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Myanmar’s new military government has ordered local telecom firms to temporarily block Facebook days after the military seized power in the Southeast Asian nation in a military coup.

Several users on Myanmar subreddit reported moments ago that Facebook was already inaccessible on their phones, suggesting that internet service providers had already started to comply with the order, which demanded compliance by midnight Wednesday. (it’s about 4.30 am Thursday in Myanmar at the time of writing.)

Myanmar’s new government alleges that Facebook is contributing to instability in the country and in its order has cited a section of the local telecom law that justifies many actions for the greater benefit of public and state.

NetBlocks, which tracks global internet usage, reports that MPT, a state-owned telecom operator that commands the market, has blocked Facebook as well as Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp on its network.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move comes after days of unrest in Myanmar, where earlier this week military took control of the country and declared a state of emergency for a year after detaining civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other democratically elected leaders of her ruling National League for Democracy.

Facebook, which has become synonymous with the internet in Myanmar, has long been blamed for not doing enough to curb the spread of misinformation that prompted real-world violence in the country.

A human rights report in 2018 said that Facebook was used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in Myanmar. Later in the same year, Facebook executives agreed that they hadn’t done enough.

BuzzFeed News reported this week that Facebook executives have now pledged to take proactive content moderation steps in Myanmar, which they termed as “Temporary High-Risk Location.”

This is a developing story. More to follow…

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/myanmar-orders-telecom-networks-to-temporarily-block-facebook/

Today, Andreessen Horowitz founder Marc Andreessen announced that social media product veteran Sriram Krishnan will be joining the firm as their latest general partner.

Krishnan, whose previous roles include stints at Snap, Facebook and Twitter, has gained a higher profile in recent weeks from his recurring audio show “The Good Time Show” on Clubhouse. His recent talk with Tesla CEO Elon Musk was something of a watershed moment for the audio chat platform driving plenty of new attention to the budding app.

This announcement follows a report in The Information regarding the hire earlier this week.

Krishnan’s hire comes at an interesting point for Andreessen Horowitz, the firm is at the center of plenty of chatter among media circles regarding their “go direct” content strategy. At the same time, a16z and its leadership have played an increasingly hard-nosed role in driving a broader backlash against tech media in recent years among founders and tech enthusiasts in their orbit. Krishnan has spent much of the past couple years building out his flirtations with “tech optimism” content with his interview newsletter “The Observer Effect,” his Clubhouse show and his prolific Twitter usage.

Broader “tech pessimism” among media outlets has, I think, partially been owed to a swift and outspoken shift in thinking regarding the societal responsibilities of social media platforms to more aggressively moderate the content they are surfacing on a global scale. Some of the partners at a16z, a Facebook backer, have been among the more vocal in pushing back on these critiques even as the executives at their portfolio companies have seemed more amenable to shift their thinking.

In his blog post, Andreessen notes that Krishnan will be joining the firm’s consumer team to invest in areas that include social.

Krishnan, well-regarded in tech circles, may play an important role at the firm as they approach more social investments in a world where the effects of rapidly scaled consumer platforms have become more understood. The firm and its partners have been throwing their full support behind Clubhouse in an aggressive push to promote the platform, flexing the firm’s celebrity connections and influence along the way as the platform quickly picks up millions of new users. Krishnan’s direct operator roles engaging with the product struggles of building platforms that responsibly scale will likely be an asset as the firm faces increased competition across an increasingly frothy venture market.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/social-platform-veteran-sriram-krishnan-is-andreessen-horowitzs-latest-general-partner/

The idea of a virtual concert tour might seem tailor-made for the pandemic, but musician Todd Rundgren said he’s actually been thinking about osmething like this for years.

Rundgren told me that he’d become frustrated with our “collapsing” air travel system — exacerbated by hurricanes and climate change — that increasingly left him “sitting somewhere, unable to get to my next gig.” So he was already convinced that he need to “start imagining other ways” to reach audiences.

But it was in the context of COVID-19 that Rundgren finally decided to make it happen, with his Clearly Human Tour kicking off on February 14. He’d been planning for a traditional tour, but the dates kept getting pushed back due to the pandemic, until he finally told the organizers, “You have to let me do this. I can’t be committed to you and go two years without touring.”

Rundgren and his band will be performing entirely from Chicago, where they’ll play songs from across his career, as well as the entirety of his album “Nearly Human.” But the tour is taking place virtually across 25 U.S. cities, starting in Buffalo on February 14 and ending on March 22 in Seattle.

Rundgren said he found this more appealing than the idea of performing “one show and then blast it out to everybody.”

“People plan weeks or months in advance for this particular event, it attracts people from all over the metropolitan area or a particular region,” he said. “It’s a social event as much as anything else, and that’s what we are trying to do with the localization.”

That means performing live shows at 8pm, according to whatever the local time zone might be. Rundgren said the band will also try to “self-hypnotize” to get into the proper spirit: “We’ll dress all the walls with posters, sports team memorabilia … We’ll get food flown in from familiar local eateries.”

Other features include virtual meet and greets with local fans, as well as placing video screens around the concert venue to display virtual audience member. (There are a limited number of in-person tickets for sale as well, but obviously those attendees will need to be in Chicago.)

The concerts will be geofenced, although Rundgren said the approach has evolved — it’s less about limiting the Buffalo concert to Buffalo attendees, and more about enforcing geographic restrictions based on Rundgren’s contractual obligations. Or as he put it, “It’s less about enclosing an audience, and more about fencing them out.”

Image Credits: Todd Rundgren

Rundgren is staging the tour with support from NoCap, the livestreaming concert startup founded by musicians Cisco Adler and Donavon Frankenreiter. NoCap has been around for less than a year, and Adler said that while it sold 700 tickets for its first show, it’s now selling “30, 40, 50 thousand tickets” per show. And he predicted that virtual concerts won’t be going away when the pandemic ends.

“There are all these underserved markets that you can visit once every five years, if that,” he said. “The future of this becomes a hybrid model.”

After all, he noted that televising sports has only made them “bigger and more global.” Similarly, when Adler was thinking about livestreaming concerts, he said, “I didn’t look at it as: How do we build a Band Aid and help everyone through this gap? It was more: How do we build a bridge to the other side of what music can be?”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/todd-rundgren-clearly-human/

Founders — by now you must have heard about TechCrunch Early Stage events on April 1 and 2 and July 8 and 9. The two-day founder and entrepreneur bootcamp brings together top experts to teach you how to get ahead and build a successful company. This year on the second day of each event we’re adding a twist — the Early Stage Pitch-Off. TechCrunch is on the hunt to showcase 10 early-stage startups to our global audience of investors, press and tech industry leaders. Apply here for the April 2 Early Stage Pitch-Off by February 21.

It wouldn’t be a TC event without highlighting the best startups in the business. Here’s how it will work. Ten founders will pitch on stage for five minutes, followed by a five-minute Q&A with an esteemed panel of VC judges. The top three will then proceed to the finals, pitching again but this time with a more intensive Q&A and a new panel of judges. The winner will receive a feature article on TechCrunch.com, one-year free subscription to ExtraCrunch and a free Founder Pass to TechCrunch Disrupt this fall.

Nervous to pitch on-stage in front of thousands? Fear not. After completing the application, selected founders will receive several training sessions during a remote mini-bootcamp, communication training and personalized pitch-coaching by the Startup Battlefield team. Selected startups will also be announced on TechCrunch.com in advance of the show. 

What does it take to qualify? TechCrunch is looking for early-stage, pre-Series-A companies with limited press. The Early Stage Pitch-Off is open to companies from around the globe, consumer or enterprise and in any industry — biotech, space, mobility, impact, SaaS, hardware, sustainability and more.

Founders don’t miss your chance to pitch your company on the world’s best tech stage. Apply today!

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/announcing-the-tc-early-stage-pitch-off/

There’s more AI news out there than anyone can possibly keep up with. But you can stay tolerably up to date on the most interesting developments with this column, which collects AI and machine learning advancements from around the world and explains why they might be important to tech, startups or civilization.

Before we get to the research in this edition, however, here’s a study from the ITIF trade group evaluating the relative positions of the U.S., EU and China in the AI “race.” I put race in quotes because no one knows where we’re going or how long the track is — though it’s still worth checking who’s in front every once in a while.

The answer this year is the U.S., which is ahead largely due to private investment from large tech firms and venture capital. China is catching up in terms of money and published papers but still lags far behind and takes a hit for relying on U.S. silicon and infrastructure.

The EU is operating at a smaller scale, and making smaller gains, especially in the area of AI-based startup funding. Part of that is no doubt the inflated valuations of U.S. companies, but the trend is clear — and perhaps an opportunity for investors is as well, who might see this as an opportunity to get in on some high-quality startups without needing quite so much capital.

The full report (PDF) goes into much more detail, of course, if you’re interested in a more granular breakdown of these numbers.

If the authors had known about this new Amazon-funded AI research center at USC they probably would have pointed at it as a good example of the type of partnership that helps keep U.S. production of AI scholars up.

A touch of class

On the farthest possible end from monetization and practical application, we have two interesting uses of machine learning in fields where human expertise is valued in different ways.

Each color indicates a different mode style. Image Credits: EPFL

At Switzerland’s EPFL, some music-minded boffins at the Digital and Cognitive Musicology lab were investigating the shift in the use of modes in classical music over the ages — major, minor, other or none at all. In an effort to objectively categorize thousands of pieces from hundreds of years and composers, they created an unsupervised machine learning system to listen to and categorize the pieces according to mode. (Some of the data and methods are available on GitHub.)

“We already knew that in the Renaissance, for example, there were more than two modes. But for periods following the Classical era, the distinction between the modes blurs together. We wanted to see if we could nail down these differences more concretely,” he explained in a university news release.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/deep-science-ais-with-high-class-and-higher-altitudes/