Author: azeeadmin

Cruise, the subsidiary of GM that also has backing from SoftBank Vision Fund, automaker Honda and T. Rowe Price & Associates, is turning to a heavy hitter to head up its legal team.

The autonomous vehicle technology company has hired Jeff Bleich, board chairman of utility Pacific Gas & Electric, as its chief legal officer. Bleich has a lengthy resume that includes a position as special counsel to former President Barak Obama and as a U.S. ambassador to Australia.

But it’s his legal career that Cruise is tapping into. Bleich was a partner during two stints for a collective 19 years at Los Angeles-based law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson. After leaving Munger in 2015, Bleich became partner at Dentons and led the firm’s global consulting group. Bleich left Dentons in March 2019 and was named board chair of PG&E a month later. During his three-decade career, Bleich has become a specialist in complex litigation with a particular interest. in cybersecurity, intellectual property and international disputes. He has also been awarded California Lawyer Attorney of the Year among others honors.

“Cruise is leading the way to change lives in a shift that is as important as the move from horses to cars,” Bleich said in a statement. “I am honored and inspired to be joining a team that is unrivaled in their focus on safety, accountability, and trust. That perspective is critical to scaling this extraordinary technology to everyone, everywhere.”

The autonomous vehicle industry is at a crossroads of sorts. The flood of startups that popped up several years ago is starting to recede. A handful of well-capitalized and partnered players have emerged, a group that includes Argo.ai, Aurora, Cruise and Waymo. Cruise has raised upwards of $7.25 billion.

Money is just part of the challenge. Companies hoping to commercialize autonomous vehicles to shuttle people and packages face a maze of legal hurdles, including protecting trade secrets, determining product liability and even squaring off against local, state and federal governments.

Disruptor Beam, the mobile gaming startup behind Star Trek Timelines, has a new name and a new business. It’s now calling itself Beamable, and it’s selling a set of tools to help game developers add commerce and social functionality to their titles.

The company’s direction became clear earlier this year when it sold Timelines to Tilting Point so that it could focus on its developer tools. Now Beamable is officially launching its Early Access program for games that are live, or that are scheduled to go live in the next 12 months.

CEO Jon Radoff told me that Disruptor Beam first built this technology for its own games — not just Timelines, but also Game of Thrones Ascent and Walking Dead: March to War.

Radoff suggested that there’s a real need for this as gaming continues shifting towards a “games as a service” model, where developers don’t just release a title and move on, but rather continue adding new features and content, while additional ways to make money from players.

Image Credits: Beamable

The largest developers with the most popular games can support this approach, but he said, “For the next 5,000 games on the app stores, any of the things they’ve built are pretty primitive and they really need help.”

He added, “For these developers, 30% or 40% of their effort goes into making a cool game, and all the other money and time goes into things the player doesn’t really see — the store and the commerce … It’s kind of like a tax on their ongoing operation.”

With Beamable, on the other hand, developers can add take advantage of the infrastructure that the company has already built for in-game storefronts, merchandising, content management and social interactions. The platform also ties together the company’s backend infrastructure with the Unity 3D editor and the live gameplay experience.

“Other products we’ve investigated are just middleware,” said Tap Slots CEO Markus Weichselbaum in a statement. “Beamable is fully-integrated with Unity, including user interfaces that work in both the Unity 3D editor and game clients. This saves us massive amounts of time we’d otherwise spend in the guts of the technology and rediscovering best practices, instead of doing what we need to do: designing great games.”

In addition to selling Timelines, Disruptor Beam also shifted its business by shutting down Ascent and March to War, and it’s sold an unnamed, still-in-development title to East Side Games.

The Beamable team Image Credits: Beamable

Radoff suggested that when Disruptor Beam started, the market for licensed games tied to major entertainment franchises was still “the Wild, Wild West” providing “a tremendous opportunity” for startups to innovate. Now, however, it’s a “mature market” that’s dominated by larger developers.

Radoff also acknowledged that he spent much of 2019 “trying to figure out how to have my cake and eat it too” — in other words, how the company could turn the game platform into a business while continuing to develop games of its own.

“Ultimately, I concluded that game development is an obsession,” he said. “When you have a company in which any amount of game development is happening, no matter what you do, you’re always going to be obsessed with game development, and that obsession tends to push out your ability to create great technology or a great product for developers.”

Instead, Radoff decided to sell off the company’s games and try to build an organization (now operating remotely via Zoom, like everyone else) that’s equally obsessed with building a development platform — primarily for mobile games, but also for PC and console.

Spotify is continuing its investment in the podcast streaming side of business with the launch of a suite of editorially-curated podcast playlists, as well as new Spotify for Podcasters functionality that will help creators to find new fans for their shows. The company is today introducing a set of 17 programmed podcast playlists, — including flagship playlists Crime Scene, Brain Snacks, and Best Podcasts of the Week — which will be updated regularly.

The launch indicates that Spotify is approaching its podcast business much as it had music, in terms of consumer-facing features.

Already, Spotify had turned its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better suggestions of what to listen to, as it had done with personalized music recommendations through custom playlists like Discover Weekly. And it had allowed users to make their own podcast playlists, as they can do with their favorite tunes.

The only big missing piece was a set of podcast playlists that could match the draw of Spotify’s top programmed music playlists, like RapCaviar and Hot Country, for example. That where today’s launch comes in, as it introduces a set of localized playlists across varying topics, categories, and themes, led by flagship playlists with mainstream appeal.

The new playlists are described by Spotify as follows:

FLAGSHIP PLAYLISTS:

Best Podcasts of the Week: A weekly collection of the latest must-hear episodes. Picked fresh every Tuesday.
Crime Scene: Dive into these gruesomely popular true crime podcasts. Updates every Tuesday.
Brain Snacks: Learn something new in the time it takes to watch an episode of your favorite TV show. Updates every other Thursday.

ADDITIONAL PLAYLISTS:

Murder Monday: Binge our freshest crop of bone-chilling murder stories. Updates every Monday.
Who Run the World?: Stories of inspiring women lifting each other up and changing the world. Updates once a month.
This Week in Hollywood: The latest celebrity news, pop culture and entertainment news. Updates every Friday.
Family-Friendly Fun: Fun, educational podcasts for the entire family. Updates monthly.
Latinx & Proud: Check out the latest Latinx stories from your favorite creators and cultural commentators. Updates twice a month.
Talk Flirty to Me: From ghosting to great loves, these pods will get you through dating’s wild ups-and-downs. Updates twice a month.
Fodder for Foodies: The full menu of tales and conversation from the world of food. Updates once a month.
LGBTQ+ Voices: Stories and interviews behind the lives of a thriving LGBTQ+ community. Updates every other Thursday.
Unsolved Crimes & Mysteries: Hair-raising stories of haunted places, inexplicable disappearances, and murder cases gone cold. Updates twice a month.
Climate Crisis: Thought-provoking conversations and stories about the world’s fight against climate change. Updates once a month.
Real People, Real Stories: Gripping personal stories about everyday life that you’ll want to hear. Updates once a month.
Let’s Talk Women in Hip Hop: Hear from the women creating and redefining hip hop culture. Updates every two months.
Stay in the Know: Smart, engaging podcasts that go beyond just the headlines. Updates every Tuesday.
100% Celebrity Interviews: Your favorite celebrities get candid about their careers, relationships, and so much more. Updates once a month.

These playlists are designed to reach more casual playlists listeners or even first-time podcast listeners, for that matter. These users may not know what podcasts they want to listen to, but may have an idea of what type of programming appeals to them. Instead of having to browse through the podcast descriptions or sample various episodes, listeners can instead engage in a lean-back experience where they just hit play on a pre-programmed set of episodes.

Spotify will also cater to podcast creators with new features launched today, as well. Already, music artists are able to use Spotify’s backend tools to add metadata to their tracks in order to better categorize their work, then submit new songs directly to Spotify editors for playlist consideration. Spotify now says it will introduce backend tools for podcast creators, as well, aimed at helping them gain new fans. Today, this includes playlist notifications which will alert creators as to when they’ve been included on a Spotify podcast playlist.

The launch arrives at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted podcast streaming, with some reports showing a drop in unique listeners and a decline in podcast downloads alongside sharper decline in ad revenue. Users now working from home are no longer tuning in to favorite shows during commutes, for example, which means podcasts have to compete with home media consumption — like streaming Netflix and watching the news — not just other audio options, like music. Spotify hopes programmed playlists will help to increase demand for podcasts at the stay-at-home era and beyond.

The new playlists are launching today across 6 markets. (US, DE, SE, UK, MX, BR)

Augmented reality has seen plenty of hardware failures, but investors are still interested in the platform’s potential to help consumers solve niche problems.

Form has been building AR-enhanced swim goggles that allow swimmers to track their pace, distance and stroke rate on a miniature heads-up display inside the goggles.

The Vancouver startup tells TechCrunch they’ve raised $8.5 million ($12M CAD) in Series A funding to continue scaling their augmented reality product into a major swim tech brand. The round came from a slew of investors including large family offices in the UK and Denmark as well as Silicon Valley Bank, the startup said.

Form CEO Dan Eisenhardt has already had an exit in the consumer AR business, Recon Instruments, a biking and skiing AR goggles company that Intel acquired for an undisclosed sum back in 2015. He launched Form in 2016 and started shipping the company’s swim goggles last year.

The AR hardware market has had a tough couple of years, general purpose AR has been a hard sell for consumers, leaving well-capitalized companies like Magic Leap forced to pursue enterprise and public sector contracts. Eisenhardt says that consumer aren’t ready for a general purpose device and that the AR market likely won’t mature “until the late 2020s.”

“There is no horizontal play until they you’ve got a lot of vertical opportunities,” Eisenhardt told TechCrunch in an interview. “There are 240 million swimmers in the world and there’s an opportunity for a billion-dollar company here.”

Part of the challenge of marketing a mainstream AR devices has been zeroing in on use cases, but high price points has also been a major roadblock. Form has prioritized a device with few additional bells and whistles but an accessible price point, retailing for $199.

In terms of functionality, you certainly won’t be pulling up any photos or searching for directions on the single pixelated monochrome mini-display, but that probably isn’t something you’d be doing underwater anyway. The startup’s focus on simplicity leaves them with a purpose-driven device that aims to give swimmers a persistent means of tracking their progress while swimming, something a smart watch can’t do.

A lightweight computer module in the same eye cup as the display measures input from onboard sensors that detect a number of metrics including interval time, rest time, stroke rate and count, distance per stroke, pace per 100 or 50 meters, length count and calories burned. The goggles claim a 16 hour battery life.

One of the company’s biggest design challenges has been perfecting the device’s fit while allowing users to orient the device to put the display in front of either eye. The company includes seven different nose bridges with the device, but Eisenhardt says that making a one-size-fits-all solution has been a “big challenge.”

For now, the startup is focused on sales of its device, which can be purchased through its site as well as the MoMa Store. Eisenhardt has not ruled out the potential for more services focused on the swimming market down the road.

“Look what Peloton has done for cycling,” Eisenhardt says. “Once you’ve got them locked in with the hardware, the party begins.”

Sonos has launched its first in-house music streaming offering: Sonos Radio, a digital streaming radio service that includes both existing radio stations from TuneIn and iHeartRadio, as well as its own original programming through three new products including two ad-free offerings and one ad-supported option.

The original streaming options from Sonos include Sonos Sound System; an ad-free single station hosted by Sonos itself, that will play “new and well-known” music, along with snippets of stories from artists about their music, as well as hours guest-hosted by select artists themselves. Sonos says this is all about mixing crowd-pleasers with the occasional song you might’ve missed, in a bid to create a single stream that will have broad appeal.

There’s also Artist Stations, which also don’t have any ads, and which are hand-curated by artists and feature a selection of songs they love or that have inspired them. The first such station, debuting with the Sonos Radio launch, is Thom Yorke’s ‘In the Absence Thereof…’, and there are more to follow in the “coming weeks,” including stations from Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes, David Byrne and more.

The final component of the original Sonos streaming content is Sonos Stations, which include over 30 dedicated genre stations. These are also free, but are ad-supported, so you’ll hear the occasional promotional message throughout the stream, kind of like you get with Spotify’s free tier.

To date, Sonos has acted strictly as an integrator for the services of others, operating the platform layer to provide in-house, multi-room streaming via its Sonos speaker and audio equipment products. This marks its first foray into doing something on the services side, so it’s a big change. I asked about whether this signals further moves into streaming, including through a potential paid premium offering with on-demand content, which would more directly compete with some of its biggest partners including Apple, Google and Spotify, and Sonos Product Marketing Director Ryan Richards didn’t shut the door on that possibility.

“This is about lean-back listening, it’s about discovery,” he said. “There are a lot of options for active listening out there, too, and so what we’re really focused on is first and foremost making the best possible radio service for our customers. In the future, we’ll see how that changes, but that’s what we’re focused on now.”

At launch, the global radio option backed by iHeartRadio and TuneIn will be available globally, but Sonos Radio’s original products will only be available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia, with the company planning to expand availability in future. Its in-house offerings are powered by a deal with Napster to use their streaming catalog, and Richards told me that that arrangement also bounds the availability of the services. Sonos is working on signing up additional streaming licensing partners for an expanded geographic footprint and catalogue size, however.

The new Sonos Radio features won’t be compatible with voice control via either Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa on Sonos hardware that supports that at launch, though Richards says the company is looking at adding that as a future feature update. Sonos also acquired a startup that built its own smart voice assistant last November, so that could potentially still result in another in-house offering to lessen its reliance on partners at some point in the future.

To get access, anyone with a Sonos system should see the new offering in their Sonos app via a software update available today.

WhatsApp is deepening its collaboration with the World Health Organization as people across the globe grapple with the coronavirus pandemic. The Facebook -owned service said today it is attempting to appeal to users in a language that they speak “billions” of times a day on its platform: Stickers.

The service, with more than 2 billion users, today introduced a new sticker pack, called “Together At Home,” that captures the moments and emotions that people are going through each day.

The stickers, developed in collaboration with the WHO, are available in 10 languages, including Arabic, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

“This pack offers creative ways to remind people to wash their hands, maintain distance, exercise, and importantly to celebrate medical heroes as well as the personal heroes in all of our lives,” WhatsApp, which added stickers feature on its platform in 2018, wrote in a blog post.

Stickers have become especially popular in developing markets such as India. Hike, a Tencent-backed messaging service in India, has added tens of thousands of stickers in recent months on its app and says it can’t make enough of them fast enough for its users.

Last month, WhatsApp collaborated with the WHO to launch an information service that reached more than 10 million users within days. The Facebook-owned service is also working with federal and state governments in many markets to help them deliver authoritative information about the infectious disease in many countries.

Additionally, WhatsApp said it is also introducing a new sticker pack based on the popular Japanese character Rilakkuma to give people more ways to express everyday emotions.

More features are on their way. The service has started to test group video and audio calls with eight users, up from four it supports currently. The feature, when rolled out to all users, could help WhatsApp compete more directly with Houseparty and Zoom that have reported major surge in their respective userbases in recent weeks.

WhatsApp, which recently introduced new limit on forwarding messages on its app, has also confirmed it is working on a new feature to help users identify whether the text or media content they have received asserts accurate information.

Env0, a startup that wants to help companies bring some order to delivery of Infrastructure as Code, announced a $3.3 million seed investment today and the release of the Beta of the company’s first product.

Boldstart Ventures and Grove Ventures co-led the round with participation from several angel investors including Guy Podjarny of Snyk.

Company co-founder and CEO Ohad Maislish says the ability of developers to deliver code quickly is a blessing and a curse, and his company wants to give IT some control over how and when code gets committed.

“The challenge companies have is how to balance between self-service and oversight of cloud resources in a cloud native kind of way, and to balance this with visibility, predictability, and most importantly, governance around cloud security and costs,” Maislish said.

The product lets companies define when it’s OK for developers to deliver code and how much they can spend instead of letting them deliver anything, at any time, at any cost. You do this by giving overall control of the process to an administrator, who can then define templates and projects. The templates define which repositories and products you can use for a given cloud vendor and the projects correlate to the users allowed to access those templates.

Image Credit: Env0

Ed Sim, founder and managing partner at Boldstart says that the startup has been able to find a good balance between governance and the need for speed that today’s developers require in a continuous delivery environment. “env0 is the first SaaS solution that meets all of those needs by offering self-service cloud environments with centralized governance,” Sim said in a statement.

It’s not easy launching an early-stage company in the middle of the current economic situation, but Maislish believes his company is in a decent position as it provides a way to control self-service development, something that is even more important when your developers are working from home outside of the purview of IT and security.

The company launched 18 months ago and has been in private Beta for some time. Today marks the launch of the public Beta. It currently has 10 employees.

Consumer financial services platform SoFi is making its first expansion outside of the United States with the acquisition of Hong Kong-based investing app 8 Securities.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Targeted to personal investors, 8 Securities will rebrand to SoFi Hong Kong and retain its team, who will began launching services in other markets as well.

SoFi currently has about one million members in the U.S. Last month, it acquired payments and bank account infrastructure company Galileo, with the goal of expanding its products further beyond consumer services.

SoFi Hong Kong gives SoFi its first international foothold. In a press statement, Anthony Noto, the CEO of SoFi, said, “We underwent an extensive process in considering our initial expansion into an international market, and it quickly became clear that Hong Kong, a financial capital of Asia, is ripe for innovation. Based on the platform we’ve built, SoFi, together with 8 Securities, can meet the needs of both experienced and novice investors alike, as part of our overall efforts to make headway on our mission outside of the U.S. to help people get their money right.”

Founded in 2012 by former E*Trade executives Mathias Helleu and Mikaal Abdulla, 8 Securities was the first mobile-only investment service and robo-advisor to launch in Asia, and raised $70 million in capital from investors including Velocity Capital, Route 66 Ventures and Normura Asset Management.

A TechCrunch Beijing finalist in 2011, 8 Securities focused on new investors with an online community that lets users follow the portfolios of top-performing members. The app’s members will still be able to trade more than 15,000 U.S. and Hong Kong stocks and ETFs with no commissions, platform fees or custodian fees, and it will continue to be regulated under the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong.

SoFi Hong Kong will retain its social trading features, and add new ones like SoFi membership points and collections that organize stocks and ETFs around themes, including gaming, Chinese e-commerce, “clean tech” and digital payments. It plans to introduce new collections, such as “Work From Home” and “Travel,” to gives insight into how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected different sectors.

Despite the impact of COVID-19 on the global markets, SoFi Hong Kong CEO Abdulla told TechCrunch that the first quarter of 2020 was 8 Securities’ strongest ever, with new accounts and assets up 400% in March, compared to the 2019 average.

“We experienced a surge in first-time investors that see the current market pull-back as an opportunity to start investing,” he said. “Despite the market decline our active accounts and assets are higher than they have ever been.”

The coronavirus pandemic’s global presence and ubiquity in everyday life is a perfect storm for misinformation, as conspiracy theorists from different corners of the web converge on a shared news topic—the only topic, at the moment. From the earliest days of the crisis, everyone from pro-Trump QAnon conspiracists to left-leaning purveyors of dubious home remedies could find a strain of misinformation tailor-made for their interests.

In new research led by its cyber intelligence analyst Melanie Smith, the social analytics AI company Graphika compared snapshots of the coronavirus conversation on Twitter in January, February and March, creating a bird’s eye view of misinformation about the virus from its earliest online mentions.

Researchers from Graphika, which specializes in disinformation, found that coronavirus conspiracies thrived unchecked in January and February, when news of the virus had yet to fully capture the world’s attention. Into March, more mainstream voices emerged to fill the information vacuum. At the same time, previously popular xenophobic hashtags like #chinavirus and #wuhanvirus were overtaken by mainstream public health terms for the virus.

In the early info vacuum, misinformation generally focused on the cause of the virus and the mystery of its origins, with plenty of unfounded theories put forward. In February, a flurry of conspiracies accused Bill Gates of creating the pandemic and potentially profiting from a vaccine, claims that originated with a QAnon-linked YouTuber.

Unfounded treatments for COVID-19 including “garlic, bleach, a strict water intake, and Silver Solution (potentially lethal doses of colloidal silver)” also emerged during this time, with colloidal silver in particular taking off among QAnon supporters on Twitter.

After the earliest waves of misinformation crested, the idea of the coronavirus as a political issue emerged on Twitter in February, according to Graphika’s researchers. The emergence of politicized content about the virus happened along with a “marked” decrease in activity from science and health outlets at the time and a surge in clickbait sites providing low-quality coronavirus updates. During this upswing in coronavirus political conversation, a subset of Twitter users added references to the virus into their profiles and some previously unrelated political groups on Facebook changed their names in an effort to “rebrand into COVID-19 centric groups.”

There are some signs that efforts by social media companies to counter misinformation and disinformation are having an effect. Between February and March, “fringe voices” commanded a smaller share of the online coronavirus conversation.

“By March, conspiratorial accounts and alt-right news sources like Zero Hedge and Breitbart were missing from the top mentions… and were replaced by influential Democrats such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and left-leaning journalists such as Jake Tapper and Chris Hayes,” the researchers found.

While the downturn in conspiracist content might be the natural result of mainstream attention turning toward the virus, a continued trend in that direction could signal that efforts by social media companies to staunch the flow of misinformation are having an impact.

Still, it’s probably too early to know. While these insights are interesting and helpful for weathering future misinformation storms, they’re also not reflective of this month’s trends—analysis we’ll have to wait a bit longer to look back on in aggregate.

VanMoof is releasing a new generation of its electric bike. In many ways, the VanMoof S3 and its smaller version the VanMoof X3 are refined versions of the VanMoof Electrified S2 and X2. It features an updated motor, hydraulic brakes and a familiar design.

If you’re not familiar with VanMoof bikes, the company has been building electric bikes with some smart features, such as an anti-theft system. There’s an integrated motion detector combined with an alarm, a GPS chip and cellular connectivity. If you declare your bike as stolen, the GPS and cellular chips go live and you can track your bike in the VanMoof app.

The company wants to control as much of the experience as possible, which means that it designs the bike in house, sells it on its website and in its own stores. 80% of orders happen on the website and VanMoof now has nine stores around the world. The company has sold 120,000 bikes over the years.

The S3 and X3 still feature the iconic triangular-shaped futuristic-looking frame. The electric motor has been updated — it is more powerful, more responsive, quieter and smaller. You’re not going to constantly switch from one gear to another as there’s an electronic gear shifting system — it has been updated from two gears to four gears. All you have to do is jump on the bike and start pedaling.

A big improvement compared to the previous generation is that the S3 and X3 now feature hydraulic brakes instead of mechanical disc brakes. And you’ll find the good old boost button on the handlebar to get an extra burst of acceleration when you need it.

When it comes to design, the saddle has been redesigned, the coating on the bike is now matte and you’ll see a lot of changes across the board. The only difference between the S3 and X3 is that the S3 is designed for taller people while the X3 is designed for smaller people. Unfortunately, it looks like the battery is still not removable.

The company is trying to control the supply chain as much as possible. It works with a small set of suppliers to manufacture custom components and then tries to cut out as many middleperson as possible to bring costs down. The VanMoof S3 and X3 cost €1,998 but the company could raise the introductory price in the future due to pressure on the supply chain.

Here’s a video of the previous generation VanMoof Electrified X2 we shot a couple of months ago: