Year: 2019

Welcome to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. I cover all the ways people and goods move from Point A to Point B — today and in the future — whether it’s by bike, bus, scooter, car, train, truck, robotaxi or rocket. Sure, let’s include hyperloop and eVTOLs, or air taxis, too.

Yup, another transportation newsletter. But I promise this one will be different. Here’s how.

Newsletters can be great mediums for curated news — a place that rounds up all the important articles a reader might have missed in any given week. We want to do a bit more.

We’re doubling down on the analysis and adding a heaping scoop of original reporting and well, scoops. You can expect Q&As with the most interesting people in transportation, insider tips, and data from that white paper you didn’t have time to read. This isn’t a lone effort either. TechCrunch senior reporter Megan Rose Dickey, who has been writing about micro mobility since before the scooter boom times of 2017, will be weighing in each week in our “Tiny But Mighty Mobility” section below. Follow her @meganrosedickey.

Consider this a soft launch. There might be content you like or something you hate. Feel free to reach out to me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share those thoughts, opinions, or tips.

Eventually, we’ll have a way for readers to sign up and have Transportation Weekly delivered each week via email. For now, follow me on Twitter @kirstenkorosec to ensure you see it each week.

Now, let’s get to the good stuff.

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ONM …

There are OEMs in the automotive world. And here, (wait for it) there are ONMs — original news manufacturers.

This is where investigative reporting, enterprise pieces and analysis on transportation will live.

We promised scoops in Transportation Weekly and here is one. If you don’t know journalist Mark Harris, you should. He’s an intrepid gumshoeing reporter who TechCrunch has been lucky enough to hire as a freelancer. Follow him @meharris.

Amazon quietly acquired robotics company Dispatch to build Scout

Remember way back in January when Amazon introduced Scout, their autonomous delivery bot? There was speculation at the time that Amazon had bought the Estonian-based company Starship Technologies. Harris did some investigating and discovered some of the intellectual property and technology behind Scout likely came from a small San Francisco startup called Dispatch that Amazon stealthily acquired in 2017.

It’s time to stop thinking about Amazon as just an e-commerce company. It’s a gigantic logistics company, probably the biggest on the planet, with a keen interest — and the cash to pursue those interests — in automation. Think beyond Scout. In fact, wander on down this post to the deal of the week.

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Dig In

Each week, transportation weekly will spend a little extra time on an approach, policy, tech or the people behind it in our ‘Dig In” section. We’ll run the occasional column here, too.

This week features a conversation with Dmitri Dolgov, the CTO and VP of engineering at Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet.

Ten years ago, right around now, about a dozen engineers started working on Project Chauffeur, which would turn into the Google self-driving project and eventually become an official company called Waymo. Along the way, the project would give rise to a number of high-profile engineers who would go on to create their own companies. It’s a list that includes Aurora co-founder Chris Urmson, Argo AI co-founder Bryan Salesky and Anthony Levandowski, who helped launch Otto and more recently Pronto.ai.

What might be less known is that many of those in the original dozen are still at Waymo, including Dolgov, Andrew Chatham, Dirk Haehnel, Nathaniel Fairfield and Mike Montemerlo.

Dolgov and I talked about the early days, challenges and what’s next. A couple of things that stood out during our chat.

There is a huge difference between having a prototype that can do something once or twice or four times versus building a product that people can start using in their daily lives. And it is, especially in this field, very easy to make progress on these kinds of one-off challenges.

Dolgov’s take on how engineers viewed the potential of the project 10 years ago …

I also use our cars every day to get around, this is how I got to work today. This is how I run errands around here in Mountain View and Palo Alto.

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A little bird …

We hear a lot. But we’re not selfish. Let’s share.
An early investor, or investors, in Bird appear to be selling some of their shares in the scooter company, per a tip backed up by data over at secondary trading platform EquityZen. That’s not crazy considering the company is valued at $2 billion-ish. Seed investors should take some money off the table once a company reaches that valuation.

We’ve heard that David Sacks at Craft Ventures hasn’t sold a single Bird share. We hear Tusk Ventures hasn’t sold, either. That leaves a few others, including Goldcrest Capital, which was the lone seed investor, and then Series A participants Lead Edge Capital, M13, and Valor Equity Partners.

Got a tip or overheard something in the world of transportation? Email me or send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec.

While you’re over at Twitter, check out this cheeky account @SDElevator. We can’t guarantee how much of the content is actually “overheard” and how much is manufactured for the laughs, but it’s a fun account to peruse from time to time.

Another new entrant to the mobility parody genre is @HeardinMobilty.

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Deal of the week

There’s so much to choose from this week, but Aurora’s more than $530 million Series B funding round announced Thursday morning is the winner.

The upshot? It’s not just that Aurora is now valued at more than $2.5 billion. The primary investors in the round — Sequoia as lead and “significant” investments from Amazon and T. Rowe Price — suggests Aurora’s full self-driving stack is headed for other uses beyond shuttling people around in autonomous vehicles. Perhaps delivery is next.

And believe it or not, the type of investor in this round tells me that we can expect another capital raise. Yes, Aurora has lots of runway now as well as three publicly named customers. But investors like Sequoia, which led the round and whose partner Carl Eschenbach is joining Aurora’s board, T. Rowe Price and Amazon along with repeaters like Index Ventures (general partner Mike Volpi is also on the board) have patience, access to cash and long-term strategic thinking. Expect more from them.

Other deals that got our attention this week:

• Lime raises $310 million
• Self-driving truck startup Ike raises $52 million
• Tesla’s acquisition of Maxwell Technologies for $218 million
• Online car retail platform BrumBrum raises $23 million led by Accel
• Car subscription service Cluno raises $28 million led by Valar Ventures, the firm founded by Peter Thiel

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Snapshot

Speaking of deals and Tesla … the automaker’s $218 million acquisition this month of Maxwell Technologies got me thinking about companies it has targeted in the past.

So, we went ahead and built a handy chart to provide a snapshot view of some of Tesla’s noteworthy acquisitions. 

One note: Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted in 2018 that the company had acquired trucking carrier companies to help improve its delivery logistics. We’ve dug in and have yet to land on the company, or companies, Tesla acquired.

The deals that got away are just as interesting. That list includes a reported $325 million offer to buy Simbol Materials, the startup that was extracting small amounts of lithium near the Salton Sea east of San Diego.

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Tiny but mighty mobility

Between Lime’s $310 million Series D round and the seemingly never-ending battle to operate electric scooters in San Francisco, it’s clear that micro mobility is not so micro.

Lime, a shared electric scooter and bikeshare startup, has now raised north of $800 million in total funding, surpassing key competitor Bird’s total funding of $415 million. Thanks to this week’s round of funding, Lime’s micromobility business is now worth $2.4 billion.

Lime currently operates its bikes and scooters in more than 100 cities worldwide. Over in San Francisco, however, Lime has yet to deploy any of its modes of transportation. Since last March, there’s been an ongoing battle among scooter operators to deploy their services in the city. The city ultimately selected Skip and Scoot for the pilot programs, leaving the likes of Lime, Uber’s JUMP and Spin to appeal the decision.

A neutral hearing officer has since determined SF’s process for determining scooter operators was fair, but the silver lining for the likes of JUMP, Spin and most likely, Lime, is that the city may open up its pilot program to allow additional operators beginning in April.

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Notable reads

Two recent studies got my attention.

The first is from Bike Pittsburgh, an advocacy group and partner of Uber, that published the findings from its latest AV survey based on responses from local residents. The last time they conducted a similar survey was in 2017.

The takeaway: people there, who are among the most exposed to autonomous vehicles due to all the AV testing on public roads, are getting used to it. A bit more than 48 percent of respondents said they approve of public AV testing in Pittsburgh, down slightly from 49 percent approval rating in 2017. 

• 21.21% somewhat approve
• 11.62% neutral
• 10.73% somewhat disapprove
• 8.73% disapprove

One standout result was surrounding responses about the fatal accident in Tempe, Arizona involving a self-driving Uber that struck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in March 2018. Survey participants were asked “As a pedestrian or a bicyclist how did this change event and it’s outcome change your opinion about sharing the road with AVs?”

Some 60 percent of respondents claimed no change in their opinion, with another 37 percent claiming that it negatively changed their opinion. Nearly 3 percent claimed their opinion changed positively toward the technology.

Bike Pittsburgh noted that the survey elicited passionate open-ended responses. 

“The incident did not turn too many people off of AV technology in general,” according to Bike Pittsburgh. “Rather it did lead to a growing distrust of the companies themselves, specifically with Uber and how they handled the fatality.”

The other study, Securing the Modern Vehicle: A Study of Automotive Industry Cybersecurity Practices, was released by Synopsys, Inc.and SAE International.

The results, based on a survey of global automotive manufacturers and suppliers conducted by Ponemon Institute, doesn’t assuage my concerns. If anything, it puts me on alert.

• 84% of automotive professionals have concerns that their organizations’ cybersecurity practices are not keeping pace with evolving technologies
• 30% of organizations don’t have an established cybersecurity program or team
• 63% test less than half of the automotive technology they develop for security vulnerabilities.

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Testing and deployments

Pilots, pilots everywhere. A couple of interesting mobility pilots and deployments stand out.

Optimus Ride, the Boston-based MIT spinoff, has made a deal with Brookfield Properties to provide rides in its small self-driving vehicles at Halley Rise – a new $1.4 billion mixed-use development in Virginia. 

This is an example of where we see self-driving vehicles headed — for now. Small deployments that are narrowly focused in geography with a predictable customer base are the emerging trend of 2019. Expect more of them.

And there’s a reason why, these are the kinds of pilots that will deliver the data needed to improve their technology, as well as test out business models —gotta figure out how to money with AVs eventually — hone in fleet operational efficiency, placate existing investors while attracting new ones, and recruit talent.

Another deployment in the more conventional ride-hailing side of mobility is with Beat, the startup that has focused its efforts on Latin America.

Beat was founded by Nikos Drandakis in 2011 initially as Taxibeat. The startup acquired by Daimler’s mytaxi in February 2017 and Drandakis still runs the show. The company was focused on Europe but shifted to Latin America, and it’s made all the difference. (Beat is still available in Athens, Greece.) Beat has launched in Lima, Peru, Santiago, Chile and Bogota, Colombia and now boasts 200,000 registered drivers. 

Now it’s moving into Mexico, where more competitors exist. The company just started registering and screening drivers in Mexico City as it prepares to offer rides for passengers this month. 

TechCrunch spoke at length with Drandakis. Look out for a deeper dive soon.

Until next week, nos vemos.

A decade ago, about a dozen or so engineers gathered at Google’s main Mountain View campus on Charleston Road to work on Project Chauffeur, a secret endeavor housed under the tech giant’s moonshot factory X.

Project Chauffeur — popularly know as the “Google self-driving car project” — kicked off in January 2009. It would eventually graduate from its project status to become a standalone company called Waymo in 2016.

The project, originally led by Sebastian Thrun, would help spark an entire ecosystem that is still developing today. Venture capitalists took notice and stampeded in, auto analysts shifted gears, regulators, urban planners and policy wonks started collecting data and considering the impact of AVs on cities.

The project would also become a springboard for a number of engineers who would go on to create their own companies. It’s a list that includes Aurora  co-founder Chris Urmson,  Argo AI co-founder Bryan Salesky as well as Anthony Levandowski, who helped launch Otto and more recently Pronto.ai.

What might be less known is that many who joined in those first weeks are still at Waymo, including Andrew Chatham, Dmitri Dolgov, Dirk Haehnel, Nathaniel Fairfield and Mike Montemerlo. Depending on how one defines “early days,” there are others like Hy Murveit, Phil Nemec, and Dan Egnor, who have been there for eight or nine years.

Dolgov, Waymo’s CTO and VP of engineering, chatted recently with TechCrunch about the early days, its 10-year anniversary, and what’s next.

Below is an excerpt of an interview with Dolgov, which has been edited for clarity and length.

TC: Let’s go back to the beginning of how you got started. Take me to those first days at the Google self-driving project.

DOLGOV: When I think about what drew me to this field, it’s always been three main things: the impact of the technology, the technology itself, and the challenges as well as the people you get to work with. It’s pretty obvious, at this point, that it can have huge implications on safety, but beyond that, it can impact efficiency and remove friction from transportation for people and things.

There is this sense of excitement that never seems to die off. I remember the first time I got to work on a self-driving car. And it was the first time when the car drove itself using software that I had written, you know, just earlier in the day. So this was back in 2007. And that completely blew my mind. (Dolgov participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge in November 2007 before the Google project launched)

TC: What were these 10, 100-mile challenges that (Google co-founder) Larry Page came up with? Can you describe that to me a little bit?

DOLGOV: This was probably the main milestone that we created for ourselves when we started this project at Google in 2009. And the challenge was to drive 10 routes, each one was 100 miles long. And you had to drive each one from beginning to end without any human intervention.

These were really well defined very clearly, crisply defined routes. So in the beginning, you’d engage the self driving mode of a car, and then had to finish the whole 100 miles on its own.

The routes were intentionally chosen to sample the full complexity of the task. In those early days, for us, it was all about understanding the complexity of the problem. All of the routes were in the Bay Area. We had some driving in urban environments, around Palo Alto,  we had one that spent a lot of time on the freeways and went to all of the bridges in the Bay Area. We had one that went from Mountain View to San Francisco, including driving through Lombard Street. We had one that went around Lake Tahoe.

We tried to cover as much of the complexity of the environment as possible. And what’s really great about that task is that it really helped us very quickly understand the core complexity of the space.

TC: How long did it take to complete these challenges?

DMITRI: It took us until the fall of 2010.

TC: It’s kind of amazing to think that the project was able to complete these challenges in 2010, and yet, there still seems to be so much more work to complete on this task.

DOLGOV: Right. But I think this is the nature of the problem. There is a huge difference between having a prototype that can do something once or twice or a handful of times versus building a product that people can start using in their daily lives. And it is, especially in this field, when we started, it’s very easy to make progress on these kinds of one-off challenges.

But what really makes it hard is an incredible level of performance that you need from your system in order to make it into a product. And that’s number one. And number two, is the very long tail of complexity of the types of problems that you encounter. Maybe you don’t see them 99% of the time, but you still have to be ready for that 1% or 1.1%.

TC:  When you think back to those early days — or maybe even more recently — was there ever a moment when where there was a software problem, or even a hardware problem that seemed insurmountable and that maybe the tech just wasn’t quite there yet?

DOLGOV: In the early days, we had all kinds of problems that we faced. In the early history of this project, we only set out to solve some problems without really knowing how we were going to get there.

You start working on the problem, and you make progress towards this. Thinking back to how these past few years have felt to me: It’s been much less of a here’s one problem, or a small number of really hard problems and we kind of hit a wall.

Instead, it’s been more like hundreds of really hard problems. None of them feel like a brick wall because, you know, the team is amazing, the technology is really powerful, and you make progress on them.

But you’re always juggling like, hundreds of these types of really complex problems, where the further you get into solving each one of them, the more you realize just how hard it really is.

So it’s been a really interesting mix: on one hand, the problem getting more difficult, the more you learn about it. But on the other hand, technology making more rapid progress and breakthroughs happening at a higher rate than you would have originally anticipated.

TC: When did you realize that this project had changed (beyond the official announcements)? When did you realize it could be a business, that it was something that could be a lot more than just solving this problem?

DOLGOV: I would describe it as more of an evolution of our thinking and investing more effort into more clearly defining the product and commercial applications of this technology.

When we started, in that very first phase, the question was, “is this even feasible? Is technology going to work?” I think it was pretty clear to everybody that if the technology succeeded then there was going to be tremendous impact.

It wasn’t exactly clear what commercial application or what product would deliver that impact. But there was just so many ways that this technology would transform the world that we didn’t spend much time worrying about that aspect of it.

When you think about it, what we’re building here is a driver: our software, our hardware —the software that runs in the car, the software that runs in the cloud. We look at the entirety of our technology stack as a driver.

There are about 3 trillion miles in the U.S. that are driven by people. In some cases, they drive themselves, in some cases, they drive other people, in some cases, they drive goods. Once you have the technology that is “the driver,” you can deploy it in all these situations. But they have their pros and cons.

Over time, our thinking on ‘what are the most attractive ones?’ and ‘in what order do we tackle them?’ has matured.

This is what they’re doing today as a result of all of that work. Ride hailing is the first commercial application that we’re pursuing. Beyond that we are working on long-haul trucking, long range deliveries. We’re interested, at some point, deploying the technology in personally owned cars, local deliveries, public transportation, so forth and so on.

TC: What application are you most excited about? The one that you think maybe is overlooked or one you’re personally the most excited about?

DOLGOV: I’m super excited about seeing the technology and the driver being deployed in, you know, across the globe and across different commercial applications. But I think the one that I am the most excited about is the one we’re pursuing as our number one target right now, which is ride hailing.

I think it has the potential to affect positively the highest number of people in the shortest amount of time.

I also use our cars every day to get around, this is how I got to work today. This is how I run errands around here in Mountain View and Palo Alto. It’s wonderful to be able to experience these cars and it just removes a lot of the friction out of transportation.

TC: So you you take a self driving car to work every day right now?

DOLGOV: Yes, but in California, they still have people in them. 

TC: How long have you been doing that?

DOLGOV: Awhile. Actually, it seems like forever.

I’ve always spent time in the cars. I think it’s really important to experience the product that you’re building and have direct experience with the technology. This was obviously the case in the early days of the project when there was a small group of us doing everything.

As the team grew, I would still make sure I would experience the technology and go on test rides at least weekly, if not more frequently.

When we started pursuing the ride-hailing application, and we build an app for it, and we built out infrastructure to make it into a user-facing product, I was one of the earlier testers.

That must have been three years ago.

TC: Did you expect it to be at this point that you are right now, 10 years ago, did you expect like 10 years from now, this is where we’re going to be? Or did it happen faster or slower than you anticipated?

DOLGOV: So for me, I think on one hand, I would not have predicted some of the breakthroughs in the technology on the hardware front, on the software and AI and machine learning back in 2009. I think the technology today is much more powerful than I would have probably said in 2009.

On the another hand, the challenge of actually building a real product and deploying it so that people can use it has turned out to be more difficult than I expected. So it’s kind of a mix.

TC: What were some of those technological breakthroughs?

DOLGOV: There were a number of things. LiDARs and radars became much more powerful.

And by powerful, I mean longer range, higher resolution and more features, if you will, in terms of the things that they can measure — richer returns of the properties of the environment. So that’s on the sensing side.

Compute, especially in the hardware-accelerated parallel computation, that’s been very powerful for the advancement of neural networks. That has been a huge boost.

Then there’s deep learning and the neural nets themselves have led to a number of breakthroughs.

TC: Yeah, with the last two examples you gave, I think of those as being breakthroughs more recently, in just the last few years. Is that about the timeframe?

DOLGOV: We’ve always used machine learning on this project, but it was a different kind of machine learning then today.

I think in 2012 is probably when, on our project, there was meaningful effort and when we were working together with Google on both the self-driving technology and deep learning.

Arguably, at the time Google was the only company in the world seriously investing in both the self driving and deep learning.

At that point, we didn’t have the hardware to be able to run those nets on the car, in real time. But there were very interesting things you could do in the cloud.

For deep learning, 2013 was a pretty big year. I think this is when ImageNet won a big competition and it was a breakthrough for deep learning. It outperformed all the other approaches in the computer vision competition.

TC: In 2009, could you imagine a world in 2019, where numerous self-driving vehicle companies would be testing on roads in California? Was that something that seemed plausible?

DOLGOV: No, no that’s not the picture I had in mind in 2009 or 2010.

In those early days of the project, people kind of laughed at us. I think the industry made fun of this project and there were multiple funny spoofs on the Google self-driving car project.

It’s been pretty amazing to go from, ‘oh there is small, group of crazy folks trying to do this science fiction thing at Google’ to this becoming a major industry that we have today with dozens, if not hundreds, of companies pursuing this.

TC: What will be the tipping point that will get folks on board with self driving vehicles in their city? Is it a matter of just pure saturation? Or is it something else that that all the companies, Waymo included, are responsible of helping usher in?

DOLGOV: It seems like there’s always a spectrum of people’s attitudes towards new technology and change. Some of the negative ones are more visible. But actually, my experience over the last 10 years, the positive attitude and the excitement has been overwhelmingly stronger.

What I what I have seen over and over again, in this project that really is very powerful, and that is powerful and changes people’s attitudes from, uncertainty and anxiety to excitement and comfort and trust is being able to experience the technology.

You get people into one of our cars and then go for a ride. Even people who are anxious about getting into a car with nobody behind the wheel, once they experience it and once they understand how useful of a product it is, and how well the car behaves, and they starting trusting it, that really leads to change.

As the technology rolls out and more people get to experience it firsthand, that will help.

TC: Are the biggest challenges in 2009 the same as today? What are the final cruxes that remain?

DOLGOV: In 2009, all the challenges were all about one-off problems we needed to solve and today it’s all about turning it into a product.

It’s about the presentation of this self-driving stack and about building the tools and the framework for evaluation and deployment of the technology. You know, what has stayed true is that it’s all about the speed of iteration and the ability to learn new things and solve new technical problems as we discover them.

If you’ve ever seen a lamp or chair that you liked and wished you could just take a picture and find it online, well, GrokStyle let you do that — and now the company has been snatched up by Facebook to augment its own growing computer vision department.

GrokStyle started as a paper — as AI companies often do these days — at 2015’s SIGGRAPH. A National Science Foundation grant got the ball rolling on the actual company, and in 2017 founders Kavita Bala and Sean Bell raised $2 million to grow it.

The basic idea is simple: matching a piece of furniture (or a light fixture, or any of a variety of product types) in an image to visually similar ones in stock at stores. Of course, sometimes the simplest ideas are the most difficult to execute. But Bala and Bell made it work, and it was impressive enough in action that Ikea on first sight demanded it be in the next release of its app. I saw it in action and it’s pretty impressive.

Facebook’s acquisition of the company (no terms disclosed) makes sense on a couple of fronts: First, the company is investing heavily in computer vision and AI, so GrokStyle and its founders are naturally potential targets. Second, Facebook is also trying to invest in its marketplace, and using the camera as an interface for it fits right into the company’s philosophy.

One can imagine how useful it would be to be able to pull up the Facebook camera app, point it at a lamp you like at a hotel and see who’s selling it or something like it on the site.

Facebook did not answer my questions regarding how GrokStyle’s tech and team would be used, but offered the following statement: “We are excited to welcome GrokStyle to Facebook. Their team and technology will contribute to our AI capabilities.” Well!

There’s an “exciting journey” message on GrokStyle’s webpage, so the old site and service is gone for good. But one assumes that it will reappear in some form in the future. I’ve asked the founders for comment and will update the post if I hear back.

Lyft, which has faced at least one lawsuit pertaining to its alleged discrimination against people with physical abilities, announced today it has expanded its wheelchair-accessible vehicle (WAV) service in New York City. Details on the blog are very scarce (we’ve reached out to Lyft for more info) but Lyft now has more than 20 partners in New York City to help increase WAV access.

“With more accessible rides on the road, we’ll be better able to help New Yorkers with physical disabilities get around the city,” Lyft wrote in a blog post.

But it’s not clear how many wheelchair-accessible vehicles are available now than before. Previously, Lyft had just a five percent success rate for finding wheelchair-accessible vehicles for riders, while Uber had a 55 percent success rate, according to a 2018 report from the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. For both of these companies, they were able to find for non-accessible rides 100 percent of the time.

The lack of WAVs on Lyft and Uber have resulted in lawsuits for both companies. Last March, Disability Rights Advocates filed a class-action lawsuit against Lyft, alleging the company discriminates against people who use wheelchairs by not making wheelchair-accessible cars available in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The case, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, alleges Lyft directly violates the law by not providing an equal and accessible transportation option to all. The suit specifically alleges Lyft is in violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which guarantees people with disabilities are entitled to full and equal accommodations. The suit also alleges Lyft is in violation of the California Disabled Persons Act.

At the time, a Lyft spokesperson told TechCrunch it currently has “partnerships and programs in place to provide enhanced WAV access in various parts of the country, and are actively exploring ways to expand them nationwide.”

Meanwhile, Uber has faced at least two lawsuits regarding its lack of wheelchair-accessible vehicles in both New York and California. In November, however, Uber took steps to ensure people who rely on wheelchairs can get rides when they need them. Through a partnership with paratransit service provider MV Transportation, Uber has been able to add hundreds of wheelchair-accessible vehicles to its platform in six markets, including New York City.

We’ll update this story as we learn more from Lyft.

The head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is calling Altria and Juul to meet in Washington to discuss their tie-up and how it impacts the companies’ plans to combat teen vaping. Earlier this year, Altria  href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/juul-labs-gets-12-8-billion-investment-from-marlboro-maker-altria-group/">invested $12.8 billion investment in Juul.

“After Altria’s acquisition of a 35 percent ownership interest in JUUL Labs, Inc., your newly announced plans with JUUL contradict the commitments you made to the FDA,” Commissioner Scott Gottlieb wrote in a strongly worded letter addressed to Altria chairman and chief executive, Howard A. Willard III.

“When we meet, Altria should be prepared to explain how this acquisition affects the full range of representations you made to the FDA and the public regarding your plans to stop marketing e-cigarettes and to address the crisis of youth use of e-cigarettes,” Gottlieb wrote.

The commissioner sent a similarly worded message to Juul’s chief executive, Kevin Burns.

As part of that deal, Juul is getting access to Altria’s retail shelf space; the company is sending out direct communications pitching Juul to adult smokers through cigarette pack inserts and mailings to the company’s database of customers; and the two will combine the power of their respective sales and distribution backend which reaches roughly 230,000 retailers across America.

The recent deal comes only months after Juul released its plan to combat teen vaping — something the FDA had required of the company.

In the commitments it made last year, the vape manufacturer and retailer said it would expand its secret shopper program to make sure underage buyers weren’t getting access to its products; pull its campaigns from social media; and limit sales of non-traditional cigarette flavors (menthol, mint, Virginia tobacco, and “classic” tobacco) to the company’s website — which requires age verification.

Gottlieb isn’t the only one who has a problem with Juul. We’ve written about how the company has lowered the barrier to entry for nicotine addiction.

For Gottlieb, the addition of Altria’s marketing firepower and network of 230,000 retail locations likely isn’t an indicator of a company that’s willing to winnow down access to its products.

“I am aware of deeply concerning data showing that youth use of JUUL represents a significant proportion of the overall use of e-cigarette products by children. I have no reason to believe these youth patterns of use are abating in the near term, and they certainly do not appear to be reversing,” Gottlieb wrote. “Manufacturers have an independent responsibility to take action to address the epidemic of youth use of their products. My office will contact you to arrange a meeting to discuss these issues. Pursuant to your request, we intend to schedule this as a joint meeting with both Altria and JUUL.”

As massive cross-platform gaming titles become even larger time-sucks for a lot of people, it’s probably worth reflecting on how to savor your in-game accomplishments.

Streaming of eSports celebrities on sites like Twitch has taken off like no one imagined, but for the most part the toil-heavy editing processes has left this attention largely focused on those with the ambitions of making gaming their full-time gig.

Athenascope is a small startup aiming to tap computer vision intelligence to record, review and recap what more novice gamers were able to pull off in their latest battle royale with a short, shareable highlight reel. The team is led by Chris Kirmse, who previously founded Xfire, a game messaging client that Viacom bought in 2006 for north of $100 million.

The company announced this week that they’ve closed a $2.5 million seed round led by First Round Capital to grow its tools and its team. They’re also rolling out their AI highlight reel tool for gamers. The tool is pretty customized for individual titles; they’re launching with support for Fortnite, Rocket League and PUBG, but Kirmse hope to expand that list significantly in the future.

Josh Kopelman, a partner at First Round Capital who is joining Athenascope’s board, highlighted that a lot of existing tools for gaming entertainment are “really skewed towards the high-end.”

“They’re not democratized, they’re for professional gamers,” Kopelman told TechCrunch. “What I think Chris is trying to do with Athenascope is enable anyone to create these high-quality game highlights — what the pros have to do manually.”

The company is tackling a problem familiar to video-editing software companies, how do you prevent footage from dying on the device. The answer here is the same as many others have posited, tapping computer vision deep learning to do the heavy lifting in determining what footage is interesting and worthy of a highlight reel. Athenascope has some key advantages over the companies like GoPro that are trying to do the same with real world video, namely the games they support operate in fundamentally more predictable ways and 2D interface cues offer some pretty healthy indicators of when exciting stuff is going down.

The game isn’t a plug-in that needs pipeline access to your Fortnite account or anything, the product simply analyzes exactly what you’re seeing when you play. The startup is also working on cool tools that allow you to see multiple perspectives of individual moments in gameplay by essentially syncing together footage from other people involved in a match that are also Athenascope’s service and giving a sort of multi-view replay.

The company has broader ambitions of how it can evolve these gaming insights with computer vision, including ways to help gamers learn about their strengths and weaknesses in a way that lets Athenascope serve as a sort of computer vision coach. For now though, the big focus is on getting gamers these entertaining snapshots of their gaming experiences in an intelligent way.

Amazon is taking on QVC with the launch of Amazon Live, which features live-streamed video shows from Amazon talent as well as those from brands that broadcast their own live streams through a new app, Amazon Live Creator. On the live shows, hosts talk about and demonstrate products available for sale on Amazon, much like they do on QVC. Beneath that sits a carousel where shoppers can browse product details and make purchases.

More than one video streams on Amazon Live at the same time, so shoppers can tune to the one that most interests them.

For example, Amazon Live is currently streaming a Valentine’s Day Gift Shop show, a cooking-focused show (In the Kitchen with @EdenEats) and Back to Business Live, which is showing off products aimed at daycare centers and schools.

You can tap on the different videos to change streams, scroll down to watch recordings of those videos that were recently live or view which live shows are coming up next.

On the web, the live-streaming site is available at Amazon.com/Live, but it’s not listed yet in Amazon’s main navigation menus so it remains hard to find. On mobile, there’s now a section labeled “Amazon Live” that’s appearing on both the iOS and Android app’s main navigation menu as of a recent app update.

We’ve confirmed the page Amazon.com/Live is newly added, though this is not the first time Amazon has offered live streams.

The retailer has dabbled in live streaming in the past, with mixed results.

Two years ago, it pulled the plug on its short-lived effort, Style Code Live, which also offered a QVC-like home shopping experience. The live show featured hosts with TV and broadcast backgrounds, and brought in experts to talk about beauty and style tips.

But Style Code Live focused only on fashion and beauty.

Amazon Live, on the other hand, covers all sorts of products, ranging from smart home to games to toys to kitchen items to home goods to electronics to kitchen items and much more. It’s also positioned differently. Instead of being a single live video show featuring only Amazon talent and guests, live streaming is something Amazon is opening up to brands that want to reach a wider audience and get their products discovered.

Above: Amazon Live hosts – according to LinkedIn, they are not Amazon employees

You may have seen some of these live-streamed videos from brands in the past.

On Prime Day 2017 and again in 2018, Amazon aired live video streams promoting some of the Prime Day deals. These videos were produced by the brands, very much like some you’ll now find on Amazon Live.

The company has also aired live-streamed content on its Today’s Deals page, and has allowed brands to stream to their product pages, their Store and on Amazon.com/Live before today.

Amazon now aims to make it easier for brands to participate on Amazon Live, too.

On a website detailing Amazon Live, Amazon touts how live-streaming video can drive sales, allow a brand to interact with their customers in real time — including through chat during the live stream — and reach more shoppers. One early tester, card game maker “Watch Ya’ Mouth,” is quoted saying that live streaming had helped to increase daily visits to its product detail page by 5x and “significantly grew our sales.”

The informational site also points brands to Amazon’s new app for live streaming, Amazon Live Creator.

Available only on iOS, the app allows a brand to stream its video content directly to Amazon.com on desktop, mobile and within the Amazon mobile app. The app supports streaming directly from the smartphone itself or through an encoder using a professional camera.

It also includes built-in analytics so brands can determine how well their stream performed, including things like how much of their budget they’ve spent on “boosting” (a way to pay to reach more shoppers), total views, unmuted views and other metrics.

According to data from Sensor Tower, Amazon Live Creator was released yesterday, on February 7, 2019, and is currently unranked on the App Store. It has no reviews, but has a five-star rating.

Currently, the live-streaming feature is open to U.S. Professional Sellers registered in the Amazon Brand Registry, Amazon’s website says, and live streaming from China and Hong Kong is not supported.

 

Amazon has been interested in live streaming for some time. The company patented its idea around live video shopping last year and was spotted hiring for its Amazon Live efforts before that.

However, Amazon had claimed at the time that its live-stream shopping experiences were “not new.”

That’s true, given that live streams that would sometimes appear around big sales, like Prime Day, for instance. But Amazon has promoted its live video directly to online shoppers since Style Code Live.

This week’s launch of the Amazon Live app for brands and Amazon’s move to create a dedicated link to the Amazon Live streams on its mobile app indicates that live video is becoming a much bigger effort for the retailer, despite its attempt to shoo this away as “old news.”

This increased focus on live video also comes at a time when Instagram is being rumored to be working on a standalone shopping app, and is heavily pushing its creator-focused IGTV product into users’ home feeds. QVC itself just announced its new identity and plans to venture deeper into e-commerce. And, of course, YouTube has capitalized on how both live and pre-recorded video demos from brands and influencers can help to sell products like makeup, electronics, toys and more.

Amazon formally declined to comment.

Baillie Gifford & Co., the second-biggest shareholder of Tesla stock, has increased its stake in the electric automaker and energy storage company.

A regulator filing posted Friday shows Baillie increased its stake in Tesla from 7.64 percent at the end of the third quarter to 7.71 percent at the end of the fourth quarter. That doesn’t sound like much, but it translates into Baillie purchasing nearly 109,000 Tesla shares in the fourth quarter. That pencils out to a ballpark of $32 million worth of shares, if based on Friday’s price alone. CNBC was the first to report the filing.

The U.K.-based investment management firm Baillie now owns 13.2 million shares of Tesla stock, according to the regulator filing. That translates to more than $4 billion worth of Tesla, based on the latest share price of $304.26.

Last month, Tesla reported it earned $139 million in the fourth quarter — its second consecutive quarterly profit.

The company managed to string together two profitable periods in a row thanks to sales of the Model 3 and despite several headwinds in the fourth quarter, including a non-cash charge of $54 million attributable to non-controlling interests, higher import duties on components from China, a price reduction for Model S and Model X in China and the introduction of a lower-priced mid-range version of Model 3.

Baillie Gifford is the largest outside shareholder of Tesla stock. CEO Elon Musk, Tesla’s largest shareholder, owns about 20 percent of the company.

Baillie appears to be increasingly interested in electric vehicles. In October, the company took a stake in Nio, the Chinese electric vehicle automaker that recently became a publicly traded company.

Baillie Gifford now owns an 11.44 percent stake in Nio, according to a regulatory filing. The company disclosed that it had purchased 85.3 million shares.

British startup OakNorth has raised a $440 million funding round from SoftBank’s Vision Fund as well as the Clermont Group. The company is creating a digital bank and focuses on loans for small and medium enterprises and the technology behind those loans.

Today’s funding round is the biggest funding round in a European fintech company. OakNorth has raised $848 million in primary funding since its creation.

With this funding round, the company plans to double down on what it already does. The company can issue fast and flexible loans to businesses and property developers in the U.K. OakNorth uses big data and machine learning to assess the risks and monitor its portfolio. The company has lent over $3.7 billion overall, and there hasn’t been a single default or late payment.

But that just part of OakNorth’s business. The company also licenses its platform to other institutions. Banks leverage OakNorth Analytical Intelligence platform for their own loan books, from origination to credit analysis and portfolio monitoring. Multiple banks already use it in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

While OakNorth doesn’t provide any current account, individuals and businesses can also open various savings accounts with OakNorth. OakNorth manages 34,000 savings accounts.

The company plans to expand to the U.S. as well. OakNorth doesn’t want to open a bank in the U.S. Instead, the company will focus on partnerships with American banks and loan origination for those banks.

Carbonite, the online backup and recovery company based in Boston, announced late yesterday that it will be acquiring Webroot, an endpoint security vendor, for $618.5 million in cash.

The company believes that by combining its cloud backup service with Webroot’s endpoint security tools, it will give customers a more complete solution. Webroot’s history actually predates the cloud, having launched in 1997. The private company reported $250 million in revenue for fiscal 2018, according to data provided by Carbonite . That will combine with Carbonite’s $296.4 million in revenue for the same time period.

Carbonite CEO and president Mohamad Ali saw the deal as a way to expand the Carbonite offering. “With threats like ransomware evolving daily, our customers and partners are increasingly seeking a more comprehensive solution that is both powerful and easy to use. Backup and recovery, combined with endpoint security and threat intelligence, is a differentiated solution that provides one, comprehensive data protection platform,” Ali explained in a statement.

The deal not only enhances Carbonite’s backup offering, it gives the company access to a new set of customers. While Carbonite sells mainly through Value Added Resellers (VARs), Webroot’s customers are mainly 14,000 Managed Service Providers (MSPs). That lack of overlap could increase its market reach through to the MSP channel. Webroot has 300,000 customers, according to Carbonite.

This is not the first Carbonite acquisition. It has acquired several other companies over the last several years, including buying Mozy from Dell a year ago for $145 million. The acquisition strategy is about using its checkbook to expand the capabilities of the platform to offer a more comprehensive set of tools beyond core backup and recovery.

The company announced it is using cash on hand and a $550 million loan from Barclays, Citizens Bank and RBC Capital Markets to finance the deal. Per usual, the acquisition will be subject to regulatory approval, but is expected to close this quarter.