Mission Everywhere

Istio , the service mesh for microservices from Google, IBM, Lyft, Red Hat and many other players in the open source community, launched version 1.0 of its tools today. If you’re not into service meshes , that’s understandable. Few people are. But Istio is probably one of the most important new open source projects out there right now. It sits at the intersection of a number of industry trends like containers, microservices and serverless computing and makes it easier for enterprises to embrace them. Istio now has over 200 contributors and the code has seen over 4,000 check-ins since the launch of  version 0.1. Istio, at its core , handles the routing, load balancing, flow control and security needs of microservices. It sits on top of existing distributed applications and basically helps them talk to each other securely, while also providing logging, telemetry and the necessary policies that keep things under control (and secure). It also features support for canary release...

Benjamin Joffe Contributor Benjamin Joffe is a partner at HAX . More posts by this contributor 70 years of VC innovation 2017 crowdfunding guide The dream of a startup founder can often be summarized by the following, well-intentioned, and mostly delusional quote, “We’ll raise a few rounds and in a few years we’ll IPO on Nasdaq.” But a more likely scenario looks something like this.: You invest a few years of hard work to build something of value. One day you receive an acquisition offer out of the blue. You’re elated. And you’re not prepared. You drop everything to focus on this opportunity. Exclusive due diligence starts. Your company is a mess (IP, contracts, burn). Days become weeks; weeks become months. You’ve neglected business and fundraising. You’re running out of money. M&A is now your one and only option. The buyer says they found a bunch of cockroaches in the walls and drops the price. Now what? Sounds unlikely? This is still a favorable situation: you ...

New York Times : Sources: Facebook has alerted Congress to new coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages, ahead of midterms   —  WASHINGTON — Facebook is preparing to announce that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2vpLx6b

Facebook has detected a coordinated effort to use its social network to influence the 2018 US mid-term elections, according to a report in the New York Times on Tuesday. Facebook has not directly linked the efforts to Russia, the Times reported, thought it cited two anonymous sources that said Russia was "possibly" involved. Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: These 13 medical technologies are changing lives from Tech Insider https://ift.tt/2v1Kx8Y

Marc Piette had a revelation as he buzzed in and out of the Palo Alto Airport in pursuit of his pilot’s license. Instead of freedom, he saw restraint. He also saw potential. “It became pretty apparent that there were major issues with the general aviation industry with smaller aircraft,” Piette said in a recent interview with TechCrunch. “And yet it had enormous potential to change the way people moved around.” Now, Piette’s two-year-old autonomous-aviation startup Xwing is ramping up to unlock that potential. The company isn’t building autonomous helicopters and planes. Instead, it’s focused on the software stack that will enable pilotless flight of small passenger aircraft. The company announced Tuesday that it has raised $4 million in a seed round led by Eniac Ventures. Array Ventures, along with Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison and Nat Friedman of Xamarin, Microsoft and GitHub, also participated in the round. The funding will be used by the San Francisco-based...

It is unclear where the UkuRobot came from and where it will go once it is done with humanity but I fear that it is up to no good. Look at this robot: small, compact, infinitely complex. Its fretting system stares at us, gimlet -eyed, while the plucking system continues its dark work on the strings. The system uses Lego, motors, and what looks like an Arduino to bring evil songs out of that mini-guitar of death, the ukulele. The world will never be the same and, honestly, do we deserve it to be? The UkuRobot can play almost any song. In these videos it plays two songs, The Godfather theme and Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day. In the end the tune this monstrous creation plays does not matter. It will pluck out the end of days, winking stars from the sky as each note cascades out of its sound hole. In the end we will not fear the UkuRobot but we will obey it. In the end, all will be lost. You can also watch it play the Requiem for a Dream theme song here . Pretty cool stuff. ...

$9 billion payments processing startup Stripe is launching a formal partner program.  Essentially, developers and outside companies can build products that integrate with Stripe, with a fancy "Works With Stripe" badge for their troubles.  Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson says that there's big opportunity: Stripe makes $1 for every $1.61 that partners make with their integrated products, she says. For Stripe, the timing comes from the fact that the company is being pulled upmarket, serving larger customers like Facebook and Salesforce — and could use the help from partners. Bill Gates gets a lot of credit for his very early insight that even a company like Microsoft can't go it alone — you need partners to build new products on top of your own, so you can reach more customers.  Now payments startup Stripe, last valued at $9 billion, is taking a page from that playbook with the launch of its first-ever official partner program. Under this Stripe Verified progr...

Wall Street Journal : Apple has recently come under fire from several Chinese state media outlets for allegedly failing to effectively counter prohibited content in iMessages   —  The state-controlled media criticism comes amid rising trade tensions with the U.S.  —  BEIJING— Apple Inc. AAPL .32% has come under fire … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2Ou7Bpb

Emma Sayle is the CEO and founder of Killing Kittens, a "female empowerment brand" valued at £5 million which hosts high-end sex parties for its members around the world. The concept? To provide a safe space for women to explore their sexuality. The parties have anywhere between 60 and 200 guests and are held in apartments, mansions, or country homes in the likes of London, New York, Paris, Venice, and Sydney. She told Business Insider what goes on behind the scenes — and what people get wrong about it. The company recently crowdfunded more than £500,000 to take the brand digital with a new platform and app. Sayle also just launched SafeDate, an app which encourages users to check in before a date, and have a notification sent to someone they trust if they don't check back in by an agreed upon time. In capital cities around the world, luxurious sex parties are being held in mansions and clubs right under our noses — but they're nothing like you'd expect...

Real estate developers and their properties are getting an opportunity to cash in on power management and surplus energy production thanks to a new company called Blueprint Power . It’s a new twist on an old idea dating back to the first clean tech boom based on ideas of demand response and power management. Companies like EnerNOC and Comverge, pitched ways for manufacturers to make money by reducing power consumption during times of peak demand and getting paid for it by energy companies. In the wake of the massive blackout that hit the U.S. in the early 2000s and decades of concerns around failing energy infrastructure in the U.S., the notion of having some way to respond more flexibly to changes in demand from the grid seemed to make sense. Now, as more residential and commercial buildings install actually renewable generation capacity and have more robust digital networks, these buildings can themselves become power generators or local points for gird power management — all in a...

If there’s one truth that applies to early-stage startup founders, it’s that there never seems to be enough time to get it all done. We feel your struggle. That’s why we’re extending the application deadline to compete in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 in Beirut, Lebanon on October 3. We’re looking for the best pre-Series A startups in the Middle East and North Africa, and we’re giving you an extra week to get it together. The new deadline expires on August 6, 2018, at 9 p.m. PST. Don’t waste any time — apply today . Competing in Startup Battlefield is the best way to launch your startup to the world. Participating startups receive invaluable exposure — to media, to potential investors and to the world-wide TechCrunch audience. We’ve been hosting Battlefields since 2007, and in that time our Battlefield alumni community — more than 750 companies — has collectively raised over $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits. Companies you might recognize include ...

Mammoth Biosciences, the biotech company that grew out of a close relationship with CRISPR legend Jennifer Doudna , has raised $23 million in a sturdy Series A. Mammoth previously raised $120,000 from NFX and the company continued quietly picking up funding as it built toward its exit from stealth mode in April 2018. Its current round was led by Mayfield with participation from NFX and 8VC. The discovery of CRISPR, by all accounts a transformative scientific and technological breakthrough, is many things to many people, but for Mammoth Biosciences, it’s all about the search functionality. “CRISPR is biology’s search engine first,” Mammoth co-founder and CEO Trevor Martin told TechCrunch in an interview. That means using a guide RNA to direct a CRISPR protein to search for any specific DNA or RNA sequence. That process provides a world of utility across fields like genotyping, oncology, infectious disease and even agriculture. Mammoth plans to use the funding to make key hire...

Binance , the world’s largest crypto exchange based on volume, has made its first acquisition after it snapped up mobile wallet company Trust Wallet . The deal is undisclosed, but Binance confirmed to TechCrunch that the compensation is a mixture of cash, Binance stock and a portion of its BNB token. U.S.-based Trust Wallet will remain independent following the deal, but Binance, which is headquartered in Malta these days, will assist running the admin side of the business and in non-technical areas like marketing. “The Trust Wallet team shares the same values as us and the products are very complementary,” Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao told TechCrunch in an interview. “For users who like to withdraw funds into a wallet now we have a product they can use. “We plan to keep the app as independent as possible. There will be more features going into it but not so much from a Binance demand perspective. We are like the addition of a godfather for the baby…...

Bloomberg : Tencent's stock has dropped 25% from its January peak, erasing $143B in value, as global investors become warier of big tech's potential growth   —  If you thought the slump in U.S. technology stocks was bad, take a look at Tencent Holdings Ltd.  —  The Chinese Internet giant has tumbled 25 percent … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2Ov8Vb2

As Internet of Things (IoT) devices become more prevalent, so do the ways that hackers exploit them, according to the Darktrace 2018 Threat Report, released Tuesday. In one instance, hackers took over a digital parking payment kiosk and connected it to websites featuring adult content. In another instance, hackers connected to industrial blenders, slicers and other connected devices on a food assembly line in an attempt to access the greater network. In a recent incident, hackers took control of a digital parking kiosk and connected it to websites featuring adult content, according to researchers at the cybersecurity company Darktrace. The kiosk didn't actually  display the content, which actually makes the stunt more confusing: If it wasn't for a weird prank, then why even bother? "It’s unknown what the attacker’s motive might have been," says Darktrace. But it points to a worrisome trend, as the company revealed Tuesday by Darktrace in its annual Threat Re...