Yesterday, Twitter rolled out its much-anticipated prototype application to the first group of testers. We’ve now gotten our hands on the app and can see how the current version differs from the build Twitter introduced to the world back in January. While the original version and today’s prototype share many of the same features, there have been some small tweaks to as to how conversation threads are displayed, and the color-coded reply labeling system is now much more subtle.

“Twttr,” as the prototype build is called, was created to give Twitter a separate space outside its public network to experiment with new ideas about how Twitter should look, feel, and operate. Initially, the prototype focuses on changes to Replies with the goal of making longer conversations easier to read.

However, the company said it will likely continue to test new ideas within the app in the future. And even the features seen today will continue to change as the company responds to user feedback.

In the early build of the twttr prototype, the color coded reply system was intentionally designed to be overly saturated for visibility’s sake, but Twitter never intended to launch a garish color scheme like this to its testers.

The new system is more readable and no longer color codes the entire tweet.

Below are a few screenshots of what the public Twitter app looks like when compared with the new prototype, plus other features found in twttr alone.

Feedback

Above: regular Twitter on the left; twttr on the right

Before digging into twttr’s key features, it’s worth noting there’s an easy way for testers to submit feedback: a menu item in the left-side navigation.

Here, you can tap on a link labeled “twttr feedback” that takes you directly to a survey form where you can share your thoughts. The form asks for your handle, what you liked, disliked and offers a space for other comments.

Reply Threads

Left: Original Twitter; Right: twttr prototype

This is the big change Twitter is testing in the prototype.

In the photo on the left, you can see how Replies are handled today – a thin, gray line connects a person replying to another user within the larger conversation taking place beneath the original tweet. In the photo, TechCrunch editor Jonathan Shieber is replying both to the TechCrunch tweet and the person who tagged him in a question in their own reply to the TC tweet.

In twttr, Shieber’s reply is nested beneath that question in a different way. It’s indented to offer a better visual cue that he’s answering Steven. And instead of a straight line, it’s curved. (It’s also blue because I follow him on Twitter.)

You’ll notice that everyone’s individual responses are more rounded – similar to chat bubbles. This allows them to pop out on the contrasting background, and gives an appearance of an online discussion board.

Left: Original Twitter; Right: twttr prototype

This is even more apparent when the background is set to the white day theme instead of the darker night theme.

Color coded Replies

Here’s a closer look at nested replies.

People you follow will be prominently highlighted at the top of longer threads with a bright blue line next to their name, on the left side of their chat bubble-shaped reply.

Left: Original Twitter; Right: twttr prototype

In the public version of the Twitter app, the original poster is also highlighted in the Reply thread with a prominent “Original Tweeter” label. In the prototype, however, they’re designated only by a colored line next to their name, on the left side of the chat bubble. (See Jordan’s tweet above.)

This is definitely a more subtle way to highlight the tweet’s importance to the conversation. It’s also one that could be overlooked – especially in the darker themed Night Mode where the gray line doesn’t offer as much contrast with the dark background.

In the day theme, it’s much easier to see the difference. (See below).

Engagements are hidden

Another thing you’ll notice when scrolling through conversations on twttr is that engagements are hidden on people’s individual tweets. That is, there’s no heart (favorite) icon, no retweet icon, no reply bubble icon, and no sharing icon, like you’re used to seeing on tweets today.

Instead, if you want to interact with any tweet using one of those options, you have to tap on the tweet itself.

The tweet will then pop up and become the focus, and all the interaction buttons – including the option to start typing your reply – will then become available.

“Show More”

Another change to conversations is that some Replies are hidden by default when you’re reading through a series of Replies on Twitter.

Often, in long conversation threads, people will respond to someone else in a thread besides the Original Tweeter. Both are tagged in the response when that occurs, but the reply may not be about the original tweet at all. This can make it difficult to follow conversations.

Above: “Show more,” before being expanded

In twttr, these sorts of “side conversations” are hidden.

In their place, a “Show More” button appears. When tapped, those hidden replies come into view again. They’re also indented to show they are a part of a different thread.

This change highlights only those Replies that are in response to the original tweet. That means people trolling other individuals in the thread could see their Replies hidden. But it also means that those responding to a troll comment to the original poster  – like one offering a fact check, for example – will also be hidden.

Above: after being expanded

The icon!

Twttr is very much a prototype. That means everything seen here now could dramatically change at any point in the future. Even the twttr icon itself has gone through different iterations.

The first version was a very lovely bird logo. The new version (which we’ll dub twttr’s Yo icon), is a plain blue box.

Twitter has its reasons for that one….and clearly, it didn’t ask for feedback on this particular change.

Where’s that feedback form again?

The origin story of Blackbird, a startup that links travelers to planes and commercial pilots through an app, didn’t begin with air travel. It was prompted by car sickness.

Blackbird CEO and founder Rudd Davis, who was getting his pilot’s license at the time, asked his flight instructor if he would fly his family to Tahoe because his son gets terribly sick every time they traveled by car. What Rudd discovered was an incredible experience that was far more affordable than he realized. 

Davis launched the company in 2016 and has spent the past two years honing in on the business model as well as adding commercial pilots and members. Now, with fresh capital from New Enterprise Associates, Blackbird is ready to spread its wings. 

The company announced Tuesday it has raised $10 million in a Series A round led by NEA. NEA partner Jonathan Golden, who previously worked at Airbnb, has joined the Blackbird board of directors alongside Francoise Brougher of Pinterest, Square, and Google, and Andrew Swain, who is also from Airbnb.

Blackbird has also hired Brian Hsu, who spent a decade at eBay and most recently vice president of supply at Lyft, as chief operating officer. Davis is counting on Hsu, who has experience scaling marketplaces, to help Blackbird expand its membership and reach.

 

 

 

The company will use its new injection of capital to scale up, in terms of users, pilots and employees.

Blackbird currently has more than 700 commercial pilots, who fly passengers between 50 and 500 miles from and within California. For now, Davis said this is a self-imposed geographic restriction.

“We’re trying to build up density and build up the network and optimize it before we start replicating it to other geographies,” Davis said.

It does face challenges. Blackbird has to find that price per seat sweet spot, which is largely driven by how many users and pilots are on the platform. Seats can be around $80 or upwards of $900, depending on the route, pilot availability and demand. And Blackbird must fight misconceptions of what and who the platform is designed for.

“A lot of people have looked at this space before, and really have kind of come up empty handed,” said Golden, who was a seed investor into Blackbird before joining NEA.

What makes Blackbird so compelling, Golden added, is that it’s not about luxury travel, but instead about how to actually replace driving through flights, which is really compelling.

“When most people think about kind of flying non-commercially, they think about huge jets with couches and for billionaires,” Davis said. “And that is not the entirety of general aviation, there’s a huge aspect of aviation that is flying in smaller planes. It just hasn’t really been as accessible.”

In the wake of the second fatal crash in six months involving Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes, the European Aviation and Safety Administration is grounding the planes as Boeing said it was taking additional steps to address an issue that may have contributed to the crash.

On Sunday, a Boeing 737 Max 8 plane operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed just minutes after takeoff killing all 157 on board the flight. Last October, a Lion Air flight departing from Jakarta crashed in similar circumstances killing all 189 people on board. The plane involved was also a 737 Max 8.

Responding to the incidents, the European Union Aviation and Safety Administration has banned the plane from operating in European airspace.

Here’s the statement from the EASA:

Following the tragic accident of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 involving a Boeing 737 MAX 8, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is taking every step necessary to ensure the safety of passengers.

As a precautionary measure, EASA has published today an Airworthiness Directive, effective as of 19:00 UTC, suspending all flight operations of all Boeing Model 737-8 MAX and 737-9 MAX aeroplanes in Europe. In addition EASA has published a Safety Directive, effective as of 19:00 UTC, suspending all commercial flights performed by third-country operators into, within or out of the EU of the above mentioned models.

Meanwhile, Boeing has issued a statement saying that it has been developing a software update following the Lion Air crash. “This includes updates to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System flight control law, pilot displays, operation manuals and crew training.”

Essentially, faulty sensors may have been to blame for the Lion Air crash. “The enhanced flight control law incorporates angle of attack (AOA) inputs, limits stabilizer trim commands in response to an erroneous angle of attack reading, and provides a limit to the stabilizer command in order to retain elevator authority,” Boeing said in a statement about its software update.

Essentially, the sensors think the plane is stalling and they apply an opposite remedial action which trims an airplanes down, Flying Magazine columnist and small-plane pilot Peter Garrison tells me. It then takes enormous force from the pilots to hold the nose up, rendering them unable to address the problem, he adds.

“Once you are holding on to the controls for dear life you don’t have any hands left to correct the problem,” says Garrison. “You expect that confronted in an emergency the pilot will analyze what’s happening and act accordingly. Human beings don’t necessarily panic, but they lose their ability to reason clearly and to weigh alternative hypotheses when they are under basically what is a threat of death. Even though it may seem obvious that all you have to do is interrupt the autopilot, amazingly that may not occur to a pilot who is hundreds of feet off the ground and has to pull back on a control yoke with hundreds of pounds of force.”

According to Garrison, the blame on Boeing may be misplaced.

“People like to talk about this as the airplane is defective and they’re correcting it with software,” he says. “That’s all nonsense. Planes today are a mix of automatic systems — and by automatic I of course mean digital electronic systems and mechanical ones — and the natural aerodynamics of the airplane and you can’t separate these.”

If Boeing had made any mistakes, Garrison believes it was in the company’s inability to adequately communicate the problem to pilots and get them ready for taking action in the event of a malfunction.

Even in perfectly designed systems, the transition from automated controls to manual manipulation is difficult to achieve, says Garrison. “It’s not that hard to understand that automation does not make a smooth interface with human control. There’s a break there and it’s a dangerous break,” he said.

Here’s an explanation from Business Insider over the latest thinking around the Lion Air crash that provide further detail.

At the heart of the controversy surrounding the 737 Max is MCAS, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System. To fit the Max’s larger, more fuel-efficient engines, Boeing had to redesign the way it mounts engines on the 737. This change disrupted the plane’s center of gravity and caused the Max to have a tendency to tip its nose upward during flight, increasing the likelihood of a stall. MCAS is designed to automatically counteract that tendency and point the nose of the plane downward.

Initial reports from the Lion Air investigation, however, indicate that a faulty sensor reading may have triggered MCAS shortly after the flight took off. Observers fear that a similar thing may have happened in Sunday’s Ethiopian Airlines flight.

“Boeing has been working closely with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on development, planning and certification of the software enhancement, and it will be deployed across the 737 MAX fleet in the coming weeks,” the company said in a statement. “The update also incorporates feedback received from our customers.”

Boeing expects the update to be completed across its fleet by April.

In the interim, U.S. politicians have been pleading with the Federal Aviation Administration to take the same steps that countries including the entire European Union, China, Ethiopia, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the operators Norwegian Air, Aeromexico, Gol Airlines from Brazil, the South Korean airline Easair, the South African airline, Comair, and others from around the globe.

No less an authority on aviation than President Donald Trump has also weighed in on the crashes and attendant controversy.

Setting the President’s calls to return aviation to the early part of the 20th century aside, several aviation administrations and airlines have grounded the Boeing 737 Max.

So the FAA is among the only civil aviation administrations in the world to keep the Boeing 737 Max 8 airborne.

“An FAA team is on-site with the NTSB in its investigation of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. We are collecting data and keeping in contact with international civil aviation authorities as information becomes available,” the FAA said in a statement yesterday.  “The FAA continuously assesses and oversees the safety performance of U.S. commercial aircraft.  If we identify an issue that affects safety, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action.”

A spokesperson for the administration said there were no other statements from the Administration available at this time.

Earlier today, politicians from both sides of the aisle — including the Republican Utah Senator Mitt Romney and Democratic Senator and Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren — pleaded with the FAA to reverse their decision, according to Politico.

“Today, immediately, the FAA needs to get these planes out of the sky,” Warren said Tuesday.

Even former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, who grounded the 787 Dreamliner back in 2013 is calling for the FAA to pull the new 737s out of service.

That’s not just the view of this columnist. It’s also the opinion of Ray LaHood, the former U.S. Secretary of Transportation who grounded the 787 Dreamliner following fires in its lithium-ion battery packs in 2013.

“The flying public has to be assured that these planes are safe, and they don’t feel that way now,” LaHood told Bloomberg. “The Secretary of Transportation should announce today that these planes will be grounded until there is 100 percent assurance from Boeing that these planes are safe to fly, because unless they can give that assurance they’re not holding up their promise to be the top safety agency in the U.S.”

Such a move could be bad for Boeing. The 737 is Boeing’s most popular aircraft and the heart of the company’s fleet.

The company has been struggling to keep up with demand for its newest model of the 737, according to reports in the Seattle Times. And the new plane was Boeing’s best seller, keeping the stock buoyant.

A report from National Public Radio showed just how robust sales were for the new aircraft. It’s the fastest-selling plane that Boeing has ever produced. Expectations from executives were for the Max model to account for 90% of all 737 deliveres in 2019, according to a statement from the company’s chief financial officer, Gregory Smith, NPR reported.

Boeing stock is down nearly 6% in trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Your startup will not succeed unless you, the founder, build an exceptional team. Great teams are built on top of great culture. Yet any venture-backed startup founder will tell you, myself included, that developing a positive corporate culture is more art than science, requiring constant and creative recalibration as your company grows. What then does this have to do with employment law?

First, building an exceptional team means hiring great people; whether that involves W-9s for consultants, I-9s for employees, lengthy H-1B visa applications, or a new employee handbook, you need to hire the right people in the right way. Second, one bad employment-related legal dispute can have ripple effects throughout an organization, undermining employee morale and executive credibility in one fell swoop, with palpable culture fallout.

Fortunately, when working to promote healthy company culture, founders can look to employment law for some preventive medicine. In fact, transparency through written policies, clearly communicated in advance and followed in practice, can help create the trust and accountability which are foundational to positive company culture. Moreover, in the event employment disputes do arise, well-drafted employment policies actually provide valuable guidance through difficult to navigate situations, while limiting downside risks to the company, as well.

This article, the fourth in Extra Crunch’s exclusive five-part “Startup Law A to Z” series, follows previous articles on customer contracts,  intellectual property (IP) and corporate matters. This series is calculated to provide founders the information needed to assess legal risks in the areas common to most startups.

After reading this article, or other “Startup Law A to Z” articles, should you identify legal risks facing your startup, Extra Crunch resources can help. For example, the Verified Experts of Extra Crunch include some of the most experienced and skilled startup lawyers in practice today. So use these resources to identify attorneys focused on serving companies at your stage and then reach out for further guidance in the particular issues at hand.

The Employment Law checklist:

Employee vs. independent contractor classification

• Payroll Taxes and Payroll Providers
• Federal Classification: 21-Part Test
• State Classification: Various tests, e.g., Dynamex in California
• Intentional vs. Unintentional Misclassification and Penalties

Minimum wage and hour laws

• Application to founders
• Federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
• State Laws

Meal and rest breaks, vacation pay

• Federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
• State Laws

Deferred compensation

• Rule 409A
• Founders
• Employees

Sexual harassment, discrimination, and related claims

• Federal:
  • Civil Rights Act of 1964
  • Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA)
  • Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA)
  • Equal Pay Act of 1963
  • Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008
• State Laws
• Employee Handbook
• Documentation and Investigation

Work authorization / immigration

• Form I-9 (Employees) and W-9 (Independent Contractors)
• For Temporary Workers:
  • Visa Waiver Program
  • B-1
• Employee Visas:
  • H1-B
  • L-1
  • O-1
• Students:
  • F-1 with OPT STEM Extension
• Other Visas:
  • EB-5
  • E Visas (E-1, E-2, E3)

 

Employee vs. independent contractor classification

One of the biggest employment law issues that startups get wrong, often willingly, is “employee” versus “independent contractor” classification. For employees, a startup must withhold and pay federal, state, and local income taxes, state disability, and payments under the Federal Unemployment Tax Act and Federal Insurance Contribution Act (i.e. Social Security and Medicare), not to mention contributions for federal and state unemployment and workers compensation insurance. Given this complexity, startups should absolutely hire a payroll provider to help manage the process, such as ADP, Gusto, Paychex or Quickbooks.

Of course, all of this gets expensive. Instead, far too many early-stage startups simply hire “independent contractors” to avoid everything mentioned above, often misclassifying these workers in the process, whether under federal law, state law, or both.

Cloud-hosting company Scaleway refreshed its lineup of high-performance instances today. These instances are now all equipped with AMD EPYC CPUs, DDR4 RAM and NVMe SSD storage. The more you pay, the more computing power, RAM, storage and bandwidth you get.

High-performance plans start at €0.078 per hour or €39 per month ($44.20), whichever is lower at the end of the month. For this price you get 4 cores, 16GB of RAM, 150GB of storage and 400Mbps of bandwidth.

If you double the price, you get twice as many cores, RAM and storage. Higher plans get a tiny discount on performance bumps. And the fastest instance comes with 48 cores, 256GB of RAM, 600GB of storage and 2Gbps of bandwidth. That beast can cost as much as €569 per month ($645).

Here’s the full lineup:

Scaleway had high-performance instances in the past, called “X64” instances. They were relatively cheaper. Despite that price bump, Scaleway manages to stay competitive against Linode, DigitalOcean and others.

A server with 6 CPU cores and 16GB of RAM costs $80 per month on Linode. After that, you have to choose between high memory plans and dedicated CPU plans, so it’s harder to compare.

On DigitalOcean, an instance with 16GB of RAM and 4 CPU cores costs $120 per month. The most expensive instance costs $1,200 per month, and it doesn’t match the specifications of Scaleway’s most expensive instance.

Voice recognition is a standard part of the smartphone package these days, and a corresponding part is the delay while you wait for Siri, Alexa, or Google to return your query, either correctly interpreted or horribly mangled. Google’s latest speech recognition works entirely offline, eliminating that delay altogether — though of course mangling is still an option.

The delay occurs because your voice, or some data derived from it anyway, has to travel from your phone to the servers of whoever operates the service, where it is analyzed and sent back a short time later. This can take anywhere from a handful of milliseconds to multiple entire seconds (what a nightmare!), or longer if your packets get lost in the ether.

Why not just do the voice recognition on the device? There’s nothing these companies would like more, but turning voice into text on the order of milliseconds takes quite a bit of computing power. It’s not just about hearing a sound and writing a word — understanding what someone is saying word by word involves a whole lot of context about language and intention.

Your phone could do it, for sure, but it wouldn’t be much faster than sending it off to the cloud, and it would eat up your battery. But steady advancements in the field have made it plausible to do so, and Google’s latest product makes it available to anyone with a Pixel.

Google’s work on the topic, documented in a paper here, built on previous advances to create a model small and efficient enough to fit on a phone (it’s 80 megabytes, if you’re curious), but capable of hearing and transcribing speech as you say it. No need to wait until you’ve finished a sentence to think whether you meant “their” or “there” — it figures it out on the fly.

So what’s the catch? Well, it only works in Gboard, Google’s keyboard app, and it only works on Pixels, and it only works in American English. So in a way this is just kind of a stress test for the real thing.

“Given the trends in the industry, with the convergence of specialized hardware and algorithmic improvements, we are hopeful that the techniques presented here can soon be adopted in more languages and across broader domains of application,” writes Google, as if it is the trends that need to do the hard work of localization.

Making speech recognition more responsive, and to have it work offline, is a nice development. But it’s sort of funny considering hardly any of Google’s other products work offline. Are you going to dictate into a shared document while you’re offline? Write an email? Ask for a conversion between liters and cups? You’re going to need a connection for that! Of course this will also be better on slow and spotty connections, but you have to admit it’s a little ironic.

Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange today per SEC documents and confirmation from CEO Sacha Poignonnec to TechCrunch.

The valuation, share price, and timeline for public stock sales will be determined over the coming weeks for the Nigeria headquartered company.

With a smooth filing process, Jumia will become the first African tech startup to list on a major global exchange.

Poignonnec would not pinpoint a date for the actual IPO, but noted the minimum SEC timeline for beginning sales activities (such as road shows) is 15 days after submitting first documents. Lead adviser on the listing is Morgan Stanley .

There have been numerous press reports on an anticipated Jumia IPO, but none of them confirmed by Jumia execs or an actual SEC, S-1 filing until today.

Jumia’s move to go public comes as several notable consumer digital sales startups have faltered in Nigeria — Africa’s most populous nation, largest economy, and unofficial bellwether for e-commerce startup development on the continent. Konga.com, an early Jumia competitor in the race to wire African online retail, was sold in a distressed acquisition in 2018.

With the imminent IPO capital, Jumia will double down on its current strategy and regional focus.

“You’ll see in the prospectus that last year Jumia had 4 million consumers in countries that cover the vast majority of Africa. We’re really focused on growing our existing business, leadership position, number of sellers, and consumer adoption in those markets,” Poignonnec said.

The pending IPO creates another milestone for Jumia. The venture became the first African startup unicorn in 2016, achieving a $1 billion valuation after a $326 funding round that included Goldman Sachs, AXA, and MTN.

Founded in Lagos in 2012 with Rocket Internet backing, Jumia now operates multiple online verticals in 14 African countries spanning Ghana, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Morocco, and Egypt. Goods and services lines include Jumia Food (an online takeout service), Jumia Flights (for travel bookings), and Jumia Deals (for classifieds). Jumia processed more than 13 million packages in 2018, according to company data.

Starting in Nigeria, the company created many of the components for its digital sales operations. This includes its JumiaPay payment platform and a delivery service of trucks and motorbikes that have become ubiquitous with the Lagos landscape.

Jumia has also opened itself up to traders and SMEs by allowing local merchants to harness Jumia to sell online.  “There are over 81,000 active sellers on our platform. There’s a dedicated sellers page where they can sign-up and have access to our payment and delivery network, data, and analytic services,” Jumia Nigeria CEO Juliet Anammah told TechCrunch.

The most popular goods on Jumia’s shopping mall site include smartphones (priced in the $80 to $100 dollar range), washing machines, fashion items, women’s hair care products, and 32 inch TVs, according to Anammah.

E-commerce ventures, particularly in Nigeria, have captured the attention of VC investors looking to tap into Africa’s growing consumer markets. McKinsey and Company projects consumer spending on the continent to reach $2.1 trillion by 2025, with African e-commerce accounting for up to 10 percent of retail sales.

Jumia has not yet turned a profit, but a snapshot of the company’s performance from shareholder Rocket Internet’s latest annual report shows an improving revenue profile. The company generated €93.8 million in revenues in 2017, up 11 percent from 2016, though its losses widened (with a negative EBITDA of €120 million). Rocket Internet is set to release full 2018 results (with updated Jumia figures) April 4, 2019.

Jumia’s move to list on the NYSE comes during an up and down period for B2C digital commerce in Nigeria. The distressed acquisition of Konga.com, backed by roughly $100 million in VC, created losses for investors, such as South African media, internet, and investment company Naspers .

In late 2018, Nigerian online sales platform DealDey shut down. And TechCrunch reported this week that consumer focused venture Gloo.ng has dropped B2C e-commerce altogether to pivot to e-procurement. The CEO cited better unit economics from B2B sales.

As demonstrated in other global startup markets, consumer focused online retail can be a game of capital attrition to outpace competitors and reach critical mass before turning a profit. With its unicorn status and pending windfall from an NYSE listing, Jumia could be better positioned than any venture to win on e-commerce at scale in Africa.

More than a year after the deal was first announced, it looks like Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox is about to close.

Disney announced today that the deal is “expected to become effective at 12:02 a.m. Eastern Time on March 20, 2019,” suggesting that it has obtained the final approval needed, specifically from regulators in Mexico.

Disney had initially agreed to acquire Fox for $52.4 billion, before a counter-offer from Comcast prompted it to increase its bid to $71.3 billion.

The acquisition will see Disney buying Fox’s film and television studios, giving it control of “Avatar” franchise and the film rights to a number of Marvel characters including the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and Deadpool. It will allow Disney to double its stake in Hulu, from 30 to 60 percent.

Bringing the two entertainment giants together is also expected to lead to more than 4,000 layoffs.

Meanwhile, Fox News, the Fox broadcast network and other assets that Disney is not buying is being spun out into a new entity called Fox Corporation.

We can’t wait to see all of you at TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI, which takes place April 18 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. That’s still slightly more than a month away, but your opportunity to buy an early-bird ticket — and save $100 — disappears in just three short days. When that day arrives, the admission price goes up to $329. Why spend more than necessary? Go buy your early-bird ticket right now.

This is the first time we’ve rolled AI into the robotic mix, and it makes perfect sense. Our day-long intensive event highlights the top leaders and the most innovative startups in these two converging and rapidly evolving fields. You’ll hear from — and rub elbows with — the most influential makers, researchers, founders and investors in robotics and AI. Here’s a quick sampling of the programming you’ll enjoy.

Investing in robotics is a wild ride, and no one knows that better than Helen Liang, founding and managing partner of FoundersX Ventures, and Andy Wheeler, the founding partner at GV (formerly Google Ventures). They’ll grace our stage to share their insight and experience. Liang, who also serves as founding president at Tech for Good, has invested in 20 early-stage robotics and AI startups. Wheeler focuses on bringing early-stage tech to market and has invested in Carbon, Farmer’s Business Network, Abundant Robotics and Orbital Insight.

If you wonder how and when robots will become a part of the construction crew, join Noah Ready-Campbell (Built Robotics) and Saurabh Ladha (Doxel AI) as they discuss whether robots can help us build faster, smarter and for less.

Who doesn’t love an awesome robot demo? Don’t miss Marc Raibert’s presentation, The Best Robots on Four Legs. He’ll demo SpotMini, Boston Dynamic’s latest creation, and talk about what it takes to bring a robotic product to market.

We still have a few surprises up our non-robotic sleeve, so keep checking our event agenda for the latest updates.

We’re expecting more than 1,000 people to attend this immersive event, and if you really want to stand out and connect with dream makers and game changers, consider buying a demo table. The price, $1,500, includes three attendee passes.

You’ll find comradery, connection and opportunity at TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI. And if you buy an early-bird ticket, all that goodness will cost $100 less. You have just three days left to save. Buy your ticket today.

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

1. Facebook’s ad team shoots itself in the foot by pulling Elizabeth Warren campaign ads

Facebook’s advertising department pulled Elizabeth Warren campaign ads touting the senator’s proposal to break up big tech. According to Politico, the offending ads were pulled over their use of the Facebook brand in their copy.

The removal appears to be short-lived, but it has given the Warren campaign ammunition for their argument.

2. Marking 30 years of the web, Tim Berners-Lee calls for a joint fight against disinformation

“If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us,” said the inventor of the World Wide Web in an open letter. “We will have failed the web.”

3. Google paid $105 million to two executives accused of sexual harassment

The suit, filed by shareholder James Martin, confirms the board of directors approved a $90 million exit package for Andy Rubin “as a goodbye present to him. No mention, of course, was made about the true reason for Rubin’s ‘resignation’ — his egregious sexual harassment while at Google.”

4. Twitter’s new prototype app ‘twttr’ launches today

Initially, the new twttr app will focus on testing new designs for conversations. As the company demonstrated at CES, the app will show a different format for replies, where conversations themselves have a more rounded chat-like shape and are indented so they’re easier to follow.

5. Russia blocks encrypted email provider ProtonMail

The block was ordered by the state Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, according to a Russian-language blog, which obtained and published the order after the agency accused the company and several other email providers of facilitating bomb threats.

6. Hulu and Spotify launch an even more steeply discounted bundle of $9.99 per month

This effectively lowers the price of Hulu’s ad-supported service to nothing.

7. Amazon reportedly nixes its price parity requirement for third-party sellers in the US

Amazon will stop forbidding third-party merchants who list on its e-commerce platform in the United States from selling the same products on other sites for lower prices, according to Axios.