Month: August 2018

With its latest funding round, Formlabs has achieved unicorn status. The Massachusetts-based 3D printing startup just raised another $15 million. The latest round brings its total funding up to $100 million, and puts the company in the relatively rare air of hardware startups with valuations in excess of $1 billion. This latest funding, which follows a $30 million raise in April, is led by New Enterprise Associates.

The milestone is doubly impressive, given the state of 3D printing. After years of hype, the bubble burst, sending much of the competition scrambling. But Formlabs, which began life as a Kickstarter campaign back in 2012, set itself apart from the competition by offering industrial 3D printing in a desktop form factor.

That technology was quick to catch on among hardware prototypers looking to step up their game from the plastic depositing technology found on devices from companies like MakerBot. In recent years, the company has added more desktop manufacturing technologies and worked to push its existing tech into the burgeoning world of 3D printing for manufacturing.

Along with the new funding, Formlabs is also adding former GE CEO Jeff Immelt to its board of directors. 

“I’m excited to work with Formlabs at this pivotal time in the company’s development,” Immelt said in a release tied to the news. “Max and the team have demonstrated outstanding progress to date, with best-in-class technology and impressive momentum across a wide swath of industries, including engineering, healthcare and manufacturing. Since the company’s founding in 2011, they have outpaced competitors and established themselves as a leader in 3D printing. I look forward to supporting this next phase for the company as they accelerate adoption and continue to advance the technology.”

Formlabs currently employs 500 across North America, Europe and Asia.

A little more than a year ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk handed over the first Model 3 electric vehicles to employees at a splashy event in Hawthorne, California. It’s been (production) hell ever since, a term Musk has used repeatedly in the past 12 months as the electric automaker struggled to ramp up production of its most important vehicle to date.

Now, a month after Tesla hit a key milestone and produced nearly 5,000 Model 3 cars in the last week of June, investors, fans and critics are waiting to get a closer look at the company’s finances. Tesla is expected to report its second quarterly earnings after the market closes August 1. A conference call will be held at 2:30 pm PT.

Here’s what we’re looking for and what we hope to hear from Musk:

Conversions

Tesla has opened the Model 3 waitlist floodgates and invited all reservation holders in the U.S. and Canada to order the electric sedan.

Tesla might not share the number of reservations holders who have opted to ask for a refund or to go ahead and order a Model 3. But that figure would give insight on demand as well as help determine what obstacles lie ahead. For instance, a large number of reservations converting to orders might signal a rosy future for revenue as well as potential headwinds in production and delivery times with the increased volume.

Those reservations also equal money. The company had $985 million in customer deposits, which includes the Model 3, at the end of the first quarter. Once a customer decides to buy a Model 3, their $1,000 deposit becomes non-refundable and another $2,500 payment is required to complete the order.

Cash

The company did bring in record revenues in 2017— $11.8 billion in all. And first-quarter revenues of $3.4 billion were 26% higher than the previous quarter.

But revenue only tells part of the story.

A Bloomberg analysis in May estimates Tesla is spending more than $7,430 every minute. Tesla’s free cash flow, which is the amount of cash it generates after accounting for capital expenditures, has been negative for six consecutive quarters.

Tesla ended the first quarter with a cash balance of $2.67 billion, a $702 million drop from the previous quarter. Tesla saw its net debt increase $1.05 billion. The company’s outstanding debt is more than $10 billion.

And it doesn’t appear that the spending has slowed. The company is pulling skilled workers from a variety of departments to work on its vehicle and battery plants, sometimes flying them in from out of state and housing them in hotels, CNBC reported Tuesday.

It’s just one of the extra costs Tesla is taking on to consistently produce 5,000 or more Model 3 sedans a week if it hopes to be profitable.

Tesla reported in the first quarter a net loss of $$784.6 million, or $4.19 per share.

China

China has the potential to be a key market for Tesla. The automaker reached a deal in July with the Shanghai government to build a factory capable of producing 500,000 electric vehicles a year.

The factory would be the automaker’s second assembly plant and aimed at serving the alluring Chinese market.

Watch (or listen) for more information on Tesla’s factory plans for China, including the potential financial strains it will place on the company. Tesla hasn’t provided an estimate of what the factory might cost to build. That’s a critical data point for Tesla, which has been burning through cash as it tries to ramp up production of its Model 3 vehicle.

Cool head

Musk’s combative behavior during the previous earnings call in May and erratic tweets has even supportive investors taking note.

For better or worse, Tesla and Musk are inextricably linked. In the past, Musk’s frankness during calls and his late-night tweets has been celebrated. But patience has grown thin with some in recent weeks, including analysts.

Earnings calls have become a gauge, not just of how the company is holding up, but for its leader as well.

Felicis Ventures, the early-stage, San Francisco-based venture firmed founded a dozen or so years ago by former Googler Aydin Senkut, has closed its sixth fund with $270 million.

It’s Felicis’s biggest vehicle to date (the firm closed its last fund with $200 million in 2016). Yet even bigger news for the team may be its new managing director, Victoria Treyger, who spent the last six-plus years as the chief revenue office of the online lending company Kabbage and before that, spent a couple of years as the chief marketing officer of RingCentral, the cloud phone system company.

It’s easy to understand the attraction on both sides. Treyger gives the firm greater strength when it comes to marketing and fintech know-how. According to Senkut, Treyger is also acutely interested in health-related opportunities, which, not coincidentally, is a growing area of interest for the firm.

Indeed, he argues, persuasively, Treyger was being courted aggressively from operating companies wanting to tap her experience as a C-level executive at two separate but fast-growing companies.

That Treyger decided to pursue venture capital surely speaks to an interest in the industry broadly. But Felicis seems like a particularly good fit for her, too. For one thing, Treyger “basically has an equal spot at the table,” according to Senkut. This isn’t always the case with a new hire into a venture firm, even at the most senior level.

Treyger also joins a now four-person leadership team — including Senkut, Sundeep Peechu, and Wesley Chan — that has, in the parlance of the startup world, been crushing it.

Already in 2018, the firm has seen three major exits, including when Adyen, the Amsterdam-based payments platform, went public in June (it currently boasts a $16.3 billion market cap); when Pluralsight, the corporate learning platform, went public on the Nasdaq in May (it’s currently valued at just north of $3 billion); and when Ring, the video doorbell maker, was acquired in March by Amazon for $1 billion.

Felicis can — and does — further brag that has enjoyed a $1 billion(ish) exit in each of the last seven years. The full list includes: Meraki (acquired for $1.2 billion by Cisco in 2012); Climate Corp (which sold in 2013 to Monsanto for roughly $930 million); Twitch (acquired for $970 million in 2014 Amazon); Shopify (it went public in 2015); Fitbit (it also went public in 2015); Cruise (it was acquired by General Motors for reportedly more than $1 billion in 2016); Dollar Shave Club (acquired for $1 billion by Unilever in 2016); and Rovio (which went public last year).

How was the firm pulled off what seem like an outsize number of hits for a small and relatively young organization? Senkut says one central tenet for the firm is resiliency, meaning Felicis works to ensure that it’s portfolio is “anti fragile,” as described by essayist, scholar, and risk analyst Nassim Taleb, in his 2012 book about “things that gain from disorder.”

As it pertains to Felicis, Senkut says, “We basically want to have many uncorrelated bets — across stages, sectors and geographies — so that no matter what happens in the world, some part of our portfolio is always poised to win.”

The strategy, which has since the firm invest everywhere from Canada to Australia and in between, has certainly paid off so far.

Though early last year Felicis lost its first female general partner, Renata Quinitini, to venture peer Lux Capital (she said her interests and Lux’s began to align better over time),  Felicis describes its newest fund as “oversubscribed.” It’s an easy claim to believe, given the amount of money that investors are looking to park with venture firms, and the performance to date of Felicis in particular.

Still, taking on more investing capital was not a consideration, says Senkut. Asked why not, he laughs. “We know our strike zone,” he says.

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei is now the second biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world according to new reports from IDC and Canalys, as The Verge initially spotted.

In IDC’s latest report, the firm says that the overall market has shrunk by 1.8 percent in Q2 2018. But the biggest surprise is that Huawei now has a 15.8 percent market share with 54.2 million smartphones shipped in Q2.

It doesn’t mean that Apple is performing poorly. The company is shipping slightly more smartphones this year compared to last year. Apple also has a slightly bigger market share with 12.1 percent of the market.

Samsung is shipping 10.4 percent less smartphones but still remains the leader with 20.9 percent market share, or 71.5 million smartphones. In other words, many Samsung buyers are now buying Huawei devices, or other Android devices.

Canalys confirms this trend with the same order — Samsung, Huawei and then Apple. But the firm also highlights that Apple suffers from seasonability compared to its competitors.

Samsung and Huawei sell many different devices and release new phones all year long. Apple usually releases new devices in September, which creates a huge spike during the last quarter of the year. Apple will likely overtake Huawei and maybe even Samsung in a couple of quarters.

It’s interesting to see that Huawei is performing so well while the company has had issues with the U.S. government. If you browse the smartphone category on Amazon, Honor devices usually appear near the top of the list — Honor is Huawei’s brand for cheaper devices. The Huawei P20 Pro is also a solid device for those looking for a premium device.

It’s passive zombie feed scrolling, not active communication with friends that hurts our health, according to studies Facebook has been pointing to for the last seven months. Yet it’s treating all our social networking the same with today’s launch of its digital wellbeing screentime management dashboards for Facebook and Instagram in the US before rolling them out to everyone in the coming weeks.

Giving users a raw count of the minutes you’ve spent in their apps each day in the last week plus your average across the week is a good start to making users more mindful. But by burying them largely out of sight, giving them no real way to compel less usage, and not distinguishing between passive and active behavior, they seem destined to be ignored while missing the point the company itself stresses.

TechCrunch scooped the designs of the two separate but identical Instagram and Facebook tools over the past few months thanks to screenshots generated from the apps’ code by Jane Manchun Wong. What’s launching today is what we saw, with the dashboards located in Facebook’s “Settings” -> “Your Time On Facebook” and Instagram’s “Settings” -> “Your Activity”.

Beyond the daily and average minute counts, you can set a daily “limit” in minutes after which either app will send you a reminder that you’ve crossed your self-imposed threshold. But they won’t stop you from browsing and liking, or force you to dig into the settings menu to extend your limit. You’ll need the willpower to cut yourself off. The tools also let you mute push notifications (you’ll still see in-app alerts), but only for as much as 8 hours. If you want anything more permanent, you’ll have to dig into their separate push notification options menu or your phone’s settings.

The announcement follows Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom’s comments about our original scoop, where he tweeted “It’s true . . . We’re building tools that will help the IG community know more about the time they spend on Instagram – any time should be positive and intentional . . . Understanding how time online impacts people is important, and it’s the responsibility of all companies to be honest about this. We want to be part of the solution. I take that responsibility seriously.”

Users got their first taste of Instagram trying to curtail overuse with its “You’re All Caught Up” notices that show when you’ve seen all your feed posts from the past two days. Both apps will now provide callouts to users teaching them about the new activity monitoring tools. Facebook says it has no plans to use whether you open the tools or set daily limits to target ads. It will track how people use the tools to tweak the designs, but it sounds like that’s more about what time increments to show in the Daily Reminder and Mute Notifications options than drastic strengthenings of their muscle. Facebook will quietly keep a tiny fraction of users from getting the features to measure if the launch impacts behavior.

“It’s really important for people who use Instagram and Facebook that the time they spend with us is time well spent” Ameet Ranadive, Instagram’s Product Director of Well-Being, told reporters on a conference call. “There may be some tradeoff with other metrics for the company and that’s a tradeoff we’re willing to live with, because in the longer term we think this is important to the community and we’re willing to invest in it.”

Facebook Needs Stronger Screen Time Tools That Deter Passive Browsing

Facebook has already felt some of the brunt of that tradeoff. It’s been trying to improve digital wellbeing by showing fewer low quality viral videos and clickbait news stories, and more from your friends since a big algorithm change in January. That’s contributed to a flatlining of its growth in North America, and even a temporary drop of 700,000 users early this year while it also lost 1 million users in Europe this past quarter. That led to Facebook’s slowest user growth rates in history, triggering a 20 percent, $120 billion market cap drop in its share price. “The changes to the News Feed back in January were one step . . . giving people a sense of their time so they’re more mindful of it is the second step” says Ranadive.

The fact that Facebook is willing to put its finances on the line for digital wellbeing is a great step. It’s a smart long-term business decision too. If we feel good about our overall usage, we won’t ditch the apps entirely and could keep seeing their ads for another decade. But it’s likely to be changes to the Facebook and Instagram feeds that prioritize content you’ll comment on rather than look at and silently scroll past that will contribute more to healthy social networking than today’s toothless tools.

While iOS 12’s Screen Time and Android’s new Digital Wellbeing features both count your minutes on different apps too, they offer more drastic ways to enforce your own good intentions. iOS will deliver a weekly usage report to remind you the features exist. Android’s is best-in-class because it grays out an app’s icon and requires you to open your settings to unlock an app after you exceed your daily limit.

To live up to the responsibility Systrom promised, Facebook and Instagram will have to do more to actually keep us mindful of the time we spend in their apps and help us help ourselves. Let us actually lock ourselves out of the apps, turn them grayscale, fade their app icons, or persistently show our minute count onscreen once we pass our limit. Anything to make being healthy on their apps something you can’t just ignore like any other push notification.

Or follow the research and have the dashboards actually divide our sharing, commenting, and messaging time from our feed scrolling, Stories tapping, video watching, and photo stalking. The whole point is that social networking isn’t all bad, but there are behaviors that hurt. Most of us aren’t going to give up Facebook and Instagram. Even just trying to spend less time on them is difficult. But by guiding us towards the activities that interconnect us rather than isolate us, Facebook could get us to shift our time in the right direction.

When it comes to measuring your fitness progress, there’s only so much your weight scale can tell you, actually there’s only one thing it can convey. That one metric hardly encapsulates all of the successes that active people are looking to achieve.

Naked Labs believes that body shape is a more important thing to measure and they’ve begun shipping their body-scanning mirror that builds a 3D model of users and alerts them where progress is being made and where there’s potential for more work to be done.

The startup also announced today that it has raised a $14 million Series A led by Founders Fund. Also participating were NEA, Lumia Capital, Venture 51, Seabed VC, among others.

The company began taking pre-orders last year for its $1,395 Naked 3D Fitness Tracker. It’s already started shipping out those orders and by next quarter the startup hopes to have the devices generally available. The device consists of two parts, a scale that houses sensors and a computer and the weight scale which spins you around so that the stationary mirror can grab a body scan of a user in about 15 seconds.

Soon after, you’ll get your body fat percent, lean mass and fat mass, circumferences, as well as side-by-side comparisons with earlier scans and some graphs that showcase historical data.

Part of what makes this device so pricy is that the Naked 3D Fitness Tracker packs some pretty serious internals for a freaking mirror. The device has an Intel x86 processor, RAM, 4GB DDR4 RAM, and a 64GB SSD. All of this is so that the device can stitch the imagery it’s taking into an easy model that it can then beam directly to your phone from the device, meaning that depth data of your body isn’t being uploaded to the cloud and is being handled on-device.

On the privacy front there are certainly some real concerns about having a mirror stocked with sensors that scans your naked body. For its part, Naked Labs seems to have made some significant choices to minimize some of these concerns. For starters the mirror doesn’t even have RGB cameras, relying entirely on Intel RealSense depth sensors instead. As a result, what the app ends up getting looks more like a TSA body scan image rather than a 3D avatar.

“We have to have a certain amount of trust when we look in the mirror,” Founders Fund Partner Cyan Banister said in a statement. “Naked Labs takes what could be a scary body scan image and turns it into an avatar – like Marvel’s Silver Surfer. This creates a different relationship between people and their body – a more objective one because it takes the emotion out of it.”

Ultimately, the company is in the business of 3D body scanning. Peloton has certainly shown that people are willing to invest significantly in exercise hardware for their homes, but there are a lot of applications outside of fitness which I would imagine is where a lot of these investors’ interests really lay. Having an accurate body model has a lot of applications for helping consumers pick out items that fit their body and style more.

At $1,395 this isn’t the most accessible device to the everyday exerciser, but Naked Labs seems to realize that and it hoping to take some of this funding to scale manufacturing, hire new people and continue working on developing new products.

Apple released the fifth beta of iOS 12 a few days ago. 9to5mac discovered strings in configuration files that reference dual SIM devices. You should expect at least one new iPhone model with two SIM trays.

Apple is said to unveil three new iPhone models in September. In addition to an updated iPhone X, the company should announce a bigger second generation “iPhone X Plus”.

Apple also plans to bring the notch to more devices with a replacement to the iPhone 8. This iPhone will feature a 6.1-inch LCD display with a notch as well as a single camera on the back of the device. It should be as expensive as the iPhone 8 today.

There have been rumors in the past that Apple was looking at selling iPhones with two SIM cards. It was unclear if Apple wanted to put a normal SIM tray and a second e-SIM card like on the Apple Watch.

But according to these configuration files, this model will let you add two physical SIM cards — there are references to “second SIM status” and “second SIM tray status”.

Apple could limit dual SIM support to some models in particular. For instance, it could be limited to the rumored iPhone X Plus, or maybe the high-end OLED models.

Many users don’t need two SIM slots. But it’s an essential feature for some countries. For instance, in India, cell carriers are regional companies. If you travel back and forth between Delhi and Mumbai, you need two SIM cards and two plans.

Frequent travelers could also use a second SIM slot to avoid expensive roaming fees. It’s usually cheaper to buy a local SIM card. By using two SIM cards, you get the best of both worlds because you can still receive two-factor text messages, keep your phone number for iMessage and more.

Google’s search service could be poised to make a dramatic return to China next year, according to an explosive report from The Intercept.

Google yanked its search service from China in 2010 in the face of pressure over censorship, but now the publication reports that it has developed a censored version that could launch in the country in six to nine months, according to information supplied by a source with knowledge of the plans. The alleged product would block Western services already outlawed in China, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and also scrub results for sensitive terms, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre, and international media including the BBC and New York Times.

Google didn’t explicitly deny the report in a statement:

“We provide a number of mobile apps in China, such as Google Translate and Files Go, help Chinese developers, and have made significant investments in Chinese companies like JD.com . But we don’t comment on speculation about future plans,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The insider claims that the search product is codenamed Dragonfly and that knowledge of it is limited to a handful of high-level Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai . The company is said to plan to operate a joint venture in China with an unnamed local company.

The Intercept said its source got in touch out of concern that the project “will set a terrible precedent for many other companies who are still trying to do business in China while maintaining the principles of not succumbing to China’s censorship.”

There’s been plenty of speculation over the years that Google will re-enter China with a meaningful product. That has tended to focus on the Play Store, but it looks like the search product has already gained considerable momentum. The Intercept reports that it has been demonstrated to Chinese government officials, with Pichai himself having attended at least one meeting with authorities.

Internal documents seen by The Intercept show that an Android app is the initial focus, but there could be scope for a desktop version and more further down the line. The current concern, according to the publication, is ensuring that the service gains Chinese government approval and is good enough to compete with what is already available to internet users in China.

The Intercept’s report comes less than a week after Facebook briefly received approval to operate a subsidiary on Chinese soil. Its license was, however, revoked as news of the approval broke. The company said it had planned to open an innovation center, but it isn’t clear whether that will be possible now.

Facebook previously built a censorship-friendly tool that could be deployed in China.

While its U.S. peer has struggled to get a read on China, Google has been noticeably increasing its presence in the country over the past year or so.

The company has opened an AI lab in Beijing, been part of investment rounds for Chinese companies, including a $550 million deal with JD.com, and inked a partnership with Tencent. It has also launched products, with a file management service for Android distributed via third-party app stores and, most recently, its first mini program for Tencent’s popular WeChat messaging app.

The Intercept suggests that these dealings are a prelude to introducing Dragonfly in a bid to capture a chunk of the 700 million internet user market that grown quickly since Google’s search business left the country.

Well, Elon Musk sure had a good run at fixing the world’s pressing problems. Stuff like climate change — with those fancy electric sports cars, built in a fancy tent. Or those fancy solar roof tiles. (Fancy rockets aren’t really a ‘fix’ at this point but he’s thinking about the extraterrestrial future of humanity, okay.)

There was also that kid-sized sub he hastily put together this summer to try and save boys trapped in a cave in Thailand (that endeavor didn’t end so great for Musk though).

He’s even offered to fix Flint’s polluted water.

But it appears that even a (very) well-greased God Complex knows its limits. Because the problem that Musk himself has said is too big for Musk himself to fix is, well, cash-strapped MoviePass.

At least that’s what Musk said to BuzzFeed reporter Samir Mezrahi via twitter….

So, sorry movie lovers. Musk and his billions might have been your only hope — i.e. against price rises and being forced to see shit films because there are fewer tickets on movies you actually want to see.

Turns out some things really are just too good to be saved.

Go-Jek, the Indonesia-based ride-sharing company valued at $5 billion, has begun its ambitious plan to increase its rivalry with Grab by expanding into three new markets after it opened shop in Vietnam.

The service — which is known as Go-Viet — covers an initial 12 districts in Ho Chi Minh City with a motorbike on-demand service. Rival Grab is in five cities in Vietnam and its services include motorbikes, taxis, private cars and food delivery.

The August 1 Vietnam launch as TechCrunch reported in June. The plan is to then expand into Thailand in September, and the Philippines before the end of this year. Singapore remains a market that Go-Jek would like to enter — it has held partnership talks with taxi operator ComfortDelGro — but it remains unclear whether, and when, that might happen.

Go-Jek expansion plan will put some heat on Grab, which has occupied a near-dominant position across Southeast Asia since it acquired Uber’s local business back in March.

Unlike Grab, though, Go-Jek is taking a very local approach to each market. Not only will it use a local name in each country — in Thailand it will be called “Get” — it has hired local ‘founder’ teams who will be responsible for service offerings and other local business aspects. It isn’t clear how closely they will work with the core Go-Jek team in Indonesia.

That may mean anyone traveling between countries will need to download local Go-Jek apps, which is in contrast to Grab, which offers a single app for eight countries in Southeast Asia.

Valued at $10 billion, Grab has raised over $5 billion from investors, including its most recent $1 billion investment from Toyota. Go-Jek has pulled in just over $2 billion. Tencent, Google, Meituan and others participated in its most recent (estimated) $1.4 billion raise which closed earlier this year.