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Saturday, June 30, 2018
Announcing TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield Latin America in São Paulo on Nov. 8
TechCrunch is excited to announce that the Startup Battlefield Latin America is coming to São Paulo on November 8 this year. This is the first event TechCrunch has ever held in Latin America, and we are all in to make it a memorable one to support the fast-emerging startup ecosystem in the region.
The Startup Battlefield is TechCrunch’s premier startup competition, which over the past 12 years has placed 750 companies on stage to pitch top VCs and TechCrunch editors. Those founders have gone on to raise more than $8 billion and produce more than 100 exits. Startup Battlefield Latin America aims to add 15 great founders from Latin America to those elite ranks.
Here’s how the competition works. Founders may apply now to participate in Startup Battlefield. Any early stage (pre-A round) company with a working product headquartered in an eligible Latin American country (see list below) may apply. Applications close August 6. TechCrunch editors will review the applications and, based on which applicants have the strongest potential for a big exit of major societal impact, pick 15 to compete on November 8. TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield team will work intensively with each founding team to hone their six-minute pitch to perfection.
Then it’s game day. The 15 companies will take the stage at São Paulo’s Tomie Ohtake Institute in front of a live audience of 500 people to pitch top-tier VC judges. The judges and TechCrunch editors will pick five for a finals round. Those lucky finalists will face a fresh team of judges, and one will emerge as the winner of the first-ever Startup Battlefield Latin America. The winner takes home $25,000 and a trip for two to the next Disrupt, where they can exhibit free of charge in the Startup Alley and may also qualify to participate in the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt. Sweet deal. All Startup Battlefield sessions will be captured on video and posted on TechCrunch.com.
It’s an experience no founder would want to miss, considering the opportunity to join the ranks of Battlefield greats from years past, including Dropbox, Yammer, Mint, Getaround, CloudFlare, Vurb and many more.
Get that application started now.
Here’s the need-to-know about qualifying to apply:
- Have an early-stage company in “launch” stage
- Headquartered in one of these countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela (Central America) Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama (Caribbean – including dependencies and constituent entities), Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.
- Have a fully working product/beta reasonably close to, or in, production
- Have received limited press or publicity to date
- Have no known intellectual property conflicts
- Apply by Aug. 6, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST
Tickets to attend Startup Battlefield Latin America will go on sale soon. Interested in sponsoring the event, contact us here
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The hottest investors at The Europas, & your specially discounted ticket
In partnership with TechCrunch, The Europas Conference & Awards, features smaller breakout sessions on key subjects for startups, followed by a glittering awards show for the hottest startups in Europe, based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself. Plus loads of networking opportunities with investors, and the super-fun Pitch Rolette pitch competition. See below for your special discount offer!
Just some of the investors coming to The Europas this Tuesday, July 3, in London include:
Alliott Cole, Octopus Ventures
Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel Partners
Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Seedcamp
Damir Bandolo, Columbus Capital
Eileen Burbidge, Passion Capital
Eze Vidra, Reimagine Ventures
George McDonuagh, KR1 (Blockchain/Crypto)
Jamie Burke, Outlier Ventures (Blockchain/Crypto)
Jason Ball, Qualcomm Ventures
Jeremy Yap, Angel Investor
Joe White, Entrepreneur First
Maria Wagner, Beringea
Michael Jackson, Mangrove Capital Partners
Nancy Fechnay, Angel Investor (Blockchain/Crypto)
Paul Dowling, Dreamstake Ventures
Richard Muirhead, Fabric Ventures (Blockchain/Crypto)
Scott Sage, Crane Venture Partners
Sitar Teli, Connect Ventures
Stephanie Hospital, OneRagtime
Suzanne Ashman, LocalGlobe
Thomas Graham, TLDR Capital
Tugce Ergul, Angel Labs
Vishal Gulati, Draper Esprit
Wendy Tan White, BGF
Instead of thousands and thousands of people, think of a great summer event with a selected 800 of the most interesting and useful people in the industry, including key investors and leading entrepreneurs.
And here’s 14 reasons to attend The Europas:
• Ultra-high quality Investors, speakers & featured guests
• New startup founders brought into the eco-system
• New deal-flow for investors
• Our “Diversity Matters” Free pass bringing in more women and POC
• Expert speeches, discussions, and Q&A
• Intimate “breakout” sessions with key players on vertical topics
• The opportunity to meet almost everyone in those small groups, super-charging your networking
• Convivial, relaxed atmosphere conducive to networking
• Key press including WSJ, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, attending
• A stunning awards dinner and party which honors both the hottest startups and the leading lights in the European startup scene
• Content independently curated by journalists
• The only truly independent, industry-backed awards in Europe
• Percentage of profits will be donated to charity
• All on one day to maximize your time in London
Plus, as a special offer for TechCrunch readers, we have discounted tickets of up to 60% off:
• Daytime conference plus evening awards tickets (£250, 60% discount) (valid all day, July 3rd) – this ticket includes the daytime conference and the awards dinner with ceremony and after party. It includes refreshments and lunch during the conference, and the awards drinks reception and dinner.
• Daytime only, Unconference tickets (£75, 60% discount) – this ticket includes the afternoon Unconference only.
• Evening Awards-only tickets (£195, 60% discount) – this ticket is for the awards dinner with ceremony and after party. It includes the awards drinks reception and dinner.
If you wish to sponsor the events or to purchase a table for 10 or 12 guest or a half table for 5 guests, please contact petra@theeuropas.com
The conference and awards are supported by TechCrunch, the official media partner. Attendees, nominees, and winners will get deep discounts to TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin, later this year.
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Mapping The Available API Integrations Each Company Has
Integrations with common, and sometimes uncommon platforms add value to any company who operates in the API economy. As we profile APIs as part of our work on the Streamdata.io API Gallery, one of the elements we keep an eye out for as we profile interesting platforms is the number of API integrations that they have with other platforms. It is hard to imagine how companies are able to get business done in 2018 without an API, let alone a steady stream of new integrations that empower end-users and power partnerships between technology platforms.
As we work to profile the companies, we are actively profiling the integration pages for leading API platforms, adding to our index of useful resources within the gallery. One interesting integrations page we wanted to highlight is from customer data platform Segment, who "collect clickstream data from your mobile apps, websites, and servers with one API. Use turnkey integrations to pull in contextual data from cloud apps like your CRM and payment systems." Clearly, Segment makes API integrations a first-class citizen on their platform and is something that they view as core to what they do.
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Errors, Exceptions, and Faults, Oh My!
If we could code for the happy path only, I think that our lives would have been much nicer. Errors are hard because you keep having to deal with them, and even basic issues in error handling can take down systems that are composed of thousands of nodes.
I went out to look at research around error handling rates, and I found this paper. It says that about 3% of code (C#, mind) is error handling. However, it counts only the code inside catch/finally as error handling. My recent foray into C allowed me another data point. The short version with no memory handling is 30 lines of code. The long version with error handling is over a 100.
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Enhancing Intelligent Automation With Agility for Dev and Ops
The Problem With DevOps
DevOps alone is not a silver bullet. While it has no doubt changed the way we work and our expectations of software engineering departments, the promised panacea needs help scaling across all organizations.
Since its inception, the emphasis within DevOps has predominantly been on the "Dev" side of the equation. The question, of course, becomes where does the "Ops" part fit in? For some digital pure players, it seemingly doesn't, hence the advent of NoOps-the complete removal of traditional operations. However, in reality, this solution is unlikely to be the norm for the vast majority of companies. Whereas NoOps has become a banner to circumnavigate the requirements and safety nets of operations teams, DevOps initiatives are still heavily reliant on the infrastructure and services provided by IT operations.
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10 Website Redesign Tips for 2018
In 2018, a website is one of the most important representations of your business. It provides visibility, 24/7 accessibility, and is proved to be an effective sales channel.
However, if you want your website to deliver a significant return on investment (ROI), it needs to be well-designed and built specifically for users' eyes and preferences. Why is that? Let's see.
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PyDev of the Week: Mario Corchero
This week we welcome Mario Corchero (@mariocj89) as our PyDev of the Week! He is the chair of PyLondinium18, PyConES and PyCon Charlas, the Spanish track at this year's PyCon US. Let's spend some time learning more about Mario!
Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc.)?:
I work at Bloomberg as a Senior Software Developer on the Python Infrastructure team, I've previously worked in other teams within Bloomberg's Engineering department, like News Automation and News Search, where I used Python to automate the generation of content that we deliver to our clients in the form of news. This was quite an exciting project to be a part of. Before joining Bloomberg in London, I worked for Amadeus (Nice, France) and as an assistant researcher at my university in Spain, where I studied Computer Science and Software Development.
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How Do I Prepare for a Software Engineering Job Interview?
Let's look at the basic things you must know if you are interviewing for a software engineering position:
- Programming in a language of your choice: You should have a strong hold on at least one programming language. You should be quickly able to understand a reasonably complex piece of code and mentally dry run them. You should be able to code a complex scenario in the said language.
- Problem solving/ Algorithms: Algorithms in itself is a huge field. You are expected to know about basic algorithms. You will be at a great advantage if you know about basic problem solving approaches.
- The above 2 topics make up for 50-75% of a software engineering interview process.
- System Design: This is extremely important if you are an experienced software engineer. You need to be good at:
-
- Understanding the requirements of a system
- Designing scalable, fault-tolerant systems (Horizontal vs. vertical scaling )
- Basics of the following:
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- Operating Systems: Threads and Processes, Thread synchronization primitives ( semaphores and mutex), Memory management ( Paging, Swapping )
- Databases: Querying a Relational DBMS, Indexing, Primary and Foreign Key constraints, Normalisation, Internal storage
- Networks: Network Layers, TCP, and UDP, TCP packet structure, Packet routing, Subnetting
- Web: Cookies, Session management, Caching, Http / Https
Where to learn them:
- Programming in a language of your choice: I will assume you know the basics of programming in at least one language. Then it boils down to a lot of practice.
- Problem solving/Algorithms: Personally, I feel mycodeschool does a good job of teaching the basics of algorithms required. InterviewBit has topic-wise video tutorials augmented with related historical interview problems to practice on. Leetcode has a great selection of problems to build problem-solving skills. If you feel a bit more adventurous, you can check out http://www.spoj.com and Problemset - Codeforces. However, most of these problems might be too hard to qualify for a technical interview question.
- System Design: I feel this is a great point to start with. Do try out the most frequently asked questions at System Design Interview Questions - InterviewBit. Distributed Systems: For Fun and Profit makes for an interesting read.
Final Execution
Now that you are done with the preparation, the following few final tips might help you do well in an actual interview:
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Would Airbnb Have Fared Better With NativeScript Instead of React Native?
Last week, Airbnb's engineering team published a 5-part series on why they're moving away from React Native. It's well written, and worth reading if you're looking for some context for this post's discussion. All quotes you see in this article are from the Airbnb writeup.
As you might imagine, Airbnb's recent announcement piqued our interest on the NativeScript team. Airbnb's feedback on React Native was very technical and, interestingly, delved into areas where React Native and NativeScript take different approaches to app development. Therefore, as we read through the series we couldn't help but wonder-would Airbnb have fared better with NativeScript?
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Best Practices for Multi-Cloud Kubernetes
This article is featured in the new DZone Guide to Containers: Development and Management. Get your free copy for more insightful articles, industry statistics, and more!
The 2018 State of the Cloud Survey shows that 81% of enterprises use multiple clouds. Public cloud computing services, and modern infrastructure platforms enable agility at scale. As businesses seek to deliver value faster to their customers, it's no surprise that both public and private cloud adoption continue to grow at a healthy pace. In fact, according to the latest figures from IDC, worldwide server shipments increased 20.7% year-over-year to 2.7 million units in Q1 of 2018, and revenue rose 38.6%, the third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth!
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Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky will reportedly step down from Snap’s board of directors
Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky, who has served on Snap’s board of directors since December 2012, is not expected to stand for re-election to Snap’s board of directors and will thus be stepping down, according to a report by The Information.
Early investors stepping down from the board of directors — or at least not seeking re-election — isn’t that uncommon as once-private companies grow into larger public ones. Benchmark partner Peter Fenton did not seek re-election for Twitter’s board of directors in April last year. As Snap continues to navigate its future, especially as it has declined precipitously since going public and now sits at a valuation of around $16.5 billion. Partners with an expertise in the early-stage and later-stage startup life cycle may end up seeing themselves more useful taking a back seat and focusing on other investments. The voting process for board member re-election happens during the company’s annual meeting, so we’ll get more information when an additional proxy filing comes out ahead of the meeting later this year.
Benchmark is, or at least was at the time of going public last year, one of Snap’s biggest shareholders. According to the company’s 424B filing prior to going public in March last year, Benchmark held ownership of 23.1% of Snap’s Class B common stock and 8.2% of Snap’s Class A common stock. Lasky has been with Benchmark since April 2007, and also serves on the boards of a number of gaming companies like Riot Games and thatgamecompany, the creators of PlayStation titles flower and Journey. At the time, Snap said in its filing that Lasky was “qualified to serve as a member of our board of directors due to his extensive experience with social media and technology companies, as well as his experience as a venture capitalist investing in technology companies.”
The timing could be totally coincidental, but an earlier Recode report suggested Lasky had been talking about stepping down in future funds for Benchmark. The firm only recently wrapped up a very public battle with Uber, which ended up with Benchmark selling a significant stake in the company and a new CEO coming in to replace co-founder Travis Kalanick. Benchmark hired its first female general partner, Sarah Tavel, earlier this year.
We’ve reached out to both Snap and a representative from Benchmark for comment and will update the story when we hear back.
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WhatsApp copies Telegram to add one-way ‘broadcast’ mode to group chats
“Good artists borrow great artists steal” is a phrase that Facebook seems acutely aware of.
It’s common to speak of Instagram, the Facebook-owned photo-app-now-social-network, borrowing from Snapchat, but now Facebook’s WhatsApp chat app is increasingly drawing its innovation from others such as Telegram.
This week, WhatsApp outed a new feature for its groups that is essentially a replica of Telegram’s channels — that is, a one-way broadcast communication stream.
Telegram channels are popular for setting up a broadcast news feed that allows people to sign up to get alerts from channel admins, who might be news agencies, companies, schools, public interest groups or more. Now WhatsApp is adding the feature to gives its message app new use cases.
Actually, as is often the case for WhatsApp, users have unofficially adopted channel-like behavior for some time. Last year, for example, there were reports of a rural journalist using the messaging app to report and broadcast local news. Doing that is suddenly a whole lot easier through this new ‘broadcast-only’ feature.
“One way people use groups is to receive important announcements and information, including parents and teachers at schools, community centers, and non-profit organizations. We’ve introduced this new setting so admins can have better tools for these use cases,” WhatsApp wrote in a short blog post.
Still, the fact that WhatsApp requires users to provide a phone number to join groups — anyone’s number can be looked up by any group member — is one issue when it comes to creating or joining public groups. Telegram has introduced usernames, which mitigate that issue, but still, the app doesn’t have anything like WhatsApp’s scale which is a crucial consideration when deciding which app to plump for.
WhatsApp has over 1.5 billion active users, more than 200 million of which are in India, whereas Telegram recently passed 200 million active users worldwide.
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California man arrested for sending death threats to FCC’s Ajit Pai over net neutrality
While many people in this country are angry with current chairman of the FCC Ajit Pai, arguably with good reason, it’s unfortunate that at least one has descended to the level of sending credible death threats and, unsurprisingly, has subsequently been arrested.
Shortly after the FCC voted in December to nullify the agency’s 2015 net neutrality rules, Norwalk resident named Markara Man contacted Pai several times threatening him and his family.
According to a Justice Department press release, Man first told Pai that he was responsible for the death of a kid who had killed herself because of the loss of net neutrality. Next he sent a list of locations around Arlington, where the chairman lives, and threatening to kill members of his family. The third apparently was just an image of a framed photo of Pai’s family.
This clearly rises above the low-level — yet also deeply inappropriate — casual slurs against the chairman one sees in practically every discussion of FCC issues, including this website. As such it was investigated by the FBI, which traced the emails to Man’s location and confronted him.
He admitted to sending the emails in order to “scare” Pai, which I can only imagine it did. He’s been charged with the incredibly wordy crime of “threatening to murder a member of the immediate family of a U.S. official with the intent to intimidate or interfere with such official while engaged in the performance of official duties, or with the intent to retaliate against such official on account of the performance of official duties.” If convicted he could face up to 10 years, but that’s all up in the air still.
Listen: as you may be able to tell from TechCrunch’s own coverage of FCC issues and net neutrality (mostly by myself), I’m no fan of Chairman Pai’s, though I try my best to stick to the facts — which, helpfully, are also largely anti-Pai. But threatening the family of the man is, I hardly need say, taking it much too far. Not only is it reprehensible on its face, but it feeds a narrative of spite and ignorance that works counter to the very goals the threat-maker evidently espouses.
Net neutrality is a serious issue and the current administration’s elimination of the 2015 rules is a perfectly good reason to protest and, indeed, take Pai personally to task, since he is the foremost architect of our present situation. By all means call your elected officials, make net neutrality an issue in the 2018 midterms, and make your voice heard. But for everyone’s sake keep it civil.
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Here’s what it was like to stumble into Netflix and Lyft’s activation for GLOW at ‘Muscle Beach’
Today at “Muscle Beach” in Venice, Calif., Netflix and Lyft joined forces for a promotional campaign in support of the streaming media site’s (really excellent) dramatization of the origin story for the women’s wrestling league — GLOW (or the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling).
Your intrepid reporter was taking a walk on the beach and stumbled upon the marketing stunt (which was kind of genius).
For those of y’all who don’t know, Muscle Beach is sort of a mecca for weight lifters and body builders — including, back in the ’80s, a young Ah-nold Schwarzenegger. A history that made it an ideal spot to celebrate Netflix’s (pretty terrific) ode to all things new wave-d, hair metal-ed, neon accented, high-waisted, cocaine addled and muscle-bound.
Members of the cast posed for pictures, and wrestlers engaged in training sessions and ’80s-themed exercise classes throughout the day.
The activation will be up for the next week and included a Reebok pop-up with limited-edition ’80s styles; a photo booth and costumes for pictures; free copies of Paper Magazine and trading cards emblazoned with the pictures of each of the most popular characters from the show.
The day wasn’t without incident. Some Muscle Beach-goers got into a war of words with security over the event’s unannounced takeover of the basketball courts adjacent to the “beach.”
The second season of “GLOW” dropped today on Netflix.
[gallery ids="1666102,1666103,1666105,1666106,1666107"]
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What we know about Maryland’s controversial facial recognition database
When police had difficulty identifying the man whom they believed opened fire on a newsroom in Maryland, killing five people, they turned to one of the most controversial yet potent tools in the state’s law enforcement arsenal.
As The New York Times reports, Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare’s department failed to ID its suspect through fingerprinting. The department then sent a picture of the suspect to the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, which combed through one of the nation’s largest databases of mug shots and driver’s license photos in search of a match.
That database is the source of some debate. Maryland has some of the most aggressive facial recognition policies in the nation, according to a national report from Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy & Technology, and that practice is powered by one central system: a pool of face data known as the Maryland Image Repository System (MIRS).
For facial recognition searches, Maryland police have access to three million state mug shots, seven million state driver’s license photos and an additional 24.9 million mug shots from a national FBI database. The state’s practice of face recognition searches began in 2011, expanding in 2013 to incorporate the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration’s existing driver’s license database. The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) describes MIRS “as a digitized mug shot book used by law enforcement agencies throughout Maryland in the furtherance of their law enforcement investigation duties.”
According to the Georgetown report, “It’s unclear if the [Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services] ‘scrubs’ its mug shot database to eliminate people who were never charged, had charges dropped or dismissed, or who were found innocent.”
In a letter to Maryland’s House Appropriations and Senate Budget and Taxation Committees in late 2017, DPSCS Secretary Stephen T. Moyer notes that the software “has drawn criticism over privacy concerns.” In that report, the state notes that images uploaded to MIRS are not stored in the database and that “the user’s search results are saved under their session and are not available to any other user.” DPSCS provides these details about the software:
MIRS is an off-the-shelf software program developed by Dataworks Plus. Images are uploaded into the system from MVA, DPSCS inmate case records, and mugshot photos sent into the DPSCS Criminal Justice System-Central Repository (CJIS-CR) from law enforcement agencies throughout the State at the time of an offender’s arrest and booking. Members of law enforcement are able to upload an image to MIRS and that image is compared to the images within the system to determine the highest probability that the uploaded image may relate to an MVA and/or DPSCS image within MIRS.
In the 2017 fiscal year, DPSCS paid DataWorks Plus $185,124.24 to maintain the database. The report declined to answer questions about how many users are authorized to access the MIRS system (estimates in The Baltimore Sun put it at between 6,000 and 7,000 individuals) and how many user logins had occurred since 2015, stating that it did not track or collect this information. On a question of what steps the department takes to mitigate privacy risks, DPSCS stated only that “the steps taken to protect citizen’s privacy are inherent in the photos that are uploaded into the system and the way that the system is accessed.”
In 2016, Maryland’s face recognition database came under new scrutiny after the ACLU accused the state of using MIRS without a warrant to identify protesters in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray.
Last year, Maryland House Bill 1065 proposed a task force to examine surveillance techniques used by law enforcement in the state. That bill made it out of the House but did not progress past the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. Another bill, known as the Face Recognition Act (HB 1148), would mandate auditing in the state to “ensure that face recognition is used only for legitimate law enforcement purposes” and would prohibit the use of Maryland’s face recognition system without a court order. That bill did not make it out of the House Judiciary Committee, though the ACLU intends to revisit it in 2018.
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