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With $15M, The Riveter plans to open 100 new female-focused co-working spaces | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | In a — at least those looking to raise venture capital — not only closed , but it’s today announcing a $15 million Series A funding, bringing its total backing to $20.5 million. The Seattle-based co-working startup, led by co-founder and chief executive Amy Nelson (pictured), has raised the capital from lead investor Alpha Edison, with support from Madrona Venture Group, New America president and CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter, fashion designer Liz Lange and TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie. As of November, startups founded by all-female teams had closed 391 deals worth $2.3 billion, an increase from the $2 billion invested in 2017, though still just of all VC invested this year. Nelson, an advocate for female entrepreneurs who’s spoken publicly about , the and as a solo female founder, started The Riveter in 2016 after a decade-long career as a lawyer. Today, the startup operates five locations in the U.S., with ambitious plans to open another 100 female-focused co-working spaces by 2022. The Riveter has 2,000 members throughout its locations in Seattle, Bellevue, Wash. and Los Angeles. Its expansion plans include new spots in Texas, Colorado and Portland. The spaces are built with women in mind but are not exclusive to one gender. Nelson tells us The Riveter’s membership is 25 percent male, setting it apart from spaces like The Wing, which is only available to female-identifying people. A look inside one of The Riveter’s Seattle co-working spaces The Riveter provides space to work and collaborate; a digital network, currently in beta, for its members to connect; and programming ranging from office hours with venture capitalists to “self-care Saturday.” Other investors in the startup include Brilliant Ventures, The Helm and X Factor Ventures. |
Podcast industry aims to better track listeners through new analytics tech called RAD | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | Internet users are already being tracked to death, with ads that follow us around, search histories that are collected and stored, emails that report back to senders when they’ve been read, websites that know where you scrolled and what you clicked and much more. So naturally, the growing podcast industry wanted to find a way to collect more data of its own, too. Yes, that’s right. Podcasts will now track detailed user behavior, too. Today, NPR announced RAD, a new, open-sourced podcast analytics technology that was developed in partnership with nearly 30 companies from the podcasting industry. The technology aims to help publishers collect more comprehensive and standardized listening metrics from across platforms. Specifically, the technology gives publishers — and therefore their advertisers, as well — access to a wide range of listener metrics, including downloads, starts and stops, completed ad or credit listens, partial ad or credit listens, ad or credit skips and content quartiles, . However, the technology stops short of offering detailed user profiles, and cannot be used to re-target or track listeners, the site notes. It’s still anonymized, aggregated statistics. It’s worth pointing out that RAD is not the first time podcasters have been able to track engagement. Major platforms, including , today offer granular and anonymized data, including listens. But NPR says that data requires “a great deal of manual analysis” as the stats aren’t standardized nor as complete as they could be. RAD is an attempt to change that, by offering a tracking mechanism everyone can use. Already, RAD has a lot of support. In addition to being integrated into NPR’s own NPR One app, it has commitments from several others that will introduce the technology into their own products in 2019, including Acast, AdsWizz, ART19, Awesound, Blubrry Podcasting, Panoply, Omny Studio, Podtrac, PRI/PRX, RadioPublic, Triton Digital and WideOrbit. Other companies that supported RAD and participated in its development include Cadence13, Edison Research, ESPN, Google, iHeartMedia, Libsyn, The New York Times, New York Public Radio and Wondery. NPR says the NPR One app on Android supports RAD as of now, and its iOS app will do the same in 2019. “Over the course of the past year, we have been refining these concepts and the technology in collaboration with some of the smartest people in podcasting from around the world,” said Joel Sucherman, vice president, New Platform Partnerships at NPR, . “We needed to take painstaking care to prove out our commitment to the privacy of listeners, while providing a standard that the industry could rally around in our collective efforts to continue to evolve the podcasting space,” he said. To use RAD technology, publishers will mark within their audio files certain points — like quartiles or some time markers, interview spots, sponsorship messages or ads — with RAD tags and indicate an analytics URL. A mobile app is configured to read the RAD tags and then, when listeners hit that spot in the file, that information is sent to the URL in an anonymized format. The end result is that podcasters know just what parts of the audio file their listeners heard, and is able to track this at scale across platforms. (RAD is offering both and SDKs.) While there’s value in podcast data that goes beyond the download, not all are sold on technology. Most notably, the developer behind the popular iOS podcast player app , Marco Arment, today publicly stated his app will not support any listener-tracking specs. Yes. I understand why huge podcast companies want more listener data, but there are zero advantages for listeners or app-makers. I won’t be supporting any listener-behavior tracking specs in Overcast. Podcasters get enough data from your IP address when you download episodes. — Marco Arment (@marcoarment) “I understand why huge podcast companies want more listener data, but there are zero advantages for listeners or app-makers,” Arment wrote in a tweet. “Podcasters get enough data from your IP address when you download episodes,” he said. The developer also pointed out this sort of data collection required more work on the podcasters’ part and could become a GDPR liability, as well. (NPR tells us GDPR compliance is up to the mobile apps and analytics servers, as noted in the specs .) In addition to NPR’s use of RAD today, Podtrac has also now a beta program to show RAD data, which is open to interested publishers. |
Elon Musk’s plans for 2019 might include a Tesla pickup truck prototype | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | Tesla CEO Elon Musk has floated the idea for an all-electric pickup truck numerous times in the past two years. Now, he’s back at it, this time with a teaser that Tesla might have a prototype to unveil in 2019. Musk mentioned on Twitter the desire to produce a pickup truck way back in April 2017, before the first Model 3 sedans had been handed over to customers and the CEO had entered production hell. At the time, Musk tweeted that a pickup truck would be unveiled in 18 to 24 months. That timeline is in sync Musk’s latest tweet. I’m dying to make a pickup truck so bad … we might have a prototype to unveil next year — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Musk brought up the pickup truck on Twitter again in June 2018, a move some described as a as the company tried to hit an important production target for the Model 3. What would you love to see in a Tesla pickup truck? I have a few things in mind, but what do you think are small, but important nuances & what would be seriously next level? — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Of course, it should be noted that a prototype isn’t the same as a production vehicle nor does it provide any clues as to when such a truck would make it into customers’ hands. A prototype would raise other questions too, specifically where Tesla would develop and assemble these trucks. Tesla’s Fremont, California plant, where the Model S, Model X and Model 3 are produced, doesn’t have the room to take on a fourth vehicle. The company is building out other facilities, but it’s unclear if there’s space for the kind of tooling and assembly lines needed for mass production. The automaker would face competition from the gas-powered trucks of the world, which are among the best-selling vehicles in North America, as well as newcomer . Rivian, which unveiled an all-electric pickup and SUV at the LA Auto Show in November, is expected to start production of their pickup and SUV in 2020. |
Airbnb settles disputes with big property landlord | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | Almost one year after a , both companies have agreed to settle all of their disputes. Aimco, which owns or manages 50,000 properties, , seeking monetary damages as well as court orders to stop Airbnb from enabling people to breach their leases. Aimco’s stated issue with Airbnb was that its platform brings inside their buildings people with “unvetted personal histories” with “no vested interest in maintaining a peaceful community atmosphere.” In a joint statement today, Aimco and Airbnb announced they had settled all of their disputes, and dismissed all litigation between them. It’s not clear if there were any financial elements involved in the settlement. Airbnb said it could not share anything beyond the joint statement, with the exception of the following: “Airbnb is committed to building mutually beneficial partnerships with building owners and landlords through initiatives like our Friendly Building program,” Airbnb spokesperson Christopher Nulty said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We believe that by working together, home sharing can bring economic benefits to both landlords and tenants.” |
Dell’s long game is in hybrid and private clouds | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | When Dell voted to again this morning, you had to be wondering what exactly the strategy was behind these moves. While it’s clearly about gaining financial flexibility, the has always been about setting up the company for a hybrid and private cloud future. The hybrid cloud involves managing workloads on premises and in the cloud, while private clouds are ones that companies run themselves, either in their own data centers or on dedicated hardware in the public cloud. Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insight & Strategy, says this approach takes a longer investment timeline, and that required the changes we saw this morning. “I believe Dell Technologies can better invest in its hybrid world with longer-term investors as the investment will be longer term, at least five years,” he said. Part of that, he said, is due to the fact that many more on-prem to public connectors services need to be built. Dell could be the company that helps build some of those missing pieces. It has always been at its heart a hardware company, and as such either of these approaches could play to its strengths. When the company in 2016, it had to have a long-term plan in mind. Michael Dell’s parents didn’t raise no fool, and he saw an opportunity with that move to push his company in a new direction. It was probably never about EMC’s core storage offerings, although a storage component was an essential ingredient in this vision. Dell and his investor’s eyes probably were more focused on other pieces inside the federation — the loosely coupled set of companies inside the broader EMC Corporation. The crown jewel in that group was of course VMware, the company that introduced the enterprise to server virtualization. Today, it has taken residency in the hybrid world between the on-premises data center and the cloud. Armed , VMware finagled its way to be a key bridge between on prem and . IT pros used to working with VMware would certainly be comfortable using it as a cloud control panel as they shifted their workloads to AWS cloud virtual machines. In fact, speaking at a press conference at AWS re:Invent earlier this month, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said the partnership with VMware has been really transformational for his company on a lot of different levels. “Most of the world is virtualized on top of VMware and VMware is at the core of most enterprises. When you start trying to solve people’s problems between being on premises and in the cloud, having the partnership we have with VMware allows us to find ways for customers to use the tools they’ve been using and be able to use them on top of our platform the way they want,” Jassy told the press conference. The two companies also announced an extension of the partnership servers, which bring the AWS cloud on prem where customers can choose between using VMware or AWS to manage the workloads, whether they live in the cloud or on premises. It’s unclear whether AWS will extend this to other companies’ hardware, but if they do you can be sure Dell would want to be a part of that. But it’s not just VMware that Dell had its sights on when it bought EMC, it was Pivotal too. This is another company, much like VMware, that is publicly traded and operates independently of Dell, even while living inside the Dell family of products. While VMware handles managing the server side of the house, Pivotal is about building software products. When the company went public earlier this year, that Dell recognizes that Pivotal works better as an independent entity. “From the time Dell acquired EMC, Michael was clear with me: You run the company. I’m just here to help. Dell is our largest shareholder, but we run independently. There have been opportunities to test that [since the acquisition] and it has held true,” Mee said at the time. Virtustream could also be a key piece providing a link to run traditional enterprise applications on multi-tenant clouds. EMC bought this company , then later spun it out as a of EMC and VMware later that year. The company provides another link between applications like SAP that once only ran on prem. Surely it had to take all the pieces to get the ones it wanted most. It might have been a big price to pay for transformation, especially since you could argue that some of the pieces were probably past their freshness dates (although even older products bring with them plenty of legacy licensing and maintenance revenue). Even though the long-term trend is shifting toward moving to the cloud, there will be workloads that stay on premises for some time to come. It seems that Dell is trying to position itself as the hybrid/private cloud vendor and all that entails to serve those who won’t be all cloud, all the time. Whether this strategy will work long term remains to be seen, but Dell appears to be betting the house on this approach, and today’s moves only solidified that. |
Bumblebees bearing high-tech backpacks act as a living data collection platform | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | There’s lots of research , but one of the many hard parts is keeping them in the air for any real amount of time. Why not hitch a ride on something that already flies all day? That’s the idea behind this project that that charge wirelessly and collect data on the fields they visit. A hive full of these cyber-bees could help monitor the health of a field by checking temperature and humidity, as well as watching for signs of rot or distress in the crops. A lot of this is done manually now, and of course drones are being set to work doing it, but if the bees are already there, why not get them to help out? , a tiny wafer loaded with electronics and a small battery, was designed by University of Washington engineers led by Shyam Gollakota. He’s quick to note that although the research does to a certain extent take advantage of these clumsy, fuzzy creatures, they were careful to “follow best methods for care and handling.” Part of that is minimizing the mass of the pack; other experiments have put RFID antennas and such on the backs of bees and other insects, but this is much more sophisticated. [gallery ids="1757459,1757477,1757479,1757480,1757481,1757482"] The chip has sensors and an integrated battery that lets it run for seven hours straight, yet weighs just 102 milligrams. A full-grown bumblebee, for comparison, could weigh anywhere from two to six times that. They’re strong fliers, if not graceful ones, and can carry three-quarters of their body weight in pollen and nectar when returning to the hive. So the backpack, while far from unnoticeable, is still well within their capabilities; the team checked with biologists in the know first, of course. “We showed for the first time that it’s possible to actually do all this computation and sensing using insects in lieu of drones,” . “We decided to use bumblebees because they’re large enough to carry a tiny battery that can power our system, and they return to a hive every night where we could wirelessly recharge the batteries.” The backpacks can track location passively by monitoring the varying strengths of signals from nearby antennas, up to a range of about 80 meters. The data they collect is transferred while they’re in the hive via an energy-efficient backscatter method that Gollakota has used in other projects. The applications are many and various, though obviously limited to what can be observed while the bees go about their normal business. It could even help “It would be interesting to see if the bees prefer one region of the farm and visit other areas less often,” said co-author Sawyer Fuller. “Alternatively, if you want to know what’s happening in a particular area, you could also program the backpack to say: ‘Hey bees, if you visit this location, take a temperature reading.’ ” It is of course just in prototype form right now, but one can easily imagine the tech being deployed by farmers in the near future, or perhaps in a more sinister way by three-letter agencies wanting to put a bee on the wall near important conversations. The team plans to at the ACM MobiCom conference next year. |
Here’s how Lyft envisions self-driving cars communicating with pedestrians | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | The question of how self-driving cars will interact and communicate with humans is one that has come up before, but the answer is still up in the air. Google , and earlier this year, . Now, the United States Patent Office for what it describes as an autonomous vehicle notification system. Lyft’s solution entails developing a predetermined message to display on the most visible car window. In one example, each window includes a projector, a see-through screen or another display device to communicate the message. “[…] integrating these autonomously-provided services into a mixed autonomous and human-operated environment has many challenges,” the patent filing states. “Drivers and pedestrians are accustomed to interacting in particular ways, removing a driver from some vehicles can lead to uncertainty and miscommunication.” Below, you can see how Lyft envisions communicating with other cars, bikers, as well as passengers waiting for their car to arrive. [gallery ids="1757405,1757402,1757403"] As noted, Lyft is not the only company looking at ways for their autonomous vehicles to interact with the outside world. Startup , for example, uses LED signs that use text and pictures to communicate. Meanwhile, Ford recently called for an industry standard . “We want everyone to trust self-driving vehicles — no matter if they are riders in these vehicles themselves or pedestrians, cyclists, scooter users or other drivers sharing the road,” . “Having one, universal communication interface people across geographies and age groups can understand is critical for the successful deployment of self-driving technology.” Lyft . Since then, Lyft has as well as with . Magna also invested $200 million in Lyft in exchange for an equity stake. To be clear, patents don’t always lead to product implementation. I’ve reached out to Lyft and will update this story if I hear back. |
Report: Morgan Stanley lands coveted Uber IPO role | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | Uber has reportedly picked Morgan Stanley to lead its upcoming initial public offering, news of which became public last week when the ride-hailing giant filed confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO expected in the first quarter of 2019. Uber’s choice, first reported by , comes after a months-long bidding war, of sorts, between Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. The pair of investment banks presented IPO plans to Uber this fall, in hopes of landing the top underwriting spot in what will be one of the largest stock market debuts to date. Morgan Stanley, having won the battle, can expect to receive a large portion of the fees that come with an IPO. Uber declined to comment. Morgan Stanley has not responded to a request for comment. Michael Grimes, managing director of global technology for Morgan Stanley, speaks at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2010 Uber’s pick isn’t too surprising; rumors pointing to Morgan Stanley have floated around the tech ecosystem for months. Morgan Stanley’s head of technology investment banking, Michael Grimes, the lead underwriter on Facebook’s initial public offering, resorted to gimmicks to ensure his spot in Uber’s IPO. According to , Grimes moonlighted as an Uber driver for years to demonstrate his loyalty. Both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are investors in Uber. Morgan Stanley participated in Uber’s Series G funding in 2016 and Goldman Sachs has been a backer for years, . Uber was most recently valued at $72 billion and is expected to garner a valuation as high as $120 billion upon its stock market debut. Lyft, its key competitor in the U.S., also recently . It has as the lead underwriter of its offering, per reports, which is also expected as early as Q1 2019. People familiar with the company’s IPO plans said its valuation will exceed the earlier this year. |
With Congress focused on political bias, Google’s CEO gets off easy | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | null |
Lift Aircraft’s Hexa may be your first multirotor drone ride | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | We were promised jetpacks, but let’s be honest, they’re just plain unsafe. So a nice drone ride is probably all we should reasonably expect. is the latest to make a play for the passenger multirotor market, theoretical as it is, and its craft is a sleek little thing with some interesting design choices to make it suitable for laypeople to “pilot.” The Austin-based company just took the wraps off the Hexa, the 18-rotor craft it intends to make available for short recreational flights. It just flew for the first time last month, and could be taking passengers aloft as early as next year. The Hexa is considerably more lightweight than the aircraft that seemed to be getting announced every month or two earlier this year. Lift’s focus isn’t on transport, which is a phenomenally complicated problem both in terms of regulation and engineering. Instead, it wants to simply make the experience of flying in a giant drone available for thrill-seekers with a bit of pocket money. This reduced scope means the craft can get away with being just 432 pounds and capable of 10-15 minutes of sustained flight with a single passenger. Compared with Lilium’s VTOL engines or Volocopter’s 36-foot wingspan, this thing looks like a toy. And that’s essentially what it is, for now. But there’s something to be said for proving your design in a comparatively easily accessed market and moving up, rather than trying to invent an air taxi business from scratch. “Multi-seat eVTOL air taxis, especially those that are designed to transition to wing-borne flight, are probably 10 years away and will require new regulations and significant advances in battery technology to be practical and safe. We didn’t want to wait for major technology or regulatory breakthroughs to start flying,” said CEO Matt Chasen in a news release. “We’ll be flying years before anyone else.” The Hexa is flown with a single joystick and an iPad; direct movements and attitude control are done with the former, while destination-based movement, take-off and landing take place on the latter. This way people can go from walking in the front door to flying one of these things — or rather riding in one and suggesting some directions to go — in an hour or so. It’s small enough that it doesn’t even count as a “real” aircraft; it’s a “powered ultralight,” which is a plus and a minus: no pilot’s license necessary, but you can’t go past a few hundred feet of altitude or fly over populated areas. No doubt there’s still a good deal of fun you can have flying around a sort of drone theme park, though. The whole area will have been 3D mapped prior to flight, of course. Lifting the Hexa are 18 rotors, each of which is powered by its own battery, which spreads the risk out considerably and makes it simple to swap them out. As far as safety is concerned, it can run with up to six engines down, and has pontoons in case of a water landing and an emergency parachute should the unthinkable happen. The team is looking to roll out its drone-riding experience soon, but it has yet to select its first city. Finding a good location, checking with the community, getting the proper permits — not simple. Chasen the craft is “not very loud, but they’re also not whisper-quiet, either.” I’m thinking “not very loud” is in comparison to jets — every drone I’ve ever come across, from palm-sized to cargo-bearing, has made an incredible racket, and if someone wanted to start a drone preserve next door I’d fight it tooth and nail. (Apparently Seattle is high on the list, too, so this may come to pass.) In a sense, engineering a working autonomous multirotor aircraft was the easy part of building this business. that the company has raised a “typical-size seed round,” and is preparing for a Series A — probably once it has a launch city in its sights. We’ll likely hear more at SXSW in March, where the Hexa will likely fly its first passengers. |
VRgineers looks to set a new gold standard with their $5,800 VR headset | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | Thought VR was too expensive and too bulky? Well, is here with a giant $5,800 headset to prove that you lack perspective. The Prague-based startup just showed off its latest piece of high-end VR hardware, which it will be launching at this year’s CES expo. The headset sports a 180-degree field-of-view, dual 2560 x 1440 OLED displays and a form factor that’s massive. The big focus of the revamped XTAL headset seems to be in the lenses, which have a brand new design meant to expand what users can see at full resolution inside the headset while also minimizing distortion elsewhere. The headset has integrated Leap Motion hand-tracking, is compatible with a variety of tracking systems and leans heavily on voice controls. What VRgineers has built is quite obviously professional-focused. It’s pushing industry boundaries in field-of-view and resolution. Their focus is clearly enterprise, given its $5,800 price tag. Specifically, the startup seems to be trying to capture the automotive market, where VR is actually being leaned on heavily in design and manufacturing. The high-end VR headset market is in a bit of an interesting spot right now. Oculus has seemed to hurt the rest of the market by having driven hardware margins so low in the quest to make VR more approachable. It’s difficult to fault them for wanting to recoup some of their investment in Oculus VR, but the more niche hardware players have really been usurped by a competitor that’s just operating on longer timelines. Things are looking up for more high-end-focused VR startups, though; Oculus seems to be moving in a different direction for its next PC VR hardware release. We reported last month that Oculus was looking to keep a lot of stuff the same with its next headset, possibly called the “Rift S.” This leaves some positive room for high-end VR startups to charge exorbitant amounts for their products but also deliver more niche feature sets for customers at the same time. |
Gift Guide: the 17 best board games for holiday family fun | John Biggs | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | Ah, holiday board gaming. A roaring fire. A glass of nog. And a raging debate over whether the blue guy was next to the red square or vice versa. Buying a gift for a board game fan? Just need something new to bring along to the get together? In this roundup we highlight some of what we’ve been playing lately — from the easy to the immensely complex — and give you and your family fodder for your next bout of holiday fun. Some new, some old, all great. This involves building a city using special buildings and attractions. Will your city have a power station, a noodle bar and a playground? Or will you focus on a TV station, a bakery and city hall? Think of it as a whimsical Sim City in physical form. Who do you want to be today? A giant lizard? A mech? An alien invader? With you can take over a Japanese metropolis with your giant monster and, with the right moves, take out other players with your spiky tail or teeth. A great game for middle-schoolers, it offers some of the fun of card gaming with board game play. Codenames is a wildly different experience with each new group of players. You lay out a grid of cards, each with a single word on it. You pair off two-versus-two, with one player being the clue giver, the other being the guesser. The clue giver is trying to get their guesser to pick as many of their team’s cards as they can each turn, but there’s a catch: the clue giver can only say one word per turn… and there are sudden-death cards on the board. You’re looking for single words that can connect multiple cards misleading the guesser into tapping any of the other team’s cards or, worse yet, the sudden-death killer card. Lead the guesser astray, and your team’s done for. There are all sorts of variations of Codenames at this point — including a picture-heavy Disney remix for when the littles want to join in. You pull a card. It has a seemingly random symbol on it, along with a category — like “Shoe brand,” or “Occupation,” or “Pop Star.” Look at the top cards of the other players at the table; does your symbol match anyone else’s symbol? If so, the race is on. The first one who can name something, that fits the category wins that round. It sounds simple, but it’ll leave your brain exhausted and your body sore from laughter. In this , you’re dealt a hand of assorted types of beans (some more rare than others) that you must play in the order they’re dealt. You have a limited number of fields in which to plant your beans, which you can then harvest for money. The trick of the game is that as new cards/beans are introduced, they must be planted or harvested by someone at the table for play to resume, so a big part of the game is negotiating bean trades with other players to make the most of your own hand. The player with the most money at the end of the game wins. If you enjoy haggling and negotiating (and goofy cartoon beans) this game is for you. I’ve talked about this game before on TC, but this version, in the , is one of the coolest versions. The gameplay is simple: you turn off the lights in the room and hide little elves behind tall trees. Then one player moves her candle through the forest, trying to catch the elves at play. Once all the elves are caught — or all the elves hide in one spot — you win. The best part? Fire! Given that most games are played while drinking a bottle or two of wine, is the drinking person’s board game. You and your family run a small winery in Tuscany and you have to grow your business by picking grapes, making wine and getting visitors. Another building game with a great premise. is a game about the rise of fascism. While it’s not a light-hearted game, it does teach us about the fragility of political systems and what it takes to go from a peaceable state to a fascist one overnight. Influenced by Werewolf/Mafia style games, one player is Secret Hitler and another player is a secret Nazi. Together, without telling the other players, they must work together to convert the government to fascism. It’s well worth a look if you like thinking games. Spaceteam is a cooperative game — you win, or lose, together. But just because it’s cooperative doesn’t mean it’s a calm, friendly hang. Oh, there will be yelling. Spaceteam has you working together to repair your failing spacecraft. Everyone at the table has a set of goals they need to accomplish… but everyone at the table has their own goals, too. And everyone seemingly has the wrong tools. Gather all the tools you need from other players, and that goal is complete… but everyone else needs their tools too, and with the timer counting down, you’re going to have to all go simultaneously if you’re going to survive. It’s frantic and ridiculous and is one of my absolute favorite games. This city-building game lets little ones take part in the fun and, because it is so visually arresting, it can engross you for hours. This massive box includes almost all the expansions. I cannot recommend this game more highly. This lets you play the USSR vs. the USA in a struggle for world domination. Designed to simulate the Cold War — I know, exciting! — it’s actually a truly engrossing title and well worth a look. Scythe is a sprawling game that uses cards and miniatures to describe a world of alternate reality. As a farmer in this broken world you must rebuild your armies, reclaim lost lands and start up the great gears of progress. It’s a long game — about 115 minutes — but it has gotten rave reviews. is a cooperative kids game with a twist. One player sees a maze while other player cannot. The players work together to move through the maze to the treasure, encouraging communications and interaction that online games lack. offers all the complexity of Risk with even more complexity! In each game the board and pieces themselves change, allowing you to create long stretches of gameplay that promise repeat bouts. While old-fashioned Risk is a still a classic, this amazing game is a great expansion to that military world. is a board game with multiple playthrough scenarios. Players get to choose if they play as humans or zombies. If you’re on the human team, you get to pick a hero card before the game starts. You then move around the board to solve the scenario — for instance, you can be defending a manor, escaping a location and more. Zombies will get in the way and you’ll have to find the best weapon to get rid of them. If your friends and family take board gaming , consider Gloomhaven. It’s a good bit more intense (and, at $140+, more expensive) than anything listed above, but it’s one of the most popular games of the year for a reason. A ready-to-play dungeon crawler in a box, it’s got thousands of cards, dozens of playable classes and nearly 100 playable scenarios. You’ll want to lock in a group of friends who can meet up regularly to play this one before diving in — but if you can do that, you’re in for something special. is like a trading card game (think Magic: The Gathering) but also quite different. If you hate buying card packs to build the best deck ever, Hero Realms is for you — everything is already in the box. Each player starts with just a handful of cards and slowly builds a deck by acquiring cards from the central pile. After that, it’s a matter of combining the effects of multiple cards to attack your opponent and destroy their heroes. |
Tencent left out as China approves the release of 80 new video games | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 29 | has been excluded from the first batch of video game license approvals issued by the state-run government since March. China regulators approved Saturday the released of 80 online video games after a months-long freeze, . None of the approved titles listed on the approval list were from Tencent Holdings, the world’s largest gaming company. Licenses are usually granted on a first come, first serve basis in order of when studios file their applications, several game developers told TechCrunch. There are at least 7,000 titles on the waiting list, among which only 3,000 may receive official licenses in 2019, citing experts. Given the small chance of making it to the first batch, it’s unsurprising the country’s two largest game publishers Tencent and NetEase were absent. The controlled and gradual unfreezing process is in line with a While the Chinese gaming regulator is trying its best to greenlight titles as soon as possible, there is a huge number of applications in the pipeline, the official said. Without licenses, studios cannot legally monetize their titles in China. The hiatus in approval has slashed earnings in the world’s largest gaming market, which posted a 5.4 percent year-over-year growth in the first half of 2018, the slowest rate in the last 10 years, according to a by Beijing-based research firm GPC and China’s official gaming association CNG. Tencent is best known as the company behind WeChat, a popular messaging platform in China. But much of its revenue comes from gaming. Even with a recent decline in gaming revenue, the company has a thriving business that is majority owner of several companies, including Activision, Grinding Gears Games, Riot and Supercell. In 2012, the company took a in Epic Games, maker of Fortnite. Tencent also has alliances or publishing deals with other video gaming companies such as Square Enix, makers of Tomb Raider. The ban on new video game titles in China has affected . The company reported revenue from gaming fell 4 percent in the third quarter due to the prolonged freeze on licenses. At the time, Tencent claimed it had 15 games with monetization approval in its pipeline. To combat pressure in its consumer-facing gaming business, the Chinese giant launched a to focus more on enterprise-related initiatives such as cloud services and maps. Founder and CEO Pony Ma said at the time the strategic repositioning would prepare Tencent for the next 20 years of operation. “In the second stage, we aspire to enable our partners in different industries to better connect with consumers via an expanding, open and connected ecosystem,” stated Ma. China tightened restrictions in 2018 to combat games that are such as those that make children addicted or near-sighted. This means studios, regardless of size, need to weigh new guidelines in their production and user interaction. Tencent placed its own restrictions on gaming in what appeared to be an attempt to assuage regulators. The company has expanded its , an effort aimed at curbing use of young players, and placed limits on daily play. |
FlixBus is testing VR on certain routes to Las Vegas | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 29 | , the low-cost tech-forward bus service out of Europe that launched in the U.S. this year, has added a VR experience to some long-distance routes to and from Las Vegas. For now, the FlixBus VR feature, which includes about 50 virtual reality games and travel experiences, is limited to routes from Tucson, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego. It will run for three months. Travelers who reserve a panoramic seat on these routes will get the VR experience for free. Once on board, passengers will receive a VR headset loaded with content. The Pico Goblin 2 headsets are from Pico Interactive. Inflight VR provides the content and software updates of the VR platform. Inflight VR has experience with offering a platform to people who are traveling. The company already provides the platform for airlines and airport lounges. This VR experiment matches the company’s tech-forward and youthful approach to bus travel. competes with traditional bus company Greyhound with fares between U.S. cities as low as $4.99. However, it has a different business model that is more comparable to ride-hailing company Uber. FlixBus, which now operates in 28 countries, manages the ticketing, customer service, network planning, marketing and sale of its product. The driving is left to local partners, which get to keep a percentage of the ticket receipts. These local bus partners manage the daily operations of the brightly painted FlixBuses, which are outfitted with free Wi-Fi, power outlets at every seat and complimentary onboard entertainment portal. The company launched in the U.S. in May, starting with routes across California, Arizona and Nevada. |
Crawling from the wreckage | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 29 | — but especially in the digital media business of 2018. Probably the most high-profile flame-out this year was at Mic, which ahead of an acquisition by Bustle. Mic had raised , with major media organizations like Time Warner and Bertelsmann writing checks for . But Mic’s issues were just the capstone to a long year of shutdowns and layoffs. Among the headlines: It may not be entirely fair to group these stories together — some companies likely failed because of specific management or business issues, while others fell victim to broader shifts and still others may bounce back. But collectively, they paint a picture of an industry under intense pressure. Peter Csathy, an industry veteran and , has just published a book, about the changes in the media landscape. In an interview with TechCrunch, Csathy argued that it’s become a best-of-times, worst-of-times world. The worst-of-times side seems obvious — the companies that are struggling due to the “devastation of certain business models,” particularly reliance on big platforms like Facebook, and on an online ad business that’s currently “under tremendous pressure.” At the same time, he said, “The best of times are the companies like Netflix, the Amazons, the Apples — some of these major new tech-driven media companies.” Of course, Amazon and Apple make most of their money outside the media business, leaving . But even there, Csathy predicted that in 2019, “Netflix will be challenged like never before” as it tries to compete with a vast array of new streaming services, many of them created by the same companies that have been selling content to Netflix. A remote control is seen being held in front of a television running the Netflix application on October 25, 2017. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images) “Ultimately, the question becomes whether Netflix can prove long-term that it is more than a ‘House of Cards,’” he added via email. And what about companies that aren’t already big, dominant players — the entrepreneurs who want to build the next Netflix or the next BuzzFeed? It won’t be easy, particularly when it comes to convincing venture capitalists to come on-board. Still, there were some digital media startups that successfully raised funding in 2018, like and . And New York-based startup studio Betaworks recently focused on “synthetic media,” which partner Matt Hartman explained is an area taking advantage of advances in graphics and artificial intelligence. This could include companies fighting against misleading, manufactured news stories and videos (“The need for deep fake detection is growing”), but also the ones trying to create new kinds of content, like “virtual” characters such as . More broadly, Hartman suggested that business models in the media world are changing, particularly as publishers experiment with paywalls and also . Lil Miquela “I think that next year, we’re going to see a lot of experiments — skinny bundles, thick bundles, companies you wouldn’t expect to come together saying, ‘These things work together,'” he said. And even if many of these experiments fail, Hartman suggested that they’re pushing things in the right direction: “The last 10 years have been about building companies that have turned out to be harvesting our attention. I think what we’re really excited about is companies that treat their users more humanely. How do we align the incentives for the companies that are entertaining us and educating us and informing us, but also being respectful of our time and our attention?” Csathy made a similar point, saying, “These new companies that are ad-driven have no choice but to reinvent their business models. [Otherwise] they’ll be lost in the shuffle, because the monetization just isn’t there.” Does that mean that as a reader and a viewer, you’re going to keep hitting paywalls everywhere? It will probably become increasingly common (New York magazine, for one, ), but CEO Sachin Kamdar suggested that subscriptions won’t solve things on their own. “The best publishers are probably going to have five or six revenue streams,” Kamdar said. “It’s not just going to be one.” As the CEO of an analytics company that sells its products to publishers (as well as marketers), Kamdar has a vested interest in the continued health of the media business. He worried that in the industry’s “echo chamber,” publishers may simply follow the latest trend, but he warned, “Just because everybody else goes that direction doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you.” The key, he suggested, is “figuring out the existential thing — who you are as a publisher.” So he’s hoping they move on from “a very short-term view” of chasing the latest platforms and sources of traffic: “Now, I think, people are finally coming to the conclusion that sustainability needs to be a priority.” And despite the current business climate, Kamdar said there’s a straightforward reason for optimism. “More time is being spent reading things and watching things,” he said. “You take the long-term picture, there’s a big opportunity to figure out what is happening with that, where they’re going, how you can capture those audiences.” |
Chinese scientist who allegedly created the first genetically engineered babies is being detained | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 12 | 29 | The Chinese scientist who shocked the world with claims of creating the first genetically engineered babies is being detained in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, . He Jiankui, a Chinese research scientist at the Southern University of Science and Technology and an entrepreneur , made headlines and generated controversy . Now it appears that the government has also put He and his family under a form of house arrest. He Jiankui who shocked the science world by announcing he created the world’s first genetically edited babies had been missing since a November conference in Hong Kong. found him under house arrest at a dorm at his university in Shenzhen. — Paul Mozur (@paulmozur) He is apparently under the supervision of armed guards and is staying at a housing facility typically reserved for visiting professors on the campus of the university where he performed his research. Hotel staff and Liu Chaoyu, the co-founder alongside Dr. He of a genomics startup, Vienomics, confirmed the identity of the professor, whose whereabouts had been unknown since a public appearance in late November, where Dr. He defended his use of the CRISPR gene-editing technology. According to the Times report, Dr. He is allowed to make phone calls and send emails. Executives at Vienomics have spoken to the scientist about company matters but could not confirm his whereabouts when questioned by reporters from the Times. The Southern University of Science and Technology, based in Shenzhen, has denied the reporting around Dr. He’s whereabouts and fate, telling the Times, “Right now nobody’s information is accurate, only the official channels are.” Meanwhile, the official channels are staying silent. Reporters found security personnel blocking access to the residence where Dr. He is reportedly staying and others denying access to the former offices Dr. He used to conduct his research. The scientist’s name and biography remains on a board listing staff in the university’s biology department. He first announced the results of his experiments at the , a Summit convened to determine how and under what conditions it would be acceptable to create genetically engineered children. Almost immediately after reporting his findings, He was met with condemnation. , David Baltimore, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist (and co-chair of the conference) said, “I don’t think it has been a transparent process,” Baltimore said. “We’ve only found out about it after it’s happened and the children are born. I personally don’t think it was medically necessary… I think there has been a failure of self-regulation by the scientific community because of a lack of transparency,” he added. Another scientist who organized the conference, University of Wisconsin Bioethicist Alta Charo, said the treatments were performed under false pretenses. “The patients were given a consent form that falsely stated this was an AIDS vaccine trial and which conflated research with therapy by claiming they were ‘likely’ to benefit,” Charo said. “In fact, there is not only very little chance these babies would be in need of a benefit, given their low risk, but there is no way to evaluate if this indeed conferred any benefit.” According to the Times report, the university had advised its staff that they are prohibited from talking to the media about Dr. He’s research. |
BMW’s premium ride-hailing service is now live in China | Rita Liao | 2,018 | 12 | 16 | BMW has joined a handful of automakers to compete with transportation upstart Didi Chuxing, which . Last Friday, the German luxury carmaker launched a premium ride-hailing service in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan Province with over 14 million people. The new offer is part of BMW’s that kicked off an with a local partner last December. The new ride-hailing venture manages a crew of trained drivers to chauffer riders in a fleet of 200 BMW 5 Series, out of which half are plug-in-hybrid, according to the company. “We are excited to offer our new premium ride-hailing service in Chengdu, one of the largest ride-hailing hubs in the world embracing mobility solutions for a sustainable urban future,” said Peter Schwarzenbauer, a member of BMW AG’s board of management, in a . ReachNow trips appear to be pricier than those on Didi’s “luxury” feature — which is currently only available in China’s top-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou — that also deploys BMW Series 5 and the likes of Mercedes-Benz E-Class and Audi A6. A 23-kilometer ride in Chengdu, for instance, costs 468 yuan or $68 at 3 p.m. on Monday. That’s about $3 per kilometer. By comparison, a trip of similar distance in Shenzhen via Didi Luxury costs 210 yuan, or $30, at a rate of $1.3 per kilometer on a Monday afternoon. BMW’s new move comes shortly after it became the first global carmaker to nab China’s ride-hailing operating license in late November, and at a time when the country’s biggest player, Didi, faces public and government backlashes following two China’s transportation rules stipulate that drivers must hold two certificates — one for themselves and one for their vehicles — to be eligible to take passenger requests on ride-hailing apps. That turned a lot of part-time drivers away as they either don’t want to invest the time and money preparing for exams or scrap their passenger cars after eight years. To cope with regulatory changes, Didi has introduced to help drivers obtain the desired licenses. The mobility giant has also partnered with carmakers to for on-demand rides, although that process had started before the passenger deaths. Like BMW, China’s old-fashioned carmakers also have their sights set on the car-hailing market. Among them are Volkswagen’s local partner and Geely, which |
Citi slashes sales outlook for iPhone XS Max by nearly half | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 29 | Citi Research has joined a growing list of analysts to lower first-quarter production estimates for Apple’s iPhones amid weakening demand for the smartphones. Citi Research analyst William Yang cut the overall iPhone shipment forecast by 5 million, to 45 million for the quarter, . That’s a sting that falls in line with others such as influential TF International Securities Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who delivered a less than stellar iPhone forecast earlier this month. It’s Yang’s outlook for the 6.5-inch iPhone XS Max that is particularly gloomy. In a research note to clients, Yang slashed the shipment forecast for the iPhone XS Max by 48 percent for the first quarter of 2019. The cut in Citi’s forecasts is driven by the firm’s view that “2018 iPhone is entering a destocking phase, which does not bode well for the supply chain,” Yang wrote. Two weeks ago, Kuo predicted that will likely between 5 to 10 percent lower than 2018. He also lowered first-quarter shipment forecasts by 20 percent. |
Virtual reality gaming and the pursuit of ‘flow state’ | Maggie Lane | 2,018 | 12 | 16 | Gameplay in RaveRunner |
Original Content podcast: Netflix’s ‘Mowgli’ offers a darker take on Kipling’s ‘Jungle Book’ | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 16 | At first, “Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle” might seem like an afterthought — or maybe a failed exercise in franchise-building. This new take on the story of Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book” comes just two years after Disney’s version at the worldwide box office. Plus, it seemed a little strange for director Andy Serkis to say he’d respect — this is, after all, a talking animal story. And didn’t exactly suggest that it had much confidence in the film. But as we argue in the latest episode of , “Mowgli” is actually a lot more interesting than the Disney film. It certainly has its flaws, including a rushed ending, but the increased darkness and maturity is surprisingly effective, giving real excitement and suspense to the action. And thanks to Serkis’ background in performance capture (he played Gollum in Lord of the Rings and Caesar in the new Planet of the Apes films), the animals turn out to be the real highlight. Each of them seems to be animated by their actor’s personality — for example, Benedict Cumberbatch brings a sense of sly menace to the tiger Shere Khan — and the relationship between Mowgli (Rohan Chand) and Bagheera (Christian Bale) ends up being the heart of the movie. Before our review, we also cover the latest streaming headlines, namely and . You can listen in the player below, or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can . (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!) |
3D-printed heads let hackers – and cops – unlock your phone | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 12 | 16 | There’s a lot you can make with a 3D printer: , , — even . You can even 3D-print a life-size replica of a human head — and not just for Hollywood. Forbes reporter Thomas Brewster commissioned a 3D-printed model of his own head to on a range of phones — four Android models and an iPhone X. Bad news if you’re an Android user: only the iPhone X defended against the attack. Gone, it seems, are the days of the trusty passcode, which many still find cumbersome, fiddly and inconvenient — especially when you unlock your phone dozens of times a day. Phone makers are taking to the more convenient unlock methods. Even if Google’s latest Pixel 3 shunned facial recognition, many Android models — including popular Samsung devices — are relying more on your facial biometrics. In its latest models, Apple effectively in favor of its newer Face ID. But that poses a problem for your data if a mere 3D-printed model can trick your phone into giving up your secrets. That makes life much easier for hackers, who have no rulebook to go from. But what about the police or the feds, who do? It’s no secret that biometrics — your fingerprints and your face — aren’t protected under the Fifth Amendment. That means police can’t compel you to give up your passcode, but they can forcibly depress your fingerprint to unlock your phone, or hold it to your face while you’re looking at it. And the police know it — it happens than you might realize. But there’s also little in the way of stopping police from 3D-printing or replicating a set of biometrics to break into a phone. “Legally, it’s no different from using fingerprints to unlock a device,” said Orin Kerr, professor at USC Gould School of Law, in an email. “The government needs to get the biometric unlocking information somehow,” by either the finger pattern shape or the head shape, he said. Although a warrant “wouldn’t necessarily be a requirement” to get the biometric data, one would be needed to use the data to unlock a device, he said. Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Project On Government Oversight, said it was doable but isn’t the most practical or cost-effective way for cops to get access to phone data. “A situation where you couldn’t get the actual person but could use a 3D print model may exist,” he said. “I think the big threat is that a system where anyone — cops or criminals — can get into your phone by holding your face up to it is a system with serious security limits.” The FBI alone has thousands of devices in its custody — even after admitting the number of encrypted devices is . With the ubiquitous nature of surveillance, now even more and , it’s easier than ever for police to obtain our biometric data as we go about our everyday lives. Those cheering on the “death of the password” might want to think again. They’re still the only thing that’s keeping your data safe from the law. |
Ten pieces of friendly VC advice for when someone wants to buy your company | David Frankel | 2,018 | 12 | 16 | I’ve been fortunate to have been part of half a dozen exits this year, and have seen the process work smoothly, and, other times, like a roller coaster, with only the most tenuous connection to the track. Here are 10 bits of advice I’ve distilled from these experiences in the event someone makes you an offer for your startup. The first thing you need to understand is why the acquiring company wants your startup. Do you have a strategic product or technology, a unique team or a sizable revenue run rate? Strategic acquirers, like Google and Facebook, likely want you for your tech, team or sometimes even your user traction. Financial acquirers, like PE firms, care a great deal more about revenue and growth. The motivations of the buyers will likely be the single-biggest influencer of the multiple offered. It’s also essential to talk price early on. It can be somewhat awkward for less experienced founders to propose a rich valuation for their company, but it’s a critical step toward assessing the seriousness of the discussion. Otherwise, it’s far too easy for an acquirer to put your company through a distracting process for what amounts to an underwhelming offer, or worse, a ploy to learn more about your strategy and product roadmap. Going through an M&A process is the single most distracting thing a founder can do to his or her company. If executed poorly, the process can terminally damage the company. I’d strongly advise founders to consider these three points before making a decision: As soon as you attract interest from an acquirer, start socializing the idea that most M&A deals fall apart — because they do. This is important for two reasons. First, your executive team will likely start counting their potential gains, and they just may let KPIs key to running the business slip. If the deal fails to close, the senior team will be dejected, demotivated and you may start to hear some mutinous noises. This attitude quickly percolates through the team and can be deadly for the culture. What was supposed to be your moment of triumph can quickly turn into a catastrophe for team morale. This is typically the toughest part of the M&A process. You need the exec team to execute to close a deal, but you’re running into some of the deepest recesses of human nature, too. Recognize the fact that managing internal expectations is as important as managing the external process. Assuming you’re selling your company from a position of strength, make sure you have enough capital so that you don’t lose leverage due to a balance sheet lacking cash. I’ve seen too many companies start M&A discussions and take their foot off the gas in the business, only to see the metrics drop and runway shorten, allowing the acquirer to play hardball. In an ideal scenario, you want at least nine months of cash in the bank. If you get serious inbound interest, or if you’re at the point where you want to sell your company, hire a banker. Your VCs should be able to introduce you to a few strong firms. Acquisition negotiations are high stakes, and while bankers are expensive, they can help avoid costly rookie mistakes. They also can classically and plausibly play the bad cop to your good cop, which also can contribute positively to your post-merger relations. My only caveat is that bankers have a playbook and tend not to get creative enough. You can still be additive in helping fill the funnel of potential acquirers, especially if you’ve had communication with unlikely acquirers in the past. The hardest bit of advice is also the most valuable. Get a second bidder ASAP. It’s Negotiation 101, but without a credible threat of a competitive bid, it is all too easy to be dragged along. Hopefully, you’ve been talking with other companies in your space as you’ve been building your startup. Now is the time to call your point of contact and warn them that a deal is going down, and if they want in, they need to move quickly. Until you’re in a position of formal exclusivity, keep talking with potential acquirers. Don’t be afraid to add new suitors late in the game. You’d be amazed at how much info spreads through M&A back channels and you may not even be aware of rivalries that can be extremely useful to your pursuit. Even when you’re far down the road with an acquirer, if they know you have a fallback plan in mind it can provide valuable leverage as you negotiate key terms. The valuation may be set, but the amount paid upfront versus earnouts, the lock-up period for employees and a multitude of other details can be negotiated more favorably if you have a real alternative. Of course, nothing provides a better alternative than your simply having a growing and profitable business! Founders can raise shockingly large sums of money with pitch decks and spreadsheets, but when it comes time to sell your startup for a large sum, the buyer is going to want to get access to documentation, sometimes down to engineering meeting minutes. Financial records, forward-looking models, audit records and any other spreadsheet will be scrutinized. Large acquirers will even want to look at information like HR policies, pay scales and other human resources minutiae. As negotiations progress, you’ll be expected to share almost every detail with the buyer, so start pulling this information together sooner rather than later. One CEO said that during the peak of diligence, there were more people from the acquirer in his office than employees. Remember to treat your CFO and General Counsel well — chances are high that they get very little rest during this process. Founders are in a tough situation in that they’re starving for advice, but they should avoid the temptation to share info about negotiations with those who don’t have alignment. For instance, a small shareholder on the cap table is more likely to blab to the press than a board member whose incentives are the same as yours. We’ve seen deals scuttled because word leaked and the acquirer got cold feet. Loose lips sink startups. Leaks are annoying and preventable, but if they do happen, try using them as leverage. If the press reports that you’ve been acquired, and you haven’t been, and also haven’t entered a period of exclusivity, try to ensure that other potential bidders take notice. If you’ve been having trouble drumming up interest with potential bidders, a report from Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal or TechCrunch can spark interest in the way a simple email won’t. There’s a disconnect between how founders perceive a $500 million acquisition and how a giant like Google does. For the founder, this is a life-changing moment, the fruition of a decade of work, a testament to their team’s efforts. For the corp dev person at Google, it’s Tuesday. This reality means that your deal may get dropped as all hands rush to get a higher-priority, multi-billion dollar transaction over the finish line. It can be terrifying for founders to have what were productive talks go radio silent, but it happens more often than you think. A good banker should be able to back channel and read the tea leaves better than you can. It’s their day job, not yours. No amount of advice can prepare you for the M&A process, but remember that this could be one of the highest-quality problems you’re likely to experience as a founder. Focus on execution, but feel good about achieving a milestone many entrepreneurs will never experience! |
HQ Trivia and Vine co-founder Colin Kroll found dead of suspected overdose | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 12 | 16 | Colin Kroll, the 34-year-old co-founder and CEO of the HQ Trivia app, has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his apartment, TechCrunch has confirmed. A spokesman for the NYPD told us that a female called 911 for a wellness check on Kroll’s apartment and he was found dead inside at 08:00 hours today. The police department said the investigation is ongoing but added that the cause of death is “allegedly a drug overdose”. “We’re still waiting on the ME’s report to confirm that,” he added. The story was reported earlier by — which cites a police source saying cocaine and heroin were believed to be involved. In a brief statement, HQ said: “We learned today of the passing of our friend and founder, Colin Kroll, and it’s with deep sadness that we say goodbye. Our thoughts go out to his family, friends and loved ones during this incredibly difficult time.” Tonight at 6pm pacific, HQ Trivia’s app will broadcast a memorial led by host Scott Rogowsky. There’ll be no game or push notifications sent, but people can open the app then for a moment of remembrance. Kroll was only named CEO of the HQ Trivia mobile game show app , replacing fellow co-founder Rus Yusupov who moved over to serve as chief creative officer. Prior to taking the CEO role Kroll served as HQ’s CTO. He co-founded the startup in 2015, a few months after — the Twitter-owned short video format startup which got closed down in . It’s not clear who will take over the CEO role for HQ Trivia at this stage but Yusupov looks a likely candidate, at least in the interim. In recent months the startup has been beta testing a follow up mobile game show, called HQ Words. Its original trivia format show airs twice per day and awards winners for successfully answering 12 questions. The app debuted last August and was a viral success. But the question hanging over HQ Trivia and its co-founders has increasingly been how to sustain an early winning streak, once the novelty of the original show ran its course. As we , HQ Trivia’s ranking in the app store has been steadily decreasing in recent months. Kroll started his career as a software engineer at Right Media, which went on to be acquired by Yahoo in 2006. From then until 2011, he led the engineering team in Yahoo’s search and advertising tech group before joining luxury travel site Jetsetter as VP of Product — where he went on to be promoted to CTO. In 2012 he left to start Vine with co-founders Dominik Hofmann and Yusopov. So sad to hear about the passing of my friend and co-founder Colin Kroll. My thoughts & prayers go out to his loved ones. I will forever remember him for his kind soul and big heart. He made the world and internet a better place. Rest in peace, brother. — Rus (@rus) |
Epic sheathes Infinity Blade after Fortnite fan backlash | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 12 | 16 | Epic, the maker of the insanely popular, cross-platform third-person shooter online game Fortnite, has ‘fessed up to a gameplay misstep when it dropped a super powerful new weapon into the battle royale arena earlier this month — triggering a major fan backlash. Complaints boiled down to it being unfair for the overpowered weapon to exist in standard game modes, given the massive advantage bestowed on whoever happened to be lucky enough to find it. Earlier this month Epic had trailed the forthcoming Infinity Blade as “a weapon fit for a king”. Coming soon… a weapon fit for a King 🗡👑 — Fortnite (@FortniteGame) It went on to unleash the super-powered weapon, on , shortly after releasing a — so presumably it had been intending to increase Fortnite fans’ gaming itch. Instead it managed to drastically upset the balance of play. Without adequate counter weapons/strategies to prevail against the weapon Fortnite fans were rightly mad as hell. But on Friday, three days after launching the blade, Epic pulled the “overpowered” weapon from the game — admitting it had failed to provide “good counters”, and was “re-evaluating our approach to Mythic items”. Heya folks, We messed up and rolled out the Infinity Blade overpowered / without good counters, especially in the end game. The Infinity Blade has been Vaulted and we are re-evaluating our approach to Mythic items. Thanks for calling us out on this! — Fortnite (@FortniteGame) Turns out even and tens of millions of obsessively engaged fans can’t shield a games maker against making some piss-poor gameplay decisions. A few days earlier Epic had posted a saying it wanted to provide “more context on item philosophy”, and trailing “upcoming changes to the Blade” — such as removing the ability of gamers to build and harvest when wielding the Blade so as to add some risk to holding it — so it was still hoping to win fans over at that point. And indeed appeared to be doubling down on its mythic items push. Then it also wrote that its intention with adding a mythic tier of items to Fortnite is to provide “new and flavorful ways to interact with the map and generally shake up normal play across default modes”. Which is of course another way of saying it doesn’t want its highly engaged fanbase to get bored and stop pouring cash into its coffers. However Epic clearly failed to build in the necessary balance into the Infinity Blade from the start. So pulling the blade was the right move, and Fortnite fans should be happy it’s realized it needs to rethink and factor in their concerns. It’s not clear whether Epic’s re-evaluation will result in mythic items being ditched entirely. Although, with the right balancing characteristics — such as being time-limited and/or locked to certain game modes — there could still be a place for a little epic chaos in Fortnite to further up the fun. Just don’t go doing anything too crazy, alright? |
In the winds of crypto winter | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 12 | 16 | Well, it was surreal while it lasted, by which I mean the 2017-18 cryptocurrency bubble. For a while there, Coinbase was #1 in the App Store, Bitcoin was above $10K, and there were more notional crypto zillionaires out there than you could shake a Merkle tree at. Those were the crazy days. Now, though, a rude awakening has come. Now Bitcoin is down to $3200 and counting, other cryptocurrencies are down well over 90%, and worst of all, none of the billions of dollars which poured into cryptocurrencies during the bubble have led to anything even remotely like a killer app. Instead the crypto space remains a giant casino of penny stocks, with little to no utility outside of financial speculation. Don’t kid yourself — this is . Yes, this cryptocurrency downturn is totally like the dot-com crash — if half the dot-com bubble had consisted of shares in companies with no web site; Internet growth had been flat in 2000; and no ordinary people had ever used Amazon, eBay, or Hotmail. — Jon Evans (@rezendi) What comes next? Not much, at least not soon. I am sorry to report that we have entered the , as the estimable Michael Casey puts it, and, like that in Game of Thrones, it’s likely to be a long one. Herein please find your guide to the icy landscape ahead, and some predictions of what we’ll find there: We’re going to see sizable numbers of both cryptocurrencies, and the businesses built on them, simply . In fact we’re seeing that already: Steemit has laid off 70% of its staff, and even mighty Consensys has cut 13%. Of the tracked by CoinMarketCap, hundreds upon hundreds will wither into disuse until their liquidity turns to ice and their price to zero. Meanwhile, many who run their own blockchains will find themselves increasingly vulnerable to 51% attacks. In the winter, only the strong survive; the weak are culled. We’ll also see more . The schism within a schism which has marked Bitcoin Cash of late is only the beginning. A rising tide has room for many ships, but they’ll have to fight to survive this ebb. Which blockchain will become the default for smart contracts — Ethereum, EOS, or Tezos? It’s hard to see all three remaining relevant. (My money’s on the first and last.) Which will be the privacy-preserving cryptocurrency: Monero, ZCash, or an upgraded Bitcoin? Here it’s easier to see room for all three, but it’s by no means guaranteed. Meanwhile, as the winter leads to widespread losses, regulators will grow ever more intrusive, trying to minimize or stop future losses due to fraud or negligence. We’ll see more regulatory tightening, more fines, more bans, and, I predict, at least one case of by a major player in the cryptocurrency world. Will it be Tether? Will it be an exchange? Who can say? But I’d be extremely surprised if that didn’t happen. Let’s look to the brighter side. I predict we’ll also see two welcome new interesting developments; at least one for cryptocurrencies in the developing world, and at least one more from a major tech player. (Facebook would be a pretty good bet, but it’s not the only one.) These will not lead to a massive upswing in the whole space though. Which is good, because the way all cryptocurrencies trade in lockstep is one of the most compelling proofs that they’re not currently not even close to a real market. That said, , because traders love volatility — but exchanges will shrink their short-term aspirations as their fees plateau and/or decrease. What’s more, trading will increasingly focus on a smaller number of cryptocurrencies with real tech/biz differentiation, eg ZCash, Monero, Tezos, and Binance Coin. (Say what you like about Binance — I don’t like them much either — but their token, unlike almost all tokens, has an actual business model.) While this all happens we’ll see , as a “flight to quality” continues; clearly, if only one cryptocurrency were to survive, it would be that one. Meanwhile, its hashrate will continue to decrease, which is good for the world, as that means less electricity consumption. Businesses will , because if you want replicated write-once-read-many databases whose contents are cryptographically signed, it’s easier to just … use replicated write-once-read-many databases whose contents are cryptographically signed, rather than a spectacularly inefficient blockchain. What makes blockchains interesting is their permissionlessness. Conversely, until/unless a dapp actually takes off, which seems unlikely in the near future. I know this sounds harsh, and technically I’m a fan of Ethereum — my own pet crypto projects are built on it — but its value proposition is built around dapps, and no dapp hits means no value. Unlikely, but not impossible; we’re seeing green shoots of on-chain security tokens, the most likely near-term prospect for actual meaningful usage of Ethereum smart contracts. I predict that at some point during the crypto winter some bright startup will make its own equity, and its own cap table, into an on-chain Ethereum security token. Technically, the crypto winter will consist of a lot of grotty, important work being done underneath the snowbanks: infrastructure, scaling, privacy, usability, identity, etcetera. I predict that and hesitant: it’s essentially a whole new consensus algorithm, and one which substantially more complex (and therefore with a broader attack surface) than Proof-of-Work. I also predict that even the most interesting and useful dapps (eg FOAM, Grid+, and Augur) will see slow if any growth until their fundamental usability issues are solved. I do think that will happen — that a de facto, painful, hard-to-use but viable , especially digital nomads, will arise. This will include a “sovereign identity” protocol, a social network, a decentralized exchange which includes peer-to-peer fiat-to-crypto, data storage, maybe even email — all decentralized, all relatively hard to use, but adopted by a tiny hardcore minority. I furthermore predict that this suite will be roughly evenly split between “built on Ethereum” and “built on Blockstack.” I also believe there’ll be a great deal of technically fascinating cross-chain (eg Cosmos, Polkadot) and second-layer or off-chain (eg Lightning, Plasma, Celer) work done, laying the groundwork for future connectivity and scalability. This will happen along with decentralized work which is not actually crypto-related, eg Scuttlebutt and IPFS, and that which is only tangentially related, eg Blockstack. In general there will be now that empty prose is no longer rewarded by lucrative ICOs. And, my final prediction: cryptocurrencies will become seen as a weird alternative space for the 1% of hardcore traders, believers and techies, like Linux desktop users … until we finally emerge from the crypto winter. When will that happen? Not next year, and probably not the year after that. What will cause that emergence to happen? Here’s my most outré prediction of all: something entirely new, something so that we can hardly even imagine it right now. |
Alibaba-backed Hellobike bags new funds as it marches into ride-hailing | Rita Liao | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | 2018 has been a rough year for China’s bike-sharing giants: Alibaba-backed Ofo as it fought with a severe cash crunch; Tencent-backed Mobike put the brakes on expansion after it was . But one newcomer is pedaling against the wind. Hellobike, currently the country’s third-largest bike-sharing app, according to , announced this week that it raised “billions of yuan” ($1 = 6.88 yuan) in a new round. The company declined to reveal details on the funding amount and use of the proceeds when inquired by TechCrunch. Leading the round were Ant Financial, the financial affiliate of Alibaba and maker behind digital wallet Alipay, and Primavera Capital, a Chinese investment firm that’s backed other mobility startups, including electric automaker Xpeng and car-trading platform Souche. The fledgling startup also The Information reported in November. The fresh capital arrived about a year after it from investors, including Ant Financial. As China’s bicycle giants burn through billions of dollars to tout subsidized rides, they’ve gotten caught up in financial troubles. Ten months after Ofo , the startup is . Meanwhile, Mobike is a Meituan executive recently said. It’s interesting to note that while both Ofo and Hellobike fall under the Alibaba camp, they began with different geographic targets. By May, only 5 percent of Hellobike’s users were in China’s Tier 1 cities, while that ratio was over 30 percent for both Mobike and Ofo, a by Trustdata shows. This small-town strategy gives Hellobike an edge. As the bike-sharing markets in China’s major cities become crowded, operators began turning to lower-tier cities in 2017, from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology points out. The new contender is still dwarfed by its larger competitors in terms of user number. Ofo and Mobike command 43 million and 38 million unique monthly mobile installs, respectively, while Hellobike stands at 8 million, according to Hellobike’s ambition doesn’t stop at two-wheelers. In September, it rebranded its Chinese name to HelloTransTech to signify an extension into other transportation means. Aside from bikes, the startup also offers shared electric bikes, ride-hailing and carpooling, a category that became much contested following high-profile passenger murders on Didi Chuxing. In May and August, separately when they used the Hitch service on Didi, China’s biggest ride-hailing platform that . The incidents sparked a huge public and , forcing Didi to suspend its carpooling service up to this day. But this week, its newly minted rival Hellobike decides to forge ahead with a campaign to recruit carpooling drivers. Time will tell whether the latecomer can grapple with heightened security measures and fading customer confidence in riding with strangers. |
TechCrunch’s Favorite Things of 2018 | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | 2018! We did it! Way to go, Earth! As we do each year, the TechCrunch Staff — our writers, our illustrators, our editors and more — have gathered together and come up with a mega list of our favorite things of 2018. “Things” here is intentionally defined rather loosely. “Things” here can be a book, or a game, or a concept, or a thought, or an album, or anything else. It can be something that popped up for the first time in 2018, or it can be something we’ve had for a while but found a new appreciation for this year. We tried to limit it to things you, too, might be able to enjoy (so no people from our respective lives, for example) — but beyond that, if it left a positive mark in our lives in 2018, it can make the list. Here goes! Google recently added a low-light photography mode to its Pixel phones, and it’s just ridiculously good. It’s one of those “Hahaha there’s no way it really works like thaaa ” features. Other phone makers will be chasing this feature in 2019. I liked my Kindle Oasis in 2017. It’s light! It’s waterproof! The battery lasts for-freakin’-ever! But the more I use it, the less certain I am that it was actually designed for human hands. The back is slippery smooth, with a weird ridge that looks like it should be easy to hold onto for extended periods of time but isn’t really. In 2018 I stuck a PopSocket on the back and it changed everything — I’m reading more often, and for much longer stretches. My Kindle has gone from something that lives on my nightstand to something that is with me. Between the light weight of the Oasis and the flexibility of the PopSocket, it’s the most comfortable reading experience I’ve ever had. I’ve been commuting more this year, with the upside being that I’m finally able to catch up on a thousand podcasts I’ve been wanting to listen to forever. My favorite right now is — it’s one that friends have been suggesting to me for , and now I’m sort of mad I didn’t start listening sooner. Each episode focuses on something that we tend to overlook; the history of the places around us, the clothes we wear, the tools we use, etc. They start most episodes with a bit of narrative, then throw you face-first into a rabbit hole. They present a little dangling thread, then spend the next 20-30 minutes tugging on it until your understanding of that thing unravels and reforms. I’m hooked. This game. Just… damn. I can’t remember the last single player game I enjoyed quite this much. It’s the first game that convinced me to pre-order all of the DLC long before I was even done with the main campaign. It’s the first game I’ve been drawn back to completing every storyline, side quest and collectible. There’s too much right about this game to fit into a little blurb like this, but above it all: that webswinging, though. Insomniac Games built a webswinging system that’s intuitive enough to immediately make sense, but complex enough that you can get more adept and precise every time you sit down to play. What could’ve been deeply frustrating instead feels very natural and, before long, wired in. Sequel please. At once an interactive storybook, a maddening logic puzzle and a beautiful game, Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn bucks pretty much every gaming trend and is a resounding success. Tasked with investigating the fates of all hands aboard the derelict Obra Dinn using an artifact that shows you the scenes of their deaths, you work your way backwards and forward through a strange, compelling story told in freeze frame, snippets of audio and your imagination. Not for quitters — this game is hard. I’ve been disappointed by modern sci-fi, fantasy and magical realism for years, and thought I’d try my luck with this newly translated novel touted as “Harry Potter meets metaphysics in backwater Russia.” A girl is approached by a mysterious stranger offering entrance to a mysterious school… but instead of magic the students seem to be having their minds systematically broken. I was very pleasantly surprised by the freshness, weirdness and intelligence of Vita Nostra, which is nothing like anything else I’ve read, and certainly not in the increasingly overcrowded YA genre, which this only barely fits into. I’d recommend this to anyone over 16 who’s okay with having their mind bent a bit. As everyone in the world fusses about the latest, largest phones, which notch is best and how to get the most out of your virtual assistant, I’m content with my years-old, pocket-sized iPhone SE, in my opinion the zenith of Apple’s design philosophy. It’s been discontinued (I suspect because it was still showing up newer models) and that’s a shame. I wish more things in the tech world worked as well and lasted as long as this phone. I belong to a group for fans of true crime podcasts who are also parents of young children. We were wondering how to indulge that interest without traumatizing our offspring and someone suggested bone-conduction headphones, which send sound vibrations through the bones of your cheeks and jaw, keeping your ears open so you remain aware of surrounding noises. I bought a pair of wireless Trekz Air and they have totally changed my life. Fine, that’s hyperbole, but I love being able to listen to things while keeping an ear out for my toddler, deliveries or traffic. Not surprisingly, the sound quality doesn’t match traditional headphones, but it’s more than clear enough for spoken words. Trekz Air are lightweight and a good option for people who find earbuds uncomfortable but don’t want to lug around over-the-ear headphones. The vibrations tickle at first, but you get used to them. Before downloading , using online recipes meant printing them out or smearing grease, flour and possible traces of salmonella on my iPhone. Paprika makes everything easier by downloading recipes, cutting out the 2,000 word essays and dozens of photos many food sites publish, and sorting ingredients and directions into organized sections. You also can keep an inventory of ingredients you already own and match that against meal or menu plans to automatically create grocery shopping lists. The iOS and Android apps cost a very reasonable $4.99. is often painful to listen to, but it is one of the most important podcasts released this year. Through interviews with survivors, their parents, advocates and law enforcement officials, Michigan Radio reporters Kate Wells and Lindsey Smith not only examine how Larry Nassar was able to get away with sexually abusing hundreds of girls and women for so many years, but also how his young victims eventually found their voices and succeeded in bringing him to justice. (For people raising kids, the “Gaslighting” and “The Parents” episodes are essential listening.) The captures many of the noises that once formed the ambient soundtrack of daily life, but are disappearing as technology advances, including typewriters, printing machines and looms. All are combined by composer Iain Chambers into a gentle medley that’s awesome for background noise if you find music too distracting while you work.
Lee, a designer, breaks down the aesthetic elements that induce feelings of contentment, wonder and glee: lush bouquets and bright colors, balloons bobbing in the air, gardens hidden in the city neighborhoods, the glow of sunlight against pale yellow walls, a silly pair of socks, the perfect harmony of a Rockettes’ kick line. Her book makes a solid argument for the link between good design and social well-being, while serving as a guide for how you can create more moments of transcendence and joy in your life. I’m more than a decade older than their target age bracket, but I loved Rookie, the online magazine for teenagers edited by Tavi Gevinson, because it was the kind of thing I longed for in high school and I was just happy it existed. It also brought exposure to an amazing group of young writers and artists, including Jenny Zhang, Hazel Cills, Petra Collins and Rachel Hodgson (to name just a very truncated list). Though the site recently announced it will stop publishing new content, this year also marked the release of Rookie on Love, an anthology of essays, interviews and comics about all kinds of love — romantic, platonic, familial, self — and heartbreak. It is just as remarkable as the Rookie Yearbook series and cements the legacy Gevinson and her colleagues built over the last seven years. Want a plant you can’t kill? Screw succulents. Get a bougainvillea instead. I bought four potted ones and they make me feel like a gardening genius. The bright pink perennial blooms also add a happy note to my balcony on cold and grey days. 2018 has been an interesting year for people living in Paris and who love bikes. In 2017, I was using Paris’ bike-sharing system (Vélib) constantly, but couldn’t anymore because the new provider made the whole system unusable. After a lot of Ofo and Mobike rides, I became frustrated with the unpredictable nature of free-floating services. Will I find a bike? Is the bike broken? And let’s be honest, those bikes tend to suck. So I switched to a VanMoof Smart X and I love this bike. It’s a solid, connected bike that doesn’t need a ton of attention. This weekend, maybe you can leave your phone in your pocket and talk with people around you. After countless examples of Facebook missteps, multiple digital well-being dashboards and many #quitfacebook hashtags, it’s time to act. If you were waiting for proof that social networks, ad companies and addictive engagement tricks were hurting your social behavior, now you have it. A tiny little red number shouldn’t stop you from engaging in an interesting conversation with your family, your neighbor, your Uber driver or the person waiting in line in front of you for a concert. I’m not perfect on this front. The goal isn’t to reach perfection — being mediocre at something is OK. But trying to talk a tiny bit more with people around you is already better than clearing your Instagram feed multiple times a day. It’s a bit of a love-hate “favorite” because my Twitter account’s noise to signal ratio has inexorably taken a (small) hit after I opened up DMs this year. But, on balance, having to tune out a bit of spam PR/worthless crypto pitches/random “suspicious” photo-messages (which are helpfully autoblocked from being displayed by Twitter anyway) has been worth it to allow some interesting new signals to filter through via direct message. Email is an alternative channel for this, of course. But the level of inbox noise makes it challenging for this type of “alien signal” to break through. Ditto LinkedIn, which also only offers the messaging feature to paying users or existing contacts. So Twitter — at least for now — offers a decent alternative where interesting strangers can whisper in your ear. There’s no predicting what might happen to the calibre and cadence of these alien signals in the future though. Much like Slack used to claim to aid productivity until it became a self-replicating, attention-sucking virus, comms technologies work until they break from overuse (and/or corporate growth targets…). My sound system stopped working this year, so I looked into getting a Sonos system. The price was initially a turn-off, but after using it for the last few months I can honestly say it’s well worth the steep price tag. The sound is stellar, but what’s more impressive was that it only took 30 minutes to set up a 5.1 surround sound system. It’s an always-on camera for my car that gives me peace of mind that no one is smashing my windows or towing my car. These transcriptions are the actual best. has become my go-to for transcribing recorded interviews. It’s a fun, pick-up-and-play kind of game that’s great for groups — even if half the group isn’t usually super into games. “God is not a contract or a guy / God is an unspecified tide” is one of the great opening lines, on-par with Patti Smith’s “Gloria” and Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms.” I don’t know how, but seven records into her solo career, the sometime New Pornographer keeps getting better. Hell-On is an intricately layered and deeply personal expression from an immensely talented singer-songwriter. If you haven’t had this spoiled yet, congrats. Turn off all internet notifications and go watch it immediately. Sorry to Bother You is such a beautiful brainfuck in ways the trailer, thankfully, doesn’t begin to approach. True, there’s all of the social commentary one would expect from the directorial debut of Coup frontman Boots Riley, but the movie explores the subjects through shockingly hilarious unexpected avenues. I’m bad at meditation. Like really, really bad. I may be the only person in the world who actually gets MORE anxious when I sit quietly with my thoughts. I’ve had mixed results with apps (Calm has been my go-to, of late), and while I initially balked at the idea of gamifying the process, I’ve actually found this wearable a useful tool in helping regain my focus, even when not wearing it. , Olivia Jaimes’ take on the octogenarian newspaper strip, feels too good for this world. Or at very least, too good for the hate-spewing comments section that follows it around on GoComics.com. You see, newspaper strips are like Ghostbusters or Star Wars. People want a fresh take on something familiar that’s somehow exactly the same as the original. Jaimes has the unenviable task of being the first woman to take on Ernie Bushmiller’s beloved strip, and some of the angrier corners of the internet have not been so kind — causing her to take on a forced anonymity. It’s not for lack of brilliance. Her take on the strip is often hilarious and frequently meta — exactly the sort of stuff we’d hope for Nancy and Sluggo. I travel a lot and do around 75 percent of my movie watching on planes. Turns out you run out of reasonable movie choices pretty fast. Thankfully, I discovered this HBO series at the beginning of a 16-hour flight back from Hong Kong and proceeded to watch the entire thing, front to back in one leg-cramping binge. It’s the only show that’s held my increasingly short attention span since last year’s Twin Peaks reunion. Sharp Objects leans less on the weird, but has enough left-field twists and turns to make it one of the most engaging series in recent memory. I’ve used for years as a window manager for when I have to drop from 2 screens to 1. I realized how important it was to me this year, when it was one of the first installs on a new Mac. I mean, I and it’s not cracked yet, but feel free to spend 3x more on Apple’s version. Michael Kupperman is known for hilarious, absurd comics such as Snake ‘n’ Bacon and Mark Twain’s Autobiography 1910-2010, but the author opens up about his own family history in this graphic memoir. His father is “quiz kid” Joel Kupperman, who became world-famous in his youth but retreated from the spotlight after adolescence. The memoir is beautifully rendered in stark black and white drawings as Kupperman tells his father’s life story in an effort to understand his own. is ostensibly a recap podcast about Friends, but you don’t have to like or know the ’90s sitcom to enjoy this. Tom Scharpling (who also hosts ) tries to run a smooth ship that seems to be coming apart right from its launch due to infighting with his engineer(s). Running jokes about music cues, sound effects bumpers and fake ads for ridiculous companies and products build throughout the series. Unlike the sprawling Best Show, each episode of MMFTF is about 15 minutes. I’m a huge fan of stand-up comedy, but no special has ever touched my heart the way that Nanette did. Hannah Gadsby reimagines what a stand-up special can be. She feeds information to the audience bite by bite, whether it’s the sad reality of art history legends or her own personal stories, all the while narrating the underlying meaning of the special. Bottom line: Is it funny? Yes. Very. Does it go beyond funny to something more meaningful? Indeed, it does, and with a combination of authenticity and grace that are rarely paired so well. If the holidays are a time for rest and reflection, heading into the new year means taking on new challenges. Red Dead Redemption 2 is great for both. It’s a laid back beautiful game that at times feels much more like a movie than a game, and yet the sheer volume of the game is most certainly a vast undertaking. It follows the story of a man, Arthur Morgan, but also the story of a time and place. Growing up, my parents’ bed was always the best bed in the house. Not only was it a giant California King (which feels like a cruise ship to a six-year-old), but it was beautiful and had the most luxurious, soft sheets. The older I get, the more I feel pushed to make my bed just as luxurious, and Brooklinen has paved the way. The mix-and-match sheet sets are adorable, and they feel amazing. Plus, they’re pretty affordable. I am what most would call a smart speaker power user. Despite living in an apartment with few distinct rooms, I’ve somehow gotten addicted and am situated with a dwelling that has twice as many smart speakers as it does doors. As such, I was super intrigued by the HomePod when it came out. I was already an Apple Music user because of the enhanced support for other devices, but I’ve really enjoyed the capabilities of the HomePod beyond its nepotistic relationship with Apple Music. The voice command isolation usurps similarly priced speakers, and the speaker is incredibly well-balanced, with solid bass and volume that fits my needs. Siri’s capabilities are getting there and hopefully Apple gets a little bit more aggressive with what bits are Siri-enabled in the next iOS release. Overall, I am still a big fan of Siri’s most custom-built hardware home. Combining home theater gear into a unified smart system is often the most frustrating tech task you can attempt. This year I picked up a Harmony Home Hub for about $50 and made everything a lot easier. The idea of controlling all of your gear with your phone is sometimes better in theory than it is in practice, but by using the IFTTT app you can create custom Google Assistant or Alexa controls for the Harmony Hub so that you can easily switch between audio and video outputs. I still keep my remotes around, but I’m able to do a good chunk of what I want with my voice. The perfect flight companion. I have spent a ton of time with VR headsets and, for the most part, it’s been time I wish I could get back. That being said, I’ve really liked traveling with Facebook’s Oculus Go headset on my last couple long-haul flights. A lack of self-awareness is something Santa can’t put under your tree, but spending 7 or 8 hours with a VR headset strapped to your face binging movies on an airplane is borderline magical if you can stomach the fact that you’ll end up being ridiculed in about a dozen tweets by the end of your flight. Friends — and regular listeners of our — know that it takes a for me to stick around for more than one season of a TV show, even a show that I’m enjoying. (There’s just so much else to watch!) But this year, I finally caught up on seasons two or three of HBO’s The Leftovers, and I can now confidently state that it’s one of the best shows ever made. Aside from maybe Twin Peaks, I can’t think of anything else that mixes goofy humor and existential despair, the surreal and the mundane, so effectively. Carrie Coon delivers an all-time great performance as Nora Durst, a woman whose entire family disappeared in the mysterious Sudden Departure, and when Justin Theroux sings “Homeward Bound,” it’s probably the most emotionally devastating karaoke performance you’ll ever see. Like everyone whose working life has moved online, my concentration has been shot to hell, which is why I’ll happily try out anything with a halfway-decent chance of making me less distractible and more productive. The Pomodoro technique (basically: you work without interruption in 25-minute intervals, then take short breaks) turns out to be less-than-ideal for covering breaking news, but it’s great for other, longer-form writing, like fiction. And while there are plenty of Pomodoro timers in the App Store, has become my favorite, thanks to its playful design, and the cheerful scolding you get when you’re tempted to break concentration by checking your phone. |
Mark Zuckerberg is ‘proud’ of how Facebook handled its scandals this year | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | After the year Mark Zuckerberg’s had, you’d think he’d struggle to appear so chipper. “I’m proud of the progress we’ve made,” he said posted on his Facebook page for everyone to see. Acknowledging that the social network played its part in the spread of hate speech, election interference and misinformation, Zuckerberg’s note seemed more upbeat about his response to the hurricane of hurt caused by the company’s attitude to world affairs and less concerned about showing contrition and empathy for the harm Facebook caused in the past year — including its inability to keep its users’ data safe and, above all else, its failure to prevent its site from being used . Zuckerberg’s tone-deaf remarks read like of patting himself on the back. But where the Facebook co-founder pledged to “focus on addressing some of the most important issues facing our community,” he conveniently ignored some of the most damaging, ongoing problems that the company has shown little desire to solve, opting instead for quick fixes or simply pretending they don’t exist. A decade ago, Facebook had moderating its entire site — some 120 million users. Now, the company spread out across the world to millions of on the site each week. Zuckerberg said the company has this year increased those working on safety to “more than 30,000 people.” That’s on top of the 33,600 full-time employees that Facebook had as of the end of September. But that’s a massive task to police Facebook’s 2.27 billion monthly active users. Those 30,000 new safety contractors equates to about one moderator for every 75,660 users. Facebook’s contractors have long complained , and that’s not even taking into account the thousands of gruesome posts — from beheadings to child abuse and exploitation — they have to review each day. Turnover is understandably high. No other social network in the world has as many users as Facebook, and it’s impossible to know what the “right number” of moderators is. But the numbers don’t add up. Facebook’s army of 30,000 safety staffers isn’t enough to combat the onslaught of vitriol and violence, let alone against an advanced adversary like that . Zuckerberg made no mention of the and that the company had to contend with this year, even if he couldn’t avoid mentioning Cambridge Analytica, the voter research firm that , just the once. Yet, Zuckerberg made no commitment to doubling down on the company’s efforts to secure the platform, despite years of . Since in August, the company hasn’t hired his replacement. All signs point to nobody taking the position at all. While many see a chief security officer as a figurehead-type position, they still provide executive-level insight into the threats they face and issues to handle — no more than ever after a string of embarrassing and damaging security incidents. Zuckerberg said that the company invests “billions of dollars in security yearly.” That may be true. But without an executive overseeing that budget, it’s not confidence-inducing knowing that there’s nobody with the years of experience needed to oversee a company’s security posture in control of where those billions go. Fake news, misinformation and is one thing, but Zuckerberg refused to acknowledge the direct impact Facebook had on Myanmar’s ethnic violence — which the United Nations is . It can’t be much of a surprise to Zuckerberg. The UN said Facebook had a in inciting genocide in the country. He faced questions directly from U.S. lawmakers earlier this year when he was . Journalists are and for reporting on the military-backed government’s activities. The Facebook boss — which human rights groups on the ground called “grossly insufficient.” Facebook said last week that it has associated with inciting violence in Myanmar, but continues to refuse setting up an office in the country — despite groups on the ground saying would be necessary to show it’s serious about the region. Zuckerberg said in his note that the company “didn’t focus as much on these issues as we needed to, but we’re now much more proactive.” “That doesn’t mean we’ll catch every bad actor or piece of bad content, or that people won’t find more examples of past mistakes before we improved our systems,” he said. Some have seen that that some of . Perhaps it’s just Zuckerberg hedging his bets as a way to indemnify his remarks from criticism when the next inevitable bad news break hits the wires. In his 1,000-word post, Zuckerberg said he was “proud” three times, he talked of the company’s “focus” four times and how much “progress” was being made five times. But there wasn’t a single “sorry” to be seen. Then again, he’s spent most of his Facebook career apologizing . Any more at this point would probably come across as trite. Zuckerberg ended on as much as a cheery note as he began, looking to the new year as an opportunity for “building community and bringing people together,” adding: “Here’s to a great new year to come.” Well, it can’t be much worse than this year. Or can it? |
null | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 12 | 11 | null |
Samsara banks $100M at a $3.6B valuation for its internet-connected sensors | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | Sensor data platform Samsara this morning that it had closed a new round of funding from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst that values the startup at $3.6 billion. The news was first reported by , which spotted a filing with the state of Delaware on December 21 disclosing Samsara’s intent to raise a $100 million round at more than double the valuation it garnered upon its this March. “Our growth comes from bringing transformational new technologies to solve the problems of operational businesses, a massive segment of the economy that has long been underserved by the technology industry,” wrote Kiren Sekar, Samsara’s vice president of marketing and products, in the funding announcement. “Today, the advent of inexpensive sensors, high-bandwidth wireless connectivity, smartphones, and cloud computing enable these businesses to fully reap the benefits of 21st century technology.” Founded in 2015, Samsara supports the transportation, logistics, construction, food production, energy and manufacturing industries with its internet-connected sensor systems, which helps businesses collect data and derive insights to improve the efficiency of physical operations. The company’s co-founders are Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket, who previously launched Meraki, an enterprise Wi-Fi startup in an all-cash $1.2 billion deal in 2012. Samsara’s latest financing brings the company’s total raised to $230 million. According to , Andreessen Howoritz and General Catalyst are the only two private investors in the company, with Marc Andreessen and Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst representing the venture capital firms as lead investors on several Samsara deals. San Francisco-based Samsara says revenue grew 250 percent in 2018 as its customer base swelled to 5,000. As for how it will deploy the new capital, the company plans to hire 1,000 employees, double down on AI and computer vision technology and open its first East Coast office in Atlanta. The startup has yet to spend a dime of its last financing round, evidence it, like many other venture-funded startups, is pulling in capital before a and makes it increasingly difficult to raise hefty sums at impressive valuations. “While the company already had a healthy balance sheet – we hadn’t dipped into our previous round of funding – the new capital enables us to accelerate long-term product investments and expand into new markets while continuing to maintain a strong balance sheet over the long term,” wrote Sekar. |
A year’s worth of Porsche Taycans are already reserved, mostly by Tesla owners | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | Porsche’s might be the most hotly anticipated vehicle of 2019. Even Tesla owners are hooked. In a , Porsche North America president and CEO Klaus Zellmer said if everyone who has placed a deposit to pre-order the car actually buys it, the Taycan will be sold out in its first year of production. Who are these early reservation customers? According to Zellmer, more than half have not owned or do not own a Porsche. More specifically, Zellmer said these potential customers are coming from Tesla. The quote from CNET: Typically, if we look at our source of business, people coming from other brands, it’s Audi, BMW, or Mercedes. The no. 1 brand now is Tesla. That’s pretty interesting, to see that people that were curious about the Tesla for very good reasons obviously don’t stop being curious. Zellmer didn’t share any numbers or further details, however. It’s unclear how many deposits have been made or the number of Taycan vehicles Porsche will ultimately produce per year. Porsche previously planned to produce about 20,000 Taycans per year. Porsche CEO Oliver Blume told WirtschaftsWoche in November that demand for the Taycan prompted the automaker to increase production capacity without indicating by how much. The Taycan is due to launch at the end of 2019. |
‘Bird Box’ breaks a Netflix record with 45M+ people watching in its first week | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | Sandra Bullock’s star power can still sell a movie, apparently. Though reviews for the Netflix horror film “Bird Box” have been lukewarm — the movie has a respectable, but not outstanding, score of 65 percent on — it has still managed to break records for the streaming service, Netflix said this afternoon. The company in a tweet that more than 45 million Netflix accounts have now streamed “Bird Box,” which set a new record for the best-ever first week for a Netflix film. Took off my blindfold this morning to discover that 45,037,125 Netflix accounts have already watched Bird Box — best first 7 days ever for a Netflix film! — Netflix Film (@NetflixFilm) Of course, many Twitter users then proceeded to joke that means well over 45 million have actually watched the movie because of Netflix password sharing. That actually means 135,111,375 people have watched it 😂😉 — Patty (@pmcakes22) And out of those 45 million accounts, 1 billion people have seen the movie. — Malika Parker (@MalikanParker) Netflix doesn’t tend to reveal its streaming numbers for its movies or its TV shows, except in cases like this when they’re worth sharing. But for comparison’s sake, Nielsen’s third-party measurement service estimated that Netflix’s original movie “Bright” starring Will Smith saw in its first three days — less than “Stranger Things” Season 2’s first three days, which pulled in viewers. Meanwhile, “The Cloverfield Paradox,” which Netflix acquired first-run rights to from Paramount, saw 5 million viewers in its first week. “Bird Box” is doing much better. Netflix, however, has always disputed Nielsen’s figures, because they don’t count mobile devices or computers, and only measure data in the U.S. But they’re all the industry has to go on for now. As another less direct point of comparison, that its Oscar-winning film “Mudbound,” released in November 2017, had been streamed for 20 million hours. And in October, Netflix said that watched at least one of its summer rom-coms over the past few months, like “Kissing Booth” or “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.” “Bird Box’s” setting of a new Netflix streaming record is likely due to a combination of factors, none of which have much to do with it being a film, in the traditional sense. For starters, audiences seemed to like the film more than critics did, with a 74 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The film is boosted by the star talent of Sandra Bullock, who can still draw a crowd. The cast includes other known names, too, like “Get Out” star Lil Rel Howery, along with “Moonlight” stars Trevante Rhodes and John Malkovich. That's the power of Sandra, baby. — andrew sanford (@arsnford) “Bird Box” is also riding a wave of high-concept horror movies. The film has been the successful thriller “A Quiet Place,” which had monsters that hunted by sound while “Bird Box” monsters are a threat only if they’re seen — hence all the blindfolds. The film has benefited from word-of-mouth recommendations, too, including one from Stephen King who suggested horror fans ‘ bad reviews. And it has been the subject of , which made it something of a viral, cult sensation across social media. That could have prompted more people to watch just to get in on the joke. Plus, the movie is a holiday release — it dropped on Netflix on December 21 — a time when many people are off work and have the time to stream. |
Capsicum launches a beautiful daily planner for iOS | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | Calendaring and note-taking apps have never really filled the void left behind when we moved away from our old, paper-based daily planners to digital devices. But a newly launched iOS app called The idea for the app comes from U.S. software engineer Ish ShaBazz, who was featured in the 2017 documentary “App: The Human Story,” and Australian designer Heidi Helen Pilypas. Both love beautiful planners and iOS apps, so around three years ago, they decided to work on a project that has now become The app’s name refers to a bell pepper, which is why it’s in the logo. However, the name was chosen because the Latin root “capsa” means “box.” And the app uses individual boxes — components — throughout its design for things like the weather, your events, to-dos and more. There are three main use cases for As you complete your daily to-dos, you can check them off just as you could a list in Apple’s Notes. However, if you don’t get them done, they can be moved over to another day. Another section of the daily planner lets you jot down free-form notes. This can be used for journaling or just writing down other things you need to remember — like your thoughts, moods or health concerns, perhaps. The app’s center tab allows you to get a better handle on your habits. This is a particularly handy feature for anyone with a list of New Year’s resolutions in search of a tracking app. Here, you can log when you complete a habit — like working out, hydrating, reading, etc. — which you can do with a tap or a Siri Shortcut. You also can add notes to your habits and look back at patterns over time to see if you’re meeting your goals. The other main tab in the app is “Loose Leaf,” which offers a larger page than the one in the daily planner’s notes section, for writing long-form journal entries or anything else you want to remember. This can be a place for personal writing, or a place to make lists that don’t belong on a particular day — like your bucket list, travel ideas, redecorating plans or others that aren’t immediate “to-dos.” In time, the team says the Loose Leaf section will also include a sketch pad, too. can be personalized with beautiful covers, decorative tapes and headings to match your style, to make it feel more like your own notebook and not a generic app. And you can create more than one notebook in the app — in case you want to maintain separate notebooks by year or for work and personal life, for instance. The app is well-designed and feels like it fits somewhere in-between the simplicity of jotting down an item in Notepad and the structure of adding events in Calendar. That said, it’s still hard to abandon a history of notes and reminders from other apps, which makes it hard to switch. Plus, the search feature is a time travel option where you have to put in a date — which means you may not want to use it for things you need to pull up by keyword. The app provides a 14-day trial, but unlike all other subscription apps, it doesn’t immediately begin charging you when the trial ends. If you decide you want to continue with |
911 emergency services go down across the US after CenturyLink outage | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | 911 emergency services in several states across the U.S. went down after a massive outage at a CenturyLink data center. The outage began after 12pm ET on Thursday, , and caused disruption across 911 call centers through Friday. Some states saw their services restored throughout the day. CenturyLink did not say what caused the outage beyond an issue with a “network element,” but said around 11am ET on Friday that the company said that it was “ After 8pm on Friday, more than a day later, CenturyLink confirmed that “all consumer services impacted by this event, including voice and 911, have been restored.” CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the U.S., provides internet and phone backbone services to major cell carriers, including AT&T and Verizon. Data center or fiber issues can have a knock-on effect to other companies, cutting out service and causing cell site blackouts. In this case, the outage affected only cellular calls to 911, and not landline calls. Several states sent emergency alerts to residents’ cell phones warning of the outage. Who is and what does this mean? How is 911 down. I don’t need to call but this is alarming — its_lady_kc (@its_lady_kc) Among the areas affected included Seattle, Washington and Salt Lake City, Utah. Several other states, including Idaho, Oregon, Arizona and Missouri, were also affected, local news has reported. Many other police departments tweeted out alternative numbers for 911 in the event of an emergency. Police in Boston, Massachusetts tweeted that their service this morning. UPDATE: Technical issues with the 911 system, and the resulting wireless capability outages, have been resolved. Massachusetts callers may resume using 911 from their cell phones for public safety emergencies. — Mass State Police (@MassStatePolice) Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates and monitors 911 services, said the commission is investigating the outage. “When an emergency strikes, it’s critical that Americans are able to use 911 to reach those who can help,” said Pai in a statement. “The CenturyLink service outage is therefore completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are particularly troubling.” “I’ve directed the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to immediately launch an investigation into the cause and impact of this outage. This inquiry will include an examination of the effect that CenturyLink’s outage appears to have had on other providers’ 911 services,” he said. |
The Very Slow Movie Player shows a film over an entire year | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | It seems someone took literally: is a device that turns cinema into wallpaper, advancing the image by a single second every . The result is an interesting household object that makes something new of even the most familiar film. The idea occurred to designer and engineer Bryan Boyer during one of those times we all have where we are sitting at home thinking of ways to celebrate slowness. “Can a film be consumed at the speed of reading a book?” he asked himself, slowly. “Slowing things down to an extreme measure creates room for appreciation of the object… but the prolonged duration also starts to shift the relationship between object, viewer, and context. A film watched at 1/3,600th of the original speed is not a very slow movie, it’s a hazy timepiece. A Very Slow Movie Player (VSMP) doesn’t tell you the time; it helps you see yourself against the smear of time.” The Very Slow Movie Player is an e-paper display attached to a Raspberry Pi board; you load a movie onto the latter, and it processes and displays a single frame at a time, updating the screen with a new one every two and a half minutes. That adds up to 24 frames per hour, as opposed to the usual 24 frames per second — 3,600 times slower than normal viewing, and producing a (perhaps) 7-or-8,000-hour tableau you view over the course of a year or so. “It is impossible to ‘watch’ in a traditional way because it’s too slow. In a staring contest with VSMP you will always lose,” writes Boyer in a post explaining the project. “It can be noticed, glanced at, or even , but not watched.” He compares it to the work of Bill Viola, whose super-slow-motion portraits are similarly impossible to watch from start to finish (unless you’re very, very patient) and therefore exist in a sort of limbo between motion picture and still image. The image itself leaves something to be desired, of course: e-paper is essentially 1-bit color depth — black and white. So the subtleties of color you might see in any film, color or no, will be lost to dithering. The way it’s done helps highlight the contrasts and zones of a scene, though if you really want to appreciate Rear Window as cinema, you can watch it any time you like. But if you want to appreciate it as a process, as a relationship with time, as an object and image that exists in the context of the rest of the world and your life… for that, you have the Very Slow Movie Player. |
Smart speakers hit critical mass in 2018 | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | We already know Alexa had a good Christmas — the app shot to over the holidays, and the from all the new users. But Alexa, along with other smart speaker devices like Google Home, didn’t just have a good holiday — they had a great year, too. The smart speaker market reached critical mass in 2018, with around 41 percent of U.S. consumers now owning a voice-activated speaker, up from 21.5 percent in 2017. According to a series of reports from RBC Capital Markets analysts released in December, the near doubling of the adoption rate for smart speakers in the U.S. was driven by growth in both Alexa and Google Home devices, while Apple’s HomePod played only a small role. The firm found that U.S. penetration of Alexa-enabled devices reached 31 percent this year, compared with 41 percent overall for smart speakers. It also forecast that Alexa would generate $18 billion to $19 billion in total revenue by 2021 — or ~5 percent of Amazon’s revenue — through a combination of device sales, incremental voice shopping sales and other platform revenues. In the U.S., there are now more than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices installed — a key milestone for Alexa to become a “critical mass platform,” the report noted. RBC additionally called out Amazon’s progress with Alexa’s development, with launches like Alexa Guard, which and smoke detector alarms; plus new features like local voice control for when the internet is down; location-based reminders; advanced routines; email integrations; expanded calling options; and many others. Alexa’s third-party app ecosystem also grew in 2018, with 150 percent year-over-year growth in skills to reach over 60,000 total Alexa skills by year-end. That’s up from 40,000 skills in May; 25,000 in Q3 2017; and just 5,000 two years ago. Google Home also gained traction in 2018, with U.S. penetration for Google devices growing to 23 percent, up from 8 percent in 2017. Each household owns around 1.7 devices, which leads a Google Home install base of around 43 million in the U.S., and around 9 million in other Google Home markets, the forecast said. However, the report doesn’t see as much revenue coming in from Google Home over the next few years, compared with Alexa. Instead, it estimates that Google Home generated $3.4 billion in revenue this year, and will grow that to $8.2 billion by 2021. But combined with Google’s other hardware products like Pixel, Nest and Chromecast, the hardware suite will have generated approximately $8.8 billion in 2018, and will grow to $19.6 billion in 2021. This is the first year the analysts asked about Apple’s HomePod in the consumer survey, and they found its share of the U.S. smart speaker market remains small. Amazon has a 66 percent share to Google’s 29 percent. HomePod had 5 percent, it said. |
Tesla names Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Walgreens executive to board as part of SEC settlement | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | Tesla has added two independent directors to its board — Oracle founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison and Walgreens executive Kathleen Wilson-Thompson — as part of a settlement with U.S. securities regulators over CEO Elon Musk’s infamous tweets about . The pair joined the board as of December 27, Tesla said in an announcement . Kathleen Wilson-Thompson is currently executive vice president and global chief human resources officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance. She also sits on public boards at two U.S.-based manufacturing companies. The Tesla board, led by its Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, said it considered candidates with a “wide range of skill sets” from across the globe who also hold a strong personal belief in Tesla’s mission of accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy. Ellison isn’t just a Tesla “believer,” he’s also a friend and ally of Musk. Ellison came to during an analyst meeting in October and disclosed that Tesla is his second-largest investment. Ellison purchased 3 million Tesla shares earlier this year. The Oracle founder also spent $1.9 million on a microgrid energy system from Tesla in 2017 for a greenhouse farming project in Lanai, according to a regulatory filing. The farming project is part of another Ellison company called that he co-founded with friend David Agus, an author and professor of medicine at USC. Sensei is a that will focus first on developing hydroponic farms. Its first project involves building a hydroponic farm of undisclosed size on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which Ellison acquired for back in 2012. Sensei president Dan Gruneberg told TechCrunch that the farm will focus on nutrition per acre, a selling point for the fruits and vegetables it plans to sell to restaurants and retailers under the brand Sensei Farms. “In conducting a widespread search over the last few months, we sought to add independent directors with skills that would complement the current board’s experience. In Larry and Kathleen, we have added a preeminent entrepreneur and a human resources leader, both of whom have a passion for sustainable energy,” Tesla’s Board of Directors said in a prepared statement. The appointments closes a dramatic year for Tesla and Musk, who in September that included he step down as chairman of the board and pay a $20 million fine. The SEC filed a complaint earlier this year alleging that Musk lied when he tweeted on August 7 that he had “funding secured” for a private takeover of the company at $420 per share. Musk has remained CEO and still has a seat on the board. Tesla also agreed to name two independent directors to the board. Tesla paid a separate $20 million penalty. The SEC said the charge and fine against Tesla is for failing to require disclosure controls and procedures relating to Musk’s tweets. Tesla’s fulfillment of the agreement with the SEC marks the beginning of a new era of corporate governance for Tesla, which some shareholders have argued is too tightly controlled by Musk and others closely aligned to him, such as his brother Kimbal Musk. In 2017, Tesla diversified its board and added James Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc., and Linda Johnson Rice, chairman and CEO of Johnson Publishing Company. Other board members include: Robyn Denholm, who joined the board in 2014; Brad W. Buss, who has been on since 2009; Antonio Gracias; and Ira Ehrenpreis, one of longest-serving board members, who joined in 2007. Denholm was named Tesla chairman in October. |
Bradley Tusk on mobile voting, Uber’s IPO race with Lyft and the Dems taking over the House | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | Hello! Welcome back to , TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. As you know, typically, a few of us try cramming into the Equity podcast dungeon, including the nimble , the scholarly and, when we can lasso her, the razor-sharp , plus a guest from the investment world. With everyone logging valuable family time this week and wondering if it’s worth returning that sweater, we decided to do something a little different and run a special holiday episode, one that features just in conversation with , a venture capitalist, philanthropist, and, earlier in his career, a trusted aid to billionaire Michael Bloomberg, whose successful third run for mayor of New York — as first and only mayor to serve — was managed by Tusk. In fact, one of Tusk’s first roles after moving on from politics was an early advisor to Uber, which sought his know-how about both regulatory environments and upturning the status quo. Perhaps because all of these interests, Tusk has become among the country’s most , supporting — though not investing in — an app called that was first used in a small pilot project in West Virginia last spring that gave overseas citizens and members of the military the option of using it to cast ballots on their phones. Not a whole lot of attention was paid to the project at the time, though when the app was used again in 24 West Virginia counties in the mid-term elections, critics who worry about voter fraud were quick to call it a “ .” That isn’t stopping Tusk from getting behind more mobile voting efforts, which we chatted about recently for “Equity,” along with a bunch of other things, including the that Uber’s bankers have bandied about in conversations about its upcoming IPO, how important it is for Uber to beat Lyft to the public market (assuming they move forward ) and what it means for fintech startups that Democrats are in another week. We always enjoy talking with Tusk; we hope you’ll enjoy our chat, too. In the meantime, a quick reminder that after this, we’re off for two weeks, then back in full force in the middle of January. Until then, all of us wish you very happy holidays and a terrific New Year. More soon! |
Private equity buyouts have become viable exit options — even for early-stage startups | Ajay Chopra | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | About 13 years ago I faced an excruciating decision: whether to sell my company, Pinnacle Systems, to a private equity firm or to another large public company. I felt that both suitors would treat my employees well (and I negotiated hard to make sure that was the case), and both offered a good asking price well above our value on NASDAQ. After raising what at the time felt like my first child, born in my living room and nurtured into a publicly traded entity, I was ready for it to take its next step and for me to take mine. I ultimately opted for the strategic sale, but I left the process intrigued by what was already an evolving dynamic between private equity firms and tech exits. In years past, stigma often accompanied private equity sales. I know I felt that way, even under strong deal terms. Plus, private equity exits were only available to companies generating substantial annual revenues and often profits, making this exit option inaccessible for many startups. Today, private equity buyout firms can provide a solid (and on occasion excellent) exit route — as well as an , accounting for 18.5 percent of VC-backed exits in 2017. Private equity firms are investing in a broad array of technology companies, including , but also early- to mid-stage profitable and unprofitable companies that a few years ago would have been unable to secure interest from these buyout firms. In addition, the lines between venture capital and private equity are increasingly blurring, with more private equity investments in tech, and several-late stage VC firms creating large, . Further blurring the lines, some of the late-stage VC firms are taking controlling interests in startups, a strategy typically associated with private equity. Recently, one of our portfolio companies received an investment from a late-stage VC firm that acquired a majority stake by providing liquidity to some existing shareholders and investing in the company, utilizing a strategy typically associated with PE buyout firms. The rise of private equity buyouts within the tech sector presents a viable exit option for founders, given the reality that most startups won’t ultimately IPO. (According to PitchBook, only 3 percent of venture-backed companies in the last decade eventually went public.) If an IPO is not a realistic long-term option, the remaining primary exit option has typically been a sale to another company (a strategic buyer, in venture parlance). However, in the past few years, private equity firms have become aggressive buyers of private companies, sometimes bidding as high as or higher than strategic buyers. With one of my portfolio companies, a private equity buyer placed the second highest bid ahead of all but one strategic buyer and helped raise the final price from the strategic buyer just by being in the bidding process. Founders who find themselves in negotiations with strategic buyers should also reach out to PE firms . , , and ’s annual liquidity report lists other firms. Vista has been especially active, acquiring many technology companies, including Infoblox, Lithium and Marketo. Not all PE firms are the same, just like not all VCs and strategic buyers are the same. Years ago, when private equity buyouts were typically only large deals, new management teams were almost always brought in to tweak the edges of already successful companies. Today, each private equity firm has its own strategy — some only buy large profitable companies, others focus on mid-size acquisitions and some only buy early-stage (typically unprofitable) companies, which brings us to the next point. While most readers are familiar with private equity buyers at later stages, what’s new is the emergence of PE activity at early stages. These firms acquire majority stakes in startups that have only raised early-stage investments but are having trouble scaling or raising the next round. After a buyout, these private equity firms typically provide value by adding the missing elements, such as marketing or sales know-how, in order to kick-start the business and achieve scale. Their goal is to increase the value of the underlying asset by augmenting founder teams with the buyout firm’s own operational experts, sometimes combining newly acquired assets with already existing assets to create a stronger whole, or doubling-down on promising products (while shedding less promising offerings) to unlock potential. Typically, these PE firms then sell the company to another company (usually a strategic buyer) for greater value. In some cases, these early-stage PE firms sell to another PE buyout firm further up market. In some of these acquisitions, founders can maintain minority ownership in the company (though not a controlling stake), which they can carry through to their “next exit.” Unlike PE buyouts at later stages, PE buyouts at the earlier stages are not usually high-value exits; they are mostly an avenue to provide the founders some return for their hard work, rather than the disappointing returns they can expect from an or, even worse, a shutdown. If negotiated correctly, a private equity deal can give founders an opportunity to play another hand to the next exit. Few founders create companies in order to flip them. Strong entrepreneurs create companies to transform their missions into reality and positively impact the world. Steve Jobs said, “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” An acquisition — particularly to private equity — may not have been the original goal, but it may fuel the continued pursuit of the founder’s mission. Or, perhaps it will enable the pursuit of a new and worthy mission. |
This wristband detects an opiate overdose | John Biggs | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | A project by students at Carnegie Mellon could save lives. Called the , the wristband senses low blood oxygen levels and sends a text message and sounds an alarm if danger is imminent. “Imagine having a friend who is always watching for signs of overdose; someone who understands your usage pattern and knows when to contact [someone] for help and make sure you get help,” student Rashmi Kalkunte told IEEE. “That’s what the HopeBand is designed to do.” The team won third place in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Opioid Challenge at the Health 2.0 conference in September and they are planning to send the band to a needle exchange program in Pittsburgh. They hope to sell it for less than $20. Given the more than 72,000 overdose deaths in America this year, a device like this could definitely keep folks a little safer. |
Put down your phone if you want to innovate | John Biggs | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | We are living in an interstitial period. In the early 1980s we entered an era of desktop computing that culminated in the dot-com crash — a financial bubble that we bolstered with Y2K consulting fees and hardware expenditures alongside irrational exuberance over Pets.com. That last interstitial era, an era during which computers got , , and , ushered us, after a long period of boredom, into the mobile era in which we now exist. If you want to help innovate in the next decade, it’s time to admit that phones, like desktop PCs before them, are a dead-end. We create and then brush up against the edges of our creation every decade. The speed at which we improve — but not innovate — is increasing, and so the difference between a 2007 iPhone and a modern Pixel 3 is incredible. But what can the Pixel do that the original iPhone or Android phones can’t? Not much. We are limited by the use cases afforded by our current technology. In 1903, a bike was a bike and could not fly. Until the Wright Brothers and others turned forward mechanical motion into lift were we able to lift off. In 2019 a phone is a phone and cannot truly interact with us as long as it remains a separate part of our bodies. Until someone looks beyond these limitations will we be able to take flight. While I won’t posit on the future of mobile tech, I will note that until we put our phones away and look at the world anew we will do nothing of note. We can take better photos and FaceTime each other, but until we see the limitations of these technologies we will be unable to see a world outside of them. We’re heading into a new year (and a new ) and we can expect more of the same. It is safe and comfortable to remain in the screen-hand-eye nexus, creating VR devices that are essentially phones slapped to our faces and big computers that now masquerade as TVs. What, however, is the next step? Where do these devices go? How do they change? How do user interfaces compress and morph? Until we actively think about this we will remain stuck. Perhaps you are. You’d better hurry. If this period ends as swiftly and decisively as the other ones before it, the opportunity available will be limited at best. Why hasn’t VR taken off? Because it is still on the fringes, being explored by people stuck in mobile thinking. Why is machine learning and AI so slow? Because the use cases are aimed at chatbots and better customer interaction. Until we start looking beyond the black mirror (see what I did?) of our phones, innovation will fail. Every app launched, every pictured scrolled, every tap, every hunched-over moment davening to some dumb Facebook improvement is a brick in the bulwark against an unexpected and better future. So put your phone down this year and build something. Soon it might be too late. |
Venture capital, global expansion, blockchain and drones characterize African tech in 2018 | Jake Bright | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | Jake Bright is a writer, author and advisor with a focus on global business, politics, and technology. From 2017 to 2020, he was a contributing writer and advisor at TechCrunch where he published on Africa, mobility and politics. Bright helped spearhead consistent Africa coverage and co-produce the first Startup Battlefield competitions in Africa and Africa focused programming on the Disrupt San Francisco mainstage. Bright’s first book, (Macmillan 2015), forecast the rise of Africa’s venture backed startup scene. Prior to this he worked in international finance and as a speechwriter in Washington, DC. Bright continues to contribute occasional guest pieces at TechCrunch. , , that , |
Grab raises fundraising target to $5B as Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing war heats up | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 28 | Southeast Asian ride-hailing firm Grab is aiming to start the new year with a bang and an awful lot of bucks. The company, , is planning to raise as much as $5 billion from its ongoing Series H round, up from an original target of $3 billion, a source with knowledge of the plan told TechCrunch. Grab declined to comment for this story. That Series H round has been open since June. Already, it has seen participation from the likes of , , and , which have pushed it close to the original $3 billion target. Prior to raising $150 million from Yamaha, Grab said the round stood at $2.7 billion. While it is true that the company first announced that it was “on track to raise over $3 billion by the end of 2018,” it is not public knowledge that it has set its sights as high as $5 billion. Grab is already the most capitalized startup in Southeast Asia’s history, having raised around $6.8 billion from investors, . The company was last valued at $11 billion — when Toyota invested the initial $1 billion in this Series H six months ago — and it is unclear how much that valuation will increase when the round is completed. The company is also one of the widest-reaching consumer internet companies in Southeast Asia, a region of 650 million consumers. Grab claims more than 130 million downloads and more than 2.5 billion completed rides to date, while it has expanded into fintech and it is in the mold of Meituan in China. On the financial side, Grab is assumed to not yet be profitable. But it has said that it made $1 billion in revenue and that it projects that the figure will double in 2019. Buying Uber’s business made it the dominant ridesharing operator in the region — a position that saw it pay fines in and — but Uber’s exit also saw Go-Jek, a rival in Indonesia, step up and expand its business into new markets. Go-Jek — which is backed by the likes of Tencent, Meituan and Google — in August, and has recently launched in Thailand and Singapore as it bids to step into Uber’s shadow. , it certainly looks like Grab’s extension of its already-enormous Series H round is aimed at increasing its war chest as the competition intensifies in post-Uber Southeast Asia. |
Ola, Uber’s India rival, invests $100M in scooter rental startup Vogo | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | We’re familiar with Uber cozying up to scooter startups — and — but over in India, the U.S. firm’s key rival is hatching a major alliance of its own as Ola invested $100 million in scooter rental startup . Ola first invested back in August when Vogo raised an undisclosed Series A round from Ola, Matrix Partners and other investors, but now Ola is doubling down with this follow-on deal. It isn’t saying how much equity it has captured with this investment, nor the valuation that it gives Vogo, but you can well imagine it is high for a company that has only just done its Series A. As you’d expect, this is a strategic investment and it’ll mean that Vogo scooters will appear within the Ola app, from where they can be booked by the company’s 150 million registered users, “soon.” Bangalore and Hyderabad are the two cities where Vogo operates, but you’d imagine that it will lean on Ola to expand into other parts of tier-one India where Ola already has a strong presence. Ola’s money is going directly into supply, with Vogo planning to buy 100,000 more scooters for its platform. The company’s scooters, for those who don’t know them, are unlocked using a one-time password generated from the company’s Android app. Scooters are either dropped off at a designated station, or the rider specifies that they are taking a round trip and then returns it to the station where they started. Ola CEO and co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal — pictured in the top image alongside Vogo CEO and founder Anand Ayyadurai — said he hopes that the deal and integration will improve last-mile transportation options across India. A selection of screen captures from the Vogo Android app “Our investment in Vogo will help build a smart multi-modal network for first-last mile connectivity in the country. Vogo’s automated scooter-sharing platform, backed by Ola’s expertise in this space can help transform our cities. Together, we are thrilled to be at the forefront of India’s rapidly growing micro-mobility market,” he said in a prepared statement. , although that category has struggled in India as Chinese imports like Ofo have fled the country after struggling to develop a sustainable business in the country, and others outside of China. , but scooters offer a more individual approach. Uber, for its part, doesn’t offer scooters in India at this point. But with India its second-largest market — — you’d imagine that it is near the top of the company’s thoughts… although there is to deal with. |
Ford comes up with a prototype noise-cancelling kennel to shelter dogs from fireworks | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | Dogs have a much wider range of hearing than humans, and noises that don’t bother us can give them a very ruff time. Fireworks are especially tough on many pups, and also hard on owners who have to calm their panicking pets. To potentially help them, Ford has that it says was inspired by the noise-control technology introduced in its Edge SUV to soften engine and transmission noises. When microphones inside the kennel detect the sound of fireworks, a built-in audio system sends out opposing frequencies that Ford claims significantly reduces or cancels the cacophony. The kennel is also built with high-density cork to further mute outside noises. The noise-cancelling kennel is not currently for sale, but Ford says it “is the first in a series of initiatives—called interventions—that applies automotive know-how to help solve everyday problems.” You might remember, especially if you have a small child, that last year Ford developed a cot called to calm babies who only fall asleep in moving vehicles, a situation many exhausted parents (with high-mileage cars) are familiar with. The cot had small motors underneath that simulated the feel of a moving vehicle, played actual road noise and even had built-in LED lighting to mimic the glow of streetlights. At the time, Ford , but even though it went viral, Max Motor Dreams never did make it to the market. That’s not an encouraging sign for people who want to buy the noise-cancelling kennel, but in the meantime, here are some ways you can . There is also a product called the that is supposed to help alleviate anxiety in dogs, but of course results will vary from canine to canine. |
Google will make it easier for people without accounts to collaborate on G Suite documents | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | Soon it will be easier for people without Google accounts to collaborate on G Suite documents. Currently in beta, a will enable G Suite users to invite people without G Suite subscriptions or Google accounts to work on files by sending them a pin code. Using the pin code to gain access allows invitees to view, comment on, suggest edits to or directly edit Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. The owners and admins of the G Suite files monitor usage through activity logs and can revoke access at any time. According to the , admins are able to set permissions by department or domain. They also can restrict sharing outside of white-listed G Suite domains or their own organization. In order to sign up for the beta program, companies need to and select a non-G Suite domain they plan to collaborate with frequently. According to a , since intensifying their focus on enterprise customers, Google has doubled the number of organizations with a G Suite subscription to more than 4 million. But despite Google’s efforts to build its enterprise user base, G Suite hasn’t come close to supplanting Office 365 as the cloud-based productivity software of choice for companies. Office 365 made $13.8 billion in sales in 2016, versus just $1.3 billion for G Suite, according to Gartner. Google has added features to G Suite, however, to make the two competing software suites more interoperable, including that enables Google Drive users to comment on Office files, PDFs and images in the Drive preview panel without needing to convert them to Google Docs, Sheets or Slide files first, even if they don’t have Microsoft Office or Acrobat Reader. Before that, Google also released a . This may not convince Microsoft customers to switch, especially if they have been using its software for decades, but at least it will get more workers comfortable with Google’s alternatives, and may convince some companies to subscribe to G Suite for at least some employees or departments. |
This fake package covers porch thieves in glitter and fart spray | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | Having a package stolen off your front porch sucks. No matter what’s inside the box, it just feels… violating. Someone came into and took just because they could probably get away with it. And even if you go to the cops with license plates and high-res face photos, they’ll often respond with a big, apathetic shrug (particularly around Christmas when package thefts skyrocket). After having one of his own packages nabbed, engineer/YouTuber decided to take things into his own hands. He built a box that… well, it’ll make any would-be thieves think twice before hitting his house again. And probably make them have to go buy a really good vacuum. In what might be the most wonderfully over-engineered act of lighthearted retaliation to ever exist, this thing is just layer upon layer of ingenuity. It starts with a GPS tracker that lets Mark know when the box has been moved. As soon as it’s opened, a custom-built spinning tub flings ridiculously fine glitter in every direction, covering whoever opened it from head to toe (or, in many of the filmed cases, from car door to car door). Look for the slo-mo glittersplosion at around the four-minute mark — that alone is a work of art. A few seconds later comes a blast of canned fart spray. Or, I should say, the blast of canned fart spray… because it keeps coming (partly in hopes that the thief throws out the box, allowing Mark to use the GPS tracker to recover it). Oh, and the whole thing is being filmed (and uploaded online!) from basically every angle, thanks to a very carefully aligned rig of four hidden cameras. And there’s more! I don’t want to spoil it, but everything down to the tiny details of the box itself were planned out to make thieves feel a little bit more silly after the glitter settles. Now, this probably isn’t something you should try at home. Building packages that use hidden switches and circuit boards to do unexpected things when you open them seems like something that can land you on a list. But holy wow, watching it is therapeutic. Want to go deeper? His co-builder on this project, Sean Hodgins, has a . |
Equifax, Western Union, Priceline settle with New York attorney general over insecure mobile apps | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | New York’s attorney general has settled with five tech and financial giants, requiring each company to implement basic security on their mobile apps. The settlements force Credit Sesame, Equifax (yes, ), Priceline, Spark Networks and Western Union to ensure data sent between the app and their servers are encrypted. Specifically, the attorney general said their apps “could have allowed sensitive information entered by users — such as passwords, social security numbers, credit card numbers, and bank account numbers — to be intercepted by eavesdroppers employing simple and well-publicized techniques.” In other words, their mobile apps “all failed” to properly roll out and implement HTTPS, one of the barest minimum security measures in any modern app’s security. HTTPS certificates (also known as SSL/TLS certificates) encrypt data between a device, like your phone or computer, and a website or app server, ensuring any sensitive data, like credit card numbers or passwords, can’t be intercepted as it travels over the internet — whether that’s someone on the same coffee shop Wi-Fi network or your nearest federal intelligence agency. These certificates are more common than ever, not least because when they’re not incredibly cheap, — and most modern browsers these days will bluntly tell you Apps are no different, but without a green padlock in your browser window, there’s often very little to know for sure on the face of it that your data is traversing the internet securely. At least, with financial, banking and dating apps — you’d just assume, right? Bzzt, wrong. “Although each company represented to users that it used reasonable security measures to protect their information, the companies failed to sufficiently test whether their mobile apps had this vulnerability,” the office of attorney general Barbara Underwood said in a statement. “Today’s settlements require each company to implement comprehensive security programs to protect user information.” The apps were picked out after an extensive batch of app testing in an effort to find security issues before incidents happen. Underwood’s office follows in the footsteps of in recent years by the Federal Trade Commission, which brought action against several app makers — including Credit Karma and Fandango — for failing to properly implement HTTPS certificates. In taking action, the attorney general gets to keep closer tabs on the companies going forward to make sure they’re not flouting their data security responsibilities. |
As adult content ban arrives, Tumblr clarifies and refines rules | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | null |
Abacus raises $2 million to help startups and investors manage tokenized liquidity programs | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | For the crypto market to become attractive to institutional investors, companies and their investors need to ensure that tokenized securities — digital assets subject to federal security regulations — can be as easily tracked and traded and exchanged as traditional stock shares. , a young company that passed through Y Combinator this past summer, thinks its technology can make it so. According to the picture painted by Abacus founder and CEO Pradyuman Vig, Abacus can both automate compliance for tokenized security transactions and keep track of the chain of custody of private securities, making it simple for the SEC, among other parties, to audit the entire history of these securities transactions. Indeed, using the blockchain and its proprietary software, Vig says that Abacus can facilitate the issuance, administration and settlement of tokenized financial instruments on the blockchain through smart contracts that it keeps track of via an on-chain storage layer. The company’s goal, ultimately, is to make it easier to buy and sell private securities, as well as to make the process far more transparent. If it works, it could be a big deal, too. Consider that traditionally, funds and companies have experienced liquidity events either when they get acquired or sold or go public (or get liquidated). Meanwhile, because so much money has poured into the private market over the last decade, companies have pushed off all of these types of events for longer periods of time. That shift has given rise to secondary sales as we know them today, but Abacus thinks it can help usher in yet another way for startups and funds to exit their holdings: through secondary markets for tokenized securities. Right now, of course, the mere idea of a secondary market for tokenized securities feels like a very distant possibility. As TC columnist Jon Evans noted over the weekend, Bitcoin — priced at $19,000 apiece at this time last year — is now trading at $3,500, and other cryptocurrencies have cratered even more dramatically. What’s left of the crypto space right now, writes Evans, is a “ .” It could be a painfully long period before that changes, but true believers in digital assets are covering their bases in the meantime, and betting on Abacus is seemingly one way to do that. In fact, the company just closed on $2 million in funding, including $1 million from serial entrepreneur and investor Justin Kan. Other investors in the round include YC and Coinbase, which has been plain about its ambitions to some day offer crypto securities trading, and that last month took another step toward that end when it for institutional customers that allows them to direct trades between each other. Coinbase, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also among Abacus’s first “exchange” partners, or it will be, once it that will first be made to customers outside the U.S. that allows them to trade hundreds of tokens directly from their wallets. Vig says that Abacus also is working with a Chicago-based exchange called OpenFinance, which is about to . And Abacus has partnered with , a New York-based peer-to-peer trading platform. Presumably, the technology that Abacus is developing is of burgeoning interest to all of these parties, but one assumes that investors are also putting stock — no pun intended — in Vig and his co-founder, Ian Macalinao. The young software engineers originally met in 2012 through the Texas Academy of Mathematics, a college entrance residential program for gifted high school students. After they headed off to different colleges — they graduated from Purdue and the University of Texas, respectively — they came together to form , and, more recently, to create Abacus. It’s still a very small operation. The two have just two other employees as of this writing. Vig insists that Abacus doesn’t need an army of engineers, though. “We’re programmatic and automatic, so if we got a lot of interest, we could spin out new issuances pretty quickly,” he says. “It’s all API-based, so four people doesn’t seem like much but we’ve accomplished a lot.” They’re already seeing some revenue, too, they say, including from , a new, Texas-based venture capital firm focused on using blockchain technology to fund “frontier enabling” space startups by selling its own security tokens to accredited investors to fund them. (The idea is that these same investors will be able to sell their SpaceFund tokens to other investors as their value rises.) As far out as it all sounds, SpaceFund is paying Abacus a subscription fee, after paying a set-up fee. And Vig expects such fees to add up over time as it attracts more customers, even if it’s too nascent to know what to charge just yet. “We don’t have a formula yet for our SaaS Model,” says Vig. “It depends on the number of people involved in a particular offering, and how complicated compliance is.” Of course, what it really depends on is whether and when enough startups and investors gravitate toward tokenized securities. If it happens sooner rather than later, Abacus will be ready and waiting. |
How Russia’s online influence campaign engaged with millions for years | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | U.S. politics and sway public opinion were consistent and, as far as engaging with target audiences, largely successful, according to a report from Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project published today. Based on data provided to Congress by Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter, the study paints a portrait of the years-long campaign that’s less than flattering to the companies. The report, which you can read , was published today but given to some outlets over the weekend; it summarizes the work of the Internet Research Agency, Moscow’s online influence factory and troll farm. The data cover various periods for different companies, but 2016 and 2017 showed by far the most activity. If you’ve only checked into this narrative occasionally during the last couple of years, the Comprop report is a great way to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, with no “we take this very seriously” palaver interrupting the facts. If you’ve been following the story closely, the value of the report is mostly in deriving specifics and some new statistics from the data, which Oxford researchers were provided some seven months ago for analysis. The numbers, predictably, all seem to be a bit higher or more damning than those provided by the companies themselves in their voluntary reports and carefully practiced testimony. Previous estimates have focused on the rather nebulous metric of “encountering” or “seeing” IRA content put on these social metrics. This had the dual effect of increasing the affected number — to on Facebook alone — but “seeing” could easily be downplayed in importance; after all, how many things do you “see” on the internet every day? The Oxford researchers better quantify the engagement, on Facebook first, with more specific and consequential numbers. For instance, in 2016 and 2017, nearly 30 million people on Facebook Russian propaganda content, with similar numbers of likes garnered, and millions of comments generated. Note that these aren’t ads that Russian shell companies were paying to shove into your timeline — these were pages and groups with thousands of users on board who actively engaged with and spread posts, memes and disinformation on captive news sites linked to by the propaganda accounts. The content itself was, of course, carefully curated to touch on a number of divisive issues: immigration, gun control, race relations and so on. Many different groups (i.e. black Americans, conservatives, Muslims, LGBT communities) were targeted; all generated significant engagement, as this breakdown of the above stats shows: Although the targeted communities were surprisingly diverse, the intent was highly focused: stoke partisan divisions, suppress left-leaning voters and activate right-leaning ones. Black voters in particular were a popular target across all platforms, and a great deal of content was posted both to keep racial tensions high and to interfere with their actual voting. Memes were posted suggesting followers withhold their votes, or with deliberately incorrect instructions on how to vote. These efforts were among the most numerous and popular of the IRA’s campaign; it’s difficult to judge their effectiveness, but certainly they had reach. Examples of posts targeting black Americans. In a statement, Facebook said that it was cooperating with officials and that “Congress and the intelligence community are best placed to use the information we and others provide to determine the political motivations of actors like the Internet Research Agency.” It also noted that it has “made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections, strengthened our policies against voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms, and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy.” Based on the narrative thus far, one might expect that Facebook — being the focus for much of it — was the biggest platform for this propaganda, and that it would have peaked around the 2016 election, when the evident goal of helping Donald Trump get elected had been accomplished. In fact Instagram was receiving as much or more content than Facebook, and it was being engaged with on a similar scale. that around 120,000 IRA-related posts on Instagram had reached several million people in the run-up to the election. The Oxford researchers conclude, however, that 40 accounts received in total some 185 million likes and 4 million comments during the period covered by the data (2015-2017). A partial explanation for these rather high numbers may be that, also counter to the most obvious narrative, IRA posting in fact increased following the election — for all platforms, but particularly on Instagram. IRA-related Instagram posts jumped from an average of 2,611 per month in 2016 to 5,956 in 2017; note that the numbers don’t match the above table exactly because the time periods differ slightly. Twitter posts, while extremely numerous, are quite steady at just under 60,000 per month, totaling around 73 million engagements over the period studied. To be perfectly frank, this kind of voluminous bot and sock puppet activity is so commonplace on Twitter, and the company seems to have done so little to thwart it, that it hardly bears mentioning. But it was certainly there, and often reused existing bot nets that previously had chimed in on politics elsewhere and in other languages. In a statement, Twitter said that it has “made significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service, including our release of additional data in October related to previously disclosed activities to enable further independent academic research and investigation.” Google too is somewhat hard to find in the report, though not necessarily because it has a handle on Russian influence on its platforms. Oxford’s researchers complain that Google and YouTube have been not just stingy, but appear to have actively attempted to stymie analysis. Google chose to supply the Senate committee with data in a non-machine-readable format. The evidence that the IRA had bought ads on Google was provided as images of ad text and in PDF format whose pages displayed copies of information previously organized in spreadsheets. This means that Google could have provided the useable ad text and spreadsheets—in a standard machine- readable file format, such as CSV or JSON, that would be useful to data scientists—but chose to turn them into images and PDFs as if the material would all be printed out on paper. This forced the researchers to collect their own data via citations and mentions of YouTube content. As a consequence, their conclusions are limited. Generally speaking, when a tech company does this, it means that the data they could provide would tell a story they don’t want heard. For instance, one interesting point brought up by a second report , concerns the 1,108 videos uploaded by IRA-linked accounts on YouTube. These videos, a Google statement explained, “were not targeted to the U.S. or to any particular sector of the U.S. population.” In fact, but a few dozen of these videos concerned police brutality and Black Lives Matter, which as you’ll recall were among the most popular topics on the other platforms. Seems reasonable to expect that this extremely narrow targeting would have been mentioned by YouTube in some way. Unfortunately it was left to be discovered by a third party and gives one an idea of just how far a statement from the company can be trusted. (Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) In its conclusion, the Oxford researchers — Philip N. Howard, Bharath Ganesh and Dimitra Liotsiou — point out that although the Russian propaganda efforts were (and remain) disturbingly effective and well organized, the country is not alone in this. “During 2016 and 2017 we saw significant efforts made by Russia to disrupt elections around the world, but also political parties in these countries spreading disinformation domestically,” they write. “In many democracies it is not even clear that spreading computational propaganda contravenes election laws.” “It is, however, quite clear that the strategies and techniques used by government cyber troops have an impact,” the report continues, “and that their activities violate the norms of democratic practice… Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike.” Predictably, even social networks’ moderation policies became targets for propagandizing. Waiting on politicians is, as usual, something of a long shot, and the onus is squarely on the providers of social media and internet services to create an environment in which malicious actors are less likely to thrive. Specifically, this means that these companies need to embrace researchers and watchdogs in good faith instead of freezing them out in order to protect some internal process or embarrassing misstep. “Twitter used to provide researchers at major universities with access to several APIs, but has withdrawn this and provides so little information on the sampling of existing APIs that researchers increasingly question its utility for even basic social science,” the researchers point out. “Facebook provides an extremely limited API for the analysis of public pages, but no API for Instagram.” (And we’ve already heard what they think of Google’s submissions.) If the companies exposed in this report truly take these issues seriously, as they tell us time and again, perhaps they should implement some of these suggestions. |
Moonbug nabs $145M to buy up kids’ digital media brands | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | , a kid-focused media business founded by a pair of entertainment executives, has brought in a $145 million Series A investment led by The Raine Group, a merchant bank that supports technology, media and telecom efforts. Venture capital firms Felix Capital and Fertitta Capital also participated in the financing. Moonbug, headquartered in London, acquires and distributes media content made for kids. Recently, the company completed its first IP acquisition of Little Baby Bum, a children’s sing-along show popular on YouTube, Amazon and Netflix. According to a , one of the show’s videos is the 20th most popular video in YouTube history, boasting 2.1 billion views. In total, Moonbug says Little Baby Bum has clocked in 23 billion views across multiple platforms. With its Series A investment, Moonbug will amp up its M&A activity to expand its portfolio of content that “helps children build essential life skills.” Moonbug chief executive officer René Rechtman, who spent the last three years as the head of digital studios at The Walt Disney Co., says they plan to acquire eight media businesses. Rechtman and John Robson, a former senior vice president of digital distribution at Paramount Pictures and vice president of global content at HTC, launched Moonbug earlier this year. “I see an independent creator and I put them in very simple brackets: one is high viewership and engagement and one is quality of IP,” Rechtman told TechCrunch. “If they have both of those, I am very interested.” |
In emerging markets there are no copycats, just budding entrepreneurs | Federico Antoni | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | Every year I teach an MBA course at Stanford about the exciting opportunities for tech investors and entrepreneurs in developing economies. When we designed the syllabus back in 2013, Rocket Internet was still firing on all cylinders on four continents. The unapologetic machine built to copy big American internet companies created billions of dollars for the Samwer brothers and its backers. During Rocket’s golden years, the best startups in the developing economies seemed to inevitably have an original reference in Silicon Valley. Accordingly, we added a class about the opportunity of replicating business models to seize this information arbitrage. Call it the second-mover advantage. Despite my conviction about the model, the copycat word — short for replicating startups and attached to these ventures — annoyed me from the start. More than a term to describe a straightforward recipe to launch, I see it as an unconscious way to belittle an entire group of hard-charging founders and investors. Indeed, while in foreign eyes, we have been building a Mexican Kickstarter, a Middle Eastern Uber, an Indian Amazon or a Colombian Postmates, I argue visionary founders are taking a simple idea that already exists and creating new worlds. While impact is the final goal, founders can approach the journey in different ways. The most common approach in the startup world is to use the business method, or more pompously, the design thinking methodology. “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution,” mentors keep telling a succession of startup clusters in acceleration programs. The best and “leanest” way to product market fit is by starting small then keep iterating the solution until you nail it. A second way to start is favored by engineers and scientists: Take a new promising technology or a forgotten molecule, then find a big problem. Keep iterating until you find a problem worth solving, like a hammer looking for a nail. A third way is starting like painters create, building skills by copying classics, or like a new chef cooks by starting with iconic recipes: replicate a proven idea and iterate until you find traction. Until a few years ago it was ostensibly the only way to scale in developing economies. The model helped raise local capital from risk-averse investors who needed reassurance. The playbook to scale was unfolding a couple of years ahead and served as a guide to founders without previous startup experience and no local role models. The potential acquirer was identified and sometimes contacted in advance. Founders weren’t crazy and investors weren’t dumb. Photo courtesy of Flickr/A_Marga According to conventional wisdom, new ecosystems around the world grow through the following three stages, be them in developing economies or more developed countries. First, local and foreign entrepreneurs replicate successful models focused on local markets. Then as the ecosystem evolves, founders start applying existing technologies to solve local problems. Finally, as the tech space matures, new technologies begin to flourish. In my opinion, those stages never happen sequentially as stated by ecosystem observers. Successful startups that started with a foreign inspiration can outgrow the master. If they are not bought into submission by the first mover, some of the most famous copycats reinvented the original and made it better: Mercado Libre is much more relevant in the e-commerce space than eBay. Flipkart is hardly an Amazon, not to mention WeChat. These companies are in turn some of the most prolific tech innovators on the globe. Truly ecosystems evolve organically in unique ways reflecting their history, geopolitical environment, economic structure and cultural features. Recently, it’s hard to hear American observers use the word copycat to describe any American company. After all, Guilt replicated VentesPrivees and Lime, Chinese dockless bike sharing and many more examples. All American startups are treated as innovators while the rest as mere followers. Recently, Chinese or Indian startups seem to be given the benefit of the doubt regarding their originality. Is it because these regions have become more innovative? Maybe. But it’s also because these ecosystems have gained the respect of Silicon Valley. Indeed, Chinese consumer tech surpassed decisively the U.S. as the most important country in terms of investments. So here’s my humble suggestion to our wealthier and more accomplished colleagues: stop using the c-word with founders. It’s offensive. Most probably, these founders are facing more challenges to build their companies and lower odds for success that the first mover. If anything, they have more merit than the originals. As for founders, when they call you a me-too, remember all teams started somewhere, somehow. In fact, most started like Bob the Builder before turning into Einsteins. The truth is, it doesn’t matter where you start. You can start by applying a new technology or protocol. You can start with a problem you feel passionate about. You can start by replicating a business model. It doesn’t really matter if you take a big swing at the future and trust you will figure out how to make it happen. It doesn’t matter what label they use while you change the world for the better. |
Lightspeed is raising its largest China fund yet | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | Lightspeed China Partners, the China-focused affiliate of Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, has set a $360 million target for its fourth flagship venture fund, according to a filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today. If the target is reached, the fund will be Lightspeed China’s largest yet, per . Lightspeed China’s previous two funds each closed on $260 million. The VC raised $168 million for its debut fund in 2013. Lightspeed China is led by James Mi (pictured). Mi, an investor in multiple billion-dollar Chinese companies, was previously the director of corporate development at Google, where he helped lead the search giant’s investment in Baidu. He joined Lightspeed in 2008 and established the firm’s China presence in 2011. Yan Han, a long-time Lightspeed investor and a founding partner of the firm’s Chinese branch, is also listed on the filing. Lightspeed China has backed e-commerce platform Earlier this year, Lightspeed Venture Partners filed to raise a record in new capital commitments. This month, it tacked onto its consumer and enterprise investment teams, including Slack’s former head of growth and Twitter’s former vice president of global business development. Lightspeed declined to comment. |
Lawmakers push to create a three-digit suicide hotline number | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | null |
The Google Assistant can now alert you of potential flight delays | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | If you’re an experienced traveler, you know that plenty of your delays are due to your plane being stuck somewhere else or because the weather at your local or arrival airport isn’t ideal (I’m looking at you, fogged-in SFO in the morning). So you also know to check on your incoming flight, even when the airline tells you everything is fine, and the FAA’s airspace status pages. But maybe you are not a frequent flier (be glad and rejoice) or don’t care to go through that process. In that case, you’ll be happy to hear that Google today that its Assistant will soon proactively notify you on your phone when its algorithms predict that your flight will be late. This feature is rolling out now and should be available to all users in the next few weeks. It’s worth noting that flight delay predictions from Google aren’t new. It introduced its first iteration of this in January. At the time, it didn’t proactively alert you of those delays, though. You first had to search for your flight. So unless you knew this feature existed, you probably never saw it in action. Google says it mostly uses machine learning algorithms trained on historic flight data to predict delays. In addition, though, the company also clearly looks at some other information, given that it knows about delays of incoming flights, too. The airlines aren’t kidding when they tell you that you should still be at the gate at the original time, by the way. If you’re flying through a hub, they could still swap in another plane, after all. If you’re like me, though, instead of taking to the friendly skies, you will likely have to sit in Newark until well after midnight before the plane finally arrives. That’ll be right as your crew times out and with the next available reserve crew hours away. Chances are Google wouldn’t have been able to alert me of those delays, though, given that incompetence isn’t something it can predict yet, after all. |
New malware pulls its instructions from code hidden in memes posted to Twitter | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | Security researchers said they’ve found a new kind of malware that takes its instructions from code hidden in memes posted to Twitter. The malware itself is relatively underwhelming: like most primitive remote access trojans (RATs), the malware quietly infects a vulnerable computer, takes screenshots and pulls other data from the affected system and sends it back to the malware’s command and control server. What’s interesting is how the malware uses Twitter as an unwilling conduit in communicating with its malicious mothership. Trend Micro said that the malware listens for commands from a Twitter account run by the malware operator. The researchers found two tweets that used steganography to hide “/print” commands in the meme images, which told the malware to take a screenshot of an infected computer. The malware then separately obtains the address where its command and control server is located from a Pastebin post, which directs the malware where to send the screenshots — 10/10 points for creativity, that’s for sure. The researchers said that memes uploaded to the Twitter page could have included other commands, like “/processos” to retrieve a list of running apps and processes, “/clip” to steal the contents of a user’s clipboard and “/docs” to retrieve filenames from specific folders. The malware appears to have first appeared in mid-October, according to by VirusTotal, around the time was first created. But the researchers admit they don’t have all the answers, and more work needs to be done to fully understand the malware. It’s not clear where the malware came from, how it infects its victims or who’s behind it. It’s also not clear exactly what the malware is for — or its intended use in the future. The researchers also don’t know why the Pastebin post points to a local, non-internet address, suggesting it may be a proof-of-concept for future attacks. Although Twitter didn’t host any malicious content, nor could the tweets result in a malware infection, it’s an interesting (although not unique) way of using the social media site as a clever way of communicating with malware. The logic goes that in using Twitter, the malware would connect to “ ,” which is far less likely to be flagged or blocked by anti-malware software than a dodgy-looking server. After Trend Micro reported the account, Twitter pulled the account offline, suspending . It’s not the first time malware or botnet operators have used Twitter as a platform for communicating with their networks. Even , Twitter was used as a way to send commands to a botnet. And, , Android malware would communicate with a predefined Twitter account to receive commands. |
Getaround co-founder Jessica Scorpio leaves day-to-day role | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | Since launching Getaround at , the car-sharing startup has expanded to more than 90 cities and, more recently, . With the company in a good place and its co-founder and CMO Jessica Scorpio “really happy with where things are,” she told TechCrunch, it’s time for her to take some time off, leave her day-to-day role at the company and move into a role on the board of directors. In addition to serving on Getaround’s board of directors, Scorpio says she’ll join some other boards and likely do some more angel investing. Meanwhile, Getaround hired five people to join its executive team. Those roles entail a VP of People and Culture, VP of Marketing, general counsel and VP and GM of Conveyance. “Today, we are well on our way to realizing the vision that Jessica, Elliot and I set out to achieve years ago,” . “We have Jessica to thank, in large part, for how far we’ve come, and I’m excited to pass her torch to a world-class executive team.” Since Getaround’s launch in 2011, a number of competitors have entered the car rental market. , for example, lets people rent relatively new cars by the hour, while Turo offers a more Getaround-like peer-to-peer rental platform. In April, following a $92 million fundraising round earlier in the year. Still, Getaround was most attractive to SoftBank. “As we saw the space early on, we knew this would be a big market,” she said. “We took a long-term perspective in building technology that would create behavior change, while also tee-ing up the market for self-driving cars and a platform for sharing cars in that future.” As a car owner, you can list your vehicle for on-demand rentals via Getaround. After you list it, Getaround installs its Connect hardware, which allows renters to locate and unlock your car using the Getaround mobile app. For extra peace of mind for the car owner, the Connect also features GPS tracking, tamper detection and engine lock. Getaround also has deals in place with brands like Audi and Ford to further incentivize people to share their cars. In 2016, to enable people to purchase cars that are pre-installed with Getaround connectivity. Earlier this month, Getaround . Dubbed Uber Rent, the platform taps into Getaround’s existing marketplace of cars that are available for instant rentals. “I’m excited to be involved at the board level,” she said. “We have a lot of exciting plans and will continue innovating on what products we offer, going to more markets, expanding internationally and continuing value-add partnerships.” |
Twitter bug leaks phone number country codes | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | Twitter accidentally the ability to pull an account’s phone number country code and whether the account had been by Twitter. The concern here is that malicious actors could have used the security flaw to figure out in which countries accounts were based, which could have ramifications for whistleblowers or political dissidents. The issue came through one of Twitter’s for contacting the company, and the company found that a large number of inquiries through the form came from IP addresses located in China and Saudi Arabia. Twitter writes, “While we cannot confirm intent or attribution for certain, it is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors.” We’ve requested more info on why it’s suggesting that. Attribution in these situations can be murky, and naming specific countries or suggesting state actors could be involved carries heavy implications. Twitter began working on the issue on November 15th and fixed it on November 16th. Twitter tells TechCrunch that it has notified the European Union’s Data Protection Commissioner, as EU citizens may have been impacted. However, as country codes aren’t necessarily considered sensitive personal information, the leak may not trigger any GDPR enforcement or fines. Twitter tells us it has also updated the FTC and other regulatory organizations about the issue, though we’ve asked when it informed these different regulators. Twitter has directly contacted users impacted by the issue, and says full phone numbers were not leaked and users don’t have to do anything in response. Users for more info. We’ve asked how many accounts were impacted, but Twitter told us that it doesn’t have more data to share as its investigation continues. A Twitter spokesperson pointed us to a previous statement: It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease. These types of tactics have been around for far longer than Twitter has existed — they will adapt and change as the geopolitical terrain evolves worldwide and as new technologies emerge. For our part, we are committed to understanding how bad-faith actors use our services. We will continue to proactively combat nefarious attempts to undermine the integrity of Twitter, while partnering with civil society, government, our industry peers, and researchers to improve our collective understanding of coordinated attempts to interfere in the public conversation. Sloppy security on the part of tech companies can make it dangerous for political dissidents or others at odds with their governments. Twitter explains that it locks accounts if it suspects they’ve been compromised by hackers or violate “Twitter’s Rules,” which includes “unlawful use” that depends greatly on what national governments deem illegal. What’s worrisome is that attackers with IP addresses in China or Saudi Arabia might have been able to use the exploit to confirm that certain accounts belonged to users in their countries and whether they’ve been locked. That information could be used to hunt down the people who own these accounts. The company apologized, writing that “We recognize and appreciate the trust you place in us, and are committed to earning that trust every day. We are sorry this happened.” But that echoes other apologies from big tech companies that consistently ring hollow. Here, in particular, it fails to acknowledge how the leak could harm people and how it will prevent this kind of thing from happening again. With these companies judged quarterly by their user growth and business, they’re incentivized to cut corners on security, privacy and societal impact as they chase the favor of Wall Street. |
France doesn’t want to wait for European tax reform to tax tech giants | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | France’s Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire earlier today to announce that France will tax big tech companies starting on January 1st, 2019. This has been a , and it looks like France is changing the scope of the new tax. After a couple of years of negotiations at the European level, France and other European countries have failed to convince everyone that tech companies have been optimizing their tax structure for too long. The main issue is that a new tax model requires a unanimous vote — every European Union member country needs to vote for the reform. While countries with big local markets were in favor of the move, many smaller countries have yet to support the new tax. So the French government is trying something new. Le Maire thinks it’s better to start taxing tech companies in France now and find European support later. Le Maire wants to target big tech companies in particular — think Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. He thinks the new tax could represent around €500 million for 2019 alone ($565 million). And it’s true that , and have all had issues at some point. They’ve all been accused of illegal tax benefits and other tax evasion schemes. In many cases, those companies have reported ridiculously low profits in most European countries as they’ve been wiring all profits to a tax-friendly country. It’s still unclear how the French tax is going to work. But Le Maire says that France will look at advertising revenue, marketplace revenue and revenue based on personal data. |
This post may contain sensitive media | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | null |
The Mom Project, a job site for moms returning to work, nabs $8M from Initialized and more | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | If you are a mother who has taken a break from full-time employment to raise kids, you may have also experienced the challenge that is jumping back into the working world after your break. You may find you need more time flexibility; you have been out of the job market for years and so your confidence is knocked; your skills are no longer as relevant as they were before; or you just want to rethink your career; plus many employers — whether they say it or not — seem less interested in you because of all of the above, and no level of burnishing your resume on LinkedIn will help. It can be tough (and I say that from first-hand experience). Now, Chicago-based startup , a platform specifically built to help female find jobs after pausing to raise kids, has raised a little egg of its own to take on this challenge. It’s picked up a Series A of $8 million that it plans to use to bring its job marketplace to more cities — it’s currently in Chicago, Atlanta and San Francisco — and to expand the kinds of services it offers to make the challenge of juggling work and parenthood easier. The funding is being led by Grotech Ventures and Initialized Capital, with another new investor, Aspect Ventures, and previous backers Atlanta Seed Company, Engage Ventures, OCA Ventures, BBG Ventures, IrishAngels and Wintrust Financial also participating. This brings the total raised by The Mom Project to $11 million, and with 75,000 registered moms and 1,000 companies, including Procter & Gamble, BP, Miller Coors and AT&T, the startup claims it’s now the largest platform of its kind in the U.S. Allison Robinson, the founder and CEO of The Mom Project, said she came up with the idea for the startup in 2016, when she was on maternity leave from a strategy role at Pampers. “I started realising a lot about moms before I became one,” she says about her last role before striking out as an entrepreneur. “But what I hadn’t understood until I was on maternity leave myself was that your priorities can change after having a child.” (She’s pictured up above with her son.) Citing a study she’d seen in the Harvard Business Review that estimated 43 percent of skilled women exit the workforce after having children, Robinson realised there was a gap in the market for those among them who had timed out from returning to their previous roles, but still wanted to make the leap back into working at some point. And she has a point: Not only do people who decide they want to return to work face all of the usual issues of newly needing more time flexibility, wondering whether their skills are still current enough, general confidence and so on, but the average recruitment process, and job sites overall, do not really have ways to account for any of that very well. And the gap exists on the employer side of the marketplace, too. Businesses — both large corporates very much in the public eye as well as smaller businesses that are not — are rethinking how they hire and keep good people in the overall competition for talent. (Just this week, the U.K.’s said that the number of unfilled positions in the information and communication technology sector rose by 24.3 percent compared to last year in the country, a shortage that’s reflected in other markets.) Having a diverse workforce — including more women and women from different walks of life — is key not only to helping counteract that, but to contribute to better overall work culture. That’s a fact that many employers have realised independently or have simply been thrown into the spotlight unwittingly and now are trying to repair. And yet, there haven’t been many opportunities for them to pursue more diverse hiring practices. LinkedIn recently made a tiny move into exploring diversity in hiring by at least allowing recruiters to , but this is a far cry from actually addressing the specific predicaments that particular segments of the working population have, and how to help them connect better with employers who might be keen to bring more of them on through recruitment. In fact, the idea of providing improved job search for knowledge workers in specific cases is actually a very interesting one that shows there is definitely still room for innovation in the world of recruitment: for its own take on this, which is providing a better LinkedIn-style platform to connect minority university graduates with interesting job opportunities at companies keen to make their workforces more diverse. “Companies have started to realize the value in building a diverse workforce, but we still have a long way to go in achieving equal representation and opportunities,” said Julia Taxin, a partner at Grotech and new Mom Project board member. “Allison and her team have built an incredible marketplace of diverse talent for companies and I look forward to working with The Mom Project to execute on their vision of helping to close the gender gap in the workplace.” The Mom Project, Robinson said, is tackling the challenges at both ends of the spectrum. On the employer side, she said there is a lot of educating going on, talking to HR people and getting them to understand the opportunity they could unlock by hiring more parents — which tend to be almost entirely all-women, but sometimes men, too. “We want to provide more data to these companies,” she said, pointing out that it’s not just a matter of providing a job opportunity, but also giving parents options in areas like childcare, or flexible working schedules. “We want to show them ‘here is where you are doing well, and here is where you are not. Fixes don’t cost a lot of money, but a lot of companies are just not aware.” “We’ve got 75,000 women on our platform, and currently around 1,000 companies posting jobs,” she said. “The goal is to have 75,000-plus jobs. We want to make sure that all the moms signing up on the platform are getting work.” “The Mom Project is determined to create a future where women aren’t forced to choose between their families and their careers,” said Alda Leu Dennis, partner at Initialized Capital and new Mom Project board member, in a statement. “There is a huge pool of experienced talent, parents and non-parents, that is sometimes overlooked because companies haven’t created the kind of diverse, flexible workplace culture that attracts and retains them. Initialized wants to be part of making this cultural shift happen.” On the parent side, not only is it also about making the platform known to people who are considering a return to work, but it’s also about some fundamental, but very important basics, such as giving would-be jobseekers the flexibility to go to interviews. Robinson said that one campaign it’s about to launch, in partnership with Urban Sitter, is to provide free childcare credits to Mom Project jobseekers so that they can get to their interview. “Sometimes you have to go to an interview with 24 hours’ notice, and lining up a sitter can be stressful,” she said. “We want to alleviate that.” Parents also know that this isn’t just an issue for the interview: Many towns and regions have what Robinson called “childcare deserts,” where there is a scarcity of affordable options to replace the parent on a more daily basis. For now, Robinson said that the majority of jobs on the platform are focused on fixed-term employment — that is, not permanent, full-time work. This is due to a number of reasons. For example, parents coming back to working after a break may be more inclined to ease in with shorter roles and less long-term commitment. And employers are still testing out how this demographic of workers will work out, so to speak. Equally, though, we have seen a huge swing in more general employment trends, where businesses are hiring fixed-term workers rather than full-time employees to account for seasonality and to give themselves more flexibility (not to mention less liability on the benefits front). While Robinson said that the aim is definitely to bring more full-time job opportunities to the platform over time, this has nonetheless presented an interesting business opportunity to The Mom Project. The startup acts like Airbnb, Amazon and a number of other marketplaces, where it not only connects job-seekers and employers, but also then handles all the transactions around the job. When the job is fixed-term, the Mom Project essentially becomes like the job agency paying the employee, and that is how it makes a cut. And it also becomes the provider of benefits and more. In other words, while there is an immediate opportunity for The Mom Project to compete against (or at least win some business from) the likes of LinkedIn to target the specific opportunity of providing jobs for women returning to work, there is a potentially and equally big one in becoming a one-stop employment shop to handle customers’ other needs as employers or workers, providing a range of other services, from payroll through to childcare listings and more. |
Apple says iPhones remain on sale in China following court injunction | Rita Liao | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | Apple has filed an appeal to overturn a court decision that could ban iPhone sales in China, the company said on Monday, adding that all of its models remain available in its third-largest market. The American giant is locked in a legal battle in the world’s biggest smartphone market. On Monday, Qualcomm that a court in Fujian Province has granted a preliminary injunction banning the import and sales of old iPhone models in China because they violated two patents owned by the American chipmaker. The patents in question relate to features enabling consumers to edit photos and manage apps on smartphone touchscreens, according to Qualcomm. “Apple continues to benefit from our intellectual property while refusing to compensate us. These Court orders are further confirmation of the strength of Qualcomm’s vast patent portfolio,” said Don Rosenberg, executive vice president and general counsel of Qualcomm, in a statement. Apple fought back in a statement calling Qualcomm’s effort to ban its products “another desperate move by a company whose illegal practices are under investigation by regulators around the world.” It also claimed that Qualcomm is asserting three patents they had never raised before, including one which has already been invalidated. It is unclear at this point what final effects the court injunction will have on Apple’s sales in China. The case is part of an ongoing global patent dispute between Qualcomm and Apple, which saw the former the manufacturing and sale of iPhones in China over patent issues pertaining to payments last year. Qualcomm shares were up 3 percent on Monday. Apple opened down more than 2 percent before closing up 0.7 percent. its Apple price target to $200 a share from $240 a share, saying in a note to investors that while it does not expect China to ban or impose additional tariffs on Apple, “should this occur Apple has material exposure to China.” The Apple case comes as the tech giant faces intensifying competition in China, which represented of its total sales from the third quarter. The American company’s market share in China year-over-year in the second quarter as local competitors Huawei and Oppo gained more ground, according to market research firm IDC. The annual drop is due to Apple’s high prices, IDC suggests, but its name “is still very strong in China” and “the company will fare well should it release slightly cheaper options later in the year.” |
N26 launches its premium offering in the UK | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | Fintech startup recently in the U.K. with a single product offering. You could sign up to a free account that gives you free payments around the world, but no insurance and no free withdrawals in foreign currencies. The company just added to its lineup in the U.K. And N26 is choosing to focus on N26 Metal in the U.K. You can now sign up to a Metal account for £14.90 per month (€16.59). In other N26 markets, people can currently subscribe to N26 Black for €9.90 per month or N26 Metal for €16.90 per month. It’s interesting to see that N26 is using its fresh start in the U.K. to simplify its offering and target premium customers. The startup can still change its mind and launch N26 Black later down the road. Basic customers can pay anywhere in the world without any foreign fee. The company uses Mastercard’s foreign exchange rates and doesn’t add anything on top. But ATM withdrawals in a foreign currency still cost 1.7 percent of the total amount. Metal customers get the same perks in the U.K. and other European countries, such as foreign ATM withdrawals with no fee, a travel insurance package from Allianz and dedicated customer support. N26 also provides partner offerings for N26 Metal subscribers. For instance, you can work from a WeWork office for free one day per month. Deals vary from one country to another; British customers get airport lounge access thanks to . Your mileage may vary depending on your favorite airport, as LoungeKey doesn’t have a lounge in all terminals in all airports around the world. Now let’s see if N26 users outside of the U.K. will get a similar service in the future. |
Walmart partners with Rakuten to open its first e-commerce store in Japan | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | Walmart is continuing its strategy of revamping its businesses in Asia after the U.S. retail giant , where it is working with local retail giant Rakuten. when they agreed to team up on the launch of an online grocery service in Japan and the sale of e-readers, audio books and e-books from Rakuten-owned Kobo in the U.S. That e-grocery service — Rakuten Seiyu Netsuper — rolled out in October, and now the duo has launched the Walmart Rakuten Ichiba Store to help Walmart grab a slice of Japan’s e-commerce market, which is estimated to be worth ($148 billion) per year. The store, which sits on Rakuten Ichiba — Japan’s largest e-commerce store — will cover 1,200 “U.S. branded” products that include clothing, outdoor items and kids toys. Walmart will fulfill orders in the U.S. and they will be sent by air to Japan where Rakuten will use its e-commerce smarts to deliver them. There’s no word on how long the process will take, but it will include shipping cost, duties and taxes in the final price. The move is an interesting one for Walmart, which has struggled in Japan for some time. Earlier this year, that it was in the process of offloading its Seiyu GK unit, which operates its Japan-based supermarkets. A sale may not be happening (yet), but Walmart has shuttered some 100 Seiyu stores, , which shows that it isn’t performing as expected in the country. Partnering with Rakuten, the $10 billion e-commerce giant that also covers financial services, travel, mobile and more, is a smart way to take a bite out of Japan’s online market with risk or exposure. Though it does have its limits. Amazon, Walmart’s big domestic rival, is taking on Rakuten directly, by contrast, and albeit at a high cost of investment. The partnership approach isn’t new for Walmart in Asia. The partner of choice in China is JD.com, second to Alibaba, which . As part of that deal, Walmart became a retailer inside Yihaodian, thus leveraging JD’s platform and logistics know-how to generate sales in China. That relationship was deepened this year when that’s part-owned by JD — yep right, another case of online grocery in tandem with e-commerce. Elsewhere, Walmart decided to enter India this year when , a record deal for the U.S. firm. |
Google Lens arrives in iOS search app | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | Google is bringing its Lens visual search feature to the iOS Google app, giving iPhone users a new way to search the web on mobile. By tapping on the Google Lens icon, you dive straight into the camera at which point if Google recognizes something in the space that you tap on, the app will automatically populate search results for those objects. You’ve always wanted to know what type of 🐶 that is. With Google Lens in the Google app on iOS, now you can → — Google (@Google) Lens, which Google announced at its I/O conference in 2017, has been rolled out pretty slowly across the company’s suite of products, with most new features seeming to debut on the company’s Pixel phones before trickling down to other devices. Google Lens was previously available in the Google Photos app on iOS where the feature could recognize objects in images. The company has also announced that they’re bringing some updates to Lens in Google Photos, with additional language support beyond English (now, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Korean), and new ways to search images by style. |
Report: A manager at Uber’s self-driving unit warned executives about safety issues just days before fatal crash | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | Less than a week before an Uber self-driving SUV prototype struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona last March, a manager sent executives an email cautioning that its autonomous vehicle unit needed to “work on establishing a culture rooted in safety,” . Robbie Miller, then a manager in the unit’s testing operations, was preparing to leave the company when he warned that “cars are routinely in accidents resulting in damage” and backup drivers, who sit behind the wheel in self-driving cars for safety reasons, weren’t properly trained or fired even if they made repeated mistakes. In his March 13 email, Miller wrote that “the cars are routinely in accidents resulting in damage. This is usually the result of poor behavior of the operator or the AV technology. A car was damaged nearly every other day in February. We shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles. Repeated infractions for poor driving rarely results in termination. Several of the drivers appear to not have been properly vetted or trained.” Miller, who previously held positions in self-driving programs at Google and Otto, also gave a comprehensive list of suggestions he believed would reduce the likelihood of accidents. Five days later, on March 18, the Tempe collision occurred, , who was crossing a street when she was hit by the SUV. Uber immediately halted testing of its autonomous cars on public roads and reached a settlement with Herzberg’s family two weeks later. It was later that the car’s backup safety driver was watching videos on her phone when the crash occurred. The incident also raised serious questions about the safety of Uber’s self-driving technology system. Uber , but in manual mode and with new safety standards in place. Before the crash, Uber had planned to launch a limited self-driving taxi service in the suburbs of Phoenix that would let users hail autonomous cars without backup drivers. Alphabet’s Waymo, one of Uber’s main rivals in the autonomous vehicle space, , but with backup drivers. The email, obtained and , was sent to Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit and John Thomason, vice president of software, as well as five other executives and lawyers. It details several safety incidents that had occurred in the months before the fatal collision in Arizona, including one in which a prototype swerved off the road and drove on the sidewalk for several meters. Miller described delays in reviewing incident logs and wrote, “This is not how we should be operating.” During that period, Uber continued to test hundreds of self-driving vehicles on the streets of San Francisco, Pittsburgh and suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, before the program was brought to a temporary halt by the fatal accident in Tempe. Miller’s suggestions included reducing the size of Uber’s fleet of autonomous vehicles by 85 percent so the software quality team could better review safety incidents, have more than one backup driver in each prototype (Uber had previously used two backup drivers per vehicle) and allow individual employees, including engineers or operation managers, to shut down testing if they believed there were potential safety issues. “The cars are collecting more than enough data for the engineers to be aware of and solve the issues they encounter. Reducing the fleet size dramatically would not change that nor would it slow down the current rate of progress,” Miller wrote. “It would significantly reduce ATG’s likelihood of being involved in an accident. This sentiment is echoed widely throughout ATG.” The Information report says that Miller’s assertions were supported by interviews with five current and 15 former Uber employees. While Meyhofer and the other executives who were sent the email did not respond to it, Miller was told by his supervisor that the team would discuss it. The Information’s sources also said his suggestions were discussed during the internal safety review that followed the Tempe accident. TechCrunch has contacted Uber for comment. |
GoPro will move production of most US-bound cameras out of China by next summer | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | China and the United States have been , and more may come if the trade war continues to escalate, prompting some companies to move manufacturing out of China. One of the latest is GoPro, which it will move production of most U.S.-bound cameras out of China by summer 2019. Cameras bound for other countries will continue to be produced in China. GoPro’s announcement isn’t a surprise, as its chief executive officer Nick Woodman that it would be “prudent” for the company to consider moving manufacturing out of China to lower costs or cope with potential tariffs. GoPro hasn’t specified where production of U.S.-bound cameras will go, but Asian countries that have been considered as alternatives by other tech companies in the wake of the U.S.-China trade war . In a statement, GoPro chief financial officer Brian McGee said “Today’s geopolitical environment requires agility, and we’re proactively addressing tariff concerns by moving most of our U.S.-bound camera production out of China. We believe this diversified approach to production can benefit our business regardless of tariff implications.” He added that even though GoPro’s manufacturing partner provides facilities, GoPro owns its production equipment, so the company “expect[s] to make this move at a relatively low cost.” TechCrunch has contacted GoPro for more information about the move and possible destinations. |
HypeHop is a product to fix sponsored videos | John Biggs | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | I’ve been thinking hard about the concept of sponsored content — you can find some of it on TechCrunch if you look hard enough, and it appears almost everywhere else. It’s an important consideration, because as an online journalist I’ve heard everything from “How much did Apple pay you to post this?” to “How much can I pay you to ?” And I’m sick of it. Journalists afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Marketers comfort the comfortable. The only person who wins in that struggle is the guy with the biggest wallet to buy as much coverage as possible. Crypto, for all its faults, promises to change that. Now I’d like to introduce something else I built (and I never do this on TC so I think it’s pretty important and interesting). It’s called and it’s an experiment in sponsored video. Most sponsored video appears in front of your YouTube selections like a cold sore — you know it’s there, it’s unwanted and you know it will take a while for it to go away. For example, this deeply applicable ad appeared as my son was watching Nerf videos, for example, proving that algorithms aren’t always the smartest. Enough. In the current system marketers pay media platforms for their audience. The marketer gets eyeballs, the media platform gets money and the user gets bupkus. I wanted to try to change that. With a few I made something called . It basically pays you for watching videos. At this point it’s a proof-of-concept that accepts uploaded videos, a small payment for hosting, and then watches the viewer to ensure they are watching the video. “Watching the viewer?,” you ask? Sure. We’re being surveilled every day. Isn’t it time we were paid for it? Viewers currently get about 40 cents in BTC per view. I created a here to show off how it worked and preseeded some videos with BTC to test. Thus far it’s been an interesting experiment. I’d love to talk to like-minded folks about expanding this technology. I could, for example, see this as a tool to make sponsored posts more interesting to readers — who doesn’t want a few pennies for reading marketing dross — and a way to monetize many marketing tools for readers, producers and marketers. Ultimately this is a win-win-win in a win-win-lose world and it’s vitally important we look at it as a way forward in our fight against fake news and faker marketing. |
Google’s search data shows YouTube’s influence over this season’s hottest toys | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | If there was any doubt about YouTube’s power to influence children, look no further than this year’s list of the hottest holiday toys, based on Google shopping search data. According to the , at least four of the top 10 most searched toys were among those heavily featured in YouTube unboxing videos — subsequently turning them into the most in-demand and best-selling toys of the holiday season. Plus, another top toy is the JoJo Siwa Singing doll — a product from the YouTube star of the same name. Clearly, we’re long past the days where TV commercials are the ways toy makers are reaching children. Instead, they’re leveraging the power of YouTube to drive hype and interest in their products, as Google’s list and those from the major retailers themselves show. In particular, is having a great 2018 holiday season. The company, which is best known for back in the day, is today the force behind some of the most in-demand toys, like L.O.L Surprise! and Num Noms, plus top preschooler brand Little Tikes, and others. The toy maker has not one but three of its L.O.L. Surprise! toys on Google’s list this year, which the search giant points out were also all the subject of numerous YouTube unboxing videos over the holiday shopping season, . The most searched for toy — Spin Master’s Luvabella doll — was also regularly featured across YouTube, the company notes. This search data turns into real-world sales, too. Though we’ll have to wait for the holidays to wrap to get the final count, already L.O.L Surprise! toys have made their way onto , for example, and its Best Sellers. In fact, L.O.L. Surprises have claimed half the spots on as of today. (And they’ve snagged spots further down the list: L.O.L Surprise! toys are the No. 13 and No. 34 best sellers, too.) Not coincidentally, L.O.L. Surprises are the sort of toy that’s designed perfectly for the YouTube era. They’re basically made for unboxing. https://youtu.be/jWMqDM0-LNE The toys themselves are not sold in transparent packaging, but are rather hidden away inside some sort of container — a box, case or a ball, for example. The excitement for the kids comes from the unboxing process itself — only then will they see their doll and all their accompanying accessories. Sometimes there’s another step, too — like decoding secret messages on the outside of the packaging, or dunking a fizz in some water to reveal the enclosed toy. With multiple steps to even get to the toy itself, it’s ideal content for YouTube. Combined with YouTubers’ high-pitched squeals of joy as they work their way through the process, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for selling toys. Other most-searched toys from Google’s list also made an appearance on Amazon’s Top Toy list of 2018, like LEGO Friends Heartlake City Resort and the Kano Harry Potter Coding Kit, for example. Google’s list is also biased toward tech toys, with top searches for things like the DJI Tello, VTech Kidizoom Smartwatch DX, as well as the Harry Potter kit, in addition to classics from NERF and LEGO. Amazon’s best sellers include some VTech and Melissa and Doug products, but not the specific SKUs Google had picked up on. YouTube’s influence can be spotted on Walmart’s toys list, as well. In its list of , L.O.L Surprise!, Pikmi Pops, Hatchimals and Fingerlings — all of which star in dozens upon dozens of unboxing videos — make several appearances. And then, of course, there’s , which comes from one of the best-known YouTubers to date — the 7-year-old millionaire and toy unboxer supreme, Ryan of who scored . Walmart senior buyer Brad Bedwell the toy egg has been “the big winner of the season.” Walmart was pretty savvy to scoop up Ryan for . “Years ago, kids would have been glued to the TV watching the traditional channels, and now they’re watching content everywhere. They’re still watching TV, but they’re also watching it on tablets and parents’ cellphones,” Bedwell told Yahoo. “Everywhere they are, they can look at and consume content. And YouTube is now up there with the major TV channels with how many kids watch it.” |
Doom is 25 and co-creator John Romero is putting out a giant expansion for it | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | Twenty-five years ago, anyone old enough to navigate DOS was likely playing Doom every spare minute, assuming their parents weren’t around. after its release, the game’s legacy is unquestionable — but it could always use a few new levels. . They come with a silver statue of his head impaled on a spike. There’s not a lot one can say at Doom’s 25th anniversary that one couldn’t at its 20th, so I’ll spare you the big retrospective. Suffice it to say that Doom still rules, and if you’ve never played it, you’ve got a treat ahead of you. And at this point there’s enough of it to rival modern games in length and challenge. What has happened in the intervening five years is the release of… well, Doom, AKA Doom 2016. This gory, kinetic remake charmed (and tore out) the hearts of millions, reigniting interest in a franchise that had seen better days. Seeing this renewed interest, and with the 25th anniversary, approaching, co-creator John Romero decided he wanted to dive back into making maps for the game that made him. I'm excited to announce the project that I've been working on: SIGIL, an unofficial spiritual successor to The Ultimate DOOM's 4th episode! Read about it here: — 𝕵𝖔𝖍𝖓 𝕽𝖔𝖒𝖊𝖗𝖔 (@romero) “I worked on it part time during 2017 and 2018, mostly while I was on vacation or in the evenings,” Romero explained in an interview, apparently with himself, . “For me, making this whole episode was a labor of love and a reminder of all the amazing times that we had at id working on the original. I was fortunate to be a part of such a great team and a foundational game.” Sigil is a pack of nine levels that are an unofficial, but probably as official as we’re likely to get, fifth “episode” of Doom. “I wanted the levels to feel like they belong to the original game as if they were a true fifth episode,” Romero told himself. “There’s more detail in the levels than episodes 1-4, but not overly so. The boss level is terrifying. There’s a massive room in E5M6 that is the coolest room I’ve created in any map.” Many will remember the synth-metal soundtrack to the original, and to match that Romero tapped legendary metal guitarist Buckethead to contribute a song to Sigil. The catch is that the song doesn’t come with the free version of the expansion. See, Sigil will release as a megawad — a wad of .wad (“where’s all the data?”) files, the original format for Doom expansions and mods. You’ll be able to download that for free and play it on your original copy of Doom; if you don’t have one, you can buy one for $5, and should. But true Doom megafans will want to go with a boxed edition. The standard one comes with a 3.5″ floppy disk-shaped USB drive with the game on it, but the “Beast Box” has a bunch of extra gear inside the giant box: a booklet and print, an XL Sigil shirt and, most tempting of all, “a pewter statue of John Romero’s head on a spike.” This is a reference to a , but honestly would have made perfect sense anyway. “I believe the most important legacy of Doom is its community, the people who have kept it alive for 25 years through the creation of mods and tools,” said Romero. “It’s not at all lost on me that I have gone from a creator to a part of the community in that space of time, and I love that.” Sigil comes out mid-February. I can’t wait. If you’re interested in the more modern Doom stuff, though, keep an eye out for Doom Eternal, the sequel to the 2016 hit. More of the same? Sounds good to me. Rip and tear! |
CTRL-labs’ first dev kit is a gesture-tracking neural controller | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | The race to replace the mouse and keyboard has yielded a lot of weird tech, but as various hardware startups try to find the missing link between what we have now and some sort of embedded brain chip, we’re seeing some fascinating solutions surface. New York-based just announced its CTRL-labs’ investors are betting big on the insight this unconventional interface type can deliver. The startup closed a $28 million Series A in May with funding coming from Vulcan Capital, GV and others. The use cases for something like this seem to be a little up in the air at the moment, hence the interest in getting a developer kit out into the wild. There are some more obvious use cases in the VR space, but pushing a theoretical input type on an industry with theoretical appeal obviously isn’t the best basket in which to put a Series A. CTRL-kit Think about the link between some lightweight glasses with a heads-up display and an Apple Watch-type controller that can parse hand gestures and you can see a more predictable endgame for this kind of tech. Controlling augmented reality systems has always been a big UX question. Hand-tracking startups like Leap Motion have delivered very polished solutions that offer finesse but sidestep realistic user behaviors. Who’s going to wave their hands in front of their face while walking down the street? Microsoft has dumbed this down into optically tracked gestures like the “air tap” for HoloLens that let you select things in a pretty straightforward, yet cumbersome way. Magic Leap integrates a few input types into their system but seems to be pushing developers toward a physical controller while the current hardware is more focused on home use. The company says they’re also intrigued by potential with the automotive industry and more conventional desktop applications. Like a good amount of technologies that are attractive for VR and AR tech, what CTRL-labs is building has an attractive endgame but suspect near-term utility. Startups like Thalmic Labs, now , tried and failed to gain an audience for a consumer-grade motion-control armband like this. For the time being, the company expects a decent amount of developer attention to go toward using this tech for gaming. The company says it plans to begin shipping the CTRL-kit in the first quarter of next year. |
Equifax breach was ‘entirely preventable’ had it used basic security measures, says House report | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | A House Oversight Committee report out Monday that Equifax’s security practices and policies were sub-par and its systems were old and out-of-date, and bothering with basic security measures — like patching vulnerable systems — could’ve prevented its massive data breach last year. It comes , one of the world’s largest credit rating agencies, confirmed its systems had fallen to hackers. Some 143 million consumers around the world were affected — most of which were in the U.S., but also Canada and the U.K. — with that figure later rising to 148 million consumers. Yet, to date, the company , despite a string of corporate failings that led to one of the largest data breaches in history. The House report was scathing, criticizing the handling of the hack by Equifax’s former chief executive Richard Smith — who went on to “retire” following the breach. Smith boasted that the credit giant held “almost 1,200 times” the data held in the Library of Congress every day, but the House report said that Equifax had “failed to implement an adequate security program to protect this sensitive data.” “Such a breach was entirely preventable,” said the report. The report confirmed most of what was already known, but added new color and insights that were previously unreported. During that time, the hackers sent more than 9,000 queries on the databases, downloading data on 265 separate occasions. Equifax’s former boss Smith for failing to patch the Struts system. In fact, it was just another example in the company’s cavalier attitude toward data security, the House report found. “Equifax did not see the data exfiltration because the device used to monitor [the vulnerable server’s] network traffic had been inactive for 19 months due to an expired security certificate,” the report said. It took another two months for Equifax to update the expired certificate, at which point staff “immediately noticed suspicious web traffic.” Even Equifax’s own former chief information officer David Webb — who also “retired” following the incident — told House investigators that the whole incident could have been prevented had the company updated the vulnerable Struts system within two days of the patch’s release. “Had the company taken action to address its observable security issues prior to this cyberattack, the data breach could have been prevented,” said the report. Two more months later, Equifax went public. That was no picnic either. When Equifax’s “are you at risk?” website wasn’t crashing, it was . Then the site was — and was inadvertently linked to by Equifax’s own social media staff. When concerned consumers finally got through to the site, they were offered Equifax’s own credit freezing service, which — the one and only thing that was protecting consumers’ already fragile credit. The site was later pulled offline after another security researcher that let an attacker siphon off sensitive consumer data. This was all while , and many struggled to get basic questions answered. In all, the House report didn’t hold back its critique — slamming the credit rating agency’s poor security practices, especially given the data involved — which the report noted that consumers do not “have the ability to opt out of this information collection process.” Equifax’s response to the House’s report? Go on the defensive. “We are deeply disappointed that the Committee chose not to provide us with adequate time to review and respond to a 100-page report consisting of highly technical and important information,” said Equifax spokesperson Wyatt Jefferies. “During the few hours we were given to conduct a preliminary review we identified significant inaccuracies and disagree with many of the factual findings,” the statement continued. “This is unfortunate and undermines our hope to assist the Committee in producing a credible and thorough public resource for those who wish to learn from our experience managing the 2017 cybersecurity incident,” the statement continued. When TechCrunch asked for those “significant inaccuracies,” the spokesperson returned with a bulleted list of “factual errors” — or nit-picks — rather than pointing out substantial discrepancies with the report — including that Equifax offered two years of credit monitoring and not one year as was stated in the report, and that the report referenced an apparent settlement with a state attorney general that has not occurred. |
SoftBank invests in parking startup ParkJockey pushing valuation to $1 billion | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | SoftBank continues to invest in the future of transportation — this time in ParkJockey, a startup that has built a technology platform aimed at monetizing parking lots. And ParkJockey, which was founded in 2013, is already using that capital to scale up. Along with the SoftBank investment news, also announced that it was acquiring two of the largest parking operators in North America. The startup, with help from Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala Capital and debt financing from Owl Rock, said it had reached an agreement to acquire Imperial Parking Corporation, a North American-based parking management company often referred to as Impark. The agreement follows ParkJockey’s acquisition of parking management operator Citizens Parking Inc. The investment puts the ParkJockey valuation to more than $1 billion, . Miami-based ParkJockey developed a parking management platform that helps commercial property owners better monetize parking lots as well as handle operations at large venues and stadiums. The company’s platform offers features like automatic license plate recognition and pay-by-app, among others. The company’s app also can be used by drivers to find parking spaces more efficiently. Financial terms of the SoftBank investment or the acquisitions weren’t disclosed. The announcement follows an last week that reported SoftBank was backing the startup. SoftBank’s investment in parking might seem rather, well, pedestrian. It’s actually a bet on an automated future from present-day parking management issues like electric vehicle charging, designated areas for ride-hailing and automatic pay, as well as a day when vehicles are fully autonomous. |
Google employees demand the end of forced arbitration across the tech industry | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | On the heels of an employee-led is Following the walkout last month, rid of forced arbitration for sexual harassment and sexual assault claims, offering more transparency around those investigations and more. and quickly followed suit. However, optional arbitration at Google is only granted for full-time employees, which does not include the . Now, a group of Google employees is demanding an end to forced arbitration, as it relates to any case of discrimination, across the entire industry. As the employees note on Medium, arbitration is still forced for discrimination cases pertaining to race, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, age and ability. Additionally, employee contracts in the U.S. still have an arbitration waiver, the employees wrote. “We have not heard of any plan to render these waivers null and void,” employees wrote on Medium. “Google operates in 52 countries where arbitration laws vary, and leadership has not addressed these variances. What should we expect?” Moving forward, they’re asking other tech workers to join them in their fight to end forced arbitration for all forms of harassment and discrimination. They’re also calling on elected officials to support the Arbitration Fairness Act, as well as Restoring Justice for Workers Act. “We are already engaging with multiple organizations and can help connect the dots through educational materials and organizing resources,” they wrote. “2019 must be the year to end a system of privatized justice that impacts over in the US alone.” Google declined to comment, saying, “nothing more to share at this time” and linking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s . |
null | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 17 | null |
Google Fit gets improved activity logging and a breathing exercise | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | , Google’ s activity-tracking app for Android, is getting a small but meaningful today that adds a few new features that’ll likely make its regular users quite happy. Some are pretty basic, like the launch of a Fit widget for your Android home screen, while others introduce new features like a breathing exercise (though that will only be available on Wear OS), an updated home screen in the app itself and improved activity logging. The app got a earlier this year and in the process, Google introduced Heart Points as a way of tracking not just the length but also the strenuousness of your activities. Those are tracked automatically as you go about your day, but since Fit also lets you log activities manually, you didn’t really get a chance to log the intensity of those exercises. Now, however, you can adjust the intensity in your quest for getting more Heart Points. The other major new feature is the exact opposite of strenuous exercise: a breathing exercise for those moments when you want to calm down. For some reason, Google decided that this feature is Wear OS-only right now. I’m not quite sure why that’s the case, but if you don’t have a Wear OS watch, you’ll just have to figure out some other way to keep calm and bugger on. |
Krisp reduces noise on calls using machine learning, and it’s coming to Windows soon | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | If your luck is anything like mine, as soon as you jump on an important call, someone decides it’s a great time to blow some leaves off the sidewalk outside your window. 2Hz’s that uses machine learning to subtract background noise like that, or crowds, or even crying kids — while keeping your voice intact. It’s already out for Macs and it’s coming to Windows soon. I met the creators of Krisp, including 2Hz co-founder Davit Baghdasaryan, earlier this year at UC Berkeley’s Skydeck accelerator, where they demonstrated their then-prototype tech. The tech involved is complex, but the idea is simple: If you create a machine learning system that understands what the human voice sounds like, on average, then it can listen to an audio signal and select only that part of it, cutting out a great deal of background noise. Baghdasaryan, formerly of Twilio, originally wanted to create something that would run on mobile networks, so T-Mobile or whoever could tout built-in noise cancellation. This platform approach proved too slow, however, so they decided to go straight to consumers. “Traction with customers was slow, and this was a problem for a young startup,” Baghdasaryan said in an email later. However, people were loving the idea of ‘muting noise,’ so we decided to switch all our focus and build a user-facing product.” That was around the time I talked with them in person, incidentally, and just six months later they had released on Mac. It’s simple: You run the app, and it modifies both the outgoing and incoming audio signals, with the normal noisy signal going in one end and a clean, voice-focused one coming out the other. Everything happens on-device and with very short latency (around 15 milliseconds), so there’s no cloud involved and nothing is ever sent to any server or even stored locally. The team is working on having the software adapt and learn on the fly, but it’s not implemented yet. Another benefit of this approach is it doesn’t need any special tweaking to work with, say, Skype instead of Webex. Because it works at the level of the OS’s sound processing, whatever app you use just hears the Krisp-modified signal as if it were clean out of your mic. They launched on Mac because they felt the early-adopter type was more likely to be on Apple’s platform, and the bet seems to have paid off. But a Windows version is coming soon — the exact date isn’t set, but expect it either late this month or early January. (We’ll let you know when it’s live.) It should be more or less identical to the Mac version, but there will be a special gaming-focused one. Gamers, Baghdasaryan pointed out, are much more likely to have GPUs to run Krisp on, and also have a real need for clear communication (as a PUBG player I can speak to the annoyance of an open mic and clacky keys). So there will likely be a few power-user features specific to gamers, but it’s not set in stone yet. You may wonder, as I did, why they weren’t going after chip manufacturers, perhaps to include Krisp as a tech built into a phone or computer’s audio processor. In person, they suggested that this ultimately was also too slow and restrictive. Meanwhile, they saw that there was no real competition in the software space, which is massively easier to enter. “All current noise cancellation solutions require multiple microphones and a special form factor where the mouth must be close to one of the mics. We have no such requirement,” Baghdasaryan explained. “We can do it with single-mic or operate on an audio stream coming from the network. This makes it possible to run the software in any environment you want (edge or network) and any direction (inbound or outbound).” If you’re curious about the technical side of things — how it was done with one mic, or at low latency, and so on — there’s a nice explanation Baghdasaryan a little while back. Furthermore, a proliferation of AI-focused chips that Krisp can run on easily means easy entry to the mobile and embedded space. “We have already successfully ported our DNN to NVIDIA GPUs, Intel CPU/GNA, and ARM. Qualcomm is in the pipeline,” noted Baghdasaryan. To pursue this work the company has raised a total of $2 million so far: $500K from Skydeck as well as friends and family for a pre-seed round, then a $1.5 M round led by Sierra Ventures and Shanda Group. Expect the Windows release later this winter, and if you’re already a user, expect a few new features to come your way in the same time scale. You can download Krisp for free . |
US tech giants decry Australia’s ‘deeply flawed’ new anti-encryption law | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | A group of U.S. tech giants, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, have collectively denounced the new so-called “anti-encryption” law passed by the Australian parliament last week. The bill was after the ruling coalition government secured the votes from opposition Labor lawmakers, despite strong objection from tech companies and telcos. “The new Australian law is deeply flawed, overly broad, and lacking in adequate independent oversight over the new authorities,” said the Reform Government Surveillance coalition in a statement. The tech companies added that the law would “undermine the cybersecurity, human rights, or the right to privacy of our users.” It’s the latest rebuke since the bill’s passing, following an extensive lobbying effort by Silicon Valley to push back on the anti-encryption proposals. The law allows Australian police and the intelligence agencies wide-reaching powers to issue “technical notices” — essentially forcing companies and even websites operating in Australia to help the government undermine encryption or insert backdoors at the behest of the government. Critics argue that there’s little oversight, potentially allowing abuse of the system. And because the notices will almost always be issued with a gag order, any technical notices are served behind closed doors in secret. Companies that refuse to comply with the demands in a technical notice can be served heavy financial penalties. The Australian government won in part by accusing Labor of using scare tactics, saying that the opposition party was choosing to “allow terrorists and pedophiles to continue their evil work in order to engage in point scoring,” said Australian defense minister Christopher Pyne, in . Labor caved in to the pressure, and party leader Bill Shorten instructed his members to vote for the bill. He promised that the party to the law once passed in the coming months, while keeping “Australians safer over Christmas.” The tech coalition said it’ll hold the Australian parliament’s feet to the fire, urging lawmakers to “promptly address these flaws when it reconvenes” in the new year. The group, which also includes Dropbox, Facebook, Google and Yahoo parent company Oath (which also owns TechCrunch) — was set up after the companies were named in classified U.S. documents as participants in the secret National Security Agency program, . All of the companies denied their willing involvement, and began a collective effort to lobby the government to reform its surveillance operations — many of which rely on compelled assistance from tech companies and telcos. Evernote, LinkedIn, Snap and Twitter, which weren’t named as PRISM partners, later joined the coalition, and also signed on to the letter. Cisco and Mozilla joined other companies in separately filing complaints with Australian lawmakers ahead of the planned vote, arguing that the law “could do significant harm to the Internet.” |
AR startup Blippar in danger of becoming a blip as shareholders fight over future funding | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | , the U.K.-based AR startup that raised more than $130 million, may be nearing the end of the road. The company has been burning through cash in a bid to pivot in search of a profitable AR business model, and now shareholders are in dispute over whether to throw Blippar any more money to aid that effort, according to a statement the company provided to TechCrunch. The company has been on the , but things have taken a hard turn in the past few months on the back of yet another pivot. A Blippar spokesperson told TechCrunch that a single shareholder is blocking the required unanimous vote to close on emergency funding, without which Blippar must begin insolvency proceedings. The company is hoping to continue negotiating with the holdout and come to a resolution this week. A source close to the company confirmed from this weekend, which stated that Khazanah, a strategic investment fund from the Malaysian government, did not approve Blippar’s bid for emergency funding. In July, Khazanah’s as part of the transition to a new government, meaning that the top brass at the firm are not the same people who invested in Blippar originally. In September, Blippar raised $37 million from Candy Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures, stating that the Series E financing would help the company achieve its goal of becoming profitable by September 2019. But the private company has posted losses for the past two years, according to . It’s unclear whether or not the emergency funding being blocked now is the same $37 million Series E the company claimed to have closed in September or new cash. Blippar has been a contender in the AR space . The company started as a marketing agency that would allow brands to purchase augmented reality ads placed on real-world objects or on magazines. Users could scan these “Blipps” to unlock additional AR content and offers. In 2013, Blippar launched in the U.S. and the company grew alongside the momentum of the AR space in general. But there were more than a few missteps. The company spent time and money building for short-lived platforms like and . But even if resources weren’t wasted on now-defunct platforms, the general premise of Blippar was always somewhat questionable. Even if the format of the engagement was novel, an ad is still an ad. Few consumers are interested in downloading and engaging with an app that simply serves up brand content. So Blippar switched things up. The company on the heels of its $45 million Series C to become a computer vision-powered visual search engine. Blippar overhauled the technology to allow for content to be unlocked by any object in the real world via computer vision, instead of relying on physical stickers (Blipps). The company also started incorporating content that wasn’t necessarily ad-based but information-based, such as the make and model of a car or the scientific name of a plant. Indeed, there seems to be a use case for visual-based search. There are times when we simply don’t have the words to properly identify something we see in the real world. But in a world where really only one company dominates search, executing on that proved incredibly complicated for Blippar. Google has offered a form of visual search for years, and you could argue that those companies that are already strong players in search and information discovery might become strong players (or at least tough competition) in visual search, an extension of what they already do. Blippar has claimed it has upwards of 65 million registered users via its network of brand and publishing partners, white-label SDK partners, etc.; actual downloads of its app were closer to 500,000 in 2017, reports . (And it’s not clear how many of those registered users were regular users, anyway.) After a number of attempts at making visual search relevant — including a truly bizarre move into social with the launch of a Snapchat-esque feature called — Blippar turned its attention to spaces. In 2017, the company launched the , which lets users navigate their way through more than 300 cities using the camera on their smartphone. The company argued that navigation via its computer vision tech was more accurate than GPS. In August 2018, Blippar took the technology indoors with the launch of the . The hope with this launch is that it would attract whales for clients, as it was built to be used in large commercial spaces like stadiums, airports, shopping centers and large office buildings/campuses. The positioning system not only allowed for hyper accurate indoor navigation, but also extra AR content such as points of interest, personalized content, etc. Shortly after the launch, in September of this year, Blippar picked up its most recent $37 million Series E funding, which it said would “help the company reach its profitability goal within the next 12 months.” But, if this report is true, it would appear that it’s just too little too late. While being an early player can have its advantages, many pioneers in the tech startup landscape don’t have the benefit of learning from others’ mistakes. With a launch in 2011, Blippar most certainly falls into that category. But beyond the timing, Blippar also seemed to be building technology for the sake of building technology, without ever really nailing down a focused way for that technology to earn money. We reached out to the company and a Blippar spokesperson had this to say: The rate of change in the AR industry resulted in a lack of standardisation across platforms and tools which has become a barrier to greater adoption and application of the technology. In response to these we refined our strategy to primarily focus on our SaaS self-service AR creation and publishing platform and we are on the path to accelerate the developments of this platform. Our goal is to unify and standardise all AR formats and make it easy for everybody to create AR. Our strategy and product roadmap to enable this goal has unanimous approval from our board, for which we require an additional amount of funding to accelerate our growth and fulfill our profitability plans. The additional funding has been secured and approved by the whole board, but ultimately requires shareholders’ approval, which was given by all except one. Despite not participating in any further funding of the business, that shareholder took the decision to vote against the additional funding. We tried to reach an agreement with them that would allow the business to continue with these plans and have offered various solutions, and so far they have refused all proposals. Our board is still trying to negotiate with them and we hope to have a reasonable position at some point this week. We also reached out to Qualcomm Ventures but have not heard back. We will update if/when we do. |
Voyager 2 joins its twin in interstellar space | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | Voyager 2, the multi-planetary exploratory probe launched in 1977, , some six years after its twin, , did the same. It’s now about 11 billion miles from Earth, the second-farthest-out human-made object in space. Interstellar space starts where the sun’s “heliosphere” ends — the big ball of radiation and plasma in which the planets bathe and by which they are protected. Both Voyagers have instruments on board that monitor all this stuff, and both have shown a major drop-off in electrical and plasma activity, suggesting they’ve crossed over. The border of interstellar space is a matter of debate, a great deal of which occurred while Voyager 1 was on the very edge and scientists were arguing whether it was out or not. A consensus was reached, however, and most agree that both probes have now left the heliosphere. They have , however, left the solar system, defined more or less by the extent of the Oort cloud, an enormous collection of dust and small objects caught in the sun’s gravity (but just barely). Until the Voyagers leave that, in perhaps 30,000 years, they’re still technically in-system. Interestingly, although Voyager 2 was the second to enter interstellar space, it was actually the first to launch. The risk of failure for these complex, ambitious probes was high enough that NASA felt it should build two and send them out one after another, and it so happened that Voyager 2 launched 16 days before Voyager 1. However, the latter’s trajectory caused it to exit the ecliptic (the flat disk in which most of the solar system’s objects are found) earlier and at a different angle. That makes Voyager 2 NASA’s longest-running mission (though not the object in space for longest — early satellites are still floating around up there), and those working on it couldn’t be happier. “I think we’re all happy and relieved that the Voyager probes have both operated long enough to make it past this milestone,” said Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd at JPL, in a NASA news release. “This is what we’ve all been waiting for. Now we’re looking forward to what we’ll be able to learn from having both probes outside the heliopause.” Both Voyagers should continue operating for at least a few more years; their power sources are likely to go out around 2025. At that point they’ll have been in space sending back data for nearly 50 years. Congratulations to the team and, really, to humanity, for doing something so amazing. |
Pew: Social media for the first time tops newspapers as a news source for US adults | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | It’s not true that everyone gets their news from Facebook and Twitter. But it is now true that more U.S. adults get their news from social media than from print newspapers. According to from Pew Research Center out today, social media has for the first time surpassed newspapers as a preferred source of news for American adults. However, social media is still far behind other traditional news sources, like TV and radio, for example. Last year, the portion of those who got their news from social media was around equal to those who got their news from print newspapers, Pew says. But in its more recent survey conducted from July 30 through August 12, 2018, that had changed. Now, one-in-five U.S. adults (20 percent) are getting news from social media, compared with just 16 percent of those who get news from newspapers, the report found. (Pew had asked respondents if they got their news “often” from the various platforms.) The change comes at a time when newspaper circulation is on the , and its popularity as a news medium is being phased out — particularly with younger generations. In fact, the report noted that print only remains popular today with the 65 and up crowd, where 39 percent get their news from newspapers. By comparison, no more than 18 percent of any other age group does. While the decline of print has now given social media a slight edge, it’s nowhere near dominating other formats. Instead, TV is still the most popular destination for getting the news, even though that’s been dropping over the past couple of years. TV is then followed by news websites, radio and then social media and newspapers. But “TV news” doesn’t necessarily mean cable news networks, Pew clarifies. In reality, local news is the most popular, with 37 percent getting their news there often. Meanwhile, 30 percent get cable TV news often and 25 percent watch the national evening news shows often. However, if you look at the combination of news websites and social media together, a trend toward increasing news consumption from the web is apparent. Together, 43 percent of U.S. adults get their news from the web in some way, compared to 49 percent from TV. There’s a growing age gap between TV and the web, too. A huge majority (81 percent) of those 65 and older get news from TV, and so does 65 percent of those ages 50 to 64. Meanwhile, only 16 percent of the youngest consumers — those ages 18 to 29 — get their news from TV. This is the group pushing forward the cord cutting trend, too — or more specifically, many of them are the “cord-nevers,” as they’re never signing up for pay TV subscriptions in the first place. So it’s not surprising they’re not watching TV news. Plus, a meager 2 percent get their news from newspapers in this group. This young demographic greatly prefers digital consumption, with 27 percent getting news from news websites and 36 percent from social media. That is to say, they’re four times as likely than those 65 and up to get news from social media. Meanwhile, online news websites are the most popular with the 30 to 49-year-old crowd, with 42 percent saying they get their news often from this source. Despite their preference for digital, younger Americans’ news consumption is better spread out across mediums, Pew points out. “Younger Americans are also unique in that they don’t rely on one platform in the way that the majority of their elders rely on TV,” Pew researcher Elisa Shearer . “No more than half of those ages 18 to 29 and 30 to 49 get news often from any one news platform,” she says. |
Instagram launches walkie-talkie voice messaging | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | You’d think Facebook would be faster at copying itself. Five years after Facebook Messenger took a cue from WhatsApp and Voxer to launch voice messaging, and four months after TechCrunch reported Instagram was testing its own walkie-talkie feature, voice messaging is rolling out globally on Instagram Direct today. Users can hold down the microphone button to record a short voice message that appears in the chat as an audio wave form that recipients can then listen to at their leisure. Voice messages are up to one-minute long, stay permanently listenable rather than disappearing and work in one-on-one and group chats on iOS and Android. The feature offers an off-camera asynchronous alternative to the in June. It will have to compete with Viber, Zello and Telegram, as well as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp for the use case. Hands-free Direct messaging could make Instagram a more appealing chat app for drivers, people on the move with their hands full or users in the developing world who want a more intimate connection without having to pay for the data for long audio or video calls. It also could be a win for users in countries with less popular languages or ones that aren’t easily compatible with smartphone keyboards, as they could talk to friends instead of typing. The launch deepens Facebook’s entry into the voice market. From its first voice messaging and VOIP features back in 2013 to its new voice control system Aloha that works on its recently launched , Facebook has long taken an interest in the accessibility of voice, but only got serious about building it across its products in 2018. Along with Instagram video calling, today’s launch raises the question of whether Portal and Instagram will team up. That could make Portal more useful… but also risks making Instagram less cool by tightening its ties to Facebook. |
Google+ bug gave developers access to non-public data from 52.5M users | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | Google+ was a bit of a disaster for the company when it was still alive, and now that it’s walking dead, it’s becoming even more of a stone around its neck. After disclosing that affected just under half a million users, it announced that the service would shut down in August 2019. But things are getting worse. Today, the company a new privacy hole, one that it found last month, that left some data from about 52.5 million users up for grabs from apps that used the Google+ API. Because every bug seems to move up the Google+ shutdown date, Google also today announced that the service will now close in April 2019. All Google+ APIs will shut down within the next 90 days. The new bug, which was only live for about six days in early November, is related to the Google+ . It allowed apps that requested the permission to view profile information from users — like their names, email address, occupation, gender, birthday, relationship status and age — to access this information, even when that data was set to non-public. It gets worse, though; apps that had access to this data also had access to profile data that had been shared with the user by other Google+ users but that wasn’t shared publicly. Google says that it doesn’t have any evidence that developers ever realized that they had access to this data (the advantage of running a social network that few people still use, I guess) or that the data was misused in any way. It also stresses that these apps only had access to this data for six days. The bug was introduced, detected and fixed within the period of one week, from November 7 to 13 of this year. The last time around, Google was for waiting far too long to disclose the bug. This time, people in the know inside the company tell me that they decided to react quickly after going through the internal disclosure process, in part because the company wants to show more transparency. “We understand that our ability to build reliable products that protect your data drives user trust,” the company writes in a blog post today. “We have always taken this seriously, and we continue to invest in our privacy programs to refine internal privacy review processes, create powerful data controls, and engage with users, researchers, and policymakers to get their feedback and improve our programs. We will never stop our work to build privacy protections that work for everyone.” |
Grab is messing up the world’s largest mapping community’s data in Southeast Asia | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | top ride-hailing company, has hit a roadblock in its efforts to improve its mapping and routing service after running into trouble with OpenStreetMap, the world’s largest collaborative mapping community, through a series of blundering edits in Thailand. Grab, which in exchange for an equity swap earlier this year, has busily added details and upgraded the maps it uses across its eight markets in Southeast Asia. Accurate maps are, of course, essential to a smooth ride-hailing experience for Grab’s 125 million registered users. Without accurate location details, ensuring that drivers and passengers can easily rendezvous becomes nearly impossible. Grab’s effort to improve the never-ending quest of more accurate maps involves a multi-input approach that uses Google Maps as the base with Grab adding in its own information — “points of interest” cultivated through customer feedback and groundwork — and other public or licensed information. However, what appears to be a focus on speed has seen it suspend all activities in Thailand — Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy — after it was found to have overwritten data developed by OpenStreetMap (OSM) with inaccurate edits that were created by a remote team based in India. Established in 2006, OSM’s mission is to “make the best map data set of the world” and it makes its data, which is developed by more than two million volunteers from across the world, available for use without charge. An India-based team from , an outsourced software firm contracted by Grab, made dozens of edits in recent months that overwrote information created by OSM members, who voluntarily map streets by visiting them in person. Grab suspended work in Thailand by the GlobalLogic team after OSM members complained about numerous incorrect edits in OSM forum posts. Unlike the hobbyist mappers who collect data in person, the Grab contractors used satellite imagery to “correct” local map details in Thailand which, in fast-changing cities like Bangkok, meant that their work was incorrect because it relied on out-of-date sources. One mapper, so exasperated at the continued flow of inaccurate updates, with #WhatInGrabsNameIsThis to document the trail. , but countless others may not have been found yet. “OpenStreetMaps, for the most part, is craftsmanship but they are coming at this with an industrial mindset,” Mishari Muqbil, a Bangkok-based OSM member, told TechCrunch. Muqbil, who previously arranged and managed a workshop to help local Grab staff and volunteers working on maps in Thailand understand how OSM works, said he spent “hours” fixing road edits in his neighborhood which had been incorrectly changed. “God knows what they’ve been doing in other places,” he added. Grab claims more than 150 million registered users and 2.5 billion rides completed to date The problems came to a head in November when the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s board of directors rejected membership requests for “more than 100 applicants” from GlobalLogic, thereby restricting the number of outsourced representatives working on maps for Grab and other clients of the agency. “There had been a mass sign-up of 100 new accounts on 15.11.2018 from India, most coming from one single IP address from a company ‘well known’ to OpenStreetMap. There had been a larger amount of complaints regarding edits from that company, who provide ‘mapping services’ to other companies,” . The board rejected a proposal to reject the applications, so they were in fact accepted. The incident was the most significant membership rejection spree from OSM since 2011, the board said. Beyond making incorrect edits using a remote team, Grab — from , and has raised $6.8 billion to date — appears to be using OSM data without proper attribution. In a phone interview, Ajay Bulusu — head of regional operations at Grab — confirmed that the company uses OSM data, but he told TechCrunch that it is not consumer-facing within Grab’s app. Instead, he explained, Grab uses the information for some internal algorithms, routing and estimated time of arrival data. Bulusu — a former Googler who joined Grab last year — explained that the company uses a combination of information, including OSM data in some places where needed. Grab, however, does use OSM data in consumer terms, as . There are some parts of Bangkok where the ride-hailing app routes a ride through roads that are not shown within the Google Map overlay that it uses to display locations. did the same. A screenshot from the Grab app [left] appears to show that it uses information from OSM maps [right] to route rides beyond the roads displayed in Google Maps in some parts of Bangkok (Credit: Mishari Muqbil) When presented with two examples that appeared to show a use of OSM data, Grab backtracked and confirmed that it does use some of the organization’s data within its consumer-facing apps. Grab’s statement (below) doesn’t say that the company will add attribution to its map, per OSM policy; instead, the company suggested that it will update an OSM Wiki page it operates. We have always been open and transparent about the partners we work with and the sources of our data. We are actively working to find the best way to acknowledge all sources within the app itself. With regards to OSM specifically, we outline our partnership here: https://github.com/GRABOSM/Grab-Data. We are also updating the Grab OSM Wiki page with more details of our partnership. Grab and the OSM community have worked closely together across many Southeast Asian cities – we share the same goal, which is to map SEA better for the common good. It’s been a very positive relationship by and large and one that we are excited to keep expanding. Grab said it has included attribution to OSM within its app, although the credit is not appended to the map itself as is required by . However, that license appears focused on map products based on substantial usage of OSM data, but Grab is somewhat of a newer use case since it uses a smaller amount. More on Grab-OMS — Grab said it has added attribution inside its app. The note appears at the bottom of the home page as you scroll down, however OSM's license terms state that "credit should appear in the corner of the map" when data is used for "a browsable electronic map" — Jon Russell (@jonrussell) It may sound trivial to some, but mapping information is a crucial differentiator that is much sought-after by the world’s billion-dollar ride-hailing companies. Indeed, Grab’s failure to comply with OSM’s policy comes barely a week after — its Indonesia-based rival that’s backed by Tencent, Google and others — had copied Grab’s map data, specifically its points of interest in Singapore as part of its recent expansion into the country. Bulusu refused to be drawn into commenting on the reports, claiming that he “doesn’t know” if Go-Jek did scrape Grab’s data. A Go-Jek spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment. CEO Anthony Tan has consistently positioned Grab as Southeast Asia’s “local champion” Grab has indicated its intention to work more closely with the OSM community in Thailand. shone a light on the work it is doing in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia, where it collaborates with HOT, Humanitarian OSM Team, a nonprofit that spun out of the OSM movement, which specializes in mapping for disaster relief. Bulusu said he plans to meet with Thailand’s OSM community while he admitted that the company must do better. “We apologize to the Thai OSM community,” he said. “We’re planning to build a process [and are] trying to have an open discussion with the Thailand forum.” As part of that bridge-building effort, Bulusu himself has committed to meeting with OSM members face-to-face in Thailand. A meeting at Grab’s office in Bangkok is in the planning, although the Grab exec has not yet committed to a request to meet in Chiang Mai, where a substantial number of community members are located. “We totally understand the Thailand sentiment and we’ve stopped mapping to make sure we do the right thing,” Bulusu added. “Across the region, we’ve done a lot of good work on OSM and we want to continue that… if people reach out, we want to work with them.” It’s certainly ironic that Grab, which during its battle with Uber and has raised more money than any startup in Southeast Asia, has resorted to outsourcing elements of its mapping to India and, in doing so, harmed the local champions developing maps that are designed to help improve services for all. Bulusu, however, defended Grab’s use of GlobalLogic. He said that Hyderabad, where the GlobalLogic team working with Grab is based, “is where most global mapping talent is based.” He said usage of the agency was “complementary to local teams” and, while he acknowledged that there could be errors, he again reiterated that Grab is keen to establish a system of working with Thailand’s OSM community. Grab has provided an additional response to this story as follows: The article misrepresents the positive relationship we have with the OSM community across Southeast Asia. Together, in collaboration with OSM, we have conducted numerous meetups, mapathons and other outreach across the region like our GEO*Star program to nurture interest in mapping among the larger community. By working hand in hand with OSM, we have reviewed almost 1 million KM of roads across SEA this year alone. We take exception to the misleading headline, and are disappointed that the article focuses only on some mistakes made in Thailand, without highlighting the full efforts of Grab’s on-ground education and training to improve maps in Southeast Asia. We hope this does not detract from scale of the impact the whole mapping community can make, nor deter enthusiasts and corporate partners from participating in the effort. Specific to the concerns of Thai OSM, we acknowledge that mistakes have been made in Thailand and would like to assure the community that they do not have to be unduly alarmed, as the number of wrong edits made are small and were rectified immediately as soon as we were alerted to them. Out of 150,000 map edits we contributed to OSM in Thailand, 52 (0.03%) were flagged as mistakes by the local community. We believe the best results and quick improvements for mapping are best done through collaboration and community effort, and we will continue to contribute where we can, and most importantly, engage with local mappers to make sure we do it right. In addition from a TechCrunch perspective, during research for this story, TechCrunch held numerous phone interviews and conversations with Grab and exchanged multiple emails prior to the publishing of this story, which is focused on Grab’s mapping efforts in Thailand. |
Bowtie raises $30M to bring the digital insurance model to Hong Kong | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | The digital revolution has spawned “challenger” banks that operate entirely online, with no High Street presence. That phenomenon has taken off in Europe — particularly the U.K. — but over in Hong Kong, one of the world’s key financial hubs, the digital-only push is coming to the insurance industry. Bowtie, a Hong Kong-based digital insurer, just announced a double milestone today: the company has become the first online-only operator to earn a license in the country while it has also revealed it has raised a HK$234 million ($30 million) Series A funding round. Founded just over one year ago, Bowtie plans to offer a range of health-focused insurance products to Hong Kong consumers. It’ll launch in the first half of 2019; however, per issued by Hong Kong’s Insurance Authority (IA), it will not maintain any physical presence for consumers. That’s in stark contrast to the traditional industry, but the idea is to pass on cost benefits to consumers, provide strong offline customer service and offer a more transparent experience. That vision already has some hefty weight behind it. Sun Life, the $20 billion global insurance giant, is one investor in that Series A round via its Hong Kong business unit. The other backer is Hong Kong X Technology Fund, a two-year-old program backed by the likes of Tencent founder Pony Ma and Sequoia China chief Neil Shen. In an interview with TechCrunch, Bowtie co-founder and co-CEO Michael Chan stressed that his company will operate independently of Sun Life Hong Kong. “We definitely like the value alignment,” he explained. “They have been very gracious and trusting, giving us a lot of management control.” Chan clarified that there will be no sharing of customers or customer data. He painted a picture of a business — Sun Life — that’s curious about the potential of digital-only services and keen to see what a startup — Bowtie — can do with a leaner and more agile model. However, Chan was unable to confirm the size of Sun Life’s investment, and whether it owns a majority of the startup. “We believe in Bowtie’s vision and commitment to enhancing the customer experience. Our investment complements our business, while enabling new distribution modes through the latest technology and digital innovations,” said Fabien Jeudy, CEO of Sun Life Hong Kong, in a press statement. Indeed, there could be the potential for collaboration in the future, particularly since Sun Life has a strong presence in Asia Pacific, where its operations span Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia. “If this business model makes sense, we could potentially collaborate on expansions,” said Chan, who spent nearly a decade with the likes of EY and PwC in the U.S. before returning to Hong Kong in 2015. The Bowtie team at its office in Hong Kong That’s looking a little far into the future for a company that has only just received the regulatory green light. When pushed on a potential expansion strategy, such as possible markets and entry times, Chan said there’s currently no information to share. “It’s really very much a one step at a time approach,” Chan told TechCrunch. “Everything has to run smoothly” before the company considers moving outside of Hong Kong. Although he did acknowledge that “most of the growth” from the global insurance industry is happening in Asia. Chan and fellow co-CEO and co-founder Fred Ngan met while working in the U.S. and, after both returning to their country of birth, they visualized the potential for a disruptive online play whilst working in consulting and other companies, Chan said. The IA’s “fast track” for virtual insurers was that spark. Announced in September 2017, — including global firms — and Chan said that while there were teething issues around accommodating online-only businesses, the process was rapid and as thorough as the awarding of a traditional license. “Bowtie is all about delivering convenience through technology. Our market research shows Hong Kong consumers would love to be able to sign up for health insurance and submit a claim online, but the insurance industry has essentially operated the same way when it first began 300 years ago,” Chan said in a prepared statement. Unlike others in the tech space across Asia, Bowtie doesn’t plan to locate its development team in other parts of the world, . “That’s fine for more established or mature models, but with the level of commitment we’ve given the regulator and our customers, I think that it’s best we are all here,” Chan said in an interview. “I truly believe there is good talent in Hong Kong.” Where it has needed to, Chan said the company has hired from overseas, including Silicon Valley. Certainly, the ongoing privacy snafus from U.S. tech companies and the polarizing politics mean that markets like Hong Kong have never been in a stronger position to lure new hires from Silicon Valley, New York, London and other Western hubs. Meanwhile, its insurance industry hires have from come from firms such as AIA, AXA, Chubb, Manulife, Prudential and Sun Life. |
TikTok parent ByteDance sues Chinese news site that exposed fake news problem | Rita Liao | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | from China’s online media world as ByteDance, the $75 billion company behind popular video app TikTok, is taking a news site to court for alleged defamation after it published a story about ByteDance’s fake news problem in India. U.S. tech firms have come to rely on media to help uncover issues, but Chinese tech news site Huxiu has become the latest litigation target of ByteDance, which after raising $3 billion. The company has sued internet giants and in the past year for alleged anti-competitive behavior. This time around, ByteDance — which is backed by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, KKR and General Atlantic among others — has taken issue with an op-ed published earlier this month that spotlights a fake news problem on its Indian language news app, Helo. as part of ByteDance’s push in India, Helo competes with local media startups such as ShareChat and DailyHunt, as well as Facebook. ByteDance operates news app Jinri Toutiao with monthly active users in China, according to data services provider QuestMobile. TikTok, branded as Douyin in China, has a reach well beyond its home front and claims 500 million MAUs worldwide, with an gleaned from its On December 4, Huxiu published an opinion piece that condemned Helo and ShareChat for allowing misinformation to spread. One Helo post, for instance, falsely claimed that a Congress leader had suggested that India should help neighboring rival Pakistan clear its debt rather than invest in the State of Unity, a pricey local infrastructure project. In response, ByteDance filed a lawsuit against Huxiu, saying that the Chinese news site made defamatory statements against it in translating an op-ed by contributor Elliott Zaagman. Tech blog TechNode — TechCrunch’s partner in China — ran an of the story but it is not part of the suit. Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, poses for a photograph at the company’s headquarters in Beijing, China. Photographer: Giulia Marchi/Bloomberg via Getty Images “Technode edited the piece and removed some of my words. Huxiu was, and is with most of my articles, true to my original words,” Zaagman wrote on his WeChat timeline. To adhere only to “facts” as part of its editorial process, TechNode removed “colorful” parts of Zaagman’s article, according to the blog’s editor-in-chief. What goes missing on TechNode is what incensed ByteDance. Zaagman’s unfiltered statements on Huxiu “constitute an insult and abuse against ByteDance” by “claiming that Chinese companies have influence over the Indian election,” a ByteDance spokesperson told TechCrunch. “The content on Huxiu is obviously a rumor and libel. It’s malicious slander. Whether it’s Chinese or foreign publications, Chinese or foreign authors, they must respect the truth, laws, and principles of journalism,” the spokesperson added. The unedited English version is posted on Zaagman’s personal LinkedIn account . Here is one paragraph that TechNode removed: Maybe still Zhang is simply a victim of his own success. Few entrepreneurs start a company expecting it to be worth $75 billion. But what he has created may have far broader ramifications. As is demonstrated by Russia’s use of American social networking platforms to interfere in Western elections, misinformation campaigns can be a tool used by adversaries to disrupt a country’s internal politics. At this current moment when China faces greater international tensions, a pushback to their rising influence in Asia, and territorial disputes along their border with India, the last thing that Beijing needs is accusations from an opportunistic Indian politician sounding the alarm about how Beijing-based Chinese companies are spreading misinformation among the impressionable Indian electorate…. And this as well: Although, on second thought, maybe it makes perfect sense that Zhang Yiming is peddling products that he himself would likely never use. After all, any good drug dealer knows not to get high on their own supply. In a , Huxiu dismissed ByteDance’s accusation for being “wildly untrue” and bringing “major repercussions” for the online publication’s reputation. A spokesperson for Huxiu told TechCrunch that it hasn’t received any summons as the court is still processing the complaint. In a peculiar twist to the incident, Huxiu actually pulled its Chinese version of Zaagman’s piece days leading to the ByteDance suit. The removal came as a result of “negotiations among multiple parties,” said the Huxiu representative, who declined to share more details on the decision. In China, an online article can be subject to censorship for containing material considered illegal or inappropriate by the media platform itself or the government. The logo for ByteDance’s popular video app TikTok (called Douyin in China) at an electronic dance music festival. / Credit: ByteDance In the U.S., Facebook has responded proactively to issues raised by the media — for example by — while that journalists sniffing out issues on his service is “critical” to the company. Beijing-based ByteDance hasn’t commented on the fake news problem highlighted in Zaagman’s article, but staff from its Indian regional app previously acknowledged the presence of misinformation. “We work very closely with our local content review and moderation team in harnessing our algorithms to review and take down inappropriate content,” a Helo spokesperson . [Update: Helo has recently partnered up with local fact-checking webiste as part of its effort to combat fake news on its app that’s available in 14 vernaculars.] The concerns about Helo are the latest blow for ByteDance, which has marketed itself as an artificial intelligence company delivering what users want to see based on their online interaction in the past. As has been the case with Western platforms, such as Google-owned YouTube, which also uses an algorithm to feed users videos that they favor, the outcome can mean sensational and sometimes illegal content. Along those lines, ByteDance’s focus on AI at the expense of significant “human-led” editorial oversight has come in for criticism. In July, the Indonesian government because it contained “pornography, inappropriate content and blasphemy.” At home, Chinese media watchdogs have similarly slammed a number of the company’s other content platforms, and regulators in the country went so far as to for serving “vulgar” content. But ByteDance is hardly the only tech company entangled in China’s increased media scrutiny. Heavyweights, including Tencent, Baidu and ByteDance’s archrival Kuaishou, have also come under attack at various degrees for hosting content deemed problematic by the authorities over the past year. |
The LibreRouter project aims to make mesh networks simple and affordable | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | In the city, we’re constantly saturated with the radio waves from 10 or 20 different routers, cell towers and other wireless infrastructure. But in rural communities there might only be one internet connection for a whole village. is a hardware and software project that looks to let those communities build their own modern, robust mesh networks to make the most of their limited connectivity. The intended use case is in situations where, say, a satellite or wired connection terminates at one point, the center of an area, but the people who need to use it live nearby — but well outside the hundred feet or so you can expect a Wi-Fi signal to travel. Often in such a case it’s also prohibitively expensive to run more wires or install cellular infrastructure. So instead of having people come to the signal, you bring the signal to them with a mesh network: a collection of interconnected wireless routers that pass signals to and from anyone who can reach one of them. This approach has its own problems: routers can be expensive and difficult to maintain or repair, and the network itself isn’t trivial to set up and troubleshoot either. Off-the-shelf routers and software aren’t the best options — : LibreRouter, and LibreMesh, the software that runs on it. It’s not some groundbreaking device or fancy software — just purpose-built for use by communities like the ones they’ve tested with in rural Argentina, Mexico, Spain and Canada. The goal, , is to make mesh networks affordable, robust, scalable and simple to operate; they’re not all the way there, but they do have a working prototype and full software stack based on OpenWRT, a well-known and trusted wireless utility. They’ve designed to be modern and powerful, but easy to repair with normal tools and off-the-shelf parts; the software won’t quite be one-click simple, but it should automate many of the harder parts of configuring a mesh. The range on them is in the kilometers rather than meters, so these can really connect quite a large area. It’s all open source, of course, and the team is always looking for contributors. There’s enough interest, Pace said, that they might ship as many as 2,500 of the devices over the next couple of years once the design is finalized. |
This Elon Musk Interstellar parody is the weirdest thing you’ll see all day | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | After leaving Elon Musk’s big Tuesday night, TechCrunch stumbled upon a gem that only the interwebs can provide. And because and an “entirely new system of transport” just wasn’t enough for the last 24-hour Elon Musk news cycle, TechCrunch is sharing what it found. To be clear, this is a parody video. Elon Musk did not star in the movie “Interstellar.” The video’s creator, who goes by @KaziooFX on Twitter, didn’t use AI or neural nets to create the video. Instead, Kazioo explained via Twitter that traditional manual editing methods were used to place Musk’s face over actor Matthew McConaughey, who in the film. This took me much longer than it should: Replaced Matthew McConaughey with in Interstellar. Enjoy! — Kazioo (@KaziooFX) The video features footage of Musk in various interviews, including his public pot smoking debut on the . The video also includes what appears to be footage of SpaceX’s 16th Commercial Resupply Services mission to the International Space Station. |
Square Roots is bringing more transparency to its produce | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | If you’re concerned about what you eat, there’s a good chance you’ve looked at the food in the supermarket, or in your fridge, and wondered where it actually comes from. Now urban farming incubator is introducing a new way for you to check full history of the produce that you’re about to purchase. To do so, you just scan the QR code or type in the lot number that the company says will be included in the packaging of all its produce moving forward. Either way, you’ll be taken to to what Square Roots calls a Transparency Timeline. You can actually try this out on the QR codes — the timelines show where and when the produce was planted, grown and harvested, and when it was delivered to the store. To do this, Square Roots says it’s taking advantage of its indoor growing system, which involves refurbished, climate-controlled shipping containers, as well as “software that enables us to monitor and control every aspect of the process” — that’s supposed to help the farmers who are being trained at Square Roots, but apparently it gives the company data that it can package for consumers too. In the announcement, Kimbal Musk (who founded Square Roots with Tobias Peggs) laid out the reasoning behind the Transparency Timeline: Consumers across the world are into where and how their food is grown — and with good reason. As mentioned above, this past Thanksgiving, resulted in the recall of all romaine lettuce grown in the US. This was the third such outbreak in the last two years. It put millions of consumers at major risk of foodborne illnesses. The situation was compounded by opaque supply chains in the Industrial Food System, making it ridiculously difficult to accurately trace the source of guilty pathogens. To their credit, the big lettuce producers did eventually react, and with a mark of the state in which their products are grown. But that’s not enough. Consumers demand — and deserve — to know more. Musk acknowledged that some companies are trying to to introduce more transparency to the food supply chain, but he suggested that the results have been “underwhelming,” and that the solution is more straightforward: “What people want to know, simply, is where and how was my food grown and who grew it? With that information, they can make their own informed choices about whether to trust the food and whether to buy it.” Square Roots produce is only sold in , so the rest of you probably won’t get a chance to try this out in your own supermarket anytime soon. But it sounds like Musk has expansion plans, and he said, “As we scale, we will keep building local farms in the same neighborhood as the consumers — so we can always own the supply chain end to end.” |
Using Facebook’s latest privacy stumble, lawmakers push for strong FTC oversight | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | Lawmakers are again unhappy with Facebook after the again portraying Facebook’s failure to protect the private data of its users. Yesterday, that the company had special relationships with a handful of major tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Spotify. The report alleges that Facebook allowed those partners forms of user data access that the company claimed it had curtailed prior to this year’s revelations around Facebook’s data sharing with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook predictably pushed back against the report , claiming that “none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC.” While Facebook dismisses much of the current criticism as a mischaracterization of these data sharing relationships, a number of lawmakers are, naturally, using the situation to nudge forward their own regulatory agendas. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, one of the fiercest privacy advocates in Congress, released a statement on the news: “Mark Zuckerberg had a lot of chutzpah telling Congress that Americans could control their data, when seemingly every other week Facebook faces a new privacy scandal for abusing our personal information,” Wyden said. “When companies repeatedly lie to Congress and the American people about what they do with our messages, location, likes and everything else, Congress has a duty to do something about it.” Wyden pointed to his own proposed legislation, the , released as a discussion draft in early November. The legislation would empower the Federal Trade Commission to punish companies with meaningful fines (up to 4% of annual revenue) and even “10-20 year criminal penalties for senior executives.” The bill also proposes a national Do Not Track system to protect user privacy, minimum cybersecurity standards and a means for consumers to review what personal data has been collected about them and what entities it has been sold to or shared with. “I wrote a tough new consumer privacy bill to punish companies – and even put CEOs in jail – if they lie about protecting your privacy. Clearly these people need some skin in the game before they will take Americans’ privacy seriously,” Wyden said of the bill. Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz weighed in as well, also recommending that the FTC be given the power to oversee and punish large tech companies that trade in user data. It has never been more clear. We need a federal privacy law. They are never going to volunteer to do the right thing. The FTC needs to be empowered to oversee big tech. — Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) Senator Amy Klobuchar tweeted “@nytimes Facebook report today must = FTC penalties & privacy legislation,” echoing the idea of empowering the FTC to police big tech. Klobuchar also pointed to her own bipartisan privacy bill, the , co-sponsored by John Kennedy (R-La.). That bill would force companies to make terms of service more simple and comprehensible and allow users to request to have their data (actually) deleted. BREAKING: Investigation uncovered that Facebook gave companies access to private personal data – including messages & phone numbers – for hundreds of millions of users without their knowledge. Unacceptable. Congress should pass my bipartisan privacy bill with . — Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) If Wyden’s proposal is aggressive, it’s also probably a good starting place for regulating big tech’s data brokers — that and cheating off the . If the bill picks up any traction (and it’s new enough that we don’t know yet if it will) it’s likely to be watered down over time as lawmakers with a more lenient view of how big tech should be regulated look it over. Of course, nothing in Congress happens quickly, especially considering the amount of money that tech’s biggest companies pour into Washington D.C. lobbying that makes a case for ongoing self-regulation. Still, with every new privacy stumble, Congress gets a notch more serious about regulation, even if it moves at a snail’s pace. |
Did unicorns like Lyft and Uber wait too long? | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | It was several years ago, at a tech conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., that the venture capitalist Bill Gurley issued one of what would become repeated warnings that startups were staying private too long. Comparing companies that refuse to go public to undergrads whose college careers extend , Gurley suggested they should be embarrassed, not proud, for keeping their shares in private hands. “Until you get liquid, you really haven’t accomplished anything,” Gurley said. Whether Gurley was referring to Uber at the time, only he knows. Though his firm, Benchmark, eventually forced out Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Uber, the tipping point was seemingly not Kalanick’s as long as possible, but rather an investigation into sexual harassment investigations and the employee misconduct that was discovered in the process. Either way, it’s looking increasingly like Gurley had a point. As you may have noticed if you care anything about the public markets, . In fact, they fell to a new low for the year this afternoon, a reaction in part to the Federal Reserve’s decision earlier today to raise its benchmark overnight lending rate for the fourth time in 2018. The Fed also signaled minimal rate hikes for next year — forecasting two rate hikes instead of three — but investors were apparently hoping for even better news. It’s hard to blame them for seeking out more of a silver lining, given everything else that’s going on. Tech stocks are getting battered, with the FANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google) down meaningfully from their share prices of six months ago. (Amazon has held up the best.) The economy of China — the U.S.’s third largest export partner and its largest import partner — is , which is expected to have an impact on the U.S. and world economies. Add trade tensions into the mix, a sprinkling of uncertainty about regulations, a splash of a possible government shutdown and the that Donald Trump will be impeached, and you start to appreciate why the market is finally going off the rails. Despite so much uncertainty, Uber, Lyft, Slack and , among many others, are racing to become publicly traded at long last. According to Dealogic data quoted in , 38 unicorn companies went public this year, and more are expected to test the market in 2019. Their venture backers will tell you it’s because the markets recognize a strong growth company when they see it, and that each is finally positioned well to tell their story, aided by some dazzling metrics. Yet it seems just as likely that they see the window, which flew open this year, starting to swing back in the other direction. And if this month is any indicator, it could be hard to pry it open again, at least in the first quarter or two. “The market is basically closed between now, and the start of a new year is always slow because companies don’t start roadshows [until the markets re-open],” says Kathleen Smith, a principal of Renaissance Capital and the manager of its . Pre-IPO companies like Uber are also waiting on their audits to close before they put any numbers in a public document, she notes. But it could be far from smooth sailing after that, suggests Smith. “In normal times, late January and February and March become very active, but we aren’t in a typical market. I can predict from other times that we’ve seen a bear market like this that it will have an impact on IPO activity.” It’s all part of a vicious cycle, Smith suggests. As public market shareholders begin to feel less affluent and more risk averse, they start redeeming their public market shares. That leaves fund managers who might otherwise gamble on new issuers with less capital to invest, and less flexibility. “Investors are just not going to want to take on any risk positions when market has [taken a turn for the worse],” says Smith. Put another way, if the markets are as crummy early next year as looks to be the case, it’s too bad, too sad for unicorn companies. “They made the choice to stay private and get capital,” says Smith. “I’ve stated many times that they should be getting while the getting is good. The pain can happen if money dries up, and it will dry up when the public market dries up.” That doesn’t mean tech’s favorite unicorn companies are doomed, of course, especially those that can show strong fundamentals. For her part, Smith notes that what often happens in a downturn is that offerings get heavily discounted. “Valuations will be chopped if the companies want investors to participate. They’ll have to be sure to make money.” Even if they don’t get the rich (or that their VCs assigned them before that), they can always grow into the valuations their investors want to see. One need look no further than Facebook to remember why a bumpy offering . “Just because a stock crashes below its IPO price isn’t a sign of a bubble,” says Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser. “You also have to keep in mind the dynamic of companies going public,” he says. “You expect IPOs to be overvalued. Investors in these companies are necessarily selling to the greatest fool.” Still, there may be fewer fools willing to buy what they are selling than there might have been this year or last, and if those numbers really change, today’s unicorns will look like tomorrow’s donkeys. They’re certainly going to face more scrutiny than they might have had they moved sooner. “Maybe we’ll roar into 2019 and all will be well,” says Lise Buyer, the founder of Class V Group, an advisory firm for IPOs. “But to the extent that investors will be more selective, they’ll look at path to profitability, and they’ll look at the valuations these companies took when they were private.” Then they’ll do their own math, suggests Buyer. If the market is truly shifting, public market shareholders “won’t care what valuations companies achieved when they were private,” says Buyer. “They’ll only be willing to pay what they are willing to pay.” |
Facebook defends allowing third parties access to user messages | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | In a , Facebook VP of Product Partnerships Ime Archibong addressed the company’s latest user privacy controversy. The rebuttal is the second round of Facebook’s pushback against Tuesday’s detailing some of Facebook’s special partnerships and extensive data sharing with major tech players. In the new post, Archibong specifically argues that Facebook never allowed its partners to access private Facebook messages without a user’s permission. While Facebook did in fact share user messages with third parties, the company claims it only did so “if they chose to use Facebook Login.” Facebook Login allows users to log into third party sites without making a specific new set of login credentials. As Archibong writes: “We worked closely with four partners to integrate messaging capabilities into their products so people could message their Facebook friends — but only if they chose to use Facebook Login. These experiences are common in our industry — think of being able to have Alexa read your email aloud or to read your email on Apple’s Mail app.” He goes on to claim that these features “were experimental and have now been shut down for nearly three years.” Facebook is being purposefully quite specific here about what this particular timeline applies to, as The New York Times story reports that the company engaged in some forms of “special access” data sharing with third parties “as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.” As to the question of why Facebook would grant messaging partners deep messaging access: That was the point of this feature — for the messaging partners mentioned above, we worked with them to build messaging integrations into their apps so people could send messages to their Facebook friends… In order for you to write a message to a Facebook friend from within Spotify, for instance, we needed to give Spotify “write access.” For you to be able to read messages back, we needed Spotify to have “read access.” “Delete access” meant that if you deleted a message from within Spotify, it would also delete from Facebook. No third party was reading your private messages, or writing messages to your friends without your permission. Facebook’s post provides screenshots of these messaging integrations, which happened long enough ago that most of us don’t remember them at all. What Facebook declined to provide in this post: the permissions screens that users saw when granting this access. Those will be key in determining just how informed users were of what they were handing over when casually enabling these integrations. screenshot via Facebook Still, no matter how clearly Facebook might have worded the permissions screens, social media users are only just now broadly awakening to the fact that something is unsettling about all of this data sharing. The fact remains that even if users clicked to grant their consent for a feature like this, it’s a problem that they didn’t understand the privacy implications of doing so. In this instance, it isn’t just Facebook’s problem. With privacy regulation and the GDPR for consumer privacy in the EU, it’s only a matter of time before all major tech companies that rent user data to advertisers face a reckoning that could change everything about the way they do business. |
Listen to a Tesla make 6 farting noises on demand | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | One of Tesla’s big selling points is the company’s ability to wirelessly push software updates to its electric vehicles. It’s what allows these vehicles to improve over time long after they’ve been purchased by customers. This week, one of those improvements was to deliver a few Easter eggs — as promised by CEO Elon Musk — including the ability to make a Tesla vehicle fart on demand or every time a turn signal is used. Hopped in my this morning and was delighted to find “romance mode” and a drop-down list of juicy, on demand fart noises, that can be triggered with a wheel click or turn signal. The best keeps getting better. Thanks and team! — Kevin Pereira (@Attack) One Easter egg, coyly referred to as Emissions Testing Mode, allows the driver to choose from six different fart noises. A seventh option will pick one randomly. Here’s a guide to the list and a handy tweet from @microfrost_, who posted a video of what each fart sounds like. Enjoy. — Microfrost (@Microfrost_) Improvements to the fart app might come soon. Musk tweeted Wednesday that he would add a “fart on demand” option to the mobile app too. Ok 😀💨 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) |
WhatsApp makes group calls easier, but calls still limited to four people | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | WhatsApp is making group calls easier with a change to the way its mobile app works. Before, users would have to start a 1:1 video call, then add participants — there wasn’t an option to begin a group call at once, the company says. Now, the design has been updated so you can start group calls with just a couple of taps. In the new design, you can go to the group whose members you want to call, then tap on the phone icon at the top-right corner of the screen to get started. From the next screen, you’ll tap the contacts within the group you want to call, then tap the voice or video button — depending on what type of call you want to make. The company added a new way to make group calls from the Calls tab, as well. With the update, you can tap the new Call icon on the top-right corner of the screen, pick the contacts you want to call and again pick either the voice or video icon. WhatsApp currently supports calling up to four people at one time. That’s fewer than is supported on other top mobile messaging services — like Apple’s FaceTime, which was to support 32 people (up from only two people before); or Messenger, which 50 people in a call, for example. However, WhatsApp’s group call feature itself is still fairly new — it was For a smaller group, it’s still a useful way to connect with friends and family without having to tap into your cellular plan’s voice minutes. Calls are also end-to-end encrypted, which makes it a good option for privacy seekers — that is, if you believe that any app owned by Facebook can fit that description. WhatsApp warns that all members should have a good internet connection before using the group calling feature, as the quality of the call will depend on the contact with the weakest connection. The update is available now to iPhone users and is rolling out “soon” on Android. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 12 | 10 | null |
Crew, a Workplace and Slack messaging rival for shift workers, raises $35M, adds enterprise version | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | When it comes to shift workers communicating with each other in the workplace when they are not face-to-face, gone are the days of cork announcement boards. Now, the messaging app is the medium, and today one of the startups tackling that opportunity in a unique way has raised a round of funding to get to the next stage of growth. , a chat app that specifically targets businesses that employ shift workers who do not typically sit at computers all day, has now raised $35 million in Series C funding from DAG Ventures, Tenaya Capital and previous backers Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Harrison Metal Capital and Aspect Ventures. With the funding news, it’s also announcing the launch of a new feature called Crew Enterprise, which helps businesses better manage messaging across large groups of these workers. The funding and new product come on the heels of the company hitting 25,000 organizations using its service — many of them multi-store retailers with an emphasis in the food industry; household names like Domino’s Pizza and Burger King — with some strong engagement. Its users are together sending some 25 million messages or responses to other messages each week, on average six times per day per user, with more than 55 percent of its whole user base logging in on an average day. There are quite a lot of messaging apps out in the market today, but the majority of them are aimed at so-called knowledge workers, people who might be using a number of apps throughout their day, who often sit at desks and use computers alongside their phones and tablets. Crew takes a different approach in that it targets the vast swathe of other workers in the job market and their priorities. As it turns out, co-founder and CEO Danny Leffel tells me that those priorities are focused around a few specific things that are not the same as those for the other employment sector. One is to get the latest shift schedules for work, especially when they are not at work; another is to be able to swap those shifts when they need to; and a third, largely coming from the management end, is to make sure that everything gets communicated to the staff even when they are not in for work to attend a staff meeting. “Some of the older practices feel like versions of a ,” he said. “The stories we hear are quite insane.” Shift schedules, he said, are an example. “Lots of workplaces have rules, where you can’t call in to check the schedule because it causes employees to come off the floor. One hotel manager told us he couldn’t hold staff meetings with everyone there because he runs a 24/7 workplace so some people would have to come in especially. One store GM from a supermarket chain told us that the whole store has only one email address, so when an announcement goes out, the GM prints that and hands it to everyone. And the problems just compound when you talk to them.” Crew is by no means the only business internal messaging service that is aiming to provide a product specifically for shift workers. Workplace, Facebook’s own take on enterprise communications, has also positioned itself as a platform for “every worker,” and has snagged a such as Walmart (2.2 million employees globally) and Starbucks (254,000) to fill out that vision. Leffel, however, paints a sightly different picture of how this is playing out, since in many cases even when a company has been “won” as a global customer that hasn’t translated to a global roll out. “Starbucks is theoretically using Workplace, but it’s been deployed only to managers,” he said. “We have almost 1,000 Starbucks locations using Crew. We knew we had a huge presence there, and we were worried when Facebook won them, but we haven’t seen even a dent in our business so far.” Leffel has had some previous experience of getting into the ring with Facebook — although it hasn’t ended with him the winner. His previous startup, Yardsellr, positioned itself as the “eBay of Facebook,” working as a layer on top of the big social network for people to sell items. It in 2013, when Facebook took a less friendly turn to Yardsellr using Facebook’s social graph to grow its own business (it was a time when it was cutting off apps from Zynga for similar reasons). Today, Facebook itself owns the experience of selling on its platform via Marketplace. Crew seems to have found a strong foothold among enterprises in terms of its usefulness, not just use, which is one sign of how it might have more staying power. A Crew’s new enterprise tier is aiming to take the company to the next step. Today, Leffel says that a lot of its customers are buying on a location-by-location basis. The idea with Crew Enterprise is that larger organizations will be able to provide a more unified experience across all of those locations (not to mention pay more for the functionality). Managers can use the service to message out details about promotions, and they have a better ability to manage conversations across the platform and also get more feedback from people who are directly interacting with customers. Meanwhile, admins also gain better ability to manage compliance. If some of this sounds familiar, it’s not just because Workplace is the only one that is also targeting the same users. and (formerly Cotap) are two other startups that are also trying to provide better messaging-based communications to more than just white-collar knowledge workers. Crew will have its work cut out for it, but there is a lot of room for now for multiple players. “We are seeing a shift in the marketplace, going from ‘absolutely don’t use your phone at work’ to ‘don’t use it when customers are present,'” Leffel said of the opportunity. “Some have started to change the rules to allow workers to use their own phones to perform price checks. We are solving for this evolving workflow.” |
These 10 enterprise M&A deals totaled over $87 billion this year | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | M&A activity was brisk in the enterprise market this year, with 10 high-profile deals totaling almost $88 billion. Companies were opening up their wallets and pouring money into mega acquisitions. It’s worth noting that the $88 billion figure doesn’t include Dell paying investors more than $23 billion for VMware tracking stock or several other deals of over a billion dollars that didn’t make our list. Last year’s big deals included and Cisco getting , but there were not as many big ones. Adobe, which made two large acquisitions this year, was mostly quiet last year, only making a minor purchase. Salesforce too was mostly quiet in 2017, only buying a digital creative agency, after an active 2016. SAP also made only one purchase in 2017, paying $350 million for Gigya. Microsoft was active buying nine companies, but these were primarily minor. Perhaps everyone was saving their pennies for 2018. This year, by contrast, was go big or go home, and we saw action across the board from the usual suspects. Large companies looking to change their fortunes or grow their markets went shopping and came home with some expensive trinkets for their collections. Some of the deals are still waiting to pass regulatory hurdles and won’t be closing until 2019. Regardless, it’s too soon to judge whether these big-bucks ventures will pay the dividends that their buyers hope, or if they end up being M&A dust in the wind. By far the biggest and splashiest deal of the year goes to IBM, to acquire Red Hat . IBM sees this acquisition as a way to build out its hybrid cloud business. It’s a huge bet and one that could determine the success of Big Blue as an organization in the coming years. This deal was unexpected, as Broadcom, a chip maker, spent the second largest amount of money in a year of big spending. for its many billions was an old-school IT management and software solutions provider. Perhaps Broadcom felt it needed to branch out beyond pure chip making, and CA offered a way to do it, albeit a rather expensive one. While not anywhere close to the money IBM or Broadcom spent, SAP went out and just before the company was about to IPO, still paying a healthy $8 billion. The company believes that the new company could help build a bridge between SAP operational data inside its back-end ERP systems and Qualtrics customer data on the front end. Time will tell if they are right. In June, , giving it a key developer code repository. It was a lot of money to pay, and Diane Greene expressed regret that Google hadn’t been able to get it. That’s because cloud companies are working hard to win developer hearts and minds. Microsoft has a chance to push GitHub users toward its products, but it has to tread carefully because they will balk if Microsoft goes too far. Salesforce wasn’t about to be left out of the party in 2018 and in March, the CRM giant announced it was buying API integration vendor . It was a big deal for Salesforce, which tends to be acquisitive, but typically on smaller deals. This one was a key purchase though because it gives the company the ability to access data wherever it lives, on premises or in the cloud, and that could be key for them moving forward. Adobe primarily on the strength of its Creative Cloud, but it has been trying to generate more revenue on the marketing side of the business. To that end, for $4.75 billion and immediately boosted its marketing business, especially when combined with earlier in the year. SAP doesn’t do as many acquisitions as some of its fellow large tech companies mentioned here, but this year it did two. Not only did it buy Qualtrics for $8 billion, . SAP is best known for managing back-office components with its ERP software, but this adds a cloud-based, front-office sales process piece to the mix. Cisco has been hard at work buying up a variety of software services over the years, and this year it added to its security portfolio . The Michigan-based company helps companies secure applications using their own mobile devices and could be a key part of the Cisco security strategy moving forward. Twilio got into the act this year too. While not in the same league as the other large tech companies on this list, it saw a piece it felt would enhance its product set and it was willing to spend big to get it. Twilio, which made its name as a communications API company, saw a kindred spirit in SendGrid, to get the API-based email service. Vista Equity Partners is the only private equity firm on the list, but it’s one with an appetite for enterprise technology. With Apttio, it gets a company that can help companies understand their cloud assets alongside their on-prem ones. The company had been public before last month. |
Snapchat takes on TikTok with launch of Lens Challenges | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | Snapchat is looking to increase user engagement with the app with the launch of a new feature called Lens Challenges. Users can opt to participate in the challenges by creating a snap with a Lens that’s themed to a particular song, dance, holiday, event and more, the company explains. For example, one of the first challenges to launch is a sing-along with Gwen Stefani’s “Jingle Bells.” Users access the new challenge from the Lens Explorer section of the app, then lip sync along with the song. When finished, they’ll send the snap to the Gwen Stefani Challenge story for the chance to be featured in the app. While this particular challenge was designed by the company itself, others will be created by community members. Also new today is one called the “Disappear” challenge, created by Snapchat user Jye Trudinger. In this one, users are prompted to take two photos that superimpose, in order to make the photo’s subject disappear. Users can also watch others’ Challenge Snaps while in Lens Explorer. But the Challenges don’t have to be public — they also can be privately shared with your friends, if you prefer. The company hopes that more creators will create challenges going forward, as it will help them to grow their own audience and engage their fans. The new feature seems to be inspired by TikTok, the rapidly growing social app where things like song, dance and lip sync challenges are the norm. TikTok has been surging in recent months following Bytedance’s of Musical.ly, which allowed it to . That led Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube in new downloads last month. Snapchat, meanwhile, has been struggling this past year to recover from a rushed redesign plus declining engagement and revenue per user, . The company in , but its user base is still up year-over-year — so there’s a chance for a recovery from some of its missteps. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel this year laid out the company’s “comeback” plan in that focused on fixing problems with the design, Discover section, inability to reach older users and more. Since its launch, Snapchat had seen Facebook steal some of its best ideas for its own, like Stories — which are now one of Instagram’s defining features. Stories have also become something of an industry standard the way Facebook’s News Feed format has — they’re now found everywhere across the social web, from to . Now Snap is the one borrowing from a buzzy up-and-comer aimed at its tween to teenage customer base. That may not be its worst idea, even if it’s not very original. |
Report: Pinterest may go public as soon as April | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 19 | Pinterest may follow Lyft and Uber to the public markets in the first half of 2019, according to a from The Wall Street Journal. The visual search engine and shopping tool is expected to tap underwriters in January and complete an initial public offering as soon as April. The company was valued at just over $12 billion with its last private fundraise, a in mid-2017, and is to bring in $700 million in revenue this year. The company, founded in 2008 by Ben Silbermann (pictured), is also in talks to secure a $500 million credit line, per the report, not an uncommon move for a pre-IPO giant like Pinterest. To date, the company has raised nearly $1.5 billion from key stakeholders such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, Fidelity and SV Angel. Pinterest recently reached monthly active users, . This year, it launched to make it easier for passive Pinterest users to actually buy products on the platform, and , where users could view only the content from brands and people they follow. It also added the as part of an effort to create more local content for its users, and implemented — an area where it competes directly with Facebook and Google. 2019 is poised to be a banner year for venture-backed IPOs. Both and are in IPO registration, filing privately to go public within hours of each other earlier this month, and Slack, too, has reportedly to lead its 2019 float. Pinterest declined to comment. |
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