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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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If we let the US Postal Service die, we’ll be killing small businesses with it

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/if-we-let-the-us-postal-service-die-well-be-killing-small-businesses-with-it/

If we let the US Postal Service die, we’ll be killing small businesses with it

Laura Behrens Wu Contributor

Laura Behrens Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Shippo, which is building a shipping platform for 21st century e-commerce.

Since moving to the United States, I’ve come to appreciate and admire the United States Postal Service as a symbol of American ingenuity and resilience.

Like electricity, telephones and the freeway system, it’s part of our greater story and what binds the United States together. But it’s also something that’s easy to take for granted. USPS delivers 181.9 million pieces of First Class mail each day without charging an arm and a leg to do so. If you have an address, you are being served by the USPS — and no one’s asking you for cash up front.

As CEO of Shippo, an e-commerce technology platform that helps businesses optimize their shipping, I have a unique vantage point into the USPS and its impact on e-commerce. The USPS has been a key partner since the early days of Shippo in making shipping more accessible for growing businesses. As a result of our work with the USPS, along with several other emerging technologies (like site builders, e-commerce platforms and payment processing), e-commerce is more accessible than ever for small businesses.

And while my opinion on the importance of the USPS is not based on my company’s business relationship with the Postal Service, I want to be upfront about the fact that Shippo generates part of its revenue from the purchase of shipping labels through our platform from the USPS along with several other carriers. If the USPS were to stop operations, it would have an impact on Shippo’s revenue. That said, the negative impact would be far greater for many thousands of small businesses.

I know this because at Shippo, we see firsthand how over 35,000 online businesses operate and how they reach their customers. We see and support everything from what options merchants show their customers at checkout through how they handle returns — and everything in between. And while each and every business is unique with different products, customers operations and strategies, they all need to ship.

In the United States, the majority of this shipping is facilitated by the USPS, especially for small and medium businesses. For context, the USPS handles almost half of the world’s total mail and delivers more than the top private carriers do in aggregate, annually, in just 16 days. And, it does all of this without tax dollars, while offering healthcare and pension benefits to its employees.

As has been the case for many organizations, COVID-19 has significantly impacted the USPS. While e-commerce package shipments continue to rise (+30% since early March based on Shippo data), it has not been enough to overcome the drastic drop in letter mail. With this, I’ve heard opinions of supposed “inefficiency,” calls for privatization, pushes for significant pricing and structural changes, and even indifference to the possibility of the USPS shutting down.

Amid this crisis, we all need the USPS and its vital services now more than ever. In a world with a diminished or dismantled USPS, it won’t be Amazon, other major enterprises, or even Shippo that suffer. If we let the USPS die, we’ll be killing small businesses along with it.

Quite often, opinions on the efficiency (or lack thereof) of the USPS are very narrow in scope. Yes, the USPS could pivot to improve its balance sheet and turn operating losses into profits by axing cumbersome routes, increasing prices and being more selective in who they serve.

However, this omits the bigger picture and the true value of the USPS. What some have dubbed inefficient operations are actually key catalysts to small business growth in the United States. The USPS gives businesses across the country, regardless of size, location or financial resources, the ability to reach their customers.

We shouldn’t evaluate the USPS strictly on balance sheet efficiency, or even as a “public good” in the abstract. We should look at how many thousands of small businesses have been able to get started thanks to the USPS, how hundreds of billions of dollars of commerce is made possible by the USPS annually and how many millions of customers, who otherwise may not have access to goods, have been served by the USPS.

In the U.S., e-commerce accounts for over half a trillion dollars in sales annually, and is growing at double-digit rates each year. When I hear people talk about the growth of e-commerce, Amazon is often the first thing that comes up. What doesn’t shine through as often is the massive growth of small business — which is essential to the health of commerce in general (no one needs a monopoly!). In fact, the SMB segment has been growing steadily alongside Amazon. And with the challenges that traditional businesses face with COVID-19, more small businesses than ever are moving online.

USPS Priority Mail gets packages almost anywhere in the U.S. in two to three days (average transit time is 2.5 days based on Shippo data) and starts at around $7 per shipment, with full service: tracking, insurance, free pickups and even free packaging that they will bring to you.

In a time when we as consumers have become accustomed to free and fast shipping on all of our online purchases, the USPS is essential for small businesses to keep up. As consumers we rarely see behind the curtain, so to speak, when we interact with e-commerce businesses. We don’t see the small business owner fulfilling orders out of their home or out of a small storefront, we just see an e-commerce website. Without the USPS’ support, it would be even harder, in some cases near impossible, for small business owners to live up to these sky-high expectations. For context, 89% of U.S.-based SMBs (under $10,000 in monthly volume) on the Shippo platform rely on the USPS.

I’ve seen a lot of talk about the USPS’s partnership with Amazon, how it is to blame for the current situation, and how under a private model, things would improve. While we have our own strong opinions on Amazon and its impact on the e-commerce market, Amazon is not the driver of USPS’s challenges. In fact, Amazon is a major contributor in the continued growth of the USPS’s most profitable revenue stream: package delivery.

While I don’t know the exact economics of the deal between the USPS and Amazon, significant discounting for volume and efficiency is common in e-commerce shipping. Part of Amazon’s pricing is a result of it actually being cheaper and easier for the USPS to fulfill Amazon orders, compared to the average shipper. For this process, Amazon delivers shipments to USPS distribution centers in bulk, which significantly cuts costs and logistical challenges for the USPS.

Without the USPS, Amazon would be able to negotiate similar processes and efficiencies with private carriers — small businesses would not. Given the drastic differences in daily operations and infrastructure between the USPS and private carriers, small businesses would see shipping costs increase significantly, in some cases by more than double. On top of this, small businesses would see a new operational burden when it comes to getting their packages into the carriers’ systems in the absence of daily routes by the USPS.

Overall, I would expect to see the level of entrepreneurship in e-commerce slow in the United States without the USPS or with a private version of the USPS that operates with a profit-first mindset. The barriers to entry would be higher, with greater costs and larger infrastructure investments required up-front for new businesses. For Shippo, I’d expect to see a much greater diversity of carriers used by our customers. Our technology that allows businesses to optimize across several carriers would become even more critical for businesses. Though, even with optimization, small businesses would still be the group that suffers the most.

Today, most SMB e-commerce brands, based on Shippo data, spend between 10-15% of their revenue on shipping, which is already a large expense. This could rise well north of 20%, especially when you take into account surcharges and pick-up fees, creating an additional burden for businesses in an already challenging space.

I urge our lawmakers and leaders to see the full picture: that the USPS is a critical service that enables small businesses to survive and thrive in tough times, and gives citizens access to essential services, no matter where they reside.

This also means providing government support — both financially and in spirit — as we all navigate the COVID-19 crisis. This will allow the USPS to continue to serve both small businesses and citizens while protecting and keeping their employees safe — which includes ensuring that they are equipped to handle their front-line duties with proper safety and protective gear.

In the end, if we continue to view the USPS as simply a balance sheet and optimize for profitability in a vacuum, we ultimately stand to lose far more than we gain.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson on ‘the conversation no one has during an upmarket’

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Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson on ‘the conversation no one has during an upmarket’

For pre-seed startups, precarious times are baseline until they secure their first customer, first hire and first check. But no matter how built-in turbulence might be for a pre-seed founder, we’re entering a period where stresses are amplified and outlooks are unpredictable.

In light of the new market conditions, a harder fundraising market and slower expected growth, Charles Hudson (founder and general partner of Precursor Ventures) is urging his portfolio companies to reassess their futures with a refreshingly human question: “Are you excited and prepared to run this company for the next two years?

If not, you might want to do something else. Why? Because if a super early-stage company manages to survive the COVID-19 era, making it out the other end, it’s not clear that they’ll be venture-ready when markets recover. As Hudson put it, “there’s never been a better time to maybe fold.” That’s because, he explained, startups that merely survive won’t be judged merely against their peers that also survived; they will also compete with brand-new startups for capital and companies that didn’t need to hunker down during lean times.

It’s possible to make it through, but it won’t be an easy path.

TechCrunch spoke with Hudson earlier this week as part of our ongoing Extra Crunch Live series that brings leading founders and investors to our (virtual) stage. Between our editors and journalists and the best questions from the audience, we’re working with guests to understand the new world that we find ourselves in. That we’re hosting these events virtually instead of in-person is testament to our changed reality.

But the chat was far from all gloom; Hudson is bullish on a number of things. Niche publications with subscription economics? Yes. Social services targeting particular audiences? Yep! Precursor is still cutting checks into net-new deals, and while it’s wrapping up its second main fund and first opportunity fund, the firm is also raising a new, larger capital pool.

The conversation ran the full hour we had set aside for it, meaning we had to condense some later discussions about fintech and the new trade-off between growth and profit, but we did get to diversity in venture and startups in the future, and what impact a recession might have on both (it’s a bigger possible impact than you’re considering).

Hit the jump for the best Hudson takeaways and the full audio recording from the session. Head here if you need Extra Crunch access; there are some trials for just a few bucks, so everyone can access the chat. Let’s go!

Raising a fund in the COVID-19 era

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Matt Ocko saw COVID-19 coming: Here’s what his venture firm is doing about it

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/matt-ocko-saw-covid-19-coming-heres-what-his-venture-firm-is-doing-about-it/

Matt Ocko saw COVID-19 coming: Here’s what his venture firm is doing about it

Matt Ocko, co-founder of venture firm Data Collective (DCVC), was among a small group of VCs viewed as alarmists when they began tweeting about the coronavirus’s imminent appearance in the U.S. back in January.

In retrospect, those individuals were prescient, so we spoke with Ocko last week about why he was so certain the U.S. was about to get walloped by COVID-19, and asked how some of the startups in DCVC’s portfolio — which has long had a strong biotech focus — are trying to get us back to a state of normalcy.

This conversation has been edited for length.

TechCrunch: You were tweeting about COVID-19 back in January; I almost canceled a flight out of San Francisco because of your [expressed concern about a flight bound for SFO from Wuhan, China]. What did you see that the rest of us missed?

Matt Ocko: My family has been working with the Chinese government at a reasonably high level since the late 1970s, starting with my dad, and I kind of grew up in that environment. And at a relatively young age, as a professional [in the 1990s], I started pro bono helping my dad, who’s a Chinese legal expert, on things like constructing the laws around China’s Nasdaq equivalent, its stock markets, the joint dollar-renminbi investment legislation, advice on technology development and venture capital development.

I’m not an anti-China hawk by any means. But I do have an understanding of some of the idiosyncrasies of Chinese culture reflected in its government, the same way every country has its idiosyncrasies.

[In China’s case], it’s a focus on face and reputation and extreme sensitivity to negative perception or shame or humiliation at every level of government and culture. And so there’s [an] unfortunate trend — and not a universal one — for people to manage upwards, especially in the government, and tell their higher-ups what they want to hear to avoid shame, to avoid the loss of reputation and to kick the can down the road or hope that circumstances on the ground change favorably in the face of denial or equivocation.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Manufacturing startup Divergent 3D reduces staff by one-third

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/manufacturing-startup-divergent-3d-reduces-staff-by-one-third/

Manufacturing startup Divergent 3D reduces staff by one-third

Divergent, the Los Angeles-based startup aiming to revolutionize vehicle manufacturing, has cut about one-third of its staff amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has upended startups and major corporations alike.

The company, which employed about 160 people, laid off 57 workers, according to documents filed with the California Employment Development Department. Founder and CEO Kevin Czinger didn’t provide specific numbers. However, he did confirm to TechCrunch that he had to reduce staff due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A core team remains, he said.

“Whenever you’re doing something that’s affecting people’s jobs — and especially in a company where I basically recruited everyone and knew everyone by face and name — it’s obviously super painful to do that under any circumstance,” Czinger said in an interview this week.

The company’s No. 1 priority was to ensure long-term financial stability and secure the core team, technology development and customer programs no matter what the scenario, Czinger said, adding that there is still enormous uncertainty surrounding the real impact and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This was about making the company as totally weatherproof as possible,” Czinger said.

Divergent 3D is essentially a Tier 1 supplier for the automotive and aerospace industry. But it can hardly be considered a traditional supplier. After resigning as CEO of the now-defunct EV startup Coda Automotive in 2010, Czinger began to focus on how the vehicle manufacturing process could become more efficient and less wasteful.

Divergent 3D was born out of that initial exploration. The company developed an additive manufacturing platform designed to make it easier and faster to design and build new cars at a fraction of the cost — all while reducing the environmental impact that traditional factories have.

The platform is an end-to-end digital production system that uses high-speed 3D printers to make complex parts out of metal alloys. This system produces the structures of vehicles, such as the full frame, subframes and suspension structures that are part of the crash-performance structure of the vehicle.

In its early years as a company, Divergent 3D was perhaps best known for Blade, the first automobile to use 3D printing to form the body and chassis. Divergent 3D made Blade — which was on the auto show circuit in 2016 — to demonstrate the technology platform.

It was enough to get the attention of investors and at least two global OEMs as customers. Divergent can’t name the customers because of non-disclosure agreements.

The company has raised about $150 million from investors that include venture capital fund Horizons Ventures, automotive and aerospace engineering services company Altran Technologies and Chinese backers O Luxe Holdings, an investment conglomerate backed by the Hong Kong-based real estate investment magnate Li Ka-shing and Shanghai Alliance Investment Limited, an investment arm of the Shanghai Municipal Government.

The latest example of Divergent’s technology is the 21C, a hypercar unveiled in March that was built using the additive manufacturing platform. The high-performance 3D-printed vehicle was produced by Czinger Vehicles. Divergent 3D and Czinger Vehicles are wholly owned subsidiaries under Divergent Technologies.

Image Credits: Czinger Vehicles

Czinger said the company is poised to navigate the pandemic and ultimately survive. Divergent 3D has two global OEMs as customers. Structures such as chassis components and subframes, for which Divergent has supply contracts, are going through various testing and validation stages, depending on the program. Those programs, which are for serial production vehicles, are moving forward, Czinger said.

There will be delays as automakers have slowed or stopped operations. Czinger is hopeful that by 2021 the company will be able to announce that its 3D-printed structures will be production vehicles.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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My experience with the CARES Act was frustrating, confusing and unfair

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/my-experience-with-the-cares-act-was-frustrating-confusing-and-unfair/

My experience with the CARES Act was frustrating, confusing and unfair

If we let the US Postal Service die, we’ll be killing small businesses with it

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-24

Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson on ‘the conversation no one has during an upmarket’

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-24

Matt Ocko saw COVID-19 coming: Here’s what his venture firm is doing about it

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-24

Manufacturing startup Divergent 3D reduces staff by one-third

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-24

Indian smartphone market grew by 4% in Q1, but projected to decline by 10% this year

Source: Techcrunch Gadgets Published on 2020-04-24

Apple and CMU researchers demo a low friction learn-by-listening system for smarter home devices

Source: Techcrunch Gadgets Published on 2020-04-23

Apple said to sell Macs powered by in-house ARM-based chips as early as 2021

Source: Techcrunch Gadgets Published on 2020-04-23

Instagram Speeding Up Rollout of a Memorial Account Feature Due to Coronavirus Deaths: Report

Source: NDTV Social Published on 2020-04-23

Coronavirus Lockdown Will Cause Gridlock to 5G Rollout in India

Source: NDTV Mobiles Published on 2020-04-23

Israel Suspends Cellphone-Tracking for Coronavirus Quarantine Enforcement

Source: NDTV Mobiles Published on 2020-04-23

Facebook to Label National Origin of Popular Posts in the US

Source: NDTV Social Published on 2020-04-23

Heartcore Capital’s ‘Fellowship’ offers pre-seed funding for founders building consumer tech during lockdown

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-23

Email, Password Details of Nearly 25,000 Employees at WHO, CDC, NIH Dumped Online: Report

Source: NDTV Social Published on 2020-04-23

Vivo iQoo, iQoo Neo, iQoo Pro, Other Older iQoo Phones to Receive iQoo UI Update Starting Mid-June

Source: NDTV Mobiles Published on 2020-04-23

Hong Kong insurtech startup OneDegree launches its first product, medical coverage for pets

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-23

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Replacing plastic with plant pulp for sustainable packaging attracts a billionaire backer

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/replacing-plastic-with-plant-pulp-for-sustainable-packaging-attracts-a-billionaire-backer/

Replacing plastic with plant pulp for sustainable packaging attracts a billionaire backer

If we let the US Postal Service die, we’ll be killing small businesses with it

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-24

Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson on ‘the conversation no one has during an upmarket’

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-24

Matt Ocko saw COVID-19 coming: Here’s what his venture firm is doing about it

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-24

Manufacturing startup Divergent 3D reduces staff by one-third

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-24

My experience with the CARES Act was frustrating, confusing and unfair

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-24

Indian smartphone market grew by 4% in Q1, but projected to decline by 10% this year

Source: Techcrunch Gadgets Published on 2020-04-24

Apple and CMU researchers demo a low friction learn-by-listening system for smarter home devices

Source: Techcrunch Gadgets Published on 2020-04-23

Apple said to sell Macs powered by in-house ARM-based chips as early as 2021

Source: Techcrunch Gadgets Published on 2020-04-23

Instagram Speeding Up Rollout of a Memorial Account Feature Due to Coronavirus Deaths: Report

Source: NDTV Social Published on 2020-04-23

Coronavirus Lockdown Will Cause Gridlock to 5G Rollout in India

Source: NDTV Mobiles Published on 2020-04-23

Israel Suspends Cellphone-Tracking for Coronavirus Quarantine Enforcement

Source: NDTV Mobiles Published on 2020-04-23

Facebook to Label National Origin of Popular Posts in the US

Source: NDTV Social Published on 2020-04-23

Heartcore Capital’s ‘Fellowship’ offers pre-seed funding for founders building consumer tech during lockdown

Source: Techcrunch Startups Published on 2020-04-23

Email, Password Details of Nearly 25,000 Employees at WHO, CDC, NIH Dumped Online: Report

Source: NDTV Social Published on 2020-04-23

Vivo iQoo, iQoo Neo, iQoo Pro, Other Older iQoo Phones to Receive iQoo UI Update Starting Mid-June

Source: NDTV Mobiles Published on 2020-04-23

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Indian smartphone market grew by 4% in Q1, but projected to decline by 10% this year

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/indian-smartphone-market-grew-by-4-in-q1-but-projected-to-decline-by-10-this-year/

Indian smartphone market grew by 4% in Q1, but projected to decline by 10% this year

India has emerged as one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the last decade, reporting growth each quarter even as handset shipments slowed or declined elsewhere globally. But the world’s second largest smartphone is beginning to feel the coronavirus heat, too.

The Indian smartphone market grew by a modest 4% year-over-year in the quarter that ended on March 31, research firm Counterpoint said Friday evening. The shipment grew annually in January and February, when several firms launched their smartphones and unveiled aggressive promotional plans.

But in March the shipment saw a 19% year-over-year dip, the firm said. Counterpoint estimated that the smartphone shipments in India will decline by 10% this year, compared to a 8.9% growth in 2019 and 10% growth in 2018.

The research firm also cautioned that India’s lockdown, ordered last month, has severely slowed down the local smartphone industry and it may take seven to eight months to get back on track. Currently, only select items such as grocery products are permitted to be sold in India.

Prachir Singh, Senior Research Analyst at Counterpoint Research, said the COVID-19 impact on India was relatively mild until mid-March. “However, economic activities declined as people save money in expectation of an extended period of uncertainty and an almost complete lockdown. Almost all smartphone manufacturing has been suspended. Further, with the social distancing norms, factories will be running at lower capacities even after the lockdown is lifted,” he said.

Overall, 31 million smartphone units shipped in India in Q1 2020. Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, which has held the tentpole position in what has become its biggest market globally for more than two years, widened its lead to command 30% of the market.

Vivo’s share grew to 17%, up from 12% during the same period last year. Samsung, which once led the Indian market, now sits at the third spot with 16% market share, down from 24% in Q1 2019. Apple maintained its recent momentum and grew by a strong 78% year-over-year in Q1 this year. It now commands 55% of the premium smartphone segment (handsets priced at $600 or above.).

More than 100 smartphone plants in India assemble or produce about 700,000 to 800,000 handsets a day, some of which are exported outside of the country. But the lockdown has halted the production and could cost the industry more than $3 billion to $4 billion in direct loss this year.

“We often draw parallels between India and China. But in China, their factories have adopted automation at various levels, something that is not the case in India,” said Tarun Pathak, a senior analyst at Counterpoint, earlier this week.

China, where smartphone sales declined by 38% annually in February this year, has already started to see recovery. Xiaomi said last month that its phone factories were already operating at more than 80% of their capacity. Globally, smartphone shipment declined by 14% in February, according to Counterpoint.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Apple and CMU researchers demo a low friction learn-by-listening system for smarter home devices

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/apple-and-cmu-researchers-demo-a-low-friction-learn-by-listening-system-for-smarter-home-devices-2/

Apple and CMU researchers demo a low friction learn-by-listening system for smarter home devices

A team of researchers from Apple and Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute have presented a system for embedded AIs to learn by listening to noises in their environment without the need for up-front training data or without placing a huge burden on the user to supervise the learning process. The overarching goal is for smart devices to more easily build up contextual/situational awareness to increase their utility.

The system, which they’ve called Listen Learner, relies on acoustic activity recognition to enable a smart device, such as a microphone-equipped speaker, to interpret events taking place in its environment via a process of self-supervised learning with manual labelling done by one-shot user interactions — such as by the speaker asking a person ‘what was that sound?’, after it’s heard the noise enough time to classify in into a cluster.

A general pre-trained model can also be looped in to enable the system to make an initial guess on what an acoustic cluster might signify. So the user interaction could be less open-ended, with the system able to pose a question such as ‘was that a faucet?’ — requiring only a yes/no response from the human in the room.

Refinement questions could also be deployed to help the system figure out what the researchers dub “edge cases”, i.e. where sounds have been closely clustered yet might still signify a distinct event — say a door being closed vs a cupboard being closed. Over time, the system might be able to make an educated either/or guess and then present that to the user to confirm.

They’ve put together the below video demoing the concept in a kitchen environment.

[embedded content]

In their paper presenting the research they point out that while smart devices are becoming more prevalent in homes and offices they tend to lack “contextual sensing capabilities” — with only “minimal understanding of what is happening around them”, which in turn limits “their potential to enable truly assistive computational experiences”.

And while acoustic activity recognition is not itself new, the researchers wanted to see if they could improve on existing deployments which either require a lot of manual user training to yield high accuracy; or use pre-trained general classifiers to work ‘out of the box’ but — since they lack data for a user’s specific environment — are prone to low accuracy.

Listen Learner is thus intended as a middle ground to increase utility (accuracy) without placing a high burden on the human to structure the data. The end-to-end system automatically generates acoustic event classifiers over time, with the team building a proof-of-concept prototype device to act like a smart speaker and pipe up to ask for human input.

“The algorithm learns an ensemble model by iteratively clustering unknown samples, and then training classifiers on the resulting cluster assignments,” they explain in the paper. “This allows for a ‘one-shot’ interaction with the user to label portions of the ensemble model when they are activated.”

Audio events are segmented using an adaptive threshold that triggers when the microphone input level is 1.5 standard deviations higher than the mean of the past minute.

“We employ hysteresis techniques (i.e., for debouncing) to further smooth our thresholding scheme,” they add, further noting that: “While many environments have persistent and characteristic background sounds (e.g., HVAC), we ignore them (along with silence) for computational efficiency. Note that incoming samples were discarded if they were too similar to ambient noise, but silence within a segmented window is not removed.”

The CNN (convolutional neural network) audio model they’re using was initially trained on the YouTube-8M dataset — augmented with a library of professional sound effects, per the paper.

“The choice of using deep neural network embeddings, which can be seen as learned low-dimensional representations of input data, is consistent with the manifold assumption (i.e., that high-dimensional data roughly lie on a low-dimensional manifold). By performing clustering and classification on this low-dimensional learned representation, our system is able to more easily discover and recognize novel sound classes,” they add.

The team used unsupervised clustering methods to infer the location of class boundaries from the low-dimensional learned representations — using a hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) algorithm known as Ward’s method.

Their system evaluates “all possible groupings of data to find the best representation of classes”, given candidate clusters may overlap with one another.

“While our clustering algorithm separates data into clusters by minimizing the total within-cluster variance, we also seek to evaluate clusters based on their classifiability. Following the clustering stage, we use a unsupervised one-class support vector machine (SVM) algorithm that learns decision boundaries for novelty detection. For each candidate cluster, a one-class SVM is trained on a cluster’s data points, and its F1 score is computed with all samples in the data pool,” they add.

“Traditional clustering algorithms seek to describe input data by providing a cluster assignment, but this alone cannot be used to discriminate unseen samples. Thus, to facilitate our system’s inference capability, we construct an ensemble model using the one-class SVMs generated from the previous step. We adopt an iterative procedure for building our ensemble model by selecting the first classifier with an F1 score exceeding the threshold, 𝜃&'( and adding it to the ensemble. When a classifier is added, we run it on the data pool and mark samples that are recognized. We then restart the cluster-classify loop until either 1) all samples in the pool are marked or 2) a loop does not produce any more classifiers.”

Privacy preservation?

The paper touches on privacy concerns that arise from such a listening system — given how often the microphone would be switched on and processing environmental data, and because they note it may not always be possible to carry out all processing locally on the device.

“While our acoustic approach to activity recognition affords benefits such as improved classification accuracy and incremental learning capabilities, the capture and transmission of audio data, especially spoken content, should raise privacy concerns,” they write. “In an ideal implementation, all data would be retained on the sensing device (though significant compute would be required for local training). Alternatively, compute could occur in the cloud with user-anonymized labels of model classes stored locally.”

You can read the full paper here.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Apple said to sell Macs powered by in-house ARM-based chips as early as 2021

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/apple-said-to-sell-macs-powered-by-in-house-arm-based-chips-as-early-as-2021/

Apple said to sell Macs powered by in-house ARM-based chips as early as 2021

Apple’s long-rumored Mac ARM chip transition could happen as early as next year, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The report says that Apple is currently working on three Mac processors based on the design of the A14 system-on-a-chip that will power the next-generation iPhone. The first of the Mac versions will greatly exceed the speed of the iPhone and iPad processors, according to the report’s sources.

Already, Apple’s A-series line of ARM-based chips for iPhones and iPads have been steadily improving, to the point where their performance in benchmark tests regularly exceeds that of Intel processors used currently in Apple’s Mac line. As a result, and because Intel’s chip development has encountered a few setbacks and slowdowns in recent generations, rumors that Apple would move to using its own ARM-based designs have multiplied over the past few years.

Bloomberg says that “at least one Mac” powered by Apple’s own chip is being prepared for release in 2021, to be built by chip fabricator and longtime Apple partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). The first of these chips to power Macs will have at least 12 cores, including eight designed for high-performance applications, and four designed for lower-intensity activities with battery-preserving energy efficiency characteristics. Current Intel designs that Apple employs in devices such as the MacBook Air have four or even two cores, by comparison.

Initially, the report claims Apple will focus on using the chips to power a new Mac design, leaving Intel processors in its higher-end pro level Macs, because the ARM-based designs, while more performant on some scores, can’t yet match the top-end performance of Intel-based chip technology. ARM chips generally provide more power efficiency at the expense of raw computing power, which is why they’re so frequently used in mobile devices.

The first ARM-based Macs will still run macOS, per Bloomberg’s sources, and Apple will seek to make them compatible with software that works on current Intel-based Macs as well. That would be a similar endeavor to when Apple switched from using PowerPC-based processors to Intel chips for its Mac lineup in 2006, so the company has some experience in this regard. During that transition, Apple announced initially that the switch would take place between 2006 and 2007, but accelerated its plans so that all new Macs shipping by the end of 2006 were powered by Intel processors.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Instagram Speeding Up Rollout of a Memorial Account Feature Due to Coronavirus Deaths: Report

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Instagram Speeding Up Rollout of a Memorial Account Feature Due to Coronavirus Deaths: Report

Instagram is working on a new account memorialisation feature to help acknowledge a deceased person’s account better. The new feature will enable a ‘Remembering’ banner under the username after they have died and the account has been memorialised. The company says that it has been working on this feature for a while now, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has accelerated the development to ‘help support the community during a difficult time.’ There is no word on when this feature will be launched.

Tipster Jane Manchun Wong discovered this feature first, and tested it on her own account. Wong shared a screenshot on how the new banner will look on a dead person’s account, after the account memorialisation feature is activated. Instagram has also confirmed that it has accelerated work on this feature.

Instagram Founders Launch Website to Track Rate of COVID-19 Infections

“We’ve been working on these updates for some time, though this is one — among others — that we’ve accelerated in light of COVID-19 to help support our community during a difficult time,” Liza Crenshaw, a spokesperson for Instagram told BuzzFeed News.

While Facebook-owned Instagram allows users to memorialise an account for a while now, the ‘Remembering’ banner below the Instagram profile picture is new. The family of the deceased can memorialise the account by filling up a form and giving the necessary proofs and documents. Once memorialised, Instagram doesn’t allow anyone to log into a memorialised account. The profile page remains the same, and posts shared by deceased person continue to stay visible. However, memorialised accounts don’t appear in public spaces, like people’s Explore section. No changes on existing posts, comments, privacy settings, or profile info can be made in a memorialised account.

While these features will continue to exist, Instagram will now add a ‘Remembering’ banner to help differentiate a deceased person’s account better.

It is understandable that Instagram would want to speed up the implementation of this feature, given the increasing number of deaths from COVID-19. According to the latest figures, over 1.82 lakh people have lost their lives due to the novel coronavirus.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Coronavirus Lockdown Will Cause Gridlock to 5G Rollout in India

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Coronavirus Lockdown Will Cause Gridlock to 5G Rollout in India

The ongoing coronavirus crisis has already affected over 24 lakh lives and left nearly 1,70,000 people dead worldwide. The pandemic that is believed to be caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus strain has also put a strong impact in India, with over 20,400 cases and 652 deaths reported so far. But apart from its hit on individuals, the COVID-19 outbreak has put major pressures on the economy. The nationwide lockdown that’s been in place to reduce the coronavirus spread has also put a stop on various plans that were made to uplift our lives.

One such plan was the rollout of 5G networks in India. The next-generation wireless technology provides amplification in terms of speed and latency over what we get from a 4G network. It would have taken the government’s Digital India initiative to new levels by supporting millions of connected devices and powering Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) among various other developments.

Although the Indian telecom sector has lately been struggling due to several financial challenges, the government was set to kick off a spectrum auction sometime last month or this month that was aimed to license operators for the new experience. This would have been the latest round after telcos in the country failed to participate in the initial 5G-focussed auction that took place back in 2017. However, the coronavirus impact has postponed that spectrum auction for 5G airwaves.

In addition to the spectrum delay, smartphone makers including OnePlus and Xiaomi that were set to launch their 5G smartphones in the country are awaiting the lockdown restrictions to get over. The market nevertheless has a couple of smartphone models supporting 5G networks — the Realme X50 Pro from Realme and the iQoo 3 from iQoo.

Both Realme and iQoo believe that their move with the 5G smartphone launch was to fulfil the demands of early adopters in the country and provide a solution to the people who travel to 5G markets on a regular basis. But that being said, there is practically no network in the Indian market so far to offer 5G experiences on their models. The two Chinese players are also not open to bringing their new 5G phones to the country in the near future.

The anticipated delay in 5G rollouts from the side of network providers is expected to discourage smartphone makers to consider India as a potential market for their compatible offerings. Samsung, the second largest vendor in the Indian smartphone market after Xiaomi, has already shown such signs by bringing its Galaxy S20 series to India sans 5G support. Similar move was taken by Oppo, which was once the parent of Realme and is a part of the group owned by China’s BBK Electronics that also owns OnePlus, Realme, Vivo, and iQoo, as it launched the Reno 3 Pro flagship in the country with only 4G connectivity. Other phone companies have also maintained silence on their plans to launch new 5G phones.

Initial tests conducted, but nothing beyond Operators including Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio did conduct some initial 5G tests in the country. Similarly, telecom equipment manufacturers such as Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung worked upon some use cases of the next-generation network technology in partnership with their respective operator partners. The pandemic, however, has shifted the entire focus of the operators and telecom gear makers towards providing seamless connectivity to the users who’re observing social distancing by staying and working from their homes.

Telcos in the country have seen 15-22 percent surge in demand for data in the last few days. A shift has also been noticed in traffic hotspots and peak usage hours.

Rajan S Mathews, Director General, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) that represents Airtel, Reliance Jio, and Vodafone Idea in the country, told Gadgets 360 that the entire sector is currently busy in keeping the network robust and catering to the increased capacity requirement with an uptime of 99.9 percent. He also pointed out that apart from the national lockdown, global lockdowns had also adversely affected the existing upgradable plans.

“The supply of telecom gear had been delayed due to the global lockdown,” he said. “Hence, there will be some delay in enhancements and upgradation planned by the telecom network providers.”

The industry body has urged the Ministry of Home Affairs to provide permissions to start domestically manufacturing telecom equipment units and related infrastructure material. Additionally, it has requested the government to help address the financial distress that has been widened due to the pandemic.

Not likely to become reality before late 2021 Market analysts believe that while 5G wasn’t likely to arrive at a mass level in India anytime soon, the impact from COVID-19 and its relative measures would certainly delay the rollouts of the new network technology. It is quite expected that due to the pandemic, the rollout of 5G networks in the country wouldn’t be a reality until late 2021 or early 2022.

“Due to the COVID-19 impact on the global supply chain and economy, it will be fair to assume that 5G rollout in India will not happen anytime before 2022, depending upon how quickly enterprises (which will be the first wave of adopters of and create use cases out of 5G) and telcos bounce back from this impact,” said Navkendar Singh, Research Director – Devices and Ecosystem for India and South Asia, IDC.

Similar to Singh, Parv Sharma, a research analyst at market research firm Counterpoint Research, does foresee the delay but he noted that the current scenario where the entire telecom sector requires capacity, efficiency, and reliability might push carriers for faster deployments of 5G networks in the country.

Having said that, operators are yet to find avenues to pay huge spectrum prices and acquire licences for 5G deployments. It is also important to note that while many towers have equipment supporting upgrades from 4G to 5G networks using a software update, there is still a large infrastructure in the country that needs to be upgraded to support the new technology.

As per the data provided by COAI, so far 16 states have aligned their telecom infrastructure policy with the law Indian Telegraph Right of Way (RoW) Rules, 2016, that is designed to uniform the telecom infrastructure in the country. This shows that much work on the infrastructure part still needs to be done.

Faisal Kawoosa, founder and chief analyst of research firm TechArc, said that enabling 5G would be a challenge, though the pandemic was indeed making the case for 5G stronger for India in terms of how it could be helpful. “I think the government has to look at it from a different view now where it’s important for a backbone infrastructure for the economy as well as social activities,” he told Gadgets 360.

Telecom operators are under a debt of around Rs. 7.7 lakh crores, highlighted Mathews of COAI. There are also Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) payment dues and other financial challenges that have impacted the demand for the 5G spectrum and made Indian telcos stragglers against their counterparts in China, South Korea, and the US among other markets.

“There are various factors at play here, including the state of debt-laden operators, the uncertainty around AGR payments, the ability to bid for 5G auctions, as well as infrastructure supply chain issues causing uncertainties for the likelihood of 5G spectrum auctions this year,” said Prabhu Ram, Head-Industry Intelligence Group, CyberMedia Research (CMR).

How are we staying sane during this Coronavirus lockdown? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Israel Suspends Cellphone-Tracking for Coronavirus Quarantine Enforcement

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Israel Suspends Cellphone-Tracking for Coronavirus Quarantine Enforcement

An Israeli parliamentary oversight committee on Wednesday suspended police use of cellphone data to enforce coronavirus quarantines, with one lawmaker citing privacy concerns.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government last month empowered the police to requisition cellphone roaming data on those ordered to self-isolate as suspected or confirmed coronavirus carriers, to confirm that they were not straying.

The measure, and a parallel decision to use counter-terrorist technology developed by the Shin Bet security agency to map out carriers’ movements and infection patterns, prompted Supreme Court challenges by civil liberties groups.

Having invoked emergency coronavirus regulations to expand police access to cellphone data for a month, the government pledged that any extension would require parliamentary approval.

But, with the initial month due to expire on Wednesday, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee voted to block an extension bill filed by the government.

“The utility offered by this (cellphone tracking) is outweighed by the great harm inflicted to privacy,” committee member Ayelet Shaked said on Twitter, arguing that police could make do with visits to quarantine homes.

The committee spokesman said police had conducted around 500 random cellphone location checks a day, based on a list of 13,500 people provided by the Health Ministry, which believes that 15 percent of those confined to their homes violate the order.

A police spokesman said 203 violators had been arrested, and that tracking them down had often involved cellphone location. In such pursuits, police gets court permission to access cellphone data, the committee spokesman said.

Israel has reported 14,326 coronavirus cases and 187 deaths. It has imposed country-wide lockdowns over national holidays, and otherwise restricted non-essential activities.

The use of Shin Bet technology, to map out past movements of confirmed coronavirus carriers and identify other people who might have been exposed to them, continues. While secret, it is widely believed to be based on tracking cellphones.

One Israeli government official deemed the results “surprisingly good”, telling Reuters: “More than half of those diagnosed (with the coronavirus), not including nuclear family members, were diagnosed with help from the Shin Bet.”

The official said that an inter-ministerial committee monitoring the Shin Bet involvement has recommended expanding it so that movements of those exposed to confirmed carriers are also mapped out – “to see whose paths crossed where”.

The information gleaned is expunged after a week, the official said, dismissing privacy concerns.

Besides, the official said, “people don’t have to carry a phone on them if they are doing something very personal”.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Facebook to Label National Origin of Popular Posts in the US

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Facebook to Label National Origin of Popular Posts in the US

Facebook said on Wednesday that it will label posts from popular accounts with their geographic origin in an attempt to curb political misinformation by foreign-based pages that mimic legitimate groups and political parties.

The new policy will apply to popular pages about elections, entertainment and other topics and will stamp every post they make on Facebook and Instagram with its origin. For instance, an Instagram account targeting US voters but based in Brazil will have every post labelled with “Based in Brazil.” Users then can swipe to find out more information about the account.

It’s the social network’s latest attempt to fight election-related misinformation. Russia and other countries have been using social media to try to influence political discourse in the US and elsewhere, often by masquerading as local interest groups.

Facebook will initially target pages based outside of the US that reach a large number of people inside the US The labels, the company says, will help people “gauge the reliability and authenticity” of what they see.

While the labels add a new layer of information — and one users won’t have to click to find — it’s unlikely to help with more insidious attempts to influence the November presidential election and sow political discord in the US.

Last fall, for instance, Facebook removed dozens of pages and accounts that purported to be Americans focused on US politics, but which actually originated in Iran and Russia. This March, meanwhile, both Twitter and Facebook announced takedowns of sophisticated foreign operations showing that showed Russian trolls outsourcing election interference efforts to countries in West Africa.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Heartcore Capital’s ‘Fellowship’ offers pre-seed funding for founders building consumer tech during lockdown

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Heartcore Capital’s ‘Fellowship’ offers pre-seed funding for founders building consumer tech during lockdown

The new “normal” offers new opportunities. That’s the thinking behind a new pre-seed funding program from Heartcore Capital. The European consumer-focused VC usually invests in startups at seed and Series A, but recognising that many potential founders are in lockdown and with time of their hands, is moving to the top of the funnel with the launch of a pre-seed fellowship programme.

Specifically, entrepreneurs interested in starting a consumer technology company during lockdown can apply for a pre-seed investment of €100,000 per founder to finance development of a prototype. The entire investment process will be conducted online and begins via a simple web form, followed by Zoom conversations with the investment team.

“Heartcore is offering €100,000 per founder for a 7% equity stake per company – to reflect that a larger founding team will also mean a larger initial cost base,” explains the VC. “The investment instrument is a convertible note. The company does not need to be founded yet, nor is an idea required to apply. All companies must operate within consumer technology (B2C/B2B2C) and be based in Europe”.

More broadly, the goal of Fellowship financing is to “build a prototype, with a view to raising a seed round when normal life resumes”.

To find out more, I caught up with Heartcore Capital General Partner Max Niederhofer, where we discussed the program’s inception, who it competes with, and startup opportunities after lockdown.

TechCrunch: How did the idea of the fellowship come about or was Heartcore working on a pre-seed model before the coronavirus crisis hit (I gather it might be the latter)?

Max Niederhofer: Heartcore has been investing from inception to Series A since we got started in 2007. Half of the investments in the last twelve months have been in a team and a plan, often pre-product. But many of these were sizeable funding rounds where there was already a fully fleshed out idea, already a larger team, already a company.

This is different. We sat down two weeks ago, after we had worked to make sure that our portfolio is well funded, and after closing the three deals we had in the pipe from pre-lockdown. And we asked ourselves: what if this lasts longer? Is there an instrument that we could come up with that is tailored to this situation, that lives the Heartcore ethos of “no fear, no greed” and puts founders’ needs first.

Everyone seems to be examining their life right now, including their life’s work. We know some exceptional people have lost their jobs. Others might have more time to think about the big idea they’ve been mulling over for a while. What can we offer them to get going right now, rather than having to wait until normal life resumes?

Will the fellowship continue to be open to applications if/when lockdown restrictions are lifted across Europe?

The intention is to keep it open through 2020, potentially into 2021, depending on how long it takes to resume “normal life.” We will see what happens this year, whether the offering resonates with entrepreneurs, and we will adjust accordingly.

There’s certainly a possibility that this becomes part of our operating model going forward. But like any startup, we will iterate it to make sure that it’s something that makes sense for founders given the overall fundraising environment.

Arguably, with the maturity of remote working tools, a period of lockdown is a good opportunity for a small team to build an MVP or have a prolonged period of product development without worrying too much about go-to market. Is that your thinking?

That is certainly part of it. This is a great time for focused product work. But we also think it’s a great time to launch prototypes, get people using them, and collect feedback. App downloads are significantly up. The willingness to try new things is high.

More than that, however, we think that founding teams will want to be ready to raise larger seed financing when restrictions are lifted. We want to put them in a position to do so.

Which funding sources or other programs do you think the Heartcore fellowship most closely competes with?

It’s like Y Combinator for people who can’t leave their house.

You’re targeting companies within consumer technology (B2C/B2B2C) that are based in Europe. Within this definition, what type of products or sectors do you think have the best opportunity to be founded in the current crisis and (hopefully) as we come out of it?

The crisis serves as an accelerant to some of the secular trends we’ve been seeing anyway, e.g. the convergence of online and offline. Of course everyone is talking about the “digital only” companies right now, but we invest in B2C and marketplaces across the entire consumer spend spectrum: in health, food, finance, insurance, real estate, mobility, travel, retail/ecommerce, education, media/entertainment, and of course consumer productivity tools.

We are also happily counter-cyclical: we definitely want to speak with founders in the travel sector. We believe travel will rebound in a big way and that online travel companies will disproportionately benefit.

We are big believers in technology’s potential to give people superpowers, but also to help them become more human by addressing our common desires to belong, to stay safe and protect others, to have fun and work on something meaningful.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Email, Password Details of Nearly 25,000 Employees at WHO, CDC, NIH Dumped Online: Report

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Email, Password Details of Nearly 25,000 Employees at WHO, CDC, NIH Dumped Online: Report

Around 25,000 email addresses and passwords allegedly related to the employees at health organisations the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation among others working to fight the coronavirus outbreak were dumped online, according to a media report. Some unknown activists have also spread the credentials online via Twitter. The new revelation has emerged amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has impacted millions of individuals all across the globe.

SITE Intelligence Group, the non-governmental organisation (NGO) that tracks the online activities of extremist groups, found the dumped data and reported its spread on the Web, according to the Washington Post. There isn’t any clarity whether the data was leaked through a breach of official systems or a part of an earlier data breach. The NGO was also not able to verify the authenticity of email addresses and passwords.

However, the group did reportedly mention that some hacks were attempted almost immediately after receiving the information on Sunday and Monday this week. The paper also quoted an Australian cyber-security expert who was able to verify the WHO email addresses and passwords and said that the alleged data might have been purchased from some dark Web vendors.

Some credentials, whose origins weren’t clear, were initially posted to text storage portal Pastebin. A link to that data was also reportedly made public on Twitter and some far-right extremist channels on Telegram.

The group reportedly said that the largest group of purported data was from the NIH, with over 9,900 accounts found on online listings. That was followed by the alleged emails and passwords from the CDC and WHO.

“We are always working to ensure optimal cyber safety and security for NIH and take appropriate action to address threats or concerns. We do not comment on specific cyber-security matters, as such such information could be used to undertake malicious activities,” the NIH said in a statement issued pertaining to the matter, as quoted by the paper.

The WHO also released a statement confirming the incident reported by SITE and cited even a higher number of exposed credentials than the 6,835 number mentioned in the report. However, the agency responsible for international public health said that only 457 of the total exposed data were active and valid, and none of those were compromised. It also reset the passwords for the affected users as a precautionary measure.

The Gates Foundation, on the other hand, said that it didn’t have an indication of a data breach. “We are monitoring the situation in line with our data security practices,” it said in a separate statement.

Since some data has been spread through Twitter, the microblogging network is taking down the URLs suspected to spread the information online.

“We’re aware of this account activity and are taking widespread enforcement action under our rules, specifically our policy on private information,” said Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough.

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magzoso-tech · 4 years

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Vivo iQoo, iQoo Neo, iQoo Pro, Other Older iQoo Phones to Receive iQoo UI Update Starting Mid-June

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Vivo iQoo, iQoo Neo, iQoo Pro, Other Older iQoo Phones to Receive iQoo UI Update Starting Mid-June

iQoo has made a name for itself in the smartphone market. The manufacturer, started off as a Vivo sub-brand, has become an independent brand in India. While it initially released smartphones with Vivo’s Funtouch OS on top of Android, iQoo developed its own user interface (UI) called Monster UI that was later renamed to iQoo UI, first seen in the iQoo 3. Now, according to a post by the company on its Weibo account, older iQoo phones will also be updated to receive this iQoo UI in mid-June. Additionally, iQoo has officially launched its iQoo community.

The post shared by iQoo through its Weibo account includes a poster with the list of phones that will be receiving iQoo UI. These include the Vivo iQoo, iQoo Neo, iQoo Pro, iQoo New 855, and the iQoo New 855 Racing Edition. These phones are part of the first wave of smartphones by the brand to receive this update, starting in mid-June. All of the aforementioned phones, except for the iQoo New 855 Racing Edition, launched with Vivo’s Funtouch OS, based on Android 9. The iQoo New 855 Racing Edition came with Monster UI, based on Android 9. The poster also revealed that iQoo UI will be based on Android 10. Notably, the iQoo 3 is the first phone from the brand to be launched in India with iQoo UI 1.0, based on Android 10.

The list does not include the iQoo Pro 5G that was also launched with Funtouch OS 9, based on Android 9. The phone will most likely receive the new UI in the second wave.

Additionally, the brand shared that iQoo community has been officially launched but no further details were given about the same. We believe it will be something similar to the Realme community or Mi community where the companies share developments, news, and updates with their community members.

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on Twitter, Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Vineet Washington Vineet likes to be surrounded by tech. He writes tech news for Gadgets 360 and in his free time plays video games, watches anime, and plays guitar. More

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