Researchers receive $3.5 million to gain insight into brain and cranium development in children
With prevalence of developmental disorders on the rise, the need to understand brain development has never been more critical.
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Good news for Mortal Kombat game franchise fans
There is some good news for the Mortal Kombat game franchise as one of its installments titled Mortal Kombat X will be available on PlayStation Plus in October without any cost.
PS Plus will also see free of cost access to several games that is Mortal Kombat X, PGA Tour 2K21, and the upcoming game titled Hell Let Loose.
The subscriber will be able to get their hands on the free games from October 5.
Mortal Kombat X is one of the most beloved games and it received praise for its visuals, gameplay and storylines. It was released in 2015 and was followed by Mortal Kombat 11.
The project will be available in a catalogue of 20 games for those who buy PS5 consoles.
Read More: Do you know the man who played terrifying ‘Goro’ in Mortal Kombat?
Hell Let Loose was released in access back in June 2019 and was launched on PC a month later July. It will see its release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X on the same day.
It is a team-based multiplayer shooter with the team side having 50 players maximum. Set in World War II, the players can join German forces and engage in battle against the US or Soviet Union or vice versa.
PGA Tour 2K21, also called PGA Tour 2021, got launched in the summer of 2020 and was praised by the gaming industry. It had an impressive robust career mode along with a rotating lineup.
The post Good news for Mortal Kombat game franchise fans appeared first on ARY NEWS.
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Latent AI, which says it can compress common AI models by 10x, lands some key backing
Roughly a year ago, Latent AI, a now three-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based startup, pitched a handful of investors during TechCrunch’s Battlefield competition. It didn’t win that contest, but that hasn’t kept it from winning the interest of investors elsewhere. It just closed on $19 million in Series A funding in a round co-led by Future Ventures and Blackhorn Ventures, with participation from Booz Allen, Lockheed Martin, 40 North Ventures, and Autotech Ventures. The company has now raised $22.5 million altogether.
What are these backers funding exactly? The company says that its software tools allow AI models to run anywhere, irrespective of hardware constraints, and that includes on the inexpensive chips that are typically found in edge devices. It also says it can compress common AI models by ten times without a noticeable change in accuracy, partly through an “attention mechanism” that enables it to save power and run only what is needed, and partly because it can self-adjust its workload based on environment and operational context.
That means — according to Latent AI — that its tools can help developers deliver AI models that are optimized for compute; that they can overcome memory and power constraints; and that there’s almost no latency (thus the company name).
Steve Jurvetson, the veteran investor and cofounder of Future Ventures, says to “think of face-detection algorithms running locally within security cameras or appliances, or Siri-like voice interfaces working instantly, even when there’s no network connectivity.”
Certainly, there’s a huge market for the kind of tech that Latent AI is developing. Indeed, though in an interview earlier today, cofounder and CEO Jags Kandasamy declined to delve into specifics, he suggested that the U.S. government is already a customer, thanks in part to strategic investors like Booz Allen. (In a press release last month about Booz Allen’s investment in Latent AI, Steve Escaravage, an SVP at the government services agency, noted that the “ability to collect, analyze and quickly act on data is at the core” of the U.S.’s national defense strategy.)
Another strategic investor, Lockheed Martin, is very focused on finding ways that AI technologies can help the U.S. military improve on situational awareness across land, sea, air, space, cyber and electromagnetic spectrum domains, so it’s easy to appreciate its attraction to the startup.
Kandasamy also talked this afternoon about an unnamed ski manufacturer that it is using Latent AI’s tech in its Google Glass-like augmented reality goggles, and he suggested that Latent AI sees a world of opportunities in the commercial market, too.
Of course, given that the world is now rife with data-collecting-devices and that there’s an enormous interest in making that data actionable without having to send it back and forth to a distant cloud, there are many other companies and projects with the same objective as Latent AI. Among them are open source tools like TensorFlow, hardware vendors like Xilinx, and rival startups like OctoML and Deeplite.
Kandasamy insists that all fall short in some way. Of TensorFlow, he says that developers have only community support when it comes to production deployment. Of the chipmakers of the world, they’re focused on their own hardware and not vertically integrated. And what of those rivals? They’re either focused on compression or compiling and not both, says Kandasamy.
Either way, Latent AI has the kind of backstory that investors like. After Kandasamy, a serial entrepreneur, sold his last startup to Analog Devices, he headed to SRI International in 2018 as an entrepreneur-in-residence. There, he was quickly wowed by tech being developed by Sek Chai, who was the research institution’s technical director for nearly a decade, and who specialized in low-power high performance computing, computer vision, and machine learning. Indeed, soon after, Kandasamy had Chai had formed Latent AI and begun smoothing out some of the kinks.
Now, with fresh funding and a small but growing customer base that pays Latent AI on a subscription basis to access to its tools (then deploy them on premise), the question is whether the 15-person outfit is coming along far enough, fast enough, to get ahead of its current and future rivals.
Jurvetson plainly thinks it’s well-positioned. He says he has been an advisory board member for SRI International for more than a decade and seen a good many technologies like Siri develop and then spin out of the organization.
“This is the only one I have invested in,” he says.
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Daily Crunch: Alphabet shuts down Loon
Alphabet pulls the plug on its internet balloon company, Apple is reportedly developing a new MacBook Air and Google threatens to pull out of Australia. This is your Daily Crunch for January 22, 2021.
The big story: Alphabet shuts down Loon
Alphabet announced that it’s shutting down Loon, the project that used balloons to bring high-speed internet to more remote parts of the world.
Loon started out under Alphabet’s experimental projects group X, before spinning out as a separate company in 2018. Despite some successful deployments, it seems that Loon was never able to find a sustainable business model.
“While we’ve found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business,” Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth wrote in a blog post. “Developing radical new technology is inherently risky, but that doesn’t make breaking this news any easier.”
The tech giants
Apple reportedly planning thinner and lighter MacBook Air with MagSafe charging — The plan is reportedly to release the new MacBook Air as early as late 2021 or 2022.
Google threatens to close its search engine in Australia as it lobbies against digital news code — Google is dialing up its lobbying against draft legislation intended to force it to pay news publishers.
Cloudflare introduces free digital waiting rooms for any organizations distributing COVID-19 vaccines — The goal is to help health agencies and organizations tasked with rolling out COVID-19 vaccines to maintain a fair, equitable and transparent digital queue.
Startups, funding and venture capital
‘Slow dating’ app Once is acquired by Dating Group for $18M as it seeks to expand its portfolio — Once has 9 million users on its platform, with an additional 1 million users from a spin-out app called Pickable.
MotoRefi raises $10M to keep pedal on auto refinancing growth — CEO Kevin Bennett sees the opportunity to service Americans who collectively hold $1.2 trillion in auto loans.
Backed by Vint Cerf, Emortal wants to protect your digital legacy from ‘bit-rot’ — Emortal is a startup that wants to help you organize, protect, preserve and pass on your “digital legacy” and protect it from becoming unreadable.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
How VCs invested in Asia and Europe in 2020 — The unicorns are feasting.
End-to-end operators are the next generation of consumer business — VC firm Battery has tracked seismic shifts in how consumer purchasing behavior has changed over the years.
Drupal’s journey from dorm-room project to billion-dollar exit — Twenty years ago, Drupal and Acquia founder Dries Buytaert was a college student at the University of Antwerp.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
UK resumes privacy oversight of adtech, warns platform audits are coming — The U.K.’s data watchdog has restarted an investigation of adtech practices that, since 2018, have been subject to scores of complaints under GDPR.
Boston Globe will consider people’s requests to have articles about them anonymized — It’s reminiscent of the EU’s “right to be forgotten,” though potentially less controversial.
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.
Google to add App Store privacy labels to its iOS apps as soon as this week
Contrary to reports, Google is not delaying updates to its iOS apps because it doesn’t want to comply with Apple’s recently announced App Store Privacy Labels policy. The new policy, a part of the company’s larger privacy push, requires developers to disclose how data is collected from App Store users and used to track them. TechCrunch confirmed Google is not taking a stand against the labels. It is, in fact, preparing to roll out privacy labels across its sizable iOS app catalog as soon as this week or the next.
TechCrunch looked into the situation with Google’s apps following a story by Fast Company today that speculated that Google’s slowdown on releasing iOS app updates could be because it was not ready to be transparent about the data it collects from its users. The report stated that “not a single one” of Google’s apps had been updated since December 7, 2020 — coincidentally, just one day before Apple’s new privacy label requirements went into effect on the App Store.
It went on to suggest the late November to early December time frame when many of Google’s iOS apps were updated was another indication that Google was trying to squeeze in a few last updates before the app privacy label deadline.
There are a few problems with speculation, however.
For starters, Google actually did update two of its apps after the deadline — but those updates didn’t include privacy labels.
Google Slides, the slideshow presentation app and one of Google’s more significant apps in the productivity space, was updated on December 14, 2020. And Socratic by Google, a homework helper and the No. 7 free app in the Education category, was updated on December 15. (We fact-checked this data with Sensor Tower’s assistance, as Google’s iOS catalog is nearing 100 iPhone apps!)
While it may seem Google is skirting Apple’s new rules, we must also be careful about reading too much into the update timing. A slowdown in December app updates isn’t unusual by any stretch. Nor is it suspicious to see app changes pushed out to the public in the weeks before Christmas and New Year’s because the Apple’s App Store itself shuts down over the holidays. This year, The App Store closed from December 23 through December 27, 2020 for its annual break.
And like other large companies, Google goes on a code freeze in late December through early January, so as not to cause major issues with its products and services over the holidays when staff is out.
Google also isn’t the only major app publisher that delayed an immediate embrace of app privacy labels. Amazon and Pinterest haven’t yet updated with privacy labels as of the time of writing, for example.
Of course, none of this is to say that app privacy labels aren’t a concern for Google, given its primary business is advertising. In fact, they’re being taken quite seriously — with execs attending meetings to discuss that sort of thing.
Apple may have given Google some leeway on the matter, it seems, as it allowed Google’s apps to update after the deadline without submitting the privacy label information. (That probably won’t make happy smaller developers who worked to comply with the deadline, however.)
Reached for comment, a Google spokesperson confirmed the company has a plan to add privacy labels across its app catalog. They also confirmed the labels are expected to begin rolling out as soon as this week or next week, though an exact date is not yet available.
Divvy raises $165M as the spend management space stays red-hot
Today Divvy, a Utah-based startup that focuses on corporate spend management, announced that it has closed a $165 million round at a $1.6 billion valuation. The company said that the new capital was raised from Hanaco, Schonfeld, PayPal Ventures and Whale Rock, along with a cadre of prior investors.
The new investment is not Divvy’s first megaround of private capital. The well-known startup raised $200 million in April of 2019. TechCrunch reported at the time that that round valued Divvy at around $700 million, making today’s deal a more than 2x increase in valuation for the company.
Divvy exists amongst the current generation of Utah-based tech upstarts that are keeping the state’s tech scene in the broader startup conversation. Podium fits in the same cohort, for example, while Qualtrics feels like it’s from the preceding peer group.
Divvy’s market, the corporate spend management space — broadly, corporate cards and software that helps firms manage and limit expenses — is incredibly active today as businesses look to modernize their financial infrastructure. The new capital for Divvy comes after multiple other competitors recently announced fresh funds itself, for example. Let’s take a look at who Divvy is taking on with its new round.
Competition
A few weeks back Ramp, another corporate-cards-and-software startup, announced a $30 million raise and that it had reached $100 million in spend through its service in its first 18 months of business. At the same time Divvy shared with TechCrunch that it had seen 120% customer growth and over 100% growth in platform spend in 2020, compared to 2019. At the time, Brex, which also competes in the corporate spend space, declined to share metrics.
That Divvy was able to raise so much capital given its recent growth rates is not surprising. But that so many companies in its sector are managing similarly strong-to-line expansion stands out. After covering the Ramp round in December and noting Divvy’s metrics at the same time, both Airbase (more here) and Teampay (more here) reached out with numbers of their own.
Teampay reiterated its October-era metrics: that it has seen its annual recurring revenue (ARR) grow by 320% and its total spend grow by 800% since its then year-ago Series A. Airbase noted what it described as 250% growth in ARR — up by 2.5x, in other words — and 700% growth in payment volume (annualized).
Divvy, Teampay and Airbase are therefore growing like all heck, though in slightly different fashions. Divvy and Ramp offer their corporate spend products and software for free, taking a slice of payment volume through interchange revenues. Teampay and Airbase generate incomes from interchange as well, but also charge for their software. This gives them both spend and software revenues.
Which brings us back to Divvy’s news from today. I normally avoid quoting from releases, but in today’s case a paragraph is worth sharing:
The valuation of $1.6 billion and the addition of key investors validates Divvy’s ambition to modernize financial processes by combining credit, vendor, and spend management into a single platform. With this round of funding, Divvy plans to invest heavily in product development and engineering in order to accelerate their future roadmap.
Divvy is going to invest heavily in product? That makes sense. But to give away its software forever just seems odd. Some of its competitors are charging for theirs! Why not Divvy as well?
We’ll see, but what is clear today is that the capital that has gone into startups in Divvy’s cohort was put into a niche that has shown huge demand. So, expect to hear more from this product area in 2021.
T-Mobile says hackers accessed some customer call records in data breach
T-Mobile, the third largest cell carrier in the U.S. after completing its recent $26 billion merger with Sprint, ended 2020 by announcing its second data breach of the year.
The cell giant said in a notice buried on its website that it recently discovered unauthorized access to some customers’ account information, including the data that T-Mobile makes and collects on its customers in order to provide cell service.
From the notice: “Our cybersecurity team recently discovered and shut down malicious, unauthorized access to some information related to your T-Mobile account. We immediately started an investigation, with assistance from leading cybersecurity forensics experts, to determine what happened and what information was involved. We also immediately reported this matter to federal law enforcement and are now in the process of notifying impacted customers.”
Known as customer proprietary network information (CPNI), this data can include call records — such as when a call was made, for how long, the caller’s phone number and the destination phone numbers for each call, and other information that might be found on the customer’s bill.
But the company said that the hackers did not access names, home or email addresses, financial data, and account passwords (or PINs).
A spokesperson for T-Mobile said the breach happened in early December, and affects about 0.2% of all T-Mobile customers — or approximately 200,000 customers.
It’s the latest security incident to hit the cell giant in recent years.
In 2018, T-Mobile said as many as two million customers may have had their personal information scraped. A year later, the company confirmed hackers accessed records on another million prepaid customers. Just months into 2020, T-Mobile admitted a breach on its email systems that saw hackers access some T-Mobile employee email accounts, exposing some customer data.
Updated with comment from T-Mobile.
Sony to launch PlayStation 5 in India on February 2
Sony said on Friday that it will launch the PlayStation 5 in India on February 2, suggesting improvements in the supply chain network that was severely impacted last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Japanese firm said it will begin taking pre-order requests for the new gaming console in India, the world’s second largest internet market, on January 12. The console will be available for pre-order from a number of retailers including Amazon India, Flipkart, Croma, Reliance Digital, Games the Shop, Sony Center, and Vijay Sales, the company said.
The PlayStation 5 is priced at Indian rupees 49,990 ($685), while the digital edition of the console will sell at Indian rupees 39,990 ($550). Xbox Series X, in comparison, is priced at $685 in India, and Xbox Series S sells at $480. Both the consoles launched in India in November.
However, much like elsewhere in the world, Microsoft has been struggling to meet the demand for the new Xbox consoles in India. The Xbox Series X is facing so much shortage in the country that it’s not even easy to locate its page on Amazon India.
The announcement today should allay concerns of loyal PlayStation fans, some of whom — including, of course, yours truly — secured a unit from the gray market at a premium in recent months after India was not included in the first wave of nations for the PS5. Fans have also been frustrated at Sony and its affiliated partners for not offering clarification or providing conflicting accounts about the probable launch of the new gaming console in recent months.
In November, Sony suggested that it had delayed the launch of the PS5 in India due to local import regulations. Game news site The Mako Reactor reported earlier this week that Sony is unlikely to offer warranty and after-sales support for PlayStation 5 accessories in India — as has been the case for several previous generations.
India is not yet a big market for full-fledged gaming consoles yet. According to industry estimates, Sony and Microsoft sold only a few hundred thousand units of their previous generation consoles in the country. Thanks to the proliferation of affordable Android smartphones and world’s cheapest mobile data tariffs, tens of millions of Indians have embraced mobile gaming in recent years.
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