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Rocket Lab is preparing for its next launch, currently set to take place in May from its launch facility in New Zealand. The payload for the flight are two satellites to join BlackSky’s Earth observation constellation, but Rocket Lab has a secondary goal crucial to its aim of adding reusability to its Electron launch vehicle: Recovering the booster stage after its return from space.

This isn’t the first time Rocket Lab has done a booster recovery; last December, it fished one out of the sea following its aptly-named ‘Return to Sender’ mission. For this flight, dubbed ‘Running Out of Toes,’ the goal is roughly the same, but the Electron vehicle has some upgrades and modifications that will help Rocket Lab gather even more data, and make progress towards actually fully reusing one of these boosters once they get it back.

“We were very, very pleased with the condition of the [first] booster we got back with basically no modifications to any of the thermal protection systems,” Rocket Lab CEO and founder Peter Beck explained in an interview. “The way that we enter with the booster is obviously engines-first and propagate a big shockwave forward. This next flight is the next iteration where we’ve upgraded the heat shield to be able to actually carry those loads, because we know those loads now.”

Flight one provided plenty of valuable data about what the actual stresses were on the Electron booster during re-entry — information that engineers on the ground could make educated guesses about, but couldn’t actually really know without a real-world test. The data collected by sensors onboard the rocket during that December flight provided Rocket Lab the ability to redesign Electron’s heat shield for a “major increase in performance and strength,” according to Beck.

This second flight will test the efficacy of those improvements, and provide even more data to the Rocket Lab team, which will be used to inform the design of the third and final planned recovery test. That will focus on adjusting the re-entry procedure so that the Electron booster sheds even more of its speed while coming back into the atmosphere, which makes Rocket Lab’s final recovery steps — a parachute-assisted slowdown and a mid-air helicopter capture — more viable.

“There’ll be one other design iteration after this, where we will look to scrub even more velocity in the air for more heat off the stage, to get us to that point where it really is worth introducing the other elements of the helicopter to go and pick up a stage that we feel like we could go and re-fly,” Beck said.

That third and final splashdown test should happen sometime later this year, if all goes to plan. And while Rocket Lab doesn’t aim to actually re-fly any of the boosters from these three development tests, Beck told me that certain components from the first booster they got back have been re-integrated into this second test vehicle, and the plan is to recover and re-use even more parts for test #3.

Beck said that bringing the booster back to the Rocket Lab factory and essentially cutting it into tiny pieces is actually the best way for the company’s engineers to learn about what happens during re-entry, and what parts of the rocket are affected most.

“There’s nothing like putting a stage back in the factory to really understand,” he explained. “You can have all the instrumentation you want, but we brought that stage back here and the first thing we did is, we cut it up. We cut all the heat-affected areas, all of the areas that are in the shadow of flow, and then start doing tensile polls on them to understand the material properties.”

All of this work drives towards the end goal of re-flying a recovered Electron booster — which will be a major accomplishment not only because it should help Rocket Lab increase its launch pace, but also because the vehicle was never designed for reusability to begin with. I asked Beck whether that first re-flight of a recovered Electron will be a commercial mission, or just a test without a customer payload.

“I would imagine it would be a commercial mission, simply because we’re not going to put anything on the pad that we don’t have really high confidence in anyway,” he said. “I suspect the first reused vehicles will have quite a lot of refurbishment on them, because if you look at the only other company that has demonstrated reusability [SpaceX], it’s been many, many years of learning and understanding. You don’t just kind of grab a launch vehicle, say it looks good, put it back on the pad and fly again. It’s a very iterative process of building confidence and assurance.”

While introducing reusability to Electron has benefits in its own right for that launch vehicle, the process of developing that capability has also been invaluable for Rocket Lab’s efforts to build out its next spacecraft, the higher-capacity Neutron launch system, according to Beck. Neutron is designed to launch and land propulsively, and to include a lot more usability by design from the very start.

“Electron was designed to be the world’s most manufacturable launch vehicle — Neutron is designed to be the most reusable launch vehicle,” Beck said. “They’re very different paradigms, but unusually we now have experience in both. For Neutron, the innovation really is around reusability, and there’ll be some interesting bits shortly, when we we reveal a little bit more about the vehicle architecture, that will make it very obvious to what degree we’re going to make this a reusable launch vehicle.”

Samsung’s Galaxy SmartTag+, the company’s competitor to Apple’s forthcoming lost-item finder known as AirTags, has now arrived. Samsung had first announced its Tile competitor known as the Galaxy SmartTag, a Bluetooth-powered locator, during its press event in January. At the time, it teased that a ultra-wideband (UWB) powered version called the Galaxy SmartTag+ would arrive sometime later in the year, without giving a specific time frame.

Now it’s here. The newly launched iteration will offer support for both Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and UWB, and can be attached to the everyday items you want to keep track of — like backpacks or keychains, for example.

Like Apple’s rumored (and accidentally confirmed) AirTags, the SmartTag+ for Samsung device owners offers more precise finding capabilities because of its use of UWB technology, which the recently launched Galaxy SmartTag doesn’t include.

When items go missing, SmartTag+ users will be able to use AR technology to help locate the tags more easily using their Samsung phone, because of its spatial awareness capabilities. As you get closer to the tag’s location, you can also opt to have it make a loud ring — which can help if it’s fallen under something, like a sofa cushion.

Like Tile’s UWB device, SmartTag+ also supports a sort of community find type of feature where any nearby Galaxy device that’s opted in will be able to help locate lost items and notify their owners through the SmartThings Find network. Samsung says this data is encrypted so the tag’s location is only known to its owner.

But unlike the earlier SmartTag, which has expanded to include tags that come in pink and green, the SmartTag+ comes only in black and gray at launch.

Because the new beacons rely on UWB, Samsung says they will only work with Galaxy devices that include UWB technology, including the Galaxy Note20 Ultra, Galaxy S21+, Galaxy S21 Ultra, and Galaxy Z Fold2.

The SmartTag+’s arrival comes at a time when the lost item beacon market is poised for a shakeup.

Apple’s plans to enter this space, where today businesses like Tile dominate, could be fairly disruptive. Apple’s AirTags will leverage UWB to capture spatial and directional data, which will make finding lost items with the tags attached easier and more accurate. But AirTags will also integrate with Apple’s Find My app, which has now opened up to third-party manufacturers as of this week, including the makers of earbuds and e-bikes, among others.

Notably absent from that early lineup is Tile, which also has its own UWB tracker on the way. Tile doesn’t want to give up the customer relationship it has already established via its own app and hand that over to Apple instead, we understand. Instead, it plans to offer its own UWB tracker and AR finding features through its own iOS app.

Samsung, however, doesn’t have that issue as its first-party trackers are designed for its own devices. This SmartTag+ is basically the AirTag for Samsung owners, and if and when Apple launches its own beacons, the demand for the Android version could be impacted.

The company will begin to sell the new SmartTag+ on April 16th.

Samsung’s earlier Galaxy SmartTags cost $29.99. The new SmartTag+ are $10 more at $39.99 in the U.S.

Edraak, an online education nonprofit, exposed the private information of thousands of students after uploading student data to an unprotected cloud storage server, apparently by mistake.

The nonprofit, founded by Jordan’s Queen Rania and headquartered in the kingdom’s capital, was set up in 2013 to promote education across the Arab region. The organization works with several partners, including the British Council and edX, a consortium set up by Harvard, Stanford and MIT.

In February, researchers at U.K. cybersecurity firm TurgenSec found one of Edraak’s cloud storage servers containing at least tens of thousands of students’ data, including spreadsheets with students’ names, email addresses, gender, birth year, country of nationality and some class grades.

TurgenSec, which runs Breaches.UK, a site for disclosing security incidents, alerted Edraak to the security lapse. A week later, their email was acknowledged by the organization but the data continued to spill. Emails seen by TechCrunch show the researchers tried to alert others who worked at the organization via LinkedIn requests, and its partners, including the British Council.

Two months passed and the server remained open. At its request, TechCrunch contacted Edraak, which closed the servers a few hours later.

In an email this week, Edraak chief executive Sherif Halawa told TechCrunch that the storage server was “meant to be publicly accessible, and to host public course content assets, such as course images, videos, and educational files,” but that “student data is never intentionally placed in this bucket.”

“Due to an unfortunate configuration bug, however, some academic data and student information exports were accidentally placed in the bucket,” Halawa confirmed.

“Unfortunately our initial scan did not locate the misplaced data that made it there accidentally. We attributed the elements in the Breaches.UK email to regular student uploads. We have now located these misplaced reports today and addressed the issue,” Halawa said.

The server is now closed off to public access.

It’s not clear why Edraak ignored the researchers’ initial email, which disclosed the location of the unprotected server, or why the organization’s response was not to ask for more details. When reached, British Council spokesperson Catherine Bowden said the organization received an email from TurgenSec but mistook it for a phishing email.

Edraak’s CEO Halawa said that the organization had already begun notifying affected students about the incident, and put out a blog post on Thursday.

Last year, TurgenSec found an unencrypted customer database belonging to U.K. internet provider Virgin Media that was left online by mistake, containing records linking some customers to adult and explicit websites.

More from TechCrunch:

• U.S. charges California man over Shopify data breach
• MobiKwik investigating data breach after 100M user records found online
• FatFace tells customers to keep its data breach ‘strictly private’
• How Jamaica failed to handle its JamCOVID scandal
• Roll still doesn’t know how its hot wallet was hacked

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Howard Lerman, the co-founder and CEO of Yext, has a new startup called Wonder Inventions, which is officially launching its first product today — Dynascore.

Let’s focus on Dynascore first. Lerman said he and his team created the product to solve the problem of the ever-growing demand for video content, which often relies on stock music. But by its nature, stock music isn’t designed for a specific video or a specific length, which can lead to some awkward fits, or require producers to edit their videos to match the music since “you can’t just chop three seconds out of a song and put it together.”

Dynascore, however, can take an existing piece of music and adapt it to a video of any length. It can also adjust the music to put the transitions, pauses and endings where you want them.

Lerman and his team demonstrated this for me, taking a fitness commercial and fitting different pieces of music to it, as well as adjusting the length of the commercial and where the transitions fell. Each time, Dynascore would generate a new version of the track that flowed well with the commercial (though I got the sense that if you’ve picked the wrong song for the video, no amount of adjustment can help).

To achieve this, Lerman said Dynascore examines a song and breaks it down to “the smallest unit of music that makes musical sense,” which it calls at a “morphone.” So depending on the specifications, it can assemble those morphones in ways that maximize what the company calls “musicoherence” — basically, to make sure it still flows like a real song.

Image Credits: Dynascore

Lerman emphasized that that Dynascore’s technology isn’t trying to write music from scratch. Instead, it’s adapting human compositions — there are Masterworks, a.k.a. classic compositions that are in the public domain, as well as around 1,000 original compositions to start.

“There’s a lot of companies out there that use AI to write music,” he said. “They train their models on Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, but the stuff that comes out of it is trash […] The critical breakthrough we realized is that computers cannot write music, the same way that AI can’t write a film and can’t write a book. But AI can reconstruct music in a way that the human ear responds to.”

After a free trial, pricing for Dynascore starts at $19 per month. It’s available as a desktop app for Mac and Windows, as well as an extension for editing software Adobe Premiere Pro. The company has also built a Developer API to integrate into other apps, starting with video builder Biteable and marketing production tool Rocketium.

Dynascore is just the first product that we should expect from Wonder Inventions, which Lerman said will develop a whole portfolio of new products.

Image Credits: Dynascore

“We’re not starting Wonder Inventions for a single idea,” he said. “Wonder Inventions is 20 master inventors who are some of the most creative and brilliant and people we’ve ever met, and they will develop many products that will have synergies.”

Lerman himself is serving as Wonder’s chairman while he remains CEO at Yext, which he described as his full-time job. When pressed on whether there’s a unifying vision for the company beyond making cool stuff, he replied, “Thirty years ago, when people started a business, it would be about the company. Now when a company is started, it’s about the product” — something he attributed to venture capitalists’ focus on a single, scalable idea.

“I don’t think any VC would fund Dynascore — it’s too goofy and someone would look at the [total addressable market] and say, ‘I don’t think this is a multi-billion dollar category,'” Lerman continued. He doesn’t necessarily disagree with that assessment, but he added, “It can be great first product, with more hits to come.”

There’s been a lot of investment in machine learning startups recently as companies try to push the notion into a wider variety of endeavors. Comet, a company that helps customers iterate on models in an experimentation process designed to eventually reach production, announced a $13 million Series A today.

Scale Venture Partners led the round with help from existing investors Trilogy Equity Partners and Two Sigma Ventures. The startup has raised almost $20 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Investors saw a company that has grown revenue over 500% over the last year, says Gideon Mendels, co-founder and CEO. “Things have been working very well for us. On the product side, we’ve continued to double down on what we call experimentation management where we are really tracking these models — data that came into them, the hyper parameters and helping teams to debug and understand what’s going on with their models,” he said.

In addition to the funding, the company is also announcing an expansion of the platform to follow the models into post production with a product they are calling Comet Model Production Monitoring (MPM).

“The model production monitoring product essentially focuses on models post production. The original product was more around how multiple offline experiments are modeled during training, while MPM is focused on these models once they hit production for the first time,” Mendels explained.

Andy Vitus, partner at investor Scale Venture Partners, sees model lifecycle management tooling like Comet’s as a developing market. “Machine learning and AI will drive the future of enterprise software, and ensuring that organizations have full visibility and control of a model’s life cycle will be imperative to it,” Vitus said in a statement

As the company grows, it’s opening a new engineering hub in Israel in addition to its office in NYC. While these offices are closed for now, Mendels says that they will have a hybrid office when the pandemic ebbs.

“Moving forward we are planning to have an office in New York City and another office in Tel Aviv. But we’re not going to require anyone to work from the office if they choose not to, or, they can come in a couple days a week. And we’re still going to support hires from around the world.”