out of apertures shone

Stox.com is Invest.com’s prediction market product and it’s getting a little boost through a newly-opened token sale using Bancor’s smart token protocol. This announcement, while full of jargon, means that Stox will be able to raise money to develop infrastructure and increase its marketing and sales groups heatvape.
Stox is a spin-off of Invest.com, an established player in the financial market. Invest sees $50 million in annual revenue and 3 million registered clients. Stox will be an “open source, Ethereum-based prediction market platform” according to the team.
“The biggest difference, is that there is a real, substantial, experienced company behind this,” said CEO Ophir Gertner. “This isn’t a few folks and a whitepaper that have never managed a company, dealt with user acquisition, weather the ups and downs, etc.”
The team is calling its raise a “token generation event,” a move that distances them from the concept of the initial coin offering or ICO so popular in crypto jargon. Users can use the single token on Stox.com to “trade” on the outcome of “finance, sports, politics and even the weather.” Because it is open source anyone can connect to the platform and post a trade.
“Stox will feature Invest.com as its debut provider, but will be built in such a way that allows independent operators to join and partake in its ecosystem as well,” said Gertner.
The team isn’t concerned about the recent dip in cryptocurrencies.
“Rather than a negative signal for the space, we see it as supporting our assertion that this is exactly why you need real companies involved,” said Gertner. “Teams that have weathered the ups and downs of running a real business, that are experienced in user acquisition, and so forth.”Self-driving trucking startup Embark has raised $15 million in Series A financing, the company announced on Tuesday. Embark first broke cover back in February, when it revealed trucks equipped with its neural net-based deep learning approach to autonomous trucking ielts registration. The startup’s also revealing a team-up with heavy equipment manufacturer Peterbilt today, which will help it roll out its new group of test trucks.
The funding is led by Data Collective, and includes participation by YC Continuity, Maven Ventures and SV Angel. It will help Embark hire new talent for their engineering team, and add more trucks in order to help expand their test fleet across the U.S., with the aim of gearing up for a broad commercialized launch. Embark’s post-money valuation following this round is $75 million.
Embark originally built its test prototype on a Peterbilt 579 truck, and so the formal partnership with the semi truck maker is an exciting development, according to Embark CEO Alex Rodrigues. Peterbilt will be building the new test trucks for Embark’s fleet custom at its Denton, Texas factory, in order to help better tailor them to the startup’s needs.
The advantage of Embark’s approach, according to DCVC Managing Partner Matt Ocko in a statement, is that they’re “producing top-notch real-world driving results far more quickly and on far less capital than anyone else.” Embark’s solution offers great performance without requiring advance exhaustive mapping of all U.S. roads, he notes, which will cut down the time it takes to bring it to market.
Embark is also focusing on handling freeway driving, with a human driver on board who navigates city streets. Still, taking the freeway scenarios out of their hands should eventually mean that drivers can do more loads per day, increasing efficiency, cutting cost and addressing demand for trucking that is outpacing driver supply Managed Security. This, combined with the relatively low cost of Embark’s tech, should help U.S. truckers essentially purchase themselves a virtual “employee” in the form of semi-autonomous trucks, while still retaining work, the company says.

  

They were over the bridge now, and entering the northwest side of the town. "This is Main Street," said Mulligan, "and this," he said, crossing Main Street and turning right, "is the town square."
Even in the winter the town square was impressive, but Shadow knew that this place was meant to be seen in summer: it would be a riot of color, of poppies and irises and flowers of every kind, and the clump of birch trees in one corner would be a green and silver bower. Now it was colorless, beautiful in a skeletal way, the bandshell empty, the fountain turned off for the winter, the brownstone city hall capped by white snow .
"...and this," concluded Chad Mulligan, bringing the car to a stop outside a high glass-fronted old building on the west of the square, "is Mabel's."
He got out of the car, opened the passenger door for Shadow. The two men put their heads down against the cold and the wind, and hurried across the sidewalk and into a warm room, fragrant with the smells of new-baked bread, of pastry and soup and bacon.
The place was almost empty. Mulligan sat down at a table and Shadow sat opposite him. He suspected that Mulligan was doing this to get a feel for the stranger in town. Then again, the police chief might simply be what he appeared: friendly, helpful, good.
A woman bustled over to their table, not fat but big, her hair bottle-bronze kangertech ecig.
"Hello, Chad," she said. "You'll want a hot chocolate while you're thinking." She handed them two laminated menus.
"No cream on the top, though," he agreed. "Mabel knows me too well," he said to Shadow. "What'll it be, pal?"
"Hot chocolate sounds great," said Shadow. "And I'm happy to have the whipped cream on the top."
"That's good," said Mabel. "Live dangerously, hon. Are you going to introduce me, Chad? Is this young man a new officer ?"
"Not yet," said Chad Mulligan, with a flash of white teeth. "This is Mike Ainsel. He moved to Lakeside last night. Now, if you'll excuse me." He got up, walked to the back of the room, through the door marked POINTERS. It was next to a door marked SETTERS.
"You're the new man in the apartment up on Northridge Road. The old Pilsen place. Oh, yes," she said, happily, "I know just who you are. Hinzelmann was by this morning for his morning pasty, he told me all about you. You boys only having hot chocolate or you want to look at the breakfast menu?"
"Breakfast for me," said Shadow. "What's good?"
"Everything's good," said Mabel. "I make it. But this is the farthest south and east of the yoopie you can get pasties, and they are particularly good. Warming and filling too. My speciality."
  

Shadow's first, everything's just fine and jimdandy thank you officer. But it was too late for that, and he started to say, "I think I'm freezing. I was walking into Lakeside to buy food and clothes, but I underestimated the length of the walk"-he was that far through the sentence in his head, when he realized that all that had come out was "F-f-freezing," and a chattering noise, and he said, "So s-sorry. Cold. Sorry."


The cop pulled open the back door of the car and said, "You get in there this moment and warm yourself up, okay?" Shadow climbed in gratefully, and he sat in the back and rubbed his hands together, trying not to worry about frostbitten toes. The cop got back in the driver's seat. Shadow stared at him through the metal grille. Shadow tried not to think about the last time he'd been in the back of a police car, or to notice that there were no door handles in the back, and to concentrate instead on rubbing life back into his hands. His face hurt and his red fingers hurt, and now, in the warmth, his toes were starting to hurt once more. That was, Shadow figured, a good sign.

The cop put the car in drive and moved off. "You know, that was," he said, not turning to look at Shadow, just talking a little louder, "if you'll pardon me saying so, a real stupid thing to do. You didn't hear any of the weather advisories? It's minus thirty out there. God alone knows what the wind-chill is, minus sixty, minus seventy, although I figure when you're down at minus thirty, windchill's the least of your worries."

"Thanks," said Shadow. "Thanks for stopping. Very, very grateful."

"Woman in Rhinelander went out this morning to fill her birdfeeder in her robe and carpet slippers and she froze, literally froze, to the sidewalk. She's in intensive care now. It was on the TV this morning. You're new in town." It was almost a question, but the man knew the answer already.

"I came in on the Greyhound last night. Figured today I'd buy myself some warm clothes, food, and a car. Wasn't expecting this cold."

"Yeah," said the cop. "It took me by surprise as well. I was too busy worrying about global warming. I'm Chad Mulligan. I'm the chief of police here in Lakeside."  

Prisma’s next AI project is a fun selfie sticker maker
What do you do after garnering tens of millions of downloads and scores of clones of your AI-powered style transfer app? Why, keep innovating of course reenex.
Meet Sticky, the next app from the startup behind Prisma, which turns selfies into stylized and/or animated stickers for sharing to your social feeds. Sticky is launching today on iOS, with an Android version due in a week or two.
While Prisma gained viral popularity last year, netting its Moscow-based makers around 70 million downloads in a matter of months, its core feature has been rapidly and widely copied — including by social goliaths like Facebook.
to having their USP eaten alive by others’ algorithms was to evolve their cool tool into a platform. But with the social app space essentially sewn up (at least in the West) by Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, building momentum and making a lasting impression as a new platform is clearly not an easy task Laser Sticker.
Co-founder Aram Airapetyan tells us Prisma’s audience has been “very stable for the last six months” — shaking out to “around 10 million monthly active users”.
That’s not bad for a ~one-year-old app. But, well, Facebook has two billion monthly users at this point… (And that’s before you factor in all the Instagram and WhatsApp users.) So it’s hardly a fair fight.
Still, Prisma’s team isn’t sitting still. Their next app project also applies neural networks to another photo-focused task — this time creating selfie stickers for social sharing to messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Apple’s iMessage and Telegram .