Year: 2020

The European Commission has set out a plan to move towards a ‘right to repair’ for electronics devices, such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops.

More generally it wants to restrict single-use products, tackle “premature obsolescence” and ban the destruction of unsold durable goods — in order to make sustainable products the norm.

The proposals are part of a circular economy action plan that’s intended to deliver on a Commission pledge to transition the bloc to carbon neutrality by 2050.

By extending the lifespan of products, via measures which target design and production to encourage repair, reuse and recycling, the policy push aims to reduce resource use and shrink the environmental impact of buying and selling stuff.

The Commission also wants to arm EU consumers with reliable information about reparability and durability — to empower them to make greener product choices.

“Today, our economy is still mostly linear, with only 12% of secondary materials and resources being brought back into the economy,” said EVP Frans Timmermans in a statement. “Many products break down too easily, cannot be reused, repaired or recycled, or are made for single use only. There is a huge potential to be exploited both for businesses and consumers. With today’s plan we launch action to transform the way products are made and empower consumers to make sustainable choices for their own benefit and that of the environment.”

The Commission said electronics and ICT will be a priority area for implementing a right to repair, via planned expansion of the Ecodesign Directive — which currently sets energy efficiency standards for devices such as washing machines.

Its action plan proposes setting up a ‘Circular Electronics Initiative’ to promote longer product lifetimes through reusability and reparability as well as “upgradeability” of components and software to avoid premature obsolescence.

The Commission is also planning new regulatory measures on chargers for mobile phones and similar devices. While an EU-wide take back scheme to return or sell back old mobile phones, tablets and chargers is being considered.

Back in January the EU Parliament voted overwhelmingly for tougher action to reduce e-waste, calling for the Commission to come up with beefed up rules by this summer.

In recent years MEPs have also pushed for the Ecodesign Direction to be expanded to include repairability.

The Commission proposals also include a new regulatory framework for batteries and vehicles — including measures to improve the collection and recycling rates of batteries and ensure the recovery of valuable materials. Plus there’s a proposal to revise the rules on end-of-life vehicles to improve recycling efficiency and waste oil treatment. 

It’s also planning measures to set targets to shrink the amount of packaging being produced, with the aim of making all packaging reusable or recyclable in an economically viable way by 2030.

Mandatory requirements on recycled content for plastics used in areas such as packaging, construction materials and vehicles is another proposal.

Other priority areas for promoting circularity and reducing high consumption rates include construction, textiles and food.

The Commission expects the circular economy to have net positive benefits in terms of GDP growth and jobs’ creation across the bloc — suggesting measures to boost sustainability will increase the EU’s GDP by an additional 0.5% by 2030 and create around 700,000 new jobs.

The backing of MEPs in the European Parliament and EU Member States will be necessary if the Commission proposals are to make it into pan-EU law.

Should they do so, Dutch social enterprise Fairphone shows a glimpse of what’s coming down the repairable pipe in future…

Users of Storz & Bickel’s vaporizers can once again connect their vapes to iPhones. The company’s solution comes several months after Apple enacted a ban on apps for tobacco and cannabis vaporizers. This time around, Storz & Bickel turned to a web app to provide iPhone users with expanded controls over their vapes.

I found the process straightforward and requiring just a few more steps than installing a traditional app. First, using the right browser, navigate to Storz-Bickel.com and click the link on the home page. Press the Connect button and load the device. From there the web app works as advertised, providing access to temperature control and different settings on two of Storz & Bickel’s vapes.

Right now, Storz & Bickel’s web app features most of the functionality of the company’s Android app. Peter Popplewell, Canopy Growth’s CTO, tells TechCrunch more functions are coming, including the ability to update firmware. The company will soon roll out similar web apps to other products like Juju Joints.

The web app requires the use of specific third-party browsers as Safari and Chrome lacks a critical function. Users need to install a browser that supports Bluetooth connections. Storz & Bickel recommends iPhone owners us Bluefy or WebBLE.

In my testing, I used the free Bluefy browser. The connection was reliable and easy to use. The experience isn’t as seamless as an app, but this solution is the only way to restore the features lost after Apple pulled the company’s app from the App Store.

Banned iOS apps like these from Storz & Bickel give users more control and transparency into consuming cannabis. Some allow users to fine-tuning temperature to control dosage amounts. A few vape apps display detailed lab reports around the contents of pre-packaged cartridges, offering the consumer protections against harmful chemicals.

This ban came after illicit vaping products caused a public health crisis. In response, Apple institute a complete removal on vaping apps rather than filtering apps from legitimate companies like Canopy Growth, Pax, and others. Now, six months after the ban, these companies are turning out workarounds to restore advertised functions disabled by Apple’s ban.

Users of Storz & Bickel’s vaporizers can once again connect their vapes to iPhones. The company’s solution comes several months after Apple enacted a ban on apps for tobacco and cannabis vaporizers. This time around, Storz & Bickel turned to a web app to provide iPhone users with expanded controls over their vapes.

I found the process straightforward and requiring just a few more steps than installing a traditional app. First, using the right browser, navigate to Storz-Bickel.com and click the link on the home page. Press the Connect button and load the device. From there the web app works as advertised, providing access to temperature control and different settings on two of Storz & Bickel’s vapes.

Right now, Storz & Bickel’s web app features most of the functionality of the company’s Android app. Peter Popplewell, Canopy Growth’s CTO, tells TechCrunch more functions are coming, including the ability to update firmware. The company will soon roll out similar web apps to other products like Juju Joints.

The web app requires the use of specific third-party browsers as Safari and Chrome lacks a critical function. Users need to install a browser that supports Bluetooth connections. Storz & Bickel recommends iPhone owners us Bluefy or WebBLE.

In my testing, I used the free Bluefy browser. The connection was reliable and easy to use. The experience isn’t as seamless as an app, but this solution is the only way to restore the features lost after Apple pulled the company’s app from the App Store.

Banned iOS apps like these from Storz & Bickel give users more control and transparency into consuming cannabis. Some allow users to fine-tuning temperature to control dosage amounts. A few vape apps display detailed lab reports around the contents of pre-packaged cartridges, offering the consumer protections against harmful chemicals.

This ban came after illicit vaping products caused a public health crisis. In response, Apple institute a complete removal on vaping apps rather than filtering apps from legitimate companies like Canopy Growth, Pax, and others. Now, six months after the ban, these companies are turning out workarounds to restore advertised functions disabled by Apple’s ban.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today, something a little different. Last week both Okta (2017 IPO) and Ping Identity (2019 IPO) reported earnings. Given that Okta and Ping are SaaS companies that sport competing product lines, the paired financial reports caught our attention. TechCrunch spoke with each after earnings. The picture that we got back from both companies was one of continued growth and increasing profitability.

This matters, as some cloud investors have thoughts about an eventual cloud slowdown. The most common argument that TechCrunch has heard is that as cloud and SaaS continue to eat at the current portion of enterprise software spend that they don’t already control, the pace at which they add market share will slow.

This doesn’t mean that SaaS and cloud products are going to go shrink; instead, the idea is that the pace of their expansion could slow, perhaps dramatically. End of the world? No. But a potentially notable change from the heady, recent days when SaaS and cloud were storming ahead.

Slower growth could limit the value of SaaS and cloud companies, which have long enjoyed rich valuations as investors coveted their recurring and regular revenues. This has in turn bolstered startup investors piling into enterprise-focused software companies. Changes to the market would impact not only the big shops, but perhaps smaller companies as well.

Let’s peek at Okta and Ping’s earnings briefly, and then read through notes from the companies about growth, customer acquisition costs, and more. Our goal is to get a handle on how two large, public SaaS players think about the world as they compete for growth and market share. What they tell us should help both you and I know what’s ahead for other SaaS players, large and small alike.

PandaDoc, a sales-focused document automation startup, announced a new web-based document production editor today that allows sales teams to quickly generate proposals and contracts from design templates.

The templates give a consistent and professional look to these documents, which might otherwise be produced in a word processor like Word or Google Docs. While customers are free to customize these any way they like, the templated approach means these businesses don’t require a designer to create quality looking documents.

Company co-founder and CTO Serge Barysiuk says the startup has had a vision for some time that sales documents would be more interactive than a static PDF or Word document, and they have invested a lot of resources into building a more interactive document editor, while enabling the sales team to see usage statistics like document opens, time on pages and so forth.

“We have added a new document builder editor to our platform, which helps you create documents that you can personalize and merge data, and that are also interactive,” Barysiuk told TechCrunch.

PandaDoc document templates selection screen. Screenshot: PandaDoc (cropped)

He says this means their documents contain business logic and data, but also has a professional look and feel, whether being viewed online or on a mobile device.

Barysiuk says that the company recognizes that some customers will be using Word and other tools to produce boilerplate content, and users can import existing documents into the PandaDoc editor where appropriate.

In addition to the document editing capabilities, the company provides a general workflow to support sales teams from proposal to contract to digital signing — and even collecting funds.

PandaDoc launched in 2011 and has raised just over $21 million on a post valuation of $70 million, according to PitchBook data. The company reports it has 250 employees with over 17,000 customers, the majority of whom are SMBs, who have closed more than $20 billion in deals on the platform.

The company’s last raise was $15 million in 2017 led by Rembrandt Venture Partners.

Founders: it’s time to get moving. On May 13, the night before TC Sessions: Mobility 2020, TechCrunch is hosting a private Pitch Night for mobility-focused startups. We’re looking to feature 10 early stage mobility startups that are breaking barriers in the industry.

TechCrunch is always on the hunt for the most disruptive tech in the industry and this time our spotlight is shining on mobility.

The line up for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 is lit. We’ve got the major players from Boris Sofman of Waymo and Nancy Sun of Ike to Trucks VC’s Reilly Brennan, Shin-pei Tsay, director of policy for cities and Transportation at Uber and Jody Kelman, who heads the self-driving platform at Lyft’s Level 5 program.

Now we want to select the early stage startups, the underdogs, to pitch with TechCrunch. We’re on the look out for startups that have a relevant impact on mobility, including micromobility, large scale fleet management software, flying cars, autonomous vehicle technology, sensors, mapping and battery tech.

How does it work?

Apply here with a demo video of your hardware or software working. TechCrunch editorial will read every application and select the top 10 companies to feature at Pitch Night on May 13 and provide complimentary tickets to the Mobility 2020 main event. Companies will be pitching in front of VCs, TC editors, industry leaders from across the states and a panel of expert judges.

The judges will then select the top five, yes FIVE companies, to pitch on the main stage at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 in front of more than a thousand attendees and the industries top experts and innovators. Deadline to apply is April 8. Selections will occur on a rolling basis so get your application in ASAP.

The top ten selected companies will receive two complimentary main event tickets, an hour training with the Startup Battlefield Editor and a chance to participate in CrunchMatch: TC’s Meeting Matching Program. So, what are you waiting for? Get a move on and apply today. 

Earlier this week, Amazon announced it’s will now sell its cashierless technology dubbed “Just Walk Out” to other retailers. Today, airport hospitality group OTG, which operates over 350 restaurants and retail locations in North American airports, revealed it will be one of the first retailers to adopt Amazon’s tech in its own stores. The first store, a CIBO Express Gourmet Market, will open next week (Mar. 16) in Newark Liberty’s Terminal C.

This will be followed by additional stores in both Newark Liberty and LaGuardia airports, OTG says.

OTG today operates over 100 “CIBO Express Gourmet Markets” across ten major North American airports. The stores stock items like ready-made and fresh foods, health and beauty items, gifts, and electronics.

Shoppers will enter the new, tech-enabled store in the Newark airport by first swiping their credit card.

Then, Amazon’s Just Walk Out system uses a combination of cameras, shelf sensors, computer vision, and deep learning techniques, to identify when an item has been removed from the shelf or rack and by which customer. After being picked up, the item is added to the customer’s “virtual cart.” And if it’s returned to the shelf, it’s removed from that cart. When the shopper leaves the store, they’re automatically charged for the items they bought.

In Amazon’s own stores, Amazon Go and Amazon Go Grocery, the technology allows staff to focus on other tasks besides checking out customers, like restocking shelves, greeting customers or answering questions, among other things.

In the CIBO Express Gourmet Market stores, however, the focus is more on speeding up transactions — a critical need when travelers are dashing in between gates to make connections and have limited time to shop.

According to OTG CEO Rick Blatstein, the company is always looking for ways to make shopping its stores a frictionless experience.

“We’re incredibly proud to be integrating Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology into the OTG airport experience,” said Blatstein, in a statement. “OTG has always embraced technology as a means of optimizing the airport experience so that we can give our guests their time back. By using the world’s most advanced shopping technology in our CIBO Express Gourmet Markets, we’re doing just that by putting our guests in full control of their time,” he said.

With the OTG deal, Amazon will also have a high-profile example of how its technology can work to create a better checkout experience for shoppers outside of its own Amazon Go-branded stores, where it can tolerate losses or make adjustments to the tech without anyone knowing. In other words, it will serve as a proving grounds for the technology’s readiness to scale in a real-world retail environment that’s not Amazon’s own.

“Starting next week, travelers in the busy Newark Liberty Terminal C will no longer have to assess store lines to determine if they can quickly grab that snack, bottle of water, or travel essential they need before their flight,” said Dilip Kumar, Vice President, Physical Retail & Technology at Amazon, in a statement. “OTG’s CIBO Express Gourmet Markets featuring Just Walk Out technology will let them quickly grab what they need and get on their way without standing in line to check out. We can’t wait to hear how travelers like the experience,” he added.

While many venture capital firms spend their days either chasing the limelight or shunning it, for the last 42 years New Enterprise Associates has just done the work of investing capital and building startup businesses.

Now the firm has closed its latest investment vehicle, a $3.6 billion fund that brings its total capital under management to nearly $24 billion, according to a statement.

Unlike some firms, the partnership at NEA hasn’t really focused on star-making. For the last several years the fund has been run by Scott Sandell, who has been with the firm since 1996 (his last tweet was in 2010).

The strategy stands in sharp contrast to the loud voices and strong personalities that dominate venture capital’s online conversation. The browsers in business sections of airport bookstores won’t see many books on venture capital or thought leadership from NEA partners.

These days, the most public figure from NEA is Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration who has become a leading voice on the national response to the recent coronavirus outbreak.

What NEA does have are results. Sandell’s portfolio alone includes Salesforce.com, Tableau Software, WebEx, and Workday.

In early January, Visa acquired another NEA portfolio company, Plaid, for over $5 billion.

In addition to the new capital, NEA has promoted Liza Landsman to general partner. Landsman joined the firm in 2018 after working as the president of the NEA portfolio company Jet.com (another multi-billion exit for the firm).

At last week’s TC Sessions: Robotics+AI, I felt it was important to focus at least one panel on companies that are working to foster robotics startups. NVIDIA’s VP of Engineering Claire Delaunay and Freedom Robotics co-founder and CEO Joshua Wilson joined me to offer unique perspectives.

Both companies help provide building blocks for founders. NVIDIA is using some of its tremendous resources to create platforms like Isaac, designed to help prototype robots. And Freedom, a fairly fresh startup in its own right, is designing AI offerings to ease the deployment of those manner of systems.

But the first step of helping robotic startups help themselves is identifying why so many fail. Citing a handful of high-profile examples like Rethink, Anki, Jibo and CyPhy Works, I put the question to the panelists: even with a lot of funding and plenty of smart people on board, why do so many robotic startups fail?

“I think it’s just very hard to solve robotics problems today, which makes it still very expensive and very hard to get to even an MVP (minimum viable product)  in the development cycle of the of the company,” said Delaunay. “Too many people focus still on robotics problem, not on the final problem, not on the on the business proposition.”

There are lots of reasons why robotics startups fail, but Delaunay honed in on one of the principle issues right out of the gate: unlike many other tech startups, robotics companies aren’t focused on solving a problem. But that’s often out of necessity. Imagine starting a car company but you first have to mine cobalt for the battery and pave the roads. Or, to use Delaunay’s analogy, building and manufacturing your own smartphone in order to launch an app.

Have you ever seen a dead cat bounce?

It’s a term that Wall Street traders coined to describe the moment when collapsing markets briefly rise before resuming a downward trajectory.

It looks like investors new to the notion of an economic downturn may have seen their first such bounce yesterday. The glacial domestic response to the spreading novel coronavirus in the U.S. and Europe, coupled with economic pressures on the domestic oil industry coming from Saudi Arabia and Russia, are fueling increasingly negative outlooks among global investors.

Regular readers of TechCrunch’s Market-Mandated Stocks Coverage will note that we’ve been covering the public market’s open and close lately, because with the return of volatility the markets have become active and therefore more influential in day-to-day news. When stocks only went up, it was boring. Now, they do all sorts of crazy things, like kicking off the day like this:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: -712.4, -2.85%
• S&P 500: -76.4, -2.65%
• Nasdaq Composite: -208.1, -2.49%

Cryptos are off a few points in the last 24 hours (small potatoes for bitcoin and friends), while SaaS and cloud stocks are off 2.5%, similar to their broader category.

Sentiment may be shifting from This too shall pass to You shall not pass. Goldman Sachs, an influential investment bank with a growing consumer arm and digital dreams, said today that “the bull market will end soon with stocks dropping another 15% from here,” according to CNBC. That’s bad.

So what?

Are you a little tired of the daily ups and downs in the stock market, and instead want to know how things are in aggregate. Me too. Here’s the stock market’s gains and losses since recent all-time highs, and where they were a year ago:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: -17.8% from recent highs, -2.47% last twelve months (CNBC data)
• S&P 500: -17.3% from recent highs, +3.35% last twelve months (CNBC data)
• Nasdaq Composite: -17.0%, +10.4% last twelve months (CNBC data)

You may now consider yourself informed and up to date on the stocks that are already trading.

Turning to stocks that want to start trading, there’s not much to report. A few SPACs are drawing attention in the Valley, but there are no scheduled, venture-backed IPOs on the horizon. Sure, Procore and Accolade have filed, but they are hardly trying to get out while no one knows what anything is worth.