Walmart -owned streaming service Vudu announced today that it will be launching new interactive shows later this year, created through the company’s joint venture with interactive content startup Eko.

This confirms a Bloomberg report that Walmart plans to debut several interactive new shows produced with Eko, along with shoppable ads.

We’d hoped that the company would take advantage of its NewFronts event for advertisers today to reveal more details about these plans, but Vudu Senior Director Julian Franco simply confirmed that the service will be “rolling out interactive content” later this year.

He then rolled a brief clip of what looked like a variety of scripted programs (I caught a glimpse of “Saturday Night Live” star Beck Bennett), while the voiceover declaring, “You don’t just watch Eko stories, you control them.”

The video also said the content will cover a variety of genres, including comedy, drama and thrillers.

Franco had more details to share when it came to Vudu’s plans for non-interactive, original content. He announced that the service is co-producing “Albedo,” a science fiction detective series from “Rampage” director Brad Peyton that will premiere next year, and will mark “Lost” star Evangeline Lilly’s return to TV. In addition, the first three episodes of Nickelodeon’s remake “Blues Clues & You” will premiere on Vudu before they air on linear TV.

Also in the works are unscripted shows like “Turning Point With Randy Jackson” and “Friends with Strange Places,” a travel show with Queen Latifah.

In total, the service be premiering around a dozen original movies and TV shows later this year, Franco said. It might seem tough for Vudu to stand out in the crowded landscape of streaming companies spending big bucks on original content, but he argued that it will be differentiated by a focus on creating content kids, their parents and for entire families to watch together.

“We’re not just going to be programming for Williamsburg and Silver Lake,” he said.

As for those shoppable ads, Vudu Chief Operating Officer and Head of Product Scott Weinstein said the service is already testing them. These are ads with that allow you to purchase the featured products through a pop-up window. He added that these ads are dynamic, changing based on viewer preferences.

Weinstein also announced Vudu Audience Extension, an ad network that will allow advertisers to buy campaigns from Vudu that will run on other streaming media services.

“The future of TV looks a lot like the TV of the past — ad-supported, premium content that brings people together,” he said.

During last year’s F8 developer conference, Facebook announced the 1.0 launch of PyTorch, the company’s open source deep learning platform. At this year’s F8, the company launched version 1.1. The small increase in version numbers belies the importance of this release, which focuses on making the tool more appropriate for production usage, including improvements to how the tool handles distributed training.

“What we’re seeing with PyTorch is incredible moment internally at Facebook to ship it and then an echo of that externally with large companies,” Joe Spisak, Facebook AI’s product manager for PyTorch, told me. “Make no mistake, we’re not trying to monetize PyTorch […] but we want to see PyTorch have a community. And that community is starting to shift from a very research-centric community — and that continues to grow fast — into the production world.”

So with this release, the team and the over 1,000 open-source committers that have worked on this project are addressing the shortcoming of the earlier release as users continue to push the limits. Some of those users, for example, include Microsoft, which is using PyTorch for its language models that scale to a billion words and Toyota, which is using it for some of its driver assistance features.

As Spisak told me, one of the most important new features in PyTorch 1.1 is support for TensorBoard, Google’s visualization tool for TensorFlow that helps developers evaluate and inspect models. Spisak noted that Google and Facebook worked together very closely on building this integration. “Demand from developers has been incredible and we’re going to contribute back to Tensorboard as a project and bring new capabilities to it,” he said.

Also new are improvements to the PyTorch just-in-time compiler, which now supports dictionaries, user classes and attributes, for example, as well as the addition of new APIs to PyTorch that support Boolean tensors and support for custom recurrent neural networks.

What’s most important for many production users, though, is the improvements the team made to PyTorch’s distributed training capabilities. These include the ability to split large models across GPUs and various other tweaks that’ll make training large models faster when you have access to a cluster of machines.

At its F8 developer conference, Facebook today launched Ax and BoTorch, two new open-source AI tools.

BoTorch, which, as the name implies, is based on PyTorch, is a library for Bayesian optimization. That’s a pretty specialized tool. Ax, on the other hand, is the more interesting launch, as it’s a general-purpose platform for managing, deploying and automating AI experiments. Both tools, though, are part of the same overall work at Facebook, which focuses on what the company calls “adaptive experimentation.” Indeed, Ax interfaces with BoTorch and, internally, Facebook has used the two tools for tasks that vary from optimizing Instagram’s back-end infrastructure to improving the response rates of user surveys.

At its core, BoTorch — and Bayesian optimization in general — is all about making model optimizing easier and faster for data scientists to get to a production-ready model. Typically, this involves a lot of trial and error and is often more an art than a science. “It takes the art out of it. It automates it,” Joe Spisak, Facebook AI’s product manager for PyTorch, said. “And our goal is to consume the latest research.”

BoTorch is not the first Bayesian optimization tool. Facebook, however, argues that these existing libraries are difficult to extend and customize — and that they didn’t meet Facebook’s needs.

Ax then takes these capabilities and provides all the management functions around BoTorch’s ability to find the optimal configuration for these models, and allows developers to focus on getting their services production-ready. At Facebook, Ax interfaces with A/B testing and simulation tools, for example, and because the whole purpose of these tools is to automatically optimize the system, there’s very little user involvement needed. As it runs the experiments, Ax can automatically pick the best optimization strategy. That could be Bayesian optimization, bandit optimization (another classic optimization strategy) or another algorithm. Indeed, it’s worth noting that Ax is framework-agnostic. While it uses BoTorch, researchers can also plug in their own code using the services PyTorch and NumPy interfaces.

Open-sourcing tools at Facebook has become pretty standard at this point. PyTorch itself is a good example for this. Spisak also noted that for BoTorch, the team decided to open-source the tool because it wanted to collaborate with the top researchers in the field (and it did so by working with Cornell University for this first release, for example). “How do we collaborate? How do we build an open community around what we’re doing? You can’t do that in closed source. It has to be open source,” he said.

It’s no secret that unless you opt out, Google keeps a very detailed record of your location history and a log of the web sites you visit in Chrome and apps you use. There have always been ways to fully opt out of this or to painstakingly delete these records manually. Yet while there are plenty of reasons to opt out, you also miss out on many of Google’s personalization features. As a middle ground, Google today announced that you can now auto-delete your location history and web and app activity by setting a time limit for how long Google can save this data.

Google will give you two options for this time limit: 3 or 18 months. Any data that is older than that will be automatically deleted. With this, you will still get recommendations, but the extent of your personal data that’s stored on Google’s servers and can be used by the company will be limited. The recommendations, too, will only be based on the limited recent data you still share, so they won’t be as precise as before, but should still be useful.

For now, this feature is launching for location history, as well as web and app activity. That includes your Chrome browsing history, for example, as well as your notification history from Google’s Discover feature on Android, locations you searched for in Google Maps, apps you used and more.

This is still plenty other data in your Google Account, though, that isn’t included in this auto-delete service. There’s your voice and audio activity, for example, as well as your YouTube search and watch history. Over time, though, I’d expect Google to add these to the list of auto-deleting items, too.

 

Twitter has faced a barrage of awkward questions from the U.K. parliament over its ongoing failure to tackle violent abuse targeted at women. 

Katy Minshall, the social media platform’s head of U.K. government public policy, admitted it needs to do more to safeguard women users — but claimed the company is “acutely aware” of the problems women experience on Twitter, saying it’s in the process of reviewing how it applies its policies to fix its long-running misogyny problem. 

“We are acutely aware of the unique experience women have on Twitter and changes we may have to make in our policies to get that right,” she told the human rights committee session on free speech and democracy this afternoon. “We are very much aware of the real issue that women experience on our platform.”

Parliamentarians raised the issue of how unequally Twitter applies policies on hateful conduct depending on the sex being targeted, with MP Joanna Cherry accusing the company of displaying a pattern of relaxed tolerance to tweets containing violent attacks on women.

She contrasted that with examples of alacritous intolerance to tweets that raised the issue of male violence — citing examples of users who had had their Twitter accounts temporarily suspended for making factual, gender-based observations with a male flavor — such as that, on aggregate, men kill more than women.

Or tweets citing English law — which states that only a man can commit rape.

“There seem to be a number of mistakes here. And they seem to be mistakes that are failing to protect women. Do you accept that?” asked Cherry.

“There is clearly a number of steps that we want to take, we need to take, but we are in a different place to where we were even this time last year,” said Minshall initially, before simplifying her response to “clearly there’s an issue here for us to look at” later in the Q&A session.

She was asked to look at several examples of violent tweets which had been directed at women, including tweets whose recipients had reported them to Twitter — only to be told they did not violate its hateful conduct policy.

Only later, after feminist campaigners, journalists and Cherry herself had tweeted about Twitter’s decision not to take down some of these misogynistic tweets did it reverse course and remove them.

Minshall admitted that one of the abusive tweets had been removed last night, after Cherry had tweeted to draw attention to it.

One tweet cited during the session depicted a cartoon figure with a photo of a real hand holding a gun pointed at the viewer, atop the caption “shut the fuck up terf” — ‘terf’ being a term of abuse which Cherry pointed out tends to be applied to women; another showed a video game clip of a man repeatedly chopping a woman in the neck which had been attached to a tweet saying “what I do to terfs”; a third was what Cherry dubbed “a very unpleasant representation of a male flaying a woman alive” — that she said had been sent to one of the women after they had complained on Twitter about receiving one of the other violent tweets.

Minshall said she believed all the tweets Cherry raised as examples violated Twitter’s policies and should have been removed if they hadn’t already. Though said she doesn’t work in the safety team, caveating her response with: “I’m not the expert.”

She also said that trying to moderate a public discussion about transgender rights can be “difficult” — leading Cherry to point out that none of the counter examples she had raised were in any way abusive towards transgender people.

“What I’m trying to understand is why, initially, the first tweet — the chopping in the neck — was ruled alright by Twitter. And why it took the intervention of a leading journalist, a leading feminist commentator and a member of parliament for it to be ruled not alright,” she went on.

“We need to understand who is actually carrying out these decisions. Who is carrying out the mediation at Twitter. Is it done in the UK, is it done in America, who is done by. Is there any attempt at gender balance within the teams of people looking at these tweets.”

Minshall said she could not answer the gender breakdown question there and then — saying she would write to the committee with an answer.

Cherry also made the point that sex is a protected characteristic in UK law, and pressed Minshall several times on why Twitter’s hateful conduct policy only applies to gender.

“Can you tell us why Twitter has chosen to exclude sex from their hateful conduct policy as a protected characteristic?” she asked. “I’m wondering if that’s what could be going wrong here? That the training is not covering the fact that sexist, misogynistic, demeaning behavior should be treated as seriously as abuse of, for example, trans people.”

Minshall said Twitter’s hateful conduct policy is based upon United Nations definitions, arguing the current policy that protects gender should also protect against misogyny — while admitting there’s still an asymmetrical burden on women users of Twitter to report abuse.

She agreed to follow up with the committee to explain why Twitter’s policy does not include sex as a protected characteristic too.

“There’s a lot that we want to do to reduce the burden on reporters,” she said. “We have rules in place where it would be a breach to target someone based on the fact that they’re a woman — where we need to do far more is to be proactive in reducing the burden on victims to report that to us.”

At another point during the session she said Twitter is also reviewing its policy on harassment — saying it’s concerned about the risk of women being stalked via the platform by ex-partners.

“There is an issue specific to women, typically ex-partners, stalking them on Twitter in ways that have traditionally been difficult to detect in our rules — and we want to do better on that,” she added.

Google is combining several technologies including virtual phone numbers, audio transcriptions, automated reporting and analytics, in a new effort to help small business owners better manage their inbound phone calls. The company’s latest project from its in-house incubator is CallJoy, launching today.  Aimed at the U.S.’s 30.2 million small business owners, the system offers a low-cost customer service agent that helps block spam calls, provide callers with basic business information, and redirect customers to complete their requests — like appointment booking or placing a to-go order — over SMS.

Any other calls or questions would be directed to the main business phone number.

Typically, customer service phone agents like this are out of reach for small business owners, but CallJoy is priced at a flat monthly fee of $39 to make the technology affordable.

Like other virtual customer service systems, CallJoy can greet the caller and offer basic information like the business hours or address, for example. It also frees up the business owner from having to deal with the ever-increasing number of spam calls which waste their time, and can move customers off of phone lines to complete tasks online, where appropropriate.

To do so, CallJoy’s virtual agent can send a customer who opts in an SMS text message that includes an URL where the task — like appointment booking or online orders, for example — can be completed.

For example, the agent may ask the customer “Can I send you our food ordering link?” If the customer says “yes,” the text is sent immediately. In addition, the feature can be customized for sharing other types of information — like the company’s email or where to find an online contact form.

If the customer is calling from a landline, however, this textback feature will be disabled and they’ll be directed to the business line instead.

Like other customer service software which alerts callers that calls “will be recorded for quality assurance purposes,” CallJoy records the incoming calls (which is also disclosed). This can help cut down on spam calls because once spammers know the call is recorded, they usually hang up.

The recorded calls are also encrypted and transcribed, and these transcripts then become searchable in the CallJoy dashboard.

Here, call information — including the phone number, audio, and transcript — is stored. The business owner can also go back and tag the calls in order to run reports that help them gain insight into their business. For example, if a salon got a lot of inbound calls about “wedding hairstyles” they may then decide it would make sense to include this information on their website; or a restaurant may want to track how many calls it gets per night for reservations.

Other insights are available, too, like call volume, peak call times, and new vs. returning callers. These are displayed in the online dashboard and sent out in a daily email.

The service works today with existing landlines, mobile phones, Google Voice lines, or other cloud providers by routing calls to the business phone number.

But phone numbers are not ported to CallJoy. Instead, similar to Google Voice, the business would select their virtual CallJoy number with their local area code.

To start receiving call there, they’d have to update all their business information with this new number — including the website, business cards, online listings, ads, social media, and anywhere else the number appears.

CallJoy is also tied to only one location and one phone number. Additional locations with their own lines can be added within the CallJoy dashboard, but businesses are charged per line.

At launch, CallJoy is available on an invite-only basis. Businesses have to request a spot on the waitlist from the CallJoy homepage. More invites will be shared every day, and eventually, the system will open to all.

While we haven’t achieved Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the transporter beam (yet), mobility and transportation — and the tech that drives both — are undergoing a huge and rapid evolution. There’s no better place to see, share and learn about these revolutionary advances than at TC Sessions: Mobility 2019, a day-long conference that takes a deep dive into all things mobility.

If you’re an early-stage startup founder in either industry, there’s no better way to position your business in front of the most influential investors, media and technologists. Simply book a demo table and join us on July 10 in San Jose, Calif.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 will be packed with a veritable who’s who of mobility movers, shakers and makers. Consider just some of the speakers that are already announced:

• Oliver Cameron, co-founder and CEO of Voyage, an autonomous driving startup making a big name for itself with a door-to-door self-driving taxi service. Cameron will discuss the company’s mission and its plans for the future.
• Then there’s Jump founder Ryan Rzepecki — he sold his startup to Uber for about $200 million — and Katie DeWitt, the SVP of product at Scoot. These two visionary leaders will talk about the future of micromobility, including topics like asset management, unit economics, partnering with cities, data sharing and more.
• You won’t want to miss what Amnon Shashua has to say about autonomous vehicle technology. The co-founder, president and CEO of Mobileye — and a senior vice president at Intel — will share his vision of the future. It includes using Mobileye sensors for mapping to improve operations between businesses and cities, which will help bring us closer to creating smart cities and safer roads.

That’s just a taste of the in-depth programming you’ll find at TC Sessions Mobility. We’re announcing more speakers, panelists and workshops every week. If you’d like to speak, demo your technology or nominate someone else, you can submit an application right here.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 goes down on July 10 in San Jose, Calif., with more than 1,000 members of the mobility community — founders, technologists, engineering students and investors — expected to be there.  This inaugural mobility event promises to be a highly focused, world-class networking opportunity. Don’t miss your chance to place your startup front and center. Book a demo table right now. Extra credit if your startup’s working on a transporter beam.

Looking for sponsorship opportunities? Contact our TechCrunch team to learn about the benefits associated with sponsoring TC Sessions: Mobility 2019.

The smartphone industry is in rough shape. Sundar Pichai used the word “headwinds” to discuss the company’s difficulties moving Pixel 3 units, but Canalys’ latest report is far more blunt, describing the situation as a “freefall.”

Things are pretty ugly in the Q1 report, as smartphone shipments declined for the sixth quarter in a row. The combined global units hit 313.9 million, marking their lowest point in almost half a decade, according to the firm.

Of the big players, Apple seems to be particularly hard hit, falling 23.2% year on year. Once again, China played a big role here, but as usual, the full story is much more complex.

“This is the largest single-quarter decline in the history of the iPhone,” said analyst Ben Stanton in a release tied to the news. “Apple’s second largest market, China, again proved tough. But this was far from its only problem. Shipments fell in the US as trade-in initiatives failed to offset longer consumer refresh cycles. In markets such as Europe, Apple is increasingly using discounts to prop up demand, but this is causing additional complexity for distributors, and blurring the value proposition of these ‘premium’ devices in the eyes of consumers.”

A lot to unpack there, but what we’re looking at are some larger issues within the industry, including global economic issues and slowed upgrade cycles for users. The XS was also notably much less dramatic of an upgrade than its predecessor. Stanton did add that the iPhone, “show[ed] signs of recovery towards the back-end of the quarter,” which is promising for Q2.

It also remains to be seen what this year will hold in terms of iPhone upgrades, though most signs point to 2020 as the year the company makes the jump to 5G. Tim Cook was noncommittal on the topic during the company’s earnings call last night, instead pointing to positive numbers on the iPad side and, of course, Apple’s continued push into services.

Analysts are somewhat bullish about the potential of innovations like 5G and even foldables in shaking up the stagnant market, but big players like Apple are clearly hedging their bets, should the free-falling headwinds continue.

Huawei, meanwhile, continues to be a bright spot, with a 50.2% year over year growth and an 18.8% global market share, according to the firm. That growth could be hampered, however, by increased competition from Samsung and fellow Chinese handset companies like Xiaomi and Oppo.

The U.K. government is proposing new legislation aimed at improving security of Internet of Things devices.

Digital minister Margot James MP revealed the draft law on Wednesday as part of the government’s efforts to protect millions of internet-connected devices from cyberattacks.

The law will mandate that internet-connected devices, like smart thermostats, appliances and webcams, must be sold with a unique password.

Botnets typically rely on default passwords that are hardcoded into devices when they’re built that aren’t later changed by the user. By selling a device with a unique password, it significantly slows down cybercriminals from scanning the internet and automatically logging into devices with a default password, often to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks.

On a massive scale, botnets operating thousands of hijacked Internet of Things devices entire websites offline. Two years ago, the Mirai botnet briefly downed Dyn, a networking company that provides domain name service to major sites. That outage knocked dozens of major sites offline — like Twitter, Spotify and SoundCloud.

The new U.K. law will also mandate device makers to provide a public point of contact to allow hackers and security researchers submit flaws and vulnerabilities.

And device makers will have to tell consumers for how long each device will receive security updates.

The law, if passed, would create a labeling scheme for consumers to easily see devices that are “Secure by Design,” said James, giving consumers greater confidence that the devices land with a baseline level of security out of the box.

“Many consumer products that are connected to the internet are often found to be insecure, putting consumers privacy and security at risk,” said James. “Our code of practice was the first step towards making sure that products have security features built in from the design stage and not bolted on as an afterthought.”

The U.K. is following in the footsteps of California, which in October passed a law banning default passwords in connected devices. The law will come into effect in 2020. Each device sold in the state must come with a password “unique to each device.”

Ken Munro, founder of security firm Pen Test Partners, said in a blog post that the proposed law was a “great start,” but the new rules were a “fairly light touch.”

His company finds security flaws in internet-connected devices like car alarms and other consumer goods.

“We hope that the government will also commit to a program of continual improvement of smart product security,” he said.

Netflix this morning announced a new feature for its streaming service focused on offering viewers better sound. The company is rolling out “high-quality audio,” or an audio experience that features a higher bitrate for TV devices that support either 5.1 or Dolby Atmos. Depending on the device and the customer’s bandwidth capabilities, the actual bitrate you receive will vary, Netflix says.

However, it will range from 192 kbps (good) up to 640 kbps (great) for 5.1, and from 448 kbps to 768 kbps for Dolby Atmos — which is available to members subscribed to the Premium plan.

Netflix says the bitrates will evolve over time as its continues to get more efficient with its encoding techniques.

Netflix’s tech blog gets into more details about the feature, noting that the high-quality sound is not lossless, but is “perceptually transparent” — meaning that even though the audio is compressed, it’s indistinguishable from the original source, Netflix claims.

The company also offered a bit of backstory about how high-quality audio came to be, thanks to sound-quality issues with Stranger Things 2 back in 2017. In one episode, a car chase scene wasn’t sounding crisp, so Netflix tasked its sound expert and engineers to make improvements. They addressed the problem by delivering a higher bitrate for the audio. And since then, the team has been working to roll out the improved audio more broadly.

“Often the subtlety of sound may go unnoticed, but it can have a profound impact on the atmosphere of a scene and fundamentally change how a viewer responds to it,” the company writes in an announcement. “Supporting and delivering on the vision of our creative partners has always been incredibly important to us, and sound is something we’ve been really focused on.”

The feature launches today for TV viewers.