Month: October 2018

There’s concern for the freedom of the press in Hong Kong after the government declined to renew the visa of a veteran Financial Times’ editor, dealing an alarming blow to the country’s thriving journalism community.

Victor Mallet, the FT’s Asia news editor who is also vice-president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, is effectively being expelled after he was denied a new work visa without reason. The incident follows a controversial FCC event in August, chaired by Mallet, which featured pro-Hong Kong independence activist Andy Chan.

“This is the first time we have encountered this situation in Hong Kong, and we have not been given a reason for the rejection,” an FT spokesperson told HKFP, which was first to report the news.

It is common for the Chinese government to turn down visa renewals for reporters — for example, BuzzFeed’s Megha Rajagopalan had her annual visa rejected last month after she published stories on the plight of China’s Uyghur Muslims — but Hong Kong has long been a bastion of free speech and free press. A range of global media uses the country as their regional HQ for that very reason, while a substantial amount of Chinese reporting is conducted by Hong Kong-based journalists on account of the trickiness of Chinese media visas. Expelling a reporter — and without reason — runs contrary to that.

“This is unprecedented. We expect foreign journalists to have this kind of visa rejection happen in China, but it has never happened in Hong Kong because Hong Kong has a tradition until recent years of respect for free speech,” Human Rights Watch’s Maya Wang told the New York Times.

The situation appears to be a direct response to Chan’s interview at the FCC, which was strongly criticized by the Hong Kong government and China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. Former Hong Kong leader CY Leung went so far as to suggest that the FCC should be forced to give up its lease (which he incorrectly claimed was government-subsidized) while he claimed that hosting Chan was tantamount to giving “criminals and terrorists” air time. His successor Carrie Lim called the FCC event “regrettable and inappropriate.”

Chan’s Hong Kong National party, which pushes back on increased influence from Beijing, was formally outlawed last month. The ban, the first of its kind since the UK handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, was made “in the interests of national security, public order or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”

Forward Health, the U.K. startup that has built an app to help healthcare professionals communicate in a secure and compliant way, has picked up $3.9 million in seed funding.

Leading the round is Stride.VC, the new VC fund from Fred Destin, formerly a Partner at Accel, and Harry Stebbings, producer of the “The Twenty Minute VC” and most recently Entrepreneur-in-Residence at VC firm Atomico.

Additional backing comes from Albion Capital, while Forward already boasts a decent array of angel investors. They include health tech founders Jay Desai from U.S. company Patient Ping, and Melissa Morris from U.K.-based Lantum.

Founded in 2016 by U.K. doctors Barney Gilbert and Lydia Yarlott, with serial entrepreneur Philip Mundy (who previously founded Goodlord), Forward Health is a messaging app and broader communications platform designed for healthcare professionals, particularly those working in hospitals.

One overly simple way to think of it is as a “WhatsApp for doctors,” helping to wean healthcare professionals off of using the popular messaging app professionally, which is entirely unsuited for a regulated industry like healthcare. However, the bigger vision is to “connect healthcare systems around the world” by improving clinician-to-clinician (and potentially clinician-to-patient) communication and information-sharing with a platform that is built from the get-go to be secure, flexible and compliant.

“Healthcare communication is incredibly fragmented,” Forward Healthcare’s Mundy tells me. “This has a direct impact on how well clinicians can do their jobs and the level of care patients receive. Currently, doctors and nurses working within the NHS have to rely on an outdated and inefficient combination of pagers, landlines, switchboards and fax machines to contact each other. This 1960s infrastructure wastes huge amounts of time and can lead to critical delays in information flow”.

It is in this context that clinicians have resorted to alternative methods of communication, such as WhatsApp, which Mundy rightfully says are not fit for purpose and pose real risks.

“Any communication of this kind needs to support the exchange of highly sensitive patient information, any app used needs to be NHS digital compliant, GDPR compliant and operate within the highest levels of data security,” he explains. “WhatsApp and others don’t do this, meaning individual doctors could be liable should patient data be sent to the wrong contact or thread. Additionally, an app such as Forward is designed by and for doctors, meaning it can perform in just the right way”.

In Forward’s case, that means offering an in-app directory of healthcare professionals who work within the same hospital so that it is possible to message colleagues even if you don’t know their number, “safe exchange of information and images”, the ability to create task lists, and a way of ensuring everyone involved with a patient’s care “is on the same page and working from the same information”. The latter includes the ability for clinicians to share patient cards, akin to a mini electronic health record, on a need-to-know basis.

To that end, the Forward app is GDPR compliant, NHS IG Toolkit Certified, and meets the GMC’s confidentiality guidelines. Clinicians must have an approved NHS or Trust email address to log into the app. Over the last year it has been piloted with a community of 5,000 doctors across five partner hospitals.

In a call with Harry Stebbings — who led the round on behalf of Stride and whom I promised not to refer to as a podcaster-turned-VC (sorry, Harry, I’m a terrible person!) — he told me that Forward Health’s mission resonated with him personally due to his first-hand experience of how doctors communicate and share information in the NHS. It is quite well-known that Stebbings’ mother has MS, while more recently his father suffered a heart attack.

“I knew healthcare communication was broken when, post my father’s heart attack, they faxed his ECG scans,” he says, aghast.

When he was introduced to the Forward Health team, Stebbings says he already understood the problem. But, more so, he looks for founder-market fit and believes the Forward founders are extremely well-placed to solve this particular problem, with the right mixture of healthcare and product backgrounds.

He says that another thing that has impressed him is the bottom-up growth that the Forward app has garnered, which we both agree is a little reminiscent to how business social network Yammer originally penetrated corporations. This sees healthcare professionals download the app and sign up using their NHS email address, without the need for a central diktat. They then typically encourage colleagues to do the same, which creates further network effects. This viral growth is also benefiting from the current career path of junior doctors, who, as part of their training, move from hospital to hospital and in turn spread use of the Forward app.

Adds Mundy: “The last year has not only furthered our aims to help thousands of doctors and nurses avoid using pagers and WhatsApp, but it’s also shown us the scale of the clinical communication problem. It’s an issue at every level of healthcare, from A&E to community services, and affects all clinicians and every patient. With this capital, we’ll be able to work with even more clinicians across the UK to identify their challenges and expand our product to help solve them. We believe our current offering is just the start of what our platform is set to become”.

Samsung’s last quarter of business saw its slowest growth of profits in a year thanks to weak sales of its flagship Galaxy S9 smartphone. But the company is about much more than just phones, and that’s why it is forecasting a record operating profit of nearly $15.5 billion for its upcoming Q3 results.

The Korean firm said in a filing that it expects to revenue jump five percent year-on-year to hit 65 trillion KRW ($57.5 billion) with an operating profit of 17.5 trillion KRW ($15.5 billion), which represents a 20 percent annual jump and an 18 percent increase on the previous quarter.

Samsung’s pre-earnings filings are brief and don’t contain detailed information about the performance of its business units, thus we can’t assess demand for its high-end phones — which include the Note 9 — in the quarter that Apple unveiled its newest iPhones. But the clues suggest that it is actually the more boring (but reliable) divisions that are, once again, responsible for Samsung’s strong forecast.

Chips account for some 80 percent of Samsung’s revenue and demand for DRAM, which is important in areas such as cloud, pushed prices up during Q3 but analysts suspect that the growth won’t last.

“Its earnings appeared to have peaked,” Mirae Asset Daewoo Securities analyst William Park told Reuters. “DRAM prices are going to fall, although not dramatically, and that will negatively impact its margins.”

We’ll know more when Samsung releases its full earnings this month.

Adults, not teens. Messaging, not Stories. Developing markets, not the US. These are how Snapchat will make a comeback, according to CEO Evan Spiegel . In a 6,000-word internal memo from late September leaked to Cheddar’s Alex Heath, Spiegel attempts to revive employee morale with philosophy, tactics, and contrition as Snap’s share price sinks to an all-time low of around $8 — half its IPO price and a third of its peak.

“The biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest way to communicate” Spiegel stresses throughout the memo regarding ‘Project Cheetah’. It’s the chat that made Snapchat special, and burying it within a combined feed with Stories and failing to build a quick-loading Android app have had disastrous consequences.

Spiegel shows great maturity here, admitting to impatient strategic moves and outlining a cohesive path forward. There’s no talk of Snapchat ruling the social app world here. He seems to understand that’s likely out of reach in the face of Instagram’s competitive onslaught. Instead, Snapchat is satisfied if it can help us express ourselves while finally reaching even meager profitability.

Snapchat may be too perceived as a toy to win enough adults, too late to win back international markets from the Facebook empire, and too copyable by good-enough alternatives to grow truly massive. But if Snap can follow the Spiegel game-plan, it could carve out a sustainable market through a small but loyal audience who want to communicate through imagery.

Here are the most interesting takeaways from the memo and why they’re important:

1. Apologizing For Rushing The Redesign

“There were, of course, some downsides to moving as quickly as a cheetah We rushed our redesign, solving one problem but creating many others . . . Unfortunately, we didn’t give ourselves enough time to continue iterating and testing the redesign with a smaller percentage of our community. As a result, we had to continue our iterations after we launched, causing a lot of frustration for our community.”

Spiegel always went on his gut rather than relying on user data like Facebook. Aging further and further away from his core audience, he misread what teens cared about. The appealing buzz phrase of “separating social from media” also meant merging messaging and Stories into a chaotic list that made both tougher to use. Spiegel seems to have learned a valuable lessen about the importance of A/B testing.

2. Chat Is King

“Our redesigned algorithmic Friend Feed made it harder to find the right people to talk to, and moving too quickly meant that we didn’t have time to optimize the Friend Feed for fast performance. We slowed down our product and eroded our core product value. . . . Regrettably, we didn’t understand at the time that the biggest problem with our redesign wasn’t the frustration from influencers – it was the frustration from members of our community who felt like it was harder to communicate . . . In our excitement to innovate and bring many new products into the world, we have lost the core of what made Snapchat the fastest way to communicate.”

When Snap first revealed the changes, we predicted that “Teen Snap addicts might complain that the redesign is confusing, jumbling all content from friends together.” That made it too annoying to dig out your friends to send them messages, and Snap’s growth rate imploded, with it losing 3 million users last quarter. Expect Snap to optimize its engineering to make messages quicker to send and receive, and it even sacrifice some of its bells and whistles to make chat faster in developing markets.

3. Snapchat Must Beat Facebook At Best Friends

“Your top friend in a given week contributes 25% of Snap send volume. By the time you get to 18 friends, each incremental friend contributes less than 1% of total Snap send volume each. Finding best friends is a different problem than finding more friends, so we need to think about new ways to help people find the friends they care most about.”

Facebook’s biggest structural disadvantage is its broad friend graph that’s bloated to include family, co-workers, bosses, and distant acquaintances.  That might be fine in a feed app, but not for Stories and messaging where you only care about your closest friends. With friend lists and more, Facebook has tried and failed for a decade to find better ways to communicate with your besties. This is the wedge through which Snapchat can attack Facebook. If it develops special features for luring your best friends onto the app and staying in touch with them for better reasons than just maintaining a Snap “Streak”, it could hit Facebook where it can’t defend itself.

4. Discover Soars As Facebook Watch And IGTV Stumble

“Our Shows continue to attract more and more viewers, with over 18 Shows reaching monthly audiences of over 10M unique viewers. 12 of which are Original productions. As a platform overall, we’ve grown the amount of total time spent engaging with our Shows product, almost tripling since the beginning of the year. Our audience for Publisher Stories has increased over 20% YoY, and we believe there is a significant opportunity to continue growing the number of people who engage with Discover content . . .We are also working to identify content that is performing well outside of Snapchat so that we can bring it into Discover. “

Discover remains Snapchat’s biggest differentiator, scoring with premium video content purposefully made for mobile. What it really needs, though, are a few must-see tentpole shows to drag in a wider audience that can get hooked on the reimagined digital magazine experience.

5. But Discover Is A Mess

“Our content team is working hard to experiment with new layouts and content types in the wake of our redesign to drive increased engagement.”

Snapchat Discover is an overcrowded pile of clickbait. News outlets, social media influencers, original video Shows, and aggregated user content collections all battle for attention in a design that feels overwhelming to the point of exhaustion. Thankfully Snapchat seems to recognize that more cohesive sorting with fewer images and headlines bombarding you might make Discover a more pleasant lean-back consumption experience.

6. Aging Up To Earn Money

“Most of the incremental growth in our core markets like the US, UK, and France will have to come from older users who generate higher average revenue per user . . . Growing in older demographics will require us to mature our application . . . Many older users today see Snapchat as frivolous or a waste of time because they think Snapchat is social media rather than a faster way to communicate. Changing the design language of our product and improving our marketing and communications around Snapchat will help users understand our value . . . aging-up our community in core markets will also help the media, advertisers, and Wall Street understand Snapchat.”

Snapchat can’t just be for cool kids anymore. Their lower buying power and lifestage make them less appealing to brands. The problem is that Snapchat risks turning off younger users by courting their older siblings or adults. If, like Facebook, users start to feel like Snapchat is a place for parents, they may defect in search of the next purposefully built to confuse adults to stay hip.

7. Finally Prioritizing Developing Markets

“We already have many projects underway to unlock our core product value in new markets. Mushroom allows our community to use Snapchat on lower-end devices. Arroyo, our new gateway architecture, will speed up messaging and many other services . . . It might require us to change our products for different markets where some of our value-add features detract from our core product value”

Sources tell me Snapchat’s future depends on the engineering overhaul of its Android app, a project codenamed ‘Mushroom’. Slow video load times and bugs have made Snapchat practically unusable on low-bandwidth connections and old Android phones in the developing world. The company concentrated on the US and other first-world markets, leaving the door open for copycats of Stories built by Instagram (400 million daily users) and WhatsApp (450 million daily users) to invade the developing world and dwarf Snap’s 188 million total daily users. In hopes of a smooth rollout, Snapchat is already testing Mushroom, but it will have to do a ton of marketing outreach to convince frustrated users who ditched the app to give it another try.

8. Fresh Ideas, Separate Apps

“We’re currently building software that takes the millions of Snaps submitted to Our Story and reconstructs parts of the world in 3D. We can then build augmented reality experiences on top of those models and distribute them as Lenses . . . If our innovation compromises our core product of being the fastest way to communicate, we should consider create [sic] separate applications or other ways of delivering our innovation.”

Snapchat has big plans for augmented reality. It doesn’t just want to stick animations over the top of anywhere, or create AR art installations in a few big cities. It wants to build site-specific AR experiences across the globe. And while everything the company has built to date has lived inside of Snapchat, it’s willing to spawn standalone apps if necessary so that it doesn’t bog down its messaging service. That could give Snapchat a lot more leeway to experiment.

9. The Freedom Of Profitability

“Our 2019 stretch output goal will be an acceleration in revenue growth and full year free cash flow and profitability. With profitability comes increased autonomy and freedom to operate our business in the long term best interest of our community without the pressure of needing to raise additional capital.”

Snapchat is still bleeding money, losing $353 million last quarter. Snapchat ended up selling 2.3 percent of its equity to a Saudi Arabian prince in exchange for $250 million to lengthen its rapidly shortening runway. And last year it took $2 billion from Chinese gaming giant Tencent. Deals like that could threaten Snapchat’s ability to prioritize its goals alone, not the moral imperatives or developer platforms that would benefit its benefactors. Once profitable, Snapchat won’t have to worry so much about struggling with short-term user growth and can instead focus on retention, societal impact, and its true purpose — creativity.

Polestar has started assembling verification prototypes of its upcoming plug-in hybrid sports car as Volvo’s standalone electric performance brand prepares to produce customer cars next year.

Verification prototypes of the Polestar 1 vehicle, which are built largely by hand, mark the first testing phase for production. The vehicles will be crashed and driven through different kinds of weather and on-road conditions — the kinds of tests that help engineers identify problems and tune the car.

The company plans to build 34 of these vehicles at a prototype production facility in Gothenburg, Sweden. Polestar will likely pay particular attention to how the carbon-fiber body of the vehicle holds up under testing. This is the first time that a brand in the Volvo Car Group has explored carbon fiber construction, according to Polestar, which noted that the company had to develop new equipment and use new construction techniques.

That equipment will be transferred to its new factory in Chengdu, China, where customer cars will be produced.

Polestar plans to start production of the Polestar 1 in mid-2019, according to Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath. The company has said it will produce 200 Polestar 1 vehicles in the first full year of production. All of those $155,000 vehicles, which are destined for North America, have already been sold.

Polestar was once a high-performance brand under Volvo Cars. In 2017, the company was recast as an electric performance brand aimed at producing exciting and fun-to-drive electric vehicles — a niche that Tesla was the first to fill and has dominated ever since. Volvo has said it plans to invest more than $750 million into Polestar.

The Polestar 1 is the first model of the electric brand. However, the Polestar 1 is not a pure electric vehicle; it’s a plug-in hybrid with three electrical motors powered by twin 34 kilowatt-hour battery packs and a turbo and supercharged gas V4 up front.

Ingenlath views this initial model as a “bridge” to pure EVs. The Polestar 2 will be the company first all-electric vehicle and is designed to compete with Tesla Model 3. The Polestar 2 will be revealed early in 2019, with production starting a year later.

So long, Tronc. We hardly Tronced you. Why, it seems like only yesterday you Tronced into our world as an utterly insane “Pixels to Pulitzers” marketing video that was somehow too satirical to be satire.

Today, Tronc confirmed rumors that its retrofuturist onomatopoetic name wasn’t long for this world. Soon, the company that owns the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, Orlando Sentinel, The New York Daily News and various others, will revert back to the Tribune Publishing Co.

The news of the DeTroncification was, fittingly, reported by The Chicago Tribune (nee Troncbune).

The company was notably excited to commence the UnTroncing. “We are excited about the company rebranding to Tribune Publishing,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “It’s a nod to our roots, and a reinforcement of the journalistic foundation on which all of our news brands stand.”

For now, it seems, our long national Troncmare is over. So long, and thanks for all the Tronc. 

This is sure to exacerbate fears that Facebook will further exploit Instagram now that its founders have resigned. Instagram has been spotted prototyping a new privacy setting that would allow it to share your location history with Facebook. That means your exact GPS coordinates collected by Instagram, even when you’re not using the app, would help Facebook to target you with ads and recommend you relevant content. Worryingly, the Location History sharing setting was defaulted to On in the prototype. The geo-tagged data would appear to users in their Facebook Profile’s Activity Log, which include creepy daily maps of the places you been.

This commingling of data could upset users who want to limit Facebook’s surveillance of their lives. With Facebook installing its former VP of News Feed and close friend of Mark Zuckerberg, Adam Mosseri, as the head of Instagram, some critics have worried that Facebook would attempt to squeeze more value out of Instagram. Tat includes driving referral traffic to the main app via spammy notifications, inserting additional ads, or pulling in more data. Facebook was sued for breaking its promise to European regulators that it would not commingle WhatsApp and Facebook data, leading to an $122 million fine.

 

A Facebook spokesperson tells TechCrunch that “To confirm, we haven’t introduced updates to our location settings. As you know, we often work on ideas that may evolve over time or ultimately not be tested or released. Instagram does not currently store Location History; we’ll keep people updated with any changes to our location settings in the future.” That effectively confirms Location History sharing is something Instagram has prototyped, and that it’s considering launching but hasn’t yet.

The screenshots come courtesy of mobile researcher and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong. Her prior finds like prototypes of Instagram Video Calling and Music Stickers have drawn “no comments” from Instagram but then were officially launched in the following months. That lends credence to the idea that Instagram is serious about Location History.

Located in the Privacy and Security settings, the Location History option “Allows Facebook Products, including Instagram and Messenger, to build and use a history of precise locations received through Location Services on your device.”

A ‘Learn More’ button provides additional info (emphasis mine):

“Location History is a setting that allows Facebook to build a history of precise locations received through Location Services on your device. When Location History is on, Facebook will periodically add your current precise location to your Location History even if you leave the app. You can turn off Location History at any time in your Location Settings on the app. When Location History is turned off, Facebook will stop adding new information to your Location History which you can view in your Location Settings. Facebook may still receive your most recent precise location so that you can, for example, post content that’s tagged with your location. Location History helps you explore what’s around you, get more relevant ads, and helps improve Facebook. Location History must be turned on for some location feature to work on Facebook, including Find Wi-Fi and Nearby Friends.”

As part of a 2011 settlement with the FTC over privacy violations, Facebook agreed that “Material retroactive changes to the audience that can view the information users have previously shared on Facebook” must now be opt-in. But since Location History is never visible to other users and only deals with data Facebook sees, it’s exempt from that agreement and could be quietly added. Most users might never dig deep enough into their privacy settings to turn the opt-out feature off.

Delivering the exact history of where Instagram users went could assist Facebook with targeting them with local ads across its family of apps. If users are found to visit certain businesses, countries, neighborhoods, or schools, Facebook could use that data to infer which products they might want to buy and promote them. It could even show ads for restaurants or shops close to where users spend their days. Just yesterday, we reported that Facebook was testing a redesign of its Nearby Friends feature that replaces the list view of friends’ locations with a map. Pulling in Location History from Instagram could help keep that map up to date.

Sources tell TechCrunch that Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left the company following increasing tensions with Zuckerberg about dwindling autonomy of their app within the Facebook corporation. Systrom apparently clashed with Zuckerberg over how Instagram was supposed to contribute to Facebook success, especially as younger users began abandoning the older social network for the newer visual media app. Facebook is under pressure to keep up revenue growth despite it running out of News Feed ad inventory and users switching to Stories that advertisers are still acclimating to. Facebook is in heated competition with Google for last-mile local advertising and will take any advantage it can get.

Instagram has served as a life raft for Facebook’s brand this year amidst an onslaught of scandals including fake news, election interference, social media addiction, and most recently, a security breach that gave hackers the access tokens for 50 million users that could have let them take over their accounts. A survey of 1,153 US adults conducted in March 2018 found that 57 percent of them didn’t know Instagram was owned by Facebook. But if Facebook treats Instagram as a source of data and traffic it can strip mine, the negative perceptions associated with the parent could spill over onto the child.

Cities all over the world have been hit with the rise of on-demand services like Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Postmates, Caviar and so many others in recent years. Last year, there were 5.4 million on-demand workers in the country. This year, there are an estimated 6.8 million people working in the on-demand economy, according to now-former Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers analyst Mary Meeker’s state of the Internet report.

While San Francisco has found some success managing and regulating ride-hailing services, moped sharing, bike sharing and most recently, scooter sharing, it says it’s missing some critical data around the 1099 workers who deliver food, groceries and other items via tech startups. That’s why the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is looking to better understand the role of these services through a new survey.

A significant concern in the city of San Francisco is traffic caused by all of these services. Earlier this year, San Francisco ranked the fifth in the world for the worst traffic congestion. But the SFMTA says the purpose of its survey is to “understand the challenges couriers experience while performing deliveries” in the city, as well as see what effect these courier networks have on the city’s transportation network. More specifically, it’s looking to answer a few questions, like:

• How many couriers enter SF on a daily basis?
• What time of the day do couriers complete most deliveries?
• Where are the most deliveries made?

The survey asks questions about how far couriers have to travel to the delivery pickup location, how frequently they accept a new delivery, their primary mode of transportation and which service they deliver goods for. Based on one of the survey’s questions, it seems that the city is considering allowing couriers to use loading spaces for pickups and dropoffs.

“By learning about the challenges couriers experience when performing deliveries, the SFMTA will better understand the role on-demand delivery services play in San Francisco and their use of the overall transportation network,” the SFMTA wrote in a blog post. “The insights gained from this survey may also help to inform the city’s future transportation planning decisions.”

I’ve said it right here on these very pages: If hardware is hard, robotics are next to impossible. That truism is not better exemplified by this week’s closure of Rethink Robotics. A well-respected name in automation, the Boston-based company produced a pair of robotics that have become mainstays in research facilities and warehouse floors alike.

In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Rethink spells out its own demise in straightforward language. “Rethink Robotics closed its doors,” it reads. “We were early to market with a very innovative product that was ahead of its time, and unfortunately, we did not achieve the commercial success we had expected. A planned acquisition of the company fell through at the last moment. All of Rethink Robotics’ employees are being actively recruited for roles in other robotics firms.”

Rumors of the Rodney Brooks-led startup had been floating around the robotics industry for some time now, but that doesn’t make the closure any less impactful. In the company’s decade-long existence, it produced Baxter and Sawyer, two of the most iconic robots in the collaborative category.

“Rodney Brooks and Rethink Robotics are important pioneers in the collaborative robot sector,” Association for Advancing Automation/Robotic Industries Association President Jeff Burnstein said in a statement offered to TechCrunch. “Like start-ups in all sectors, not everything goes smoothly. Sometimes early products aren’t exactly as good as you would like, sometimes new ideas don’t receive immediate market acceptance, and sometimes other market players gain traction sooner. Some or all of these factors may have impacted Rethink.”

Given the difficulty of maintaining in the category, perhaps none of this ought to be a surprise. During its existence the 100-person team raised nearly $150 million by Crunchbase’s count, but that ultimately wasn’t enough for it to continue down its path. If this was 2012, perhaps Amazon might have eyed the company while building its own robotics wing atop Kiva systems.

Two years later, the company might have been a good fit for Andy Rubin’s nascent Google Robotics, which had its eyes firmly set on factory automation. Even now, SoftBank’s deep pockets could have gone a long ways toward keeping it afloat — after all, the financial giant was more than happy to take Boston Dynamics off Google’s hands, adding it to the portfolio that already included Pepper manufacturer, Aldebaran Robotics.

Ultimately, however, it sounds like the company’s demise was a confluence of factors. Certainly there appears to be some parallels that can be drawn to the 2014 closure of Bay Area-based Willow Garage, whose PR2 was previously a familiar sight in university robotics labs all over the world.

Certainly there’s hope to be found in Willow Garage’s legacy, from spin-offs like Redwood Robotics to employee led companies like Fetch, to the continued existence of the ROS, the Robot Operating System.

On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence called for Google to end its development of a search engine custom built to accommodate China’s disposition for censorship.

Pence gave the speech at a conservative think tank in D.C., dipping into a range of anti-Beijing sentiments, from intellectual property concerns to tariffs and the trade war. Pence didn’t mince words, calling on Google to abandon its plans for a China-friendly mobile version of its otherwise ubiquitous search engine.

Pence accused any company with plans to work around Chinese internet restrictions of “abetting Beijing’s oppression” and didn’t hesitate to call the search giant out by name:

More business leaders are thinking beyond the next quarter, and thinking twice before diving into the Chinese market if it means turning over their intellectual property or abetting Beijing’s oppression. But more must follow suit. For example, Google should immediately end development of the “Dragonfly” app that will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers…

More journalists are reporting the truth without fear or favor, and digging deep to find where China is interfering in our society, and why – and we hope that more American, and global, news organizations will join in this effort.

More scholars are speaking out forcefully and defending academic freedom, and more universities and think tanks are mustering the courage to turn away Beijing’s easy money, recognizing that every dollar comes with a corresponding demand. We’re confident that more will join their ranks.

And across the nation, the American people are growing in vigilance, with a newfound appreciation for our administration’s actions to re-set America’s economic and strategic relationship with China, to finally put America First.

Pence’s full remarks are available on the Hudson Institute’s website.

Google’s covert project, known as Dragonfly, is reportedly a version of the search engine that blocks forbidden sites like Facebook and Twitter, censors search terms like the Tiananmen Square massacre and cuts out prominent Western news sources like the BBC and The New York Times. The project, first reported by the Intercept, sparked internal turmoil at the company and a letter of protest from employees who felt too in the dark to make “ethically-informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment.”

Google drama aside, Pence’s tough talk on China might be politically expedient bluster, but it’s not without irony: The Trump administration has repeatedly expressed its outright contempt for a free press, a hallmark of an aggressively restrictive government like China. Pence’s derision of China’s “unparalleled surveillance state” is also fairly rich, given domestic policy on warrantless surveillance.

The vice president also took the opportunity to refresh controversial claims that China is “meddling” in the U.S. midterm elections, echoing language often used to describe Russia’s substantiated election interference efforts. President Trump suggested as much last week, claiming that China “has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election, coming up in November, against my administration.” Yesterday, Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen declined to endorse the president’s unsubstantiated claims, noting that China pursues a “holistic approach” to cultivating a positive image in the U.S.