Month: September 2020

04 Sep 2020

Low-cost fitness bands see a resurgence in interest amid the pandemic

While wearable fitness devices saw an uptick in shipments in North America for Q2, the overall dollar amount of the market remained steady, according to new numbers out of Canalys. The discrepancy can be chalked up to a decline in the average selling price of the products.

Continuing an overall trend for 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased interest in wearable devices, as consumer look to both monitor their health and track step counts, as mass closing have made many more sedentary. Perhaps owing to large unemployment figures and a massive economic downturn, the decisions customers have been making are trending forward the more frugal end of the spectrum.

Image Credits: Canalys

“Americans invested heavily in sub-US$50 trackers during the pandemic to stay accountable for the greater amount of time spent at home,” analyst Vincent Thielke said in a comment tied to the figures’ release.

The numbers buck larger on-going wearable trends, which have found smartwatches starting to utterly dominate the conversation. Of course, results that can tied directly to the pandemic ought not be viewed as indicators of broader, on-going trends. They do, however, seem to open up a perhaps temporary opportunity to low cost device makers. Amazon is tricking while the iron is hot with the Halo band, and a number of companies that have had continued success in Asia could potentially find an opening in the market. Subscription services appear to be the key way forward for monetizing relatively low-cost devices.

Apple continues to dominate the category overall. That’s helped along by a bump in shipments for the Apple Watch Series 3. The three-year-old smartwatch saw a 30% year-over-year growth, as a $200 alternative to Apple’s higher end devices.

04 Sep 2020

Palantir’s concentrated governance is great for execs, but what about shareholders?

A few days ago I wrote down a few notes making a bullish case for Palantir, searching to find good news amidst the company’s huge historical deficits.

Heading into the next phase of Palantir’s march to the public markets, I was very curious to see how the company would hone its S-1 filing to give itself the best possible shot during its impending debut.


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And we finally did get a new S-1/A filing, a document that our own Danny Crichton quickly parsed and covered. What he found was a set of amendments that seem to increase the chance that three Palantir insiders will control more than 50% of the company’s voting power forever, possibly making it a controlled company which would loose the firm from select regulatory requirements.

Danny dryly noted that “given the diminished voting power of employee and investor shares, it is possible that these voting provisions will negatively impact the final price of those shares.” That’s being polite.

Mulling this over this morning, I kept thinking about Snap, which sold stock in its IPO that gave new shareholders no votes at all, and Facebook, which is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg as his personal fiefdom. The two are not alone in this matter. There are a number of other public tech companies that provide certain groups of pre-IPO shareholders more votes than others on a per-share basis, though perhaps to a smaller degree than what Facebook has managed.

It feels like many startups (and former startups) have decided over time that having material shareholder input is a bad idea. That, in effect, they must run companies as not merely monarchies, but unquestioned ones to boot.

I am not entirely convinced that this is the best way to create long-term shareholder wealth.

If you are on the other side of this particular fence, I understand. After all, Facebook is a global juggernaut and Snap has finally managed to eke out stock-market gains to bring its value it back where it was around when it went public. (A three-year journey.)

But those arguments are only so good. You could easily argue that the two companies could have done much more with less self-sabotage (Facebook) and a bit more spend discipline (Snap).

04 Sep 2020

Mustard raises $1.7M to improve athletic mechanics with AI

Athletic coaching is a massive, multi-billion-dollar industry. No surprise, really, given the massive revenue some top athletes are able to generate. Mustard is working to supplant — or at least augment — some of that pricey coaching with the launch of a new mobile app designed to analyze an athlete’s mechanics and offer corrective tips to help them improve.

The company was co-founded by Tom House, a former reliever whose coaching career has earned him the reputation as one the “father[s] of modern pitching mechanics.”

“Too many kids miss out on the power of play and the many physical and mental benefits of sports—studies show that 70% of kids stop playing sports by the age of 13 due to cost and lack of access to quality coaching. Mustard offers every kid access to the same coaching programs and extensive biomechanical analysis used by the best athletes in the world, and the same personalized training protocols that I use with the Hall of Famers I see in person,” House says in a release tied to the news. “We want to make elite personalized coaching accessible to all.”

Mustard announced this week that it has raised $1.7 million to improve its tool, led by Shasta Ventures and Intersect VC, along with a number of angel investors, including David Novak and Mike Dixon, and all-star athletes Nolan Ryan and Drew Brees. Ryan, in fact, has become one of the main faces of the company, gracing its home page, along with a color scheme that appears inspired by his days with the Astros.

The name isn’t great. It’s a reference to the phrase “put some mustard on it” — which refers to the act of adding a bit of an edge to a throw.

The app is opening up for a limited, free public beta, focused solely on baseball to start. “The product will be entirely free at first,” CEO Rocky Collins tells TechCrunch. “Over time, we will add premium features for a low monthly subscription. Even when premium features are added, we plan to continue to offer a free version of the app that offers tremendous value to users.”

The system relies on the smartphone’s camera and then uses proprietary AI algorithms to monitor the player’s motion and approximate human athletic coaching. For the baseball side of things, the company has employed engineers from Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM). Future sports will be added at some point down the road.

04 Sep 2020

NSA’s Anne Neuberger to talk cybersecurity at Disrupt 2020

We are thrilled to announce that Anne Neuberger, director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, will join us at Disrupt 2020 from September 14-18.

The headlines are not always kind to the government agencies that work in secret, and the NSA is no exception. Leaks have exposed some of the agency’s most clandestine intelligence gathering operations. But the important role of the spy agency in securing the nation’s cybersecurity defenses can go overlooked.

Neuberger took the helm at the NSA’s newly created Cybersecurity Directorate a year ago as part of the agency’s renewed effort disrupt foreign adversaries and help Americans to stay secure. She previously served as the NSA’s first chief risk officer.

As much of the NSA works in secret by collecting intelligence on foreign adversaries and disrupting threats to the U.S. homeland, Neuberger’s division works on the defensive side. It’s there that the NSA has unique insights into some of the biggest threats that the public and private sector faces, and uses that information to help protect the nation’s most critical infrastructure and systems from disruption.

In the past year since the directorate was launched, the NSA called out nation-state hackers, warned of new strains of disruptive malware, and advised on how to patch or mitigate major vulnerabilities. Or, in other words, getting unclassified but actionable information to the network defenders who need it.

We’ll hear from Neuberger how the agency is balancing spycraft and intelligence gathering with defensive cybersecurity at Disrupt 2020 on September 14-18. Get a front-row seat with your Digital Pro Pass for just $245 during our Labor Day Flash Sale or with a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. Prices increase next week, so grab your tickets today!

04 Sep 2020

Peloton said to be launching new, cheaper treadmill and higher-end stationary smart bike

Peloton is reportedly getting ready to add to its product lineup with two new products at either end of its pricing spectrum, according to Bloomberg. The workout tech company is planning both a cheaper, entry-level smart treadmill, and a higher-end version of its stationary exercise bike, with an announcement set to take place as early as sometime next week in time for its quarterly financial earnings.

The new products would come alongside a price drop for its existing exercise bike, to a price point under $1,900 according to the report. While the new ‘Bike+’ will retail for more than the current price of the existing model, the price drop will help Peloton stoke the high demand for its products resulting from the closure of gyms and social distancing measures instituted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Peloton’s new ‘Tread’ treadmill will retail for under $3,000, according to Bloomberg’s sources, which is a considerable discount vs. the $4,295 asking price for the existing model. That one will remain on sale as a premium offering, and the new version will reportedly more closely resemble a traditional home treadmill in terms of materials and construction, allowing for the cheaper asking price.

The new, upscale Bike+ model will also reportedly feature a repositionable smart display, which will help it serve as the centerpiece of a more comprehensive home gym that includes strength training and other kinds of guided workouts. Peloton’s hardware products are what helped distinguish it in the exercise market, but it has built another strong business on subscription plans and app-guided workouts, which are available with or without its home gym equipment.

The new treadmill will likely go to market before the upgraded smart bike, in terms of availability, according to the report. Peloton’s main blocker for customer base expansion is probably its relatively high point of entry, in terms of its in-house hardware, so that makes a lot of sense if the company is looking to capitalize on general consumer appetite for at-home fitness solutions during the COVID-19 crisis.

04 Sep 2020

Qualcomm-powered Chinese XR startup Nreal raises $40 million

Nreal, one of the most-watched mixed reality startups in China, just secured $40 million from a group of high-profile investors in a Series B round that could potentially bring more adoption to its portable augmented glasses.

Kuaishou, the archrival to TikTok’s Chinese version Douyin, led the round, marking yet another video platform to establish links with Nreal following existing investor iQiyi, China’s own Netflix. Like other major video streaming sites around the world, Kuaishou and iQiyi have dabbled in making augmented reality content, and securing a hardware partner will no doubt be instrumental to their early experiments.

Other backers in the round with plentiful industry resources include GP Capital, which counts state-owned financial holding group Shanghai International Group and major Chinese movie studio Hengdian Group as investors; CCEIF Fund, set up by state-owned telecom equipment maker China Electronics Corporation and state-backed investment bank China International Capital Corporation; GL Ventures, the early-stage fund set up by prominent private equity firm Hillhouse Capital; and Sequoia Capital China.

That’s not it. In early 2019, Nreal brought onboard Xiaomi founder’s venture fund Shunwei Capital for its $15 million Series A funding. As I wrote at the time, AR, VR, MR, XR — whichever marketing coinage you prefer — will certainly be a key piece in Xiaomi’s Internet of Things empire. It’s not hard to see the phone titan sourcing smart glasses from Nreal down the road.

The other key partner of Nreal, a three-year-old company, is Qualcomm. The chipmaker has played an active part in China’s 5G rollout, powering major Chinese phone makers’ next-gen handsets. It supplies Nreal with its Snapdragon processors, allowing the startup’s lightweight mixed reality glasses to easily plug into an Android phone.

“Its closer partnership with Qualcomm will allow it to access Qualcomm’s network of customers including telecoms companies,” Seewan Toong, an industry consultant on AR and VR, told TechCrunch.

Indeed, the mixed reality developer has already signed a deal with Japanese telco KDDI and in Korean, it’s working with LG’s cellular carrier LG Uplus Corp.

The latest round brings Nreal’s total raise to more than $70 million and will accelerate mass adoption of its mixed reality technology in the 5G era, the company said.

It remains to be seen how Nreal will live up to its promise, secure users at scale, and move beyond being a mere poster child for tech giants’ mixed reality ambitions. So far its deals with big telcos are in a way reminiscent of that of Magic Leap, which has been in a legal spat with Nreal, though the Chinese company appears to burn through less cash so far. The troubled American company is currently pivoting to relying on enterprise customers after failing to crack the consumer market.

“Nreal is patient and not in a rush to show they can start selling high volume. It’s trying to prove that there’s a user scenario for its technology,” said Toong.

04 Sep 2020

Google pushes Europe to limit ‘gatekeeper’ platform rules

Google has made its pitch to shape the next decades of digital regulation across the European Union, submitting a 135-page response yesterday to the consultation on the forthcoming Digital Services Act (DSA) — which will update the bloc’s long-standing rules around ecommerce.

The package also looks set to introduce specific rules for so-called “gatekeeper platforms” which wield outsized market power thanks to digital network effects. Hence Mountain View’s dialled-up attention to detail.

The lion’s share of Google’s submission focuses on lobbying against the prospect of ex ante regulation for such platform giants — something the European Commission has nonetheless signalled is front of mind as it looks at how to rein in platform power.

This type of regulation intervention aims to identify competitive problems and shape responses ‘before the event’ via the application of obligations on players who hold significant market power vs after the fact competition enforcement when market harm has been established.

“A blanket approach to ex ante competition regulation could have unintended consequences on user experience as well as multiplying costs for European businesses,” it writes, urging lawmakers to take a long, hard look at existing regulation to see if it’s not able to do the job of ensuring markets are “working properly”.

“Where the evidence shows meaningful gaps, the next step ought to be to consider how one can modernise those existing rules and procedures to address the underlying concerns before turning to consideration of new and distinct regulatory frameworks,” it adds.

If EU lawmakers must go ahead with ex ante regulation of platforms giants, Google — an adtech giant — is especially keen that they do not single out any specific business models. So it definitely wouldn’t be a fan of ex ante regs applied only to surveillance-fuelled ad-targeting platforms. Funny that. 

“The criteria for identifying ‘gatekeeper power’ should be independent of the particular business model that a platform uses, making no distinction as between platforms that operate business models based on advertising, subscriptions, sales commissions, or sales of hardware,” Google writes.

“Digital platforms often operate using different business and monetization strategies, across multiple markets, geographies, and sectors, with varying degrees of competitive strength in each. Regulators should not favor or discriminate against any business, business model, or technology from the outset,” it goes on.

“In certain sectors, the platform may have market power; in others, it may be a new entrant or marginal player. The digital ecosystem is extremely diverse and evolving rapidly and it would be misguided for gatekeeper designations to be evaluated by reference to the position of an entire company or corporate group.”

Nor should lawmakers opt for what Google dubs “an overly simplistic” assessment of what constitutes a gatekeeper — giving the example of number of users as an inadequate way to determine whether a platform giant has significant market power in a given moment. (Relevant: Google market share of search in Europe exceeds 90%.)

“Recent competition enforcement demonstrates the range of platforms that have been found to have market power (e.g., Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple) and other platforms may be found to have market power in the future (borne out, for example, by the UK CMA’s investigation into online auction platform services),” it writes. “The gatekeeper assessment should therefore recognize that a range of platforms — operating a range of different business models (e.g., ad-funded, subscription-based, commission-based, hardware sales) — may hold ‘market power’ in different circumstances and vis-à-vis different platform participants.”

The tech giant can also be seen pushing a familiar talking point when its business is accused of profiting, parasitically, off of others’ content — by suggesting that when regulators are assessing whether a platform is a gatekeeper or not by considering the economic dependence of traditional businesses on a limited number of online platforms they should look favorably on those platforms “through which a materially significant proportion of business (e.g. in the form of highly valuable traffic) is channeled”.

But of course it would say that clicks are just as good as all the ad dollars it’s making.

Google is also pushing for regular review of any gatekeeper designations to ensure any obligations keep pace with fast-moving markets and competition shifts (it points to the recent rise of TikTok by way of example).

It also doesn’t want gatekeeper designations to apply universally across all markets — arguing instead they should only apply in the specific market where a platform is “found to have ‘gatekeeper’ power”.

“Large digital platforms tend to operate across multiple markets and sectors, with varying degrees of competitive strength in each,” Google argues, adding that: “Applying ex ante rules outside these markets would create a risk of deterring pro-competitive market entry through excessive regulation, thereby depriving SMEs and consumers of attractive new products.”

That would stand in contrast to the EU’s modus operandi around competition law enforcement — where a business that’s been judged to be dominant in one market (like Google is in search) has what competition chief Margrethe Vestager likes to refer to as a “special responsibility” not to abuse its market power to leverage that advantage in any other market, not only the one it’s been found to hold most of the market power.

At the same time as Google is lobbying for limits on any gatekeeper designations, the tech giant wants to see certain types of rules applied universally to all players. Here it gives the examples of privacy, transparency (such as for fees) and ranking decisions.

Data portability is another area it’s urging rules to be applied industry-wide.

It also wants to see any online ad rules applied universally, not just to gatekeeper platforms. But it’s also very keen for hard limits on any such rules.

“It will be important that any interventions seeking to achieve more transparency and accountability are carefully designed to avoid inadvertently hampering the ability of online advertising tools to deliver the value that publishers and advertisers have come to expect,” the adtech giant writes, lobbying to reduce the amount of transparency and accountability set down in law by invoking claims of privacy risks to user data; threats to commercial IP; and ‘bad actors’ gaming the system if it’s not allowed to continue being (an ad-fraud-tastic) blackbox.

“Consideration of these measures will therefore require the balancing of factors including protection of users’ personal data and partners’ commercially sensitive information, and potential harm to users and competition through disclosure of data signals that allow ‘bad actors’ to game the system, or rivals to copy innovations. We stand ready to engage with the Commission on these issues,” Google intones.

On updating ecommerce rules and liability — which is a stated aim of the DSA plan — Google is cautiously supportive of regulatory changes to reflect what it describes as “the digital transformation of the last two decades”. While pushing to retain core elements of the current e-Commerce Directive regime, including the country-of-origin principle and freedom to provide cross-border digital services. 

For example it wants to see more expansive definitions of digital services, to allow for more specific rules for certain types of businesses — pushing for a move away from the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ hosts distinction for platforms, to enable them to respond more proactively in a content moderation context without inviting liability by doing so, but suggesting hosting services may be better served by retaining the current regime (Article 14 of the e-Commerce Directive).

On liability for illegal content it is lobbying for see clear lines between illegal material and what’s “lawful-but-harmful”.

“Where Member States believe a category of content is sufficiently harmful, their governments may make that content illegal directly, through democratic processes, in a clear and proportionate manner, rather than through back-door regulation of amorphously-defined harms,” it writes.

It also wants the updated law to retain the general prohibition on content monitoring obligations — and downplays the potential of AI to offer any ‘third way’ there.

“While breakthroughs in machine learning and other technology are impressive, the technology is far from perfect, and less accurate on more nuanced or context-dependent content. Their mandated use would be inappropriate, and could lead to restrictions on lawful content and on citizens’ fundamental rights,” Google warns. “The DSA can help prevent risks to fundamental rights by ensuring that companies are not forced to prioritise speed of removal over careful decision-making,” it adds, saying it encounters “many grey-area cases that require appropriate time to evaluate the law and context”.

“We remain concerned about recent laws that enable imposition of large penalties if short, fixed turn-around times are not met,” it goes on, pointing to a recent ruling by the French Constitutional Council which struck down an online hate speech law on freedom of expression grounds.

“Any new standard should safeguard fundamental rights by ensuring an appropriate balance between speed and accuracy of removal,” Google adds.

You can read its full submission — including answers to the Commission’s questionnaire — here.

The Commission’s DSA consultation closes on September 8. EU lawmakers have previously said they will come forward with a draft proposal for the new rules by the end of the year.

04 Sep 2020

Yandex spins out self-driving car unit from its Uber JV, invests $150M into newco

Self-driving cars are still many years away from becoming a ubiquitous reality, but today one of the bigger efforts to build and develop them is taking a significant step out as part of its strategy to be at the forefront for when they do. Yandex — the publicly-traded Russian tech giant that started as a search engine but has expanded into a number of other, related areas (similar to US counterpart Google) — today announced that it is spinning out its self-driving car unit from MLU BV — a ride-hailing and food delivery joint venture it operates in partnership with Uber.

The move comes amid reports that Yandex and Uber were eyeing up an IPO for MLU. The JV was estimated to be valued at around $7.7 billion last October. It’s now clear how those plans will have been impacted in recent months, with COVID-19 putting huge pressure on ride-hailing and food-delivery businesses globally, and IPOs generally down compared to a year ago.

As part of the spin-out, Yandex is investing $150 million into the business. That will include $100 million in equity, plus $50 million in the form of a convertible loan, the company said. It added that it had invested some $65 million in the business up to now. Yandex is buying out some of Uber’s shares and will now have a 73% stake in the spun-out business, with Uber owning 19%, and the remaining 8% owned by Yandex self-driving group (SDG) management and employees

It’s not clear if spinning out the unit is intended to improve the unit economics and cost base of the MLU unit, or if it’s being done to double down on more focused investment in self-driving, or perhaps a combination of both.

“We are excited to increase our stake in this strategically important part of our business,” said Arkady Volozh, CEO and co-founder of Yandex, in a statement. “In just a short period of time, we have achieved breakthrough results in autonomous driving. We firmly believe in the future of autonomous mobility as a safe and cost-effective form of transportation with a vast addressable market. The additional capital that we are investing in SDG will allow it to continue to pursue the R&D and productization of autonomous mobility.”

Dmitry Polishchuk, who has been running the unit, will be the CEO of new self-driving group.

We have asked what the valuation will be of the new unit — we will update if and when we learn more — but when the spin-out first occurred in 2017 as a part of a bigger strategy at Uber to divest of some of its less profitable, ultra-competitive international operations ahead of its IPO, the larger MLU operation was valued at $3.72 billion.

In the interim, MLU has made some acquisitions to expand in specific regions. And separately, its self-driving car unit has made some significant headway.

That has included building up a fleet of some 130 vehicles across Russia, Israel and the US for testing, with that fleet collectively clocking up 4 million autonomous miles across cities and different weather conditions — with driving being critical part of how self-driving car companies “teach” their AI algorithms to work. It also licenses tech to car makers, such as in this deal with Hyundai.

Yandex also claims that its robotaxi service, launched in 2018, was the first to come to Europe. It has also built its own autonomous delivery robot, Yandex.Rover, which is also coming over to the self-driving unit with the deal.

As with Google-parent Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving division, the logic behind Yandex’s self-driving car unit has been that it can keep costs down by tapping into IP built and developed by Yandex’s substantial engineering team.

That deal, Yandex said, will remain in place after the spin-off with access to company infrastructure, resources and more; and it will continue to have a commercial outlet: selling its technologies as and when they are developed to Yandex.Taxi, which forms the heart of the ride-hailing and food-delivery operations of MLU, as well as to other e-commerce and logistics efforts.

Yandex — which is publicly traded and currently has a market cap of nearly $23 billion — said that it will continue to consolidate the results of Yandex SDG and will report it as part of its “Other Bets and Experiments” category in its earnings.

04 Sep 2020

Teemyco creates virtual offices so that you can grab a room and talk with colleagues

Meet Teemyco, a Stockholm-based startup that wants to reproduce office interactions in a virtual environment. The company wants to foster spontaneous interactions and casual collaboration with a room-based interface. Each employee moves from one room to another just like in a physical office.

If you’re no longer working from an office, chances are you rely heavily on email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet or a combination of all those tools. While those tools work perfectly fine for what they’re designed to achieve, many companies feel like important information is getting lost. It’s harder to bump into a colleague next to the coffee machine and ask a quick question.

With Teemyco, each person is working in a virtual room. By default, you work in the lobby. You can consider it as an open space with multiple desks. When you want to get together for a planned or unplanned meeting, you can pull someone from the lobby and create another room.

In that room, you can start an audio call or a video call. You can see your colleagues in the corner of your screen and stay focused on a document at the same time, or you can put a video call in full screen. When someone is done, they can leave the room.

Those interactions are less formal than what you get with video-conferencing services. You don’t have to send a link to a Zoom room, you don’t have to send a calendar invite. People hop in and hop out.

If you’re working on something important, you can move to a focus room so that you don’t get interrupted every fifteen minutes. Other people won’t be able to pull you from your virtual desk. If you have to run some errands, you can also put yourself in a room that says you’re not there — those rooms can act as a status.

Teemyco also helps you work next to your favorite colleague. You can create a room and use a walkie-talkie feature for quick interactions throughout the day. And, of course, you can create a break room for non-work related discussions.

Teemyco is still a young company. The product is only available in beta. The company raised a $1 million seed round led by Luminar Ventures with Antler, Gazella and various business angels also participating.

It’s also not going to work for all companies. I’m not sure it scales well for a company with hundreds of employees for instance. Introverts might not be fans of real-time communication either.

If you’re a remote-first company, you know that it’s important to have a culture of transparency. And written information is always more transparent than video conferences.

And yet, depending on your corporate culture, something like Teemyco can be useful. It can augment information stored in shared documents and internal communication tools.

It’s an interesting product that proves that the inevitable debate between physical offices and remote teams is not a binary problem. There is some granularity and companies can adjust the knob depending on specific needs.

04 Sep 2020

Early-bird savings extended for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

Mobility may be one of the fastest moving technologies going, but procrastination is an equal-opportunity affliction that can strike even the most dedicated founders and devotees. Fortunately, Saint Expeditus, patron saint of procrastinators great and small, called in a favor.

Early-bird pricing for passes to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020, which takes place October 4-6, remains in effect for one more week. Find out where your got-up-and-go got-up-and went and buy your pass before the new deadlineSeptember 11 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Boom! You just saved $100.

Now get ready to make the most of two programming-packed days. You’ll hear from the top leaders in mobility and transportation on a range of topics — from autonomous cars, AI and micromobility to investment trends, EV tech and navigating regulatory realities. Check out the agenda here.

How can attending TC Sessions: Mobility help your business? We could tell you, but why not listen to your contemporaries instead?

“People want to be around what’s interesting and learn what trends and issues they need to pay attention to. Even large companies like GM and Ford are there, because they’re starting to see the trend move toward mobility. They want to learn from the experts, and TC Sessions: Mobility has all the experts.” — Melika Jahangiri, vice president at Wunder Mobility.

“TC Sessions: Mobility isn’t just an educational opportunity, it’s a real networking opportunity. Everyone was passionate and open to creating pilot programs or other partnerships. That was the most exciting part. And now — thanks to a conference connection — we’re talking with Goodyear’s Innovation Lab.” — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking

We’re mixing things up a bit this year (in addition to going all-virtual) by adding a pitch night competition. We’re looking for 10 outstanding early-stage mobility startups — from anywhere in the world — to deliver their best one-minute pitch on October 5. Five of them will go on to the finals and pitch from the main stage at Mobility 2020 in front of thousands of TC viewers — press, industry leaders and VCs. If you want to be considered, submit this application before September 15. Good luck!

Do not disappoint Saint Expeditus. Buy your TC Sessions: Mobility pass before September 11 at 11:59 p.m. (PT), save $100 and grab yourself a double handful of opportunity.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.