Year: 2019

If you want to set your movie or game on the Moon, it’s not hard to find imagery of our photogenic satellite. But NASA has just released a useful and beautiful new set of data just for creators that includes not just imagery but depth data, making it simple to build an incredibly detailed 3D map of the Moon.

The CGI Moon Kit comes from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where science visualization expert Ernie Wright found that data he had assembled for other purposes was proving popular with 3D artists.

The data came from two instruments on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft that has been in orbit around the Moon for more than a decade, snapping pictures and taking measurements the whole time.

On board the LRO is a high-quality “traditional” camera (really a sophisticated multispectral imager), which it has been using to build an amazingly high-quality map of the lunar surface. It can only capture a small portion at a time, but it does so constantly and as its orbit has shifted, it has captured pretty much the entire visible area of the Moon, though some shadowy regions can’t be imaged even after passing over them thousands of times.

Great photographs are only one part of a map, though. If you really want to recreate the surface of the Moon you need information on the topology of its surface as well. And that’s what the LRO’s laser altimeter has been collecting.

The laser altimeter works like any typical orbital laser ranger you have around the house. It sends a pulsed laser towards the surface and tracks both how long it takes to come back and how strong it is. These tell the device how far away the surface is (and therefore its altitude) down to half a meter, and what that surface is like, for instance a hard rocky structure or soft powdered regolith.

That data is assembled into what’s called a displacement map, sort of like a topographic map where instead of the height actually changing, the color does. There are a couple varieties of this map, but the basic use case is the same: You overlay the displacement map on the photographic map, then wrap it all around a sphere — and you’ve got a virtual topographic globe.

Here’s a slower version of the GIF you see above.

This would be really interesting to explore in first person in a game where you build a lunar colony, or maybe have dogfights in spacecraft above a realistic lunar surface. Or maybe an artist could use it to create a model of the Moon like this one.

The CGI Moon Kit is free to download and all the assets are available with a few options that 3D artists will probably understand. You can learn more about it and get it here.

Adam Neumann may be out of the daily flow of WeWork, but he seemingly remains top of mind to some of the company’s bankers.

According to a new Business Insider piece, Neumann is working with JPMorgan, UBS, and Credit Suisse to consider new terms for a $500 loan that he took out before WeWork filed to go public, and from which Neumann has already drawn down $380 million. Since he can no longer pay the loan with proceeds from selling WeWork shares publicly (it yanked its S-1 earlier this week), he may have to put up some of his properties or other assets as collateral for the loan, according to one of BI’s sources.

“No terms have been set,” a spokeswoman for Neumann tells the outlet.

Per earlier reports, Neumann has plenty to offload if it comes to it, having acquired numerous residential and commercial properties over the years.

Among his reported investments is a $10.5 million Greenwich Village townhouse; a farm in Westchester, New York; a home in the Hamptons where he reportedly weathered the storm with his family ahead ahead of resigning as CEO; and a $21 million, 13,000-square-foot house in the Bay Area with a guitar-shaped room.

According to an earlier WSJ report, Neumann has also bought several properties through investor groups that he had leased back, in some cases, to WeWork.

WeWork, and Neumann, has enjoyed a cozy relationship with JPMorgan in recent years. As recently reported in the NYTimes,  JPMorgan “lent Mr. Neumann money personally (with his inflated shares as collateral), provided equity and debt for the company, served as a corporate adviser for the I.P.O. and secured nearly $6 billion in financing as part of the now scotched offering.”

At the very beginning, there were 20 startups. After two days of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner.

Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup.

After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: OmniVis, Orbit Fab, Render, StrattyX and Traptic.

These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included: Mamoon Hamid (Kleiner Perkins), Ashton Kutcher (Sound Ventures), Alfred Lin (Sequoia), Marissa Mayer (Lumi Labs), Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate Ventures) and Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch).

Winner: Render

Render has created a managed cloud platform. The company wants to provide an alternative to traditional cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure and GCP. And it starts with an infrastructure that is easier to manage thanks to automated deployments and a abstracted way to manage your application that is reminiscent of Heroku.

Read more about Render in our separate post.

Runner-Up: OmniVis

OmniVis aims to make detection of cholera and other pathogens as quick, simple and cheap as a pregnancy test. Its smartphone-powered detection platform could save thousands of lives.

Read more about OmniVis in our separate post.

NASA issues a new formal request for info from industry specifically around spacesuits. The agency is hoping to gather information in order to help it figure out a future path for acquisition of spacesuit production and services from external industry sources.

That doesn’t mean it’s outsourcing its spacesuit design and production immediately – NASA will build and certify its own spacesuits for use in the first Artemis missions, including Artemis III which is the one that’ll see the next American man and the first American woman take their trip to the lunar surface. But for Artemis missions after that, of which there are currently five more proposed (Artemis 4 through 8), four of which will have crew on board.

NASA has of course already worked with private industry, as well as academic institutions and researchers, on the technologies that will go into its own space suits. And the agency fully expects that the current exploration suit will form the basis of any future designs. It is however looking to fully transition their prouduction and testing to industry partners, and will additionally expect those partners to “facilitate the evolution of the suits” and also suggest improvements on the existing suit design.

On top of the suits, NASA is looking for input on tools and support hardware to be used with the suits, during extra-vehicular activities, or in making sure the suits work well with the vehicles that’ll be transporting them, as well as the lunar gateway that will act as the staging ground between Earth and the Moon’s surface.

Finally, NASA also would like to hear from companies about how to better commercialize spacesuits and spacewalks – making them available to customers outside of the agency itself, as well.

This isn’t surprising given how many signals NASA has been giving lately that it’s interesting in partnering with industry more deeply across both Artemis, future Mars exploration, and the ISS (and its potential commercial successor). The full RFI issued by NASA is available here, in case you’re interested in spinning up a spacesuit startup.

Physical storage-turned-rentals startup Omni is dealing with layoffs today, two sources familar with the situation tell TechCrunch. Omni just shed seven operations team members. The startup is in talks to sell its engineering team to Coinbase after also receiving interest from Thumbtack.

Omni’s rental business was doing poorly without enough users paying a few bucks to borrow a tent, bike, or power drill. Omni had planned to launch a white-labeled platform allowing brick-and-mortar merchants to operate and market their own rental business.

But despite having plenty of cash left after raising $25 million from cryptocurrency company Ripple early last year, Omni feared the new platform would flop too and its prospects would worsen.

The company is in talks with Coinbase to hiring some of the engineering staff, who would have them work on Coinbase Earn, which rewards users with cryptocurrency for completing online educational programs. Some employees are interviewing at Coinbase today. However, a Coinbase spokesperson told me there’s currently no official deal before noting that theres’s nothing on the record they can share. Omni promised TechCrunch a statement but then refused to talk on the record.

Omni got its start in on-demand storage where it would come to your home, pick up and tag your stuff, store it in a warehouse, and bring it back whenever you wanted it. It grew popular in San Francisco and started to scale out to other cities. In April Omni began allowing users to earn money by renting out their stored goods to other Omni customers.

But by May, Omni was selling its storage business to SoftBank-funded competitor Clutter, and the transition was rocky. Users complained about changing prices and misplaced items, alarmed that suddenly a different startup had control of their possessions.

I was formerly a happy Omni customer of its storage business, but the transition to Clutter was botched and shook faith that users’ stuff would be taken care of. At one point they lost some of my belongings until C-level excecutives stepped in to figure out what happened.

Going forward, instead of storing goods itself, Omni would rely on local storefronts for pick up and drop off of rentals. But many users balked at the hassle of rentals when Amazon makes buying so easy.

Omni’s vision of cloud storage for the physical world and access over ownership had attracted capital from Flybridge, Highland, Allen & Company, Founders Fund, Precursor, and a wide array of angels. But efforts to change user behavior and operate a logistically complicated business matched with spotty execution led the startup to hit the skids and seek a soft landing.

On September 17, HTC announced that cofounder Cher Wang would be stepping down as CEO. In her place, Yves Maitre stepped into the role of Chief Executive, after more than a decade at French telecom giant, Orange.

It’s a tough job at an even tougher time. The move comes on the tail of five consecutive quarterly losses and major layoffs, including a quarter of the company’s staff, which were let go in July of last year.

It’s a far fall for a company that comprised roughly 11 percent of global smartphone sales, some eight years ago. These days, HTC is routinely relegated to the “other” column when these figures are published.

All of this is not to say that the company doesn’t have some interesting irons in the fire. With Vive, HTC has demonstrated its ability to offer a cutting edge VR platform, while Exodus has tapped into an interest in exploring the use of blockchain technologies for mobile devices.

Of course, neither of these examples show any sign of displacing HTC’s once-booming mobile device sales. And this January’s $1.1 billion sale of a significant portion of its hardware division to Google has left many wondering whether it has much gas left in the mobile tank.

With Wang initially scheduled to appear on stage at Disrupt this week, the company ultimately opted to have Maitre sit in on the panel instead. In preparation for the conversation, we sat down with the executive to discuss his new role and future of the struggling Taiwanese hardware company.

5G, XR and the future of the HTC brand

When Elizabeth Warren took on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook earlier this week, it was a low moment for what New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz calls “techno-utopianism.”

That the progressive, populist Massachusetts Senator and leading Democratic Presidential candidate wants to #BreakUpBigTech is not surprising. But Warren’s choice to spotlight regulating and trust-busting Facebook was nonetheless noteworthy, because of what it represents on a philosophical level. Warren, along with like-minded political leaders, social activists, and tech critics, has begun to offer the first massively popular alternative to the massively popular wave of aggressive optimism and “genius” ambition that characterized tech culture for the past decade or two.

“No,” Warren and others seem to say, “your vision is not necessarily making the world a better place.” This is a major buzzkill for tech leaders who have made (positive) world-changing their number one calling card — more than profits, popularity, skyscrapers like San Francisco’s striking Salesforce Tower, or any other measure.

Enter Marantz, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and Brooklyn, N.Y. resident who has recently trained his attention on tech culture, following around iconic figures on both sides of what he sees as the divide of our time — not between tech greats whose successes make us all better and those who would stop them, but between the alternative figures on the “new right” and the self-understood liberals of Silicon Valley who, according to Marantz, have both contributed to “hijacking the American conversation.”

Marantz’s first book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation,” will be released next week, and I recently had a chance to talk with him for this series the ethics of technology.

Greg Epstein: Congratulations on your absolutely fascinating new book Antisocial, and on everything you’ve been up to.

PayPal is the first company to walk away from Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency.

PayPal’s decision to take its ball and go home was first reported by The Wall Street Journal .

“PayPal has made the decision to forgo further participation in the Libra Association at this time and to continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities as we strive to democratize access to financial services for underserved populations,” PayPal said in an emailed statement. “We remain supportive of Libra’s aspirations and look forward to continued dialogue on ways to work together in the future. Facebook has been a longstanding and valued strategic partner to PayPal, and we will continue to partner with and support Facebook in various capacities.”

It could be that PayPal isn’t the only firm to walk away from the ambitious effort to transform the entire global financial system.

Mastercard, Visa and other companies may join PayPal in backing away from the Libra project, which has been the subject of mounting criticism since its launch.

As we reported when Libra first launched, Facebook doesn’t control the Libra organization or currency, but gets a single vote alongside the remaining partners which include Uber, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm with roughly $10 billion in assets under management, Mastercard and Visa. Each partner has invested at least $10 million in the project and the association will promote the open-sourced Libra Blockchain.

The partners will not only pitch the Libra Blockchain and developer platform with its own Move programming language, plus sign up businesses to accept Libra for payment and even give customers discounts or rewards.

Facebook has a lot more riding on the success of the Association that just it’s Libra stake. The company has also launched a subsidiary company called Calibra that handles crypto transactions on its platform that would use the Libra blockchain.

Governments around the world have been up in arms about what they see as Facebook and its partners making an end run around the existing financial services.

And earlier this month, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the company would  be willing to push back the launch of the cryptocurrency past its planned 2020 launch date, in an interview with the Japanese Nikkei news service.

We’re excited to announce a new partnership with Amazon Web Services for annual members of Extra Crunch. Starting today, qualified annual members can receive $1,000 in AWS credits. You also must be a startup founder to claim this Extra Crunch community perk.

AWS is the premier service for your application hosting needs, and we want to make sure our community is well-resourced to build. We understand that hosting and infrastructure costs can be a major hurdle for tech startups, and we’re hoping that this offer will help better support your team.

What’s included in the perk:

• $1,000 in AWS Promotional Credit valid for 1 year
• 2 months of AWS Business Support
• 80 credits for self-paced labs

Applications are processed in 7-10 days, once an application is received. Companies may not be eligible for AWS Promotional Credits if they previously received a similar or greater amount of credit. Companies may be eligible to be “topped up” to a higher credit amount if they previously received a lower credit.

In addition to the AWS community perk, Extra Crunch members also get access to how-tos and guides on company building, intelligence on what’s happening in the startup ecosystem, stories about founders and exits, transcripts from panels at TechCrunch events, discounts on TechCrunch events, no banner ads on TechCrunch.com and more. To see a full list of the types of articles you get with Extra Crunch, head here.

You can sign up for annual Extra Crunch membership here.

Once you are signed up, you’ll receive a welcome email with a link to the AWS offer. If you are already an annual Extra Crunch member, you will receive an email with the offer at some point today. If you are currently a monthly Extra Crunch subscriber and want to upgrade to annual in order to claim this deal, head over to the “my account” section on TechCrunch.com and click the “upgrade” button.

This is one of several new community perks we’ve been working on for Extra Crunch members. Extra Crunch members also get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets (email extracrunch@techcrunch.com with the event name to receive a discount code for event tickets). You can learn more about our events lineup here. You also can read about our Brex community perk here.

At age 27, Jordan Fudge is quietly making a splash in the VC world.

Fudge is the managing partner of Sinai Ventures, a multi-stage VC fund that manages $100 million and has more than 80 portfolio companies including Ro, Drivetime, Kapwing, and Luminary. His 2017 investment in Pinterest — a secondary shares deal from his prior firm that was rolled into Sinai when he spun out — will have returned the value of Sinai’s Fund I by itself once the lockup on shares expires next week.

Fudge and co-founder Eric Reiner, a Northwestern University classmate, hired staff in New York and San Francisco when Sinai launched in early 2018. Today, they’re centralizing the team in Los Angeles for its next fund, a bet on the rising momentum of the local startup ecosystem and their vision to be the city’s leading Series A and B firm.

Fudge and Reiner have intentionally stayed off the radar thus far, wanting to prove themselves first through a track record of investments.

A part-time film financier who also serves on the board of LGBT advocacy non-profit GLAAD, Fudge describes himself as an atypical VC firm founder, an edge he’s using to carve out his niche in a crowded VC landscape.

I spoke with Fudge to learn more about his strategy at Sinai and what led to him founding the firm. Here’s the transcript (edited for length and clarity):

Eric Peckham: Tell me the origin story here. How did Sinai Ventures get seeded?

Jordan Fudge: I was working for Eagle Advisors, a multi-billion dollar family office for one of the founders of SAP, focused on the tech sector across public markets, crypto, and eventually VC deals. Two years in, I pitched them on spinning out to focus on VC and they seeded Sinai with the private investments like Compass and Pinterest I had done already, plus a fresh fund to invest out of on my own. It was $100 million combined.