RosieReality, a startup out of Zürich developing consumer augmented reality experiences, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding led by RedAlpine. Other backers include Shasta Ventures, Atomico Partners Mattias Ljungman and Siraj Khaliq (both of whom invested in a personal capacity), and Akatsuki Entertainment Fund.
Founded in early 2018, RosieReality’s first AR experience is designed to ignite kids interested in robotics and programming. The smart phone camera-based app is centred around “Rosie,” a cute AR robot that inhabits a “Lego-like” modular AR world within which you and your friends are tasked with building and solving world-size 3D puzzles.
The kicker: to solve these 3D-puzzle games requires “programming” Rosie to move around the augmented reality world.
“By developing Rosie the Robot, we created the first interactive and modular world that exclusively lives in your camera feed,” RosieReality co-founder and CEO Selim Benayat tells TechCrunch. “We use this new computational platform to enable kids to creatively build, solve and share world-sized puzzle games with friends and families – much like modern-day Lego”.
Describing Rosie the Robot’s typical users as teens that “like the challenge of intricately crafted puzzles,” Benayat says part of the inspiration behind the AR game was remembering how as a kid he used to love spending time building stuff and then inviting friends over to show them what he’d built.
“Kids today are not that different,” he argues, before adding that AR makes it possible for them to have the same tangible and contextual sensation while giving them a bigger outlet for their creativity.
“We see the camera as a tool to teach and enable [the] next generation of creators. For us gaming is the ultimate creative, social and educational outlet,” says the RosieReality CEO.
An Indian state court has reversed its ban on TikTok, allowing the short video app to return to both Apple and Google’s app stores, according to a report this morning from Reuters. Earlier this month, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had ordered TikTok be removed from app stores, after a High Court in Madras determined the app was encouraging pornography and other illicit content.
Though the removal only affected new users who were looking to download TikTok’s app to their devices for the first time — not those who already had it installed — the ban was a major blow to TikTok’s Chinese owner Bytedance. The company said in a court filing the ban was resulting in a $500,000 daily loss, and was putting more than 250 jobs at risk.
India had become a large and growing market for TikTok, with nearly 300 million users in the country out of over 1 billion total downloads, according to Sensor Tower. (TikTok notes it had over 120 million monthly actives in India.)
India had also accounted for 27 percent of TikTok’s total installs between December 2017 and December 2018, Sensor Tower found, which meant the app was a huge source of TikTok’s overall growth.
However, some Indian politicians and parents believe the app’s content is inappropriate, particularly with regard to its use by minors. And the Tamil Nadu court — which ruled against TikTok — said the app could expose children to sexual predators, as well.
TikTok, meanwhile, had argued that a “very miniscule” proportion of its videos were inappropriate, and that it had removed over 6 million videos that had violated its terms of use and community guidelines after reviewing content created by users in India.
The ban, had it been upheld, could have foretold increased legal action and regulation against other social media apps in India.
This wasn’t the first time TikTok has come under fire by government regulators.
In February, the FTC in the U.S. fined TikTok $5.7 million for violating children’s privacy law (COPPA) and required the app to implement an age gate.
Bytedance, in a statement, welcomed the court’s decision to reverse the ban, saying:
We are glad about this decision and we believe it is also greatly welcomed by our thriving community in India, who use TikTok as a platform to showcase their creativity. We are grateful for the opportunity to continue serving our users better. While we’re pleased that our efforts to fight against misuse of the platform has been recognised, the work is never “done” on our end. We are committed to continuously enhancing our safety features as a testament to our ongoing commitment to our users in India
The ethics of technology is not a competition. But if aliens happened to descend upon our planet right this moment, Arrival-style, demanding to speak with our top tech ethicist, Douglas Rushkoff would be a reasonable option.
Rushkoff — a prolific writer, broadcaster, and filmmaker once named by MIT as “one of the world’s ten leading intellectuals,” recently published a new book, Team Human, that certainly would be a strong contender for tech ethics ‘book of the year’ thus far. Team Human is both an intellectual history of the technologies (including social technologies) of the past millennium or two and an effective rallying cry for humanity at a time when many of us have rightly become far too cynical to stomach most rallying cries on most topics.
Douglas Rushkoff
If nothing else, you’ll see below that Rushkoff wins, hands down, the competition for most Biblical references in one of my TechCrunch interviews thus far. He ends our conversation, however, echoing Felix Adler, the late 19th-century founder of the Ethical Culture movement — Adler, like me, was essentially secular clergy — who famously said, “the place where people meet to seek the highest is holy ground.”
I don’t know if readers of this piece will have a transcendent experience reading it, secular or otherwise, but if you want to spend meaningful time with one of the world’s greatest living thinkers on technology and ethics, please proceed below.
Reading time for this article is 24 minutes (6,050 words)
“Celebration of being human”
Greg Epstein: I loved Team Human and I’m excited for TechCrunch readers to learn about it. First, how would you summarize the argument?
Douglas Rushkoff: I see [the book] less as an argument than as an experience. I’m from this old fashioned author community that thinks of books less as about whatever data or information might be in them and more about what happens to you. A book is almost more like a poem or a piece of art, or a movie that takes you through an experience. The experience I’m trying to convey is celebration of being human. To reacquaint people with their essential human dignity.
But really, the book is arguing we too easily reverse the figure and ground between us and our tools, or us and our institutions. Then we end up trying to conform to them rather than have them serve us. This time out, it might be particularly dangerous since we’re empowering technologies with the ability to search out and leverage human exploits. These are powerful tools. It’s not just some advertising agency trying something and then retooling every quarter. It’s algorithms trying things and retooling in real-time to activate our brainstem and thwart our higher processes.
TikTok, the user-generated video sharing app from Chinese publisher Bytedance that has been a global runaway success, has stumbled hard in one of the world’s biggest mobile markets, India, over illicit content in its app.
Today, the country’s main digital communications regulator, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, ordered both Apple and Google to remove the app from its app stores, per a request from High Court in Madras after the latter investigated and determined that the app — which has hundreds of millions of users, including minors — was encouraging pornography and other illicit content.
This is the second time in two months that TikTok’s content has been dinged by regulators, after the app was fined $5.7 million by the FTC in the US over violating child protection policies.
The order in India does not impact the 120 million users in the country who already have the app downloaded, or those on Android who might download it from a source outside of Google’s official Android store. But it’s a strong strike against TikTok that will impede its growth, harm its reputation, and potentially pave the way for further sanctions or fines against the app in India (and elsewhere taking India’s lead).
TikTok has issued no less than three different statements — each subsequently less aggressive — as it scrambles to respond to the order.
“We welcome the decision of the Madras High Court to appoint Arvind Datar as Amicus Curae (independent counsel) to the court,” the statement from TikTok reads. “We have faith in the Indian judicial system and we are optimistic about an outcome that would be well received by over 120 million monthly active users in India, who continue using TikTok to showcase their creativity and capture moments that matter in their everyday lives.”
(A previous version of the statement from TikTok was less ‘welcoming’ of the decision and instead highlighted how TikTok was making increased efforts to police its content without outside involvement. It noted that it had removed more than 6 million videos that violated its terms of use and community guidelines, following a review of content generated by users in India. That alone speaks to the actual size of the problem.)
On top of prohibiting downloads, the High Court also directed the regulator to bar media companies from broadcasting any videos — illicit or otherwise — made with or posted on TikTok. Bytedance has been working to try to appeal the orders, but the Supreme Court, where the appeal was heard, upheld it.
This is not the first time that TikTok has faced government backlash over the content that it hosts on its platform. In the US, two months ago, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that the app violated children’s privacy laws and fined it $5.7 million, and through a forced app updated, required all users to verify that they were over 13, or otherwise be redirected to a more restricted experience. Musically, TikTok’s predecessor, had also faced similar regulatory violations.
More generally the problems that TikTok is facing right now are not unfamiliar ones. Social media apps, relying on user-generated content as both the engine of their growth and the fuel for that engine, have long been problematic when it comes to illicit content. The companies that create and run these apps have argued that they are not responsible for what people produce on the platform, as long as it fits within its terms of use, but that has left a large gap where content is not policed as well as it should be. On the other hand, as these platforms rely on growth and scale for their business models, some have argued that this has made them less inclined to proactively police their platforms to bar the illicit content in the first place.
Jarno M. Koponen is working on intelligent systems and human-centered personalization. He currently is product lead at Yle, one of the leading media houses in the Nordics.
New machine learning technologies, user interfaces and automated content creation techniques are going to expand the personalization of storytelling beyond algorithmically generated news feeds and content recommendation.
The next wave will be software-generated narratives that are tailored to the tastes and sentiments of a consumer.
Concretely, it means that your digital footprint, personal preferences and context unlock alternative features in the content itself, be it a news article, live video or a hit series on your streaming service.
The title contains different experiences for different people.
When you use Youtube, Facebook, Google, Amazon,Twitter, Netflix or Spotify, algorithms select what gets recommended to you. The current mainstream services and their user interfaces and recommendation engines have been optimized to serve you content you might be interested in.
Your data, other people’s data, content-related data and machine learning methods are used to match people and content, thus improving the relevance of content recommendations and efficiency of content distribution.
However, so far the content experience itself has mostly been similar to everyone. If the same news article, live video or TV series episode gets recommended to you and me, we both read and watch the same thing, experiencing the same content.
That’s about to change. Soon we’ll be seeing new forms of smart content, in which user interface, machine learning technologies and content itself are combined in a seamless manner to create a personalized content experience.
What is smart content?
Smart content means that content experience itself is affected by who is seeing, watching, reading or listening to content. The content itself changes based on who you are.
We are already seeing the first forerunners in this space. TikTok’s whole content experience is driven by very short videos, audiovisual content sequences if you will, ordered and woven together by algorithms. Every user sees a different, personalized, “whole” based on her viewing history and user profile.
At the same time, Netflix has recently started testing new forms of interactive content (TV series episodes, e.g. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) in which user’s own choices affect directly the content experience, including dialogue and storyline. And more is on its way. With Love, Death & Robots series, Netflix is experimenting with episode order within a series, serving the episodes in different order for different users.
Some earlier predecessors of interactive audio-visual content include sports event streaming, in which the user can decide which particular stream she follows and how she interacts with the live content, for example rewinding the stream and spotting the key moments based on her own interest.
Now, imagine, that TikTok’s individual short videos would be automatically personalized by the effects chosen by an AI system, and thus the whole video would be customized for you. Or that the choices in the Netflix’s interactive content affecting the plot twists, dialogue and even soundtrack, were made automatically by algorithms based on your profile.
Say that a news article you read or listen to is about a specific political topic that is unfamiliar to you. When comparing the same article with your friend, your version of the story might use different concepts and offer a different angle than your friend’s who’s really deep into politics. A beginner’s smart content news experience would differ from the experience of a topic enthusiast.
Content itself will become a software-like fluid and personalized experience, where your digital footprint and preferences affect not just how the content is recommended and served to you, but what the content actually contains.
Automated storytelling?
How is it possible to create smart content that contains different experiences for different people?
Content needs to be thought and treated as an iterative and configurable process rather than a ready-made static whole that is finished when it has been published in the distribution pipeline.
Importantly, the core building blocks of the content experience change: smart content consists of atomized modular elements that can be modified, updated, remixed, replaced, omitted and activated based on varying rules. In addition, content modules that have been made in the past, can be reused if applicable. Content is designed and developed more like a software.
Currently a significant amount of human effort and computing resources are used to prepare content for machine-powered content distribution and recommendation systems, varying from smart news apps to on-demand streaming services. With smart content, the content creation and its preparation for publication and distribution channels wouldn’t be separate processes. Instead, metadata and other invisible features that describe and define the content are an integral part of the content creation process from the very beginning.
Turning Donald Glover into Jay Gatsby
With smart content, the narrative or image itself becomes an integral part of an iterative feedback loop, in which the user’s actions, emotions and other signals as well as the visible and invisible features of the content itself affect the whole content consumption cycle from the content creation and recommendation to the content experience. With smart content features, a news article or a movie activates different elements of the content for different people.
It’s very likely that smart content for entertainment purposes will have different features and functions than news media content. Moreover, people expect frictionless and effortless content experience and thus smart content experience differs from games. Smart content doesn’t necessarily require direct actions from the user. If the person wants, the content personalization happens proactively and automatically, without explicit user interaction.
Creating smart content requires both human curation and machine intelligence. Humans focus on things that require creativity and deep analysis while AI systems generate, assemble and iterate the content that becomes dynamic and adaptive just like software.
Sustainable smart content
Smart content has different configurations and representations for different users, user interfaces, devices, languages and environments. The same piece of content contains elements that can be accessed through voice user interface or presented in augmented reality applications. Or the whole content expands into a fully immersive virtual reality experience.
In the same way as with the personalized user interfaces and smart devices, smart content can be used for good and bad. It can be used to enlighten and empower, as well as to trick and mislead. Thus it’s critical, that human-centered approach and sustainable values are built in the very core of smart content creation. Personalization needs to be transparent and the user needs to be able to choose if she wants the content to be personalized or not. And of course, not all content will be smart in the same way, if at all.
If used in a sustainable manner, smart content can break filter bubbles and echo chambers as it can be used to make a wide variety of information more accessible for diverse audiences. Through personalization, challenging topics can be presented to people according to their abilities and preferences, regardless of their background or level of education. For example a beginner’s version of vaccination content or digital media literacy article uses gamification elements, and the more experienced user gets directly a thorough fact-packed account of the recent developments and research results.
Smart content is also aligned with the efforts against today’s information operations such as fake news and its different forms such as “deep fakes” (http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-preparing-its-journalists-to-detect-deepfakes). If the content is like software, a legit software runs on your devices and interfaces without a problem. On the other hand, even the machine-generated realistic-looking but suspicious content, like deep fake, can be detected and filtered out based on its signature and other machine readable qualities.
Smart content is the ultimate combination of user experience design, AI technologies and storytelling.
News media should be among the first to start experimenting with smart content. When the intelligent content starts eating the world, one should be creating ones own intelligent content.
The first players that master the smart content, will be among tomorrow’s reigning digital giants. And that’s one of the main reasons why today’s tech titans are going seriously into the content game. Smart content is coming.
Amazon-owned game-streaming site Twitch is today publicly launching its first game. But it’s not a traditional video game — like those the site’s creators stream for their fans. Instead, the new game is called “Twitch Sings” and is a free karaoke-style experience designed for live streaming.
The game, which was launched into beta last year, includes thousands of karaoke classics that players can sing either alone or in a duet with another person. In addition, streamers can choose to sing as themselves in a live camera feed, or they can create a personalized avatar that will appear in their place. (The songs are licensed from karaoke content providers, not the major labels.)
But unlike other karaoke-style apps — like TikTok or its clones — Twitch Sings is designed to be both live-streamed and interactive. That is, viewers are also a part of the experience as they can request songs, cheer with emotes to activate light shows and virtual ovations and send in “singing challenges” to the streamer during the performance. For example, they could challenge them to sing without the lyrics or “sing like a cat,” and other goofy stuff.
“Twitch Sings unites the fun and energy of being at a live show with the boundless creativity of streamers to make an amazing shared interactive performance,” said Joel Wade, executive producer of Twitch Sings, in a statement. “Many games are made better on Twitch, but we believe there is a huge opportunity for those that are designed with streaming and audience participation at their core.”
The game is designed to not only capitalize on Twitch’s live-streaming capabilities, but to also engage Twitch viewers who tune in to watch, but don’t stream themselves.
Those efforts haven’t really helped Twitch break out with the non-gamer crowd.
Karaoke may not do the trick either. In reality, this “game” is more of a test to see if Twitch can turn some of its platform features — like its chat system and custom interactive video overlays — into tools to help increase engagement among existing users and attract new ones. It still remains to be seen if and how the game actually takes off.
The game was unveiled today at TwitchCon Berlin, where the company announced it had added more than 127,000 Affiliates and 3,600 new Partners in Europe since the beginning of 2018.
The company also detailed a few other updates for Twitch creators, including those across payments, streaming and discovery tools.
Starting Monday, April 15, Twitch will pay out in just 15 days after the close of the month, instead of 45, eligible creators that reached the $100 threshold. In May, it will make the Bounty Board (paid sponsorship opps) available to Partners and Affiliates in Germany, France and the U.K., and will partner Borderlands 3, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 and Unilever, in Europe.
In June, Twitch is also rolling out faster search, automated highlight reels (recaps) and the ability to sort through channels in a directory by a range of new options — including lowest to highest viewers, most recently started or suggested channels based on their viewing history.
TwitchCon Europe 2019 is streaming live this weekend at twitch.tv/twitch.
“By developing Rosie the Robot, we created the first interactive and modular world that exclusively lives in your camera feed,” RosieReality co-founder and CEO Selim Benayat tells TechCrunch. “We use this new computational platform to enable kids to creatively build, solve and share world-sized puzzle games with friends and families – much like modern-day Lego”.
