Year: 2019

As we get ready for TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI on April 18 at UC Berkeley, we can’t help but look back at last year’s robotics event. With more than 1,000 attendees, thought-provoking panels and cutting-edge demos, 2018’s TC Sessions: Robotics was pretty great.

We’ve compiled some highlights of some of our favorite moments from last year to whet your appetite for 2019’s current speaker lineup. Check out the highlights below and be sure to grab your Early-Bird ticket for this April’s TC Sessions: Robotics + AI.

The Best Robots on Four Legs

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

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Getting a Grip on Reality: Deep Learning and Robot Grasping

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

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Teaching Intelligent Machines

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

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The Future of the Robot Operating System

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

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Eyes, Ears and Data: Robot Sensors and GPUs

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

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Teaching Robots New Tricks with AI

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

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Venture Investing in Robotics

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

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Agility Robotics demonstration of Cassie

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

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The Future of Transportation

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

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Building Stronger Humans

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

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Grab your Early-Bird Tickets to TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI today before prices increase, and check out the latest news about this year’s event here.

 

This is not earth-shattering news by any means, but Google today announced that Gmail is getting a strikethrough button in its formatting bar. In addition, it’s also getting Undo/Redo options and the ability to download emails as .EML files.

There really isn’t much more to be said about this, but if you ever wanted to use strikethrough in an email to show that you edited something out, then your time has come. Same for those of you who always wanted to see undo and redo buttons in Gmail because you keep forgetting the keyboard shortcuts for those.

The new features are now rolling out to all G Suite users and should be available to all of them within the next three days. Chances are users of the free version of Gmail will see them very soon, too.

 

 

Latin America is getting another fintech unicorn thanks to Advent International’s acquisition of a 51 percent stake of Prisma Medios de Pago, an Argentine payments company formed as a joint venture between Visa International and local banks.

The deal, which values Prisma at $1.42 billion, is yet another sign of Latin America’s growing prominence for global investment and the central role that fintech plays in the development of an innovation economy in the region.

Prisma Medios de Pago is the leading payments company in Argentina, and one of the largest in Latin America, with a full suite of services including point-of-sale hardware rental, e-commerce gateways, transaction processing, payments processing and electronic bill pay.

Its newest business line, TodoPago, offers peer-to-peer payments, mobile wallets, point of sale offerings, QR code payments and e-commerce payments to merchants.

Across Latin America, fintech startups have hit billion-dollar valuations and raised hundreds of millions as investors vie for a piece of the region’s growing e-commerce and financial services markets.

Brazil’s StoneCo Ltd., a provider of payment technology and services, is worth more than $6 billion after its October 2019 initial public offering. It’s a decline from the $9 billion pop the company had back when it debuted on the Nasdaq, but still represents a healthy valuation for the Latin American technology company.

Waiting in the wings are companies like Brazil’s NuBank, which reached a $4 billion valuation last year on the strength of a significant investment from the Chinese technology giant, Tencent.

At the time, company co-founders Cristina Junqueira and David Velez said the opportunity for financial services startups to achieve significant scale was far higher in emerging markets like Brazil than in developed markets, because the barriers to banking are so much higher.

Financial services, Velez said, has been controlled by massive oligopolies that have erected unfair obstacles to wealth creation for the masses. Nubank and other companies like it are working to change that.

An article from Fintech Futures last year outlined just how large the opportunity was for Latin America. In 2018, roughly half the population of Latin America was unbanked. In Brazil, about 40 percent of the country have no access to traditional banking services and its small businesses face a credit gap of $237 billion, according to a McKinsey study cited by Fintech Futures.

Investment in fintech has soared alongside the opportunity. Two years ago, fintech investment on the continent nearly hit $600 million, and public offerings like Stone and PagSeguro point to public market appetite for the sector.

Zynga founder Mark Pincus is raising up to $700 million for a new investment fund that will focus on publicly traded tech companies in need of strategic restructuring, according to a new report in Axios. It says his new firm is called Reinvent Capital and that Pincus is founding the outfit with hedge fund manager Michael Thompson, who has been steering his own New York-based firm, BHR Capital, for the last nine years.

Reinvest’s plans, says Axios, involve investing in up to 15 internet, software, and media companies, adding that the firm will be “size agnostic,” working with small, medium, and large-cap companies.

Pincus has been a founder and operator since graduating from Harvard Business School in the early ’90s, cofounding an early internet company called FreeLoader, a web-based push technology services that sold a couple of years later to a now-defunct public company. Pincus went on to cofound SupportSoft, a pioneer in tech support and cloud services, then an early social network called Tribe.net, before founding the social gaming company Zynga in the spring of 2007.

The company went public in 2011 at a $7 billion valuation. Seen as vulnerable to competition and to the whims of Facebook, whose rules had already changed in ways that hurt Zynga leading into its IPO, its shares began slipping almost immediately. Today, the market cap of the company —  where Pincus remains non-executive chairman after twice stepping into and out of top management roles — is $3.7 billion

That Pincus would become a full-time investor is less surprising than the stage of companies he will reportedly be targeting. Pincus has long been an active investor, though typically (as far as we know) taking very early stakes in companies. Among his most recent seed-stage bets, for example, is Spatial, a roughly year-old, Emeryville, Ca.-based cross-reality collaboration platform that turns rooms into 3D workspaces and that raised raised $8 million in seed funding last fall, including from Pincus, along with numerous other individual investors and early-stage venture firms.

Another is Invisible, a New York-based company that says it can customers to outsource their work (professional and personal) to real humans via AI, and which raised $2.6 million in seed funding last fall.

A third recent and slightly later-stage bet centers on Cargo Systems, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based startup that helps ride-sharing drivers earn money by bringing the convenience store into their vehicles and that raised $22 million in Series A funding led by Founders Fund back in September.

In fact, Pincus appears to have generated much of his wealth via one very early bet on Facebook. According to tech journalist David Kirkpatrick’s book, “The Facebook Effect,” Pincus, alongside his longtime friend Reid Hoffman, had written an early $40,000 check to the company. When Facebook went public, Pincus reportedly sold roughly one million shares, about a fifth of his stake at the time, for what was expected to be $35 million in pre-tax dollars.

Hoffman, who famously cofounded LinkedIn and is today a partner with the venture firm Greylock Partners, is reportedly advising Reinvent Capital. It’s just the latest effort on which the two are teaming up.

In the summer of 2017, Pincus and Hoffman announced an effort called Win the Future, or WTF, that aimed to be a “new movement and force within the Democratic Party,” Pincus had told the outlet Recode at the time. Designed to be equal parts platform and movement, it began life by allowing site visitors to vote on topics like whether or not engineering degrees should be free to all Americans.  The site no longer features much at all, other than a descriptor as a “non partisan project lab.”

Hoffman more recently landed in hot water after it was learned that he had indirectly contributed funding to a deceptive social media campaign aimed at helping Democratic candidate Doug Jones win Alabama’s state senate race in 2017. Jones won narrowly; Hoffman has said he had no knowledge of the project, did not endorse its tactics, and that he “categorically” disavows the use of misinformation to sway a campaign.

We reached out to Pincus earlier today to learn more. We hope to have more information for you soon.

Having reached critical mass, Netflix shows are now influencing culture — whether that’s prompting everyone to “tidy up” or causing chaos with “Bird Box”-inspired challenges. For good or bad, what happens on Netflix is talked about, memed and shared across the social media landscape. Today, Netflix is launching a new feature aimed at better inserting its brand into those online conversations: Instagram Story integration.

Launching first on iOS, Netflix users will be able to share their favorite movies and shows to their Instagram Story right from the Netflix mobile app.

The feature will add the title’s custom art to a users’ Instagram Story, where it remains visible for 24 hours. The Story can also be customized with other options, like a user poll, for example.

If the viewer has the Netflix app installed on their iPhone, they’ll see a “watch on Netflix” link in the Story that takes them to the show’s or movie’s page in the Netflix app when tapped.

This isn’t the first time you could share a show from Netflix’s app to a social platform — that’s been supported for some time. However, the existing experience will pull up iOS’s “share sheet” (the built-in sharing function in the iOS operating system).

According to a screenshot provided by Netflix, however, the new sharing feature is now a part of the Netflix app itself.

After tapping “share,” a screen appears with various options, including WhatsApp, Messages, Messenger, Twitter, Line and more, in addition to the newly added “Instagram Stories.”

The launch follows Facebook’s introduction of an option last year that allows third-party apps to share their in-app content to Instagram Stories. The idea was to provide users with an alternative to screenshotting what they wanted to share from other apps — like a song, a video, a playlist, etc. — to Instagram Stories. It’s also meant to provide a more seamless experience for the Story’s viewers, as they’re able to tap the Story to engage with the shared content — while also giving the brand more control over the look-and-feel of what’s being shared.

In Netflix’s case, it’s branding shared title art with the name of the show or film, as well as a teaser or slogan, and the words “Netflix Original,” where relevant. (The feature works with all titles, not just originals.)

The feature could prompt more word-of-mouth recommendations between friends and followers on Instagram, whose Stories platform alone is bigger than Snapchat, reaching more than 400 million users. And it could help content go viral within a certain fan base or demographic — like teen girl viewers or sci-fi fans, for instance — as prominent Instagram accounts shared the Netflix show.

“We’re always on the lookout for ways to make it easier for members to share the Netflix titles they’re obsessing about and help them discover something new to watch,” said Netflix in a statement about the launch.

Instagram Stories integration is launching today on iOS to Netflix users worldwide. An Android version is in the works.

The electric guitar has been floating around in some for or another since the early 30s. But given how much the instrument dominated the music landscape for the latter half of the 20th century, interesting innovations don’t really come along too often.

Fender’s models are probably the most iconic of the bunch, and the company’s found most of its successes sticking to what works. In recent years, however, the American guitar manufacturer has been looking for ways to broaden its appeal as rock music has slowly waned from the music charts.

The Acoustasonic Telecaster, however, makes a pretty compelling case that there’s still room for innovation in that well-tread ground. The acoustic/electric hybrid is more than just your standard hollow body with built-in pickups. The magic is a built-in digital signal processing chip — not entirely dissimilar from the one you find in effect pedals.

The company describes the “Acoustic Engine” as, “a proprietary blend of classic analog and future technologies that optimizes the guitar’s natural sound, and then modifies the resonance to deliver a curated collection of voices. These acoustic and electric voices can be played solo or blended via the Mod Knob to create new sounds. They can also be used simultaneously, courtesy of the Fender Acoustasonic Noiseless magnetic pickup.”

If you pay any attention to instruments, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is all fairly gimmicky. But demos and some early hands-on with the guitar show a surprisingly rich and full sound from the system.

The Acoustasonic is built in Fender’s California factory. It’s available starting today for $2,000.

Honor officially launched the Honor View 20 today in Paris. Honor is Huawei’s sub-brand for mid-range phones. And the View 20 doesn’t look like your average smartphone — the company traded the notch for a hole-punch display.

Honor thinks this design isn’t as intrusive as a centered notch. And rumor has it that Samsung could also put a hole-punch display into the Samsung Galaxy S10.

I played with the Honor View 20 for a bit of time, and it definitely feels different from an iPhone X-style notch. Let’s start with the little details that annoy me. The 4.5mm cutout for the selfie camera isn’t exactly in the corner of the device and it looks a bit weird with a standard Android menu. Somehow, I want the cutout to be vertically centered — it’s not.

And yet, when you look at photos and videos, it looks great. After a few minutes, you barely notice it. It feels like yet another icon in the notification area while the rest is just s-c-r-e-e-n. I hope more companies are going to follow this trend.

The device features a gigantic 6.4-inch LCD display with rounded corners — I’ve been using OLED displays for a couple of years, and it’s hard to look at LCD displays again. It’s nearly as big as an iPhone XS Max. While you can’t find a bezel at the top of the device, the View 20 still has a chin — a small bezel at the bottom of the device.

Unlike Huawei’s P20 Pro, the company has moved the fingerprint sensor to the back of the device. It has two cameras on the back — a 48 megapixel Sony IMX596 sensor as well as a second, cheap sensor to detect objects in 3D and add background blur using software features.

Huawei/Honor has updated its system-on-a-chip. The company has been working on its own chips instead of working with Qualcomm or Samsung. The result is a new Kirin 980 system-on-a-chip. Like Apple’s A12 Bionic, the company now uses a 7nm manufacturing process. The phone has a 4,000 mAh battery.

It comes in four colors — Midnight Black, Sapphire Blue, Phantom Red and Phantom Blue. As you can see in the photos, the company is still setting its phones apart from the competition thanks to colorful backs with mesmerizing reflections. This time, the Honor View 20 has a V-shaped pattern on the back. Unfortunately, it attracts fingerprints like crazy.

The Honor View 20 is going to be available starting tomorrow for €569/£499 for 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, or €649/£579 for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. As usual, Huawei/Honor focuses on Asia and Europe.

But the best part about this new phone is that you get an exclusive character skin for Fortnite when you buy it. What else do you need from a phone?

Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind the Firefox browser and other open source projects, today announced that it has hired Roxi Wen, the former CFO of display manufacturer Elo Touch Solutions, as its new CFO. Wen will replace former Mozilla CFO Jim Cook, who departed almost a year ago after 14 years with the organization.

Wen joins Mozilla at a crucial time. In terms of its technology, Firefox is now a real competitor again. With that foundation in place, Mozilla is now in a position where it needs to look toward growth again, something that has eluded it for a while.

“As our CFO Roxi will become a key member of our senior executive team with responsibility for leading financial operations and strategy as we scale our mission impact with new and existing products, technology and business models to better serve our users and advance our agenda for a healthier internet,” writes Mozilla CEO Chris Beard in today’s announcement.

It’s interesting to note that Mozilla, which currently has about 1,000 employees, is looking at new business models, too. The organization remains heavily dependent on revenue from search partnerships, which obviously creates some friction as Mozilla continues to focus on privacy.

Prior to her CFO role at Elo, Wen held senior positions at FleetPride, GE Energy, Medtronic and the Royal Bank of Canada.

Google’s strategy around its consumer messaging services remains baffling, especially since it killed off Allo (yet kept Duo on life support). Today, the company clarified the timeline of the transition from classic Hangouts to Chat and Meet for its paying G Suite customers. For them, the Hangouts retirement party will start in October of this year.

For consumers, the situation remains unclear, but Google says there will be free versions of Chat and Meet that will become available “following the transition of G Suite customers.” As of now, there is no timeline, so for all we know, Hangouts will remain up and running into 2020.

As for G Suite users, Google says it will start bringing more features from classic Hangouts to Chat between April and September. Those include integration with Gmail, the ability to talk to external users, improved video calling and making calls with Google Voice.

Google originally started migrating Hangouts users to the Meet video conferencing service last year. The story there was pretty straightforward, though, given that Meet was a new service with new functionality. For Hangouts, the story is far more complicated, and Hangouts Chat isn’t currently available to consumers. They do have the choice between dozens of other messaging apps, though, and all of this confusion is likely to cost Google quite a few users.

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1. After raising $125M, Munchery fails to deliver

On-demand food delivery startup Munchery is ceasing operations, effective immediately. The company laid off 30 percent of its workforce in May, after shutting down its Seattle, Los Angeles and New York operations.

At the time, Munchery said it planned to double down on its biggest market, San Francisco, which would help it “achieve profitability in the near term, and build a long-term, sustainable business.” Sadly, that doesn’t see to have worked out.

2. Apple Pay is coming to Target, Taco Bell, Speedway and two other US chains

Apple Pay is rolling out to Target stores now — Apple says its mobile payment tech will be available in all 1,850 U.S. retail locations “in the coming weeks.”

3. French data protection watchdog fines Google $57 million under the GDPR

The regulatory body claims that Google has failed to comply with the new regulations. At issue: How new Android users set up their phone and follow Android’s onboarding process.

4. Netflix’s ‘Roma’ nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture and director

“Black Panther,” meanwhile, received seven nominations.

5. Samsung could release three variants of the Galaxy S10

According to a leaked image from Evan Blass, Samsung’s new flagship device could come in three different versions — the Samsung Galaxy S10, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ and the Samsung Galaxy S10E (a more affordable version of the phone).

6. Shodan Safari, where hackers heckle the worst devices put on the internet

Hackers share their worst finds from Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and databases popular with security researchers.

7. TechCrunch podcasts are back, baby!

After a few slow weeks due to holidays and travel, all of TechCrunch’s podcasts have new episodes. On Equity, the team talks about new funding rounds for scooter startups. On Original Content, we review the Netflix show “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.” And on Mixtape, the big topic is a sex tech fail at CES.