Author: azeeadmin

The people who volunteer their time modifying and updating old games are among the most generous of developers. So when drama erupts there’s not just irritation and testy emails but a sense of a community being betrayed or taken advantage of. A recent conflict over work on the perennially renewed classic Skyrim may seem small but for those involved, it’s a huge upset.

I don’t mean to make a bigger deal out of this niche issue than it is; I feel though that sometimes it’s important to elevate things not because they are highly important in and of themselves, but because they represent a class of small injustices or conflicts that are rife on the modern web.

The example today comes from the Skyrim modding community, which creates all kinds of improvements for the classic fantasy adventure, from new items and better maps to complete overhauls. It’s one of the most active out there, as Bethesda not only is highly tolerant of modders but tends to ship games, if we’re honest, in pretty poor shape. Modders have taken to filling in the gaps left by Bethesda and making the original game far better than how it shipped.

One of the more useful of these mods, for developers but indirectly for players, is the Skyrim Script Extender, or SKSE. It basically allows for more complex behaviors for objects, locations, and NPCs. How do you have a character seek shelter from the rain if there’s no weather-based behaviors in their original AI? That sort of thing (though that’s an invented example). SKSE goes back a long way and the creators provide much of the code for others to use under a free license, while declining donations themselves.

Another project is Skyrim Together (ST), a small team which since 2013 has (among others) been working on adding multiplayer functionality to the game — their Patreon account, in contrast, is pulling in more than $30,000 a month. The main dev there allegedly independently distributed a modified version of SKSE several years ago against the terms of the license, and was henceforth specifically banned from using SKSE code in the future.

Guess what SKSE’s lead found in a bit of code inspection the other day?

Yes, unfortunately, it seems that SKSE code is in the ST app, not only in violation of the license as far as not giving credit, but in that the dev himself has been barred from using it, and furthermore that — although there is some debate here — the ST team is essentially charging for access to a “closed beta.” Some say that it’s just a donation they ask for, but requiring a donation is really indistinguishable from charging for something.

A response from the devs downplayed the issue; they say it’s just a bit of old junk in the codebase:

There might be some leftover code from them in there that was overlooked when we removed it, it isn’t as simple as just deleting a folder, mainly our fault because we rushed some parts of the code. Anyway we are going to make sure to remove what might have slipped through the cracks for the next patch.

Instead of SKSE, one developer said, they had substituted other code, for instance from the project libSkyrim. But as others quickly pointed out, libSkyrim is based on SKSE and there’s no way they could be ignorant of that fact. So the assertion that they weren’t using the forbidden code doesn’t really hold water. Not only that, but ST doesn’t even credit libSkyrim at all, a standard practice when you reuse code.

This wouldn’t really be as big of a problem if ST was not only making quite a bit of scratch off their project via donations, but required donations for access to the code. That arguably makes it a commercial project, putting it even farther outside the bounds of code reuse.

Now, taking the hard work of open and semi-open source developers and using it in other projects is encouraged — in fact, it’s kind of the point. But it’s meant to be a collaboration, and the rules are there to make sure credit goes where it’s due.

I don’t think the ST people are villains; they’re working on something many players are interesting in using — and paying for, if the Patreon is any indication. That’s great, and it’s what the mod community is all about. But the other side of the community, as in any group of developers, is respectful and mutual acknowledgement.

Honesty is important here because it’s not always possible to audit someone else’s code. And honesty is also important because users want to be able to trust developers for a variety of reasons — not least of which that they are donating to a project working in good faith. That trust was shaken here.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t mean to make this a huge deal. No one is getting rich (though even split ten ways, $33,000 a month is nothing to sniff at), and no one is getting hurt. But I imagine there’s hardly an open source project out there that hasn’t had to police others’ use of their code or live in fear of someone cashing in on something they’ve donated their time to for years.

Here’s hoping this particular tempest in a teapot resolves happily, but don’t forget there’s a lot more teapots where this one came from.

Women’s health has long been devoid of technological innovation, but when it comes to fertility options, that’s starting to change. Startups in the space are securing hundreds of millions in venture capital investment, a significant increase to the dearth of funding collected in previous years.

Fertility entrepreneurs are focused on a growing market: couples are choosing to reproduce later in life, an increasing number of female breadwinners are able to make their own decisions about when and how to reproduce, and overall, around 10% of women in the US today have trouble conceiving, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Startups, as a result, are working to improve various pain points in a women’s fertility journey, whether that be with new-age brick-and-mortar clinics, information platforms, mobile applications, wearables, direct-to-consumer medical tests or otherwise.

Although the investment numbers are still relatively small (compared to, say, scooters), the trend is up — here’s the latest from founders and investors in the space.

VCs want to help you get pregnant

Clue, a period and ovulation-tracking app, co-founder and CEO Ida Tin talks at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2017 (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

This fall, TechCrunch received a tip that SoftBank, a prolific venture capital firm known for its nearly $100 billion Vision Fund, was investing in Glow, a period-tracking app meant to help women get pregnant. Max Levchin, Glow’s co-founder and a well-known member of the PayPal mafia, succinctly responded to a TechCrunch inquiry regarding the deal via e-mail: “Fairly sure you got this particular story wrong,” he wrote. Glow co-founder and chief executive officer Mike Huang did not respond to multiple requests for comment at the time.

Needless to say, some semblance of a SoftBank fertility deal got this reporter interested in a space that seldom populates tech blogs.

Femtech, a term coined by Ida Tin, the founder of another period and ovulation-tracking app Clue, is defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health. Femtech, and more specifically the businesses in the fertility and contraception lanes, hasn’t made headlines as often as AI or blockchain technology has, for example. Probably because companies in the sector haven’t closed as many notable venture deals. That’s changing.

The global fertility services market is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2020, according to Technavio. Meanwhile, private investment in the femtech space surpassed $400 million in 2018 after reaching a high of $354 million the previous year, per data collected from PitchBook and Crunchbase. This year already several companies have inked venture deals, including men’s fertility business Dadi and Extend Fertility, which helps women freeze their eggs.

“In the last three to six months, it feels like investor interest has gone through the roof,” Jake Anderson-Bialis, co-founder of FertilityIQ and a former investor at Sequoia Capital, told TechCrunch. “It’s three to four emails a day; people are coming out of the woodwork. It feels like somebody shook the snow globe here and it just hasn’t stopped for months now.”

Dadi, Extend Fertility and FertilityIQ are among a growing list of startups in the fertility space to crop up in recent years. FertilityIQ, for its part, provides a digital platform for fertility patients to research and review doctors and clinics. The company also collects data and issues reports, like this one, which ranked businesses by fertility benefits. Anderson-Bialis launched the platform with his wife, co-founder Deborah Anderson-Bialis, in 2016 after the pair overcame their own set of infertility issues.

Anderson-Bialis said he has recently fielded requests from seed, Series A and growth-stage investors interested in exploring the growing fertility market. His company, however, has yet to raise any outside capital. Why? He doesn’t see FertilityIQ as a venture-scale business, but rather a passion project, and he’s skeptical of the true market opportunity for other businesses in the space.

If you’ve ever dabbled in collectible card games — Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, etc. — you know how quickly collections can grow. One pack turns into two. Two turns into five. Then they release some new set and… screw it, why not buy a whole box?

Card resellers have the same problem, just magnified to an extreme. People who’ve stopped playing a game for whatever reason (sometimes years prior) walk in with massive collections and just want to get rid of them. Online resellers and card stores can end up with monstrous stockpiles of unsorted cards, and going through them requires a ton of time and a wealth of ultra specific knowledge of a game. Which cards are rare? Which ones are a bit more common, but useful enough that players would want to buy them for their decks? What are they all worth?

Sorting Robotics, a company in Y-Combinator’s Winter 2019 class, has built a robot laser-focused on that problem. You load it with up to 1000 Magic cards, and it’ll automatically sort them to your liking, look up their values, and give you all the data in a big spreadsheet.

The machine is able to sort by a bunch of different criteria, be it alphabetically, by the set a card is from, or by its resale value (as pulled from TCGPlayer.) Want a big pile of all of the cards worth over $1? It can do that. If you need them sorted other ways, the company is open to helping with custom sorting logic.

One challenge the team had to tackle early on was how to handle cards with minimal contact for the sake of preventing possible damage. Some Magic cards, after all, resell for hundreds or thousands of dollars — if their machines got a reputation for damaging cards even occasionally, no one would use it.

So Sorting came up with a pneumatic system that uses cameras, computer vision, polished surfaces, and silicone suction cups to identify and move cards from stack to stack with limited contact. There are a few fancy tricks involved, like picking up cards in a way that utilizes the airflow within the machine to keep it from lifting two lightly-stuck-together cards at once. If a card is loaded into the machine upside down, it’ll shift it into a pile with other upside down cards to be manually flipped and re-sorted later. Sorting 1000 cards takes 1-2 hours, depending on the criteria they’re being sorted by.

If a card does somehow get damaged, Sorting Robotics says they’ll cover the cost. (They’ll want to check the feed from a pair of cameras inside the machine to see exactly what happened, so you probably shouldn’t go throwing an already-bent up Time Walk card in there and asking for reimbursement.)

Another challenge: dirt. Even for collectors, cards are rarely 100% pristine. There’s the natural oils from your hand, the dust from being stored over time, and even some amount of the card’s own dust, left over from the printing and cutting process. You might not really notice it if you’re just dealing with your own collection — but when you’re putting thousands of cards through a machine with moving parts and camera lenses, the dust adds up fast. Later versions of their machine have been re-tailored to better deal with dust, and to be more easily maintained when the dust builds up.

Sorting has three founders: Nohtal Partansky and Sean Lawler (both of whom were previously Systems Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion lab), and Cassio Elias dos Santos Junior, a computer vision engineer who previously built a popular Magic card scanning app for Android.

As for how much it costs, the company would only say that it’s working on that on a case-by-case, shop-by-shop basis. They stressed that they’re focusing on building these for online resellers and card shops — so it sounds like it’s not in the price range that most hobbyists might consider.

The machine currently only sorts Magic cards, though the founders tell me support for Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokémon cards is coming shortly.

Tesla buyers might have a hard time ordering a vehicle through its website for the next several hours.

The “order” webpages for the Model 3, Model S and Model X vehicle all redirect to show nebulous  message that reads “”The wait is almost over.” Below the main message, it reads “Great things are launching at 2 pm.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Feb. 27 “Some Tesla news,” followed by equally vague tweets “2 pm” and “California.”

The tweets had lead to widespread speculation of what Musk will announce Thursday. It was enough to send shares higher yesterday.

This is a developing story.

Uber and Lyft are reportedly going to give money to some of its drivers to enable them to buy stock in the transportation companies’ respective initial public offerings, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier today.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the WSJ says both Uber and Lyft will reward some of their more active or long-time drivers with a cash award with an option to buy stock in the initial public offerings. Uber’s program will reportedly be worth hundreds of millions of dollar and based on a sliding scale that takes into account the driver’s time working for Uber, as well as the number of trips or deliveries made.

This comes after Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in May that the company was looking to offer benefits and insurance to its drivers. The WSJ says Uber has been looking into providing drivers shares in the company since 2016.

Lyft, on the other hand, reportedly plans to give drivers who have completed at least 20,000 rides $10,000 in a cash award or the equivalent amount of stock.

Both Uber and Lyft have confidentially filed for IPOs. Lyft is expected to debut on the Nasdaq this coming March. Neither Uber or Lyft have disclosed the number of shares they expect to offer.

TechCrunch has reached out to Uber and Lyft and will update this story if we hear back.

As the mobility world awaits Harley Davidson’s EV debut, there’s plenty of motion in the e-moto startup space.

Zero Motorcycles unveiled its new 110 horsepower SR/F model in New York this week, offering a 200 mile range, one hour charge capability, and top speed of 124 mph.

The California based startup—whose investors include New York VC firm Invus—wired the SR/F with Zero’s new Cypher III operating system and Bosch’s Motorcycle Stability Control.

Both combine to offer remotely synced mobile connectivity to the motorcycle’s charge status and performance controls. The 485 pound SR/F is upgraded from Zero’s existing line-up to include cornering ABS, traction control, and a new app and dash interface.

Zero’s two-wheeler comes in at an entry price of $18,995. On the business side, the EV startup could produce as many as 10,000 SR/Fs and add members to its 200 dealer network, CEO Sam Paschel told TechCrunch in New York.

Zero’s SR/F enters the e-moto market in a year where EV startups will face more competition on specs and pricing, and big motorcycle manufacturers will feel more pressure to go electric.

From a business perspective, as TechCrunch has reported, the U.S. motorcycle industry has been in pretty bad shape since the recession. New sales dropped by roughly 50 percent since 2008, with sharp declines in ownership by everyone under 40. The exception is women, who have become the only growing motorcycle ownership segment.

E-moto upstarts have worked to attract new riders and close gaps with gas motorcycles in performance and cost—but most offerings have come with some compromise.

Italian company Energica’s models hit high marks in tech controls and performance—with 150 horsepower, 30 minute fast-charge times, and 125 mile range—but not without a hefty price of $20K and up.

Lightning Motorcycles, another California based e-moto startup, offers ultra-high end of performance, claiming the world’s fastest production motorcycle in the world with its LS-218. But the $38K, 218 mph, track bred e-moto isn’t exactly average rider accessible.

Zero Motorcycles has found the widest market and model breadth, with prices starting at $8K on its FX model. Still, Zero’s e-motos (including the $16K SR) haven’t matched the performance control options, specs, or charge-times of the higher priced Energica Ego or Eva.

In 2019, Zero’s new machine—and a model being teased by Lightning—could bridge gaps in performance, range, charge-times, and price that have held many back from going e-motorcycle.

With its Bosch MSC system and upgraded operating system, the fully redesigned SR/F matches Energica in digital performance controls and comes close on power and speed at a more competitive price.

As TechCrunch reported, Lightning began taking reservations for a $12,998 Strike e-moto with some almost unbelievable stats at that price: 150 mph top speed, 35 minute charge-time, and 150 mile range. Lighting calls it their “first premium mass-market motorcycle,” with plans to unveil sometime in March.

Both Zero and Lightning’s 2019 models are positioned to compete with Harley Davidson’s EV entry, the $29K LiveWire expected to debut sometime this summer. HD revealed more product specs recently, such as 3 second 0-60 mph acceleration and 110 mile range. Harley Davidson has also indicated it plans a full pivot to electric, with additional e-motorcycles in the pipeline, as well as e-bicycles and scooters.

Harley’s electric moves, as well as Zero and Lightning’s more competitive offerings, could hasten major motorcycle manufacturers’ plans to sell e-motos. None of the big names producers—Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, BMW—have offered a production electric street motorcycle in the U.S. HD will be the first.

With momentum in the motorcycle world shifting electric, there are more than a few caveats as to whether there’s a viable U.S. market. In addition to the contracting sales environment, the e-moto startup space has racked up a series of failures. These include Brammo, Mission Motorcycles, and more recently,  Alta Motors—a California based EV venture backed by $45 million in VC that ceased operations in October. Alta had a partnership with Harley Davidson (now defunct) and there’s been little light shed on what forced them to shut off the lights.

Alta Motors resurfaced last week, when Canadian company BRP—the owner of such brands as snowmobile maker Ski-Doo and watercraft producer Sea-Doo—acquired select Assets of Alta. There had been hopes someone would purchase and revive the California e-moto startup, but that looks unlikely. “We don’t have any current plans for resuscitating Alta Motors in it’s old form,” BRP’s Vice President for Communications Leslie Quinton told TechCrunch. “We have no plans yet to announce how we’re going to use the technologies,” she said.

So as Harley Davidson, Zero, and Lightning move to mainstream electric motorcycles in 2019, it appears another e-moto startup has officially faded into history.

Twitter confirmed it has in development a new “Hide Tweet” option, but has yet to provide more detail about its plans for the feature. The new option, spotted in Twitter’s code, is available from a list of moderation choices that appear when you click the “Share” button on a tweet – a button whose icon has also been given a refresh, it seems. Like it sounds, “Hide Tweet” appears to function as an alternative to muting or blocking a user, while still offering some control over a conversation.

Related to this, an option to “View Hidden Tweets” was also found to be in the works. This appears to allow a user to unhide those tweets that were previously hidden.

The “Hide Tweet” feature was first discovered by Jane Manchun Wong, who tweeted about her findings on Thursday.

Wong says she found the feature within the code of the Twitter Android application. That means it’s not necessarily something Twitter will release publicly, but has at least thought about seriously enough to develop.

Reached for comment earlier today, Twitter told us some employees would soon tweet out more context about the feature. As of the time of writing, those explanations had not gone live.

Immediately, there were concerns an option like this would allow users to silence their critics – not just for themselves, as is possible today with muting and blocking – but for anyone reading through a stream of Twitter Replies. Imagine, for example, if a controversial politician began to hide tweets they didn’t like or those that contradicted an outrageous claim with a fact check, people said.

On the flip side, putting the original poster back in control of which Replies are visible may allow people to feel more comfortable with sharing on Twitter, which could impact user growth – a number Twitter struggles with today.

But as of now, it’s not clear that the “Hide Tweet” button is something that would hide the tweet from everyone’s view, or just the from the person who clicked the button.

It’s also unclear what stage of development the feature is in, or if it will be part of a larger change to moderation controls.

If Twitter chooses to comment, we’ll update with those answers.

The feature’s discovery comes at a time when Twitter has been under increased pressure to improve the conversational health on its platform.

In a recent interview, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that it puts most of the burden on the victims of abuse, which has been “a huge fail.” He said Twitter was looking into new way to proactively enforce and promote health, so blocking and reporting were last resorts.

A “Hide Tweet” button doesn’t seem to fit into that plan, as it requires users’ direct involvement with the moderation process.

It’s worth also noting that Twitter already has a “hidden tweets” feature of sorts.

In 2018, the company introduced a new filtering strategy to hide disruptive tweets, which takes into consideration various behavioral signals – like whether the account had verified its email, is frequently blocked, or tweets often at accounts that don’t follow it back, for example. If Twitter determined the tweet should be downranked, it moved it to its own secluded part of the Reply thread, under a “Show more replies” button.

Twitter tests a number of things that never see the light of day in a public product. More recently, the company said it was weighing the idea of a “clarifying function” for explaining old tweets. It’s also launching a prototype app that will experiment with new ideas around conversation threads.

Customer experience management platform Medallia has filed to raise up to $70 million in Series F funding, according to regulatory documents obtained by the Prime Unicorn Index. The new shares were priced at $15 apiece, valuing the nearly two-decades-old business at $1.7 billion.

We’ve reached out to Medallia for comment.

Medallia is expected to finally transition to the public markets in 2019, a year chock-full of high-profile unicorn IPOs. The downsized round, which if raised at full is less than half of its Series E funding, will likely be Medallia’s final infusion of private investment.

San Mateo-headquartered Medallia, led by newly-appointed chief executive officer Leslie Stretch, operates a platform meant to help businesses better provide for their customers. Its core product, the Medallia Experience Cloud, provides employees real-time data on customers collected from online review sites and social media. The service leverages that data to provide insights and tools to improve customer experiences.

Leslie Stretch, president and CEO of Medallia (PRNewsfoto/Medallia).

According to PitchBook, Medallia boasts a particularly clean cap table, especially for a roughly 18-year-old business. It’s backed by four venture capital firms: Sequoia Capital, Saints Capital, TriplePoint Venture Growth and Grotmol Solutions, the latter which invested a small amount of capital in 2010. Medallia has raised a total of $268 million in equity funding, including a $150 million round in 2015 that valued the company at $1.25 billion.

Prior to hiring Stretch to lead the company to IPO, Medallia co-founder Borge Hald ran the company as CEO since its 2001 launch. Hald is now executive chairman and chief strategy officer.

YouTube will shut off comments on videos featuring “younger minors and videos with older minors at risk of attracting predatory behavior,” according to a statement from the company. It’s an effort to stamp out predatory behavior from viewers that included salacious notes in the comments section of videos featuring underage kids.

Last week, TechCrunch confirmed reports which first arose on Reddit about the existence of a soft-core pedophile ring that was communicating via YouTube’s comments section and disseminating videos of minors by gaming the company’s search algorithms.

YouTube creator Matt Watson flagged the problem in a subreddit, noting that he found scores of videos of kids where YouTube users are trading inappropriate comments and identifying timestamps to focus on below the fold. Watson denounced the company for failing to prevent what he describes as a “soft-core pedophilia ring” from operating in plain sight on its platform.

Embattled venture capitalist Justin Caldbeck (pictured) is suing his former co-Binary Capital founder Jonathan Teo, alleging breach of contract, fraud and more.

Caldbeck, accused of sexual harassment and unwanted sexual advances in 2017, took an indefinite leave of absence from Binary Capital, leaving to Teo all the responsibilities of the $175 million fund. Shortly after, Teo offered to step down in a last-ditch effort to keep the firm afloat. Ultimately, Binary Capital shut down and New York venture capital firm Lerer Hippeau assumed responsibility for its $125 million debut investment vehicle, 70 percent of which has been deployed, per details shared in the lawsuit.

In the legal filing submitted to the Superior Court of The State of California, Caldbeck accuses Teo of mismanagement following his June 2017 departure. We’ve reached out to lawyers for both parties for comment.

“Mr. Teo completely abandoned the leadership responsibilities that were entrusted to him, neglecting to take the most basic steps required to run a venture capital firm,” the lawsuit states. “Mr. Teo was laughably bad at this job. As another Silicon Valley entrepreneur remarked publicly, ‘this guy has done everything possible wrong.’ ”

The filing cites 500 Startups and Sherpa Capital as examples of funds that were able to survive following similar scandals wherein a partner was accused of sexual harassment and misconduct. Caldbeck, in essence, is upset Teo wasn’t able to successfully run Binary Capital following his own alleged wrongdoings.

Binary Capital co-founders Jonathan Teo and Justin Caldbeck

Caldbeck, who’s taken to angel investing in the months following the high-profile scandal, was previously a managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners before launching Binary Capital alongside Teo in 2014. Teo, for his part, was formerly a managing director at General Catalyst. Binary Capital, an early-stage fund, has backed companies including plus-sized clothing business Dia&Co and airfare search engine Skiplagged.

According to several reports, Teo had hoped to keep Binary Capital alive after The Information published a report highlighting six women’s allegations of being groped and propositioned during their professional relationship with Caldbeck.

Caldbeck, however, is less than satisfied with Teo’s handling of those allegations and the wave of “negative press articles” that followed. Caldbeck also claims he resigned from the firm only in exchange for a promise for future financial stability from Teo.

In the months following his departure, Caldbeck asserts Teo took personal vacations to Mongolia, Ibiza and the Burning Man festival. He “went AWOL,” “was completely unresponsive,” “seemed not to care,” and “made no effort to save the firm,” per the filing.

Teo, additionally, allegedly took on an operating role at Binary Capital portfolio company Trillex, where he increased corporate spending limits to purchase gifts for himself, including taking out a more than $2 million unauthorized loan to pay his personal taxes and to assist a family member with a real estate project.

According to a Forbes report on the lawsuit, Teo’s legal team says “The justice system will soon remind Mr. Caldbeck that he alone is responsible for his many misdeeds.” We will update this report when he hear back from Caldbeck and Teo’s legal teams.

Here’s the full lawsuit: