Year: 2019

The reMarkable tablet is a strange device in this era of ultra-smart gadgets: A black and white screen meant for reading, writing, and sketching — and nothing more. Yet the company has sold 100,000 of the devices and now has attracted $15 million in series A funding from Spark Capital.

It’s an unusual trajectory for a hardware startup exploring a nearly unoccupied market, but CEO Magnus Wanberg is confident that’s because this category of device is destined to grow in response to increasingly invasive tech. Sometimes an anti-technology trend is the tech opportunity of a lifetime.

I reviewed the reMarkable last year and compared it with its only real competition, the Sony Digital Paper Tablet. It was launched not on Kickstarter or Indiegogo but with its own independent crowdfunding campaign — and considering we’ve seen devices like this attempt such a thing and either let down or rip off their backers, that alone was a significant risk.

The device has been a runaway success, though, selling over 100,000 units — and attracting investment in the process. When I talked with Wanberg and co-founder Gerst about their new A round, the conversation was so interesting that I decided to publish it in full (or at least slightly edited).

How did they get here? What would they have done differently? Is the threat of the “smart” world really a thing? Why fight tech with more tech?

Devin: So you guys raised some money, that’s great! But it’s been a while since we talked. I think it’s important to hear about the progress of unique companies that are doing interesting things. So first can you tell me a little about what the company’s been busy with?

Magnus: Well, we’ve created this wonderful product, the reMarkable paper tablet. We’ve been very focused on that effort, based on a love for paper and a love for technology, to see if we can find some ways to join these two together to help people think better. That’s sort of the the whole ethos of the company.

So for the last six years, we’ve just been grinding away… you know, we’re a small player up against the big guys on this. So we’ve been sort of fighting guerrilla warfare trying to trying to establish ourselves.

And we were successful, fortunately, when we did our pre-order campaign, because as we found out, we weren’t the only ones who who love this notion of thinking better with the paper tablet, seeing paper as a powerful tool for thinking and for creating.

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1. Apple’s MacOS Catalina is now available

Catalina bucks the trend of recent MacOS updates with some pronounced changes — the underlying principles are the same, but the latest version of Apple’s Mac operating system makes some fundamental updates to popular apps, like getting rid of iTunes.

Brian Heater argues that these changes will have an immediate impact on current usage while also laying the groundwork for future evolutions.

2. Sony’s next console is… the PlayStation 5, arriving holidays 2020

The company is saving most of the details for future announcements, but it did reveal a few things about the upcoming game console — like the fact that the controllers will include new haptic feedback.

3. Group Nine acquires PopSugar

Earlier this year, there were reports that Group Nine — which was formed by the merger of Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo and Seeker — was in talks to acquire a different women’s lifestyle publisher, Refinery29, which was ultimately acquired by Vice Media instead.

4. Chinese firms Tencent, Vivo and CCTV suspend ties with the NBA over Hong Kong tweet

Smartphone maker Vivo, broadcaster CCTV and internet giant Tencent said today they are suspending all cooperation with the National Basketball Association, becoming the latest Chinese firms to cut ties with the league following a tweet from a Houston Rockets executive supporting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters.

5. Opera’s desktop browser gets built-in tracking protection

The marquee feature of Opera’s latest desktop browser is the addition of a blocker that will make it harder for advertisers and others to track you while you browse the web — and which has the additional benefit of speeding up your browsing session. In fact, Opera argues that turning on both the tracking protection and the built-in ad blocker can speed up page loads by up to 23%.

6. Via is launching an on-demand public transit network in the city of Cupertino

The aim is for these on-demand shuttles — starting with six vans branded with the city of Cupertino logo — to provide more efficient connections to CalTrain and increase access to public transit across the city.

7. Laurel Bowden of VC firm 83North on the European deep tech and startup ecosystems

London and Tel Aviv-based VC firm 83North has closed out its fifth fund at $300 million. In a conversation with general partner Laurel Bowden, the veteran investor shared a few thoughts about the tech scene in Europe versus Israel, what the firm looks for in a team and how to scale globally. (Extra Crunch Membership required.)

Nio delivered 4,799 vehicles in the third quarter, a 35.1% surge in sales and a positive development for the Chinese electric automaker that has been plagued by cost overruns, a voluntary battery recall and macroeconomic conditions such as declining passenger vehicle sales and reduced EV subsidies.

The company said Tuesday it also exceeded the middle point of its guidance range by 499 vehicles, or 11.6%.

The deliveries sent Nio shares up more than 9%. However, Nio shares, which were trading at $1.69 on Tuesday prior to the market close, are still down some 49% from just a month ago.

In the third quarter, Nio delivered 4,196 of its 5-seater ES6 SUV and 603 of the ES8, its more expensive 7-seater premium electric SUV. As of September 30, 2019, aggregate deliveries of the Company’s ES6 and ES8 reached 23,689 vehicles, of which 12,341 vehicles were delivered in 2019.

Nio founder, chairman and CEO William Li credited more “competitive retail prices” on the ES6 for contributing to the jump in deliveries. He added that the company began in October delivering ES6 and ES8 vehicles with an 84-kWh battery pack that extends their range to 316 miles and 276 miles, respectively. Li expects these longer range vehicles to accelerate orders and deliveries in the fourth quarter.

Nio has struggled to hit its own guidance in previous quarters. Nio began deliveries of the ES8 in China in June 2018. And while deliveries initially surpassed expectations, they slowed in 2019. The company reported loss of $390.9 million in the first quarter. The rout continued in the second quarter when Nio reported a loss of $462 million.

Nio delivered 3,553 vehicles in the second quarter, a 7.9% decline from the first period of 2019.

Nio’s response to its dismal numbers has included shifting its vehicle production plans, reducing R&D spending and cutting thousands of jobs. The company plans to cut its workforce from 9,900 people down to 7,800 by the end of the third quarter, Li said in September when reporting its earnings. He also said there will be additional restructuring and some non-core businesses will be spun off by the end of the year.

In June, Nio faced a new problem when it voluntarily recalling nearly 5,000 of its ES8 high-performance electric SUVs after a series of battery fires in China and a subsequent investigation revealed a vulnerability that created a safety risk. The recall affected a quarter of the ES8 vehicles it has sold since they went on sale in June 2018.

Nio was able to complete its recall for the 4,803 ES8s by prioritizing battery manufacturing capacity for this effort. But that significantly affected production and delivery results, Li said at the time. Nio delivered just 837 electric vehicles in July.

But even before the recall, delivery numbers were down. Nio delivered 1,340 vehicles in June, 1,089 in May and 1,124 in April. Those numbers rebounded in September when Nio said it delivered 2,019 vehicles.

It’s unclear if these rosier numbers signal the beginning of a broader turnaround for Nio, which has accumulated about $6 billion in losses since its founding in 2014. Sales of EVs in China continue to slide, a fall blamed on a reduction in subsidies.

Google today announced a small but nifty feature for the Google Assistant and its smart home devices that makes it easier for you to take your music and videos with you as you wander about the different rooms in your home.

‘Stream transfer’ as Google prosaically calls it, allows you to simply ask the Assistant to move your music to a different speaker, or — if you have the right speaker group set up — to all speakers and TVs in your home. All you have to say is “Hey Google, move the music to the bedroom speaker,” for example. In addition to your voice, you can also use the Google Home app or the touchscreen on your Google Nest Home Hub.

This will work with any source that can play to your Chromecast-enabled speakers and displays.

It’s all pretty straightforward — to the point where I’m surprised it took so long for Google to enable a feature like this. But maybe it just needed to have enough devices in peoples’ homes to make it worthwhile. “Now that millions of users have multiple TVs, smart speakers and smart displays (some in every room!) we wanted to make it easy for people to control their media as they moved from room to room,” Google itself explains in today’s announcement.

At its annual TechCon event in San Jose, Arm today announced Custom Instructions, a new feature of its Armv8-M architecture for embedded CPUs that, as the name implies, enables its customers to write their own custom instructions to accelerate their specific use cases for embedded and IoT applications.

“We already have ways to add acceleration, but not as deep and down to the heart of the CPU. What we’re giving [our customers] here is the flexibility to program your own instructions, to define your own instructions — and have them executed by the CPU,” ARM senior director for its automotive and IoT business, Thomas Ensergueix, told me ahead of today’s announcement.

He noted that Arm always had a continuum of options for acceleration, starting with its memory-mapped architecture for connecting GPUs and today’s neural processor units over a bus. This allows the CPU and the accelerator to run in parallel, but with the bus being the bottleneck. Customers can also opt for a co-processor that’s directly connected to the CPU, but today’s news essentially allows Arm customers to create their own accelerated algorithms that then run directly on the CPU. That means the latency is low, but it’s not running in parallel, as with the memory-mapped solution.

As Arm, argues, this setup allows for the lowest-cost (and risk) path for integrating customer workload acceleration, as there are no disruptions to the existing CPU features and still allows its customers to use the existing standard tools they are already familiar with.

For now, custom instructions will only be available to be implemented in the Arm Cortex-M33 CPUs, starting in the first half of 2020. By default, it’ll also be available for all future Cortex-M processors. There are no additional costs or new licenses to buy for Arm’s customers.

Ensergueix noted that as we’re moving to a world with more and more connected devices, more of Arm’s customers will want to optimize their processors for their often very specific use cases — and often they’ll want to do so because by creating custom instructions, they can get a bit more battery life out of these devices, for example.

Arm has already lined up a number of partners to support Custom Instructions, including IAR Systems, NXP, Silicon Labs and STMicroelectronics .

“Arm’s new Custom Instructions capabilities allow silicon suppliers like NXP to offer their customers a new degree of application-specific instruction optimizations to improve performance, power dissipation and static code size for new and emerging embedded applications,” writes NXP’s Geoff Lees, SVP and GM of Microcontrollers. “Additionally, all these improvements are enabled within the extensive Cortex-M ecosystem, so customers’ existing software investments are maximized.”

In related embedded news, Arm also today announced that it is setting up a governance model for Mbed OS, its open-source operating system for embedded devices that run an Arm Cortex-M chip. Mbed OS has always been open source, but the Mbed OS Partner Governance model will allow Arm’s Mbed silicon partners to have more of a say in how the OS is developed through tools like a monthly Product Working Group meeting. Partners like Analog Devices, Cypress, Nuvoton, NXP, Renesas, Realtek,
Samsung and u-blox are already participating in this group.

Microsoft is following Apple and Google’s lead with today’s launch of per-app and per-game time limits in its parental control software. Already, the company allows parents to limit screen time across Windows 10, Xbox One, and Android via the Microsoft Launcher. However, it hadn’t yet allowed parents to limit the amount of time a child would spend in a specific app or game, as its competitors do.

Instead, its existing controls allowed parents only to dole out a set amount of hours of screen time. Parents could choose to either leave the time up to the kids to manage, or limit it at the device level — like, only allowing one hour of Xbox time but permitting more screen time on the PC, for example.

However, the current trend in screen time management is not to approach all screen time as unproductive and unhealthy. Instead, it’s about configuring limits on the more addictive apps and games that eat up increasing amounts of children’s time, while permitting educational tools to have fewer limits.

For older kids and teens, social media apps like TikTok or Instagram could be the culprit, while younger kids may just be spending too much time “hanging out” in virtual worlds like Roblox and Fortnite. Problems on this front have gotten pretty bad. Mobile games are under fire for using gambling tactics like loot boxes to engage children. And Fortnite is now the subject of a lawsuit that claims that, in part, that the game’s addictive nature is due to its use slot machine-like mechanics and variable reward systems, which manipulate children’s brains.

Without being able to limit these apps directly, kids may end up using all of their allotted screen time on just the one app or game they’re obsessed with at the moment.

Apple had already allowed per-app time limits with the launch of its screen time controls in iOS 12. And Google more recently updated its own Family Link software, now preinstalled on new Android devices, to include a similar feature.

With today’s update, Microsoft is now on board, too.

The new app and game limits parents set will apply across Windows 10, Xbox and Android devices running Microsoft Launcher. In other words, kids can’t get more game time just by switching devices.

The controls also allow parents to offer more screen time on certain days — like weekends, for instance — than others.

To use this feature, parents will need to create a family group and make Microsoft accounts for all the kids.

Once enabled, kids will get a warning about their screen time 15 minutes before the limit is reached, and then again at 5 minutes. Since kids will often beg for a few more minutes, Microsoft made it easy for parents to grant or deny more time via email or via a Microsoft Launcher notification on their own Android phone.

The per-app time limits are launching today in preview within Microsoft’s existing family settings.

“Ultimately, our goal is for the app and game limits feature to provide flexible and customizable tools to meet each family’s unique needs,” the company explains in an announcement. “You as parents know what’s best for your children — no technology can ever replace that — but we’re hoping these tools can help you to strike the right balance,” it says.

European startup studio eFounders has shared some metrics about its portfolio companies. The startup studio has launched 23 companies with a focus on software-as-a-service enterprise products.

While eFounders might not be a familiar name, some of the companies in its portfolio have become promising startups with impressive growth, such as Front, Aircall, Forest, Spendesk, Mailjet and others. Front is also company #85 in Y Combinator’s list of top 101 companies of all time.

And the big new metric is that the total valuation of all 23 companies has now reached $1 billion. Of course, eFounders is just a shareholder in those 23 companies, so eFounders itself isn’t a unicorn. But it’s still an impressive number.

At the end of 2018, eFounders’ portfolio valuation was at $541 million. At the end of 2017, the same metric was at $385 million.

Overall, eFounders companies have raised $254 million from VC funds and business angels, and employ 1,000 people, mostly in Paris, San Francisco and New York. And when you add up the annual recurring revenue of all those startups, they generate $107 million in ARR together.

If you don’t know the eFounders model, it’s quite simple. At first, the core eFounders team comes up with an idea and hires a founding team. In exchange for financial and human resources, the startup studio keeps a significant stake in its startups.

After a year or two, startups should have proven that they can raise a seed round and operate on their own. This way, eFounders can move on to the next project and start new companies. Up next, eFounders is already working on 5 new companies.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, delivering the keynote at the Microsoft Government Leaders Summit in Washington, DC today, had a message for attendees to maintain user trust in their tools technologies above all else.

He said it is essential to earn user trust, regardless of your business. “Now, of course, the power law here is all around trust because one of the keys for us, as providers of platforms and tools, trust is everything,” he said today. But he says it doesn’t stop with the platform providers like Microsoft. Institutions using those tools also have to keep trust top of mind or risk alienating their users.

“That means you need to also ensure that there is trust in the technology that you adopt, and the technology that you create, and that’s what’s going to really define the power law on this equation. If you have trust, you will have exponential benefit. If you erode trust it will exponentially decay,” he said.

He says Microsoft sees trust along three dimensions: privacy, security and ethical use of artificial intelligence. All of these come together in his view to build a basis of trust with your customers.

Nadella said he sees privacy as a human right, pure and simple, and it’s up to vendors to ensure that privacy or lose the trust of their customers. “The investments around data governance is what’s going to define whether you’re serious about privacy or not,” he said. For Microsoft, they look at how transparent they are about how they use the data, their terms of service, and how they use technology to ensure that’s being carried out at runtime.

He reiterated the call he made last year for a federal privacy law. With GDPR in Europe and California’s CCPA coming on line in January, he sees a centralized federal law as a way to streamline regulations for business.

As for security, as you might expect, he defined it in terms of how Microsoft was implementing it, but the message was clear that you needed security as part of your approach to trust, regardless of how you implement that. He asked several key questions of attendees.

“Cyber is the second area where we not only have to do our work, but you have to [ask], what’s your operational security posture, how have you thought about having the best security technology deployed across the entire chain, whether it’s on the application side, the infrastructure side or on the endpoint, side, and most importantly, around identity,” Nadella said.

The final piece, one which he said was just coming into play was how you use artificial intelligence ethically, a sensitive topic for a government audience, but one he wasn’t afraid to broach. “One of the things people say is, ‘Oh, this AI thing is so unexplainable, especially deep learning.’ But guess what, you created that deep learning [model]. In fact, the data on top of which you train the model, the parameters and the number of parameters you use — a lot of things are in your control. So we should not abdicate our responsibility when creating AI,” he said.

Whether Microsoft or the US government can adhere to these lofty goals is unclear, but Nadella was careful to outline them both for his company’s benefit and this particular audience. It’s up to both of them to follow through.

The rapid rise of Slack — which has recently broken the 100,000 mark for paying businesses using its service — has ushered in a rush of competition from other companies across the worlds of social media and enterprise software, all aiming to become the go-to conversation layer for businesses. Today, Workplace, Facebook’s effort in that race, announced a milestone in its growth along with a bigger push into video services and other improvements.

The service — priced at $1.50 per month per employee — now has passed 3 million paying users, adding in 1 million workers from mostly enterprise businesses in the last eight months.

And to capitalize on Facebook’s growing focus on video in its consumer service, Workplace is announcing several steps of its own into video: it’s releasing a special app that can be used on the Portal, Facebook’s video screen; and alongside that it’s announcing new video features: captioning at the bottom of videos; auto-translating starting with 17 languages; and a new P2P architecture that will speed up video transmission for those who might be watching videos on Workplace in places where bandwidth is constrained.

The features and milestone number are all being announced today at Flock, the Workplace user conference that Facebook puts on each year. Alongside all these, Facebook also announced several other features for its enterprise app (more on the other new features below).

The push to video comes at an interesting time for Workplace on the competitive front. Karandeep Anand, who came to Facebook from Microsoft and currently heads up Facebook with Julien Codorniou managing business development, has made a point of differentiating Workplace from others in the field of workplace collaboration by emphasizing how it’s used by very large enterprises like Walmart (the world’s largest single employer) to bring together not just white-collar knowledge workers but also frontline workers on to a single communication platform.

The company says that today, its customers include 150 companies with over 10,000 active users apiece, with other names on its books including Starbucks, Spotify, AstraZeneca, Deliveroo and Kering.

The push to video follows that trajectory: it’s a way for Workplace (and Facebook) to differentiate the experience and use cases for the product to businesses, who might already be using Slack but might consider buying this as well, if not migrating away from the other product altogether. (Teams is a different ballgame, of course, since it has a strong video component of its own and also likes to position itself as a product for all kinds of employees, too.)

Workplace’s video efforts here will mark the first time that Facebook is positioning Portal as a product for businesses. This is notable, when you consider that there has been some adoption of Amazon’s Alexa in workplace scenarios, too; and that there has been some pushback from consumers about the prospect of having a Facebook video device sitting in their homes. This gives Facebook’s $179 hardware (which will be sold at the same price to businesses) a new avenue for sales.

Video has been a cornerstone of how Workplace has been developing for a while now, with companies using it as a way for, say, the big boss to send out more personalised communications to workers, and for people in workgroups to create video chats with each other. A dedicated screen for video chats takes this idea to the next level, and plays on the fact that video conferencing services like Zoom have caught on like wildfire in modern offices, where people who work together often work in disparate locations.

There is another way that Portal could find some traction with businesses: videoconferencing solutions tend to be very expensive, in part because of the hefty hardware investments that need to be made. Offering a device at $179 drastically undercuts that investment. Codorniou declined to comment on whether Facebook might make a more concerted effort to push this as a cost-effective videoconferencing alternative down the line, but he did point out that today Facebook and Zoom have a close relationship.

The other video features that Workplace is announcing today will further enhance the experience: Facebook will now give users the option to incluce automatic captions at the bottoms of videos, with the added bonus of translation, initially in 17 languages. And the improved video quality for those with limited bandwidth is significantly not something that Facebook has rolled out in its consumer app: the aim is to improve the quality of broadcasting in scenarios where bandwidth might not be as strong but there are simultaneous people watching the same event: something you could imagine applying, say, at a company all-hands or townhall event with remote participants.

Alongside all of these video features, Workplace is adding in a host of other features to expand the use cases for the product beyond basic chatting:

New learning product. This is not about e-learning per se, but Workplace is now offering a way for HR to add onboarding teaching and videos into Workplace for new employees or new services at the company. No plans right now to expand this to educational content, Codorniou said.

Surveys are also coming to Workplace. These will be set by administrators — not any worker at any time — and it seems that for now there will be no anonymity, so that will mean it’s unlikely that these will cover any sensitive topics, and might in any case see a chilling effect in how people feel they can respond.

Frontline access is getting overhauled in Workplace, where people who do not use company email addresses will now be able to create accounts using generated codes.

Those admins that are trying to track how well Workplace is actually working for them will also be able to track engagement and other metrics on the platform.

In addition to these, Workplace is also adding in some gamification features to the platform, where people can publicly thank people, set and follow workplace goals, and award badges to individuals who have achieved something in areas like sales, anniversaries or other positive milestones.

As with the video features, the idea is to bring services to Workplace that you are not necessarily getting in Slack and other competitive products. That is the maxim also when the features are replicas of features you might have seen elsewhere, but not all in one consolidated place.

Asked what he thought about the claims that Facebook is too much of a “copycat” when it came to building new features, Codorniou was defensive. “I think Workplace itself is getting to a market that has been untouched before. When it comes to badges or goals, for example, yes people have but these before, but the difference is that we are offering them to a wide network of people. If you have to use a separate app, it’s not a great experience.

“Everything that we ship is the result of customer feedback and requests. If they tell us they want these, it means they’re not finding what they needed on the market.”

Google today announced that Grasshopper, its tool for teaching novices how to code, is now available on the desktop, too, in the form of a web-based app. Back in 2018, Grasshopper launched out of Area 120 as a mobile app for Android and iOS and since then, Google says, ‘millions’ have downloaded it.

A larger screen and access to a keyboard makes learning to code on the desktop significantly easier than on mobile. In the desktop app, for example, Google is able to put columns for the instructions, the code editor and the results next to each other.

Google also today added two new classes to Grasshopper, in addition to the original ‘fundamentals’ class on basic topics like variables, operators and loops. The new classes are Using a Code Editor and Intro to Webpages, which teaches you more about HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

In case you are wondering why a “Using a Code Editor” class is useful, it’s worth noting that most of the coding experience in the first few courses is more about clicking short code snippets and putting them in the right order than typing out code by hand.

After completing all courses, users will be able to build a simple webpage and ready to take on more complex courses on other platforms like Codecademy, for example.