Author: azeeadmin

Set for a late-July release, Tenet has been viewed an important bellwether for Hollywood. After all, director Christopher Nolan has long been a surefire blockbuster machine, courtesy of films like the Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception and Interstellar. The mysterious thriller will be a clear test of whether audiences are willing to brave the indoor theater experience, even as COVID-19 remains an on-going in much of the world.

This week, Warner Bros. announced that it has decided to push the film to August 12, as several states have seen an increase in cases. This marks the second two-week delay for the film, which was initially set for a July 17 release.

“Warner Bros. is committed to bringing Tenet to audiences in theaters, on the big screen, when exhibitors are ready and public health officials say it’s time,” the company said in a statement offered to the press. “In this moment what we need to be is flexible, and we are not treating this as a traditional movie release. We are choosing to open the movie mid-week to allow audiences to discover the film in their own time, and we plan to play longer, over an extended play period far beyond the norm, to develop a very different yet successful release strategy.”

Warner Bros. isn’t the only major studio to get cold feet. Disney is also expected to push the release of Mulan, which was set for a week prior to Tenet. The news come as states like Florida and Texas slow reopening amid new record infection numbers. New York State also recently pulled movie theaters from its list of Phase 4 reopenings, alongside other risky establishments like gyms and malls.

All of this presents some important existential questions for theaters, large and small. We’ve reached out to AMC, which plans to open hundreds locations on July 15 (now with mandatory mask requirements, for what it’s worth). Theaters will likely be forced to rely on smaller films, titles that have already debuted via VOD and older movies. Take Jurassic Park. The nearly 30-year-old film raked in $517,000 over the weekend, putting it at the top of the North American box office.

We’ve reached out to AMC for comment on how this news will impact its plans to reopen.

SpaceX is launching yet another Starlink mission – its fourth in a month – on Thursday afternoon at 4:18 PM EDT (1:18 PM PDT). The launch will carry 57 of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, which will join the existing constellation in space in order to prepare for SpaceX’s launch of Starlink broadband internet service.

Also on board the Falcon 9 rocket launching today are two BlackSky satellites, which will be used for BlackSky’s earth-imaging and data analytics services. This is another rideshare mission for SpaceX, organized under the program it introduced last year, which allows smallest operators to book rides on missions as part of shared payloads, allowing access to launch services for a starting price of around 1 million. SpaceX flew the first of these missions earlier this month, with a payload that included 58 of its Starlink satellites, alongside three satellites for client Planet.

The mission today will take off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the Falcon 9 booster used fo rate mission has flown four times previously, including for Crew Dragon’s first unscrewed demonstration mission, as well as twice before for earlier Starlink missions. Reuse of the boosters, combined with rideshare arrangements, are probably helping significantly offset launch costs as SpaceX continues to grow its own Starlink constellation at a rapid clip.

For this launch, all the Starlink satellites are equipped with the deployable sun visor systems that SpaceX came up with to limit the reflectivity of Starlink overall, since it operates relatively close to Earth and has posed an interference hazard with Earth-based night sky observation.

The launch will also include a landing of the first stage booster. This is the fourth launch that SpaceX has done in just three weeks – including the historic crewed Dragon demonstration mission that took place on May 30. It’s also the 10th Starlink launch to date. Next week, SpaceX has yet another launch scheduled for June 30 – a GPS satellite mission that is set to take off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Housing has been constructed for millennia, and while clearly our modern abodes are ever so slightly better than the elk tents we used to live in, the construction techniques behind housing today haven’t progressed all that much. What has progressed are prices — it’s more expensive than ever to build a modern unit, and that’s just for housing — head over to commercial real estate, and the numbers don’t look much better.

For Martin Diz and his team, that’s a problem. Diz is not exactly a lifelong builder — in fact, he was building proverbial rockets as an aerospace engineering PhD researcher several years ago. As he was talking to his roommate back then, who was studying structural engineering, he realized that some of the techniques that his roommate’s field was trying to pioneer had already been discovered by the aerospace folks decades ago.

His roommate was trying to simulate an earthquake to model how the tremors would affect objects like a table inside a building. As Diz recalled, he said “Hey dude, did you know that in aerospace engineering, we did the same thing for the space station 50 years ago? … I learned this in grad school, you know, in our basic course because it’s a very old technique.”

Diz is legitimately a nice chap, and totally not the kind of aerospace engineer who goes around talking about how aerospace solved everything a century ago (okay, maybe just a tad of that). But the interaction and followup conversation got him thinking about what aerospace as a field had solved, and whether some of those techniques could be used in other domains.

Diz and his roommate kept talking over the years, and eventually, the two formed Tango Builder. Tango’s main premise is to bring more sophisticated engineering techniques to construction, improving performance and quality while lowering costs. It’s part of the current YC batch, and previously raised a small seed round which included participation from Tracy Young, cofounder and CEO of PlanGrid.

The two plus one employee have already worked on a handful of projects with some early promising results. Tango helped to design a hospital for COVID-19 patients in Ecuador that saw total savings of $1 million by lowering structural costs by a third. They consulted on the creation of a justice center in Mexico, and were able to reduce the required steel in the project down by 40%. And they used their platform to optimize wall thickness in a masonry home to bring total cost down by 15%. All numbers are reported by the company and have not been independently verified.

There is a heavy focus on structural integrity (as there should be in construction), but Tango particularly shines around seismic modeling. While earthquakes are perhaps most pronounced in places like California and Mexico, both of which suffered major tremors this past week, earthquakes are a lingering threat throughout the world, and buildings need to be designed to handle them even if they are rare.

Diz and his team want to give designers better tools to model what happens in different scenarios while understanding the tradeoffs of various building materials and designs. “You’re building with steel stock, but it’s much more expensive now, so it’s up to the user or the owner to decide which of the paths he wants to take,” he said. Safety is always important, but how much steel do you place in a building which might see an earthquake once a century? That’s what Tango wants to help answer.

Beyond improving structural modeling, Tango’s big ambition is to find additional efficiencies in the construction process by helping everyone involved with construction to work together through a better workflow. “Each person has benefits from the platform, the architect will get the approvals … faster, the engineer can focus on the creative side of things, the contractor” can bid earlier knowing what design is coming, Diz explained. Saving time in all these processes ultimately translates directly to a project’s bottom-line.

It’s very early days of course, with just Diz, his co-founder Juan Aleman, and one employee “working extremely hard.” The hope though is that melding some aerospace engineering techniques with a much more robust and technical platform will help push construction to better quality while saving costs as well. After all, aerospace did all this a century ago.

You might have been considering – or have already started – picking up a new hobby this year, particularly one you can do at home. Podcasting seems to be a popular option, and RODE is a company that has done more to cater specifically to this audience than just about any other audio company out there. The RODECaster Pro ($599) all-in-one podcast production studio that they released in 2018 is a fantastic tool for anyone looking to maximize their podcast potential, and with amazing new firmware updates released this year, along with a host of great new accessories, it’s stepped up even further.

The basics

The RODECaster Pro is a powerful production studio, but it’s not overwhelming for people who aren’t audio engineers by trade. The deck balances offering plenty of physical controls with keeping them relatively simple, giving you things like volume sliders and large pad-style buttons for top level controls, and then putting more advanced features and tweaks behind layers of menus accessible via the large, high-resolution touchscreen for users who desire more fine-tuned manipulation.

RODECaster Pro includes four XLR inputs, each of which can provide (individually selectable) phantom power for condenser mics, along with four 1/4″ headphone outputs for corresponding monitoring. That’s great because it means if you have guests used to recording podcasts and high-quality audio, they can listen to their own input, or you can opt to just have one producer keeping track of everything. There’s also a left and right 1/4″ audio out for a studio monitor speaker or other output, as well as a USB-C connector for plugging into a computer, and a 3.5mm in for connecting a smartphone or other external audio source. Smartphones can also be connected via Bluetooth, which is very handy for including a call-in guest via wireless.

The main surface of the RODECaster Pro includes volume sliders for each available input and pre-set sound effects; volume knobs for each headphone and speaker output; buttons to activate and deactivate inputs; large buttons for playing back pre-set audio files and a large record button. There’s also a touchscreen which gives you access to menus and settings, and which also acts as a visual levels editor while recording.

RODECaster Pro is designed so that you can use it completely independently of any computer or smartphone – it has a microSD slot for recording, and you can then upload those files via either directly connecting the deck through USB, or plugging the card in to a microSD card reader and transferring your files. You can also use multitrack-to-USB or stereo USB output modes on the RODECaster Pro to effectively turn the studio hardware into a USB audio interface for your Mac or PC, letting you record with whatever digital audio production software you’d like, including streaming software.

Design

The RODECaster Pro’s design is a perfect blend of studio-quality hardware controls and simplicity, making the device accessible to amateurs and pros alike. I was up and running with the deck out of the box in just a few minutes, and without making any adjustments at all to the sound profile or settings, I had great-sounding recordings using the RODE PodMic, a $99 microphone that is optimized by RODE to work with the RODECaster Pro out of the box.

All the controls are easy and intuitive to manage, and you shouldn’t need to read any instruction manuals or guides to get started. The eight button sound effects grid is likely the most complicated part of the entire physical interface, but even the default sounds that RODE includes can be useful, and you can easily set your own via the RODECaster companion app for Mac and PC, and in the box you’ll find guides that you can use to overlay the buttons and label them to keep track of which is which.

The sliders are smooth and great to use, making it easy to do even, manual fade-ins and fade-outs for intro and outro or pre-recorded soundbites. Backlit keys for active/inactive inputs, mute status and the large record button mean you can tell with a quick glance what is and isn’t currently active on the track.

RODE has smartly included a locking power adapter in the box, so that you won’t find the cord accidentally yanked out in the middle of a recording. Each of the XLR inputs also includes a quick release latch for secure connections. And while the RODECaster Pro definitely takes up a lot of space with roughly the footprint of a 13-inch MacBook Pro, it’s light enough to be perfectly portable in a backpack for on-location recordings.

The touchscreen display is another design highlight, since it’s high-resolution, with a matte cover that makes it viewable in a wide range of light, and very responsive touch input, It’s a great way to extend the functionality of the deck through software, while still ensuring nothing feels fiddly or hard to navigate, which can be the case with hardware jog controllers like you’d find on a Zoom recorder, for instance.

Features

Balancing simplicity and power is the real reason RODECaster Pro works so well. If you’re just starting out, you can basically just begin using it out of the box without changing anything at all about how it’s set up to work. That’s especially true if you’re using any of RODE’s microphones, each of which has built-in profiles included for optimizing sound settings instantly.

I mentioned above that the RODE PodMic is optimized for use with the RODECaster Pro in this way, and the results are fantastic. If the price tag on the RODECaster Pro is a deterrent, it’s worth considering that the PodMic is a fantastically affordable dynamic podcasting mic, which produces sound way above its class when paired with the deck. so the overall cost of a RODE podcasting setup using both of these would actually be relatively reasonable vs. other solutions.

If you’re ready to dive in and customize sound, you can toggle features like built-in compressor, de-esser and other audio effects. You can also manually adjust each of these effects since the release of Firmware 2.1 earlier this month – letting you adjust the processing of each included sound effect through the RODECaster Pro companion app for a totally custom, unique finally sound.

The ability to pre-load and call up sound effects and other audio tracks on demand on the RODECaster Pro is another killer feature. It’s true that you could achieve a lot of this in editing post-recording, but having it all to-hand for use in live recording scenarios just feels better, and it also enables genuine interactions with your guests that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. That 2.1 firmware update also brought the ability to loop clips indefinitely, which could be great if you want to place a subtle backing track throughout your recording.

One final feature I’ll highlight because it’s fantastic especially in a world where it might be hard to consistently get guests in-studio is the smartphone connectivity. You can either plug in via cable, or connect via low-latency Bluetooth for terrific call-in interactivity, using whatever software you want on your smartphone.

Accessories

RODE has done a great job building out an ecosystem of accessories to further extend the capabilities of the RODECaster Pro, and enhance the overall user experience. Among its recent releases, there’s the Rode PodMic, mentioned above, as well as colored cable clips that correspond to each input backlight color for easily keeping track of which hardware is which, 1/4″ to 3.5mm stereo jack adapters for using standard headphones as monitors, a TRRS-to-TRRS 3.5mm audio aux cable for smartphone connections, and a USB power cable to replace the adapter for easier plug-in power on the go.

The small plastic cuffs for your XLR cables are simple but smart ways of keeping track of gear, especially when everyone’s using the same mic (as they likely should be for sound consistency) – and it helps that they enhance the look of your overall setup, too. And the USB power cable in particular is a great addition to any RODECaster Pro kit that you’re intending to use outside of your own recording studio/home, since you can use it with any USB charger you have to hand – so long as it can provide 5V/2.5A output.

The real must-have accessory for the RODECaster Pro, however, is the RODE PodMic. It’s a no-fuss, well-built and durable microphone that transports well and that can work flexibly with a wide range of mounting options, and in a wide variety of settings including open air and in-studio. Yes, you can get better sound with more expensive mics, but with the PodMic, you can afford a set of four to complement the RODECaster Pro for the same price you’d pay for one higher-end microphone, and most people won’t notice the audio quality difference for their podcasting needs.

Bottom line

The RODECaster Pro is a fantastic way to upgrade your at-home podcasting game – and a perfect way to take the show on the road once you’re able to do so. Its high-quality hardware controls, combined with smart, sophisticated software that has improved with consistent RODE firmware updates to address user feedback over time, are a winning combo for amateurs, pros, and anyone along the spectrum in between.

In a move that highlights how open the American IPO window may be at the moment, China-based Agora priced its public offering at $20 per share last night, ahead of its $16 to $18 proposed price range.

At $20 per share, the 17.5 million shares sold in its debut raised $350 million, a huge haul for a company that reported around 10% of that figure in Q1 2020 revenue. Provided that your humble servant is doing his Class A to ADS share conversion calculations correctly, Agora is worth about $2.0 billion at its IPO price.

Agora raised well over $100 million while a private company, backed by GGV Capital, Coatue and others, according to Crunchbase data.

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Agora is an API-powered company that allows customers to embed real-time video and voice abilities in their applications; appropriately, the company’s ticker symbol in America will be “API.”

With an annual run rate of $142.2 million, a $2 billion valuation gives Agora a run-rate multiple of around 14x. That’s rich, but not stratospheric. Perhaps Agora wasn’t able to command a higher multiple due to its sub-70% margins (68.8% in Q1)?

Agora’s financials make its IPO pricing a neat puzzle, so let’s pull apart the good and the bad to better understand why the market was willing to pay than the company anticipated.

After that short exercise, we’ll make note of the current IPO climate, inclusive of what we learn from Agora. (Spoiler for unicorns out there: things look good.)

The good, the bad, the odd

We can’t calculate Agora’s enterprise value with confidence until we get updated filings. But taking into account the company’s pre-IPO cash and liabilities, its implied enterprise value/run rate is something around 13x. (That figure will dip if the company’s shares don’t rise after its debut, as its cash position rises from its share sale; more on enterprise values here.)

It was one of the fastest growing startups in modern history and one of the most anticipated IPOs of 2019. But now, following the company’s disclosure of a potential fraud of hundreds of millions of dollars, Luckin’s journey is starting to meet its end.

The company, in a statement today filed with the SEC, said that it would not contest Nasdaq’s decision to delist the company after having received two notifications in recent weeks of the stock exchange’s desire to push the China-based coffee chain from its market. It will officially stop trading Tuesday morning, meaning that Monday is your last day to trade LK, at least for the time being.

The saga of Luckin was an extraordinarily exciting one. Here was a barely two-year-old startup that was launching coffee “shops” and delivering cups of coffee faster than international incumbent Starbucks, which it had overtaken in total locations in China despite the latter’s multi-decade foray into the Middle Kingdom as it tried to convert local Chinese consumers from traditional tea culture.

That growth led to a huge surge of interest from Wall Street for the company’s debut last year, and the company’s stock soared as its growth reached her more dizzying heights. There was just one problem: little of that growth was apparently real.

This April, the company’s board started to investigate a $300 million dollar fraud within its accounting books, discovering that the company had inflated sales by essentially having affiliated companies buy large orders of coffees that never got delivered. The tactic boosted sales figures and total transaction volume while helping the company’s margins look great (seriously, if you haven’t tried it, selling nothing for something is a great margin business). Of course, that’s fraud when you put it on a 10-K form and submit it to the SEC.

That led to a huge surge of consumer downloads of the company’s app, as its customers lined up to try to exchange their coupons and other giveaways for actual coffees before the company collapsed.

Now, with the company’s delisting imminent, there are huge concerns about the quality of the accounting standards in the United States and around the world. The United States, through the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, has limited ability to actually verifying company records in China, which means that fraud scandals like Luckin have repeatedly happened despite the verification of auditors like EY, which is Luckin’s auditor.

Congress is now working on legislation that would require local access to company documents and metrics, to help shore up what is clearly a black eye for the U.S. markets.

But Luckin’s fraud isn’t the only one that reached its denouement this week. German fintech payments company Wirecard officially announced its insolvency this week in a Munich court, which is likely to stiff creditors billions of dollars on loans. It was a huge failure for Germany’s innovation scene, where Wirecard had been a rare upstart among the country’s Dax 30 index of top companies.

As for Luckin — more drama seems to be unfolding. Banks are trying to reclaim what assets they can from the company and its chairman, Lu Zhengyao. Maybe the company will have more … luckin’ going forward.

As other retailers begin the slow, cautious move to reopen, Microsoft has announced that will be permanently shutting down the vast majority of its retail stores. There are some exceptions, including flagships in urban hubs including London, New York City, Sydney and its own campus in Redmond, Washington, but the remainder of the locations are going away.

In a post optimistically titled, “Microsoft Store announces new approach to retail,” the company spells out what amounts to a profound shift in an approach to retail that had previously found the company looking to compete with Apple at its own brick and mortar game.

It notes the planned temporary shutdown of locations due to COVID-19, but while the pandemic no doubt had an impact on that sector, this was likely a long time coming. In June of late year, it closed its smaller Specialty Stores and kiosks in the U.S.

“Our sales have grown online as our product portfolio has evolved to largely digital offerings, and our talented team has proven success serving customers beyond any physical location,” said Corporate VP David Porter says in the post.

Some goodish news in all of this. Microsoft has committed to transitioning retail employees to new sales and other roles, as the company shifts resources back into online commerce.

“The company’s retail team members will continue to serve customers from Microsoft corporate facilities and remotely providing sales, training, and support,” it writes. “Microsoft will continue to invest in its digital storefronts on Microsoft.com, and stores in Xbox and Windows, reaching more than 1.2 billion people every month in 190 markets.”

Amazon has announced that it will acquire Zoox, a self-driving startup founded in 2014, which has raised nearly $1 billion in funding and which aims to develop autonomous driving technology, including vehicles, for the purposes of providing a full-stack solution for ride-hailing.

Zoox will continue to exist as a standalone business according to Amazon’s announcement, with current CEO Aicha Evans continuing in her role, as well as CTO and co-founder Jesse Levinson. Their overall company mission will also remain the same, the release notes.

The Wall Street Journal had reported at the end of May that Amazon was looking at Zoox as a potential acquisition target, and that the deal had reached the advanced stages.

Zoox has chosen one of the most expensive possible paths in the autonomous driving industry, seeking to build a fit-for-purpose self-driving passenger vehicle from the ground up, along with the software and AI ended to provide its autonomous driving capabilities. Zoox has done some notable cost cutting in the past year, and it brought in CEO Evans in early 2019 from Intel, likely with an eye towards leveraging her experience to help the company move towards commercialization.

With a deep-pocketed parent like Amazon, Zoox should gain the runway it needs to keep up with its primary rival – Waymo, which originated as Google’s self-driving car project, and which counts Google owner Alphabet as its corporate owner.

Amazon has been working on its own autonomous vehicle technology projects, including its last-mile delivery robots, which are six-wheeled sidewalk-treading bots designed to carry small packages to customer homes. The company has also invested in autonomous driving startup Aurora, and it has tested self-driving trucks powered by self-driving freight startup Embark.

Developing…

The direct-to-consumer health insurer Oscar has raised another $225 million in its latest, late-stage round of funding as its vision of tech-enabled health care services to drive down consumer costs becomes more and more of a reality.

In an effort to prevent a patient’s potential exposure to the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, most healthcare practices are seeing patients remotely via virtual consultations, and more patients are embracing digital health services voluntarily, which reduces costs for insurers and potentially provide better access to basic healthcare needs. Indeed, Oscar now has a $2 billion revenue base to point to and now a fresh pile of cash to draw from.

“Transforming the health insurance experience requires the creation of personalized, affordable experiences at scale,” said Mario Schlosser, the co-founder and chief executive of Oscar.

Oscar’s insurance customers have the distinction of being among the most active users of telemedicine among all insurance providers in the US, according to the company. Around 30 percent of patients with insurance plans from the company have used telemedical services, versus only 10 percent of the country as a whole.

The new late-stage funding for Oscar includes new investors Baillie Gifford and Coatue, two late-stage investor that typically come in before a public offering. Other previous investors including Alphabet, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Lakestar and Thrive Capital also participated in the round.

With the new funding, Oscar was able to shrug off the latest criticisms and controversies that swirled around the company and its relationship with White House official Jared Kushner as the President prepared its response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

As the Atlantic reported, engineers at Oscar spent days building a stand-alone website that would ask Americans to self report their symptoms and, if at risk, direct them to a COVID-19 test location. The project was scrapped within days of its creation, according to the same report.

The company now offers its services in 15 states and 29 U.S. cities, with over 420,000 members in individual, Medicare Advantage, and small group products, the company said.

As Oscar gets more ballast on its balance sheet, it may be readying itself for a public offering. The insurer wouldn’t be the first new startup to test public investor appetite for new listings. Lemonade, which provides personal and home insurance, has already filed to go public.

Oscar’s investors and executives may be watching closely to see how that listing performs. Despite its anemic target, the public market response could signal that more startups in the insurance space could make lemonade from frothy market conditions — even as employment numbers and the broader national economy continue to suffer from pandemic-induced economic shocks.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week was a bit feisty, but that’s only because Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas and I were all in pretty good spirits. It would have been hard to not be, given how much good stuff there was to chew over.

We kicked off with two funding rounds from companies that had received a headwind from COVID-19:

• Away raises new capital, reported to be $30 million to $40 million after revenue declines
• Sonder raises $170 million at a higher $1.3 billion valuation after seeing its hospitality business recover

Those two rounds, however, represented just one side of the COVID coin. There were also companies busy riding a COVID-tailwind to the tune of new funds:

• Hopin raised a $40 million Series A as its virtual events business accelerated
• DoNotPay raised an $18 million round at an $80 million valuation

But we had room for one more story. So, we talked a bit about Robinhood, its business model, and the recent suicide of one of its users. It’s an awful moment for the family of the human we lost, but also a good moment for Robinhood to batten the hatches a bit on how its service works.

How far the company will go, however, in limiting access to certain financial tooling, will be interesting to see. The company generates lots of revenue from its order-flow business, and options are a key part of those incomes. Robinhood is therefore balancing the need to protect its users, and make money from their actions. How they thread this needle will be quite interesting.

All that we had a lot of fun. Thanks for tuning in, and follow the show on Twitter!