Year: 2019

As rumored, Google just dropped a little hint about its next generation Pixel Buds. The company unveiled a pair of fully wireless earbuds following the release of its promising, but fairly disappointing tethered earbuds. The new headphones are certainly nice looking, maintaining the same pastel color scheme it offers on its Pixel handsets.

The headphones are still a long ways out, arriving in spring of next year. Clearly the company wanted to let the world know that it still has a vested interest in the category, even as the likes of Apple, Samsung and Sony have taken most of the air out of the room. The headphones use long range bluetooth wireless, maintaining a connection up to three rooms away in doors and a full football field from its source when outside.

The on-board mics give the Pixel Buds adaptive sound, adjusting based on the wearer’s environment. The mics also focus in on the speaker during a phone conversation, while helping to remove ambient sound like the wind The battery should get five hours on a charge, with a full 24 hours in the included battery case. The case looks a bit like a streamlined version of the one that comes with Apple’s AirPods, though thankfully not as large as, say, the one that comes with Beats version.

When they arrive next year, the new Pixel Buds will run $179 — not a bad price, particularly if these ones live up to the (admittedly vague) promises made at today’s event. Once again, the company is focused on software here — not unlike Microsoft’s recently announced Surface earbuds. Though Google’s offerings, including Maps and translate are likely far more useful on a pair of headphones than, say, Office functionality.

[gallery ids="1897318,1897316,1897315,1897314,1897313"]

Perhaps second time is the charm here. And, admittedly, the wireless earbud market is significantly more mature than it was when the original Pixel Buds. That means Google’s got a better framework to work with here — but it also means that the company’s got a lot of competition, as well, if it wants to be the Android take on AirPods.

Google dropped a bit of news right off the bat at this morning’s Made by Google event: Stadia, its on-demand cloud game streaming service, will launch on November 19th.

Stadia is Google’s experiment in changing up the way we play video games; rather than rendering video games on a console or a powerful local PC, Stadia games are rendered in the cloud and pushed to your Chromecast, smartphone, or browser on-the-fly.

Google has already announced a few dozen games they plan to support on the $10 per month service — you can find that list here.

TiVo’s answer to The Roku Channel, TiVo Plus, is launching today. The company had already unveiled its plans for ad-supported streaming earlier this month with the debut of two new models of its DVR, the TiVo Edge. Like The Roku Channel, TUBI, Vudu’s Movies on Us, and others, TiVo Plus is available to stream for free. But unlike others in this space, TiVo Plus is available exclusively to TiVo devices owners.

The service is enabled by a TiVo partnership with XUMO, Jukin Media and other publishers.

It includes a variety of content from sources like TMZ, America’s Funniest Home Videos, FilmRise, Outside TV+, PowerNation, FailArmy, Hell’s Kitchen | Kitchen Nightmares, Food52, Ameba, BatteryPOP, Baeble Music, Kid Genius, Journy, NatureVision, People are Awesome, Puddle Jumper, The Asylum, The Pet Collective, The Preview Channel, Unsolved Mysteries, Adventure Sports Network, AllTime, Complex, and others.

TiVo also has deals with Gannett, Loop Media, Revry, Newsy, Tastemade, Latido Music and Mobcrush to expand TiVo Plus even further.

The company says there will be “thousands” of movies and TV shows available in an app-free environment.

Despite the obvious comparisons to The Roku Channel, the TiVo Plus interface isn’t as well-designed. Where Roku puts the focus on the content that’s available for free streaming, TiVo Plus highlights the publishers. The content is organized in generic and broad groupings, like “Movies and TV,” “Sports,” “Kids and Family,” “Entertainment, Comedy Pop Culture,” and others, instead of being more editorially curated or personalized to the viewer.

Though TiVo Plus is a free service, being a TiVo owner is not. For example, the new TiVo Edge DVR for cable customers is $400, followed by a $14.99 per month service fee, which can be paid either as an annual fee ($149.99) or all at once with a lifetime plan ($549.99).

The same DVR for cord-cutters is $350 and the service fee is $6.99 per month, or $69.99 per year and $249.99 for a lifetime fee.

The DVRs include support for Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision HDR, 2TB of storage, TiVo’s OnePass, SkipMode (automatic commercial skip),

This was the first time that TiVo lowered its subscriptions for the DVR for antenna users, in an effort to respond to market pressures. Most streaming media devices — like Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, etc. — don’t require subscriptions, as the companies don’t license TV guide data for their users nor do they operate with cable TV-like business model involving ongoing service fees. That’s allowed customers, and particularly cord-cutters, to get comfortable with one-time purchase fees and has weakened TiVo’s position.

With a dwindling customer base, TiVo has turned to advertising — not only with its new ad-supported streaming service on its devices, but also with skippable pre-roll ads on DVR recordings, as recently reported and confirmed by TiVo. 

TiVo Plus is rolling out starting today and continuing over the next few weeks to customers with Series 6 devices with Experience 4 (TE4). It will be available on the Home screen, when it goes live.

Beats this morning announced that it will be bringing its excellent noise-cancellation technology to its Solo line of on-ear headphones. The Solo Pro are the official followup to the Solo 3, a branding shift that’s in line with its other technologies.

The noise canceling is the same introduced with the Studio over-ear line, way back in 2017. It’s adaptive technology, meaning that rather being tuned to a specific sound like, say, an airplane drone, an array of microphones listen for ambient sound and adjust accordingly.

I was pretty impressed in the case of the Studio line and expect much of the same here. There’s also an on-board button for Transparency, which lets in ambient noise for those times when you need to hear what’s around you. Beats being an Apple company, the microphones are also optimized for Siri use, while the W1 and H1 chips mean quick syncing to iOS products, along with the new audio sharing.

Beats says the headphones should last “up to 22 hours” with either active noise canceling or Transparency on and “up to 40 hours” with them shut off. I might have to test them out on my upcoming trip to Asia. They’re charged up via Lightning — kind of a bummer, but Apple. A 10-minute charge should get you up to three hours of playback.

They arrive October 30, priced at $300.

After approximately 48 hours offline, Fortnite has returned from its black hole hiatus with a brand new map for the launch of Chapter 2.

The new map features 13 points of interest, and also includes a web of rivers that allow for new water gameplay, such as swimming, fishing, and armed motorboats that seem awfully similar to the dinghies in Call of Duty: Blackout.

[gallery ids="1897276,1897277,1897278,1897279,1897280,1897281,1897282"]

Players can also swim now, instead of just hopping around in shallow water, and can eat fish for more health.

Epic Games has added a few new mechanics to the game, most notably the ability to actually pick up and carry knocked teammates to a safer location to resurrect them. Plus, the game now has something called the bandage bazooka, which helps players heal their teammates (kind of like the chug splashes in Season 10).

And for folks who are sick of running around with common weaponry, they can visit the Upgrade Bench and use resources to upgrade their weapons.

As with any new season launch, new map or not, there is a brand new Battlepass in Fortnite that players can work their way through to receive skins, emotes, etc.

Here’s the Chapter 2 trailer:

If you’re an avid TechCrunch reader, someone who loves to absorb endless startup profiles and pore through fundraising stories, you might think raising venture capital is easy. In reality, it’s very, very difficult and not the best source of capital for most businesses.

For startups hoping to scale far and wide as fast as possible, VC may be the right fit. To shed light on the process of raising equity capital from venture capital firms and provide some exclusive tips and tricks for Extra Crunch subscribers, we sat down with three experts on the subject. Below are the top pieces of advice from Charles Hudson, founder and managing partner of Precursor Ventures, Redpoint Ventures general partner Annie Kadavy, and DocSend founder Russ Heddleston. The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

1. First, make sure your company is fit to raise venture capital.

Charles Hudson: I think venture capital, it’s really a specialty type of capital. It’s really for companies that have the aspiration to grow really quickly, to build really large businesses … If you’re not a company that needs to grow quickly, venture capital might not be the right source of capital for you. There has to be a really big prize at the end of the journey.

2. Raise capital early if you’re stressing about small costs or fretting competition

Russ Heddleston: If you’re thinking about whether or not to raise, there are a couple of reasons that I will often advise people to raise early. One is if they’re really stressing about buying a whiteboard for their office, or like some something of relatively small cost. If you think it could be a big company, and you’re stressing about small things, raise money and buy the whiteboard, hire the additional person and get back to what you should be doing, which is running your business and growing it quickly.

The other thing is if you ask the question, ‘is there a competitor I don’t know about?’ If you heard tomorrow, that competitor just raised $2 million, or $5 million or $10 million, how nervous would that make you? For some businesses, you’re like, I don’t really care, it’s a services industry, it’s not a winner take all market. And other times, you’re like, oh, I’d be really nervous. So if either those apply, that’s a good reason to make a compelling case to someone like Charles.

3. It’s OK to take a salary

Annie Kadavy: I’d be hard-pressed to think of an example where a founder is not paying themselves, the question, though, is how much? You’re paying yourself enough so that the basic costs of life and running your business are not giving you anxiety, because as an early stage investor one of our primary roles is to try and keep the baseline stress as low as it can be, because it’s really hard to go build a company.

If a founder is coming in at the Series A and they say I’m going to go pay myself $300,000, we might be like, well, that doesn’t really feel right, shouldn’t you want to put some of that money into the company? The ranges I’ve seen are anything from $60,000 up to probably $120,000 at the Series A, or maybe $150,000. Then, as the company grows and as the balance sheet grows and it’s de-risked, your salary as an executive at the company will scale with that.

Interior design platform Havenly is raising $32 million in new funding to create its first private label brand as the startup aims to integrate its own products into its design recommendation engine.

The Denver-startup is an online interior design consultancy of sorts which pairs users looking to redesign their homes or apartments with expert designers.

For Havenly, there have been two sides of the business, commercial partnerships with vendors and the paid design services for users. It’s a model we’ve also seen from the folks at Modsy, Havenly puts a bit more of an emphasis on pairing users with an individual designer who they can chat with on the phone and share their hopes for the space, something CEO Lee Mayer says can help make the space feel more customized to them.

“Your home is very personal, if you and I show up to work one day and we have the same shirt, that may not be that weird. It is a little weird if I walk into your living room and it looks exactly like mine,” Mayer tells TechCrunch.

The big evolution with this raise will be that Havenly is going to start putting its own products into the mix with a private label called Cove Goods. The line largely seems to be focused on accent pieces, but they are working on some furniture as well.

Pricing for their services sits between $69 and $99 depending on whether you’re starting from a blank slate or just want some additional pieces recommended to you that you can buy through the platform. The startup can also send you custom floor plans and layout renders to show you what your space will look like.

Havenly has now raised $57.8 million. Series C investors included Foundry Group, Lerer Hippeau, Kickstart Ventures and Gingerbread Capital.

 

Just how Android is the operating system for a number of mobile phones, Tortoise wants to be the operating system for micromobility vehicles, its co-founder Dmitry Shevelenko, who previously served as Uber’s director of business development, told TechCrunch. Given the volume of micromobility operators in the space today, Tortoise aims to make it easier for these companies to more strategically deploy their respective vehicles and reposition them when needed.

Using autonomous technology in tandem with remote human intervention, Tortoise’s software enables operators to remotely relocate their scooters and bikes to places where riders need them, or, where operators need them to be recharged. On an empty sidewalk, Tortoise may employ autonomous technologies while it may rely on humans to remotely control the vehicle on a highly-trafficked city block.

“There are big daily operating expenses with the repositioning of scooters using cars and vans,” Shevelenko said. “Not only is that very expensive, but it ends up undoing a lot of the environmental benefit of shared electric scooters.”

In order for this to work, Tortoise partners with both cities and operators. Though the city partnership needs to happen first, Shevelenko said. That’s because Tortoise will only reposition the vehicles along routes that the city has pre-approved.

“We only want to deploy in cities that want this and have given us written permission,” Shevelenko said. “If the cities say yes, then the operators say yes.”

For the operators, they’ll need to install about $100 worth of equipment on each scooter in order to run Tortoise’s software. That includes two phone cameras, a piece of radar, a processor and a motor. If it’s a two-wheeled vehicle, Tortoise requires the addition of robotic training wheels. All of this is included in the reference design Tortoise provides to operators.

“In the same way Google helps Samsung make its phones work will with the latest version of Android, it’s in our interest that people build vehicles that are compatible with Tortoise,” Shevelenko said. “We also consult with OEMs and help them with their testing.”

Tortoise is currently focused on suburban environments but would like to make this work in cities like San Francisco, as well. For the initial pilot deployment, Tortoise is retrofitting existing scooters with robotic training wheels. In rider mode, those wheels are up but in autonomy mode, it’s wheels down.

Tortoise envisions three general use cases for repositioning. The first is reparking the scooter in a higher-trafficked area immediately after a rider trip is complete. The second is implementing digital scooter stops of sorts where riders can request a scooter to go there. The third is the Uber-Lyft experience where the scooter goes directly to you, wherever you are.

“The key to making that third use-case work is having enough scooters so that the ETA is predictable and accurate,” Shevelenko said.

While the software will ultimately rely on the battery capabilities of the vehicles, Shevelenko said most of the battery consumption happens when there is a rider on the vehicle. Since Tortoise will only reposition them without riders present, it will consume very little of the battery, Shevelenko said.

“Assuming eight repositions a day using our technology at 30 minutes each, that only takes up about 10% of a daily charge,” he said. “Even if that weren’t the case, as operators switch to swappable batteries, if you’re getting more rentals per day because of repositioning based on demand, you could just drive it to a location where it’s close to a swappable battery location.”

As business and mobility analyst Horace Dediu recently told me, these micromobility vehicles have an opportunity to also be software hubs. In fact, he said it’s where he expects bigger players like Google and Apple to enter the space. So far, Tortoise has partnered with Peachtree Corners, Ga. to demonstrate its software at Atlanta Tech Park. It’s also working with operators and manufacturers like Wind, CityBee, Go X and Shared to deploy Tortoise in their respective markets.

Wind, which operates in countries like Denmark, France, Spain and Germany, sees Tortoise as a natural fit, its EMEA CEO Ed Schmidt said in a statement.

“It will allow us to keep sidewalks clear and safe for pedestrians while delivering on our mission to always have a scooter within a 2 minute walk of a user ready to take a ride,” he said. “This technology will enable us to provide the best mobility service for our users and the city authorities.”

Tortoise is not the only company to explore adding autonomous technology to micromobility vehicles. In January, Uber spoke about a micromobility robotics team that would explore autonomous scooters and bikes that could drive themselves to be charged, or drive themselves to locations where riders need them. Last month, Uber revealed a bit more about its New Mobility Robotics team that would explore sensing and robotics for light electric vehicles. That entails features like sidewalk detection and, down the road, automatic repositioning of scooters, Uber Head of New Mobility Robotics Alan Wells told TechCrunch.

“That makes sense for a number of reasons,” Wells said of automatic repositioning. “It has a possibility of addressing some of the biggest downsides of where do you park them and also make them convenient for riders without being a burden to other people.”

Tortoise has raised some funding but is declining to disclose the amount and specific investors.

Elastic acquired Endgame Security in June for $234 million, and as a result of that deal, today the company announced Elastic Endpoint security to help customers secure laptops and servers. It also announced the acquisition has officially closed.

Elastic CEO and co-founder Shay Banon says that the company has already been helping threat hunters inside organizations find security events via its security information and event management (SIEM) tool. With Endgame, the company it wanted to extend its security coverage to laptops and servers. It’s probably not a coincidence that Endpoint is built on top of Elastic technology.

The company announced that it’s going to offer an unusual pricing model for this tool. Banon says that instead of charging by the machine as is the industry norm, it’s going to charge based on the amount of data stored. He says it’s an essential change to carry the security and coverage across the range of tools.

“We deeply believe in order to converge segments like SIEM and endpoint, you not only want to have the same technology stack, but you also want to provide customers with the same packaging and pricing. This is a first in the endpoint market, and we think it’s a big deal when it comes to security users and CISOs and CIOs out there,” Banon told TechCrunch.

Elastic is at its heart a search tool, but it has been expanding what that search tool covers over the years beyond web and enterprise search to other areas like applications performance management, log management and security.

Today’s announcement is about expanding that security component to enable the company to offer more comprehensive coverage across an organization. Endpoint’s 150 employees, which are mostly engineers and data scientists, have joined Elastic and will be providing the company with a machine learning knowledge boost to help make sense of the growing amounts of data across the Elastic toolset.

Endgame is based in Arlington, Virginia and will keep its offices there. It raised over $111 million (according to Crunchbase data) before being acquired.

Toggle, a Brooklyn-based robotics startup, announced today that it scored $3 million in seed funding. The early-stage round was led by Point72 Ventures’ AI Group, with participation from Mark Cuban and VC Twenty Seven Ventures. The series follows a 2018 pre-seed round of $570,000 from its Urban-X accelerator, Urban Us, Accelerate NY / Empire State Development and Perl Street Capital.

The 15-person startup creates robotics that fabricate and assemble rebar. It’s designed to work in tandem with existing robotics and steel fabrication technologies, while speeding up the process up to 15 times, by the company’s count.

Toggle has already begun a soft launch “for a wide range of projects in New York City and the surrounding area,” according to the company. It expects to ramp up toward commercial production over the course of the next year and a half. CEO Daniel Blank tells TechCrunch that the seed round will be used toward R&D and growing the Toggle team.

“This funding will be used to further develop our technology — both the hardware and software — around assembly and fabrication automation, as well as grow the engineering team that supports this development,” Blank tells TechCrunch. “The funding also provides us with a strong foundation for our manufacturing operation which is already supplying services and materials to customers in New York City and the surrounding region.”