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The nation-state of the internet | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 12 | 8 | , but can it be a nation-state? It’s a question that I have been pondering on and off this year, what with and the deeply libertarian ethos baked into parts of the blockchain community. It’s clearly on a lot of other people’s minds as well: when , he noted (unprompted) that Uber is one of the few companies that could reach “nation-state” status when it IPOs. Clearly, the internet is home to many, diverse communities of similar-minded people, but how do those communities transmute from disparate bands into a nation-state? That question led me to , a book from 1983 and one of the most lauded (and debated) social science works ever published. Certainly it is among the most heavily cited: at almost 93,000 citations. Benedict Anderson, a political scientist and historian, ponders over a simple question: where does nationalism come from? How do we come to form a common bond with others under symbols like a flag, even though we have never — and will almost never — meet all of our comrades-in-arms? Why does every country consider itself “special,” yet for all intents and purposes they all look identical (heads of state, colors and flags, etc.) Also, why is the nation-state invented so late? Anderson’s answer is his title: people come to form nations when they can imagine their community and the values and people it holds, and thus can demarcate the borders (physical and cognitive) of who is a member of that hypothetical club and who is not. In order to imagine a community though, there needs to be media that actually links that community together. The printing press is the necessary invention, but Anderson tracks the rise of nation-states to the development of vernacular media — French language as opposed to the Latin of the Catholic Church. Lexicographers researched and published dictionaries and thesauruses, and the printing presses — under pressure from capitalism’s dictates — created rich shelves of books filled with the stories and myths of peoples who just a few decades ago didn’t “exist” in the mind’s eye. The nation-state itself was developed first in South America in the decline and aftermath of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Anderson argues for a sociological perspective on where these states originate from. Intense circulation among local elites — the bureaucrats, lawyers, and professionals of these states — and their lack of mobility back to their empires’ capitals created a community of people who realized they had more in common with each other than the people on the other side of the Atlantic. As other communities globally start to understand their unique place in the world, they import these early models of nation-states through the rich print culture of books and newspapers. We aren’t looking at convergent evolution, but rather clones of one model for organizing the nation implemented across the world. That’s effectively the heart of the thesis of this petite book, which numbers just over 200 pages of eminently readable if occasionally turgid writing. There are dozens of other epiphanies and thoughts roaming throughout those pages, and so the best way to get the full flavor is just to pick up a used copy and dive in. For my purposes though, I was curious to see how well Anderson’s thesis could be applied to the nation-state of the internet. Certainly, the concept that the internet is its own sovereign entity has been with us almost since its invention (just take a look at if you haven’t). Isn’t the internet nothing but a series of imagined communities? Aren’t subreddits literally the seeds of nation-states? Every time Anderson mentioned the printing press or “print-capitalism,” I couldn’t help but replace the word “press” with WordPress and print-capitalism with advertising or surveillance capitalism. Aren’t we going through exactly the kind of media revolution that drove the first nation-states a few centuries ago? Perhaps, but it’s an extraordinarily simplistic comparison, one that misses some of the key originators of these nation-states. Photo by metamorworks via Getty Images One of the key challenges is that nation-states weren’t a rupture in time, but rather were continuous with existing power structures. On this point, Anderson is quite absolute. In South America, nation-states were borne out of the colonial administrations, and elites — worried about losing their power — used the burgeoning form of the nation-state to protect their interests (Anderson calls this “official nationalism”). Anderson sees this pattern pretty much everywhere, and if not from colonial governments, then from the feudal arrangements of the late Middle Ages. If you turn the gaze to the internet then, who are the elites? Perhaps Google or Facebook (or Uber), companies with “nation-state” status that are essentially empires on to themselves. Yet, the analogy to me feels stretched. There is an even greater problem though. In Anderson’s world, language is the critical vehicle by which the nation-state connects its citizens together into one imagined community. It’s hard to imagine France without French, or England without English. The very symbols by which we imagine our community are symbols that community, and it is that self-referencing that creates a critical feedback loop back to the community and reinforces its differentiation. That would seem to knock out the lowly subreddit as a potential nation-state, but it does raise the question of one group: coders. When I write in Python for instance, I connect with a group of people who share that language, who communicate in that language (not entirely mind you), and who by their choice of that language. In fact, software engineers can tie their choices of language so strongly to their identities that it is entirely possible that “Python developer” or “Go programmer” says more about that person than “American” or “Chinese.” Where this gets interesting is when you carefully connect it to blockchain, which I take to mean a technology that can autonomously distribute “wealth.” Suddenly, you have an imagined community of software engineers, who speak in their own “language” able to create a bureaucracy that serves their interests, and with media that connects them all together (through the internet). The ingredients — at least as Anderson’s recipe would have them — are all there. I am not going to push too hard in this direction, but one surprise I had with Anderson is how little he discussed the physical agglomeration of people. The imagining of (physical) borders is crucial for a community, and so the development of maps for each nation is a common pattern in their historical developments. But, the map, fundamentally, is a symbol, a reminder that “this place is our place” and not much more. Indeed, nation-states bleed across physical borders all the time. Americans are used to the concept of worldwide taxation. France seats representatives from its overseas departments in the National Assembly, allowing French citizens across the former empire to vote and elect representatives to the country’s legislature. And anyone who has should know that “jurisdiction” these days has few physical borders. The barrier for the internet or its people to become nation-states is not physical then, but cognitive. One needs to not just imagine a community, but imagine it as the prime community. We will see an internet nation-state when we see people prioritizing fealty to one of these digital communities over the loyalty and patriotism to a meatspace country. There are already early acolytes in these communities who act exactly that way. The question is whether the rest of the adherents will join forces and create their own imagined (cyber)space. |
Now you can read the controversial Definers research about George Soros and Facebook | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 1 | Facebook is still dealing with the fallout from outlining the company’s strategy to fight back against criticism, particularly its work with Definers Public Affairs, an opposition research firm with ties to the Republican Party. That work included a document that Definers sent to reporters suggesting ties between George Soros and progressive political groups criticizing Facebook. The Times story described the broad strokes of the claims made by Definers, but the document itself has not been shared with the public — until today, when it was . At this point, the contents aren’t particularly revelatory, but the document is still worth reading, as it’s at the center of the recent controversy. It’s titled “Freedom From Facebook Potential Funding,” and it begins: Recently, a number of progressive groups came together to form the Freedom From Facebook campaign which has a six-figure ad budget. It is not clear who is providing the large amount of funding for the campaign but at least four of the groups in the coalition receive funding or are aligned with George Soros who has publicly criticized Facebook. It is very possible that Soros is funding Freedom From Facebook. The document goes on to point out connections between Soros and several of the groups involved in Freedom From Facebook, and it notes Soros’ public criticism of Facebook and Google. On its own, the document seems “largely innocuous” (as BuzzFeed put it), but it’s become controversial for potentially playing into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Soros. A Freedom From Facebook spokesperson has said that no money from Soros was used to fund the campaign — in fact, that its initial funding came from David Magerman, a Pennsylvania-based philanthropist and former hedge fund executive. According to BuzzFeed, this is one of at least two documents that Definers prepared after Soros made critical remarks about Facebook and Google at Davos. Meanwhile, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg have denied knowledge of Definers’ work for Facebook, and outgoing head of public policy . But that Sandberg had asked the communications team to research Soros’ financial ties after he criticized the company, and reporting by my colleague that . When reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson pointed us to and said the company has nothing further to add. |
Robot couriers scoop up early-stage cash | Joanna Glasner | 2,018 | 12 | 1 | Much of the last couple of decades of innovation has centered around finding ways to get what we want without leaving the sofa. So far, online ordering and on-demand delivery have allowed us to largely accomplish this goal. Just point, click and wait. But there’s one catch: Delivery people. We can never all lie around ordering pizzas if someone still has to deliver them. Enter robots. In tech-futurist circles, it’s pretty commonplace to hear about how some medley of autonomous vehicles and AI-enabled bots will take over doorstep deliveries in the coming years. They’ll bring us takeout, drop off our packages and displace lots of humans who currently make a living doing these things. If this vision does become reality, there’s a strong chance it’ll largely be due to a handful of early-stage startups currently working to roboticize last-mile delivery. Below, we take a look at who they are, what they’re doing, who’s backing them and where they’re setting up shop. Crunchbase data unearthed at least eight companies in the robot delivery space with headquarters or operations in North America that have secured seed or early-stage funding in the past couple of years. They range from heavily funded startups to lean seed-stage operations. Silicon Valley-based , an autonomous delivery startup founded by former engineers at , is the most heavily funded, having raised . Others have raised a few million. In the chart below, we look at key players, ranked by funding to date, along with their locations and key investors. While startups may be paving the way for robot delivery, they’re not doing so alone. One of the ways larger enterprises are keeping a toehold in the space is through backing and partnering with early-stage startups. They’re joining a long list of prominent seed and venture investors also eagerly eyeing the sector. The list of larger corporate investors includes Germany’s Daimler, the lead investor in . China’s , meanwhile, is backing San Francisco-based , while Toyota AI Ventures has invested in . As for partnering, takeout food delivery services seem to be the most active users of robot couriers. Starship, whose bot has been described as a slow-moving, medium-sized cooler on six wheels, is making particularly strong inroads in takeout. The San Francisco- and Estonia-based company, launched by Skype founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, is teaming up with and in parts of California and Washington, DC. It’s also working with the Domino’s pizza chain in Germany and the Netherlands. , another maker of cute, six-wheeled bots, has also been with Postmates in parts of Los Angeles. And , which is branding its boxy bots as “your friendly neighborhood robot,” teamed up for a trial with Yelp in San Francisco. While their visions of world domination are necessarily global, the robot delivery talent pool remains rather local. Six of the eight seed- and early-stage startups tracked by Crunchbase are based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the remaining two have some operations in the region. Why is this? Partly, there’s a concentration of talent in the area, with key engineering staff coming from larger local companies like Uber, Tesla and Waymo. Plus, of course, there’s a ready supply of investor capital, which bot startups presumably will need as they scale. Silicon Valley and San Francisco, known for scarce and astronomically expensive housing, are also geographies in which employers struggle to find people to deliver stuff at prevailing wages to the hordes of tech workers toiling at projects like designing robots to replace them. That said, the region isn’t entirely friendly territory for slow-moving sidewalk robots. In San Francisco, already home to absurdly steep streets and sidewalks crowded with humans and discarded scooters, city legislators to ban delivery robots from most places and severely restrict them in areas where permitted. But while San Francisco may be wary of a delivery robot invasion, other geographies, including nearby Berkeley, Calif., where startup operates, have been more welcoming. In the process, they’re creating an interesting new set of robot overseer jobs that could shed some light on the future of last-mile delivery employment. For some startups in early trial mode, robot wrangling jobs involve shadowing bots and making sure they carry out their assigned duties without travails. Remote robot management is also a thing and will likely see the sharpest growth. Starship, for instance, relies on operators in Estonia to track and manage bots as they make their deliveries in faraway countries. For now, it’s too early to tell whether monitoring and controlling hordes of delivery bots will provide better pay and working conditions than old-fashioned human delivery jobs. At least, however, much of it could theoretically be done while lying on the sofa. |
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian brings Armenian brandy to the US | Brett Moskowitz | 2,018 | 12 | 1 | When Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and Initalized Capital, approached the members-only spirits subscription club about bringing an Armenian brandy to market, he saw it as a unique opportunity to honor his paternal heritage. “My father’s side all fled during the genocide,” Ohanian told me in an interview. “He grew up pretty Americanized, but the food and drink were the big parts of the culture that were passed down.” Ohanian spent some time in Armenia as an adult and became acquainted with the tradition of taking shots of the local brandy, called “konyak,” out of sliced apricots. And he wanted to expose Americans to the highest-quality aged Armenian brandy. So when he received the investor update about Son of a Peat, a whiskey that Flaviar made for its members, he saw that the company was capable of bringing its own spirits to market. It was a new direction for Flaviar, and he thought it opened the door for him to have his own product. Ohanian decided to pitch his idea to the team. “For most Americans, this is their first exposure. If we can make it a thing in America, I’d love to pull that off,” Ohanian said. “ He says that there are not many Armenian exports that people are aware of and has a hunch that more than just Armenians will like the brandy. “I hope I can be a good ambassador for it.” Flaviar agreed to make the brandy for Ohanian who decided to call it — “chess” in Armenian. “Chess is a huge part of the Armenian identity. So is Armenian konyak.” The launch of Shakmat is an expansion of the relationship between Ohanian and Flaviar, which recently began developing its own spirit brands after initial success building a consumer base with subscription deliveries of spirit-tasting boxes. Since beginning operations in 2012, Flaviar has grown to include thousands of annual subscribers in the U.S. and Europe. In addition, the $210 yearly fee gets members access to live tastings and discounts on exclusive bottlings and private labels. After initial funding from a local angel investor, and later one of the first investments from Speedinvest’s first fund, says Petkovic, Flaviar went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2014. It was there where Petkovic and his co-founder Grisa Soba met Ohanian. “He, among several other YC partners, ended up investing personally, as well. We raised a few undisclosed rounds of funding since then.” Ohanian says that what drew him to Flaviar was its unique approach to connecting with consumers in the spirits marketplace. “This was before ‘direct to consumer’ was a thing,” Ohanian says. “The state laws around liqueur sales were starting to change, because of e-commerce. And what [Flaviar] realized was that you could build a relationship with customers around liquor. We can focus on curating really great juice. And we have enough credibility now that we can make our own.” The privately held company purchased competitor Caskers.com earlier this year and has an ambitious vision based on the idea that spirits remain inaccessible to most consumers who are interested in educating themselves about what’s out there. “We always envisioned Flaviar as a lifestyle club to which members would belong for years,” says Petkovic. “We believe new products are best discovered through curated selection, education and engagement with a community of people who share your passion.” Shakmat launched in the U.S. on November 12. Ohanian says he was thrilled at the opportunity to provide a platform for a deep cultural tradition and to donate 10 percent of profits to the community by supporting . (Armenian forests were severely depleted during the Soviet occupation because of the need to use wood as an energy source.) The includes 2,400 bottles of the 80 proof (40% ABV) 23-year-old brandy, but don’t be surprised if another run hits the market soon. Bottles can be purchased by Flaviar members for $95 and non-members for $110. |
The battle over the driving experience is heating up and will be won in software | Lou Shipley | 2,018 | 12 | 1 | Sirius XM’s recent all-stock $3.5-billion purchase of the music-streaming service Pandora raised a lot of eyebrows. A big question was why Sirius paid so much. Is Pandora’s music library and customer base really worth that amount? The answer is that this was a strategic move by Sirius in a battle that is far bigger than radio. The real battle, which will become much more visible in the coming years, is over the driving experience. People spend a lot of time commuting in their cars. That time is fixed and won’t likely change. However, what is changing is the way we drive. We’re already seeing many new cars with driver-assist features, and automakers (and tech companies) are working hard to bring fully autonomous cars to the market as quickly as possible. New cars today already contain an average of 100 million lines of code that can be updated to increase driver-assist options, and some automakers like Tesla already offer an “autonomous” mode on highways. According to the , one-quarter of all cars will be autonomous by 2040, and predicts all cars will be autonomous after 2050. Those are conservative estimates, as we are likely to see major changes in the next 10 years. These changes will impact the driving experience. As cars become more autonomous, we can do more than simply listen to music or podcasts. We may be able to watch videos, surf the web and more. The value of car real estate is already valuable, but it’s going to skyrocket as we change the way people consume media while driving. The Pandora acquisition was a strategic move by Sirius to gain the necessary assets so that it won’t fall behind in this space — and to get into the fast-growing music-streaming business, where users consume music at home, work and play. While Pandora’s music library is arguably second-tier, it’s also good enough that it can provide pretty much every artist most people want. This is often how high-priced mergers happen — one party is concerned about falling behind and pays a premium to purchase the other company’s assets. It’s also a bet by Sirius about the driving experience of the future. As the battle over the driving experience heats up, we will initially see companies like Google, Amazon and Apple start dipping their toes in the market. They might do that through investments in startups, rolling out their own services or purchasing competitors. Some of those large tech companies already have projects around autonomous cars. Uber may even be interested in this market. For now, Sirius probably doesn’t need to worry about competition from startups. They won’t be able to grow big enough, fast enough to get a sizable share of the market. A more likely scenario is that startups will work on software that offers a unique functionality, making it an attractive acquisition target by a larger company. This is going to be an interesting battle to watch in the coming years, as cars essentially become software with four wheels attached. Companies like Sirius know this is an important space and that the battle over the driving experience will be won in software. The acquisition of Pandora is only the beginning. |
Brazilian long-term rentals service QuintoAndar raises $64M Series C | Anna Escher | 2,018 | 12 | 1 | GA is one of the largest investors in online marketplaces across the globe combined with deep pockets, a long-term mindset, and a strong commitment and success within Latin America,” says the founder of the GA partnership. |
The economics and trade-offs of ad-funded smart city tech | Arman Tabatabai | 2,018 | 12 | 1 | innovative smart city applications, cities first need to build out the connected infrastructure, which can be a costly, lengthy and politicized process. Third-parties are helping build infrastructure at no cost to cities by paying for projects entirely through advertising placements on the new equipment. Here I try to dig into the economics of ad-funded smart city projects to better understand what types of infrastructure can be built under an ad-funded model, the benefits the strategy provides to cities and the non-obvious costs cities have to consider. A LinkNYC kiosk enabling access to the internet in New York on Saturday, February 20, 2016. More than 7,500 kiosks are to be installed, replacing standalone pay phone kiosks, providing free Wi-Fi, internet access via a touch screen, phone charging and free phone calls. The system is to be supported by advertising running on the sides of the kiosks. (Richard B. Levine) (Photo by Richard Levine/Corbis via Getty Images) Source: LinkNYC, NYC.gov, NYCOpenData Source: LinkNYC, NYC.gov, NYCOpenData But |
The Epic Games Store is now live | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | It’s a busy week for Epic Games. , so the gaming giant has . , the Epic Games Store is targeted squarely at Steam — the giant in the digital game commerce space — and . Right now there’s a small cluster of games available, including Hades, a new title from Supergiant Games that is in “early access” for $19.99, and Epic’s own Fortnite and Unreal Tournament, both of which are free. But Epic is saying that’s there’s a lot more to come. In particular, the store will offer a free game every two weeks, starting with Subnautica from December 14-17 and Super Meat Boy from December 28 until January 10. What is most interesting about the store is the revenue split, which is just 12 percent. That has set off a change at Valve, the firm behind Steam, : While Valve will continue to take an App Store-like 30 percent from sales of game makers with less than 10 million in revenue, that figure drops to 25 percent until they hit 50 million revenue, from which point the slice drops to 20 percent. All in all, the store is very early-stage, but you can imagine that Epic is working to add more flesh to the bones. It makes absolute sense that the company is aiming to capitalize on the phenomenal success of Fortnite — which was estimated to be — by building a destination for gamers. Indeed, a big clue came from its decision to bypass the Google Play Store and — that’s a move that is in 2018. “As a developer ourselves, we have always wanted a platform with great economics that connects us directly with our players,” CEO Tim Sweeney told TechCrunch in an emailed statement sent earlier this week. “Thanks to the success of Fortnite, we now have this and are ready to share it with other developers.” The Epic Games Store is part of a wider vision that prompted . That round has participation from the likes of KKR, Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners and it is said to value the Epic Games business — which also includes for game development — at more than $15 billion. Epic is the only gaming firm to go after Valve this year. — just months earlier, Valve appeared to go after Discord with . So everyone is going after everyone, but Epic’s big advantage continues to be Fortnite. |
7 things to think about voice | Tom Goodwin | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | The next few years will see voice automation take over many aspects of our lives. Although voice won’t change everything, it will be part of a movement that heralds a new way to think about our relationship with devices, screens, our data and interactions. We will become more task-specific and less program-oriented. We will think less about items and more about the collective experience of the device ecosystem they are part of. We will enjoy the experiences they make possible, not the specifications they celebrate. In the new world I hope we relinquish our role from the slaves we are today to be being back in control. The standard way that technology arrives is to augment more than replace. TV didn’t kill the radio. VHS and then streamed movies didn’t kill the cinema. The microwave didn’t destroy the cooker. Voice more than anything else is a way for people to get outputs from and give inputs into machines; it is a type of user interface. With UI design we’ve had the era of punch cards in the 1940s, keyboards from the 1960s, the computer mouse from the 1970s and the touchscreen from the 2000s. All four of these mechanisms are around today and, with the exception of the punch card, we freely move between all input types based on context. Touchscreens are terrible in cars and on gym equipment, but they are great at making tactile applications. Computer mice are great to point and click. Each input does very different things brilliantly and badly. We have learned to know what is the best use for each. Voice will not kill brands, it won’t hurt keyboard sales or touchscreen devices — it will become an additional way to do stuff; it is incremental, not cannibalistic. Nobody wanted the computer mouse before it was invented. In fact, many were perplexed by it because it made no sense in the previous era, where we used command lines, not visual icons, to navigate. Working with Nokia on touchscreens before the iPhone, the user experience sucked because the operating system wasn’t designed for touch. 3D Touch still remains pathetic because few software designers got excited by it and built for it. What is exciting about voice is not using ways to add voice interaction to current systems, but considering new applications/interactions/use cases we’ve never seen. At the moment, the burden is on us to fit around the limitations of voice, rather than have voice work around our needs. Have you ever noticed that most company desktop websites are their worst digital interface; their mobile site is likely better and the mobile app will be best. Most airline or hotel or bank apps don’t offer pared-down experiences (like was once the case), but their very fastest, slickest experience with the greatest functionality. What tends to happen is that new things get new cap ex, the best people and the most ability to bring change. However, most digital interfaces are still designed around the silos, workflows and structures of the company that made them. Banks may offer eight different ways to send money to someone or something based around their departments; hotel chains may ask you to navigate by their brand of hotel, not by location. The reality is that people are task-oriented, not process-oriented. They want an outcome and don’t care how. Do I give a crap if it’s Amazon Grocery or Amazon Fresh or Amazon Marketplace? Not one bit. Voice allows companies to build a new interface on top of the legacy crap they’ve inherited. I get to “send money to Jane today,” not press 10 buttons around their org chart. The first time I showed my parents a mouse and told them to double-click on it I thought they were having a fit on it. The cursor would move in jerks and often get lost. The same dismay and disdain I once had for them, I now feel every time I try to use voice. I have to reprogram my brain to think about information in a new way and to reconsider how my brain works. While this will happen, it will take time. What gets interesting is what happens to the 8-year-olds who grow up thinking of voice first, what happens when developing nations embrace tablets with voice not desktop PCs to educate. When people grow up with something, their native understanding of what it means and what it makes possible changes. It’s going to be fascinating to see what becomes of this canvas. We keep being dumb and thinking of voice as being the way to interact with “a” machine and not as a glue between all machines. Voice is an inherently crap way to get outputs; if a picture states a thousand words, how long will it take to buy a t-shirt. The real value of voice is as a user interface across all devices. Advertising in magazines should offer voice commands to find out more. You should be able to yell at the Netflix carousel, or at TV ads to add products to your shopping list. Voice won’t be how we “do” entire things, it will be how we trigger or finish things. We’ve only ever assumed we talked to devices first. Do I really want to remember the command for turning on lights in the home and utter six words to make it happen? Do I want to always be asking. Assuming devices are select in when they speak first, it’s fun to see what happens when voice is proactive. Imagine the possibilities: While many think we don’t want to share personal information, there are ample signs that if we get something in return, we trust the company and there is transparency, it’s OK. Voice will not develop alone, it will progress alongside Google suggesting emails replies, Amazon suggesting things to buy, Siri contextually suggesting apps to use. We will slowly become used to the idea of outsourcing our thinking and decisions somewhat to machines. We’ve already outsourced a lot; we can’t remember phone numbers, addresses, birthdays — we even rely on images to jar our recollection of experiences, so it’s natural we’ll outsource some decisions. The medium-term future in my eyes is one where we allow more data to be used to automate the mundane. Many think that voice is asking Alexa to order Duracell batteries, but it’s more likely to be never thinking about batteries or laundry detergent or other low consideration items again nor the subscriptions to be replenished. There is an expression that a computer should never ask a question for which it can reasonably deduce the answer itself. When a technology is really here we don’t see, notice or think about it. The next few years will see voice automation take over many more aspects of our lives. The future of voice may be some long sentences and some smart commands, but mostly perhaps it’s simply grunts of yes. |
Fortnite gets into Christmas mode with snow, planes and ziplines in season 7 | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | Fortnite, the world’s most popular game, is getting into the festive period after it released , which includes lots of Christmasy touches. The new season sees an iceberg smash into the island where the battle royale smash hit is located — that means there’s frozen terrain in the form of places like Frosty Flights and Polar Peak, as well as falling snow, snow-covered trees and slippery ice. The most notable update to the playing style is the arrival of X-4 Stormwing planes, which you can take for a ride in the skies. Beyond helping you get around quicker, they’re also complete with weapons for shooting down other planes or taking aim at enemies on the ground. The game now also includes ziplines, another useful addition that’ll change how players get around the map. The festive touches also include wrapping for weapons and vehicles, while there’s a Sergeant Santa skin that’s up for grabs. Outside the regular battle mode, Epic Games has added a Minecraft-like “creative” mode that gives each player their own island that can be customized. This, to me, is one of the best introductions to date, as the new game mode gives players a new way to battle privately with friends. Creative is initially limited to players who buy the season 7 battle pass, but it’ll be available to all Fortnite gamers after December 13. |
MoviePass announces new pricing plans for 2019 | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | It’s been a rocky year for , something that CEO Mitch Lowe acknowledged in . “We have a lot to prove to all our constituents,” Lowe said. “We don’t just have to prove ourselves to our members, we also have to prove ourselves to the investment community, our employees, and our partners. We believe we’re doing everything that we possibly can to deliver a great service and we’re in the process of fixing all the things that went wrong.” To that end, the company is launching a new pricing structure that will take effect in January. If you like paying $9.95, don’t worry: You’ll still be able to do that (at least in some geographies). If, on the other hand, you’re willing to pay a little more, you’ll no longer be limited by the ever-changing list of movies that MoviePass is supporting on a given day. So there are now three tiers, each of them offering three movie tickets each month. There’s Select, which will cost between $9.95 and $14.95 per month (depending on geography), and will only allow viewers to watch certain movies on certain days; All Access, which costs between $14.95 and $19.95 and allows you to go to any standard screening; and Red Carpet, which costs between $19.95 and $24.95 and includes one IMAX, 3D or other large-format screening each month. The company says that this new structure will allow it to break even on the tickets it’s selling — a key step to making the business model work. MoviePass fans will likely remember that the company over the summer, leading it to , only to back away from the price hike in favor of . Meanwhile, the New York attorney general’s office said it was , and parent company Helios and Matheson said it would . (TechCrunch’s parent company .) . And app store intelligence company says MoviePass only added 12,000 new users to its mobile app last month, down 97 percent from the growth it was seeing at its high point in January. In addition to rethinking its pricing, MoviePass is also making organizational changes. that although Lowe will remain CEO, he’ll be handing over responsibility for day-to-day operations to Executive Vice President Khalid Itum. |
Microsoft calls on companies to adopt a facial recognition code of conduct | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | null |
Lightspeed hires 5 new partners from Slack, Twitter and more | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the best-performing VC firms in Silicon Valley, is closing out 2018 with a slew of new hires. The firm has brought on five additional investing partners: Jana Messerschmidt, Ashley Brasier, Merci Victoria Grace (pictured above), Jerry Ye and Jay Madheswaran. Neetzan Zimmerman, a former senior editor at Gawker, has also joined as vice president of growth, as first reported by . The additions are 50 percent female, a good move for Lightspeed, which like many VC firms, has been long short on female partners. Founded in 2000, Lightspeed has had just two female partners, Nicole Quinn and Natalie Luu, who joined in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Two of its newest hires, Messerschmidt and Grace, are particularly active advocates of women in tech, too. Jana Messerschmidt, one of Lightspeed’s newest partners Messerschmidt joins from Twitter, where she was vice president of global business development and platform. She’s also held business and engineering roles at Netflix and DivX, and is a co-founder of #Angels, a group of early-stage investors focused on getting more women on . Messerschmidt already has a number of consumer tech companies in her portfolio, including Bird, Winnie, Carrot, TruStory and Cameo. Brasier, also tapped to support Lightspeed’s consumer investing practice, joins straight out of Stanford Business School. Before that, she was a manager at on-demand services marketplace Thumbtack, where she ran the events and weddings category. On top of that, Lightspeed has poached Slack’s head of growth Merci Victoria Grace, who’s also a founder of a community for women in the field that has grown to 5,000 members since 2015. She’ll join the firm’s enterprise team. Ye, a founding partner and former head of data science at SignalFire, a data-focused venture firm, will support Lightspeed’s growth team and will help support the firm’s data science practice. Madheswaran, for his part, will specialize in open source and cloud software. He was most recently at Lightspeed portfolio company Rubrik, where he was a founding engineer and head of product engineering. Finally, the firm has brought on Zimmerman, the former Gawker editor, as VP of growth. Until recently, he was a senior director of audience and strategy at The Hill. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Whisper, a Sequoia-backed AI-enabled storytelling platform. The hiring news comes hot off the feels of Lightspeed’s announcement. The pool of capital is the 18-year-old firm’s largest to date. Lightspeed, the first institutional investor to throw support behind Snap, has also written early checks to MuleSoft and Stitch Fix, which both completed successful IPOs this year. |
Mozilla and Qualcomm are bringing a native version of Firefox to Windows 10 on ARM | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | Microsoft is working with Google to bring a native ARM64 version of Chrome to and as Mozilla announced today, it, too, is working on bringing a native version of Firefox to Windows 10 on ARM. The organization is doing so in cooperation with Qualcomm. Typically, to make any Windows 10 application run on ARM-based machines, Microsoft uses a number of emulation techniques. Those work quite well, but they do incur both power and performance cost. Native applications obviously don’t need emulation, so they run faster and more efficiently. Given that browsers are among the most-used applications, it’s no surprise that the major browser vendors are interested in offering the best support for the platform, even if we’re still talking about a very small niche for the time being. We asked Mozilla for a release date for this Windows 10 on ARM version, but the organization has yet to provide us with this information. We’ll update this post once we learn more. Qualcomm also today its new premium 8cx platform for PCs, which extends the company’s bet on the PC market. It’s probably no surprise that Mozilla chose today to make its announcement. In addition, though, Microsoft also today that it will move to the Chromium engine for its Edge browser. That leaves Firefox’s Gecko engine and WebKit, which Apple’s Safari uses, as the last two competitors with any major market share in the browser space. |
TransferWise keeps growing money transfers despite global turbulence | Gregg Schoenberg | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | to follow the financial technology industry or work with developers in faraway lands to know , arguably the world’s leading peer-to-peer money-transferring startup. Thanks to its presence in more than 70 countries, low-cost rates for moving money internationally and, of course, its famous “nothing to hide” PR campaign that featured its semi-naked employees running through the streets of London and New York, TransferWise has become one of the world’s most recognizable fintech brands. Along the way, the company helped usher in the age of the rebel-fintech adolescent startup that could compete and win against dusty incumbents on the basis of transparency, value, technology and, perhaps most importantly, moxy. But today, the macroeconomic, business and political conditions that served as the feedstock to co-founders Kristo Käärman and Taavet Hinrikus when they launched TransferWise are ancient history. Can it keep scaling amidst heightened trade tensions, the unfortunate rise of xenophobia and capital controls? Will it continue to grow profits in the face of competition from other well-funded fintech startups and incumbents that look less dusty? Does the company, which has recently launched , a revamped “borderless” business offering and a Mastercard debit card, have aspirations to provide other financial services? And, why isn’t TransferWise public? In the interview below, CEO Käärman addresses these questions head-on. In doing so, the Estonian native makes the case for his company’s future as a trusted partner for its dedicated (and growing) customer base. |
Google partners with media outlets to provide on-demand news audio | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | Google has reached out to note that the product is still in the early stages, so don’t exact to see a wide release of the final version just yet. |
Artie aims to bring you closer to your digital idols with autonomous AR avatars | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | If you spend enough time scrolling through manicured photos of manicured lives on social media, you might come to the realization that maybe the fakeness of the online world has started to look too real. This might be why so many investors are starting to stare headlong into the world of avatars and digital influencers that aren’t real people but can learn from their audiences in real time. Earlier this week, I chatted with a pair of interesting founders from the startup . The team is basically trying to create an interaction engine for digital avatars to sit in the real world and have some sort of meaningful interaction with users through phone-based AR. The startup’s backers include Founders Fund and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Co-founders Armando Kirwin and Ryan Horrigan both come from some top startups in the VR media space. The Artie team Artie’s sort of autonomous storytelling platform really focuses in on a couple of emerging trends. One is this big idea of digital influencers revving up in Japan and Korea that’s basically leveraging all of these new face-tracking capabilities of smartphones to allow users to craft 3D avatars that are sort of animated, abstracted online personalities. It’s , but it’s a slower grind. Artie isn’t necessarily looking at user-generated content at this moment, but the company’s work in more branded moments with already leveraged IP is an interesting first step toward something bigger. Artie is also an AR company. The phone AR market really seems to have a number of usage obstacles to overcome. Despite the excitement coming from Apple and Google, platforms like ARKit and ARCore have mostly arrived with a thud. There are a few companies trying to build out some more fundamental backend capabilities to enable shared experiences that adjust to their surroundings, but it’s unclear where the missing link really is in getting people to use a feature that’s really just sitting dormant on their smartphone. The company is working with WebXR standards that will basically allow anyone to tap a link on their phone and plunge straight into an experience where the avatar is inside their physical space. The video below gives some early insight into what their platform is going to offer. https://vimeo.com/304719943 As niche as this market sounds, Artie isn’t totally alone here, in its Playground release on Pixel phones, where users can jump into photos with 3D characters who are somewhat aware of their environments. For Artie, the deeper interactions between the avatar and characters is really where they hope the magic comes into view. Their platform carries out emotion tracking and object detection to give Unity developers some freedom to let users interrupt the avatars and send them on tangents, all while learning from the user in how they interact with the character and want them to act. “Think of it like how YouTube, back in the day, established this notion where content creators could for the first time get closer to their audiences through the comments, but it always happens post-mortem after the video was published and would inform what would happen next week,” Horrigan told TechCrunch. “So the difference here is that we’re actually bringing that intimacy between audience and content creator in real time.” The co-founders both share some big ideas for the direction of storytelling that leverages deep learning to tell the content creators more about the world and audience they’re building for. Artie is at the forefront of some interesting but deeply odd market trends, ones that are probably driven as much by the state of pop culture as they are by tech capabilities, though it’s all still early tech coming from a small team. The founders say they’ll start working with some early “power users” like media companies and celebrities in the first quarter of next year to start building out the first experiences for Artie on their “Wonderfriend” engine. |
Let’s meet in Poland this month | John Biggs | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | I’m heading back to Europe to run a pitch-off in Wroclaw and Warsaw, Poland. Are you ready? The Wrocwal event, is happening on December 17 and you can submit to . The team will notify you if you have been chosen to pitch. The winner will receive a table at TC Disrupt in San Francisco. The Warsaw event, , is on the 19th. You can sign up to . I’ll notify the folks I’ve chosen to pitch and the winner gets a table as well. Special thanks to Dermot Corr and Ahmad Piraiee for putting these things together. It’s always fun to get back to the stary kraj. |
Walgreens enlists FedEx to offer speedy drug delivery | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | null |
Netflix tops other streamers with most Golden Globes nods, but Amazon beats it on TV | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | Netflix is having another good year when it comes to racking up the Golden Globe nominations. Last year, Netflix of the most-nominated networks alongside HBO with 12 nods, even if that didn’t translate to for the streaming service. This time around, eight nominations for its TV series and another five in the film category. However, Netflix is not the most-nominated “TV” network. This year, that honor goes to FX Networks, which accumulated 10 nominations for its shows like “Atlanta,” “Pose” and “The Americans.” FX is followed by HBO and Amazon Prime Video, each with nine nominations apiece. HBO is usually further ahead because of its top vote-getter “Games of Thrones,” but the show’s hiatus meant . So, consider this a glimpse of how HBO will fare in the years ahead, when the “Game of Thrones” final season has wrapped. Instead, HBO shows like “Barry” and “Sharp Objects” helped HBO score. While Netflix by earning 13 total nominations across film and television, Amazon Prime Video was ahead on the TV side of things. It grabbed nominations for shows like “Homecoming,” featuring Julia Roberts; popular comedy “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel;” and the limited series “A Very English Scandal,” with Hugh Grant. (Perhaps Hollywood star power still sells on the small screen?) Netflix, meanwhile received nods for Chuck Lorre’s comedy “The Kominsky Method,” starring Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin, which is up for best comedy series. Netflix’s “Bodyguard” is also up for best drama, and actors from “Glow,” “Ozark” and “Seven Seconds,” were nominated, as well. Like HBO, Netflix this year was missing the chance to compete with some of its top shows, like “Stranger Things” and “The Crown.” Plus, post-scandal, longtime favorite “House of Cards” didn’t get any nominations for its last season. Netflix’s eight nominations put it ahead of Hulu, though, which only pulled in two nominations this year — both for “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Though Hulu also invests in original content, it does so on a smaller scale than Netflix and Amazon, which in part accounts for its meager showing. (It could also do better with what it greenlights…”The Handmaid’s Tale” is arguably very good, but difficult to watch. And its other shows don’t have as big a following, except perhaps those from Stephen King.) On the film side of things, Netflix’s Oscar hopeful “Roma” received three nominations, including best foreign language film, best director (Alfonso Cuarón) and best screenplay. The foreign language film “Girl” (Belgium) and “Dumplin'” also helped Netflix earn more shots this year. |
Ericsson software problem has been causing widespread cell phone outages | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | A problem with the software in Ericsson equipment is causing outages across the world, including O2 users in Great Britain and SoftBank users in Japan, according to earlier today. Ericsson took blame for the outage . It apparently involves faulty software on certain Ericsson equipment used on the affected company’s mobile networks. While Ericsson indicated it involved multiple countries, it appeared to try to minimize the impact by stating it involved “network disturbances for a limited number of customers.” The FT report indicated that it was actually affecting millions of mobile customers worldwide. Regardless, the company said that an initial analysis attributed the problem to an expired software certificate on the affected equipment. Börje Ekholm, Ericsson president and CEO, said they were working to restore the service as soon as possible, which probably isn’t soon enough for people who don’t have a working cell phone at the moment. “The faulty software that has caused these issues is being decommissioned and we apologize not only to our customers but also to their customers. We work hard to ensure that our customers can limit the impact and restore their services as soon as possible,” Ekholm said in a statement. While the press release went on to say they are working to restore the service throughout the day, as of publishing this article, the still showed problems in the London area and throughout Great Britain. The and outage pages are also currently showing outages in the U.S, but Ericsson reports that these are unrelated to today’s issues with their equipment, which are only affecting customers outside of the US. (Note that Verizon owns this publication.) |
Contentful raises $33.5M for its headless CMS platform | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | , a Berlin- and San Francisco-based startup that provides content management infrastructure for companies like Spotify, Nike, Lyft and others, today announced that it has raised a $33.5 million Series D funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from OMERS Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors General Catalyst, Benchmark, Balderton Capital and Hercules. In total, the company has now raised $78.3 million. It’s been less than a year since the company and, as Contentful co-founder and CEO Sascha Konietzke told me, the company didn’t really need to raise right now. “We had just raised our last round about a year ago. We still had plenty of cash in our bank account and we didn’t need to raise as of now,” said Konietzke. “But we saw a lot of economic uncertainty, so we thought it might be a good moment in time to recharge. And at the same time, we already had some interesting conversations ongoing with Sapphire [formerly SAP Ventures] and Salesforce. So we saw the opportunity to add more funding and also start getting into a tight relationship with both of these players.” The original plan for Contentful was to focus almost explicitly on mobile. As it turns out, though, the company’s customers also wanted to use the service to handle its web-based applications and these days, Contentful happily supports both. “What we’re seeing is that everything is becoming an application,” he told me. “We started with native mobile application, but even the websites nowadays are often an application.” In its early days, Contentful focused only on developers. Now, however, that’s changing, and having these connections to large enterprise players like SAP and Salesforce surely isn’t going to hurt the company as it looks to bring on larger enterprise accounts. Currently, the company’s focus is very much on Europe and North America, which account for about 80 percent of its customers. For now, Contentful plans to continue to focus on these regions, though it obviously supports customers anywhere in the world. Contentful only exists as a hosted platform. As of now, the company doesn’t have any plans for offering a self-hosted version, though Konietzke noted that he does occasionally get requests for this. What the company is planning to do in the near future, though, is to enable more integrations with existing enterprise tools. “Customers are asking for deeper integrations into their enterprise stack,” Konietzke said. “And that’s what we’re beginning to focus on and where we’re building a lot of capabilities around that.” In addition, support for GraphQL and an expanded rich text editing experience is coming up. The company also recently launched a new editing experience. |
Qualcomm expands its PC bet with its new 7nm 8cx platform | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | Qualcomm wants to become a major player in the PC/laptop market. Now that there is Windows 10 on ARM, that’s more than a pipe dream, but in its earliest iterations, those Qualcomm-based Windows 10 laptops used the Snapdragon 850 system on a chip that was specifically designed for PCs but still very much a direct descendant of its smartphone platform. Today, the company announced its Snapdragon 8cx platform, “the most extreme Snapdragon ever,” in Qualcomm’s parlance, which still leverages some of the company’s mobile expertise and building blocks, but which was built from the ground up to power PCs. The 8cx is very much tailored toward the PC, down to how it handles peak performance and multitasking. It’s also the first 7nm PC platform, the company claims, though the first devices won’t hit the market until Q3 of 2019. The promise of using Qualcomm Snapdragon platform for a PC (which Qualcomm and Microsoft brands as “always connected PCs”) is that you’ll get multi-day battery life and a performance that is comparable to what you’d get with an Intel chip. The first generation of devices delivered great battery life, but performance wasn’t quite up to par. With this new release, Qualcomm promises to change that. Without saying Intel, Qualcomm argues that its 7nm chips are “multiple generations ahead of the traditional PC space.” Despite launching the 8cx platform, Qualcomm is keeping the 850 around. It’s positioning the 8cx as a premium platform that complements the existing 850 platform in order to allow vendors to offer PCs at a wide range of different price points. The new 8cx will feature Qualcomm’s Kryo 495 CPU and the Adreno 860 GPU, which will be able to power two 4K HDR monitors. It’ll also feature Qualcomm’s latest quick charging technology and all the usual connectivity options, ranging from Bluetooth to USB-C and LTE (for that always connected connectedness). “With performance and battery life as our design tenets, we’re bringing 7nm innovations to the PC space, allowing for smartphone-like capabilities to transform the computing experience,” said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager of mobile for Qualcomm, in today’s announcement. “As the fastest Snapdragon platform ever, the Snapdragon 8cx will allow our customers to offer a powerful computing experience of multi-day battery life and multi-gigabit connectivity, in new thin, light and fanless design for consumers and the enterprise.” |
FB QVC? Facebook tries Live video shopping | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | Want to run your own home shopping network? Facebook is now testing a Live video feature for merchants that lets them demo and describe their items for viewers. Customers can screenshot something they want to buy and use Messenger to send it to the seller, who can then request payment right through the chat app. Facebook confirms the new shopping feature is currently in testing with a limited set of Pages in Thailand, which has been a testbed for shopping features. The option was first spotted by social media and reputation manager , and re-shared by and . But now Facebook is confirming the test’s existence and providing additional details. The company tells me it had heard feedback from the community in Thailand that Live video helped sellers demonstrate how items could be used or worn, and provided richer understanding than just using photos. Users also told Facebook that Live’s interactivity let customers instantly ask questions and get answers about product specifications and details. Facebook has looked to Thailand to test new commerce experiences like , as the country’s citizens were quick to prove how Facebook Groups could be used for peer-to-peer shopping. “Thailand is one of our most active Marketplace communities” says Mayank Yadav, Facebook product manager for Marketplace. Now it’s running the Live shopping test, which allows Pages to notify fans that they’re broadcasting to “showcase products and connect with your customers.” Merchants can take reservations and request payments through Messenger. Facebook tells me it doesn’t currently have plans to add new partners or expand the feature. But some sellers without access are being invited to join a waitlist for the feature. It also says it’s working closely with its test partners to gather feedback and iterate on the live video shopping experience, which would seem to indicate it’s interested in opening the feature more widely if it performs well. Facebook doesn’t take a cut of payments through Messenger, but the feature could still help earn the company money at a time when it’s as it runs out of space there, Stories take over as the top media form and user growth plateaus. Hooking people on video viewing helps Facebook show lucrative video ads. The more that Facebook can train users to buy and sell things on its app, the better the conversion rates will be for businesses, and the more they’ll be willing to spend on ads. Facebook could also convince sellers who broadcast Live to buy its new to promote their wares. And Facebook is happy to snatch any use case from the rest of the internet, whether it’s long-form video viewing or job applications or shopping to boost time on site and subsequent ad views. Increasingly, Facebook is setting its sights on Craigslist, Etsy and eBay. Those commerce platforms have failed to keep up with new technologies like video and lack the trust generated by Facebook’s real-name policy and social graph. A few years ago, selling something online meant typing up a generic description and maybe uploading a photo. Soon it could mean starring in your own infomercial. [PostScript: And a Facebook home shopping network could on its new countertop smart display Portal.] |
Join TechCrunch for our 2nd Annual Winter Party | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | null |
Rideshare advertising startup Firefly launches with $21.5M in funding | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | , a startup that allows rideshare drivers to make money through digital advertising, is officially launching today. It’s also announced that it has raised $21.5 million in seed funding. The idea of sticking advertising on a cab isn’t new, but Firefly offers drivers what it calls a “digital smart screen,” allowing advertisers to run targeted, geofenced campaigns. The company has apparently run more than 50 ad campaigns already, during a beta testing period in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with hundreds of cars on the road. “Being the first at building out the IP is going to be the main differentiator,” said co-founder and CEO Kaan Gunay. “Over half our team are engineers, and we have been extremely focused on developing core IP to make sure it’s scalable.” In addition, Gunay said that thanks to the combination of Firefly’s targeting capabilities with its “strict” advertising policies (it won’t accept ads for strip clubs, tobacco and cannabis companies, among others), “We’re working with a lot of advertisers who might not even have advertised outdoors before. We believe we are expanding the market.” One of the main goals is to allow drivers for Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing services to make more money. In fact, Firefly says the average driver in its network makes an additional $300 per month. Gunay explained that if the driver meets a certain threshold for hours on the road, the company will pay them a flat fee to carry its advertising — but he also said the company is exploring different ways to “maximize the revenue that we share with the drivers and give the maximum benefit to the drivers.” It’s an issue on regulators’ minds as well, with . Earlier this year, to allow drivers to make additional income by selling goods like gum, snacks and phone chargers. Firefly doesn’t have an official relationship with the ride-hailing companies, but Gunay said, “In our conversations with these large companies … they’ve said the drivers are free to do what they want to do. This is why it’s a win for everyone.” Gunay also said these displays will become the foundation for a “smart city data network.” In other words, they will collect data that Firefly plans to share with local governments and nonprofit groups. For example, he said the company has already been sharing air quality data with the Coalition for Clean Air, and it’s also looking to include temperature sensors and accelerometers. Apparently Gunay doesn’t plan to make money from this side of the business. He told me, “We want to be able to add value to how cities operate … We’re not planning to monetize that.” Getting back to the funding, $21.5 million is a huge seed round, but Gunay said the company’s success thus far was able to”justify a larger raise and a higher valuation.” The round was led by NFX with participation from Pelion Venture Partners, Decent Capital (founded by Tencent’s Jason Zeng) and Jeffrey Housenbold of SoftBank Vision Fund (yes, ). |
Microsoft Edge goes Chromium (and macOS) | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 12 | 6 | The were true: is moving to the open-source Chromium platform, the same platform that powers Google’s Chrome browser. And once that is done, Microsoft is bringing Edge to macOS, too. In addition, Microsoft is decoupling Edge from the Windows update process to offer a faster update cadence — and with that, it’ll bring the new Edge to Windows 7 and 8 users, too. It’ll be a while before any of this happens, though. There’s no code to test today and the first previews are still months away. But at some point in 2019, Microsoft’s EdgeHTML and Chakra will go away and and V8 will take its place. The company expects to release a first developer preview early next year. Obviously, there is a lot to unpack here. What’s clear, though, is that Microsoft is acknowledging that Chrome and Chromium are the de facto standard today, both for users and for developers. Over the years, especially after Microsoft left the behind, Edge had, for the most part, become a perfectly usable browser, but Microsoft acknowledges that there were always compatibility issues. While it was investing heavily in fixing those, what we’re hearing from Microsoft is a very pragmatic message: it simply wasn’t worth the investment in engineering resources anymore. What Microsoft had to do, after all, was reverse engineer its way around problems on certain sites. In part, that’s because Edge never quite gained the where developers cared enough to test their code on the platform. And with the web as big as it is, the long tail of incompatible sites remains massive. Because many web developers work on Macs, where they don’t have access to Edge, testing for it became even more of an afterthought. Hence Microsoft’s efforts to bring Edge to the Mac, 15 years after it abandoned . The company doesn’t expect that Edge on Mac will gain any significant market share, but it believes that having it available on every platform will mean that more developers will test their web apps with Edge, too. Microsoft also admits that it didn’t help that Edge only worked on Windows 10 — and that Edge updates were bound to Windows updates. I was never quite sure why that was the case, but as Microsoft will now happily acknowledge, that meant that millions of users on older Windows versions were left behind, and even those on Windows 10 often didn’t get the latest, most compatible version of Edge because their companies remained a few updates behind. errand imagine With this move, Microsoft also plans to increase its involvement in the Chromium community. That means it’ll bring to Chromium some of the work it did to make Edge work really well with touchscreens, for example. But also, as , the company now publicly notes that it is working with Google and Qualcomm to bring a native implementation of the Chrome browser to Windows 10 on ARM, making it snappier and more battery friendly than the current version that heavily relies on emulation. Microsoft hopes that if it can make the compatibility issues a thing of the past, users will still gravitate to its browser because of what differentiates it. Maybe that’s its Cortana integration or new integrations with Windows and Office. Or maybe those are new consumer services or, for the enterprise users, specific features that make the lives of IT managers a bit easier. When the rumors of this change first appeared a few days ago, a number of pundits argued that this isn’t great for the web because it gives even more power over web standards to the Chromium project. I share some of those concerns, but Microsoft is making a very pragmatic argument for this move and notes that Edge’s small market share didn’t allow it to make a dent in this process anyway. By becoming more active in the Chromium community, it’ll have more of a voice — or so it hopes — and be able to advocate for web standards and bring its own innovations to Chromium. Your bro Microsoft stresses that it isn’t giving up on Edge, by the way. The browser isn’t going anywhere. If you’re a happy Edge user today, chances are this move will make you an even happier Edge user in the long run. If you aren’t, Microsoft hopes you’ll give it a fresh look when the new Chromium-based version launches. It’s on Microsoft now to build a browser that is differentiated enough to get people to give it another shot. |
Tesla shares fall 7.6% following price cuts in China and Elon Musk’s promise to reimburse missed tax credits | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | Monday , but Tesla shares were hit especially hard. The stock after Tesla cut the Model 3’s price in China and CEO Elon Musk promised to reimburse U.S. customers if they miss a tax credit deadline due to Model 3 shipment delays. this weekend that the Model 3’s prices on Tesla’s China website had been reduced by up to 7.6 percent, with the starting price now at 499,000 RMB (about $72,000). This is the third time since November that Tesla has lowered the price of its vehicles in China. The first was in November, when it slashed the price of Model X and Model S vehicles by 12 to 26 percent, stating that it was “absorbing a significant part of the tariff to help make cars more affordable for customers in China.” Then this month, Tesla cut Model X and Model S prices again, citing China’s decision to on American-produced vehicles and auto parts as the two countries reached a ceasefire in the trade war. In October, Tesla announced on its site that U.S. customers needed to order a Model S, Model X or Model 3 before October 15 if they wanted the full $7,500 federal tax credit, which begins to phase out once a manufacturer sells 200,000 qualifying vehicles in the U.S. (Tesla hit that milestone earlier this year). As a result, the federal tax credit , for vehicles delivered January 1 to June 30, 2019, before being halved again on July 1. On Sunday, Musk tweeted in response to a question that if a customer’s pre-December order isn’t delivered before the end of the year, Tesla will reimburse the tax credits they missed out on. If Tesla committed delivery & customer made good faith efforts to receive before year end, Tesla will cover the tax credit difference — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) After months of production and delivery delays, Tesla in the third quarter of this year, when it delivered a total of 83,500 vehicles, including 55,840 Model 3 units. |
Salesforce keeps rolling with another banner year in 2018 | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | The good times kept on rolling this year for with all of the requisite ingredients of a highly successful cloud company — the steady revenue growth, the expanding product set and the splashy acquisitions. The company also opened the doors of its shiny new headquarters, , a testament to its sheer economic power in the city. Salesforce, which set a few years ago is already on its way to $20 billion. Yet Salesforce is also proof you can be ruthlessly good at what you do, while trying to do the right thing as an organization. Make no mistake, Marc Benioff and Keith Block, the company’s co-CEOs, want to make obscene amounts of money, going so far as to tell a group of analysts earlier this year that their goal by 2034 is to be . Salesforce just wants to do it with a hint of compassion as it rakes in those big bucks and keeps well-heeled competitors like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP at bay. In the end, a publicly traded company like Salesforce is going to be judged by how much money it makes, and Salesforce it turns out is pretty good at this, as it showed once again this year. The company by over 24 percent YoY and ended up the year with $12.53 billion in revenue. Based on its last quarter of $3.39 billion, the company finished the year on a $13.56 billion run rate. This compares with $9.92 billion in total revenue for 2017 with a closing run rate of $10.72 billion. Even with this steady growth trajectory, it might be some time before it hits the $5 billion-a-quarter mark and checks off the $20 billion goal. Keep in mind that it took the company three years to get from $1.51 billion in Q12016 to $3.1 billion in Q12019. As for the stock market, it has been highly volatile this year, but Salesforce is still up. Starting the year at $102.41, it was sitting at $124.06 as of publication, after peaking on October 1 at $159.86. The market has been on a wild ride since then and , warranted or not. On one particularly bad day last month, Salesforce had its worst day since 2016 losing 8.7 percent in value, When you make a lot of money you can afford to spend generously, and the company invested some of those big bucks when in March, making it the most expensive acquisition it has ever made. With Mulesoft, the company had a missing link between data sitting on-prem in private data centers and Salesforce data in the cloud. Mulesoft helps customers build access to data wherever it lives via APIs. That includes legacy data sitting in ancient data repositories. As Salesforce turns its eyes toward artificial intelligence and machine learning, it requires oodles of data and Mulesoft was worth opening up the wallet to provide the company with that kind of . Salesforce 2018 acquisitions. Chart: Crunchbase. But Mulesoft wasn’t the only thing Salesforce bought this year. It made five acquisitions in all. The other significant one came in July when for a cool $800 million, giving it a market intelligence platform. What could be on board for 2019? If Salesforce sticks to its recent pattern of spending big one year, then regrouping the next, 2019 could be a slower one for acquisitions. Consider that it bought just one company last year after buying a dozen in 2016. One other way to keep revenue rolling in comes from high-profile partnerships. In the past, Salesforce has partnered with Microsoft and Google, and this year it announced that it was teaming . Salesforce also announced another to share data between the two platforms more easily. The hope with these types of cross pollination is that the companies can both increase their business. For Salesforce, that means using these partnerships as a platform to move the revenue needle faster. Even while his company has made big bucks, Benioff has been preaching compassionate capitalism using Twitter and the media as his soap box. He went on record throughout this year , a referendum question designed to help battle San Francisco’s massive homeless problem by taxing companies with greater than $50 million in revenue — companies like Salesforce. Benioff was a vocal proponent of the idea, and it won. He did not find kindred spirits among some of his fellow San Francisco tech CEOs, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Twitter. Speaking about Prop C in November, Benioff talked in lofty terms about why he believed in the measure even though it would cost his company money. “You’ve got to really be mindful and think about what it is that you want your company to be for and what you’re doing with your business and here at Salesforce, that’s very important to us,” he told Swisher in the interview. He also talked about how employees at other tech companies were driving their CEOs to change their tune around social issues, including supporting Prop C, but Benioff had to deal with his own internal insurrection this year when 650 employees signed a petition asking him to rethink the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in light of the current administration’s border policies. Benioff defended the contract, stating that that Salesforce tools were being used internally at CBP for staff recruiting and communication and not to enforce border policy. Regardless, Salesforce has never lost its focus on meeting lofty revenue goals, and as we approach the new year, there is no reason to think that will change. The company will continue to look for new ways to expand markets and keep their revenue moving ever closer to that $20 billion goal, even as it continues to meld its unique form of compassion and capitalism. |
My product launch wishlist for Instagram, Twitter, Uber and more | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | ‘Twas the night before Xmas, and all through the house, not a feature was stirring from the designer’s mouse . . . Not Twitter! Not Uber, Not Apple or Pinterest! On Facebook! On Snapchat! On Lyft or on Insta! . . . From the sidelines I ask you to flex your code’s might. Happy Xmas to all if you make these apps right. – A button on feed posts that when tapped inserts a burst of similar posts before the timeline continues. Want to see more fashion, sunsets, selfies, food porn, pets or Boomerangs? Instagram’s machine vision technology and metadata would gather them from people you follow and give you a dose. You shouldn’t have to work through search, hashtags or the Explore page, nor permanently change your feed by following new accounts. Pinterest briefly had this feature (and should bring it back), but it’d work better on Insta. – Instagram’s messaging feature has become the de facto place for sharing memes and trash talk about people’s photos, but it’s stuck on mobile. For all the college kids and entry-level office workers out there, this would make being stuck on laptops all day much more fun. Plus, youth culture truthsayer wants Instagram web DMs, too. – Try to post a Story video or Boomerang from a crummy internet connection and they turn out a blurry mess. Instagram should warn us if our signal strength is low compared to what we usually have (since some places it’s always mediocre) and either recommend we wait for Wi-Fi, or post a low-res copy that’s replaced by the high-res version when possible. Oh, and if new VP of product Vishal Shah is listening, I’d also like Bitmoji-style avatars and a better way to discover accounts that shows a selection of their recent posts plus their bio, instead of just one post and no context in Explore, which is better for discovering content. – Ummm, this is pretty straightforward. It’s absurd that you can’t even search DMs by person, let alone keyword. Twitter knows messaging is a big thing on mobile right? And DMs are one of the most powerful ways to get in contact with mid-level public figures and journalists. PS: . – Social networks are obsessed with getting us to follow more people, but do a terrible job of helping us clean up our feeds. With Twitter bringing back the option to see a chronological feed, we need unfollow suggestions more than ever. It should analyze who I follow but never click, fave, reply to, retweet or even slow down to read and ask if I want to nix them. and the problem has only gotten worse. Because people feel like their feeds are already overflowing, they’re stingy with following new people. That’s partly why you see accounts get only a handful of new followers when their tweets go viral and are seen by millions. I recently had a tweet with 1.7 million impressions and 18,000 Likes that drove just 11 follows. Yes I know that’s a self-own. – If Twitter wants to improve conversation quality, it should teach us what works. Twitter offers analytics about each of your tweets, but not in context of your other posts. Did this drive more or fewer link clicks or follows than my typical tweet? That kind of info could guide users to create more compelling content. (Obviously we could get into Facebook’s myriad problems here. A less sensationalized feed that doesn’t reward exaggerated claims would top my list. Hopefully its plan to will help when it rolls out.) – Facebook sends way too many notifications. Some are downright useless and should be eliminated. “14 friends responded to events happening tomorrow”? “Someone’s fundraiser is half way to its goal?” Get that shit out of here. But there are other notifications I want to see but that aren’t urgent nor crucial to know about individually. Facebook should let us decide to batch notifications so we’d only get one of a certain type every 12 or 24 hours, or only when a certain number of similar ones are triggered. I’d love a digest of posts to my Groups or Events from the past day rather than every time someone opens their mouth. I so don’t care – Facebook tells you how many minutes you spent on it each day over the past week and on average, but my total time on Facebook matters less to me than how often it interrupts my life with push notifications. The “Your Time On Facebook” feature should show how many notifications of each type I’ve received, which ones I actually opened and let me turn off or batch the ones I want fewer of. Oh, and for Will Cathcart, Facebook’s VP of apps, can I also get proper syncing so I don’t rewatch the same Stories on Instagram and Facebook, the ability to invite people to Events on mobile based on past invite lists of those I’ve hosted or attended and the See More Like This feature I recommended for Instagram? – Sometimes you’re just not in the mood for small talk. Had a rough day, need to get work done or want to just zone out? Ridesharing apps should offer a request for a quiet ride that if the driver allows with a preset and accepts before you get in, you pay them an extra dollar (or get it free as a loyalty perk), and you get ferried to your destination without unnecessary conversation. I get that it’s a bit dehumanizing for the driver, but I’d bet some would happily take a little extra cash for the courtesy. [Update 5/14/19: ] – Sometimes you overestimate the ETA and suddenly your car is arriving before you’re ready to leave. Instead of cancelling and rebooking a few minutes later, frantically rushing so you don’t miss your window and get smacked with a no-show fee or making the driver wait while they and the company aren’t getting paid, Uber, Lyft and the rest should offer the “I Need More Time” button that simply rebooks you a car that’s a little farther away. – I wish I could just take photos of the album covers, spines or even discs of my CD or record collection and have them instantly added to a playlist or folder. It’s kind of sad that after lifetimes of collecting physical music, most of it now sits on a shelf and we forget to play what we used to love. Music apps want more data on what we like, and it’s just sitting there gathering dust. There’s obviously some fun viral potential here too. Let me share what’s my most embarrassing CD. For me, it’s my dual copies of Limp Bizkit’s “Significant Other” because I played the first one so much it got scratched. – Spotify ditched its in-app messaging, third-party app platform and other ways to discover music so its playlists would decide what becomes a hit in order to exert leverage over the record labels to negotiate better deals. But music discovery is inherently social, and the desktop little ticker of what friends are playing on doesn’t cut it. Spotify should let me choose to recommend my new favorite song or agree to let it share what I’ve recently played most, and put those into a Discover Weekly-style social playlist of what friends are listening to. – I’m sorry, I had to. – But seriously, Snapchat is shrinking. That’s worrisome because some users’ photos and videos are trapped on its Memories cloud hosting feature that’s supposed to help free up space on your phone. But there’s no bulk export option, meaning it could take hours of saving shots one at a time to your camera roll if you needed to get off of Snapchat, if for example it was shutting down, or got acquired, or you’re just bored of it. – Snapchat’s Spectacles are actually pretty neat for recording first-person or underwater shots in a circular format. But otherwise they don’t do much more, and in some ways do much less, than your phone’s camera, and are . That’s why if Snapchat really wants to become a “Camera Company” it should build sleek add-on cameras that augment our phone’s hardware. Snap previously explored selling a 360-camera but never launched one. A little Giroptic iO-style 360 lens that attaches to your phone’s charging port could let you capture a new kind of content that really makes people feel like they’re there with you. An attachment that easily fits in your pocket unlike a DSLR could also be a hit – I thought the whole point of Control Center was one-touch access, but I can only turn on or off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It’s silly having to dig into the Settings menu to switch to a different Wi-Fi network or Bluetooth device, especially as we interact with more and more of them. Control Center should unfurl a menu of networks or devices you can choose from. – Live Photos are a clumsy proprietary format. Instagram’s Boomerang nailed what we want out of live action GIFs and we should be able to shoot them straight from the iOS camera and export them as actual GIFs that can be used across the web. Give us some extra GIF settings and iPhones could have a new reason for teens to choose them over Androids. – Anyone else have a heart attack whenever they hear their phone’s Alarm Clock ringtone? I know I do because I leave my alarms on so loud that I’ll never miss them, but end up being rudely shocked awake. A setting that gradually increases the volume of the iOS Alarm Clock every 15 seconds (or minute) so I can be gently arisen unless I refuse to get up would be grand. Maybe some of these apply to Android, but I wouldn’t know because I’m a filthy casual iPhoner. Send me your Android suggestions, as well as what else you want to see added to your favorite apps. |
Four ways to bridge the widening valley of death for startups | Shahin Farshchi | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | Money will have the look, and heft, of dumbbells as the economic cycle turns. Expect an abundance of small, seed checks at one end, an abundance of massive checks for clear, breakout companies at the other, and a dearth of capital for expanding companies with early proof points and market traction. Read more on how to best prepare for this inevitable future. (Image courtesy Flickr/ ) Even as the overall number of deals decrease below 2012 levels, the overall dollars invested into startups continue to soar. The 200+ “seed-stage” funds formed since 2012 will continue to chase nascent companies. Meanwhile, the increasing number of mega-funds will seek breakout companies into which to make $100 million+ investments. Companies with early traction seeking ~$20 million to grow will be abundant and have difficulty accessing capital. Image courtesy Getty Images |
Stock markets suffer their worst Christmas Eve trading day | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | Twas the last trading day before Christmas, and on the trading floor,
Most stocks were falling, and then falling some more,
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin all the banks had called,
In hopes that full coffers were still in their vaults. Bruising selloff continues, as Treasury sec tries to calm jittery via — Cameron McWhirter (@cammcwhirter) The analysts were shaken by news of the call,
which initially caused the stock market to fall,
Then President Trump took to Twitter, to blame the Federal Reserve,
Which was something the Fed chairman just didn’t deserve. The only problem our economy has is the Fed. They don’t have a feel for the Market, they don’t understand necessary Trade Wars or Strong Dollars or even Democrat Shutdowns over Borders. The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch – he can’t putt! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) So banks and traders rushed to their phones with a clatter,
Causing stock market value further to shatter,
Markets don’t like decisions made in a flash,
And criticizing sound economic policy can exacerbate a crash. This is amazing. It's as if Mnuchin was trying to create a panic over something nobody was worried about until this release 1/ — Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) Mnuchin made his call with banks from a tropical isle,
and analysts criticized his decision’s lack of guile,
They were more concerned with policy stupidity,
Since there’s already enough administrative volatility.
Like the chairman of the Federal Reserve,
Someone whose position it would be better to preserve. So now the Dow has fallen some 653 points,
And doctors may advise traders to light up their joints,
Because U.S. indices are on track for their worst December,
Since the 1930s, which almost no one alive remembers. |
Silicon Valley’s year of reckoning | Anna Escher | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | always branded themselves as the good guys. But 2018 was the year that the long-held belief that Silicon Valley is on the right side of progress and all things good was called into question by a critical mass. As startups grow bigger and richer, amassing more power and influence outside of the Valley, a reckoning has played out in government and business. Mission statements like “connecting the world” and “don’t be evil” no longer hold water. A look at a few of this year’s most impactful news themes underscore why; we’ve racked up too many examples to the contrary. Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive officer of Uber, arrives for a morning session at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., on Wednesday, July 10. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg via Getty Images JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images The tech industry was collectively upset by its proximity to a government and funding source that blatantly misused its power. Did we see a single example of a startup that refused to work with SoftBank in the aftermath? No. Will we? Probably not. Because Silicon Valley players are mostly only political and activist when it’s convenient for them. UNITED STATES – APRIL 11: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a House Energy and Commerce Committee in Rayburn Building on the protection of user data on April 11, 2018. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call) but they SAN FRANCISCO, CA – OCTOBER 22: Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an Apple announcement. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) CHICAGO, IL – JUNE 14: Engineer and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk of The Boring Company listens as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel talks about constructing a high speed transit tunnel at Block 37 during a news conference on June 14, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois. Musk said he could create a 16-passenger vehicle to operate on a high-speed rail system that could get travelers to and from downtown Chicago and O’Hare International Airport under twenty minutes, at speeds of over 100 miles per hour. (Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images) Chief Executive Officer of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, tours the facility at the grand opening of the Amazon Spheres, in Seattle, Washington on January 29, 2018. Amazon opened its new Seattle office space which looks more like a rainforest. The company created the Spheres Complex to help spark employee creativity. (Photo: JASON REDMOND/AFP/Getty Images) |
Alphabet spins off moonshot project Malta with backing from Gates’s BEV fund | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | Malta, the renewable energy storage project born in Alphabet’s moonshot factory X, is now on its own and flush with $26 million from a Series A funding round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Concord New Energy Group and Alfa Laval also invested in the round. Project Malta launched last year in Alphabet’s X (formerly X) with an aim to build energy storage facilities that can support full-scale power grids. The independent company spun out of Alphabet is now called Malta Inc. Malta Inc. has developed a system designed to keep power generated from renewable energy or fossil fuels in reserve for longer than lithium-ion batteries. The first captures energy generated from wind, solar or fossil generators on the grid. The collected electricity drives a heat pump, which converts the electrical energy into thermal energy. The heat is stored in molten salt, while the cold is stored in a chilled antifreeze liquid. A heat engine is used to convert the energy back to electricity for the grid when it’s needed. The system can store electricity for days or even weeks, Malta says. Malta is going to use the funds to work with industry partners to turn the detailed designs developed and refined at X into industrial-grade machinery for its first pilot system. BEV, the lead investor in Malta’s Series A round, was created in 2016 by the , an investor group that includes Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, John Doerr, chairman of venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, and SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner. |
Dolls Kill is raising up to $15 million for its edgy fashion brand made for ‘misfits’ | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | When founder Bobby Farahi met Shaudi “Shoddy” Lynn, it was at a rave in L.A. Farahi he was immediately drawn to the fashion sense of Lynn, who was a DJ at the time; she, meanwhile, might have appreciated the business acumen of Farahi, who had already a broadcast monitoring service called Multivision to a rival company. As Farahi told Inc. magazine several years ago, the couple, now married, decided to try their hand at business together, calling it and selling foxtail keychains before eventually evolving the brand into an online boutique that sells edgy, risqué clothes and accessories from companies like and , both in the U.K., as well as makeup from another London company called . Shoppers like what they see, evidently. Back in 2014, Inc. reported, Dolls Kill, which is based in San Francisco, generated $7.6 million in sales. It was enough to elicit the attention of the consumer-focused venture firm Maveron, which wrote the company a check for $5 million. Now, shows an , seven-year-old Dolls Kill is raising $15 million in new equity funding, and it has secured at least $10.7 million toward that end. Some of that capital is being used to test out offline stores. Dolls Kill already has one in San Francisco’s famous Haight neighborhood. In August, the company in a 6,000-square-foot space on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. Dolls Kill is sometimes likened to Nasty Gal, founded in 2006 by Sophia Amoruso. Nasty Gal had filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016 after raising from investors and reportedly spending heavily on marketing; two storefronts in L.A.; a downtown L.A. headquarters that quadrupled the size of an earlier HQ; and a fulfillment center in Kentucky. At the time, industry analyst Richie Siegel that a central challenge to the company’s growth was Nasty Gal’s target market, suggesting that there is a ceiling to the number of women to whom a brand like Nasty Gal appeals. The company, since acquired by British online retailer Boohoo, continues as an . |
On Christmas Eve, Chevrolet drivers can track Santa from their cars | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, has been tracking Santa’s progress around the globe every Christmas Eve for more than 60 years. Even a won’t prevent NORAD from completing its once-a-year mission. Now, General Motors is getting in on the annual tradition. On December 24, owners of the company’s Chevrolet-branded vehicles, including the Traverse and Tahoe SUVs, Silverado truck and Cruze sedan, can push the OnStar button and get a real-time update on Santa’s whereabouts. Only Chevrolet owners with an active OnStar plan can push their blue OnStar button to request a Santa Update and learn Santa’s current location. The location service uses NORAD’s official Santa location data. Santa update calls can be made anytime between 6 a.m. ET on Dec. 24 through 5 a.m. ET on December 25. Advisor staffing is adjusted to accommodate increased call volume from Santa Update requests, GM said. “Each year we receive thousands of Santa Update requests,” said Stacey Unold, director of Contact Center Operations supporting Chevrolet. “It’s a fun way for Chevrolet owners to use technology to connect their families with important information about Santa’s journey and spread holiday cheer.” Chevrolet and OnStar plan to donate $1 to the American Red Cross for each Santa Update button push received in the United States. |
Remembering the startups we lost in 2018 | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | things in this world more difficult than launching a successful startup. It takes talent, know-how, money and a hell of a lot of good timing and luck. And even with all of those magical components in place, the odds may still be against you. At TechCrunch, we take pride in covering the best and brightest of the startup world. But while covering the startup world is one of the most exciting and fulfilling parts of our job, death is a part of any life cycle. Sadly, not all startups that burn bright ultimately make it. In fact, most don’t. As we wrap up this year and look forward to the next, let’s take a moment to remember some of those startups we lost in 2018. Airware created a cloud software system to help construction companies, mining operations and other enterprise customers use drones to inspect equipment for damage. It also tried to build its own drones, but found that it couldn’t compete with giants like China’s DJI. , coming just four days after Airware opened a Tokyo office, with an investment and partnership from Mitsubishi. In a statement, the company said, “Unfortunately, the market took longer to mature than we expected. As we worked through the various required pivots to position ourselves for long-term success, we ran out of financial runway.” Blippar was one of the early pioneers in augmented reality, but unfortunately the AR market has yet to live up to the hopes for mainstream adoption. And despite raising a funding round earlier this year, the startup was apparently losing money quickly as it sought new customers. Not helping matters was , where an emergency influx of $5 million was blocked by Khazanah, a strategic investment fund from the Malaysian government. In a blog post, the company said this was “an incredibly sad, disappointing, and unfortunate outcome.” One of the major casualties of the FAA’s ban on smart luggage, this New York-based startup was . CEO Tomi Pierucci was extremely outspoken when airlines started to enforce the new rules early this year, calling the news “an absolute travesty.” From the standpoint of Bluesmart, he was right. The startup went all-in on connected luggage, and ultimately found it impossible to adapt when battery packs were no longer allowed on flights. The startup ended all sales and manufacturing, selling what was left of its tech, designs and IP to luggage giant TravelPro. Things came crumbling down for San Francisco-based Doughbies in July, when the 500 Startups-backed, same-day cookie delivery service announced it was . But it wasn’t because the startup ran out of money. Doughbies was actually profitable. Rather, its founders, Daniel Conway and Mariam Khan, just wanted to move onto something new. TechCrunch’s Josh Constine at the time that Doughbies really didn’t need venture backing and that pressure to deliver adequate returns may have weighed more heavily on Doughbies than it was willing to admit. RIP Doughbies. Like many failed startups before it, San Francisco-based Lantern was forced to after an acquisition deal fell through. The mental health startup, founded by Nicholas Bui LeTourneau and Alejandro Foung, had raised from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s venture arm, Mayfield and SoftTechVC, but failed to follow through on its promise. What was that promise? To offer personalized tools to deal with stress, anxiety and body image based on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques via a mobile application. Despite being an early mover in a now overly crowded field of mental wellness apps, Lantern wasn’t able to find enough customers to survive. Smart security camera maker Lighthouse AI had a promising product with a natural language processing system that allowed users to navigate their footage. But it also faced a crowded market, and it seems consumers didn’t embrace the product. The company . “I am incredibly proud of the groundbreaking work the Lighthouse team accomplished – delivering useful and accessible intelligence for our homes via advanced AI and 3D sensing,” wrote CEO Alex Teichman. “Unfortunately, we did not achieve the commercial success we were looking for and will be shutting down operations in the near future.” Mayfield, which was originally part of Bosch, created the adorable home robot Kuri. However, it announced in July that it would stop manufacturing Kuri, and followed with . “Our team is beyond disappointed,” the company said in a blog post. “Together we’ve spent the past four years designing and building not just Kuri, but also an equally incredible company culture and spirit.” A major player in industrial robotics, Rethink was founded by iRobot co-founder Rod Brooks and former MIT CSAIL staff researcher Ann Whittaker. The Boston area startup grew into one of the most important players in both the collaborative and educational robotics space, courtesy of creations like Baxter and Sawyer. Ultimately, however, the company served as yet another testament to just how difficult it is to launch a robotics startup. Even with brilliant minds and nearly $150 million in funding, the company couldn’t turn enough profit to stay afloat. A last-minute planned acquisition fell through, and Rethink in October. Startup stories don’t come more film-ready than this. Even before it officially closed its doors, Theranos was set to be the subject of a book, documentary and an Adam McKay-directed feature film starring Jennifer Lawrence as founder Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes founded the company in 2003, promising a breakthrough in blood testing. By age 31, she became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. Theranos would go on to raise $1.4 billion, with a $10 billion valuation at its peak. In 2015, medical professionals began to mount criticism against the company’s methods. The following year, the SEC began investigating Theranos, ultimately charging it with “massive fraud.” In September, the company , with Holmes agreeing to pay a $500,000 penalty, while being barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years. NEW YORK, NY – MAY 06: Co-founder and CEO of Shyp, Kevin Gibbons speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2015 – Day 3 at The Manhattan Center on May 6, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch) A $250 million valuation and capital from some of the best investors (Kleiner Perkins, Slow Ventures) failed to keep on-demand shipping startup Shyp from . The San Francisco-based startup raised multiple rounds of venture capital amid a major hype cycle for on-demand shipping companies, but successfully beyond the Bay Area. “To this day, I’m in awe of the vigor the team possessed in tackling a 200-year-old industry,” CEO Kevin Gibbon wrote at the time. “But, growth at all costs is a dangerous trap that many startups fall into, mine included.” Over the past few years, Telltale Games seemed to reinvent adventure gaming, adapting big franchises like The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and Batman into episodic stories where players’ choices seemed to have real weight. It even to bring a version of “Minecraft: Story Mode” to the streaming service. But it seems the company has had longstanding business issues, with 90 employees laid off in November 2017, then in September of this year. Although a skeleton crew remained employed to finish the work for Netflix, it looks like Telltale is dead. And the fact that those employees were let go without severance seems to reinforce . |
Captiv8 report highlights data for spotting fake followers | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | , a company offering tools for brands to manage influencer marketing campaigns, has released its . The goal is to give marketers the data they need to spot fake followers — and thus, to separate the influencers with a real following from those who only offer the illusion of engagement. The report argues that that this a problem with a real financial impact (it’s something that ), with $2.1 billion spent on influencer marketing on Instagram in 2017 and 11 percent of the engagement coming from fraudulent accounts. “For influencer marketing to truly deliver on its transformative potential, marketers need a more concrete and reliable way to identify fake followers and engagement, compare their performance to industry benchmarks, and determine the real reach and impact of social media spend,” Captiv8 says. So the company looked at a range of marketing categories (pets, parenting, beauty, fashion, entertainment, travel, gaming, fitness, food and traditional celebrity) and randomly selected 5,000 Instagram influencer accounts in each one, pulling engagement from August to November of this year. The idea is to establish a baseline for standard activity, so that marketers can spot potential red flags. Of course, everyone with a significant social media audience is going to have some fake followers, but Captiv8 suggests that some categories have a higher rate of fraud than others — fashion was the worst, with an average of 14 percent of fake activity per account, compared to traditional celebrity, where the average was just 4 percent. So what should you look out for? For starters, the report says the average daily change in follower counts for an influencer is 1.2 percent, so be on the lookout for shifts that are significantly larger. The report also breaks down the average engagement rate for organic and sponsored content by category (ranging from 1.19 percent for sponsored content in food to 3.51 percent in entertainment), and suggests that a lower engagement rate “shows a high probability that their follower count is inflated through bots or fake followers.” Conversely, it says it could also be a warning sign if a creator’s audience reach or impressions per user is higher than the industry benchmarks (for example, image posts in fashion have an average audience reach of 23.69 percent, with 1.32 impressions per unique user). You can . |
The Yule Log Channel | John Biggs | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | My aunt and uncle lived up the hill from Martins Ferry, Ohio, high above the river. My uncle ran a used car lot — Snezek’s — and so it was understood that they had a little bit of money and a bigger house than the rest of the family in the Valley. We would drive there every year at Christmas; first the two and a half hours to Martins Ferry, a pit-stop at my grandmother’s, and then a drive up the woods that covered the winding upper roads like a dark cloud. These were family gatherings before distractions, before everyone carried their lives with them in their pocket, so you had to prepare. I always brought a few books or some Christmas presents to play with. One year I brought my entire Dungeons & Dragons set in an effort to learn how to play — even though I had no one to play with. We’d shiver in the backseat as we wound up the hill. House windows faced us, candles aglow. White glowing reindeer and sleighs peeked between pines. At the house we’d coast into the driveway and hop out into the crystalline cold. A few steps more and we would be warm. Walking into the house through the door next to the garage, into the warmth of a home fired with cooking and laughter, is one of my fondest memories. The family made pierogi and lasagna, two staples in the pot-luck rotation of those old coal and steel towns. There would be plates of cookies and plenty of ginger ale and , the best candy on earth. There were jars of pretzels and nuts here and there, a sprinkling of gumdrops or hard candy for the old folks. There was fried chicken someone made and wedding soup my mother made. As you walked into that warm place you heard the clack of billiard balls and the roar of the game in the other room. My dad cracked a beer. I got kissed by my aunts a few times and then hid, perhaps in a corner or maybe upstairs by their big tree in a darkened room lit only by a fire roaring on a tube television. That was the height of interactivity, then: a live fire on TV (or, more likely, a looped fire). You imagined what it must be like on the other end of that picture, how much technology you needed to make something so primal and imperative appear on a glass tube. It was as if we had traversed space into a strange craft outfitted with the comforts of home and none of the discomforts. Nestled on the couch, the TV crackling, you were on a space station and safe, a self-sufficient place where memories of cold were far distant. They aired the first in 1966 from New York’s Gracie Mansion. By the time I was watching it had been around for 20 years. It was a holdover from the early days of broadcast, from the days when the air was dead if there was no one to play in front of the cameras. In a few years the tradition would vanish, but in 2001, in the wake of 9/11, it came back, a reminder of simpler times. There was something about it that could change your outlook. A distant roaring fire was almost as good as one in the house, and far less work. I’d curl up, read, and nod off, the voices of the adults below lulling me to sleep. Now we carry things that burn brightly in our pockets. We don’t need these camera tricks to see fires everywhere. We don’t curl up to the magnet hum of a cathode ray tube and the tinny crackle and pop of facsimile logs. We’re beyond that. Maybe we aren’t, though. Maybe there’s still a warm place, the umbilicus to get there a crystalline moment between the backseat of a car and warm basement rec room. And maybe upstairs there’s a dozing kid watching the last drops of Christmas burn away into the country dark. I think there still is. I hope there still is. Merry Christmas. |
Facebook is not equipped to stop the spread of authoritarianism | Yael Grauer | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | of a in Dhaka in July, student protesters took to the streets. They and stopped vehicles to inspect license and registration papers. They even of the chief of Bangladesh Police Bureau of Investigation and found that his license was expired. And they . The fatal road accident that led to these protests was hardly an isolated incident. Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, which was ranked the in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2018 global liveability index, scored 26.8 out of 100 in the infrastructure category included in the rating. But the regional government chose to stifle the highway safety protests anyway. It went so far as to check social media activity, leading to the arrest of 20 students. Although there were many images of Bangladesh Chhatra League, or BCL men, on students, none of them were arrested. (The BCL is the student wing of the ruling Awami League, one of the major political parties of Bangladesh.) Students were forced to log into their Facebook profiles and were arrested or beaten for their posts, photographs and videos. In one instance, BCL men called three students into the dorm’s guest room, quizzed them over Facebook posts, beat them, then handed them over to police. They were . A pregnant school teacher was for “spreading rumors” due to sharing a Facebook post about student protests. A photographer and social justice activist for describing police violence during these protests; he he was beaten in custody. And a university professor was for his Facebook posts. A Dhaka resident who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety said that the crackdown on social media posts essentially silenced student protesters, many of whom removed from their profiles entirely photos, videos and status updates about the protests. While the person thought that students were continuing to be arrested, they said, “nobody is talking about it anymore — at least in my network — because everyone kind of ‘got the memo,’ if you know what I mean.” This isn’t the first time Bangladeshi citizens have been arrested for Facebook posts. As just one example, in April 2017, a rubber plantation worker in southern Bangladesh was arrested and detained for three months for liking and sharing a Facebook post that criticized the prime minister’s visit to India, according to . Bangladesh is far from alone. Government harassment to silence dissent on social media has occurred across the region, and in other regions as well — and it often comes hand-in-hand with governments filing takedown requests with Facebook and requesting data on users. Facebook has removed posts critical of the prime minister in and reportedly “agreed to coordinate in the monitoring and removal of content” . Facebook was criticized for not stopping the repression of Rohingya Muslims , where military personnel created fake accounts to spread propaganda, which human rights groups say fueled violence and forced displacement. Facebook has since in Myanmar, and it also coordinated inauthentic accounts in the country. UNITED STATES – APRIL 10: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies during the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee joint hearing on “Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data” on Tuesday, April 10, 2018. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call) Protesters scrubbing Facebook data for fear of repercussion isn’t uncommon. Over and over again, authoritarian-leaning regimes have utilized low-tech strategies to quell dissent. And aside from , Facebook still has little in place to protect its most vulnerable users from these pernicious efforts. As various countries pass laws calling for a local presence and increased regulation, it is possible that the social media conglomerate . “In many situations, the platforms are under pressure,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, policy director at Access Now. “Tech companies are being directly sent takedown orders, user data requests. The danger of that is that companies will potentially be overcomplying or responding far too quickly to government demands when they are able to push back on those requests,” he said. Elections are often a critical moment for oppressive behavior from governments — , and have specifically targeted citizens — and candidates — during election time. Facebook that it had taken down nine Facebook pages and six Facebook accounts for in Bangladesh. These pages, which Facebook believes were linked to people associated with the Bangladesh government, were “designed to look like independent news outlets and posted pro-government and anti-opposition content.” The sites masqueraded as news outlets, including fake BBC Bengali, BDSNews24 and Bangla Tribune and news pages with Photoshopped blue checkmarks, according to . Still, the imminent election in Bangladesh doesn’t bode well for anyone who might wish to express dissent. In October, a that regulates some types of controversial speech was passed in the country, signaling to companies that as the regulatory environment tightens, they too could become targets. More restrictive regulation is part of a greater trend around the world, said Naman M. Aggarwal, Asia policy associate at Access Now. Some countries, like , have passed “fake news” laws. (A similar law was proposed in Malaysia, but it was blocked in the Senate.) These types of laws are frequently followed by content takedowns. (In Bangladesh, the government not to air footage that could create panic or disorder, essentially halting news programming on the protests.) Other governments in the Middle East and North Africa — such as , , and — clamp down on free expression on social media under the threat of fines or prison time. And countries like have passed laws requiring social media companies to — typically an indication of greater content regulation and pressure on the companies from local governments. In India, WhatsApp and other financial tech services were told to open offices in the country. And crackdowns on posts about protests on social media come hand-in-hand with government requests for data. Facebook’s biannual provides detail on the percentage of government requests with which the company complies in each country, but most people don’t know until long after the fact. Between January and June, the company received 134 emergency requests and 18 legal processes for 205 users or accounts. Facebook turned over at least some data in 61 percent of emergency requests and 28 percent of legal processes. Facebook said in a statement that it “believes people deserve to have a voice, and that everyone has the right to express themselves in a safe environment,” and that it handles requests for user data “extremely carefully.” The company pointed to its and said it is “saddened by governments using broad and vague regulation or other practices to silence, criminalize or imprison journalists, activists, and others who speak out against them,” but the company said it also helps journalists, activists and other people around the world to “tell their stories in more innovative ways, reach global audiences, and connect directly with people.” But there are policies that Facebook could enact that would help people in these vulnerable positions, like allowing users to post anonymously. “Facebook’s doesn’t exactly protect anonymity, and has created issues for people in countries like Vietnam,” said Aggarwal. “If platforms provide leeway, or enough space for anonymous posting, and anonymous interactions, that is really helpful to people on the ground.” BERLIN, GERMANY – SEPTEMBER 12: A visitor uses a mobile phone in front of the Facebook logo at the #CDUdigital conference on September 12, 2015 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images) A German court in February under its decade-old privacy law. Facebook said it the decision. “I’m not sure if Facebook even has an effective strategy or understanding of strategy in the long term,” said Sean O’Brien, lead researcher at Yale Privacy Lab. “In some cases, Facebook is taking a very proactive role… but in other cases, it won’t.” In any case, these decisions require a nuanced understanding of the population, culture, and political spectrum in various regions — something it’s not clear Facebook has. Facebook isn’t responsible for government decisions to clamp down on free expression. But the question remains: How can companies stop assisting authoritarian governments, inadvertently or otherwise? “If Facebook knows about this kind of repression, they should probably have… some sort of mechanism to at the very least heavily try to convince people not to post things publicly that they think they could get in trouble for,” said O’Brien. “It would have a chilling effect on speech, of course, which is a whole other issue, but at least it would allow people to make that decision for themselves.” This could be an opt-in feature, but O’Brien acknowledges that it could create legal liabilities for Facebook, leading the social media giant to create lists of “dangerous speech” or profiles on “dissidents,” and could theoretically shut them down or report them to the police. Still, Facebook could consider rolling a “speech alert” feature to an entire city or country if that area becomes volatile politically and dangerous for speech, he said. O’Brien says that social media companies could consider responding to situations where a person is being detained illegally and potentially coerced into giving their passwords in a way that could protect them, perhaps by triggering a temporary account reset or freeze to prevent anyone from accessing the account without proper legal process. Some actions that might trigger the reset or freeze could be news about an individual’s arrest — if Facebook is alerted to it, contact from the authorities, or contact from friends and loved ones, as evaluated by humans. There could even be a “panic button” type trigger, like , but for Facebook — allowing users to wipe or freeze their own accounts or posts tagged preemptively with a code word only the owner knows. “One of the issues with computer interfaces is that when people log into a site, they get a false sense of privacy even when the things they’re posting in that site are widely available to the public,” said O’Brien. Case in point: this year, women anonymously shared their experiences of abusive co-workers in a shared Google Doc — the so-called “Shitty Media Men” list, likely without realizing that a lawsuit could unmask them. That’s exactly . Instead, activists and journalists often need to tap into resources and gain assistance from groups like Access Now, which runs a , and the . These organizations can provide personal advice tailored to their specific country and situation. They can . Then can use VPNs, and end-to-end encrypted messaging tools, and non-phone-based two-factor authentication methods. But many may not realize what the threat is until it’s too late. The violent crackdown on free speech in Bangladesh accompanied government-imposed internet restrictions, including . Users at home with a broadband connection did not feel the effects of this, but “it was the students on the streets who couldn’t go live or publish any photos of what was going on,” the Dhaka resident said. Elections will take place in Bangladesh on December 30. In the few months leading up to the election, Access Now says it’s noticed an increase in Bangladeshi residents expressing concern that their data has been compromised and seeking assistance from the Digital Security hotline. Other rights groups have also found an uptick in malicious activity. Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in an email that the organization is “extremely concerned about the ongoing crackdown on the political opposition and on freedom of expression, which has created a climate of fear ahead of national elections.” Ganguly cited politically motivated cases against thousands of opposition supporters, many of which have been arrested, as well as candidates that have been attacked. Human Rights Watch about the situation, warning that the Rapid Action Battalion, a “paramilitary force including extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances,” and has been “ for ‘anti-state propaganda, rumors, fake news, and provocations.'” This is in addition to a and around dedicated to quashing so-called “rumors” on social media, amid the . “The security forces continue to arrest people for any criticism of the government, including on social media,” Ganguly said. “We hope that the international community will urge the Awami League government to create conditions that will uphold the rights of all Bangladeshis to participate in a free and fair vote.” |
LetsTransport raises $13.5M to digitize and improve last-mile logistics in India | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | India’s B2B supply chain is slowly shifting into the digital era. Following , which helps bring business and manufacturing procurement online, LetsTransport, a startup that brings increased efficiency to logistics and business transportation, has raised $13.5 million for growth. Founded in 2015 by IIT Kharagpur graduates Pushkar Singh, Sudarshan Ravi and Ankit Parasher, Bangalore-based LetsTransport has surface-level comparisons with Uber and other on-demand services, as it pairs companies with trucks to carry out their last-mile distribution. But that is really a cosmetic comparison. LetsTransport offers a range of product modules to manage fleets, including intelligent routing. Then, on the business side, its For the truck operations, the service is designed to increase their average utility and get more jobs completed in quicker times. Singh, the company’s CEO, told TechCrunch in an interview that operating partners are typically seeing 40 percent efficiency improvements with a 30 percent reduction in distribution cost for the brands and retailers on the other side. Routing, he explained, is currently “ The service currently operates in seven cities in India, and has been used by big-name customers like Coca-Cola, Amazon, Metro Cash & Carry and Big Bazaar, while some 20,000 truckers have carried out jobs on its platform to date. To help sweeten its appeal, the company goes beyond providing work to help trucking operators with insurance, after sale care and other maintenance services. This Series B funding round was led by Bertelsmann India Investments with participation from China’s Fosun International and others. The company’s other investors include Japan duo GMO Venture Partners and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, as well as Rebright Partners and NB Ventures. Singh told TechCrunch the capital will go toward expanding to 20 new cities in tier-two India, as well as looking into global opportunities. “We’re trying to consolidate our position in India and [are] looking at products that can be offered internationally,” he said, explaining that markets in Southeast Asia and Africa could be in the pipeline. “The needs of an emerging market are quite similar… it needs a little localization but we have a great product.” In particular, he added, LetsTransport has received expansion requests from its existing client base, which would help when it comes to new launches. For now, though, the plan is to test specific modules in new markets before bringing other, more significant operational aspects of the business overseas. Those modules could include the company’s smart routing system, which companies can deploy for their own transportation solutions. That’s a good way to reach new customers and develop a moat around those who use its marketplace business, too. Pointing out that — — Singh is bullish that there is plenty of scope to digitize the system and make significant improvements to efficiencies. “It’s a very large industry that’s ripe for disruption,” he said. “There are inefficiencies that should be dead by now.” |
China’s WeChat is the latest to get Snap-like ‘Stories’ | Rita Liao | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | WeChat, the Chinese messaging giant with more than 1 billion monthly active users around the world, just added a Snap-like ephemeral video feature as part of its biggest overhaul since 2014. The revamp comes as Tencent, which , sees increasing rivalry from up-and-comers like video app TikTok and news app Jinri Toutiao. WeChat has, over the years, morphed beyond a straight-up messenger to include many utility purposes. With up and running, users can accomplish a long list of tasks, ranging from shopping to ride-hailing, without ever having to leave WeChat. Meanwhile, some have expressed frustration over WeChat’s core as a social app. Moments, a feature akin to Facebook News Feed, was once a haven for close friends to share articles, photos and videos. But newsfeed content became blander over time as people’s contact list grew to include their bosses and their local fruit seller who needs to be added as a friend to process WeChat payments. WeChat founder Allen Zhang is known for his obsession with user experience and has been cautious with tweaks, so a major redesign to the super app is effectively a guidebook for where WeChat is headed for the next few years. The new off-the-cuff video feature, aptly named “Time Capsule,” is one of WeChat’s more noticeable updates. In the past, users shared videos to three main destinations: A friend, a group chat or Moments. This route remains unchanged, but with Time Capsule, users also can upload videos of up to 15 seconds that disappear after 24 hours, similar to how Snap Stories and its slew of clones, including Instagram Stories, work. Meanwhile, Snap also has in a recent redesign. A blue ring will appear near the profile of those who have recorded an instant story. Screenshot by TechCrunch Different from Instagram, which recently started allowing users to , WeChat doesn’t let users share Time Capsule videos to friends yet. Instead of lining up all the instant videos at the top of the app as Instagram does, WeChat is asking users to find them in less conspicuous ways: On Moments, in a group chat or in one’s starred friend list, a blue ring will appear near the profile of those who have recorded instant stories. These secret entry points mean users are prompted to watch videos of those they know well, as they rarely click on the profile of, say, a fruit vendor. Time Capsule is also a step up from WeChat’s old video sharing tool, with additional features such as locations and music, functions that are ubiquitous in TikTok and other short-form video apps. Users also can react to Time Capsule videos by blowing virtual “bubbles,” whereas the old video format doesn’t allow such interaction. Time Capsule is a step up from WeChat’s old video sharing tool, with additional features such as locations and music. Screenshot by TechCrunch While Time Capsule is not necessarily a direct challenger to TikTok — a product of the — it enriches the video experience for users who want to give close friends a window into their life. TikTok, by comparison, delivers content by relying on artificial intelligence to read users’ past habits rather than studying their social graphs. That said, WeChat has by rolling out a dozen video apps this year. While Tencent blocks TikTok videos from being shared to WeChat, its own proprietary video app Weishi gets preferential treatment. When users choose to record a video on WeChat, there’s an option to record it via Weishi. But Tencent’s short video fleet has a long way to go before they reach TikTok’s global dominance of Another WeChat update also appears as a response to a popular ByteDance app. While WeChat users could show appreciation for an article by clicking on a “like” button, there was no effective way in the past to know what their friends enjoyed. The revamped WeChat now lets people see all the articles their friends have liked under one single stream called “Wow.” That’s a feature that ByteDance’s Jinri Toutiao news app cannot rival, as Wow is built on billions of users who know each other, unlike Jinri Toutiao, which relies on AI personalization like its sibling TikTok. WeChat is already colossal and can never please every user, but its new move shows that it’s paying close attention to whoever that may steal its users’ eyeball time away. |
UK police release airport drone suspects and admit there may not have been any drones after all | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 24 | Less than a week after , wreaking havoc on as many as 140,000 people’s travel plans for the Christmas period, police have admitted that there may in fact not have been any drones at all. after a one-day shutdown but it appears that investigators are no closer to knowing what actually took place. that police released and exonerated a couple who had been detained as suspects, while a senior police spokesperson said there is “always a possibility that there may not have been any genuine drone activity in the first place.” Indeed, the police are reliant on eyewitness accounts — 67 of them, to be precise — to piece together what happened. that two drones flying “over the perimeter fence and into where the runway operates from” were spotted by bystanders late Wednesday, with a third reportedly seen on Thursday morning. Runways were shut for around six hours between Wednesday evening and the early hours of Thursday, before a fuller suspension came into effect after the alleged sighting of the third drone. Police released suspects Elaine Kirk and Paul Gait on Sunday evening after concluding that they were not responsible for the incident. Their arrest had prompted British newspapers and commentators to berate the pair even before they were charged. them for “ruining Christmas” while TV presenter and former tabloid journalist for an earlier tweet that labeled Kirk and Gait as “clowns.” Despite going down the wrong avenue with the arrest, investigators do have more to work with after they recovered a fallen and damaged drone from the north side of the airport. It is being tested for clues on who piloted it, according to The Guardian. , the U.K. has specific laws around flying drones near an airport, although it remains unclear exactly what did take place. The U.K. made amendments to existing legislation this year to after a planned drone bill got delayed. also restricted drone flight height to 400 ft. is also set to be introduced next year. Under current U.K. law, a drone operator who is charged with recklessly or negligently acting in a manner likely to endanger an aircraft or a person in an aircraft can face a penalty of up to five years in prison or an unlimited fine, or both. Although, in the Gatwick incident case, it’s not clear whether simply flying a drone near a runway would constitute an attempt to endanger an aircraft under the law. Even though the incident has clearly caused major disruption to travelers as the safety-conscious airport takes no chances. |
10 key lessons about tech mergers and acquisitions from Cisco’s John Chambers | Cyril Ebersweiler | 2,018 | 12 | 23 | John Chambers, chairman emeritus of Cisco (now founder of ), knows a thing or two about tech acquisitions: he bet his career on a first one in ’93, and went on to complete 180 M&As during his 20 years tenure. His latest message for large corporations is an alarm bell. In a fireside chat at the HAX M&A Masterclass that followed the publication of his book: Chambers issued a clear warning: learn about tech M&As or the future might happen without you. Here are the key lessons to take away (video and transcript are ): When stepping down from Cisco in 2015, John Chambers said that . And 10 years might now be conservative. It took about 20 years to Amazon to challenge WalMart, barely 10 to Airbnb with hotels and to Uber with taxis and car ownership. Since no company can invent everything — even Apple or Google buy startups routinely — you’ll need to either or seriously with startups (more on that later). ’, said Chambers. . Many of the corp dev executives who attended our last event were from tech. I met recently power tool companies from US and Europe . They had just set up CVC arms. They were looking into acquisitions, saying . They’d better quickly! There was only one Steve Jobs, who just knew what to build. For others, your will might you what to buy. Listen to them and pay special attention to to buy . Like Chambers experienced early in his career at IBM with mainframes, and at Wang Laboratories with mini-computers, missing a critical shift might be the end of you! The corollary for startups is: do something cool for key customers of a corporate, and you’ll get on their radar in no time! said Chambers. Oracle has mastered takeovers but for most others, acquisitions can fail due to a poor alignment of for the industry and each company’s role, mismatch, geographic or lack of integration of (once you scale your number of acquisitions, having different divisions or subsidiaries use different software will make your CFO insane). There is generally more than one possible M&A target, and Cisco often walked away from potential buys for the above reasons. It also developed : , Chambers added. Back in the 90’s tech M&As were often failures. Chambers and his team researched why and built Cisco’s playbook, then tweaked it for 2 decades. According to Chambers, . So save yourself some time and costly attempts by getting his book ;) Interestingly, they approached the leadership transition in the same way: they studied what made them work or fail, and made it as smooth as could be when John stepped down in 2015. One common trait of experienced corp dev teams is the amount of work they put in before they approach a startup. Not only are they aware of many through their own research, their customers, business units, CVC arms or the media, but also via extensive networks, including with VC firms. Like investors, . Corp devs then a startup might bring, and pay the right price for it (more on this below). A hot startup can command a high price, but ? If it offers no complementarity or synergies, it might in fact be of . On the opposite, the current revenue of a startup might be irrelevant if you can . The company Chambers bought in ’93 for close to US$100million only had US$10 million in revenue. It paid off in droves. When you buy a tech company, you must try and keep the talent — especially founders, emotional leaders and engineers. Understand ’ . So to answer key questions and help define attractive career paths within your organization for the acquired teams. If you fail to do so, people will or , and you will not get the new products you hope for. At Cisco, about 1/3 of the top leadership came from internal promotions, 1/3 from recruiting and 1/3 from acquisitions. At peak it likely had about 100 former CEOs on payroll! Despite its stellar track record, about 1/3 of Cisco’s were failures. Reasons may vary, and some might be caused by market changes. When it decided to : Apple had just added cloud video capabilities, it was game over. Expect them, learn from them, and and, ideally, redeploy people. As the pace of innovation accelerates, and top talent joins startups rather than large companies, startups might become threats faster than you can buy them. Chambers suggested that the to develop is the ability to , such as this recent for urban aerial mobility. |
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The year social networks were no longer social | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 12 | 23 | network” has become a meaningless association of words. Pair those two words and it becomes a tech category, the equivalent of a single term to define a group of products. But are social networks even social anymore? If you have a feeling of when you open the Facebook app, you’re not alone. Watching distant cousins fight about politics in a comment thread is no longer fun. Chances are you have dozens, hundreds or maybe thousands of friends and followers across multiple platforms. But those crowded places have never felt so empty. It doesn’t mean that you should move to the woods and talk with animals. And Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn won’t collapse overnight. They have intrinsic value with other features — social graphs, digital CVs, organizing events… But the concept of wide networks of social ties with an element of broadcasting is dead. If you’ve been active on the web for long enough, you may have fond memories of internet forums. Maybe you were a fan of video games, Harry Potter or painting. Fragmentation was key. You could be active on multiple forums and you didn’t have to mention your other passions. Over time, you’d see the same names come up again and again on your favorite forum. You’d create your own running jokes, discover things together, laugh, cry and feel something. When I was a teenager, I was active on multiple forums. I remember posting thousands of messages a year and getting to know new people. It felt like hanging out with a welcoming group of friends because you shared the same passions. It wasn’t just fake internet relationships. I met “IRL” with fellow internet friends quite a few times. One day, I remember browsing the list of threads and learning about someone’s passing. Their significant other posted a short message because the forum meant a lot to this person. Most of the time, I didn’t know the identities of the persons talking with me. We were all using nicknames and put tidbits of information in bios — “Stuttgart, Germany” or “train ticket inspector.” And then, Facebook happened. At first, it was also all about interest-based communities — attending the same college is a shared interest, after all. Then, they opened it up to everyone to scale beyond universities. When you look at your list of friends, they are your Facebook friends not because you share a hobby, but because you’ve know them for a while. Facebook constantly pushes you to add more friends with the infamous “People you may know” feature. Knowing someone is one thing, but having things to talk about is another. So here we are, with your lousy neighbor sharing a sexist joke in your Facebook feed. Facebook’s social graph is broken by design. Putting names and faces on people made friend requests emotionally charged. You can’t say no to your high school best friend, even if you haven’t seen her in five years. It used to be okay to leave friends behind. It used to be okay to forget about people. But the fact that it’s to stay in touch with social networks have made those things socially unacceptable. One of the key pillars of social networks is the broadcasting feature. You can write a message, share a photo, make a story and broadcast them to your friends and followers. But broadcasting isn’t scalable. Most social networks are now publicly traded companies — they’re always chasing growth. Growth means more revenue and revenue means that users need to see more ads. The best way to shove more ads down your throat is to make you spend more time on a service. If you watch multiple YouTube videos, you’re going to see more pre-roll ads. And there are two ways to make you spend more time on a social network — making you come back more often and making you stay longer each time you visit. And 2018 has been the year of cheap tricks and dark pattern design. In order to make you come more often, companies now send you FOMO-driven notifications with incomplete, disproportionate information. I created a new Facebook account just so I could access an Oculus thing. Despite having no friends, apparently I'm really missing out on a whole lot of "fun" activity from all these specifically-named people I don't know. And I have two notifications already! "Cool." — Nick Farina (@nfarina) This isn’t just about opening an app. Social networks now want to direct you to other parts of the service. Why don’t you click on this bright orange banner to open IGTV? Look at this shiny button! Look! Look! This navigation bar makes no sense Facebook. Also it’s an insult to trick people’s brains with animated ✨ to foster engagement — Romain Dillet 🙃 (@romaindillet) And then, there’s all the gamification, algorithm-driven recommendations and other mechanisms. That tiny peak of adrenaline you get when you refresh your feed, even if it only happens once per week, is what’s going to make you come back again and again. Don’t forget that Netflix wanted to give kids digital badges if they completed a season. The company has since realized that it was . Still, U.S. adults now spend consuming digital media — and phones represent more than half of that usage. Given that social networks need to give you something new every time, they want you to follow as many people as possible, subscribe to every YouTube channel you can. This way, every time you come back, there’s something new. Algorithms recommend some content based on engagement, and guess what? The most outrageous, polarizing content always ends up at the top of the pile. I’m not going to talk about fake news or the fact that YouTubers now all write titles in ALL CAPS to grab your attention. That’s a topic for another article. But YouTube shouldn’t be surprised that Logan Paul a suicide victim in Japan to drive engagement and trick the algorithm. In other words, as social networks become bigger, content becomes garbage. Centralization is always followed by decentralization. Now that we’ve reached a social network dead end, it’s time to build our own digital house. Group messaging has been key when it comes to staying in touch with long-distance family members. But you can create your own interest-based groups and talk about things you’re passionate about with people who care about those things. Social networks that haven’t become too big still have an opportunity to pivot. It’s time to make them more about close relationships and add useful features to talk with your best friends and close ones. And if you have interesting things to say, do it on your own terms. Create a blog instead of signing up to Medium. This way, Medium won’t force your readers to sign up when they want to read your words. If you spend your vacation crafting the perfect Instagram story, you should be more cynical about it. Either you want to make a career out of it and become an Instagram star, or you should consider sending photos and videos to your communities directly. Otherwise, you’re just participating in a rotten system. If you want to comment on politics and life in general, you should consider talking about those topics with people surrounding you, not your friends on Facebook. Put your phone back in your pocket and start a conversation. You might end up discussing for hours without even thinking about the red dots on all your app icons. |
Original Content podcast: Netflix’s ‘Roma’ might be the best movie of the year | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 23 | A number of critics have declared that “Roma” is . Naturally, we had to weigh in on the latest episode of . Director Alfonso Cuarón’s recent (and excellent) films were all fantasy and science fiction (“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” “Children of Men” and “Gravity”). But with “Roma,” he returns to the realist mode of his breakthrough “Y Tu Mamá También.” Here, Cuarón tells the story of his childhood in Mexico City — but through the eyes of Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio), based on the real maid who played a crucial role in raising Cuarón and his siblings. It’s a largely plotless film (particularly in its first half), beautifully shot in black-and-white, capturing the rhythms and subtle power dynamics of everyday family life. To discuss “Roma,” we’re joined by Brian Heater, who said he was hard-pressed to think of a better movie released this year. We had a few reservations — about the film’s pace, about some of the plotting and about whether Cleo is depicted as a fully three-dimensional person — but none of us denied that Cuarón has staged scenes here that are suspenseful as anything in “Gravity.” And as the credits rolled, at least one of your hosts found himself in tears. "Roma" (2018) review: 🤔😐🤨😴😯😱🥺😢😟😨😌🤯 — Brian Heater (@bheater) Also this week: Brian used the recording to , which is why we’re accompanied by random sound effects. There wasn’t much streaming news to recap, but we did discuss as well as 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!) |
SpaceX completes its last mission of 2018 with the launch of a military GPS satellite | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 23 | SpaceX launched the United States Air Force’s first (GPS) III satellite, nicknamed Vespucci, from Cape Canaveral, Florida this morning in what was the aerospace company’s first U.S. national security mission to date. The company had planned to complete the launch, its last of the year, earlier this week, but heavy winds imposed delays. SpaceX with the Air Force in 2016 and intends to launch an additional four GPS III missions on Falcon 9, a two-stage rocket manufactured by the company. The GPS is owned by the U.S. military and operated by the Air Force. , it’s been used for commercial purposes since the mid-2000s. The new GPS satellites, built by Lockheed Martin, will provide three-times better accuracy than the current system of GPS, and will be eight times better at anti-jamming, according to . “This newest generation of GPS satellites is designed and built to deliver positioning, navigation, and timing information,” the company . “GPS is used by over four billion users and supports critical missions worldwide.” SpaceX completed 21 launches in 2018, up from in what’s been a banner year for the company. Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, it’s also at a valuation of $30.5 billion to help fund which will see the company launching 11,000 satellites to improve internet connectivity around the globe. The new round of capital would bring its total raised to date to more than $2.5 billion. You can watch the live stream of today’s rocket launch . |
5 unicorns that will probably go public in 2019 (besides Uber and Lyft) | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 23 | There’s been plenty of fanfare surrounding Uber and Lyft’s initial public offerings — slated for early 2019 — since the two companies with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in early December. On top of that, public and private investors have had plenty to say about . But those aren’t the only “unicorn” exits we should expect to witness in the year ahead. Using its proprietary company rating algorithm, data provider CB Insights ranked five billion-dollar companies most likely to perform IPOs next year in . The algorithm analyzes non-traditional public signals, including hiring activity, web traffic and mobile app data, to make its predictions. These are the startups that topped their list. Peloton co-founder and CEO John Foley speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 on September 6, 2018 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch) Peloton, dubbed the “Netflix of fitness,” has raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital funding in the six years since it was founded by John Foley, most recently raising . The manufacturer of tech-enabled exercise equipment is more than doubling in size every year and is an unusual characteristic for a venture-backed business of its age. Headquartered in New York, Peloton doesn’t have any public IPO plans, though Foley recently told The Wall Street Journal that 2019 for its stock market debut. Select investors: L Catterton, True Ventures, Tiger Global Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince appears onstage at the 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt Europe/London. (Photo by Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for TechCrunch) Cybersecurity unicorn Cloudflare is likely to in what is poised to be a strong year for IPOs in the security industry. The web performance and security platform is said to be at a potential valuation of more than $3.5 billion after last at a $1.8 billion valuation. Since it was founded in 2009, the San Francisco-based company has raised just north of $250 million in VC funding. CrowdStrike, another security unicorn, is and it wouldn’t be surprising to see Illumio and Lookout make the jump to the public markets, as well. Select investors: Pelion Venture Partners, NEA, Venrock San Jose-based Zoom Video Communications has reportedly tapped Morgan Stanley to lead its upcoming IPO Zoom, a provider of video conferencing services, online meeting and group messaging tools that’s raised $160 million in VC cash to date, is eyeing a multi-billion IPO in 2019 and has hired Morgan Stanley to lead the offering. Founded in 2011, the company most recently brought in a , entirely funded by Sequoia, at a $1 billion valuation in early 2017. Based in San Jose, Calif., Zoom is hoping to garner a valuation significantly larger than $1 billion when it IPOs, according to . Select investors: Sequoia, Emergence Capital Partners, Horizons Ventures Data management company Rubrik co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha Data management company Rubrik has quietly made moves indicative of an impending IPO. The startup, which provides data backup and recovery services for businesses across cloud and on-premises environments, hired former Atlassian chief financial officer earlier this year, as well as its , Peter McGoff. Palo Alto-based Rubrik was round in 2017. The company has raised nearly $300 million to date. Select investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock, Khosla Ventures Medallia, a customer experience management platform that’s nearly two decades old, may finally become a public company in 2019. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company, which has been rumored to be planning an IPO for several years, hired a new CEO this year and reported $250 million in GAAP revenue for the year ending January 31, 2018, according to . Medallia hasn’t raised capital since 2015, when it secured a at a $1.2 billion valuation. It has raised a total of just over $250 million. Select investor: Sequoia |
HQ Trivia launches HQ Words as reinstalled CEO seeks a game-changer | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 12 | 23 | HQ’s expansion beyond trivia is emerging from beta, but the question is whether it’s different and accessible enough to revive the startup’s growth. HQ Words to everyone today with games at 6:30pm PT within the HQ Trivia app after several weeks of closed beta testing of the Wheel of Fortune-style game. The launch will be the first big move of Rus Yusupov now that he’s been officially renamed CEO a week after the of fellow co-founder and former CEO Colin Kroll, HQ confirms to TechCrunch. “Intermedia Labs introduced the world to a category-defining product, HQ Trivia. Once again, with HQ Words, Intermedia Labs is poised to captivate the world with a revolutionary experience that will bring people together in new ways around live mobile video,” Yusupov tells us. “HQ Words is the most interactive experience we’ve ever made.” Kroll’s passing comes at a tough time for HQ. Its daily player count has declined since it became a phenomenon a year ago. The novelty has begun to wear off, and with so many experienced trivia whizzes, cash jackpots are often split between enough people that winners only get a few bucks. Interrupting your days or nights to play at a particular time can be inconvenient compared to the legions of always-available other games. Yusupov, who was HQ’s CEO until Kroll took over in September, will have to figure out what will attract casual crosswords players and those who flocked to Zynga’s Words with Friends — the kind of disruptive thinking Kroll excelled at. “Colin and I shared many incredible life moments over the last 7 years. We embarked on an incredible journey co-founding two breakthrough companies together – and the lessons we learned at Vine and HQ will continue to have a big impact on me. Like many relationships, we’ve also had our challenges – but it was during these challenging times that Colin’s kind soul and big heart would truly shine,” Yusupov wrote in a statement about his co-founder that was originally published by in a touching memorial post. Between building Vine and HQ together, the pair have reimagined mobile entertainment, giving millions a chance to show off their wits and creativity. “He had this incredible ability to make everyone feel special. He listened well. He thought deeply. But above all, he cared about people more than work. The driving force behind his innovations was the positive impact they would have on people and world. Colin’s innovations and inventions have changed many people’s lives for the better and will continue to impact the world for years to come.” HQ Trivia’s co-founder and former CEO Colin Kroll passed away earlier this month Make it through 10 rounds and you and other winners get a cut of the cash prize, with the three who solved the puzzles fastest scoring a bigger chunk of the jackpot. The startup earns money through selling you extra lives inside Words, though it will probably feature sponsored games and product placement like Trivia does to pull in marketing dollars. Words will go live daily at 6:30pm Pacific after Trivia’s 6:00 game, so you can turn it into HQ hour with family and friends. HQ Words is much more frenetic than Trivia. Rather than picking a single answer, you have to rapidly tap letters through a combination of educated and uneducated guesses. That means it really does feel more interactive, since you’re not sitting for minutes with just a sole answer tap to keep you awake. And because it doesn’t require deep and broad trivia knowledge, Words could appeal to a wider audience. The spinner also adds an element of pure luck, as a weaker player who gets to auto-reveal a vowel might fare better than a wiser player who gets stuck with a “Z” like I always seem to. The concern is that at its core, Words is still quite similar to Trivia. They’re both real-time, elimination round-based knowledge games played against everyone for money. Both at times feel like they use cheap tricks to eliminate you. A recent Words puzzle asked you to name a noisy instrument, but the answer wasn’t “kazoo” but “buzzing kazoo” — something I’m not sure anyone has ever formally called it. Given the faster pace of interaction, even tiny glitches or moments of lag can be enough to make you lose a round. An HQ Words beta game earlier this week failed to show some users the keyboard, causing mass elimination. The pressure to get HQ’s engineering working flawlessly has never been higher. The phrasing of some HQ Words answers seems like a stretch HQ originally agreed to let TechCrunch interview Kroll about what makes Words different enough to change the startup’s momentum. Yusupov was supposed to fill in after Kroll was sadly found dead last Friday of an apparent drug overdose. He later declined to talk or provide written responses. That’s understandable during this time of mourning and transition. But HQ will still need to build an answer into its app. Meanwhile, Chinese clones and U.S competitors have begun co-opting the live video quiz idea. for content makers to create their own. HQ could benefit from a better onboarding experience that lets people play a sample game solo to get them hooked and tide them over until the next scheduled broadcast. Mini-games or ways to play along after you’re eliminated could boost total view time and the value of brand sponsorships. A “quiet mode” that silences the between-round chatter and distills HQ to just the questions and puzzles might make it easier to play while multi-tasking. Head-to-head versions of Trivia and Words might help HQ feel more intimate, and there’s an opportunity to integrate peer-to-peer gambling like . And branching out beyond knowledge games into more social or arcade-style titles would counter the idea that HQ is just for brainiacs. Around the height of HQ’s popularity it raised a at a $100 million valuation. That seems justified, given HQ will reportedly earn around in revenue this year. Gamers are fickle, though, and today’s Fortnite can wind up tomorrow’s [Update: Draw Something would be a better example] — a flash in the pan that fizzles out. Words is a great bridge to a world outside of Trivia, but HQ must evolve, not just iterate. |
The electric scooter wars of 2018 | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 12 | 23 | was undoubtedly the year of the electric scooter. Between massive fundraising rounds, lofty valuations and both Uber and Lyft’s entrance into the space, it’s clear these scooters are here for the long haul. But just because investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into these companies in the past year, the electric scooter business is not without its difficulties. In fact, it’s an immensely difficult business with tough unit economics, regulatory challenges on a city-by-city basis, and a ridiculous number of competitors vying for the micro-mobility services market share. It’s only a matter of time before consolidation becomes the only way to survive and, already, we’ve started to see some early signs of that with Uber’s partnership with Lime, as well as Ford’s acquisition of Spin. Let’s take a look at how the industry got to where it is today. Bird, currently valued north of $2 billion, was the first electric scooter company to launch, having first deployed in September 2017 in Santa Monica, Calif. One year later, . Then came , which started as a bike-share startup. In February, its plans to get into electric scooter sharing before ultimately it was going all in on scooters. Fast , and Ford decided to gobble up Spin in a deal . Next up was , which also got its beginnings as a bike-share company. Also in February, . Since then, Lime has deployed its bikes and scooters in over 100 cities in the U.S. and 27 international cities. Lime has also partnered with Uber to offer Lime scooters within the Uber app. Skip, founded by Boosted Board co-founder Sanjay Dastoor, was a bit of a latecomer — albeit one that has an approach that cities seem to appreciate. Skip launched in March, and has since deployed scooters in Washington, D.C., Portland, Ore., and San Francisco — . The other scooter startup permit in San Francisco went to Scoot, a company that also operates shared mopeds in the city, . On an international-only level, there are companies like Y Combinator-backed Grin, to operate shared, electric scooters in Latin America. Later that month, São Paulo-based to further the company’s expansion across Latin America, which is becoming a hot spot for scooters. In September, . Meanwhile, Bird and Lime are actively targeting markets in the area. Abroad, scooters have also popped up in Tel Aviv, London, Paris and 15 other cities across countries like Spain, Switzerland, Portgual and others. Bird, Lime and Spin quickly became known for their strategies of begging for forgiveness rather than first asking for permission. Regulatory challenges for these electric scooter companies abounded in Santa Monica, San Francisco, Austin and other cities around the country. In San Francisco, the Municipal Transportation Agency conducted a several-months-long process to determine which scooters would be allowed to operate in the city. The city’s permit process came as a result of Bird, Lime and deploying their electric scooters without permission in the city in March. As part of a new city law, which went into effect June 4, scooter companies were not able to operate their services in San Francisco without a permit. Today, just Skip and Scoot are permitted to operate in the city. , and many other cities have also had their fair share of regulatory hurdles. Still, Lime has more than doubled the number of cities where it operates in the U.S. since June. Meanwhile, the number of cities where scooters in the U.S. has quickly to more than 90 at the time of publication. Initially, many companies were not focused on building their own scooters. Instead, they slapped stickers and logos on scooters that have been around for years. Lime, Bird and Spin launched using scooters from Ninebot, a Chinese scooter company that has merged with Segway. Ninebot is backed by investors, including Sequoia Capital, Xiaomi and ShunWei. That started to change with the entrance of Skip, in March. Skip has since begun rolling out new versions of its scooters, with plans to eventually make totally custom scooters from the ground up. Earlier this month, Skip unveiled new scooters with cameras and locks. The goal is to improve its unit economics, which are notoriously difficult in this space. Investors, who have poured millions of dollars into electric scooter startups like Bird and Lime, are now pumping the brakes on funding due to the difficulty of the business. , which is not enough time to recoup the cost of purchasing the scooter. Perhaps that’s why Skip . Skip, however, declined to comment on the lifespan of its scooters and its debt financing. In May, to launch its next generation of electric scooters. These Segway-powered Lime scooters are designed to be safer, longer-lasting via battery power and more durable for what the sharing economy requires, Lime CEO Toby Sun told TechCrunch earlier this year. But this partnership hasn’t been without its issues. In October, Lime due to battery fire concerns. The next month, $3 million toward a new safety initiative called “Respect the Ride.” Safety, in general, is a major concern. In September, . A Scoot scooter with the company’s new locks in San Francisco. Photo via Scoot. Scoot, which works with Telepod to create its scooters, has also had its issues. In November, Scoot CEO revealed that during the first two weeks of Scoot’s operations of shared, electric scooters in San Francisco, That’s why this month, in an attempt to prevent theft. Superpedestrian, recognizing that this is a hard business, . Superpedestrian’s main offering is a sturdier scooter with self-diagnostic and remote management capabilities. Superpedestrian says its scooters can maintain themselves from nine to 18 months at a time, while other scooters break down more often, the company says. Superpedestrian’s scooters are equipped to self-diagnose issues that involve components, the motherboard, motor controller, land management system, batteries and more. In total, Superpedestrian can detect about 100 different things that could be wrong with it. Superpedestrian says it already has a big player on board, though the CEO would not disclose which one. The first deployment, however, will happen in Q1 2019. There can only be so many electric scooters on any given city street, which is a result of increasing city regulations around these micro-mobility services. And even if cities didn’t have limits on the number of scooter operators, there are not enough major differentiators between these services to obtain significant market share. Meanwhile, investors have mostly placed their bets on the likes of Bird and Lime, and with Lyft and Uber now making their scooter plays, it’s going to be really hard for other, smaller companies to compete. As mentioned earlier, Ford bought electric scooter company Spin, Uber has a partnership with Lime, and Uber is also . Bird has, however, , which leaves Lime. And if Lime sells to Uber, perhaps Lyft will go after Scoot or Skip. I obviously cannot tell the future, but do expect to see consolidation, additional market launches, and scooter companies looking to improve their unit economics by relying more on custom-built scooters rather than off-the-shelf ones from the likes of Segway and Xiaomi. |
Here comes the downturn | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 12 | 23 | It’s remarkable how fast the tenor of the times has changed. Only a few months ago we were in a boom that seemed like it might never end. Now ; the markets have gone bear; and Google Trends has the word “recession” at its . There seems to be near-universal consensus that a major, worldwide economic downturn is coming. Lux partner with sage wisdom. (sharing publicly what Lux has advised in boardrooms privately) CASH is the ultimate call option—on time, on other's assets. Watch your LIQUIDITY. — Josh Wolfe (@wolfejosh) When exactly? Who knows? Late 2019 or early 2020, says the smart money; much sooner than that, quoth the doomsayers (including a truly remarkable percentage of CEOs). What effect will it have on tech, in particular? Ah, now there’s a very interesting question indeed. You can make a pretty good case that technology, as an industry, will actually see a net benefit from any downturn. Note how tech essentially ignored the Great Recession of 2008 and kept on thriving, despite much of the smart money at the time warning us that the tech industry as we knew it was all but doomed — who can forget Sequoia Capital’s infamous “R.I.P. Good Times” deck? The theory goes: every industry is becoming a technology industry, and downturns only accelerate the process, because software is eating the world, and recessions bring fresh carrion we don’t even have to hunt. It’s plausible. It’s uncomfortable, given how much real human suffering and dismay is implicit in the economic disruption from which we often benefit. And on the macro scale, in the long run, it’s even probably true. Every downturn is a meteor that hits the dinosaurs hardest, while we software-powered mammals escape the brunt. Even if so, though, what’s good for the industry as a whole is going to be bad for a whole lot of individual companies. Enterprises will tighten their belts, and experimental initiatives with potential long-term value but no immediate bottom-line benefit will be among the first on the chopping block. Consumers will guard their wallets more carefully, and will be ever less likely to pay for your app and/or click on your ad. And everyone will deleverage and/or hoard their cash reserves like dragons, just in case, which means less money for new or struggling companies. Above all we might be hurt by the mindset more than the money. Bruce Sterling once observed, of the debt calamities of 2008, that the interesting thing was that physically, hardly a molecule had changed — and yet we all agreed that we had all transitioned from a world of plenty to one of despair. Similarly, on paper, any recession’s numbers really won’t be so bad. Heck, even if GDP shrank an impossible-to-imagine 10 percent, that would take us back to the dire wasteland of warlords and mutants that we last suffered through in [checks notes] er, 2013, which didn’t seem like such a dystopia at the time. But we’re geared so much for growth that even stagnation feels like disaster. The lesson is pretty clear: it’s coming, and it will bring both misery and opportunities, depending on some combination of its vicissitudes and how well you are positioned for it. Don’t be overstretched. Don’t be in (too much) debt. Don’t be flailing. And this is probably a worse-than-usual time to bet the company on any particular project, or pivot. But at the same time, for better or worse, we in tech are, currently, carrion eaters high up the food chain. That bright light in the sky, that oncoming meteor, brings a kind of ugly promise. Let’s try to make the best of it, and not just for ourselves. |
The business case for serverless | Zack Kanter | 2,018 | 12 | 15 | While serverless is typically championed as a way to reduce costs and scale massively on demand, there is one extraordinarily compelling reason above all others to adopt a serverless-first approach: it is the best way to achieve maximum development velocity over time. It is not easy to implement correctly and is certainly not a cure-all, but, done right, it paves an extraordinary path to maximizing development velocity, and it is because of this that serverless is the most under-hyped, under-discussed tech movement amongst founders and investors today. The case for serverless starts with a simple premise: if the fastest startup in a given market is going to win, then This may sound obvious, but very, very few startups state as an explicit goal. “Development velocity,” to be specific, means Of course, an additional unit of customer value can be delivered either by shipping more value to existing customers, or by shipping existing value—that is, existing features—to new customers. For many tech startups, particularly in the B2B space, both of these are gated by development throughput (the former for obvious reasons, and the latter because new customer onboarding is often limited by onboarding automation that must be built by engineers). What does serverless mean, exactly? It’s a bit of a misnomer. Just as didn’t mean that data centers disappeared into the ether — it meant that those data centers were being run by someone else, and servers could be provisioned on-demand and paid for by the hour — doesn’t mean that there aren’t any servers. There always have to be servers somewhere. Broadly, serverless means that you aren’t responsible for all of the configuration and management of those servers. A good definition of serverless is . With zero usage, there is zero cost. And if the service goes down, you are not responsible for getting it back up. AWS started the serverless movement in 2014 with a “serverless compute” platform called . Whereas a ‘normal’ cloud server like AWS’s EC2 offering had to be provisioned in advance and was billed by the hour regardless of whether or not it was used, AWS Lambda was provisioned instantly, on demand, and was billed only . Lambda is astonishingly cheap: $0.0000002 per request plus $0.00001667 per gigabyte-second of compute. And while users have to increase their server size if they hit a capacity constraint on EC2, Lambda will scale more or less infinitely to accommodate load — without any manual intervention. And, if an EC2 instance goes down, the developer is responsible for diagnosing the problem and getting it back online, whereas if a Lambda dies another Lambda can just take its place. Although Lambda—and equivalent services like or —is incredibly attractive from a cost and capacity standpoint, the truth is that saving money and preparing for scale are very poor reasons for a startup to adopt a given technology. Few startups fail as a result of spending too much money on servers or from failing to scale to meet customer demand — in fact, optimizing for either of these things is a form of premature scaling, and premature scaling on one or many dimensions (hiring, marketing, sales, product features, and even hierarchy/titles) is the primary cause of death for the vast majority of startups. In other words, prematurely optimizing for cost, scale, or uptime is an anti-pattern. When people talk about a serverless approach, they don’t just mean taking the code that runs on servers and chopping it up into Lambda functions in order to achieve lower costs and easier scaling. A proper serverless architecture is a radically different way to build a modern software application — a method that has been termed a approach. It starts with the aggressive adoption of off-the-shelf platforms—that is, —such as or (user authentication—sign up and sign in—as-a-service), or (workflow-orchestration-as-a-service), (GraphQL backend-as-a-service), or even more familiar services like . Whereas Lambda-like offerings provide as a service, managed services provide as a service. The distinction, in other words, is that write and maintain the code (e.g., the functions) for serverless compute, whereas writes and maintains the code for managed services. With managed services, the platform is providing both the functionality managing the operational complexity behind it. By adopting managed services, the vast majority of an application’s “commodity” functionality—authentication, file storage, API gateway, and more—is handled by the cloud provider’s various off-the-shelf platforms, which are stitched together with a thin layer of your own ‘glue’ code. The glue code — along with the remaining business logic that makes your application unique — runs on ultra-cheap, infinitely-scalable Lambda (or equivalent) infrastructure, thereby eliminating the need for servers altogether. Small engineering teams like ours are using it to build incredibly powerful, easily-maintainable applications in an architecture that yields an unprecedented, sustainable development velocity as the application gets more complex. There is a trade-off to adopting the serverless, service-full philosophy. Building a radically serverless application requires taking an enormous hit to short term development velocity, since it is often much, much quicker to build a “service” than it is to use one of AWS’s off-the-shelf. When developers are considering a service like Stripe, “build vs buy” isn’t even a question—it is unequivocally faster to use Stripe’s payment service than it is to build a payment service yourself. More accurately, it is —a testament both to the complexity of the payment space and to the intuitive service that Stripe has developed. But for developers dealing with something like authentication (Cognito or Auth0) or workflow orchestration (AWS Step Functions or Azure Logic Apps), it is generally to understand and implement the provider’s model for a service than it is to implement the functionality within the application’s codebase (either by writing it from scratch or by using an open source library). By choosing to use a managed service, developers are deliberately choosing to go slower in the short term—a tough pill for a startup to swallow. Many, understandably, choose to go fast now and roll their own. The problem with this approach comes back to an old axiom in software development: “code isn’t an asset—code is debt.” Code requires an entry on both sides of the accounting equation. It is an asset that enables companies to deliver value to the customer, but it also requires maintenance that has to be accounted for and distributed over time. All things equal, startups want the smallest codebase possible (provided, of course, that developers aren’t taking this too far and writing clever but unreadable code). Less code means less surface area to maintain, and also means less surface area for new engineers to grasp during ramp-up. Herein lies the magic of using managed services. Startups get the beneficial use of the provider’s code as an asset without holding that code debt on their “technical balance sheet.” Instead, the code sits on balance sheet, and the provider’s engineers are tasked with maintaining, improving, and documenting that code. In other words, startups get code that is and —the equivalent of hiring a first-rate engineering team dedicated to a non-core part of the codebase—for free. Or, more accurately, at a predictable per-use cost. Contrast this with using a managed service like Cognito or Auth0. On day one, perhaps it doesn’t have all of the features on a startup’s wish list. The difference is that the provider has a team of engineers and product managers whose sole task is to ship improvements to this service day in and day out. If there is a single unifying principle amongst a startup’s engineering team, it should be to write as little code—and be responsible for as few non-core services—as humanly possible. By adopting this philosophy, a startup can build a platform that can process billions of transactions at an extremely predictable, purely-variable cost with nearly zero devops oversight. Being this lazy takes a surprising amount of discipline. Getting good at managing a serverless codebase and serverless infrastructure is nontrivial. It means building extensive practices around testing and automation, which means an even larger upfront time investment. Integrating with a managed service can be unbelievably painful, with days spent trying to understand all of the gaps, gotchas, and edge cases. The temptation to implement a proprietary solution can be incredible, especially when it means a story can be done in a matter of minutes or hours instead of days or longer. It means writing wonky workarounds when a service only accommodates 80% of a developer’s needs. And as the missing 20% of functionality is released, it means refactoring code to remove the workaround, even when it is working just fine and there is no near-term benefit to changing it. The substantial early time investment means that a serverless/managed-service-first approach is not right for every startup. The most important question to ask is, If the answer is days or weeks, as is the case for many very early-stage startups, it is probably not the right approach. But if the timescale for velocity optimization has shifted from to , it is worth taking a close look at going serverless. Recruiting great engineers is extraordinarily hard—and only getting harder. It is a tremendous competitive advantage to task those engineers with building differentiated business functionality while your competitors build services that do commoditized, undifferentiated heavy lifting, and then remain stuck with the maintenance of those services for years to come. Of course, there are certain cases where serverless just doesn’t make sense, but those are disappearing at a rapid rate (for example, Lambda’s 5-minute timeout was recently tripled to 15 minutes)—and reasons such as lock-in or latency are or . Ultimately, the job of a software startup—and therefore the job of the founder—is to deliver customer value above and beyond the capability of the competition. That job comes down to maximizing development velocity, which, in turn, comes down to mitigating complexity wherever possible. It may be that every codebase, and therefore every startup, is destined to become “a big ball of mud”—the term coined in a to describe the “haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape-and-baling-wire, spaghetti-code jungle” that every software project seems eventually destined to become. One day, complexity will grow past a breaking point and development velocity will begin to decline irreversibly, and so the ultimate job of the founder is to push that day off as long as humanly possible. The best way to do that is to keep your ball of mud to the minimum possible size— serverless is the most powerful tool ever developed to do exactly that. |
California says all city buses have to be emission free by 2040 | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 12 | 15 | On the heels of a published last month about climate change and its devastating impacts, many cities and states are scrambling to find ways to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that threaten their air quality, not to mention their economies. As is often the case, California is leading the charge, yesterday becoming the first state to mandate that mass transit agencies purchase fully electric buses only beginning in 2029, and that public transit routes be populated by electric buses alone by 2040. The new rule is expected to require the production and purchase of more than 14,000 new zero-emission buses. Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air and Resource Board (CARB) that voted unanimously to make California the first state with such a commitment, earlier this month that California has “to push standards that are more progressive” than the federal government because of the state’s chronic air pollution, which is linked to asthma and heart disease, among other things. The move is reportedly the result of several years of CARB’s work with industry and public-health groups, and it flies in the face of moves by the Trump administration to push for lower fuel efficiency standards and to promote the use of fossil fuels. Indeed, the Trump administration has questioned from the outset how much the U.S. is responsible for cutting back emissions, and the newest government report seemingly didn’t alter anything for the President. Asked last month about the government’s findings that, unchecked, global warming will have catastrophic implications for the U.S. economy, he said, “ .” He added: “People like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers.” Instead of wait on the administration to change its mind, California’s new Innovative Clean Transit rule will force California’s public bus lines — many of which currently run on natural gas or diesel fuel — to shift to either electric power or hydrogen fuel cells. The move could be a boon for electric bus companies like , a 14-year-old, Burlingame, Ca., company that has raised roughly half a billion dollars from investors to build its zero-emission, battery-electric buses. It could also potentially help the publicly traded Chinese automaker giant BYD, which, as TC has reported, has been on a with cities across China to electrify their public transportation systems and is now extending its footprint across the globe. The new ruling is not the only line of attack that California is adopting. As The Hill notes, earlier this year, California also the first state to mandate new homes be retrofitted with solar panels. In September, Governor Jerry Brown that will require the state to transition to a 100 percent renewable energy electric grid by 2045. CARB has also worked to advise the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which last month announced what it called its Cleaner Trucks Initiative. EPA officials say that via the initiative, the agency plans to revise truck pollution standards in a way that lowers their nitrogen oxide emissions while also doing away with requirements that the industry has complained are financially onerous. As , despite the announcement, no one yet knows if the EPA is planning more stringent emissions limits or anything as strict as the 90 percent reduction in nitrogen oxide pollution that CARB has said is needed to clean smog to health standards. |
Finalcad, the mobile platform for the construction industry, raises $40M Series C | Steve O'Hear | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | , a mobile platform that enables the construction industry to digitize much of its processes, has closed $40 million in Series C funding. The round was led by publicly listed London venture capital firm Draper Esprit and Cathay Innovation, with the support of Salesforce Ventures. Existing French investors Serena, Aster and CapHorn Invest also participated. Funded in 2012 by Jimmy Louchart, Joffroy Louchart and David Vauthrin, Finalcad has set out to solve the construction industry’s “chronic low productivity” problem. The Paris-based company has developed a SaaS and mobile app to help construction workers and other construction stakeholders collaborate digitally, which is believed to be the key to removing many of the inefficiencies in construction. Specifically — and according to McKinsey — labor-productivity growth in construction has averaged only 1 percent a year over the past two decades, compared with growth of 2.8 percent for the total world economy and 3.6 percent in the case of manufacturing. The construction industry is also lagging behind in terms of digitization: places it among the least digitized sectors. To help remedy this, Finalcad’s SaaS lets construction site engineers, foremen, architects and consultants work together via the Finalcad mobile app, enabling collaboration across a wide variety of workflows both on site and at the office. Along with acting as a communication tool — akin to a “Yammer for construction” — the software also enables stakeholders to work on drawings, BIM models, tasks, controls, safety procedures and progress monitoring. From this vantage point, Finalcad is able to provide insights and “best practices at a company level,” powered by its analytics technology. On who Finalcad’s competition is, unsurprisingly co-founder and CMO David Vauthrin says it’s a “mix of paper and pencil, Excel sheets and IM platforms,” such as WhatsApp or WeChat, etc. “On direct competition, we face some players, but they are all very small companies, limited to one trade (e.g. buildings) or to a [single] geography,” he says. Vauthrin also tells me that the Paris-based company’s business model is not based on per project sales, but is designed to encourage company-wide digital transformation. This sees Finalcad operate a subscription model based on a percentage of a company’s turnover. “We created and implement into our customer’s organisation a ‘change management’ methodology to make sure that the majority of our customer’s workforce is going to embrace this change,” he adds. To that end, Finalcad says it will use the new Series C funding to extend its SaaS, which spans support for buildings and infrastructure to energy, operations and maintenance. It will also invest in R&D related to its Construction Insight Platform, and plans to hire an additional 100 people globally, adding to a current headcount of 170 people across 12 countries. “When we raised our Series B in 2016, we intended to implement pivotal change: moving from a project-based business model to a company-wide digital transformation one. This involved covering all the main activities of our industry: buildings, infrastructure, energy, operations and maintenance,” says Jimmy Louchart, co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “Since then, we validated this shift with some major contract wins in Europe and Asia. Now this Series C allows us to fully deploy our new strategy on a global scale. We firmly believe that this unique approach is coming to fruition, and the value we bring to our customers is the right path towards changing the way we build.” |
Workers protest outside Minnesota Amazon warehouse | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 15 | null |
The limits of coworking | Arman Tabatabai | 2,018 | 12 | 15 | there’s a on every street nowadays. Take a walk through midtown Manhattan (please don’t actually) and it might even seem like there are more WeWorks than office buildings. Co-working has . The rise has been so remarkable that even the headline-dominating SoftBank seems on the shift continuing, having poured billions into WeWork – including a that saw the co-working king’s valuation spike to $45 billion. And there are no signs of the trend slowing down. With growing frequency, new startups are popping up across cities looking to turn under-utilized brick-and-mortar or commercial space into low-cost co-working options. It’s a strategy spreading through every type of business from retail – where companies like have helped portions of their stores – to more niche verticals like parking lots – where companies like are transforming empty lots into spaces for outdoor co-working and corporate off-sites. Restaurants and bars might even prove most popular for co-working, with startups like and turning restaurants that are closed during the day into private co-working space during their off-hours. Before you know it, a startup will be strapping an Aeron chair to the top of a telephone pole and calling it “WirelessWorking”. But is there a limit to how far co-working can go? Are all of the storefronts, restaurants and open spaces that line city streets going to be filled with MacBooks, cappuccinos and Moleskine notebooks? That might be too tall a task, even for the movement taking over skyscrapers. Photo: Vasyl Dolmatov / iStock via Getty Images Customers realize more affordable co-working alternatives, while tight-margin businesses facing increasing rents for under-utilized property are able to pool resources into a network and access a completely new revenue stream at very little cost. The value proposition is proving to be seriously convincing in initial cities – Spacious , that so many restaurants were applying to join the network on their own volition that only five percent of total applicants were ultimately getting accepted. Basically, the business model here checks a lot of the boxes for successful marketplaces: Acquisition and transaction friction is low for both customers and suppliers, with both seeing real value that didn’t exist previously. Unit economics seem strong, and vetting on both sides of the market creates trust and community. Finally, there’s an observable network effect whereby suppliers benefit from higher occupancy as more customers join the network, while customers benefit from added flexibility as more locations join the network. Photo: Caiaimage / Robert Daly via Getty Images So is this the way of the future? The strategy is really compelling, with a creative solution that offers tremendous value to businesses and workers in major cities. But concerns around the scalability of demand make it difficult to picture this phenomenon becoming ubiquitous across cities or something that reaches the scale of a WeWork or large conventional co-working player. All these companies seem to be competing for a similar demographic, not only with one another, but also with coffee shops, free workspaces, and other flexible co-working options like , which provides members with access to unused desks and offices in traditional co-working spaces. Like Spacious and KettleSpace, the spaces on Croissant own the property leases and are already built for co-working, so Croissant can still offer comparatively attractive rates. The offer seems most compelling for someone that is able to work without a stable location and without the amenities offered in traditional co-working or office spaces, and is also price sensitive enough where they would trade those benefits for a lower price. Yet at the same time, they can’t be too price sensitive, where they would prefer working out of free – or close to free – coffee shops instead of paying a monthly membership fee to avoid the frictions that can come with them. And it seems unclear whether the problem or solution is as poignant outside of high-density cities – let alone outside of high-density areas of high-density cities. Without density, is the competition for space or traffic in coffee shops and free workspaces still high enough where it’s worth paying a membership fee for? Would the desire for a private working environment, or for a working community, be enough to incentivize membership alone? And in less-dense and more-sprawl oriented cities, members could also face the risk of having to travel significant distances if space isn’t available in nearby locations. While the towards more remote, agile and nomadic workers that can do more with less, it’s less certain how many will actually fit the profile that opts out of both more costly but stable traditional workspaces, as well as potentially frustrating but free alternatives. And if the lack of density does prove to be an issue, how many of those workers will live in hyper-dense areas, especially if they are price-sensitive and can work and live anywhere? To be clear, I’m not saying the companies won’t see significant growth – in fact, I think they will. But will the trend of monetizing unused space through co-working come to permeate cities everywhere and do so with meaningful occupancy? Maybe not. That said, there is still a sizable and growing demographic that need these solutions and the value proposition is significant in many major urban areas. The companies are creating real value, creating more efficient use of wasted space, and fixing a supply-demand issue. And the cultural value of even modestly helping independent businesses keep the lights on seems to outweigh the cultural “damage” some may fear in turning them into part-time co-working spaces. |
Cydia shuts down purchasing mechanism for its jailbreak app store | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 15 | null |
Tony Hawk goes mobile | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 15 | , Tony Hawk has been conspicuously absent from the video store shelves. For most game developers, that’s little more than a blip between titles. When your name and face are attached to 16 titles in 15 years, however, everyone starts to notice when you’re gone. |
Wandelbots raises $6.8M to make programming a robot as easy as putting on a jacket | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | Industrial robotics is on track to be worth around , but while it may have something in common with other categories of cutting-edge tech — innovative use of artificial intelligence, pushing the boundaries of autonomous machines that are disrupting pre-existing technology — there is one key area where it differs: each robotics firm uses its own proprietary software and operating systems to run its machines, making programming the robots complicated, time-consuming and expensive. A startup out of Germany called Wandelbots (a portmanteau of “change” and “robots” in German) has come up with an innovative way to skirt around that challenge: using software built by the company, a person wearing a jacket fitted with dozens of sensors can now program the actions of robots from the 12 most popular industrial robotics makers. “We are providing a universal language to teach those robots in the same way, independent of the technology stack,” said CEO Christian Piechnick said in an interview. Essentially reverse engineering the process of how a lot of software is built, Wandelbots has created a Linux-like underpinning to all of it. With some very big deals under its belt with the likes of Volkwagen, Infineon and Midea, the startup out of Dresden has now raised €6 million ($6.8 million), a Series A to take it to its next level of growth and specifically to double down on its operations in China. The funding comes from , and other unnamed previous investors. (It had previously raised a seed round around the time it was a finalist in our last year, pre-launch.) Paua has a bit of a history backing transformational software companies (it also invests in Stripe), and EQT, being connected to a private equity firm, is treating this as a strategic investment that might be deployed across its own assets. Piechnick — who co-founded Wandelbots with Georg Püschel, Maria Piechnick, Sebastian Werner, Jan Falkenberg and Giang Nguyen on the back of research they did at university — said that typical programming of industrial robots to perform a task could have in the past taken three months, the employment of specialist systems integrators, and of course an extra cost on top of the machines themselves. Someone with no technical knowledge, wearing one of Wandelbots’ jackets, can bring that process down to 10 minutes, with costs reduced by a factor of ten. “In order to offer competitive products in the face of the rapid changes within the automotive industry, we need more cost savings and greater speed in the areas of production and automation of manufacturing processes,” said Marco Weiß, Head of New Mobility & Innovations at Volkswagen Sachsen GmbH, in a statement. “Wandelbots’ technology opens up significant opportunities for automation. Using Wandelbots offering, the installation and setup of robotic solutions can be implemented incredibly quickly by teams with limited programming skills.” Wandelbots’ focus at the moment is on programming robotic arms rather than the mobile machines that you may have seen and using to move goods around warehouses. For now, this means that there is not a strong crossover in terms of competition between these two branches of enterprise robotics. However, Amazon has been expanding and working on new areas beyond warehouse movements: it has, for example, been working ways of using computer vision and robotic arms to identify and pick out the most optimal fruits and vegetables out of boxes to put into grocery orders. Innovations like that from Amazon and others could see more pressure for innovation among robotics makers, although Piechnick notes that up to now we’ve seen very little in the way of movement, and there may never be (creating more opportunity for companies like his that build more usability). “Attempts to build robotics operating systems have been tried over and over again, and each time it’s failed,” he said. “But robotics has completely different requirements, such as real time computing, safety issues and many other different factors. A robot in operation is much more complicated than a phone.” He also added that Wandelbots itself has a number of innovations of its own currently going through the patent process, which will widen its own functionality too in terms of what and how its software can train a robot to do. (This may see more than jackets enter the mix.) As with companies in the area of robotic process automation — which uses AI to take over more mundane back-office features — Piechnick maintains that what he has built, and the rise of robotics overall, is not going to replace workers, but put them on to other roles, while allowing businesses to expand the scope of what they can do that a human might never have been able to execute. “No company we work with has ever replaced a human worker with a robot,” he said, explaining that generally the upgrade is from machine to better machine. “It makes you more efficient and cost reductive, and it allows you to put your good people on more complicated tasks.” Currently, Wandelbots is working with large-scale enterprises, although ultimately, it’s smaller businesses that are its target customer, he said. “Previously the ROI on robots was too difficult for SMEs,” he said. “With our tech this changes.” “Wandelbots will be one of the key companies enabling the mass-adoption of industrial robotics by revolutionizing how robots are trained and used,” said Georg Stockinger, Partner at Paua Ventures, in a statement. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen a steep decline in robotic hardware costs. Now, Wandelbots’ resolves the remaining hurdle to disruptive growth in industrial automation – the ease and speed of implementation and teaching. Both factors together will create a perfect storm, driving the next wave of industrial revolution.” |
Volvo Trucks teases the all-electric semi truck it’s bringing to California in 2019 | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | Volvo Trucks released teaser images Wednesday of the electric trucks it plans to bring to California next year as part of a demonstration project, the latest truck manufacturer to publicize its electric plans in the state. The attraction to California is no accident. The state has set aggressive targets to improve air quality and reduce carbon emissions, particularly those generated from tailpipes. Daimler Trucks North America said in July it would begin testing 20 fully electric heavy- and medium-duty Freightliner models at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach this year. Tesla, which unveiled the , began testing its prototype semis in California and Nevada earlier this year. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said production of the Tesla Semi, a Class 8 heavy-duty truck, would begin in 2019. Newcomer Thor Trucks is developing a medium-duty Class-6 electric truck for UPS, which will also be tested in California. Volvo Trucks plans to test its new electric VNR truck, a refitted version of its diesel-powered VNR model. The electric VNR, which will be based on powertrain technology used in the Volvo FE Electric, will be produced for the North American commercial vehicle market starting in 2020, the company said. The introduction of the Volvo VNR Electric models is part of a partnership called LIGHTS (Low Impact Green Heavy Transport Solutions) between Volvo Group, California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) and industry leaders in transportation and electrical charging infrastructure. The California Air Resources Board awarded $44.8 million to SCAQMD for the Volvo LIGHTS project. The LIGHTS project will focus on distribution, regional-haul and drayage operations. The future is electric. The all-electric Volvo VNR will be introduced to demonstrators next year and commercialized in 2020. — Volvo Trucks North America (@VolvoTrucksNA) The goal, according to Volvo Trucks North America President Peter Voorhoeve, is to test and showcase their approach to electrifying the freight transport industry. The project will ultimately result in the commercialization of fully electric heavy-duty trucks, Voorhoeve added. “Electric trucks bring many unknowns and our holistic focus through the LIGHTS project will help our fleet partners transition securely and smoothly based on their individual needs regarding driving cycles, load capacity, uptime, range and other parameters,” Johan Agebrand, Volvo Trucks North America director of product marketing said in a statement. “Within the project we’ll look at everything from route analysis and battery optimization to servicing and financing. We always aim to offer high uptime and productivity.” |
Pokémon GO trainer battles are now live (for some players) | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | Last week we did a on how Pokémon GO’s new (and long overdue) player-versus-player battle system would work. The only thing we didn’t know at the time was when, exactly, it would actually start rolling out. The answer: tonight. Just a few days ago, Niantic started shipping an update to the app that contained everything required for PvP, but they’d yet to actually flip the switch to turn it on. According to a tweet that just went live from the Pokémon GO account, it seems said switches have just been flipped: Calling all level 40 Trainers. Your time has come to ❗ Trainers of lower levels, please stand by, as we will be rolling Trainer Battles out to more levels soon. — Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) One catch (but one noted as likely in our initial post) is that it’s not available to right off the bat. As with many of GO’s newer features, it’ll go live for higher-level players first. More specifically, only players who’ve hit the level cap of 40 will get access to PvP immediately, with plans to roll it out to others in the coming days. It’s done like this partly to reward the most dedicated players for their efforts… but it’s also an easy way for them to roll things out gradually to double-check that nothing explodes. Well, that was quick. Within an hour of launch, Niantic has opened PvP to anyone over level 20. (If you’re a sufficient level and for some reason don’t see the PvP stuff, Niantic says a reset of your app should fix it.) Waiting for it to be rolled out to your level? Want a refresher on how it’ll all work while you wait? |
Revolut gets European banking license in Lithuania | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | Fintech startup is now officially a bank. While the startup to get its European banking license during the first half of 2018, the company has finally come out of the regulatory tunnel with a license in hand. As expected, Revolut applied for a license through the Bank of Lithuania and is leveraging to operate in other European countries. Users will see some changes over the coming months. First, the company expects to roll out new features in the U.K., France, Germany and Poland. Right now, Revolut is more like an e-wallet that you can top up in many different ways. Users in those countries will get a true current account and a non-prepaid debit card in a few months. After transferring your money to Revolut’s own infrastructure, funds will be covered up to €100,000 under the European Deposit Insurance Scheme. It should convince more users to switch to Revolut for their salaries and big sums of money. Eventually, the startup expects to be able to offer overdrafts and loans. All fintech startups end up offering credit at some point as it’s a good way to generate revenue. There are currently 8,000 to 10,000 people opening a Revolut account per day. Users generate $4 billion in monthly transaction volume. It’s going to be interesting to see if current accounts will affect growth. It’s currently quite easy to open a Revolut account as users don’t need to go through a lot of KYC processes. This is going to change once the startup starts opening current accounts. |
Feds like cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech, and so should antitrust agencies | Thibault Schrepel | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | While statements and position papers from most central banks were generally skeptical of cryptocurrencies, the times may be changing. Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve of Saint Louis published a that relates the positive effects of cryptocurrencies for privacy protection. Even with the precipitous decline in value of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other currencies, the Federal Reserve author emphasized the new competitive offering these currencies created exactly because of the way they function, and accordingly, why they are here to stay. And antitrust authorities should welcome cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies for the same reason. In the July article from Federal Reserve research fellow Charles M. Kahn, cryptocurrencies were held up as an exemplar of a degree of privacy protection that not even the central banks can provide to customers. Kahn further stressed that “privacy in payments is desired not just for illegal transactions, but also for protection from malfeasance or negligence by counterparties or by the payments system provider itself.” The act of payment engages the liability of the person who makes it. As a consequence, parties insert numerous contractual clauses to limit their liability. This creates a real issue due to the fact that some “parties to the transaction are no longer able to support the lawyers’ fees necessary to uphold the arrangement.” Smart contracts may address this issue by automating conflict resolution, but for anyone who doesn’t have access to them, crypto-currencies solve the problem differently. They make it possible to make a transaction without revealing your identity. Above all, crypto-currencies are a reaction to fears of privacy invasion, whether by governments or big companies, according to Kahn. And indeed, following Cambridge Analytica and fake news revelations, we are hearing more and more opinions expressing concerns. The General Data Protection Regulation is set to protect private citizens, but in practice, “more and more individuals will turn to payments technologies for privacy protection in specific transactions.” In this regard, cryptocurrencies provide an alternative solution that competes directly with what the market currently offers. Indeed, cryptocurrencies may be the least among many blockchain applications. The diffusion of data among a decentralized network that is independently verified by some or all of the network’s participating stakeholders is precisely the aspect of the technology that provides privacy protection and competes with applications outside the blockchain by offering a different kind of service. The Fed of St. Louis’ study underlines that “because privacy needs are different in type and degree, we should expect a variety of platforms to emerge for specific purposes, and we should expect continued competition between traditional and start-up providers.” And how not to love variety? In an era where antitrust authorities are increasingly interested in , cryptocurrencies (and more generally blockchains) offer a much more effective protection than antitrust law and/or the GDPR combined. These agencies should be happy about that, but they don’t say a word about it. That silence could lead to flawed judgements, because ignoring the speed of blockchain development — and its increasingly varied use — leads to of the competitive field. And in fact, because they ignore the existence of blockchain (applications), they tend to engage in more and more procedures where privacy is seen as an antitrust concern ( what’s happening in Germany). But blockchain is actually providing an answer to this issue; it can’t be said accordingly that the market is failing. And without a market failure, antitrust agencies’ intervention is not legitimate. This new privacy offering from blockchain technologies should also lead to changes in the . As the Fed study stressed: The future of central banks and payments authorities is no longer in privacy provision but in privacy regulation, in holding the ring as different payments platforms offer solutions appropriate to different niches with different mixes of expenses and safety, and with attention to different parts of the public’s demand for privacy. Some constituencies may criticize the expanding role of central banks in enforcing and ensuring privacy online, but those banks would be even harder pressed if they handled the task themselves instead of trying to relinquish it to the network. The same applies to . It is not for them to judge what the business model of digital companies should be and what degree of privacy protection they should offer. Their role is to ensure that alternatives exist, here, that blockchain can be deployed without misinformed regulation to slow it down. Perhaps antitrust agencies should be more vocal about the benefits of cryptocurrencies and blockchain and advise governments not to prevent them. After all, if even a Fed is now pro-cryptocurrencies, antitrust regulators should jump on the wagon without fear. After all, blockchain creates a new alternative by offering real privacy protections, which ultimately put more power in the hands of consumers. If antitrust agencies can’t recognize that, we will soon ask ourselves: who are they really protecting? |
TNB Aura closes $22.7M fund to bring PE-style investing to Southeast Asia’s startups | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | TNB Aura, a recent arrival to Southeast Asia’s VC scene, announced today that it has closed at SG$31.1million, or around US$22.65 million, to bring a more private equity-like approach to investing in startups in the region. The fund was launched in 2016 and it is a joint effort between Australia-based venture fund Aura and Singapore’s TNB Ventures, which has a history of corporate innovation work. I Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering” scheme which, as you’d expect, means there is a focus on hardware, IO, AI and other future-looking tech like “industry 4.0.” The fund is targeting Series A and B deals and it has the firepower to do 15-20 deals over likely the next two to three years, co-founder and managing partner Vicknesh R Pillay told TechCrunch in an interview. There’s around $500,000-$4 million per company, with the ideal scenario being an initial $1 million check with more saved for follow-on rounds. Already it has backed four companies, including , which in a round that saw TNB Aura invest alongside Aura, and AI marketing platform . The fund has a team of 10, including six partners and an operating staff of four. It pitches itself a little differently than most other VCs in the region given that manufacturing and engineering bent. That, Pillay said, means it is focused on “hardware plus software” startups. “We are very strong fundamentals guys,” Pillay added. We ask what is the valuation and decide what we can get from a deal. It’s almost like PE-style investing in the VC world.” A selection of the TNB Aura team [left to right]: Samuel Chong (investment manager), Calvin Ng, Vicknesh R Pillay, Charles Wong (partners), Liu Zhihao (investment manager) “We particularly like B2B SaaS companies and we believe we can assist them through our innovation platforms,” Pillay explained. Outside of Singapore — which is a heavy focus thanks to the relationship with Enterprise Singapore — TNB Aura is focused on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, four of the largest markets that form a large chunk of Southeast Asia’s cumulative 650 million population. With an internet population of more than 330 million — higher than the entire U.S. population — the region is set to grow strongly as internet access increases. the region’s digital economy will triple to reach $240 billion by 20205. The report also found that VC funding in Southeast Asia is developing at a fast clip. Excluding unicorns, which distort the data somewhat, startups raised $2.6 billion in the first half of this year, beating the $2.4 billion tally for the whole of 2017. There are plenty of other Series A-B funds in the region, including , , , , and more. |
Lazada, Alibaba’s Southeast Asia e-commerce business, gets a new CEO | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | Alibaba has reshuffled the leadership at Lazada, its e-commerce firm in Southeast Asia, after CEO Lucy Peng — an original Alibaba co-founder — stepped down to be replaced by Lazada executive president Pierre Poignant after just nine months in the role. Alibaba owns more than 90 percent of Lazada but it has been involved in the business since April 2016 when . It invested to increase its equity to around 83 percent, and earlier this year it raised its stake even higher with . That last investment saw Peng, formerly executive chairman of Ant Financial, become Lazada CEO in place of Max Bittner, who had been installed by former owner Rocket Internet back in 2012. Poignant also arrived at the company in 2012 and worked alongside Bittner as Lazada’s COO. Since then, he has been head of its logistics division before a brief five-month stint as executive president prior to this new role. Peng will remain involved in the Lazada business as its executive chairwoman, the company said. Lazada operates in six countries across Southeast Asia, but there are very few indicators of how the business is performing. Alibaba’s own financial reports bundle Lazada with the firm’s other international businesses. Collectively, they grossed RMB 4.5 billion ($650 million) in the last quarter. That’s an impressive 55 percent revenue jump, but it accounts for . Lazada took part in the recent 11/11 Singles’ Day sale mega day. but the company did not break out numbers for Lazada. Lazada itself said it broke records, but the only data it provided was that 20 million shoppers were “browsing and grabbing” deals on its site — you’ll note that statement doesn’t explicitly provide sales. We did ask at the time, but Lazada declined to give sales or revenue numbers. Against that backdrop, it is hard to say whether Peng was brought in as a stop-gap while Lazada searched for a new CEO, or whether her original remit was to preside over a revamp of the business. Lazada has certainly gone about installing new executive teams in many local markets, according to sources within the company, but it isn’t clear whether Peng is moving as planned or whether things didn’t work out as expected. The news follows , Indonesia’s leading e-commerce platform, yesterday. Speaking on the rivalry, Tokopedia CEO William Tanuwijaya told TechCrunch that he sees differences between the two. “We see Lazada having a different business model than us: Lazada is a hybrid of retail and marketplace model, whereas Tokopedia is a pure marketplace. Lazada is [a] regional player, we are a national player in Indonesia,” he said. |
Watch Rocket Lab launch 10 cubesats into orbit tonight for NASA | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | : Bad weather rolled in and postponed the launch for a few days — they’re going to take another shot at it come Saturday evening. With a worsening weather system on the way, Rocket Lab is now targeting no earlier than 0400 UTC, Sunday 16 December for the launch on Electron. We'll let the weather clear completely to give us a solid green window. 🌩️ — Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) The current weather has violated FAA flight rules, so this one is kind of out of our hands. Some good weather is on its way soon however! — Peter Beck (@Peter_J_Beck) It’s been just over a month since Rocket Lab’s inaugural (and long-delayed) commercial launch, and it’s about to take another customer to space: NASA. Tonight’s 8PM scheduled launch will take 10 small satellites to orbit as part of NASA’s . This is not only Rocket Lab’s first all-NASA launch, but the first launch from NASA under its “Venture Class Launch Services” initiative, which is taking advantage of the new generation of smaller, quick-turnaround launch vehicles. “The NASA Venture Class Launch Service contract was designed from the ground up to be an innovative way for NASA to work and encourage new launch companies to come to the market and enable a future class of rockets for the growing small satellite market,” said Justin Treptow, ELaNa XIX’s mission manager . Last week our team completed fairing encapsulation in our shiny new clean rooms at LC-1 for this week's NASA mission. All CubeSats are now installed on the kick stage payload plate inside Electron's fairing & ready for lift-off. Launch window opens 13 Dec UTC. — Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) On board tonight’s launch are four satellites from NASA researchers, plus six from various universities and institutions around the country. NASA Spaceflight , as well as some technical details about the rocket, if you’re curious. They’ll all go their separate ways once the Electron rocket takes them up to the appropriate altitude. The launch vehicle is named “This One’s For Pickering,” after former JPL head Sir William Pickering, who led the team that created Explorer I, the first U.S. satellite in space. Sir Pickering was born in New Zealand, where Rocket Lab is based and where the launch will take place. Liftoff will take place no sooner than about 8 PM Pacific time, and payload deployment should be just short of an hour after T-0; . |
Stratim, formerly known as valet startup Zirx, sues co-founder for theft | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | Stratim, , its co-founder and now-former COO Shmulik Fishman, alleging breach of fiduciary duties, civil conversion, criminal conversion, theft, criminal mischief, deception, unjust enrichment and fraud. The lawsuit’s co-plaintiff is Adesa, a subsidiary of KAR Auction Services, . Stratim powers fleet management for more than 50 companies, including BMW (DriveNow), General Motors (Maven), Ford (Chariot) and Toyota, to power their respective mobility services. Through STRATIM’s vendor marketplace, for example, Ford can request gas fill-ups for its Chariot shuttles. The next day, a fuel company will come to fill up the tanks and then send that information back into the system. Stratim alleges Sean Behr, the company’s CEO, noticed unusual activity in Fishman’s expense reports and notified Adesa. That led to an investigation, which allegedly found Fishman did not properly file his expenses. “In order to further his embezzlement scheme and avoid having these expenses rejected for failure to attach receipts, Fishman uploaded sham files including indiscernible black, red or blue images, the KAR logo, pictures of trees, images of the Stratim vision statement, a bath towel, and even a Val Pak envelope with a New York City address,” the lawsuit states. But Fishman’s attorney, Todd Gutfleisch of Wechsler & Cohen, LLP, says the lawsuit “has no merit and that Mr. Fishman will ultimately prevail.”* He added, “Stratim’s lawsuit is nothing more than a transparent preemptive ploy to avoid liability stemming from Mr. Fishman’s notice of resignation and Stratim’s contractual liability resulting therefrom.” Fishman also, allegedly, reimbursed himself for flights, hotel stays, restaurants, Apple products, Uber and other expenses that were “all unrelated to any legitimate business purpose for Stratim.” This went unnoticed, the lawsuit states, because Fishman had administrative rights in the expense reports system. In total, Stratim alleges Fishman reimbursed himself $738,942.80 in unauthorized expenses. After a conversation with Fishman, Stratim says it terminated him on December 6, 2018. Zirx had previously raised more than $36.4 million from investors, like Bessemer Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and others. That funding rolled into Stratim’s operations. *This story has been updated to reflect a comment from Fishman’s lawyer. I’ve reached out to Stratim and will update this story if I hear back. |
‘The Mandalorian’ cast includes Pedro Pascal, Gina Carano … and Werner Herzog | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | Lucasfilm has released for the live-action Star Wars series that for the upcoming streaming service Disney+. Pedro Pascal, who had a brief-but-glorious run on “Game of Thrones” as Oberyn Martell, will star in the title role — Lucasfilm describes his character as “a lone Mandalorian gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy.” (In the Star Wars universe, the Mandalorians are a group of warriors that includes Jango and Boba Fett.) The cast also includes Gina Carano, Giancarlo Esposito, Nick Nolte and legendary director Werner Herzog. Sadly, it appears that Herzog will only be acting in the series, not directing any episodes. However, there will be some , including Dave Filoni (the creative force behind the recent Star Wars animated series), Bryce Dallas Howard and Taika Waititi. So far, “The Mandalorian” is looking like it will be the marquee title for Disney+ when it launches late next year — over the summer suggested that the series could cost $100 million for a 10-episode season. There will also be at least one other live-action Star Wars series about Cassian Andor (played by Diego Luna) from “Rogue One,” as well as a Marvel series with Tom Hiddleston returning to the role of Loki. |
Scoot unveils new lock to prevent scooter theft | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | During the first two weeks of Scoot’s operations of shared, electric scooters in San Francisco, more than 200 scooters were either stolen or damaged beyond repair, Scoot . As a temporary fix, Scoot attached cable locks to some of its scooters in San Francisco. Now, the company is unveiling its permanent solution. The solution still relies on a cable lock, but instead of using a padlock to unlock the scooter, you just use the Scoot app. These locks will be deployed sometime this month. “This will not prevent all theft and vandalism, but it will reduce the rate to one that is sustainable, both operationally and environmentally,” Keating wrote. “It will also have the benefit of keeping Kicks locked to street infrastructure out of the way of pedestrians. We wish we didn’t need this lock but the reality of operating in San Francisco and many other cities is that assets like shared EVs need to be secured so that they can be used.” These kick scooters are a valuable asset for Scoot. So far, people use these scooters more than any other type of Scoot vehicle. Scoot also offers mopeds and bikes in certain markets. |
Bowery, an indoor farming startup, raises $90 million more, including to counter a SoftBank-funded rival | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | When in July of last year, SoftBank’s Vision Fund led a whopping in the Silicon Valley startup , investors behind a competing indoor farming startup across the country, New York-based , were left reeling. Just one month earlier, they’d closed on a round that brought Bowery’s total funding to $31 million. As one of Bowery’s backers told us in the immediate aftermath of Plenty’s enormous round, SoftBank’s involvement “ .” Its involvement has not, however, prompted investors to give up. On the contrary, Bowery just today announced that it has raised $90 million in fresh funding led by GV, with participation from Temasek and Almanac Ventures; the company’s Series A investors, General Catalyst and GGV Capital; and numerous of its seed investors, including First Round Capital. It’s easy to understand investors’ unwavering interest in the company and the space, given the opportunity that Bowery, and Plenty, and , are chasing. As Bowery this morning, “traditional agriculture uses 700 million pounds of pesticides annually, and fresh food takes weeks” and sometimes longer to land on the dinner table. Along the way, terrible things sometimes happen, including E.coli outbreaks, like the kind recently linked to the sale of in the U.S. Meanwhile, Bowery, which is growing crops inside two warehouses in New Jersey, can promise people in New York that their bok choy didn’t travel far at all. Bowery also appears to be gaining the kind of momentum that VCs want to see. According to the company, it started life with five employees three years ago; today its staff has ballooned to 65 people. It has established a distribution partnership with Whole Foods. It has partnered with sweetgreen, the fast-food chain known for its farm-to-table salad bowls, and Dig Inn, a New York- and Boston-based chain of locally farm-sourced restaurants. Unsurprisingly, the company says it plans to partner with new retail, food service and restaurant partners in the new year, too. Bigger picture, Bowery says it plans to build a “global distributed network of farms” that are connected to each other through a kind of operating system, and that it has already begun work on the first of these outside the tri-state area. Whether it succeeds in that vision is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s hard to know how big an impact that Bowery, or Plenty (which plans to build in or near Chinese cities) or any of its many competitors will ultimately have. But given that we’ll need to feed two billion more people by 2050 without overwhelming the planet, it’s also easy to understand from a humanitarian standpoint why investors might be keen to write these companies big checks. In fact, the rest of us should probably be rooting them on, too. |
Changing consumer behavior is the key to unlocking billion-dollar businesses | Jonathan Golden | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | In the summer of 2012, I had just learned of a new service where a driver would pick you up in their own car, not a taxi or licensed town car. You’d be able to recognize the car by the pink mustache strapped to the front. I quickly downloaded the new app called and, intrigued, started to share it with others around the offices. Almost everyone gave me the same response: “I would never use it.” I asked why. “Well, I wouldn’t feel comfortable getting into someone else’s car.” I said, “Wait a minute, you are comfortable allowing others into your home and staying in others’ homes while you travel, but you don’t want to get into someone else’s car?” The reply was always a version of “Yeah, I guess that’s it — a car is different than a home.” I was dumbfounded. Here was a collection of adventurous individuals — who spent their days at Airbnb expanding the boundaries of what it means to trust another person — but they were stuck on the subtle behavior change of riding shotgun with a stranger. I then had another quick reaction: this product was going to be huge. Truly transformative consumer products require a behavior shift. Think back to the early days of the internet. Plenty of people said they would put their credit card credentials online. But they did, and that behavior shift allowed e-commerce to flourish, creating the likes of . Fast-forward to the era when Myspace, Facebook and other social networks were starting out. Again, individuals would commonly say they would put their real names or photos of themselves online. It required only one to two years before the shift took hold and the majority of the population created social media profiles. The next wave included sharing-economy companies like Airbnb, Lyft and Uber, prompting individuals to proclaim they would stay in someone else’s home or get into their car. In short order, times changed and those behaviors are now so commonplace, these companies are transforming how people travel and move about the world. The behavior shifts were a change in socially accepted norms and previously learned behavior. They alone don’t create stratospheric outcomes, but they do signal that there could be something special at play. Still, just because a product creates a behavior shift does not mean that it will be successful. Often, though a handful of loyal users may love them, there is ultimately no true advantage to these products or services. One prime example comes to mind in the product Blippy. In late 2009, the team built a product to live stream a user’s credit card transactions. It would show the purchase details to the public, pretty much anyone on the internet, unlocking a new data stream. It was super interesting and definitely behavior shifting. This was another case where many people were thinking, “Wow, I would never do that,” even as others were happily publishing their credit card data. Ultimately there was little consumer value created, which led Blippy to fold. The founders have since gone on to continually build interesting startups. In successful behavior-shifting products, the shift leads to a better product, unlocking new types of online interactions and sometimes offline activities in the real world. For instance, at Airbnb the behavior shift of staying in someone else’s home created a completely new experience that was 1) cheaper, 2) more authentic and 3) unique. Hotels could not compete, because their cost structure was different, their rooms were homogenized and the hotel experience was commonplace. The behavior shift enabled a new product experience. You can easily flip this statement, too: a better experience enabled the behavior shift. Overall, the benefits of the new product were far greater than the discomfort of adopting new behavior. Revolutionary products succeed when they deliver demonstrable value to their users. The fact that a product creates a behavior shift is clearly not enough. It must create enormous value to overcome the initial skepticism. When users get over this hurdle, though, they will be extremely bought in, commonly becoming evangelists for the product. One key benefit of a behavior-shifting product is that it commonly creates a new market where there is no viable competition. Even in cases where several innovative players crop up at the same time, they’re vying for market share in a far more favorable environment, not trying to unseat entrenched corporations. The opportunity then becomes enormous, as the innovators can capture the vast majority of the market. Other times, the market itself isn’t new, but the way the product or service operates in it is. Many behavior-shifting products were created in already enormous markets, but they shifted the definition of those markets. For instance, e-commerce is an extension of the regular goods market, which is in the trillions. Social media advertising is an extension of online advertising, which is in the hundreds of billions. Companies that innovated within those markets created new greenfield, but also continued to grow the existing market pie and take market share away from the incumbents. The innovators retrain the consumer to expect more, forcing the incumbents to respond to a new paradigm. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images) A behavior shift also allows the innovator to shape the future by creating a new product experience and pricing structure. When it comes to product experience, there are no prior mental constructs. This is a huge advantage to product development, as it allows teams to be as creative as possible. For instance, the addition of ratings in Uber’s and Lyft’s products changed the dynamic between driver and rider. Taxi drivers and passengers could be extremely rude to each other. Reviews have altered that experience and made rudeness an edge case, as there are ramifications to behaving badly. Taxis can’t compete with this seemingly small innovation because there is no mechanism to do so. They can’t enhance quality of interaction without taking the more manual approach of driver education. Another benefit to the innovator is that they can completely change the economics of the transaction, shaping the future of the market. Amazon dictated a new shopping experience with online purchasing, avoiding the costs of a brick-and-mortar location. They could undercut pricing across the board, focusing on scale instead of margin per product. This shifted the business model of the market, forcing others to respond to follow suit. In many cases, that shift ultimately eroded the competition’s existing economic structure, making it extremely challenging for them to participate in the new model. It can be difficult to imagine at the outset, but if your product is encouraging massive behavior shifts, you will undoubtedly encounter many unintended consequences along the way. It is easy to brush off a problem you did not directly and intentionally create. But as the social media companies are learning today, very few problems go away by ignoring them. It is up to you to address these challenges, even if they are an unintended byproduct. One of the most common unintended consequences nearly all behavior-shifting companies will run into is government regulation. Regulation is created to support the world as it is today. When you introduce a behavior shift into society, you will naturally be operating outside of previously created societal frameworks. The sharing-economy companies like Airbnb and Uber are prime examples. They push the boundaries of land-use regulation and employer-employee relationships and aggravate unions. I want to emphasize that you should not ignore such matters or think that their regulation is silly. Regulation serves a purpose. Startups must work with regulators to help define new policy structures, and governments must be open to innovation. It’s a two-way street, and everyone wins when we work together. My advice is to start by thinking about existing categories that represent people’s biggest or most frequent expenditures. The amount of money you spend on your home, transportation and clothes, for example, is enormous. Is there an opportunity to grow and capture part of these markets by upending old commercial models and effecting a behavior shift? Scooter networks are a real-time example of a behavior-shifting innovation that is just getting going. It has the same explosive opportunity of prior game-changing innovations. There are still many individuals who state that they will commute on a scooter. But applying this framework tells me that it is just a matter of time before it is more widely adopted as the technology keeps evolving and maturing. There is no magical formula for uncovering massive, behavior-shifting products. But if you come up with an innovative idea, and everyone initially tells you that they would use it, think a little harder to make sure they are right… |
Wellness giant Life Time targets co-working, shopping malls for next act | Gregg Schoenberg | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | by CEO Bahram Akradi, Minnesota-based Life Time used to be known as a premier health club that operated large gyms mainly in affluent suburbs in Midwestern and Southern states. Its success was memorialized in 2015 when two leading private equity firms, Leonard Green & Partners and TPG Capital, led a $4-billion deal to take the company private. But rather than retire or move on to new challenges, Akradi chose to remain in his leadership post and continue to build the Life Time brand. Just a few years later, , which has always been profitable — even in the depths of the Great Recession — is enjoying double-digit top-line growth, which should enable it to top $2 billion in revenues next year. With the median household income of its members topping $100,000 throughout its 139 clubs, Life Time has sought to build a central relationship with its discriminating clientele by adding extensive health, wellness, spa and sports offerings. For the company’s next act, Akradi plans to make a big leap into co-working and residential living, and he’s spending considerable time with shopping mall landlords as they look to replace struggling anchor stores with vibrant new tenants. A one-time immigrant who has overcome his fair share of adversity, Akradi understands that he will encounter formidable competitors as he adds new services that are not within the typical scope of a company with fitness roots. But Akradi doesn’t have time to dwell on his boundary-busting ways. Instead, he’d rather talk to you about his Four Seasons-esque vision for his company and his desire to serve a customer’s mind, body and soul at play, at work and at home. |
Senators aim to give internet companies doctor-like duties to protect our data | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | Consumers are increasingly entrusting online services with all kinds of personal data — but that trust has been repeatedly abused or taken for granted. If a doctor or a lawyer did that, they’d be kicked to the curb, because they have a legally defined duty to protect privileged data. Why don’t Facebook and Google? They might soon, via the . This bill, proposed today by Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) and co-sponsored by 14 more Democrats in the Senate, would essentially establish a set of consumer protection duties, defined and enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, preventing tech companies from knowingly doing harm to their users. It’s inspired by, though very different from, what is called a “fiduciary,” a concept that encompasses doctors and lawyers, among others, whom people really have no choice but to trust. When you go into the doctor’s office or meet with your lawyer, you don’t sign waivers saying which parts of the conversation can be used to target you for advertising or build a database for an AI paralegal. You just trust that the person you’re giving your personal information to won’t use it in a way that causes you any harm. Sure, doctors take an oath — but there are legal protections as well, and serious consequences for those who act in bad faith from a position of power over their clients or patients. Senator Schatz and his co-sponsors feel that a company like Facebook is now in a similar position, in which consent isn’t meaningful: the balance of power has tilted too far to the companies’ side. “It is not realistic in today’s digital world to suggest that people could simply forgo online services and websites if they object to the way their data is being used,” said co-sponsor Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) . “Online service providers should be required to act in the best interests of their customers, just like providers of other critical services.” “A lot of attention, appropriately, has been paid on the privacy front to transparency and control,” Sen. Schatz explained in a press call. “Those are important conversations but there’s been very little in the public policy setting — not enough conversation about what happens the data has been collected. And to me that ‘s a more important and consequential problem.” The idea has been brought up before, , whom Sen. Schatz has previously cited. His proposal, obviously now only in the earliest stages since it has only just been announced, is to establish some basic “duties” companies must make reasonable efforts to fulfill. As the release puts them: If those seem a little woolly, that’s on purpose (though they’re considerably more specific ). The bill isn’t meant to create the specifics of those duties, only the general shape of them, at the same time authorizing the FTC to figure out the details, creating and modifying rules as it sees fit. “From my observation and experience, the moment we’re too prescriptive in the statute about what’s allowed and not allowed, the general councils and chief software engineers will sit down and start to code around it,” he said. The solution is to “lay down broad principles and then empower the expert agency,” which is standard practice for regulating fast-moving industries. If the bill became law, the FTC would go through the normal rulemaking process, consulting experts, industry, and political authorities to figure out what constitutes, for example, “reasonable” security measures. Once those were in place, it would have the authority to enforce them as well. “One of the reasons I like using the FTC is they’re hard-nosed regulators that know what they’re doing and have not become a political lightning rod,” Sen. Schatz said. Notably the law does not actually call or classify these companies as fiduciaries, because “when we said fiduciary, every lawyer’s head exploded,” the Senator explained. One major difference between this and existing fiduciaries is that lawyers have bars and doctors have medical licenses, among other things — local expert authorities that examine and judge conduct. Obviously there’s no such thing for tech or internet companies. I asked the Senator about this; his feeling was that fractured authorities like those work in some ways but with tech and internet issues jurisdiction is much more naturally federal or interstate. It would be (and is) a mess trying to figure out whether to apply Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act to a person in an airport in Ohio using a VPN in New York to use a service hosted in Chicago. Better leave it to the feds. The political landscape this bill will have to navigate is not exactly a friendly one. Though he has the support of many Democrats in the Senate, he has no House collaborator or Republican co-sponsors, though he said that he has not encountered any “instinctive” opposition to his idea. Rather, the opposing party is more concerned with the growing power of states like California and Illinois to project on the rest of the country their local, highly progressive views on privacy and regulation. Even though California’s privacy bill technically only affects citizens of that state, companies will build national and international policy around it to avoid getting taken to court by litigious Californian billionaires. The idea of a federal internet privacy policy that could pre-empt California’s and others’ in case of conflict is attractive to many in D.C., and it’s likely, Schatz said, that his bill would end up as part of a bipartisan package along those lines. Not that he wants to pre-empt California’s rules, but that it may be a reasonable compromise in order to put consumer protection laws in place at a national level. The bill is co-sponsored by Michael Bennet (D-CO), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Patty Murray (D-WA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Ed Markey (D-MA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Doug Jones (D-AL), Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Dick Durbin (D-IL). .
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Farfetch bets on sneakers with $250M Stadium Goods acquisition | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | The lines between streetwear and luxury fashion have blurred in recent years, especially as excitement around sneaker brands like Yeezy and Off-White has soared. A marriage between a luxury fashion marketplace and a sneaker and streetwear reseller seems like a natural way to wrap up M&A in 2018. With that said, Farfetch has acquired New York-based , opting to pay $250 million for the sneaker startup in a combination of cash and Farfetch stock. Headquartered in London, Farfetch on the New York Stock Exchange in September, pricing its shares at $20 apiece and raising $885 million in the process. What’s more impressive is Stadium Goods’ journey to exit. The company, which sells new and products online and in a brick-and-mortar store in New York’s Soho neighborhood, was founded in 2015 by and Stadium Goods founders John McPheters (left) and Jed Stiller Farfetch boarded the sneaker and streetwear hype train a while ago when it incorporated brands like Nike’s Jordan, pairs of which sell for more than $1,000 on the site. The company doubled down on sneakers earlier this year when it began integrating Stadium Goods products. After noticing high-demand, Farfetch founder and CEO José Neves tells TechCrunch, they began acquisition talks with the startup. Stadium Goods will remain independent as part of the deal, with McPheters and Stiller staying on to lead the brand forward. The company’s portfolio of shoes and apparel will be fully available on Farfetch’s e-commerce platform in the coming months. Together, Farfetch and Stadium Goods will focus on international growth. McPheters tells TechCrunch Stadium Goods already had a significant international base of customers, but a partnership with Farfetch gives them the tools to go places they’ve never been. The global athletic footwear industry is expected to be worth $95 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, sneaker resale is a and growing, fueled by a cohort of startups making it easier than ever for sneakerheads to locate rare shoes online and have them delivered to their doorsteps. That includes Stadium Goods, Flight Club, GOAT and StockX. All four of these resellers, which ensure authentication of their products, are backed by VCs. earlier this year and together the pair raised a $60 million Series C. Before that, GOAT had brought in for its secondary market for collectible shoes from Accel, Upfront Ventures, Matrix Partners and more. StockX, for its part, has raised just over from Mark Wahlberg, Scooter Braun, Wale, Eminem, SV Angel and others. According to Crunchbase data, VCs have funneled more than $200 million into sneaker startups in the past two years. Now, given the size of Stadium Goods’ exit, investment in the space will likely pick up significantly as other VCs hope to land an exit multiple that substantial. Whether the reselling market will continue to expand is in question. Some have called it a poised to burst, it’s at its “height in popularity.” Why? Because corporate shoe brands like Nike and Adidas are keenly aware of the secondary market for their products and how they, too, can profit from it. If they decide to increase the supply of particular shoe models hot on the secondary market, they can radically disrupt the reseller economy. McPheters, however, says this doesn’t concern him. |
Oracle is suing the US government over $10B Pentagon JEDI cloud contract process | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | Oracle filed suit in federal court last week alleging yet again that with its single-vendor award is unfair and illegal. The complaint, which has been sealed at Oracle’s request, is available in the public record with redactions. If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same argument the company used when it filed a similar (GAO) last August. The last month stating, “…the Defense Department’s decision to pursue a single-award approach to obtain these cloud services is consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns, as the statute allows.” That hasn’t stopped Oracle from trying one more time, this time filing suit in the United States Court of Federal Claims this week, alleging pretty much the same thing it did with the GAO, that the process was unfair and violated federal procurement law. Oracle Senior Vice President Ken Glueck reiterated this point in a statement to TechCrunch. “The technology industry is innovating around next generation cloud at an unprecedented pace and JEDI as currently envisioned virtually assures DoD will be locked into legacy cloud for a decade or more. The single-award approach is contrary to well established procurement requirements and is out of sync with industry’s multi-cloud strategy, which promotes constant competition, fosters rapid innovation and lowers prices,” he said, echoing the language in the complaint. The JEDI contract process is about determining the cloud strategy for the Department of Defense for the next decade, but it’s important to point out that even though it is framed as a 10-year contract, it has been designed with several opt-out points for DOD with an initial two-year option, two three-year options and a final two-year option, leaving open the possibility it might never go the full 10 years. Oracle has complained for months that it believes the contract has been written to favor the industry leader, Amazon Web Services. Company co-CEO to the president in April, before the RFP process even started. in October, citing many of the same arguments. Oracle’s federal court complaint filing cites the IBM complaint and language from other bidders including, Google (which ) and Microsoft that supports their point that a multi-vendor solution would make more sense. The Department of Justice, which represents the U.S. government in the complaint, declined to comment. The DOD also indicated it wouldn’t comment on pending litigation, but in September spokesperson that the contract RFP was not written to favor any vendor in advance. “The JEDI Cloud final RFP reflects the unique and critical needs of DOD, employing the best practices of competitive pricing and security. No vendors have been pre-selected,” she said at the time. That hasn’t stopped Oracle from continually complaining about the process to whomever would listen. This time they have literally made a federal case out of it. The lawsuit is only the latest move by the company. It’s worth pointing out that the RFP process closed in October and a winner won’t be chosen until April. In other words, they appear to be assuming they will lose before the vendor selection process is even completed. |
Confirmed VPN wants to bring transparency to the VPN industry | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | The VPN industry sucks. Dozens of companies promise you the impossible dream of perfect privacy. But it’s simply a big lie. A company called wants to change that by holding VPN companies accountable. VPN companies let you establish an encrypted tunnel between your device and a server in a data center somewhere. While nobody can see what’s inside the tunnel, the VPN company can see on their servers. Many shady companies use that to analyze your browsing habits, sell them to advertisers, inject their own ads on non-secure pages or steal your identity. The worst of them can hand to authorities a ton of data about your online life. They lie in privacy policies and often don’t even have an About page with the names of people working for those companies. They spend a ton of money buying reviews and endorsements. Don’t trust any of them. In other words, VPN services don’t make you more secure on the internet. Install , install an ad blocker and change your DNS settings to or Cloudflare’s . Those are better steps to secure your connection. Now that I got that out of the way, Confirmed VPN is yet another VPN service that wants to try something new. The team behind it (Duet Display’s Rahul Dewan and former iCloud engineer Johnny Lin) has open-sourced the code of its clients and server-side components. It then automatically deploys new commits on Amazon Web Services. The company uses AWS CloudWatch to monitor unusual activity on the server to prove that they’re not downloading logs or anything like that. Security experts can also log into AWS using read-only credentials. Confirmed VPN has also two security audits and has a bug bounty program. I’m not a security expert, so I can’t endorse or recommend Confirmed VPN — remember, I still think you shouldn’t use a VPN service. But this transparent approach is interesting by itself. Now let’s see how competitors react. |
Fortnite developer Epic Games to release SDK for cross-platform profiles | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | Epic Games for a new developer framework for online services. This framework will let other game developers add cross-platform support into their games. The SDK will be free and roll out in multiple parts over 2019. Fortnite has been one of the best examples of cross-platform gameplay. A single player can install Fortnite on a console, a PC and a phone and find their profile on all platforms. Many games support multiplayer matches between players on multiple platforms, but very few games “port” your profile from one platform to another. That’s why Epic Games wants to make that easier. The SDK will work with all game engines (not just Unreal Engine) and support many identification methods (Facebook, Google, Xbox Live, PSN, Nintendo accounts and Epic accounts). After you sign up, you can customize your profile, add friends and win items. Everything you do on one platform shows up on another. User data is stored in the cloud and you can track achievements across platforms. And, of course, you can create parties with players on different platforms and start playing together. Epic has also developed its own voice communications service. This is an intriguing move. It sounds like Epic wants to control your video game identity. The company could also potentially get a lot of insight on user habits even if they’re playing non-Epic games. Maybe Rocket League was waiting for this SDK to roll out cross-platform IDs… |
Netflix is testing a new feature that lets you instantly replay scenes (for some reason) | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | Netflix loves to test new ideas, and its latest experiment is an odd new feature that lets viewers watch a scene again. A selection of Netflix subscribers noticed the new addition, which serves a pop-up asking if they want to “watch this scene again” after certain “highlight” scenes in a show. , adding: We’re trying out a feature which gives Netflix members the ability to rewatch favorite scenes and memorable moments with the click of a button. Right now we’re just looking to learn from it and may or may not roll it out more broadly in the future. I can’t say I’ve ever had the urge to watch a scene again — and I spend a considerable amount of time on Netflix, often with kids — so this is a pretty curious test. As you might imagine, early users haven’t been too impressed either. to bemoan how it “devalued” the film they were watching. That person was watching “Dumplin,” but even still it isn’t hard to imagine how frustrating multiple popups would be. Other Netflix tests from the past have included , and . On the business side, it has experimented with and also to make its service more affordable in emerging markets. But experimentation and thinking differently is often a key part of what makes a business successful, and Netflix certainly knows a lot about the latter. The company just broke new records on consumer spending in its mobile apps during November, . It is said to have grossed $86.6 million during the month, a whopping 77 percent annual rise, with increasing revenue coming to Netflix from its international markets. |
A former Ofo exec is launching his own scooter startup | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | The funding extravaganza may be approaching its end for scooter “unicorns” Lime and Bird, but smaller startups in the micro-mobility space have continued to close venture capital rounds at a consistent pace. See , and for examples. The latest is , a European scooter startup founded by Maxim Romain, Ofo’s former head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Romain joined Ofo, a Chinese bike- and scooter-sharing company that in venture capital funding but has struggled to scale overseas, in 2018 to help it expand. He only lasted seven months before realizing he could do it better himself. Dott, headquartered in Amsterdam, has raised €20 million in a round co-led by EQT Ventures and Naspers. Axel Springer Digital Ventures, DN Capital, Felix Capital and others also joined. Dott is using the capital to launch in several cities across Europe, beginning with an early 2019 e-scooter pilot at Station F, a startup campus located in Paris. Additional launches are in the pipeline, as are electric bikes. As a result of its learnings from Ofo, Bird and Lime, all of which have struggled to keep their equipment out of disadvantageous spots, like , and , Dott says it’s built sturdier scooters. They have 10” wheels, wider decks, a double brake system for safety, a speed cap at 20km/h and apparently are able to hold a charge longer than competing scooters — though we couldn’t independently verify this. Dott says it’s taking a friendlier approach to launching in new cities, again, unlike some of its predecessors. If you remember, Bird showed up in a number of cities — a move that resulted in it being to operate in San Francisco. Dott will hire local teams to collaborate with city officials to develop pilot plans tailored to each market and it won’t rely on gig economy workers to recharge, clean and maintain scooters. Instead, it will hire and train a team of Dott employees dedicated to maintenance in each city. |
IMAX pulls the plug on its dream of VR arcades | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | The company behind the biggest screens in cinema is giving up on bringing VR screens within a few inches of users’ faces. The company announced today in an SEC filing that it will be shutting down its three remaining virtual reality centers, including its flagship location in Los Angeles. Via the : In connection with the Company’s previously-announced strategic review of its virtual reality pilot initiative, the Company has decided to close its remaining VR locations and write-off certain VR content investments. The locations in LA, Bangkok and Toronto will be shuttered in Q1 of 2019 according to . After making a lot of noise about the centers at launch, the company seemed to realize pretty quickly that the economics just weren’t there. Previous to today’s announcement, IMAX had already shut down 4 of the 7 VR centers that had been opened. A lot of virtual reality startups that were counting on the pipe dream resurgence of the American arcade scene are probably sweating a bit after today’s news. It was clear that IMAX’s efforts hadn’t been a raving success, but there’s a big difference between dialing it back and shutting it down. Earlier this year, IMAX that it had paused work on a VR camera project it was developing with Google. |
LemonBox, which brings US vitamins to Chinese consumers, raises $2M | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | , a Chinese e-commerce startup that imports vitamins and health products from the U.S., has raised $2 million to develop its business. in the U.S. and, fueled by the demo day, has pulled in the new capital from 10 investors, which include Partech, Tekton Ventures, Cathexis Ventures, Scrum Ventures and 122 West Ventures. LemonBox started when co-founder and CEO Derek Weng, a former employee at Walmart in the U.S., saw an opportunity to organize the common practice of bringing health products back in China. Any Mainland Chinese person who has lived in, or even just visited, the U.S. will be familiar with such requests from family and friends, and LemonBox aims to make it possible for anyone in China to get U.S.-quality products without relying on a mule. The service is primarily a WeChat app — which taps into China’s ubiquitous messaging platform — and a website, although Weng told TechCrunch in an interview this week that the company is contemplating a standalone app of its own. The benefit of that, beyond a potentially more engaging customer experience, could be to broaden LemonBox’s product selection and use data to offer a more customized selection of products. Related to that, LemonBox said it hopes to work with health and fitness-related services in the future to gather data, with permission, to help refine the personal approach. LemonBox’s team has now grown to 20 people, with 12 full-time staff and 8 interns, and Weng said that the new funding will also go toward increased marketing, improvements to the WeChat app and upgrading the company’s supply chain. Business, he added, is growing at 35 percent per week as LemonBox has adopted a personal approach to its packaging, . “This is the first time people in China have ever seen this level of customization for their vitamins,” Weng told TechCrunch. Members of the LemonBox team with Qi Lu, who heads up Y Combinator’s China business Qi Lu, the former Microsoft and Baidu executive , said he is “bullish” about the business. “What LemonBox offers resonates with me and is serving a clear China market needs. Personally, I travel a lot between China and the U.S., and I often was asked by my relatives to help purchase and carry them similar products like vitamins,” he said in a prepared statement. “More importantly, what LemonBox can do is to build an initial core user base and a growing brand. Over time, by serving their users well, it can reach and engage more users who want to better take care of their broader nutrition needs, use more data and take advantage of increasingly stronger AI technologies to customers and personalize, and become an essential service for more and more users and customers in China,” Lu added. |
These face-generating systems are getting rather too creepily good for my liking | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | Machine learning models are getting quite good at generating realistic human faces — so good that I may never trust a machine, or human, to be real ever again. The new approach, from researchers at Nvidia, leapfrogs others by separating levels of detail in the faces and allowing them to be tweaked separately. The results are eerily realistic. (PDF), describes a new architecture for generating and blending images, particularly human faces, that “leads to better interpolation properties, and also better disentangles the latent factors of variation.” What that means, basically, is that the system is more aware of meaningful variation between images, and at a variety of scales to boot. might, for example, produce two “distinct” faces that were mostly the same except the ears of one are erased and the shirt is a different color. That’s not really distinctiveness — but the system doesn’t know that those are not important pieces of the image to focus on. It’s inspired by what’s called style transfer, in which the important stylistic aspects of, say, a painting, are extracted and applied to the creation of another image, which (if all goes well) ends up having a similar look. In this case, the “style” isn’t so much the brush strokes or color space, but the composition of the image (centered, looking left or right, etc.) and the physical characteristics of the face (skin tone, freckles, hair). These features can have different scales, as well — at the fine side, it’s things like individual facial features; in the middle, it’s the general composition of the shot; at the largest scale, it’s things like overall coloration. Allowing the system to adjust all of them changes the whole image, while only adjusting a few might just change the color of someone’s hair, or just the presence of freckles or facial hair. In the image at the top, notice how completely the faces change, yet obvious markers of both the “source” and “style” are obviously present, for instance the blue shirts in the bottom row. In other cases things are made up out of whole cloth, like the kimono the kid in the very center seems to be wearing. Where’d that come from? Note that all this is totally variable, not just a A + B = C, but with all aspects of A and B present or absent depending on how the settings are tweaked. None of these are real people. But I wouldn’t look twice at most of these images if they were someone’s profile picture or the like. It’s kind of scary to think that we now have basically a face generator that can spit out perfectly normal looking humans all day long. Here are a few dozen: It’s not perfect, but it works. And not just for people. Cars, cats, landscapes — all this stuff more or less fits the same paradigm of small, medium and large features that can be isolated and reproduced individually. An infinite cat generator sounds like a lot more fun to me, personally. The researchers also have published a new data set of face data: 70,000 images of faces collected (with permission) from Flickr, aligned and cropped. They used Mechanical Turk to weed out statues, paintings and other outliers. Given the standard data set used by these types of projects is mostly red carpet photos of celebrities, this should provide a much more variable set of faces to work with. The data set will be . |
Anki’s Vector is getting Alexa access next week | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | null |
VCs back wholesale marketplace Faire with $100M at a $535M valuation | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | A slew of venture capitalists known for high-profile exits — Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures, Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital and Alex Taussig of Lightspeed Venture Partners — have invested in (formerly known as Indigo Fair), a wholesale marketplace for artisanal products. A quick glance at Faire suggests it’s a combination of Pinterest and Etsy, complete with trendy, pastel stationery, soap, baby products and more, all made by independent artisans and sold to retailers. Faire has today announced a $100 million fundraise across two financing rounds: a $40 million Series B led by Taussig at Lightspeed and a $60 million Series C led by Y Combinator’s Continuity fund. New investors Founders Fund, the venture firm founded by Peter Thiel, and DST Global also participated. The business has previously brought in a total of $16 million. The latest financing values Faire at $535 million, according to a source familiar with the deal. If you’re feeling a little bit of déjà vu, that’s because a similar startup also raised a sizeable round of venture capital funding, announced today. That’s Minted. The 10-year-old company, best known for its wide assortment of wedding invitations and stationery, raised led by with participation from T. Rowe Price. Though Minted is first and foremost a consumer-facing marketplace, it plans to double down on its wholesale business with its latest infusion of capital, setting it up to be among Faire’s biggest competitors. Like Minted, Faire leverages artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to forecast which products will fly off its virtual shelves in order to to source and manage inventory as efficiently as possible. The approach appears to be working; Faire says it has 15,000 retailers actively purchasing from its platform — a 3,140 percent year-over-year increase. It’s garnered $100 million in run rate sales and has expanded its community of artists 445 percent YoY, to 2,000. The company, headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Ontario and Waterloo, was founded by three former Square employees: chief executive officer Max Rhodes, who was product manager on a variety of strategic initiatives, including Square Capital and Square Cash; chief data officer Daniele Perito, who led risk and security for Square Cash; and chief technology officer Marcelo Cortes, a former engineering lead for Square Cash. “Our mission at Faire is to empower entrepreneurs to chase their dreams,” Rhodes wrote in a this morning. “We believe entrepreneurship is a calling. Starting a business provides a level of autonomy and fulfillment that’s become difficult to find for many elsewhere in the economy. With this in mind, we built Faire to help entrepreneurs on both sides of our marketplace succeed.” |
Online ads and games would benefit from more rewards, according to UCLA survey | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | A new study from and the MEMES (Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports) Center at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management examines how gaming and advertising are evolving, and how one influences the other. As Versus Systems CEO Matthew Pierce put it, the goal was to study, “What is the impact on advertising as interactive media grows, and as more people consume interactive media?” The individual findings — People like rewards! Not everyone who plays games calls themselves a gamer! — may not be that shocking to TechCrunch readers. And because Versus Systems has built a white-label platform for publishers to offer in-game rewards, the study might also seem a bit self-serving. But again, this was conducted with UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and both Pierce (who’s a lecturer at the school) and UCLA MEMES head Jay Tucker pointed to the size of the study, with 88,000 (U.S.-based) participants across a broad range of demographic groups. Of those respondents, 50 percent said they’ve played a video game (on any platform) in the past week, while 41 percent said they’ve played a game in the past 24 hours. However, only 13 percent of respondents described themselves as gamers. That “identification gap” is even larger among women, where 56 percent played a game in the past week but only 11 percent identified themselves as gamers. Why does that matter? Well, the MEMES Center and Versus Systems argue in the study press release that “advertisers that are recognizing the value in advertising in-game may be underestimating how large and how diverse the gaming audience really is today.” The study also suggests that traditional advertising may be facing more resistance from consumers, with 46 percent of respondents saying they frequently or always avoid ads by “clicking the X” to close windows or changing channels or closing apps. Only 3.6 percent of respondents said they always watch ads all the way through. When asked what would make them play games more, the most popular answer was “winning real things that I want when I achieve things in-game” — it was the number one result for 30 percent of respondents, and among millennials, it did even better. (In comparison, 18 percent put “if the games were less expensive” as their top answer and 11 percent said “my friends playing the same game(s).”) This attitude even extended to TV, where 77 percent of respondents listed rewards as one of the things (not necessarily the top reason) that would make them watch more television. Meanwhile, 24 percent of respondents listed “if more games/more shows were made for people like me” as the number one thing that would convince them to play or watch more. Tucker suggested that these seemingly scattershot answers are actually connected. On the advertising side, “We’ve got folks who are used to being part of a community all day, every day, whether that’s social media or massively multiplayer games. We see users are increasingly connected and are not really interested in getting pulled out of an experience. Rewards, if done properly, can reinforce being part of a community … you can amplify that sense of connection.” “The introduction of choice seems to make a big difference,” Pierce added. “We need new models where we can foster choice, foster community, foster more aspirational relationships between viewers and brands that ultimately allows content developers to have a relationship with the brands that isn’t so adversarial.” Meanwhile, when it comes to content and storytelling, Tucker said we’re entering an “age of personalization.” Among other things, that means more diversity, in what he described as “a generational shift away from stories that assume everybody’s looking at life from the same perspective.” Pierce and Tucker suggested that they’ll be taking an even closer look at the data in the coming months (“needs further study” was repeated several times during the interview), particularly by examining responses within smaller demographic groups. |
Tumblr’s back in the App Store following porn ban announcement | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | I just went through the 12 most recent pages of my Tumblr archive and these were the only three photos flagged. Two photos of me fully clothed and a picture of my vase ¯_(ツ)_/¯ — Erika Moen (@ErikaMoen) |
Powering customer journeys in the age of AI | Anirudh Pandit | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | Technology has been the cornerstone of economic growth around the world for hundreds of years. It has underpinned the last three industrial revolutions and is now the driving factor in today’s Fourth Industrial Revolution — marked by emerging technologies in a variety of fields. Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence is one of the key technologies driving this new revolution. As described in the 1950s by the father of modern computer science, Alan Turing, “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience.” His paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” is the earliest description of neural networks and how computer intelligence should be measured. While the concept of AI isn’t new, we’re only on the cusp of seeing AI drive real business value in the enterprise. Businesses today are trying to augment and improve their customer, partner and employee experiences by leveraging AI. However, what many have yet to realize is that AI is only as good as the APIs that support it. For example, we’re seeing the rise of conversational commerce, where consumers can interact with businesses and their services via digital voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri. Two very important things occur here. First, the voice assistant uses AI and machine learning technology — or algorithms that are trained using massive amounts of existing data — to understand voice commands. Second, the voice assistant acts on those commands by calling back-end services with APIs that do the actionable work. This can include getting product information from a database or placing an order with the order management system. APIs truly bring AI to life and, without them, the value of AI models cannot be unlocked for the enterprise. Many businesses are beginning to deploy AI-based systems. , 21 percent said they are already piloting AI initiatives or have short-term plans for them. Another 25 percent said they have medium- or long-term plans. However, many businesses are adopting AI as a point solution to help customers with queries via a chatbot or with making recommendations via an AI and machine learning-based platform. These point solutions don’t have the ability to influence the entire customer journey. The customer journey in today’s digital world is complex, with interactions spanning many different applications, data sources and devices. It is very hard for businesses to unlock and integrate data across all the application silos in their enterprise (e.g. ERP, CRM, mainframes, databases) to create a 360-degree view of the customer. So, how do businesses go about unlocking these information systems to make AI a reality? The answer is an API strategy. With the ability to securely share data across systems regardless of format or source, APIs become the nervous system of the enterprise. As a result of making appropriate API calls, applications that interact with AI models can now take actionable steps, based on the insights provided by the AI system — or the brain. The key to building a successful AI-based platform is to invest in delivering consistent APIs that are easily discoverable and consumable by developers across the organization. Fortunately, with the emergence of , software developers don’t have to break a sweat to create everything from scratch. Instead, they can discover and reuse the work done by others internally and externally to accelerate development work. Additionally, APIs help train the AI system by enabling access to the right information. APIs also provide the ability for AI systems to act across the entire customer journey by enabling a communication channel — the nervous system — with the broader application landscape. By calling appropriate APIs, developers can act on insights provided by the AI system. For example, Alexa or Siri cannot place an order for a customer directly in the back-end ERP system without a bridge. An API can serve as that bridge, as well as be reused for other application interactions to that ERP system down the road. At their core, APIs are developed to play a specific role — unlocking data from legacy systems, composing data into processes or delivering an experience. By unlocking data that exists in siloed systems, businesses end up democratizing the availability of data across the enterprise. Developers can then choose information sources to train the AI models and connect the AI systems into the enterprise’s broader application network to take action. As AI systems and APIs get leveraged together to build adaptive and actionable platforms, the customer journey changes dramatically. Consider this scenario: A bank offers a mobile app that targets customers looking to buy or sell a home. In the app, customers can simply point at the property they are interested in and immediately rich data comes together via APIs to provide historical information on property sales, nearby listings and market trends. Customers can then interact with an AI-powered digital assistant on the app to start the loan application process, including getting lender approval and mortgage rates. All the data captured from the mobile app can then feed the mortgage origination process to reduce errors and provide a fast and superior experience to the customer. Businesses haven’t truly realized the full potential of AI systems at a strategic level, where they are building adaptive platforms that truly create differentiated value for their customers. Most organizations are leveraging AI to analyze large volumes of data and generate insights on customer engagement, though it’s not strategic enough. Strategic value can be realized when these AI systems are plugged into the enterprise’s wider application network to drive personalized, 1:1 customer journeys. With an API strategy in place, businesses can start to realize the full potential AI has to offer. |
Scammers are sending bomb scares to nab BTC | John Biggs | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | A new scam is making the rounds that promises to disrupt countless offices and schools. The scam is simple: the scammers send an email threatening to detonate a bomb if they don’t get a certain amount of Bitcoin within a specified time frame. Because there is little upside to ignoring a bomb threat at this point in history, entire offices are now being evacuated as this scam spreads. The scammers usually send something like : My man carried a bomb (Hexogen) into the building where your company is located. It is constructed under my direction. It can be hidden anywhere because of its small size, it is not able to damage the supporting building structure, but in the case of its detonation you will get many victims. My mercenary keeps the building under the control. If he notices any unusual behavior or emergency he will blow up the bomb. I can withdraw my mercenary if you pay. You pay me 20.000 $ in Bitcoin and the bomb will not explode, but don’t try to cheat -I warrant you that I will withdraw my mercenary only after 3 confirmations in blockchain network. Here is my Bitcoin address : 1GHKDgQX7hqTM7mMmiiUvgihGMHtvNJqTv You have to solve problems with the transfer by the end of the workday. If you are late with the money explosive will explode. This is just a business, if you don’t send me the money and the explosive device detonates, other commercial enterprises will transfer me more money, because this isnt a one-time action. I wont visit this email. I check my Bitcoin wallet every 35 min and after seeing the money I will order my recruited person to get away. If the explosive device explodes and the authorities notice this letter:
We are not terrorists and dont assume any responsibility for explosions in other buildings. This and the address changes with each email. The NYPD reacted to these threats and noted that they are not credible. Please be advised – there is an email being circulated containing a bomb threat asking for bitcoin payment. While this email has been sent to numerous locations, searches have been conducted and NO DEVICES have been found. — NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) At this time, it appears that these threats are meant to cause disruption and/or obtain money. We’ll respond to each call regarding these emails to conduct a search but we wanted to share this information so the credibility of these threats can be assessed as likely NOT CREDIBLE. — NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) The FBI wasn’t so certain and recommend vigilance. FBI: “We are aware of the recent bomb threats made in cities around the country … As always, we encourage the public to remain vigilant and to promptly report suspicious activities which could represent a threat to public safety.” — NBC News (@NBCNews) Ultimately scams like this one do more harm than good and are rarely credible. While nothing is impossible, please take a moment before panicking if you receive one of these emails. |
US intelligence community says quantum computing and AI pose an ’emerging threat’ to national security | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | It’s not often you can put nuclear weapons, terrorism and climate change on the same list as quantum computing, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, but the U.S. government believes all pose an “emerging threat” to its national security. Several key agencies in the U.S. intelligence community were asked what they saw faced by the country in the next decade and beyond, and the future of “dual-use technologies” took center stage. Agnostic technologies like encryption, autonomous and unmanned systems, AI and quantum computing rank at the top of the agencies’ “worry list” for fears that they could be used to cause harm, rather than advance society. While all can be used for good — to secure data, to survey a dangerous area or simply to save time and effort — the government says that all can have disastrous effects if used by an adversary. For example, the government says that, “adversaries could gain increased access to AI through affordable designs used in the commercial industry, and could apply AI to areas such as weapons and technology,” and that “quantum communications could enable adversaries to develop secure communications that U.S. personnel would not be able to intercept or decrypt.” The list of emerging threats also includes information operations — such as those purportedly in the run up to recent elections — may engage in “advanced information operations campaigns that use social media, artificial intelligence, and data analytics to undermine the United States and its allies.” A list of “dual-use” technological threats faced by the U.S. (Image: Government Accountability Office) It’s no surprise that the government fears the unknown: warfare in this day and age has adapted beyond recognition, with nation states targeting one another with and disinformation campaigns, sowing seeds of doubt rather than lobbing bombs over borders. “As such, the nature of warfare has evolved to include ‘gray zone’ conflict — defined as the area between war and peace — where weaker adversaries have learned how to seize territory and advance their agendas in ways not recognized as ‘war’ by Western democracies,” the government watchdog wrote. Notably, the U.S. pointed its finger specifically at China and Russia — with Iran a close third — for “pursuing gray zone strategies to achieve their objectives without resorting to military conflict.” And the U.S. knows it has to keep up with the range of threats, or face weakening on the world stage. “The challenge for the United States and its allies will be to develop responses faster than adversaries through a better understanding of the strategic environment,” the government said. That might be tougher than it seems, given that senior government officials said the U.S. has been “strategically surprised” by how fast the threats have evolved. “The nature of conflict has changed, and so the United States must evolve,” the government said. |
Google Maps now shows nearby Lime bikes and scooters in 13 cities | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | Google has partnered with Lime to show nearby bikes and scooters in 13 cities worldwide. If there’s a Lime vehicle available nearby, Google Maps will show you how long it will take to get to the vehicle, the estimated price of the ride and total journey time. Similar to the Uber integration in Google Maps, tapping on Lime will open the Lime app. If you don’t have it installed, you’ll be directed to the Apple App or Google Play store. This is now live in Auckland, New Zealand, Austin, Texas, Baltimore, Md., Brisbane, Australia, Dallas, Texas, Indianapolis, Ind., Los Angeles, Calif., San Diego, Calif., Oakland, Calif., San Jose, Calif., San Antonio, Texas, Scottsdale, Ariz. and Seattle, Wash. Google says additional cities are in the works. In September, Lime hit 11.5 million bike and scooter rides after just 14 months in operation. Lime has raised $467 million in funding to date, with its most recent round coming in at . |
The annual PornHub year in review tells us what we’re really looking at online | John Biggs | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | PornHub, a popular site that features people in various stages of undress, saw 33.5 billion visits in 2018. There are currently 7.53 billion people on Earth. Y’all have been busy. The company, which owns most of the major porn sites online, user behavior on the site. Of particular interest, aside from the fact that all of us are horndogs, is that the U.S., Germany and India are in the top spots for porn browsing and that the company transferred 4,000 petabytes of data, or about 500 MB, per person on the planet. [gallery ids="1758849,1758848,1758846,1758495"] We ignore this data at our peril. While it doesn’t seem important at first glance, the fact that these porn sites are doing more traffic than most major news organizations is deeply telling. Further, like the meme worlds of Twitter and Facebook, Stormy Daniels and Fortnite made the top searches, which points to the spread of politics and culture into the heart of our desires. TV manufacturers should note that 4K searchers are rising in popularity, which suggests that consumer electronics manufacturers should start getting read for a shift (although it should be noted that there is sadly little free 4K content on these sites, a discovery I just made while researching this brief.) Need more frightening/enlightening data? Here you go. Just as ‘1080p’ searches had been a defining term in 2017, now ‘4k’ ultra-hd has seen a significant increase in popularity through-out 2018. The popularity of ‘Romantic’ videos more than doubled, and remained twice as popular with female visitors when compared to men. Searches referring to the dating app ‘Tinder’ grew by 161% among women, 113% among men and 131% by visitors aged 35 to 44. It was also a top trending term in many countries including the United Kingdom and Australia. The number of Tinder themed fantasy date videos on the site is now more than 3500. Life imitates art, and eventually porn imitates everything, so perhaps it’s no surprise to see that ‘Bowsette’ also made our list of searches that defined 2018. After the original Nintendo fan-art went viral, searches for Bowsette exceeded 3 million in just one week and resulted in the release of a live-action Bowsette themed porn parody (NSFW) with more than 720,000 views. Bowsette. Good. Moving on. The Bible Belt represented well in the showings, with Mississippi, South Carolina and Arkansas spending the most time looking at porn. Kansas spent the least. Phones got the most use as porn distribution devices and iOS and Android nearly tied in terms of platform popularity. Windows traffic fell considerably this year, while Chrome OS became decidedly more popular in 2018. Chrome was popular when it came to browsers used, while the PlayStation was the biggest deliverer of flicks to the console user. Porn is a the canary in the tech coal mine, and where it goes the rest of tech follows. All of these data points, taken together, paint a fascinating picture of a world on the cusp of a fairly unique shift from desktop to mobile and from HD to 4K video. Further, given that these sites are delivering so much data on a daily basis, it’s clear that all of us are sneaking a peek now and again… even if we refuse to admit it. |
This early GDPR adtech strike puts the spotlight on consent | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | as a valid legal basis for processing personal data look like under Europe’s updated privacy rules? It may sound like an abstract concern but for online services that rely on things being done with user data in order to monetize free-to-access content this is a key question now the region’s is firmly fixed in place. The GDPR is actually clear about consent. But if you haven’t bothered to read the text of the regulation, and instead just go and look at some of the self-styled consent management platforms (CMPs) floating around the web since May 25, you’d probably have trouble guessing it. Confusing and/or incomplete consent flows aren’t yet extinct, sadly. But it’s fair to say those that don’t offer full opt-in choice are on borrowed time. Because That means you can’t bundle multiple uses for personal data under a single opt-in. Nor can you obfuscate consent behind opaque wording that doesn’t actually specify the thing you’re going to do with the data. You also have to offer users the choice not to consent. So you cannot pre-tick all the consent boxes that you really wish your users would freely choose — because you have to actually let them do that. It’s not rocket science but the pushback from certain quarters of the adtech industry has been as awfully predictable as it’s horribly frustrating. This has not gone unnoticed by consumers either. Europe’s Internet users have been filing . And a lot of what is being as ‘GDPR compliant’ right now likely is not. So, some six months in, we’re essentially in a holding pattern waiting for the regulatory hammers to come down. But if you look closely there are some early enforcement actions that show some consent fog is starting to shift. Yes, we’re still waiting on the outcomes of major consent-related complaints against tech giants. (And stockpile popcorn to watch that space for sure.) But late last month French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, the closure of a formal warning it issued this summer against drive-to-store adtech firm, Fidzup — saying it was satisfied it was now GDPR compliant. Such a regulatory stamp of approval is obviously rare this early in the new legal regime. So while Fidzup is no adtech giant its experience still makes an interesting case study — showing how the consent line was being crossed; how, working with CNIL, it was able to fix that; and what being on the right side of the law means for a (relatively) small-scale adtech business that relies on consent to enable a location-based mobile marketing business. Fidzup’s service works like this: It installs kit inside (or on) partner retailers’ physical stores to detect the presence of user-specific smartphones. At the same time it provides an SDK to mobile developers to track app users’ locations, collecting and sharing the advertising ID and wi-fi ID of users’ smartphone (which, along with location, are judged personal data under GDPR.) Those two elements — detectors in physical stores; and a personal data-gathering SDK in mobile apps — come together to power Fidzup’s retail-focused, location-based ad service which pushes ads to mobile users when they’re near a partner store. The system also enables it to track ad-to-store conversions for its retail partners. The problem Fidzup had, back in July, was that after an audit of its business the CNIL deemed it did not have proper consent to process users’ geolocation data to target them with ads. Fidzup says it had thought its business was GDPR compliant because it took the view that app publishers were the data processors gathering consent on its behalf; the CNIL warning was a wake up call that this interpretation was incorrect — and that it was responsible for the data processing and so also for collecting consents. The regulator found that when a smartphone user installed an app containing Fidzup’s SDK they were not informed that their location and mobile device ID data would be used for ad targeting, nor the partners Fidzup was sharing their data with. CNIL also said users should have been clearly informed data was collected — so they could choose to consent — instead of information being given via general app conditions (or in store posters), as was the case, after the fact of the processing. It also found users had no choice to download the apps without also getting Fidzup’s SDK, with use of such an app automatically resulting in data transmission to partners. Fidzup’s approach to consent had also only been asking users to consent to the processing of their geolocation data for the specific app they had downloaded — not for the targeted ad purposes with retail partners which is the substance of the firm’s business. So there was a string of issues. And when Fidzup was hit with the warning the stakes were high, even with no monetary penalty attached. Because unless it could fix the core consent problem, the 2014-founded startup might have faced going out of business. Or having to change its line of business entirely. Instead it decided to try and fix the consent problem by building a GDPR-compliant CMP — spending around five months liaising with the regulator, and finally getting a green light late last month. A core piece of the challenge, as co-founder and CEO Olivier Magnan-Saurin tells it, was how to handle multiple partners in this CMP because its business entails passing data along the chain of partners — each new use and partner requiring opt-in consent. “The first challenge was to design a window and a banner for multiple data buyers,” he tells TechCrunch. “So that’s what we did. The challenge was to have something okay for the CNIL and GDPR in terms of wording, UX etc. And, at the same time, some things that the publisher will allow to and will accept to implement in his source code to display to his users because he doesn’t want to scare them or to lose too much. “Because they get money from the data that we buy from them. So they wanted to get the maximum money that they can, because it’s very difficult for them to live without the data revenue. So the challenge was to reconcile the need from the CNIL and the GDPR and from the publishers to get something acceptable for everyone.” As a quick related aside, it’s worth noting that Fidzup does not work with the thousands of partners an ad exchange or demand-side platform most likely would be. Magnan-Saurin tells us its CMP lists 460 partners. So while that’s still a lengthy list to have to put in front of consumers — it’s not, for example, the 32,000 partners of another French adtech firm, Vectaury, which has also recently been on the receiving end of an invalid consent ruling from the CNIL. In turn, that suggests the ‘Fidzup fix’, if we can call it that, only scales so far; adtech firms that are routinely passing millions of people’s data around thousands of partners look to have much more existential problems under GDPR — as we’ve re: the Vectaury decision. Returning to Fidzup, its fix essentially boils down to actually offering people a choice over each and every data processing purpose, unless it’s strictly necessary for delivering the core app service the consumer was intending to use. Which also means giving app users the ability to opt out of ads entirely — and not be penalized by not being able to use the app features itself. In short, you can’t bundle consent. So Fidzup’s CMP unbundles all the data purposes and partners to offer users the option to consent or not. “You can unselect or select each purpose,” says Magnan-Saurin of the now compliant CMP. “And if you want only to send data for, I don’t know, personalized ads but you don’t want to send the data to analyze if you go to a store or not, you can. You can unselect or select each consent. You can also see all the buyers who buy the data. So you can say okay I’m okay to send the data to every buyer but I can also select only a few or none of them.” “What the CNIL ask is very complicated to read, I think, for the final user,” he continues. “Yes it’s very precise and you can choose everything etc. But it’s very complete and you have to spend some time to read everything. So we were [hoping] for something much shorter… but now okay we have something between the initial asking for the CNIL — which was like a big book — and our consent collection before the warning which was too short with not the right information. But still it’s quite long to read.” Fidzup’s CNIL approved GDPR-compliant consent management platform “Of course, as a user, I can refuse everything. Say no, I don’t want my data to be collected, I don’t want to send my data. And I have to be able, as a user, to use the app in the same way as if I accept or refuse the data collection,” he adds. He says the CNIL was very clear on the latter point — telling it they could not require collection of geolocation data for ad targeting for usage of the app. “You have to provide the same service to the user if he accepts or not to share his data,” he emphasizes. “So now the app and the geolocation features [of the app] works also if you refuse to send the data to advertisers.” This is especially interesting in light of the filed against tech giants Facebook and Google earlier this year. These complaints argue the companies should (but currently do not) offer an opt-out of targeted advertising, because behavioural ads are not strictly necessary for their core services (i.e. social networking, messaging, a smartphone platform etc). Indeed, data gathering for such non-core service purposes should require an affirmative opt-in under GDPR. (An additional has also since attacked how consent is gathered, arguing it’s manipulative and deceptive.) Asked whether, based on his experience working with the CNIL to achieve GDPR compliance, it seems fair that a small adtech firm like Fidzup has had to offer an opt-out when a tech giant like Facebook seemingly doesn’t, Magnan-Saurin tells TechCrunch: “I’m not a lawyer but based on what the CNIL asked us to be in compliance with the GDPR law I’m not sure that what I see on Facebook as a user is 100% GDPR compliant.” “It’s better than one year ago but [I’m still not sure],” he adds. “Again it’s only my feeling as a user, based on the experience I have with the French CNIL and the GDPR law.” Facebook of course maintains its approach is 100% GDPR compliant. Even as . One thing is clear: If the tech giant was forced to offer an opt out for data processing for ads it would clearly take a big chunk out of its business — as a sub-set of users would undoubtedly say no to Zuckerberg’s “ads”. (And if European Facebook users got an ads opt out you can bet Americans would very soon and very loudly demand the same, so…) In Fidzup’s case, complying with GDPR has had a major impact on its business because offering a genuine choice means it’s not always able to obtain consent. Magnan-Saurin says there is essentially now a limit on the number of device users advertisers can reach because not everyone opts in for ads. Although, since it’s been using the new CMP, he says a majority are still opting in (or, at least, this is the case so far) — showing one consent chart report with a ~70:30 opt-in rate, for example. He expresses the change like this: “No one in the world can say okay I have 100% of the smartphones in my data base because the consent collection is more complete. No one in the world, even Facebook or Google, could say okay, 100% of the smartphones are okay to collect from them geolocation data. That’s a huge change.” “Before that there was a race to the higher reach. The biggest number of smartphones in your database,” he continues. “Today that’s not the point.” Now he says the point for adtech businesses with EU users is figuring out how to extrapolate from the percentage of user data they can (legally) collect to the 100% they can’t. And that’s what Fidzup has been working on this year, developing machine learning algorithms to try to bridge the data gap so it can still offer its retail partners accurate predictions for tracking ad to store conversions. “We have algorithms based on the few thousand stores that we equip, based on the few hundred mobile advertising campaigns that we have run, and we can understand for a store in London in… sports, fashion, for example, how many visits we can expect from the campaign based on what we can measure with the right consent,” he says. “That’s the first and main change in our market; the quantity of data that we can get in our database.” “Now the challenge is to be as accurate as we can be without having 100% of real data — with the consent, and the real picture,” he adds. “The accuracy is less… but not that much. We have a very, very high standard of quality on that… So now we can assure the retailers that with our machine learning system they have nearly the same quality as they had before. “Of course it’s not exactly the same… but it’s very close.” Having a CMP that’s had regulatory ‘sign-off’, as it were, is something Fidzup is also now hoping to turn into a new bit of additional business. “The second change is more like an opportunity,” he suggests. “All the work that we have done with CNIL and our publishers we have transferred it to a new product, a CMP, and we offer today to all the publishers who ask to use our consent management platform. So for us it’s a new product — we didn’t have it before. And today we are the only — to my knowledge — the only company and the only CMP validated by the CNIL and GDPR compliant so that’s useful for all the publishers in the world.” It’s not currently charging publishers to use the CMP but will be seeing whether it can turn it into a paid product early next year. How then, after months of compliance work, does Fidzup feel about GDPR? Does it believe the regulation is making life harder for startups vs tech giants — as is sometimes suggested, with claims put forward by certain lobby groups that the law risks entrenching the dominance of better resourced tech giants. Or does he see any opportunities? In Magnan-Saurin’s view, six months in to GDPR European startups are at an R&D disadvantage vs tech giants because U.S. companies like Facebook and Google are not (yet) subject to a similarly comprehensive privacy regulation at home — so it’s easier for them to bag up user data for whatever purpose they like. Though it’s also true that U.S. lawmakers are now paying at a federal level. (And from Congress on that front just this week.) “The fact is Facebook-Google they own like 90% of the revenue in mobile advertising in the world. And they are American. So basically they can do all their research and development on, for example, American users without any GDPR regulation,” he says. “And then apply a pattern of GDPR compliance and apply the new product, the new algorithm, everywhere in the world. “As a European startup I can’t do that. Because I’m a European. So once I begin the research and development I have to be GDPR compliant so it’s going to be longer for Fidzup to develop the same thing as an American… But now we can see that GDPR might be beginning a ‘world thing’ — and maybe Facebook and Google will apply the GDPR compliance everywhere in the world. Could be. But it’s their own choice. Which means, for the example of the R&D, they could do their own research without applying the law because for now U.S. doesn’t care about the GDPR law, so you’re not outlawed if you do R&D without applying GDPR in the U.S. That’s the main difference.” He suggests some European startups might relocate R&D efforts outside the region to try to workaround the legal complexity around privacy. “If the law is meant to bring the big players to better compliance with privacy I think — yes, maybe it goes in this way. But the first to suffer is the European companies, and it becomes an asset for the U.S. and maybe the Chinese… companies because they can be quicker in their innovation cycles,” he suggests. “That’s a fact. So what could happen is maybe investors will not invest that much money in Europe than in U.S. or in China on the marketing, advertising data subject topics. Maybe even the French companies will put all the R&D in the U.S. and destroy some jobs in Europe because it’s too complicated to do research on that topics. Could be impacts. We don’t know yet.” But the fact of GDPR enforcement having — perhaps inevitably — started small, with so far a small bundle of warnings against relative data minnows, rather than any swift action against the industry dominating adtech giants, that’s being felt as yet another inequality at the startup coalface. “What’s sure is that the CNIL started to send warnings not to Google or Facebook but to startups. That’s what I can see,” he says. “Because maybe it’s easier to see I’m working on GDPR and everything but the fact is the law is not as complicated for Facebook and Google as it is for the small and European companies.” |
Jennifer Garner and J.J. Abrams are making a limited series for Apple | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | More than a decade after the end of “Alias,” J.J. Abrams and Jennifer Garner are teaming up on a new limited series for Apple. The show, titled “My Glory Was I Had Such Friends,” will be based on the Amy Silverstein , about how Silverstein’s friends supported her as she waited for her second heart transplant. As and elsewhere, the series will be produced by Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television. Karen Croner will write and executive produce (she previously wrote “The Tribes of Palos Verdes,” which Garner starred in last year), Garner will serve as both star and executive producer and Abrams will also be an executive producer. “Alias” first aired in 2001 — Abrams created, wrote and directed, while Garner starred as double agent Sydney Bristow. The show helped make Garner a star, while also , “Mission Impossible III.” Garner recently returned to television on the HBO series “Camping.” Abrams, meanwhile, has remained involved in TV , but usually just as an executive producer. Earlier this year, Apple was reportedly bidding for “Demimonde,” the first series that Abrams co-created since “Fringe,” but it . |
Lyft is becoming a one-stop transportation app in these 3 cities | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | Lyft is turning its app into a one-stop multimodal transportation app in a few U.S. cities, the latest illustration of its transformation from ridesharing startup to a company that wants to own, or at least be a part of, every way people move from Point A to Point B, whether it’s cars, bikes, scooters or even public transit. trip might be quicker or more efficient using a local bus or subway, even though Lyft doesn’t financially benefit from that option. Lyft has been moving toward this “all-of-the-above” approach for much of 2018, a shift accelerated by its , the oldest and largest electric bike-share company in North America, the launch of its scooter business and its that kicked off in Santa Monica this September. Lyft’s scooter-sharing service, which launched in Denver, is now in six cities. The company plans to nearly double that number by the end of 2018 — just a few weeks away. It’s scaling up bike sharing, as well. The company, through its Motivate bike-share brand, has invested $100 million in Citi Bike, expanding the fleet to 40,000 bikes over the next five years. Lyft is now the largest bike-share service in North America. On Thursday, Ford GoBike — a Motivate system that is now owned by Lyft — is This multimodal strategy, which Lyft outlined back in July, will help the company meet its goal of taking 1 million cars off the road by 2019. (Last year, Lyft says 250,000 of its community members gave up their personal cars.) It’s an effort that has been driven, in part, by Caroline Samponaro, Lyft’s head of bikes, scooters and pedestrian policy who has a long history as a bike activist. Samponaro, who posted a describing her approach, fought for protected bike lanes in New York and led a grassroots campaign to redesign NYC’s streets. Samponaro most recently worked at Transportation Alternatives, a bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group. Lyft is also pushing to improve bike safety. It recently received approval for its Of course, this isn’t just about making the world a better place. Lyft is a company after all, and one that sees greater opportunity and benefits to diversifying its business. The battle between Uber and Lyft over ride-hailing market share in the U.S. has shifted to a larger war for control over transportation. While much of the attention has focused on the Uber versus Lyft story line, there are other important players in the mix that will influence the outcomes. And those are cities and transit authorities. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 12 | 12 | null |
Basis, backed with $133 million from top VCs to build a price-stable cryptocurrency, says it’s shutting down and returning the money | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | Earlier this year, we told you about a now 18-month-old, Hoboken, N.J.-based cryptocurrency startup working on a “stable coin” whose elastic supply would ostensibly expand and contract to keep its value at about a dollar instead of all over the map. The company’s big idea: to develop a new token that people would actually use, instead of use to speculate. Investors — a lot of them — fell in love with the concept. In fact, eight months ago, Basis landed $133 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, GV, longtime hedge fund manager Stan Druckenmiller, one-time Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Foundation Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, WingVC, NFX Ventures, Valor Capital, Zhenfund, Ceyuan, Sky9 Capital, Digital Currency Group and others. Today, that same team, led by CEO Nader Al-Naji — who co-founded the company with former Princeton classmates Lawrence Diao and Josh Chen — says it is shutting down the project. Basis is also returning to investors the capital it didn’t use in trying to make a go of things. As Al-Naji explained it in a a bit ago, its technology road map and U.S. securities regulations didn’t quite mix. More specifically, writes Al-Naji, the founders didn’t foresee some of the ripple effects of the regulatory guidance it began receiving. For one thing, he writes, Basis soon realized that there would be “no way to avoid securities status for bond and share tokens” and that “due to their status as unregistered securities, bond and share tokens would be subject to transfer restrictions, with [Basis] responsible for limiting token ownership to accredited investors in the U.S. for the first year after issuance, and for performing eligibility checks on international users.” Part of the problem with this scenario, continues Al Naji, is that “enforcing transfer restrictions would require a centralized whitelist, meaning our system would not only lose its censorship resistance, but also that on-chain auctions would have significantly less liquidity.” Ultimately, having fewer participants in those on-chain auctions would adversely affect the stability of Basis, he adds, which was sort of the whole point. It isn’t clear from what’s happened to Basis whether so-called stablecoins are simply not viable, or whether its particular approach to an asset with price stability characteristics was ill-planned. Though it’s easy to grasp how they could spur the adoption of crypto payment applications, the technology remains unproven, even as a stablecoin rush got underway this past summer. As Garrick Hileman, head of research at the cryptocurrency services firm Blockchain, back in September, there were a handful of stablecoins in the works in early 2017. As of this fall, that number was closer to 60. We’ve reached out to some of Basis’s investors to learn more. In the meantime, it’s worth noting that even when Basis raised that giant round of funding, Al-Naji was candid about not knowing when Basis’s token would be used in circulation. In short, he never made aggressive promises that Basis was unable to keep — at least, not to us directly. You can read the full text of his letter to investors and supporters below. Eighteen months ago, we set out with the ambitious goal of creating a better monetary system: one that would be resistant to hyperinflation, free from centralized control, and more stable and robust than the monetary systems that came before it. This was a goal we felt could create tremendous value for society if achieved, and one we also felt well-positioned to take on. We started with a white paper that proposed a stable, decentralized cryptocurrency called Basis that had the potential to fulfill this vision. Basis remains stable by incentivizing traders to buy and sell Basis in response to changes in demand. These incentives are set up through regular, on-chain auctions of “bond” and “share” tokens, which serve to adjust Basis supply. Because the Basis ecosystem would take some time to develop, we knew we’d need to initially play the role of trader ourselves, which would be capital-intensive. As such, after publishing our white paper, we raised a $133M round of financing. This allowed us to involve a diverse set of investors who we felt could add a lot of value to the project and enabled us to build a large stabilization fund to bootstrap the system. We then assembled an outstanding team and set our sights on launching the system. Unfortunately, having to apply US securities regulation to the system had a serious negative impact on our ability to launch Basis. As regulatory guidance started to trickle out over time, our lawyers came to a consensus that there would be no way to avoid securities status for bond and share tokens (though Basis would likely be free of this characterization). Due to their status as unregistered securities, bond and share tokens would be subject to transfer restrictions, with Intangible Labs responsible for limiting token ownership to accredited investors in the US for the first year after issuance and for performing eligibility checks on international users. Enforcing transfer restrictions would require a centralized whitelist, meaning our system would not only lose its censorship resistance, but also that on-chain auctions would have significantly less liquidity. Having fewer participants in the on-chain auctions adversely affects the stability of Basis, making Basis intrinsically less attractive to users. Additionally, imposing transfer restrictions on bond and share token auctions materially hurts our ability to build the Basis ecosystem. While transfer restrictions can generally lapse 12 months after a security is issued, because the auctions of bond and share tokens governed by our monetary policy would be continuously issued, transfer restrictions and a centralized whitelist would be required indefinitely. We considered many alternative paths to launch to try and comply with the regulatory constraints while keeping our product compelling and competitive. These paths included launching offshore with added utility to make bond and share tokens less financial in nature, and starting off with a centralized stability mechanism. Ultimately, however, we don’t think any of the paths we considered are compelling enough for our users or our investors, or consistent enough with our vision to justify moving forward. As such, I am sad to share the news that we have decided to return capital to our investors. This also means, unfortunately, that the Basis project will be shutting down. Although this isn’t the outcome any of us wanted, we knew going into this that we were fundamentally making a binary bet on a favorable regulatory landscape. The binary nature of our bet is precisely why we included a return of capital clause in our token sale to begin with, even though it was something we hoped we’d never have to rely on. So, while we’re disappointed we couldn’t launch the system we were all hoping to build, we’re thankful that we can at least do right by our investors given these circumstances. Finally, we owe our sincere thanks to everyone who supported us and our project—from the extraordinary backers and partners who believed in us, to the outstanding team that joined us in our mission. You gave us the opportunity to change the world, and we’re looking forward to trying again. Until next time, Nader Al-Naji, CEO |
Amazon adds toys to its growing list of private labels | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | Batteries. Clothing. Household goods. Supplements. Diapers. Furniture. Toys? Yes, toys. It seems Amazon’s private label business is preparing to enter the toy market next. The retailer’s initial toy listings include an indoor play set for toddlers, along with other toys for climbing and playing on, as well as a toy storage system. The listings were , but the items themselves are not available for sale. (The listings have also been pulled down, following our inquiry to Amazon.) In total, the firm found five SKUs: a Soft Play Single Tunnel; Soft Play Climber; Soft Play Climb and Crawl Play Set, 5-Piece, and Kids’ Toy Storage Organizer. We were able to confirm that the products will be added to the AmazonBasics line in the future and they’re aimed at daycares more so than consumers. AmazonBasics is Amazon’s flagship private label brand, where consumers can shop for Amazon’s version of everyday needs like cables, batteries and other home necessities, such as bed sheets, bath towels, knife sets, tools and more, plus office products, sports and travel accessories, pet supplies . Basically, it’s Amazon’s attempt at owning a piece of the market for every top-selling item and category on its site. As for the new toys, they’re not exactly Amazon’s attempt to take on Mattel or LEGO, but rather are meant to cater toward childcare business owners, we understand. That is to say, these are not dolls and playthings — they’re classroom needs. A tunnel for toddlers to climb through or soft foamy shapes for the kids to climb up and over, for example. These aren’t the only AmazonBasics supplies geared toward early-education classrooms, like daycares and preschools. The retailer already today sells things like and that are also targeted toward the same business customer base. Still, it is notable that this is the first time Amazon has produced its own toys. Amazon declined to offer an official comment. The new additions are arriving at a time when Amazon has been looking to increase its presence in the toy market. This year, It also reported selling more than 18 million toys on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, TJI Research noted. Today, many children’s toys rely on the power of their brand to sell, and . But Amazon could easily compete on classic toys and staples, if it chose — things like stacking rings or wooden blocks for baby, little wagons, toy cars, easels, wooden puzzles and more. Newer brands like like this, even in a day and age when kids are drawn to digital playthings like tablets and video games. However, Amazon hasn’t made any moves yet into the broader toy space — and it may not do so, given the potential for alienating toy makers whose brands it needs to list and sell. Given the launch of the toy listings pages, TJI Research estimates the toys will begin to ship in the days or weeks ahead. |
They scaled YouTube — now they’ll shard everyone with PlanetScale | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 12 | 13 | CTOs of YouTube, Facebook and Dropbox seed fund a database startup, you know there’s something special going on under the hood. Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane saved YouTube from a scalability nightmare by inventing and open-sourcing Vitess, a brilliant relational data storage system. But in the decade since working there, the pair have been inundated with requests from tech companies desperate for help building the operational scaffolding needed to actually integrate Vitess. So today the pair are revealing their new startup that makes it easy to build multi-cloud databases that handle enormous amounts of information without locking customers into Amazon, Google or Microsoft’s infrastructure. Battle-tested at YouTube, the technology could allow startups to fret less about their backend and focus more on their unique value proposition. “Now they don’t have to reinvent the wheel” Vaidya tells me. “A lot of companies facing this scaling problem end up solving it badly in-house and now there’s a way to solve that problem by using us to help.” PlanetScale quietly raised a $3 million seed round in April, led by SignalFire and joined by a who’s who of engineering luminaries. They include YouTube co-founder and CTO Steve Chen, Quora CEO and former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, former Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal, PayPal and Affirm co-founder Max Levchin, MuleSoft co-founder and CTO Ross Mason, Google director of engineering Parisa Tabriz and Facebook’s first female engineer and South Park Commons founder Ruchi Sanghvi. If anyone could foresee the need for Vitess implementation services, it’s these leaders, who’ve dealt with scaling headaches at tech’s top companies. But how can a scrappy startup challenge the tech juggernauts for cloud supremacy? First, by actually working with them. The PlanetScale beta that’s now launching lets companies spin up Vitess clusters on its database-as-a-service, their own through a licensing deal, or on AWS with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure coming shortly. Once these integrations with the tech giants are established, PlanetScale clients can use it as an interface for a multi-cloud setup where they could keep their data master copies on AWS US-West with replicas on Google Cloud in Ireland and elsewhere. That protects companies from becoming dependent on one provider and then getting stuck with price hikes or service problems. PlanetScale also promises to uphold the principles that undergirded Vitess. “It’s our value that we will keep everything in the query pack completely open source so none of our customers ever have to worry about lock-in” Vaidya says. PlanetScale co-founders (from left): Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane He and Sougoumarane met 25 years ago while at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Back in 1993 they worked at pioneering database company Informix together before it flamed out. Sougoumarane was eventually hired by Elon Musk as an early engineer for X.com before it got acquired by PayPal, and then left for YouTube. Vaidya was working at Google and the pair were reunited when it bought YouTube and Sougoumarane pulled him on to the team. “YouTube was growing really quickly and the relationship database they were using with MySQL was sort of falling apart at the seams,” Vaidya recalls. Adding more CPU and memory to the database infra wasn’t cutting it, so the team created Vitess. The horizontal scaling sharding middleware for MySQL let users segment their database to reduce memory usage while still being able to rapidly run operations. YouTube has smoothly ridden that infrastructure to 1.8 billion users ever since. “Sugu and Mike Solomon invented and made Vitess open source right from the beginning since 2010 because they knew the scaling problem wasn’t just for YouTube, and they’ll be at other companies five or 10 years later trying to solve the same problem,” Vaidya explains. That proved true, and now top apps like Square and HubSpot run entirely on Vitess, with Slack now 30 percent onboard. Vaidya left YouTube in 2012 and became the lead engineer at Endorse, which got acquired by Dropbox, where he worked for four years. But in the meantime, the engineering community strayed toward MongoDB-style non-relational databases, which Vaidya considers inferior. He sees indexing issues and says that if the system hiccups during an operation, data can become inconsistent — a big problem for banking and commerce apps. “We think horizontally scaled relationship databases are more elegant and are something enterprises really need. Fed up with the engineering heresy, a year ago Vaidya committed to creating PlanetScale. It’s composed of four core offerings: professional training in Vitess, on-demand support for open-source Vitess users, Vitess database-as-a-service on PlanetScale’s servers and software licensing for clients that want to run Vitess on premises or through other cloud providers. It lets companies re-shard their databases on the fly to relocate user data to comply with regulations like GDPR, safely migrate from other systems without major codebase changes, make on-demand changes and run on Kubernetes. The PlanetScale team PlanetScale’s customers now include Indonesian e-commerce giant Bukalapak, and it’s helping Booking.com, GitHub and New Relic migrate to open-source Vitess. Growth is suddenly ramping up due to inbound inquiries. Last month around when Square Cash became the No. 1 app, its engineering team published a extolling the virtues of Vitess. Now everyone’s seeking help with Vitess sharding, and PlanetScale is waiting with open arms. “Jiten and Sugu are legends and know firsthand what companies require to be successful in this booming data landscape,” says Ilya Kirnos, founding partner and CTO of SignalFire. The big cloud providers are trying to adapt to the relational database trend, with Google’s Cloud Spanner and Cloud SQL, and Amazon’s AWS SQL and AWS Aurora. Their huge networks and marketing war chests could pose a threat. But Vaidya insists that while it might be easy to get data into these systems, it can be a pain to get it out. PlanetScale is designed to give them freedom of optionality through its multi-cloud functionality so their eggs aren’t all in one basket. Finding product market fit is tough enough. Trying to suddenly scale a popular app while also dealing with all the other challenges of growing a company can drive founders crazy. But if it’s good enough for YouTube, startups can trust to make databases one less thing they have to worry about. |
Apple is producing new content about Snoopy and other Peanuts characters | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 12 | 14 | Apple has signed a deal with DHX Media that will see the Canadian broadcaster producing new shows, specials and short films about Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang. That includes exclusive short-form content for Apple starring astronaut Snoopy, aimed at getting kids excited about STEM. Peanuts was created by Charles Schulz, who wrote and illustrated the popular comic strip for five decades, starting in 1950. The characters moved to television in the 1960s with “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which was followed by . And they recently returned to the big screen in the computer animated “Peanuts Movie,” which grossed $246 million worldwide. DHX in Peanuts last year (the remaining 20 percent stake is still held by the Schulz family). Apple, meanwhile, has been lining up lots of new, content for its upcoming streaming service. That includes also (not Sesame Street, which recently moved to HBO). By the way, if you only know Peanuts secondhand, through Snoopy dolls or other merchandise, it’s worth revisiting the early strips ( ), which are among the finest you’ll ever read. There, you can fully appreciate Schulz’s art, as well as his ability to craft unforgettable jokes from Charlie Brown’s bleak outlook and constant heartbreak. |
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