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Google Play to pilot third-party billing option, starting with Spotify | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | Amid increasing global regulations over app stores and their commission structures, Google today the launch of a pilot program designed to explore what it calls “user billing choice.” The program will allow a small number of participating developers, starting with Spotify, to offer an additional third-party billing option next to Google Play’s own billing system in their apps. While Google already offers a following the arrival of new legislation requiring it, this will be the first time it will test the system in multiple worldwide markets. Spotify said the pilot will roll out to all markets where Spotify Premium is available, which is 184 total markets worldwide. Google, however, cautioned the pilot will begin with select markets and build on the experience over time, and which regions would be first has yet to be determined. As the debut pilot partner, Spotify will introduce both their own billing system alongside Google Play’s own when the pilot goes live. Google did not say which other developers it has lined up for future tests, but noted Spotify was a “natural first partner” on the effort given its reach as one of the “world’s largest subscription developers with a global footprint” and its “integrations across a wide range of device form factors.” Spotify, of course, has also been one of the larger developers to push for regulatory changes to app stores’ existing billing systems and structure, having on the matter, joined lobbying groups, and backed app store legislation — including , which would require companies like Apple and Google to permit alternatives to existing app stores. This fight is not just about wanting to have a more direct relationship with customers — it’s largely about money. Today’s app stores charge commissions ranging from 15%-30%, generally speaking, for apps offering subscriptions and in-app purchases through their platforms. Even where Google was required to permit alternative billing systems, it only reduced commissions by 4% for developers that directed users to their own billing systems. Reached for comment, Spotify declined to say what sort of commission it would be paying Google as a part of this pilot test, noting that the agreement was confidential. But a company spokesperson suggested that the commercial terms met Spotify’s “standards of fairness.” Google also declined to detail the commission structure involved. However, it noted that user choice billing, such as is the case in South Korea, will still involve a service fee regardless of which billing system the user chooses. The new system is not immediately available as of this announcement. Rather, it will take Google’s product and engineering teams time to build the new experience over the coming months. Once live, users will see the two billing options presented side-by-side directly in the Spotify app. If they choose the Spotify payment method, they’ll continue to checkout with Spotify’s own billing system and user interface. If they choose Google Play Billing, they will transition into the Google Play Billing experience instead. Spotify will also remain primarily responsible for customer communications regarding their Spotify subscription. But users who elected to pay via Google Play Billing will be able to see their Spotify subscription within the Google Play Store Subscription Center, as usual. Spotify says it anticipates launching pilots of the first iteration of this system sometime later this year. It will be offered in every market where Spotify’s Premium subscription is available today, the company told TechCrunch. “Spotify is on a years-long journey to ensure app developers have the freedom to innovate and compete on a level playing field,” said Alex Norström, Spotify’s Chief Freemium Business Officer, in a . “We’re excited to be partnering with Google to explore this approach to payment choice and opportunities for developers, users and the entire internet ecosystem. We hope the work we’ll do together blazes a path that will benefit the rest of the industry. Google added that the pilot is still early days and the company will be working through various details about how the system works and how it appears as it builds and iterates on the experience alongside Spotify. While it wouldn’t disclose which partners may follow Spotify, Google told us its goal is to learn how to solve the challenges of offering billing choice across countries and developer types — a hint that some testers of the system could be smaller businesses. It said it will pilot the program in a few countries with a limited number of developers to start and would share more in the months ahead. Ahead of this change, Google had already from 30% to 15% for the first $1 million of revenue developers earn using Play billing system each year, following The company said that due to this pricing model shift, 99% of developers qualify for a service fee of 15% or less on its app store. “Android has always been about openness and user choice,” stated Sameer Samat, Vice President, Product Management at Google. “This step is an important milestone for mobile app stores and I can’t imagine a better first partner than Spotify. They value choice as much as we do and understand the importance and continued investment in Android and Play to the health of the entire ecosystem. This is an exciting first step and we look forward to adding new partners and learning how this model could be expanded across the platform.” |
3 factors to consider when building an early-stage cloud sales team | Andy Stinnes | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | in a classic Series A venture capital firm, I have the pleasure of regularly speaking to cloud software company founders. At this early stage, a lot of company building has yet to be done, which includes the development of a professional sales team. Let me set the scene: The founders have been at it for about two years, built an early product and won their first cohort of customers; ARR is $200,000-$500,000. The early customers were roped in by the founders, and the initial market was validated in the process. They just recently hired a first BDR to generate more leads. Now, the founders want to hire their first sales professional and have a lot of questions. Hire a leader and build top-down, or start with an individual rep? Which kind of profile and how much experience should they have? Will hiring a few reps right away help them grow faster? Founders often come from successful cloud companies and have seen what an efficient sales machine looks like at the growth stage. But that is very different from a company just starting its sales engine, so the first discussion I usually have is about early versus later-stage sales. Selling an early product in a nascent market to an unclear set of customers is like being dropped into a jungle with nothing but a knife. Where is north? Where is water, food and shelter? Who is friend or foe? It takes a special type of sales professional to be successful at this stage — a highly intelligent, self-directed, curious person who is consultative with prospects. They must be comfortable with a lack of clarity, resources and direction. Founders often proudly share the profile of a hot-shot sales candidate who is a top performer and exceeded quota three years running at a billion-dollar cloud unicorn. They are certainly impressive, but likely not the right person. Founders need someone who gets the big picture, understands the business domain, loves the technology, and, crucially, asks a lot of questions. They need a salesperson with an inquisitive mind who appropriately challenges the prospects, and learns and adapts quickly. This person should also be creative enough to envision how the technology can deliver value in new and different ways. |
Twitter might start charging for TweetDeck through Twitter Blue | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | Twitter has been spotted working on making TweetDeck a premium feature through its Twitter Blue subscription service. According to reverse engineer , who searches the code of mobile apps to spot features and upcoming changes in development, the social media giant is currently working on the addition to Twitter’s premium offering, adding it to the Twitter Blue feature list within its Android app. Wong recently found Twitter working on adding a reference to TweetDeck in the list of Twitter Blue features in the company’s Android app. Last week, Wong came across code in the app that would restrict access to TweetDeck to users who have a Twitter Blue subscription and redirect those who don’t to sign up for one. She also noted that if Twitter plans to go forward with making TweetDeck a paid feature under Twitter Blue, it would be locking out millions of users who don’t have access to the subscription service yet, as it’s currently only available in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. TweetDeck is currently free and doesn’t include any ads, which makes it a popular go-to service for people who don’t want to use Twitter’s web interface. Twitter is working on referencing in ’s features list This is another indication that TweetDeck might become a paid feature under the subscription service — Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) When asked about the possible change, a spokesperson from Twitter told TechCrunch that the company doesn’t have anything to share at the moment. Before Twitter Blue officially launched last year, that Twitter’s upcoming subscription feature might charge people to use TweetDeck. But, once Twitter Blue launched, the premium service didn’t make any mention of TweetDeck, launching instead with with tools to organize bookmarks, read threads in a clutter-free format and an “Undo Tweet” feature. This wasn’t the first time that Twitter has explored the idea of asking users to pay for TweetDeck, and the company was looking into ways to charge for app . At the time, some Twitter users were asked to fill out a survey about what features they would want to see in TweetDeck and whether they would be willing to pay for an advanced version of the service, but the concept was never actually tested. Twitter Blue in Australia and Canada in June 2021 and in the United States and New Zealand in November. As it expanded, Twitter Blue added early access to new features via the and offered ad-free news articles from hundreds of publishers through . In the United States, the subscription service costs $2.99 per month. TweetDeck initially started off as a third-party app, but Twitter bought the company . The service makes it easier to manage and post to Twitter accounts and offers a convenient way to view multiple timelines and feeds in one place. |
The product-led growth playbook | Vidya Raman | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | and a recent product manager, I have encountered many companies that failed and some that succeeded at their product-led growth (PLG) efforts. The PLG journey is never easy, but it can be a powerful path to enduring success. I have distilled my experience into a short but essential list of prerequisites that I believe will significantly increase the chances of success at your startup. One pervasive approach to embarking on a PLG journey is to create a sign-up page and make the whole product available for self-serve consumption. Maybe there is a snazzy marketing campaign to go with it. Now, unless the product is so simple that the user can, on their own, get to an a-ha! moment in a matter of minutes, I have never seen this approach work — ever. In a PLG setting, there is no live human being who can set the stage or hand-hold the customer through the product. If the home page doesn’t make sense in a few seconds and the product doesn’t work in a few minutes, the customer will summarily dismiss everything the startup offers.
Some founders argue that their products are too complicated to lend to PLG. Instead of completely giving up on self-serve, how about designing an experience that showcases the essence of the product with complexity pre-packaged or sandboxed? For example, depending upon the use case, this might mean an offering that works in a multicloud, pre-configured setup or runs on multiple virtual endpoints. Self-serve doesn’t have to mean that the entire product works in the customer’s own desired setup. Think in bite-sized experiences, each of which would be a meaningful outcome for the customer. Product-led growth can be notoriously difficult to troubleshoot because of the inherent low-touch nature of this go-to-market approach. Consider a scenario where conversion to a paid product is low. Is it because you’re giving away too much of the product for free? Are the benefits of the paid product not clearly articulated? Is it because you are targeting a customer segment with no budget? Is the pricing too high (or low)? To determine what the issue(s) is — product packaging, positioning, pricing, market segmentation or some combination — you need data to inform the troubleshooting process. This is why I’d highly recommend carefully instrumenting various customer touch points (including, but not limited to, product usage) even before rolling out a self-serve product. |
Google Cloud now lets you suspend and resume VMs | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | Google Cloud today its Suspend/Resume feature for virtual machines into general availability. Before it launched this feature as an alpha a couple of years ago, the only option developers had were to stop and start instances. With , the experience is more akin to closing and opening the lid on your laptop, Google argues. While the instance is suspended, you don’t pay for the cores and RAM it would typically use. Instead, you only pay for the storage cost of the instance memory. OS licensing may also be reduced, Google noted. Other clouds offer similar features, though Google argues that because it sends a standard ACPI S3 signal — that’s the same signal your operating system sends to your desktop or laptop to put it into its sleep state and suspend to RAM — its solution is compatible with a wider range of OS images. Indeed, it encourages developers to try it out with undocumented custom OS images, since they may just work out of the box, too. Google also argues that its solution is different because storage for the image is dynamically provisioned when a VM is suspended and independent of the boot disk. This means you don’t have to worry about running out of space on the boot disk and the suspended instance consumes less storage. While it is suspended, the instance’s IP address remains in place and once the instance is resumed, the memory is simply moved back from storage to the instance memory and the cycle continues. You can only suspend an image for up to 60 days, though. After that, it’s automatically terminated. It’s worth noting that Suspend/Resume also doesn’t work for GPU instances, instances with more than 120 GB of memory, E2 instances and . Preemptible instances can be suspended, but there is a risk that they will be terminated during the suspension process. But the advantage here is not just cost savings. A system like this also means you can keep a few instances on standby for quick horizontal scaling when needed. Provisioning a new VM can take a while, after all. If that’s your use case, going serverless may be the way to go in the future, but that’s a long-term project, while a system like this can help in the meantime. Some companies are also using Suspend/Resume for their developer environments, which often don’t need to run 24/7. “Utilizing Compute Engine’s suspend and resume functionality has allowed BigCommerce to reduce operating costs of our Compute Engine-driven development environment,” explained Aaron Humerickhouse, manager, Engineering at BigCommerce. “BigCommerce allows each engineer to customize their environment’s ‘working hours,’ which triggers suspension at the end of each work day and resumption at the beginning of the next day. This has reduced our Virtual Machine Instance usage times from 168 hours a week to 60 hours a week per environment on average, enabling us to save thousands of dollars each month. We expect these cost-efficiency savings to only increase as our Engineering organization grows.” |
Despite declines, the value of crypto assets in DeFi protocols is up 3x from a year ago | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | have you believe it’s a down market for decentralized finance (DeFi) chains, with total value locked across all decentralized finance (DeFi) chains down from all time highs, but that hasn’t been true for most of the major protocols over the past week. Of the top 100 chains, only 18 have lost value over the past seven days, according to . The rest, it appears, are riding a rising wave on the back of demand and early adopter enthusiasm. Blockchain protocol Terra hit a new TVL peak on March 22 at $27.45 billion, rising over 68% from a month earlier, and Curve, a decentralized exchange liquidity pool on Ethereum, took the No. 1 spot in terms of TVL, seeing a from a week ago to $20.41 billion. Total value locked, or TVL, across all DeFi protocols is the sum of all staked crypto assets that are earning rewards, interest and so on. The total amount locked on chains has dropped about 16% from a peak in early December 2021, but market players feel the DeFi space is still in its early stages and has room to grow. “At a high level, TVL is a good indication of the trust that users have in the various DeFi protocols, namely the blue chip ones like Maker, Aave, Uniswap,” , head of crypto insights at said. “It is also representative of the users’ recognition that DeFi protocols do have some substantive value-add. However, although TVL does paint a certain picture of the DeFi landscape, it doesn’t paint a full one.” |
Dear Sophie: How long does it take to get International Entrepreneur Parole? | Sophie Alcorn | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says , a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to in my next column.” TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; . Dear Fast-Flying, Congrats on your prospective funding! I’m so excited that International Entrepreneur Parole (IEP) can help people like you and your co-founder rapidly grow your startup and create jobs in the United States. It’s a great interim program until Congress passes a startup visa. My attorney colleague Nadia Zaidi, an expert in immigration law for startups, and I . As the process is anything but rapid, it’s still important to consider all available options. Based on the cases we’ve filed since the Biden administration officially resurrected the program last May, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is taking at least six to eight months to make a decision. So I’m educating entrepreneurs to allow a minimum of a year for the normal IEP process. Joanna Buniak / Be aware that premium processing is currently not available for IEP cases. Available for other forms of visas, premium processing guarantees USCIS will make a decision — or issue a Request for Evidence (RFE) — within 15 days for an additional fee. The other main option to try to speed things up is through USCIS Expedite Request for severe financial loss to a company. Talk to your attorney about whether you might qualify. I feel very strongly that issues such as the lack of premium processing should be changed. I’ve been working behind the scenes with other immigration attorneys and groups to make waves in the field of immigration — we are advocating for other improvements to streamline the IEP application process. I was proud to be a part of last year’s advocacy effort that pushed U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to grant IEP beneficiaries the full 30 months of initial stay in the United States. Previously, CBP officers would only grant a maximum 12-month stay to IEP recipients. We discovered that was due to a glitch in the agency’s automated system, which erroneously set the maximum stay at 12 months rather than 30 months. |
Nvidia’s Clara Holoscan MGX means to bring high-powered AI to the doctor’s office | Emma Betuel | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | This week, Nvidia, a company best known for its high-powered graphic processing units (GPUs) debuted a platform for the development of AI-powered medical devices. The device, called , provides computing power allowing medical sensors to process multiple data streams in parallel, train AI algorithms and visualize biology in real time. Clara Holoscan MGX, debuted at the Nvidia’s 2022 GTC conference, is an “open, scalable robotics platform,” as CEO Jensen Huang put it in a . It’s a hardware and software stack designed to help connect robotic medical devices or sensors with AI applications. How might that work? Take the process of endoscopy as an example. Typically, a doctor will insert a small camera inside your body and take a look around. Clara Holoscan MGX can connect directly to that camera and in real time process the data that’s being collected. That data could then be fed into AI models that could detect anomalies, navigate through your anatomy and help the surgeon come up with a treatment plan. (To be clear, these AI models wouldn’t be made by Nvidia, just run on their hardware.) Nvidia is already well-known for its GPUs, which are especially good at quickly running computations in parallel. GPUs were once best known to gamers, but they’ve become a key accelerator for any industry interested in training deep neural networks. Deep neural networks need to quickly crunch billions of data points as they learn to, say, read an X-ray. And the resulting models need a lot of computation to be used in real time as well — which this platform is aimed at providing. Nvidia is now a dominant player in the AI space because it supplies the raw computational strength needed for many of these projects, and it has made doing so easy with a fleet of industry-specific hardware and software combos. For instance, Nvidia has been active in the self-driving car space with projects like , a for the training and building of autonomous vehicles. Nvidia has already started making overtures into the healthcare space. The Clara platform was first , and was initially designed to create a smooth medical imaging experience. The platform has been over the years, but the Clara Holoscan MGX platform is meant to basically become a one-stop shop. Kimberly Powell, VP of Healthcare at Nvidia, told TechCrunch that Clara Holoscan is “a complete end-to-end platform. Nvidia Clara Holoscan is to medical devices what Nvidia Drive is to autonomous vehicles,” she said. Powell says that Clara Holoscan’s core innovations are twofold. First, it’s been designed to comply with the IEC 62304 standard, which is a benchmark process for the safe development of medical software. Then, it’s basically packed with what Huang calls “an insane” amount of computing power. Together, the combination should allow companies looking to build or train AI powered medical devices to move forward much faster. Nvidia “The architecture of Clara Holoscan significantly reduces the engineering investment needed to bring a new medical device or software as a medical device to market,” Powell said. There are plenty of companies already out there looking to do exactly what Nvidia is pitching: combine devices and AI. Activ Surgical, for example, a startup working on AI-assisted surgical scopes (called ActivSight) already uses Nvidia’s GPU and is informed by scope data. To do this, the company was accepted into Nvidia’s Inception program, which gave it early access to the Clara AGX Developer Kit. That kit, per a press release, echoed Powell’s assertion that Nvidia’s tech can speed up product development. “The developer kit will also reduce the overall development time to bring future Activ Surgical products, including ActivSight, to market in the next two years,” Activ Surgical’s release reads. At the moment, the full powers of Clara Holoscan aren’t available. During his keynote address Huang said the medical-grade technology won’t be available for early access until Q1 2023. At that point, Powell added, hardware pricing will be set by Nvidia’s ODM partners, and software pricing “will be made available.” ( .) For now, the launch of Clara Holoscan MGX seems like a reinforcement of Nvidia’s already firm foothold in the AI healthcare space. Basically, it’s building the computational bedrock that sits beneath it. And that’s a good place to be. According to Stanford’s 2022 AI Index , the two greatest areas of private investment in AI sat right in these crosshairs in 2021: $12.2 billion in data management, processing and cloud computing, and $11.29 billion in medical and healthcare tools. |
What Yuga Labs wants to build after raising $450M | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | investor deck from February is a , bringing together gaming, a new currency, and an ever-growing pool of digital assets that can be bought and sold by fans of Yuga’s well-known NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club. I ran through the deck last night and again this morning to get a better grip on the company’s financials, expectations, and business promise. But we can’t really get into those matters until we talk about what the company has in mind — recall that Yuga , a deal that it announced earlier this week. No one is having more fun than the web3 folks today as they find themselves in the nearly unique position of seeing their current fascination (blockchain-based assets and related applications) also become the object of ample investor interest and consumer demand. That doesn’t happen too often. With popular NFT projects under its belt, and of ability to use one collection of digital assets to grow another, Yuga has ambitious plans for the coming years. It also has a fresh half-billion in capital to help power its vision. This morning, let’s talk about what it wants to build, and how the economics shake out. If things go according to plan, Yuga is about to make a lot of money. Yuga wants to build something that “expands the universe” of Bored Ape Yacht Club, but “invites the larger NFT community” at the same time. More simply, the company wants to build atop its early success while making room for wider participation. That’s pretty reasonable. Yuga is not big on present-day efforts to build metaverses. Missing in today’s metaverse efforts, per the company, are things like “purpose,” “shared goals,” and “real stakes,” along with “connections,” “decisions,” and a “story.” It sums up its view by noting that a simple social hub set in a virtual world is not enough to command consumer attention over a longer time horizon. |
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Arizona becomes first state to offer driver’s license and state ID in Apple Wallet | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | Apple today that Arizona will become the first U.S. state to offer residents the ability to their driver’s license or state ID in Apple’s Wallet app. The company had already it had secured the state to be among the first to offer the new feature. With the launch, Apple device owners will be able to tap their iPhone or Apple Watch to present their ID, starting at select TSA security checkpoints in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. To get started, Arizona residents will tap the plus “+” button at the top of the screen in the Wallet app on their iPhone, then choose “Driver’s License or State ID,” and follow the on-screen instructions to start the setup and verification process, Apple explains. The person is verified by taking a selfie, then by scanning both the back and front of their existing driver’s license or state ID card. (In other words, this is not a replacement for getting an ID or license from the DMV to begin with.) There’s also an additional fraud prevention step that asks users to complete a series of facial and head movements during the setup process. The app will present a camera view where the user will need to turn their head to the side as a means of ensuring that they have not, for example, held up a photograph to the camera in an attempt to commit fraud. These scans and the user’s photo are securely provided to the issuing state for verification. Apple additionally sends a numeric indicator of its confidence that the person presenting the ID is the owner of the ID. It does not send the video of the person moving their head, as had been requested during verification. The approval process generally takes just minutes and users will be notified when the ID is available in Wallet, as they are when adding credit cards. Apple Once the ID or license is added to Wallet, users will be able to access it for use at supported TSA checkpoints. Users can see what information is being requested, then consent to provide the information with Face ID or Touch ID. This works similarly to Apple Pay — meaning users don’t have to unlock their iPhone to use the feature. The information is then sent to an identity reader through encrypted communication, after consent is provided. Because the information is shared digitally, users won’t have to hand over their physical ID card nor will they have to hand over their device, Apple says. The TSA’s reader will also capture a picture of the traveler for further verification. (This is the digital equivalent to how TSA agents will look at a person’s license then back at their face to determine if they are, in fact, the same person.) Apple Apple says that, soon, other states will offer the feature as well, including Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Ohio and the territory of Puerto Rico. And it had previously seven states were planning to come on board, including Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma and Utah, in addition to Arizona. Apple first its plan to support driver’s licenses and IDs in Apple Wallet at its developer conference last year. But in an update published on the iOS 15 website in November, Apple quieted the feature would be delayed until early 2022. The company, of course, is at the to get such a feature off the ground, given they have to verify the user’s ID. Apple Use of the feature requires users to consent to Apple Wallet’s terms and conditions, and any additional terms and conditions that may be required by the state. What those terms are, however, will be determined at the state level. Some people may be wary of storing their ID on their phone, but Apple assures customers the ID data is encrypted when sent off to the state of Arizona for verification, and it never sits — even temporarily — on Apple’s servers. When the ID is added to the device, it’s encrypted there, as well. There, it’s encrypted and protected by the hardware keys associated with the device’s secure enclave processor, which means it’s encrypted and protected while at rest. Only the customer using Face ID or Touch ID, or someone who has the customer’s passcode to access Wallet, can view the ID’s details. There are also hardware keys associated with the secure element that are used at the time the user is presenting their ID to the TSA via the Apple device. The device then signs the driver’s license or ID data, so that the relying party (the TSA) can cryptographically verify this is a valid state ID by examining the signature of the state as well as the device signature. This means is that if someone was able to get the ID information off the user’s device, they could not present it because it’s tied to the device hardware. The new feature is supported in iPhone 8 or later devices running iOS 15.4, and Apple Watch Series 4 or later running watchOS 8.4 or later. For the time being, only select TSA checkpoints will support the feature, starting with the Phoenix airport, with more added over time. Apple says it’s also working on other use cases in the future, including those with law enforcement partners. |
Google is moving the ‘Movies & TV’ tab from the Play Store to Google TV | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | Google is removing the “Movies & TV” section from the Play Store and moving it to the Google TV app, the company announced in a . The upcoming change will go into effect starting in May. Google says the Google TV app will become the place for users to buy, rent and watch movies and tv shows on their Android mobile device or tablet, as they’ll no longer be supported on the Google Play app. The company notes that your purchased content will continue to be available in the Google TV app and that purchases on the Google TV app will continue to be eligible for family sharing and Google Play Points. You can also still use Play credit and Play gift cards to make purchases in the Google TV app. Your wishlist will also still be accessible in the Google TV app. Google notes that you can still view and request refunds for your purchases on Google Play. “Google Play will continue to be your store for apps, games, and books,” the company said in the blog post. “On Google TV, you will find the same experience you are used to on Google Play Movies & TV with the latest new releases, rentals, deals, and great recommendations for you.” The company last year with an updated user interface, expanded set recommendations, and more TV and movies to watch. Google had updated the app’s look and feel with new 16:9 widescreen movie and show posters, which it said would give the app a more “cinematic” look. In addition, the app’s recommendation system was overhauled to be based on what you’ve watched in the past, your interests from your Google account and trending and popular content in your region. The app had also expanded its content lineup by adding new providers like Discovery+, Viki, Cartoon Network, PBS Kids and Boomerang, as well as on-demand content from live TV services, including of course, YouTube TV, as well as Philo and fuboTV. |
Microsoft confirms Lapsus$ breach after hackers publish Bing, Cortana source code | Carly Page | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | Microsoft has confirmed that it was breached by the Lapsus$ hacking group. In — published hours after Lapsus$ posted a torrent file containing partial source code from Bing, Bing Maps and Cortana — Microsoft revealed that a single employee’s account was compromised by the hacking group, granting the attackers “limited access” to Microsoft’s systems and allowing the theft of the company’s source code. Microsoft added that no customer code or data was compromised. “Our cybersecurity response teams quickly engaged to remediate the compromised account and prevent further activity,” Microsoft said. “Microsoft does not rely on the secrecy of code as a security measure and viewing source code does not lead to elevation of risk. Our team was already investigating the compromised account based on threat intelligence when the actor publicly disclosed their intrusion. This public disclosure escalated our action allowing our team to intervene and interrupt the actor mid-operation, limiting broader impact.” Microsoft hasn’t shared any further details about how the account was compromised but provided an overview of the Lapsus$ group’s tactics, techniques and procedures, which the company’s Threat Intelligence Center , known as MSTIC, has observed across multiple attacks. Initially, these attacks targeted organizations in South America and the U.K., though Lapsus$ has since expanded to global targets, including governments and companies in the technology, telecom, media, retail and healthcare sectors. The group, which the technology giant is tracking as DEV-0537, operates with a “pure extortion and destruction model” and, unlike other hacking groups, “doesn’t seem to cover its tracks,” according to Microsoft, likely a nod to the group’s public recruitment of company insiders to help it carry out their targeted attacks. The group uses a number of methods to gain initial access to an organization, which typically focus on compromising user identities and accounts. As well as the recruitment of employees at targeted organizations, these include purchasing credentials from forums, searching public repositories for exposed credentials and deploying the Redline password stealer. Lapsus$ then uses compromised credentials to access a company’s internet-facing devices and systems, such as , remote desktop infrastructure, or identity management services, such as which the hacking group . Microsoft says that in at least one compromise, Lapsus$ performed a to gain control of an employee’s phone number and text messages to gain access to (MFA) codes needed to log in to an organization. After gaining access to the network, Lapsus then uses publicly available tools to explore an organization’s user accounts to find employees that have higher privileges or broader access, and then targets development and collaboration platforms, such as Jira, Slack and Microsoft Teams, where further credentials are stolen. The hacking group also uses these credentials to gain access to , GitHub and Azure DevOps, as it did with the attack on Microsoft. “In some cases, DEV-0537 even called the organization’s help desk and attempted to convince the support personnel to reset a privileged account’s credentials,” Microsoft added. “The group used the previously gathered information (for example, profile pictures) and had a native-English-sounding caller speak with the help desk personnel to enhance their social engineering lure.” The Lapsus$ gang set up a dedicated infrastructure in known virtual private server (VPS) providers and leverages consumer virtual private network service NordVPN for exfiltrating data — even using localized VPN servers that were geographically close to their targets to avoid triggering network detection tools. Stolen data is then used for future extortion or publicly released. The Lapsus$ hacking group has made a name for itself over the past few weeks, compromising a number of prominent companies, including and . Earlier this week, its latest victim was outed as Okta after the gang posted screenshots of the identity giant’s internal systems. Okta , which it said was the result of Lapsus$ compromising a third-party customer support engineer and said it impacted around 2.5% of its 15,000 customers. It’s currently unclear why Okta didn’t notify its customers about the compromise, which occurred during a five-day window in January, until now. |
Kenya-based fintech 4G Capital to scale lending after raising $18.5M from Lightrock | Annie Njanja | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | Kenya-based fintech company , which provides unsecured credit to micro enterprises, has raised $18.5 million in Series C funding from global private equity firm . The equity funding comes as the fintech plans to roll out a series of new products and services, including new loans that will increase the credit limit from $1,000, and allow longer repayment periods from the current maximum of one month. All this is in its plan to expand its clientele base and grow its profits. The products are currently under development; however, the plan is to also lend to bigger businesses in the agri-value chain, as the company expands its reach from micro-sellers, who have been their target market since launch in 2013. The CEO and founder of 4G Capital, , told TechCrunch that, additionally, they’ll launch an app later this year that will enable their clients to sell on digital marketplaces and to be connected to other digital providers like delivery services. “We will be building new loan products this year, with longer durations and larger amounts and lend to bigger businesses in the agri-value chain…We are also planning to launch an app that will allow our clients to run their businesses better, have access to our goods and services, and connect them with other providers like FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) distributors. The future of 4G, is a really enriched value proposition for our clients driven by data and AI,” said Hennessy-Barrett. Already, 4G Capital is conducting trials of its latest retail finance product dubbed Kuza, which allows clients to access goods from FMCG producers and distributors on credit. Hennessy-Barrett launched 4G Capital in 2013 after a short stint as a loans manager based in Kenya for a lending corporation, an opportunity that saw him travel across Africa and gain insights on the continent’s lending space. “I spent a lot of time in informal markets and across the board, informing my knowledge of what to look for — the energy, the potential and the vibrancy of the informal merchants in Kenya; what they needed was somebody to back them,” said the British Army veteran. It is this experience that inspired him to go into the lending space with a target on the micro-traders, which are often locked out by formal lending and banking institutions. Drawing from his experience in consultancy and as a loans manager, he sought to do things differently — 4G Capital established physical branches in its push to know its customers better instead of just being accessible over the phone alone. “I could see how a lot of banks and financial institutions had closed the community branches, off-offshored call centers to emerging markets where labor costs were lower. But banks didn’t know their customers anymore and, therefore, weren’t able to make good lending decisions,” said Hennessy-Barrett. “I always felt it was important, particularly dealing with people who can be quite vulnerable, to have a personal interaction touch point, which is then augmented by technology.” 4G Capital offers short-term loans to micro-businesses in Kenya and Uganda, which are often locked out by formal banking institutions. 4G Capital Hennessy-Barrett said physical locations make it possible for 4G Capital to authenticate that they are dealing with real businesses, besides helping them to deliver business training to their clients. “It makes us much more resilient in terms of fraud prevention, of money laundering, financing of terrorism and things like that, which, unfortunately, if you’re lending blind, then you don’t necessarily know who’s on the other end,” he said. “We know our clients better than anybody else because we are alongside them in the markets. Nonetheless, we’re not running brick-and-mortar conventional micro-finance operations — we have very lightweight teams of three to five people who are incredibly efficient in terms of their productivity.” Hennessy-Barrett said that 4G Capital has extended credit valued at $230 million since launch and loaned to over 1.75 million micro-businesses over the same period, recording a 90% year-on-year growth. The lender has also worked with a number of debt investors that have extended them loans for onward lending, including Alphamundi, the Swiss impact investor, Citi Bank — which advanced them $3 million credit in 2020, a facility that was guaranteed by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the Ford Foundation, Kenya’s Co-operative bank and high net-worth individuals. After nearly a decade in operations, 4G Capital is also exploring new growth opportunities in West and North Africa, with a keen eye on partnerships in Ghana, Nigeria and Egypt, which will happen after deepening and enriching its market share and customer value proposition in its core markets. As it plans to scale its operations, 4G Capital plans to invest in data science enhancements for its evaluation algorithm, and grow its management team in evolving its core banking system. “We want to make sure that we’re growing at the right pace so we have the capital that we need to move to the next phase, and that we’re building the foundations properly to enable that digital scaling,” said Hennessy-Barrett. The recent funding round brings to $27.5 million the total equity funding raised by 4G Capital since 2016. The deal also comes with the backing of Lightrock’s partner Shakir Merali, who now joins 4G Capital’s Board. Merali, while commenting on the deal, said: “Often used to justify the backing of many African companies, ‘financial inclusion’ has not always translated into positive outcomes for customers. What is needed on the continent is investment capital to back companies with the mission of financial empowerment. 4G Capital provides liquidity to the vast market of economically generative businesses – the mobile phone repairers, hairdressers and food sellers – that dot the landscape of Africa.” |
Remote work platform Multiplier raises $60M Series B at $400M valuation | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | , a startup that enables companies to hire and pay remote workers while complying with local laws, announced today that it has raised a $60 million Series B at a valuation of $400 million. The round was co-led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India, and brings Multiplier total investment since it was founded in 2020 to $77.2 million. Multiplier raised a . The funds will be used to add more features. For example, businesses can now self-register on the platform and instantly send candidates contracts and offer employee stock ownership plans. Multiplier is currently working on a crypto-payroll feature that will allow employers to pay freelancers with cryptocurrencies. The startup’s main product is an Employer of Record (EOR) solution that allows it to partner with clients, acting as the legal employer of their employees and enabling them to comply with local labor and tax laws. So far, Multiplier has EORs set up in more than 150 countries. Multiplier’s clients can pay their employees through its professional employer organization (PEO) solution, which helps them manage payroll, benefits and expenses. The company’s services start at $300 per employee per month or $40 per freelancer per month. If a company already has its own local entity, Multiplier can help them manage payroll for $20 per employee a month. Some companies that use Multiplier to support their global payroll and compliance include Amazon, ServiceNow and Graphisoft. In a prepared statement, Sequoia India principal Rohit Agarwal said, “Today, founders and businesses are not constrained by borders in their thinking. This has been one of the most fascinating trends in the last couple of years and it’s a fundamental shift. Several founders across Asia are building for the world from day 1 and hiring from around the world from day 1. We believe globalization of the workforce is one of the most exciting trends of the next decade and are thrilled to see Multiplier facilitate that shift seamlessly for hundreds of companies and thousands of employees.” |
Talent.com raises $120M to take on Indeed and ZipRecruiter in mass-market job search | Ingrid Lunden | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | Online recruitment was one of the early and big hits of the first dot-com boom. But with more and more business processes moving online, online job search is the gift that keeps on giving, and so today comes news of another portal raising a big round to take on the incumbents in the space with more innovative and accurate technology. Talent.com — a portal that aggregates both job ads posted directly by recruiters as well as ads from third-party recruitment sites — has picked up $120 million, a Series B round of funding that it will use to continue expanding internationally, investing further in its programmatic search platform, and introducing new products and services for users. Talent.com’s co-founder and co-CEO, Lucas Martínez, who co-founded the company with Maxime Droux and Benjamin Philion, said in an interview that the aim is to use the funding to build more tech to help consumers see results more relevant to what they are looking for and to make Talent.com more attractive to employers, with tools to measure the responsiveness of ads and plans to charge them based on what gets people clicking. (The company itself knows a little something about having the right wording to get people interested in content: The startup used to be called Neuvoo, Finnish for “advise,” and while it was profitable, it wasn’t growing very fast, in part because it found that many people stumbled on how to pronounce the word and that its meaning wasn’t particularly relevant to the mass market. So when Neuvoo decided to rethink its name in 2019 and saw that Talent.com was up for sale, it jumped at it and rebranded. It paid $1.3 million for the domain, although mysteriously the rest of the details are under NDA for three years, so it’s unclear who was doing the selling. Martínez laughed and said no when I asked if it was Google, but didn’t elaborate any further.) It is also investing the funding in more international expansion. Martínez spoke to me from Barcelona, where the company is setting up a new European hub. Some of the big players in the market today include Indeed.com — owned Japan’s HR giant, Recruit Holdings, which itself is valued at around $66 billion and owns other brands like SimplyHired — ZipRecruiter, which went public last year; LinkedIn; and the search giant Google. But there are a number of startups going head-to-head today with these more established players, leveraging new technology and changing expectations from the market to introduce new competitive battlefronts. Some like and are positioning themselves as platforms to help hire remote employees; others like are taking the remote concept and focusing it on sourcing a specific talent pool: engineers. has ambitions to be the “Salesforce of recruitment,” an ambition others like are also chasing. is borrowing a concept from another enterprise field (its buzzword is orchestration) in its recruitment platform. And , and (which ) all have business models to target casual, gig and hourly workers. Talent.com, like the latter three, is largely targeting markets that include hourly and gig workers, as well as skilled labor. Alongside its programmatic approach to job ads, its other tools for employers include the ability to integrate their existing applicant tracking systems and CRMs. On the consumer side, users are given the ability, in addition to basic job search, to do salary research, to calculate salary after deducting tax in their locale, and to answer profile questions to better tailor their search results. This will also pave the way for how the product will develop in the future. “This is crucial,” said Martínez. “The job search is aspirational. Many are not qualified for the jobs they are applying for. So we are combining experience and education, and guiding users to what they should do so if they want to become, say, an engineer. We will know who you are and have your CV on our platform and we’ll say, these are the educational programs in that area online. This is where we will provide a lot more value to our user.” It’s the play for a wider set of services to drive more revenue from users that piqued investors’ interest. “The race for talent has only been accentuated by the significant challenges that businesses are facing right now. Talent.com has rapidly grown to become one of the largest and most international platforms for employers to source and recruit,” Chris Arsenault, partner at Inovia Capital, said in a statement. “This partnership is prompting a new phase of growth as they launch a suite of value-added products to become a true job-seeker-centric platform.” |
Indonesian earned wage access platform Wagely raises $8.3M as it expands into Bangladesh | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | , an earned wage access (EWA) platform based in Jakarta and Dhaka, has raised $8.3 million in pre-Series A funding, just seven months after announcing . The new funds will be used to fuel Wagely’s expansion in Bangladesh, where it recently launched, and build other features to become a “holistic financial wellness platform,” including savings, insurance, long-term installment loans and financial education. Earned wage access platforms allow workers to access wages they have already earned on demand, instead of waiting until payday. Wagely says its user base grew 10x year over year in 2021, with clients including British American Tobacco, Ranch Market, Adaro Energy and Medco Energi. The new round was led by East Ventures (Growth Fund), with participation from returning investors like Integra Partners, the Asian Development Fund, Global Founders Capital, Trihill Capital, Blauwpark Partners and 1982 Ventures. It brings Wagely’s total raised to $14 million since it was launched in 2020. Wagely also received backing from Central Capital Ventura, the venture capital arm of Bank Central Asia (BCA), one of Indonesia’s largest private banks. Tobias Fischer, co-founder and CEO of Wagely, told TechCrunch that BCA “has one of the largest corporate networks in Indonesia. Many of these corporates fit into the target profile of Wagely customers. On the other hand, Wagely is already servicing some … BCA customers, which presents the opportunity to leverage synergies across segments and products, not only with BCA but also other banking partners that want to innovate financial services and create positive impact.” Bangladesh was chosen as Wagely’s second market because “we see a massive opportunity for financial technology in Bangladesh that is characterized by similar attractive fundamentals like Indonesia in terms of demographics, large TAM, limited access to credit, growing demand for tailored financial services, and the ability to expand product and segments.” The startup has already signed up leading ready-made garment manufacturers like SQ Group, Classic Composite and Vision Garments. In a statement, East Ventures managing partner Roderick Purwana said, “With Wagely’s rapid growth in recent quarters, we believe they will be the preferred partner for large enterprises that aim to challenge the status quo of worker financial wellness in Indonesia and beyond.” |
Well…Facebook has a TikTok now | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | What’s Facebook doing on TikTok? Scoping out the competition? DM’ing Charli? Recruiting beta testers? Buying ads? We’ll know soon enough, because the social networking company has set up , where it’s already amassed some 15,100 followers, as of the time of writing, despite not having posted any public videos. The account is verified by TikTok and Facebook also confirmed it’s legit. Facebook’s TikTok (that sounds wrong) was spotted a couple of days ago by social media consultant I hope their first tiktok is a watermarked Reel — Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) The account had acquired a blue checkmark, indicating its verified status. But its lack of content and somewhat odd bio — “ (Why the comma?!) — still made us question whether this was really Facebook’s account. In addition, the account’s bio links out to the Facebook app on Google Play, not the Facebook website or some sort of official communication channel. I mean, Facebook already killed its account And there’s no Instagram.com/Facebook, either. It’s . But Facebook — err, Meta — told us the TikTok account is real. “Brands leverage a variety of channels, including some of our social media platforms, to reach and engage with the people using their products and services every day,” a Meta spokesperson said. “Our intent with establishing a brand presence and cultivating community on platforms like TikTok or others is no different.” Facebook’s TikTok It’s possible that Facebook wants to juice its Gen Z user base by leveraging TikTok (or its ad platform), after having recently reported flat monthly active user growth in its last quarter and, significantly, its . And while it true that large brands use a variety of channels for marketing and communications, it’s a little funny to see Facebook pop up on TikTok, given how often the company has cited the short-form video app as its main competitive threat these days. In Meta’s Q4 2021 earnings, CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated this point in a call with investors. “People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly,” Zuckerberg said. He later added that “TikTok is so big as a competitor already and also continues to grow at quite a faster rate off of a very large base.” The company wouldn’t share any further information on its plans for TikTok, including what sort of content it had in store or whether or not the account would be running ads. (But feel free to if you see them!) Facebook isn’t the only Meta brand on TikTok. Instagram runs ads, and also just launched an Instagram Creators account, apparently. Instagram just launched their creator account on TikTok … with repurposed Reels 😄 — Lia Haberman (@liahaberman) In the meantime, we’re feeling… |
Hyundai’s solar car roof isn’t as dumb as it sounds | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 3 | 23 | The new hybrid Hyundai Sonata has . After baking in the sun all day, the car can add 3-4 miles to its range. That might sound underwhelming, but my EV discharges far more than 3-4 miles per day just sitting parked and doing whatever a Tesla does when it’s not being driven around. I can only assume that, given its power consumption while doing nothing, it is becoming self-aware, developing feelings and writing love haikus to Elon Musk. “The Sonata Hybrid’s solar panels have a capacity of 204W to be exact; that is, panels exposed to the Sun in good sunlight will produce 200Wh of electricity,” Hyundai writes on its website. Fair, 200W is not nothing, but in the context of electric cars, 200W is not exactly impressive. A high-speed home charger on a 50-amp circuit breaker can charge at 9.6 kW — almost 50x faster than the pathetic little solar cells baked into the roof of the Sonata. Hyundai argues that “charging for 5.8 hours per day adds 1,300 km per year to the total driving distance.” Do the math, and it turns out that you’re lucky to add 2.5 miles per day to your range. If you are able-bodied and your commute is 2.5 miles or less, it could be argued that perhaps a stroll would be better for the environment, your health and general transportation infrastructure sanity. But there are plenty of people who drive less than 2.5 miles in a day — and even if weather patterns dictate that you don’t add a significant amount of miles’ worth of range to your car, it wouldn’t be horrible if the vehicle you parked had the same or slightly more battery power after a few days of sitting around idle. In a world where average drivers drive 10,000 miles per year, 800 miles of free driving means a fuel efficiency bump of around 8%. In any universe, if someone offers you an 8% discount on anything, you take it. If you also , this all adds up to real numbers. It’s hard to say whether the additional cost and complexity of the roof turns out to actually be a money saver (or even an environmental saver) in the long run — but I think there’s a question of principle at play here: Every car has a few square feet worth of real estate that isn’t being used for anything “useful” on the boot, roof and hood. If it can reduce the overall energy consumption by 8-10%, multiply by all cars that have battery storage capacity (EVs, hybrids and others) and it soon starts to add up. The solar roof feature is available in the highest-end version of the 2022 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid, the Limited trim, which starts at $35,500. It’s super easy to snipe at Hyundai and others for greenwashing, and perhaps it’ll turn out that this is a gimmick that ultimately, over the life-span of a vehicle, is a net negative. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’d rather drive around with a solar panel on the roof that barely does anything, than . |
Mercedes-Benz shows off the interior of the 2023 EQS SUV | Igor Bonifacic | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | Ahead of its official debut on April 19, Mercedes-Benz has at the interior of the 2023 EQS SUV. As you can see from the photos the automaker provided, Mercedes didn’t reinvent its interior design language. As before, the most eye-catching feature is the optional 56-inch that spans across the entire front cabin of the car. It includes a 12.3-inch OLED display that allows the front passenger to watch video content while the car is moving. If an onboard camera detects the driver sneaking a glimpse of the display, the screen will automatically dim to refocus their eyes on the road. Mercedes-Benz 2023 EQS SUV interior cabin The interior cabin incorporates both wood and leather to create a “lounge-like” ambiance. Mercedes will allow customers to customize the interior in seven different color combinations. It will also offer optional third-row seating and an electrically adjustable second row, allowing the EQS SUV to transport up to seven people. Other notable features include a Dolby Atmos sound system and an air filtration system that incorporates a HEPA filter to prevent pollen and dust from entering the cabin. Mercedes also announced today it will manufacture batteries for the EQS SUV (and EQE SUV) at a newly opened battery , Alabama, that will create up to 600 jobs. The company will assemble the vehicle at its long-standing plant in nearby Tuscaloosa, Alabama. |
Mark Zuckerberg says NFTs are coming to Instagram soon | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | Meta wants you to mint in the metaverse. In a conversation at SXSW, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company plans to introduce NFTs into Instagram in the “near term.” While the Meta CEO and founder didn’t offer a ton of detail, he characterized the integration of non-fungible tokens into the company’s photo and video sharing app as something on the way once the Instagram team works out some of the technical challenges. “We are working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term,” Zuckerberg said in a . “I’m not ready to announce exactly what that’s going to be today, but, over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, and hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment.” In December, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri confirmed that the company was with the goal of bringing the technology to a wider audience. “I think it’s an interesting place that we can play and also to hopefully help creators,” Mosseri said in an Instagram story. Those plans were already in the works: Last summer, Instagram an invite-only virtual summit that the company characterized as a “private event for NFT creators” in its . Instagram’s interest in NFTs dovetails with parent company Meta’s filled with digital goods. “I would hope that the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the Metaverse can be minted as an NFT and you can take it between different places,” Zuckerberg said. While the company’s NFT plans aren’t much of a departure for anyone who’s been tracking Meta’s aspirations, the integration might be a lot to stomach for some creators . Twitter enabled NFT profile pictures for — an integration that stops short of what Meta is hinting at here — but between Jack Dorsey’s crypto hype and the platform’s existing NFT community, non-fungible features might be more at home there than on Instagram. There’s also the matter that Meta’s track record of products in the cryptoverse is spotty so far, to put it generously. Facing headwinds from central banks and regulators, the company until they bore little resemblance to its initial pronouncements of an industry-shaking innovation. |
Cadillac will offer two new features to select Super Cruise drivers this summer | Andrew Tarantola | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | will learn two new tricks this summer. GM announced on Tuesday that the driver assist system will offer Automatic Lane Change and Trailering capabilities for eligible owners. Owners of the will have the opportunity to purchase Automatic Lane Change capabilities, while 2021 Escalade owners will be given the Trailering option, which allows the SUV to tow without touching the steering wheel. The company estimates that some 12,000 CT4s, 5s and Escalades will be eligible for the paid updates. “Eligible customers will receive communication from Cadillac about pricing, and how they can purchase and install these new upgrades in the near future,” a GM spokesperson told Engadget via email. Super Cruise, which can be found on a variety of GM products including the new is a Level 2 system, in that it is a driver assist and not fully autonomous. It relies on a mixture of LiDAR mapping, GPS, visual cameras and radar sensors to navigate traffic. GM originally however, the COVID pandemic and a global processor shortage . |
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Beat the early-bird deadline to save $300 at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 | Alexandra Ames | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | Not much else matches the fast, evolving pace of mobility technology. It’s revolutionizing the way we move people, as well as parcels both big and small, and it’s simultaneously reshaping the present and future of industries, cities and towns around the world. If you want to keep your fingers on mobility’s driving pulse, you can’t afford to miss , a two-day, programming-packed summit covering all aspects of the mobility ecosystem. We’re back live and in-person May 18-19 in San Mateo, California, with an online component on May 20. You also can’t afford to miss our early-bird pricing — about which two things are true: It saves you a lot of cash, and it doesn’t last forever. Your opportunity to save $300 is time-sensitive… and time is running out. by April 1 and keep three fat Franklins in your wallet — no foolin’. What can you expect at ? In a word, plenty. It starts with more than 2,000 attendees. You’ll hear and learn from mobility’s leading founders, CEOs, VCs and policymakers as TechCrunch editors ask tough, thought-provoking questions during one-on-one interviews and panel discussions. Case in point: , co-founder and CEO of Nuro — the California-based AV behemoth that hit an $8.6 billion valuation last year — will be in the house for a 1:1 fireside chat. We can’t wait to hear why Nuro steered clear of people and bet on delivering packages instead. We also want to learn more about the company’s many high-profile partnerships, and that’s just the tip of the conversation. Don’t go skipping out on the smaller breakout sessions and topic-driven roundtable discussions. They’re designed for taking conversations deeper and for making invaluable connections. Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking, who attended our last in-person TC Mobility event (in 2019 thanks, pandemic), shared her experience with us. “I enjoyed the big marquee speakers from companies like Uber, but it was the individual presentations where you really started to get into the meat of the conversation and see how these mobile partnerships come to life.” You’ll find tons of prime networking opportunities everywhere, and especially in the huge indoor expo area where dozens of early-stage startups showcase and demo their products and tech. Get your ride on in the outdoor playground — test drive the latest in scooters, e-bikes and autonomous vehicle technology. takes place on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California, and if you want to save $300 on the price of admission, you need to shift into gear and .
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Daily Crunch: Former Metamates go from zero to unicorn with $200M crypto investment led by a16z | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Tuesday, March 15, 2022! Well, we’ve done it. We made it through earnings season and nearly all of Q1. Now it’s just the final two weeks until we rock into the second real period of 2022. Time flies, but the fact that we’re toward the end of March means that Early Stage is coming up. I, for one, cannot wait. (And, fine, I’m looking forward to Q1 earnings as well.) – What crypto slowdown? Last week TechCrunch noted that . But that and generally uninspiring price movements in major crypto tokens are not slowing venture interest in the space. The parent company of well-known crypto wallet , and the team that was working on crypto at Facebook . Which is, notably, a new blockchain, and not something built atop an existing decentralized network. Before we dive into the rest of the startup news, there’s regarding BNPL (consumer lending fintech, essentially) regulation that’s worth reading. I have yet to finish digesting it, but the concept of laggy regulation in the face of rapid innovation is never something to ignore. And there was more. Bobbie , , and . / Getty Images Poring over public information will not tell you exactly which kinds of deals VCs are looking for at the moment or how they prefer to be approached by founders. To dispel some of these mysteries and learn more about where top VCs are searching for opportunities, we polled the following investors: |
Bird’s Q4 revenues beat expectations, but investors don’t love its conservative 2022 growth forecast | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | Shared micromobility company Bird 2021 fourth quarter and full year earnings on Tuesday after the bell. The report was the company’s second public earnings release after finalizing its SPAC deal in November. Since its combination, the company’s value has fallen, mirroring declines seen in other SPAC combinations. Still, the company raised capital and went public, so we now receive regular financial updates regarding its operations. In the fourth quarter, Bird beat Wall Street revenue expectations, but its guidance fell short of analyst expectations and could come up short when compared to projections listed its SPAC investor presentation. Let’s dig in. Bird’s full-year revenue of $205 million exceeded expectations of $193.1 million. That was a win for the company. The e-scooter company’s revenue grew 117% from its 2020 total. Naturally 2020 was a year that heavily impacted all mobility-focused startups, so there’s some nuance to the figure, but it is still a strong result. In a call, Bird emphasized to TechCrunch that its 2021 revenue result was 9% above its SPAC forecast. Full-year adjusted EBITDA for 2021 was -$67 million, which also beat the original SPAC forecast by 30%. Bird had originally anticipated a $96 million adjusted EBITDA loss in 2021. The company’s fourth quarter, however, was not as impressive as its full-year results. Bird’s top line in Q4 2021 came to $54 million, an increase from its year-ago result, but a decrease from its sequentially preceding quarter, which saw $65.4 million in revenue. Bird’s Q4 revenue did beat , and despite a quarter-to-quarter revenue decline, gross margin at Bird in Q4 was 15%, up from 13.5% in Q3 of the same year. Most of Bird’s revenue came from vehicle sharing, but revenue from expanded. In 2021, product sales made up about $17.8 million of Bird’s revenue, up from $14.7 million in 2020. While that number doesn’t represent massive growth, Bird did see improved economics in its hardware business. The revenue costs of product sales in 2021 were $17.3 million, compared to $22.7 million in 2020, which means the company is getting better at hardware keeping costs down and efficiencies up. Part of Bird’s overall decrease in Q4 revenue — when compared to its Q3 2021 metrics — is attributable to average rides per vehicle per day dipping in Q4 compared to its full-year metrics. Bird attributes this decline to seasonality, wherein Q4 and Q1 tend to be a little lighter for key mobility metrics due to poor weather and less tourism. COVID, of course, also affected ridership in Q4. Bird does expect more market recovery in 2022, with cities across the U.S. shedding mask mandates and tourism and commuting expected to make a comeback. The company also noted the rise in gas prices due to the war in Ukraine is expected to account for increased ridership as people look to alternative forms of transportation. Turning to costs, total operating expenses in the fourth quarter at Bird grew sharply to $136.6 million, up from $40.0 million last quarter. Bird attributes this to $82.3 million of non-cash stock-based compensation expenses, which was triggered by its SPAC combination. Many companies report near-term boosts to share-based compensation costs in the wake of public-market debuts. Gross margin for 2021 was 19% of revenue, and Bird expects that percentage to march forward into the 20s over time. In the wake of its better-than-expected Q4 2021 revenue result, and lower-than-promised full-year adjusted EBITDA losses, you might be surprised to learn that Bird’s stock is down in after-hours trading. Why the declines? Guidance, it appears. Bird expects revenue in the first quarter of this year to land between $34 million and $36 million. Investors had estimated $49.0 million for Q1 2022, . For the full year, Bird expects revenues of $350 million, an uninspiring estimate given the company’s previous $401 million target as laid out in its . Bird forecast its 2022 with flat utilization when compared to its 2021 results, rather than modeling continued recovery from COVID and continued return to work and tourism, the company told TechCrunch. The company also argued that hitting $350 million would still be a healthy 70% YOY growth rate from 2021’s $205 million. (We note here that $401 million in revenue would represent even faster growth!) Bird says that despite challenges, it’s been profitable by some metrics in each quarter. The question remains, will it be able to maintain a sustainable business and reach long-term, GAAP profitability? Bird’s earnings release claims the company is present in 400 cities globally, a footprint that could give it the type of reach it will need to become fully profitable. , which it says has been successful and will lead the city to double Bird’s service area this summer. That in turn will lead to Bird’s doubling its fleet size in the city, Travis VanderZanden, founder and CEO of Bird, said during Tuesday’s earnings call. Existing large markets like Washington D.C. and Marseille, France also renewed their e-scooter programs over the course of 2021 the company said. VanderZanden said Bird had entered 250 cities with populations of fewer than 500,000 in 2021 through its fleet manager operating model, which involves scooter fleets being handed over to third party operators and . “Despite the seasonal impact on our top line, this model is a key differentiator for Bird both due to the profitability focus as well as the operational efficiency we unlock with each partner managing about 100 vehicles on average. In fact, our pipeline for logistics partners remains robust even as we continue to elevate our expectations. As we look ahead, we will continue to optimise and develop our fleet manager programme including further investment in the technology platforms our partners use to manage their operations,” the CEO said. Bird’s ride-profit margin before vehicle depreciation increased to 49% in 2021 from 20% in 2020, and Bird tells TechCrunch there’s room to move that number further as gross profit increases, saying that both Bird and the fleet managers see more profits when utilization increases, which will lead to a rise in those percentages. Bird is counting on vehicle innovation to drive profits, as well. The Bird Three, , has accounted for higher utilization rates than other models, which could be attributed to the novelty factor that new hardware brings. But Bird says its new scooter has sustained higher rates of use throughout its launch because it’s simply a great ride. It’s also much easier to repair and damage vectors are way down in the deployment of the vehicles, which could provide a boost to some of the company’s profit metrics. At the end of 2021, the Bird Three accounted for 40% of Bird’s overall fleet, but the company is expecting the vehicle to make up for most of its fleet by end of year. The good thing about having the previous models still on the streets, though, is that Bird continues to repair them and get them back on the road. There’s a balance here because the Bird Three outperforms those new vehicles, but it carries the total depreciation charge, whereas those older vehicles effectively give Bird free rides because they’re already fully depreciated. To continue to drive ridership, Bird will be focusing on hitting the use case of longer rides by deploying . It will also expand its smart bikeshare program, wherein it brings local bikeshares onto its app in the hopes that this will encourage greater mode shift, which might ultimately reflect back on Bird. How much more growth will the startup need to get closer to profitability? The fourth quarter revenues of $54 million generated gross profits of $8.2 million, down from $13.5 million in Q3 2021. The figure shows an improvement on the -$2 million gross profits of a year ago, when the first COVID winter was upon us, but it’s still far and away from the $136.6 million in operating costs in the quarter, a gap that was, in all fairness, expected to widen last quarter. Bird still has cash on hand to the tune of $159.9 million in “total cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash and cash equivalents,” which means it has some time to reduce its losses. But not infinite time. The company’s operations consumed $131.6 million worth of cash during 2021, while its investing cash flows ran a larger, negative $215.8 million during the same period. The company’s vehicle purchases are recorded in investing cash flow, for reference. Bird tells TechCrunch that it’s laser focused on its core sharing business and is chugging along toward profitability. Overall YOY growth is still trending upward, and if those headwinds really have turned into tailwinds, Bird might make its conservative full-year guidance estimates after all. |
Startup banking service Mercury jumps into debt lending to take on Silicon Valley Bank | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | , a , three-year-old startup that offers a host of banking services to startups, is today rolling out a new offering for its customers: venture debt. The idea is to loan out $200 million this year and up to $1 billion next year to startups that have already raised $2 million in funding from at least one institutional investor. The product is for early-stage startups only, with Mercury offering between 25% to 50% of a startup’s equity round in debt. The move puts the 250-person, San Francisco-based outfit — which says it already has 60,000 businesses on its platform — on a collision course with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). Mercury co-founder and CEO Immad Akhund says that’s very much the idea, too. Like a lot of fintech startups, Mercury — which is not a bank itself but a banking platform that offers FDIC-insured products through an Arkansas-based bank called — says bigger rivals like SVB are cumbersome and don’t understand the changing expectations of its customers. “These banks have just never had to build a product, so the idea that you go to a website, fill out a form and connect to QuickBooks is not something any bank would normally think of,” Akhund says. “It seems obvious as a product entrepreneur, but that’s just how these experiences are built at banks. Everything is still happening over email and PDFs. There are a ton of calls back and forth, a lot of Excel spreadsheets.” While a growing number of startups have begun securing debt nevertheless while either raising a round or soon afterward to extend their runway — SVB says a whopping 63% of U.S. companies to go public in the first half of last year were customers — Mercury’s advantage over SVB is that it’s a “product-first” startup, Akhund argues. Akhund says he knows the pain points of startups well, having previously co-founded two earlier companies, including Heyzap, a mobile ad network that was . Indeed, it’s because of that firsthand experience, as well as his work with some of the hundreds of other startups to which he says he has written angel investor checks over the years, that Mercury was founded. Its modus operandi all along was to blow up traditional banking hurdles for founders, beginning with services like checking and savings accounts, debit cards, ACH payments, check payments, and domestic and international wire transfers. Venture debt is just the newest product offering — one that Mercury’s team expects will become a sizable part of its business. It could also prove more lucrative than the products from which Mercury currently derives revenue. Its biggest moneymaker right now is debit card interchange, meaning that every time a Mercury customer swipes their debit card, Mercury gets a small piece of the transaction. Akhund says Mercury also makes a “little bit of money” on float, meaning the lag between when a customer deposits a check into its Mercury account and the moment those funds become available. Whether ease of use is enough to eat into the market share of a brand like SVB, with its market cap of $30 billion, is the question. It’s the only front on which Mercury is competing right now, given that its lending terms aren’t necessarily more beneficial or forgiving than those of rivals. “We have comparative interest rates,” says Jason Garcia, Mercury’s head of capital and relationship management. He says Mercury also takes a “small warrant” when it extends venture debt and charges origination fees, as do banks like SVB. (Notably, Garcia logged time previously with SVB as a senior vice president.) Apparently, it’s doing enough to win over some converts. Mercury — which is backed by Coatue and a16z, among other firms — has extended venture debt to several Series A startups to date, including and . In the meantime, the company talks a good game, and in a world where there’s little allegiance to established banking brands, that could go a long way. “There’ve been a bunch of people that have tried [offering venture debt],” says Garcia. “Wells Fargo. JPMorgan. People know this is a good product.” The challenge, he insists, “is that bankers have a hard time connecting with founders, and that’s one thing that Mercury does really, really well. We’re built by founders, they are technologists themselves, and we built it ourselves with them in mind.” |
Infrastructure bill could promote lean construction via data capture | Meirav Oren | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | to be significant for the construction industry and the technology that empowers its workforce. Data capture and measurement hold much promise this year thanks to $550 billion in funding allocated to infrastructure projects as part of President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The bill also includes $100 million to construction technology over the next five years. Data enhances our understanding of a project’s success. Construction crews’ job site knowledge is rich with insights, and technology can convert these insights into process benchmarks to improve overall performance, validate workers’ skills and plan future projects. Savings on even one task — such as rebar installation — allow superintendents to extrapolate those efficiencies into expedited project timelines, leading to less overtime and a healthier work-life balance, as well as improved efficiency and safety. Despite recent strides in construction technology, general contractors are still hesitant to implement new technology, with some struggling to secure organizationwide buy-in for new tools. According to JB Knowledge’s (registration required), 35.9% of employees are hesitant to try new technology. Timing is paramount for capturing the full value of data. The sooner teams deploy technology, the sooner they can begin benchmarking. Here are a few tips general contractors should follow to accelerate the adoption of new tech in this space. After introducing a solution, the last thing general contractors need is a lengthy training session, especially one that keeps them from their work. Such long training sessions shouldn’t be necessary for solutions built to scale immediately. In fact, the quicker they’re implemented, the sooner the solution can be optimized into project plans. Data and analytics solutions can begin evaluating and validating job site information immediately without a long training process. Data captured on the worksite (particularly by experienced crew members) serves as guidance to upskill other crew members — which can be critical, given that 41% of the current construction workforce is expected to retire by 2031, according to a recent report. |
Google unveils ‘Immersive Stream for Games,’ its service that lets companies use Stadia’s tech | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | At its , Google today unveiled Stadia’s B2B offering called “Immersive Stream for Games.” The offering, which was created in partnership with Google Cloud, will allow companies to take advantage of Stadia’s underlying platform technology and deliver games directly to players. With this offering, Google is branching out by opening up Stadia’s streaming technology for other companies to license. Google says the service will allow companies to run game trials, offer subscription bundles or entire storefronts. Google began working with AT&T last year to pilot the new offering. AT&T used the service to power its offering of Batman: Arkham Knight to thousands of its users for free. The company will be using Immersive Stream for Games to power another game coming soon to its customers, which will be playable on the web and on mobile. Google plans to scale Immersive Stream for Games more this year. “The Google for Games Developer Summit is designed to support studios of every size, with tools and innovations from teams across Google,” said Dov Zimring, Stadia’s head of product, in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. “The core features we’re talking about today are benefitting both the development journey and player experience for Immersive Stream for Games customers, including Stadia. In partnership with Google Cloud, we’re working to build out the underlying cloud gaming technology that powers both Stadia and our customers’ offerings via Immersive Stream for Games. A rising tide for cloud gaming lifts Immersive Stream for Games as well as Stadia, and we’re excited for what’s to come in 2022 and beyond.” Google’s official unveiling of the offering follows from February that indicated that the company was deprioritizing Stadia and focusing on striking deals with companies through a B2B cloud gaming service. Today’s announcement finally gives this project a name. Google Stadia As for Stadia itself, Google announced plans to launch new features to make it easier for players to discover and play games. Google is making it possible for people to browse games in the Stadia store without needing to log into the service or create a Stadia account. The company says this will make it easier for users to browse titles available on the store. Google is also launching new “Click to Play Trials” to enable players to try out games on Stadia. Players can try out games without having to pay or sign up for a Stadia account. Developers can choose how long they want a game trial to last. The company launched its “Click to Play Trials” pilot phase last October with select developers. In the first public test, Google found that players are about 35% more likely to respond to a “Click to Play Trials” promotion than a traditional “buy or claim” message. Google plans to offer the trials as an option for all titles on Stadia in 2022. The company is also working to make it easier for companies to port Windows games to Stadia. Its new “Low change porting” toolkit is designed to reduce the time and resources required for developers to bring games to Stadia. Google revealed that more than 10 studios, including Paradox Interactive and Team 17, are currently testing the toolkit in order to port their Windows-based games to Stadia. The new toolkit will be made more widely available to developers later this year. It’s no surprise that Google is looking to deliver Stadia gaming streaming technology to other companies, as Google has struggled to grow and scale Stadia over the past few years since its in 2019. Although the company initially planned to release exclusive titles, Google closed Stadia’s in-house game studios in . |
Bear Robotics targets restaurant staffing shortages with another $81M raise | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | One of the most interesting things about following food robotics startups over the past couple of years is tracking all of the different tasks companies are looking to automate, from prep to delivery. Bay Area-based Bear isn’t the only firm attempting to bring robots out in front of the the counter, but in recent years, it’s become one of the most prominent. Bear has seen some success in deployment of late, including a bid to get its system in more restaurants in Japan. That push comes courtesy of backer SoftBank, as well as some ongoing labor shortages in the country. Japan has long eyed robots as a way to keep business moving for its aging population, and the pandemic only served to accelerate those needs. Here in the States, Bear has partnered with Chili’s, Compass Group, Denny’s, Marriott and Pepsi. The business model has clearly garnered a lot of confidence in SoftBank, which has become even more bullish on robotics of late, leading its 2020 Series A. Today new investor IMM is coming on board to lead an , along with existing investors like Cleveland Avenue. This latest round brings Bear’s full funding up around $117 million to date. Bear is understandably cautious around the subject of full automation. The company has long positioned itself as a way for restaurants to augment — rather than replace — human waitstaffs. That’s no doubt, in part, due to the fact that the machines are more akin to mobile tables, rather than robot waiters, moving orders from Point A to Point B. “Having started my own restaurant years ago, I learned firsthand just how hard things could get,” founder/CEO John Ha said in a release. “I thought there must be a way to automate some of these repetitive tasks without losing what makes a restaurant great. That’s why we created Servi. It’s a solution meant to enhance the experience of customers, employees, and operators. While others are trying to fully automate work, we’re trying to elevate the future of work for stakeholders in this industry that keep it going each day.” All told, Bear says its Servi robot has delivered 28 million meals over a combined 335,000 miles. |
Russia’s App Store lost nearly 7K apps since its invasion of Ukraine, but some Big Tech apps remain | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | The Russian App Store has lost 6,982 mobile apps since the start of the Ukraine invasion, as numerous companies have now pulled their apps and games from Apple’s iPhone and iPad App Stores in the country, according to data shared with TechCrunch by app intelligence firm . To date, those apps had been downloaded around 218 million times in Russia, representing a little over 3% of their total 6.6 billion global lifetime installs. Amid the widespread exits, several Big Tech companies’ apps continue to rank highly on the Russian App Store, though the Top Charts currently are filled with VPN apps. While Apple routinely removes outdated and abandoned apps from its App Store, the Russian App Store app removals post-invasion (February 24 through March 14) represent a 105% increase in the number of apps removed from the store when compared with the first two weeks of February 2022 (February 1 to 14). During that earlier period, Russia’s App Store had seen only 3,404 app removals — a figure that was in line with the number of apps pulled from Apple’s App Stores in other markets, including the U.S., where 3,422 apps were removed. These pre-invasion app removals were likely related to Apple’s ongoing cleanup efforts, Sensor Tower noted. Russia is not the only country being impacted in this way. Many publishers also removed their apps and games from the App Store in Belarus, Russia’s neighbor and ally. That country has now seen a loss of 5,900 apps since the invasion’s start — a figure that increased by 73% when compared with the 3,418 apps removed from February 1-14. By comparison, other app markets had seen smaller increases in app removals, perhaps also related to Apple’s App Store maintenance efforts. : Sensor Tower As a result of Russia’s decision to wage war against Ukraine, the country has been the global economy as the U.S. and its allies coordinated to enact broad economic sanctions. Large companies have also stopped doing business in Russia, including some of the , like McDonald’s, Apple, Microsoft, Disney, IKEA, H&M, Adidas and Starbucks, as well as payments giants Visa, Mastercard and Amex, among others. In some cases, the Russian App Store removals are related to those big brand exits. For instance, Coca-Cola pulled its iOS loyalty and rewards-focused app out of the Russian App Store, to suspend its business in Russia. Retailers like H&M and American Eagle Outfitters also pulled apps, along with Ebates’ shopping platform ShopStyle. In sports, apps from the NFL, NBA, WWE and Eurosport have disappeared from the Russian App Store following the invasion. Also gone are health apps from MyFitnessPal, Kaiser Permanente, and numerous smaller fitness, meditation and yoga apps. Of these, MyFitnessPal had been fairly popular in Russia, having seen some 4.2 million installs to date, including those across both iOS and Android. Games are the largest category seeing removals in Russia and represent some huge departures. The Russian App Store has lost a number of top games from publishers including Zynga, Supercell, Take-Two (Rockstar Games), and others — many of which have publicly announced their exits. In response to the ongoing war in Ukraine, Supercell has removed its games from app stores in Russia and Belarus. New downloads are halted and access for existing players will be suspended with the next client updates. — Supercell (@supercell) For instance, that, in response to the ongoing war, “new downloads are halted and access for existing players will be suspended with the next update. The company’s games that were pulled from the App Store in Russia included Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale and Hay Day. These are sizable exits — Clash of Clans alone has seen 36 million installs across both iOS and Android to date in Russia, for example. Rockstar Games pulled over a half dozen titles from its Grand Theft Auto series, among others. Its parent company, Take-Two, had announced its intentions to exit Russia on March 7, noting it had watched the events unfolding in Ukraine with “concern and sadness.” It said it would stop new sales, installations, and marketing in both Russia and Belarus. Zynga, meanwhile, it’s been watching the events in Ukraine with “great concern” and would exit Russia and Belarus as well as donate to relief organizations. The publisher has now pulled dozens of its casual games from those countries’ App Stores, including many bigger titles like Farmville 3, Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells, Empires & Puzzles, Solitaire, Zynga Poker, and others from its Netflix has also delivered to leave Russia with the removal of its streaming app in the country. Dating apps Bumble and Badoo are gone, too. Bumble (Badoo’s parent) said on March 8 that it would leave both app stores in Russia and Belarus. The combined revenue it saw from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus was approximately 2.8% of total Bumble annual revenue in 2021, the company added. Other notable removals from the Russian App Store include IMDb, travel app , The Weather Channel ( ), Playtika and (games), , Citizen, DAZN sports live streaming, AllTrails, and Google Home. (AllTrails had not yet released a public statement, but told TechCrunch it has now “indefinitely suspended” services in Russia. “We stand with the people of Ukraine, and refuse to associate with Russia as they wage this tragic war,” the company said.) In terms of removal by categories, the types of apps that have seen the largest number of removals from the Russian App Store include those in Games, Productivity, Utilities, Music, Business, Education and Health. As a point of reference, more than 860 games were removed across impacted App Stores, including those in Russia, Belarus and, to some extent, Ukraine. (Only a handful were pulled in the latter, however.) However, not all tech giants have fully exited Russia’s App Store at this time. Microsoft it was halting all new sales of products and services in Russia and has since pulled apps like Solitaire, Majong, Wordament from the Russian App Store. But still ranking at the top of the Productivity charts in Russia are Microsoft’s Word, Office, Excel, Powerpoint, Teams and Outlook, per Sensor Tower data. Sensor Tower. Russian App Store’s Top Charts for Productivity apps on March 15, 2022. Microsoft is not alone. Google Russia, including in the country, but its productivity apps are still available in Russia. Currently ranking highly on the Top Productivity apps chart are Google’s Docs, Sheets, Slides, Assistant, Calendar, Drive, One and Keep, for instance. Adobe, too, to leaving Russia, it would “halt all new sales” of Adobe products and services in Russia, “effective immediately.” It also said it would terminate access to Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud for all Russian state media outlets and pledged money toward the refugee and humanitarian aid. In the days since, Adobe has pulled some of its apps from the Russian App Store, like Photoshop and Illustrator, but others remain available for download, as of the time of writing, including a top-ranked Business app, Adobe Reader. Its iOS app is currently at No. 15 in the top Business apps chart. Sensor Tower – Adobe Reader in Russia on March 15 Google and Adobe did not yet respond to requests for comment. Microsoft declined to comment but pointed to its previously . At present, Russia’s Top Chart for its overall App Store is pointing to apps that no longer work or where content is heavily restricted. On Monday, , impacting 80 million users. But the app still ranks at No. 34 overall in the country today, as it wasn’t actually removed from the App Store. (That means users can still download the app, but can’t access the service, except, perhaps, via a VPN). Russia has also other social media, , while TikTok users’ ability to livestream and post new content in Russia and has blocked all non-Russian content. But TikTok is still ranking well, as the No. 18 overall app on Russia’s App Store, followed by YouTube at No. 27. YouTube, like other platforms, has banned Russian state media outlets and paused advertising and payments. The downranking of these social apps can only partly be attributed to the bans and restrictions. Another factor is the VPN apps, which now dominate the Top Charts. Sensor Tower The top 10 VPN apps collectively reached 4.2 million installs from February 24 through March 13, up 2,286% from the prior period, when the top 10 apps hit about 176,000 installs, Sensor Tower data indicated. The firm noted it also saw apps like Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 and Psiphon appear in the Top 10, though the app dubbed 1.1.1.1 isn’t only a VPN; it advertises privacy and security, which likely appeal to Russian users at this time. |
Apple’s Studio Display fills an obvious gap in the monitor market | Owen Williams | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | At Apple’s March event, the company , a new, 27-inch external monitor that starts at $1,599 — a huge step down in price from the company’s only other monitor, the Pro Display XDR, . The announcement of the Studio Display is big news for many who have been waiting for Apple to offer a replacement for its popular Thunderbolt Display, which was released more than a decade ago and was eventually discontinued in 2016 when Apple . In the tech industry, I know many product designers that refused to give up their Thunderbolt Displays, keeping them limping along despite their limited resolutions and outdated ports, in the hope Apple might eventually release a successor. When Apple discontinued the Thunderbolt Display, it left a large gap in the market: There are practically zero all-in-one displays that combine a monitor with a webcam, microphone, speakers USB ports into a single product. The LG Ultrafine was , but it fell short in build quality, reliability and connectivity compared with the Thunderbolt Display, despite sporting the more modern USB-C port. When the technology industry switched to working remote full-time in 2020 due to the pandemic, I was surprised by the lack of great options for all-in-one external displays when I was shopping for a new monitor. With USB-C popping up on almost every modern computer, promising high-speed connectivity, display support and charging over a single cable, I had expected monitor companies might try to recreate the success of the Thunderbolt Display. But I found few options when I looked for one, and wound up ordering a simple 4K monitor, a separate Logitech webcam, a USB hub and a microphone. Apple’s new Studio Display is the answer, after a decade of waiting, and . It sports a 5K display (5120 × 2880 pixels) at a 60hz refresh rate with a wide P3 color gamut, a 12-megapixel webcam, three studio microphones for noise cancelling, six built-in speakers and a Thunderbolt 3 port, along with three USB-C ports for plugging in all of your peripherals. It plugs into a MacBook via a single Thunderbolt 3 USB-C cable, which charges the laptop while it’s being used. Apple It stands out from the competition because it’s one of the few 5K resolution options available to buy, but also because Apple built in an A13 processor to add additional features such as , which adjusts the color temperature based on the ambient light in your room, as well as , which tracks you and keeps you in the frame of the webcam as you move around. While it might sound sort of dull, you can also control the brightness, sound levels and other functionality directly from your Mac’s keyboard hotkeys instead of requiring navigating a cryptic on-screen display menu built into your screen, which is a massive quality of life improvement. The most common complaint I’ve seen online of Apple’s new display is that it doesn’t support the company’s ProMotion technology found in its latest computers, which includes a high maximum refresh rate (120hz) that can only be described as buttery. This was never going to happen, however, because the port throughput required to pull this off doesn’t exist yet: , but Thunderbolt 3/4 are only capable of carrying 40 Gbps over a single cable. This type of speed is , but the new technology is yet to be announced publicly and isn’t available on any computers yet. While many have balked at the $1,599 base price, I’d argue that all of this is actually well worth it for folks that need a high resolution, color accurate display and spend most of their day in front of a screen, especially if they work from home — which is especially true of anyone working in the product design industry, such as myself, but it’s compelling for anyone who’s in meetings all day and would like to ditch all of the accessories. Being able to plug in a single cable and have a webcam, microphone and speakers ready to roll for your next video call is a massive improvement over fiddling around every time you’ve unplugged your laptop, especially considering that the integrated microphones are optimized for noise cancelling to make taking video calls on the speakers tolerable for everyone involved. For companies hiring on remote employees, being able to ship out a single screen that includes all of the accessories they’re going to buy individually anyway is likely to make it a popular choice for enterprise buys. Is the Studio Display expensive? Absolutely, but it’s an investment in something you’re likely using all day, and will get years of use out of if the Thunderbolt Display’s legacy is anything to go by. I never thought I’d be dropping $1,599 on a , but didn’t hesitate to order one the moment it was available, because life’s too short for bad screens and having webcams perched precariously on top of them. |
Ukraine’s Mykhailo Fedorov talks about corporate sanctions and running a government during wartime | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | started invading Ukraine three weeks ago. And the conflict has been multifaceted from day one. In addition to the ground war, the Ukrainian government quickly reacted on the digital front. Representatives asked for , called out tech companies so that they would sales and services in Russia and organized a digital resistance. One of the public figures that embody the government’s reaction to the Russian invasion is Mykhailo Fedorov. In 2019, he became Ukraine’s first minister of Digital Transformation at the age of 28. He is also the vice prime minister of Ukraine. The country’s deputy minister for Digital Transformation Oleksandr (Alex) Bornyakov has also played an important part in Ukraine’s government — TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden . “Our vision with President Zelensky — before the war — was to build the world’s most convenient country in terms of digitally available public services,” Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview with TechCrunch earlier today. While many of those projects are currently on hold, the Ukrainian government already sees the benefits of its digital transformation efforts. Fedorov is also very active on the digital diplomacy front. He is well aware that Big Tech companies have become quite powerful when it comes to international relations. That’s why he is doing whatever he can to have them on Ukraine’s side. In a wide-ranging interview on Zoom and with the help of a translator, Fedorov also shared some insights about what it’s like to participate in a government during wartime. The interview has been slightly edited for clarity and brevity. I’m at the very center of action. I can’t quite give you a geolocation for security reasons but let me assure you we stay in touch with the president’s team 24/7 about all the projects. We are a very young ministry. We have been created by President Zelensky when he was elected to implement some crucial parts of his program. Before the election I was the head of his digital campaign. After he got elected, we joined forces to implement our shared vision of a digital country. And our vision with President Zelensky — before the war — was to build the world’s most convenient country in terms of digitally available public services. And our goal was to create a government where services would be available in a double tap. They would be semi-automated with as little interference with public officials as possible. In other words, we tried to be more resemblant of an Uber than a government as you would expect it to be. We have created something like a factory to launch public services. That’s enabled by our app which has 15 million users. And it’s also enabled by the interactions of all of the government-run databases that we’ve been able to implement through this period of time, and also by our management structure, which has been fine-tuned to basically launch new services and provide these things. For example, during wartime, we’ve been able to launch such services as cash payouts to people who have been forced to resettle from areas that were badly affected by combat. Also, we’ve been able to embed free public television and free radio. We also added the possibility to raise money for the army through official channels. We have services that allow us to track and report on the enemy movements as well. It’s basically crowdsourced intelligence, and we’ve been able to launch that in just a couple of days since the war erupted. Because our internal ID is a very specific document and not everybody has it. But during war time, we’ve been able to launch an additional document that has all of the vital information for internal mobility and getting public services no matter who you are and where you are and what your status is. We’re also working on a service to basically provide an inventory of your property if it has been damaged or destroyed by the war for future processes. I would say that we are very stable and confident at the moment because of our telecom industry. I think they are real heroes because they work around the clock. And whenever there’s an outage, they go out and fix it. So we are able to maintain stable internet connectivity throughout most of the country. We also have the largest number of Starlink terminals anywhere in the EU. Building a digital state increases your exposure, your surface of attack, which means that we have been always very mindful and very serious about cybersecurity. Also, as we we have been building our digital state, we have been constantly targeted by the Russian Federation with cyber attacks. Without elaborating, I would like to say that our data is safe. We have backups. We have means to ensure consistency and safety of the data. This means that our services will remain reliable and available for Ukrainian citizens no matter what happens. We call this project digital blockade. And we believe that this is a very crucial component to winning this war. And I think that, in the future, governments will resemble tech companies, not classical governments. Digital platforms provide some vital services. They have become so embedded into the fabric of society. Once you start removing these services from the aggressor, one by one, you actually damage their fabric of society and you make it very uncomfortable for them to go along with their daily lives. We’d like to think of this as a completely new and unexplored battlefield. And this is a complementary measure to sanctions which we expect is going to push the development of Russia back decades. I also think that high-tech businesses create tremendous added value. And that’s why Tesla is worth more than Gazprom. People who create this added value, the tech talent, they’re actually very mobile and nomadic. When you create these unfavorable conditions in Russia, you’re likely to cause the tech talent to move elsewhere. This is why we are committed to making this digital blockade as thorough and as comprehensive as we can. Up until the moment when Russian tanks and soldiers leave our country and stop killing our people. I think one company I’d particularly like to call out is SAP. It’s a German company that provides ERP to banks and major enterprises. Basically, they contribute to the aggressive war by providing IT infrastructure to Russian companies and also by paying taxes in Russia. Thus, they support the army that is murdering Ukrainian nationals and civilians. There are about 300,000 tech talent in Ukraine. Most of these international companies have been able to stabilize their operations and ensure business continuity in Ukraine. Even though it’s been challenging but most of them are managing to do it. We try to cater to the needs of our tech companies by providing them with broadband internet, with safe locations, with some tax stimulus, as well as with mobility. So basically, we aim to be their one-stop shop — should they have problems. I would say that this project is currently in very early development. I would not be in a position to comment on the progress but once we have results I would be glad to share results. I would start off by saying that most of these use cases would not be public, not something that we’d be able to share publicly. But something that I can just give you a sneak peek would be our work with the Ministry of Internal Affairs. We would be trying to identify Russian forces who have been killed or taken prisoner in Ukraine. As you know, the Russian government starts to deny their presence, send them without documents, etc. Another one would be checking people who cross our roadblocks. Another one would be looking for missing persons. As of now, we have been able to raise $55 million. And all of that has been directed toward the needs of the Ukrainian army. We are also trying to become a crypto friendly country. I can even give you some specifics. The Parliament has adopted a law on virtual assets. I think the president is about to sign it into law in a matter of days. So we strive to be as friendly to virtual assets as possible. And we are continuing this effort during war time as well. That’s an excellent question. During wartime our government is working in overdrive mode basically. We’re working 24/7 — no weekends. While our cabinet meetings were held weekly before the war now they’re held daily. Just like the brave servicemen and women in our armed forces are defending our country day and night without any weekends or holidays. We’re doing likewise. We are working on the military front; we are working on the tech front. We are also working on the economic front. And our government has been working especially hard to liberalize the economy and remove all hurdles, roadblocks and bottlenecks in our economy. We are simplifying tax rules. We are opening up our customs and — gee — we’re even trying to develop our country economically despite the war. Sure I’d like to organize a follow-up call. And I’d like to also just say a few words in conclusion, if you could put those in your article. I’d like to say thank you to the entire tech community because I believe that the tech community has chosen our side, which is obviously the side of good. We can feel it with our hearts and we can feel it by the actions of the tech community, and we are very grateful for that. |
How the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is set to shake up BNPL in 2022 | Yaacov Martin | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | behind on for fintechs, which is unsettling considering the number of U.S. citizens in serious debt. As of the third quarter of 2021, American citizens owed , nearing the highest level in the nation’s history. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) services offer customers accessibility and flexibility for payments, but mean people can unintentionally put their financial health at risk. Some BNPL providers penalize consumers up to for repaying late. And a showed 72% of consumers in the U.S. ended up with lower credit scores after using unregulated BNPL services. But the right set of regulations will resolve this issue and ultimately provide an opportunity for banks to enter and become leaders in the BNPL arena. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is keeping a close eye on consumer credit products. A probe announced in December 2021 asked major players Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna, PayPal, and Zip to provide insight into the risks and benefits of their products. While BNPL players have positioned themselves as the driving force for financial inclusion, policymakers will discover that many of these providers need to make far more progress regarding customers’ financial well-being. Regulation is the way to ensure that. Although regulators will take some time to reach conclusions and implement real hardline requirements, the ramifications will be immediate. Here’s what we expect: The right set of regulations will soon show that fair and responsible lending goes hand-in-hand with accessible and affordable consumer financing. The CFPB regulation probe will level the playing field in the long term. Fintechs have shown there is a need for BNPL, and have proven that it is possible to scale these offerings throughout both in-store channels and e-commerce sites. However, traditional lenders and banks, which already offer services that adhere to reporting protocols, can now also flourish in the BNPL space with the right technological partnerships. By partnering with a BNPL provider, banks can deploy agile, responsible BNPL solutions that will benefit both merchants and consumers. By offering white-labeled BNPL options from banks, merchants could increase sales and average order value (AOV). Consumers will benefit from high acceptance rates provided by banks and other regulated financial institutions. Plus, leading banks and lenders often offer the most competitive loan programs. Let’s analyze which countries are on the right track. The U.K. was one of the first movers regarding regulation. But despite the Woolard Review published by the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in early 2021, which explained the urgency to regulate the BNPL industry, there is no new regulatory regime expected to bring unregulated BNPL products under the FCA . |
TechCrunch+ roundup: Crypto tax prep, no-code survey, 4 VCs discuss how to pitch them | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 3 | 15 | Fundraising is a highly specialized skill: unless you’ve started a business, worked in a non-profit, or perhaps defrauded someone, you won’t have much practical experience when it comes to convincing strangers to give you their money. But startup-land is different: before a founding team can breathe life into their great idea, someone must first show investors exactly how that idea solves an existing problem and generates enough revenue that it’s worth the risk and paperwork. Performing due diligence is critical, but it won’t give you all the information you need to approach a VC. For some, a LinkedIn DM may be an appropriate way to get their attention, but others may filter notes from unknown senders into their spam folder. Likewise, one investor may ask to review your deck in detail; another may prefer a probing one-on-one conversation. Poring over publicly-available information will not indicate exactly which kinds of deals they’re looking for at the moment. As markets shift, so will their focus — but there’s no way to know that after reading about a round they led last year. To dispel some of these mysteries and learn more about where top VCs are searching for opportunities, : Responses were varied, but I thought it was particularly notable that warm introductions aren’t necessarily more popular than cold emails. I’ll be talking to more venture capitalists and angel investors in the coming weeks, so watch this space. Thanks very much for reading TechCrunch+! Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch+
/ Getty Images We’ve reported on the rise of no-code/low-code software for years, but since the pandemic began, they’ve taken on new importance. Rapid digital transitions are taking place in an era where employees have become adept at working remotely and software developers are in higher demand than ever. We interviewed six technologists to learn more about the impacts of no-code/low-code tools, minimizing technical debt and related topics: / Getty Images Regardless of whether you’ve liquidated your crypto assets or plan to hodl until the heat death of the universe, if you made any profits last year while trading, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service would like to have a chat. But some digging may be required to identify those taxable proceeds. Because cryptocurrency exchanges aren’t SEC-regulated, “they’re not legally required to offer the same level of tax reporting that discount brokerages and custodians must provide to stock, bond and mutual fund investors.” Are we in a bull market or a bear market? The publicly-traded software companies that comprise the Bessemer Cloud Index saw “good growth during the pandemic,” reports Alex Wilhelm in The Exchange, but today, it’s lost almost “50% of its value since it reached record highs in late 2021.” Last year, many software startups boasted of revenue multiples in double digits, which thrilled investors. “What are those startups going to do if they are worth not 100x their recurring revenue, but, say, 8x?” asks Alex. Greylock / Snorkel AI Since launching in 2019, Snorkel.AI co-founder and CEO Alex Rather has raised $135 million across four rounds. “I was a pitch deck nerd even before giving a real pitch deck,” Ratner said on a recent episode of TechCrunch Live. Storytelling comes up frequently while discussing startup pitch strategy: investors are only interested in entrepreneurs who can convey a holistic understanding of their market and the problem they’re trying to solve. “To be candid, the startup just needs to get this right,” said Greylock partner Saam Motamedi, who led Snorkel.AI’s $3.3 million seed round. “These are the two things we look for at seed and Series A.” |
This Week in Apps: War and the app economy, Google’s Messages update, Telegram ‘TV’ | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 12 | Welcome back to This Week in Apps, that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the year-end . Global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021, and mobile ad spend grew 23% year over year to reach $295 billion. Today’s consumers now spend more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours, either. They can grow to become huge businesses. In 2021, 233 apps and games in consumer spend, and 13 topped $1 billion in revenue. This was up 20% from 2020, when 193 apps and games topped $100 million in annual consumer spend, and just eight apps topped $1 billion. This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place, with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and suggestions about new apps to try, too. Mika Baumeister / Unsplash As the Russia-Ukraine war continued this week, the app ecosystem also saw further impacts. As businesses pulled out of Russia, the ability for Russian consumers to transact on the app stores and in apps is similarly being impacted. This week, Google it was suspending Google Play’s billing system for users in Russia in the “coming days,” which means Russian users won’t be able to purchase apps and games, make subscription payments or conduct any other in-app purchases of digital goods using Google Play in Russia. Free apps will remain available on the Play Store, the company said. But the app platform themselves don’t necessarily have to shut down payments for Russian users to experience issues with billing and transactions, as some users now are. That’s because this week they would suspend operations in Russia in protest of its invasion of Ukraine. If App Store or Google Play users had these cards on file, they would have stopped working anyway. Numerous tech companies, including , , , have also suspended sales and operations in Russia as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition to the humanitarian reasons for their exit, there are other costs — sanctions and complications with payments make it difficult to continue supporting Russian customers regardless. Alongside a wider Android update, Google announced new features designed to work around Apple’s decision to continue to support SMS instead of the newer and more modern standard RCS. This week, Google’s , which comes pre-installed on most Android phones, was updated to address the long-standing issue where iMessage’s “ ” weren’t delivered as emoji reactions, but were rather sent as a separate message. It’s been an annoyance that’s made chats between Android and iPhone users confusing, cluttered and far too noisy. After the update, reactions from iPhone users will be sent as an emoji on text messages on Android. As on iMessage, the emoji reaction — like love, laughter, confusion or excitement — will appear on the right side of the message. (On Android, it’s the bottom right.) Android’s interpretation of which emoji to use varies slightly from iPhone, however. For instance, the “heart” reaction on Android becomes the “face with the heart eyes” emoji. And the iMessage’s exclamation mark reaction becomes the “face with the open mouth” emoji. This update is first rolling out to Android devices set to English, but additional languages will follow. Google Related to the lack of RCS support, Google also integrated Google Photos into the Messages app to improve the video-sharing experience between iOS and Android users. While people with Android devices can share high-quality videos with each other, those same videos appear blurry when shared with those on iPhone, as iMessage doesn’t support RCS. By sending the link to the video through Google Photos, iPhone users will be able to watch the video in the same high resolution. This feature will later include support for photos, too. Google thus far has been about Apple’s decision to avoid supporting RCS — largely because RCS adoption would allow Google to better compete with Apple’s iMessage. But Google is not wrong when it points out that Apple is not serving its own customers very well by having iMessage fall back to the older standard of SMS, which is less secure. (An odd choice for a privacy-focused company like Apple claims to be.) It also leads to an inconsistent messaging experience, where features like typing indicators, read receipts and high-res media sharing don’t work in some chats. Apple, to some extent, benefits by making SMS the “worse” experience, as this can help with ecosystem But critics argue that decisions like this have led to as a global messaging champion, benefitting third-party messaging apps. Users worldwide have turned to other messaging apps in part because Apple chose not to compete on Android, or even keep up with the baseline features for modern-day messaging. Apple Google Instacart Twitter Instagram Meta Telegram Tinder/Garbo Meta Data.ai Google 🤝 The startup’s platform, which has been used to create over 50,000 WebAR experiences to date, will a standalone offering and will expand Niantic’s Lightship technology to WebAR. The investment is part of Scopely’s larger plan to expand its ecosystem of studios that it has built, bought or backed, it says. The company has partnered with publishers like PUBG Corp., Activision Blizzard and Riot Games. It offers a mobile app where users watch and interact with streamers and support them via virtual goods. The announcement came around six weeks after the consumer fintech startup dropped its plan for a $2.2 billion SPAC with Pioneer Merger Corp. in favor of an eventual traditional IPO. offering payments, remittance and other banking features. for things like fitness, virtual events and more. It can also support audio rooms. Over 2,200 businesses are using its live video infrastructure. led by Insight Venture Partners, for its app offering an alternative payment network that brings together mobile money and traditional banks. in total funding to date, including from China’s 5Y Capital and Zoo Capital. The funds were raised last year, but had not been previously reported. Amazon’s Clubhouse competitor arrived this week. The retail giant on Tuesday launched a new mobile app called , which allows people to create live “radio shows” where they can act as a DJ by taking callers and playing tracks from its catalog of tens of millions of licensed songs, ranging from classic titles to today’s music. While most Clubhouse rivals have focused on talk — like live podcasts — Amazon’s Amp differentiates itself by providing access out of the gate to a broad music catalog. That means Amp users can play DJ, streaming and chatting about their favorite songs and artists to establish themselves as a creator. Or they can use the app to talk about anything else — like sports or pop culture, for example — but do so while also curating a selection of music for their listeners and taking live callers. The app will also feature shows from Nicki Minaj, Pusha T, singer-songwriter Tinashe, electronic artist and violinist Lindsey Stirling, Travis Barker, Lil Yachty and Big Boi; well-known personalities Tefi Pessoa and Nikita Dragun; popular radio hosts Zach Sang, Kat Corbett, Christian James Hand, and Guy Raz; and writers from music and culture publication The FADER. The app is available in a limited U.S. beta, and users will need to seek out an invite to get in. Substack Subscription newsletter platform Substack announced this week it’s for reading that organizes all your Substrack email newsletter subscriptions in one place. Substack writers, meanwhile, will benefit if their readers install the app, as they’ll get reliable delivery of their publications and their other media in one place. Users can also choose to turn off emails (!!!) if they want to get the publications just inside the app. The company said it’s working to develop more features to better support podcasters, videomakers, community leaders and more in addition to readers and writers. The company previously a Substack Reader on the web, which offered a similar way to organize and aggregate all your subscriptions in one place; now that offering is mobile. The app, however, has a bit of Google Reader-like vibe to it, in the sense that it’s allowing a user to build out a reading list of their favorite publications. But while Reader was built on open standards, like RSS, Substack is trying to lock you inside their world — one which increasingly feels like a publisher’s own content platform. Plus, Substack readers didn’t necessarily need a dedicated app to read their newsletters outside of their inbox — plenty of reading apps, from RSS readers like to new startups like , allow for this functionality, too. |
Tiger’s stamp of approval is coming for the early stage | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 3 | 12 | For my full take on this topic, check out my TechCrunch+ column, “ ” In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll talk about an inclusive and disruptive LatAm startup, community beyond capitalism and why SPACs are in the news again. As always, you can support me by sharing this newsletter, or I want to give a shout-out to Mara, for the underserved in Latin America that raised $6 million this week. The startup offers supermarket items at a wholesale price, and lets folks order a basket via websites — instead of hard to access phone apps. It also has delivery points where customers can pick up and pay for their groceries. Grocery delivery is a tough business, let alone one that is hoping to make it cheaper and more convenient for low-income families. That’s why I was interested in the fact that the company is avoiding the growth at all costs mindset. Mary Ann reports that Mara is adopting an approach where it focuses on one area at a time, making sure it is “gross margin break even” there before moving on to another area. / Getty Images No buzzword should ever go unchecked, which is why — and how capitalism both complicates and changes its connotation within startups. Bringing people together to rally behind a product and idea isn’t a new phenomenon, after all. After much attention, we’re starting to see which community efforts amount to actual impact. This week, , powered by and from the community that she has aggregated over her past decade in startups. Ganas Ventures, her pre-seed and seed-stage firm, is even raising the rest of its debut fund from Taub’s followers. Lolita Taub On Equity Live this week, we came to the conclusion that The route to going public is no longer in vogue, with companies such as Better.com and Kin tossing aside their plans (and Acorns raising lots more capital after pausing its interest in them). The IPO window is pretty much closed at this point. While I’d expect to see startups staying private longer as a result, the late-stage market is softening. Uh oh. Late-stage companies that need more capital may not be able to access some if they don’t have rock-solid business models. Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch Techcrunch Early Stage 2022 is April 14, aka right around the corner, and it’s in San Francisco. Join us for a one-day founder summit featuring GV’s Terri Burns, Greylock’s Glen Evans and Felicis’ Aydin Senkut. The TC team has been fiending to get back in person, so don’t be surprised if panels are a little spicier than usual. , and Also, follow our newest producer for Equity: Until next time, |
Casey Neistat’s David Dobrik documentary explores what happens when creators cross the line | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 3 | 12 | things that make up a vlog,” David Dobrik, then a rising YouTube star, explained to Casey Neistat, a veteran YouTuber and filmmaker. Neistat’s camera pans to show a swimming pool, where a member of Dobrik’s ensemble, the Vlog Squad, balances on a jet ski, attempting to toss a basketball from half-court distance over his shoulder and into a hoop. “It’s like, interesting things, cool visuals and funny stuff. And this is not funny unless someone gets hurt.” As Dobrik’s following grew, his stunts became more elaborate. People got hurt. It wasn’t funny. When Neistat began filming his first feature-length documentary “ ” in 2019, the older, wiser YouTube star wanted to capture the phenomenon of David Dobrik, the then-22-year-old and creator on the platform. Neistat followed Dobrik as he moved into multimillion-dollar homes, performed for crowds of screaming college kids and bought his friends Teslas as casually as if treating them to lunch at Chipotle (where they could have ordered ). Now, as “Under the Influence” premieres at SXSW, Neistat is telling a far different story than the one he set out to document. In fact, he threw out two years of post-production work once his already-controversial muse became a bonafide persona non grata online. “I definitely started the process of making this movie in good faith. I think it was undeniable, David’s phenomenon. That’s not to praise the content he was making itself, but certainly, the phenomenon that was David was something absolutely extraordinary,” Neistat told TechCrunch. “It was clear that his content, I think to say it generously, was walking a very fine line, even back then.” At the time, Dobrik was on top of the world, filming prank videos with celebrities like and and transcending the bounds of social media to on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.” But his pedestal was built on the sheer luck that he got away with so many dangerous stunts. Eventually, Dobrik went far enough that it toppled over. Within two years – as Neistat continued to document – Dobrik found himself at the center of two serious scandals. In March 2021, Insider that a woman in one of his videos claimed to have been sexually assaulted by a Vlog Squad member on the night they filmed a video about group sex. Dobrik lost sponsorships with brands like Hello Fresh, SeatGeek, EA Sports and DoorDash; he was on YouTube; and he stepped down from Dispo, the venture-funded social photo-sharing app that he co-founded. Early investors including Spark Capital, Seven Seven Six and Unshackled committed to donate from their investment in the app to organizations working with survivors of sexual assault. But all the while, Dobrik was hiding another secret: The year before, a risky stunt went so wrong that his friend and collaborator Jeff Wittek nearly died. Casey Neistat Dobrik’s stunts were always dangerous. When Neistat first visited his mansion in 2019, Dobrik greeted him at the door with a flamethrower, which he wielded haphazardly, like a Nerf gun. Yet documenting the highs and lows of Dobrik’s at-times dangerous pursuits is arguably its own flavor of sensationalism. Early in the documentary, when Jonah (whose real name is Nick Antonyan – he’s called Jonah in the vlogs because he looks like Jonah Hill, and his body type often makes him the butt of hurtful jokes) drives a motorbike over a ramp and into a pool, he punctures a hole in his stomach. “Let’s get Jonah to the hospital, and David, let’s get this footage into editing,” a Vlog Squad member told Dobrik. Jonah proved to be OK after his trip to the emergency room, yet this near-miss didn’t appear to be a wakeup call for Dobrik, who continued to pursue the next biggest stunt, regardless of whether it could put his friends – who also acted as business collaborators – in danger. “I remember very clearly, one of the first questions I asked David was, ‘These people that we’ve seen in your videos, are they your friends or your coworkers?’ And his response, that’s included in the movie, is … he hesitates,” Neistat said. “It caught me off guard, because I expected him to be almost offended at that question.” Dobrik’s newfound wealth gave him access to flamethrowers, motorcycles, jet skis and heavy machinery for riskier stunts, but unlike Hollywood, where on-set stunts are heavily regulated, Dobrik was not required to hire safety professionals, so he didn’t. “It’s certainly an understandable suggestion to draw parallels between the content that David made and something like ‘Jackass,’ but there’s one extraordinary, bold line between the two, and that line is one of consent,” Neistat told TechCrunch. “Steve-O is a friend of mine, and every member of the ‘Jackass’ team knows exactly what they’re signing up for. They know what the cost is going to be to them physically. They know what their liability is, they know what their return is, they know what the transaction is. It is consensual, and I think that is the extraordinary difference between the things that you see on YouTube – especially when you’re looking at sort of an ensemble cast of characters like David’s videos – and something like ‘Jackass.’” Of course, accidents still happen in Hollywood, but on YouTube, there’s no possible way that a platform could regulate what happens during filming, even if it wanted to. Even though YouTube bans “ ,” the guideline is usually only enforced to stop people from participating in potentially deadly viral challenges. When YouTube in 2019, the company specifically referenced trends like people or trying to light themselves on . While Dobrik’s pranks could (and did) cause serious injury, his videos weren’t removed from YouTube. “We don’t allow pranks that make victims believe they’re in serious physical danger – for example, a home invasion prank or a drive-by shooting prank,” YouTube at the time. “We also don’t allow pranks that cause children to experience severe emotional distress, meaning something so bad that it could leave the child traumatized for life.” Many of YouTube’s biggest stars have followed this same formula – they start with low-budget pranks, and as their channels pick up steam and bring them riches, there’s no boundary to the potential for their antics. It’s a form of wish-fulfillment for young viewers – if you and your friends lived in a big mansion with unlimited cash, what mischief would you get up to? “This endless pursuit of sensationalism is where I think someone like David lives. The more sensational it was, the crazier the stunts, the more views it had,” Neistat said. “A number of creators on YouTube have pursued a similar trajectory, and it has never ended well.” YouTube’s of 2021 featured Jimmy Donaldson ( ) following a similar – he for 50 hours, though Donaldson did hire a medic to keep watch on standby. Another prominent YouTuber, Logan Paul, faced consequences for prioritizing shock value over his responsibility as a creator with a massive platform. In conversation with TechCrunch, Neistat brought up Paul’s “ ” scandal, in which the YouTuber visited a Japanese forest known to be a common site of suicides and made jokes about a dead body he encountered. YouTube with Paul, who his poor judgment was a result of being “misguided by shock and awe.” Similarly, YouTube Dobrik’s channels in the aftermath of the sexual assault allegations against a member of his Vlog Squad. Recently, Dobrik that he still isn’t making money on YouTube. TechCrunch asked YouTube if Dobrik’s channels remain demonetized, but did not receive a response. On screen, Neistat asked Dobrik, “There’s something gross about a guy using his social media platform and his influence to attract young women, and then you make a video out of it. Did any of that occur to you as wrong or inappropriate?” “At that time, there was no such thing as a ‘power dynamic’ to me,” Dobrik replied in the documentary – an admission that he never considered how his position as a super-sized social media star could change the way people interacted with him. “I didn’t see that as anything weird. Looking back at it now, it’s really gross.” Casey Neistat A month after the Insider article was published, another bomb dropped: Vlog Squad member Jeff Wittek revealed in his own YouTube that, the previous year, Dobrik had swung him around on an excavator. The construction equipment requires a license to operate, and Dobrik didn’t have that or any other safety supervision for the stunt. Dobrik subsequently lost control of the heavy machinery and, as Neistat depicts in a horrifyingly gory scene, Wittek slammed into the side of the crane and broke open the side of his face. Since then, Wittek has had at least nine eye surgeries and cut ties with Dobrik, who continues to pay his medical bills. “I shouldn’t be here anymore,” Wittek told Neistat in the film. “I should be dead.” Neistat told TechCrunch that Dobrik has seen the documentary, but they haven’t spoken about it – in fact, they haven’t spoken since their final interview, which took place after Insider published sexual assault allegations against Dobrik’s collaborator. TechCrunch asked Dobrik’s team for comment on the film, but did not hear back before publication. “Jeff’s accident had a tremendous impact on how I was conducting interviews, and my professional relationship with David,” Neistat said. “And then when Kat’s article came out, that was a dramatic, dramatic shift in how the movie was captured.” “It was very heavy, and you can hear in the tone of my voice just how it kind of became a little bit more contentious, and I became more confrontational with him. In that final interview, I think one of the first questions I asked him was, ‘Do you feel responsible?’” In a podcast published days before “Under the Influence” premiered at SXSW, Dobrik expressed for the egregious incidents that the documentary centers around. Yet in the documentary, he doesn’t seem to grasp the implications of his mistakes. “The [Insider article] was written because this place wanted clicks, like, it wasn’t written because the company’s going and looking after the victim and making sure she’s OK,” Dobrik said to Neistat in the documentary. A few weeks ago, Wittek made a podcast episode called “Dear David…” about why he was no longer friends with the figure who propelled him to fame. “I’ll have life-long brain injuries, and I saved him from fucking everything. He could’ve got deported, he could’ve got put in jail for manslaughter, he could’ve got sued for everything,” Wittek said on . “I took it on the chin, and then to see [the documentary] … that just made me completely lose all respect for this guy, and lose all hope he could ever turn around and become a better person.” Dobrik’s career has certainly taken a sizable hit, but he continues to post on YouTube, where he still has 18.3 million subscribers. He even has a Discovery show called “ ,” a docuseries in which he travels the world with his friends. The show was after both of these scandals came to light. Even in his first interview with Dobrik, Neistat observed that the young star looked haggard and overworked. “It’s prescient to see it now,” Neistat told TechCrunch. But it’s not a coincidence that so many top YouTubers like Dobrik, Donaldson and Paul follow this same trajectory: They strive to make each video more engaging than the last, but eventually, there seems to be just two paths. Either you burn out or make a career-altering mistake before you take a beat to slow down. “I think that there’s always a pursuit. It’s relevant for a musician – how do you keep your music interesting?” Neistat said. “But what makes individuals like David Dobrik different is that their pursuit is not coming out with the next song or making the next movie. Their pursuit is, how can I be more sensationalist? And that is a very, very, very dangerous pursuit, because the minute you achieve something that was crazier than the last, you then have to go past that.” |
Flipkart founder’s Navi files for $440 million IPO | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 3 | 12 | Sachin Bansal’s Navi Technologies, a fintech startup that offers customers insurance and loan products, has filed for a $440 million IPO as the 40-year-old entrepreneur who made his money by kick-starting the e-commerce wave in India once again makes a bold choice. Navi Technologies’ initial public offering will consist entirely of new shares, and the startup may consider raising a pre-IPO placement, it said in its draft prospectus filed with the local regulator Saturday. The IPO comes at a time when tech stocks – and most others – have plunged in recent months. Tech startups including Zomato, Paytm, Nykaa and PolicyBazaar that went public last year have traded at their lowest share prices in recent weeks. But for Navi Technologies, which has been eyeing an initial public offering for more than a year, there’s also a sense of urgency in making the company public. The startup’s most recent attempt to raise money from SoftBank and other investors at a valuation over $4 billion crumbled following its inability to secure a license to become a bank, according to two people familiar with the matter. Founded in 2018, Navi offers digital personal loans, home loans and credit against property in the lending space. It also provides customers with health insurance and digital asset management with a passive fund focus. Thus far, the startup is nearly entirely funded by Bansal. Billionaire Bansal, who co-founded Flipkart over a decade ago and was pushed out of the company , and Navi have largely stayed out of the limelight. The for the first time offers color on Navi’s various businesses and its financial health. Navi “With its in-house NBFC (non-banking lender) arm, AI/ML-based underwriting and digital-only D2C approach, Navi has been able to exercise control over its lending products from sourcing, underwriting to the collection and offer a smooth experience to customers,” the startup describes itself in the draft prospectus. Navi said it is using technology to serve customers who have not been served otherwise. The startup ensures “instant loan disbursals, offer[s] digital home loans at low-interest rates, leverage[s] technology to manage fraud and credit default risks, use[s] data analytics to train its lending algorithms to offer attractive pricing and better loan account management and exercising both digital and field collections to its advantage.” Navi’s value preposition, in its own words. Navi The startup – which has reported a consolidated profit of $9.2 million in FY21 on revenue of $17.8 million – says its personal lending and retail health insurance products are helping customers sign up in less than 4.5 minutes and 2.5 minutes, respectively. In 21 months since its launch, Navi’s personal loans business has served over 481,000 customers in 84% of Indian ZIP codes and extended 2 million Indian rupees to them with up to 84 months of tenure. The ticket size of these loans is $665. “As of December 31, 2021, 61.17% of our health insurance policies sold were approved without any human assistance on the Navi App. Further, we have developed our chat-based interface which ensures that our customers are served seamlessly throughout their buying journey,” the startup said. “We offer health insurance premiums through EMIs, where a customer can pay a fixed amount every month towards their policy has made our products attractive and affordable. During the nine months ended December 31, 2021, our GWP was ₹667.60 million, of which ₹63.26 million was from the retail health insurance segment. During the nine months ended December 31, 2021, we had issued a total of 220,491 insurance policies of which 27,800 were retail health insurance policies.” |
Holoride’s in-car VR tech is coming to Audi this summer | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 3 | 12 | Virtual reality is about to launch in series production cars this summer, starting with Audi sedans and SUVs. Holoride announced Saturday at the SXSW tech, music and film conference in Austin that its headset-based will debut in June in certain Audi models with the latest MIB 3 software. The announcement is a milestone for the startup that spun out of Audi several years ago; it also signals an increasing interest among automakers to find new ways to capture the attention of consumers. The Holoride system intertwines backseat passengers’ physical world with augmented reality for a as the car moves along. The system is brand-agnostic, which means other automakers can support it, too. Holoride’s partnership with Terranet, a Swedish ADAS software development company, allows for the VR system’s sensors and software stack to capture and interpret the environment quickly and accurately. Terranet’s VoxelFlow system calculates VR movement based on data points received from the car. The software to build virtual-reality content for cars is also open source, allowing developers to create content and eventually cash in. For now, the only additional cost to use the VR system is a headset, but there is limitless potential for carmakers and developers to generate revenue from car owners by selling subscription services or charging for certain features. The global automotive AR and VR market is projected to reach $674 million by 2025, according to an Allied Market Research report. Bringing VR entertainment into series production cars is also an initial step toward developing the type of content passengers may consume once driverless cars arrive. Holoride and Audi, which owns part of the Munich-based VR company, hope to stake an early claim in the tech stack of autonomous cars — and the nearer-term prospect of capturing more revenue from its human-driven vehicles. The future market opportunity for in-car content and entertainment is vast because once driverless cars begin to roll out, everyone will become a passenger, Holoride contends. Being first also allows them an opportunity to establish a new media category Holoride calls “Elastic Content.” Whether you’re operating a flying saucer or a submarine from behind the headset, the VR system so that your VR journey mimics the acceleration, turns and stops of the car. The opportunities are boundless, according to Holoride and Audi. Passengers will be able to buy or collect NFTs, supported by Elrond’s blockchain, while visiting the virtual world. Location-based games could connect the virtual world to locations or events in the physical world, like Pokemon Go. Of course, motion sickness is a key concern in VR. Holoride says that syncing with the vehicle’s movements reduces the symptoms. The Munich-based company, which last year for a valuation of $30 million, debuted a prototype of the VR system at CES in 2019, taking reporters for spins around the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The colorful, virtual reality world was created with Disney and other partners. Some journalists felt dizzy, while others reported feeling fine. |
The Mini Cooper SE is a fun EV with some catching up to do | Alex Kalogiannis | 2,022 | 3 | 12 | Electrifying a car like the two-door Mini Cooper seems like a brilliant, forehead-slapping, “why didn’t we think of this before” kind of concept, and Mini certainly agrees. The brand has been toying with the concept since 2009, with the limited run of the Mini E, a program designed to field test the viability and attractiveness of an all-electric Cooper. Advancements in technology and demand for such a car led to the Mini Cooper SE, a fully electric version of the manufacturer’s stalwart two-door hatch. It’s a first step toward the brand’s recent self-imposed deadline to be fully electric by 2030. The upshot: The Mini Cooper SE is a jaunty car with the playful performance fans of the brand expect, but sadly — and a bit on the nose — retrofitting a long-in-the-tooth hatchback with an electrified powertrain doesn’t get it very far in 2022. The Mini Cooper SE is a full battery electric version of the third-generation Cooper or Hatch, as it’s known in other markets, which debuted just two short years ago. The combustion guts of the cheerful two-door have been replaced with its new electrified innards. The battery sits in place of a fuel tank, cables run through the transmission tunnel and the car’s drive unit occupies most of the engine bay. In lieu of a standard turbocharged engine, the Mini is fitted with an electric motor powering the front wheels, delivering 181 horsepower and 199 pound-feet of torque. In comparison to the rest of the Coopers in the lineup, it’s about on par with the Cooper S and its turbocharged 2.0-liter 4-cylinder power plant. Power for the SE is stored in a 28.9 kWh battery, providing the SE with roughly 114 miles of range on a full charge. Mini claims the Cooper SE can charge 80% of the battery in roughly 35 minutes on a level 3 DC fast charger, and as much as 20% per hour on a level 2 charger. Basic home outlets can trickle out 2% per hour. Alex Kalogianni In terms of baked-in tech, the Mini Cooper SE has the basics covered. An 8.8-inch touchscreen is the main interface for drivers and passengers. This houses the entertainment and navigation functions, the latter of which Mini provides with real-time traffic status displays. As one familiar with other cars within the BMW family, the Cooper SE has pages of settings that can be sifted through to customize myriad little functions. Everything is arranged in a “live widget” format, which manifests as big colorful graphics available with a swipe of the finger. If it’s not your cup of tea, Apple CarPlay is available as an alternative. For safety and driving assistance, there is an adaptive cruise control system as well as lane departure warnings. There’s even forward collision detection that keeps an eye out for both cars and pedestrians. Since it was redesigned and reintroduced in its current, BMW-produced form, nu-Mini has always been careful to emphasize the spirited dynamics of the Cooper. As such, it’s incredibly driver-friendly in many fundamental ways. For starters, the driving position is much roomier than it appears to be. The cockpit conforms snugly around the driver and passenger seats, making both positions feel connected to the jovial plaything they’re seated in. For the driver, a simple display sits behind the steering wheel, which avoids clutter by providing the minimum amount of required information. Apart from the current speed, two gauges spell out the state of charge, how it’s being used and if it’s in a regenerative state. Between these two readouts and the ever-changing range estimates, drivers will be eyeballing this for most of the drive, sometimes too much, in fact. Thankfully, the always-on collision detection throws up a bright red graphic on the same display when they are approaching another vehicle, reminding them to look up. This Mini retains the circular dashboard display that once housed the speedometer. An homage to this unique characteristic of the original Mini, it feels more vestigial than ever in the era of ubiquitous infotainment screens. The 8.8-inch touch screen sits like a square peg in a round hole, with piano black buttons occupying the negative space. The widget UI is appropriately colorful and cheerful, but it’s at the detriment of intuitive navigation. Oftentimes, it’s not particularly clear how to get to a selected function at the cost of precious driving attention. The rest of the physical inputs are very chunky and substantial, from the aircraft-like switches to the dials for the HVAC. Everything is laid out in a reasonable, functional way and with these, it’s rare that you are searching for that moment’s desired input. This is fortunate, because driving the Mini SE is an active experience. Alex Kalogianni Though not as mini as the Minis of old, the Cooper SE is still a compact, agile car that lays its character on pretty thick while backing it up with sprightly performance. Pair that with the superior torque delivery of an electrified ride and the car darts around enthusiastically like an automotive Pikachu from Pokémon. Reps from Mini are quick to point out the “go-kart” feel of the car’s handling, and they’re not wrong to do so. Probably now more than ever thanks to an electrified powertrain, the Cooper’s performance is responsive and never feels like it’s too much of a handful. Its torque is readily available, and though the 7-second zero-to-60 mph sprint time isn’t going to get anyone hot under the collar, its ability to dart into corners or gaps in traffic is commendable. Rarely does the Cooper SE get out of sorts, and how this lands depends on the individual. Thrill-seekers may desire a little loose-wheel squirreliness, but others will be happy the car stays within its limits. There are four driving modes baked into the Cooper SE. In its default “Mid” mode, the EV balances efficiency with engagement, providing power when a heavy foot is delivered onto the throttle but otherwise conserving as much juice as possible. “Green” limits available acceleration energy and also softens the pedal’s input, while “Green+” does this while also shutting off some of the creature comforts for maximum power-saving. “Sport” ups the throttle sensitivity while offering up as much power as possible, at the expense of battery power, naturally. All of this is to say your mileage will literally vary when using these modes. Each changes the dynamics of the car in a very tangible way. There are also two levels of regenerative braking active at all times. By default, the Cooper SE starts in the more aggressive setting that allows for one-pedal driving, but it can be switched to a less effective and more natural setting. Available modes such as these are commonplace, but the Mini’s 100 or so miles of range greatly influences the driving experience. Due to this limited range, it’s easy to find yourself repeatedly readjusting things. A typical journey looks like this: Whatever mileage estimate the Mini displays in Mid, it’s always going to be a more attractive and anxiety-reducing one in Green, so you try to cruise in Green mode as much as possible, occasionally switching to Mid when traffic picks up. Sport is always lingering in the background as a very indulgent treat, because it means even a short burst of whimsy costs a precious amount of the dwindling charge. Meanwhile, it’s not uncommon to fiddle with the regen switch to balance out comfort with stretching out the miles. You’ll hear arguments that people don’t typically drive over a hundred miles a day anyway, which is true, but even with a robust home charging solution, the concern of getting caught short diminishes the enjoyment of the car. In terms of future EV development, we have an idea of , and we know that parent company BMW plans to make Mini fully electric by 2030. Efforts seem like a slow burn toward a rapidly approaching deadline, but Patrick McKenna, Department Head for Mini Product Planning, gave TechCrunch some insight as to why. “The specifics of how we’re transitioning is still being formulated, but what we’re focusing on in the coming years is strategic flexibility, the ability to still offer internal combustion and battery electric vehicles,” McKenna told TechCrunch. “The [Cooper SE] runs on the same production line as the internal combustion F56 hardtop,” McKenna continued. “[This flexibility] allows us to produce the cars right next to each other.” From a manufacturing standpoint, it makes sense to be in a position to satisfy two different kinds of customers, but this strategy is inherently limiting. Unless there are some advancements to the efficiency of the battery used, the Cooper SE’s largest issue physically doesn’t have room to improve. Since the powertrain was derived from the now-discontinued BMW i3, it’s unclear if this will happen anytime soon. There’s tons to like about the Cooper SE, especially if you’re into Mini’s style of whimsy. If you’re not, it’s still hard to ignore how well the automaker continues to keep its cars consistently fun to drive. And yet, the conversion of the existing car to EV and its lackluster range makes it a hard sell, particularly in an era where sporty BEVs with ample battery life aren’t as rare as they were even just a handful of years ago. Mini, a brand that leans heavily on its past to inform its style, may have an all-electric future ahead of it, but its efforts in the present feel a few steps behind the competition. |
AngelList Venture has a new look | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 3 | 12 | Venture closed its first tranche of institutional funding since spinning out The $100 million round was led by Tiger Global and Accomplice, It wasn’t necessarily expected. The round comes just weeks after the organization’s CEO, Avlok Kohli, told me that the company didn’t need venture money, a stance that AngelList, which was founded in 2010 and split into AngelList Venture and AngelList Talent in 2020 – each with their own CEOs and boards – has long embraced. Despite its business of helping other startups raise money, AngelList Venture itself has largely resisted the siren call of venture capital and run on what others might consider a shoestring budget. Indeed, prior to raising this massive new round, the larger company, pre-spin out, had raised $124 million across multiple rounds over the years — some previously unannounced. |
The startup growth paradox | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 12 | Friends! Welcome to the weekend. I hope you are resting and recharging. Our work today is pretty relaxed, so pour another coffee and let’s get into it. This week, The Exchange spent a good amount of time . To summarize, the value of tech companies is being re-drafted by investors, and it appears that some of the speculative enthusiasm that drove startup results in 2020 and 2021 has disappeared. For many companies, near-term market changes aren’t a big deal. Some startups have enough cash to power through and will solve falling revenue multiples with sustained growth. Call . But for a good number of startups, the situation looks different. Here’s where some startups find themselves today: This isn’t bad of a situation, provided that the startups we’re talking about have enough cash to get through 2022. By then perhaps valuations for tech companies may have recovered somewhat. But with companies raising faster than ever before last year — sometimes three times in a single year!– some startups lashed themselves to growth targets that were inherently cash-consumptive. This means that many 2020 and 2021 raises won’t get companies through this full year. That means they have to raise again, timing be damned. So, some upstart tech companies now find themselves looking at the following two options: grow more slowly, saving cash, or keep the pedal to the floor at the expense of cash. What’s tricky is that option may work out for them. How so? This is the startup growth paradox. It is solved by going back in time and taking on capital at lower prices, or perhaps with a more limited growth plan. However, given that last year was a record for startup fundraising in terms of volume and prices, it’s a bit late for that. Precisely how startups will handle this challenge will probably be a key narrative in 2022. There are some ameliorating factors. Investors could fund their existing portfolio companies with extension rounds at flat prices. That would be dilutive to startups, but far from lethal. And startups can leverage some methods of growth that are less expensive — product-led growth, etc. — in hopes of managing good revenue expansion without terrifying operating losses. But such forms of growth are not easy to pursue, even for companies built with such go-to-market methods in mind from day one. How to pivot from other sales methods isn’t clear for startups that may suddenly want to find a way to attract new top-line without hiring more sales staff or spending more on advertising. Sorry for all the bad news lately, but consider it the tonic to last year’s party. This is the hangover. |
Byju’s founder took loan to invest $400 million in edtech giant | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 3 | 13 | Byju Raveendran, founder and chief executive of the eponymous edtech giant, has financed his recent $400 million investment in Byju’s through a debt he raised from multiple international banks, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. On Friday, the startup announced it has raised $800 million in a new financing round, half of which it said was . The revelation immediately created buzz in the market as it’s very rare to see a founder invest in a startup that is about to file for an IPO, let alone do that at a $22 billion valuation, as is the case with Raveendran and Byju’s. Making things more interesting is the fact that Raveendran, who taught students before starting Byju’s, has not sold any shares in the startup in several years to build a liquidated personal wealth big enough to carry such a deal. Raveendran took the loan at “very favorable terms,” a source said. He has put approximately 2% shares in Byju’s as collateral to take the loan, two sources said. His and his family’s shares in the startup now stand close to 25%, up from about 23%. The founder’s stake enjoys the same rights as other investors in the startup — which prepares students pursuing undergraduate and graduate-level courses and in recent years expanded to serve all school-going students — one source said. Both sources requested anonymity discussing private matters. A Byju’s spokeswoman declined to comment Monday. If this deal structure sounds similar, that’s because three years ago Oyo founder Ritesh Agarwal . But unlike Agarwal’s investment, Raveendran’s loan is not backed by any third party. (SoftBank was on the hook for Agarwal’s personal loan.) If things go as planned, Raveendran should be able to pay off his loan within quarters. Byju’s has multiple term sheets to explore an initial public offering. The startup’s board has yet to reach a decision on which backer it wants to go with for its reverse-merger with a SPAC for the U.S. listing, one of the sources said. It plans to have listings in both India and the U.S. but the listings are likely to take at least six months, the source said. (An announcement about the IPO could happen much sooner.) The startup is hoping to raise as much as $4 billion from the IPO. It may raise as much as $1 billion of that in a pre-IPO round, one of the sources said, cautioning that terms and planning are not final. |
Augmented reality’s half-decade of stagnation | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 3 | 13 | Hello readers, and welcome back to ! Last week, I talked about the future of this newsletter and what’s coming next. The short of which is that in the coming weeks I will be winding down my time authoring the newsletter as I start sending out a brand new newsletter for TechCrunch called focused exclusively on crypto, web3 and the metaverse — with all of its ridiculousness and intrigue. The extra-thrilling element is that this weekly newsletter will have a weekly podcast attached to it, which I will share some more details on soon. I currently send out to a couple hundred thousand subscribers (and you’ll all continue to receive it as I pass the baton to my colleague Greg Kumparak, who will take it over.) That said, is starting from square one, so it would mean a lot if you pre-subscribed to the newsletter so that it lands in your inbox on day one. You can do so on the TechCrunch Please! Now that my groveling is out of the way, you still have me for a few more weeks, so let’s get to the meat of this week’s update. Remember Magic Leap? I tried out their unreleased new headset and chatted with the company’s CEO about the startup’s wild ride thus far. So, let’s talk about it. This week, I spent an hour or so playing around with the unreleased next-generation Magic Leap headset, all while discussing the augmented reality company’s wild ride with Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson and other members of its executive team. Ultimately, Magic Leap is on the road to delivering a very fascinating device, but in spite of that, the broader industry has publicly stagnated so much in the nearly five years since the company revealed its first device that the augmented reality opportunity has still never felt more distant. Few startups have been publicly subjected to corporate humiliation quite as drastically as augmented reality goggles maker Magic Leap has been in recent years. It’s a saga that has slowed the progress of an industry — hyped as the inevitable successor to mobile phones — to a crawl. The Florida startup infamously raised billions in venture capital funding on the promise of bringing a new technological future to consumers, much more impactful than the launch of the iPhone. When it finally launched its first product after years of delays, secrecy and hype, tech watchers balked at a device that failed to deliver on many of the claims made by the startup’s eccentric founder, Rony Abovitz, and instead made largely incremental gains over the competing Microsoft HoloLens, which was unveiled years earlier. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey called the device a “tragic heap” and sales of the device flopped — reported that the company sold just 6,000 of the devices in the six months following its long-awaited launch. “[Magic Leap’s previous marketing strategies] were incredible for driving a lot of attention to the company and the field itself, not so great at setting realistic expectations,” Magic Leap CMO Daniel Diez told us. A ridicule-laden launch was followed by near-catastrophic financial ruin for the fast-spending company, which was forced to lay off half of its employees in April 2020 and was left begging for bridge funding, which it raised at a reportedly massive discount to stave off a shutdown. Following the move, Abovitz stepped down from his role and former Microsoft exec Peggy Johnson was brought in to turn the company around and abandon its near-term consumer ambitions in favor of a less sexy enterprise rollout. “When I came in, I had to reset what our focus was and rebuild credibility,” Johnson told me. After 18 months on the job in the midst of a seemingly endless global pandemic, Johnson brought me in to show off what the company has been working on: its new headset, the Magic Leap 2. I spent around 20 minutes with the new headset, which consists of substantially lighter face-worn glasses (248 grams versus ML1’s 316 grams), a remote control input device (with a new optical tracking system), and a fairly heavy belt-worn compute pack that houses the device’s brains. The headlining feature of the device is its expanded field of view, which now nearly doubles the visual area inside the glasses where digital content can be displayed. It’s an impressive feat and makes the headset a clear improvement over its predecessor. The device is still in development and it’s clear that they were trying out some new software features that will hopefully be more fine-tuned when the device ships sometime this summer. Overall, I was impressed with what honestly feels like the best augmented reality device soon to be on the market. But while it makes some big gains over competing devices like the HoloLens 2, it’s also still clear that even if this had been the first iteration, it still would not have lived up to the expectations that Magic Leap’s executives had set for the initial device and product category. I’ve spent an awfully long time covering the AR/VR market and have written a dozen stories on Magic Leap specifically over the years with probably a thousand others on the broader AR/VR industry. What’s clear to me is that the AR industry has now been at a standstill in public for years. Mobile AR development on smartphones was more or less a complete failure and took down dozens of startups. The future of enterprise use doesn’t feel particularly bright to me either because there are so few hardware players powering so few headsets that there isn’t much of a software development scene anymore compared to even 2018 or 2019. “In the space we’re going after … it’s really just us and Microsoft,” Johnson concedes. As Microsoft seems to run into hiccups with its multibillion-dollar military contract, and say is perhaps even losing interest in launching a new version of HoloLens, it’s clear that Magic Leap is in a lonely position. On the consumer side, there’s more to feel optimistic about as both Facebook and Apple reportedly set their sights on a consumer release of a mixed reality device. But as Apple inches nearer the rumored release of a consumer headset, Magic Leap CTO Julie Larson-Green seems skeptical of what they could possibly release. “We’ll see what they do,” Larson-Green tells me. “I still don’t understand what the consumer scenarios are that get you outside of gaming which is a small and contained niche. … What are those scenarios? Certainly for me, it’s not notification glasses; I don’t need more things distracting me. But, I’m excited to see what Apple thinks it is.”
This was a busy week when it came to companies leveraging a wave of private market sanctions against Russia. While plenty of Big Tech platforms aimed to roll back the presence of Russian state media on their platforms, Russia has taken particular aim at Meta, shuttering Facebook and announcing this week that it intends to shut down Instagram access in the country as well. Biden’s long-awaited executive order on cryptocurrencies went live this week and the crypto industry breathed a sigh of relief. The EO largely pushed government agencies to start researching the implications of crypto and how the government should balance protecting investors with ensuring that the United States remains a hub for crypto innovation. Apple unveiled a few products this week, including a very, very fast new desktop Mac and an upgraded iPhone SE. Beyond that, Apple snuck in plenty of more low-key announcements into their “Peek Performance” event. / Getty Images
“The health of the NFT market is itself a fascinating data project. The historical volatility of the price of crypto tokens and other blockchain-based assets is high, which means that you might be fooled into calling a trend early, only for the markets to reverse and make you look silly. In the crypto world, it’s good sense to never say never. And yet, we’re content to highlight a number of data points that indicate that the NFT market is slowing along a number of axes, indicating, at a minimum, that growth in the hot sector has come to a halt.”
“When you present your market size data to investors, they’ll look for TAM, SAM and SOM information. These data points pack a mystique about numbers that can appear colossal and out of reach, but if you approach market sizing methodically, you’ll realize it’s really not that complicated.
“Mass adoption is still held up, however: many organizations prefer to build from scratch, and complete end-to-end solutions are still nowhere to be found. To get a more in-depth look at the technical aspects of the space, we decided to talk to some of the technologists ushering in the no-code/low-code revolution.” Thanks for reading! |
Alexis Ohanian on his plan to back more emerging managers | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 3 | 13 | Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder, venture capitalist, and enthusiastic , quietly announced a new initiative last week out of his venture firm, (776): the 776 Titans Fund. The new fund, as the firm describes it, plans to “focus on emerging managers, each with their own influential distribution channels and unique operational experience in backing startup ventures.” The firm added in a statement that each fund will operate independently and will receive an initial $500,000 investment from 776, along with access to Cerebro (the proprietary operating system of the firm), and ongoing support from Series, an enterprise digital finance platform whose seed round was led by 776. Already, three teams have received checks from Ohanian & Co.: Marques Brownlee of MKBHD Ventures (Brownlee has become renowned for his tech-focused videos on his YouTube channel and is focusing broadly on early-stage startups); brother and sister Allyson and Wes Felix of Crenshaw Ventures (Allyson is a five-time Olympian and founder of a lifestyle brand, and the two plan to invest in web3, metaverse and fintech companies); and Cleo Abram of Huge If True Ventures (Abram is an Emmy-nominated video producer and journalist who is looking for moonshot ideas). To find out more, we reached out Ohanian last week with some questions. He responded to them via email. AO: It’s a carve-out from Fund II, and we’re investing around $10 million. We’re looking for folks who great founders will absolutely want to make room for on their cap tables. Why? The combination of unique distribution and/or their reputation and experience. We’re looking for the things that traditional VCs don’t have. This differentiation is what the best founders are looking for — everything else is just capital. Cerebro is the operating system we’ve built that we use for all the work at 776. Our team, founders, LPs (and soon, Titans) have their own logins and workflows. I started like any good product manager and listed and ranked all the tasks I do as a VC and then sorted the most valuable ones that were most productizable and started building. First was the network — we have a massive one that founders got lots of value from, but it’s not very efficient to ask a human “Do you know someone at Twitter?” for an intro. Databases are much better for that query, so our network search and intro tool was the first product we shipped, which lets founders search over 44,000 contacts anytime they’d like, request intros with one click, and have them routed to the person on the team with the strongest relationship to that contact. [These fund managers] will get their own access to Cerbero, which will help them be more efficient and effective at deploying capital — and it should unlock some very interesting benefits to have this federation of funds plugged into our global brain. The Ancient Greeks had 12 Titans (the Olympian pantheon of gods we know today), but with the excitement and opportunity we’ve seen, it’ll be more like 20. Our main focus is backing new managers. Many of them have angel invested before, but we’re not ruling out backing a Fund II. We believe all of these managers will produce outsized returns — the goal here is always excellence — and many of them are going to have overlap with a generalist firm like ours, though we do a lot of web3. Here are some themes we’ve backed so far: generalist, crypto, consumer, policy, hard tech, and construction. Thanks to Cerebro, we’ll have insights into the companies our managers are funding, but there’s no expectation or ask for them to be [scouts for us]. They’re Titans running their own funds that we’re fortunate to be LPs in. |
Founders: Connect with influential movers and shippers at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 | Alexandra Ames | 2,022 | 3 | 13 | If you’re itching to get your game-changing product out of the garage, onto the streets or into customers’ driveways, we not-so-humbly suggest that you do whatever it takes to attend in San Mateo, California on May 18-19. It’s your chance to meet, mingle and network with mobility’s movers, shakers, shippers and unicorn makers under one roof at the spacious San Mateo County Event Center. Who’s at the top of your must-meet list? Whether it’s top VCs, cutting-edge mobility companies, government policy makers, visionary engineers or tech journalists — to score coveted media exposure — you’ll find that and more waiting for you in two action-packed days at TC Mobility. Early-bird savings are in play — for a limited time. , before prices increase, and you’ll keep $300 in your wallet. Sweet, sweet savings. Your all-access pass includes panel discussions, 1:1 interviews, breakout sessions and networking, plus access to our indoor AND outdoor expo area — where you’ll find dozens of innovative early-stage startups demoing their latest and greatest. More on that in a moment. You’ll also have access to our day of online content on May 20. Oh, plus videos on-demand following the live event. If you want to place your mobility tech directly in the path of thousands of attendees — we’re talking potential investors, customers and influential tech titans — . Don’t wait. The early-bird special saves you $200. You’ll get four passes with full access to the event, both in-person and virtually, the ability to demo on-site on May 18 and 19, and the ability to pitch during the online event on May 20. Okay, let’s go back to the expo area. The huge indoor space expands into the great outdoors. You’ll find demos spanning the range of mobility tech, including the latest in scooters, e-bikes, EVs and autonomous vehicles. Test drive to your heart’s content or snag a Startup Demo Package and showcase your mobile marvel in our outdoor playground. Take it from Jens Lehmann, technical lead and product manager, SAP, who had this to say about our last in-person mobility event back in 2019 (thanks a bunch, pandemic): “The most surprising aspect of TC Sessions: Mobility was just how much fun I had while learning. I can’t emphasize that enough. I got to drive the latest and greatest electric scooters, and I rode around in a VR/AR-enhanced car. That was pretty cool.” takes place live and in-person on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California, and a day of online content on May 20. , save money and get ready to connect with the influential people you need to drive your business forward.
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Kirsten Green on selling to consumers in the metaverse: brands should ‘get in there’ | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | When Forerunner Ventures was founded in 2012, traditional brands still reigned supreme, and most of us shopped in physical spaces. Firm founder Kirsten Green, who was earlier an equity research analyst at Banc of America Securities, was maybe more aware than most that this picture was about to dramatically change; over the years, Forerunner invested in a company that delivered to people’s doorsteps, a built atop a devoted community and a that matches bewildered shoppers with people who are “expert” in their fields. Forerunner’s have been so in some that the young outfit is now managing roughly $2 billion in assets after quietly closing its sixth fund with a whopping in capital commitments last month. Given the team’s success in funding what’s up and coming, we talked with Green last week for a podcast interview about the trends Forerunner is tracking closely right now. Some of what we discussed follows, edited for length and clarity. You can also listen to that chat in its entirety . KG: A lot of that thinking, if not most of it, still feels very relevant and active for us today. Thinking about powering the one-to-one opportunity and what it takes to make that viable is multilayered. You start with this idea that anyone who’s got something to say can now be a publisher and put [out content] and charge for it. But the difference between that idea and its execution is a lot, because it’s a lot to do and it’s hard to do. So we try thinking: What are the tools and services and software and community that needs to support the person who is becoming the single entrepreneur, the ‘solopreneur’? There’s a whole ecosystem of efforts that need to be built and trialed and tested and moved forward. I think we’re still early on in the innings of organizing all of that and [producing] the really big, breakout companies. When it comes to discretionary spending, sometimes it’s about the item, but a lot of times it’s about the journey. We had malls that brought lots of stores together to create a dynamic environment . . . You [separately see] people on social networks following people and engaging in content. It’s sort of natural to think, okay, there’s a shopping component somewhere in here, too. It’s part of the mix of the entertainment and the engagement and the camaraderie that happens. And certainly we’ve seen this in other places in the world, most predominantly in China, where [livestreamed shopping] it’s a huge business. [Layer into the mix] this collectibles trend, which is also not new, and the sports memorabilia market [which is] a huge, significant market [the majority of which is still offline] and the founder of Loupe, Eric [Doty]. He comes from Xbox. He has a lot of experience around gamification and game-oriented experiences. He is passionate about the category and really articulated a vision for how to create a great intersection of entertainment and exchange — which is commerce in this case — and maybe even be a third screen for people who are engaging in watching sports or sports activities. The whole metaverse, web3, crypto [universe] opportunity or conversation is really interesting and really promising. Like most new things, it’s unknown how long it takes to play out or when the mass adoption [reaches] a tipping point. But I definitely believe in it, and I think most companies do [because of the] contributing trends driving it, so with that in mind, I think it’s, ‘Get in there and start experimenting. Get comfortable. Start building muscle in it. Think about what’s right for your business and brand and identify where there are opportunities, [be it for] customer acquisition or customer retention or even to sell new things, because quite frankly, all of those things are probably in play in that universe.’ It’s not going to come out of the gate as a make-or-break-it [moment] for anyone’s business in 2022. But a few years out, or maybe even closer, it could. We’ve invested in a handful of B2B companies over the last 18 months because of the stage of development of that whole ecosystem. A bunch of them have not been announced. But we think with this web3 evolution, companies can use it to have a future-leading stance on community, on empowerment, maybe even a future product strategy. I’m imagining a whole new protocol being developed for digital connections. On the infrastructure side, there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity, and that’s not historically where Forerunner has really showed up. We’ve been more on the front line as it relates to the consumer. So I think [our focus is on] what is it going to take to include web2 companies in web3. [To date, much of the activity has] lived in specific corners of the universe [including] NFTs, which, when they hit the radar, may have confused people [regarding] how they worked or why [consumers] should value them. But the idea that there was a good or a service that you could pay money for [by using NFTs] resonated . . . [Now] to make [them] more mainstream, I imagine there needs to be real use cases — something beyond a novelty — and there needs to be much lower friction in how you engage. So the effort to make that happen is essential to getting [web3] mainstream and ubiquitous and valuable, and I think there are a lot of opportunities [in creating] that bridge. |
Fintech Roundup: Due diligence makes a comeback and a former Better.com employee speaks out | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 3 | 13 | Note: After I wrote all of the above, I came across from a Better.com employee who on March 11 was asked to resign a week early after publishing an internal communication from the company on social media. Senior product designer publicly pushed his employer — including directly communicating with CEO Vishal Garg and CFO Kevin Ryan on LinkedIn and Slack — to provide additional severance pay and extended insurance benefits to the expecting parents who were being laid off. The company reportedly pledged to offer these employees extended COBRA benefits for 12 months, as reported by . Eric Blattberg His experience illustrates Better’s efforts to make itself look better (he was to post the company’s move on social media), the disappointment that many of its former employees feel, and what accountability looks like. At least Better — in this case — pledged to do the right thing. As of March 12, there were reports of the extended benefits not amounting to 12 months as promised. According to Blattberg, who posted the following on LinkedIn: Better is adding to its string of corporate incompetence today with written agreements to expecting parents that differ from what a Better lawyer reading from a script promised them in a phone call, according to two of the expecting parents who noted the disparities to me earlier today. In the phone call with the laid-off employees, the Better lawyer promised four additional weeks of severance pay and 12 additional months of paid COBRA premiums on top of the standard package offered to all laid-off employees, bringing their health insurance coverage to the end of June 2023, the expecting parents told me. But in an email subsequently received by the expecting parents, the COBRA coverage was only nine additional months, bringing their coverage to March 2023, and there was no additional severance pay offered. In a subsequent communication with one of the expecting parents described to me this morning, the lawyer admitted to making a mistake, confusing the 20 days of extended severance offered to all fired employees as additional pay in their custom package, but declined to honor the prior commitment. This is, as usual, unacceptable. Better should . I reached out to Better.com and a spokesperson sent me to the original letter sent to employees on March 8 but declined to respond to any questions regarding health insurance benefits, citing privacy concerns. Via DMs, Blattberg told me: “On Tuesday morning I found myself in a unique position of privilege: still inside Better as it casually fumbled the layoffs it had spent months planning, causing an unfathomable amount of collateral damage, but not scared of losing my job, since I was sitting on an offer from Ergatta, where I’ll start as a senior product designer March 21. … My only goal this whole time has been to help people. I don’t want to tear the company down, I want to shield the employees Vishal has tossed aside like they were just numbers on a balance sheet. They are not just a number. Every one of them has their own story, their own health care journey, their own reason for working at Better. And they deserve so much more respect, consideration, and support than they received this week. So I’m going to keep fighting on their behalf from the outside.” Co-founders Juan Pablo Ortega and Julian Nunez / Yuno Dash Note: And last but not least, I wrote about how Credit Karma, Betterment and Austin-based startup Chipper want . |
India’s Licious raises $150 million for its fresh animal protein e-commerce platform | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Licious, a Bengaluru-based startup that sells fresh meat, seafood and other fresh animal protein online and which became the , said on Tuesday it has raised an additional $150 million from a set of late-stage investors in a move that appears to be a precursor to startup’s initial public offering. The round was led by Singapore based Amansa Capital, Kotak PE and Axis Growth Avenues AIF – I. A number of existing investors as well as new set of angel investors including Nithin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath of Zerodha, BoAt’s Aman Gupta and Haresh Chawla of True North also participated in the new round. The new funding — which is an extension to the $52 million Series F disclosed last year — brings Licious’ all-time raise to $488 million, according to insight platform Tracxn. Licious, which counts Temasek, 3One4 Capital and IIFL among its backers, operates an eponymous e-commerce platform where it sells meat and seafood in over a dozen Indian cities. The startup has built a supply chain network across several Indian cities to be able to procure meat and seafood, keep them fresh and deliver within hours of the order. It’s among a group of growing startups that is disrupting the meat and seafood category, an area that has largely been unorganized and underserved. Analysts at Bernstein estimate that the meat and seafood market is a $40 billion opportunity. Captain Fresh, which operates a business-to-business marketplace, earlier this month that more than doubled the startup’s valuation in just three months. “Today, Licious is the highest valued D2C start-up in India. This valuation is a direct outcome of the value that we have created for our stakeholders- investments made towards building the category have borne us rich dividends and have propelled growth for the company and its people,” said Vivek Gupta and Abhay Hanjura, co-founders of Licious, in a joint statement. “The growing interest of investors- from India and abroad alike is an added assurance that obsession with customers, quality and service standards are the pillars of the best businesses.” The startup did not disclose any metrics today, but it has been a beneficiary of the surge in direct-to-consumer brands’ popularity amid the pandemic. In October, it said its business had grown by over 500% year-on-year. Sharp scale up in operations of digital brands in FY21, partly pushed by COVID. (Image and analysis: Bernstein) “We are excited to partner with Licious, India’s #1 D2C brand,” said S Sriniwasan, MD of Kotak Investment Advisors, in a statement. “Due to Licious’ focus on quality and strong execution, its successfully creating a habituated and loyal customer base. We believe under the leadership of Abhay and Vivek, Licious is best positioned to serve the fresh meat and seafood need of India.” |
Google Cloud gets more expensive | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Renting cloud infrastructure typically gets cheaper over time, but Google Cloud is bucking this trend today with across a number of core services. These increases, which Google announced under the guise of wanting to provide “more flexible pricing models and options,” will go into effect on October 1, 2022. Most developers are . It’s not all bad news, with some archive storage at rest in Google’s U.S., Europe and Asia regions decreasing in price, and there’s a new lower-cost Persistent Disk archive snapshot option, too. The company is also raising its “Always Free Internet” egress from 1 GB per month to 100 GB per month. But a number of , like multi-region storage, will see increases of 50%. Operations pricing for Google Cloud’s Coldline Storage Class A will double from $0.10 per 10,000 operations to $0.20. And while reading data in a Cloud Storage bucket located in a multi-region from a service in a region on the same continent was previously free, it’ll now be priced just like any other data movement between Google Cloud locations on the same continent. Load balancing, too, will see a price increase now that Google applies an “outbound data processing charge” of $0.008 to $0.012, depending on the region. Ticketmaster would be proud, but Google says this will align its pricing with other leading cloud providers. “Google Cloud offers innovative solutions to transform businesses, priced in a customer-focused and consistent way. With our pay-as-you-go pricing structure, customers have the ability to better match costs to the services they use. Customers can also more easily compare services between leading cloud providers,” the company wrote in an FAQ today. The marketing teams of the other leading cloud providers are probably having a field day with this announcement, but moving large amounts of data is hard. There’s a reason people talk about data gravity. That’s one area where you can maybe raise prices without having to fear an exodus of customers. Despite the flowery language in the announcement, Google is clearly aware of the impact these changes will have. Why else would its FAQ note that its customers should “adapt their current usage to better align their applications to these new business models and help mitigate some of the price changes,” after all? Google — and Google Cloud especially — already suffers from the perception that it will almost randomly, even though its customers depend on them. Now add to that the perception that it will randomly hike its prices, and its sales teams will likely have to work overtime to fulfill the ambitious growth goals the company has surely set for itself. |
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Bazaar raises $70 million from Tiger Global and Dragoneer to digitize Pakistan’s retail | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global are backing Bazaar, a startup that is attempting to , they said today, joining a growing list of high-profile investors making large bets in the South Asian market. The two investors are leading Bazaar’s $70 million Series B funding. Existing backers including Indus Valley Capital, Defy Partners, Acrew Capital, Wavemaker Partners, B&Y Venture Partners and Zayn Capital also participated in the new round, which brings one-and-a-half-year-old startup’s all-time raise to over $100 million. is attempting to build what it calls an “operating system for traditional retail” in Pakistan. It’s a $170 billion market that comprises 5 million small and medium-sized businesses and enterprises across the country. But these merchants are largely unbanked and offline today. Banks and other formal financial institutions don’t extend credit to these merchants because they don’t have a credit score. This gap has forced many of these shop operators to take loans from shark loan providers. For those following the South Asia coverage, this challenge will sound very familiar. Business-to-business e-commerce Udaan, logistics startup ElasticRun, and Dukaan, a startup that is helping shops go online, as well as scores of startups and giants including Reliance and Amazon, are solving a similar problem in India. Bazaar is combining many of these offerings. The startup’s B2B e-commerce marketplace, thanks to its network of a dozen fulfillment facilities, is helping merchants in 21 towns and cities across Pakistan procure items to sell. These merchants also use the startup’s Easy Khata app, which helps them maintain bookkeeping. Bazaar’s financial arm, called Bazaar Credit, is offering these merchants, many of whom operate neighborhood stores, with short-term working capital financing. Bazaar’s suite of commerce, fintech and supply chain products. : Bazaar Piecing together many of its services makes sense for a startup like Bazaar in Pakistan because it enables the startup to offer a more comprehensive set of values to a merchant, and Easy Khata is helping the firm win customers, Saad Jangda, co-founder of Bazaar, said in an interview with TechCrunch. In August, “we had just started piloting our credit product and at the time we had partnered with a third-party,” he said. “Now, our credit product is developed completely in-house and is digitally enabled that connects to our last mile network. Everything from order generation to credit disbursement to cash collection is done completely by Bazaar,” he said. “We acquire customers through Easy Khata, funnel them through commerce, and once we have enough data on the merchants, we start building a credit product atop of it,” he said, adding that the startup has issued thousands of loans in recent months. Easy Khata has amassed over 2.4 million registered businesses across 500 cities in Pakistan. “But more importantly, Easy Khata is serving as both a core system of records and also helping us launch in new cities,” he said. Merchants have recorded over $10 billion in annualized bookkeeping transaction value on Easy Khata, the startup said. “Our expansion within Pakistan in the last few months is a testament to how crucial Easy Khata is for us,” Jangda said. The startup’s last-mile network, which was operational in just two cities in August of last year, is now adding three to four cities each month. “The goal is to keep building for Pakistan. We want to cover more than 100 urban and rural centres across the country and build the largest network in the country so that we can move any category of goods from point A to B whenever and wherever is needed.” The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand to more cities across Pakistan and launch new marketplace categories. It is also working to scale its lending offerings and explore new product lines. Childhood friends Jangda and Hamza Jawaid reconnected in Dubai a few years ago. At the time, Jawaid was at McKinsey & Company, while Jangda was working with Careem as a product manager for ride-hailing and food delivery products. The opportunities they saw in their home nation drove them back to the country to build Bazaar. “We are thrilled to support Bazaar’s vision of building an end-to-end commerce and fintech platform for millions of unbanked and offline merchants in Pakistan,” said Christian Jensen, partner at Dragoneer Investment Group. “Bazaar’s pace of geographic expansion and new product development is a testament to the rare talent and culture Hamza and Saad have cultivated at Bazaar.” |
Motto to launch a new electric bike subscription service in Paris | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Meet , a new French startup that plans to offer electric bikes in Paris. Instead of buying those bikes, Motto customers will be able to rent them for a fixed price of €75 per month (around $82 at today’s exchange rate). Customers get Motto-branded electric bikes with a motor in the rear wheel that helps you pedal up to a speed of 25km/h. It has integrated lights, a GPS tracker and an anti-theft system. It features a carbon belt and the battery is removable. The battery is integrated into the seat tube, meaning that you can access the battery by removing the saddle and taking it with you. There are two different models, a step-over model and a low-step model. The frame is slightly different but everything else is identical. But Motto doesn’t want to stop at hardware. Users aren’t just renting a bike — they’re subscribing to a service. The monthly subscription fee includes damage and theft insurance, as well as on-demand maintenance and repairs. When there’s something wrong with your Motto bike, you can open the app and request a repair within 48 hours. In the near future, Motto plans to offer a baby carrier and a front rack as subscription add-ons. Motto The startup has raised a $4.4 million (€4 million) seed round led by Cassius Family and Founders Future. Several business angels are also participating. Before rebranding to Motto, the startup was originally called Bloom, and 200 users tested the service in Paris already. And everybody will be able to sign up and get a bike starting in April 2022. The startup will compete with other bike subscription services, such as German startup , Netherlands company and publicly funded service . More importantly, the startup competes with public transportation, bike-sharing schemes and buying your own electric bike. The bike-as-a-service model provides many advantages. First, you don’t have to pay a large sum of money upfront. Second, many bike owners don’t want to get an electric bike because of thefts. Third, many people want to make sure they can actually use a bike to commute before buying one. For all these reasons, it’s good to see that bike-as-a-service represents another interesting option to get started with bikes. I still believe that we’re at the very start of the urban mobility revolution and people will end up using different transportation methods to get from point A to point B — especially in European cities. And many people should consider services like Motto to add an electric bike to their personal transportation mix. |
Amazon accuses estranged Indian partner Future and Reliance of fraud in newspaper ads | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Amazon’s two-year effort to between its estranged partner Future Group and Reliance Retail took a new turn on Tuesday as tens of millions of Indians woke up to find the U.S. e-commerce giant airing its grievances in several newspapers. Amazon has accused Future Group (which runs the nation’s second-largest retail chain) and Reliance Industries (India’s most valuable firm by market cap) of indulging in fraudulent practices, saying the Indian firms did not comply with court orders and recently attempted to “remove the substratum of the dispute.” As Amazon and Future continue to fight in courts, Reliance last month began taking over several of Future stores after brokering deals with landowners in a move that stunningly blindsided and outwitted the U.S. firm, which has invested over $6.5 billion in its India operations. Cash-strapped Future said in a filing earlier this month that it could not pay rent at many outlets. Future Retail and its partners “have consistently acted in violation of the order passed by the emergency arbitrator and reaffirmed by the Arbital Tribunal,” Amazon said in the Tuesday ad titled “Public Notice.” “It has now come to light that FRL, and its promoters have been attempting to remove the substratum of the dispute by purportedly transferring and alienating FRL’s retail assets comprising the retail stores in favour of the MDA Group,” the ad said. “Amazon hereby puts all persons concerned to notice that any attempt by FRL, and its prompters to transfer/dispose/alienate any of its retail assets is in violation of binding orders of the Arbitral Tribunal, which operate as orders of an Indian Court and any party assisting or cooperating in such fraudulent and contumacious actions will be liable for civil and criminal consequences under law.” A snapshot from Times of India New Delhi edition. |
Ireland’s privacy watchdog sued for inaction over ‘massive Google data breach’ | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Ireland’s evasive response to a major security complaint filed against Google’s adtech the year the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into application is the target of a new lawsuit that accuses the Data Protection Commission (DPC) of years of inaction over what the complainants assert is “the largest data breach ever.” Today reported that the Irish High Court has agreed to hear the suit. The litigation has been prepared by the (ICCL), whose senior fellow, Johnny Ryan, is named as the plaintiff. At issue is the DPC’s response to a long-running complaint about Google’s role in the high-velocity trading of web users’ personal data to determine which ads get served — and, more specifically, the lack of attention the data-trading systems of the tracking-based advertising industry pay to security. (Security, of course, is a key principle of the EU’s flagship data protection regime.) The ICCL’s suit thus accuses the DPC of a failure to act on what it couches as a “massive Google data breach.” Conservative estimate: Google does this billions of times, every day. This is the biggest data breach ever recorded. (See estimate from Texas AG et al. v Google, p. 2 ) — Johnny Ryan (@johnnyryan) Ryan will be familiar to anyone who’s been following adtech’s mounting legal woes in Europe as the driving force behind a series of complaints and lawsuits, since 2018, targeting the high-velocity trading of people’s data for real-time ad auctions (real-time bidding, or RTB). A former adtech insider turned whistleblower, Ryan has amped up pressure on the industry for reform through a series of strategic GDPR complaints. But, more recently, his complaints have increasingly targeted the DPC itself. In , for example, he published a dossier of evidence highlighting how the online ad-targeting industry profiles internet users’ intimate characteristics without their knowledge or consent — calling out the DPC for ongoing inaction over the RTB security complaint. He has also lodged a complaint with the European Commission that led to an ombudsperson stepping in to look into the EU’s own high-level monitoring of the (decentralized) application of the GDPR, which relies upon agencies in each member state to do the graft of investigating and enforcing violations of the law. On the 2018 Google adtech complaint, the DPC has — so far — announced some procedural steps. Following Ryan’s original September 2018 complaint, which named both Google and the online ad industry body the IAB Europe (two key players in the RTB system), Ireland opened a formal inquiry into Google’s adtech in The regulator is the lead EU watchdog for Google. However, Ireland did not open an inquiry based on the substance of Ryan’s complaint; rather, it opened what’s known as an “own-volition inquiry” — saying it would seek to “establish whether processing of personal data carried out at each stage of an advertising transaction is in compliance with the relevant provisions of the GDPR, including the lawful basis for processing, the principles of transparency and data minimisation, as well as Google’s retention practices,” as it put it at the time. Notably, the DPC did not say its inquiry would interrogate Google’s role in RTB through a security lens — despite the core of Ryan’s complaint being that a system that “functions” by broadcasting highly sensitive data about people (browsing habits, device IDs, location, etc.), across the internet to intermediaries, with no way for the tracked users to control who receives their information or what gets done with it, is the opposite of secure. So that’s what Ryan, via the ICCL, is now pressing for: The lawsuit aims to force Ireland to investigate the security of RTB, an issue the regulator has so far seemed keen to avoid. While RTB has faced a number of other GDPR complaints, in relation to issues like the legal basis for processing people’s data in the first place, Ryan’s complaint intentionally zeroed in on security as it seemed to offer the clearest route to demonstrating that something was very rotten in the state of adtech, as he explained to TechCrunch . “I’m trying to be as efficient as possible with every bit of litigation that we launch,” Ryan tells us now. “For 3.5 years I have asked the Irish Data Protection Commission to investigate and act on the biggest data breach ever recorded. And it has not done so and as a result of that, every European has been exposed to this.” “The DPC is really good at muddying things,” he adds. “This is a really nice, crisp, clear example of the DPC having Europe-wide responsibility for a really big issue that affects everybody — everyone — and it’s not some small thing. And they haven’t done anything. So there isn’t really any thing that I could do — we have to sue them.” “If they don’t act on this, they may as well not exist,” he concludes. Commenting on the suit in a statement, Liam Herrick, executive director of ICCL, added: We are concerned that the rights of individuals across the EU are in jeopardy, because the DPC has failed to investigate Google’s RTB system over three and half years since first notified by Johnny Ryan in 2018. The issue at stake here affects the rights of every European and we are going to court to see that digital rights are protected. Repeated attempts to get the DPC to take up this rights violation have failed.” , a flagship ad industry framework that was also targeted in complaints attached to RTB, the IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) — which is routinely served to web users in the form of a “privacy choices” pop-up, asking people to consent to their data to be used for ad-targeting in real-time ad auctions — was found by Belgium’s data protection authority to be in breach of the GDPR. (As was the IAB itself.) The IAB has been given a few months to find a fix for a very long list of violations — and argue this is likely an impossible task, given the systemic violations the TCF plugs into (and for which RTB is the core aim). The Belgian authority was acting on similar RTB complaints to Ryan’s that had been filed locally. (The IAB is overseen by Belgium’s regulator, so Ireland would not be expected to lead on that branch of his complaint. However, Ryan also accuses Ireland of failing to pass on his original complaint to Belgium as the GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism would surely intend.) The laundry list of failures identified by the Belgian DPA with regards to the IAB’s TCF very much features security — with breaches of the security of processing, integrity of personal data, data protection by design and default among those listed in its final decision earlier this year. Yet, despite security being clearly identified as a problem with a flagship industry framework that plugs into RTB (and, more than that, is intended to feed the system as a key strategic piece of adtech apparatus), the DPC’s still ongoing investigation of Google’s adtech — using its own terms of reference — does not mention “security.” In a timeline chronicling what the ICCL’s couches as “3 ½ years of inaction,” the civil liberties organization writes that on January 12 of this year the regulator finally said it had written a “statement of issues” of what it will investigate, vis-a-vis the Google complaint, but that statement “excludes data security — the critical issue of the complaint.” It’s not clear why the DPC has chosen to carve out security from its probe of Google’s adtech. Its plentiful critics would surely have thoughts on that. (Ryan says he has “no idea about their motives” when asked for a view — suggesting “many people see conspiracy where there is merely cock-up” and “we do not know why there is this persistent inertia” — hence “that’s why we need an independent review.”) Reached for comment on the ICCL’s lawsuit, deputy commissioner Graham Doyle declined wider remarks — saying only that there’s “not much to say at this stage beyond the fact that our investigation is progressing.” Ireland’s data protection regulator continues to attract trenchant criticism over its circuitous (some might say labyrinthine) approach to GDPR enforcement — especially in regards to cross-border complaints against major tech giants like Google and Facebook. Civil society, consumer protection and digital and privacy rights groups, and individual experts have all blasted the regulator for years for dragging its feet — or simply avoiding — properly investigating a string of major complaints and concerns, from systemic privacy and consent abuses to location tracking violations or indeed RTB’s massive security question, even though these are the sorts of systemic issues which, if confirmed by investigation, implicate massive consumer harms that scale right across the bloc. That also means these are the sorts of complaints that, were they to actually be enforced, could force wholesale reform of certain types of privacy-hostile data-mining business models. It’s notable that the handful of final decisions the DPC has issued against tech giants to date, since the GDPR began being applied in May 2018, have had to go through an objection resolution process baked into the regulation — after other EU data protection agencies rejected Ireland’s preference for lesser penalties. (See its 2020 security breach decision against and its 2021 transparency decision against .) A draft DPC decision against Facebook that was made public by the complainant (against the DPC’s wishes) also looks laughably lenient. (That complainant also filed a criminal complaint against the regulator in — accusing the DPC of using “procedural blackmail” to try to gag it.) It’s not clear how quickly the ICCL lawsuit against the DPC might progress and potentially accelerate Ireland’s GDPR enforcement of adtech. That may depend upon which of Ireland’s courts chooses to hear it. The regulator has faced a number of other legal challenges to its processes in recent years — including a couple in relation to a long-running complaint against Facebook’s EU-U.S. data transfers, one component of which it settled in by agreeing to swiftly resolve the complaint. (However, a final decision on that issue is pending.) The U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office, meanwhile, has also faced and litigation over RTB complaints starting after it closed a similar complaint without taking any enforcement action against the adtech industry (despite publicly acknowledging systemic lawlessness). In that case, the legal action only went to a tribunal, which ultimately to assess the validity of the outcome the ICO had claimed (but which the plaintiffs had sought to challenge). A suit against the DPC that’s heard in court should not face such powers-based uncertainties — so if the ICCL and Ryan prevail in their arguments, the Irish regulator could face an order to investigate the security of Google’s adtech that it can’t simply ignore; it would be forced to enforce a security-minded cleanup of adtech. Which is quite a thought. Google did not respond to a request for comment on the ICCL lawsuit. |
inFeedo gets $12M to help employers find out how their workforce really feels | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Employee sentiment can be hard to gauge, even at smaller businesses. This can lead to burnout and attrition when managers least expect it. To solve that problem, wants to act as a bridge between workers and their managers, with surveys performed through a chatbot called Amber, which inFeedo refers to as a “chief listening officer.” The company announced today it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Jungle Ventures, with participation from Tiger Global and returning investors like Bling Capital. This brings inFeedo’s total raised since the U.S.-headquartered company was founded in 2016 to $16 million. Part of the funding will be used for the company’s second ESOP buyback for all employees. Other investors in the round included Zeta founder Bhavin Turakhia, Gainsight co-founder Sreedhar Peddineni, Freshworks chief human resources officer Suman Gopalan, and Ankur Warikoo. Amber, inFeedo’s chatbot. inFeedo Amber, inFeedo’s chatbot, is available in more than 100 languages, and customers include a wide range of companies in terms of sizes and sector: Samsung, Xiaomi, Lenovo, TATA, Godrej, Bharti, Unacademy, Paytm, OYO, Lenovo, JD.ID., Tiket.com, Mediacom, Sunlife, BukuWarung and Aboitiz. In total, Amber is used by 30,000 employees in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. The company has 175 enterprise clients in 60 countries, especially Southeast Asia, India and the U.S., and it plans to speed up its go-to-market plans in North America with its new funding. Tanmaya Jain, who founded inFeedo with Varun Puri, told TechCrunch the idea for the platform was planted when the two were still at school. “Both Varun and I came from liberal schools and the general concept of a university was a big culture shock. People were encouraged to follow a template rather than think, and new ideas were often ignored, shot down or lost.” They found that this continued at workplaces, and that employees often felt “neglected, under-appreciated and were afraid to open up and share honest feedback with managers, which led to disengagement and attrition.” After doing research, the two realized that companies do care about employee sentiment, but struggle to stay on top of it. “When you have an HR:employee ratio of 1:300, 40% of their time is spent manually tracking, collecting and analyzing feedback, and it becomes humanly impossible to give employees the voice they need,” Jain said. While many organizations use annual or pulse surveys, inFeedo was created to standardize surveys across domains and cultures, he added. Amber also builds connections with employees by remembering context from previous chats. Employees can engage with the chatbot as often as they like, but Jain said they typically have three to four chats with Amber in a year. Each conversation is about eight questions long and takes no more than two and a half minutes to answer. The new funding will be used to ship new products over the next two years, with the “vision of an all-in-one employee experience platform with predictive people analytics that involve 0 effort HR/IT,” said Jain. The company also plans to quadruple its revenue and double its team, and is currently hiring for 140 remote roles, especially marketing, product, engineering and sales in Southeast Asia, India and the United States. |
The Station: A final rule for AVs and Cruise’s Kyle Vogt on why he’s ready to be CEO again | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present, and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. It was a busy week of “future of transportation” news, and lucky for us, we have a new reporter here at TechCrunch ready to dig into the beat. Reporter Jaclyn Trop has had a long career writing about automotive and other ways we move around this world. She’ll be focused on EVs and in-car tech, so expect more stories like her coverage of , and coming to cars. Some fun Jaclyn Trop facts: She has driven vehicles in more than 50 countries. In her view, the worst traffic she encountered was in China, the scariest roads were in Montenegro and the best roads she has driven on were in Bahrain. Follow her on Twitter. Or email her a tip at . Finally, I am in Austin for a few days to attend SXSW. If you’re in the city, please come meet me at one of two panels I will be moderating. The first one, called “ ,” will begin at 2:30 p.m. CT on March 14 at The Line Hotel. Speakers will be Ashwin Dias, global head of electrification at Uber; Avinash Rugoobur, president at Arrival; and Selika Talbott, founder and CEO of Autonomous Vehicle Consulting. I will also be moderating a panel at 11:30 a.m. March 16 at the Hilton Austin Downtown. This panel, called “ ,” will feature Carlos Gonzalez, senior director of global business development at Enel X North America, and Adam Gromis, public policy manager of sustainability and environmental impact at Uber. As always, you can email me at to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. You also can send a direct message on Twitter — . Move over, , there’s a new micromobility battery-swapping startup in town. Berlin-based Swobbee just to expand its battery-swapping network, which focuses more on e-bikes and e-scooters than e-mopeds like Gogoro, across Germany and into two new European markets. Speaking of Gogoro, the company just unveiled a , which it hopes will lead to higher capacity and range and lower chance of catching fire. Baltic e-bike company has added to its five-strong lineup. Each of Ampler’s bikes tries to offer something for everyone with variations on size, taste and design. The company is also opening two new showrooms in Amsterdam and Zurich. is launching a with Lisbon’s public bike service, Gira. As part of Bird’s Smart Bikeshare integration, now Gira’s e-bikes will be visible on the Bird app. , the docked electric bike service that launched in New York City last April to rival , is from consumer rides and toward last-mile delivery. The move comes after Joco was sued by the city for operating a bike share without prior authorization from the NYC Department of Transportation. , makers of the fun-looking Onewheel electric boards, sent their first shipments of the new flagship Onewheel GT units to customers from its San Jose facility. has partnered with to offer Lime riders the chance to fund the planting of a tree for each ride. Aspiration members will be incentivized to choose a greener mode of transport with free access to LimePrime for up to 12 months. has to be the RadExpand5, the fourth model the company has released in the last six months and a lightweight foldable e-bike. Priced at $1,299, the bike has a rear rack included and new 4-inch-wide tires. was added to Fast Company’s annual list of the . U.S. motorcycle company and lifestyle adventure brand have teamed up to create the eFTR Hooligan 1.2, an at $3,999.99. Japanese motorcycle manufacturer plans to bring its first three e-bikes to market by the end of 2022. We are watching and waiting with anticipation for this one. I’m talking about and its plan to go public. Mobileye, which was acquired by for about $15 billion in 2017, filed confidentially for an initial public offering this week. We’re still waiting on lots of information, including the number of shares that will be offered and the price. What we do know is that Mobileye has a multibillion-dollar business supplying automakers with computer vision technology that powers advanced driver assistance systems is taking aim at the robotaxi market as well. We’ve known about Intel’s plan to free Mobileye for months now. But in this market, the company’s IPO will likely get more attention. Why? Well, as TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim write “with today’s IPO market frozen like a glacier, any and all exit data is welcome. If Mobileye manages a smooth IPO at an attractive price, the company could help shake loose the exit market for tech companies. No single IPO will fix a bear market, but it would help. “In contrast, if Mobileye struggles when it debuts, or its IPO is pushed back due to market conditions, we’ll know that the public markets remain pretty darn closed for unicorns and other late-stage startups.” , the Israeli startup that believes it has figured out how to fix the 1% margin of error typical in self-driving with a “self-learning” approach, . The funding rounds out its Series C at $120 million. The first tranche of this investment was made public in , and altogether the investor list includes Continental and BMW i Ventures, and new backers Knorr-Bremse AG and VinFast. , the San Francisco-based auto financing startup, with a post-funding valuation of $700 million from Santander Holdings USA; SVB Financial Group, the parent of Silicon Valley Bank; and Crosslink Capital. , which built a self-service truck rental app, has to help expand its team and operations. The round was led by NextView Ventures and backed by Knoll Ventures, Zeno Ventures, Nassau Street Ventures and a number of angels. , the Berlin-based freight forwarding and logistics company, in a round led by technology investment firm Disruptive and including SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. The funding nearly doubled Forto’s valuation to $2.1 billion in eight months, Reuters reported. made its first investment in the sidewalk delivery bot sector. The chipmaker and AI company in Uber spinout . The startup led by Ali Kashani said it will use capital to further expand its sidewalk delivery robot service outside Los Angeles and San Francisco. , one of the most active startup investors, including in the transportation sector, is focusing on early-stage. Apparently, partners at the firm have committed $1 billion of their own cash to invest in seed funds that focus on backing the youngest startups, , citing unnamed sources. A couple of weeks ago, Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt took . If you recall, Vogt had vacated the top seat at GM’s self-driving car subsidiary in January 2019 when Dan Ammann took over. Vogt moved into the CTO spot. At the time, the move seemed to make sense. Cruise had grown from a small startup with 40 employees to more than 1,000 by the time Ammann took over. But in late December 2021, in what insiders told me was a surprising and sudden development. I caught up with Vogt and thought I would share some of his sentiments and other insights with you. Here are the highlights. I asked Vogt about why he gave up the CEO spot only to take it back a few years later. He said: The first few years of Cruise was when it was at a very different stage for the company. It was about building something from scratch and getting it up and running. When Dan came in and took over as CEO, I thought that was a great move at the time because it helped us get through some of the scaling challenges of going from a few 100 people up to a couple 1,000. And now, as we’re on the verge of commercialization, and the company is in a very good position and much larger scale, I wanted to reflect on that and make sure that this is the right time for me to take over and that we had the best person possible running Cruise. I asked him why he wasn’t the right person before and when a founder should step back from the CEO job. I think a good leader knows when they’ve reached their limits, and the best thing for the company is to bring in someone to augment their skills. I felt like I was over my skis a little bit at the time Dan came on, so it was perfect. Since then, I’ve been surrounded by really great leaders, both at Cruise and GM, and had a chance to basically catch up to where I think we need to be and perhaps get ahead of the curve a bit. And so it’s a different situation, but I think the challenging thing for any founder is to step aside when it’s the right thing for the company. And, you see time and time again when people do that, it works out well. And when they don’t, and they wait too long, that works out not so well. So I’m glad I did. I think it was the right move for the company at that stage. And I’m also happy with today’s move. I asked Vogt what he learned after giving up the CEO position a few years ago. It’s not rocket science, just experience, you know, like managing teams of a few 1,000 people — the job of a CEO shifts to be more about attracting and retaining world-class leaders. These are VPs or senior VPs and the way you manage VPs and senior VPs is very different than a first line engineering manager. And so for me, it was just getting experience, learning how to attract and work with really great leaders that expect a high degree of autonomy, a high degree of responsibility, but when given the right environment, will knock it out of the park. Vogt told me that to go from nothing to “something that can have meaningful change” founders should be thinking on a decade-long timescale. Cruise is approaching that decade mark. So, what does achievement or “building something” mean to Vogt and what can we expect over the next couple of years? His answer: This is something that we’ve run into a number of times in the AV industry, which is that when things are improving or scaling exponentially, it’s really hard to predict exactly what the Y axis is going to be in two years out. But what I will say is, what we’re seeing today is really the tip of the iceberg. The amount of development and energy going into just this first commercial deployment that we have in San Francisco was enormous. And now that the initial deployment has happened, I think you’re going to continue to see a massive rate of progress that was kind of hidden behind the veil before because we hadn’t done our first product launch. That rate of improvement, that increase in scale is going to start happening pretty rapidly now that we’ve crossed that initial threshold and we’ve decided we’re ready for early customers. The this week wasn’t a funding round or partnership. Nope, it was a from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (NHTSA) that finally gives autonomous vehicles and vehicles with automated driving functions their own set of motor vehicle safety standards. The ruling begins to provide clarity on how passenger safety should be defined in vehicles that are designed without features like driver’s seats and steering wheels. Taking a closer read of this , you find all sorts of insights into companies and what they’re angling for. , , , , , and all made comments in the document (check it out!). Tesla, which currently does not have an autonomous vehicle but sells an advanced driver assistance product for $12,000 that is called “Full Self-Driving,” had some of the more interesting arguments. In one example, Tesla argued that driving controls should include instances where manual controls may be removable, or “locked” or where the vehicle may be operated remotely by portable steering controls within the vehicle, such as “cell phones or tablets.” NHTSA disagreed “stating the new definition is meant to encompass traditional driving controls, not future controls that have not yet been developed.” , the autonomous trucking startup, partnered with to between Dallas-Forth Worth and Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. issued a recall following an October crash in California, according to the NHTSA. This is the , according to the agency. Finally, I recommend reading this about Rafaela Vasquez, one of the central figures in the Uber self-driving crash that occurred in Tempe, Arizona, in March 2018. I have resisted giving his own category in this newsletter, but with so much news coming from him and his companies, perhaps I should. This week, the big Elon news (besides that he apparently has another child with former partner Grimes) is his effort to back out of a with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The settlement is tied to his infamous tweet in 2018 that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, made two filings this week. One asked a federal judge to terminate the consent decree, an agreement with the SEC that among other things required some of his tweets be pre-approved by a lawyer. The filing argues that the SEC’s oversight borders on micromanagement and continues to infringe on Musk’s freedom of expression. The second and separate filing disputed SEC’s initial claims that Musk defrauded investors with the tweet. Musk claims he was forced to settle with the SEC because it threatened the viability of Tesla as well as his numerous other companies, including The Boring Company, Neuralink and SpaceX. could get a lot more expensive thanks to , according to a recent research note. . Lots of problems, including that the SEC has opened an investigation into the company and an impending cash crunch. (PG&E) is collaborating and (in separate pilots) to test how the automakers’ EVs can for customers’ homes in the California utility’s service area. , the AV technology startup, named as its first chief commercial officer. Dhar previously served as chief revenue officer at data-annotation firm CloudFactory. He also had stints at Zūm, Google and Oracle. The company also added , president of SPARX Capital Investments, and , vice president of dealer experience and mobility at Toyota Motor North America, to its board. of Tokio Marine Holdings Inc. and of Toyota Tsusho Corporation are also joining as board observers. appointed Plaid co-founder to the company’s board of directors. Hockey is joining to help the Scale team expand products to meet growing customer demand and support more data types and use cases across industries, including finance, e-commerce, transportation and logistics and government, according to the company. appointed as its new chief strategy and insights officer. He was previously at Via and McKinsey and Co. Join us on May 18-20 for . Whether you’re an early- or even late-stage founder, an investor, engineer or builder, or you’re focused on the policies and ethics of new mobility technologies, this event is for you. Plus, you’ll get hands-on with the latest autonomous, electric and flying vehicles! . |
Daily Crunch: African mobility fintech Moove raises $105M in Series A2 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, March 14, 2022! This week I am writing to you from New Orleans, where I am busy – when not writing – eating everything in sight. I bring that up as getting around is something that many of us are now doing a bit more of. Which means we’re once again. And that’s a great segue to remind you that you . The TechCrunch transport team is full of brilliant humans, so do not miss out on this one. – To kick off, our own has a great investor survey . It’s written and compiled in a manner that makes the advice fresh – what do venture investors want . And with Sarah Kunst (Cleo Capital), Christine Choi (M13), and others included, it’s well worth your time. And speaking of pitching, we have a great piece up . One theme I noticed between the two articles is the importance of storytelling. As a journalist, I am piss-poor at storytelling, but do respect the craft. For founders, it appears to be a central pillar of commanding investor attention. And to close out, has a bit more on . / Getty Images Regardless of whether you’ve liquidated your crypto assets or plan to hodl until the heat death of the universe, if you made any profits last year while trading, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service would like to have a chat. But some digging may be required to identify those taxable proceeds. Because cryptocurrency exchanges aren’t SEC-regulated, “they’re not legally required to offer the same level of tax reporting that discount brokerages and custodians must provide to stock, bond and mutual fund investors.” |
Vira Health gets $12M to dial up personalized menopause support | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | , a U.K. startup that offers personalized digital therapeutics for women going through menopause, has closed a second round of funding — taking $12 million from lead investor Octopus Ventures, along with participation from U.S.-based VC firm Optum Ventures, as it gears up to hop over the pond. Existing investors in the April 2020-founded business also joined in the latest round of financing. Vira’s £1.5 million seed — announced — included backing from LocalGlobe, MMC Ventures, Amino Collective and other angels. (The startup is reluctant to label this “second raise” using standard fundraising terminology but, when pressed, pegs it as equivalent to a Series A.) Vira’s app — — which launched in the U.K. last August, delivers information and targeted support for women who are experiencing menopausal symptoms, supporting them to make lifestyle and behavior changes aimed at tackling whatever blend of physical and/or psychosocial issues they’re experiencing. This means the app may be serving up exercise programs alongside diet advice or a course of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to combat insomnia or mood-related issues, or indeed another combination of customized support programs. It also takes a community approach to further expand the support, with opportunities for users to be brought together for Q&As/Zoom chats around discussion topics so they can quiz experts and/or share related experiences with each other. This sort of digital therapeutics formula looks very familiar now — given the decade-plus we’ve seen a variety of established therapeutics being digitized to scale and reach more people in need of targeted support via their mobile device, whether for problems with , and , , , , and even , to name a few. Menopause has had relatively less love than some other areas where digital therapeutics startups have been busy for years. Although there is a growing number of players in this space too now — such as the likes of , and . Over what has generally been a boom decade for digital health, we’ve also seen the rise of femtech as a distinct category — and raised awareness has to female-led startups that are tackling issues which exclusively affect women. So it follows that the attention-value calculus is continuing to shift. Hence now a U.K. startup that’s addressing an issue which “only” affects a subset of woman (middle-aged females) can close a double digit second round just a couple of years after being founded. Not that raising Vira’s latest tranche of funding was a cake-walk, says co-founder and CEO Andrea Berchowitz. “We were speaking to one investor in the U.S. — who I’m sure would be not thrilled if I said who it was — and she said she’d seen 30 menopause startups and had not done an investment yet,” she recounts, saying one of the hurdles for that particularly reluctant (unnamed) investor was a question mark over whether women in the U.S. are actively seeking this sort of care, being as the conversation around menopause over the pond is not as advanced as it is in the U.K. (where Berchowitz emphasizes the topic gets a lot of mainstream media coverage). “Fundraising is so hard,” she adds. “I think it’s really important to keep saying that — sometimes you can almost forget how hard it was when the money hits the bank account but it’s really hard. “We know it’s hard for women to raise money… every data points shows that. Let’s not pretend it’s not. And then when you’re raising for a product that no one in the room has experience with — because they’re either young or male — the fact is we need someone to basically be over 45, probably over 50 — there’s not a tonne of that and then to be female so yes we have to do a lot more education. “However I think it’s an interesting litmus test because… people who are unwilling to learn about new things probably aren’t right for us as investors. And so our approach was to really target funds that had either invested in women’s health before or digital therapies before. So we knew we could have a conversation with them about what we were building.” Commenting on Vira’s funding in a statement, Kamran Adle, health investor at Octopus Ventures, said: “Menopause is an enormous yet underserved and underfunded market. One billion women, or approximately 12% of the global population, are expected to experience menopause by 2025, and we’re excited to work with the Vira Health team.” “We are pleased to invest in Vira Health,” added Julia Hawkins, general partner at LocalGlobe and Latitude, in another supporting statement. “There is a strong interest in menopause care right now and this is a phenomenal team committed to building what women want and need.” Vira Health It is also gearing up for a U.S. launch of the app — which it’s penciling in for the second half of this year, To ensure the app is targeting relevant support, it personalizes the package of therapeutics based on what the user tells it they’re most concerned about. “The way it works is a woman comes on the app and she tells us what symptoms are bothering her the most,” explains Berchowitz. “That was based on the fact that menopause is going to be an entirely different experience for everyone — no two women have the same symptoms and the same health background and the same preferences and the same way they want to be talked to and all that. “So we say you tell us what’s bothering you the most — and if that’s sleep and incontinence then we’re going to help you with that. If it’s weight gain and feelings of low mood or anxiety then we’re going to help you with that. And then we take those symptoms and we design a 12-week program to help get relief for those symptoms.” “Each program is based on the best available science for that given symptom,” she adds. “So if that’s sleep it’s built on cognitive behavioral therapy and sleep scheduling. If those are pelvic floor issues — so incontinence or painful sex — that’s built on pelvic floor activation.” The science behind these app-based interventions draws on current best practice per symptom, according to Berchowitz, although she confirms the app itself is not currently a regulated medical device (rather it’s offered as an information service). That said, as the product evolves — notably as Stella expands from dishing out purely information-based support into becoming a telehealth platform which may be involved in issuing prescriptions for pharmaceuticals or being able to provide a service like fitting a Mirena coil — the nature of the interventions are set to change. And Berchowitz further confirms its regulated status may therefore end up changing too, suggesting an application for regulatory clearance could be a future step for the business. (And, again, that sort of trajectory isn’t new: We’ve seen other femtech startups evolve from building a pure consumer service to launching a regulated medical product. See, for example, .) As noted above, Vira is by no means the first to digitize existing therapeutic approaches like CBT either, so — as regards the meat of a digital support service — it’s far from starting from scratch here. Rather it can draw on plenty of existing success in the digital health category — gleaning inspiration and ideas from the growing body of implementations of digital therapeutics, pioneered by the likes of Sleepio, to name one of the early startups in the space (which recently raised a from SoftBank’s Vision Fund). This (now) rich field of digital therapeutic startups has provided passive support to Vira on the fundraising front, per Berchowitz. “Our investors in this round are Octopus which has in its stable Quit Genius and Sleepio, among others, which are two digital therapies that did kind of go U.K. to U.S. — so I think there’s a lot to learn there,” she notes, adding of Optum: “They’re in Kaia Health, they’re in Equip which is a digital therapy for eating disorders. “And that allowed us to have a really great conversation, like, you know how Kaia works, how it’s been sold, what their challenges and opportunities are — so using that frame let’s chat about menopause. And how it fits into that frame.” “We weren’t convincing people that the digital delivery of lifestyle and behavior change was a totally new idea,” she continues. “We were saying maybe you don’t know but a lot of the things that you need to do to manage symptoms at menopause are lifestyle and behavior change — there’s specific exercises, there’s change to diet or it’s cognitive behavioral therapy — and these are all things that have been proven for digital delivery in other ways so what we’re doing is [what investors refer to as] a ‘horizontal roll-up’. So it’s unreasonable that a woman is going to have and for pelvic floor plus an plus, plus, plus, and do that all! “So the explosion of digital therapies allowed us to just say — yeah, that’s us. You’ve heard of that, you believe in that, this is how that applies to our area.” “Optum is [also] very U.S.-health focused so I think we’ve tried to surround ourselves with as much of that experience as we can while continuing to build here in the U.K. because we do just get that feedback loop faster because menopause is on the [public/media] agenda,” she adds, fleshing out the strategy for the second raise — and noting that Octopus’ “stated interest in taboo topics” also made it “easier to go to them”. What about product efficacy? Some of the new funding is being pegged for clinical trials of its approach. And Berchowitz also flags a feasibility study they undertook from December to February — which Vira Health So while she says the startup is not in a position to quantify exactly how much of the benefit users report from engaging with its app-based programs is — or could be — linked to a placebo effect, ultimately if women are finding the targeted support helps them to navigate a challenging period of life change does it really matter how or why it’s working for them? “Sometimes what’s happening in menopause is your oestrogen is fluctuating all the time and so even if you are on hormone replacement therapy and doing your pelvic floor activation it could still be incredibly tough,” Berchowitz adds. “There is no silver bullet that just fixes it all for every woman and so I think placebo is one way of saying it — but I also think there is something about awareness and information that does remove some of the fear and the unknown.” Placebo question aside, one thing at least looks relatively clear: An oft-reported lack of support for women raising menopausal concerns via traditional healthcare services is creating a sizeable opportunity for startups to step in, unbundle the use-case and offer specialized care to middle aged women for a fee. (Including, evidently, in the U.K. where healthcare is available free-at-the-point-of-use.) “Not everyone gets high quality menopause care from their GP [doctor] — we hear that time and again,” says Berchowitz, expanding on the rational for bolting on a telehealth component. “We’re not trying to be a GP service, we are trying to be a specialized service for women seeking out care at menopause.” Vira isn’t disclosing how many users its app has at this stage but Berchowitz is upfront that they expect the U.S. to be a relatively challenging market to grow the business — given how discussion around menopause is less developed there than in the U.K. The U.S. also of course has a very different healthcare model. And she further notes that there can be a lot of variation states-by-state — adding that Vira will thus be spending time adapting and localizing content to ensure that the language and tone used strike an appropriately familiar note. Vira’s business model for Stella is two-fold: Direct to consumer paid subscriptions and a B2B2C approach which targets employers to fund the service, making it available as a free benefit to their staff. And Berchowitz confirms it plans to use broadly the same approach in the U.S. “The model will be similar in the U.S. because I think the workplace angle for us is the priority — we have lots of conversations with workplaces that are really making a shift in how they think about benefits. And the focus on women, especially senior women, is increasing — not enough but it is increasing. And so the conversation of ‘if you provide better support for women at menopause you can keep them longer, you can support them to make that next promotion, which also means you have more role models.’ “It’s much louder in this country than it is in the U.S. — but it has started in the U.S. So I think the workplace benefits is one we’re going to stick with.” The workplace focus is also where it all started for Berchowitz. Winding back to the beginning of Vira’s journey, she says the idea for the business began with a personal urge to do something to address the lack of women in senior leadership positions — having seen little progress on this very visible problem over a long career at McKinsey and also working for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “I’d been in senior positions and the lack of women at the top was something that was talked about a lot and just didn’t change in that whole time I was there and so I knew I wanted to do something that helped women jump over that last promotion or help them in the workplace,” she tells TechCrunch. “I wasn’t totally sure what the issue I was going to tackle was but I knew it was something about getting women into senior positions.” The idea crystalized into tackling menopause as she explored the topic, hearing stories about women abandoning their careers Meeting the right co-founder was also key to launching Stella, per Berchowitz. Her co-founder, Dr. Rebecca Love, is a chronic disease epidemiologist and an expert in behavior change — bringing the dedicated medical expertise needed to credibly underpin a recasting of lifestyle change-based therapeutics in digital form. “I was really lucky to meet Rebecca,” recalls Berchowitz. “At that point she was looking at obesity and diabetes and we hit it off as friends — and the kind of entry point for her is that menopause is this amazing entry point into later life health for women where the things that need to happen to manage symptoms around exercise or nutrition or pelvic floor activation or strength training. That sort of lifestyle and behavior change affects immediate symptoms — so it gives relief in the short term — but also really changes the long term health trajectory for a woman. “So we kind of met over this idea that menopause could be a really interesting and untapped way to really change the lives of women over time — and so Vira Health was born.” |
NASA’s mega expensive moon rocket will make its public debut Thursday | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Twelve years after it was first announced, NASA’s massive Space Launch System will finally make its public debut. The super heavy-lift rocket and Orion spacecraft will begin the rollout to the launch pad at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, a much-anticipated development for a launch system that’s been beset by delays and a mounting price tag. Following the rollout Thursday, which is expected to take 11 hours, NASA will conduct a slew of tests to determine launch readiness, like validating the software systems and servicing the boosters. After that, NASA will commence a “wet dress rehearsal,” a series of additional prelaunch tests, during which the system will be loaded with its propellant tanks. Artemis launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson told reporters during a media call Monday that the wet dress could take place on April 3, should the rollout go as expected. It’s been a long time coming. Congress directed NASA to develop SLS to replace the Space Shuttle, the agency’s original spaceflight workhorse, back in 2010. SLS is envisioned as a vehicle to return humans to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, and possibly even further into the solar system. But ever since, the project has faced repeated setbacks and technical issues. A year ago, NASA’s Inspector General’s office issued on the costs and contracts associated with the SLS program, finding that “rising costs and delays” have pushed the overall budget for the project far beyond the original scope. Arguably, the biggest winners out of this snafu have been the aerospace primes — notably Boeing, which is heading SLS development, Northrop Grumman and Aerojet, whose contracts made up 71% of the total funding spent in 2019 on all SLS contracts, according to the Inspector General. All of this has added up to an extremely costly project. At the beginning of March, a NASA auditor reported that the operational expenses for the first four Artemis missions will total $4.1 billion — each. The cost of constructing a single SLS accounts for around half of that, or $2.2 billion. NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems development, Tom Whitmeyer, seemed to tacitly comment on the price tag, telling reporters that the project is a “national investment.” “From my perspective, it’s a strong national investment [and] international engagement in our economy,” he said. SLS’s high price tag is partly due to the fact that neither stage of SLS is reusable, so each mission will need its own rocket. As opposed to SLS, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk estimated last month that his company’s super-heavy, fully reusable rocket, Starship, would cost less than $10 million per launch within the next few years. SpaceX is developing a version of the rocket for NASA as part of the Artemis program, after winning a $2.9 billion contract for the task last year. |
Microsoft’s PeopleLens project helps blind kids learn social cues in conversation | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Among the challenges of growing up with a visual impairment is learning and participating in the social and conversational body language used by sighted people. is a research project at Microsoft that helps the user stay aware of the locations and identities of the people around them, promoting richer and more spontaneous interactions. A sighted person looking around a room can quickly tell who is where, who’s talking to whom and other basic information useful for lots of social cues and behaviors. A blind person, however, may not know who has just entered a room, or whether someone has just looked at them to prompt them to speak. This can lead to isolation and antisocial behaviors, like avoiding groups. Researchers at Microsoft wanted to look into how technology could help a child blind since birth access that information and use it in a way that made sense for them. What they built was PeopleLens, a clever set of software tools that run on a set of AR glasses. Using the glasses’ built-in sensors, the software can identify known faces and indicate their distance and position by providing audio cues like clicks, chimes and spoken names. For instance, a small bump noise will sound whenever the user’s head points in anyone’s direction, and if that person is within 10 feet or so, it will be followed by their name. Then a set of ascending tones helps the user direct their attention toward the person’s face. Another notification will sound if someone nearby looks at the user, and so on. The PeopleLens software and its 3D view of the environment. Microsoft Research The idea isn’t that someone would wear a device like this for life, but use it as a learning aid to improve their awareness of other cues and how to respond to them in a prosocial way. This helps a kid build the same kinds of non-verbal skills that others learn with the benefit of sight. Right now PeopleLens is very much an experiment, though the team has been working on it for quite a while. The next step is to assemble a cohort of learners in the U.K. between the ages of 5 and 11 who can test out the device over a longer period. If you think your kid might be a good match, |
Lyft, Uber add surcharge due to high gas prices | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Lyft and Uber are adding temporary fuel surcharges to fares for ride-hail and deliveries as fuel prices around the country rise. The rising prices are due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has resulted in a mountain of economic sanctions from the west against Russia, and the U.K.’s promise to ease its dependency on Russian fuel by the end of the year. Russia is one of the world’s biggest oil exporters, mainly supplying Europe and Asia, which have not formally banned Russian oil supplies yet. However, the sanctions have made oil importers nervous about touching anything Russian, so there’s been a leading to a decreased global supply of natural gas and oil. that riders would now be charged a fee of $0.45 to $0.55 per trip, and Uber Eats deliveries will include a $0.35 to $0.45 surcharge. The fees, which are happening in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Australia, will last for at least two months and may be adjusted based on driver, courier and consumer feedback, the company said. In the U.S., the surcharges apply nationwide except for New York City, where on March 1, drivers received a 5.3% increase based on the city’s mandated minimum earnings standard, which Uber says accounts for the increase in operating costs. In addition, the vast majority of delivery workers in NYC use bicycles, not cars, said Uber. It’s not clear which other markets will be affected by the surcharges, but Uber told TechCrunch it’s considering a number of different countries. On Monday, Lyft joined Uber in adding surcharges to rides, . Like Uber, Lyft says it will give the entirety of its surcharge to drivers, which is meant to soften the burden of higher prices, not cover all of the cost of gas, according to Uber. Lyft said on Wednesday its surcharge of $0.55 would affect riders in the United States everywhere but New York City and Nevada. The fuel surcharge will kick in next week and will last for 60 days, the company said. Uber’s surcharge will apply for electric vehicle rides, as well. Lyft has not confirmed to TechCrunch whether it will have the same policy. “We’ve been closely monitoring rising gas prices and their impact on our driver community,” Lyft said in a statement. “Driver earnings overall remain elevated compared to last year, but given the rapid rise in gas prices we’ll be asking riders to pay a temporary fuel surcharge, all of which will go to drivers. We’ll share more details shortly.” Food-delivery company DoorDash said on Tuesday its U.S. delivery partners are eligible for a 10% cashback on gas purchases starting March 17. |
SoftBank turns fund for diverse entrepreneurs into an ‘evergreen’ opportunity | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate, that it has an uncapped, evergreen fund made explicitly to back Black, Latinx and Native American entrepreneurs within the United States. The commitment is a continuation of SoftBank’s $100 million Opportunity Growth Fund for underrepresented founders, which first launched in June 2020 in the “wake of increased racial justice.” The effort, which the firm says took 24 hours to spin up, has now been invested in its entirety across 70 companies. About 55% of the initial portfolio companies are Black-founded, 40% Latinx-founded and 5% Black and Latinx-founded. Still, the portfolio weighs heavily toward men: only 13% of companies in the SoftBank Opportunity portfolio are founded by women of color, The Opportunity fund has also had four companies valued over $1 billion, as well as two exits; half the portfolio has raised or is raising another round of funding post-initial investment. The momentum could be part of the reason why SoftBank is continuing its efforts. In other (unsurprising) words, it’s working. The question remains as to why SoftBank is turning its commitment into an evergreen fund, versus dedicating a clear bucket of money, and ergo heavy signal, to back historically overlooked entrepreneurs. It doesn’t have a fear of numbers: just four months ago, SoftBank Evergreen funds have an open-ended structure with no termination date. The strategy can allow firms to recycle capital from realized returns without constraints, and invest cross-stage and perhaps even different ownership stakes. In this case, SoftBank is planning to recommit to the early-stage startup scene, There’s no fixed amount of capital that SoftBank has committed to the cohort, which makes it tougher to understand how much of an impact the commitment will have. that the team plans to deploy more capital than it did in the debut fund. In an e-mail to TechCrunch, the firm said that it will make 20 to 30 investments per year with check sizes between $300,000 to $700,000, and follow-on funding between $1 million and $5 million. Marcelo Claure, former COO of SoftBank, was the person who originally conceptualized and launched the Opportunity fund — alongside managing partner Shu Nyatta, with Paul Judge, the founder of TechSquare and chairman of Pindrop, and Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO of TaskRabbit. Claure left SoftBank early this year over a Nyatta now leads the Opportunity fund’s efforts, and appointed managing partners Catherine Lenson and Brett Rochkind to join the investment committee as well. |
Ukrainian hackers say HackerOne is blocking their bug bounty payouts | Zack Whittaker | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Ukrainian hackers and security researchers say bug bounty platform HackerOne is withholding their bug bounty rewards, in some cases thousands of dollars, and refusing to let hackers withdraw their earnings. Several hackers and researchers with affected HackerOne accounts said in tweets that HackerOne is blocking payouts, citing economic sanctions and export controls following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February, but that the sanctions don’t apply to them. “If you are based in Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus all communications and transactions (including swag shipping) have been paused for the time being,” according to an email from a HackerOne support representative to security researcher Vladimir Metnew, which . Metnew, who is Ukrainian but currently in the European Union, told TechCrunch that his account is frozen. “I think they blocked payments for everyone who registered from Ukraine,” Metnew said. Bug bounty company HackerOne acts as an intermediary between the hackers and security researchers who find and report security bugs and the companies that ask for help fixing their products and services. In 2020, HackerOne paid out more than $107 million in bug bounty rewards to researchers, many of whom rely on their earnings as a source of income. Other hackers and researchers who are still in Ukraine are reporting similar circumstances, that their accounts are frozen or that they cannot withdraw funds. Bob Diachenko, a Ukrainian security researcher whose have on , said that he had $3,000 in earnings since February currently withheld from his account. The move to block payouts across Ukraine has been met with anger and confusion, and without any apparent official communication from the bug bounty company. It’s not clear what sanctions or export controls HackerOne is referring to. The U.S., the European Union and several other allied nations have against Russia and Belarus, as well as an embargo on territory in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine currently held by separatist groups and Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. But Ukraine is not subject to those sanctions. One affected Ukrainian hacker who goes by the handle said in a tweet that they are “not from Crimea or Donbas … you just suspended all Ukrainian accounts, you just put the whole country under sanctions,” referring to HackerOne. HackerOne has not said why it blocked payouts to Ukrainian hackers and researchers or cited the specific sanctions it believes apply. When reached before publication, a HackerOne spokesperson was unable to comment or answer our questions, including what sanctions it believes apply. Provided after publication, HackerOne chief technology officer Alex Rice told TechCrunch that bounty payouts are to resume shortly. “We actively support Ukraine’s fight for freedom and have no intention of restricting bounty payments to Ukrainian hackers. I’m truly sorry for the stress caused here, and am committed to getting things back up and running as quickly as possible,” said Rice. “When the Biden administration announced financial sanctions against the two occupied regions of Ukraine, we immediately began work to ensure that no bounties were inappropriately issued to those sanctioned regions. This has created a delay in the processing of payments for some hackers in this region that the team is actively working to resolve. This delay pains me and I am personally committed to seeing all bounty processing resume within the week.” The account freezes appeared came into effect around the time that HackerOne chief executive Marten Mickos said in a since-deleted tweet thread that HackerOne would “re-route” earnings for hackers living in sanctioned countries — notably Russia and Belarus — to charity since sanctions prevent the company from transacting with those residents. One hacker, who goes by the handle , said HackerOne is taking $25,000 in earnings “because I am a Belarusian citizen.” The hacker, who expressed their support for Ukraine but feared for their safety due to speaking out against the Belarusian regime, said their earnings were the “result of years of hard work.” Mickos recanted his comments about re-routing funds in , now offering to donate hackers’ rewards only with their permission. |
Mask unlock is finally live on iPhone as iOS 15.4 arrives | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Just under a week , the company dropped the latest version of a trio of operating systems: iOS/iPadOS 15.4 and macOS 12.3 are now live. For those who don’t live , that means a bunch of key features, including using Face ID with a mask unlock and , which offers even more seamless integration between an iPad and Mac. The operating systems arrive ahead of the new iPhone SE and Mac Studio — one of which . The whole mask unlock thing has been a pretty big bugbear for the past, oh, two years or so. Apple offered a nice stopgap solution in the form of unlocking with the Apple Watch, but this new version makes things more accessible to more users (though, again, you can always stick to the thumb with the SE). I’ve been using the beta for several weeks and have been satisfied with the results. It works well with a mask and glasses, which was nice during the first real traveling I’ve done since this whole thing started. Naturally, it struggled when my glasses fogged, but I don’t know, that’s probably the fault of Honeywell and Warby Parker as much as anyone. Get it together, folks. The OS will walk you through setting up the opt-in feature, while warning you that things are, naturally, safer when relying on the full face. Apple Also new on the phone side is the Tap to Pay feature, which cuts out the middleman card reader to allow iPhone users to accept payments via the NFC chip. That arrives alongside a whole bunch of new emojis — 37 in all. Included are one melting face and another peeking one, which probably didn’t give its name to last week’s “Peek Performance” event, but, really, who can say for sure anymore? The other big news here is on the iPadOS/MacOS side. Apple’s not positioning it as a Sidecar killer, exactly, but it will no doubt fill that role for many users. The feature makes it possible to synch keyboards, trackpads and mice between a Mac and iPad. That means you can drag and drop files between the devices and operating systems, effectively using a more seamless version of AirDrop. Both operating systems should be available for download now on your compatible devices. |
The inevitable codification of Silicon Valley’s relationships | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | Hello and welcome back to , a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week, is running the show, which means we’re returning to our private market focus and, for the fun of it, reminding you all that This is going to be a busy week for the team, so expect our sassiness to only increase as the days roll forward. Here’s what I got into today: And of course we have to end with the fact that it is Mary Ann’s birthday, We are so thankful to have you as part of the show, and a go-to friend for all things fintech and existential. You can find me on Twitter and the show , |
IRS FUD: What you need to know about crypto taxes | Pam Krueger | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | of the millions of Americans who jumped on the Bitcoin bandwagon in 2021. Or perhaps you’ve become an active crypto trader. Or maybe digital currency bonuses have become part of your compensation package at work. You might have even used some of it to buy something or pay someone else for their services. Perhaps you’ve been thinking, cryptocurrencies aren’t physical currencies; they aren’t even regulated by the U.S. government. That means I don’t have to pay taxes on profits I make from trading crypto, right? Wrong. Even though the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’ rules around crypto are sketchy in many areas, they’ve made it clear that . For calculating taxable gains and losses, crypto transactions are treated exactly the same as those involving stocks, bonds or mutual funds. Seems relatively simple, right? But what if you’ve traded Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other cryptocurrencies throughout the year, profiting from some transactions and losing money on others? Will your crypto exchange help you accurately calculate how much you’ll owe Uncle Sam? The answer is: It depends. Since crypto exchanges aren’t regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, they’re not legally required to offer the same level of tax reporting that discount brokerages and custodians must provide to stock, bond and mutual fund investors. While some U.S.-based crypto exchanges offer basic summaries of taxable proceeds from crypto-related trading activities, many do not. And, to the best of our knowledge, none currently generate IRS Forms and , which brokerage companies and custodians deliver to consumers to help them report income and capital gains and losses from the sales of investable assets. |
Max Q: Russian invasion reverberates through space industry | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 3 | 14 | This week, Max Q again puts the focus on the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and the resulting halo effects that’s having on the international space industry. Neither private companies, like OneWeb, nor national space programs have been spared from ongoing shockwaves from the conflict. Perhaps most significantly for the space sector, the Russian invasion is undoing decades of collaboration, with no indication that things are going to turn around any time soon. Russia is uttering threats and taking action in response to mounting global sanctions, and last month Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin issuing vague and ominous warnings about operation of the ISS without Russian participation. This week, Rogozin came up with another memorable phrase while ending Russian supply of rocket engines to companies in the States. Rogozin said during a state media broadcast. It may come as a surprise to more casual space fans that Russian engines actually do still power American rockets — including ULA’s Atlas V, and Northrop Grumman’s Antares. But ULA obviously saw this eventuality coming at some point, and contracted Blue Origin to supply rocket engines for its next-generation Vulcan launch vehicle. Notably, the market for launch and engines has so radically transformed that the withholding of Russian space assets is not quite the blow that it might’ve been even a decade ago — though BryceTech analyst Phil Smith it does “[put] some customers in a lurch.” Aubrey Gemignani/NASA The fallout goes further. French space company in accordance with “the sanctions decided by the international community.” Meanwhile, , a British manufacturer and operator of satellites, said it would no longer use the Soyuz after it refused to capitulate to that it guarantee its satellites would not be used for military purposes. One reason the U.S. and NASA aren’t nearly as reliant on Russian rockets and rocket tech is the Commercial Crew program, which saw NASA seek two new sources for ferrying astronauts to and from the ISS. SpaceX successfully completed NASA’s rigorous test program for human flight and is now offering said service (while other contract winner Boeing is in progress, but with a few bumps in the road). Last week NASA announced that it has officially re-upped its Commercial Crew contract with SpaceX, adding to its existing deal three more missions worth a combined total of $900 million. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon on the launch pad for the Crew-3 mission. SpaceX NASA will receive $24 billion in funding for the 2022 fiscal year, after Congress passed a sweeping $1.5 trillion spending bill. (Check out this closer look into the funding from the ) Most notably, that includes $1.19 billion for the agency’s Human Landing System (HLS) program, which aims to land astronauts on the moon for the first time since the Apollo era. HLS made lots of headlines earlier this year, after NASA awarded to SpaceX to develop the lander. The competitors, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics, filed with a government watchdog a complaint over the sole award; , Blue even went as far as to . But there may be hope yet for these competitors — legislators go out of their way to require NASA to lay out a plan of how it will “ensure safety, redundancy, sustainability, and ” (emphasis mine) in the program. Astra Space on the company’s February rocket launch that resulted in a complete loss of payload. It was Astra’s first mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida (thus far, all launches have been conducted from the company’s spaceport in Kodiak, Alaska), and the first time its rocket was carrying a customer payload. Things didn’t go as planned. The botched launch was due to two things, the company said in its preliminary findings: an issue with the fairing separation mechanisms, which led to an off-nominal stage separation, and a software issue with the upper-stage engine, according to Astra’s senior director of mission management and assurance, Andrew Griggs. The company has already introduced new controls to ensure these errors don’t happen again, he said. “Through constant iteration and extensive testing, we have been able to demonstrate that the changes eliminate the failure mode we saw on LV0008, while making the software suite much more robust.” “With the root causes identified and corrective measures in place, we’re preparing to return to the launch pad with LV0009 soon — stay tuned!” he added. Spaceship Soyuz on Baikonur spaceport ready for launch. /Getty Images. This week’s Max Q was brought to you by me, . I’m back at the helm after an extended break. Thoughts, comments and tips can be sent to . You can also catch me on Twitter at . See you next week. |
Japan’s Terra Drone lands $70M Series B funding to accelerate global expansion | Kate Park | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | As the use of aircraft like drones, electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles and uncrewed aerial vehicles take off, Japanese startup wants to make sure trafficking the skies doesn’t get overlooked. When asked about its next plan after Series B, Seki told TechCrunch that Terra Drone considers going public. The company also could raise another funding before its IPO, Seki added. Terra Drone has about 500 customers including oil and gas companies like Shell, Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Vopak and Japan’s Inpex Corporation as well as chemical companies like BASF and Kansai Electric Power. Seki told TechCrunch that the firm also provides its inspection services to food company Bunge and survey services to construction companies. Terra Drone’s uncrewed traffic management |
Daily Crunch: Identity-as-a-service platform Okta says it ‘contained’ network breach in January | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Tuesday, March 22, 2022! Excited to announce that we’re bringing in a few other folks to help bring this newsletter for you. helped write the Big Tech and Startups sections today, for example. will also be rotating in this week. Give them a follow! Before we start, , so if that’s your bag, hit the link. Now, to work! – To kick off, let’s have a smile. Have you been on Zoom too much lately? Do you want to be a cat, deep down in your soul? If so, you might want to to turn you, well, into an animal. The fun little tool might be aimed at kids, but I fully intend to use it in my next all-hands. (A big shoutout to for helping keep TechCrunch weird.) Turning to the startup market, we have some unicorn news to kick us off. Jeeves, which is a search engine product, . The fintech company’s round sticks out from the rest thanks to the fact that it quadruples Jeeves’ valuation in around a half year. And then there’s Capitolis, which . The U.S. and Israeli company works with large financial institutions concerning “how they move money,” our own reports. We’ve been covering more agricultural technology companies lately, which we sort into a bucket labeled “agtech.” So let’s harvest a few of our latest headlines from that particular crop, yeah? Up first, . It’s also adorable, at least as far as robots go. We also wrote up the story about a number of individuals who, instead of raising a fund out the gate, . It’s a super interesting yarn. / Getty Images Founding a tech company isn’t like starting most small businesses: No one expects a plumber to show 3% month-over-month growth, for example. Tech entrepreneurs are under pressure to build a team, regularly ship new products, and quickly capture revenue so they can provide a return to their investors. So it’s not surprising that sometimes, they let ethics fall by the wayside. Entrepreneur and investor Marjorie Radlo-Zandi says the “fake it till you make it” mindset is a useful motivational tool, but it’s not a basis for a sustainable business strategy: The founder of a company I invested in secretly kept two sets of books: one with correct historical financials, and another with numbers inflated more than 10 times actuals. Sales and product performance had fallen short. His solution was to present the inflated financials to investors. |
Former Cruise CEO Dan Ammann joins ExxonMobil | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | Dan Ammann, the New Zealand native who served as CEO of autonomous vehicle company Cruise since 2019, has moved on to ExxonMobil, where he will be leading a new business focused on commercializing low-emission business opportunities in carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and low-emission fuels, according to a . Ammann, the former president of General Motors, abruptly , to be formally replaced by . He will take up the position of president of ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions effective May 1, replacing Joe Blommaert who is retiring after 35 years with the company. Ammann was president of GM from 2014 to 2018, and before that, he served as CFO from 2011 to 2014. The executive was front and center of GM’s initial investment and acquisition of Cruise, of which the automaker . When he took over as CEO, Cruise had grown from a small startup with 40 employees to more than 1,000. He pushed the company to expand, setting ambitious goals, like his most recent plans for . Other targets in the past have come up short, like the plan to launch a commercial robotaxi business in 2019. Now, Ammann has other enthusiastic goals for ExxonMobil. “We’ll be significantly moving the needle toward net zero in the most hard-to-decarbonize industries, in an economically viable way, and with urgency,” Ammann wrote in a on Tuesday. “To do this we’ll draw on the deep resources and know-how that exist inside of ExxonMobil today, together with the best external ideas and an initial $15 billion capital commitment that the company has made to build this business and reduce emissions.” |
It’s time to hold investors accountable and abolish pro-rata | Vijay Chattha | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | a lot since I was pounding the pavement on Sand Hill Road as a young entrepreneur in the late ’90s. Capital was hard to come by, and founders had to practically beg VCs to back their company. Our options for funding were limited to a handful of blue-chip firms and networks of successful angels. Two decades later, there is more money flowing from more sources than ever, and equity capital has become a commodity. In today’s market, it’s not uncommon to hear the sentiment that VCs have to work to sell their money. We’re now in the era of “value-add venture capital,” where investors need to show founders that they will do more for them than merely cut a check. It’s a change of power, and the sales pitch these VCs give to founders is that they’ll be true partners who will be with them every step of the way. But all too often, founders discover the hard way that these value-add services have a short expiration date. When we polled founders across our portfolio, we found that even the best-intentioned investors rarely provide much value-add beyond 90 days from when they signed the term sheet. At that point, the investor’s engagement is limited to their attendance at the quarterly board meeting — and that’s the lead investor. Many of the other participants provide no additional value beyond their check besides the occasional introduction. Based on what our founders told us, a solid 20% of cap table contributors don’t even help their founders make strategic connections. They throw their money in the pot and disappear. In a world where investor money flows freely, the VCs that don’t provide value-add are dead weight. Yet, they invariably invoke their contractually negotiated pro-rata rights when it comes time to raise a new round. Their mere presence on the cap table disincentivizes other VCs from working harder for their founders. After all, why should they do more for their founders than their peers if they both are guaranteed to keep a spot at the table? “This is the way it’s always worked” isn’t a good excuse. It’s time for founders to hold their investors to a higher standard and insist that they provide continuing support as they scale their company. It’s time to abolish traditional pro-rata rights. In a term sheet, the pro-rata clause guarantees an investor the right to maintain (or increase) their equity stake in the company by investing in future rounds. There are no strings attached, no KPIs that the investor must hit for their founders. Pro-rata rights are simply part of the deal. In truth, pro-rata is an immense privilege that VCs take for granted. Now that capital is a commodity, founders can and should demand that the right to invest in future rounds is contingent on demonstrating value-add. Think of it as “performance-rata,” a new type of pro-rata granted only to investors that brought more to the partnership than capital. |
Alphabet just spun out out its quantum tech group, launching it as an independent company | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | Quantum tech may be having its moment at long last. Consider that earlier this month, one of the few “pure play” quantum tech companies in the world, Rigetti Computing, by merging with a special purpose acquisition company or SPAC. It only narrowly missed becoming the first publicly traded company to expressly focus on commercializing quantum tech when another outfit, IonQ, went public through a SPAC merger . Meanwhile, another rival in the space, D-Wave, says it is also now planning to go public . While movement toward the public markets is one indicator that quantum tech is progressing beyond the realm of the theoretical, an even stronger signal that it’s getting ready for its close-up ties to Alphabet, which said this morning that it’s spinning out its six-year-old quantum tech group, , into a standalone company. Jack Hidary, who was formerly the director of AI and quantum at Sandbox and is a longtime X Prize board member, will continue to lead the 55-person, Mountain View, California, outfit, which describes itself as an enterprise SaaS company that’s developing commercial products for telecom, financial services, healthcare, government, computer security and other sectors. Sandbox has also assembled an enviable cast of advisers, including former Alphabet Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt; Blythe Masters, the former JPMorgan Chase exec who helped create credit default swaps; and John Seely Brown, the former chief scientist of Xerox PARC. Notably, too, Sandbox is rolling out with an undisclosed amount of “nine-figure” funding. Among its new outside investors is Breyer Capital, whose founder, Jim Breyer, has also joined Sandbox’s board of advisers. Section 32, Guggenheim Investments, TIME Investments and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates are also in the investor mix. Seemingly, burgeoning market demand partly explains Alphabet’s decision to spin out Sandbox. According to Gartner, by next year, 20% of global organizations are expected to budget for quantum-computing projects, up from less than 1% in 2018. Among the customers already paying Sandbox for its computing power are Vodafone Business, SoftBank Mobile and the Mount Sinai Health System. But judging by a recent chat with Breyer, perhaps an even bigger driver of growing interest in quantum tech is the realization is that, while true, fault-tolerant quantum computing — meaning the ability to harness quantum physics to zip through numerous possibilities and determine a probable outcome — could be five or more years away, other related tech, like so-called — is fast becoming a reality. Indeed, rather than work on quantum computers, Sandbox is instead focused on how quantum tech intersects with AI, developing applications to strengthen cybersecurity platforms, among other things. In the company’s , “[T] The statements echo comments made by Breyer when we spoke a , when he told us that there are “tremendous national security opportunities for the quantum companies … But what I’m really excited about today from an investment standpoint is not necessarily the big super capital intensive quantum computers … but areas like quantum sensing.” Think of a very high-powered 1,000x light microscope that can be applied to medicine, Breyer had offered by way of explanation. “There are quantum sensing technologies today that are being piloted at some of our great hospitals in the United States that I think will revolutionize areas such as cardiology [and] drug discovery.” Indeed, suggested Breyer, while quantum computing platforms will eventually play a role in helping catch diseases faster, improve security systems and to protect all kinds of data — they might also be used to attack some of those systems, which is partly why larger organizations, including governments and corporations, are no longer waiting for those massive quantum computers to arrive — or shouldn’t be, in any case. “We need to get our arms around it,” he’d said. “There are quantum technologies now where — they’re not at the breakout point of where quantum computing will be in four or five years — but are making a very big difference,” he said. The team at Sandbox, he suggested at the time, is among those leading the charge. |
Web3 digital identity startup Unstoppable Domains said to seek funding at $1 billion valuation | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | Unstoppable Domains, a popular blockchain naming system provider, is putting together a funding round at a valuation of $1 billion, three people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The startup is in talks with a number of new and existing investors including Draper Associates, Coinbase Ventures, Protocol Labs and Naval Ravikant to raise about $60 million in a new financing round, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are ongoing and private. The round hasn’t closed yet, so the terms may change, they cautioned. The startup had no comment on Tuesday. allows people to create their username for crypto and build decentralized digital identities. The startup, which sells domains with certain TLDs for as low as $5, has helped people register over 2.1 million domains to date, it says on its website. Some of the popular TLDs it offers include .crypto, .coin, .bitcoin, .x, .888, .nft and .dao. Unstoppable Domains, which includes members who worked at companies such as Amazon’s AWS, Uber and Slack, mints each decentralized domain name as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain to give the owner broader control and ownership. Having a domain name allows users to not bother with sharing their meaninglessly long wallet addresses with friends and businesses. It also has integrations with over 140 applications including OpenSea, Coinbase wallet, Rainbow wallet, Chainlink, Brave browser and ETHMail. Over 90 DApps support the startup’s Login with Unstoppable product, a single sign-on service for Ethereum and Polygon, addressing one of the painful experiences plaguing the crypto community. In a pitch deck to investors, the startup said it is attempting to build the “Coinbase of the decentralized web.” Thanks to its wide offerings today, it competes with ENS, Solana Bonfida, Tezos and Handshake. The startup has amassed over 240,000 customers and posted a revenue of $53 million last year, two sources said. It’s also profitable, they added. It plans to partner with corporates this year to launch their TLDs, the startup says in the pitch deck, obtained by TechCrunch. |
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You can now make GIFs in Twitter’s iOS app | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | If you ever wanted to make a GIF from your iOS camera while using the Twitter app, today’s your lucky day. Twitter that now, we can do just that. When you compose a new tweet on iOS, click the camera button. Then, you have the option to choose between a photo, a video and an animated GIF. Your GIF recording can’t be very long — only a few seconds — but hey, it’ll probably come in handy once or twice? Ok GIFs aren’t new but what *is new* is the option to capture your own using the in-app camera on iOS. — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) After you record your short GIF, you have the option to either play it front to back on loop, or you can make it play like an Instagram boomerang, playing forward, then reverse on loop. The world is your oyster, unless if you want to make a GIF that lasts longer than like two seconds. Once you make the GIF, it saves automatically to your camera roll as a GIF in your images folder — it’s not a video. Because it’s a GIF. Twitter releases so many new features these days that it’s hard to keep track. Some recent updates you may have missed include posting , a potential upcoming spin on Instagram’s and some snafus. Twitter hasn’t indicated when this GIF feature might roll out for Android, but Twitter usually new updates to Android users eventually. Soon, hopefully you too can post a GIF of your snake plant. This is a test — amanda silberling (@asilbwrites) |
Bored Apes NFT startup Yuga Labs raises seed round at monster $4B valuation | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | , maker of the multimillion dollar monkey JPEGs that plenty of NFT skeptics love to hate, just raised a $450 million round from Andreessen Horowitz at a $4 billion valuation, the company announced Tuesday. The Miami-based NFT firm behind Bored Apes Yacht Club has not previously raised funding, though the startup has long been courting attention from VCs eager to back a major player in the NFT craze. Other investors in the round include Animoca Brands, LionTree, Sound Ventures, Thrive Capital, FTX and MoonPay. Yuga Labs is increasingly doubling down on its position. The startup is soon looking to build this momentum into its own version of the metaverse called “ ,” which will also integrate avatars from a number of other NFT projects. |
US regulators say someone really needs to monitor Elon Musk’s tweets | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | U.S. securities regulators on Tuesday said they have authority to subpoena Tesla CEO Elon Musk about his tweets and urged a federal judge not to let the executive get away with tweeting with abandon. Musk has called the actions of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which in 2018 required Musk to get pre-approval for certain Tesla-related public communications, i.e. wild tweets that could affect stock price and shareholder value, “harassment” and “ .” Musk had agreed to settle with the SEC back then, but last year came under fire again when he asked his followers on Twitter if he should sell 10% of his stake in Tesla, resulting in Tesla’s shares decreasing sharply. Musk has since sold around $16 billion worth of stock. Shortly thereafter, in November, to determine if Musk was complying with the previous settlement. In response to the SEC’s probes, Musk has tried to terminate or modify the 2018 consent decree, as well as quash a subpoena requesting records concerning the November Twitter poll. “In 2018, to settle the SEC’s action against him, Musk agreed to comply with Tesla’s mandatory procedures requiring pre-approval of certain of his Tesla-related public communications,” wrote SEC regulator Melissa Armstrong in a filing in the federal court of Manhattan. “Musk cannot now cast off the Amended Final Judgment simply because he has found complying with Tesla’s procedures to be less convenient than he had hoped, or because he wishes the SEC would not investigate whether Tesla’s disclosure controls and procedures are actually being maintained and followed.” The dispute with the SEC stems from an August 2018 tweet from Musk that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private, but in reality the buyout was not close and “subject to numerous contingencies,” . U.S. regulators said that Tesla’s claims constituted fraud because they were “false and misleading” – Musk hadn’t discussed deal terms or price with any potential financing partners, and his tweets caused Tesla’s stock price to jump by over 6%, leading to significant market disruption, said the regulators. In the settlement, Tesla and Musk each paid a $20 million civil fine, and Musk stepped down as Tesla’s chairperson. Musk has since accused the SEC of punishing him for criticizing the government and exercising his constitutional right to free speech under the First Amendment, complaining about the “sheer number of demands” by the SEC from 2018 to present. “But Musk’s own chronology of alleged demands is both underwhelming and reflects legitimate inquiries as to new potentially violative conduct by Tesla and Musk – including the conduct that gave rise to the SEC’s 2018 enforcement actions,” wrote Armstrong in the court filing. Doubling down, the regulator said that modifying the 2018 final judgement wouldn’t free Musk from scrutiny over his Tesla-related tweets because as an officer of the company, “Musk would still be subject to Tesla’s disclosure controls and procedures.” “So long as Musk and Tesla use Musk’s Twitter account to disclose information to investors, the SEC may legitimately investigate matters relating to Tesla’s disclosure controls and procedures, including Musk’s tweets about Tesla, as well as the accuracy of Tesla’s public statements about its controls and procedures,” said Armstrong. |
Kickstarter’s CEO stepping down in April | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | In a today titled “Moving Forward, With Gratitude,” Kickstarter CEO Aziz Hasan announced that he is stepping down from his leadership role at the crowdfunding platform. After three years, April 4 will be his final day as chief executive. In his stead, the company’s COO Sean Leow will fill the role as interim CEO as the company’s board of directors searches for a more permanent replacement. “I am so proud of the work we’ve done together,” Hasan writes. “Leading such a passionate, skilled, and dedicated team through intense moments of change, milestone victories, and complex challenges has been a humbling and rewarding experience.” The executive about the decision, citing “personal reflection” as a motivator, as well as a desire to spend more time with his young family. As Hasan notes, his tenure has seen strong growth for the service, though the last several years have also had their share of controversy. In 2020, , a move Hasan had referred to as “inherently adversarial” in a letter to staff, adding, That dynamic doesn’t reflect who we are as a company, how we interact, how we make decisions, or where we need to go. We believe that in many ways it would set us back, and that the us vs. them binary already has. More recently, it courted backlash among creators with plans to move its services to the blockchain. Amid fierce criticism, Kickstarter to “better address [ … ] concerns.” Leow highlighted Hasan’s accomplishments in a statement, Aziz poured so much of his creative spirit and expertise into Kickstarter over the past 3 years as CEO. We deeply appreciate his contributions and look forward to building on them as we aim to grow the number of creative projects that come to life. As a die-hard believer in the power of creative projects, I am committed to keep Kickstarter moving in the right direction as we search for our next leader. Co-founder and former CEO Perry Chen echoed the sentiment, noting, Aziz Hasan took over leadership of Kickstarter at a critical moment for the company, providing a thoughtful and steady hand throughout his tenure, including historic funding milestones for creative projects and navigating the many challenges of a global pandemic. While we search for the future CEO of Kickstarter, we are very fortunate to have Sean Leow leading the company. Sean has consistently led many of the company’s most important initiatives throughout his long tenure at Kickstarter and brings a deep expertise and passion for helping creative projects come to life. Before joining Kickstarter, Leow was employed by Facebook and co-founded social media art site, Neocha. |
Eko expands algorithmic heart problem detection and lands $30M Series C extension | Emma Betuel | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | The stethoscope has come a long way from its humble beginnings in the 19th century. The regular acoustic type is still used every day, but it’s been joined by a panoply of digital options that can amplify or convert heart sounds into electrical signals. Eko, a company founded in 2013, has focused on bringing applied AI into the stethoscope space. Now there’s real-world data to suggest that the company has made progress, and it has secured a $30 million extension to its earlier C round to continue its work. Eko’s hardware consists of digital stethoscopes that boast a few basic bells and whistles, like noise-canceling technology or the ability to record and visualize heartbeats. But the company has also been tweaking some FDA-approved clinical support algorithms. In 2020, clearance to a suite of Eko algorithms that help detect heart murmurs and atrial fibrillation, or AFib. (A company earns this when it demonstrates that its tech is similar to what is already out there). The Journal of the American Heart Association Eko has been working toward developing machine learning-based analysis capability. But so far, the company has focused on devices and clinical tools. This software launch will be the company’s first true foray into more complex AI applications. What does the new software mean for doctors? It’s not exactly a “machine learning brain” yet. Basically, a doctor could listen to heart sounds and conduct ECG like before, while the new software captures that data in the background. Then it provides an analysis, or interpretation, of that ECG rhythm that could help alert a doctor to the presence of AFib or heart murmur. “The physician gets basically an analysis report or a summary view of the patient’s heart sounds, lung sounds and ECG data immediately, there in the exam room with the patient,” he said. The Eko CORE stethoscope. Eko On the surface, this might remind you of something like an Apple Watch — another device that has an FDA-cleared . Eko sits solidly on the practitioner side of things, rather than the consumer side. Instead, think of this new software as a clinical decision support system (CDS). These systems, which are popping up everywhere, from to , don’t actually make diagnoses, but are designed to help doctors interpret medical data. Such systems aren’t new, but they are becoming more widespread, and many U.S. hospitals use them regularly. However, there are signs that CDS systems have been ambulatory clinics or smaller non-hospital-affiliated healthcare systems. Eko, says Landgraf, endeavors to reach those smaller clinics with its devices and algorithms. “The goal is to be able to extend the capability of a specialist. To put that [cardiology expertise] in the hands of a rural primary care physician or an urgent care physician or a minute clinic nurse practitioner,” he said. Still, detecting AFib and heart murmur isn’t the company’s ultimate goal. As COO Jason Bellet told TechCrunch after the closing of Eko’s series A round , the company was really going after “screening for structural heart diseases and heart failure.” Heart failure affects about 7 million people in the U.S., and is expected to reach . It represents % of U.S. healthcare budget spending, per an estimate reported in BMC Medicine. EKO’s collaboration with 3M Littmann: a digital and acoustic stethoscope. Eko The company has made progress on that front, but has not yet received FDA clearance to use the algorithm clinically. In January, run by the U.K.’s national health system suggested that another algorithm developed in conjunction with Mayo Clinic could flag signs of a weakened heart. In a study of 1,050 patients, the Eko device was capable of detecting when a left ventricle ejection fraction (LVEF) was operating at 40% — the threshold at which heart failure could be occurring — after 15 seconds of listening. Currently about 80% of heart failure cases in the U.K. are diagnosed in hospitals, but 40% of those patients show signs of the disease that be picked up earlier, notes. To add to that, confirming a heart failure diagnosis isn’t always straightforward. It usually involves some of blood tests, exercise stress tests, biopsies, ECGs, echocardiograms or chest scans. , gold standard, non-invasive diagnostic test for heart failure. The goal is to use this program to turn a regular checkup into a way to screen for heart failure, said Landgraf. He imagines something like a mammogram or a colonoscopy for heart failure delivered with non-invasive tech at a primary care office. “[Heart failure] is a massive cost driver, and yet we don’t do a good job of detecting this disease early,” he said. “We detect it, you know, years after it’s been in that patient. We lose that opportunity to treat that patient earlier. And that’s something we really, really want to change with this technology.” Eko has also closed a 30 million extension to their previous . This brings the company’s total funding to $125 million. That extension will allow the company to support further commercialization efforts and develop new products, said Landgraf. |
Following a16z departure, Katie Haun debuts Haun Ventures with $1.5B in capital to back crypto startups | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | Katie Haun, who co-led Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm before announcing her departure this past December, is ready to take the wraps off her new organization, which she’s calling . The venture capital firm is devoted to backing crypto startups and is launching with $1.5 billion in capital across two funds — a $500 million early-stage fund and a $1 billion “acceleration” fund. The firm’s launch is one of the more hyped debut funds in recent memory. Haun was one of Andreessen Horowitz’s most high-profile defectors in years, having served as the public face for its crypto efforts at a time when the firm’s founders were increasingly stepping back from the public light. “We believe the next generation of the internet deserves a new generation of investors,” Haun wrote in a blog post announcing the fund. The success of Haun Ventures may depend heavily on timing. The crypto bull run is already a couple years deep and many of the more active elements of the market appear to be deep into correction territory at the moment. Cryptocurrency prices are down, as are NFT sales and total value locked in DeFi protocols. Meanwhile, plenty of unicorn crypto startups have already filled their war chests to weather any market downturns. Those macro factors have not seemed to halt the pace of crypto deals getting done, however, and Haun Ventures has already participated in a handful of them including Aptos, Autograph and OpenSea’s Series C. The $1.5 billion in capital puts Haun Ventures in the company of other crypto native funds like Paradigm and Electric Capital, which have debuted large funds in recent months. All of that new money is spread across just a handful of employees. The Haun Ventures team has just nine team members but has “plans to expand quickly.” Several of the team members are coming straight from a16z including marketing chief Rachael Horwitz, global policy head Tomicah Tillemann and comms lead Nicholas Pacilio. Sam Rosenblum is joining from Polychain Capital and Chris Lehane is coming aboard as chief strategy officer after a lengthy stint as Airbnb’s policy chief. It certainly appears that Haun Ventures will aim to lean into regulatory expertise as one of the firm’s defining advantages, which isn’t entirely surprising given Haun’s background as a federal prosecutor with the DOJ. This framing will, however, directly put it up against Andreessen Horowitz, which has gone to great lengths to build up its own crypto policy arm. For now, the firms are clearly aiming to play nice, having already co-invested in a number of deals while a16z is a large investor in Haun Ventures as are a handful of the firm’s top partners. |
Builders and VCs explore the impact of air mobility on urban planning at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | Simi is Joby Aviation’s head of air operations and people. Prior to joining the team at Joby, she served at JetBlue where she not only founded and led JetBlue Technology Ventures, but also held several operational and strategic roles within the company including airports, customer support, flight operations and system operations. As a pilot, Simi has commanded Boeing, Airbus and Embraer aircraft at both United Airlines and JetBlue Airways. She is an Emmy-nominated sports reporter and a three-time Olympian in the sport of Luge.
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Twitter leads call for EU lawmakers to ‘think beyond Big Tech’ | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | In a formalization of an Twitter-led push to try to exert influence over fast-forming European digital regulations, the social media firm has used its Twitter Spaces platform to host the official kick-off of a policy advocacy lobby group that’s being branded the (OIA). Alongside Twitter, video streaming platform Vimeo; Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Tumblr; the Czech and Slovak-focused search engine company, Seznam; and Jodel, a Berlin-based (profile-less) social network, are named as founding members. Twitter said the establishment of this formal lobbying alliance has been some two years in the making. Notably Mozilla — which had joined Twitter, Auttomatic and Vimeo in for incoming EU digital regulations to support better user controls to tackle bad speech rather than home in on content censorship — is not being named as a founding member, so appears to be sitting this one out. At the time of writing it’s unclear why Mozilla is missing (we’ve asked). But the Alliance is putting out a wider call for other “middle-layer” internet companies to join the initiative — so the grouping may grow in size. Albeit — very clearly — Big Tech need not apply. Speaking during a Twitter Spaces event today to discuss the formation of the alliance, Sinéad McSweeney, Twitter’s global policy VP, said the group is making a plea to lawmakers to think about the wider web ecosystem — rather than see the internet as “a monolith” comprised of just a handful of tech giants. “Our plea in aid of the open internet is that [lawmakers] not view the internet as a monolith, nor indeed view it as fixing the internet solving all of societies problems,” she said, urging policymakers to: “Take a wider focus when they’re looking at solutions — not look at the internet just through the lens of a handful of companies. And really think about the entire ecosystem — and get away from this sense ‘oh Big Tech is the problem’.” “Because — in actual fact, in their efforts to tackle so called ‘Big Tech’ — that is all we may end up with,” she warned. In remarks ahead of the Spaces event, a Twitter spokesperson also told TechCrunch the aim of the initiative is to kick off an “open conversation” and press for regulation that fosters “diversity and innovation on the internet”, as the company put it. Per Twitter, OIA members support “an Open Internet where digital rights are preserved, where the internet is not dominated by a handful of companies and internet users and consumers can have real and meaningful choice and their privacy protected”. “At a time where the global internet is at a crossroads, potentially ill-considered regulations risk us heading for a future where the biggest internet companies become the only companies able to operate stifling innovation, and risking freedom of expression as a pillar of democracy becoming more and more compromised,” Twitter also said ahead of today’s event. The alliance’s Eurocentric focus is clear, given two of the five founding members are (smaller) European tech firms. This isn’t surprising, given how advanced the EU is on digital policy making — with a whole swathe of ambitious policy proposals being presented in recent years, which are set to impact scores of digital businesses. Some major EU digital proposals have already been adopted (e.g. the ), others — like the Digital Services Act (DSA), and gatekeeper-focused Digital Markets Act (DMA) — are speeding towards adoption. Still more are wending through the EU’s co-legislative process, while other incoming puzzle-pieces of the bloc’s expansive digital policy agenda are in the process of being drafted. All these incoming EU regulations will have broad application once they are transposed into nation law, applying across the bloc’s 27 Member States (which has some 440 million+ citizens). So European digital policymaking is both cutting edge and big enough in scope to make any global tech business sit up and take notice. (And when the goal is, first and foremost, to lobby EU lawmakers, having local membership in your alliance will surely help Big Tech’s lobbying of the flotilla of EU digital regulations being shaped in Brussels, meanwhile, has been hard to miss in recent years as the sums of euros involved are so eye-watering — and, seemingly, keep inflating. Lobbying transparency group, Corporate Europe Observatory (COE), points out that the top five Big Tech lobbyists all updated their entries in the EU’s lobby register last week to disclose beefed up spending. (Apple, for example, went from spending €3.5 million to a whopping €6.5 million+.) a report by COE and another local lobbying transparency group, LobbyControl, found that just 10 tech giants dominate EU lobbying — namely: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Huawei, Amazon, IBM, Intel, Qualcomm and Vodafone — which it said were collectively spending more than €32 million a year (at that point) to try to influence EU tech policy (a third of the €97 million annual spend by hundreds of companies, groups and business associations the NGOs were able to track). But those figures are already out of date as Big Tech lobby budgets keep swelling. In any case, the bald sums transparency organizations have been able to attribute to tech giants is likely the tip of the iceberg where Big Tech’s public policy spending is concerned — especially U.S. giants Facebook, Google, Microsoft and (to a lesser extent) Apple — as these companies also plough support into a network of third-party industry associations, which they help fund or otherwise influence, who can then act as indirect mouthpieces for their talking points. This networked structure enables the largest tech firms to launder regional lobbying that’s directly aligned with their corporate interests under the guise of grassroots industry concern (see, for example, p. 38 of on the digital industry’s funding of a sprawling network of think tanks and NGOs). How, then, can the SME layer of the internet — which includes plenty of platforms offering directly competing services to Big Tech — hope to get their voices heard by lawmakers? Twitter et al’s answer is by banding together to push a narrative around the notion of Internet openness, it seems. (Somewhat unfortunately, we’ve seen a similar “open internet” claim being deployed as a lobbying device elsewhere recently, — in that case to push against privacy-minded reform of ad tracking technologies; but there’s no suggestion of any formal link between the two separate lobby groupings.) In simple spending terms, the OIA is of course hopelessly outgunned by Big Tech’s EU lobbying blitz — as the entries for , , and in the EU’s lobbying register illustrate. These disclosures indicate that Twitter leads the grouping with a spend of between €300,000-€399,999 in 2021; followed by Seznam (€100,000-€199,900). While Vimeo (€10,000-€24,999 spent between 2020 and 2021) and Automattic (€10,000 in 2021) are mobilizing considerably less. (Jodel is not a registered EU lobbyist). “The combined lobbying of these companies is at at least €420,000 per year,” confirms COE researcher, Margarida Silva, when asked about the discrepancy in lobbying fire power between the OIA’s four EU lobby registered founding members and big tech. “This pales in comparison with Big Tech firms which together spend more than €27 million a year lobbying. This is line with the overall massive gap between the lobbying budgets of the top companies with the vast majority of other players.” As it stands, the resources the OIA can marshal to try to influence EU digital policy are a far cry from the multi-millions being annually pumped into Brussels by Big Tech — at least, unless they manage to recruit more long-tail internet companies to their cause. So grouping together under an “open internet” banner — which may also be able to attract wider support from progressive NGOs and civil society organizations — looks savvy. What exactly is the alliance lobbying for then? The OIA has condensed its objectives into — some of which look ambitious, to say the least, given how much digital policymaking is now going on around the world, as multiple countries seek to put their own stamp on ‘acceptable’ online activity. (See, for example, the U.K.’s which looks set to rip up the EU principle of no general monitoring obligation for platforms; or growing Russian censorship mandates which are being extended to blocking entire foreign web services that don’t toe the Kremlin’s line; or Australia’s and to , to name a few recent policy developments which risk further and even fatally splintering the notion of a single “global internet”). Regardless, among the eight OIA “principles” is a push for “Regional & global regulatory alignment”, aka advocacy for a single set of rules for the global internet (or, at least, less regional variation); as well as what’s being billed as “non-binary content regulation”, which suggests the group favors rules that focus on tackling problem content with less absolutist measures (i.e. reduced discovery and/or reach/amplification versus hard takedown/leave-up mandates that they argue “only benefits the largest companies”); along with a push for intermediary liability protections for platforms, net neutrality, decentralization (i.e. through use of open APIs and protocols) and interoperability, among other goals. Interoperability is likely to be a key component of the EU’s ex ante competition reform (the DMA) — but the extent to which the incoming regulation will force the most powerful tech platforms to make their services play nice with rivals is still being debated. An EU diplomat with knowledge of trilogue discussions on this file told TechCrunch that discussions are ongoing over whether or not interoperability provisions should apply to messaging platforms — and, if so, whether group messages should be excluded from a requirement to interoperate (which would leave only one-to-one messaging cross-platform interoperability on the table). The latter outcome would limit how far the EU’s flagship ex ante competition regulation could reverse messaging platforms’ network effects and dominance of the social messaging sphere — so the stakes remain extremely high for smaller and mid tier messaging firms which stand to benefit (by gaining users) if they are able to plug their competing services into major messaging networks. On the flip side, if EU lawmakers lose their nerve over the extent of the DMA’s interoperability obligations, tech giants like Meta stand to gain a major victory by closing down the possibility of smaller, nippier, friendly rivals and startups having a legally certain route (mandatory interoperability) through which they might have a fighting chance of challenging Meta’s grip on consumers’ attention through their service innovation. As regards the DSA — which is set to apply more broadly to digital services (i.e. not only operationally to the most powerful internet gatekeepers) — Twitter told us that the OIA’s focus will be Twitter said the group is especially concerned about the risk of incoming EU rules like the DSA increasing fragmentation. On this front it suggested the DSA’s focus on illegal content could further empower Member States to create their own rule variations, rather than harmonizing approaches across the bloc — arguing that could result in geoblocking within the EU, if platforms are required to comply with a patchwork of national laws. (Indeed, as has already been the case after The alliance argues that such fragmentation is easier for the largest companies to comply with — meaning regulations that don’t limit regional variation could end up helping the tech giants and penalizing the longer tail of digital businesses which have nowhere near as much resource to throw at compliance and lawyers as the giants. During today’s Spaces event, Twitter’s McSweeney spoke to this concern, saying: “Our concern within the alliance is the voices of mid and smaller sized companies are just not being heard in talks on these pieces of legislation. And that if we don’t speak up there is a risk that while the DMA seeks to open the gates to competition that the DSA will actually slam them shut by mandating content moderation rules that will fracture the digital single market into 27 different markets with 27 different sets of rules. And the inevitable consequence of that kind of fragmentation is only the very largest tech companies will be able to comply.” “Our industry is more than the largest companies and our laws need to reflect that reality. And sometimes it’s important to highlight how large the gap is between the top companies and the rest of the internet,” she added, reiterating that the Alliance is: “A plea to policymakers, particularly in the EU, that they would create a regulatory environment that promotes fair competition, consumer choice — but fundamentally one that acknowledges the internet is more than just four companies.” Per McSweeney, the industry group is the culmination of two years of “talking and letter writing”, as lesser sized internet companies have watched regulatory proposals brewing. She said the goal now is “to forge dialogue with policymakers and define the future of the open internet in the EU”. “It’s timely because as we know the EU is now looking to finalize two significant laws — the DSA and the DMA — that will set rules in Europe itself for at least a generation. While also setting a McSweeney also said that Twitter shares policymakers’ concerns about online disinformation and illegal and/or harmful content — which the DSA is intended to address by setting out governance rules for how platforms handle such content — but she urged lawmakers to work towards “solutions and regulations which are forward thinking and which are broader in their application”. “As an Alliance our aim is to foster an Internet as it was intended to be: Open, diverse, fair innovative and I think we would welcome harmonized and proportionate regulation — that would give us clear parameters in which to operate,” she added. Representatives from the other founding member companies of the OIA also spoke during the Twitter Spaces event. “The budgets are obviously incomparable to what large giants can spend on public affairs and PR through tens of different Brussels-based associations and lobby groups. So I see this as an opportunity for those smaller, like-minded internet companies to voice their views and concerns on what’s going on around Brussels while shaping the legislation in Europe,” said “There’s lot of important legislation growing right now in Brussels,” he added. “And this is going to shape the face of Europe for the next several years — I think it is important to show off what we believe… It’s not just a bunch of those usual suspects. But it is a large ecosystem of companies that actually helps keep internet open and full of choices. And these companies simply should be heard.” The Alliance’s smallest founding member, Berlin-based Jodel, chipped in to speak up in favor of “good” regulation — while also emphasizing the disproportionately greater burden that less well crafted regulations can impose on smaller tech firms. “I think regulation is good, regulation is needed but it also obviously needs to be good regulation and in order to preserve innovation, to preserve the innovation we’ve been experiencing over the last 20 years with the internet. We want to keep that so let’s make sure that the regulation goes in the right direction,” said Tim Schmitz, COO and co-founder of Jodel. “The more complex the regulation, the more local regulation — sometimes within a country it’s different from state to state — it creates a lot of… unnecessary friction. The time would better be invested into making sure you have a safe environment on the platform,” he added. “Lawyers are expensive and we are a small company and we would rather invest that money into building a better product.” Setting aside the (gentle) irony of a call for a more open internet being hosted on Twitter’s (proprietary) Spaces platform — which doesn’t exactly make it easy to join without signing into (or up for) Twitter first (or at least knowing someone else who is and has and is willing to send you a link to one of these ephemeral, walled garden audio events) — the not-as-giant-as-some social media firm said it’s leading the lobbying initiative because it sees it as its mission to serve the “public conversation”; a mission Twitter further suggested must extend to fostering dialogue about the future of the internet. Mozilla’s senior public policy manager, Owen Bennett, has now sent this statement about its work with the Alliance: “Mozilla was involved in some early discussions and actions out of which the Open Internet Alliance has ultimately emerged. Being involved in early conversations and engaging with potential allies on building collaborative movements focused on issues that aim to make the web better, more open and accessible to all is typical of how we engage on policy issues. Sometimes, this may result in Mozilla joining the coalition; other times, we may find other helpful ways to contribute to bringing these issues forward. “We’re glad to see the members reach this milestone. We’re focusing our resources on other open internet projects at this time but we will continue to follow this initiative with interest.” |
TechCrunch+ roundup: Startup survival tips, content as a service, leading with transparency | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | of “Planet of the Apes” (1968), the human protagonist realizes that the alien world he crash-landed upon is actually post-apocalyptic Earth. For many first-time founders in fundraising mode, the current market correction for publicly-traded tech companies has been similarly jarring. Once investors started shaving value from high-flying stocks, , says Navin Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield. Looking back at the burst of the first internet bubble in the early 2000s and the 2008 financial meltdown, Chaddha notes that we can expect roiling public markets and “geopolitical challenges” to inform the size of seed and Series A rounds. “If you are at the inception stage, we are primarily evaluating your team to make sure the product is a pain-killer and not a vitamin.” Conditions change, and so do investor expectations, which means founders should reframe their thinking about acceptable entry valuations and revisit their spending plans. If I were starting up today, setting aside cash for hiring bonuses would be a much higher priority than buying Herman Miller Aeron chairs. As Chaddha notes, “it is easier to go up than down.” Thanks very much for reading TechCrunch+, and have a great week. Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch+
sorbetto / Getty Images Over the last six months, the share price of planning software company Anaplan dropped more than 22%, which explains why private equity firm Thoma Bravo just announced plans to acquire it for $10.7 billion. Ron Miller and Alex Wilhelm studied the transaction to see “if Thoma Bravo is paying a premium for this company,” but they also looked at the larger question — is this “the beginning of a trend of private equity taking aim at vulnerable SaaS firms?” / Getty Images Content as a service? In the last few years, Salesforce, Hubspot, Shopify and other enterprise companies have begun scaling their own media operations. Online audiences are accustomed to consuming well-produced videos, podcasts, infographics and other media. As a result, simple blog posts lost their luster years ago, found reporter Ron Miller. To see what startups can learn from SaaS’ new approach to content marketing, he interviewed several analysts and experts. “If I’m a CMO, I have to ask how I get access to these audiences,” said Robert Rose, founder and principal analyst at The Content Advisory. “I can either continue to rent it through the access that Facebook or Google gives me, which are increasingly walled gardens, or I can start to build it on my own or acquire it.” / Getty Images Founding a tech company isn’t like starting most small businesses: no one expects a plumber to show 3% month-over-month growth, for example. Tech entrepreneurs are under pressure to build a team, regularly ship new products, and quickly capture revenue so they can provide a return to their investors. So it’s not surprising that sometimes, they let ethics fall by the wayside. Entrepreneur and investor Marjorie Radlo-Zandi says the “fake it till you make it” mindset is a useful motivational tool, but it’s not a basis for a sustainable business strategy: The founder of a company I invested in secretly kept two sets of books: one with correct historical financials, and another with numbers inflated more than 10 times actuals. Sales and product performance had fallen short. His solution was to present the inflated financials to investors. Bloomberg / Getty Images After stockholders rejected Zendesk’s plan to acquire SurveyMonkey’s owner Momentive earlier this year, activist investor Jana Partners is now trying to shake up the company’s board, Ron Miller and Alex Wilhelm reported. “The tension between external and internal parties likely comes from precisely how much the company will be worth in the future, and whether or not there is a price that a larger company will pay that Jana and others like, and the company’s current leaders will accept,” wrote Ron and Alex. “The more optimistic the current Zendesk management is, the harder it will be to find that price.” E-commerce boomed after middle-class consumers turned to online shopping and grocery delivery during the pandemic. But two years on, that growth is slowing as the world recovers, which indicates that “future e-commerce activity was pulled forward, instead of the larger digital commerce pie growing thanks to long-term changes to the economy,” wrote Alex Wilhelm in The Exchange. Analyzing data from e-commerce giants like Shopify, Pinduoduo, Alibaba and Amazon, Alex shares his insight into the slowing state of e-commerce in 2022. |
New Twitch appeals portal lets users monitor and object to account bans | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | Twitch is updating its appeals and reporting processes, following through on product updates the company promised late last year. The biggest change is the introduction of a new portal where users facing account suspensions can appeal those rulings and monitor the progress of their requests. While Twitch deals with its fair share of , the company wants to provide more clarity and consistency for users who accidentally break the rules in the process of livestreaming. The new appeals hub allows users to view enforcement actions eligible for appeal starting today at . The portal will usually be limited to bans enforced within the last 60 days, but the company says that anyone facing an indefinite suspension that went into effect before that interval will also be able to request to have an eligible case reviewed there. The new appeals tool will also appear in the profile menu under the “safety” section, where it will remain available even for users who are currently suspended. Users appealing Twitch’s moderation decisions will still receive an update over email when an appeal is accepted or rejected. The company notes that those decisions will now be accompanied by more detail on its thinking, though that still won’t include how many “strikes” an account has because enforcement decisions consider context and severity — not just the quantity of violations. Twitch also said that it still plans to attach relevant video clips to its emailed enforcement notices, but that particular feature is still in the works. “Sometimes we get it wrong, which is why the appeals process is so important,” Twitch wrote in the announcement. “We’ve heard that our current system is slow, and that it doesn’t provide enough insight about how your current appeal is going or how past appeals have gone. Twitch Twitch is also making updates to its reporting system, inviting users to search for the reason they are flagging content and offering customized menus depending on if reported content appears in a livestream, VOD or a clip. The changes will appear first on the web version of Twitch, rolling out to mobile afterward, with a global rollout complete within the “next few months,” according to the company. While all major social platforms continue to grapple with the complexity of content moderation at scale, the fact that most content on Twitch is streamed live adds an additional layer of challenge. Twitch relies less heavily on automated content moderation systems than some of its peers, leaning instead on human review teams that prioritize speed due to the real-time nature of the vast majority of its content. Twitch VP of Global Trust and Safety Angela Hession in a blog post that reviewed the platform’s content moderation policies and safety tools. Twitch viewership and the company has been scaling up its content moderation efforts accordingly. Though it declined to provide specific numbers to TechCrunch, Twitch says it has “quadrupled” the number of moderators reviewing user reports over the last two years. The company notes that it responds to more than 80% of reports within 10 minutes. “As our community has grown and become more global over the past few years, we’ve continued to scale and streamline our operations accordingly, while still prioritizing keeping a human in the loop in all aspects of moderation,” Twitch VP of Global Safety Operations Rob Lewington said. Beyond its everyday enforcement decisions, the company attracts a lot of attention for enacting temporary suspensions against some of its most popular streamers. In December, political streamer HasanAbi was after using the word “cracker,” which Twitch apparently considers to be a legitimate anti-white slur. Other star streamers have been banned for everything from to . Meanwhile, Twitch to , the practice of flooding a streamer’s channel with harassment en masse. Those attacks often target marginalized Twitch streamers, further driving those voices off a platform where Black, LGBTQ and female streamers already . In November, Twitch that detects accounts trying to get around channel-level bans. Channel bans are one of the main ways that Twitch streamers and moderators can control who can interact within a community, but ban evaders render that otherwise powerful option ineffectual. Late last year, Twitch took the extraordinary step of for organizing thousands of bot accounts into hate raids, though the company did not have their real identities at the time. “This Complaint is by no means the only action we’ve taken to address targeted attacks, nor will it be the last,” Twitch wrote in the suit. |
Fresh off dramatic majority shareholder exit, Firefly could be headed for a SPAC | Mark Harris | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | Firefly Aerospace’s roller coaster ride could soon send the rocket startup to the public market via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, a recent suggests. Aerospace private equity firm AE Industrial Partners (AEI) announced last month that it had reached an agreement to acquire a “significant stake” in Firefly after its largest shareholder, Ukrainian Max Polyakov, was over national security concerns. A recent FCC filing provides new details of the deal, including that it involves a special purpose acquisition vehicle. The , which relates to a proposed launch of Firefly’s second Alpha rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this spring, adds that the acquisition involved “the majority of Firefly Aerospace’s equity” and was by “special purpose acquisition vehicles controlled by AE Industrial Partners.” The move would not be unprecedented for AEI. In 2020, the private equity firm that specializes in aerospace, defense and power generation bought Deep Space Systems and then combined it will a previously acquired company Adcole Space to form the space infrastructure company called Redwire. AEI took Redwire public last September via a SPAC merger. AEI declined to comment on the filing to TechCrunch. Firefly CEO Tom Markusic has publicly talked about taking the company public in the past. last November that there could be a public offering as early as 2022. Neither Firefly, Noosphere nor Polyakov immediately responded to requests for comment. Firefly has experienced many challenges since Markusic, a SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic alum, founded it in 2014. In its original incarnation, Firefly began to develop the Alpha rocket for use as an air-launched rocket with Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch system. But a trade secrets lawsuit from Virgin Galactic, mounting costs and the withdrawal of a major investor saw the company run out of money in 2016, before launching anything. A series of maneuvers followed, including a lightning asset sale and a brief Chapter 7 bankruptcy that are still the subject of litigation by the company’s early investors. The upshot was that, in 2017, Polyakov gained control of a new version of Firefly, including its intellectual property and many of its engineers, through his investment company Noosphere Venture Partners. The company then enjoyed substantial commercial success, including multiple satellite launch orders and a $93 million contract from NASA for a called Blue Ghost. Firefly raised $75 million in a Series A round in May 2021. At the same time, Noosphere sold about $100 million of its Firefly holdings to Series A participants, which reportedly reduced its overall stake to less than 50%. Noosphere’s remaining equity would be valued at around $500 million. In September, Alpha’s maiden launch failed to reach orbit when one of the rocket’s engines shut down two and a half minutes into flight. It was in the process of negotiating a launch license for its second attempt when that Polyakov had agreed to sell Noosphere’s stake in Firefly. His move was reportedly prompted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS, expressing concerns about the possibility of Firefly’s technology making its way to Ukraine, Russia or other nations. In February, Polyakov to accuse CFIUS, the U.S. Air Force and other U.S. agencies of betraying him, and saying that he was “giving up” his stake in Firefly to Markusic for $1. In fact, the transaction, announced late last month, was ultimately with AE Industrial Partners. And it was worth at least $101 million, as it triggered a regulatory review that kicks in at that amount. The recent FCC filing gives more detail on the transaction. As well as purchasing the entirety of Noosphere’s stake, AEI made a $75 million direct equity investment in Firefly Aerospace through a Series B preferred equity round. The combination, noted AEI, means that it “will own over 50% of Firefly Aerospace’s equity and voting interest percentage and will have the right to appoint a majority of Firefly Aerospace’s Board of Directors.” Space SPACs were market darlings in 2020 and 2021, with companies like Virgin Galactic and Rocket Lab seeing their stock soar. But of the dozen space startups that used SPACs to go public, only AST Space Mobile (working on a space-based cellular network) is trading above their typical launch price of $10, and only by pennies. AEI’s Redwire is currently trading below half its 52-week high. The timing of Firefly’s SPAC could depend on when it can prove its ability to reach orbit — and that is still very much up in the air. While Firefly’s application to transfer the communications authorization for its second Alpha flight was approved overnight by the FCC last week, the FAA has yet to issue the company with an actual launch license. |
Glass rethinks the smartphone camera through an old-school cinema lens | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | gotten quite good, but it’s getting harder and harder to improve them because we’ve pretty much reached the limit of what’s possible in the space of a cubic centimeter. Glass is a startup looking to fundamentally change how the camera works, using a much bigger sensor and an optical trick from the depths of filmmaking: anamorphic lenses. It may not be obvious that cameras won’t get better, since we’ve seen such advances in recent generations of phones. But we’ve used up all the slack left in this line, as it were. To improve the image, you need a bigger sensor, better lens or some kind of computational wizardry. Unfortunately, sensors can’t get much bigger because they’d need bigger lenses to match. And lenses can’t get bigger because there’s just no room for them in the phone body, even when you “fold” the camera. Meanwhile, computational photography is great, but there’s only so much it can do — stacking a few images to get better dynamic range or depth information is good, but you reach a point of diminishing returns pretty quickly. “The limitations used to be about price, but now it’s size,” explained Glass co-founder and CEO Ziv Attar, who has worked in mobile imaging for over a decade, including at Apple. The other co-founder, Tom Bishop, also worked at Apple, the two of them working on creating Portrait Mode and likely chafing at the limitations of traditional camera design. “Up to 5 years ago they just made the lens wider, then they started making the sensor bigger,” Attar said. “Then you throw algorithms at it to reduce noise, but even that is reaching its limits; pretty soon it will be pure hallucination [i.e. AI-generated imagery]. Night mode takes exposure stacking to extremes — it deals very nicely with the lack of photons, but if you zoom in it starts to look very weird and fake.” “The phone screen kind of deceives us,” he continued. “If you let a regular person compare an iPhone 12 and 13, they won’t see the difference — but compared to a pro camera, anyone can tell. And if you can see the difference, there’s a lot of work to do.” So what is that work, exactly? Attar has decided that of these various conundrums, the only one that makes sense to change is the lens. True, it can’t get any bigger — but only if you’re using a normal, symmetrical lens assembly. But why should we? They gave up on that constraint a century ago in cinema. A CG image showing examples of anamorphic (top) and traditional symmetric lenses and the resulting internal image size. Glass Films weren’t always widescreen. Originally they were more likely to be approximately the shape of a 35mm film frame, for obvious reasons. If you matted out the top and bottom, you could project a widescreen image, which people liked — but you were basically just zooming in on a part of the film, which you paid for in detail. But a technique first tested in the ’20s soon solved the problem. Anamorphic lenses squeeze a wide field of view from the sides so it fits in the film frame, and when projected using an anamorphic projector, the process was reversed — the image is stretched back out to the desired aspect ratio. There are a few interesting optical effects introduced but… if I describe them you’ll never be able to un-see them in content, so I’ll forbear. The lens system proposed by Glass isn’t quite the same, but it uses similar principles and unusually shaped lenses. It started from the fundamental idea of how to add a larger sensor. Simply making a larger square would necessitate a larger lens, which we can’t do — but what if you made the sensor as in a rectangle? Well, you’d need a longer, rectangular lens too. The anamorphic technique means you can capture and project a larger but distorted image, then convert it to the right aspect ratio in the image processor. (The process isn’t exactly analogous to the film technique but it uses the same principles.) How much larger an image are you able to capture? Well, an iPhone 13’s main camera has a sensor about 7×5 millimeters, so 35 square mm total. Glass’s prototype uses a sensor that’s about 24×8 mm: about 192 square mm, 5-6 times larger, with a commensurate increase to megapixels. Here’s a little chart for casual reference: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch Considering the fanfare that generally accompanies increasing a phone’s sensor size by 15 or 20 , that’s an enormous leap. But Attar explained that the way they measure it, it’s even more. If you were to expand the image to the correct aspect ratio, it would actually be twice as tall: 24x16mm, just shy of the APS-C standard in DSLRs but well above the Micro Four Thirds and 1″ sensors also common (and highly performant) in mirrorless cameras. That leads to the company’s claim of having 11 times the “imaging area” of an iPhone. The evaluation of these metrics is a non-trivial process I’m not equipped to do, but truthfully either one would be a game-changing upgrade for a phone. There are benefits and drawbacks to this process. The most important one is an immense increase in light gathering and resolving power. More light means better exposures in general and better shots in challenging conditions — no need for a fancy machine learning powered multi-exposure night mode if you can just… see things. And there is far, far more detail in images compared with those from ordinary smartphones. Images from an iPhone 12 Max (left) and Glass prototype. Glass Note that the limited example above is just that — it’s hard to do apples-to-apples comparisons when the focal lengths, image processing and output resolution are so different (not to mention my cropping and re-encoding), but at the very least you can see that a great deal of detail is added even in this non-optimal presentation. The full-size original images are available here: , . An example of a very low-light exposure — iPhone left, Glass right. Glass Because of the larger sensor and the nature of the glass, you also get natural bokeh, or background blur. Portrait mode is of course a favorite among smartphone users, but even the best methods of simulating bokeh are far from perfect. The same effect Apple painstakingly simulated lenses to achieve occurs naturally on the Glass prototype, just as it would on a larger digital camera. And there’s no chance of the kind of weird mistake you see in the AI-segmented images, which often clip out hair and other details, or fail to achieve the depth effect in subtler ways. Example image showing portrait mode on an iPhone (left) and the unprocessed Glass shot, which lacks the smoothing and artifacts of the manipulated one. Glass While there would be no optical zoom, Attar pointed out that zooming in by cropping (i.e. digital zoom) on a Glass system would let you zoom in more than most optical zooms out there, and you’d still have more light and pixels than the competition. I’m not normally one to let “digital zoom is fine” claims live, but in this case the sheer size of the lens and sensor more than make up for it. These benefits, though briefly stated, are more than considerable. The improvement to light and detail puts it way out in front of the best cameras out there. (And while the smallest details may escape your notice on a small screen, a bad exposure is noticeable at any size.) Drawbacks are mainly to do with the complexities of operating a camera that’s totally optically different from a traditional one. The mechanisms for autofocus are different (anamorphic focus is notoriously complex) and there are plenty of distortions and aberrations that need to be corrected for — symmetrical lenses at this size also have distortion and degradation, but of a different type. “[Distortions] are all constrained during design such that we know in advance that we can correct for them,” said Attar. “It’s an iterative process but we did kick start development of a custom dedicated software tool to co-optimize lens parameters and neural network variables.” In other words they didn’t design anything they couldn’t correct for. One effect I find disorientating but perhaps others will decide is trivial is the shape of the bokeh. Normally out of focus highlights blur out into little translucent discs, but in the Glass system they resolve into a gradient of ovals and chubby crescents. Glass To my neurotic eye that just isn’t right. It’s… unnatural. But I also can’t not notice vignetted bokeh due to french flags in film and TV (don’t look it it up — this too is everywhere and you can’t unsee it). And anyway films shot in anamorphic show similar bokeh distortion, so it’s actually quite common, just not in still images and smartphone shots. I assumed there would be drawbacks due to the need to stretch the image digitally — that sort of thing if done poorly can lead to moiré and other unwanted artifacts. But Attar said it’s remarkably straightforward to train a model to do it so that no one can tell the difference except pixel peepers: “We trained networks to apply 1-D super-resolution based on information from the other axes. After we apply our algorithm it looks like it came from a full APS-C sensor, in field of view and resolution.” That will all have to be verified by reviewers and camera experts when there’s a production version, but the theory seems sound and the early results are more than promising. Right now the company has moved on from standalone prototypes to a third-generation phone factor device that shows how the tech will fit into pretty much any chassis on the market. There’s nothing exotic about it other than the optical qualities, Attar said, so although it won’t be as cheap to manufacture as today’s off-the-shelf camera and image processing units, it can be made just as easily. As he noted, price is hardly an option any more, and if one company can make a huge leap in camera quality they can capture a large chunk of the market. “We have to convince a phone maker to basically ditch the old technology,” said Attar. “We’re seeing nice feedback. The only challenge is doing it in a reasonable time. I’m not saying there’s no risk. But a lot of us had good jobs at big companies — we didn’t leave our fancy salaries at Apple to work on some BS thing. We had a plan from the beginning.” Even if an agreement was struck now with a big mobile manufacturer, it would take a year and half or two years to get to market. “But we have to start somewhere,” he concluded. Glass has raised $2.2 million in seed funding, led by LDV Capital and a collection of angel investors. Of course that’s not meant to cover the cost of manufacturing, but now that the company is leaving the lab it will need operating cash to commercialize even should a major manufacturer make a commitment. Greg Gilley, formerly Apple’s VP of cameras and photos, and MIT Media lab’s Ramesh Raskar joined as advisors, rounding out a team investors are likely to have a lot of confidence in. If the Glass approach catches on, expect to hear about other companies claiming to have invented it in a little less than two years. |
Nvidia launched a mapping product for the autonomous vehicle industry | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | Nvidia has launched a new mapping platform that will provide the autonomous vehicle industry with ground truth mapping coverage of over 300,000 miles of roadway in North America, Europe and Asia by 2024, The platform, dubbed Drive Map, is geared toward enabling high levels of autonomous driving. Drive Map isn’t only open to existing Nvidia customers, but it does augment the company’s existing solutions for the AV industry. At the same event, , Nvidia’s sensor and compute self-driving toolkit which is used by the likes of Mercedes, Volvo, JiDu and, as of Tuesday, BYD and Lucid Motors, to provide a variety of smart driving and advanced driving assistance features. AV companies like TuSimple, WeRide, Zoox and DeepRoute.ai are also Hyperion customers. Drive Map represents the fruits of , a high-definition mapping startup. The tool provides centimeter-level accuracy by combining DeepMap’s accurate survey mapping with anonymous mapping data that’s been crowdsourced from all the vehicles that use Nvidia’s Hyperion architecture. The mapping tool features three localization layers — camera, lidar and radar — to provide the redundancy needed for autonomy. All of the data pulled from Nvidia customers is being constantly uploaded to the cloud as vehicles drive. It’s then aggregated and loaded onto Nvidia’s Omniverse, the company’s open platform built for virtual collaboration and real-time physically accurate simulation, and used to update the map so vehicles can achieve proper localization. In the process, Nvidia is able to more quickly scale its mapping footprint. In addition, Omniverse uses automated content generation tools to build a detailed map, which is then converted into a drivable simulation environment that can be used with , an end-to-end simulation platform for autonomous vehicles. |
Cloud providers’ default retention policies are not enough: You better back your SaaS up | Brian Spanswick | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | thing that recent earnings reports from Microsoft, Google and Amazon made clear, it’s that their cloud businesses are booming. While the shift to the cloud is well underway, many companies aren’t paying attention to a critical aspect of this growth: the dramatic increase in data generated by SaaS that is not adequately protected. This exposure can put companies at greater risk for ransomware attacks, breaches, compliance woes and much more. The growth of enterprise SaaS is rapid and inevitable. end-user spending on SaaS to rise over 18% to $171.9 billion in 2022 from $145.5 billion in 2021 — and it’s easy to see why. The SaaS model offers significant value to both service providers and customers, ranging from reduced costs to simplified management and maintenance. The benefits of SaaS are many: It eliminates the need to install and configure software; it gives the customer greater financial flexibility by moving from licensing fees to subscriptions; there is no need to purchase and maintain hardware; and new releases and upgrades are automatically deployed. But despite its rapid growth and countless benefits, there are significant challenges associated with managing and protecting SaaS data. That’s a problem that can only get worse, as for many organizations, SaaS is the fastest-growing segment of their data. Each cloud service provider (CSP) and SaaS provider has its own data retention policy, and once that policy expires, the customer is responsible for backing up, protecting, and, if needed, restoring the data in the event of a cyber attack. Not only is the customer responsible, but data retention policies can differ based on the provider and the type of SaaS data. In the current world of rampant ransomware attacks and stringent privacy and compliance regulations, leaving data unmanaged and unprotected is a risk few organizations can take. Let’s look at Microsoft 365 as an example. Microsoft 365 adoption has been phenomenal, with over the past two years. It is one of the most popular enterprise SaaS applications, and yet backup options are limited in terms of data stored on Azure. |
Spotify will suspend its services in Russia in light of free speech crackdown | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | Spotify will discontinue access to its streaming services in Russia in light of the country’s dramatic new restrictions on free speech. In early March, the Russian parliament that criminalizes sharing what the government deems to be “false information” about Russia’s operations in Ukraine. The new restrictions also punish any speech that undermines the military, including describing the war in Ukraine using the word “war.” Western news outlets including CNN, ABC and the BBC within Russia in response to the law, which can carry up to a 15-year prison sentence. While Spotify is primarily a music streaming platform, the company is increasingly investing in podcasts that incorporate politics and current events — a direction that’s already entangled it in a . “Spotify has continued to believe that it’s critically important to try and keep our service operational in Russia to provide trusted, independent news and information in the region,” a Spotify spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Unfortunately, recently enacted legislation further restricting access to information, eliminating free expression and criminalizing certain types of news puts the safety of Spotify’s employees and possibly even our listeners at risk.” After considering different paths, Spotify opted to “fully suspend” its service in Russia, a process that will be complete by early April after the company wraps up logistics related to the move. Spotify in Russia, though the free version of the app remained available. As most of the world looks on in horror, the Kremlin continues to tighten its grip on the flow of information, falsely spinning its actions over the last month as a liberation effort rather than a bloody war of choice claiming civilian lives. That push and its accompanying legal crackdown pose serious risks for anyone within the country sharing a perspective on the invasion that is at odds with the Russian government. |
Daily Crunch: EU, US reach ‘agreement in principle’ on trans-Atlantic data flows | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, March 25, 2022! This is one of the last Daily Crunch intros that I will write for you. I will miss our daily chats and hellos. But there’s no time on a Friday for relaxing. We have work to do! Let’s go! – The creator economy is :chart-up-and-to-the-right: like there’s no tomorrow, and everybody wants a slice of the action. looking to up their content production game, including paying the creators for their following, depending on the number of content consumers. Of course, the creator economy has a downside, too; content moderation continues to be a challenge, and a couple of against the social media belle de jour for the psychological trauma they claim they experienced in the course of their roles as moderators. Meanwhile, the work-from-home trend seems to stretch into the space beyond “avoiding offices like the plague during a literal plague.” . Other noteworthy things on this fine Friday: / Getty Images A lot of work today has moved to the cloud as SaaS tools replace traditional on-prem software in the enterprise. But while SaaS tools make life easier, the nature of cloud businesses and their data retention policies mean that in the event of a cyber attack or failure, you’re responsible for backing up all the data used by those tools, not your cloud provider, points out Brian Spanswick, CISO and head of IT at Cohesity. To safeguard their data, companies must proactively put in place mechanisms to protect, back up and recover all data being used by SaaS tools within the enterprise, Spanswick writes. “Relying on providers’ default retention and recovery policies is just not enough.” |
Counting for Amazon’s Alabama and Staten Island union votes begins next week | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | It’s been a predictably wild ride for unionization efforts at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama fulfillment center. After , the retail giant emerged victorious last April. While workers had received support from representatives on the political spectrum ranging from Bernie Sanders to Marco Rubio, it was a lop-sided victory — and one immediately challenged by union reps. The RWDSU managed to toward the end of the year, as the The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) agreed to conduct a second vote, following accusations that Amazon had been “gaslighting” employees through “egregious and blatantly illegal action.” In January, the NLRB announced that the secret ballot vote was set to begin February 4. On Monday, March 28, vote tallying begins for what has thus far been an historic push. Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse is facing a similar push — albeit with a significantly smaller voting window. The voting, which begins today, is set to run through March 31, at which point counting will commence. Unlike the Alabama’s mail-in election, this one is being held in-person, which had been the source of some tension with the earlier vote. The labor push has already seen some controversy. Christian Smalls, a former JFK8 employee turned union advocate, along with two others in late-February over trespassing charges. Smalls refuted the charges, stating that the trio were on-sight to drop off food for with Amazon employees. “This is simply Amazon creating a situation,” he told press. “It’s a bad look.” The company countered with their own statement, telling the media that he “has repeatedly trespassed despite multiple warnings.” Amazon has been accused of union suppression tactics previously, likely concerned that any successful union push could be a bellwether for a company whose treatment of workers has faced staunch criticism for years. A successful push would almost certainly embolden workers at more Amazon warehouses. Conditions during the pandemic have also been a motivating factor for many. “We look forward to having our employees’ voices heard,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Our focus remains on working directly with our team to continue making Amazon a great place to work.” Notably, the company is one of several large U.S. brands facing increased interest in organizing. Earlier this month, workers at a Manhattan REI story voted to unionize. A kind of domino effect has also been unfolding at Starbucks around the country, beginning with a Buffalo, New York location. Stores in Mesa, Arizona and — earlier this week — the coffee chain’s home base of Seattle have followed suit. |
IT can play a major role in driving sustainability | Jeff Kukowski | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | alone consuming around , IT departments have substantial influence on their organization’s sustainability goals. Significantly reducing the amount of energy used to run workloads and business processes, however, requires intelligent automation, deep visibility, reducing shadow IT and optimizing CI/CD pipelines. The report revealed that 39% of financial operations professionals’ number one problem is getting engineers to take action when cloud inefficiencies are identified. This inaction means a lot of money and energy is being wasted unnecessarily. IT departments can make dramatic reductions in their use of electricity by leveraging intelligent automation and resource management. With an advanced, automated alert and visualization system, developers and other stakeholders across the organization can always be informed of the environmental impact of the decisions they make throughout their day. For example, if a developer is provisioning a public cloud resource and a less energy-intensive option is available, they could receive a notification alerting them to the issue and suggesting the greener option. Such a system could also leverage built-in guardrails to automatically turn off idle resources that are no longer in use, such as zombie VMs, neglected development environments and resources left running overnight and on weekends. When you don’t have to manually chase people down to remind them to turn things off or check recommitments with spreadsheets, less energy is wasted and less carbon is burned. The lack of visibility is one of the most pressing challenges in optimizing mutlicloud, multitool environments and truly realizing their benefits. Major cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and GCP provide visibility tools, and they even offer tools that enable enterprises to measure carbon usage. However, these tools are cloud-native, which means they only work on that vendor’s products and services. |
SpaceX, Northrop Grumman to resupply the ISS through 2026 | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | NASA just placed another order with SpaceX. The agency said Wednesday it had ordered six additional resupply missions from the company under its Commercial Resupply Services-2 (CRS-2) contract. NASA also placed an order for six more missions with aerospace prime Northrop Grumman, another major provider of resupply services to the ISS. NASA awarded both SpaceX and Northrop with the resupply contracts in 2016, for services through 2024. Sierra Nevada Corporation was the third chosen supplier. CRS-2 guaranteed a minimum of six missions for each supplier, with the option for NASA to order additional missions as needed. The maximum potential value of all three contracts is $14 billion, though the end cost to NASA will depend on the number of orders, the agency said. This order brings the total number of missions under CRS-2 to 32, with 14 missions to Northrop, 15 to SpaceX and three to Sierra. By now, SpaceX is very familiar with these flights. The company completed 20 supply missions under a previous CRS contract, CRS-1. , the total payment to SpaceX for those missions was $3.04 billion, or around $152 million per mission. SpaceX uses its cargo Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to furnish the ISS with supplies, and has done so since it conducted the first resupply mission to the station in 2012. After departing Earth, the Dragon rendezvous with the ISS and autonomously dock at the station. SpaceX also provides crewed missions to the ISS with its Crew Dragon capsule. |
US charges four Russian spies for hacking Saudi oil facility and US nuclear power plant | Carly Page | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | The U.S. Department of Justice has against four Russian government employees for a years-long hacking campaign targeting critical infrastructure, including a U.S. nuclear power operator and a Saudi petrochemical facility. The first indictment, from June 2021, charges Evgeny Viktorovich Gladkikh, 36, a computer programmer at the Russian Ministry of Defense, and two co-conspirators, of planning to hack industrial control systems — the critical devices that keep industrial facilities operational — at global energy facilities. Gladkikh is believed to be behind the infamous Triton malware, which was used to in 2017. Hackers used the malware in an attempt to disable safety systems in the plant designed to prevent dangerous conditions that could lead to leaks or explosions. in October 2018. Following their failed plot to blow up the Saudi plant, the hackers attempted to hack the computers of a company that managed similar critical infrastructure entities in the U.S, according to the DOJ. The second indictment, filed in August 2021, charges Pavel Aleksandrovich Akulov, Mikhail Mikhailovich Gavrilov and Marat Valeryevich Tyukov, all allegedly members of Military Unit 71330 of Russia’s Federal Security Bureau (FSB), with a number of attacks targeting the energy sector between 2012 and 2017. The hackers, better known to security researchers as “DragonFly,” “Energetic Bear” and “Crouching Yeti,” attempted to gain access to computer networks of companies in the international energy sector, including oil and gas firms, nuclear power plants and utility and power transmission companies, the DOJ said. In the first stage of their attacks, which took place between 2012 and 2014, the threat actors compromised the networks of industrial control device makers and software providers, then hid Havex malware inside software updates. This, along with spearphishing and watering hole attacks — a form of attack that targets users by infecting websites that they commonly visit — enabled the attackers to install malware on more than 17,000 unique devices in the United States and abroad. The second phase, “DragonFly 2.0,” ran from 2014 to 2017 and involved targeting more than 3,300 users at over 500 U.S. and international organizations, including the U.S. government’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation. “Russian state-sponsored hackers pose a serious and persistent threat to critical infrastructure both in the United States and around the world,” said U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco in . “Although the criminal charges unsealed today reflect past activity, they make crystal clear the urgent ongoing need for American businesses to harden their defenses and remain vigilant.” John Hultquist, vice president of intelligence analysis at Mandiant, said the indictments provide a glimpse of the FSB’s role in Russia’s state-sponsored hacking attempts, and come as a “warning shot” to the Russian intrusion groups who carry out these disruptive cyberattacks. “These actions are personal and are meant to signal to anyone working for these programs that they won’t be able to leave Russia anytime soon,” he said. But Hultquist warned that the hackers likely retain access to these networks. “Notably, we have never seen this actor actually carry out disruptive attacks, just burrow into sensitive critical infrastructure for some future contingency,” he told TechCrunch. “Our concern with recent events is that this might be the contingency we have been waiting for.” Casey Brooks, a senior adversary hunter at Dragos, which calls the group behind the Triton malware “Xenotime,” told TechCrunch that the indictments are unlikely to deter the hackers. “These activity groups are well-resourced and can conduct continuous complex operations. While the indictments detail some of these groups’ intrusion activity, their breadth is much greater,” said Brooks. “For example, we know that for Xenotime this is only a fraction of their overall activity. It’s essential to realize that these groups are still active and the indictments will probably do little to deter these adversary groups’ future operations.” The unsealing of the indictments came three days after President Joe Biden warned of a growing Russian cyber threat against U.S. businesses in response to Western sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. It also comes just days after the DOJ indicted six hackers working in the service of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU. The hackers, known as Sandworm, are accused of a five-year spree of attacks, including the destructive cyberattack that targeted hundreds of firms and hospitals worldwide in 2017 and a cyberattack that took down the Ukraine power grid. |
null | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 22 | null |
How Europe has expanded its bid to disrupt Big Tech | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | co-legislators reached political agreement on a major reform of digital competition rules , which will introduce up-front obligations and restrictions (literally a list of “dos and don’ts”) on the most powerful internet giants — enforced by the threat of substantial fines and other types of penalties if they fail to meet the requirements. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is the bloc’s response to systemic misbehavior in digital markets over many years. The regulation has been informed by a string of major EU antitrust cases against tech giants like Amazon, Google and Apple, and an accompanying frustration that Big Tech’s dominance has simply continued to entrench itself, as cases take years to conclude, leaving abuse largely unchecked in the meanwhile. The EU’s habit of letting tech giants define their own remedies even when they do (finally) get hit with antitrust enforcement — with only a general pronouncement that identified infringements must stop — has also allowed platforms plenty of wiggle room to keep stacking their hand. (Hence the Commission having to , years later, in the Google Android case to pressure Google to drop a paid auction model that rivals had declaimed as unfair from the start.) The DMA proposes to flip this hindsight-riven dynamic by fixing conditions up front and applying an expectation of compliance with fixed rules of the road for giants that fall in scope, with the goal of ushering in a new era of more proactive and effective tech regulation. The bloc’s conviction is that an ex ante competition regime will supplement the usual ex post antitrust procedures to ensure that digital markets remain fair and contestable. Despite EU policymakers spending long years mulling whether and then how exactly to act, a formal legislative proposal was only presented in December 2020 — so it’s taken less than 18 months for the EU’s institutions to reach agreement on a provisional text. That looks remarkably fast, underlining how much consensus there is around Europe on the need to reign in Big Tech’s market power. The EU has also doubled down — agreeing yesterday to expand the DMA’s asks on Big Tech, including with a new interoperability obligation for messaging platforms. Whether the regulation will actually succeed in boosting competition in digital markets that remain dominated by core platform services is really the €75 billion+ question. The EU argues that having a common set of rules across the single market for Big Tech will foster innovation, growth and competitiveness, as well as supporting the scaling up of smaller platforms, SMEs and startups — who it suggests will benefit from the existence of a single, clear framework at the EU level. But some experts have expressed doubt about this thesis — arguing that the best way to improve competition in digital markets might be by encouraging more direct competition between gatekeeping giants themselves, which isn’t how the Commission has configured its approach. Whether the DMA will do what the EU hopes, and stop platform giants from unfairly throwing their weight around at the same time as firing up fresh competition and innovation, is likely to take longer to assess than the relatively short order it took for the bloc to agree on the detail of the new regime. But one thing is clear: Change it coming — and it’s coming relatively fast. The regulation will apply to intermediating platforms of a certain size and market cap which play a “gatekeeping” role — meaning these are companies that get to set the “rules of play” for other businesses and consumers via their platforms T&Cs and as a result of their market power. Long-standing examples given include search engines and social networks. Marketplaces and booking platforms also seem likely categories to fall in-scope. The EU co-legislators also added virtual assistants and web browsers to the list, apparently with an eye on further future-proofing the regulation. The EU institutions agreed to meet in the middle on this: The law will apply to tech giants with a market capitalisation of at least €75 billion or an annual turnover of €7.5 billion (rejecting a slightly lower threshold the Commission originally proposed and a higher one proposed by some MEPs). Companies must also have at least 45 million monthly end users in the EU and 10,000+ annual business users. Likely suspects to fall in-scope include Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta (Facebook). The European booking platform giant, Booking.com, may also join the ex ante club. As might the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. It will be the Commission’s job to designate gatekeepers so there will be something of a front-loaded sprint of work once the regime starts operating for the EU to identify all the gatekeepers (and see off any legal challenges to a designation) before a segue into the wider, ongoing work of monitoring, investigations and enforcements. There’s a long list of requirements that the EU hopes will shape the behavior of market giants in a way that ensures digital market stay open and contestable (or, well, can be cracked open in cases where they may have already tipped). Many of these have been maintained since the Commission’s original proposal — which we — or else have been strengthened and extended. A few new ones have also been added. Articles 5 and 6 if the are where these key lists appear. One major new requirement introduced via the trilogue process is platforms. This is focused on “basic” functionality — such as the ability to send text messages, photos, video and files, rather than full feature parity. It will also start with one-to-one messaging; group chats will be phased in over two years and video calling/conferencing over four. The way this will work is smaller messaging platforms will be able to request interoperability from gatekeepers (who will be obliged to provide it). But there is no obligation for such platforms to take up the entitlement; it’s their choice. Their users would also need to choose to opt in to being able to send messages cross platform — and so users will not be forced to accept off-platform messages just because the service has elected to plug into the APIs of a gatekeeper. Hence the co-legislators talk about this being an “asymmetrical” interoperability requirement. We understand there is no literal limitation in the DMA that would prevent a gatekeeper from requesting interoperability from another gatekeeper. But whether platform giants — such as Apple with its iMessage service or Facebook with Messenger — would choose to do so is a whole other question. EU lawmakers emphasize that they are very focused on the security element of messaging interoperability — stipulating that all cross-platform comms must maintain the same level of security (so, for example, if it’s E2EE it cannot be lowered to a lesser level of encryption). Beyond messaging, the bloc’s co-legislators only agreed to assess social media interoperability in the future — so for now that’s off the table, likely owing to perceived additional technical complexity. They also agreed to set up a new high-level adviser group to support the Commission with cross-cutting technical sectoral advice to support its work in areas like interoperability. In another major new addition to the DMA stipulations, a parliamentary push to include limits on how personal data can be used for tracking ads survived the trilogue negotiations. Moreover, there was further accord to ensure this issue will also be tackled in the DMA’s sister regulation, the more broadly applying Digital Services Act (which is still going through trilogue). So the consensus here spans two separate (if linked) pieces of legislation. Which is notable given that the ads component was a late addition and given how much counter lobbying the tracking ads industry has done to try top evade limits. As regards the DMA component of this, gatekeepers must gain — a provision that could finally force Meta (Facebook) to provide users in Europe with a choice not to be tracked and profiled when using its services. There was also agreement between EU co-legislators on extending mandatory for consumers to pick their own preference of search engine, browser and virtual assistant — i.e., rather than gatekeepers being able to preselect or force use of their own products through bundling. Although lawmakers appear to have resisted calls to further widen the scope to other key services (such as email) as they were concerned about the risk of over-burdening the user experience. — originally in the DMA with a focus on third-party developers and gatekeepers operating mobile app stores — has also been extended to cover search and social media. This puts obligations on gatekeepers to be transparent about the terms they apply to business users and to offer a dispute settlement mechanism. (Idea being this will also help the Commission spot potentially unfair terms and/or behavior more quickly so it can tackle problems faster; but the Commission itself won’t be overseeing FRAND down to the level of an individual business’ Facebook page, for example.) An and app stores has also been retained — but with some reworking to try to reach a compromise that balances consumer choice against security concerns like the risk of introducing malware (an argument that’s been repeatedly raised by tech giants like Apple in their lobbying against this provision). The exact detail of this compromise isn’t clear but we understand it will involve somehow letting users define their own level of risk, such as by options available to them at the settings level. Elsewhere, a ban on self-preferencing of gatekeepers’ own services, such as in content rankings they curate and present to users, remains intact; as does a stipulation that gatekeepers cannot block users from uninstalling preloaded apps, along with wider support measures to enable service switching — and plenty more besides. Fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover can be levied on a gatekeeper for a breach of the regime — or up to 20% for repeated breaches. The latter refers to a situation of systemic non-compliance which, as we understand it, is being defined as at least three non-compliance decisions over a period of eight years. (It would also require a legal test to be carried out that indicates the gatekeeper in question has maintained or strengthened their position.) The DMA’s penalty regime also allows for non-financial penalties in the case of system infringements, retaining the possibility that the Commission could order structural remedies, such as the break up of a gatekeeper’s business empire. That said, the regime looks explicitly intended to avoid such a one-way outcome as this power is very much held in deferred reserve (as a nuclear option; more to scare that it’s there than to use), with the bulk of enforcement resources set to be directed toward achieving compliance with the up-front market rules. Furthermore, the Commission is able to engage in a regulatory dialogue with gatekeepers to ensure they understand the rules and requirements — so it can also push platforms to make changes that help them avoid fines in the first place. However — for those gatekeepers that decide to thumb their noise at the EU’s ex ante competition rules — another interesting addition to the DMA’s penalty pot is the possibility that a gatekeeper could be temporarily banned from making mergers and acquisitions. It’s a step that looks geared toward preventing the phenomenon of killer acquisitions. But how long such an M&A ban might last isn’t clear. During a press conference today, competition commissioner and EVP Margrethe Vestager talked around the topic, making passing reference to the recent Google-Fitbit acquisition (which ) — and to conditions the EU had accepted for allowing that to go ahead (including a time-limited ban on Google using Fitbit health data for ad targeting), going on to note that the EU has been trying to look into more big tech acquisitions to assess effects “on the ground” and has already increased its merger enforcement as a result of that. The DMA putting sanctions on gatekeepers that limit their ability to do M&A is appropriate within a behavioral framework, Vestager argued, also pointing to how many European startups are getting snapped up by Big Tech. “This entire legislation deals exactly with the behavior of the gatekeeper and how to make sure that markets remains competitive and of course here mergers play a role as we see it in our specific merger control,” she added. As part of general DMA reporting requirements, all gatekeepers are required to notify the Commission in advance of M&A too. The European Commission itself will be the sole enforcer — but its original proposal has been amended to allow a bigger involvement for national authorities on the investigation side. That may, at least in part, be a measure of how much (new) work the Commission is taking on with the DMA. Some joint-working with Member State agencies with relevant expertise could help lighten the load and expedite enforcements. That said, if a national authority starts an investigation which the Commission subsequently picks up we understand that the national probe would be expected to end. The Commission says it expects to need to add around 80 people to deal with the DMA workload. Some of this headcount will come from redeploying existing staff, others will be new hires — the latter with a focus on beefing up its technical expertise. Some time in October is said to be “likely” — though not set in stone — at this stage. The provisional text still needs to be checked over to produce a final legal document (in all the various EU languages) for approval by the Council and Parliament (the latter in a plenary vote). But the main hurdle to EU legislation is the political negotiation that concluded with agreement yesterday. There is a six-month period allowed for member states to transpose the pan-EU regime into national legislation. So it may be that 2023 will be when we see the real DMA fireworks. It’s been interesting to see how much shock/surprise and even horror greeted yesterday’s trilogue agreement announcement from U.S.-based industry watchers — who seem not to have been paying attention to a flagship reform EU lawmakers proposed in detail years ago. On the flip side, Europeans, both consumers and businesses, plus the myriad civil society groups that have been advocating for competition reform to untip digital markets for years, are sounding — broadly — supportive, while being very keen to remind the Commission that the best-crafted regulation is only as good as the quality of enforcement that accompanies it. All eyes in the region will be on how the Commission executes on this sizable challenge. As regards more specific criticism, the measure that’s garnering the most criticism is the interoperability obligation for messaging apps — which is attracting flak from a technical and/or product experience point of view from some quarters, with concerns being raised about the potential impact on security or other safety specific processes that platforms may carry out in areas like abuse-monitoring or content moderation. Concerns include that interoperability might introduce vulnerabilities and could also break delicate safety systems — at times combined with a strong dash of paranoia that the EU is trying to use competition reform as a pretext to, er, break strong encryption. Yeah, and also as many people have pointed out federating an end-to-end encrypted namespace across many providers is a very open engineering challenge. A cynic might say that this is a way to effectively outlaw E2EE while framing it as an antitrust move against tech. — Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) Again, though, it’s possible to find opposing technical views: The Europe-based messaging company Element — which develops apps atop the decentralized Matrix protocol — has been a keen proponent of interoperability from the start. Albeit it was advocating for EU lawmakers to go further and adopt a standards-based approach, which would support more fully featured interoperability versus the open API route plus core functionality the Commission has opted for. Even so, Element co-founder and COO, Amandine Le Pape, is still happy that (some) interoperability for messaging has been included in the DMA. “Any interoperability would be better than the current walled gardens,” she told us. “An open standard approach could come later, especially if it’s pushed bottom up by the industry which may eventually understand that by all speaking the same language it makes everyone’s life easier and more secure.” |
TechCrunch+ roundup: PLG handbook, hiring early-stage sales teams, abolishing pro-rata | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | In a previous era, startups that gained influence with CIOs could skate through the procurement process and start planning seminars for new customers as soon as contracts were finalized. Today, a decade or more into the End User Era, consumers have become the tail that wags the dog. Product-led growth models have been widely embraced: Instead of devoting resources to customer acquisition, PLG companies ship and scale quickly and more efficiently. They also tend to go public faster. Optimizing time-to-value, using data to calibrate customer touchpoints, and giving every employee “a shared understanding of the customer’s journey” is how PLG giants like Slack and Dropbox carved out their niche, writes Vidya Raman, a partner at Sorenson Ventures. She shared her prerequisites with TechCrunch+. “Think in bite-sized experiences, each of which would be a meaningful outcome for the customer,” she says. Her advice skips straight past basic best practices to explain alignment and partnership strategies, recommendations for nurturing community, and other PLG tactics. Related: I’m talking to GV investor/partner Terri Burns about finding product-market fit . I hope you can join the conversation! Have a great weekend, Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch+
/ Getty Images Many investors shower entrepreneurs with praise and attention early on, only to fade into the background. “Based on what our founders told us, a solid 20% of cap table contributors don’t even help their founders make strategic connections,” wrote Vijay Chattha and Jay Kapoor, general partners at VSC Ventures. In a call for industry reform, Kapoor and Chattha suggest replacing pro-rata clauses with performance-based covenants. “A performance-rata clause will look different for each investor on a founder’s cap table. Larger firms might be able to offer a suite of services, whereas solo GPs and smaller funds might specialize in a particular business function like marketing, sales, design, engineering or PR.” / Getty Images Hiring an experienced sales professional who’s also comfortable with the uncertainty that comes with working at an early-stage startup is a tall order. “Founders need someone who gets the big picture, understands the business domain, loves the technology, and, crucially, asks a lot of questions,” says Andy Stinnes, general partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners. / Getty Images A lot of work today has moved to the cloud as SaaS tools replace traditional on-prem software in the enterprise. But while SaaS tools make life easier, the nature of cloud businesses and their data retention policies mean that in the event of a cyber attack or failure, you’re responsible for backing up all the data used by those tools, not your cloud provider, points out Brian Spanswick, CISO and head of IT at Cohesity. To safeguard their data, companies must proactively put in place mechanisms to protect, back up and recover all data being used by SaaS tools within the enterprise, Spanswick writes. “Relying on providers’ default retention and recovery policies is just not enough.” Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch / Although 18 of the top 100 decentralized finance chains fell in value in recent days, “the rest, it appears, are riding a rising wave on the back of demand and early adopter enthusiasm,” according to Jacquelyn Melinek, our new senior crypto reporter. The total value locked (TVL) across all DeFi chains has fallen approximately 16% since last December, “but market players feel the DeFi space is still in its early stages and has room to grow.” The Bored Ape Yacht Club was an unprecedented success for Yuga Labs, and with a fresh $450 million in capital, the crypto startup is aiming to build a full-fledged universe for its apes. Taking cues from Second Life, Yuga Labs plans to open the gates to a wider audience with an “interoperable gaming metaverse” that will leverage its newly minted APEcoin, wrote Alex Wilhelm in The Exchange. Alex dives deep into Yuga’s proposed plans for this “MetaRPG,” its investor deck, and how its financials paint a picture of a company that, while valued like a gaming concern, stands to make a lot of money if it plays its cards well. / Getty Images Banks and fintechs can access more data than ever, but much of the benefits have flowed in one direction: Inflation and stagnant wages limit consumers’ ability to save, but services like buy now, pay later make it much easier to spend. Algorithms, social media and collaborative filtering have dramatically enhanced product discovery, but to give customers more financial support, “modern banks can use data and build trust to improve consumer financial health,” writes Uday Akkaraju, CEO of fintech firm Bond.ai. |
Spotify confirms it’s testing a new ‘Car Mode’ interface with some users | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | Spotify has started testing a new “Car Mode” interface with some users, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Friday. The test comes a few months after Spotify that it was retiring its simplified automotive interface called “Car View,” which displayed playback controls and your current track when driving. At the time, Spotify said it was exploring new ways to deliver in-car listening experiences and that it would be launching new features soon. “At Spotify, we’re always working to ensure our users have the best possible listening experience,” a spokesperson from Spotify told TechCrunch. “We can confirm we are testing a new Car Mode for some users. As with any of our tests, we always seek feedback from our users before rolling out changes more broadly.” The new interface was first spotted by . The website posted screenshots of the Android version of Car Mode. Spotify did not comment on whether the new interface is also being tested with iOS users. The screenshots show that Car Mode allows users to browse and search for music via voice controls. The Car Mode track player view includes simple controls, such as a play/pause, skip shuffle and like buttons. There’s also a microphone button that you can use to search Spotify’s library while in Car Mode. You can also use the voice controls to access recently played music or podcasts. The layout is similar to Spotify’s regular interface, but without a lot of the visual distractions that are usually present on-screen. 9to5Google Spotify is still testing the new interface and is looking for feedback from users who have access to it, which means that the final version of Car Mode may look different than the screenshots seen above. The new Car Mode is just one part of Spotify’s efforts to provide a seamless in-car listening experience. Last April, the company the limited U.S. release of its first hardware device called Car Thing. The device is aimed at Spotify Premium subscribers and vehicle owners who don’t have a built-in infotainment system offering easy access to Spotify, like Apple’s CarPlay or Android Auto. Spotify made Car Thing in November for $89.99. Car Thing connects with the Spotify mobile app on your phone, then uses the phone’s cellular signal (or Wi-Fi, if available) to stream your music or podcasts over the car’s sound system. The device works with USB, Bluetooth and Aux. You can access the service by either saying “Hey Spotify,” tapping its touchscreen, turning the dial or using one of the four preset buttons at the top of the player. Spotify can also be integrated with Google Assistant in order to listen to music and podcasts hands-free while driving. The feature also works with Google Maps so you can navigate while listening to Spotify. To do so, you can link your accounts and say ‘Hey Google, play Spotify.’ |
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