Author: azeeadmin

Magic Leap may be on its last legs, the next iPhone could be delayed by a month and WhatsApp says its efforts to slow the spread of misinformation are working.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 27, 2020.

1. Magic Leap’s $2.6 billion bait and switch

“Why are people still giving Magic Leap money?” our own Lucas Matney asked a year ago. The company’s device sales were terrible. Last month it sought an acquisition for a $10 billion price tag that Josh Constine called “crazy.” Most recently, it laid off half the company and pivoted to enterprise.

Now columnist Jon Evans looks back at what went wrong. The issue, he concludes, is that Magic Leap never managed to miniaturize its breakthrough technology into anything actually releasable.

2. The next iPhone could be delayed a month, as pandemic wears on

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the iPhone 12 may be among the devices impacted by unexpected COVID-19 issues. Apple is supposedly “pushing back the production ramp-up” of the new devices owing to manufacturing issues in Asia and “weakened global consumer demand.”

3. WhatsApp’s new limit cuts virality of ‘highly forwarded’ messages by 70%

WhatsApp’s bid earlier this month to cut the virality of messages circulating on its platform by introducing a forwarding limit has already started to pay off.

4. Facebook launches drop-in video chat Rooms to rival Houseparty

Facebook is co-opting some of the top video chat innovations like Zoom’s gallery view for large groups and Houseparty’s spontaneous hangouts for a new feature called Rooms.

5. Coronavirus could push consumers away from influencers and toward streaming TV

LiveRamp TV’s Jay Prasad notes that prior to the onset of coronavirus, the influencer trend was diminishing while the streaming TV trend became more prominent. Today, influencers have actually seen increased levels of engagement — but they face credibility issues, which could lead to a reduction in perceived value to brands. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Brave accuses European governments of GDPR resourcing failure

Brave, maker of a pro-privacy browser, has lodged complaints with the European Commission against 27 EU Member States for under resourcing their national data protection watchdogs. The company has compiled a report to back up the complaints, in which it chronicles a drastic shortage of tech expertise and budget resource among Europe’s privacy agencies to enforce the region’s data protection framework.

7. Codota picks up $12M for an AI platform that auto-completes developers’ code

Codota is an Israeli startup that provides an AI tool for developers to let them autocomplete strings of code that they are writing — intended both to speed up their work (it claims to “boost productivity by 25%”) and to make sure that the code is using the right syntax and “spelled” correctly.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

The original Pixel Buds weren’t very good. No way around it. Here’s a thing I wrote about them in a review titled “A disappointing debut for Google’s Pixel Buds“: As recently as a couple of years ago, they would have been a contender for the most compelling Bluetooth headphones on the market. But given the strides much of the competition has made, they mostly land with a dull thud.”

And we weren’t alone. Google’s first attempt at wireless earbuds were met with a pretty resounding “meh,” when they arrived in 2017. It’s probably an understatement to suggest that the company went back to the drawing board on this one. The line required a rethink from the ground up.

It took another two and a half years to deliver their successor. And Google seemingly sought to wipe the slate clean entirely, even going so far as not listing a “2” in the name. The new Pixel Buds are simply Pixel Buds. Anything else you remember with that name was clearly a figment of your own imagination.

Those original Pixel Buds that definitely didn’t exist already felt outdated when they hit the market. And while a clean slate was certainly required, Google didn’t do itself any favors by waiting that long. The landscape for wireless earbuds has grown by leaps and bounds in that time. The market has been saturated and the products feel more of a necessity than a luxury.

Six months after their introduction at a Pixel event in New York, the Buds are finally available for purchase in the U.S. — in Clearly White, at least. The other, more fun colors — Oh So Orange, Almost Black and Quite Mint — are not yet on the market. A minor quibble for those who have waited this long for a decent pair of Google headphones.

Color issues aside, I’m pretty into the design language here. It feels fresh in a way most earbuds don’t — the case in particular. It would have been easy to knock-off Apple or Samsung or any number of competitors, but the new Pixel Buds manage to pull off a fresh aesthetic built on top of the same basic concept of charging case that’s essentially universal across the board, at this point.

I actually prefer the matte black to the AirPod gloss. It’s better to look at and feels nice to the touch. Jury’s still out on how easily it will scratch. Full disclosure, I haven’t really left my apartment since the Buds arrived — because, well, life. The case is ovular — a flattened egg, if you will. The top of the case opens with an easy flip. There’s a black accent running around the lid, easily showing where to stick your thumb.

The case is fairly long in relation to the Buds themselves, owing, one imagines, to the size of the battery. All told, the Buds should get 24 hours with the case. There’s a USB-C port on the bottom (they’re wirelessly chargable, too) and a pairing button on the rear. The charging light flips on when open — white for full, orange for low battery.

Flipping the case open with the Buds in will also trigger a pairing dialog box on Pixel phones and other handsets running Android 6.0 and up. It’s a super simple pairing process — one akin to what you’ll get with AirPods on iOS. And once the headphones are registered to you, the box will pop up with the info on your other devices.

The Buds themselves are also aesthetically distinct from most of the competition. They feature a round button surface sporting a small, engraved Google “G.” The surface gives you space for the touch controls, which are as follows:

• Tap to play/pause media, answer calls
  
• Double tap to skip track, end/reject call, stop the Assistant
  
• Triple tap to rewind/go to previous track
  
• Swipe forward to increase volume
  
• Swipe backward to decrease volume

The Buds felt good in my ears with the default medium tips. There are a larger and smaller pair in the box, as well, so you can play around to get a better fit. They’ve been in for the better part of four hours and my ears feel fine — not something I can say with every pair of earbuds I’ve tested. They’re not too large or heavy, so they don’t pull on or press the ear. There’s also a small, removable silicone wing at the top to keep them in place.

The battery on the buds is a bit lacking. After the aforementioned amount of time, I just got a low battery notification on the right bud. Curiously, they’ve run down at different rates. The right is at 14%, the left at 34%. Time to stick them back in the case for a recharge.

The sound is decent. Not the best sounding pair I’ve tried and certainly not the worst. I’d say they’re pretty middle of the pack in terms of the price point. If audio is (understandably) you’re biggest concern, I’d recommend opting for a pricier model from Sony, Sennheiser or Apple’s AirPods Pro. There’s no active noise canceling here, either. The “Hey Google” microphone array works as advertised whether activated by voice or a long press with a finger. The connection was mostly solid. I was able to keep the music playing while walking into another room, though I did hit a few rough patches here and there.

At $179, the new Pixel Buds are priced close to the middle of the pack. That feels about right. The models are a big upgrade over their disappointing predecessors, but are still a pretty middle of the road choice for Android users.

The co-founders of Walrus.ai, a new software company which raised $4 million in a new round of financing fro Homebrew, Felicis Ventures and Leadout Capital, started their business with one problem.

Jake Marsh, Ogden Nathan, and Scott White had a problem had left Wealthfront to launch a new service that would solve what they saw as a key problem with new business workflows. Their idea was to integrate the disparate software silos that different parts of their former business used to complete assignments.

The company was going to be called Monolist and it was going to aggregate tasks across every tool into a single actionable list. Unfortunately it wasn’t working.

They had founded the business back in 2018 and had gone on to raise seed capital from Homebrew and Leadout Capital, but they were hitting walls in their product development.

“Reliability was a huge problem for us,” said company co-founder, Scott White. “There were various frameworks that would let you test your automation so that before you launch your software, you catch bugs… There were some code languages that exist that can help you do this, but they didn’t work for us at all.”

The browser testing frameworks that White and his co-founders were using hadn’t kept up with the evolution of the software development industry and couldn’t adequately recreate the ways that actual users would interact with the software. “The stuff is super brittle,” said White.

Typically, according to White, these assurance tests break and then force engineers and developers to then investigate why the tests broke, to see if they can figure out what went wrong with the test even before they move on to any quality assurance of the actual changes made to a product.

“They weren’t designed to handle that much complexity,” White said of the existing testing tools.

So White and his co-founders thought about how they’d solve what they see as one of the critical problems that engineers face.

“The problem for engineers right now is that writing tests for your applications is hard because you have to write code and the frameworks are very inflexible and flaky,” White said. “Engineers spend tons of time running tests and if those tests fail then your code would not get shipped so you have to debut all those tests.”

Enter the new venture from White and his co-founders.

That would be Walrus.ai “We’re outsourced engineering through an API,” said White. “We understand how to do testing and we can do it way better and more quickly.”

Using simple text descriptions of a planned user interface, Walrus.ai’s co-founder said his company can run diagnostics on just how effectively the code manages to execute its planned commands.

Given its status as a relatively new kind on the testing block, Walrus.ai only has tens of paying customers right now as it spins out from Monolist.

The company sees its competition coming primarily from outsourced quality assurance companies like Rainforest QA; test recorders like Mabel and Testim; and testing frameworks like Selenium and Cypress, but believes that its ability to take natural language prompts and run QA tests will be enough of a differentiator to capture a significant share of the market.

471 French cryptography and security researchers have signed a letter named Attention StopCovid to raise awareness about the potential risks of a contact-tracing app. A debate in the French parliament will take place tomorrow to talk about all things related to post-lockdown — including contact-tracing app StopCovid.

Among the group of researchers, 77 of them are affiliated with Inria, the French research institute that has been working on the contact-tracing protocol that will power the government-backed contact-tracing app, ROBERT. With this letter, it appears that Inria is conflicted about ROBERT.

“All those applications induce very important risks when it comes to protecting privacy and individual rights,” the letter says. “This mass surveillance could be done by collecting the interaction graph of individuals — the social graph. It could happen at the operating system level on the phones. Not only operating system makers could reconstruct the social graph, but the state could as well, more or less easily depending on the approaches.”

The letter also mentions a thorough analysis of centralized and decentralized implementations of contact-tracing protocols. It includes multiple attack scenarios and undermines both the DP-3T protocol as well as ROBERT.

Ahead of the debate in the French parliament tomorrow, researchers say that “it is essential to thoroughly analyze the health benefits of a digital solution with specialists — there should be important evidence in order to justify the risks incurred.”

Researchers also ask for more transparency at all levels — every technical choice should be documented and justified. Data collection should be minimized and people should understand the risks and remain free not to use the contact-tracing app.

Over the past few weeks, multiple groups of researchers in Europe have been working on different protocols. In particular, DP-3T has been working a decentralized protocol that leverages smartphones to compute social interactions. Ephemeral IDs are stored on your device and you can accept to share ephemeral IDs with a relay server to send them to the community of app users.

PEPP-PT has been backing a centralized protocol that uses pseudonymization to match contacts on a central server. A national authority manages the central server, which could lead to state surveillance if the protocol isn’t implemented properly. ROBERT is a variant of PEPP-PT designed by French and German researchers.

While the French government has always been cautious about the upsides of a contact-tracing app, there’s been little debate about the implementation. Inria, with official backing from the French government, and Fraunhofer released specifications for the ROBERT protocol last week.

Many (including me) have called out various design choices as you have to trust your government that they’re not doing anything nefarious without telling you — a centralized approach requires a lot of faith from the end users as the government holds a lot of data about your social interactions and your health. Sure, it’s pseudonymized, but it’s not anonymized despite what the ROBERT specification document says.

Moreover, ROBERT doesn’t leverage Apple and Google’s contact-tracing API that is in the works. France’s digital minister, Cédric O, has been trying to put some pressure on Apple over Bluetooth restrictions with a Bloomberg interview. Given that Apple and Google provide an API for decentralized implementations, they have little incentive to bow to French pressure.

On Sunday, Germany announced that it would abandon its original plans for a centralized architecture in favor of a decentralized approach, leaving France and the U.K. as the two remaining backers of a centralized approach.

France’s data protection watchdog CNIL released a cautious analysis of ROBERT, saying that the protocol could be compliant with GDPR. But it says it will need further details on the implementation of the protocol to give a definitive take on StopCovid.

The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) also said on Twitter that the debate in front of the French parliament is particularly important. “Decisions will have an impact not only on the immediate future but as well on years to come,” they say.

On May 4, CVS and UPS will begin offering drone-based prescription drug delivery to Florida’s massive retirement community, The Villages. The news is part of a partnership with Matternet that began last year, utilizing the company’s M2 drone system to make similar delivers to customers in North Carolina. Last March, the company announced an initial deal, which found Matternet’s drones delivering medical supplies at WakeMed’s flagship hospital in North Carolina. The drones are capable of carrying a five pound payload up to 12 miles.

The expansion comes as residents all over the U.S. have had diminished access to the outside world as part of state issued lockdown measures. Florida’s state at home order order is currently expected to last at least through April 30, though some restrictions have been loosened on beaches throughout the state.

The move is falls under the FAA’s Part 107 Small Unmanned Aircraft regulations, “with authority to operate through the pandemic and explore ongoing needs as they arise after that period,” according to UPS. The parcel delivery services is exploring opening up deliveries to two more CVS locations in the immediate area.

Seniors (60 and up) are, of course, the most vulnerable to this novel coronavirus. Those over 80 are even more at risk, with a fatality risk of around 15% among those who contract the virus.

A startup that’s hoping to be a contender in the very large and fragmented market of human resources software has captured the eye of a big investor out of the US and become its first investment in Spain.

Barcelona-based Factorial, which is building an all-in-one HR automation platform aimed at small and medium businesses that manages payroll, employee onboarding, time off and other human resource functions, has raised €15 ($16 million) in a Series A round of funding led by CRV, with participation also from existing investors Creandum, Point Nine and K Fund.

The money comes on the heels of Factorial — which has customers in 40 countries — seeing eightfold growth in revenues in 2019, with more than 60,000 customers now using its tools.

Jordi Romero, the CEO who co-founded the company with Pau Ramon (CTO) and Bernat Farrero (head of corporate), said in an interview that the investment will be used both to expand to new markets and add more customers, as well as to double down on tech development to bring on more features. These will include RPA integrations to further automate services, and to move into more back-office product areas such as handling expenses,

Factorial has now raised $18 million and is not disclosing its valuation, he added.

The funding is notable on a couple of levels that speak not just to the wider investing climate but also to the specific area of human resources.

In addition to being CRV’s first deal in Spain, the investment is being made at a time when the whole VC model is under a lot of pressure because of the global coronavirus pandemic — not least in Spain, which has a decent, fledgling technology scene but has been one of the hardest-hit countries in the world when it comes to COVID-19.

“It made the closing of the funding very, very stressful,” Romero said from Barcelona last week (via video conference). “We had a gentleman’s agreement [so to speak] before the virus broke out, but the money was still to be wired. Seeing the world collapse around you, with some accounts closing, and with the bigger business world in a very fragile state, was very nerve wracking.”

Ironically, it’s that fragile state that proved to be a saviour of sorts for Factorial.

“We target HR leaders and they are currently very distracted with furloughs and layoffs right now, so we turned around and focused on how we could provide the best value to them,” Romero said.

The company made its product free to use until lockdowns are eased up, and Factorial has found a new interest from businesses that had never used cloud-based services before but needed to get something quickly up and running to use while working from home. He noted that among new companies signing up to Factorial, most either previously kept all their records in local files or at best a “Dropbox folder, but nothing else.”

The company also put in place more materials and other tools specifically to address the most pressing needs those HR people might have right now, such as guidance on how to implement furloughs and layoffs, best practices for communication policies and more. “We had to get creative,” Romero said.

At $16 million, this is at the larger end of Series A rounds as of January 2020, and while it’s definitely not as big as some of the outsized deals we’ve seen out of the US, it happens to be the biggest funding round so far this year in Spain.

Its rise feels unlikely for another reason, too: it comes at a time when we already have dozens (maybe even hundreds) of human resources software businesses, with many an established name — they include PeopleHR, Workday, Infor, ADP, Zenefits, Gusto, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Rippling, and many others — in a market that analysts project will be worth $38.17 billion by 2027 growing at a CAGR of over 11%.

But as is often the case in tech, status quo breeds disruption, and that’s the case here. Factorial’s approach has been to build HR tools specifically for people who are not HR professionals per se: companies that are small enough not to have specialists, or if they do, they share a lot of the tasks and work with other managers who are not in HR first and foremost.

It’s a formula that Romero said could potentially see the company taking on bigger customers, but for now, investors like it for having built a platform approach for the huge but often under-served SME market.

“Factorial was built for the users, designed for the modern web and workplace,” said Reid Christian, General Partner at CRV, in a statement. “Historically the HR software market has been one of the most lucrative categories for enterprise tech companies, and today, the HR stack looks much different. As we enter the third generation of cloud HR products, with countless point solutions, there’s a strong need for an underlying platform to integrate work across these.”

The job of an early-stage startup founder is challenging in good times, never mind a crash like the one we are experiencing today.

While most expect private investing to slow down, it’s clear that some investments are still happening in spite of the pandemic, if the stories we are writing on TechCrunch are any indication.

But the downturn is bound to have an impact on the types of deals that receive funding; any startup that offers a good or service requiring human interaction or installation will face an uphill battle, at least in the short term. That said, enterprise SaaS vendors, especially ones that solve hard problems, help with work-from-home or collaboration, or better yet, help increase efficiency and save money, are still very much in demand.

Nobody can do anything about the CIO who is hunkering down until things improve — but that’s not everyone. Companies might be thinking twice about where they spend money, but some are still helping drive the net-new, post-COVID-19 investments happening from seed to late stage across many sectors.

We looked at data and spoke to a couple of enterprise-focused, NYC-based seed investors to better understand their investing cadence. Nobody painted a rosy picture of today’s climate, but seed investors were never about immediate gratification, especially where enterprise startups are concerned. That means, if a seed-stage investor believes in the founders and their vision and the company can ride out today’s economic upset, there’s still money in the till — at least for now.

Seed investment generally in decline

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

As global startup markets enter a slowdown — more on that shortly — we’re starting to get notes on when growth-oriented firms are going to run short of cash. Of course, startups around the world are cutting staff and trying to limit costs as macro uncertainty reins, but their efforts won’t save everyone.

This morning, let’s dig into what venture’s impending investment pace may look like over the next year or two, courtesy of Upfront Ventures‘ Mark Suster. Then we’ll parse cash runway data from UK and Belgian startups. The resulting picture is one detailing falling cash accounts for a number of startups that could reach zero before venture trends are expected to recover.

Downturn

With COVID-19 making it unsafe to watch movies in crowded theaters, not to mention traveling for the red-carpet glamor of a film festival, many festival organizers have been looking at online alternatives.

So today, YouTube and Tribeca Enterprises (the organization behind New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival) are announcing a new event called We Are One: A Global Film Festival.

It’s not simply an online replacement for Tribeca, but aims to be a truly global event. The 10-day digital film festival will include programing curated by representatives from most of the major film festivals around the world.

We Are One kicks off on May 29 and is supposed to benefit the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, as well as local relief providers.

“We are proud to join with our partner festivals to spotlight truly extraordinary films and talent, allowing audiences to experience both the nuances of storytelling from around the world and the artistic personalities of each festival,” said Pierre Lescure and Thierry Frémaux of the Cannes Film Festival (which will not be taking place this year in its “original form”) in a statement.

While the programming featured during the 10-day event hasn’t been announced yet, participating festivals include:

• the Annecy International Animation Film Festival
• Berlin International Film Festival
• BFI London Film Festival
• Cannes Film Festival
• Guadalajara International Film Festival
• International Film Festival & Awards Macao
• Jerusalem Film Festival
• Mumbai Film Festival
• Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
• Locarno Film Festival
• Marrakech International Film Festival
• New York Film Festival
• San Sebastian International Film Festival
• Sarajevo Film Festival
• Sundance Film Festival
• Sydney Film Festival
• Tokyo International Film Festival
• Toronto International Film Festival
• Tribeca Film Festival
• Venice Film Festival