Year: 2018

Earlier this year, we told you about a now 18-month-old, Hoboken, N.J.-based cryptocurrency startup working on a “stable coin” whose elastic supply would ostensibly expand and contract to keep its value at about a dollar instead of all over the map. The company’s big idea: to develop a new token that people would actually use, instead of use to speculate.

Investors — a lot of them — fell in love with the concept. In fact, eight months ago, Basis landed $133 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, GV, longtime hedge fund manager Stan Druckenmiller, one-time Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Foundation Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, WingVC, NFX Ventures, Valor Capital, Zhenfund, Ceyuan, Sky9 Capital, Digital Currency Group and others.

Today, that same team, led by CEO Nader Al-Naji — who co-founded the company with former Princeton classmates Lawrence Diao and Josh Chen — says it is shutting down the project. Basis is also returning the capital to investors that it didn’t use in trying to make a go of things.

As Al-Naji explained it in a post at Basis’s site a bit ago, its technology road map and U.S. securities regulations didn’t quite mix. More specifically, writes Al-Naji, the founders didn’t foresee the some of the ripple effects of the regulatory guidance it began receiving.

For one thing, he writes, Basis soon realized that there would be “no way to avoid securities status for bond and share tokens” and that “due to their status as unregistered securities, bond and share tokens would be subject to transfer restrictions, with [Basis] responsible for limiting token ownership to accredited investors in the U.S. for the first year after issuance, and for performing eligibility checks on international users.”

Part of the problem with this scenario, continues Al Naji, is that “enforcing transfer restrictions would require a centralized whitelist, meaning our system would not only lose its censorship resistance, but also that on-chain auctions would have significantly less liquidity.”

Ultimately, having fewer participants in those on-chain auctions would adversely affect the stability of Basis, he adds, which was sort of the whole point.

It isn’t clear from what’s happened to Basis whether so-called stablecoins are simply not viable, or whether its particular approach to an asset with price stability characteristics was ill-planned. Though it’s easy to grasp how they could spur the adoption of crypto payment applications, the technology remains unproven, even as a stablecoin rush got underway this past summer. As Garrick Hileman, head of research at the cryptocurrency services firm Blockchain, told Technology Review back in September, there were a handful of stablecoins in the works in early 2017. As of this fall, that number was closer to 60.

We’ve reached out to some of Basis’s investors to learn more. In the meantime, it’s worth noting that even when Basis raised that giant round of funding, Al-Naji was candid about not knowing when Basis’s token would be used in circulation. In short, he never made aggressive promises that Basis was unable to keep — at least, not to us directly.

You can read the full text of his letter to investors and supporters below.

Eighteen months ago, we set out with the ambitious goal of creating a better monetary system: one that would be resistant to hyperinflation, free from centralized control, and more stable and robust than the monetary systems that came before it. This was a goal we felt could create tremendous value for society if achieved, and one we also felt well-positioned to take on.

We started with a white paper that proposed a stable, decentralized cryptocurrency called Basis that had the potential to fulfill this vision.

Basis remains stable by incentivizing traders to buy and sell Basis in response to changes in demand. These incentives are set up through regular, on-chain auctions of “bond” and “share” tokens, which serve to adjust Basis supply. Because the Basis ecosystem would take some time to develop, we knew we’d need to initially play the role of trader ourselves, which would be capital-intensive. As such, after publishing our white paper, we raised a $133M round of financing. This allowed us to involve a diverse set of investors who we felt could add a lot of value to the project and enabled us to build a large stabilization fund to bootstrap the system. We then assembled an outstanding team and set our sights on launching the system.

Unfortunately, having to apply US securities regulation to the system had a serious negative impact on our ability to launch Basis.

As regulatory guidance started to trickle out over time, our lawyers came to a consensus that there would be no way to avoid securities status for bond and share tokens (though Basis would likely be free of this characterization).

Due to their status as unregistered securities, bond and share tokens would be subject to transfer restrictions, with Intangible Labs responsible for limiting token ownership to accredited investors in the US for the first year after issuance and for performing eligibility checks on international users.

Enforcing transfer restrictions would require a centralized whitelist, meaning our system would not only lose its censorship resistance, but also that on-chain auctions would have significantly less liquidity.

Having fewer participants in the on-chain auctions adversely affects the stability of Basis, making Basis intrinsically less attractive to users. Additionally, imposing transfer restrictions on bond and share token auctions materially hurts our ability to build the Basis ecosystem.

While transfer restrictions can generally lapse 12 months after a security is issued, because the auctions of bond and share tokens governed by our monetary policy would be continuously issued, transfer restrictions and a centralized whitelist would be required indefinitely.

We considered many alternative paths to launch to try and comply with the regulatory constraints while keeping our product compelling and competitive. These paths included launching offshore with added utility to make bond and share tokens less financial in nature, and starting off with a centralized stability mechanism. Ultimately, however, we don’t think any of the paths we considered are compelling enough for our users or our investors, or consistent enough with our vision to justify moving forward.

As such, I am sad to share the news that we have decided to return capital to our investors. This also means, unfortunately, that the Basis project will be shutting down.

Although this isn’t the outcome any of us wanted, we knew going into this that we were fundamentally making a binary bet on a favorable regulatory landscape. The binary nature of our bet is precisely why we included a return of capital clause in our token sale to begin with, even though it was something we hoped we’d never have to rely on. So, while we’re disappointed we couldn’t launch the system we were all hoping to build, we’re thankful that we can at least do right by our investors given these circumstances.

Finally, we owe our sincere thanks to everyone who supported us and our project—from the extraordinary backers and partners who believed in us, to the outstanding team that joined us in our mission. You gave us the opportunity to change the world, and we’re looking forward to trying again.

Until next time,

Nader Al-Naji, CEO

Batteries. Clothing. Household goods. Supplements. Diapers. Furniture. Toys? Yes, toys. It seems Amazon’s private label business is preparing to enter the toy market next. The retailer’s initial toy listings include an indoor play set for toddlers, along with other toys for climbing and playing on, as well as a toy storage system.

The listings were first spotted by TJI Research this week, but the items themselves are not available for sale. (The listings have also been pulled down, following our inquiry to Amazon.)

In total, the firm found five SKUs: a Soft Play Single Tunnel; Soft Play Climber; Soft Play Climb and Crawl Play Set, 5-Piece, and Kids’ Toy Storage Organizer.

We were able to confirm that the products will be added to the AmazonBasics line in the future and they’re aimed at daycares, more so than consumers.

AmazonBasics is Amazon’s flagship private label brand, where consumers can shop for Amazon’s version of everyday needs like cables, batteries, and other home necessities, such as bed sheets, bath towels, knife sets, tools, and more, plus office products, sports and travel accessories, pet supplies, and many other things. Basically, it’s Amazon’s attempt at owning a piece of the market for every top-selling item and category on its site.

As for the new toys, they’re not exactly Amazon’s attempt to take on Mattel or LEGO, but rather are meant to cater towards childcare business owners, we understand. That is to say, these are not dolls and playthings – they’re classroom needs.

A tunnel for toddlers to climb through or soft foamy shapes for the kids to climb up and over, for example.

Image credit: Amazon.com, via TJI Research

These aren’t the only AmazonBasics supplies geared towards early education classrooms, like daycares and preschools. The retailer already today sells things like small lockers and bookshelves which are also targeted towards the same business customer base.

Still, it is notable that this the first time Amazon has produced its own toys.

Amazon declined to offer an official comment.

The new additions are arriving at a time when Amazon has been looking to increase its precense in the toy market. This year, it mailed out its first printed holiday toy catalog to consumers. It also reported selling over 18 million toys on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, TJI Research noted.

Today, many children’s toys rely on the power of their brand to sell, and their YouTube unboxing videos, too. But Amazon could easily compete on classic toys and staples, if it chose – things like stacking rings or wooden blocks for baby, little wagons, toy cars, easels, wooden puzzles, and more. Newer brands like Melissa & Doug have proven there’s a market for classic toys like this, even in a day and age when kids are drawn to digital playthings like tablets and video games.

However, Amazon hasn’t made any moves yet into the broader toy space – and it may not do so, given the potential for alienating toy makers whose brands it needs to list and sell.

Given the launch of the toy listings pages, TJI Research estimates the toys will begin to ship in the days or weeks ahead.

(Featured image is not an AmazonBasics playset, as the listing was pulled down. It’s a similar product from Walmart’s Hayneedle.)

When the former CTOs of YouTube, Facebook, and Dropbox seed fund a database startup, you know there’s something special going on under the hood. Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane saved YouTube from a scalability nightmare by inventing and open sourcing Vitess, a brilliant relational data storage system. But in the decade since working there, the pair have been inundated with requests from tech companies desperate for help building the operational scaffolding needed to actually integrate Vitess.

So today the pair are revealing their new startup PlanetScale that makes it easy to build multi-cloud databases that handle enormous amounts of information without locking customers into Amazon, Google, or Microsoft’s infrastructure. Battletested at YouTube, the technology could allow startups to fret less about their backend and focus more on their unique value proposition. “Now they don’t have to reinvent the wheel” Vaidya tells me. “A lot of companies facing this scaling problem end up solving it badly in-house and now there’s a way to solve that problem by using us to help.”

PlanetScale has quietly raised a $3 million seed round in April led by SignalFire and joined by a who’s who of engineering luminaries. They include YouTube co-founder and CTO Steve Chen, Quora CEO and former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, former Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal, PayPal and Affirm co-founder Max Levchin, MuleSoft co-founder and CTO Ross Mason, Google director of engineering Parisa Tabriz, and Facebook’s first female engineer and South Park Commons Founder Ruchi Sanghvi. If anyone could foresee the need for Vitess implementation services, it’s these leaders who’ve dealt with scaling headaches at tech’s top companies.

But how can a scrappy startup challenge the tech juggernauts for cloud supremacy? First, by actually working with them. The PlanetScale beta that’s now launching lets companies spin up Vitess clusters on its database-as-a-service, their own through a licensing deal, or on AWS with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure coming shortly. Once these integrations with the tech giants are established, PlanetScale clients can use it as an interface for a multi-cloud setup where they could keep their data master copies on AWS US-West with replicas on Google Cloud in Ireland and elsewhere. That protects companies from becoming dependent on one provider and then getting stuck with price hikes or service problems.

PlanetScale also promises to uphold the principles that undergirded Vitess. “It’s our value that we will keep everything in the query pack completely open source so none of our customers ever have to worry about lock-in” Vaidya says.

Battletested, YouTube Approved

He and Sougoumarane met 25 years ago while at Indian Institute Of Technology Bombay. Back in 1993 they worked at pioneering database company Informix together before it flamed out. Sougoumarane was eventually hired by Elon Musk as an early engineer for X.com before it got acquired by PayPal, and then left for YouTube. Vaidya was working at Google and the pair were reunited when it bought YouTube and Sougoumarane pulled him on to the team.

“YouTube was growing really quickly and the relationship database they were using with MySQL was sort of falling apart at the seams” Vaidya recalls. Adding more CPU and memory to the database infra wasn’t cutting it, so the team created Vitess. The horizontal scaling sharding middleware for MySQL let users segment their database to reduce memory usage while still being able to rapidly run operations. YouTube has smoothly ridden that infrastructure to 1.8 billion users ever since.

“Sugu and Mike Solomon invented and made Vitess open source right from the beginning since 2010 because they knew the scaling problem wasn’t just for YouTube, and they’ll be at other companies 5 or 10 years later trying to solve the same problem” Vaidya explains. That proved true, and now top apps like Square and HubSpot run entirely on Vitess, with Slack now 30 percent onboard.

Vaidya left YouTube in 2012 and became the lead engineer at Endorse, which got acquired by Dropbox where he worked for four years. But in the meantime, the engineering community strayed towards MongoDB-style key-value store databases, which Vaidya considers inferior. He sees indexing issues and says that if the system hiccups during an operation, data can become inconsistent — a big problem for banking and commerce apps. “We think horizontally-scaled relationship databases are more elegant and are something enterprises really need.

Database Legends Reunite

Fed up with the engineering heresy, a year ago Vaidya committed to creating PlanetScale. It’s composed of four core offerings: professional training in Vitess, on-demand support for open source Vitess users, Vitess database-as-a-service on Planetscale’s servers, and software licensing for clients that want to run Vitess on premises or through other cloud providers. It lets companies re-shard their databases on the fly to relocate user data to comply with regulations like GDPR, safely migrate from other systems without major codebase changes, make on-demand changes, and run on Kubernetes.

PlanetScale’s customers now include Indonesian ecommerce giant Bukalapak, and it’s helping Booking.com, GitHub, and New Relic migrate to open source Vitess. Growth is suddenly ramping up due to inbound inquiries. Last month around when Square Cash became the number one app, its engineering team published a blog post extolling the virtues of Vitess. Now everyone’s seeking help with Vitess sharding, and PlanetScale is waiting with open arms. “Jiten and Sugu are legends and know firsthand what companies require to be successful in this booming data landscape” says Ilya Kirnos, founding partner and CTO of SignalFire.

The big cloud providers are trying to adapt to the relational database trend, with Google’s Cloud Spanner and Cloud SQL, and Amazon’s AWS SQL and AWS Aurora. Their huge networks and marketing war chests could pose a threat. But Vaidya insists that while it might be easy to get data into these systems, it can be a pain to get it out. PlanetScale is designed to give them freedom of optionality through its multi-cloud functionality so their eggs aren’t all in one basket.

Finding product market fit is tough enough. Trying to suddenly scale a popular app while also dealing with all the other challenges of growing a company can drive founders crazy. But if it’s good enough for YouTube, startups can trust PlanetScale to make databases one less thing they have to worry about.

Earlier this year, Apple Music launched some of its top charts as playlist series. Today, YouTube is doing something similar. The company announced it’s making its YouTube Charts available as playlists in YouTube Music to users across the 29 markets where the music service is live. Each market will receive five of these “charts playlists” – three specific to their country, and two global lists, the company says.

The Top 100 Songs and the Top 100 Music Videos will be offered both as local and global playlists, while the Top 20 Trending Songs will be offered as a local playlist.

This latter playlist is updated several times per day in order to offer a real-time view into current music trends in a specific country. It’s also the first “dedicated external signal of the country’s most-viewed new music on the YouTube platform,” Google explained in a blog post this afternoon.

The other Top 100 Songs and Music Video charts are calculated differently and updated less often. The Top Songs is based on the overall performance of a song on YouTube by view count, which includes counting all the official versions of a song – meaning, the official music video, the user generated content that uses the official song, and lyric videos.

The Top Songs chart is updated weekly, according to YouTube’s documentation on how the charts are calculated.

The Top 100 Music Videos ranks the official music videos by view count in the previous week. It’s also updated weekly.

By comparison, YouTube Music’s Top Songs and Music Videos charts seem to have the potential to be staler than those on rival services. For example, when Apple announced its Top 100 Songs chart would be available both as global and local playlists, it said it would update them daily at 12 AM PT based on Apple Music streams. Spotify’s top charts are also available both as daily and weekly charts.

“The charts, currently topped globally by Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next,” are the most accurate reflection of what’s happening in music culture and based purely on the number of views from more than 1 billion global music fans on YouTube each month,” noted the post, which does speak to YouTube Music’s strength.

Apple Music and Spotify are both fighting to break into the triple-digit millions in terms of paying customers, while Spotify is nearing 200 million total actives. But YouTube has a billion-plus users to generate its data from. That’s not insignificant.

The new charts-turned-playlists are now available in the YouTube Music app. The playlists will appear on users’ home screens and be surfaced through search, says YouTube.

The simplest needs are often the most vital: power and clean water will get you a long way. But in rural areas of developing countries they can both be hard to come by. OffGridBox is attempting to provide both, sustainably and profitably, while meeting humanitarian and ecological goals at the same time. The company just raised $1.6 million to pursue its lofty agenda.

The idea is fairly simple, though naturally rather difficult to engineer: Use solar power to provide both electricity (in the form of charged batteries) and potable water to a small community. It’s not easy, and it’s not autonomous — but that’s by design.

I met two of the OffGridBox crew, founder and CEO Emiliano Cecchini and U.S. director Troy Billett, much earlier this year at CES in Las Vegas, where they were being honored by Not Impossible, alongside the brilliant BecDot braille learning toy. The team had a lot of irons in the fire, but now are ready to announce their seed round and progress in deploying what could be a life-saving innovation.

They’ve installed 38 boxes so far, some at their own expense and others with the help of backers. Each is about the size of a small shed — a section of a shipping container, with a scaffold on top to attach the solar cells. Inside are the necessary components for storing electricity and distributing it to dozens of rechargeable batteries and lights at a time, plus a water reservoir and purifier.

Water from a nearby unsafe natural (or municipal, really) source is trucked or piped in and replenishes the reservoir. The solar cells run the purifier, providing clean water for cheap — around a third of what a family would normally pay, by the team’s estimate — and potentially with a much shorter trek. Simultaneously, charged batteries and lights are rented out at similarly low rates to people otherwise without electricity. Each box can generate as much as 12 kWh per day, which is split between the two tasks.

The alternatives for these communities would generally be small dedicated solar installations, the upfront cost of which can be unrealistic for them. The average household spend for electricity, Billett told me, is around 43 cents per day; OffGridBox will be offering it for less than half that, about 18 cents.

It doesn’t run itself: The box is administrated by a local merchant, who handles payments and communication with OffGridBox itself. Young women are targeted for this role, as there they are more likely to be long-term residents of the area and members of the community. The box acts as a small business for them, essentially drawing money out of the air.

OffGridBox works with local nonprofits to find likely candidates; the women pictured above were recommended by Women for Women. They in turn will support others who, for example, deliver or resell the water or run side businesses that rely on the electricity provided. There’s even an associated local bottled water brand now — “Amaziyateke,” named after a big leaf that collects rainwater, but in Rwanda is also slang for a beautiful woman.

Some boxes are being set up to offer Wi-Fi as well via a cellular or satellite connection, which has its own obvious benefits. And recently people have been asking for the ability to play music at home, so the company started including portable speakers. This was unexpected but an easy demand to meet, said Billett — “It is critical to listen!”

The company does do some work to keep the tech running efficiently and safely, remotely monitoring for problems and scheduling maintenance calls. So these things aren’t just set down and forgotten. That said, they can and have run for hundreds of thousands of hours — years — without major work being done.

Each box costs about $15K to build, plus roughly another $10K to deliver and install. The business model has an investor or investors cover this initial cost, then receive a share of the revenue for the life of the box. At capacity usage this might take around two years, after which the revenue split shifts (from 80/20 favoring investors to 50/50) and it’s a small, safe source of income for years to come. At around $10K of revenue per year per box with full utilization, the IRR is estimated at 15 percent.

What OffGridBox believes is that this model is better than any other for quick deployment of these boxes. Grants are an option, of course, and they can also be brought in for disaster relief purposes. Originally the idea was to sell these to rich folks who wanted to live off the grid or have a more self-sufficient mountain cabin, but this is definitely better — for a lot of reasons. (You could probably still get one for yourself if you really wanted.)

OffGridBox has been through the Techstars accelerator as part of a 2017 group, and worked through 2018, as I mentioned earlier, to secure funding from a variety of sources. This seed round totaling $1.6M was led by the Doen and Good Energies Foundations; the Banque Populaire du Rwanda is also a partner.

Along with a series A planned for 2019, this money will support the deployment of a total of 42 box installations in Rwandan communities.

“This will help us become a major player in the energy and water markets in Rwanda while empowering women entrepreneurs, fighting biocontamination for improved health, and introducing lighting in rural homes,” said Ceccini in the press release announcing the funding.

Alternative or complementary sources of power, such as wind, are being looked into, and desalination of water (as opposed to just sterilization) is being actively researched. This would increase the range and reliability of the boxes, naturally, and make island communities much more realistic.

Those 42 boxes are just the beginning: the company hopes to deploy as many as a thousand throughout Rwanda, and even then that would only reach a fifth of the country’s off-grid market. By partnering with local energy concerns and banks, OffGridBox hopes to deploy as many as a hundred boxes a year, potentially bringing water and power to as many as a hundred thousand more people.

Parallel Domain, the startup that develops software to train self-driving cars in virtual worlds, has added an additional investor to its seed round. Earlier this month, Toyota AI Ventures contributed to Parallel Domain’s $2.65 million seed round led by Costanoa Ventures with participation from Ubiquity Ventures and others.

“We’re not only impressed with their technology, but also with the Parallel Domain team,” Toyota AI Ventures Founding Manager Director Jim Adler wrote in a blog post. “They have a clear vision for solving the problems associated with getting AVs on the road safely, and the expertise to make it happen.”

Using real-world map data, procedural growth algorithms and generative models, Parallel Domain’s platform can teach cars how to drive and make sure the car’s software is learning how to drive properly, he said. All elements of the world are adjustable and programmable — be that the number of lanes, type of terrain, the location of mountains, road curvature and so forth.

Initially, the plan is to sell this platform to autonomous vehicle companies. From there, an autonomous vehicle company could use Parallel Domain to generate 3D, virtual worlds in which to test their cars.

Holberton School, the full-stack software engineering school that opened its first campus in San Francisco in 2015, today announced that it is opening two campuses in Colombia, one in Bogotá and one in Medellin. This marks the school’s first international expansion and comes only a few months after it opened its first East Coast campus in New Haven, Connecticut. Applications for the programs in Colombia are now open, with the first batch of students starting in January 2019.

The idea behind Holberton has always been to give students something akin to a college engineering degree. It’s a two-year program that focuses on the fundamentals of software engineering, not just on the raw programming skills that many coding boot camps tend to stress.

[gallery ids="1758640,1758687,1758692"]

“Colombia’s digital growth is so impressive that they cannot currently train the required pool of software engineering talent fast enough,” said Julien Barbier, Holberton’s CEO and co-founder, in today’s announcement. “These new schools will enable Colombia to take a quantum leap into the Fourth Industrial Revolution and give so many of its citizens lasting skills and high-quality jobs.”

For the first time Holberton is also partnering with a local nonprofit, Coderise, to operate the school. In addition, Holberton is also partnering with delivery startup Rappi, Colombia’s first unicorn that will ensure that a nice cold Club Colombia arrives at your door anytime you need it. Rappi is contributing the opening costs of the school in Bogotá and will provide mentors to students. The company also says that it plans to hire some of the school’s graduates.

“The future of LATAM is digital, and we are leading the revolution in Colombia. But this success will depend on available high-quality software engineering talent,” said Rappi co-founder and CEO Simón Borrero. “The ability of Holberton to attract students of all genders, rich or poor, educated or not and to effectively train them on in-demand skills is exactly what’s needed.”

Holberton’s selection process is largely automated and focused on a number of projects and challenges. The company argues that this allows for an unbiased admissions process, something that looks to have panned out in practice.

Instacart has announced this morning it will no longer be doing business with Whole Foods, a U.S. organic grocery chain the company launched a partnership with in 2014. This comes roughly one year after Amazon closed its $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods; Amazon, of course, has its own grocery delivery service, AmazonFresh.

Currently, Instacart has 1,415 in-store shoppers, or paid Instacart couriers, at 76 Whole Foods locations. 243 of those couriers, who exclusively deliver groceries from Whole Foods, will no longer be able to make Instacart deliveries beginning February 10, when the company officially winds down its partnership. Instacart says they have already placed 75 percent of those workers to new roles, though 25 percent, or about 60 workers, have been laid off.

Instacart added that 75 percent of the 1,415 total shoppers, or 1,016 people, are also expected to be placed in new stores, meaning layoffs could surpass 350.

A person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that significant developments over the last 18 months forced Instacart to wind down its relationship earlier than planned. Whole Foods didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Whole Foods will fully exit the Instacart marketplace, which allows shoppers to order from more than 300 retailers, including Kroger, Costco, Walmart and Sam’s Club, in 2019.

In a blog post this morning, Instacart founder and chief executive officer Apoorva Mehta (pictured) said the company will be offering transfer bonuses to all current Whole Foods couriers being transitioned to new stores. As for those being laid off as part of the dissolution of the partnership, Instacart will provide a minimum of 3-months separation package based on maximum monthly pay in 2018.

Instacart pays 70,000 people to shop for its customers. The 1,415 affected by the news may seem like a small fraction, but its bad news for the business, which has likely been bracing for this since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos signed the Whole Foods check in 2017.

VCs, however, seem to be confident in Instacart’s ability to compete with Amazon. The company raised $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation in October, just six months after it brought in a $150 million round and roughly eight months after a $200 million financing that valued the business at $4.2 billion.

We love parties almost as much as we love startups, but we go absolutely bonkers for a hot startup-party mashup. That’s why we’re returning to host our 2nd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party in San Francisco on Friday, February 8. Even better news, party-goers — the first batch of coveted tickets to this wild winter romp are available now. Better get your tickets while you can.

Last year’s inaugural event was a huge success as nearly 1,000 of Silicon Valley’s brightest minds came to relax, connect and celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit of the startup community — and cast a keen eye over some promising startups.

This year’s soiree takes place at Galvanize and features tasty libations, delicious hors d’oeuvres and engaging conversation. That sounds so very civilized, right? Well, don’t dry clean your stuffed shirt just yet, because we’ll have plenty of party games and activities, giveaways and fun surprises. And, of course, plenty of photo ops, baby!

Galvanize may be a multi-level venue, but the space is still limited — as are the tickets. We’re rolling them out in batches over the next few weeks, so keep checking back if you can’t snag a ticket. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter (if you don’t already) to stay up to date on the next release.

Here are the pertinent Winter Party details.

• When: Friday, February 8, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
• Where: Galvanize, 44 Tehama St., San Francisco, CA 94105
• Ticket price: $85

Here’s another great idea. Why just mingle and schmooze when you can mingle, schmooze and demo your early-stage startup in front of hundreds of the Valley’s top star-makers? Buy a demo table for $1,500 (the price also includes three attendee tickets). Demo tables are limited, so act now before other founders snatch ’em up.

Of course, no TechCrunch party is complete without plenty of awesome prizes, including TC swag and tickets to Disrupt San Francisco 2019, which takes place this October. Come on out for a great midwinter’s night of relaxed connection, fun and opportunity. Get your tickets to the 2nd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party at Galvanize today.

The fourth test flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo took its test pilots to the very edge of space this morning, reaching just over 52 miles of altitude and a maximum speed of Mach 2.9. It’s another exciting leapfrog of the aspiring space tourism company’s previous achievements.

Takeoff was at 7:30 AM against a lovely sunrise in the Mojave:

The actual spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, was strapped to the belly of WhiteKnightTwo (VSS Unity and VMS Eve specifically) as the latter gave it a ride up to about 45,000 feet.

At that point SpaceShipTwo ignited its rocket engine and started zooming upwards at increasing speed. The 60-second burn of the engine, 18 seconds longer than the third test flight’s, took the craft up to Mach 2.9 — quite a bit faster than before.

After that minute-long burn SpaceShipTwo deployed its “feathers,” helping slow and guide it to a controlled re-entry. It had at this point reached 271,268 feet, approximately 51.4 miles or 82.7 kilometers.

Now, space “officially” begins by international consensus at 100 km, at what’s called the Karman line. But space-like conditions begin well before that, and a planned altitude of around 80 km was good enough for NASA to load a set of microgravity experiments onto the craft. And some have suggested the line should be 80 km instead. So while it’s debatable whether Virgin Galactic truly went to space (the company is saying so), it definitely got close enough to get a taste.

And the pilots, Mark ‘forger’ Stucky and CJ Sturckow, are definitely astronauts.

If this flight isn’t the one that makes Virgin Galactic the first to get to space without a national space organization’s help, chances are the next one will be. I’m awaiting more images from the flight and will update this post with them as soon as they’re available.