Zoom revenues skyrocket as profits double

The popular video conferencing app has seen a 458% jump in customer growth compared with last year.

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Walmart Announces Membership Service in Attempt to Compete With Amazon

Walmart+ will cost $98 a year to receive free shipping for orders over $35. The company hopes to build on the success of its pickup grocery business.

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Walmart unveils its new membership service Walmart+, launching Sept. 15 for $98 per year, will offer free, unlimited same-day delivery, fuel discounts, and more (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Walmart unveils its new membership service Walmart+, launching Sept. 15 for $98 per year, will offer free, unlimited same-day delivery, fuel discounts, and more  —  Walmart today officially unveiled its new membership service and Amazon Prime rival, which it's calling “Walmart+.”

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Stanford launches Cable TV News Analyzer, a free AI-powered online service for querying the screen time of public figures or specific topics on cable TV news (Thomas Macaulay/The Next Web)

Thomas Macaulay / The Next Web:
Stanford launches Cable TV News Analyzer, a free AI-powered online service for querying the screen time of public figures or specific topics on cable TV news  —  A new AI-powered tool can show you how much screen time different public figures and topics are getting on TV.

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Walmart+ will finally launch in September. Can it compete with Amazon Prime?

The Walmart+ membership program launches September 15. Can it offer an alternative to Amazon Prime? | Walmart

One Walmart executive says the new program is “the ultimate life hack”

Walmart’s much-anticipated membership program, Walmart+, will finally launch nationwide September 15, the company announced today, about six months after the Covid-19 pandemic pushed the retailer to delay its original timing. The brick-and-mortar retail giant needs the program to be successful to stop top-spending customers from fleeing to Amazon Prime.

Walmart+ will cost $98 a year, or $12.95 a month, and focus mainly on unlimited delivery of groceries and other general merchandise from Walmart stores that will be delivered as soon as the same day they are ordered. Members also get fuel discounts at Walmart gas stations and those of partners, as well as access to “Scan & Go” technology which allows shoppers to use smartphones to scan goods at Walmart stores and exit without stopping to pay a cashier. The company says it will add more perks in the future. Recode previously reported these may include a branded credit card, early availability on product deals, and potentially access to a popular streaming video service.

Walmart wants the membership program to be “the ultimate life hack” for customers, Walmart Chief Customer Officer Janey Whiteside told Recode in an interview on Monday, arguing that its perks will save customers both time and money.

At the same time, Walmart+ will undoubtedly attract comparisons to Amazon’s Prime program, the ultra popular delivery and entertainment membership program that boasts more than 150 million members worldwide and has developed into a retail industry wrecking ball since its launch in 2005. Amazon Prime includes express delivery of millions of products (including groceries), video streaming of a large library of TV shows and movies, music streaming, and other perks. It now costs $119 a year, and Prime customers spend more and shop more frequently than non-Prime members.

And, most importantly for Walmart, more than half of Walmart’s top-spending families are now Prime members, as Recode previously reported. Which begs the question: Will they really subscribe to both membership programs?

When asked about comparisons to Prime on Monday, Whiteside told Recode that “we didn’t necessarily launch Walmart+ to compete with anything else.” And that answer makes sense; the head-to-head comparison between the services does not look great for Walmart when considering online customers who value the widest selection of goods or the longest list of perks.

In addition to the unlimited delivery perk — which is basically just a rebrand of Walmart’s existing Delivery Unlimited membership — Walmart+ only features two other benefits at launch. One is fuel discounts of up to 5 cents per gallon at Walmart, Murphy USA, and Murphy Express gas stations (Sam’s Club gas stations are slated to be included soon). The other perk is access to Walmart’s “Scan & Go” technology for in-store shopping, which allows shoppers to scan items with their phone, scan their phone at a self-checkout kiosk, and walk out of the store without stopping to pay. Walmart briefly tested, but discontinued the tool, two years ago. Walmart’s bet is that the mix of online, in-store, and on-the-go perks, like fuel discounts, will carry unique appeal. Whiteside said that “deepening a relationship further will mean we will get an even greater share of wallet from those customers.” Of course, some Walmart shoppers will also value the $21 difference between the annual fee of Walmart+ and Amazon Prime.

Amazon has made moves in recent years for Prime to appeal to households with less disposable income that historically have favored shopping at Walmart. Amazon added a monthly payment option for Prime fees in 2016, a 45 percent Prime fee discount for those on government assistance in 2017, and most recently, ways for Prime customers to pay for orders with cash. By early 2017, Amazon Prime membership growth was strongest in the US for households making less than $50,000 a year, according to a study by Robert W. Baird & Co.

The success of Walmart+ will likely hinge on how many customers are attracted to the core grocery delivery component of it. While Walmart’s overall grocery business is larger than Amazon’s and its prices are often cheaper, one fear is that top Walmart customers could eventually turn to Amazon for groceries as they get sucked further into the Prime suite of perks. Sources previously told Recode that some Walmart execs believe that top-spending Walmart families that subscribe to Amazon Prime will still be attracted to Walmart+ because its fresh grocery prices are often lower than those Amazon offers.

In the past, some Walmart executives have opposed a paid membership program, seeing Walmart’s competitive advantage as giving shoppers everyday low prices without the need to splurge on a membership fee. Whiteside promised that the low prices will remain even for those who don’t splurge for the bonus services.

“In no way does this membership program take anything away from customer who don’t choose to, or can’t afford to, engage with this,” he said.

On the company’s earnings call earlier this month, CEO Doug McMillon stressed the flexibility of Walmart’s customer offerings.

“We’re going to have multiple ways to serve them, and those families will decide in that moment how they want to shop,” McMillon said. “And sometimes they’ll be in the store, and sometimes they’ll do pickup, and sometimes they’ll do delivery, and many of them will buy a membership, and when they do they’ll get benefits from that.”

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Bella Thorne, OnlyFans and the battle over monetising content

Content creators say OnlyFans has slashed incomes by placing caps on prices charged on the platform.

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Facebook threatens news sharing ban in Australia

The social media giant is preparing for a new law that would force it to pay publishers for news articles.

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Making health care more personal

The health care system today largely focuses on helping people after they have problems. When they do receive treatment, it’s based on what has worked best on average across a huge, diverse group of patients.

Now the company Health at Scale is making health care more proactive and personalized — and, true to its name, it’s doing so for millions of people.

Health at Scale uses a new approach for making care recommendations based on new classes of machine-learning models that work even when only small amounts of data on individual patients, providers, and treatments are available.

The company is already working with health plans, insurers, and employers to match patients with doctors. It’s also helping to identify people at rising risk of visiting the emergency department or being hospitalized in the future, and to predict the progression of chronic diseases. Recently, Health at Scale showed its models can identify people at risk of severe respiratory infections like influenza or pneumonia, or, potentially, Covid-19.

“From the beginning, we decided all of our predictions would be related to achieving better outcomes for patients,” says John Guttag, chief technology officer of Health at Scale and the Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT. “We’re trying to predict what treatment or physician or intervention would lead to better outcomes for people.”

A new approach to improving health

Health at Scale co-founder and CEO Zeeshan Syed met Guttag while studying electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Guttag served as Syed’s advisor for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. When Syed decided to pursue his PhD, he only applied to one school, and his advisor was easy to choose.

Syed did his PhD through the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST). During that time, he looked at how patients who’d had heart attacks could be better managed. The work was personal for Syed: His father had recently suffered a serious heart attack.

Through the work, Syed met Mohammed Saeed SM ’97, PhD ’07, who was also in the HST program. Syed, Guttag, and Saeed founded Health at Scale in 2015 along with  David Guttag ’05, focusing on using core advances in machine learning to solve some of health care’s hardest problems.

“It started with the burning itch to address real challenges in health care about personalization and prediction,” Syed says.

From the beginning, the founders knew their solutions needed to work with widely available data like health care claims, which include information on diagnoses, tests, prescriptions, and more. They also sought to build tools for cleaning up and processing raw data sets, so that their models would be part of what Guttag refers to as a “full machine-learning stack for health care.”

Finally, to deliver effective, personalized solutions, the founders knew their models needed to work with small numbers of encounters for individual physicians, clinics, and patients, which posed severe challenges for conventional AI and machine learning.

“The large companies getting into [the health care AI] space had it wrong in that they viewed it as a big data problem,” Guttag says. “They thought, ‘We’re the experts. No one’s better at crunching large amounts of data than us.’ We thought if you want to make the right decision for individuals, the problem was a small data problem: Each patient is different, and we didn’t want to recommend to patients what was best on average. We wanted what was best for each individual.”

The company’s first models helped recommend skilled nursing facilities for post-acute care patients. Many such patients experience further health problems and return to the hospital. Health at Scale’s models showed that some facilities were better at helping specific kinds of people with specific health problems. For example, a 64-year-old man with a history of cardiovascular disease may fare better at one facility compared to another.

Today the company’s recommendations help guide patients to the primary care physicians, surgeons, and specialists that are best suited for them. Guttag even used the service when he got his hip replaced last year.

Health at Scale also helps organizations identify people at rising risk of specific adverse health events, like heart attacks, in the future.

“We’ve gone beyond the notion of identifying people who have frequently visited emergency departments or hospitals in the past, to get to the much more actionable problem of finding those people at an inflection point, where they are likely to experience worse outcomes and higher costs,” Syed says.

The company’s other solutions help determine the best treatment options for patients and help reduce health care fraud, waste, and abuse. Each use case is designed to improve patient health outcomes by giving health care organizations decision-support for action.

“Broadly speaking, we are interested in building models that can be used to help avoid problems, rather than simply predict them,” says Guttag. “For example, identifying those individuals at highest risk for serious complications of a respiratory infection [enables care providers] to target them for interventions that reduce their chance of developing such an infection.”

Impact at scale

Earlier this year, as the scope of the Covid-19 pandemic was becoming clear, Health at Scale began considering ways its models could help.

“The lack of data in the beginning of the pandemic motivated us to look at the experiences we have gained from combatting other respiratory infections like influenza and pneumonia,” says Saeed, who serves as Health at Scale’s chief medical officer.

The idea led to a peer-reviewed paper where researchers affiliated with the company, the University of Michigan, and MIT showed Health at Scale’s models could accurately predict hospitalizations and visits to the emergency department related to respiratory infections.

“We did the work on the paper using the tech we’d already built,” Guttag says. “We had interception products deployed for predicting patients at-risk of emergent hospitalizations for a variety of causes, and we saw that we could extend that approach. We had customers that we gave the solution to for free.”

The paper proved out another use case for a technology that is already being used by some of the largest health plans in the U.S. That’s an impressive customer base for a five-year-old company of only 20 people — about half of which have MIT affiliations.

“The culture MIT creates to solve problems that are worth solving, to go after impact, I think that’s been reflected in the way the company got together and has operated,” Syed says. “I’m deeply proud that we’ve maintained that MIT spirit.”

And, Syed believes, there’s much more to come.

“We set out with the goal of driving impact,” Syed says. “We currently run some of the largest production deployments of machine learning at scale, affecting millions, if not tens of millions, of patients, and we  are only just getting started.”

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Google quietly updates its AdMob Help Center with iOS 14 information, says it will use Apple's ATT API for triggering the IDFA opt-in notice (Allison Schiff/AdExchanger)

Allison Schiff / AdExchanger:
Google quietly updates its AdMob Help Center with iOS 14 information, says it will use Apple's ATT API for triggering the IDFA opt-in notice  —  Like all companies invested in the mobile ecosystem, Google is getting ready for iOS 14.  But the company is playing its cards close to the vest.

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Facebook threatens to remove news from its platform in Australia - CNET

Users could be blocked from sharing news, Facebook claims, if new draft regulations are put in place.

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US hotel operator MCR Development to buy StayNTouch, a cloud platform for hotels, for $46M, after Trump said StayNTouch's Chinese owners threaten US security (Katy Stech Ferek/Wall Street Journal)

Katy Stech Ferek / Wall Street Journal:
US hotel operator MCR Development to buy StayNTouch, a cloud platform for hotels, for $46M, after Trump said StayNTouch's Chinese owners threaten US security  —  MCR Development's planned acquisition comes after Trump said ownership of StayNTouch by Beijing Shiji Information Technology threatens U.S. security

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No, Microsoft has not made 825,000 carbon-neutral Xbox Series X consoles - CNET

A Microsoft sustainability campaign creates confusion.

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Chadwick Boseman, star of Black Panther, dead at 43: 'A king on and off screen' - CNET

Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, Michael B. Jordan, the Russo brothers, Marvel Studios and many others honor the actor, who died after a four-year fight with colon cancer.

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15 best TV shows to stream on Amazon Prime Video - CNET

Searching for a great show to watch tonight? Let's round up Amazon's best gems.

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SpaceX Starlink: How to watch Falcon 9 launch next batch of satellites - CNET

Weather postponed the launch Sunday, but SpaceX will go for its 10th Starlink launch in 2020 on Thursday.

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The best drones for 2020 - CNET

Everything you need to know before you take off.

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Watch Marvel's touching tribute to Chadwick Boseman - CNET

The studio remembers the Black Panther actor, who died Friday at 43.

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Facebook Could Block Sharing of News Stories in Australia

The move, a response to pressure to pay publishers when their stories are posted on the social network, could add to internet silos springing up around the world.

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Reinvent Technology Partners, a new SPAC formed by Reid Hoffman, Zynga founder Mark Pincus and hedge fund manager Michael Thompson, have filed for a $600M IPO (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch:
Reinvent Technology Partners, a new SPAC formed by Reid Hoffman, Zynga founder Mark Pincus and hedge fund manager Michael Thompson, have filed for a $600M IPO  —  Reinvent Technology Partners, a new special purpose acquisition company formed by famed investor and serial entrepreneur Reid Hoffman …

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Facebook warns it will block Australian users and news organizations from sharing news stories on Facebook and Instagram if the ACCC's proposal passes (New York Times)

New York Times:
Facebook warns it will block Australian users and news organizations from sharing news stories on Facebook and Instagram if the ACCC's proposal passes  —  The move, a response to pressure to pay publishers when their stories are posted on the social network, could add to internet silos springing up around the world.

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Elon Musk's Neuralink device focused on the 'computer', but what about the 'brain'? - CNET

Commentary: The groundbreaking device is impressive, but where is the data?

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Twitter now shows quote tweet counts directly under tweets, rebranding "Retweets with comments" as "Quote Tweets" (Filipe Espósito/9to5Mac)

Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac:
Twitter now shows quote tweet counts directly under tweets, rebranding “Retweets with comments” as “Quote Tweets”  —  Twitter has been testing a new way to let users easily find quote tweets by separating them from regular retweets.  The company confirmed today …

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Should Google’s Ad Market Be Regulated Like the Stock Market?

A leading antitrust scholar says yes. Congress may be listening.

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How Cryptography Lets Down Marginalized Communities

Speaking at a prestigious crypto conference this month, Seny Kamara called on the field to recognize its blind spots—and fix them.

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Mexican cartel hitmen seem to have adopted the use of bomb-laden drones in assassinations, following the tactic's proliferation on Iraqi and Syrian battlefields (Joseph Trevithick/The Drive)

Joseph Trevithick / The Drive:
Mexican cartel hitmen seem to have adopted the use of bomb-laden drones in assassinations, following the tactic's proliferation on Iraqi and Syrian battlefields  —  Mexico's drug cartels are notoriously well armed and equipped, with some possessing very heavy weaponry, including armored gun trucks sporting heavy machine guns.

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Roman Reigns' heel turn at Payback is WWE's boldest move in years - CNET

Commentary: Believe that.

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Myriam Sarachik Never Gave Up on Physics

The New York-based scientist overcame sexism and personal tragedy to make major contributions to the field, for which she received recognition this year.

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Explainer: What do political databases know about you?

American citizens are inundated with political messages—on social networks, in their news feeds, through email, text messages, and phone calls. It’s not an accident that people get bombarded: political groups prefer a “multimodal” voter contact strategy, where they use many platforms and multiple attempts to persuade a citizen to engage with their cause or candidate. An ad is followed by an email, which is followed by a text message—all designed to reinforce the message.

These strategies are employed by political campaigns, political action committees, advocacy groups, and nonprofits alike. These different groups are subject to very different rules and regulations, but they all rely on capturing and devouring data about millions of people in America. 

Who is in these data sets?

Almost everyone. Most campaigns get their voter information from a handful of data vendors, either nonpartisan or partisan. These companies try to provide data on all US adults, regardless of whether they are registered voters. It’s unlikely that an individual vendor has comprehensive files on all eligible US voters, but the Pew Research Center, which released a report on commercial voter files in 2018, found that over 90% of people in its own sample of US adults could be found on at least one registry.

What data is collected and where does it come from?

The main source of voter data is public voting records, which include a voter’s names, address, and party affiliation. But voter data is very patchy and decentralized: each state holds its own database, and they often have different attributes. So vendors supplement it with other sources, like phone books and credit data. 

It’s hard to get a full picture of everything that is fed into the vendors’ databases: the recipe each one uses is usually considered a trade secret. Pew’s study explained that the registries are “an amalgamation of administrative data from states about registration and voting, modeled data about partisanship, political engagement and political support provided by vendors; and demographic, financial and lifestyle data culled from a wide range of sources.” 

Data vendors attempt to match up and reconcile these different data sets to create one comprehensive record for each person in the US based on key identifiers like name, address, gender, and date of birth.

L2 is one of the largest companies trading in this information, and it claims to have more than 600 data attributes pulled from census data, emails from commercial sources, donor data sets, and more. Experts say that most vendors provide hundreds of data points about each voter. 

How accurate are these voter databases? 

It’s up for debate. Some data points are very accurate, but others are really just predictions or guesses. Party and race, for example, are often inferred on the basis of someone’s name and location. Somebody with the last name Ryan is assumed to be white, while somebody in a heavily Republican district is assumed to be a Republican voter. 

The accuracy of specific attributes varies a lot: Pew found that race was accurate 79% of the time, education 51%, and religion 52%. Household income, meanwhile, was accurate just 37% of the time. There was also measurable bias, with higher error rates for younger, highly mobile, unregistered, and Hispanic voters. 

Eitan Hersh, a professor at Tufts who testified to Congress after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016, believes the data—particularly the modeled attributes—is inaccurate to the point of hindering its usefulness for campaigns. In his testimony, he noted that models he’d studied assumed a person’s race incorrectly 25% of the time. And race is much easier to predict than a person’s swing issue.

How do political groups use this data?

Campaigns and other political groups purchase data from vendors, but they often combine information and attach additional data sets to it. Campaigns will also create data sets themselves from social-media testing and advertisement data, though it’s not clear just how common this practice is. 

They often use all this to try to identify adults who will respond to a specific issue. For example, a campaign might develop a model to find voters who support climate change legislation. The model might use these data sets to spit out a list of voters ranked on a scale from 1 to 100, with 100 being those most likely to strongly support the cause. The campaign could then choose to send a message to voters with a score higher than 70 in an effort to encourage mobilization. 

Although it’s arguable whether targeted advertising shifts the way people vote, it has proved extremely useful in harvesting other contact information, like email addresses, and in raising money. 

What role does social media play?

Your social-media information—such as the public Facebook posts you’ve liked or the Twitter hashtags you’ve used—can be combined with other data at many different stages. Some vendors integrate social-media data into their main data set, especially for people whose profile matches their name. That information can help build better predictive models.

Infamously, Cambridge Analytica gamed Facebook by acquiring information on 270,000 users from a third-party app, and pulled the friend networks of those users until it had a data set covering 87 million people, most of whom had not consented and were not aware this was happening. It claimed to run models on that data to generate personalized and predictive political pictures of users.

But the effectiveness of such techniques is up for debate. 

A 2013 study by psychologist Michal Kosinski, on which Cambridge Analytica based many of its methods, argued that the data from 150 likes on Facebook is enough for an algorithm to know your “sensitive personal attributes” better than a family member does. But Cambridge Analytica was not able to produce any evidence that it succeeded in creating these algorithms, or that any of its targeting persuaded anybody. It’s incredibly hard to attribute any vote to a particular ad, article, or tweet. 

One of the most important uses of social-media information is to refine and target messaging. A/B testing has gotten so precise that campaigns can keep tweaking a given ad until it becomes hyper-specific to the user. 

What are the different kinds of targeted ads?

Targeted ads are messages directed to people on the basis of their confirmed or suspected political identities. Many focus on issue persuasion, voter mobilization, or fundraising, and some groups use much more sophisticated approaches than others.

Targeting methods include email, telephone, and text message, but much of the advertising takes place online—on Facebook, Google, and Instagram. Twitter banned political ads this November, though 501c(3) nonprofit groups are still able to use targeting on the platform. In order to target a voter, groups will use specific filters in order to reach exactly who they want—for example, women on college campuses in Michigan. On Facebook, and possibly on other social platforms as well, campaigns can actually target individuals directly by uploading a list of accounts—perhaps just a tiny number of people, if the advertiser wants to do extremely specific personalized messaging.

What rules are there about the way data gets used?

Different groups are subject to different rules. 501c(3) groups like Turning Point USA or the Tides Foundation can’t advance any electoral or candidate messages. They are also exempt from donor-disclosure laws. Political campaigns, on the other hand, are subject to campaign finance laws and oversight by the Federal Election Commission. 

But although campaign-sponsored advertisements must be identified as such, on the internet it is often unclear who exactly is trying to grab your attention and support. Misinformation and manipulation get confused with official campaign messaging, while campaigns can skirt accountability by distancing themselves from more controversial groups with parallel messages. 

Why does this matter for the 2020 election?

Polling data suggests it is likely that this election will be decided in the suburbs. In 2016, it was suburban counties that gave Trump the electoral edge even while he trailed in the popular vote. And suburban voters use Facebook … a lot. Campaigns and advocacy groups can use the growing power of data crunching to speak directly to those voters. So far, Donald Trump has spent twice as much on Facebook ads as Joe Biden.

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Galaxy Note 20 ongoing review: Here's how Samsung's $1,000 phone stacks up so far - CNET

The Note 20 has a plastic backing, different screen and different camera specs compared to the $1,300 Note 20 Ultra. Does it truly make a difference?

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Best airline credit cards for August 2020 - CNET

Earn miles toward a free flight when flying with your preferred airline.

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Chess Olympiad: India and Russia both get gold after controversial final

India is declared joint winner with Russia after two players lost connection during the final round.

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Sir Isaac Newton's notes among Cambridge web gallery 'treasures'

Cambridge University Library adds high-resolution images of its collection to a free culture site.

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New York-based healthcare analytics company Aetion raises $82M Series B (Alaric DeArment/MedCity News)

Alaric DeArment / MedCity News:
New York-based healthcare analytics company Aetion raises $82M Series B  —  The healthcare analytics company said it had raised the extension funding from three new investors and would use it to accelerate development of its real-world evidence technology.  —  A data analytics firm focused …

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UVC wands kill viruses. They're also a 'major safety issue,' experts warn - CNET

The invisible light can kill viruses and pathogens like the one that causes COVID-19, but experts are raising alarms about the potential safety risks.

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The best outdoor smart home products to buy in summer 2020 - CNET

Here are the best smart home devices for your yard.

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The best office chairs for 2020 - CNET

If your current office chair is causing you pain, it might be time for an upgrade.

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Kymeta raises $85M led by Bill Gates as it prepares to launch a flat panel antenna for cellular and satellite broadband connections (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Kymeta raises $85M led by Bill Gates as it prepares to launch a flat panel antenna for cellular and satellite broadband connections  —  Bill Gates is boosting his bet on next-generation satellite broadband technology, leading a new $85 million funding round for Kymeta as the Redmond, Wash. …

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The airline founder building Asia’s next super app

AirAsia’s Tony Fernandes is expanding into banking, music and e-payments to help tackle the travel slump.

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How the startup Farmers Business Network is trying to disrupt the largely brick-and-mortar $40B US farm supply business, while agri giants refuse to play along (Jacob Bunge/Wall Street Journal)

Jacob Bunge / Wall Street Journal:
How the startup Farmers Business Network is trying to disrupt the largely brick-and-mortar $40B US farm supply business, while agri giants refuse to play along  —  Farmers Business Network faces pressure from big suppliers as it tries to grow its online platform

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30 of the best TV shows to stream on Hulu - CNET

Looking for a great show to watch tonight? Here are some of the best Hulu has to offer.

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30 best movies to stream on Disney Plus - CNET

Looking for something other than Marvel or Star Wars? Here are some of the hidden gems on Disney Plus.

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Tenet ending explained and all questions answered - CNET

Christopher Nolan's latest mind-bender is oftentimes mind-boggling. Here are some answers to what the hell happened.

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The best gaming routers in 2020 - CNET

A gaming router may be overkill for most of us, but if you're looking for low-latency performance and advanced features, here's what we recommend.

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Profile of cloud database company Snowflake's CEO Frank Slootman, hired sixteen months ago, as he takes his third startup public (CNBC)

CNBC:
Profile of cloud database company Snowflake's CEO Frank Slootman, hired sixteen months ago, as he takes his third startup public  —  - Frank Slootman is preparing to take Snowflake public 13 years after his first tech IPO, Data Domain, and eight years after his second, ServiceNow.

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Government paid influencers to promote Test and Trace

Taxpayer money was used to pay influencers to promote Test and Trace.

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The 15 Best Wireless Headphones (2020): Earbuds, Noise-Canceling, and More

These are WIRED's favorite wireless headphones and earbuds for taking phone calls, listening to music, working out, and more.

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Elon Musk’s Neuralink is neuroscience theater

Rock climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. Superhuman vision to see radar. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness and mental illness. Those are just a few the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his neuroscience company Neuralink, formed in 2016, believe that electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about.

While none of these advances are close at hand and some are unlikely, in a “product update” streamed over YouTube on Friday, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, joined staffers wearing black masks to discuss the company’s work towards an affordable, reliable brain implant which Musk believes billions of consumers will clamor for in the future.

“In a lot of ways,” Musk said, “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires.”

Although the online event was described as a product demonstration, there is as yet nothing that anyone can buy or use from Neuralink. (This is for the best since most of the company’s medical claims remain highly speculative.) It is, however, engineering a super-dense electrode technology that is being tested on animals.

Neuralink isn’t the first to believe brain implants could extend or restore human capabilities. Researchers began placing probes in the brains of paralyzed people in the late 1990s in order to show signals could let them move robot arms or computer cursors. And mice with visual implants really can perceive infrared rays.

Building on that work, Neuralink says it hopes to further develop such brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs) to the point where one can be installed in a doctor’s office in under an hour. “This actually does work,” Musk said of people who have controlled computers with brain signals. “It’s just not something the average person can use effectively.”

Throughout the event, Musk deftly avoided giving timelines or committing to schedules, including when Neuralink’s system might be tested in human subjects.

As yet, four years after its formation, Neuralink has provided no evidence that it can (or has even tried) to treat depression, insomnia, or a dozen other diseases that Musk mentioned in a slide. One difficulty ahead of the company is perfecting microwires that can survive the “corrosive” context of a living brain for a decade. That problem alone could take years to solve.

The primary objective of the streamed demo, instead, was to stir excitement, recruit engineers to the company (which already employs about 100 people) and build the kind of fan base that has cheered on Musk’s other ventures and has helped propel the gravity-defying stock price of electric car-maker Tesla.

Pigs in the matrix

In tweets leading up to the event, Musk had promised fans a mind-blowing demonstration of neurons firing inside a living brain—though he didn’t say of what species.  Minutes into the livestream, assistants drew a black curtain to reveal three small pigs in fenced enclosures; these were the subjects of the company’s implant experiments.

The brain of one pig contained an implant, and hidden speakers briefly chimed out ring-tones which Musk said were recordings of the animal’s neurons firing in real time. For those awaiting the “matrix in the matrix,” as Musk had hinted on Twitter, the cute-animal interlude was different than hoped for. To neuroscientists, it was nothing new; in their labs the buzz and crackle of electrical impulses recorded from animal brains (and some human ones) has been heard for decades.

A year ago, Neuralink presented a sewing-machine robot able to plunge a thousand ultra-fine electrodes into a rodent’s brain. These probes are what measure the electrical signals emitted by neurons, whose speed and patterns are ultimately a basis for movement, thoughts and recall of memories.

An illustration of a prototype neural sewing machine with a helmet to secure a patient’s head.

WOKE STUDIO

In the new livestream, Musk appeared beside an updated prototype of the sewing robot encased within a smooth, white plastic helmet. Into such surgical headgear, Musk believes, billions of consumers will one-day willingly place their heads, submitting as an automated saw carves out a circle of bone and a robot threads electronics into their brains.  

The futuristic casing was created by the industrial design firm Woke Studio, in Vancouver. It’s lead designer, Afshin Mehin, says he strived to make something “clean, modern, but still friendly-feeling” for what would be voluntary brain surgery with inevitable risks.  

To neuroscientists, the most intriguing development shown Friday may have been what Musk called “the link,” a silver-dollar sized disk containing computer chips which compresses and then wirelessly transmits signals recorded from the electrodes. The link is about as thick as the human skull, and Musk said it could plop neatly onto the surface of the brain through a drill hole then be sealed with superglue.

“I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn’t know it,” Musk said.

Elon Musk holds “the link” a circular device loaded with computer chips during a demonstration. It serves to collect and wirelessly transmit brain signals.

The link can be charged wirelessly via an induction coil and Musk suggested people in the future would plug in before they go to sleep to power up their implants. He thinks an implant also needs to be easy to install and remove, so that people can get new ones as technology improves. You wouldn’t want to be stuck with version 1.0 of a brain implant forever. Outdated neural hardware left behind in people’s bodies is a real problem already encountered by research subjects.

The implant being tested by Neuralink on its pigs has 1,000 channels, and is likely to read from a similar number of neurons. Musk says his goal to increase that by a factor of “100, then 1,000, then, 10,000” to read more completely from the brain.

Such exponential goals for the technology don’t necessarily address specific medical needs. Although Musk claims implants “could solve paralysis, blindness, hearing,” as often what is missing isn’t ten times as many electrodes, but scientific knowledge about what electro-chemical imbalance creates, say depression, in the first place.

Despite the long list of medical applications Musk presented, Neuralink didn’t show it’s ready to commit to any one of them. During the event, the company did not disclose plans to start a clinical trial, a surprise to those who believed that would be Neuralink’s next logical step.

A neurosurgeon who works with the company, Matthew MacDougall, did say the company was considering trying the implant on paralyzed people, for instance to allow them to type on a computer, or form words. Musk went further: “I think long term you can restore someone full body motion.”

It is unclear how serious the company is about treating disease at all. Musk continually drifted away from medicine and back to a much more futuristic “general population device,” which he called the company’s “overall” aim. He believes that people should connect directly to computers in order to keep pace with artificial intelligence.

“On a species level, it’s important to figure out how we co-exist with advanced AI, achieving some AI symbiosis,” said Musk. “Such that the future of world is controlled by the combined will of the people of the earth. That might be the most important thing that a device like this achieves.”

How brain implants would bring about such a collective world electronic mind, Musk did not say. Maybe in the next update.

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Galaxy Note 20 Ultra review: Amazing features, but is anyone a 'power user' anymore? - CNET

Samsung's Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G is possibly the right phone in the wrong situation. The newest power phone is too expensive for a steep global recession, and its feature set will be too much for many.

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Review: Pixel 4A officially has the best camera for the money - CNET

The Pixel 4A raises the bar for how good a budget phone's camera can be.

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How to Protect the Data on Your Laptop

Your laptop is a treasure trove of personal and sensitive information—make sure it's as secure as it can be.

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The Joy of ‘Analog’ Cooking on a Green Coleman Camp Stove

The best way to unplug from all your digital kitchen gadgetry is to fire up a pair of propane burners in the middle of nowhere.

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Can Australia Force Google and Facebook to Pay for News?

A proposed law would require the tech giants to negotiate with publishers. Similar attempts in Europe have largely failed.

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iPhone 'batterygate' settlement: There's still time to claim your $25 - CNET

You'll need to know the serial number of your iPhone 6, 6S, SE or 7 to submit a claim.

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A look at the rapid growth of TikTok in Southeast Asia, where the app has been downloaded 360M times, up 151% YoY, according to Sensor Tower (Fanny Potkin/Reuters)

Fanny Potkin / Reuters:
A look at the rapid growth of TikTok in Southeast Asia, where the app has been downloaded 360M times, up 151% YoY, according to Sensor Tower  —  SINGAPORE (Reuters) - At 19, Sandy Saputra is big on TikTok Indonesia.  Within a year, he's leapt from quiet, small-town life to star influencer status …

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The week’s biggest IPO news had nothing to do with Monday’s S-1 deluge

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. (You can sign up for the newsletter here!)

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

The week’s biggest IPO news had nothing to do with Monday’s S-1 deluge

During Monday’s IPO wave I was surprised to see Asana join the mix. 

After news had broken in June that the company had raised hundreds of millions in convertible debt, I hadn’t guessed that the productivity unicorn wouldn’t give us an S-1 in the very next quarter. I was contentedly wrong. But the reason why Asana’s IPO is notable isn’t really much to do with the company itself, though do take the time to dig into its results and history. 

What matters about Asana’s debut is that it appears set to test out a model that, until very recently, could have become the new, preferred way of going public amongst tech companies. 

Here’s what I mean: Instead of filing to go public, and raising money in a traditional IPO, or simply listing directly, Asana executed two, large, convertible debt offerings pre-debut, thus allowing it to direct list with lots of cash without having raised endless equity capital while private.

The method looked like a super-cool way to get around the IPO pricing issue that we’ve seen, and also provide a ramp to direct listing for companies that didn’t get showered with billions while private. (That Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s trust led the debt deal is simply icing on this particular Pop-Tart).

This brief column was going to be all about how we may see unicorns follow the Asana route in time, provided that its debt-powered direct listing goes well. But then the NYSE got permission from the SEC to allow companies to raise capital when they direct-list.

In short, some companies that direct-list in the future will be able to sell a bloc of shares at a market-set value that would have previously set their “open” price. So instead of flogging the stock and setting a price and selling shares to rich folks and then finding out what public investors would really pay, all that IPO faff is gone and bold companies can simply offer shares at whatever price the market will bear. 

All that is great and cool, but as companies will be able to direct-list and raise capital, the NYSE’s nice news means that Asana is blazing a neat trail, but perhaps not one that will be as popular as we had expected.

The NASDAQ is working to get in on the action. As Danny said yesterday on the show, this new NYSE method is going to crush traditional IPOs, provided that we’re understanding it during this, its nascent period.

Market Notes

Look, this week was bananas, and my brain is scrambled toast. You, like myself, are probably a bit confused about how it is only finally Saturday and not the middle of next week. But worry not, I have a quick roundup of the big stuff from our world. And, notes from calls with the COO of Okta and the CEO of Splunk, from after their respective earnings report: 

• China-based fintech giant Ant is super profitable and super big and super powerful and is going to have a mega-IPO that matters, even if it isn’t happening Stateside. (This has long been expected.)
• As I write to you, the TikTok saga is not yet over, but between the lawsuits and smokescreens and other crap, it appears that Microsoft and perhaps Walmart are the leading bidding duo. What a year.
• SPACs for real companies are happening, and Boston unicorn Desktop Metal is pushing ahead with one. This is an event to watch, and if it goes well we could see a bunch more in rapid-fire fashion.
• Speaking of which, here’s a run-down of all the companies that filed to go public on Monday. You are welcome, as that post was annoying to compile. (I jest, it was fun as hell.)
• Also this week, Y Combinator had a two-day Demo Day confab that we wrote a lot about. Sure, these are early-stage companies, but their ranks will generate some material winners. So catch up here, with that link containing our chat about the startups and directions to all our coverage.
• And for fun, here are some slightly deeper looks at Snowflake and Sumo Logic’s respective IPO filings, and a contrarian take on why Palantir has problems, but also some merit.

Over to our chats, starting with Okta COO and co-founder Frederic Kerrest:

• Okta had a good quarter. But instead of noodling on just the numbers, we wanted to chat with its team about the accelerating digital transformation and what they are seeing in the market. 
• On the SMB side, Kerrest reported little to no change. This is a bit more bullish than we anticipated, given that it seemed likely that SMB customers would have taken the largest hit from COVID.
• Kerrest also told us some interesting stuff about how the wave of COVID-related spend has changed: “We actually have seen the COVID ‘go home and remote work very quickly’ [thing], we’ve actually seen that rush subside a little bit, because you know now we’re five months into [the pandemic], so they had to figure it out.”
• This is a fascinating comment for the startup world. 
• Okta is big and public and is going to grow fine for a while. Whatever. For smaller companies aka startups that were seeing COVID-related tailwinds, I wonder how common seeing “that rush subside a little bit” is. If it is very common, many startups that had taken off like a rocket could be seeing their growth come back to Earth.
• And if they raised a bunch of money off the back of that growth at a killer valuation, they may have just ordered shoes that they’ll struggle to grow into.

And then there was new McLaren F-1 sponsor Splunk, data folks who are in the midst of a transition to SaaS that is seeing the firm double-down on building ARR and letting go of legacy incomes:

• I spoke with CEO Doug Merritt, kicking off with a question about his use of the word “tectonic” regarding the shift to data-driven decisions from Splunk’s earnings report. (“As organizations continue to adapt to tectonic societal shifts brought on by COVID-19, one thing is constant: the power of data to radically transform business.”)
• I wanted to know how far down the American corporate stack that idea went; are mid-size businesses getting more data-savvy? What about SMBs? Merritt was pretty bullish: “We’re getting to tectonic,” he said during our call, adding that before “it really was the Facebooks, the Googles, the Apples, the DoorDashes, [and] the LinkedIns that were using [Splunk].” But now, he said, even small restaurant chains are using data to better track their performance. 
• Relating this back to the startup world, I’ve been curious if lots of stuff that you and I think is cool, like low-code business app development, will actually find as wide a footing in the market as some expect. Why? Because most small and medium-sized businesses are not tech companies at all. But if Merritt is right, then the CEO of Appian might be right as well about how many business apps the average company is going to have in a few years’ time.

And finally for Market Notes, my work BFF and IRL friend Ron Miller wrote about Box’s earnings this week, and how the changing world is bolstering the company. It’s worth a read. (Most public software companies are doing well, mind.)

Various and Sundry

We’re already over length, so I’ll have to keep our bits-and-bobs section brief. Thus, only the brightest of baubles for you, my friend:

• Y Combinator startups are focusing on revenue in this more uncertain world. Per The Information, the startup org has encouraged startups in its world to “focus on generating revenue” and how to juice enough cash from their operations to endure sans checks from private investors. 
• Given the pace of private investments into certain startup niches today, it’s almost odd advice. But what is true for late-stage SaaS companies (very hot!) might not hold true for smaller YC companies that are focused on consumers.
• Natasha wrote about a particularly hot startup from this YC batch, so I reached out to a hot company from a prior batch, namely Tandem. But they didn’t want to talk on the record, so no news there. Alas.
• The Fastly deal is super cool and you should read more about it. As was this $300 million investment.

And with that, we are out of room. Hugs, fist bumps and good vibes, 

Alex

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Stop buying breakable phones: The new rugged phones are tough and hot - CNET

Phones that are rugged and waterproof -- even without a case -- should be the new normal.

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iPhone 11 and 11 Pro might secretly be waterproof: Results of our water test - CNET

Both phones are water resistant but in our extreme water test, we weren't able to drown the iPhone 11 or 11 Pro.

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Remember when we wore cell phones on belts? This Motorola phone started the trend - CNET

Compared with other cellphones of its day, the first famous flip phone was an amazingly sleek, cutting-edge device.

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Cory Doctorow highlights the conceptual limitations of Shoshana Zuboff's "surveillance capitalism" and details how to dismantle it (Cory Doctorow/OneZero )

Cory Doctorow / OneZero :
Cory Doctorow highlights the conceptual limitations of Shoshana Zuboff's “surveillance capitalism” and details how to dismantle it  —  The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the 21st century is just how widespread the evidence against them is.

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iPhone SE vs. Pixel 4A: Apple and Google's 2020 budget phones, compared - CNET

CNET compares budget smartphones from Apple and Google to determine which device has the best camera, design, software, performance and battery life.

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Slack discloses a now fixed critical RCE flaw in its desktop app; Slack paid $1,750 bug bounty to researcher, which critics say is a paltry sum for such a bug (Jack Morse/Mashable)

Jack Morse / Mashable:
Slack discloses a now fixed critical RCE flaw in its desktop app; Slack paid $1,750 bug bounty to researcher, which critics say is a paltry sum for such a bug  —  Slack and its scores of desktop app users just dodged a major bullet.  —  The communications tool relied upon by journalists …

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Construction of a $20B chip manufacturing plant in Wuhan stopped due to lack of funding, the latest example of China's semiconductor efforts failing to take off (South China Morning Post)

South China Morning Post:
Construction of a $20B chip manufacturing plant in Wuhan stopped due to lack of funding, the latest example of China's semiconductor efforts failing to take off  —  Construction on a US$20 billion state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing plant in Wuhan has stalled due to a lack of funding It's …

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All the best apps for drawing on your iPad - CNET

From Procreate's blank canvas to creative coloring books, these iPad drawing apps will unleash your inner digital artist.

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How a law professor became the target of posts on conservative sites, social media harassment, and PR firms hired by gig economy companies, for supporting AB5 (Dara Kerr/CNET)

Dara Kerr / CNET:
How a law professor became the target of posts on conservative sites, social media harassment, and PR firms hired by gig economy companies, for supporting AB5  —  Labor activists are targeted in a social media campaign as gig economy companies spend millions to prevent workers from becoming employees.

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Medium says it had 1.2B page views in Q2 and now has "several hundred thousand" paying subscribers, and will start offering custom domains again (Ev Williams/The Official Medium Blog)

Ev Williams / The Official Medium Blog:
Medium says it had 1.2B page views in Q2 and now has “several hundred thousand” paying subscribers, and will start offering custom domains again  —  Upcoming features and a status update  —  We've had a busy summer.  —  Last month, we announced new features coming to our publishing tools …

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Best laptop under $500 of 2020 in stock from HP, Lenovo, Dell and more - CNET

Wading through cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks is a chore, especially if you need one right now for remote learning. We're here to help.

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Tweet honoring actor Chadwick Boseman becomes most-liked Twitter post ever - CNET

"A tribute fit for a king."

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ReliaQuest, a managed cybersecurity and intelligence services provider, raises $300M led by KKR, says its revenue grew more than 450% in the past three years (Christine Hall/Crunchbase News)

Christine Hall / Crunchbase News:
ReliaQuest, a managed cybersecurity and intelligence services provider, raises $300M led by KKR, says its revenue grew more than 450% in the past three years  —  ReliaQuest, a company developing a cybersecurity managed service and intelligence platform for global enterprises …

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Yes, Bill & Ted Face the Music has an end-credits scene - CNET

Even after the end credits roll, an extra scene will make fans want to rock out at any age.

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Best French press coffee makers for 2020: Oxo, Bodum, Frieling and more - CNET

Looking at Veken, Oxo, Frieling, Bodum, Kona and others, we put popular French press coffee makers through their paces to learn which one is the best.

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Inside Asana, whose CEO Dustin Moskovitz rejected Silicon Valley's hard-charging style while building the company, as it prepares for a investor roadshow (Alex Konrad/Forbes)

Alex Konrad / Forbes:
Inside Asana, whose CEO Dustin Moskovitz rejected Silicon Valley's hard-charging style while building the company, as it prepares for a investor roadshow  —  Covering venture capital, software and startups … At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, upbeat synth music announces the arrival of Dustin Moskovitz.

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Pinterest is canceling its 490,000-square-foot lease at San Francisco's unbuilt 88 Bluxome project, citing a shift toward remote work amid the pandemic (Roland Li/San Francisco Chronicle)

Roland Li / San Francisco Chronicle:
Pinterest is canceling its 490,000-square-foot lease at San Francisco's unbuilt 88 Bluxome project, citing a shift toward remote work amid the pandemic  —  Pinterest terminated its massive 490,000-square-foot lease at San Francisco's unbuilt 88 Bluxome project, citing a shift toward more remote work amid the coronavirus pandemic.

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