Year: 2020

As smartphone sales began to plateau and slow over the past couple of years, many device makers arrived at the same conclusion: people want cheaper phones. It’s clear why companies like Apple and Samsung took the message to heart, as the smartphone market downturn appeared to coincide with the standardization of $1,000 premium devices.

While Motorola is undoubtedly best know for its budget devices these days, the company is using the opportunity to take things in an entirely different direction. The Edge+ finds the company entering true premium territory with the arrival of its first $1,000 device. It’s an even more dramatic move than OnePlus’s recent release of the $899 8 Pro.

A mainstay in the budget and mid-tier, the Motorola name doesn’t exactly conjure images of premium products. The Lenovo-owned smartphone maker’s ventures in pricier models have tended more toward the gimmicky — or, at very least niche — with the warmly received modular Moto Z and the largely panned foldable Razr reboot.

The Edge+ is a more earnest approach to premium. The selling points are the camera, display and 5G — pretty standard fare these days in the world of premium handsets. For the first time in recent memory, Motorola is positioning itself to go head-to-head with the Samsungs and Apples of the world. 

Okay, so specs. There’s a 6.7-inch display with a 21:9 aspect ratio and 90Hz refresh rate. It’s curved on the sides — similar to what Samsung’s been offering for a while now. And like Samsung, the company is using that extra narrow real estate to offer up things like notifications, call alerts, alarms and battery status. Basically stuff to offer a quick view without having to pick up the phones.

There’s a flagship-level Snapdragon 865 inside, coupled with a healthy 12GB of memory. Oh, and there’s 5G here, too, with access to both mmWave and sub-6GHz  bands. The company is also touting the quality of its speakers — one of the most overlooked aspects of smartphone hardware. I haven’t actually tried them out — or seen the phone in person yet. Social distancing and all that.

There are three rear facing camera, including a massive 108-megapixel main, which lets in a lot of light, an eight-megapixel telephoto and 16-megapixel ultra-wide angle. There’s no devoted macro camera, unlike other recent Motorola models, but the 16-megapixel should be able to do some close up shots.

The Edge+ arrives May 14 as a Verizon exclusive (something Motorola has, unfortunately, done many times before) in the States and on a bunch more carriers in Canada. It will arrive in Europe in May, and other market, including India and Latin America at a latter date.

A lower-tired Edge will be available with a downgraded processor and camera array, but the same display. That’s coming to Europe, Latin America and the Asia Pacific region, with U.S. availability arriving later. 

Google Meet, like all video chat products, is seeing rapid growth in user numbers right now, so it’s no surprise that Google is trying to capitalize on this and quickly iterating on its product. Today, it is officially launching a set of new features that include a more Zoom-like tiled layout, a low-light mode for when you have to make calls at night, and the ability to present a single Chrome tab instead of a specific window or your entire screen. Soon, Meet will also get built-in noise cancellation so nobody will hear your dog bark in the background.

If all of this sounds a bit familiar, it’s probably because G Suite exec Javier Soltero already talked to Reuters about these features last week. Google PR is usually pretty straightforward, but in this case, it moved in mysterious ways. Today, though, these features are actually starting to roll out to users, a Google spokesperson told me, and today’s announcement does actually provide more details about each of these features.

For the most part, what’s being announced here is obvious. The tiled layout allows web users to see up to 16 participants at once. Previously, that number was limited to four and Google promises it will offer additional layouts for larger meetings and better presentation layouts, as well as support for more devices in the future.

For the most part having this many people stare at me from my screen doesn’t seem necessary (and more likely to induce stress than anything else), but the ability to present a single Chrome tab is surely a welcome new feature for many. But what’s probably just as important is that this means you can share higher-quality video content from these tabs than before.

If you often take meetings in the dark, low-light mode uses AI to brighten up your video. Unlike some of the other features, this one is coming to mobile first and will come to web users in the future.

Personally, I’m mostly excited about the new noise cancellation feature. Typically, noise cancelation works best for noises that repeat and are predictable. Think about the constant drone of an airplane or your neighbor’s old lawnmower. But Google says Meet can now go beyond this and also cancel out barking dogs and your noise keystrokes. That’s increasingly become table stakes, with even Discord offering similar capabilities and Nvidia RTX Voice now making this available in a slew of applications for users of its high-end graphics cards, but it’s nice to see this as a built-in feature for Meet now.

This feature will only roll out in the coming weeks and will initially be available to G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Enterprise for Education users on the web, with mobile support coming later.

Meet Libeo, a French startup that just raised a $4.4 million (€4 million) funding round led by LocalGlobe with Breega and various business angels also participating. The company has built a service that helps you pay your providers much more easily. You no longer have to manually keep track of invoices, log into your banking interface, enter banking information and transfer money.

Libeo targets small and medium companies that don’t necessarily have a dedicated accounting team. It wants to simply payment processes as much as possible.

It starts by collecting invoices from your suppliers. You can import invoices to your Libeo account directly on Libeo, by forwarding emails to a special address, by connecting Libeo to popular services, such as Amazon, or by connecting Libeo with your existing accounting platform, such as QuickBooks or Receipt Bank.

Once your invoices are all on Libeo, the startup automatically fills out payment information based on information on the invoice. It can also identify duplicates and keep track of VAT payments.

After that, Libeo wants to simplify payments. When you sign up, you share your company’s IBAN with Libeo so that it can take money from your account using direct debits. Whenever there’s an outstanding invoice in your Libeo account, you can decide to pay it now or schedule payment for later. Libeo transfers money to your recipient and collects money from your bank account at the same time.

What if it’s a new supplier and you don’t have their banking information? Instead of going back and forth with your supplier to get their IBAN, your supplier receives an email from Libeo with a link. The supplier drags and drops their bank details on Libeo’s web page. Libeo then checks that everything matches with the invoice and automatically adds the IBAN information to the payment.

Over time, if you use Libeo, you get an address book of all your suppliers. You can see how much you’re spending with a specific supplier, track your cash flow and more.

Like modern software-as-a-service tools, Libeo lets you collaborate on your invoices. Multiple people can have a Libeo account with different rights. You can set up an approval workflow as well.

There’s a free plan but it’s limited to 5 payments per month. You can then pay to access advanced features and get bigger limits. 5,000 companies are currently using Libeo four months after the initial release. The company has facilitated €2 million in payments.

In a story that’s become all too common these past few weeks and months, Magic Leap this morning announced that it will be laying off “a number of employees” across the country. The size and scope of the move is not clear at the moment, but the moves are clearly significant as the well-funded A.R. startup struggles to adapt to the harsh reality of the current pandemic.

The layoffs also comes as the hardware maker has increased focus on enterprise applications. Late last year, it announced the release of the Magic Leap Enterprise Suite, a $3,000 package designed to take on the more lucrative business side of augmented and mixed reality, joining the likes of Microsoft’s Hololens.

The open letter attempts to strike a hopeful tone, both in terms of its IP portfolio and the role its technology might play as more organizations actively explore virtual interactions.

“The post-COVID economy will be one of resiliency and the ability for businesses to operate across vast distances and connect with their customers in ways that mimic physical interactions,” founder/CEO Rony Abovitz writes, “but benefit from the speed and scale of high-speed networks, will be critical. Spatial computing will very much be part of that coming economic change.”

Developing…

In a story that’s become all too common these past few weeks and months, Magic Leap this morning announced that it will be laying off “a number of employees” across the country. The size and scope of the move is not clear at the moment, but the moves are clearly significant as the well-funded A.R. startup struggles to adapt to the harsh reality of the current pandemic.

The layoffs also comes as the hardware maker has increased focus on enterprise applications. Late last year, it announced the release of the Magic Leap Enterprise Suite, a $3,000 package designed to take on the more lucrative business side of augmented and mixed reality, joining the likes of Microsoft’s Hololens.

The open letter attempts to strike a hopeful tone, both in terms of its IP portfolio and the role its technology might play as more organizations actively explore virtual interactions.

“The post-COVID economy will be one of resiliency and the ability for businesses to operate across vast distances and connect with their customers in ways that mimic physical interactions,” founder/CEO Rony Abovitz writes, “but benefit from the speed and scale of high-speed networks, will be critical. Spatial computing will very much be part of that coming economic change.”

Developing…

Google is adding a new feature to Search that will help you keep track of all the TV shows and movies you want to watch during these long weeks at home. The company had already been offering personalized TV and movie recommendations in Search, as of an update released last fall. Building out a watchlist with your top picks is the obvious next step.

To get started, mobile users can first search “what to watch” to get Google’s suggestions. The are organized at the top of the search results, and can be filtered by type (show or movie), by whether the content is free, by category (comedy, action, documentary, sitcom, kid-friendly, etc.), and by provider. Google also offers a rating experience where you train its algorithms on what sort of content you like and dislike.

For any movie or show you want to then add to your list, you just tap “Watchlist” in the preview window. (You can also tap “Watched” if it’s something you’ve already seen.

The new Watchlist is available as second tab at the top of this What to Watch section, and can be accessed any time you’re searching for something to buy, rent or stream. You can also search for “my watchlist” on Google or tap on “Collections” from within the Google app to access your list more quickly.

At launch, Google had said the TV and movies feature was designed to further the company’s larger goal of helping connect people with the information they need — it was not offering the data to advertisers. But by placing a regularly-used feature like this within Google, users will spend more time on Google’s platform which helps Google’s business.

While Google’s version of watchlist concept is handy for more casual users, a number of dedicated mobile apps offer an expanded experience and, at times, more accurate and more granular recommendations. For example, TV Time not just makes recommendations but also lets you check off which episodes you’ve watched from a series and participate in a mobile forum of sorts with other fans. Reelgood, Watchworthy, Taste, Bingeworthy, Likewise, itcher, Hai, and many other apps also offer show and movie suggestions to varying degrees of success.

Reelgood even recently launched a feature called Reelgood Remote which will instantly play the content you choose on your Roku device.

Google’s new Watchlist feature was one of several additions rolling out today focused on entertainment.

On Android TV devices, it also added three new home screen rows from YouTube, including COVID-19 News, Stay Home #WithMe, and free movies from YouTube. Android TV also gained more collections from Google Play while streaming apps are now organized under a row titled “Stream the shows and movies you love.”

Plus, on Google Play, the company introduced a collection of special deals, including offers on apps for movies, TV and comics, among other things. There are offers for game streaming service Stadia and subscription service Google Play Pass, as well.

The Google Watchlist feature is live now on mobile devices.

Google is adding a new feature to Search that will help you keep track of all the TV shows and movies you want to watch during these long weeks at home. The company had already been offering personalized TV and movie recommendations in Search, as of an update released last fall. Building out a watchlist with your top picks is the obvious next step.

To get started, mobile users can first search “what to watch” to get Google’s suggestions. The are organized at the top of the search results, and can be filtered by type (show or movie), by whether the content is free, by category (comedy, action, documentary, sitcom, kid-friendly, etc.), and by provider. Google also offers a rating experience where you train its algorithms on what sort of content you like and dislike.

For any movie or show you want to then add to your list, you just tap “Watchlist” in the preview window. (You can also tap “Watched” if it’s something you’ve already seen.

The new Watchlist is available as second tab at the top of this What to Watch section, and can be accessed any time you’re searching for something to buy, rent or stream. You can also search for “my watchlist” on Google or tap on “Collections” from within the Google app to access your list more quickly.

At launch, Google had said the TV and movies feature was designed to further the company’s larger goal of helping connect people with the information they need — it was not offering the data to advertisers. But by placing a regularly-used feature like this within Google, users will spend more time on Google’s platform which helps Google’s business.

While Google’s version of watchlist concept is handy for more casual users, a number of dedicated mobile apps offer an expanded experience and, at times, more accurate and more granular recommendations. For example, TV Time not just makes recommendations but also lets you check off which episodes you’ve watched from a series and participate in a mobile forum of sorts with other fans. Reelgood, Watchworthy, Taste, Bingeworthy, Likewise, itcher, Hai, and many other apps also offer show and movie suggestions to varying degrees of success.

Reelgood even recently launched a feature called Reelgood Remote which will instantly play the content you choose on your Roku device.

Google’s new Watchlist feature was one of several additions rolling out today focused on entertainment.

On Android TV devices, it also added three new home screen rows from YouTube, including COVID-19 News, Stay Home #WithMe, and free movies from YouTube. Android TV also gained more collections from Google Play while streaming apps are now organized under a row titled “Stream the shows and movies you love.”

Plus, on Google Play, the company introduced a collection of special deals, including offers on apps for movies, TV and comics, among other things. There are offers for game streaming service Stadia and subscription service Google Play Pass, as well.

The Google Watchlist feature is live now on mobile devices.

When Liliana Pertenava decided to go all-in on crypto by investing $2,000 in a mining rig in 2017, she went so far down the crypto rabbit-hole she decided to make a documentary about it. If you’re locked-down and looking for something to watch, you could do worse than sit down and watch “Crypto Rush“, which just went live on Vimeo today (8AM PT / 11AM ET / 4PM BST / 5PM CEST), and is available free for the first 100 TechCrunch readers to grab one of these codes.

Covering blockchain technology, its applications, and the culture that surrounds it, Pertenava’s 90-minute-long documentary led her to meet such characters as a tribe of iconoclasts living in a small cabin in the Swiss Alps, using cheap, hydro-electric energy to mine cryptocurrency while living like monks. She also meets crypto-miner David Carlson in Seattle, Washington, who built the world’s largest crypto-farm, only to later go bankrupt.

It’s also likely to prompt feelings of nostalgia, not just for the heady days of crypto but also the fact people are actually hanging out with each other (OMG).

To that point, stymied by the COVID-19, Pertenava has decided to go through Vimeo to release the movie, so that people can watch it at home. “Also, since it’s a road movie, I hope to feed everyone’s wanderlust while the world is on lockdown,” she says.

A former broadcaster in Russia, Pertenava was intrigued by the decentralized nature of blockchain tech. “I felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland, exploring this strange world and its colorful characters,” said Pertenava. “We live in a world where digital technologies are transforming reality. I wanted to emphasize the stories of people, especially women, taking part in these technological developments.”

Blockchain advocate Toni Lane Casserly, who tragically passed away recently, also features, speaking about the concept of when nations might compete for our citizenship. Her predictions about this are not to be missed.

Made in collaboration with Steven Pape, a director who has worked with James Cameron, the film will be available for streaming worldwide today and 10% of the funds gathered through streaming will be donated to organizations battling COVID-19, and organizations supporting female entrepreneurs.

Michael Ovitz didn’t invent the idea of a talent agency, but one might argue that he perfected it. He founded the CAA in 1975, and grew it into the world’s leading talent agency, serving as chairman for 20 years. Now, Ovitz is investing in a brand new type of talent agency called Human Capital.

Human Capital is a hybrid organization, one part VC fund, one part recruiting business, and one part creative agency. (Human Capital did not invest in its agency startup from its VC fund.) The Human Capital VC fund has $210 million in assets under management.

The Human Capital recruitment/agency company, founded by former General Catalyst associate Armaan Ali and Stanford grad Baris Akis, looks to provide for tech engineers the same services that Ovitz provided to actors and creatives back in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Engineers are some of the most sought-after talent in Silicon Valley and across the globe. And while big corporations and high-growth startups duke it out over these young engineers, the candidates themselves have little to no guidance around where they should go, what they should expect during the process, and, in some cases, what they should expect to earn.

Ovitz — alongside Qasar Younis, Founder of Applied Intuition and former Partner & COO of YC, Adam Zoia, Founder and Chairman of Glocap, Stephen Ehikian, cofounder and CEO of Airkit, and other financial institutions and LPs — recently injected $15 million into Human Capital, which is valued in the hundreds of millions according to the company.

Human Capital looks to pair the brightest engineers with the right company for them, while giving startups a new way to approach recruitment. Thus far, the company has 5,000 members (engineers) and has placed them at startups like Brex, Grammarly, Robinhood and more.

Human Capital starts by doing outreach on university campuses with outstanding engineering programs, setting up coffee with engineers who have been recommended or referred by alumni of the program. Once accepted as a member, the engineer explains to Human Capital what type of role they’re interested in, whether it’s at a big corporation, a high-growth startup, or an early-stage company where they have the opportunity to build something from scratch.

The recruitment team at Human Capital then coaches the engineer through the interview process and beyond, helping with decision-making around promotions, understanding equity, and negotiating new offers.

The org never charges the engineer, but rather takes a commission on the engineer’s annual income for the first year from the startup that recruited them.

Ali explained to TechCrunch how Human Capital is operating during the coronavirus pandemic, describing a situation in which the top talent that is in the market right now has a level of uncertainty about the future, leading them to seek positions at huge companies like Facebook and Google.

“Our hypothesis when we started this was that there are amazing businesses that are being run better at an earlier stage and have a proxy for that same type of stability [at a Google or Facebook] via their access to capital, alongside other foundational pieces of business security, such as their business model, unit economics, long-term vision for the company, gross margin rate, and growth opportunities for individuals at those companies.”

He said that Human Capital believed that, if a macro event occurred in the market place — we’re right in the middle of one of the least predictable and most impactful macro economic events ever — some of those ‘stable’ earlier stage businesses wouldn’t be hit in the same way as public companies who have to worry about short-term profitability.

“The issue is that you have to know a lot about those businesses in order to be able to discern that, and that’s our job,” said Ali. “And what we’ve seen is that a number of the companies in that position are actually ramping up recruiting right now.”

There is no mandatory link between Human Capital’s venture capital fund and their recruiting/agency entity, though the fund does like to invest in engineers who have gone through the program and move on to start their own businesses. Those types of investments include Brex, Bolt, and Qualia among others. Human Capital also invests in companies for whom they’ve recruited, such as Livongo, Snowflake, Clumio, Wildlife, and Trackonomy. Human Capital has a preference for leading rounds only for companies that are started by its engineer members.

The model isn’t unlike SignalFire or GloCap, founded by Adam Zoia (investor in Human Capital). The idea is that VC funds are great for capital injections, but with the cut-throat recruiting atmosphere and a finite number of engineers, that money can be relatively useless if it can’t be used to bring on the best talent. So firms like SignalFire (in the tech world) and GloCap (in the business/finance world) put recruitment front and center in their value proposition. (GloCap doesn’t invest, but is the premier recruitment platform in the financial sector.)

Human Capital is also starting to look at potential acquisitions that can beef up its agency business, recently acqui-hiring Khonvo Corporation, a recruitment agency founded by Archit Bhise and Andrew Rising.

Ovitz explained to TechCrunch that his ultra-successful career as an agent stemmed from his ability to make decisions about people and projects quickly. He sees the same type of intuition in Ali and Akis at a much younger age and with less experience than he had.

“It’s a checklist in your head,” said Ovitz. “It’s a combination of when your brain meets your stomach, your intellect meets your gut that lets you know you’ve hit a winner. The thing that’s allowed Ali and Akis to build a company that’s worth the hundreds of millions in such a short period of time is that they had that when I met them without having an enormous amount of experience.”

He added that access to the internet, which he did not have during his agency days, is an amazing learning tool and an ‘epic crutch’ that, when paired with good instincts, can accelerate the learning curve on building a business.

(It’s worth noting that this isn’t Ovitz’ foray into Silicon Valley. The entertainment powerhouse was one of the earliest advisors to Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz during the formation of the legendary VC firm A16Z, helping them model the firm after CAA itself. Ovitz has been quietly investing in and advising tech startups for the past 15 years.)

As companies increasingly look to find ways to cut costs, Granulate, an early-stage Israeli startup, has come up with a clever way to optimize infrastructure usage. Today it was rewarded with a tidy $12 million Series A investment.

Insight Partners led the round with participation from TLV Partners and Hetz Ventures. Lonne Jaffe, managing director at Insight Partners, will be joining the Granulate board under the terms of the agreement. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $15.6 million, according to the company.

The startup claims it can cut infrastructure costs, whether on-prem or in the cloud, from between 20% and 80%. This is not insignificant if they can pull this off, especially in the economic maelstrom in which we find ourselves.

Asaf Ezra, co-founder and CEO at Granulate, says the company achieved the efficiency through a lot of studying about how Linux virtual machines work. Over six months of experimentation, they simply moved the bottleneck around until they learned how to take advantage of the way the Linux kernel operates to gain massive efficiencies.

It turns out that Linux has been optimized for resource fairness, but Granulate’s founders wanted to flip this idea on its head and look for repetitiveness, concentrating on one function instead of fair allocation across many functions, some of which might not really need access at any given moment.

“When it comes to production systems, you have a lot of repetitiveness in the machine, and you basically want it to do one thing really well,” he said.

He points out that it doesn’t even have to be a VM. It could also be a container or a pod in Kubernetes. The important thing to remember is that you no longer care about the interactivity and fairness inherent in Linux; instead, you want that the machine to be optimized for certain things.

“You let us know what your utility function for that production system is, then our agents. basically optimize all the decision making for that utility function. That means that you don’t even have to do any code changes to gain the benefit,” Ezra explained.

What’s more, the solution uses machine learning to help understand how the different utility functions work to provide greater optimization to improve performance even more over time.

Insight’s Jaffe certainly recognized the potential of such a solution, especially right now.

“The need to have high-performance digital experiences and lower infrastructure costs has never been more important, and Granulate has a highly differentiated offering powered by machine learning that’s not dependent on configuration management or cloud resource purchasing solutions,” Jaffe said in a statement.

Ezra understands that a product like his could be particularly helpful at the moment. “We’re in a unique position. Our offering right now helps organizations survive the downturn by saving costs without firing people,” he said.

The company was founded in 2018 and currently has 20 employees. They plan to double that by the end of 2020.