Author: azeeadmin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New domains using Shopify each month

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

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

Talk of an economic downturn can be frightening, especially one precipitated by a pervasive health crisis. At times, I’m overwhelmed by the images of countless patients on life-support and the near-endless streams of statistics regurgitating bad news.

Having started in venture at the beginning of two recessions, I’ve seen how the startup industry functions during economic trouble. My second day of work at Charles River Ventures was September 11th, 2001. My first project, analyzing the VC industry, propelled the firm to return more than 60% of its fund to investors, going from a $1.2 billion fund to $450 million. In May 2008, Mike Maples and I founded Floodgate in the midst of the Great Recession. We learned that great founders won’t wait for a better economic moment to start a company.

While we are currently embroiled in personal and professional circumstances unimaginable even three months ago, these very challenges will form the basis of incredibly innovative ideas. In order for the world to move forward, we need our greatest minds to imagine a brighter future and create solutions to make it a reality.

When I analyze our society and novel health situation, one thing is certain: COVID-19 is a paradigm-shifting event, creating massively accelerated social and economic change.

The Great Reset is not just another economic event

Our current situation is unique. It’s not merely a cyclical economic event, nor is it a standalone health crisis. What we are experiencing is not just an inflection point: it’s a societal phase-change unlike anything we have ever seen. We face an epic choice of how we move forward, and the decisions we make today will shape an entire generation.

Here’s why: COVID-19 is prompting us to reset many of our most fundamental behaviors. These changes are impacting our financial system, with effects visible throughout our homes, businesses and even the concept of “workplace” itself.

COVID-19 is pervasive

As a global pandemic, the virus itself has spread to nearly every country in the world.

Between February 20 and March 26, 100% of the world’s 20 largest economies implemented government-mandated social distancing. Globally, the number of scheduled airline flights is down 64%. In some countries, like Spain and Germany, flight numbers are down by more than 90%.

Since the timeline for lifting government restrictions is unclear — and even then, scientists are uncertain how the virus will spread — the question lingers: How long will this go on?

COVID-19’s impact is uncertain, long-term and potentially undulating, affecting every facet of our lives. You can’t simply wait it out with the expectation that industries will rebound. In 2001, September 11 felt pervasive, but its economic impact ultimately stemmed from just one single incident and the resulting fear… and that one single incident still cost more than three trillion dollars. How much larger will COVID-19 be?

COVID-19 knocked the wheels off the economy, but one nascent tech job not only kept rolling, it picked up speed.

Teleoperations — or more specifically, teleops for autonomous delivery robots — is still a niche job within an industry that has yet to dive into the deep end of the commercialization pool. However, the job, in which a human remotely monitors and guides autonomous robots, has seen growth along with rising demand for contactless delivery over the past several months.

And it appears that COVID-19 inadvertently expanded the labor pool — at least for Postmates.

On-demand delivery startup Postmates partnered last year with Phantom Auto, an autonomous vehicle teleoperations company. Postmates uses Phantom Auto’s software development kit to remotely monitor, guide or operate its fleet of cooler-inspired autonomous delivery robots known as Serve.

The partnership is part of Phantom Auto’s efforts to diversify beyond autonomous robotaxi applications to a logistics business targeting sidewalks, warehouses and cargo yards — all the places where autonomy and teleoperation are being deployed today.

Momentum for delivery robots

The so-called “race” to deploy self-driving trucks, robotaxi services and other applications of autonomous vehicle technology on public roads had slowed long before COVID-19 appeared. Deployment timelines moved as engineers dug into the harder-than-expected challenges of validating and verifying that their self-driving vehicle technology was safe enough to operate without a human operator behind the wheel. The smaller less capitalized startups have tried to pivot, some unsuccessfully.

COVID-19 has slowed development even further with one exception: autonomous delivery robots that operate on sidewalks or in bike lanes — not roads. Startups like Refraction AI, Starship Technologies and Postmates have experienced an uptick in demand as COVID-19 prompted cities, counties and states to issue stay-at-home orders. Autonomous robots, once considered novelties, have become accepted and even sought after. For instance, Nuro’s R2 delivery robots are being used to move medical supplies around two stadiums in California that were converted into COVID-19 treatment centers.

A Postmates employee monitors one of the company’s autonomous delivery robots. Photo: Postmates

As COVID-19 swept into the U.S., Postmates executives came to the conclusion that this was going to be a long ordeal. The company had already sent its engineering staff to work from home, but its teleoperators were still in coming to the company’s operations centers.

By mid-March, stay-at-home orders began in San Francisco and Los Angeles — the two markets where Postmates operates its autonomous delivery bots. Soon after, Postmates made its move and turned teleoperators, or fleet supervisors as they call them, into a work-from-home job.

“We had this recognition that this isn’t really going to be a two or three-week phase,” Ali Kashani, Postmates’ vice president of special projects said in a recent interview. “We realized that we have a role to play here — we can actually do something.”

Postmates decided to ramp up the deployment of its Serve robots, which would require more teleoperations workers. These autonomous robot guides are needed to make sure the Serve bots make it safely to and from their destination.

Using Phantom Auto’s software, a Postmates fleet supervisor can monitor a robot from thousands of miles away. The supervisor will jump in to help the bot navigate the first and last 15 feet to a restaurant or the recipient or if it needs help crossing a busy street.

These robot guides can assist using a couple of methods. The human teleoperator can provide input to the system, something as simple as a thumbs up or thumbs down to help the bot make the right choice. The employee can also use a hand-held remote controller to steer, accelerate and slow down the bot in real-time.

Instead of cramming people into its operations centers, Postmates took the tech to employees’ homes. The company, along with an assist from Phantom Auto, set up at-home workstations, upgraded their internet and developed new standard operating procedures to ensure that managers could monitor their connectivity more effectively.

Postmates had its fleet supervisors working from home a few days after the first shelter-in-place orders kicked off in mid-March, Kashani said.

That seemingly obvious move might never happened had it not been for COVID-19. Under normal operating procedures, fleet supervisors worked in Postmates’ centralized operation center facilities in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

When it moved the job to employees’ homes, Postmates discovered it had a much larger labor pool to pull from. Postmates can now employ workers who live far from its offices or people with disabilities who might have difficulty traveling from home.

The company has increased its fleet supervisors by 30% since San Francisco issued its shelter-in-place order March 17. Postmates wouldn’t share exact employee numbers.

Kashani said demand for robot deliveries was never the problem. “The limitations in this kind of business is just how many robots can you build and deploy?” Kashani said. And the more robots that are deployed, the more fleet supervisors are needed.