Author: azeeadmin

After closing stores across four states, this was no doubt a bit of an inevitable: Following reporting earlier today, Apple has confirmed that it will be shutting down an additional 14 stores in Florida, joining the two it closed last week.

The company sent a statement to TechCrunch that is essentially identical to the one it gave us last week, reading, “Due to current COVID-19 conditions in some of the communities we serve, we are temporarily closing stores in these areas. We take this step with an abundance of caution as we closely monitor the situation and we look forward to having our teams and customers back as soon as possible.”

The move comes as COVID-19 cases continue to surge in the southern states. On Wednesday, state officials reported north of 5,000 new infections for the second straight day. In all, Florida has experienced more than 114,000 COVID-19 cases and 3,000 deaths, ranking sixth among all states by number of infections.

As noted last week, Apple had earlier confirmed the possibility of closed locations as soon as it began to reopen select locations in May. The full list of newly closed Florida stores includes:

• The Galleria
• The Falls
• Aventura
• Lincoln Road
• Dadeland
• Brickell City Centre
• Wellington Green
• Boca Raton
• The Gardens Mall
• Millenia
• Florida Mall
• Altamonte
• International Plaza
• Brandon

The Waterside Shops and Coconut Point stores were closed last week. Locations in Arizona and North and South Carolina have also been closed following reopening.

Karat is a new startup promising to build better banking products for the creators who make a living on YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and other online platforms. Today it’s unveiling its first product — the Karat Black Card.

The startup, which was part of accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, is also announcing that it has raised $4.6M in seed funding from Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, SignalFire, YC, CRV and Coatue.

Co-founder and co-CEO Eric Wei knows the creator world well, thanks to his time as product manager for Instagram Live. (His co-founder Will Kim was previously an investor with seed fund Lucky Capital.) Wei told me that although many creators have significant incomes, banks rarely understand their business or offer them good terms when they need capital.

“Traditional banks care a lot about FICO [credit scores],” he said. “A lot of YouTubers, when they’re blowing up, they don’t have time to think: Let me make sure my FICO is awesome as well.”

At the same time, he argued that creators have become suspicious of potentially scammy financial offers, to the point that if you were to attend a pre-COVID VidCon and tried to give out $3,000, “The good creators will not take it, even if you tell them there are no strings behind it.”

Karat co-founders Will Kim and Eric Wei

With the Karat Black Card, the startup is giving creators a credit card that they can use for their business-related expenses. When creators are approved, they receive a $250 bonus that can be applied to any future purchases of electronics or equipment. The card also comes with custom designs, 2% to 5% cashback on purchases and even offers advances on sponsorship payments.

Underlying it, Wei said Karat has developed an underwriting model that works for creators. Instead of looking at credit scores, Karat focuses on the size of a creator’s following, their current revenue and whether or not they’re “business savvy.”

“It’s not just the number of followers you have, but what platforms,” Wei added. “I would rather have 100,000 subscribers on YouTube than 1 million on TikTok, because on TikTok, it’s all algorithmically driven.”

Karat has already provided the card to an initial group of creators, including TheRussianBadger, TierZoo and Nas Daily. Wei said the model is working so far, with no defaults.

For now, the card is aimed at professional, full-time creators who have at least 100,000 followers. Wei estimated that that’s a potential customer base of 1 million creators. Eventually, he wants to provide those creators with more than a black card.

“We’re building a vertical financial and biz ops experience,” he said. “People in earlier stages, we do want to get to them eventually, but only after we feel like we’ve developed enough of an underwriting model.”

There are some wearables out there in the world that are making claims around COVID-19 and their ability to detect it, prevent it, certify that you don’t have it, and more. But a new wearable device from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory might actually be able to do the most to prevent the spread of COVID-19 – and it’s not really all that technically advanced or complicated.

JPL’s PULSE wearable uses 3D-printed parts and readily available, affordable electronic components to do just one thing: remind a person not to touch their face. JPL’s designers claim that its simple enough that the gadget “can easily be reproduced by anyone regardless of their level of expertise,” and to encourage more people and companies to actually do that, the lab has made available a full list of parts, 3D modelling files and full instructions for its assembly via an open source license.

The PULSE is essentially a pendant, worn between six inches and 1 foot from the head around the neck, which can detect when a person’s hand is approaching their face using gan IR-based proximity sensor. A vibration motor then shakes out an alert, and the response becomes stronger as your hand gets closer to your face.

The hardware itself is simple – but that’s the point. It’s designed to run on readily available 3V coin batteries, and if you have a 3D printer to hand for the case and access to Amazon, you can probably put one together yourself at home in no time.

The goal of PULSE obviously isn’t to single-handedly eliminate COVID-19 – contact transmission from contaminated hands to a person’s mouth, nose or eyes is just one vector, and it seems likely that respiratory droplets that result in airborne transmission is at least as effective at passing’s the virus around. But just like regular mask-wearing can dramatically reduce transmission risk, minimizing how often you touch your face can have a big combinatory effect with other measures taken to reduce the spread.

Other health wearables might actually be able to tell you when you have COVID-19 before you show significant symptoms or have a positive test result – but work still needs to be done to understand how well that works, and how it could be used to limit exposure. JPL’s Pulse has the advantage of being effective now in terms of building positive habits that we know will limit the spread of COVID-19, as well as other viral infections.

There’s huge news today for Animal Crossing: New Horizons players still devoted to the most pleasantly addictive way to stay kind of sane stuck at home during the pandemic. In the biggest update yet to the Nintendo Switch hit, players will soon be able to explore the water around their island. Oh—and Gulliver is a pirate now.

The free update will arrive on July 3, marking the first of two waves of new content due out in the summer season (for players in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway!). The update invites players to plunge into the ocean and swim around to collect anemones, starfish, eels and other sea-faring creatures, which can then be donated to their museum collection. The mysterious second half of the update is due out in early August.

The game will also add another new character, Pascal, a sea otter who you can hit up for new recipes. Anyone who’s played past Animal Crossing titles will recognize Pascal as a chill guy who doles out equally chill pearls of wisdom while casually treading water.

For a game that revolves around familiar cycles—collecting fruit, pulling weeds, shaking trees to find nice living room furniture—the addition of swimming and diving is actually a pretty big change. And it’s probably a good reason for anyone who went hard on New Horizons in the early days of the pandemic and ran out of things to do to revisit the game. It’ll be interesting to see what else Nintendo has in store New Horizons, since it’s the first Animal Crossing title in in a gaming era that expects of plenty of post-release downloadable content already plotted out on the roadmap.

It’s also the perfect time to casually stroll out among your villagers while acting like no time passed at all if, like me, your wife accidentally broke one of your Switch controllers and you haven’t played in three weeks. Lolly, if you’re reading this, I want you to know they were back-ordered and this doesn’t change anything between us. Really.

The fact that Apple takes a 30% cut of subscriptions purchased via the App Store isn’t news. But since the company threatened to boot email app Hey from the platform last week unless its developers paid the customary tribute, the tech world and lawmakers are giving Apple’s revenue share a harder look.

Although Apple’s Senior Vice President of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller denied the company was making any changes, a new policy will let developers challenge the very rules by which they were rejected from the platform, which suggests that change is in the air.

According to its own numbers, the App Store facilitated more than $500 billion in e-commerce transactions in 2019. For reference, the federal government has given out about $529 billion in loans to U.S. businesses as part of the Paycheck Protection Program.

Given its massive reach, is it time for Apple to change its terms? Will it allow its revenue share to go gently into that good night, or does it have enough resources to keep new legislation at bay and mollify an increasingly vocal community of software developers? To examine these questions, four TechCrunch staffers weighed in:

• Devin Coldewey
• Lucas Matney
• Sarah Perez
• Darrell Etherington

Devin Coldewey: The App Store fee structure “seems positively extortionate”

Apple is starting to see that its simplistic and paternalistic approach to cultivating the app economy may be doing more harm than good. That wasn’t always the case: In earlier days it was worth paying Apple simply for the privilege of taking part in its fast-expanding marketplace.

But the digital economy has moved on from the conditions that drove growth before: Novelty at first, then a burgeoning ad market supercharged by social media. The pendulum is swinging back to more traditional modes of payment: one-time and subscription payments for no-nonsense services. Imagine that!

Combined with the emergence of mobile platforms not just as tools for simple consumption and communication but for serious work and productivity, the stakes have risen. People have started asking, what value is Apple really providing in return for the rent it seeks from anyone who wants to use its platform?

Surely Apple is due something for its troubles, but just over a quarter of a company’s revenue? What seemed merely excessive for a 99-cent app that a pair of developers were just happy to sell a few thousand copies of now seems positively extortionate.

Apple is in a position of strength and could continue shaking down the industry, but it is wary of losing partners in the effort to make its platform truly conducive to productivity. The market is larger and more complicated, with cross-platform and cross-device complications of which the App Store and iOS may only be a small part — but demanding an incredibly outsized share.

It will loosen the grip, but there’s no hurry. It would be a costly indignity to be too permissive and have its new rules be gamed and hastily revised. Allowing developers to push back on rules they don’t like gives Apple a lot to work with but no commitment. Big players will get a big voice, no doubt, and the new normal for the App Store will reflect a detente between moneyed interests, not a generous change of heart by Apple.

Virgin Galactic has passed a key milestone in its SpaceShipTwo qualification program. The company performed a glide flight, which means that it was flying its VSS Unity spacecraft unpowered in glide configuration, after its release from its carrier aircraft, a modified Boeing 747 called VMS Eve.

This flight was the second such test flight that Virgin has flown with Unity from its Spaceport America launch facility in New Mexico, but it was done at higher altitudes and at higher speeds than the earlier flight. This sets up Virgin to now move on to powered spaceflight from Spaceport America – its first at the facility, though Unity itself has flown previously in a test capacity, reaching a heigh of 41.4 miles above Earth at supersonic speeds back in 2018 for its most impressive demonstration.

Virgin Galactic returned to powered spaceflight testing at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California in 2018 – four years after it had a fatal crash during testing of Unity’s predecessor, VSS Enterprise. Virgin’s co-pilot for that flight, Michael Alsbury, was tragically killed in that incident, and pilot Peter Siebold suffered serious injuries.

Unity has had no such issues, and today’s unpowered glide flight seems to have gone perfectly to plan, providing Virgin with key data about flight conditions and aircraft/spacecraft behaviour from the New Mexico launch site, which will ultimately also serve Virgin Galactic’s paying customers as the departure and return location for their tourist trips to the edge of space.

The next major step for the company as it moves towards actually getting those ticket-holders on their space tours is performing powered test flights from Spaceport America. As mentioned, Unity has done powered test flights previously, including with Virgin’s Chief Astronaut Trainer Beth Moses on board, but there are still a number of intermediary steps that need to take place to get there, including reviewing the data collected during today’s flight, and making any small changes to the launch and flight system that may be required to ensure the success of a powered spaceflight.

Virgin had been looking to begin commercial flights as early as the middle of this year, but given that it still has some significant testing to complete, the timeline looks more like end of year as a best-case scenario for any actual tourist launches.

Waymo’s self-driving software footprint is expanding — this time in a partnership with Volvo Car Group. The two companies announced Thursday an “exclusive” partnership to integrate Waymo’s self-driving software into a new electric vehicle designed for ride-hailing.

Volvo and Waymo provided just a few details on the partnership and what this might actually look like except that the companies “will first work together to integrate the Waymo Driver into an all-new mobility-focused electric vehicle platform for ride hailing services.” The phrase “first work together” suggests more is coming. We know that the new vehicle platform will be capable of Level 4 autonomy, a designation by SAE that means it can handle all driving in a specific geographic area or in certain weather and road conditions.

The partnership also includes other subsidiaries under Volvo Car Group, including electric performance brand Polestar and Lynk & Co. International, a point that Volvo Car Group CTO Henrik Green specifically noted in his prepared statement.

“Fully autonomous vehicles have the potential to improve road safety to previously unseen levels and to revolutionize the way people live, work and travel,” Volvo Car Group CTO Henrik Green said in a statement. “Our partnership with Waymo opens up new and exciting business opportunities for Volvo Cars, Polestar and Lynk & Co.”

The term “exclusivity” is also used to describe the partnership. But without specific details it’s hard to know where this is headed and what “exclusive” actually means. The exclusivity term is used to describe Waymo’s Level 4 self-driving software, which suggests that the two companies might be co-developing or certainly sharing sensitive information on the inner workings of the stack. It also hints that the partnership is structured to include a possible licensing deal.

Waymo’s strategy so far has been to partner with automakers. Waymo handles the design of its hardware suite, software and compute system. It then works with the automakers to create vehicles that integrate easily with its so-called Waymo Driver. These relationships have largely focused on ride-hailing applications, but could be customized to make the vehicles more suitable for local delivery, trucking and personal car ownership.

If a licensing deal between the two companies materializes, it could be similar to Waymo’s partnership with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. In May 2018, FCA announced it expanded its contract with Waymo to supply the self-driving car company with up to 62,000 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans. FCA also said at the time that it was exploring ways to license Waymo’s self-driving car technology in order to deploy the tech in cars for consumers.

Waymo has a supplier partnership with Jaguar Land Rover for up to 20,000 all-electric I-Pace vehicles. In June 2020, Waymo locked in a partnership with Renault and Nissan to research how commercial autonomous vehicles might work for passengers and packages in France and Japan.

Don’t forget that Volvo still has a deal with Uber self-driving unit Uber Advanced Technologies Group. Both Volvo and Uber ATG confirmed that its four-year partnership is still intact. Under that partnership, Volvo is supplying Uber with a vehicle designed for autonomous driving. These special Volvo XC90 vehicles are equipped with the hardware necessary to support Uber’s self-driving software. Uber then integrates its self-driving software stack into the vehicle. Volvo said it has a “framework agreement with Uber to deliver tens of thousands of autonomous drive ready vehicles.”

The latest version of iOS adds a few smart features intended for use by people with hearing and vision impairments, but some of which may be helpful to just about anybody.

The most compelling new feature is perhaps Sound Recognition, which creates a notification whenever the phone detects one of a long list of common noises that users might want to be aware of. Sirens, dog barks, smoke alarms, car horns, doorbells, running water, appliance beeps — the list is pretty extensive. A company called Furenexo made a device that did this years ago, but it’s nice to have it built in.

Users can have notifications go to their Apple Watch as well, in case they don’t always want to be checking their phone to check if the oven has gotten up to temperature. Apple is working on adding more people and animal sounds as well, so the system has room to grow.

The utility of this feature for hearing-impaired folks is obvious, but it’s also nice for anyone who gets lost in their music or podcast and forgets they let the dog out or are expecting a package.

Also new in the audio department is what Apple is calling a “personal audiogram,” which amounts to a custom EQ setting based on how well you hear different frequencies. It’s not a medical tool — this isn’t for diagnosing hearing loss or anything — but a handful of audio tests can tell whether certain frequencies need to be boosted or dampened. Unfortunately the feature only works, for some reason, with Apple-branded headphones.

Real Time Text conversations is an accessibility standard that basically sends text chat over voice call protocols, allowing seamless conversations and access to emergency services for nonverbal people. It’s been supported by iPhones for some time, but now users don’t need to be in the calling app for it to work — do a call while you play a game or watch a video, and the conversation will appear in notifications.

A last feature intended for use by the hearing impaired is an under-the-hood change to group FaceTime calls. Normally the video automatically switches to whoever is speaking — but of course sign language is silent, so the video won’t focus on them. Until iOS 14 anyway, in which the phone will recognize the motions as sign language (though not any specific signs) and duly switch the view to that participant.

VoiceOver makeover

Apple’s accessibility features for those with low or no vision are solid, but there’s always room to grow. VoiceOver, the smart screen-reading feature that’s been around for more than a decade now, has been enhanced with a machine learning model that can recognize more interface items, even if they haven’t been properly labeled, and in third party apps and content too. This is making its way to the desktop as well, but not quite yet.

iOS’s descriptive chops have also been upgraded, and by analyzing a photo’s contents it can now relate them in a richer way. For instance, instead of saying “two people sitting,” it might say,  “two people sitting at a bar having a drink,” or instead of “dog in a field,” “a golden retriever playing in field on a sunny day.” Well, I’m not 100 percent sure it can get the breed right, but you get the idea.

The Magnifier and Rotor controls have been beefed up as well, and large chunks of Braille text will now auto-pan.

Developers with vision impairments will be happy to hear that Swift and Xcode have received lots of new VoiceOver options, as well as making sure common tasks like code completion and navigation are accessible.

Back tappin’

The “back tap” is a feature new to Apple devices but familiar to Android users, who have seen things like it on Pixel phones and other devices. It enables users to tap the back of the phone two or three times to activate a shortcut — super handy for invoking the screen reader while your other hand is holding the dog’s leash or a cup of tea.

As you can imagine the feature is useful to just about anyone, since you can customize it to perform all sorts of shortcuts or tasks. Unfortunately the feature is for now limited to phones with FaceID — which leaves iPhone 8 and SE users, among others, out in the cold. It’s hard to imagine that there is no secret tap-detection hardware involved — it’s almost certain that it uses accelerometers that have been in iPhones since the very beginning.

Apple is no stranger to holding certain features hostage for no particular reason, such as the notification expansions that aren’t possible a brand-new phone like the SE. But doing so with a feature intended for accessibility is unusual. The company did not count out the possibility that the back tap would make its way to button-bearing devices, but would not commit to the idea either. Hopefully this useful feature will be more widely available soon, but only time will tell.

As perennial front runner for the title of probably-the-most-evil tech company, Amazon has a long way to go to rehabilitate its image as a take-no-prisoners, industry-consolidating wealth machine.

In a bold effort to do so, the company announced today that it would buy the rights to Seattle’s KeyArena, an aging stadium currently under redevelopment in the city. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos boasts that the stadium will “be the first net zero carbon certified arena in the world.”

“Instead of calling it Amazon Arena, we’re naming it Climate Pledge Arena as a regular reminder of the urgent need for climate action,” Jeff Bezos wrote on Instagram.

Other regular reminders for urgent climate action include the company’s own employees walking out to protest its lack of accountability on climate issues, its ongoing courtship with oil and gas companies and the sheer amount of times in a single day we see Amazon delivery vans dropping packages off on the same block.

Addressing its record of climate indifference, Amazon announced a $2 billion investment in sustainable efforts to reduce the company’s massive carbon footprint earlier this week as part of the same climate-friendly PR blitz.

Bezos himself announced in February that he would invest $10 billion of his personal wealth in a fund to address climate change, which is probably the least you can do when you’ve amassed an amount of wealth that’s incomprehensible to any normal person at the expense of workers, the environment and whatever else got in the way.