Month: July 2018

On the heels of Lyft’s acquisition of bike-share company Motivate, the company is gearing up to fully integrate bicycle and scooter sharing into the app. There’s no word on exactly when this will happen, but it’s likely this will happen soon.

Lyft is also investing $1 million to advance transportation equity to people in underserved communities. As part of its commitment, Lyft will work with non-profit organizations like TransForm to develop programs that support people with low incomes.

“Soon you will be able to get real-time transit information, plan a multi-modal trip, and use Lyft Bikes and Scooters to connect to a local transit stop or shared ride pickup location,” Lyft wrote in a blog post.

In June, Lyft revamped its rider app to encourage shared rides. Currently, 35 percent of Lyft rides are shared, but the goal is to reach 50 percent shared rides by 2020, Lyft VP of Government Relations Joseph Okpaku told TechCrunch last month. With scooters and bikes offered via the app, Lyft envisions being better equipped to “bridge the first and last-mile gap.”

By the end of 2019, Lyft says it aims to take one million cars off the road. Last year, Lyft says 250,000 of its community members gave up their personal cars.

This comes shortly after Uber invested in part of Lime’s $335 million round. Uber’s plan is to put its logo on Lime’s scooters, Bloomberg previously reported. Meanwhile, Uber owns and operates bike-share service JUMP following a ~$200 million acquisition earlier this year. And, then in April, Uber unveiled its multi-modal transportation ambitions, which includes car rentals and public transit integration.

Last month, both Lyft and Uber applied to operate electric scooter programs in San Francisco. The city’s municipal transportation agency, however, has yet to make a decision on which five companies, if any, will receive permits.

Update: Here’s how to get around Amazon’s error. Use smile.amazon.com. TechCrunch confirmed this workaround works.

It’s not just you. Amazon Prime Day started 15 minutes ago, and so far, it’s not going well for Amazon. The landing page for Prime Day does not work. When most links are clicked, readers are sent to an error page or to a landing page that sends readers back to the main landing page.

Direct links to the product pages, either from outside links or the single product placement on the landing page, seem to work fine. I just bought this tent two weeks ago for $120. Some users are reporting errors when completing a purchase, too.

This is a huge blow to Amazon and its faux holiday Prime Day. The retailer has been pushing this event for weeks and there are some great deals to be had. It’s not a good look for the world’s largest retailer even though the retailer saw glitches last year too.

Other retailers jumped on Amazon’s bandwagon and are running big sales around Prime Day. As of this post’s publication, both Walmart and Target are not suffering site outages and are probably love Amazon’s outage.

Updating…

3:30pm EDT: It’s 30 minutes past the launch of Prime Day and the landing page and deal navigation page is still down.

I like the Nuraphones a lot. In fact, I named the sound-adapting headphones one of my favorite things of 2017. Clearly I’m not alone in that enthusiasm, eithe — the Melbourne-based startup scored $4.7 million to expand its market early last year.

Nura announced this week that it’s making its headphones even better, courtesy of a software update. The company is pushing out a bunch of tweaks to the headphones through a upgrade initiative it’s deemed “G2.” Chief among them is active noise cancelation — something that was conspicuously absent from the products upon release.

Until now, the company has relied on the passive version — using the unique combination of over-ear cups and in-ear buds to muffle out ambient noise. The update, however, will bring the ability to filter out low-frequency sounds like airplane engine rumble, without adding a high-frequency hiss into the mix.

Also new is the addition of Social Mode, which does the opposite, using the four on-board microphones to let sound in, so users can hear their coworkers or carry on a conversation with the headphones on. They’ll also be used to improve the sound of voice calls, filtering out noisy environments during conversations.

Now’s as good a time as any to pick up a new pair, by the way. The company is offering Nuraphones for $260 for Amazon’s Prime Day — that’s a 25-percent discount off their normal price.

CRISPR-Cas9, the gene-editing tool that is currently the darling of biotech and many other fields, may not be quite as miraculous as early tests suggested. A new study finds that what scientists thought of as a scalpel may be more like a felling axe, causing damage hundreds of times what was previously observed.

Before anyone panics and checks out the window for mutated monstrosities, it should be said right away that this isn’t a nightmare scenario by any means: the tool can still be used in many ways safely, and the clinical repercussions of the damage are unexplored. But this unexpected limitation of a tool so widely applied will almost certainly put a chill on its use.

CRISPR, as a quick reminder, is basically a molecule that cleanly and reliably snips bases out of DNA strands paired with a molecule that hunts out a single sequence of bases. Together, they act like a pair of laser-guided scissors.

The idea is that by cutting out a handful of bases in a sequence that produces, for instance, sickle cell anemia, you can disable that gene altogether. This has been shown in numerous studies, and although unexpected insertions and deletions (abbreviated “indels”) of a handful of base pairs has been observed, no greater damage has been expected or seen — until now.

It turns out that some CRISPR edits may produce indels at the scale of thousands of bases — more than enough to affect adjacent genes or otherwise interfere with normal genetic operation.

The study published today in Nature, by Michael Kosicki, Kärt Tomberg and Allan Bradley of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, explains that previous research may have never encountered this type of damage simply because, essentially, it never allowed damage at this scale to occur.

The problem isn’t that CRISPR is going wild and producing this damage on its own; instead, the issue is an unexpectedly sloppy repair job by the cell itself.

After a CRISPR snip, lead author Bradley explained in a Nature news writeup, “the cell will try to stitch things back together. But it doesn’t really know what bits of DNA lie adjacent to each other.”

While doing its best to repair the damage with a bit of its own genetic cutting and pasting, it may accidentally substitute hundreds or thousands of base pairs that weren’t there, or cut out similarly sized ranges that were supposed to remain.

Because previous studies often used many copies of the same thousand-pair (or thereabouts) sequence to watch CRISPR in action, the possibility of thousand-pair damage was pretty much absent. It’s only when using much longer and more diverse strands of DNA that these high-volume indels are possible.

“We speculate that current assessments may have missed a substantial proportion of potential genotypes generated by on-target Cas9 cutting and repair, some of which may have potential pathogenic consequences,” reads the paper.

Fortunately, the damage seems to only occur when the job performed by the CRISPR complex is the cutting out of a sequence, leaving it open for the cell to repair. There are other methods that involve replacing or deactivating sequences that should not provoke this reaction. And like many problems in the practical biological sciences, it doesn’t need to be feared and worried about — it needs to be studied and accounted for.

All the same, having serious genetic damage accompany any part of this revolutionary technique will surely (or at least hopefully) spur inquiry and countermeasures, even if it means tapping the brakes on certain existing therapies, experiments and companies.

Mobility is undergoing a radical transformation and the topic will be thoroughly examined at Disrupt SF this September. We’re excited to have BMW’s Dieter May speak on the main stage about how the German car company is addressing the connected car while still building, what they say is, the ultimate driving machine.

And bonus! May plans to unveil something brand new right on the Main Stage. We can’t share many details on the unveiling, but we can say that it’s certainly worth your attention.

May has been at BMW since 2014 when he joined the car company after eight years at Nokia. He currently leads the digital products and services as a Senior Vice President. It’s an interesting position that puts him in the middle of merging consumer technology with the driving experience — and doing it in a safe manner. That’s the tricky part and a topic we’re excited to speak to him about.

BMW is in a tough position like most auto makers. Consumers expect the latest and flashiest technology. Massive LCD screens are expected now to display rich navigation with always-updated information. Auto makers need to deploy this technology in a manner that is safe and practical. BMW just revealed its latest in-car operating system that upends traditional BMW style in favor of what’s best for the driver.

We’re excited to talk to talk to May about how automakers and startups alike should address consumer’s expectations.

Dieter May joins several other notable figures in the mobility space speaking at Disrupt SF including Cruise’s Kyle Vogt and Aurora’s Chris Urmson.

Passes to Disrupt SF 2018 are available at the Early Bird rate until July 25 here.

Apple’s App Store continues to outpace Google Play on revenue. In the first half of the year, the App Store generated nearly double the revenue of Google Play on half the downloads, according to a new report from Sensor Tower out today. In terms of dollars and cents, that’s $22.6 billion in worldwide gross app revenue on the App Store versus $11.8 billion for Google Play – or, 1.9 times more spent on the App Store compared with what was spent on Google Play.

This trend is not new. Apple’s iOS store has consistently generated more revenue than its Android counterpart for years due to a number of factors – including the fact that Android users historically have spent less on apps than iOS users, as well as the fact that there are other Android app stores consumer can shop – like the Amazon Appstore or Samsung Store, for example. In addition, Google Play is not available in China, but Apple’s App Store is.

Last year, consumer spending on the App Store reached $38.5 billion, again nearly double that of Google Play’s $20.1 billion.

As the new figures for the first half of 2018 indicate, consumer spending is up this year.

Sensor Tower estimates it has increased by 26.8 percent on iOS compared with the same period in 2017, and it’s up by 29.7 percent on Google Play.

The growth in spending can be partly attributed to subscription apps like Netflix, Tencent Video, and even Tinder, as has been previously reported.

Subscription-based apps are big businesses these days, having helped to boost app revenue in 2017 by 77 percent to reach $781 million, according to an earlier study. Netflix was also 2017’s top non-game app by revenue, and recently became ranked as the top (non-game) app of all-time by worldwide consumer spend, according to App Annie’s App Store retrospective.

Many of the other all-time top apps following Netflix were also subscription-based, including Spotify (#2), Pandora (#3), Tencent Video (#4), Tinder (#5), and HBO NOW (#8), for example.

And Netflix is again the top non-game app by consumer spending in the first half of 2018, notes Sensor Tower.

Game spending, however, continues to account for a huge chunk of revenue.

Consumer spending on games grew 19.1 percent in the first half of 2018 to $26.6 billion across both stores, representing roughly 78 percent of the total spent ($16.3 billion on the App Store and $10.3 billion on Google Play). Honor of Kings from Tencent, Monster Strike from Mixi, and Fate/Grand Order from Sony Aniplex were the top grossing games across both stores.

App downloads were also up in the first half of the year, if by a smaller percentage.

Worldwide first-time app installs grew to 51 billion in 1H18, or up 11.3 percent compared with the same time last year, when downloads were then 45.8 billion across the two app stores.

Facebook led the way on this front with WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook and Instagram as the top four apps across both the App Store and Google Play combined. The most downloaded games were PUBG Mobile from Tencent, Helix Jump from Voodoo, and Subway Surfers from Kiloo.

Google Play app downloads were up a bit more (13.1 percent vs iOS’s 10.6 percent) year-over-year due to Android’s reach in developing markets, reaching 36 billion. That’s around 2.4 times the App Store’s 15 billion.

Despite this, Apple’s platform still earned more than double the revenue with fewer than half the downloads, which is remarkable. And it can’t all be chalked up to China. (The country contributed about 31.7 percent of the App Store revenue last quarter, or $7.1 billion, to give you an idea.)

Sensor Tower tells TechCrunch that even if China was removed from the picture, the App Store would have generated $15.4 billion gross revenue for first half of 2018, which is still about 30 percent higher than Google Play’s $11.8 billion.

Uber’s head of policy for autonomous vehicles and urban aviation, Justin Erlich, has left the company to join self-driving car startup Voyage, TechCrunch has learned. Erlich’s departure comes a couple of months after Uber Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden, who oversaw Uber Elevate, left the company.

At Voyage, Erlich will lead the company’s strategy, policy and legal efforts. Voyage, led by CEO Oliver Cameron, spun out of Udacity last year and has since deployed Level 4 autonomous vehicles in retirement communities in California and Florida.

Erlich previously worked under Attorney General Kamala Harris, where he focused on emerging technology and the key policies that the government will want to have in place to ensure technology helps the people of California. During his time, autonomous vehicles were becoming more and more exciting, he told me back in February. You can hear that full conversation below.

I’ve reached out to Erlich, Uber and Voyage and will update this story if I hear back.

The FCC has been under serious scrutiny by citizens, advocates, and politicians alike due to its laissez-faire attitude towards, in particular, the proposed Sinclair Broadcasting merger with Tribune. But the agency is showing some backbone today with a no-nonsense declaration that the merger can’t go through unless a few “serious concerns” are addressed. It’s not the outright disapproval many have recommended, but it’s better than an unconditional green light.

In a short memo posted to the agency’s site, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai explained that even under his notoriously (or blessedly, depending on your politics) deregulatory regime, the proposed deal is not acceptable as is. Here it is in full:

Based on a thorough review of the record, I have serious concerns about the Sinclair/Tribune transaction. The evidence we’ve received suggests that certain station divestitures that have been proposed to the FCC would allow Sinclair to control those stations in practice, even if not in name, in violation of the law. When the FCC confronts disputed issues like these, the Communications Act does not allow it to approve a transaction. Instead, the law requires the FCC to designate the transaction for a hearing in order to get to the bottom of those disputed issues. For these reasons, I have shared with my colleagues a draft order that would designate issues involving certain proposed divestitures for a hearing in front of an administrative law judge.

The issue is that the proposed Sinclair-Tribune merger would result in a company that controls a huge amount of TV stations — far more than is healthy for a single company. This was demonstrated effectively by a viral video demonstrated earlier this year showing news anchors at Sinclair stations reading the exact same script without acknowledging that it was under the direction of their owner. (Ironically, the script was regarding ethics and accountability in the media.)

In order to make the deal more palatable, Sinclair offered to divest itself of a number of stations. But these promises appear to have been “less than candid,” as former FCC counsel Gigi Sohn put it; “This transaction would place far too many free over-the-air broadcast stations and far too much power in the hands of one company,” she concluded.

Chairman Pai, surprisingly, appears to have come to the same conclusion. Perhaps Sinclair’s plans to puppeteer these stations were transparent, or perhaps there are too many eyes on the Commission right now to let something like this slide, but whatever the case, the merger can’t go forward without FCC approval — and now FCC approval won’t go forward without this hearing and revised divestiture plans.

This is a pleasant surprise for critics of the FCC who have repeatedly argued that the agency isn’t just soft on broadcasters and other big cable and internet businesses, but may be effectively in bed with them.

“As I have noted before, too many of this agency’s media policies have been custom built to support the business plans of Sinclair Broadcasting,” said Commissioner Rosenworcel in a statement accompanying and applauding the Chairman’s.  “With this hearing designation order, the agency will finally take a hard look at its proposed merger with Tribune. This is overdue and favoritism like this needs to end.”

The FCC’s multi-part “modernization” of rules governing media companies has contributed powerfully to the feeding frenzy of consolidation we’ve seen over the last couple years, and the Sinclair-Tribune merger is just one of many deals that watchdogs have warned about. But it seems that this one at least will get some consumer-positive checks in the near future.

Back in August of 2016, Pinterest acquired Instapaper, the read-it-later bookmarking service originally built by Marco Arment.

Just shy of two years later, Instapaper is going back to being independent.

In a blog post published this afternoon, the team clarifies that a new company called “Instant Paper, Inc.” has been formed to oversee Instapaper, and that it’ll largely be made up of the same folks who’ve worked on it since ~2013.

Don’t expect much to change, for better or worse — at least, not immediately. The company is waiting three weeks before officially transferring ownership, in order to “give [its] users fair notice about the change of control with respect to their personal information.”

The team doesn’t outline the reasoning for splitting away, but it has many users hoping its newly regained independence means it can become GDPR-compliant sooner than later. Instapaper shut off its services in Europe back in May so they could “make changes in light of [GDPR]”; two months later, the service remains offline in the EU.

Instapaper confirmed this afternoon that GDPR-compliance is still a goal:

In honor of World Emoji Day (yes, that’s a thing), Apple is previewing some of its upcoming emoji. Later this year, Apple’s emoji set will feature people with a variety of hairstyles and colors, including curly hair, red hair and white hair. What you’re about to see are simply Apple’s take on emoji that were previously approved by the Unicode Consortium’s emoji subcommittee.

Folks with curly hair, rejoice!

Let’s hear it for the redheads

Like white on rice

No hair? No problem

Other fun emoji include a freezing face, peacock, mango, lobster, nazar amulet, superheroes and kangaroo.

Back in March, Apple proposed new emojis to represent people with disabilities in Unicode’s next batch of emoji. Then in May, Unicode announced some of the draft candidates for its next emoji release in Q1 2019 to include some of Apple’s proposed emoji, which featured a guide dog, an ear with a hearing aid and more. If you want to hear more about what goes into emoji approval, be sure to check out this interview with Jeremy Burge, vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee.