In a previous life, John Underkoffler spent his days in Los Angeles dreaming up all of the possible ways men and machines would interact as a science adviser on films like Minority Report.

Now, he designs those systems for the real world through his company Oblong Industries, which has labored to create a full stack of collaborative tools for business users that are every bit as high-tech as the one’s Underkoffler dreamt for the silver screen.

The first bolt in the quiver of tools that Underkoffler began building out over the course of 15 years spent at MIT’s Media Lab was Mezzanine. A multipurpose collaborative platform that allowed business users to share documents and interact in real time through a powerful combination of videoconferencing hardware and software.

In the age of Zoom though, Oblong’s tools have become more lightweight, and the company is steadily adding multi-share capabilities to platforms other than its own. That new gaggle of collaboration tools launched under the moniker of Rumpus, and Oblong has been partnering with different video services to add its services to their own.

The latest to get the Rumpus treatment is Cisco Webex.  Now Cisco’s videoconferencing customers will get access to Rumpus’ personal cursors that point and emphasize content on shared screens, presence indicators to show who is looking where and at what, and emoji reactions to provide feedback without disrupting the flow of a meeting.

The company’s tools enable all of the users in a meeting to share their screens without competing for screen time.

“We’ve worked closely with Cisco over the last year to bring the capabilities of our flagship product, Mezzanine, to the Cisco suite of enterprise solutions for meetings paces. So as we completed Oblong’s own set of content-first collaboration offerings by building out Rumpus for pure-virtual work, it was obvious that Webex should be among the first conferencing solutions to be directly integrated,” said Underkoffler in a statement. “We’re thrilled to bring . the next level of engagement and productivity to millions of Webex users when their meetings require more than basic video and messaging.”

Rumpus is currently available for free to Mac computer users with Windows support coming soon.

Yapily, a London fintech startup that offers an Open Banking-based API platform to enable financial services providers and other types of enterprises, such as merchants, to connect to banks, has raised $5.4 million in seed funding.

Leading the round is HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and LocalGlobe. Investors also include Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise Chairman and co-founder), Ott Kaukver (Twillio’s CTO) and Roberto Nicastro (UniCredit’s former deputy CEO).

Founded in mid 2017 by ex-Goldman Sachs employee Stefano Vaccino, Yapily is another platform play aiming to grasp the opportunity of Open Banking by making it easier for various service providers to connect to banks. The platform provides a way to retrieve financial data and initiate payments via a “single secure API” that in turn connects to each supported bank’s open API.

Customers include accountancy firms, companies in the payment space, crypto currency providers, digital wealth applications and e-commerce companies.

“Yapily removes the technical barriers for enterprises that want to benefit from Open Banking, helping them to innovate and bring new products to life faster,” Vaccino tells TechCrunch. “Legislators have been implementing Open Banking differently in various countries and even within the same jurisdiction banks all have disparate technical implementations. For a service provider that wants to benefit from it, the technical barriers to integrating with hundreds or thousands of banks are very high”.

To that end, Vaccino says Yapily’s mission is to enable service providers to connect to all banks, both for data retrieval and payment initiation, via one single API. “We manage the upfront integrations and the ongoing maintenance of these connections,” he says, thus removing the technical obstacle for companies that want to benefit from “the Open Banking revolution”.

In that sense, similar to a cloud provider, Yapily is positioning itself as a pure technology enabler. “Our objective is to offer all the tools that an enterprise will need to manage this connectivity layer easily,” adds Vaccino.

To date, the Yapily API supports 35 of the biggest banks in Europe, both for data retrieval and payments initiation. This equates to 250 million bank accounts, the startup says. By the end of the year, Yapily aims to have connected to 536 banks, as more banks across Europe bring their open APIs online in order adhere to European Union PSD2 legislation.

“By mid-september, 5,000 banks across Europe will need to have an API in place,” notes Yapily. “Governments in Australia, Japan, Canada, Singapore, South Korea, Mexico and several other countries are also committed to delivering open banking”.

Meanwhile, Yapily says this seed round will be used to help the company expand its tech team and further develop the platform. It also plans to build out a sales team to respond to demand for its Open Banking product.

An international coalition of civic society organizations, security and policy experts and tech companies — including Apple, Google, Microsoft and WhatsApp — has penned a critical slap-down to a surveillance proposal made last year by the UK’s intelligence agency, warning it would undermine trust and security and threaten fundamental rights.

“The GCHQ’s ghost protocol creates serious threats to digital security: if implemented, it will undermine the authentication process that enables users to verify that they are communicating with the right people, introduce potential unintentional vulnerabilities, and increase risks that communications systems could be abused or misused,” they wrire.

“These cybersecurity risks mean that users cannot trust that their communications are secure, as users would no longer be able to trust that they know who is on the other end of their communications, thereby posing threats to fundamental human rights, including privacy and free expression. Further, systems would be subject to new potential vulnerabilities and risks of abuse.”

GCHQ’s idea for a so-called ‘ghost protocol’ would be for state intelligence or law enforcement agencies to be invisibly CC’d by service providers into encrypted communications — on what’s billed as targeted, government authorized basis.

The agency set out the idea in an article published last fall on the Lawfare blog, written by the National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) Ian Levy and GCHQ’s Crispin Robinson (NB: the NCSC is a public facing branch of GCHQ) — which they said was intended to open a discussion about the ‘going dark’ problem which robust encryption poses for security agencies.

The pair argued that such an “exceptional access mechanism” could be baked into encrypted platforms to enable end to end encryption to be bypassed by state agencies would could instruct the platform provider to add them as a silent listener to eavesdrop on a conversation — but without the encryption protocol itself being compromised.

“It’s relatively easy for a service provider to silently add a law enforcement participant to a group chat or call. The service provider usually controls the identity system and so really decides who’s who and which devices are involved — they’re usually involved in introducing the parties to a chat or call,” Levy and Robinson argued. “You end up with everything still being end-to-end encrypted, but there’s an extra ‘end’ on this particular communication. This sort of solution seems to be no more intrusive than the virtual crocodile clips that our democratically elected representatives and judiciary authorise today in traditional voice intercept solutions and certainly doesn’t give any government power they shouldn’t have.”

“We’re not talking about weakening encryption or defeating the end-to-end nature of the service. In a solution like this, we’re normally talking about suppressing a notification on a target’s device, and only on the device of the target and possibly those they communicate with. That’s a very different proposition to discuss and you don’t even have to touch the encryption.”

“[M]ass-scale, commodity, end-to-end encrypted services… today pose one of the toughest challenges for targeted lawful access to data and an apparent dichotomy around security,” they added.

However while encryption might technically remain intact in the scenario they sketch, their argument glosses over both the fact and risks of bypassing encryption via fiddling with authentication systems in order to enable deceptive third party snooping.

As the coalition’s letter points out, doing that would both undermine user trust and inject extra complexity — with the risk of fresh vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers.

Compromising authentication would also result in platforms themselves gaining a mechanism that they could use to snoop on users’ comms — thereby circumventing the wider privacy benefits provided by end to end encryption in the first place, perhaps especially when deployed on commercial messaging platforms.

So, in other words, just because what’s being asked for is not literally a backdoor in encryption that doesn’t mean it isn’t similarly risky for security and privacy and just as horrible for user trust and rights.

“Currently the overwhelming majority of users rely on their confidence in reputable providers to perform authentication functions and verify that the participants in a conversation are the people that they think they are, and only those people. The GCHQ’s ghost protocol completely undermines this trust relationship and the authentication process,” the coalition writes, also pointing out that authentication remains an active research area — and that work would likely dry up if the systems in question were suddenly made fundamentally untrustworthy on order of the state.

They further assert there’s no way for the security risk to be targeted to the individuals that state agencies want to specifically snoop on. Ergo, the added security risk is universal.

“The ghost protocol would introduce a security threat to all users of a targeted encrypted messaging application since the proposed changes could not be exposed only to a single target,” they warn. “In order for providers to be able to suppress notifications when a ghost user is added, messaging applications would need to rewrite the software that every user relies on. This means that any mistake made in the development of this new function could create an unintentional vulnerability that affects every single user of that application.”

There are more than 50 signatories to the letter in all, and others civic society and privacy rights groups Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, Liberty, Privacy International and the EFF, as well as veteran security professionals such as Bruce Schneier, Philip Zimmermann and Jon Callas, and policy experts such as former FTC CTO and Whitehouse security advisor, Ashkan Soltani .

While the letter welcomes other elements of the article penned by Levy and Robinson — which also set out a series of principles for defining a “minimum standard” governments should meet to have their requests accepted by companies in other countries (with the pair writing, for example, that “privacy and security protections are critical to public confidence” and “transparency is essential”) — it ends by urging GCHQ to abandon the ghost protocol idea altogether, and “avoid any alternative approaches that would similarly threaten digital security and human rights”.

Reached for a response to the coalition’s concerns, the NCSC sent us the following statement, attributed to Levy:

We welcome this response to our request for thoughts on exceptional access to data — for example to stop terrorists. The hypothetical proposal was always intended as a starting point for discussion.

It is pleasing to see support for the six principles and we welcome feedback on their practical application. We will continue to engage with interested parties and look forward to having an open discussion to reach the best solutions possible.

Back in 2016 the UK passed updated surveillance legislation that affords state agencies expansive powers to snoop on and hack into digital comms. And with such an intrusive regime in place it may seem odd that GCHQ is pushing for even greater powers to snoop on people’s digital chatter.

Even robust end-to-end encryption can include exploitable vulnerabilities. One bug was disclosed affecting WhatsApp just a couple of weeks ago, for example (since fixed via an update).

However in the Lawfare article the GCHQ staffers argue that “lawful hacking” of target devices is not a panacea to governments’ “lawful access requirements” because it would require governments have vulnerabilities on the shelf to use to hack devices — which “is completely at odds with the demands for governments to disclose all vulnerabilities they find to protect the population”.

“That seems daft,” they conclude.

Yet it also seems daft — and predictably so — to suggest a ‘sidedoor’ in authentication systems as an alternative to a backdoor in encrypted messaging apps.

If Shrek saw Matebot, no amount of sad-eyes could win him back to Puss in Boots’ side. Created by Shenzhen-based robotics company Ekasbo, Matebot looks like a black and white cartoon cat and responds to your touch by wiggling its ears, changing the expression in its big LED eyes and tilting its head.

Built with voice recognition, infrared technology and seven moving parts, the Matebot is designed to serve as an interactive companion, including for people who can’t keep pets, creator Zhang Meng told TechCrunch at Computex in Taiwan.

Met Matebot the cat robot today! pic.twitter.com/jJaa5EhKC8

— Computex Shu (@CatherineShu) May 30, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The Matebot is controlled with a smartphone app and can be integrated with Android voice control systems. Its price starts at about 4,999 yen or about $45 USD.

Tired of home security cameras that add nothing to your home (besides, well, surveillance)? The Ulo, created by Luxembourg-based Mu Design, adds a touch of whimsy. The owl-shaped surveillance camera has two big interactive LCD eyes that follow your movements, and its two lenses—a HD camera and motion sensor camera—discreetly hidden in its beak, made of one-way mirrored glass, that capture high-resolution images. .

Mu Design founder Vivien Muller, who is currently showing off Ulo at Computex in Taipei, said he wanted to create a security camera that feels like a pet and makes its owners happy. The Ulo, with its huge, expressive eyes, is certainly adorable. Ulo runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 212 series processor and is made with an internal microphone, WifFi and Bluetooth models and an orientation sensor. It can use rechargeable NiMH batteries or be charged with a standard micro USB charger. Ulo also boosts 8GB eMMC and a microSD card clot.

Ulo is controlled by iOS or Android apps. Like other cameras, it can send images to your email when movement is detected, send data to secure devices if requested and stores a few minutes of video locally.

The camera is currently out of stock, but available for pre-order and costs 199 euros, or about $220.

Kurly, a startup that operates a grocery delivery service in Korea, said today that it has closed an upsized Series D round that reached a total of $113 million.

The company announced the round in April when it was $88 million led by investors that include Sequoia China, however it has now increased by $25 million. That’s thanks to an injection from China’s Hillhouse Capital, a firm which counts Tencent, Meituan and JD.com among its most successful investments.

Launched in 2015 by former Goldman Sachs and Temasek analyst Sophie Kim, its Kurly Market service is designed to provide groceries and produce to customers who don’t have the time or interest to visit regular retail stores for their shopping.

Kurly Market delivers orders by 7am each morning with customers given until 11pm the previous day to place their order.

Korea is the place for speedy deliveries, if that’s your thing. Coupang, a company backed by SoftBank’s Vision Fund that’s widely seen as ‘the Amazon of Korea’ — and valued at $9 billion, to boot — has built out an impressive network that allows same- and next-day delivery for its “millions”of customers.

Coupang CEO Bo Kim told TechCrunch last year that his company was “approaching” $5 billion in revenue for 2018 with 70 percent annual growth. Additionally, he said, one in every two adults in Korea have the Coupang app on their phone and, having started out in Amazon-like areas, Coupang is doubling down on fresh produce with its own cold chain logistics network.

That represents a direct challenge to Kurly, which differentiates itself by operating through its own brands, unlike Coupang, which runs using a marketplace model to connect retailers with consumers. Kurly is also focused on convenience over cost savings, indeed its service began in Seoul’s high-end Gangnam neighborhood but has since expanded more widely.

Still, investors are bullish on Kurly and its laser focus on produce and groceries.

Kurly said its revenue grew three-fold year-on-year to reach $131 million in 2018, although it did not provide profit/loss figures.

“The latest round of investment is a major endorsement of the progress we’ve made differentiating ourselves in the market through our cold-chain fulfillment infrastructure and unique offering of premium, curated products. Our focus is on further strengthening our relationships with our suppliers, developing our fulfillment infrastructure and continually improving our customer experience,” Kim said in a statement.

East Ventures has long been known as one of Indonesia’s longest-serving and most active seed-stage investors, but now it has officially moved up the food chain after it announced a final close of its growth fund at $200 million.

Called EV Growth, the fund is a joint venture between East Ventures, SMDV — the VC arm of Indonesian conglomerate Sinar Mas — and YJ Capital, which is associated with Yahoo Japan. The fund was first announced last year with a target of $150 million, but this final close has already surpassed that thanks to contributions from LPs that include SoftBank Group, Pavilion CapitaI and Indies Capital.

EV Growth is already active, with 40% of the fund deployed to date, according to East Ventures’ founding partner Willson Cuaca, who serves as partner for the new fund alongside Roderick Purwana from SMDV and  YJ Capital’s Shinichiro Hori.

“We thought ‘There’s a gap in Series B in Southeast Asia, many of our portfolio is good so why not do this together?’” Cuaca told TechCrunch in an interview. “SMDV and YJ Capital have been our long-term partners in Japan and Southeast Asia so it’s the perfect partnership… the chemistry is already there.”

“We are more seed and product market fit focused but our two partners bring their capabilities on financial modeling so it becomes a complete set,” he added.

Beyond chemistry, East Ventures also has a track record.

The firm was one of the first to focus on Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, and encourage its companies to dominate that market rather than rapidly expand across the region. East Venture’s portfolio includes unicorns Tokopedia and Traveloka, while ride-sharing Grab and Go-Jek acquired two of its companies, Kudo and Loket, respectively.

Cuaca said EV Growth will continue the focus on Indonesia, but he admitted that there is scope to invest outside of the region if the right opportunity pops up.

Operating at seed and further down the investment pipe throughs up the possibility of conflicts of interest. EV Growth is aimed at filling a funding gap that does genuinely exist in Southeast Asia so it is bound to touch on East Ventures’ portfolio companies, but Cuaca is ready for that scenario. While he will source and fetch potential EV Growth deals, he must recuse himself from a decision on any East Ventures company, leaving his partners to make the final call. That’s fairly standard in the investment world, but new to Southeast Asia where growth funds are just taking off.

That development is a sign of the maturity of the region’s venture ecosystem, and East Ventures isn’t the only one pursuing a ‘growth fund’ strategy.

Singapore’s Golden Gate Ventures is currently raising a growth fund with Korea’s Hanwha as the anchor LP, while TechCrunch has heard plenty of rumors linking a number of other investors with interest in doing the same, albeit that they are unfulfilled at this time.

It isn’t just new funds that are springing up, those that were once seed-stage investors are also scaling to cover unfulfilled Series B demand. Jungle Ventures, for example, recently hit the first close on its newest fund that’s aimed at $220 million. Others stepping into the void include Vertex Ventures, which has a new $230 million fund.

Added to that, there will be more to come from EV Growth.

Cuaca told TechCrunch that discussions are already underway for a follow-up growth fund with “interest still coming in” from prospective LPs. That makes sense given that the current fund’s deployment is nearly at the halfway point. Watch this space for more.

The IEEE’s ban on Huawei following new trade restrictions in the United States has sent shock waves through the global academic circles. The organization responded saying the impact of the trade policy will have limited effects on its members, but it’s hard at this point to appease those who have long hailed it as an open platform for scientists and professors worldwide to collaborate.

Earlier this week, the New York-headquartered Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers blocked Huawei employees from being reviewers or editors for its peer-review process, according to screenshots of an email sent to its editors that first circulated in the Chinese media.

The IEEE later confirmed the ban in a statement issued on Wednesday, saying it “complies with U.S. government regulations which restrict the ability of the listed Huawei companies and their employees to participate in certain activities that are not generally open to the public. This includes certain aspects of the publication peer review and editorial process.”

In mid-May, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security added Huawei and its affiliates to its “Entity List,” effectively barring U.S. firms from selling technology to Huawei without government approval.

It’s unclear what makes peer review at the IEEE a technology export, but the science association wrote in its email to editors that violation “may have severe legal implications.”

Whilst it’s registered in New York, the IEEE bills itself as a “non-political” and “global” community aiming to “foster technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity.”

Despite its removal of Huawei scientists from paper vetting, the IEEE assured that its compliance with U.S. trade restrictions should have “minimal impact” on its members around the world. It further added that Huawei and its employees can continue to participate in other activities as a member, including accessing the IEEE digital library; submitting technical papers for publication; presenting at IEEE-sponsored conferences; and accepting IEEE awards.

As members of its standard-setting body, Huawei employees can also continue to exercise their voting rights, attend standards development meetings, submit proposals and comment in public discussions on new standards.

A number of Chinese professors have reprimanded the IEEE’s decision, flagging the danger of letting politics meddle with academic collaboration. Zhang Haixia, a professor at the School of Electronic and Computer Engineering of China’s prestigious Peking University, said in a statement that she’s quitting the IEEE boards in protest.

This is Haixia Zhang from Peking University, as an old friend and senior IEEE member, I am really shocked to hear that IEEE is involved in “US-Huawei Ban” for replacing all reviewers from Huawei, which is far beyond the basic line of Science and Technology which I was trainedand am following in my professional career till now.

…today, this message from IEEE for “replacing all reviewers from Huawei in IEEE journals” is challenging my professional integrity. I have to say that, As a professor, I AM NOT accept this. Therefore, I decided to quit from IEEE NANO and IEEE JMEMS editorial board untill one day it come back to our common professional integrity.

The IEEE freeze on Huawei adds to a growing list of international companies and organizations that are severing ties or clashing with the Chinese smartphone and telecom giant in response to the trade blacklist. That includes Google, which has blocked select Android services from Huawei; FedEx, which allegedly “diverted” a number of Huawei packages; ARM, which reportedly told employees to suspend business with Huawei; as well as Intel and Qualcomm, which also reportedly cut ties with Huawei. 

In a week where AMD, Intel and Qualcomm have already made major announcements, Microsoft’s keynote yesterday at Computex in Taipei was relatively lowkey. Instead of revealing new products, the company hinted at what it wants in a modernized operating system. Intriguingly, Microsoft’s blog post about the keynote does not mention Windows, lending credence to speculation that it is developing a new “super-secure” OS.

According to the blog post by Nick Parker, corporate vice president of consumer and device sales, a modern OS should enable “form factor agility” by being flexible enough to be integrated into different types of devices, which is noteworthy because last year the company hinted at new additions to the Surface lineup, which some have speculated might mean the line is adding a smartphone.

He added that a modern OS should include seamless updates, done invisibly in the background without forcing people to stop using their computers and be secure by default, preventing attacks by separating the state from the operating system and the compute from applications.

A modern OS would constantly be connected to LTE 5G and use AI to help make apps more efficient. It would also support different kinds of input, including pen, voice, touch and even the ability to use your eyes to control apps or write—two things that likely to fuel more speculation that the new OS will be developed with mobile products (like a possible Surface Phone) and lightweight or dual-screen laptops in mind.

Revel Transit has released 1,000 of its shared electric mopeds onto the streets of Brooklyn and Queens, following the end of a nine-month pilot program in the area.

The New York-based startup pulled the original 68 mopeds it used in its limited pilot and has replaced them with new models (and hundreds more of them) built for two riders and equipped with kickstands for parking.

Revel has expanded the service as well. The pilot restricted moped movement to the Bushwick, Williamsburg or Greenpoint neighborhoods. Now, the Revel mopeds will be available in more than 20 neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.

“During the nine-month pilot, we learned what worked well, what needed fixing and what users wanted from the service going forward,” Revel co-Founder and CEO Frank Reig said in a release.

Venture firm Maniv Mobility led Revel’s seed round. The company has raised $4.5 million, according to PitchBook.

The deluge of Revel mopeds comes amid a larger debate about access to transportation within New York and a specific discussion over electric stand-up scooters. Technically, scooters like the ones rented out by startups Bird and Lime are illegal in New York City.

Officials worry about safety in a crowded city, particularly Manhattan, millions of pedestrians, cyclists and cars are already jostling for space.

Before gaining access to the service, users must register on the Revel app using their driver’s license and paying a one-time $19 fee to cover a motor vehicle license check. Once approved, riders can use the app to find and unlock the nearest moped.

The mopeds, which are safety certified by the U.S. Department of Transportation and registered with the New York Department of Motor Vehicles, include insurance and a helmet.

Revel, which has opened a new 10,000-square foot operations facility in Red Hook, is also introducing a new pricing structure as part of its commercial launch. Revel used to charge a flat rate of $4 for the first 20 minutes, with an additional $0.25-per-minute charge and $0.05 a minute to pause the ride.

Under the new pricing structure, riders pay $1 to start a ride and $0.25 per minute after a free first-minute grace period, which is meant to give riders a chance to secure their helmet. If a ride includes passenger, the initial cost is $2. Riders can pause their ride for $0.10 per minute.

Revel will cut the cost by 40 percent for riders who use public assistance programs like SNAP or live in NYCHA housing.