Author: azeeadmin

GM and its new EV business unit BrightDrop are launching a fleet charging service as the automaker aims to ramp up its bet on connected and electric commercial vehicles.

The service, branded Ultium Charge 360 fleet charging service in a nod to GM’s new electric architecture and batteries that will be the foundation of its future EV plans, offers many of the tools that a commercial delivery, sales or motor pool business might need. It also includes an effort to add home charging for drivers.

The charging service is the latest addition to BrightDrop, which was launched in January. The business unit offers commercial customers — starting with FedEx — an ecosystem of electric and connected products. BrightDrop has said it will begin with two main products: an electric van called the EV600 with an estimate range of 250 miles and a pod-like electric pallet dubbed EP1. BrightDrop is part of GM’s aim to reach 1 million EV sales globally by 2025.

GM and BrightDrop are launching the charging service with Duke Energy company eTransEnergy, EVgo, In-Charge Energy and Schneider Electric, four companies that can provide the infrastructure needed to keep the commercial vans properly powered.

On the home-charging front, GM said it will expand an existing agreement with Qmerit.

The service is meant to provide tools for fleet operators, which Alex Keros, GM’s  lead architect of EV Infrastructure noted in a call with reporters Thursday are important market growth segment and a critical piece of the electrification puzzle. The company looked at “how to put the right customer experiences together … you know, when you think about fleets these are cars that come home with employees for example, and we’ll have to help those companies and employees figure out charging in their home.”

News broke this morning that Revolut, a U.K.-based consumer fintech player, raised a Series E round of funding worth $800 million at a valuation of $33 billion. Those figures are breathtaking not only due to their sheer scale, but also thanks to their radical divergence from Revolut’s preceding funding event.

At times, The Exchange, TechCrunch’s markets-and-startups column, runs into two topics worth exploring in a single day. Today is such a day. You can check out our earlier notes on the buy now, pay later startup market and Apple’s entrance into the BNPL space here. Now, let’s talk about neobanks.

As TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden wrote earlier today concerning the news:

This latest Series E is being co-led by Softbank Vision Fund 2 and Tiger Global, who appear to be the only backers in this round. It comes on the heels of rumors earlier this month Revolut was raising big. Revolut last raised about a year ago, when it closed out a Series D at $580 million, but what is stunning is how much its valuation has changed since then, growing 6x (it was $5.5 billion last year).

Stunning indeed.

Lunden also went on to report on the company’s changing financial picture based on Revolut’s recently released 2020 results. In this entry, we’re digging more deeply into those financial results and usage metrics detailed by the fintech megacorn.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The picture that emerges is one of a company with a rapidly improving financial image, albeit with some blank spaces regarding recent customer growth.

Shortly after the first  Sight Tech Global event, in December last year, Apple and Microsoft announced remarkable new features for mobile phones. Anyone could point the phone camera at a scene and request a “scene description.” In a flash, a cloud-based, computer vision AI determined what was in the scene and a machine-voice read the information. Learning that “a room contains three chairs and a table” might not seem like a big advance for the sighted, but for blind or visually impaired people, the new feature was a notable milestone for accessibility technology: An affordable, portable and nearly universal device could now “see” on behalf of just about anyone.

Technologies like scene description will be on the agenda at the second annual Sight Tech Global event, December 1-2, 2021. The free, sponsor-supported, virtual and global event will convene many of the world’s top technologists, researchers, advocates and founders to discuss how rapid advances in technology, many centered on AI, are altering — both improving and complicating — accessibility for people with sight loss.

Register today — it’s free.

At the heart of Sight Tech Global is the hard question: How do highly advanced, AI-based technologies actually become compelling, affordable products that folks who are blind or visually impaired readily adopt? It took 40 years, for example, for the $50,000 “Kurzweil reading machine,” a boxy desktop device, to evolve into what blind people take for granted today, a free app available on any mobile phone that can “read” just about any text. As anyone working in the field will tell you, shaping technologies into truly useful, everyday, affordable tools for people with vision loss is no less demanding than it was 40 years ago.

The agenda for last year’s Sight Tech Global convened many of the best minds across the spectrum of accessibility-related technologies, including Microsoft’s Saqib Shaikh, Amazon’s Josh Miele, Apple’s Chris Fleizach, Orcam’s Amnon Shashua, civil rights lawyer Haben Girma, author and professor Sara Hendren and researcher and professor Danna Gurari. In addition to those speakers were a dozen well attended breakout sessions led by Perkins Access, Salesforce, APH, Humanware and others.

Because the event was free, virtual and highly accessible, more than 4,000 people from 70 countries attended the event last December. All the sessions (video and transcript) are still available on demand via the agenda or on YouTube. Attendees gave the event a generous thumbs up: 4.7 out of 5  for programming and 4.6 out of 5 for accessibility.

Now is the time to register so that our all-volunteer team can keep you posted on agenda updates and ensure you have a chance to sign up for limited-attendance breakout sessions. You can register here.

Got programming ideas? We are happy to hear from you — especially founders, inventors and researchers who have working technology products! The programming committee includes Jim Fruchterman (Benetech / TechMatters), Larry Goldberg (Verizon Media), Matt King (Facebook), Professor Roberto Manduchi (UC Santa Cruz) and Will Butler (Be My Eyes). Contact us Info@sighttechglobal.com.

Calling all sponsors! We’re delighted that Google, TechCrunch and Verizon Media have already signed on for 2021, and nearly all last year’s sponsors have signaled that they plan to renew their support for this significant event. Private donors are also welcome! To learn more, read here or contact us a sponsor@sighttechglobal.com.

Sight Tech Global is a production of the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a 501(c)(3), that has been serving the Silicon Valley area for 75 years. Vista’s executive director, Karae Lisle, is the event’s chair. Vista is the beneficiary of all sponsorships and donations to Sight Tech Global. In 2020, 92% of the proceeds from Sight Tech Global went to support the Vista Center’s work to help thousands of people with vision loss in the Bay Area lead their best life.

Please join us at Sight Tech Global in December!

At the TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising event last week, Norwest Venture Partners‘ Lisa Wu took the stage to discuss how founders can think like venture capitalists in all facets of their business. The overlapping in job roles is uncanny: The best investors and founders have to find focus through the noise, understand the weight of due diligence and pitch others with conviction. Wu, who has investments in Plaid, Calm and Ritual, used anecdotes and exercises — such as the eyebrow test — in the tactical, engaging chat.

Pitch deck or pitch blurb?

Startup founders often turn to pitch decks when fundraising as a visual representation of their story — from the origins to total addressable market to those juicy metrics. While the format definitely works, the influx of pitch decks in a hot deal environment makes it harder to stand out.

Wu gave some pointers on how she reacts to cold pitch decks, and why founders may want to take some unconventional advice.

I love it because I can quickly flip through the deck and generally form an opinion on it. And I think I’ve read some stat recently, which is that investors really spend 2 minutes and 47 seconds per deck. It’s an easy way for me to, in that short amount of time, just get a calibration of the business to decide whether to move forward.

But, as the founder, I’ll probably tell you don’t do [the cold pitch deck]. Because if you’re sending me the pitch deck, I’m quickly screening and then I’m making a decision of whether it makes sense to meet, but your goal is really just to try to get the meeting with me to tell the story and let that unfold. And so, give us enough of it — like a blurb to tease us to want to continue to engage is great. But if it is possible, I would suggest a late pullback of the pitch deck, even though I love to receive it in advance. (Timestamp: 21:50)

In other words, she loves founders sliding into the DMs with pitch decks, but doesn’t think that strategy always gives the founder storytelling power.

This answer triggered a series of questions from attendees on whether pitch decks are even necessary in the first place. Here, Wu explains how the competitive venture market has impacted her preferences — and her interest in what I’d describe it as a private beta, except for fundraising rounds.

So, everything is shifting these days. Because there’s so much capital [and competition] out there, sometimes if I’m chasing a really hot company, I actually prefer that they don’t have a deck, or they haven’t created one yet. Because once you have a deck, that means you can go and take it out to a bunch of other investors, too. And so it’s helpful to structure the conversation and to storytell around it. I think I like a deck more so than not, unless it’s in a competitive situation. If I’m trying to close the deal, I actually prefer just an open dialogue. (Timestamp: 23:30)

We just have them come in and we just prepare our team internally to let them know that there’s no deck here. And so, it’s just up to the founders to really just tell the story to us. And, it’s worked. (Timestamp: 24:20)

• Don’t send VC a cold deck ever again: Start sending video pitches
• 11 words and phrases to cut from your VC pitch deck
• How Retail Zipline’s Series A pitch deck ticked every box for Emergence Capital

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

How to implement conflicting feedback?

The need for more affordable housing has never been more urgent as a shortage in the U.S. housing market persists.

Startups attempting to help address the shortage in a variety of ways abound. One such startup, Abodu, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Previous backer Initialized Capital also participated in the financing, along with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, former Stockton, California Mayor Michael Tubbs, GGV investor Hans Tung and Paradox Capital’s Kyle Tibbitts.

The California legislature changed laws in 2017 to make it easier to build Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs). Then on January 1, 2020, the state of California made it dramatically easier to add extra housing units to single-family home sites. Cities and local agencies have to quickly approve or deny ADU projects within 60 days of receiving a permit application. The state also now prevents cities from imposing minimum lot size requirements, maximum ADU dimensions or off-street parking requirements. 

Redwood City, California-based Abodu, which builds prefabricated ADUs, was founded in 2018 to serve as a “one-stop shop” for building an ADU, or as some describe it, a home in a backyard.

Image Credits: Co-founders John Geary and Eric McInerney / Abodu

What sets the company apart from others in the space, its execs claim, is that it not only builds and installs the units, it helps homeowners with the painful process of getting permits. Abodu says it pre-approves its structural engineering with California state-level agencies to ensure its units can be built statewide and works with local agencies to pre-approve its foundation systems to ensure projects can proceed on predictable timelines.

It also claims to offer a cheaper and faster process than if one were to build an ADU from start to finish. Specifically, the startup claims that one of its backyard homes can be installed in just 10% of the time it would take for a traditional ADU to be built. 

Abodu has been active in the market, selling and building its ADUs since the fall of 2019. Since then, it has put “dozens and dozens” of units in the ground, and has multiple dozen units in production on top of that, according to CEO and co-founder John Geary. So far, it’s operating in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Seattle. The company claims it can deliver an ADU in as little as 30 days in San Jose and Los Angeles thanks to the cities’ pre-approval process. In other cities in California and Washington, turnaround is “as little as 12 weeks.” But a standard bespoke project takes 4-5 months from start to finish, according to Geary.

The startup’s three products include a 340-square foot studio; a 500-square foot one bedroom, one bath, and a 610-square foot two bedroom unit. All have kitchens and living space.

Pricing starts at $190,000, but the average project cost across all sizes is around $230,000, Geary said, inclusive of permits and site work.

There are a variety of use cases for ADUs, the most popular of which is to house family and for rental income. 

“During the pandemic, multigenerational living has been at an all-time high. There are acute family needs that people are trying to solve for,” Geary said. “In addition, folks are earning extra money by renting them out to members of the community such as teachers or fireman, a single person or younger couple.”

Next, Abodu is eyeing the San Diego market.

Earlier this week, we covered the recent raise of Mighty Buildings, another Bay Area-based startup building ADUs and other housing. The biggest difference between the two companies, according to Geary, is that Mighty Buildings is focused on innovation in construction with its 3D-printed method. 

“We decided early on that we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel from the construction standpoint,” Geary said. “Instead, we looked at ‘how can we solve for speed and ease?’ ”

Abodu operates with an asset-light model, and doesn’t own any factories. Instead, it has built a network of factory “partners” across the Western U.S. that builds its units depending on how their capacities look at any given time.

Naturally, the company’s investors are bullish on the company’s business model.

Jeff Crowe, managing partner of Norwest Venture Partners, believes that Abodu’s “beautifully crafted units” are just one of the company’s selling points.

“John, Eric, and their team manage the end-to-end process of permitting, building, and installing on behalf of their customers,” he told TechCrunch. “And with the expedited permitting that Abodu has been granted in over two dozen cities, it has faster time-to-installation than other ADU market participants.  The result has been very high levels of customer satisfaction and rapid growth.”

Former Stockton Mayor Tubbs said Abodu is tackling two of California’s most consequential issues: the statewide housing shortage and its impacts on racial and economic segregation in our neighborhoods.

“By making it fast and accessible for normal homeowners to build high-quality backyard housing units, Abodu’s success will mean integrating options for both renters and homeowners in the same neighborhoods, while supporting small landlords and property owners in building equity in their homes,” he wrote via email.

Abodu’s success would be a win-win that strengthens communities.

Alt-Bionics made waves back in late 2019 when the brand new startup competed at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Tech Symposium. The company finished second to 3BM’s infrared paint-curing system, but Alt went on to capture national and international headlines on the strength of promising technology and a great story.

A writeup on the school’s site noted that, at $700, its prosthetic hand cost a mere fraction of the cost of standard systems. Most of the subsequent coverage has focused on the story of the team’s journey from good idea to marketable product, with CEO/co-founder (and USTA engineering grad) Ryan Saavedra noting that these sorts of products can range from $10,000-$150,000 a pop. The company is working to a price point around $3,500.

In the meantime, the Alt-Bionics team has been chronicling product development on social media. Before we get this roundup stared in earnest, we wanted to check in with Saavedra about how the past three years have gone and what the future holds for the company. And bonus: We’ve got a couple of unreleased renderings that Alt notes are “not indicative of our final product. Just merely a celebratory rendering our team put together to announce the completion of our patent” — so take that as you will.

Image Credits: Alt-Bionics

Why are prosthetics prohibitively expensive?

I’ll start by saying that they aren’t expensive to manufacture and they do not need to be so expensive to the user. At all. There is no one answer for this, but I will do my best to summarize the multiple reasons behind the exorbitant prices surrounding bionic hands. We have found that there are two parts to the end price/cost of prosthetic devices. A third (but secondary reason) will also be discussed.

The manufacturer. The manufacturer develops and creates these bionic devices and then sells them to prosthetic and orthotic clinics (one of the few places you can be fitted for and purchase these devices). The most affordable bionic prosthetic hand sold to P&O clinics starts at about $10,000 and can go up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Oddly enough, this cost doesn’t always reflect the functionality or performance of the devices. These manufacturers ultimately determine the prices of their devices. The larger among them cite overhead costs as the primary reason they cannot lower their price tags.

The prosthetic & orthotic clinic. We are still learning more about the specifics, but these clinics handle the medical insurance side of things. This means that they submit LCodes (insurance codes for bionic hands, suggested by the manufacturer) to the medical insurance company for reimbursement. These LCodes have floor and ceiling reimbursement amounts that the prosthetist can select. The reimbursement amount is commonly more than what they paid for the hand, and covers the time and effort the clinic and clinician put into procurement, fitting, testing, assembly and patient care. While normally a reasonable margin is obtained (through reimbursement amounts closer to the floor), we have seen reimbursement amounts exceed $124,000 for a $10,000 hand (from a 2018 patient receipt).

Technological stagnation. The technology for bionic hands has been stagnant for almost 15 years, with companies only just now emerging as competitors in this space. Larger companies in this space are tackling more than the one area of transradial (below elbow) bionic prosthetic devices. This means that their attention is not solely focused on the development and affordability aspects of upper extremity prostheses. The stagnation has meant that there are no external factors or forces being pressed on the existing devices and their manufacturers. Essentially, they have no reason to lower the prices, so they remain the same. This is more of an affirmation that reason No. 1 is a larger problem.

How has the reception been from the broader medical community?

Wonderful! Clinics, clinicians, patients, potential users and other competing companies have all been incredibly supportive of our mission. The space and companies, while competitive, are all aiming for the same thing: using technological advancements to give people a better quality of life.

There is obviously some skepticism at first at how we are able to achieve our much lower price point ($3,500), but it is quickly assuaged when we talk with them about our technologies and processes. We are currently discussing partnerships with prosthetic and orthotic clinics to help develop devices that not only help patients, but also lessen the burden of prosthetists in the repair and maintenance of these devices.

How far along is the project? What’s the current timeline for bringing it to market?

The project is just emerging from its infancy and is about 42% complete. Some notable achievements are as follows:

• Successful proof of concept with Army Ranger, Ryan Davis. December, 2019.
• Alt-Bionics was formed. May 2020.
• $42,000 SolidWorks grant from D’Assault Systems. July, 2020.
• Provisional patent filed. June, 2021.
• $50,000 investment from the city of San Antonio’s SAMMI Fund. July 2021.

The current timeline to bring our device to market is one year from the closing of our seed round of financing. We have, to date, raised $142,000 of our $200,000 goal and are looking to close out this round by September.

What have the biggest challenges been so far?

Navigating the FDA regulatory space and raising capital. It is no secret that the FDA regulatory process is a fearsome beast. There are even companies dedicated to assisting those looking to bring medical devices to market, navigate the process and all its intricacies. Alt-Bionics was recently accepted into a biomedical accelerator program based out of San Antonio, Texas, and will be working with regulatory experts to ensure we have a smooth rest of the ride to market. While our mission is noble and our business plan sound, COVID has brought about many worries and fears from investors. The inability to pitch to a live audience has hindered us from being able to appear in front of investors and has made raising capital a little more difficult than it normally is for a company like ours.

What is your funding status? How much have you raised thus far and are you looking to raise more?

To date, Alt-Bionics has raised a total of $142,000 from a handful of investors and has received a $50,000 investment from the city of San Antonio’s SAMMI fund. We are looking for an additional $58,000 from accredited investors to help fill out our seed round. From there our timeline of one year to market begins (though we have a hefty head start) and Alt-Bionics will push into its Series A, which will allow us to bring on additional engineers, develop the technology further and expand into international markets.

 Are developing markets going to be a key target? 

Developing countries will be a key market for Alt-Bionics, particularly through NGOs, and will play an important part in our international expansion. We see a large opportunity to provide our medical devices to these markets. Affordability is critical to our mission to provide access to these devices and therefore we believe we will be successful with this expansion.

And now back to your regularly scheduled roundup.

Image Credits: Berkshire Grey

I’ll cop to the fact that when Berkshire Grey announced a “$23+” million deal for grocery picking robots, I had one name in mind: Walmart. After talking a bit about Walmart’s mixed robotics play in this panel a couple of weeks back, I’d heard rumblings the company was getting set for a big new play in the category.

Granted, the Symbotic deal doesn’t necessarily mean BG isn’t teaming with Walmart on this one, but it’s worth noting that the mega-retailer loves talking about its big spending on automation. From the outside, looking in, at least, it seems like these deals are often as much about the PR of looking like it’s ready to compete with Amazon as they are about actually competing with Amazon (win-win, I guess).

Image Credits: Walmart

The deal will bring Symbotic’s tech to 25 additional Walmart distribution centers (the two have been running pilots since 2017) in a rollout that will take “several years,” per Walmart. I’ve speculated before (and will happily continue to do so) that one or several of these robotic fulfillment companies are a no-brainer acquisition for Walmart, though Symbotic is probably a bit tougher, given existing ties with competitors like Target.

Berkshire Grey, meanwhile, continues to go the public route. Revolution Acceleration Acquisition Corp. (RAAC) shareholders are set to vote on the SPAC deal on July 20. Newly soon to be acquired Fetch, meanwhile, announced a deal with supply chain logistics company Korber for a new pallet robot designed to replace forklifts.

Image Credits: Facebook AI

A pair of cool research projects this week. Devin wrote about a team from Facebook AI, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University that is exploring Rapid Motor Adaptation, a method that allows quadrupedal robots to adapt to uneven terrain on the fly. This quote from one of the Berkley researchers gets to the heart of the matter: “We do not learn about sand, we learn about feet sinking.”

Image Credits: MIT CSAIL

Meanwhile, I wrote about research at MIT’s CSAIL that involves using robotic arms to get people dressed. It’s a promising bit of functionality for eldercare robotics and technology that could assist people with mobility issues.

Every application is a palimpsest of technologies, each layer forming a base that enables the next layer to function. Web front ends rely on JavaScript and browser DOM, which rely on back-end APIs, which themselves rely on databases.

As one goes deeper down the stack, engineering decisions become ever more conservative — changing the location of a button in a web app is an inconvenience; changing a database engine can radically upend an entire project.

It’s little surprise then that database technologies are among the longest-lasting engineering projects in the modern software developer toolkit. MySQL, which remains one of the most popular database engines in the world, was first released in the mid-1990s, and Oracle Database, launched more than four decades ago, is still widely used in high-performance corporate environments.

Database technology can change the world, but the world in these parts changes very, very slowly. That’s made building a startup in the sector a tough equation: Sales cycles can be painfully slow, even when new features can dramatically expand a developer’s capabilities. Competition is stiff and comes from some of the largest and most entrenched tech companies in the world. Exits have also been few and far between.

That challenge — and opportunity — is what makes studying Cockroach Labs so interesting. The company behind CockroachDB attempts to solve a long-standing problem in large-scale, distributed database architecture: How to make it so that data created in one place on the planet is always available for consumption by applications that are thousands of miles away, immediately and accurately. Making global data always available immediately and accurately might sound like a simple use case, but in reality it’s quite the herculean task. Cockroach Labs’ story is one of an uphill struggle, but one that saw it turn into a next-generation, $2-billion-valued database contender.

The lead writer of this EC-1 is Bob Reselman. Reselman has been writing about the enterprise software market for more than two decades, with a particular emphasis on teaching and educating engineers on technology. The lead editor for this package was Danny Crichton, the assistant editor was Ram Iyer, the copy editor was Richard Dal Porto, figures were designed by Bob Reselman and stylized by Bryce Durbin, and illustrations were drawn by Nigel Sussman.

CockroachDB had no say in the content of this analysis and did not get advance access to it. Reselman has no financial ties to CockroachDB or other conflicts of interest to disclose.

The CockroachDB EC-1 comprises four main articles numbering 9,100 words and a reading time of 37 minutes. Here’s what we’ll be crawling over:

• Part 1: Origin story “CockroachDB, the database that just won’t die” (2,100 words/8 minutes) — Looks at the origins of CockroachDB, from the creation of the popular open-source image editor GIMP to some of Google’s most well-known infrastructure products.
• Part 2: Technical design “How engineers fought the CAP theorem in the global war on latency” (2,400 words/10 minutes) — Analyzes the key differentiation that CockroachDB offers the relational database market, particularly its focus on geography and data storage.
• Part 3: Developer relations and business “‘Developers, as you know, do not like to pay for things‘” (2,200 words/9 minutes) — Explores how CockroachDB engages with developers while also pivoting to the cloud at a key inflection point in its business.
• Part 4: Competitive landscape and future “Scaling CockroachDB in the red ocean of relational databases” (2,400 words/10 minutes) — Evaluates the future of the startup within the extremely competitive landscape of relational databases and what possible exit routes might look like.

We’re always iterating on the EC-1 format. If you have questions, comments or ideas, please send an email to TechCrunch Managing Editor Danny Crichton at danny@techcrunch.com.

There is an art to engineering, and sometimes engineering can transform art. For Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, those two worlds collided when they created the widely successful open-source graphics program, GIMP, as college students at Berkeley.

That project was so successful that when the two joined Google in 2002, Sergey Brin and Larry Page personally stopped by to tell the new hires how much they liked it and explained how they used the program to create the first Google logo.

In terms of good fortune in the corporate hierarchy, when you get this type of recognition in a company such as Google, there’s only one way you can go — up. They went from rising stars to stars at Google, becoming the go-to guys on the Infrastructure Team. They could easily have looked forward to a lifetime of lucrative employment.

But Kimball, Mattis and another Google employee, Ben Darnell, wanted more — a company of their own. To realize their ambitions, they created Cockroach Labs, the business entity behind their ambitious open-source database CockroachDB. Can some of the smartest former engineers in Google’s arsenal upend the world of databases in a market spotted with the gravesites of storage dreams past? That’s what we are here to find out.

Berkeley software distribution

Mattis and Kimball were roommates at Berkeley majoring in computer science in the early-to-mid-1990s. In addition to their usual studies, they also became involved with the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF), an organization of undergraduates who have a keen, almost obsessive interest in CS.

CockroachDB was intended to be a global database from the beginning. The founders of Cockroach Labs wanted to ensure that data written in one location would be viewable immediately in another location 10,000 miles away. The use case was simple, but the work needed to make it happen was herculean.

The company is betting the farm that it can solve one of the largest challenges for web-scale applications. The approach it’s taking is clever, but it’s a bit complicated, particularly for the non-technical reader. Given its history and engineering talent, the company is in the process of pulling it off and making a big impact on the database market, making it a technology well worth understanding. In short, there’s value in digging into the details.

In part 1 of this EC-1, I provided a general overview and a look at the origins of Cockroach Labs. In this installment, I’m going to cover the technical details of the technology with an eye to the non-technical reader. I’m going to describe the CockroachDB technology through three questions:

1. What makes reading and writing data over a global geography so hard?
2. How does CockroachDB address the problem?
3. What does it all mean for those using CockroachDB?

What makes reading and writing data over a global geography so hard?

Spencer Kimball, CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, describes the situation this way:

There’s lots of other stuff you need to consider when building global applications, particularly around data management. Take, for example, the question and answer website Quora. Let’s say you live in Australia. You have an account and you store the particulars of your Quora user identity on a database partition in Australia.

But when you post a question, you actually don’t want that data to just be posted in Australia. You want that data to be posted everywhere so that all the answers to all the questions are the same for everybody, anywhere. You don’t want to have a situation where you answer a question in Sydney and then you can see it in Hong Kong, but you can’t see it in the EU. When that’s the case, you end up getting different answers depending where you are. That’s a huge problem.

Reading and writing data over a global geography is challenging for pretty much the same reason that it’s faster to get a pizza delivered from across the street than from across the city. The essential constraints of time and space apply. Whether it’s digital data or a pepperoni pizza, the further away you are from the source, the longer stuff takes to get to you.

The company behind ubiquitous livestreaming software Streamlabs is introducing a new way for streamers to share their gaming highlights to platforms well beyond Twitch. Streamlabs calls the new tool Crossclip, and it’s available now as an iOS app and as a lightweight web tool.

With Crossclip, creators can easily convert Twitch clips into a format friendly to TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook videos. Adapting a snippet from Twitch that you’d like to share is as simple as putting in the clip’s URL and choosing an output format (landscape, vertical or square) and a pre-loaded layout.

You can crop the clip’s length within Crossclip, blur part of the background and choose from a handful of layouts that let you place the frames in different places (to show the camera view and the livestream view together in vertical orientation, for example).

Crossclip’s core functionality is free, but a premium subscription version ($4.99/month or $49.99/year) removes a branded watermark and unlocks exports in 1080/60fps, larger uploads, added layers and pushes your edits to the front of the processing queue.

Discovery on Twitch is tough. Established streamers grow their audiences easily but anybody just getting started usually has to slog through long stretches of lonely Stardew Valley sessions with only the occasional viewer popping in to say hi. The idea behind Crossclip is to make it easier for streamers to build audiences on other social networks that have better discoverability features, subcommunities and tags to make that process less grueling.

Streamlabs, now owned by Logitech, has released a few useful products in recent months. In February, the company launched Willow, its own link-in-bio tool with built-in tipping. In May, Streamlabs deepened its relationship with TikTok — an emerging hub for all kinds of gaming content — adding the ability to “go live” on TikTok into its core livestreaming platform, Streamlabs OBS.