Tag: Media

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Google’s new media literacy program teaches kids how to spot disinformation and fake news

Google announced this morning it’s expanding its two-year-old digital safety and citizenship curriculum for children, “Be Internet Awesome,” to now include media literacy — specifically, the ability to identify so-called “fake news” and other false content. The company is launching six new media literacy activities for the curriculum that will help teach kids things like how to avoid a phishing attack, what bots are, how to verify that information is credible, how to evaluate sources, how to identify disinformation online, spot fake URLs, and more.

The new media literacy classes — which frankly, some adults should read through as well — were developed in collaboration with Anne Collier, executive director of The Net Safety Collaborative, and Faith Rogow, Ph.D., co-author of The Teacher’s Guide to Media Literacy and a co-founder of the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

“We need the right tools and resources to help kids make the most of technology, and while good digital safety and citizenship resources exist for families, more can be done for media literacy,” writes educator and teachmama.com founder Amy Mascott, in an announcement on Google’s blog today. “I’ve worked alongside dozens of educators who believe that media literacy is essential to safety and citizenship in the digital age, but agree that it’s a topic that can be tough to cover.”

The courses offer kids not only instruction, but also a combination of activities and discussion starters aimed at helping them develop critical thinking skills when it comes to pursuing online resources.

Its overall theme, the course material explains, is to help kids understand that the content they find online isn’t necessarily true or reliable  — and it could even involve malicious efforts to steal their information or identity.

The kids learn how phishing works, why it’s a threat, and how to avoid it. They then practice their anti-phishing skills by acting out and discussing reactions to suspicious online texts, posts, friend requests, pictures, and emails.

In the bots section, they learn about how A.I. works and compare and contrast talking to a bot versus talking to a human being.

In the following media literacy sections, kids learn what a credible source is, how to figure out what a source’s motives are, and learn that “just because a person is an expert on one thing doesn’t make them an expert on everything.”

In a related classroom activity, the kids pick a question related to something they’ve seen online or are learning in class and try to get the answers online, while figuring out if the sources are credible.

They also learn to fact check credible sources with other credible sources as a way to look for a variety of sources.

“If you can’t find a variety of credible sources that agree with the source you are checking, you shouldn’t believe that source,” the curriculum explains.

Kids are additionally taught how to spot fake information using clues like deceptive URLs as well as checking the sources for credibility. They’re told that some people don’t know how to do this, and share fake information online — which is how it spreads.

“There are a lot of people and groups who are so passionate about what they believe that they twist the truth to get us to agree with them. When the twisted information is disguised as a news story, that’s disinformation,” the curriculum says.

Kids are also informed that some of the fake news organizations are hard to spot because they use names that sound like they’re real.

And the course delves into various tricks some websites use — like using photos that don’t relate to the story, using clickbait words like “shocking” or “outrageous” which they know make people curious,” using bold, underline, exclamation points or ALL CAPS, to convince you to agree with them.

This section concludes with an online game, Reality River, that asks kids to use their best judgment in order to cross the river rapids. This takes place in Interland, the game developed as a companion to Google’s digital safety and citizenship curriculum.

The overall goal of the media literacy course is to encourage the kids to make checking all news and information a habit — not just those they think seem suspicious.

Google says the new curriculum is available online for both teachers and families alike to use, and are offered in English, Spanish and eight other languages.

Google is partnering with the YMCA and National PTA across multiple cities to host online safety workshops, as well.

 

 

 

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Byju’s-owned Osmo education startup enters pre-schoolers market

Osmo, a Palo Alto-based education startup acquired by Indian unicorn Byju’s for $120 million this year, is expanding its product lineup to serve a new and largely untapped market: pre-schoolers.

Osmo today announced Osmo Little Genius Starter Kit, a set of tools that aims to help children that have yet to enter schools to understand letters, expand their vocabulary, and build motor and social skills. The kit is priced at $79 and is available through Amazon, Target, and Apple stores in the U.S.

The kit provides children with sticks and rings of varying shapes, tasking them to assemble them to mimic objects and words that they see through video instructions on an accompanying tablet. Osmo claims its kit for pre-schoolers is based on Friedrich Froebel’s and Maria Montessori’s manipulative with advanced computer vision for a personalized experience.

Pramod Sharma, CEO of Osmo, told TechCrunch in an interview that he believes that the market for pre-schoolers remains untapped with little innovation hitting the space over the last 100 years. This new product launch represents a large and new opportunity for Osmo, which has so far catered to kids aged between five and 12.

In the U.S. alone, there are about 10 million kids who are in the pre-school stage. Additionally, “half of all the toys sale are aimed at kids who have not entered schools,” Sharma said.

The announcement today comes weeks after Byju’s, which acquired Osmo for $120 million earlier this year, expanded its own product catalog. Earlier this month, it partnered with Disney to roll out a new app that aims to educate children aged between six and eight.

Until recently, Byju’s focused entirely on high school students and those preparing for university entrance exams. It has since broadened its courses to cover all school grades. Byju’s, which competes with Unacademy in India, is heavily-funded by investors and valued at nearly $4 billion — it is widely acknowledged to be the leader in India’s e-learning market.

To tackle the pre-schoolers’ market, Osmo is leveraging on the interactive content produced by Byju’s, Sharma said. The nature of the product and market it serves will allow Osmo and Byju’s to expand the kit to many global markets, he explained.

The distribution of the new kit could prove challenging, however, Sharma acknowledged. Osmo has tie-ups with more than 30,000 U.S. elementary classrooms that help it deploy its product to a large number of students. It lacks that for earlier-stage education, but Osmo does plan to replicate that model in some capacity by partnering with pre-schools.

Sharma said also that a number of parents have asked Osmo whether it will have any products for their younger children which gives him confidence that there is raw demand. That said, he acknowledged that Osmo will initially need to be more aggressive than usual with its marketing and other outreach programs to parents.

In terms of subject matter, Osmo has largely focused on science and math to date. Moving forward, though, it plans to broaden its existing product lineup with more content and explore subjects including English language, history and social studies to “cover every aspect of learning,” Sharma said.

Byju’s claims 35 million registered users and some 2.4 million paid customers. It generated around $205 million in revenue in the fiscal year that ended in March this year. The company said it aims to increase that figure to over $430 million this year.

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Cricket World Cup highlights just how big video streaming is in India

As hundreds of millions of people turn their attention to the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup tournament, many of them are using an Indian streaming service to follow the ins and outs of the game.

More than 100 million users tuned in to Hotstar, an on-demand streaming service owned by Disney, on June 16, the day India and Pakistan played a league match against each other. That’s the highest engagement the four-year-old service has clocked on its platform to date, it said in a statement today.

Hotstar said about 66% of its viewers came from outside of big metro cities, an equally remarkable feat that illustrates the growing adoption of the streaming service in smaller cities and towns that remain sporadic consumers — if at all — of internet services.

To be sure, these 100 million users are not paying subscribers. Hotstar offers five-minutes streaming of live events to users at no cost. The platform, which competes with Netflix, Prime Video, AltBalaji, Zee5, and YouTube in India, declined to share its paying subscribers base. In April, the company said it had 300 million monthly active users.

Regardless, 100 million daily active users is an impressive feat for any service in India. Especially for streaming services that, thanks to dramatically dwindling data prices in the country in recent years, are increasingly changing users’ behavior toward intensive data usage online. (For some context, Facebook and WhatsApp have under 300 monthly active users in India; Google’s YouTube, which is its fastest growing service in the nation, also has fewer than 300 million monthly active users in the country.)

It also helps that the game between India and Pakistan, two neighboring nations with a long history, remains one of the most anticipated events for cricket following countries.

Cricket itself has emerged as the biggest driver of video streaming in India in the last three years. The game is followed by hundreds of millions of users across the globe — if not more. In 2010, Hilary Clinton urged nations to look at cricket as a model for improving relationships with other countries.

“I might suggest that if we are searching for a model of how to meet tough international challenges with skill, dedication and teamwork, we need only look to the Afghan national cricket team,” she said as U.S. Secretary of State in 2010.

Star India, which operates Hotstar, owns rights to most cricket tournaments, a bet that has immensely helped it scale its business. This then wouldn’t come as a surprise that both Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, that do not offer live streaming of sporting events in India, have produced shows themed around cricket.

Both Amazon and Netflix have fewer than 5 million subscribers in India, according to industry estimates. While Amazon Prime Video, which bundles a range of other services including faster delivery of goods, and Hotstar are priced at Rs 999 ($14.4) for a year-long service, Netflix’s monthly offering starts at Rs 500 ($7.2) — though it has been experimenting with more options.

Even Facebook made an unsuccessful bid to acquire streaming rights to a cricket tournament in India two years ago, months before it began to talk about its Watch ambitions. That cricket tournament was Indian Premier League (IPL), which concluded its 12th edition last month. Hotstar, which also owns the right to stream IPL matches, set a global record for most simultaneous views to a live event in the final game of the tournament last month.

Beating its own previous record, Hotstar claimed that more than 18.6 million viewers watched the game simultaneously. Interestingly enough, even as a record 100 million plus users simultaneously watched the game between India and Pakistan this month, Hotstar said the concurrent views count peaked at 15.6 million.

It remains unclear why Hotstar was not able to break its concurrent record that day. TechCrunch reported earlier this month that Hotstar had identified a security flaw in its service that allowed some Safari browser users to access and distribute Hotstar’s content without a paid subscription. To fix it, Hotstar had temporarily discontinued support for Safari browser.

Last year, Hotstar and Walmart-owned Flipkart began a collaboration on building an advertising business in India. According to media planners TechCrunch has spoken to, Hotstar-Flipkart’s digital ad business is already the third largest in India, only behind Google and Facebook.

For Hotstar, the biggest challenge is in retaining customers after the mega cricket season ends next month. Each year, the service struggles to appease customers and sees a massive drop in users count after the cricket season is over, a source familiar with the matter said. In the last one year, it has started to invest in producing its original shows. Many inside the company have high hopes that people will show up to watch the Indian versions of Jim and Pam in the remake of NBC’s “The Office.” It premieres on Hotstar later this week.

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Original Content podcast: Netflix’s ‘When They See Us’ is difficult-but-essential viewing

“When They See Us,” a new miniseries on Netflix, can be so infuriating that it’s hard to watch — especially its first hour, which depicts the arrest of the teenaged boys who became known as The Central Park Five, and shows police detectives coercing them into confessing to a brutal rape.

We review the series on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast. Some of us struggled to get through that first episode, and the episodes that follow have plenty of painful moments too, but “When They See Us” rewards viewers who persist with a moving and unforgettable dramatization of all the ways the system failed Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Antron McCray.

The show is already having an impact, with President Donald Trump facing questions about his aggressive campaign to have the death penalty applied to five boys who were ultimately exonerated (Trump remains unapologetic).

Meanwhile, prosecutor Linda Fairstein has resigned from several boards and was dropped by the publisher of her crime novels. Fairstein said the series was “full of distortions and falsehoods,” though some of her claims don’t seem to stand up. (Others who’ve followed the case are praising the series for its accuracy.)

So perhaps it’s not surprising that the review leads us to a broader conversation about some of the bigger issues that “When They See Us” raises, and about how much weight we should give to stories like this one, or like HBO’s “Chernobyl,” which bring a scripted approach (and presumably some degree of fiction) to historical events.

We also recap some of the week’s other streaming news, namely the latest TVs recommended by Netflix and the streamer’s new deal with “Pose” writer-director Janet Mock.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you want to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:45 Netflix recommended TVs
10:43 Netflix signs a deal with Janet Mock
17:15 When They See Us review
47:54 When They See Us spoiler discussion

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Netflix is testing a pop-out floating video player on desktop

Netflix is testing out a new feature that could mean you never have to stop watching, not even while you work – it’s a pop-out video player, similar to the one you may be used to from iOS and macOS for any website or app that supports Safari’s native video player. Basically, that means you can choose to ‘pop out’ the video and then reposition it anywhere on your screen for a picture-in-picture effect that remains visible over any other apps you might be using.

The streaming company told Engadget, which found this experimental feature, that it’s only a test, but you can see why this might be a useful feature for users. Netflix could offer this already to iOS and Mac users using built-in system tools, but because it uses is own player (in part likely for copyright protection), it instead has to build its own feature. The benefit of this is that it should be coming to both Windows PCs and Macs should it graduate from being an experiment to being a full-fledged product.

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YouTube confirms a test where the comments are hidden by default

YouTube’s comments section has a bad reputation. It’s even been called “the worst on the internet,” and a reflection of YouTube’s overall toxic culture where creators are rewarded for outrageous behavior — whether that’s tormenting and exploiting their children, filming footage of a suicide victim, promoting dangerous “miracle cures” or sharing conspiracies, to name a few high-profile examples. Now, the company is considering a design change that hides the comments by default.

The website XDA Developers first spotted the test on Android devices in India.

Today, YouTube’s comments don’t have a prominent position on its mobile app. On both iOS and Android devices, the YouTube video itself appears at the top of the screen, followed by engagement buttons for sharing, liking, disliking, downloading and saving the video. Below that are recommendations from YouTube’s algorithm in a section titled “Up Next.” If you actually want to visit the comments, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.

In the test, the comments have been removed from this bottom section of the page entirely.

Instead, they’ve been relocated to a new section that users can only view after clicking a button.

The new Comments button is found between the Thumbs Down and Share buttons, right below the video.

It’s unclear if this change will reduce or increase user engagement with comments, or if engagement will remain flat — something that YouTube likely wants to find out, too.

On the one hand, comments are hidden unless the user manually taps on the button to reveal them — users won’t happen upon them by scrolling down. On the other hand, putting the comments button behind a click at top of the page instead of forcing users to scroll could make them easier to access.

As XDA Developers reports, when you’ve loaded up this new Comments section, you can pull to refresh the page to see the newly-added comments appear. To exit, you tap the “X” button at the top of the window to close the section.

While it reported the test was underway in Android devices in India, we’ve confirmed it’s also appearing on iOS and is not limited to a particular region. That means it’s something YouTube wants to test on a broader scale, rather than a feature it’s considering for a localized version of its app for Indian users.

The change comes at a time when YouTube’s comments section has been discovered to be more than just the home to bullying, abuse, arguments, and other unhelpful content, but also a tool that was exploited by pedophiles. A ring of pedophiles had communicated through the comments to share videos and timestamps with one another.

YouTube reacted then by disabling comments on videos with kids. More recently, it’s been considering moving kids content to a separate app. (Unfortunately, it will never consider the appropriateness of having built a platform where young children can be put on public display for the whole world to see.)

A YouTube spokesperson confirmed the Comments test, in a statement, but downplayed its importance by referring to it as one of many small experiments the company is running.

“We’re always experimenting with ways to help people more easily find, watch, share and interact with the videos that matter most to them,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are testing a few different options on how to display comments on the watch page. This is one of many small experiments we run all the time on YouTube, and we’ll consider rolling features out more broadly based on feedback on these experiments.”

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Northzone’s Paul Murphy goes deep on the next era of gaming

As the gaming market continues to boom, billions of dollars are being invested in new games and new streaming platforms vying to own a piece of the action. Most of the value is accruing to the large incumbents in a space, however, and the entrance of Google and other big tech companies makes it difficult to identify where there are compelling opportunities for entrepreneurs to build new empires.

TechCrunch media analyst Eric Peckham recently sat down with Paul Murphy, Partner at European venture firm Northzone, to discuss Paul’s view of the market and where he is focusing his dollars. Below is the transcript of the conversation (edited for length and clarity):

Eric Peckham: You co-founded the hit mobile game Dots before moving to London and joining Northzone last year. Are you still bullish on investment opportunities in mobile gaming or do you think the market has changed?

Paul Murphy: I’m bullish on mobile gaming–the market is bigger than it has ever been. There’s a whole generation of people that have been trained to play games on mobile phones. So those are things that are very positive.

The challenge is you don’t really have a rising tide moment anymore. The winners have won. And so it’s very, very difficult for someone to enter with new content and build a business that’s as big as Supercell or King, regardless of how good their content is. So while the prize for winning in mobile gaming content big, the likelihood is smaller.

Where I’m spending most of my time is not on content, it’s on components within mobile gaming. We’re looking at infrastructure: different platforms that enable mobile gaming, like Bunch which we invested in.

Their product allows you to do live video and audio on top of mobile games. So we don’t have to take any content risk. We’re betting that this great product will fit into a large inventory ecosystem.

Peckham: New mobile game studios that are launching all seem to fall under the sphere of influence of these bigger companies. They get a strategic investment from Supercell or another company. To your point, it’s tough for a small startup to compete entirely on its own.

Murphy: It’s possible in mobile gaming still but it’s really, really hard now. At the same time, what you’ve seen is the odds of winning are lower. It is hard to reach the same scale when it costs you $5.00 to acquire a user today, whereas when Candy Crush launched, it was $0.05 per user. So it’s almost impossible to achieve King-like scale today.

Therefore, you’re looking at similar content risk with reduced upside, which makes that equation less attractive for venture capital. But it might be perfectly fine for an established company because they don’t need to do the marketing, they have the audience already.

The big gaming companies all struggle with the challenge of how to create the next hit IP. They have this machine that can bring any great game to market efficiently, with a large audience they can cross promote from and capital they can invest to build a big brand quickly. For them, the biggest challenge is getting the best content.

So it’s natural to me that the pendulum has swung towards strategic investors in mobile gaming content. Epic has a fund that they set up with Improbable, Supercell is making direct investments, Tencent has been making investments for years. Even from a content perspective, you’re probably going to see Apple, Google, and Amazon making more content investments in mobile gaming.

Image via Getty Images / aurielaki

Peckham: Does this same market dynamic apply to PC games and console games? Do you see a certain area within gaming where there’s still opportunity for independent startups to create the game itself and find success at a venture scale?

Murphy: The reason we made our investment in Klang Games, which is building an MMO called Seed that people will primarily play through PC, is that while there is content risk–you’re never going to get rid of the possibility that the IP doesn’t fly–if it works, it will be massive…an Earth-shattering level of success. If their vision comes to life, it will be very, very big.

So that one has all the risks that you’d have in any other game studio but the upside is exponentially larger, so the bet makes sense to us. And it so happens that it’s going to be on PC first, where there’s certainly a lot of competition but it’s not as saturated and the monetization methods are healthier than in mobile gaming. In PC, you don’t have to do free-to-play tactics that interfere with the gameplay.

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A chat with Niantic CEO John Hanke on the launch of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite

Just shy of three years ago, Pokémon GO took over the world. Players filled the sidewalks, and crowds of trainers flooded parks and landmarks. Anywhere you looked, people were throwing Pokéballs and chasing Snorlax.

As the game grew, so did the company behind it. Niantic had started its life as an experimental “lab” within Google — an effort on Google’s part to keep the team’s founder, John Hanke, from heading out to start his own thing. In the months surrounding GO’s launch, Niantic’s team shrank dramatically, spun out of Google, and then rapidly expanded… all while trying to keep GO’s servers from buckling under demand and to keep this massive influx of players happy. Want to know more about the company’s story so far? Check out the Niantic EC-1 on ExtraCrunch here.

Now Niantic is back with its next title, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Built in collaboration with WB Games, it’s a reimagining of Pokémon GO’s real-world, location-based gaming concept through the lens of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter universe.

I got a chance to catch up with John Hanke for a few minutes earlier this week — just ahead of the game’s US/UK launch this morning. We talked about how they prepared for this game’s launch, how it’s built upon a platform they’ve been developing across their other titles for years, and how Niantic’s partnership with WB Games works creatively and financially. Heres the transcript:

Greg Kumparak: Can you tell me a bit about how all this came to be?

John Hanke: Yeah, you know.. we did Ingress first, and we were thinking about other projects we could build. Pokémon was one that came up early, so we jumped on that — but the other one that was always there from the beginning, of the projects we wanted to do, was Harry Potter. I mean, it’s universally beloved. My kids love the books and movies, so it’s something I always wanted to do.

Like Pokémon, it was an IP we felt was a great fit for [augmented reality]. That line between the “muggle” world and the “magic” world was paper thin in the fiction, so imagining breaking through that fourth wall and experiencing that magic through AR seemed like a great way to use the technology to fulfill an awesome fan fantasy.

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Netflix wins rights to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Tick, Tick… Boom!’

“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda will be making his debut as a feature film director on Netflix .

Variety reports that Netflix won the rights to Miranda’s film adaptation of “Tick Tick … Boom!” following “a heated bidding war,” with Andrew Garfield (who played Eduardo Saverin in “The Social Network” and recently won a Tony for his role in the onstage revival of “Angels in America”) in talks to star.

The musical was written by Jonathan Larson, who went on to write “Rent.” It’s an autobiographical story about a composer who’s filled with anxiety and doubt as he approaches the age of 30. Larson first performed “Tick Tick … Boom!” as a solo show in 1990, and after larson’s death, playwright David Auburn adapted it into a three-actor musical that debuted Off Broadway in 2001.

“Dear Evan Hansen” writer Steven Levenson is writing the movie’s script.

While Miranda is best known for his work on the Broadway stage, he’s also made the move into film, writing songs for Disney’s “Moana” and appearing in last year’s “Mary Poppins Returns.”

He’ll also have a small role in next year’s movie adaptation of his first Broadway musical, “In The Heights,” which will be directed by Jon Chu. (Chu and the rest of the creative team behind “Crazy Rich Asians” famously turned down an offer from Netflix because they wanted a theatrical release.)

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A Netflix hack lets you feel the action in a scene by vibrating your phone

Netflix Hack Day, the company’s internal hackathon, has a habit of producing some amazing gems — like a brain-controlled interface, a Fitbit hack that shuts off Netflix when you fall asleep, a Netflix app for the original NES, and a way to navigate the Netflix app with Face ID and ARKit, to name a few. At this year’s Netflix Hack Day, employees ventured into areas like voice technology and haptics — the latter, so your phone could vibrate right along with the on-screen action, among other things.

Project Rumble Pack, as the hack that used haptics was called, takes inspiration from mobile gaming. Some games vibrate, which allows players to feel the action — like a bouncing ball, a car on a race track, an object getting hit or destroyed, and so on.

Similarly, Project Rumble lets you feel the action in a scene from a show or movie — like a fight, battle or big explosion. (Imagine a Michael Bay movie with Rumble Pack turned on!) The team behind the hack, Hans van de Bruggen and Ed Barker, demoed haptics in an episode of Voltron where a huge explosion makes the phone shake in your hands.

The hack was created by syncing Netflix content with haptic effects using Immersion Corporation technology.

Another hack called The Voice of Netflix, taught Netflix to speak using the voice of Netflix’s favorite characters. The team trained a neural net to find words in Netflix’s content, which could then be used to create new sentences on demand.

A third favorite was TerraVision — a practical hack that sounds like a business opportunity.

The hack lets filmmakers drop a photo of a look like they like for a film location into an interface, then get back the closest results from a library of location photos. The hack used a computer vision model trained to recognize places for its reverse image search functionality.

The final highlight was a silly hack that plays “walk-out music” — like the music that kicks in when Oscar speeches go too long — when someone overstays their allotted time in a booked conference room.

Sadly, many of Netflix’s hacks don’t tend to escape the confines of the hackathon itself. But they can inspire real-world projects in other ways, and help to keep the creativity flowing.

An overview of this year’s Netflix Hack Day, which focused on Netflix’s studio efforts, is below.