Month: June 2019

Mirakl is launching a new product called Mirakl Connect. As the name suggests, this central dashboard lets you control which marketplace you’re working with, and which seller you want to list on your marketplace.

Mirakl is a French startup that recently raised a $70 million funding round. The company works with e-commerce platforms so that they can add a marketplace of third-party sellers in addition to their own inventory.

Marketplaces are increasingly popular on e-commerce websites, and Mirakl powers the marketplaces for Darty, Office Depot, Best Buy in Canada, etc. The company also powers B2B marketplaces.

But now that marketplaces are booming, it becomes increasingly complicated for sellers to list their products on different marketplaces and reach as many clients as possible.

Thanks to Mirakl Connect, sellers can create a company profile and promote products on multiple marketplaces at once. On the other side, e-commerce platforms that are just starting can find third-party sellers more easily.

If you’re running a small e-commerce website, third-party sellers don’t want to waste time and efforts to list products if it doesn’t lead to a lot of sales. By minimizing efforts, it should boost smaller marketplaces.

Sellers and marketplace owners can discuss together on Mirakl Connect with a built-in chat feature. Yes, Mirakl Connect sounds a bit like a marketplace of marketplaces — double marketplaces all the way.

YouTube is a confusing mess of an internet platform. In what appears to be a moment that draws a line in the sand around how online platforms regulate content, YouTube has told a gay reporter that homophobic harassment he received from a prominent conservative channel does not violate its policies.

The company told Vox reporter Carlos Maza that comments from Steven Crowder, who has over 3.8 million subscribers, that focused on his sexuality and ethnicity are within its rules. The Google-owned video platform, which claims two billion monthly users, said on Twitter that it spent “the last few days” looking into a complaint lodged by Maza, who alleges that Crowder taunted him with racist and homophobic comments.

Yet, despite admitting that Crowder used “language that was clearly hurtful,” the company said that the show has acted within its boundaries. That means the videos remain on the site, and Crowder’s channel will not be punished.

Here’s what the company told Maza on Twitter in full:

(1/4) Thanks again for taking the time to share all of this information with us. We take allegations of harassment very seriously–we know this is important and impacts a lot of people.

(2/4) Our teams spent the last few days conducting an in-depth review of the videos flagged to us, and while we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don’t violate our policies. We’ve included more info below to explain this decision:

(3/4) As an open platform, it’s crucial for us to allow everyone–from creators to journalists to late-night TV hosts–to express their opinions w/in the scope of our policies. Opinions can be deeply offensive, but if they don’t violate our policies, they’ll remain on our site.

(4/4) Even if a video remains on our site, it doesn’t mean we endorse/support that viewpoint.

There are other aspects of the channel that we’re still evaluating– we’ll be in touch with any further updates.

When contacted for comment, YouTube referred TechCrunch to its tweets but it did additional color. A spokesperson said that Crowder had asked viewers not to harass Maza, while it said that the YouTube host had not revealed his personal information.

That is true but, in a sign of the complexities around online communities, Crowder fans did doxx Maza last year. That resulted in a barrage of messages demanding that the Vox reporter “debate” with Crowder.

“It makes life sort of miserable. I waste a lot of time blocking abusive Crowder fanboys, and this shit derails your mental health,” wrote Maza.

Crowder, meanwhile, couched the situation as being about a larger battle between established media, such as Vox, and independent creators like his channel.

“This isn’t about me versus some guy at Vox. This is an example of a giant corporate media entity trying to silence voices that they don’t like,” he said in a video published on May 31.

“This is David versus Goliath,” he added.

The YouTuber admitted making comments that reference Maza’s sexuality and race — which include “the gay Latino host at Vox” and “lispy queer” — but he dismissed them as “friendly ribbing.” Crowder argued that because Maza identifies as Latino and gay on the internet — his Twitter handle is @gaywonk, for example — it is just “harmless” banter.

Beyond comments, Crowder also sells a range of merchandise, including t-shirts, which generate revenue for the YouTube Channel. The collection includes t-shirts that are labeled “Socialism Is For Fgs” — indeed that slogan has been adapted by Crowder fans to read “Carlos Maza Is A Fg,” as Maza himself has pointed out.

Crowder’s online store is powered by Shopify, which outlaws its service being used for “hateful content,” including discrimination based on sexual orientation, according to its terms and conditions.

TechCrunch has contacted Shopify for comment.

Despite Crowder’s claims of victimization, clips shared by Maza paint a different picture of the rhetoric used on his show.

Some choice quotes from Crowder include: “You’re being given a free pass as a crappy writer because you’re gay,” and a number of derogatory references to his ethnicity.

“These videos get millions of views on YouTube. Every time one gets posted, I wake up to a wall of homophobic/racist abuse on Instagram and Twitter,” Maza said.

The kicker for this, however, is that YouTube calls Crowder’s comments “clearly hurtful” and that’s an exact term used within its harassment and cyberbullying policy. According to that policy, “content that makes hurtful and negative personal comments/videos about another person” will be removed with the channel owner warned. YouTube’s three-strike rule then comes into effect for channels.

It is not clear how or why YouTube did not take action based on that policy breach.

YouTube did not respond to a request for clarification.

This episode appears to mark a crisis moment for YouTube, as it continues to grapple with the demands of policing its service, particularly since it has become the go-to place for “far right” figures like Crowder to connect with their audience. Despite some in that community claiming YouTube, and other internet companies, are biased against them, Maza maintains that Crowder’s large following and conservative focus is precisely why YouTube is not taking action.

In an April interview with the New York Times, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said the company would lessen its focus on juicing numbers and generating revenue to instead focused on “responsible growth.”

“To boil it down: YouTube wants to remove the content that violates its policies more quickly and effectively; promote better, more authoritative material and limit the spread of videos that are potentially harmful but do not break the rules,” the Times wrote.

Despite the soundbites, there’s little evidence that Wojcicki can deliver on that promise.

Tier, the Berlin-based e-scooter rental startup that competes with the likes of Voi, Lime, Wind, Circ and a host of others, is unveiling new hardware today in a bid to further improve the usability and unit economics of its service.

The new Tier scooters produced via a strategic partnership with Okai utilise a “modular” design — something that Voi is also doing — so that they can be customised for different (regulated) markets, iterated more frequently and for easier maintenance.

Previously, the startup was using off-the-shelf-models, namely the Segway Ninebot ES2 and ES4, which aren’t explicitly designed to withstand the wear and tear endured by being shared commercially, with multiple users and rides per day.

On that note, Tier co-founder and CEO Lawrence Leuschner tells me the startup recently ratcheted up 2 million rides. The company operates in over 20 cities across Europe, with around 10,000 Tier scooters on the streets. Noteworthy, Leuschner says Tier is already profitable “in several key cities”.

He also talked up what he claims is Tier’s better unit economics and more capital efficient model. This sees the startup shun the gig economy-style model where competitors utilise freelance workers for charging e-scooters, often in their own homes. Instead, Tier employs a centralised team of professionals for pick up, charging, maintenance and repair processes, meaning that problems in the hardware can be spotted earlier and maintenance can be more proactive, increasing the lifetime of each device and ensuring more scooters remain in circulation. That’s the argument, anyway.

Leuschner tells me this “professionalised” model is born out of his previous experience as CEO and co-founder of reBuy, the European online used electronics and media retailer, a company he says was dedicated to extending the life cycle of over 100 million products. His point is, how do you ensure quality of service if you don’t frequently touch your own products, in a thinly veiled critique of competing e-scooter services.

The new more rugged Tier e-scooters are designed to last at least 12 months in operation, more than twice Tier’s current average device lifetime. Other improved features include 10″ tires and improved suspension (variants include double or single suspension), plus an increased range of 35-40 kilometres. The IoT, bell and cables are now integrated, and thus less susceptible to vandalism.

Safety is said to be significantly improved, too, including more powerful brakes. Variants feature one mechanic and one electric brake, or two mechanic and one electric brake. This is especially important given concerns over how safe e-scooters are, whether used on sidewalks or on the road. Just last week, Sweden saw its first e-scooter rental casualty, leading to the Swedish transport agency reportedly calling for a ban on all electric scooters.

Meanwhile, along with most competitors, such as Circ, Tier is keen to position itself beyond e-scooters alone and is now calling itself a “micro-mobility” company. I’m told “new exciting vehicles” that go beyond scooters are in the pipeline and that the Tier software platform has been built to cover various “shared urban mobility,” with the ability to integrate all kinds of urban mobility categories, not limited to the startup’s own assets.

To date, Tier has raised around €30 million. Its backers inckude Northzone, Speedinvest and Point Nine. Most recently, Formula 1 World Champion Nico Rosberg became an investor. I’m also hearing the company is in the midst of raising a large round.

Endpoint security — the branch of cybersecurity that focuses on data coming in from laptops, phones, and other devices connected to a network — is an $8 billion dollar market that, due to the onslaught of network breaches, is growing fast. To underscore that demand, one of the bigger startups in the space is announcing a sizeable funding round.

SentinelOne, which provides real-time endpoint protection on laptops, phones, containers, cloud services and most recently IoT devices on a network through a completely autonomous, AI-based platform, has raised $120 million in a Series D round — money that it will be using to continue expanding its current business as well as forge into new areas such as building more tools to automatically detect and patch software running on those endpoints, to keep them as secure as possible.

The funding was led by Insight Partners, with Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, NextEquity participating, alongside all of the company’s existing investors, which include the likes of Third Point Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Data Collective, Sound Ventures and Ashton Kutcher, Tiger Global, Granite Hill and more.

SentinelOne is not disclosing its valuation with this round, but CEO and co-founder Tomer Weingarten confirmed it was up compared to its previous funding events. SentinelOne has now raised just shy of $130 million, and PitchBook notes that in its last round, it was valued at $210 post-money.

That would imply that this round values SentinelOne at more than $330 million, likely significantly more: “We are one of the youngest companies working in endpoint security, but we also have well over 2,000 customers and 300% growth year-on-year,” Weingarten said. And working in the area of software-as-a-service with a fully-automated solution that doesn’t require humans to run any aspect of it, he added, “means we have high margins.”

The rise in cyberattacks resulting from malicious hackers exploiting human errors — such as clicking on phishing links; or bringing in and using devices from outside the network running software that might not have its security patches up to date — has resulted in a stronger focus on endpoint security and the companies that provide it.

Indeed, SentinelOne is not alone. Crowdstrike, another large startup in the same space as SentinelOne, is now looking at a market cap of at least $4 billion when it goes public. Carbon Black, which went public last year, is valued at just above $1 billion. Another competitor, Cylance, was snapped up by BlackBerry for $1.5 billion.

Weingarten — who cofounded the company with Almog Cohen (CTO) and Ehud Shamir (CSO) — says that SentinelOne differs from its competitors in the field because of its focus on being fully autonomous.

“We’re able to digest massive amounts of data and run machine learning to detect any type of anomaly in an automated manner,” he said, describing Crowdstrike as “tech augmented by services.” That’s not to say SentinelOne is completely without human options (options being the key word; they’re not required): it offers its own managed services under the brand name of Vigilance and works with system integrator partners to sell its products to enterprises.

There is another recurring issue with endpoint security solutions, which is that they are known to throw up a lot of false positives — items that are not recognized by the system that subsequently get blocked, which turn out actually to be safe. Weingarten admits that this is a by-product of all these systems, including SentinelOne’s.

“It’s a result of opting to use a heuristic rather than deterministic model,” he said, “but there is no other way to deal with anomalies and unknowns without heuristics, but yes with that comes false positives.” He pointed out that the company’s focus on machine learning as the basis of its platform helps it to more comprehensively ferret these out and make deductions on what might not otherwise have proper representation in its models. Working for a pilot period at each client also helps inform the algorithms to become more accurate ahead of a full rollout.

All this has helped bring down SentinelOne’s own false positive rate, which Weingarten said is around 0.04%, putting it in the bracket of lower mis-detectors in this breakdown of false positive rates by VirusTotal:

“Endpoint security is at a fascinating point of maturity, highlighting a massive market opportunity for SentinelOne’s technology and team,” said Teddie Wardi, Managing Director, Insight Partners, in a statement. “Attack methods grow more advanced by the day and customers demand innovative, autonomous technology to stay one step ahead. We recognize SentinelOne’s strong leadership team and vision to be unique in the market, as evidenced through the company’s explosive growth and highly differentiated business model from its peer cybersecurity companies.”

By virtue of digesting activity across millions of endpoints and billions of events among its customers, SentinelOne has an interesting vantage point when it comes to seeing the biggest problems of the moment.

Weingarten notes that one big trend is that the biggest attacks are now not always coming from state-sponsored entities.

“Right now we’re seeing how fast advanced techniques are funnelling down from government-sponsored attackers to any cyber criminal. Sophisticated malicious hacking can now come from anywhere,” he said.

When it comes to figuring out what is most commonly creating vulnerabilities at an organization, he said it was the challenge of keeping up to date with security patches. Unsurprisingly, it’s something that SentinelOne plans to tackle with a new product later this year — one reason for the large funding round this time around.

“Seamless patching is absolutely something that we are looking at,” he said. “We already do vulnerability assessments today and so we have the data to tell you what is out of date. The next logical step is to seamlessly track those apps and issue the patches automatically.”

Indeed it’s this longer term vision of how the platform will be developing, and how it’s moving in response to what the current threats are today, that attracted the backers. (Indeed the IoT element of the “endpoint” focus is a recent additions.

“SentinelOne’s combination of best-in-class EPP and EDR functionality is a magnet for engagement, but it’s the company’s ability to foresee the future of the endpoint market that attracted us as a technology partner,” a rep from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation said in a statement. “Extending tech stacks beyond EPP and EDR to include IoT is the clear next step, and we look forward to collaborating with SentinelOne on its groundbreaking work in this area.

Uber’s best hope to beat all its ride sharing and food delivery competitors is that it does both. Through cross-promotion, it can combine activities people might only do a few times per week or month into a product they open daily.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said cryptically on the company’s first earnings call last month that “Suffice it to say we are starting to experiment in ways in which we can upsell our ride customers to Eats deals in a way that — you know, to be plain spoken — isn’t annoying . . . I will tell you that we are very, very early in the stages of exploring the many, many ways in which our Ride business can help continue to build our Eats business and vice versa by the way . . . I don’t want to give away too much.”

But TechCrunch has discovered that specifically, Uber is starting to make a web view of Uber Eats accessible from its main app. A tipster in Boston first clued us in to the feature and now Uber confirms that it’s merging a fully functional web version of Uber Eats into its ride-hailing product. Uber quietly began rolling out a pilot of the merged app in late April. Uber Eats app will remain available as a standalone app.

The move could give Uber a customer acquisition and retention edge on single-product competitors like Lyft or DoorDash, while helping it keep up with multi-product peers like Careem and Bolt (which recently added food delivery), and its biggest global foe Didi from China which just launched food delivery in Uber stronghold Mexico. Combining functionality means Uber’s ride hailing customers could see a promotion for Eats and instantly try it without downloading a new app as their tummy rumbles. It could also get the 50% of Eats customers who don’t ride in Ubers to try it for transportation.

“We’re rolling out a new way to order Eats directly in the Uber app on Android (we’ve already been experimenting on iOS)” an Uber spokesperson tells me. “This cross-promotion gives riders who are new to Eats a seamless way to order a meal via a webview instead of opening up the App Store for download.”

The merged app is now available to all iOS users in cities where Uber doesn’t offer bikes and scooters that already clutter the interface of its car service app such as SF, LA, and NYC. The Android version is out to 17% of riders in Uber’s 500 other markets with the goal of the cross-promotional tool being available to all riders outside of micromobility cities soon.

A third of all Boston riders should have the feature by June 5th, while a third of riders in more markets like Washington D.C. and Atlanta will get it a week later. Uber plans to roll the feature out to all markets  (except for Japan). And eventually Uber wants all its Eats markets to sport the cross-promotion in its main app.

“We believe our platform model allows us to acquire, engage and retain customers with the cost, as well as efficiency and effectiveness advantage over our rivals, typically monoline competitors” Khosrowshahi said on the earnings call. “What we found is that with Rides and Eats . . . we are seeing early signal where essentially you can have very little if any cannibalization of a Ride and throw a significant amount of potential demand onto the Eats side.”

The CEO also mentioned Uber’s loyalty and subscription programs are vital to cross-promotion. Its Uber Rewards that rolled out in January earns users points for both rides and food orders, and higher reward tiers score users free Eats deliveries that could get them hooked on the convenience. And last month, TechCrunch broke the news of Uber prototyping a $9.99 Uber Eats Pass subscription that offers unlimited free Eats deliveries.

“Really what we are looking to do is significantly increase the percentage of our MAPCs [monthly active platform consumers] that use both products [ride-hailing and Eats] and when we see customers using more than one product, their engagement with the platform more than doubles” Khosrowshahi concluded on the call. “So not only does engagement with Uber increase, but the engagement with our individual products increases as well, so it’s kind of a win, win, win.”

Uber’s market is all about lifetime value. If it can lock users in now, it could earn a fortune off them in the decades to come. That’s why it’s spending so much on marketing and expansion now even if it means racking up earnings losses. But its best (and cheapest) marketing channel is likely cross-promotion through the apps it’s already gotten people to install.

As expected, there was a lot at yesterday’s big WWDC keynote. In fact, you got the sense watching the whole thing unfold that Apple had to race through a number of its new features to cram everything into the two-hour-plus event.

For many, the new Mac Pro was the star of the show, but for Apple, the clear the focus was on software. The company is keenly aware as hardware sales slow that its future is all about software, services and content. This week at the show, we got a guided look through the best new features iOS, macOS and watchOS have to offer.

No surprise, iOS 13 brings the biggest changes of the bunch. Dark Mode is the highlight so to speak. The feature has the same selling points as it does on other operating systems — namely being easier on the eyes and the battery. With a touch in settings, users can turn set it as a constant or have it switch when the sun goes down.

The feature swaps in dark wallpapers and will work with all of Apple’s native apps. Third-party supports is coming as well and will be a part of its development platforms like Swift, going forward.

Apple Maps, a major underdog at launch, continues to get some key upgrades. Most notable is Lookaround — a competitor to Google’s longstanding Street View, which brings seamlessly stitched photographs to help users better navigate around. The feature was extremely smooth in our brief demo. It’s hard to say how it will behave on cellular networks out on the street, but the preview was certainly impressive.

Imaging is a key part of every iOS upgrade, and this one’s no different. Photo editing has been much improved, with more pro-style control over aspects like white balance, contrast, sharpening and noise reduction.

There are some handy dummy proof additions as well, like the ability to adjust saturation without impacting flesh tones. iOS’s editing tools are coming to video as well, this time out, with the ability to adjust settings and even rotate orientation. The photos app also gets a new dynamic view that groups images by occasions like birthdays, giving you another opportunity to mark the unwavering march of time.

This year’s show marked a big moment for iPad as well, as the tablet’s operating system broke free from iOS. For users, that primarily means more functionality on the larger screen, including the ability to to open up multiple windows of the same app for additional multitasking. That joins various other features like improved gesture based highlighting and cut and paste that help iPadOS behave more like a PC.

Far and away the most exciting addition here, however, is actually on the mac side. macOS Catalina brings Duet/Luna style second screen functionality to the tablet, letting it serve as an external monitor. The feature can be used wirelessly (over bluetooth) or tethered.

Our demo was the latter (WWDC is a busy place for wireless signals), but operated pretty flawlessly in spite of some complicated demands. With an iPad Pro, users can draw with the Apple Pencil. There’s also a handy Touch Bar-style menu tray at that populates the bottom of the iPad display.

A couple of watchOS additions are worth mentioning, as well. The most significant is native menstrual cycle tracking. The feature, which is also coming to iOS, gives users a way to keep track of another key aspect of health.

Other additions to the wearable operating system include a native app for audiobooks and a noise app that uses the watch’s built in mics to alert wearers of loud sounds that can lead to hearing loss.

Developer tools don’t tend to make headlines outside the tech ecosystem. But the developer tools announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week could have a significant impact on both the number of apps and, potentially, the quality of apps available to consumers across Apple’s numerous platforms — including all those that aren’t iPhone — like macOS, watchOS, tvOS and now iPadOS.

One thing in particular developers can’t stop talking about on the sidelines of the event this week is SwiftUI.

Five years ago, Apple moved to make development easier with the launch of its Swift programming language. At WWDC this week, it expanded on that vision with the launch of a new user interface framework, called SwiftUI. The framework, built from the ground up, is designed to help developers build a full-featured user interface with smooth animations using simple, declarative code.

For developers, this means they can save a lot of time by way of SwiftUI’s automatic functionality when it comes to designing apps that are both well-designed and less buggy. Or, as Apple explained to developers, “it’s not just less code, it’s better code.”

Its simplicity is meant to eliminate entire categories of errors that could otherwise crop up; its code is easy to read — like having someone explain a user interface to you; and it lets developers reuse more code across platforms.

It also allows for iteration to become much faster. If a developer later wants to change a part of their app’s user interface, it’s a much quicker, easier change.

SwiftUI’s framework helps with interface layout, adapting apps for iOS 13’s new Dark Mode, accessibility, right-to-left language support and internationalization, among other things. Just as important, SwiftUI can be used across Apple’s app ecosystem by way of the same API built into iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.

That could kickstart cross-platform development from those publishers who previously focused only on iOS, if they were to adopt the new framework in their existing apps.

To what extent they will do so depends on their app’s specifics, but SwiftUI will appeal to new developers as well as novices looking to get started for the first time.

The SwiftUI news comes alongside a new version of Xcode — Xcode 11 — that now includes a graphical UI design tool that will allow developers to build a user interface via SwiftUI, without having to write code.

The Swift code is automatically generated as changes to the UI are made within the visual design tool. Developers can then see real-time previews of how their apps will look and how they work by running them on connected devices like iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple Watch and Apple TV.

This allows them to test how their code works with each platform, ranging from how the app responds to multi-touch or how it works with the camera or other sensors during the development process itself.

Watch apps

For watchOS, SwiftUI solves the problems around the complexities of building animations and effects for Watch apps — something that limited some developers from focusing on Watch as an app platform.

The framework will support building Watch apps with features like swipe to delete, reordering list items, carousel sliding and direct access to the digital crown.

The Watch is also getting its own on-device App Store and standalone apps that can be installed even without an iOS counterpart. (Or even an iPhone.)

With standalone apps, developers can break off their Watch app from iOS and even specify the Watch as a standalone push target — meaning they can send notifications only to the Watch, not all the user’s platforms.

Watch apps will also be able to support CloudKit subscriptions and complication pushes to keep users up to date. And because Watch apps can now target users who aren’t using the iPhone version of the app, they can also offer text fields where users can enter a username and password to sign up for an app from their wrist or they can use the Sign in with Apple button, also newly announced (and even required, in some cases.)

Watch apps can also now stream audio, which paves the way for a different kind of app than what was previously possible. It’s not hard to imagine — as demoed — an app that streams live sports or music from an internet-based streaming service like Pandora.

In addition, a new extended runtime for watchOS could prompt the development of another kind of Watch app that still runs even after the user lowers their wrist.

For example, apps focused on self-care, mindfulness, physical therapy, smart alarms or health monitoring could take advantage of this to create new experiences aimed at Watch users.

The original version of the Watch app ecosystem was slowed not only because of the complexity of building apps, but the constraints placed on developers that didn’t allow them to target the wrist in certain ways. Instead of thinking what makes sense on the wrist — apps that use sensors or stream audio, for example — developers made more basic ports of existing iOS apps.

Not surprisingly, many of those failed and were later removed. This is Apple’s attempt to give the Watch app ecosystem a second go.

macOS apps

For the Mac, new developer tools announced at WWDC will help iOS developers reach Mac’s 100 million active users. 

Apple said it realized that a number of native iPad apps would look great on the Mac, but developers didn’t have the time to use AppKit to port apps over. So this year, it introduced technology that would allow developers to take an iPadOS app and bring it to Mac with “minimal” effort.

It spoke of the current ecosystem of more than a million iPad apps, many of which it believes would make sense on the Mac, too.

As part of this effort, Apple ported 40 frameworks from iOS to Mac, and almost the entire iOS API set with only a few exceptions. This was achieved by adapting UIKit as a native framework and integrating it directly into macOS with the new release, macOS Catalina, Apple said.

In addition, Apple made porting an iPad app to Mac a three-step process.

And the first step is literally checking a box in Xcode’s project editor that says “Mac.”

In Xcode, when you make a change to your source, all your apps will update automatically — including those on iOS/iPadOS and Mac.

Developers were told they need a great iPad app that supports best practices to begin with, and then should customize it for Mac by adding Mac-specific features like Full Menus, Toolbars, Hover events, Touch Bar and more, where appropriate.

It’s not literally a checkbox to make a great Mac app, but it is much less work.

The question, however, remains about how much Apple will enforce the “great” iPad app requirements. It says developers should adopt iPad best practices, like supporting external keyboards or leveraging other key technologies, like Metal, for optimal results.

However, if Apple really just wants to flesh out its Mac App Store with more apps — and more revenue-generating apps — it may not insist on this level of great iPad design.

The company already tested this process with a dozen developers before WWDC, including American Airlines, Crew, DC Universe, Post It, Twitter, Tripit, Fender, Asphalt 9, Jira and others.

iPadOS

Meanwhile, iOS running on the iPad got its own rebrand with the introduction of iPadOS.

The iPad has been powered by iOS since launch, but over time it developed its own set of specific features designed for the larger canvas, like slideover, split view, drag-and-drop and support for Apple Pencil, for example.

For starters, iPadOS will have a tighter grid of homescreen icons, which means there’s more room for developers’ apps. And app widgets can now be pinned to the homescreen, which is another way that iPad apps get to take up space… and users’ attention.

But where iPad excels is in becoming an alternative to a notebook computer for productivity, and in the creative arts, such as sketching and digital art, for example.

For productivity app developers, iPadOS’s new ability to pop out separate windows of an app — more like a “real” computer — will be useful, as will the addition of App Exposé, and new gestures like the three-finger copy, cut, paste and undo gestures.

In terms of developer-specific tools, a new PencilKit API will allow third-party apps to have the same access to Apple’s newly redesigned Pencil tools.

However, what may actually spur more iPad app development could be the ease of porting an iPad app to the Mac. In other words, developers may be motivated to really flesh out their iPad app because they know that work can be replicated over to Mac with less work than before.

tvOS

Apple’s tvOS for Apple TV received less attention given the focus on SwiftUI and porting iPad apps to Mac — and because Apple just held an event where its ambitions around Apple TV and its streaming service, Apple TV+ were a key focus.

That said, SwiftUI will come into play here, as it will allow for reusing code with tvOS apps as well.

AR & ML

Beyond just prompting development by making the process simpler, Apple this week unveiled several other developer technologies, including an updated version of its ARKit (ARKit 3) that will allow for better AR apps that allow for motion capture, and the ability to identify people in the frame so they can move behind and in front of AR objects, and more.

Apple’s Core ML 3 lets developers build, train and deploy machine learning in their apps, even if they’re not ML experts.

These and other improvements to key technologies, like Metal and CreateML, will help developers working in these areas build better-quality apps.

But there’s perhaps more excitement and interest around how Apple is now leveraging its most popular app platform, iOS, to recharge its entire app ecosystem. With the tools it announced this week, Apple aims to streamline and simplify development and design, get more people coding and encourage its app developer community to think beyond the iPhone.

Move over, Starlink. SpaceX’s global internet play might have caught the world’s attention with its 60-satellite launch last month, but little did we know that it had already been upstaged — at least in terms of sheer numbers. The KickSat-2 project put 105 tiny “femtosats” into space at once months earlier, the culmination of a years-long project begun by a grad student.

KickSat-2 was the second attempt by Zac Manchester, now a professor at Stanford, to test what he believes is an important piece of the coming new space economy: ultra-tiny satellites.

Sure, the 4-inch Cubesat standard is small… and craft like Swarm Technologies’ SpaceBEEs are even smaller. But the satellites tested by Manchester are tiny. We’re talking Triscuit size here — perhaps Wheat Thin, or even Cheez-It.

The KickSat project started back in 2011, when Manchester and his colleagues did a Kickstarter to raise funds for about 300 “Sprite” satellites that would be launched to space and deployed on behalf of backers. It was a success, but unfortunately once launched a glitch caused the satellites to burn up before being deployed. Manchester was undeterred and the project continued.

He worked with Cornell University and NASA Ames to redesign the setup, and as part of that he and collaborator Andy Filo collected a prize for their clever 3D-printed deployment mechanism. The Sprites themselves are relatively simple things: essentially an unshielded bit of PCB with a solar panel, antennas, and electronics on board to send and receive signals.

The “mothership” launched in November to the ISS, where it sat for several months awaiting an opportunity to be deployed. That opportunity came on March 17: all 105 Sprites were sprung out into low Earth orbit, where they began communicating with each other and (just barely) to ground stations.

This isn’t the start of a semi-permanent thousands-strong constellation, though — the satellites all burned up a few days later, as planned.

“This was mostly a test of deployment and communication systems for the Sprites,” Manchester explained in an email to TechCrunch. The satellites were testing two different signals: “Specially designed CDMA signals that enable hundreds of Sprites to simultaneously communicate with a single ground station at very long range and with very low power,” and “simpler signals for short-range networking between Sprites in orbit.”

This proof of concept is an important one — it seems logical and practical to pack dozens or hundreds of these things into future missions, where they can be released into controlled trajectories providing sensing or communications relay capabilities to other spacecraft. And of course as we’ve already seen, the smaller and cheaper the spacecraft, the easier it is for people to access space for any reason: scientific, economic, or just for the heck of it.

“We’ve shown that it’s possible for swarms of cheap, tiny satellites to one day carry out tasks now done by larger, costlier satellites, making it affordable for just about anyone to put instruments or experiments into orbit,” Manchester said in a Stanford news release. With launch costs dropping, it might not be long before you’ll be able to take ownership of a Sprite of your own.

Apple’s splashy new product announcements at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose also ushered in new rules of the road for its ecosystem partners that force hard turns for app makers around data ownership and control. These changes could fundamentally shift how consumers perceive and value control over the data they generate in using their devices, and that shift could change the landscape for how services are bought, consumed and sold.

A lot of privacy advocates have posited a future wherein we ascribe value to the data of individuals and potentially compensate people directly for its use. But others have also rightly pointed out than in isolation, a single individual’s data is precisely value-less, since it’s only in aggregate that this data is worth anything to the companies that currently harvest it to inform their marketing and drive their product decisions.

There are many reasons why it seems unlikely that any of the companies for which user data is a primary source of revenue or a crucial aspect of their business model would shift to a direct compensation model – not the least of which is that it’s probably much cheaper, and definitely much more scalable, to build products that provide them use value in exchange instead. But that doesn’t mean privacy won’t become a crucial lever in the information economy of the next wave of innovation and tech product development.

Perils of per datum pricing

As mentioned, the mechanics of directly selling your data to a company are problematic at best, and unworkable at worst.

One big issue with this is that there’s definitely bound to be a scale limit on any subscription paid product. In a world where that’s increasingly a preferred method for media companies, food and packaged goods delivery, and even car ownership alternatives, there’s clearly a cap on how much of their income consumers are willing to commit to these kinds of recurring costs.

Here’s how Haun, a former federal prosecutor and clerk for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy puts it.

Kik’s best argument seems to be (2), that there’s no common enterprise between them and the Kin purchasers. Courts have held that the mere sale of something, without promising more, doesn’t give rise to a common enterprise. Based on the public information I’ve reviewed, it’s not obvious that Kik was under any contractual obligation to the purchasers other than to deliver the tokens. Once that delivery occurred, Kin holders controlled their tokens and could use them how they pleased — whether to buy items or otherwise. And plenty did. Kik created a marketplace that was open and that was meant to achieve real exchange between participants, so Kik wasn’t necessarily a participant in all transactions. Thus, the SEC may have a hard time demonstrating common enterprise between Kik and token purchasers — unless they can come up with evidence showing that Kik had obligations to purchasers after token delivery.

What about (3), the expectation of profits through the efforts of others? In its Wells response, Kik tells a good story about consumptive uses, given its integration with the messenger platform, which had millions of users at the time of the token sale. Apparently, 20% of Kin purchasers linked their wallets to Kik to buy everything from games to digital products and services. That some participants purchased as little as 9 cents in Kin also seems more consistent with for “use” than for “investment”.

Kik’s defense hinges on who used the company’s cryptocurrency to make purchases through its messaging service versus which of the 10,000 acquirers of Kin currency at the time of the token offering were speculating on the cryptocurrency’s potential rise in value.

Here again, Thaun’s explanation of what Kik needs to prove about the Kin offering is helpful.

But anecdotal evidence about why purchasers bought Kin won’t matter as much as the evidence around what Kik led purchasers to expect. This is because the case law focuses less on what was in a particular purchaser’s mind at the time, and more on what the seller “offered or promised” those purchasers. So the key will be what statements can be attributed to Kik before the sale — a great example of how PR, marketing, and other company building functions really matter when it comes to many crypto projects.

Kik says its primary marketing message focused on Kin’s use rather than on Kin as an investment, which makes sense since the project would only work if people actually used Kin. If that’s true, the SEC will need to contend with some of these facts:

• 50% of participants in the token sale purchased less than $1000 of Kin, which seems more consistent with a consumptive use vs. investment purpose argument.

• The way in which Kik structured things encouraged broad participation and discouraged speculation, for example, by capping the amount an individual could purchase to ensure more participants used its network.

• It delayed its token sale to ensure functionality of the network first, making sure it could be used now vs. just in the future.

• Since the token sale, the use of Kin has increased.