Year: 2018

Do you thrive on looming deadlines? Do you make your best decisions at the last minute? Hey, we don’t judge. We just want to make sure you’re clear that you have only 48 hours left to score early-bird tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2018. Buy your pass before the 2 November deadline and you’ll save up to €500.

Every startupper worthy of that title knows Disrupt Berlin 2018 is the place to be if you want to showcase your ideas, products and company to top influencers in the European and international startup scene. Last year in Berlin, we hosted 2,600 attendees and 416 exhibitors from more than 50 countries.

Disrupt events drive opportunity and deliver outstanding ROI — at least that’s what our attendees tell us. Founders like Luke Heron of TestCard, who first joined us in Berlin last year where he established relationships with several investors. He emailed us recently after attending Disrupt San Francisco 2018.

“It’s great to be back at TechCrunch Disrupt again this year. We have just closed $1.7m in funding, thanks to you and your team! You guys are fantastic — the lifeblood of the startup scene.”

Caleb John, CEO of Cedar Robotics, came to Disrupt San Francisco 2018 as a TechCrunch Top Pick. From what he tells us, it’s an experience he won’t soon forget.

“Disrupt blew away my expectations. The ROI was amazing. The number of people we met, the connections we made and the amount of media exposure we received is worth its weight in gold.”

Amber Hopkins Grow, a marketing consultant with Loji, said Team Loji’s experience competing in Startup Battlefield helped them see new possibilities for Loji’s technology.

“Come to Disrupt with an open mind and listen to advice about your product and your startup. Don’t get stuck in what you think your product does, because these people know what they’re talking about. Take advantage of the access to their fresh eyes and experience. It’s invaluable.”

There’s plenty more on tap, including world-class networking in Startup Alley; a slate of speakers featuring the brightest tech luminaries, business moguls, founders and investors; Q&A Sessions; Startup Battlefield and wicked-killer after parties.

There’s no lack of opportunity at Disrupt Berlin 2018. And the ROI potential is off the hook. Buy your ticket before the 2 November deadline, save up to €500 and get your ROI party started.

If you need a safe haven on the internet, where the pipes are open and the freedoms are plentiful — you might want to move to Estonia or Iceland.

The latest “internet freedoms” rankings are out, courtesy of Freedom House’s annual report into the state of internet freedoms and personal liberties, based on rankings of 65 countries that represent the vast majority of the world’s internet users. Although the U.S. remains firmly in the top ten, it dropped a point on the year earlier after a recent rash of changes to internet regulation and a lack of in the realm of surveillance.

Last year, the U.S. was 21 in the global internet freedom ranking — the lower number, the better a country ranks. That was behind Estonia, Iceland, Canada, Germany and Australia. This year the U.S. is at 22 — thanks to the repeal of net neutrality and the renewal of U.S. spy powers.

The report also cited “disinformation and hyperpartisan content” — or fake news — as a “pressing concern.”

It was only in June, after a protracted battle, that the Federal Communications Commission finally pulled the plug on the Obama-era rules that guaranteed the free and fair flow of internet data. Net neutrality — which promises to treat every user’s traffic as equal and doesn’t prioritize certain internet users or services over others — was dead. That was despite months of delays and a scandal that embroiled the FCC’s chairman Ajit Pai for allegedly lying to lawmakers over a falsified denial-of-service attack that he used to try to stifle criticism of his repeal plans. What did happen was an onslaught of citizens demanding that the net neutrality rules. But that was eclipsed by an astroturfing campaign that even used dead people to try to swing the decision.

What also dropped the U.S. a point was the near-clean reauthorization of the government’s surveillance laws, which passed with little debate despite a call for change. It was the first time to reel in the government’s spying powers since the Edward Snowden revelations a half-decade ago — but lawmakers buckled to pressure from the intelligence community, despite recognizing a long history of abuse and overreach by U.S. spy agencies.

Freedom House called the law’s renewal “a blow to civil rights and privacy advocates,” who advocated for change since long before Edward Snowden had a face.

A single digit drop in ranking may not seem like much, compared to the last-place contenders — Iran and China, predictably ranking in worst, but many see the U.S. as a beacon of free speech and expression — a model that others aspire to replicate.

As the report found, that goes both ways. The U.S. has its part to blame for the decline in at least 17 countries where “fake news” has been co-opted by oppressive regimes to justify crackdowns on dissent and free speech. The rise of “fake news,” a term largely attributed to Donald Trump — then a candidate for president — which spread like wildfire — and across borders — as a way to reject reported information or factual current events that were derogatory to a person’s views. In other words, it was a verbal hand grenade, lobbed whenever a person heard something they didn’t like.

Now, other regimes are cracking down on internet freedoms under the guise of fighting fake news. Philippines and Kazakhstan were both named by Freedom House as using “fake news” to restrict the internet by removing content and stifling the spread of views in the name of fighting misinformation.

While many might not care much for a country you know little about, it’s a reminder that the U.S. is still seen in high regard and other nations will follow in its footsteps.

Michael Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, said that the U.S. government in particular should take “a more proactive role” in stepping up their efforts to maintain a free and open internet to prevent playing into the hands of of “less democratic governments looking to increase their control of the internet.”

A little known Chinese bike company is riding into Europe as its peer Ofo has applied the brakes to its global expansion strategy in recent months.

Youon, which gets by manufacturing public bikes for city governments across China, has formed a joint venture with UK-based bike-sharing startup Cycle.land, it says in a statement. The deal allows the Chinese firm to sit back in its headquarters in eastern China while its British partner deploys its bikes and takes care of on-the-ground operation.

Youon’s fleet of 1,000 public bikes will start appearing in London next March, making the UK the fourth country in its international expansion after Russia, India, and Malaysia.

Youon’s name may not ring a bell, but its subsidiary Hellobike is increasingly turning heads as its dockless bikes win over users in China’s smaller cities where its larger rivals Ofo and Mobike lack a presence. This is in part thanks to Hellobike’s partnership with its investor Ant Financial, Alibaba’s financial affiliate, which lets users skip Hellobike’s standalone app and access the service on Ant’s Alipay wallet, which has over 500 million MAUs.

While Hellobike’s mobile penetration recorded a 20 percent month-over-month increase (link in Chinese) in September, Mobike and Ofo barely saw any growth in the same period, according to data service provider Jiguang.

Away from home, Youon’s partnership approach is also noticeably different from that of Mobike and Ofo, which have chosen to run their own overseas operation. Teaming up with local players gives Youon insight into customers abroad, suggests market research firm Analysys.

“User behavior in Europe and North America is very different and it will be reckless for a [Chinese] firm to abruptly set up its own operations overseas,” Sun Naiyue, an analyst at Analysys, tells TechCrunch.

Having a local ally also helps Youon avoid government protectionism and regulatory meddling in the foreign market, Sun adds. London has already greenlighted the company to place bikes in the city and the company will “follow local demand and rules to deploy bikes accordingly,” Cycle.land says of its partner.

Contrasting the prospects of Youon’s latest push is the bleak outlook of its peer. The past few months have seen Ofo retreat from its overseas markets to prioritize profitability. To date, Ofo has shut down in Australia, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Israel, and scaled back operation in a host of other countries.

With more failures in the electric motorcycle industry than going concerns and a contracting American motorcycle market, now would seem to be an odd time to launch a new bike into the EV arena. But Tarform, a new startup that unveiled its first vehicle last month in Brooklyn, is undeterred.

That’s despite the fact that the company will likely face an uphill ride selling its high-end, higher priced e-motos.

The EV upstart recently pulled the cover off its first e-motorcycles—prototype Café and Scrambler models at Brooklyn’s NewLab.

The 295 and 320 pound machines bring 7 kilowatt-hour (KwH) Lithium-ION batteries, 43 horsepower, a top speed of 93 miles per hour, and 92 mile city riding ranges.

With the debut, the New York and Stockholm based startup now moves into testing phase and taking orders for its first production electric two-wheelers, expected to manufacture by late 2019.

Before getting back to the sobering EV topic of achieving scale and profitability, Tarform is committed to bringing a fresh design aesthetic to the motorcycle world.

The startup’s stated mission is “to set a new standard for two-wheeled transport by developing fully electric, zero-emission premium motorcycles, using sustainable materials and smart connectivity.”

For its prototype debut, the company did more than source parts and slap batteries into motorcycle frames.

“In order to distill the form to only the essentials, we were challenged to redesign every component,” said CEO and founder Taras Kravtchouk—an industrial design specialist, former startup head, and passionate motorcyclist.

From the swingarm to the pegs, speedo, fairing and handlebars—the company custom engineered a large portion of the Café and Scrambler prototype parts. Each also has a custom sound produced by a transducer inside the tank that matches a low pitch hum to motor revs.

A lot of the important stuff—such as the battery, suspension, and current power regulation system are sourced—but Tarform looks to shift toward more proprietary features, including a digital power delivery system with AI functions.

 “Were talking to a company in Sweden to do a custom vehicle control unit to integrate Bluetooth connectivity [and ultrasonic proximity sensors],” Kravtchouk told TechCrunch.

“You’ll be able to sync your ride to an app…and get inputs on your riding behavior…to become a better rider.”

Tarform will offer two variants of its production motorcycles. Version one will be a 9kWh, 53 horsepower, 350 pound two-wheeler with a 95 mile per hour top speed and 129 mile range.

A larger 13.5 kWh battery, 80 horsepower, 395 pound model will be good for 168 miles.

Charging time will be 3.5 hours to 80 percent and 8 hours to full power using a standard electrical outlet. A fast-charger option will get the bikes to 80 percent in less than an hour.

The starting price to pre-order one of Tarform’s first production motorcycles is $18,000.

That compares to $8K for an entry level FX from Zero—America’s highest selling e-motorcycle manufacturer—and $24K for an Eva EsseEsse9 from Energica, a high-performance Italian EV startup with a U.S. sales network.

As for market positioning, Tarform aims to attract buyers by hitting that optimum balance of performance and design, according to Kravtchouk.

On power and range, “the question is how much we compromise the design [for a bigger battery], without making the bikes look fat and ugly. We’re trying to find a compromise,” he said.

Some people may want to have “a bike that looks sweet” with a slightly shorter ride distance, versus “a bike that goes further with a big battery jammed into it,” he said.

And that pivots to the business side of the equation for Tarform as an EV startup. A core part of the company’s value proposition is to create motorcycles that recapture the imagination of young folks.

As we’ve covered here at TechCrunch, the U.S. motorcycle industry has been in the doldrums since the recession.

New U.S. sales dropped roughly 50 percent since 2008, with sharp declines in ownership by everyone under 40. Motorcycle manufacturers are now largely competing for an aging and shrinking American buying demographic.

Females are one of the only growing ownership segments. And per an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study, total motorcycles on the road actually increased from 2008 to 2017—though nearly 75 percent of registrations are for bikes over seven years old.

So some Americans are buying motorcycles—but often not new ones—and the industry is (by and large) not connecting with 20 and 30 somethings.

Tarform believes e-motos (theirs in particular) can bring at least some segment of a more tech and design savvy younger generation back to motorcycles.

Of course, they’re not the only ones, and as mentioned, there have already been several flops in the U.S. market. Electric motorcycle startups Brammoand Mission Motors already tried and failed. And per TechCrunch’s recent reporting, California based Alta Motors—that had $45 million in VC—ceased operations two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, Energica and Zero Motorcycles have revved up U.S. promotion, distribution and sales.  The two have extensive R&D facilities and roughly $90 million in VC among them.

Then there’s Harley Davidson’s full commitment to EVs. This year the company announced the debut of a production e-moto by 2019, an expanded electric line-up to follow, and the opening of a Silicon Valley research facility to support it all.

With their largely untested and higher priced product Tarform, faces a rough ride to compete with these companies in what is still a shrinking U.S. motorcycle market.

But going head to head with Harley or capturing existing market share from other e-moto startups isn’t necessarily Tarform’s strategy, according to CEO Kravtchouk.

“We’re not in the arms race. We’re not saying we’re faster than anyone else…We think our positioning is a little bit different,” he said.

“Since we started showing the design…so many people who are not motorcycle riders have come forward and said, ‘I want to ride that thing,” explained Tarform’s CEO.

“So maybe our demographic is not existing motorcycle riders, but people who wished they were motorcycle riders. That’s what industry, gas or EV, has had such a hard time capturing.”

Over the next year Tarform will look to see “how the market responds” to its first offering before raising a round.

“Before getting big funding we want to show we’re able to build this in a small garage in Brooklyn. Then the startup will “want to partner up with major manufacturers to take it to the next level,” said Kravtchouk.

With more failures in the electric motorcycle industry than going concerns and a contracting American motorcycle market, now would seem to be an odd time to launch a new bike into the EV arena. But Tarform, a new startup that unveiled its first vehicle last month in Brooklyn, is undeterred.

That’s despite the fact that the company will likely face an uphill ride selling its high-end, higher priced e-motos.

The EV upstart recently pulled the cover off its first e-motorcycles—prototype Café and Scrambler models at Brooklyn’s NewLab.

The 295 and 320 pound machines bring 7 kilowatt-hour (KwH) Lithium-ION batteries, 43 horsepower, a top speed of 93 miles per hour, and 92 mile city riding ranges.

With the debut, the New York and Stockholm based startup now moves into testing phase and taking orders for its first production electric two-wheelers, expected to manufacture by late 2019.

Before getting back to the sobering EV topic of achieving scale and profitability, Tarform is committed to bringing a fresh design aesthetic to the motorcycle world.

The startup’s stated mission is “to set a new standard for two-wheeled transport by developing fully electric, zero-emission premium motorcycles, using sustainable materials and smart connectivity.”

For its prototype debut, the company did more than source parts and slap batteries into motorcycle frames.

“In order to distill the form to only the essentials, we were challenged to redesign every component,” said CEO and founder Taras Kravtchouk—an industrial design specialist, former startup head, and passionate motorcyclist.

From the swingarm to the pegs, speedo, fairing and handlebars—the company custom engineered a large portion of the Café and Scrambler prototype parts. Each also has a custom sound produced by a transducer inside the tank that matches a low pitch hum to motor revs.

A lot of the important stuff—such as the battery, suspension, and current power regulation system are sourced—but Tarform looks to shift toward more proprietary features, including a digital power delivery system with AI functions.

 “Were talking to a company in Sweden to do a custom vehicle control unit to integrate Bluetooth connectivity [and ultrasonic proximity sensors],” Kravtchouk told TechCrunch.

“You’ll be able to sync your ride to an app…and get inputs on your riding behavior…to become a better rider.”

Tarform will offer two variants of its production motorcycles. Version one will be a 9kWh, 53 horsepower, 350 pound two-wheeler with a 95 mile per hour top speed and 129 mile range.

A larger 13.5 kWh battery, 80 horsepower, 395 pound model will be good for 168 miles.

Charging time will be 3.5 hours to 80 percent and 8 hours to full power using a standard electrical outlet. A fast-charger option will get the bikes to 80 percent in less than an hour.

The starting price to pre-order one of Tarform’s first production motorcycles is $18,000.

That compares to $8K for an entry level FX from Zero—America’s highest selling e-motorcycle manufacturer—and $24K for an Eva EsseEsse9 from Energica, a high-performance Italian EV startup with a U.S. sales network.

As for market positioning, Tarform aims to attract buyers by hitting that optimum balance of performance and design, according to Kravtchouk.

On power and range, “the question is how much we compromise the design [for a bigger battery], without making the bikes look fat and ugly. We’re trying to find a compromise,” he said.

Some people may want to have “a bike that looks sweet” with a slightly shorter ride distance, versus “a bike that goes further with a big battery jammed into it,” he said.

And that pivots to the business side of the equation for Tarform as an EV startup. A core part of the company’s value proposition is to create motorcycles that recapture the imagination of young folks.

As we’ve covered here at TechCrunch, the U.S. motorcycle industry has been in the doldrums since the recession.

New U.S. sales dropped roughly 50 percent since 2008, with sharp declines in ownership by everyone under 40. Motorcycle manufacturers are now largely competing for an aging and shrinking American buying demographic.

Females are one of the only growing ownership segments. And per an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study, total motorcycles on the road actually increased from 2008 to 2017—though nearly 75 percent of registrations are for bikes over seven years old.

So some Americans are buying motorcycles—but often not new ones—and the industry is (by and large) not connecting with 20 and 30 somethings.

Tarform believes e-motos (theirs in particular) can bring at least some segment of a more tech and design savvy younger generation back to motorcycles.

Of course, they’re not the only ones, and as mentioned, there have already been several flops in the U.S. market. Electric motorcycle startups Brammoand Mission Motors already tried and failed. And per TechCrunch’s recent reporting, California based Alta Motors—that had $45 million in VC—ceased operations two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, Energica and Zero Motorcycles have revved up U.S. promotion, distribution and sales.  The two have extensive R&D facilities and roughly $90 million in VC among them.

Then there’s Harley Davidson’s full commitment to EVs. This year the company announced the debut of a production e-moto by 2019, an expanded electric line-up to follow, and the opening of a Silicon Valley research facility to support it all.

With their largely untested and higher priced product Tarform, faces a rough ride to compete with these companies in what is still a shrinking U.S. motorcycle market.

But going head to head with Harley or capturing existing market share from other e-moto startups isn’t necessarily Tarform’s strategy, according to CEO Kravtchouk.

“We’re not in the arms race. We’re not saying we’re faster than anyone else…We think our positioning is a little bit different,” he said.

“Since we started showing the design…so many people who are not motorcycle riders have come forward and said, ‘I want to ride that thing,” explained Tarform’s CEO.

“So maybe our demographic is not existing motorcycle riders, but people who wished they were motorcycle riders. That’s what industry, gas or EV, has had such a hard time capturing.”

Over the next year Tarform will look to see “how the market responds” to its first offering before raising a round.

“Before getting big funding we want to show we’re able to build this in a small garage in Brooklyn. Then the startup will “want to partner up with major manufacturers to take it to the next level,” said Kravtchouk.

In the first of many annual letters Chamath Palihapitiya will be penning as part of his firm’s new era as a technology holding company, the founder of Social Capital criticized the venture capital industry.

After highlighting the latest trends within VC — i.e. SoftBank’s Vision Fund, private equity activity in VC deals and inflated valuations — Palihapitiya divulged the asset class’s biggest problems. A copious amount of capital is flowing through the industry and VCs have an insatiable appetite for “unicorn status.” As a result, investors are paying more and more for equity in startups at all stages, hurting both startup employees and limited partners, who ultimately have to foot the bill.

“The dynamics we’ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme,” Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive, wrote. “Highly marked up valuations, which should be a cost for VCs, have in fact become their key revenue driver. It lets them raise new funds and keep drawing fees.”

LPs and startup employees are suffering as a result of VC greed. Why? According to Palihapitiya, LPs are seeing delayed returns and startup employees are being offered stock options at inflated prices to match a company’s sky-high valuation.

“VCs bid up and mark up each other’s portfolio company valuations today, justifying high prices by pointing to today’s user growth and tomorrow’s network effects. Those companies then go spend that money on even more user growth, often in zero-sum competition with one another. Today’s limited partners are fine with the exercise in the short run, as it gives them the markups and projected returns that they need to keep their own bosses happy.”

“Ultimately, the bill gets handed to current and future LPs (many years down the road), and startup employees (who lack the means to do anything about the problem other than leave for a new company, and acquire a ‘portfolio’ of options.)”

Social Capital has had a rough go of it lately. The firm made the call to stop accepting outside capital about a month ago, with plans to invest off a “multi-billion dollar balance sheet of internal capital only.” That decision followed a string of high-profile exits that cemented the supposition that Social Capital, as we’ve known it, was over.

In his new role as a leader of a tech holding company, not a VC firm, Palihapitiya claims to have the solution to the aforementioned problem plaguing the venture and startup industry: “Return to the roots of venture investing.”

“The real expense in a startup shouldn’t be their bill from Big Tech but, rather, the cost of real innovation and R&D,” he said. “The second is to break away from the multilevel marketing scheme that the VC-LP-user growth game has become. At Social Capital, we did this by actively shifting away from funds and LPs to rely only on our own permanent capital moving forward.”

“Are we crazy to reject tens of millions of dollars a year in fees? We think not, and we believe it’s time to wait patiently as the air is slowly let out of this bizarre Ponzi balloon created by the venture capital industry.”

You can read the full letter here.

In the first of many annual letters Chamath Palihapitiya will be penning as part of his firm’s new era as a technology holding company, the founder of Social Capital criticized the venture capital industry.

After highlighting the latest trends within VC — i.e. SoftBank’s Vision Fund, private equity activity in VC deals and inflated valuations — Palihapitiya divulged the asset class’s biggest problems. A copious amount of capital is flowing through the industry and VCs have an insatiable appetite for “unicorn status.” As a result, investors are paying more and more for equity in startups at all stages, hurting both startup employees and limited partners, who ultimately have to foot the bill.

“The dynamics we’ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme,” Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive, wrote. “Highly marked up valuations, which should be a cost for VCs, have in fact become their key revenue driver. It lets them raise new funds and keep drawing fees.”

LPs and startup employees are suffering as a result of VC greed. Why? According to Palihapitiya, LPs are seeing delayed returns and startup employees are being offered stock options at inflated prices to match a company’s sky-high valuation.

“VCs bid up and mark up each other’s portfolio company valuations today, justifying high prices by pointing to today’s user growth and tomorrow’s network effects. Those companies then go spend that money on even more user growth, often in zero-sum competition with one another. Today’s limited partners are fine with the exercise in the short run, as it gives them the markups and projected returns that they need to keep their own bosses happy.”

“Ultimately, the bill gets handed to current and future LPs (many years down the road), and startup employees (who lack the means to do anything about the problem other than leave for a new company, and acquire a ‘portfolio’ of options.)”

Social Capital has had a rough go of it lately. The firm made the call to stop accepting outside capital about a month ago, with plans to invest off a “multi-billion dollar balance sheet of internal capital only.” That decision followed a string of high-profile exits that cemented the supposition that Social Capital, as we’ve known it, was over.

In his new role as a leader of a tech holding company, not a VC firm, Palihapitiya claims to have the solution to the aforementioned problem plaguing the venture and startup industry: “Return to the roots of venture investing.”

“The real expense in a startup shouldn’t be their bill from Big Tech but, rather, the cost of real innovation and R&D,” he said. “The second is to break away from the multilevel marketing scheme that the VC-LP-user growth game has become. At Social Capital, we did this by actively shifting away from funds and LPs to rely only on our own permanent capital moving forward.”

“Are we crazy to reject tens of millions of dollars a year in fees? We think not, and we believe it’s time to wait patiently as the air is slowly let out of this bizarre Ponzi balloon created by the venture capital industry.”

You can read the full letter here.

Twitter is digging one of its most important new features out of its settings and putting it within easy reach. Twitter is now testing with a small number of iOS users a homescreen button that lets you instantly switch from its algorithmic timeline that shows the best tweets first but out of order to the old reverse chronological feed that only shows people you follow — no tweets liked by friends or other randomness.

Twitter had previously buried this option in its settings. In mid-September, it fixed the setting so it would only show a raw reverse chronological feed of tweets by people you follow with nothing extra added, and promised a more easily accessible design for the feature in the future. Now we have our first look at it. A little Twitter sparkle icon in the top opens a menu where you can switch between Top Tweets and Latest Tweets, plus a link to your content settings. It would be even nicer if that was a one-tap toggle.

Twitter’s VP of Product Kayvon Beykpour tweeted that “We want to make it easier to toggle between seeing the latest tweets the top tweets. So we’re experimenting with making this a top-level switch rather than buried in the settings. Feedback welcome.. what do you think?”

Given the backlash back in 2016 when Twitter started shifting to an algorithmically sorted timeline based on what you engaged with, many users will probably think this is great. Whether you’re trying to follow a sports game, a political debate, breaking news, or are just glued to Twitter and want the ordering to make more sense, there are plenty of reasons you might want to switch to reverse chronological.

Still, Twitter’s apprehension to make the setting too accessible makes sense. Hardcore users might prefer reverse chronological, but for most people who only open Twitter a few times per day or week, that’d mean they’d likely miss the tweets from their closest friends that could be drown out by the noise of everyone else. Twitter’s user growth rate perked up after the shift to algorithmic.

We’ve asked whether the setting reverts to the Top Tweets default when you close the app. That might be frustrating to some expert users, but could prevent novice users from accidentally getting stuck in reverse chronological and not knowing how to switch back. The company tells TechCrunch that it’s trying out several different duration options for the setting based on user inactivity to see what works best. For example, one version will revert the setting to the Top Tweets default if they’re gone for a day. That method would make sure people who’ve been inactive long enough to forget changing their timeline setting will get the default back and not end up stuck in a chronological abyss.

If Twitter gets the reversion to default situation figured out, the new button could make the service much more flexible, thereby boosting usage. You could start algorithmic in the morning or after a weekend away to see what you missed, then quickly toggle to reverse chronological if something big happens or you’ll be on it non-stop all day to get the real-time pulse of the world.

General Motors has offered voluntary buyouts to 18,000 salaried employees in North America who have at least 12 years of experience, as the automaker looks to cut costs all while investing in its electric and autonomous future.

The company has described this as a proactive measure aimed at preparing for coming headwinds such as  slow sales in North America and China, commodity prices and tariffs.

But it’s just as much about preparing for the future. The company has been undergoing a transformation over the past four to five years, ditching expensive, money-losing programs like the Opel brand in Europe, and investing more into electrification and autonomous vehicle technology.

And it’s not wasting any time.

GM is giving these employees until November 19 to decide whether they’ll take the buyout offer. Those who accept will receive severance beginning February 1, 2019.

About 36 percent of the company’s 50,000 employees in North America are eligible for the buyout. A GM spokesman declined to say how many employees it expected to take the buyout, except to predict that it was unlikely the number would be anywhere close to 18,000.

GM has been on a three-year $6.5 billion cost-cutting mission that it expects to hit by the end of the year. GM CFO Dhivya Suryadevara said in the company’s earnings call Wednesday that GM had made $6.3 billion in cost-saving measures as of the end of the third quarter.

GM’s cost-cutting measures have happened in parallel with its investments and commitments to electrification and autonomous technology. GM acquired Cruise Automation for $1 billion in 2016. Earlier this year, the automaker said it would invest another $1.1 billion into its self-driving unit as part of a bigger deal with SoftBank. Cruise Holdings has said it will launch a commercial autonomous vehicle ride-hailing service in 2019.

It has also focused on hiring more software engineers, and will continue to add those kinds of jobs even as the buyouts begin, according to GM.

GM’s plan is to launch 20 new all-electric vehicles globally by 2023 and increase production of the Chevy Bolt. At an event in September, GM chairman and CEO Mary Barra said the company is poised to build more all-electric vehicles as improvements continue at its recently expanded battery lab and a new LG Electronics plant in Michigan comes online.

The LG Electronics facility in Hazel Park will start making battery packs this fall to supply GM’s Orion Assembly Plant, where the automaker builds the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt.

Robots just want to get things done, but it’s frustrating when their rigid bodies simply don’t allow them to do so. Solution: bodies that can be reconfigured on the fly! Sure, it’s probably bad news for humanity in the long run, but in the meantime it makes for fascinating research.

A team of graduate students from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania made this idea their focus and produced both the modular, self-reconfiguring robot itself and the logic that drives it.

Think about how you navigate the world: If you need to walk somewhere, you sort of initiate your “walk” function. But if you need to crawl through a smaller space, you need to switch functions and shapes. Similarly, if you need to pick something up off a table, you can just use your “grab” function, but if you need to reach around or over an obstacle you need to modify the shape of your arm and how it moves. Naturally you have a nearly limitless “library” of these functions that you switch between at will.

That’s really not the case for robots, which are much more rigidly designed both in hardware and software. This research, however, aims to create a similar — if considerably smaller — library of actions and configurations that a robot can use on the fly to achieve its goals.

In their paper published today in Science Robotics, the team documents the groundwork they undertook, and although it’s still extremely limited, it hints at how this type of versatility will be achieved in the future.

The robot itself, called SMORES-EP, might be better described as a collection of robots: small cubes (it’s a popular form factor) equipped with wheels and magnets that can connect to each other and cooperate when one or all of them won’t do the job. The brains of the operation lie in a central unit equipped with a camera and depth sensor it uses to survey the surroundings and decide what to do.

If it sounds a little familiar, that’s because the same team demonstrated a different aspect of this system earlier this year, namely the ability to identify spaces it can’t navigate and deploy items to remedy that. The current paper is focused on the underlying system that the robot uses to perceive its surroundings and interact with it.

Let’s put this in more concrete terms. Say a robot like this one is given the goal of collecting the shoes from around your apartment and putting them back in your closet. It gets around your apartment fine but ultimately identifies a target shoe that’s underneath your bed. It knows that it’s too big to fit under there because it can perceive dimensions and understands its own shape and size. But it also knows that it has functions for accessing enclosed areas, and it can tell that by arranging its parts in such and such a way it should be able to reach the shoe and bring it back out.

The flexibility of this approach and the ability to make these decisions autonomously are where the paper identifies advances. This isn’t a narrow “shoe-under-bed-getter” function, it’s a general tool for accessing areas the robot itself can’t fit into, whether that means pushing a recessed button, lifting a cup sitting on its side, or reaching between condiments to grab one in the back.

As with just about everything in robotics, this is harder than it sounds, and it doesn’t even sound easy. The “brain” needs to be able to recognize objects, accurately measure distances, and fundamentally understand physical relationships between objects. In the shoe grabbing situation above, what’s stopping a robot from trying to lift the bed and leave it in place floating above the ground while it drives underneath? Artificial intelligences have no inherent understanding of any basic concept and so many must be hard-coded or algorithms created that reliably make the right choice.

Don’t worry, the robots aren’t quite at the “collect shoes” or “collect remaining humans” stage yet. The tests to which the team subjected their little robot were more like “get around these cardboard boxes and move any pink-labeled objects to the designated drop-off area.” Even this type of carefully delineated task is remarkably difficult, but the bot did just fine — though rather slowly, as lab-based bots tend to be.

The authors of the paper have since finished their grad work and moved on to new (though surely related) things. Tarik Tosun, one of the authors whom I talked with for this article, explained that he’s now working on advancing the theoretical side of things as opposed to, say, building cube-modules with better torque. To that end he helped author VSPARC, a simulator environment for modular robots. Although it is tangential to the topic immediately at hand, the importance of this aspect of robotics research can’t be overestimated.

You can find a pre-published version of the paper here in case you don’t have access to Science Robotics.