Sight Tech Global day 2 is live! Hear from Apple, Waymo, Microsoft, Sara Hendren and Haben Girma

Day 2 for the virtual event Sight Tech Global is streaming on TechCrunch from 8 a.m. PST to 12:30. The event looks at how AI-based technologies are rapidly changing the field of accessibility, especially for blind people and those with low vision. Today’s programming includes top accessibility product and technology leaders from Apple, Waymo, Microsoft and Google, plus sessions featuring disability rights lawyer Haben Girma and author and designer Sara Hendren. Check out the event’s full agenda.

The Sight Tech Global project aims to showcase the remarkable community of technologists working on accessibility-related products and platforms. It is a project of the nonprofit Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, which is based in Silicon Valley.

This year’s event sponsors include: Waymo, Verizon Media, TechCrunch, Ford, Vispero, Salesforce, Mojo Vision, iSenpai, Facebook, Ability Central, Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Amazon, Eyedaptic, Verizon 5G, Humanware, APH, and accessiBe. Our production partners: Cohere Studio (design),  Sunol Media Group (video production), Fable (accessibility crowd testing), Clarity Media (speaker prep), Be My Eyes (customer service), 3Play and Vitac  (captioning).

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/39LvOEa

Google now lets anyone contribute to Street View using AR and an app

An update to Google’s Street View app on Android will now let anyone contribute their photos to help enhance Google Maps, the company announced this morning. Using a “connected photos” tool in the new version of the Street View app, users are able to record a series of images as they move down the street or a path. The feature requires an ARCore-compatible Android device, and for the time being, will only support image capture and upload in select geographic regions.

ARCore is Google’s platform for building augmented reality experiences. It works by allowing the phone to sense its environment, including the size and location of all types of surfaces, the position of the phone in relation to the world around it, and the lighting conditions of the environment. This is supported on a variety of Android devices running Android 7.0 (Nougat) or higher.

Meanwhile, Google’s Street View app has been around for half a decade. Initially, it was designed to allow users to share their own panoramic photos to improve the Google Maps experience. But as phones have evolved, so has the app.

The updated version of the Street View app allows users to capture images using ARCore — the same AR technology Google users for its own Live View orientation experiences in Maps, which helps phones “see” various landmarks to help users get their bearings.

After the images are published in the Street View app, Google will then automatically rotate, position and create a series of connected photos using those images, and put them in the correct place on Google Maps so others can see them.

It will also use the same privacy controls on these contributed photos as are offered on its own Street View images (the ones it captured by driving the Street View car around). This include blurring people’s faces and license plates, and allowing users to report imagery and other content for review, if needed.

Image Credits: Google

The new system of connected photos won’t be as polished as Google’s own Street View images, but it does make the ability to publish to Street View more accessible. Now, the image capturing process no longer requires a 360-degree camera or other equipment mounted to a top of car, for example. And that means users who live in more remote regions will be able to contribute to Street View, without needing anything more than a supported Android phone and internet connection.

Google says it will still default to showing its own Street View imagery when it’s available, which will be indicated with a solid blue line. But in the case where there’s no Street View option, the contributed connected photos will appear in the Street View layer as a dotted blue line instead.

Image Credits: Google

The company will also use the data in the photos to update Google Maps with the names and addresses of businesses that aren’t already in the system, including their posted hours, if that’s visible on a store sign, for instance.

During early tests, users captured photo using this technology in Nigeria, Japan and Brazil.

Today, Google says it’s officially launching the connected photos feature in beta in the Street View app. During this public beta period, users will be able to try the feature in Toronto, Canada, New York, NY and Austin, TX, along with Nigeria, Indonesia and Costa Rica. More regions will be supported in the future as the test progresses, Google says.

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3mDSD0b
via IFTTT

Daily Crunch: Apple announces its best apps of 2020

Apple releases its annual best apps list, a self-driving truck startup raises $350 million and the BioNTech/Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine gets emergency approval in the United Kingdom. This is your Daily Crunch for December 2, 2020.

The big story: Apple announces its best apps of 2020

There were different winners — all selected by App Store editors — for different devices. Home workout app Wakeout! was named the iPhone App of the Year, Disney+ was the Apple TV App of the Year and the productivity app Fantastical was the Mac App of the Year. As for the iPad App of the Year, it went to perhaps the most obvious choice: Zoom.

As far as user popularity goes, Apple said that Zoom was the biggest free iPhone app, followed by TikTok and Disney+ (which must qualify as free on a technicality), while the most popular free iPhone game was Among Us.

The tech giants

Loon’s stratospheric balloons are now teaching themselves to fly better thanks to Google AI — Alphabet’s Loon has been using algorithmic processes to optimize the flight of its stratospheric balloons for years, but the company is now deploying a new navigation system.

Apple’s MagSafe Duo charger is now available — The MagSafe Duo appeared yesterday on Apple’s own store and has delivery estimates as soon as this week.

Google says its News Showcase will add free access to paywalled stories — So far, Google News Showcase has launched in countries including Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, France, U.K. and Australia.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Self-driving trucks startup TuSimple raises $350M from US rail, retail and freight giants — TuSimple was one of the first autonomous trucking startups to emerge in what has become a small-yet-bustling industry.

Virta Health’s behavioral diabetes treatment service is now worth over $1B — Virta aims to reverse the presence of type 2 diabetes and other chronic metabolic conditions by changing a user’s diet and exercise.

Space Perspective raises $7M for its plan to ferry tourists to the edge of space — Spaceship Neptune is designed to carry up to eight passengers on a six-hour journey that will include two hours spent at the upper edge of Earth’s atmosphere.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

From surviving to thriving as a hardware startup — Six strategies from Minut CEO Nils Mattisson.

A roundup of recent unicorn news — So much for a December news slowdown.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

The U.K. approves the BioNTech/Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use — The U.K. is the first country to approve the vaccine for widespread use.

Discovery will launch its own streaming service on January 4 — Discovery is the latest media company to launch a standalone streaming service, and the latest to adopt the simple naming strategy of just adding a plus sign.

Gift Guide: The best books for 2020 recommended by VCs and TechCrunch writers (Part 1) — Includes lots of good books for tech and business readers, plus my recommendation for the non-new, non-tech, yet extremely good novel “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.”

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2JIZPJO

Looking Glass’s next product is a holographic digital photo frame

Looking Glass’s technology is extremely cool, but has, thus far, been prohibitively expensive, ranging from $600 for its 8.9-inch product to $6,000 for the 15-inch model — and an undisclosed sum for its 32-inch 8K display. Portrait might not be the most technically ambitious or versatile product the Brooklyn-based startup has produced, but it’s easily the most accessible.

At $349, it’s still not cheap (though it’s $199 if you get in early via Kickstarter), but it has to be one of the most affordable holographic displays on the market. Along with the pricing, the company is taking a more populist approach to functionality, as well, offering up what is essentially a very advanced digital photo frame. The system offers up to 100 different perspectives on a 3D image, which, unlike products like Sony’s new 3D display, can be viewed by multiple people at once.

Image Credits: Looking Glass

The system can also be run without being tethered to a computer. Its standalone mode relies on a built-in computer to deliver a 60 FPS holographic image. Those photos, meanwhile, can be captured with an iPhone and edited into a 3D image using the included HoloPlay Studio software. Holographic videos can also be captured with Azure Kinect and Intel RealSense cameras.

Looking Glass is targeting enterprises and eventually gamers with 8K holographic display

“It’s the first step toward holographic video calls,” the company notes, perhaps tipping its hand a bit about future plans.

“Ever since I was a little kid, I dreamed of the moment that I’d be able to have a holographic display of my own,” CEO Shawn Frayne says in the release. “I imagined what it would be like to send someone a holographic birthday message, or to say hello as a hologram to my great-great-great granddaughter. Looking Glass Portrait, the culmination of six years of work by our Brooklyn and Hong Kong based team, makes those dreams real for more people than ever before.”

The Portrait goes up on Kickstarter today, and will be available to early backers for $199.

Looking Glass starts shipping its 8K holographic display

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3mxwfps

Twitter now supports hardware security keys for iPhones and Android

Twitter said Wednesday that accounts protected with a hardware security key can now log in from their iPhone or Android device.

The social media giant rolled out support for hardware security keys in 2018, allowing users to add a physical security barrier to their accounts in place of other two-factor authentication options, like a text message or a code generated from an app.

Security keys are small enough to fit on a keyring but make certain kinds of account hacks near impossible by requiring a user to plug in the key when they log in. That means hackers on the other side of the planet can’t easily break into your account, even if they have your username and password.

But technical limitations meant that accounts protected with security keys could only log in from a computer, and not a mobile device.

Twitter solved that headache in part by switching to the WebAuthn protocol last year, which paved the way for bringing hardware security key support to more devices and browsers.

Now anyone with a security key set up on their Twitter account can use that same key to log in from their mobile device, so long as the key is supported. (A ton of security keys exist today that work across different devices, like YubiKeys and Google’s Titan key.)

Twitter — and other companies — have long recommended that high-profile accounts, like journalists, politicians, and government officials, use security keys to prevent some of the more sophisticated attacks. Twitter explains how to set up two-factor authentication (and security keys) here.

Earlier this year Twitter rolled out hardware security keys to its own staff to prevent a repeat of its July cyberattack that saw hackers break into the company’s internal network and abuse an “admin” tool, which the hackers then used to hijack high-profile accounts to spread a cryptocurrency scam.

In the wake of the attack, Twitter hired Rinki Sethi as its new chief information security officer, and famed hacker Peiter Zatko, known as Mudge, as the company’s head of security.

Decrypted: Apple and Facebook’s privacy feud, Twitter hires Mudge, mysterious zero-days

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2L0JCk6

From surviving to thriving as a hardware startup

Nils Mattisson Contributor

Formerly at Apple, Nils Mattisson is now CEO and co-founder of smart home tech company Minut.

More posts by this contributor

• The road to recurring revenue for hardware startups

When a friend forwarded this tweet from Paul Graham, it hit close to home:

Startups are subject to something like infant mortality: before they’re established, one thing going wrong can kill the company. Hardware companies seem to be subject to infant mortality their whole lives.
I think the reason is that the evolution of the product is so discontinuous. The company has to keep shipping, and customers to keep buying, new products. Which in practice is like relaunching the company each time.
I don’t know if there is an answer to this, but if there were a way for hardware companies to evolve more the way software companies do, they’d be a lot more resilient.

Looking back on our startup journey at Minut, I remember several moments when we could have died. However, surviving several near misses we learned to tackle these challenges and have become more resilient over time. While there will never be one fully exhaustive answer, here are some of the lessons we learned over the years:

Subscription revenue is the only revenue that counts

While you can sell hardware with a margin and make important early revenue, it’s not a sustainable business model for a company that requires both software and hardware. You can’t cover an indefinite commitment with a finite amount of money.

Many hardware companies don’t consider subscriptions early enough. While it can be hard to command a subscription from the start (if you can, you might have waited too long to launch), it needs to be in the plan from the beginning. Look for markets where paying subscriptions is the norm rather than markets that operate on a one-time sale model.

Set high margins and earn them over time

It’s tempting to set low prices for hardware to attract customers, but in the beginning you should do the opposite. Margins allow for mistakes to be rectified. A missed deadline might mean you have to opt for freight by air rather than boat. You might have to scrap components or buy them expensively in a supply crunch. Surprises are seldom positive, and you don’t want to use your venture capital to pay for them.

Healthy margins can also be used to cover marketing costs while you learn what kind of messaging works and what channels you can sell through. If that wasn’t enough reason, starting with relatively high prices will help you avoid another common mistake, selling too much at launch.

This might seem counterintuitive — why wouldn’t you want great success out of the gate? The reason is that you will inevitably make mistakes with your early launches, and the bigger the launch, the bigger the blow. There are plenty of companies who achieved amazing crowdfunding success and then failed to deliver even the first units. Startups tend to chase growth at all costs, but for hardware startups in the first few years there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2VvT5lg

Apple releases its ‘Best of 2020’ App Store winners and most downloaded apps of the year

Apple today released its highly anticipated annual list of the best apps and games of 2020. As in previous years, App Store editors selected the winners based on factors like the app’s quality, creative design, usability and use of Apple technology, among other things. The “Best of 2020” winners this year include a number of apps that helped people transition to a life spent at home. For example, home workout app Wakeout! won iPhone App of the Year, while Zoom snagged the top spot as the iPad App of the Year.

Disney+, which helped families keep kids entertained during coronavirus lockdowns, won for Apple TV App of the Year. The streaming service had just won “best app” in Google Play’s User Choice category, announced on Tuesday alongside its other Play Store winners.

Image Credits: Wakeout!

Top games of the year highlighted our collective need for escapism, often to fantasy worlds. This year, the list of game winners included Genshin Impact (also a Play Store “best game” winner) for iPhone Game of the Year; Legends of Runeterra as iPad Game of the Year; Disco Elysium as Mac Game of the Year; Dandara Trials of Fear as Apple TV Game of the Year; and Sneaky Sasquatch as the Apple Arcade Game of the Year.

Image Credits: Fantastical

Meanwhile, productivity app Fantastical won as Apple’s Mac App of the Year, a reflection of our new work-from-home lifestyles.

A relaxation and sleep app, Endel, won Apple Watch App of the Year.

Image Credits: Endel

It’s not surprising to see another relaxation app win a top app of the year accolade. Google just awarded sleep app, Loóna, the title of best app of 2020 on Tuesday, as well.

2020 has been a tough year filled with stressful events, including not only the COVID-19 pandemic, but Trump’s impeachment and November’s contentious U.S. presidential elections, the biggest stock market crash since ’87, protests and riots over racial injustice, wildfires in Australia and the U.S. West, the Weinstein verdict, Brexit, the deadly Beirut explosion, violence in Delhi, the Hong Kong protests, locust swarms in East Africa and deaths of prominent figures like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kobe Bryant Chadwick Boseman and others.

As Apple explained in its announcement, apps are a reflection of culture. And this year, they reflected people’s focus on self-care and mental health, remote work and learning, staying connected with family and friends, interactive and social gaming, and more.

Image Credits: Pokémon GO

Apple selected a handful of apps to reflect these “app trends,” including self-care app Shine, remote learning app Explain Everything Whiteboard, family messaging app Caribu, charitable giving app SharetheMeal and the revamped Pokémon GO, which shifted to support indoor gaming.

“This year, more than ever before, some of our most creative and connected moments happened in apps. This was thanks to the amazing work of developers who introduced fresh, helpful app experiences throughout the year,” said Phil Schiller, Apple Fellow, in a statement. “Around the world, we saw remarkable efforts from so many developers, and these Best of 2020 winners are 15 outstanding examples of that innovation,” he added.

Image Credits: Apple

This year’s “Best of” winners will receive the first-ever physical App Store Best of 2020 award, featuring the App Store logo set into 100% recycled aluminum, with the winner’s name on the side.

Apple also unveiled the most downloaded apps and games of the year, which, unlike its “best of” editorial selections, are a showcase of real consumer demand.

Not surprisingly, these lists included remote work must-haves like Zoom and Gmail; a number of escapist games and, not coincidentally, pandemic simulator Plague, Inc.; the viral hit Among Us! ,which even AOC live-streamed; kids’ “metaverse” platforms like Minecraft and Roblox; and the usual set of top social apps — this year led by TikTok, not a Facebook-owned app.

The most-downloaded apps and games of 2020 were, as follows:

Top Free iPhone Apps

1. ZOOM Cloud Meetings
2. TikTok
3. Disney+
4. YouTube
5. Instagram
6. Facebook
7. Snapchat
8. Messenger
9. Gmail
10. Cash App

Top Paid iPhone Apps

1. TouchRetouch
2. Procreate Pocket
3. Dark Sky Weather
4. Facetune
5. HotSchedules
6. AutoSleep Track Sleep
7. The Wonder Weeks
8. SkyView
9. Shadowrocket
10. Sky Guide

Top Free iPhone Games

1. Among Us!
2. Call of Duty: Mobile
3. Roblox
4. Subway Surfers
5. Ink Inc. – Tattoo Drawing
6. Magic Tiles 3: Piano Game
7. Brain Test: Tricky Puzzles
8. Brain Out
9. Coin Master
10. Cube Surfer!

Top Paid iPhone Games

1. Minecraft
2. Plague Inc.
3. Heads Up!
4. Monopoly
5. Bloons TD6
6. Geometry Dash
7. NBA 2K20
8. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
9. The Game of Life
10. True Skate

Top Free iPad Apps

1. ZOOM Cloud Meetings
2. Disney+
3. YouTube
4. Netflix
5. Google Chrome
6. TikTok
7. Amazon Prime Video
8. Gmail
9. Hulu
10. Google Classroom

Top Paid iPad Apps

1. Procreate
2. GoodNotes 5
3. Notability
4. Duet Display
5. Teach Your Monster
6. LumaFusion
7. Affinity Designer
8. Toca Hair Salon 3
   9: Toca Life: Hospital
9. Toca Kitchen 2

Top Free iPad Games

1. Among Us!
2. Roblox
3. Magic Tiles 3: Piano Game
4. Ink Inc. – Tattoo Drawing
5. Call of Duty: Mobile
6. Subway Surfers
7. Dancing Road: Color Ball Run!
8. Tiles Hop – EDM Rush
9. Mario Kart Tour
10. Save The Girl!

Top Paid iPad Games

1. Minecraft
2. Monopoly
3. Bloons TD 6
4. Plague Inc.
5. Geometry Dash
6. The Game of Life
7. Five Nights at Freddy’s
8. Human: Fall Flat
9. Stardew Valley
10. Terraria

Top Arcade Games

1. Sneaky Sasquatch
2. Hot Lava
3. Skate City
4. Sonic Racing
5. PAC-MAN Party Royale
6. SpongeBob: Patty Pursuit
7. Oceanhorn 2
8. Crossy Road Castle
9. WHAT THE GOLF?
10. LEGO Brawls

Google Play’s Best of 2020 Awards highlight the stressful year it’s been

 

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3ofxNVC