Month: August 2018

Here’s some unusual news: AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, today announced that it plans to bring its Relational Database Service (RDS) to VMware, no matter whether that’s VMware Cloud on AWS or a privately hosted VMware deployment in a corporate data center.

While some of AWS’s competitors have long focused on these kinds of hybrid cloud deployments, AWS never really put the same kind of emphasis on this. Clearly, though, that’s starting to change — maybe in part because Microsoft and others are doing quite well in this space.

“Managing the administrative and operational muck of databases is hard work, error-prone, and resource intensive,” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy . “It’s why hundreds of thousands of customers trust Amazon RDS to manage their databases at scale. We’re excited to bring this same operationally battle-tested service to VMware customers’ on-premises and hybrid environments, which will not only make database management much easier for enterprises, but also make it simpler for these databases to transition to the cloud.”

With Amazon RDS on VMware, enterprises will be able to use AWS’s technology to run and manage Microsft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB databases in their own data centers. The idea here, AWS says, is to make it easy for enterprises to set up and manage their databases wherever they want to host their data — and to then migrate it to AWS when they choose to do so.

This new service is currently in private preview, so we don’t know all that much about how this will work in practice or what it will cost. AWS promises, however, that the experience will pretty much be the same as in the cloud and that RDS on VMware will handle all the updates and patches automatically.

Today’s announcement comes about two years after the launch of VMware Cloud on AWS, which was pretty much the reverse of today’s announcement. With VMware Cloud on AWS, enterprises can take their existing VMware deployments and take them to AWS.

It isn’t the most usual situation for a founder to write a review trashing a competitor’s new product, but Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has never been the most conventional entrepreneur.

Yesterday, Luckey published a review of Magic Leap’s developer kit on his personal blog titled “Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap,” wherein he offered a few compliments but spent the majority of his words highlighting shortcomings of the new device while seeking to remind everyone of all the shit that Magic Leap execs talked about existing AR tech and how they nevertheless ended up running with a device that, in his opinion, made only minor improvements over the three-year-old HoloLens. 

There are a number of digs he makes in his review. Perhaps most insightfully he takes on the tracking technologies used for the headset and controller, noting areas where they are actually steps back in user experience. The Magic Leap One’s controller uses magnetic tracking, a system far different and generally more complex than the optical tracking systems that almost all VR companies, including Oculus, utilize. Once you read the paragraph where he trashes the lack of a clickable trackpad, it becomes clear that this is probably more than a little personal for Luckey.

Magic Leap One ‘Lightwear’

At this point, Luckey has moved beyond his VR days in a professional sense (for the most part). His new company, Anduril Industries, is focused on creating border security technologies; nevertheless, he has remained a very vocal personality in the VR space with a reputation of a hardcore hobbyist.

A lot of this beef seems easy to identify. Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz has spent the last several years raising a lot of money while developing technology in secret and trash-talking existing tech in public. In Luckey’s view this hasn’t been great for investment in the AR/VR space, where investors have had unrealistic expectations put in front of them that may have reduced interest in other existing companies that were taking a more conservative approach to hyping themselves.

The most brutal takes are reserved for the ML1’s display tech, which Luckey points out really isn’t any different from what other companies have been looking at. While the Magic Leap team invented terminology to describe what they have built, Luckey points out that they didn’t solve what they claimed that they would:

They call it the “Lightwear”. This is the part that has gotten the most hype over the years, with endless talk of “Photonic Lightfield Chips”, “Fiber Scanning Laser Displays”, “projecting a digital light field into the user’s eye”, and the holy-grail promise of solving vergence-accommodation conflict, an issue that has plagued HMDs for decades – in other words, ensuring that the focus of your eyes always matches their convergence, something that Magic Leap has touted as critical in avoiding “permanent neurologic deficits” and brain damage.  It is even more important for AR than VR, since you have to blend digital elements with real-world elements that are consistently correct.

TL;DR: The supposed “Photonic Lightfield Chips” are just waveguides paired with reflective sequential-color LCOS displays and LED illumination, the same technology everyone else has been using for years, including Microsoft in their last-gen HoloLens.  The ML1 is a not a “lightfield projector” or display by any broadly accepted definition, and as a Bi-Focal Display, only solves vergence-accommodation conflict in contrived demos that put all UI and environmental elements at one of two focus planes.  Mismatch occurs at all other depths.  In much the same way, a broken clock displays the correct time twice a day.

He also takes on the headset’s small field-of-view, something that honestly feels like a bit of a cheap shot when he compares it to other AR headsets that use much more simplistic optical systems. Magic Leap’s display offers a viewing area that has been estimated to be about 40 percent larger than the HoloLens, but is still a small box in someone’s perspective.

If you felt this was just someone’s occasionally harsh look at a big product, the intent is clear when Luckey attempts to estimate sales of the device by looking at the company’s order numbering system:

The Magic Leap order system was really easy to figure out for the first few days after launch.  I gathered some order numbers from friends and compared their order times, and I am pretty confident about predicting first-week sales.  Unfortunately, they changed the system shortly after I tweeted about it.  Based on what I do know, it looks like they sold about 2,000 units in the first week, with a very heavy bias towards the first 48 hours.  If I had to guess, I would put total sales at well under 3,000 units at this point.  This is unfortunate for obvious reasons – I know over a hundred people with an ML1, and almost none of them are AR developers.  Most are tech executives, “influencers”, or early adopters who work in the industry but have no plans to actually build AR apps.  This was a big problem in the early VR industry, and that was with many tens of thousands of developers among hundreds of thousands of development kits sold!  Multiplying the problem by a couple orders of magnitude is going to be rough for ML.

Luckey doesn’t seem like he’ll be publishing any follow-ups with this device either; he gave his personal device to iFixit to tear down after playing around with it for the review.

Following the post going up, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz responded in typically eccentric fashion, assumedly comparing Luckey to a character from Avatar: The Last Airbender with more strange tweets to follow.

The biggest, most ambitious Disrupt event ever is less than two weeks away! Disrupt SF 2018 takes place at Moscone Center West on September 5-7 — that’s three action-packed, business-oriented days of programming. But like you, we know how to have a good time, too. It’s all about balance, friends. And that’s why you do not want to miss the TechCrunch After Party on Thursday September 6.

Disrupt After Parties are the stuff of legend, and this year will be no exception. Expect a ’90s theme complete with fun wearables like glow stick necklaces and slap bracelets. And you can get a tote bag — screen-printed on-site — to take home with you.

It wouldn’t be a TechCrunch After Party without a chance to get your dance on. We’ll have DJ King Mos spinning the best ’90s music all night long — with an immersive Sound Experience from Envelop.

There’s plenty to do while you sip a beverage and groove on the dance floor. Check out the graffiti artist creating a mural, dive into Snapfiesta’s Ball Pit Photo Booth to capture all manner of silliness, or relax, chill and chat in the Super Mario Brother’s Lounge. You can also continue to network — hey, we don’t judge.

Speaking of lounges, Universe presents the Top-Secret Lounge. We can’t divulge the details, but you might find specialty cocktails and a variety of ’90s games — among other things. You’ll have to keep a sharp lookout, though. It’s up to you to find the Top-Secret Lounge: look for discreetly hidden signage to suss out the location and gain access.

We invite all Disrupt SF attendees with an Innovator Pass and above to come and celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit of tech startups, network in a relaxed environment and burn off the adrenaline rush that comes with experiencing TechCrunch Disrupt. Basic Pass holders should email events@techcrunch.com to upgrade to attend.

In addition to all the craziness we have in store for you, our partners have lined up some activities and giveaways just for Disrupt SF attendees:

Fuel with sweetgreen during Disrupt Week 2018 
Take a break from the action with $10 app credit to use at sweetgreen. Redeem your app credit at our SoMa location (171 2nd St.) — only a 5-minute walk away from Moscone. Grab a (new) friend and come by for lunch or dinner. Redeem your $10 credit with this link. Limited quantities available, so claim your credit before they are gone!

Virtual Workout Session with Aaptiv
Start your day with an inspiring workout led by one of Aaptiv’s personal trainers! TechCrunch Disrupt attendees get free, unlimited access to Aaptiv — on-demand audio workouts you can do in the hotel gym, in your room or on the streets of San Francisco. Choose from more than 2,500 classes for running, cardio machines, strength, HIIT, yoga and more. Get started at aaptiv.com/disrupt.

We can’t wait to party with you!

It’s been a full year since Disney first made public its intentions to go head to head with Netflix. In the intervening months, the media giant has started the process of pulling content from the streaming service, bit by bit.

And while Disney isn’t planning to launch the product until some time next year, at least we’ve finally got a name. CEO Bob Iger is calling the video service “Disney Play,” according to a new report from Variety.

That little tidbit is buried in a larger piece of about Netflix competitors. In it, the chief executive notes that the services is Disney’s “biggest priority of the company during calendar [year] 2019.” That’s some big talk from a company with the reach and resources of a Disney.

From the sound of things, however, it’s going all in on its plan to beat Netflix and its ilk at their own game. Along with an extremely strong slate of existing films, the company’s got some big titles just over the horizon.

There’s Marvel’s Captain Marvel, the final installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy and surefire sequels like Frozen 2 and Toy Story 4.  And then there’s the original content, led by a live action Star Wars series helmed by Iron Man director, Jon Favreau (who’s also directing Disney’s upcoming Lion King remake).

The exact date and pricing for the service are still TBD, but Iger has promised to undercut Netflix’s monthly fee.

Last year, Walmart acquired outdoor retailer Moosejaw for $51 million –  a company that’s now one of several brands Walmart picked up during a speciality retail buying spree, along with ShoeBuy, Jet.com, Hayneedle, ModCloth, and Bonobos. Now, the company is making good on that purchase, as Moosejaw is the first of Walmart’s acquired brands to arrive on Walmart.com. The company will now curate its own storefront, in addition to operating its own separate site.

Since its acquisition, Moosejaw began to offer customers free, two-day shipping on orders over $49, and invested in technology improvements to its own site. It also enhanced its rewards program, and reported a 50% increase in redemption rates, as a result.

On Walmart.com, Moosejaw will now curate the new “Premium Outdoor Store,” which will offer Walmart online shoppers access to an assortment of outdoor speciality items that weren’t available on the site in the past.

This includes thousands of items from brands like Craghoppers, Deuter, First Ascent by Eddie Bauer, Gramicci, Jack Wolfskin, KLYMIT, LEKI, Stonewear and Tentsile. The store will also carry the full range of Moosejaw-branded clothing, jackets and gear. This premium assortment will complement the everyday camping assortment currently available on Walmart.com.

However, the store itself is not being branded as “Moosejaw” because Walmart plans to expand the assortment over time to pull in products from other speciality retailers and brands in the future. That means Moosejaw will fulfill much, but not all, of the orders placed in the new online shop.

In addition, the Walmart shop will launch with nearly 50 brands, while Moosejaw itself carries nearly 500 – that’s why it’s referred to as a more “curated” selection, in addition to the fact that non-Moosejaw products will join at a later point.

The online storefront will also feature Walmart.com’s new design, which offers a more modern and clean look-and-feel, and other personalization features.

In its quest to challenge Amazon, Walmart’s speciality retailer buying spree last year allowed it to bring in small, but tactically important brands targeting upscale shoppers and millennials.. But it was unclear if Walmart planned to allow them to run independently forever, or try to bring them onto Walmart.com – or both. In the case of Moosejaw, at least, the latter is true.

The addition is not the only way Walmart is trying to target a new type of consumer via more premium merchandise.

In May, Walmart announced  a Lord & Taylor speciality shop was arriving its site, to pull in more upscale shoppers. Many of its e-commerce initiatives – including online grocery, the redesign, partnerships like that with Lord & Taylor and others – appear to be finding success. The company reported its U.S. online sales were up 40% in Q2.

It recently took on Amazon in an area that’s a definite part of Amazon’s brand, too: e-books and e-readers. Through a partnership with Rakuten Kobo, Walmart now sells e-books, audiobooks, and Kobo e-readers online and in its store. It’s also rumored to be working on its own video service, which could help to flesh out an alternative to Amazon Prime.

Asked if Walmart had similar plans to launch speciality shops for its other acquired brands, a spokesperson replied with an intentionally vague, “not at this time.”

French cloud hosting company OVH just announced a new CEO. Michel Paulin is now heading the company. Founder Octave Klaba remains Chairman of the Board and plans to focus on the big picture.

Paulin recently worked at telecom company SFR. If you look further in the past, he also was a key member at Neuf Cegetel, another telecom company. He overlooked the IPO of Neuf Cegetel and the merger with SFR more than ten years ago.

While telecom companies and cloud hosting companies aren’t the same thing, it sounds like Paulin could bring his operational and M&A experience at OVH.

OVH is currently trying to morph its cloud offering into a leading alternative service to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud. The company is currently working on simplifying its offering and attracting new clients.

The company currently has 2,500 employees and generated $488 million in revenue in 2017 (€420 million). OVH still plans to invest a ton of money in hiring more people, opening more data centers and launching new offerings.

The company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. More recently, OVH got a $467 million credit line (€400 million) from multiple banks to expand aggressively. The new executive team could help when it comes to… executing this roadmap.

Caffeine-infused meal replacement products may be all the rage among techies, but a good ol’ cup of joe is still the choice morning beverage for most of us. To capitalize on America’s insatiable coffee habit, Bellwether Coffee has raised a $10 million Series A and begun selling its zero-emissions commercial roaster and online coffee bean marketplace to cafés and grocers. The funding follows a $6 million seed round in 2016.

Congruent Ventures led the round for the Berkeley, Calif.-based startup, with participation from FusionX Ventures, Tandem Capital, New Ground Ventures, Hardware Club, XN Ventures and SolarCity founders Pete and Lyndon Rive. As part of the deal, Pete Rive has joined the startup’s board, as has Congruent managing partner Josh Posamentier. Bellwether was founded by Ricardo Lopez, who serves as the company’s head of product innovation, in 2013. 

Bellwether CEO Nathan Gilliland says the company sits at the nexus of software and hardware. The latter can be a tougher sell to VCs, though Gilliland said its latest round was oversubscribed. The company has just begun leasing its $1,000 per month ventless, electric coffee roaster to cafés, grocers and other businesses.

As part of the monthly fee, Bellwether customers get access to its online bean marketplace, which they can use to order beans from a revolving list of 20-some coffee farms curated by the team at Bellwether. Retailers and coffee consumers also can tip farmers directly via Bellwether. Gilliland explained that could be a game changer for the industry. Coffee farmers, he said, earn roughly 75 cents per pound of coffee sold. If a dollar is tipped on every pound of coffee, a farmer could double their revenue.

Tracing where the beans in your daily brew originated from, whether that be Guatemala, Ethiopia, Colombia or another one of the top producers of beans, can be difficult. Bellwether’s marketplace, which lets retailers browse coffee farms based on factors, including whether the farm is organically certified or woman-owned, is intended to add a bit of transparency to an often opaque business.

“We live in such a connected world now it really makes sense to enable consumers to know who made their coffee and where they are located,” Gilliland told TechCrunch. “We really try to align the quality and the taste with the sustainability metrics. We want a perfect balance between the two.”

Berkeley, Calif.-based Bellwether Coffee has raised a $10 million Series A led by Congruent Ventures

Bellwether has a large potential market, as most cafés and grocers don’t have in-house roasters, but can save money by leasing one like Bellwether’s. On top of that, Americans drink a whole lot of coffee. According to a recent study by the money-saving app Acorns, one-third of its users spent more on coffee annually than they invested. Most of their respondents, however, were millennials, who of course are known to overspend on avocado toast, among other things. So their spending habits may not be the most accurate representation of all coffee consumers. Regardless, there could be a big opportunity here for Bellwether.

In the coffee tech scene generally, a few other companies have captured the attention of venture capital investors recently. Luckin Coffee, a Chinese on-demand coffee delivery startup, raised $200 million in July at a billion-dollar valuation, followed by a $40 million round for Bulletproof 360, the company behind Bulletproof Coffee.

If Bellwether doesn’t soar into unicorn territory, Gilliland has at least come to appreciate a good cup of coffee and its many subtleties.

“I will admit, I used to throw a little creamer in my coffee but no, it’s all black now.”

Microsoft published a news item announcing Xbox All Access on the Xbox blog and then unpublished it. But multiple news outlets spotted the article before Microsoft could take the post down. So now that the cat is out of the bag, it looks like Microsoft’s new hardware and software subscription is real.

There have been rumors over the past few weeks that Microsoft was planning to announce a new subscription. Today’s announcement lines up with those rumors. Microsoft is launching Xbox All Access in the U.S., which includes a console, Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass.

You get to choose between an Xbox One S for $22 per month or an Xbox One X for $35 per month. After paying for 24 months, the subscription stops and the console is yours. You can then choose to keep paying for Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass or you can cancel your subscriptions — it’s your console after all.

So let’s do the math. You can currently buy an Xbox One S for around $299. Xbox Live Gold lets you play multiplayer games and access free games for $60 per year. The Xbox Game Pass lets you download and play games from a library of 100+ games for $9.99 per month — it’s a sort of Spotify for video games.

If you buy a console and subscribe for two years, you’ll end up paying around $659. An Xbox All Access subscription lets you save around $130. If you already planned on subscribing to those two services, it sounds like a good deal. If you didn’t really care about Xbox Game Pass, you’ll end up paying more than buying a console the normal way.

The Xbox One X currently costs around $499. If you add two years of Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass, the bottom line is $859. Two years of Xbox All Access with the Xbox One X costs $840. So it’s not that good a deal if you’re interested in the Xbox One X.

With this new offering, Microsoft shows that it wants to shift its gaming strategy to subscriptions. Buying a console every few years isn’t as lucrative as buying an all-in-one Xbox subscription. Subscriptions increase customer loyalty and create predictable recurring revenue.

More importantly, gaming consoles won’t stick around forever. At some point, games will run on expensive servers in the cloud and you’ll subscribe to a service. Rumor has it that Microsoft is already getting ready to launch a low-powered system to stream games from the cloud. This is what Microsoft is thinking about with Xbox All Access.

Over the weekend, pirates made off with millions in potential YouTube revenues by hijacking the live-streams of its pay-per-view “boxing” match between YouTube celebrities Logan Paul and KSI and broadcasting them on the rival streaming platform Twitch.

The theft represents a pretty bold move in the continuing cat-and-mouse game between rival entertainment platforms Twitch (for live streaming) and YouTube (for pretty much everything else in the world of user-generated video). It also shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

For Twitch, the case of the pirated content is less a mystery worthy of the Hardy Boys and more a simple case of history repeating.

Back in the halcyon days of live-streaming, when Twitch was a young upstart service known as Justin.tv (and well before it was bought by Amazon), the service had already had several run-ins with the law over pirated content.

Basically, Twitch had a piracy problem before Twitch was even Twitch.

At the time, the company was able to ultimately duck its fight with UFC parent company Zuffa, using the platform argument that tech companies manage to use a shield against all sorts of criticisms (offering a platform for nazism, insane conspiracy theories and serial harassment and abuse).

That was when the company was still a relatively small, independent business with arguably limited resources. Now that it’s owned by Amazon, there’s less of an argument to be made that the company lacks the tools to monitor the streams that it hosts.

Already, Twitch has come in for a fair share of criticism for its handling of the whole sordid business.

There’s no real protagonist in this story (I can’t find it in me to weep for YouTube and its lost revenue when it pulls in billions and hasn’t figured out a good way to moderate its own user base — including Paul), but it’s worth noting that Justin.tv’s pivot to focus on video game streaming came as it was looking to make itself more respectable to investors and possible acquirers.

“In the lead-up to the actual acquisition from Amazon, [Twitch] implemented a service that would look for copyrighted music and would remove audio files,” noted Will Partin, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on platform economics and a game reporter for a number of sites. “It did its rebrand around games in 2011 and has gotten gradually more permissive.”

The benefit of focusing on gaming, Partin noted, was that it’s a medium that’s far easier to moderate and control. As Twitch has diversified with Twitch Creative and Twitch IRL, it’s opening itself up to the same kind of problems with copyright infringement and abuse it suffered from nearly a decade ago.

As they’re currently written, DMCA laws offer little protection to copyright and license holders in the modern era of live-streaming content. “Twitch gets 24 hours to do a DMCA takedown. That’s beside the point when you’re doing a livestream,” Partin said.

In the case of the Paul fight, Twitch can’t even say that it didn’t know the streams were happening. As noted eSports commentator Richard Lewis flagged on Twitter, there were Twitch employees watching and commenting in some of the pirated streams.

“There were clearly Twitch staff in the channel that were watching,” said Partin. “It brings up a tricky and challenging topic… it’s not enough just to blame Twitch, which is not to say that Twitch doesn’t share some of the blame.”

Over the weekend, pirates made off with millions in potential YouTube revenues by hijacking the live-streams of its pay-per-view “boxing” match between YouTube celebrities Logan Paul and KSI and broadcasting them on the rival streaming platform Twitch.

The theft represents a pretty bold move in the continuing cat-and-mouse game between rival entertainment platforms Twitch (for live streaming) and YouTube (for pretty much everything else in the world of user-generated video). It also shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

For Twitch, the case of the pirated content is less a mystery worthy of the Hardy Boys and more a simple case of history repeating.

Back in the halcyon days of live-streaming, when Twitch was a young upstart service known as Justin.tv (and well before it was bought by Amazon), the service had already had several run-ins with the law over pirated content.

Basically, Twitch had a piracy problem before Twitch was even Twitch.

At the time, the company was able to ultimately duck its fight with UFC parent company Zuffa, using the platform argument that tech companies manage to use a shield against all sorts of criticisms (offering a platform for nazism, insane conspiracy theories and serial harassment and abuse).

That was when the company was still a relatively small, independent business with arguably limited resources. Now that it’s owned by Amazon, there’s less of an argument to be made that the company lacks the tools to monitor the streams that it hosts.

Already, Twitch has come in for a fair share of criticism for its handling of the whole sordid business.

There’s no real protagonist in this story (I can’t find it in me to weep for YouTube and its lost revenue when it pulls in billions and hasn’t figured out a good way to moderate its own user base — including Paul), but it’s worth noting that Justin.tv’s pivot to focus on video game streaming came as it was looking to make itself more respectable to investors and possible acquirers.

“In the lead-up to the actual acquisition from Amazon, [Twitch] implemented a service that would look for copyrighted music and would remove audio files,” noted Will Partin, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on platform economics and a game reporter for a number of sites. “It did its rebrand around games in 2011 and has gotten gradually more permissive.”

The benefit of focusing on gaming, Partin noted, was that it’s a medium that’s far easier to moderate and control. As Twitch has diversified with Twitch Creative and Twitch IRL, it’s opening itself up to the same kind of problems with copyright infringement and abuse it suffered from nearly a decade ago.

As they’re currently written, DMCA laws offer little protection to copyright and license holders in the modern era of live-streaming content. “Twitch gets 24 hours to do a DMCA takedown. That’s beside the point when you’re doing a livestream,” Partin said.

In the case of the Paul fight, Twitch can’t even say that it didn’t know the streams were happening. As noted eSports commentator Richard Lewis flagged on Twitter, there were Twitch employees watching and commenting in some of the pirated streams.

“There were clearly Twitch staff in the channel that were watching,” said Partin. “It brings up a tricky and challenging topic… it’s not enough just to blame Twitch, which is not to say that Twitch doesn’t share some of the blame.”