Year: 2018

Starbucks is expanding its partnership with Uber Eats to more than 2,000 stores in the United States next year, about a quarter of all of the company’s locations in the country.

The relationship bolsters Uber’s mission for its on-demand food delivery service, Eats. Uber has said it plans to cover more than 70 percent of the U.S. population by the end of 2018. The partnership with Starbucks, while it won’t start in earnest until next year, will help the delivery meet or even exceed that goal as it battles Postmates for market share.

Starbucks first launched its program Starbuck Delivers as a pilot in September serving people in Miami and Tokyo. Its coffee delivery roots actually began in China through a partnership with Alibaba and on-demand food delivery service Ele.me. The company also piloted a delivery service through two supermarkets in Shanghai and Hangzhou.

It’s an experiment that appears to have had some success. Starbucks Delivers has reached 2,000 stores across 30 cities in China since launching three months ago, the company said at its investor conference Thursday.

Now it’s taking what it learned in China and applying it to the U.S.

When I visited the GE Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York in April 2017, I thought I saw a company that was working hard to avoid disruption, but perhaps the leafy campus, the labs and experimental projects hid much larger problems inside the company. Yesterday GE announced that it was spinning out its Industrial IoT business and selling most of its stake in ServiceMax, the company it bought in 2016 for $915 million.

For one thing, Jeff Immelt, the CEO who was leading that modernization charge, stepped down 6 months after my visit and was replaced by John Flannery, who was himself replaced just a year into his tenure by C. Lawrence Culp, Jr. It didn’t seem to matter who was in charge, nobody could stop the bleeding stock price, which has fallen this year from a high of $18.76 in January to $7.20 this morning before the markets opened (and had already lost another .15 a share as we went to publication).

Immelt at least recognized that the company needed to shift to a data-centered Industrial Internet of Things future where sensors fed data that provided ways to understand the health of a machine or how to drive the most efficient use from it. This was centered around the company’s Predix platform where developers could build applications using that data. The company purchased ServiceMax in 2016 to extend that idea and feed service providers the data they needed to anticipate when service was needed even before the customer was aware of it.

As Immelt put it in a 2014 quote on Twitter:

“If you went to bed last night as an industrial company you’re going to wake up a software & analytics company.” – @JeffImmelt

— General Electric (@generalelectric) October 9, 2014

That entire approach had substance. In fact, if you look at what Salesforce announced earlier this month around service and the Internet of Things, you will see a similar strategy. As Salesforce’s SVP and GM for Salesforce Field Service Lightning Paolo Bergamo described in a blog post, “Drawing on IoT signals surfaced in the Service Cloud console, agents can gauge whether device failure is imminent, quickly determine the source of the problem (often before the customer is even aware a problem exists) and dispatch the right mobile worker with the right skill set.”

The ServiceMax acquisition and the Predix Platform were central to this, and while the idea was sound Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says that the execution was poor and the company needed to change. “The vision for GE Digital made sense as they crafted a digital industrial strategy, yet the execution inside GE was not the best. As GE spins out many of its units, this move is designed to free up the unit to deliver its services beyond GE and into the larger ecosystem,” Wang told TechCrunch.

Current CEO Culp sees the spinout as a way to breathe new life into the business “As an independently operated company, our digital business will be best positioned to advance our strategy to focus on our core verticals to deliver greater value for our customers and generate new value for shareholders,” Culp explained in a statement.

Maybe so, but it seems it should be at the center of what the company is doing, not a spin-off  –and with only a 10 percent stake left in ServiceMax, the service business component all but goes away. Bill Ruh, GE Digital CEO, the man who was charged with implementing the mission (and apparently failed) has decided to leave the company with this announcement. In fact, the new Industrial IoT company will operate as a wholly owned GE subsidiary with its own financials and board of directors, separate from the main company.

With this move though, GE is clearly moving the Industrial IoT out of the core business as it continues to struggle to find a combination that brings its stock price back to life. While the Industrial Internet of Things idea may have been poorly executed, selling and spinning off the pieces that need to be part of the digital future seem like a short-sighted way to achieve the company’s longer term goals.

I’m heading back to Europe to hang out in Wroclaw and Warsaw so it’s last call for pitch off applications.

I’ll be at a Wroclaw event, called In-Ference, which is happening on December 17 and you can submit to pitch here. The team will notify you if you have been chosen. The winner will receive a table at TC Disrupt in San Francisco.

The Warsaw event, here, is on the 19th at WeWork in Warsaw. You can sign up to pitch here. I’ll notify the folks I’ve chosen and the winner gets a table at TC Disrupt, as well.

Special thanks to WeWork Labs in Warsaw for supplying some beer and pizza for the event and, as always, special thanks to Dermot Corr and Ahmad Piraiee for putting these things together. See you soon!

Smart home items make great gifts and what follows are some of the best. From faster Wifi to smart meat thermometers, there’s something here for everyone on your list.

I use everything listed here and can attest to their quality. That’s important to me. I’m not going to recommend something I do not use. Throughout the year, I see a lot of gadgets and most are junk. The nine items listed here work great and are quality products.

Netgear Orbi

The Netgear Orbi is part of a new class of Wifi routers that use multiple units to blanket a home in Wifi. This one just works. For medium to large size homes, the Orbi will radically improve your Wifi performance.

I’ve used a few of Orbi’s competitors and prefer the Orbi for several reasons. Installation was straight forward and follows traditional router setup routines. The units themselves sport more ethernet jacks than competitors, and from what I can tell, the Netgear Orbi app is the most feature-packed yet best designed.

The Orbi system is expensive with basic systems starting out around $300 though with holiday sales, they can be found for around $200 and up. Netgear released several new Orbi products in 2018 including one with a built-in cable modem, allowing owners to ditch one more box in their house.

Meural

Give someone the gift of art. The Meural is a smart LCD screen designed to display works of art. It’s a lovely device that I quickly feel in love with. It’s magical.

The idea is simple: Provide owners with a never-ending parade of classical and modern works of art. This is done through a subscription service that features a deep collection of available images. Art is available from the top museums, artists and image makers. It’s easy to get lost in the app. There’s just so much available and the app does a great job explaining about the artists and their works.

Owners can also send their own images to the display.

The unit can be mounted vertically or horizontally and features a crisp display. There’s a small, somewhat unwieldy sensor to navigate the controls, but most often, the owner will use the smartphone app to change the art.

AcuRite Atlas Weather Station

This is the best home-based weather station I’ve used. It’s loaded with features. The station measures rain, wind speed, lightening strikes, UV levels and more. All the data is sent to a large touchscreen monitoring station.

Be warned. The weather station is large and needs to be mounted in a central location.

There are a lot of weather stations on the market. The AcuRite Atlas is one of the most expensive but from what I’ve seen, it’s one of the most accurate too. AcuRite says it accurate to 1 degree of temperature and 3 degrees of wind direction. Good data is expensive. But if this unit is out of your price range, AcuRite and a few other companies have less expensive models available too. Sure, someone can always look at their phone for the weather, but this is a bit more fun.

Amazon Echo Dot

The Echo Dot is fantastic. It’s small, cheap and still works like its bigger siblings. The retail price is $50 but it can be had for much less with holiday sales.

The Echo Dot can do everything: play music, tell the weather, control smart home devices and output audio to an audio system. Because of this vast amount of functions there’s something here for everyone.

Have someone on your list that just wants to listen to music? Get them the Dot. Do they already have another Alexa device but have a large house? Get them another Dot; I have six throughout (and outside) of my home. Do they listen to a lot of music through a big audio system? The Dot can send the audio out through the 3.5mm jack.

SnapPower Outlet Covers

SnapPower’s outlet covers are amazing. I backed the Kickstarter back in 2014 and have been a customer since. The products just work.

The idea is crazy simple: Built into the outlet cover are LED lights or USB outlets or child-proof outlet covers. Simply take off the old outlet cover and snap this one in its place. It’s the snap itself that powers the device; the covers sport metal clips that grab onto the outlet’s conductors and powers the light or USB outlet (they’re UL listed in the US).

I have a couple of the LED plates throughout the house and a USB outlet cover in the kitchen. Prices start around $15. A boring gift? Yeah, but an amazing gift.

Philips Wake-up Light

I’m convinced waking up to a loud alarm will shorten a person’s life, but this alarm is different. Made by Philips and available in several different models, this device slowly starts getting brighter as the alarm nears. Philips says it helps a person wake up in a more natural way. All I know is it works.

I bought one of these devices last year and it improved my morning routine. However it works, I tend to wake up more refreshed and in a better mood though it’s not perfect. The on-device controls are touchy and the clock can be hard to read. It could use Alexa integration.

Also, why is the women in the stock photo staring at the light? Don’t do that.

Sonos Beam

The Sonos Beam is a fantastic soundbar that provides more than just an improved audio experience. It also gives owners an easy way to control all the boxes stored under their TV.

The speaker includes Alexa — and promises Google Assistant support — and it improves your TV sound immensely. Designed as an add-on to your current TV, it can stand alone or connect with the Sonos subwoofer and a few satellite surround speakers for a true surround sound experience. It truly shines alone, however, thanks to its small size and more than acceptable audio range.

Sonos’ surround sound systems install quickly and run seamlessly. You can buy a few speakers, tap a few buttons and have 5.1 sound in less time than it takes to pull a traditional home audio system out of its shipping box.

Meater

This is a meat thermometer. That’s why it’s called Meater. I have one and love it.

The Meater is a wireless thermometer, but unlike the cheap versions available in hardware stores, this one works well and features a smartphone app. There are two thermometers on the Meater. One monitors the meat’s temp and the other monitors the ambient temperature. That’s critical. The companion app gives accurate readings and provides estimates of when the item will be done cooking.

I found the Meater is most helpful when cooking something low and slow. I don’t use it for steak, but when barbecuing a pork butt, it’s handy.

Nest Hello

Video doorbells change everything. I have one on my house and it’s invaluable. The Nest Hello is one of the best on the market. The Hello is easy to install and use. Anyone can do it.

The Hello provides great video quality and records constantly. That’s key. Most other video doorbells only record when triggered and sometimes key moments are not captured because they don’t trigger the camera. The Hello even features facial recognition and can send smartphone alerts when it detects someone it knows.

At $229 it’s not the cheapest on the market, but it’s one of the best.

TF International Securities Apple analyst extraordinaire Ming-Chi Kuo delivered a less than stellar iPhone forecast this week with the straightforwardly titled note, “2019 iPhone shipments likely to be under 190 million units.” The letter puts the number of Apple handsets well below previous analyst predictions of 212 million for next year.

Kuo is largely regarded as the most influential analyst for the company, both with regards to sales figures and a stellar track record of predicting future products, thanks in part to relationships with Apple suppliers. His forecasts have the ability to impact Apple stock, which has already taken a hit this past quarter.

“The increase in orders of legacy iPhone models cannot offset the decline of XR and XS series shipments because of the low season impact,” Kuo writes in the note. The analyst also singles out the XR, which many anticipated would be a hit for the company, courtesy of a considerably low price point.

Of course, Apple’s not alone in this. The smartphone industry has seen an overall decline this past year. After years of explosive growth, things have begun to slow for many. In February, Gartner noted its first year-over-year decline since it began tracking the category. A perceived lack of upgrade-worthy features have contributed to a slow down.

That could ultimately be reversed, in part, by the arrival of 5G. A small number of companies have committed to bringing the technology to handsets next year, with Apple’s 5G handset expected to arrive in 2020.

Researchers at the University of Zurich and EPFL have created a robot that shrinks to fit through gaps, a feature that could make it perfect for search and rescue missions. The researchers initially created a drone that could assess man-made gaps and squeeze through in seconds using only one camera. This extra feature — a scissor-like system to shrink the drone in flight — makes it even more versatile and allows these drones to react to larger or smaller gaps in nature.

“The idea came up after we worked on quadrotor flight through narrow gaps,” said PhD candidate Davide Falanga. “The goal of our lab is to develop drones which can be in the future used in the aftermath of a disaster, as for example an earthquake, in order to enter building through small cracks or apertures in a collapsed building to look for survivors. Our previous approach required a very aggressive maneuver, therefore we looked into alternative solutions to accomplish a task as passing through a very narrow gap without having to fly at high speed. The solution we came up with is the foldable drone, a quadrotor which can change its shape to adapt to the task.”

The system measures the gap and changes its shape without outside processing, a feat that is quite exciting. All of the processing is done on board and it could be turned into an autonomous system if necessary. The team built the drone with off the shelf and 3D-printed parts.

“The main difference between conventional drones and our foldable drone is in the way the arms are connected to the body: each arm is connected through a servo motor, which can change the relative position between the main body and the arm. This allows the robot to literally fold the arms around the body, which means that potentially any morphology can be obtained. An adaptive controller is aware of the drone’s morphology and adapts to it in order to guarantee stable flight at all times, independently of the configuration,” said Falanga.

The team published a report on their findings in Robotics and Automation Letters. As IEEE notes, this is no flying drone dragon, but it is a far simpler, cooler and more effective product.

Reset the “days since the last Facebook privacy scandal” counter, as a Facebook has just revealed a Photo API bug gave app developers too much access to the photos of up to 5.6 million users. The bug allowed apps users had approved to pull their timeline photos to also receive their Facebook Stories, Marketplace photos, and most worryingly, photos they’d uploaded to Facebook but never shared. Facebook says the bug ran for 12 days from September 13th to September 25th.

Facebook initially didn’t disclose when it discovered the bug, but in response to TechCrunch’s inquiry, a spokesperson says that it was discovered and fixed on September 25th. They say it took time for the company to investigate whch apps and people were impacted, and build and translate the warning notification it will send impacted users. The delay could put Facebook at risk of GDPR fines for not promptly disclosing the issue within 72 hours that can go up to 20 million pounds or 4 percent of annual global revenue.

Facebook provided merely a glib “We’re sorry this happened” in terms of an apology. It will provide tools next week for app developers to check if they were impacted and it will work with them to delete photos they shouldn’t have. The company plans to notify people it suspects may have been impacted by the bug via Facebook notification that will direct them to the Help Center where they’ll see if they used any apps impacted by the bug. It’s recommending users log into apps to check if they have wrongful photo access. Here’s a look at a mockup of warning notifcation users will see:

The privacy failure will further weaken confidence that Facebook is a reponsible steward for our private data. It follows Facebook’s massive security breach that allowed hackers to scrape 30 million people’s information back in September. There was also November’s bug allowing websites to read users’ Likes, October’s bug that mistakenly deleted people’s Live videos, and May’s bug that changed people’s status update composer privacy settings. It increasingly looks like the social network has gotten too big for the company to secure.

That it keeps photos you partially uploaded but never posted in the first place is creepy, but the fact that these could be exposed to third-party developers is truly unacceptable. And it seems Facebook is so tired of its failings that it couldn’t put forward even a seemingly heartfelt apology is telling. This company’s troubles are not only souring users on Facebook, but employees and the tech industry as large as well.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we had the regular crew back together which was good fun. Connie took point, we had Danny mic’d up in New York, and I was onsite to help the crew natter along with Bubba Murarka, a former VC and founder who now cuts checks on his own.

Thematically, this was a week of mega rounds so we had little choice but to go over more than a few. And Uber is out there doing its IPO thing. So, we started with cars and pivoted to rounds.

Regarding Uber and Lyft, it’s mostly been said, but we took a noodle through the historical context of two other temporally close IPOs between rivals, Visa and Mastercard, and talked about the impending offerings for a minute, as we couldn’t resist. Do they lose too much money? Is there an advantage to going first? That sort of thing.

After, we got to the new funding rounds. First up was the Luckin Coffee $200 million round. The rise of Luckin in China has been simply astounding. I wanted to know some boring financial results, which our guest found a bit old-fashioned, but we all agreed that the company has hit on something big. And something big in China to boot, which means the company has been heading straight north.

Next, we touched on Plaid and its own $250 million infusion. The Kleiner-sourced round was far more money than the financial API company had raised before. It was a staggering amount of capital. Coming on the heels of the recent public-market success of Twilio and the private-market success of Stripe, both API-based companies, may have played a part in the rounds construction.

The good times are not merely coffee and software-focused, however. Zymergen also picked up a nine-figure round: $400 million.

So much for a seasonal slowdown. Hang tight, we’ll be right back.

Working in video games might sound like a dream job to a 12-year-old Fortnight-loving kid but the day-to-day reality of grinding in the industry can be as unrelenting as fighting an end of level baddie.

Games devs are routinely corralled to ‘crunch’ to hit sequential release target deadlines to ensure a project gets delivered on time and budget. Unpaid overtime is a norm. Long hours are certainly expected. And taking any holiday across vast swathes of the year can be heavily frowned upon, if not barred entirely.

From the outside looking in it’s hard not to conclude people’s passion for gaming is being exploited in the big business interest of shipping lucrative titles to millions of gamers.

In the UK that view is now more than just a perception, with the decision of a group of video games workers to unionize.

The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) said today it’s setting up a union branch for games workers, the first such in the country — and one of what’s claimed as just a handful in the world — with the aim of tackling what it dubs the “wide-scale exploitation” of video games workers.

In recent years the union has gained attention for supporting workers in the so-called ‘gig economy’, backing protests by delivery riders and drivers for companies including Uber and Deliveroo. But this is its first foray into representing games workers.

As well as seeking to tackle issues of excessive and often unpaid overtime (aka “crunch”) — with the union claiming some workers have reported clocking up as much as 100 hours a week — it says it will focus on the use of zero-hour contracts in the industry, especially among Quality Assurance testers (aka game testers). 

Zero-hour contracts refer to employment contracts with no minimum guaranteed hours of work. 

The IWGB says the branch also intends to shine a light on the industry’s lack of diversity and inclusion — and what it couches as a failure to tackle a “pervasive culture of homophobia and sexism”. So, um, it’s about ethics in the games industry itself this time. 

Commenting in a statement, game worker and founding member of the IWGB‘s Games Workers Unite branch, Dec Peach, said: “For as long as I can remember it has been considered normal for games workers to endure zero-hours contracts, excessive unpaid overtime, and even sexism and homophobia as the necessary price to pay for the privilege of working in the industry. Now, as part of the IWGB, we will have the tools to fix this broken sector and create an ethical industry where it’s not only big game companies that thrive, but workers as well.”

In another supporting statement, IWGB general secretary Dr Jason Moyer-Lee added: “The game workers’ decision to unionise with the IWGB should be a wake up call for the UK’s gaming industry. The IWGB is proud to support these workers and looks forward to shining a massive spotlight on the industry.”

The UK games industry employs some 47,000 workers, according to UKIE — making it one of the largest such sectors in Europe.

The IWGB‘s Games Workers Unite branch will hold its first meeting on December 16, which the union says will be open to all past, current and “soon to be” workers in the industry — including contract, agency and casual workers, plus direct employees (with the exception of those with hiring and firing power).

It says it’s expecting “hundreds” of games workers to join in the first few months.