Author: azeeadmin

Sometimes, the best missions are the hardest to fund.

For the founders of RapidSOS, improving the quality of emergency response by adding useful data, like location, to 911 calls was an inspiring objective, and one that garnered widespread support. There was just one problem: How would they create a viable business?

The roughly 5,700 public safety answering points (PSAPs) in America weren’t great contenders. Cash-strapped and highly decentralized, 911 centers already spent their meager budgets on staffing and maintaining decades-old equipment, and they had few resources to improve their systems. Plus, appropriations bills in Congress to modernize centers have languished for more than a decade, a topic we’ll explore more in part four of this EC-1.

People obviously desire better emergency services — after all, they are the ones who will dial 911 and demand help someday. Yet, they never think about emergencies until they actually happen, as RapidSOS learned from the poor adoption of its Haven app we discussed in part one. People weren’t ready to pay a monthly subscription for these services in advance.

So, who would pay? Who was annoyed enough with America’s antiquated 911 system to be willing to shell out dollars to fix it?

Ultimately, the company iterated itself into essentially an API layer between the thousands of PSAPs on one side and developers of apps and consumer devices on the other. These developers wanted to include safety features in their products, but didn’t want to engineer hundreds of software integrations across thousands of disparate agencies. RapidSOS’ business model thus became offering free software to 911 call centers while charging tech companies to connect through its platform.

It was a tough road and a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Without call center integrations, tech companies wouldn’t use the API — it was essentially useless in that case. Call centers, for their part, didn’t want to use software that didn’t offer any immediate value, even if it was being given away for free.

This is the story of how RapidSOS just plowed ahead against those headwinds from 2017 onward, ultimately netting itself hundreds of millions in venture funding, thousands of call agency clients, dozens of revenue deals with the likes of Apple, Google and Uber, and partnerships with more software integrators than any startup has any right to secure. Smart product decisions, a carefully calibrated business model and tenacity would eventually lend the company the escape velocity to not just expand across America, but increasingly across the world as well.

In this second part of the EC-1, I’ll analyze RapidSOS’ current product offerings and business strategy, explore the company’s pivot from consumer app to embedded technology and take a look at its nascent but growing international expansion efforts. It offers key lessons on the importance of iterating, how to secure the right customer feedback and determining the best product strategy.

The 411 on a 911 API

It became clear from the earliest stages of RapidSOS’ journey that getting data into the 911 center would be its first key challenge. The entire 911 system — even today in most states — is built for voice and not data.

Karin Marquez, senior director of public safety at RapidSOS, who we met in the introduction, worked for decades at a PSAP near Denver, working her way up from call taker to a senior supervisor. “When I started, it was a one-man dispatch center. So, I was working alone, I was answering 911 calls, non-emergency calls, dispatching police, fire and EMS,” she said.

RapidSOS senior director of public safety Karin Marquez. Image Credits: RapidSOS

As a 911 call taker, her very first requirement for every call was figuring out where an emergency is taking place — even before characterizing what is happening. “Everything starts with location,” she said. “If I don’t know where you are, I can’t send you help. Everything else we can kind of start to build our house on. Every additional data [point] will help to give us a better understanding of what that emergency is, who may be involved, what kind of vehicle they’re involved in — but if I don’t have an address, I can’t send you help.”

Our Extra Crunch Live series continues with some heavy hitters in August, including Jen Nwankwo, founder and CEO at 1910 Genetics, and Playground Global general partner Jory Bell. They’ll be with us live on August 11 at 12 p.m. PT (3 p.m. ET) to tell us all about how Nwankwo and her startup won over Bell and Playground as an investor, and as we do every week on Extra Crunch Live, we’ll conduct a live pitch feedback session featuring you, the members of our audience.

Extra Crunch Live gives you the chance to hear live from entrepreneurs who have successfully raised significant rounds of venture capital — and from the investors who believed in them. We go into detail about how the deal got done, and you’ll hear from both about what it takes to pitch VCs and what industry-leading VCs look for in prospective portfolio companies.

We’re thrilled to have Nwankwo and Bell joining us for this episode. Nwankwo founded and leads 1910 Genetics, which takes advantage of AI to accelerate the discovery and development of new drug therapies across a wide range of disease and condition categories. She has a Ph.D. in pharmacology and experimental therapeutics from Tufts University School of Medicine and participated in drug discovery development that led to the creation of Type 2 diabetes drug Trulicity prior to her graduate school work.

Bell’s career includes designing and building autonomous robots for deep-sea exploration, as well as a six-year stint at Apple designing notebooks for the consumer technology leader. Bell’s venture investment work began at Playground Global in 2015; he focuses on deep tech investments, including in aerospace, genomics, synthetic biology, and AI-assisted drug discovery, as in the case of 1910 Genetics.

Extra Crunch Live also features the ECL Pitch-off, where startups in the audience can virtually “raise their hand” to pitch their startup live on our stream. Our expert guests will give their feedback on each pitch. If you want to throw your hat in the ring, you have to show up.

Extra Crunch Live is accessible to everyone, but only Extra Crunch members can access the content on demand. We do these every week, so there are scores of episodes across a wide variety of startup sectors in the ECL Library. It’s but one of many reasons to become an Extra Crunch member. Join here.

Interested in hanging with us for this upcoming episode? Register here for free! 

One of the most challenging aspects of leading a startup is the seeming impossibility of building partnerships and executing business development. Large companies are sclerotic and bureaucratic, taking eons in terms of startup years to make decisions that for them are small, but for a new company, can be life itself. Every startup ultimately needs to break through those logjams, and sometimes, they need to lock in quite a few partnerships to be successful.

And then there is RapidSOS. With a two-sided business built around relationships with dozens if not hundreds of companies on both sides of the coin, it needed to gain competency in building partnerships really early and really quickly as it scaled its data platform to improve emergency 911 calls. We’ve already covered the company’s origin story and business in parts one and two of this EC-1, and now I want to turn to the secret sauce: How a scrappy cadre of startup folks were able to break down the walls that imperil partnerships at some of the largest tech companies in the world.

The key, as we will learn, is a set of creative tactics that the company used to bind as many stakeholders into its business as possible. We’ll look at what these partnerships are and how they are formed, and then explore how RapidSOS integrated with software vendors in the 911 space. We’ll also explore how it educated call takers at public safety answering points (PSAPs), worked with its customer partners, and finally, how it built its advisory board and an industrywide initiative around health profiles to become a key thought leader in the market.

The art of the partnership

“Partnership” is a notably and intentionally vague term often thrown around startup circles. Simply put, it describes a business relationship, generally consummated with a contract or statement of work, that brings two companies together over a common initiative. Unlike a mere sale, where one company supplies a product and perhaps customer support in exchange for compensation, partnerships tend to be much broader and more strategic, and can include everything from cross-promotion and channel marketing to engineering assistance, venture investment, exclusivity commitments and more.

When it comes to user-interface design, 911 is about as good as it gets. It’s the “most recognized number in the United States,” Steve Souder, a prominent 911 leader, points out. Simple, fast, and it works from any telephone in the United States. No matter what the emergency is, the call takers on the other side will triage and dispatch assistance.

I’ve taken that ubiquity and simplicity for granted over the past three parts of this EC-1 on RapidSOS as we’ve looked at the startup’s origin story, business and products, as well as its partnerships and business development engine. The company is deeply enmeshed with 911, which means that the prospects of 911 as a system will heavily determine the trajectory of RapidSOS in the coming years, or at least, until its international expansion hits scale and it isn’t so dependent on the U.S. market.

Now, you might think, “911, how could they screw that up?” But this is America, and you’d be surprised.

Despite the daily heroic work of tens of thousands of 911 personnel who keep this brittle system afloat, the reality today is that America’s emergency call infrastructure is in a perilous state. After more than a decade of heavy advocacy, the transition to the “next generation” of 911 (dubbed NG911), which would replace a voice-centric model with an internet-based one designed around data streams, has been trundling along, with some early traction but little universality.

As a Congressional Research Service report described it just a few years ago, “funding has been a challenge, and progress has been relatively slow.” Three years later, the words are just as true as they were then.

Given that RapidSOS’ future ultimately relies on a competent government capable of providing core infrastructure, this fourth and final part of the EC-1 will look at the current state of 911 services and what their prospects are, and finally, how one should ultimately judge RapidSOS given all that we have seen.

The three-digit number that feels like it is three-digits old

911 was invented in the late 1960s to unify America around one emergency number. Early forays to create emergency lines had sprouted up across cities and states, but each used their own system and telephone number, creating massive complications for travelers and people living on jurisdictional boundaries. President Lyndon Johnson’s 1967 crime task force recommended creating a single number for emergency calls as a crime-prevention tool, and on February 16, 1968, the first 911 call was dialed in Haleyville, Alabama.

After announcing that threads were on the way earlier this year, Discord is now introducing the long-requested way to make conversations in bustling servers more comprehensible.

Starting today, any server with “community” features enabled will be able to transform messages into threaded conversations, across mobile and desktop. Threads are designated by their own subject name, making it easy to compartmentalize an off-topic idea into its own mini-conversation.

Channel members can create a thread by selecting a new hashtag symbol that now appears in the contextual menu when hovering over messages or pressing the plus sign in the chat bar and and choosing “create thread.” The feature will be enabled in all servers automatically by August 17.

“… We wanted to help communities stay engaged while avoiding having to shut down conversation to maintain organization,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the feature, noting that hopping into a busy new channel can “feel like walking into the middle of three different movies.” Discord introduced replies last year to help the flow of conversations and threads is an expansion of that same idea.

From the flow of a channel, Discord’s new threads open up into a split-view pane instead of taking over the full screen, serving their function as side conversations naturally. Threaded topics will also show up in the list of channels and will open to the full screen if selected from the channel list.

Threads will auto-archive after 24 hours of inactivity — a nice way to keep channels from being clogged up with off-topic or time-sensitive chat. Boosted servers can keep a thread around for a week instead of a single day, giving a channel’s members more time to hop into relevant side conversations.

Servers that are boosted through Discord’s premium features will also be able to create private threads that don’t show up in the channel list. Private threads only appear to users who are manually added into them or mentioned by name within a thread.

Discord designed private threads so that users could hold group conversations without adding each person in the conversation as a friend, a feature that may be a boon to moderators looking to have one-on-one or small group chats more easily.

Moderators will also be able to designate who can create threads within a channel. Channel members can be given permissions to use private threads, manage threads or just be allowed to use public threads (“send messages” must be toggled on to allow them to create new threads). Threads will work the same way regular channels do for moderation bots.

Sony has launched its first vlogging-specific mirrorless camera, the ZV-E10, that borrows a number of features from ZV-1 compact vlogging model. At the same time, it’s roughly based on the A5000 and A6000-series APS-C mirrorless cameras, with all the good (and bad) that entails.

The two biggest advantages of the ZV-E10 over the ZV-1 are the larger 24-megapixel APS-C sensor and interchangeable mirrorless mount. The latter feature opens Sony’s range of 60-plus E-mount lenses to vloggers, making the ZV-E10 much more versatile than the fixed-lens ZV-1. The larger sensor, meanwhile, will deliver improved light sensitivity and a shallower depth of field.

Sony

The ZV-E10 uses the aging 24-megapixel APS-C sensor found in the A6100 and other recent Sony models. While that delivers sharp, downsampled 4K video at up to 30 fps (or 120 fps 1080p), it’s likely to have a serious amount of rolling shutter that’s not ideal for its intended purpose.

On the more positive side, it offers optical and active electronic image stabilization, just like the ZV-1. That should smooth out handheld shooting pretty well, though don’t expect miracles for walk-and-talk type vlogging — especially if rolling sensor wobble proves to be an issue.

Size-wise, the ZV-E10 is smaller than any of the A6000-series cameras at 343 grams and isn’t much larger and heavier than the ZV-1. It lacks an electronic viewfinder, but it’s Sony’s first APS-C mirrorless camera with a fully-articulating flip-out screen — a basic requirement on any vlogging camera these days.

Sony

The ZV-E10 comes with Sony’s latest phase-detect autofocus system, both for video and still shooting. That means you should get incredibly quick subject tracking, along with reliable eye, face and head detect autofocus. It also has an S&Q (slow & quick) feature that lets you record time-lapse and slow motion footage in-camera without the need for any post processing work.

It borrows several vlogging features directly from the ZV-1. The first is called “product showcase,” a setting that allows it to instantly focus away from your face and onto an object placed in front of the camera. That’s particularly handy for vloggers reviewing products, devices, etc.

The other is a bokeh switch that instantly sets the lowest f-stop available for lighting conditions. That way, you can have the background as defocused as possible, allowing your subject to stand out clearly.

The ZV-E10 has a built-in, high-quality three-way microphone (left, right and central channels) that’s designed to pick out your voice. That means you can vlog without the need to buy a microphone, though it still won’t match the quality and voice isolation of a dedicated shotgun or lapel mic. It also comes with a hotshoe-attached muff to help block wind noise, and if that’s not enough, a wind noise reduction setting. It also comes with a microphone input, though not a headphone output.

Finally, if you’re into live streaming, you can connect the ZV-E10 directly to a smartphone and stream directly to YouTube or other services — much as you can with Panasonic’s latest GH5-II. It will also work directly as a webcam, streaming both video and audio (not just video like other cameras) so you can take advantage of its high-quality microphone.

The ZV-E10 will be available in either black or white by the end of August and will cost $700 for the body, or $800 in a bundle including Sony’s 16-50mm F/3.5-5.6 power zoom lens.

This post originally appeared on Engadget.

TikTok announced this morning it’s expanding its TikTok LIVE platform which today allows creators livestream to fans, while also responding to viewer comments and questions, and accept virtual gifts. Now, the LIVE experience will include a number of new features for creators to make it more competitive with competing platforms, like Instagram Live, including the ability to go live with others, host Q&As, use moderators and improved keyword filters, and more.

For viewers, TikTok is also adding new discovery and viewing tools, among other changes.

The company recently teased some of the LIVE updates to creators across social media ahead of today’s announcement.

According to TikTok, select markets have already had access to LIVE Events, which is a new tool that lets creators better plan their upcoming LIVE sessions.

Creators can schedule and promote their event in advance to build anticipation across their community, while fans can discover, register and then get notifications and reminders when the LIVE Event is about to begin. Scheduling tools are a fairly common baseline feature for livestreaming platforms to offer, so it makes sense that TikTok would now add this.  

Image Credits: TikTok

To use this feature, creators can select the LIVE Events icon from the top-right corner of their profile page, then name the event, list the start time and write a brief description. Once they hit create, the LIVE event will go through a brief review process before being visible to the rest of TikTok.

After the event is scheduled, creators can share it through in-app messages, promote with a TikTok video using a LIVE countdown sticker, or promote it outside of TikTok. They can also make changes or even delete event at any time, if need be. As they plan for their event, TikTok will show how many people have already registered to attend to better inform creators’ promotional efforts.

This feature had already become available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but is now testing in other global markets, the company tells us.

Creators can also now go live with others in order to benefit from the combined audience to gain exposure with each other’s community. Currently, the ability to go live with one other co-host is available worldwide, but TikTok is testing going live with multiple hosts in select regions. For comparison, Instagram this year launched the ability for creators to go live with up to four others in Live Rooms.

Meanwhile, TikTok’s LIVE Q&As allow audience members to ask questions during the creator’s livestreams. Creators can view these questions in their stream chat from a separate panel, and have the option to show the questions to all viewers and answer them formally through the existing Q&A tools.

Image Credits: TikTok

Another new tool allows creators to assign trusted moderators to manage their streams before a livestream starts. These moderators will have the ability to mute and block users from the chat, as needed. The keyword filtering tool, which blocks words the creators doesn’t want to appear in their chats, has also been expanded to support up to 200 terms.

Over the next few weeks, TikTok will also introduce a way for hosts and moderators to temporarily mute viewers and remove comments.

For viewers, meanwhile, TikTok will make it easier to find LIVE videos to watch. Soon, users will be able to tune into LIVE videos directly from the For You Feed and Following pages, by tapping on the new LIVE button (which some may already have), then the “Explore” button which launches a side panel where they can browse through the various LIVE videos available now.

Viewers will also be prompted to reconsider their comments during livestream if the system detects them about to post something potentially harmful or abusive. TikTok has used prompts before to flag unsubstantiated claims in videos its fact-checkers couldn’t verify and it has used a similar prompt to address potentially bullying comments. 

Image Credits: TikTok

Livestream viewers can also now use picture-in-picture mode on iOS and Android to watch LIVE videos while continuing to use their phone.

The TikTok LIVE experience became particularly popular during the pandemic. And while the company declined to share exact viewer metrics for its livestreams, it would say that the number of people going LIVE and the number of people watching LIVE videos had doubled over the last year. These LIVE videos may be helping to fuel demand for the app as well, as a recent report from Sensor Tower noted TikTok became the first non-Facebook app to reach 3 billion downloads worldwide, despite being banned in India. 

The report also noted that in Q2 2021 the app saw its greatest quarter-over-quarter growth in consumer spending in a year’s time, climbing 39% to $534.6 million up from $384.7 million in the previous quarter. This could signal an increased interest in livestreams, as that’s where creators tend generate revenue through the virtual gifts.

TikTok’s LIVE platform is only open to users over the age of 16, and it regularly removes those who the system detects may be underage. (Asked about a recent purge, TikTok said it’s just enforcing its existing guidelines.). It also bans accounts that impersonate or mislead the community about their identity, it says.

All of the newly  features are available, in some form, to global audiences as of now.

U.S.-based edtech investors are increasingly going global, but recent regulatory crackdowns in China, which instructed local K-12 tutoring startups to go non-profit, have led to a chill among check-writers looking at the country.

When I first started reporting on edtech over a year ago, U.S.-based investors often cited China as validation of the opportunity for direct-to-consumer businesses in the K-12 world. The success of Chinese edtech was used to predict the surge of U.S.-based consumer edtech, which saw parent adoption surge during the pandemic.

On Saturday, however, the Chinese government rolled out legislation aimed at easing the financial burden of education services on families, at the cost of venture-backed startups. The reactions were mixed: One founder told me they doubled their personal stake in every publicly traded Chinese edtech startup, considering the present issues a blip in the timeline, but another told me that they were glad they sold their investments in China just last month.

And everyone seems to be looking to India as the next geographic testing ground.

‘We didn’t think we were smart enough’

Reuters reported last week that China is barring for-profit tutoring platforms on core school subjects. The country has also introduced time caps and tutoring curfews, and notably, forbade the platforms from raising capital through IPOs as well as advertising their programs. The news sent Chinese edtech stocks tumbling — NYSE-listed TAL Education’s shares, for instance, closed at $4.47 per share on Monday, down nearly 80% from $20.52 per share last Thursday before the news broke.

Owl Ventures, which has one of the largest edtech-focused funds at $585 million, has been actively investing globally over the past few years. Investor Ian Chiu said last October that he views K-12 tutoring in China as “the biggest market right now in education”.

Among Silicon Valley circles, a fun parlor game is to ask to what extent world GDP levels are held back by a lack of computer science and technical training. How many startups could be built if hundreds of thousands or even millions of more people could code and bring their entrepreneurial ideas to fruition? How many bureaucratic processes could be eliminated if developers were more latent in every business?

The answer of course is on the order of “a lot,” but the barriers to reaching this world remain formidable. Computer science is a challenging field, and despite proactive attempts by legislatures to add more coding skills into school curriculums, the reality is that the demand for software engineering vastly outstrips supply available in the market.

Coding is not a bubble, and Bubble wants to empower the democratization of software development and the creation of new startups. Through its platform, Bubble enables anyone — coder or not — to begin building modern web applications using a click-and-drag interface that can connect data sources and other software together in one fluid interface.

It’s a bold bet — and it’s just received a bold bet as well. Bubble announced today that Ryan Hinkle of Insight Partners has led a $100 million Series A round into the company. Hinkle, a long-time managing director at the firm, specializes in growth buyout deals as well as growth SaaS companies.

If that round size seems huge, it’s because Bubble has had a long history as a bootstrapped company before reaching its current scale. Co-founders Emmanuel Straschnov and Josh Haas spent seven years bootstrapping and tinkering with the product, before securing a $6.5 million seed round in June 2019 led by SignalFire. Interestingly according to Straschnov, Insight was the first venture firm to reach out to Bubble all the way back in 2014. Seven years on, the two have now signed and closed a deal.

Since the seed round, Bubble has been expanding its functionality. As a no-code tool, any missing feature could potentially block an application from being built. “In our business, it’s a features game,” Straschnov said. “[Our users] are not technical, but they have high standards.” He noted that the company introduced a plugins system that allows the Bubble community to build their own additions to the platform.

Bubble’s editor offers a clickable interface for designing dynamic web applications. Image Credits: Bubble.

As the platform matured, it happened to nail the timing of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, which saw people scrambling for new skills and improving their prospects for what was then a gloomy job market. Straschnov says that Bubble saw an immediate bump in usage in March and April 2020, and the company has tripled revenue over the past 12 months.

Bubble’s focus for the past eight years has been on helping people turn their ideas into startups. The company’s proposition is that a large number of even venture-backed companies could be built using Bubble without the expense of a large engineering team writing code from scratch.

Unlike other no-code tools which focus on building internal corporate apps, Straschnov says that the company remains as focused today on these new companies as it has always been. “[We’re] not trying to move upmarket just yet — we are trying to do the same thing that AWS and Stripe did five years ago,” he said. Instead of trying to dominate the enterprise, Bubble wants to grow with its nascent customers as they expand in scale.

The company today charges a range of prices depending on the performance and scale requirements of an application. There’s a free tier, and then professional pricing starts at $25/mo all the way to $475/mo for its top-listed offering. Enterprise pricing is also available, as is special pricing for students.

On the latter point, Bubble is looking to invest heavily in education using its newly-raised capital. While the platform is easy to use, the reality is that any design of a web application can be intimidating for a new user, particularly one who isn’t technical. So the company wants to create more videos and documentation while also heavily investing in partnerships with universities to get more students using the platform.

While the no-code space has seen prodigious investment, Straschnov said that “I don’t look at all the no-code players as competition … the true competition we have is code.” He noted that while the no-code label has been assumed by more and more startups, very few companies are focused on his company’s specific niche, and he believes he offers a compelling value proposition in that category.

The company has doubled head count since the beginning of the pandemic, growing from around 21 employees to about 45 today. They are lightly concentrated in New York City, but the company operates remotely, and has folks in 15 states as well as in France. Straschnov says that the company is looking to aggressively hire technical talent to build out the product using its new funds.

Santa Cruz, California-based Joby Aviation has completed the longest test flight of an eVTOL to date, as its unnamed full-sized prototype aircraft concluded a trip of over 150 miles on a single charge, the company said Monday.

The test was completed at Joby’s Electric Flight Base in Big Sur, California earlier this month. It’s the latest in a succession of secretive tests the company’s been conducting, all part of its goal to achieve certification with the Federal Aviation Administration and start commercial operations.

The prototype spent more than an hour and 17 minutes in the air and covered 154.6 statute miles on a single battery charge, traveling along a predefined circuit. While the test flight was remotely piloted by Joby’s chief test pilot, Justin Paines, the company plans to have pilots in the aircraft when it opens its ridesharing service for customers.

Image Credits: Joby Aviation (opens in a new window)

Headed by JoeBen Bevirt, Joby Aviation has spent the past twelve years designing eVTOL – an electric vertical take-off and landing craft that ascends like a helicopter but flies like an airplane, and is magnitudes quieter than both.

Joby is one of a suite of startups looking to make electric air travel a reality for the average American. The company’s website features a handy graphic showing a proposed trip from Los Angeles airport to Newport Beach – over an hour and 44 miles by car, but only 15 minutes and 35 miles with Joby. Joby aims to make such trips a reality by 2024, and tests like these are a major sign to the public, investors and regulators that it is on-track to meet that timeline.

Significantly, the company uses commercially available lithium-ion batteries that its adapted for air travel, so this test flight is also proof that its battery tech is up for the challenge. It’s a tricky challenge: the battery must have enough energy density to fly around 150 miles while also having enough power to take-off and land vertically. But Joby says its nailed a specific combination of cathode and graphite anode to achieve these goals.

Besides being one of the oldest eVTOL developers, Joby is also the best-funded, raising nearly $800 million in funding to date. That includes a $75 million investment from Uber after Joby bought its air taxi arm, Elevate, and a $400 million investment from Toyota Motor Corp. Joby is going to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Reinvent Technology Partners, a business combination that will inject the startup with an additional $1.6 billion in capital.

It’s a lot of money, but designing and commercializing a novel aircraft is an expensive business: according to some estimates, costing up to $1 billion all told.

“We’ve achieved something that many thought impossible with today’s battery technology,” Bevirt said in a statement. “By doing so we’ve taken the first step towards making convenient, emissions-free air travel between places like San Francisco and Lake Tahoe, Houston and Austin, or Los Angeles and San Diego an everyday reality.”

Watch a video on the test flight here: