Year: 2019

There’s been a heap of China in Africa coverage over the last decade, but very little of it is focused on tech. In part, because the country’s engagement with African startups is light compared to its deal-making on infrastructure and commodities. Now, that all looks to be shifting.

TechCrunch has tracked moves by a number of Chinese actors in Africa’s tech sector over the past year. This could signal the next chapter in China’s influence in Africa — one more digital than bricks and mortar.

Primer on China in Africa

To the former, the government of China has designated Africa a strategic priority in its foreign relations and has pursued policies and programs accordingly.

There’s been a heap of China in Africa coverage over the last decade, but very little of it is focused on tech. In part, because the country’s engagement with African startups is light compared to its deal-making on infrastructure and commodities. Now, that all looks to be shifting.

TechCrunch has tracked moves by a number of Chinese actors in Africa’s tech sector over the past year. This could signal the next chapter in China’s influence in Africa — one more digital than bricks and mortar.

Primer on China in Africa

To the former, the government of China has designated Africa a strategic priority in its foreign relations and has pursued policies and programs accordingly.

Salesforce announced this week that it’s building another shiny tower. This one will be in Sydney with views of the harbor and the iconic Sydney Opera House. The company has also committed to adding 1000 new jobs in the next five years and to building the tower in a sustainable fashion.

In fact, Salesforce is pledging the new tower will be one of the greenest buildings in the country when they are finished. “The building has achieved Sydney’s first-ever WELL core and shell Platinum pre-certification, the highest obtainable pre-certification, and will achieve a 6 Star Green Star Design and As-Built rating, representing world excellence in sustainable design,” Salesforce’s Elizabeth Pinkham wrote in a blog post announcing the project.

As is Salesforce’s way, it’s going to be the tallest building in the city when it’s done, and will sit in the Circular Quay, part of the central business district in the city, and will house shops and restaurants on the main floor. As with all of its modern towers, it’s going to dedicate the top floor to allow for flexible use for employees, customers and partners. The building will also boast a variety of spaces including a Salesforce Innovation Center for customers along with social lounges, mindfulness areas and a variety of spaces for employees to collaborate.

Salesforce has had a presence in Sydney for over 15 years, according to the company, and this tower is an attempt to consolidate that presence into a single, modern space with room to expand over the next five years and add hundreds of new employees.

The announcement comes on the heels of the one earlier this year that the company was building a similarly grand project in Dublin to centralize operations in that city where it has had a presence since 2001.

Catalyte, the Baltimore-based coding training and placement service, has launched a new software service designed to take its machine learning-based skills-assessment and training program to companies around the country.

With revenues already approaching nearly $100 million for its outsourced software development services, Catalyte is hoping to take the lessons and tools it has learned and developed over the course of its 18-year history as a staffing and training company for the tech industry and sell them to companies looking to retrain . or provide additional skills development opportunities for their employees.

“Even if we were the largest employer in the world we still would not be able to move the needle on the labor economy,” says Catalyte’s chief executive, Jacob Hsu. 

He sees the company’s mission as providing a critical step for companies to identify the employees in their workforce with the skills to become coders and an opportunity for those employees to then receive the training they need to move into higher paying roles as software eats into low-skilled, repetitive labor.

“We’re encouraging all of these employers to deploy these up-leveling skills,” Hsu says.

At Catalyte, the company’s success has hinged on practicing what it preaches (and what it’s now selling). Launched in 2000 as a staffing service in Baltimore called Catalyst Devworks by a former White House economist, Michael Rosenbaum, the company expanded to locations in Chicago and Portland and offers training and workforce development through contracted consulting projects with companies.

The company’s recruits come from anywhere and everywhere and hiring hinges on a skills test would-be employees have to perform which is monitored by software that tracks how test-takers respond to the company’s questions.

Once an applicant passes the test, they’re brought in for training and given a two-year contract during which time they’re put to work on development projects Catalyte has won from customers like Under Armor, Aetna, AT&T and Microsoft .

Catalyte’s developers are paid roughly $40,000 per-year (less than half of what a developer typically makes) while they’re working under the two-year contract and are then allowed to seek employment outside of the company. Any employee that breaks the mandatory two-year contract is subject to a $25,000 penalty, according to a report in “Fast Company”. As they enter the third year, their contract with Catalyte gets renegotiated and employees who stay with the company can earn at least $75,000.

“We’re taking people from all walks of life,” says Hsu. “The average salary is $25,000 for people who have come in to the program… But within five years from working with the company, the average salary is $98,000.”

It’s this kind of narrative, and the company’s solid revenue that attracted investors like Steve Case, who’s backing Catalyte through his $150 million Rise of the Rest Seed Fund.

In 2018, Catalyte raised roughly $27 million in a round of funding from Palm Drive Capital, Cross Culture ventures, Expon Capital, and the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund.

The relatively novel approach to training and hiring (with some of the company’s recruits even coming in through Craiglist ads that pitch getting paid for learning to code) has netted Catalyte some impressive statistics when it comes to the diversity of its workforce — another important criteria for Case’s Rise of the Rest fund.

“When you use this approach to hiring [in a city]… you end up with a workforce that’s similar to the demographics of a city,” says Hsu.

In Baltimore the company’s workforce is about 29% African American and 30% of the developers are women. The average age of a programmer in the company’s workforce is 33 years-old and education levels range from about one quarter with only a college degree to college-educated candidates. 

Catalyte’s growth over the past three years has been nothing short of explosive. The company went from 50 employees in 2016 to around 800 people on staff now.

That staff is critical not just to the company’s current business model, but also served as a training tool for the machine learning and assessment tools that Catalyte is now trying to sell. “We spent over a decade collecting outcome data from engineering projects,” says Hsu. And that data was what was used to create the company’s metrics for whether or not a candidate for a programming job at the company would be successful.

The company intends to bring its assessment tool to market in the fourth quarter, but on the back of its recent fundraising, Catalyte has been ramping up its research and development activities. It wants to begin putting together a curriculum around cybersecurity and site reliability engineers. The software will cost roughly $1,000 per seat for every employee that receives its training regime.

“One of the fundamental ways our economy is going to both remain competitive on the international level and expand opportunities to more Americans is by changing the way we identify talent,” said Case in a statement discussing Catalyte’s financing last year. “Catalyte proved to us that not only can it bring new and underrepresented groups into the fold, it can do so while helping its own clients grow.”

While the company is growing its product pipeline, it also intends to expand the number of development and training centers it operates. The plan, according to an interview Hsu gave to the local technology news site Technically Baltimore in February, is to have 20 development centers around the country by 2020.

Catalyte, the Baltimore-based coding training and placement service, has launched a new software service designed to take its machine learning-based skills-assessment and training program to companies around the country.

With revenues already approaching nearly $100 million for its outsourced software development services, Catalyte is hoping to take the lessons and tools it has learned and developed over the course of its 18-year history as a staffing and training company for the tech industry and sell them to companies looking to retrain . or provide additional skills development opportunities for their employees.

“Even if we were the largest employer in the world we still would not be able to move the needle on the labor economy,” says Catalyte’s chief executive, Jacob Hsu. 

He sees the company’s mission as providing a critical step for companies to identify the employees in their workforce with the skills to become coders and an opportunity for those employees to then receive the training they need to move into higher paying roles as software eats into low-skilled, repetitive labor.

“We’re encouraging all of these employers to deploy these up-leveling skills,” Hsu says.

At Catalyte, the company’s success has hinged on practicing what it preaches (and what it’s now selling). Launched in 2000 as a staffing service in Baltimore called Catalyst Devworks by a former White House economist, Michael Rosenbaum, the company expanded to locations in Chicago and Portland and offers training and workforce development through contracted consulting projects with companies.

The company’s recruits come from anywhere and everywhere and hiring hinges on a skills test would-be employees have to perform which is monitored by software that tracks how test-takers respond to the company’s questions.

Once an applicant passes the test, they’re brought in for training and given a two-year contract during which time they’re put to work on development projects Catalyte has won from customers like Under Armor, Aetna, AT&T and Microsoft .

Catalyte’s developers are paid roughly $40,000 per-year (less than half of what a developer typically makes) while they’re working under the two-year contract and are then allowed to seek employment outside of the company. Any employee that breaks the mandatory two-year contract is subject to a $25,000 penalty, according to a report in “Fast Company”. As they enter the third year, their contract with Catalyte gets renegotiated and employees who stay with the company can earn at least $75,000.

“We’re taking people from all walks of life,” says Hsu. “The average salary is $25,000 for people who have come in to the program… But within five years from working with the company, the average salary is $98,000.”

It’s this kind of narrative, and the company’s solid revenue that attracted investors like Steve Case, who’s backing Catalyte through his $150 million Rise of the Rest Seed Fund.

In 2018, Catalyte raised roughly $27 million in a round of funding from Palm Drive Capital, Cross Culture ventures, Expon Capital, and the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund.

The relatively novel approach to training and hiring (with some of the company’s recruits even coming in through Craiglist ads that pitch getting paid for learning to code) has netted Catalyte some impressive statistics when it comes to the diversity of its workforce — another important criteria for Case’s Rise of the Rest fund.

“When you use this approach to hiring [in a city]… you end up with a workforce that’s similar to the demographics of a city,” says Hsu.

In Baltimore the company’s workforce is about 29% African American and 30% of the developers are women. The average age of a programmer in the company’s workforce is 33 years-old and education levels range from about one quarter with only a college degree to college-educated candidates. 

Catalyte’s growth over the past three years has been nothing short of explosive. The company went from 50 employees in 2016 to around 800 people on staff now.

That staff is critical not just to the company’s current business model, but also served as a training tool for the machine learning and assessment tools that Catalyte is now trying to sell. “We spent over a decade collecting outcome data from engineering projects,” says Hsu. And that data was what was used to create the company’s metrics for whether or not a candidate for a programming job at the company would be successful.

The company intends to bring its assessment tool to market in the fourth quarter, but on the back of its recent fundraising, Catalyte has been ramping up its research and development activities. It wants to begin putting together a curriculum around cybersecurity and site reliability engineers. The software will cost roughly $1,000 per seat for every employee that receives its training regime.

“One of the fundamental ways our economy is going to both remain competitive on the international level and expand opportunities to more Americans is by changing the way we identify talent,” said Case in a statement discussing Catalyte’s financing last year. “Catalyte proved to us that not only can it bring new and underrepresented groups into the fold, it can do so while helping its own clients grow.”

While the company is growing its product pipeline, it also intends to expand the number of development and training centers it operates. The plan, according to an interview Hsu gave to the local technology news site Technically Baltimore in February, is to have 20 development centers around the country by 2020.

Micromobility has taken off over the last couple of years. Between electric bike-share and scooter-share, these vehicles have made their way all over the world. Meanwhile, some of these companies, like Bird and Lime, have already hit unicorn status thanks to massive funding rounds.

Horace Dediu, the well-known industry analyst who coined the term micromobility as it relates to this emerging form of transportation, took some time to chat with TechCrunch ahead of Micromobility Europe, a one-day event focused on all-things micromobility.

We chatted about the origin of the word micromobility, where big tech companies like Apple, Google and Amazon fit into the space, opportunities for developers to build tools and services on top of these vehicles, the opportunity for franchising business models, the potential for micromobility to be bigger than autonomous, and much more.

Here’s a Q&A, which I lightly edited for length and clarity, I did with Dediu ahead of his micromobility conference.

---

Megan Rose Dickey: Hey, Horace. Thanks for taking the time to chat.

Horace Dediu: Hey, no problem. My pleasure.

Rose Dickey: I was hoping to chat with you a bit about micromobility because I know that you have the big conference coming up in Europe, so I figured this would be a good time to touch base with you. I know you’ve been credited with coining the term micromobility as it relates to likes of shared e-bikes and scooters.

So, to kick things off, can you define micromobility?

Dediu: Yes, sure. So, the idea came to me because I actually remembered microcomputing.

Can you never find a scooter to rent when you need one? Here’s a radical idea. Buy one. While Bird, Lime, Skip, Scoot, Uber, Lyft and more compete for on-demand micromobility, a new startup invented a vehicle worthy of ownership. The Unagi looks downright futuristic with its classy paint jobs, foldable body, LED screen, and built-in lights. The ride feels sturdy, strong, and responsive while being light enough at 24lbs to lug up subway stairs or the flights to your home.

That’s why Unagi has become a hit with musicians like Kendrick Lamar, Chance The Rapper, Halsey, Steve Aoki, and teen pop megastar Billie Eilish, who use the scooter to rip around the empty venues as they soundcheck before concerts. Paparazzi shots of those moments have spurred demand for the $990 dual motor and $840 single motor Unagis, with co-founder David Hyman telling me the startup can’t make them fast enough but it’s ramping up production.

To fuel the fervor for the scooter before it’s inevitably copied by cheap knock-offs, Unagi has raised a $3.15 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures. Building on its $750,000 in Kickstarter, angel, and founder-contributed funding, the cash will go to building out a distribution network and developing its next-gen scooter with a smoother ride but no more pounds.

“We felt Unagi’s focus on light weight and substantial powering in a beautifully designed package was the right approach for ownership” Menlo partner Shawn Carolan tells me. “This is what premium brands do – continue to reinvent the way we think about the world. This category of vehicle – personal, portable, and electric has enormous potential and we are still in the first inning of the game.”

The magic of the Unagi Model One is how it balances speed, battery, weight, price, and style so it works for most anything and everyone. That combination won it CNET‘s best all-around scooter award versus the hardcore but extremely heavy Boosted Rev, cheap but weak Swagtron, long-lasting but boring Ninebot, and speedy but scary Mercane.

The Unagi’s biggest flaw is the smoothness of the ride due to its harder airless wheels and narrow handlebars that can make gravelly roads precarious. The high-pitched beeeeeep of its horn is also so annoying that people are more likely to cover their ears than get out of your way, but Hyman promises his 12-person team will fix that.

Where Unagi truly excels is in its looks. The lithe curves of its polished carbon fiber frame are accented with candy paint jobs in matte black, white, grey, and blue. It ditches the bike handlebar vibe for something closer to space shuttle controls. And while many people scoff at scooter riders, I saw those smirks turn into curious awe as I flew by.

Hyman got the idea for a premium scooter you own after a rental turned into a melty mess. He’d taken an on-demand scooter to the grocer on a hot day, picked up some ice cream, and emerged to find his ride snatched by another user. He hustled to another nearby but someone else got their first. He walked home dripping sugar everywhere wondering “Why am I messing around with rentals i just want to own one?”

He bought a generic scooter off Alibaba, and despite being janky straight out of the box “it made me feel like I was a super hero with this magic carpet”. But he wanted something better.

Previously the CEO of audio fingerprinting giant Gracenote and then Beats Music before it sold to Apple, Hyman is known for his obsession with hi-fi speaker systems. So after touring Chinese scooter factories and still being unsatisfied, he partnered with a group of inventors called QMY who’d prototyped a slick vehicle they called the Swan. Hyman funded it to production, brought the team in house, and now they’re selling Unagis as fast as they can.

Now the startup wants to double-down on selling to more petite riders who could never carry the 46lb Boosted Rev out of a train station. But the clock is ticking before copycats with similar silhouettes but inferior insides spring up. Meanwhile, Unagi must keep safety top-of-mind to avoid any disastrous crashes hurting customers and its brand. There are also plenty of better funded mobility giants that could barge into the space if Unagi can’t build a lead.

Scooters are part of a powerful wave of new technologies that actually sell us back our time. When a 20-minute walk becomes a 4-minute scoot, you gain something priceless. Urban landscapes unfold beneath their wheels as you explore new neighborhoods or parts of parks. I was once a diehard electric skateboarder until a crash on a Boosted Board shattered my ankle. Unagi is the first scooter that delivers that same gliding feeling of weightlessness and freedom but in a form-factor safe enough for most people to experience.

GoPro has released new versions of both its hero line, and its newer 360-degree ruggedized action cameras. The $399 GoPro Hero8 Black’s most significant change is that it gains a new body design that incorporates GoPro’s signature mounting system right into the case, so that you no longer need add-on frames to attach it to selfie sticks, suction mounts, body mounts and more.

The GoPro Hero8 Black shoots at resolution between 1080p and 4K, and also gains HyperSmooth 2.0, the aptly named second generation version of GoPro’s proprietary digital stabilization technology. The first version, which premiered on the GoPro Hero7, was hailed for its effectiveness, and the follow-up is apparently even more powerful – plus, it provides new adjustment options so you can tweak how aggressive it is.

GoPro’s proprietary variable speed recording mode TimeWarp also gets upgraded to 2.0, and there’s better on-board wind suppression for mic-free recording. The body changes mean that the lens is no longer removable, but GoPro is planning to release a new mounting system for filters soon to make up for this limitation.

On top of the new design, there’s a series of new aftermarket add-ons, which GoPro calls “Mods,” to provide add-on features. There’s a Media Mod ($79.99) that includes a built-in shotgun mic; a Display Mod ($79.99) which has a flip up LCD viewfinder for vlogging, and a Light Mod ($49.99) which has a 200 lumen LED continuous video light source.

The other new camera, the GoPro MAX, is a $499 successor to the GoPro Fusion, and provides 360 capture. It’s designed to also produce great single lens, traditional wide angle footage, and has its own version of HyperSmooth stabilization called Max HyperSmooth (which you know much be extreme because it’s called ‘Max’).

The MAX seems less oriented at 360 video and more at advanced content creators who want maximum editing flexibility and the ability to more easily vlog, since it also includes a front-facing display.

GoPro faces increased competition from legit sources in their home category, including competing devices from DJI and Insta360, but the slate of new upgrades here really do sound like quality, meaningful improvements vs. the existing Hero7, and the new all-in-one body design should make it even more convenient for general use while out on the go.

Pre-orders are live now for the cameras, with shipping starting on October 15 for the GoPro Hero8, and shipments for the Max starting on October 24.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. WeWork withdraws its S-1 filing, will delay its IPO

The move was widely expected, but The We Company (which owns WeWork) made it official yesterday, with new co-CEOs Artie Minson and Sebastian Gunningham declaring that they’ve “decided to postpone our IPO to focus on our core business.”

Since the company’s S-1 became public, it has faced intense scrutiny over the general state of its finances, and more specifically over the power and behavior of Adam Neumann, who stepped down as CEO last week.

2. Europe’s top court says active consent is needed for tracking cookies

It’s a decision that plunges many websites into legal hot water in Europe. The Court says consent must be obtained prior to storing or accessing non-essential cookies, such as tracking cookies for targeted advertising.

3. Twitter launches its anti-abuse filter for Direct Messages

Twitter is rolling out its spam and abuse filter for Direct Messages, a month and a half after the company announced it had started testing the feature. This should be useful for people who want to keep their DMs open without having to see abusive content.

4. Microsoft OneDrive Personal Vault rolls out worldwide, launches expandable storage

Earlier this summer, Microsoft introduced an extra layer of security for its OneDrive product, allowing users to protect their files with two-step verification. Now it’s rolling this feature out worldwide.

5. Pandora puts its personalization powers to work in a revamped app

The company’s new mobile experience includes a dedicated “For You” tab where a continually updated feed of content is presented to users, including music and podcast recommendations.

6. Rapyd raises $100M for its ‘fintech as a service’ API, now valued at nearly a $1B valuation

Currently, Rapyd lets customers use its API to enable checkout, funds collection, fund disbursements, compliance as a service, foreign exchange, card issuing and integration.

7. SmartNews’ head of product on how the news discovery app wants to free readers from filter bubbles

SmartNews’ Jeannie Yang talks about the app’s place in the media ecosystem, creating recommendation algorithms that don’t reinforce biases, the difference between its Japanese and American users and the challenges of presenting political news in a highly polarized environment. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Apple is launching an early look at its new Deep Fusion feature on iOS today with a software update for beta users. Deep Fusion is a technique that blends multiple exposures together at the pixel level to give users a higher level of detail than is possible using standard HDR imaging — especially in images with very complicated textures like skin, clothing or foilage.

The developer beta released today supports the iPhone 11 where Deep Fusion will improve photos taken on the wide camera and the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max where it will kick in on the telephoto and wide angle but not ultra wide lenses. 

According to Apple, Deep Fusion requires the A13 and will not be available on any older iPhones. 

As I spoke about extensively in my review of the iPhone 11 Pro, Apple’s ‘camera’ in the iPhone is really a collection of lenses and sensors that is processed aggressively by dedicated machine learning software run on specialized hardware. Effectively, a machine learning camera. 

Deep Fusion is a fascinating technique that extends Apple’s philosophy on photography as a computational process out to its next logical frontier. As of the iPhone 7, Apple was blending output from the wide and telephoto lenses to provide the best result. This process happened without the user ever being aware of it. 

Deep Fusion continues in this vein. It will automatically take effect on images that are taken in specific situations.

On wide lens shots, it will start to be active just above the roughly 10 lux floor where Night Mode kicks in. The top of the range of scenes where it is active is variable depending on light source. On the telephoto lens, it will be active in all but the brightest situations where Smart HDR will take over, providing a better result due to the abundance of highlights.

Apple provided a couple of sample images showing Deep Fusion in action which I’ve embedded here. They have not provided any non-DF examples yet, but we’ll see those as soon as the beta gets out and people install it. 

Deep Fusion works this way:

The camera shoots a ‘short’ frame, at a negative EV value. Basically a slightly darker image than you’d like, and pulls sharpness from this frame. It then shoots 3 regular EV0 photos and a ‘long’ EV+ frame, registers alignment and blends those together. 

This produces two 12MP photos which are combined into one 24MP photo. The combination of the two is done using 4 separate neural networks which take into account the noise characteristics of Apple’s camera sensors as well as the subject matter in the image. 

This combination is done on a pixel-by-pixel basis. One pixel is pulled at a time to result in the best combination for the overall image. The machine learning models look at the context of the image to determine where they belong on the image frequency spectrum. Sky and other broadly similar high frequency areas, skin tones in the medium frequency zone and high frequency items like clothing, foilage etc.

The system then pulls structure and tonality from one image or another based on ratios. 

The overall result, Apple says, results in better skin transitions, better clothing detail and better crispness at the edges of moving subjects.

There is currently no way to turn off the Deep Fusion process but, because the ‘over crop’ feature of the new cameras uses the Ultra Wide a small ‘hack’ to see the difference between the images is to turn that on, which will disable Deep Fusion as it does not use the Ultra Wide lens.

The Deep Fusion process requires around 1 second for processing. If you quickly shoot and then tap a preview of the image, it could take around a half second for the image to update to the new version. Most people won’t notice the process happening at all.

As to how it works IRL? We’ll test and get back to you as Deep Fusion becomes available