Apple introduced some new Apple Watch models at a press conference. The Apple Watch Series 5 has an always-on display. It seems to look just like the Apple Watch Series 4.
“Apple Watch puts groundbreaking health, fitness and communication capabilities on the wrist of millions and millions of people,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said. He then introduced a video segment showing how Apple Watch users are healthier.
The Apple Watch automatically adjusts the brightness of the new always-on display. When you lower your wrist, the brightness goes down. It features an LTPO display with an adaptive refresh rate. It can go down to 1Hz, or one screen refresh per second. That’s how Apple can reach 18 hours of battery life with a display that stays on.
The new Apple Watch also features a built-in compass. There’s a new app that tells you your latitude, longitude and direction. It could be particularly useful when you’re hiking.
When it comes to emergency calling, Apple is extending emergency calling to 150 countries. When you press and hold down the side button, it automatically calls local emergency services.
Aluminum models come in silver, gold and space gray. Those cases are now made from recycled aluminum. Stainless steel models come in gold, space black and and polished.
And finally, there are two new titanium models (brushed and brushed space black) and a ceramic model. Apple is refreshing special editions of the Apple Watch with Nike and Hermès as well.
Apple Watch Series 5 with a GPS starts at $399 (for the aluminum model). For $499, you also get a cellular modem. Pre-orders start today and they will be available on September 20. The Apple Watch Series 3 first introduced in 2017 now starts at $199.
Apple also announced three new health research studies with health facilities. Apple is starting a hearing study with the World Health Organization and the University of Michigan, a women’s health study with NIH and Harvard thanks to the new cycle tracking feature, and a heart and movement study with the American Heart Association and Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Today, was supposed to be all about the iPhones but Apple took some time to offer a hardware refresh to the entry-level iPad. Things are largely the same, but the updates aren’t driving the entry-level device’s price any higher.
The 7th generation tablet now sports a 10.2″ display, upgraded from the previous 9.7″ variety. The updated iPad also supports the first-generation Apple Pencil and the company’s Smart Keyboard. The device will continue to start at $329.
The device notably still has a home button and some healthy bezels, so it’s not a major design revamp just an extra half-inch of display for users.
Keeping the entry-level price is notable, especially as Apple’s most expensive iPads are more costly than they’ve ever been. The more low-powered entry-level iPad will still be running the same OS as the higher-end iPad Pros.
The device is available for pre-order today and ships September 30.
The Volkswagen ID.3 that debuted ahead of the IAA International Motor Show in Frankfurt looks like a compact hatchback. And it is.
But inside customers might feel like they’re sitting in a bigger car, thanks to how engineers and designers took advantage of the electric architecture. Without having to contend with an internal combustion engine, there was more room to play around with. A high-voltage flat battery is in the underbody to save space, as well as auxiliary units, such as air conditioning compressor or steering rack, that have been integrated into the vehicle front end.
The ID.3 is as long as a VW Golf, but because it has shorter overhangs, the wheelbase is larger.
As a quick recap, the five-seater ID.3 will go into production this year. The all-electric vehicle, which is not coming to the U.S., will start landing in customers’ hands in spring 2020.
The first vehicle to go into production is a special edition called the ID.3 1ST. The special edition will come with a 58 kWh-battery pack with a range of up to 420 kilometers, or about 260 miles, and be offered in three equipment variants. The ID.3 1ST will start under 40,000 euros ($44,200).
Apple today formally announced its launch plans for its new TV streaming service, Apple TV+, which will be available starting on November 1st, 2019 and will cost just $4.99 per month for the whole family. The service will be available across Apple’s platforms in over 100 countries through the Apple TV app.
As an unexpected surprise, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that when buy an Apple device — including an iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple TV — you’ll get a year of Apple TV+ for free.
According to Cook, only some of the shows will be available at launch. Others will be added every month.
A higher price point of $9.99 per month was previously reported by Bloomberg, which would have made Apple TV+ more expensive than rivals like the $6.99 per month Disney+, $5.99 per month Hulu (with ads), or the $8.99 per month single screen Netflix plan. It would have been less expensive than Netflix’s $12.99 per month standard plan.
The $4.99 per month price undercuts all. And bundling a free year with new Apple hardware should boost sales as well.
Apple’s entry into the TV streaming market has been public for some time thanks to leaks and reports from Hollywood media news sites and announcements of programs from Apple itself. The company then officially introduced Apple TV+ this March at a special event focused on the company’s services and subscriptions.
The event brought out a cavalcade of stars to discuss their involvement in the new streaming platform, including Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell, Reese Witherspoon, Jason Momoa, Alfre Woodard, Kumail Nanjiani, J.J. Abrams, Sara Bareilles, and even Big Bird.
Despite the numerous high-profile names attached, Apple’s service isn’t really a Netflix alternative. There’s not a big back catalog of licensed TV shows and movies, as you’d find elsewhere. Instead, the focus is on original content. If you want more, Apple TV Channels offers paid subscriptions to other premium services.
As Apple SVP Eddy Cue told attendees at SXSW 2018: “we’re not after quantity, we’re after quality.”
Services, like Apple Music, iCloud and AppleCare, have been a bigger focus for Apple in recent years, and may even become its most profitable sector, according to reports. As of its third-quarter earnings, Apple reported its services revenues, which include App Store fees, subscriptions, and other online services, had grown to $11.456 billion. At the same time, the iPhone made up less than half of Apple’s business.
The slowing iPhone sales have to do with the quality of the devices — even older models are still very good, and the improvements in new versions are not enough to prompt as frequent upgrades. To diversify, Apple has been focused on growing services revenues with launches like Apple News+, Apple Arcade, and now Apple TV+.
Apple is also clearly willing to spend in order to grow its media business further.
Last year, Apple had said it would spend around a billion dollars acquiring ten shows for the streaming TV service. But it later signed deals with Oprah, Steven Spielberg, and Sesame Workshop, which likely pushed that number much higher. A newer report from the Financial Times in August claimed the figure was now around $6 billion instead.
What we don’t yet know is how well Apple’s investment will attract new subscribers in a market where there’s an increasing number of services offering premium, award-winning on-demand content, including Netflix, HBO, Hulu, and soon, Disney+.
The few trailers Apple has released so far have been fairly iffy — the first one of “The Morning Show” almost felt like a parody, while the latest, “Dickinson” seems to have turned the celebrated poet Emily Dickinson into a CW-style feminist punk rock hero.
Apple said the trailers had been watched over 100 million times.
At the event, it unveiled the trailer for the post-apocalyptic drama starring Jason Momoa, “See,” which is Apple TV+’s take on Netflix’s “Bird Box,” apparently. It takes place in a world where all have gone blind.
As media critics finally get their hands on the shows for reviews, we’ll know more about whether Apple TV+ is worth the price.
“Our mission for Apple TV+ is to bring you the best original stories from the most creative minds in television and film,” said Cook, speaking to the audience at the iPhone press event today. “Stories that help you find inspiration that are grounded in emotion. Stories to believe in. Stories with purpose,” he said.
Apple finally delivered more details on its gaming subscription program Apple Arcade.
The ad-free gaming service will launch September 19 for $4.99 per month with a one-month free trial.
Users will access the service via a dedicated Arcade tab in the App Store. The company reiterated that the service will boast “more than 100 ground-breaking exclusive games,” also noting that new titles will be added every month.
Arcade titles are playable on iPhone, iPad, Mac and AppleTV. Though, Apple maintained that the additions will be cross-genre, it’s apparent that the emphasis is on more snack-able titles rather desktop class epics.
Apple has partnered with some high-profile studios like Konami, Square Enix and Capcom. We saw a few demos which all seemed very mobile-friendly.
Coinbase is announcing a new initiative called the USDC Bootstrap Fund. As the name suggests, the company wants to support developers with a fund composed of USDC tokens.
DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, is a recent trend in the blockchain space. DeFi projects are traditional financial products that you’d expect from a traditional bank, such as lending protocols and derivatives, built on top of a blockchain.
Thanks to the decentralized nature of these protocols, it’s harder to censor them and more people should theoretically be able to access those services.
Going back to Coinbase, the company thinks there’s not enough liquidity for some DeFi protocols. The startup wants to improve that by investing USDC directly in DeFi protocols. Those investments are smart contracts, and returns should be provided by a counterparty, such as a borrower or taker.
In other words, it’ll become much easier to borrow USDC using some DeFi protocols as Coinbase is providing a pool of USDC tokens. Counterparties will have to provide crypto collateral and pay some interest rate.
Coinbase is also announcing its first two investments through the USDC Bootstrap Fund. The company is handing 1 million in USDC to Compound, and 1 million in USDC to dYdX.
Last week, users around the world found Wikipedia down after the online, crowdsourced encyclopedia became the target of a massive, sustained DDoS attack — one that it is still actively fighting several days later (even though the site is now back up). Now, in a coincidental twist of timing, Wikipedia’s parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, is announcing a donation aimed at helping the group better cope with situations just like this: Craig Newmark Philanthropies, a charity funded by the Craigslist founder, is giving $2.5 million to Wikimedia to help it improve its security.
The gift would have been in the works before the security breach last week, and it underscores a persistent paradox. The non-profit is considered to be one of the 10 most popular sites on the web, with people from some 1 billion different devices accessing it each month, with upwards of 18 billion visits in that period (the latter figure is from 2016 so likely now higher). Wikipedia is used as reference point by millions every day to get the facts on everything from Apple to Zynga, mushrooms and Myanmar history, and as a wiki, it was built from the start for interactivity.
But in this day and age when anything is game for malicious hackers, it’s an easy target, sitting out in the open and generally lacking in the kinds of funds that private companies and other for-profit entities have to protect themselves from security breaches. Alongside networks of volunteers who put in free time to contribute security work to Wikimedia, the organization only had two people on its security staff two years ago — one of them part-time.
That has been getting fixed, very gradually, by John Bennett, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Director of Security who joined the organization in January 2018, and told TechCrunch in an interview that he’s been working on a more cenrtralised and coherent system, bringing on more staff to help build both tools to combat nefarious activity both on the site and on Wikimedia’s systems; and crucially, put policies in place to help prevent breaches in the future.
“We’ve lived in this bubble of ‘no one is out to get us,'” he said of the general goodwill that surrounds not-for-profit, public organizations like the Wikimedia Foundation. “But we’re definitely seeing that change. We have skilled and determined attackers wishing to do harm to us. So we’re very grateful for this gift to bolster our efforts.
“We weren’t a sitting duck before the breach last week, with a lot of security capabilities built up. But this gift will help improve our posture and build upon on what we started and have been building these last two years.”
The security team collaborates with other parts of the organization to handle some of the more pointed issues. He notes that Wikimedia uses a lot of machine learning that has been developed to monitor pages for vandalism, and an anti-harassment team also works alongside them. (Newmark’s contribution today, in fact, is not the first donation he’s made to the organization. In the past he has donated around $2 million towards various projects including the Community Health Initiative, the anti-harassment program; and the more general Wikimedia Endowment).
The security breach that caused the DDoS is currently being responded to by the site reliability engineering team, who are still engaged and monitoring the situation, and Bennett declined to comment more on that.
Service mesh is just beginning to take hold in the cloud native world, and as it does, vendors are looking for ways to help customers understand it. One way to simplify the complexity of dealing with the growing number of service mesh products out there is to package it as a service. Today, HashiCorp announced a new service on Azure to address that need, building it into the Consul product.
HashiCorp co-founder and CTO Armon Dadgar says it’s a fully managed service. “We’ve partnered closely with Microsoft to offer a native Consul [service mesh] service. At the highest level, the goal here is, how do we make it basically push button,” Dadgar told TechCrunch.
He adds that there is extremely tight integration in terms of billing and permissions, as well other management functions, as you would expect with a managed service in the public cloud. Brendan Burns, one of the original Kubernetes developers, who is now a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, says the HashiCorp solution really strips away a lot of the complexity associated with running a service mesh.
“In this case, HashiCorp is using some integration into the Azure control plane to run Consul for you. So you just consume the service mesh. You don’t have to worry about the operations of the service mesh, Burns said. He added, “This is really turning it into a service instead of a do-it-yourself exercise.”
Service meshes are tools used in conjunction with containers and Kubernetes in a dynamic cloud native environment to help micro services communicate and interoperate with one another. There is a growing number of them including Istio, Envoy and Linkerd jockeying for position right now.
Burns makes it clear that while Microsoft is working closely with HashiCorp on this project, it’s also working with other vendors, as well. “Our goal with the service mesh interface specification was really to let a lot of partners be successful on the platform. You know, there’s a bunch of different service meshes. It’s a place where we feel like there’s a lot of evolution and experimentation happening, so we want to make sure that our customers can can find the right solution for them,” Burns explained.
Volta Charging, the San Francisco-based company that combines outdoor digital advertising with charging stations to give electric vehicle owners free power, has added another $20 million in a follow-on to its Series C round.
The company’s Series C round is now closed at $100 million. Schneider Electric Ventures, SK Innovation, Energize Ventures and a number of existing partners participated in the follow-on Series C round. Volta Charging also borrowed $44 million from Energy Impact Partners and CION.
Volta, which launched in 2010, partners with businesses and real estate owners to install EV chargers in high-traffic areas such as grocery stores, entertainment venues and shopping centers. Instead of charging EV owners, the power is provided for free. Volta makes money on the outdoor advertising that is a centerpiece of the charger design.
More than 45 million free electric miles have been given to EV drivers to date, the company said.
The company’s first charging stations popped up in Hawaii. Since then, Volta has expanded to San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley in California as well as Chicago and its suburbs, Phoenix, and Dallas and Houston.
The funds will be used to expand the company’s network of free, advertiser sponsored charging stations. Volta is focused on adding more chargers to cities where it already has a presence as well as moving into new markets.
“As the electric vehicle industry continues to grow, Volta is well-positioned to build out an economically viable charging network needed to facilitate the shift from gas to electric,” Volta CEO and founder said Scott Mercer said in a statement. “We continue to rapidly scale our business to meet the growing demands of drivers, real estate partners and sponsors. This capital injection will accelerate our mission of mainstreaming electric vehicles.”
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Following the launch of its money-lending program Stripe Capital, the company is unveiling the Stripe Corporate Card, a Visa card open to businesses incorporated in the United States.
Those businesses can use the card without worrying about interest rates or fees — Stripe’s Cristina Cordova said the company expects to have “fewer problems” with this, particularly because participants will be approved based on their revenue in the Stripe platform.
A customer exits the drive-thru lane at a McDonald’s Corp. fast food restaurant in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, U.S., on Monday, Jan. 14, 2019. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The company has already been testing Apprente’s technology in select locations, creating voice-activated drive-thrus (along with robot fryers) that it said will offer “faster, simpler and more accurate order taking.”
Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk is joining us to talk about the process of spinning out a new holding company called Prosus NV. We’ll also ask about how the company thinks about new investments, including how it views different sectors and different geographies.
