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3D Robotics Raises $30 Million To Legitimize Aerial Drones For Business
The very mention of the word “drone” often conjures up images of autonomous machines cruising over battlefields, but that’s far from the future 3D Robotics has in store for its own aerial machines. And thanks a recent infusion of capital, that future may be closer than you think.
3D Robotics announced earlier today that it locked up a $30 million Series B round, with a list of participants that includes Foundry Group, True Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and SK Ventures.
The company previously closed a $5 million round last December that featured many of those same names, and at the time CEO (and former Wired EiC) Chris Anderson said the infusion of funds would be used to open and staff a then-new San Francisco office. Another crucial component of the 3DR growth story was to launch a new website, flesh out the community experience, and developer and a new slew of products meant to make “drones and other aerial robotics technology easier, more powerful and cheaper”.
There’s been plenty of progress made on that final front too as the 3D Robotics portfolio is now comprised of a single plane-style drone and four copter drones. The newest of addition to the lineup? The Iris, a $720 drone that can be controlled with ease from a PC or an Android device (as long as you have the corresponding app) that can also follow paths “drawn” on an on-screen map thanks its built-in GPS. While Anderson and the rest of the team have spent the past year trying to more effectively court hobbyists and DIY drone buffs, the company’s ambitions hinge on proving that drone’s have plenty of commercial value as well.
Anderson gave the Financial Times a clearer view of the wildly varying fields that he thinks 3D Robotics’ drones can disrupt, and all of the usual suspects are accounted for. Remotely controlled drones can make for cheaper, more effective search and rescue operations, as well as hyperlocal deliveries (I personally can’t wait for someone to put together a fleet of tacocopters.
Perhaps the most curious application is in agriculture, in which farmers and ranchers could remotely keep tabs on the all their land and livestock without having to trudge into the fields themselves.
Facebook Hires Data Privacy Litigator Ashlie Beringer As New Deputy Counsel
Between its struggles with the NSA and negotiations with privacy regulators, Facebook needs a lawyer that can fight to protect its data, and its ability to use yours. So today it announced that its new Deputy Counsel is Ashlie Beringer, a litigation partner at Palo Alto’s Gibson Dunn and co-chair of the law firm’s Information Technology and Data Privacy practice group.
Beringer will report to Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch, who was promoted from deputy to take the social network’s top legal job in June after long-running GC Ted Ullyot left the company. Ashlie will run Facebook’s 80-person legal department’s litigation, regulatory, and product groups, which contain about 20 employees.
Beringer might assist with cases like the $3 million permanent injunction and damages suit it won yesterday against Power and Vachani. In this situation Facebook sued the defendants for tricking users into giving them their Facebook log-ins, scraping Facebook content for use on their website, lying to users saying they could win money by inviting their Facebook friends to Power’s site, and sending fraudulent emails that said they were from the Facebook team. You can see the court document embedded below.
“We are pleased with today’s ruling awarding over $3 million in damages and injunctive relief. We will continue to enforce our rights against bad actors who seek to harm Facebook and the people who use it” wrote Facebook’s Associate General Counsel Craig Clark. Beringer didn’t work on this case, though, as her first day on the job will be November 18th.
Experience To Grapple With Regulators And NSA
On Beringer’s past accomplishments in the field, Facebook tells us:
“Ms. Beringer has extensive experience defending companies in high stakes technology and intellectual property disputes, with particular expertise representing clients in the technology, media, Internet, and entertainment industries. She has successfully represented clients in numerous consumer and regulatory actions relating to online and mobile technologies and data privacy and security issues. In addition, Ms. Beringer has successfully defended clients throughout the country in complex patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secrets disputes, including several disputes involving digital technologies, gaming and application platforms, and online and mobile advertising and e- commerce networks.”
Before getting into tech, Beringer was an entertainment litigator, defending reality TV stars including Ozzy Osbourne. His wife Sharon wrote in her memoir that “Ashlie Beringer has got balls of steel.” Facebook mirrored that sentiment, saying “We have always been impressed with her toughness and commitment to innovation.”
She’ll need that strength as Facebook pushes the boundaries of people’s comfort around privacy as part of its mission “to make the world more open and connected.” Facebook has wrestled with audits and settlements with the American FTC and the Office Of The Irish Data Protection Commissioner who oversees Facebook’s European operations. The social network has also squared off against privacy activists such as Europe Vs Facebook, which has fought terms of service changes and the abolishment of voting in Facebook’s site governance system.
Beringer’s patent litigation background could also protect it from more infringement suits like last year’s from Yahoo. Facebook ended up buying and licensing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of patents from IBM, AOL (TechCrunch’s parent company), and Microsoft to defend against the claims which ended up being settled with a full cross-license of Facebook and Yahoo’s patents. Beringer could wield those patents to fight off future attacks.
Most recently, Facebook has been pushing the NSA for more transparency. The company wants to be able to reveal more specific numbers around how many requests for private user data it gets from security agencies to show users it’s not selling them out to spies. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said onstage at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference that “I think the government blew it” in reference to how the NSA has handled surveillance and the Edward Snowden leaks. That might make Beringer’s job extra challenging.
Google Research's Open Project Makes It Easy To Project Android Apps Onto Touch Screens
For the last year or so, Google Research has been working on a project that aims to make it easier to migrate tasks between different devices. The premise of this work is that you are currently using a number of computers, smartphones and tablets every day. Even though much of your data is stored in the cloud, Google argues that “there are not many ways to easily move tasks across devices that are as intuitive as drag-and-drop in a graphical user interface.”
The small form factor of a smartphone, Google’s team argues, makes it hard to collaborate on content, and handheld projectors suffer from too many hardware limitations and don’t allow for easy user input.
Earlier this year, the company’s research team that focuses on solving this problem showed us Deep Short, a system for “capturing” an application like Google Maps that runs on a large screen via a smartphone camera and transfer it to mobile. Today, the team is turning this idea on its head and showing a cool new way to project smartphone content onto any display.
The Open Project (PDF), as Google’s researchers call it, is an end-to-end framework that can project native mobile apps onto a screen. That sounds a bit like Apple’s AirPlay, but it’s actually a bit cooler than that, especially when it’s coupled with the giant touch screen Google uses in its demo.
In its current form, Open Project displays a QR code on the display and all you need to do is point your app at it, scan the code and the app is displayed on the screen. From there, you can move it around on the screen and even interact with it just like on the phone.
A number of companies are currently looking at how they can use large touch screens to make collaboration easier. Adobe’s Project Context, for example, uses a table with a built-in touch screen and a wall of large screens in the room to allow its users to create magazine layouts. Microsoft, too, is working on similar setups based on Windows 8 and acquired Perceptive Pixel last year to experiment with large touch displays.
As always, it remains to be seen if this project ever becomes a reality. It’s definitely an easy way to share content from your phone (assuming you have a giant wall of touch-enabled screens in your house) and with a bit of added intelligence, you could even use it to just share text or images you want to collaborate on, too, with the text editor or layout engine running on the machine that powers the display.
You can find the full research paper that explains the system in more detail here.
(RED) Partner Apple Has Raised Over $65M For AIDS Relief In Total
(RED) announced early today that its partner Apple had helped it raise more than $65 million to finance programs which include prevention, treatment, counseling, HIV testing and care services. The announcement was made by U2 singer Bono at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting.
The $65 million means that Apple has raised around $15 million since February 2012 with the (PRODUCT)RED initiative, if numbers out of an internal Apple meeting are accurate.
“Apple is an enormously valued (RED) partner,” A (RED) spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Their contributions help enable the Global Fund to finance the AIDS fight on the ground in Africa. This work is absolutely critical to ending AIDS.”
(RED) partners with a bunch of corporations like Nike, Starbucks, Apple, American Express and Beats, who contribute a slice of their profits from (RED)-branded products to HIV/AIDS research. Bono and Bobby Shriver of ONE/DATA created the concept in 2006 and Apple has been a partner for some time.
Bono at #CGI2013 on @RED partners: “Apple is certainly leading the crew” Thank you Apple for raising over $65 million to fight AIDS.
— (RED) (@RED) September 26, 2013
Apple currently offers a bunch of (PRODUCT)RED merchandise including an iPod Shuffle, iPod nano and iPod touch, as well as some iPad and iPhone cases.The (RED) iniative has come under fire for promoting the kind of ‘middle-man’ philanthropy that wastes money on advertising and fancy events rather than donating directly. The organization claims that it has raised $215 million so far, and has impacted 14 million people. 100% of the money raised by (RED) goes directly to the Global Fund to support work on the ground in Africa, a (RED) spokesperson tells us, no overhead is taken out.
One couldn’t help but think about how much more money Apple might be able to donate if it produced a (RED) version of its most popular product: The iPhone.
Apple doesn’t have a reputation for public philanthropy but has been making some moves to change that. Early last year, Tim Cook held a town hall meeting with Apple employees and noted several donations that Apple had made. Those included $50 million to Stanford’s hospitals, as well as the quoted $50 million (RED) contribution.
Of course, Apple has around $146 billion in the bank, so charitable contributions are probably a good way to snag a tax break. Hopefully the expansion of Apple’s charitable efforts under Cook continues.
This article has been updated with statements from a (RED) spokesperson.
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