Author: azeeadmin

3D Hubs, like MakeXYZ, was a community-based 3D printing service that let anyone with a printer sell their prints online. Founded in the heyday of the 3D printing revolution, the service let thousands of makers gather a little cash for making and mailing prints on their home 3D printers.

Now, however, the company has moved to a model in which its high-end partners will be manufacturing plastic, metal, and injection molded parts for customers willing to pay extra for a professional print.

“Indeed, more focus on high end printers run by professional companies,” said founder Brian Garret. “So a smaller pool of manufacturing locations (still hundreds around the world), but with more control on standardized quality and repeatability. Our software takes care of the sourcing, so companies order with 3D Hubs directly.”

Not everyone is happy with the decision. 3DPrint.come editor Joris Peels saw the value in a solid, dedicated community of hobbyists in the 3D space. The decision to move away from hobbyist printers, wrote Peels, “has confused many.”

“The value of 3DHubs is in its community; the community gives it granular local presence and a barrier to entry. Now it is just like any 3D printing service upstart and will lose its community entirely. I’ve always liked 3DHubs, although I have been very skeptical of their Trends Report I like the company and what they’re doing. I liked the idealism coupled with business,” he wrote.

The community, for its part, is angry.

The move will happen on October 1 when all prints will be completed by Fulfilled by 3D Hubs partners, dedicated merchants who will offer “source parts for larger, high value engineering projects.” The company wrote that during the early hobbyist days the “platform at that time was very much free-form, with the goal of serving as many, mostly one-off, custom maker projects as possible.”

This slow movement from hobbyist 3D printing to professional parts manufacturer is not surprising or unexpected, but it is jarring. The 3D printing community is small, vociferous, and dedicated to the technology. In the early days, when 3D printers were rare, it was tempting to buy a mid-price printer and become a small, one-person shop online. Now, with the availability of commodity printers that cost less than some paper printers, the novelty and utility of a low-resolution print has fallen considerably.

3D printing never fulfilled its promise in the home and small office. A one-off print can save some of us a trip to the machine shop or music store but in practice home 3D printing has been a bust.

Like most open source technologies that went commercial, the dedicated zealots will complain and the established players will pivot into profitability. It ruffles feathers, to be sure, but that’s how these things work. To paraphrase the White Stripes, “Well, you’re in your little room and you’re printing something good/ But if it’s really good, you’re gonna need a bigger room/ And when you’re in the bigger room, you might not know what to do/ You might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room.”

CBS All Access, the network’s over-the-top streaming service for cord cutters, will now let subscribers save shows for offline viewing. The feature, “Download & Play,” is only available to those on CBS’s Commercial Free plan, not those on the cheaper, ad-supported tier. It also supports a range of programming, including CBS All Access Originals, reality shows, primetime dramas, news magazines, and other classics from the CBS library.

At launch, the lineup of supported shows includes originals like Star Trek: Discovery, The Good Fight, One Dollar, Strange Angel, and No Activity, plus Big Brother, Survivor, Blue Bloods, Bull, Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver, NCIS: New Orleans, 60 Minutes, and 48 Hours. All classics will also be available for offline access, meaning you can download old Star Trek episodes, Cheers, Twin Peaks and many others.

Content from local stations, local news and sports will not be available for offline viewing.

There are a few caveats in using the download feature. The content is only available offline for 30 days after the download, or 48 hours from the time of playback. If it expires, you’ll then have to download it again.

Downloads are also only available in the U.S. for the time being, CBS says.

However, users are able to download up to 25 videos at once, and can watch videos on up to 5 different devices.

The feature is going live on both iOS and Android, on version 6.0 of the CBS All Access app and higher.

The company considers this a “premium” option, which is why it’s only making it available to Commercial Free subscribers, it says.

In reality, though, CBS may need more time to make ad attribution work on offline content – something that’s still fairly new.

Hulu, for example, only recently announced it would allow offline viewing, including the download of commercials for those on its ad-supported plan. It then became the first in the industry to support downloads with ads, it said during its Upfronts presentation in May.

CBS may choose to invest in similar technology in the future, but for now, it’s easier to just roll out offline support to those who pay more to skip the commercials.

Other major streamers have allowed for downloads for years, it’s worth noting. Netflix added support on mobile back in 2016, following Amazon Prime Video’s launch of offline support the year prior.

The addition of offline support for CBS All Access means you’ll be able to watch shows when you’re out of reach of a network or good signal – like when traveling, commuting, or on a plane, for example. (Maybe I’ll finally finish this new, not so great Star Trek). Or you can use the option to save money on your data plan.

But the feature will matter even more as CBS expands its originals catalog, which will include new shows like a reboot of The Twilight Zone from Get Out director, Jordan Peele; Scream writer and producer Kevin Williamson’s twisted fairytale series Tell Me a Story; and a new Star Trek series led by Patrick Stewart, among others.

Drivers of new Mercedes-Benz A-Class vehicles will soon be able to talk to their cars. And the cars will respond. Ask the car to turn on the heads-up display or for sports scores. Say you’re hungry and it will suggest restaurants. The new in-vehicle assistant utilizes local and cloud data to provide drivers plenty to talk about.

The service was built by a 13-year old startup ran out of Santa Clara, CA called SoundHound . Originally, the company launched as a Shazam-like service but kept evolving into a robust conversational artificial intelligence service. Different versions of SoundHound’s service are available on a number of platforms including iOS, Android and in several vehicles made by Kia and Hyundai.

Mercedes’ version of SoundHound’s service is two parts. Some of the requests, mostly about the vehicle’s systems, are processed locally. If a driver asks about sports scores or stock prices or a gas station location, the service reaches out to a cloud service to retrieve the latest information. The service is location-aware, too, allowing the driver to ask about nearby restaurants without specifying a city to search within.

The voice assistant is part of Mercedes-Benz’s new MBUX user interface. The car company says its highly personalized and configurable and adapts to the user over time.

In May of 2018 Mercedes-Benz joined four other investors including Tencent and Hyundai Motors in a $100m corporate round. The company has raised $215m to date through six rounds of funding since 2005.

This voice service comes a week after BMW announced its custom-built in-vehicle voice assistant. As voice assistant gain household penetration, more automakers are looking to cash in on consumer’s acceptance of technology. The trick is finding a balance between utility and novelty. Car companies cannot simply turn to Amazon and build-in Alexa; Alexa is not meant for in-car users. Rather, car companies must use off-the-shelf systems like from SoundHound or Clinc or build their own service to best suit their users.

The DelFly is a super light, super agile robot that flies like a real insect. By using a quad-wing flapping system, this odd little bot can flit, hover, and land like a fruit fly.

Part of a research project at the Delft University of Technology, this is the latest version of the DelFly and it can now perform high speed maneuvers including rapid turns.

From the release:

The so far unmatched combination of performances makes the lightweight (and thus inherently safe) natural-looking robot ready for many real-world tasks. At the same time, the high agility, combined with the programmability of the robot, opens up a new way of studying insect flight dynamics and control during high agility maneuvers, such as rapid banked turns observed in fruit-flies when evading predators.

The robot flies by rolling in the air and it has four wings to control three axes of flight. It flies left and right by changing the way each wing flaps.

The researchers, Matěj Karásek, Florian T. Muijres, Christophe De Wagter, Bart D.W. Remes, and Guido C.H.E. de Croon, wrote about the DelFly in an article for Science called “A tailless aerial robotic flapper reveals that flies use torque coupling in rapid banked turns.”

Netflix on Thursday announced a new program aimed at helping Netflix Originals artists and producers select the right tools for delivering their content to its streaming service. With the launch of the Netflix Post Technology Alliance, as the program is called, Netflix will now identify products from vendors that meet technical and delivery specifications today, and will continue to support any specifications that Netflix rolls out in the future.

The program’s focus is on certifying vendors’ products across categories, including cameras, creative editorial, color grading, and IMF packaging.

Some vendors whose products have already received certification include  Adobe, Arri, Avid, Blackmagic Design, Canon, Colorfront, Fraunhofer IIS, Filmlight, Marquise Technologies, MTI Film, Ownzones, Panasonic, Red Digital Cinema, Rohde & Schwarz, and Sony.

These products will be allowed to sport the Netflix Post Technology Alliance logo, to alert artists of their certification status.

“Manufacturers of products bearing this logo are closely partnered with Netflix,” the company explained via  a post on its tech blog. “They have early access to the Netflix technical roadmap and collaborate with Netflix on technical support, training, and updates. As Netflix technical requirements evolve, you can be assured products bearing this logo will evolve in step with us.”

The program doesn’t extend to every type of tool used in production, however. For example, it won’t include lenses.

But many other of the other tools that are used will join the program in time, as new products submit themselves for inclusion.

Netflix explains its goal here is not to dictate to artists what tools have to be used – they should use whatever best makes sense for their efforts, it says. Instead, it’s about being able to quickly identify those tools that have been vetted for delivery to Netflix, as well as being able to identify companies who plan to continue to work with the streamer’s evolving tech on an ongoing basis.

Flagging products like this could help smaller producers just getting started, and that, in turn, could help feed more content into the streaming service over time, as their works won’t get rejected for quality issues.

The program joins others Netflix already runs, including a Post Partner Program, which collaborates with post-production partners worldwide, and the Prefered Fulfillment Partner program, which represents a global network of media fulfillment companies.

 

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

After a long run of having guests climb aboard each week, we took a pause on that front, bringing together three of our regular hosts instead: Connie Loizos, Danny Chrichton, and myself.

Despite the fact that there were just three of us instead of the usual four, we got through a mountain of stuff. Which was good as it was a surprisingly busy week, and we didn’t want to leave too much behind.

Up top we dug into the latest in the land of crypto, which Danny had politely summarized for us in an article. The gist of his argument is that the analogies relating crypto as an industry to the Internet may work, but most people have their timelines wrong: Crypto isn’t like the Internet in the 90s, perhaps. More like the 80s.

On the same topic, crypto companies formed a team lobbying effort, and a high-flying crypto fund is struggling to once again post strong profit figures.

Moving along, Juul is back in the news. Not, however, for raising more money or posting quick growth. Well, sort of the latter, as the government is after it. The Food and Drug Administration has put Juul on a countdown to get its act together regarding teens and smoking. That the financially-impressive unicorn is in as much trouble as it is nearly surprising.

Finally, we ran through the three most recent Chinese IPOs that hit our radar. Here they are:

• Meituan Dianping: The Tencent-backed group buying, delivery, and everything company raised over $4 billion in its debut, which was impressive, but also short of expectations. The firm won’t begin trading until the 20th, but it’s one more massive deal that got done in 2018.
• 111: We spent a minute on the show discussing what counts as a technology company thanks to 111. We voted that the Chinese online-to-offline pharmacy startup did in fact count. So, it’s in our list. Some notes on its debut can be found here.
• NIO: Finally on our list was NIO, a Chinese electric car company with, as we have discussed on Equity before, a shockingly short history of revenue generation. Whether the company is a gamble or not, it did raise $1 billion in its own offering. And its stock is off like a rocket to boot.

And that was the end of things. Thanks for sticking with us, as always. Speaking of which, our 100th episode is coming up. Who should we bring onto the show to celebrate?

Remember 3D Touch? Unless you’re a power iOS user you probably don’t. Or, well, you’d rather not. It’s been clear for some time now that the technology Apple lauded at its 2015 unveiling as the “next generation of multi-touch” most certainly wasn’t. For the mainstream iPhone user it’s just that annoying thing that gets in the way of what you’re actually trying to do.

What Apple actually made with 3D Touch is the keyboard shortcut of multi-touch. Aka a secret weapon for nerds only.

Pro geeks might be endlessly delighted about being able to learn the secrets of its hidden depths, and shave all-important microseconds off of their highly nuanced workflows. But everyone else ignores it.

Or at least tries to ignore it — until, in the middle of trying to do something important they accidentally trigger it and get confused and annoyed about what their phone is trying to do to them.

Tech veterans might recall that BlackBerry (remember them?!) tried something similarly misplaced a decade ago on one of its handsets — unboxing an unlovely (and unloved) clickable touchscreen, in the one-off weirdo BlackBerry Storm.

The Storm didn’t have the iconic physical BlackBerry keyboard but did have a touchscreen with on-screen qwerty keys you could still click. In short, madness!

Safe to say, no usage storms resulted then either — unless you’re talking about the storm of BlackBerry buyers returning to the shop demanding a replacement handset.

In Apple’s case, the misstep is hardly on that level. But three years on from unveiling 3D Touch, it’s now ‘fessing up to its own feature failure — as the latest iPhone line-up drops the pressure-sensing technology entirely from the cheapest of the trio: The iPhone XR.

The lack of 3D Touch on the XR will help shave off some manufacturing cost and maybe a little thickness from the device. Mostly though it shows Apple recognizing it expended a lot of engineering effort to make something most iPhone users don’t use and don’t want to use — given, as TC’s Brian Heater has called it, the iPhone XR is the iPhone for the rest of us.

It isn’t a budget handset, though. The XR does pack Apple’s next-gen biometric technology, Face ID, for instance, so contains a package of sophisticated sensor hardware lodged in its own top notch.

That shows Apple is not cheaping out here. Rather it’s making selective feature decisions based on what it believes iPhone users want and need. So the clear calculation in Cupertino is lots of iPhone users simply don’t need 3D Touch.

At the same time, company execs heaped praise on Face ID at its event this week, saying the technology has proved wildly popular with users. Yet they glossed over the simultaneous depreciation of 3D Touch at the end of the iPhone line without a word of explanation.

Compare the two technologies and it’s easy to see why.

Face ID’s popularity is hardly surprising. It’s hard to think of a simpler interaction than a look that unlocks.

Not so fiddly 3D Touch — which requires a press that’s more than a tap and kind of akin to a push or a little shove. Push too softly and you’ll get a tap which takes you somewhere you weren’t trying to go. But go in too hard from the start and the touchscreen starts to feel like work and/or wasted effort.

On top of that the sought for utility can itself feel pointless — with, for example, content previews that can be horribly slow to load, so why not just tap and look at the email in the first place?

With all the fingering and faffing around 3D Touch is like the Goldilocks of user interfaces: Frustration is all but guaranteed unless you have an awful lot of patience to keep going and going until you get it just right. And who, but power users, can be bothered with that?

For the ‘everyman’ iPhone XR, Apple has swapped 3D Touch for a haptic feedback feature (forgettably named Haptic Touch) — that’s presumably mostly intended to be a sticking plaster to smooth out any fragmentation cracks across the iPhone estate, i.e. in the rare instances where developers have made use of 3D Touch to create in-app shortcuts that people do actually want to use.

If, as we’ve suggested, the iPhone XR ends up being the iPhone that ships in serious quantities there will soon be millions of iOS users without access to 3D Touch at all. So Apple is relegating the technology it once called the future of multi-touch to what it really was: An add-on power feature for pro users.

Pro users are also the people most likely to be willing to spend the biggest bucks on an iPhone — and so will happily shell out to own the iPhone XS or XS Max (which do retain 3D Touch, at least for now).

So while 3D Touch might keep incrementally helping to shift a few extra premium iPhones at the top of the range, it isn’t going to be shifting any paradigms.

Multitouch — combined with generous screen real estate — has been more than good enough on that front.

In the realm of rapidly evolving technologies, mobility is without doubt one of the fastest-moving. And that’s why we’re searching for up to five of the most promising early-stage mobile tech startups to apply as a TechCrunch Top Pick at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on 29-30 November.

Whether you’re focused on drones, autonomous vehicles, sensors, apps, security or some other mobile magic, you’re on the forefront of a revolution, and we want to hear about it. What’s more, if TechCrunch editors (a very picky bunch if ever there was one) choose your startup as a TC Top Pick, you’ll get to exhibit for free in Startup Alley — to thousands of influential technologists, investors and potential collaborators and customers. The deadline to be considered is 28 September, so don’t wait — apply to be a TC Top Pick today.

What’s so great about exhibiting in Startup Alley? It’s the land of opportunity. Here’s what Luke Heron, CEO of TestCard.com — an at-home urine test company that combines smartphone technology and traditional snail mail to deliver a medical test experience at home — had to say about his experience.

“TechCrunch uses a curation process regarding the companies it accepts, so being in Startup Alley — among all these other fantastic startups — has a hugely positive impact when you’re fundraising. We just closed $1.7 million in funding. The TechCrunch crew is fantastic — the lifeblood of the startup scene.”

If you’re chosen as a TC Top Pick, you’ll receive one free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, which includes a one-day exhibit space, three Disrupt Berlin Founder Passes, access to CrunchMatch (our free investor-to-startup matching platform), access to the Disrupt press list and a chance to be selected as one of the Startup Battlefield Wild Card companies (and compete in our $50,000 startup-pitch competition).

Disrupt Berlin 2018 takes place on 29-30 November, and the TC Top Pick application window closes on 28 September. Don’t miss this opportunity to put your mobile startup in front of Europe’s most influential tech and investment movers and shakers. Get moving and apply right here.

Singapore’s Golden Gate Ventures has announced the close of its newest (and third) fund for Southeast Asia at a total of $100 million.

The fund hit a first close in the summer, as TechCrunch reported at the time, and now it has reached full capacity. Seven-year-old Golden Gate said its LPs include existing backers Singapore sovereign fund Temasek, Korea’s Hanwha, Naver — the owner of messaging app Line — and EE Capital. Investors backing the firm for the first time through this fund include Mistletoe — the fund from Taizo Son, brother of SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son — Mitsui Fudosan, IDO Investments, CTBC Group, Korea Venture Investment Corporation (KVIC), and Ion Pacific.

Golden Gate was founded by former Silicon Valley-based trio Vinnie Lauria, Jeffrey Paine and Paul Bragiel . It has investments across five markets in Southeast Asia — with a particular focus on Indonesia and Singapore — and that portfolio includes Singapore’s Carousell, automotive marketplace Carro, P2P lending startup Funding Societies, payment enabler Omise and health tech startup Alodokter. Golden Gate’s previous fund was $60 million and it closed in 2016.

Some of the firm’s exits so far include the sale of Redmart to Lazada (although not a blockbuster), Priceline’s acquisition of Woomoo, Line’s acquisition of Temanjalan and the sale of Mapan (formerly Ruma) to Go-Jek. It claims that its first two funds have had distributions of cash (DPI) of 1.56x and 0.13x, and IRRs of 48 percent and 29 percent, respectively.

“When I compare the tech ecosystem of Southeast Asia (SEA) to other markets, it’s really hit an inflection point — annual investment is now measured in the billions. That puts SEA on a global stage with the US, China, and India. Yet there is a youthfulness that reminds me of Silicon Valley circa 2005, shortly before social media and the iPhone took off,” Lauria said in a statement.

A report from Google and Temasek forecasts that Southeast Asia’s digital economy will grow from $50 billion in 2017 to over $200 billion by 2025 as internet penetration continues to grow across the region thanks to increased ownership of smartphones. That opportunity to reach a cumulative population of over 600 million consumers — more of whom are online today than the entire U.S. population — is feeding optimism around startups and tech companies.

Golden Gate isn’t alone in developing a fund to explore those possibilities, there’s plenty of VC activity in the region.

Some of those include Openspace, which was formerly known as NSI Ventures and just closed a $135 million fund, Qualgro, which is raising a $100 million vehicle and Golden Equator, which paired up with Korea Investment Partners on a joint $88 million fund. Temasek-affiliated Vertex closed a $210 million fund last year and that remains a record for Southeast Asia.

Golden Gate also has a dedicated crypto fund, LuneX, which is in the process of raising $10 million.

Last week, on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, regulator Jina Choi, who heads the SEC’s wide-reaching San Francisco unit, declined to confirm or deny that the SEC is investigating Tesla CEO Elon Musk for possible fraud.

Said Choi, “I can’t tell you about any particular investigation in our office. And I can’t confirm or deny the existence of investigations that are in our office. I can say that we are very diligent about covering the issuers in our region and some of the more high-profile issuers in our region. We try to stay on top of that, but that’s about all I can say.”

Now, investor James Anderson of the global asset manager Baillie Gifford tells Reuters that, as a shareholder, he was recently questioned by U.S. securities regulators about Musk’s famous  — and possibly fateful  —  early August tweet that he was thinking of taking Tesla private and that he had “funding secured.”

Said Anderson to Reuters, “I don’t know what they’ll do with [Musk], but there’s no implication that we’ve done anything wrong . . . I think quite naturally they wanted to know whether major shareholders had any lead indication or knowledge of the tweet about ‘funding secured.’”

Because it isn’t talking, it’s impossible to know how seriously the SEC is looking into the chain of events that led to the tweet or what followed. As industry watchers likely know, days after making his surprising announcement, Musk elaborated on why he made it, writing in a post that he’d left a late July meeting with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund that gave him the impression that a deal to take Tesla private could close.

A tick-tock account by the WSJ of what happened behind the scenes during this period —  it was published shortly after Musk abandoned his take-private idea – said officials in the kingdom were “rankled” by the suggestion that the Saudis, who have quietly acquired up to 5 percent of Tesla’s shares this year,  had made any kind of formal proposal.

Bruised feelings aside, Musk, it’s now plain, may be dealing with regulatory fall-out, too. And interestingly, much of what happens next may center not just on interviews with shareholders and Musk’s other communications, but on plain-old psychology.

On stage, we asked Choi if, typically speaking, false statements are enough to prove fraud or whether there needs to be an accompanying scheme. “When you talk about fraud,” she answered, “you’re talking about a state of mind, you’re talking about mens rea. We call it scienter. You have to do something with intentionality. The idea of just making a misstatement doesn’t necessarily rise to the level of fraud. I think that’s what makes our investigations so challenging. I think the idea of trying to understand what’s in people’s heads can be very difficult.”

Misstatements can “be the first step to fraud,” Choi had added. “But generally, when we talk about fraud the F word, I think we are talking about a state of mind that’s a little bit higher than that.”