Advanced walking assistance system for visually impaired revealed by Ashirase, a Honda incubation

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According to 2020 data from the Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science journal, People suffering from moderate or severe visual impairments are estimated to be 225 million and 49.1 million are blind. A Japanese startup that was incubated at Honda Motor Company’s business creation program hopes to make navigating the world easier and safer for the visually impaired. 

Ashirase, which debuted as the first business venture to come out of Honda’s Ignition program in June, shared details of its in-shoe navigation system for low-vision walkers on Tuesday. The system aims to help users achieve more independence in their daily lives by allowing them to feel which way to walk through in-shoe vibrations connected to a navigation app on a smartphone. Ashirase hopes to begin sales of the system, also named Ashirase, by October 2022.

Honda created Ignition in 2017 to feature original technology, ideas, and designs of Honda associates with the goal of solving social issues and going beyond the existing Honda business. CEO Wataru Chino had previously worked at Honda since 2008 on R&D for EV motor control and automated driving systems. Chino’s background is evident in the navigation system’s technology, which he said is inspired by advanced driver assist and autonomous driving systems.

“The overlap perspective can be, for instance, the way we utilize sensor information,” Chino told TechCrunch. “We use a sensor fusion technology, meaning we can combine information from the different sensors. I have experience in that field myself so that is helpful. Plus there is overlap with automated driving because when we were thinking of safety walking, the automated driving technology had given us an idea for the concept.”

“Ashirase” comes from the Japanese words ashi, meaning “foot,” and shirase, meaning “notification.” As its name suggests, the device, which is attached to the shoe, vibrates to provide navigation based on the route set within an app. Motion sensors, which consist of an accelerometer, gyro sensors and orientation sensors, enable the system to understand how the user is walking.

While en route outside, the system localizes the user based on global navigation satellite positioning information and data based on the user’s foot movement. Ashirase’s app is connected to a range of different map vendors like Google Maps, and Chino said the device can switch to adapt to different information available on different maps. 

This capability might be helpful if, say, one map had updated information about a road blockage and could send over-the-air updates.

“Going forward, we want to develop the function to generate a map itself using sensors from the outdoor environment, but that’s maybe five years down the line,” Chino said.

The vibrators are aligned with the foot’s nerve layer, so it’s easy to feel the pulse. To indicate the user should walk straight ahead, the vibrator positioned at the front of the shoe vibrates. Vibrators on the left and the right side of the shoe also indicate turning signals for the walker.

Ashirase says this form of intuitive navigation helps the walker attain a more relaxed state of mind rather than one that is constantly alert, leading to a safer walk and less stress for the user.

This also allows the user to have more attention to spare for audible warnings in their environment, like, for example, if they were at a crosswalk, because the device cannot warn the user of obstacles ahead.

“Going forward, we’re thinking about technical updates for users who are totally blind because they don’t have such information like obstacle awareness like low-vision people,” Chino said. “So at this moment, the device is designed for low-vision walkers.”

While indoors, like in a shopping mall, the GPS won’t reach the user, and there isn’t a map for them to localize to. To solve for this, the company says its plan is to use WiFi or Bluetooth-based positioning, connecting to other devices and cell phones within the store, to localize the visually impaired person.

Ashirase is also considering ways to integrate with public transit systems so that the device can alert a user if they have arrived or are near their next stop, according to Chino.

It’s a lot of tech to pack into one little device that attaches to a shoe — any shoe. Chino said the device, which only needs to be charged once a week based on three hours of use per day, is made to be flexible and fit onto different types, shapes and sizes of shoes.

Ashirase intends to release its beta version for testing and data collection in October or November this year and hopes to achieve mass production by October 2022. It’ll have a direct-to-consumer model, the price of which the company is not yet ready to disclose, and a subscription model, which should cost about 2,000 to 3,000 Japanese Yen ($18 to $27) per month.

Chino estimates it’ll take the company 200 million Yen ($1.8 million), including the funds the company has already raised, to make it to market. So far, the company has raised 70 million Yen ($638,000), which came in the form of an equity investor round and some non-equity rounds, according to Chino.

Honda maintains an investor role in the company, supporting and following the business along the way, but Ashirase’s aim is to go public as a standalone company.

Zuckerberg told investors that he is turning trillion-dollar Facebook into a ‘metaverse’ company

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CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a moment to zoom out and wax on the company’s future goals, following the quarterly release of Facebook’s earnings numbers where the company’s CFO takes time to walk analysts through the nitty gritty of the company’s financials, specifically calling out his ambitions to turn Facebook into “a metaverse company.” 

**Zuckerberg said that he wanted to discuss the future that they are working towards and how their major initiatives across the company are going to map to that.**

“What is the metaverse? It’s a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces. You can kind of think of this as an embodied internet that you’re inside of rather than just looking at.” 

The metaverse offers Facebook an opportunity to draw a line between its moonshot efforts and its core business, building a wide-reaching hub that shines on augmented reality and virtual reality platforms but feels just as friendly on mobile and desktop. Zuckerberg’s definition of metaverse is more broad than some others, but comes down to building a version of the web that feels more like an MMO than a collection of web pages. 

It’s hard to imagine now, but Facebook was late to mobile. A decade ago, Facebook’s apps were buggy, crash-prone HTML5 experiences, even as smooth native mobile apps were quickly becoming the standard for major software makers. 

By 2012, Zuckerberg realized that apps were the future — quickly becoming the present — and the Facebook founder scrambled to turn the company’s attention toward mobile at every level. Facebook doesn’t intend to make the same mistake twice. That philosophy first became abundantly clear when the company bought the industry-leading VR hardware maker Oculus in 2014. 

“Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,” Zuckerberg said around the time of the two billion dollar acquisition. “Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate.” 

Becoming “a metaverse company” is a further evolution of this thinking. For many, Roblox has seemed to be the clearest embodiment of the metaverse today — a social world where users can jump between virtual experiences while creating their own experiences inside it. It’s notably not a virtual reality experience instead thriving largely on mobile and desktop. Roblox’s vision has resonated with investors, the now-public company is worth more than $45 billion — a fraction of Facebook’s value but more than almost any other games company in the West. 

Facebook has been signaling its continued interest in this space. In June they bought a Roblox-like platform called Crayta for an undisclosed sum, and they’ve spent much of the last several years buying up a host of VR-focused game studios. 

The company has tried to build its own VR-centric social hubs but most have fallen flat. Facebook’s metaverse-like Horizon platform garnered major headlines when it was announced nearly two years ago, but the company has had little to say during its exceedingly quiet beta period. This week, Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth detailed that Gaming VP Vivek Sharma would be taking over the effort under a new metaverse-centric product group led by Instagram’s Vishal Shah. 

There’s a very particular distinction in Facebook’s choice of rebranding itself as a “metaverse” company as opposed to an AR/VR one. While some might have seen specialized hardware as essential to a spatial internet, it’s become increasingly clear that users aren’t clamoring to embrace early headsets even as other new gaming platforms greatly accelerate their growth. 

While the company’s Quest 2 headset has sold much better than its previous devices — according to Facebook which has yet to release any hard sales numbers — it’s unclear whether they truly need a world full of users with Facebook glasses and headsets strapped to their faces in order to embrace this metaverse ideal — or whether that would just be the cherry on top.

Spotify’s clone of Clubhouse tops 140K installs on iOS and 100K on Android

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Spotify Greenroom,the live audio app and Clubhouse rival which was recently launched by Spotify, has a long road ahead of it if it wants to take on top social audio platforms like Clubhouse, Airtime, Spoon and others, not to mention those from top social networks like Twitter and Facebook. To date, the new Greenroom app has only been downloaded a total of 141,000 times on iOS, according to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. This includes downloads from its earlier iteration Locker Room — an app Spotify acquired to make its move into live audio.

On Android, Google Play data indicates the app has been installed over 100,000 times, but Sensor Tower cannot yet confirm this figure.For comparison, Clubhouse today has 30.2 million total installs, 18.7 million of which are on iOS, Sensor Tower says.Other top audio apps include Airtime, with 11.4 million iOS installs, out of a total of 14.3 million (including Android); and Spoon, with 7.6 million iOS installs, out of a total of 27.3 million.

International apps like UAE’s Yalla and China’s Lizhi are massive, as well, with the former sporting 48.1 total installs, 3.8 million of which are on iOS. The latter has 29.5 million+ total installs, but only a handful on iOS.

There are other newcomers that have managed to stake small claims in the social audio space, too, including Fishbowl (759,000 total installs), Cappuccino (497,000 installs), Riff (339,000 installs) and Sonar (154,000 installs).
Spotify Greenroom’s launch last month, meanwhile, seems to have attracted only a small fraction of Spotify’s larger user base, which has now grown to 365 million monthly active users.

The majority of Greenroom installs — around 106,000 — took place after Greenroom’s official launch on July 16, 2021 through July 25, 2021, Sensor Tower says. Counting only its Greenroom installs, the app is ranked at No. 12 among social audio apps. It follows Tin Can, which gained 127,000 installs since launching in early March.

Because Greenroom took over Locker Room’s install base, some portion of Greenroom’s total iOS installs (141,000) included downloads that occurred when the app was still Locker Room. But that number is fairly small. Sensor Tower estimates Locker Room saw only around 35,000 total iOS installs to date. That includes the time frame of October 26, 2020 — the month when the sports chat app launched to the public — up until the day before Greenroom’s debut (July 15, 2021).

We should also point out that downloads are not the same thing as registered users and are far short of active users. Many people download a new app to try it, but then abandon it shortly after downloading it or never remember to open it at all.

That means the number of people actively using Greenroom at this time is likely much smaller than these figures indicate.

Spotify declined to comment on third-party estimates.

While Sensor Tower looked at competition across social audio apps on the app stores, Spotify’s competition in the live audio market won’t be limited to standalone apps, of course.

Other large tech platforms have more recently integrated social audio into their apps, too, including Facebook (Live Audio Rooms), Twitter (Spaces), Discord (Stage Channels) and trading app Public. A comparison with Greenroom here is not possible, as these companies would have to disclose how many of their active users are engaging with live audio, and they have not yet done so.

Despite what may be a slower uptake, Greenroom shouldn’t be counted out yet. The app is brand-new and has time to catch up if all goes well. (And if the market for live audio, in general, continues to grow — even though the height of COVID lockdowns, which prompted all this live audio socializing in the first place, seems to have passed.)

Spotify’s success or failure with live audio will be particularly interesting to watch given the potential for the company to cross-promote live audio shows, events and artist-produced content through its flagship streaming music application. What sort of programming Greenroom may later include is still unknown, however.

Following Spotify’s acquisition of Locker Room maker Betty Labs, the company said it would roll out programmed content related to music, culture and entertainment, in addition to sports. It also launched a Creator Fund to help fuel the app with new content. 

But so far, Spotify hasn’t given its users a huge incentive to visit Greenroom.

The company, during its Q2 2021 earnings, explained why. It said it first needed to get Greenroom stabilized for a “Spotify-sized audience,” which is why it only soft-launched the app in June. Going forward, Spotify says there will be “more tie-ins” with the main Spotify app, but didn’t offer any specifics.

“Obviously we’ll leverage our existing distribution on Spotify,” noted Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. “But this feels like a great way to learn, experiment and iterate much faster than if we had to wait for a full-on integration into the main app,” he added.

Upvote and downvote buttons on tweets are being tested by twitter

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Twitter is working on new upvote and downvote reactions for tweets to accompany the usual options to retweet and reply. Twitter confirmed it was testing the feature for a small group of users on iOS, and it’s already been spotted according to multiple tweets from users that are part of the test group.

Twitter writes that iOS users may see upvote and downvotes in several different styles (up and down arrows, a heart icon and a down arrow, and thumbs up and thumbs down icons) and that it’s testing the feature to “understand the types of replies you find relevant in a convo, so we can work on ways to show more of them.” Currently votes are not public.

While Twitter hasn’t said if it plans to add up and down voting as a permanent feature (or how voting affects what you see in your feed), there are clear parallels to be drawn to Reddit, which features upvoting and downvoting as a way of surfacing a subreddit’s favorite replies, responses, and posts. Twitter says that for now though upvotes and downvotes don’t impact the order of tweets.

Twitter toyed with other kinds of tweet interactions in the past, including reactions that appeared to mimic the emoji reactions Facebook uses for Facebook posts and Messenger messages. Twitter’s product lead Kayvon Beykpour has also said that the company planned to work on dislikes last year, saying the feature was “something we’re exploring” in response to a user’s tweet.

UK man arrested for massive Twitter hack of 2020 that targeted Biden, musk

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A UK man was arrested in Spain for his alleged role in a massive hack of high-profile Twitter accounts that targeted politicians and celebrities in 2020, the US Department of Justice said Wednesday.

22-year-old Joseph O'Connor was arrested by Spanish National Police on behalf of US authorities. O'Connor was also charged with computer intrusions related to takeovers of TikTok and Snapchat user accounts, along with cyberstalking a juvenile in a criminal complaint filed in federal court in San Francisco. O'Connor was charged with a total of 10 counts.

More than 130 accounts were taken over by hackers, including those of Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West and Barack Obama, in July 2020 and duped people into sending more than $100,000 of Bitcoin to addresses cited in the tweets. The widespread hack raised concerns about whether Twitter was doing enough to protect the security of its users ahead of the US presidential election.

“The hack was the result of a ‘coordinated social engineering attack’ on its employees,” Twitter said. 

O'Connor isn't the only person who's been arrested in connection with the hack. Last year, the Department of Justice filed 30 felony charges against Florida teenager Graham Ivan Clark, who was 17 at the time. Clark, accused of being the "mastermind" behind the Twitter hack, then pleaded guilty in exchange for a three-year prison sentence. 

It wasn't immediately clear if O'Connor had legal representation.

Two other people, UK resident Mason Sheppard and Florida resident Nima Fazeli, were also arrested for their alleged role in the hack.

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