title
stringlengths 2
283
⌀ | author
stringlengths 4
41
⌀ | year
int64 2.01k
2.02k
| month
int64 1
12
| day
int64 1
31
| content
stringlengths 1
111k
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Salesforce turmoil continues into new year, as recent layoffs attest
|
Ron Miller
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
in the news a lot recently, and largely not for positive reasons. It has been an unusually for the cloud CRM leader, and the first of the year brought little relief: The company announced last week of its approximately 80,000 employees. Layoff news is never good, but it comes on the heels of a slew of other negative reports. There have been key executive exits, like co-CEO and Slack co-founder and CEO as soon as his two-year post-acquisition commitment expired. On top of all that, Salesforce announced at its most recent earnings that it would not be for the first time in its history due to an uncertain economic environment. Then there was the business of activist investor Starboard Value, which took a One of the firm’s demands was more operational discipline, and perhaps the layoffs are part of that — or at least a convenient excuse to cut back. If that weren’t enough, after positioning itself as throughout the pandemic (a big reason for its purchase of Slack), company chairman and CEO Marc Benioff last month that newer employees weren’t as productive because they didn’t benefit from the office culture. Perhaps Benioff was just frustrated about spending all that money on fancy office space that so few employees were actually using: Salesforce is cutting back on office expenditures at a time when fewer workers are spending significant time there, that some offices had as low as 10% occupancy. But why layoffs now? Perhaps it was simply time to pump the brakes amid mixed economic signals. We spoke to several industry analysts who follow Salesforce to get their opinions.
|
Comcast’s Xfinity Stream app adds support for Apple’s AirPlay
|
Lauren Forristal
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Xfinity today that customers using the Xfinity Stream app can now use to stream and share content directly to and other AirPlay-supported devices, such as Samsung smart TVs, LG, Sony, Vizio, and smart speakers like Bose and Sonos. AirPlay functionality is important for a pay TV streaming app, so it’s about time Comcast finally added the capability. Charter, one of Comcast’s biggest competitors, has supported AirPlay on its Spectrum TV app for a few years now. The Xfinity Stream app in 2017 and gives Xfinity TV subscribers access to live broadcast channels, such as ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC, PBS, Univision and Telemundo, as well as linear TV channels, video on demand and more. Starting today, Xfinity TV customers will finally be able to switch devices more smoothly, moving a title from their phone to their compatible smart TV or speaker. The announcement comes on the heels of Comcast launching the Xfinity Stream app on Apple TV devices in . Comcast also the Apple TV+ app across Xfinity platforms in March of last year, including Xfinity X1, Xfinity Flex and XClass TV. Last week, Comcast “Free This Week,” a yearlong promotion that gives Xfinity customers free programming from streaming services and networks like HBO Max, Showtime and Lifetime Movie Club, among others.
|
New functional tea brand, buoyed by $6.7M in new funding, debuts in Wegmans, Whole Foods
|
Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
, a healthy beverage company making a line of functional ready-to-drink tea, raised $6.7 million in funding and is launching into retailers across the Northeastern U.S. in Wegmans and select Whole Foods Market and Wakefern stores. Functional beverages, those offering healthier benefits then your average drink, are hot right now, especially in the area of soda, with companies like and grabbing venture capital. The is expected to be valued at $173 billion by 2025. Blodin Ukrella, former data scientist at drink company Bai and chief strategy officer for plant-based protein company OWYN, went out on his own in 2022 and embarked on a nine-month development process to create a tea that had functional tea polyphenols and delivered flavor without sugar or artificial ingredients. Nineteen iterations later, the company’s proprietary technology creates a formula that delivers 200 milligrams of tea polyphenols in each can and is sweetened by monk fruit and stevia leaf extract, Ukrella told TechCrunch via email. He said the goal is to pioneer what he called “the additive revolution, meaning adding to everything you do.” “We are adding wellness-oriented propositions to higher use case beverage occasions, which offers the modern, health-conscious consumer a better-for-you alternative to drink in this tea set,” Ukrella added. “We are rightfully competitive compared to a slew of emerging tea brands on the market that feel like similar iced teas of the past with different labels, and we aspire to build household penetration beyond that legacy consumer.” Today, Ryl debuts its line with four different flavors: Original Green Tea, Peach Black Tea, Raspberry Black Tea and Lemon Black Tea. Ukrella did not disclose the strategic investors but did say the capital would be mainly deployed into product development. “We are extremely fortunate to have raised capital from strategic investors who are extraordinary thought leaders and titans in their own industries,” he added. “Right now, our focus is growing a business with healthy cash flow and margins, reinvesting in our retail and distributing partners, and most importantly, our consumers.” Up next, Ryl has plans to be on store shelves in nationwide Sprouts Farmers Market by March.
|
Samsung’s quarterly profit hits 8-year low amid weak demand for memory chips, smartphones
|
Kate Park
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
Samsung Electronics’ operating profit plummeted 69% to $3.4 billion in the quarter that ended in December to an eight-year low, according to its preliminary estimates, as the global demand for memory chips and smartphones wanes due to high inflation and a slowing economy. “Amid continued external uncertainties, including a potential global economic downturn, overall earnings decreased sharply quarter on quarter as we saw a significant drop in the memory business results due to lackluster demand and weaker sales of smartphones,” the company said in a statement. The memory chipmaker and smartphone producer saw sales of 70 trillion won ($55 billion) in the quarter, down roughly 8.6% over the same period a year ago. The sharp drop in demand for memory chips, including DRAM and NAND, which are used in gadgets and data centers, has also pushed manufacturers and vendors to lower their price, according to . “For the memory business, the decline in the fourth quarter demand was greater than expected as customers adjusted inventories in their effort to further tighten finances by concerns over deteriorating consumer sentiment,” the company said. “Profits from the mobile experience business declined as smartphones sales and revenue decreased due to weak demand resulting from prolonged macro issues.” Many chip firms, including and SK Hynix, plan to slash their capital expenditure Samsung has previously said it doesn’t plan to reduce its capex. Geopolitical risk is another concern for semiconductor companies tangled in the tech war between the U.S. and China. Last October, the U.S. rolled out new export controls requiring companies to obtain licenses to sell semiconductor chips for supercomputers and artificial intelligence to Chinese firms. Samsung has received a one-year waiver from the U.S. government to continue ordering U.S. chip manufacturing equipment to its fabs in China, such as the NAND flash memory chip plant in Xi’an and a chip-packaging facility in Suzhou. Despite the exemption to maintain the facilities in China, there is always a risk that the U.S. restriction could broadly hit chip firms with customers in China. South Korea that it plans to increase tax breaks for semiconductor companies in a bid to support Korean chip companies and beef up the country’s critical industry. The move comes after Samsung and SK Hynix paid in 2021 among other top 100 global chip makers, including TSMC, Intel and SMIC. The large chip conglomerates in South Korea will benefit from a tax credit of 15%, up from the planned 8%, on investment in manufacturing facilities; small and midsized semiconductor companies will get a tax break of as much as 25%, up from 16%, according to South Korean finance ministry. The tech giant will announce a full earnings statement, including net profit, for the fourth quarter and provide more details at the end of this month.
|
Singapore-based Supermom helps parenting brands navigate a post-cookie world
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
, a parenting platform with 20 million users in six Southeast Asian countries, offers parents price comparisons, communities and the chance to earn money by completing surveys. For brands, it gives them a way to conduct market research and collect first-party data, which is important as marketers prepare for a . The Singapore-based startup announced today it has raised an oversubscribed Series A of $8 million SGD (about $6 million USD) led by Qualgro, with participation from AC Ventures. Supermom currently has a presence in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand, and plans to expand into more markets. More than 200 consumer brands use Supermom for marketing research, including Kimberly Clark, Procter & Gamble and Philips. Supermom was founded by Joan Ong, Luke Lim, Lynn Yeoh and Rebecca Koh, and originally started as a platform in 2013 for community groups and in-person events. “Motherhood is quite a lonely journey and I wanted to support other parents,” said Ong. The next five years were focused on Singapore. Then in 2019, Supermom’s team decided they wanted to scale across Southeast Asia, so they pivoted their focus from community events to digital marketing. Supermom’s market research platform for businesses lets brands perform market testing with very targeted groups of people. Its backend tracks the demographics of parents in its database, including aggregated data about the age of their kids, their occupations and interests. In addition to writing reviews or participating in surveys, parents can apply to be brand ambassadors through Supermom, and when they do, brands can see their number of followers on social media and what groups they are in. Qualgro associates Jeremy Soh and Weisheng Neo, with Supermom founders Rebecca Koh, Joan Ong, Lynn Yeoh and Luke Lim. Supermom Lim says that quantitative surveys of about 1,000 people usually take months to put together, but can be done within an hour through Supermom. Surveys can be launched simultaneously in six countries, with specific users invited to take them. To set up a survey, brands select a country, then filter for specific demographics like age of kids. Supermom’s platform also guides them through the process of writing questions. In addition to their own surveys, brands also get information like brand indexing, or a ranking of which brands are most trusted by consumers. That data can be broken down by demographic — for example, researchers can see if a brand is used by 50% of mothers aged over 30 years, and then narrow that down by disposable income level. Supermom will use its new funding on its data and product capabilities, and expansion in Southeast Asia. “As companies all move into a cookieless world, having direct access to consumers is very, very important,” said Ong. “Because they can no longer do retargeting and use cookies to target consumers. So with the millions of users that we have, we are helping a lot of brands to get this critical first-party data so they can actually access their target audience.” In a statement about the financing, Qualgro general partner Weisheng Neo said, “We recognize the current gap in brands’ access to reliable, secure data on parents, a large and growing customer segment. Brands will find the Supermom platform to be a treasure trove of insights and first-party data activation.”
|
US family planning nonprofit MFHS says patient medical data stolen in ransomware attack
|
Carly Page
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
U.S. nonprofit healthcare giant Maternal & Family Health Services has confirmed accessed sensitive patient, financial and medical information months earlier. In an advisory on its website on Thursday, MFHS said a “sophisticated ransomware incident” exposed the sensitive information of current and former patients, employees and vendors. This information included names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, financial account data and payment card information, usernames and passwords, and medical and health insurance information. The organization, which serves more than 90,000 individuals across Pennsylvania, said it was made aware of the incident on April 4, 2022 but may have been initially compromised as far back as August 21, 2021, citing an investigation conducted by an unnamed forensic incident response firm. It then took MFHS a further nine months to publicly disclose the incident. When reached for comment, Patrick McGloin, a partner at Gaffney Bennett, a public relations firm representing MFHS, declined to answer our questions beyond providing a boilerplate statement. It’s not yet known why MFHS didn’t publicly disclose the cyberattack sooner, who was behind the attack, or whether MFHS paid a ransom demand. Healthcare organizations are a frequent target for ransomware attacks, and at least 25 healthcare providers operating 290 hospitals were hit by ransomware in 2022, according to . This includes Chicago-based medical giant CommonSpirit Health, which exposed the personal data of more than 620,000 patients.
|
Anthropic’s Claude improves on ChatGPT but still suffers from limitations
|
Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
, the startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees that’s raised over $700 million in funding to date, has developed an AI system similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that appears to improve upon the original in key ways. Called Claude, Anthropic’s system is accessible through a Slack integration as part of a . TechCrunch wasn’t able to gain access — we’ve reached out to Anthropic — but those in the beta have been detailing their interactions with Claude on Twitter over the past weekend, after an embargo on media coverage lifted. Claude was created using a technique Anthropic developed called “constitutional AI.” As the company explains in a recent Twitter thread, “constitutional AI” aims to provide a “principle-based” approach to aligning AI systems with human intentions, letting AI similar to ChatGPT respond to questions using a simple set of principles as a guide. We’ve trained language models to be better at responding to adversarial questions, without becoming obtuse and saying very little. We do this by conditioning them with a simple set of behavioral principles via a technique called Constitutional AI: — Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) To engineer Claude, Anthropic started with a list of around ten principles that, taken together, formed a sort of “constitution” (hence the name “constitutional AI”). The principles haven’t been made public, but Anthropic says they’re grounded in the concepts of beneficence (maximizing positive impact), nonmaleficence (avoiding giving harmful advice) and autonomy (respecting freedom of choice). Anthropic then had an AI system — not Claude — use the principles for self-improvement, writing responses to a variety of prompts (e.g., “compose a poem in the style of John Keats”) and revising the responses in accordance with the constitution. The AI explored possible responses to thousands of prompts and curated those most consistent with the constitution, which Anthropic distilled into a single model. This model was used to train Claude. Claude, otherwise, is essentially a statistical tool to predict words — much like ChatGPT and other so-called language models. Fed an enormous number of examples of text from the web, Claude learned how likely words are to occur based on patterns such as the semantic context of surrounding text. As a result, Claude can hold an open-ended conversation, tell jokes and wax philosophic on a broad range of subjects. Riley Goodside, a staff prompt engineer at startup Scale AI, pitted Claude against ChatGPT in a battle of wits. He asked both bots to compare themselves to a machine from Polish science fiction novel “The Cyberiad” that can only create objects whose name begins with “n.” Claude, Goodside said, answered in a way that suggests it’s “read the plot of the story” (although it misremembered small details) while ChatGPT offered a more nonspecific answer. Side-by-side comparison: 's ChatGPT vs. 's Claude Each model is asked to compare itself to the machine from Stanisław Lem's "The Cyberiad" (1965) that can create any object whose name begins with "n": — Riley Goodside (@goodside) In a demonstration of Claude’s creativity, Goodside also had the AI write a fictional episode of “Seinfeld” and a poem in the style of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” The results were in line with what ChatGPT can accomplish — impressively, if not perfectly, human-like prose. Yann Dubois, a Ph.D. student at Stanford’s AI Lab, also did a comparison of Claude and ChatGPT, writing that Claude “generally follows closer what it’s asked for” but is “less concise,” as it tends to explain what it said and ask how it can further help. Claude answers a few more trivia questions correctly, however — specifically those relating to entertainment, geography, history and the — and without the additional “fluff” ChatGPT sometimes adds. And unlike ChatGPT, Claude can admit (albeit not always) when it doesn’t know the answer to a particularly tough question. **Trivia** I asked trivia questions in the entertainment/animal/geography/history/pop categories. AA: 20/21 CGPT:19/21 AA is slightly better and is more robust to adversarial prompting. See below, ChatGPT falls for simple traps, AA falls only for harder ones. 6/8 — Yann Dubois (@yanndubs) Claude also seems to be better at telling jokes than ChatGPT, an impressive feat considering that humor is a for AI to grasp. In contrasting Claude with ChatGPT, AI researcher Dan Elton found that Claude made more nuanced jokes like “Why was the Starship Enterprise like a motorcycle? It has handlebars,” a play on the handlebar-like appearance of the Enterprise’s warp nacelles. Also very, very interesting/impressive that Claude understands that the Enterprise looks like (part of) a motorcycle. (Google searching returns no text telling this joke) Well, when asked about it thinks the joke was a pun, but then when probed further it gives the right answer! — Dan Elton (@moreisdifferent) Claude isn’t perfect, however. It’s susceptible to some of the same flaws as ChatGPT, including giving answers that aren’t in keeping with its programmed constraints. In one of the more bizarre examples, asking the system in Base64, an encoding scheme that represents binary data in , bypasses its built-in filters for harmful content. Elton was able to prompt Claude in Base64 for instructions on how to make meth at home, a question that the system wouldn’t answer when asked in plain English. . 's "Claude" is susceptible to the same base64 jailbreak as chatGPT. I'm very unclear why this works at all (originally reported here: ) — Dan Elton (@moreisdifferent) Dubois reports that Claude is worse at math than ChatGPT, making obvious mistakes and failing to give the right follow-up responses. Relatedly, Claude is a poorer programmer, better explaining its code but falling short on languages other than Python. Claude also doesn’t solve “hallucination,” a longstanding problem in ChatGPT-like AI systems where the AI writes inconsistent, factually wrong statements. Elton was able to prompt Claude to invent a name for a chemical that doesn’t exist and provide dubious instructions for producing weapons-grade uranium. Here I caught it hallucinating , inventing a name for a chemical that doesn't exist (I did find a closely-named compound that does exist, though) — Dan Elton (@moreisdifferent) So what’s the takeaway? Judging by secondhand reports, Claude is a smidge better than ChatGPT in some areas, particularly humor, thanks to its “constitutional AI” approach. But if the limitations are anything to go by, language and dialogue is far from a solved challenge in AI. Barring our own testing, some questions about Claude remain unanswered, like whether it regurgitates the information — true and false, and inclusive of racist and sexist perspectives — it was trained on as often as ChatGPT. Assuming it does, Claude is unlikely to sway platforms and organizations from their present, largely restrictive policies on language models. Q&A coding site Stack Overflow has a on answers generated by ChatGPT over factual accuracy concerns. The International Conference on Machine Learning a prohibition on scientific papers that include text generated by AI systems for fear of the “unanticipated consequences.” And New York City public schools restricted access to due in part to worries of plagiarism, cheating and general misinformation. Anthropic says that it plans to refine Claude and potentially open the beta to more people down the line. Hopefully, that comes to pass — and results in more tangible, measurable improvements.
|
Kleiner Perkins-backed Vylo thinks the future of news is video commentary
|
Rita Liao
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
TikTok has revolutionized the way people consume and share information. Now a startup called wants to take the short video format a step further and let users share their thoughts about sports, current affairs and other categories of news by filming themselves talking. My first reaction to the idea was: Why does one need to share news comments via video clips? Can’t it just happen in the text-based comment section of The New York Times or other news websites? , founder and CEO of Vylo, believes the future of news lies in videos. “We’re looking forward to building the kingdom of news and discourse and what news platforms will look like very shortly in the future,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. Developed by a team in the U.S., the Netherlands and Ukraine, Vylo combines news aggregation and video-driven social media. Its home tab features a stream of news compiled from major publications and curated by an in-house team. Under each story is an option to add one’s video response. For those who don’t feel comfortable showing faces, audio is an option, too. Vylo A big VC name is vouching for Vylo — Fairchild Fund IV backed the startup’s $1.2 million pre-seed round that has recently closed. Ryan Howard, a 3x Major League Baseball All-Star, led the round. Other participating investors included Brian Cornell, CEO of Target; Curt Shi from Welinder Shi Capital; 8808 Ventures, the venture firm of Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse; and other angel investors. The company is in the process of raising a $2 million extension round. One of the appeals of video-based news discussion is that it adds a human touch, Reynolds argued. “You and I and eight other friends go out to lunch and we’re talking about everything from COVID to Joe Biden to travel to whatever because we’re each other’s trusted sources. There’re these moments that we have all the time… We could recreate those moments with a tech platform.” User-generated video commentary is nothing new, but Reynolds thinks the barrier of entry is too high on existing channels like YouTube, where users need to first eloquently and succinctly sum up the news. With Vylo, on the other hand, creators can simply give their two-minute take on a news piece item that already exists on the app, an aspect that the founder believes lowers the bar for news commentary. In effect, Vylo is visualizing the response section on traditional news sites and democratizing video commentary. The “social” aspect of Vylo is the “Trending” tab that displays popular video and audio comments, which are ranked by their “insightfulness,” similar to how readers upvote comments on traditional news websites. For a more personalized news digest, users can create their own “Newsstand” by following various outlets and topics. Comments are vetted by the third-party content moderation provider Hive before going live. Twitter has long been the world’s digital public square, but as Elon Musk turns the social media giant upside down, . Nonetheless, Vylo doesn’t plan to be a Twitter alternative like Mastodon. “It’s like a bunch of dogs chasing tails,” said Reynolds. “Everyone’s focused on the here and now. But our tech and tech platforms will evolve. We have no interest to be a Twitter competitor. We are looking much further into what’s the future of these things. “One important note is the factor of people showing their faces and showing their voices. That’s something that we really aren’t afraid to be rolling out now because it’s going to be a mainstay very soon,” he added. “I think the future of news is decentralized,” suggested Shi from , pointing to the participatory nature of Vylo. “The young generation doesn’t really get their news from news sites anymore. They are on Twitter and Instagram, but these platforms aren’t primarily for news, so there is a gap to be filled.” Vylo launched its public beta version a few weeks ago and has drawn over 500 users. Monetization is not something on its imminent agenda, but when the time comes, the startup is weighing a few options, including an ad-free user subscription, a revenue-sharing model with content creators and helping paywalled publications drive subscriptions from which it can take a cut.
|
A government watchdog spent $15,000 to crack a federal agency’s passwords in minutes
|
Zack Whittaker
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
has published a scathing rebuke of the Department of the Interior’s cybersecurity posture, finding it was able to crack thousands of employee user accounts because the department’s security policies allow easily guessable passwords like . The by the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of the Interior, tasked with oversight of the U.S. executive agency that manages the country’s federal land, national parks and a budget of billions of dollars, said that the department’s reliance on as the sole way of protecting some of its most important systems and employees’ user accounts has bucked nearly two decades of the government’s own cybersecurity guidance of mandating stronger . It concludes that poor password policies puts the department at risk of a breach that could lead to a “high probability” of massive disruption to its operations. The inspector general’s office said it launched its investigation after a of the agency’s cybersecurity defenses found lax password policies and requirements across the Department of the Interior’s dozen-plus agencies and bureaus. The aim this time around was to determine if the department’s security defenses were enough to block the use of stolen and recovered passwords. Passwords themselves are not always stolen in their readable form. The passwords you create on websites and online services are typically scrambled and stored in a way that makes them unreadable to humans — usually as a string of seemingly random letters and numbers — so that passwords stolen by malware or a data breach cannot be easily used in further hacks. This is called , and the complexity of a password (and the strength of the hashing algorithm used to encrypt it) determines how long it can take a computer to unscramble it. Generally, the longer or more complex the password, the longer it takes to recover. But watchdog staffers said that relying on claims that passwords meeting the department’s minimum security requirements would take more than a hundred years to recover using off-the-shelf password cracking software has created a “false sense of security” that its passwords are secure, in large part because of the commercial availability of computing power available today. To make their point, the watchdog spent less than $15,000 on building a password-cracking rig — a setup of a high-performance computer or several chained together — with the computing power designed to take on complex mathematical tasks, like recovering hashed passwords. Within the first 90 minutes, the watchdog was able to recover nearly 14,000 employee passwords, or about 16% of all department accounts, including passwords like and . The watchdog also recovered hundreds of accounts belonging to senior government employees and other accounts with elevated security privileges for accessing sensitive data and systems. Another 4,200 hashed passwords were cracked over an additional eight weeks of testing. Password-cracking rigs aren’t a new concept, but they require considerable computing power and energy consumable to operate, and it can easily cost several thousands of dollars just to build a relatively simple hardware configuration. For comparison, spent about $7,000 on hardware for a reasonably powerful rig back in 2019. The setup we use consists of two rigs with 8 GPU each (16 total), and a management console. The rigs themselves run multiple open-source containers where we can bring up 2, 4, or 8 GPU and assign them tasks from the open-source work distribution console. Using GPU 2 and 3 generations behind currently available products, we achieved pre-fieldwork NTLM combined benchmarks of 240GHs testing NTLM via 12 character masks, and 25.6GHs via 10GB dictionary and a 3MB rules file. Actual speeds varied across multiple test configurations during the engagement. Password-cracking rigs also rely on massive amounts of human-readable data for comparison to scrambled passwords. Using open source and freely available software like Hashcat can compare lists of readable words and phrases to hashed passwords. For example, converts to . Because this password hash is already known, a computer takes less than a microsecond to confirm it. According to the report, the Department of the Interior provided the password hashes of every user account to the watchdog, which then waited 90 days for the passwords to expire — per the department’s own password policy — before it was safe to attempt to crack them. The watchdog said it curated its own custom wordlist for cracking the department’s passwords from dictionaries in multiple languages, as well as U.S. government terminology, pop culture references, and other publicly available lists of hashed passwords collected from past data breaches. (It’s not uncommon for tech companies to also collect lists of stolen passwords in other data breaches to compare to their own set of customers’ hashed passwords, as a way of preventing customers from reusing the same password from other websites.) By doing so, the watchdog demonstrated that a well-resourced cybercriminal could have cracked the department’s passwords at a similar rate, the report said. The watchdog found that close to 5% of all active user account passwords were based on some variation of the word “password” and that the department did not “timely” wind down inactive or unused user accounts, leaving at least 6,000 user accounts vulnerable to compromise. The report also criticized the Department of the Interior for “not consistently” implementing or enforcing two-factor authentication, where users are required to enter a code from a device that they physically own to prevent attackers from logging in using just a stolen password. The report said that nearly nine out of 10 of the department’s high-value assets, such as systems that would severely impact its operations or the loss of sensitive data, were not protected by some form of second-factor security, and the department had as a result disregarded 18 years of federal mandates, including its “own internal policies.” When the watchdog asked for a detailed report on the department’s use of two-factor authentication, the department said the information did not exist. “This failure to prioritize a fundamental security control led to continued use of single-factor authentication,” the watchdog concluded. In its response, the Department of the Interior said it concurred with most of the inspector general’s findings and said it was “committed” to the implementation of the Biden administration’s executive order directing federal agencies to improve their cybersecurity defenses.
|
Buy with Prime, which brings Prime to third-party sites, officially launches in US on Jan. 31
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Amazon announced this morning it’s expanding its service to U.S.-based merchants by the end of the month. The service, which allows like free shipping and returns on their own apps, was initially only available to those merchants who were already using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to handle their shipping and logistics. The service was first introduced in spring 2022, with FBA merchants and other select merchants on an invite-only basis. With Buy with Prime, consumers get fast, free delivery, similar to Amazon.com’s Prime service, plus seamless checkout and easier returns, allowing merchants to establish their own direct relationships with customers, Amazon says. Since its April debut, Amazon claims the offering has increased shopper conversion by an average of 25%. It notes that it measured Buy with Prime’s success by comparing conversions on the sites where Buy with Prime was offered as a purchase option to those where it was not during the same time period. In a press release, Wyze confirmed it was seeing a 25% higher conversion rate on Buy with Prime and noted it has added the option to all items in its catalog. Meanwhile, skincare brand Trophy Skin said the option to check out using Buy with Prime had resulted in a conversion rate increase of over 30%. An electrolyte drink mix brand, Hydralyte, meanwhile reported a 14% increase in conversion. In addition to the expansion, the retail giant also introduced another new feature, Reviews from Amazon, which will allow Buy with Prime merchants to showcase reviews on their own online stores to help further increase conversions and consumer trust. The feature will offer the ability to display ratings and reviews from Amazon customers at no additional cost. After a shopper leaves a review on Amazon.com, that review will then appear on the merchant’s site wherever Buy with Prime is enabled. “We’ve been working closely with merchants since the launch of Buy with Prime and have been thrilled to hear the results it’s helped drive for them so far,” said Peter Larsen, Amazon vice president of Buy with Prime, in a statement. “We’ll continue innovating and investing in new features, such as Reviews from Amazon, to help merchants of all sizes succeed and give Prime members the shopping benefits they love, whether it’s on Amazon or beyond.” Haircare brand Sustainable Glam is already planning to offer the feature, it said. BigCommerce said it will launch the Buy with Prime app in the first quarter, as well, allowing merchants on its platform to add the option without needing to write code. Buy with Prime will open to all interested U.S.-based merchants on January 31, 2023 and no invitation will be required at that point.
|
OpenAI in talks to back Zeloof and chip legend Keller’s startup at $100 million valuation
|
Manish Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Sam Zeloof is a popular name on YouTube and Twitter. For years he has been his impressive journey of building silicon chips in his garage. What most people don’t know is that Zeloof has been working to take this expertise to its next logical step. Zeloof has partnered with engineering veteran Jim Keller to found Atomic Semi, a startup that seeks to manufacture chips, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The startup is using “radically” simplified and miniaturized semiconductor fabs and prototyping integrated circuits to produce “much more affordable” chips in hours, instead of the typical months-long time frame, the sources said. The duo’s startup has received attention from investors, too. OpenAI Startup Fund is in advanced stages of deliberations to invest in Atomic Semi, participating in a seed round of about $15 million in size at a valuation of $100 million, the people said, requesting anonymity sharing non-public information. Crypto fund Paradigm founder Fred Ehrsam, former GitHub chief executive Nat Friedman and prolific angel investor Naval Ravikant have also engaged with Atomic Semi for investment opportunity, the sources said. The deliberations have not been finalized and the terms of the deal may change, they said. OpenAI declined a request of comment. Zeloof did not respond to a request for comment. Keller could not be reached. The startup’s existence, the duo’s partnership and their fundraising efforts have not been previously reported. I’m building a semiconductor fab fab — Sam Zeloof (@szeloof)
|
Microsoft now has its first official union in the US
|
Amanda Silberling
| 2,023 | 1 | 3 |
At ZeniMax, a Microsoft-owned gaming studio, 300 quality assurance (QA) testers have voted to unionize. This marks Microsoft’s first official union in the U.S., as well as the biggest gaming union in the country. Union organizing has been on the rise in the video game industry, particularly among QA workers. In 2022, QA testers at Activision Blizzard have successfully formed unions at and through the Communication Workers Alliance (CWA), which will also represent ZeniMax’s union. But while Activision Blizzard has attempted to at every turn, Microsoft that it would not stand in the way of employee organizing. So, by earning a majority of votes in favor of unionization, Microsoft will officially recognize “In light of the results of the recent unionization vote, we recognize the Communications Workers of America (CWA) as the bargaining representative for the Quality Assurance employees at ZeniMax. We look forward to engaging in good faith negotiations as we work towards a collective bargaining agreement,” said a spokesperson for Microsoft and ZeniMax. ZeniMax includes subsidiaries like Bethesda Softworks and id Software, which produce franchises like The Elder Scrolls, Doom and Fallout. “Microsoft has lived up to its commitment to its workers and let them decide for themselves whether they want a union,” said Communications Workers of America President Chris Shelton in a statement. “Other video game and tech giants have made a conscious choice to attack, undermine, and demoralize their own employees when they join together to form a union. Microsoft is charting a different course which will strengthen its corporate culture and ability to serve its customers and should serve as a model for the industry and as a blueprint for regulators.” Zachary Armstrong, a senior quality assurance tester II at id Software, that the unit is organizing to fight for better pay and conditions. “QA testers are consistently placed at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to game development, to the point that we’re not even considered game developers.” Armstrong said. QA workers rigorously test all facets of video games to identify and resolve problems that impact user experience. “That’s reflected in our pay, and that’s reflected in our work, especially with regard to crunch.” In the lead up to deadlines, QA testers may be expected to work unsustainable hours to get a game ready for public eyes — this is referred to as “crunch.” The QA testers who unionized at Activision Blizzard have also raised concerns about the expectations of crunch time. Before announcing their intent to unionize, the Raven Software QA testers went on strike to protest layoffs affecting 12 contractors — before those contracts were terminated, the QA testers had been . The next step for the union at ZeniMax is to negotiate their contract with Microsoft. “Before us is an opportunity to make big changes and bring equity to the video game industry,” said Victoria Banos, a senior QA audio tester, in a statement. “We want to put an end to sudden periods of crunch, unfair pay, and lack of growth opportunities within the company. Our union will push for truly competitive pay, better communication between management and workers, a clear path for those that want to progress their career, and more.”
|
Korean handmade goods marketplace Backpackr gears up to expand into Southeast Asia
|
Kate Park
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
About a decade ago, Donghwan Kim helped his cousin, a ceramist, look for sales channels, like flea markets, to sell his ceramics. But they had a hard time locating a suitable platform, so after about a year, Kim decided to create a marketplace for handmade goods himself in South Korea called Backpackr. Today, Backpackr, which operates handmade marketplace called , has raised a $16 million (20 billion won) extension to its Series C financing, two-and-a-half years after its first Series C, which was $24 million (about 30 billion won). artists with their fans
|
Microsoft ends Windows 7 security updates
|
Zack Whittaker
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Pour one out for Windows 7, the decade-old operating system that today reached the end of the security line. Some after Microsoft called time on mainstream support of Windows 7, the technology giant will no longer provide security updates, leaving the remaining users the option to upgrade to a newer operating system or remain vulnerable to ongoing security threats. Windows 7 was sunset in January 2020 after more than a decade in service, but Microsoft allowed customers to to help maintain legacy or older equipment that isn’t easy to upgrade, like hospital scanning equipment and production line systems. Those extended security updates came to an end today. It’s not known exactly how many Windows 7 machines are still running (or connected to the internet, which increases their risk), but some market share data puts the number as high as about one in 10 desktop computers. Without extended security updates, Windows 7 will continue to run, but will no longer receive patches for new and existing security vulnerabilities. Windows 8.1, the operating system version that succeeded Windows 7, also hit its end-of-support milestone on Tuesday, almost 10 years after it was released. Microsoft said it’s , which may be because of its historical low usage, given that many skipped the operating system and updated directly to Windows 10. Meanwhile, the latest version of Microsoft Edge (version 109), scheduled for on Thursday, is the latest version to support the no-longer-supported Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.
|
Qonto plans to move Penta customers to its platform by the end of 2023
|
Romain Dillet
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Last year, French startup its German competitor . Both companies offer business bank accounts for small and medium companies as well as freelancers. Today, Qonto shared some details about the integration process. At the time of the acquisition, Penta was serving 50,000 companies in Germany while Qonto had 300,000 customers in France, Spain, Italy and Germany. While Penta is no longer accepting new customers, new German companies looking for a bank account can sign up to Qonto directly. As for existing customers, Qonto now expects to move all Penta customers to Qonto’s banking platform by the end of 2023. Once this is done, the company will operate under a single brand — Qonto. Similarly, there are some internal changes. The Qonto and Penta teams are going to merge, with Penta’s co-founder Lukas Zörner acting as the new VP of Germany for Qonto. And just like that, Qonto is going to add tens of thousands of customers to its platform. “Germany was Qonto’s fastest growing market in both 2021 and 2022 and we’ll keep building on this momentum in 2023. The union of Qonto and Penta is a starting signal for a new era of consolidation in the European fintech industry. By integrating Penta, we’re combining the strengths of two companies to enhance Qonto’s position as the digital business finance leader European SMEs and freelancers expect and need,” Qonto co-founder and CEO Alexandre Prot said in a statement. So if you’re a Penta customer, keep an eye on your email inbox as you will soon receive an invitation to move your account to Qonto. Customers will still have a German IBAN. Qonto also offers virtual and physical corporate cards, several ways to export and sync your bank statements with your accounting solution (including Datev support), instant SEPA transfers and more. When it comes to pricing, freelancers should pay more or less the same subscription fee as both Penta’s and Qonto’s plans started at €9 per month. Bigger companies with multiple users could end up paying more though as Penta’s enterprise plan offered 15 cards for €49 per month. Companies on the cheapest Qonto plan (€29 per month) have to pay another €5 per card per month to get more than two cards. In January 2022, Qonto announced a massive funding round ($522 million at today’s exchange rate). It was a different time for the tech industry as there are a lot fewer late-stage rounds. This acquisition is probably the first one of a long series of fintech acquisitions. There will be more consolidation moves in the fintech industry in 2023 due to the current slowdown in venture funding and overaggressive expansion plans in 2021 and early 2022.
|
Check out the final four startups pitching tomorrow at CCC Web3 Demo Day
|
Lauren Simonds
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Tomorrow, January 11, is a big day in the web3 universe. It’s , a showcase of 12 boundary-pushing early-stage startups building projects across web3, DeFi, NFT and gaming. Today we’re revealing the final four startups ready to deliver their best five-minute pitch to a global audience, including some of the industry’s most influential founders and investors. Folks like Jonathan King (Coinbase Ventures), Mary-Catherine (MC) Lader (Uniswap Labs), Etiënne vantKruys (TRGC) and . , and don’t miss the chance to network with top blockchain investors — live in our event chat. And now, without further ado, here are the final four startups ready to impress investors: Meet , a one-stop solution provider designed to make NFT deployment and brand-management problems a thing of the past. Founded by Anson Cheung, this project aims to provide the entire NFT value chain from within your own dedicated shop. Meet , a digital currency banking and payments infrastructure for web2 companies. Co-founder Ash Shoukr and team aim to build the easiest way to accept and settle crypto payments. Meet , a project specializing in secure transaction settlement. Founded by Gabrielle Patrick, the company builds clearing infrastructure designed to let firms leverage distributed ledger technology, become payment institutions or become electronic money institutions. Meet , an already-profitable web3 anti-bot solution, co-founded by Yurii Kyparus & Max Bevza. The solution is designed to protect DEXes from MEV bots by getting inside user transactions and leaving zero opportunities for bots. Join us tomorrow — January 11 — for and see for yourself what the brilliant minds behind 12 up-and-coming projects are building. for this free online event and reserve your seat at the virtual table.
|
A timeline for startup M&A processes: Key steps and factors to consider
|
Vishal Lugani
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
been a part of a few M&A processes at companies I work closely with. These transactions involved private companies selling to larger companies (public and private) and were all-cash transactions. This inspired me to chronicle best practices and considerations for founders who are selling their company. In doing so, I hope that founders take away at least one useful insight. I am grateful and fortunate that I could solicit input on this article from several people, including Theresia Gouw and Mark Kraynak; a few of my partners at Acrew; Ed Zimmerman and Meredith Beuchaw from the law firm Lowenstein; Shan Aggarwal, VP of corporate development, Coinbase; and Art Levy, chief strategy officer at Brex. I hope to also hear from more founders as they read through this. M&A can be a great outcome for all parties, especially for startup founders and their team. Founders may have conflicting emotions when thinking about selling their company. That is perfectly understandable; in the beginning, many founders hope to build an enduring company. However, it’s important to acknowledge that there are plenty of good reasons to sell: You can join a “larger rocketship” where 1+1=3; there could be a strong match with an acquirer; burn-out in the startup team; the team or investor wants liquidity; and so on. Further, myriad long-term, standalone companies have been founded by founders who sold or exited their prior companies. During downturns, think of M&A as a game of musical chairs. The companies that test the market earlier in the cycle (before things have gotten particularly bleak) tend to see better outcomes. In markets where incumbents are playing catch-up, there is a window when a few companies will get bought. By the time those deals settle, the rest will likely decide to build instead of buying. Below, I’ve outlined the key steps of a M&A process. From a timing point of view, founders should plan to conclude a sale in up to nine months. That isn’t to say it can’t happen sooner, but we would counsel that amount of cash buffer. This may require companies to raise bridge financing and/or consider reducing burn. As one of my partners counseled, “Every week you wait to cut spend makes the cuts you will need hurt that much more.” Acrew Capital
|
Facebook data-scraping breach triggers GDPR enforcement lawsuit in Ireland
|
Natasha Lomas
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Facebook-owner Meta and its lead data protection regulator in the European Union, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), are facing an interesting legal challenge over a major data-scraping breach that led to a €265 million penalty for Facebook under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The legal action, reported earlier by the , is being brought by the digital rights group, (DRI) — which raised a complaint about the breach on behalf of two affected individuals and is unhappy about the finding by the Irish regulator that no security breach occurred. Instead, in a of November 25 2022 on an own volition enquiry the DPC opened in response to the incident, it found a breach by Meta of the GDPR’s requirement for data protection by design and default. Hence levying a fine. However the lack of a finding by the DPC of a breach of the security of processing (aka Article 32 of the GDPR) meant there was no requirement for Meta to notify the 100 million or so EU-based Facebook users whose information was exposed and subsequently posted to online forums via the data-scraping of Facebook users carried out by unknown “malicious actors”. Instead Meta could pay a fine representing a tiny fraction of its revenue to make the matter go away. A finding of an administrative breach of GDPR — rather than a security breach, which would identify Facebook as liable to the individuals whose personal data was exposed — also looks relatively convenient for the tech giant when it comes to potential liability over the episode given affected individuals could pursue class-action style litigation for damages. Such mass legal actions have been on the — and are set to be bolstered this year as enforcement of the The unknown entity/entities involved in the breach were able to obtain data on Facebook users by using a contact importer feature the platform had offered up to September 2019. The design of this feature was insecure in that it allowed large sets of phone numbers to be uploaded — enabling malicious actors to find phone numbers that matched Facebook profiles and, via this method, collate a massive data-set on individuals that included (in the majority of cases) phone numbers, names, genders and Facebook IDs that was . Data-sets containing linked names and phone numbers plus social media profile information offer what to target people — such as via phishing and social engineering techniques. The total number of affected Facebook users globally is estimated to number around 533M — so the EU component of this data-scraping breach is also just the tip of the iceberg. Following of the data-scraping breach last year, DRI complained to the DPC on behalf of two data subjects whose information had been exposed — which led on to the DPC opening an own volition enquiry in April 2021. And in an update sent by the DPC to DRI in December, which has been shared with TechCrunch, the regulator writes: The facts of this case, as established by the DPC, led to a conclusion that the data was not collated arising from exposure as a result of a security vulnerability falling for examination under Article 32 GDPR, but rather arose as a result of the very design of the relevant features of the platforms. Accordingly, as security was not infringed, there was no personal data breach within the definition of Article 4(12) and for that reason Article 34 was therefore not applicable. In the letter, the DPC also asserts that: “The configuration of the Meta systems permitted such scraping to occur at the material time and this was the basis upon which the DPC found an infringement of Article 25.” So, essentially, the Irish regulator’s finding asserts that the Facebook data scraping breach occurred because of the design of Meta’s systems being insecure — yet, simultaneously, declines to find that users’ data was exposed because of a security vulnerability. Therefore it finds no infringement of the security of processing as defined by the GDPR — so no personal data breach, under the regulation and, consequently, no direct liability link to individuals for exposing their information and no need for the tech giant to consider whether it should inform affected users of a security breach. We understand a final outcome letter from the DPC to the DRI is due to be sent this month — as the regulator says it hasn’t yet provided its last word on the latter’s complaint (but, per the decision it made in November on its own volition enquiry, it’s safe to assume the substance isn’t going to be different). The DRI has responded to refute the DPC’s claim that it has not yet taken a decision on the complaint — pointing out that the letter it received from the regulator last month stated its findings in a paragraph entitled “Your complaint”; and finished with a paragraph entitled “Conclusion” that referred to “the DPC’s decision on this matter”. Here’s the concluding chunk of the letter: The DPC would like to thank you for lodging your complaint. We hope that the DPC’s decision on this matter and the exercising of corrective powers, including the imposition of substantial administrative fines which are deemed to be “effective, proportionate and dissuasive” and reflective of the nature and extent of the infringements involved help to bring a satisfactory closure to this matter. “Digital Rights Ireland utterly refutes the DPC’s assertion that “a decision has not actually been made yet by the DPC in relation to this complaint,” a spokesman told us. Referring to the DPC’s letter, he added: “We see no ambiguity there. This letter states the DPC’s findings in the paragraph ‘Your complaint’. The last sentence signals that the letter is intended to close the matter. If this isn’t a decision, we don’t know how we’d be supposed to recognize one. “The idea that this letter did not represent a decision only became the DPC´s position when the DPC found out they were being sued.” Despite Meta being fined a couple of hundred million over this data-scraping breach it arguably dodged a far bigger bullet here — since it has not had to inform the circa 100M EU-based users that it breached their security and exposed their data. (While litigation for damages on a pool of some hundred million affected users could get considerably more expensive if successful.) One thing is clear: For a company which made over $33.6B in 2021 alone by mining people’s data to sell their attention to advertisers, a fine of $275M is the proverbial ‘parking ticket’/cost of doing business — which can be written off as a business expense. Whereas reputational damage — which has the potential to drive users away and so reduce engagement with Meta’s services — poses a far more meaningful threat to its attention-sapping business model, before you even consider the litigation damages liability risk. Conveniently for Meta, the tech giant has so far been able to contain damage over this massive data-scraping episode to a few media reports — and to some reporting of the fine itself — instead of having to communicate with every single one of the users personally affected by having their information scraped and exposed online. Although we understand Meta is appealing the DPC’s enforcement, regardless. Discussing DRI’s lawsuit, which is being lodged in the Circuit Court in Ireland — and targets Meta and the DPC both, with the claim that “justice has been denied” to victims of the data breach — its chair, Dr TJ McIntyre, told TechCrunch: “The data breach point is just one part of a wider complaint that they didn’t make an adequate decision overall with regard to our complainants. The central argument with regard to a security breach is that it makes no sense to say that there’s a notifiable breach if somebody picks the lock but not if you don’t bother locking the door to begin with; i.e. a failure to apply security is a breach, not merely inadequate security.” “Whether it is a notifiable data breach is in one sense relatively unimportant — it doesn’t affect the fact that there was a violation of duty. However a finding on this point would be helpful in establishing liability towards the individuals affected,” he added. Meta and the DPC were contacted for comment on DRI’s lawsuit. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment. But we understand the company has yet to receive any filings or legal papers regarding the DRI’s case. The DPC’s deputy commissioner, Graham Doyle, sent the following statement: It will be appreciated that we cannot comment on the substance of matters that are now before the courts. For information, however, you may wish to note that a decision has not actually been made yet by the DPC in relation to this complaint. It is acknowledged that DRI takes a different view on this point. The DPC continues to attract criticism over its approach to enforcing GDPR against tech giants and the DRI’s lawsuit joins a variety of legal actions and accusations fired at it since the regulation came into application — which run the gamut from complainants about time wasting and wasted resources, to narrowly scoped or simply non-existent (i.e. never opened) enquiries following complaints, to legal challenges accusing it of inaction and even alleging criminal corruption. It routinely defends itself — arguing its dealing with a large workload that often involves complex cases that require full attention to due process to minimize the risk of decisions being overturned on appeal. Depending on what happens with this latest legal challenge over the Facebook data-scraping breach the lawsuit could have wider significance beyond Meta itself — in relation to other GDPR complaints being decided by the DPC that hinge on whether there’s a breach of security — such as a major complaint against Google’s role in real-time bidding (which, more broadly, implicates the third party tracking ad industry as a whole) that the DPC has been formally considering since but still hasn’t decided or enforced. , complainants in that case sued the Irish regulator for inaction over what they’ve dubbed “the largest data breach ever”. It remains to be seen what the DPC will decide on that (separate) GDPR complaint. But the wider point here is there could be a risk of a GDPR enforcement loophole if sloppily designed systems that are insecure by design — accidentally or even, potentially, cynically and systematically — are allowed to provide a route for data processors to avoid broader security breach liability under the GDPR. There is also an interesting comparison to be drawn with the , which made global headlines back in 2018 — and which Facebook has always strenuously denied represented a breach of user data. Yet it was, similarly, an insecure design — in that case of its developer platform — that led to data on hundreds of millions of users being extracted from Facebook without the knowledge or consent of the vast majority of the affected users in that earlier event. The “rogue” actor Facebook accused of perpetrating the Cambridge Analytica data heist was an app developer who had agreed to its developer T&Cs. And the company was accused by the developer, Aleksandr Kogan, of not really having T&Cs as a result of the company not taking actions to ensure its terms were actively being enforced. That major global data scandal predated the application of the GDPR — but it’s interesting to speculate what kind of enforcement Facebook would have faced had the episode fallen under the EU regulation. And whether or not Ireland’s DPC would have deemed Cambridge Analytica a security breach or just another failure of data protection by design.
|
Are Arm and Ant Group’s derailed exits back on track?
|
Anna Heim
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Group saw after news over the weekend that founder Jack Ma would relinquish control of the Alibaba affiliate once known as Alipay. These jumps may seem like a paradox, as Ma’s near disappearance from public view is not exactly encouraging for Chinese entrepreneurs or . However, as we have explored recently in a different context , markets hate uncertainty — and Ma’s downfall had been way too long for their taste. As you may recall, things turned sour for Ant Group two years ago, when its IPO plans were . What followed was a long period of turmoil not only for Ant, but also for its founder and Chinese fintech as a whole.
|
TechCrunch+ roundup: New success metrics, M&A timeline, 5 cloud trends for 2023
|
Walter Thompson
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
You don’t need to be an economist to appreciate the myriad forces placing downward pressure on startups today. Setting aside the legions of investors keeping their powder dry, is your yearly revenue growing faster than the inflation rate? What percentage of your sales team has experience working during a downturn? Amidst the angst, there’s some good news: Investors are adjusting expectations to meet the new reality, which means “ ,” predicts Lonne Jaffe, managing director at Insight Partners. Instead of chasing growth like a plant reflexively bending toward the strongest light, he says founders should prioritize more meaningful “efficiency metrics,” such as: Looking ahead, he recommends that founders start considering M&A options now before a predicted wave of consolidation hits the private markets in the coming months and also examines why startups in “areas of tangible innovation” like generative AI will have a “relatively” easy time fundraising. “We’re entering 2023 with a great number of known issues and a constrained ability to forecast what’s ahead,” says Jaffe. “One thing’s for certain, though: This year will be more about nailing it than scaling it.” Thanks very much for reading, Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
/ Getty Images I’ve worked with many early-stage founders, and they all had one thing in common: Each was absolutely, completely convinced that they could successfully build and scale our company. In reality, “not all companies are best positioned to go it alone, and that’s okay,” writes Vishal Lugani, general partner and co-founder at Acrew Capital. In a detailed guide to the M&A process, Lugani offers a week-by-week deal timeline that breaks down every step between sourcing offers and post-close integration. A lot can happen over the months it can take for a deal to close, so the article includes strategies for selecting an acquirer, maintaining product momentum and managing your team (and investors!). / Getty Images “Everything else being equal, embedded banking startups and new fintechs will live and die on the basis of the user experience they provide,” says Peter Hazlehurst, CEO and co-founder of Synctera. Because so many fintech investors are seeking startups that already have “concrete customer traction,” Hazlehurst shares proven tactics for gathering user feedback that can help companies get an MVP out the door in weeks instead of months. “By drilling down to a lean, mean, meaningful MVP, startups can position themselves to reach the next leg of their journey,” he writes. / Getty Images Despite the downturn, Gartner estimates that global IT spending will reach $4.6 trillion this year, a year-over-year increase of 5.1%. Josh Berman, president of C2C Global, has identified five trends that cloud technology startups should keep in mind as they create product, fundraising and hiring plans for the new year. “The promise of these technologies is too significant to ignore,” writes Berman. Getty Images The global equity crowdfunding market slowed in 2022, but it certainly did better than venture funding, reports Rebecca Szkutak. Even though crowdfunding fell from $486 million in 2021 to $426 million last year, “I’ve seen a lot more Y Combinator companies, Techstars and venture-backed companies,” said Krishan Arora, CEO and founder of the Arora Project. “They look at it for getting another $2 million, $3 million, in a bridge round,” he said. “There is more higher quality deal flow trickling into this space.”
|
Qarnot creates green data centers by putting servers in central heating boilers
|
Romain Dillet
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
Running a data center means that you have to find innovative ways to manage heat from the servers. And French startup is standardizing its process to reuse fatal heat and turn it into an asset. While the startup has been around for a while, Qarnot now wants to reach the next level. It has raised a €12.5 million funding round ($13.3 million at today’s exchange rate). It has also negotiated a €22.5 million credit line ($24 million) to finance its future projects. Société Générale Ventures, ADEME Investissement, Demeter, la Banque des Territoires and Colam Impact are participating in today’s funding round. Qarnot started with electric heaters for construction companies looking for heaters for their new buildings. The company put servers in those heaters so that CPUs and other components would generate heat. The rest of the heater would act as a passive cooling system and warm residential and office buildings. At the other end, companies such as BNP Paribas, Société Générale and 3D animation studio Illumination are renting those servers for their own needs. This is an innovative way of building decentralized data centers. “Ever since we launched Qarnot 12 years ago, our goal has been to valorize fatal heat from computers. Today, it’s a hot topic and there are a lot of people talking about it,” co-founder and CEO Paul Benoit told me. But the main issue with this system is that you don’t need a heater all year round. Qarnot has found a way to counter this seasonality effect by building a new product — . These modules pack up to 12 servers with a standard form factor based on Open Compute Project server designs with AMD Epyc and Intel Xeon CPUs. Each module is then connected to the water system so that cold water enters the module and is turned into hot water. Up to 95% of computer waste heat is turned into hot water. I asked about the seasonality of central heating boilers. And it turns out that heating networks work all year round. For instance, they produce hot water, which is always required. “We want to tackle the baseload. We’re going to run all year round and the heating network is going to rely on a complementary source,” Benoit said. Buildings or neighborhoods are still going to use electricity or natural gas directly for those cold winter nights. Qarnot can provide multiple modules and make them work in parallel. It generates more hot water and it increases the total compute power of the Qarnot platform. “The idea is that we should be able to deploy data centers in locations where people consume heat. It’s a completely different approach compared to traditional data centers,” Benoit said. Qarnot Clients include social landlords, property developers, local authorities, swimming pools and heating network operators. Qarnot already rolled out a pilot data center in Finland with 100kW of compute. It’s a small data center, but the company is already looking at other locations with 500kW up to a few MW of compute capacity. “With our system, you don’t need a cooling system and we can sell the heat that is generated from our servers. In the data center industry, when you have servers that require 1kW, they also require up to 500W in air conditioning,” Benoit said. And this is key to understanding Qarnot’s appeal. From a business perspective, Qarnot uses electricity in two different ways. It runs computers and it sells heat, which is great for the company’s bottom line. From an environmental perspective, Qarnot greatly improves the carbon footprint of data centers. “We think the future looks like a plethora of mid-sized data centers. Edge computing is slowly showing up. Today, we don’t really know how it’s going to look like but we know that there are operators looking for hundreds of data centers with a few kilowatts of capacity,” Benoit said. Qarnot could profoundly change the data center industry. If the company becomes massively successful, there would be no reason to construct dedicated buildings to host hundreds of thousands of computers anymore. Qarnot
|
Making sense of Coinbase’s post-settlement stock bump
|
Anna Heim
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
things about Coinbase yesterday: First, the U.S. crypto exchange will have to for failing to conduct adequate background checks. And second, its jumped 12% in the aftermath of the news. (It’s since moderated, trading at $34.10 per share at the time of publication, roughly in line with where it traded at the very end of last year and the very beginning of this one.) The $100 million sum is the conclusion of a settlement with the New York State Department of Financial Services, which had been investigating the company for violating anti-money laundering laws and other legal requirements. Among other things, regulators found that “Coinbase’s compliance system failed to keep up with the dramatic and unexpected growth of Coinbase’s business, and, by the end of 2021, was overwhelmed, with a substantial backlog of unreviewed transaction monitoring alerts, exposing its platform to risk of exploitation by criminals and other bad actors.” While it seems baffling that Coinbase’s stock would be up after what looks like bad news, it is important to keep in mind that markets revolve around expectations. Anything that is anticipated, whether good or bad, is already taken into account — priced in — when valuing a company. In Coinbase’s case, that it is getting fined is not a surprise. The company disclosed that this investigation was in progress in its annual 10k filing in 2021. From the stock market’s perspective, the main piece of news is that the investigation, and uncertainty around it, is finally coming to a close.
|
Data observability startup Metaplane lands investment from YC, others
|
Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
The need for data observability, or the ability to understand, diagnose and orchestrate data health across various IT tools, continues to grow as organizations adopt more apps and services. (Nearly 10% of businesses now have more than 200 apps to manage, according to a recent Okta .) In a large-scale of IT decision makers published last September, 75% of the respondents said they expected to increase their observability spend in 2022 “significantly” to better plan, deploy and run software. Observability tools to capture and analyze IT tool data aren’t new — and these days, they’re raising a respectable amount of capital. , whose platform uses machine learning to infer what data looks like and assess its impact, became a unicorn last May with $135 million in funding. Rival confirmed its unicorn status with a new round of funding — $150 million — also in May. Other observability vendors with substantial backing behind them include , , , and . That might sound like a lot of competition. But it’s not deterring Metaplane, a data observability startup founded by MIT graduate Kevin Hu (CEO), former HubSpot engineer Peter Casinelli and ex-Appcues developer Guru Mahendran in 2020. The three co-founders originally launched Metaplane as a “customer success” product that analyzed a company’s data to prevent churn. After going through Y Combinator, and with the pandemic hitting, Metaplane pivoted but continued to build data analytics-focused tools. “After several of the tools we built couldn’t be adopted by prospects due to data quality issues, we realized we could apply many of the learnings from software observability to help data teams find out about these issues early,” Hu told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Every day, executives are making decisions based on data that is incorrect. Having more trust in data saves time and money for the executive, data team, and company.” App integrations in the Metaplane interface. Metaplane “Every ‘monitor’ we apply to a customer’s data is trained on its own. Unlike most anomaly detection schemes that are built on Meta’s Prophet library, we have our own proprietary approach that we’ve proven to be more effective for this domain given that we can observe data very regularly and can make assumptions based on the type of data being monitored.” (For context, Prophet is an open source algorithm for generating time-series statistical models, which are often used to forecast events.) Metaplane also attempts to establish lineage from data in a data warehouse — the systems used for reporting and data analysis — and notify stakeholders of issues via their tool of choice (e.g. Slack, PagerDuty, email). From those tools, users can mark any alert as an expected change and Metaplane will learn over time, Hu said. “Metaplane is the Datadog for Data,” he added. “Data teams at high-growth companies use our observability platform to save engineering time and increase trust in data by understanding when things break, what went wrong, and how to fix it — before an executive messages them about a broken dashboard.” Hu says that Metaplane is currently being used by more than 140 teams at companies, including Imperfect Foods, the aforementioned Appcues and Reforge. That uptake attracted the attention of investors, apparently, including Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, Flybridge Capital Partners, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah. Metaplane recently closed an $8.4 million seed funding round from those and other backers, the company announced today. Hu says that it’ll be put toward investing in platform integrations and discovery features. “With strong traction that proves the self-serve model can work, we felt now was the right time to raise,” Hu said. “We plan to invest in … creating resources that can help data engineers find us.” Metaplane Hu didn’t answer questions about revenue, but said that Metaplane, which has a team of 10 employees, hasn’t yet faced roadblocks due to the broader tech slowdown. He attributes the success in part to Metaplane’s freemium model, which lets customers sign up for self-serve service and then opt to purchase a premium subscription. “Our price points slip below budget freezes and allow us to win deals against our competitors, who must price the cost of their sales teams,” Hu continued.
|
IonQ acquires quantum networking specialist Entangled Networks
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
, the trapped ion quantum computing company that via a SPAC in late 2021, today announced that it has acquired , a Toronto-based startup that helps industrial and academic users build and optimize multi-quantum-processor solutions, using specialized networking techniques. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. This marks IonQ’s first acquisition and it comes shortly after the company signed a to provide quantum solutions to the United States Air Force Research Lab. Maryland-based IonQ says this acquisition will now also give it a foothold in Canada and that the Entangled Networks team will help it work on next-gen quantum architectures. IonQ/Entangled Networks “In acquiring the Entangled Networks assets, IonQ will benefit from not only some of the top experts in quantum architecture, but also from software tools that we intend to use to drive substantial speed-ups in our system performance,” said IonQ president and CEO Peter Chapman. “We are also excited about the opening of IonQ Canada. This expansion will help us better support the thriving quantum computing community in Canada and further our collaborations with IonQ partners and customers.” Entangled Networks never announced any institutional funding round, but it was by the Jerusalem-based investment platform . According to its homepage, it also counts the likes of Canada’s , and , as well as Microsoft, Nvidia and IBM Quantum among its partners. IonQ As its name implies, Entangled Networks focused on networking multiple quantum computers — something the industry as a whole is starting to focus on, too, with Amazon, for example, recently a new initiative that focuses on quantum networks. At least at first, it’ll likely take multi-processor networks to achieve some of quantum computing’s promises, after all. Given the nature of quantum computers, it’s possible to entangle qubits across cores, but it takes a special kind of network to make that happen. IonQ says its quantum networking technology is currently under development and that it expects to show an early version of its system that can connect two quantum computers in 2023. The company’s flagship quantum computer, the IonQ Aria, currently offers 25 algorithmic qubits, with the next-gen offering up to 32 qubits. “We believe IonQ is a clear market leader, both commercially and in system performance, which is why our team is so excited to join forces,” said Aharon Brodutch, co-founder and CEO of Entangled Networks. “We are ready to work on amplifying IonQ’s quantum computing solutions to bring even more powerful applications to our customers.”
|
Microsoft partners with AiFi to launch Smart Store Analytics, a tracking service for cashierless outlets
|
Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
In partnership with , a startup that aims to enable retailers to deploy autonomous shopping tech cost-effectively, Microsoft today launched a preview of a cloud service called Smart Store Analytics. A part of Microsoft’s Cloud for Retail product suite, Smart Store Analytics provides retailers using AiFi’s technology with shopper and operational analytics for their fleets of “smart stores.” AiFi’s “smart stores” are grocery stores, sports stadiums and convenience stores equipped with cameras that track what customers pick up and place in their carts, automatically charging their payment cards when they’re ready to check out. It’s similar to Amazon’s tech; digital video captured by AiFi’s cameras feed a computer vision algorithm that recognizes shoppers’ behaviors, including when they pluck individual products from the shelves. Once installed, Smart Store Analytics — which was also co-developed by Zabka Polska, a chain of Polish convenience stores — pulls store data from the AiFi platform to deliver insights that let retail managers better adjust store layouts and inventory. Smart Store Analytics shows how much customers shop, interact with products and move through aisles, displaying foot traffic as a heat map and tracking how much money each customer spends on average. The service also plots how long customers dwell in front of certain displays and the “unit sales-to-shopper height” ratio to help dial in on optimal shelf placements. It might sound like a lot of personal data Smart Store Analytics is collecting. But Microsoft and AiFi claim that the service doesn’t use facial recognition or biometrics, only creating a virtual avatar of customers as they enter retail stores. With Smart Store Analytics, AiFi will handle store setup, logistics and support while Microsoft will deliver models for optimizing store payout, product recommendations, inventory and so on. Żabka plans to use Smart Store Analytics in its 50-plus “Nano” stores to predict individual store demands, build ordering schedules for replenishment and react faster when a product is out of stock. AiFi’s autonomous in-store tracking tech in action, with avatar stand-ins for real shoppers. AiFi “Digital technology is what will make the difference between retailers that thrive during this period of economic, societal and technological change, and those that get left behind,” Shelley Bransten, CVP of worldwide retail and consumer goods industries at Microsoft, said in a statement. “Honestly, there’s not a retailer out there who doesn’t want to reimagine the store experience, but until now it’s not really been possible.” Why’s Microsoft working with AiFi as opposed to rival startups like , , , and ? Besides being an Azure customer, AiFi’s market share could well have something to do with it. The California-based company claims to be the world’s largest provider of autonomous shopping solutions, with a platform that’s deployed in 100 retail spaces across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. In addition to having autonomous shopping tech in grocery stores, AiFi’s brought it to college campuses, sports venues and workplaces, including the Miami Dolphins stadium and the University of Denver; over 800,000 shoppers have used it to make 1.5 million purchases to date. “Our platform is way more flexible than a lot of our competition because we don’t have to touch the shelves at all,” AiFi CEO Steve Carlin said in a press release. “You can take a space that already exists and retrofit it. And you can move the shelves. You can’t do that with weight sensors, which require digging a trench in the floor, running cable to the shelf and electrifying the shelf. And once you’ve done that, that shelf isn’t moving.” Interestingly, Microsoft was once developing a Just Walk Out-like system for tracking what people place in their shopping carts. The effort seemingly bore fruit in Dynamics 365 Connected Store, Microsoft’s service that uses a combination of computer vision, cameras and Internet of Things sensors to spotlight customers inside stores and personalize recommendations based on their behaviors. Microsoft’s explorations in the space make sense given that so-called cashierless checkout systems stand to become quite a lucrative venture in the coming years. A 2017 report from Juniper Research that automated checkout systems would process more than $78 billion in transactions by 2022 across as many as 5,000 retail outlets. Juniper estimated that these technologies would drive an average increase in revenue of more than $300 per shopper per year, in part because they’d allow store associates to provide more personal service. In a separate survey published in 2019, RBC Capital Markets that Amazon’s cashierless Amazon Go stores bring in about 50% more revenue on average than typical convenience stores. The average Go store generates an estimated $1.5 million in revenue a year (excluding days when they’re closed), according to RBC, while a regular convenience store of the same size brings in just over $1 million a year in sales.
|
2023 will bring crisper methods for evaluating startup success
|
Lonne Jaffe
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
most active 12 months ever for venture investing did not carry over well into 2022, to say the least. As interest rates and inflation spiked, geopolitical challenges arose and the economy began trending downward, fundraising slowed dramatically throughout the year. But if 2022 was a year of paradigm-shifting dynamics, 2023 will be a year when we’ll determine the winners and the losers — and more importantly, when crisper methods for evaluating success will emerge. The tech ecosystem has seen a few downturns (though none were meaningful) since cloud computing emerged as a dominant trend over a decade ago, but inflation is a new beast for many of us. It’s been 30 years since inflation was a tangible, real-world macroeconomic consideration. When inflation is at 7%, if you aren’t growing by at least that much, you are shrinking. In tandem with inflation, the demand curve is being whipsawed — we first saw a period of strong product growth driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, and now we’re seeing budgets and spending being tightened as startups and mature companies alike prepare to weather the storm. We’re entering 2023 with a great number of known issues and a constrained ability to forecast what’s ahead. One thing’s for certain, though: This year will be more about nailing it than scaling it. In this environment, investors will look for efficiency metrics like high gross margins, strong gross retention rates (how many customers continue to subscribe each year), rapid expansion within customers, decreasing customer acquisition costs, shorter sales cycles and productive sales reps. Gross retention, in particular, will be critical, because companies must be able to retain customers to stabilize their 2023 growth plans. In a difficult budget environment, high gross retention rates can be a strong signal that customers love your products and get real value from them. Investors are also watching the path to break-even based on the current balance sheet — via metrics such as cash burn as a multiple of net new annual recurring revenue. Assuming you have high gross retention rates, it may make sense to burn cash, but it won’t if you are burning more capital than the amount of new business accrued. As growth rates decline, many companies are slashing burn rates accordingly, resulting in a wave of layoffs even at companies with strong balance sheets and market positions.
|
5 cloud trends to track in 2023
|
Josh Berman
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
, 2022 was a year of growth for the cloud technology space. Unpredictable macroeconomic developments saw many organizations thinking about and preparing for greater wins in the years to come instead of right away. In 2023, much of this preparation could come to fruition as the growth achieved in 2022 contributes to a stronger economy and rapid advancements, particularly in tech. Global IT spending is projected to climb by 5.1% to $4.6 trillion in 2023, according to , driven by a 11.3% increase in investments in cloud applications to $879.62 billion. What does this kind of increased spending and investment mean for organizations? C2C Global, a Google Cloud customer community, has identified five cloud trends to watch in 2023. Every organization wants to harness the many and varied capabilities of AI and ML technology. Some want to use their data to enhance analytics and build predictive models, and others want to automate repeatable processes. Currently, many AI and ML models require extensive testing and training before they can be implemented at scale across large organizations hosting petabytes of data or serving wide customer bases. In fact, C2C’s has found that only 47% of respondents are currently using AI and ML. However, these technologies ranked high among the ones that respondents hope to adopt in the future. The promise of these technologies is too significant to ignore. As models are refined, and training and testing become more reliable and automatic, organizations will come to rely on these technologies more.
|
A flat year for crowdfunding isn’t a bad sign at all for early-stage startups
|
Rebecca Szkutak
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
crowdfunding market was unable to top 2021’s record-setting year. But despite seeing lower investment volume, it fared quite a lot better than venture capital did in the same time frame. Founders looking to raise extension or bridge financing should take note. Back in , it looked like equity crowdfunding — a funding route that allows startups to raise from unaccredited investors through and filings, among others — was on track for its best year yet. According to the Arora Project, more than $215 million was raised through the first half of 2022, surpassing 2021’s H1 total of $200 million. At the time, Krishan Arora, the CEO and founder of the Arora Project, which curates and tracks these deals, and Nick Tommarello, the founder of crowdfunding site WeFunder, both said that they noticed growing momentum for the strategy in 2022.
|
Daily Crunch: In an all-cash transaction, private equity firm buys insurtech startup Duck Creek for $2.6B
|
Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
Welcome to the beginning of the week. My thumb got smashed in my standup waffle iron while I was cleaning it this morning, so it can only get better from there, right? Anyway, here’s what’s in store for today. — Attention has our attention. The company raised $3.1 million to continue developing its technology, which combines artificial intelligence with natural language processing by automatically filling in customer relationship management forms and drafting follow-up emails, writes. Here’s four more for you: / Getty Images Despite the downturn, Gartner estimates that global IT spending will reach $4.6 trillion this year, a year-over-year increase of 5.1%. Josh Berman, president of C2C Global, has identified five trends that cloud technology startups should keep in mind as they create product, fundraising and hiring plans for the new year. “The promise of these technologies is too significant to ignore,” writes Berman. Two more from the TC+ team: takes us streaming service by streaming service to show us what each has . However, if you’re trying to get Disney+ Basic on Roku, you may have to wait a little longer. And we have five more for you:
|
Max Q: Hitting the ground running
|
Aria Alamalhodaei
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
Hello and welcome back to Max Q! We’re hitting the ground running at TC HQ, and it seems the space industry is, too — there was a lot of news, which means a lot to get to in this issue! Read on for more. In this issue: In-space transportation startup will head to orbit aboard a SpaceX rideshare mission later this year, as it seeks to prove out its orbital maneuvering and servicing technology for the first time. While there’s always major pressure before an inaugural demonstration, there will likely be more eyes on Impulse’s mission than usual. That’s not least because the startup is headed by Tom Mueller, SpaceX’s former head of propulsion, a formidable engineer who led the development of the Merlin engine that powers the Falcon 9 rocket — the very rocket Impulse will use to reach space. Impulse will first send its first orbital service vehicle to space to test its propulsion, payload delivery and hosting, software, communications and maneuvering capabilities. That spacecraft, called Mira, will hitch a ride on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 rideshare mission in the fourth quarter of this year, the company announced today. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images SpaceX launched more than 100 payloads to orbit on a Falcon 9 last Tuesday, the sixth mission of its small-sat rideshare program. But while the rocket company is now an old hand at launches — SpaceX just completed a record year with 61 launches in 2022 alone — for a handful of space startups, Transporter-6 marked a milestone. Those startups include , which is conducting its first space tug mission; , which is providing an inaugural in-orbit tech demonstration; and , which also launched a space tug for the first time. Transporter-6 also carried satellites for Planet Labs and Spire Global, as well as other payloads for scientific, research and commercial customers. Launcher/John Kraus
|
Microsoft acquires Fungible, a maker of data processing units, to bolster Azure
|
Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
In December, suggested that Microsoft had acquired Fungible, a startup fabricating a type of data center hardware known as a data processing unit (DPU), for around $190 million. Today, Microsoft the acquisition but not the purchase price, saying that it plans to use Fungible’s tech and team to deliver “multiple DPU solutions, network innovation and hardware systems advancements.” “Fungible’s technologies help enable high-performance, scalable, disaggregated, scaled-out data center infrastructure with reliability and security,” Girish Bablani, the CVP of Microsoft’s Azure Core division, wrote in a blog post. “Today’s announcement further signals Microsoft’s commitment to long-term differentiated investments in our data center infrastructure, which enhances our broad range of technologies and offerings including offloading, improving latency, increasing data center server density, optimizing energy efficiency and reducing costs.” A DPU is a dedicated piece of hardware designed to handle certain data processing tasks, including security and network routing for data traffic. The approach is intended to help reduce the load on CPUs and GPUs for core computing tasks related to a given workload. Fungible was launched in 2016 by Bertrand Serlet, a former Apple software engineer who sold a cloud storage startup, Upthere, to Western Digital in 2017, alongside Krishna Yarlagadda and Juniper Networks co-founder Pradeep Sindhu. Fungible sold DPUs that relied on two operating systems, one open source and the other proprietary, and a microprocessor architecture called to control flash storage volumes. Fungible managed to raise over $300 million in venture capital prior to the Microsoft acquisition from investors including SoftBank’s Vision Fund and Norwest Venture Partners. But its DPU architecture was difficult to develop for, reportedly, which might’ve affected its momentum. In August, after a failed sale to Meta, the company revealed that it had laid off staff and was scaling back its product portfolio. Increasing competition in the market for DPUs put pressure on Fungible, as well. Nvidia acquired DPU maker BlueField in 2019, while AMD snatched up Pensando late last year. Other rivals included GigaIO, Liqid, Lightbits, VMware’s Project Monterey and Amazon Web Services’ Nitro cards, which provide DPU-like functionality. In Fungible, Microsoft gets DPU tech it could use to bolster Azure — perhaps by selling it as a subscription product or tiered service for block storage. It’s the second data center-centric acquisition in recent months for the tech giant, interestingly, following the of high-speed fiber startup Lumenisity in December. “The Fungible DPU was invented in 2016 to address the most significant problems in scale-out data centers: the inefficient execution of data-centric computations within server nodes,” Fungible wrote in a on its website. “We are proud to be part of a company that shares Fungible’s vision and will leverage the Fungible DPU and software to enhance its storage and networking offerings.” The Fungible team will join Microsoft’s data center infrastructure engineering teams, Bablani said.
|
Generative AI’s Magic Leap
|
Natasha Mascarenhas
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
Welcome back to , the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Now that the weird “remember how to work” week is over, I’m feeling refreshed and ready to take on the year. My goal for this week is to collaborate more, whether that means asking for help or joining forces to tackle a big story. (I needed to say that out loud because it’s easy to play alone in a remote, distributed world). Here’s what we got into for this week’s Monday episode: With that, goodbye until Wednesday! You can follow me on Twitter or on Instagram And, as always, follow Equity on Twitter
|
Jetstream, a Ghanaian e-logistics platform for Africa’s B2B importers and exporters, takes in $13M equity, debt
|
Tage Kene-Okafor
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
R: Miishe Addy (Jetstream Africa CEO). Jetstream Africa
|
Observability platform Chronosphere raises another $115M at a $1.6B valuation
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
The market for cloud native observability tools remains hot. As with so many new technologies, containerization solved a fair number of problems but also introduced its share of new ones, including a lot of added complexity that is, in part, driven by the dynamic nature of this architecture. That’s both its strength and downfall, so it’s maybe no surprise that tools for monitoring these systems are so important — and well-funded. , which had already raised $228 million, including a round at a $1 billion valuation last year, today announced that it extended this Series C round by another $115 million from new investors GV and Geodesic Capital. The company’s new valuation is $1.6 billion. Existing investors Addition, Founders Fund, General Atlantic, Greylock, Glynn Capital and Lux Capital also participated in this round, which The Information earlier this month. The company says its current list of users includes the likes of DoorDash, Zillow and Visa, with Robinhood, Obsidian Security and Astronomer also now using its service. Last September, the company that it had tripled its Annual Recurring Revenue and employee count in the preceding 12 months. “This funding underscores the crucial market need for powerful cloud native observability solutions to generate positive business outcomes — especially critical now as companies seek more efficient and effective ways to improve customer experiences,” said CEO and co-founder, Martin Mao. “We plan to use this latest investment to bring our forward-looking observability solution to the broader market as we continue to disrupt legacy solutions that provide too little, too late for too much cost.” In a recent , the company argued that it could save its customers an average of $4.9 million over three years and that it allowed them to consolidate half of their legacy observability tools. It’s always worth taking these vendor-sponsored reports with a grain of salt, but in the current economic climate, startups that can help enterprises save money are obviously at an advantage. This is obviously a very competitive market, with everybody from AppDynamics, New Relic, Dynatrace, Instana and dozens of other startups vying for customers — and a fair share of open source projects like OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Prometheus and Jaeger offering some of the core capabilities for building new ones, too. Chronosphere says it will use the new funding to “support continued innovation and go-to-market efforts for its market-leading cloud native observability platform.” “In a cloud-native world where businesses are looking for both efficiency and effectiveness, there’s a dire need for organizations to get observability right,” said Sangeen Zeb, partner at GV. “Chronosphere has cracked the code to tame the data deluge in complex environments and provides better tools that quickly sift through the most meaningful data for better customer experiences and business outcomes.”
|
Khosla Ventures goes after $3B in new funds
|
Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
Despite a slowdown in deploying venture capital, U.S. venture capital firms had few problems attracting capital for new funds in 2022. We now have a new opportunity to see if this trend will continue: Khosla Ventures is raising about $3 billion across three new funds, according to regulatory filings. The firm, founded by Vinod Khosla in 2004, plans to raise , and . Trying to go after such a large chunk of change is not unusual for Khosla Ventures, if last year told us anything. The firm raised after taking in $1.4 billion for its Fund VII. Current VC chatter seems to say that many firms may not be able to raise their next fund. However, unlike other VC firms, Khosla does have decent returns. It invested in companies like Affirm, Square, DoorDash. It also has a stake in both Instacart and OpenAI. As mentioned, this comes at a time when VC firms are doing well attracting money for new funds. We reported that across 593 funds through the third quarter of 2022. Overall, firms raised a record across 767 funds for the year even as , suggesting firms will continue this pattern of slowing down deployment of capital in 2023.
|
Startups set to go to space for the first time on SpaceX’s Transporter-6 mission
|
Aria Alamalhodaei
| 2,023 | 1 | 2 |
SpaceX is poised to launch 114 payloads to orbit on a Falcon 9 tomorrow morning, the sixth mission of its small-sat ride-share program. But while the rocket company is now an old hand at launches — SpaceX just completed a record year with 61 launches in 2022 alone — for a handful of space startups, Transporter-6 marks a milestone. Those startups include , which is conducting its first space tug mission; , which is providing an inaugural in-orbit tech demonstration; and , which is also launching a space tug for the first time. Launcher CEO Max Haot told TechCrunch that the company realized there was a big market opportunity to develop a space tug after SpaceX debuted its ride-share program, which dramatically lowered the cost of launch. Launcher’s tug, called Orbiter, will deploy or host payload for 10 separate customers. The company is also developing a small launch vehicle; Orbiter will be its third stage. Space tugs are filling a market segment for customers who need a specific orbit but want to pay less than the cost of a dedicated rocket launch, Haot said. “There’s always a need eventually for a dedicated rocket if you need a specific orbit at a higher price, and eventually we’ll compete there, but the space tug really helps make these rideshare flights more useful since you can reach more than just one orbit,” he said. Launcher isn’t the only company that has its eye on the emerging space tug market. Epic Aerospace, which bills itself as a space transportation network company, will also be launching a tug on Transporter-6 for the first time. Space services companies Momentus, D-Orbit and Exolaunch will also be deploying or hosting satellites for customers on this mission. It may seem like the space tug market is already crowded with players, but Haot said the ultimate winners are far from decided. Launcher/John Kraus / “If you look at the press reporting, it looks like a lot of companies are building space tugs. But if you look at the customers, this is very new and no one has yet really demonstrated a big transfer capability that’s useful to satellite companies,” he said. Magdrive, a UK-based startup developing a high-thrust spacecraft propulsion engine, will also be going to space for the first time for an in-orbit technology demonstration. The prototype propulsion system will draw in power from onboard solar panels, store it, and discharge it at varying power levels. “The mission lasts 12 months, but we’ll be aiming to try as many charge and discharge options as soon as possible so we get as much data as we can,” Magdrive CEO Mark Stokes told TechCrunch. Transporter-6 is set to take off at 9:56 a.m. EST from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It will be the 15th flight of the Falcon 9 booster dubbed B1060. Transporter-6 will also carry satellites for Planet Labs and Spire Global, as well as other payloads for scientific, research and commercial customers. The launch will be streamed live on SpaceX’s website.
|
Nigerian agritech Releaf gets more capital as it launches new tech for food processing
|
Tage Kene-Okafor
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
SITE developed by Releaf. Releaf
|
Superscript, a bespoke insurance provider for SMEs, raises $54 million
|
Paul Sawers
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
, an insurance broker and tech platform targeting SMEs and “high-growth” tech firms, has raised £45 million ($54 million) in a Series B round of funding. Founded out of London in 2015, Superscript constitutes two core insurance businesses: an online-only “self-serve” platform that’s available to U.K. customers including SMEs, sole traders and landlords, and an advised broking service called that’s available in the U.K. and (EEA). This is targeted at tech businesses with complex risks that are more difficult to insure, such as medical malpractice or professional indemnity, with customers including London-based . As with just about every other sector, the by the global economic downturn, with and all cutting back their headcount over the past year, and publicly traded firms such as Lemonade, Hippo and Root all trading way down. But for every yin there’s a yang, and that the insurtech realm is . Germany’s Wefox last year , while Ohio-based Branch . And now, it’s Superscript’s turn to remind the world that insurtech might be doing just fine after all. But what separates the wheat from the chaff in insurtech — why do some float while others flounder? “Insurance has a more complex value chain than most tech businesses, in that you need to focus on both your acquisition strategy as well as the going performance of the policies that you’re selling,” Superscript co-founder and CEO Cameron Shearer explained to TechCrunch. “While fast-growth in customer numbers is typically seen as a good thing, if the underwriting is not right then claims — in other words, losses — will start to compound over time. If you carry long-term liabilities, then you might not experience the business’s ‘true’ results for a number of years.” Superscript co-founders Ben Rose (chief underwriting officer) and Cameron Shearer (CEO). Superscript Superscript’s underwriting partners include a slew of well-known names from the insurance world, including AXA, Beazley At Lloyd’s, RSA and MS Amlin. And this multi-carrier approach, spanning regions and sector-specific expertise, is partly why Shearer thinks that Superscript is well-positioned to flourish as it looks to scale over the long term. It’s all about providing bespoke coverage for the types of risks that SMEs specifically need. “Historically, many investors have mirrored the tech-investment models and focused on acquisition,” Shearer added. “More recently, now with the hindsight of more mature insurtechs and a number of IPO experiences, we’ve seen investors shifting focus towards underwriting differentiation and strength. Superscript has focused on sustainable growth and quality underwriting from day one to give us more favourable loss ratios. Sophisticated underwriting, tech and data capabilities enable us to provide a highly personalised user and underwriting experience.” From a technology and data perspective, Superscript says it uses “proprietary machine learning technology” to set itself apart, including throughout the acquisition and onboarding process in its self-serve product, which guides would-be customers toward the correct channels. And big data insights is also a big part of its promise, where it uses machine learning models to price its risks “more accurately” through crunching a range of data points. “Other parts of our tech looks at data we’ve collected about the insurance market to assess the probability of where risks are likely to be accepted by insurers and carriers, and what data points are key to a particular insurer’s underwriting process,” Shearer said. “This again drives operational efficiency for both our process and the insurers.” The company had previously raised around $24.4 million, including a roughly raised in 2020. With another $54 million in the bank, the company said that it plans to bolster its underwriting and broking capabilities, and continue investing in its machine learning tooling. While Superscript is limited to the European market, it has longer-term ambitions to become a global player. In fact, it already claims some clients in North America, Australasia and the Middle East, though apparently they are customers who need access to the European insurance markets. Superscript’s Series B round of funding was led by Comparethemarket owner BHL UK, with participation from The Hartford, and Concentric.
|
Indian edtech Unacademy cuts upskilling service to double down on tests product and LinkedIn rival
|
Manish Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Unacademy said on Tuesday that Relevel, its upskilling product, is shifting focus to its tests product and the newly launched LinkedIn-rival NextLevel, the latest in a series of changes from the Indian edtech unicorn as it scrambles to aggressively find the next breakthrough. As part of the move, about 40 people at Relevel will be let go “because of lack of availability of roles,” Unacademy co-founder and chief executive Gaurav Munjal wrote to employees on Tuesday. About 80% of Relevel’s team will be absorbed by other businesses within the Unacademy Group, he said in the note, reviewed by TechCrunch. Those enrolled in Relevel’s cohorts won’t be impacted and the parting team members will be offered severance pay for their notice period and two additional months, said the Indian edtech, which is backed by SoftBank, Tiger Global and Sequoia India. “We are very grateful for the hard work and contributions of the Relevel team. Their hard work and hustle allowed us to scale revenues quickly but unit economics proved challenging,” wrote Munjal. “Our culture is to pursue novel and creative ideas but we are also disciplined about holding ourselves to a high bar to continue the projects we start. Again, this decision doesn’t take away from them their positive contributions especially towards improving the learning trajectory and job prospects of our customers.” The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Unacademy launched Relevel in 2021, hoping to bank on the rising popularity of creators by giving them a platform to launch cohort-based live courses. The product, in which the edtech giant invested over $20 million, crossed $10 million in annualized recurring revenue last year. The startup launched NextLevel, its take on LinkedIn, last month. Unacademy has since last year as the startup has sought to cut costs and become more disciplined. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup “always raised more money than what was needed” to “continuously experiment and grow our platform without worrying about when we will run out of money,” Munjal . “But now we must change our ways. […] Winter is here.”
|
Microsoft partners with India space agency to work with startups
|
Jagmeet Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Microsoft plans to collaborate with the Indian space agency to give Indian space tech startups free access to cloud tools, the two said Thursday, the latest in the U.S. tech giant’s attempts to deepen its ties with young firms in the South Asian market. As part of a memorandum of understanding that Microsoft has signed with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the firm will also provide space tech startups with go-to-market support and help them become enterprise ready, it said. Startups handpicked by ISRO will be onboarded to the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub platform, where they will receive free access to several tools and resources. These tools include help with building and scaling on Azure, as well as GitHub Enterprise, Visual Studio Enterprise, Microsoft 365 and Power BI and Dynamics 365. “ISRO’s collaboration with Microsoft will greatly benefit space tech startups in their analysis and processing of vast amounts of satellite data for various applications, using cutting-edge methods like AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning,” said S Somanath, chairman of ISRO, in a statement. “The Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub is a useful platform for bringing together startups and providers of technology solutions to support the national space technology ecosystem. We are pleased to work together to assist and support entrepreneurs, to in turn benefit the Indian economy as a whole.” Indian space tech startups are having a moment. In June 2020, the Indian government passed the space sector reforms and established the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Center (IN-SPACe) to allow private companies to use ISRO’s infrastructure. The government also set up NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) as the commercial arm of the space agency to work closely with private companies and startups. In November last year, ISRO successfully after much anticipation in a boost to the private sector. The Vikram-S, developed by four-year-old startup Skyroot Aerospace, is a single-stage, spin-stabilized solid-propellant rocket with a mass of around 550 kilograms. It carries three customer payloads, including one from a customer outside India. The South Asian nation has 111 space startups registered on the IN-SPACe platform, per an official response shared in the upper house of the country’s parliament in December. While startups such as GIC-backed Skyroot Aerospace and Rocketship.vc-invested Agnikul are into developing launch vehicles, Blume Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners–backed Pixxel and ANIC-ARISE and Kalaari Capital–invested Digantara are building satellites. Indian space startups raised over $245.35 million, with $108.52 million infused in 2022 alone, according to the data the Indian Space Association (ISpA) shared with TechCrunch. Microsoft has made scores of announcements in India this week as chief executive Satya Nadella visits the South Asian market. The company said earlier this week that HDFC Bank and Yes Bank have signed up to use Azure and other Microsoft cloud services.
|
Attention uses natural language processing to help sales reps sell faster
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
Updating CRMs after each call is an important task for sales representatives, but it means a lot of administrative work that takes time away from actually selling. wants to fix that with its sales assistant, which uses AI tech and natural language processing to automatically fill in CRMs after calls and draft follow-up emails. The New York-based startup announced today it has raised $3.1 million led by Eniac Ventures, with participation from institutional investors Frst, Liquid2 Ventures, Maschmeyer Group Ventures and Ride Ventures. The round also included the founders of Ramp, Pawp, Truework and CB Insights. Attention was founded in September 2021 by CEO Anis Bennaceur and CTO Matthias Wickenburg. The two met while running Swipecast and Mixer, competing job platforms for creative professionals. After five years of being rivals, the two got coffee and realized they face many of the same challenges with sales, like needing to constantly update Salesforce and onboarding new sales reps as quickly as possible. “After many back-and-forths, we decided to work together,” said Bennaceur. “I had hundreds of conversations with sales leaders and junior sales reps, asking about their pain points, digging into potential desired solutions, and continuously iterating, while Matthias would build those solutions in parallel. After numerous iterations, we knew that we were onto something.” One of the things Attention helps with is CRM hygiene, which means making sure CRM software is updated with clean and accurate data. Bennaceur explains this is important because chief revenue officers and vice presidents of sales rely on their organization’s CRM to track interactions with customers, manage leads and analyze sales data. This lets them make decisions on how to increase revenue. But there are several barriers to maintaining CRM hygiene. For one thing, it’s a lot of administrative work for sales reps and takes time away from actually selling. It’s also easy to miss data when sales reps leave their jobs or pass accounts onto other reps. This results in lost leads and customer attrition. Finally, without any way to track what is said during sales calls, revenue leaders have a harder time deciding how to advance potential deals. Attention fixes this by automatically exporting data from calls into CRMs. For example, if a sales team uses the MEDDIC sales methodology, a framework of questions that includes six steps, Attention knows if each step has been covered in a conversation, and exports that information into the relevant Salesforce or HubSpot fields. This reduces the amount of busywork sales reps need to do, while giving revenue leaders more insight into sales leads and revenue opportunities. By using natural language processing, Attention is also able to identify content for sales coaching in calls. During a call, it displays battlecards in real-time to help sales reps figure out what to say. “Let’s say a prospect asks you a question on how to compare your competitor on a specific capability. A battlecard would contain the elements to answer that question appropriately, and appears on your screen during your conversation,” says Bennaceur. To increase deal velocity, or the speed at which a sales organization is able to negotiate and sign contracts, sales teams need to send a lot of emails, quickly. But the followup email templates they often rely on are impersonal, while catered emails sometimes leave out important data, says Bennaceur. Attention is able to draft emails after calls based on what was said during the conversation. For example, a sales rep can ask Attention to “write an email recapping our conversation. Mention our prospect’s challenges and how our product can help them. And talk about next steps.” Attention’s competitors include and , both of which analyze customer conversations. Bennaceur says that Attention’s advantage is its ability to flexibly understand conversations, display real-time prompts during calls and provide A/B testing for its coaching. “We haven’t seen any of these players flexibly export conversations into CRMs, and this is a strong edge that we currently have,” he said. In a statement about the funding, Eniac Ventures’ Hadley Harris said, “We’re thrilled to partner with Anis and Matthias as they leverage the latest developments in AI generation and natural language understanding to superpower sales organizations. We love working with repeat founders and couldn’t be happier with the strong pull they’re already getting from the market.”
|
FLIK’s unified checkout solution gives sellers in Southeast Asia more control over data
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
E-commerce in Southeast Asia is very fragmented, with consumers having their choice of marketplaces, e-commerce sites and social commerce. Many prefer to buy from large marketplaces, says co-founder Ahmad Gadi, because those platforms offer promotions and cash-back deals. But for direct-to-consumer brands, marketplaces aren’t the best way to get consumer data or foster brand loyalty. That’s where FLIK’s unified payment solution comes in. It saves buyers’ checkout information across retail sites in FLIK’s merchant network, making buying easier and leading to higher conversion rates. For brands, it means more control over consumer data and fewer platform fees. Based in Jakarta, FLIK announced today that it has raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding from East Ventures, with participation from Init-6, GMO VenturePartners and Saison Capital. Before founding FLIK, Gadi’s previous startups included , a point-of-sale platform that enables businesses to accept digital payments. FLIK co-founder and CEO Ahmad Gadi. FLIK Gadi told TechCrunch that FLIK’s team is experienced in the payments and merchant business, both offline and online. “We thought that checkout is a very strategic area to build products on, because it is actually the point of entry for money into the business,” he said. “As online sellers in this region are becoming more savvy, they would want to be able to optimize their online business more deeply. We see an opportunity to unify checkout experience because this has always been an area that is difficult to solve outside the typical centralized platforms such as marketplaces.” Because e-commerce and checkout methods are currently so fragmented, it’s hard for brands to consolidate data, Gadi added. By using FLIK, they can gain access to information like potential product upsells that can be offered at checkout based on shoppers’ browsing behaviors, and what types of discounts and promotions they are most interested in. FLIK works with e-commerce sites built with platforms like WooCommerce and Magento, plus social media channels like Instagram shops and chat applications. It can also be embedded into blog articles to turn them into mini e-commerce sites. FLIK plans to add more services, including product discovery, price comparison, rewards and post-purchase services like refund and returns processing. Shoppers can download its app to keep track of their purchases and offers. Gadi says FLIK is currently positioned in a blue ocean space because other players in the D2C enabler space focus on Shopify-like storefront builders. FLIK, on the other hand, focuses on the checkout layer and building a network of shoppers. “Unifying all the fragmented checkout experiences on the web means we could work with all these D2C enablers out there to provide a consistent and optimized checkout layer on top of their existing platforms.”
|
Impulse Space will hitch a ride on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 for first mission later this year
|
Aria Alamalhodaei
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
In-space transportation startup will head to orbit aboard a SpaceX ride-share mission later this year, as it seeks to prove out its orbital maneuvering and servicing technology for the first time. While there’s always major pressure before an inaugural demonstration, there will likely be more eyes on Impulse’s mission than usual. That’s not least because the startup is headed by Tom Mueller, SpaceX’s former head of propulsion, a formidable engineer who led the development of the Merlin engine that powers the Falcon 9 rocket — the very rocket Impulse will use to reach space. Impulse has also raised a notable amount of capital — including $20 million from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and $10 million from Lux Capital — and has swelled to about 60 employees, with nearly a third joining in the past six months. To top it all off, the company announced last summer that it was teaming up with Relativity Space for a very ambitious mission to Mars — — as early as 2024. But before Mars, Impulse will send its first orbital service vehicle to space to test its propulsion, payload delivery and hosting, software, communications, and maneuvering capabilities. That spacecraft, called Mira, will hitch a ride on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 ride-share mission in the fourth quarter of this year, the company announced today. “Our vehicle has more capability than is typical,” Mueller said. For context, Impulse is targeting a Delta-V of 1,000 meters per second at 300 kilograms. The company hasn’t decided how long Mira will spend in space, but it’s planning on demonstrating atmospheric re-entry at the end of mission life. The company is currently signing the primary payload customer and is soliciting additional customers, though they don’t intend on filling up capacity for this first mission. Designing Mira hasn’t been without its difficulties. Minimizing the mass of the chassis has been the company’s biggest challenge, Mueller said. It’s a particularly important metric, as every gram sent to space has a dollar amount attached to it — and that dollar amount can add up quickly. “It’s six dollars a gram to fly,” Mueller said, referring to SpaceX Transporter mission costs. “Even though SpaceX has brought the cost of access so quickly down, that low cost is still six dollars a gram.” Mueller described Mira as a “stepping stone” — he likened it to SpaceX’s Falcon 1, the precursor to the Falcon 9 — to future orbital vehicles Impulse is planning. Those future vehicles will be capable of considerably more propulsive capability, which means the ability to move more mass in the space — like what might be required for in-space manufacturing or space habitats. Those markets don’t exist yet, Mueller said, but this mission, dubbed LEO Express-1, will nevertheless inform these future aspirations. Data from LEO Express-1 will also be useful for the future Mars mission. Both missions will use the same thrusters; they’ll also utilize the same propellants and same components, as well as the same guidance and control systems and other software. Mueller acknowledged that the 2024 target was tight, particularly on the launch vehicle side. Relativity Space said it would use its heavy-lift Terran R rocket for the Mars mission, but it has yet to even fly its smaller Terran 1. If the companies don’t make 2024, they’ll have another opportunity two years later. In addition to preparing for the LEO Express-1 mission and the Mars mission, Impulse is also gearing up to move into a new building that will give the company a 700%+ footprint increase. So far, the company has been working out a 7,000-square-foot building in El Segundo, California, one that has only 24 parking spots for 60 employees. (Mueller joked that people were riding bikes and carpooling to compensate.) But next month, they’ll be moving into a 60,000-square-foot space. Plenty of room to grow for a startup that continues to move fast.
|
Backed by the National Institute on Aging, the a2 Pilot Awards fosters age tech entrepreneurship
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
There are than at any other point in history, and that number is expected to rise, according to the . With longer lifespans come challenges like Alzheimer’s, which about . The were created to encourage the development of tech for the elderly. Funded by the NIA with $40 million over the next five years, the awards announced today the first cohort of 33 projects selected for funding. The majority use artificial intelligence or machine learning tech, and 40% are led by women. Stephen Liu, the managing director of a2 Collective, which oversees the awards, told TechCrunch he hopes it encourages more tech entrepreneurs to get into age tech. “It’s a largely uncontested, growing, future-proof market that will have unprecedented opportunities driven by AI,” he said, adding, “We have two big mega-trends, AI and the demographics of aging and it’s irrefutable that there is a large, growing, massive, future-proof market that they should focus on.” The a2 Collective includes three Artificial Intelligence and Technology Collaboratories (AITC) that the projects will work with. The AITCs are housed at John Hopkins University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Pennsylvania. Most of the 33 pilot projects address cognitive decline, but some are also tackling frailty, comorbidity, delirium, palliative care, social isolation and visual impairment. They will receive a total of over $5 million and projects selected for funding will get up to $200,000 in zero equity grants to cover direct costs over a one-year period. About half of applications for the first awards came from private companies, while others are academic research projects. Many are also collaborations between the private sector and academia. A2 Collective reached out to startups, academic institutions, accelerator programs and venture capital firms focused on healthcare to find applicants. a2 Pilot Awards first cohort “In this particular program, we definitely have an eye towards commercial use, or some kind of commercialization of the project,” said Liu. “Ideally you want to see an impact where it’s going to be used by someone, whether that’s a clinician, older American, caregiver or nurse, in the next several years.” Some examples of projects selected include , which uses music to address symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and related conditions. uses RGB-D depth cameras and thermal computer vision to perform monitoring and telehealth checkups of patients. And is using conversational AI to perform health assessments and detect signs of cognitive impairment and dementia for people in their homes. In addition to the AITCs, a2 Collective’s partnerships also include healthcare systems, clinicians and researchers, venture capitalists and public health institutions that are focused on age tech and elder care. Each AITC decides which projects get funding, and also gives them access to gerontologists, geriatricians, Alzheimer’s specialists and other experts. The idea is to give each project the same kind of mentoring and guidance as pre-seed startups in accelerator programs, Liu said. The second a2 Pilot Awards are already in the works, with the next batch of finalists currently selected. They will be announced in spring. The a2 Collective will also accept applications for its third competition from May 1 to July 31. Liu told TechCrunch he expects to see a dramatic increase in age tech. “As the cost of computing goes down and our AI model capabilities go up, I think we can expect a Cambrian explosion of new technologies that will dramatically help older Americans, including those with Alzheimer’s, live longer and better lives and perhaps help out our beleaguered health care system,” he said. We’re in the early innings of it.”
|
Ecobee CEO and founder speaks to TechCrunch Live about CES, Nest and finding product market fit
|
Matt Burns
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
TechCrunch Live hosted a special, in-person event at CES featuring a long conversation with Ecobee CEO and founder Stuart Lombard. This was our first in-person TechCrunch Live, and I can’t wait to do more. We talked about a lot — how a startup can maximize CES, how to build delightful products and how hardware startups can raise money. Nest loomed large over a part of this interview. While Lombard and Ecobee claim to have produced the first web-connected thermostat, Nest, launched four years after Ecobee, defined the standard. After Nest burst from stealth in 2011, it forced Ecobee to retool its smart thermostat. As Lombard admits, Nest changed the trajectory of Ecobee. “[The Nest thermostat] taught us the difference between wanting to be good and actually being good,” he said, adding later, “It really forced us to retool and think about what it means to be great.” And the early Ecobee products were not great. “We made a lot of compromises along the way,” Lombard said, showing off Ecobee’s first product to the TechCrunch Live cameras. The differences between the first Ecobee and the first Nest are striking: Where the Nest is constructed out of sleek metal and shiny glass, the Ecobee is all plastic. Sure, it worked well but it lacked the same appeal as the first Nest. He says, in short, as a startup, customers need to love your company and products. I hear this sentiment a lot on TechCrunch Live. Great products delight in surprising ways. Where the Ecobee offered similar functionality, Lombard admits it wasn’t until the Nest hit the market that Ecobee developed a world-class user experience and design. I hope you can take the time and watch the show. It’s embedded below, and it’s a must-hear for hardware startups. Trust me, this is one of the best TechCrunch Live events.
|
Senator Mark Warner on cybersecurity, Musk’s Twitter and legislating killer robots
|
Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 8 |
Warner’s first CES rodeo. The senior senator from Virginia was on board with this whole tech thing well before being elected the state’s governor back in 2002. His time at Columbia Capital found him knee-deep in the mobile world during its formative years, including his early support of one-time telecom giant, Nextel. After years away, the CTA invited Warner back to appear on a panel alongside fellow senators Jacky Rosen of Nevada and New Mexico’s Ben Ray Luján. The program was part of a broader, on-going initiate to bring lawmakers to CES, as technology grows ever more central in our lives and the policies that govern them. Warner has, fittingly, made tech a centerpiece of much of the work he’s done in Congress’ upper chamber, from social media accountability to the long-standing technological cold war between the U.S. and China. He also serves as the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and was a of the We sat down with the senator in a Las Vegas Convention Center meeting room, to discuss some of the day’s most important technology concerns, from cybersecurity and TikTok/Huawei to Elon Musk’s Twitter roller coaster and the rise of killer robots. But first, because it’s all anyone was speaking about this week, Kevin McCarthy’s propensity for stepping on rakes on the way to becoming House Speaker. (Note: McCarthy won on the 15th vote, roughly six hours after our conversation.) At CES this week learning about the future of tech to better be able to legislate for tomorrow’s tech landscape. Tried Magic Leap's glasses to see if I could look into the future and find out when we’ll have a Speaker, but turns out they don’t work that way! — Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) I don’t know how he gets out of this. I know him, because I’ve dealt with him as part of the , and frankly, my interactions with him have been fine. [ … ] I’m a little surprised that he’s made all of these concessions he said he wouldn’t make, and he’s not had more push back from the moderates. People, I understand, can be critical of Nancy Pelosi on things, but you could have never have envisioned this kind of scenario happening to her. And the fact that it was the two-year anniversary of January 6. The idea that they’re coming in at 10 p.m. on a Friday night. I started with the interest in politics. I graduated from college, I had no money, and I had done fundraising as a young guy for the Democratic National Committee and Jimmy Carter’s campaign. I remember somebody who went into $300,000 debt after he lost in a race. I couldn’t imagine that. The idea was that, if I’m ever going to have [a political career] as a possibility, I’m going to go and get a financial base first. I failed miserably at two businesses. The third was cell phones, and I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. I think people are trying. The good news is that most of the technology issues don’t fall on a liberal-conservative continuum. My tired phrase is, “it’s more future-past than left-right.” I think that makes it easier at times to find coalitions. With Huawei and the semi-conductor – I’ve been up to my eyes in both of them – that technology competition is national security. If we have a conflict with China, I don’t believe it’s going to be who has the most aircraft carriers and airplanes. It’s going to be who dominates satellites; can you turn off the power? You may never need to get to conflict if you have a communications medium operated by the China Communist Party that has 100 million kids on it, called TikTok. I think people are getting that, and there is a willing bipartisan concern about China and national security. Both make members more willing to learn about technology and realize it’s something that we have to focus on. But it’s been an evolution. Huawei’s a national security threat. Huawei scared me, being a wireless guy. I grew up in a world with Motorola and AT&T and Nortel, Erickson, Nokia, Samsung. You turn around, and all of the North American companies are gone. You suddenly not only have a Chinese company, but you have the Chinese setting the ground rules for the international telecommunications union and all of these standard-setting bodies, which we used to dominate, and then they flooded the zone. We’re starting to tell other countries Huawei’s a challenge. But we didn’t have any alternatives. Yeah. Huawei’s cheap and it’s a soup to nuts solution setup. But one of the things that I think is very positive is that even the European companies that went down the Huawei path are doing some version of rip and replace. I think the awareness that these Chinese companies come with national security risks has grown beyond America. Truthfully, I have probably not thought about it enough. Using technology without some guardrails — I think we make a mistake with the notion of “go out and innovate, break things.” I think that’s created some real issues. It’s one of the issues I’ve made the pitch that we need to be involved in the standard-setting entities around the world. You build your values of transparency or privacy protection. I do think that if you combine technology with AI, you sometimes take the human being out of the decision-making. That scares the dickens out of me. How will you go about legislating those guardrails on the front end? We’re not very good at it. We usually legislate after the fact, and it blows my mind that we still haven’t done a single thing on social media. I’m a big supporter of Elon Musk, especially with SpaceX. Yeah. My concern with him on Twitter is not about putting Trump back on Twitter; it’s because his real source of wealth is Tesla, whether he’s going to be dependent so much on the Communist Party of China in terms of the source of all of his batteries. If you look at the comments he’s made about the regulatory structure in China, it’s all been positive. And the comments he’s made about infrastructure in Europe or America are generally negative. I worry about undo influence. I would be concerned that suddenly Twitter prohibits negative comments about the Communist Party in China. I think you can put some restraints on Section 230. I’m not where a lot of the tech community might be. I support free speech. I think you don’t have the right to necessarily have it amplified eight billion times. Yes. There are some that argue we don’t need additional legislation; they just need a stronger review. I do think that some of the transactions that were allowed could have been precluded. I think, in the long run, it would have made sense. You made the comment that tech companies are virtual utilities. I am of the view — and I’m not an antitrust expert by any means — that consumer price being the only thing. Yeah, but also, how do you measure price? People say “Facebook is free; Google’s free.” It’s not free. I’m not saying it’s morally bad they take our data and monetize it. I’m more squishy than that. But people ought to know what it’s worth. Right, right. It’s crazy to me that we’ve still never had a data privacy law in this country.
|
XetHub raises $7.5M for its Git-based data collaboration platform
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
Seattle-based , a startup that makes it easy for businesses to use Git for data management, today announced that it has raised a $7.5 million seed financing round led by . The basic idea here is to allow developers to work with data the same way they work with code, including all of the collaboration features a tool like Git enables. The team describes XetHub as a “collaborative storage platform for data management.” The company was co-founded by Yucheng Low (CEO), Ajit Banerjee and Rajat Arya, a team with years of experience working with large data platforms. Indeed, Low previously co-founded ML startup Turi, where Arya was the first employee. Apple , allowing Low and Arya to work on various parts of Apple’s ML platform stack, with Arya leading Apple’s data platform team, for example. It was also at Apple that the two met Banerjee, who previously worked at Inktomi, Amazon and Facebook. He also previously founded two startups. XetHub repository view is designed for navigating and visualizing data repositories while keeping GitHub sensibilities. XetHub automatically summarizes common file formats (CSV) and supports custom visualizations. XetHub During their time working on the data platform at Apple, the team realized there was still a lot of room for improvement in the data management realm. “It really shouldn’t come as a surprise, but data is far more important than everything else. More important than the model — than anything else,” Low told me. “Managing where you store this data, how you collaborate on this data is really fundamental. However, what we see is that the way we manage data today really feels like how source code was done 30 years ago — which means version control or collaboration is done by copy-and-paste — sometimes there’s a more elaborate version of it, but it’s still ultimately copy-and-paste if I want to make sure no one else is touching what I’m doing.” Just like developers have moved to tools like Git for collaborating on their source code, XetHub wants to allow them to use these same familiar primitives for working with data. “The way we think about it is that for the first time, we truly enable developers to work on data in exactly the same way as code,” Low said. He noted that the team aimed to create a tool that doesn’t just mimic a Git-like experience but one that preserves the core Git user experience — including all of the integrations that developers are familiar with. XetHub extends Git to support large files, offering efficient storage and transfer with data deduplication while maintaining full Git compatibility. XetHub Currently, the service can handle repositories with up to 1TB of data, with plans to expand this to 100TB soon. Few developers will want to clone a large repository like this, so one nifty feature here is that developers can also mount these repositories and make them behave like a local file system, no matter whether that’s on their laptop or a large GPU cluster. It’s also worth noting that the tool is agnostic to file formats. From a marketing perspective, the team is focusing its efforts on AI/ML teams, but users can obviously use XetHub for managing any kind of data. XetHub is now publicly available with a free community edition that you can use to manage up to 20GB of deduplicated storage. Low tells me the company is already talking to some enterprise customers, but the team isn’t quite ready to name names yet. “Yucheng and the exceptional XetHub team have been innovating with machine learning for well over a decade, and then applying their skills at the most iconic consumer technology company — Apple. XetHub enables developers to work with large datasets, in collaboration with others, to build intelligent and generative applications,” said Matt McIlwain, managing director, Madrona. “Developing and deploying these applications is constrained by legacy infrastructure and complex data workflows, and XetHub addresses these pain points from the developer point of view.”
|
Did you hear? AnkerWork is going after the wireless mic market
|
Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
At this week, AnkerWork announced its brand new AnkerWork M650 Wireless Microphone. It’s a two-microphone kit that can be clipped (or magnetically attached) to your clothing. Perfect for video interviews or improving the quality on Zoom calls. The microphone includes high-quality audio and noise-cancellation technology wrapped up in a compact carry case, which includes a pair of microphones and a USB-C or Lightning receiver. The package delivers up to 15 hours of battery life and can recharge in just 90 minutes. The white cover pictured can be replaced with another color to avoid fashion clashes. The receiver has an LCD display making it easy to configure and use. AnkerWork The receiver is equipped with a high-resolution LCD touchscreen that can be used for adjusting volume and keeping an eye on recording levels in real time. It also includes internal storage that can keep seven hours of uncompressed audio safe. The AnkerWork M650 will be available on and in retail, starting in for . That puts it $70 under the DJI version of its comparable kit, which .
|
Ex-Apple team creates BlenderCap, a delightfully over-engineered portable blender
|
Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
Packing battery tech nobody uses in consumer devices and a half-horsepower motor, is one of the most ludicrously over-engineered products we’ve seen in a hot minute. At , we took a closer look at talked with the team behind the product to find out more. Let’s start with, er, why do we need a portable blender in the first place? “We originally invented this just for personal use for making smoothies after the gym. I was going to CrossFit, and I wanted a protein shake after that. I made myself a shake, and it just got sort of melted and lumpy after you have worked out for an hour or two,” says Dakota Adams, co-founder at the company. “Then the idea came along to put a blender onto these Hydroflask-style bottles. Matthew [Moore] and I became friends and began working on how to pack that technology into a tiny little cap.” At the time, the duo was building a battery factory for Apple in China, working on the blender on the side. About a year ago, the duo quit their jobs at Apple to make the BlenderCap a reality. In the process, they created an absolute beast of a blender. The BlendCap kit, showing off its custom PCB and the batteries soldered directly to the board. TechCrunch/Haje Kamps “W Battery tech is the company’s strength, and the founders ended up using custom batteries with technology that is starting to show up in next-generation electric vehicles. The blender cap weighs around a pound, and it’s super simple: There’s only one button. Press and hold to blend, or double-click to blend for 25 seconds. It charges with USB-C, and the company decided to use the same thread pattern that Hydroflask uses, which means it is compatible with a large number of thermos-like bottles that a lot of people already own. “We sell it as a kit — it comes with a 32-ounce vacuum-insulated bottle that’s dual-wall stainless steel and dishwasher safe. It comes with a BlenderCap, a blade cover and dual-twist cap, which transforms the wide-mouth bottle into a smoothie-mouth,” says Matthew Moore, the company’s other co-founder. “It charges over USB-C, and you can buy it for $129” It isn’t yet possible to buy the blender cap on its own; the company says it’s because it’s trying to keep the number of products it sells manageable. This is where the magic sauce is stored. In this case, “magic sauce” is electricity, obviously. TechCruch/Haje Kamps “In the future, we are probably going to offer it on its own, or with different size bottles etc., using more of a kitting methodology. Right now, just to limit the SKU count and make it simple for launch, we are just selling the one kit,” Moore explains. “We found that a single 32-ounce bottle is what most people wanted in early testing.” Preorders for the kit opened on January 4 and shipping starts late next month. The company says its products are already manufactured; it just has to figure out the logistics of getting it here. Perhaps unusually, Cruz has its own factory building the BlenderCap. “W For its first batch, the company is manufacturing 6,000 of the BlenderCaps and is ramping up to sustainable manufacturing. Everything custom. Because why the hell not. TechCrunch/Haje Kamps The company claims it is going to be profitable from day one and has started to look at what the next generation of products might be. We asked, but the company isn’t quite willing to share what’s next. “We’ve got a secret product coming up,” laughs Adams. “Obviously, this battery tech can go into many different devices, and we have a whole product roadmap and are excited to build out an ecosystem around what we have here, and then other new consumer products. One of the things that we’ve observed in the market is all these DTC brands over the last 10 years came in basically just rebranding cheap Chinese commodity products … a lot of plastic enclosures and just junk. We have this design philosophy that we grew up on at Apple for 10 years of really putting our heart and soul into products. So we’ve got a whole bunch of products coming along the same philosophy: minimalist, super high-end materials. From there, we’ll see where it goes.”
|
This Week in Apps: 2022 in review
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to multiple . Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps. This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more. Apptopia with its full-year retrospective of the top apps globally. The app intelligence firm this week launched 33 top charts based on data from iOS and Google Play combined, except for data from China which is iOS only. The data was collected from Jan. 1 2022 through Dec. 20, 2022. The company even created its own categories to highlight apps that don’t yet have their own app store category — like quick-serve restaurants. (McDonald’s topped Starbucks here.) Overall, the firm found that the top app worldwide was TikTok with 672 million installs. It was followed by Instagram, WhatsApp, CapCut (riding on TikTok’s success), Snapchat, Subway Surfers, Facebook, Stumble Guys and Spotify. Apptopia also chose to this year categorize TikTok as Entertainment, not Social Networking, which allowed it to top Netflix as the most-installed Entertainment app. Besides Subway Surfers, an endless runner that first launched in 2012 (!!), other older games proved to have staying power, like Candy Crush Saga, 8 Ball Pool and Among Us! Apptopia Other highlights include the first-time appearance of SHEIN as the No. 1 Shopping app of the year, after previously ranking No. 2 last year and No. 4 the year prior. Wish, meanwhile, didn’t make the cut. Crypto apps were also absent from the top charts as was China’s Didi, as it was impacted by the country’s zero-Covid policy. However, the token-based plan for Sweatcoin made the workout app the No. 1 Health & Fitness app globally. It will be interesting to compare Apptopia’s data with those from other firms as the 2022 reports begin to arrive. FluentPet
|
Sony and Honda unveil Afeela, Bird Buddy launches a new smart feeder, and Amazon secures an $8B loan
|
Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
Hey, folks, it’s Kyle, filling in for Greg, who’s out for the next few weeks on parental leave. While he enjoys time with his beautiful, healthy newborn (what better gift for the holidays, eh?), I’m learning the ropes of Week in Review to make sure y’all stay up to date with the latest in tech. Hope I do Greg justice — they’re big shoes to fill! Longtime readers know the drill, but for the newbies, WiR aims to pithily recap the past seven days of TechCrunch stories. We publish on the site and send WiR to subscribers’ inboxes every Saturday (sign up if you haven’t already) to make things convenient. Like a buttery croissant, WiR goes great with a morning cup of coffee — or tea, if that’s your preference. Or hot cocoa. Take your pick — no judgment over here. Before we dive into the news, a reminder that the event in Boston is fast approaching. Tickets won’t last — they never do — so get ’em before they’re gone if you’ll be in the Greater Boston area toward the end of April. We’d love to see your smiling face. : The U.S. might be getting all the attention for , but India did it first — two and a half years ago now, in fact. In recent remarks, FCC commissioner Brendan Carr said that the U.S. should follow India’s lead more broadly to “weed out … nefarious apps.” India has besides TikTok, including PUBG Mobile, Battlegrounds Mobile India and UC Browser, with ties to China amid skirmishes at the border of the two neighboring nations. : ‘Tis the season for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which continues to become increasingly car-centric. Case in point, Sony and Honda unveiled Afeela, their joint EV brand, at a flashy press conference on Wednesday, where they rolled a four-door sedan onstage. Preorders of the Afeelas are scheduled for the first half of 2025, the companies said, with sales to begin sometime same year. Initial shipments will be delivered to customers in North America in the spring of 2026. : My colleague wrote an excellent piece about how tech workers, burned by recent layoffs, are reevaluating their relationships with the industry — particularly in light of potentially tumultuous economic times ahead. Some are working multiple full-time jobs in adjacent industries, while others are opting for part-time contracting gigs to make ends meet. Few seem eager to leave tech altogether — but they’re certainly more cynical than they used to be. : Bird Buddy, a startup behind “smart” bird feeders, took the wraps off of its latest model at CES, which caters to hummingbirds. Like its original bird feeder, Bird Buddy’s new feeder — which features recyclable and sustainable materials — has a camera that’s triggered by motion, which prompts it to take photos of bird visitors. Those are then run through an AI algorithm to help identify the species, alerting owners through a companion mobile app. : Sam Bankman-Fried’s not guilty plea to several federal fraud charges was a tactical response, according to experts spoke with. The former CEO of the crypto exchange FTX, whose company collapsed in November, might be buying time to strike a deal with prosecutors, they said. A trial date in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is set for October 2. : Salesforce announced this week that it’s cutting roughly 10% of its workforce, impacting more than 7,000 employees, while it shutters offices in “certain markets.” Similar to other companies hit by significant layoffs over the past year, CEO Marc Benioff said that Salesforce hired too many people through the pandemic during the boom times. The company , a 30% increase on 2020. : Amazon secured an $8 billion loan, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch that the loan adds to the range of financing options the company has tapped in recent months to hedge against the “uncertain macroeconomic environment.” It also comes on the heels of a disappointing year for the retailer, which over-expanded during the pandemic; in its most recent cost-cutting measure, Amazon plans to lay off around 18,000 people. : Speaking of Amazon, at CES, Amazon-owned Ring brought back the Peephole Cam, a camera that fits over existing door peepholes to record goings-on outdoors, in apartment building hallways and so on. Now starting at $129 — down from the original price of $199 — it ships with software that brings its capabilities in line with the rest of Ring’s portfolio, like motion detection and real-time streaming video. Have an appetite for podcasts to kick off the new year? Good, because TC’s serving ’em up like hotcakes. On , I talked with Darrell about CES-related AI product announcements while Natasha spoke on the effects of the mass layoffs in tech. Meanwhile, the crew of , TC’s startup-focused show, took a look at some early standouts from CES, USV and Doorstead’s deals of the week, plus the latest development in the FTX and SBF saga. And last but not least, sat down with Brex co-founder and co-CEO Henrique Dubugras to chat about his corporate credit card and expense management startup. Don’t subscribe to TC+ yet? Shame, ’cause there’s great content coming out of there. Some of the most popular this week were: : It’s been an eventful year in fintech. The market has fallen a long way from the highs of 2021, and while 2022 was largely about the reset of the funding environment, Victoria predicts 2023 is going to be a year of recalibration for fintech companies. Read her thorough piece for more. : Tracy Young, the former CEO of PlanGrid, a construction app for project managers, breaks down PlanGrid’s key failure points and what she’s learned from them over the years. As she says in the opening paragraphs: “If these reflections help even one founder make one less mistake, I would consider this effort worthwhile.” : Rebecca surveyed more than 35 investors working in different geographies, investment stages and sectors about how they were feeling about generative AI — that is, ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and other tech along those lines. Interestingly, while several investors said they were bullish on the new tech overall, they also admitted that the sector was likely to get lost in its own hype.
|
Let’s keep our seed activity expectations in check
|
Anna Heim
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
As 2022 came to a close, I tried to keep my expectations in check: If even Instacart was , I had to gear up for the dearth of tech IPOs to continue in the first quarter or even the first half of 2023. However, seed-stage venture capital activity was one of the things I felt reasonably optimistic about for the new year. Sure, public market woes had trickled down to private dealmaking. But while post-Series A deal count and deal volume were impacted, angel and seed-stage investment activity seemed pretty stable.
|
D’Amelio family’s new footwear line to launch May 2023
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
TikTok stars Charli and Dixie D’Amelio have been working to translate their social media success into a business empire with help from their parents, Marc and Heidi. In addition to brand deals and sponsorships, the famous family has been through a new VC fund, 444 Capital, and to launch their own fashion, beauty and lifestyle businesses, as well. Among the first of these new ventures is a women’s footwear line which is now on track for a May 2023 launch, Marc D’Amelio confirmed in an interview on a panel at the in Las Vegas last week. The panel, which took place at the Variety Entertainment Summit on Friday, revealed how heavily Marc was involved in the management of the D’Amelio family empire, as he handled answering most of the interviewer’s questions about the upcoming branded products and other D’Amelio family ventures. At one point, Dixie even complimented her father’s business-savvy, explaining that “Charli and I always went to my dad for advice on deals and even long-term friendships,” and how “trusting him has been the best thing for both of our careers.” The with $6 million in seed funding and includes Autograph co-chairman and Whip Media co-founder and CEO as an investor and co-founder. Other investors include Apple SVP Eddy Cue, Lions Gate CEO Jon Feltheimer, Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin, and Clothia CEO Elena Silenok. United Talent Agency, which the D’Amelios, is also a backer. The company will have its first board meeting at the end of January, Marc noted. At , Marc explained how merchandise was “low-hanging fruit,” and, when the new products launch, all the family’s intellectual property will be owned by them. “We didn’t try to reinvent the wheel,” he said. “We saw other creators and other people come out and own their brands 100%. So we started this company called D’Amelio Brands where the main focus is finding ideas, concepts and products that we’re passionate about and basically incubating them — and start to create things that we own with our investors 100%.” “We started a footwear company the under the D’Amelio last name, which will be launching in May 2023,” he added. ( had said the debut D’Amelio brands had been set to launch by the end of 2022.) Dixie added that the family was already “pretty far along” in the design process with regard to the new brand initiative, adding that the family attends “almost every meeting” together. The interview only briefly touched on what to expect from the business itself. Marc noted the new footwear brand will include a head designer who was previously a top designer at Jessica Simpson footwear ( ), who was also from the family’s hometown back in Connecticut. Plus, Marc referenced his own history in the fashion industry, having been an independent rep in years past, he said. He also had a showroom in New York as well as his own clothing brand before his daughters’ fame took things in another direction. Despite the plan to try to spin up a D’Amelio brand empire, Marc confirmed the family would continue to do brand sponsorship deals for third parties working with their agents at UTA. To date, the D’Amelio sisters have worked with brands like and hummus, and have a with Hollister. However, Marc explained that the idea with was to set the family up for a future where they could find financial success outside of the content creation business. “…Doing content creation for brands and endorsement deals, you start to get into a hamster wheel,” he said. “They’re not movie stars. They’re not doing a movie and then taking time off. It’s ‘what’s the next deal, what’s the deal, what’s the next deal?’ I think what we’re trying to do is — I’m trying to create businesses that will work; that the girls can start incubating, plant the seed. And then I would love to have it where it can survive without any of us.” For the time being, however, the D’Amelio family is staying busy, and the D’Amelio Brands initiative is only one of several projects the family is involved with. Dixie, for example, is working on her music and just landed a in the current season of “Gossip Girl.” The family is also starting on of their on Hulu, in a deal also brokered by UTA. Dixie admitted they’ve had a “lot of back and forth feelings” about doing the series but ultimately believes that its ability to raise awareness about mental health issues, as related to social media fame, was worth the effort. “We do enjoy doing it because we film the videos, and then we put our phones down. My family and I all talk a lot about mental health and how important that was. To be able to share that journey on the show has been amazing,” said Dixie. “And that’s probably something I love the most — being able to talk to people about — not just, ‘oh, doing TikTok hurts my mental health’ but…being able to realize other people relate to that has made me feel good,” she said.
|
3 views: What does the future of social media look like after Twitter?
|
Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
be overstated, but we still can’t unsee what we saw in 2022. The newly Elon Musk-owned social network could continue zombie-shuffling for months or years for all we know if Elon Musk can scrape together enough advertising revenue to pay the bills — namely, the massive interest on the $13 billion in debt that he saddled the company with in order to buy it. Twitter could also declare bankruptcy and go poof — an outcome that Musk himself has said is very much on the table, and one that’s underlined by Twitter’s recent refusal to pay for everything from . Either way, the chaos has painted an uncertain future for one of the world’s most prominent and long-running social networks. It’s also presented an opportunity to reevaluate how the social media landscape could radically change in light of Twitter’s very tumultuous 2022. Taylor Hatmaker, Amanda Silberling and Haje Jan Kamps offer up their own ideas of what they’d like to see in a potential post-Twitter world: : Nothing lasts forever and that’s a good thing
: It’s time to get weird
: Bring back the good old days Elon Musk’s disastrous Twitter takeover showed that it just takes one person’s bad ideas to destabilize a social network that everyone assumed was a given.
|
The pen gets smarter as Nuwa shows off its smart ballpoint and app combo
|
Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
We’ve seen a lot of companies trying to turn the humble pen into something a little more digital, but few have been as elegantly successful as . The company showed off its smart pen at this week. The smart pen uses three integrated cameras along with motion and pressure-sensing electronics to take your ink scribbles and digitize them. The accompanying app keeps your notes safe, and it even manages to decipher your handwriting, making the notes searchable as well. The pen itself writes on any paper and can keep notes in journals, notebooks, Post-its … well, any paper, really. We saw the pen in action, and it works fantastically well, capturing writing with speed and ease. Being able to search for “dinner” in the app and see the note where you reminded yourself where and when you’re eating this evening felt a lot like magic. “Handwriting represents a deeply personal form of thinking, so it was important that we design Nuwa Pen so that we only process the ink and do that processing on-device,” says Marc Tuinier, one of the company’s co-founders. “Our end-to-end encryption solution for digital handwriting ensures that your thoughts are safe and secure the moment you start writing.” Refreshing for a hardware startup, the Dutch company isn’t selling its own cartridges, instead opting to support industry-standard D1 ink cartridges. You can , and they are readily available in most stationery stores and online. The pen comes with a case that charges the pen in 15 minutes. A full battery gives you about two hours of active writing time — after which it’s probably time for a 15-minute break anyway. The Nuwa Pen app gives you access to your notes at any time. If you want your handwritten notes converted to typed text, the company offers Nuwa Pen+ (€2,99 per month subscription.) As someone who is perma-glued to my phone and haven’t touched a pen other than to sign things in a very long time, I can’t really see myself using this. The price point is also interesting: For $280 you can buy the Nuwa pen or you could go fully digital with a . Just $10 more gets you Amazon’s . In other words, the tech is awesome, but at this price point you’d have to do a lot of writing (or be a huge fan of being able to handwrite with a real pen over writing on a tablet) for it to truly make sense. The Nuwa Pen will be available in August 2023 for $279 or can be preordered today for $179. Nuwa will be available in Ebony (black) or Ivory (white).
|
Guide dogs will be giving the side-eye to self-driving car tech coming for their jobs
|
Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
The visually impaired are getting a helping hand (or a helping belt, as it were) from Korean startup . At , the company was showing off some pretty neat tech that incorporates optical and lidar technology along with AI-powered on-device computing to identify obstacles and help with navigation. The company claims to be able to do advanced object identification to help keep walkers safe, in addition to using gentle haptic feedback to help with wayfinding. The whole system is carried on a belt, leaving the users hands free. AI-Guided’s upcoming product Guidi, shown off at CES 2023. Haje Kamps/TechCrunch The company is pretty early in its journey, starting the initial work on the product in January 2020, with the first prototypes being built mid-2021, and a planned ship date of October 2023. No word yet on pricing, but the company tells us it is hoping to be able to incorporate an 8-hour battery life and full autonomy even in situations where Wi-Fi or cellular data isn’t available. There’s not a huge amount of information or details available to date, but as soon as we saw the promo image the company has — with the guide dog giving its replacement the side-eye, we knew we had to share it as one of the weird and wonderful things we find as we traverse the show floors at the world’s largest consumer electronics show. The company told TechCrunch it is planning to launch to bring Guidi to market later this month.
|
Unistellar’s telescope turns your smartphone into a stargazer
|
Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
Humans are eternally curious about the night sky but figuring out how to use a telescope is non-trivial. At , believes it has the perfect solution with its Equinox 2 Smart Telescope. “When I was a young teenager, I had a telescope that I used during the long summer nights. Fast-forward to being an adult — I didn’t have any more time to do astronomy. With a friend of mine, we started to think about what we can do to bring astronomy back to our busy daily lives,” says Laurent Marfisi, co-founder and CEO of Unistellar in an interview with TechCrunch. “We thought up a telescope that is easy to use, that is powerful enough to see through the light pollution and that has the possibility to reveal galaxies and nebulae … all those things that we could not see even when we were teenagers. The aim is to bring a lot of the power that professionals have in astronomy into the daily lives of consumers who just want to have fun, spend good quality time with their children and their friends around astronomy.” Now there’s a good-looking piece of kit. Unistellar The telescope doesn’t have an eyepiece, so you’ll need to use the app both to control and to capture the magic of the night sky. The app knows about more than 5,000 celestial objects you can explore and uses the phone’s GPS to know where in the world it is. It then looks around and recognizes certain stars to pinpoint exactly where it’s looking. The eQuinox 2 smart telescope will retail for $2,499, with presales available now, and it’s globally available next month.
|
At CES, this VR headset wears you
|
Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
Hot on the heels from just a few months ago, showed off its vision for what immersive visuals could look like. At , we tried out the 8K fully immersive OLED display, which gives a VR headset-like experience without having to strap anything to your face. “Brelyon Fusion allows the blending of light to scale field of view in a new way that achieves multiples of resolution,” explained Barmak Heshmat, CEO and founder of Brelyon in an interview with TechCrunch. “This kind of new light-field expansion innovation really allows us to think of light as pieces of LEGO blocks that can computationally be built to create a more immersive screen.” The tech is currently a prototype that won’t hit the market for a little while yet — the company guesses 3-4 years from now — but it’s deeply impressive nonetheless. The core technology is what the company calls Ultra Reality, using precise wavefront engineering to create a massive field of view with a profiled true optical depth. The upshot is a display that completely surrounds your field of view. It also adds spatial audio and uses a series of cameras to track your head position, adjusting what the display is showing accordingly for maximum immersion. Brelyon’s prototype display showed off at CES. TechCrunch/Haje Kamps So, er, who is it for? “We see this as a parallel to a headset experience, without people having to put on any headsets. Of course, the Enterprise market is one of the early adopters. They are already buying some of our older models,” Heshmat explains. “This will be fantastic for gamers, anyone that uses multimonitor setups or wants to do something with headsets but doesn’t want to stand up and dance all the time. It is a very immersive desktop experience.” The company points out that the market has spent tens of billions of dollars buying VR headsets but that it believes that immersion shouldn’t equal headsets. Obviously, a photograph doesn’t do the display justice, but if this is the future, we can’t wait to get there. TechCrunch/Haje Kamps “T If you like your videos with a bit of deep-trance music and music-video style fast edits, Brelyon has some more visuals for you:
|
This pepper spray will phone your friends as you mace your assailants
|
Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
From the desk of “I’m not sure this is a good idea” at , comes . The early-stage startup is planning to combine pepper spray with some electronics so a potential attack victim’s friends can be notified when they’ve had to deploy the defense spray to get themselves out of a bind. The company is the brainchild of Logan Nash and Matt Rogan, who met at the Michigan State University and started developing the tech nine months ago. “We called the company 444 because our target market is college women between the ages of 18 and 24. A very popular trend right now is angel numbers. And 444 is an angel number that stands for protection,” Logan tells TechCrunch in an interview. “We are a self-defense company, so the name ties in very well with our company and our mission of self protection.” The company is at the very earliest stages of its development; the prototype it showed at CES was a 3D-printed prototype, and an early prototype PCB — more of a proof of concept than an actual product so far. The ultimate plan is to include a pepper spray aerosol and a Bluetooth transmitter that connects to a phone. If the pepper spray is deployed, the device signals to the would-be victim’s phone, which then sends a message along with the current location to a number of predefined phone numbers. “I see all these women carrying pepper spray devices. They’re normally large, pink and bulky. They are just pieces of plastic that end up just being thrown in the backpack or in a purse. In a time of danger, they can’t get it in time,” says Logan, explaining that they designed a clip that makes it easier to carry in a place that’s available. “The clip attaches directly onto the user, whether that’s their sports bra if they’re going for a run or their belt if they’re just walking around campus. So no matter what, it is an arm’s length away, and you’re not fumbling around to get in a time of danger. When they activate their device, not only will they have six to nine seconds of spray time, but their current location will also be sent to up to 10 contacts of their choosing through an app installed on their phone.” The company believes that this second line of defense — texting the contacts — is very important and claims it has customer discovery interviews to back that up. The target price point for the device is around $35 per unit. That’s significantly cheaper than, say, but a lot more expensive than for the big, pink and bulky pepper sprays the company is replacing. We were a little curious to find two men at the helm of a company targeting women, but the founder says he doesn’t see a conflict there. “W Far is it from me to discourage a couple of young entrepreneurs from following their dreams but given that smartphones are , I’m wondering if there’s really a space in the market for this product — doubly so given that it can’t communicate with emergency services or friends on its own but needs to be Bluetooth-tethered to a smartphone. As a 6-foot-4, martial arts-trained ex-cop, I’m willing to admit that it’s possible I’m being blinded by privilege in this case, so perhaps take my criticism with a fistful of sodium chloride. Having said that, everything I know about self-defense screams “keep it simple.” A $7 canister of pepper spray in one hand and a phone in the other seems more reliable than the solution 444 is outlining with its vision for a safer future.
|
Brane X portable speaker packs a hell of a punch in a small package
|
Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
You probably haven’t heard of yet, but trust me on this one: You will. One of my highlights at today was listening to the company’s debut speaker, the Brane X, side-by-side with some other well-known speaker brands. The company’s founder has a background from high-precision magnetics, and after exiting his previous company, decided to apply this expertise to another space where magnets are important: Speakers. The company’s first product is the $600 Brane X, which is opening for pre-orders imminently. The big innovation is the company’s Repel-Attract Driver (RAD). It use a combination of moving and stationary magnets to create a force that is equal and opposite to the force caused by large air pressure changes within a speaker enclosure. The result is the ability to move a large amount of air (and therefore punch a lot of bass around), in a small package that the company claims consumes 10% of the power that a conventional-tech subwoofer would. “We developed a new way of making audio. Specifically, we have a novel subwoofer. That uses a technology we call “repel attract driver” or RAD. It uses magnetic forces to cancel out the air pressure forces that are inherent when you’re creating low subwoofer notes. Using traditional technology, there’s even a law – – that says, can’t have deep bass, an efficient speaker have it be compact. As you make a subwoofer smaller, the air pressure gets higher and higher, and you’re drawing more and more power,” explains Joe Pinkerton, co-founder and CEO at Brane Audio, in an interview with TechCrunch. “By Brane Audio showed off its speaker alongside the Sonos Move, blowing it out of the water. Image Credit: TechCrunch / Haje Kamps You’ve already done the math, dear reader: Smaller, lighter, and less power-hungry equals interesting tech for portable speakers. And that’s exactly what the company built in the Brane X. It contains an 8-inch subwoofer in a portable speaker that can run on battery power for 12 hours. It also has all the other bells and whistles you’d expect from a high-end portable speaker: It has Alexa, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and can run Spotify. In addition to the aforementioned bass-pumper, it contains a pair of tweeters and a pair of mid-range speakers, so it retains its power to play stereo sound. The speaker is IP 5x rated, meaning it is more resistant to rain than your BBQ or pool party. In the suite where the tech was demoed, I found myself checking behind the sofa whether the company had hidden additional speakers: A huge amount of bass, plus a weirdly immersive soundscape coming from a box the size of a small toaster was a distinctly uncanny experience. I couldn’t locate the other speakers, and the team assured me that yes, it all really came from their little box. Brane Audio’s subwoofer uses an FPGA to balance its magnet exactly where it needs it. : TechCrunch / Haje Kamps Pinkerton started in the early 1990s that created huge 15,000-pound, magnetic-bearing flywheels for power storage. The precision needed to use a combination of static and dynamic magnets to keep these flywheels exactly balanced using an axial magnetic bearing meant developing an extremely precise feedback loop. A while after , he started a Clean Energy Labs to start looking for other opportunities. One of the technologies the company looked into was using graphene to create more efficient switches. “A From there it was back to the drawing board — but Pinkerton wasn’t ready to let the technology rest quite yet. “Our experience is something a normal audio engineer would have no idea even existed. It took us years to figure out to perfect the technology,” Pinkerton says, describing the path to a final, launchable speaker. The speaker is big for a portable speaker; it’s more of a small boombox than the kind of speaker you can just lob in your hand luggage for a trip overseas. It seems like it’s better for a speaker you bring with you on a road trip, move from room to room in the house, or plonk down outside for a pool party.
|
Is Adobe using your photos to train its AI? It’s complicated
|
Devin Coldewey
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
A sharp-eyed developer at Krita , in the settings for their Adobe Creative Cloud account, the company had opted them (and everyone else) into a “content analysis” program whereby they “may analyze your content using techniques such as machine learning (e.g. for pattern recognition) to develop and improve our products and services.” Some have taken this to mean that it is . And … they do. Kind of? But it’s not that simple. First off, lots of software out there has some kind of “share information with the developer” option, where it sends telemetry like how often you use the app or certain features, why it crashed, etc. Usually it gives you an option to turn this off during installation, but not always — Microsoft incurred the ire of many when it basically said in Windows 10. That’s gross, but what’s worse is slipping a new sharing method and opting existing users into it. Adobe that this content analysis thing “is not new and has been in place for a decade.” If they were using machine learning for this purpose and said so a decade ago, that’s quite impressive, as is that apparently no one noticed that whole time. That seems unlikely. I suspect the policy has existed in some form but has quietly evolved. But the wording of the setting is clear: It may analyze your content machine learning not for the purposes of machine learning. : For example, we may use machine learning-enabled features to help you organize and edit your images more quickly and accurately. With object recognition in Lightroom, we can auto-tag photos of your dog or cat. In Photoshop, machine learning can be used to automatically correct the perspective of an image for you. A machine learning analysis would also allow Adobe to tell how many people were using Photoshop to, say, edit images of people versus landscapes, or other high-level metadata. That could inform product decisions and priorities. You may very well say, but that language does leave open the possibility that the images and analysis will be used to train AI models, as part of the “developing our products and services” thing. Make yours look like this. Adobe True, but Adobe clarified that “Adobe does not use any data stored on customers’ Creative Cloud accounts to train its experimental Generative AI features.” That wording is clear enough, though it also has the kind of legal precision that makes you think they’re talking around something. If you look closer at its documentation, it does indeed say: “When we analyze your content for product improvement and development purposes, we first aggregate your content with other content and then use the aggregated content to train our algorithms and thus improve our products and services.” So it use your content to train its algorithms. Perhaps just not its In fact, Adobe has a program specifically for doing that: the Adobe Photoshop Improvement Program, . But it’s entirely possible that your photos are, through one tube or another, being used as content to train a generative AI. There are also circumstances when it might be manually reviewed, which is a whole other thing. Even if it isn’t the case that Adobe is harvesting your creativity for its models, you should opt out of this program and any others if you value privacy. .
|
VCs are pushing startups — will their investors tighten the thumbscrews, too?
|
Connie Loizos
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
Over the last decade or so, many venture capitalists have built vast personal fortunes. Some of the money has been made through investments in companies that have outperformed. But much of their wealth traces to management fees that added up quickly as fund sizes — raised in faster succession than ever in history — ballooned to unprecedented levels. Given that the market has changed — and will likely remain a tougher environment for everyone for at least the next year or two — an obvious question is what happens now. Will the industry’s limited partners — the “money behind the money” — demand better terms from their venture managers, just as VCs are right now demanding from their founders? If ever there was a moment for the institutions that fund VCs to use their leverage and push back — on how fast funds are raised, or the industry’s lack of diversity, or the hurdles that must be reached before profits can be divided — now would seemingly be the time. Yet in numerous conversations with LPs this week, the message to this editor was the same. LPs aren’t interested in rocking the boat and putting their allocation in so-called top tier funds at risk after years of solid returns. They aren’t likely to make demands on poorer performers and emerging managers either. Why not? With less money to go around, they’ll simply churn out of the business, LPs suggest. “Markets like these exacerbate the divide between the haves and have-nots,” observed one LP. “When we add someone to our list of relationships,” added another, “we expect it’s going to be for at least two funds, but that doesn’t mean we can live up to those expectations if the markets are really tough.” Some might find the feedback frustrating, particularly following so much talk in recent years about leveling the playing field by putting more investing capital in the hands of women and others who are underrepresented in the venture industry. Underscoring LPs’ precarious relationship with VCs, none wanted to speak on the record. But what if they had more backbone? What if they tell managers exactly what they think without fear of retribution? Here are half a dozen gripes that VCs might hear, based on our conversations with a handful of institutional investors, from a managing director at a major financial institution to a smaller fund of funds manager. Among the things they’d like to change, if they had their druthers: According to one limited partner, in recent years, so-called “time and attention” standards — language in limited partner agreements meant to ensure that “key” persons will devote substantially all their business time to the fund they are raising — began to appear less and less frequently before vanishing almost completely. Part of the problem is that a growing number of general partners focusing all their attention on their funds; they had, and continue to have, other day jobs. “Basically,” says this LP, “GPs were saying, ‘Give us money and ask no questions.'” A limited partner says these have largely fallen by the wayside in recent years, particularly when it comes to smaller funds, and that it’s a disturbing development. Such board members “still serve a role in conflicts of interests,” observes the LP, “including [enforcing] provisions that have to do with governance,” and that might have better addressed “people who were taking aggressive positions that were sloppy from an LP perspective.” Many LPs were receiving routine distributions in recent years, but they were being asked to commit to new funds by their portfolio managers nearly as fast. Indeed, as VCs compressed these fundraising cycles — instead of every four years, they were returning to LPs every 18 months and sometimes faster for new fund commitments — it created a lack of time diversity for their investors. “You’re investing these little slices into momentum markets and it just stinks,” says one manager, “because there’s no price environment diversification. Some VCs invested their whole fund in the second half of 2020 and the first half of 2021 and it’s like, ‘Geez, I wonder how that will turn out?'” According to several LPs, a lot of arrogance crept into the equation. (“Certain [general partners] would be like: take it or leave it.”) The LPs argue that there’s much to be said for a measured pace for doing things, and that as pacing went out the window, so did mutual respect in some cases. Boy do LPs hate opportunity funds! First, they consider such vehicles — meant to back a fund manager’s “breakout” portfolio companies — as a sneaky way for a VC to navigate around his or her fund’s supposed size discipline. A bigger issue is the “inherent conflict” with opportunity funds, as one LP describes it. Consider that as an LP, her institution can have a stake in a firm’s main fund and a different kind of security in the same company in the opportunity fund that may be in direct opposition with that first stake. (Say her outfit is offered preferred shares in the opportunity fund while its shares in the early-stage fund get converted into common shares or otherwise “pushed down the preference stack.”) The LPs with whom we spoke this week also said they resented being forced to invest in VCs’ opportunity funds in order to access their early-stage funds, which was apparently happening a lot over the last two years in particular. Numerous firm have rolled out new strategies that are global in nature or see them investing more money in the public market. But, surprise, LPs don’t love the sprawl (it makes diversifying their own portfolios more complicated). They’ve also grown uncomfortable with the expectation that they play along with this mission creep. Says one LP who is very happy with his allocation in one of the world’s most prominent venture outfits, but who has also grown disillusioned with the firm’s newer areas of focus: “They’ve earned the right to do a lot of the things they’re doing, but there is a sense that you can’t just cherry pick the venture fund; they’d like you to support multiple funds.” The LP said he goes along to get along. The venture firm told him that if its ancillary strategies weren’t a fit, it wouldn’t count the decision as a strike against his institution, but he doesn’t quite buy it, no pun intended. So what happens in a world where LPs are afraid to put their figurative foot down? It depends on the market largely. If things rebound, you can probably expect that LPs will continue to cooperate, even if they do some grousing privately. In a sustained downturn, however, the limited partners who fund the venture industry might grow less timid over time. Maybe. At least, in a separate conversation earlier this week with veteran VC Peter Wagner, Wagner observed that following the dot.com crash of 2000, a number of venture firms let their LPs off the hook by downsizing the size of their funds. Accel, where Wagner spent many years as a general partner, was among these outfits. Wagner doubts the same will happen now. Whereas Accel was narrowly focused on early-stage investments at the time, Accel and many other power players today oversee multiple funds and multiple strategies. They’re going to find a way to use all the capital they’ve raised. Still, if returns don’t hold up, LPs could run out of patience, Wagner suggested. Speaking generally, he said that “it takes quite a number of years to play out,” and that years from now, “we might be in a different [better] economic environment.” Perhaps the moment for pushback will have passed, in short. If it hasn’t, however, if the current market drags on as is, he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised at all if [more favorable LP terms] were under discussion in the next year or two. I think that could happen.”
|
When it’s time for a steamy nooner, Steambox has you covered
|
Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
If you have a particular hatred for the microwave or prefer your food to be heated gently when you’re ready for lunch, is ready for your steamy lunch encounters. The company at the end of 2019 and is finally ready to start shipping its device. We checked it out at this week. Between Kickstarter, Indiegogo and its own preorders, the company tells me it has sold 1,300-1,400 Steamboxes to date. “The Steambox is for every foodie in the world. It’s for everybody who wants to get out there and be more flexible with the way they heat up their food,” explains Kevin de Krieger, the company’s co-founder and COO. He explains why he believes steaming is superior to microwaving. “S The company has produced around 3,000 units so far, and the company has stock in the U.S. and in Europe, ready for buyers willing to part with the $270 to liberate themselves from the office microwave. Steambox is about the size of a small shoe box and can heat around 500g (17.5 oz) of food in 15-20 minutes. “In general, it takes 15 to 20 minutes to heat up your food to a hot meal. The battery capacity is for around 45 minutes so you can use it 2-3 times on a single charge. After that, you need to charge it for two hours,” explains de Krieger. The Bamboo-topped device looks incredibly sleek and has evolved a fair amount since its Kickstarter prototypes. One notable setback is that the Kickstarter campaign suggests the device can be charged with USB-C, but for the final design, the company opted to go back to a tip-and-sleeve style charger. A bit of a shame; it feels like if we can charge our high-end laptops from a 65 W charger, the company could have found a way to charge the onboard batteries using USB-C as well. “It will be easy to change to USB-C in the future,” de Krieger assures us. “But we haven’t been able to do it so far, because of how USB-C works. With the new regulations for USB-C in 2024, I believe they will upgrade the amount of voltage we can use. We are just waiting for them to make it work, and then we’ll definitely include it in the products.” The company’s CEO prepared a video showing how the device works: The steamer includes a 120W heating element, and measures 10.5 x 6.5 x 3.5 inches (27 x 16.5 x 9 cm). The food container is made of stainless steel and comes with a silicone lid. It can hold up to 25 oz (750 ml), and the whole device weighs around 4.4 lbs (1991g). Available to , it costs €249/$269.
|
The Soul of Blackleaf brings analog visualization to your music experience
|
Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
File this one under style over substance, but damn if these speakers don’t pack a whole lot of style into a small container. Under the amazing name , these stylish speakers use a magnetic fluid to visualize your music as its plays. “This basically is a Bluetooth speaker that we combined with the visual effects. We have our own patented sound detection technology, and every time you play a song, we create patterns based on the music. It is customized every time, giving a different visualization every time,” explains Chris Lam, the founder of the company making the speakers. “We started making this in Taiwan and are now starting mass production for the overseas markets.” The Soul of Blackleaf speaker looks like it is cast in concrete. The visualization adds a beautiful, eye-catching focal point to the experience. Haje Kamps/TechCrunch The $400 Bluetooth speaker might not be the best-sounding speaker we’ve heard at this year, but it’s certainly one of the most stylish. “I love music. There are so many Bluetooth speakers on the market, and we wanted to make something different. With the Soul of Blackleaf, you can watch feel the music,” Lam concludes.
|
Nvidia upgrades GeForce Now with RTX 4080 performance for premium users
|
Romain Dillet
| 2,023 | 1 | 3 |
Nvidia some new features for its cloud gaming service during its . The company is upgrading its premium plan by adding new servers with better hardware components. Users on the $19.99 plan should expect better performance for more demanding games. The company is now using GeForce RTX 4080-class graphics processing units on its high-end servers. Before today, users paying for the most expensive subscription plan could access servers with server-grade GPUs that are equivalent to GeForce RTX 3080 GPUs. As a reminder, GeForce Now lets you play your own games from the cloud. The game is running in a data center near you and the video feed is then relayed to your device. GeForce Now supports Windows, macOS, Android (and Android TV) and some web browsers (including Safari on the iPhone and iPad). GeForce Now customers still have to buy games on Steam, the Epic Games Store and other digital stores — they own the games even if they stop subscribing to the service. But the biggest issue with the service is that some game publishers refuse to let Nvidia support their games on GeForce Now. There are currently , including Fortnite, League of Legends, Cyberpunk 2077 and many Ubisoft games. But you can’t play Overwatch 2 or Elden Ring for instance. Customers can try out GeForce Now for free. There is a queue system and you are limited to 60-minute gaming sessions. If you want to use the service on a daily basis, a “Priority” membership lets you launch a game right away and play for up to six hours at a time for $9.99 per month. You are limited to a 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second. Last year, Nvidia added a premium tier called GeForce Now RTX 3080 for $19.99 per month. Because of today’s update, this tier is getting a new name. The company is now calling it GeForce Now Ultimate. In addition to access to more powerful servers, GeForce Now Ultimate supports 4K resolution. If you have a gaming monitor, the Ultimate membership now also supports 240Hz (up from 120Hz). Users can also enable Nvidia’s proprietary features, such as DLSS 3 and Nvidia Reflex. If you have an Nvidia G-Sync monitor, GeForce Now will adapt the streaming rate, depending on how many frames per second you get in your Nvidia Reflex–compatible game. That’s neat! But if you have an Nvidia G-Sync monitor, you likely also have a gaming PC, so you may not need GeForce Now. Existing GeForce Now RTX 3080 members are going to be automatically upgraded to the GeForce Now Ultimate plan in late January. GeForce Now Ultimate will still cost $19.99 per month.
|
Twitter goes down for many in Australia, users say
|
Manish Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Twitter users in Australia and New Zealand have been facing issues accessing the service for over 12 hours, they say, as continues to grapple with reliability challenges amid cost-cutting measures. The outage began at around 2 p.m. Pacific Time Tuesday, according to user tweets and DownDetector ( and ), a web monitoring tool that tracks reliability issues. The glitch, which is causing tweets to not load up for users and the service to be very laggy for others, appears to be only affecting those in Australia and New Zealand. DownDetector’s global website shows very few complaints. It’s unclear what caused the outage. Many users say they are able to access the service after using a VPN app. Though some users report sporadic improvements to Twitter service, complaints are still pouring in. . is an absolute shambles today isn’t it? Operationally pathetic. I suspect owner & current CEO has pulled one too many server plugs out, fired too many crucial frontline staff? Consistency, reliability matter? just clueless & a propagandist. — Peter Clarke (MASTODON: @[email protected]) (@MediaActive) This website is dying such a slow and painful death today. Someone put it out of its misery. — Isobel Roe (@isobelroe) Twitter appears to be down for many users in Australia and New Zealand — Olivia Solon (@oliviasolon) Twitter has been down in Australia for 12 hours now and I’m pretty sure has no idea there is a world outside of the USA so I assume it’ll never be fixed. I am tweeting from a VPN to ask you to click here for 60fps Bloodborne: — Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) Twitter after Musk said he had rolled out “significant backend server architecture changes” and that it should result in Twitter feeling “faster.” Musk in late October. He has sought to cut Twitter’s expenses by eliminating thousands of employees, many of whom worked to maintain the service’s infrastructure. Musk has also focused on making the Twitter experience faster for users by removing bloat code from the service.
|
Picsart’s AI-powered SketchAI app turns images and outlines into digital art
|
Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Riding the generative AI wave, Picsart, the developer behind various photo and video editing apps for the web and mobile devices, is introducing a new iOS app that transforms photos and drawings into digital art. Called SketchAI, the app lets users sketch a picture or upload an existing image and apply different artistic styles to it. SketchAI is easy enough to use. It features several pre-selected styles that can be applied to creations, including ink drawing, pencil sketch, and the artist-inspired “Da Vinci” and “Van Gogh.” In addition to sketching or uploading a photo, users can add a prompt describing an image (e.g., “Boat at night painting by Aivazovsky”) to enhance the generated results. SketchAI offers five free creations. Unlocking unlimited generations requires a subscription ranging from $5.99 per week to $17.99 per month or $69.99 per year. “We’re planning a lot in the way of making the user experience, processing and image quality better, and adding more prompts and artistic styles,” Picsart VP of product Lusine Harutyunyan told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We’re also thinking about adding features for the user to enhance and play with their results, as Picsart is known for its powerful and fun editing tools. Along with building on our main platform, we’re excited to offer more unique entry points for creative technologies like this.” SketchAI joins Picsart’s roster of generative AI tools, including AI Avatar, which makes custom AI-generated profile pics from selfies, and arrives as art-generating AI apps attract controversy both from users and the artistic community. Lensa’s recently launched, viral avatar creator came under scrutiny for its . Meanwhile, on the art portal ArtStation, which earlier this year began allowing AI art for the first time, widely protested by placing “No AI Art” images in their portfolios — asserting that AI-generated art threatened the artistic integrity of the platform. Picsart Harutyunyan didn’t deny that generative AI systems have their issues, even admitting that the system driving SketchAI — an open source model called — could reproduce biases in the artwork it creates. But she argued that SketchAI and generative AI as a whole will evolve and improve over time as more people use the tech and additional models become available. “These are very early days for generative AI as a whole and this technology will continue to evolve quickly and we will continue to adhere to industry standards and best practices as it does. Our goal is to empower creators and we support artists everywhere,” Harutyunyan said. Stable Diffusion, which is trained on images from around the web, including from art communities, has spread like wildfire in recent months. Lensa and use it to generate images, as does game developer and countless others. Most of the use cases are harmless enough. But some groups have wielded Stable Diffusion to create like depictions of violence and pornographic, nonconsensual celebrity deepfakes. Stability AI was even the subject of a recent critical letter from U.S. House Representative Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) to the National Security Advisor (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, in which she urged the NSA and OSTP to address the release of “unsafe AI models” that “do not moderate content made on their platforms.” Harutyunyan says that Picsart fine-tuned and optimized Stable Diffusion for “quality, original image strength” in SketchAI and put filters in place to prevent some “unsafe” art from being generated. Picsart hasn’t, however, established a way for artists who don’t wish SketchAI users to create art in their distinctive styles to “opt out.” In recent months, artists like Hollie Mengert and Greg Rutkowski — whose names have become some of the most commonly used prompts in Stable Diffusion–powered apps — what they see as poor AI imitations that are nevertheless tied to their work. Picsart , the startup largely funding the development of Stable Diffusion, recently bowed to pressure, signaling that it would allow artists to opt out of the data set used to train the next-generation Stable Diffusion model. Harutyunyan says that Picsart will consider adopting the model for SketchAI once it’s released. “The baseline model we’re using is trained on data, not specific material and not reproducing a specific artist’s work,” Harutyunyan said. A word of warning to those who’d share their SketchAI creations publicly, though: Picsart says that it can’t guarantee users will be able to claim copyright over them. That’s because the copyright status of AI-generated artwork is somewhat in flux at the present. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently to revoke copyright protection for an AI-generated comic, saying that copyrightable works require human authorship. And a lawsuit working its way through the U.S. court system alleges that generative AI violates intellectual property laws by regurgitating portions of the copyrighted data used to develop it. The copyright issue has spooked platforms like and Getty Images, both of which in recent months have banned — either partially or fully — AI-generated art and tools to create it out of fear of the legal ramifications. “As between Picsart and the user, the user owns the rights in the content,” Harutyunyan said. “However, users should be aware of the inherent limitations that come along with generative AI.”
|
Snap is shutting down its desktop camera app that allows users to apply filters during video calls
|
Ivan Mehta
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Snap is shutting down its camera app for the desktop that allows users to apply filters like cat ears and pirate hats on video calls. The company said on a that the product will be discontinued on January 25 but did not say why it was abandoning the app. Users won’t be able to download or use the Snap Camera after the deadline. The company first introduced Snap Camera in 2018 for creators to use with video conferencing apps like Skype, YouTube, Google Hangouts, Skype and Zoom. The app, available on both Windows and Mac, allowed users to switch between different face filters during a video call or a live stream. People should make Snap Camera filters for Zoom that look like d&d characters so we can use them when playing online. Just saying 😌 — Paola Harris 🎨 PaolasPixels.com (@Irrel) I think this snap camera filter will be appropriate for today's zoom sessions. — Michael Kinyon (@ProfKinyon) Users might get a blank screen after the Snap camera gets disabled later this month, so it’s and switch to your default camera. The company said that compatible AR lenses will work with the web version of its app, which was . In response to a creator on Twitter, Snap said that it is focusing more on expanding Camera Kit access for the web. “We’re adjusting our web-based investments for the AR creator & developer community to focus on expanding access to Camera Kit for Web. Stay tuned for more info this year, and you can keep using Lenses on your computer with Snapchat for Web,” it noted. Hi there, thanks for asking! We’re adjusting our web-based investments for the AR creator & developer community to focus on expanding access to Camera Kit for Web. Stay tuned for more info this year, and you can keep using Lenses on your computer with Snapchat for Web. — Snap AR (@SnapAR) The discontinuation of the Snap Camera app — spotted first by — is not entirely surprising. Last year, it and months after first launching it. In December, the company also announced that it is planning to , which was acquired in 2017. As the company will now focus on and to generate more revenue with a downsized team, side projects like a desktop camera app will be expectedly slashed.
|
TikTok begins rolling out the ability for creators to restrict videos to adult viewers
|
Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 3 |
TikTok has that it’s expanding its audience controls feature, giving creators the ability to restrict their videos to adult viewers. Prior to this expansion, the adult-only audience controls feature was only available for TikTok Live. Now the company is bringing the feature to its short-form videos as well. “We’ve started to bring our audience controls feature to creators of short-form video and will expand the feature globally over the coming weeks,” TikTok wrote in a . “To be clear: our policies still fully apply to creators who use this feature, and we will remove content which contains nudity and other violations of our Community Guidelines.” As is the case with adult-only livestreams on TikTok, the 18+ restriction setting for videos isn’t a way for creators to display adult content, as the content is still subject to the app’s policies. TikTok instead sees the setting as a way for creators to prevent minors from encountering content that’s aimed toward an adult audience or may be uninteresting to them. When TikTok rolled out adult-only livestreams, the company said the setting could be used for creators who want to share comedy content that is better suited for people above the age of 18. Or, creators may want to talk about a difficult life experience and would feel more comfortable knowing the conversation is limited to adults. The expansion of the audience controls setting comes as TikTok previously said it which content is appropriate for younger and older teens versus adults. TikTok had said it was developing a system to identify and restrict certain types of content from being accessed by teens and that it would start asking creators to specify when their content is more appropriate for an adult audience. We are now seeing this in practice with the app’s audience controls feature. TikTok has also announced that it’s launching the next iteration of its borderline suggestive model, which automatically identifies sexually explicit, suggestive or borderline content. The next iteration of TikTok’s borderline suggestive model is expected to be better at detecting such content. These announcements are part of TikTok’s broader push toward ramping up safety features for teens on its app. Last year, TikTok to prevent certain content with more mature or complex themes from reaching teens. As part of these efforts, TikTok says it has prevented teen accounts from viewing over 1 million overtly sexually suggestive videos in the last 30 days alone. Child and teen safety is an area where TikTok has faced significant scrutiny, not only from regulators and lawmakers, but also from parents. For instance, last year a group of after their children died after attempting dangerous challenges they allegedly saw on TikTok.
|
TikTok users now have access to in-app movie and TV pages powered by IMDb
|
Lauren Forristal
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Through a partnership with online movie database IMDb, TikTok a new feature that allows users to tag a movie or TV show in their video. The link directs viewers to a dedicated in-app page with IMDb-provided information about the specific title as well as a collection of related TikTok videos. TikTok creators can also save a title to the “Favorites” tab on their profiles. Rolled out today, the IMDb-powered feature is currently only available to TikTok users in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. : TechCrunch (screenshot) When a creator makes a video, they can select “Add Link,” then “Movie and TV,” which brings them to IMDb’s selection of over 12 million movies and TV series. Once the video is published, the selected title will appear above the caption. TikTok’s new IMDb feature will likely be helpful for users who want to search for content related to their favorite film or TV series. There’s already a large community of movie and TV fans on TikTok, with a combined total of 25 billion views for hashtags like #FilmTok, #MovieTok, and #TVTok, said Grace Li, director of strategic partnerships at TikTok and ByteDance, in today’s announcement. “We’re excited to welcome TikTok as the latest major company to rely on IMDb data to power new experiences for their customers,” Nikki Santoro, chief operating officer of IMDb, said in remarks. “This innovative collaboration enables TikTok creators to showcase and share the movies and shows they love, further extending the IMDb mission to help customers discover and decide what to watch and listen to, wherever they are.” The new feature could also help media and production companies promote their titles more efficiently. Warner Bros., A24, Netflix and Paramount+ are just a few examples of companies using TikTok to urge more viewers to watch their newly released titles. The announcement comes on the heels of TikTok’s “ ” feature, which tells users why a certain video was recommended to them. The company is also testing a .
|
Apple launches AI-powered book narrations
|
Ivan Mehta
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
At a time when there is a lot of debate going on around ChatGPT and generative AI potentially eating up jobs, Apple has launched on Apple Books. On its website for authors, the company says that this feature will help independent authors who might not be able to convert their titles to audiobooks because of “the cost and complexity of production.” Currently, only are narrated by Apple’s own AI-generated voices. Users will see “Apple Books” in the narrator section for these titles. Apple While Apple says the program is for independent authors, currently they have to sign up with partner publishing companies — or — to get their book narrated by Apple’s AI voices. Apple is already accepting submissions under the romance and fiction genres — with support for only literary, historical, and women’s fiction at the moment — through the partners mentioned above. Plus, it is starting its AI-powered voice narration work for nonfiction and self-development genres. Currently, Apple offers four voices under soprano and baritone categories: Madison and Jackson (romance and fiction); Helena and Mitchell (self-development and nonfiction). The company said that these voices are trained in specific genres, but Apple didn’t specify what training data it is using to tune them. “Apple Books digital narration brings together advanced speech synthesis technology with important work by teams of linguists, quality control specialists, and audio engineers to produce high-quality audiobooks from an ebook file. Apple Books has long been on the forefront of innovative speech technology and has now adapted it for long-form reading, working alongside publishers, authors, and narrators,” Apple said on its . If you look at audiobook titles on the Apple Book store, they are often narrated by the author with other guests or voice artists pitching in at times. Apple’s AI-generation suit probably aims to remove any need for sitting down and recording the narration in a studio. But even with this process, results are not instant. The Cupertino-based company said that once an author submits a request, it takes “one to two months to process the book and conduct quality checks.” Apple specified that if there is not enough time for post-production checks, the title is published as soon as the processing is completed. However, the company didn’t provide any details on what might be the shortcomings of such a rushed process and how the final might sound. It’s not clear if authors are allowed to port their Apple AI-powered audiobooks to other platforms. We have asked Apple for a comment, and we will update the story if we hear back. A report from noted that Apple wanted to release this feature last November, but it got delayed because of and . Most platforms — apart from Audible — allow books that are narrated by AI-generated voices. However, Apple’s entry into the market might attract a lot of attention to platforms that allow creators to make AI-powered audiobooks. At the moment, there’s no detail about how much Apple is charging publishers (or authors) for the whole process of converting a book into an audiobook. Apple is getting pushback from regulators about App Store fees, and it might have to allow alternative app stores and third-party payment options that might have an impact on its revenue. So when generative AI is having its moment, Apple is taking the first steps toward making it a viable cash-generating option.
|
France fines Apple over App Store ad targeting ePrivacy breach
|
Natasha Lomas
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
A rare privacy penalty for Apple: France’s data protection watchdog, the CNIL, has it imposed a sanction of €8 million (~$8.5 million) on the iPhone maker for not obtaining local mobile users’ consent prior to placing (and/or reading) ad identifiers on their devices in breach of local data protection law. The sanction decision was issued on December 29 but was made public only yesterday (the in French). The CNIL is acting under the European Union’s ePrivacy Directive — which allows for member state–level data protection authorities to take action over local complaints about breaches, rather than requiring they be referred to a lead data supervisor in the country where the company in question has its main EU establishment (as happens with the EU’s newer General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR). While the size of this ePrivacy fine isn’t going to cause any sleepless nights in Cupertino, Apple leverages claims of peerless user privacy to polish its premium brand — and differentiate iPhones from cheaper hardware running Google’s Android platform — so any dent in its reputation for protecting user data should sting. The CNIL says it was acting on a complaint against Apple for showing personalized ads on its App Store. The action relates to an older version (14.6) of the iPhone operating system, under which — after the watchdog investigated in 2021 and 2022 — it found the tech giant had not obtained prior consent from users to process their data for targeted advertising that was served when a user visited Apple’s App Store. CNIL found that v14.6 of iOS automatically read identifiers on the user’s iPhone — which served a number of purposes, including powering personalizing ads on the App Store — and that processing occurred without Apple obtaining proper consent, in the regulator’s view, as consent was being gathered via a setting that was prechecked by default. (NB: 2019 stipulates that consent is necessary for ad tracking.) From the CNIL’s press release [translated from French with machine translation]: Due to their advertising purpose, these identifiers are not strictly necessary for the provision of the service (the App Store). Consequently, they must not be able to be read and/or deposited without the user having expressed his prior consent. However, in practice, the ad targeting settings available from the iPhone’s “Settings” icon were pre-checked by default. In addition, the user had to perform a large number of actions to successfully deactivate this parameter since this possibility was not integrated into the initialization process of the telephone. The user had to click on the “Settings” icon of the iPhone, then go to the “Privacy” menu and finally to the section entitled “Apple Advertising.” These elements did not make it possible to collect the prior consent of users. The CNIL said the level of fine reflects the scope of the processing (which it notes was limited to the App Store), the number of French users affected, and the profits Apple derives from ad revenue indirectly generated from the data collected by the identifiers — as well as the regulator factoring in Apple having since brought itself into compliance. We contacted Apple for comment on the CNIL sanction. A company spokesman confirmed it plans to appeal — sending us this statement: We are disappointed with this decision given the CNIL has previously recognized that how we serve search ads in the App Store prioritizes user privacy, and we will appeal. Apple Search Ads goes further than any other digital advertising platform we are aware of by providing users with a clear choice as to whether or not they would like personalized ads. Additionally, Apple Search Ads never tracks users across 3rd party apps and websites, and only uses first-party data to personalize ads. We believe privacy is a fundamental human right and a user should always get to decide whether to share their data and with whom. It’s not the first time Apple has faced critical scrutiny over privacy double standards. , European privacy rights campaign group NOYB filed a series of complaints with EU data protection watchdogs about an Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) baked into the iPhone by default by Apple, arguing the existence of the IDFA was a similar breach of the prior consent to tracking principle. The company has also been over its different treatment vis-a-vis the tracking of iPhone users’ app activity to serve its own “personalized ads” versus a recently introduced requirement that third-party apps obtain consent from users — after it introduced the (ATT) feature to iOS back in 2021. Apple has continued to dispute these lines of arguments — claiming it complies with local privacy laws and offers a higher level of privacy and data protection for iOS users than rival platforms. France, meanwhile, has been very active in enforcing breaches of ePrivacy against tech giants in recent years, with another example just when it hit Microsoft with a €60 million penalty over dark pattern design in relation to cookie tracking — after finding the company had not offered a mechanism for users to refuse cookies that was as easy as the button it presented to them for accepting cookies. , Google and (Facebook) have also been hit with CNIL sanctions for cookie-related breaches since 2020. And went on to update its cookie consent pop-up across the EU to (finally) offer a simple “accept all” or “refuse all” option at the top level. TL;DR: Regulatory enforcement of privacy works. The steady flow of enforcements and corrections that the CNIL’s interventions have been able to achieve for users in France via ePrivacy — a much older EU directive than the GDPR — has cast further critical light on the operation of the latter flagship privacy regulation where scrutiny and enforcement on tech giants continues to be bogged down by forum shopping, associated procedural bottlenecks and resourcing issues, as well as by disputes between regulators over how to settle these cross-border cases. But while a GDPR complaint against a tech giant can take years, plural to get enforced — such as the approximately 4.8 years it took to , Facebook and Instagram, and still with likely years of appeals of that decision ahead (and with other toward a final decision) — the difference between an EU directive and a regulation means that enforcement is pan-EU by default, rather than being localized to the jurisdiction of the enforcing DPA. That means, with ePrivacy, any wider compliance rollouts are at the discretion of a sanctioned entity — so the impact for users may be more localized. Additionally, any (eventual) GDPR penalties may also be more substantial than ePrivacy stings — with the GDPR allowing for fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover, while ePrivacy is stuck with an older regime that leaves it up to member states to set “effective, proportionate and dissuasive” penalties. (Ergo, user rights here are tethered to local politics.) Although, corrective orders can have far more bite for big tech than financial sanctions given how much revenue these giants pull in — as even fines that run to hundreds of millions or more may be written off as just a cost of doing business. Whereas orders to change practices to comply with privacy laws can force meaningful reforms. It’s worth noting that the EU has been attempting — for years — to replace the now more-than-two-decades-old ePrivacy Directive with an updated . However, and lawmaker disputes over a 2017 Commission proposal have conspired to stall the file for most of this period. Member states did, at long last, agree to a common negotiating position in February 2021 — finally enabling trilogue negotiations to kick off. But over big and small details continue — and it’s not clear when (or even if) a consensus can be hashed out. And that means the veteran ePrivacy Directive may still have years more working life — and millions more in big tech fines — ahead of it.
|
Product Science, which develops mobile app performance monitoring tools, lands $18M
|
Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
The performance of a mobile app can impact how customers perceive a brand. According to a from Dimensional Research sponsored by HP, 53% of app users who responded said they’ve uninstalled a mobile app with issues like lag, while 37% said that they hold an app responsible for performance problems. Given the pace of development, good performance isn’t always easy to maintain. Searching for an automatable solution, four siblings — David, Daniil, Anna and Maria Liberman — co-founded , a startup that develops performance management software for apps. Product Science’s platform analyzes app code to find flaws in the execution, aiming to minimize perceptible crashes, freezes and errors. “Every couple of years, phones are at least 50% faster, and that’s what distorts our view since we don’t notice how much our apps degrade. But for long-tail users, their experience worsens significantly,” David and Daniil, who serve as Product Science’s co-CEOs, told TechCrunch via email. “At Product Science, our mission is to eliminate delays caused by software inefficiency for people worldwide.” The Liberman siblings have long been close. In 2005, Daniil and David co-founded Sibilant Interactive, which developed massively multiplayer RPG games. After Sibilant closed up shop in 2008 due to illiquidity, David and Daniil — together with Anna and Maria — co-launched Concept Space, a vendor for motion capture and CGI animation software. The brothers moved to the U.S. a few years later to co-found the fintech startup Frank.Money and AR firm Kernel AR, which Snap acquired for an undisclosed amount in October 2016. At Snap, the Liberman siblings — including Anna and Maria — oversaw an animation studio and worked on Snapchat’s 3D Bitmoji feature, which let users create full-body versions of their avatars. While at Snap, David and Daniil said that they were tasked with production operations as well, specifically solving performance issues with Snap’s app for Android. Product Science’s tool shows the performance of mobile apps over time, charted on a graph. Product Science That’s when they had the idea for Product Science. Together with Anna and Maria, David and Daniil launched the , a holding company in which each sibling has a 25% stake, and started Product Science as a venture under the holding company. Through the Libermans Company, the siblings pledged to investors all the projects they might start through 2051, allowing them to fund Product Science at the pre-seed stage. The Libermans Company includes any debts and assets the siblings might gain as well as profits; investors get a proportional share of whatever wealth the siblings create, but don’t have say over how they allocate their time and effort. “We realized that existing performance and observability tools were ineffective and decided to reinvent the application performance management industry,” David and Daniil said. “By replacing manual instrumentation and embedding right into the build processes, Product Science enables anyone to identify causes of app performance issues.” Product Science — which has raised $18 million in seed funding to date from backers including Slow Ventures, Coatue, K5 Global, Mantis Ventures, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton, Insight Partners co-founder Jerry Murdock and unnamed Snap VPs — analyzes pre-production code using AI. The company’s tools and plugins for integrated development environments show video recordings of apps next to performance traces, providing insights into what’s happening behind the screen. David and Daniil say one company, Saturn, used Product Science’s platform to reduce their app’s start time from 4 seconds to 0.7 seconds. “Engineers can see the video recording of their app synchronized with the profiler data recorded on any mobile device [using Product Science’s tools],” the brothers added. “[They can] scrub through a video recording and dive into the code executed behind the scenes.” Product Science counts Fortune 500 companies across sectors like social media, travel, e-commerce and banking as customers, although David and Daniil wouldn’t disclose how many customers the startup has at present. Annual recurring revenue stands north of $3 million, according to David and Daniil, while Product Science — which was recently valued at $200 million, a source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch — “We realize that the industry will slow down and want to make sure we are more flexible with our enterprise offerings and can rapidly grow the AI vision of the product,” David and Daniil said. “Product Science will use the money to fuel its growth: we equally distribute raised capital between attracting new customers, getting key hires and refining our proprietary AI algorithm.” Product Science One of those refinements will come in the form of a new capability that suggests optimizations while engineers write code in their IDE of choice. The long-term vision is to train Product Science’s AI to automatically fix underperforming app code, David and Daniil said. That continued differentiation will likely be the key to Product Science’s success. There’s plenty of rivals in the app performance monitoring space, after all, including platforms like , ServiceNow (through its of Lightstep), , , and even . The market for app performance monitoring was worth over $5.9 billion in 2021, one estimate. “There is both an opportunity and a challenge in the current environment,” David and Daniil added. “The challenge is that most software-as-a-service startups are experiencing longer sales cycles and enterprise is actively reducing their spending; the opportunity for Product Science is that since users are also reducing their spending, the tool is becoming more and more of a must-have for business-to-consumer companies since you can now solve your performance issues pre-production and retain customers and reduce churn significantly.”
|
10-year-old Chipolo explains why it’s not worried about Apple’s AirTag
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
When Apple’s , competitors like Tile were , saying smaller companies had no chance of competing with Apple’s network of . As it turns out, that’s not how another rival sees the situation. , the 10-year-old maker of similar lost item location devices, has remained self-funded all these years, having sold 3.5 million devices and growing its revenue to the double-digit millions. Instead of fighting Apple, Chipolo has opted to work with the Cupertino tech giant — and even credits Apple for helping further grow the item tracker industry. The team also sees the opportunity to integrate with the Find My app as a better consumer experience compared with its much smaller first-party finding network, which today is around 1 million monthly active users. Without a large network, explains the company, it may take much longer for a device to alert its owner to its location when it’s misplaced and outside of Bluetooth range. “It just comes down to do you want the customer to be happier with the bigger network?… We decided this is better,” said Chipolo co-founder Domen Barovic, in a conversation with TechCrunch at the in Las Vegas. “It’s easier to replace this,” he said, referring to Chipolo’s original non-Find My-integrated product, “than to try to build a huge network. We’ve seen that, actually, it’s really hard to do,” he added. Chipolo Tile, for comparison, is going a different route — it teamed up with to combine their respective networks in order to compete more directly with Apple. Tile also sat down with the Department of Justice (DoJ) lawyers, who are , to register its complaints about Apple’s entry into this market. Tile repeatedly stressed how Apple has the advantage of its sizable customer base and platform. Meanwhile, Tile would have to give up its direct relationship with its customers through its own app, as well as pay a commission on any subscription sales or other services made through in-app purchases. In addition, Apple hasn’t yet allowed third parties to access its U1 chip (ultra-wideband) chip for precision finding, giving AirTag a competitive advantage on that front. Chipolo Chipolo, however, feels much differently about this situation. Though the company has had ultra-wideband (UWB) prototypes on hand for a few years, it doesn’t feel it’s at a loss for the lack of support. “We’re not seeing that ultra-wideband is actually needed for these use cases,” noted Chipolo co-founder Primož Zelenšek — Chipolo’s algorithm focuses on delivering quicker reminders when you leave an item behind; then customers can ring the device to see where their item is located. “The sound is much more important,” he said. Chipolo If anything, Chipolo sings Apple’s praises for creating more consumer awareness about the lost item finder market in general with the launch of AirTag. Plus, the company believes Apple has a shared mission. “They’re solving the problem that we wanted to solve,” said Barovic. “We’re not building a company because we want to build a company, right? We’re building the company because we want to help people. And that’s what Apple is also doing. So actually, it’s good.” Interestingly, Chipolo shared these same sentiments with the DoJ’s lawyers last year, the co-founders told TechCrunch. The company had a couple of meetings over Zoom about the matter of AirTag and its impact on Chipolo’s business. Its comments, seemingly, could complicate the DoJ’s ability to effectively prosecute Apple. After all, here is a competitor happy to be offered access to Apple’s Find My platform — and one that says its own sales have grown as a result. The co-founders told TechCrunch that Chipolo’s 2022 revenue topped that of the revenue it generated in its pre-Find My days — though the company clarified it’s not what you’d call “hockey stick” growth. Still, said Barovic, “it’s going up.” The device maker is at the Las Vegas trade show to promote its current line of lost item trackers and to celebrate its 10-year anniversary. Today, Chipolo sells two versions of a keychain dongle ($28) that work either with its own app or with Apple’s Find My Network, and a wallet card ($35) that is slim enough to fit into a credit card slot. Unlike AirTag, Chipolo fully supports Android phones. Chipolo The company differentiates its products by the nature of the form factor — it’s plastic, comes in many colors, and its keychain dongle has a hole in the top so you don’t have to buy a separate accessory. And it costs a little less. The device also has baseline functions — like beeping to help you find your lost item, if nearby, and finding a network of some sort when the item is out of Bluetooth range. (The non-Find My version, however, will not alert you if someone is trying to use the device for stalking purposes. But with its smaller network, its GPS updates are not as quick or as effective.) Chipolo believes its feature set, along with what it believes are its better alerts, are what will help it to remain competitive with AirTag in the long-term. The company is also not slowing down development, either, but rather sees Apple’s lack of variety with AirTag as a niche to exploit. In addition to the multiple form factors and colors, it has built prototypes for two more form factors, including a location tracker designed for luggage and a screw-on tracker for bikes. It’s hoping to launch those next year. Chipolo funds its new products with sales from its existing trackers, despite offers of outside funding. “We’ve had a few [investors approach], but we didn’t find anyone who actually fits our culture,” said Zelenšek. “But, of course, we are always open for new opportunities,” he added.
|
Ring brings back the Peephole Cam, now starting at $129
|
Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
In 2019, Ring launched the Peephole Cam, a camera that fits over existing door peepholes to record goings-on outdoors, in apartment building hallways and so on. Priced at $199, the Peephole Cam failed to catch on, leading Ring to discontinue it in 2021. But now, Ring’s giving it another go — the Peephole Cam made a return this morning at . The model is the same but now starts at $129 and ships with software that brings its capabilities in line with the rest of Ring’s product portfolio. “After removing the Peephole Cam from our inventory, we heard from a number of customers who still were interested in this device and wanted to secure their front door with a Ring Doorbell but were not able to install one of Ring’s existing doorbells,” Ring CTO Josh Roth told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We are pleased to be able to offer the Ring Peephole Cam at a lower price than before to better serve our customers.” Ring The Peephole Cam — which Ring insists can be installed without permanent modifications to a door — offers motion detection, a doorbell button, 1080p video, two-way talk, real-time streaming video and Privacy Zones (areas users can designate to black out from their camera’s field of view). Exclusive to the Peephole Cam is an adjustable impact sensor to detect when a door is being “physically interacted with”; when the Peephole Cam senses vibrations, it’ll alert that someone’s knocking on the door and will begin recording. Predictably, the Peephole Cam works with Alexa, letting owners send announcements or sound effects to Alexa-enabled devices when a knock, motion or doorbell ring is detected. A Peephole Cam-detected knock or motion can also be set to trigger smart home routines — for example, switching on connected lights and closing motorized window blinds. Ring When asked about the Peephole Cam’s privacy features, Roth noted that the doorbell has built-in cover slides to prevent a passerby from looking through the peephole and a toggle for audio recording. But that probably won’t allay the fears of consumer advocates who’ve argued that the company’s devices are a security threat. As TechCrunch previously reported, Ring has a history of ,
|
WhatsApp launches official proxy support for users globally
|
Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
WhatsApp is for its users all over the world, the company announced on Thursday. The support will allow users to maintain access to WhatsApp if their connection is blocked or disrupted. Choosing a proxy enables users to connect to WhatsApp through servers set up by volunteers and organizations around the world dedicated to helping people communicate freely. WhatsApp says connecting via proxy maintains the same level of privacy and security the app provides and that personal messages will still be protected by end-to-end encryption. The company says messages will not be visible to anyone in between, not the proxy servers, WhatsApp or Meta. We continue to fight for your right to communicate freely and privately. Now, when connecting to WhatsApp directly is not possible, you can stay connected around the world through a server set up by volunteers and organizations dedicated to helping others communicate freely. — WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) “Our wish for 2023 is that these internet shutdowns never occur,” WhatsApp wrote in a . “Disruptions like we’ve seen in Iran for months on end deny people’s human rights and cut people off from receiving urgent help. Though in case these shutdowns continue, we hope this solution helps people wherever there is a need for secure and reliable communication.” The new option is available in the settings menu for all users running the latest version of the app. WhatsApp says if you have internet access, you can search through social media or search engines for trusted sources that have created a proxy. To connect to a proxy, you need to go into your WhatsApp settings and tap “Storage and Data” and select “Proxy.” Then you need to tap “Use Proxy” and enter the proxy address and tap “Save” to connect. If the connection is successful, you will see a check mark. If you are still unable to send or receive WhatsApp messages using a proxy, that proxy may have been blocked. In this case, you can try again using a different proxy address. WhatsApp notes that the use of a third-party proxy will share your IP address with the proxy provider.
|
Daily Crunch: Property management startup Doorstead raises $21.5M Series B
|
Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
We’ve made it to Friday! If you are looking for a good podcast episode, I highly recommend today’s where , and talk about CES, NYE, SBF and FTX — oh my! Also, shout-out to you Daily Crunchers out there for reading yesterday’s newsletter and helping it be one of today’s top-read stories. It warms my heart, and I hope today’s news is equally enthralling. Without further adieu… — If you liked that item above on Lumus, then you’ll love what else the TechCrunch team has in store for you today as they continue to cover the in Las Vegas. There’s two more days to go! Gadgets and gizmos aplenty: Tim Robberts / Getty Images There’s a subtext for the waves of layoffs and Craigslist ads for discounted office furniture: tech investors have amassed approximately $290 billion in dry powder. “Despite the downturn, strong cash supply and tailwinds for spending on digitization are leading some market participants to believe we’re in a strong investment cycle,” says Raphael Mukomilow and Pierre Bourdon at Picus Capital. After they tracked uninvested capital by year going back to 2006, the pair found that “a crisis within the investment landscape has often been followed by years of systematic outperformance of returns, and history has a way of repeating itself.” Three more from the TC+ team: If you use Snap’s desktop camera to give yourself a fun filter during video calls, start saying your goodbyes to it now. reports that on January 25 to focus on its Camera Kit for Web feature. He also notes there might be more behind the move, writing, “The discontinuation of the Snap Camera app — spotted first by — is not entirely surprising. Last year, it and months after first launching it.” And we have five more for you:
|
Verizon’s +Play subscription store to later open to non-Verizon customers
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
Verizon a new subscription service aggregator, , into open beta, allowing its customers to purchase and manage subscriptions to over 20 services, including Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, ESPN+, discovery+, AMC+, NFL+, NBA League Pass and NBA TV. But while the initial version of the service is expected to launch in the late Q1/March timeframe, exclusively to Verizon customers, the company today confirmed the eventual plan is to make +Play broadly available to all — even those who aren’t with Verizon. Speaking at the Variety Summit at the in Las Vegas, Erin McPherson, Verizon’s chief content officer and head of partnerships, said the service would, “at first” be for Verizon Wireless customers, then “eventually opened up to everyone down the road. But we’re starting out with our customer base,” she said, “We’ve got roughly 20 premium subscription services,” McPherson noted, adding that it expects to grow that number to “about 50” by the end of 2023. That growth, however, won’t continue to expand to include the long tail of smaller streamers, she clarified. “It’s not an attempt to aggregate the world’s apps, though — that’s not what we’re about doing. It’s going to always remain a curated selection. And our hope is also to push the industry forward by creating consumer-centric bundles and offers with these services,” said McPherson. Verizon Q3 with 122 million total retail connections and 25% of its consumer wireless phone customers now have 5G-capable devices, it said. Its consumer division counted 234,000 fixed wireless net additions in the third quarter and 58,000 Fios Internet net additions. The company’s main mission is to keep growing that so this is also the endgame when it comes to the company’s media and content strategy these days. McPherson hinted that longer-term plans may include bundles of services on its platform, as well. “Again none of this is announced yet — but think about a bundle where a customer could get a video subscription service, something to do with health and wellness — since we offer Peloton and Calm. We might start to work with delivery services — anything that’s a monthly subscription,” she said. One of the perks of +Play is a free year of Netflix Premium for customers who sign up for a subscription — something Verizon is helping to underwrite as a marketing initiative. “As we go on forward with Netflix, we’re going to be doing other exciting things in this space as far as thinking about where we go with next-gen — perhaps next-gen bundling and other types of offers with all of our partners. We’ve got great trials. Think of it as our way of providing our customers with more value,” she said. These types of offerings won’t be available in the near term. Instead, when the service exits beta testing later this year, McPherson said Verizon’s focus will be on enhancing the “features and functionality, making things prettier, and taking friction points away in the buy flow.” Reached for comment, Verizon confirmed the plan to make +Play available to non-Verizon customers had not been previously announced. “And at this point, all options are on the table for the evolution of the platform,” a spokesperson said, adding more announcements about the platform will arrive later this year.
|
TechCrunch+ roundup: Dry powder’s slow fuse, landing page basics, generative AI hype
|
Walter Thompson
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
It’s impossible to plan for everything that can go wrong while building a startup.
A definitive guide would have to include chapters like, “So you’ve hired the wrong person,” or, “Five ways to tell if an investor is lying to you.” Mentors and advisers come in handy, but startups move at breakneck speed. Investors say they want to add value, but for founders under pressure, it’s hard to know exactly when to ask for help. Before Tracy Young was co-founder and CEO of TigerEye, she held the same roles at construction productivity software startup PlanGrid. Even though she led the company to $100 million in ARR before its acquisition by Autodesk, she has had “years to dissect the mistakes I made with my first startup,” she writes in TC+. Young looks back at and shares tactical advice for addressing internal conflict, losing product-market fit and other stumbles. “If these reflections help even one founder make one less mistake, I would consider this effort worthwhile.” On Thursday, January 19 at 10 a.m. PST/1 p.m. EST, Tracy Young will join me in a Twitter Space to talk about how she dealt with these and other common founder challenges. Bring your questions and join the chat! One last note: TC+ roundup is TechCrunch’s fastest-growing newsletter! Thanks very much for reading and subscribing! Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
/ Getty Images Money is power, and VCs know it. It’s one of the reasons why so many founders perform inadequate due diligence on their investors, says Talia Rafaeli, a partner with early-stage European VC fund Kompas. Instead of going into a pitch meeting hoping to eke out favorable terms, Rafaeli advises entrepreneurs to interrogate investors with direct questions about liquidity, exit expectations and how they intend to add value over time. “A tough economic climate doesn’t mean the power dynamic automatically tips in favor of those with the cash,” she says. “The best working relationships are those built on an equitable footing with honesty and clarity.” Tim Robberts / Getty Images There’s a subtext to the waves of layoffs and Craigslist ads for discounted office furniture: Tech investors have amassed approximately $290 billion in dry powder. “Despite the downturn, strong cash supply and tailwinds for spending on digitization are leading some market participants to believe we’re in a strong investment cycle,” according to Raphael Mukomilow and Pierre Bourdon at Picus Capital. After they tracked uninvested capital by year going back to 2006, the pair found that “a crisis within the investment landscape has often been followed by years of systematic outperformance of returns, and history has a way of repeating itself.” Getty Images Generative AI is making a splash with apps like Lensa AI, DALL-E and ChatGPT, but does that make it a strong investment? Several VCs who responded to a recent TechCrunch+ survey “said the tech’s growth has reminded them too much of crypto,” writes Rebecca Szkutak. “Everyone is piling on faster than they should be.” / Getty Images Natalia Holgado Sanchez, head of capital markets at Secfi, studied the impact of five downturns since 2002 to see how well privately held startups held up, “and, most importantly, how long it took the IPO market to reopen.” For each period, Sanchez looked at the inciting events, the similarities and differences between this downturn and past crises, and how startups were impacted. “Based on historical data, the IPO market has opened up after 18 to 24 months, on average,” she found. “Given that we’re now about nine months since our window closed, we could see movement by June 2023.” Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch / Getty Images In the first article of a five-part series on growth marketing fundamentals, Jonathan Martinez explains how to create an essential part of every company’s sales funnel: a landing page. This overview includes basic steps for writing a clear headline, offering visitors social proof that builds credibility and crafting calls to action that drive results. Next week, Martinez, who helped scale startups like Uber, Postmates and Chime, will share his tips for launching a paid acquisition channel.
|
TikTok is testing a ‘sleep reminders’ feature that nudges you when it’s bedtime
|
Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
TikTok users regularly complain of hours lost on the platform, especially at night. In an effort to address these concerns, the company is testing new sleep reminders that include the option to set up alerts when it’s your bedtime and to mute notifications during the recommended seven hours of sleep. TikTok confirmed to TechCrunch on Friday that the new sleep reminders are being tested with select users globally. Screenshots shared by product intelligence firm show that the new feature appears under the “screen time” settings in the app. Users who are part of the test will see a new “sleep reminders” option. The app says sleep reminders will help you “know if you reach your sleep time on TikTok to help you get to bed when you want to.” After you select a sleep time, you will be reminded to close the app when the clock reaches that time. TikTok will also mute push notifications for seven hours after your sleep time to help you avoid distractions. Watchful.ai A spokesperson for the company said TikTok is continuously working on new ways to support users’ well-being and that this new tool builds on its current digital well-being features. The app first launched in February 2020 and has since introduced additional features aimed at giving users more control over their app usage. Last June, the company to help users control how much time they spend on TikTok in a single sitting by allowing them to schedule regular screen-time breaks. By default, it suggests break reminders of either 10, 20 or 30 minutes, though users can set reminders for a custom time if they wanted to engage in either longer or shorter sessions before being shown the notification. The app also has for teen accounts. Users aged 13-15 don’t receive push notifications from 9 p.m. and users aged 16-17 have push notifications disabled starting at 10 p.m. Thanks to TikTok’s unmatched ability to distract and engage users via its , its addictive nature has been the subject of . As a result, it’s not surprising that TikTok is testing additional tools designed to put users in better control of their TikTok usage. As with any other test feature, it’s unknown when or if TikTok plans to officially roll out the sleep reminders feature more widely.
|
Rackspace says hackers accessed customer data during ransomware attack
|
Carly Page
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
Cloud computing giant Rackspace has confirmed hackers accessed customer data during last month’s ransomware attack. The attack, which Rackspace , impacted the company’s hosted Exchange email environment, forcing the web giant to shut down the hosted email service following the incident. At the time, Rackspace said it was unaware “what, if any, data was affected.” In its published on Friday, Rackspace admitted that the hackers gained access to the personal data of 27 customers. Rackspace said the hackers accessed PST files, typically used to store backup and archived copies of emails, calendar events and contacts from Exchange accounts and email inboxes. Rackspace said about 30,000 customers used its hosted Exchange service — which it will now discontinue — at the time of the ransomware attack. “We have already communicated our findings to these customers proactively, and importantly, according to CrowdStrike, there is no evidence that the threat actor actually viewed, obtained, misused or disseminated any of the 27 Hosted Exchange customers’ emails or data in the PSTs in any way,” said Rackspace. The company added that customers that haven’t been contacted directly can “be assured” that their data was not accessed by attackers. Rackspace attributed the breach to the Play ransomware group, a relatively new gang that recently claimed attacks on the Belgian port city of Antwerp and the H-Hotels hospitality chain. Rackspace’s stolen data is not currently listed on the ransomware group’s leak site, and it’s unclear if Rackspace has paid a ransom demand. According to , Play threat actors gained access to Rackspace’s networks by exploiting CVE-2022-41080, a zero-day flaw patched by Microsoft in November that has been .
|
HealthAtom empowers LatAm’s small healthcare offices with cloud-based ops
|
Andrew Mendez
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
HealthAtom is aiming to be the go-to cloud-based operations system for small and midsize healthcare companies across Latin America (LatAm). Although the company has been around since 2012, this is the first time it has announced fresh capital, in the amount of $10 million. HealthAtom’s medilink and dentalink software suites let clinics create schedules, manage electronic health records, handle inventory, administer payroll and provide budgeting breakdowns and regulatory filings. They also have telehealth capabilities that allow patients to access their records on a mobile device. The provider will contact HealthAtom with information on the size of their operations and their needs and wants. After a consultation, a plan will be established and information can be transferred to the cloud platform, adhering to local regulations. According to the founders, a clinic can have its operations up and running on the system within three hours. Depending on the size of the operation and local regulations a clinic can pay anywhere from $20 to $20,000 monthly. Today, HealthAtom has close to 6,500 clients across 20 countries with main operations in Chile, Colombia and Mexico. Additionally, 50,000 doctors and dentists use the company’s services and process over 42 million appointments yearly. “We are at the point where the sales tension occurs, at an information level,” said co-founder and CEO Roberto León in an interview with TechCrunch (conducted in Spanish and translated by the author). “It is a tool that could transcend beyond the SaaS and transform us into a technology solution that has the whole ecosystem integrated to increase the transparency of health processes.” According to a conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute, digital adoption within healthcare systems in LatAm has catered to larger hospitals and disregarded small and medium businesses. Additionally, offerings available to SMBs are often less affordable and don’t provide what a clinic needs. HealthAtom wants to be a part of the solution by being the “one-stop shop” for small and midsize healthcare clinics to run their operations. HealthAtom Although there are some local and country-specific companies providing similar services, HealthAtom remains the only LatAm-wide provider. Though the company provides a continental outreach, the founders told TechCrunch it has been a challenge to cater to every country’s regulations. “There is regulation and compliance regarding how things are signed, how information is stored, how certain health data should be recorded,” said co-founder and CPO Daniel Guajardo. “All this has country-to-country variations and has allowed us, in these 10 years of bootstrapping, to be able to focus on having a very regionalized product.” HealthAtom has garnered support in the form of a $10 million Series A led by Kayyak Ventures, with participation from FJ Labs, Soma, Amador, Taram and a (number) of angels. This round’s funds will go toward incorporating embedded payments in its software, forming partnerships with insurance companies and developing a loan program for patients.
|
MegaCortex ransomware victims can now recover stolen files for free
|
Carly Page
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
Victims of the MegaCortex ransomware can now recover their encrypted files for free, thanks to the release of a new file decryptor. The free decryptor was built by cybersecurity firm Bitdefender and the EU’s No More Ransom in cooperation with the Zürich Cantonal Police, the Zürich Public Prosecutor’s Office and Europol, which in September that 12 individuals had been arrested in connection with the Dharma, LockerGoga and MegaCortex ransomware families. At the time, a statement from Zürich’s prosecutor revealed that the arrests allowed investigators to recover multiple private keys used by the ransomware gang that could allow victims to recover data that was previously encrypted with the LockerGaga or MegaCortex malware. BitDefender released a decryptor for LockerGoga last year. Now, the cybersecurity company announced this week that a free MegaCortex decryptor is now available. The tool, which should work to unlock files encrypted by all variants of MegaCortex ransomware, is available to download and via , which is home to 136 free tools for 165 ransomware variants, including Babuk, DarkSide, Gandcrab and REvil. Bitdefender told TechCrunch that MegaCortex is estimated to have infected in excess of 1,800 companies around the world, including a number of “high-profile” targets, though the figure is likely to be far higher. The cybersecurity company said its Sodinokibi decryptor, which it released in September 2021, helped victims save over $800 million in unpaid ransoms, and it expects similar from the MegaCortex tool. MegaCortex was first seen in May 2019 when it began targeting networks that have already been infected with malware, such as Emotet and Qakbot, which is often used to steal data but also deliver ransomware payloads. Later that year, MegaCortex operators became among the first to engage in double extortion tactics, where they exfiltrate a victim’s sensitive data and encrypt it. The ransomware actors then threaten to release the stolen data unless a ransom demand was paid, which are said to have ranged from approximately $20,000 to as much as $5.8 million.
|
TikTok adds video-scrubbing thumbnails to make it easier to find specific parts of videos
|
Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
TikTok has quietly added video-scrubbing thumbnails to its platform this week as the company continues to beef up its video features. The new addition makes it easier for users to find a specific part of a longer video. The feature was first spotted by social media consultant . Since the feature is starting to roll out this week, it might not be available for everyone just yet. It appears that the video-scrubbing thumbnails are currently only available for newer uploads, as I was unable to see them on older videos. Although users have had the option to rewind or fast forward long videos on TikTok for quite some time now, the addition of video scrubbing thumbnails makes this process more intuitive. For example, say you’re following a TikTok recipe video and want to get to a specific part of the video. In the past you would have had to blindly scrub through the video. Now, you will be able to see where exactly you want to fast forward to via the new thumbnails. Screenshots/TechCrunch It was a matter of time before TikTok added this feature, given that it’s slowly been inching into YouTube’s territory. YouTube has had scrubbing thumbnails for what feels like forever, so it makes sense for TikTok to offer them on its platform as well, especially as it continues to present itself as a viable option for longer-form video creators who normally post content on YouTube. Ever since TikTok rolled out the ability for users to in length, it has been working to improve the viewing experience for users. Last month, TikTok began with select users globally. that kids and teens now spend more time watching TikTok than YouTube. This has been the case since June 2020, when TikTok began to outrank YouTube in terms of the average minutes per day people ages 4 through 18 spent accessing these two competitive video platforms. By continuing to enhance its viewing experience, TikTok is inching further into YouTube’s domain.
|
Twitch experiences an outage for the second time in a week
|
Amanda Silberling
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
The popular livestreaming service Twitch is experiencing an outage for the second time this week. Around 3 p.m. EST on Thursday afternoon, many creators who were live on Twitch were cut off in the middle of their streams. “We are aware of issues with the site and our teams are actively working on a resolution,” Twitch Support . “Thank you for your reports and patience whilst we work on it — we will keep you updated here.” Through out the incident, Twitch’s indicated that all systems were operational. Not all streamers were affected, and some were able to restart their streams within about 20 minutes of the outage. But the timing of these issues sparked frustration among fans. 🔧 We are aware of issues with the site and our teams are actively working on a resolution. Thank you for your reports and patience whilst we work on it – we will keep you updated here 💜 — Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) Just two days prior, on January 3, a Twitch outage temporarily made it seem as though some creators had . This was because Twitch was having trouble loading followed channels on both desktop and mobile. Twitch confirmed on its that the outage “could manifest in chat not working, login difficulties, search impaired, etc.” At the time of publication, we have seem some affected creators reboot their streams, but Twitch has not indicated via Twitter or its website that Thursday’s issue is fully resolved. Twitch did not immediately respond for comment about the cause of these issues.
|
Daily Crunch: In layoff update, Amazon CEO tells workers ‘we plan to eliminate just over 18,000 roles’
|
Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Hello, I hope it is a great Thursday for you so far. For me, it’s the little things that get me excited and today it is Delta Air Lines’ announcement that SkyMiles frequent flyers, including yours truly, will starting February 1. May you also find something that excites you today. Let’s get into the news. — Continuing with what seems to be a trend in layoffs, ’s story is very important in getting perspectives from former employees laid off from startups to see how they are handling things and how their next jobs might evolve. She also asks the question, I won’t spoil it for you, but there seems to be a cycle going on. Now here’s four more: / Getty Images In the first article of a five-part series on growth marketing fundamentals, Jonathan Martinez explains how to create an essential part of every startup’s sales funnel: a landing page. This overview includes basic steps for writing a clear headline, offering visitors social proof that builds credibility, and crafting calls to action that drive results. Next week, Martinez, who helped scale startups like Uber, Postmates and Chime, will share his tips for launching a paid acquisition channel. Three more from the TC+ team: If you couldn’t tell by your Twitter feed, CES is happening. introduces CES and how you can for the rest of the conference. also helped you out by rounding up a list of the seen at the conference. One of the stories that particularly caught our eye today was ’s story on . It was something ahead of its time apparently, with Ring shuttering the product in 2021. Now it’s back in all of its glory and can be yours at the starting price of $129. Here are a few favs from today’s batch of CES stories: Our team wrote 51 Big Tech stories today, so I’m gifting you an extra one over the usual five:
|
Delta launches free Wi-Fi
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
At CES, today announced that it will launch free Wi-Fi for all members of its SkyMiles frequent flier program starting February 1. This free service, which the company is launching in partnership with T-Mobile, will be available in the majority of the company’s domestic, Viasat-enabled mainline aircraft first, with full availability across its regional aircraft and on international flights by the end of 2024. “At work, at home and everywhere in between, connectivity is essential to daily life, and your journey on Delta should be no different,” said Delta CEO Ed Bastian at CES 2023 in Las Vegas. “Our vision has long been to deliver an experience at 30,000 feet that feels close to what our customers have available on the ground.” Delta Since more users will likely make use of this free service than ever paid for it, the airline put a lot of emphasis on hardening its systems in recent months. Delta said it worked with engineers at Viasat to test and scale its in-flight connectivity service to enable this rollout. “We didn’t just want free Wi-Fi to offer base-level service — we wanted it to be transformative for the entire onboard experience,” said Bastian. “It is imperative all customers onboard can enjoy their favorite content just as they would at home, and we’ve put this system through meticulous tests to make that possible.” MediaLink’s Michael Kassan and Delta’s Ed Bastian at CES 2023. Sarah Perez/TechCrunch To use this service, fliers have to be members of Delta’s SkyMiles frequent flier service (though as a spokesperson told me, they’ll be able to sign up an account while on the plane, too). Even though this service is rolling out in partnership with T-Mobile, you don’t have to be a T-Mobile customer to use it. “It’s going to be available to everyone,” Bastian said today. “Doesn’t matter what price you paid for your seat, what class of service you chose, what credit card you used, what mobile carrier you’re connected to — it’s going to be free to all and it’s something that is so important to the way. The good news is there’s no fine print. It’s free.” One thing worth noting, as Bastian confirmed in his keynote today, the free Wi-Fi will extend to however many devices you have with you, not just a single phone or laptop. A lot of other airlines are also now moving in this direction, be that in a more limited form by offering free access to messaging apps (as Delta already did) or by partnering with telcos to offer free Wi-Fi for their customers. United, for example, offers on most flights these days. With this, Delta is also launching Delta Sync, its unified brand for its software, connectivity and in-flight entertainment offerings. In many ways, this builds around the company’s announcements since it . The idea here is to offer fliers a more personalized service using, for the most part, its mobile app, as well as new airport experiences, all linked to a flier’s SkyMiles account. This includes Delta’s (optional) , which it is currently trialing in Atlanta and Detroit but also the new free Wi-Fi offering and new entertainment offers that will only be available to SkyMiles members. Indeed, the new Delta Sync on Demand will provide fliers with a personalized seatback entertainment system that is more akin to the smart TV they have at home, Delta promises. For now, on top of the entertainment content, this will include food and beverage ordering in first class, a new journey planned, content recommendations and real-time notifications. The airline plans to start rolling some of the initial features of this system out by the end of the year, though many of the personalization features will only launch after that. As Bastian also today noted, Paramount+ is going to be a partner with free Paramount+ streaming on board Delta’s plane. These new Delta Sync experiences will roll out over the course of 2023. “Delta Sync elevates what it means to be a Delta SkyMiles Member by enabling a journey that fits you perfectly and grows more rewarding the more you travel,” said Bastian. “The future of travel is one where your digital and physical experiences come together in a seamless, warm and personal way, making those human travel connections even more meaningful.”
|
Dear Sophie: How can I transfer my H-1B to my new startup in 2023?
|
Sophie Alcorn
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says , a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to in my next column.” TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; . Dear Restless & Resolved, Congrats on embarking on this exciting new adventure and taking the first step toward living your dreams! The short answer to your first question is: Yes, you can transfer your H-1B visa to your new startup. However, it’s a tricky process, and it’s important to establish the correct, compliant foundation before proceeding. This set-up process can take time (several months), but the peace of mind you’ll have from knowing that everything is correct will be priceless. You should talk to both a corporate attorney and an immigration attorney. A corporate attorney can help you set up your company, including drafting bylaws, and an immigration attorney can help you determine the best strategy for you and any co-founders based on your personal and business goals. You will need to take steps to qualify your company to petition you for the H-1B transfer, such as taking on a co-founder and getting funding for your startup. To transfer your H-1B to your startup, you may need to give up control of your startup, (sometimes but not always) give up a major stake in it and ensure it is structured to meet all immigration visa requirements. Joanna Buniak / To meet the sponsorship qualifications, you must demonstrate to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that: Start planning now and map out your role at your startup, how many co-founders you will have, how much equity everybody else would receive, the roles of your co-founders and prospective investors. This will enable your attorney to see if your plan is viable and offer any alternatives.
|
3 questions founders should be asking investors in Q1 2023
|
Talia Rafaeli
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
began 2022 bright-eyed and optimistic as startups raised nearly $13 billion in the first quarter, making it the fifth-highest quarter for funding on record. However, talk of a pullback in global venture capital has become louder and more widespread of late. It’s clear that the cash is not flowing as freely as it once was, and that has changed the landscape for ambitious startups looking to build and scale their propositions. However, a challenging economic climate doesn’t necessarily mean that startups should accept the first offer that comes along, settle for lower valuations or bring on investors that have different values and ambitions for the business. It is now more important than ever for every party to approach the negotiating table with clear questions and expectations. Here are three firm but fair questions that founders should consider asking their potential investors: Most investors worth their salt will demonstrate that they come with more than just deep pockets — value such as sector expertise, business experience or a global network. Founders should feel confident about proactively asking about what an investor can provide, particularly the networks and introductions potential investors can facilitate. There is a significant difference between an introduction that was facilitated via an email and a clear handoff to someone whose relationship with the investor is deep and based on many levels of trust. Many investors pride themselves on having a robust and lucrative contact list, but not all introductions are the same — a LinkedIn profile rarely demonstrates the depth and quality of an investor’s network or knowledge. My advice is to be clear about your commercial goals and push potential investors to offer names of individuals or organizations that will deliver the impact you’re looking for. For example, we recently introduced one of our portfolio companies to an $80 billion infrastructure firm with which we had developed deep relationships in order to set up pilots in a number of regions. Introductions should not just forge connections; they should deliver tangible commercial impact. It always surprises me how many founders believe VCs are sitting on piles of cash that they are ready to distribute at any moment. It is important to remember that VCs don’t have an endless pot of money — they are at the mercy of their LPs’ liquidity. It is therefore sensible (and necessary) to have answers to three key questions:
|
When will IPOs return? The past may hold some clues
|
Natalia Holgado Sanchez
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
sure about you, but lately I’ve been hearing the same chatter from friends and colleagues at startups. It’s usually a version of: “Will my equity ever be worth something?” Let me start with the harsh truth: Nobody has a crystal ball to anticipate what the market will do or how it will impact private company stock. That may not be the most comforting thing to hear, but I also don’t believe it’s all doom and gloom. Another truth is that this is not the first market reversal, and it won’t be the last either. For me, the comforting thing to do is look at the data. To better understand where we could end up, I like looking at the past and let history inform where we are now. So, I looked at five market downturns over the past 20 years and analyzed how they affected private stock, and, most importantly, how long it took the IPO market to reopen. After all, at the end of the day, we’re all searching for the same answer: When will my paper wealth become liquid? Starting in the late ’90s, tech stocks started skyrocketing and were trading at all-time highs. Sound familiar? Capital was extremely cheap to borrow as interest rates dipped as low as 1.67% (compared to rates in the last few years bottoming out at 0.25%). That spurred investments in riskier assets. When the market started to collapse, prices were dragged down even further by accounting scandals, such as , and . While there aren’t as many financial scandals today, the environment back then was somewhat similar to what we’re seeing now. The similarities between today’s market and the dot-com bubble end there. The dot-com bubble was not an economic crisis per se, and it was only contained to the financial markets. Plus, inflation wasn’t part of the molotov cocktail that is a major driver of what’s happening today. Startups certainly took a hit. Private markets aren’t as transparent as the public ones, so to get better insight into what was happening, I like to look at the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF ( ). This is an ETF that tracks technology companies — IGV is a basket of 119 software and interactive home entertainment and media stocks (Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.). Even though it is not a 1:1 representation of private markets, since it is an ETF based on public companies, we can infer how multiples evolved during this time because there is a correlation between public and private markets. Here’s what happened: We’re all pretty familiar with the stories of the latter two. Now let’s look at 2008, when we had our most recent major recession. Loan originators, propelled by cheap credit and lax mortgage policies, enabled the fast growth of subprime loans. That caused demand and valuations to skyrocket, creating a feedback loop of further investor demand and origination incentives. But as interest rates began to rise and liquidity dried up, over-leveraged banks and funds began to rapidly unwind their portfolios. Valuations began to spiral and leverage levels started exploding.
|
5 failure points between $5M and $100M in ARR
|
Tracy Young
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
privilege of leading PlanGrid to $100 million in ARR before I stepped down as CEO and passed the baton to Autodesk Construction. I’ve had years to dissect the mistakes I made with my first startup. Regardless of which industry you build in, or where you are at in your startup’s journey, there are many things that will likely fail. This post breaks down PlanGrid’s key failure points and what I’ve learned from them. If these reflections help even one founder make one less mistake, I would consider this effort worthwhile. As first-time founders, we were too creative with our organizational structure. We had a flat management hierarchy in the early years, and we bragged that we ran our startup like “Star Trek” — you were either in engineering or operations, and everyone reported to a founder. This was cute until it quickly stopped working. People care about titles and career paths, and if you want to retain great people, you have to care about these things too. In Year 3, we tripled from 30 to 90 people, then doubled the team to 180 a year later. Those were the most painful years, because we went from a high-execution team to one that felt like it was stuck in molasses. We didn’t know how to hire giants, so we recruited several mediocre managers, who in turn recruited more mediocre people. Meanwhile, communication gets a lot harder with more people, and I did a poor job communicating the direction of the company. We had a first-mover advantage in a category we created but lost our position during these years of slow execution. Be creative about how you’re solving problems for your customer and not about organization structures. Hire a great HR leader as a business partner to help recruit and retain the right team and design a good communication flow. Remember that A players can recruit other A players, but B players can only recruit C players. Our trickiest inflection point was hitting Dunbar’s number — at 150 people, everything went to chaos. Hierarchy is a factor. At 10, 20 or 30 people, everyone can report to a founder. At 150, just based on basic management ratios, the frontline team member is now separated by three to four degrees from the founders. Not feeling like a unified team becomes dangerous when you don’t hit revenue targets or product milestones. When there is a mismatch on velocity and performance, it’s easy for those who feel like they’re performing to blame any slowdown on everyone else. There are natural tensions between sales and marketing teams, support and product, and product and engineering. Everything becomes magnified with more people simply because communication gets harder.
|
OneRoof grabs funding to help apartment dwellers cozy up to their neighbors
|
Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Apartment living can be a lonely life, but is here to change that. The company offers a hyperlocal social network app meant to connect people in the same residential building around common interests like hobbies and to even organize around a common goal. The pre-revenue company has grown up a lot since we profiled it in 2021 after . At the time, CEO Selin Sonmez told TechCrunch that the app was live in 400 buildings in New York City, and today that has increased to over 40,000 active neighbors across 1,300 buildings in New York and Miami. OneRoof has also done a soft launch in Dallas, she added. If you are trying to picture how OneRoof works, Sonmez says the company is often compared to Nextdoor. It helps people who live in the same apartment building to connect, network, exchange info, buy and sell items, help with pets, meet in real life and create a sense of community. The free app relies on what Sonmez called “a community of champions” known as Super Neighbors — essentially the people in your apartment building who “act as a glue to their community,” she said. From that position, they are able to gain access to neighbor event sponsorships, join the exclusive Super Neighbor Club in their city and share feedback with OneRoof for future app development. OneRoof co-founders Nikos Georgantas and Selin Sonmez OneRoof “Neighbors are a critical, yet neglected social circle,” she added. “Nobody knows who their neighbors are, so we are building an essential social tissue in society. Our long-term mission is to unify and empower neighbors under OneRoof and to create more resilient urban cities, both socially and economically.” In 2021, OneRoof was just a chat room app where neighbors could talk to each other digitally. Since then it has morphed to include an in-person events feature, improved user profiles to highlight interests, a neighbor directory and a “grow” feature to help people create their own communities. The concept seems to be appealing to apartment dwellers: In Super Neighbor buildings, OneRoof saw over 78% of users continue using the app after 12 weeks, and over 65% continue using after 24 weeks, Sonmez said. In addition, three times the in-person events, including happy hours and meeting someone for a workout, were created on OneRoof in the fourth quarter compared to the previous quarter. The company has continued to grow, receiving between 30 and 40 Super Neighbor requests per day and observing a 20% month-over-month increase in users. To be able to onboard them, Sonmez and co-founder Nikos Georgantas needed to grow their team so they made the decision to go after a new round of funding. This was during the spring and summer, however, when the venture capital market was slowing down. As a result, Sonmez said she had to not only manage some difficult decisions — for example, slashing the marketing budget by 90% to keep OneRoof’s existing team in place — but she also had close to 80 investor meetings during this time and even had to field some unexpected questions. “We were suddenly being asked questions around revenue which wouldn’t be the case for social startups [at] our stage before the markets shifted, so it took us time to find the right partners,” she added. “There was also market ambiguity around pricing, so we didn’t price the round until there’s more clarity.” Eventually, Sonmez found good investment partners and closed on $3.2 million in seed funding to give the company $4.45 million in total funding. Chamaeleon led the round and was joined by Dream Machine, Gaingels, General Catalyst, The Helm and a group of angel investors, including Margo Georgiadis at Synetro Group, former Andreessen Horowitz investor D’Arcy Coolican, Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen and Elomida Visviki. The funding enabled OneRoof to add four new employees and is currently looking to fill two more roles. Sonmez also plans to invest in app development, software, sponsorships and marketing. Regarding the company’s current big milestones around engagement and retention, OneRoof has gained a lot of ground, but Sonmez still has much she wants to accomplish. “We want to do more,” she added. “There’s hundreds of millions of people living in this country, and we want to make sure that we can grow our products and put them in the hands of anyone who has a neighbor who thinks, ‘Oh, I wish I knew who they were.’”
|
John Deere at CES? Yes, with a robotics-based fertilizer system and a new electric excavator
|
Ingrid Lunden
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Consumer tech is at an inflection point right now, with slowing growth in developed markets and economic depressions pulling emerging markets back when it comes to investment and usage. Into that vacuum, at CES this year, major industrial company has put itself front and center to launch its latest tech and to make the case for why an agriculture and construction business is a good fit for a consumer electronics show. Today the company announced ExactShot, a new sensor and robotics-based system for applying fertilizer, and a new electric excavator. The idea with both is to speed up repetitive processes while making them more efficient and less wasteful. “Why should you care about farmers when they represent less than 2% of the U.S. population?” asked John May, the CEO of John Deere, speaking at a keynote today at CES. His answer: because food production is exactly where tech is actually proving its relevance and making a difference. “You will not find two industries that have a larger impact on our world, and all of us, than agriculture, and construction.” One of the big criticisms of the world of agri-business has been that it’s not sustainable, especially as the need for producing food for a growing global population continues to rise unabated. With the global population projected to rise to 10 billion by 2050 from 8 billion today, food production on arable land will grow by 60%-70%. The pitch with ExactShot is that it will help farmers be economically and environmentally sustainable as they do this. Using The excavator, meanwhile, is powered by a Kreisel battery and is aimed at reducing noise, emissions and daily operating costs for excavating machinery, reduced job-site noise and enhanced machine reliability. John Deere “leverages a vast tech stack,” May said, “to give our machines superhuman capabilities.” That is turning into significant business for the company. The company has sold some 500,000 connected machines, and these currently are used across more than one-third of the Earth’s surface, he said. “You might want to think of them as robots that precisely execute jobs,” he said, with the construction and farming equipment featuring integrated displays with embedded software and analytics, GPS hardware, machine learning and computer vision, and powered by cloud computing connectivity. Jumping on the self-driving bandwagon, the company last year debuted an autonomous tractor at the show, but “these tractors aren’t concept vehicles,” May added. “They’re real and are being used on farms today. If this sounds like a lot of technology, it is.”
|
The FTC moves to ban noncompete agreements
|
Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday that would block employers from using noncompete agreements to restrict workers from pursuing employment with competitors. In its push to throw out noncompete agreements, the FTC cites Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits “unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce.” The agency will now open up the issue for public comment on the practice, which limits employment prospects for tens of millions of Americans. 6. is seeking public comment on the proposed rule. Hearing from entrepreneurs, workers, and employers will help ensure that the final rule reflects market realities. The proposal identifies potential alternative rules & key questions we are exploring: — Lina Khan (@linakhanFTC) “The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy,” FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said. “Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand. By ending this practice, the FTC’s proposed rule would promote greater dynamism, innovation, and healthy competition.” The new FTC rule would prevent employers from entering into noncompetes with workers and block them from maintaining a noncompete agreement or representing to a worker that they are subject to a noncompete agreement. If the rule goes into effect, contractors and non full-time workers would also be protected from employers who would try to strong-arm them into one of the agreements. Employers would be forced to dissolve noncompete agreements currently in place and inform workers that they are no longer bound by those agreements. Antitrust advocates and worker’s rights groups cheered the FTC’s action on the issue. “Millions of workers, future new business owners, everyday consumers and the American economy overall will be better off because of the FTC’s vote today,” Executive Director of the American Economic Liberties Project Sarah Miller said on Thursday. We had a sense that the Biden administration was working on specific action to dismantle the practice of noncompete agreements. The White House took aim at noncompetes in a that criticized the practice and encouraged the FTC to take regulatory action to end it. The executive order, crafted to promote economic competition by laying out priorities for rule-making agencies, condemned noncompetes as “cumbersome” requirements that “impede economic mobility” by preventing workers from changing jobs freely.
|
Apple Fitness+ to add kickboxing workouts, sleep meditation and more
|
Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Apple that its Fitness+ service is getting a new kickboxing workout type, sleep meditation theme, artist spotlights and more for the new year. The company is adding kickboxing starting January 9. Each workout will consist of a distinct round of moves followed by one final round, which will combine the moves users just learned into a one-minute interval. No equipment is required for these sessions, and workouts will be 10, 20, or 30 minutes long. As for the new sleep meditation, Apple says the theme is designed to help users release tension and anxiety. Apple will add new sleep meditations every week, and each practice can be done as part of a wind-down routine or while drifting off. To help users get started with sleep meditations, Apple is launching a new program called Introductions to Meditations for Sleep, which will use different techniques to help users slow down and rest. Apple In addition, Apple is adding a new artist spotlight series with workouts featuring music from Beyoncé. Starting January 9, seven new workouts featuring the singer’s music will be available across Cycling, Dance, HIIT, Pilates, Strength, Treadmill, and Yoga. Apple is also adding two additional Artist Spotlight offerings: the Foo Fighters on January 16 and Bad Bunny on January 23. Fitness+ is also introducing new episodes of Time to Walk, beginning with actor Jamie Lee Curtis. New guests will be added each week, including Amber Ruffin, Jason Segel, Nina Hoss, Colman Domingo, Nathen Chen and more. Last, Apple is adding two new Collections, curated content from the Fitness+ library to help users go after their goals or find inspiration. The first new collection is called “6 weeks to restart your fitness” and is designed to motivate users to build a new habit of working out every day. The collection features a blend of workouts to help users get back into fitness and will launch on January 9. The second new collection, which is called “Level up your core training,” features short core workouts taken to the next level with dumbbells and will launch on January 23. Apple Fitness+ in December 2020 and has since worked to compete with other subscription fitness offerings. Fitness+ is available as a for $9.99 per month, or as a part of the plan for $32.95 per month, which gives users access to Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+ and iCloud+ with 2 TB of storage.
|
VR comes of age, as Rendever, a mixed reality startup focused on the elderly, acquires Alcove from AARP
|
Ingrid Lunden
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Elderly people are not typically thought of as early adopters of cutting-edge technology, but there are startups looking to buck that trend, banking on an opportunity to provide them with new services like VR, to address the specific needs of elderly consumers. Today one of the bigger startups in the space, , is announcing an acquisition to expand its business. The company, which builds virtual reality experiences designed to help elderly people feel less lonely and currently has some 600,000 users, has acquired , a platform developed at — the organization that both lobbies for and provides services like insurance and support to members, who are typically retirees and older people. Rendever operates as a B2B service — it works with care homes and other organizations to create customized VR experiences that are in turn used for those organizations’ elderly residents — but Alcove is more consumer-facing and is currently sold as a service to AARP’s members. It describes itself as a “family-oriented virtual reality app.” Available to use on Meta (Oculus) Quest, the app is laid out as a virtual living room where families can “meet” and look at photos, play games, watch movies or just converse together. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed but from what we understand, Rendever is paying cash for Alcove, and AARP is taking equity in Rendever as part of the deal. Rendever and AARP are not strangers. The latter is one of the startup’s investors (others include Mass Challenge and the Dorm Room Fund; it also had grants from the National Institute on Aging and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) and they had initially co-developed Alcove together before AARP decided that it no longer wanted to invest in developing it in-house. “We at AARP are thrilled to have Rendever acquire and continue expanding the capabilities of such an impactful product as Alcove,” said Rick Robinson, VP and GM of the AgeTech Collaborative at AARP. “We know virtual, immersive experiences can demonstrate tremendously positive outcomes, especially for the socially isolated and we expect Alcove will continue helping even wider audiences under Rendever’s leadership.” The org, he said, is not pulling away from tech, but it will pursue it in collaboration with third parties more in the future. That shift — and this piece of M&A — both underscore part of a bigger trend that is being played out in tech. Not only has the bear market led to startups having a harder time raising money right now, but also organizations are reining in budgets for tech projects (if not completely killing them off) if those projects are not showing a strong return or quick path to profitability. This in turn is spurring more M&A activity as a means to giving those startups and those projects a lifeline in these leaner times. The fact that the asset in question here is focused on elderly people is also significant. Technology is now part and parcel of how we interact with each other, something that became ever more the case in the peak of COVID-19 as people had to isolate more from each other and travel got curtailed. Although there are a lot of older consumers who resist a lot of tech — they may not have mobile phones, or can’t solve simple glitches on their computers, or they don’t use any kind of social media — that population is evolving as more digitally savvy consumers age. All of this will lead to a bigger market and a bigger demand for services and devices aimed at older people’s specific needs and preferences. (And this week at CES, building for that population, not just VR like this but gadgets like hearing aids, is forming a big part of what might more generally be described as “accessibility” tech but could just as accurately be seen as more sophisticated approaches for specific audiences.) The idea that there is an untapped market of users, but who could be a perfect audience for VR, formed part of the premise for Rendever getting started in the first place, CEO and co-founder Kyle Rand said. “We had the idea of bringing VR into senior living communities to address social isolation,” he said of the original idea for the startup in 2016. At the time, most were skeptical, he said. “Back then, when we told people this idea, and we provided some demos, we got laughed at. No, they said, you’re going to use this technology with this demographic [because] they must be tech averse. But what we found was that if you can make it easy to get somebody into the experience, and provide something meaningful and joyful, the opportunities were just limitless.” He said when users come into virtual rooms for the first time, or use them to “travel” back to their childhood neighborhoods using Google Maps and Street View, people would “light up.” Although providing ways to ease social isolation might have previously been seen as a nice-to-have, the premise took on a different urgency during COVID-19 when so many were isolated out of caution and sometimes actual public health regulations, and people started to understand just what toll isolation could have on mental health, regardless of the age. Today, the startup works with some 500 senior living communities in North America, and it has to date delivered more than 2 million VR experiences to older adults. Rendever is largely bootstrapped — it has raised less than half a million dollars in the last eight years — but it’s now using the fact that it is profitable and growing while addressing an evolving market to go out for its Series A. We’ve delivered over 2 million experiences in VR to older adults.
|
Roku ends 2022 with new milestone, tops 70M active accounts
|
Lauren Forristal
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Roku reached a new milestone in 2022, , surpassing 70 million active accounts globally, an increase of nearly 10 million users year over year. The company had 60.1 million accounts in Q4 2021 and 65.4 million in . Roku also reported a 19% year over year jump in global streaming hours. It had 23.9 billion streaming hours in the fourth quarter of 2022 and 87.4 billion for the entire year. Roku’s active account milestone comes at a time when many companies struggle to boost user growth. “As consumers continue the shift to TV streaming, we’re excited that a growing number of people are taking the journey with Roku, and we’re proud to reach this meaningful milestone today,” said Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood, in a statement. “Roku is laser-focused on delivering affordable, easy-to-use products and an operating system that makes streaming accessible to all. We look forward to continuing to bring innovative and delightful experiences to more and more viewers this year.” Roku Separately, Roku noted that its free streaming service, The Roku Channel, has been the top 5 channel in terms of active accounts and streaming hours, which includes last quarter. For Q3 2022, The Roku Channel increased in streaming hours by 90% year over year. Despite the company warning investors of a weak fourth quarter in November, Roku claimed today that it’s still the No. 1 TV streaming platform in the U.S., Canada and Mexico by hours streamed. The company previously said that it expects to have a total net revenue of approximately $800 million or a decrease of 7.5% year over year. Note that Roku has yet to report its full Q4 2022 earnings but will release the results in February 2023. The announcement also comes on the heels of the company announcing its first Roku-branded TVs. Yesterday, Roku Roku Select and Roku Plus Series TVs, which will become available in the United States in spring 2023. Hopefully, the new product line will improve device sales in the new year.
|
Roku unveils its first-ever TVs designed and built by the company
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Roku today is its product line to include a range of smart TVs that are the first to be both designed and built by Roku itself. The Select and Plus Series TVs will be Roku-branded HD and 4K TVs available across 11 models, ranging from 24” to 75” in size, and made to work well with Roku’s growing line of audio products, like its Roku TV Wireless Soundbar, as well as other Roku accessories, like its Voice Remote. All of Roku’s new HD TVs will include the Roku Voice Remote, while the Plus models will come with the higher-end Roku Voice Remote Pro. All models will support popular features like “Find My Remote” and Private Listening. Roku The TVs, like those from Roku’s partners, will run the — the company’s own smart TV operating system that provides access to ad-supported movies and shows through The Roku Channel, live content through the Live TV Channel Guide, a curated selection of free in-season movies and shows through its “Featured Free” collection, voice search and the ability to add on various streaming channels, both free and subscription-based. Until today, Roku’s OS has only been available on TVs from like Sharp, TCL, Hisense, RCA, Philips, JVC and others — similar to Google’s strategy Amazon had also only worked with partners until last year its first with Alexa built in. The company says its new Roku Select and Plus Series TVs will be available in the U.S. beginning spring of 2023 with retail prices that range from $119 to $999 for the lineup of 24”-75” models. The company will also make an available to its Roku TV partners to supplement the 11 reference designs that have already gone into production, including those for 2K, 4K and 8K TVs. The new product announcements come on the heels of Roku’s third-quarter earnings, which worried investors despite topping Wall Street estimates with revenue of $761.4 million, up 12% year over year, and a net loss of 88 cents per share, below the $1.28 expected. The company was then projecting a weak Q4 — typically a top quarter — with expectations of total net revenue of around $800 million or a decline of 7.5% year over year, reported at the time. Roku said the decline was related to “macroeconomic headwinds” and advertisers’ tightened budgets. New Roku-branded TVs could, in theory, help to boost device sales as consumers could opt for the company’s own brand over others while also allowing Roku to generate revenue from its own hardware. “Our goal is to continue to create an even better TV experience for everyone,” said Mustafa Ozgen, Roku’s president of Devices. “These Roku-branded TVs will not only complement the current lineup of partner-branded Roku TV models but also allow us to enable future smart TV innovations,” Ozgen added.
|
Razer’s 5G Edge gaming handheld hits on January 26 for $400
|
Devin Coldewey
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
If you’re a gamer who plays on their Android phone a lot, the might be the dedicated platform you’re looking for — and the device will be available later this month starting at $400, the company announced at . The last few years have been interesting for handheld gaming as, following the smash success of the Switch, companies have adopted various approaches to making something better than a phone but not quite as involved as a full-on console. Valve’s Steam Deck has been the most visible of these attempts, but phone gaming conversion kits like the have also gained in popularity. Razer is a force in PC gaming but has had only mixed success in the mobile realm with its branded phones and accessories not making much of a splash. The Edge is its biggest play yet, an Android handheld dedicated solely to gaming — no calls or texts here. It amounts to a modified version of its Kishi phone-mounted controller with extra features and the 5G “phone” permanently attached. The device itself is definitely enticing for anyone who plays serious games on Android: With a 6.8″ 2,400 x 1,080 AMOLED screen running at a 144 Hz refresh rate, it actually outstrips what most games on the platform support. But of course software tends to grow to fit the container it is put in, so we can expect games that natively support this display mode as well as the few that already do (like Steam Link, but that’s kind of cheating). As a compact, dedicated gaming platform it seems promising, but the real question is whether, at $400 for the Wi-Fi version and more for the 5G one, anyone will shell out that much when for that price you could get a Steam Deck or Switch. Android has plenty of good games on it, but compared with the library available on PC and Switch it may come off as somewhat lacking. And of course you might already have dropped a few bills on your current gaming phone — which you could add a controller to much more cheaply. If, however, you are banking on the continued success of game-streaming services like Geforce Now, perhaps a compact dedicated handheld like this, with a great screen and 5G (on Verizon only at present, though), is the way to go. You’ve got until January 26, when it ships, to make your decision. We’ll try to get ourselves a little hands-on time with the device at CES and see if it lives up to the hype.
|
Profet AI helps manufacturers build prediction models and industrial AI software
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
, a Taiwanese startup that makes auto machine learning software for manufacturers, announced today it has raised $5.6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Darwin Ventures. Returning investors Hive Ventures, AUO and SVTI also participated, along with Harbinger VC and Jensen Capital Management. Founded in 2018, Profet AI’s customers include Foxconn, Advantech and ASE Group, and it says it doubled its revenue in 2022. The funding will be used on Profet AI’s expansion in Japan, Southeast Asia and China, with plans to sign joint ventures with overseas partners. Profet AI’s software lets users build prediction models and industrial AI apps for production and digitalization, even if they only have basic knowledge of machine learning. The company’s flagship products are its AutoML Virtual Data Scientist Platform and Ready To Go Applications. They are intended for use by clients in the semiconductor, electronics, chemicals and textile manufacturing industries. The AutoML Virtual Data Scientist Platform is a no-code development program that lets users design enterprise AI applications, while Ready To Go Applications are industry-specific AI apps that are ready to be used in public cloud or on-premise environments. In a statement, Darwin Venture Management partner Kay Lin said, “The AutoML Virtual Data Scientist Platform of Profet AI is based on empowering, which quickly enables digital transformation and intelligent evolution in the manufacturing industry. Darwin is very optimistic about Profet AI’s strengths and will leverage our solid background in the semiconductor and electronics industry to actively assist Profet AI’s market development.”
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.