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Answers for H-1B workers who’ve been laid off (or think they might be) | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | , more than 23,000 tech workers have been laid off so far this month. For comparison, the site tracked 12,463 layoffs in October. Facebook’s parent company Meta announced the first major job cuts in its history this week, eliminating 11,000 jobs. Like Twitter, Stripe, Brex, Lyft, Netflix and other tech firms based in the Bay Area, many of the employees impacted are immigrants on worker visas. An unexpected layoff introduces an element of chaos into anyone’s life, but when an H-1B worker loses their job, a loud clock starts clicking: unless they can land a new position or change their immigration status within 60 days, they are required to leave the country. And because tech companies at every size are enacting hiring freezes and planning more cuts, their ability to live and work in the U.S. is suddenly in question. Earlier today, I hosted a Q&A for foreign tech workers who have been laid off (or think they might be) with Silicon Valley-based immigration lawyer . Alcorn, who writes “Dear Sophie,” a weekly advice column for TechCrunch+, shared general information for visa workers and hiring managers who are looking for talent. If you’re a visa holder who’s been laid off, your first priority is to “find a lawyer and figure out your last day of employment, because that’s when you need to start counting the 60-day grace period,” said Alcorn. “You either get a new job, you leave, or you figure out some other way to legally stay in the United States, but you have to take some action within those 60 days.” Start looking now for new opportunities, she advised, as it will take a new employer time to submit paperwork to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “The best-case scenario would be that this new company files your new change of employer petition and USCIS receives the paperwork on or before the 59th day since your last day of employment,” said Alcorn. “It takes at least three weeks to prepare everything,” which means candidates and employers must move quickly as the days count down. “You probably need a signed offer around day 33,” she said. Based on her experience, Alcorn estimated that 15% of the people laid off from Bay Area startups are immigrants, 90% of which are H-1B holders. Below, you’ll find answers to several of the questions we received [edited for space and clarity]. Sophie Alcorn: If you’re in the United States on ESTA after being laid off while abroad, you’re not in H-1B status anymore. You need to leave the country to get a new H-1B and try to come back in and start working. You don’t have the 60-day grace period anymore; you’ve abandoned it. The only thing you can do to change or extend your status if you’re in the United States on the Visa Waiver Program for 90 days on ESTA is get married to a U.S. citizen and have them sponsor you for a green card. It needs to be a real, good-faith marriage. You have to intend to share a life together, you have to demonstrate that your families know each other, that you do romantic comedy things together and have the photos to prove it. And the government’s going to check in two years to see if you’re still married. You can actually change employers without [doing so]. When you’re interviewing for jobs, you need to make it very clear to the HR person that you think you are eligible for an H-1B change of employer, and you really need their immigration lawyers to take a close look, because essentially, what you will need is a change of status from F-1 or OPT to H-1B within the United States, as well as a change of employer. |
Amid record dry powder, VCs are determined to fund anything but you | Rebecca Szkutak | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | to sum up the 2022 venture capital market in one word, that word could be . Venture funds have record dry powder — deployable capital on hand — and yet funding continues to . There is seemingly more talk of backing and people of color in the industry than ever, and yet the numbers are headed in the . VCs said publicly that they were focusing on companies on the path to profitability, but that for even a minute. So while many venture firms said they are largely sitting out investing this year as they wait for valuations to fall, it is, again, largely untrue. What seem to be true, though, is that some VCs are using this year’s uncertainty as an excuse to avoid doing the work it takes to discuss valuations and assess TAM on potential investments into companies with real customer bases. Because they aren’t backing no one — they’re just backing everyone but you. |
Sight Tech Global 2022 agenda announced | Ned Desmond | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | The third annual conference, a event on December 7 and 8 convenes some of the world’s top experts working on assistive tech, especially AI, for people who are blind or visually impaired. If you don’t follow this topic, maybe you should, because a lot of cutting-edge tech over the years — think OCR and NLP — was developed at the outset with blind people in mind, and went from there to more mainstream uses. At this year’s event we have sessions with the creators of several new devices to assist with vision, and we’ll talk about the technology architecture decisions that went into balancing capability with cost and tapping existing platforms. We’ll also take our first look at accessibility in VR, which is an area of huge concern because if/when VR takes off in the entertainment and business worlds, it’s vital that people without vision have access, as they do today on smart phones and computers thanks to screenreaders like JAWS, VoiceOver and NVDA. Our third big slab of programming is about AI itself. There is no shortage of hype as far as AI’s capabilities, and it’s important to push back on that by discussing some serious limitations and deficits in the way today’s AI works for people with disabilities, not to mention humanity in general. At the same time, AI is arguably the best core tech ever for people without sight. Understanding AI is vital to the future of everyone with disabilities for all those reasons. Don’t forget to today! And before you browse this awesome agenda: For technologists, designers and product folks working on earthshaking assistive tech, we’re hosting a small, in-person event on December 9 featuring workshops on assistive tech, many run by the same luminaries on the agenda. Interested? . Here’s the agenda. To see times and more, go to the Sight Tech Global . Following up on to create an education-focused tactile display (see next session), Greg Stilson updates Sight Tech Global on the project’s progress and APH’s work toward an SDK for developers to build on the tactile display. Greg Stilson will also lead a breakout session for attendees who want to go deeper on the Dynamic Tactile Device. , Head of Global Innovation, APH Moderator: , Writer & Photographer, TechCrunch For decades, engineers have worked toward a braille display that can render tactile images and multiline braille. may have with an innovative approach to generating dynamic fields of braille pins actuated by smart integrations combined with existing technologies, like Apple’s VoiceOver. Eric Kim and Ki Sung will also lead a breakout session for attendees who want to learn more. Co-Founder/CEO DOT Co-Founder/CEO DOT Moderator: Writer & Photographer TechCrunch People with disabilities and accessibility advocates are working to make sure the metaverse is accessible to everyone. This panel will delve into research on the challenges current virtual and augmented reality tools create for people who are blind or have low vision.The panelists will share their experiences using immersive technologies and explore how these tools can be used to enhance employment opportunities in hybrid and remote workplaces — but only if they are built with inclusion in mind. Moderator Co-Director, Partnership on Employment & Accessible Technology (PEAT) , Director Strategic Communications, PEAT , Software Engineer, The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute and CEO XR Navigation , PhD candidate in Human-Centered Computing, Clemson University For developers of virtual reality games, there’s every reason to experiment with accessibility from the start, which is what the Owlchemy Labs team did with , the 2022 release of a fun, first-person game situated in an inter-galactic high school that “has all the charm and cheek of a good Nickelodeon kids show.” And it reveals some of the earliest approaches to accessibility in VR. , Accessibility Engineer II, Owlchemy Labs , Accessibility Product Manager II, Owlchemy Labs Moderator , Filmmaker, Accessibility Advocate and Gamer AI-driven, synthetic audio description may have a place in some forms of accessible video content, but the artistry of the entirely human-produced audio descriptions Pixar produces for its productions set a creative standard no AI will ever attain, and that’s all for the good. Meet members of the Pixar team behind excellence in audio descriptions. , Home Entertainment Supervisor, Pixar , Director, Audio Description Operations, Deluxe , Voice Actress , Writing Manager, Deluxe Moderator , Vice President, Accessibility, Comcast Microsoft’s hugely popular Seeing AI is one of the apps that appears to do it all, from reading documents to recognizing people and things. Those services are enabled by Microsoft’s rapidly advancing cloud-based AI systems. How is Seeing AI advancing with those capabilities and what is the future for Seeing AI? , Co-founder of Seeing AI, Microsoft Moderator , Accessibility Sensei & Technology Consultant Smart home technology, like Alexa, has been one of the biggest boons in recent years for people who are blind, and for people with disabilities altogether. Voice technology and AI help empower people in many ways, but one obstacle stands in its way: making it equitable. In this session, learn from Amazon about how they’re approaching the challenge ahead. , Director of Accessibility, Devices & Services, Amazon , Principal Accessibility Researcher, Amazon , Founder & CEO, Scribely Rapid advances in phones, data networks and hardware miniaturization always seem to be converging on the concept of that super useful, affordable, unobtrusive assistive device. Seleste plans to launch later this year with a pair of tech-enabled glasses that mark an important waypoint on that journey. , Founder, Seleste , Co-Founder, Seleste Moderator, , Head of Accessibility Engineering Evangelism, LinkedIn Like Seleste, ARx is a recently released device designed to take advantage of the technology tech platforms that surround everyday life with a private, minimally visible, head-mounted device. Both the Seleste and ARx leaders will discuss what they’ve learned in the course of developing and testing their devices. , CEO, ARx Vision Moderator, , Electronic accessibility expert and consultant Where Seleste and ARx are newcomers to assistive devices, Humanware is a highly respected, established player whose new also takes powerful advantage of technology advances but also parts ways with the newcomers when it comes to technology architecture and form factors. , Vice President of Product Innovation and Technologies, Humanware , Director of Strategic Partnerships, Humanware Moderator, Accessibility Evangelist, Fable Despite the stunning advances in AI over the past decade, the so-called “deep learning” AI technology prevalent today has under-appreciated limitations and even poses societal dangers. Our speakers are world-renowned AI experts and AI “dissenters” who believe we need an AI that’s both . , Founder & CEO, Elemental Cognition , Founder and Executive Chairman, Robust AI Moderator, Founder and Executive Producer, Sight Tech Global The ability of assistive tech devices to recognize objects, faces and scenes is a type of AI called Computer Vision, which calls for building vast databases on images labeled by humans to train AI algorithms. A new technique called “ ” learns dramatically faster because the AI trains itself on images across the internet. No human supervision needed. Is that a good idea? , Asst. Professor, Founding Director, Image & Video Computing group, University of Colorado Boulder Moderator, , Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge Waymo participated in the U.S. Department of Transportation , and emerged with numerous that will help Waymo’s autonomous rides offer people with disabilities better service. Waymo’s team is still processing all they learned. , UX Design Lead & Manager, Waymo , Director of Access Technology, Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired Moderator, , Chief Evangelist, Goodmaps Don’t forget for this free, virtual event. We’re grateful to current sponsors iSenpai, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, Humanware, Microsoft, Ford, Fable, APH and Waymo. If you would like to sponsor the event, . All sponsorship revenues go to the nonprofit , which has been serving the Silicon Valley community for 75 years. |
Framework Ventures co-founder says DeFi gives hope following FTX collapse | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | heighten the need for regulation but also pique long-term interest from venture capitalists looking to invest in decentralized finance (DeFi), according to Michael Anderson, co-founder of Framework Ventures. “It just seems obvious that DeFi is the only way that we can continue to do these types of financial services operations in the crypto ecosystem,” Anderson said to TechCrunch. “It gives us hope and strengthens our resolve that the things we’re pushing for are the right things to be working on.” In April, Framework Ventures launched its third fund at $400 million, with about half of it earmarked for web3 gaming. Anywhere from half to 70% of pitches the firm gets are gaming-related companies, Anderson said. But the recent situation with FTX has the firm “doubling and tripling down on everything we believe in,” which includes DeFi and regulation of centralized finance (CeFi). While some firms like have seemingly lost capital stored on FTX’s crypto exchange, Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures, said the firm had no exposure. “Regulation is not something we should be against or preventing,” Anderson said. “Sensible regulation makes sense and now that [ Sam Bankman-Fried] has been removed from the table, we can move forward and get more vocal about centralized finance versus DeFi and the pros and cons of each.” |
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy faces enormous challenges amid falling profits and negative numbers | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | Jassy is the definition of a company man. In an age when people switch jobs frequently, he has been at Amazon for 25 years, working his way up to president and CEO. But before he reached the corner office, he helped build Amazon Web Services, its cloud arm, into a $60 billion juggernaut. It wasn’t exactly a rise from the mailroom, but Jassy was there as founder Jeff Bezos’ aide-de-camp when they in the early 2000s at an executive offsite. He helped build it. He nurtured it. He made it into the crown jewel of the company. So when Bezos announced early last year, it didn’t take long for the organization to turn to Jassy, whose hard work at AWS and his deep understanding of company culture seemed to make him the perfect heir apparent. But things haven’t necessarily gone as planned the leadership role in July 2021. Much of what has happened has been out of his control. Like many chief executives, he inherited the problems left behind by his predecessor. During the pandemic, Amazon became the general store for the world. People stuck in lockdown turned to Amazon for their goods. The company’s revenues mushroomed and its workforce exploded, with the organization adding an astonishing 800,000 workers, mostly in its warehouses (per ). The future was bright, but as Jassy took over last year, people were heading out again. Suddenly, everyone wasn’t buying everything online anymore. As we headed into 2022, other macroeconomic factors began to affect commerce — online and brick-and-mortar — as inflation soared and consumers’ buying power began to diminish. Add to that the higher cost of energy and persistent supply chain issues, and Amazon was suddenly facing some challenges that were beginning to have a serious impact on earnings. |
Numerous social apps see gains in wake of Twitter chaos, new data shows | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | The drama at Twitter following Elon Musk’s acquisition has seen some users looking for an exit. In recent days, alternative social apps and microblogging platforms have seen strong gains, including, most notably, the open source decentralized Twitter alternative Mastodon. The service’s founder and CEO recently announced Mastodon had , after more than half a million users joined the network since the . (It’s now 1.5 million.) But Mastodon isn’t the only app profiting from Twitter’s upheaval. In a new report, app intelligence firm after Musk took over. It noted Mastodon has seen approximately 322,000 new downloads from U.S. app stores in the 12 days following Twitter’s acquisition (October 27 through November 7), which is more than 100x the 3,000 it had seen in the prior 12-day period. Globally, the app grew 657% to 1 million installs during that same October 27-November 7 time frame, up from 15,000 in the 12 days prior. Other third-party Mastodon clients saw a bump, too, with Metatext and Tootle both growing from less than 1,000 installs to 19,000 and 7,000, respectively, between the two time periods. But Mastodon isn’t the only network seeing an uptick in app installs, as it turns out. Tumblr also saw its U.S. app installs grow 96% from 47,000 to 92,000 between the two time periods. Plus, its global installs grew 77% from 170,000 to 301,000. Sensor Tower In addition, alternative social app CounterSocial grew 2,300% to 24,000 installs in U.S. app stores in the 12 days following the acquisition, and grew 3,200% globally, with 33,000 installs, the report said. Another app intelligence firm, , sliced the data in a slightly different way. It examined various social apps’ worldwide download growth during a seven-day period following the acquisition (October 27 through November 2), then compared that with the prior seven-day period. Its data, shared exclusively with TechCrunch, also confirmed the sizable gains made by Mastodon and CounterSocial in terms of the growth in global installs between the two time periods. Mastodon’s installs jumped 2,200% and CounterSocial’s grew 1,200% its analysis found. But Data.ai looked further up and down the apps stores’ charts and found that a number of other social apps were seeing bumps, beyond just direct Twitter alternatives. These included David’s Disposable (up 83% during the two time periods), nFollowers (up 50%), CocoFun (up 46%), Substack Reader (up 24%), Tribel (up 11%), Tumblr (up 7%) and Pinterest (up 2%). Substack, in particular, has been marketing itself as a social community following the Twitter acquisition, that allows writers and their audience to engage in threaded chats. Dispo had fun trolling Twitter’s chaos in a couple of tweets and memes, how Musk doesn’t own the Dispo app. data.ai This isn’t to say the drama has been all bad for Twitter. Surprisingly, some people have even newly installed the app since the acquisition, as it turns out. Data.ai shows Twitter’s app installs jumped 17% after the acquisition, while Sensor Tower’s look at the slightly longer timeframe saw a 21% increase. The latter said Twitter saw 7.6 million global installs and $502,000 in consumer spending in the 12 days after the acquisition, an increase from 6.3 million installs and $303,000 in spending in the prior 12-day period. These consumer spending numbers, however, should be taken with a grain of salt for now as Twitter Blue’s launch was put on pause after being live for only a couple of days. There’s no reason to believe that these figures indicate, as of yet, a significant increase in demand for the subscription with long-term staying power. That data will come in time. If anything, it shows Musk’s ability to market things to his fanbase and users’ general curiosity about what’s going on with Twitter’s products at present. Sensor Tower Though Twitter may have seen slight gains this week, not everyone is happy about the changes. Some angrier Twitter users took out their angst over the acquisition in the Twitter app’s reviews on the App Store. On November 5, 2022, the app saw a spike in negative ratings as 119 one-star iOS reviews were added — the most it has seen in a single day during this latest surge in negative reviews, also according to data from Sensor Tower. However, this isn’t the biggest surge of negative reviews Twitter has ever seen, we understand. Other incidents have caused larger bumps. After Trump was banned, for instance, Twitter saw 801 one-star reviews on January 9, 2021. It also saw a surge in March 2022 after the new timeline was rolled out and in April and when Elon Musk said he was buying Twitter. Its largest spike in negative reviews this year wasn’t even this week — it was on October 28, when Musk’s deal was finalized. Overall, however, it was the Israel-Palestine crisis in May 2021 that resulted in the highest volume of new negative reviews, followed by the Trump ban. |
SpaceX, Relativity and others urge FCC to stay in its lane | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | Major space companies, including SpaceX and Relativity, are urging the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to stick to its purview — spectrum usage — as it looks to potentially update its rules for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM) missions. There is plenty that the FCC could — and should do — to support ISAM missions that sit squarely within its regulatory bounds, the companies said. SpaceX and others, as well as startups like Orbit Fab, which wants to build refueling depots in space, and Starfish Space, which is developing a satellite servicing vehicle, submitted recommendations related to spectrum and ISAM. The commission also heard from Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance and other space companies and industry groups. “The biggest chunk of this proceeding is the question of, do we need new spectrum allocation for ISAM?” Brian Weeden, executive director of The Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS), explained to TechCrunch in a recent interview. “And that is absolutely within the FCC’s existing authority.” The FCC requested comments from industry after it opened a new proceeding on ISAM in August. In a statement, the commission said it specifically sought to understand how it could “update, clarify, or modify its rules and licensing processes” to support these emerging capabilities in space. SpaceX, Relativity and others said in their responses that the FCC should bring its considerable authority to bear on issues related to spectrum use and licensing — and only issues related to spectrum use and licensing. “The Commission must handle this potentially important but still nascent industry with care, exercising caution not to unintentionally stifle innovation by stepping outside the authority expressly delegated to it by Congress,” SpaceX said. Relativity Space and the industry association Commercial Spaceflight Federation separately argued that the FCC’s involvement in issues outside of those related to spectrum could result in duplicative approvals processes. These could be especially challenging for smaller startups and newer space entrants to navigate. The new proceeding is one of a handful of actions the commission has taken in recent months to keep pace with the growing commercial space industry. In September, the FCC also updated rules related to spacecraft deorbiting and orbital debris management, voting that satellite operators must deorbit satellites in low Earth orbit five years after their mission conclusion, rather than 25. But such actions have raised questions as whether the FCC has sufficient authority to pass such rules. As of yet, Congress has made no gesture toward expanding or extending that authority. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel appeared to tacitly acknowledge these concerns in a speech to the Satellite Industry Association, announcing that the FCC will establish a new bureau dedicated to handling space activities. “The changes I am announcing today are not about taking on new responsibilities at the FCC,” she said. “They are about performing our existing statutory responsibilities better and freeing up resources to focus on our mission.” |
Pixxel, Slingshot Aerospace discuss complexities of dual-use at TC Sessions: Space | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | Orbital imagery is becoming commonplace in industries and defense, but looking beyond the visible spectrum has yet to break through into the mainstream. Pixxel is poised to change that with its hyperspectral imaging satellites, and co-founder Awais Ahmed will join us at in Los Angeles on December 6 to tell us why this tech matters. Hyperspectral imagery includes wavelengths well beyond what people and traditional cameras see, allowing satellites to detect things like polluting gases, the hydration level of soil or concentrations of desirable minerals. Pixxel’s approach is modern and adaptable, with a new imaging stack that slices the wider spectrum into extremely thin slices, allowing very specific detections that would normally take a spectrometer or science mission. earlier this year, a coup for the young founders, Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal, his fellow graduate from BITS Pilani in Rajasthan, India. The two set out to change orbital imagery and are now in pole position as numerous industries, the military, and climate-monitoring authorities are all seeing the benefits of hyperspectral image data. Ahmed told TechCrunch recently that the new push toward ESG, as well as a large new tranche of federal funding for climate solutions, is reinforcing existing interest from stakeholders in this area, from climate activists to gas and oil companies. And of course the strategic importance of this type of data is easy to see, which is why Ahmed will be joining us for a discussion of the evolving dual-use sector where startups like Pixxel have twice the opportunity — but also double the responsibility. Melanie Stricklan, the CEO and co-founder of Slingshot Aerospace, will also join the discussion and weigh in on how startups and growing companies can better understand and navigate the complex world of dual use. Stricklan, who served in the U.S. Air Force for 21 years, holds a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautics from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, a Master of Science in Space Operations Management from Webster University, and she was named one of Inc. Magazine’s 2019 Top 100 Female Founders in the United States. takes place on December 6 in Los Angeles. , and then join us to see and learn about the latest space tech from the industry’s most beautiful minds, network for opportunities and build a stronger startup to the stars.
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Pet insurance startups chase the market as pet ownership booms among Gen Z and millennials | Mike Butcher | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | Walk through any public park these days and you will see a hell of a lot more dogs than you might have three years ago. The loneliness of the pandemic lockdowns led to an explosion in pet ownership. Plus, The demographic of pet ownership has shifted. Whereas previously it was Granny or Grandpa who tended to be the pet owner, now, Gen Z and millennials represent around 70% of pet owners, according to some statistics. This has created a big fight between insurers over this new market, and has of course predictably led to new startups in the arena. In the U.K. you can find UK ManyPets, Waggle, PetPlan, while in the U.S. there’s Lemonade, Figo, ManyPets and Trupanion. Over in the EU you’ll find Dalma (France), Lassie (Sweden) and ManyPets (Sweden). Meanwhile, pet insurance startup has decided to take a particular angle on this topic, not only offering pet insurance but also pet health prevention information, pet ownership education and additional services. It’s now raised a £15 million Series A funding round, led by DN Capital, and with the participation of the petcare-focused Companion Fund as well as Helvetia Venture Fund, M Tech Capital, Picus Capital, dmg ventures, Sarona Partners, T0 Ventures and FJ Labs. Napo claims to have insured over 35,000 pets in the year since its launch last December. It offers access to 24/7 online vet consultations, obesity awareness resources and access to expert-led live classes to help puppy train their dogs. In a statement, co-founder and CEO Jean-Philippe Doumeng said: “Our mental model is fundamentally different from traditional pet insurance. We are aligning all stakeholders to look in the same direction by helping people to take better care of their pets.” Guy Ward Thomas, who led the deal at DN Capital, added: “We met all of the ‘neo pet-insurers’ in Europe… What set Napo apart was their focus on building a virtuous circle between educating owners, providing veterinary care and improving pet health — all leading to lower claims, lower premiums and happier customers in the long-term.” |
Microsoft brings helicopters, gliders and the Spruce Goose to its Flight Simulator | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | Microsoft is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the venerable series today with the launch of the aptly named Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary update. As the company had teased before, this update to the sim will introduce helicopters and gliders, as well as a few classic aircraft. Gliders and helicopters aren’t new to Flight Simulator, but when Microsoft and Asobo back in 2020, they were still missing from the game. In total, the update includes 12 new planes (two helicopters, two gliders and eight fixed-wing aircraft). The highlights here are what Microsoft and Asobo call their first “true-to-life” airliner in the base game — an Airbus 310-300 — and the Spruce Goose, the largest seaplane and wooden aircraft ever built. Other new aircraft include classics like the 1903 Wright Flyer, the 1915 Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, the 1927 Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis, the 1935 Douglas DC-3, the 1937 Grumman G-21 Goose and the 1947 Havilland DHC-2 Beaver. Microsoft Microsoft To enable helicopters and their ability to beat air into submission, the Asobo team had to build a new physics engine in the sim, and while the fluid dynamics simulation for modeling planes in the game runs 100 times per second, for example, the rotors of the helicopters are modeled at 1,000 times per second to achieve a higher degree of realism. And to really showcase that, you can now also visualize exactly how the air flows over and around these helicopters (and planes). The team says that this new physics system realistically models ground effect and also allows you to recreate emergencies and set the helicopter down using when you turn off the engine, for example. Microsoft As you would expect, Gliders are a much more docile affair. Here, too, Microsoft added some new visualization to the sim to let you see up- and downdrafts around you. The physics engine for this takes into account everything from the outside temperature, the angle of the sun, the material the sunlight is reflecting from and more — but the Asobo team also admits that it still cheats quite a bit here to do this within the computational limits of the engine. The weather engine doesn’t create clouds from first principle, for example, and so when creating the system for the thermals, the team had to work from where the clouds are and then work backward from there. “If we want the perfect simulation, then we would need a quantum computer 100 years from now,” Asobo’s Martial Bossard explained. “Sometimes you have to make some clever choices that help us to create the same kind of behavior with a low computational cost.” Still, as Bossard told me, the idea here was to create an engine that allows real-life glider pilots to find thermals exactly where they would expect them to be. Otherwise, there are very few surprises here. If you’re looking for a more relaxed flying experience, gliders are definitely the way to go. One nifty feature is that you get the option between winch launches — which are standard in Europe, for example — or using a tow plane, which is the usual way to launch a glider in most of the U.S. And those animations are nice, too, including your friendly launch helper running next to the glider to help keep you steady as you start your takeoff roll. And you can launch a glider from anywhere, too, whether that’s JFK or your local glider field. Interestingly, while there are no new tutorials in the game to teach you how to fly helicopters — because the team argues that with all of the assistance functions turned on, it’s actually pretty easy to fly them — there are about half a dozen glider tutorials in the game now. I’m sure we’ll see some helicopter tutorials pop up in future releases, though. Microsoft As for the regular planes, I tend to stick to the smaller general aviation planes that are more like what I fly in real life, but the highlight here are the A310-100 and the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’ giant flying boat (the H-4 Hercules) that was a bit of a disaster and never flew more than 27 seconds. The A310 is modeled in exquisite detail, with virtually every switch doing what it would do on a real plane, including the flight computer. Typically, a model like this would be a paid third-party DLC, so it’s nice to see something of this quality now becoming part of the base game. Microsoft The Spruce Goose feels a bit like a novelty, but it’s also a beautiful model and surprisingly easy to fly. It’s a beast, no doubt, with its massive engines and weight. You’re not going to do steep turns with it anytime soon, but it’s a fun diversion. And there is more. Microsoft and Asobo also brought back four classic airports, including Chicago’s Meigs Field and added 14 heliports and 15 glider airports. And for those who feel nostalgic, the team also brought back 24 classic missions from previous Flight Simulator versions. But beyond looking back, Asobo and Microsoft also used this event to look into the future a bit. As Jorg Neumann, the head of Microsoft Flight Simulator at Asobo noted a number of times during the event, the mission here is to build a digital twin of the earth. That includes cities — for which the Flight Simulator team now charters its own planes to get the photogrammetry data — but also smaller features like adding more animals, including birds, and getting better weather data (and maybe historical weather data in the future). Microsoft “I for some stuff in ‘ And everybody Early on, the team worked with the data from Microsoft’s Bing maps. Now, it’s almost the other way round and the Flight Simulator team provides its data to Bing Maps. And while Microsoft worked with to fill in spots where it didn’t have 3D photogrammetry data when it launched the sim, the company has now brought this work in-house, Asobo’s director Bossard told me. “S PlayStation 2 game. W a lot of work and Neumann said he’s also thinking about digital preservation a lot these days. That may mean building digital models of classic aircraft like the Spruce Goose, but also classic airports and using the satellite imagery and other data the team is capturing and visualizing and preserving. He noted that the current version of New York City in the game is actually a few years old now and that the team has a 2022 version ready to roll out, but that he wants to be able to give players the choice of which one to use. That’s an interesting concept and something we’ll likely hear more about in the coming years. |
Telegram shares users’ data in copyright violation lawsuit | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Telegram has disclosed names of administrators, their phone numbers and IP addresses of channels accused of copyright infringement in compliance with a court order in India in a remarkable illustration of the data the instant messaging platform stores on its users and can be made to disclose by authorities. The app operator was forced by a Delhi High Court order to share the data after a teacher sued the firm for not doing enough to prevent unauthorised distribution of her course material on the platform. Neetu Singh, the plaintiff teacher, said a number of Telegram channels were re-selling her study materials at discounted prices without permission. An Indian court earlier had ordered Telegram to adhere to the Indian law and . Telegram unsuccessfully argued that disclosing user information would violate the privacy policy and the laws of Singapore, where it has located its physical servers for storing users’ data. In response, the Indian court said the copyright owners couldn’t be left “completely remediless against the actual infringers” because Telegram has chosen to locate its servers outside the country. In an order last week, Justice Prathiba Singh said Telegram had complied with the earlier order and shared the data. “Let copy of the said data be supplied to Id. Counsel for plaintiffs with the clear direction that neither the plaintiffs nor their counsel shall disclose the said data to any third party, except for the purposes of the present proceedings. To this end, disclosure to the governmental authorities/police is permissible,” (PDF) and first . A Telegram spokesperson declined to say whether the app operator shared private data. “Telegram stores very limited or no data on its users. In most cases, we can’t even access any user data without specific entry points, and we believe this was the case here. Consequently, we can’t confirm that any private data has been shared in this instance,” Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn told TechCrunch. India is one of the largest markets for Telegram, which has amassed nearly 150 million users in the South Asian market. Telegram has gained popularity among some users in part due to its , as I previously reported. The platform remains littered with easily discoverable channels — sometimes with tens of thousands of users — where movies and TV shows are widely shared. |
Facing economic headwinds, Amazon consolidates robotic projects | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | town of 22,000, 40 minutes by car southeast of Boston. BOS27 is among the town’s newer residents. The 350,000-square-foot Amazon facility opened its doors a little over a year ago. It’s a hulking, gray addition to the tree-filled scenery. Inside is a state of the art facility that — along with a space on the opposite side of Boston in North Reading, Massachusetts — forms the beating heart of the company’s lofty robotics ambitions. In the decade since the company acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash, it’s grown itself into one of the world’s leading robotics firms. Ask any founder in the warehouse robotics space, and they’ll quickly credit the company as the driving force in the space. “We look at Amazon, probably as the best marketing arm in the robotics business today,” Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk said at our robotics event in July. “They have set SLAs that everyone has to match. And we look at them as being a great part of our marketing team.” Amazon has set package delivery expectations at once-seemingly-impossible next or same day, and an entire industry has grown up around it, in hopes of keeping smaller firms competitive with the retail giant. Brian Heater What strikes you as soon as you walk through the doors at BOS27 is how much the space resembles one of the company’s many fulfillment centers. It’s cavernous and buzzing with robots and their human counterparts. The space, which was built to accommodate a business that had grown too large for just the North Reading location, is where the company develops, tests and builds its robotic systems. (Another space has recently opened in Belgium, as well, courtesy of Amazon’s .) This week, the company opened its doors to a handful of press members, including TechCrunch. The event was, by any measure, a PR push. It was an opportunity to show off the company’s shiny new production facility and a chance to present a kind of unified front for Amazon Robotics, a category that now encapsulates every element of the Amazon retail experience from the moment a consumer hits “buy now.” Amazon A couple of guided tours around the floor showcased the company’s growing army of wheeled robots built atop the Kiva platform, including the ubiquitous blue Hercules (the fourth-gen version of the product), and the mini conveyor belt sporting Pegasus and Xanthus, which is, for most intents and purposes, a lightweight version of the latter. Newer on the scene , which arrives in a nearly neon green (“Seahawks green” as one executive joked today), with a small LED face and full autonomy — meaning it can safely operate outside the structured confines developed for the older models. Amazon Amazon also showed off a trio of robotic arms, which follow a similar evolutionary trajectory as their wheeled counterparts. There’s Robin, which debuted around 18 months ago and is now installed in 1,000 warehouses across the world. Its successor Cardinal adds a level of efficiency to the system, as it tightly packs boxes to send across the fulfillment center. A third, Sparrow, . As with its predecessors, Sparrow is effectively a souped-up version of a Fanuc off-the-shelf industrial robotic arm. The system is still in very limited pilots, including a facility in Texas and behind a safety cage at BOS27. What sets it apart from standard Fanuc arm deployments, however, is two-fold. First is the suction cup gripper, which utilizes pneumatics to pick up a wide range of different objects. The real secret sauce is the software of course. Amazon says the AI, coupled with a range of different hardware sensors, allows the system to identify around 65% of the inventory offered through the retailer. It’s a mindboggling figure. The system uses things like bar codes, size and shape to identify individual objects. Amazon Robin and Cardinal deal exclusively in boxes — of which Amazon has around 15 basic models. Sparrow has the far more complex task of picking up the products themselves. Beyond identification, this introduces its own spate of different challenges. If you’ve ever purchased anything from the company, you know how wildly these things fluctuate in size, shape and material. Hypotheticallym the same arm is picking up a bowling bowl and a bag of cotton swabs. That’s where the suction cup system comes in, offering a far greater range of picks than a rigid robotic hand. All told, the company has deployed more than 520,000 robotic drives since Amazon Robotics’ 2012 founding. It says that more than 75% of products ordered through its site come into contact with one of its robotic systems at some point in the process. Amazon Last-mile was the other of focus of today’s event. That starts with the 1,000 Rivian EVs the company has begun deploying to meet holiday demand. “Customers across the U.S. will begin to see custom electric delivery vehicles from Rivian delivering their Amazon packages, with the electric vehicles hitting the road in Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Nashville, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle and St. Louis, among other cities,” the company . “This rollout is just the beginning of what is expected to be thousands of Amazon’s custom electric delivery vehicles in more than 100 cities by the end of this year — and 100,000 by 2030.” Amazon Somewhat surprisingly, Amazon is still very bullish on the . “A demonstrated, targeted level of safety that is validated by regulators and a magnitude safer than driving to the store,” Prime Air VP David Carbon said during a keynote. “Delivering 500 million packages by drone annually by the end of this decade. Servicing millions of customers, operating in highly populated, suburban areas such as Seattle, Boston and Atlanta. Flying in an uncontrolled space autonomously.” Amazon But while a rendering of its MK30 drone — set for a 2024 debut — did make an appearance onstage, one important robot was missing in all of this. Not a single word was uttered about Scout, the sidewalk delivery robot for which Amazon in a major way. “During our limited field test for Scout, we worked to create a unique delivery experience, but learned through feedback that there were aspects of the program that weren’t meeting customers’ needs,” an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch amid reports of widespread layoffs. “As a result, we are ending our field tests and reorienting the program. We are working with employees during this transition, matching them to open roles that best fit their experience and skills.” Scout certainly isn’t alone. Broader economic headwinds have found . Among them are the loss of several divisions deemed to be underperforming. It’s a tricky lens through which to view projects like Prime Air or Scout, which understandably require a long runway (as do robotics and automation projects generally). Suddenly even corporations as massive as Amazon are posing questions around sunk cost to determine whether some moonshots still have a reasonable chance of success. The backdrop of these cuts loomed over the event. At the very least, they present a pragmatic lens through which to view these projects. It’s important to remember that even a massive multinational corporation with seemingly more money than god is still subject to macroeconomic factors. From the outside, at least, it’s hard to reconcile why a drone delivery program gets support and a last-mile delivery robot gets kicked to the curb, but this appears to be Amazon’s approach to the future of last mile, going forward. Tye Brady, chief technologist, Amazon. Amazon I had a few moments to speak with Amazon Robotics head Tye Brady, and used the opportunity to discuss robotic innovation set against a backdrop of corporate belt tightening. “We’re definitely aware of the macroecnomic conditions that are going on,” Brady told TechCrunch, before noting that the company had recently put a freeze on new hires through the end of the year. Amazon’s certainly not alone in that move — nor has it gutted its own headcount in the way corporations like Meta have in recent months. Amazon “For Scout, we’ve always been — regardless of where we are with the economy — experimental,” Brady explained. “We’re ready and willing to experiment and try new things. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. But we always learn from that experience and roll that into our thinking in robotics.” Asked whether Scout was a case of “things not working out,” Brady explained. “We did a couple of trials. How can we better the customer experience is the question we always ask in the end. The signals that we’re seeing are maybe not at this time. Not saying that’s forever the case, but not at this time.” Hercules robotics being assembled in BOS27. Brian Heater Even more deeply embedded in the Robotics team is Canvas. The startup, which Amazon acquired for more than $100 million in 2019, was reportedly among . The firm had built a truly impressive autonomous cart system. VP Joseph Quinlivan that the Proteus system was developed independently of the Canvas acquisition. “That was internally developed by the Amazon Robotics team that came out of the Kiva acquisition,” he noted at the time. “A lot of times at Amazon, we have concurrent development efforts. We’re excited about what the Canvas team is going to deliver, and they’re going to focus on a different application we haven’t announced yet.” Canvas/Amazon For his part, Brady says the Canvas team was not an example of a project — like Scout — that simply wasn’t working out. “We learned a lot from Canvas,” the executive told TechCrunch. “We talked to the team, saw the protoypes they wanted to do. We’d been working on prototypes a number of years, even prior to the Canvas acquisition. We got to share some of the technologies and real-world learnings from the team. […] These are experiences where we’re leaning, but now we have this Proteus vehicle out and we’re really excited about that.” As the company continues to pull back on or cut other projects, Brady says that Amazon is “consolidating” its robotics projects under a single roof. “Leadership, how we organize ourselves in how to deliver robotics products, which you’ve seen today and future products, which we’re hopefully announcing coming up. That doesn’t mean that we’re changing investment. There’s still a lot of need for investing in robotics. It has not changed our philosophy at all of people and machines working together and that we can give them a better toolset for them to do their jobs more safely, more simply and more efficiently.” Screenshot/TC Robotics He adds that, in spite of cutbacks, acquisitions are “always on the table.” Amazon is also maintaining its $1 billion in the face of broader cutbacks. The company has already invested in a slew of robotics firms, including Digit-maker Agility and BionicHIVE, an Israeli company that produces an impressive shelf-based robotic system. BionicHIVE “We realize that not everything has to be invented inside the walls of Amazon,” said Brady. “If we can seed some of these companies and allow them to do technology with a real project context behind it, then we can ride along with them. As they’re successful, we can learn from them, and if it makes sense, we can then start to incorporate those products into our own processes. But really, the point of the fund is let’s learn and let’s see what’s going to happen in this amazing new golden era of robotics.” |
Disney coughs up $900M to acquire MLB’s remaining stake in BAMTech streaming company | Ivan Mehta | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Disney paid $900 million to Major League Baseball (MLB) earlier this month to buy out the league’s remaining 15% stake in the streaming firm BAMTech, according to made public Tuesday. The transaction makes Disney a 100% owner of the streaming company that powers Disney+ and the firm’s other consumer services. The SEC filing noted that MLB’s interest in BAMTech was recorded in the entertainment company’s financial statements at $828 million, and in November Disney bought out MLB’s stake for $900 million. Last week, Disney announced that as a CEO to replace Bob Chapek. As this transaction was undertaken earlier this month, it was probably one of the last big moves by Chapek. In the filing, Disney said that Iger will “initiate organizational and operating changes within the Company to address the Board’s goals” in the coming months. MLB founded MLB Advanced Media in 2000 to power its website and online streaming. It spun off the streaming division as BAMTech in 2015. A year later, Disney invested . In 2017, the entertainment conglomerate invested an additional $1.58 billion to acquire 42% more stake. In 2021, sold its 10% stake to Disney for $350 million — propelling Disney’s stake in BAMTech to 85%. The move comes days before Disney+ is set to launch its . In Q3 2022, the streaming service with a total of 164.2 million subscribers globally. |
eFounders morphs into Hexa, a portfolio company of startup studios | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Over the past 11 years, has refined the startup studio model in Europe. The company has contributed to the launch of more than 30 startups, including three unicorns — , and . While things seem to be going well for the startup studio, eFounders is pivoting — sort of. As of today, eFounders is becoming , a holding company for different startup studios. You could have seen this change coming as eFounders hasn’t been eFounders for a while. In addition to its initial studio focused on the future of work, eFounders has already launched two new studios — for fintech startups and for web3 startups. Hexa is going to run three different studios — Logic Founders, 3founders and, yes, eFounders. So what is happening with eFounders then? “I started writing a LinkedIn article saying that it is the last time I’m writing as the founder of eFounders,” eFounders co-founder Thibaud Elzière told me. But he is not going anywhere, as the eFounders core team is simply going to work for Hexa now. Just like with Hexa’s other studios, there is a dedicated eFounders team with a head of studio as well as a core team of product people. Matthieu Vaxelaire is now at the helm of eFounders. Combined, Hexa companies have hired 3,000 people and have reached a total valuation of $5 billion. And Hexa isn’t going to change its formula going forward. Hexa’s startup studios match an idea with a founding team. The studio team then provides resources and help to launch a product. After raising some funding, startups gain their independence and the startup studio can move on and focus on new projects. “We reached a limit when it comes to scalability. It’s a virtuous model but it’s also very much handcrafted work,” Elzière told me. In addition to supporting Hexa’s existing studios, the company wants to launch studios around new verticals, such as climate, education and health. But it will depend on heads of studio that they meet and end up hiring. Hexa aims to launch two new studios next year. “It’s a crazy bet for us. We are creating a brand from scratch. And we are doing that because eFounders is a strong brand when it comes to SaaS startups, but also because eFounders was outshining other studios,” Elzière said. “What we are doing with Hexa is that we are democratizing team entrepreneurship. We offer an alternative to traditional entrepreneurship,” Elzière said. “Like a lot of things in life, when you work as a team, it works better.” But that doesn’t mean that Hexa and its startup studios are launching new startups for fun. They are taking a significant stake in each new startup. “We want to launch more startups. But it costs us around €800,000 to launch a company. We can either invest some money ourselves, or we could create a small fund like Y Combinator. Investors could contribute and they would end up on the cap table.” When Hexa’s startup studios launch a new startup, they try to keep a 30% stake in the company after raising a seed round. With third-party investors, Hexa could lower its stake to something like 25%, and investors would get 5%. Hexa’s own stake would be split between Hexa and each startup studio. “You would have 5 to 10% that would be allocated to the head of studio and their team,” Elzière said. The bottom line is that Hexa and its partners would still take a 30% stake. Then it would be split between multiple partners. “That deal might seem a bit unfair,” Elzière said. But he thinks eFounders’ track record speaks for itself. With roughly three unicorns out of 30 portfolio companies, entrepreneurs are more likely to create a unicorn with the help of eFounders than without. Essentially, founders can potentially get a smaller portion of a bigger cake. But where does Hexa come from exactly? It comes from the hexadecimal numbering system. In particular, hexadecimals are used to represent binary digits (0 and 1) in computing programming. Each hexadecimal character represents a succession of four binary digits. “For me, it’s the simplest expression of the human-machine interface,” Elzière said. As a bonus, hexadecimal characters are also used by designers for color codes. He believes that startup studios will work just like startups. Some of them will thrive, others will fail. “Studios will have a certain lifespan. At some point, they’ll run out of steam because the head of studio won’t be there anymore or there won’t be any opportunity left,” Elzière said. As always, we will judge the quality of Hexa’s work by the new startups that emerge from those studios. |
Sequoia India backs Prismforce to help IT companies build better talent supply chains | Jagmeet Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Prismforce, an India-U.S. startup that provides IT and tech services companies with tools to build better talent supply chains, has raised $13.6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India. IT providers spend a large part of their variable costs on hiring skilled employees. But finding those employees from the ever-growing talent market and deploying them effectively to get adequate results is one of the most significant pain points for the industry worldwide. is taking Amazon’s approach to matching the demand for talent with the supply for companies offering IT and tech services, said co-founder and CEO Somnath Chatterjee. “We are treating this as a supply chain problem, where you have to standardize demand, standardize supply, make the match happen, almost as if you are an e-commerce engine and e-commerce marketplace trying to make a talent marketplace,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. After spending 14 years as a partner at McKinsey, Chatterjee founded Prismforce with Mohd Qasim in April 2021. Qasim also worked as a senior engagement manager at McKinsey. While working at the management consulting firm, both co-founders served several IT providers, which helped them identify the problem that Prismforce aims to solve. Prismforce’s product catalog includes SkillPrism, which uses AI over a skill inventory management application to automate talent profiling. The startup also offers IntelliPrism for an end-to-end resource management module with AI-driven search and match, OutlookPrism to enable workforce planning and resource forecasting and InsightPrism to offer CXO dashboards. The Delaware-registered startup, which has a wholly owned India subsidiary and offices in San Francisco, Mumbai and Bengaluru, is currently on track to amass 10 clients by the end of this year, with the smallest client generating $400 million of revenue while the biggest counterpart is making more than $10 billion. Chatterjee did not disclose their names, but said half of them have their presence in India, while half of them are U.S.-domiciled companies. The executive said that he expects the geographical ratio of the startup’s clients to shift over time, with 70-80% coming from English-speaking countries, such as the U.S. and U.K., and Europe. Although the primary focus of Prismforce is limited to companies offering IT and tech services, it also targets entities in the enterprise IT domain. The startup also plans to reach professional services firms in the future, including accounting, tax and consulting firms, Chatterjee said. “It is a lot more pertinent for IT companies because the underlying skills are changing very fast, which is not the case for many of these consulting and professional services companies. But that could be the third horizon we can go to,” he noted. With the fresh funding from Sequoia Capital India and global angel investors, Prismforce plans to scale up its go-to-market reach, enhance its product suite and grow its talent base from the existing team of more than 60 members to a 120-140 group in the next nine to 12 months. “The technology services industry, with a cumulative market cap of over $4 trillion and a global workforce of over 20 million, is a core pillar of the global digital economy. Despite that, there is no large vertical software vendor serving its varied needs,” said Abhishek Mohan, principal at Sequoia Capital India, in a prepared statement. “Somnath and Qasim’s vision is to create the defining vertical software company for technology and professional services. Over the past year, this vision has been validated by multiple industry-leading IT providers, which have deployed Prismforce products to great impact.” Prismforce has raised a total of $15.4 million to date, with $1.8 million infused in a seed funding round a year ago from an undisclosed group of angel investors that included serial entrepreneurs and SaaS founders. |
Gogoro to pilot battery swapping and Smartscooters in Philippines next year | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Gogoro, the Taiwanese company that’s commercializing battery swapping ecosystems for electric scooters, is targeting the Philippines as its next market. The startup said Tuesday it has partnered with Filipino conglomerate Ayala Corporation, telecomms provider Globe and corporate venture builder 917Ventures to launch a B2B battery swapping pilot in Manila in the first quarter of 2023. 917Ventures is a subsidiary of Globe, which is part of Ayala Corporation’s umbrella. The partnership with heavy hitters in the Filipino ecosystem comes a few days after the on electric vehicles and their parts for the next five years. The move is part of the Philippines’ , signed into law this year, to promote clean energy innovation. Horace Luke, founder and CEO of Gogoro, told TechCrunch the tariff removal applies to battery charging and swapping equipment, as well, making it the perfect time for Gogoro to introduce its battery swapping stations and Smartscooters into the country. “The Philippines is trying to electrify, so we’re progressively saying we’re gonna be the first one to really take a leadership position in that and lead the market,” Luke said. “We see a huge opportunity for us to grow the market because there just hasn’t been the mass adoption of two-wheelers yet. And as they adopt, it would be great if it goes towards electrification.” Eventually, Gogoro wants to bring an open network battery swapping system to the Philippines, one that’s compatible with locally produced electric two-wheelers as well as Gogoro’s own Smartscooters — Gogoro has worked with electric two-wheeler manufacturers in India and China to integrate its own swappable batteries into their scooters for easier market entry, rather than having to also import its own Smartscooters. The Philippines is a different type of market, though. Two-wheelers have not historically been as popular in the country, as compared to India or China, said Luke. now alongside the increase of delivery and logistics services, hence Gogoro’s strategy of entering the market with a B2B pilot focused on the logistics industry. Gogoro wouldn’t announce which delivery provider it will initially partner with, but Ayala Corp. does have its own dedicated unit, . Luke said by early next year, Gogoro will have sent through several hundreds of its Smartscooters and several hundred batteries, as well as half a dozen swapping stations, which will be placed throughout Manila for delivery riders to use. “We’re going to use B2B as the first step to really build what we call the base load,” said Luke. “Base load is basically the minimum amount of users using the network that allows you to actually create a business model that is proven to be workable. Now, given the gas prices in the Philippines, given the amount of logistics rider output everyday, this is an opportunity for us to demonstrate that the business model is viable.” The pilot will last at least six months before expanding to new B2B partners or even private consumers, said Luke. During that time, Gogoro hopes to gain feedback from the market both on whether two-wheelers can be adopted in the Philippines and on whether battery swapping will take hold alongside two-wheeler adoption. Gogoro will also collect data from vehicles while they’re on the road in order to fine tune its system, said Luke. “More than 25% of Taiwan’s quick commerce deliveries and almost all of their electric deliveries are powered by Gogoro’s battery-swapping technology, and we see this solution being most beneficial to a densely populated region like Metro Manila, which is also the hub of business districts,” said Patrick Aquino, director of the Department of Energy’s Energy Utilization Management Bureau in the Philippines, in a statement. “The success of this pilot will pave the way for a new sustainable business model in other cities in the country as well. Philippines can learn from Taiwan’s experience.” Gogoro’s global network includes nearly 11,000 battery swapping stations at over 2,260 locations. The company, which has a market dominance in Taiwan, says it hosts more than 370,000 daily battery swaps with more than 360 million total swaps to date. The company recently announced a with EV-as-a-Service platform Zypp Electric to electrify logistics fleets and last-mile deliveries in India. Gogoro expects to launch a pilot with Zypp in Delhi in December, which will complement Gogoro’s existing consumer-focused partnership in India with local . Gogoro also recently launched battery swapping stations and Smartscooters , and has a , as well. |
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Austin-based ICON awarded $57.2 million NASA contract for lunar construction tech | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | , a construction tech company that’s raised more than $400 million in funding, has landed a new contract from NASA to develop new systems to build on the moon and Mars. The $57.2 million contract is a continuation of a previous Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) dual-use contract with the U.S. Air Force, which was partly funded by NASA. This award will support the development of what ICON is calling “Project Olympus,” an ambitious plan to build structures on the moon and Mars using in-situ resources. “To change the space exploration paradigm from ‘there and back again’ to ‘there to stay,’ we’re going to need robust, resilient, and broadly capable systems that can use the local resources of the Moon and other planetary bodies,” ICON CEO Jason Ballard said in a statement. It’s clear that NASA agrees. Indeed, the agency has explicitly stated that one of the goals of its ambitious Artemis lunar program is to establish a long-term human presence on the moon. But as of yet, NASA has established no clear plans on where those astronauts will stay once they get there. ICON, which is best-known for its 3D-printed homes, has been working on Project Olympus for some time. The company was awarded the initial SBIR grant from the U.S. Air Force in October 2020 for $14.55 million. This latest funding will keep the project alive for a handful more years at least: the contract runs through 2028. Under the terms of this contract, ICON will be working with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, under an agency venture called the “Moon to Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technologies” project. The company is planning on working with samples of lunar regolith and bringing its hardware and software into space to help it develop construction approaches that can best function in the cold, low-gravity atmosphere of the moon. Habitats aren’t the only thing on the company’s radar: it’s also eyeing up landing pads and other infrastructure to support sustained lunar exploration. ICON has seen explosive growth since its founding in late 2017. The company landed a last August, and closed another scarcely six months later. Sources told TechCrunch that the latest funding pushed ICON’s valuation close to $2 billion. |
Let’s-a-go again with a new ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ trailer | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | One month after Nintendo debuted its for “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” the company has yet another trailer — this time giving fans a first look at Princess Peach and Donkey Kong. In the newest trailer, viewers get to see more of Illumination’s incredible animating skills with Donkey Kong, voiced by Seth Rogen, completely bitch-slapping Mario ( ), and Princess Peach, voiced by Anya Taylor-Joy, ripping off a Cheep-Cheeps (pufferfish) from the plumber’s face. We also see Mario Kart get a nod with a quick clip of the legendary Rainbow Road. And while many fans were disappointed with Pratt’s impression of Mario in the first trailer, he did give us a “let’s-a-go” and a “wahoo!” this time around. So, we’ll give him a break from the mocking for now. Or not. In a pre-recorded clip that played before the trailer, Rogen pretty much echoed Pratt’s statement from Nintendo’s last video. He said, “I remember looking at Mario Brothers and thinking, if they ever make a movie out of this, I better be in it. I’m happy to say that dream came true.” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is slated to premiere in theaters on April 7, 2023. The film also stars Charlie Day as Luigi, Keegan-Michael Key as Toad, Jack Black as Bowser, Fred Armisen as Cranky Kong, Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek, and Sebastian Maniscalco as Spike. |
Iterative launches its second fund for Southeast Asia startups | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Despite global headwinds, Southeast Asia’s early-stage startups are still going strong, say the founders of . The Singapore-based venture capital firm, which runs a YC-style accelerator program, announced today it has raised $55 million for its Fund II from LPs like Cendana, K5 Global, Village Global and Goodwater Capital. Other backers include a group of founders and executives, such as Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Bukalapak co-founder and former CEO Achmad Zaky, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Andrew Chen, former YC COO Qasar Younis, former Foursquare CEO David Shim and Airbnb Asia head Kum Hong Siew. Since , the firm has backed more than 65 companies in five cohorts. Its portfolio companies have raised $163 million in follow-on funding and are worth $1.2 billion in total. Venture firms that have invested in Iterative’s portfolio companies include Insight Partners, Tiger Global, Monk’s Hill, Wavemaker and Hustle Fund. The new funding will allow Iterative to increase its check sizes to $500,000 and add more programs for founders in different stages, including ones for earlier-stage founders who aren’t ready for an accelerator yet and later-stage founders who have already gained strong traction. With Fund II, Iterative’s plan is have bigger batches of startups of about 30 each. Its goal is to invest in 100-plus companies at more stages, including pre-seed, seed and Series A startups. While Iterative’s first fund did not perform follow-on investments, the firm is now in the position to do so. Iterative co-founder and general partner Brian Ma said Fund II took just four weeks to raise, because Fund I’s founders performed well. Many of the first fund’s LPs returned and attractive return profiles in Southeast Asia also attracted new LPs. Startups in Iterative programs have access to its 80+ group of venture partners and visiting partners, who are all previous or current operating founders. “More concretely, we run weekly office hours, group office hours, speakers and workshops with our visiting partners, have a scaled-out fundraise bootcamp program, a built-out network to automate white-gloved introductions to investors and 450+ investors engage with our startups at our demo days,” said Ma. “Some of the most important work actually happens post-cohort, where we help alumni companies deal with negotiating their A’s or B’s, deal with scaling their organizations and help coach them through co-founder issues and other growing pains.” Some examples of Iterative’s portfolio companies that have recently raised money include Spenmo, which closed an ; travel company GoZayaan, which raised $8 million and to expand beyond Pakistan; and proptech startup Propseller, which raised a $12 million Series A in August. Meanwhile, another Iterative alum, Sendhelper, was . Iterative’s founders remain upbeat about startups in Southeast Asia. Even though there are currently fewer startups currently exiting there, early-stage investments continue to increase. For example, a report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Co. is “relatively less impacted by global economic trends” and that its real GDP growth is still 4.6% year-over-year. Iterative’s founders also note that Southeast Asia’s digital economy is expected to reach $200 billion this year, while Indonesia’s online spending it expected to hit $130 billion by 2025. Vietnam is an especially promising market, forecasted to more than double its online GMV over the next three years. Ma said Southeast Asian startups benefit from high potential and reasonable valuations. “With depressed economies and lofty priced companies in the U.S., China, etc., more capital is flowing into more nascent and higher growth regions like Southeast Asia. We believe this is where the best returns will come from in the next seven to 10 years.” |
Daily Crunch: Apple announces its 2022 App Store Award winners | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Oh hey! While we have you here, grab your calendar — we’ve got some things for you to add. For the stargazers among us, we’ll be in Los Angeles doing on December 6. And on April 20, 2023, we’re . Come to either. Come to both. Come to neither. We love you all just the same. But we’d prefer to see your faces in person if we can! Oh, and did you know it’s “Giving Tuesday”? That means it’s time to think about which of your favorite causes deserve some of your time or dollars, if you have some of either to spare. — and The venture market is in the middle of a downturn, but there are still plenty of emerging fund managers. Seedstars announced today it has launched a platform called Seedstars Capital with Swiss-based investment holding company xMultiplied to . The folks behind the initiative told that “Seedstars’ mission is to impact people’s lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship.” Earlier today, renowned VC Bill Gurley put together a list of the many “red flags” that VCs should have paid closer attention to when funding FTX, suggesting in a tweet that this summary of warning signs might help keep VCs “out of the investor hurt locker” going forward. All good and well, but in her great piece today, wonders , watching its smoldering remains dissolve into the parking lot. Most of the behaviors that Gurley identified today came to a grinding halt when the market abruptly shifted in spring, and by then, the damage was already done. And we have five more for you. Can you spot the theme of these puns? Send if you think you know the answer! / Getty Images According to a pre-seed report by DocSend, founders took an average of 52 meetings with investors in 2022, compared to 39 last year. At the same time, they are submitting 30% more pitch decks, but VC engagement has fallen 23%. “Founders may be discouraged in this environment, but they need to remember that they have ‘currency,’ too,” said Russ Heddleston, co-founder and former CEO of DocSend at Dropbox. DocSend’s report recommends using no more than 50 words per slide. The sections of the deck that address purpose, product and business model are the meat in the sandwich, so founders should spend the most time polishing those points. “Investors spent the third-highest amount of time reviewing the company purpose slide in pre-seed pitch decks, behind only the business model and product slides,” said Heddleston. Three more from the TC+ team: A group of our fine folks are covering Amazon’s conference in Las Vegas this week and have already posted a number of AWS announcements and updates. If you’re looking for recommendations, let us steer you toward: Here’s a bit of non-AWS news for ya: |
Magic creator Richard Garfield on why he put a paper game on the blockchain | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Richard Garfield is a name familiar to many in the tabletop gaming world, most notably as one of the creators of Magic: The Gathering, the most prominent trading card game out there. But Garfield is dipping his toe into the world of digital and in particular blockchain-adjacent games, and TechCrunch took the opportunity to quiz the veteran gamemaker on the pros and cons of this and other new approaches to gaming. It should be noted at the outset that unlike the dubious profit-focused gameplay of your Axie Infinity and suchlike, Garfield’s new game, technically a “mode” of , is not focused on speculation but is more of an experiment in distribution of a complete card-based game outside traditional publishing methods. It should probably also be noted that the game is full of the usual NFT and monetization chatter, but the core game itself, a 1v1 bluffing style match, is or numbered pieces of paper, for that matter. I played a few rounds with him that way and it’s actually quite fun and straightforward (I would like to state for the record that I was in a fair way to win but we had to stop early). A follow-up game unrelated to Garfield’s design and that uses more rarity/stat/token-focused mechanics is underway for a separate release in 2023. : There’s some benefits of not being tied to paper, and there’s some benefits of not being digital. In the digital space, the opportunity to sell people games which are digital but ownable has some appeal. In particular, when you sort of contrast what’s evolved in other digital spaces, where there’s so much free-to-play, which has a lot of negative baggage along with whatever positive it brings to the table. It’s all the above and more. It’s also a designer and a publisher choice. I think there’s some natural caution in this space, because so much of the design has been in an area which I don’t think is healthy for games, which is trying to conflate it with speculation — which I’ve got a lot of experience with, because this was the environment which Magic: The Gathering began in. And it was very poisonous for the gameplay to have people basically buying just to see their money go up. Because it got in the way of the game as a game. Blockchain Brawlers A lot of the designers and publishers these days are embracing that and saying, “Join this game now, make a lot of money.” That’s not healthy for game design, but is not intrinsically a part of players’ ownership of digital assets anymore. The negative qualities of free-to-play, for instance, aren’t intrinsically a part of free-to-play. It’s just there’s some things that are difficult to avoid, because of the way the revenue model works. And players these days, with digital ownership, it’s natural for them to conflate that with the speculation bubble, in the same way that a player who engages free-to-play, it’s always going to be a danger for them to think that it’s pay to win, or it’s some sort of hustle. But there is some confusion, and some reasons for that confusion. Yes, there was some skepticism. And it actually took a lot of effort to get past that. And it was quite divisive inside Wizards of the Coast itself. The problem was that as the prices went up with speculation, everybody drew comparison to the comic book market or Cabbage Patch Kids or whatever people collected, and got really popular, and then always busted. I wasn’t very educated in that area when I began, because I didn’t pay much attention to collectibles. But very quickly, I adopted the idea that this speculation was just awful for gameplay, that there was no upside for the players. We had to really work to bust that cycle — intentionally overprinted, for example, because we had to make it so that it wasn’t appealing to collect. When we finally managed to do that, there were some people at the company that thought we had sunk the product. And some players did, because they saw the value of their collection go down. But the game just blossomed at that point. And in the end, that’s what it was about: it was a game. It became very clear that the people who were playing the game were doing it because they loved the gameplay, not because of any investment. You really have to trust your publisher. When you’re doing a tradable object game, the publisher can always mess it up. Blockchain Brawlers On the other hand, people don’t buy Settlers of Catan and worry about whether the publisher is going to screw that by making their game weaker; they’ve got the game, and they can play it. And that is, to me, the potential appeal of digital ownership, that people don’t necessarily have to rely on the publisher. They only have to rely on the publisher to be fair when they’re in charge of some ongoing environment. Well, it’s a matter of, if you’re having your game engine being provided by somebody, you’ve got to trust them. That’s the end of the story. Here you have other avenues. Whether those will evolve or not depends on the community, and you know, whether there’s people who are interested enough to pursue that. I should point out that, with the game that I’ve worked on here, I was very firmly in the board game category, in the sense that the game that’s been provided is something where there’s no distinction between what players own — it’s a completely fair game. Really, it was the only reason I became interested in the project, because the publisher said they backed me on that. [Note: Players can own different “moves” and cosmetics but the gameplay elements, essentially the numbers 1-8 and some other minor things, are functionally the same for all even though they are treated as NFTs or some other owned digital item. These items may serve different purposes in other modes or games.] That part of the game is always there for people, like they can play it themselves, or somebody can code a new framework for it. And it’s simple enough that that’s not hard. This really is very close to a traditional game, in the sense that you buy a box and you can play. Frankly, I think that the advantages have been overstated by a lot of people. And, in fact, what’s kept me out of it for so long is that I really didn’t see the advantage over a server-based system for a long time. The key thing which got me involved is just how hard it is to get certain games done in the digital space, because of this free-to-play expectation. Like there’s a lot of games that, in theory, you could just put it on Steam, or put it up on iOS and have people download and play it. But you actually can’t do that, because you can’t charge for it. And if you put it up for free, you got to pay for it. And if you start attaching some free-to-play monetization to it, you’ve got advertisements or you got to fill a bar, or do cosmetics, or something which may not be of interest to designers or the players. So the game that’s being done here, for example, it be done on Steam, or it could be done on iOS. But the games I’ve done in the past, which are in this description have been really hard to get going because of this, because you’ve got to make it free. And then you’ve got to put in ads or something. So I’m being drawn to it in the same way that I really like working with paper publishers, because I can say: “Here’s a card game,” and they can print it, put it in a box, sell it to people. And nobody complains about that as a revenue model. That’s a really exciting area. I could talk for a long time on that. I’ve been really interested in that space. I first began to think about it back in, I guess, the late ’90s, where I just was struck by how I liked computer games, I like board games. And then I would play whatever, TF [Team Fortress]. I would play some digital shooter or something like that, and then I would play Scrabble. And I’d think, how are these even in the same space? They’re just such different experiences, and why aren’t there more games sort of like the board games I love, but taking advantage of all the things which have to be offered digitally. So to see more and more examples of that, including, like, Slay the Spire, these games, which have this sensibility really rooted in traditional gameplay, but taking full advantage of what the computer has to offer, and not making you just play Twitch games or something like that…It’s a very exciting area. I’m really excited to see where it goes, and happy to contribute anything to it where I can. |
AWS adds automated agent monitoring to Amazon Connect | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | AWS introduced Amazon Connect, its customer service-oriented product, some years ago, putting it smack dab in the middle of enterprise applications. It also places the company in the position of competing directly with the likes of Salesforce and other established enterprise SaaS vendors. When you are competing in that space, you need some powerful features, and today at AWS re:invent in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky introduced several new features to help bring more automation to Connect. For starters, the company is introducing new performance management capabilities under Contact Lens for Amazon Connect designed to help managers identify CSAs who are having issues. The solution uses a combination of performance review forms and machine learning-driven voice analytics to review job performance. It’s supposed to help identify agents who might need additional training or coaching. “These reduce the time the contact center managers spend identifying performance issues and helping to coach agents,” Selipsky explained today. Employees could see it differently (the bot says I didn’t answer correctly). Somewhat along the same lines, AWS is also introducing a new capability to guide agents through customer interaction so they can resolve issues faster and in a more consistent manner. This should help reduce the number of mistakes, and the need for the prior feature (at least in theory). AWS The company also announced the general availability of Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning and scheduling, which was originally announced in March this year. It’s designed to help contact center managers optimize agent schedules and ensure that they have the right people available. “Connect is a great example of how the cloud is removing constraints to reimagine business challenges like delivering better customer service,” Selipsky said, something that SaaS companies have known all along, but for AWS, which tends to concentrate on infrastructure and platform pieces, it is a different approach. |
Amazon introduces AWS Supply Chain to help bring order to supply chain chaos | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Over the last several years, we’ve seen supply chain disruptions the likes of which we haven’t seen previously. The pandemic led to a series of issues that spiraled into a full-blown supply chain crisis. Amazon wants to put AWS technology to work on the problem, and today the company announced a new supply chain solution at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky talked about the supply chain disruptions in today’s keynote. “The last few years have highlighted the importance of supply chain resilience; from baby formula shortages to ships circling ports unable to unload, the disruptions have been widespread. Addressing supply chain issues around inventory is especially critical,” he said. And that is an area where the company wants to put its strengths to work with a new solution called AWS Supply Chain. “So today I am thrilled to announce the preview of AWS Supply Chain, a new cloud application that improves supply chain visibility, delivers actionable insights to help customers mitigate supply chain risks and lower costs. With AWS Supply Chain you get a unified view of your supply chain data, ML-powered insights, recommended actions and built-in collaboration capabilities, so you can react quickly to unexpected issues,” Selipsky explained. Selipsky says that the solution is designed to strip away the complexity associated with managing this kind of data. “First, with just a few clicks you connect your supply chain data from SAP, EDI or other sources like warehouse management or order management systems. Then AWS Supply Chain automatically sets up a data lake using ML models that have been pre-trained to understand, extract and transform disparate incompatible data into a unified data model.” It then lets you display your supply chain data on a map, and drill down on specific locations to find where inventory is and how you can eliminate issues in any particular location, all while communicating with supply chain managers across your organization from the same tool. AWS “AWS supply chain helps you mitigate risk and lower cost by giving you a unified supply chain and surfacing the best actionable insights, all with a single pricing and no upfront licensing fees,” he said — and he promised as is often the case with AWS annoucements, this is just the start. Over time the company plans to add additional functionality and linkages. “And this is just the beginning. We’re going to continue to invest here and work to solve your hardest supply chain problems,” he said. AWS Supply Chain is available in preview starting today. |
8 great gifts for anyone working from home | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | This time two years ago, I changed up my annual gift guide feature’s focus from travel to working from home. After all, very few of us were doing much traveling at the time. I planned to switch back as the world reopened; it’s clear now, however, that for many of us, The pandemic has had a number of lasting impacts on our lives, including how — and where — we work. But requires more than simply choosing not to get on that train every morning. Creating a home office is a deliberate act. At its center is building a space where it’s possible to be every bit as productive in the absence of in-face meetings and awkward break-room conversations. You need to build a place that will sufficiently separate work life from the personal for eight to 10 hours a day. Here’s a handy for the person in life who needs a little extra push into that — or perhaps requires a refresh on some of the gear they purchased early in the pandemic. Brian Heater This thing is a beast. This is that money-is-no-object gift to really, properly transform that spare room into a home office. There are far-less-expensive options out there — including several from Apple — but the And hey, while you’re picking up that little square computer, why not shell out for the $1,599 27-inch 5K Studio Display? It’s a heck of a one-two combo — though fair warning, the Studio Display’s webcam for a system at that price point. Aside from that, picking up one of these will make you never want to go into the office (or, perhaps, leave the house) ever again. Mac Studio $1,999, Studio Display $1,599 Brian Heater Speaking of webcams, I continue to get a lot of compliments on the picture quality from the . The startup’s hardware had great image quality out of the gate that nearly rivaled a desktop DSLR, and subsequent software updates have only made things better. The company has worked out most of the beta bugs, with firmware that will work with all the major teleconferencing platforms and tweaks to image quality that make this is a hard one to beat. Also worth a look is the . The webcam is priced the same at $300, but the clever gimbal base makes for more dynamic shot tracking. That’s great for those who like to move around a bit more during remote meetings. $300 Shure I love this mic. I asked Shure to send me one for gift guide testing purposes and As I shifted from in-person to remote podcasting during the pandemic, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find the perfect USB mic. With design and sound-quality to rival its famous XLR counterparts, the directional MV7 is going to be a hard one to beat. I recently recorded an NPR interview on the thing, and have turned it into my day-to-day teleconferencing microphone. It’s about as close as you’ll get to plug and play at this level, and the sound rivals studio-quality recordings. Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about it. Pair this with the and wow everyone on that Zoom call. $225
Brian Heater The is a bit of an odd duck. Like some of the products above, it’s super easy to use. After years of wildly complicated router installs, it’s a breath of fresh air. Setup is effectively as easy as getting a smart speaker up and running. Also like the above, it may be a lot more powerful than most need. The system supports extremely fast download speeds via WiFi 6E — and there’s a good chance your existing ISP is going to be the biggest bottleneck. I’ve happily ditched my ISP’s hardware for one and haven’t looked back. It’s reasonably priced at $200 (larger homes may want to go the mesh route with the two- or three-device bundle) and designed to blend in with its surroundings, much like the rest of the Nest line. $200
Sony Unless you live alone in the middle of nowhere, a good pair of noise canceling headphones are a must — and over-ear models don’t come better than this. , courtesy of sound quality, comfort, battery life and active noise canceling. And bonus: when it’s time to get back on the road, these are a perfect carry-on companion. $350
Satechi I love me a good accessory. The company makes clever, well-designed products that blend in well with their surroundings. The 2-in-1 Headphone Stand With Wireless Charger is a particularly good desktop companion. The bar up top gives you a place to keep the over-ear headphones, with a USB-C port in the rear to keep them charged up. Below is a MagSafe compatible wireless charging pad for your iPhone or AirPods. The 3-in-1 Magnetic Charging stand is a bit pricier. It’s great way to charge up the iPhone, AirPods and Apple Watch in one fell swoop. The MagSafe pad is also designed to keep the phone upright, so you can continue to use it while topping up the battery. 2-in1 Headphone Stand With Wireless, $80 | 3-IN-1 Magnetic Wireless Charging Stand, $120
Keychron I asked my friend (and fellow TechCruncher) to recommend a nice, accessible mechanical keyboard for my work from home guide. He recommended the Keychron Q5 QMK Custom Mechanical Keyboard. The accessory is customizable, but it’s nothing too fancy, just a great feeling, terrific sounding, well-priced mechanical keyboard that will help your loved one reconnect with the joys of typing. $200
Coway How about the person who seems to otherwise have their office in order? No one has ever regetted bringing a high-quality air purifier into their house. There are a lot of overpriced products and quite a bit of snake oil in this category, but the Coway Airmega AP-1512HH Mighty is a reasonably priced powerhouse. This HEPA filter is designed to clean a space up to to 874 sq. ft. in around half an hour, promising to reduce 99.999% of 0.01-micron particles. In addition to removing pollen and odors, there’s a built-in pollution sensor that showcases a room’s air quality in real time. It’s hard to imagine a better gift than the gift of breathable air. $220
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AWS now supports natural language forecasting queries in QuickSight Q | Paul Sawers | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced some notable new natural language querying capabilities that enable nonanalysts to forecast future business outcomes. By way of a quick recap, AWS first introduced its business intelligence service , allowing customers to visualize their data through dashboards and reports without requiring the technical prowess of a developer. Fast-forward to 2020, and to the mix via , enabling users to find answers simply by typing plain-English questions into a search bar, such as “show me this month’s sales by segment.” Today’s announcement builds on that by serving answers to future-gazing questions. “ML-powered forecasting with Q,” as AWS CEO Adam Selipsky referred to the new feature onstage at AWS re:Invent today, allows users to view business performance forecasts without involving any analysts or data scientists. All they have to do is enter “forecast” or “show me a forecast” into the search bar, followed by up to three metrics (e.g., “sales”), and Q will deliver the appropriate visualizations for that query. On top of that, users can include filters — for example, if they want to see sales for a specific region over a specific timeframe. QuickSight Q: Forecasts with filters Additionally, QuickSight Q will also now support natural language “why” questions, allowing nonanalysts to drill down into the data and figure out what factors led to a particular outcome. For example, if a graph shows that enrollment in a course dropped, the user might also want to know why it dropped. So they would start such a query with the word “why” and then follow it up with a metric and a timeframe. In this case, the question could be: “Why did enrollment drop in 2021?” QuickSight Q: “Why” questions Both forecasting and “why” questions are available to users from today. |
AWS SimSpace Weaver can run city-sized simulations in the cloud | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | At this morning’s re:Invent keynote in Las Vegas, Amazon unveiled AWS SimSpace Weaver, a computing service that allows developers to run city-sized simulations at scale in the cloud. The service is designed to free simulation developers from the constraints of their own hardware. Amazon’s proposed applications are for city managers simulating a natural disaster to test emergency response systems, as well as the impact of sports games on traffic flow. These are complex situations with a lot of moving parts, which shouldn’t require watching a real-life instance to gain insight. Among the other advantages to running this in the cloud is the ability to have multiple external parties view and interact with the simulation remotely in real time. Amazon “Simulating these events requires modeling hundreds of thousands of independent dynamic entities to represent the people and vehicles,” AWS principal developer advocate Marcia Villalba notes . “Each entity has its own set of behaviors that need to be modeled as it moves throughout the world and interacts with other entities. Simulating this at a real-world scale requires CPU and memory beyond what you can have in one instance.” Amazon The system works by portioning the space into instances and partitions, creating the kind of grip design you see above. SimSpace Weaver’s data replication system manages memory management and networking for transferring entities across partitions. The company notes that SimSpace Weaver is not itself a simulator. Instead, it creates a basis on which a simulator can be built across instances, effectively weaving (hence the name) multiple instances together into a single experience. Find your spatial footing. ☁️📍🗺 With SimSpace Weaver, you can develop real-world simulations where millions of dynamic entities—from vehicles & people to devices & machines—interact in real time. It’s positively s(t)imulating. 👉 — Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) Unity and Unreal Engine 5 developers can access the system through SimSpace Weaver plug-ins. It’s available starting today in the U.S. East, U.S. West, Asia-Pacific and Europe AWS regions. There’s no licensing fee; instead the pricing depends on the number of instances a developer integrates into the simulation. |
TechCrunch+ roundup: Fundraising under scrutiny, optimizing LTV, visa bulletin update | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Plenty of companies that launched during downturns went on to be phenomenally successful. During the Great Depression, Stanford grads David Packard and William Hewlett famously set up shop in a Palo Alto garage. Microsoft was founded as the U.S. was recovering from a years-long oil embargo that hobbled the economy. Slack, Airbnb, Uber and Square all rose from the ashes of the Great Recession. As of September 2022, investors have amassed almost $300 billion in dry powder, and VC funds are still raising money by the boxcar. That’s because even during recessionary times, VC funds tend to outperform public markets. Which explains why I’ve never heard an investor say it’s a bad time to launch a startup. But ask a few entrepreneurs, and you may get a different story. , founders took an average of 52 meetings with investors in 2022 compared to 39 last year. At the same time, they are submitting 30% more pitch decks, but VC engagement has fallen 23%.
In Q4 2022, it takes more time to raise less money. “Founders may be discouraged in this environment, but they need to remember that they have ‘currency,’ too,” said Russ Heddleston, co-founder and former CEO of DocSend at Dropbox. Because investors spend less time reviewing pitches, concise, data-driven storytelling is more important than ever. DocSend’s report recommends using no more than 50 words per slide. The sections of the deck that address purpose, product and business model are the meat in the sandwich, so founders should spend the most time polishing those points. “Investors spent the third-highest amount of time reviewing the company purpose slide in pre-seed pitch decks, behind only the business model and product slides,” said Heddleston. The idea that there’s a “good” time to launch a startup is just a bedtime story investors tell founders, and I regret any role I had in promoting it. Starting a company is an uphill slog on an uncertain path, and it’s not for everyone. But if that’s your path, don’t let anyone talk you out of it. Thanks for reading. Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
/ Getty Images Low valuation caps allow early-stage investors to gain a larger ownership stake and reduce their risk. However, these caps are increasingly being used as a proxy for the value of the company at the time of the investment, which in turn creates “unnecessary complexity for inexperienced founders and investors,” write attorneys Andrew Ritter, Adam Silverman and Jack Sousa, partners at Wiggin and Dana. “With the interim rate of return method, you simply negotiate a rate of return (like an interest rate) that applies to the convertible instrument investment solely for purposes of future conversion or the amount payable in a pre-conversion exit.” / Getty Images Deep tech VC Champ Suthipongchai is a successful fund manager, but he claims to have made plenty of mistakes along the way. As co-founder and general partner of Creative Ventures, he raised $65 million “with fewer than 25 LPs.” Looking back, he says he initially wasted too much time chasing investors and failed to use FOMO to his advantage. “While there’s no one right way to go about fundraising, there are a few wrong ways — and failure is a wonderful teacher,” says Suthipongchai. / Getty Images Over the last two years, intelligent calendar platform Reclaim.ai raised $10 million “using a more incremental approach,” writes co-founder Henry Shapiro. “We’ve done all this without giving up a single board seat, and Reclaim employees continue to own over two-thirds of the company’s equity,” rejecting conventional wisdom that founders should “raise as much as you can as fast as you can.” In a TC+ post, Shapiro reviews the process they used to identify follow-on investors, shares the email template they used to pitch the SAFE and explains why “a larger cap table means more founder control.” Legal tech startup Juro raised a $23 million Series B earlier this year to scale its web-based contract negotiation platform. Juro’s founders shared their 15-slide pitch deck with TC+ and only “blurred out part of its future road map and the actual numbers for the financials.” Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch / Getty Images E-commerce startups make as much as one-fifth of their yearly revenue in the months after Black Friday/Cyber Monday. But how can brands convert shoppers who respond to a holiday promotion into repeat customers who come back all year long? In a TC+ post, Dan LeBlanc, CEO and co-founder of data and analytics firm Daasity, provides a detailed strategy guide aimed at helping marketers boost ROI and perform cohort analysis to track lifetime value against customer acquisition cost. “Consumer brands who know how to use their data to maximize LTV will win the holidays and set their brand up for growth well into the new year.” / Getty Images No-code technology can be a double-edged sword. Platforms like Zapier and Salesforce make it easy to automate tasks and workflows, but “configuring a low-code platform is so easy that the low-code administrator often does not understand the impact of checking a box,” writes David Brooks, senior vice president of product at Copado. In a post for TC+, he breaks down the three riskiest Salesforce misconfigurations: / Getty Images According to Ann Lai, a general partner at Bullpen Capital, many startups that put core metrics front and center during fundraising are sabotaging themselves. “Using raw, unfiltered data is common at startups that donʼt know how to properly filter their information, and they often end up offloading data irrelevant to their company and mission,” says Lai. In a post aimed at both investors and founders, Lai offers three strategies that will help “ensure that you arenʼt just data-driven, but data-informed.” |
Amazon announces preview of new Inf2 instances designed for larger models | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | As companies build more complex machine learning models, the cost of training and running these models becomes a real issue. AWS has created a series of custom instances to help bring down the cost, and today it introduced a preview of an all-new Inf2 instance for EC2 designed to process data from larger workloads more efficiently. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky made the announcement today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. As Selipsky told the AWS re:Invent audience, “Inf1 is great for small-to-medium complexity models, but for larger models, customers have often relied on more powerful instances because they don’t actually have the optimal resource configuration for their inference workloads.” They did this because up until now, there simply wasn’t another solution available to help bring down the cost and complexity of processing these larger workloads. “You want to choose the solution that is the best fit for your specific needs, which is why today I’m excited to announce a preview of the Inf2 instance powered by our new inferentia2 chip,” he said. For folks who need that extra power, Inf2 provides it. “Customers can deploy a 175 billion parameter model for inference on a single instrument with four times higher throughput and 1/10 the latency of Inf1 instances,” he said. The new instances are available in preview starting today. |
Edtech Saasguru wants to fix the cloud talent shortage at scale | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Cloud tech companies are facing a , making it hard to hire people and difficult to make sure their current workforce’s skills are up to date. Australia- and U.S.-based Saasguru wants to narrow the gap with an edtech platform designed for new graduates and tech workers who want to become better at using cloud platforms like Salesforce or AWS. The company announced today it has raised a seed round of $4 million AUD (about $2.7 million USD) led by , along with returning investors Black Nova and Antler. Saasguru’s last funding was nine months ago, when it raised a pre-seed round of $1.3 million AUD. The company was founded in 2021 by Amit Choudhary, Atif Saad and Prateek Kataria. Choudhary and Saad sold their last startup SaaSfocus, a Salesforce consulting company, . So far, Saasguru has been used by 40,000 students in 20 countries and has worked with 20 cloud consulting companies that want to train new workers, as well as refresh the skills of their existing teams. Its students range from new graduates who are starting their first jobs in cloud tech to professionals who want to earn more training certificates. The search for people with cloud computing skills in the Asia-Pacific region is urgent, with showing that workers needed will triple by 2025, going from 37 million workers in 2020 to 109 million. Saasguru wants to help its learners become ready for cloud tech jobs, while creating more talent at scale. Saasguru founders Atif Saad, Amit Choudhary and Prateek Kataria. Saasguru Choudhary told TechCrunch that the idea for Saasguru was planted while he and Saad were still working on SaaSfocus and struggled to compete for talent with large cloud consulting companies. “This forced us to look at organic talent creation by hiring people from diverse non-technology backgrounds and upskilling them through a homegrown program tailor-made for Salesforce job readiness,” he said. “This became a bit of a ‘secret sauce’ for us and it helped us scale the business to over 360 consultants, with over 80% of them being trained through this program.” SaaSfocus’s training program included hyperpersonalized study plans, “TikTok-like” micromodules of content, mentoring, peer-to-peer learning and hands-on assignments. After selling SaaSfocus, Choudhary and Saad used this approach in a pro bono program to help people get new jobs during COVID by teaching them Salesforce skills. Of the 50 people who took part in the program, almost all got placed in Salesforce-related jobs. “It was the lightbulb moment when we realized this could be scaled with tech into a global business,” Choudhary said. Saasguru was launched in early 2021, combining the components of the pro bono program with a deep tech platform. Saasguru’s 15 programs include ones for learning Salesforce, ServiceNow, AWS, GCP and Azure. It plans to use its funding to add more cloud certifications. Choudhary said Saasguru personalizes courses, which can take from 30 hours for a self-paced cloud certification program to 300 hours for a career bootcamp, by using a two-step process. The first step is an initial assessment that analyzes the readiness of a learner and creates a learning pathway for them. Then as they start taking a course, the platform recommends the next best step to take. Saasguru acquires customers by running free webinars with its teachers, or gurus. They also offer free one-on-one mentoring sessions on careers and interview tips and certifications, and they run a Slack community. Saasguru serves both individuals and cloud consulting companies that want to build the skills of new and existing employees. In a statement about the funding, Square Peg Capital principal Lucy Tan said, “There is a massive cloud skills shortage in the industry that is slowing down digital transformation initiatives undertaken by businesses. Universities are not well equipped to solve this skills shortage as the skills update so quickly. This means post-university upskilling is critical for continued business growth and Saasguru provides a personalised learning pathway for cloud professionals to embark on, helping them get skilled and certified in cloud technologies. This can make a meaningful impact on people’s lives from either landing them in a new career or getting salary increases.” |
AWS gets data clean rooms for analytics data | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | AWS today launched that will help users inside an advertising or marketing organization share data with other employees inside their company or with outside partners, all without running the risk of inadvertently sharing personal data. This new service is part of Amazon’s , which aims to leverage existing AWS services — and those from its partners — to provide purpose-built services for them. Clean Rooms is the first major new product of this initiative. “Data clean rooms are protected environments where multiple parties can analyze combined data without ever exposing the raw data,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky explained in today’s keynote. “The clean rooms are hard to build. Their complex requirements take months to develop and once you’ve built a clean room you have to continuously update the data all the while meeting requests for new collaborators and data types.” AWS A company that has a customer’s loyalty data, for example, could collaborate with another that has data on a user’s ad-clicking behavior to create new insights into a user’s behavior, all without ever sharing that user’s raw and identifiable data, Selipsky argued. “With these insights, we can produce even more relevant ads while maintaining privacy for everyone to get started,” he said. “Brands and media publishers use the clean room console or the API and they set up a clean room and start collaborating with other companies in just a few clicks. So instead of spending months of development time to customize the types of queries and restrictions, you just need to allow partners to run these clean rooms with you.” The idea here is to provide a single service that companies can use to collaborate on data while still protecting the underlying data, using a set of configurable controls. All collaborators can contribute their own data, be it in plain text, hashed, or pre-encrypted. Then they can use these clean rooms to collaborate on this data, all without revealing the raw data to each other. In total, there can be up to five collaborators and their data is stored in an AWS Glue Data Catalog. When anyone runs a query over this data, Clean Rooms will read it, wherever it lives, and then the service will automatically apply the preset rules to protect each participant’s raw data. Each table can have its own rules, which restrict the type of query that is allowed. Encrypted data will remain encrypted when these queries are run. AWS “Customers in the advertising and marketing industry have been seeking new ways to interoperate with their partners while protecting consumer data and reducing heavy lifting from their engineering teams,” said Tim Barnes, director of solutions for advertising and marketing technology at AWS. “With the launch of AWS Clean Rooms and AWS for Advertising and Marketing, AWS customers now have a broad set of solutions that make it easier for them to securely collaborate together, operate cost-effectively at petabyte scale and millisecond latency, and innovate more quickly in areas like advertising measurement and customer experience.” |
For $20 a month, you can host meetings in Mozilla’s mini metaverse | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | Mozilla’s Hubs offering has been kicking around for several years now. Lucas a 2018 preview of the service thusly, “It’s not Second Life, or even Facebook Spaces; it’s pretty low-key. You’re just a humble robot hanging with other robots who are hopefully your friends.” The service has expanded features since then (including the arrival of non-robot avatars), but the bare-bones Second Life vibe is still very much intact. Mozilla notes that over the years, has hosted a number of different gatherings, from virtual events and classrooms to art galleries. Mozilla Today it’s introducing a subscription version of the service. Is this simply an effort to charge for what Mozilla has offered up for free? Per an FAQ in an associated blog post: No. Our new Hubs subscription service is a significant expansion of what you can do today by creating a room. With our new subscription model, rather than having to manage individual rooms on hubs.mozilla.com, you’ll have access to account management tools, privacy and security features to customize access to your Hub, the ability to brand your Hub’s home page and color theme. From the sound of it, the big draws are more customization and control over Hubs. That will run you $20 a month. The org says additional tiers and a free version are coming down the road, but at this point, it’s $20 a month or bust (though you can cancel whenever). Future tiers will offer up things like more storage and the ability to host more people in a room. No word on what the free version will — and won’t offer. As for existing Hubs, Mozilla says: At this time, we will keep hubs.mozilla.com as it exists today up and running, but we do plan to change our data retention policies for hubs.mozilla.com in the future to remove old content that is no longer in use. In the coming months, we will release a timeline for these changes and include instructions on how to migrate content to a free or paid subscription. The paid tier is available starting today and Mozilla is soliciting requests. How about some arms to start? We recognize that legs might be a bridge too far. |
Summer International uses social media data to launch new beauty brands | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | If you follow #beautytok, #beautytube or any beauty content on social media platforms, you know that popular product trends are hard to keep up with. stays ahead of the game by identifying the most influential content creators, and working with them to incubate new brands. Founded in Singapore and based in Los Angeles and South Korea, Summer International announced today it has raised a $5 million seed round from investors including GDP Ventures, Teja Ventures, Gushcloud International and Singaporean angel investors Koh Boon Hwee and Shirley Crystal Tan. NYX founder and Bespoke Beauty Brands CEO Toni Ko will also join Summer International as a strategic investor. NYX was acquired by L’Oreal in 2014 for about $500 million. Summer International co-founder and CEO Xiaoski Kuik said the company’s goal is to create an ecosystem to help influencers and creators launch and sell beauty brands using consumer data and analytics. It operates in the United States, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. The company launched in 2018 along with Gushcloud International, an influencer marketing firm. Since then, Summer International has incubated brands like skincare line Baby Face with Singaporean influencer Jamie Chua, who has over 1.2 million followers, and wellness brands HANJAN, which launched in April at Coachella and recently struck a partnership with singer Nicole Scherzinger. Kuik told TechCrunch that Summer International looks for creators and influencers who have a strong connection with their audience based on engagement rates, how active they are a video-first platforms and whether they have a strong localized community and global presence. “Many times, creators seek us out because of our reach and resources,” she said. “We have our own supply chain and we have the power to distribute brands across Asia via our social commerce and live distribution platforms. Our goal is to establish these top influencers as founders of the next-gen beauty, skincare and wellness brands and to provide them with the access and necessary resources they need to break into the market.” Other companies that also work with creators to launch brands include Pietra and Forma Brands. Ko said Summer International differentiates by owning its own distribution network and it also has a network of live commerce and social commerce distributors, mainly micro influencers based in Southeast Asia. “It gives us the ability to understand data of what consumers want and would buy and this allows us to collaborate with creators to build brands in a more cost-efficient manner,” Kuik said. Summer International’s live commerce distribution network helps it understand what brands and products consumers from different parts of Southeast Asia want to buy. It also provides data points like pricing and demographics to create new brands and market them. Summer International brands are sold through a mix of digital and offline channels, including e-commerce platforms, social and live commerce platforms and big box stores. They are also available on Summer.store, the company’s proprietary social commerce network. |
Meta appoints new India head amid key departures in its largest market | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | Meta has appointed Sandhya Devanathan as the new head of its India business following several high-profile departures in the key overseas market. The social juggernaut said on Thursday that Devanathan, who joined the firm in 2016 and helped build the company’s Singapore and Vietnam businesses, In her new role, which begins January 1, Devanathan will report to Dan Neary, vice president at Meta Asia-Pacific. The new reporting hierarchy is a shift for the firm, which earlier saw India executives directly report to the U.S. leadership. “Devanathan will focus on bringing the organization’s business and revenue priorities together to serve its partners and clients, while continuing to support the longterm growth of Meta’s business and commitment to India,” Meta said in a statement. With over half a billion Indians using Meta services, the American giant identifies India as its largest market by users. Facebook’s family of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, have grown fastest in India in recent years, onboarding hundreds of millions of users. It has also made a series of ambitious investments in the country, including and ramping up the . “India is at the forefront of digital adoption and Meta has launched many of our top products, such as Reels and Business Messaging, in India first. We are proud to have recently launched JioMart on WhatsApp, which is our first end-to-end shopping experience in India,” said Marne Levine, chief business officer of Meta, in a statement. “I’m pleased to welcome Sandhya as our new leader for India. Sandhya has a proven track record of scaling businesses, building exceptional and inclusive teams, driving product innovation and building strong partnerships. We are thrilled to have her lead Meta’s continued growth in India.” The new appointment comes at a time when Meta has seen several key departures in India in recent weeks. Ajit Mohan, the former head of Meta India, to join rival Snap as the president of the younger firm’s Asia-Pacific business. WhatsApp India head Abhijit Bose and Meta India’s Public Policy head Rajiv Aggarwal . Even as the parent firm Meta has grown its finances in India in recent years, the company’s WhatsApp service has been slow at keeping pace in the country’s mobile payments market. “WhatsApp Pay has to be the biggest failure in India as a tech product,” tweeted Ashneer Grover, the flamboyant entrepreneur who co-founded fintech startup BharatPe. “Everyone has WhatsApp on their phone — sending money on WhatsApp using UPI is as easy as sending pictures. It should have beaten Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay,” he added. WhatsApp, which over recent regulatory changes, has struggled to get regulatory clearance from the National Payments Corporation of India, the payments body that oversees the widely popular UPI instrument, to extend its mobile payments service to its entire userbase of over 500 million users in the country. Earlier this year, NPCI permitted WhatsApp to roll out . In the meantime, WhatsApp has also received criticism from some users for not putting enough safeguards to prevent businesses from . |
Blizzard ends 14-year licensing deal with NetEase in China | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | In a somewhat surprising turn, Blizzard Activision, the California-based gaming publisher behind global hits like World of Warcraft and Overwatch, will be suspending most of its games in China due to the expiration of licensing agreements with NetEase, the second-largest gaming company in the country. Blizzard’s is set to end a 14-year licensing partnership between the two gaming giants. All told, Blizzard has been providing gaming services in China through various partners, including Electronic Arts-backed The9, for 20 years. From January 2023, most of Blizzard’s titles will stop operating in China. That includes the likes of World of Warcraft, Warcraft III: Reforged, Overwatch, the StarCraft series and Diablo III. Diablo Immortal co-development and publishing is covered under a separate agreement between the two companies, Blizzard said. This could mean the game will likely continue its service in China. The companies each released their own response explaining how they reached the end of the marriage. “The two parties have not reached a deal to renew the agreements that is consistent with Blizzard’s operating principles and commitments to players and employees, and the agreements are set to expire in January 2023,” said Blizzard. The decision came at a time when a silver lining appears in China’s gaming industry, which has been hit with heavy-handed regulations over the last few years. But Blizzard isn’t giving up on China and is open to finding alternative publishing partners, which are that serve the market. “We’re immensely grateful for the passion our Chinese community has shown throughout the nearly 20 years we’ve been bringing our games to China through NetEase and other partners,” said Mike Ybarra, president of Blizzard Entertainment. “Their enthusiasm and creativity inspire us, and we are looking for alternatives to bring our games back to players in the future.” Even if Blizzard manages to land a new partner, the process of reapplying for regulatory permits for its franchise of games could be an ordeal. China has of video games after implementing a spate of strict regulations on the sector. The termination of the partnership seems to have a limited impact on NetEase’s bottom line. The firm said in a statement that “the net revenues and net income contribution from these licensed Blizzard games represented low single digits as a percentage of NetEase’s total net revenues and net income in 2021 and in the first nine months of 2022.” Still, NetEase’s shares plunged 11% on the news Thursday afternoon in Hong Kong. Interestingly, NetEase also had this to say: “We hold high regard in our product and operational standards and abide by our commitments to Chinese players.” Is NetEase hinting at its dissatisfaction with how Blizzard operates in China? In any case, the divorce doesn’t sound like an amicable one. Indeed, Simon Zhu, president of global investment and partnership at NetEase Games, : “As a gamer who spent ten thousand hours in the world of Azeroth, starcraft and overwatch, I feel so heartbroken as I will not longer have the access to my account and memories next year. One day, when what has happened behind the scene could be told, developers and gamers will have a whole new level understanding of how much damage a jerk can make. Feel terrible for players who lived in those worlds.” |
Singapore’s Temasek writes down $275M investment in FTX | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | continuing to deal with the fallout from the cryptocurrency exchange’s . In a today, Temasek, the investment firm owned by Singapore’s government, said it wrote down its full investment in FTX, “irrespective of the outcome of FTX’s bankruptcy protection filing.” Temasek invested $210 million USD in FTX international, giving it a minority stake of about 1%. It also invested $65 million for a minority stake of about 1.5% in FTX US, in two funding rounds from October 2021 to January 2022. The firm said the total cost of its investment was 0.09% of its net portfolio value of $403 billion SGD (about $293 billion USD). Temasek made a point of noting that its investment in FTX was not an investment in cryptocurrencies. “To clarify, we currently have no direct exposure in cryptocurrencies,” it said. Instead, the reason it invested in FTX was because it wanted to back a “leading digital asset exchange providing us with protocol agnostic and market neutral exposure to crypto markets with a fee income model and no trading or balance risk sheet.” It also said that its due diligence process for FTX took about eight months, from February to October 2021, and involved a review of FTX’s audited financial statement, which it said showed the exchange to be profitable. But with FTX’s collapse, Temasek now says “it is apparent from this investment that perhaps our belief in the actions, judgement and leadership of Sam Bankman-Fried, formed from our interactions with him and views expressed in our discussions with others, would appear to have been misplaced.” Temasek’s announcement comes a few days it was writing down its $100 million investment in FTX, which was once valued at $32 billion. it was writing down its other investments. FTX’s other investors include BlackRock, Tiger Global, Insight Partners and Paradigm. |
BoomPop gains traction by designing high-end off-sites for a remote-first world | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | There’s nothing sexy about corporate retreats. But , a 26-person, San Francisco-based outfit that the startup studio Atomic launched in 2020, is managing to infuse some pizazz into the long-formulaic industry. Given what BoomPop is building, one could even see it evolving into more than a way for companies to more easily plan luxury meet-ups for their far-flung employees, which is how it largely exists right now. Think weddings, family reunions, business conferences and more. Fast-forward to today, and the viability of the business is even more assured, says Cypher. He says that some of its customers have already paid BoomPop to organize “60 to 70” mini meetups for them — both virtual and offline. They also have many more options from which to choose. According to Cypher, BoomPop now features “thousands of hotel options, meeting spaces, activities, photographers who can create sizzle reels of these events and swag” to give to participants as they head back home. BoomPop also handles the invitations, creates event pages with agendas, tracks scheduling and budget changes and handles payments. (It creates an escrow account for every event that shuts off when it’s over.) In short, it’s a lot of mini-businesses in one, and it has all been built from the ground up, says Cypher, who claims that so far, 4,000 companies have made arrangements for 150,000 of their employees at an average price of $65,000 per event. Most of those customers — 73%, says Cypher — have never planned or hosted an off-site before. All of them pay a flat fee that BoomPop guarantees that is “at least 10% to 20% off the best rates you can buy,” he says. BoomPop The numbers would seem to validate Cypher’s theory that as companies shrink their physical footprint, along with the associated cost of outfitting those offices, there’s a lot of “new, shiny, found money” that’s being spent in different ways. Most is likely being used right now to extend companies’ runway, but some percentage will invariably be used to adapt to a world where employees who work from home would benefit from greater social cohesion. (It’s not an act of altruism. Colleagues are often what make jobs sticky.) Unsurprisingly, BoomPop isn’t alone in spying the trend lines. In addition to competing with Airbnb Experiences (which is more disjointed), BoomPop is going up against the internal event planning teams within big companies and a growing spate of startups, including the end-to-end retreat planning startup , whose founder was a former Apple engineer (the company went through YC last winter) and , an LA-based seed-funded outfit that is similarly designing off-sites and other experiences for its customers. Still, BoomPop would seem to have some advantages over some of these rivals. First, Atomic is a company-making factory whose best-known brands include the telehealth outfit Hims & Hers, which via a special purpose acquisition company early last year, and OpenStore, an outfit that is snapping up . Atomic hasn’t had a blow-your-hair-back-level exit yet, but it has seen plenty of success to date, including on the basis of how many of its raise follow-on rounds and considering that it doesn’t pour a into its creations. BoomPop itself quietly raised a previously unannounced round of $14 million back in February from ACME Capital and Atomic, along with Box founder and CEO Aaron Levie. Meanwhile, Cypher is no slouch, either, having co-founded some of Atomic’s companies, as well as founded his own company before he teamed up with Atomic. That earlier startup, Oak Labs, made a full-length touch-screen mirror for dressing rooms and was for “tens of millions” of dollars three years after it was founded, per Cypher, who was once a retail innovation head at eBay. Indeed, while a recession could certainly crush a business like BoomPop depending on its severity and length, there’s data to support that should it make it through, BoomPop could become a big business. Consider that even with layoffs in the air, offices in the U.S. are still , according to recent data out of the security firm Kastle Systems. And companies are adjusting to that shift in behavior. According to a July survey of 250 U.S. companies from the flexible workspace software provider Robin, 46% of companies plan to cut their office space in the next year. Of those outfits, 59% said they would shrink their space by . It should free up some capital. If BoomPop’s bet is right, some of it will be spent on bringing employees who are increasingly apart back together in new ways. |
The new 2023 Toyota Prius plays up power, not fuel economy | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | Toyota is beefing up the fuel-sipping Prius hybrid, adding more power and quicker acceleration to appeal to a wider range of car shoppers in an increasingly crowded market. The car created — and dominated — the segment when it launched in the U.S. 22 years ago. But the world’s first production hybrid car has steadily lost ground to from American, German, and Korean automakers as it enters its fifth generation. The 2023 Toyota Prius debuted Wednesday evening at the with a sportier powertrain and curvier, low-slung silhouette to broaden its appeal to sports car customers who would not have considered a Prius in the past. However, the hybrid won’t become much greener: Toyota said the new model can deliver 57 mpg, similar to the outgoing Prius. 2023 Toyota Prius. Toyota Toyota said the new model features a lower roofline and wider rear for a more modern, athletic look. The standard, front-wheel-drive model will now produce 194 horsepower, a 60% increase over the previous generation. The new hybrid can travel from 0 to 60 mph in 7.2 seconds — slower than a sports car but still a 26% improvement over the previous Prius’ 9.8-second trip. The power boost comes from the new hybrid’s larger engine and a smaller, lighter lithium-ion battery that increases output 15% over the previous generation’s nickel metal battery, according to Toyota. [gallery ids="2444220,2444222,2444225,2444226,2444227,2444228"] 2023 Prius Prime plug-in hybrid. Toyota A lower, longer and wider Prius Prime, the nameplate’s plug-in hybrid version, also debuted at the auto show Wednesday evening, boasting a 50% increase in its electric range. That suggests that the new Prime will be able to travel roughly 37 miles on a fully charged battery before drawing power from its gas engine, compared with the outgoing model’s 25-mile range. Toyota said it will announce pricing and delivery dates for the Prius hybrid later this year and for the Prius Prime early next year. |
Korean VC Sopoong closes $8M fund for startups focused on environmental impact | Kate Park | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | Two years ago, South Korea a plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Getting there will be another story. A , a social impact-focused VC, intends to support environmentally minded tech founders in South Korea and Southeast Asia, while building a bridge between Korean conglomerates and startups in the sector. Sopoong has closed on around $8 million (10.3 billion won) for its latest, sixth fund, bringing the firm’s total assets under management to approximately $22 million (28 billion won). I spoke with Sopoong chief executive , a serial entrepreneur who joined Sopoong in 2016 and acquired the firm in 2019, to learn about the VC’s plans. Sopoong Ventures / CEO Max Han “It is a significant signal for large South Korean corporates participating as limited partners of environmental and climate tech-focused venture capitals like us,” Han said. “Participating LPs [Korean conglomerates] are passionate about climate technology and want to take part to address the climate and environment issue as they agree that the climate crisis is one of the urgent problems.” Korean petroleum refining company and chemical company participated in Sopoong’s climate-focused fund as limited partners, Han said, adding that they will be more like strategic partners to Sopoong. Nonprofit organizations such as , established by Hyundai Group, and , as well as startup founders and executives, including the co-founder and former CEO of Krafton, , also joined Sopoong’s climate fund, Han continued. The early-stage VC had already set up five social impact funds and backed 81 startups since 2020, after Han acquired the firm in December 2019. Sopoong was launched in 2008 by , who co-founded South Korea’s largest internet portal operator Daum Communication, which merged with Kakao in 2014. Now, the VC firm wants to zero in on the climate crisis and other environmental issues through its sixth fund, but other tech sectors like SaaS and IT will still be on its radar, according to Han. “Two-thirds of the fund will be invested in the environment and climate tech, including renewable energy, agritech and food tech, and the rest will go to the information technology industry investment,” Han said. Its sweet spot is early-stage ventures from seed to Series A stages across South Korea and Southeast Asia. Its average check size is $150,000, but the firm can go up to $600,000, Han told TechCrunch. The sixth fund has already invested in 16 startups, including , a plant-based food startup; , a Vietnam-based electric scooter and battery-swapping technology startup; , a platform for managing charitable donations; and , an automation tool that helps users complete coding and design files. Nine of the 16 portfolio companies are participating in Sopoong’s first accelerator program, which launched in June and runs for six months. Sopoong invests up to $350,000 into each startup via the accelerator program and offers mentorship, co-working space, administrative support and networking opportunities with experts. On top of the accelerator, the firm also launched a six-month fellowship program to foster climate tech entrepreneurship. So far, Sopoong says it has selected 13 individuals with master’s or doctoral degrees in environment-related majors, offering them $1,700 in grants per month and other support, including the accelerator program. If participating fellows succeed in founding a startup, Sopoong could make a seed investment, Han said. |
Protein programmers get a helping hand from Cradle’s generative AI | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | Proteins are the molecules that get work done in nature, and there’s a whole industry emerging around successfully modifying and manufacturing them for various uses. But doing so is time consuming and haphazard; aims to change that with an AI-powered tool that tells scientists what new structures and sequences will make a protein do what they want it to. The company emerged from stealth today with a substantial seed round. AI and proteins have been in the news lately, but largely because of the efforts of research outfits like and . Their machine learning models take in easily collected RNA sequence data and predict the structure a protein will take — a step that used to take weeks and expensive special equipment. But as incredible as that capability is in some domains, it’s just the starting point for others. Modifying a protein to be more stable or bind to a certain other molecule involves much more than just understanding its general shape and size. “If you’re a protein engineer, and you want to design a certain property or function into a protein, just knowing what it looks like doesn’t help you. It’s like, if you have a picture of a bridge, that doesn’t tell you whether it’ll fall down or not,” explained Cradle CEO and co-founder Stef van Grieken. “Alphafold takes a sequence and predicts what the protein will look like,” he continued. “We’re the generative brother of that: You pick the properties you want to engineer, and the model will generate sequences you can test in your laboratory.” Predicting what proteins — especially ones new to science — will do is a difficult task for lots of reasons, but in the context of machine learning the biggest issue is that there isn’t enough data available. So Cradle originated much of its own dataset in a wet lab, testing protein after protein and seeing what changes in their sequences seemed to lead to which effects. Interestingly the model itself is not biotech-specific exactly but a derivative of the same that have produced text production engines like GPT-3. Van Grieken noted that these models are not limited strictly to language in how they understand and predict data, an interesting “generalization” characteristic that researchers are still exploring. Examples of the Cradle UI in action. Cradle The protein sequences Cradle ingests and predicts are not in any language we know, of course, but they are relatively straightforward linear sequences of text that have associated meanings. “It’s like an alien programming language,” van Grieken said. Protein engineers aren’t helpless, of course, but their work necessarily involves a lot of guessing. One may be fairly certain that among the 100 sequences they’re modifying is the combination that will produce the desired effect, but beyond that it comes down to exhaustive testing. A bit of a hint here could speed things up considerably and avoid a huge amount of fruitless labor. The model works in three basic layers, he explained. First it assesses whether a given sequence is “natural,” i.e.. whether it is a meaningful sequence of amino acids or just random ones. This is akin to a language model just being able to say with 99% confidence that a sentence is in English (or Swedish, in van Grieken’s example), and the words are in the correct order. This it knows from “reading” millions of such sequences determined by lab analysis. Next it looks at the actual or potential meaning in the protein’s alien language. “Imagine we give you a sequence, and this is the temperature at which this sequence will fall apart,” he said. “If you do that for a lot of sequences, you can say not just, ‘this looks natural,’ but ‘this looks like 26 degrees Celsius.’ that helps the model figure out what regions of the protein to focus on.” The model can then suggest sequences to slot in — educated guesses, essentially, but a stronger starting point than scratch. The engineer or lab can then try them and bring that data back to the Cradle platform, where it can be re-ingested and used to fine-tune the model for the situation. The Cradle team on a nice day at their HQ (van Grieken is center). Cradle Modifying proteins for various purposes is useful across biotech, from drug design to biomanufacturing, and the path from vanilla molecule to customized, effective and efficient molecule can be long and expensive. Any way to shorten it will likely be welcomed by, at the very least, the lab techs who have to run hundreds of experiments just to get one good result. Cradle has been operating in stealth and is now emerging having raised $5.5 million in a seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Kindred Capital, with participation from angels John Zimmer, Feike Sijbesma and Emily Leproust. Van Grieken said the funding would allow the team to scale up data collection — the more the better when it comes to machine learning — and work on the product to make it “more self-service.” “Our goal is to reduce the cost and time of getting a bio-based product to market by an order of magnitude,” said van Grieken in the press release, “so that anyone — even ‘two kids in their garage’ — can bring a bio-based product to market.” |
Toyota unveils all-electric SUV concept under its ‘Beyond Zero’ badge | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | Toyota unveiled Wednesday an all-electric SUV concept with plant-based seating and an AI “personal” assistant as the automaker expands its “beyond zero” portfolio. The bZ compact crossover concept that debuted at the Los Angeles Auto Show is meant to showcase Toyota’s vision for its battery-electric future. Toyota has said it plans to launch 30 fully electric vehicles, including five under the bZ (“Beyond Zero”) badge. Last year, the Japanese automaker kicked off the bZ brand with the unveiling of the . That vehicle, which is nearly identical to the thanks to a collaboration between the two companies, came to market earlier this year. The SUV concept car showcases a “possible vision of the very near future” for its EV lineup, the automaker said in a statement. Toyota didn’t provide a timeline for the launch, but said the portfolio will support its goal to go carbon neutral by 2050. Toyota The 2023 Toyota Prius, a mild hybrid, also debuted Wednesday ahead of the auto show. Toyota said the sleek bZ concept pushes the wheels to the corners to achieve an aggressive stance, making it appear in motion when parked. Its silhouette displays short overhangs, sweepback angles and a “narrowed-down cabin design” to create a futuristic look, according to the automaker. Inside, the car showcases seating made from plant-based and recycled materials and a semicircle-shaped steering wheel that looks like the top half has been lopped off. Yui, the name of the AI-based “personal agent,” responds to requests from front or rear passengers using sound and lights that “move around the cabin.” [gallery ids="2444247,2444246,2444248,2444245"] |
Cruise has expanded its driverless robotaxi service to daytime hours | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | Cruise is expanding its driverless ride-hailing service in San Francisco to daytime hours, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt tweeted Wednesday. The robotaxi service is now available to employees 24 hours a day. Eventually, these expanded operating hours will be available to the public. The bolstered hours are the latest expansion of the GM subsidiary’s driverless operations in San Francisco. Cruise opened its , in which there is not a human safety operator, to the public in early 2022. Initially, the rides were free, limited to small portions of the city and only offered between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. That service has expanded over time. Cruise began charging for rides in June 2022. Today launched *daytime* driverless rides. Service is live for Cruisers and will launch to the public soon. First ride was this morning around 8:30 am: — Kyle Vogt (@kvogt) Today, public customers can hail (and are charged for) driverless rides between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. About 70 Cruise AVs are operating in the service. Cruise has about 300 AVs across its operations in San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix. Fares include a base fee of $5 and a $0.90 per mile and $0.40 per-minute rate. A 1.5% city tax is also included in the price. An estimated fare is calculated using the estimated time and distance of the fastest, most optimal route. Cruise shares that estimate fare with customers and will charge that amount if the time or distance of the actual ride takes longer. Cruise doesn’t have surge pricing. Cruise Earlier this month, Cruise expanded its service area to most of San Francisco. For now, that expanded area is only available to employees. Cruise is also expanding operations to Austin and Phoenix. In October, the company invited potential passengers in Phoenix and Austin to to be among the first robotaxi passengers. During GM’s third-quarter earnings call, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said the company remains on track to complete its first commercial driverless public rides and deliveries by the end of the year. Cruise will likely follow a similar playbook in Austin and Phoenix as it has in San Francisco, albeit at a faster pace considering both locations are in states with fewer regulatory hurdles than California. In San Francisco, Cruise typically starts with its own employees and then opens it up to the public. The service area and hours also start small and grow, each time being first offered to employees. |
Tatum is building a robot arm to help people with deafblindness communicate | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | Precise numbers on are difficult to calculate. For that reason, figures tend to be all over the place. For the sake of writing an intro to this story, we’re going to cite from the World Federation of the DeafBlind that puts the number of severe cases at 0.2% globally and 0.8% of the U.S. Whatever the actual figure, it’s safe to say that people living with a combination of hearing and sight loss is a profoundly underserved community. They form the foundation of the work being done by the small robotics firm, . I met with the team at during a trip to Boston last week. The company’s 3D-printed robotic hand sat in the middle of the conference room table as we spoke about Tatum’s origins. The whole thing started life in summer 2020 as part of founder Samantha Johnson’s master’s thesis for Northeastern University. The 3D-printed prototype can spell out words with American Sign Language, offering people with deafblindness a window to the outside world. From the user’s end, it operates similarly to tactile fingerspelling. They place the hand over the back of the robot, feeling its movements to read as its spells. When no one is around who can sign, there can be a tremendous sense of isolation for people with deafblindness, as they’re neither able to watch or listen to the news and are otherwise cut off from remote communication. In this age of teleconferencing, it’s easy to lose track of precisely how difficult that loss of connection can be. Tatum Robotics “Over the past two years, we began developing initial prototypes and conducted preliminary validations with DB users,” the company notes on its site. “During this time, the COVID pandemic forced social distancing, causing increased isolation and lack of access to important news updates due to intensified shortage of crucial interpreting services. Due to the overwhelming encouragement from DB individuals, advocates, and paraprofessionals, in 2021, Tatum Robotics was founded to develop an assistive technology to aid the DB community.” Tatum continues to iterate on its project, through testing with the deafblind community. The goal to build something akin to an Alexa for people with the condition, using the hand to read a book or get plugged into the news in a way that might have otherwise been completely inaccessible. In addition to working with organizations like the Perkins School for the Blind, Tatum is simultaneously working on a pair of hardware projects. Per the company: The team is currently working on two projects. The first is a low-cost robotic anthropomorphic hand that will fingerspell tactile sign language. We hope to validate this device in real-time settings with DB individuals soon to confirm the design changes and evaluate ease-of use. Simultaneously, progress is ongoing to develop a safe, compliant robotic arm so that the system can sign more complex words and phrases. The systems will work together to create a humanoid device that can sign tactile sign languages. Tatum Robotics Linguistics: In an effort to sign accurately and repeatably, the team is looking to logically parse through tactile American Sign Language (ASL), Pidgin Signed English (PSE) and Signed Exact English (SEE). Although research has been conducted in this field, we aim to be the first to develop an algorithm to understand the complexities and fluidity of t-ASL without the need for user confirmation of translations or pre-programmed responses. Support has been growing among organizations for the deafblind. It’s a community that has long been underserved by these sorts of hardware projects. There are currently an estimated 150 million people with the condition globally. It’s not exactly the sort of total addressable market that gets return-focused investors excited — but for those living with the condition, this manner of technology could be life changing. |
Daily Crunch: Amazon starts delivering layoff notices to thousands of employees | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | Hello, and welcome to your…checks the top right of the screen…Wednesday. Several of our TechCrunch colleagues headed to Miami today for the event tomorrow. Given the past week, it will no doubt be an interesting event. . Now, let’s get to some news! — Venture capital firms continue to close new funds as they decide their next moves. I wrote about , which has a new $25 million fund focused on fintechs, while has details about ’s $212 million that will be essentially split between seed-stage and follow-on opportunities and two coasts. And now here’s four more for you: / Getty Images Investors might enjoy listening to a well-rehearsed founder’s story, but sharing the right customer data “can definitively power up a pitch deck,” says David Smith, VP of data and analytics at TheVentureCity. “Investors need to see that you’re not being blindsided by easy wins that can go up in smoke within weeks, but are using hard data to build a sustainable company that will endure, and thrive, with time.” Three more from the TC+ team: Having been married for 20 years, I’ve completely avoided the whole online dating scene, but I have heard from friends that it’s tough out there. Most people are looking for commitment, but hey it’s 2022, and not everyone is ready for that. Hinge, which touts itself as “the dating app designed to be deleted,” recognizes this and has added a new feature that . has more. It is indeed the end of an era: Evernote, the note-taking and task management app, has by Bending Spoons, a company you probably just opened up a new tab to do a Google search on. has the details. And we have four more for you: |
Upside’s cell-cultured chicken is first to receive FDA blessing for its production method | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | In a major first, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration just offered its safety blessing to a cultivated meat product startup. It with Upside Foods to examine human food made from the cultured cells of animals, and it concluded that it had “no further questions” related to the way Upside is producing its chicken. “At this time, this is the only human or animal food product for which the FDA has completed an evaluation,” the agency confirmed to TechCrunch via email. Before you get too excited, the FDA noted that the pre-market consultation “is not an approval process,” but that it did agree with Upside’s safety conclusion about its products. Still, it’s a historic milestone for cultivated meat companies that are trying to scale their products. Indeed, progress around the world has been slower than food entrepreneurs might like. Singapore was the , with Eat Just being the first, and really only, company to sell its lab-grown chicken there. As Upside Foods explains, the company will now work with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to secure the remaining approvals before its cultivated chicken can be sold to consumers. The company didn’t provide a time frame for when that will happen, but says that “more details on the timing of the launch will follow.” The FDA and United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) say these requirements include facility registration for the cell culture portion of the process, a manufacturing inspection and for the food itself to receive a mark of inspection from the FSIS before it can enter the U.S. market. This includes making sure it is properly regulated and labeled, the agency said. “We are already engaged in discussions with multiple firms about various types of food made from cultured animal cells, including food made from seafood cells that will be overseen solely by the FDA,” the FDA said in a written statement. “Our goal is to support innovation in food technologies while always maintaining as our priority the production of safe food. Human food made with cultured animal cells must meet the same stringent requirements, including safety requirements, as all other food.” While Upside’s chicken product is now deemed safe, is it practical price-wise? As we’ve previously reported, making cultivated meat products is expensive and the scale is not yet close to meeting the demand for meat around the world. “ What is evident is that there is a lot of activity going on in this space. Just this week, of lab-grown meat and plant-based proteins to be able to move faster to market. Meanwhile, Vow, another cultivated-meat startup, announced a rather — $49.2 million — and is tapping into that existing Singapore network to get its exotic meat products, like kangaroo and alpaca, into restaurants. One thing’s for sure, the FDA making a definitive move for Upside Foods will hopefully be a “rising tide lifts all boats” moment for the cultivated meat industry. Synthesis Capital’s co-founder and partner Rosie Wardle, who was part of earlier this year, seems to think so. She said via email that Synthesis sees this “as one of the most important milestones for the future of the food industry to date.” Especially as the cultivated-meat method is estimated to via less water, land use and energy over the traditional way of using animals to make meat. “Our own research indicates that alternative protein growth will continue exponentially through the late 2020s and early 2030s, with the sector reaching dominant market share in around 2035,” Wardle added. “The FDA approval for cultivated meat is a significant step in that direction, and we believe this announcement will have an overwhelmingly positive impact on the broader alternative proteins market.” We’ve reached out to Upside Foods for comment and will update the story with any responses. |
SBF regrets declaring FTX bankrupt | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | The saga of FTX, formerly that fell rapidly into bankruptcy, took a new turn today after Sam Bankman-Fried. The erstwhile executive, known in the crypto world as SBF, discussed regulators, ethics and bankruptcy regrets, amongst other issues that have become the de jure conversation in tech since FTX itself immolated. “Everyone goes around pretending that perception reflects reality, it doesn’t,” SBF said in a Twitter conversation with reporter Kelsey Piper. “Some of this decade’s greatest heroes will never be known, and some of its most beloved people are basically shams.” In the notes, shared in screenshot form by the publication, SBF spoke harshly of regulators, saying that they “make everything worse” and that “they don’t protect customers at all.” Given that SBF’s former company will soon , the approach and tone are notable. His take on regulators is predicated, later messages make clear, on his view that their methods of control are too simplified — “just ‘do more business’ vs ‘do less business’ and ‘put up more moats’ vs ‘put up fewer moats’” — which doesn’t distinguish “between good and bad” in his estimation. The Vox interview spent a good chunk of its time discussing ethics and philanthropy, an unsurprising choice given that SBF was a well-known person in the “effective altruism” movement, a method of helping others that focuses on what is practical. SBF was also an active political donor until recently, further keeping him in the media limelight. Back on the matters most pertinent to TechCrunch, while discussing his own activities, SBF wrote that he “didn’t want to do sketchy stuff [as] there are huge negative effects from it,” adding in a following message that he “didn’t mean to.” Last week, while Enron wind-down veteran John J. Ray III was appointed as the new CEO. In response to SBF’s public statements, although we’re not exactly sure which ones as there are many, Ray published a statement saying that “Mr. Bankman-Fried has no ongoing role at FTX…and does not speak on their behalf.” Later in the conversation with Vox, SBF brought up CZ, the well-known leader of Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world. up until, and after, the FTX meltdown centered the attention of the world on their different business approaches, and leverage. “A month ago CZ was a walking example of ‘don’t do unethical shit or your money is worthless,’” SBF Wrote, “now he’s a hero,” later asking if the shift in his view of market perception of CZ was due to his being virtuous, or simply having had the “bigger balance sheet,” leading to CZ winning and not SBF. CZ’s comments about FTX’s native token FTT are viewed by some as a precipitating event in the collapse of the latter exchange; precisely where blame lies is not yet entirely clear, so grains of salt, please. Interestingly enough, Bankman-Fried tells Vox that his “biggest single fuckup [was] the one thing everyone told” him to do: file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He thinks if he hadn’t filed for bankruptcy, “withdrawals would be opening up in a month with customers fully whole.” He adds: “But instead I filed, and the people in charge of it are trying to burn it all to the ground out of shame.” So Vox inquired whether he was suggesting he should’ve just kept trying to raise the $8 billion lifeline. SBF added that he might still get there, but with way more “collateral damage.” Damage is correct. The impact is still being felt; at the other firms in the crypto trading and investing business or the smaller individuals and businesses that had assets on the platform (pre-bankruptcy). The fall-out even hurts early-stage entrepreneurs, that was originally backed by FTX Future Fund. There are entire chapters, if not volumes to come. And thankfully for those of us observing, and reporting, SBF continues to talk. |
This robotic dog can walk over just about any terrain | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | Quadruped robot developers like Boston Dynamics have taken great pains to develop systems capable of traversing all manner of terrain. For the right price, you can pick up a robotic dog that can take a kick, get back up and get back on its way. A team comprised of researchers at Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley have for teaching these sorts of robots to make their way over tough ground. The list includes stairs, curbs and uneven and slippery terrain. Rather than relying on the more standardized method of using cameras to map the world in front of them, the team trained the roots using simulators: four thousand virtual clones were sent on their way across all manner of different terrain. CMU The researchers say the method allowed them to effectively reproduce six years of walking experience in a single 24-hour period. The data collected in the simulations was then fed into a neural network and loaded on the robot. With the on-board learning, the system can react to its environment in real time and adjust its legs accordingly. The team claims that the system can bring down the cost of robots substantially. “This system uses vision and feedback from the body directly as input to output commands to the robot’s motors,” researcher Ananye Agarwal said in a post tied to the research. “This technique allows the system to be very robust in the real world. If it slips on stairs, it can recover. It can go into unknown environments and adapt.” Assistant professor Deepak Pathak says the system works in similar ways to real animals like cats. “Four-legged animals have a memory that enables their hind legs to track the front legs. Our system works in a similar fashion.” In additional to being able to climb stairs nearly its own height, the system is also able to operate in the dark, though the vision system is still required for improved performance. |
Apple to launch ‘MLS Season Pass’ subscription on February 1 | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | Today, Apple the launch date and price of its upcoming subscription service for Major League Soccer (MLS) fans, “MLS Season Pass.” Starting February 1, 2023, subscribers in 100+ countries and regions can get MLS Season Pass on the Apple TV app for $14.99 per month during the season or $99 per season. Notably, Apple TV+ subscribers that sign up for MLS Season Pass only have to pay $12.99 per month or $79 per season. Viewers can stream MLS games on the Apple TV app on Apple devices, smart TVs, streaming devices, game consoles, set-top boxes and . The company claims that the new subscription service will bring the league to its “biggest worldwide audience ever.” MLS Season Pass will likely be a great option for cord-cutters as it features all live MLS regular season matches, playoffs, hundreds of MLS NEXT Pro and MLS NEXT games, and the Leagues Cup match. Plus, there are no blackouts, the company says. So, soccer fans in over 100 territories will get to watch teams in or out of market. For comparison, ESPN+ streams up to 350 out-of-market MLS matchups for . Apple users can tune into the live game anytime and watch it from the start, so they don’t miss their favorite team. Games on MLS Season Pass will feature English and Spanish broadcasters. Canadian games will have commentary in French. Also, during match days, Apple will livestream an exclusive show on MLS Season Pass so viewers can watch game replays, highlights and analysis. MLS 2023 regular season is set to begin on February 25 and will open with the Los Angeles FC against the LA Galaxy. During the “MLS is Back” opening weekend, Apple TV users don’t need an MLS Season Pass subscription as all these matches will be available to stream for free. Fans can expect to learn the league’s full 2023 schedule in mid-December. “We could not be more excited to bring our fans MLS Season Pass, a new home for all MLS matches and a wide variety of league and club content they can’t get anywhere else,” said Don Garber, MLS’s commissioner, in a statement. “We have the most engaged and passionate fans in sports, and now they’ll have every match everywhere with MLS Season Pass.” Apple’s announcement comes on the heels of the company closing a , a significant move pushing Apple further into the live sports streaming space. currently only offers games. As more media companies , Apple needs to be more aggressive with its live sports offerings. Reports have circulated for months that Apple may be the for . “There isn’t a more perfect time to introduce MLS Season Pass, coming off the heels of the most dramatic MLS Cup in history and with MLS as the fastest-growing soccer league in the world,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services, added. “We’re counting down the days to February 2023 when fans everywhere can enjoy MLS Season Pass on billions of devices — all with no blackouts.” |
Kenya’s Twiga dismisses in-house sales team, affecting 21% of it employees | Annie Njanja | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | Kenya’s B2B e-commerce food distribution platform has laid off 211 of its full-time employees following restructuring that has eliminated the company’s in-house sales team. The laid-off staff make up 21% of the over 1,000 employees mainly in Kenya, where it links farmers or agricultural producers and fast-moving consumer goods manufactures to retailers. The agritech’s CEO and co-founder Peter Njonjo told TechCrunch that the laid-off trade development representatives (TDRs) were given the option of working for the company as independent agents with pay based on the customers they acquire and sales they make. The representatives signed up vendors and were in charge of customer relations, gathering market intelligence and promoting products to clients. In the current proposition, the agents will carry out similar duties. also state that Twiga has limited its staff travel allowances as part of its cost-cutting measures. “Twiga recently launched a new optimized sales agents’ program … where current trade development representatives will transition from permanent employees into independent agents on a 100% commission basis,” said Twiga in response to a TechCrunch inquiry, adding that the transition of the TDRs was made in line with labor laws and that impacted employees were granted the first right of refusal to transition to the new model. The company says it plans to create 1,000 opportunities through the agent model by the end of next year’s first quarter. “This transition creates an opportunity for entrepreneurship open to former sales agents and the general public. The benefit of this transition is that it allows for higher earnings based on the effort and enterprise of the agent. This model has worked with other businesses like insurance and banking that have transitioned fully into Independent Agents in Kenya.” Twiga, co-founded by Njonjo and Grant Brooke in 2014, joins the growing list of startups in Africa and across the globe downsizing amid a slowdown in VC funding, which has made capital for operations and growth hard to access. The changes come exactly a year after Twiga . The round was led by Paris- and Nairobi-based family office and private equity firm Creadev as TLcom Capital, IFC Ventures, DOB Equity and Goldman Sachs’ spinoff Juven made follow-on investments. They also recently launched Twiga Fresh, an addition to its private label through which it will farm and distribute its own agricultural produce to traders and to deal with traceability challenges, stock outs and price volatility — which have made it hard for the company to deliver on its promise of affordability and food security. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 11 | 29 | null |
More reasons than ever to go to TC Sessions: Crypto | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | We can’t think of a more exciting moment in time to host — it opens tomorrow, November 17, in Miami. The past two weeks have been a wild roller-coaster ride — to say the least — and there’s not a better place to unpack everything that’s happened. to see and hear the latest developments and analysis live and in person. It’s also the perfect place to recalibrate expectations about what the future of the cryptoverse might hold. You’ll hear directly from leading experts like: Need more reasons to attend? Listen up. It’s seriously now o’clock for founders and developers to make sure you know how to keep your dream funded, secure your work and ensure that you can continue to grow at scale. Check out just some of the day’s panel discussions, and be sure to check out . But wait, there’s more! You’ll learn plenty from our partners, who offer a range of essential topics: On top of all that, connecting with great colleagues and developing new business relationships is one of the best ways to weather uncertain times. You’ll have time to meet old friends and make new connections at the expo hall, during breakout sessions, in the networking zone or over drinks at our after party. takes place on November 17 in Miami. This is one of the most pivotal points in crypto history: Don’t miss your chance to hear the current analysis and learn what you need to do — now — to keep your crypto dreams on track. and be in the room tomorrow!
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Iran-backed hackers breached a US federal agency that failed to patch year-old bug | Carly Page | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | The U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency says hackers backed by the Iranian government compromised a federal agency that failed to patch against , a vulnerability fixed almost a year ago. In , the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said that a federal civilian executive branch organization (FCEB) was breached by Iranian government hackers earlier in February. CISA did not name the breached FCEB agency, a list that includes the likes of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Trade Commission, and CISA spokesperson Michael Feldman declined to answer our questions when reached by TechCrunch. CISA said it first observed the suspected activity on the unnamed federal agency’s network months later in April while conducting retrospective analysis using Einstein, a government-run intrusion detection system used to protect federal civilian agency networks. The agency found that the hackers had exploited Log4Shell, a critical zero-day vulnerability in the ubiquitous open source logging software Log4j, in an unpatched VMware Horizon server to gain initial access into the organization’s network with administrator and system-level access. VMware released security patches for Horizon servers in December. But this compromise happened even though CISA had all federal civilian agencies to patch their systems affected by the Log4Shell vulnerability by December 23. Once inside the organizations’ network, CISA observed the threat actors installed XMRig, open source crypto mining software that is commonly abused by hackers for mining virtual currency on compromised computers. The attackers also installed Mimikatz, an open source credential stealer, to harvest passwords and to create a new domain administrator account. Using this newly created account, the hackers disabled and implanted Ngrok reverse proxies on several hosts in order to maintain their access in the future. The attackers also changed the password for the local administrator account on several hosts as a backup should the rogue domain administrator account get detected and terminated. It’s not clear for what reason the hackers targeted the U.S. federal agency. Broad access to an organization’s network can be used for both espionage as well as launching destructive attacks. CISA, which has not attributed the breach to a particular advanced persistent threat (APT) group, shared indicators of compromise (IOCs) to help network defenders detect and protect against similar compromises. CISA also said that organizations that haven’t yet patched VMware systems against Log4Shell should assume that they’ve already been breached and advises them to start hunting for malicious activity within their networks. The agency also urges organizations to keep all software up-to-date, implement |
Instafest app lets you create your own festival lineup from Spotify | Ivan Mehta | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | If your favorite music festival’s lineup didn’t live up to your expectations this year, don’t worry; a new app called will create a music festival poster for you based on your Spotify listening habits. The free web app, created by developer , is pretty straightforward to use: sign in with your Spotify account, and it will generate a poster based on the artists to whom you most listened. You can customize the poster based on time intervals — last four weeks, last six months and all time. You can also select different styles of posters such as Malibu Sunrise, LA Twilight and Mojave Dusk. Instafest app also calculates what it calls “Basic Score,” which might give you bragging rights about the niche music choice. The lower the score, the more niche your music festival is. Once you generate the poster, you can choose to rename your music festival, hide/show your username and hide/show your Basic Score. If you want to remove support for this app, you can follow to revoke access. Saboo told TechCrunch he got the idea for the app while thinking about what Coachella’s lineup would look like if he picked the artists. “I had the idea when I was in bed scrolling through TikTok one day. I saw people were posting videos from Coachella and I started thinking about how I would set the Coachella lineup if I could pick the artists. The thought process led to me thinking about generating a music festival graphic using a Spotify integration, and I built off from there,” he said. The developer is already working on adding support for more platforms. The site already lets you generate a festival poster using your Last.fm listening history and support for Apple Music support is in the works. Saboo wants to add support for music streaming services such as YouTube Music, Deezer and Amazon Music down the road, he said, but cautioned that it might take some time as not every platform’s APIs are as friendly as those of Spotify. is no longer limited to just Spotify! Support for is officially live at . Next up: Apple Music 🤫 — Anshay Saboo (@AnshaySaboo) Saboo is currently focusing on maintaining the app and adding more integration that makes sharing users’ festival lineups more fun. He said while it’s too early to comment on long-term plans, he is exploring possibilities of making a music-based social network around festival graphics generation. Within hours of launch, Instafest has become a popular talking point on social media. Folks are posting their lineup to show off their good (or trash) taste in music. Saboo told TechCrunch that more than 5 million people have generated their Instafest poster. I first thought: “I got a lot of explaining to do” 🤣🤣🤣😂😂 I don’t owe no one ish. No More. — Dr. Love (@questlove) Makes sense. — Woman King (@keiopensdoors) The Instafest app seems like a mirror version of the app, which lets you create playlists through music festival posters. So, if you like someone’s Instafest poster, you can use the LineupSupply app to make a playlist. The app’s launch comes days before for users — showing customized listening habits across music and podcasts for each user — drops. So in a way, this feels like a Spotify Wrapped before Spotify Wrapped. |
Seedstars Capital launches to support new fund managers around the world | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | The , but there are still plenty of emerging fund managers. Seedstars announced today it has launched a platform called Seedstars Capital with Swiss-based investment holding company xMultiplied to help new fund managers around the world launch funds and develop their investment firms. Seedstars Group co-founder and Seedstars Capital managing partner Michael Weber and Seedstars Capital partner Benjamin Langer told TechCrunch in an email that “Seedstars’ mission is to impact people’s lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship.” Over the past decade, it has supported various stakeholders, mostly tech entrepreneurs, through entrepreneurial programs. “We’ve seen so many talented entrepreneurs grow their companies very fast, to the standard of the U.S. or Europe, but unfortunately too many struggle to raise capital to grow even faster. To continue our mission to support them, Seedstars is now supporting the next generation of VC fund managers in emerging markets that will then back those promising entrepreneurs.” Seedstars Capital will look for sector and industry-specific strategies in regions and countries like Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia and India. It is looking for funds that target pre-seed to Series A companies, because that is where they see the biggest funding gaps and potential. “Ideally, we want to support gender-diverse teams as we know we need a more inclusive industry,” said Weber and Langer. “We are convinced this will have a tremendous impact at the portfolio level and we will be able to empower more women entrepreneurs.” The platform will incubate, accelerate and invest in new venture capital funds in emerging markets like Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Managers have usually raised a micro fund, already have experience as angel investors or worked at larger investment firms, and are in the process of launching their first institutional funds of between $15 million to $50 million. Many fund managers are ones that Seedstars has known for a long time “and despite having relatively little track record on their own we knew they had the necessary skills to become top performing managers,” Weber and Langer said. In fact, this is how Seedstars International Ventures began. Weber and Langer had worked with co-founder Charlie Graham-Brown since 2014, and in 2019 launched its first global fund for emerging markets, focusing on pre-seed stage. Last year, it with Patricia Sosrodjojo, which is now backed by the IFC, the Rockefeller Foundation, Visa Foundation and Symbiotics, among other investors. Seedstars Africa Ventures, which invests across the continent, was also formed in a similar way. Seedstars had known Tamim El Zein and Maxime Bouan since they worked at Blue Orchard, focusing on Africa. They , Bruce Nsereko-Lule, and now the fund has LBO France as an anchor investor. “Over the last year, we have meet with many exceptionally talented teams working very hard building their ecosystems and investing in outstanding entrepreneurs across emerging markets,” Weber and Langer said. “We want to partner with them and allow them to develop their strategies and have a powerful and positive impact.” Seedstars group partners Michael Weber, Alisée de Tonnac, Pierre-Alain Masson and Charlie Graham-Brown. Seedstars Seedstars Capital is committed to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and plans to use ESG and impact considerations as it selects a diverse group of fund managers. It also plans to serve as an investment catalyst with the goal of getting fund managers over $500 million of new funding in total. Seedstars Capital says this will create more than 10,000 new jobs and generate over $20 billion of additional GDP in emerging markets over the next 10 years. Challenges Seedstars Capital will help emerging VC managers solve include ones like access to international funding. Since most of them typically have assets under management below $50 million and focus on a specific country or sector, they often rely on local individual investors, family offices and development finance institutions (DFIs), which can make fundraising periods stretch as long as 18 to 24 months. Many emerging managers also lack access to infrastructure, even though they are good at investing in high-growth startups. That means they don’t have the resources to build the right support infrastructure for their portfolio companies and firms, including marketing budgets, tech stacks to manage deal flow and investors, tools and framework to measure the positive impact of portfolio companies or a network of mentors to support their founders. They also lack access to a community of people, including mentors, investors and other managers, that can help them share best practices, deal flow, market trends or informal events, Weber and Langer said. “These are critical components of building a brand that will allow managers to select the best opportunities and attract the best talent.” Weber and Langer said Seedstars can help solve these issues because it has over 10 years of experience in emerging markets, and has accelerated or incubated more than 2,000 ventures. It also has a network of more than 1,000 experts and mentors and is therefore “in a prime position to become that partner who can support emerging managers thrive in the industry and develop their investment firms in an institutional manner.” In terms of investment, Weber and Langer said Seedstars Capital has tested several models, including investing in the management company, providing warehousing facilities or serving as an LP. In the future, it will work with managers throughout the fundraising stage, providing access to Seedstars network and relationships to help funds hit their first or final close more quickly. It will also be an LP in all funds, and plans to invest between 3% to 5% of the fund size, with the goal of increasing that allocation to up to 10% in the future. “Having said that, we do not intend to become an investor and our goal will always remain the same, working alongside the most talented emerging managers as partners in the development of their investment firms,” Weber and Langer said. |
AWS makes Lambda cold start latency a thing of the past with SnapStart | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | At its re:Invent kickoff keynote tonight, AWS a small but important update to , its serverless platform, that tackles one of the most common issues with the service. Typically, when a function isn’t used for quite a while, Lambda will shut down the virtual machine — and despite improvements like faster microVMs, this still takes a while. Now, with SnapStart, AWS is addressing this by creating snapshots of a customer’s Lambda functions and then simply starting those up without having to go through the usual initialization process. Cold start times have long been one of the biggest complaints about Lambda — yet as Peter DeSantis, AWS’s senior VP of Utility Computing, noted in today’s keynote, spiky workloads are pretty much what Lambda (and all other serverless platforms) were built for. With its Firecracker microVMs, AWS already improved cold start times from multiple seconds to well under a second. Now, the company promises a 90% improvement in cold start times by using Firecracker’s . Frederic Lardinois This new feature is now available to all Lambda users, though it has to be enabled for existing Lambda functions, and for now it only works for Java functions that make use of the . Once enabled, when you first run that function, it will perform a standard initialization. After that, it will create an encrypted snapshot of the memory and disk state and cache that for reuse. Then, when the function is invoked again, Lambda will grab the cache and start up the function. Cached snapshots are removed after 14 days of inactivity. As DeSantis also noted, improvements like this will enable more users to bring their workloads to a platform like Lambda. The company already saw this with the launch of Firecracker on Lambda, he explained. |
Despite ban, Twitter downloads surge in China amid COVID protests | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | Twitter saw a surge in downloads in China as protests against the country’s stringent COVID restrictions erupted nationwide over the last few days. The social media app ranked 9th amongst all the free iOS apps in China on November 29, up from 150th a week ago, according to . Discussion about the protests, a rare act of defiance that has swept across major Chinese cities and universities since the past weekend, is closely monitored by censors and has been largely silenced on local social media. As a result, people are pouring onto foreign alternatives like Twitter to disseminate information and Telegram to organize demonstrations. The spike in Twitter downloads is intriguing since the app has long been blocked by China’s “Great Firewall”. Accessing the app in China requires the use of a censorship circumvention tool or a virtual private network. The app has, however, remained available for download in the Apple App Store, at least since February 2019, , an independent project that tracks censorship in the App Store. Twitter ranking in the China App Store / Screenshot from Sensor Tower Gauging the size of Android downloads is trickier because Google Play is unavailable in China. Android-based app stores are operated by an array of local tech firms like Huawei and Xiaomi, which tend to strictly follow local censorship rules. Apple has also in recent years come under fire for from some governments. Even when China-based users manage to jump over the “Great Firewall” and get on Twitter, they will likely have a difficult time finding the information they need. Bot accounts are bombarding searches for Chinese cities with tweets of porn, escort ads and gambling links, making it . It doesn’t help that Elon Musk recently axed the team at Twitter responsible for fighting propaganda and misinformation. Given the increase in Chinese-language bot activity, which is thought to be state-directed, it’s hard to know how many of the new app installs belong to protestors. Access to Twitter and other Western internet platforms is increasingly challenging in China as Beijing continues to clamp down on censorship circumvention tools. All VPN providers without government authorization are in effect . In October, a protocol widely used in VPN services experienced an in the country. It won’t be a surprise if the authorities move to further tighten the grip on VPN tools following this wave of protests. |
AWS launches Graviton3E, its new Arm-based chip for HPC workloads | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | At its traditional evening keynote at re:Invent, AWS tonight announced quite a bit of new hardware in its cloud, starting with a new version of its Nitro hypervisor, new instance types and a new version of its custom Arm-based Graviton chips, which was specifically designed for powering high-performance computing workloads. This new Graviton3E chip — a variant of the existing Graviton line — promises significant performance improvements, including 35% better performance for workloads that heavily depend on vector instructions. These new chips will obviously power new AWS EC2 instance types, starting with the logically dubbed Hpc7G. This new instance type will come in a variety of sizes, with up to 64 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory. It’ll take until early 2023 before these instances become available, though. For more network-intensive workloads, AWS is also launching a new Graviton3E instance type (c7gn). For Intel fans, there are also , too. Frederic Lardinois All of these new instances will make use of AWS’s new , which the company also announced today. Nitro v5 promises significantly improved latency, up to 40% better performance per watt, and 60% higher PPS. The AWS team made this possible by roughly doubling the number of transistors in the custom Nitro chips. Frederic Lardinois “Performance can be hard to achieve when you refuse to budge on things like security and cost,” Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of AWS Utility Computing, said in tonight’s keynote. And in many ways, that’s long been the story of AWS’s compute platform and its work on its custom processors. |
Southeast Asia insurtech Igloo increases its Series B to $46M | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | , a Singapore-based insurtech focused on underserved communities in Southeast Asia, announced it has raised a Series B extension of $27 million, bringing the round’s total to $46 million. The first tranche of $19 million was and led by Cathay Innovation, with participation from ACA and returning investors OpenSpace. The newest round was led by the InsuResilience Investment Fund II, which was launched by the German development bank KfW for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and is managed by impact investor BlueOrchard. Other lead investors were the Women’s World Banking Asset Management (WAM), FinnFund, La Maison and returning investors Cathay Innovation. Igloo develops its insurance products and then partners with insurers who underwrite their policies. Igloo currently works with 20 global, regional and local insurers across Southeast Asia. It distributes its insurance products through partnerships, and is partnered with over 55 companies in seven countries. It now offers 15 products, including policies for gig workers, gamers, cars and farmers in Vietnam, and says it has facilitated more than 300 million policies and increased gross written premiums by 30 times since 2019. Co-founder and CEO Raunak Mehta told TechCrunch that Igloo decided to raise a Series B extension because of investor interest after the first tranche of funds. The extension will give the startup a multiyear runway and will be used for hiring, infrastructure and merger and acquisitions opportunities. Mehta said that the penetration rate of insurance in much of Southeast Asia is low, less than $100 USD per capita across Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Igloo was created to make insurance more affordable and relevant to the needs of communities in Southeast Asia. Igloo distributes insurance products that range from 2 cents USD for phone screen protection to $600 USD for comprehensive motor insurance. Igloo provides the tech stack for its products across Southeast Asia, which Mehta says means the entire insurance value chain, from product discovery to claims, is available on one platform. This makes it faster for it to bring the policies it distributes to market more quickly, and significantly reduce the operational cost of claims. Mehta said more than 80% of claims are currently managed in an automated or semi-automated way, and that big data management, along with machine learning and artificial intelligence, has enabled it to reduce anti-selection risks, false positives and fraudulent claims. By bringing down the cost of managing claims, Igloo is able to offer lower premium to customers. An example of Igloo’s insurance policies include ones for gig economy riders that it sells through its partnership with Foodpanda in Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines, and Lozi and Ahamove Vietnam. Its policy for Foodpanda, called PandaCare, includes motor, personal accident and hospitalization income protection for workers. Another, more recent one, is Weather Index Insurance product in Vietnam. The policy uses blockchain-backed smart contracts and automates claims payouts by using pre-assigned values for crop losses caused by weather and other natural events. Igloo says the Weather Index Insurance is Vietnam’s first parametric insurance (or a that agrees to make pre-agreed payouts based on trigger events like a flood) and its first integration of smart contracts into insurance. Igloo also provides products that Mehta says directly or indirectly benefits women, through a partnership with Philinsure in the Philippines. They have distributed more than 5 million policies that cover credit default, personal accident, family relief and natural calamity support to women micro-entrepreneurs and their families. In Vietnam, more than 65% of the agents who use Igloo’s Ignite digital platform to sell insurance policies are women, and they are also the main beneficiaries of the Weather Index Insurance product. The insurtech’s distribution partners include telecoms like Telkomsel, AIS and Mobifone, and e-commerce platforms like Shopee, Lazada, Bukalapak and JD.ID. It also works with financial service providers, like AEON, Gcash and UnionBank, to sell policies for their customer base, and provides products for insuring goods in transit and protecting fleet drivers through logistics platforms like Ahamove, Shippit, Loship and Locad. Other Southeast Asia-based insurtechs that want to and have raised large Series B rounds include Indonesia’s and and Thailand’s |
As Pipe’s founding team departs, tensions rise over allegations | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | In an exclusive interview, co-founder and former co-CEO Harry Hurst told TechCrunch that the trio were “0-1 builders, not at-scale operators.” He said the company’s revenue was growing year-over-year and that the company had five years of runway. Finding the right successor could take a while, however. For starters, Pipe — which has raised from investors since it was founded in 2019 — has just one outside board member in Peter Ackerson, a general partner at Fin Capital who himself became a VC just three years ago. Hurst and fellow founders Josh Mangel and Zain Allarakhia are the only other directors on the board. More, detractors seem bent on raising questions about the way the business has been run. Since that article was published, several sources who wished to remain anonymous — including one investor who says he passed on investing in the startup in its early days — have said that they have “heard” that Pipe made roughly $80 million in loans to one or several crypto mining companies. The outfit or outfits have since gone out of business and the $80 million is believed to have been completely written off, said these individuals. Asked about the allegations, Twitter Meanwhile, a signed by Pipe Senior Counsel Peter Chiaro with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in late September reveals that the company recently secured $7.12 million in debt financing, which could be construed as a positive alternative to the kind of highly structured inside round that many startups are closing currently. |
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FTX exposure hits market makers and funds | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 11 | 16 | is swiftly draining money from the crypto economy: Information reviewed by TechCrunch indicates that market makers and funds that lost money on the exchange, until recently one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, are more numerous than previously anticipated — and some might be in conversations with creditors soon. Dozens of market makers and fund managers in an invite-only Telegram chat responded to a poll titled “my/my firms [sic] current exposure to FTX.” TechCrunch reviewed the results from the 147-member chat, dubbed “FTX creditors private.” Among the 70 respondents, 66% said they lost $25 million or less, 7% indicated that they lost between $25 million and $50 million, 6% lost $50 to $100 million, and 1% reported FTX-related losses of between $100 million and $500 million. The remaining 20% declined to provide a sketch of their potential losses, according to private documents reviewed by TechCrunch. Who is in the cohort? “Anyone who was a big player was on FTX,” a source close to the matter said. “You couldn’t have a credible market-making business if you weren’t on that platform.” There are a few members of the chat who have spoken publicly, but the majority of the firms in the group have not gone public with their losses, the source said. “There’s a lot of funds out there who haven’t reported what they lost. There’s going to be a lot of contagion.” If the FTX collapse is anything like what happened with crypto exchange Mt. Gox (which was hacked and then filed for bankruptcy), what will result will be a in which depositors try to recoup their losses. But some members of the chat are also exploring opportunities to sell claims of their FTX accounts. Individuals in the chat asked others if they’ve been able to sell their accounts over the counter, according to messages seen by TechCrunch. Enigma Securities is looking to buy claims of individual or company accounts, according to group members. is a Financial Conduct Authority-registered crypto asset facilitator for liquidity, banking relations and custody solutions. “Enigma is looking to buy claims >10m via a Dutch auction as soon as this week. I can make an intro if anyone is interested,” one group member wrote on Tuesday. |
EV SPAC Faraday Future ousts its CEO | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | , the troubled EV startup-turned-publicly-traded company, has shuffled its executive ranks once again. The board fired its CEO Carsten Breitfeld, according to a posted Monday after the markets closed. Brietfeld, who was the former co-founder of failed EV startup Byton, took the leadership role at Faraday Future in September 2019. The board said Monday it appointed Xuefeng Chen, a former and longtime Chery Jaguar Land Rover executive who most recently led Faraday Future’s China division, as its new CEO. As Faraday’s new global CEO, Chen will receive a base annual salary of $900,000, a performance-based bonus of up to $600,000 and a cash signing and retention bonus of $500,000. The retention bonus must be returned if Chen resigns or is terminated without cause in the next 36 months. Chen will also receive restricted stocks and performance-based restricted stock units. The CEO upheaval is the latest in a string of internal drama and financial problems that have plagued the company for years. Even its public debut at CES 2016 was controversial. The messiness at the company has only ramped up since it went through a merger with Property Solutions Acquisition Corp. in July 2021. Investigations, a restructuring and a going concern warning are just a few of the dramatic turn of events in the past 18 months. Breitfeld’s dismissal comes just a week since the it might not be able to continue operating over the next year and that it was uncertain when its first FF 91 luxury EVs would be delivered. The company has repeatedly delayed the FF 91 vehicle, which as of November 17 had received only 369 non-binding preorders. While Faraday Future did appear to snag a $350 million lifeline in recent weeks, it may not be enough to sustain its operations or deliver on its long-promised vehicle. |
Daily Crunch: WhatsApp rolls out new ‘Message Yourself’ feature globally | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | We’re joining the Cyber Monday fun with content and analysis starting today until Wednesday, November 30. Plus, today only, ! Okay, we haven’t done a newsletter since Wednesday, and while the U.S. team was chillin’ like villains, the rest of the team was hard at work, so here’s some of the highlights from the last half-week of TechCrunchy goodness! — and Dubai-based mass transit and shared mobility services provider SWVL has carried out of its remaining headcount, reports. The news is coming six months after SWVL laid off 32% (over 400 employees) of its workforce in a “portfolio optimization program” effort geared toward achieving positive cash flow next year. There’s a couple of new funds in town, too! reports that while writes that He also writes about . And we have five more for you: / Getty Images Over the last two years, intelligent calendar platform Reclaim.ai raised $10 million “using a more incremental approach,” writes co-founder Henry Shapiro. “We’ve done all this without giving up a single board seat, and Reclaim employees continue to own over two-thirds of the company’s equity,” rejecting conventional wisdom that founders should “raise as much as you can as fast as you can.” In a TC+ post, Shapiro reviews the process they used to identify follow-on investors, shares the email template used to pitch the SAFE, and explains why “a larger cap table means more founder control.” Three more from the TC+ team: Amazon’s recent seem to be affecting more than just its delivery business. writes that the company is its wholesale distribution business, called Amazon Distribution, in India. Amazon had started this unit to help neighborhood stores secure inventory. The company didn’t say why it was closing this particular business down, but Manish notes that this is the third such Amazon unit to be shuttered in India. Meanwhile, reports that Meta has gotten itself into trouble again with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (aka, the agency that regulates data protection). Facebook’s parent company is being for what the agency said was breaches in data protection that resulted in some 530 million users’ personal information being leaked. Now enjoy six more: |
Max Q: Thank you | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | Hello and welcome back to Max Q. I hope everyone had a restful Thanksgiving with loved ones. As it was a holiday week, this is an abbreviated version of the regular newsletter, and I’m writing it on Wednesday, November 23. Before we get to the news, I wanted to give a heartfelt to all Max Q subscribers. Doing this would be literally and figuratively pointless without you. In this issue: The spacecraft Orion made a historic fly-by of the moon last week, completing a key maneuver as part of its 25-day test flight. The spacecraft, which NASA hopes will eventually carry astronauts, was carried to orbit by the super-heavy Space Launch System during earlier this month. Orion’s journey is at the heart of the Artemis I mission. Artemis is the name NASA has given to its human spaceflight program to the moon, and (as the name suggests) this mission is the first in what the agency hopes will be many — up to four in this decade alone. But before we go about launching up astronauts, NASA is using this first mission to test the Orion capsule and ensure it’s safe to carry humans. What does Thanksgiving weekend have in store for Orion? Well, quite a lot. Read more by clicking on the link above. Orion is due to make its splashdown to Earth on December 11, and that will be the capstone to the mission. During the return to Earth, NASA engineers will carefully monitor the performance of the heat shield and other critical components on the spacecraft. Once the capsule lands in the Pacific, it’ll be fished out and returned to the agency for further inspection. Orion took this selfie when it was just 81 miles above the lunar surface. NASA about the event and get your free ticket by . |
Nufa lets you live up to unrealistic beauty standards at the tap of an app | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | It isn’t like Instagram is a beacon of truth as it is, but things are about to get a lot worse, as takes any image and sculpts you into the “after” picture dream that every gym owner wants to project into our souls as they continue on their mission to make us all look like body-building beasts with cleavage out the wazoo and abs for days. The new mobile app “seamlessly transforms the human body into a picture in one click,” as it considers muscle structure, body type, skin color, body position and even tattoos to provide a “digital experience that hardly differs from real body transformation pics.” “For women, we have an additional feature of transforming the breast from the 1st to the 5th size that works even with neckline clothes,” Nufa’s head of Analytics, Artem Petrikeev, said in an email to TechCrunch. “We are changing body pics similar to how Faceapp changes selfies.” Can we be done making ourselves feel already? But hey, if this is your jam, I guess you, too, can see what you’d look like if you conformed to completely unrealistic beauty standards. You do you, boo, but if you install this app, perhaps think about what it is you’re buying into. You’re perfect as you are, and if you don’t believe that, think about where that belief came from. [gallery ids="2448973,2448972,2448968,2448971,2448974,2448975,2448976"] |
Flickr weighs support for ActivityPub, the social protocol powering Twitter alternative Mastodon | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | On the heels of Tumblr’s decision to — the social protocol powering the open source and others — it appears that photo-sharing site is now considering doing the same. Flickr CEO Don MacAskill today began to actively poll users about whether or not they’d like to see Flickr support the protocol, too. If it moved forward with this plan, Flickr would be the latest larger company to commit to joining the “ ” — the interconnected group of independent servers across the globe running free, open source software that allows their users to communicate and connect with one another. The concept presents a challenge to modern-day social networks controlled by corporations — or billionaires like Elon Musk. is a key component to the fediverse, powering not only Mastodon, , but also other alternative social platforms, including the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. If Flickr were to add support for ActivityPub, it would no longer function only as a photo-sharing site, but would become a part of a larger web of social networks where users could find, follow and engage with one another across platforms without having to create separate accounts for each service. MacAskill had already been weighing Flickr’s direction with regard to the fediverse before today. Last week, following the Tumblr announcement, the Flickr CEO had that his company had been internally discussing ActivityPub support, too. “It might be right up our alley,” MacAskill said at the time. But in a later tweet, he cautioned that taking this path would mean having to deprioritize other projects on Flickr’s roadmap — including those customers said they wanted. That’s why it makes sense that the exec would try to gauge consumer demand for the protocol’s adoption before actually making a commitment. MacAskill today that there “appears to be a lot of interest” in seeing Flickr move forward with ActivityPub, but he wanted to first gauge the type of interest more specifically. So far, the results of a he published on Twitter seem to be promising. As of the time of writing, only 8.9% of respondents have said no to the idea of ActivityPub integration; 38.2% said yes, but only if it was free. Meanwhile, two other groups indicated that ActivityPub support could become something that encouraged them to pay for Flickr, as 37.4% said yes and that they already pay for Flickr, while 15.4% said yes and that they might pay for Flickr if the protocol was supported. MacAskill ran the same poll on , where the interest for making the support a part of a free product is so far running even higher, at 47%; meanwhile, 26% said yes and they even already pay for Flickr and 22% would consider doing so if ActivityPub was added. Though an older site, Flickr today claims it’s used by more than 60 million people per month, to its Jobs listings page. That would bring a significant number of new people to the fediverse, if the company chooses to add support for ActivityPub. Flickr, of course, could use a feature that encouraged more customer engagement and adoption. Once a prominent company in the Web 2.0 era, Flickr eventually lost out to other social photo-sharing platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, as well as to more utilitarian photo-hosting services, like Google Photos and iCloud. In April 2018, and soon the company reduced the limits for free usage, began threatening to the photos of nonpaying users, and to keep it afloat. Earlier this year, to upload NSFW photos to its site. In more recent days, MacAskill has Flickr is “healthy and growing again,” and noted it has established to preserve its images in the event that the company again falls on hard times. Flickr didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on its ActivityPub plans, but a representative later noted MacAskill is a “wildly customer-centric leader and technologist with a long track record of successfully identifying meaningful innovations,” and, “This is potentially one of those innovations, which is why he’s exploring it publicly,” they said. |
Elon Musk’s next trick? Picking a fight with Apple | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | After , and all within his first month at the company, it’s on to the next thing for Elon Musk. The erratic billionaire picked a fight with Apple in a series of tweets on Monday, bracing for a battle — or perhaps just another volley of tweets — that would comfortably position the perpetually aggrieved Twitter owner as the David to Apple’s Goliath. Musk is now claiming that Apple threatened to “withhold” Twitter from the App Store, implying that the iPhone maker might take action against the social app over changes under its new ownership without offering any evidence. TechCrunch has reached out to Apple for clarification, but for now we don’t know if Apple really contacted Twitter over content moderation concerns or something else entirely. Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America? — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Twitter’s new owner also claims that Apple has pulled most of its advertising on the platform, which seems possible or even likely considering how many other major ad buyers have done the same since Musk’s takeover, citing concerns about brand safety and content moderation changes. Whatever is really going on here, a few things are true. For one, Twitter needs to stay in the App Store and to do so it needs to clear Apple’s low bar for content moderation, which Truth Social and Parler — apps with far less mature algorithmic content moderation systems — . Even with Musk’s threatened policy changes and his deep cuts to moderation teams, Twitter would likely still remain on Apple’s good side if those apps pulled it off. It’s also true that Apple’s rules for what gets an app get kicked out of the App Store are vague and arbitrarily enforced. Apple “content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy,” which would seem to rule out a lot of social apps, pre-Musk Twitter included, if it really came down to it. At the same time that Musk is portraying Apple as a censor, he’s also railing against the fees the company charges apps that operate in its ecosystem. Musk calls this a but in reality Apple’s cut is well-documented and much discussed. Epic Games and Apple went to court over Apple’s fees in 2020, with Epic arguing that the iPhone maker wields monopoly power in the software market. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Whether intentional or not, Musk reigniting the App Store antitrust battle is timely. Epic’s ongoing fight with Apple is and Congress could be poised for to pass the , a bipartisan bill that would crack open the App Store and “tear down coercive anticompetitive walls in the app economy,” according to its sponsors. It’s also possible that Apple actually cautioned Musk that banned for stuff like hate speech and harassment might nudge the app afoul of the App Store’s actually quite lenient content moderation requirements. In that case, Musk could position himself as a high-profile champion of the , joining Epic’s whole thing and making nice with regulators who are rightfully concerned over Musk’s Twitter plans (or lack thereof). But even then, Twitter Apple in both the short- and long-term and Apple certainly doesn’t need Twitter. And fighting on yet another front would stretch Musk’s attention even more when he should probably be focused on the basics, like running his myriad other companies or, say, . You can be mad that Apple takes 30% of what you make on the iPhone, but 30% of zero is still zero. At the end of the day, Musk, the world’s richest man and maker of luxury cars and spaceships, generally seems to enjoy portraying himself as a scrappy upstart fighting against larger powers that be. If Musk wants to re-create that dynamic at Twitter, Apple is arguably one of the only entities that can still make the hugely influential social media company look like the little guy. Musk might be the Twitter boss now, but he knows that turning everyone against the is a good way to maintain the approval of the miscellaneous internet devotees who affirm his existing beliefs and vote in his deeply unscientific tweet polls, so maybe it’s just about that. Whatever inspired his anti-Apple tirade, waging a war on Apple is probably a losing fight. But it’s a fresh conflict that diverts attention from Musk’s embarrassing and seemingly endless parade of catastrophes as he fumbles Twitter’s policy, personnel and product alike, possibly running one of the world’s biggest social networks into the ground in the process. |
Move over, operators — consultants are the new nontraditional VC | Rebecca Szkutak | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | become a buzzword over the last few years as venture capitalists pump up their resumes in a quest to set themselves apart from other sources of startup capital. Now, it seems that we are seeing the next evolution of that trend. This year has seen a wave of startup consultant firms looking to raise venture funds of their own to take stakes in companies they are already working with or that align with their practice. In theory, this makes total sense because both consultants and venture capitalists have the same goal at the end of the day: helping companies grow. But why are so many consultant-led venture capital funds launching now? It’s a particularly rough time in the broader venture market, and economy in general, in addition to being one of the toughest periods for It’s worth noting that all of these funds are raising outside capital as opposed to investing off their balance sheets. For one thing, the startups they were already working with were asking them to. |
Post News, a Twitter alternative, gets funding from a16z | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | If it seems like launched overnight, that’s because it kind of did. Unlike , , or other existing social networks being flooded with dissatisfied Twitter users, Post News emerged . The platform was a live beta, since its team wanted to go public in a time when the of was in our collective headspace. Post News has some similar basic functions to Twitter: you make posts, you like and repost other people’s posts, you follow interesting accounts. Yet in its beta stage, it still lacks basic functions like DMs, a native app and accessibility features like adding to images (and, sparking concern for some users, the company said it was at this time). Post News is trying to capitalize on the “virtual watercooler for journalists” side of Twitter. The platform as a place to access “premium news content without subscriptions or ads.” News publishers and independent writers are encouraged to share their articles on Post News under a paywall. The idea is that this would allow users to pay for individual articles from a variety of news sources. It’s an alternative, or a supplement, to paying for individual subscriptions to specific news sources. “I believe the future newspaper is the feed and want to make it more civil for users, profitable for publishers and better for society,” wrote Post News founder Noam Bardin in a announcing the endeavor. Bardin previously served as the CEO of Waze between 2009 and 2021. A profile on Post News. TechCrunch As of Monday, Post News has about on its waitlist, according to Bardin, while about 65,000 accounts have been activated. (Users are being let in slowly as to not overload the platform’s operations and moderation capabilities). The platform has already an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), as well as Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and tech commentator. Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher she is an advisor to the company but is not an investor. A16z is a curious choice for an investor in a Twitter alternative, given that the venture capital firm contributed to Musk’s Twitter acquisition. Sriram Krishnan, a crypto investor at a16z, has also been with Musk at Twitter HQ. But Bardin that he chose to work with a16z simply because they were the quickest investor to make a decision and fork over a check. “This does not mean that I am a Crypto fan, that I think [a16z] should have funded some of the or that I agree with every statement of theirs,” Bardin on his Post News account on Sunday. “We did discuss the Twitter investment at the highest level and I can assure you that it is not a problem — Post is separated from the people involved with Twitter and a clear line has been set.” TechCrunch reached out to Bardin and a16z for comment. Post News’ goals are ambitious. Not only is the platform attempting to compete with a longtime social media mainstay, but its business model relies on digital news publishers opting in to its model of charging readers per article, rather than for a subscription. Plus, the platform is rapidly growing while it is still building out key safety features, which makes things a bit precarious. “I want to remind everyone that this is a super early beta and it is not right for everyone,” Bardin wrote on Monday. “People looking for a polished product will have to wait. It is OK to take a break and come back when things are production grade — betas are not for everyone.” |
On affinity-focused fintechs, the future of BNPL and more | Anna Heim | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | venture capital funding invested in 2021, around one in every five dollars went to fintech. But this boom now seems behind us, as global fintech funding activity . Worse, fintech , with high-profile companies like Brex, Chime and Stripe making headlines for this disheartening reason over the last few weeks. And yet, fintech startups are still getting founded and funded this year. Of the 223 companies in Y Combinator’s summer 2022 batch, into the fintech category. Why are founders and investors still placing bets in fintech and where? To find out more, we reached out to fintech-focused VC firm . Fiat co-founders , and also run its sister arm, , a growth consultancy working with fintech and insurtech clients. This enables them to comment not only on sector trends from an investor perspective but also to share practical advice. One of their key recommendations is for fintech startups to lean into customer acquisition channels whose cost is less variable or seasonal than others, but our exchange covered a wider range of topics, from financial inclusion to offline channels and more. Read on: Fintech products by nature have complicated acquisition funnels and enrollment flows. Some complications are unavoidable in a highly regulated environment, but superfluous complications can arise when rigorous testing is not applied and funnels include unnecessary bloat. Even the smallest detail can generate friction. For example, in the know-your-customer (KYC) process, many fintechs will ask a customer for their entire Social Security number. In most cases, for non-credit products, only the last four digits of the SSN are needed for identification purposes. While only a five-digit difference, this can have a meaningful impact on conversion rates that can save large sums of money at scale. Data is certainly king, but there is a time and place for data collection and personalization. Too often, a well-intentioned data team will ask personalization and demographics questions directly in an enrollment process. However, these questions can most often come in a post-enrollment survey or periodically throughout the lifecycle of a customer. Even post-enrollment, these questions need to be thought out. We regularly see data collected for the sake of collecting it, without actionable insights derived from them. |
Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor lets you track connection-related performance issues | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | When it comes to performance issues, it’s hard to know where the problem lies. This is especially true when your monitoring dashboard shows an all-clear, yet you’re still hearing slow app complaints from your users. In these cases, there’s a good chance those problems could be related to an internet connection issue. These kinds of issues are harder to track down because they vary so greatly and depend on a lot of factors that are mostly out of your control. Amazon wants to make it easier to track these kinds of issues on apps running on AWS infrastructure with a new service called Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor. It’s announcing the new service this week at AWS re:Invent. As the name implies, it’s part of the CloudWatch monitoring tool, and it looks at internet connections around the world to find trouble spots. “Internet Monitor uses the connectivity data that we capture from our global networking footprint to calculate a baseline of performance and availability for internet traffic,” Amazon’s Sébastien Stormacq wrote in The idea is to let you monitor problems related to internet connection problems with applications running on AWS infrastructure resources. Most major monitoring tools allow you to track various types of network traffic, but this one takes advantage of the same data AWS uses to monitor its own uptime, so presumably it’s pretty solid for those AWS-centric applications. You simply create a monitor and add some internet resources, and you can monitor from there when you’re getting performance complaints that you can’t pinpoint. Among other data, you can see a health score based on the quality of the connections on the resources you’ve added to your monitor. The new service is available in public preview starting today across 20 regions. It’s free in public beta, but it’s worth noting that you could still be charged for log data the service is collecting as part of its monitoring process. |
AirTree and Greycroft return to lead Australian regtech FrankieOne’s Series A+ | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | , a Melbourne-based startup that provides an API platform for identity verification and fraud detection, said it has added $23 million AUD (about $15.4 million USD) in a Series A+, taking its Series A’s total to $45 million AUD (about $30 million USD). FrankieOne says this is the largest amount of VC funding raised by an Australian regtech so far. The funding included a group of returning investors, including lead backers AirTree Ventures and Greycroft, and participants Reinventure (financial services company Westpac’s venture arm), Tidal Ventures and Apex Capital Partners, which are all also existing investors. New strategic investors include Binance Labs and Kraken Ventures. Founded in 2019 by serial fintech entrepreneurs Simon Costello and Aaron Chipper, FrankieOne connects banking, fintech, crypto and gaming companies to hundreds of data sources and works with 170 financial institutions around the world. The startup says it has seen 4x revenue growth over the last 12 months and its customers now include Westpac, Shopify, Afterpay, Binance, Zipmex and PointsBet. Its team doubled over the past year, and it opened a new office in San Francisco. Costello told TechCrunch that FrankieOne grew out of a neobank venture he also founded with Chipper called Frankie. Costello and Chipper wanted Frankie to differentiate from the rest of the industry with the best onboarding experience, using the top identity and fraud prevention tools available, but “this process proved to be unnecessarily complicated, requiring multiple integrations and it was clear we would need to create our own risk-based onboarding,” Costello said. They realized other fintech companies also had the same problems. FrankieOne founders Simon Costello and Aaron Chipper. FrankieOne As a result, FrankieOne was created to streamline processes around regulation and compliance. It now provides a single API that connects third-party vendors with over 350 data sources in 48 countries. Costello explained that most fintechs, banks and crypto companies deal with shortfalls in match rates, coverage or ability to scale because they connect to a single vendor for their identity needs. This means their tech stacks also need constant maintenance. FrankieOne solves this problem by connecting to hundreds of data sources from multiple vendor partners, which means their clients no longer have to rely on a single vendor. Its API’s connected vendors include established financial services companies like Equifax, Experian and Socure and fast-growth startups such as Sardine AI. “What sets FrankieOne apart is it allows its customers to switch on vendors, create dynamic workflows, add in further fraud signals and add new markets, ensuring our customers can respond quickly to changing regulations and updated business requirements, without taking on any additional work burden,” Costello said. FrankieOne’s customers are usually mid- to large-sized organizations in highly regulated industries that need to adapt to complex policies that frequently change, he added. As an example of how FrankieOne has been used by its clients, Costello pointed to sports betting app PointsBet, which previously used a single provider for customer onboarding but dealt with high numbers of prospective users who couldn’t be verified in real time. This resulted in customer drop-offs, or further manual work to verify their details. Since working with FrankieOne, PointsBet has been able to increase customer onboarding by 14%. When Westpac began digitizing more of their financial services, they still used separate legacy systems and, as a result, needed to increase their pass rates to reduce drop-offs. They integrated FrankieOne’s platform for their KYC (know your customer) feature on their new BaaS (banking-as-a-service). This significantly increased pass rates, so the firm added FrankieOne across its entire group. The latest round of funding will allow FrankieOne to scale more quickly and expand in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Costello said it will also enable FrankieOne to make a significant investment into its ecosystem of vendors, data sources and fraud capabilities, enabling it to grow its customer base. |
Interim rate of return: A better approach to valuing early-stage startups | Andrew Ritter | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | in the form of convertible notes, simple agreements for future equity (SAFEs) or otherwise, have long been used in the startup world to avoid a fundamental issue: the extreme difficulty associated with valuing early-stage companies. But what happens when the very mechanisms designed to address this problem become a part of it? Valuation caps, for instance, are now employed in most early-stage convertible instruments. By imposing a ceiling on the price at which a convertible instrument converts to future stock ownership, valuation caps were intended to protect early-stage investors from extreme, unexpected growth (and, consequently, equity positions deemed excessively small by such investors). However, valuation caps are increasingly being used as a proxy for the value of the company at the time of the investment — creating the very problem they were designed to help avoid, while adding unnecessary complexity for inexperienced founders and investors. It isn’t surprising that founders and investors struggle to resist the lure to discuss present value when using valuation caps, despite efforts to push back against that use. This is especially true in contexts where the valuation cap “ceiling” expressly values the investment in a pre-conversion exit event (e.g., both the old pre-money valuation cap SAFEs and the newer post-money valuation cap SAFEs made available by Y Combinator). Fortunately, there’s a better approach: the interim rate of return method. Before we get to the solution, it’s useful to provide additional context on the problem — namely, why it’s so difficult to thoughtfully and rationally negotiate the value of early-stage companies. Some will say that such valuations are difficult because early-stage companies don’t have meaningful (if any) revenue, have limited assets or are just an idea. Yet, while these arguments identify real issues, they miss what may be the most important one: Investors at the earliest stages are investing in a possible ownership structure that will typically only fully exist in the future upon completion of the founders’ vesting schedules. Let’s say you’re an early-stage investor writing a $500,000 check for a startup at a stated pre-money valuation of $4.5 million, where 100% of the existing equity is held by a single founder and subject to a 4-year vesting schedule that just started. On its face, that would entitle you to a 10% ownership in the company (i.e., the post-money value would be $5 million, with your capital representing 10% of the value). But your stake and the pre-money valuation at which you effectively invested depends on how much of the founder’s vesting schedule is actually completed, as shown by the following table: |
GoTo cuts 1,300 jobs as it anticipates ‘uncertainties’ to linger for long | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | GoTo Group is cutting 1,300 jobs, or 12% of its workforce, it informed staff early Friday, as Indonesia’s attempts to trim costs and improve finances. “Achieving financial independence more quickly has a profound cost for us, because when we take a hard look at how we fundamentally need to change (business focus and ways of working), it also includes you, the people who are the backbone of this company,” wrote GoTo Group chief executive Andre Soelistyo in an email to staff, seen by TechCrunch. “It pains me to say that, as a result of our organizational review, we have to part ways with some of you,” he wrote. “I know you are filled with many emotions right now, pain, anger, sadness, and most of all, grief. I feel the same way.” GoTo joins scores of local and global peers in its decision to cut workforce to navigate the economic slowdown, rising interest rates, or as Soelistyo described in the email Friday, “uncertainties will linger for a while, and there is not much that we can do to change that.” A GoTo spokesperson told TechCrunch that the move is part of its growing attempts to “accelerate its progress towards becoming a truly sustainable and financially independent business, centered on its core offerings of on-demand, e-commerce and financial technology services.” “GoTo has been making steady progress in this area underpinned by its strategic focus on high-quality cross-platform users, reduced incentive spending, and driving deeper synergies across its ecosystem.” “To accelerate further, since the beginning of the year, the company has been implementing a comprehensive end-to-end cost optimization exercise that involves aligning operating models, unifying processes, consolidating vendors, renegotiating contracts for various cost items and finding structural efficiencies. By the end of Q2, approximately Rp800 billion ($51 million) in structural cost savings had been achieved in areas such as technology, marketing and outsourcing,” the spokesperson added. |
India’s first private rocket, built by startup Skyroot, makes successful launch | Jagmeet Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | India’s space agency has successfully launched the Vikram-S after much anticipation and years-long work in a boost to the private sector of the nation’s space industry. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) kicked off the suborbital rocket at 11:30 a.m. local time Friday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India. The Vikram-S, developed by four-year-old startup Skyroot Aerospace, is a single-stage, spin-stabilized solid-propellant rocket with a mass of around 550 kilograms. It carries three customer payloads, including one from a customer outside India. Made of all-carbon fibre core structure, the six-meter-long rocket was developed in two years. Skyroot The demonstration mission, named Prarambh (“the beginning” in Sanskrit), is the first by Hyderabad-based Skyroot. The startup is building a series of launch vehicles named after Vikram Sarabhai, the founder of India’s space program. In June 2020, the Indian government passed the space sector reforms and established the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Center (IN-SPACe) to allow private companies to use ISRO’s infrastructure. New Delhi also set up NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) as the space agency’s commercial arm to work closely with private companies and startups to bolster space developments in the South Asian country. “I am happy to announce the successful completion of mission Prarambh, ‘the beginning’ of Skyroot Aerospace. The rocket VKS [Vikram-S] took off at an LEA (launch elevation) of 80 degrees and azimuth of 100 degrees, achieved an altitude of 89.5 kilometers and a range of 121.2 kilometers — exactly what was planned by Skyroot Aerospace. All systems, as I can make out, worked as planned and Skyroot Aerospace has demonstrated capability of various subsystems that will go into the orbital launch vehicle,” said Pawan Goenka, chairperson of IN-SPACe, Department of Space, after the successful launch. Founded in 2018 by former ISRO scientists Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, Skyroot successfully in December 2020. It was also the country’s first startup in 2021 to sign a memorandum of understanding with the ISRO to launch its rockets. The startup has raised $68 million in total, including $51 million in a Series B round led by Singapore-based GIC in September, and has a valuation of $165 million. According to the data shared by Indian Space Association (ISpA) with TechCrunch, Indian space startups have raised more than $245.35 million, with $108.52 million infused in 2022 alone. The association counts Skyroot as one of its members, alongside private companies including Bharti Airtel and OneWeb as founding members. The government is currently working on a new space policy to increase private participation and encourage investment in the country’s space sector. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, ISpA Director General Lt. Gen. AK Bhatt said the space policy would address some issues raised by the industry players, including a single sanction window and spectrum allocation for satellite-based communication services through the Department of Telecommunications. The industry players have also requested the government to open foreign direct investment policy and incentives on taxes, import duties and domestic manufacturing of space equipment that are yet to be addressed. “We’re very excited to announce that we scripted history today by successfully launching India’s first privately developed rocket Vikram-S,” said Chandana of Skyroot. “This Prarambh mission, as the name signifies, is the beginning of a new era in the Indian Space ecosystem. Team Skyroot dedicates this successful mission to Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, who boldly started the Indian space program in the 1960s and honorable Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi ji, who unlocked the space sector to the private players. And most importantly, we thank InSPACe and ISRO, all their teams and the dynamic leadership who enabled this mission in this most efficient way.” |
Logistics and procurement on autopilot is the future Cofactr wants to live in | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | Cofactr is a logistics and supply chain tech company that provides scalable warehousing and procurement for electronics manufacturers. The company today announced it raised a $6 million round of seed funding, to “lead the next generation of agile hardware materials management.” The company raised on a SAFE note with a $25 million cap. We spoke to the company’s team to learn more about its vision of the future. addresses a suite of challenges for electronics producers through pre-manufacturing, third-party logistics services and supply chain automation. By providing these products as a unified strategic solution, the goal is to enable hardware manufacturers the ability to get to production volume without investing in the specialized facilities or headcount historically needed to manage electronic components. “Both Phil [Gulley, the company’s CRO and co-founder] and I are driven by the desire to solve problems. Before Cofactr, we were working on the engineering and solutions side of hardware with our previous company, BeSide Digital, starting off in the entertainment industry and growing to support companies like Zoox, Google and CrowdStrike across product and custom hardware for marketing,” said Matthew Haber, co-founder and CEO of Cofactr in an interview with TechCrunch. “A challenge we had, and saw reflected in the processes of our clients, was that building and scaling hardware felt incredibly laborious in comparison to software. After we sold BeSide, electronic supply chain and logistics was the biggest and most personal problem we could address.” The company told me that the journey to Cofactr’s current state wasn’t entirely linear. The company initially built and ran a contract manufacturer for circuit board assembly, but realized that wasn’t the right context to tackle these problems. From there, the company evolved to build electronics-specific third-party logistics and procurement automation. “Having worked in hardware and software we had the opportunity to experience both ecosystems and knew how easy things could be when technology bridges gaps between ideas and scale,” said Gulley. “That was the insight that Cofactr was born out of. It’s the company we wished existed when we were on the engineering side of the table.” Cofactr co-founders Matthew Haber (l) and Phil Gulley (r). The investment round was led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Broom Ventures, Cathexis Ventures, Sweet Spot Capital, Pioneer Fund, Seed River, Litani Ventures, Correlation Ventures and a few angel investors. “The big players on the cap table are Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) and Y Combinator. YC helped us focus on finding and providing the things that people really loved about Cofactr and set us up to meet Ajay Agarwal at BCV, which immediately felt like a match. The BCV team understood the opportunities that can come out of a business that integrates hardware, logistics and software into a single solution, as well as the challenges that come with building in many areas simultaneously,” says Gulley. The investors, in turn, see a future where the Cofactr team can put a dent in how electronics are manufactured. “When we first met Cofactr founders, I was really impressed with their understanding of the challenges of electronic component procurement. We’ve never seen anything similar to the integrated software and logistics system they’ve built. It combines cloud procurement software, a network of suppliers and a turn-key logistics platform that handles shipping, customs management, counterfeit insurance, inventory, kitting and shipping management,” says Agarwal, partner at BCV, in an interview with TechCrunch. “With the Cofactr platform, hardware manufacturers can find electronic components, check pricing, order parts, handle replenishment and send parts to their partner manufacturers. Behind the scenes, Cofactr handles everything including the acquisition of the parts, storage and management of the inventory, control checks to ensure the inventory is not counterfeit and regular shipments of components to manufacturers.” Cofactr appears to represent a continuation of BCV’s focus on logistics and supply chain. The investor has backed companies such as Kiva Systems (robotic fulfillment ); FourKites (supply chain visibility — which ); ShipBob (cloud fulfillment for e-commerce brands); TruckSmarter (mobile app to allow freight drivers to find and book their next load) and now Cofactr. In addition, it made . Of course, the pandemic, in particular, exposed many cracks in the supply chain. Ford, for example, warned its investors that it had to eat an additional $1 billion of costs in Q3 this year, largely due to supply chain challenges, and . It ain’t pretty out there, but that’s the fertile ground in which supply chain startups get to sow their opportunities. “Electronics components were particularly hard to come by. That meant a lot of challenges for hardware companies, whether they’re building dishwashers, robots or smart speakers. In a handful of industries, we think there is an opportunity to create a vertically integrated software and logistics solution,” Agarwal explains. “A good example of this is ShipBob and what they built for mid-market e-commerce brands. Cofactr is doing this for procurement of electronic components, with a complete software-and-logistics solution for hardware manufacturers.” The ultimate goal for Cofactr is to make hardware not-so-hard, the founders quip. “There is starting to be a real groundswell of startups attacking the hardware engineering space, but we all have to interconnect and work together in the same way that software development tools do. You’ll be seeing more collaboration between Cofactr, other startups and well-established organizations that serve hardware,” says Gulley. “Fast-forward a few years and we see Cofactr as the cloud solution for pre-manufacturing infrastructure. Our vision feels something like the hardware manufacturing version of AWS; on-demand, cloud-based solutions for physical manufacturing. Today, companies can take a software product from MVP to massive scale without crippling infrastructure investments. In a decade, the same will be true for building hardware products and we believe that Cofactr will be a core enabler of that transformation.” All of this makes a lot of sense in the context of the U.S. wanting to build a more reliable and resilient on-shore manufacturing capacity. The CHIPS act is , and there’s been a fair chunk of investment in logistics and electronics manufacturing in the past year. Last month, and . |
Daily Crunch: Google upgrades Search, Shopping and Maps with more data, AR and accessibility | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | Hello! You’ve got one more day of just me before I take a well-deserved Friday off and fills in, so I have decided to make an extra-large version of Daily Crunch. We hope many of you are hanging out with the cryptocurrency gang down in Miami for . As you can see, a few stories have come out of it already and I’m sure there is more to come. Oh, and if you have 30 minutes of downtime, I think you’ll enjoy ’s on the ins and outs of working with startups and public companies. Also, check out ’s , which has a lot going for it, but needs last names for its team members. Let’s dig into today’s news! — More cybersecurity M&A happening here as reports that in a deal said to be valued at up to $300 million. This is a move that she writes has been rumored for a bit, but now some pieces have fallen into place, including telling investors, that make it more apt to be happening. spoke with some crypto-focused venture capitalists who told her that they were already proceeding with caution when it came to deploying their funds into cryptocurrency but are now worried that fallout from FTX’s collapse may make it . And we have six more for you: / Getty Images Many VCs advised founders to dial back their sales and marketing outlays to preserve runway this year. And, as it turns out, many VCs have been giving the wrong advice. According to data from Capchase, a fintech that offers startups nondilutive capital, “companies that didn’t cut spending on sales and marketing were in a better financial and growth position now than those that did when the market started to dip in 2022,” reports . Of the 500 companies surveyed, bootstrapped firms showed the strongest growth, said Miguel Fernandez, Capchase’s co-founder and CEO: “What we have seen in this case, and what is most interesting, is the best companies have actually cut every other cost except sales and marketing.” Three more from the TC+ team: Please enjoy ’s extra-large today, where he breaks down Boston’s tech scene, going all over the city, talking to Tye Brady, getting in some work with robotics, and taking “a field trip to some of Boston’s best startups.” For those of you who like to tweet in threads, Twitter is working on a feature for you that will , reports. This move will reduce the need to break up all of your carefully curated word vomit into 280-character segments. Meanwhile, over in Binance land, co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao, also known as CZ, spoke with this morning at , and grabbed some of the highlights, including CZ’s thoughts on FTX: Then pulled out some of CZ’s comments as they relate to . Namely, there is none. Today, there are six more we thought you should read: |
FCC orders ISPs to show broadband ‘nutrition labels’ with all fees and limits | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | Hidden fees and unexpected rate hikes have become an expected part of Americans’ internet, cable, and phone bills, but that may make this a lot less common. Broadband providers will now have to “prominently” display a “nutrition label” with all fees, catches, and caps clearly stated for any plan you’re considering. “Our rules will require that broadband nutrition labels are fully displayed when a consumer is making a purchasing decision. That means consumers will have simple, easy-to-read facts about price, speed, data allowances, and other aspects of high-speed internet service up front,” said Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement accompanying the decision. The labels look like the familiar food labels, and for good reason (beyond being “iconic”). With broadband providers, if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile and then slow-roll it all the way to the Supreme Court if they think it’ll be more profitable that way. So the labels must be completely standard, machine-readable, and displayed “on the main purchasing pages that providers have online. That means they cannot be buried in multiple clicks or reduced to a link or icon that a consumer might miss.” They also must be easily available on request after someone signs up. Example of a broadband “nutrition label” with important statistics on it. FCC On the label, which you can see here, are all the vital statistics you need to know about your potential internet connection: With all this posted clearly and in the same format between providers, anyone can look at two of these labels and, like comparing two brands of cereal, decide which one is right for them. Not because of flashy advertising or a misleading promo price, but because they can see the right numbers are higher or lower than the competition. The idea has been bouncing around for a while, but the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act made it possible to take it over the finish line. It’ll be a bit before these will be required by law, though: an FCC spokesperson explained that the rules must first be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, after which they will be published in the federal register, and from that point broadband providers will have six months to comply, or a year if they’re on the small side. It’s a lot of red tape, to be sure, but chances are the ISPs will jump on this early rather than take it down to the wire. There’s been a trend in that direction after a lot of blowback a decade or so ago. The labels themselves may change slightly over time, just as nutrition labels have (e.g., separating out types of fats and sugars). More and better information will find a place on the labels depending on what the FCC hears from customers and the industry: “That’s why the agency also kicks off a further rulemaking today that asks about how to incorporate more pricing and discount data on the label itself, how to measure service reliability, and how to make broadband nutrition labels even more accessible,” she concluded. |
Ticketmaster faces antitrust scrutiny after Taylor Swift ticket chaos | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | is facing more scrutiny from politicians after its chaotic presales for tickets to Taylor Swift’s tour. Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti said he is looking into whether Ticketmaster violated consumers’ rights and antitrust regulations. Skrmetti is the latest politician who has called attention to Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s hold on the ticketing market. This comes as Ticketmaster cancelled its public sales for Swift’s tour, called Eras. In a , Ticketmaster said the cancellation was due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” The public sale would have been for tickets left over from the site’s troubled presales, which started on Tuesday for members of its Verified Fan program. Many fans experienced technical glitches and hours-long wait times, with many ultimately unable to buy a ticket. According to , Ticketmaster said in a now-deleted post that 3.5 million people registered for the Verified Fan program. Around 1.5 million were given a special access code, and the rest were put on a waiting list. “Never before has a Verified Fan on sale sparked so much attention—or uninvited volume,” Ticketmaster said. Skrmetti said he had received complaints from fans who tried to purchase tickets for Eras. In a on Thursday, the attorney general said that other state attorney generals are also looking into the matter: “Ticketmaster’s decision to cancel sales underscores the important need for accountability. Fans deserve a fair chance to buy a ticket. I’m encouraged by other state AGs who are taking this issue serious as well.” The reports that Skrmetti said Ticketmaster should have been better prepared for the high demand and questioned whether “because they have such a dominant market position, they felt like they didn’t need to worry about that.” In before the sale was canceled, the attorney general’s office said Skrmetti “is concerned about consumer complaints related to @Ticketmaster’s pre-sale of @taylorswift13 concert tickets. He and his Consumer Protection team will use every available tool to ensure that no consumer protection laws were violated.” TechCrunch has contacted Ticketmaster and Skrmetti’s office for comment. Eras is Swift’s first tour in four years and comes after the release of her new album “Midnights.” Other politicians have raised concerns over the combined company of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which , including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Representative David N. Cicilline and Representative Bill Pascrell, Jr. Representative Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday that “Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they needed to be reigned in. Break them up.” Representative Cicilline on Wednesday that Ticketmaster’s “excessive wait times and fees are completely unacceptable, as seen with today’s @taylorswift13 tickets, and are a symptom of a larger problem. It’s no secret that Live Nation-Ticketmaster is an unchecked monopoly.” And Representative Pascrell, Jr., who was for Swift tickets, “The Ticketmaster-Live Nation monopoly should never have been allowed to merge and must be broken up.” Consumers are also pushing for a breakup of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. An alliance of consumer rights groups, including antitrust nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, launched a campaign last month called , saying that Ticketmaster’s “market power over live events is ripping off sports and music fans and undermining the vibrancy and independence of the music industry.” |
Soft Robotics raises $26 million as staffing shortages continue across industries | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | I spent , meeting with several of the area’s top automation startups. Soft Robotics — based in nearby Bedford, Massachusetts — is one of those names that comes up a lot. As the concept of soft robotics grippers have increasingly come into vogue, the company of the same name has been reaping much of that windfall. Today, for instance, a $26 million Series C, led by Tyson Ventures. The VC arm of Tyson Foods is a natural fit here. After all, food production has long been a big piece of Soft Robotics’ strategy. Its compliant grippers do a good job picking up fragile and inconsistently sized foodstuffs, from meat to produce — a longstanding challenge for more rigid systems. “At Tyson, we are continually exploring new areas in automation that can enhance safety and increase the productivity of our team members,” Tyson Ventures’ Rahul Ray said in a release. “Soft Robotics’ revolutionary robotic technology, computer vision and AI platform have the potential to transform the food industry and will play a key role in any company’s automation journey.” Marel and Johnsonville also joined the round as new investors, following a with a $10 million extension raised in June of last year. At the time, Soft Robotics cited pandemic-fueled job loss as a major motivator in the funding round. Obviously the job situation hasn’t gotten much better — particularly in industries like meat packing — even as funding has largely slowed down across the board over the past year. The firm says the new round of funding will go toward accelerating the deployment of its mGripAI system, which combines 3D vision with a soft gripping system. Soft Robotics says the perfect storm of pandemic-fueled issues has resulted in “the four largest sales quarters in the company’s eight-year history.” |
Jack Selby of Thiel Capital is using a new VC fund to invest in Arizona startups | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | Jack Selby, a former PayPal exec and the longtime managing director of Thiel Capital who attracted some attention years back for his low-key , has a new, $110 million venture fund that he intends to invest mostly in his adopted state of Arizona, where Selby has lived since 2002. The debut vehicle of the firm, called , is backed by a number of real-estate outfits in Arizona, along with a major local utility company. Notably, however, Thiel is not an investor and neither are any of Thiel Capital’s many institutional backers. We talked earlier today with Selby — who was calling from the Milken Institute summit in Abu Dhabi and planning to attend the last of the season afterward — to learn more about why that is. We also talked with Selby about his relationship with Thiel and whether, like a growing number of people in Thiel’s universe, Selby plans to jump into regional politics at some point, using this fund as a jumping-off point. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. JS: My father worked for a “MadMen” era advertising firm called J. Walter Thompson, in a job where you either got fired or promoted every three or four years. My dad [experienced] a bit of both, so we had this almost army brat-type upbringing, moving seven times during my childhood. During my senior year, I refused to move [from our then-home] in suburban Detroit and stayed with a friend and his family until graduation, but my dad moved to Phoenix; my younger brother grew up in Phoenix. And going in the summers in between college, I really kind of fell in love with the place. Later, I was part of the group that started PayPal [as a VP nearly straight out of college] and when we sold the business to eBay in 2002, I knew I wanted to get away from the onerous tax regime of California. Arizona was kind of the obvious choice, so I moved in 2002, and I’ve been a happy resident for a lot of years. I pop back and forth between Arizona and California quite often. That’s one of the appeals of Arizona. Contrary to the whole narrative that’s been built up around Austin and certainly Miami, proximity to California matters. If you can get back and forth to California in an hour or so by plane, that’s very convenient, whereas it’s a four-hour flight from Austin. It’s one of the huge advantages I think we have in Arizona. A lot of the big defense contractors like Lockheed Martin have a presence in Arizona. A lot of the chip companies have a presence in Arizona. Phoenix is the fifth [most-populous] city in the United States, which a lot of folks don’t know, so you have pockets of activity throughout greater Phoenix, ranging from Glendale, which is in the far northwest corner, and all points in between. The best analogy I can give you is Los Angeles, but just, say, 50 years earlier. I don’t mean this to compliment myself, but it was a two-year-long courting process to get them across the finish line. With my day job with Peter, and I say this very humbly, but I basically know every LP that allocates venture capital in the world, whether they’re here in Abu Dhabi or Tokyo or New York or wherever it is. They all know who we are, and they would love to curry favor with him by giving money to some new fund that’s connected to Peter’s universe. But I wanted to use the fund as a litmus test to see if the Arizona community wanted to see something like this fund rise up and get off the ground. Honestly, I didn’t know what the result was going to be, but I was very heartened by the fact that people raised their hand and put us in business. Arizona has been very, very real estate oriented, and if you look back across various housing cycles, Arizona has been the poster child for the boom and bust because we don’t have much diversification in terms of industry. The thinking from a utility perspective is [anything that] helps diversify the economy and helps build up the technology sector within Arizona [is a positive] that will help smooth out some of these ups and downs. My day job with Peter is protecting the nest, so to speak, and the nest is very important. Peter is my golden goose. I’ve been working with him longer than anyone else. He’s a very close friend. He’s a very loyal person. As you might imagine, we get barraged with unsolicited inquiries looking for his backing all day long. So sure, I could have gotten [their collective backing] but I didn’t go to a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi or go to Peter because they have no connection or ties to Arizona and I want people to be involved. I want people to be advisors. I want them to be deal scouts. I want them to be mentors. And the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund is not going to do that. If we get to the point where Peter is sniffing around and wanting to look at a deal [in AZ-VC’s portfolio], then that’s mission accomplished. I will gladly figure out that conundrum. No, I don’t have any interest in politics. I’m only interested in the sense that I want to see our political environment be as middle and down the fairway and normal as it possibly can be. I don’t want to see another come about because Sheriff Joe is bad for business. He prizes loyalty and he is himself just an extremely loyal person, and I think he’s been so mischaracterized in the media. Obviously, I’m biased, but it drives me crazy. He’s a very normal guy. He’s very rational. He’s obviously very smart. And I have a huge amount of respect for him. I will never voluntarily leave the orbit of Peter Thiel. It’s a pretty amazing seat to have. |
GM says supply chain issues won’t affect EV profitability by 2025 | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | General Motors says supply chain constraints won’t hinder the automaker’s goal of reaching electric vehicle profitability by 2025. GM expects its EV portfolio to have “the same margin profile” as its internal combustion engine portfolio over the next three years once factoring in U.S. tax credits for cars and trucks, CEO Mary Barra said Thursday at GM’s investor conference. The automaker expects to generate more than $50 billion in revenue from sales of its 30 EV models in 2025, with profit margins in the low to mid single digits. Investors have been of GM’s promises, citing macro headwinds like increased battery raw material costs. Doug Parks, GM’s executive vice president of global product development, purchasing and supply chain, admitted that those costs could put GM’s targets at risk. However, Parks said a combination of increased efficiencies in GM’s — which is the underlying EV and battery architecture that will help GM scale its EV lineup — and supply chain agreements that are locked in through 2025 will reduce those macro impacts. “GM has signed binding agreements to secure the battery raw materials to support 1 million units of annual capacity in North America by 2025,” said Parks. “These are not just handshakes, these are not just meetings or MOUs.” GM is hoping to reduce cell costs by nearly 40% to an $87 per kilowatt hour by 2025, and then down to a $70 per kilowatt hour from mid to late decade. The automaker’s stock experienced a mid-day spike, rising 1.75% at around 1:45 pm ET. At market close, GM’s share price settled at an increase of 0.39%. Parks highlighted GM’s agreement with Livent to source lithium hydroxide from its North American facility starting in 2025, a strategic investment and collaboration with CTR to source lithium from the Salton Sea in California using a closed loop geothermal process, and an agreement to secure sustainable cobalt from Glencore’s Murrin Murrin mine in Australia. In addition, GM has made a strategic investment in Queensland Pacific Metals for cobalt and nickel processing in Australia, as well as a long-term for high-grade nickel sourced and processed in Canada. Parks added that GM has price controls in place for lithium that will dampen the volatility and pricing the market has seen over the past year. He noted the new clean energy tax credits will help GM accelerate its process of creating a domestic supply chain for EVs in North America. GM is also working with recycling affiliates to take scrap from battery cell plants and return critical materials to make new batteries or even sell materials at market rate, said Parks. Beyond battery cells, Parks said GM has long-term supply agreements in place with key EV motor component suppliers, including binding agreements with GE to support Many of these agreements are in place to help the company scale cell production rapidly once its four are underway. GM said its Lordstown, Ohio plant has already opened, with Spring Hill, Tennessee close behind. The automaker is also building a plant in Lansing, Michigan, and is for its fourth plant. Until those factories come online, GM is still mainly buying cells, which is a roadblock to high EV margins today. |
The FTX implosion is an opportunity to learn | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | At , Chainalysis CPO Pratima Arora, Tezos co-founder Kathleen Breitman and Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier talked about security in the crypto industry. A good chunk of the discussion was spent talking about the collapse of FTX. “First of all, I don’t think it is over,” Pascal Gauthier said. “In the FTX story, it is starting to be a bit more clear every day that the vast sums of money have sort of disappeared and sort of been mismanaged by SBF and his management team.” As a crypto exchange, FTX has become a sort of single point of failure for many users as well as for many of the moving parts of the crypto industry. It’s still not clear how many people, companies and projects have been affected by . But it makes you wonder if crypto has been a bit too centralized. “Cryptocurrencies are basically meant to disintermediate — that’s explicitly their purpose. And I think if you’re not designing something where users can be empowered in some form or another, you’re not doing a good job of designing your protocol. Basically, you’re just shifting the onus from one centralized actor to another,” Tezos co-founder Kathleen Breitman said. But it doesn’t mean that centralized exchanges will disappear overnight. Many crypto users simply don’t know how to store their crypto assets in a secure way — whether it’s a hardware wallet like Ledger or a non-custodial software wallet. That move to decentralized crypto is going to require some education — and it might be a good opportunity to learn. “We need to unlearn web2 and learn web3. Web2 is something where you don’t control anything. You are the product for bigger companies. Therefore, you click yes, yes, yes on everything that you do without thinking twice and you sacrifice freedom for convenience,” Ledger’s Pascal Gauthier said. “The problem is web3 cannot work if you click yes, yes, yes [ … ] And there is some convenience that will go away as a result of this because you have just to be much more responsible in the sense that now it’s yours. It’s for you to worry about it,” he added. People were already saying that we were in a crypto winter before the FTX saga. That’s why the coming months and years are likely to be a long bear market for the crypto industry. But people who have been working in crypto for long enough have already been through tough times. “We will see some slowness on adoption,” Chainalysis’ Pratima Arora said. “I feel like this is the time to hunker down and build, and then the best companies will survive. We will weed out things that don’t work. And we will see that without bad actors we’re going to come out of it stronger. It’s like a cleansing round.” |
Fiat CEO teases subscriptions, car-sharing for all-electric 500e launch in US | Harri Weber | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | Stellantis plans to “explore alternative business models,” such as subscriptions and car sharing, when it The executive added cryptically, “There will be a healthy dose of digital, that’s for sure. We all collectively need to reinvent the business model.” The all-electric Fiat 500e launched in Europe in 2020 and is considered a massive success for Stellantis. Whether it will be embraced by U.S. buyers is unclear. The original 500e, which was essentially a retro’d version of an internal combustion version of the same model, didn’t fare so well and was largely regarded as a compliance car in the U.S. This time, Francois suggested it would be different. When the Fiat 500e comes to North America in early 2024 it will have an estimated range of more than 150 miles, the ability to charge the 85 kW battery up to 30 miles in five minutes and will come with an advanced driver assistance system that provides “Level 2+” features such as lane centering and adaptive cruise control, traffic sign recognition, blind spot detection and 360-degree parking sensors. The Fiat 500e will also come with the UConnect 5 connected car system and a 10.25-inch touchscreen. If there was a theme to Francois’ comments around the North American rollout of the Fiat 500e, it was experimental. It seemed the brand is ready to try a variety of sales and launch tactics for the region. Kirsten Korosec Stellantis isn’t the first automaker to suggest that subscriptions could remake the car business. At the tail end of 2018, Volvo went as far as to say “ ” during an event for its Care By Volvo subscription. Though Volvo intended to make “having a car as easy as having a cell phone,” the program turned out to be anything but for some subscribers, who said they encountered delays and mixups with dealerships. Today, Volvo’s greets visitors with a note that “inventory is currently unavailable online.” For its part, Francois claimed Fiat’s strategy had little to do with cranking U.S. sales, saying he was “capacity constrained” and instead focused on figuring out the “future of mobility with a car that’s designed for the city.” |
Can gaming resurrect the NFT market? OpenSea thinks so | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | Today at , OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer discussed his business and the future market for non-fungible tokens. The digital assets, better known by the acronym “NFTs,” saw their stock rise during the 2021-era crypto boom. NFTs became synonymous with neo-wealth bubbling up from the blockchain economy, as a number of image collections that employed the digital asset format reached pop-culture status and eye-watering prices. However, , the evolving market for crypto-related activities and products is currently in a downturn. NFT trading volumes are depressed compared to year-ago levels, and elsewhere in the decentralized economy there’s chaos to be found as the . This made Finzer’s appearance at the event potentially clarifying — in the midst of a downturn, where does OpenSea see the future for its core product category? Naturally given that he’s running a company in the space, we expected optimism from the tech executive. He delivered. Inside his perspective, however, a few key themes emerged that caught our attention. (TechCrunch has riffed on the idea of , it’s worth noting). First, gaming. Finzer argued early in his conversation with our own that the world of NFTs is “quite diverse,” going on to state that NFTs in games are a place where his market is seeing an “explosion in innovation.” The CEO also cited gaming as a market opportunity for NFTs to spark more consumer enthusiasm (OpenSea is games and gaming companies mint NFTs). The union of gaming and digital assets has proven to be a popular theme for press coverage and founder activity. However, much of the focus during the last crypto boom was on play-to-earn (P2E) games like Axie Infinity. But while Axie has seen its fortunes rise and fall, OpenSea appears to be yet bullish to gaming-related NFTs. As a person who has spent a reasonable amount of time in games like the Diablo franchise, I can imagine certain use cases for the pairing, even if I remain a little bit skeptical of bringing real-world economics into most video games. The scale of Finzer’s excitement regarding NFTs and gaming indicates that it’s perhaps where we should be most focused when covering what the asset varietal can do next. Looking more broadly at the NFT market space itself, Finzer argued on stage that platforms like Instagram joining the industry will be net-positive. In his view, inclusion of NFTs from social companies may provide an on-ramp to the crypto market for regular folks. Given that, historically, such points of entry have been criticized as too steep, new methods of getting consumers into NFTs is likely welcome to his platform. The future of NFTs may be less crypto-focused than it has been. Finzer cited the recent Reddit NFT effort in a discussion of trust, consumers and crypto more generally. Many Reddit NFT users are not aware that it’s a crypto-powered product, he explained. If consumers are willing to engage with crypto products outside of a crypto-native experience, it is easier to see how gaming and crypto could eventually find common ground. What’s ahead for the company? Not a native token, at least not yet, per our chat with OpenSea today. The company also didn’t want to talk about potential fundraises, though we do expect it to raise more capital in 2023. After listening to the chat, it felt like the era of pricey profile pictures had faded to the background. Now we have to see if the potential use cases for NFTs in other areas of the digital economy — and perhaps even IRL — can make the jump from possibility to reality. |
Hyundai’s hydrogen fuel cell concept hints at the performance N brand’s future | Abigail Bassett | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | a hydrogen fuel cell hybrid concept vehicle called the N Vision 74 that the company says demonstrates the performance sub-brand’s vision for electrification. The Hyundai N sub-brand, the performance-focused arm of the automaker, has been applied to a range of production vehicles since its founding in 2015, from the Hyundai Veloster N and Elantra N to the Kona N. The N brand, a name inspired by Germany’s famed racetrack in Nürburgring and where Hyundai tests these models, has targeted luxury performance brands like BMW M, Mercedes AMG, Audi RS and Cadillac V-series with its N brand. The N Vision 74 raises the stakes. Just don’t say it’s inspired by the DeLorean. Abigail Bassett Hyundai calls the N Vision 74 a “rolling lab,” — a testbed of sorts for future products. Although there is some Hyundai Pony Coupe history in there too. The N Vision 74 pays homage to the Hyundai Pony Coupe concept from 1974, which was developed by the legendary car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, who also designed the DeLorean. (The DeLorean made its debut in 1981 after the Pony Coupe.) It’s a detail that Sang Yup Lee, the Hyundai Global Design Center and an executive vice president at Hyundai Motor Company was quick to point out. “Don’t say they look alike, because we did it first,” Lee said during the press conference. N Vision 74 gets a unique hydrogen hybrid and battery-electric architecture. Underpinning the N Vision 74 concept sits both a fuel cell stack and a battery pack. The fuel cell stack at the front puts out 85 kW (max 95 kW), while the 62.4 kWh battery sits at the rear. The hydrogen W fuel cell converts hydrogen to electricity to charge the 62 kWh battery. The car also gets independent rear-mounted motors on each wheel to generate a total power output of 500 kW and nearly 670 horsepower and 663 pound-feet of torque. Hyundai says that allows for engineers to tune power distribution between left and right wheels and optimally set the N Vision 74 up to handle different types of tracks. The N Vision 74 concept gets dual-charging capabilities. It can be filled with hydrogen or recharged on a DC fast charger thanks to the underlying 800-volt architecture E-GMP platform. Hyundai says it can get as much as 372 miles of range and a top speed of 155 mph. The question is, of course, will this hydrogen fuel cell hybrid technology come to a production car? Hyundai wouldn’t say whether this kind of powertrain will go into production. However, Lee did conclude his presentation stating that “The N Vision 74 Concept has undeniable Hyundai DNA and design that serves as a compass to guide our future.” |
Meet Unstable Diffusion, the group trying to monetize AI porn generators | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | , the text-to-image AI developed by startup , was open sourced earlier this year, it didn’t take long for the internet to wield it for porn-creating purposes. Communities across Reddit and 4chan tapped the AI system to generate realistic and anime-style images of nude characters, mostly women, as well as non-consensual fake nude imagery of celebrities. But while Reddit quickly shut down many of the subreddits dedicated to AI porn, and communities like NewGrounds, which allows some forms of adult art, banned AI-generated artwork altogether, new forums emerged to fill the gap. By far the largest is , whose operators are building a business around AI systems tailored to generate high-quality porn. The server’s — started to keep the server running as well as fund general development — is currently raking in over $2,500 a month from several hundred donors. “In just two months, our team expanded to over 13 people as well as many consultants and volunteer community moderators,” Arman Chaudhry, one of the members of the Unstable Diffusion admin team, told TechCrunch in a conversation via Discord. “We see the opportunity to make innovations in usability, user experience and expressive power to create tools that professional artists and businesses can benefit from.” Unsurprisingly, some AI ethicists are as worried as Chaudhry is optimistic. While the use of AI to create porn isn’t new — TechCrunch covered an AI-porn-generating app just a few months ago — Unstable Diffusion’s models are capable of generating higher-fidelity examples than most. The generated porn could have negative consequences particularly for marginalized groups, the ethicists say, including the artists and adult actors who make a living creating porn to fulfill customers’ fantasies. A censored image from Unstable Diffusion’s Discord server. Unstable Diffusion “The risks include placing even more unreasonable expectations on women’s bodies and sexual behavior, violating women’s privacy and copyrights by feeding sexual content they created to train the algorithm without consent and putting women in the porn industry out of a job,” Ravit Dotan, VP of responsible AI at Mission Control, told TechCrunch. “One aspect that I’m particularly worried about is the disparate impact AI-generated porn has on women. For example, a previous AI-based app that can ‘undress’ people works only on women.” Unstable Diffusion got its start in August — around the same time that the Stable Diffusion model was released. Initially a subreddit, it eventually migrated to Discord, where it now has roughly 50,000 members. “Basically, we’re here to provide support for people interested in making NSFW,” one of the Discord server admins, who goes by the name AshleyEvelyn, wrote in an announcement post from August. “Because the only community currently working on this is 4chan, we hope to provide a more reasonable community which can actually work with the wider AI community.” Early on, Unstable Diffusion served as a place simply for sharing AI-generated porn — and methods to bypass the content filters of various image-generating apps. Soon, though, several of the server’s admins began exploring ways to build their own AI systems for porn generation on top of existing open source tools. Stable Diffusion lent itself to their efforts. The model wasn’t built to generate porn per se, but Stability AI doesn’t explicitly prohibit developers from customizing Stable Diffusion to create porn so long as the porn doesn’t violate laws or clearly harm others. Even then, the company has adopted a laissez-faire approach to governance, placing the onus on the AI community to use Stable Diffusion responsibly. Stability AI didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Unstable Diffusion admins released a Discord bot to start. Powered by the vanilla Stable Diffusion, it let users generate porn by typing text prompts. But the results weren’t perfect: the nude figures the bot generated often had misplaced limbs and distorted genitalia. Unstable Diffusion The reason why was that the out-of-the-box Stable Diffusion hadn’t been exposed to enough examples of porn to “know” how to produce the desired results. Stable Diffusion, like all text-to-image AI systems, was trained on a dataset of billions of captioned images to learn the associations between written concepts and images, like how the word “bird” can refer not only to bluebirds but parakeets and bald eagles in addition to more abstract notions. While many of the images come from copyrighted sources, like Flickr and ArtStation, companies such as Stability AI argue their systems are covered by fair use — a that’s soon to be tested in court. Only a small percentage of Stable Diffusion’s dataset — about 2.9% — NSFW material, giving the model little to go on when it comes to explicit content. So the Unstable Diffusion admins recruited volunteers — mostly members of the Discord server — to create porn datasets for fine-tuning Stable Diffusion, the way you would give it more pictures of couches and chairs if you wanted to make a furniture generation AI. Much of the work is ongoing, but Chaudhry tells me that some of it has already come to fruition, including a technique to “repair” distorted faces and arms in AI-generated nudes. “We are recording and addressing challenges that all AI systems run into, namely collecting a diverse dataset that is high in image quality, captioned richly with text, covering the gamut of preferences of our users,” he added. The custom models power the aforementioned Discord bot and Unstable Diffusion’s work-in-progress, not-yet-public web app, which the admins say will eventually allow people to follow AI-generated porn from specific users. Today, the Unstable Diffusion server hosts AI-generated porn in a range of different art styles, sexual preferences and kinks. There’s a “men-only” channel, a softcore and “safe for work” stream, channels for hentai and furry artwork, a BDSM and “kinky things” subgroup — and even a channel reserved expressly for “nonhuman” nudes. Users in these channels can invoke the bot to generate art that fits the theme, which they can then submit to a “starboard” if they’re especially pleased with the results. Unstable Diffusion claims to have generated over 4,375,000 images to date. On a semiregular basis, the group hosts competitions that challenge members to recreate images using the bot, the results of which are used in turn to improve Unstable Diffusion’s models. Unstable Diffusion As it grows, Unstable Diffusion aspires to be an “ethical” community for AI-generated porn — i.e. one that prohibits content like child pornography, deepfakes and excessive gore. Users of the Discord server must abide by the terms of service and submit to moderation of the images that they generate; Chaudhry claims the server employs a filter to block images containing people in its “named persons” database and has a full-time moderation team. “We strictly allow only fictional and law-abiding generations, for both SFW and NSFW on our Discord server,” he said. “For professional tools and business applications, we will revisit and work with partners on the moderation and filtration rules that best align with their needs and commitments.” But one imagines Unstable Diffusion’s systems will become tougher to monitor as they’re made more widely available. Chaudhry didn’t lay out plans for moderating content from the web app or Unstable Diffusion’s forthcoming subscription-based Discord bot, which third-party Discord server owners will be able to deploy within their own communities. “We need to … think about how safety controls might be subverted when you have an API-mediated version of the system that carries controls preventing misuse,” Abhishek Gupta, the founder and principal researcher at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, told TechCrunch via email. “Servers like Unstable Diffusion become hotbeds for accumulating a lot of problematic content in a single place, showing both the capabilities of AI systems to generate this type of content and connecting malicious users with each other to further their ‘skills’ in the generation of such content .. At the same time, they also exacerbate the burden placed on content moderation teams, who have to face trauma as they review and remove offensive content.” A separate but related issue pertains to the artists whose artwork was used to train Unstable Diffusion’s models. As evidenced recently by the artist community’s to DeviantArt’s AI image generator, , which was trained on art uploaded to DeviantArt without creators’ knowledge, many artists take issue with AI systems that mimic their styles without giving proper credit or compensation. Character designers like Hollie Mengert and Greg Rutkowski, whose classical painting styles and fantasy landscapes have become one of the most commonly used prompts in Stable Diffusion, what they see as poor AI imitations that are nevertheless tied to their names. They’ve also expressed concerns that AI-generated art imitating their styles will crowd out their original works, harming their income as people start using AI-generated images for commercial purposes. (Unstable Diffusion grants users full ownership of — and permission to sell — the images they generate.) Gupta raises another possibility: artists who’d never want their work associated with porn might become collateral damage as users realize certain artists’ names yield better results in Unstable Diffusion prompts — e.g., “nude women in the style of [artist name]”. Unstable Diffusion Chaudhry says that Unstable Diffusion is l Of course, there’s a fertile market for adult artists who draw, paint and photograph suggestive works for a living. But if anyone can generate exactly the images they want to see with an AI, what will happen to human artists? It’s not an imminent threat, necessarily. As adult art communities grapple with the implications of text-to-image generators, Simply finding a platform to publish AI-generated porn beyond the Unstable Diffusion Discord might prove to be a challenge. The furry art community FurAffinity decided to ban AI-generated art altogether, as did Newgrounds, which hosts mature art behind a content filter. When reached for comment, one of the larger adult content hosts, OnlyFans, left open the possibility that AI art might be allowed on its platform in some form. While it has a strict policy against deepfakes, OnlyFans says that it permits content — including AI-generated content, presumably — as long as the person featured in the content is a verified OnlyFans creator. Of course, the hosting question might be moot if the quality isn’t up to snuff. “AI generated art to me, right now, is not very good,” said Milo Wissig, a trans painter who has experimented with how AIs depict erotic art of non-binary and trans people. “For the most part, it seems like it works best as a tool for an artist to work off of… but a lot of people can’t tell the difference and want something fast and cheap.” For artists working in kink, it’s especially obvious to see where AI falls flat. In the case of bondage, in which tying ropes and knots is a form of art (and safety mechanism) in itself, it’s hard for the AI to replicate something so intricate. “For kinks, it would be difficult to get an AI to make a specific kind of image that people would want,” Wissig told TechCrunch. “I’m sure it’s very difficult to get the AI to make the ropes make any sense at all.” The source material behind these AIs can also amplify biases that already exist in traditional erotica – in other words, straight sex between white people is the norm. “You get images that are pulled from mainstream porn,” said Wissig. “You get the whitest, most hetero stuff that the machine can think up, unless you specify not to do that.” Milo Wissig These have been extensively documented across applications of machine learning, from to . When it comes to porn, the consequences may not be as stark – yet there is still a special horror to watching as an AI twists and augments ordinary people until they become racialized, gendered caricatures. Even AI models like DALLE-2, which went viral when its mini version was released to the public, have been criticized for in European styles. Last year, Wissig tried using VQGAN to generate images of “sexy queer trans people,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “I had to phrase my terms carefully just to get faces on some of them,” he added. In the Unstable Diffusion Discord, there is little evidence to support that the AI can adequately represent genderqueer and transgender people. In a channel called “genderqueer-only,” nearly all of the generated images depict traditionally feminine women with penises. Unstable Diffusion isn’t strictly focusing on in-house projects. Technically a part of Equilibrium AI, a company founded by Chaudhry, the group is funding other efforts to create porn-generating AI systems including Waifu Diffusion, a model fine-tuned on anime images. Chaudhry sees Unstable Diffusion evolving into an organization to support broader AI-powered content generation, sponsoring dev groups and providing tools and resources to help teams build their own systems. He claims that Equilibrium AI secured a spot in a startup accelerator program from an unnamed “large cloud compute provider” that comes with a “five-figure” grant in cloud hardware and compute, which Unstable Diffusion will use to expand its model training infrastructure. In addition to the grant, Unstable Diffusion will launch a Kickstarter campaign and seek venture funding, Chaudhry says. “We plan to create our own models and fine-tune and combine them for specialized use cases which we shall spin off into new brands and products,” he added. The group has its work cut out for it. Of all the challenges Unstable Diffusion faces, moderation is perhaps the most immediate — and consequential. Recent history is filled with examples of spectacular failures at adult content moderation. In 2020, MindGeek, Pornhub’s parent company, lost the support of major payment processors after the site site was found to be circulating child porn and sex-trafficking videos. Will Unstable Diffusion suffer the same fate? It’s not yet clear. But with at least one calling on companies to implement stricter content filtering in their AI systems, the group doesn’t appear to be on the steadiest ground. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 11 | 28 | null |
Beam raises $6.4M to help citizens access safety net funds | Andrew Mendez | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | , a startup that helps citizens access government financial aid, has raised $6.4 million in Series A funding. The company, previously known as , helps deliver funds across a wide array of programs, like emergency cash assistance, rental relief and public utility benefits. “We fundamentally work to transmit critical services and resources to those in need,” said David Helene, CEO of Beam. The company’s Series A funding comes as the company said it saw a greater need to provide disadvantaged communities with financial support following the COVID-19 pandemic. Beam said the funds will be used to expand its headcount and further develop its platforms. The round was led by Potencia Ventures, with participation from Spring Point Partners, American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact, Imaginable Futures, Lumina Impact Ventures, Michelson Runway and Schmidt Futures. Beam, when partnered with governments, operates as the end-to-end cash assistance administration system, which handles applications, ID verification, case decisions and payments. “Our system has a single system of records,” said Helene. “Our intent is to create the least amount of friction and the most dignity for those that are interacting with applications in the system.” Beam said it allows applicants to receive funds by bank account, a prepaid card or online services like Zelle to serve communities equitably. Beam says it has helped process over $180 million to about 300,000 households. The company currently has operations in 16 states with 53 governments. |
Qualcomm debuts latest flagship Snapdragon chip and a new AI platform | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | It’s that time of year again. It can drop 20 degrees on any given day, and we’re stuck indoors watching people watch Qualcomm announce new chips and reference designs in sunny Hawaii. The Snapdragon Summit is the component-maker’s annual opportunity to map out its big plans for the next year, ahead of the holiday scrum and product deluge of CES and MWC. It’s an ideal time to pepper the industry with some timeline news items. Many of the major manufacturers are effectively finished announcing hardware for the year, and things won’t really ramp up for another couple of months. The big news is, naturally, . That’s the chip that’s going to power a majority of your flagship Android handsets next year — at least until the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2 presumably starts rolling out at some point mid-2023. It’s likely not surprising for those who have been following the space for the last several years that Qualcomm is positioning AI/ML as the centerpiece of its latest system on a chip. With the new Hexagon Processor (that’s a Qualcomm trademark, mind) at its center, the new system on a chip promises up to 4.35x gains for things like natural language processing. “This is thanks to the industry’s only Micro Tile Inferencing technique so we can power features like real-time multi-language translation,” the company writes. “In other words, you can speak into a language translator and have it translated into multiple languages running these complex networks.” Computational photography is the other big piece there. The system is able to recognize and segment different aspects of an image before the photo is taken. It uses a portrait as an example — breaking up hair, clothes, the background and a face into different segments. It’s a feature that will no doubt be present in imaging products like Portrait mode, in which depth sensing is important. The first devices with Gen 2 are set to arrive before the end of the year. The list of phone makers signed up for the SoC includes ASUS, HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMAGIC, Redmi, SHARP, Sony Corporation, vivo, Xiaomi, XINGJI/MEIZU and ZTE. Qualcomm Also of note this week is the arrival of Qualcomm’s new augmented reality chip, the . The component is designed to power a new generation of slim AR wearables. It’s a low-power solution that sits across different parts of the glasses in order to better distribute its weight. “We built Snapdragon AR2 to address the unique challenges of headworn AR and provide industry-leading processing, AI and connectivity that can fit inside a stylish form factor,” Qualcomm’s Hugo Swart said in a release. “With the technical and physical requirements for VR/MR and AR diverging, Snapdragon AR2 represents another metaverse-defining platform in our XR portfolio to help our OEM partners revolutionize AR glasses.” The list of manufacturers developing hardware with the platform includes Lenovo, LG, Nreal, OPPO, Pico, QONOQ, Rokid, Sharp, TCL, Vuzix and Xiaomi. |
Bahama homes were purchased with FTX corporate funds | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | A new bankruptcy filing, , shows that FTX’s corporate funds were used to purchase homes in the Bahamas among other personal items. The details arise less than a week after the now infamous crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy — a decision that founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried FTX’s new CEO, Enron wind-down veteran John J. Ray III, said that he never in his career had “seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.” “From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented,” Ray said in the filing. The document states that corporate funds of the FTX group were used to purchase homes and other personal items for employees and advisers. Ray added that “certain real estate” was recorded in the personal names of employees and advisrrs, and “there does not appear to be documentation for certain of these transactions as loans.” The newly installed chief executive makes it clear that he’s not blaming all FTX employees for the potential mishandling of funds. “Although the investigation has only begun and must run its course, it is my view based on the information obtained to date, that many of the employees of the FTX Group, including some of its senior executives, were not aware of the shortfalls or potential commingling digital assets.” If that possible lack of blame extends to the real estate transactions is not clear. He adds that current and former employees are some of the people most hurt by FTX, and that “these are many of the same people whose work will be necessary to ensure the maximization of value for all stakeholders going forward.” FTX’s downfall began last week after Binance backed out of a deal to acquire the crypto exchange as a result of a due diligence process. News reports that FTX was mishandling funds and under investigation soon bloomed into the company filing for bankruptcy. Bankman-Fried, meanwhile, claims that he is still . “Everyone goes around pretending that perception reflects reality, it doesn’t,” Bankman-Fried said in a Twitter conversation with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper earlier this week. “Some of this decade’s greatest heroes will never be known, and some of its most beloved people are basically shams.” |
Discord users can now link their Crunchyroll accounts | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | Anime streaming service Crunchyroll has partnered with Discord. Starting today, users will be able to display the movie or TV show they’re currently watching on their Discord profile. Crunchyroll is the latest media company to add “ ,” the “Now Playing” functionality that automatically displays the video you’re watching, the game you’re playing, the song you’re listening to, etc. Discord users can also link their accounts for Reddit, Steam, TikTok, Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, PlayStation Network and Xbox, among others. The new integration is rolling out to users throughout the day in over 200 countries and territories. Note that some regional content restrictions will apply since Crunchyroll isn’t available in Japan and has a limited streaming library in some parts of Asia. To link accounts, Crunchyroll subscribers go to Discord on the web or desktop app, navigate to “User Settings,” click “Connections” and select the Crunchyroll logo. It will be available on mobile devices soon, a Crunchyroll spokesperson told TechCrunch. Discord and Crunchyroll Once Rich Presence is enabled, the anime title you’re watching will appear as a small icon with an image of the series, the season and the episode. Users can watch along with their friends directly from their profile pop-out. There’s also a button directing users to the anime streaming service. “Anime is an adventure, and Crunchyroll’s Rich Presence on Discord will allow our fans to take their journey together,” said Kaliel Roberts, chief product officer, Crunchyroll, in the announcement. “The Crunchyroll community loves to share their favorite anime with their friends, and now on Discord, fans have another avenue to celebrate their favorite series, discover new shows, and build deeper connections through the content they love.” Crunchyroll launched its last month, which it uses to announce new events and activations. On November 2, Crunchyroll subscribers received a for Discord Nitro, a monthly subscription service that unlocks various perks like custom emojis and stickers, HD video streaming and more. Similarly, Discord Nitro users were offered one month of Crunchyroll’s $9.99/month subscription, “Mega Fan.” Crunchyroll has a free ad-supported plan and three paid tiers. |
BrightDrop is tracking $1 billion revenue in 2023 | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | General Motors’ e-delivery van subsidiary BrightDrop said Thursday it’s on track to reach $1 billion in revenue next year. The company, which launched in 2021 and was incubated at the automaker’s , said reaching the financial milestone would make it one of the quickest tech startups to reach unicorn status, ahead of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tesla, which took five or more years to reach their first billion. On Thursday at GM’s Investor Day, BrightDrop also unveiled BrightDrop Core, a subscription-based software platform that combines data generated from its other products to provide customers with more detailed insight into their operations. The platform will launch early next year to feature a user portal and mobile productivity apps. The company reported that it has received more than 25,000 reservations and letters of intent from customers, including , Hertz, FedEx and Verizon for its Zevo 600 all-electric commercial van, which is already on the road. The company said that it’s set to generate up to $10 billion in revenue and reach profit margins of 20% by the end of the decade. Travis Katz, BrightDrop president and CEO, said that BrightDrop’s recent expansion into the online grocery sector will help it capture “substantial market share across multiple industries.” “We’re a tech startup with a subscription-based product offering that’s backed by a global powerhouse — this puts us in a league of our own,” Katz said in a statement. |
Scene Report: Boston | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | on returning to Boston* for the first time since the onset of the pandemic was just how clustered things are. I’m not a great scheduler and I don’t know the city’s geography particularly well, but after two days spent meeting with more than a dozen startups, it slowly dawned on me that I was mostly operating within a five- to ten-block radius a stone’s throw from MIT (and, for that matter, Harvard). I’d given myself a little breathing room between meetings and site visits on Friday and was able to walk to all my meetings (the unseasonably warm weather didn’t hurt) — passing several of the spots I’d visited for conversations two days prior. Much like Pittsburgh, Boston has a tight-knit startup community. As companies get bigger, they’ll move to places like Waltham and Bedford on the outskirts, but they’ll remain part of this community nonetheless. There are several reasons I can see, as an outsider with only passing familiarity: That last one’s diversifying a bit. Big corporations like Amazon (which may soon absorb iRobot) and Google have moved in as well. But the fact remains that most people aren’t ready to launch a startup right out of college, and these sorts of bigger corporations can be a good place to establish yourself and get a lay of the land. (Though universities are now doing an increasingly good job providing startup resources and accelerating companies after graduation.) Much like my own industry, everyone sort of knows everyone else, whether personally or by reputation. The longer you stay in a relatively insular industry, the more you’ll find yourself working with the same people time and again, so definitely (good advice generally, but doubly so when there can be clear and immediate consequences). You’re going to cross paths with the same people over and over. Life is funny like that. World’s widest cable stayed bridge crossing the Charles River. Completed 2002. Getty Images / John Coletti This struck me the first time TechCrunch did a small dinner ahead of . Everyone knew everyone else. And most of them had been through the ranks of iRobot at one point or another. It’s not quite the story, but it’s another very clear case of a hub with a lot of important spokes. It also points to — as numerous people rightfully reminded me over the past week — the fact that we’re still very much in the early days of robotics. It feels like a small community because it is one, in a lot of ways. That’s exciting. I’ve spent much of my life feeling like I was a bit lately to different parties, but robotics feels new and fresh because it is. Some folks point to the home-brewed computer revolution that pulled in Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as a helpful way to contextualize where we are on the timeline. Others (like Tye Brady below) point significantly further back. I don’t think there’s a direct analog, but I do believe that 15 or 20 years from now, people will fondly remember this as a golden age for robotic discovery. The energy is palpable when you visit these sites. Much of Silicon Valley has spent the last decade trying to reengineer the same handful of tired apps over and over again (that’s not to say it’s all bad, but there’s a kind of stasis that comes with maturity). Here, however, you can talk to a million people chasing down real-world problems. The speed and excitement at which many of these breakthroughs occur can be head spinning. Of course, it’s important to remember that they’re standing on the backs of decades of research. Practically every technical founder has some university professor they’ll happily tell you is one of the great unsung heroes of robotics and AI. This, I think, is a big part of the reason why many robotics firms have set up a kind of miniature museum near the building’s entrance. It serves to show how far you’ve come, while providing a tangible connection to where you came from. Many of the products found on these shelves are a jumble of hastily soldered wires and 3D-printed parts. They’re the results of the excitement that drives people to build things with their hands in an effort to prove out whiteboarded theses. You want to bottle that jolt of electricity you get from the first time a scrappy bit of hardware works as intended and mete it out in those times when businesses become a hard slog and you lose sight of that original vision. Rise Robotics I should add here that pivoting doesn’t necessarily qualify as losing sight. It’s extremely common in robotics. You set out to solve a specific problem and find yourself suddenly deeply immersed in another thing entirely. A prime example of that from last week is the team at , which and is now making massive actuators for heavy machinery. Perhaps the most prominent example in the local community is iRobot, which appears to have spent its formative years . Ignore the sunk-cost fallacies as you work to determine how your business might best exist within the confines of late capitalism. That journey is on display at the company’s headquarters. An industrial catwalk carries the company’s own makeshift museum, which we toured in reverse chronological order, as the actuators shrink from bulldozer to human scale. This is suspended over the startup’s build space, which housed a car mechanic until quite recently. The awning out front still bears the sentiment “Fixing Today’s Automobiles With Tomorrow’s Technology.” It was inherited from the previous tenant, but the sentiment is relevant enough to stick around. Renovated buildings are a big part of the Boston ecosystem. That’s another bit of shared DNA with the Pittsburgh scene. It’s not specific to startups, either. I spent part of the rainy Friday afternoon working out of Bloc Cafe in Somerville. The coffee shop maintains many quirks of the bank that previously occupied the space, including vaults where you can sit and drink a latte. Multiple people mentioned the nearby offices of , housed in a big, . There are competing theories regarding the space’s originally intended use. iRobot occupied the space previously, but a representative from the team tells me that “Formlabs employees still like to find clues around the office.” Prevailing theories include its use as an animal staging area/market and/or slaughterhouse, given some peculiarities about the structure and local history. Oddly, the subject came up twice in two separate conversations on the same day last week. Who knows how many cow corpses haunt the place? Here I am, watching a video with RightHand, inside their Somerville office. RightHand Robotics Perhaps the ultimate example of repurposing is , which occupies Somerville’s former post office, built in 1935. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the building contains a lobby that houses a large mural titled, “A Skirmish Between British and Colonists Near Somerville in Revolutionary Times.” The painting was commissioned as part of the New Deal post office mural project. Then there’s in Cambridge. Built in 1910, the massive structure was the longtime home of Polaroid but ultimately lay dormant for several years. Someone mentioned to me that the sewing machine was built there, but those timelines don’t really add up. It’s now home to MIT-supported venture capital firm which largely focuses on deep tech, sometimes spilling over into robotics. I was given a tour of the space, which recently underwent a massive renovation. It now has a strong startup feel, with 150,000 square feet of space that includes workshop space, chem labs and offices. The Engine provides space for its own startups and rents offices out to other startups. The workshop areas contain most of the big, heavy equipment you’d want for product prototyping, from water cutters to circuit board and industrial 3D printers. While it’s true that Somerville is home to world-class maker spaces like , this is a more business-focused environment rather than educational, where startups can build and iterate on eventual products. Spaces like these also afford opportunity for early-stage collaboration and, perhaps, cross-pollination between companies. I heard great things about but ultimately didn’t have enough time to visit. Also located in Somerville, the space is a climate-focused startup incubator. Rather than taking equity in the companies that come through its doors, Greentown charges a monthly fee for access to offices and labs. The company writes, “Membership fees are approximately market rate, but include so much more than desk and lab space — members also gain access to more than $1 million worth of resources, equipment, programming, staff support, and more.” While I didn’t get to visit Greentown, I did spend a good chunk of Tuesday afternoon at . Founded in 2015, the organization bills itself as an “innovation hub.” It has, by all accounts, been a welcome addition to the city’s maturing robotics community. It’s also served as an important support mechanism for recent success stories like automation platform Realtime Robotics and service drone firm American Robotics (which recently acquired competitor, ). The firm expanded its offices with help from a government fund . It’s changed a good deal since my last pre-COVID visit, but the nonprofit is still headquartered away from the relative bustling comforts of Cambridge, in the South Boston Waterfront. It’s an industrial space whose entrance is just off to the side of a truck loading bay. There’s a cruise ship docking terminal just across the way, and the closest restaurants have names like Pete’s Dockside and the Dry Dock Cafe. I remember thinking I’d gotten the address wrong the first time I visited. Certainly a location like this offers plenty of room to grow operations. Big thanks to MassRobotics COO Joyce Sidopoulos, who booked me a conference room for several hours, featuring that served as the feature image for last week’s newsletter — a large chunk of which I wrote in that room. When I wasn’t working on that, I was meeting with a handful of MassRobotics startups. Tatum Robotics Of note is (“Tatum” standing for “Tactile ASL Translational User Mechanism”), which began life as Stephanie Johnson’s undergrad thesis for Northeastern. This job has somewhat cynically caused me to focus on things like total addressable market (hence the “C” in VC), but it’s also important to pay mind to those projects that focused on positive impact, above all. I’ve seen some wildly divergent figures regarding deafblindness in the U.S., likely due to different severity levels, the distinction between medical and nonmedical diagnoses, and the fact that the condition is often degenerative. That is to say, it often falls under the acquired (the condition occurring later in life) versus congenital (from birth). Whatever the case, this is an underserved community. Tatum cites a from the World Federation of the DeafBlind that puts the number of severe cases at 0.2% globally and at 0.8% in the U.S. In our meeting, Tatum showed off its . The user places their hand on the back of the robot, reading the signs in much the same way they would with another person. The system could be used for audiobooks, the news, and other forms of communication that have traditionally been shut off from the community. Tatum notes: Over the past two years, we began developing initial prototypes and conducted preliminary validations with DB users. During this time, the COVID pandemic forced social distancing, causing increased isolation and lack of access to important news updates due to intensified shortage of crucial interpreting services. Due to the overwhelming encouragement from DB individuals, advocates, and paraprofessionals, in 2021, Tatum Robotics was founded to develop an assistive technology to aid the DB community. The company has thus been using pilots to iterate on the technology. Rar Labs I also met with the small team at . Or I should say, I met with the small team at Ras Labs again. I didn’t realize until we started speaking that they were the brand-new robotic skin startup on my last trip to Boston before the world exploded. The company builds a rubbery “fingertip” electroactive polymer (EAP) pad that brings pressure sensitivity to robotic grippers. In fact, the thing is so sensitive that the company found itself attempting to determine why it was getting false readings at one point, only to realize that it was picking up the heartbeat felt in the fingers of the employee holding it. The team is currently piloting its technology and hoping to raise funds. They’re also another prime example of a pivot, having begun life with a focus on prosthesis. The evening culminated with a panel on corporate VC, featuring an interview with Sherwin Prior, who currently serves as the director of Amazon’s $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund — which, for the record, is sticking around in spite of broader recession-fueled cutbacks at the company. He discussed a kind of “rising tide raises all ships” approach to funding startups outside of Amazon. We’ll go into that a bit more below with the full text of my conversation with Amazon Robotics chief technologist Tye Brady. Pickle Robot Clusters take all sorts of different forms in the Boston Robotics scene. In between intentionally built spaces like accelerators and city blocks with multiple robotics firms sit coworking spaces like Industry Lab. After I noted on social media that I wanted to meet with robotics startups during my few days in Boston, Pickle Labs hit me with a great pitch: meeting four companies in one building. The timing couldn’t have been better with Pickle. Earlier this week, . Founded in mid-2018 (talk about good timing), its become one of the leading names in truck-unloading robotics. It sounds like a niche of a niche, but it’s a place a lot of companies are looking to automate for the simple reason that these are extremely difficult roles to fill with people. In addition to the strain of repetitively lifting and moving heavy boxes comes dramatic swings in temperature. Imagine stepping into a shipping container that’s been sitting in the summer sun all day as it’s docked at a warehouse. No wonder some of these companies are posting 100% turnover rates, with new workers leaving after the first lunch break. Companies like Boston Dynamics and Agility have been eyeing the space as well, but Pickle has been developing its own tethered solution for several years now. “Customer interest in Pickle unload systems has been incredibly strong, and now that we have our initial unload systems out of the lab and into customer operations we have a clear path to broad commercialization,” Pickle CEO AJ Meyer said in a release. “The early customer deployments, financing, and leadership additions set the stage for us to accelerate customer acquisition and build the company infrastructure we need to deliver more systems to more customers in the coming months.” Perch Also in the building is , an MIT graduate that builds a professional strength training detection system used by several professional sports teams. LeafLabs, meanwhile, was one of the more interesting pivots on display last week. The firm dates back to 2009, when a quartet of MIT students developed a computing board that operated in the same space as Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Over the years, it’s pivoted to developing hardware for other firms. The company worked on Google’s promising (if ultimately doomed) , as well as , a neurological implant capable of processing as many as 1,024 channels of electrophysiological data. It’s an extremely crafty bunch — the kind of people who just go ahead and build their own faraday cage for in-house testing. Of the group, however, it was that really jumped out at me. If I’m a robotics VC in 2022, I’m taking a close look at companies operating in some of the world’s least sexy spaces — and it doesn’t get less sexy than a slaughterhouse. As a vegetarian, I have mixed feelings about a company that automates that process, but it does ultimately ease the lives of workers operating in one of the roughest environments imaginable. Perhaps you remember or maybe you just read “The Jungle” or “Fast Food Nation” at some point. I should clarify that Marble’s system doesn’t do the actual killing. Instead, the company’s conveyor belt system sits in after the packaging. It uses hardware and AI to automate the sorting process. I was impressed by the automation cells the company produces, though I should clarify that I didn’t actually see one in person. Co-founders Chafik Barbar and Tim Kelsey met at the University of Nebraska, and Marble’s “show room” is located in Lincoln. The firm has generated a good amount of interest in an understaffed industry, with pilots set to begin for its tech. Categories like fulfillment are big and will continue to grow, but if looking to build and invest in technologies, I’m looking at places like slaughterhouses. There are so many underserved jobs that need to be dragged kicking and screaming into this century. A veteran in the robotics space told me that they had explored the category but ultimately opted not to go any further because, well, who wants to be in the slaughterhouse business, even tangentially? Toggle Construction and food are still prime categories. I met with someone from (somewhat ironically, as they’re actually based in my neck of the woods), who we’d previously covered. An important piece of the puzzle I’d missed earlier is that Toggle isn’t just in the rebar-tying robotics business — it’s also in the just plain old rebar-tying business. That is, in addition to creating and selling the robots, the company has begun selling the rebar itself to clients. It’s a clever way to both prove out the technology for clients while generating revenue in the meantime. The idea is that once you’ve got enough construction clients buying the product from you, you’ll be able to upsell sell them on buying or renting the robot to save money in the long-term. Brian Heater I also stopped by ’s offices — though sadly a bit on the early side to eat a salad. I admit I was skeptical going into it. Specifically, I wasn’t sure why anyone would invest in a cooking system based around a robot arm, versus the sort of vending machine or even counter-based solutions such as . I won’t say I’m entirely sold on the form factor just yet, but I’m certainly impressed with the implementation. When I arrived at the company’s office, they were putting a quartet of the robots through a kind of stress test. Brian Krieger, the “Chef de Technologie” (and former regular old sous chef), was effectively monitoring four of the systems at once, each making salads with different ingredients. This, the company says, is sort of the ideal scenario: one human to four robots, all working to get through that lunchtime rush. The secret sauces here are twofold. First is the second arm, which carries the bowl. The second is the system of attachment tools — the robot automatically drops and picks up different utensils. We got to watch as the system learned a new tool in real time, determining how to best hold it (and accidentally dropping some piles of rice as it figured things out). The company currently has a deal to deliver ten of these systems to the military, including one that’s already been installed in a working kitchen. Adaptability is a big selling point for the arm. The company says that, with the right tool, it can grill steaks, open the fridge, and more. The Alfred system runs $50,000, plus a monthly service fee. The arm itself is a modified off-the-shelf system — which was another theme. To paraphrase someone I spoke with last week, many a startup has gone bankrupt attempting to build its own robot arm. That’s precisely why companies like RightHand are focused solely on the gripper. Amazon Heck, even Amazon didn’t build its own arm. The utilizes a modified version of one of Fanuc’s arms — just as the company did with its predecessors Robin and Cardinal. Brian Heater Of course, in spite of ongoing cutbacks, the company still has more money than God. As such, we’re not dealing with repurposed buildings here. Nor are we talking about life inside a cluster. The company instead opened the massive BOS27 facility about 40 minutes outside of downtown Boston in Westborough, Massachusetts. This is their second major robotics facility in the state after a location on the opposite side of Boston in North Reading. A third space is located in Belgium, following Amazon’s What struck me immediately about the space is how much it looks like one of the company’s fulfillment centers. I spent a little time at prior to unionizing efforts, and there’s a lot of undeniable shared DNA there. Makes sense that you’d want to do all of your testing in a facility that looks a lot like the one these products will ultimately occupy. In addition to testing, the company also designs and assembles the robots on-site. I wrote that originally brought me up to Boston. Also, check out a write-up of Amazon’s . With that in mind, I think the best use of our time here is digging deeper into our conversation with Tye Brady. Tye Brady, Chief Technologist, Amazon Amazon TB: We’re definitely aware of the macroeconomic conditions going on in. You may have seen from Amazon that we’re putting a pause on hiring at this moment. That’s not saying that we’re not making investments. We have the Amazon Innovation Fund for $1 billion. We have what we’re doing with Kuiper, for example, with our satellites and Zooks, Whole Foods. We continue to make those types of investments. For , we’ve always been — regardless of where we are with the economy — experimental. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, but we always learn from that experience and rolling that into our experiences here in Robotics. We did a couple of trials and were like, how can we better the customer experiences? It’s the question we always ask in the end, and the signals we were seeing were just, “maybe not at this time.” Not saying that’s forever gone, but maybe not at this time. We like the fact that it’s delivered right to the customer’s door in a timely manner. No. We learned a lot from Canvas. We talked to the team, saw the prototypes they wanted to do. We’d been working on prototypes for a number of years, even prior to the acquisition, and got to share some of the technology and real-world learnings from the team. That’s where we are experimenting, and we have that with Proteus. Amazon We are consolidating inside of Robotics — putting all of Robotics under one roof, which I think is actually really exciting. There’s so many opportunities. Yeah, leadership and how we organize ourselves in order to deliver the robotics products that you’ve seen today, or the future products that hopefully we will be announcing coming up. That doesn’t mean that we’re changing investment. There’s still a lot of need for investment in robotics. It has not changed our philosophy at all of people and machines working collaboratively together and that we can give them a better tool set for them to do their jobs, more safely or simply and more efficiently as well. Yeah, although I want to remind you that there are robots like our Xanthus robot. That’s the lower-profile robot that we announced a few years ago. It’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades. It carries much less of a payload, but it can do multiple things, because the need for movement is high. Also, the Proteus vehicle is more general purpose. It does more than containerized carts. We’re approaching the ability to be able to move goods on demand around people. A promotional stress ball version of the real thing. Brian Heater We don’t do technology for technology’s sake. We use our technology to solve problems. I’m passionate about it because I like to start out teams with what problem we’re trying to solve. And how can we apply our technology in a way that extends human capability? Because they’re very much part of the equation. I’m going to give you my answer as a technologist — as a roboticist. This is not the company line. We have to be really careful when we talk about humanoid robots. When you see the human form, there’s an expectation of human capabilities. Human capabilities are incredibly unique, valuable and have been engineered over millions of years. We have common sense; we understand how to solve problems at a higher level. We can look at a situation and just about instantly figure out the best way to do that. When a robot comes in the human form, I think there’s that expectation that’s initially set. We need to be really careful of that. My philosophy is extending human capability — a helper that will allow me to do more things, that will allow me to be more capable and intelligent . . . in whatever form it takes. That’s a great observation, and that’s one of the ways that we’re accelerating technology development from a roboticist’s point of view in a nonlinear fashion. It’s a semistructured environment where we have people working collaboratively with our machines and we have a process for the flow of goods that I call “technology development with project context.” We have that, but we’re not completely out in the wild, in a city street where there are people all around. […] Eventually, and I do feel this, the work that we’re doing now, in 10, 20 years will actually benefit society as a whole. As we learn the ability to move, manipulate and identify things, I can see that coming into the home. We rolled out the Fund this year. It’s a billion dollars that we’re committing to various robotics companies. It’s important to realize that we’re in the very early stages of robotics. If we’re talking computers, we’d be in the 1950s. It’s really that early. The more that we can raise all boats, I think we all win from that. We realize that not everything needs to be invented inside the walls of Amazon. If we can seed some of these companies and allow them to do technology development with a real project context, then we can ride along with them. As they’re successful, we can learn from them, and if it makes sense, then we can start to incorporate those products into our processes. They’re always on the table. PAUL ELLIS / AFP via Getty Images Amazon has already left an undeniable mark on the industry — that much isn’t up for debate. Questions do remain, however, what its strategy will look like in the face of both and increased regulatory scrutiny around its proposed acquisition of iRobot (though it’s important to point out that the latter would exist as part of its home robotics division, rather than the industrial Amazon Robotics). Again, the Amazon Fund remains intact, and it seems entirely possible that the company might lean more heavily on outside firms like Agility and to round out its warehouse robotics ecosystem. The economy was obviously top of mind the entire Boston trip, to such a point that it took center stage in the above conversation (more reports of big layoffs at the company have arrived in the interim — the latest putting the figure at ). I also made a point to broach the topic with the various founders and VCs I met with during the week. We’re in a moment of transition for the industry. Robotics and automation were very clearly accelerated by the events of the last few years. First the pandemic, then the resulting ability to fill jobs. This has been a watershed moment for the industry and — until recently — has left investments relatively un-impacted by financial headwinds. This has been the overarching storyline for for the last couple of years. But things are changing. When even Amazon is struggling to figure things out, you know it’s going to be a tough time for startups. I certainly wouldn’t want to be raising money right now, regardless of how strong my project is. For those who are, it’s a simple matter of having no other choice. Waiting for the economy isn’t always an option — I suspect that was at least part of the reason why had to lay off roughly half its staff, for example. Even the longest runways have to end. One theme I found, however, is that even those companies that are well-positioned have still slowed hiring. This is a period of massive uncertainty, above all. If I’m a robotics startup without tens or hundreds of millions to burn, I’m being exceedingly cautious right now. Hell, even with a big war chest, I’m still playing it close to the vest. Do what you can with what you have and hire strategically. You don’t want to put your employees in the extremely unfortunate position of being laid off because you grew too fast. Attabotics There are, of course, those companies that simply can’t wait for more favorable conditions to start raising. Take Attabotics, which , bringing the Calgary firm’s total raise up to $165.1 million. “We’re not at the stage where we could have [waited],” founder and CEO Scott Gravelle told me on a call this week. “We’ve got some great traction with some great customers. We signed a deal with the DoD. So now it’s time to go from making stuff work to growing the business and deploying it and executing it.” The company is challenging Amazon’s dominance with a vertical storage solution that uses AI and robotics to locate and retrieve products. The densely packed solution is capable of operating in 15% of the space required by more traditional warehouse solutions. In addition to space savings, that means companies can potentially open more microfulfillment centers in densely packed urban environments, keeping products closer to consumers. “Amazon remains the best member of our business development team,” Gravelle adds with a hint of snark, “as companies go look for alternatives and look for ways to stay competitive. Amazon has been setting customer expectation in North America for years. They’re the benchmark.” The Owl Labs Meeting Owl. Owl Labs Another Boston-based startup, Owl Labs, . The company, which produces an AI-powered teleconferencing system, also used the opportunity to announce a new deal with HP. “The funding will allow Owl Labs to continue its accelerated growth … Owl Labs will use the investment to support product development and increase global adoption of the company’s products, including the [Owl Labs’] product line,” CEO Frank Weishaupt told TechCrunch. “The funding will also be used to expand Owl Labs’ global footprint and deepen go-to-market partnerships starting with a commercial agreement between Owl Labs and HP France, where HP will sell Owl Labs’ products through their local sales team.” The company has raised $47 million to date. Ghost Robotics Ghost Robots is back in the news this week, but this time it’s not due to outrage over its bots sporting sniper rifles or being used to patrol the U.S./Mexico border. Nope, this time it’s good old-fashioned accusations of patent infringement. Boston Dynamics recently filed a suit in Delaware accusing the Philadelphia firm of using registered IP in its robotic dog systems. Per the filing, Boston Dynamics said it wrote multiple letters to Ghost Robotics, including a couple of cease and desists. A spokesperson for Boston Dynamics that the company doesn’t comment on pending litigation, but adds: Innovation is the lifeblood of Boston Dynamics, and our roboticists have successfully filed approximately 500 patents and patent applications worldwide. We welcome competition in the emerging mobile robotics market, but we expect all companies to respect intellectual property rights, and we will take action when those rights are violated. Boston Dynamics is seeking unspecified damages. Still awaiting comment from Ghost. Miso Robotics The subject of Miso Robotics came up a few times during my conversations with Dexai — in large part because the company has done a good job keeping itself top of mind through partnerships and expansions. I will say, the kitchen is one of those places where an arm makes sense. It’s effectively the same argument as the one fueling humanoid robot research: we build our environments for humans, so why not build robots for those environments? If you’re attempting to automate the job of a fry chef, an arm makes sense. It’s not a place where you can just plunk down a vending machine. This week, Miso announced that Flippy will be deployed to a restaurant in the Midlands, marking its first expansion into the U.K. The company won’t disclose the name of the restaurant, only telling TechCrunch that it’s an “international fast-food chain.” The news also finds the firm turning to crowdfunded investing again, this time through the European site CrowdCube, an apparent indication that Miso is eyeing more aggressive U.K. expansion. Luxonis This blew past its goal — and then some — almost immediately. Rae (Robotics Access for Everyone) is an open source piece of hardware designed to give users access to robotics technologies. The company says it’s designed to work out of the box, while offering up customization through its use of ROS2 and SLAM hardware. In announcing the project, the company writes: Unlike other consumer home robots that have the majority of their functionality pre-determined, rae has potential beyond its pre-built offerings, and serves as a platform for more advanced users to create and build. If our initial software collection doesn’t solve your problem, simply develop your own. Since it’s fully open-source, rae is wide open for customization. And it will link directly to our new cloud based platform, RobotHub, for easy sharing and collaboration with a worldwide network of rae users. Looks like a fun project for people looking to pull back the curtain a bit on the world of home robots. Iconic Old State House in Boston, Massachusetts. Ian.CuiYi / Getty Images That’s all I’ve got in the tank for this week. I traveled to Boston specifically for the Thursday Amazon event in Westborough, while tacking on some time to meet with startups on either side — making up for a July trip I postponed due to COVID. The last few times I made work trips to the city, I took a film crew along. It’s always fun having the opportunity to shoot new startups, but the solo trip affords me the ability to jam a lot more into two days. Amazon aside, I intentionally skipped the usual suspects like iRobot and Boston Dynamics in hopes of finding some hidden treasures. I overbooked my trip, of course. That’s just how it tends to go when I do my own scheduling. Next time I do one of these city trips, I’m going to make a point of giving myself an extra day. Without fail, you always hear of interesting new projects only after you’re on the ground. Boston people are big cheerleaders for their city and its startup ecosystem and will happily talk your ear off about all of the cool local stuff. I regret that I wasn’t able to make visits to the labs at schools like MIT and Harvard on this trip. I was felled with COVID a third time the week before the trip, so much of this scheduling came through last minute. It also didn’t help that Friday was a holiday — though that did, comically, lead to a coffee shop musical chairs for meetings. I ended up taking one outside on a bench directly across from a construction site in Cambridge, because every spot we tried was closed. The rain, mercifully, started minutes after we were done chatting. As a microcosm of the broader robotics community, Boston presents a great diversity in projects. Yet another reason there’s camaraderie among companies is that most everyone seems to be doing something different. They’re either focused on a different category or a different method for tackling the same problem — and for the most part, they all appear to be cheering each other on. It’s a rising tide in the very early stage of the robotics revolution in which we currently find ourselves. I mentioned to those I was meeting with that a big part of the reason for the trip was to get the temperature of the industry at the beginning of what’s shaping up to be a difficult period for things like fundraising and hiring. It’s nice to be able to have coffee with and pick the brains of founders and investors. These are the kinds of conversations that fuel a newsletter like this for months to come. We discussed a broad range of topics, from military contracts to climate to university support to labor. Bad economic headwinds aside, it’s an extremely exciting moment to be in this industry — even if only tangentially. We’re on the cusp of something revolutionary. Thanks to everyone in Boston for being so accommodating (shout-out to , , and State Park’s extremely good jukebox), and thanks to you for making it through this beast of a newsletter (I lost track after word 6,000). I’ll be more pithy next week (also because Thanksgiving). Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch |
Pitch Deck Teardown: Sateliot’s $11.4M Series A deck | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | really sucks? Your IoT devices not being able to phone home. Rarely a problem when you’re in the center of a well-populated urban center with oodles of cell towers, but think of that water temperature buoy floating around in the Atlantic, an autonomous drone flying above the rain forest or a glacier-creep measuring sonde high up in the mountains. The fact is that about 90% of the planet has no cell coverage at all, and raised to change that. The company shared its pitch deck with us to take a deeper look, and so we will! Here’s the good and the bad of this high-flying space deck. Sateliot’s deck consists of 18 slides and is as pitched; the company redacted some of the info that goes into depth about how its tech works. It’s always interesting to see companies that are trying to have an enormous impact on the space they operate in. Sateliot is making space for an incredible opportunity, essentially removing the need for infrastructure to make IoT solutions work from pretty much anywhere in the world with a clear view of the sky. It’s a story that could be told in so many ways, and I was excited to see how the company launched into things. [Slide 2] Crisp and easy. Sateliot As a startup, if you can distill your problem, solution and opportunity this elegantly, you’ve got yourself a great launchpad to start weaving your narrative for your pitch. [Slide 7] Being the right team for the job is a crucial aspect of pitching. This is hella compelling. Sateliot One of the big questions an investor will be asking themselves is whether a particular company is well positioned to take charge of a market. In other words: Is there something about this team or company that gives them an unfair advantage over the competitors? This slide is labeled as “value proposition,” which is a little confusing. The slide doesn’t describe a value prop but a competitive advantage. It describes the “number of contributions to the 3GPP Standard,” but it doesn’t say what that . that seems to indicate that this is very relevant, but I’d love for the company to have contextualized it on this slide. Those caveats aside: If it turns out that contributions to the standard are directly relevant to the company’s success and show that it’s particularly well positioned to corner this market, this absolute design disaster and word soup of a slide might actually be a powerful storytelling device. Scanning down the lists of companies that have made more and fewer contributions, there are a lot of big-name vendors. Seeing Sateliot in the top 25 or so — ahead of many other well-known companies — could suggest that there’s a significant moat in place. I wish the company had connected the dots for me, but if this slide means what I suspect it means, it makes up for the distinctly subpar “team” slide (which we’ll discuss in a bit). As a startup, what you can learn here is that if you have a moat, or some reason why nobody else can truly solve the problem at hand as well as you can, shout about it loudly — it makes you a far more tempting investment target. [Slide 14] Having a social mission component can help give investors the warm-and-fuzzies. Sateliot As I said, that doesn’t matter to all investors, but in this case, you’re creating a win-win. Zero marginal cost means that there’s no real downside to offering the company’s services to causes that improve the planet and plenty of potential upsides. In addition to making the world a better place, there are PR opportunities, ESG advantages and secondary benefits to the company. Sateliot could very easily not have included this in its story, but it makes me happier that they did. The lesson here is to think about whether you can tell your story in ways that appeal to audiences in multiple ways. Giving an investor the chance to brag about a company they invested in that’s doing some good in the world can never harm, so if that’s true for you (and it is a natural, logical part of the story), then why not throw it into the mix? In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Sateliot could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck! |
Daily Crunch: Sequoia Capital writes off its $210M investment in crypto exchange FTX | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | Tech reporting is a lot of things, but it sure ain’t boring, as the chaos around Twitter, crypto, and layoffs continues. We’re just trying to hang on for dear life to try to make some sense of it all. We think we did a pretty decent job, and here, we’ve got a selection of what’s been happening in the past 24 hours of tech. — and . Denver-based VC firm on its home state of Colorado, despite being the only local fund in two of the state’s 10 unicorn companies, reports. It’s also now able to expand its team thanks to raising three times as much money for Fund II, giving SpringTime enough cash on hand to allow its partners to finally pay themselves “a real salary.” New crypto startups forged ahead during Alliance DAO’s demo day on Wednesday amid the FTX implosion. The most recent cohort, known as All9, for Alliance DAO, a web3 accelerator and builder community, , exclusively covered by . And here’s a smattering of other things that caught our beady little eyes today: / Getty Images Founding teams usually select a corporate structure like an LLC or S-Corp, but those who hope to exit for $10 million or more should consider starting up as a Qualified Small Business (QSB) C-Corporation, advises tax attorney Vincent Aiello. Under IRS Code Section 1202, founders who hold QSB stock for five years or longer will be exempt from paying capital gains tax after a sale. “It constitutes a significant tax savings benefit for entrepreneurs and small business investors,” Aiello says. “However, the effect of the exclusion ultimately depends on when the stock was acquired, the trade or business being operated, and various other factors.” Three more from the TC+ team: Elon Musk wants Twitter workers in the office and wants them battling spam. Those were some of the for his social media staff, writes. Oh, he also told them to be ready for “difficult times ahead,” which is always something you want to hear from your leader with regard to the future of your job. After the Binance deal fell through, FTX founder : winding down trading at Alameda Research and winding up his fundraising prowess, reports. We promise, no more FTX or Twitter below: |
RIP to FTX? | Anita Ramaswamy | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | TechCrunch We had to talk about the news that rocked the crypto world this week in our : . To begin, we gave you a rundown of WTF just happened with the beef between two of the largest crypto exchanges in the world and how Sam Bankman-Fried’s storied exchange , bringing down investors, cryptocurrencies and other companies in the space tumbling down with it. Welcome to , where we unpack and explain the latest in crypto news, drama and trends, breaking things down block by block for the crypto curious. You can listen to the episode below: Once we ran through the background behind the situation that’s been unfolding in real time this week, we shared our thoughts on the massive implications this fiasco might have for the rest of the crypto industry, from to . It’s a fascinating backdrop for our conversation at our next week, where we’ll be chatting with Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the billionaire who is seen as the catalyst for FTX’s downfall. You can use the promo code REACT a General Admission ticket to the event to hear from CZ and plenty of other crypto market players about what the future of this tumultuous industry might hold in the coming months. |
More key Twitter execs just quit, including the head of trust and safety | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | Hours after news broke that Twitter lost top , another round of departures deepened the company’s ongoing crisis. Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer first that Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth quit the company Thursday after just two weeks under Musk’s leadership. Robin Wheeler, who was elevated to lead Twitter’s marketing and sales teams, has also reportedly left the company, according to . After reportedly resigning on Thursday, Wheeler tweeted that she remains at the company, suggesting that she was convinced to stay on board, for now at least. I'm still here. — Robin Wheeler (@robinw) Roth, who remained a public face at the company in the brief Musk era and about the company’s moderation efforts, is an especially shocking departure. But both executives played a visible role in Musk’s version of the company. Just yesterday, Roth and Wheeler moderated a in which Musk shared his vision for the company. Twitter also lost its chief privacy officer Damien Kieran and chief compliance officer Marianne Fogarty on Thursday along with the departure of its CISO. The latest wave of resignations on top of Musk’s erratic behavior and his haphazard mass layoffs are likely to crater whatever advertiser and regulator trust remained in Musk’s ability to run the company. Time honored tradition. ✌️ — Damien (@Damokieran) I've made the hard decision to leave Twitter. I've had the opportunity to work with amazing people and I'm so proud of the privacy, security, and IT teams and the work we've done. I'm looking forward to figuring out what's next, starting with my reviews for 😁 — Lea Kissner (@LeaKissner) Per multiple reports, Musk also convened an impromptu all-hands meeting at the company on Thursday, painting a dire picture of its financials and that “bankruptcy isn’t out of the question.” Twitter’s new owner repeated his assertion that the company would no longer allow remote work, suggesting that anyone who didn’t report to the office in person would be fired. |
FTC warns ‘no CEO or company is above the law’ if Twitter shirks privacy order | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | telegraphed what appears to be a now-inevitable investigation into Twitter’s internal data handling practices, as the company continues to shed important staff and improvise new features. “No CEO or company is above the law,” the agency said in a statement — and if Elon Musk’s Twitter continues its current spree, they may find themselves in violation of the FTC’s order and facing serious consequences. To be clear at the outset, the FTC has not announced any investigation into Twitter or Elon Musk, or even that they are gathering information in service of such an investigation. Nor would it be able to confirm it was investigating if it was. But circumstantial evidence, common sense, and the ominous statement issued today leave little doubt that the company is in the agency’s crosshairs. In the course of its ordinary oversight duties, the FTC looks into complaints by consumers, companies, and anyone with a bone to pick about things like misleading advertising, broken privacy promises, illicit business arrangements, and so on. But in 2011, Twitter agreed to a consent decree with the regulator after being found to have misused user data. It was also found to have done so again for many years in an investigation earlier this year, so this isn’t some bygone red tape. This decree required Twitter to establish and maintain a program to ensure and regularly report that its new features do not further misrepresent “the extent to which it maintains and protects the security, privacy, confidentiality, or integrity of any nonpublic consumer information.” The revised order adds more oversight and gives the FTC more power, since evidently Twitter needed a stick as well as a carrot. The gist of it is that Twitter is in the doghouse with the FTC already, and it has specific and legally binding requirements regarding what it can and can’t do with data, and how it verifies that it is in compliance. Around the time of the settlement, Elon Musk entered the stage and now we have . But the news that last night , no doubt important to walking the line with a watchful regulator, . Literally minutes after I wrote this paragraph, the company’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, was reported to be leaving as well. NEW: A senior member of Twitter’s legal team just posted this message in Slack:“Everyone should know that our CISO, Chief Privacy Officer and Chief Compliance Officer ALL resigned last night. This news will be buried in the return-to-office drama. I believe that is intentional.” — Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) This would be troubling at any company, at any time, under any level of federal scrutiny. But for Twitter, the departing chiefs might as well have hired a skywriter to spell out “INVESTIGATE ME” in huge letters above Twitter HQ. (Of course, normally that might apply to any number of companies in downtown San Francisco, but right now there’s little question.) The amount of changes, new products, eliminations of various departments and processes (many of which had to do with privacy, fairness, data handling and other crucial topics) don’t mean Twitter is necessarily in violation of the consent decree. But with things going the way they are, it’s quite hard to imagine that it is in compliance now, or if it is, will it remain so for long. It’s important, though, to understand that the FTC isn’t like the FBI, kicking doors down and arranging evidence in damning dioramas. The FTC conducts its investigations privately and at great length — they can’t and don’t publicize the fact that they are looking into a company for some violation or another until there is a legally binding consequence like a signed consent decree, settlement, or a decision to go to trial via the Department of Justice. Although many expected the FTC, , to be more proactive, it is limited by law as to what it can do. It’s actually a bit surprising that the agency got as spicy as it did in the full statement: We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern. No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees. Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them. Though it stops short of saying, “We are sharpening our knives,” this statement nevertheless is about as strong an implication that they will be giving Twitter a call as soon as they can justify it. (A juicy tidbit uncovered by , while enticing, could relate to ongoing discussions regarding the $150 million settlement, so don’t get too excited.) If they decide to pursue an investigation, which would probably happen if there are any red flags at all, let alone this many, it will be done confidentially — but importantly, it is not . That means that although it is the FTC’s policy not to reveal or comment on an investigation, a company or person being investigated may do so at any time if they wish. So if the FTC makes a formal request for certain data from Twitter, or deposes its executives (present or former), they may decide to publicize that information. , long before the settlement with the FTC was finalized. After all, you don’t want your investors to be the last to hear about something like a $150 million charge, even though in telling them you risk discovery by hawk-eyed journalists. So if the FTC investigates Twitter, it’s far more likely that we will hear about it from the company — in a filing with investors or, more likely, from its incautious and prolix CEO during one of his increasingly frequent emergency meetings. The state of chaos at Twitter makes the commonplace observation that we don’t know what it will look like in six months into a gross understatement, however, meaning the entire company might have changed hands or business models before the FTC has finished its (hypothetical) work. Still, that won’t get the flailing company off the hook. Twitter’s leadership, or what’s left of it, may want to prioritize survival and compliance with federal regulators before returning to its now regularly scheduled mayhem. |
Tumblr’s only viable business model is shitposting | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | As Elon Musk struggles to make people give Twitter , Tumblr had an idea: What if they offered users $8 for not one, but blue checks? Yes, you can legitimately buy two blue checks for your Tumblr blog. For the low, low price of $7.99. As Tumblr wrote in an post, “That’s cheaper than some other places, when you consider that you get not one but TWO checkmarks for your blog.” A checkmark isn't cool, you know what's cool? Two checkmarks. — Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) If you keep paying Tumblr, you can get blue checks. Want 10 blue checks? That’ll be about $40. Tumblr has struggled to monetize for its entire existence. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo (TechCrunch’s parent company) for $1 billion in 2013, but when it sold again to Automattic in 2019, it was worth . Tumblr’s success as a social media platform has been in even more jeopardy since it porn in 2018 to protect its presence on the App Store. In the last year alone, Automattic has tried to get Tumblr to make money through , a and a , marking some of the first paid creator features on the longstanding blogging site. Yet despite growing for Tumblr, the platform has failed to grow its user base significantly since the , when it lost of web traffic. According to data from SensorTower, Tumblr’s mobile app has seen approximately $507,000 in consumer spending since April. That was the month when Tumblr announced Blaze, a feature that lets users promote their own posts. Not coincidentally, debuted on 4/20 with price points ending in $4.20. On a platform like Facebook, promoted posts are usually for businesses. On Tumblr, Blazed posts are commonly used to make other people bear witness to your cursed content. Tumblr’s top in-app purchases (April to November 10, 2022). SensorTower Since the launch of Blaze, Tumblr’s top five in-app purchases have been ad-free browsing (monthly and annual), two price points for Blaze and … crabs. Yes, crabs. In July, Tumblr a feature that allows you to send someone crabs that dance around their dashboard for a day, and now, crabs have generated more in-app purchases than Post+. that's not a bug, that's a feature. — tumblr dot com the website and app (@tumblr) According to analytics firm Similarweb, Tumblr did not experience a uptick in monthly visits worldwide on mobile and desktop after it launched creator monetization features in summer 2021. However, Tumblr is generating some more interest now that we live in a world in which Elon Musk owns Twitter. Other alternative social networks have seen an influx of new users too — nearly doubled its user base so far this month. Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic (the company that owns Tumblr), tweeted that Tumblr app downloads are up about 58% in the last week. This could be because Twitter now seems like more of a hellsite than Tumblr under Musk’s ownership, or because Tumblr just changed its . Now, Tumblr allows nudity, but not “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts.” Some internet denizens took this policy change to mean that porn is back, but the last time we checked, porn generally falls into the category of “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts.” For : Over the past 7 days, iOS downloads are up 58% with 30% more impressions in the App Store. Android downloads are up 57% with 50% more impressions in the Play Store. — Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) If you’re looking to jump ship from Twitter as Elon Musk gets settled in as its new owner, I hate to break it to you: Tumblr may not be your saving grace (unless if you’re a former “Superwholock” fan whose new favorite book is “Gideon the Ninth,” in which case, you’re probably still on Tumblr anyway). But to be fair, it’s likely that none of the Twitter alternatives that are floating around — no, not even — will become the new Twitter. Regardless, Tumblr now has something that Twitter doesn’t: blue checkmarks. |
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