Year: 2019

Spotify’s push into podcasts continues today with the launch of a new, 10-episode original series, “The Decade Wrapped,” that taps into insights and data from Spotify’s year-end Wrapped campaign to inform its episodes. Wrapped, of course, is Spotify’s annual look back at the biggest music trends during the year — or in 2019’s case, the decade — but personalized to individual users. “The Decade Wrapped,” however, pulls from the aggregate data Spotify has on what its users like to stream.

The topics for the new podcast include artists like Drake, Nicki Minaj, One Direction, Beyoncé, as well as other big trends, like Harlem Shake and “Despacito,” among others. These were chosen because of how much Spotify’s users were streaming these artists and songs throughout the years.

For example, Nicki Minaj’s most popular song “Bang Bang” has seen more than 730+ million streams; One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful” has reached 270+ million streams; Beyoncé’s “Halo” has more than 705 million all-time streams; Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next” saw 973+ million streams; Kendrick Lamar’s top song of all time, “Humble” has received more than 1.1 billion streams; Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” hit more than 1.08 billion streams.

The hit song “Despacito” saw more than 1.3 billion all-time streams and “Gangnam Style” saw more than 205+ million streams since its debut in 2012.

The podcast will be hosted by Eric Eddings, who will be joined by critics, comedians, influencers, and writers, including Robin Thede, Hannah Bronfman, Lele Pons, and others. Together, they’ll look back on the music that defined pop culture in the decade.

The original podcast is the latest in a series of moves by the streamer to attract podcast listeners to its service. Most recently, it added a new way for users to discover podcasts, by allowing you to pick topics you like, then receive recommendations. It also added podcaster metrics to Wrapped, launched a personalized podcast playlist, added support for adding podcasts to your own playlists, and continually launches new and original series from Spotify Studios, as well as those from the studios it acquired, Gimlet and Parcast. 

The first three episodes are arriving today, December 16 in the U.S., while the rest will arrive daily over the course of the week, says Spotify. The full descriptions of the shows are here on Spotify’s site.

 

 

Adobe’s Photoshop on the iPad got off to a rocky start that doesn’t seem to have left fans of the desktop version very happy, but the company looks intent on incorporating user feedback and releasing meaningful feature updates on a timely basis. Like today, for instance, it’s adding ‘Select Subject’ to the iPad version of Photoshop, which is a feature that should make working with photos and compositions on the Apple tablet much, much easier and more flexible.

Select Subject is a new feature that Adobe introduced last year to the desktop version, and offers one-tap selection of the subject of your image, as determined by Adobe’s Sensei AI engine to take all the manual work out of the process. This is one of the Photoshop tasks that people are used to doing manually using either pen input and freehand selection, or a combination of the Magic Wand, lasso and polygonal selection tools, all of which involve considerably more work.

Adobe says the 2019 version of Select Subject on iPad and on desktop provides better selection edges and works almost instantly, even on iOS. Behind the scenes, the feature is actually a bunch of different machine learning algorithms working together to make the selection, refine the selection, de-artifact the edge and more. The end result is that you can get a very usable subject cut out that allows you to easily recompose, or independently edit subject and background very quickly and with very little, if any, manual refinement required.

You’ll still get better, cleaner results with defined, continuous edges and high-contrast backgrounds, but Adobe says it’s working on improving Select Subject performance around things like hair and fur.

Meanwhile, Adobe also started rolling out improvements for its cloud documents feature, which was introduced alongside the public release of Photoshop for iPad and lets you work with PSDs across platforms via shared cloud-based storage. They’ve also tweaked the user interface with improvements to things like text entry and layer management.

Adobe still has a lot to do to make a convincing argument that it regards Photoshop for iPad as a flagship product on par with the desktop version, but these are steps in the right direction, and it looks like 2020 should bring a host of additional refinements and improvements, along with and iPad version of Illustrator and more.

OneConnect’s US-listed IPO flew under our radar last week, which won’t do. The company’s public offering is both interesting and important, so let’s take a few minutes this morning to understand what we missed and why we care.

The now-public company sells financial technology that banks in China and select foreign countries can use to bring their services into the modern era. OneConnect charges mostly for usage of its products, driving over three-quarters of its revenue from transactions, including API calls.

After pricing its shares at $10 apiece, the SoftBank Vision Fund-backed company wrapped last week worth the same: $10 per share.

One one hand, OneConnect is merely another China-based IPO listing domestically here in the United States, making it merely one member of a crowd. So, why do we care about its listing?

A few reasons. We care because the listing is another liquidity event for SoftBank and its Vision Fund. As the Japanese conglomerate revs up its second Vision Fund cycle (Vision Fund 2, more here), returns and proof of its ability to pick winners and fuel them with capital are key. OneConnect’s success as a public company, therefore, matters.

And for us market observers, the debut is doubly-exciting from a financial perspective. No, OneConnect doesn’t make money (very much the opposite). What’s curious about the company is that it brought huge losses to sale when it was pitching its equity. Which, in a post-WeWork world, are supposed to be out of style. Let’s see how well it priced.

What’s it worth?

OneConnect targeted a $9 to $10 per-share IPO price. That makes its final, $10 per-share pricing the top of its range. That said, given how narrow its range was, the result doesn’t look like much of a coup for the company. That’s doubly true when we recall that OneConnect lowered its IPO price range from $12 to $14 per share (a more standard price band) to the lower figures. So, the company managed to price at the top of its expectations, but only after those were cut to size.

When it all wrapped, OneConnect was worth about $3.7 billion at its IPO price according to math from the New York Times. TechCrunch’s own calculations value the firm at a slightly richer $3.8 billion . Regardless, the figure was a disappointment.

When OneConnect raised from SoftBank’s Vision Fund in early 2018, $650 million was invested at a $6.8 billion pre-money valuation according to Crunchbase data. That put a $7.45 billion post-money price tag on the Ping An-sourced business. To see the company forced to cut its IPO valuation so far is difficult for OneConnect itself, its parent Ping An, and its backer SoftBank.

Why so little?

I promised to be brief when we started, so let’s stay curt: OneConnect’s business was worth far less than expected because while it posted impressive revenue gains, the company’s deep unprofitability made it less palatable than expected to public investors.

OneConnect managed to post revenue growth of over 70 percent in the first three quarters of 2019, expanding top line to $217.5 million in the period. However, during that time it generated just $70.9 million in gross profit, the sum it could use to cover its operating costs. The company’s cost structure, however, was far larger than its gross profit.

Over the same nine-month period, OneConnect’s sales and marketing costs alone outstripped its total gross profit. All told OneConnect posted operating costs of $227.6 million in the first three quarters of 2019, leading to an operating loss of $156.6 million in the period.

The company will, therefore, burn lots of cash as grows; OneConnect is still deep in its investment motion, and far from the sort of near-profitability that we hear is in vogue. In a sense OneConnect bears the narrative out. It had to endure a sharp valuation reduction to get out. You can see the market’s changed mood in that fact alone.

Photo by Roberto Júnior on Unsplash

Capella Space is all set to begin commercial operations in 2020, with the launch of seven satellites that will provide synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-based imaging, which will provide its clients with extremely high-resolution imaging of Earth with extremely fast turnaround time, more power-efficient operation and higher quality than is currently available on the market from other small satellite-based solutions.

Backed by DCVC and Spark Capital, Capella says it has all the funding it needs to get its seven satellites launched and operational next year. The startup has also locked in deals with various U.S. government clients, including one with the U.S. Air Force. Its technology is a natural fit for defense applications, since it can capture high resolution data not only with greater quality than competitors, but also for longer spans – it can provide up to 10 minutes of active image capture per orbital path, which the company says is around 5x what its closest competitor can provide due to power consumption limitations.

In addition to government clients, Capella also has signed partnerships with key players in data delivery and ground-based relay, including Immarsat, Addvalue and AWS. These companies and the capabilities they provide will allow Capella to essentially offer real-time satellite tasking, which means that when a client asks it to point its imaging array at a specific location, that can do that immediately, “virtually latency free,” something it says it is unique in offering across the Easy observation industry. That’s an incredible competitive advantage – and it also says it’ll be able to actually collect and provide the resulting imaging from the satellites in as little as 30 minutes on average, which is also way below the industry average.

All told, Capella has lined up eight customers over the course of this past year, and they span a range of industries including not just defense, but also insurance, disaster relief, energy/oil and gas, urban development and maritime operations.

Rocket Lab’s merch store has pretty much what you’d expect from a space-themed gift shop – baby onesies, t-shirts, caps and mission patches. But the commercial rocket launch company just added its latest product, and it’s a bit different from their standard fare: For just $7.5 million, you can own a “Gold Mission Success coin” for a “dedicated mission,” in either LC-1 (Rocket Lab’s New Zealand launch facility) or LC-2 (the company’s new Virginia-based US launch site) flavors.

The coin is “triple plated gold,” but its material composition isn’t the reason for the high price. And in fact, there is a way to get one absolutely free – all you have to do is purchase a dedicated launch aboard one of Rocket Labs’ Electron launch vehicles. That makes sense because the cost for Rocket Lab’s dedicated launch services (when you’re not splitting the cost across a long list of small payloads from multiple customers) appears to be right in that range.

If you just want the coin and not the 56-foot, 27,000+ lb rocket, however, Rocket Lab’s latest product is for you. The detailing on the coin’s face and back looks pretty nice, and it’s a relatively large coin as far as coins goes, since it looks like its probably around double the diameter of a quarter, at least.

If anyone’s feeling generous, this is now at the top of my holiday wish list – but I want both obviously so I can have a full set.

 

 

Licious, a Bangalore-based startup that sells fresh meat and seafood online, has secured $30 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in the nation.

The new financing round, dubbed Series E, for the four-year-old startup was led by Singapore-based Vertex Growth Fund, it said Monday. Existing investors 3one4 Capital, Bertelsmann India Investments, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, and Sistema Asia Fund also participated in the round.

The Series E pushes Licious’ to-date raise to $94.5 million.

Licious operates an eponymous e-commerce platform to sell meat and seafood in seven cities in India (Bengaluru, NCR, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Panchkula, Mohali, Mumbai, Pune, and Chennai). The startup does not stock any inventory, so any raw material it procures, it processes and ships that on the same day or next. It processes more than 17,000 orders everyday.

The startup, which employs more than 2,000 people, has built its own supply chain network to control sourcing and production of food, it said. Licious executives said the startup is growing at a healthy rate of 300% year-over-year and aims to generate $140 million in annual revenue by 2023.

Licious will use the fresh capital to expand to more cities in India, and launch new products, said Vivek Gupta, co-founder of the startup.

The startup competes with Bangalore-based FreshToHome, which has amassed more than 650,000 customers in 10 cities in India. As of August, when FreshToHome raised $20 million in a new funding round, the startup was handling 14,000 orders a day.

Gupta said the vast majority of the Indian meat and seafood industry remains unorganized, which has created an immense opportunity for startups to address the sector. The cold-chain market of India is estimated to grow to $37 billion in the next five years, according to industry estimates.

“The traditional meat and seafood industry are in dire need of tech intervention, quality standardisation and a skilled talent pool. Licious is working towards creating these differentiators and will stay committed towards elevating India’s meat and seafood experience,” he said.

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, we are looking at how WeWork’s largest rival in China — UCommune — is pulling ahead with its initial public offering and GitHub’s potential big move in China.

GitHub turns to China

The world’s largest source code repository host GitHub is mulling to open a Chinese subsidiary, the company’s CEO told the Financial Times recently. The plan comes at a time when the technological rift between China and the U.S. is deepening. The U.S.’s trade sanctions on Huawei, which includes limiting the company’s access to certain Android services, has stirred concerns of further “decoupling” between the two countries. Since then Huawei has stepped up efforts to cut its reliance on American suppliers and develop its own core chips and software operating system.

American tech companies are feeling a similar chill from the trade war. Opening a China office could potentially help GitHub hedge against trade war bans and alleviate the company’s risks in its second-largest market. The demand for a China backup plan appears to have grown after GitHub restricted accounts of users in Cuba, Iran and a few other countries to comply with U.S. sanctions, a decision that sparked an outcry from open-source developer communities around the world and worried Chinese users that the same could befall them.

On the other hand, developers in China and overseas worry that maintaining a China-based operation might subject GitHub’s local projects to Beijing censorship as the country requires foreign companies operating in China to store users’ data locally. Though GitHub has previously been blocked in China seemingly for sharing anti-censorship tools, the restriction was usually temporary. As of now, the site remains largely accessible in China, according to Greatfire.org, a website that monitors China’s online censorship. But the concerns are justified. LinkedIn and Bing, sharing the same parent company — Microsoft — with GitHub, have been roundly criticized for practicing censorship in China.

Big hopes and losses

China’s shared space provider UCommune is moving ahead of its rival WeWork as it filed with the U.S. securities exchange for an IPO this week. Like its American counterpart, UCommune — which rebranded from UrWork after a name dispute with WeWork — hasn’t yet found its way to profitability. The Beijing-based company posted a net loss of 573 million yuan ($80.13 million) for the first three quarters ended September 30, 2019, up from 271 million yuan a year earlier, shows its F1 filing.

UCommune founder Mao Daqing, a real estate veteran, has previously forecasted that China’s co-working industry would be valued close to 100 billion yuan ($14 billion) by 2030. The reality is a bit more dismal. WeWork is reportedly coping with high vacancy rates across major Chinese cities, although sources told TechCrunch that spaces could be easily filled up with one or two large corporate contracts per location.

Perhaps more notably, half of UCommune’s revenue is derived from so-called “marketing and branding services,” which include content design as well as online and offline advertising services it sells to customers. The marketing segment, curiously, is attributed to one single subsidiary, a digital marketing services provider it acquired in late 2018. UCommune warns in its prospectus that “the historical financial results of our marketing and branding services may not serve as an adequate basis for evaluating the future financial results of this segment” because revenue from the unit relies overwhelmingly on a small number of major enterprise clients.

Also worth your attention…

Despite Huawei’s push to build its own alternative operating system — HarmonyOS — the Chinese giant is sticking with Android for the foreseeable future. At a company event this week in Shenzhen, its home city, consumer software executive Wang Chenglu announced (in Chinese) that all of Huawei’s handsets, tablets and laptops will continue to carry Android-based OS in 2020. Meanwhile, Huawei’s other products, including a broad range of Internet of Things that make up a smaller chunk of its consumer revenue, will ship with HarmonyOS.

Kuaishou, the largest rival to TikTok in China has reached 100 million daily active users, the company announced (in Chinese) this week. Tencent-backed Kuaishou was one of China’s first short-video apps to have attracted a meaningful following, but it was quickly leapfrogged by a latecomer, ByteDance’s Douyin, which is TikTok’s brand in China.

Though similarly focused on bite-sized videos, the two apps differ fundamentally in the way they distribute content. Trending videos on Douyin tend to come from pedigreed influencers and professional creators; users are fed what Douyin’s complex algorithms determine as “quality” content. Kuaishou, in comparison, works to cultivate a sense of community as its users get exposed to a broader range of long-tail content — often from creators with insignificant followings.

That places Douyin closer to a form of “media” and Kuaishou closer to a “social network,” suggested (in Chinese) Liu Jianing, managing director of China’s top boutique investment bank China Renaissance, at a recent industry conference. For that reason, the two apps also monetize differently — while Douyin generates revenue mainly from ads, Kuaishou harnesses its social graphs to enable social commerce wherein shoppers leverage other users’ recommendations to make purchases.

Neo-Pentecostal gangs in Brazil, driving out other faiths at gunpoint. A mob of 100 lawyers attacking a hospital in Pakistan to revenge themselves on violent doctors there. Anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazis, and red-pillers. Sometimes it seems like the world has fragmented into a jagged kaleidoscope of countless mobs and subcultures, each more disconcerting than the last.

Much of this is selection bias: if it bleeds, it leads, in both mass media and social-media algorithms. But it does seem plausible that the Internet is contributing to this kaleidoscope, to this growth in worrisome fringe subcultures, in three separate ways: complexity, information, and connectivity.

Connectivity is the most obvious avenue. The Internet empowers everyone to find their like-minded people, and this is as true of the hateful and vengeful as it is of the dispossessed and downtrodden. Furthermore, the power of a group increases nonlinearly with its size. The hateful views of one man in a community of 100 people are unlikely to make a huge collective difference; worst case, they become a fabled missing stair. But 1% of a nation of 100 million? That’s a million people. That’s a movement ready to join, to march, to pay tithes, to reinforce one another.

Information is more subtle. There’s a fascinating quote from the recent New Yorker profile of William Gibson: “Gibson noticed that people with access to unlimited information could develop illusions of omniscience.” You can get any kind of information you want on the Internet. You can find what appear at first glance to be closely argued and well-supported claims that global warming will kill off all but half a billion people by the end of this century, and also, if you prefer, that global warming is an authoritarian hoax.

No wonder people increasingly act as if the truth is something you choose from a buffet rather than a fact that will eventually bite you, hard, if you refuse to believe in it. As Philip K. Dick put it, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” But if all your information comes from the Internet, and is never testable, you never have to stop believing in it … until it’s far too late.

Complexity is, I think, the saddest. It has nothing to do with being led astray by evil companions or disinformation. It’s just that our modern world has become so complicated, such an endless buzz of noise and events and obligations, that lashing back against it, fixating on a simple solution to all the world’s problems, makes people feel strong. This delightful article about schisms among believers in a flat Earth includes the telling quote: “When you find out the Earth is flat … then you become empowered.”

Is the world going to get weirder yet, with new and more bizarre and inexplicable subcultures erupting from the Internet with every passing year? Have we hit the plateau of an S-curve? Or are we in a local minimum, and as we get better at dealing with connectivity and complexity, will we look back on these as the crazy years? My money’s on door number two … but I’ve been outweirded before.

Max Q is a new weekly newsletter all about space from TechCrunch. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Sundays in your inbox.

This is it – the very first edition of Max Q: TechCrunch’s space newsletter. Despite approaching the end of the year, it’s been a really busy week in the space industry, too. Between launches real and metaphorical, there’s plenty of activity to catch up on. And if you’ve got any space stuff you want to share for future newsletters, feel free to email me at darrell@techcrunch.com or let me know on Twitter @etherington.

Space enters a bit of a frenzy time at year’s end as a lot of other areas in tech are slowing down – especially over the past few years, as a number of companies push to re-ignite crewed spaceflight in the U.S. It’s common for many of these companies, and NASA itself, to set ambitious, optimistic timelines, and that often also means trying to fit in as much as possible before the year is out to make good on at least some of those promises.

Blue Origin launches and lands 12th New Shepard

Blue Origin launched its 12th New Shepard sub-orbital spacecraft this week, on its second try after bad weather scrubbed the first attempt. The launch was the sixth for the booster stage rocket used on the mission, and it landed perfectly meaning it could potentially serve even more launches in future.

Onboard were experimental and research payloads from Columbia University and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, as well as student postcards and art projects from a collaborative contest launched with the band OK Go. This mission is also noteworthy because it’s yet another step in Blue Origin’s progress towards qualifying New Shepard for human flight, after which it’ll start to shuttle tourists to space for a quick, but unbeatable, view.

Rocket Lab’s U.S. launch site is officially open

Rocket Lab, one of few launch startups that’s actually flying payloads to space, has officially opened its second launch pad – this one in the U.S. The company’s original launch site, which will continue to fly missions, is in New Zealand, but its new launch facility on Wallops Island in Virginia will open the doors for a key new customers, the U.S. Air Force. The first launch from this site, designed LC-2, should happen sometime in the first half of next year.

Kepler Communications books SpaceX rideshare missions

Small satellite startup Kepler Communications has booked two batches of nanosatellite launches on board SpaceX’s new rideshare missions. SpaceX announced earlier this year that it would be doing this as a new offering, allowing companies with smaller payloads to book space on a ride that will take up a bunch at once. It’s perfect for startups like Kepler, who wouldn’t be the primary customer on any SpaceX mission, and who might not be able to find a large lead partner to foot the majority of the bill for a mission that works on their schedule.

Near Space Labs uses stratospheric satellites to do what orbital ones can’t

A new startup is looking to produce high-resolution, on-demand and timely imaging for various customers and applications, and it’s using its own custom satellites hat are carried by weather balloons to make it happen. Advantages of taking this approach include cost, as well as access and the ability to capture very detailed pictures without having to use massively expensive and bulky optics, as you would from space.

Northrop Grumman booked a customer for its first OmegA rocket flight

Northrop Grumman’s in-development OmegA launch craft will be able to carry large payloads, and it’ll be doing that mostly on behalf of the U.S. Air Force and other U.S. defence agencies. But the rocket will first need to qualify to get USAF clearance to operate, and it’s going to be using its first ever launch in pursuit of said qualification to also ferry payloads for paying customers. Two birds, one stone, as they say.

What starfighters would look like if Porsche was in the Star Wars universe

There’s a new Star Wars movie coming out this week, and it’ll definitely feature new ships and other fancy sci-fi gadgets, if previous films are any indication. One you won’t see in the movie is this starfighter, which was designed in collaboration with both Porsche and Lucasfilm . The ship has a distinctive Star Wars vibe, to be sure – but Porsche says it’s also got elements inspired by the 911 and Taycan. Still definitely wouldn’t look out of place berthed next to the Millennium Falcon.

What to watch out for this week

SpaceX has a launch coming up on Monday, and the crucial Boeing/NASA commercial crew capsule test launch is set for Friday, December 20. That launch will be the uncrewed version of the first-ever commercial crew launch for Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule, and if all goes well, that will mean we’re closer than ever for U.S. astronauts launching once again from U.S. soil aboard an American launch vehicle.

Uber is in advanced stages of talks to close a deal to sell its food delivery service UberEats’ India business to local rival Zomato, as the American ride-hailing giant looks to cut its spending, three people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The deal values UberEats’ India business at around $400 million, one of the sources said. As part of the deal, UberEats would get a sizable stake in Zomato, and Uber would further invest $150 to $200 million in the 11-year-old Indian firm, people said.

A spokesperson for Uber declined to comment. A text to Zomato founder and chief executive Deepinder Goyal, who met Uber executives last week, remained unanswered.

The deal comes at a time when Zomato is in final stages to close a new financing round of $600 million, Goyal told news agency PTI earlier this month. TechCrunch reported earlier that China’s Ant Financial was close to leading a financing round of up to $600 million in the 11-year-old firm.

More to follow…