Year: 2019

The idea seemed simple: if you find yourself regularly ordering the same thing from Amazon — coffee, laundry detergent, whatever — why not replace the whole ordering process with a button you put somewhere in your house? Push a button, get a thing.

And from that, Amazon’s Dash Button was born. Announced one day before April Fools’ 2015, people weren’t sure if it was actually real.

It was! But now it’s dead.

Amazon stopped selling the Dash button earlier this year; now they’re ending support for them all together. In an email to Dash users, Amazon says that Dash button devices will cease to function as of August 31st, 2019.

Why? They’re not selling any more of them, and too few people are using the ones that still exist. An Amazon rep told CNET that usage of the buttons “had significantly slowed” over the last few months.

“Virtual” dash buttons (the same push-button concept, but digitized and tucked into Amazon’s app) will continue to work, as will devices that tie into Amazon’s “Dash Replenishment Service” — think washing machines that have a button to order detergent, or coffee makers that can order their own beans. Just the dedicated, physical, standalone buttons are going dark.

While the Dash button program may not have ever taken off, people found their own fun uses for the hardware since launch. After Amazon started selling re-purposable, hackable Dash buttons that could be used to fire off custom scripts on the Internet, one modder built a button that automatically placed his favorite Starbucks order as he was walking out the door.

If you’ve still got a Dash button around the house and don’t know what to do with it after the end of the month, Amazon is encouraging people to send the buttons into its recycling program (which covers the costs of shipping/disposal.)

Direct-to-consumer plant retailer Bloomscape has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding, with several high-profile D2C startup founders signing on as investors.

Founder and CEO Justin Mast told me that his family has five generations of experience as greenhouse owners and operators, and that he first tried to get Bloomscape off the ground more than a decade ago. Since then, Mast has worked at other startups, but he said, “Bloomscape was the one that got away. I would find myself dreaming about it.”

The current version of the startup launched just over a year ago, and has shipped more than 100,000 plants since then. The company is headquartered in Detroit, while shipping plants from its greenhouses near Grand Rapids, Michigan.

When asked what’s wrong with the existing brick-and-mortar plant-buying process, Mast said convenience is a big factor, particularly once you start talking about plants that are too big to carry in one hand — he said Bloomscape’s packing and shipping methods can accommodate everything from a 10-inch aloe plant to a five-foot bird of paradise.

Bloomscape also helps people care for their plants through its Plant Mom service, allowing customers ask for advice from an expert. The Plant Mom is, in fact, Mast’s mother Joyce, who has more than 40 years of horticulture experience.

Mast said the service is designed to replicate his own experience texting his Mom for help when his plants weren’t doing well: “We wanted to figure out how to do this in a way that didn’t feel like tech support, that actually felt convenient warm and helpful.” (Bloomscape has since hired other experts to support her)

Mast added that he sees the free service as “this tremendous opportunity to create value,” particularly since “people who feel confident that they’re going to be able to keep their plants alive go and buy more plants.”

Ultimately, Mast’s vision for Bloomscape to be involved in “plant life in every area of the home and garden.”

The new round was led by Revolution Ventures, with participation from Endeavor, as well as Allbirds co-founder Joey Zwillinger, Away co-founder Jen Rubio, Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, Harry’s co-founder Jeff Raider, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, and Warby Parker co-founders Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa.

“Plants are a highly fragmented, fast growing industry, but the market has been slow to come online – warehousing and shipping living things is hard,” Revolution Ventures Partner Clara Sieg in a statement. “Drawing on five generations of horticultural experience, Justin and the Bloomscape team combines the ease of e-commerce with care and maintenance resources in a beautifully branded, consumer-centric experience that empowers even the least green thumbed among us to be successful plant parents.”

In the summer of 2018, parts of San Francisco’s public utilities turned gold. Manhole covers, drainpipes and gas line covers were gilded in protest by a pair of street artists, Erick Schmitt and Nick Bushman, and quickly became an obvious metaphor that  “the San Francisco Bay Area has become an enclave unattainable to all but the most privileged.”

In his 1990 book, City of Quartz, Mike Davis envisioned another enclave of exclusion and elitism: Fortress LA. With San Francisco gold-plated, who’s to say Los Angeles is far behind?

As someone in the tech industry now based in LA, I am acutely aware that my field is seen as part of the problem. When we set up shop, we quickly realized that we must keep our community top of mind. We’ve all got to learn the lessons of gold-plated San Francisco.

The most important differentiation for tech companies to make is that gentrification doesn’t necessarily mean revitalization. The difference is evident in some of LA’s quickly changing neighborhoods and has invoked fierce reactions. Anti-gentrification activists in Boyle Heights and downtown have succeeded in their efforts to close at least one art gallery. They’ve picketed businesses like Weird Wave Coffee. Detergent attacks during gallery openings, anti-gentrification graffiti and harassment via social media have put owners on edge.

Activists have a point. Local communities don’t often see the benefits of gentrification that newer, more privileged people do in those hip new wine shops. Too often, they’re taking the place of family businesses or driving up the cost of living beyond the point where locals can compete. What’s more, families displaced by rising costs of living are at a much higher risk of becoming homeless.

Research shows that homelessness in LA has risen by a staggering 75% since 2012, with elderly people and single-parent households most affected. The majority of this displacement is attributed directly to the surge in rental prices brought on by gentrification.

As opposed to gentrification, revitalization is a collaborative effort, where the city’s urban planning department, existing community members and business owners (incoming and long-standing) decide on improvements that can create more equitable change for all involved.

In 1994, author John Elkington proposed something called a “triple bottom line.” Corporations, he said, should add a second and third key performance indicator of success: their people and their impact on the environment. I agree.

Initiatives that begin in the brains of company boards or directors intended for the communities they inhabit often miss a crucial partner — the communities themselves. Businesses can be positive for a community; make sure to do it responsibly.

High-level community engagement

Businesses should work with communities to execute a project that will have a direct impact on their lives. Instead of coming to the community with a solution, engage the community to help ideate and problem solve together. Smaller commitments that can be sustained over the long term have more impact than grand gestures that disappear within a few months.

In the words of Gina Belafonte, co-director of Sankofa, the social justice organization based in New York and LA, “The process in which it’s executed is the problem. They don’t look to the community for the solution. They try to just bring up solutions to the community. You need to give them not just buy-in but the feeling that, ‘This is our park, this is not a park that was brought here for us. We designed this park, we were part of the team to work with the architects to design that building.’ ”

Employee engagement and education

A brand’s strongest ambassadors are the people who work for it. Many will be living in the neighborhoods struggling with changes. Incentivizing employees to get involved in community work or working with local schools can be a way of counteracting criticism.

One of the clearest opportunities, especially for tech companies moving into areas with low levels of science, tech, engineering and math levels (STEM), is in education where it’s badly lacking in public schools. The advantage here is twofold: the investment is designed to grow the talent pool from which your company can only benefit, and the positive impact is obvious to the community in the short and long term.

There are other opportunities for engagement: coding classes for public school students, scholarship opportunities for state and community college students and training programs for those interested in switching careers. Helping existing community members train for the kinds of jobs your company offers will allow locals to bridge the income gap so central to the destruction of existing communities.

Cultural preservation

Finally, one of the thorniest issues is gentrification’s role in disrupting local culture. The makeup of a place naturally changes when newer, more affluent residents move in, and, unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this.

What’s at stake isn’t necessarily the loss of the community but the successful meshing of what came before with what is coming now. Drum circles, mariachi bands, block parties — these neighborhoods have histories, customs and rituals. Understanding what those are upon entering a new community is maybe the most important step a company and its new employees can take.

There are the surface solutions: investing in local galleries, sponsoring cultural programs and arts organizations. But then there are the less obvious opportunities, such as maintaining the architectural style of the neighborhood in the design of new office space, including the work of neighborhood artists in company projects or creative initiatives launched by your brand.

Ultimately, Los Angeles doesn’t need to become another San Francisco. This isn’t about finding comfortable ways of appeasing locals for the sake of positive PR. It’s about being more adept at stemming the turbulence that accompanies change and harnessing it in a way that benefits the community.

After all, empathy doesn’t simply apply to a company’s decision making, staff and customers. It applies to the communities we call home.

The $10 billion, decade long JEDI cloud contract drama continues. It’s a process that has been dogged by complaints, regulatory oversight and court cases. Throughout the months long selection process, the Pentagon has repeatedly denied accusations that the contract was somehow written to make Amazon a favored vendor, but today the Washington Post reports President Trump has asked the newly appointed Defense Secretary, Mark T. Esper to examine the process because of concerns over that very matter.

The Defense Department called for bids last year for a $10 billion, decade long contract. From the beginning Oracle in particular complained that the process favored Amazon. Even before the RFP process began Oracle executive Safra Catz took her concerns directly to the president, but at that time he did not intervene. Later, the company filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office, which ruled that the procurement process was fair.

Finally, the company took the case to court alleging that a person involved in defining the selection process had a conflict of interest, due to being an employee at Amazon before joining the DoD. That case was dismissed last month.

In April, the DoD named Microsoft and Amazon as the two finalists, and the winner was finally expected to be named some time this month. It appeared that the we were close to the finish line, but now that the president has intervened at the 11th hour, it’s impossible to know what the outcome will be.

What we do know is that this is a pivotal project for the DoD, which is aimed at modernizing the U.S. military for the next decade and beyond. The fact is that the two finalists made perfect sense. They are the two market leaders, and each has tools, technologies and experience working with sensitive government contracts.

Amazon is the market leader with 33% marketshare. Microsoft is number two with 16%. Number three vendor, Google dropped out before the RFP process began. It is unclear at this point whether the president’s intervention will have any influence on the final decision, but the Washington Post reports it is an unusual departure from government procurement procedures.

DoorDash has reached an agreement with Square to purchase on-demand food delivery and catering business Caviar. DoorDash has agreed to pay Square $410 million in cash and preferred DoorDash stock.

Square bought Caviar about five years ago in a deal worth about $90 million. Now, Caviar has found a new home with DoorDash, the on-demand delivery startup that had been under fire for months regarding how it pays its delivery workers. DoorDash finally did right by its workers just last week.

“Today’s announcement is another important step forward on our mission to empower local economies,” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu (pictured above) said in a statement. “We have long-admired Caviar, which has a coveted brand, an exceptional portfolio of premium restaurants and leading technology. The acquisition further enhances the breadth of our merchant selection, enabling us to offer customers even more choice when they order through DoorDash. We look forward to welcoming the Caviar team to DoorDash and expanding our partnership with Square in the future.”

This story is developing…

Forget the village, people. It takes an army to make TechCrunch Disrupt the well-oiled experience that savvy start-uppers have come to know and love. And we couldn’t do it nearly as well without our incredible volunteers. If you’re looking for a no-budget way to experience Disrupt San Francisco 2019 up-close-and-personal, sign up to volunteer for work exchange, and not only will you get a behind the scenes look at how events are produced, you’ll also earn a free Innovator pass to experience the event.

You’ll work hard, play hard and get free access to all three days of Disrupt SF. Whether you dream of becoming a startup founder, marketer or event coordinator, this is a great way to see what it takes to produce a world-renowned startup conference. Plus, your free Innovator pass gives you access to the full Disrupt experience and all four stages — including the Startup Battlefield competition.

We expect more than 10,000 people at Disrupt SF 2019, and volunteers will handle a variety of tasks to help make this startup conference an epic experience for everyone. At any given time, you might help with registration, wrangle speakers, direct attendees, stuff goodie bags, place signage, scan tickets or help with pre-marketing activities.

We need volunteers on October 1-4. If you can meet the following criteria, we want to hear from you:

• Attend a mandatory orientation on Tuesday, October 1 at Moscone Center.
• Work a minimum of 16 hours during the entire conference starting from October 1 (the day before the conference starts) to October 4. You’ll find volunteer shift availability in the application. We might select you for some pre-event opportunities, which would count toward your hours.
• We will assign volunteer schedules. Shifts run between 2.5 to 6 hours and can start as early as 6 a.m. or end as late as 11:30 p.m.
• You must provide your own housing and transportation.
• Due to the high volume of applications, we will notify only the selected applicants.

Lend us a helping hand, and we’ll hand you a free Innovator pass. Save money, gain valuable experience and still have plenty of time to take in all the startup goodness Disrupt SF 2019 has to offer. Apply to volunteer before September 20 to get your free Innovator pass, and we’ll see you in October!

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There are a lot of ugly fonts out there, but outside Papyrus, few illustrate a deeper sickness in our society. A new typeface called Ugly Gerry does just that: Its letters are formed from the shapes of grotesquely gerrymandered U.S. districts.

There’s no doubt gerrymandering is one of the scourges of our political “system”: nothing more than a way for incumbents to stack the odds in their favor, further disenfranchising and redlining disfavored populations and districts.

And while districts may take many shapes due to the natural features of the cities and regions they occupy or contain, in many contentious ones the hand of the man is more than evident, producing contortions weird and various.

The bright side is that this variety is so great that among it can be found shapes resembling (slightly) all the capital letters of the English alphabet. So that’s just what rogue creatives Ben Doessel and James Lee did.

“After seeing how janky our Illinois 4th district had become, we became interested in this issue,” the team wrote in a little press release they provided. “We noticed our district’s vague, but shaky U-shape, then after seeing other letters on the map, the idea hit us, let’s create a typeface so our districts can become digital graffiti that voters and politicians can’t ignore.”

The resulting type is ugly, but so, they point out, is gerrymandering. They also had to cheat a few by sticking two districts together, but that too seems in the spirit of the thing.

You can download the font for free at UglyGerry.com.

While I suspect that Doessel and Lee have underestimated politicians’ ability to ignore things, it’s good to draw attention to this un-democratic practice, and you’re encouraged (as with most things) to tweet. Of course the very best thing you can do is call your representatives and officials and register your protest against gerrymandering in general, and to vote if possible to limit or outlaw it.

Today, tweeting about a novelty font… tomorrow, action! That’s the idea, anyway.

The recently reported Capital One data breach has once again turned the technology world’s attention to cloud security. A lot of speculation is all that the industry can surmise about exactly what happened and how the events came to pass. The indictment is vague and the companies are in PR crisis mode.

Let’s not waste this time on conjecture. It’s important to focus on the uncomfortable yet completely valid cloud security concerns while everyone is listening.

The elephant in the room in cloud platform security is the inherently problematic issue of customers not knowing which cloud provider employees are entrusted with administrative-level access to the clouds themselves. Cloud Customer X does not know the names of employees at Cloud Provider Y who, upon succumbing to moral failing, could theoretically abuse privileged knowledge, credentials, or internal cloud provider tools in order to inappropriately access, copy, or otherwise interact with Cloud Customer X’s provisioned systems or stored data.

To be clear, there’s no suggestion that the Capital One breach is the result of insider access or privileged knowledge abuse. While the alleged perpetrator’s prior work history includes employment at Amazon Web Services — the cloud provider which data was downloaded from — the amount of cloud service know-how necessary to pull off the alleged wrongful acts can certainly be gained by anyone with an internet connection and enough curiosity.

Instead, we need to talk about cloud platform security in a broader sense. We need to make sure when executives sign on the dotted line and agree to put mountains of their own customer data under someone else’s control that they understand the stark trade-off realities, rather than the myths, of cloud platform security.

Simply put, moving operations into the cloudspace means you are putting yourself at the mercy of the cloud host. Ultimately, the cloud provider can take their ball and go home, leaving your business stranded. Doing so might be in violation of some words that an attorney typed up and both sides agreed to. But those words cannot physically stop a cloud provider’s rogue subcontractor from abusing trusted access — of which the cloud customer would most likely never know.

There are no easy fixes for such a scenario. But it would be foolish to wait for egregious examples of cloud platform insider abuse to be known publicly prior to sparking the very important conversation, even if the topic is uncomfortable for cloud providers to acknowledge and unsettling for cloud users to realize.

The latest bout in Las Vegas is not taking place in a raucous casino boxing ring, but in the hushed rooms of planning committees. The reigning champion, the Las Vegas Monorail, is facing upstart challenger The Boring Company, in a fight to decide the future of Sin City’s urban transportation.

In May, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority approved a $48.7 million contract for The Boring Company (TBC) to design and build a short underground transit system at the city’s Convention Center, using Tesla electric vehicles running through narrow tunnels. 

The ambitious contract calls for the system, called the LVCC Loop, to be up and running in time for the city’s biggest trade show, CES, in January 2021. Over the next 18 months, TBC has to construct one pedestrian tunnel, two 0.8-mile vehicle tunnels and three underground stations, as well as modify and test seven-seater Tesla cars to carry up to 16 people. 

TBC has already submitted detailed construction plans to the city for review, which TechCrunch has obtained, and recently raised $120 million in funding. The company hopes to start construction later this summer. 

But TBC’s tight deadlines — and the payments it receives by meeting them — could be jeopardized by the Monorail’s concerns that the new tunnels could undermine its own system. To connect two parts of the Convention Center, the Loop will have to burrow directly beneath the Monorail’s elevated tracks.

‘It will shut the Monorail down’

“The proposed underground people mover system intersects our existing system route, and it appears the presented tunnel alignment interferes with our existing columns for the Las Vegas Monorail system and creates significant concern regarding both vertical and lateral loads,” Monorail CEO Curtis Myles wrote in a letter to Clark County planning officials in June.

Chris Kaempfer, a lawyer representing the Monorail, clarified the company’s position at a meeting of the Winchester Town Advisory Board the same day.

“When you have columns that would be this close, you’re not just concerned about contact with the columns, you’re also concerned about vibration,” Kaempfer said. “The record has to be absolutely clear, if there’s any damage at all to the columns, it will shut the Monorail down.”

Kaempfer lobbied the advisory board to increase oversight of the TBC project, and require the company to work with the Monorail and city officials during construction to prevent damage to the train system’s columns.

“It’s extremely important to the Monorail that everyone acknowledge that this potential exists and that it needs to be appropriately addressed,” Kaempfer said.

TBC pushed back against any new restrictions, telling the board that it was already committed to protecting existing infrastructure along the Loop’s route.

“[Tunneling] noise and vibration are imperceptible at the surface. We design our process to be deep enough underground such that a person walking [at ground level] creates more vibration than our tunnel-boring machine underground,” said Jane Labanowski, TBC’s government relations executive.

At the final bell, the Winchester Town Board awarded this round to the Monorail, conditioning the Loop design’s approval on regular coordination between TBC, the Monorail and the city’s Public Works department. “That way we all have a point of reference to go back to, just in case somebody forgets or doesn’t check in with other people,” said the chairperson. “All of a sudden, someone gets to be a bad actor who doesn’t mean to be.”

TBC did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

While the Monorail and Elon Musk’s Loop don’t yet compete directly, TBC’s ultimate ambition is to expand the LVCC Loop from a campus people mover to a Vegas-wide transit system serving the airport, the Strip and beyond. 

The Monorail itself started as a short, one-mile system shuttling tourists between the MGM Grand and Bally’s Hotel, using monorail cars bought from Disney World in Florida. It now extends nearly four miles and carries up to 67,000 passengers a day during its busiest times.

The Las Vegas Monorail crosses over the Las Vegas Convention Center as viewed on January 4, 2017 in Las Vegas.

TBC has promised that the Loop will be able to handle up to 4,400 passengers an hour — equivalent to more than 100,000 a day — as soon as it becomes operational. Its website states that the total journey time between the farthest LVCC stations will be around one minute. This means that the Loop will need at least six 16-person vehicles operating simultaneously to hit its goal. However, a one-minute journey might not be realistic at busy times. New York and Boston subway trains regularly stop for more than 30 seconds at popular stations.

Human drivers will pilot Loop Teslas

At the Winchester meeting, Labanowski also revealed further details about the Loop’s vehicles and operations. Although TBC’s website states that the system would use autonomous vehicles, presumably using Tesla’s Autopilot technology, Labanowski said the LVCC Loop vehicles would actually also have human drivers “for additional safety.”

Loop plans submitted by TBC to Las Vegas show a modest glass structure at surface level, with elevators, escalators and stairs leading down to a mezzanine level with gates, and then down again to three platforms. With no room at the platform level for vehicles to turn around, it appears TBC’s people movers will operate in both forward and reverse.

And although TBC hopes its Loop system will eventually span the city, a TBC contractor at the Winchester meeting said that public access could be limited for now. “We will monitor how it’s open to the public based on our commitment to our trade show customers on any given day,” said Terry Miller of the Cordell Corporation, which has been awarded a $1 million contract to oversee the project. “During CES it will be a little more difficult to have the public coming in and out than it would be for a [smaller] trade show.”

The next challenge for TBC is getting all the necessary permits to excavate a shaft to deploy its tunnel-boring machine underground. Its schedule calls for construction to begin in September.

Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, the biggest streamer ever, has today announced his intention to leave the Twitch platform in favor of Microsoft’s Mixer.

Twitch is far and away the biggest video game streaming platform on the internet, claiming 72 percent of all hours watched according to StreamElements. Mixer, by comparison, owns 3 percent, which is approximately 112 million viewership hours this most recent quarter.

Mixer is owned by Microsoft following an acquisition in 2016, back when Mixer was called Beam. Interestingly enough, Beam won the Disrupt NY Battlefield competition in 2016.

Twitch offered this statement to the Verge:

We’ve loved watching Ninja on Twitch over the years and are proud of all that he’s accomplished for himself and his family, and the gaming community. We wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.

Surprisingly quickly, Twitch took away Ninja’s ‘Partnered’ check mark, the Twitch equivalent of a verified blue tick.

Ninja announced the news via video:

The announcement is very light on reasons why Ninja might have moved from his longtime home at Twitch over to Microsoft. It’s possible (and likely?) that Mixer offered the streaming star an enormous amount of money to make the move, which could signal the beginning of a new wave of payouts for mega streaming stars — not unlike the current NBA free agency bonanza, which has seen the migration of superstars to marquee franchises in order to form basketball equivalents of supergroups.

It’s also worth wondering who reigns supreme in this equation: players or platforms? Luckily, we’ll find out quickly as the video game streaming space sees its biggest talent shakeup since the industry’s inception.