Year: 2020

Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract semiconductor maker, has stopped taking new orders from Huawei Technologies, one of its largest customers, according to the Nikkei Asian Review. The report said the decision was made to comply with new United States export controls, announced last Friday, that are meant to make it more difficult for Huawei to obtain chips produced using U.S. technology, including manufacturing equipment.

Orders taken before the ban or already in production will not be affected, if they can ship before September 14. Huawei, the world’s largest telecom equipment maker, is TSMC’s second-biggest customer after Apple. TSMC makes many of the advanced chips used by Huawei, including in its smartphones.

The U.S. Commerce Department released its new orders on Friday, which specifically target Huawei by making it harder for the company to create chips using U.S. software and technology, even in foundries located abroad.

On the same day as the Commerce Department’s announcement, TSMC said that it is opening a new $12 billion advanced chip foundry in Arizona with support from the state and the U.S. federal government. Once opened, the plant will allow more of TSMC’s American clients to fabricate their chips domestically.

TSMC’s announcement came after the Wall Street Journal reported that White House officials were in discussions with TSMC and Intel to build foundries in the U.S. in order to reduce reliance on factories in Asia and the international supply chain.

In an email, a TSMC representative told TechCrunch that the company does not disclose customers’ order details. She added that TSMC complies with laws and applicable regulations, and is “following the U.S. export rule change closely” and “working closely with outside counsels to conduct legal analysis and ensure a comprehensive examination and interpretation of these rules.”

This is the latest restriction the U.S. government has leveled against Huawei citing national security concerns. Along with ZTE, Huawei was identified as a potential threat to security by the House Intelligence Committee in 2012.

The two companies have denied the charges, but under the Trump administration, the U.S government’s efforts to stop both from doing business with U.S. companies has intensified. According to the Nikkei Asian Review report, Huawei anticipated the Commerce Department’s new orders and has been building a year’s worth inventory of chips needed for its telecom equipment.

TechCrunch has contacted Huawei for comment.

SoftBank Group said today that Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba Group, will step down from its board after serving as a director for 13 years. Ma’s resignation will be effective on June 25, the date of SoftBank Group’s annual shareholder meeting.

The company did not give a reason for the resignation, but over the past year, Ma has been pulling back from business roles to focus on philanthropy. Last September, he resigned as Alibaba’s chairman, and is also expected to step down from its board at its annual general shareholder’s meeting this year.

Ma has a long business relationship with Softbank Group chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son. SoftBank was one of Alibaba’s first major backers, investing a reported $20 million in 2000, one year after the e-commerce company was founded. As of a February 2020 SEC filing, it owned about 25.1% of Alibaba shares. Its stake in Alibaba is currently worth more than $100 billion, making it SoftBank Group’s most valuable investment.

SoftBank Group’s announcements were made a few hours before it is scheduled to release a dour first quarter earnings report. The company said last month it expects its $100 billion Vision Fund to lose about $16.5 billion, due largely to the near collapse of WeWork, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on other portfolio companies, including Uber and Oyo. It is also expected to post an annual operating loss of $12.5 billion.

To lower debt and increase its cash reserves, SoftBank Group said in March that it is selling or monetizing $41 billion of its assets and buying back $4.7 billion of its shares.

Ma is the only person out of SoftBank Group’s current 11 directors who is leaving. The company also said it nominated three new board directors for election at the shareholders meeting: SoftBank Group chief financial officer Yoshimitsu Goto; Cadence Design Systems chief executive Lip-Bu Tan; and Waseda Business School professor Yuko Kawamoto.

Huawei is facing an uphill challenge in the overseas market as its upcoming devices lack the full set of Google apps and services. That leaves ample room for its Chinese rivals to chase after foreign consumers.

That includes Oppo, the sister brand of Vivo under Dongguan-based electronics holding company BBK. In an announcement on Monday, the Chinese firm announced a partnership with Vodafone to bring its smartphones to the mobile carrier’s European markets. The deal kicks off in May and will sell Oppo’s portfolio of advanced 5G handsets as well as value-for-money models into the U.K, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Turkey.

While Vodafone pulled Huawei phones from its U.K. 5G network last year following the U.S. export ban that stripped Huawei models of certain Android services, the British operator can now tap Oppo’s wide range of mobile products in a heated race to sign up 5G customers. The partners will jointly explore online sales channels as many parts of Europe’s physical premises remain closed due to the COVID-19.

Oppo, currently the second-largest smartphone vendor in its home country after Huawei, has seen a spike in sales across Europe since entering the market in mid-2018. The company was one of the first to launch commercially available 5G phones in Europe last year and now ranks fifth on the continent.

“Oppo has a product range that can hit many of the same segments as Huawei, enabling it to gain market share at the expense of Huawei,” Peter Richardson, research director at Counterpoint Research, explained to TechCrunch. “Oppo has always used quite a European flavour in its product design. This extends to things like colour choice, packaging, and advertising materials. This makes it acceptable to European consumers.”

Interestingly, Richardson pointed out that Oppo, which has a less “Chinese sounding” name than its domestic rivals Xiaomi and Huawei, will help it circumvent some of the “negative media surrounding China just now – first Huawei’s difficulties around security threats and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Huawei is facing an uphill challenge in the overseas market as its upcoming devices lack the full set of Google apps and services. That leaves ample room for its Chinese rivals to chase after foreign consumers.

That includes Oppo, the sister brand of Vivo under Dongguan-based electronics holding company BBK. In an announcement on Monday, the Chinese firm announced a partnership with Vodafone to bring its smartphones to the mobile carrier’s European markets. The deal kicks off in May and will sell Oppo’s portfolio of advanced 5G handsets as well as value-for-money models into the U.K, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Turkey.

While Vodafone pulled Huawei phones from its U.K. 5G network last year following the U.S. export ban that stripped Huawei models of certain Android services, the British operator can now tap Oppo’s wide range of mobile products in a heated race to sign up 5G customers. The partners will jointly explore online sales channels as many parts of Europe’s physical premises remain closed due to the COVID-19.

Oppo, currently the second-largest smartphone vendor in its home country after Huawei, has seen a spike in sales across Europe since entering the market in mid-2018. The company was one of the first to launch commercially available 5G phones in Europe last year and now ranks fifth on the continent.

“Oppo has a product range that can hit many of the same segments as Huawei, enabling it to gain market share at the expense of Huawei,” Peter Richardson, research director at Counterpoint Research, explained to TechCrunch. “Oppo has always used quite a European flavour in its product design. This extends to things like colour choice, packaging, and advertising materials. This makes it acceptable to European consumers.”

Interestingly, Richardson pointed out that Oppo, which has a less “Chinese sounding” name than its domestic rivals Xiaomi and Huawei, will help it circumvent some of the “negative media surrounding China just now – first Huawei’s difficulties around security threats and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a wave of Chinese companies with manufacturing operations to produce virus-fighting equipment: Shenzhen-based electric vehicle giant BYD quickly moved to launch what it claims to be the world’s largest mask plant; Hangzhou-based voice intelligence startup Rokid is making thermal imaging glasses targeted at the US market; and many more.

The latest of such efforts comes from Huami, the NASDAQ-listed wearables startup that makes Xiaomi’s Mi Bands and sells its own fitness tracking watches under the Amazfit brand in more than 70 countries. In a phone interview with TechCrunch, the firm said it is developing a see-through plastic mask with built-in ultraviolet lights that can disinfect filters within 10 minutes when connected to a power supply through a USB port.

The Aeri concept comes with built-in ultraviolet lights that can disinfect filters within 10 minutes when connected to a power supply through a USB port. 

Called Aeri, the mask uses removable filters that are on par with N95 filtration capacity. If the concept materializes, each filter could last up to a month and a half, significantly longer than the average life of surgical masks and N95 respirators. The modular design allows for customized accessories such as a fan for breathable comfort, hence the mask’s name Aeri, a homophone of “airy”.

Aeri started from the premise that wearing masks could thwart the increasingly common adoption of facial recognition. That said, imaging companies have been working on biometric upgrades to allow analyses of other facial features such as irises or the tip of noses.

Aeri might still have a market appeal though, argued Pengtao Yu, vice president of industrial design at Huami. “Whether people need to unlock their phones or not, they want to see each other’s faces at social occasions,” said Yu, the California-based Chinese designer who had served clients including Nest Labs, Roku, GoPro and Huawei prior to joining Huami.

Huami’s U.S. operation, which focuses on research and development, opened in 2014 and now counts a dozen of employees.

Many companies turning to pandemic-fighting manufacturing have taken a hit from their core business, but Huami has managed to stay afloat. Its Q1 revenue was up 36% year-over-year to hit $154 million, although net income decreased to $2.7 million from $10.6 million. Its stocks have been declining, however, sliding from a high point of $16 in January to around $10 in mid-May.

Huami is in the process of prototyping the Aeri masks. In Shenzhen, which houses the wearables company’s headquarters, the development cycle for hardware products — from ideation to market rollout — takes as short as 6-12 months thanks to the city’s rich supply chain resources, said Yu.

Huami hasn’t priced Aeri at this early stage, but Yu admitted that the masks are targeting the “mass consumer market” around the world, not only for protection against viruses but also everyday air pollution, rather than appealing to medical workers. Given Huami’s history of making wearables at thin margins, it won’t be surprising that Aeri will be competitively priced.

The Aeri project is part of Huami’s pivot to enter the general health sector beyond pure fitness monitoring. The company has recently teamed up with a laboratory led by Dr. Zhong Nanshan, the public face of China’s fight against COVID-19, to track respiratory diseases using wearables. It’s also in talks with the German public health authority to collaborate on a smartwatch-powered virus monitoring app, the company told TechCrunch.

In mid-March, Apple closed all of its stores outside of China “until further notice.” It was a sweeping — but necessary — move for a world facing down a growing pandemic. In a statement issued today until the title, “To our Customers,” Retail SVP Deirdre O’Brien offered insight into the company’s plans to reopen locations.

Nearly 100 stores have already resumed services, according to O’Brien — though the famously open retail spaces are taking on a new look in the face of the highly contagious novel coronavirus. “In every store, we’re focused on limiting occupancy and giving everybody lots of room, and renewing our focus on one‑on‑one, personalized service at the Genius Bar and throughout the store,” she writes.

A spokesperson for the company adds, “Next week we’ll continue our very gradual and thoughtful reopening of US stores, adding more than 25 locations in seven states. While we know many customers are eager for their local store to reopen, our commitment is to reopen our stores when we are confident the environment is safe. We miss our customers and look forward to seeing them again soon.”

As seen in the above image, face covers will be required for both employees and customers alike — already a legal requirement in many locales. More unusual for many retail establishments is the addition of temperature checks now conducted at the store’s entrance, coupled with posted health questions. Apple has also instituted deeper cleaning on all surfaces, including display products.

That last point is an important one, given how much of the company’s store layout revolves around hands-on products. Curb-side pick and drop off have been added, as well, for those who understandably would like to avoid the in-person experience.

As for when each location reopens, Apple says it’s monitoring health trends and local/national guidance to determine the timeframe. You can check your local store’s status here. And as the conversation of secondary waves begin to become a reality in many areas, O’Brien says the company will close stores down again, if necessary. “These are not decisions we rush into,” she writes, “and a store opening in no way means that we won’t take the preventative step of closing it again should local conditions warrant.”

I’m sure you’ve experienced it too. Some kind of discussion — perhaps a dispute, perhaps just a friendly exchange of ideas — arises online. People regurgitate what they know, or what they think they know. A few admirable souls even include links to sources. Those people tend to be more correct —

— unless their citation is a link to a video longer than a couple of minutes … in which case they are, almost invariably, completely wrong, and often far more wrong than even the wrongest of the people who cited nothing at all.

There’s no intrinsic reason for this. Video is as good a medium as any for supporting a viewpoint. Longer videos should if anything provide better material support. So why are such online citations always, almost without exception, made of ridiculously brittle clay?

Please note that I’m referring to discussions which involve some objective truth. De gustibus non est disputandum and all that, and videos are often one of the best ways to support subjective opinion. (“Honest Trailers” might be my favorite YouTube series ever.) And a sixty-second clip to illustrate a particular concrete point? Often easily worth a thousand words.

But when you’re linked to something ten minutes longer or more, especially with an exhortation to “watch the whole thing!”, you already know you’re entering the land of illogic and unreason.

Is this because videos are a “hot” medium, connected straight(er) to our limbic system, and therefore unusually well suited to covering up half-truths and specious arguments? Are people instinctively more inclined to give the benefit of any doubt to an impassioned or confident person or voice, compared the benefit of the doubt, compared to the written word?

Or is this a correlation-not-causation thing? Is someone who was willing to sit through a long video, almost by definition, someone who’s already internalized its arguments rather than think critically about them? And/or, someone who favors information absorption via long videos because they have a relatively low level of written literacy, and therefore have limited critical thinking skills full stop?

Or do people who link to long videos know that essentially no one has enough time and interest to actually wade their way through them? Are they just using their “citation” as a bad-faith smokescreen to pretend that they’re serious thinkers who have done their research? That strikes me as extremely plausible, a lot of the time. Some of the watch-this-half-hour-video people seem to be operating in good faith, though, just … misguided.

It’s not an inherent law of the universe that if you have to cite a 30-minute video, it means you don’t actually have any cogent arguments. But it does seem to be a law of the Internet. Perhaps that’s for the best, though; it means when the deepfakes arrive en masse, we — or, at least, the critical thinkers among us — will be suspicious already. Let’s hope automatic skepticism of videos spreads before then.

Everyone is living a different pandemic right now. Your relationship with shelter-in-place mandates and social distancing can look wildly different depending on your profession, age, health and, often, privilege. It’s why a week of monotony for some of us might mean a week of madness for others. The best we can do, as exhaustion and Zoom fatigue sets in, is try to be patient, kind and thoughtful.

That’s why this week we are showcasing a number of different tech initiatives trying to tackle the stresses of specific groups, from students to nurses. Let’s get into it.

Help for interns. Major League Hacking, an edtech company that focuses on engineers, is partnering with Github to launch a summer program that is an alternative to internships. Students will spend 12 weeks working on open source projects, and get feedback from professional engineers. The students will be paid $1,000 per month.

Healthcare worker family support. Juni Learning, an online tutoring startup, launched a new initiative to support struggling families of healthcare workers. The platform is giving away $150,000 in credits for its Juni Team product. The Juni Team connects students to small groups with a live instructor to work on STEM projects. “We are hopeful that the Team Sessions will allow Juni to be able to support a greater number of students who may not necessarily need 1:1 instruction, but rather, just crave being back in a structured learning environment with new or existing friends,” the CEO Vivian Shen said in a Medium post.

Health-friendly snorkels. Doctors at hospitals all around the country teamed up to work with Google project engineers and academics from Columbia, MIT, Harvard and more to make snorkel masks into protective PPE gear for doctors. The masks are not meant to replace FDA-approved N95s, but instead can take the place of disposable N95s. Researchers took snorkels, printed breathing filters using 3-D technology and are giving the washable and reusable product to healthcare workers.

A free social media manager. Unemployment in 2020 is rivaling the Great Depression, leaving over 30 million Americans without work. That’s why SalesLoop is giving its platform, which manages social media platforms on LinkedIn, Twitter, and e-mail, for free to job seekers for three months. “The aim here is to help people who want to grow their network and be proactive about reaching out to potential hiring managers, to do so for free. Normally, our biggest customer base are recruiters – so this is sort of the reverse effect that we’re seeing now,” said John Fennessy, a director at the company.

On-demand volunteers. Mon Ami is collaborating with the city of San Francisco and Los Angeles to connect thousands of available volunteers free to do critical errands with people in need, from seniors living alone to at-risk adults and children. The volunteer management platform is backed by Cowboy Ventures, and traditionally connected college students with the elderly. During COVID-19, Mon Ami has set up volunteers one-on-one with people in need, and serves as a central hub to help cities, NGOs target more seamlessly.

Firefly tries to help. Ridesharing advertising company Firefly is providing an in-car plastic protective sheet-film to its drivers at no cost to help reduce the risk of COVID-19 exposure. The initiative is starting in San Francisco and is aimed to help independent rideshare drivers that drive for a ride-hailing company like Uber or Lyft.

Sound on. Shure, a Chicago-based headphone startup, has donated $79,000 worth of earphones to Chicago Public Schools to support students and teachers with online learning.

Thank you notes for healthcare workers. Depending on where you live, when 7 p.m. rolls around your street might be filled with cheers in solitude with your local healthcare workers. But, for those workers on shift, the cheers might be muffled from the sheer stress happening within hospitals. 6FTCloser lets anybody send a quick, personalized video at no cost to frontline workers, for them to watch on their time. The platform was founded mid-April and over 1,000 frontline workers in 40 states across America and more than nine countries have received personalized videos thanks to this service.

Headspace for a year. Unemployed Americans are eligible for a year of Headspace, a digital meditation service. The mobile app startup also offered its meditation content to any and all frontline workers. “While meditation and mindfulness can’t change our circumstances in life, it can help us change our perspective on those circumstances. And, now more than ever, that’s an incredibly powerful skill to learn,” said Rich Pierson, the CEO of Headspace, in a release.

Honorable mention. Where to shop that isn’t Amazon, Target or Walmart? A few of us on the TechCrunch team listed out a couple options to support local businesses versus big corporations. We hope you take our suggestions into consideration!

E-commerce is taking off faster than ever. In the last couple of weeks, my Twitter timeline has been filled with operators gushing about how the weekends seem like Black Friday, even for non-essential commodities. Change is already here.

Looking at the above graph in this Tweet from Shopify CTO Jean-Michel Lemieux — and the passing, contextless mention of “Offline2Online” — we got curious.

Beyond just the anecdotal evidence, we looked for signs that tell us e-commerce is being adopted at a faster pace. One way to ascertain that is to look at the historical data of how Shopify has been onboarding merchants for the last two years on a monthly basis, and compare that with what happened this year in Q1.

All of these data points come from PipeCandy’s own data platform that tracks close to 750K+ Shopify merchants with historical data for each:

New domains using Shopify each month

While 2020 started on a faster clip than 2018 and 2019, February and March have seen nothing short of jaw-dropping growth in merchant numbers for Shopify. In those two months alone, Shopify seems to have onboarded more merchants than in the whole of 2018.

The softening you see in April is a result of the lag in the way our systems validate and confirm the data and not a slowdown in Shopify per se. The e-commerce embrace is real.