Month: June 2019

YouTube has teamed up with Universal Music Group to remaster nearly a thousand classic music videos, the companies announced today, including those from from Billy Idol, Beastie Boys, Boyz II Men, George Strait, Janet Jackson, Kiss, Lady Antebellum, Lady Gaga, Lionel Richie, Maroon 5, Meat Loaf, No Doubt/Gwen Stefani, Smokey Robinson, The Killers, Tom Petty, and others.

Many of the most iconic music videos on YouTube were only available in the “outdated standards originally intended for tube televisions with mono speakers,” YouTube explained in an announcement. But today, people watch videos across a number of platforms — desktop, mobile, and TV — and they often do so in high-definition. The old videos didn’t hold up.

With the new partnership, both the video and audio quality will be updated to the highest standards, then the new videos will slide in to take the place of the existing SD versions. They’ll also retain the same URL on YouTube as well as all the view-counts and likes, instead of arriving as new content.

As of today, the companies have already updated over 100 music videos including the following:

• Billy Idol: White Wedding
• Beastie Boys: Sabotage
• Boyz II Men: End of the Road
• George Strait: Check Yes or No
• Janet Jackson: When I Think of You
• KISS: Forever
• Lady Antebellum: I Run To You
• Lady Gaga: Bad Romance
• Maroon 5: She Will Be Loved
• Meat Loaf: I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)
• No Doubt: Don’t Speak
• Gwen Stefani: Hollaback Girl
• Smokey Robinson: Being With You
• The Killers: Mr. Brightside
• Tom Petty: Free Fallin’

The plan is to fully upgrade nearly 1,000 over the next year, with plans to have all 1,000 titles available before year-end 2020. More videos will arrive on a weekly basis as this program continues, YouTube says.

The videos will be available exclusively on YouTube and YouTube Music — the latter ahead of a planned merger with Google Play Music. 

You’ll be able to tell if a YouTube music video has been through the upgrading process because it will read “Remasted” in the video’s description.

“It’s really an honor to partner with Universal Music Group and change the way fans around the globe will experience viewing some of the most classic and iconic videos. The quality is truly stunning,” said Stephen Bryan, Global Head of Label Relations at YouTube, in a statement. “It’s our goal to ensure that today’s music videos — true works of art — meet the high-quality standards that artists’ works deserve and today’s music fans expect.”

“We’re excited to partner with YouTube to present these iconic music videos in the highest audio and video quality possible,” added Michael Nash, Executive Vice President of Digital Strategy at UMG. “Our recording artists and video directors imbued these videos with so much creativity; it’s great to enable the full experience of their vision and music. These videos not only look amazing on any screen now, they will be enjoyed by music fans for decades to come.”

Startup founders need to decide how much salary is enough

One of the great things about running your own startup is that you have the independence to make critical business decisions, but those decisions can get very complicated when you are the direct beneficiary.

When it comes to ethics and optics, few early decisions are as impactful as setting your own salary. Founders have a right — as with any employee of a company — to a full salary, but how much is too little, and how much is too much? Ron Miller interviewed a number of VCs and founders about how they approached this question.

Ed Sim, founder at Boldstart, an early stage enterprise startup investor in NYC says as an early check writer, he doesn’t want to see founders living high on the hog, but at the same time, they need enough money to live on, and that takes a bit of cash, say $100-150K a year to live in places like New York or San Francisco, the cities where companies tend to launch.

“What you don’t want is founders worrying about the cost of living — living in New York and San Francisco is really [costly] — and you don’t want founders worrying about paying their bills and living under water. They want to be covering their expenses, especially if they have a family or a mortgage. So we want to remove those obstacles for the founders,” he explained.

A diversity and inclusion playbook

Increasing diversity and representation is one of the most pressing issues facing the tech industry. But while many founders, VCs, and others have good intentions, they can often struggle to determine the right approaches and tactics to improve outcomes.

NASA’s X-59 QueSST experimental quiet supersonic aircraft will have a cockpit like no other — featuring a big 4K screen where you’d normally have a front window. Why? Because this is one weird-looking plane.

The X-59, which is being developed by Lockheed Martin on a $247 million budget, is meant to go significantly faster than sound without producing a sonic boom, or indeed any noise “faster than a car door closing,” at least to observers on the ground.

Naturally in order to do this the craft has to be as aerodynamic as possible, which precludes the cockpit bump often found in fighter jets. In fact, the design can’t even have the pilot up front with a big window, because it would likely be far too narrow. Check out these lines:

The cockpit is more like a section taken out of the plane just over the leading edge of the rather small and exotically shaped wings. So while the view out the sides will be lovely, the view forward would be nothing but nose.

To fix that, the plane will be equipped with several displays, the lower ones just like you might expect on a modern aircraft, but the top one is a 4K monitor that’s part of what’s called the eXternal Visibility System, or XVS. It shows imagery stitched together from two cameras on the craft’s exterior, combined with high-definition terrain data loaded up ahead of time.

It’s not quite the real thing, but pilots spend a lot of time in simulators (as you can see here), so they’ll be used to it. And the real world is right outside the other windows if they need a reality check.

Lockheed and NASA’s plane is currently in the construction phase, though no doubt some parts are still being designed as well. The program has committed to a 2021 flight date, an ambitious goal considering this is the first such experimental, or X-plane, that the agency has developed in some 30 years. If successful, it could be the precursor to other quiet supersonic craft and could bring back supersonic overland flight in the future.

That’s if Boom doesn’t beat them to it.

Kano, the London-based startup that builds hardware designed to teach younger people about computing and coding, is taking a significant step forward in its growth strategy today. The startup has inked a partnership with Microsoft that sees Kano launching the Kano PC, a new 11.6-inch touch-enabled, Intel Atom-powered computer, its first to run Windows — Windows 10 S specifically. As part of the deal, Microsoft is also making an investment of an undisclosed amount in Kano.

The Kano PC is up for pre-order now at $299.99 and £299.99 on Kano.me and the Microsoft Store, to ship in October. It will also go on sale at selected retailers in the US, Canada, and the UK starting October 21, 2019.

The shift to building a Windows-powered device is a significant one for Kano.

The startup first made its name with a popular Kickstarter campaign based around a device built using Raspberry Pi, speaking to the DIY ethos that has shaped it over the last several years.

Alex Klein, Kano’s founder and CEO, said that while Kano will continue to support its Raspberry Pi-powered devices, it has yet to determine what its roadmap will be in terms of launching new hardware on this processor:

“The Raspberry Pi devices remain in the portfolio at good price points, but this machine is designed for a much broader age set. It’s a proper Windows PC” — Klein said, pointing to the Intel Atom x5-Z8350 Quad core 1.44 GHz processor, the 4GB of memory, and 64GB of storage — “and a powerful machine for the price point.”

While the Kano line up to now has largely been used and tracked by 6-13 year-olds, Klein describes the Kano PC as a “K-12 device,” acknowledging that “branding might take more time to unfold” to connect with the younger and older ends of that range.

It will be doing so with an army of software now supplied by way of its Microsoft partnership:

Make Art – Learn to code high-quality images in Coffeescript
Kano App – Make almost anything, including magic effects and adventurous worlds, with simple steps and programming fundamentals
Paint 3D – Make and share 3D models and send them out for printing
Minecraft: Education Edition – The award-winning creative game-based learning platform
Microsoft Teams – To get new projects and content, and share your work (Yes, Slack, now kids will be using Teams)
Live Tiles – Personalized projects on coding and creativity delivered directly to your dashboard

Up to now, Kano’s traction with a core group of users — younger kids who are interested in computers and coding, as well as parents who want to encourage their kids to be interested in these — has led to it launching a number of other accessories to work with its basic computers. It’s also launched a clever tech toy that plays to its demographic: last year, it launched a Harry Potter magic wand that you could build yourself, program and use. Alex Klein, the CEO and founder, hinted in an interview that we’re going to see more products of this kind coming soon from Kano.

The Microsoft deal will bring it a higher profile among a wider set of consumers beyond early adopters, and likely a new entry point into selling into educational environments, where Microsoft has been making a big push.

This is the second side of the deal that’s also interesting: Microsoft has a long history of selling software and hardware into educational environments and this — a different brand from the rest of the back — will bring move diversity into the mix, with a brand designed specifically for younger people, rather than adult-focused brands that have been downsized in functionality (but possibly not in price) for children.

“We’re very excited to partner with Kano for the launch of the Kano PC. We align with Kano’s goal of making classroom experiences more inclusive for teachers and students, empowering them to build the future, not just imagine it’” said Anthony Salcito, VP of Education at Microsoft, in a statement.

Kano’s scrappy success up to now has also led to it raising some $50 million in funding from a list of backers that include Saul and Robin Klein (relatives of the founder Alex Klein), as well as Marc Benioff, Index Ventures, Breyer Capital, Troy Carter and a number of other investors. Klein said that it’s likely to be looking for another equity round in the near future, but declined to comment further on that.

Facebook unveiled its audacious Libra cryptocurrency and Calibra digital wallet on Tuesday through which it plans to transform financial services across the globe. The social juggernaut made clear of its ambitions when it said that it wishes to empower more than 1.7 billion people around the world who currently do not have a bank account.

But potentially an equally large group of people would not be able to use Facebook’s new digital payments service when it begins rollout next year.

Responding to queries from TechCrunch, a Calibra spokesperson said that the digital wallet will not be rolling out to a number of markets that have taken a stand against cryptocurrency, or are sanctioned by the United States.

“The Libra Blockchain will be global, but it will be up to custodial wallet providers to determine where they will and will not operate. Calibra won’t be available in US-sanctioned countries or countries that ban cryptocurrencies,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch understands that India, Facebook’s biggest market, is among the list of countries where Calibra does not intend to launch. Additionally, Calibra isn’t going to be available in China, North Korea, and Iran, too, where Facebook does not currently have a presence.

India remains cautious about cryptocurrency. The country’s central bank Reserve Bank of India told the highest court in the nation that it did not want cryptocurrency to spread like “contagion,” citing potential harms. Last month, the nation proposed a bill that would penalize ten year jail sentence to those who “mine, hold, sell, transfer, dispose, issue, or deal in cryptocurrencies.”

Earlier this week, Facebook said that Calibra will be available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and through a standalone app. In India, this created some additional confusion as WhatsApp already offers a person-to-person payments service in the nation, called WhatsApp Pay. India is the only market where WhatsApp currently offers its payments service.

A WhatsApp spokesperson told TechCrunch that Facebook is committed to the efforts that it has made on WhatsApp Pay, which is built on top of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a three-year-old government-backed payments infrastructure that is driving hundreds of millions of financial transactions in the nation each month.

WhatsApp’s payments service is currently available to one million users in India, and the Facebook -owned instant messaging giant is working with the government for a nation-wide rollout.

Netflix has signed a development deal with “Pose” writer-producer-director Janet Mock. In its announcement, the streamer notes that Mock is the first black transgender woman to sign an overall deal with a major studio.

Before joining “Pose” — an FX series about New York’s LGBTQ ballroom scene in the 1980s and ’90s — Mock began her career as an editor and journalist, then wrote the bestselling memoir “Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More.”

According to Variety, this is a three-year, multimillion dollar deal. Mock will continue to write and direct for “Pose,” while also serving as an executive producer and director on “Hollywood,” an upcoming Netflix series from “Pose” co-creator Ryan Murphy. (Murphy signed a deal with Netflix last year that was reportedly worth $300 million.)

Netflix will also get exclusive rights on any TV shows that Mock develops, and first-look rights on any feature film projects.

There’s a relatively short list of streaming shows from trans creators, including “Transparent” from Jill Soloway — who identifies as gender non-binary — and “Sense8” from Lilly and Lana Wachowski. (In addition, Laverne Cox of Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black” has been a trailblazer for transgender actors and actresses, and she was the first to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy.)

It sounds like Mock will be adding a number of titles to that list.

“This deal is so bonkers,” she said in the announcement, adding, “You know, 84% percent of Americans say that they don’t know and/or work with a trans person. And so, there’s potential now with Netflix’s worldwide audience to introduce millions, hundreds of millions of people to trans people and showing people who may not understand us that we can tell our own story.”

Earlier this year, Google announced plans to build a Chromebook App Hub designed to help teachers and other curriculum administrators more easily find educational tools and apps to use in the classroom. Today, as a part of Googe’s educational announcements at ISTE 2019, the company officially launched the App Hub with content from Epic!, Adode, Khan Academy, and others. It also unveiled new product features in Quizzes in Google Forms, Classroom, Course Kit, and more.

As Google previously explained, teachers today often surf the web to seek out new ideas and activities to help them create their lesson plans. Meanwhile, curriculum specialists field special requests from teachers but are tasked with making sure the programs requested meet the district’s policies.

The Chromebook App Hub aims to address both these scenarios by offering a place for educators to discover ideas and resources, as well as learn how they can be implemented in the classroom and if they meet district policy.

Google worked with the EdTechTeam to help gather the ideas around apps, it says.

It also worked with the nonprofit Student Data Privacy Consortium (SDPC) to help app developers better consider the data privacy aspects of their products. That way, the districts would be able to find the appropriate solutions that meet their own privacy requirements.

“The SDPC is proud to work with [the Chromebook App Hub] to provide transparency and openness around the critical aspects of schools, states, and vendors securing learner information,” says Dr. Larry L. Fruth II, CEO of A4L/SDPC, in a statement.

Google additionally consulted with the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) and ConnectSafely on guidelines focused on creating “healthy digital citizenship habits,” it says.

At launch, Epic! will contribute its library of children’s books, videos, and games to the App Hub; Adobe will include its visual storytelling app Adobe Spark; and Khan Academy will bring its free library of lessons across subjects like math, grammar, science, history, standardized tests and more.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to better establish the Chromebook’s presence in the classroom, as App Hub’s apps and activities are designed to run on the Chromebook computers.

Schools and classrooms are a newer battleground for devices, with Google, Microsoft and Apple all investing in various initiatives in the K-12 market.

Last year, for example, Apple introduced a new iPad designed to help it catch up with Google, and win over more school districts. At its developer conference earlier this month, Apple also showed off new features for its educational framework ClassKit and its free app for teachers, Schoolwork.

However, Google’s Chromebook is dominating the U.S. K-12 market because of its simplicity, price, and  I.T. department tools. As of 2017, it had 58% of the market, versus 22% for Microsoft Windows and 19% for Apple.

In addition to the launch of App Hub, Google launched a beta program for teachers that lets them create a rubric and attach it to an assignment, so students know how their work will be graded. The rubrics can be created in both Classroom and Course Kit.

It also launched tools that let teachers lock Quizzes in Google Forms on managed Chromebook so students can’t navigate away until they submit their answer. And it says it will soon introduce a feature that allows teachers to import questions from previously used Forms into new ones.

Google is also launching an updated version of Gradebook, that offers a more holistic view of student progress plus an early access program that lets teachers sync grades from Classroom to the School Information System (SIS). The early access beta program will be available to schools this summer, with Infinite Campus and Capita SIMS as initial partners, with more to come.

Another day, another shareholder suit. This time it’s Google in the spotlight.

Shareholders have tabled a resolution which, if passed, would demand Google put the brakes on its controversial search engine efforts in China. The program, internally dubbed “Dragonfly,” is said to be a censorship-friendly search engine with the capability to hide results at the behest of Beijing, which administers one of the most restrictive internets in the world.

The project remains largely secret, amid an internal upheaval and political pressure from the Trump administration to scrap the effort, but was later acknowledged by Google chief Sundar Pichai, describing China as an “important” market.

The resolution, set to be voted on at the company’s annual shareholder meeting Wednesday, would instruct Google to conduct and publish a human rights impact assessment examining the impacts of a censored Google search engine in China.

Open Mic, a non-profit representing shareholders worth $3 billion in Google assets, said Google should examine the human rights impact during Dragonfly’s development and not after.

“The Chinese government already employs invasive, data-driven surveillance to track its citizens,” said Joshua Brockwell, an investment communications director at Azzad Asset Management, which supports the resolution. “The potential for it to weaponize data from Google searches could allow the government to expand its human rights abuses, including mass detentions of the Uighur minority.”

Among recent crackdowns, China has come under international pressure in the past year for targeting Uighur Muslims and holding more than a million in detention.

Google opposes the resolution, saying in its proxy statement: “Google has been open about its desire to increase its ability to serve users in China and other countries. We have considered a variety of options for how to offer services in China in a way that is consistent with our mission and have gradually expanded our offerings to consumers in China, including Google Translate.”

A spokesperson for Google told TechCrunch it had “nothing more to add” beyond its proxy statement.

It’s unclear how the vote will go, given the pressure on Google to evaluate the introduction of search into China. In context, the shareholder in the top 10 with the least amount of shares still has $3.9 billion in stock.

Early-stage startup founders, we’re looking at you. Are you ready to launch your company and show the world what you’ve got? There’s no better launching pad than Startup Battlefield, and the next battle goes down at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 — in the city that gave birth to startup dreams.

There’s no time to waste. The application deadline expires on June 25th at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Apply to compete in the Startup Battlefield today.

Because Disrupt San Francisco 2019 is our flagship event, it’s appropriate that Startup Battlefield comes with a flagship prize. We’re talking a $100,000 equity-free cash infusion to the winner’s bottom line. But there’s more on the line than a wad of cash. Here’s how Startup Battlefield works and the benefits all participants receive.

First off, applying to and participating in Startup Battlefield is free. However, the selection process is extremely competitive. Discerning TechCrunch editors vet every application and choose approximately 15-20 startups to compete. All participating teams receive free, extensive pitch coaching from our Battlefield-tested editorial team.

When you step onto the Disrupt Main Stage, you’ll have six minutes to pitch and present a live demo to a panel of expert VCs and tech leaders — and then respond to their questions.

Teams that make it through to the final round repeat the process to a second set of judges, and it’s from that elite cohort that one standout startup will earn the title, hoist the Disrupt Cup and claim the $100,000 prize.

It all goes down live in front of an audience of thousands, and we live-stream the entire event to the world on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter — and make it available later on-demand.

Whether you win the whole shebang or not, you still win. All competing teams receive intense media and investor attention and exhibit for free in Startup Alley for all three days of the show. You also receive invitations to VIP events, free passes to future TechCrunch events and complimentary subscriptions to our new editorial offering, Extra Crunch.

It’s time. You’re ready to launch. Apply to the Startup Battlefield, and join us at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. And remember, the application deadline expires on June 25th at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Not quite ready to battle it out on the Main Stage? Why not apply for our TC Top Picks program? It’s a select group, and if we pick your startup, you’ll receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, VIP treatment and plenty of media and investor exposure.