Month: September 2020

Facebook is sharing some new growth numbers around its video destination — namely, that Facebook Watch is now receiving more than 1.25 billion visitors every month.

The company isn’t saying specifically how those numbers have changed during the pandemic (when video services like Netflix have seen dramatic growth), but product lead Paresh Rajwat said there was “a really big surge” at the beginning of lockdown and social distancing, and that the surge has not subsided as society begins to reopen.

Facebook Watch launched in 2018. Back in June of last year, the company said that 720 million people were watching at least one minute of Watch content every month.

Rajwat noted that while Watch is built on “the social layer of Facebook,” with videos shareable across Facebook’s many products, the views are happening on Watch itself.

“It is super critical for us to have a destination,” he said, keeping videos from popular creators and publishers separate from the core Facebook experience of interacting with friends and family. “The moment we mix them together, it becomes a completely different product for people.”

Rajwat added that the company isn’t just looking at overall audience size. He argued that when you look at “the reactions and comments and shares” you can see that “the content we have is working.” (Advertisers have wondered about the true extent of audience engagement on Facebook Watch.)

Last year, as tech and media companies were all investing heavily to launch their own streaming services, we argued that Facebook’s efforts with unscripted shows and older content seemed pretty lackluster in comparison. But it sounds like the content that’s working on Watch isn’t the kind of thing that you’d find on Netflix or Disney+ — as Rajwat put it, “The angle we’ve taken is to focus more on content that is around social topics to drive conversations.”

Image Credits: Facebook

For example, there’s “Red Table Talk” from Jada Pinkett Smith and family, a talk show that made headlines over the summer for bringing Will Smith and Jada together to discuss their marital issues. Facebook plans to launch another version of Red Table talk in October, “Red Table Talk: The Estefans,” with Gloria Estefan, her niece Lily and her daughter Emily.

As another example of a successful original Facebook Watch show, Rajwat pointed to “Returning the Favor,” an Emmy-winning program where host Mike Rowe showcases everyday heroes.

Rajwat said that live programming has increased significantly during the pandemic. That includes live sports, with 13.7 million people watching the UEFA Champions League final, making it the most popular football broadcast ever on Facebook Watch. And Facebook recently announced that publishers and other businesses will be able to charge for access to live online events, with Facebook taking no fees for the next year.

The site also added licensed music videos over the summer, with Katy Perry premiering her music video for “Smile” exclusively on Facebook Watch, where it was watched by “millions” of fans.

The company highlighted successful publishers on Facebook Watch include organizations like UFC, large publishers like BuzzFeed and individual creators like Benito Skinner and Brandi Guice, a.k.a. Braannxo, who’s making 98% of her revenue from Facebook Stars and fan subscriptions.

Looking forward, Rajat said that a big priority is making “more and more investment in showing people what they really are interested in.” To that end, users have already spotted that Facebook Watch is now allowing users to customize their feed by exploring and subscribing to different topics.

SpaceX has confirmed some details of its Starlink internet service beta test, via SpaceX engineer Kate Tice on today’s launch webcast for its most recent Starlink satellite mission. Tice said that SpaceX’s service has demonstrated latency low enough to allow it to play the “fastest multiplayer” networked online games, and that it has also shown download speeds in excess of 100Mbps, which she added is fast enough to stream multiple HD video streams at once, with additional bandwidth to spare.

Anyone who has spent any time using an existing connection a rural, poorly covered area that relies on either traditional satellite or perhaps limited cellular-based service will know that both these parameters far exceed the capabilities of most existing options. Starlink’s goal is to leapfrog what’s out there already with its low Earth orbit constellation, which has the advantage of transmitting its signal much closer in to Earth than the far-out geostationary satellites that provide legacy networking capabilities.

Tice also said that while performance so far has been impressive during the private beta, the company expects both more features and greater capabilities to be unlocked over time through updates. She also said that SpaceX recently completed it first inter-satellite link between Starlink spacecraft – which can transfer 100s of gigabytes of data between satellites via optical laser, at speeds that will be the fastest available anywhere for inter-satellite communications. This is a core capability for the network, which will rely on handoffs between Starlink satellites to maintain connections as they orbit the Earth.

While the current private beta is essentially limited to SpaceX employees, and designed to help them fine-tune the network as it comes online for the first time, Tice said that the public Starlink beta is still on track to kick off later this year. SpaceX has asked those interested in participating to sign up via its Starlink website, and earlier this year a leak from said website provide a detailed look at how the public beta will operate when live.

SpaceX has launched its latest batch of Starlink internet satellites, a full complement of 60 spacecraft that will join those already on orbit to add to the constellation. These will form the backbone of SpaceX’s broadband internet service, which will aim to provide low-latency, high-speed connections to customers and regions where quality, consistent service hasn’t been available.

The launch took place at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, from SpaceX’s launch facility at 8:46 AM EDT (5:46 AM PDT). The Falcon 9 rocket used on the launch included a first-stage booster that flew once previously – just a few months ago in June. SpaceX also successfully recovered the Falcon 9 booster once again with a controlled landing at sea on its ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ drone landing ship.

The company will also be attempting to recover the fairing used to protect the satellites during launch for this mission, which includes two halves that have a combined value of around $6 million per launch.

Lately, SpaceX has been flying Starlink missions with shared payloads, dedicated a small amount of the available cargo space to clients including Planet and others for their own satellites. Today’s launch was a return to form of earlier Starlink missions, carrying only SpaceX’s own satellites. This was the 12th total Starlink mission, and the 10th this year alone.

SpaceX also confirmed that its Starlink service is currently in private beta testing, and that a public beta test is planned for later this year. The company hopes to begin to offer paid service more broadly next year.

Smart lighting company Philips Hue has a new product in its home entertainment catalog that should make a smart TV lighting setup much easier and more powerful. The new Philips Hue Play gradient lightstrip features individually-addressable full-color LEDs, meaning each one can be tuned to a different color independent of the rest for a more immersive color-matching experience when using it in tandem with the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync box, or the sync software for PC or Mac.

The new gradient lightstrip is custom-made in three different size settings, for 55-inch ($199.99), 65-inch ($219.99) and 75-inch ($239.99) TVs respectively. The company created them in these settings for easy mounting and installation, but you can also use them with larger or smaller sets with just a bit of tweaking. They’re available for pre-order now, and will ship on October 16 in the U.S.

Using the Hue Sync mobile app, users can tweak the position and height of the gradient lights (and any other compatible Hue products) in their entertainment area, and the lights will tune their color and brightness to match what’s being displayed on screen. Prior versions of Hue’s lightstrip products were only able to switch entirely from one color to another, meaning they weren’t nearly as good at matching specific to particular areas of the screen. The gradient lightstrip looks to be able to provide a much more natural and immersive color matching experience as a result.

Image Credits: Philips Hue

Alongside the new gradient lightstrip, Philips also introduced a number of other new products, including a redesigned Hue Iris table lamp that now has increased brightness, better colors, and a lower dimmed floor. It’s got Bluetooth onboard, for use with out a Hue bridge, too. Likewise for the company’s news Philips Hue E12 candelabra bulbs, which all have Bluetooth on board.

Image Credits: Philips Hue

The Hue collection also now includes vintage-look filament bulbs in two new form factors, ungluing a large globe and. large Edison design, and the Hue Ensis pendant light is available in a new black colorway. Finally, there’s a new Philips Hue White buster E14 bubble, which is a tiny adorable little bulb for use in itty bitty sconce lights and other small fixtures.

We’re now 61 days away from the US Presidential election, and Facebook is once more ramping up its efforts to level the playing field and attempt to keep its platform from being manipulated to influence how people vote.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg today announced a series of new measures, including the news that it will block new political and issue ads in the final week of the campaign — although campaigns can still run ads to encourage people to vote, and they can still run older political ads. Other announcements today detailed more work to counter misinformation, and stronger rules to counter voter suppression, including misleading references to COVID-19 at the polls.

The news today is significant not just because it’s a sign of how Facebook continues to work on more proactive measures around the election, but that it is definitely past the point of trying to present itself as an innocent bystander to forces that would have been in play even if Facebook didn’t exist.

“This election is not going to be business as usual,” he wrote in the post. “We all have a responsibility to protect our democracy. That means helping people register and vote, clearing up confusion about how this election will work, and taking steps to reduce the chances of violence and unrest.”

Other measures will include placing its Voter Information Center — a hub for voting information, with deadlines and guides on how to vote by mail and other related details that it announced in August — at the top of Facebook and Instagram “almost every day until the election.” (Originally, the hub was going to be accessible — and somewhat hidden — in the menu; now it’s being moved it into a more prominent slot.)

Zuckerberg said that the political ad blocking is being put in place because Facebook — another admission — doesn’t believe that there would be enough time to contest any new claims that might come in the ads.

But while blocking those last-minute political ads is an important move, it’s not a complete block of all political ads. Facebook said that political ads posted more than a week before the election can still stay up, and targeting for those ads can still be adjusted (that is — they can essentially be run as new campaigns).

Zuck’s explanation is that the older ads have time to be researched. “Those ads will already be published transparently in our Ads Library so anyone, including fact-checkers and journalists, can scrutinize them,” he noted.

The company said that its efforts so far have driven 24 million clicks to voter registration sites, but how those translate into actual registrations is not clear. The company has set a goal of helping 4 million people register and vote, and Zuckerberg himself has donated $300 million to organizations working on that effort.

Other efforts announced today include a number of moves to try to combat misinformation — one of the key ways that Facebook has been leveraged in past elections to influence voting.

Specifically, Facebook said it is extending the window beyond 72 hours — its original timescale — where it’s going to try to identify and remove false claims about polling conditions, given that many may try to vote early this time around.

And given how a lot of misinformation is also shared through direct channels off Facebook itself, it’s also going to limit how things can be forwarded on Messenger to stem how content goes viral on there. “You’ll still be able to share information about the election, but we’ll limit the number of chats you can forward a message to at one time,” Zuckerberg noted. This will, of course, cut both ways (those trying to put out accurate information might also get dinged) but ultimately is a direct result of how Facebook has altered forwarding on WhatsApp around elections in other countries, such as India.

One of the other issues that has been highlighted by many has been how the high percentage of people voting by mail might be exploited to the advantage of candidates that take strong early leads in live voting: the worry is that the live results get called as early victories, before other votes are tallied, which could, for example, dissuade people from going to polling stations and voting. Facebook now says that it will be adding labels to candidates and campaigns that try to declare victory before the official calls (but won’t be removing those posts). It’s working with Reuters and the National Election Pool to determine more accurate results, it said.

Another big theme in misinformation has been around COVID-19 and how scare tactics around this are used to dissuade people from voting. Facebook said it will “remove posts with claims that people will get Covid-19 if they take part in voting”, with links to more accurate information. The rule will also include ads with this message.

Misinformation also comes through Facebook by way of sending false details about how polling stations or how voting works, for example not just trying to discourage people from going to polls, but also intentionally giving specific groups of voters the wrong information about how to vote, for example telling them that it’s okay to send in their ballots past the deadline.

All of these policies will work in tandem with how Facebook deals with a completely different threat, coming not from candidates and their campaigns but other actors intent on destabilising how democratic processes work, or simply to influence how they go.

Just this week, Facebook took down a network of 13 accounts and 2 pages sending out misleading claims about political candidates. The company says that it’s investing more into its security to continue fighting this but it’s a huge problem, stretching back years now to the previous US Presidential election, and apparently not going away anytime soon. While originally the threats were identified as coming from countries like Russia, Zuckerberg now admitted that “We’re increasingly seeing attempts to undermine the legitimacy of our elections from within our own borders.”

It’s going to be a long 61 days….

SpaceX is about to hit an even dozen for its Starlink launches, which carry the company’s own broadband internet satellites to low Earth orbit. This flight carries a full 60-satellite complement of the Starlink spacecraft, after the last couple of these have reserved a little space for client payloads. The launch is set to take off at 8:46 AM EDT (5:46 AM PDT) from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and there’s a backup opportunity tomorrow morning should it need to be scrubbed for any reason.

This mission will use a Falcon 9 booster that has flown once previously, just a few months ago in June for a mission that delivered a GPS III satellite on behalf of the U.S. Space Force. SpaceX will also try to recover the booster with a landing at sea on its ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ drone landing ship.

Starlink has been by far the most frequent launch focus for SpaceX this year, as the company ramps the size of its active constellation in preparation for the deployment of its service in the U.S. According to some internet speed testing websites, the service is already being used by some individuals, and a leak from SpaceX’s dedicated Starlink website indicates a broader public beta test is imminent. The company has said service should be available in parts of the U.S. and Canada by later this year, with a planned expansion to follow in 2021.

The webcast above should go live about 15 minutes prior to the liftoff time, so at around 8:31 AM EDT (5:31 AM PDT).

The small satellite launch industry is heating up, with a number of small launch providers currently vying to become the next with an active orbital launch vehicle. Existing large launch vehicle operator Arianespace is also joining the fray, however, and performed a first demonstration launch to show how its rideshare offering will work for small satellite companies. This also marks the first launch for Arianespace in over a year, after a number of launches planned for earlier in 2020 were scrubbed or delayed due to COVID-19 and the mitigating measures put in place in French Guiana where it has its launch facility.

Arianespace launched its Vega light payload rocket from the Guiana Space Center at 9:51 PM ET (6:51 PM PT) on Wednesday evening, carrying a total of 53 satellites on board to various target destinations in low Earth orbit. This was a proof-of-concept mission, funded in part by the European Space Agency and the European Commission, but it did carry actual satellites on behalf of commercial customers – including 26 for remote space-based sensing company Planet. IoT connectivity startup Swarm had 12 of its tiny satellites on board, and communications satellite startup Kepler sent up. its third-satellite. Two other startups, Satellogic, which does remote sensing, and GHGSat, which does methane emission tracking, also had satellites among the large shared payload.

This mission was intended to show that Arianespace’s Vega vehicle is able to serve the needs of small satellite rideshare customers. The rideshare model is a popular one for small satellite operators, since it helps spread the cost of a launch across multiple customers. Small satellites are extremely lightweight relative to the large, geosynchronous satellites that many of these launch vehicles were intended to carry on behalf of government and defense customers, so their operators typically don’t have the budget to support booking up a full-scale launch.

SpaceX introduced a self-booked rideshare model last year for small satellite companies, and Rocket Lab offers a service dedicated to the same market, with smaller launch vehicles that greatly reduce launch costs and that can carry small satellites more directly to their target destination. The market seems ready to support more launch providers, however, and for Arianespace, it’s a way to diversify their offering and bring in new revenue while serving this growing demand.

Garmin today is announcing a $999 GPS unit designed specifically for motorsports. Called the Garmin Catalyst the unit aims to be a motorsports coach of sorts, helping drivers improve lap times, and more. It’s the latest example of Garmin testing different markets now that GPS units are built-into most vehicles.

Like standard GPS units, the Catalyst mounts on the windshield and provides detailed maps for the driver. However, since this is for racing around tracks, instead of providing driving directions, the Catalyst is said to provide motorsports coaching with voice instructions and detailed analysis of the driver’s performance.

Adam Spence, Garmin product manager explains, “[The Catalyst] gathers several data metrics and identifies where laps can be seamlessly joined together to create the fastest racing line. This shows users their fastest achievable time based on lines actually driven and gives them an optimal lap they can truly achieve.”

The GPS unit uses a series of sensors and components to generate the car’s racing line on the track. The included camera captures 1080p video, which can be played back on the unit with the track data overlaid showing speed, lap data, and more.

When driving, the Catalyst is said to be able to provide adaptive instruction to the driver based on past driving laps, instructing the driver on when to turn in, apex, and exit turns along with braking data when needed. This information can playback through compatible headsets or the vehicle’s Bluetooth stereo.

Data and track information can be viewed on the device itself or exported to a mobile device or computer.

The system is the latest product from Garmin who is trying to bring its GPS know-how to niche markets. Previously, the company unveiled a similar unit for overlanding vehicles. Based on pictures, the Overlander and the Catalyst seem to use the same mounting hardware and have a similar design albeit the Overlander appears more rugged.

[gallery ids="2039045,2039042,2039026,2039040,2039038,2039037,2039033,2039029,2039028,2039047,2039043"]

QuantumScape, the solid-state battery company backed by Volkswagen Group, has agreed to merge with a special purpose acquisition company Kensington Capital Acquisition Corp. as it aims to raise the capital it needs to commercialize solid-state batteries for electric vehicles.

The merger will give QuantumScape a post-deal market valuation of $3.3 billion.

QuantumScape said it was able to raise more than $700 million through the business combination, a figure that includes $500 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE. The raise was anchored by institutional investors including Fidelity Management & Research Company and Janus Transaction. The combined company will be named QuantumScape and is expected to remain listed on the NYSE and trade under the new ticker symbol “QS.”

The merger and associated PIPE transaction will fund the company’s plans to first production, according to QuantumScape founder and CEO Jagdeep Singh. Numerous automakers have pursued solid-state batteries, but challenges such as cost have hampered efforts to commercial the technology.

Electric vehicles on the road today are equipped with lithium-ion batteries. A battery contains two electrodes. There’s an anode (negative) on one side and a cathode (positive) on the other. An electrolyte sits in the middle and acts as the courier that moves ions between the electrodes when charging and discharging. Solid-state batteries use a solid electrolyte and not a liquid or gel-based electrolyte found in lithium-ion batteries.

Developers claim that solid electrolytes have greater energy density, which translates into squeezing more range out of a smaller and lighter battery. Solid electrolytes also are supposed to be better at thermal management, reducing the risk of fire and the reliance on the kinds of cooling systems found in today’s EVs.

Summer of the SPAC

QuantumScape joins what appears to be a seemingly endless line of venture-backed companies that have eschewed the traditional IPO path and instead opted to go public via a reverse merger with a SPAC, or blank-check company.  QuantumScape is also part of a smaller and notable group of electric vehicle-related companies that have announced plans to go public via a SPAC. EV companies Canoo, Fisker Inc., Lordstown Motors and Nikola Corp. have gone public, or announced plans to, via a SPAC merger this spring and summer.

Unlike some of the companies in this new batch of SPACs, QuantumScape can hardly be called a startup. The Stanford University spinout has been working for a decade on developing solid-state batteries and designing a scalable manufacturing process to commercialize its battery technology for the automotive industry.

Volkswagen venture

QuantumScape attracted attention and capital early on from high-profile venture firms like Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures. Volkswagen entered the picture in 2012. The automaker has invested a total of $300 million in QuantumScape, including $200 million this year.

The heart of the VW-QuantumScape relationship is a joint venture, which was announced in 2018, that aims to accelerate the development of solid-state battery technology and then produce them at commercial scale. The companies have plans to set up a pilot plant for the industrial-level production of the solid-state batteries. Volkswagen said in June that plans for the pilot factory will be “firmed up” sometime this year.

QuantumScape’s board is also loaded with notable investors and experts in the electric vehicle industry, notably former Tesla CTO and Redwood Materials founder JB Straubel, who called QuantumScape’s solid-state anode-less design “the most elegant architecture I’ve seen for a lithium-based battery system.”

Kensington Chairman and CEO Justin Mirro will also join the combined company’s board of directors.

couMotif has an app that allows patients to monitor themselves for treatments or drug trials which then feeds into a platform allowing a much faster approach to clinical studies. It’s now raised £5 million in a Series A investment round led by existing UK investor AlbionVC, with participation from Oslo-based DNV-GL and existing angel investors. This latest round takes it to a total funding size of £7.5m.

The platform is sold into life sciences companies which are gradually replacing centralized studies where patients have to go to a site, such as a hospital, to submit their data. The trend has obviously been catalyzed by Covid-19. The platform is now used by studies taking place in 26 countries from clinical to real-world settings, and across more than 25 therapeutic areas – from dermatology and rare disease to oncology and cardiology. The largest study involved over 13,000 participants tracking their pain levels and the weather. This was featured on the BBC and published in Nature.

Its competitors are almost entirely US-based and include organizations such as SnapIOT, Medable, and ClinicalInk as well as other large platform companies.

“We’re excited to help our customers implement patient-centered research designs by using the uMotif platform to capture high-quality data,” siad Bruce Hellman, CEO and Co-Founder of uMotif in a statement. “This new funding will rapidly accelerate our development and will ultimately help our customers to get new therapies to patients faster”.

Dr. Andrew Elder, deputy managing partner at AlbionVC says: “Now more than ever, having access to reliable patient data during clinical trials is crucial. uMotif’s platform is built with patients in mind; designed to help academics, researchers and healthcare professionals to capture the best quality data in a way that suits the participants. It’s a win-win for all stakeholders and the platform has the potential and momentum to revolutionize the speed and efficiency with which therapies can reach and help millions of patients.”