Author: azeeadmin

Electric scooter startup Bird has laid off between four to five percent of its workforce, The Information first reported. That comes out to about 40 people of its ~900-employee workforce. This comes shortly after Lyft laid off up to 50 employees in its bikes and scooters division.

“As we establish local service centers and deeper roots in cities where we provide service, we have shifting geographic workforce needs,” a Bird spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are expanding our employee bases in locations that match our growing operations around the world, while developing an efficient operating structure at our Santa Monica headquarters. The recent events are a reflection of shifting geographical needs and our annual talent review process.”

The layoffs were part of Bird’s annual performance review process and only affected U.S.-based employees, TechCrunch has learned. Those laid off are eligible for severance, including health and medical benefits. Despite the layoffs, Bird is actively looking to hire for more than 100 positions throughout the company.

Earlier this month, Bird unveiled its platform to let entrepreneurs manage their own fleet of scooters in New Zealand. Bird Platform is part of Bird’s mission to bring its scooters across the world “and empower local entrepreneurs in regions where we weren’t planning to launch, to run their own electric scooter-sharing program with Bird’s tech and vehicles,” Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden told TechCrunch earlier this month.

Bird has raised more than $400 million in funding to date and is reportedly in the midst of raising an additional $300 million.

Apple is airing a new ad spot focused on privacy today in primetime. The spot is visually cued, with no dialog and a simple tagline: Privacy. That’s iPhone.

In a series of humorous vignettes, the message is driven home that sometimes you just want a little privacy. The spot has only one line of text otherwise, and it’s in keeping with Apple’s messaging on privacy over the long and short term. “If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on.”

The spot will air tonight in primetime in the US and extend through March Madness. It will then air in select other countries.

You’d have to be hiding under a rock not to have noticed Apple positioning privacy as a differentiating factor between itself and other companies. Beginning a few years ago, CEO Tim Cook began taking more and more public stances on what the company felt to be your ‘rights’ to privacy on their platform and how that differed from other companies. The undercurrent being that Apple was able to take this stance because its first-party business relies on a relatively direct relationship with customers who purchase its hardware and, increasingly, its services.

This stands in contrast to the model of other tech giants like Google or Facebook that insert an interstitial layer of monetization strategy on top of that relationship in the forms of application of personal information about you (in somewhat anonymized fashion) to sell their platform to advertisers who in turn can sell to you better.

Turning the ethical high ground into a marketing strategy is not without its pitfalls, though, as Apple has discovered recently with a (now patched) high profile FaceTime bug that allowed people to turn your phone into a listening device, Facebook’s manipulation of App Store permissions and the revelation that there was some long overdue house cleaning needed in its Enterprise Certificate program.

I did find it interesting that the iconography of the ‘Private Side’ spot very very closely associates the concepts of privacy and security. They are separate, but interrelated, obviously. This spot says these are one and the same. It’s hard to enforce privacy without security, of course, but in the mind of the public I think that there is very little difference between the two.

The App Store itself, of course, still hosts apps from Google and Facebook among thousands of others that use personal data of yours in one form or another. Apple’s argument is that it protects the data you give to your phone aggressively by processing on the device, collecting minimal data, disconnecting that data from the user as much as possible and giving users as transparent a control interface as possible. All true. All far, far better efforts than the competition.

Still, there is room to run, I feel, when it comes to Apple adjudicating what should be considered a societal norm when it comes to the use of personal data on its platform. If it’s going to be the absolute arbiter of what flies on the worlds most profitable application marketplace, it might as well use that power to get a little more feisty with the bigcos (and littlecos) that make their living on our data.

I mention the issues Apple has had above not as a dig, though some might be inclined to view Apple integrating privacy with marketing as boldness bordering on hubris. I, personally, think that there’s still a major difference between a company that has situational loss of privacy while having a systemic dedication to privacy and, well, most of the rest of the ecosystem which exists because they operate an ‘invasion of privacy as a service’ business.

Basically, I think stating privacy is your mission is still supportable, even if you have bugs. But attempting to ignore that you host the data platforms that thrive on it is a tasty bit of prestidigitation.

But that might be a little too verbose as a tagline.

Somewhere out there, there’s a person willing to pay $2,500 for a smartwatch. Surprisingly, that individual has several high end options to choose from. And while the Garmin name doesn’t exactly scream luxury, the company does know how to build a solid smartwatch — and these ones look pretty decent to boot.

Maybe not $2,500 decent, but decent nonetheless.

The Marq GPS line puts the company in relatively rare air, with devices starting at $1,500. Asking people to spend luxury watch prices on a smartwatch is a pretty heavy lift, of course. At well over three times the cost of an Apple Watch, you’re going to want the thing to last for…well, a long time.

To make things even nichier, each watch is targeted at a very specific audience, including athletes, hikers, boating enthusiasts, pilots and race car drivers (that last one is the $2,500, mind). They all offer a specific design and feature set tailored to those categories, including faces that show off wind speed and a built-in altimeter.

Here’s Garmin on why the things are so damn expensive,

Each watch is built with titanium, which is lightweight, yet incredibly strong for high performance in all activities, and are constructed with sapphire crystal formed under extreme heat and pressure to create an extremely durable lens that’s over twice as hard as glass.

Of course, Garmin’s always been a bit of an underdog in the smartwatch wars, courtesy of devices targeted specifically at outdoors folks and athletes, so a targeted audience has always been the company’s M.O. Though even for them, $1,500 and up is almost certainly pushing it. The watches will be available later in Q2. 

We’re just over a month out from our TC Sessions: Robotics + AI event at UC Berkeley on April 18. We’ve already announced a number of marquee guests for the event, including Marc Raibert, Colin Angle, Melonee Wise and Anthony Levandowski. Today we’ve got another exciting panel to unveil and as an FYI our early bird sale ends Friday!

This is our third robotics event, but it’s the first time artificial intelligence has shared the spotlight. Today we’re revealing that two of UC Berkeley’s top names in the space will be sharing a stage to discuss the role of AI in society for a panel titled, TC Sessions: Robotics + AI Artificial Intelligence: Minds, Economies and Systems that Learn.

The pair of professors will be discussing how AI grew to become of modern society’s most ubiquitous and wide ranging technologies. The panel will also explore where the tech will go from here.

Ken Goldberg is a Professor, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at U.C. Berkeley. He has co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed papers on automation, robotics and social information. He is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering and cofounder of the the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at U.C. Berkeley. His work touches on a wide range of topics, including computer science, AI and computational biology. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Early bird ticket sales end tomorrow, Friday. Book your tickets today and save $100 before prices increase.

Students, grab your discounted $45 tickets here.

Startups, make sure to check out our demo table packages, which include 3 tickets for just $1500.

Facebook’s gaming efforts and challenge to Twitch are taking another big leap today, as the social network begins the initial rollout of a dedicated Facebook Gaming tab in the main navigation of Facebook’s app. The goal with the new addition is to help people more easily find games, streamers and gaming groups they follow, as well as discover new content, based on their interests.

After clicking the new Gaming tab, there will be a feed of content that points you to instant games you can play with friends; videos to watch from top streamers, esports organizations, and game publishers; and updates from your various gaming groups, the company says.

The new Facebook Gaming tab builds on the gaming video destination the site launched last year as Fb.gg. That hub had offered a collection of all the video games streaming on Facebook, and a way to for gamers and fans to interact. As a top-level navigation item, Facebook’s new Gaming tab will now further extend the gaming hub’s reach.

While Twitch and YouTube are today dominating the gaming space, Facebook’s advantage – beyond its scale – are its promises of a reduced cut of transactions. On Fb.gg, gamers were able to attract new fans with the aid of Facebook’s personalized recommendations based on users’ activity, and then monetize those viewers through a virtual tipping mechanism.

Facebook’s cut of those tips ranges from 5 to 30 percent, with the cut getting smaller when users buy larger packs of the virtual currency. Meanwhile, Facebook’s fan subscriptions payments for streamers also see it taking a cut of up to 30 percent, the same as YouTube but smaller than Twitch’s roughly 50 percent.

That could potentially attract streamers who want to maximize their earnings and believe they can port their audience over to a new destination. Of course, some streamers may not trust Facebook to maintain those same percentages over time, nor believe it will ever offer the sorts of features and innovations that a more focused gaming destination like Twitch can.

Facebook also last year experimented with making its gaming hub mobile with the launch of Fb.gg as a standalone mobile app.

The app, like the web-based gaming hub, offered a way for gamers and fans to discover content, join communities, and even play instant games like Everwing, Words with Friends, Basketball FRVR, and others.

However, the strategy of keeping Facebook’s Gaming efforts more separated from Facebook’s main site may not have paid off – the Fb.gg Android app, for example, only has some 100,000+ installs according to Google Play.

Instead, much like YouTube recently decided – Facebook will now leverage the power of its platform to boost interest in its gaming content.

YouTube in September said it was giving its Gaming hub a new home right on the YouTube homepage, and would shut down its standalone Gaming app. (The latter doesn’t seem to have occurred, however). As YouTube noted, gaming was a popular category, but the majority of viewers weren’t looking for a separate app or experience – they were just visiting YouTube directly.

Similarly, Facebook today says that over 700 million people play games, watch gaming videos or engage in gaming groups on Facebook. That’s a far larger number than those who downloaded the Fb.gg app, and surely a much larger number than those who have been visiting the Fb.gg destination directly.

That said, Facebook is continuing its tests on mobile with a standalone (rebranded) Facebook Gaming app on Android, which will have more features that the Gaming tab.

Facebook says it will roll out the Gaming tab to a subset of the over 700 million Facebook game fans, and will expand it over time to more gaming enthusiasts across the network. If you don’t see the new tab in your main navigation bar, you can still find it by going to the Bookmarks menu on Facebook.

13-year Facebook veteran, Chief Product Officer, and the spirit animal of the social network Chris Cox is departing the company after two years of seeking to do something new. Cox’s exit is part of a big executive reshuffle as Facebook embarks on prioritizing privacy through messaging, groups, Stories, and integration of its chat features.

Cox bowing out after so long is understandable, but more surprising is today’s departure of Chris Daniels, an 8-year employee who was moved from being head of Internet.org to VP of WhatsApp just last May. CEO Mark

The changes solidify that Facebook is entering a new era as it chases the trend of feed sharing giving way to private communication. Cox and Daniels may feel they’ve done their part advancing Facebook’s product, and that the company needs renewed energy as it shifts from a relentless growth focus to keeping its users loyal while learning to monetize a new from of social networking.

Here’s the breakdown of the executive changes:

• Chris Cox will depart Facebook, but hasn’t revealed plans for what’s next. He will not be immediately replaced
• Chris Daniels will leave WhatsApp, and Facebook declined to provide any details on why or the circumstances
• Will Cathcart wil go from running the main Facebook app to VP of WhatsApp
• Fidji Simo who was the Director Of Product for Facebook video, news, and advertising will take over Cathcart’s role running Facebook’s main app
• Javier Olivan who was Facebook’s VP of growth will oversee integration of Facebook’s products, including the plan to unify the backend of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram direct to expand encryption and allow cross-app messaging that some see a shield against Facebook being broken up.
• Instagram’s VP Adam Mosseri
• Instagram VP Adam Mosseri, Messenger’s VP Stan Chudnovsky, Simo, and Cathcart will now report directly to  Zuckerberg, while Chief Marketing Officer Antonio Lucio reports to COO Sheryl Sandberg

Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post:

Hey everyone — I want to share some important updates as we organize our company to build out the privacy-focused social platform I discussed in my note last week. Embarking on this new vision represents the start of a new chapter for us.

As part of this, I’m sad to share the news that Chris Cox has decided to leave the company. Chris and I have worked closely together to build our products for more than a decade and I will always appreciate his deep empathy for the people using our services and the uplifting spirit he brings to everything he does. He has played so many central roles at Facebook — starting as an engineer on our original News Feed, building our first HR teams and helping to define our mission and values, leading our product and design teams, running the Facebook app, and most recently overseeing the strategy for our family of apps. Along the way, Chris has helped train many great leaders who are now in important roles across the company — including some who will now take on bigger roles in our new product efforts.

For a few years, Chris has been discussing with me his desire to do something else. He is one of the most talented people I know and he has the potential to do anything he wants. But after 2016, we both realized we had too much important work to do to improve our products for society, and he stayed to help us work through these issues and help us chart a course for our family of apps going forward. At this point, we have made real progress on many issues and we have a clear plan for our apps, centered around making private messaging, stories and groups the foundation of the experience, including enabling encryption and interoperability across our services. As we embark on this next major chapter, Chris has decided now is the time to step back from leading these teams. I will really miss Chris, but mostly I am deeply grateful for everything he has done to build this place and serve our community.

At the same time, as we embark on this new chapter, Chris Daniels has also decided to leave the company. Chris has also done great work in many roles, including running our business development team, leading Internet.org, which has helped more than 100 million people get access to the internet, and most recently at WhatsApp, where he has helped define the business model for our messaging services going forward. Chris is one of the clearest and most principled business thinkers I’ve met and the diversity of challenges he has helped us navigate is impressive. I’ve really enjoyed working with Chris and I’m sure he will do great work at whatever he chooses to take on next.

While it is sad to lose such great people, this also creates opportunities for more great leaders who are energized about the path ahead to take on new and bigger roles.

I’m excited that Will Cathcart will be the new head of WhatsApp. Will is one of the most talented leaders at our company — always focused on solving the most important problems for people and clear-eyed about the challenges and tradeoffs we face. Most recently he has done a great job running the Facebook app, where he has led our shift to focusing on meaningful social interactions and has significantly improved the performance and reliability of the app. In his career here, Will has helped lead our teams focused on security and integrity, and he believes deeply in providing end-to-end encryption to everyone in the world across our services.

I’m also excited that Fidji Simo will be the new head of the Facebook app. She is one of our most talented product and organizational leaders — passionate about building community and supporting creativity, and focused on building strong teams and developing future leaders. She has played key roles in building many aspects of the Facebook app, including leading our work on video and advertising. She believes deeply in helping people get more value out of the networks they’ve built. She has already led this team for much of last year while Will was out on parental leave, and she is the clear person to lead these efforts going forward.

Our family of apps strategy has been led jointly by Chris Cox and Javier Olivan. Chris managed the leaders of the apps directly and Javi has been responsible for all of the central product services that work across our apps, including safety and integrity, analytics, growth, and ads. Javi will now lead identifying where our apps should be more integrated. Javi is an incredibly thoughtful, strategic and analytical leader, and I’m confident this work will continue to go well. Since we have now decided on the basic direction of our family of apps for the next few years, I do not plan on immediately appointing anyone to fill Chris’s role in the near term. Instead, the leaders of Facebook (Fidji Simo), Instagram (Adam Mosseri), Messenger (Stan Chudnovsky), and WhatsApp (Will Cathcart) will report directly to me, and our Chief Marketing Officer (Antonio Lucio) will report directly to Sheryl.

This is an important change as we begin the next chapter of our work building the privacy-focused social foundation for the future. I’m deeply grateful for everything Chris Cox and Chris Daniels have done here, and I’m looking forward to working with Will and Fidji in their new roles as well as everyone who will be critical to achieving this vision. We have so much important work ahead and I’m excited to continue working to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. 

Chris Cox’s Facebook Post

It is with great sadness I share with you that after thirteen years, I’ve decided to leave the company.

Since I was twenty-three, I’ve poured myself into these walls. The pixels, the code, the products we’ve built together, the language, the culture, the values, the big ideas, and most of all, the people. Most all my personal highs and lows of the last decade have been tied up in the journey of this company, with Mark, and with so many of you. This place will forever be a part of me.

On Monday I gave my last orientation at Facebook to a hundred new faces. For over a decade, I’ve been sharing the same message that Mark and I have always believed: social media’s history is not yet written, and its effects are not neutral. It is tied up in the richness and complexity of social life. As its builders we must endeavor to understand its impact — all the good, and all the bad — and take up the daily work of bending it towards the positive, and towards the good. This is our greatest responsibility.

As Mark has outlined, we are turning a new page in our product direction, focused on an encrypted, interoperable, messaging network. It’s a product vision attuned to the subject matter of today: a modern communications platform that balances expression, safety, security, and privacy. This will be a big project and we will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through.

I’m proud of the team who will succeed me: Fidji, Will, Adam, Stan, and Antonio. They are strong leaders, serious thinkers, good managers, craftspeople, and most importantly, deeply good people. I trust that, along with Mark, they will carry on the work of building out our platforms in a way that honors the responsibilities we have to the billions of people who rely upon our tools each day.

Mark, thank you for creating this place, and for the chance to work beside a dear friend for over thirteen years. Thank you Sheryl, Schrep, and Javi for your partnership, and for showing me what a wise and dedicated team is meant to be. And to the company: thank you for your creativity, humanity, resilience, and sleepless nights. It has been an honor to work alongside you and I will miss you dearly.

Chris

Uber, on the heels of Lyft’s official documentation for its initial public offering, is expected to file its S-1 in April, Reuters reports. Uber, in December, filed confidential paperwork for its IPO.

Uber will also reportedly kick off its IPO roadshow next month. As part of its offering, Uber is also expected to reward some of its more active, or long-time drivers with a cash award.

About a month ago, Uber reported $3B in Q4 2018 revenues with net losses of $865 million. That figure, however, was aided by a tax benefit that saved the company from reporting a $1.2 billion net loss in the period. On an adjusted, pro-forma basis, Uber’s net loss in the final quarter of 2018 was a slimmer $768 million.

The figures were an improvement of sorts. The firm reported a pro-forma net loss of $939 million in the preceding, third quarter of 2018, but also reported a smaller pre-tax net loss of $971 million. Regardless, Uber’s stiff losses continued in the quarter. On an annual basis, Uber’s revenues came in at $3 billion while losses came in at $1.8 billion for 2018, compared to $2.2 billion in 2017.

Competitor Lyft filed its S-1 earlier this month, reporting $2.2 billion in revenue and nearly $1 billion in losses in 2018. In its S-1, Lyft outlined its program to give a maximum cash bonus of $10,000 to drivers “in good standing” who have completed at least 20,000 rides as of February 25, 2019.

Uber declined to comment on this story.

French startup Stanley Robotics showed off its self-driving parking robot at Lyon-Saint-Exupéry airport today. While I couldn’t be there in person, the service is going live by the end of March 2019. And here’s what it looks like.

The startup has been working on a robot called Stan. These giant robots can literally pick up your car at the entrance of a gigantic parking lot and then park it for you. You might think that parking isn’t that hard, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about airport parking lots.

Those parking lots have become one of the most lucrative businesses for airport companies. But many airports don’t have a ton of space. They keep adding new terminals and it is becoming increasingly complicated to build more parking lots.

That’s why Stanley Robotics can turn existing parking lots into automated parking areas. It’s more efficient as you don’t need space to circulate between all parking spaces. According to the startup, you can create 50 percent more spaces in the same surface area.

If you’re traveling for a few months, Stan robots can put your car in a corner and park a few cars in front of your car. Stan robots will make your car accessible shortly before you land. This way, it’s transparent for the end user.

At Vinci’s Lyon airport, there will be 500 parking spaces dedicated to Stanley Robotics. Four robots will work day in, day out to move cars around the parking lot. But Vinci and Stanley Robotics already plan to expand this system to up to 6,000 spaces in total.

According to the airport website, booking a parking space for a week on the normal P5 parking lot costs €50.40. It costs €52.20 if you want a space on P5+, the parking lot managed by Stanley Robotics.

Self-driving cars are not there yet because the road is so unpredictable. But Stanley Robotics has removed all the unpredictable elements. You can’t walk on the parking lot. You just interact with a garage at the gate of the parking. After the door is closed, the startup controls the environment from start to finish.

Now, let’s see if Vinci Airports plans to expand its partnership with Stanley Robotics to other airports around the world.

Chinh Pham got his first degree in genetics, but realized his real interest was the law as it applies to technology. Today, he combines his interests by working with a wide range of startups, including those in the life sciences, medical hardware and other industries where intellectual property defines a company from day one. As the co-chair of the emerging technology practice at international law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP, he and his team provide a range of services to companies from the ground floor up; he also spends significant time with commercialization programs at top universities.

On common startup mistakes:

“I’d say it is important to get all the founders in place and on the same page very early on. We’ve seen so many situations where there’s some internal turmoil before the company even gets off the ground, and then the whole venture falls apart. I typically suggest that each team member be responsible for specific tasks, because not everyone is good at everything.

“I also find that many student entrepreneurs are in the United States on an academic F1 visa. They may not realize that while they may found a startup, an F1 visa may not allow them to work or be employed by the startup. Therefore, consultation with an immigration attorney may be needed.”

On the importance of IP to many startups:

“I divide the world into wet, under which life sciences fall, and dry, under which everything else falls. Regardless of the type of client, I’ve found that most often IP is fairly critical for their success, because as they’re thinking about fundraising, they need a solid IP portfolio for investors to look at because most of these investors, as you know, aren’t going to put money into a company that really doesn’t have any innovation.”

Below, you’ll find founder recommendations, the full interview, and more details like their pricing and fee structures.

This article is part of our ongoing series covering the early-stage startup lawyers who founders love to work with, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely so please fill it out if you haven’t already. If you’re trying to navigate the early-stage legal landmines, be sure to check out our growing set of in-depth articles, like this checklist of what you need to get done on the corporate side in your first years as a company.

The Interview

Eric Eldon: First of all, how did you get into working with startups and within the wider world of the legal profession? I’d love to hear about your experiences working in Boston in particular as well.

Chinh Pham: My work with technology companies began while in law school in San Francisco back in the early 90s. As an intellectual property attorney, I’ve continued to work with technology companies, from startup phase to exit, throughout my entire career. Very early on in my legal career, an investor friend asked me about nanotechnology, which at that time, was a little-known but promising technology. I spent some time researching the nanotech industry and learning everything I could about the technology and its potential applications. Almost instantly, I was the nanotech expert at my firm and quickly became known as a nanotech specialist in the business world. That was an exciting time in my career, and I discovered that I loved the challenge and promise of emerging technologies, so I dedicated my practice to helping innovators develop, commercialize and protect their technologies.