Year: 2018

Lawmakers are again unhappy with Facebook after the latest big story again portraying Facebook’s failure to protect the private data of its users.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the company had special relationships with a handful of major tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Spotify. The report alleges that Facebook allowed those partners forms of user data access that the company claimed it had curtailed prior to this year’s revelations around Facebook’s data sharing with Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook predictably pushed back against the report in a blog post, claiming that “none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC.”

While Facebook dismisses much of the current criticism as a mischaracterization of these data sharing relationships, a number of lawmakers are, naturally, using the situation to nudge forward their own regulatory agendas.

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, one of the fiercest privacy advocates in Congress, released a statement on the news: “Mark Zuckerberg had a lot of chutzpah telling Congress that Americans could control their data, when seemingly every other week Facebook faces a new privacy scandal for abusing our personal information,” Wyden said.

“When companies repeatedly lie to Congress and the American people about what they do with our messages, location, likes and everything else, Congress has a duty to do something about it.”

Wyden pointed to his own proposed legislation, the Consumer Data Protection Act, released as a discussion draft in early November. The legislation would empower the Federal Trade Commission to punish companies with meaningful fines (up to 4% of annual revenue) and even “10-20 year criminal penalties for senior executives.”

The bill also proposes a national Do Not Track system to protect user privacy, minimum cybersecurity standards and a means for consumers to review what personal data has been collected about them and what entities it has been sold to or shared with.

“I wrote a tough new consumer privacy bill to punish companies – and even put CEOs in jail – if they lie about protecting your privacy. Clearly these people need some skin in the game before they will take Americans’ privacy seriously,” Wyden said of the bill.

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz weighed in as well, also recommending that the FTC be given the power to oversee and punish large tech companies that trade in user data.

Senator Amy Klobuchar tweeted “@nytimes⁩ Facebook report today must = FTC penalties & privacy legislation,” echoing the idea of empowering the FTC to police big tech. Klobuchar also pointed to her own bipartisan privacy bill, the Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act, co-sponsored by John Kennedy (R-La.). That bill would force companies to make terms of service more simple and comprehensible and allow users to request to have their data (actually) deleted.

If Wyden’s proposal is aggressive, it’s also probably a good starting place for regulating big tech’s data brokers — that and cheating off the EU’s tough GDPR template. If the bill picks up any traction (and it’s new enough that we don’t know yet if it will) it’s likely to be watered down over time as lawmakers with a more lenient view of how big tech should be regulated look it over.

Of course, nothing in Congress happens quickly, especially considering the amount of money that tech’s biggest companies pour into Washington D.C. lobbying that makes a case for ongoing self-regulation. Still, with every new privacy stumble, Congress gets a notch more serious about regulation, even if it moves at a snail’s pace.

It was several years ago, at a tech conference in Laguna Beach, Ca., that the venture capitalist Bill Gurley issued one of what would become repeated warnings that startups were staying private too long. Comparing companies that refuse to go public to undergrads whose college careers extend several years past the point that they should, Gurley suggested they should be embarrassed, not proud, for keeping their shares in private hands. “Until you get liquid, you really haven’t accomplished anything,” Gurley said.

Whether Gurley was referring to Uber at the time, only he knows. Though this firm, Benchmark, eventually forced out Travis Kalanick, the cofounder and longtime CEO of Uber, the tipping point was seemingly not Kalanick’s determination to keep Uber privately held as long as possible but rather an investigation into sexual harassment investigations and the employee misconduct that was discovered in the process.

Either way, it’s looking increasingly like Gurley had a point. As you may have noticed if you care anything about the public markets, they took a nosedive today. In fact, they fell to a new low for the year this afternoon, a reaction in part to the Federal Reserve’s decision this morning to raise its benchmark overnight lending rate for the fourth time in 2018.

The Fed also signaled minimal rate hikes for next year — forecasting two rate hikes instead of three — but investors were apparently hoping for even better news.

It’s hard to blame them for seeking out more of a silver lining, given everything else that’s going on. Tech stocks are getting battered, with the FANG companies, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google, down meaningfully from their share prices of six months ago. (Amazon has held up the best.) The economy of China —  the U.S.’s third largest export partner and its largest import partner —  is slowing sharply, which is expected to have an impact on the U.S. and the world economy. Add trade tensions into the mix, a sprinkling of uncertainty about regulations, a splash of a possible government shutdown, and the growing prospect that Donald Trump will be impeached, and you start to get the picture.

The market is scary suddenly, yet Uber and Lyft and Slack, among others, are now racing to dive into it. Why? Their venture backers will tell you it’s because the public markets recognize a strong growth company when they see it, and that each is finally positioned well to tell their story, aided by some dazzling metrics. But it seems just as likely that they see the window, which flew open this year, starting to swing back in the other direction. And if this month is any indicator, it could be hard to pry it open again, at least in the first quarter or two.

“The market is basically closed between now, and the start of a new year is always slow because companies don’t start roadshow [until the markets re-open],” says Kathleen Smith, a principal of Renaissance Capital and the manager of its IPO exchange traded fund. Pre-IPO companies like Uber are also waiting on their audits to close before they put any numbers in a public document, she notes. But it could be far from smooth sailing after that, suggests Smith. “In normal times, late, January and February and March become very active, but we aren’t in a typical market. I can predict from other times that we’ve seen a bear market like this that it will have an impact on IPO activity.”

It’s all part of a vicious cycle, Smith suggests. As public market shareholders begin to feel less affluent and more risk averse, they start redeeming their public market shares. That leaves fund managers who might otherwise gamble on new issuers with less capital to invest, and less flexibility. “Investors are just not going to want to take on any risk positions when market has [taken a turn for the worse],” says Smith.

If the markets are as crummy early next year as looks to be the case, it’s too bad, too sad for unicorn companies “They made choice to stay private and get capital,” says Smith. “I’ve stated many times that they should be getting while the getting is good. The pain can happen if money dries up, and it will dry up when the public market dries up.” 

That doesn’t mean the companies are doomed, of course, especially those that can show strong fundamentals.

For her part, Smith notes that what often happens in a downturn is for offerings to be heavily discounted. “Valuations will be chopped if the companies want investors to participate. They’ll have to be sure to make money.”

Even if they don’t get the prices that ambitious bankers might have discussed with them in recent months, they can always grow into the valuations their investors want to see. One need look no further than Facebook to remember why a bumpy offering doesn’t mean all that much longer term. “Just because a stock crashes below its IPO price isn’t a sign of a bubble,” says Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser. “You also have to keep in mind the dynamic of companies going public,” he says. “You expect IPOs to be overvalued. Investors in these companies are necessarily selling to the greatest fool.”

Still, there may be fewer fools willing to buy what they are selling than there might have been a year or two ago, and if those numbers really change, today’s unicorns will look like tomorrow’s donkeys. They’re certainly going to face more scrutiny than they might have had they moved sooner.

“Maybe we’ll roar into 2019 and all will be well,” says Lise Buyer, the founder of Class V Group, an advisory firm for IPOs. “But to the extent that investors will be more selective, they’ll look at path to profitability, and they’ll look at the valuations these companies took when they were private.” Then they’ll do their own math, suggests Buyer.

If the market is truly shifting, public market shareholders “won’t care what valuations companies achieved when they were private,” says Buyer. “They’ll only be willing to pay what they are willing to pay.”

One of Tesla’s big selling points is the company’s ability to wirelessly push software updates to its electric vehicles. It’s what allows these vehicles to improve over time long after they’ve been purchased by customers.

This week, one of those improvements was to deliver a few Easter eggs — as promised by CEO Elon Musk — including the ability to make a Tesla vehicle fart on demand or every time a turn signal is used.

One Easter Egg, coyly referred to as Emissions Testing Mode, allows the driver to choose from six different fart noises. A 7th option will pick one randomly.

Here’s a guide to the list and a handy tweet from @microfrost_ who posted a video of what each fart sounds like. Enjoy.

1. Not a Fart (a reference to Not a Flamethrower that Musk sold in 2018)
2. Short Shorts Ripper (Musk simply can’t seem to stop trolling short sellers)
3. Falcon Heavy (as in SpaceX’s big rocket that launched in 2018)
4. Ludicrous Fart (super speed?)
5. Neurastink (a reference to another Musk company Neuralink. We’re not sure how farts play into the company’s plans to build a brain-to-machine interface that would allow the human mind to keep up with AI.
6. Boring (as in The Boring Company)
   * The 7th choice, called “I’m so random,” will pick one of the sounds randomly.

Improvements to the fart app might come soon. Musk tweeted Wednesday that he would add a “fart on demand” option to the mobile app too.

WhatsApp is making group calls easier with a change to the way its mobile app works. Before, users would have to start a 1:1 video call, then add participants – there wasn’t an option to begin a group call at once, the company says. Now, the design has been updated so you can start group calls with just a couple of taps.

In the new design, you can go to the group whose members you want to call, then tap on the phone icon at the top right corner of the screen to get started. From the next screen, you’ll tap the contacts within the group you want to call, then tap the voice or video button – depending on what type of call you want to make.

The company added a new way to make group calls from the Calls tab, as well.

With the update, you can tap the new Call icon on the top right corner of the screen, pick the contacts you want to call, and again pick either the voice or video icon.

WhatsApp currently supports calling up to four people at one time.

That’s fewer than is supported on other top mobile messaging services – like Apple’s FaceTime, which was updated in October to support 32 people (up from only 2 people before); or Messenger, which can support up to 50 people in a call, for example. However, WhatsApp’s group call feature itself is still fairly new – it was officially rolled out at the end of July this year.

For a smaller group, it’s still a useful way to connect with friends and family without having to tap into your cellular plan’s voice minutes. Calls are also end-to-end encrypted, which makes it a good option for privacy seekers – that is, if you believe that any app owned by Facebook can fit that description.

WhatsApp warns that all members should have a good internet connection before using the group calling feature, as the quality of the call will depend on the contact with the weakest connection.

The update is available now to iPhone users and is rolling out “soon” on Android.

When it comes to shift workers communicating with each other in the workplace when they are not face-to-face, gone are the days of cork announcement boards. Now, the messaging app is the medium, and today one of the startups tackling that opportunity in a unique way has raised a round of funding to get to the next stage of growth.

Crew, a chat app that specifically targets businesses that employ shift workers who do not typically sit at computers all day, has now raised $35 million in Series C funding from DAG Ventures, Tenaya Capital, and previous backers Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Harrison Metal Capital and Aspect Ventures. With the funding news, it’s also announcing the launch of a new feature called Crew Enterprise, which helps businesses better manage messaging across large groups of these workers.

The funding and new product come on the heels of the company hitting 25,000 organizations using its service — many of them multi-store retailers with an emphasis in the food industry, household names like Domino’s Pizza and Burger King — with some strong engagement. Its users are together sending some 25 million messages or responses to other messages each week, on average six times per day per user, with more than 55 percent of its whole user base logging in on an average day.

There are quite a lot of messaging apps out in the market today, but the majority of them are aimed at so-called knowledge workers, people who might be using a number of apps throughout their day, who often sit at desks and use computers alongside their phones and tablets. Crew takes a different approach in that it targets the vast swathe of other workers in the job market and their priorities.

As it turns out, co-founder and CEO Danny Leffel tells me that those priorities are focused around a few specific things that are not the same as those for the other employment sector. One is to get the latest shift schedules for work, especially when they are not at work; another is to be able to swap those shifts when they need to; and a third, largely coming from the management end, is to make sure that everything gets communicated to the staff even when they are not in for work to attend a staff meeting.

“Some of the older practices feel like versions of a Rube Goldberg machine,” he said. “The stories we hear are quite insane.” Shift schedules, he said, are an example. “Lots of workplaces have rules, where you can’t call in to check the schedule because it causes employees to come off the floor. One hotel manager told us he couldn’t hold staff meetings with everyone there because he runs a 24/7 workplace so some people would have to come in especially. One store GM from a supermarket chain told us that the whole store has only one email address, so when an announcement goes out, the GM prints that and hands it to everyone. And the problems just compound when you talk to them.”

Crew is by no means the only business internal messaging service that is aiming to provide a product specifically for shift workers. Workplace, Facebook’s own take on enterprise communications, has also positioned itself as a platform for “every worker,” and has snagged a clutch of huge clients such as Walmart (2.2 million employees globally) and Starbucks (254,000) to fill out that vision.

Leffel, however, paints a sightly different picture of how this is playing out, since in many cases even when a company has been “won” as a global customer that hasn’t translated to a global roll out.

“Starbucks is theoretically using Workplace, but it’s been deployed only to managers,” he said. “We have almost 1,000 Starbucks locations using Crew. We knew we had a huge presence there, and we were worried when Facebook won them, but we haven’t seen even a dent in our business so far.”

Leffel has had previous some experience of getting into the ring with Facebook — although it hasn’t ended with him the winner. His previous startup, Yardsellr, positioned itself as the “eBay of Facebook,” working as a layer on top of the big social network for people to sell items. It died a death in 2013, when Facebook took a less friendly turn to Yardsellr using Facebook’s social graph to grow its own business (it was a time when it was cutting off apps from Zynga for similar reasons). Today, Facebook itself owns the experience of selling on its platform via Marketplace.

Crew seems to have found a strong foothold among enterprises in terms of its usefulness, not just use, which is one sign of how it might have more staying power.

A survey it conducted among 50,000 of its users found that 63 percent of leaders who use Crew report fewer missed shifts and 70 percent see increased motivation on their team. Crew worked out that among respondents, it is generating time savings of four or more hours per week for 93 percent of surveyed managers. And because of better communication, people are working faster when handing off things to each other on the front line, with a Domino’s Pizza franchisee sped up delivery punctuality by 23 percent as one example. (The company offers services on three tiers, ranging from free for small teams, Pro at $10 per month per location, to Enterprise priced on negotiation.)

Crew’s new enterprise tier is aiming to take the company to the next step. Today, Leffel says that a lot of its customers are buying on a location-by-location basis. The idea with Crew Enterprise is that larger organizations will be able to provide a more unified experience across all of those locations (not to mention pay more for the functionality). Managers can use the service to message out details about promotions, and they have a better ability to manage conversations across the platform and also get more feedback from people who are directly interacting with customers. Meanwhile, admins also gain better ability to manage compliance.

If some of this sounds familiar, it’s not just because Workplace is the only one who is also targeting the same users. Dynamic Signal and Zinc (formerly Cotap) are two other startups that are also trying to provide better messaging-based communications to more than just white-collar knowledge workers. Crew will have its work cut out for it, but there is a lot of room for now for multiple players.

“We are seeing a shift in the marketplace, going from absolutely don’t use your phone at work to don’t use it when customers are present,” Leffel said of the opportunity. “Some have started to change the rules to allow workers to use their own phones to perform price checks. We are solving for this evolving workflow.”

M&A activity was brisk in the enterprise market this year with 10 high-profile deals totaling almost $88 billion. Companies were opening up their wallets and pouring money into mega acquisitions. It’s worth noting that the $88 billion figure doesn’t include Dell paying investors over $23 billion for VMware tracking stock to take the company public again or several other deals of over a billion dollars that didn’t make our list.

Last year’s big deals included Intel buying MobileEye for $15 billion and Cisco getting AppDynamics for $3.7 billion, but there were not as many big ones. Adobe, which made two large acquisitions this year was mostly quiet last year only make a minor purchase. Salesforce too was mostly quiet in 2017, only buying a digital creative agency, after an active 2016. SAP also made only one purchase in 2017, paying $350 million for Gigya. Microsoft was active buying 9 companies, but these were primarily minor. Perhaps everyone was saving their pennies for 2018.

This year by contrast was go big or go home, and we saw action across the board from the usual suspects. Large companies looking to change their fortunes or grow their markets went shopping and came home with some expensive trinkets for their collections. Some of the deals are still waiting to pass regulatory hurdles and won’t be closing until 2019. Regardless, it’s too soon to judge whether these big-bucks ventures will pay the dividends that the their buyers hope, or if they end up being M&A dust in the wind.

IBM acquires Red Hat for $34 billion

By far the biggest and splashiest deal of the year goes to IBM, which bet the farm to acquire Red Hat for a staggering $34 billion. IBM sees this acquisition as a way to build out its hybrid cloud business. It’s a huge bet and one that could determine the success of Big Blue as an organization in the coming years.

Broadcom nets CA Technologies for $18.5 billion

This deal was unexpected as Broadcom, a chip maker, spent the second largest amount of money in a year of big spending. What Broadcom got for its many billions was an old school IT management and software solutions provider. Perhaps Broadcom felt it needed it to branch out beyond pure chip making and CA offered a way to do it, albeit a rather expensive one.

SAP buys Qualtrics for $8 billion

While not anywhere close to the money IBM or Broadcom spent, SAP went out and nabbed Qualtrics last month just before the company was about to IPO, still paying a healthy $8 billion. The company believes that the new company could help build a bridge between SAP operational data inside its back-end ERP systems and Qualtrics customer data on the front end. Time will tell if they are right.

Microsoft gets Github for $7.5 billion

In June, Microsoft swooped in and bought Github, giving it a key developer code repository. It was a lot of money to pay, and Diane Greene expressed regret that Google hadn’t been able to get it. That’s because cloud companies are working hard to win developer hearts and minds. Microsoft has a chance to push Github users toward its products, but it has to tread carefully because they will balk if Microsoft goes too far.

Salesforce snares Mulesoft for $6.5 billion

Salesforce wasn’t about to be left out of the party in 2018 and in March, the CRM giant announced it was buying API integration vendor, Mulesoft for a cool $6.5 billion. It was a big deal for Salesforce, which tends to be acquisitive, but typically on smaller deals. This one was a key purchase though because it gives the company the ability to access data wherever it lives, on premises or in the cloud, and that could be key for them moving forward.

Adobe snags Marketo for $4.75 billion

Adobe has built a strong company primarily on the strength of its Creative Cloud, but it has been trying to generate more revenue on the marketing side of the business. To that end, it acquired Marketo for $4.75 billion and immediately boosted its marketing business, especial when combined with the $1.68 billion Magento purchase earlier in the year.

SAP acquires CallidusCloud for $2.4 billion

SAP doesn’t do as many acquisitions as some of its fellow large tech companies mentioned here, but this year it did two. Not only did it buy Qualtrics for $8 billion, it also grabbed CallidusCloud for $2.4 billion. SAP is best known for managing back office components with its ERP software, but this adds a cloud-based, front-office sales process piece to the mix.

Cisco grabs Duo Security for $2.35 billion

Cisco has been hard at work buying up a variety of software services over the years, and this year it added to its security portfolio when it acquired Duo Security for $2.35 billion. The Michigan-based company helps companies secure applications using their own mobile devices and could be a key part of the Cisco security strategy moving forward.

Twilio buys SendGrid for $2 billion

Twilio got into the act this year too. While not in the same league as the other large tech companies on this list, it saw a piece it felt would enhance its product set and it was willing to spend big to get it. Twilio, which made its name as a communications API company, saw a kindred spirit in SendGrid, spending $2 billion to get the API-based email service.

Vista snares Apttio for $1.94 billion

Vista Equity Partners is the only private equity firm on the list, but it’s one with an appetite for enterprise technology. With Apttio, it gets a company that can help companies understand their cloud assets alongside their on-prem ones. The company had been public before Vista bought it for $1.94 billion last month.

Pinterest may follow Lyft and Uber to the public markets in the first half of 2019, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The visual search engine and shopping tool is expected to tap underwriters in January and complete an initial public offering as soon as April. The company was valued at just over $12 billion with its last private fundraise, a $150 million round in mid-2017, and is on pace to bring in $700 million in revenue this year.

The company, founded in 2008 by Ben Silbermann (pictured), is also in talks to secure a $500 million credit line, per the report, not an uncommon move for a pre-IPO giant like Pinterest.

To date, the company has raised nearly $1.5 billion from key stakeholders such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, Fidelity and SV Angel.

Pinterest recently reached 250 million monthly active users, up from 200 million in 2017.

This year, it launched several new features to make it easier for passive Pinterest users to actually buy products on the platform and introduced the following tab, where users could view only the content from brands and people they follow. It also added the Pinterest Propel program as part of an effort to create more local content for its users and it implemented full-screen video ads to beef up its advertising options — an area where it competes directly with Facebook and Google.

2019 is poised to be a banner year for venture-backed IPOs. Both Uber and Lyft are in IPO registration, filing privately to go public within hours of each other earlier this month, and Slack, too, has reportedly hired Goldman Sachs to lead its 2019 float.

Pinterest didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Snapchat is looking to increase user engagement with the app with the launch of a new feature called Lens Challenges. Users can opt to participate in the challenges by creating a snap with a Lens that’s themed to a particular song, dance, holiday, event, and more, the company explains.

For example, one of the first challenges to launch is a sing-along with Gwen Stefani’s “Jingle Bells.”

Users access the new challenge from the Lens Explorer section of the app, then lip sync along with the song. When finished, they’ll send the snap to the Gwen Stefani Challenge story for the chance to be featured in the app.

While this particular challenge was designed by the company itself, others will be created by community members. Also new today is one called the “Disappear” challenge, created by Snapchat user Jye Trudinger. In this one, users are prompted to take two photos that superimpose, in order to make the photo’s subject disappear.

Users can also watch others’ Challenge Snaps while in Lens Explorer. But the Challenges don’t have to be public – they can also be privately shared with your friends, if you prefer.

The company hopes that more creators will create challenges going forward, as it will help them to grow their own audience and engage their fans.

The new feature seems to be inspired by TikTok, the rapidly growing social app where things like song, dance and lip sync challenges are the norm. TikTok has been surging in recent months following Bytedance’s acquisition of Musical.ly, which allowed it to merge the latter’s customer base with its own. That led TikTok to surpass Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube in new downloads last month.

Snapchat, meanwhile, has been struggling this past year to recover from a rushed redesign plus declining engagement and revenue per user, among other things. The company in Q3 lost 2 million users, but its user base is still up year-over-year – so there’s a chance for a recovery from some of its missteps.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel this year laid out the company’s ‘comeback’ plan in a massive internal memo which focused on fixing problems with the design, Discover section, inability to reach older users, and more.

Since its launch, Snapchat had seen Facebook steal some of its best ideas for its own, like Stories – which are now one of Instagram’s defining features. Stories have also become something of an industry standard the way Facebook’s News Feed format has – they’re now found everywhere across the social web from LinkedIn to YouTube. Now Snap is the one borrowing from a buzzy up-and-comer aimed at its tween to teenage customer base. That may not be its worst idea, even if it’s not very original.

Renewable energy is the future, but at present no one is tracking just who’s got solar panels on their roof, in their back yard, or a shared neighborhood installation. Fortunately, solar panels generally work best when exposed to the light. That makes them easy to spot, and count, from orbit — which is just what the DeepSolar project is doing.

There are a number of initiatives for collecting this information — some regulated, some voluntary, some automated. But none of them is comprehensive enough or accurate enough to base policy or business decisions on at a national or state level.

Stanford engineers (mechanical and civil, respectively) Arun Majumdar and Ram Rajagopal decided to remedy this with what seems like, in retrospect, rather an obvious solution.

Machine learning systems are great at looking at images and finding objects they’ve been “trained” to recognize, whether it’s cats, faces, or cars… so why not solar panels?

Their team, including grad students Jiafan Yu and Zhecheng Wang, put together an image recognition machine learning agent trained on hundreds of thousands of satellite images. The model learns both to identify the presence of solar panels in an image, and to find the shape and area of those panels.

Having evaluated the model on nearly a hundred thousand other randomly sampled satellite images of the U.S., they found they achieved an accuracy of about 90 percent (slightly more or less depending on how it’s measured), which is well ahead of other models, and it estimated cell size with only about a 3 percent error. (Its main weakness is very small installations, Rajagopal told me, but this is partially due to the limits of the imagery.)

The team then put the model to work chewing through over a billion image tiles covering as much of the lower 48 states as they could find suitable imagery for. That excludes quite a bit of area, but consider that much of that is, for example, mountains. Not a lot of solar installations there, and few people are trying to put up cells in national parks.

All in all it’s about 6 percent of the actual country — but Rajagopal pointed out that urban areas comprise only about 3.5 percent, so this covers all of them and more. He estimated that perhaps perhaps 5 percent of installations are in the areas the system has yet to process (but is working on).

Scanning took a whole month, but at the end the model had found 1.47 million individual solar installations (which could be a few panels on a roof or a whole solar farm). That’s many more than have been counted by other efforts, and the most successful of those didn’t come with the exact location, as DeepSolar’s data does.

Basic plotting of this data produces all kinds of interesting new info. You can compare solar installation density at the state, county, census tract, or even square mile level and compare that to all kinds of other metrics — average sunny days per year, household income, voting preference, and so on.

A couple interesting findings: Only 4 percent of all census tracts (roughly 3,000 out of 75,000) had more than 100 residential-scale solar systems, meaning installations are highly concentrated. Residential solar made up 87 percent of the total installation count, but with a median size of around 25 square meters, only 34 percent of the total solar cell surface area.

Peak deployment density can be found where there are about a thousand people per square mile — think a small town or suburb, not a major city. And there’s a sort of inflection point at which people start installing: when an area receives more than 4.5 kWh per square meter per day of solar radiation. How that corresponds to weather, location, exposure and so on is a more complicated question.

This and other demographics are all good information to know if you want to invest in solar, since they basically tell you where it’s justified or needed.

“We have created and released a website where you can play with the data at the aggregated level (we are keeping it at census tract level) to respect the privacy of consumers,” Rajagopal said. “We are exploring how to make individual detections public while respecting privacy (perhaps by encouraging public participation and crowdsourcing).”

“We decided to share all of the work in open source to encourage others in industry and academia to utilize both the method as well as the data to produce more insights. We feel that changes need to happen fast, and this is one of the ways to aid in that. Perhaps in the future, services can be built around this type of data,” he continued.

Plans are underway to expand the service to the rest of the U.S. and other countries as well. The data is available to peruse here, or here as a map; the team’s paper describing the project was published today in the journal Joule.

Coinbase acquired Earn.com for at least $120 million back in April. And the company now plans to transform Earn.com into Coinbase Earn, a website with educational content to learn more about cryptocurrencies. Users who complete those classes will earn tokens.

Coinbase bought Earn.com partly so that it could appoint Earn.com co-founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan as Coinbase’s CTO. The previous iteration of Earn.com wasn’t a priority for Coinbase.

Earn.com started as a service where you can contact busy people for a small fee. Busy people would get paid in cryptocurrencies to accept those requests. The platform quickly became a way to massively contact Earn.com’s user base for initial coin offerings and airdrops.

Coinbase Earn is launching today in private beta. But at the time of this article, the new Coinbase Earn service is not live. Some Coinbase users will receive an invitation to the service. The company says that educational content will go beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. Developing education pages for obscure cryptocurrencies makes sense as Coinbase plans to add dozens of cryptocurrencies over the coming months.

At first, there is just one track. Users can learn more about 0x (ZRX), a protocol that lets you create decentralized exchanges. Cryptocurrency trades can be executed without a centralized exchange thanks to 0x .

0x content includes video lessons and quizzes — and yes, writing this makes me feel like it’s 2005 and webinars are cool again. Even if you’re not invited to Coinbase Earn, you can view the content. But those who are part of Coinbase Earn will receive a small amount of ZRX at the end of the track.

Coinbase had previously launched a learning hub to understand the basics of cryptocurrencies.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.