#Xiaomi Buys 3%Of Chinese Games And Software Giant Kingsoft For $68m Xiaomi became the world third largest smartphone company based on sales last year
but it also invested in a number of companies in 2014. Its early deals have largely been in hardware
but today it announced PDF plans to put money into games and software by buying 2. 98 percent of Kingsoft for HK$527 million ($68 million).
Kingsoft started out developing PC games but today the company which is listed in Hong kong and valued at over $2 billion produces security entertainment and enterprise products too.
It already has strong links to Xiaomi whose CEO and cofounder Lei Jun is also founder and chairman of Kingsoft.
The investment is notable because it is a sign of Xiaomi intention to increase its focus on software and services.
Its deals to date have circled around hardware including a $200 million investment in appliance maker Midea
and a funding round for wearables startup Misfit but with the Kingsoft deal Xiaomi may well be laying the ground for a dedicated games service security features and other mobile services for its customers.
Xiaomi sold more than 60 million devices last year a feat that saw it overtake Samsung as China top smartphone company
and become the third biggest seller of smartphones worldwide in Q3 2014. With a burgeoning family of hardware
and smart home products including an air purifier blood test device smart TV and streaming box Xiaomi could look to construct a network of services to further monetize its user base in the future.
Xiaomi hasn revealed its hand as yet but Hugo Barra the company VP of international did tell Techcrunch last week that it is in the market for investments
and acquisitions in India with a particular focus on startups that offer mobile services and e-commerce.
The Xiaomi investment in Kingsoft is expected to be completed at the end of January. The company bought its shares from internet giant Tencent
which reduced its stake in Kingsoft to 9. 6 percent. Lei Jun himself owns 15 percent of the company e
#Apple Cuts Off Developers In Crimea Following U s. Sanctions Tensions between Russia and the U s. over Crimea are spilling into the world of tech:
developers are reporting that Apple is sending out notices of termination to people whose accounts are registered in Crimea citing sanctions that the U s. has ordered against the region as a response to Russia annexing it earlier in 2014.
This means the developers cannot create nor publish apps in Apple App store. The move follows Valve apparently also terminating access to its Steam games distribution platform in Crimea too.
Apple note which has been reproduced in more than one place online (including here on Russian-language tech site Habrahabr
and requires the developers to cease all use of Apple software and destroy related materials.
The backstory lies in a classic case of using economics as a diplomatic lever. Apple move is in response to an Executive Order signed by U s. President Barack Obama on December 19
which describes dditional steps to address the Russian occupation of the Crimea. he region a peninsula that juts into the Black sea has less than 2 million inhabitants
Among the various activities that are prohibited now are new investment in the region by a U s. person;
or technology to the Crimea region of Ukraine Other areas covered in the order include investments and immigration.
The company at one point last month closed its online store as the value of the Ruble plunged.
It then reopened it several days later with prices up by 35 %(which is huge
Putin government has put in place measures for tracking data on websites and restrictions on certain types of content.
This has resulted in some sites like Github getting blocked and others like Intel shutting down some of their online operations u
how to boost the operational efficiency of hospitals and improve patient care by helping staff make better choices about how resources are allocated.
Its founders liken their product to an ir traffic controller for the hospital and healthcare system Their real-time analytics platform predicts changes in demand
so that resources such as extra staff and beds can be brought in before they are needed to prevent scenarios such as emergency room waiting times spiraling outside target limits or the quality of patient care suffering.
The HIPAA compliant Saas software has been rolled out to several paying customers in the U s. healthcare sector so far
machine learning prediction engine at the core of their platform, say cofounders Brent Newhouse and Mudit Garg.
This ingests spectrumof real-time data signals from electronic medical records, to staffing systems and outpatient numbers,
along with granular on-the-ground signals such as bed sensors and emergency call button data, to external factors gleaned by scraping public data such as weather info, disease seasonality and even local events
which might have an impact on hospital admissions looking for patterns to generate its demand predictions.
Predicting accidents that end up in the ER does sound a tad oxymoronic but that exactly the point of such complex multi-signal AI-powered analytics platforms.
feed the machine enough data and the learning algorithms will find the patterns, or at least be able to predict likelihoods with decent accuracy.
So that what Analyticsmd says its platform can do and with a high degree of accuracy. In testing of its algorithms it says it has measured measured id-step accuracyin the 90%range of predicting volume a day ahead,
or predicting census of a unit a day ahead, although Garg stresses it not putting those test figures in front of customers.)
The software weighs up demand probabilities and considers the various costs involved, meaning financial costs such as staffing and beds but also care costs, so crucial factors such as quality of service and patient satisfaction,
a little bit there are, based on how this algorithm has performed in the past. If you have a sense of what that distribution looks like you can make your decision based on the relative costs,
More than a dashboard This predictive core they argue sets the product apart from rival software products
which just plug multiple data signals into a dashboard view for hospital staff to interpret themselves.
The problem with the dashboard approach in healthcare operations is staff simply don have time to be triaging all this data themselves.
And while Analyticsmd does offer its own real-time dashboard view too its added layer of data processing helps hospitals achieve greater operational efficiencies by providing a nudge ahead of time.
Recommendations generated by Decisionos are delivered to hospital staff as preemptive alerts, perhaps sent as a mobile text message (as in the below example) or via a phone call to their device.
Whatever device and medium is most appropriate for reaching that particular healthcare providersstaff. hese users are ones that are constantly battling fires that are happening in the hospital and taking care of patients,
and then decide what the best data-driven decision, based on that is really hard, says Garg. e started with a real-time dashboard at firstand realized that,
and let the hospital know; second: find the root causes, we actually filed some IP on that,
to prevent this you need to call a doctor in one hour earlier, or you need to open that bed.
Or even to detect which patients may not have had the best service in the hospital. The team claims one early implementation of its platform was able to cut the number of patient falls in half over a 1. 5 month period,
based on analyzing a combination of data signals such as when a patient presses a call button for help,
how long it takes a nurse to respond, what the patient was asking for, how much they were moving around in their bed and so on. istorically we detected patterns to patients that had fallen
and used that combination to be able to say who are the patients who are likely to fall. e do use a whole bunch of machine learning algorithms that help take out any unknowns in the equation,
rather than just a dashboard or even a dedicated human team focused on optimizing operational efficiency is that it provides unbroken continuity between staff changes.
So, for instance, a nurse just arriving for a day shift will be automatically in the loop about any ongoing issues from the night before
because the platform provides the data overlap as human staff come and go. But what about the other humans in this equation the patients?
and that happen to them in hospital are now being processed, and how certain actions might trigger certain healthcare outcomes?
In its current rollouts Garg says is only utilizing data elements that hospitals were already capturing,
They probably just see the hospital as being a lot more responsive. Without necessarily seeing the tech explicitly,
if a hospital started asking for additional decisions that maybe required additional data elements to be captured then the team would efinitely want to have a conversation with the patients to make sure they are comfortable with that Newhouse also points out that Analyticsmd makes a point of not capturing personal data such as patientsnames
while working in hospitals on operational issues where they saw how day to day operational challenges
The team third cofounder, Ian Christopher, brings the algorithmic expertise having worked on predictive software while at Stanford.
with investors including YC and some undisclosed U s. angels. Given it taking revenue, it not in a position where it needs to raise more funding at this point
but the cofounders speculate that if they convert all the interest they are seeing into paying customers they may look to bring on additional investors to help scale to meet demand.
In terms of their next steps, as they graduate from the YC program, they are focusing on the newly launched Decisionos feature including getting it rolled out to more customers. e are flushing out the delivery mechanism of the Decisionos and launching it in a 30 hospital system,
hopefully soon, in all their emergency rooms. And then a few customers on the operating room side. And then our plan going forward is to mature that Decisionosand take the partners that we have today, many
picking out new diseases as theye coming to the area so we can start helping different systems
which have silos of data derive benefit from each other as well. m
#Signal Keeps Your iphone Calls And Texts Safe From Government Spies Don want someone else handing your text messages, pictures, video or phone conversations over to the government?
There an app for that. An ios app called Signal is a project out of Open Whisper Systems,
a not-for-profit collective of hackers dedicated to making it harder for prying government eyes to get a hold of your information.
It gets high marks from both the American Civil liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a comprehensive solution for protecting your privacy.
The second version of the app, which launched this week on the App store, makes it possible to send encrypted group, text, picture and video messages for free from iphone to iphone.
For those who want to share with their friends on Android the community organization currently has two Android apps Textsecure
and Redphone that need to be combined to do the same thing as Signal does on ios. Textsecure is the text message solution
and Redphone is encrypted the phone-call solution. The plan is to combine those two into one Android app for Signal users.
Recent security breaches and other events have prompted a number of apps to emerge that promise encrypted communications between mobile phones.
The Dutch SIM CARD manufacturer Gemalto is just one company among many of the alleged government hacking operations.
Meanwhile, several tech companies have decided to take privacy measures into their own hands after the revelations from Edward Snowden that the NSA was capturing the private data of U s. citizens from several Silicon valley tech giants.
Signal was created to make that sort of mass collection too difficult to pursue. ven if we wanted to,
we can hand your information over to anyone, Founder Moxie Marlinspike tells me over the phone.
Marlinspike knows his way around encryption technology. He started cloud-based password-cracking service Chapcrack
and formerly ran Twitter security team. he idea is to scramble the information so well that it not worth pursuing.
Adding to the frustration of the NSA in its fight to get at your data, Signal code is open source. This means anyone can go to Github
and use the source code to create encrypted apps. Whatsapp recently incorporated Open Whisper System code into the Android version of its app. e want as many people as possible to have embedded the capability within their apps
so that nobody can get your information, Marlinspike says o
#Facebook Open-sources Some Of Its Deep-Learning Tools In the world of machine learning the buzzword these days is eep learning.
It a technique that has been popularized a by Geoff Hinton who is now at Google and previously worked at Microsoft Research as well as other computer science researchers like Yann Lecun who are looking for better ways to teach computers how to recognize objects and speech.
Facebook too has done quite a bit of work in the area and today the company is open-sourcing some of its projects around the Torch7 computing framework for machine learning.
Torch has long been at the center of many machine learning and artificial intelligence projects in academic labs and at companies like Google Twitter and Intel.
Facebook today is optimized launching tools to increase the speed at which deep-learning projects that use Torch run.
One allows developers to parallelize the training of their networks using multiple GPUS simultaneously. Another improvement ensures that training the convolutional neural nets at the center of many deep learning systems can be trained 23 times faster
when compared to the fastest publicly available code today. In addition Facebook is launching a number of additional tools that bring more speed to other parts of Torch as well.
Some of these are modest but many of Facebook projects results in 3 to 10x improvements over the default tools.
All of this is pretty technical of course and you can read more about the details here. What matters though is that deep learning techniques
(or at least their results) are slowly starting to show up in a lot of the software we use every day.
Google+Photos for example uses it to allow you to find images in your photo library.
And at CES last week Nvidia spent most of its keynote discussing how it uses deep learning to classify objects that a camera on a car may see in order to further its research in autonomous driving o
#Trillion-Dollar Alternative Lending Industry Is A VC Gold mine In a recovering economy where big banks are restricted by complex regulations,
startups and venture investors are gearing up for the next gold rush in the trillion-dollar marketplace lending industry.
That trillion. With A t. Big IPOS for Lending Club and Ondeck (valued at $9 billion and $1. 3 billion, respectively) appear to have spurred a funding frenzy this year as venture investors dig for more pay dirt.
In the first two months of 2015, VCS committed $340 million in venture capital for lending tech startups
according to Crunchbase data. The 17 deals recorded in 2015 average $23 million each, compared to a $14 million average deal size in 2014.
Peer-to-peer lenders Lending Club and Prosper set the stage for the lending marketplace boom, but the latest generation of lending tech is all about verticals.
Student loan marketplace Sofi $200 million monster round in January, led by Third Point, is the largest round tracked to date.
And Driverup, a lending platform for automotive financing, announced a $50 million Series A last week from Emerald Development Managers
and RRE Ventures. he reason these alternative lending platforms are coming up is that platform lending is simply more efficient for both the borrower and the lender,
says Stuart Ellman, managing partner at RRE. he borrower is able to find loans that they otherwise weren able to get either from the banking crisis
or from banks tightening up their lending process and lenders have the ability to do their diligence,
see the risk and the interest rates, and make the loans they want to on an a la carte basis,
Ellman says. The marketplace model has been proven, and now entrepreneurs are tweaking it to fit all industries.
Driverup is the first to bring marketplace tech to the $400 billion automotive lending market
which CEO Sam Ellis says has operated in a very traditional mode for the past 30 years. uto loans as an asset class different than real estate, gold, treasuries,
bonds and stocks historically have performed well and held up well through the recession, says Ellis. f youe a high net worth individual or some sort of investment fund,
you want options and you want attractive risk-adjusted returns. The economy may have recovered, but the 2008 meltdown is still taking a toll on the lending market.
Investors are concerned more than ever about where their money is going and how their investments will fare in another economic downturn. eople are learning that post-recession,
post-financial crisis, they want more data and more transparency about what theye investing in, and the marketplace platform allows investors to do their own analysis,
says Ellis. Driverup is just one of the venture-backed startups to apply the marketplace model to a specific vertical.
Companies like Realtymogul in the $2 trillion real estate industry and Noesis in the $18 billion commercial energy equipment market have seen rapid growth despite a narrow focus. nlike some industries,
where if youe starting to go after certain verticals maybe youe a little too niche, in this industry,
youe talking about massive markets that are still able to be disrupted, says Dan Ciporin, partner at Canaan Partners and Lending Club board member.
As alternative lending becomes more popular, shifting capital to lending marketplaces gets especially tricky for institutional investors.
Many firms have come to rely on enabling technologies to expedite the process. s soon as you start talking to operations or accounting teams,
you realize that the thought of trying to track $100 million worth of $8, 000 loans is just terrifying none of their systems are set up to deal with loans that small,
explains Matt Burton, founder of Orchard. Orchard, a Canaan portfolio company launched last year to simplify online direct lending at scale,
and currently powers seven investment platforms, including Lending Club, Prosper, and Ondeck. Burton says there are 450 more currently on their wait list. his is an area that going to continue to see a lot of innovation and disruption for the next few years minimum,
if not the next 20 years, says Ciporin. oul see things start to happen around the ecosystem that being created,
and that what I think is really exciting that there is an ecosystem now and it getting to be very large. t
#Are Drones A Fad Or Here For good? Drones are seen no longer just as a tool of the military
or a toy that people use to fly around. Theye becoming accepted as a tool that businesses can deploy,
and every day more and more companies are being created to build drone prototypes and software to help them fly,
detect obstacles and make sense of terabytes of data they collect. This is the golden age of drones,
and it is just taking off. Take consumer perception roneis a household word. Just look at the Google Trends for the word ronesor JI.
Check out the number of drone videos on Youtube (827 000). ) According to Frost and Sullivan, an aerospace research firm,
over 200,000 drones were sold each month in 2014. Parrot, a french drone maker, reported sales of over $47 million in drones in 2013.
Whether we like it or not, we are going to be seeing more drones in the sky and on the news,
and they will get cheaper, faster and more reliable. Here, I want to go into some reasons why
I think drones are not just a fad but are here to stay. The Trend of Drones in Industry While still not commonplace
drones are beginning to appear in many different industry settings, where their ease of use and huge costs savings over traditional methods,
it makes it a no brainer for companies. Construction companies are not always first movers when it comes to new technology,
but when it comes to drones, they have taken really a liking to them. Companies like Bouygues, Balfour Beatty and Webcor are using drones to map construction sites.
They are employing drones made by Skycatch, which recently made a deal with Japan Komatsu to enable driverless bulldozers to take instructions from unmanned drones.
You may not have known it but youe probably already seen a lot of footage taken by drones on TV.
Big brands like Walmart, BMW and Nike have taken videos using drones. Video production companies have been very quick to use drones to get difficult-to-reach shots.
Modern drones now use steady-cam like gimbals to make videos look super smooth. As drones get more sophisticated,
expect to see more drone-made movies. Farmers are increasingly using drones to monitor crop health and gauge growth patterns.
This is a job well-suited to drones, as previously helicopters would have had to do this job,
at great expense. Companies like Precision Hawk are developing software and hardware that automatically measures the height of crops
and detect weeds, and they can even count plants. These kinds of drones are using fixed wings,
which mean they can stay in the air for much longer, and capture a lot more data than a DJI-like quadcopter.
Jay Bregman, the former CEO of Hailo, is verified developing database of drones, that will allow people to know where you can
and cannot fly a drone. Saving Lives Many of you will have seen the defibrillator drone which is still an idea,
but could be a reality very soon. These kinds of drones could be useful for cities with dense traffic.
A drone like this could fly across heavy traffic and deliver lifesaving equipment in under three minutes.
For places with no roads to speak of, companies like Matternet are creating drones that will deliver medicine.
Then there are drones that will deliver life vests to drowning victims, or when a life guard can get to a person on time.
The average human takes 90 seconds to reach and save a drowning victim who is 75 meters from the beach.
It takes a drone 22 seconds. Why send a human into a blazing inferno when you can send a robot?
Drone America, a company based in Reno, Nev. recently unveiled a drone that can capture heat signatures,
analyze the chemical, biological, and radiological threats before someone actually gets to the fire. Police have been buying up drones for years now,
as the cost of running helicopters is compared very high to sending up a drone for a short period of time.
Whatever you think about the surveillance state, drones will continue to be used by law enforcement and security forces.
Transportation The idea of a drone taking you to work is still a Jetsons kind of idea,
but there one company in Santa cruz, Calif.,that plans to kill your commute. Joby Aviation is building an ambitious aircraft:
A personal craft that can lift off vertically, fly 200 miles and land vertically, all on battery power.
While still several years away, the technology this company is developing could pave the way for new advances in personal transportation.
I took a visit to their HQ and was blown away by the work theye doing on VTOL technology,
propellers that adapt and huge carbon fibre wings. Some people think that drones could be the next trend in personal transportation.
While this is some ways off, I would love to believe in this dream, as would millions of commuters.
Battery power and battery weight will have to improve dramatically safety systems will have to be developed and anti-collision infrastructure will have to be deployed.
The promise of personal drones is one where youl jump into some kind of craft from your rooftop,
punch in your destination via Google maps, and be driven by a computer, guiding your destination while avoiding all other air traffic.
Youl leave roads, traffic lights, traffic jams and accidents behind. The Challenge for Entrepreneurs This leaves us entrepreneurs with some challenges.
Think about the huge opportunity of drones in the future, and what kind of software and hardware will have to be developed to manage that growth.
There are very few companies out there today creating software to make drones safer. What about systems to manage where drones can
and cannot legally go? How will we know who owns a drone when the next one crashes into a famous person lawn?
There is no equivalent of the DMV for drones yet, or safety belts or airbags. Drones could spur demand for lighter batteries or a different kind of power source.
Drones need to see where they are going and avoid obstacles, and software is going to have to be built to make all of these dreams a reality.
There are so many great applications for drones, we haven even begun to scratch the surface. Whatever happens, drones are here to stay p
#Duke Researchers Create Artificial Human Muscles As a representative of M. U s c. L. E, . I find artificial muscles a bit unseemly.
However, researchers at Duke university have been able to grow their own twitching tissue, a first that could allow researchers to test drugs on working muscle without damaging a live host.
From the release:##In a laboratory first, Duke researchers have grown human skeletal muscle that contracts and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli such as electrical pulses,
biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals. he beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish,
said Bursac. e are working to test drugsefficacy and safety without jeopardizing a patient health
and also to reproduce the functional and biochemical signals of diseases especially rare ones and those that make taking muscle biopsies difficult.
Interestingly there is no mention here of using these tiny bits of working muscle muscle that twitches in response to electricity
and responds to drugs just like regular human muscle as replacements for lost musculature, which suggests the samples are still too small to be useful.
However, this is the first time human-equivalent muscle has been grown in the lab and it looks like it will be a real boon for researchers trying to figure out the effects of various diseases and drugs on the body.
That said, I fully intend to eventually embed huge chunks of artificial muscle into my body
and walk around looking like the Hulk o
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