Year: 2020

Robots are no longer the high-tech tools reserved for university labs, e-commerce giants and buzzy Silicon Valley startups. The local grocer now has access too.

Tortoise, the one-year-old Silicon Valley startup known for its remote repositioning electric scooters, has taken its tech and adapted it to delivery carts. The company recently partnered with online grocery platform Self Point to provide neighborhood stores and specialty brand shops with electric carts that — with help from remote teleoperators — deliver goods to local consumers.

The companies have launched the product offering in Los Angeles with three customers. Each customer, which includes Kosher Express, has two to three carts that can be used to make deliveries up to three-mile radius from the store. Unlike the network models used by some autonomous sidewalk delivery companies, grocery stores lease the delivery carts and are responsible for the storage, charging and packing it up with goods that their customers have ordered.

The initial Self Point -Tortoise launch is small. But it has the makings of expanding far beyond Los Angeles. More importantly for Tortoise, it’s a validation of the company’s larger vision to make remote repositioning a horizontal business with numerous applications.

Tortoise started by equipping electric scooters with cameras, electronics and firmware that allow teleoperators in distant locales drive the micromobility devices to a rider or deliver it back to its proper parking spot. Now, it has taken that same hardware and software and used it to build its own delivery cart.

Tortoise co-founder and president Dmitry Shevelenko has said the company’s remote repositioning kit can be used for security and cleaning bots as well as electric wheelchairs and other accessibility devices. He’s even fielded inquiries from farmers interested in using remote repositioning scooters to monitor crops.

“From a practical point of view we’re not trying to not be everywhere overnight, but there’s really no technological constraint for us,” Shevelenko said in a recent interview.

The emergence of COVID-19, and its affects on consumer behavior, prompted Tortoise to home in on delivery carts as its second act.

“We kind of quickly realized that we’re living in a once-in-a-generation change in consumer behavior where now everything is online and people are expecting it to be delivered same day,” Shevelenko said. Tortoise was able to go from the first renderings in May to a delivery cart launch by the fourth quarter because of its ability to repurpose its hardware, software and workforce.

The company still remains bullish on its initial application in micromobility. Earlier this year, Tortoise, GoX and and tech incubator Curiosity Labs launched a six-month pilot in Peachtree Corners, Georgia that allows riders to use an app to hail a scooter. The scooters are outfitted with Tortoise’s tech. Once riders hail the scooter, a Tortoise employee hundreds of miles away remote controls the scooter to the user. After riders complete trips, the scooters drive themselves back to a safe parking spot. From here, GoX employees charge and sanitize the scooters and then mark them with a sticker that indicates they have been properly cleaned.

While partnership with Self Point is Tortoise’s next big project, Shevelenko was quick to note that the company is only focused on one slice of the on-demand delivery pie.

“Low speeds and hot foods don’t work too well,” he said. Startups such as Kiwibot and Starship have smaller robots that focus on that market, Shevelenko added. Tortoise’s delivery carts were designed specifically to hold large amounts of groceries, alcohol and other goods.

“We saw kind of a big opening in grocery,” he said, adding that relying on remote operators and its kit is a low-cost combination that can be used today while automated technology continues to develop. “We’re doing for last-mile delivery what globalized call centers did for customer support.”

France is going forward with its plan to tax big tech companies. The government has sent out notices to tech giants, as reported by the Financial Times, Reuters and AFP. There could be retaliation tariffs on French goods in the U.S.

For the past couple of years, France’s Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire has been pushing hard for a tax reform. Many economy ministers in Europe think tech companies aren’t taxed properly. They generate revenue in one country, but report to tax authorities in another country. They take advantage of countries with low corporate tax to optimize the bottom line.

Le Maire first pitched the idea of a European tax on big tech companies based on local revenue. But he failed to get support from other European countries — European tax policies require a unanimous decision from members of the European Union.

The French government chose not to wait for other European countries and started working on its own local tax. There are two requirements:

• You generate more than €750 million in revenue globally and €25 million in France.
• And you’re operating a marketplace (Amazon’s marketplace, Uber, Airbnb…) or an advertising business (Facebook, Google, Criteo…).

If you meet those two requirements, you have to pay 3 percent of your French revenue in taxes.

At the same time, the OECD has been working on a way to properly tax tech companies with a standardized set of rules that would work across the globe. But OECD members have yet to reach a compromise.

France and the U.S. have been arguing on and off for the past couple of years about the tech tax. In August 2019, then U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron reached a deal by promising that the French government would scrap the French tax as soon as the OECD finds a way to properly tax tech companies in countries where they operate.

In December 2019, the U.S. promised 100% tariffs on French wine, cheese and handbags because the previous deal wasn’t good enough. In January 2020, the two sides agreed to wait a little bit more to see if the OECD framework would come through.

And here we are. According to the French government, OECD negotiations have failed so it’s time to start collecting the French digital tax. Let’s s see how the U.S. reacts during the Trump-Biden transition.

As IBM makes a broad shift in strategy, Bloomberg reported this morning that the company would be cutting around 10,000 jobs in Europe. This comes on the heels of last month’s announcement that the organization will be spinning out its infrastructure services business next year. While IBM wouldn’t confirm the layoffs, a spokesperson suggested that there were broad structural changes ahead for the company as it concentrates fully on a hybrid cloud approach.

IBM had this to say in response to a request for comment on the Bloomberg report, “Our staffing decisions are made to provide the best support to our customers in adopting an open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities. We also continue to make significant investments in training and skills development for IBMers to best meet the needs of our customers.”

Unfortunately, that means basically if you don’t have the currently required skill set, chances are you might not fit with the new version of IBM. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna alluded to the changing environment in an interview with Jon Fortt at the CNBC Evolve Summit earlier this month when he said:

“The Red Hat acquisition gave us the technology base on which to build a hybrid cloud technology platform based on open-source, and based on giving choice to our clients as they embark on this journey. With the success of that acquisition now giving us the fuel, we can then take the next step, and the larger step, of taking the managed infrastructure services out. So the rest of the company can be absolutely focused on hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence.”

The story has always been the same around IBM layoffs, that as they make the transition to a new model, it requires eliminating positions that don’t fit into the new vision, and today’s report is apparently no different, says Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research.

“IBM is in the biggest transformation of the company’s history as it moves from services to software and specialized hardware with Quantum. That requires a different mix of skills in its employee base and the repercussions of that manifest itself in the layoffs that IBM has been doing, mostly quietly, for the last 5+ years,” he said.

None of this is easy for the people involved. It’s never a good time to lose your job, but the timing of this one feels worse. In the middle of a recession brought on by COVID, and as a second wave of the virus sweeps over Europe, it’s particularly difficult.

We have reported on number of IBM layoffs over the last five years. In May, it confirmed layoffs, but wouldn’t confirm numbers. In 2015, we reported on a 12,000 employee layoff.

When I was pronounced legally blind in 2009, I didn’t know one other person who called themselves blind – least of all “low vision” or “visually impaired.” Today, I manage the largest blindness community in the world, Be My Eyes, a support platform where more than 4 million people and companies use live video to support users in almost 200 languages. And though the growth of our collective community is a crucial step making our lives better, it’s just one piece of what makes today, as I’ve heard many others say, “a great time to be blind.”

That’s because in the past 10 years, “sight tech” has taken off. What we might have once called “assistive” or “special needs” technology has gone mainstream – and the technology developed by and for people with disabilities is now used by you, your kids, your grandparents – regardless of whether you identify as having a disability or not.

Sight tech – or more broadly, eyes-free tech – now touches every part of our lives and the devices that we depend on. And it’s not just blind and visually impaired people who are benefitting. It’s everyone. That’s why I’m pleased to be hosting the first ever Sight Tech Global conference on December 2 and 3, to sit down with the tech world’s most important figures in sight tech and talk about the past, present and future of how designing for the blind informs and affects all of our lives. Registration is free; sign up today.

What is Sight Tech?

Inventions to help the blind “see” have quietly been spurring innovation for decades. Often, idealistic inventors create with a charitable mindset – to help the needy or return something lost – but the real technological advances in sight tech have done a lot more than simply suggest a cure for human disability. They’ve created new abilities for everyone, and opened new doors to unpredictable innovation: The 12-inch record, the computer keyboard, and the text recognition software that laid the foundation for the modern database were all brought to market, initially, for blind consumers.

There was a time when a personal assistant, someone to read to you or a car at your door, were once thought of as “special” – but no longer. Today, every device shipped by Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft includes these capabilities and more, not as a bonus but as a necessity to compete in today’s competitive hardware and software markets. So whether you use your phone in dark mode or talk to Siri while you’re driving, you too use “sight tech” that was invented initially for the visually impaired.

Over and over again, designing for blind consumers has shown an ROI far beyond helping the needy. Audiobooks, which were heavily resisted by publishers when first developed for blind readers in 1934, now are the book industry’s only growing business. Likewise, coding your website for a blind person’s screen reader might seem like extra work until you realize it optimizes your SEO and makes your website more usable to about a billion other non-standard device users, as well. The world of sight tech is absolutely full of these types of happy surprises; unexpected synchronicities and wide applicability that started with designing for a seemingly small group.

Founded by former TechCrunch COO Ned Desmond earlier this year, Sight Tech Global provides a new venue for those who are passionate about AI, blind tech, digital inclusion and equal access for all to gather and hear from the accessibility community’s greatest thinkers and doers. Best of all, this free, all-virtual conference is a benefit for the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired which has been helping individuals with blindness or low vision for the past 75 years.

Here’s a little preview of what we’ll be unveiling, cheering, arguing and dreaming about at Sight Tech Global. I hope you’ll join us! Here is a link to the full agenda.

Achieving perfect mobility

For most, the self-driving car is a long-promised luxury. For those of us who can’t get a driver’s license, it’s the key to an unprecedented level of independence. Researchers at Waymo are intent on making sure that, when the first self-driving taxi arrives on your doorstep, it shouldn’t matter whether you can see or not: You should be able to hop in and take a ride.

Similarly, maps are much more than just a handy tool for those of us with visual impairments. In many cases, they’re the only option for finding your bearings – the difference between independence and codependence. Blind and sighted inventors alike have been pushing for better, more exact navigational tools for decades, and today the team at GOOD Maps has harnessed the power of lidar, data and and faster-than-ever processors to make sure that someone with no sight can get themselves within arm’s reach of exactly what they’re looking for.

Join product managers from Waymo, Waymap, Goodmaps and more to hear about the future of getting from point A to point B.

The next talking computer

Since the late 1980s, companies like Freedom Scientific and Humanware have laid the foundation for accessible computing, writing software and building devices that can convert visual information into sound or touch. Those devices were operating computers, rendering digital Braille and delivering audio books to readers long before there was an app for that.

Today, mainstream tech giants Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google are creating screen readers and assistive devices of their own, not to mention the thousands of third-party apps for navigation, sensory optimization, recognizing text and images and more. And with this new functionality native to operating systems, established assistive tech companies are evolving, too.

We’ll take a deep dive into what’s next for the “screen reader” – and how new tech from AI to AR, and headgear to haptics are shaking up interfaces and reshaping paradigms across our industry.

Over the course of two days, we’ll be hearing from the accessibility leaders at Apple, Microsoft, Google, Vispero, Humanware, Amazon and more.

Tech that doesn’t discriminate

Even the greatest new tech creates great new problems. And as AI swoops in to save the day, allowing blind and visually impaired people to overcome barriers in their work and social lives, AI can also introduce new biases that we never expected. When training our systems to recognize, categorize and interact with real people, how do we account for disability and a diverse range of functional needs? How do we make machines that don’t inherit our own cultural prejudices?

We’ll also be joined by some of the blindness and disability community’s greatest advocates: people like Lainey Feingold, Haben Girma and George Kerscher, who will take a hard look at access to information as a civil right, how far we’ve come and how far we have to go in the era of AI.

Sight Tech Global is December 2-3 – all-virtual and 100% free. All sponsorship proceeds benefit the Vista Center for the Blind. It’s not too late to sponsor – learn more here.

In the wake of insurtech unicorn Root’s IPO, it felt safe to say that the big transactions for the insurance technology startup space were done for the year.

After all, 2020 had been a big one for the broad category, with insurtech marketplaces raising lots, rental insurance startup Lemonade going public, Root itself debuting even more recently on the back of its automotive insurance business, a big round to help Hippo keep building its homeowners company, and more.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But yesterday brought with it even more news: Metromile, a startup competing in the auto insurance market, is going public via a blank-check company (SPAC), and Hippo raised a huge, unpriced round.

So let’s talk about why Metromile might be plying the public markets, and why Hippo may have have decided to pick up more cash. Hint: The reasons are related.

A market hungry for growth

The Lemonade IPO was a key moment for neo-insurance startups, a key part of the broader insurtech space. When the rental insurance provider went public, it helped set the tone for public exit valuations for companies of its type: fast-growing insurance companies with slick consumer brands, improving economics, a tech twist and stiff losses.

For the Roots and Metromiles and Hippos, it was an important moment.

So, when Lemonade raised its IPO range, and then traded sharply higher after its debut, it boded well for its private comps. Not that rental insurance and auto insurance or homeowners insurance are the same thing. They very most decidedly are not, but Lemonade’s IPO demonstrated that private investors were correct bet generally on the collection of startups, because when they reached IPO-scale, they had something that public investors wanted.

Amazon Web Services is currently having an outage, taking a chunk of the internet down with it.

Several AWS services were experiencing problems as of early Wednesday, according to its status page. That means any app, site or service that relies on AWS might also be down, too. (As I found out the hard way this morning when my Roomba refused to connect.)

Amazon says the issue is largely localized to North America. The company didn’t give a reason for the outage, only that it was experiencing increased error rates and that it was working on a resolution. The irony is that the outage is also affecting the company’s “ability to post updates to the Service Health Dashboard,” so not even Amazon is immune from its own downtime.

So far a number of companies that rely on AWS have tweeted out that they’re experiencing issues as a result, including Adobe and Roku. We’ll keep you updated as this outage continues.

News that Salesforce is interested in buying Slack, the popular workplace chat company, sent shares of the smaller firm sharply higher today.

Slack shares are up just under 25% at the moment, according to Yahoo Finance data. Slack is worth $36.95 per share as of the time of writing, valuing it at around $20.8 billion. The well-known former unicorn has been worth as little as $15.10 per share inside the last year, and worth as much as $40.07.

Inversely, shares of Salesforce are trading lower on the news, falling around 3.5% as of the time of writing; investors in the San Francisco-based SaaS pioneer were either unimpressed at the combination idea, or perhaps worried about the price that would be required to bring the 2019 IPO into their fold.

Why Salesforce, a massive software company with a strong position in the CRM market, and aspirations of becoming an even larger platform player, would want to buy Slack is not immediately clear though there are possible synergies. This includes the possibility of cross-selling the two companies products’ into each others customer bases, possible unlocking growth for both parties; Slack has wide marketshare inside of fast-growing startups, for example, while Salesforce’s products roost inside a host of mega-corps.

TechCrunch reached out to Salesforce, Slack, and Slack’s CEO for comment on the deal’s possibility. We’ll update this post with whatever we get.

While Salesforce bought Quip for $750 million in 2016, which gave it a kind of document sharing and collaboration, other than that, Salesforce Chatter has been the only social tool in the company’s arsenal. Buying Slack would give the CRM giant solid enterprise chat footing and likely a lot of synergy among customers and tooling.

But Slack has always been more than a mere chat client. It enables companies to embed workflows, and this would fit well in the Salesforce family of products, which spans sales, service, marketing and more. It would allow companies to work both inside and outside the Salesforce ecosystem, building smooth and integrated workflows. While it can theoretically do that now, if the two were combined, you can be sure the integrations would be much tighter.

Slack has come under withering fire from Microsoft in recent quarters, as the Redmond-based software giant poured resources into its competing Teams service. Teams challenges Slack’s chat tooling, and Zoom’s video features, and has seen huge customer growth in recent quarters.

Finding Slack a corporate home amongst the larger tech players could ensure that Microsoft doesn’t grind it under the bulk of its enterprise software sales leviathan. And Salesforce, a sometimes Microsoft ally, would not mind adding the faster-growing slack to its own expanding software incomes.

The question at this juncture comes down to price. Slack investors won’t want to sell for less than a good premium on the pre-pop per-share price now feels rather dated.

The holiday seasons is upon us and with that comes stress, anxiety, and the airing of grievances. And this year is worse. Instead of watching a yule log smolder in a warm hearth, we’re all stuck in our homes watching the world burn.

Instead of yelling into the void, let me suggest this interactive dumpster fire instead. The instructions are simple. Just email a note or picture and a contraption incinerates your asseveration. It’s cathartic, but takes a minute. About 20 minutes after emailing my issues, I’m still waiting to see it burn.

Do it as a family or with your cats. Roast Covid-19. Burn politics. Send a picture of your QAnon-loving uncle. The fire doesn’t care. Everything burns eventually.

Sure, we’re heading into a holiday weekend here in America, but that doesn’t mean that the good ship TechCrunch is going to slow down. We’re diving right back in next week with another installment in season two of Extra Crunch Live, our regular interview series with startup founders, venture capitalists, and other leaders from the technology community.

This series is for Extra Crunch members, so if you haven’t signed up you can hop on that train right here.

Next week I’m virtually sitting down with Jai Das, a well-known managing director at Sapphire Ventures.

Das as invested in companies like MuleSoft (sold for $6.5 billion), Alteryx (now public), Square (also public), Sumo Logic (yep, public) while at Sapphire, having previously worked corporate venture jobs at Intel Capital and Agilent Ventures. (Sapphire was itself originally SAP’s corporate venture capital arm, but it split off from its parent in 2011, rebranded, and kept on raising funds.)

Here are notes from the last episode of Extra Crunch Live with Bessemer’s Byron Deeter.

It’s going to be fun as there’s so much to talk about. I’m still bubbling up my question list, so to avoid giving the Sapphire PR team too much pre-discussion ammo let’s just say that corporate venture capital’s place in the 2020 boom is an interesting topic for both founders, and investors alike.

And I’ll want to press Das on the current market for software startups, where we are in the historical arc of SaaS multiples, the importance of API-led tech upstarts, where founders might look to build the next great enterprise startup, and if there are any new platforms bubbling up that could be a foundation for future founders to later leverage.

As this is an Extra Crunch Live, I’ll also work in a few questions from the audience (that means you, make sure you Extra Crunch subscription is live), to augment my own clipboard of notes.

This is going to be a good one. I’ll see you next Tuesday for the show.

Details

Below are links to add the event to your calendar and to save the Zoom link. We’ll share the YouTube link shortly before the discussion:

When you launch an application in the public cloud, you usually put everything on one provider, but what if you could choose the components based on cost and technology and have your database one place and your storage another?

That’s what Cast.ai says that it can provide, and today it announced a healthy $7.7 million seed round from TA Ventures, DFX, Florida Funders and other unnamed angels to keep building on that idea. The round closed in June.

Company CEO and co-founder Yuri Frayman says that they started the company with the idea that developers should be able to get the best of each of the public clouds without being locked in. They do this by creating Kubernetes clusters that are able to span multiple clouds.

“Cast does not require you to do anything except for launching your application. You don’t need to know  […] what cloud you are using [at any given time]. You don’t need to know anything except to identify the application, identify which [public] cloud providers you would like to use, the percentage of each [cloud provider’s] use and launch the application,” Frayman explained.

This means that you could use Amazon’s RDS database and Google’s ML engine, and the solution decides how to make that work based on your requirements and price. You set the policies when you are ready to launch and Cast will take care of distributing it for you in the location and providers that you desire, or that makes most sense for your application.

The company takes advantage of cloud native technologies, containerization and Kubernetes to break the proprietary barriers that exist between clouds, says company co-founder Laurent Gil. “We break these barriers of cloud providers so that an application does not need to sit in one place anymore. It can sit in several [providers] at the same time. And this is great for the Kubernetes application because they’re kind of designed with this [flexibility] in mind,” Gil said.

Developers use the policy engine to decide how much they want to control this process. They can simply set location and let Cast optimize the application across clouds automatically, or they can select at a granular level exactly the resources they want to use on which cloud. Regardless of how they do it, Cast will continually monitor the installation and optimize based on cost to give them the cheapest options available for their configuration.

The company currently has 25 employees with four new hires in the pipeline, and plans to double to 50 by the end of 2021. As they grow, the company is trying keep diversity and inclusion front and center in its hiring approach and they currently have women in charge of HR, marketing and sales at the company.

“We have very robust processes on the continuous education inside of our organization on diversity training. And a lot of us came from organizations where this was very visible and we took a lot of those processes [and lessons] and brought them here,” Frayman said.

Frayman has been involved with multiple startups including Cujo.ai, a consumer firewall startup that participated in TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in New York in 2016.