The Arlo line was something of a surprise hit for Netgear, causing the networking company to spin it off into its own business earlier this year. The Arlo ecosystem is one of the most robust in the smart security camera space, and now it’s getting something it had never had before: 4K.
The new Arlo Ultra shoots in ultra high definition, with HDR image processing. At $400, it seems like — and likely is — overkill for most users. Do you need a 4K security camera? Almost certainly not. But there are some instances when getting the extra granular detail ultra high def affords could come in handy.
That price also gets you a free one-year subscription to Arlo’s Smart Premier service (worth $120), along with the Arlo SmartHub for connecting to home Wifi.
Beyond that, the Ultra also sports a 180-degree field of view and a built-in LED spotlight to get a better shot of dark views that night vision car offer. There are dual-mics on board as well, for two-way communications with active noise cancelation built in for clearer conversations.
The company offered a few more details about this new service during the presentation, noting that it will have three tiers of service.
The entry-level package will be focused on movies, followed by a premium service with original programming and “blockbuster movies.” The third service will include content from the first two tiers, then add an “extensive library of WarnerMedia and licensed content,” including classics, kids & family programing, comedy, and other theatrical releases and niche content.
The service will launch into beta in Q4 2019, AT&T said, and will complement WarnerMedia’s existing business. It will also work across devices, and will expand over time to include third-party content through partnerships.
As for selling its stake in Hulu, the company is “looking for opportunities to monetize assets” that are not essential to its current strategies, explained AT&T CFO John Stephens. He said the company was looking at its “minority investments in things like Sky México or Hulu or a variety of other things.”
The mention of the Hulu sale was a part of a larger discussion about paying down $18 billion of AT&T’s $20 billion in debt by the end of next year, which involved raising up $8 billion in cash by the sale of some assets. The Hulu stake could be worth up to $930 million, Variety notes.
Also of note was the company’s not-so-vague threat that WarnerMedia would not be renewing its licensing deals with rival streaming services when their rights expire.
Asked how the new direct-to-consumer effort will be able to compete with incumbents, WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey responded that over the next 18 to 24 months, “we’re going to see a pretty substantial structural shift that’s going to occur…some of the incumbents in that are in that space today should expect that their libraries are going to get a lot thinner,” he said.
“75 to 80 percent of their total viewing tonnage is sitting on a lot of that licensed content. So their pressure is they’ve got to make this pivot over the next 18 to 24 months to get people off of viewing the licensed content that maybe sits in our library or sits in a Disney/Fox library, and get it onto their own,” Stankey added.
The company believes that, over time, it will be able to bring in enough new subscribers to its streaming offers to offset the declines related to cord cutting, which is impacting its satellite TV company DirectTV. In Q3 2019, the company lost 359,000 net DirecTV subscribers as more consumers dropped pay TV in favor of streaming services, like Netflix.
Toyota introduced T-HR3 to the world right around this time last year. The humanoid robot is capable of mimicking to the motions of a plugged-in human, a la Pacific Rim and countless other sci-fi franchises. The ‘bot’s learned a few new tricks in the intervening years, including, notably, untethered control via 5G.
Using the next-gen wireless tech, a plot is able to remotely control the robot from a distance of up to 10 kilometers (~6 miles). Toyota notes in a press release tied to the news that, in spite of earlier images, demos have been performed with a tethered robot. Using 5G tech from Japanese carrier Docomo, however, the robot can be controlled from a distance with low latency.
As for what such a robot might actual be good for (beyond knocking the snot out of pint-sized kaiju), Toyota sees potential in homes and healthcare, with an eye on “a prosperous society of mobility.”
At the very least, it’s a nice little bit of press for the promise of 5G connectivity, which networking companies aim to frame as being a relevant technology well beyond just smartphones and computers. The tech will be demoed at a Docomo event in Tokyo early next year.
At the very beginning, there were 13 startups. After two days of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner.
Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $50,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup.
And now, meet the Startup Battlefield winner of TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2018.
Winner: Legacy
Legacy is tackling an interesting problem: the reduction of sperm motility as we age. By freezing men’s sperm, this Swiss-based company promises to keep our boys safe and potent as we get older, a consideration that many find vital as we marry and have kids later.
Imago AI is applying AI to help feed the world’s growing population by increasing crop yields and reducing food waste. To accomplish this, it’s using computer vision and machine learning technology to fully automate the laborious task of measuring crop output and quality.
Black Friday wasn’t just a boon for e-commerce retailers, it helped the mobile app stores break new records, too. According to a new report from Sensor Tower, the combined consumer spending across the U.S. Apple App Store and Google Play on Black Friday 2018 reached $75.9 million – a record for the most ever spent in a single day on both stores.
The App Store accounted for most of that figure, however, with U.S. consumers spending a record $52 million on Black Friday. That’s a 31.6 percent increase in spending over last year’s shopping event, when consumers then spent $39.5 million.
It’s also notably higher than Christmas 2017, when spending reached $39.8 million – typically a strong day for app purchases and in-app sales, as consumers unwrap new iPhones.
The App Store’s $52 million was more than double the $23.9 million spent on Google Play during the same time.
Sensor Tower attributes the increased spending to a variety of factors, largely driven by mobile gaming. Game makers this year got in on the Black Friday action by offering players discounts on in-app purchases and other special bundles.
On the U.S. App Store, mobile gaming accounted for 68 percent of Black Friday spending, with consumers spending $35.4 million on games. That’s a 63 percent increase from the week prior, the report notes.
Other categories saw a boost, too, including Food & Drink and Sports – both reflective of the leisure time consumers had over the holidays. Food & Drink grew 34 percent while Sports grew 49 percent, Sensor Tower found, with top apps like NYT Cooking and ESPN: Live Sports and Scores benefitting from the surge.
Though the Black Friday shopping holiday is heavily associated with the U.S. because of its ties to Thanksgiving, the sales event is making its way around the world, too.
On the mobile app stores, that meant worldwide consumer spending saw a jump this year, as well.
The firm found that $117.3 million was spent by App Store users outside the United States on Black Friday, bringing the global total to $169.3 million, up 18.4 percent from 2017. The spending outside the U.S. was up 13.9 percent year-over-year, but that’s lower than the U.S.’s year-over-year growth of 31.6 percent between Black Friday 2017 and Black Friday 2018.
Also of note: while Amazon had its biggest day ever on Cyber Monday 2018, Cyber Monday didn’t perform as well on the app stores. In the U.S., app revenue was up about 20 percent versus the previous Cyber Monday to reach an estimated $37 million.
Amazon has “failed to provide sufficient answers” about its controversial facial recognition software, Rekognition — and lawmakers won’t take the company’s usual silent treatment for an answer.
The letter, signed by eight lawmakers — including Sen. Edward Markey and Reps. John Lewis and Judy Chu — called on Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos to explain how the company’s technology works — and where it will be used.
It comes after the cloud and retail giant secured several high-profile contracts with the U.S. government and at least one major metropolitan city — including Orlando, Florida — for surveillance.
The lawmakers said that they expressed a “heightened concern given recent reports that Amazon is actively marketing its biometric technology to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as other reports of pilot programs lacking any hands-on training from Amazon for participating law enforcement officers.”
They also said that the system suffers from accuracy issues — which could lead to racial bias, and could harm citizens’ constitutional rights to free expression.
“However, at this time, we have serious concerns that this type of product has significant accuracy issues, places disproportionate burdens on communities of color, and could stifle Americans’ willingness to exercise their First Amendment rights in public,” the letter said.
The lawmakers want Amazon to explain how Amazon tests for accuracy and if those tests have been independently verified — and how the company tests for bias.
Instead of plugging their ears, Amazon needs to take responsibility for the grave threat that face surveillance poses to everyone, and especially to people of color, immigrants, and activists.
It comes after the ACLU found that the software failed to facially recognize 28 members of Congress, with a higher failure rate towards people of color.
The facial recognition software has been controversial from the start. Even after concerns from its own employees, Amazon said it would push ahead and sell the technology regardless.
Amazon has a little over two weeks to respond to the lawmakers. A spokesperson for Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
UK entrepreneur turned billionaire investor, Mike Lynch, has been charged with fraud in US over the 2011 sale of his enterprise software company.
Lynch sold Autonomy, the big data company he founded back in 1996, to computer giant HP for around $11BN some seven years ago.
But within a year around three-quarters of the value of the business had been written off, with HP accusing Autonomy’s management of accounting misrepresentations and disclosure failures.
Lynch has always rejected the allegations, and after HP sought to sue him in UK courts he countersued in 2015.
Meanwhile the UK’s own Serious Fraud Office dropped an investigation into the Autonomy sale in 2015 — finding “insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction”.
But now the DoJ has filed charges in a San Francisco court, accusing Lynch and other senior Autonomy executives of making false statement that inflated the value of the company.
They face 14 counts of conspiracy and fraud, according to Reuters — a charge which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
We’ve reached out to Lynch’s fund, Invoke Capital, for comment on the latest development.
The BBC has obtained a statement from his lawyers, Chris Morvillo of Clifford Chance and Reid Weingarten of Steptoe & Johnson, which describes the indictment as “a travesty of justice”.
The statement also claims Lynch is being made a scapegoat for HP’s failures, framing the allegations as a business dispute over the application of UK accounting standards.
Two years ago we interviewed Lynch on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt London and he mocked the morass of allegations still swirling around the acquisition as “spin and bullshit”.
Following the latest developments, the BBC reports that Lynch has stepped down as a scientific adviser to the UK government.
“Dr. Lynch has decided to resign his membership of the CST [Council for Science and Technology] with immediate effect. We appreciate the valuable contribution he has made to the CST in recent years,” a government spokesperson told it.
Until recently, humans have relied on the trained eyes of doctors to diagnose diseases from medical images.
Beijing-based Infervision is among a handful of artificial intelligence startups around the world racing to improve medical imaging analysis through deep learning, the same technology that powers face recognition and autonomous driving.
The startup, which has to date raised $70 million from leading investors like Sequoia Capital China, began by picking out cancerous lung cells, a prevalent cause of death in China. At the Radiological Society of North America’s annual conference in Chicago this week, the three-year-old company announced extending its computer vision prowess to other chest-related conditions like cardiac calcification.
“By adding more scenarios under which our AI works, we are able to offer more help to doctors,” Chen Kuan, founder and chief executive officer of Infervision, told TechCrunch. While a doctor can spot dozens of diseases from one single image scan, AI needs to be taught how to identify multiple target objects in one go.
But Chen says machines already outstrip humans in other aspects. For one, they are much faster readers. It normally takes doctors 15 to 20 minutes to scrutinize one image, whereas Infervision’s AI can process the visuals and put together a report under 30 seconds.
AI also addresses the long-standing issue of misdiagnosis. Chinese clinical newspaper Medical Weekly reported that doctors with less than five years’ experience only got their answers right 44 percent of the time when diagnosing black lungs, a disease common among coal miners. A research from Zhejiang University that examined autopsies between 1950 to 2009 found that the total clinical misdiagnosis rate averaged 46 percent.
“Doctors work long hours and are constantly under tremendous stress, which can lead to errors,” suggested Chen.
The founder claimed that his company is able to improve the accuracy rate by 20 percent. AI can also fill in for doctors in remote hinterlands where healthcare provision falls short, which is often the case in China.
Winning the first client
A report on bone fractures produced by Infervision’s medical imaging tool
Like any deep learning company, Infervision needs to keep training its algorithms with data from varied sources. As of this week, the startup is working with 280 hospitals – among which twenty are outside of China – and steadily adding a dozen new partners weekly. It also claims that 70 percent of China’s top-tier hospitals use its lung-specific AI tool.
But the firm has had a rough start.
Chen, a native of Shenzhen in south China, founded Infervision after dropping out of his doctoral program at the University of Chicago where he studied under Nobel-winning economist James Heckman. For the first six months of his entrepreneurial journey, Chen knocked on the doors of 40 hospitals across China — to no avail.
“Medical AI was still a novelty then. Hospitals are by nature conservative because they have to protect patients, which make them reluctant to partner with outsiders,” Chen recalled.
Eventually, Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital gave Infervision a shot. Chen with his two founding members got hold of a small batch of image data, moved into a tiny apartment next to the hospital, and got the company underway.
“We observed how doctors work, explained to them how AI works, listened to their complaints, and iterated our product,” said Chen. Infervision’s product proved adept, and its name soon gathered steam among more healthcare professionals.
“Hospitals are risk-averse, but as soon as one of them likes us, it goes out to spread the word and other hospitals will soon find us. The medical industry is very tight-knit,” the founder said.
It also helps that AI has evolved from a fringe invention to a norm in healthcare over the past few years, and hospitals start actively seeking help from tech startups.
Infervision has stumbled in its foreign markets as well. In the US, for example, Infervision is restricted to visiting doctors only upon appointments, which slows down product iteration.
Chen also admitted that many western hospitals did not trust that a Chinese startup could provide state-of-the-art technology. But they welcomed Infervision in as soon as they found out what it’s able to achieve, which is in part thanks to its data treasure — up to 26,000 images a day.
“Regardless of their technological capability, Chinese startups are blessed with access to mountains of data that no startups elsewhere in the world could match. That’s an immediate advantage,” said Chen.
There’s no lack of rivalry in China’s massive medical industry. Yitu, a pivotal player that also applies its AI to surveillance and fintech, unveiled a cancer detection tool at the Chicago radiological conference this week.
Infervision, which generates revenues by charging fees for its AI solution as a service, says that down the road, it will prioritize product development for conditions that incur higher social costs, such as cerebrovascular and cardiovascular diseases.
Longtime Accel partners Philippe Botteri, Sonali De Rycker, Luciana Lixandru, and Harry Nelis took the stage at Disrupt Berlin earlier today, and unlike many London-based investors, who have downplayed how much Brexit could hurt their local economy, the team was frank about their sundry concerns over what happens if the U.K. leaves the European Union as is currently scheduled to happen, beginning March 29, 2019.
Though they reiterated that no one can know for certain what Brexit’s impact might be, Botteri raised a handful of things that have the firm worried, beginning with “immigration and hiring talent and the movement of talent,” which could be meaningfully hampered by Brexit. “Even companies that don’t move their headquarters to London will often at some point begin to build a team,” he noted, questioning whether that will continue to happen.
There’s also the nontrivial issue of what happens to fintech companies, which have been thriving in London as a gateway between the U.S. and Europe and that have easily operated across all of Europe. Asked Botteri, “What about that?” post Brexit.
Others of the teams’ concerns center on data resiliency and subsidies. Regarding the first, Botteri noted that “more and more” of Accel’s portfolio companies are “dependent on the use and leverage of data, and obviously,” he continued, “where the data is stored is very critical. You have laws in the EU. If the U.K. is out [that bloc], then does it mean that every company will need to have a separate data center in the U.K. or manage data differently?” As for subsidies, Botteri observed that U.K. startups have received meaningful R&D support from the European Union, and well as the U.K., and wondered aloud how a split will impact startups.
Botteri then offered on a personal note that, “It’s not just startups. I’m not a U.K. citizen. I’d love to know at some point what’s going to happen to my visa,” he said with an uncomfortable laugh.
The partners didn’t talk about Brexit alone. Instead, among other topics covered in the discussion were the downstream effects of having a player like SoftBank’s Vision Fund in the market, and whether the secondary market is picking up in Europe as many regional companies — like their U.S. counterparts — linger ever longer as privately held companies.
Of SoftBank and the $100 billion that it’s currently plugging into startups around the world, Nelis initially answered generally, saying that it’s a “great trend for there to be more money for the European ecosystem. More money means more opportunities for great companies to be funded.”
He later added that he does think SoftBank’s appearance on the investing scene “changes the dynamic in the market. SoftBank is later-stage oriented and competing with other later-stage funds, so [what’s happening] is these [later-stage] funds are [trying to reach startups] a little bit earlier. So there’s this chain effect, where everyone needs to go earlier [stage] in order to accommodate this big amount of money.”
In part, she suggested, founders don’t have the time to give it as much thought as they perhaps should.
“The world right now is in such a race, it’s moving so fast . . . that I fear to say that for some of these questions, it matters at the core expense of some of these questions around where is the money coming from and what it means for your direction and who you are accountable to.” If a startup can “go forward without asking too many questions right now, why wouldn’t you, especially if you can get a lot of capital at a very high price?”
Before the foursome exited the stage, the partners touched on the secondary market, saying that though there is one, it’s not quite as evolved as in the U.S., where secondaries have become a routine way for venture capitalist to exit all or part of their investments.
“Primarily in Europe,” said Nelis, “secondaries are used to provide liquidity to founders. We’re very long term investors, where we’re involved eight, nine, ten years with our companies” and where Accel’s “main objective is to build big, valuable businesses, and to exit these companies when the founders do.”
If founders take a “little bit of money off the table” so they can “go and build a big company, rather than sell it halfway through the process,” he added, “that’s a good thing.”
Asked how soon is too soon to do that, the firm declined to comment directly. Instead, Botteri said that it hasn’t noticed any changes on this front over the last five years.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week as TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin came to life, Kate Clark and I snagged some mics and dug through the biggest news of the week (a $50 million check), and talked through who may go public next year, and what those IPOs might look like.
Our usual fare, if you will. (If you are missing Danny and Connie, fear not, they will be back next week.)
This week we hit two news items and one roundup. Here’s the skinny:
Asana raises $50 million. Yep, Asana went back to the funding well this week for its Series E, despite having raised a $75 million Series D earlier this year. The company’s funding pace might seem aggressive, but we’re hearing that many startups are looking to tack on extra cash. Why? Because the market might change, and so the savvy are stacking chips in case the cashier closes. Oh, and the company dropped a number of relative growth metrics that were, I have to say, impressive.
Airbnb gets a new CFO. After its old CFO took off, Airbnb’s eventual IPO was on hold. You can’t go public without a CFO. But now it has one! And that means that the company can eventually sell shares on a public exchange, whenever it deigns to sell equity to the hoi polloi. But put your checkbook down, as it’s far from clear precisely when Airbnb will pull the trigger and give us an S-1.
Speaking of which, let’s talk decacorn IPOs. Not my best segue, but it’ll do. There are a number of private tech companies worth $10 billion or more (10x unicorns, or, ahem, decacorns) that will probably try to go public next year. You can read about it here, but the gist is that Uber, Lyft, Pinterest and Airbnb need to go public, and there’s reason to believe that they are going to do it next year.
All that and we managed to mispronounce “EBITDA” a few times.
That’s Equity for this week. Have a listen and we’ll be back in just seven days!
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
