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Spotify releases a new exclusive podcast hosted by Kim Kardashian | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 10 | 3 | Today, Spotify the first two episodes of the new original podcast “ ,” narrated by reality TV star Kim K and true-crime producer Lori Rothschild Ansaldi. The series will be available worldwide and is free for all Spotify listeners. The podcast will have eight episodes in total and explore the story of Kevin Keith, who was convicted of a triple homicide in 1994. For 28 years, Keith has been trying to prove his innocence. Kardashian and Rothschild Ansaldi will work with investigators and experts to demonstrate how the legal system is broken, Spotify wrote in its release. New episodes of “The System” will be released on Mondays. Kardashian has been open about her thoughts on the flawed justice system and is currently pursuing a career as a lawyer. She in California and claims to have plans to open her own law firm in the future. Kardashian entered a in 2020 to produce and host an exclusive podcast for the music streaming platform. Her podcast deal joins other celebrities who have inked with Spotify as part of the company’s strategy to expand its exclusive audio offerings. Also, in 2020, Spotify closed a deal with . “The System” podcast launched on the same day that the for “unlawfully touting a crypto security.” Kardashian settled the case and paid $1.26 million. |
Tier Mobility-owned Spin lays off about 10% of workforce, exits two markets | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 10 | 3 | Spin, which was acquired by Tier Mobility earlier this year, has laid off about 10% of its staff — including a number of executives — and is exiting Canada and Seattle, TechCrunch has learned. The micromobility company informed its workforce of more than 700 during a Friday all-hands meeting that lower-than-expected demand in the U.S. amid the waning pandemic, along with economic conditions such as rising inflation and a tightening VC funding environment, led to the decision. About 78 people, the majority of whom are white-collar workers based in its San Francisco headquarters, have been laid off. The affected employees were notified prior to the meeting. Staff was also told that it is exiting Kelowna, British Columbia, and Seattle, where it was just invited to return as a bikeshare vendor for 2023. Seattle’s Department of Transportation told TechCrunch that Spin, which operated a scootershare in Seattle from 2021 to 2022, was not granted a permit to continue scooter operations in 2023; the DOT said it was working with Spin to confirm their plans in light of the recent announcement. Spin had operations in Edmonton, Red Deer and St. Albert, Canada, but never reactivated those cities after winter ended this year. Kelowna was its last remaining Canadian market. Philip Reinckens, a Tier veteran in May, delivered the news to employees, according to sources who asked not to be named. During the 20-minute meeting, Reinckens told workers that the company’s priorities are to preserve cash and achieve profitability. Notably, he said the entire micromobility industry was suffering from a perfect storm of events that included supply chain constraints, inflation, the war in Ukraine and a tight labor market. While the company has cut costs such as downsizing its San Francisco office and rolled out programs to encourage more ridership and raise its bottom line, the company still wasn’t able to capture the demand needed to make profit and loss figures work, he said, according to an audio recording of the event shared with TechCrunch. Lucas Beard, Spin’s VP of growth and marketing, also confirmed the layoffs and the decision to leave Canada. “While it’s impossible for us to predict the future in such a new industry, what we can promise is that we’ll continue to be as transparent and thoughtful as possible as we continue to evaluate our financial performance and external market conditions,” Beard wrote in an email. He added that Spin is also centralizing some areas with parent company Tier. The layoffs come about six months after Berlin-based micromobility operator from automaker Ford. The acquisition marked Tier’s move into North America and came after an aggressive expansion in Europe that included buying and . The Spin acquisition gave Tier a global footprint of more than 520 cities and communities in 21 countries. It also added to its costs and ultimately led Tier to restructure. In August, of its workforce, or 180 people, due to economic conditions and a tightening funding climate. The VC firms once gladly forked over funds to shared micromobility startups even as costs piled up and questions loomed about whether shared scooters and e-bikes could ever be profitable enterprises. In the past year, micromobility companies still reliant on external funding have found a less receptive VC community. Bird, Superpedestrian and Voi are a few that have in 2022. The lack of demand in some markets — including ones that once were teeming with users before the COVID pandemic — has forced companies to restructure their businesses and seek ways to cut costs. |
Gopuff delivers on Goodnow, its new health, wellness private label offering | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 10 | 3 | added another private label to its arsenal of offerings, this time in the health and wellness space with Goodnow, the company announced Monday. The Philadelphia-based instant grocery delivery company is starting with products like over-the-counter medications for pain, allergy, cold, flu and sinus relief, as well as first aid items, sleep aids and diagnostic test kits. However, look for items, including electrolyte drinks, bandages, antihistamines and antacids, to be offered nationwide in the coming months, the company said. Items are produced and controlled according to quality standards and manufactured in third-party good manufacturing practice-certified facilities. Goodnow, which was in development for over a year, follows a bevy of private label brands. Its first, Basically, a snack line launched in January, saw 150% growth in sales since April, the company told TechCrunch via email. Then came fresh-made pizza brand, The Mean Tomato, followed by a plant-based snack collaboration with NBA player Chris Paul called Good Eat’n, which launched in September. The company said the health and wellness industry was a natural next step for it and instant delivery overall. Not only is it a massive industry , but when surveyed, customers expressed interest in purchasing over-the-counter medicines from Gopuff specifically, the company said. It also saw sales of these kinds of items increase over 130% in 2022 after rising 200% in 2021. Gopuff, which has plans to grow its private label portfolio, is in a good position to launch more verticals and will continue to monitor its customers’ needs and evaluate opportunities accordingly, the company said. Meanwhile, the company, co-founded by CEOs Yakir Gola and Rafael Ilishayev in 2013, has not been immune to some of the quick-commerce slowdown of late. In May, Ingrid Lunden reported that the company as its newest investor and advisor and got confirmation that Gopuff laid off 3% of its staff, or 450 people, earlier this year. She noted that the company said the addition of Iger, “is coming at a pretty critical time for the company and the wider category of commerce.” The company was valued at $15 billion in 2020 and , but to focus on more lucrative markets, like the U.K., after less than a year serving Europe. It also discussed a mid-2022 public listing, but Lunden reported in May that those plans seemed to be on hold after the public markets stalled out. The company declined to provide an update on its IPO plans. |
Meta settles lawsuit for ‘significant’ sum against businesses scraping Facebook and Instagram data | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 10 | 3 | Facebook parent Meta has in the U.S. against two companies that had engaged in data scraping operations, which had seen them gathering data from Facebook and Instagram users for marketing intelligence purposes, according to the . The companies named in the suit, Israeli-based BrandTotal Ltd. and Delaware-incorporated Unimania Inc., agreed to a permanent injunction banning them from scraping Facebook and Instagram data going forward or profiting from the data they collected. They also agreed to pay a “significant financial sum” as part of their settlement, Meta says. Meta declined to disclose the sum paid, however, and court filings didn’t specify the amount. According to BrandTotal’s website, its company had offered a real-time competitive intelligence platform designed to give media, insights and analytics teams visibility into their competition’s social media strategy and paid campaigns. These insights would allow its customers to analyze and shift their budget allocation to target new opportunities, monitor trends and threats from emerging brands, optimize their ads and messaging and more. Meanwhile, Unimania operated apps claiming to offer users the ability to access social networks in different ways. For example, Unimania offered apps that let you view Facebook via a mobile-web interface or alongside other social networks like Twitter. Another app allows you to view Instagram Stories anonymously, it claimed. Together, the two companies developed and distributed products under the brand names UpVoice, Social One, Phoenix, Anonymous Story Viewer, Story Savebox, Calix and Restricted Panel. The original complaint had offered by the companies: Unimania’s “Ads Feed” and BrandTotal’s “UpVoice.” The former had allowed users to save the ads they saw on Facebook for later reference, but also opted users into a panel that informed the advertising decisions of Unimania’s corporate clients. UpVote had rewarded users with gift cards for sharing their opinions about the online campaigns run by brands. According to the filing that detailed the proposed settlement, both companies agreed to stop scraping or assisting others in data collection practices, delete their software and code, and agreed to a ban on distributing or selling any data they collected through their operations, among other things. It also notes that they agreed to pay monetary damages in a confidential settlement. The district court overseeing the case ruled in earlier this year that BrandTotal did “not violate the CFAA,” or the which governs what constitutes computer hacking under U.S. federal law. This decision came weeks after the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed that under the CFAA after the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, but the Ninth Circuit did not rule on whether scraping could violate a company’s terms of service or other contractual agreements. But in its summary judgment, the district court found that BrandTotal failed to show that Facebook’s terms of service are unenforceable. The case is one of several filed by Meta designed to take on data scraping operations, including with the scraping service Massroot8. This year, the company also and a company called Octopus, a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese national high-tech enterprise Meta last year disclosed it has a dedicated team devoted to detecting, blocking and deterring scraping. And, in a year’s time, it said it data scraping and other platform abuse. The problem can still threaten user privacy, however. An April 2021 that the personal data from 533 million Facebook users had been leaked online, via ; Meta . More recently, it changed how uses Facebook Identifiers (FBIDs) to make it more technically challenging for unauthorized scraping to occur in the first place. |
IriusRisk lands $29M to automate threat modeling for apps | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | , a threat modeling platform, today announced that it raised $29 million in a Series B funding round led by Paladin Capital Group with participation from BrightPixel Capital, SwanLab Venture Factory, 360 Capital and Inveready. In a conversation with TechCrunch, CEO Stephen de Vries said that the proceeds will be put toward growing IriusRisk’s U.S. and Europe, Middle East and Africa sales and marketing teams as the company’s total raised nears $40 million. De Vries, who previously worked at cybersecurity firm Corsaire, KPMG and ISS as a principal security consultant, said he came to the realization that companies were wasting resources performing security testing on software that developers didn’t design with security in mind. If developers could understand the security flaws in their designs by threat modeling — i.e. identifying the types of threats that cause harm to software — it’d reduce the bottleneck caused by security reviews, de Vries theorized. Indeed, threat modeling doesn’t appear to be top of mind at many organizations. In a Golfdale Consulting commissioned last year by cybersecurity vendor Security Compass, less than 10% of developers reported that threat modeling was performed on 90% or more of the apps they developed at their organizations. Only 25% said their organizations conducted threat modeling during the early phases of software development, like requirements gathering and design, before proceeding with development. “Threat modeling is now established as a required activity for secure software development,” de Vries said — pointing to President Joe Biden’s recent establishing threat modeling as a “recommended minimum” for verifying app code. “Since threat modeling as an activity is still relatively new, there is a need for organizations to share strategies, tips and tricks for what works when rolling out a threat modeling program — and what doesn’t.” IriusRisk leverages a rules engine to “reason over” client-side and cloud-hosted codebases, taking a pattern-based approach to modeling threats. Users of platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudFormation, HashiCorp Terraform and Microsoft Visio can tap IriusRisk to import code and automatically generate a diagram and threat model of it. IriusRisk’s threat modeling dashboard. IriusRisk IriusRisk also provides an analytics module with reports and logs, which can be used by data analysts and scientists to interpret threat data from within their organizations. To increase the granularity and accuracy of this data, customers can add to IriusRisks’ pattern detection library components unique to their industry or company, including those for AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and . “IriusRisk allows technical decision makers to bake in security right from the start of the software development life cycle, turning it into an easily implemented practice that can be consistently applied across an organization’s product portfolio, creating security-by-design at scale,” de Vries said. “Organizations benefit from IriusRisk’s extensive security standards libraries which include existing threat models for known components, comprehensive security standards and compliance libraries, which helps teams to build secure software first and automatically address regulatory requirements.” When asked about competition, de Vries conceded that startups like Spectral take an approach similar to IriusRisk in some respects. But he asserted that his company’s largest competitors are behind the curve, performing threat modeling manually with “whiteboards and maybe rudimentary tooling.” “We are focused on solving the problem of performing threat modeling consistently and at scale, with minimal developer friction. We often talk to organizations … who are looking to mature their approach by taking it out of the security team and into engineering teams,” de Vries added. “We are making a significant investment into the wider threat modeling community.” IriusRisk claims to have more than quadrupled its partner base through 2021 and grown its free offering, IriusRisk Community Edition, by 120% in terms of active users (to just over 5,400). More than 4,000 projects ran through the free platform over the last year, de Vries said — a number he expects will grow when IriusRisk launches a new open threat model format, scheduled for November, to allow better interoperability between threat modeling tooling and existing architectural and security tools. “Our customers include six of the and nine Fortune 100 companies … Government organizations are using the tool, as well as a digital forensics company, which supports military end-users,” de Vries said. “It is very typical for application security or cyber security teams to adopt our software and then roll it out to the wider engineering organization so that they can self-serve a threat modeling capability … We have grown annual recurring revenue at over 106% year-over-year for the last two years and are currently at a 120% year-over-year growth rate.” IriusRisk has 137 employees today and plans to expand its headcount to 160 by the end of the year. |
Party Round’s rebrand is banking on founder bank accounts | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | wants you to know that the party isn’t over. In fact, it just rebranded, put the music just a little bit lower and finally put out some appetizers. After a certain point, don’t we all get peckish? Party Round announced today that it has rebranded to Capital to underscore its product expansion. Now, the startup won’t just make it easier for other startups to raise their own party round. Capital wants to build a tech stack for the modern founder to handle their finances, a crowded space, but one always in need of more disruption. “Party Round was this amazing, living breathing meme that was evolving and meant to entertain the community,” Hays, who built the company alongside Sarah , said. “But the thing is, even our ambition as a company, and what we want to do on the product side, is [different]. Fundraising and investing gets so much attention in the startup media, but it’s maybe like 1-5% of what it actually takes to build a company.” “We were very comfortable saying that in the first 18 months of building this company, we’re going to ignore every single possible channel except tech Twitter, and that was like the best possible strategy we could have done,” the founder said. “There’s 100,000 early-stage founders and investors signed up for our email list.” Capital wants to take that trust and expressed interest and give the same founders a place to raise, hold and spend that earned capital. It’s a maturation for the company, which from Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six fund, Anish Acharya from a16z, Shrug Capital, Packy McCormick, Nik Sharma and Austin Rief. Here’s the simplest way to describe what Capital does today: Founders can turn to the platform to create and set terms for SAFE notes, and then invite potential investors to contribute through the platform. Investors, meanwhile, can select to link their banking account to invest in the company through either USD or crypto with specific allocation; all while Capital handles back-end documents. There’s an NFT to verify the investment if investors are interested in NFTs that verify the investment. Once the money is wired, founders can use Capital to create a business checking account, get a debit card and conduct payments. Hays explained how a founder who uses Ramp for creidt cards can then connect their Ramp account to Capital; same goes for if someone was using Rippling for payroll. Capital’s utility is that it gives all those fintech tools one home to live, or, some would say, one living room to party at. Hays isn’t too intimidated by the unicorns in the space, noting that many (such as Brex and Ramp) started with expense tracking and are heavily focused on the enterprise, while Capital seeks to work with smaller startups at the point of their first fundraise. “Before you need a bank account, you need money to put in that bank account. And unless you’re bootstrapping, or generating revenue, really, really early on and self funding, typically those funds are coming from your investors,” Hays said. “We are exclusively focused on companies at the inflection point and figuring out how we can be the first place that they raise, hold and spend their money.” The challenge for Capital is if it can prove that its users, a number which remains undisclosed, are sticky enough to stay. Up until now, the company’s fundraising tool was free with some simple steps: create a round, configure the SAFE terms and invite investors. Hays says that they will monetize new products over time, but ease of use will stay a focus for the business. “I think that being funny and entertaining is great, but in the long term, we think the most important [thing] is building the best products and software for founders period. And to do that we need a brand that’s going to resonate more broadly and outside of our bubble,” the founder said. |
White House proposes voluntary safety and transparency rules around AI | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | It’s also completely voluntary. While the White House seeks to “lead by example” and have federal agencies fall in line with their own actions and derivative policies, private corporations aren’t beholden to the AI Bill of Rights. Alongside the release of the AI Bill of Rights, the White House announced that certain agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, will publish guidance in the coming months seeking to curtail the use of damaging or dangerous algorithmic technologies in specific settings. But these steps fall short of, for instance, the EU’s regulation under development, which prohibits and curtails certain categories of AI deemed to have harmful potential. Still, experts like Oren Etzioni, a co-founder of the Allen Institute for AI, believe that the White House guidelines will have some influence. “If implemented properly, [a] bill could reduce AI misuse and yet support beneficial uses of AI in medicine, driving, enterprise productivity, and more,” he The Wall Street Journal. |
What tech tycoon Richard Liu’s sexual misconduct case means for China’s #MeToo | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 10 | 3 | One of the highest-profile sexual assault allegations against Chinese business tycoons ended abruptly this past weekend. Liu Qiangdong (also known as Richard Liu), the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, has reached a settlement with Liu Jingyao, a former University of Minnesota student who alleged that the billionaire raped her in her apartment in 2018. The announcement came in a joint statement from the two parties on Saturday, just two days before Mr. Liu was scheduled to face a civil trial in Minneapolis, during which the press . The amount for the settlement wasn’t disclosed. The joint statement neither denied nor confirmed Ms. Liu’s claims, saying only that the incident between Mr. Liu and Ms. Liu (unrelated) “resulted in a misunderstanding that has consumed substantial public attention and brought profound suffering to the parties and their families.” “Today, the parties agreed to set aside their differences, and settle their legal dispute in order to avoid further pain and suffering caused by the lawsuit.” Some might see the result as yet another instance where powerful figures get to shun legal ramifications using their power and money. But others argue this is already a step forward for China’s beleaguered #MeToo movement. Mr. Liu has and could have used his financial prowess to defend his purported innocence through the trial. A settlement instead might suggest his silent admission of wrongdoings. “It’s such a historic moment for the past four-year #Metoo movement in China, as the settlement remains significant for the results of struggle by Jingyao and feminists,” reads a by the Free Chinese Feminist group. “The settlement also reconfirms the facts that have been denied by Liu Qiangdong and JD.com, and recognizes that Liu Qiangdong kept hiding the truth.” The case has drawn widespread attention in China and many were waiting for the trial to uncover more details of the case against one of China’s wealthiest men, a scenario that would have been nearly impossible in China where . Online discussions about the #MeToo case at least seem to be allowed. On the microblogging platform Weibo, the hashtag for the settlement news has accumulated . That’s perhaps unsurprising, given that Chinese censors are unlikely to side with an e-commerce boss at a time Beijing is . Mr. Liu, whose blunt speeches and marriage to an internet celebrity was often the topic of tabloid news, has largely retreated from public life since the case surfaced. In April, the 49-year-old executive after founding the online retailer, which is hailed as the Amazon of China, some 24 years ago. He remains the chairman of the firm’s board. |
China officially bans fruit flavorings in e-cigarettes | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | China has joined a handful of countries in banning flavored vapes to combat underage use of nicotine. Starting October 1, e-cigarette companies are only allowed to sell tobacco-flavored vapes in the country, an effort by the government to “standardize” the production, sales and consumption of the novel tobacco product. China’s e-cigarette makers had a short-lived boom before regulators the lucrative industry around three years ago. First, it was a . Then in May this year, a set of comprehensive regulations , effectively subjecting e-cigarettes to the purview of China’s tobacco authorities. The ban is long in coming and investors anticipated the change. Relx, which commanded 70% of China’s pod vape market, has lost over 95% of its stock value since its debut on NYSE in January 2021. Shares of Smoore, a major manufacturer of vaping devices based out of Relx’s home city of Shenzhen, are down 90% since hitting an all-time high in January 2021. A ban on flavored vapes is like a death knell to the vaping industry. Tobacco-flavored products accounted for only an insignificant amount of e-cigarette sales, according to a conducted by Landong, a Chinese media publication focused on the vaping industry. Other major measures from the regulations include a tobacco tax on e-cigarette sales and stringent new requirements on how a vape is made, from its battery, ceramic coil and nicotine content to fragrance. Meeting all these criteria could cost a fortune, which means the shoddy, scruffy type of vape sellers that were crowding the market before will struggle to survive. Well-funded Chinese vaping startups such as Relx and Myst have long begun international expansion to diversify their revenue streams. In 2020, Relx the costly and time-consuming ordeal of obtaining FDA approval in the U.S. Myst, which was , had entered Malaysia, Russia, Canada and the United Kingdom . China’s clampdown on vaping flavors stems from the same concern shared by other jurisdictions: health risks for young people. In a from 2019, the country’s tobacco authority had this to say: “The current electronic cigarette market in China is chaos. The quality of products varies substantially, and a large number of them has safety issues around unsafe additives, leaky e-juice, and shoddy battery. In particular, some companies are casually adding addictives to change the flavor and color of e-cigarettes to make them more appealing, but this is causing severe damage to underage users’ mental and physical health.” In 2019, the U.S. government to ban flavored e-cigarette products. In June, European Union lawmakers are flavored heated tobacco products. As the world’s largest producer of vaping devices, China’s e-cigarette factories will likely see their demand shrink as regulators around the world continue their battle with the vaping industry. |
Daily Crunch: Blocking VLC player downloads violates Indian law, claims VideoLAN in legal challenge | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | Good to have you with us again, as the TechCrunch train continues to rumble along the tracks. It’s gonna be a fun and busy week, so let’s dive straight in with the news! — and John Curtius, the prolific Tiger Global senior partner who has been at the center of some of the firm’s biggest deals in the last several years, is leaving the firm, writes. He will be leaving to . Curtius will stay with Tiger until June. In the broadest of strokes, the circular economy represents a colossal shift in how humanity makes and uses stuff. Instead of primarily harvesting raw materials to produce goods that wind up incinerated, or in oceans or landfills, the circular economy offers an alternative where stuff is deliberately reused, repaired and recycled over and over again. reports that . The effort is Google’s latest to help environmentally focused startups grow while potentially hooking them on its cloud products in the process. In other news: / Getty Images After the pandemic drove students at every level into remote learning, the edtech sector saw record levels of investment — until the public markets began to cool off several months ago. “That said, it’s important to remember that publicly traded value represents a fraction of the overall edtech sector,” found Dealroom edtech analyst Carla Napoleão and Rhys Spence, head of research at Brighteye Ventures. In a detailed report that studies both the public and private markets, the duo looked at global deal flow, trends in subsectors like K–12 and corporate learning, and recent M&A activity. “Edtech still has deep and untapped opportunities. The markets may have slowed, but it won’t be long until the momentum returns.” But wait, there’s more! Aren’t you glad you came here? It’s an Elon Musk day. The big story was ’s report on for the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war was not taken probably the way he thought it would. Then in a strange turn of events today, writes that Musk will now go through with at his initial offer of $54.20 per share. That news sent shares of the company skyrocketing to over $47 from the open at nearly $43. Meanwhile, we enjoyed ’s Q&A with , who has been in the role for less than a week and is already hitting the ground running. Here’s five more for ya: |
Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor on blockchain, inclusion, unions and the future of crowdfunding | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | , the first several weeks or months are spent learning the ropes, poring over financials and meeting shareholders. More often than not, press interviews are reserved for a later date. , on the other hand, is jumping in with both feet. It hasn’t been a full week since Kickstarter appointed the former Artsy CMO to the chief executive role, and from the sound of it, he hasn’t wasted a moment. Fresh off an appearance at Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Summit, he sat down for a chat in his Detroit Airbnb, only slightly worse for the wear from his travels. The conversation comes amid a kind of listening tour, where Taylor says he’s been engaging both Kickstarter staffers and users about things the service does well, and those things it can do better. It’s an important step, as he takes over the role in the wake of turbulent times for the crowdfunding service. The past few years have been rough for Kickstarter, with layoffs, a butting of heads around unionization and some bad publicity tied to blockchain plans. Taylor discusses all of that, and where the service — and crowdfunding in general — is headed. It’s been enlightening, to say the least. One of the things that I knew about Kickstarter before coming here was that obviously the company had such incredible brand awareness. I thought that was really a strength. What I’ve been not surprised by, but really inspired by, is how passionate the community is, good or bad. This past week was me really being able to get so much feedback, positive and negative, from our community and learn so many of the challenges that Kickstarter faces and our users in our community really want to see us succeed. Even if they’re upset about us not having this product feature, or us doing this or that, they really are so heavily invested. The most common feedback is about our blockchain plans. I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there. People think that we’re turning Kickstarter into a web3 blockchain company. We’ve started a protocol as a separate entity. We’re exploring the opportunities that’s there in the blockchain to alleviate some of the challenges that we face as a centralized crowdfunding company. That’s it. We’re not committed to moving Kickstarter to the blockchain or doing anything specific there. I don’t think so. I think our intentions were always genuine and positive. We came at this from the point of supporting people, creators and backers — wanting people to have a better experience and also wanting to see creators be more successful. […] This decentralized play is really only targeted towards improving and helping to solve some of the headaches and problems that we have in crowdfunding. But that doesn’t mean that we’re committed to it. We just want to explore it and see what’s out there that we can do. I’m still absolutely learning, but think of a world where, if you’re raising, you’re not limited to one platform. That’s the beauty. That’s the beauty of that. If Indiegogo’s on the protocol, if Kickstarter’s on the protocol, everyone can benefit from each other. I think it’s involving our community first and getting feedback from our community. It’s really important for a company, listening to your community, getting feedback. I think we would have probably better understood the ramifications of making that announcement. We had only but good intentions, but we didn’t communicate that well. We could have communicated that better and gotten our community involved in some of the feedback of what we were working on. Now we do have a Kickstarter Advisory Council. I’m actually meeting with them tomorrow. These are our eyes and ears on the ground. These are the people that are actively using Kickstarter as creators and backers. They’re heavily involved in the community. A lot of these people actually make a living off of Kickstarter, so these people are heavily invested. They’re using the product, they know what they want to see and what they don’t want to see. They know what’s needed. They know the complaints of our user base. To be able to get that feedback from that group to our strategy to help us prioritize, is how I’m seeing the group. I just met with the union reps last week, it was incredible. They genuinely care so much about Kickstarter. They’re giving their free time committed to providing a better experience for not only themselves, but their colleagues and also the future people that work at Kickstarter. I think that’s incredibly inspiring. Here’s the thing: these are things I want to do anyway. These are the things that I want to do to support the members of our team. The fact that it’s in the [Collective Bargaining Agreement] and in writing, that’s great. But these are things that I want to make sure that we’re supporting our team with regardless. One-thousand percent. The head of our union, I’m probably going to hang out with him in Brooklyn soon, maybe play some games. We’ll see what happens. It’s not union and Kickstarter. This is our team. I don’t see it as a union versus Kickstarter. These are the people that I’m going to war with. Kickstarter Kickstarter is a very healthy business from a financial perspective and very profitable. At the time of the decision, there was a lot of uncertainty. I can’t even imagine being in Aziz’s shoes and trying to predict are people going to create product projects during the pandemic? I think [the reorg] gave Kickstarter two things. Number one, it gave us a little bit more financial flexibility in terms of headcount. And number two, it provided us with strategic thinking of what do we actually need? All of these tech companies right now laying off tons of people. Kickstarter, no problem. And I think that’s because after the layoffs, we have strategically hired and built a team that we need instead of having a more bloated team. I plan to continue to increase and hire incredible people here. No layoffs for the foreseeable future. Absolutely. Here’s the thing: If you’re a person that wants to support people or support things that you’re passionate about, it doesn’t change. I plan to make changes to our experience and help people have better experiences from the creator side and the backer side of the platform. When those changes are made, trust me, I will scream those changes to the rooftops. And I want to make sure that people come back and have better experiences. That’s one of my biggest priorities. I’m really thinking about the lifecycle experience of a Kickstarter backer. If you’re somebody who’s shown a history of backing music projects, or you’ve shown a history of backing people from Tacoma, Washington — if you’re showing that you have intentions of wanting to support a certain thing, then we should be letting you know about those things. We should be doing a better job engaging our users and letting them know about the things that they’re going to be most interested in on the platform. When they get onto the platform, they get push notifications, or they get email. When it came to Artsy, the art world was still by and large, very exclusive. A lot of people from different walks of life didn’t feel like the art world or buying art was an option for them. I think the same is the case for crowdfunding. As incredible of a job as Kickstarter has done, it’s still a niche space. What I want the future of crowdfunding to be is that anybody with an idea — I don’t care what your socio-economic background, your race, or sexuality is. I don’t care. You have a platform that evens the playing field, and anybody with an idea, anybody with a creative idea, or project or company or brand or anything that they want to start, they can do it through a platform like Kickstarter, or some of our competitors or other players out there. I think the future of crowdfunding if we do this right, is we provide a platform for anybody to make their dreams come true. Anybody that has an idea, they feel like they have an option to actually make it come true. When I talk about the future of crowdfunding, I think about people from where I’m from. I grew up in Southside Richmond. I didn’t grow up in the best neighborhood. A lot of people that I grew up with didn’t have resources, or money, or the direction or guidance to be successful or be able to do the things that they wanted to do. We all have dreams. The difference is that the people with the resources and the money to actually make those dreams come true, typically are the ones that actually are able to see those dreams through and bring them to fruition. At Artsy, I wanted to see more black collectors or collectors of color, women collectors, I wanted to see more artists on our platform thrive. When I came there, the majority of the artists on the platform that were successful were white men. And then when I left, the majority of the most successful artists were people of color — I think it was 70% people of color were the most successful on the platform. By seeing them and making people feel seen. They’re out there, they just want to be engaged, they want to feel seen, they want to feel heard. There are so many amazing creators of color from different backgrounds that just don’t feel seen and heard. My biggest thing that I’ll bring from Artsy is to make sure that they feel heard, that they feel engaged, that they feel important. You do that, and you make sure that you’re building with them in mind, whenever you’re doing any marketing campaigns, whenever you’re doing any product innovations. You have all of them in mind. I know it sounds so simple, but it’s really the intentionality that you bring in building a company and making sure that everybody is included, and you have an inclusive mindset when doing so. |
Russia debates staying on ISS past 2024 despite tensions | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | Russia is having internal discussions over continuing its participation in the International Space Station (ISS) beyond 2024, despite statements made earlier this summer that the country will pull out of the station program by the middle of the decade. Sergei Krikalev, head of human space programs at Roscosmos, said Monday that the Russian space agency is in discussions to extend its “participation in [the] ISS program with our government and hope to have permission to continue next year.” The about-face comes just a few months after Roscosmos head Yuri Borisov announced Russia’s plans to , and instead construct its own orbiting station. The ISS is operated in partnership between the space agencies of U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan and Europe. America has committed to operate the station through 2030. However, Krikalev admitted that a new Russian station may not be ready by 2025. “We know that it’s not going to happen very [quickly], so probably we will keep flying [on the ISS] until we have any new infrastructure that will allow us to do continuous human presence on low Earth orbit,” he said. He made his comments during a NASA media briefing on the Crew-5 mission, which is scheduled to take place on October 5. During that mission, SpaceX will launch a crew of four — including cosmonaut Anna Kikina — to the ISS. It marks the first time a cosmonaut will fly on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, part of a recent astronaut transportation exchange deal between the U.S. and Russia. American astronaut Francisco Rubio launched to the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft last month as part of the deal. “This type of exchange will increase [the] robustness of our program and we will continue this practice to make our program more reliable,” Krikalev said. While Russia and the U.S. have collaborated on the ISS for decades, tensions between the two countries have been mounting since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Despite this strain, NASA’s manager of the ISS program Joel Montalbano said during the media briefing that American staff are still in Russia working with Roscosmos at Mission Control Center Moscow and other locations. He added that NASA is in frequent contact with the American Embassy in Moscow and that he anticipates no impacts to the next Soyuz launch that will carry an American astronaut. |
Tesla is now building Model 3 and Model Y vehicles without ultrasonic sensors | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | Tesla is removing ultrasonic sensors from Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, the next step in CEO Elon Musk’s plan to only use cameras and software to support its advanced driver assistance system and other active safety features. Starting this month, all Model 3 and Model Y vehicles built for North America, Europe, the Middle East and Taiwan will no longer include the 12 ultrasonic sensors typically found on the front and rear bumpers of its vehicles. Ultrasonic sensors, which measure distance by using ultrasonic waves, are generally used as proximity sensors to support anti-collision safety systems, particularly in low-speed applications like parking. Tesla announced the about 17 months after it said it would remove radar from its vehicles. The decision to eschew radar or ultrasonics is a contrarian approach to the rest of the industry, which is adding, not removing, sensors from its vehicles to support ADAS. Automakers typically use a combination of radar and cameras — and now even lidar — to provide the sensing required to deliver ADAS features like adaptive cruise control, which matches the speed of a car to surrounding traffic, as well as lane keeping and automatic lane changes. Tesla began its so-called Tesla Vision plan in 2021, from Model 3 and Model Y vehicles made in North America, followed by Model S and Model X in 2022. Earlier this year, Tesla expanded that to include Model Y and Model 3 vehicles sent to . Tesla said the removal of ultrasonic sensors (or USS) will begin with Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. In 2023, it will include Model S and Model X vehicles. The company said it is also launching a “vision-based occupancy network” that is used in Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software — the $15,000 package that augments Autopilot and is not self-driving — to replace the inputs generated by USS. Tesla claims this approach improves Autopilot, giving it longer-range visibility and the ability to identify and discern different objects. Tesla said that initially any vehicle delivered to customers without USS will have limited or inactive features such as park assist and summon, which allows a person to move their vehicle forward or back via the Tesla app. Those features will eventually be restored via over-the-air software updates, the company said. |
Yeah, no, most VCs still don’t really care about your path to profitability | Rebecca Szkutak | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | costs” was fuel to 2021’s funding fire as venture capitalists poured money into startups spending oodles of cash on everything from overhiring to inefficient customer acquisition. But amid this year’s downturn, venture capitalists decided — to say, at least — that torching cash in the name of growth maybe wasn’t their best idea. They put out , about it, and spent time telling that maybe they goofed on some of their riskier bets. They said cash preservation and a potential path to profitability was the soup du jour of investing in Q2, while taking big risky bets on cash-burning, fast-growing startups was off the menu. But did their actions align with their words? Not really. |
Duolingo makes its first official acquisition, with more to come | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | has acquired its first startup, an animation studio that has created art for the language learning app and for Amazon, Dropbox, Spotify and Google. The startup, is a Detroit-based business moving from just being a partner with Duolingo to a full-fledged part of Duolingo declined to reveal the terms of the deal including the purchase price; but considering the fact that last year, we’ll likely have the price of the deal during its next earnings and will update this story accordingly. Duolingo says that all of Gunner’s 15-person team will join Duolingo’s staff as part of the acquisition. It also confirmed that the edtech company is opening up an office in Detroit, joining its other offices in Pittsburgh, New York, Seattle, Detroit, Beijing and Berlin. The edtech meets entertainment business has historically stayed away from acquisitions in the past, beyond its acqui-hire of Steve Ridout, the founder of an e-reader language learning tool (who then went on to ). Last year, however, Duolingo began . Duolingo’s chief business officer said that “prior to 2022, we were just taking a more reactive ‘wait and see’ approach. And then this year we were a fair bit more proactive in terms of defining what would be the best fit for the company in terms of categories and and targets.” For those who have followed Duolingo’s trajectory — — it’s not all that surprising that the education company’s first acquisition was not in the language learning space but instead focused on technology to make learning more easy on the eyes. CEO and co-founder Luis Von Ahn has said many times that he doesn’t pay too much attention to direct competition. Meese explains that the Gunner acquisition fits into the fact that Duolingo is a “very metrics-focused company.” “There’s some ways that we use animation that we can draw super clear value from,” he explained. The executive described Duolingo’s subscription product, which is branded as Super Duolingo. Subscriptions rose, he says, when the company included an animated promotion inside the app. “That’s something you can put a very clear economic value on.” According to , paid Subscribers totaled 3.3 million at the end of the quarter, up 71% from the prior year’s quarter. Not every benefit of animation is so monetary. There’s a team at Duolingo whose entire job it is to make the app more delightful that would benefit from more animation resources. They don’t need to move a metric, they just need to think about how to make the app experience more enjoyable, especially as “Luis was just encouraging us to use more sparkles in the app,” Meese explained. When asked about which team Gunner will report to, Meese didn’t offer specifics but said that “we’re bringing more of our creative teams together, especially in design, marketing and other creative pursuits within the company.” Going forward, the executive said that Duolingo does expect to do more acquisitions, and companies of interest must fall into one of the following three categories: language learning, other education verticals, or, like Gunner, tech capabilities. There’s lots of “internal discussions” over where the company is going but no specific cadence on how many companies Duolingo wants (or can afford to scoop). Duolingo’s current stock is trading at $101.36, down 47% from its 52-week high price of $191.82 and up 68% from its 52-week low price of $60.50. |
It’s official, Elon Musk is buying Twitter | Harri Weber | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | It sure looks like Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter takeover is actually happening. On Tuesday, representatives of the billionaire notified Twitter through a letter that he intends to move forward with the tumultuous deal, confirming that things were back on track. “We write to notify you that the Musk Parties intend to proceed to closing of the transaction contemplated by the April 25, 2022 Merger Agreement, on the terms and subject to the conditions set forth therein,” reads , which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk and Twitter were headed to court over the deal, with the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive claiming that Twitter had misled him over the number of bots that existed on the social network. Without providing evidence of his claims, Musk has that as much as 20% of Twitter’s user base consisted of “fake/spam accounts.” Twitter has long maintained that less than 5% of its “monetizable daily active users” — a subset of its user base provided as a metric for advertisers — are bots. However, it now seems that Musk no longer intends to press the issue. “We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC,” Twitter told TechCrunch in a statement, which it also shared on its investor relations account. “The intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share,” the company added. Musk’s notice sent Twitter’s stock price rocketing more than 12%, above $47 per share. Twitter issued this statement about today's news: We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC. The intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share. Per the letter, Musk intends to move forward with the deal “provided that the Delaware Chancery Court enter an immediate stay of the action, Twitter vs. Musk, et al. and adjourn the trial and all other proceedings.” In other words, Musk is down to move forward under the condition that the lawsuit does not proceed. However, given Musk’s chaotic nature, it’s possible that another wrench could be thrown into the works. While it’s not clear what inspired Musk’s change of heart, there have been a number of recent twists and turns in the days leading up to the trial, which was set to begin on October 17. The court recently about the deal, uncovered through the discovery process, and the messages clearly show him getting cold feet in light of the war in Ukraine and a looming worsening global economic picture. Another , when Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen McCormick approved Twitter’s request to review texts from Musk’s inner circle related to a mysterious anonymous email that Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro received on May 6. In the email, which was sent through ProtonMail, the sender identified themselves only as a former Twitter executive and asked Musk’s team to follow up on a different platform. While the tipster was anonymous, it certainly seems possible that the email was sent by former Twitter head of security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, who denied reaching out to Musk prior to going public with his whistleblower complaint in August. Musk’s , seeking testimony and documents that could make the case that revelations around security lapses at the company were concerns sufficient to kill the deal. Late Tuesday, Musk tweeted that buying Twitter would provide an “accelerant” to a different project altogether, “X, the everything app.” Musk’s mysterious software grand plan is probably news to everyone on either side of the deal, though he did previously say he’d launch if the Twitter plan fell through. He , and a holding company by the same name, but an app called X seems more likely to be vaporware — or just a joke — than anything that will actually materialize. Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app |
This startup out of Carnegie Mellon wrangled my tabs once and for all | Annie Saunders | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | situation is utterly untenable. I subscribe to a (really great) newsletter called “ ,” the name of which sums up a problem that’s surely not unique to me: By 5 p.m. EDT, I have a line of tabs of stories I want to read culled from Twitter, various Slack channels, email newsletters and homepages. That’s to say nothing about my job. If you’re a “knowledge worker,” you invariably end your day with a slew of tabs that collectively become your to-do list, your reading list, your shopping list, your assorted communications channels. It’s chaos, and it seems most of us are just … dealing with it? There are, of course, tab-wrangling solutions in the market: , and , a vertical tabs feature recently , etc. I never considered any of them, and I’m a terminally organized control freak obsessed with productivity. In other areas of my life, I look for ways to maximize the efficiency of how my space is arranged. But not my tabs. This speaks to the hegemony of Chrome: I accepted that the collection of features bestowed upon us by Google was what I needed to do my job, shop online and keep track of my life. It never occurred to me that a bare minimum of four windows with — depending on the time of day — two to two dozen tabs apiece was . I know now that it is. In the interest of being a little servicey, let me tell you about , a fresh startup out of Carnegie Mellon University that could easily be tossed in the “tabs management” bucket, but actually does — and has the potential to do — so much more. I didn’t think about the fact that until a few weeks ago. A friend who works at CMU here in Pittsburgh dropped in our (Google, duh) chat to a Medium post written by Niki Kittur, a professor at CMU’s and the CEO/founder of Skeema, a Chrome extension that immediately changed how I spend my day on the internet. After using Skeema for just a few days and successfully corralling my tabs, I set up a chat with Kittur to learn how it came to exist. |
Just before Musk backtracked, a judge said Twitter could hunt for secret chats with whistleblower | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | Elon Musk may have said , but his legal fight with Twitter is still producing some eleventh-hour twists and turns. In a with the Delaware Court of Chancery, Judge Kathaleen McCormick weighed in on Twitter’s request for additional discovery around potential messages between Musk’s inner circle and the Twitter whistleblower, former head of security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko. While Zatko has stated under oath that he did not contact Musk or his team, Twitter wants to keep looking in light of a mysterious email from May 6 that turned up in the files of Quinn Emanuel, a legal firm that represents Musk. Specifically, someone reached out with an anonymous ProtonMail account on that date purporting to be a “former Exec at Twitter leading teams directly involving Trust & Safety/Content Moderation.” In the email, the sender suggests that Musk’s team get in touch on another platform (through “alternate secure means”) in order for them to provide information about Twitter. Musk’s team wanted to limit any additional search for possible messages with Zatko, while Twitter pushed to search any digital communications, including texts, instant messages and printed documents, from a wider swath of Musk’s close contacts. In the new letter, Judge McCormick rejected Musk’s legal team’s argument that Zatko’s denial makes additional discovery irrelevant. She also shot down the argument that because the email, which was sent to Musk lawyer Alex Spiro, wasn’t forwarded to anyone else that there’s nothing else to learn from additional searches: “Defendants’ interrogatory answers do not obviate the need for Plaintiff to test those answers through document discovery; if they did, document discovery would rarely be permitted. Zatko’s testimony, while sworn, is not susceptible to a credibility assessment at this stage and is therefore not dispositive. Moreover, Defendants’ statements concerning the May 6 email raise more questions. For example, Defendants do not state whether anyone replied to the May 6 email or took any steps (successful or otherwise) to determine the sender’s identity. The timing and the contents of the May 6 email render it at least plausible that Zatko was the author.” McCormick notes that because , Twitter has the right to figure out if he had any prior contact with Musk or Musk’s team that hasn’t come to light. Ultimately, she says that Twitter can search “beyond emails,” using 15 search terms of their choosing to find what they’re looking for, including in paper files. Musk’s team was ordered to provide the additional documents by this Friday, October 7. Spiro would also be required to explain what he did after receiving the anonymous email in an affidavit that should be filed by this Wednesday, October 5 — but that’s assuming there’s still a trial. In his letter to Twitter, , Musk says that he’ll proceed with buying Twitter as promised, but only if the Chancery Court will “adjourn the trial and all other proceedings related thereto pending such closing or further order of the Court.” With anyone but Musk, we’d assume a letter of intent filed with the SEC would mean a done deal, but this entire saga has never resembled anything approaching a done deal. The timing of Musk’s decision to suddenly put the deal back on the rails is curious and so is the mysterious May 6 email that we may never have answers about, assuming the trial indeed does get called off. It’s impossible to know if his about-face has anything to do with the Mudge intrigue or the realization that new intel from the whistleblower might not carve him a clear exit out of the deal, but this is Silicon Valley’s most mercurial man we’re talking about — it’s just as likely that or an about complex and sensitive geopolitical events tipped the scales the other way. by |
null | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 10 | 3 | null |
Google Japan’s outlandish keyboards might be the best running joke in tech | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | The TechCrunch newsroom fears only one thing: the coming of April 1. Because, I’m just going to say it, the tech industry isn’t very funny. But Google Japan’s ongoing series of ridiculous keyboards, where they completely commit to the joke, suggests we may have found the first known exception. (or stick version depending on the translation), a keyboard about 1.6 meters feet long (down from 2.4 meters in the prototype) with all the letters and numbers arranged from left to right in a “one-dimensional QWERTY layout.” There are options for ABC, ASCII codes and katakana. No longer will you have to hunt and peck for individual keys, the creators explain. “With this keyboard, it is very convenient to know immediately that the 16th letter from the left is G.” So simple! It also has ergonomic advantages: “When you use this keyboard, your arms will naturally spread out, so you can stretch your arms secretly even at work. When you press the rightmost and leftmost keys at the same time, you may stretch your legs unintentionally,” the team writes. Of course it also doubles as a reaching implement for hitting far away light switches, and triples as a walking stick for when you need to touch grass. Watch the video below for many more little light-hearted and genuinely chuckle-worthy uses and benefits: It was posted on September 1, I think because it has 101 keys. The joke not appearing on the traditional day for such things makes it all the funnier. But this isn’t the first “new input proposal from the Gboard team.” The posts have been going on for 10 years now, starting with a and getting rather more involved from there. Some are more successful than others, but even if is a bit much, the origin video is still amazing. I love send-ups of self-serious product journeys, and this is no exception: The , essentially a real-world version of the swiping used on the actual Gboard and others, is close enough to reality that you might just think it’s an actual product. In fact I feel sure I’ve seen something like this before, as a way of controlling the cursor. Some of the designs are genuinely interesting and remarkable little pieces of engineering, like this tilting-key keyboard: Google Japan And this integrated teacup item is delightfully absurd: Google Japan In case you’re wondering how you use it (translated by Google from the Japanese): “The kanji for fish are arranged in the syllabary on the 50 keys. Instead of [an] alphabet, it uses a sushi arrangement of horse mackerel, sardine, eel, ei, and okoze, and characters are input by fish-kanji conversion.” Very finny. But the team clearly had fun with it, and amazingly they’ve actually built these designs — . This is certifiably ancient news for our Japanese readers, but I hadn’t seen it get any play over here in the States. And I figure the opposite end of the year from April Fool’s is the best time to highlight this delightful bit of work by a team that seems to be funny and dedicated in equal measure. |
Substack officially launches its ‘Reader’ Android app | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | Substack is officially launching its following beta tests, the company on Tuesday. The rollout of the Android app comes six months after Substack introduced . The Substack Reader app brings all of your Substack subscriptions into one place where you can read content from writers you follow. The app is also designed to give writers the ability to better connect with their readers. The company says the app makes it easier for writers to get new subscribers and for readers to explore and sample Substacks they might otherwise not have found. Users can also add any RSS feed to the app via the recently launched . Introducing the Substack Android app. It’s like your email inbox, but better. Get the app: — Substack (@SubstackInc) “Your subscribers who use Android devices can expect the same quality reading, watching, and listening experience from our new app,” Substack said in a . “The Android app is simple and focused. No ads, no noise, no spam. Podcasts, videos and community make the inbox even richer. We’ll add new features and functions as we continue to develop the app and improve the experience for readers, writers, podcasters, videomakers, community leaders and more.” Once you open the app, you’re taken to your inbox, which shows you new newsletters from all of the writers you subscribe to. When you click on a post, you can use the navigation bar at the bottom to view and post comments. On the main homepage, there’s a discover tab where you can search or view featured writers. You can also browse content based on categories, including technology, politics, travel, podcasts, art and more from the discover section. Substack says this is just the first version of the Android app, but that it incorporates early feedback that the company received from users of the iOS app. The company also notes that the iOS app is the source of 10% of all of the new subscriptions writers receive and that it expects the Android app will see similar results. At the time of the iOS launch, the company said the main focus of the app is to give users a simple way to read posts and discover new writers on Substack. In addition, Substack had said that although its main framework has been “flourishing,” it’s time for it to branch outside of email and the web. The launch of the Android app will likely help Substack better compete with other companies in the continuously expanding newsletter market. The rollout comes a few months after Twitter began testing its long-form content after its . Although Meta was also looking to compete in the newsletter market, it was revealed today that Facebook is its Substack competitor. |
Crypto losses total $428M in Q3, down 36% from previous quarter | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | to decline in the third quarter, a new report shows. Immunefi’s Crypto Losses Q3 found $428,718,083 worth of losses in Q3, down 36% from and a drop of 62.9% from $1,155,334,775 during the year-ago quarter. Crypto losses are defined as a combination of hacks and alleged fraud incidents like rug pulls in web3 projects, Adrian Hetman, tech lead of the triaging team at Immunefi, told TechCrunch. Most of those losses derived from two specific incidents involving the cross-chain messaging protocol and crypto market maker , which lost $190 million and $160 million, respectively. These two projects represent around 80% of Q3 losses, it found. According to the report, crypto losses have declined for the past three quarters in a row, but it’s not clear whether that trend will continue for the rest of the year. |
Meta shuts down Bulletin newsletters, moves resources to its discovery algorithm | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | Meta is shutting down Bulletin, the off-platform newsletter product it launched last summer. Available to writers on an invite-only basis, Bulletin allowed readers to subscribe to newsletters from contributors like Malcolm Gladwell, Tan France and Malala Yousafzai. While some content was available for free, Bulletin allowed writers to sell subscriptions to their newsletters, similar to a platform like Substack. “Bulletin has allowed us to learn about the relationship between Creators and their audiences and how to better support them in building their community on Facebook,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “While this off-platform product itself is ending, we remain committed to supporting these and other Creators’ success and growth on our platform.” Bulletin writers will continue to earn subscription revenue until the platform shuts down by early 2023. Writers also have access to the email addresses of all of their subscribers, so they can alert them if they choose to move their newsletter to a different site. Just last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company would hiring, cut costs and restructure some groups within the company. Today, Meta says it will refocus resources from Bulletin to work on its , a key point of interest for the company as it attempts to keep up with TikTok. Earlier this summer, the company already started shifting engineering and product support away from products like Facebook News and Bulletin to work on Meta’s creator economy . Meta’s biggest financial bet right now is on its attempt to , but the company is also focused on competing with TikTok. Though its Instagram platform has tried to convert to a feed with more , users have pushed back in favor of seeing posts from people they follow. Despite this feedback, Meta is continuing forward with its plans to master algorithmic discovery. |
‘Grocery sharing’ app Recelery lets users resell food items to help minimize waste | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | It is typical for consumers to purchase more food items than they need and then throw them away because they either forgot about them or the food expired. It is that 1.3 billion tons of food items are wasted yearly, an approximate $1 trillion loss. , a pantry tracker app and online marketplace, aims to reduce food waste with an array of features. Users can log their recent food purchases, manage grocery lists and see “virtual pantries” from other users in their area, as well as sell unused grocery items to their neighbors. Users can also invite friends and family to share what food is in their virtual pantry. The startup hopes its app helps consumers keep track of when food in their kitchen/pantry expires and discover what food they can buy from neighbors in between grocery trips. Plus, during high inflation, the marketplace tool will potentially give everyday consumers a way to earn money on recently purchased food that would otherwise be uneaten and in the trash. Recelery’s public marketplace allows anyone within one mile from your location to sell and buy unused grocery store items. When uploading an item on the app, sellers can note when the food item expires, where it was originally purchased, pickup location and how much they’re selling it for. Over the weekend, Recelery relaunched its app with updates to its marketplace feature, such as expanding the limit of pictures that users can post, new markers to show the specific date for when an item was added, and users can now sell up to 25 items at a time. Before the relaunch, sellers could only upload one picture of the food item, and it wasn’t clear to buyers when a food item was first uploaded for sale. Now, sellers can add as many images as they want, and buyers can see how long the food item has been available. Also, with the update, completed sales are removed from the marketplace. As of now, Recelery doesn’t take a fee from the transaction, so the seller gets 100% of the sale. Also, this may be obvious to some, but Recelery users are not allowed to sell homemade food products, already opened items, rotten food or food items past their expiration date. Users are also not allowed to sell party trays of perishable food, baby food and baby formula. Founder Daniel Abrams recommends that users use “reasonable judgment” when buying from people they just met online. “You have the right to request pictures and connect with the seller via text message before you complete the transaction,” Abrams told TechCrunch. Recelery is free to use and available to download internationally on the and the . Recelery launched in June 2021 and was entirely self-funded by Abrams, who came up with the idea five years ago when he was a law student living by himself for the first time. “I realized I was throwing away so much produce and went to see if there was anything where I could resell food or find out what food my neighbors had,” Abrams said. However, Abrams couldn’t find an app that met his exact needs. So, he decided to create one. The company claimed Recelery is the “first app of its kind.” On average, the app has more than 1,000 monthly users. |
Binance founder Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao shares his vision of web3 opportunities at TC Sessions: Crypto | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | When it comes to the decentralized world of crypto, few single entities loom larger or carry more weight in the industry than exchange behemoth Binance. The blockchain giant processed $34 trillion in trading volume in 2021, it says, and the exchange shows few signs of resting on its laurels as it pursues bold new bets to diversify its business. At the forefront of these changes is Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao. The leader, commonly known as “CZ,” has managed to cultivate a celebrity status in the crypto space rivaled only by some of the space’s patron saints, including the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. Zhao is worth an $65 billion. We’re thrilled to welcome Changpeng Zhao to in Miami on November 17. CZ will join our stage virtually and we’re looking forward to discussing global market opportunities in a bear market, the regulatory challenges up ahead and where opportunities are (and aren’t) in web3. Binance has been extremely busy in 2022, even amid a crash in cryptocurrency prices and macroeconomic uncertainty. The company has continued to diversify its offerings and scour for new markets. In recent months, the company’s stateside entity Binance.US earned new investment as it strives to topple incumbents like Coinbase. Competitors have also been taking notice. And while Binance sits comfortably atop the market for crypto exchanges, rising competitors like FTX are looking to find new opportunities to increase their market share, pursuing bold M&A strategies and scaling venture investments. The exchange’s breakneck growth has attracted the attention of regulators as well, particularly in the United States. This summer, Bloomberg reported that the SEC was investigating Binance’s 2017 coin offering of their BNB token. That ecosystem is now the third-largest non-stablecoin cryptocurrency by market cap with a value north of $40 billion. takes place on November 17 in Miami. Take advantage of our . today, and then join the web3, DeFi and NFT communities to keep up with the ever-evolving and always exciting cryptoverse.
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Do Kwon set to lose South Korean passport amid active Interpol red notice | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | South Korea Do Kwon to surrender his passport, or risk getting it revoked, as the East Asian nation escalates actions against the crypto entrepreneur whose blockchain collapse earlier this year . The South Korean government has given Kwon 14 days to comply with the new order, it said in a notice on the website Thursday. The order follows Interpol against the crypto entrepreneur last month, requesting law enforcement agencies worldwide to locate and arrest him. Kwon’s current whereabouts are unknown, but he is keeping his followers up to date with his life through Twitter. On Wednesday, he refuted claims that his crypto funds had been frozen after media reports said South Korean prosecutors had escalated actions against him. Korean media outlet News1 reported that prosecutors had frozen $39.6 million of crypto assets tied to the Terraform Labs founder and chief executive. The report was amplified by CoinDesk, a popular crypto-focused news outlet. In response, Kwon labelled the news item as “falsehood,” once again reiterating that he doesn’t use KuCoin and OkEx. “Have no time to trade, no funds have been frozen,” he said. “I don’t know whose funds they’ve frozen, but good for them, hope they use it for good,” he added. The collapse of Terra cryptocurrency (Luna) and the so-called stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) in May wiped out investors’ $40 billion, prompting an uproar that caused the prosecutors to launch investigations into Kwon and his colleagues. Kwon has previously said that he is not trying to hide from the authority and is not on the run, a characterization the South Korean prosecutors have refuted. |
Halo Car’s teleoperated car-sharing service to roll out this year with no one behind the wheel | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | Halo Car, a Las Vegas-based startup that combines teleoperations and car sharing, said it will remove the human safety operator from behind the wheel later this year — the last hurdle before its commercial launch. The milestone would mean Halo Car will use humans to remotely control vehicles through public streets and deliver them to its car-sharing service customers. These fully remote deliveries will mark the official launch of commercial operations and kick off a campaign to scale its fleet of electric vehicles and expand beyond Las Vegas. The unique approach to car sharing has attracted several investors. The company said Wednesday it raised $5 million in a seed round led by climate tech fund At One Ventures, with participation from T-Mobile Ventures, Earthshot Ventures and existing investor Boost VC. The funds will help the startup expand into cities beyond Las Vegas and scale its fleet to 1,000 EVs by the end of 2023. Halo Car’s model shouldn’t be confused with autonomous vehicle technology companies like Argo AI, Aurora, Cruise, Waymo and Zoox, which have developed self-driving systems designed to allow vehicles to navigate public streets without any human in the loop — either behind the wheel or remotely. Halo Car’s model provides remote human assistance at all times. Halo Car’s business model crosses Zipcar, which requires customers to pick up the car wherever the previous user parked it, with traditional rental car companies such as Enterprise and Rent-A-Car. However, Halo Car delivers the vehicle directly to the next customer; think white-glove chauffeur service, without the white gloves or the chauffeur. Founder and CEO Anand Nandakumar led perception for Uber’s self-driving unit Advanced Technologies Group. He developed the idea of using remote piloting in 2019 after leaving Uber. Looking at the 10-year horizon for fully autonomous driving, he thought remote human piloting could serve as a bridge to deploying driverless cars sooner. Halo Car’s remote operators work out of the company’s Las Vegas headquarters, using T-Mobile’s Ultra Capacity midband 5G network, as well as extended range low-band 5G networks and on LTE when needed, to transmit video and data from the cars to a driving simulator. The human operator sits in the simulator, which features an oversized TV monitor, a steering wheel, pedals and a gearshift, and watches for pedestrians, bicyclists, cars, trash cans and other obstacles when the car is in driverless mode. A teleoperator drives a Halo Car remotely. Halo Car The remote pilot disconnects from the car once the customer is granted keyless access through Halo Car’s app. When they’re done, they leave the car for the remote human operator to retrieve and return it to headquarters, where it is cleaned, charged and parked waiting for the next ride. If the vehicle loses connection to 5G networks, it is brought to a full stop. Halo Car completed beta testing in Las Vegas earlier this year using two Kia Niro EVs retrofitted with six cameras but no radar, lidar or ultrasonics, a pared-down approach . Past iterations of used nine cameras, radar and ultrasonics to support the remote controlled operations. During the beta phase, support operators sat inside the cars to oversee the remote piloted deliveries and were picked up and driven back to headquarters by a Halo Car employee. Nandakumar positions Halo Car as a more cost-effective and convenient way to rent an EV without worrying about parking. The vehicles, which can be rented by the hour or at a flat daily rate, could help manufacturers increase their visibility and get more potential customers to try EVs. Both and are using that playbook, inking deals to supply Hertz’s rental fleet with up to 240,000 EVs over the next five years. |
Google debuts a new Nest Doorbell, faster Wi-Fi router and redesigned Home app | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | Seems Google couldn’t wait until Thursday to announce all of its upcoming hardware. In a , the company announced two additions to its Nest line of smart home products: a and the Nest WiFi Pro. The latter amps up the company’s dead-simple mesh Wi-Fi offering. The top-line feature here is the addition of Wi-Fi 6E. The “E” there is short for “extended,” a reference to the new 6GHz radio band, which promises speeds “up to two times faster” than the standard Wi-Fi 6. Beyond that, the core draw of the product remains: an ultra simple setup. Google has done a fine job removing some of the most annoying things about setting up home Wi-Fi. The new hardware maintains that, making the Google Home app the centerpiece of the process, promising the get things up and running in “minutes.” After setup, the app can run speed tests, share passwords and continue monitoring the network for potential issues. The system will alert you if something like a connection issue arises and work to walk you through the process toward resolution. There are also a number of family-friendly features on board, including content blocking and Wi-Fi scheduling for kids. The router is made from 60% recycled material by weight and comes in four pastel colors, as part of Google’s bid to make home networking devices a bit less ugly. A one-pack runs $200, the two-pack is $300 and the three-pack is $400 — the latter of which is designed to cover up to 6,000 square feet. Preorders start today and the system ships October 27. There’s also a new version of the Nest Doorbell. The second-gen wired product stores an hour of “important events” locally, in case of Wi-Fi outage. The camera has been improved to include HDR support for various lighting conditions. That’s available today, starting at $180. Google All of that comes as the company announces a long overdue redesign to the Home app in parallel with the release of . The new app features fast Matter pairing, which will arrive as an update to its smart speakers, displays and older routers. There are new customization options on board as well, as Anish Kattukaran, group product manager, notes: For me, I care most about making sure our doors are locked and viewing our security cameras, while my wife loves quick access to the thermostat. With favorites, you can set your own personalized view of the devices, actions and automations that matter most. And this also includes being able to favorite all of your Nest cameras so you can view your livestreams, right when the app opens, no additional taps required. An update will also be arriving for the Wear OS version of the app, after the Pixel Watch hits the market. |
Daily Crunch: Google will use private subsea cable to launch its first full-scale cloud region in Africa | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | Happy Wednesday! is enjoying a well-deserved day off, but I’m here to dive into some news with you. Let’s join hands and jump in at the same time, shall we? — Headline included, I enjoyed ’s story today on , an aptly named company that took in a $3 million seed round to continue developing its product aimed at making it easier for workers to report corporate wrongdoings. Enjoy five more: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch Dear Sophie, I’m currently on an F-1 student visa. I’ll receive my bachelor’s degree in computer science in December and will apply for OPT. I’d like to stay and work in the U.S. Do you have any tips for negotiating visa and green card sponsorship? Anything else I should remember as I start contacting prospective employers? — Shy Student Three more from the TC+ team: A disrupted business at U.S. hospital chain CommonSpirit Health, causing it to take some of its information technology systems offline, reports. It is not yet known what kind of incident it was or what, if any, personal information was taken in the process. Here’s five more for you: |
SpaceX notches eighth human spaceflight mission with Crew-5 | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | SpaceX successfully launched another batch of astronauts to the International Space Station Wednesday, part of an ongoing astronaut transportation contract with NASA. Like the company’s seven other human spaceflight missions, it was completely routine — and that’s what made it so remarkable. The Crew-5 mission (so named because it’s SpaceX’s fifth crewed mission with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program) took off from launch pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center at noon. The crew of four — which includes American astronauts Nicole Mann, mission commander, and Josh Cassada, mission pilot; JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata, mission specialist; and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina, mission specialist — are traveling to the station in a Crew Dragon dubbed “Endurance.” It separated from the Falcon 9 rocket shortly after launch and is expected to arrive at the station on Thursday. The quartet will spend up to six months aboard the ISS. Wakata is the sole spaceflight veteran amongst the crew, having spent more than 11 months in space. Meet Crew-5 — SpaceX (@SpaceX) SpaceX has now delivered 30 humans to space. The mission is notable for a few other reasons, too. It also marks the first time that a cosmonaut has flown on a SpaceX Crew Dragon and the first time a cosmonaut has flown on an American spacecraft since 2002. Cosmonaut Kikina’s spot on the spacecraft is part of a recent astronaut transportation deal between the U.S. and Russia. American astronaut Francisco Rubio flew to the ISS on a Russian Soyuz last month as part of the deal. In a post-launch briefing, Roscosmos’ chief of human spaceflight Sergei Krikalev said the Crew-5 mission marked “a new phase of our cooperation” between the U.S. and Russia, part of a relationship that began “more than 40 years ago.” Krikalev has struck a decidedly more conciliatory tone than some of his former colleagues in recent weeks. In a NASA media briefing prior to the Crew-5 mission, he said that to extend its participation in the ISS — despite Roscosmos head Yuri Borisov announcing just a few months earlier that Russia planned to leave the station and operate its own orbiting platform. When asked if his recent comments on the NASA-Roscosmos partnership is part of an effort to smooth relations between the two countries, Krikalev said it was. Crew-5 is the eighth human spaceflight mission for SpaceX in less than three years. The Endurance Dragon also flew on Crew-3. |
Startups and VCs are increasingly embracing the federal government. Here’s why | Rebecca Szkutak | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | federal government looks like an ideal customer for an enterprise startup: Its seemingly endless budget doesn’t fluctuate with market conditions and it’s always in the market for new tech. But it’s a slog to break into, and for a long time, startups and VCs didn’t seem to want to associate with it. That’s rapidly changing. Over the last few years, and especially the most recent one, interest in working with and taking money from the U.S. government has exploded in the venture ecosystem. Meg Vorland, a co-founder at Dcode and partner at Dcode Capital, advises companies on how to pitch and land those contracts. Vorland told TechCrunch that the interest level in her firm’s services has been night and day since launching in 2015. |
Fiserv, LG back Korea Credit Data as the SME-focused fintech startup raises another $24.7M | Kate Park | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | In South Korea, there are about small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) — defined as firms with less than 250 employees. Their workforces combined make up 83.1% of all corporation employees in the country, totaling about 17.1 million people, according to To help meet SMEs’ financial needs in the country, Seoul-based fintech startup (KCD) said Thursday that it has raised $24.7 million in Series D extension financing. Strategic investors — Fiserv, a Nasdaq-listed fintech company, and LG Uplus, a telco unit of LG Corporation — participated in the extension round. In total, KCD has raised about $70 million in its Series D round and about $112 million since its 2016 inception, said CEO of KCD Kelvin Dongho Kim. The latest financing values the company at approximately $776 million (1.1 trillion KRW). KCD was valued at about $563 million in November last year when it raised $28.1 million in its Series D1. The startup wants to address small merchants’ pain points by providing digital financial services, Kim told TechCrunch. In 2017, KCD launched its bookkeeping app for SMEs, called Cash Note, which helps small and mid-sized enterprise owners track a comprehensive overview of cash flow, including revenues, credit card sales and expenditure. The app also provides services like SMEs’ sales ledgers and policy information. It enables small business owners to connect with other entrepreneurs in their communities looking to scale their businesses. Most small and mid-sized business owners with low credit records often struggle to secure working capital loans and survive tight cash flow, according to Kim. So the startup added SME-focused lending services to its platform, connecting SMEs entrepreneurs to access capital loan programs, Kim said. KCD claims that it has more than 1.7 million registered merchants in South Korea and its app has grown into a super app among small and mid-sized business owners. KCD has acquired South Korean startups, including ImU, a POS (point of sale) service provider, and Persona, a government subsidy alert service for SMEs. The company plans to use its fresh capital to expand its team of 230 and make additional acquisitions. Its previous backers include KB Kookmin Bank, KB Securities, GS Holdings, KT Investment, Pavilion Capital, Shinhan Card, Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance, Kakao and Kclavis. |
Popular censorship circumvention tools face fresh blockade by China | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | Tools helping China’s netizens to bypass the Great Firewall appear to be facing a fresh round of crackdowns in the run-up to the country’s quinquennial party congress that will see . Greater censorship is not at all uncommon during countries’ politically sensitive periods, but the stress facing censorship circumvention tools in China appears to be on a whole new level. “Starting from October 3, 2022 (Beijing Time), more than 100 users reported that at least one of their TLS-based censorship circumvention servers had been blocked,” writes GFW Report, a censorship monitoring platform focused on China, in a . TLS, or transport layer security, is a ubiquitous internet security protocol used for encrypting data sent across the internet. Because data shared over a TLS connection is encrypted and cannot be easily read, many censorship circumvention apps and services use TLS to keep people’s conversations private. A TLS-based virtual private network, or VPN, directs internet traffic through a TLS connection instead of pushing that traffic to one’s internet provider. But Chinese censors seem to have found a way of compromising this strategy. “The blocking is done by blocking the specific port that the circumvention services listen on. When the user changes the blocked port to a non-blocked port and keeps using the circumvention tools, the entire IP address may get blocked,” GFW Report says in the post. According to GFW Report’s estimates provided to TechCrunch, more than half of China’s netizens who circumvent online censorship use some sort of TLS-based tools. Tech-savvy users may buy their own domains and set up services to bypass the so-called “Great Firewall (GFW)”, an elaborate censorship system developed by the Chinese authorities to regulate the country’s internet access, such as blocking certain foreign web services or slowing down their traffic. But many netizens instead opt for ready-to-use subscription services from resellers, which rely heavily on TLS-based techniques, says GFW Report. “The TLS-based tools have been reportedly blocked before, but we have never seen it got [sic] blocked on such a scale,” the organization notes. “At the same time, knowing October will be the most politically sensitive time this year, we have been preparing some for months with other developers which will get released soon to mitigate the blocking.” According to GFW Report, some of the TLS-based censorship circumvention tools that are reportedly blocked include , , , and , but it has not yet received any reports that , another tool used to circumvent censorship, has been blocked. While some may continue to find new ways to play “catch-me-if-you-can” with the country’s censors, the less technical demographic is left with few options. Ever since China outlawed the unauthorized use of VPNs in 2017 — though unhindered internet access can be granted for certain use cases, such as university research or cross-border businesses — major VPN apps from domestic Android and App Stores. Censorship circumvention apps that face state blockades often don’t stay blocked for long. Providers that are pulled from app stores can soon reappear reincarnated with a different name and look, repeating that process indefinitely if they get removed again. , a Greatfire.org project unaffiliated with Apple but which tracks when the company acquiesces to censorship demands, found that around 200 VPN services it surveyed the past summer were unavailable in China’s app stores, while Belarus came in second place with 21 of the VPN apps unavailable, Benjamin Ismail, project director at Apple Censorship tells TechCrunch. Bans on internet services can also be unpredictable. While the major services of Google, Twitter, Facebook and the like have long been unavailable in China, some of their less-known services have been allowed to stay. Many services don’t get blocked until a certain event or uptick in usage puts them on regulators’ radar. The voice-based social network Clubhouse, for example, had a that saw netizens freely speaking their minds and tuning into politically sensitive topics before the app’s . A handful of Google’s less sensitive products existed in China until recently. On September 30, our colleague Kyle Wiggers that Google Translate became unavailable in China; the parent firm later confirmed it discontinued the service in mainland China “due to low usage,” meaning it’s a voluntary retreat rather than a ban. But GFW Report’s findings suggest the government might have indeed imposed new restrictions on Google services. China has blocked and all its subdomains , affecting more than 1,100 domains and a large number of popular services, including firebase.google.com, translate.google.com, maps.google.com, scholar.google.com, feedburner.google.com and ads.google.com, the censorship tracking platform said in a on October 1. TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment. |
Google answers Meta’s video-generating AI with its own, dubbed Imagen Video | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | Not to be outdone by Meta’s Make-A-Video, Google today detailed its work on an AI system that can generate video clips given a text prompt (e.g. “a teddy bear washing dishes”). While the results aren’t perfect — the looping clips the system generates tend to have artifacts and noise — Google claims that Imagen Video is a step toward a system with a “high degree of controllability” and world knowledge, including the ability to generate footage in a range of artistic styles. As my colleague Devin Coldewey noted in his about Make-A-Video, text-to-video systems aren’t new. Earlier this year, a group of researchers from Tsinghua University and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence released CogVideo, which can translate text into reasonably high-fidelity short clips. But Imagen Video appears to be a significant leap over the previous state-of-the-art, showing an aptitude for animating captions that existing systems would have trouble understanding. “It’s definitely an improvement,” Matthew Guzdial, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta studying AI and machine learning, told TechCrunch via email. “As you can see from the video examples, even though the comms team is selecting the best outputs there’s still weird blurriness and artificing. So this definitely is not going to be used directly in animation or TV anytime soon. But it, or something like it, could definitely be embedded in tools to help speed some things up.” Google Google Imagen Video builds on Google’s , an image-generating system comparable to OpenAI’s and . Imagen is what’s known as a “diffusion” model, generating new data (e.g. videos) by learning how to “destroy” and “recover” many existing samples of data. As it’s fed the existing samples, the model gets better at recovering the data it’d previously destroyed to create new works. Google As the Google research team behind Imagen Video explains in a , the system takes a text description and generates a 16-frame, three-frames-per-second video at 24-by-48-pixel resolution. Then, the system upscales and “predicts” additional frames, producing a final 128-frame, 24-frames-per-second video at 720p (1280×768). Google Google Google says that Imagen Video was trained on 14 million video-text pairs and 60 million image-text pairs as well as the publicly available LAION-400M image-text dataset, which enabled it to generalize to a range of aesthetics. (Not-so-coincidentally, a portion of LAION was used to train Stable Diffusion.) In experiments, they found that Imagen Video could create videos in the style of Van Gogh paintings and watercolor. Perhaps more impressively, they claim that Imagen Video demonstrated an understanding of depth and three-dimensionality, allowing it to create videos like drone flythroughs that rotate around and capture objects from different angles without distorting them. In a major improvement over the image-generating systems available today, Imagen Video can also render text properly. While both Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 struggle to translate prompts like “a logo for ‘Diffusion'” into readable type, Imagen Video renders it without issue — at least judging by the paper. That’s not to suggest that Imagen Video is without limitations. As is the case with Make-A-Video, even the clips cherrypicked from Imagen Video are jittery and distorted in parts, as Guzdial alluded to, with objects that blend together in physically unnatural — and impossible — ways. “Overall, the problem of text to video is still unsolved, and we’re unlikely to reach something like DALL-E 2 or in quality soon,” continued Guzdial. To improve upon this, the Imagen Video team plans to with the researchers behind , another Google text-to-video system debuted today that can turn long, detailed prompts into two-minute-plus videos — albeit at a lower quality. It’s worth peeling back the curtain on Phenaki a bit to see where a collaboration between the teams might lead. While Imagen Video focuses on quality, Phenaki prioritizes coherency and length. The system can turn paragraph-long prompts into films of an arbitrary length, from a scene of a person riding a motorcycle to an alien spaceship flying over a futuristic city. Phenaki-generated clips suffer from the same glitches as Imagen Video’s, but it’s remarkable to me how closely they follow the long and nuanced text descriptions that prompted them. For example, here’s a prompt fed to Phenaki: Lots of traffic in futuristic city. An alien spaceship arrives to the futuristic city. The camera gets inside the alien spaceship. The camera moves forward until showing an astronaut in the blue room. The astronaut is typing in the keyboard. The camera moves away from the astronaut. The astronaut leaves the keyboard and walks to the left. The astronaut leaves the keyboard and walks away. The camera moves beyond the astronaut and looks at the screen. The screen behind the astronaut displays fish swimming in the sea. Crash zoom into the blue fish. We follow the blue fish as it swims in the dark ocean. The camera points up to the sky through the water. The ocean and the coastline of a futuristic city. Crash zoom towards a futuristic skyscraper. The camera zooms into one of the many windows. We are in an office room with empty desks. A lion runs on top of the office desks. The camera zooms into the lion’s face, inside the office. Zoom out to the lion wearing a dark suit in an office room. The lion wearing looks at the camera and smiles. The camera zooms out slowly to the skyscraper exterior. Timelapse of sunset in the modern city. And here’s the generated video: Google Still, with text-to-video tech progressing at a rapid clip, it might not be long before an open source model emerges — both supercharging human creativity and presenting an intractable challenge where it concerns , and misinformation. |
7 investors discuss how agtech can solve agriculture’s biggest problems | Harri Weber | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | geopolitical instability are wreaking havoc on agriculture. To gauge how VCs are responding to these issues, we spoke with seven investors. For starters, rising greenhouse gas emissions are driving punishing droughts and storms, which are harming crops, exacerbating food insecurity and threatening countless livelihoods. At the same time, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is rattling the world’s grain supply, driving up costs and further aggravating supply chains. Even as these and other crises hammer the industry, startup investors see potential for huge returns with tech that could boost yields, slash emissions and mitigate waste. “There are opportunities to develop [and] adopt new technologies all along the food value chain that will impact key issues like food security and emissions,” Adam Anders, a managing partner at Anterra Capital, told TechCrunch. Among the areas where he sees the biggest potential impact, the investor cited improving plant genetics, boosting the shelf life of more products and putting digital tools in the hands of farmers. Consumer behavior is another piece of the proverbial puzzle as climate literacy increasingly alters how folks shop. “Over the last few years, we have seen skyrocketing interest in sustainability from consumers and food brands, and awareness over the negative impacts of agriculture continues to grow,” said Ting-Ting Liu, investor at Prosus Ventures. “People are not only paying more attention to agricultural-related emissions but also how much land and water is required to support the world’s food supply and the amount of runoff being generated,” she said. Liu argued that this demand is creating strong tailwinds for businesses that strive to address agriculture’s environmental impact, ultimately driving more capital into everything from cellular agriculture to methane reduction solutions for livestock. Still, agtech is not immune to some of the broader trends in venture. While the value of rose to $11.4 billion in 2021 from $6.5 billion in 2020, several investors told TechCrunch they’ve noticed a in agtech deals this year amid the wider . “2021 was a record year for VC across the board. In 2022, VC investments across the board are about 30% lower year on year, and I would expect a similar slowdown for agtech,” Monica Varman, a partner at G2 Venture Partners, told TechCrunch. “Over the medium to long term, however, I do expect agtech VC funding to grow, given supply chain challenges, traceability concerns and advancements in enabling technologies in synbio and robotics,” she added. Agtech investors are also still largely funding men. Out of the nearly $11 billion dispensed into agtech in 2021, 78% went to firms with all-male founders, according to PitchBook. The disparity has only worsened so far in 2022, rising to 81% (out of nearly $7.3 billion) as of September 14, per the data firm. To gauge whether (and how) VCs are responding to these issues and more, we reached out to: It’s not going to continue in the short run largely because of macroeconomic factors you’re just not seeing — for example, many late-stage deals are going through recently — so in the short term, definitely not. In the long run, the sector has a tremendous amount of opportunity and room for innovation, so with time, you will see continued growth and investor focus on agtech. It is a huge reason deal value skyrocketed in 2020 and 2021. Investors understand that this challenge creates an opportunity. Agtech is not as mainstream as many other sectors, so we need more eyeballs and capital. If you are making the food system more effective and efficient, you are making it more sustainable. We aren’t a big enough fund to finance a startup forever, and we depend on later-stage investors, so this attention and resulting influx of capital helps remove some risk from our portfolio. We 100% believe in cellular agriculture and are also huge fans of the robotics space, especially robotics that solve very specific pain points and have low BOMs. We also love the packaging space — lots of packaging goes into the transportation and movement of food. We’re also excited about anything to do with logistics, manufacturing or transportation that makes the food chain more sustainable. Investing in agtech startups is no different from any other company. A great team can take a C- idea, pivot, iterate and make it work. But a C- founder will run any idea into the ground, regardless of how good it is. While founder-market fit can be a benefit to a company, great entrepreneurs are smart, have a great work ethic, are coachable and know how to surround themselves with people who make up for their weaknesses. So industry experience isn’t a requirement for us. The obvious answer is alternative proteins. So much capital has been invested and so many founders are building cool things in the space. I’d love to see more attention paid to things that are a bit downstream, such as manufacturing, logistics and the future of food retail. Over the last few years, you have seen traditional agtech investors move their thesis further downstream, so it is happening. I’m also really interested in fintech applications in the agriculture space, like what and are doing. We actively seek out investors, forums and networks that support underrepresented founders and invest or work with entrepreneurs that are a stage earlier than where we invest. We also maintain a diverse investment team — 75% of our fund are women. Finally, we hold open office hours for anyone every week and provide free public education through multiple channels to help founders level up. I don’t think it’s done much to early-stage agtech founders or venture capital. The macroeconomic effect of the war has at least, in part, been a tightening of monetary supply, which will trickle down to early-stage startups. However, the impact has not been significant at early stages yet. I wouldn’t call these acquisitions of “modern” agtech companies. Monsanto has been around for 100+ years, and Syngenta was formed over 20 years ago, and even then it was a spin-off. Additionally, these happened in 2017 and 2018. Investment in agtech has exploded since then, indicating that the market does not think these two acquisitions are indicative of underperforming venture investments. The outcomes of companies like Upside Foods, FBN and Indigo Ag will be far more important to the agtech ecosystem. Unfortunately, it’s a very tough market for late-stage companies right now, and that will slow exits and depress ROI on many venture investments, not just agtech deals. I’m open to warm intros, thoughtful or pitches during my . If you’re pitching me on a call, the number one thing is to be yourself. I think the blurred lines between food tech and agtech are really interesting. What is agtech? It’s not just farm inputs; there is a lot more to it and that, to me, is exciting. 2021 was a record year for VC. In 2022, VC investments across the board are about 30% lower, and I would expect a similar slowdown for agtech. Over the medium and long term, however, I do expect agtech VC funding to rise given supply chain challenges, traceability concerns and advancements in enabling technologies in synbio and robotics. |
Twitter v. Musk judge says the trial is still on | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | Third-party discovery found that Elon Musk had corresponded with investor Marc Andreessen via Signal as well — the venture capitalist had contacted Musk on April 25 with interest in becoming an equity partner in Twitter. When Twitter’s team found out that Musk was talking about major elements of the deal via Signal, they pointed out that this makes it seem more likely that other key conversations were happening on the encrypted app too. Musk said in an affidavit that he didn’t recall using the Signal app to talk about the deal in any instance other than his conversation with Andreessen. But discovery revealed yet another instance of Musk using Signal to talk to his advisor, Jared Birchall. It isn’t clear when these relatively routine Signal messages were sent, but it’s suspicious enough that Judge McCormick said it “seems unlikely” that these two exchanges were the only times Musk used the app. “ Since the evidence is not yet clear, McCormick will not rule on this matter until a pending post-trial briefing. In his second to Twitter, Musk leveraged whistleblower complaints from Twitter’s former head of security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko to justify pulling out of the deal. Like Musk, Zatko claims that Twitter is from its investors. Twitter’s lawyers theorized that Zatko may have anonymously contacted Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, in a mysterious, anonymous email sent on May 6, which was found in discovery. McCormick has said that because Musk relies heavily on new revelations from Zatko, Twitter has the right to figure out if he had any prior contact with Musk or Musk’s team that hasn’t come to light. Shortly after Judge McCormick filed her letter today, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro submitted a addressing these concerns. In the affidavit, Spiro declares that he does not recall reading the May 6 email when he received it, since he gets so many anonymous emails about Twitter on a weekly basis. “It is not my habit to review those emails, and the May 6 Email did not stand out in any way,” Spiro wrote. “Reading it now, the May 6 Email appears to be from an individual looking to ‘Support [] Elon’s Twitter Transition’ by asking for a job.” Spiro said that he didn’t reply, forward, print, save or communicate with anyone about the email. To date, he says he has not attempted to reach out to the person behind the email. “I can confirm that I have never met or communicated with Mr. Zatko, nor did I communicate with Mr. Zatko through any sort of intermediary,” Spiro added. “I had no knowledge of the existence of his whistleblower complaint, or the allegations therein, prior to August 23, 2022.” As of now, Judge McCormick has ruled that Twitter can continue searching for evidence of contact between Zatko and Musk’s team. The Musk camp is also expected to provide any requested documents on the matter by Friday. It came as a surprise to many yesterday when Elon Musk suddenly backtracked months of legal sparring to say that he’s just going to pay up and buy Twitter. But this swerve isn’t as random a decision as it seems. In his letter to Twitter, , Musk says that he’ll proceed with buying Twitter as promised, but only if the Chancery Court will “adjourn the trial and all other proceedings related thereto pending such closing or further order of the Court.” Twitter thinks Elon Musk is hiding something. Musk won’t prove that he’s not hiding anything. What does a trial do? It makes you reveal what you’re hiding, under oath. If Musk really was using Signal to talk about making this deal and backing out of it, then it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe there’s something he doesn’t want Twitter or Judge McCormick to know. However, Musk has been known to change his mind often, and since the reasoning behind his actions is not transparent, there could be other elements at play. Elon Musk was supposed to be last week, but he was able to delay the trial, citing a potential COVID-19 exposure. If nothing massive changes, Musk’s deposition will now take place on Thursday and Friday, meaning that he will have to give testimony. But if he is that adamant that he doesn’t want to try his luck under oath, then… prepare for some end-of-week chaos. |
Space billboards could cost $65M and still turn a profit | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | Space-based advertising has been on the minds of every marketer on the planet since the Apollo era, yet no one has made it happen. suggests that a billboard-like constellation of about 50 satellites, costing $65 million all in, could shine ads to every corner of the Earth for months — and potentially make money while doing so. Of course, just because they doesn’t mean they . But let’s focus on the former for now. The study, from Russian researchers at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), presents a fairly compelling case that is bolstered by the recent controversy around SpaceX’s highly visible Starlink satellites. The paper’s proposal involves sending up a constellation of about 50 satellites at a 12U CubeSat volume — think about the size of a full paper grocery bag. The satellites would enter a sun-synchronous orbit, meaning they’ll always be in direct sunlight as they pass around the Earth. Once in orbit, they would deploy large, parabolic reflectors that would bounce sunlight down toward the Earth. These could be tilted to best present the sunlight to a target area they are passing over, and from the ground would appear to be a group of stars moving in synchrony for a period of perhaps three to five minutes. (To be clear, the image at top is just for illustration — it would be much dimmer in reality.) The 50 satellites could rearrange themselves in patterns, from letters to simple graphics — not fast, but fast enough that the shape could evolve over their visible time, or change advertisers between target cities. They would deorbit after 1-3 months, depending on several factors. I’ve asked the researchers for clarification on the lifetime, display length and a few other details and will update this post if I hear back. Diagram of a satellite’s reflective footprint, and examples (an Olympics logo and Eiffel Tower) of potential displays. Skoltech/MIPT The physical possibility of doing this doesn’t seem outlandish at all considering how visible existing satellites can be in these orbits, and the precision with which they can be arranged already. So with that established, a good deal of the paper is dedicated to an economic analysis. After all, we probably could have launched a Nike logo to space in the ’90s (and there were attempts) if the world came together on it… but why would they? The thing has to make financial sense. The cost of the mission is estimated at $65 million, most of which goes to manufacturing the 50 satellites ($48.7 million), then to testing, support and engineering ($11.5 million), and of course launch ($4.8 million). That seems reasonable enough in theory. But it gets a little fuzzy in the income estimates. A complicated equation for determining which cities, in which regions and at what times of the year would make more money suggests that winter provides the greatest ROI. You might think: but people stay inside during the winter. Yes, but not in the tropics and much of south and southeast Asia, where winter brings longer nights but nothing like the inclement weather of northern latitudes. And it happens some of the most densely populated cities in the world are there. Images showing potential configurations of satellites into Olympic rings and Eiffel Tower shapes. Skoltech/MIPT Their most optimistic estimate puts net income at around $111 million, over three months and 24 displays — that works out to around $4.6 million per ad. Super Bowl ads cost more than that, and only last 30 seconds — though of course they’re in 4K and full color with sound. But the money and appetite for stunt advertising is definitely there. The more important question is does anyone want to see ads in the sky? Almost certainly not. While the novelty of a satellite-based display might briefly fill some with awe, that display forming the Pepsi logo — or more likely, Crypto.com or something — might quickly turn awe to disgust. “That’s it? A crummy commercial?” if you will. It would be an enormous reputational gamble: the first company to set its advertisements among the stars. Sure, we’ve had sponsored content and logos up on the International Space Station, but that’s different. When you see the ISS pass overhead, it doesn’t blink down “SNICKERS SATISFIES” in Morse code at you. The study from Skoltech and MIPT is probably something that has been speculated on internally at many companies that have considered the possibility for years. The idea that the whole operation might actually make money, however, is a relatively new development; even five years ago the numbers might not have worked. And remember this is just one take on the problem — others may come to different conclusions. Will we see ads in the stars any time soon? Unlikely, but anything profitable tends to occur sooner or later in this mad, mad world of ours, so don’t be surprised if you hear about attempts being made. Perhaps we’ll outlaw it — but who has jurisdiction? Or maybe launch companies will decline — but do they want to be put in that position? It’s a strange possibility and very sci-fi, but so is a lot of what takes place these days. The full paper is available to read . |
null | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 10 | 4 | null |
Grubhub and Gopuff team up for grocery and alcohol delivery | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | Grubhub and Gopuff are to provide fast delivery of grocery items, alcohol and essential items. The new partnership will see the Chicago-based food delivery platform tap into Gopuff’s warehouses to deliver a wider selection of convenience items to its customers, The companies are piloting the partnership this week in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Austin. In the coming weeks, hundreds of Gopuff locations across the country will be available on the Grubhub Marketplace. Gopuff orders placed on Grubhub’s app will be fulfilled by Gopuff’s logistics. “Expanding Gopuff’s platform allows us to meet consumers’ immediate needs anywhere they shop,” said , the senior vice president of business at Gopuff, in a press release. “By combining our broad assortment, logistics network and infrastructure with the virtual storefronts of Grubhub, we can create more seamless one-stop shopping experiences for Gopuff’s unparalleled one-stop shopping experience.” The partnership will bring thousands of products available for delivery on Grubhub from more than 500 Gopuff locations, including virtual concepts. The companies note that alcohol will be available in select cities, as well. Gopuff says it will launch virtual concepts on Grubhub, including its pizza brand, The Mean Tomato, Gopuff Liquor and virtual menus for brands including Unilever. At launch, Gopuff locations will also be included in Grubhub+, which is the company’s membership program that gives customers delivery fees on eligible orders and other perks. “Diners now have more options when it comes to ordering fresh food, grocery items, snacks, and alcohol – all from the convenience of the Grubhub app,” said Ariella Kurshan, the senior vice president of growth at Grubhub, in the press release. “These expanded offerings complement Grubhub’s vast restaurant network and keep diners engaged across the Grubhub Marketplace.” Grubhub’s partnership with Gopuff will help it compete with other delivery platforms, including DoorDash, which offers convenience items through its service. The partnership comes as Gopuff, which was being valued at $15 billion as recently as 2020, and had been rumored to be prepping for an IPO at the start of this year, is to focus on more lucrative markets, like the U.K. As for Grubhub, the partnership comes as its parent company, Just Eat Takeaway, said in May that it was exploring , which it acquired for $7.3 billion in June 2021. |
As Iran throttles its internet, activists fight to get online | Mike Butcher | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | the streets of Iran in September after the death in custody of — a 22-year-old woman who was arrested for not wearing her hijab in accordance with the country’s strict dress code for women — videos and images of the protests spread online inside the country. Previously unheard-of acts, such as the destruction of pictures of Iran’s Supreme Leader or women removing their hijabs, were spread by smartphone video. But then the government on internet access; WhatsApp, Signal, Viber, Skype and Instagram were blocked. Now, groups are mobilizing to scale those growing walls. Most recently, a group of activists has come up with a new approach that involves inside Iran itself, and engaging the tech community outside the country. As that group looks to bring on more participation, its approach — using servers inside the country as a sort of “Trojan Horse for internet access” — is gaining endorsement from the free-speech community at large. Currently, some 200 people are using servers run by the group of activists who devised the method; that method is now posted on GitHub, and the group has not tracked how many others might be using it, too. “If Iran has segmented off its residential internet access from the rest of the world, but its servers located within the country can still access both Iranian residential IPs as well as the outside internet, then setting up servers within the country to relay traffic should work,” Bill Budington, senior staff technologist at the , told TechCrunch. To be sure, Iranian internet users are no strangers to internet shutdowns. More than 85 million people live in Iran, with some 84% of residents having access to the internet. To suppress dissent, Iran’s regime regularly uses internet blockades and censorship to keep videos and images of the protests from reaching the population. In 2019, when more than 100 protesters were killed during , the country’s internet access was cut for 12 days, according to Amnesty International. Details of circumvention tools and technical advice are proliferating, but the reach of censors is extensive. — which allow players to chat — have reportedly been shut down. For over two weeks, Iran’s three main mobile operators have for hours at a time, up to eight hours, from 4 p.m. local time daily, according to internet monitors. This means landline networks become a vital source of information. So finding ways around those blocks has become familiar to Iranians. Traditionally they would have turned to VPNs to stay connected. Yet with many VPNs now getting blocked, Tor networks — which allow anonymous web browsing that can bypass internet blocks — have become especially vital for spreading video and information about the most recent protests against the regime. The Tor Project, the U.S. nonprofit that maintains the Tor network, on how to use Tor to access the internet in Iran. That’s why internet freedom activists are working every hour to help Iranians get back online, and are reaching out for help outside of the country to keep that information channel open for protesters. The tech community outside Iran has come to play an important part in helping protesters get back online. Google said in a that its “teams are working to make our tools broadly available, following the newly updated U.S. sanctions applicable to communications services.” Messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp have been to make their services available inside Iran. “We are working to keep our Iranian friends connected and will do anything within our technical capacity to keep our service up and running,” the Meta-owned messaging app in September. In other efforts, Elon Musk low-Earth orbit satellite broadband service in Iran after the U.S. government allowed private companies to offer internet access to the country. This followed Starlink’s after the country’s internet was . However, a special terminal, which includes a 20-inch satellite dish, is needed to receive the signal, making it to ship the hardware into the locked-down country. Now, human rights and other observers are concerned that the regime is cutting internet links and rendering VPN and proxy servers inaccessible in a chilling repeat of the 2019 protests that saw hundreds killed during the blackout. All this has led a group of activists to take the new approach that involves Tor too, but also engages the tech community outside Iran. ONTARIO, CANADA – September 23, 2022: A sticker saying “Iran: The internet is down and they are killing the people” seen on the back of a road sign during the demonstration. Hundreds gathered to honour Mahsa Amini and to protest against the Iranian government in Toronto, Canada. Katherine Cheng/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images TechCrunch has spoken to a tech entrepreneur representing the group inside the country to get a picture of how the group of activists is working to get internet access working again to spread information about the demonstrations. (We are not publishing names to protect their safety.) The entrepreneur said that getting access has become a “game of cat and mouse” with authorities. The , which uses free and open source software for enabling anonymous communication, has become a vital way around these problems. (Indeed, Tor also allows users around the world to , an , to help users in Iran access censored websites and applications.) Usage of the Tor anonymity network has been picking up steam as VPN blocks have increased, but even that has hit roadblocks. “VPN services provide a free service for Iranians. The Tor Project is adding bridges, but few of these will work,” he said via an encrypted messaging app. The regime is also now “dropping VPN connections very aggressively and you won’t stay connected to regular VPNs [with servers outside Iran] for more than a few minutes before getting disconnected,” he said. “The government has blocked access to most non-Iranian IP addresses on residential connections (essentially a whitelist with throttled speed) and to all non-Iranian IP addresses on mobile 3G/4G data (and most people are connected to the internet through mobile data). All these services (VPNs/Tor/etc) have servers outside Iran, which is not useful,” he told me. “People cannot connect to them.” The new approach uses servers inside Iranian data centers, which “have a full-speed connection to the internet.” He and a few others are now acquiring servers in Iranian data centers, setting up a VPN server on them, and making sure that all the incoming traffic is tunneled to another server outside Iran. “Then the Iranian VPN server connection info is shared with the people who can connect to them from any device at any time of the day,” he said. He added that the internet is almost completely shut down at nights when the protests are most intense, but connections to servers within Iran still work. But this approach is not scalable. Iranian tech companies cannot buy many servers in the Iranian data centers as it raises too many red flags with the regime’s authorities. “And we can’t share the connection information publicly because the connection info includes the server IP address which can be easily used by the government to identify the person who purchased it, and they can then come after us,” he said. Instead, Iranian engineers have been in contact with members of the Tor Project to help set up bridges inside Iran. To achieve this, he and others worked on a document titled “ ,” posted to GitHub. This details how machines located inside Iranian data centers could be used to connect to websites and servers carrying information on the protests inside Iran, since the government has not yet blocked internet access to these internal servers, and may not do so in fear of cutting its own access to the outside world. The document calls on the tech industry outside Iran, including the Iranian diaspora, for help by purchasing servers. It’s not clear how successful — or safe — the group’s proposal would be in practice. “I don’t know how safe it is to do this and what could happen if they are caught,” one source involved with the Tor Project told me. Activists inside the country could face retribution if caught by the regime. The ongoing internet outage remains an active discussion An official spokesperson for the Tor Project did not respond to a request for comment, at publication. Budington at the EFF believes the approach, however, fills a gap if it manages to avoid authorities’ ability to quash access. Activists appear to be “coming up with clever ways to relay traffic to the Tor network without raising red flags by routing first through the Iranian server, then out to another server outside Iran, then to the Tor network,” he told TechCrunch. The tech entrepreneur said the method of circumventing the internet shut-downs is in active use. “Most people who are connected are using this method or similar methods (hopping the traffic through an Iranian server). We have roughly 200 people using our servers, but we can’t be sure of the number of people using our methods in total,” he said. Meanwhile, the activists TechCrunch spoke to said that because of the lack of information getting out, the protests are getting “smaller and smaller every night” and the government is getting more and more confident. Authorities in Tehran recently announced that they won’t remove the restrictions on WhatsApp and Instagram unless they register companies inside Iran and . Activists say the methods they are working on to regain access could be crucial to aiding the protests against the dictatorial regime. “People inside Iran are not seeing the videos and information about the protests. All they see is government propaganda,” one told me. “We can give them access, but we need help.” |
Overwatch 2 launch marred by ongoing DDoS attacks | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | But ever since Overwatch 2 went live on Tuesday, it’s been beset by problems, including a DDoS attack that cratered launch-day play. “Unfortunately we are experiencing a mass DDoS attack on our servers,” Blizzard Entertainment President Mike Ybarra confirmed yesterday on Twitter. Unfortunately we are experiencing a mass DDoS attack on our servers. Teams are working hard to mitigate/manage. This is causing a lot of drop/connection issues. — Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) Even players who managed to get into the servers had problems, including getting dropped from matches and other kinds of launch-day instability that made playing challenging if not impossible. Blizzard’s Overwatch Game Director Aaron Keller issued an update on Twitter Wednesday, but things weren’t looking much better. According to Keller, a second DDoS attack is in the works and servers still aren’t stable. We’re steadily making progress on server issues and stability, as well as working through a second DDoS attack. We’re all hands on deck and will continue to work throughout the night. Thank you for your patience – we’ll share more info as it becomes available. — Aaron Keller (@aaronkellerOW) We haven’t played the Overwatch sequel yet here at TechCrunch, but once the issues get settled out we’ll dive into it properly and see how the revamped game feels. Overwatch 2 will hit PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and PC, and will offer cross-play so you can team up with friends no matter which platform they’re on. A smooth multiplayer experience has always been one of the things Blizzard does best and Overwatch historically is no exception. Anyone who’s played Overwatch — like, ahem, myself for hundreds of hours way back in winter of 2016 — will see a few notable changes in its successor. For one, teams are now comprised of five heroes instead of six, changing up team compositions. New heroes and quality of life features are also on the way, including the controversial choice to make Overwatch 2 free-to-play. Of course, free-to-play is a double-edged sword — you don’t to fork over a monthly sub fee or anything to play the game, but you can be sure Blizzard will be luring players to pay for a Fortnite-like battle pass that gates off some characters and offers cool perks and cosmetics (that we won’t want to want but we ). We’ll reserve judgement on all of that until we actually have a chance to dive into Fortnite’s colorful hero-driven battlefields, dusted with here and there. These games last for ages — Overwatch itself made it a solid six years. Some launch-day chaos isn’t ideal for Blizzard (particularly given its ), but there’s plenty of time to get everything smoothed out for one of the most iconic multiplayer and of the generation. |
Engage with AT&T, Polygon & more at TechCrunch Disrupt | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | Look who’s coming to Disrupt: As , our title sponsor, , will be hosting a session on the TC+ Stage on driving innovation through collaborations both big and small. Can’t wait to hear this talk! Also on the TC+ Stage, blockchain platform will host a partner session that will knock your socks off on all things sustainable blockchain. Bringing their amazing group of startups, will be hosting a startup pavilion in the expo hall. And rounding out the show floor, we’re excited to share that , and will be demoing on the show floor.
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Is it time for Elon Musk to find a Tim Cook for Tesla? | Tim De Chant | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | his fingers in a lot of pies. He’s CEO of automaker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX. He also founded tunnel construction firm the Boring Company and co-founded Neuralink, a brain implant startup. Now it looks like Musk will and potentially roll it into an “everything app” he calls X. If that sounds like a lot, well, it is. Many observers have wondered whether Musk should step down from one or more of his leadership positions, particularly as CEO of Tesla, because he’s strapped for time. They might be right. Other observers see signs of Founder’s Syndrome, in which founders struggle to delegate, share the limelight and so on. That might also be the case. Here’s another way to phrase that question: Is Tesla still in its early days? Or is it a well-established business that needs to focus on electric vehicles and distributed renewable energy? How you answer that probably dictates whether you think Musk should stay or go. These questions address a challenge that all companies face at some point in their lives: Should they invest resources in exploring new niches or work on exploiting existing ones they’re already familiar with? Many companies try to do both — the so-called ambidextrous organization — so they can continue to profit from an existing business while exploring new markets. That’s hard to pull off, and no matter how hard they try, every leader has tendencies that pull them in one direction or another. (This is why it’s important for founders to have diverse, empowered lieutenants and boards so they can draw on a range of views and competencies.) |
Peacock grows its paid subscriber base to 15 million after pulling back shows from Hulu | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell revealed in a that Peacock added more than 2 million paid subscribers in the third quarter, bringing the total to over 15 million. The recent growth shows the streaming service is recovering from its slowdown at the end of the second quarter when Peacock stalled at . Shell claimed the boost in subs stemmed from a strong content lineup, including NBC next-day episodes that Peacock reclaimed from Hulu. “It’s really driven by the content…So all of our content that’s on NBC, Bravo, our other channels for the first time in the next couple of weeks is coming to Peacock where it used to go to Hulu,” Shell said in yesterday’s interview. NBCUniversal in August that starting on September 19, Peacock Premium will get next-day access to current seasons of NBC shows the day after they debut on the linear network. , the company also took next-day Bravo shows from Hulu. Paid subscribers can watch the hit franchise “Law & Order,” as well as “One Chicago” and other popular shows like “Saturday Night Live,” “Real Housewives,” “Top Chef,” “The Voice,” “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “Late Night With Seth Meyers” and “America’s Got Talent.” Shell also confirmed that Disney is planning to buy Comcast’s 33% stake in Hulu, . “It sounds like [Disney is] going to buy it…It’s a great asset,” he said. “If it were put on the auction block, it would fetch a high price—it would be a pretty robust auction. We’d want to participate in the auction… that’s not what we anticipate happening.” The company will lose a valuable asset once Comcast no longer owns a stake in Hulu. Peacock is behind its competitor Hulu, which has Expanding its content library and investing in more original titles appears to be helping the streamer get back on track — slowly but surely. In addition to NBC and Bravo content, Peacock is investing in more originals to gain more subscribers. For instance, Peacock is investing in original films as part of its deal with . Also, the streamer recently announced its upcoming , “In the Know,” starring “Beavis and Butt-Head” creator Mike Judge and Zach Woods from “Silicon Valley.” |
Crypto adoption skyrockets in Middle East and North Africa due to favorable economic climate | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | and North Africa (MENA) was the fastest growing crypto market in 2022, according to a new by Chainalysis. Users in the region transacted $566 billion in cryptocurrency between July 2021 and June 2022, up 48% from a year earlier, the report found. In comparison, crypto transactions rose 40% in , 36% in North America, and 35% in Central and . Other regions saw growth of 22% or less. For the report, Chainalysis conducted interviews in countries to cast what it described as a “really wide net” and talked to regulators, private businesses, OTC brokers and anyone who operated in crypto across the regions, Kim Grauer, director of research at Chainalysis, told TechCrunch. In MENA, Turkey remains the largest cryptocurrency market — its citizens used $192 billion of crypto in the period, the report said. “Based on the data, we see a ton of activity across the board in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE, and that’s just raw transaction value,” Grauer said. Saudi Arabia and UAE stand out when adjusting for metrics like population size and relative purchasing power, Grauer noted. “In terms of their kind of becoming a crypto hub/hotspot, whether it’s because of regulatory initiatives to develop that market or because there’s more disposable income and [they’re] seeking alternative investments, those two areas seem to be attracting international businesses to relocate there.” |
Waiting for Raspberry Pi: Eben Upton talks supply constraints and demand shock | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | to get their hands on some juicy single-board Raspberry Pi kit to power low-cost electronics projects have been having a frustrating time for more than a year now, as pandemic-triggered global supply chain disruption continues squeezing reseller inventory. Go try and buy Pi and you can’t miss how official reseller websites everywhere — such as and in Europe or in the U.S. — are peppered with ‘Out of Stock’ notifications. Keep looking and you’ll probably stumble across social media stories of enthusiasts forking over multiples on the RRP of sought-after boards via non official reseller routes (like Amazon) — hardware that would usually carry an exceptionally reasonable price-tag. Unlike Pi itself, these tales of Pi buyer woe are, sadly, all too easy to find online as scalpers have honed in on the supply shortage — firing up stock-buying bots and trying to swoop when a few units appear so they can sell the kit on at vastly inflated prices by exploiting people’s passion to get on with their projects… Pi Zero W2 RRP is £14, but due to low stock scalpers are selling them for upwards of £90. What’s up with that? Are they out of production? — Glenn Wilkinson 🇿🇼 (@glennzw) The biggest roadblock currently is getting a hold of Raspberry Pi Zero 2 Ws (out of stock everywhere), which are used for the hubs (running software I developed) to provide educational resources to local devices even if offline. — Charles Calzia 🎓🚀 (@CharlesCalzia) I wanted to order a but there are no in stock. Next shipping 2023. Hey this is crazy. — Jörg Mainzer (@JorgMainzer) One frustrated would-be-Pi buying tipster pinged us directly — wondering: “H To be fair to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, they have been since last year (when they also had to announce some temporary price increases also linked to the “strange times” in global semiconductor supply) — so claiming they’re ‘burying’ the bad news risks sounding a tad conspiratorial. The roots of the global semiconductor shortage itself are linked to supply chain disruption triggered by the pandemic impacting labor availability and by COVID-19 lockdowns simultaneously spiking demand for all sorts of consumer electronics (which of course need chips to power them). In short, the proverbial ‘perfect storm’. Pi’s supply issues are really a neat package of both phenomena, if we can put it that way. (Or: “We have order backlogs from our distributors, and they have order backlogs from their customers,” as Raspberry Pi’s co-founder concisely sums the problem to us.) The upshot is far from neat for individuals wanting to buy Pi, of course. But the company has stepped into the breach to support its business customers — specifically industrial and commercial OEMs — through these leaner supply times. This means it’s prioritizing available Pi stock for business customers so they can keep serving their customers, hence hobbyists are feeling the (inventory) pinch. “These are companies (often small ones) who have put their faith in our platform: Livelihoods are at stake, and we feel an obligation to them,” co-founder Eben Upton told TechCrunch, adding: “New production goes to fill these backlogs, which is how we can be consistently building over 100,000 units a week but still see little free stock in channel.” So while the Pi maker’s core ‘democratizing tech’ educational mission is intrinsically bound up with providing curious individuals with affordable access to programmable computing hardware — so they can play around and learn STEM along the way — there’s no doubt it has had to take the tough choice to ask enthusiasts to join the queue behind Pi-reliant businesses. “Obviously this translates into reduced availability for enthusiast customers,” he confirmed. “The advice there is buy from Approved Resellers, many of whom operate wait lists, and/or to use tools like to keep track of stock as it appears in channel.” “Go to Approved Resellers,” he reiterated. “We’re not supplying non-approved resellers. Go to an AR, get in the queue. Use if you want but go to an AR… that operates a queuing system, get in the queue. We are getting units out. We are still managing to get some units out to that space.” The message for hobbyists — for now — thus remains a very British one: ‘We’re sorry but you’re going to have to get in the queue and wait your turn.’ But Upton also signalled that the Pi inventory issues should start to ease next year — saying he was hopeful of a resolution “no later than Q2”. “We’re seeing positive signs that the supply chain situation is improving but it will be some months yet before we’re back in the sort of robust stock position we prefer,” he told TechCrunch. In a back in April, Upton, wrote that a “variety” of supply chain challenges are continuing to disrupt inventory-as-usual. “The current situation is as much a demand shock as a supply shock,” he explained. “Demand for Raspberry Pi products increased sharply from the start of 2021 onwards, and supply constraints have prevented us from flexing up to meet this demand, with the result that we now have significant order backlogs for almost all products. In turn, our many resellers have their own backlogs, which they fulfil when they receive stock from us.” He also reiterated the aforementioned, official Pi advice for individuals trying to get hold of kit — advice that continues to apply: Namely, buy Pi from an approved reseller (i.e. to avoid being scalped); and try to find a reseller that takes pre-orders and can (hopefully) give you an idea of how long you’re doing to be waiting… And, well, the (obvious) follow-on is: Prepare to be patient while you wait to get your Pi. Pimoroni co-founder, Jon Williamson, only had words of praise for (aka, the Pi-manufacturing arm of the charitable ) for having done “really well” keeping “SBC” (single-board computing) kit in-stock “until a long way into the shortages, especially given their popularity”, as he put it to us in an email. He also pointed us back to Pi’s April blog post — calling it a “pretty thorough” update which provides “the best info” on the supply crunch. “We get small drops of SBC stock at infrequent intervals, much like the other resellers,” Williamson said of Pimoroni’s own Pi supply situation, saying the strategy it’s using to weather inventory challenges attached to its core product is to focus on other Pi products that are in more plentiful supply. “We’ve got a good flow of stock and are focusing on our products that support that,” he noted. Upton’s April update also urges buyers to consider the (2020 launched) ; or the (2021) — which is made using and an in-house developed chip (RP2040) — as alternatives to other more supply-constrained boards, as he said those lines have been less affected by supply issues so you should have less of wait to get your Pi. Given the ongoing chatter around shortages, we reached out to Upton for a chat about how it’s been managing such a sustained period of inventory constraints — a phone call, it should be said, that Upton offered despite being on holiday at the time (so he certainly can’t be accused of running from the issue). He also readily agreed it’s a frustrating situation for Pi buyers — and indeed for everyone at Raspberry Pi which has always had a dual focus on homebrew (hobbyist) and industrial (business) users so individual buyers are absolutely a core component (pardon the pun) of its customer base. “We’re really sorry — this isn’t a situation we’ve chosen,” he volunteered during a chat which took place to an evocative backdrop of medieval church bells and buzz. “This isn’t a situation anyone wants to be in. And we’re working our knuckles to the bone trying to get out of it.” He also had some good news: Telling us he’s hopeful that the sustained inventory squeeze will start to ease from early(ish) next year. So — fingerscrossed — those annoying ‘Out of Stock’ notifications should start to get less visible in 2023. (The usual ‘black swan event’ caveats do of course apply, especially as 2022 has had no shortage of fresh geopolitical shocks, such as Russia starting a land war in Europe.) Eben Upton with a slice of Pi back at TC Disrupt London in 2014. TechCrunch “The good news is we are hopeful that, independently of whether the macro environment changes, our specific supply challenges are going to get a lot better in, say — no later than — Q2 of next year,” he said. “I think that would be a good guess because there are some supply side factors that are going to help. There’s a lot more manufacturing capacity.” His confidence on this relates to having greater production capacity for manufacturing on 28 nm silicon — which is used in products. “There’s a lot more production capacity for that… coming online in the next 12 months — and I think that will probably be the thing that brings our specific shortages to an end,” he predicted. “I’m probably pretty comfortable with Q2 [as a projected end-date for Pi’s supply crunch] so the challenge for us now is how do we bring that into Q1 — how do we eke a couple of months out… how do we just squeeze it a little, what levers can we pull to get that sort of ‘return to growth’? “Because this isn’t about contraction — it’s about a lack of growth. It’s how do we get to a return to growth a couple of months earlier than we get it naturally from the system.” Asked what’s been the biggest supply chain problem affecting Pi production to-date — or whether there have been a number of different issues since the pandemic disruption kicked off — Upton said it’s really been a shifting patchwork of supply constraints that they’re having to manage and respond to as each one occurs. “It’s pretty broad-based, actually. On any given day there’s certain components that’s challenging but it’s been pretty broad-based. It’s one of those things where you can kind of feel there’s a natural production rate that’s hard to push beyond because you have some constraint on, you know, core logic and then you get through that and wireless is a problem or some power component is a problem,” he explained. “We’re pretty good in that most components on the board are at least dual-source. And that’s given us a bit of resilience. But really it’s very persistent, very broad-based,” he added. “It’s everything.” He recounted one supply issue with a board that was triggered by a new lockdown being ordered in Shanghai — describing these “little tactical shortages which take the line down for a day or two” as still being capable of hitting production rates as they ripple through (and knock down) the supply chain. “We had a problem that we were recovering from a silicon front-end issue with a supplier — a wafer supplier — but then their packaging and test and ship-out was in Shanghai and no one could go to work in Shanghai,” he said, adding that these sorts of “geographical” issues are certainly an ongoing headache. “Probably rolling lockdowns in China are — I say the biggest source of shortage — but they’re the biggest source of day-to-day [supply issues].” Unlike governments in the West, the Chinese state has continued to pursue a ‘zero COVID-19’ policy — which has meant large scale lockdowns are still occurring there from time to time (when COVID-19 case clusters are identified), such as a Shanghai city-wide lockdown in March. Such events have the potential to set off localized labor constraints which can throttle international hardware production if companies are relying on China-based sourcing (which is of course hard to avoid if, like Pi, your business is building electronics). Though, in Pi’s case, Upton told us it has generally been able to rely on sourcing components elsewhere to get around localized disruptions. “Fortunately most of those components are multi-source components — and you tend to be able to work around those sorts of things,” he said in relation to the Shanghai incident. He added that the Pi maker has done a lot more multi-sourcing since the global supply chain disruption kicked off. “We were pretty robust already — because I mean you just have to be, even in normal times — you can’t put all of your eggs in one basket. But we’ve done a lot more.” Of course workarounds, by their nature, are unlikely to be entirely impact free when it comes to maintaining ‘normal’ production rates — especially in the middle of a global supply crisis. There’s always going to be some delay/contingency switching cost vs “One real annoyance, I guess, for us it that we’re spending engineering effort on qualifying component alternatives when we’d rather be spending engineering effort on making the next big thing,” he said, adding: “I think that’s pretty common across the industry. It’s sinking engineering time in a way which is really unhelpful from an innovation perspective. “We’re probably spending 40% of our engineering capacity on things which I would not traditionally consider to be desirable — in that they don’t move the ball. They keep the ball where it is; they don’t move the ball forward… I think that that is a challenge.” The global semiconductor shortage lies at the root of the Pi supply problem since it’s prevented the company from scaling manufacturing to meet rising demand, as would normally be the case when a business finds itself in the (otherwise) happy situation of increased appetite for its products — exactly because electronics supply issues are so pervasive. Basically: There’s no perfect workaround for these global shortages — meaning Pi simply can’t serve all the demand for its products right now. The company assembles almost all its products in U.K.-based factories in South Wales but, per Upton, it also relies on a surge facility for times of peak demand, such as around product launches — using a Sony a ‘pick and place’ facility in Japan to take care of a portion of the front-end assembly work before returning the panels to Wales where Pi’s own factories take care of the rest (also doing the testing, packing and shipping). Pico products are also made in Japan. And those boards are in less of a supply-constrained position than most other kit. But, for now, inventory disruption remains the rule as demand for Pi’s products continues to outstrip the production rate it can deliver. (In its April update, Upton wrote that it had “consistently” been able to build “around half a million” boards and modules each month for the past six, despite its various supply challenges — so at a reported 100k+ units per week now Pi’s production rates appear to be roughly around, or maybe slightly below, that level.) As , demand for Pi products accelerated during the pandemic when lots of people were stuck indoors twiddling their thumbs for things to do — some with extra disposable income burning a hole in their pockets. So lockdown boredom seems to have encouraged a bunch of people to take the plunge and give hardware hacking a whirl. Upton also points to the concern over kids’ education at a time when schools were shut being another big demand driver since Pi microprocessors can be turned into highly affordable computers for home study — just salvage a few old monitors and keyboards, say by tapping up a local businesses for donations, and off you go with cheap computers for kids. (Pro tip: He recommends asking law firms to chip in unused peripherals as he suggests they tend to hang onto their old IT kit.) Interestingly, though, he said the rise in demand for Pi has been sustained even as most pandemic lockdowns have eased. So it has not experienced the sort of spike-to-crash that hit pandemic-accelerated videoconferencing platforms when in-person meetings started back up again. “Demand is just wild at the moment,” he told us. “Everything is [up]. Demand in the industry is very, very strong. Ok, maybe there’ll be a downturn… but the shoe is taking a lot longer to drop than we might have expected.” It’s not entirely clear what all the growth drivers are exactly but one element stoking demand for Pi’s products is the industrial side of its business — as Upton said the most recent refresh to its embedded computing line (aka ) has been in especially high demand ever since it launched (just prior to the pandemic). “Probably the biggest single thing was we launched — at the tail end of 2019. And it had a really hard take-off. It’s still inexplicable to me really… It just took off like a rocket. And to this day I don’t really know why. “It might be the reduced availability of other stuff. If you think about what competes with Compute Module — [it’s] doing a forecast and design yourself. So putting a chip down, going and buying chips, going and buying memory, designing a board, and putting it yourself down on the board. And what it could be with Compute Module is the unavailability of older silicon — so sort of the global shock — has coupled through into us because people have gone well I can’t go and buy an NXP chip… so I’ll use that Compute Module; I know those guys, we trust them.” “It was just this very strange curve where Compute Module 4’s been blowing the roof off,” he added. “The business for us blew through to over 1M units a year, very, very quickly.” High demand for the Compute Module has a direct knock-on impact on Pi’s ability to supply SBC inventory since he said both lines use the same components — describing the issue as “kind of a finite [resource]”. Since the April blog post, Upton said Pi has taken on more than 2,000 direct OEM supply relationships. n this [supply] constrained environment what that’s caused us to do is have much closer relationships with our OEMs.” Upton urged any OEMs that are still struggling to get the products they need to get in touch via a dedicated email — in order that it can try to support them. “If people are having trouble they can mail and we’ll find out who they are,” he said. “We’ll do our very best to find out they’re not scalpers — that they’re real OEMs with real demand. We don’t want people who are going to resell them. We don’t want people who are building inventory, you know, building kind of a buffer so that they feel comfortable. We want to know what people’s exact requirements are — how many do you need on every given day to keep the line running so that we are not the one problem for your production. “We find out what those are and then we do our best to fulfil them. And we’re making hundreds and hundreds of Raspberry Pis a month — and I think that’s enough to feed, if well managed, and if you get rid of the panic buying [tendency] that’s enough; that will feed the OEM customers. So we think we’re doing a good job keeping our OEMs up but the heartbreaking thing for us of course is we’re an enthusiast business — we’re equal parts an industrial business and an enthusiast’s, hobbyist’s business.” “Those are both really important to us,” he added. “So when we talk about ‘getting back to growth’ that’s what we’re talking about — getting back to that kind of ‘stocked’, ‘100,000-200,000 inventory sloshing around in the channel’ kind of place where we were for a decade, for the eight or nine years before this kicked off.” Upton reiterates the aforementioned advice for Pi hungry individuals, too — pointing makers back to products that are less supply constrained, such as the Pico. “In January last year we rocked up with our own first party silicon. We control all the main silicon in the Pico products — because the RP2040 microcontroller we made ourselves. And, you know, what a time for that to appear! So Pico is one [product that’s less supply constrained]. And we’ve got some budget — we can built 10M-20M Picos if we need to. There’s no problem with that,” he said, adding the Pico line is selling “a few million” units a year currently. “Obviously it’s not the Raspberry Pi platform — when people think Raspberry Pi they tend to mean the big model, what we call ‘big Raspberry Pi’ — the Linux Raspberry Pi. But actually what you can do with the new wireless one, the Pico W, there’s quite an overlap.” He also observed that some hobbyists have been able to switch to alternative kit than they had planned on using — pointing out that the Pico can work as a stand-in for the Zero. “It’s interesting how many people’s applications for Raspberry Pi actually consist of running a Python script and reporting the results and communicating the data over wi-fi and that’s it. So it’s interesting to watch people find ways to do what would have been Raspberry Pi Zero projects — or Raspberry Pi Zero W projects — and find ways to do those projects using the Pico and Pico W platforms because they’re in better supply… Because of course the Pico W has got wireless capability, it runs Python.” “The number of high level programming languages on microcontrollers changes the game,” he added, giving a nod to Arduino for its work in making the space more accessible. “Microcontrollers always had… a bit of a sort of hairy-scary reputation. But you can just write a Python script — it’s just like a regular piece of coding.” Also on the sunnier side, Upton brushes off any concerns linked to the U.K.’s current economic turmoils — where interests rates and inflation are soaring and the British pound is, er, not — saying he’s confident economic issues on home soil won’t cause Pi fresh supply (and/or cost) headaches in the near term. This is because the U.K. company is established as a dollar business, giving it some padding against local fiscal turmoil. “We’re a dollar business. We buy things in dollars, we sell things in dollars, we report all our financials in dollars. So we’re a dollar business based in Cambridge, U.K. The only thing that’s directly [in sterling] is our salary expense, or most of our salary expense because we do have some U.S. employees,” he explained. “In the medium term, of course, our manufacturing salary expense is in sterling and therefore you would expect — it’s a slow effect — the change in the manufacturing price quotes based on salary costs but over time you would expect dollar denominated manufacturing costs to change… But, by and large, and certainly the direction in which exchange rates are moving at the moment isn’t a problem for us in that it’s making… sterling fixed costs cheaper at the moment.” “But it’s not a big effect — at all — on us. And to the extent it is an effect it’s on the ‘positive’ [side],” he added. “I mean, you can’t devalue the oasis of debt and no one’s advocating for sterling’s devaluation to make British manufacturing look better but to the extent there is an effect it’s impossible to denominate.” |
Lemonade leans on Aviva to bring its next-gen insurance platform to the UK | Paul Sawers | 2,022 | 10 | 2 | New York-based insurance giant is officially launching ., its fourth market in Europe and fifth overall, with a little help from one of the oldest and largest insurance providers in the U.K. Lemonade, for the uninitiated, emerged into the trillion-dollar insurance space back in 2015, with a new take on how consumers should be able to buy insurance. Mobile-first and AI-powered automation for registering and filing claims was the name of the game, versus dusty old brokers and bureaucracy. On top of that, the company has always been vocal about its ethics, positioning itself as the antithesis of a traditional insurance company — the company is a certified , meaning that it’s independently assessed for its social and environmental performance. Its business plan essentially involves charging a set fee, and then donating some of its underwriting profits to a charity as selected by each customer when they sign up. Lemonade U.K. launch. Lemonade But Lemonade is still very much a for-profit insurance juggernaut, nearly $500 million in funding as a startup, from big-name backers including SoftBank, Alphabet’s GV, And all this hullaballoo takes us to today, where Lemonade is now officially open for business in the U.K., where it’s going to market with a slightly more trimmed down offering compared to what it offers in the U.S. Indeed, in its domestic market, Lemonade offers insurance spanning contents (renters), homeowners, pet, car and life, while in For the U.K. market, Lemonade is offering contents insurance starting at £4 per month, and includes global coverage for personal items of up to £2,000 in value each up to a total value of £100,000. Customers can pay extra fees for additional coverage, such as accidental damage to mobile devices. Although Lemonade is a fully licensed insurance carrier in its own right, the company has formed a strategic partnership with Aviva, one of the largest general insurers in the U.K. At first, this might seem like an odd coupling, given that they are essentially competitors, but it does actually make sense. Lemonade is the young tech-driven upstart looking for help scaling in a lucrative new market, while Aviva is the $11 billion incumbent with roots running back more than 300 years, seeking to tap a younger demographic. And the first fruits of this partnership will see Aviva serve as Lemonade’s partner. “We share a common outlook for how digital, AI and data can transform customer experiences, and the role insurers can play in building stronger communities,” said Adam Winslow, CEO of Aviva UK and Ireland general insurance, in a statement. “In our 325 year history we have adapted and thrived in a changing world, and our partnership with Lemonade is a marker of our intent to continue just this.” |
Walmart counters Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale with its own fall deals event | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | Walmart is holding a “ ” sale event from October 10 to 13 to counter Amazon’s . Last week, Amazon announced that it’s holding a Prime Day-like sales event on October 11 and 12, marking the first time that the online retail giant will host two sales events exclusively for Prime members in the same year. Walmart is now looking to counter Amazon’s sale with its own savings event. The company’s sales event will include discounts on top gifts and electronics, home, toys, fashion and more. Discounted items will include TVs, Apple Watches, air fryers, robot vacuums, heaters and more. Amazon has also said it will offer deals across all top categories, including electronics, fashion, home, kitchen, pets, toys and Amazon devices. Walmart’s sales event will start on October 10 at 5 a.m. EDT and end on the 13th. Considering Walmart’s sales event starts a day before Amazon’s, the company is looking to get to customers first before Amazon’s event starts. And since it ends a day after the Prime Early Access Sale, people who missed out on Amazon’s event will still be able to shop Walmart’s deals. The event won’t mark the first time that Walmart has launched a rival sales event to compete with Amazon. When Amazon hosted its annual Prime Day sale in July, Walmart responded by holding . It’s no surprise that Walmart is looking to compete with Amazon for its second event this year as well. |
Tesla delivered a record 343,830 vehicles in Q3, but still missed Wall Street’s forecasts | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 10 | 2 | Tesla reported Sunday it delivered 343,830 vehicles in the third quarter, a new record and a turnaround when a shutdown at its China factory and challenges around opening factories in Berlin and Austin affected how many vehicles it was able to get into customers’ driveways. Despite the rebound and record number, the third-quarter delivery figure still didn’t meet Wall Street forecasts, which ranged between 358,000 and 371,000 vehicles, depending on the polled group. There was also a larger-than-usual gap between production and delivery numbers. The company produced 365,923 vehicles in the third quarter. “As our production volumes continue to grow, it is becoming increasingly challenging to secure vehicle transportation capacity and at a reasonable cost during these peak logistics weeks,” Tesla said in a statement. “In Q3, we began transitioning to a more even regional mix of vehicle builds each week, which led to an increase in cars in transit at the end of the quarter. These cars have been ordered and will be delivered to customers upon arrival at their destination.” In other words, Tesla is going to try to evolve beyond its legendary end-of-the-quarter pushes. CEO Elon Musk tweeted Sunday that it is trying for a steadier approach. “Customer experience suffers when there is an end of quarter rush. Steady as she goes is the right move,” he tweeted. Customer experience suffers when there is an end of quarter rush. Steady as she goes is the right move. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) |
24 hours left to apply to volunteer at TechCrunch Disrupt and attend for free | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 10 | 2 | It takes a veritable army to make — which takes place October 18–20 in San Francisco — the well-oiled experience that savvy startuppers have come to know and love. And we couldn’t do it nearly as well without our incredible volunteers. If you’re looking for a no-budget way to experience Disrupt up close and personal, for work exchange. Not only will you get a behind-the-scenes look at how to produce events, but you’ll also earn a free pass to experience the event. You’ll work hard, play hard and get free access to all three days of Disrupt. Whether you dream of becoming a startup founder, marketer or event coordinator, this is a great way to see what it takes to produce a world-renowned tech startup conference. Plus, your free pass gives you access to the full Disrupt experience — the main stage, the TechCrunch+ stage, the expo floor — where you’ll find the — and the competition. Volunteers handle a variety of tasks to help make this startup conference an epic experience for everyone. At any given time, you might help with registration, wrangle speakers, direct attendees, stuff goodie bags, place signage, scan tickets or help with pre-marketing activities. We need volunteers on October 17–20. If you can meet the following criteria, we want to hear from you: Read for more information. Lend us a helping hand, and we’ll hand you a free pass. Save money, gain valuable experience and still have plenty of time to take in all the startup goodness that TechCrunch Disrupt has to offer. by October 3 to get your free pass, and we’ll see you in October! |
The biological theory that explains why investors are bullish on fusion | Tim De Chant | 2,022 | 10 | 2 | answer to when fusion power would arrive was like the punchline to an oft-repeated joke — it was always 10 or 20 years away. Now, it might actually be on the cusp of commercialization. No, really. If that refrain sounds all too familiar, it’s because, well, something like that was written 10 years ago. Fusion research has been simmering for decades. But now, it’s reaching a boiling point, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that this time will be different. For a field that has existed for more than 60 years, a lot has happened in fusion research in the last half-decade. Researchers have set new records for how long they can contain the superheated plasma that fusion requires. Magnets to contain those plasmas have grown stronger and more efficient. As a result, the power produced by each fusion experiment has ramped up steadily, creeping closer to the point where the reactors produce more power than they consume, known as the break-even point. It’s as though fusion research were a race, but the different groups competing weren’t sure where they were on the course. Then, suddenly, they all spotted the finish line: reactors creating as much power as they gobble up. Buoyed by those results, investors are betting large amounts of money that fusion will soon banish the ghosts of its past: Fusion startups raised $2.7 billion in the last year alone, according to a TechCrunch analysis of PitchBook data. Such a sudden burst of progress across a number of different approaches might seem implausible at first glance. At the very least, it cuts against the popular narrative of the lone genius making a key discovery that cracks the problem once and for all. But it suggests that fusion power’s time has arrived. “Are we at an inflection point in fusion?” said Eric Toone, technical lead of the investment committee at . “We absolutely believe so.” Breakthrough is one of a handful of investors that have placed sizable bets on fusion power becoming a reality. Started by Bill Gates, Breakthrough joined a $1.8 billion Series B for last year, its third investment in the startup. (Gates personally joined that round, too.) Chevron and Google in July led a $250 million Series G for , which has been around since 1998. , led by Sam Altman. earlier this year. That’s a lot of money riding on a yet-unproven technology. Fusion power isn’t preordained, of course — humanity isn’t fated to control the power of the sun. But the recent momentum created by three technological advances suggests we’re closer than ever. And that frenzy can be explained by a concept drawn from a very different field of study: evolutionary biology. |
Despite the venture slowdown, fintech startups are still hiring | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 10 | 2 | On September 28, LinkedIn released its list, which is its self-described annual ranking of 50 emerging U.S. companies “gaining attention and recruiting top talent.” The professional networking site takes into consideration a variety of criteria based on its own data when coming up with the list: employment growth, engagement with the company and its employees, job interest and ability to attract talent from companies. Now, we often take these sorts of lists with a grain of salt. In this case, I was admittedly (and naturally) less interested in their overall rankings and more intrigued by which fintechs made the list — and why. Here’s what I found out: Seven fintech companies ranked in the top 50: Brex (No. 4), Ramp (No. 5), Gravy (No. 14), Esusu (No. 29), GPARENCY (No. 35), Deel (No. 43) and Masterworks (No. 47). Drilling down, I learned that among the seven fintech startups that made the list, there are 125+ open roles. An astounding 87% of those open roles are for remote positions. “A majority of fintech startups on this year’s list deal in the realms of building and managing credit for businesses and consumers — credit management is only becoming more important as interest rates rise and the economy slows, positioning these companies to play an even more relevant role in the lives of their users and customers,” LinkedIn business and finance editor at large told TechCrunch over email. LinkedIn went on to offer further insights on each of the companies and some examples of the roles they are looking to fill. The summaries preceding the open roles were drafted by LinkedIn using survey responses from the honoree companies. Brex is 100% remote. The company is looking for customer-focused skills and asks candidates to tell them about “a time you learned something from a team member that changed your mind or widened your perspective.” Among the positions it is hiring for are and . The No. 1 skill Ramp is looking to hire for now is software engineering, as the company’s main hiring priorities are for engineers and product managers, including entry-level and remote roles (the company is hybrid). Ramp doesn’t require college degrees for all hires, and offers lots of “learning opportunities, autonomy with a high level of ownership, and rapid advancement.” Among the roles it is hiring for are and . Esusu is looking to hire those with engineering skills, and the company says critical thinking is the hardest skill to hire for. They’re “doubling down on folks we call justice capitalists — people who have a head for business and a heart for the world. These people fundamentally believe that doing good and doing well are by no means mutually exclusive.” Esusu advises candidates to “outreach with intent…It always grabs the attention of the recruiter when you reach out directly and have clearly researched the company and the role.” Among the positions it’s hiring for are and . GPARENCY is looking to hire for sales, including entry-level roles, and says it is open to no experience — they’ll train new hires in the skills they need, and in company culture. For example, it’s looking for a . Deel is looking to hire those with sales skills and says that candidates should be prepared to answer the interview question specifically to address this remote-first company: “What would you need to be successful working in a highly diverse, global work environment with colleagues sitting in nearly 80 countries and being fully remote?” From this question, the company looks to learn “how will the candidate handle the challenges of collaborating and communicating within a hyper-growth startup with 1300 team members.” Deel also says employee referrals are the best way a candidate can catch their attention. Among the positions it’s hiring for are and . Masterworks says it is looking to hire product managers and engineers with startup experience, and asks candidates, “Where do you hope to be in 5 years?” The company says, “Though there is no right answer, we hope to see how driven the individual is, and how their personality comes through when considering their futures. We also like to hire individuals who we, as a company, can grow with.” The company is hybrid. Among the positions it’s hiring for are and . Getty Images / hanibaram Three letters we haven’t heard in a long time came up last week: . is said to in the second quarter of next year at a $12 billion valuation. Last October, TripActions raised $275 million in a Series F “growth” funding round at a $7.25 billion valuation. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, TripActions was primarily known for merging many aspects of corporate trip booking — flights, hotels and rental cars — with expense tracking. But the Palo Alto–based company was among the startups that was hit very hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, the global crisis resulted in its revenue dropping to $0, according to CEO and co-founder Ariel Cohen. But it has since leaned into its Liquid spend management offering, which puts it in direct competition with the likes of Brex and Ramp. Of course, the news had TC+ editor Alex Wilhelm and my co-host super pumped. You can read his take . When layoffs occur, we often get the employer’s side of the story — but not always that of the employees. For this , Christine Hall and I talked extensively with several former employees. Warning: Many have said it was painful to read the detailed experiences of three former and one current employee. It took us weeks to write, as we wanted to be careful to protect our sources but yet still tell their stories. From Ivan Mehta: “ , the company behind Square and Cash App, for merchants. Existing Square users or new businesses wanting to use Square can now use their iPhones to receive payments while using the fintech company’s financial management software.” From Manish Singh: has , entering a crowded category that sees more than 50 companies fiercely compete for consumers’ attention in the world’s second largest internet market. The South Korean giant said it has partnered with the Mumbai-headquartered Axis Bank and global payments processor Visa to launch the cards, which it is calling the Samsung Axis Bank Signature Credit Card. Consumers buying Samsung’s products and services through either of the cards will get 10% cash back “round the year,” the company executives said at an event in New Delhi. From Romain Dillet: Meet , that wants to make it easier to invest in cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency-related financial products. The two founders, Ayelen Denovitzer and Shailendra Sason, met while they were working for Revolut, in the crypto team more specifically. Earlier this year, Solvo raised a $3.5 million seed round from Index Ventures with CoinFund and FJ Labs also participating. Since then, the company has put together a small team of 10 people and started working on its iOS app. From Anita Ramaswamy: Investment app (Public), a Robinhood competitor that pivoted away from the contentious payment-for-order-flow (PFOF) revenue model, is expanding its offerings in a big way. The three-year-old company purchased Otis earlier this year to . Today, the company announced that it has integrated Otis’s offerings onto its own app, meaning its 3 million users can construct portfolios composed of both public stocks and alternative assets such as high-end trading cards and other collectibles.” From : “ , a property tech startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global Management, laid off about 12% of its staff Tuesday. The cuts affected about 40 people and are a reflection of how younger real estate firms are responding to rising mortgage rates that have battered the home-buying market…Divvy Homes buys homes in the U.S. and rents them to people who don’t have the credit history or savings to buy, but hope to eventually purchase the homes. The firm, valued last year at about $2 billion, has raised over $500 million in equity.” I covered the company’s February 2021 $110 million Series C raise . From : “ , a B2B payments fintech, aims to be a Venmo-like payment tool for businesses. Its 22-year-old founder was inspired after paying vendors for his apparel brand with paper checks. The company’s new product, Hopscotch Flow, is the first step towards monetizing the platform.” Via email, founder Reed Switzer told me: “Too often, B2B invoicing/bill-pay solutions are self-serving, with fragmented features, and offer few tools to help elevate hard-working modern freelancer/small business owners. We’re meeting a need. Even as small businesses struggled to survive in 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that business applications were up a record-breaking 43.3% over the same period in 2019 — small businesses are thriving and need support. We’re trying to break barriers — I’m a 22-year-old black founder in B2B payments (likely the youngest in the space) and my lead investors are also PoC (Peter Boyce II + Simeon Iheagwam).” to launch the “first-ever” DoorDash credit card, with Mastercard as the exclusive payments network for the new card. The companies said that the DoorDash Rewards Mastercard “will allow cardmembers to unlock benefits and earn rewards on purchases both on and off the DoorDash platform.” Instacart recently teamed up with Chase as well, as noted by my colleague Kyle Wiggers, who pointed out that it seems “Chase is leaning heavily into co-branding these days.” last week announced Prime Treasury, “a tailored treasury management service integrated with the Rho platform.” Via email, a company spokesperson told me: “The Fed is expected to hike interest rates this week, putting more pressure on CFOs and other business leaders to protect their cash reserves from the effects of inflation…Unless you are a Fortune 500 company, you likely don’t have access to a sophisticated treasury management team that can develop and execute a unique investment policy to combat inflation.” The move, according to the company, “bolsters Rho’s support for growth-stage companies and the middle market…As interest rates continue to rise and alternative, risky assets like crypto continue to fall, the case for high-grade assets, including US Treasuries, strengthens.” Read more on the company’s blog post . Last week, — a fully independent RIA — to provide startup founders and employees with financial planning and investment management. A company spokesperson told me via email: “Wealth Management services at traditional financial institutions usually require $1M + of liquid assets which is not a reality for most startup employees even though they have huge financial decisions to make starting with their equity. Secfi believes that the big firms have this backward as they only advise clients after a major exit event, but when it comes to equity, the reality is that the impact that can be made pre-exit is magnitudes greater than what can be done for someone after an exit. Secfi wants to help startup employees today in the pre-wealth phase so they are better set up for life events and hopefully a life-changing exit down the road.” From : “ , a business payments platform, has added optical character recognition to automatically scan invoices to create payables and process hundreds of invoices at once. Routable says the new capability can save up to three minutes per invoice. For businesses processing 10,000 invoices per month, this can add up to 167 hours per week, saving an equivalent of $168,000 per year.” I covered the company’s led by the Altman Brothers in April of 2021. Virtual payment card company has launched , which CEO Bo Jiang describes in a blog post as “a new suite of products designed for companies that need a faster, more flexible way to build out card disbursement programs.” A spokesperson told me: “Creating a card disbursement program traditionally takes months of development because of integrating with multiple vendors, mapping card transaction lifecycle to a ledger, and creating custom logic. With Lithic Send you can now do this in weeks or even days.” The company, which used to go by the name Privacy.com, raised $43 million in May of 2021, which I covered . Getty Images / REB Images Winner for headline of the week! or as American Banker describes it: The company told me via e-mail: “We’re a few 2nd-time founders who got fed up with how poor the health insurance and pensions were for employees, so we decided to rebuild the whole experience. We’ve integrated into some of Europe’s biggest insurers and pension providers to offer a delightfully quick and straightforward end-to-end experience for employers and employees. The platform removes barriers to access on a global scale, and our goal is to rebuild the rails so platforms can leverage our API.” Just a note to say that it’s much more fun to write about startups that are hiring than it is to write about those that are laying off. Here’s to more hiring, and fewer layoffs, in Q4! Thanks again for your support in reading, and subscribing to, this newsletter. See you next week! xoxoxo Mary Ann |
Form Bio says now is the time to launch — despite cooling software sales | Rebecca Szkutak | 2,022 | 10 | 2 | to cut costs and reel in spending amid uncertain macroeconomic conditions, Form Bio thinks it is actually the perfect time to launch its platform. The software company was developed at Colossal Biosciences — known for its goal to bring extinct critters like the — and is now striking out on its own. The software Form Bio developed is meant to bring a suite of workflow solutions to the computational biology space, which uses data and modeling to understand biological systems and includes sectors like gene therapy and biotech. The platform will use machine learning to help researchers and companies go from idea to scientific breakthrough faster by simplifying the data analytics processes in between and allowing users to choose from existing workflow templates that can be edited to fit a company’s specific needs. Form Bio it was spinning out of Colossal Biosciences on September 27 with $30 million in funding led by JAZZ Venture Partners and Thomas Tull, both Colossal Biosciences investors. Kent Wakeford, the co-CEO of Form Bio, said that the idea for Form Bio started on day one of Colossal’s journey when they tried to get started and realized there wasn’t a one-stop software they could use. |
Pillar of the community: How Talkbase plans to power user-led growth for any company | Paul Sawers | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | A new startup is setting out to help companies build and harness communities around their products, enabling them to side-step multiple disparate tools and manage everything in a single platform. Founded out of the Czech Republic in 2021, launched out of stealth , backed by $2 million in pre-seed funding from a mixture of Czech and U.S. funds, including J&T Ventures, Credo Ventures, Mxv Capital and Plug & Play Tech Center. The Prague-based company represents one of the startup exhibitors at TC Disrupt this week, and TechCrunch caught up with the co-founders to get the lowdown on what Talkbase is all about, and the problem that it’s looking to solve. Much has been written about the various strategies companies pursue for growth, from traditional approaches such as marketing-led and sales-led, through to what is arguably one of the biggest buzzwords of today — (PLG), where the product itself does the selling and onboarding. However, community-led growth is also an increasingly popular approach to driving new and repeat business organically — this is where a product’s users serve as advocates and a support network for other would-be customers. Community-led growth is actually closely aligned with product-led growth, insofar as a user has to first be made aware that a product exists, and then convinced that it’s worth checking out and remaining an active user. The “community” that performs this task can be anything from social media influencers and review sites, to dedicated forums such as Stack Overflow, Reddit, Slack or Facebook Groups. If companies can harness these types of channels through active engagement, and get millions of people banging the drum about their product, they can sit back (more or less) and focus on building rather than selling. As TechCrunch wrote last year, in many ways, the . “I think in some ways, they [community-led growth and product-led growth] go hand-in-hand, because in order to be product-led, and in order to build an amazing product, you really need to work close with your users,” co-founder and CEO said. “And if you want to work with them well, you build a community around your product.” Talkbase co-founders Klara Losert and Roman Nguyen. There are many examples of startups that have risen to billion-dollar behemoths off the back of community-led growth, from commercial open source companies (which actually ) to popular creator-focused companies such as (currently in the process of being ) and unicorn , which happens to be one of Talkbase’s early customers. “Community-led growth is one of the most popular growth channels in tech, but there is no platform to support it,” Losert said. “Community managers are responsible for growth, hiring, or retention programs — yet they spend most of their time in Google Sheets, Airtable, forms and other platforms to launch one single program.” A “program” could mean a one-off event, a series of content (e.g. video demos) or an ambassador program that coaches brand advocates on how best to spread the word. Community managers might use any number of platforms to manage their community, such as Slack, Discord or HubSpot, and this essentially is where Talkbase enters the fray — it bridges various community management tools, bringing everything under one roof. For example, Talkbase packs task-management and collaboration tools similar to Trello or Asana, allowing managers to assign tasks, and teams to work together on programs to meet deadlines. Talkbase: Task management. Elsewhere, Talkbase includes features for creating, managing and scheduling events, such as supporting attendee registrations and managing moderators or speakers. On top of that, Talkbase has purpose-built advocacy management tools for customizing and tracking their goals, and collating feedback for potential new projects. This can also be used to identify existing members of the community (e.g. on Twitter or LinkedIn) who are already vocal supporters of a particular product, making it easier for companies to reach out and engage with directly. Talkbase Ambassador program. It’s worth noting that there are a number of other platforms out there that have raised significant VC money to power community-led growth at companies of all sizes. recently raised a , while Common Room . , meanwhile, raised a slightly more modest . It’s difficult to ignore the parallels between Talkbase and these other companies, in terms of how they pull together the different strands that constitute a “community.” But Talkbase says that it’s moving beyond the incumbents by pulling together all the various elements that constitute a community manager’s toolset. While it’s focused mostly on managing events and company ambassadors for now, it’s adding more features to the mix, enabled in part by its recent seed round of funding. Talkbase is tooling up to replace survey tools such as Typeform; CRMs or spreadsheet tools such as Google Sheets or Airtable; event publishing tools such as Eventbrite; and even outbound communication tools such as Mailchimp — Losert said that they are currently in the process of developing their own newsletter tool. In terms of pricing, the company officially unveiled its , starting from “free” for a basic tier with restrictions, through $68 per month for the basic plan and a soon-to-launch Pro plan that opens everything up for $680 per month. |
Uber pilots electric cab offering in India | Jagmeet Singh | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | Uber has started offering electric vehicles to customers in certain parts of the Delhi-NCR region and says it will be expanding its efforts over the coming months. The electric cabs are currently only available for pre-scheduled trips. “As the leading mobility app in India, we are committed to supporting the Indian government’s emission goals. Expect to see more electric vehicles — be they two, three or four-wheeled — across Indian cities in the coming months,” the spokeswoman said in a statement emailed to TechCrunch in response to a query. The company did not share how many EV cabs were operational on its platform in India, but insisted that it is working with multiple fleet partners, OEMs and charging infra providers “to gradually build the EV business in a sustainable manner.” Uber’s move comes as India pushes ride-hailing firms to electrify a significant portion of their fleets over the next few years. Reuters reported in 2019 that the Indian government had ordered Uber and its arch-rival Ola to convert 5% of their fleet by 2022 and . The push came amid New Delhi’s pledge to reduce dependency on oil imports and cut air pollution to meet its commitment to 2015 Paris climate change treaty. The electric cabs are available through the Reserve feature on the app, allowing customers to choose a pick-up time for the ride up to 30 days in advance. Users can cancel their scheduled trips 60 minutes before their trip for no charge, according to description on the app. TechCrunch Both the federal government and various state governments in India have started to offer incentives to customers and vendors in recent years to increase the adoption of EVs. The state government in Delhi, for instance, says it has across the city. It also introduced the Delhi EV policy in August 2020, as part of which it gives subsidies for installing charging stations. The city is aiming to get 18,000 EV charging points in the next three years. Ola — which counts SoftBank, Temasek Holdings, Hyundai Motor and Kia among its investors — also has a to build EVs. The company initially introduced its EV scooters in the market and says it has plans to expand that business to include an electric car in 2024. Ola has also tried to enter the market of EV cabs in India. In 2018, it called “Mission: Electric” to bring electric cabs, electric auto rickshaws, electric buses, rooftop solar installations, charging stations and battery swapping experiments in the country. Other than Uber and Ola, Gurugram-based BluSmart Electric Mobility is also in the race for EV cabs in the South Asian market. The company, which from BP Ventures earlier this year and is , has an all-electric fleet as a significant difference over the existing two giants. It also claims to have completed more than 2.8 million all-electric trips and has over a million app downloads since its launch in 2019. BluSmart’s reach is, however, currently limited to Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru. Uber has been offering EVs in the U.S. and Europe for some time. The San Francisco, California-headquartered company runs an Uber Green program to offer EVs on its fleet and aims to . It has also set aside $800 million to encourage drivers on its platform to start using EVs by 2025. |
Uils wants to lend LatAm’s rideshare drivers cash based on their driving record | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | When launched in 2021, it was a car rental service for rideshare drivers. But after the founders realized that many rideshare drivers don’t have access to credit, particularly in Latin America, the Buenos Aires-based company pivoted to fintech, offering financial services to drivers through a behavioral scoring engine based entirely on a person’s driving history. Rideshare vehicle lending is a crowded market. Both Uber and Lyft host marketplaces where approved vehicle rental companies can show their wares; Uber has a short-term credit program offering up to $500 to drivers. One of the largest ridesharing companies in China, Didi, started offering loans to drivers in 2019. Meanwhile, l But founder and CEO Tomás Costanzo argues Uils (pronounced “wheels”), which is one of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, stands apart in its ability to give a “360-degree” view of drivers in the mobility gig economy. “Being integrated with all the mobility applications available in Latin America, we have a total vision of the driver’s work activities, being able to determine a credit offer that is more adjusted to reality,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. To use Uils, drivers download an app, fill out an application, and connect the app to the ridesharing platforms for which they drive via an API (e.g. Uber). Uils analyzes their history using a machine learning model to determine whether they qualify for a “micro” or consumer loan, considering various factors. The interest rates range from 0% for the micro loans (for a weekly subscription of $1 to $2) to 145% for the consumer loans. That’s quite a wide range — and sounds sky-high — but Costanzo says it’s reflective of the equally high inflation rate in Argentina, the country where Uils first launched. “The app has an embedded banking account where drivers collect their earnings from mobility apps,” Costanzo explained. “In that same account, they receive loan funds and pay their installments every week. We have a collection process that runs every 15 seconds so as soon as the mobility app sends the money, we will collect the pending installments before the driver notices … The rent-to-own loans are a leasing, so technically we can get the car back as soon as the driver goes into delinquency, therefore there is a tendency to 0% default.” It’s a relatively new idea in the lending domain, although services that track driver behavior to offer discounts and benefits have been around for some time. For example, collects data about driving habits and awards drivers for making safe decisions. calculates car insurance premiums based on driving patterns, and Avinew rewards customers for using autonomous safety features. But there are obvious surveillance — and bias — implications. It’s unlikely every driver would be comfortable with the idea of sharing driving histories with Uils, particularly given that the company uses that data to create a risk profile of them. And where algorithms are involved, there’s always the possibility that flaws in the model could lead some drivers to be treated unfairly or poorly. Consider traffic in a driver’s area that forces them to make frequent, sudden stops that under normal circumstances might be considered reckless. There’s another risk to consider: the challenge of paying back loans in a downtrending economy, especially as interest rates climb and inflation impacts the price of fuel. An April from The Rideshare Guy, a ridesharing blog and forum, found that nearly half of rideshare workers quit or starting driving less that month because of spikes in gas prices. Uils For its part, Uils says that it requires customers to reauthorize the connections between the app and ridesharing platforms every month, so that tracking doesn’t continue indefinitely. (The company require customers verify their identity to receive loans, however.) “The scoring engine has more than 200 data points for each driver. We have variables like their work schedule, how many trips per day, how many apps do they use, how many cars they have used, among others,” Costanzo said. “After processing the driving history, we will get a score from one to 1,000. Based on our current lending policies, that score will let us know what is the maximum that a driver can receive as a loan.” After that, Uils has the second layer that’s based on earnings. Depending on how much money the driver makes, they’re able to allocate up to 30% to loan repayment. But opaqueness aside, Uils’ terms and approach might be less onerous than, for example, those around rentals from Lyft or Uber — which some drivers say make achieving a profit nearly impossible. A 2019 investigative found that Lyft paid drivers participating in its Express Drive rental program less per mile than drivers who used cars leased through dealerships. The program imposed restrictions on drivers as well, prohibiting them from making money using their vehicles to work for other services. Costanzo stresses, again, that these are drivers without access to traditional credit — making their financial situations particularly precarious. “The biggest competitive advantage is that we apply a matching fund strategy around the installments amount,” Costanzo said. “Drivers will pay the same amount that he pays to rent the car in the informal market, offering a frictionless solution. On top of that, we are the only fintech in Latin America that offers major consumer loans and rent-to-own loans without consulting credit bureaus or asking for a credit card or any other guarantees.” Uils Uils is currently raising its second round funding round — totaling $1 million — through a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE), which grants the investors the right to purchase equity in the company at a future date. It values the startup at $7.5 million post-money; founder and CEO Tomás Costanzo says that the new capital will be put toward general “growth and development,” including expanding Uils’ headcount. “We raised $275,000 in our pre-seed round and used those funds to build and launch our product — a mobile wallet and scoring engine — for 12 months,” he said. “Now, we are expecting this round to help us achieve 24-month additional runway to evolve our scoring engine, develop new features and expand in Latin America — specifically Mexico, Chile and Colombia.” In the coming months, Uils plans to launch insurance coverage and a buy now, pay later (BNPL) solution — angling to nab a larger slice of the ridesharing fintech market. Regulatory scrutiny could be coming if the BNPL industry’s trajectory in the U.S. is any . But for now, Uils is stands to benefit from the relative dearth of direct competition. “Delivering a solid value proposal and lowering risk through alternative data models will become a requirement to be different in a very competitive market,” Costanzo said. “High-growth models have been replaced with retention ones … The current circumstances will promote efficiency over growth.” |
GM takes another full-size pickup electric with the 400-mile range GMC Sierra EV | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | General Motors unveiled Thursday an all-electric GMC Sierra Denali pickup truck, the latest model in the automaker’s march toward a global annual sales target of 1 million electric vehicles by 2025. The GMC Sierra Denali EV isn’t the first electric truck or SUV on GM’s new Ultium platform. It’s actually the brand’s , following the pickup and SUV versions of the GMC Hummer. But considering the internal combustion version of the Sierra is GMC’s best-selling model, it could be a standout for the brand. While the GMC Sierra EV shares the name and some of the looks of its ICE counterpart, this is not just a retrofit. “It’s not like we’re really taking the truck and putting a battery in it,” nce again, we’re taking the Ultium technology, the integrated cab and box construction much like the Hummer pickup and carrying that on further with additional purposeful technology in the vehicle.” The full-size pickup is slated to compete with the Ford F-150 Lightning. GMC will kick off the model with a high-end Denali Edition 1 version, which will arrive in early 2024 starting at $107,000. The Sierra Denali will come in two trims — AT4 and Elevation trims — for the 2025 model year. GMC said it will announce other versions of the pickup closer to production starting around $50,000. The F-150 Lightning, which launched in April, starts at $47,000 and tops out at nearly $100,000 for the . The Sierra Denali Edition 1 EV delivers an estimated 754 horsepower and 785 pound-feet of torque when it’s in Max Power mode. It can travel from 0 to 60 miles per hour in a relatively speedy 4.5 seconds and will have an estimated range of 400 miles. It will also be able tow up to 9,500 pounds; it’s unclear what the range will be when towing at capacity. The Sierra EV will also come with an onboard power station feature with up to 10.2 kW of power that turns the truck into a mobile power source for a variety of situations. The company said that the pickup can power a home’s “essential necessities” for 21 days when configured with a bi-directional charger and offerings from GM Energy’s . All trims of the Sierra EV will have an 800-volt architecture capable of fast charging up to 350 kilowatts. That means about 100 miles of range can be added to the battery in about 10 minutes when using certain fast chargers. Just like its Hummer EV cousin, the Sierra EV will have four-wheel steering and “crab walk” capability, Inside the Denali Edition 1 is a 16.8-inch touchscreen. The infotainment system will be powered by Google’s Android Automotive operating system, which comes with all the embedded Google services like Assistant. The Denali Edition will also come standard with GM’s hands-fee advanced driver assistance system called Super Cruise. [gallery ids="2429578,2429569,2429570,2429572,2429573,2429574,2429575,2429576,2429577"] |
Meta’s $10B metaverse investment is ‘not enough’ according to Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | Yat Siu, the co-founder and executive chairman of , has a lot of thoughts about the metaverse. That’s because his company owns and has investments in many different web3 companies, such as OpenSea, Dapper Labs and Axie Infinity. At , he shared his thoughts about Meta’s take on the metaverse. They said they’re going to spend $10 billion a year to make the metaverse work. Well, here’s the thing — we think $10 billion is not enough for Facebook to succeed. Billions of dollars are transacted in the open metaverse space — actually much more when you consider fungible tokens. Most of the value goes to the end user, so why would I transact on something like Meta — regardless of its visuals — when I have to give half of it to the platform? Whereas if I use Sandbox, I get 95% of it. It just doesn’t make any sense for me to do that, economically speaking. And because billions of dollars of value are already generated in an open way, why would I surrender that value? So Facebook would have to spend a lot more to incentivize people to go into its platform. But that doesn’t mean that Zuckerberg is the wrong person to head up this project. “I would say that certainly Zuckerberg did get it right in terms of construction. Remember, he tried to put out Libra, right?… So he understands blockchain,” Yat Siu said. But what is the metaverse exactly? A lot of people are still arguing about that. Some people think it’s online universes, while others think it involves virtual reality. According to Yat Siu, the key thing that makes a metaverse a true metaverse is property rights. “Just how George Washington said that you can’t have basically, freedom without property rights, we think the same is true with digital. You can’t have digital freedom without digital property rights. So our perspective on the open metaverse is that it has to start with a foundation of ownership. And that’s where The Sandbox stands out,” he said. Animoca Brands is much bigger than The Sandbox. There are 380 companies in the group and portfolio. Thirty of them are subsidiaries. Animoca Brands is technically an Australian company with a headquarters in Hong Kong and nearly a thousand employees. It’s quite easy to sum up Animoca Brands’ strategy. The company is investing in the web3 ecosystem because there are some strong network effects. It is betting on a web3 rising tide that could lift all boats. “The economy activity around the ownership of cars is much bigger than the sales of cars,” Yat Siu said. He mentioned Uber, Lyft and car washes as examples of businesses that work without selling cars. “For instance, when we made our first check in OpenSea, which had a very small valuation back in 2018–2019, it wasn’t because we hoped that OpenSea would be a decacorn,” he said. “We did it because OpenSea had lots of NFT work and relatively good NFT volume. We would help push that and we would have our own NFT sales and every company we invest in could sell on OpenSea.” In other words, if web3 becomes a huge thing, it’s clear that Animoca Brands is well positioned to become a key player in the space. |
null | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 10 | 5 | null |
And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2022 is…Minerva Lithium | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | — the first in-person Disrupt in three years — is in the books. And as always, we end it by crowning the winner of Startup Battlefield. As seasoned TechCrunch readers will know, startups participating in the Startup Battlefield were handpicked to compete in the event. During the first two days of Disrupt, the companies pitched before judges — multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders — for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Battlefield Cup. After much deliberation, the TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to : , , , and . They pitched in front of the final panel of judges today, which included (Pear VC), Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone, (Cowboy Ventures), TechCrunch editor in chief Matthew Panzarino, (BoxGroup) and (Accel). One startup emerged victorious. Without further ado! has produced Nano Mosaic, a coordinated polymer framework that looks a bit like black gravel and extracts critical materials from brine in just three days. Minerva says that it can extract one metric ton of lithium using just 30,000 gallons of water, and it can do it in three days. Evaporative brine processing needs to evaporate 500,000 gallons of water to get to the same amount of lithium. Just one gram of this absorbent material has a surface area equal to that of a soccer pitch, which should give you an idea of just how little you’d need to extract a large amount of minerals. Plastics are great for so many things, but they stay around for an awfully long time. leaps to the rescue with a set of enzymes that can be added to plastics at the very beginning of their life cycle, before it is even turned into products. The additives the company makes have been proof-of-concept tested and it wants to upend how plastics are made and disposed of. Intropic’s additives make many of the most commonly used plastics biodegradable in normal commercial composting. The enzymes are added to the pellets or powders that are used in the normal course of plastic production. This gives plastics new, biodegradable capabilities without changing the manufacturing processes used to create plastic products. At the end of the life cycle, when it’s time to get rid of the material, the products can be composted into their component parts. |
Sources: BeReal raised $60M in its Series B earlier this year, now has 20M DAUs | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | , the photo-sharing app, has been a huge hit with Gen Z and beyond. Now with other big social apps rushing to clone some of its no-frills ethos, it’s put together a war chest to work on its next chapter. TechCrunch has learned that the startup closed a round of $60 million earlier this year. The funding is coming in the form of a Series B and it values Paris, France–based BeReal at a valuation north of €600 million — which at today’s exchange rates is just under $587 million. (Exchange rates are tricky right now; the dollar is strong against other currencies in the face of global economic turmoil. When first and then reported on some of the details of this round, it noted the pre-money valuation of around $600 million. The size of the round had not previously been reported.) A source tells us that the company now has around 20 million DAUs. As a point of reference, The Information noted that the app had 7.9 million users as of July of this year. The numbers appear to indicate that despite efforts from competing social apps to reproduce the core of the BeReal experience — a two-photo set taken from a user’s front and back phone cameras, to be shared with friends at the same time each day — it ain’t nothing like the real thing, so to speak. The numbers are still only a small fraction of the users the world’s biggest social apps are attracting, but the velocity of BeReal’s growth, and its traction with the key demographic of young adults, have been strong fillips for those other apps to pay attention to how they can bring the same kind of experience into their own platforms. Others that have cloned the app include , , and . (We’re not including the now-defunct FrontBack in the list.) Founded in 2019 by former GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat along with Kévin Perreau, BeReal began to take off in earnest earlier this year, as its Gen Z user base . In April, app intelligence firm Apptopia BeReal had grown its installs by 315% year to date. BeReal itself is simple to use: once a day, it sends users a notification encouraging them to take a dual photo, or a “BeReal” — a combination of a selfie and a front-facing photo, snapped simultaneously. This experience intends to provide its users with a more authentic photo feed compared with the curated aesthetic found on Instagram. And the photos themselves disappear after 24 hours. The app’s appeal attracted a range of investors, culminating in , co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel in June 2021. When the Information reported on the Series B earlier this year, it was said to be valuing the app at $100 per daily active user. As one of our sources described it to us, yes, the world of consumer apps has had a lot of examples of early juggernauts fizzling out (sad waves to , , and the rest). But in relative terms, BeReal’s fast growth and how it seemed to capture attention among a certain group of users made it enough of an interesting bet at this stage. It also came at a time when the app was reaching mainstream awareness — as apparent by the fact that it was in October. The big question now is how BeReal plans to use the funding and what its next moves might be to evolve its product. The app today has no business model, though the FT said it may be considering subscriptions. Data this month also found that, despite some 53 million lifetime installs, only 9% of BeReal users on Android were opening the app daily. This doesn’t correlate to real-world usage, though, because more of BeReal’s core user base — younger Gen Z users in the U.S. — tend to use iPhones. : BeReal declined to comment for this story. |
EV maker Arrival cutting jobs again in pivot away from UK to the US | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | Commercial EV company Arrival is restructuring its business for the second time in six months as it tries to squeeze the most out of its remaining capital. The company said in a posted Thursday that it is shifting its focus to the United States and away from the UK market, where it is headquartered and where the first EV vans were supposed to be delivered. Arrival, which went from stealthy electric vehicle startup to a via a SPAC merger, said it will now put the bulk of its remaining resources toward producing a “family of van products” for the U.S. market. It will also put funds toward related technologies such as core components, composite materials, mobile robotics and what it describes as software-defined factories. The move is going to cause considerable pain across the company, namely job cuts. The company said it plans to further “right-size the organization and cut cash intensive activities” to extend its cash runway, which at the end of the third quarter, was $330 million. The company didn’t provide specific details on how many jobs it plans to cut. The language the company uses in its regulatory filing suggests it will be significant. Arrival said the restructuring is “expected to have a sizable impact on the company’s global workforce, predominantly in the UK.” The company said it will provide more information at its third-quarter earnings call November 8. Arrival also said it will try to raise more capital to fund the commercialization of these vehicle programs in the U.S. and is “exploring all funding and strategic opportunities” needed to bring the vans designed for the country into production at the company’s second microfactory in Charlotte, North Carolina. Arrival isn’t leaving the UK altogether. The company said it will continue to produce a small number of vans at its Bicester microfactory to support trials with customers. The major factors in the company’s decision to shift focus to developing its U.S. business included the tax credit recently announced as part of the Inflation Reduction Act — expected to offer between $7,500 and $40,000 for commercial vehicles, the large addressable market size, and substantially better margins. In June, Arrival said it would slash costs and in an attempt to protect the business from a challenging economic environment while meeting its production targets. At the time, Arrival said the plan would allow the company to meet its targets through late 2023 using the $513 million in cash it has on hand. In August, Arrival from 400 vehicles to 20 and postponed development of its battery-electric buses to focus on vans. Now it appears those cuts were not enough. Arrival had planned to use its existing cash on hand of $513 million plus funds available through a $300 million “at the market platform” (ATM) to deliver the first vehicles to U.K. customers this year, invest in hard tooling and launch the Charlotte microfactory next year. However, the company’s low share price, which today closed at $0.72, coupled with daily trading volumes, means the ATM was an unreliable source of capital. |
Snap stock down 25% as the social network struggles | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | Snap reported its third-quarter earnings Thursday, the first social media company to offer a financial update amid ongoing economic tumult this quarter. The company, which has seen its stock price plunge to a fraction of what it was worth during 2021’s highs, missed analyst expectations on revenue, bringing in $1.13 billion compared to the $1.14 billion anticipated. Snap’s stock dipped from around $11 per share to $8 in late trading following the report. Snap’s revenue is up 6% this quarter, a number that doesn’t compare favorably to previous periods of double-digit growth. The company’s net loss accelerated to $360 million, which includes $155 million in “restructuring charges.” The company’s daily active users were up 57 million to 363 million in Q3, a 19% increase from the same period last year. “This quarter we took action to further focus our business on our three strategic priorities: growing our community and deepening their engagement with our products, reaccelerating and diversifying our revenue growth, and investing in augmented reality,” CEO Evan Spiegel said of the quarter. While other social networks are similarly struggling due to a combination of broader economic factors, ascendant competitors and the still-reverberating changes from Apple’s ad tracking changes, Snap in particular has taken a beating. In August, the that Snap planned to lay off a fifth of its workforce, or around 1,200 employees. The company didn’t offer a forecast for the third-quarter results and similarly declined to make predictions about its upcoming quarter. |
Elon Musk reportedly wants to lay off 75% of Twitter’s staff | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | Musk has previously gestured at plans for layoffs if he were to buy Twitter, but those cuts could go even deeper than previously imagined. According to a , Musk plans to purge 75% of Twitter’s workforce, or around 5,600 employees. If Musk’s vision for a much leaner platform comes to fruition, Twitter would be forced to operate with a sliver of its current staff. Between broader economic factors and ongoing criticisms that Twitter has failed to deliver on its promise (at least as far as investors are concerned), Twitter was always going to trim its workforce. But cutting the staff down by three quarters isn’t what most people had in mind. The Post noted that Twitter already planned to cut around a quarter of its workforce — but a quarter of the workforce is a different situation altogether. A grain of salt is necessary here. While Musk reportedly described his aggressive plan over the past few months, there’s often a gulf between his words and the reality of the situation. Musk might want to lay off 75% of Twitter’s workforce — what dollar-signs-for-eyes investor or CEO wouldn’t want to make more money with fewer pesky salaries to pay! — but it’s also conceivable that Twitter wouldn’t even be able to operate if cut to the bone. Musk clearly lacks a fundamental understanding of some serious issues the company faces, some of which could only be resolved by more investment in key areas. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO was keen to turned whistleblower Peiter Zatko when it suited him, but some of the dire security and safety needs that Zatko brought up certainly wouldn’t be resolved by gutting the whole company. Musk also of the content moderation issues the company grapples with, another area that benefits from having more humans involved — not just a thrifty algorithm at the wheel. Certainly, and sadly, trust and safety would likely face deep cuts if Musk has his way. It’s also totally plausible that the 75% number is just another trick he pulled out of his hat to impress whoever he was talking to, maybe bankers he was courting for the acquisition or the . For the sake of Twitter’s already very stressed current workforce, we definitely hope that winds up being the case. The deal, which is now to back on track after months of Musk sowing chaos, is expected to close by October 28. |
Forget flat — small cuts are the new up | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | flip from greed to fear, there’s a meme that goes around in startup circles that is the new . It’s shorthand for the idea that in more difficult market conditions, a startup defending its prior valuation in a proximate venture round is as good as raising new capital at a higher valuation in better investing conditions. The brutal repricing of tech companies in the last year has led to some notes — — that we had once again found ourselves in territory. Today, however, the game looks a little bit different. News that Stripe is by culling lower-performing staff landed today, along with news that Databricks, one of the other most valuable startups of all time, . Naturally, you might look at the news and think, dang, some of those unicorns did get out of pocket last year! After all, to its own internal valuation earlier this year, so surely we’re seeing signs of excess being drained out of the market? Actually no, not really. |
Watch Draymond Green discuss investing, media and mental health | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | of Disrupt kicked off in style with a conversation featuring four-time NBA All Star Draymond Green. It was a spirited chat, covering the power forward’s push into “The Draymond Green Show” and deals with channels like TNT. Green also spoke at length , managing mental health as a professional athlete and discussed how he and the team are working through the recent highly publicized altercation with fellow Golden State Warrior Jordan Poole. |
As healthcare goes remote, Equipt Health brings medical hardware to the home | Andrew Mendez | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | It’s no secret the pandemic has pushed healthcare to become virtual, in theory making it easier for patients to attend appointments and access the care they need. But Rebecca Weisinger, CEO and co-founder of , has seen plenty of patients falter in the long process of qualifying for devices they need. Equipt is a home medical equipment company; it aims to streamline the process for providers and patients to access medical equipment needed for care. Weisinger told TechCrunch because of patients’ physical limits and lack of resources to make the process easier it has to be “connective, informative, transparent.” Though Weisinger has seen access issues professionally, personally she has also seen her friends and family experience hardships in accessing medical equipment due to the various layers of complications. Equipt aims to make the process easier by being the packager, the logistics, the clinician (via its provider network), providing technical support, and the return of data from connected devices. Although the company launched earlier this year as part of Y Combinator’s Winter cohort, it is certified to deliver DME (durable medical equipment) and HME (home medical equipment) devices across 24 states. The company is looking at expanding its reach in the near future, according to Weisinger. Currently, the company has been able to focus its efforts on sleep apnea products through the creation of , a sub-brand of Equipt. The at-home sleep test offered by Equipt through Helio Sleep. Equipt Health Equipt provides patients a home sleep test that is later interpreted by a sleep physician, and if they qualify, the company will guide the patient on the next steps of getting medical equipment, ranging from CPAPs to alternative devices through Helio Sleep. “We created Helio Sleep to give users a better way to understand and improve their health through sleep tests, best-in-class treatment devices and access to board-certified physicians,” read the Helio Sleep launch . “24M Americans are currently undiagnosed for sleep apnea, leaving them not only tired but also at risk for serious health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.” In addition to proving a more integrated path for patients, Equipt partners with medical device companies looking to go to market. Once a company is ready to launch medically cleared equipment, the company can market the product on its site to help fulfill demand. This feeds into its financial model where the company charges for DME and HME consultations. At the moment Equipt is not accepting insurance payments for care but is transitioning to “providing insurance reimbursement or insurance payments.” Although the company’s first focus is the sleep apnea market, Weisinger explained she hopes to expand services to cater to individuals with more chronic conditions. “We want to help a lot of the new medical device companies and support them as they go to market,” Weisinger said. “But at the same time, we think there’s great opportunities in the infusion pumps based around treating diabetic patients, home dialysis equipment, and other home medical devices that would include breast pumps and other like mobilization devices or hospital home.” |
Handoff is creating a more equitable workforce through job sharing | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | Storyblocks is Handoff’s first pilot partner. (Left to right) job-share partner Jodie Reyes, Handoff founder LaToria Pierce, Storyblocks CEO TJ Leonard and job-share partner Redeit Admassie. Handoff Many qualified workers are failed by the current model of work in the United States, where jobs are either part time or full time. Working 40 set hours a week is difficult for people like caregivers, but part-time jobs don’t have the same benefits or career-advancing potential. , one of the startups in TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield 200, wants to make a concept called job sharing, in which two people split the responsibilities and pay of a full-time position but get the same benefits, more widespread. Founder and CEO LaToria Pierce started working on Handoff while she was taking part in Ideas42 Venture Studio. Pierce was asked to build from lived experience and challenges. She took inspiration from her mother, who was a single parent, and set out to make a solution that was inclusive of single moms. She spent a year talking to mothers in the workforce and employers. “What I discovered is that there was this mismatch and the ‘why’ hit me — how come we aren’t seeing working mothers at certain organizations in certain roles? The 40 hour a week experience is a barrier for many parents and caregivers,” said Pierce. “They’ve got the skills, they’ve got the tenure and they’ve got the tenacity, but time can be an issue.” Part of Handoff’s software for facilitating job shares. Handoff Job sharing is already commonly used in many European countries, and Handoff’s mission is to scale it in the United States, too, by helping employers create a foundation to start offering job-sharing roles. Its minimum viable product is a job-sharing enablement tool that makes sure a job-sharing relationship is manageable and that work is split equally between the two people in it. When Handoff launched its first pilot program, “talent started showing up in droves,” said Pierce. So the startup set up a talent connection portal for them that fast-tracks employers to qualified, pre-vetted talent. Job sharing can help diversity, equity and inclusion by getting more women, women of color and caregivers into the workforce, said Pierce. Handoff’s talent pool has a wide range of professional and educational backgrounds, including people with a high school degree and 10-plus years of experience, people who have MBAs, and people who have worked in the public or public sectors. 98% of the people who come through Handoff’s portal are caregivers and 75% are people of color. Organizations are looking for people to fill business administration, executive and admin assistants, human resources and marketing roles. Pierce says those spaces are Handoff’s sweet spots because employers see high turnover and need to fill multiple positions but are struggling to hire qualified employees. It also recently kicked off a pilot program with group care homes, many of which already use a job-sharing system, to test Handoff’s software for employee coordination. Handoff’s go-to-market plan includes working with employer partners (it is currently used by organizations like stock media service ). It is now raising its pre-seed fund and targeting $500,000 to $1 million. The higher amount would give Handoff an extended runway of 18 months. |
Zapier extends its automation service with first-party database and UI tools | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | For the longest time, , which launched in 2011, was content with helping its users automate simple workflows and build integrations between various business-critical tools. That’s been a great business for the company, but users today expect a bit more, and over the course of the last couple of years, the company decided it was time to expand its product portfolio. The first of these new products was , a tool for moving data between apps, which launched last October. Today, at its ZapConnect conference, it’s taking the next step in this journey with the launch of and Interfaces, a database service and a UI builder for allowing end users to interact with existing Zapier workflows. Today, the company’s users often use services like Google Sheets as their database, Zapier to essentially create the business logic and then maybe Salesforce or Trello as a kind of front-end to these workflows. In an interview ahead of today’s announcement, Zapier co-founder and president Mike Knoop noted that about half of the service’s usage these days consists of these software-type use cases. But that’s also a very brittle system, where any chance in the spreadsheet will cause the whole system to stop working. Zapier “One of the biggest pain points we heard [about from customers] is that while Zapier has really good coverage over the logic side — the code side if you want to think about it like that — they were just telling us about all of these common pain points like having to integrate third-party tools for the UI and for the data storage layer,” Knoop said. Since Google Sheets or even newer tools like Airtable weren’t designed to be systems of record for an automation system, there are limitations to the kinds of automations that tools like Zapier can build on top of them. “Building an automation-first version of Tables has allowed us to get high-velocity change records and say, ‘okay, we’re gonna protect this system and if you make this change we’re automatically gonna sink it to the underlined system or alert you about which apps are dependent on it.’ We basically just went down the list of all the common failures,” Knoop explained. And while Tables sits on one side of the equation here, Zapier Interfaces represents the other side, with a focus on end users. The idea here is to allow users to create customizable and dynamic web pages that work with Zapier and a database, whether that’s Tables or not. Knoop noted that users today often build these systems themselves, but they, too, are brittle and hard to maintain after the initial setup. With this new tool, users can build forms, edit data, share it and launch triggers for their automations — all with a straightforward drag-and-drop interface. Zapier All of these new features are part of Zapier’s new Early Access program, which currently includes Transfer, Tables and Interfaces. Knoop wouldn’t quite say what the company will work on next, but there are obviously plenty of other pain points the company could address directly. This is definitely an interesting move for Zapier. Knoop acknowledged that the company got a bit complacent and recently had to play catch-up to meet its customers needs. That took a bit of a shift in the company culture around innovation, but that work is starting to pay off, it seems. In this context, it’s worth noting that in addition to these two new marquee products, the company also launched eight of its users’ top requested features, including the ability to draft Zapts, versioning, new tools for building more complex Zaps, the ability to schedule transfers in Transfer, custom error notifications for users on some of the higher-priced tiers, subfolders and the addition of a super admin level. |
Lyft co-founder says autonomous vehicles won’t replace drivers for at least a decade | Tim De Chant | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | Human drivers on the Lyft platform aren’t going to be replaced by autonomous vehicles anytime soon, company co-founder and president John Zimmer told the audience today at TechCrunch Disrupt. “I can’t imagine anytime in the next decade-plus where we would need any less drivers,” he said, noting that he envisions autonomous vehicles handling anywhere from 1% to 10% of rides in the future. “What we do in our industry represents maybe 1% of vehicle miles traveled,” he said. “There’s much more room for growth of our overall business.” Over the past decade, more than 112 million Lyft riders have taken over 3 billion rides, and 5 million drivers — “3% of the U.S. workforce,” Zimmer said — had earned tens of billions of dollars. In his talk with transportation editor Kirsten Korosec, Zimmer was hesitant to commit to a timeline on which he thinks autonomous vehicles will enter into broader commercial service. “I always think it’s just a couple years away, but it’s super hard to predict,” he said. “It’s this last percent of a technical problem, and then you have to get the cost down for autonomous vehicles. So it will happen. I strongly believe it’s not a matter of if, but obviously when.” Should it happen, Zimmer thinks that the initial rollout is likely to occur on platforms like Lyft. The best way to commercialize autonomous vehicles, he said, is on a “hybrid network.” Though autonomous vehicles have progressed in their capabilities, they’re still unable to handle every condition they’ll encounter on the roads. Even if they are able to safely navigate 10% of trips, that’s not a sufficient number to bring riders on board en masse. “Imagine being on AT&T or Verizon and making one out of 10 calls. That would not be a good network to be on,” said Zimmer. “Being on the Lyft network, you’ll be able to get 10 out of 10 rides. One might be an autonomous vehicle with one of our partners, nine are going to be from our driver community. And so I think what we do is super important and can flex as that technology is ready.” Lyft’s autonomous vehicle strategy has changed significantly in the last year or so. In April 2021, the company to Toyota’s Woven Planet subsidiary for $550 million, saving the company $100 million annually in operating expenses. In place of that, Zimmer said the company has been prioritizing partnerships over internal development. In August, Lyft and autonomous vehicle technology company Motional in Las Vegas on the Lyft network. “I think it’s too early to pick one winner,” he said. “Today, it’s about having multiple partners. Ten years from now? Too hard to predict.” While Lyft works to add autonomous vehicles to its network, many of the company’s drivers today are potentially augmented by Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems, known as ADAS, including Tesla’s Autopilot and possibly its Full Self Driving (FSD) software. These systems automate certain driving functions, but drivers still need to keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road while they’re engaged. Tesla has come under fire due to issues with its ADAS, which has been linked to several accidents. , claiming it falsely advertises the autonomous capabilities of its software. When Korosec asked Zimmer asked whether Lyft had considered prohibiting the use of Level 2 ADAS like Autopilot or FSD, he said that Lyft “think[s] that the regulatory bodies are our best regulators when it comes to that level of safety.” Of course, in its , Lyft already regulates its drivers in some respects, including saying that drivers cannot “engage in reckless behavior while driving” or “operate a vehicle that is unsafe to drive.” When pressed, Zimmer said that Lyft would “continue to assess” its policy regarding driver use of Level 2 autonomous assistants. “Obviously, driver and rider safety is our top priority. And so to your point, it’s something that will continue to be looked at.” |
Figma CEO Dylan Field on why he sold to Adobe | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | A month after Adobe its plans for acquiring Figma, the popular digital design startup, Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field sat down with our own enterprise reporter Ron Miller at Disrupt 2022 to discuss the deal and his motivations for selling to Adobe, a company that Figma’s own have not always described in the most glowing of terms. “We were having a blast — we are having a blast — but then we started talking with Adobe and Adobe is a foundational, really impressive company and the more I’d spend time with the people there, the more trust we built, the more that I could see: ‘Okay, wow. We’re in this like product development box right now,'” Dylan said, surely making his media trainers happy with his non-answer. He noted that Figma today offers tools for ideation and designing mockups, with plans for launching additional tools for more easily taking those mockups and turning them into code. “I started to form a thesis of ‘creativity is the new productivity’ and we don’t have the resources to just go do that right now at Figma,” Dylan noted, giving the standard answer that 99% of founders tend to give when they sell to a bigger rival. “If we want to go and make it so that we’re able to go into all these more productivity areas, that’s gonna take a lot of time. “To be able to go and do that in the context of Adobe, I think gives us a huge leg up and I’m really excited about that.” Surely, the fact that this deal — assuming it closes — will also create generational wealth for Field was a bit of a motivator, but for some reason, founders always deny this. Asked about any potential pressure from investors, Field denied that this played any role in the sale — especially because Figma continues to double its revenue year over year. “That was never the consideration here,” Field said “It was: what’s the best opportunity to achieve our vision? The vision for the company is make design accessible to everyone. So design — is not just interface design. It’s creativity. It’s productivity. It’s you know making it so that we can all be part of the digital revolution that’s happening. The entire world’s economy is going from physical to digital right now. Are we going to leave a bunch of people behind or going to give everyone the tools. I feel a lot of pressure and I think it’s really important that we give all of these people these tools really fast.” The Figma PR team surely had a smile on its face after this answer. I don’t think that’s necessarily how Adobe feels about its $82.49/month Creative Cloud subscription package that surely not everybody can afford, but Field stressed multiple times that Figma will remain an independent company and that there are no plans for changing the company’s pricing plan. Adobe is paying $20 billion for Figma, though, so let’s see if that changes over time. “What Adobe’s told us is that they want to learn from Figma,” he said. “And I think in general, they’re going ‘okay how do you go to more of a freemium model? How do you make it so that you’re able to really be bottoms up?” Adobe isn’t paying all of that money for education, though. A Coursera marketing course is a lot cheaper than $20 billion, after all. Over time, the company has a responsibility to its shareholders to increase its revenue, so we’ll see how that plays out — always assuming the deal closes. That’s not a given in this current regulatory environment. Field, for what it’s worth, thinks this is a very offensive move by Adobe, whose XD Figma rival never quite caught on with designers. “They’re trying to figure out: how do you make it so that you’re able to adapt the products they already have, but also to sort of bolster this new platform. And yeah, I don’t think that’s risk-averse in any way.” |
One month after entering the spend management space, Rippling goes after global payroll | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | The executive also makes a lofty charge — that other players in the space are “actually payroll aggregators.” “They’re companies that are sitting on top of a series of other local partners in terms of the actual payroll systems that they’re using. And so they’ve got these different systems in different countries, and that creates this sort of like shitty experience for clients,” Conrad charges. “Rippling is the first one that’s actually built a single payroll system that can pay people around the globe. I swear this is the world’s first global payroll system.” |
Battlefield bots | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | bowels of Moscone Center West. As I type this, Kevin Hart just exited the stage and Serena Williams is presiding over a packed house. No exaggeration: I attempted to make my way to grab a seat in the few rows up front allotted to the TechCrunch staff, but I physically couldn’t get through the crowd. A solid one-two punch to kick off this Wednesday morning. I’ve had a little time to walk the halls here, mostly scouring for hardware and robotics firms, as is my wont. It’s always fun to see the sorts of microcosms that develop at events like this, identifying groupings that are indicative of broader current and future trends in the startup world. I’m happy to say for my own edification that robotics firms, in particular, were well represented. Not sure that’s something I would have felt comfortable asserting five or so years back. Coupled with all of the various ongoing market indicators, it truly feels like we’ve comfortably entered a new era for robotics and robotic investing. Yesterday I hosted what amounted to a two-hour marathon pitch-off, which involved 30 startups offering two-minute pitches. It was a bit exhausting, frankly, but I’m looking forward to unpacking some of those offerings in the coming weeks. One definitely warrants mention in this week’s Actuator, because I ended up speaking with the CEO and profiling the firm late last week—Touchlab. Touchlab was the winner of our TC Sessions: Robotics event back in July, so this thing is long overdue. One bit that’s especially interesting to me is how the company’s outward focus has shifted in that short time. The Edinburg-based firm originally pitched us on its robotic skin. The applications are pretty clear there — effectively adding another layer of sensing to supplement existing vision systems and the like. That’s still the core of the startup’s play, but Touchlab has also begun to implement its own technology into a robotic system. It showcased an eldercare robot that is essentially an off-the-shelf TIAGo++ robot, outfitted with its sensor technology. Eldercare makes sense, as a highly pressure-sensitive sensor is required to interact with human patients — the elderly in particular. “We have a layer of software that translates the pressure of the skin to the suit. We’re also using haptic gloves,” co-founder and CEO Zaki Hussein told me. “Currently, our skin gathers a lot more data than we can currently transmit to the user over haptic interfaces. So there’s a little bit of a bottleneck. We can use the full potential of the best haptic interface of the day, but there is a point where the robot is feeling more than the user is able to.” The haptic sensations are translated into a wearable suit donned by a VR-wearing operator. I’m interested in exploring the state of teleoperation a bit more. There’s a weird sort of stigma around this technology in a category where everyone seems to be constantly chasing full autonomy. RIF Robotics (pronounced “riff”), another one of the entries in the Battlefield 200, operates in a similar space. Specifically, it’s building systems designed to streamline the disinfecting of medical equipment in-hospital. Co-founder Kevin DeMarco tells TechCrunch: The major challenges that the sterile processing industry is facing are a lack of experienced surgical technicians, instrument-level tracking, infection traceability and cost traceability. Medical device manufacturers are interested in knowing how their equipment is used and degrades in the field. Instrument-level data will also help them to decide where to send sales reps. Hospitals are interested in instrument-level data because it will help them operate more efficiently by improving instrument-level tracking and instrument inspection. Currently, most hospitals only track at the tray-level, but the industry wants to be able to track at the instrument level. Katakem I’m starting to sense a theme emerging here — one more healthcare robotics firm from my time at the Showcase stage. Kyle’s headline really says it all here: “ is developing a robot to automate drug development.” The firm has developed what it deems a “robot chef,” designed to create chemical reactions. It tells TechCrunch: The production of a chemical product is strictly regulated and standardized. [But] the development phase between discovery and production is still carried out manually and no significant data is extracted. Through data, we can help companies develop new life-saving drugs faster and, of course, this means higher revenues and better margins for them … Data [from OnePot] is reliable, clean and immediately usable. Jasper Montreal-based is taking a unique approach toward a market controlled by the likes of Seamless, DoorDash and Uber Eats. The firm’s play revolves around the deployment of a proprietary chain of automated ghost kitchens designed to dramatically speed up food delivery. The robotics aspect comes in through the kitchen, allowing for minimal or no staff for the food preparation process. “Having good meals at home is expensive or time consuming … Food delivery is highly inefficient — restaurants or ghost kitchens prepare meals worth a few dollars and then pay someone to ship them across town,” CEO Gunnar Froh told TechCrunch. “While most customers aren’t aware of this, about half of their dollars are spent on platform fees and delivery costs. By running robotic kitchens in or next to residential high-rises, Jasper eliminates labor and delivery inefficiencies to offer residents freshly prepared gourmet meals at the cost of home cooking. Jasper meals are plated on porcelain, which allows its clients to cut up to a third of their household waste.” Swap Robotics at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Haje Kamps / TechCrunch A couple of robotics-focused firms made it onstage for the Battlefield pitch-offs as well. an electric mower specifically designed to cut vegetation around solar farms. “Right now, there are a couple of main challenges when cutting all of the vegetation in solar fields,” the company tells TechCrunch. “The way it’s done is unsustainable. It’s done by gasoline or diesel-powered equipment, so there’s obviously a big carbon footprint there. There’s also a high cost from gasoline and diesel itself. The equipment is also going through rough terrain, so there’s a lot of equipment breakdown and costs associated with that. Since what we’re doing is 100% electric, it’s a lot more sustainable. There are also way fewer parts, so it’s not going to break down nearly as often.” One of the more unique features here are the fast-swappable attachments that give the company its name. Within minutes, you can outfit the system with a plow and have it go to town on a bunch of snow. The robotic system is also capable of carrying a payload of up to 1,000 pounds. The robot debuted a few months back, and the company claims that it already has a committed $9 million in contracts to deploy the robots at solar sites. Mitch Tolson, CEO at Ally Robotics, pitches in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on October 19, 2022. Haje Kamps / TechCrunch I . The company is attempting to solve an issue that many before it have attempted to tackle (and one we’ve spoken about quite a bit in these column inches): the creation of robotic systems that can be effectively deployed without any robotics or programming expertise. The company raised $4.7 million in crowdfunding, along with a $6.1 million Series A. Equally impressive, food service automator Miso Robotics signed a $30 million letter of intent to deploy Ally’s robotic arms in kitchens. The company develops both the software and hardware components of its system. It also has a nice little backstory. “Both my dad and mom had their own business,” Ally Robotics founder and CEO Mitch Tolson tells TechCrunch. “My mom had a sign company. Every single weekend and nights during the week, I was installing neon signs, welding up frames, digging trenches, holes for electrical, all of it.” I think that’s all of the Disrupt-related content I’ve got for you this week, but here are some quick news stories from the week. Go! Cyberdontics I (very squeamishly) $15 million raise. The idea of having a robot operating in my mouth isn’t one that I (world-famous dental not liker) am particularly psyched about, but I also don’t hate the idea of reducing the hours it takes to get a procedure like a root canal or crown down to a matter of minutes. “If you’ve had something like a root canal, a crown or any of these types of procedures, where you’re spending an hour or two in the dentist’s chair and you’re spending multiple trips to go back and get it fixed,” CEO Chris Ciriello told me, “the idea that you can literally have this robot in your mouth for under one minute and you can be out the door 15 minutes later is a game changer. For people that really don’t like the dentist, this is a really attractive way to get in and out a lot faster.” Ambi Robotics Kyle’s got a . The company is one of a growing army of firms competing to automate fulfillment centers and warehouses. It recently signed a $23 million deal to bring its systems to Pitney Bowes’ U.S.-based fulfillment centers. Hybrid Robotics Something fun to close out this week’s newsletter. I did a quick post early this week about researchers who programmed MIT’s Mini Cheetah quadruped robots to . It’s an extremely tough thing to accomplish: teaching a robot to map a projectile’s path, react, and move its body in under one second. The paper notes: Soccer goalkeeping using quadrupeds is a challenging problem that combines highly dynamic locomotion with precise and fast non-prehensile object (ball) manipulation. The robot needs to react to and intercept a potentially flying ball using dynamic locomotion maneuvers in a very short amount of time, usually less than one second. In this paper, we propose to address this problem using a hierarchical model-free RL framework. Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch |
Eswatini’s central bank mulls issuance of a digital currency | Annie Njanja | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | The kingdom of Eswatini is considering the introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), joining the growing list of African countries exploring the viability of an e-currency. The Central Bank of Eswatini (CBE) it has appointed German technology group Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) to research and explore the possibilities of a digital Lilangeni (the country’s currency) to complement banknotes. The CBDC project will involve a design concept and other considerations such as governance, accessibility, interoperability, security and programmability of the potential digital currency. The consultants are expected to help the CBE make an informed decision on whether to adopt the e-currency and the best ways to roll it out. The project follows the completion of the first phase of a 2020 CBDC Diagnostic study by the CBE, which “presented the strongest and direct opportunity for the adoption of a digital currency in Eswatini.” “The Central Bank of Eswatini is delighted to have engaged G+D as a technical consultant to walk with us in our journey as we explore and formulate the foundational policy considerations and use cases of a localized CBDC. We are confident that G+D’s technological expertise and their strong regional presence in our continent will allow us to realize all possible advantages of a Digital Lilangeni and ensure we’re fully equipped to issue a CBDC in the future,” said CBE Governor Dr. Phil Mnisi. G+D recently helped Ghana to pilot a retail CBDC, making it the second country after Nigeria to run such a trial. Nigeria’s eNaira was introduced in October last year and had by August 2022 been used to carry out transactions ($9.2 million). Kenya, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia are some of the other African countries eyeing digital currencies to enhance their access to financial services, cost reductions, interoperability and enhanced cross-border payments. The CBDCs, unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are developed by central banks and are pegged on countries’ fiat currencies. |
France fines Clearview AI maximum possible for GDPR breaches | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition firm that scrapes selfies and other personal data off the Internet without consent to feed an AI-powered identity-matching service it sells to law enforcement and others, has been hit with another fine in Europe. This one comes after it failed to respond to an order from the CNIL, France’s privacy watchdog, to stop its unlawful processing of French citizens’ information and delete their data. Clearview responded to that order by, well, ghosting the regulator — thereby adding a third GDPR breach (non-cooperation with the regulator) to its . Here’s the CNIL’s summary of Clearview’s breaches: “Clearview AI had two months to comply with the injunctions formulated in the formal notice and to justify them to the CNIL. However, it did not ,” the CNIL wrote in a today announcing the sanction [emphasis its]. “The chair of the CNIL therefore decided to refer the matter to the restricted committee, which is in charge for issuing sanctions. On the basis of the information brought to its attention, the restricted committee decided to impose a maximum financial penalty of , according to article 83 of the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation].” The EU’s GDPR allows for penalties of up to 4% of a firm’s worldwide annual revenue for the most serious infringements — or €20 million, whichever is higher. But the CNIL’s press release makes clear it’s imposing the maximum amount it possibly can here. Whether France will see a penny of this money from Clearview remains an open question, however. The U.S.-based privacy-stripper has been issued with a slew of penalties by other data protection agencies across Europe in recent months, including €20M fines from and ; and a . But it’s not clear it’s handed over any money to any of these authorities — and they have limited resources (and legal means) to try to pursue Clearview for payment outside their own borders. So the GDPR penalties look mostly like a warning to stay away from Europe. Clearview’s PR agency, LakPR Group, sent us this statement following the CNIL’s sanction — which it attributed to CEO Hoan Ton-That: There is no way to determine if a person has French citizenship, purely from a public photo from the internet, and therefore it is impossible to delete data from French residents. Clearview AI only collects publicly available information from the internet, just like any other search engine like Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo. The statement goes on to reiterate earlier claims by Clearview that it does not have a place of business in France or in the EU, nor undertake any activities that would “otherwise mean it is subject to the GDPR”, as it puts it — adding: “ (NB: On paper the GDPR has extraterritorial reach so its former arguments are meaningless, while its claim it’s not doing anything that would make it subject to the GDPR looks absurd given its amassed a database of over 20 billion images worldwide and Europe is, er, part of Planet Earth… ) Ton-That’s statement also repeats a much-trotted out claim in Clearview’s public statements responding to the flow of regulatory sanctions its business attracts that it created its facial recognition tech with “the purpose of helping to make communities safer and assisting law enforcement in solving heinous crimes against children, seniors and other victims of unscrupulous acts” — not to cash in by unlawfully exploiting people’s privacy — not that, in any case, having a ‘pure’ motive would make any difference to its requirement, under European law, to have a valid legal basis to process people’s data in the first place. “We only collect public data from the open internet and comply with all standards of privacy and law. I am heartbroken by the misinterpretation by some in France, where we do no business, of Clearview AI’s technology to society. My intentions and those of my company have always been to help communities and their people to live better, safer lives,” concludes Clearview’s PR. Each time it has received a sanction from an international regulator it’s done the same thing: Denying it has committed any breach and refuted the foreign body has any jurisdiction over its business — so its strategy for dealing with its own data processing lawlessness appears to be simple non-cooperation with regulators outside the US. Obviously this only works if you plan for your execs/senior personnel to never set foot in the territories where your business is under sanction and abandon any notion of selling the sanctioned service to overseas customers. ( Sweden’s data protection watchdog also fined a local police authority for unlawful use of Clearview — so European regulators can act to clamp down on any local demand too, if required.) On home turf, Clearview has finally had to face up to some legal red lines recently. it agreed to settle a lawsuit that had accused it of running afoul of an Illinois law banning the use of individuals’ biometric data without consent. The settlement included Clearview agreeing to some limits on its ability to sell its software to most U.S. companies but it still trumpeted the outcome as a “huge win” — claiming it would be able to circumvent the ruling by selling its algorithm (rather than access to its database) — to private companies in the U.S. The need to empower regulators so they can order the deletion (or market withdrawal) of algorithms trained on unlawfully processed data does look like an important upgrade to their toolboxes if we’re to avoid an AI-fuelled dystopia. And it just so happens that the , per legal analysis of the proposed framework. The bloc has also more recently presented a plan for an which it wants to encourage compliance with the broader AI Act — by linking compliance to a reduced risk that AI model makers, deployers, users etc can be successfully sued if their products case a range of harms, including to people’s privacy. |
Makersite lands $18M to help companies manage product supply chains | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | In 2018, Neil D’Souza, a software engineer by trade and previously the VP of product development at Thinkstep, came to the realization that his 10-plus-year effort to solve enterprise product challenges in the areas of sustainability, compliance and risk were having little impact. The way he saw it, they took too long, which minimized their influence on product design choices. “For example, analyzing a car’s life cycle assessment can easily take an automotive company an entire year,” D’Souza told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Speed matters, otherwise the analysis just becomes a meaningless report.” That frustration was the genesis of his startup, , which aims to produce near-instant impact assessments in the areas of sustainability, compliance and risk to inform corporate-level decisions. Makersite, D’Souza says, is an attempt to bridge the gap between experts who know what “good” looks like from an environmental, cost, compliance or risk perspective and decision-makers with control over the product supply chain. With over 30 customers including Microsoft, Cummins and Vestas and a balance sheet showing profitable operations over the last few years, Makersite is beginning to attract investor attention, this week securing $18 million in a Series A round with participation from Planet A Ventures. D’Souza says the tranche — Makersite’s first besides “a few convertible notes”; the company was bootstrapped until now — will be put toward work with integrators and resellers and expanding the size of Makersite’s team. “There are many companies out there that specialize in solving cost, compliance, risk or sustainability challenges. The problem is they each sit in siloes and the data they use is specialized to the people who work in those fields,” D’Souza said. “That’s what makes our solution different. We’re unique in the space as we’re the first to solve the challenge of bringing multicriteria decision analysis to non-experts.” Using AI, Makersite maps a company’s product data against a material and supply chain database, generating automated reports. The idea is to help companies meet their sustainability goals while minimizing costs and keeping compliance at the forefront. The aforementioned database — which D’Souza says is among the largest of its kind — allows Makersite to identify contextual relationships to build a model of products and their supply chains automatically. The models cover not just what a product is made out of, but how every component or ingredient is manufactured — all the way from the mining resources to the factory floor. “[Makersite] enables a customer to drop in a bill of material for, say, a wind turbine, tell the AI that it’s a wind turbine, answer a few questions (e.g., about power output), and the system will automatically build a ‘cradle-to-grave’ model of that turbine that’s localized to where it’s made and where it’ll be erected,” D’Souza explained. “That allows you to optimize designs of specific elements of the turbine — like the tower and nacelle — to locally available resources and infrastructure, such as recycling facilities, and understand trade-offs across the lifecycle and criteria, like cost, risks and regulations.” As Makersite grows its headcount from around 40 employees to over 100 over the next 12 months, D’Souza says that the focus will be on building out the company’s sales and marketing teams to grow business particularly in the U.S. and Europe. On the integration side, Makersite’s investing capital in connectors to software like Autodesk to deliver cost and environmental insights within computer-assisted design platforms. “There is a paradigm shift toward sustainable products that are driven by regulation, competition, customer demand and investments,” D’Souza said. “For that, Makersite enables procurement and product design professionals to make day-to-day decisions without the need for compliance, sustainability, cost or risk experts.” |
Google is finally making Chrome tablet-friendly | Ivan Mehta | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | After ignoring the app experience on Android tablets for years, Google appears increasingly focused on turning things around. Earlier this year, the search giant introduced Android 12L, which brought to tablets and foldable. At the developer conference Google IO in May, it promised to . Now the search giant is beginning to deliver on that pledge, starting with the browser Chrome. Google has rolled out an update to Chrome for Android tablets that introduces new features such as a side-by-side view for improved tab navigation and the ability to drag-and-drop information out of Chrome. The side-by-side view will help users navigate between tabs by swiping across the address bar (as shown in the GIF below). This is helpful when you can’t really read tab names in settings such as split-screen. Google The drag-and-drop functionality allows users to move around links, images and text from Chrome to apps such as Gmail, Keep and Photos. Watch it in action in the GIF below. Google introduced a similar on Android tablets in July. Google What’s more, the refined Chrome for Android tablets adds a grid layout for tabs to make it easier for users to switch between them — instead of having to traverse through the horizontal line of tabs. The revamp also allows users to see large-sized previews of currently open tabs when they swipe up from the bottom of the screen. This feature is already available on Chrome’s smartphone app through the tab switcher. Google The company said its tab groups feature — first introduced — is also “coming soon” to Chrome for tablets. “No matter if you prefer using a mouse, a stylus, or your finger, the Chrome on Android experience should be as intuitive and familiar on tablets as on your computer or phone. We’re constantly exploring new ways to make it easier and more enjoyable to use Chrome on your Android tablet — whether it’s easier navigation with the visual tab grid, switching to desktop mode, or finding the tab quickly,” said Lola Adams, product manager, Chrome, in a statement. Google is slowly improving the Android tablet experience through app refreshes and software updates as it prepares to next year. |
Egypt’s Nexta to launch ‘next-gen banking’ app with fresh $3M | Tage Kene-Okafor | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | , an Egyptian startup that plans to launch its banking app in the coming months, has secured a $3 million investment from eFinance Group, a state-owned provider of digital payments solutions. This news follows the Nexta announced this March, which Egyptian early-stage VC Disruptech led. Last year, Nexta obtained a provisional license from the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) and will look to fulfill further requirements and meet certain obligations before obtaining the CBE’s final approval for the agent banking license it needs to launch its services in the country. The Nexta app will have a partner bank to handle settlements and act as an intermediary between itself and the CBE — however, it’ll power its cards and tech. Founded by in 2021, Nexta wants to disrupt the Egyptian fintech scene with its “next-generation banking” app and card. According to the company, the Nexta card will aggregate users’ existing payment cards, allowing more effortless money transfer and tracking spending, among other features. “We’re trying to build next-generation banking and provide a seamless user experience to the consumer. We want to make easy and instant onboarding, card aggregation, linking all of your cards and several methods of cash-in features,” the co-founder and CEO told TechCrunch in an interview, adding that the company plans to make revenue from interchange fees. “That’s the first thing we are going in with the soft launch, and budgeting and tracking spending. And then we’ll add more features every month or quarter more features to solve the pinpoints of Egyptians.” Egypt is among the highest consumer spending markets across Africa. It is also one of the region’s most cash-reliant markets, meaning there’s an immense opportunity for fintechs to bring consumers spending online by launching card services. Egyptians looking for fresh alternatives that do not include telco-powered mobile wallets and digital channels from legacy banks can turn to Nexta and , the Sequoia-backed fintech that announced a $20 million seed round last week. Unlike Telda, which allowed signups from its yet-to-be-launched apps (it didn’t bode well with its over 30,000 users after waiting almost a year to use the app), Nexta has limited its waitlist to signups from its website, engaging them through content marketing in preparation for its launch. Hisham declined to reveal how many subscribers are on the company’s waitlist. Like Sabbah, in an interview with TechCrunch last week, Hisham agrees that both consumer-facing fintech apps ultimately compete with cash. “I believe that the competition is very healthy and thanks to Telda for the awareness they made to consumers and taking the first step. The Egyptian market needs not only Telda and Nexta but four or five other players like us,” the CEO added. In a statement, Ibrahim Sarhan, eFinance’s chairman and CEO, said the investment in Nexta is in line with Egypt’s digital transformation plan and vision for 2030, including the Group’s plan to maximize its assets and investments by investing in the fintech space. “Nexta is among the promising companies financed by the Group within several targeted investments,” Sahar said. “It’s worth noting that the Group took part in establishing Nclude — an investment fund — to invest in emerging fintech companies, thus improving the current and future direction of fintech in Egypt.” Hisham, who describes this investment as a strategic partnership rather than a funding round, said Nexta is glad to have e-finance on board as the demand for financial services in Egypt increases. “We believe there is a huge opportunity for us to offer a differentiated and outstanding experience to different users in such a promising market,” he said. Proceeds from the investment will help Nexta prepare for its launch, hire talent and invest in its technology. |
Why members-only club Chief, with a waitlist of 60K, hates the term ‘girl boss’ | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | co-founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan started the company because they had experienced firsthand being women executives without a ton of support. They created a community of female leaders that is now 20,000 strong, with 60,000 sitting on waitlists, but just don’t call these women “girl bosses.” The two women appeared at today in San Francisco. Kaplan asked the audience how many men call themselves “boy bosses.” Nobody raised their hand. “We don’t use the phrase ‘boy boss.’ We only use the phrase ‘girl boss’ because we’ve put women in another category instead of just assuming that a woman can be a leader. And so I don’t like the phrase because of that. I don’t like thinking about women in leadership. It’s just leadership,” Kaplan told the Disrupt audience. She added, “How can we celebrate women, not tear them down, not infantilize what it is to be a woman leader by calling them a ‘girl boss’ and truly make sure that women can lead and do it in their own way.” The three-year-old startup has grown from a 200-person group in NYC to a 20,000-strong organization that has raised $140 million on a $1 billion valuation. Yet they have another 60,000 women who want to join. Kaplan stresses that giving its members a highly curated and valuable experience is more important than growing too fast and losing their value proposition. “The member experience is most important. So when you ask about growth, when we think about how we’ve only scratched the surface of 5 million women [executives] in the U.S., it is so critical for us to make sure that members are really loving their experience,” she said. It all comes back to the mission, which was born in personal experience, says Childers. “When I started to get in the room where decisions were happening, and I realized that there were differences in the way that conversations were running for different people within the organization, that was just a really eye-opening thing for me,” she said. She decided creating a network of like-minded women could be incredibly helpful. This week the company opened what they call “a clubhouse” in San Francisco, a place for women to meet in person. They have three others in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. In addition, they expanded outside the U.S into the U.K. for the first time. |
Daily Crunch: AI content developer Jasper now valued at $1.5B following capital infusion | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | The newsletter is a little later than usual today and for the next three days. Don’t worry, it’s for fun reasons: We want to be the first to tell you about the awesomeness that is our TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield companies. Find ’em in our special Battlefield section belooooow! And, this is the first time EVER, that we are writing Daily Crunch, sitting next to each other, IRL. — and Venture capital funds focusing on according to , and Will Ventures is here for it. reports that the low-flying, Boston-based venture outfit just thanks to its approach of investing in sports technologies with the help of its community of athlete backers who help promote and grow the portfolio companies. Turo, the peer-to-peer car-sharing platform that’s been described as the Airbnb for cars, before the end of the year, reports. Local car owners in all major cities, including Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane, can join the waitlist on Turo’s website. Okay, fine, have a few more: : Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon dishes to about a “ ,” an inaugural accelerator program that will kick off next year in Los Angeles. He also provided more info on the firm’s recent giant .
: Both and sat in on ‘s interview with Marc Lore, who disclosed a that he is working on called Jump Platforms and provided some , calling it a “forced transaction.”
: Netflix VP of Gaming Mike Verdu spoke to about opening a new gaming studio in SoCal and . It’s Disruuuuuupt! We are so excited we can barely sit still. Here’s the first batch of Battlefield companies that pitched onstage on this fine California Tuesday — and if you’re curious, revealed the earlier today. : A Saint Paul, Minnesota–based startup that’s looking to remotely monitor cancer patients in between doctor visits using a port catheter. : Leverages OpenAI’s DALLE-2 and GPT-3 models to generate visuals and text that can be used in ads for social platforms. : Claims its new form of genetic testing can identify which medications will work for a patient in a fraction of that time. : Connects frontline workers to company resources through text messaging. : Was built on the simple idea that developers should be able to see the behavior of software as they write it so they can prevent problems when the software runs. : New commerce offering aims to give employees more freedom when it comes to caregiving spending. : Beyond flash cards to create an AI dialogue assistant that we can all carry around on our phones. : Paving the way for electric solar vegetation cuts and sidewalk snow plowing. : Hopes to encourage people with periods to do just that — add hormone-monitoring to their quantified health mix. : Thinks peer-to-peer payments can onboard a new generation of stock investors. / Getty Images Products and services that sell themselves sound great, but product-led growth (PLG) startups still launch marketing campaigns and hire sales teams. Combining PLG with traditional sales-led growth efforts can raise retention and acquisition to the next level, says Kate Ahlering, chief revenue officer at Calendly. In this TC+ guest post, Ahlering lays out multiple strategies that will help teams implement a “hybrid GTM strategy,” which includes suggestions for leveraging PLG data and optimizing success metrics. Three more from the TC+ team: We have even more for you from Apple’s surprise October event. takes a look at the company’s , which got a refresh and arrives October 26. He talks about chips and inches, and a pencil…you get the picture. Even more Apple for you to bite into: Since we have all the Battlefield companies for your reading pleasure, here are just a few more: |
Activision Blizzard’s Johanna Faries highlights the company’s emerging ‘anti-tox’ strategy | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | At TechCrunch Disrupt today, Activision Blizzard General Manager Johanna Faries elaborated on the company’s plans to clean up some of the worst behavior in the franchise’s community, even as new lawsuits and allegations about . Last month, Activision Blizzard released a for the Call of Duty community, which encompasses its broad consumer player base and the competitive scene. While the policy is pretty basic — no harassment, hate or cheating — it’s something the company can point to when it enforces the rules. “I’m happy to say, especially since you know the time that I’ve been in the chair, we’ve really raised the bar in terms of paying attention to ‘what does an anti-tox strategy need to look like? What does creating fair play environments, safe play environments look like?’” Faries said. “We just released for example — and it started in the beta — a first-ever franchisewide code of conduct, which I know may sound like table stakes, and in many ways it probably is — but it’s here now.” Faries noted that Activision Blizzard has teams “focused 24/7” on anti-toxicity, weaving together automated machine learning solutions with human moderation. The goal is to make it easier for players to quickly report bad behavior but also to incentivize the kind of good behavior that should serve as a model for the community. The crackdown on toxic behavior — which often disproportionately impacts marginalized players who still struggle for representation in streaming and gaming — goes hand in hand with weeding out players who cheat, according to Faries. “So there’s more to come on this, but I was really proud to see in addition to Ricochet [anti-cheating tech] and a lot of our anti-cheat anti-hacking initiatives that we’ve rolled out as well … our anti-toxicity focus is one that is a masthead going into this upcoming launch and for years to come,” Faries said. “We’re putting the best systems in place to make sure that players have the tools, but also have again the incentives, to continue to raise the bar of what it means to play fair to play with respect for everyone to play with integrity.” Over the weekend, Activision seemed to put its money where its mouth was, from competing in the Fortune’s Keep tournament, citing his interactions with Call of Duty streamer Nadia Amine. Martin previously filmed a joke marriage proposal to the female player, who has faced a firestorm of sexism and baseless accusations that . In a tweet, Martin said that Activision “blocked him from competing” in the tournament over harassing Amine, though Activision Blizzard hasn’t yet confirmed the claim. If the company did indeed dole out an event ban over directing unwanted attention at a fellow player, it would track with its new emphasis on cleaning up behavior in the notoriously toxic Call of Duty scene. |
Meet E-liza Dolls, the startup that’s building dolls to help young girls learn to code | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | , a Berkeley-based startup, is aiming to challenge the gender gap in STEM by helping young girls learn to code using dolls. The company, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, builds dolls that include programmable computers that girls can code through an app. The startup was founded in 2021 by Eliza Kosoy, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, who is focused on the intersection of child development and artificial intelligence. Kosoy originally came up with the idea for the dolls in 2017 while she was working at MIT in an AI lab that was mostly made up of men. Kosoy says she realized that if only a certain group of people were designing the future of AI and technology, it would only benefit that group, which is when she had the idea to come up with a way for young girls to learn to code. Kosoy wanted to find a way for girls to learn about coding without having to give up their interests, which is why she decided to combine dolls and technology. Regardless of what people may think about gendered toys, the purpose of E-liza dolls is to help girls feel confident when it comes to exploring STEM by giving them a product that is designed specifically for them. The market is filled with toys that are designed and marketed for and by males. Of course girls can play with these toys too, but some of them may prefer to play with something that is designed for them. “We want to expose young girls to technological concepts and encourage creative thinking through hardware and software, preventing girls from being influenced by generational stereotypes,” Kosoy told TechCrunch. “Parents have so few options; they feel they need to force their daughters to play with STEM products designed for boys in order to get their daughters on a STEM path. We believe little girls don’t have to sacrifice their interests in order to play with educational STEM toys.” E-liza Dolls is currently in talks with manufacturers and plans to launch on Kickstarter in early 2023. Kosoy says the team is one prototype away from the Kickstarter launch, as the startup plans to add a few iterations to the dolls and enhance their design features. After the initial launch on Kickstarter, the company plans to release the product officially in mid-2023. The 18″ dolls operate via a piece of hardware embedded in each doll. The device has a screen and is Bluetooth-enabled to receive code via the doll’s companion app. Girls can plug in different sensors or use the built-in sensors to code the doll to do different things, such as building a security alarm for your room using a distance sensor or creating a truth detector using a heartbeat pulse sensor. Since launching, E-liza Dolls has received $100,000 in funding from AIX Ventures. The company is currently in the midst of raising a pre-seed round that consists of funding from several angel investors, including poet Rupi Kaur. |
Watch Google’s Ping-Pong robot pull off a 340-hit rally | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | As if it weren’t enough to have AI tanning humanity’s hide (figuratively for now) at every board game in existence, Google AI has got one working to destroy us all at Ping-Pong as well. For now they emphasize it is “cooperative,” but at the rate these things improve, it will be taking on pros in no time. The project, , isn’t just about Ping-Pong but rather about building a robotic system that can work with and around fast-paced and relatively unpredictable human behavior. Ping-Pong, AKA table tennis, has the advantage of being pretty tightly constrained (as opposed to playing basketball or cricket) and a balance of complexity and simplicity. “Sim2Real” is a way of describing an AI creation process in which a machine learning model is taught what to do in a virtual environment or simulation, then applies that knowledge in the real world. It’s necessary when it could take years of trial and error to arrive at a working model — doing it in a sim allows years of real-time training to happen in a few minutes or hours. But it’s not always possible to do something in a sim; for instance what if a robot needs to interact with a human? That’s not so easy to simulate, so you need real-world data to start with. You end up with a chicken and egg problem: You don’t have the human data, because you’d need it to make the robot the human would interact with and generate that data in the first place. The Google researchers by starting simple and making a feedback loop: [i-Sim2Real] uses a simple model of human behavior as an approximate starting point and alternates between training in simulation and deploying in the real world. In each iteration, both the human behavior model and the policy are refined. It’s OK to start with a bad approximation of human behavior, because the robot is also only just beginning to learn. More real human data gets collected with every game, improving the accuracy and letting the AI learn more. The approach was successful enough that the team’s table tennis robot was able to carry out a 340-strong rally. Check it out: It’s also able to return the ball to different regions, granted not with mathematical precision exactly, but good enough it could begin to execute a strategy. The team also tried a different approach for a more goal-oriented behavior, like returning the ball to a very specific spot from a variety of positions. Again, this isn’t about creating the ultimate Ping-Pong machine (though that is a likely consequence nevertheless) but finding ways to efficiently train with and for human interactions without making people repeat the same action thousands of times. You can learn more about the techniques the Google team employed in the summary video below: |
Bird exits Germany, Sweden, Norway and ‘several dozen’ US, EMEA markets | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | Shared micromobility company Bird is exiting several markets across the world as it struggles to build an economically viable business, according to a regulatory . Bird said it will “fully exit Germany, Sweden and Norway, as well as wind down operations in “several dozen additional, primarily small to mid-sized markets” across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to the company. Bird would not respond to requests for more information from TechCrunch, so it’s not clear which cities Bird will exit. However, the only Middle Eastern market Bird is in is Israel, and Bird doesn’t appear to be in any African countries. The downsizing of the business comes a few months after in an attempt to become more financially self-sustainable and achieve profitability. More importantly, Bird really needs to raise its share price before it gets delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. In June, for trading too low. The company has until its annual shareholder meeting in June to get back to compliance, which means holding an average share price of at least $1 across 30 consecutive trading days and having a share value above $1 on the final trading day of that month. If the stock is still under $1, Bird would do a reverse split with shareholder approval, according to Bird CEO Shane Torchiana. When Bird received the warning, it was trading at $0.56. Today, Bird is trading at $0.37 after hours, which, to be fair, is up 1.01%. In a , Bird blamed a lot of the bumps on the road to profitability to cities that lack a “robust regulatory framework.” The company said it reviewed its portfolio of cities to weed out the ones without such a framework — the cities that have too much competition, an oversupply of vehicles and overcrowded streets. It’s not clear what this will mean for Bird’s army of fleet managers who will be affected by the change, and Bird did not respond in time to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Bird’s fleet managers are essentially contractors that pay up-front fees to manage fleets of scooters for Bird. They essentially pay to rent the scooters from Bird so they can deploy them and earn an income, but they are responsible for maintenance, storage and maintaining adequate insurance coverage. The program has been for potentially luring inexperienced contract workers into debt for scooters they’ll never own. |
null | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 10 | 20 | null |
Redditors have created millions of crypto wallets to buy NFT avatars | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | In July, Reddit jumped on the NFT train, launching an NFT-based marketplace that allows users to purchase blockchain-based profile pictures for a fixed rate. Given the general sentiment around NFTs today, you might assume — like me — that the experiment ended poorly. But the opposite’s the case apparently. Today during a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt, Reddit chief product officer Pali Bhat revealed that over three million Redditors have used Reddit’s Vault blockchain wallet to create over three million crypto wallets to date. Most of those — 2.5 million — were created to purchase NFT avatars that can be used as profile pics on the platform, he said. It’s difficult to put the figures into context, given that not all NFT marketplaces willingly share those sorts of metrics. But Dune Analytics estimated in a recent that one of the leading platforms, OpenSea, was hosting over one million active wallets as of January. Meanwhile, crypto wallet was serving over 30 million users as of March. Reddit partnered with roughly 30 artists to release around 40,000 NFT avatar designs a few months ago, which could be purchased via the Reddit mobile app at prices ranging from $9.99 to $99.99. (They’re all sold out at the moment.) Users who purchased one of the limited-edition pics got licensing rights to use it on and off of Reddit as an avatar, and could mix and match their avatar’s look using a built-in avatar builder tool. Reddit partnered with Polygon, an Ethereum-compatible blockchain, to mint the avatars. (In blockchain jargon, “minting” refers to publishing a unique NFT so that it can be bought or sold.) Vault is used to store and manage NFTs through the Reddit app. Reddit’s latest foray into the NFT space comes after the social network allowing users to set any NFT as their profile picture, following on the heels of Twitter. At the time, NFT avatars were exclusively available to members of the subreddit, which was invite-only. Beyond NFTs, Reddit has branched in a number of different directions in recent months in search of new lines of revenue. The company has with the idea of introducing TikTok-like video editing tools and made several targeted acquisitions, buying content moderation startup , natural language processing company , machine learning platform and contextualization company . Reddit also developer portal to give third-party apps and bots a boost, and it upgraded its live audio product, , with new discovery features. |
Cityblock Health CEO Toyin Ajayi on how to scale human-centered care models | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | is focused on providing affordable, human-centered healthcare in lower-income and marginalized communities, while also building sustainable business models. Founder and CEO Toyin Ajayi talked at Disrupt today about the challenges of tackling the healthcare system’s inequalities, while serving patients with personalized medical care, behavioral health care and social services. “Do I believe that healthcare is a right, that should be available to all people, irrespective of their ability to pay and then it should be distributed equitably? Yes. 100%. And there are a lot of ways of achieving that,” Ajayi said. “It’s unacceptable in 2022 that we’re looking at exactly the same data that we were looking at 15 years ago about healthcare disparities, healthcare outcomes, all exacerbated by COVID,” she added about the current healthcare system. “Everyone’s like, ‘oh my god, Black and brown people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, poor people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, essential workers who don’t have health insurance.’ We knew this stuff. Give me a break. So, yes, I would have designed it differently and I’m also not content to bitch and moan about it. We’ve got to do something.” Based in Brooklyn, New York and now live in seven markets, including Indiana and Ohio, Cityblock works with many people who lack access to basics like food, safe places to sleep and social support, which creates more risk factors for worsening chronic conditions. As a result, many rely on emergency rooms for crises, like running out of insulin or acute psychiatric care, because they didn’t received the kind of care that would have kept them at home. “I come to this work as a physician, I’m deeply passionate about caring for underserved communities. I come to this work from a place of real heart. This is my life’s work and my mission,” Ajayi said. “I’m also a deep pragmatist and I recognize that there are real economic forces that drive most of the decisions that people make in our healthcare system, certainly in the for-profit space, but even as we learn and read more about it, even in the not-for-profit space.” Addressing systemic issues like health disparities is important on a moral level, but for payers there is also an opportunity to figure out how to create a more viable business by caring for people differently. When launching in a new market, like Indiana or Ohio, Cityblock looks for places where there are socioeconomic disparities, and then looks for partners, payers and health insurers with whom they launch into markets. “Pre-launch we spend the time figuring out where exactly in the neighborhood should we be,” Ajayi said. “Can we be near public transportation, near grocery stores, making sure that we’re really mapping the ecosystem and showing up in places that are accessible to our members and also positioning ourselves so we can go to the home and see people from there.” Part of this means working with community-based organizations, include shelters, housing agencies and food pantries. “We think of ourselves as part of the glue within an ecosystem that knits together existing providers, the specialty providers, the hospitals, the communities, organizations and creates a seamless experience for the people we serve,” Ajayi said. She noted that many of these organizations run on tenuous and vulnerable business models. For example, during the pandemic, many community-based organizations couldn’t get enough workers to continue coming in. Many run on tiny margins and are grant-funded. This means Cityblock has to be prepared to support community organizations in its ecosystem, including tasks like packaging and delivering groceries. Tech and data science can also support more individualized care. For example, data science can help Cityblock figure out who it needs to engage with first in patient populations that are often very diverse in terms of age and needs. “I have to engage all of them. Who do I go after first. Who do I call first? Who’s going to go to the emergency room tomorrow unless they get a phone call from us? Who’s not home today because they’re likely not working, or who’s likely to be engageable on the weekend,” Ajayi said. “Those are types of things we can use our data and our data products to help us better refine.” Better data science means people also have to repeat their story less as they seek care. “When we interview our members about what they dislike about the traditional healthcare system, it’s ‘I gotta tell my whole story over and over again.’ And then you add on layers of discrimination and stigma that many people face. More than half of our members are people of color, because that’s the best representation of Medicaid and dually-eligible populations.” “Telling your story over and over again seems benign, but the healthcare system makes people tell their story over and over again, it subjects them to friction, abrasion and sometimes even trauma, that is entirely counterproductive to a therapeutic relationship that’s going to result in better health outcomes. Even alleviating that is such a meaningful lever for us.” |
Staax thinks peer-to-peer payments can onboard a new generation of stock investors | Anita Ramaswamy | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | worse, Robinhood helped inspire a new generation of investors to enter the stock market. Now that investing is cool again, upstarts like , which pitched today at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, are finding new ways to cash in on its cachet, particularly among young people. Nikki Varanasi, Staax’s founder and CEO, was managing an $800 million fund-of-funds at McKinsey when she began to take notice of the lack of resources available to aspiring investors who wanted to get comfortable with the process. Her initial idea was to gift her friends shares of stock — a thoughtful gesture, she hoped, that could help them kickstart their investing journeys. Oftentimes, the barriers to investing are logistical, she explained. Once someone gets paid, there are a number of different, cumbersome steps they have to go to through in order to invest that money. “Because of the disposable income left in apps [like Venmo], it takes over a week to transfer to your bank and then to your brokerage. So for a lot of people, they just leave their money in there and they don’t invest it and that takes a hit with inflation,” Varanasi said. When Varanasi realized there wasn’t an existing platform that could help her send stocks directly to her friends, thus helping them bypass the onerous aforementioned process, she decided to build it herself. Staax is the result of her efforts, alongside her two co-founders, COO Lucy Yang and CTO Victoria Yang. Staax operates like a full-service brokerage in that its users who sign up open an investment account on its platform. They can buy and sell shares much like they could on Robinhood or Fidelity, Varanasi explained. What sets Staax apart, though, is that it allows for peer-to-peer payments in stock. Nikki Varanasi, CEO and founder at Staax pitches as part of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Haje Kamps / TechCrunch “We want to turn assets into payments, because we believe that payments haven’t had a lot of evolution in the last 10 years,” Varanasi said. New users who sign up for Staax link the new brokerage account to their bank account and make a list of their top five preferred stocks to receive. Senders can’t gift shares of stock that aren’t on their recipients’ top five lists, which helps prevent unwanted transactions, alongside a feature that lets a recipient choose if and when to accept a stock gift. I asked Varanasi how the platform handles stock price movements that occur between when the shares are sent and when the recipient accepts them. She explained that the sender could gift someone a share priced at $10 each, for example, which would come out of the sender’s bank account in the form of cash. Then, if that share went up in price to $12, let’s say, the recipient could either accept the gift and would be on the hook for the extra $2, which would come out of their own bank account, or they could choose to accept the $10 in cash rather than in stock. For the sender, this system helps them avoid having to purchase the stock and sell it before sending it to the recipient in the form of cash. “What happens on Staax is we avoid taxes for the sender, because we use a ledger system based on cash on the back end, so you don’t need to own the stock to send it,” Varanasi said. According to Varanasi, the main use cases for Staax outside of gifting tend to be social, such as a friend paying back another friend for buying them coffee, but doing so in stock instead of cash. Staax’s co-founders, Nikki Varanasi, Lucy Yang and Victoria Yang. Staax “It’s not large amounts of money you need to stress about and it’s in the market, but it accumulates over time. And so [as an investor] you’re really in it for the long term strategy,” Varanasi said. It’s still early days for the company, which has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding since its founding in 2020. Its investors include Techstars and Western Union, which invested through an accelerator program for fintechs that Staax took part in, as well as VC firms Lightspeed, Harlem Capital and Hustle Fund as well as angel investor Litquidity (of finance meme account fame). Staax is still figuring out its path to monetization, though taking payment for order flow (PFOF) from market makers who execute trades on behalf of other companies’ users is a likely candidate, Varanasi said. It’s the same process Robinhood uses to make money while keeping its product free for users, but has attracted scrutiny from both customers and regulators. Varanasi said she isn’t worried PFOF will be banned in the U.S., because regulators have been talking about doing so for years but haven’t cracked down. Still, she drew a distinction between her plan to monetize Staax and Robinhood’s implementation of the same system. “We are exploring ways to make revenue on the back end through the trades, but in the most ethical way, because we know that PFOF can be controversial, especially when given to the wrong third party,” Varanasi said. In addition to PFOF, Staax is also exploring charging some users a fee for premium content from influencers and creators who partner with the startup as well as potential B2B partnerships down the line. Ultimately, Staax’s growth depends on its ability to build community because the social component is integral to getting users on the app. The company has a waitlist of 12,000 people that it has built through marketing efforts tailored toward Gen Z, including events on college campuses, Varanasi said, adding that Staax is already available for download on the iOS App Store for select users. “[With Staax], you’re not saving your money up every quarter, taking a few thousand dollars from your paycheck and investing it on Robinhood. You’re actually investing $5 or $10 every week, or more, every time you go out or get paid back.” |
DigestAI’s 19-year-old founder wants to make education addictive | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | was 14, he wished that he had an app that could summarize his textbooks for him. Just five years later, Pativada has been there and done that — earlier this year, he launched the AI-based app Kado, which turns photos, documents or PDFs into flash cards. Now, as the 19-year-old founder takes the stage for Startup Battlefield, he’s looking to take his company, , beyond flashcards to create an AI dialogue assistant that we can all carry around on our phones. “If we make learning truly easy and accessible, it’s something you could do as soon as you open your phone,” Pativada told TechCrunch. “We want to put a teacher in every single person’s phone for every topic in the world.” Quddus Pativada, founder at DigestAI pitches as part of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Haje Kamps / TechCrunch The company’s AI is trained on data from the internet, but the algorithm is fine-tuned to recall specific use cases to make sure that its responses are accurate and not too thrown off by online chaos. “We train it on everything, but the actual use cases are called within silos. We’re calling it ‘federated learning,’ where it’s sort of siloed in and language models are operating on a use case basis,” Pativada said. “This is good because it avoids malicious use.” Pativada said that this kind of product would be different from smart assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa because the information it provides would be more personalized and detailed. So, for certain use cases, like asking for sources to use in an essay, the AI will pull from academic journals to make sure that the information is accurate and appropriate for a classroom. Despite running an educational AI startup, Pativada isn’t currently in school. He took a gap year before going to college to work on his startup, but as DigestAI took off, he decided to keep building instead of going back to school. Growing up, he taught himself to code because he loved video games, so he wanted to make his own — by age 10, he published a “Flappy Bird” clone on the App Store. Naturally, his technological ambitions matured a bit over time. Before founding DigestAI, Pativada built a COVID-19 contact tracing platform. At first, he just made the app as a tool for his classmates — but his work ended up being honored by the United Arab Emirates’ government. DigestAI So far, the outlook is good for the Dubai-based company. Pativada — who says he feels skittish about the CEO label, and prefers to think of himself as just a founder — has raised $600,000 so far from angel investors like Mark Cuban and , who struck a deal on Shark Tank for his SAT prep company, Prep Expert. How does a 19-year-old in Dubai capture the attention of one of thee most well-known startup investors? A cold email. Mark, we apologize if this admission makes your inbox even more nightmarish. “I was watching a GQ video of Mark Cuban’s daily routine,” Pativada said. “He said he reads his emails every morning at 9 AM, and I looked at the time in Dallas, and it was about 9 AM. So I was like, maybe I should just shoot him an email and see what happens.” While he was at it, he reached out to Patel, whose educational startup has done over in sales. Patel hopped on a video call with the teenage founder, and by the next week, he and Cuban both offered to invest in DigestAI. “We raised our entire round through cold emails and Zoom,” Pativada told TechCrunch. “It sort of helped because no one can see how young I look in person.” Before he decided to eschew college altogether, Pativada applied to Stanford and interviewed with an alumnus, as is standard in the admissions process. He didn’t end up getting into the competitive Palo Alto university, but his interviewer, who works at Stanford, did end up investing in his company. Go figure. “Our goal is to work with universities like Stanford,” Pativada said. The company is also targeting enterprise clients. Currently, DigestAI works with some U.S.-based universities, Bocconi University in Italy, a European law firm and other clients. At the law firm, DigestAI is testing a tool that allows associates to text a WhatsApp number to quickly brush up on legal terms. In the long term, DigestAI wants to create an SMS system where people can text the AI asking for help learning something — he wants information to be so accessible that it’s “addictive.” “That is what AI is — it’s almost the best version of a human being,” Pativada said. |
Mother Honestly’s new offering aims to give employees more freedom when it comes to caregiving spend | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | parent is challenging. Being a working mother, according to many Disrupt |
Hormona wants women to track their ‘hormonal health’ with at-home testing | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | is all around us these days, as scores of people use mobile sensing technologies to keep an eye on their well-being by tracking their steps, workouts and even how long and deep they sleep — so why shouldn’t women who cycle (as in cycle) track monthly changes to their hormone levels? London-based femtech, , which is pitching its hormone tracker in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt, hopes to encourage people with periods to do just that: Add hormone-monitoring to their quantified health mix. Today it’s announcing the launch of its app in the U.S. after a period of early testing with “a few thousand” women in Europe (it’s been beta testing in Sweden). The 2019-founded U.K. startup has already spent a couple of years in R&D developing an easy-to-perform, proprietary at-home hormone test to underpin a forthcoming monthly subscription business that will enable users of its (freemium) app to pay to regularly test and report their hormone levels. In the near future, in return for “roughly” $40 per month (for the subscription package which includes a supply of self tests), paying users will get feedback on whether they’re inside or outside the normal hormonal range for women their age — and suggestions for treatments if something looks amiss. That’s for starters. Hormona’s overarching goal, as is often the case with femtech startups, is to encourage a critical mass of users to get on-board with a mission to help plug the data gap that persists around women’s health (as a result of medical research being historically skewed towards male biology) — by agreeing to pool data for research aimed at improving understanding of the roles hormones play in areas like fertility and the menopause. (This side is of course optional: Hormona confirms that any studies it engages in involving user data will be consent-based, i.e. requiring the user to opt their information in.) Jasmine Tagesson, COO at Hormona pitches as part of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Haje Kamps / TechCrunch “As of now, there isn’t enough data around hormonal health and it’s really affecting every single woman in different stages of her life so it’s a very important topic that we really need to spend more time to do more research and understand,” says Hormona CEO and co-founder, Karolina Lofqvist, ahead of today’s on stage pitch at the Startup Battlefield in San Francisco. “Our full solution is really on hormonal health — and follow[ing] a woman from her first cycle all the way to her last.” “We are hoping that with the data [users opt in] we can do more studies around how women are affected by their hormones, how different connections and different levels between hormones can be connected to hormone related issues such as PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome] or — eventually, perhaps — endometriosis as well, even if it’s not a direct hormonal issue. But PCOS for sure, and infertility and menopause,” she adds. “There are a lot of things that are connected to your hormones that are currently understudied that we are very excited to do more studies and bring more awareness around.” The startup has raised a total of $1.5 million in early backing from three VC firms so far: SFC Capital and Nascent Invest, as well as — after going through the latter’s LA accelerator program earlier this year. Hormona’s at-home hormone tests — which are lateral flow, urine-based tests for (initially) three separate hormones (FSH; progesterone; and estrogen) — will be available from Q1 next year, per Lofqvist, starting in the U.S., with a European launch to follow later. That means, for now, its (free-to-download) app is essentially a general resource that provides information about the function of different female hormones. As tests become available, it’s also designed to funnel users towards regular self-testing (and paying a subscription) to unlock personalized hormonal insights once the testing component of the business launches early next year. “In the app today you can start to understand what is supposed to happen with your hormones and then when the test is available women can confirm that what is supposed to happen is actually happening,” says Lofqvist, going on to explain that subscription users will be testing roughly one hormone per week (using a separate test per hormone) and doing this at home — “without the need for a lab”. The three hormones it’s selected for testing were picked because they’re “connected to so many different issues that we women go through”, she says, adding that they may add tests for more hormones in the future — with testosterone and cortisol being two others of potential interest. The initial batch of hormone tests are performed by users as three separate tests, rather than being bundled onto a single test strip. This is because Lofqvist says that certain hormones need to be tested on certain days to properly understand how levels are changing throughout the cycle. “You don’t test your estrogen on the same day as you test your FSH,” she notes, adding of the individual test dates: “It’s based on our algorithms telling when your estrogen and FSH is supposed to be at the highest or lowest level.” App users need to provide Hormona with some information about themselves (such as their age) and about their cycle (e.g. regular or irregular; and its length) in order that it can calculate personalized testing dates. Lofqvist confirms these dates “can vary a bit” depending on what the user’s goal and age is. While she tells us the overall accuracy of its hormone tests is “on par” with an at-home blood test. “We’ve spent the last two years in order to evaluate antibodies to give us as good result as possible and right now we are on par with at-home blood test,” she tells TechCrunch, adding: “But that’s something we continue improving.” (We asked for — but Lofqvist was unable to provide as yet — data on how its at-home hormone test compares in accuracy to a lab-based hormone test. So that’s one to watch for sure.) So how does its at-home test work? Users take the specified hormone test in the morning on the day the app instructs them to by peeing on the test stick and using the app to scan the result with their mobile phone camera to get what Lofqvist describes as “a quantitive result within 15 minutes”. The test result takes the form of a couple of lines appearing on the strip. Hormona’s algorithms work by comparing the intensity of these lines in order to determine the amount of hormone in the user’s urine. “If you compare it to a COVID-19 test, you don’t want to have two test lines — but we always have two tests lines,” she notes. “With the two tests lines we then compare the intensity in the test lines to provide a quantitive result for imaging processing.” Lofqvist argues that by being able to test hormones levels multiple times, i.e. as the months of usage go on, it has the chance to glean a better understanding of hormonal changes because the tech can pick up on patterns over time vs the traditional hormone-testing route of going to a doctor/lab and getting blood drawn which is obviously also a lot less convenient. (Although the accuracy of Hormona’s at-home tests vs a blood-based hormone test performed by a professional needs to be properly factored into any comparison.) “Today’s solution where you go to draw blood… doesn’t really tell you what is going on with your hormones because in order to understand it you need to test it multiple times in order to see the patterns and that is really what we want to try to achieve with our solution,” she suggests. Hormona will be recommending users subscribe for at least three months — in order to get what Lofqvist calls your hormonal “baseline” — although she says they’re hopeful that women will see the value in continuing to shell out for a subscription to keep tracking these chemical signals on an ongoing basis, much like they might track their steps or sleep. (And exploring how the product might usefully integrate with other trackers and biomarkers, such as those from wearables or other health tech gadgets, is something she says they’re looking at.) “As a woman, some months you may have been stressing more — which increases your cortisol and can affect your hormones — so in order to figure out what’s going on you need to test for at least three cycles. After three cycles we can give you then some indication of what’s going on with your hormones. And give you a treatment plan based on your hormone levels,” she notes. “When it comes to women that are a bit younger it tends to be holistic treatment plans — in order to stabi Karolina Lofqvist (CEO) and Jasmine Tagesson (COO) at Hormona pitch as part of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Haje Kamps / TechCrunch lize your hormones — but we also are in discussions with medical providers that can provide medication to women that are in need of it if you, for example, are going into menopause quite early or if you have issues around your menopause.” Lofqvist responds to this by recounting her own story of hormone-related health issues — which led her, ultimately, to a diagnosis of imbalances and an under-active thyroid. But it was the difficulty she had obtaining this diagnosis through traditional healthcare routes, and the stress and frustration of her experience with these conventional channels, that sealed her conviction there’s broad value for women to track their own hormones. ‘Knowledge is power’ and all that. “The reason why I started Hormona was due to my own health issues. I used to work in an investment fund and work quite long hours. I went to multiple doctors because I suddenly started to lose hair, getting brain fog, gaining weight. And a lot of doctors said that it was probably due to stress and I should try taking anti-depressants,” she recounts. “It wasn’t until I found a hormone specialist in Brussels that had me take weekly blood tests in order to figure out how my hormones were fluctuating that he realized I was suffering from hormonal imbalances. “And it is very common today [for women to have hormonal imbalances]. But today’s solution of drawing blood — one blood test — can’t really tell you what’s going on with your hormones. So the reason we have picked those three hormones is they are really the key hormones when it comes to a lot of issues that women are going through that are currently understudied that we are hoping we can bring more data and medical research around.” She also says Hormona’s start point is a list of around 50 symptoms that can be related to hormonal imbalances, such as weight gain, acne, brain fog, hair loss and so on; and its initial target are women who can “connect” to those symptoms and who are interested in investigating possible underlying causes. “There are a lot of symptoms that are related to hormonal imbalances. And what we can see from our user base today is it’s mainly women around late 20s to early 40s that are very interested in the concept — but as we go [on] we really want to follow women from her first period all the way to her last with all the hormonal changes that she’s going through,” she adds. If the app picks up something out of the normal range as the user performs regular testing — such as them having too much progesterone or too much estrogen vs the standard for their age (something which might be the result of them having been on hormonal contraception and then stopping it, for example) — it will suggest what Lofqvist describes as a “holistic treatment” plan. She says these personalized plans are based on existing scientific research into interventions that may be beneficial for hormonal imbalances — in areas like diet, exercise or taking certain supplements. “Quite often there are a lot of holistic treatments that can help women to stablize their hormones if they are at a younger age,” she suggests, pointing to “a lot of studies based on that” — and noting that such treatments worked for her when she was suffering hormone-imbalance related issues in her twenties. Hormona’s technology is not yet regulated as a medical device but Lofqvist confirms that is the goal, telling us: “We have a very clear regulatory path that we have developed over the last year where the end goal is to have an approved medical device.” For older women, the intended product utility includes being able to help them identify when they’re entering the menopause — based on spotting changes to their hormonal baseline. And perhaps picking up that change happening earlier than they otherwise might. “Today there isn’t really any test that tells a women they’re going into menopause,” she argues. “A lot of doctors say you need to wait for a year to see if you haven’t had your period for a year then you’re considered going into menopause. But with our test we can quite quickly see that you’re going into menopause when your estrogen is dropping and your FSH is going up. So there is quite [a lot of] use-cases around these three hormones but, to start off, we’re focusing on hormonal imbalances and use that to improve the general well-being of a woman.” “As we go, the more data that we collect we really hope that we can really fill the medical landscape and help to guide the future of hormonal health,” she adds. “Because it is really understudied, under-utilized and under-funded.” This isn’t the first quantified health startup we’ve seen that’s using urine testing as the method for acquiring biomarker data. Indeed, the health alert has been (both for highly targeted and far broader health concerns) — and it’s easy (pee-sy!) to see why since it’s a straightforward, minimally invasive/low mess method that can quickly be incorporated into a morning bathroom routine. Nor is Hormona the first femtech startup to be inspired to productize at-home hormone testing — with the likes of Berlin-based (saliva-based testing) and (finger prick tests) also in the game, to name a couple of rivals (albeit, the latter ). But a lot of femtech plays around hormonal health are targeted at specific issues and/or conditions — such as , another recent U.S. startup, that’s focused on support for PCOS, for example — rather than trying to center hormone tracking itself to sell the idea of ongoing testing as a useful ‘well-being’ signal. Lofqvist sums its positioning up by saying Hormona’s “pure focus is on hormonal health”. She has some warm words for fellow European startup Inne, when we bring up its competing (saliva-based) at-home hormone test (which involves an additional piece of hardware that carries out the at-home analysis). But she argues there are key differences in product focus and output — with, for example, (it had planned to prioritize a contraceptive use-case but that got delayed after the pandemic disrupted a major study it needed to support its application for regulatory clearance). She also points out that Inne provides users with less quantitative results (hormone levels are reported more abstractly; such as low, high etc.) versus Hormona (which reports actual numerical values). While Inne has always avoided describing its product as a hormone tracker, per se — instead its marketing talks of its product as a “cycle- and ovulation-tracker” (which is narrower than Hormona’s broader quantified health push). Plus it’s not testing all the same hormones. So the product positioning between that particular pair looks fairly distinct. In general, Hormona is gearing up to go after a broader ‘female wellness’ use-case vs other femtechs interested in investigating hormones. Although its challenge is therefore broader: Its “hormonal health” premise is about connecting with a wider user-base by convincing women there’s general utility in making time to keep tabs on their monthly hormone levels and being curious about how they compare with their peers. Early interest in its product has come from women who have been “dismissed by their doctors”, per Lofqvist. “Just like me they’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on with their health,” she tells us. But she points to signs of broader interest, too: “As of now we have women that are not suffering as well — they just wants to understand what is supposed to happen with their hormones on a daily basis and how you can kind of optimize your well-being. “For example we had one woman that wrote a really nice review the other day that was like ‘oh I’m so grateful that a hormone app told me that today you may suffer from PMS [premenstrual syndrome] in the days before my menstrual cycle because otherwise I thought that I was just depressed. So to just get that small awareness that it’s actually normal the way you’re feeling, due to your hormones, feels like a big relief for a lot of women.” “I think it’s amazing that there are so many femtech companies popping up and booming right now — it’s just helping everyone,” Lofqvist adds. “There is a lot of companies around fertility and menopause but what we want to focus on is purely hormonal health and carve out this new space that serves as its own category where we can follow women from her first period all the way to her last with all the changes that she’s going through.” Why should women want to track their hormones? Well, one very big red flag for potential users in the U.S., specifically — which might give women there reason to say no to using a digital tool for this kind of intimate self-surveillance — follows the Supreme Court’s which has led to a swathe of states enacting draconian laws limiting women’s access to reproductive healthcare. Some states have made abortion illegal in almost all circumstances. And prosecutions of women for or still birth were not unheard of in the U.S. even prior to the Supreme Court decision. So a digital platform that’s taking snapshots of individuals’ reproductive health data (hormone levels) could risk becoming a target for authorities seeking to press prosecutions of women suspected of illegal abortions. Women’s own devices could be targeted to access data the app holds on their reproductive health. Securing this information will be extremely important if users are to trust Hormona with such sensitive — and potentially legally risky — personal data. Asked whether it’s concerned about this risk, and how it will ensure U.S. users’ data is protected, Lofqvist says: “Like any women’s health company, we are keeping a very close eye on the situation in the U.S. and are still in the process of evaluating our best go to market strategy, whether that is initially in the U.S. or Europe. We do however know that we do not want to exclude American women from using a service that can help bring more awareness, control and understanding of the female body to the women, who at present, need it the most and we are evaluating a variety of strategies in order to keep our potential American users’ data safe.” “As a U.K. registered company compliant with GDPR [aka, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation] with all of its databases located in Europe we believe we have a degree of separation meaning that it is not as easy for the U.S. government to issue us with a subpoena to give up a user’s personal information,” she adds. “At the end of the day as a female-founded women’s health company we believe in women’s basic right and our reproductive right is part of that. As such we would always take precautions to ensure that what we do does not put any women, but specifically vulnerable women, at risk.” |
Kakao co-CEO resigns, company to invest over $300M to build data center after mass outage | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | Whon Namkoong, the co-chief executive of Kakao, has resigned in a remarkable demonstration of corporate accountability after a fire incident at an SK C&C data center in Pangyo, south of Seoul, caused a mass outage over the weekend and disrupted Kakao’s several services, including messenger, ride-hailing, payment, banking and gaming. Namkoong, who joined Kakao in 2015, was elevated to the co-CEO role this March. At a press conference on Wednesday, Namkoong apologized for the mass outage “for such an extended period” and said that he feels “the heavy burden of responsibility” over the incident, adding that the company will do its best to restore the faith of users. , head of ESG at Kakao, who led the firm alongside Namkoong and is currently leading Kakao’s emergency task force team, will remain as the sole head of Kakao, per a company filing. Kakao said today morning additional services like Kakaomail and TalkChannel. Most of its services are in almost full operation, with some remaining partially down. KakaoTalk is the most popular messaging app in South Korea, reaching over 47 million of the nation’s 51.7 million population each month. The app is also used by government officials and businesses, including banks, ride-hailing services and payment players. Kakao’s slow recovery process was caused by the company’s lack of owned server infrastructure and “high dependence” on the SK C&C data center, which caught fire, analysts at Bernstein said in a report this week. Kakao also didn’t have a well-distributed backup system, they added. Hong said at a press conference today that the company plans to invest 460 billion KRW (~$325 million) to build its own data center next year, aiming to complete it in the following year. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said on Monday that KakaoTalk is practically a national communications infrastructure. Shares of Kakao tumbled on Monday but recovered slightly on Namkoong’s departure announcement. |
Swap Robotics is paving the way for electric solar vegetation cuts and sidewalk snow plowing | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | that manufactures electric grass-cutting and snow removal robots, presented today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield to detail how it’s making sustainable outdoor work equipment. For the next few years, 95% of the startup’s focus will be on facilitating robots that cut grass and vegetation on 1,000+ acre utility-scale solar farms. The company’s secondary focus is sidewalk snow plowing. The startup was founded in October 2019 by CEO Tim Lichti, CTO Mohamed H. Ahmed, Machine Design Lead Spencer Kschesinski and Electrical Design Lead Adonis Mansour. Lichti, Kschesinski and Mansour all attended the University of Waterloo together and then got to know Ahmed during their first year. The team originally planned to develop a robotic cutting solution for sports fields, but kept hearing from landscapers that cutting 1,000+ acre utility-scale solar installations was a challenging job that could use a modern solution. Tim Lichti, CEO at Swap Robotics pitches as part of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Haje Kamps / TechCrunch The team decided it would be their mission to create a solution that could sustainably cut grass in a controlled environment. Swap Robotics was aware that solar vegetation cutting comes with its challenges, as it requires a unique type of cutting deck that is able to get underneath solar panels, and recognized that a robotic solution could address the problem. “Right now, there are a couple of main challenges when cutting all of the vegetation in solar fields,” Lichti told TechCrunch in an interview. “The way it’s done is unsustainable. It’s done by gasoline or diesel-powered equipment, so there’s obviously a big carbon footprint there. There’s also a high cost from gasoline and diesel itself. The equipment is also going through rough terrain, so there’s a lot of equipment breakdown and costs associated with that. Since what we’re doing is 100% electric, it’s a lot more sustainable. There are also way fewer parts, so it’s not going to break down nearly as often.” Swap Robotics The robots have built-in hydraulics that move the grass cutting blades and the snow plow attachment. The attachments have a “quick swap” system, hence the name Swap Robotics, to make it easier and quicker to switch attachments. The robots’ batteries can also be swapped in five minutes, which allows for nearly 24/7 operation. The robots can also hold more than 1,000 pounds. Within 60 days of debuting its robots in mid-2022, Swap Robotics had over $9 million of signed agreements for solar vegetation cutting. Swap Robotics says it has developed the world’s first 100% electric cutting deck to reach the grass and vegetation underneath solar panels. The company also says it has developed the world’s first 100% electric “rough cut” deck that can easily cut down vegetation up to two-inches in diameter. Lichti says Swap Robotics currently has several robots in commercial operation in Texas, but is unable to disclose which companies are currently using the robots. The startup is also in the midst of releasing a batch of 10 new robots and has ordered supplies for the next batch of 10 robots. The company anticipates additional sales in the future as a result of its new relationship with SOLV Energy. As for the company’s business model, Swap Robotics charges a price per acre. Lichti says the model is convenient because customers are already familiar with paying a price per acre for grass cutting done by humans. The price per acre can vary depending on factors such as the size of the site, frequency of cuts and the terrain. The startup’s goal is to provide customers with 15% to 20% in savings when compared to their current cutting costs per acre. Swap Robotics The startup also announced that it received an investment from , in the United States, but is unable to disclose the amount. Lichti says the funding is part of its pre-Series A round that it plans to close at the end of October. A large portion of the investment will go toward commercialization of the startup’s robots. The company plans to ramp up operations to have dozens of robots in service. In addition, some parts of the investment will be used for capital expenditure. Prior to this investment, Swap Robotics raised $3 million in the three years after its launch from angel investors and . The funding was used to get Swap Robotics’ initial batch of a dozen robots into commercial operation. The investment was also used for software, mechanical and electrical development. Swap Robotics at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Haje Kamps / TechCrunch Swap Robotics plans to have a larger Series A round in 2023. “Long term, we would love Swap Robotics to be an outdoor robotics platform for work,” Lichti said. “We’ve developed a form factor that is compact, extremely strong and robust and has a built-in hydraulics system that can have dozens of different use cases. I think this makes it an ideal platform for heavy use cases, especially those that sometimes may be seasonal.” Lichti reiterated that the startup’s main focus will largely be on solar vegetation, and that the potential for its additional use cases is part of its longer term vision. As for what these use cases could look like, Lichti noted that the robots could potentially be used for street sweeping or reforestation efforts. |
Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | Chri Besenbruch, CEO of , sees many problems with the way video compression standards are developed today. He thinks they aren’t advancing quickly enough, bemoans the fact that they’re plagued with legal uncertainty and decries their reliance on specialized hardware for acceleration. “The codec development process is broken,” Besenbruch said in an interview with TechCrunch ahead of Disrupt, where Deep Render is participating in the Disrupt Battlefield 200. “In the compression industry, there is a significant challenge of finding a new way forward and searching for new innovations.” Seeking a better way, Besenbruch co-founded Deep Render with Arsalan Zafar, whom he met at Imperial College London. At the time, Besenbruch was studying computer science and machine learning. He and Zafar collaborated on a research project involving distributing terabytes of video across a network, during which they say they experienced the shortcomings of compression technology firsthand. The last time TechCrunch covered Deep Render, the startup had just a £1.6 million seed round ($1.81 million) led by Pentech Ventures with participation from Speedinvest. In the roughly two years since then, Deep Render has raised an additional several million dollars from existing investors, bringing its total raised to $5.7 million. “We thought to ourselves, if the internet pipes are difficult to extend, the only thing we can do is make the data that flows through the pipes smaller,” Besenbruch said. “Hence, we decided to fuse machine learning and AI and compression technology to develop a fundamentally new way of compression data getting significantly better image and video compression ratios.” Deep Render isn’t the first to apply AI to video compression. Alphabet’s DeepMind adapted a machine learning algorithm originally developed to play board games to the problem of compressing YouTube videos, leading to a 4% reduction in the amount of data the video-sharing service needs to stream to users. Elsewhere, there’s startup WaveOne, which claims its machine learning-based video codec outperforms all existing standards across popular quality metrics. But Deep Render’s solution is platform-agnostic. To create it, Besenbruch says that the company compiled a dataset of over 10 million video sequences on which they trained algorithms to learn to compress video data efficiently. Deep Render used a combination of on-premise and cloud hardware for the training, with the former comprising over a hundred GPUs. Deep Render claims the resulting compression standard is 5x better than HEVC, a widely used codec and can run in real time on mobile devices with a dedicated AI accelerator chip (e.g., the Apple Neural Engine in modern iPhones). Besenbruch says the company is in talks with three large tech firms — all with market caps over $300 billion — about paid pilots, though he declined to share names. Eddie Anderson, a founding partner at Pentech and board member at Deep Render, shared via email: “Deep Render’s machine learning approach to codecs completely disrupts an established market. Not only is it a software route to market, but their [compression] performance is significantly better than the current state of the art. As bandwidth demands continue to increase, their solution has the potential to drive vastly improved commercial performance for current media owners and distributors.” Deep Render currently employs 20 people. By the end of 2023, Besenbruch expects that number will more than triple to 62. |
Netflix to expand into cloud gaming, opens new studio in Southern California | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 10 | 18 | At TechCrunch Disrupt, Netflix VP of Gaming dropped two bits of news about the streaming giant’s foray into games. Verdu said that Netflix is “seriously exploring a cloud gaming offering.” The company will also open a new gaming studio in Southern California. “It’s a value add. We’re not asking you to subscribe as a console replacement,” Verdu said on stage. “It’s a completely different business model. The hope is over time that it just becomes this very natural way to play games wherever you are.” Google’s Stadia and Amazon’s Luna have made the same play, attempting to peddle video games that people can play even if they don’t have an expensive gaming computer or coveted console. But these services have struggled to attain mainstream user adoption. Google recently said that it will in January. “While Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service,” Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison wrote in a blog post. Mike Verdu, VP of Games at Netflix speaks about “whether game streaming can go mainstream” at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Haje Kamps / TechCrunch “Stadia was a technical success. It was fun to play games on Stadia,” Verdu said. “It had some issues with the business model, sure.” Both Stadia and Luna have dedicated controllers — but Verdu was reticent to say whether we can expect a Netflix gaming controller in the future. He did reveal, though, that Netflix is stepping up its game development by opening an internal studio in Southern California. This is the company’s fifth studio — just last month, Netflix in Helsinki, Finland with a former Zynga GM at the helm. Others include and Finland’s , which are each designed to develop games catering to different tastes. The new California studio will be led by Chacko Sonny, the former executive producer on “Overwatch.” At Blizzard Entertainment, “Overwatch” was a massive success, netting billions of dollars. Sonny announced his from Blizzard last year in the wake of an SEC probe regarding sexual harassment and discrimination at the dominant gaming company. “He could have done anything, but he chose to come here,” said Verdu. “You don’t get people like that coming to your organization to build the next big thing in gaming unless there’s a sense that we’re really in it for the long haul and in it for the right reasons.” Since it announced its foray into gaming, Netflix has 14 games in development in its own studios and has 35 games on the service now. In total, Verdu said it has 55 games “in flight” at present. These games include experiences based on original IP like “Stranger Things,” as well as licensed IP like “Spongebob Squarepants.” Netflix is also developing original games. “ The company still considers itself in the very early stages of its gaming initiative but hasn’t ruled out expansions beyond mobile — though we understand it won’t be heading to the console or VR at this point. The news of the gaming studio launch and cloud gaming plans arrives as Netflix is , which sees the streamer beating expectations with the addition of 2.41 million subscribers, bringing the total to 223.09 million. Netflix had forecast a net gain of only 1 million subs in the third quarter. The company also reported earning $7.93 in revenue in Q3 2022, whereas analysts predicted $7.85 billion. |
US sanctions on China could extend to biotech, official says | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 10 | 27 | On the heels of the Biden administration’s decision to impose sweeping chip sanctions on China, there are signs that China might also lose access to other types of critical U.S. technologies, including biotechnology, an area that has historically seen close cooperation between the two countries. Areas “on my radar” for possible additional export controls include quantum computing, biotechnology and artificial intelligence, said Alan Estevez, Commerce Department undersecretary for industry and security, according to . The message is worrying for an industry that’s intrinsically global. Biotech is one of the few areas, alongside climate policy, that transcends nationalities and boundaries between countries. Scientific progress in China could well save lives in the U.S. The globalization of the sector has also resulted in greater efficiency. As we wrote before, biotech firms often maintain a presence in China and the U.S. to leverage the different strengths of both sides. In China, they harness large reams of patient data, fast and cost-efficient clinical trials, as well as local tax cuts, government funding and subsidized offices to advance their research. At the same time, they keep operations in the U.S. to tap the country’s R&D talent and work toward FDA regulatory approval and commercialization. It’s not uncommon to see biotech startups increasingly labeling themselves “born global” and employing executives with experiences in China, the U.S. and other countries. Needleless injection device maker NovaXS, for example, was who headquarters the company in the U.S. but conducts clinical trials in China. , one of China’s most-funded drug discovery startups, , where it “maintains close communication with professors and experts from the research community as well as from the pharmaceutical industry,” while keeping multiple R&D centers across China. When asked previously why the straddles China and the U.S., founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov where “research was done mostly in the U.S. while hardware production happened in China.” Eastern Chinese city Wuxi especially has emerged as a global hub for contract research organizations, which conduct outsourced work for international pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Biotechnology is “a highly complex, uncertain and very risky process that fails 95-99% of the time if you start from target discovery. To put one drug on the market, you need 10-15 years, $2-3 billion dollars and the process fails 95-99% of the time,” Zhavoronkov observed. “International collaboration in biotechnology is a way to share this huge risk and cost. And by limiting collaboration in this field or even talking about it, the politicians demonstrate a lack of fundamental understanding of the industry and disregard for the health and well-being of their electorate,” he added. Indeed, treating the biotech sector with a security-driven approach could harm U.S. competitiveness, argued two scholars specializing in China, writing for : Unlike the semiconductor and telecommunication sectors, whose development depends on expensive equipment and hard-to-acquire manufacturing expertise, barriers to entry in biotechnology are low. Likewise, as Eric Lander’s now infamous mapping of CRISPR’s development illustrates, both foundational research and key innovations in biotechnology often take place in the public domain and build on incremental advancements made across the globe. When breakthroughs, like employing CRISPR as a means of gene-editing, do occur they spread through global scientific networks with little heed for national boundaries. Consequently, it is not a zero-sum industry in which a single innovation sets any firm or country ahead for a prolonged period. |
Xiaomi winds down financial services business in India | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 10 | 27 | Xiaomi has quietly discontinued its financial services in India, less than three years after launching payment and lending apps in the key global market, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, retreating from what analysts say is a $1 trillion opportunity. The Chinese giant recently pulled the Mi Pay and Mi Credit apps in the country from the local Play Store and its own app store. Mi Pay, which allowed users to make transactions on the nation’s UPI payments network, is also no longer listed among the recognized UPI apps by NPCI, an industry body that oversees UPI. NPCI did not respond to a request for comment. The abrupt wind down of the financial services business is a setback for Xiaomi India, which and has aggressively expanded its offerings to increase profits as the company’s hardware business operates on razor-thin margins. “As part of the annual strategic assessment activity and as a response to enhanced focus on our core business services, we closed the Mi Financial Services in March 2022. In a short span of 4 years, we were able to connect and support thousands of customers. We are working with our partners and supporting our consumers during this process,” a Xiaomi India spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement after the story was published. Xiaomi launched Mi Pay in India in March 2019. The app had amassed over 20 million registered users in the country that year itself, company executives said at the time. Later in the year, the , an app that lent customers between $70 to $1,400 at low interest rates. It accessed users’ texts and call logs to look for transaction information and some other details to determine their credit-worthiness and approved loans to them through partners in a matter of minutes. In August last year, Xiaomi India’s then head Manu Jain told media outlets that the company was aiming to become one of the largest players in India’s fintech space through Mi Credit and Mi Pay apps. The company considered India as the biggest market for Mi Credit after China, . Scores of giants, including Facebook and Google, have entered India’s digital loan market, offering small businesses loans via partners. Digital lending is expected to be worth $1 trillion by 2025, according to estimates from the Boston Consulting Group. Jain, who has transitioned to a different role within the firm since, said last year that the company was looking to bring several more financial services, including gold loans, credit line cards and insurance to the South Asian market. It’s unclear why Xiaomi discontinued the financial services offerings in the country, but the move comes at a time when India’s central bank has proposed stringent rules surrounding lending in India, mandating what data they can access on a customer’s phone and broader disclosures about the terms of their credit agreement. Xiaomi has also been at the center of intense scrutiny from the Indian government agencies. The Indian Enforcement Directorate earlier this year seized bank accounts of Xiaomi India after finding that the company had remitted $725 million to three foreign-based entities “in the guise of royalty” payments. Executives of Xiaomi, which has refuted the charges and has legally challenged the ruling, faced threats of “physical violence” during their investigation with the ED, Reuters reported earlier. |
Elon Musk fired top Twitter execs including CEO | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 10 | 27 | The deal is done, according to multiple sources, which is what gave Musk the mandate to clean house among the executive ranks. The , since she was involved in the decision to . He has also tangled with Agrawal. Publicly, Musk tweeted poop emojis at the CEO, who late last year. It wasn’t much better in private, either. The two exchanged text messages that indicated a falling out, as revealed by in the legal battle between the billionaire and the social network. Musk was to say that he wants to cut 75% of Twitter’s staff, though he then that statement — still, gutting four execs on a Thursday night isn’t reassuring to the remaining Twitter employees. Even Twitter co-founder Biz Stone addressed the shake-up. Thank you to , , and for the collective contribution to Twitter. Massive talents, all, and beautiful humans each! — Biz Stone (@biz) Twitter has already had quite the shuffling of executive staff since Agrawal took over for Dorsey. Before serving as CEO, Agrawal was the company’s CTO — he first started at Twitter in 2011. Thursday concluded 5 years . I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such an incredible group of people building the world’s town square for all of our stakeholders. The work isn’t complete, but we made meaningful progress. — Ned Segal (@nedsegal) Twitter’s leadership is already going to look a lot different under Musk’s control, and this is only the very beginning. “ Twitter is full of the most amazing people. I have so much gratitude for my former team and colleagues. Keep taking good care of this place, Tweagle. ❤ — Sean Edgett (@edgett) |
Yuga Labs’ Nicole Muniz to talk about NFTs and Bored Apes at TC Sessions: Crypto | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 10 | 27 | As the NFT ecosystem continues to waver, superfans and blue-chip holders are still holding on strong. But how can the digital asset sector reignite growth and appeal to new audiences? The number of NFT sales is down almost 90% from the year-ago date, according to on NonFungible market tracker. But still, the hype is growing across platforms like , which saw that millions of crypto wallets were created to mint NFTs or on layer-1 blockchains like Cardano, which hit for NFT volume. NFTs are one of the most talked about topics in crypto, which is why we’re excited to have Nicole Muniz, CEO of Yuga Labs, onstage at on November 17 in Miami. Earlier this year, Yuga Labs in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, hitting a $4 billion valuation. The Miami-based NFT startup is the firm behind Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club and that has other popular NFT projects like CryptoPunks and Meebits. Yuga was also a contributor to the launch of , which was a project inspired by its BAYC collection. The token gathered a multibillion-dollar market cap on its first day of trading that is now around $1.4 billion to date. The company wants to build something that “expands the universe” of Bored Ape Yacht Club but “invites the larger NFT community” in at the same time, TechCrunch previously . With all that said, there will be plenty to talk about with Muniz, ranging from the fine-tuned details of Yuga Labs to where her thoughts are for the broader NFT ecosystem and where things stand. We’d like to hear her thoughts on the challenges and opportunities in the NFT marketplace and what areas she sees as most promising when it comes to scaling the ecosystem. Prior to Yuga Labs, Muniz founded an agency called Something New, which has worked with mega-brands like Nike, Google, EA and Square, to name a few. takes place on November 17 in Miami. Save $150 with early bird pricing and today, and then join the web3, DeFi and NFT communities to keep up with the ever-evolving and always exciting crypto world.
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Hidden Door wants to turn fiction into immersive role-playing experiences | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 10 | 27 | The first season of “ ” just ended, and I find myself wishing for more. I’ve seen each episode twice already, read through the lore and even re-watched some “Game of Thrones” episodes. If I had the option to immerse myself in that world and roleplay as a dragon-riding Targaryen queen, you bet your ass I would do it. That’s eventually the vision of , a game studio that specializes in narrative AI and which participated in TechCrunch Disrupt’s last week. Hidden Door wants to be able to turn any work of fiction into an immersive collaborative roleplaying experience, where players can jump into their favorite story worlds turned into dynamic graphic novels, with text and images being generated based on their choices. Hidden Door is currently testing out an because the story addresses various age groups and the original text is “so banana pants, which is perfect because it’s supposed to be silly and fun,” Matt Brandwein, Hidden Door’s co-founder, told TechCrunch. What the platform looks like is a combination of Dungeons & Dragons and Roblox, where you have the vibe of a tabletop roleplaying game that allows you and your friends to “conjure” a story together — only with Hidden Door it doesn’t take four hours to get into character. An in-game AI dungeon master serves as the narrator and builds out a world based on the choices you make as you play. ( To set up the game, players decide which characters, items, locations, tropes and vibe1s they want to encounter and “it all comes together like the dynamic back of a book, which doesn’t tell you everything that will happen, but it gives you the sorts of things you will encounter,” said Brandwein. When players choose a character type, the AI dynamically arts that character into a simplistic but cute 2D cartoon avatar. “It’s a trope machine,” said Brandwein about his company’s narrative AI. “It’s trained on 2 million stories in addition to being fine-tuned on the author’s work. It knows what sorts of things could plausibly happen, but also what’s implausible. And a lot of the work we’re doing right now is to fine tune it to have the right level of surprise, the right level of subterfuge.” Game studio Latitude last month came out with a similar type of game, which writes dialogue and scene descriptions using text-generating AI models. But the company has faced headwinds in both content and image generation. Hidden Door says its AI has the content generation part solved at least, and not only because the model was trained on millions of stories. The more the game is played, the bigger the world gets. Artifacts are created out of that play, which you can share with other players who can mix them into their own stories. Hilary Mason, Hidden Door’s CEO, said the creativity of the players coupled with the machine’s ability to riff off those ideas is a breakthrough on the impossible problem of generative storytelling. The company’s next move is to work with a dozen “fairly well known” sci-fi and fantasy authors who are interested in world building and want to loosely define a world for their fans to inhabit in order to “make this more of a community collaborative entertainment experience,” said Brandwein. “Beyond that, the vision we have for this is that someday, you know, if you’re on Amazon, or something like it, you can read the book, you can listen to the book, and then you might just play the book or whatever it is,” Brandwein continued. “Or if you look at , it’s some very trivial free-to-play game. But why can’t you put yourself into ‘Bridgerton’ and seduce the dude?” Netflix attempted an immersive TV experience a few years back with “ ,” which gave players an option to choose their own adventure. But that was pre-scripted, only giving you an A or a B at every moment, said Brandwein. Hidden Door recently raised a led by Makers Fund with participation from Northzone and Betaworks. The startup is testing its current product with a cohort of nine- to 12-year-olds, and is actively looking for authors to collaborate with for future stories, as well as other potential tech partners with an interest in generative AI. |
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