Year: 2020

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is perhaps one of the company’s most ambitious projects yet: Building a globe-spanning broadband wireless network to deliver affordable connectivity to underserved communities. Project Kuiper has made progress this year with a key FCC approval, and now it’s also created a prototype of a key piece of hardware that will help its future customers take advantage of the satellite network on the ground.

This is actually a big part of what will help make Project Kuiper a service that’s broadly accessible, and a development that puts the Amazon project in an industry-leading position with a unique advantage. The prototype developed by the team communicates on the Ka-band of the wireless spectrum, and is the smallest and lightest piece of hardware that can do that. It’s able to achieve speeds of up to 400 Mbps, and Amazon says that it’ll actually get better through future iterations.

For technical details on how this was accomplished and what it means for the final design, Amazon explains from a blog post describing the design process:

Our phased array antenna takes a different approach. Instead of placing antenna arrays adjacent to one another, we used tiny antenna element structures to overlay one over the other. This has never been accomplished in the Ka-band. The breakthrough allows us to reduce the size and weight of the entire terminal, while operating in a frequency that delivers higher bandwidth and better performance than other bands. Our design uses a combination of digital and analog components to electronically steer Ka-band beams toward satellites passing overhead.

The result is a single aperture phased array antenna that measures 12 inches in diameter, making it three times smaller and proportionately lighter than legacy antenna designs. This order of magnitude reduction in size will reduce production costs by an equal measure, allowing Amazon to offer customers a terminal that is more affordable and easier to install.

Image Credits: Amazon

The bottom line is that Amazon’s design for Kuiper can greatly reduce the cost and complexity of building the ground-based infrastructure that will be required in order to provide access to its network to end-users. It’s also low-latency, and Amazon has found that it can provide 4K streaming capabilities even during its testing with geostationary satellites today – which are as much as 50 times further out from where Project Kuiper satellites will eventually be positioned in low-Earth orbit.

Amazon isn’t yet sharing specific pricing information about what the terminal will eventually cost, beyond touting its affordability relative to existing solutions. I’ll be talking to Amazon SVP of Devices and Services Dave Limp at TC Sessions: Space today, and we’ll discuss the antenna along with everything else about the project.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

I’m on an F1 OPT and am about to incorporate a startup with my two American co-founders. What were the biggest immigration changes in 2020 affecting us?

—Ambitious in Albany

Dear Ambitious:

Congrats on creating your startup. The Electoral College has voted and Biden is scheduled to take office on January 20, 2021. It may take him a few months to undo many of the Trump immigration changes, so there are several things for you to consider.

2020 gave many of us whiplash with all the things that happened! We braced for the worst in April after President Trump tweeted that he would suspend immigration to the U.S. In the end, the executive proclamations he issued in April and June fell far short of that and immigration remains possible.

However, these bans remain in effect until at least the end of 2020. The proclamations placed moratoriums on the issuance of green cards by the U.S. Embassies and consulates abroad, as well as H-1B, H-2B, J-1 and L-1 work visas. The Department of State has expanded the list of exceptions to these bans so many people now qualify.

One of the current constraints affecting the most people is that many embassies and consulates remain closed or are operating at significantly reduced capacity. Given that, we are recommending to our clients who are already in the U.S. to avoid leaving by seeking Extensions of Status, Changes of Status and Adjustments of Status with USCIS stateside.

The H-1B may be another promising visa option for your future as a founder. There are two ways to do it: “cap-subject” (the annual spring lottery) and “cap-exempt” (anytime of year). At a minimum, it’s easy for your startup to register you for the upcoming H-1B lottery in March 2021. It only costs $10 to register an H-1B candidate. If you’re selected, your startup could file an H-1B petition on your behalf. If you are not selected, your startup can register you again in 2022.

Pinterest has committed to adopting the recommendations from its special committee of the Board of Directors, the company wrote in a blog post today. The committee formed earlier this year in June, shortly after two former employees, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, went public with their allegations of racial and gender discrimination while working at Pinterest.

The committee, which retained law firm WilmerHale to conduct a workplace review, spoke with more than 350 current and former employees to make its recommendations geared toward improving diversity, equity and inclusion at Pinterest. Here are a few of those recommendations:

• mandatory unconscious bias training for every employee, including managers and executives
• offer additional trainings on inclusivity and unconscious bias
• include “diverse employees” in interview panels with job candidates
• reward employees for their efforts to support and promote DEI
• publish a diversity report twice a year for at least two years; after two years, publish the report annually
• establish criteria for promotion eligibility
• enhance Pinterest’s harassment and discrimination policy
• create a centralized workplace investigations team to ensure consistent and fair outcomes

You can see all of the recommendations here. Pinterest, in a statement to TechCrunch, said it’s committed to making those changes.

“We value our employees and know it’s our responsibility to build a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment for everyone at Pinterest,” a Pinterest spokesperson said. “Because we understand the urgency for change, we have taken actions over the past months to ensure everyone at Pinterest feels safe, welcomed and championed and believe we’re on a path to ensuring a culture where all employees feel included and supported.”

In a note to employees, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said that everyone at the company will have an opportunity to discuss the recommendations and ask questions later this week. Silberman also said he felt encouraged that many of the suggestions “mirror efforts we already have underway to build a culture where all employees feel included and supported.”

Earlier this week, Pinterest settled a gender discrimination lawsuit with former COO Francoise Brougher for $22.5 million. But that hefty payout highlighted some of the inequities in tech. Brougher filed her lawsuit in August, after Ozoma and Banks went public with their allegations. While Brougher walked away with millions, Ozoma and Banks received less than one year’s worth of severance.

“So we, like in many, many, many other cases, Black women put ourselves on the line, shared absolutely everything that happened to us, then laid the groundwork for someone else to swoop in and collect ‘progress,’ ” Ozoma previously told TechCrunch. “No progress has been made here because no rights have been made with people who harm has been done to.”

A few weeks after announcing that iOS support was on the way, Google’s cloud gaming service now supports the iPhone and iPad. As expected, the company is using a web app to access the service. Google also says that you need to update to iOS 14.3, the latest iOS update that was released earlier this week.

If you want to try it out with a free or paid Stadia account, you can head over to stadia.google.com from your iOS device. Log in to your Google account, add a shortcut to your home screen and open the web app.

After that, you can launch a game and start playing. Most games will require a gamepad, so you might want to pair a gamepad with your iPhone or iPad as well.

Apple’s iOS supports Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers using Bluetooth as well as controllers specifically designed for iOS. You can also play with the Stadia controller, but it’s optional. If you just want to check your inventory quickly, Stadia on iOS also supports touch controls.

Stadia works a bit like a console that runs in the cloud. You have to buy games for the platform specifically and you can then stream them from a data center near you. Recent additions include Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

While you don’t have to pay an additional subscription to play those games, you can optionally become a Stadia Pro subscribers. In addition to games you bought on the platform, it lets you access a library of games and it unlocks 4K video. Stadia Pro costs $9.99 per month.

In other Stadia news, earlier this week, Ubisoft announced that you could subscribe to the company’s unlimited subscription service Ubisoft+ and access games from Stadia. For now, it’s only available as a beta in the U.S.

Mike Folgner has had his share of success building video editing tools, having sold Jumpcut.com to Yahoo and SnappyTV to Twitter. But as he explained in a new Medium post, he still sees “unfinished business” in the video industry.

“Today, most major productivity software categories have made the leap from desktop software to the web,” Folgner wrote. “Despite significant progress in web technology, professional video tools have not made this leap. With WebGL, WASM, and other advancements this will change. We can now build performant, feature rich applications integrated with the fabric of the web.”

To create full-featured video editing software that works in the browser, Folgner has teamed up with Ryan Cunningham (his Jumpcut and SnappyTV co-founder) and Ashot Petrosian (who was a lead engineer at Jumpcut) to found a new startup called Tensil, which is currently taking signups for anyone who wants to test the alpha version of its first product Scenery. (And they’ve hired Chris Martin as their first key engineer.)

Tensil has raised $3.89 million in funding led by Freestyle VC, with participation from Precursor Ventures, Wireframe Ventures, Transmedia Capital, Uphonest Capital, Rembrandt Venture Partners, Kayvon Beykpour, Kevin Weil, Elizabeth Weil, Russ Fradin, Ross Walker, Joe Bernstein, Keith Coleman, David Pidwell, Ryan Peirce and Don Ryan.

Image Credits: Tensil

Since they’re still developing and testing the product, I didn’t get a chance to try Scenery for myself, but I got on a call with Folgner and Petrosian to discuss their plans.

“If you stop and think about what should a video editor be today, you won’t build the same tool that was built in the 1970s,” Petrosian told me.

For example, he said that rather than relying on the standard timeline view of existing video editors, Scenery will present a two-dimensional canvas, allowing editors to think “more like a graphic designer.”

More broadly, Petrosian said Scenery is meant to better reflect current video production and editing needs, helping teams produce videos more quickly and collaboratively. In fact, he suggested that describing Scenery as merely an editor is selling it short — it’s closer to “a video production system.”

Folgner added that by moving the process into the browser, Scenery can help non-editors get involved in the process, similar to the way that Figma brought new team members into the design process.

“We are really excited about rethinking video editing as a team sport,” he said.

After reaching a previous all-time high on November 30th, 2020 and December 1st, 2020, bitcoin is now trading well above $20,000 and has surpassed its previous peak price.

Bitcoin’s value has rapidly increased over the past two months. According to CoinMarketCap, you could buy one bitcoin for $11,500 on October 16th.

As I’m writing this post, you can buy one bitcoin for $20,775.72 — it represents a 7.27% increase compared to yesterday’s price. It is now priced well over $20,000 on all major exchanges.

You might remember the bitcoin frenzy from 2017. At the time, Bitcoin nearly reached $20,000 and crashed shortly after. As always, the fact that bitcoin has been going up doesn’t mean that it’ll go up in the future.

This time, the rally seems a bit different as there’s not as much hype around bitcoin. As we’re entering a long economic crisis, some institutional investors are looking for alternative assets — and bitcoin is one of them. Some people could choose to hold their crypto assets for a longer time.

Still, there are a lot of new bitcoin investors who purchased just a fraction of a bitcoin on consumer fintech apps, such as Square’s Cash App, Robinhood and Revolut. Let’s see how the market evolves in the coming months.

Image Credits: CoinMarketCap

It’s been more than two years since the Pentagon announced its $10 billion, decade long JEDI cloud contract, which was supposed to provide a pathway to technological modernization for U.S. armed forces. While Microsoft was awarded the contract in October 2019, Amazon went to court to protest that decision, and it has been in legal limbo ever since.

Yesterday marked another twist in this government procurement saga when Amazon released its latest legal volley, asking a judge to set aside the decision to select Microsoft. Its arguments are similar to ones it has made before, but this time takes aim at the Pentagon’s reevaluation process, which after reviewing the contract and selection process, still found in a decision released this past September that Microsoft had won.

Amazon believes that reevaluation was highly flawed, and subject to undue influence, bias and pressure from the president. Based on this, Amazon has asked the court to set aside the award to Microsoft .

The JEDI reevaluations and re-award decision have fallen victim to an Administration that suppresses the good-faith analysis and reasoning of career officials for political reasons — ultimately to the detriment of national security and the efficient and lawful use of taxpayer dollars. DoD has demonstrated again that it has not executed this procurement objectively and in good faith. This re-award should be set aside.

As you might imagine, Frank X. Shaw, corporate vice president for communications at Microsoft does not agree, believing his company won on merit and by providing the best price.

“As the losing bidder, Amazon was informed of our pricing and they realized they’d originally bid too high. They then amended aspects of their bid to achieve a lower price. However, when looking at all the criteria together, the career procurement officials at the DoD decided that given the superior technical advantages and overall value, we continued to offer the best solution,” Shaw said in a statement shared with TechCrunch.

As for Amazon, a spokesperson told TechCrunch, “We are simply seeking a fair and objective review by the court, regarding the technical errors, bias and political interference that blatantly impacted this contract award.”

And so it goes.

The Pentagon announced it was putting out a bid for a $10 billion, decade long contract in 2018, dubbing it JEDI, short for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. The procurement process has been mired in controversy from the start, and the size and scope of the deal has attracted widespread attention much more than your typical government contract. It brought with it claims of bias, particularly by Oracle, that the bidding process was designed to favor Amazon.

We are more than two years beyond the original announcement. We are more than year beyond the original award to Microsoft, and it still remains stuck in a court battle with two major tech companies continuing to snipe at one another. With neither likely to give in, it will be up to the court to decide the final outcome, and perhaps end this saga once and for all.

Note: The DoD did not respond to our request for comment. Should that change, we will update the story.

The budding venture studio being built inside M13 has signed PepsiCo as its first new corporate partner.

Through the deal, PepsiCo has agreed to bankroll the first founder-in-residence program from the New York and Los Angeles-based firm, which poached former Techstars Los Angeles managing director Anna Barber to lead its new initiative.

The initial M13 Launchpad program will leverage PepsiCo executives and advisors to take entrepreneurs-in-residence on a 12-week long program in ideating and launching a health and wellness-focused startup.

“Today there is a wealth of data available to consumers about their own health, and the movement toward home testing has put ownership over health data more firmly in their hands. This creates exciting opportunities for people to use nutrition even more effectively as a source of consistent, overall health and wellness,” Barber wrote in an email. “This spring, we will be looking at everything from snacks, meal replacement foods, drinks and supplements to software platforms for optimizing nutrition, and connected devices for collecting and managing data.”

It’s a deal that compliments work M13 is already doing alongside corporate partners like Procter & Gamble Ventures, which was instrumental in developing companies like include the premium beauty tech OPTE, Kindra’s menopause products and Bodewell for sensitive skin care.

Independently, the Launchpad program was able to build up Rae, which sells affordable women’s wellness products available at Target, Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters.

Under the 12 week virtual Launchpad program, entrepreneurs will receive a $10,000 monthly stipend and enough cash for testing product market fit when they graduate. Upon leaving the program, each company will also receive a small seed round to ensure that they can continue to grow the business, M13 said.

As businesses face a complex and evolving privacy landscape, a new tool called Privacy Grader can help them make sure they’re doing the right things.

The tool was created by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, as part of their new data compliance and security startup Ketch. (Chavez and Vaidya also founded the super{set} startup studio; Ketch is part of the super{set} portfolio.)

“The truth of the matter is that we’ve cared a lot about these issues for a long time,” Chavez said. “What’s different today, in 2020, versus say a decade ago … is that it’s become an existential imperative for businesses.”

In order to use Privacy Grader, you need to have an authenticated email address tied to the website that you want analyzed — so you shouldn’t be able to see your competitors’ grades.

Once your request and email address are validated, Vaidya said you should get an analysis back in under 24 hours, which will score your site across more than 50 different factors, including trackers, storage of personal data and overall compliance with GDPR, CCPA and other regulations.

For example, Chavez and Vaidya provided me with an analysis of TechCrunch, where we scored 56% overall (Chavez assured me that this “absolutely on par with what we’re seeing out there”). The report outlined the privacy experience for users in different countries and pointed to areas where we can do better.

Chavez emphasized that this isn’t meant to be the end of a company’s privacy discussion, but rather a high-level view that helps the product and legal teams know where to focus their attention.

“Think of the scores … as an X-ray, not an MRI,” he said. “They’re indicative, not conclusive, but they shed light across the key dimensions.”

Presumably, Chavez and Vaidya are hoping companies that use Privacy Grader will turning to Ketch’s paid products for help, but Vaidya said they’ll continue improving the free service and treat it as a “first class citizen product.”

Companies that have already used Privacy Grader include Patreon, The Home Depot and Chubbies. For example, Patreon’s deputy legal counsel Priya Sanger said that the service “helped us identify improved data governance in order to effectively execute our marketing and sales strategy.”

The super popular chat app Discord is getting a much-requested feature starting today: mobile screen sharing.

As the name suggests, mobile screen sharing lets users capture and broadcast everything on their phone’s display and stream it to a group of friends. The company tells me they’ve been particularly focused on making it work well when there’s a lot of onscreen motion, allowing for things like game streaming or remote YouTube/TikTok viewing parties with high frame rates and minimal latency.

Streaming your mobile device’s display means sharing everything that floats across your phone’s screen – so if you don’t want random texts potentially popping up midstream, you’ll want to turn on your phone’s Do Not Disturb mode.

Discord first picked up screen sharing abilities in 2017, rolling it out alongside video chat. Since then, sharing your screen has required a desktop or laptop; this update brings iOS and Android devices into the mix. Mobile screen share streams can be broadcast to up to 50 viewers simultaneously, with no cap on how many users can be screen sharing in the same channel.

The feature should start rolling out today, but don’t be surprised if you don’t see it immediately; it’s going out in waves, so some will get it sooner than others. If the rollout goes as planned, all users should have it by end of day Thursday.