Author: azeeadmin

A Tesla in full self-driving mode makes a left turn out of the middle lane on a busy San Francisco street. It jumps in a bus lane where it’s not meant to be. It turns a corner and nearly plows into parked vehicles, causing the driver to lurch for the wheel. These scenes have been captured by car reviewer AI Addict, and other scenarios like it are cropping up on YouTube. One might say that these are all mistakes any human on a cell phone might have made. But we expect more from our AI overlords. 

Earlier this month, Tesla began sending out over-the-air software updates for its Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta version 9 software, an advanced driver assist system that relies only on cameras, rather than cameras and radar like Tesla’s previous ADAS systems.

In reaction to videos displaying unsafe driving behavior, like unprotected left turns, and other reports from Tesla owners, Consumer Reports issued a statement on Tuesday saying the software upgrade does not appear to be safe enough for public roads, and that it would independently test the software update on its Model Y SUV once it receives the necessary software updates. 

The consumer organization said it’s concerned Tesla is using its existing owners and their vehicles as guinea pigs for testing new features. Making their point for them, Tesla CEO Elon Musk did urge drivers not to be complacent while driving because “there will be unknown issues, so please be paranoid.” Many Tesla owners know what they’re getting themselves into because they signed up for Tesla’s Early Access Program that delivers beta software for feedback, but other road users have not given their consent for such trials. 

Tesla’s updates are shipped out to drivers all over the country. The electric vehicle company did not respond to a request for more information about whether or not it takes into account self-driving regulations in specific states — 29 states have enacted laws related to autonomous driving, but they differ wildly depending on the state. Other self-driving technology companies like Cruise, Waymo and Argo AI told CR they either test their software on private tracks or use trained safety drivers as monitors. 

“Car technology is advancing really quickly, and automation has a lot of potential, but policymakers need to step up to get strong, sensible safety rules in place,” says William Wallace, manager of safety policy at CR in a statement. “Otherwise, some companies will just treat our public roads as if they were private proving grounds, with little holding them accountable for safety.”

In June, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a standing general order that requires manufacturers and operators of vehicles with SAE Level 2 ADAS or SAE levels 3, 4 or 5 automated driving systems to report crashes. 

“NHTSA’s core mission is safety. By mandating crash reporting, the agency will have access to critical data that will help quickly identify safety issues that could emerge in these automated systems,” said Dr. Steven Cliff, NHTSA’s acting administrator, in a statement. “In fact, gathering data will help instill public confidence that the federal government is closely overseeing the safety of automated vehicles.” 

The FSD beta 9 software has added features that automates more driving tasks, like navigating intersections and city streets with the driver’s supervision. But with such excellent graphics detailing where the car is in relation to other road users, down to a woman on a scooter passing by, drivers might be more distracted by the tech that’s meant to assist them at crucial moments. 

“Tesla just asking people to pay attention isn’t enough — the system needs to make sure people are engaged when the system is operational,” said Jake Fisher, senior director of CR’s Auto Test Center in a statement. “We already know that testing developing self-driving systems without adequate driver support can — and will — end in fatalities.”

Fisher said Tesla should implement an in-car driver monitoring system to ensure drivers are watching the road to avoid accidents like the one involving Uber’s self-driving test vehicle, which struck and killed a woman in 2018 in Phoenix as she crossed the street. 

Pivot Bio makes fertilizer — but not directly. Its modified microorganisms are added to soil and they product nitrogen that would otherwise have had to be trucked in and dumped there. This biotech-powered approach can save farmers money and time and ultimately may be easier on the environment — a huge opportunity that investors have plowed $430 million into in the company’s latest funding round.

Nitrogen is among the nutrients crops need to survive and thrive, and it’s only by dumping fertilizer on the soil and mixing it in that farmers can keep growing at today’s rates. But in some ways we’re still doing what our forebears did generations ago.

“Fertilizer changed agriculture — it’s what made so much of the last century possible. But it’s not a perfect way to get nutrients to crops,” said Karsten Temme, CEO and co-founder of Pivot Bio. He pointed out the simple fact that distributing fertilizer over a thousand — let alone ten thousand or more — acres of farmland is an immense mechanical and logistical challenge, involving many people, heavy machinery, and valuable time.

Not to mention the risk that a heavy rain might carry off a lot of the fertilizer before it’s absorbed and used, and the huge contributions of greenhouse gases the fertilizing process produces. (The microbe approach seems to be considerably better for the environment.)

Yet the reason we do this in the first place is essentially to imitate the work of microbes that live in the soil and produce nitrogen naturally. Plants and these microbes have a relationship going back millions of years, but the tiny organisms simply don’t produce enough. Pivot Bio’s insight when it started more than a decade ago was that a few tweaks could supercharge this natural nitrogen cycle.

“We’ve all known microbes were the way to go,” he said. “They’re naturally part of the root system — they were already there. They have this feedback loop, where if they detect fertilizer they don’t make nitrogen, to save energy. The only thing that we’ve done is, the portion of their genome responsible for producing nitrogen is offline, and we’re waking it up.”

Other agriculture-focused biotech companies like Indigo and AgBiome are also looking at modifying and managing the plant’s “microbiome,” which is to say the life that lives in the immediate vicinity of a given plant. A modified microbiome may be resistant to pests, reduce disease, or offer other benefits.

It’s not so different from yeast, which as many know from experience works as a living rising agent. That microbe has been cultivated to consume sugar and produce a gas, which leads to the air pockets in baked goods. This microbe has been modified a bit more directly to continually consume the sugars put out by plants and put out nitrogen. And they can do it at rates that massively reduce the need for adding solid fertilizer to the soil.

“We’ve taken what is traditionally tons and tons of physical materials, and shrunk that into a powder, like baker’s yeast, that you can fit in your hand,” Temme said (though, to be precise, the product is applied as a liquid). “All of a sudden managing that farm gets a little easier. You free up the time you would have spent sitting in the tractor applying fertilizer to the field; you’ll add our product at the same time you’d be planting your seeds. And you have the confidence that if a rainstorm comes through in the spring, it’s not washing it all away. Globally about half of all fertilizer is washed away… but microbes don’t mind.”

Instead, the microbes just quietly sit in the soil pumping out nitrogen at a rate of up to 40 pounds per acre — a remarkably old-fashioned way to measure it (why not grams per square centimeter?) but perhaps in keeping with agriculture’s occasional anachronistic tendencies. Depending on the crop and environment that may be enough to do without added fertilizers at all, or it might be about half or less.

Whatever the proportion provided by the microbes, it must be tempting to employ them, because Pivot Bio tripled its revenue in 2021. You might wonder why they can be so sure only halfway through the year, but as they are currently only selling to farmers in the northern hemisphere and the product is applied at planting time early in the year, they’re done with sales for the year and can be sure it’s three times what they sold in 2020.

The microbes die off once the crop is harvested, so it’s not a permanent change to the ecosystem. And next year, when farmers come back for more, the organisms may well have been modified further. It’s not quite as simple as turning the nitrogen production on or off in the genome; the enzymatic pathway from sugar to nitrogen can be improved, and the threshold for when the microbes decide to undertake the process rather than rest can be changed as well. The latest iteration, Proven 40, has the yield mentioned above, but further improvements are planned, attracting potential customers on the fence about whether it’s worth the trouble to change tactics.

The potential for recurring revenue and growth (by their current estimate they are currently able to address about a quarter of a $200 billion total market) led to the current monster D round, which was led by DCVC and Temasek. There are about a dozen other investors, for which I refer readers to the press release, which lists them in no doubt a very carefully negotiated order.

Temme says the money will go towards deepening and broadening the platform and growing the relationship with farmers, who seem to be hooked after giving it a shot. Right now the microbes are specific to corn, wheat, and rice, which of course covers a great deal of agriculture, but there are many other corners of the industry that would benefit from a streamlined, enhanced nitrogen cycle. And it’s certainly a powerful validation of the vision Temme and his co-founder Alvin Tamsir had 15 years ago in grad school, he said. Here’s hoping that’s food for thought for those in that position now, wondering if it’s all worth it.

With the pandemic affecting every aspect of life and industry, it’s no surprise that digitization is coming to construction fast. Construction suppliers are increasingly under the same pressure as other sectors to perform at a higher level. We’ve seen the rise of companies like Dozer, Reno Run, and Toolbox try to address this, but often the model is closer to a vertical integration one rather than something more open. Even with that, it’s still the case that to order concrete or bricks, construction companies have to negotiate each time, while simultaneously record keeping.

This is the argument of Brokrete, which bills itself as the “Shopify of construction.”

The startup has now raised a $3M seed financing round led by Xploration Capital, which was joined by unnamed new strategic investors and existing investors. The startup graduated from Y Combinator’s winter cohort last year. Other strategic investors include Ronald Richardson, Avlok Kohli (CEO of AngeLlist Ventures) and the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund (IAF). The funding will be used to expand in North American and European markets. Brokrete also launched an e-commerce platform for suppliers in the construction industry it calls Storefront.

Jordan Latourelle, the company’s founder and CEO said: “Construction today is a largely offline, $1.2 trillion market where legacy commerce is the norm. Brokrete’s Storefront product equips suppliers with the tools required to enhance their operations by orders of magnitude. I founded Brokrete after seeing an industry left behind by e-commerce giants. Now we are becoming the operating system for e-commerce in the construction industry, while staying easy and affordable at the same time.”

Brokrete says its platform is code-free, white-labeled, multi-channel, and industry-specific to sell and manage orders online. Suppliers get an iOS and Android app for e-commerce to receive offline orders from more ‘traditional’ customers. It then provides order management, payouts, dispatching, logistics, and real-time delivery. There are also financial and operational ERP integrations. Brokrete claims to works with 1000+ contractors and to have a 250+ supplier network. 

Latourelle told me: “We’re giving the construction industry an opportunity to use it on a Shopify way, and create their own store. It’s like a branded storefront for suppliers.”

Eugene Timko, Managing Partner at Xploration Capital said: “Construction is one of the few remaining large industries with mostly undigitized supply chains. Historically the key problem was the lack of real-time access to actual stocks which prevented producers and distributors from going online. Now with Brokrete’s end-to-end solution, these businesses can not only sell through Brokrete’s marketplace but can also enable their own direct online channels. Similar to Shopify, this has allowed many thousands of previously offline businesses to start accepting orders online.”

The Biden administration tripled down on its commitment to reining in powerful tech companies Tuesday, proposing committed Big Tech critic Jonathan Kanter to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division.

Kanter is a lawyer with a long track record of representing smaller companies like Yelp in antitrust cases against Google. He currently practices law at his own firm, which specializes in advocacy for state and federal antitrust enforcement.

“Throughout his career, Kanter has also been a leading advocate and expert in the effort to promote strong and meaningful antitrust enforcement and competition policy,” the White House press release stated. Progressives celebrated the nomination as a win, though some of Biden’s new antitrust hawks have enjoyed support from both political parties.

The Justice Department already has a major antitrust suit against Google in the works. The lawsuit, filed by Trump’s own Justice Department, accuses the company of “unlawfully maintaining monopolies” through anti-competitive practices in its search and search advertising businesses. If successfully confirmed, Kanter would be positioned to steer the DOJ’s big case against Google.

In a 2016 NYT op-ed, Kanter argued that Google is notorious for relying on an anti-competitive “playbook” to maintain its market dominance. Kanter pointed to Google’s long history of releasing free ad-supported products and eventually restricting competition through “discriminatory and exclusionary practices” in a given corner of the market.

Kanter is just the latest high profile Big Tech critic that’s been elevated to a major regulatory role under Biden. Last month, Biden named fierce Amazon critic Lina Khan as FTC chair upon her confirmation to the agency. In March, Biden named another noted Big Tech critic, Columbia law professor Tim Wu, to the National Economic Council as a special assistant for tech and competition policy.

All signs point to the Biden White House gearing up for a major federal fight with Big Tech. Congress is working on a set of Big Tech bills, but in lieu of — or in tandem with — legislative reform, the White House can flex its own regulatory muscle through the FTC and DOJ.

In new comments to MSNBC, the White House confirmed that it is also “reviewing” Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a potent snippet of law that protects platforms from liability for user-generated content.

On Tuesday, R-Zero, a pandemic-era biosafety company, announced the acquisition of CoWorkr – a company that develops room occupancy sensors. The acquisition marks a shift in focus for R-Zero as people return to work, vaccines are rolled out, and companies that sprung up in response to the COVID-19 adapt to another phase of the pandemic. 

When R-Zero was founded in April 2020, the company primarily focused on developing hospital-grade UVC disinfection systems, or lights that can neutralize certain types of viruses (more on this later). As companies scrambled for ways to sanitize buildings, the company racked up a total of $58.8 in funding at a $256.5 million valuation. R-Zero now has about 1,000 private and public sector clients that range from correctional facilities, to the Brooklyn Nets and Boston Celtics, to the South San Francisco Unified School District. 

CoWorkr was founded in 2014 and had totaled about $200,000 in seed funding, per Crunchbase. 

With the acquisition of CoWorkr, R-Zero plans to develop an internet of things-style sensor network to manage both personnel and cleaning in the workplace, says R-Zero founder Grant Morgan. The company is moving beyond simply disinfecting air and surfaces, and will focus on managing the flow of people (and the viruses and bacteria) in public spaces. 

“It’s like an OS for the workplace. That’s what we’re building: Tools that help both create and maintain indoor environments with health and productivity at their core,” Morgan tells TechCrunch. 

Elizabeth Redmond and Keenan May, both co-founders of CoWorkr, will remain on in full time roles, where they will run a corporate real estate initiative, and develop an IoT capacity.  

“We’ve spent a lot of time with our customers and understanding our customers’ initiatives, especially in commercial real estate,” Redmond tells TechCrunch. 

“The majority are moving to a hybrid working scenario and that means you know they really need occupancy information,” she continues. “Our initiative in joining with R-Zero is very much highlighted by what the future of hybrid work looks like and what the future of commercial real estate looks like.”

Pre-CoWorkr, R-Zero’s flagship product was a UVC light called Arc – a rectangular light that can be wheeled into an office space once janitorial staff leave the office. It also offered a product called Arc Air, an air filter that also uses UVC light to kill germs, and that could be used in occupied spaces. 

UVC lights had a brief moment of fame in mid-2020 for several reasons: they seemed like powerful ways to disinfect communal spaces, and there were certain incentives for companies to apply tech-based solutions to COVID-19. 

UVC lights have been used in hospitals for decades to sanitize surfaces like scanners, or to sanitize air when inserted into UV air ducts. Studies have shown it can inactivate flu viruses in the air. Limited evidence also noted that UVC can also inactivate SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses by destroying the virus’ outer protein coating. 

These lights were also used in real-life during the pandemic. The New York Metropolitan Transport Authority, for example also, purchased $1 million worth of UVC lights to disinfect subway cars each evening. The CARES act passed in March 2020 was to allow companies and public sector institutions to use government loans to purchase cleaning services, including UV lights. 

Still, some consumer-facing lamps drew their fair share of criticism. For one, they can cause eye injuries or burns if people are exposed to them for a long period of time. One review of UVC disinfection (notably, written by two scientists with ties to a UVC disinfection company) offered a blunt assessment noting that “nonscientific performance claims” were “widespread” in the nascent industry. 

For its part, R-Zero’s Arc does have third-party testing to its name – it was shown to reduce 99.99 percent of two viruses: a common cold coronavirus, and a surrogate for norovirus on surfaces. It was also 99.99 percent effective in killing off E. Coli and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). 

Despite back-and-forth over the utility of some UVC lights as disinfection technology, some analysts suggest this industry isn’t going anywhere (for one, LG has entered the UV-based cleaning space). Tim Mulrooney, a commercial services equities analyst for William Blair told the Washington Post that we’re living through a “paradigm shift” in how people think about hygiene. 

Polling from 2020 suggests that cleaning procedures were top of mind for employees and customers alike. Of 3,000 people surveyed by Deloitte, 64 percent of employees said that regular cleaning of shared spaces was important to them and 62 percent of customers wanted surfaces cleaned after every interaction. (This is despite evidence that surfaces aren’t thought to be a way that COVID-19 spreads). 

At this point, it’s unclear how the rise of vaccines might impact perceptions of office cleanliness. But Morgan is betting that companies (and employees) are now more aware of the germs in our midst than they might have been pre-pandemic, and will be eager for ways to control their spread – that includes managing the flow of people within an office. 

For R-Zero that means moving beyond UVC disinfection to focus on occupancy management, with the acquisition of CoWorkr. 

Morgan calls CoWorkr’s sensors R-Zero’s “eyes and ears.” R-Zero plans to announce two UVC-based products that address air cleanliness in occupied spaces, and will use CoWorkr’s sensors to ensure “full automation.” 

For instance, CoWorker’s battery-powered thermal sensors allow employers to know which rooms in an office are being occupied. That information, he says, could help trigger the use of an UV-based air filter or other cleaning products. 

That information could also tell janitorial staff to clean the room more thoroughly that evening — or conversely, to forgo cleaning a room that hasn’t been touched all day. 

“What our customers are seeing is that they’re getting an immediate ROI. Our customers are reducing labor costs by 30-40 percent,” says Morgan. 

Overall, says Morgan, the company is still bullish on the idea that people will still crave clean workspaces; perhaps due to some lingering “scar tissue” from the pandemic, he notes. 

“​​In almost 100% of cases, our customers are looking at this as a long term investment,” Morgan adds. 

 

A report last week hinted at some of Netflix’s gaming ambitions. In its Q2 2021 earnings report, the company confirmed some things. First, Netflix says it “will be primarily focused” on mobile at first, looking to expand on its interactivity projects like Black Mirror Bandersnatch and its Stranger Things games. The upcoming titles will be available at no additional cost as part of your subscription and the company was clear it will keep up the pace on movies and television.

“We view gaming as another new content category for us, similar to our expansion into original films, animation and unscripted TV,” the company said in a letter to its shareholders.

2020 was a big year for Netflix. With everyone stuck at home and movie theaters closed, the streaming service attracted 16 million new customers in three months. As expected, in 2021 that pace has dramatically slowed and the new customer numbers continue to be a struggle. In its earnings report, the company says it added 1.5 million subscribers in Q2, which was actually a bit better than its forecast mark of one million. However, that’s lower than Q1 2021, which saw the company tack on 3.98 new customers globally.

Netflix says it forecasts new customer additions to hit 3.5 million in Q3 2021, up from 2.2 million during the same three-month a year ago. If it does so, the company explains that would bring the total new subscriber tally to 54 million over the last two years. The pace may have slowed for Netflix, but overall it’s doing just fine. Revenue was still up 19 percent year-over-year at $7.3 billion for the quarter.

According to Netflix’s own numbers, Shadow and Bone was a popular series this quarter, streaming to over 55 million “member households” in less than a month. The show has already been renewed for a second season based on those numbers. Sweet Tooth, a series based on a DC comic, was streamed by 60 million households the first month it was available. Unscripted series like Too Hot to Handle and The Circle were popular selections as well, as was true crime docuseries The Sons of Sam. In terms of movies, Zac Snyder’s Army of the Dead hit 75 million households in the first month. Netflix also explained that The Mitchells vs. The Machines is now its biggest animated film to date, streaming to 53 million households.

Netflix says COVID-related production delays led to a “lighter” first half of 2021 in terms of content, but the pace will pick up throughout the rest of the year. The company’s Q3 lineup includes new seasons of La Casa de Papel (Money Heist), Sex Education, Virgin River and Never Have I Ever in addition to live action films like Sweet Girl (Jason Momoa), Kissing Booth 3 and Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Plus, there’s the animated film Vivo, which will feature new music from Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.

A famous poem advises us not to compare ourselves with others, “for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”

The same holds true for startup fundraising; the size of your seed round will be determined solely by your company’s immediate needs and the investors you’re working with.

“Remember that fundraising is not the goal,” says three-time YC alum Yin Wu. “Building a successful business is.”

---

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription

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If you are an early-stage founder who’s seeking clarity about apportioning equity — or if you’re biting your nails over how much to raise — read this primer. It’s also a useful overview for early employees and co-founders who may be new to startup financing.

Topics covered:

• How financing works: SAFEs versus equity rounds
• How much to raise
• How to arrive at your valuation

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch! I hope you have a great week.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Twitter Spaces: SaaS marketing with MKT1 founders Emily Kramer and Kathleen Estreich

Join us today at 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. ET/10 p.m. London for a Twitter Spaces conversation with Emily Kramer and Kathleen Estreich, founders of MKT1, a partnership that advises SaaS startups.

In addition to their work with individual companies, they also run founder workshops, a job board and a marketer-led syndicate.

Emily has built marketing teams from scratch at companies like Asana, Carta, and Astro, and Kathleen has scaled and led marketing and operations teams at several high-growth startups, including Intercom, Box, Facebook and Scalyr.

If you have an Android device or an iPhone and a Twitter account, click here to join the conversation or set a reminder:

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1vAxRwkMWgzKl?s=20

Duolingo’s IPO could cast golden halo on edtech startups

Alex Wilhelm and Natasha Mascarenhas look into recent figures from U.S. edtech giant Duolingo.

It announced a first price range of $85 to $95 per share, which Alex and Natasha note “feels strong.”

“If Duolingo poses a strong debut, consumer edtech startups will be able to add a golden data point to their pitch decks,” they write. “A strong Duolingo listing could also signal that mission-driven startups can have impressive turns.”

But if it struggles?

“The wave of consumer edtech apps may lose some enthusiasm about going public.”

Outdoorsy co-founders detail how they expanded the sharing economy to RVs

Seven years ago, ad executive Jen Young and tech entrepreneur Jeff Cavins stepped away from the careers they’d built to launch Outdoorsy, an RV rental marketplace.

Last month, they announced a partnership with high-end camping company Collective Retreats and raised a $90 million Series D and $40 million in debt to speed up an already impressive rate of growth.

To learn more about their approach to building a transportation company that caters to people who crave a taste of nomadic existence, Rebecca Bella interviewed Young and Cavins for Extra Crunch.

Their conversation explored the impacts of COVID-19, their business strategy and why they decided to take on $30 million in debt financing:

Jeff Cavins: We like to look at macro trends as a business and I think U.S. monetary policy is going to get us all in a little bit of trouble. So we wanted to lock in a credit facility for the company at advantageous terms.

Cleo Capital’s Sarah Kunst explains how to get ready to raise your next round

TechCrunch virtually sat down with venture capitalist and Cleo Capital managing director Sarah Kunst at our latest Early Stage event. Kunst joined us to chat about preparing for raising capital in today’s frenetic fundraising environment, digging into the gritty mechanics for the audience.

This post rounds up a few favorite excerpts from the chat, starting with Kunst’s notes on how to make a killer pitch deck.

She also offered advice regarding incorporation, how to find a co-founder and when startups are too large to join an accelerator.

In an increasingly hot biotech market, protecting IP is key

The good news for biotech startups is that investment in the sector is soaring.

“Along the way, founders will need to procure additional investments, develop strategic partnerships and stave off competition,” Kevin A. O’Connor, a partner in the Intellectual Property practice group at Neal Gerber Eisenberg, writes in a guest column. “All of which starts by protecting the fundamental asset of any biotech company: its intellectual property.”

ServiceMax promises accelerating growth as key to $1.4B SPAC deal

Alex Wilhelm and Ron Miller dug into ServiceMax, a company that builds software for the field-service industry, after it announced it would go public via a SPAC.

“Broadly, ServiceMax’s business has a history of modest growth and cash consumption,” they write. “It promises a big change to that storyline, though. Here’s how.”

The head of Citi Ventures on how, and why, to leverage corporate venture arms like his

At our recent Early Stage event, we had the opportunity to talk with Arvind Purushotham, the managing director and global head of Citi Ventures, about how startups should think about corporate venture arms, including what a check from an enterprise like Citi can mean, and how to leverage that kind of goliath once it’s already a financial partner.

For founders trying to understand the benefits and potential pitfalls of working with a corporate venture arm versus a more traditional venture team, it’s worth zipping through this discussion.

Robinhood targets IPO valuation up to $35B amid warning that crypto incomes are slipping

Alex Wilhelm considers what Robinhood’s first IPO price range ($38 to $42 per share) means for the U.S. consumer fintech giant and whether we can expect it to raise the range again before it debuts.

In picking apart Robinhood’s latest filing, Alex noticed an aside about decreased crypto trading volume.

“Because Robinhood deals with consumers, who might decide to trade less in time, it has more uncertainty in its future growth than, say, Zoom,” he notes.

The Zoom-Five9 deal is a big bet for the video conferencing company

Zoom plans to spend a little less than a sixth of its value on Five9, which sells software that allows users to reach customers across platforms and record notes on their interactions.

Alex Wilhelm notes “that Five9’s revenue growth rate is a fraction of Zoom’s.”

“The larger company, then, is buying a piece of revenue that is growing slower than its core business. That’s a bit of a flip from many transactions that we see, in which the smaller company being acquired is growing faster than the acquiring entity’s own operations.

“Why would Zoom buy slower growth for so very much money?”

AngelList Venture’s Avlok Kohli on rolling funds and the busy state of VC

Few companies have deeper insights into the day-by-day state of venture capital than AngelList.

According to the company’s data, over 51% of the “top tier U.S. VC deals” involve their platform and tools, giving them a remarkably expansive view of everything going on.

AngelList Venture CEO Avlok Kohli joined us at TechCrunch Early Stage to discuss topics ranging from the state of the market to his thoughts on why there’s suddenly so much money flooding into VC (sending valuations to the sky), and where AngelList could go from here.

Twitter announced today it will begin testing a new set of features for TweetDeck, the company’s often-ignored social media dashboard aimed at Twitter’s power users, which Twitter may soon turn into a new subscription service. According to a post from Twitter Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour, the revamped version of the Twitter client will include a full tweet composer, new advanced search features, new column types, and a new ways to group columns into clean workspaces.

 

Beykpour earlier this year had teased Twitter’s plan to introduce an overhauled version of Tweetdeck. In an interview with The Verge, he admitted that Twitter hadn’t “given TweetDeck a lot of love recently,” but said that would soon change with a revamp, which he then described as a “pretty big overhaul from the ground up.”

The update appears to be making good on that promise with a handful of notable changes.

For example, Twitter tells TechCrunch the new tweet composer will allow you to add GIFs, polls, or emojis to your tweets, including scheduled tweets, not just photos and videos, as before. You will also be able to write threads and tag your images.

In addition to the large list of existing column options, users can will be able to access new column types including Profile, Topics, Explore, Events, Moments, and Bookmarks. Unfortunately, this seems to have come at the expense of other column types, including Activity, Followers, Likes and Outbox, which have been removed.

The new advanced search feature lets you use boolean queries. And you can now choose between viewing either the top tweets or the latest tweets in the first columns.

But one of the app’s more clever new additions is a feature called “Decks,” which will allow you to organize sets of columns into separate workspaces. This could help users who want to create different workspaces associated with different themes or interests. Or, for social media managers, it could help them keep up with tweets related to their many different clients, perhaps.

Despite the benefits some of the changes could provide, a number of responses from testers who gained access to the new TweetDeck weren’t all that positive. Users are complaining in particular about the loss of the “Activity” column option which shows whenever anyone you follow on Twitter favorites a tweet or follows another user, as well as the missing messages column.

Others are annoyed that the Timeline defaults to top tweets instead of new tweets, that you can’t create a column for your direct messages, and that collections are gone. Some said it’s too difficult to resize the columns and they couldn’t figure out how to use it with multiple accounts. Others said it needed a bottom scroll bar and the ability to turn off images. As one user put it, “[This] isn’t a new TweetDeck. It’s a multi-column Twitter.”

Worse, a post from TweetDeck itself about the update appeared to show a completely different type of app than what people were used to — with wide columns and a very large photo image taking up too much space. These would be the sort of changes that would ruin the information-dense experience most TweetDeck users prefer.

However, a more reassuring screenshot from Twitter employee Eric Zuckerman, who works in news partnerships, showed off a version of the new TweetDeck that looks very much like the app people know and love, with tight columns, smaller images, a smaller font size.

Twitter’s post also promoted the updated TweetDeck as something that would “incorporate more of what you see on Twitter.com,” which further confused and concerned many TweetDeck users who replied by pointing out that they use TweetDeck because it doesn’t look or operate like Twitter’s web app and is free of the many extra features Twitter introduces.

A Twitter engineer, Angelo Tomasco, clarified that the changes aren’t only about making TweetDeck “look more like Twitter” — they’re about a shared infrastructure that will bring health and safety updates to TweetDeck and allow Twitter developers to spend less time playing catch-up with Twitter so they can instead build out new features and address user feedback.

Whatever your opinion, you can at least be assured that the version of TweetDeck arriving today to testers is not the final product.

Twitter says it will roll out the new version to a small group of randomly-selected people in the U.S., Canada, and Australia to start. (Of course, app researcher Jane Manchun Wong has already found a workaround for that limitation, if you’re interested!)

And Twitter says it will listen and respond to user feedback about the changes.

It will have to, in fact, as Twitter tells us this test is about exploring how it could make TweetDeck a part of its subscription offerings in the future.

“With this test, we hope to gather feedback to explore what an enhanced version of TweetDeck could look like within Twitter’s subscription offerings later on,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “We’ll have more to share later as we learn from this test,” they noted.

 

 

Maine has joined a growing number of cities, counties and states that are rejecting dangerously biased surveillance technologies like facial recognition.

The new law, which is the strongest statewide facial recognition law in the country, not only received broad, bipartisan support, but it passed unanimously in both chambers of the state legislature. Lawmakers and advocates spanning the political spectrum — from the progressive lawmaker who sponsored the bill to the Republican members who voted it out of committee, from the ACLU of Maine to state law enforcement agencies — came together to secure this major victory for Mainers and anyone who cares about their right to privacy.

Maine is just the latest success story in the nationwide movement to ban or tightly regulate the use of facial recognition technology, an effort led by grassroots activists and organizations like the ACLU. From the Pine Tree State to the Golden State, national efforts to regulate facial recognition demonstrate a broad recognition that we can’t let technology determine the boundaries of our freedoms in the digital 21^st century.

Facial recognition technology poses a profound threat to civil rights and civil liberties. Without democratic oversight, governments can use the technology as a tool for dragnet surveillance, threatening our freedoms of speech and association, due process rights, and right to be left alone. Democracy itself is at stake if this technology remains unregulated.

We know the burdens of facial recognition are not borne equally, as Black and brown communities — especially Muslim and immigrant communities — are already targets of discriminatory government surveillance. Making matters worse, face surveillance algorithms tend to have more difficulty accurately analyzing the faces of darker-skinned people, women, the elderly and children. Simply put: The technology is dangerous when it works — and when it doesn’t.

But not all approaches to regulating this technology are created equal. Maine is among the first in the nation to pass comprehensive statewide regulations. Washington was the first, passing a weak law in the face of strong opposition from civil rights, community and religious liberty organizations. The law passed in large part because of strong backing from Washington-based megacorporation Microsoft. Washington’s facial recognition law would still allow tech companies to sell their technology, worth millions of dollars, to every conceivable government agency.

In contrast, Maine’s law strikes a different path, putting the interests of ordinary Mainers above the profit motives of private companies.

Maine’s new law prohibits the use of facial recognition technology in most areas of government, including in public schools and for surveillance purposes. It creates carefully carved out exceptions for law enforcement to use facial recognition, creating standards for its use and avoiding the potential for abuse we’ve seen in other parts of the country. Importantly, it prohibits the use of facial recognition technology to conduct surveillance of people as they go about their business in Maine, attending political meetings and protests, visiting friends and family, and seeking out healthcare.

In Maine, law enforcement must now — among other limitations — meet a probable cause standard before making a facial recognition request, and they cannot use a facial recognition match as the sole basis to arrest or search someone. Nor can local police departments buy, possess or use their own facial recognition software, ensuring shady technologies like Clearview AI will not be used by Maine’s government officials behind closed doors, as has happened in other states.

Maine’s law and others like it are crucial to preventing communities from being harmed by new, untested surveillance technologies like facial recognition. But we need a federal approach, not only a piecemeal local approach, to effectively protect Americans’ privacy from facial surveillance. That’s why it’s crucial for Americans to support the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, a bill introduced by members of both houses of Congress last month.

The ACLU supports this federal legislation that would protect all people in the United States from invasive surveillance. We urge all Americans to ask their members of Congress to join the movement to halt facial recognition technology and support it, too.

Mobileye, a subsidiary of Intel, has expanded its autonomous vehicle testing program to New York City as part of its strategy to develop and deploy the technology.

New York City joins a number of other cities including Detroit, Paris, Shanghai and Tokyo where Mobileye has either launched testing or plans to this year. Mobileye launched its first test fleet in Jerusalem in 2018 and added one in Munich in 2020.

“If we want to build something that will scale, we need to be able to drive in challenging places and almost everywhere,” Mobileye president and CEO Amnon Shashua said during a presentation Tuesday that was streamed live. As part of the announcement, Mobileye also released a 40-minute unedited video of one of its test vehicles equipped with a self-driving system navigating New York’s city streets.

These vehicles, which began testing in New York City last month, are driving autonomously with a safety operator behind the wheel using only cameras. The vehicles are equipped with 8 long-range and 4 parking cameras powered by its fifth generation system on chip called EyeQ5.

That does not mean that Mobileye is taking a camera-only approach to autonomy once it deploys. The company has also developed another subsystem with lidar and radar, but no cameras that also drives autonomously. The two subsystems of sensors and software will be combined and integrated to provide redundancy in robotaxis. The camera-only subsystem is what Shashua described as at “the cost level for consumers” and one that will be used to evolve driving assist systems. Later this year, Mobilieye’s camera-only system using the EyeQ5 SoC will be launched in a Geely Auto Group vehicle.

New York City has been in Shashua’s sights for more than six months. He first mentioned a desire to test on public roads in New York during the virtual 2021 CES tech trade show in January with the caveat that the company would need to receive regulatory approval. Now, with that regulatory approval in hand, Mobileye is the only company currently permitted to test AVs in the state and city. GM’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise outlined in 2017 a plan to test AVs in New York and even mapped parts of lower Manhattan. The company never scaled up the test program in NYC, deciding instead to focus on its primary target for commercial deployment: San Francisco. 

Mobileye applied for a permit through New York State’s autonomous vehicle technology demonstration and testing program. The company met the requirements outlined in the program which includes compliance with all federal standards and applicable New York State inspection standards as well as a law enforcement interaction plan, according to Mobileye.

“I don’t think there’s anything special about receiving approval you simply need to go through this process, Shashua said, who described it has lengthy and in some ways similar to the stringent requirements to test in Germany. “I think what is special is that it’s very very difficult to drive here.”

Mobileye is perhaps best known for supplying automakers with computer vision technology that powers advanced driver assistance systems. It’s a business that generated nearly $$967 million in sales for the company. Today, 88 million vehicles on the road are using Mobileye’s computer vision technology.

Mobileye has also been developing automated vehicle technology. Its full self-driving stack — which includes redundant sensing subsystems based on camera, radar and lidar technology — is combined with its REM mapping system and a rules-based Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) driving policy.

Mobileye’s REM mapping system crowdsources data by tapping into consumer and fleet vehicles equipped with its so-called EyeQ4, or fourth generation system on chip, to build high-definition maps that can be used to support in ADAS and autonomous driving systems. That data is not video or images but compressed text that collects about 10 kilobits per kilometer. Mobileye has agreements with six OEMs, including BMW, Nissan and Volkswagen, to collect that data on vehicles equipped with the EyeQ4 chip, which is used to power the advanced driver assistance system. On fleet vehicles, Mobileye collects data from an after-market product it sells to commercial operators.

Mobileye’s technology is mapping nearly 8 million kilometers day globally, including in New York City.

The strategy, Shashua contends, will allow the company to efficiently launch and operate commercial robotaxi services as well as bring the technology to consumer passenger vehicles by 2025. Shashua explained this dual approach in an interview with TechCrunch in 2020. 

“There was realization that dawned on us awhile ago,” he said at the time. “The Holy Grail of this business is passenger car autonomy: where you buy a passenger car and you pay an option price and with a press of button it can take you autonomously to wherever you want to go. The realization is that you can’t reach that Holy Grail if you don’t go through the robotaxi business.”

On Tuesday, Shashua said Mobileye was the only company that has its foot in both camps. (Although it should be noted that Toyota’s Woven Planet does have some strategic overlap.)

“We’re building our technology in a way that supports scale, especially geographic scale, using our crowdsourced mapping technology and building new sensors such that the entire package — the entire system — will be under $5,000 cost to allow consumer AVs, and on the other hand, we have a division building a mobility-as-a-service or robotaxi service,” Shashua said Tuesday. “This is one of the reasons why we purchased Moovit last year, to enable the customer facing of all the layers above the self-driving system to enable mobility-as-a-service business.”