Technology

Facebook first showed off its 3D photos back in 2018, and shared the technical details behind it a month later. But unless you had one of a handful of phones with dual cameras back then (when they weren&t so common), you couldn&t make your own. Today an update brings 3D photos to those of us still rocking a single camera.

In case you don&t remember or haven&t seen one lately, the 3D photos work by analyzing a 2D picture and slicing it into a ton of layers that move separately when you tilt the phone or scroll. I&m not a big fan of 3D anything, and I don&t even use Facebook, but the simple fact is this feature is pretty cool.

The problem is it used the dual-camera feature to help the system determine distance, which informed how the picture should be sliced. That meant I, with my beautiful iPhone SE, was out of the running — along with about a billion other people who hadn&t bought into the dual-camera thing yet.

But over the last few years the computer vision team over at Facebook has been working on making it possible to do this without dual-camera input. At last they succeeded, and this blog post explains, in terms technical enough that I&m not even going to attempt to summarize them here, just how they did it.

The advances mean that many — though not all — relatively modern single-camera phones should be able to use the feature. GooglePixel series is now supported, and single-camera iPhones from the 7 forward. The huge diversity of Android devices makes it hard to say which will and won&t be supported — it depends on a few things not usually listed on the spec sheet — but you&ll be able to tell once your Facebook app updates and you take a picture.

GDCtop sponsors continue to pull out of attending the San Francisco gaming conference. Today, Amazon announced it would no longer be sending employees to the event.

In an update, the team shared that they would instead be hosting a &global online event& to share news that they had been planning to detail at the conference.

Amazon Game Tech is a &diamond partner& at the Game Developers Conference this year, a designation that signifies sponsors &who play an integral role in the success of GDC,& the conference says on its website. At this point, the only diamond partners who have not officially withdrawn are Intel, Nvidia and Google.

Facebook, Sony, Microsoft, Unity and Epic Games have all pulled out of the conference over concerns surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak. Now, Amazon joins them.

TechCrunch has reached out to the other remaining sponsors at the event.

Thatit, thatthe whole post.

With the next version of Windows 10, coming this spring, Microsoft Cortana digital assistant will lose a number of consumer skills around music and connected homes, as well as some third-party skills. Thatvery much in line with Microsoftnew focus for Cortana, but it may still come as a surprise to the dozens of loyal Cortana fans.

Microsoft is also turning off Cortana support in its Microsoft Launcher on Android by the end of April and on older versions of Windows that have reached their end-of-service date, which usually comes about 36 months after the original release.

As the company explained last year, it now mostly thinks of Cortana as a service for business users. The new Cortana is all about productivity, with deep integrations into Microsoftsuite of Office tools, for example. In this context, consumer services are only a distraction, and Microsoft is leaving that market to the likes of Amazon and Google .

Because the new Cortana experience is all about Microsoft 365, the subscription service that includes access to the Office tools, email, online storage and more, it doesn&t come as a surprise that the assistantnew feature will give you access to data from these tools, including your calendar, Microsoft To Do notes and more.

And while some consumer features are going away, Microsoft stresses that Cortana will still be able to tell you a joke, set alarms and timers, and give you answers from Bing.

For now, all of this only applies to English-speaking users in the U.S. Outside of the U.S., most of the productivity features will launch in the future.

Coronavirus fears prompt even more event cancellations, controversial facial recognition software is being used widely and DocuSign acquires Seal Software. Hereyour Daily Crunch for February 28, 2020.

1. Facebook cancels F8 conference, citing coronavirus concerns

Facebook has confirmed that it has canceled its annual F8 developers conference over growing concerns about the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. More specifically, the company says itcanceling the &in-person component& — there may still be video presentations, along with live-streamed and local events, under the F8 umbrella.

At the same time, companies, including Microsoft, are pulling out of the Game Developers Conference over similar concerns. And the Geneva Motor Show was just canceled.

2. Clearview said its facial recognition app was only for law enforcement as it courted private companies

After claiming that it would only sell its controversial facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, a new report in BuzzFeed News suggests that Clearview AI is less than discerning about its client base, and has in fact shopped its technology far and wide.

3. DocuSign acquires Seal Software for $188M to enhance its AI chops

Seal Software was founded in 2010, and, while it may not be a mainstream brand, its customers include the likes of PayPal, Dell, Nokia and DocuSign itself. (DocuSign previously invested in the company, too.) These businesses use Seal for its contract management tools, but also for its analytics, discovery and data extraction services.

4. Senate passes ‘rip and replace& bill to remove old Huawei and ZTE equipment from networks

Written as a response to recent concerns around Chinese hardware manufacturers, the bill would ban purchase of telecom equipment from embattled Chinese manufactures like Huawei and ZTE. It also includes $1 billion in funding to help smaller rural telecoms &rip and replace& existing equipment from specific manufacturers.

5. The world Bob Iger made

The Disney executive has been openly thinking about retirement and searching for a successor — a search that culminated in this weekannouncement that he&d be stepping down from the CEO role immediately. But Igersuccession planning hasn&t stopped him from solidifying Disneydominance of the entertainment business, a position designed to last long after his departure. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. ‘Robot& was coined 100 years ago, in a play predicting human extinction by android hands

Published 100 years ago, R.U.R. (RossumUniversal Robots) by Czech writer Karel Čapek is best remembered for bringing the word &robot& to sci-fi — and English, generally.

7. Catching up with Startup Battlefield

We&re trying out something new: As you (hopefully) know, TechCrunch hosts a number of Startup Battlefield events, and afterwards, those startups often go on to do interesting and newsworthy things. But there are so many Battlefield alumni at this point that we can&t cover every announcement. So occasionally, I&ll be rounding them up here.

This week, we&ve got news from Berlin 2019 competitor Nodle.io, which is crowdsourcing the connectivity of smart sensors by offloading the task to smartphones. And Nodle announced this week that it has acquired Internet-of-Things security company Brickchain.com.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunchroundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you&d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

In a wide-ranging discussion at the Air Warfare Symposium held by the U.S. Air Force, Elon Musk touched on some old and new themes, but one highlight of the discussion was the small window into hiring and firing practices at SpaceX — arguably one of the worldmost demanding engineering companies.

The company prides itself on innovation, and, for its chief executive officer, that apparently extends to the interview process itself.

&[When we] interview people we ask for some evidence of exceptional ability that includes innovation,& says Musk. &At the interview point we select for new people who want to create new technology.&

The mercurial chief executive didn&t elaborate more fully on what proof of innovation looks like in the interview process or in an applicantprevious work, but itan interesting bullet point on the companypractices.

And the emphasis on innovation extends to the companyincentive structure, advancement decisions and ultimately how long someone will remain at the company, Musk said.

&Incentive structure is set up that innovation is rewarded and making mistakes along the way but failure to try to innovate comes with a big penalty,& Musk said. &You will be fired.&

Itnot just a failure to innovate, according to Musk. If the employee&innovations aspirations are not very good, they will no longer be at the company.&

This emphasis on innovation is critical for companies and nations to remain ahead of their competition. Musk said he doesn&t necessarily worry about intellectual property theft at either Tesla or SpaceX because hopefully the companies are developing technologies that are at least three years ahead of the competition.

&The way you achieve intellectual property protection is by innovating fast enough,& says Musk. &Speed of innovation is what matters. I do say this to my teams quite a lot. Innovation per-year is what matters.&

Although a company like IBM, with a massive patent portfolio and thousands of innovations locked in its laboratory might take issue with the sentiment, Musk says his point extends not just to companies, but to competing nation-states too.

Specifically, Musk mentioned the need for innovation if the U.S. is going to compete effectively against China, a country that could have an economy twice to three-times the size of the United States in the coming years.

&The foundation of war is economics,& Musk said. &If you have half the resources of the counterparty then you better be real innovative because [otherwise] we&re going to lose… The U.S. will be, militarily, second.&