Details of the Pixel 4 have been swirling around this week, so Google has decided to just leak the design of its next phone via its official Twitter account, revealing the backplate and new camera module on the smartphone.
“Well, since there seems to be some interest, here you go! Wait ’til you see what it can do. #Pixel4″ the tweet from the company’s verified @MadeByGoogle account read.
Renders of the Pixel 4 had leaked this week via smartphone blog Pricebaba.
The back of the phone makes some big changes. Most noticeable is the now-square camera module with a pair of lenses, a flash module and a couple of other sensor modules. Also noteworthy is the apparent lack of a rear fingerprint reader, in contrast to past models. There’s not much else evident here, they didn’t post renders of the device’s front.
Google’s Pixel 3 release kind of cemented that Google doesn’t stake much of the Pixel line’s strengths on hardware specs, it’s all about what it can leverage machine learning software tricks to do within those bounds.
On that note, it’s worth noting that Google has been pretty late to the two-camera rear module setup; at past event the company has always justified this by suggesting that because of their software they can do more with one than most can do with two. This was clearly the case given the strengths of their cameras, but there are undoubtedly advantages to having dual cameras with different specs, it seems Google is now ready to take this plunge.
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The company behind the Unreal Engine and the ridiculously successful Fortnite phenomenon has just picked up Houseparty . Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2015, Houseparty is a social network that delivers video chat across a number of different platforms, including iOS, Android and macOS. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said, “By teaming up, we can build even more fun, shared experiences than what could be achieved alone.”
The work, featured in a site-specific installation in the U.K. as well as circulating in video online, was the first high-profile test of Facebook’s content review policies since the company’s decision not to remove a manipulated video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Meeker highlighted slowed growth in e-commerce sales, increased internet ad spending, data growth, as well as the rise of freemium subscription business models, telemedicine, photo-sharing, interactive gaming, the on-demand economy and more.
Since 2017, the company has been working with blood donation centers worldwide that have been able to use the platform to reach potential donors and then reach out to them in times of need. Now, Facebook is bringing its Blood Donations feature to the U.S.
Several young companies — like Carvana, Shift, Vroom and Joydrive — are attempting to put the dealership online, allowing customers to buy, trade-in and even test drive vehicles without talking to a salesman in an oversized golf pullover. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
Seven months ago, TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear reported that LocalGlobe had begun the fundraising process for two separate funds. The London-based seed-stage venture firm was raising yet another seed-stage venture fund, O’Hear said at the time; he also noted that LocalGlobe was also expect to raise its first opportunities fund.
Fast forward and today, the firm, founded by father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein, says it has closed both, having secured $115 million in capital commitments for its seed fund and $180 million in capital commitments for the second fund, dubbed “Latitude,” which it says it will use to support its “winners” at the Series B and later stages.
As we’d written earlier, it’s no surprise that LocalGlobe decided to institutionalize some of its later-stage investments. It’s become a trend in recent years for early-stage firms to raise separate funds to capture more of the upside when their portfolio companies begin to break away from the pack, rather than watch their stakes get hammered down in subsequent funding rounds.
And LocalGlobe already has a bit of a track record in supporting its growing portfolio companies, writing follow-on checks to companies like the property listings startup Zoopla and the money transfer service TransferWise, among others. (Others of the outfit’s best-known investments include the transportation app Citymapper and the SpatialOS software company Improbable.)
Still, LocalGlobe remains even more active on the seed-stage front. One of its newest bets is on Yapily, a two-year-old, London-based maker of an API for connecting enterprises to banks that just raised $5.4 million in seed funding co-led by LocalGlobe and HV Holtzbrinck Venturesand LocalGlobe.
Another new investment is Soda Says, a two-year-old, U.K.-based e-commerce marketplace for daily tech gadgets, from breast pumps to alarm clocks. It raised $2.5 million from investors, including LocalGlobe, late last month.
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Fundraising 101: Do VC associates matter?
There are hundreds of associates working at VC firms traipsing through meetups and coffee meetings trying to find the best new startups. If you are looking to fundraise though — and fundraise quickly — how do you approach these nebulous non-check-writers?
Associates can be helpful, they can and should be nice, and they have a useful role to play in the venture landscape. But let’s be clear: they can’t write checks, and checks is what you are looking for. They can be useful mechanisms to get the right meetings with the right partners at exactly the moment you are ready to fundraise. You probably shouldn’t piss them off by being an asshole to them, but at the end of the day, they are not the decision-maker. And if you learn anything about sales, it is that you want to pitch the person that holds the purse strings.
What top VCs look for in women’s fertility startups
Women’s fertility is a major area of investment for VC firms these days, and several prominent investors are doing deep dives into the space. Our healthtech writer Sarah Buhrinterviewed several VCs about what they’re seeing in the space and why fertility is suddenly in the limelight:
The quest to create a social auditorium in virtual reality has eaten many VC dollars over the years. While plenty of contenders have emerged, it’s likely Against Gravity’s href="https://rec.net/"> Rec Room that has been the most creative in its approach to capturing a niche market while plotting how to build a sustainable business based on users in VR headsets talking to one another.
The Seattle startup has told TechCrunch exclusively that it has bagged $24 million over two rounds of funding. The studio’s Series A was led by Sequoia and their Series B, which just recently closed, was led by Index Ventures. Against Gravity has a bevy of top investors that also participated in the rounds including First Round Capital, Maveron, Anorak Ventures, Acequia Capital, Betaworks and DAG Ventures.
The company didn’t break down the specific details of the rounds. Against Gravity was authorized to raise up to $15.4 in its Series B at up to a $126 million post-money valuation according to Delaware stock authorization docs we got from Pitchbook. The company didn’t comment on the valuation.
Rec Room is hardly a household name compared to some major console titles, but among virtual reality users, the title has been a standby known for the diversity of gameplay available inside its walls and its wide support for hardware. Users are able to create experiences or “rooms” that can be accessed by other users. They don’t need any coding knowledge to build these spaces, creation all happens within the game and can be done by multiple users simultaneously.
Rec Room is also about to surpass one million rooms created by users on the platform. The company says these environments include “sports games, shooters, adventure quests, nightclubs, club houses, and escape rooms.”
While companies like Linden Labs, the creator of Second Life, have focused their VR efforts on realistic but unvarying user-created environments, Against Gravity has seemingly one-upped their strategy by focusing on dynamic gameplay modes where the emphasis is on user interactions as opposed to graphic fidelity.
The Seattle startup, which was founded in 2016, now has 35 employees building out and maintaining Rec Room. The company is playable on a variety of platforms, and is about to add iOS support to its roster, an expansion that could bring a lot more users onto the VR-centric platform.
Rec Room’s content isn’t monetized too aggressively at the moment, CEO Nick Fajt thinks that some of the user-generated experiences are going to offer an interesting opportunity down the road, prompting users to spend in-game tokens on more than just upgrades to the platform’s Playmobil-like avatars.
“I think a direction that we’re actually excited about is that we want to let the users creating some of this content charge tokens to play them,” Fajt tells TechCrunch. “I think that’s one that we’re kind of on the cusp of doing and we’re hoping to get that out later this year.”
For Against Gravity, timing has always been a key consideration for expansion, especially inside the slow-growing VR market, which has only recently seemed to hit a stride. I chatted with Fajt back in 2017 and he told me that the key for VR startups surviving was staying lean and biding their time until standalone mobile headsets with positional tracking and motion controllers were released. Facebook’s Oculus Quest headset which came out less than a month ago is perhaps the first clear device to fit that vision.
One of Facebook’s head AR/VR executives shared earlier this week that over $5 million in Quest content had been sold in the company’s store in the first two weeks after the device’s launch. That’s a major development for an industry that hasn’t seen many smash hits, but for free-to-play game makers like Against Gravity, which has now raised $29 million to date, there’s plenty of maturation in the VR market that still needs to happen.
People and robots working together has tremendous potential for factory and construction site settings, but robots are also potentially incredibly dangerous to people, especially when they’re large and powerful, which is typically the case for industrial robots.
There are plenty of efforts to make ‘corobotics’ a reality, including production machines like the YuMi produced by German robotics giant ABB . But a new algorithm created by MIT researchers could help make humans and robots working together even safer.
Researchers working with automaker BMW and observing their current product flow workflow noticed that the robots were overly cautious when it came to watching out for the humans in the plant – they’d lose lots of potentially productive time waiting for people to cross their paths long before there was any chance of the people actually doing that.
They’ve not developed a solution that greatly improves the ability of robots to anticipate the trajectory of humans as they move – allowing robots that typically freeze in the face of anything even vaguely resembling a person walking in their path to continue to operate and move around the flow of human foot traffic.
Researchers managed this by eschewing the usual practice of borrowing from how music and speech processing works for algorithmic prediction, which are much better when it comes to predicting predictable paths of travel, and instead came up with a ‘partial trajectory’ method that references real-time trajectory data with a large library of reference trajectories gathered before.
This is a much better way of anticipating human movement, which is very rarely consistent and involves a lot of stops and starts, even in a factory worker performing the same action repeatedly over thousands of instances.
This could have potential consumer applications too – researchers note that human movement even in the home would be better predicted using this moment, which could have benefits in terms of robotic long-term in-home care for the elderly, for instance.
Simpo is a startup with a simple idea. It wants to help project managers at large companies get software into the hands of its employee users faster. Today, the company announced a $4.5 million seed investment.
The round was led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from Janvest, UpWest, Seedcamp, Elad Gil and other unnamed investors.
The idea behind Simpo is to offer a no-code platform for distributing software and educating end users on how to use it. Any friction in this process can reduce adoption and Simpo created a platform for project managers without a lot of technical know-how to set up software distribution workflows with the goal of driving greater adoption.
There is an element of Robotics Process Automation (RPA) here too, by letting project manager build logical workflows, and then as users interact with the software, it can learn and offer next steps to help further drive usage. This approach really attracted Satish Dharmaraj, managing partner at lead investor Redpoint Ventures.
“Simpo is really exciting [to me] because it has solved so much of the software adoption problem in a sophisticated, yet incredibly simple way. Robotic process automation is a transformative force, and now product managers are able to harness its power for the first time. As software continues to dominate the enterprise, Simpo is a critical piece in driving adoption and informing how and what products will be built,” Dharmaraj said in a statement.
The company counts Walmart, DuPont and Jet as customers.
The future of gaming is streaming. If that wasn’t painfully obvious to you a week ago, it certainly ought to be now. Google got ahead of E3 late last week by finally shedding light on Stadia, a streaming service that promises a hardware agnostic gaming future.
It’s still very early days, of course. We got a demo of the platform right around the time of its original announcement. But it was a controlled one — about all we can hope for at the moment. There are still plenty of moving parts to contend with here, including, perhaps most consequentially, broadband caps.
But this much is certainly clear: Google’s not the only company committed to the idea of remote game streaming. Microsoft didn’t devote a lot of time to Project xCloud on stage the other day — on fact, the pass with which the company blew threw that announcement was almost news in and of itself.
It did, however, promise an October arrival for the service — beating out Stadia by a full month. The other big piece of the announcement was the ability for Xbox One owners to use their console as a streaming source for their own remote game play. Though how that works and what, precisely, the advantage remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that Microsoft is hanging its hat on the Xbox as a point of distinction from Google’s offering.
It’s clear too, of course, that Microsoft is still invested in console hardware as a key driver of its gaming future. Just after rushing through all of that Project xCloud noise, it took the wraps off of Project Scarlett, its next-gen console. We know it will feature 8K content, some crazy fast frame rates and a new Halo title. Oh, and there’s an optical drive, too, because Microsoft’s not quite ready to give up on physical media just yet.
The super early-bird season for serious savings on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 — on October 2-4 — comes to an end next week. Right now, you can save up to $1,800, but that deep discount disappears on June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Don’t miss your chance to attend TechCrunch’s flagship Disrupt event at the lowest possible price. Buy your passes today.
Here’s even more budget-friendly news. Choose the payment plan option during checkout, and lock in these super-low prices while spreading your payments over time. There’s some bottom-line relief.
Disrupt San Francisco is the mothership of Disrupt events. It’s three days packed with programming across the tech spectrum with more than 10,000 members of the early-startup community — tech founders, investors, hackers, leaders, makers and shakers — looking to launch, learn, connect, invest and grow.
Main attractions include Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s premier pitch competition with a grand prize of $100,000. Do you want to compete? There’s still time to apply if you act quickly — the application window closes June 17.
Take a shot a being named a TC Top Pick — and represent the best early-stage startups in the following categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS and Social Impact & Education.
If chosen, you’ll receive a free Startup Alley Exhibition package and VIP invitations to special events at Disrupt SF. Apply to be a TC Top Pick soon — applications close June 29.
You’ll find TechCrunch’s Top Picks, along with hundreds of other early-stage startups, exhibiting their tech and talent in Startup Alley. If there’s a networking paradise, this is it. And savvy Disrupters use CrunchMatch, the business-matching platform that takes the stress out of finding and connecting with the right people.
Experience a range of programming on four different stages. World-class speakers like Bastian Lehmann, Postmate’s founder and CEO, will talk about his logistics and food delivery company’s impressive growth, lessons learned and what comes next. Hear from Pete Lau, CEO and founder of OnePlus, about taking on some of the biggest players in mobile and what the future holds. Don’t miss Tess Hatch, an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. Her focus lies in funding frontier tech like commercial space, drones and autonomous vehicles.
There’s so much more to the Disrupt experience — the Hackathon, interactive workshops, Q&A Sessions and the TechCrunch After Party.
Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place October 2-4, and you can go for the lowest possible price — if you beat the deadline: June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Procrastination is not your friend. Be a super early-bird and save up to $1,800 — buy your pass today.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact the sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Bird is acquiring electric scooter and moped startup Scoot, confirming TechCrunch’s previous report that the two companies were in acquisition talks.
“We are thrilled to welcome Scoot to the Bird ecosystem and look forward to working with the Scoot team as we further scale our complementary missions – to replace car trips with micro-mobility options for all,” Bird founder and CEO Travis VanderZanden said in a statement. “Together we will make a bigger impact on our riders’ daily lives and the cities we serve.”
Prior to the acquisition, Scoot was valued at around $71 million with $47 million in funding. Scoot first launched way back in 2011 with its fleet of electric mopeds. Scoot has since deployed electric bikes and scooters.
“Since we launched the first electric vehicle service you access with your smartphone, we have pursued our mission of Electric Vehicles for Everyone and showed cities that shared, electric mobility is a convenient, fun, and affordable way for citizens to get where they need to go,” Scoot founder and President Michael Keating said in a statement. “With Bird, our mission remains the same, but the scale at which we will pursue it, and the vehicles we will offer will be so much better for our riders and the cities we serve.”
This acquisition means Bird finally gets to operate shared electric scooters in San Francisco. This will be in addition to its monthly rental service in the city.
