TechCrunch is building an epic Disrupt SF (Sept. 5-7) and we’re proud to announce another major building block for the show, this one in line with TechCrunch’sInclude programand the Justice/Diversity track at Disrupt.
The recently launchedAll Raisewill run a three-part workshop for women founders over two days at Disrupt SF. In case you missed thenews, All Raise launched in April thanks to the efforts of 36 women partners at venture firms committed to promoting diversity among “funders & founders.”
“Our mission is simple — to accelerate the success of female funders and founders,”All Raise co-founder Aileen Lee wrote on Medium. “We believe that by improving the success of women in the venture-backed tech ecosystem, we can build a more accessible community that reflects the diversity of the world around us.”
All Raise will organize the following activities for female founders at Disrupt SF to join in.
On Thursday, September 6, All Raise will hold a roundtable workshop for women founders at Disrupt SF with the opportunity to participate at one of 12 tables, each representing a major challenge facing female founders. Richly experienced mentors, including Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures) and Susan Lyne (BBG Ventures), will lead discussions on topics including: fundraising, recruiting strategies, company culture, sales and marketing strategies, board/investor management, M&A and more.
The roundtable participants will discuss their experiences as well as strategies for success.
After 90 minutes discussing those topics, the workshop will shift to an AMA with select All Raise leadership. Workshop participants will have a chance to ask the top women in venture questions about whatever is top of mind.
On Friday, September 7, All Raise will host Female Founder Office Hours at Disrupt with 18 or more All Raise VC and founder mentors. All female founders at Disrupt may apply for a 30-minute session. There will 108 sessions over three hours.
Here’s how to participate:
Buy a pass to Disrupt SF. All pass types have access to the All Raise workshop and office hours but a Founder Pass provides access to all of the show’s vast programming, networking and several other female focused activities to make the most of Disrupt SF.
Can’t swing a pass? All Raise has 50 available to distribute. Apply here.
Eligible pass holders will receive an email from TechCrunch as we get closer to the event with information on the All Raise workshop and office hours, including:
When and where to go to attend the roundtables and AMA on Thursday – first come first serve. (Any female founder is welcome.)
ApplySign up for office hours on Friday. (Open to all female founders; applications will be reviewed by the All Raise team to select those founders who might most benefit from an office hours session.)
There are many reason to attend Disrupt, including three days of programming and workshops across four stages, the hugely successful CrunchMatch founder-investor matching service, Startup Alley exhibit area, and of course the legendaryStartup Battlefieldcompetition.
Thanks to All Raise, Disrupt has another fantastic attraction, this one designed specifically for female founders.
Less than a month after announcing its “hateful content” and “hateful conduct” policy,Spotifyis backing down from one half of the equation. Following staunch criticism, the company has issued updates to its guidelines, noting that the roll out arrived in contrast to the company’s own longstanding policies.
In a news release the company acknowledged that the initial implementation was “too vague,” creating confusion around precisely what shape it would ultimately take.
“We created concern that an allegation might affect artists’ chances of landing on a Spotify playlist and negatively impact their future,” the service writes. “Some artists even worried that mistakes made in their youth would be used against them.”
The “hateful conduct” aspect focused on issues involving artists’ personal lives, and Spotify also appeared to make a point to single out two artists — R. Kelly and XXXTentacion — in the process. CEO Daniel Ek apologized for that latter bit earlier this week and noted that the policy is continuing to evolve, as rumors that XXXTentacion’s music would be added back into curated playlists surfaced.
The company also clarified the “hateful content” part of the equation, while noting that it would continue to bar songs that fit the bill. “As we’ve done before, we will remove content that violates that standard,” Spotify explains. “We’re not talking about offensive, explicit, or vulgar content – we’re talking about hate speech.”
If you’re in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Atlanta, you’ll soon be able to play mini golf (or putt-putt, as some people apparently like to call it) and learn about the Google Home product range in the meantime. Sounds like a corporation’s idea of a good time.
“We wanted people across the country to feel the magic of what Google home can do in an environment that’s slightly more exciting than your typical living room,” a Google connected with this project says in the announcement video. “Everything you can do here, you can do at home,” another Googler says. “We just took your home, and put it into a mini-golf course.”
Unsurprisingly, part of the gimmick here is that you have to talk to the Google Home’s spread across the course to navigate the obstacles. You can also “win stuff,” which seems to involve lots of Google-branded socks and Home Minis. And it’s all family-friendly, of course.
The New York course is now open for business, with the other cities following in short order. You can reserve your tee time here.
All joking aside, Google is clearly riding the positive news around Home right now, which includes the fact that Google Homes are now outselling Amazon’s Echo devices. It still doesn’t want to talk about its creepy Duplex Google Assistant demo at I/O earlier this year but feel free to ask the Google Home devices at the Google Home Mini Golf course about that.
Bonus: if you live in Portland, just come to Twin Pines Country Club and play some putt-putt without all the corporate branding, because that place is about as Portland as it gets — and it’s free, too.
Upgrade tells the story of a Grey Trace, a man in the near future who’s left quadriplegic after a car accident and mugging.
Following an interlude that sees Grey struggling with his new disability, an experimental computer chip called Stem is placed in his spinal cord, which it doesn’t just allow him control of his limbs again — it turns him into something close to a superhero, ready to track down the men who paralyzed him and murdered his wife.
The film, which comes out today in the United States, may sound like a straightforward revenge plot, but it was written and directed by Leigh Wannell, who’s best known for writing Saw and Insidious. (More recently, he made his directorial debut with Insidious 3.) He explained that he wasn’t interested in turning this into a superhero movie. Instead, he wanted to tell the “Taxi Driver version” of this story.
Without getting into details, it’s fair to say that Upgrade doesn’t feel that far removed from Wannell’s horror films. It also includes plenty of visceral action scenes and touches on bigger questions about our relationship with technology.
I met with Wannell in New York City last week to discuss the film, and an edited transcript of our conversation follows. There’s one passage that gets a little spoiler-y, but I’ll warn you so you can skip ahead.
Wannell shot Upgrade in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia, so we started off by talking about the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne.
Leigh Wannell
Leigh Wannell: I’ve lived in L.A. for 12 years now, so I no longer care about Sydney-Melbourne. We shot this film in Melbourne but we actually edited in Sydney.
I was in Sydney for a few months and I absolutely loved it. I insisted on living in an apartment on Bondi Beach, which was not practical at all to the location of the editing room, but I didn’t care because I was like, “Look, if I was going to walk on ice, then I’m going to tap dance.” If I’m going to live in Sydney, I want to live on Bondi Beach.
TechCrunch: So the big science fictional idea of Stem, where did that come from?
Wannell: The idea really just came into my head, the way all my ideas do. It’s a very random process, and in its randomness it’s frustrating, because I feel like I’m always trying to think of movie ideas. And most of the ideas aren’t good, and they instantly get filed away in the drawer for terrible ideas.
Every now and again, something will pop into my head when I’m driving or I’m in the shower, you’ll just get an image and it stays with you. It doesn’t have to be much, it doesn’t have to be a story, it could just be an image. But it won’t leave your head and that’s when you know you’ve got something.
That’s how this started. It wasn’t like I read a magazine article about where tech is going. I was in my backyard, I remember that, and it was a nice day like this, and I just suddenly had this image of a quadriplegic in a wheelchair who stood up out of the chair and was being controlled from the neck down by a computer. That image and that scenario wouldn’t leave my head and I started reverse engineering a story into it. I kept writing away and making notes and then, cut to many years later, I’m sitting here talking with you.
Wannell: So the exoskeleton that helps people with paralysis walk and move, this movie is the internalized version of that, where it goes one step further and there’s nothing exterior. It’s a chip.
It has been interesting to watch the world catch up to my script. Because when I wrote the first draft of this script, automated cars and smart kitchens were still science fiction. And in the ensuing years, they’ve become ubiquitous. I mean, my wife’s car parks itself and talks to her. And my daughter thinks it’s perfectly normal to have a voice talking to her in the kitchen, and she asks it to play songs and it does. So in a way I feel like I’m living in the world of the movie I wrote all those years ago.
TechCrunch: And when was that?
Wannell: God, the first draft was probably at least six years ago.
TechCrunch: You said a lot of ideas will come to you, and you’ll think: Some of these are bad, some of these are good. Obviously, you’re known for horror, so in this case, when you think of a science fiction idea, does that create any trepidation?
Wannell: There was a bit of trepidation on my part as I was gearing up to direct the movie. Not so much when I was writing it. But I started to worry about science fiction fans because I’m very well-versed with horror fans, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of them, I feel like I’m in that community, and I was a horror fan myself. But I realized that science fiction has its own community of these staunch fans who pick apart things like Star Trek and Star Wars. And I did remember having a moment where I thought, wow, are they going to see this and think that I’m a fraud, that I’m a tourist in this world?
I’ve just gone through a two week trip around the country, screening the movie in different cities, and afterwards I’ll always chat to people. And in the acceptance of the movie, I realize that these genres, they’re not the province of any one type of person. What I feel like science fiction fans respond to is just people trying to hit them with something new, something they haven’t seen. And if you do that you’ll be okay.
TechCrunch: When you were directing, did you feel like you were using a different skillset?
Wannell: The mechanics of making a horror film are so specific that I obviously wasn’t using any of that. Those quiet moments in a horror film where you really lean on the anticipation of things, this movie wasn’t using any of that. But I felt like some of the rhythms and filmmaking beats that I’d learned in horror, I think they’re just naturally ingrained in me.
So, for instance, I liked creating moments of silence that were suddenly punctuated by action. And I think I must be subconsciously looking for that vocal reaction that you get from a horror film. It’s almost like I was putting those horror beats into a sci-fi context: Build, build, catharsis. Build, build, catharsis. So maybe that’s in there, just ingrained.
[Skip the next few paragraphs if you don’t want to be spoiled for an early scene in Upgrade, as well as the general direction of the film.]
TechCrunch: That’s certainly true to my experience. For a lot of it I was incredibly tense, and the moment when his head gets cut open, I just screamed.
Wannell: [laughs] In the operation?
TechCrunch: No, in the first kill.
Wannell: Ah, yes, the Pez dispenser!
TechCrunch: God, yeah. That was very upsetting.
Wannell: If you look at that scene and you analyze the structure, there is kind of a horror-esque metronome to it, where it’s quiet, it’s tense, and then there’s an explosion of something.
And in watching it, it’s been interesting to see that that scene gets a vocal reaction. It’s not the same reaction that a horror movie gets, that sort of scream in the audience, but it’s almost like an adrenaline rush, and when he gets up off the floor, I see people clapping along. I’m like, “Oh cool, this is a spectator sport, they’re getting into it as participants.”
TechCrunch: When I read the description of the film — obviously, the marketing is emphasizing this dystopian, almost horrific element, but you still think, “Oh, he’s basically going to become this superhero, and there’s maybe going to be this dark side to it, but it’s still going to be this ultimately triumphant story.” Whereas throughout the whole film, there’s this darker undertone that feels very different.
Wannell: I feel like the superhero version of this movie where somebody is given something — a power or a computer chip, whatever it is — that’s been done, especially in this age we live in, it’s been done a lot. So I found what was more interesting was to do the Taxi Driver version of this, to do the version where you realize the bad guy is in your body and the fight is not between you and external forces. It’s actually two entities fighting over the same physical body. That was interesting to me.
[End spoilers]
TechCrunch: One of the things you also mentioned in the press materials was this idea of having the freedom of an independent film but also having the scope of a larger science fiction film. I don’t know what the budget was, but I assume it wasn’t Avengers-scale.
Wannell: [laughs] Very low.
TechCrunch: What was the overall approach you took to saying, “Well, we don’t have all that money but we’re still going to try to build a world that has scope”?
Wannell: It’s just been a real goal and a dream of mine to do that. To make a movie that enjoyed the worldbuilding of sci-fi but took advantage of the creative freedom of an independent. The problem is that one is supposed to cancel the other out. You’re supposed to need studio money if you’re going to go off and make the future-set action movie. So I really was trying to have my cake and eat it, but I was obsessed with doing it.
As a model, I used ‘80s sci-fi films that I grew up with. I used the original Terminator as a great example, because if you really study that movie scene-by-scene, the science fiction and the tech is doled out very judiciously and sparingly. It’s kind of this lean-and-mean, slash-and-stalk movie that is dressed in this sci-fi skin. And I loved that.
I feel like, if they can achieve that sort of sleight of hand in the ’80s, then we could do it now. Especially with the new advantage that they didn’t even have back then of CG. We could use CG to augment some of the scenes. We couldn’t go bananas with it, but we could utilize it at certain moments. And I guess I’m too close to the movie, I’ve spent too long with it to know if we really succeeded, but I’m hoping that audiences feel like they’re watching a bigger movie, you know? That they’re part of a bigger world.
TechCrunch: Right, and there’s a couple of things in the beginning that feel very big —
Wannell: Like, here’s the world!
TechCrunch: Which, if I go back clinically and watched it, I would see that those are doled out very strategically. But it does the job. And it also is an interesting constraint because it means that in a lot of the other scenes, you have one or two science fictional elements, but you’re using primarily a real world location or set, rather than a created world.
Wannell: Absolutely, and that was something that was a very conscious decision. Not just budgetary, but a creative decision for me was: Let’s set this movie in the very near future. Let’s build a world that the audience can see themselves in.
Also, the world doesn’t change completely overnight, it happens incrementally. In 30 years time, you’ll still have buildings from the 1800s in New York City. They’re not going to knock them down and build a glass tower. So what you’re going to end up in 30, 40 years is a landscape in Manhattan that is the future sort of jammed on top of the past and it’ll be this hybrid.
And people will still be driving older cars! That’s another thing that you see in a lot of future movies, all of a sudden everyone on the road is driving the future car. And I’m like, well no, there will still be people 20 years from now driving around in early ’90s Hondas, crappy cars, you know? That scaling of the world was important, but a bonus prize was that it helped us budgetarily.
TechCrunch: You mentioned that this is something that you started writing six years ago. In that time, the technology has evolved, but also the ways in which we talk or think about disability, and the ways we talk about being quadriplegic or paraplegic has changed. To what extent was that part of your research, things like talking to disability activists?
Wannell: I didn’t talk so much to activists. When I was writing the film, I wanted the idea that a chip could cure paralysis, I wanted that to be a tangible thing and I talked to a surgeon and he said, “Look, what you’re talking about is hypothetical, but in theory, it could be done. That gap between our brain and our nerve endings could be bridged by a computer.” And that was great to walk away with, the knowledge that the tech was credible.
Certainly when we were preparing to shoot the film, we took the quadriplegic side of it very seriously. Logan [Marshall-Green], who plays Gray, he worked with a guy who was a quadriplegic who was nice enough to spend a lot of time with Logan, share his life with him, talk to Logan, let Logan see what his daily rituals were like, let him actually use a chair.
And Logan had a lot of integrity about that. He felt he owed this gentleman that he had worked with the responsibility of portraying that realistically, and he was really watching it, the way he held his hands. It’s not a long moment in the film that he spends as a quadriplegic, but it was important for us for that moment to have as much integrity as anything else in the film. Especially with something that in real life, people are experiencing. You don’t want to push back at them some wonky cinematic version of the real thing.
TechCrunch: Part of what I’m getting at is, is there’s this opening image that you mentioned of him rising out of the chair. It’s this incredibly moving scene for him because you’ve been through all of these terrible things with him. But at the same time, you can imagine somebody who is quadriplegic watching the film and you don’t necessarily want them to look at themselves and think —
Wannell: Them thinking, “Oh, you’re presenting this as triumphant, as if that’s much better.” Yeah, that’s interesting, that is part-and-parcel of putting films out into the world, isn’t it? The world reflects back at you and I think you just have to take those slings and arrows. Nothing was done with any malice.
And I don’t think we were trying to present the idea that quadriplegia is this hellish situation that only being able-bodied can cure. What I think we were doing is speaking to the story of a guy who hates technology becomes technology. The way that we were enabled to do that in the story was through his condition, his quadriplegia. So it’s the result of an accident, he’s given this chip, and now he’s completely reliant on it, you know? It’s totally a story point for us.
TechCrunch: And again, without getting into too many spoilers, you said that this is the Taxi Driver version of the story. How much of that was trying to express your own concerns about people becoming more automated?
Wannell: I think a lot of it. First and foremost, I’m trying to tell this genre story, I’m trying to build a unique movie. And then the themes and the questions of the film sit underneath it.
But I have a foot in both camps with technology. Especially in researching the script and reading books by Ray Kurzweil and authors that talk about the Singularity and the point at which humans and tech will merge. Because I didn’t want to make a robot film. A robot film has been done before and I wasn’t really interested in that. I was interested in human beings putting tech into their bodies voluntarily. That was something I felt I hadn’t seen a lot of.
Through my research and reading these books, I saw both sides. I saw the wonderful side of our reliance on tech in regards to medicine. If we can install something in our bloodstream or our bodies that cures cancer, that’s obviously going to be an amazing, wonderful thing. But there’s the other foot in the other camp, which is our overreliance on automation. I’m wondering if our cars do the driving for us and our kitchens do the cooking, are we actually designing ourselves into irrelevance? That’s an interesting road to look down. It seems to me the human instinct is to always make things easier. We’re always leaping towards convenience: “Oh, wouldn’t it be better if a machine could do that?”
I’m wondering where that road ends. The movie was definitely a reflection of that, too.
TechCrunch: The last thing I’m going to ask, which I think I’m sort of required to ask, is to what extent is this meant to be a completely standalone experience? Have you thought about a potential sequel?
Wannell: I haven’t. The thought enters my mind and I push it away. Because this is an independent film, and it’s really hard in today’s media landscape to get people to pay attention to things. We’re releasing the movie in summer, surrounded by giant movies. I can’t imagine what the marketing budget for the new Han Solo movie is. To compete against that is almost foolhardy, so I feel like planning a sequel is an assumption of success that I’m not ready for.
Sitting there being vexed about where to go with a sequel would be a great problem to have.
TechCrunch: Well, it certainly doesn’t feel like a movie that was written with a sequel in mind.
Wannell: No, it definitely wasn’t. I remember when James Wan and I did the first Saw movie, a lot of people would say to us, “Well, you left the door open for a sequel.” And we would say, “No, we literally closed the door!” We thought it was a nice ending. Little did we know that the producers had other ideas once the film was a hit.
To us, the ending to that movie, in our opinion, was the very definition of a cut to black, no more story. But then we got a lesson in commerce.
Facebookreally doesn’t want to be a media company. The social network announced this morning it’s removing its often controversial “Trending” section from its site next week, in order to make way for “future news experiences,” it says. These experiences include things like a dedicated section for news videos on its video hub Facebook Watch, a breaking news label publishers can use on their posts, and a dedicated section called “Today In” which connects people to news and information from local publishers in their city along with updates from local officials and organizations.
Over 80 news publishers are currently testing the “breaking news” label, which allows them to opt to flag their Instant Articles, mobile and web links, and Facebook Live video as breaking news, the company tells us.
Facebook says that the early results from this testing have led to a 4 percent lift in click-through rates, a 7 percent lift in Likes, and an 11 percent lift in shares. The product is still in what Facebook calls “alpha” testing, which indicates it’s very early days for this feature – an alpha test precedes a beta test, which itself is ahead of a public launch.
Meanwhile, the “Today In” feature is in testing in 33 U.S. cities across the U.S.
Facebook says publishers featured in this section are seeing an average of an 8 percent incremental increase in distribution – meaning outbound clicks.
The company didn’t provide a time frame for when Facebook’s news-focused video hub would go live, but said that “soon” 10 to 12 U.S. publishers will be launching news shows in Watch, focused on live coverage of breaking events, daily shows and weekly shows. These efforts will be funded by Facebook itself, the company said. However, the company declined to provide a list of publishers or details on the funding.
The changes arrive at a time when Facebook has been held accountable for allowing the spread of fake news across its network, and it has responded with a host of fake news-fighting features like factchecking, adding publisher context, the addition of related articles, shrinking fake news in the News Feed, and other initiatives.
However, the “Trending” section in particular has been a source of concern ever since the company fired its Trending editors, leaving the selection of stories to its algorithms. And, because algorithms are not perfect, they repeatedly goofed up, allowing fake news stories to spread across the network by highlighting factually inaccurate links that were going viral as well as other inappropriate content.
Even as Facebook addressed the issues around fake news, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stuck to his belief that Facebook itself is not a “media company”– something he’s been saying for years. When recently testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, he insisted again that Facebook is a tech company.
“I consider us to be a technology company because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build product and services for other people,” he told Congress.
And in nearly the same breath, he then went on to admit that Facebook pays to “help produce content” – as it’s doing now with these new news videos.
It’s unusual for a site that’s used for search, like Facebook, to not manage a trending section. Google offers a whole suite of products around tracking trends, and Twitter offers trends, even down to a local level.
Facebook didn’t announce any plans to bring back Trending, or some version of it in the future.
Trending is being pulled from Facebook next week and it will also remove products and third-party partner integrations that rely on the Trends API, the company said.
“People tell us they want to stay informed about what is happening around them,” wrote Alex Hardiman, Head of News Products at Facebook, in an announcement. “We are committed to ensuring the news that people see on Facebook is high quality, and we’re investing in ways to better draw attention to breaking news when it matters most,” Hardiman said.
Helm is an open source project that enables developers to create packages of containerized apps to make installation much simpler. Up until now, it was a sub-project of Kubernetes, the popular container orchestration tool, but as of today it is a stand-alone project.
Both Kubernetes and Helm are projects managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee approved the project earlier this week. Dan Kohn, executive director at the CNCF says the two projects are closely aligned so it made sense for Helm to be a sub-project up until now.
“What’s nice about Helm is that it’s just an application on top of Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an API and Helm accesses that API. If you want you to install this [package], you access the Kubernetes API, and it pulls this many containers and pods and [it handles] all of the steps involved to do that,” Kohn explained.
This ability to package up a set of requirements allows you to repeat the installation process in a consistent way. “Helm addresses a common user need of deploying applications to Kubernetes by making their configurations reusable,” Brian Grant, principal engineer at Google and Kubernetes (and a member of the TOC) explained in a statement.
Packages are known as “charts,” which consist one or more containers. Kohn says for example, you might want to deploy a chart that includes WordPress and MariaDB in a single container. By creating a chart, it defines the installation process and which pieces need to go in which order to install correctly across a cluster.
Kohn said they decided to pull it out as a separate program because it doesn’t always follow the Kubernetes release schedule, and as such they wanted to make it stand-alone so it wouldn’t necessarily have to be linked to every Kubernetes release.
It also allows developers to benefit from the community, who could build Charts for common installation scenarios. “By joining CNCF, we’ll benefit from the input and participation of the community, and conversely Kubernetes will benefit when a community of developers provides a vast repository of ready-made charts for running workloads on Kubernetes,” Matt Butcher, co-creator of Helm and principal engineer at Microsoft said in a statement.
Besides Microsoft and Google, other project sponsors include Codefresh, Bitnami, Ticketmaster and Codecentric. The project website states there are currently 250 developers contributing to this project. By becoming part of CNCF that will very likely increase soon.
Back in 2016, Kanye West announced that his latest album be available exclusively on Tidal. This morning, its follow up, the simply titled ye, arrived on that service, Spotify and Apple Music all at the same time.
The move is a blow for the artist-owned music streaming service, which has amassed much of its fanbase by launching exclusives from top music acts like West and Tidal investor Jay-Z, who made his own 4:44an exclusive on the service.
Of course, West’s own relationship with Tidal (among other things) has been rocky, at best. Last July, the embattled rapper reportedly claimed that the streaming service owed him “more than $3 million” over Pablo royalties, including a bonus from bringing “1.5 million new subscribers” to the service.
West may have been among the most prominent artists to complain about Tidal royalty payments, but he certainly wasn’t alone. Earlier this month, a report surfaced claiming that it was behind on paying record labels, as well.
West ultimately terminated exclusivity for Pablo a few months after its release, a year before it became the first album to go platinum from streaming-only. He also reportedly threatened to not make its followup a Tidal exclusive, if things between the artist and the service weren’t ironed out. As of this morning, that certainly appears to be the case.
