pai may call for vacating the rules except for portions that mandate internet service providers inform customers about their practices.

The current regulations forbid broadband providers from blocking or slowing web traffic, or from charging higher fees in return for quicker passage over their networks.

Supporters of the rules say they are needed to keep network owners from unfairly squelching rivals and discouraging web startups. Critics say the rules discourage investment while exposing companies to a threat of heavier regulation including pricing mandates, and that marketplace competition will discipline broadband providers.

For the First Time, Scientists Used Gene Editing Inside a Living Patient

In Brief

For the first time, scientists have been able to make edits to the human genome inside a living patient. This process could have a huge impact on our ability to treat diseases like Hunter syndrome.

Cut and Paste

For the first time, doctors have edited the genome of a living human patient. A 44-year-old man received the treatment at a hospital in Oakland, California on November 13.

The patient suffers from Hunter syndrome, a rare genetic condition which leaves the sufferer without an enzyme that’s used to break down complex polysaccharides, a carbohydrate. Left untreated, it can cause permanent damage to mental development, organ function and physical abilities. In this case, doctors have attempted to correct the condition by using zinc finger nucleuses (ZFNs). These enzymes cut a gene that’s present in liver cells, inserting a functional copy of the gene that produces the desired enzyme.

VIDEO

The treatment was developed by Sangamo Therapeutics, a biotechnology firm based in California. “This is the first time someone could have a new gene put into their liver,” said the company’s president and CEO, Sandy Macrae, in an interview with The Scientist. He described performing the trial as “a privilege and a responsibility.”

ZFNs are a more unwieldy method of performing gene editing than CRISPR Cas-9, but they do offer more precision. The implementation utilized by Sangamo reportedly offers the ability to cut at any base that might be required.

Gene Genie

A successful trial like this demonstrates how far we’ve come in terms of being able to make edits to the human genome. Between CRISPR and ZFNs, we have developed powerful tools that allow us to make precise modifications – and that will allow us to treat a wide variety of different conditions.

This procedure is part of a larger trial being carried out by Sangamo, which will also consist of experimental treatments for people suffering from hemophilia B and Hurler syndrome, as well as Hunter syndrome. All three diseases are caused by absent or non-functional genes, which can now be inserted thanks to these cutting-edge techniques.

The use of ZFNs to treat Hunter syndrome offers up a huge improvement over the way the disease is addressed at present. The current method typically involves weekly infusions of enzyme replacement therapy. While this has proven to be effective, since the patient isn’t actually producing the enzymes, it’s an ongoing treatment that consumes a lot of time and money.

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Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab takes sci-fi fans into a VR experience

The Blade Runner film series has always been about authenticating what is true and what is fake. Reality takes on a new meaning when you are surrounded by Replicants, or human clones who are built for our pleasure and service. Uncovering what is true and what is not is the theme of a new Oculus Rift virtual reality experience, Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab.

The small game is one of a series of VR experiences being created in the Blade Runner universe by Magnopus, a Los Angeles studio that built the title for the Oculus Rift. It was released on October 19. I went through a hands-on demo of the 25-minute experience and then interviewed Ben Grossman, executive producer at Magnopus.

In this cross between a game and a film, you play the role of a silent replicant whose job is to function as a Blade Runner. The Replicant’s task is to hunt down and kill runaway Replicants for the Wallace Corp., the malevolent corporation in Blade Runner 2049. Sadly, you are not such a good Blade Runner, because you accidentally kill a human for no justifiable reason, mistaking the human for a Replicant. You are sent to the Wallace Corp. Memory Lab, where a woman tries to unravel what happened. Your memory of the events will be thoroughly investigated and scrubbed.

Wallace wants to find out what happened and then erase all of the evidence of what happened. I did this in a step by step process. So you go back to the scene of the crime and study a couple of blocks around the scene. Then you find that false memories have been implanted in your own memory. You have to go back to find out what really happened, and then you look for cameras and other clues that must be sanitized and erased. Yes, you’re pretty much participating in a cover-up.

Grossman explained what I saw and experienced. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Ben Grossman of Magnopus helped make Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab for the Oculus Rift.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: Are you in Los Angeles?

Ben Grossman: Downtown Los Angeles, yeah, where the film is set. [laughs]

GamesBeat: What was the genesis of this?

Grossman: Most filmmakers have been excited about the possibility of putting the audience directly into their movies. You very rarely get that opportunity. The original 1982 Blade Runner was one of those movies that so many people have lived in their minds. When Denis Villeneuve’s 2049 was going to come out, Alcon and Oculus got together and approached us to say, “Can we make an experience the audience can get into that’s part of the storyline, not just a marketing piece for the movie?” Something that people can go in to find and explore new stuff and be a part of the story.

Right around that time, Microsoft Holo Capture was just getting out of alpha and being put into the world. We decided to take the last mile integration there and use Holo Cap to capture actors, so it wasn’t just traditional game engine, video game characters. Then we put the audience in there and made a new storyline that explores some of the threads of the movie that haven’t fully been explored yet.

We tried to use new characters that weren’t in the film, so that we weren’t going to — if someone saw the VR experience before they saw the movie, we wouldn’t be giving anything away. There are sets and environments — we worked with the production and got assets and designs from the film. We were able to put those into VR so we could come out as close to the release of the movie as possible. If OC4 hadn’t happened just after the release, we probably would have released the same day as the movie. We haven’t gone live yet. We’ve announced today and we’ll be going live in about two weeks.

Above: Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab peels back the layers of memory.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: What was your role?

Grossman: I was one of the executive producers on the VR experience. I’m the co-founder of the developer, Magnopus.

GamesBeat: How much time did you have to work on this?

Grossman: The experience fits into a series. There’s a part one that came out at Comic-Con. This is part two, here at Oculus Connect. There are many more planned for the future. They’ll just continue on in episodic fashion across a bunch of different platforms. The development time on this was about eight months, for this episode. The engineering team varied between five people just working on concept and art, and then ramping up to 15 or 20 when it came to engineering and interactivity and distribution and all that stuff. We’re going to have a one- or two-week delay between releasing the Rift and Touch version and the Gear VR version. We’ll have it across both platforms as soon as possible.

GamesBeat: It’s an exciting IP to get your hands on.

Grossman: Yeah, we didn’t have a hard time convincing the engineers to work on Blade Runner. That much was certain. Everybody has always wanted to be inside that movie, I think.

The idea of being a part of creating that world — like I say, we had many of the filmmakers and producers and key personnel from the film working and testing out the experience and looking at it, but we also even got Doug Trumbull, who worked on the first movie from 1982. We put him in it, put him in the middle of the street, and said, “All right, you’re the only person we know who’s actually been on that movie set from the original movie. What do you think? Did we capture it?” He said, “I’m not coming out.” He sat there for like 30 minutes, just slowly teleported around and looked at everything. We were pretty happy about the level of faithfulness, both to the new movie and the old movie.

Above: Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab helps you reconstruct a crime scene and then erase it.

Image Credit: Magnopus/Oculus

GamesBeat: Did you have any help re-creating that environment, or is built from scratch?

Grossman: It’s built from scratch, but it’s built in collaboration with the production. In some cases we did get lidar scans from the film sets. The Memory Lab is from a lidar scan and photography set that came from the production in Hungary. The spinner does come from photography and modeling from the film. But the street scene was built completely. A lot of stuff had to be modified and optimized, but all the props and stuff are either captures from the film sets or pieces that were created from designs that fit into the film.

GamesBeat: So the electronic cover-up is one of themes from the film?

Grossman: There is a moment of that, yes, and I don’t want to ruin it for you. But we have — some of what you see here has themes that you see in the movie, but this electronic cover-up was also part of the earlier film. The authentication of truth versus fiction is a theme that’s been part of the Blade Runner franchise since the original film. We continued on with that theme. When you have artificial life that so closely replicates humanity, a lot of what’s “real” and what’s “fake” becomes part of what this universe needs to exist. It continues the same themes, but it’s not necessarily a directly lift from the film.

Above: Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab

Image Credit: Magnopus/Oculus

GamesBeat: You didn’t necessarily want to do any action, though? It’s more cerebral, I guess, as far as investigating–

Grossman: Yes. In this case we wanted it to be more about exploration. We felt like there are more than enough first-person shooting experiences in VR. We wanted to start trying to kick down some doors for narrative content. We know that storytelling is a challenge in VR, but stories about exploring may be the new frontier. We set up this story — in the future I think we’re going a lot farther than we have right now. But we set up this story to be something you discover through exploration.

With so many new users, we made it a little bit more — we added more tutorial content than we would have ordinarily liked. But in the future you’ll be able to go into these universes, discover the story by being in it, and follow whichever paths and whichever parts are most interesting to you. There is not one linear storyline. There will be many different storylines overlapping each other you can work your way around. This is the first step of going in that direction and getting people comfortable with those concepts and bringing in users’ feedback.

Saudi Fund Flexes Muscles With Stream of Billion-Dollar Projects

Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund is on a roll.

In the past month alone, the Public Investment Fund announced projects valued at more than $10 billion -- in industries ranging from property, energy, recycling and entertainment. Last week it set up a real-estate refinancing firm with a mandate of $20 billion in deals in five years.

The fund already holds about $110 billion of assets in listed Saudi companies and has investments with Blackstone Group LP to Softbank Group Corp. This month it scooped up a $2.4 billion stake in food processor Almarai Co.

The flurry of investments comes ahead of a three-day event starting Oct. 24 hosted by PIF. The who’s who in the business world are attending, including executives from JPMorgan Chase & Co., BlackRock Inc., Credit Suisse Group AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to central bank governors.

Adobe Project Sonicscape ‘visualizes’ 360 video to make editing easier

Adobe previewed a concept it is working on that would make it easier for creators working on VR videos to place and align sound.

Producing high-quality 360-degree video content has traditionally been a difficult affair at all stages of production, from capture to delivery. However, a constant stream of new cameras, editing tools and streaming techniques are on the way to make the process easier.

With Adobe’s SonicScape, the tool visualizes the location of audio within a spherical VR video using colorful bubbles. The visualization makes it easy to click and drag the sound to align it with the video, which could be ideal for cases where a microphone’s audio isn’t synced to the same location as the picture. The tool could make it easy for creators to enhance how immersive the sound is in their 360-degree projects, so when you turn your head in different directions while wearing a head-mounted display the audio seems to come from the right spot. It’s also possible to place additional sound effects in specific spots within the sphere, which could make it easier for creators to layer in complex soundscapes in 360-degree projects pulling from a library of effects.

The concept was revealed at Adobe’s MAX conference in Las Vegas as part of the company’s forward-looking projects. Project SonicScape may or may not be incorporated into other Adobe tools. Last year, Adobe premiered tools in a similar concept format that were ideal for its Adobe Premiere Pro video editing suite, enabling creators to easily playback and preview 360-degree content while wearing a head-mounted display and using hand controls like Oculus Touch. Those tools just started shipping as part of the actual Adobe product line and if SonicScape improves the workflow for content creators it could be a similarly useful step forward for 360-degree video creators. If useful, SonicScape could find its way into a future iteration of Adobe’s products.

Google opens AVA dataset to help machines identify human actions in videos

Computer vision is emerging as a major boon for tech companies looking to bring machines up to speed and perform tasks hitherto only achievable by humans.

In the past few months alone, eBay has revealed big plans to roll out a new search feature that lets you use existing photos to find similar items, while online clothing retailer ASOS announced something similar in the fashion realm. Taking things to the next level, Shutterstock last week unveiled a neat new experimental feature that allows users to search for stock photos based on their spatial composition, and a few days back Google’s Photos app garnered a new image recognition feature for pets.

Put simply, things are getting pretty exciting in the field of computer vision, and we’re starting to see results from the growing investment across the AI sphere.

Video gaga

Many of the computer vision developments that have already made it into actual products involve static image-based applications, but we’re beginning to see the fruits of computer vision technology in video, too. Russian authorities deployed facial recognition smarts across the country’s CCTV network, for example. Pornhub is doing something similar to automatically categorize “adult entertainment” videos, including training the system to recognize specific sexual positions. Then there is the burgeoning autonomous vehicle industry that leans heavily on machines’ ability to understand real-world actions.

Against this backdrop, Google has launched a new video dataset it hopes will be used to “accelerate research” into computer vision applications that involve recognizing actions within videos. AVA, an acronym for “atomic visual actions,” is a dataset made up of multiple labels for people doing things in video sequences.

The challenge of identifying actions in videos is compounded in complex scenes where multiple actions are combined and carried out by different people.

Above: AVA: Example

“Teaching machines to understand human actions in videos is a fundamental research problem in Computer Vision, essential to applications such as personal video search and discovery, sports analysis, and gesture interfaces,” explained Google software engineers Chunhui Gu and David Ross, in a blog post. “Despite exciting breakthroughs made over the past years in classifying and finding objects in images, recognizing human actions still remains a big challenge.”

AVA is essentially a bunch of YouTube URLs annotated with a set of 80 atomic actions that extend across nearly 58 thousand video segments and cover everyday activities such as shaking hands, kicking, hugging, kissing, drinking, playing instruments, walking, and more.

Above: Google: AVA

By allowing anyone to access the dataset, Google is hoping to improve machines’ “social visual intelligence” so they can understand what humans are doing and anticipate what they may do next.

How to Spot a Machine Learning Opportunity, Even If You Aren’t a Data Scientist

Sylverarts/iStock

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a niche subfield of computer science. Tech giants have been using AI for years: Machine learning algorithms power Amazon product recommendations, Google Maps, and the content that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter display in social media feeds. But William Gibson’s adage applies well to AI adoption: The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

The average company faces many challenges in getting started with machine learning, including a shortage of data scientists. But just as important is a shortage of executives and nontechnical employees able to spot AI opportunities. And spotting those opportunities doesn’t require a PhD in statistics or even the ability to write code. (It will, spoiler alert, require a brief trip back to high school algebra.)

Having an intuition for how machine learning algorithms work – even in the most general sense – is becoming an important business skill. Machine learning scientists can’t work in a vacuum; business stakeholders should help them identify problems worth solving and allocate subject matter experts to distill their knowledge into labels for data sets, provide feedback on output, and set the objectives for algorithmic success.

As Andrew Ng has written: “Almost all of AI’s recent progress is through one type, in which some input data (A) is used to quickly generate some simple response (B).”

But how does this work? Think back to high school math — I promise this will be brief — when you first learned the equation for a straight line: y = mx + b. Algebraic equations like this represent the relationship between two variables, x and y. In high school algebra, you’d be told what m and b are, be given an input value for x, and then be asked to plug them into the equation to solve for y. In this case, you start with the equation and then calculate particular values.

Supervised learning reverses this process, solving for m and b, given a set of x’s and y’s. In supervised learning, you start with many particulars — the data — and infer the general equation. And the learning part means you can update the equation as you see more x’s and y’s, changing the slope of the line to better fit the data. The equation almost never identifies the relationship between each x and y with 100% accuracy, but the generalization is powerful because later on you can use it to do algebra on new data. Once you’ve found a slope that captures a relationship between x and y reliably, if you are given a new x value, you can make an educated guess about the corresponding value of y.

As you might imagine, many exciting machine learning problems can’t be reduced to a simple equation like y = mx + b. But at their essence, supervised machine learning algorithms are also solving for complex versions of m, based on labeled values for x and y, so they can predict future y’s from future x’s. If you’ve ever taken a statistics course or worked with predictive analytics, this should all sound familiar: It’s the idea behind linear regression, one of the simpler forms of supervised learning.

To return to Ng’s formulation, supervised learning requires you to have examples of both the input data and the response, both the x’s and the y’s. If you have both of those, supervised learning lets you come up with an equation that approximates that relationship, so in the future you can guess y values for any new value of x.

So the question of how to identify AI opportunities starts with asking: What are some outcomes worth guessing? And do we have the data necessary to do supervised learning?

For example, let’s say a data scientist is tasked with predicting real estate prices for a neighborhood. After analyzing the data, she finds that housing price (y) is tightly correlated to size of house (x). So, she’d use many data points containing both houses’ size and price, use statistics to estimate the slope (m), and then use the equation y = mx + b to predict the price for a given house based on its size. This is linear regression, and it remains incredibly powerful.

Organizations use similar techniques to predict future product sales, investment portfolio risk, or customer churn. Again, the statistics behind different algorithms vary in complexity. Some techniques output simple point predictions (We think y will happen!) and others output a range of possible predictions with affiliated confidence rates (There’s a 70% chance y will happen, but if we change one assumption, our confidence falls to 60%).

These are all examples of prediction problems, but supervised learning is also used for classification.

Classification tasks clump data into buckets. Here a data scientist looks for features in data that are reliable proxies for categories she wants to separate: If data has feature x, it goes into bucket one; if not, it goes into bucket two. You can still think of this as using x’s to predict y’s, but in this case y isn’t a number but a type.

Organizations use classification algorithms to filter spam, diagnose abnormalities on X-rays, identify relevant documents for a lawsuit, sort résumés for a job, or segment customers. But classification gains its true power when the number of classes increases. Classification can be extended beyond binary choices like “Is it spam or not?” to include lots of different buckets. Perception tasks, like training a computer to recognize objects in images, are also classification tasks, they just have many output classes (for example, the various animal species names) instead of just Bucket 1 and Bucket 2. This makes supervised learning systems look smarter than they are, as we assume their ability to learn concepts mirrors our own. In fact, they’re just bucketing data into buckets 1, 2, 3…n, according to the “m” learned for the function.

So far, this all feels rather abstract. How can you bring it down to earth and learn how to identify these mathematical structures in your everyday work?

There are a few ways you can determine whether a task presents a good supervised learning opportunity.

First, write down what you do in your job. Break apart your activities into: things you do daily or regularly versus things you do sporadically; things that have become second nature versus things that require patient deliberation or lots of thought; and things that are part of a process versus things you do on your own.

For those tasks that you perform regularly, on your own, and that feel automatic, identify how many others in your organization do similar tasks and how many people have done this historically.

Examine the nature of the task. Does it include predicting something or bucketing something into categories?

Ask yourself: If 10 colleagues in your organization performed the task, would they all agree on the answer? If humans can’t agree something is true or false, computers can’t reliably transform judgment calls into statistical patterns.

How long have people in the organization been doing something similar to this task? If it’s been a long time, has the organization kept a record of successfully completed tasks? If yes, this could be used as a training data set for your supervised learning algorithm. If no, you may need to start collecting this data today, and then you can keep a human in the loop to train the algorithm over time.

Next, sit down with a data science team and tell them about the task. Walk them through your thought process and tell them what aspects of information you focus on when you complete your task. This will help them determine if automation is feasible and tease out the aspects of the data that will be most predictive of the desired output.

Ask yourself, if this were automated, how might that change the products we offer to our customers? Ask, what is the worst thing that could happen to the business if this were to be automated? And finally, ask, what is the worst thing that could happen to the business if the algorithm outputs the wrong answer or an answer with a 65% or 70% accuracy rate? What is the accuracy threshold the business requires to go ahead and automate this task?

Facebook Finally Unveiled a Standalone VR Headset, And It’s Just $199

In Brief

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerburg unveiled the Oculus Go today, at the Oculus Connect 4 keynote event. This low-cost, standalone VR headset will be available early next year, potentially introducing VR to a wider market.

At the Oculus Connect 4 keynote, happening now in San Jose, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerburg just unveiled a device that could make virtual reality (VR) technologies more accessible. Introducing the Oculus Go: a standalone VR headset that won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

At only $199, Zuckerberg called it “the most accessible VR headset yet.” Compared to the Oculus Rift, which costs about $600, the Oculus Go is undeniably inexpensive. Of course, at that price, it won’t offer you exactly the same VR experience. The Oculus Go will allow you to spin around while in virtual reality but not move around freely.

Image Credit: Brad Jones (@Tojiro)/Twitter

The Oculus Go is scheduled to ship early next year, but dev kits for VR developers are expected to be available by November — and Facebook is encouraging developers to give it shot. Hugo Barra, Facebook’s VP of VR, said that it’s “hands-down the easiest way for developers to get involved with VR.” The Oculus Go comes with a “fast-switch” WQHD LCD screen, wide-field lenses, and spatial audio. It is lightweight and “feels incredibly soft to wear,” Barra said.

Oculus' Santa Cruz gets closer to the future of wireless VR

Earlier today, Oculus announced Go, its first-ever consumer-ready standalone headset. But it's actually been working on another standalone headset -- Project Santa Cruz -- for a while longer. I had a chance to try on a really early version of it last year, and it was so unfinished that an Oculus helper had to put it on for me. Today at Oculus Connect 4, I tried on the latest version of hardware as well as the new Santa Cruz controllers, and the difference is night and day. It felt like a completely finished product.

We weren't allowed to take photos of the headset, but the photo seen here offers a good representation of what it looks like. From the mesh fabric surrounding the display to the adjustable head straps, the latest Santa Cruz prototype now looks almost like a wireless version of the Rift. It has an elastic strap along the top, while the rear plastic appears to be clad in a soft elastomer shell.

Putting it on was surprisingly easy -- I just wore it like a backward baseball cap -- and I was ready to go with just minimal adjustment. There's an IPD (interpupillary distance) wheel on the left underside if you want to adjust that too. On the whole, the headset feels soft, snug and lightweight -- easily one of the most comfortable VR headsets I've ever tried.

Then, an Oculus helper placed the new Santa Cruz controllers on my hands. They instantly feel much more compact than the Touch, with a fatter, stubbier grip. Also notable is the lack of a thumbstick; in its place is a large circular touchpad. One big reason for this design difference is that the Oculus folks wanted the infrared LED ring to face upwards, in order to get better tracking from the headset. And in order to move the ring to the top, some design adjustments had to be made. The grip and trigger buttons are still there, however, and feel easy enough to press.

I was instantly launched into a demo, where I was instructed to feed and play with an adorable dog-dinosaur creature hybrid. I used my virtual hands to pluck fruit from the tree and feed them to it, and I also threw a stick into the distance to have the creature fetch it for me. And because I wasn't tethered to a PC, I could walk around the room with ease and didn't have to worry about tripping over wires. Using the controllers as virtual hands felt pretty natural (thanks to the 6DOF tracking), and I got used to it fairly quickly.

I was then guided to yet another demo, and it was set in the Dead and Buried universe, where I was instructed to fend off zombies. This time, feeling untethered really made a big difference. I was able to swing around 360-degrees and shoot the undead that were coming at me from all sides. What's more, I was able to walk around the room to pick up additional weapons and gear (they included a shotgun, dynamite and a big shield). I even pressed down on an Acme-style TNT bomb detonator to set off an area of explosion.

In a way, it was a little unnerving to have so much freedom. I caught myself not wanting to move too far forward, in fear of going outside of my zone and bumping into a wall. I had to sort of peek underneath my headset every so often to make sure I wasn't too close to any furniture or obstacles. I wasn't at all -- the Oculus helpers would've told me otherwise -- but I still felt overly cautious at times.

Another thing that struck me was the audio. I had no headphones on, and still the audio came through loud and clear. That is thanks to the Santa Cruz's spatial audio tech, which lets you listen to the game audio without any headphones. I really appreciated this, because I was able to listen to the people around me while also interacting with the game.

On the whole, the experience was truly amazing. It was really as if I was using a Rift, but without being attached to a PC. It's clear that truly wireless VR is where Oculus is going -- while Go appears to be positioned as the entry-level version, Santa Cruz seems like the one you really want.

Air Berlin to End Flights October 28

Air Berlin to End Flights October 28

By

October 9, 2017, 10:47 AM EDT

Air Berlin Plc will end flights on Oct. 28 at the latest and is encouraging employees to seek jobs elsewhere as the company’s liquidation efforts proceed, according to a letter to workers from the carrier’s top two executives.

The airline has begun talks with labor leaders on terms for letting employees go, Chief Executive Officer Thomas Winkelmann and general representative Frank Kebekus said Monday in the letter. This week marks a crucial phase for the future of Air Berlin’s staff, planes and airport slots, as weeks of intensive, exclusive negotiations with Deutsche Lufthansa AG and EasyJet Plc are set to end Thursday, they wrote.

While the bankrupt carrier is trying to find positions for its roughly 8,600 employees, they should still try to find new jobs on their own because “prospective buyers of parts of Air Berlin intend to appoint new staff in the majority of cases,” Winkelmann and Kebekus wrote. “The Lufthansa group alone has already advertised 1,000 jobs with its subsidiary Eurowings.” An Air Berlin spokesman declined to comment further on negotiations.

The airline was set up in 1978 in West Berlin and, after adopting a low-cost business model following Germany’s unification in 1990, the carrier sold shares public in 2006. Air Berlin went into insolvency administration in August when Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways PJSC, its biggest shareholder, withdrew financial support after years of losses. Winkelmann and Kebekus said in their letter that Air Berlin will have to stop flying by the end of October amid proceedings to settle with creditors and distribute assets to buyers.

The carrier is holding two job fairs for employees this week, with representatives from companies including chemical maker BASF SE, state railway Deutsche Bahn AG and retailer Zalando SE, the Air Berlin executives said. A separate bidding period for the company’s Air Berlin Technik plane-maintenance arm is to end this week, while flight operations of its Niki and LGW divisions, which remain solvent, will continue.

$1.6 billion startup MongoDB could be worth less than $1 billion when its IPO happens next week

Unicorn startup MongoDB has taken another step toward its IPO by offering a price range for its shares.

It plans to price shares between $18 and $20 apiece it said in an updated prospectus filed with the SEC. The IPO is generally expected to take place on October 19.

At the mid price, MongoDB would raise about $152 million and be worth about $930 million, according to PitchBook.

That's quite a bit shy of its last valuation as a private company of $1.6 billion.

The New York-based database company has been a darling of the VC world. It raised over $311 million from private investors with later investors paying as much as $16.72/share, according to PitchBook (and earning dividends on those shares).

MongoDB offers database software that's particularly good for today's messy, big data applications, a market known as "No-SQL" databases. It fills a somewhat different technical niche than the traditional databases sold by Oracle and Microsoft. However, as No-SQL tech has grown in popularity, MongoDB has faced competition with traditional vendors and newcomers alike who offer their own versions of No SQL, including Oracle and Amazon Web Services, as well as other startups like Couchbase.

Even so, MongoDB is the granddaddy of this new market. It makes the most popular No-SQL option and is now the fourth most popular database on the market today, according to market watching site DB-Engines.

As for its financials, the company isn't profitable, albeit revenues are growing and losses are shrinking.

MongoDB reported $67.9 million in revenue in the six months ending July 31, and lost $45.76 million.  It did $45.1 million in revenue over the same period last year and lost about the same amount of money, $45.33 million. That's a loss of $1.71 a share over those same six months, versus $1.93 a share in the same period last year.

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Dove's 'racist' ad might have cost the brand an advantage it spent 13 years building

Facebook/Naythemua

Dove is hardly the first marketer to find itself embroiled in a public-relations crisis this year, but it's likely to take a bigger hit than others, experts say.

This is because the digital ad — which many say carries an overtly racist message — flies in the face of everything Dove has been trying to say about women over the past decade with its "Real Beauty" campaign.

Dove's screwup also once again highlights the delicate place that marketers occupy in the age of social media, where a consumer mob can quickly jump on a misstep and cause it to escalate far beyond the brand's control.

Dove is the latest marketer to find itself in hot water after it ran what many saw as a racist ad on Facebook last week.

The beauty brand posted a three-second video on its US Facebook page on Friday showing a black woman removing her top to reveal a smiling white woman underneath. On Saturday, the brand apologized and said in a tweet that it had removed the clip.

While Unilever, which owns the Dove brand, is hardly the first to find itself embroiled in a public-relations crisis this year, experts say it's likely to take a bigger hit than others, like Pepsi, which was hammered earlier this year for an ad starring Kendall Jenner.

That's because the Dove ad isn't just tone-deaf — more problematic is that its message seems to stands staunchly against everything that the company's much-praised, pro-women marketing has stood for over the past decade. Its uber-successful 13-year-old "Real Beauty" campaign has featured messaging such as "You're more beautiful than you think."

"The Pepsi mishap seems small compared to this ad by Dove and Unilever," said Chris Allieri, the principal of Mulberry & Astor, a New York-based PR, branding, and marketing agency. "For a company that has professed to embrace 'real beauty' by showcasing everyday women, this misstep is unconscionable."

With this unforced error, the company has unraveled the entire premise of its "Real Beauty" campaign, said Erich Joachimsthaler, the founder and CEO of the branding-strategy firm Vivaldi Partners. Those ads have long centered on rejecting insular notions of beauty while vowing to feature "real women of different ages, sizes, ethnicities, hair color, type or style."

"Dove's brand has been built on this unique and well-communicated belief system," he said. "And this ad undermines the very brand value for which Dove stands."

Not only has Dove built its brand on "Real Beauty," but Unilever too has embraced a role as a champion of diversity in the advertising and marketing industry.

Unilever is at the forefront of an industry group called the Unstereotype Alliance, tasked with proactively coming up with ways to make ads less stereotypical. The group, launched to much fanfare at the Cannes Lions festival this summer, was lauded by Unilever's marketing chief, Keith Weed, during his panels at Advertising Week two weeks ago.

"When your ad is being called 'racist' by people across social media, you've done a lot more than 'miss the mark,'" Allieri said. "It just goes to show that in reality there is a long way from Cannes to Main Street. Maybe they should have 'real people' create the ads rather than just starring in them."

This isn't the first time Dove has caused outrage — many people see the ad as just the latest in a string of marketing efforts from Dove that elevate white beauty above that of women of color.

In 2011, for example, Dove apologized for an ad for its VisibleCare body wash that seemed to show a black woman in the "before" photo and a white woman in the "after" photo with "more beautiful skin." And in 2012, Dove faced criticism for advertising its Summer Glow Lotion as being for "normal to dark skin."

"This would be a crisis of extreme proportions even if it was a one-off," said Matt Rizzetta, the CEO of the brand-communications agency North 6th Agency. "But it's not the first time that it's happened to them, and that's why lands them a place alongside the biggest brand crises of the year, including United and Uber."

Dove's widely derided ad also once again highlights the delicate place that brands occupy in the age of social media, where a consumer mob can quickly jump on any perceived slight and cause it to escalate far beyond the brand's control. Like Uber and United Airlines earlier this year, Dove has lost control of its narrative and consumers have called for a boycott, using the hashtag #BoycottDove.

"I don't question their intent, but I do question their approval process, their execution, and general common sense," Rizzetta said. "While social media requires a faster turnaround and a shorter response time, there need to be ample checks and balances to ensure that the sensitivity of the message is at par with speed and response time."

Dove told Business Insider the short video was intended to convey that Dove body wash was for every woman, as well as celebrate diversity, "but we got it wrong." The brand also said the video "did not represent the diversity of real beauty, which is something Dove is passionate about and is core to our beliefs," and that it was "re-evaluating our internal processes for creating and approving content to prevent us making this type of mistake in future."

Experts said the brand must not only put an efficient crisis-communications plan in place, but walk the walk.

"Launching an Unstereotype Alliance at an advertising party with lots of rosé at the beach or fancy yacht events at Cannes is just a lot of talk," Joachimsthaler said. "They need to walk the talk."

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Hearthstone adds its first new Warlock hero, and you can get it at a Fireside Gathering

Most people play Hearthstone online, but you’ll get a nice reward if you compete with some nearby card-slingers.

Blizzard announced today that players who participate in a Fireside Gathering (that’s what Blizzard calls these local Hearthstone events) starting on October 17 will unlock a new Warlock hero portrait, Nemsy Necrofizzle. You just need at least three players to play a Fireside Brawl at the Gathering.

Hero portraits are just cosmetic, but they help players customize their Hearthstone experience. Basically, they’re a fun collectible. Blizzard has sold some of them for real money, but it’s used others to encourage players to do things like subscribe to Twitch Prime.

While most hero portraits are prominent characters from the Warcraft games, Nemsy Necrofizzle is a Hearthstone original. But she’s not an entirely new character. The gnome has appeared in the art for the Fen Creeper and Bog Creeper cards. The Shaman hero Morgl the Oracle is the only other Hearthstone original hero portrait.

You can find the locations of Fireside Gatherings here. You can also try to host your own.

The PC Gaming channel is presented by Intel®'s Game Dev program.

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Why Bitcoin and Ethereum will soon be everywhere (for reals)

Bitcoin, Ethereum and blockchain technologies are all the rage. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are raking in millions in mere minutes, and every day a new initiative is announced with ever-increasing hype.

With all of this going on, you’d expect cryptocurrencies to be mainstream fare, right?

Unfortunately, they’re not quite there — yet.

As of now, your grandma probably isn’t wagering Ethereum with her bridge buddies. Heck, even buying pizza with cryptocurrency sounds like science fiction. The fact of the matter is that for people outside of the hardcore crypto-enthusiast community, the whole idea is still mysterious.

This article will help you get a better grasp of the future of cryptocurrency. After you finish it, you’ll clearly see how these technologies are poised to join the mainstream.

So, when will this dizzying race come to an end? Is there real value in the blockchain craze? Can it possibly live up to the expectations created by so many rivers of newsprint?

Below, you’ll find answers to all of these questions and more.

The true potential of blockchain technology

As it turns out,  distributed blockchain ledgers do have a future.

Not only can they reduce skyrocketing IT costs, but the promise of faster, less-expensive financial transactions has the potential to accelerate growth in a host of industries.

With this great potential comes some bad news, though … you won’t see these possibilities become a reality until the technology becomes useful in the real world.

What will this look like exactly? Well, when you can pay for a ride to a cafe and buy a coffee in crypto — without needing a master’s degree, mind you — its use will be pretty standard.

When crypto goes mainstream transactions won’t be measured in millions of dollars, but trillions.

The explosion of the global sharing economy illustrates how cryptocurrency can go mainstream.

Several companies are already changing the way things are done in this sector. They’re taking products and services that are already in existence and turning them into economic opportunities for millions of people.

In their industry, Uber and Lyft have transformed the way the world thinks about traveling by car. They’ve also empowered people who couldn’t otherwise find work to generate income.

With these businesses, it’s easy for drivers to get started, and they can work on their terms. Due to these reasons and more, Uber and Lyft have taken off like wildfire.

Airbnb also challenges the status quo to provide worldwide accommodations for its users. Not only has it reinvented the way people think about traveling, but it’s been an absolute game-changer when it comes to bringing more money into various communities.

Currently, initiatives like Open Money are laying the foundational groundwork so that software developers can make the vision of universal cryptocurrency acceptance possible. Their platform provides the technological infrastructure that will integrate cryptocurrency transactions into practical, everyday applications.

At the end of the day, companies like Uber and Lyft don’t just change the way we think about the world — they change the world. When it comes to cryptocurrency, companies like Open Money will significantly expand the acceptance of cryptocurrencies by facilitating their incorporation into the software people are already using.

Can cryptocurrency acceptance in consumer apps open the floodgates?

Now all of this sounds pretty amazing, but what is needed to bring this vision to reality?

Companies will need to develop strategies that are based on proven market principles to succeed. Namely, they’ll need to empower app developers from all over the world to quickly and easily integrate cryptocurrencies into their applications.

The booming consumer applications market is the ideal starting point for bringing cryptocurrencies into the mainstream. According to a recent research study by We Are Social, more than half of the world’s population now connects to the internet with a smartphone, generating over 50 percent of all internet traffic.

Overall, 3.5 billion people around the globe consistently use mass-market consumer software.

The real motor of consumer software lies in the hands of software developers. All around the globe, these individuals are innovating solutions that engage their users in powerful ways.

Unfortunately, they don’t currently have the tools they need to make this possible.

Though others are likely to follow in its footsteps, Open Money is the first initiative to provide a state-of-the-art REST API, SDKs and industry best practices designed to facilitate blockchain integration.

Built by developers and for developers, with this solution, it won’t be necessary to start from scratch. Instead, they can leverage an established infrastructure to transition their currently successful apps into the cryptocurrency market,  finally enabling you to pay for your pizza in cryptocurrency.

“We want to be the catalyst that takes blockchain technology and puts it in the hands of billions of people around the world. By empowering developers of all sizes to harness the true potential of this amazing technology, we will be contributing to a world that is more efficient, equitable and productive. That’s what the Open initiative is all about,” explained Ken Sangha, COO of Open Money.

The opportunity

Cryptocurrency is on the brink of change. Soon, app developers from around the globe will empower everyone — including grandparents— to use cryptocurrency with ease. (Nostalgia: $12 checks written by older folks will soon be a thing of the past, so get your cryptowallet ready.) If they succeed, they’ll create a new market that’ll change the economic system forever.

Visualizing The True Impact Of The Sustainable Development Goals

In September 2015, nearly 200 world leaders agreed to work toward the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, a set of universal quality of life targets that, if met, could eradicate extreme poverty and racial injustice and greatly reduce the impact from climate change by 2030.

Two years later, there’s been , but given as many countries, including the U.S. shift toward nationalistic and isolationist ideologies, there’s another global threat: that some of those commitments toward funding and researching solutions will be withdrawn.

To keep everyone accountable, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has partnered with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington to release its inaugural Goalkeepers report, which will be published annually to show whether progress toward the global goals is continuing.

In one way, it’s an incentive: “It’s hard sometimes for people to see the progress because they see how different and how tough conditions are in poor countries,” Bill Gates notes in the introductory video below. But it is also intended to be a gut check: “This year and every year, we, the Gates Foundation… will share what we think is working and be honest about what’s not,” adds Melinda in the video.

VIDEO

In Angola, the report notes, children are 75 times more likely to die than in a more developed country like Finland. Child mortality is an issue that many developing countries, including Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Pakistan struggle to fix. In contrast, Malawi has dramatically reduced its early death toll from one in four kids in 1990 to about one in 16 today, by teaching medical officials modern resuscitation techniques, outfitting clinics with inexpensive antiseptics to prevent infection, and encouraging mothers to breast feed, which has been shown to boost children’s immunity to some diseases.

On a larger level, continuing to improve vaccine distribution networks in many places is crucial: “About 1.5 million of the children who will die next year, will die from diseases that we can prevent with vaccines,” notes the report.

So what will happen more efforts aren’t ramped up or current levels of support decline? To answer that, the Gates Commission has designed a rough metric; it’s a calculation that extrapolates the current rate of change for various global goals like reducing childhood mortality, maternal death rates, even smoking against what might happen if ostensibly more or less resources were committed, causing progress to shift toward either an above or below average pace of progress. (In this case, represented by the somewhat arbitrary 85th percentile of each issue’s historical change rate (when great leaps happen), compared to the 15th percentile (or when things drag), respectively.

The result is a series of visualizations that show whether current progress is enough, and how it might ideally progress or disastrously regress if that support waivers.

Take the UN target to end or dramatically reduce preventable deaths for children under 5. Success is set at 12 deaths per 1,000 kids. As chart below shows, though, just maintaining the current level of government support and investment isn’t really enough. Not only would the result be nearly twice above the (sort of) acceptable minimum, but any reduction in worldwide engagement would likely increase that number to 31 per 1,000. (Even the best case “if we progress” scenario of 19 per 1,000 comes up short, which should be a signal to everyone involved to generate more creative solutions.

[Image: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]In the case of HIV, continued or more progressive efforts should reduce infection rates even closer to total eradication. While currently fewer than 1 in 1,000 people worldwide are infected, losing focus on what’s working might actually cause that trend to reverse itself returning the disease to levels not seen since the year 2000, doubling the current infection rate to .5 cases per 1,000 people. The problem is that after huge global investment in preventative education and treatment practices about a decade and a half ago, there’s more competition to divert funds elsewhere because the “sense of crisis” has been so dramatically reduced, the report notes.

[Image: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]The same is true of disease that have made great gains but not reached total annihilation, like malaria, tuberculosis, and neglected tropical diseases, all of which have been dramatically reduced in recent years but require a constant infusion of continued funding so that preventative measures–like, say, insecticide-treated bed nets for malaria hot zones–continue to be doled out.

Malnutrition is another huge concern because it causes stunting, a condition associated not just with shortened growth, but lifelong physical and cognitive problems for those affected. While the condition currently affects 26% of children under five, solving it involves a suite of health and nutritional interventions with a sustained and long-term commitment.

[Image: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]As more children develop normally, the argument goes, they’ll be able to be more productive, boosting their own life chances and local economies. It’s not a problem that may be solvable by 2030, but could be dramatically reduced to as low as 18%—and more if there are exponential breakthroughs (The UN has an entire accelerator program dedicated to this, and MacArthur Foundation just selected HarvestPlus, a group trying to fix local economies and their nutrition levels at the same time by enabling farmers to grow biofortified crops as a finalist in their competition that will dole out $100 to make world-changing plans like that a reality.) Alternatively, leaders backing off any current commitments may cause progress to flat line completely.

For complex issues where such maladies combine to create a cycle of poverty, every last goal remains important. Same with the commitment to match successes with even more ambition.