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Monday, December 9, 2013
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By teaching a computer to think, Facebook hopes to better understand how its users do too . So today the company announced that one of the world’s leading deep learning and machine learning scientists, NYU’s Professor Yann LeCun, will lead its new artificial intelligence laboratory.


LeCun has been pioneering artificial intelligence breakthroughs since the 1980s, when he developed an early version of the “back-propagation algorithm” that became the top way to train artificial nueral networks. He went on to work for AT&T Bell Laboratories where he created the “convolutional network model that mimics the visual cortex of living beings to create a pattern recognition system for machines.


LeCun’s expertise is in “deep learning” speech and image recognition systems has driven his research in building visual navigation systems for self-driving cars, autonomous ground robots, drones, and more.


Now, LeCun’s knowledge could help Facebook determine exactly what people want to see in their News Feeds, how they want to organize their photos, and possibly more exotic projects.


In a Facebook post this morning, LeCun gave some early details of his plans for the Facebook Artificial Intelligence lab, and noted CEO Mark Zuckerberg will reveal more today at a conference in Lake Tahoe today.

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By teaching a computer to think, Facebook hopes to better understand how its users do too . So today the company announced that one of the ...

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Building a smart home is hard. First you have to install all the hardware then you have to figure out a platform for controlling lights, sensors, and the like. Thankfully the Owl Platform has got your back.


The platform is aimed at hackers who want to experiment with various sensor arrays around their premises. It includes a base station and a number of sensors – door open/close, water level, temperature, etc. – that last for about 10 years and connect wirelessly to the base station and Owl Platform service. They are looking for $50,000 to help build a real base station, (they’ve been using Raspberry Pis so far) and to finalize their open source server software. The system will send email and text alerts when various sensors hit their maximums or minimums or when the open/close sensors are activated.


We have developed compact, reliable, and long life wireless sensors and intuitive software system for your home. Our compact (1 square inch) sensors last up to 10 years on a coin cell battery. With our online service you’ll know immediately if something is happening at home. Keeping simplicity in mind, the whole system can be unpackaged and set up in less than 15 minutes!

For a pledge of $150 you can get a basic sensor package including a water sensor and open/close sensor. The sensors, called Pips, are ready to ship and they will build the final Owl hardware by July 2014. I’ve played with an early edition and was impressed with the size of the Pips and the ease of setup. While this probably isn’t for the casual user, I could see this as being valuable to a homeowner with a more DIY bent. Just as the body is getting all sorts of quantified self hardware, perhaps this is the start of the quantified home?








10:39 AM

Building a smart home is hard. First you have to install all the hardware then you have to figure out a platform for controlling lights, sen...

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The iPhone 5s is doing pretty well in terms of sales numbers, and has just passed 10 percent usage rate among iPhone models according to mobile analytics firm Mixpanel. That’s a significant milestone, because it means that users are adopting the iPhone 5s at between two and three times the rate they got on board with the iPhone 5. And the iPhone 5c, while trailing the iPhone 5s, is actually doing better than many might expect, too.


Growth for the iPhone 5 progressed at about 0.25 to 0.5 percent per week, according to Mixpanel, and the growth for the iPhone 5s is currently trending at around 0.75 and 1 percent per week. That’s about 3x the rate of adoption of the iPhone 5c, according to the data gathered through Mixpanel’s network – which means the iPhone 5c’s growth is roughly equivalent to the general rate of adoption for the iPhone 5. Mixpanel CEO Suhail Doshi says that means the 5c is quite possibly “doing a reasonable job of taking over the mid-end part of the smartphone market.”


Screen Shot 2013-12-09 at 12.51.52 PMThe 5s is still far and away the hotter device, according to Mixpanel and other sources, which is good news for Apple in terms of average selling price since it sees relatively high margins on the manufacture and sale of those devices according to industry estimates. And the 5c’s adoption rate is in keeping with predictions that it’ll be more of a slow-burn device, getting picked up by less tech-savvy consumers who are happy to wait until their contract expires to upgrade.


Between the rapid adoption of iOS 7 and the relatively quick uptake of the new iPhone models, Apple’s doing a great job of getting everyone on board with the same platform, and on the most recent version of both software and hardware. That’s a huge boon for developers working on software for the devices, and of course it should also provide a very convincing counter argument to critics who say that Apple may have reached a ceiling in terms of how much further it can push its smartphone business growth. The really interesting numbers will come when Apple reveals its next quarterly results at the end of January.







10:39 AM

The iPhone 5s is doing pretty well in terms of sales numbers, and has just passed 10 percent usage rate among iPhone models according to mob...

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Flipboard has confirmed that it raised an additional $50 million, which will close out the Series C round of financing that it brought on in September. According to a company spokesperson, the funding closed last week, and brings the total amount raised to more than $160 million.


Rizvi Traverse Management, the investment fund run by under-the-radar Suhail Rizvi, led the second half of the funding round in addition to the first. Valuation was pegged at $800 million, which was only slightly below the $1 billion that had previously been rumored. Existing investors, which include Goldman Sachs, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Index Ventures, and Insight Venture Partners, also participated.


Flipboard’s raise comes as the company has been working to give users more tools to build magazine-like feeds of their favorite pieces of content. In March, it launched the 2.0 version of its product, which unveiled the magazine feature. Soon after, it enabled users to share those custom feeds with their friends.







10:09 AM

Flipboard has confirmed that it raised an additional $50 million, which will close out the Series C round of financing that it brought on in...

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Balaji Srinivasan, a Stanford academic who co-founded a major genetic testing company Counsyl, is stepping up as Andreessen Horowitz’ eighth general partner.


The firm, which is just four years old, tends to pick general partners who have built or operated large companies before. So this is in keeping with that philosophy.


While teaching at Stanford, Srinivasan started Counsyl, a South San Francisco-based company that helps prospective parents test their risks of passing on genetic conditions to their future children.


While Counsyl doesn’t get as much hype as other consumer Internet or mobile startups in Silicon Valley, they are the forefront of “big data” meeting the rapidly dropping costs of full genome sequencing. The company is testing somewhere around 3 to 4 percent of all births in the U.S. So with 4 million births per year, that would put them at around 120,000 to 160,000 tests per year. At around $500 to 600 per test (depending on whether there are insurance discounts), they’re on a annualized revenue run-rate of about $60 to 80 million a year and we hear that the company was last valued at $1 billion in the most recent round.


What Srinivasan brings to Andreessen Horowitz is the kind of expertise that will help the firm sort out health-related deals. But he has a pretty broad range of interests. He also runs the Stanford Bitcoin group and teaches a MOOC (or a massive open online course) about startup engineering at Stanford that has reached about 125,000 students.


“I’m interested in businesses that take digital bits and turn them into interfaces for physical atoms,” said Srinivasan, who will be the firm’s youngest partner at 33. “I’m also interested in drones, Bitcoin and 3D printing.”


It took Andreessen Horowitz about six months to recruit Srinivasan over.


“Marc was very persuasive with the idea that I could have leverage across a bunch of industries,” Srinivasan said. “Being a VC will definitely be different in certain ways. The biggest change is that I can’t be as hands-on in a company as I normally would be.”


The firm’s co-founder Marc Andreessen added, “We met Balaji back in the spring. He’s spent a lot of time at the firm. We’ve gotten to know him, built a great relationship so we decided to pull the trigger.”


Andreessen said that he has no plans to open any kind of health or biotech-specific funds. Instead, he’s looking for businesses that follow the firm’s “Software eats the world” theory, where more and more industries are being dramatically disrupted by software solutions. So they won’t be looking for traditional therapeutics companies, but rather quantified self, genome sequencing and health IT companies.


He also said that he feels comfortable with a natural size of six to 10 general partners for the firm, and a single fund and a single Silicon Valley-based office. The firm also has 65 other professionals or regular “partners” who help portfolio companies with recruiting, marketing and business development.


As a side note, Srinivasan is unafraid to voice sometimes controversial political views. In a recent speech at Y Combinator’s Startup School, he outlined ways that Silicon Valley could exercise newfound political power against the U.S.’s more traditional commercial and political centers in New York and Washington D.C. The speech triggered criticism from others who said that he was naively suggesting that Silicon Valley secede from the U.S.


He wrote a recent piece in Wired that was more specific, talking about how software is enabling groups of like-minded individuals to form long-lasting communities and perhaps even one day will let individuals group together to form new nation-states.







10:09 AM

Balaji Srinivasan , a Stanford academic who co-founded a major genetic testing company Counsyl, is stepping up as Andreessen Horowitz’ eight...

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Microsoft said last week that it had disrupted the ZeroAccess botnet, which has been around since 2011. It joined forces with the FBI, the European Cybercrime Center, and several high-tech companies. Microsoft also filed suit against various John Does believed to be involved with the botnet. However, the operators of ZeroAccess have since pushed out commands to infected PCs on two occasions. Microsoft's attack was incomplete and took down only about 40 percent of the botnet's infrastructure, said Manos Antonakakis, chief scientist at Damballa.


10:09 AM

Microsoft said last week that it had disrupted the ZeroAccess botnet, which has been around since 2011. It joined forces with the FBI, the...

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Ecuador hosted an Internet freedom forum last week, welcoming guests from the pro-transparency community. The nation's president, Rafael Correa, is also funding a new research project designed to overhaul traditional copyright laws. To that end, the FLOK Society, based at a public university in Quito, is exploring ways to liberate Ecuador's Internet from global intellectual property laws. Ecuador is famously housing Wikileaks head Julian Assange at its London embassy. It also reportedly considered granting Edward Snowden asylum.


10:09 AM

Ecuador hosted an Internet freedom forum last week, welcoming guests from the pro-transparency community. The nation's president, Rafa...

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