Month: August 2018

In the past couple decades, Elon Musk’s efforts with SpaceX have partially kicked off a space race in the VC-funded rocket startup scene. At Disrupt SF 2018, we’re thrilled to host a panel of some of Silicon Valley’s top investors whose firms are eying the stars.

Rob Coneybeer from Shasta Ventures, Tess Hatch from Bessemer Venture Partners and Matt Ocko from DCVC will all be joining us to discuss their points of view on the commercial space industry and where the major opportunities lie for startups looking to penetrate the market.

We’ll hopefully get a closer look at some of the dominating trends in the industry from the trio whose careers have taken them through legacy space companies and led them to make several investments in young space startups.

Rob Coneybeer is a managing director at Shasta Ventures, a firm he co-founded back in 2004. He has a masters in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and worked as an engineer in Martin Marietta’s Astro Space division earlier in his career. Coneybeer has directed a number of investments in the space sector, including Accion Systems, Spire and Vector.

Tess Hatch is an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. Hatch has a masters in aeronautical engineering from Stanford and has had stints at NASA, SpaceX, Northrup Grumman and Boeing previous to joining Bessemer. She’s currently the board observer for a number of the firm’s investments including Spire and Rocket Lab.

Matt Ocko co-founded DCVC 7 years ago and has continued to serve as the firm’s co-managing director. Ocko has several decades of experience as an investor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Since its co-founding, DCVC has made investments in Akash Systems, Capella Space, Descartes Labs, Planet and Rocket Lab.

We’ll be dialing into the attitudes among investors regarding the competitive arena and we’ll be looking for insights into how the esteemed group sees the industry transforming in the next decade.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

A British cave diving expert who helped save the young Thai football team that got trapped in caves this summer is preparing a legal action against Elon Musk for making “false and defamatory statements”, TechCrunch has confirmed.

BuzzFeed reported the development earlier, after obtaining a letter sent to Musk’s home on August 6 by a firm representing the diver, Vernon Unsworth.

The background here is that in a highly offensive and extremely bizarre episode last month — even for the famously ‘loose cannon online’ Musk — the Tesla and SpaceX CEO took to Twitter to attack Unsworth, branding him a “pedo guy”.

The bizarre attack came after Unsworth had given a critical interview to the media saying the mini sub which Musk had designed and brought to Thailand “had absolutely no chance of working”. Unsworth ended an interview segment by suggesting Musk should “stick his submarine where it hurts” — a tongue-in-cheek phrase which apparently triggered Musk’s Twitter outburst.

Facing a backlash over his comments about a man who had successfully helped rescue the boys, Musk subsequently deleted the offensive tweets and quasi-apologized for slurring Unsworth in a further set of tweets, on July 18, though these were only posted within a Twitter thread, rather than being broadcast to his ~22.4M Twitter followers.

At the time Musk said Unsworth’s comment had angered him, and that had made him lash out, but he also added: “Nonetheless, his actions against me do not justify my actions against him, and for that I apologize to Mr. Unsworth and to the companies I represent as leader. The fault is mine and mine alone.”

The public element of the episode might have ended there but earlier this week Musk dredged it all up again by repeating his offensive insinuation against Unsworth during a debate with ex-TechCrunch journalist Drew Olanoff — who had brought up the “pedo guy” attack as an example of Musk himself telling untruths.

Yet instead of reiterating his apology to Unsworth, Musk doubled down on his original offensive attack — writing: “You don’t think it’s strange he hasn’t sued me? He was offered free legal services.”

To which Olanoff replied: “What I think is especially strange here is that you’re wondering why he hasn’t sued you while the rest of us are wondering why you did something so egregious that he could sue you for in the first place.”

We contacted the law firm for confirmation that it is representing Mr Unsworth in a defamation suit against Musk. Partner Lin Wood was unavailable to speak about the matter when we called but he confirmed via email that the firm is representing Unsworth in a defamation suit against Musk, and that it is preparing a legal action.

In the letter sent by the firm to Musk’s home earlier this month Wood informs Musk he has been retained by Unsworth on account of the defamatory statements made by Musk on Twitter alleging that he is a pedophile.

Wood also writes that he is preparing a civil complaint of libel and invites Musk to contact him “in an attempt to avoid litigation and to see the public record corrected”.

It’s not clear whether or not Musk had seen the letter at the time of his tweets to Olanoff.

We’ve reached out to Musk (via Twitter) for comment on the legal action and to ask whether he will be withdrawing his repeat allegation against Unsworth. We’ll update this story with any response.

The Tesla CEO’s erratic behavior online has caused other high profile headaches for his companies in recent weeks, after he tweeted about taking Tesla private — triggering wild swings in the stock price and scrutiny (and potential problems) from the Securities and Exchange Commission, only for the idea to be nixed weeks later.

The associated risks for shareholders in a public company whose CEO uses Twitter as a weapon to indulge personal spats and feuds — and to spitball major business decisions — without, apparently, any thought for the legal and reputational consequences for him or his companies, are hard to quantify but equally difficult to deny.

Sony’s Playstation Vue, the over-the-top TV streaming service that’s now up against a host of new competitors including Hulu and YouTube TV, is expanding its lineup to include more local stations. While the service had already offered some limited access to locals in select markets, this expansion brings 200 more stations across the U.S. to its service, including ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC stations.

In total, there are now more than 450 local stations available, the company says. (A list of the additions is available here.)

The news is notable because of how far behind Playstation Vue has slid in terms of subscribers, since the launch of newcomers to the market. And many of these newcomers have been touting their access to locals as one of their benefits.

Playstation Vue, on the other hand, may have gained more locals this week, but it also recently lost all Sinclair-owned local stations, and before that, Viacom channels. While Sony says it doesn’t have plans to shut down Vue, it has also made statements about its “uncertain” future, which concerned its user base.

Likely because of its branding as “Playstation,” many consumers may believe that the service is something that’s only available to Playstation owners. It’s not, though – Vue also streams across platforms, including iOS, Android, the web, and connected media players like Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, Fire TV, as well as Chromecast.

While an early player in streaming TV, Playstation Vue today lags on subscribers.

Dish’s Sling TV leads the pack with 2.3 million paying customers, followed by AT&T’s DirecTV Now with 1.8 million. Meanwhile, the newer Hulu Live TV service hit 800,000 subscribers in May, while YouTube TV passed 800,000 around the same time. Playstation Vue, however, reportedly has over 500,000 subscribers, in comparison.

The major players are benefitting from their large corporate parents, Digiday recently pointed out. For example, AT&T acquired Time Warner and is now leveraging its wireless business to sells subscriptions. And Google can afford to market and fund YouTube TV as it grows, and has bought expensive partnerships like the World Series and NBA Finals along the way.

What Vue has going for it, is that the market itself – streaming – is growing, and its service is among one of the better-designed and more stable. But if it’s not willing to rebrand Playstation Vue into something more approachable, it may never be able to come out ahead.

Google today announced that it is providing the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with $9 million in Google Cloud credits to help further its work on the Kubernetes container orchestrator and that it is handing over operational control of the project to the community. These credits will be split over three years and are meant to cover the infrastructure costs of building, testing and distributing the Kubernetes software.

Why does this matter? Until now, Google hosted virtually all the cloud resources that supported the project like its CI/CD testing infrastructure, container downloads and DNS services on its cloud. But Google is now taking a step back. With the Kubernetes community reaching a state of maturity, Google is transferring all of this to the community.

Between the testing infrastructure and hosting container downloads, the Kubernetes project regularly runs over 150,000 containers on 5,000 virtual machines, so the cost of running these systems quickly adds up. The Kubernetes container registry served almost 130 million downloads since the launch of the project.

It’s also worth noting that the CNCF now includes a wide range of members that typically compete with each other. We’re talking Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle, SAP and VMware, for example. All of these profit from the work of the CNCF and the Kubernetes community. Google doesn’t say so outright, but it’s fair to assume that it wanted others to shoulder some of the burdens of running the Kubernetes infrastructure, too. Similarly, some of the members of the community surely didn’t want to be so closely tied to Google’s infrastructure either.

“By sharing the operational responsibilities for Kubernetes with contributors to the project, we look forward to seeing the new ideas and efficiencies that all Kubernetes contributors bring to the project operations,” Google Kubernetes Engine product manager William Deniss writes in today’s announcement. He also notes that a number of Google’s will still be involved in running the Kubernetes infrastructure.

“Google’s significant financial donation to the Kubernetes community will help ensure that the project’s constant pace of innovation and broad adoption continue unabated,” said Dan Kohn, the executive director of the CNCF. “We’re thrilled to see Google Cloud transfer management of the Kubernetes testing and infrastructure projects into contributors’ hands – making the project not just open source, but openly managed, by an open community.”

It’s unclear whether the project plans to take some of the Google-hosted infrastructure and move it to another cloud, but it could definitely do so — and other cloud providers could step up and offer similar credits, too.

Nintendo was slow on the draw to enter the mobile market, but now that the company’s in, the titles are starting to come at pretty steady clip. The gaming giant’s got another RPG arriving on Android and iOS September 27.

We don’t know a ton about Dragalia Lost at the moment. The title was announced back in April, and the company plans to shed more light on the game during a Mobile Direct event tonight. That will be streamed live via the YouTube video right here:

The RPG was developed by Cygames, a Japanese studio behind titles like, Granblue Fantasy, the hugely popular cross-platform title featuring art direction by Final Fantasy’s Hideo Minaba. Nintendo also acquired a chunk of stock in the studio, which bodes well for future collaborations between the two.

Nintendo describes the title as “a vast multiplayer action RPG” with a bunch of dragons. Even more importantly, it will be free to play, marking a shift in strategy from earlier titles like Super Mario Run, which proved something of a sales disappointment for the company.

Sonos is doubling down on the custom in-home audio market with new products and partnerships. The company today announced a new version of the Sonos Amp and a partnership with Sonance that will result in three architectural speakers — in-wall, in-ceiling and outdoor — that Sonos says will gain additional functionality when paired with a Sonos system.

Sonos is also announcing upcoming Control APIs that the company says will make it easier to integrate Sonos into the ever-evolving smart home. This jibes with Sonos’ long-standing approach of working with other platforms to offer its customers as many services as possible.

The new Amp allows owners to use traditional home audio speakers with a Sonos system. Connect a turntable or stream media with just the Amp and power a set of bookshelf speakers. According to the spec sheet, the Amp has enough power to push most high-end bookshelf speakers.

The Amp replaces the Connect:Amp. The new version is more powerful, works with more platforms and is more expensive at $599 rather than $499. This new version outputs 125 watts per channel at 8 ohms; it can power four speakers instead of two. The additional power makes the Amp more versatile than its predecessor, too. Sonos says the Amp can be used to add stereo sound to a TV (thanks in part to HDMI Arc support) or add wireless rears to a Sonos theater setup. Or, two Amps can be used to add a complete surround sound system. Multiple Amp units can be stacked or mounted in a rack.

The Amp works with AirPlay 2 and with Alexa when used in conjunction with an Amazon Alexa-enabled Sonos device like a Sonos One or Beam.

With a product like the Amp, Sonos has a new offering for those customers looking to integrate the convenient Sonos line into their high-end home theater setup. That’s a serious market, too, and the company’s new partnership with Sonance shows Sonos is committed to addressing the home audio enthusiast while building products to compete with Apple and Amazon.

Together, they will produce in-wall speakers that when used with a Sonos Amp will offer additional functionality. The company stopped short of detailing the added functionality. These speakers are set for an early 2019 release.

This is Sonos’ first large announcement after going public on August 2.

The interconnectedness of the cloud has allowed us to share content widely with people inside and outside the organization and across different applications, but that ability has created a problem of its own, a kind of digital fragmentation. How do you track how that piece of content is being used across a range of cloud services? It’s a problem Box wants to solve with its latest features, Activity Stream and Recommended Apps.

The company made the announcements at BoxWorks, its annual customer conference being held this week in San Francisco,

Activity Stream provides a way to track your content in real time as it moves through the organization, including who touches it and what applications it’s used in, acting as a kind of digital audit trail. One of the big problems with content in the cloud age is understanding what happened to it after you created it. Did it get used in Salesforce or ServiceNow or Slack? You can now follow the path of your content and see how people have shared it, and this could help remove some of the disconnect people feel in the digital world.

As Jeetu Patel, Box’s Chief Product and Chief Strategy Officer points out, an average large company could have more than a thousand apps and there is no good way to connect the dots when it comes to tracking unstructured content and getting a unified view of the digital trail.

“We integrate with over 1400 applications, and as we integrate with those applications, we thought if we could surface those events, it would be insanely useful to our users,” he said. Patel sees this as the beginning of an important construct, the notion of a content hub where you can see the entire transaction record associated with a piece of content.

Activity Stream sidebar inside Box. Photo: Box

But Box didn’t want to stop with just a laundry list of the connections. It also created deep links into the applications being used, so a user can click a link, open the application and view the content in the context of that other application. “It seems like Box was a logical place to get a bird’s eye view of how content is being used,” Patel said, explaining Box’s thinking in creating this feature.

A related feature is a list of Recommended Apps. Based the Box Graph, and what Box knows about the user, the content they use, and how it’s interconnected with other cloud apps, it also displays a list of recommended apps right in the Box interface. This lets users access those applications in the context of their work, so for instance, they could share the content in Slack right from the document.

Recommended Apps bar inside Box. Photo: Box

For starters, Recommended Apps integrations include G Suite apps, Slack, Salesforce, DocuSign and Netsuite, but Patel says anyone who is integrated with the web app via the API will start showing up in Activity Stream.

While the products were announced today, Box is still working out the kinks in terms of how this will work. They expect these features to be available early next year. If they can pull this off, it will go a long way toward solving the digital fragmentation problem and making Box the content center for organizations.

Netflix has hired Vernā Myers in the newly-created role of vice president, inclusion strategy.

Myers has spent the past two decades at the head of The Vernā Myers Company, where she consulted on issues around diversity and inclusion. She’s also written and spoken broadly on those topics.

In the announcement, Netflix notes that it’s already worked with Myers as a consultant, and that her new job will be to “devise and implement strategies that integrate cultural diversity, inclusion and equity into all aspects of Netflix’s operations worldwide.”

“I have been a longtime fan of the inclusive and diverse programming and talent at Netflix, and then I got a chance to meet the people behind the screen,” Myers said in a statement. “I was so impressed by their mission, their excellence, and decision to take their inclusion and diversity efforts to a higher level. I am so excited and look forward to collaborating all across Netflix to establish bold innovative frameworks and practices that will attract, fully develop, and sustain high performing diverse teams.”

Earlier this summer, Netflix fired its chief communications officer Jonathan Friedland after he used the N-word in a meeting. The company just announced that Facebook exec Rachel Whetstone will be replacing him.

Facebook says it has corrected the issue of users’ deleted posts, which had affected those who had previously cross-posted their Tweets to their Facebook profile – a feature that’s no longer supported. Earlier this month, Facebook locked down its API to prevent third-party apps from being able to post to profiles as the logged-in user, and Twitter was one of those apps impacted by the change.

However, the changes to Facebook’s API would not have mass deleted all of users’ cross-posted Tweets. It should have only prevented Twitter users from continuing to automatically post from Twitter to their Facebook profile or business page.

But Twitter, for whatever reason – an accident, one would hope – requested its Facebook app be deleted. This resulted in removals of all the content that had been cross-posted by Twitter to Facebook being also deleted from users’ profiles.

Facebook was in touch with Twitter since then, and received permission to have the app re-enabled. (Though it took longer than expected – Twitter was made aware of the problem early in the evening on Tuesday but it wasn’t until the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday that Facebook confirmed it was restoring the content – which means they received permission from Twitter to do so. Obviously, Facebook can’t just turn on a third-party app again after the developer says to take it down – it had to ask. Twitter, we understand, didn’t give Facebook immediate permission to fix the problem. Maybe it’s still mad about the whole cross-posting thing being turned off?)

While, technically speaking, the error is on Twitter’s side here, Facebook probably should have had some kind of warning in place to alert the app developers – whomever they may be – of the consequences of their decisions. That is, deleting their app would also delete all the content shared through it over the years.

Many Twitter users had heavily relied on the cross-posting feature to maintain their presence on Facebook and continue their discussions with a new audience. The deletions meant they lost years’ worth of Facebook posts and conversations, in many cases.

Facebook says it has restored all the removed content, a spokesperson told TechCrunch via email around 1:20 AM ET on Wednesday. All impacted users should be able to see their cross-posts tweets and their discussions again.

If you want to convert Netflix gift cards into dollars on a PayPal account, you usually have to find someone willing to do the same transaction in the other direction. It can quickly go wrong if you never receive your money.

Meet AirTM, a service that makes it easier to convert any form of money into any other form of money. You can deposit money using banks, gift cards, cash through Western Union and other equivalent services, cryptocurrencies and more. You can withdraw money through any of those protocols as well. AirTM is raising a $7 million Series A with BlueYard leading the round.

While many of you probably don’t see why you’d use a service like this, AirTM’s users in Venezuela are willing to pay high fees to convert their bolívars into anything else. Multiple years of hyperinflation have turned everyone’s savings into piles of bills that are worth close to nothing.

AirTM accounts aren’t bank accounts. When you create an account, you get an e-wallet in AirUSD. You can deposit and withdraw money as well as send and receive money. Depending on your payment method, you’ll get different fees.

For instance, there’s a huge supply of money from PayPal, which means that you’ll pay quite a lot to deposit money using PayPal and convert it into AirUSD.

While AirTM sounds great for money laundering, the company is a registered money service business and follow anti-money laundering and know-your-customer requirements. The company is just getting started as it manages $9 million in monthly transaction volume with 4,000 daily active users. But it’s clear that it has the potential of creating an alternative to traditional banking in countries with volatile currencies.