Year: 2018

India’s B2B supply chain is slowly shifting into the digital era. Following a $23 million investment for Moglix, which helps bring business and manufacturing procurement online, LetsTransport, a startup that brings increased efficiency to logistics and business transportation, has raised $13.5 million for growth.

Founded in 2015 by IIT Kharagpur graduates Pushkar Singh, Sudarshan Ravi and Ankit Parasher, Bangalore-based LetsTransport has surface level comparisons with Uber and other on-demand services since it pairs companies with trucks to carry out their last mile distribution.

But that is really a cosmetic comparison. LetsTransport offers a range of product modules to manage fleets, including intelligent routing. Then, on the business side, its unit economic are far superior to Uber and co since the business customers it caters are not cost-motivated and will happily pay for a consistent service with guarantees.

For the truck operations, the service is designed to increase their average utility and get more jobs completed in quicker times. Singh, the company’s CEO, told TechCrunch in an interview that operating partners are typically seeing 40 percent efficiency improvements with a 30 percent reduction in distribution cost for the brands and retailers on the other side. Routing, he explained, is currently “done primitively by the driver” which is where LetsTransport tries to add value.

The service currently operates in seven cities in India and it has been used by big name customers like Coca-Cola, Amazon, Metro Cash & Carry and Big Bazaar, while some 20,000 truckers have carried out jobs on its platform to date. To help sweeten its appeal, the company goes beyond providing work to help trucking operators with insurance, after sale care and other maintenance services.

This Series B funding round was led by Bertelsmann India Investments with participation from China’s Fosun International and others. The company’s other investors including Japan duo GMO Venture Partners and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, as well as Rebright Partners and NB Ventures.

Singh told TechCrunch that the capital will go towards expanding to twenty new cities in tier-two India as well as looking into global opportunities.

“We’re trying to consolidate our position in India and [are] looking at products that can be offered internationally,” he said, explaining that markets in Southeast Asia and Africa could be in the pipeline. “The needs of an emerging market are quite similar… it needs a little localization but we have a great product.”

In particular, he added, LetsTransport has received expansion requests from its existing client base which would help when it comes to new launches. For now, though, the plan is to test specific modules in new markets before bringing other, more significant operational aspects of the business overseas.

Those modules could include the company’s smart routing system, which companies can deploy for their own transportation solutions. That’s a good way to reach new customers and develop a moat around those who use its marketplace business, too.

Pointing out that 14 percent of India’s GDP is spent on logistics — versus 7.5 percent in the U.S. — Singh is bullish that there is plenty of scope to digitize the system and make significant improvements to efficiencies.

“It’s a very large industry that’s ripe for disruption,” he said. “There are inefficiencies that should dead by now.”

WeChat, the Chinese messaging giant with over 1 billion monthly active users around the world, just added a Snap-like ephemeral video feature as part of its biggest overhaul since 2014.

The revamp comes as Tencent, which owns stakes in Snap, sees increasing rivalry from up-and-comers like video app TikTok and news app Jinri Toutiao. WeChat has over the years morphed beyond a straight-up messenger to include many utility purposes. With more than 1 million lightweight apps up and running, users can accomplish a long list of tasks ranging from shopping to ride-hailing without ever having to leave WeChat.

Meanwhile, some have expressed frustration over WeChat’s core as a social app. Moments, a feature akin to Facebook News Feed, was once a haven for close friends to share articles, photos and videos. But newsfeed content became blander over time as people’s contact list grows to include their bosses and their local fruit seller who needs to be added as a friend to process WeChat payments.

WeChat founder Allen Zhang is known for his obsession with user experience and has been cautious with tweaks, so a major redesign to the super app is effectively a guidebook for where WeChat is headed for the next few years.

The new off-the-cuff video feature, aptly named “Time Capsule,” is one of WeChat’s more noticeable updates. In the past, users shared videos to three main destinations: A friend, a group chat or Moments. This route remains unchanged but with Time Capsule, users can also upload videos of up to 15 seconds that disappear after 24 hours, similar to how Snap Stories and its slew of clones including Instagram Stories work. Meanwhile, Snap has also drawn inspiration from Chinese apps in a recent redesign.

A blue ring will appear near the profile of those who have recorded an instant story. Screenshot by TechCrunch

Different from Instagram, which recently started allowing users to share Stories to close friends, WeChat doesn’t let users share Time Capsule videos to friends, yet. Instead of lining up all the instant videos at the top of the app as Instagram does, WeChat is asking users to find them in less conspicuous ways: On Moments, in a group chat or in one’s starred friend list, a blue ring will appear near the profile of those who have recorded instant stories.

These secret entry points mean users are prompted to watch videos of those they know well as they rarely click on the profile of, say, a fruit vendor.

Time Capsule is also a step up from WeChat’s old video sharing tool with additional features such as locations and music, functions that are ubiquitous in TikTok and other short-form video apps. Users can also react to Time Capsule videos by blowing virtual “bubbles”, whereas the old video format doesn’t allow such interaction.

Time Capsule is a step up from WeChat’s old video sharing tool with additional features such as locations and music. Screenshot by TechCrunch

While Time Capsule is not necessarily a direct challenger to TikTok — a product of the world’s most valuable startup ByteDance — it enriches the video experience for users who want to give close friends a window into their life. TikTok, by comparison, delivers content by relying on artificial intelligence to read users’ past habits rather than studying their social graphs.

That said, WeChat has shown signs to catch up with TikTok by rolling out a dozen of video apps this year. While Tencent blocks TikTok videos from being shared to WeChat, its own proprietary video app Weishi gets preferential treatment. When users choose to record a video on WeChat, there’s an option to record it via Weishi. But Tencent’s short video fleet has a long way to go before they reach TikTok’s global dominance of 500 million monthly active users.

Another WeChat update also appears as a response to a popular ByteDance app. While WeChat users could show appreciation for an article by clicking on a ‘like’ button, there was no effective way in the past to know what their friends enjoyed. The revamped WeChat now lets people see all the articles their friends have liked under one single stream called “Wow”.

That’s a feature that ByteDance’s Jinri Toutiao news app cannot rival as Wow is built on billions of users who know each other, unlike Jinri Toutiao that relies on AI personalization like its sibling TikTok. WeChat is already colossal and can never please every user, but its new move shows that it’s paying close attention to whoever that may steal its users’ eyeball time away.

Less than a week after mystery drones grounded flights at the U.K’s second largest airport, wreaking havoc on as many as 140,000 people’s travel plans for the Christmas period, police have admitted that there may in fact not have been any drones at all.

Gatwick airport reopened on Friday after a one-day shutdown but it appears that investigators are no closer to knowing what actually took place.

The Guardian reports that police released and exonerated a couple who had been detained as suspects, while a senior police spokesperson said that there is “always a possibility that there may not have been any genuine drone activity in the first place.”

Indeed, the police are reliant on eyewitness accounts — 67 of them, to be precise — to piece together what happened. The BBC reported last week that two drones flying “over the perimeter fence and into where the runway operates from” were spotted by bystanders late Wednesday, with a third reportedly seen on Thursday morning. Runways were shut for around six hours between Wednesday evenings and the early hours of Thursday, before a fuller suspension came into effect after the alleged sighting of the third drone.

Police released suspects Elaine Kirk and Paul Gait on Sunday evening after concluding that they were not responsible for the incident. Their arrest had prompted British newspapers and commentators to berate the pair even before they were charged. The Mail on Sunday shamed them for “ruining Christmas” while TV presenter and former tabloid journalist Piers Morgan was forced to apologize for an earlier tweet that labeled Kirk and Gait as “clowns.”

Despite going down the wrong avenue with the arrest, investigators do have more to work with after they recovered a fallen and damaged drone from the north side of the airport. It is being tested for clues on who piloted it, according to The Guardian .

As we explained last week, the U.K. has specific laws around flying drones near an airport although it remains unclear exactly what did take place.

The U.K. made amendments to existing legislation this year to make illegal flying a drone within 1km of an airport after a planned drone bill got delayed.

The safety focused tweak to the law five months ago also restricted drone flight height to 400 ft. A registration scheme for drone owners is also set to be introduced next year.

Under current U.K. law, a drone operator who is charged with recklessly or negligently acting in a manner likely to endanger an aircraft or a person in an aircraft can face a penalty of up to five years in prison or an unlimited fine, or both.

Although, in the Gatwick incident case, it’s not clear whether simply flying a drone near a runway would constitute an attempt to endanger an aircraft under the law. Even though the incident has clearly caused major disruption to travelers as the safety-conscious airport takes no chances.

John Chambers, Chairman Emeritus of Cisco (now founder of JC2 Ventures), knows a thing or two about tech acquisitions: he bet his career on a first one in ’93, and went on to complete 180 M&As during his 20 years tenure.

His latest message for large corporations is an alarm bell. In a fireside chat at the HAX M&A Masterclass that followed the publication of his book: Connecting the Dots: Lessons for Leadership in a Startup World, Chambers issued a clear warning: learn about tech M&As or the future might happen without you.

Here are the key lessons to take away (video and transcript are here):

1. M&As Are A Vaccine Against Irrelevance

When stepping down from Cisco in 2015, John Chambers said that 40% of companies will be dead in 10 years. And 10 years might now be conservative.

It took about 20 years to Amazon to challenge WalMart, barely 10 to Airbnb with hotels and to Uber with taxis and car ownership. The next wave might just take 4–5 years. Since no company can invent everything — even Apple or Google buy startups routinely — you’ll need to either buy or partner seriously with startups (more on that later).

2. Tech Is Entering Every Sector

‘Every company you’ll acquire over this next decade will probably be indirectly or directly a tech company’, said Chambers.

Non-tech companies need to get up to speed on how to work with tech, and startups. Many of the corp dev executives who attended our last event were not from tech.

I met recently power tool companies from US and Europe . They had just set up CVC arms. They were looking into acquisitions, saying ‘we don’t know software’. They’d better tackle that M&A learning curve quickly!

3. Your Customers Can Tell You What To Buy

There was only one Steve Jobs, who just knew what to build. For others, your customers will might you what to buy. Listen to them and pay special attention to market transitions to buy next generation products.

Like Chambers experienced early in his career at IBM with mainframes, and at Wang Laboratories with mini-computers, missing a critical shift might be the end of you! The corollary for startups is: do something cool for key customers of a corporate, and you’ll get on their radar in no time!

4. Pick The Right Match

“When you buy a company, everything is negotiable except strategy and culture”, said Chambers.

Oracle has mastered takeovers but for most others, acquisitions can fail due to a poor alignment of vision for the industry and each company’s role, cultural mismatch, geographic distance or lack of integration of systems (once you scale your number of acquisitions, having different divisions or subsidiaries use different software will make your CFO insane).

There is generally more than one possible M&A target, and Cisco often walked away from potential buys for the above reasons. It also developed efficient processes: ‘I used to view process at bureaucracy, but process done right can give you speed that others cannot match’, Chambers added.

5. Build Your Playbook(s)

Back in the 90’s tech M&As were often failures. Chambers and his team researched why and built Cisco’s playbook, then tweaked it for 2 decades. According to Chambers, most of it can apply to other companies. So save yourself some time and costly attempts by getting his book ;)

Interestingly, they approached the leadership transition in the same way: they studied what made them work or fail, and made it as smooth as could be when John stepped down in 2015.

6. Do Your Homework

One common trait of experienced corp dev teams is the amount of work they put in before they approach a startup.

Not only are they aware of many through their own research, their customers, business units, CVC arms or the media, but also via extensive networks, including with VC firms.

Like investors, you’re only as good as your deal flow. Corp devs then model the value a startup might bring, and pay the right price for it (more on this below).

7. Pay For What The Value Is To You

A hot startup can command a high price, but is it worth it for you?

If it offers no complementarity or synergies, it might in fact be of negative value. On the opposite, the current revenue of a startup might be irrelevant if you can blow their product through your channels and make it 10x or 100x.

The company Chambers bought in ’93 for close to US$100million only had US$10 million in revenue. It paid off in droves.

8. Keep The Talent

When you buy a tech company, you must try and keep the talent — especially founders, emotional leaders and engineers.

Understand ‘Leaders Currency’: Track record, Trust and Relationships. So involve your HR team to answer key questions and help define attractive career paths within your organization for the acquired teams. If you fail to do so, people will leave or underperform, and you will not get the new products you hope for.

At Cisco, about 1/3 of the top leadership came from internal promotions, 1/3 from recruiting and 1/3 from acquisitions. At peak it likely had about 100 former CEOs on payroll!

9. Expect Some Failures

Despite its stellar track record, about 1/3 of Cisco’s were failures. Reasons may vary, and some might be caused by market changes. When it decided to shut down Flip Video within 2 years after its $590 million acquisition: Apple had just added cloud video capabilities, it was game over.

Expect them, learn from them, and be ready to cut losses and, ideally, redeploy people.

10. In The Future, M&As Might Not Be Enough

As the pace of innovation accelerates, and top talent joins startups rather than large companies, startups might become threats faster than you can buy them.

Chambers suggested that the next-level skill to develop is the ability to form strategic partnerships very early on with startups, such as this recent JV between Boeing and the much smaller 5-year-old A.I. startup SparkCognitionfor urban aerial mobility.

Thanks to speakers, participants and supporters of this Masterclass series, in particular: Natasha Ligai (Logitech), Todd Neville (IBM), Christina LaMontagne(Johnson & Johnson), Anne Samak de la Cerda (former CFO, Withings), Dan Fairfax, (former CFO, Brocade), Amanda Zamurs and Larry Chu (Goodwin), Kate Whitcomb and Ethan Haigh (HAX).

The term “social network” has become a meaningless association of words. Pair those two words and it becomes a tech category, the equivalent of a single term to define a group of products.

But are social networks even social anymore? If you have a feeling of tech fatigue when you open the Facebook app, you’re not alone. Watching distant cousins fight about politics in a comment thread is no longer fun.

Chances are you have dozens, hundreds or maybe thousands of friends and followers across multiple platforms. But those crowded places have never felt so empty.

It doesn’t mean that you should move to the woods and talk with animals. And Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn won’t collapse overnight. They have intrinsic value with other features — social graphs, digital CVs, organizing events…

But the concept of wide networks of social ties with an element of broadcasting is dead.

From interest-based communities to your lousy neighbor

If you’ve been active on the web for long enough, you may have fond memories of internet forums. Maybe you were a fan of video games, Harry Potter or painting.

Fragmentation was key. You could be active on multiple forums and you didn’t have to mention your other passions. Over time, you’d see the same names come up again and again on your favorite forum. You’d create your own running jokes, discover things together, laugh, cry and feel something.

When I was a teenager, I was active on multiple forums. I remember posting thousands of messages a year and getting to know new people. It felt like hanging out with a welcoming group of friends because you shared the same passions.

It wasn’t just fake internet relationships. I met “IRL” with fellow internet friends quite a few times. One day, I remember browsing the list of threads and learning about someone’s passing. Their significant other posted a short message because the forum meant a lot to this person.

Most of the time, I didn’t know the identities of the persons talking with me. We were all using nicknames and put tidbits of information in bios — “Stuttgart, Germany” or “train ticket inspector.”

And then, Facebook happened. At first, it was also all about interest-based communities — attending the same college is a shared interest, after all. Then, they opened it up to everyone to scale beyond universities.

When you look at your list of friends, they are your Facebook friends not because you share a hobby, but because you’ve know them for a while.

Facebook constantly pushes you to add more friends with the infamous “People you may know” feature. Knowing someone is one thing, but having things to talk about is another.

So here we are, with your lousy neighbor sharing a sexist joke in your Facebook feed.

Facebook’s social graph is broken by design. Putting names and faces on people made friend requests emotionally charged. You can’t say no to your high school best friend, even if you haven’t seen her in five years.

It used to be okay to leave friends behind. It used to be okay to forget about people. But the fact that it’s possible to stay in touch with social networks have made those things socially unacceptable.

Too big to succeed

One of the key pillars of social networks is the broadcasting feature. You can write a message, share a photo, make a story and broadcast them to your friends and followers.

But broadcasting isn’t scalable.

Most social networks are now publicly traded companies — they’re always chasing growth. Growth means more revenue and revenue means that users need to see more ads.

The best way to shove more ads down your throat is to make you spend more time on a service. If you watch multiple YouTube videos, you’re going to see more pre-roll ads. And there are two ways to make you spend more time on a social network — making you come back more often and making you stay longer each time you visit.

And 2018 has been the year of cheap tricks and dark pattern design. In order to make you come more often, companies now send you FOMO-driven notifications with incomplete, disproportionate information.

This isn’t just about opening an app. Social networks now want to direct you to other parts of the service. Why don’t you click on this bright orange banner to open IGTV? Look at this shiny button! Look! Look!

And then, there’s all the gamification, algorithm-driven recommendations and other Skinner box mechanisms. That tiny peak of adrenaline you get when you refresh your feed, even if it only happens once per week, is what’s going to make you come back again and again.

Don’t forget that Netflix wanted to give kids digital badges if they completed a season. The company has since realized that it was going too far. Still, U.S. adults now spend nearly six hours per day consuming digital media — and phones represent more than half of that usage.

Given that social networks need to give you something new every time, they want you to follow as many people as possible, subscribe to every YouTube channel you can. This way, every time you come back, there’s something new.

Algorithms recommend some content based on engagement, and guess what? The most outrageous, polarizing content always ends up at the top of the pile.

I’m not going to talk about fake news or the fact that YouTubers now all write titles in ALL CAPS to grab your attention. That’s a topic for another article. But YouTube shouldn’t be surprised that Logan Paul filmed a suicide victim in Japan to drive engagement and trick the algorithm.

In other words, as social networks become bigger, content becomes garbage.

Private communities

Centralization is always followed by decentralization. Now that we’ve reached a social network dead end, it’s time to build our own digital house.

Group messaging has been key when it comes to staying in touch with long-distance family members. But you can create your own interest-based groups and talk about things you’re passionate about with people who care about those things.

Social networks that haven’t become too big still have an opportunity to pivot. It’s time to make them more about close relationships and add useful features to talk with your best friends and close ones.

And if you have interesting things to say, do it on your own terms. Create a blog instead of signing up to Medium. This way, Medium won’t force your readers to sign up when they want to read your words.

If you spend your vacation crafting the perfect Instagram story, you should be more cynical about it. Either you want to make a career out of it and become an Instagram star, or you should consider sending photos and videos to your communities directly. Otherwise, you’re just participating in a rotten system.

If you want to comment on politics and life in general, you should consider talking about those topics with people surrounding you, not your friends on Facebook.

Put your phone back in your pocket and start a conversation. You might end up discussing for hours without even thinking about the red dots on all your app icons.

A number of critics have declared that “Roma” is the best movie of the year. Naturally, we had to weigh in on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast.

Director Alfonso Cuarón’s recent (and excellent) films were all fantasy and science fiction films (“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” “Children of Men” and “Gravity”), but with “Roma,” he returns to the realist mode of his breakthrough “Y Tu Mamá También.”

Here, Cuarón tells the story of his childhood in Mexico City — but through the eyes of Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio), based on the real maid who played a crucial role in raising Cuarón and his siblings. It’s a largely plotless film, particularly in its the first half, but it’s beautifully shot in black-and-white, capturing the rhythms and subtle power dynamics of everyday life in this family.

To discuss “Roma,” we’re joined by Brian Heater, who said he was hard-pressed to think of a better movie released this year. We had a few reservations — about the film’s pace, about some of the plotting and about whether Cleo is depicted as a fully three-dimensional person — but none of us denied that Cuarón has staged scenes here that are suspenseful as anything in “Gravity.” And as the credits rolled, at least one of your hosts was in tears.

Also this week: Brian used the recording to test out the Rodecaster Pro, which is why we’re accompanied by random sound effects. There wasn’t much streaming news to recap, but we did discuss Netflix’s tease for a long, possibly interactive episode of “Black Mirror,” as well as Anthony’s review of the new “Aquaman” movie.”

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

There’s been plenty of fanfare surrounding Uber and Lyft’s initial public offerings — slated for early 2019 — since the two companies filed confidential IPO paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in early December. On top of that, public and private investors have had plenty to say about Slack and Pinterest’s rumored 2019 IPOs but those aren’t the only “unicorn” exits we should expect to witness in the year ahead.

Using its proprietary company rating algorithm, data provider CB Insights ranked five billion dollar companies most likely to perform IPOs next year in its latest tech IPO report. The algorithm analyzes non-traditional public signals, including hiring activity, web traffic and mobile app data to make its predictions. These are the startups that topped their list.

Peloton

Peloton Co-Founder and CEO John Foley speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 on September 6, 2018 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch).

Peloton, dubbed the “Netflix of fitness,” has raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital funding in the six years since it was founded by John Foley, most recently raising $550 million at a $4 billion valuation. The manufacturer of tech-enabled exercise equipment is more than doubling in size every year and is “weirdly profitable,” an unusual characteristic for a venture-backed business of its age. Headquartered in New York, Peloton doesn’t have any public IPO plans, though Foley recently told The Wall Street Journal that 2019 “makes a lot of sense” for its stock market debut.

Select investors: L Catterton, True Ventures, Tiger Global

Cloudflare

Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince appears on stage at the 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt Europe/London. (Photo by Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Cybersecurity unicorn Cloudflare is likely to transition to the public markets in the first half of 2019 in what is poised to be a strong year for IPOs in the security industry. The web performance and security platform is said to be preparing for an IPO at a potential valuation of more than $3.5 billion after last raising capital in 2015 at a $1.8 billion valuation. Since it was founded in 2009, the San Francisco-based company has raised just north of $250 million in VC funding. CrowdStrike, another security unicorn, is also on track to go public next year and it wouldn’t be surprising to see Illumio and Lookout make the jump to the public markets as well.

Select investors: Pelion Venture Partners, NEA, Venrock

Zoom

San Jose-based Zoom Video Communications has reportedly tapped Morgan Stanley to lead its upcoming IPO.

Zoom, a provider of video conferencing services, online meeting and group messaging tools that’s raised $160 million in VC cash to date, is eyeing a multi-billion IPO in 2019 and has reportedly hired Morgan Stanley to lead the offering. Founded in 2011, the company most recently brought in a $100 million Series D financing, entirely funded by Sequoia, at a $1 billion valuation in early 2017. Based in San Jose, Zoom is hoping to garner a valuation significantly larger than $1 billion when it IPOs, according to Reuters.

Select investors: Sequoia, Emergence Capital Partners, Horizons Ventures

Rubrik

Data management company Rubrik co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha.

Data management company Rubrik has quietly made moves indicative of an impending IPO. The startup, which provides data backup and recovery services for businesses across cloud and on-premises environments, hired former Atlassian chief financial officer Murray Demo as its CFO earlier this year, as well as its first chief legal officer, Peter McGoff. Palo Alto-based Rubrik was valued at over of $1 billion with a $180 million funding round in 2017. The company has raised nearly $300 million to date.

Select investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock, Khosla Ventures

Medallia

Medallia, a customer experience management platform that’s nearly two decades old, may finally become a public company in 2019. The San Mateo-based company, which has been rumored to be planning an IPO for several years, hired a new CEO this year and reported $250 million in GAAP revenue for the year ending Jan. 31, 2018, according to Forbes. Medallia hasn’t raised capital since 2015, when it secured a $150 million funding deal at a $1.2 billion valuation. It has raised a total of just over $250 million.

Select investor: Sequoia

HQ’s expansion beyond trivia emerges from beta tonight, but the question is whether it’s different and accessible enough to revive the startup’s growth. HQ Words opens to everyone with today’s 6:30pm pacific broadcast within the HQ Trivia app after several weeks of closed beta testing of the Wheel Of Fortune-style game. The launch will be the first big move of Rus Yusupov now that’s been officially renamed CEO a week after the tragic death of fellow co-founder and former CEO Colin Kroll, HQ confirms to TechCrunch.

“Intermedia Labs introduced the world to a category defining product, HQ Trivia. Once again, with HQ Words, Intermedia Labs is poised to captivate the world with a revolutionary experience that will bring people together in new ways around live mobile video” Yusupov tells us. “HQ Words is the most interactive experience we’ve ever made.”

Kroll’s passing comes at a tough time for HQ. Its daily player count has declined since it became a phenomenon a year ago. The novelty has begun to wear off, and with so many experienced trivia whizzes, cash jackpots are often split between enough people that winners only get a few bucks. Interrupting your days or nights to play at a particular time can be inconvenient compared to the legions of always-available other games. Yusupov, who was HQ’s CEO until Kroll took over in September, will have to figure out what will attract casual crosswords players and those who flocked to Zynga’s Words With Friends — the kind of disruptive thinking Kroll excelled at.

“Colin and I shared many incredible life moments over the last 7 years. We embarked on an incredible journey co-founding two breakthrough companies together – and the lessons we learned at Vine and HQ will continue to have a big impact on me. Like many relationships, we’ve also had our challenges – but it was during these challenging times that Colin’s kind soul and big heart would truly shine” Yusupov wrote in a statement about his co-founder that was originally published by Digiday in a touching memorial post. Between building Vine and HQ together, the pair have reimagined mobile entertainment, giving millions a chance to show off their wits and creativity. “He had this incredible ability to make everyone feel special. He listened well. He thought deeply. But above all, he cared about people more than work. The driving force behind his innovations was the positive impact they would have on people and world. Colin’s innovations and inventions have changed many people’s lives for the better and will continue to impact the world for years to come.”

HQ Trivia’s co-founder and former CEO Colin Kroll passed away earlier this month

How To Play HQ Words

In HQ Words, players compete live to solve word puzzles by correctly choosing what letters are hidden. You can find the game inside the existing HQ Trivia iOS and Android apps. Host Anna Roisman pluckily provides a clue and then dispenses hints as the 25-second timer for each puzzle counts down. If the clue is “gemstone” and you’re shown “_ _ _ m _ _ _”, you’ll have to tap D, I, A, O, and N in any order. Choose three wrong letters or fail to fill out the words and you lose. You’ll spin a wheel before the game starts to get one letter that’s automatically revealed each round.

Make it through ten rounds and you and other winners get a cut of the cash prize, with the three who solved the puzzles fastest scoring a bigger chunk of the jackpot. The startup earns money through selling you extra lives inside Words, though it will probably feature sponsored games and product placement like Trivia does to pull in marketing dollars. Words will go live daily at 6:30pm pacific after Trivia’s 6:00 game, so you can turn it into HQ hour with family and friends.

HQ Words is much more frenetic than Trivia. Rather than picking a single answer, you have to rapidly tap letters through a combination of educated and uneducated guesses. That means it really does feel more interactive since you’re not sitting for minutes with just a sole answer tap to keep you awake. And because it doesn’t require deep and broad trivia knowledge, Words could appeal to a wider audience. The spinner also adds an element of pure luck, as a weaker player who gets to auto-reveal a vowel might fare better than a wiser player who gets stuck with a “Z” like I always seem to.

Fill In The Blank

The concern is that at its core, Words is still quite similar to Trivia. They’re both real-time, elimination round-based knowledge games played against everyone for money. Both at times feel like they use cheap tricks to eliminate you. A recent Words puzzle asked you to name a noisy instrument, but the answer wasn’t “kazoo” but “buzzing kazoo” — something I’m not sure anyone has ever formally called it. Given the faster pace of interaction, even tiny glitches or moments of lag can be enough to make you lose a round. An HQ Words beta game earlier this week failed to show some users the keyboard, causing mass elimination. The pressure to get HQ’s engineering working flawlessly has never been higher.

The phrasing of some HQ Words answers seems like a stretch

HQ originally agreed to let TechCrunch interview Kroll about what makes Words different enough to change the startup’s momentum. Yusupov was supposed to fill in after Kroll was sadly found dead last Friday of an apparent drug overdose. He later declined to talk or provide written responses. That’s understandable during this time of mourning and transition. But HQ will still need to build an answer into its app. Meanwhile, Chinese clones and US competitors have begun co-opting the live video quiz idea. Facebook has even built a game show platform for content makers to create their own.

HQ could benefit from a better onboarding experience that lets people play a sample game solo to get them hooked and tide them over until the next scheduled broadcast. Mini-games or ways to play along after you’re eliminated could boost total view time and the value of brand sponsorships. A “quiet mode” that silences the between-round chatter and distills HQ to just the questions and puzzles might make it easier to play while multi-tasking. Head-to-head versions of Trivia and Words might help HQ feel more intimate, and there’s an opportunity to integrate peer-to-peer gambling like ProveIt trivia.  And branching out beyond knowledge games into more social or arcade-style titles would counter the idea that HQ is just for brainiacs.

Around the height of HQ’s popularity it raised a $15 million funding round at a $100 million valuation. That seems justified given HQ will reportedly earn around $10 million in revenue this year. Gamers are fickle, though, and today’s Fortnite can wind up tomorrow’s Pokemon Go — a flash in the pan that fizzles out. Words is a great bridge to a world outside of Trivia, but HQ must evolve not just iterate.

SpaceX successfully launched the United States Air Force’s first Global Positioning System  (GPS) III satellite, nicknamed Vespucci, from Cape Canaveral, Florida this morning in what was the aerospace company’s first U.S. national security mission to date.

The company had planned to complete the launch, its last of the year, earlier this week but heavy winds imposed delays.

SpaceX won the National Security Space (NSS) contract with the Air Force in 2016 and intends to launch an additional four GPS III missions on Falcon 9, a two-stage rocket manufactured by the company.

The GPS is owned by the U.S. military and operated by the Air Force. Built during the Cold War, it’s been used for commercial purposes since the mid-2000s. The new GPS satellites, built by Lockheed Martin, will provide three-times better accuracy than the current system of GPS and will be eight times better at anti-jamming, according to SpaceX.

“This newest generation of GPS satellites is designed and built to deliver positioning, navigation, and timing information,” the company wrote. “GPS is used by over four billion users and supports critical missions worldwide.”

SpaceX has completed 21 launches in 2018, up from 18 last year, in what’s been a banner year for the company. Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, it’s also said to be raising $500 million at a valuation of $30.5 billion to help fund its Starlink internet service project, which will see the company launching 11,000 satellites to improve internet connectivity around the globe. The new round of capital would bring its total raised to date to more than $2.5 billion.

You can watch the live stream of today’s rocket launch here.

This was was undoubtedly the year of the electric scooter. Between massive fundraising rounds, lofty valuations and both Uber and Lyft’s entrance into the space, it’s clear these scooters are here for the long haul.

But just because investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into these companies in the past year, the electric scooter business is not without its difficulties. In fact, it’s an immensely difficult business with tough unit economics, regulatory challenges on a city-by-city basis, and a ridiculous number of competitors vying for the micro-mobility services market share.

It’s only a matter of time before consolidation becomes the only way to survive and, already, we’ve started to see some early signs of that with Uber’s partnership with Lime, as well as Ford’s acquisition of Spin. Let’s take a look at how the industry got to where it is today.

Bird, currently valued north of $2 billion, was the first electric scooter company to launch, having first deployed in September 2017 in Santa Monica, Calif. One year later, Bird announced it hit 10 million rides across its 100-plus cities and over 2 million riders at the time.

Then came Spin, which started as a bike-share startup. In February, Spin announced its plans to get into electric scooter sharing before ultimately deciding in June that it was going all in on scooters. Fast forward to November, and Ford decided to gobble up Spin in a deal worth close to $100 million.

Next up was Lime, which also got its beginnings as a bike-share company. Also in February, Lime unveiled its take on electric scooters. Since then, Lime has deployed its scooters in over 100 cities in the U.S. and 27 international cities. Lime has also partnered with Uber to offer Lime scooters within the Uber app.

Skip, founded by Boosted Board co-founder Sanjay Dastoor, was a bit of a latecomer — albeit one that has an approach that cities seem to appreciate. Skip launched in March, and has since deployed scooters in Washington, D.C., Portland, Ore., and San Francisco — where it won one of the two coveted permits to operate in the heart of Silicon Valley. The other scooter startup permit in San Francisco went to Scoot, a company that also operates shared mopeds in the city, as well as in Barcelona.

On an international-only level, there are companies like Y Combinator-backed Grin, which raised a $45.7 million Series A round in October to operate shared, electric scooters in Latin America. Later that month, the company partnered with São Paulo-based Ride to further the company’s expansion across Latin America, which is becoming a hot spot for scooters. In September, Yellow raised a $63 million Series A round for its bike- and scooter-share company. Meanwhile, Bird and Lime are actively targeting markets in the area.

Abroad, scooters have also popped up in Tel Aviv, London, Paris and 15 other cities across countries like Spain, Switzerland, Portgual and others.

The regulatory crackdown 

Bird, Lime and Spin quickly became known for their strategies of begging for forgiveness rather than first asking for permission. Regulatory challenges for these electric scooter companies abounded in Santa Monica, San Francisco, Austin and other cities around the country.

In San Francisco, the Municipal Transportation Agency conducted a several-months-long process to determine which scooters would be allowed to operate in the city. The city’s permit process came as a result of Bird, Lime and Spin deploying their electric scooters without permission in the city in March. As part of a new city law, which went into effect June 4, scooter companies were not able to operate their services in San Francisco without a permit. Today, just Skip and Scoot are permitted to operate in the city.

Santa Monica, Austin and many other cities have also had their fair share of regulatory hurdles. Still, Lime has more than doubled the number of cities where it operates in the U.S. since June. Meanwhile, the number of cities where scooters in the U.S. has quickly increased from just 33 in August to more than 90 at the time of publication. 

Building durable scooters is hard 

Initially, many companies were not focused on building their own scooters. Instead, they slapped stickers and logos on scooters that have been around for years. Lime, Bird and Spin launched using scooters from Ninebot, a Chinese scooter company that has merged with Segway. Ninebot is backed by investors, including Sequoia Capital, Xiaomi and ShunWei.

That started to change with the entrance of Skip, which made its debut with heavy-duty scooters in March. Skip has since begun rolling out new versions of its scooters, with plans to eventually make totally custom scooters from the ground up.

Earlier this month, Skip unveiled new scooters with cameras and locks. The goal is to improve its unit economics, which are notoriously difficult in this space. Investors, who have poured millions of dollars into electric scooter startups like Bird and Lime, are now pumping the breaks on funding due to the difficulty of the business. Some scooters reportedly only last about two months, which is not enough time to recoup the cost of purchasing the scooter. Perhaps that’s why Skip reportedly received $100 million in debt earlier this month. Skip, however, declined to comment on the lifespan of its scooters and its debt financing.

In May, Lime partnered with Segway to launch its next generation of electric scooters. These Segway-powered Lime scooters are designed to be safer, longer-lasting via battery power and more durable for what the sharing economy requires, Lime CEO Toby Sun told TechCrunch earlier this year.

But this partnership hasn’t been without its issues. In October, Lime recalled some of its scooters due to battery fire concerns. The next month, Lime put $3 million toward a new safety initiative called “Respect the Ride.” Safety, in general, is a major concern. In September, someone lost their life after a scooter accident.

A Scoot scooter with the company’s new locks in San Francisco. Photo via Scoot.

Scoot, which works with Telepod to create its scooters, has also had its issues. In November, Scoot CEO revealed that during the first two weeks of Scoot’s operations of shared, electric scooters in San Francisco, more than 200 scooters were either stolen or damaged beyond repair. That’s why this month, Scoot unveiled a new locking mechanism in an attempt to prevent theft.

Superpedestrian, recognizing that this is a hard business, is putting its money on a business-to-business scooter play. Superpedestrian’s main offering is a sturdier scooter with self-diagnostic and remote management capabilities. Superpedestrian says its scooters can maintain themselves from nine to 18 months at a time, while other scooters break down more often, the company says.

Superpedestrian’s scooters are equipped to self-diagnose issues that involve components, the motherboard, motor controller, land management system, batteries and more. In total, Superpedestrian can detect about 100 different things that could be wrong with it. Superpedestrian says it already has a big player on board, though the CEO would not disclose which one. The first deployment, however, will happen in Q1 2019.

Consolidation is coming

There can only be so many electric scooters on any given city street, which is a result of increasing city regulations around these micro-mobility services. And even if cities didn’t have limits on the number of scooter operators, there are not enough major differentiators between these services to obtain significant market share. Meanwhile, investors have mostly placed their bets on the likes of Bird and Lime, and with Lyft and Uber now making their scooter plays, it’s going to be really hard for other, smaller companies to compete.

As mentioned earlier, Ford bought electric scooter company Spin, Uber has a partnership with Lime, and Uber is also reportedly looking to buy either Lime or Bird. Bird has, however, said it’s not up for sale, which leaves Lime. And if Lime sells to Uber, perhaps Lyft will go after Scoot or Skip.

I obviously cannot tell the future, but do expect to see consolidation, additional market launches, and scooter companies looking to improve their unit economics by relying more on custom-built scooters rather than off-the-shelf ones from the likes of Segway and Xiaomi.