Apple's new iPad Pro goes on sale November 11th, Facebook's testing facial recognition
in Messenger photo sharing, HipChat maker Atlassian files to go public, and more...
It's Monday, November 9th, and this is Crunch Report.
The time has come, people who like big iPads.
12.9-inch iPad Pro, which was announced at Apple's event in September, officially goes
on sale in 40 countries starting Wednesday, November 11th... online to start, with retail
stores selling the Pro later in the week.
The Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard will also be available online right away on the 11th.
It's $799 to start for the base model, which ships with 32GB of internal memory.
A $1079 model includes both WiFi and cellular connections, and has 128GB of memory.
A reminder that the iPad Pro has a high-def 12.9″ screen and allows split, “full-screen”
multitasking.
It also has an A9X chip that’s 1.8x faster than the previous A8, has a10-hour battery
life, 8MP iSight camera, Touch ID and four speaker audio.
Facebook Messenger‘s newest feature is based around the fact that you are too lazy to send
photos to your friends...
you want to, but then you just forget, and then they stop asking, and then too much time
goes by, and then nobody cares about all those wedding pics.
Photo Magic, as it's called, scans all the new photos in your camera roll using facial
recognition, and then suggests sending pics to the friends it recognizes.
The test is rolling out in Facebook's test market of choice, Australia, today on Android
and later this week on iOS, before reaching other countries... if it takes off.
Now, Facebook is using the same facial recognition technology that powers its photo tag suggestions
and standalone Moments app with Photo Magic inside Messenger, so the technology already
existed.
But Director Of Product Management Peter Martinazzi tells TechCrunch that "About 9.5 billion photos
were sent inside Messenger in the last month...It’s growing even faster than Messenger over all,
which is growing really fast.”
By the way if this creeps you out and you don’t want to be recognized, you can opt
out with the same privacy controls that turn off tag suggestions.
Atlassian, which makes enterprise-focused social products like Slack competitor HipChat,
JIRA, and Confluence, just filed to go public on NASDAQ under the ticker “TEAM”, with
the IPO expected to raise around $250 million.
with the exact number to be determined later.
The company's F-1 notes that net income for the last three years has been positive, although
it did shrink a lot in the last year because of of R&D - from $10.8 million in 2013 to
$6.8 million this year.
The company claims more than 5 million monthly active users with 48,000 organizations as
customers like Fitbit, PayPal, Visa, NASA, MIT, Nordstrom, Tesla, Cisco and Adobe.
Good group.
Atlassian is based in Sydney and has raised $210 million for a current valuation of over
$3 billion.
A company called Lucid has prototyped a point and shoot VR camera that's easy to use, doesn't
look horrible, doesn't need post-production, and will go for $299.
Sounds pretty great, right?
Lucid CEO Han Jin tells TechCrunch's Drew Olanoff that it all started out with the team
working on outfitting robots with cameras, and then using the robots to see things in
other places where they weren’t physically.. for example, with an Oculus headset.
But after many prototypes, Lucid found that the camera shooting in VR made more sense
than a robot altogether…so they ripped its “eyes” out to work on the LucidCam.
It currently shoots in 180 degrees to avoid the stitching issues that 360 degree video
has.
And as a consumer app, that requires a lot less legwork..tripods, etc.. and also keeps
the file-size down, which is always important when you want to export and share with others
quickly.
It looks promising even in the early days - LucidCam's current Indiegogo campaign is
over half funded with its current goal of $100k with 46 days remaining.
Jin says that China is a likely place for manufacturing to help keep that the $299 price
point, and that a bigger round of funding is on the way.
TensorFlow is a technology you may not have heard of, but it powers Google's Photos search,
speech recognition, and the brand-new “Smart Reply” feature for its email app Inbox..
and now Google's open-sourcing it.
TensorFlow started as a project from researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain
Team in Google’s Machine Intelligence research organization, but the team realized that any
gradient-based machine learning algorithm can use TensorFlow for differentiation and
optimization, with the ultimate goal of building a technology that works similarly to the human
brain.
No pressure.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai explains that by open-sourcing the technology, the company
can speed up research on machine learning and benefit a lot more people, by identifying
what’s in photos and videos, understand speech, and read and understand written text.
That’s the report for today.
I’m Sarah Lane.
Crunch Report airs every weekday at 7 pm Eastern, 4 pm Pacific, on Techcrunch.com.
You can also find us on iTunes, and on YouTube.
See you tomorrow!