Year: 2018

Investors may have already placed their orders in the consumer food delivery space, but there’s still a missing recipe for solving the over $250 billion business-to-business foodservice distribution problem that’s begging for venture firms to put more cooks in the kitchen. 

Stock prices for Sysco and US Foods, the two largest food distributors, are up by over 20% since last summer when Amazon bought Whole Foods. But, have these companies haven’t made any material changes to their business model to counteract the threat of Amazon. I know a thing or two about the food services industry and the need for a B2B marketplace in an industry ripe with all of our favorite buzz words: fragmentation, last mile logistics and a lack of pricing transparency.

The business-to-business food problem

Consumers have it good. Services such as Amazon and Instacart are pushing for our business and attention and thus making it great for the end users. By comparison, food and ingredient delivery for businesses is vastly underserved. The business of foodservice distribution hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention – or capital – as consumer delivery, and the industry is further behind when it comes to serving customers. Food-preparation facilities often face a number of difficulties getting the ingredients to cook the food we all enjoy.

Who are these food-preparation facilities? They range from your local restaurants, hotels, school and business cafeterias, catering companies, and many other facilities that supply to grocery markets, food trucks and so on. This market is gigantic. Ignoring all other facilities, just U.S. restaurants alone earn about $800 billion in annual sales. That’s based on research by the National Restaurant Association (the “other NRA”). Specific to foodservice distribution in the U.S., the estimated 2016 annual sales were a sizable $280 billion.

How it works today

Every one of these food-preparation facilities relies on a number of relationships with distributors (and sometimes, but rarely, directly from farms) to get their necessary ingredients. Some major national players including Sysco and US Foods mainly supply “dry goods.” For fresh meats, seafood and produce plus other artisanal goods, these facilities rely on a large number of local wholesale distributors. A few examples of wholesalers and distributors near where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area are ABS Seafood, Golden Gate Meat Company, Green Leaf, Hodo Soy and VegiWorks.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of these food-prep businesses don’t shop for ingredients the way you and I may shop for ingredients from our local supermarkets or farmer markets. There’s too little margin in food and doing so would be too costly, as well as highly inefficient (e.g., having to pay to send staff out “grocery shopping”). A few small operators do buy ingredients from wholesale chains such as Costco or Restaurant Depot. But in general, it’s way more efficient to place an order with a distributor and get the goods delivered directly to your food-prep facility.

But that’s where the problems lie. These distributors are completely fragmented, and the quality of fresh ingredients varies meaningfully from one distributor to the next. Prices fluctuate constantly, typically on a weekly basis. What’s worse is delivery timeliness, or rather the lack thereof. These distributors each employs their own delivery staff and refrigerated trucks. There is a limited number of 6 am deliveries they can make for a given delivery fleet.

As a food business operator, you may be ordering quality ingredients at the right price, but if the delivery doesn’t show up on time, you’re outta luck. You won’t be able to prepare the food in time, all the while paying for staff who are sitting around and waiting for ingredients to arrive.

As a result, you keep getting seemingly random offline pitches with promotions and price breaks from these distributors. But there’s no way to ensure timely delivery. Everybody makes verbal promises and it’s all based on who you know. Things may work for a week or two until you get “deprioritized” by one of the distributors and you have to start the process of finding the next one.

You intentionally rotate among the different distributors, just to keep them “on their toes.”

The opportunity for a food distribution platform

What’s missing is a platform that hosts a catalog of products from these distributors, with updatable availability, pricing and inventory. On it, food businesses could browse for products and place orders. Fulfillment can be done by the distributors at the beginning, but ultimately that operation may need to be done by the platform to maintain consistent quality of service. Reliable fulfillment may end up being the biggest differentiator for such a platform.

I’m aware of startups that have tried to become the dominant B2B platform for food service distribution. But it takes meaningful resources to get to critical mass and these startups tend to flame out before reaching that point. It’s not necessarily their fault for not being effective.

This industry has low margins, is slow to adopt new technologies and has many incumbent players. But the opportunity to design and execute on this platform is significant, with clear ROI as a reward and a built-in moat once it reaches critical mass.

Food-prep businesses are hungry for a better solution. And as any food entrepreneur knows, hungry customers are the best kind.

Drive.ai, the company that’s gearing up to launch an autonomous ride-hailing pilot in Frisco, Texas, just released a video showing off its driverless capabilities. Drive.ai’s service will initially launch with safety drivers in July, but the goal is to ultimately operate the ride-hailing platform without a driver behind the wheel.

In the video below, you can see a Drive.ai-powered car navigate both public and private roads without even a safety driver. On the lower right hand corner, you can see an augmented reality visualization that shows how the perception system works to identify cars, pedestrians, cyclists and other objects.

Before the July launch, Drive.ai will be collecting data along the routes and working with the city to educate people about self-driving technology. During this trial period, which starts in July and will run for six months, the service will be limited to employees, residents and patrons of Hall properties. Down the road, the goal is to open up the program to all residents of Frisco.

It seems Virginia is for tech lovers.

According to a report in The Washington Post, Apple has been searching for places to put hubs as it contemplates how to spend the $30 billion it has committed for new facilities and 20,000 new employees in the U.S. over the next five years — and it looks like Virginia is on the list.

If Virginia makes the cut, Apple would be the second large tech company to call the state a (second or third) home, as Amazon is also reportedly looking at Virginia as a site for its second U.S. headquarters.

The Post is reporting that Apple could seek to put up to 20,000 employees in a potential Northern Virginia campus that would total 4 million square feet of office space.

Citing conversations between the company and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, the Post reported that state officials had proposed several sites for the Apple campus, which would be two-thirds the size of the Pentagon and half of what Amazon is looking for in its new HQ.

All of the attention from Amazon and Apple speaks to the new realty for tech companies, which is that Washington, DC has its eye on them… and, conversely, these companies need to have a closer eye on Washington.

Facebook and Google, which is owned by parent company Alphabet, have both also expanded their presence in the DC area. Four years ago, Google opened new offices in the capital to much fanfare and ballyhoo, while Facebook plans to site a $1 billion data center in the Richmond area.

Welcome back to CTRL+T, the TechCrunch podcast where Megan Rose Dickey and I talk about the stories we want to talk about and connect them to the culture in which we’re all trying to live.

We first tackled the flying taxi phenomenon that isn’t really a phenomenon anymore. It’s more like a we’re all going to be ducking under the near-distant hum of electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles, or eVTOLs (really rolls off the tongue) sooner than later. You see, Uber already has deals with flying taxi manufacturers, electric vehicle battery and charger manufacturers, and firms who want to build the “skyports” from which these things are going to have to take off and land. And the public learned all about it at Uber Elevate.

But before we talked about Uber, we spent some time discussing the inside of Megan’s mouth. Regular readers might recall a recent visit she made to Uniform Teeth to find out about the startup’s funding round. She tried out their 3D imaging tech and received some news she wasn’t quite prepared for. And recorded the audio.

It’s a rip-roaring episode, folks, so click play below to have a listen. Or better yet, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, CastBox or whatever other podcast platform you can find.

Last week at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, TechCrunch held its second TC Sessions: Robotics event. It was a full day of panels and demos, featuring the top minds in robotics, artificial intelligence and venture capital, along with some of the most cutting-edge demonstrations around.

If you weren’t able to attend, though, no worries; we’ve got the full event recorded for posterity, along with breakdowns of what you missed below.

Getting A Grip on Reality: Deep Learning and Robot Grasping

It turns out grasping objects is really hard for a robot. According to Ken Goldberg, professor and chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department, it’s about forces and torques. He and TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Matthew Panzarino also discussed what Goldberg calls “fog robotics.” Goldberg differentiates it from “cloud robotics” in that “you don’t want to do everything in the cloud because of latency issues and bandwidth limitations, quality of service – and there are also very interesting issues about privacy and security with robotics.”

The Future of the Robot Operating System

Fetch Robotics CEO Melonee Wise joined fellow Willow Garage ex-pats Brian Gerkey and Morgan Quigley to discuss Open Robotics’ Robot Operating System (ROS) efforts. The team is working to design and maintain an open and consistent framework for a broad range of different robotic systems.

Eyes, Ears, and Data: Robot Sensors and GPUs

NVIDIA Vice President Deepu Talla discussed how the chipmaker is making a central play in the AI and deep learning technologies that will drive robots, drones and autonomous vehicles of the future.

The Best Robots on Four Legs

Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert announced onstage that the company’s 66-pound SpotMini robot will be available for purchase by the normals in 2019. Yes, one day you, too, will be able to have a dog robot perform services for you at the office or home.

Old MacDonald Needs a Robot

Agriculture is one of the next major fields for robotics, and we brought together some of the top startups in the field. Dan Steere of Abundant Robotics, Brandon Alexander of Iron Ox, Sébastien Boyer of Farmwise and Willy Pell of John Deere-owned Blue River Technology joined us on stage to discuss the ways in which robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems will transform farm work in fields and orchards.

Teaching Robots New Tricks with AI

Pieter Abbeel is the Director of the UC Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and the co-founder of AI software company, covariant.ai. In a broad ranging discussion, Abbeel described the techniques his lab is using to teach robots how to better interact in human settings through repetition, simulation and learning from their own trial and error.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Ayanna Howard of Georgia Tech, Leila Takayama of UC Santa Cruz and Patrick Sobalvarro of Veo Robotics took part in an exploration of the ways in which humans and robots can collaborate in work and home settings. Getting there is a mix of safety and education on both the humans’ and robots’ behalf.

Demos from 254 Lockdown, 1678 Citrus Circuit, Pi Competition: Hercules

Robotics teams from Bellarmine College Preparatory, Davis High School and Hercules High School took to the stage before lunch time to show us what they have been working on. Each team built robots designed to tackle various tasks and the results are impressive.

Venture Investing in Robotics

Renata Quintini of Lux Capital, Rob Coneybeer of Shasta Ventures, and Chris Evdemon of Sinovation Ventures all discussed the excitement around startups venturing into the robotics industry, but were also quite candid about the difficulty robotics founders face who are unfamiliar with a particular industry that they hope could reshape their innovation.

Betting Big on Robotics

Andy Rubin has had a lifelong fascination with robotics. In fact, it was his nickname during his time at Apple that gave the Android operating system its name. After a stint heading a robotics initiative at Google, Rubin is using his role as a cofounder of Playground Global to fund some of the most fascinating robotics startups around. In a one-on-one discussion, Rubin talked about why robotics are a good long- and short-term investment, and why one particular long-legged robot could be the future of package delivery.

From the Lab Bench to Term Sheet

This cute little robot from Mayfield Robotics can blink, play music, turn its head and recharge itself. It can also just stay put to take pictures of you and live-stream your daily life. Yep. It watches you. Its name is Kuri and it can be your little buddy to always remind you that you never have to be alone.

Agility Robotics demonstration of Cassie

Agility Robotics’ bipedal humanoid robot was designed with bird legs in mind. But it wasn’t yet designed with arms. The company’s CTO Jonathan Hurst says those are to come. It’ll cost you $35,000 when it’s in full production mode. Custom deliveries started in August 2017 to a select few universities — University of Michigan, Harvard and Caltech, and Berkeley just bought its own. Although we didn’t see an example of this application, Cassie can apparently hold the body weight of a reasonably sized human.

Autonomous Systems

Safety has long been the focus of the push toward self-driving systems. Recent news stories, however, have cast a pall on the technology, leading many to suggest that companies have pushed to introduce it too quickly on public streets. Oliver Cameron of Voyage and Alex Rodrigues of Embark Trucks joined us to discuss these concerns and setbacks, as well as how the self-driving industry moves forward from here.

Teaching Intelligent Machines

NVIDIA is working to help developers create robots and artificial intelligent systems. Vice president of Engineering Claire Delaunay discussed how the company is creating the tools to help democratize the creation of future robotics.

The Future of Transportation

Chris Urmson has been in the self-driving car game for a long time. He joined Google’s self-driving car team in 2009, becoming head of the project four years later. These days, he’s the CEO of Aurora, a startup that has logged a lot of hours testing its own self-driving tech on the roads. Urmson discussed the safety concerns around the technology and how far out we are from self-driving ubiquity.

Demos of RoMeLa’s NABi and ALPHRED

Humans are bipedal, so why is it so hard to replicate that in a robot, asks Dennis Hong, professor and founding director of RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Library) of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA. One of the reasons he said is because the distance between the left and right legs creates a twisting movement that renders forward and backward movement difficult. The resolution is to have them walk sideways. No twisting. So the team developed NABi (non-anthropomorphic biped), a bipedal locomotion robot with no “feet” or “shins.” To extend the admittedly limited functionality of NABi, the team then created ALPHRED (Autonomous Legged Personal Helper Robot with Enhanced Dynamics). ALPHRED’s limbs, as the team calls them (“not legs, not arms”), form to create multimodal locomotion, because of its multiple types of formations.

Building Stronger Humans

The BackX, LegX and ShoulderX from SuitX serve to minimize the stress we humans tend to place on our joints. We saw the application of these modules onstage. But infinitely more impressive during the conversation with company co-founder Homayoon Kazerooni was the application the audience saw of the company’s exoskeleton. Arash Bayatmakou fell from a balcony in 2012 which resulted in paralysis. He was told he would never walk again. Five years later, Arash connected with SuitX, and he has been working with a physical therapist to use the device to perform four functions: stand, sit and walk forward and backward. You can follow his recovery here.

Compound wants to let you borrow cryptocurrency, or lend it and earn an interest rate. Most cryptocurrency is shoved in a wallet or metaphorically hidden under a mattress, failing to generate interest the way traditionally banked assets do. But Compound wants to create liquid money markets for cryptocurrency by algorithmically setting interest rates, and letting you gamble by borrowing and then short-selling coins you think will sink. It plans to launch its first five for Ether, a stable coin, and a few others, by October.

Today, Compound is announcing some ridiculously powerful allies for that quest. It’s just become the first-ever investment by crypto exchange juggernaut Coinbase’s new venture fund. It’s part of an $8.2 million seed round led by top-tier VC Andreessen Horowitz, crypto hedge fund Polychain Capital and Bain Capital Ventures — the startup arm of the big investment bank.

While right now Compound deals in cryptocurrency through the Ethereum blockchain, co-founder and CEO Robert Leshner says that eventually he wants to carry tokenized versions of real-world assets like the dollar, yen, euro or Google stock. That’s because Leshner tells me “My thesis is that almost every crypto asset is bullshit and not worth anything.”

How to get Compound interest on your crypto

Here’s how Compound tells me it’s going to work. It’s an “overnight” market that permits super-short-term lending. While it’s not a bank, it is centralized, so you loan to and borrow from it directly instead of through peers, alleviating you from negotiation. If you loan, you can earn interest. If you borrow, you have to put up 100 percent of the value of your borrow in an asset Compound supports. If prices fluctuate and your borrow becomes worth more than your collateral, some of your collateral is liquidated through a repo agreement so they’re equal.

To set the interest rate, Compound acts kind of like the Fed. It analyzes supply and demand for a particular crypto asset to set a fluctuating interest rate that adjusts as market conditions change. You’ll earn that on what you lend constantly, and can pull out your assets at any time with just a 15-second lag. You’ll pay that rate when you borrow. And Compound takes a 10 percent cut of what lenders earn in interest. For crypto-haters, it offers a way to short coins you’re convinced are doomed.

“Eventually our goal is to hand-off responsibility [for setting the interest rate] to the community. In the short-term we’re forced to be responsible. Long-term we want the community to elect the Fed,” says Leshner. If it gets the interest rate wrong, an influx of lenders or borrowers will drive it back to where it’s supposed to be. Compound already has a user interface prototyped internally, and it looked slick and solid to me.

“We think it’s a game changer. Ninety percent of assets are sitting in people’s cold storage, or wallets, or exchanges. They aren’t being used or traded,” says Leshner. Compound could let people interact with crypto in a whole new way.

The Compound creation story

Compound is actually the third company Leshner and his co-founder and CTO Geoff Hayes have started together. They’ve been teamed up for 11 years since going to college at UPenn. One of their last companies, Britches, created an index of CPG inventory at local stores and eventually got acquired by Postmates. But before that Leshner got into the banking and wealth management business, becoming a certified public accountant. A true economics nerd, he’s the chair of the SF bond oversight committee, and got into crypto five years ago.

Sitting on coins, Leshner wondered, “Why can’t I realize the time value of the cryptocurrency I possess?” Compound was born in mid-2017, and came out of stealth in January.

Now with $8.2 million in funding that also came from Transmedia Capital, Compound Ventures, Abstract Ventures and Danhua Capital, Compound is pushing to build out its product and partnerships, and “hire like crazy” beyond its seven current team members based in San Francisco’s Mission District. Partners will be crucial to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of getting its first lenders and borrowers. “We are planning to launch with great partners — token projects, hedge funds and dedicated users,” says Leshner. Having hedge funds like Polychain should help.

“We shunned an ICO. We said, ‘let’s raise venture capital.’ I’m a very skeptical person and I think most ICOs are illegal,” Leshner notes. The round was just about to close when Coinbase announced Coinbase Ventures. So Leshner fired off an email asking if it wanted to join. “In 12 hours they researched us, met our team, diligenced it and evaluated it more than almost any investor had to date,” Leshner recalls. Asked if there’s any conflict of interest given Coinbase’s grand ambitions, he said, “They’re probably our favorite company in the world. I hope they survive for 100 years. It’s too early to tell they overlap.”

Conquering the money markets

There are other crypto lending platforms, but none quite like Compound. Centralized exchanges like Bitfinex and Poloniex let people trade on margin and speculate more aggressively. But they’re off-chain, while Leshner says Compound is on-chain, transparent and can be built on top of. That could make it a more critical piece of the blockchain finance stack. There’s also a risk of these exchanges getting hacked and your coins getting stolen.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of peer-to-peer crypto lending protocols on the Ethereum blockchain, like ETHLend and Dharma. But interest rates, no need for slow matching, flexibility for withdrawing money and dealing with a centralized party could attract users to Compound.

Still, the biggest looming threat for Compound is regulation. But to date, the SEC and regulators have focused on ICOs and how people fundraise, not on what people are building. People aren’t filing lawsuits against actual products. “All the operations have flown beneath the radar and I think that’s going to change in the next 12 months,” Leshner predicts. How exactly they’ll treat Compound is up in the air.

One source in the crypto hedge fund space told me about forthcoming regulation: “You’re either going to get annihilated and have to disgorge profits or dissolve. Or you pay a fine and you’re among the first legal funds in the space. This is the gamble you take before asset classes get baptized.” As Leshner confirmed, “That’s the number one risk, period.”

Money markets are just one piece of the financial infrastructure puzzle that still needs to emerge around blockchain. Custodians, auditors, administrators and banks are still largely missing. When those get hammered out to make the space safer, the big money hedge funds and investment banks could join in. For Compound, getting the logistics right will require some serious legal ballet.

Yet Leshner is happy to dream big despite all of the crypto world’s volatility. He concludes, “We want to be like Black Rock with a trillion under management, and we want to have 25 employees when we do that. They probably have [tens of thousands] of employees. Our goal is to be like them with a skeleton team.”

Coinbase has come a long way since its launch in 2012. The company has raised more than $225 million and paved the way for cryptocurrencies to enter the mainstream by providing a digital currency exchange. Which is why we’re absolutely thrilled to have Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong join us on the main stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September.

Armstrong worked as a developer for IBM and consultant at Deloitte before joining Airbnb as a software engineer in 2011. At Airbnb, Armstrong focused on fraud prevention, giving him the opportunity to learn about payment systems across the 190 countries Airbnb serves.

In 2012, Armstrong co-founded Coinbase and gave a budding demographic of cryptocurrency enthusiasts the opportunity to trade in their USD for bitcoins, and later the digital currency of their choice. Coinbase currently serves over 10 million customers across 32 countries, providing custody for more than $10 billion in digital assets.

In fact, Coinbase was valued at $1.6 billion following a $100 million funding round in August 2017.

In April, the company unveiled an early-stage fund for cryptocurrency startups, and acquired Earn.com for $100 million. As part of the acquisition, the company brought on Balaji Srinivasan as its first CTO.

There were also reports that Coinbase approached the SEC to become a licensed brokerage firm and electronic trading venue, which would allow the company to expand beyond the four coins (Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin) that trade on the platform now.

Just yesterday, Coinbase announced that it would offer a new suite of services aimed at institutional investors, who are beginning to warm up to cryptocurrencies.

There is plenty to discuss with Armstrong come September, and we’re absolutely thrilled to have him join the stellar Disrupt SF agenda. You can head over here to buy yourself tickets. See you there!

French startup OpenClassrooms is raising $60 million from General Atlantic, with existing investors Citizen Capital, Alven and Bpifrance also participating.

OpenClassrooms is the most popular massive open online course platform in France. But the startup has evolved beyond on-demand courses to provide full-fledged degrees. You can now get a degree certified by the French state by studying full time on OpenClassrooms.

Every month, 3 million users access OpenClassrooms. Many of them just want to learn something and maybe get a certification. But more and more people are following one of the 30 bachelor and master degrees. You can study many things from web and mobile development to data management and marketing.

But OpenClassrooms isn’t just leaving you with a big pile of courses to study. The company has created a community of mentors who will regularly check with you to see how you’re doing. There are 600 mentors working for OpenClassrooms.

These paths aren’t cheap as you’ll need to pay around €300 per month ($350). But it’s still cheaper and more flexible than attending a traditional engineering school right after the baccalauréat. For instance, if you want to work on the side and live in a cheap city, you can do that as you just need a computer and an internet connection.

The company will even guarantee that you’ll find a job after that. If you can’t find a job within six months, OpenClassrooms will pay you back for the degree.

And OpenClassrooms recently unveiled the next step. As OpenClassrooms students easily find a job after getting a degree, the startup started working with companies directly.

IT service company Capgemini is always looking for new people as there’s usually a high turnover in IT service companies. That’s why Capgemini is hiring trainees with OpenClassrooms.

Students learn a new skill and then work part time for Capgemini. OpenClassrooms charges Capgemini directly, students don’t have to pay for their studies and get a job instantly. It’s a win for everyone.

When I first learned about this program, I thought OpenClassrooms had finally found a highly profitable business model. Now, the company has signed deals with Orange and Google.org.

With today’s funding round, the team is going to double in size. “Within a year, OpenClassrooms will provide a hundred digital degrees, including a third of them in English,” co-founder and CEO Pierre Dubuc told me.

Many will focus on digital skills, such as data science, computer science and cybersecurity. But there will also be non-technical degrees around HR, management, accounting, marketing and communication. OpenClassrooms could end up becoming one of the biggest university in the world.

Hulu’s mobile and web apps are getting an upgrade. The company is introducing a series of new features to make the apps more personalized, as well as better support Hulu’s newer Live TV experience, among other things. It’s also adding HDMI support for iOS and improving the Chromecast option, so it’s easier to watch on a big screen – even if you don’t have a streaming media player, like Roku or Apple TV.

The changes were announced this afternoon by Hulu SVP, Head of Experience, Ben Smith, during his keynote address at The Pay TV Show event in Denver.

Some of the updates had already made their way to other platforms, and are now heading to mobile and web.

For example, last week Hulu launched its new live TV destination and guide on its TV platforms, like Apple TV, Fire TV, and game consoles, with plans to roll out to more living room devices soon.

Today, Hulu says that live TV destination and guide will come to mobile, as well. The guide, which resembles the traditional TV guide you’d find on a cable box, is a much easier way of seeing what’s on now, as well as the upcoming programming in the next 24 hours. You can change channels from the guide, too.

It’s interesting that most of the live TV services are returning to the traditional grid-like guide format. Sling TV added this feature last year, and YouTube TV launched with its own live TV guide that lets you flip through what’s on by scrolling up and down in a vertical fashion. And DirecTV Now’s upgrades, announced yesterday, also included a redesign allowing you to watch your current stream while browsing channels.

In addition to the live TV guide, Hulu now works in portrait mode, so you can browse programming while streaming. While in the on-demand library, you’ll get recommendations on what to watch while in portrait mode. You can turn the phone horizontal when you’re ready to watch.

The scrubbing function has been improved, too, as it now shows a preview of the frame so you can return to the exact spot. This was a huge frustration, in fact – Hulu tried to be clever with scrubbing where it darkened part of the screen as you dragged your finger, but it was very hard to figure out where to stop. It’s one of those things that seems like a minor detail, but when a company gets a lot of them wrong, in aggregate, it leads to a poor experience.

 

Meanwhile, Hulu’s apps are adding new features that help you improve its recommendations: “Stop Suggesting” and “Remove” from Watch history. The former was introduced briefly during Hulu’s Upfronts presentation earlier this month, after being originally teased as coming soon at CES. Essentially, the goal here is to give Hulu another means of learning your interests – in this case, an explicit signal that you don’t want to be recommended a particular show.

And you if you’ve ever accidentally shared your account with another person whose tastes differ, you can remove programming from your watch history so it will stop influencing your recommendations.

Finally, Hulu is adding features that make it easier for mobile users to stream content on their TV, when they don’t have a media player or connected TV, with the Hulu app. The iOS app will support HDMI output, and Chromecast supports the new portrait player and channel surfing mode.

The changes aren’t arriving today, but will begin to roll out next week, Hulu says.

Live TV subscribers will see them first at new.hulu.com next week, followed by Hulu’s on-demand subscribers over the course of the summer.

On mobile, however, the changes will hit Android and iOS next week for all.

OnePlus has never been the flashiest or most cutting edge — the Chinese company has mostly left that stuff to the Apples and Samsungs of the world. But in spite of some stumbles along the way, the upstart smartphone manufacturer has consistently delivered one of the best deals in mobile, a trend it most definitely maintains with the OnePlus 6.

Due out on May 22, with a starting price of $529, the new handset continues the company’s trend of definitely being ever-so-slightly behind the flagship smartphone curve, for the sake of keeping costs down. The handset does borrow a few cues from recent handsets, including, notably, the embrace of the top notch.

The company concedes that the cutout is an inevitability on handsets these days, particularly with Google’s newfound embrace through Android P. Though here it also arrives alongside the company’s largest-ever display, measuring 6.28 inches, at a 19:9 aspect ratio. Of course, OnePlus’ decision to focus on a single handset at a time means a single size option.

For some longtime fans, that might fly in the face of the company’s “never settle” mantra, but at this point in the smartphone game, it probably makes the most sense for a company of OnePlus’ size to focus on a single model. Besides, the company has managed to fit a fair amount of screen into a relatively small form factor, keeping it roughly the same footprint as the OnePlus 5T.

The design language has also been adjusted a bit, this moving to Gorilla Glass 5 on the back (same as the front), which looks nice and also makes it better for those radio waves to pass through. That backing comes in three different colors, including Mirror Black, Midnight Black and a snazzy Pearl White, which have limited availability, depending on the specific SKU.

This being a 2018 flagship, the OnePlus 6 sports dual rear-facing cameras, though the orientation has shifted to vertical. The sensors measure 16- and 20-megapixels, with improved optical image stabilization and improved shooting in the low-light settings — not quite as low-light as offered up on the latest Huawei and Samsung devices, however; ditto for the slow-motion feature, which doesn’t match the super-slow-motion offerings recently rolled out by Sony and Samsung.

The front-facing camera is getting a software upgrade, as well, bringing the faux bokeh portrait mode to selfies, courtesy of some on-board AI. The phone maintains the super-fast fake unlock you’ll find on other recent OnePluses — as ever, the caveat there is not to make that the primary unlock method. It’s not nearly as secure as handsets that use depth sensing to face unlock. Sure is fast, though.

OxygenOS is still the heart of the software experience here. As ever, the key is keeping the company’s proprietary Android skin as much in the background as possible, and using OnePlus’ actively online community as a sounding board for new features through the beta program. There’s not really a lot new to announce on the software front this time out, however, though the company’s done a good job rolling out updates to handsets after release.

Inside is a Snapdragon 845 — the latest flagship chip from Qualcomm. The base system is loaded with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. Another $50 will get you 8GB of RAM and double the storage. Bumping things up to 256GB of storage, meanwhile, will cost another $50.