Month: August 2018

At a Samsung event last week, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins explained why he doesn’t stream with female gamers.

“If I have one conversation with one female streamer where we’re playing with one another, and even if there’s a hint of flirting, that is going to be taken and going to be put on every single video and be clickbait forever,” said Ninja, who is married, in an interview with Polygon.

As you might expect, this stance was met with plenty of backlash.

Ninja then doubled down on his stance, clarifying that it comes down to an issue of online harassment.

Please read. pic.twitter.com/egfplBQFYD

— Ninja (@Ninja) August 13, 2018

First and foremost, everyone has the prerogative to make decisions for their own personal life. If Ninja believes that the online harassment suffered (by just about any internet celebrity) is too much for him and his family to deal with, and that playing with women will exacerbate that harassment, then that is his choice.

The problem is that it goes against his usual stance of taking responsibility for his position as a role model.

As Kotaku aptly points out, Ninja has made real moves toward being a role model for his 10 million+ Twitch followers, from cutting down on cursing on stream to giving to charity and other important causes. In fact, Ninja sees his commitment to charities and his role as an activist as one of the most amazing things he’s done in his life.

And he’s well aware of his influence. He often “raids” less popular Twitch streamers’ channels, including some women, to give them exposure.

So why be a role model who doesn’t include women?

Yes, being a celebrity comes with an inordinate amount of online harassment. And that sucks. But it also comes with a level of responsibility. Not everyone has the platform to make an actual difference in this world. And when our Vice President, and other influencers, have decided that being alone in the same room (virtual or otherwise) with women opens them up to too much vulnerability, they make it that much harder for women to achieve the same influence.

Remember, gaming is about as extreme a culture as a woman can find herself in. Not only are women excluded in this male-dominated community, but they’re often sexually and verbally harassed, which isn’t helped much by the fact that games themselves portray women as props moreso than protagonists.

Ninja is the most influential gamer of our generation, the likes of which have never been seen before. The success of female streamers and gamers surely isn’t reliant on him. But he could very well change the hearts and minds of a generation of young men who may stop thinking of women as less, and might start thinking of them as equals.

DC Universe’s digital subscription and streaming service has just appeared on Google Play, ahead of its planned fall 2018 release. Announced in late June, the service includes a streaming library of original programming like a live action version of “Teen Titans” and several other shows; plus a selection of DC animated movies, classic TV series like “Wonder Woman,” the four Christopher Reeve-starring Superman films; and a host of other content like a lineup of digital comics, an online forum, and more.

So far, interested users can only sign up to pre-order the service, and that, apparently, has not changed. However, the company has said that it would begin a beta test in August, and the app’s launch appears to be the first indication that’s about to kick off.

One screen, for example, shows a board within the community section where beta users can offer feedback.

The Google Play version of the app is listed as “Unreleased,” but you are able to now download it to supported Android devices. Unfortunately, you’re not able to view its content without becoming a beta tester – even if you signed up to pre-order the new subscription service. When we tested this, we were instead directed to a placeholder screen after logging in that says: “Your Universe Begins Fall 2018.” (Don’t worry, Oath corporate Expense Account auditors – I’ll cancel this. I’m just trying to do my job here, okay? Please don’t email me.)

The new app was released on Monday, and because it’s still not usable by the general public, it has no reviews. It also has no app description in its current state.

The app’s screenshots do give a sense of how the subscription service will look and feel, though. It opts to default to a dark theme, and has both a hamburger navigation and a bottom bar.

The navigation bar at the bottom offers links to “Movies & TV” and a “starred” section of favorites. Off to the right are links to the comics, an account info screen, and the online community. These buttons are not fixed, it seems, and scoot closer together or further apart, depending on what’s tapped. This gives it an uneven feel, aesthetically speaking. (It sorta kills me.)

Like most streaming services, the app also supports the ability to pick up where you left off, with features like “dive back in” and “continue watching.” And underneath the titles themselves are not just the episode lists and details, but also a link to the community.

There’s an Encyclopedia that lets you read the heroes’ backgrounds, another screen shows, plus digital comics to download, and a simple rating system involving a thumbs up icon.

DC Universe hasn’t publicly announced that the beta test has launched, but fans should probably keep their eyes peeled.

The app is expected across platforms, including iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV and the web.

Pandora Premium is coming to Google Home, Mini, and Max devices, and other smart speakers and screens with Google Assistant built-in, the company announced this morning. The integration means listeners who pay for Pandora’s on-demand music service will be able to search and play any song, album, or playlist, just by asking Google, and can even search by lyrics, play their personalized “mood” playlists, and take other actions using their voice.

For example, Google Assistant users will be able to thumbs up and thumbs down tracks on Pandora, skip tracks, create new stations, or play a song again, using voice commands.

The service can also be set as the default on Google Home, so you don’t have to specify to play the songs via Pandora when issuing commands.

Support for Pandora Premium on Google Home has been long-awaited. Pandora Plus and Pandora’s free service have been available on Google Home since November 2016.

The Premium service, however, is Pandora’s true Spotify competitor, offering a more robust feature set in addition to on-demand music.

Access to personalized soundtracks is one of Pandora Premium’s newer features, and a potential selling point for the company’s top-tier service, along with this new Google Assistant integration.

In an effort to challenge Spotify, Pandora this spring rolled out its own set of personalized playlists based on listening behavior and other factors, built using its Music Genome. This made Pandora capable of creating over 60 personalized playlists. Most users will only see a subset of those – like “party soundtracks, or those for moods like “happy” or “rainy days,” or those for various genres of music they like. Now these, too, can stream over Google Assistant-powered devices.

The ability to search by lyrics is another benefit to using Pandora Premium on Google Assistant devices – and an area where Spotify is glaringly absent. Not only does Spotify not offer lyrics search, it doesn’t even offer lyrics. And we’re hearing that it has no plans to launch this feature anytime soon, though it continues to test this. (For example.)

Meanwhile, Spotify’s rivals are offering search by lyrics, including Amazon Music – which lets you do lyrics searches using Alexa – and Apple, which is rolling out lyrics search in the latest version of Apple Music. Many Spotify users are beginning to notice this missing feature, and regularly complain. At some point, Spotify’s inability to keep up with the market on voice (it has just barely managed a voice search button) and lyrics could give competitors an edge, along with Spotify’s lack of hardware, like Apple’s HomePod or Amazon’s Echo.

Apple Music, for instance, is now ahead of Spotify in North America, according to statements made by Apple CEO Tim Cook during the last earnings call.

Pandora’s potential is more of a mixed bag. There’s a growing market of those who pay for Pandora’s service. The company reported in July. It added 351,000 paying customers across both Premium and the mid-level tier, Pandora Plus, in the last quarter, bringing the total paying customer base to 6 million. That’s up 23% year-over-year. But its total active user base was down 6% year-over-year to 71.4 million.

But Pandora is addressing the needs of cross-platform support, in an effort to meet users anywhere they want to stream. It now supports over 2,000 connected devices including TVs, smart speakers, game consoles, streaming players, and more. These days, its listeners are increasingly using Pandora through voice-activated devices – up nearly 50% since last year, the company says.

Pandora is offering a free 90-day trial of Premium to Google Home users via the Google Home app on Android or the Play Store.

Pandora Premium was one of two major additions to Google Assistant devices on Tuesday – Deezer is also now available, allowing customers access to more than 36 million HiFi tracks and voice support, Google noted.

Group FaceTime’s launch is going to be delayed. The feature, which supports up to 32 people in a single audio or video call, was pulled from the latest iOS 12 and macOS Mojave betas released on Monday, and will be held until a later date, says Apple. According to the company’s Release Notes for both operating system updates, Group FaceTime will “ship in a future update later this fall.”

The feature was introduced at this year’s WWDC, with the goal of capitalizing on the growing popularity of larger group video chat sessions – especially among younger people. Today, apps like Houseparty, Instagram, and Snapchat, among others, cater to this audience with group video calling support of their own. But they don’t offer support for up to 32 people – a feature that requires a lot of technical overhead, and apparently, more time to prep than Apple had planned.

Apple didn’t offer any official explanation for the delay, but early beta testers have said the feature has been working well so far. Of course, it’s one thing to go from supporting some 4 million beta testers, to supporting everyone who installs the iOS 12 and macOS Mojave updates.

It’s not unusual for Apple to hold back features from its September OS releases. With iOS 11, Apple held back AirPlay 2, Messages in iCloud, and Apple Pay Cash, for example.

Owl, the two-way dash cam founded by a team of ex-Apple and Dropcam executives, has secured a $10 million Series A1 round led by Canvas Ventures. This brings Owl’s total funding to $28 million.

“We’ve seen a lot of pent-up demand for car security, and Owl is tapping into that demand with a product that’s easy to install and use,” Canvas Ventures General Partner Rebecca Lynn said in a statement. “This is a testament to the team’s decades of experience building mega-hits like the iPod, iPhone, and Dropcam, and gives them a huge leg up in creating a device and service people feel excited to use every day.”

The Owl camera is designed to monitor your car for break-ins, collisions and police stops. Owl can also be used to capture fun moments (see above) on the road or beautiful scenery, simply by saying, ‘Ok, presto.’

Owl launched back in February to offer an always-on, LTE security camera for your car. Since Owl is always on, it’s able to capture car crashes, break-ins and people dinging your car in the parking lot. If Owl detects a car accident, it automatically saves the video to your phone, including the 10 seconds before and after the accident. At the time of launch, it was only available for iOS but Owl is now making it available for people with Android phones.

The two-way camera plugs into your car’s on-board diagnostics port (Every car built after 1996 has one), and takes just a few minutes to set up. The camera tucks right in between the dashboard and windshield. Once it’s hooked up, you can access your car’s camera anytime via the Owl mobile app.

Another competitor in the market is Raven. While it’s first priority is security, the camera is also designed to keep you connected to your loved ones and provide peace of mind. Raven retails for $299 and includes three months of connectivity. Owl costs $349, which includes one year of instant video via LTE.

You can learn more about Owl in my review below.

Sonatype helps enterprises identify and remediate vulnerabilities in open source library dependencies and release more secure code. Today, they announced a free tool called DepShield that offers a basic level of protection for GitHub developers.

The product is actually two parts. For starters, Sonatype has a database of open source dependency vulnerabilities called OSS Index. The company gathers this information from a variety of public sources, says Sonatype CEO Wayne Jackson. While it isn’t as highly curated as the company’s commercial offerings, it does offer a layer of protection that most individual developers or small shops wouldn’t normally have access to.

After a developer installs DepShield, it checks a code commit in GitHub against the known vulnerabilities in the OSS Index with recommendations on how to proceed. The company’s commercial offerings includes a policy engine to automate remediation. The free version simply lets developers know if there are issues, and they can go back and fix them if need be.

“What DepShield and OSS Index are doing is allowing the developers at the front lines to be able to see what’s happening inside their applications and fix the vulnerabilities directly,” Jackson said.

Vulnerability listed in OSS Index. Screenshot: Sonatype

As for the differences between the commercial and free products, Jackson say it’s a matter of scale. “The way you manage a single application or handful of applications as a developer is different than how you might approach it if you’re a CISO or a governance organization for thousands of applications,” he explained. The latter requires a higher level of automation than the former because of the sheer number of applications involved.

DepShield offers the 28 million developers using GitHub access to a baseline level of protection by identifying a set of known vulnerabilities in their applications before they make them public. Jackson says that GitHub’s role is evolving. Today, it’s not only a tool for committing your code, it’s also become a place to do issue tracking and code reviews, and he believes that as such, a product like DepShield is a natural fit.

Known issues list DepShield. Screenshot: Sonatype

DepShield is available starting today in the Security section of the GitHub Marketplace and developers can download and install it for free.

Sonatype, which is based in Maryland, launched in 2008 and has raised almost $75 million, according to data on Crunchbase. Its most recent funding round was in 2016 for $30 million. Microsoft acquired GitHub in June for $7.5 billion.

LittleBits is making its first acquisition. The New York-based educational hardware company has agreed to acquire DIY.co, an educational social network for kids. Co-founded in 2011 by Vimeo’s Zach Klein, the San Francisco-based software startup is behind the DIY.org online community and jam.com, a subscription-based STEAM educational platform.

“Over the years we’ve explored dozens of acquisitions, strategic deals, mergers,” littleBits founder and CEO Ayah Bdeir told TechCrunch. “We’re very actively looking at that stuff all the time. But DIY, Zach and his team stand out as a match made in heaven.”

DIY’s product will serve as the software foundation for littleBits’ projects moving forward. For starters, the company will provide a kind of software instruction booklet for littleBits’ kits, including a trio of new ones due out this fall. Those will follow the startup’s recent Avengers kits, the second product to take advantage of its Disney accelerator connections.

From there, its seems pretty clear how the company’s social networking and hundreds of hours of online instructional videos will complement littleBits’ long-standing goal of empowering children through STEM educational tools.

“We’re creating an environment where kids are teaching kids,” Klein tells TechCrunch. “That was our mission from day one, to create a space where kids can develop learning strategies for other kids, instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to education. We’re creating an environment where kids are forging the pathways that other kids can find and follow.”

DIY.co, will stay in its San Francisco office, allowing littleBits to expand its presence to the West Coast, where most of its investors are based. The company name and sub-brands like Jam will also remain intact, allowing littleBits to leverage the cachet the brand has built over the years, including some 1.5 million projects uploaded by 550,000 registered users.

DIY’s team of 15 will also stay on, joining littleBit’s existing staff of 100+ employees.

“The expertises are really complementary,” says Bdeir. “Zach’s team, their skill set is in software product and community building and content creation. Those are things we don’t have a lot of expertise in. We wouldn’t be doing this if we weren’t bullish about the future. This is the beginning of us doing many more aggressive steps to becoming the leading learning-to-play company in the world.”

LittleBits is clearly starting to put to use some of the $65 million it’s raised, by growing the company through acquisitions and other means. In the case of DIY, the deal is certainly a complementary one.

“This combination isn’t just about merging two mission-aligned brands,” Jon Callaghan, co-founder of littleBits investor True Ventures, told TechCrunch. “It’s reflective of a larger trend among consumer brands like Peloton and Netflix that recognize that quality content is, once again, king.”

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

While nearly every tech giant has publicly proclaimed augmented reality the next frontier to conquer, product movement has been relatively slow as the companies’ aim to nail very base issues in consumer-friendly ways has proven difficult.

Ubiquity6 is one of a handful of startups aiming to tackle the backlog of backend features currently missing from most AR experiences available today. The fast-growing company is looking to build tools that will essentially enable users to create a cloud-based AR copy of the physical world and enable persistent, dynamic multiplayer AR experiences as a result.

Today, the startup announced that it has closed a $27 million Series B led by Benchmark and Index Ventures. The company has raised over $37 million to date with plenty of high-profile VC firms amongst its investor list including Google’s Gradient Ventures, First Round, and KPCB — where Ubiquity6’s CEO Anjney Midha previously helped run a small fund. With this raise, Benchmark GP Mitch Lasky will be joining the Ubiquity6 board.

Multiplayer AR toolsets have been a trend of the year as Google, Apple and a host of other startups have looked to focus on how two or more users can sync their maps of the world in the most seamless way possible. A big focus of the Ubiquity6’s efforts have been on building 3D mesh maps of entire public areas so that that the onboarding process just naturally grows to be instantaneous.

This strategy works great for museums and much less well for your living room, but Ubiquity6 is hoping that the experiences available in their app can have episodic utility that ties them closely with events at public geographic locations.

In more ways than one, the startup seems to be taking a page from Snapchat in their approach to AR but also hopes to leapfrog Snap’s efforts by moving harder and faster into the hard AR tech that the chat app has largely sidestepped. The company’s app, which has yet to launch, has a bit of a carousel-like app selector which can boot up separate AR experiences much like one would switch through Snapchat Lenses.

I had a chance to demo some of the startup’s technology earlier this month and while phone-based AR still generally has a host of usability challenges, Ubiquity6 was able to deliver some interesting scenes that were optimized to be used by up to 100 users concurrently. My demo of adding cubes to an ever-expanding digital art sculpture was certainly simplistic but had a notable lack of hiccups through the entire process.

The company’s partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was previewed earlier this month with an activation inside the Magritte exhibit. The experience takes some familiar themes from the artist and allows phone-wilding visitors to step through AR portals and explore the “inner-workings” of the paintings. It’s an intriguing concept that seems particularly well-suited for the surrealist artist.

The company’s app hasn’t launched at a grand scale yet though people interested in testing out a beta of the startup’s tech can sign-up on the their website.

Tesla may be looking to go private, but Chinese rival Nio is going the other way after it filed to raise $1.8 billion in an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

Nio was started in 2014, initially as NextCar, by Bin Li, an entrepreneur who founded online automotive services platform Bitauto. The company is backed by Chinese internet giants Baidu and Tencent among others, and it has developed two vehicles so far: the EP9 supercar and ES8.

The former is really a concept/racer car — it broke the electric vehicle speed record last year — but the ES8, pictured above, is a car designed for the masses which is priced at 448,000 RMB, or around $65,000.

Nio opened sales for the ES8 last year but it only began shipping in June. Thus, to date, it has fulfilled just 481 orders, although it claims that there are 17,000 customers who put down reservations waiting in the wings.

That means that, essentially, it is pre-revenue at this point.

The company reported revenue of $6.9 million as of the end of June — so one month of deliveries — with a total loss of $502 million for 2018 to date. Last year, Nio lost $759 million in 2017, that included no revenue and nearly $400 million spent on R&D.

Nio may be in the same space as Tesla, but its approach differs from the U.S. firm. The company operates ‘clubhouses’ where it sells to new customers and allows existing owners to come to spend time, while it also goes direct to consumer with mobile-based sales. (Not, unlike, say an early Xiaomi model.)

Nio’s pricing is more focused on mid-market and, without a charger network like Tesla (most Chinese households would struggle to charge at home), it has developed its own unique way to handle battery charging. Its vehicles support battery swapping at dedicated stations while it operates a range of roaming charging trucks can  reach users who are low on juice.

Those on-demand charging services come as part of a subscription-based package which will add further revenue beyond car sales. Further down the line, the company said its vehicles will be compatible with the national EV charging network China is developing so that’ll help on the charging front, too.

Like China’s infrastructure play, Nio itself is very much a work in progress.

Indeed, case in point, it doesn’t yet operate its own factory.

Right now, state-owned JAC Motors handles product but Nio has pledged to invest $650 million to construct its own manufacturing plant in Shanghai. Nio’s current order backlog will take six to nine months to process, according to the filing, but its own factory could mean orders are dispatched to customers within 28 days of purchase.

The company’s focus is China, but Nio has global roots. Shanghai is its headquarters and home to nearly 2,500 staff, but it also has teams in Munich (design), San Jose (software and self-driving) and London and Oxford in the UK, which handle vehicle concepts.

Its executive team is predominantly Chinese but one familiar name is Padmasree Warrior who is the head of Nio’s U.S. business. The former Motorola CTO joined the company in 2015 after calling time on Cisco, where she spent seven years and had been chief technology and strategy officer.

Despite an international setup, there’s no word in the filing on whether Nio has a timeframe for selling vehicles outside of China. For now, the company cites analyst data claiming that “China is a clear leader in the global EV market” with sales growing from 21,800 in 2013 to 740,900 units last year. That’s despite the Chinese government cutting back on some of its generous subsidies aimed at encouraging early ownership of EVs and eco-friendly hybrid cars.

If there’s one thing we learned hosting last year’s Startup Battlefield in Kenya, it’s that the tech startup scene across Africa is both impressive and growing rapidly. More than 300 tech hubs connect and mentor entrepreneurs across the continent — making it an exciting time and place to be a startup.

And we can’t wait to see even more of Sub-Saharan Africa’s best innovators, makers and technical entrepreneurs compete in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 in Lagos, Nigeria on December 11. If you haven’t applied yet, what the heck are you waiting for? Submit your application right here and launch your early-stage startup to the world.

We’re searching for the best of the best, and our expert TechCrunch editors will review every eligible application and select up to 15 companies to compete — keep reading for important specifics on who may apply. Among other criteria, the editors will look closely at a startup’s potential to produce an exit or IPO.

Those highly experienced editors will also provide team founders with free and extensive pitch coaching. You might be nervous when the time comes to walk onstage to pitch your company, but trust us — you’ll be ready.

Up to five startups will compete in one of three preliminary rounds, where they’ll have six minutes to pitch and present their demo to a panel of judges composed of entrepreneurs, technologists and VCs (recruited by our editors), all experts in their categories. Following each pitch, the judges have six minutes to ask the tough questions. The judges then choose five startups to pitch again — to a different set of judges.

One of those five startups will be named the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 champion and take home the grand prize: US$25,000 in no-equity cash, plus a trip for two to compete in Startup Battlefield in San Francisco at our flagship event, TechCrunch Disrupt 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).

All participating teams reap the benefits that come with broad exposure to a live audience filled with media, influential technologists, entrepreneurs and investors — it can be a life-changing experience.

Here’s what you need to know about eligibility. Startups should:

• Be early-stage companies in “launch” stage
• Be headquartered in one of our eligible countries*
• Have a fully working product/beta that’s reasonably close to, or in, production
• Have received limited press or publicity to date
• Have no known intellectual property conflicts
• Apply by September 3, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST

Want even more details? Read our TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 FAQ.

TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 takes place in Lagos, Nigeria on December 11. Don’t miss your opportunity to launch your startup to the world. Apply right here today. We can’t wait to see what you’ve created!

*Residents in the following countries may apply:

Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Comoros, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in the foregoing language, the “Applicable Countries” does not include any country to or on which the United States has embargoed goods or imposed targeted sanctions.