Author: azeeadmin

While the Adidas Futurecraft 4D shoes are cool looking sneakers, the story behind those shoes is even more interesting. The sportswear company has partnered with Carbon to design a new kind of sneakers.

Behind the Futurecraft 4D, you can find a process that is not that new — 3D printing. Many companies promised an industrial revolution by bringing back factories to service-driven countries, such as the U.S. and European countries. But this partnership between Adidas and Carbon could turn that wild dream into a reality.

“What you saw there was basically this integration of hardware, software and chemistry all coming together to take a digital model, print it very fast, but do it out of the materials that have the properties to be final parts,” Carbon co-founder and CEO Joseph DeSimone told TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino.

And the secret sauce behind Carbon’s process is its cloud-based software tool. You use a primitive CAD, define some mechanical properties and it gets manufactured in front of your eyes.

It’s quite hard to buy Futurecraft 4D shoes right now because production is still extremely limited. Adidas CMO Eric Liedtke is hopeful that it’s going to change over the coming years.

“Ultimately, we're still ramping up the innovation. It will be faster, more limited material. Ideally, the vision is to build and print on demand,” he said. “Right now, most of our products are made out of Asia and we put them on a boat or on a plane so they end up on Fifth Avenue.”

You could imagine Adidas reducing the stock in its warehouse. “Instead of having some sort of micro-distribution center in Jersey, we can have a micro-factory in Jersey,” Liedtke said. When it comes to material, this manufacturing process lets you partly use corn-based material.

And it’s not just design. Making shoes on demand lets you optimize the structure of the shoe for different sports and bodies.

“In this case, we took 10 years plus — maybe 20 years — of science that we had on foot strikes, and running, and how runners run, and where the impact zones are, and what we need to design into it from a data standpoint. And then, we let the creative takeover,” Liedtke said.

Carbon isn’t just working with Adidas. The company is quite active on the dental market for instance, working on resins. “We now also have the world's first 3D-printed FDA-approved dentures,” DeSimone said.

It’s interesting to see that a simple product, such as a pair of shoes, can become the representation of a long process of research and development, engineering and design.

E-commerce beauty startup founder, Glossier CEO Emily Weiss, dished on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 this morning about some of the company’s top competitors in the e-commerce space, including Amazon as well as the forthcoming threat from Instagram – which is building out its own standalone shopping app, according to reports. 

Glossier, founded in 2014 and backed by $87 million, has created a massive beauty brand that’s now a household name among women. And it’s done so without being on Amazon.

The company doesn’t work with Amazon, and Weiss said that it doesn’t intend to.

When asked if the company would sell into Amazon, she responded with an emphatic “no, no, no.”

Glossier may have been acquisition target for Amazon, however – when asked if Amazon ever approached Glossier about about a deal, Weiss didn’t deny it, but instead demurred, “a lot of people have approached Glossier,” before quickly moving on.

Weiss, clearly, doesn’t think that Amazon is the best place for beauty brands.

“The interesting thing about Amazon and how they’ve addressed obviously one of the biggest consumer needs, which is solving buying, is that in the process, in some ways, they’ve kind of killed shopping,” Weiss said.

“I think in terms of breadth of product, obviously, no one will ever beat them. They have done the most phenomenal job,” she continued.

But going to Amazon for everything, every time doesn’t make sense, she believes. It’s only one kind of shopping experience.

And even though Amazon is massive, it doesn’t mean there’s no room for others outside of its shadow to grow.

“E-commerce is 10% of global commerce – that’s nothing,” Weiss pointed out. “We are at the dawn of e-commerce, and this is one user experience,” she said, referring to Amazon.

Plus, Amazon’s user experience may not be the best fit for beauty and fashion products – even though Amazon is quickly ramping up in those areas with its own private labels, Amazon Fashion, Prime Wardrobe, beauty boxes, and other initiatives.

“I think it’s exciting that we are really at the dawn of  e-commerce, and that there’s going to be so many paradigms. What we’re focused on building is an emotional commerce experience which is focused on a breath of connection, and not a breath of product,” Weiss explained.

While Glossier may not be on Amazon, it does leverage Instagram to reach customers, possibly making Instagram’s shopping app a bigger rival, if launched.

“It makes sense,” Weiss said, when asked her thoughts about Instagram’s plans in this space. “72% of millennials make their purchasing decisions for beauty and fashion products through Instagram,” she said.

Glossier itself has a long history with Instagram. It launched on Instagram before it even had its website up, for example. They also just hired Keith Peiris, who led DMs and Camera at Instagram, as Head of Product.

“Instagram’s an incredible tool,” Weiss admitted, but also cautioned that it could still face difficulties as a shopping app.

“I think of the challenges might be these platforms were not built around specific topics, they were built around specific media expressions,” said Weiss.

That said, Instagram could have more potential in the beauty market than Amazon.

“When you look at a platform like Amazon, no woman has ever told me that their criteria for best mascara was what was fastest or cheapest. That’s not how people are buying emotional things – like a fashion or beauty product,” said Weiss. “But the leading paradigm of what an e-commerce experience gives you is one of efficiency, and one of breadth of product. When what users are actually doing and wanting is one of breadth of connection,” she said.

Tachyon, the accelerator of the blockchain powerhouse ConsenSys which launched earlier this year, has announced the first cohort for its 10 week accelerator program which is aimed at taking early stage blockchain projects from idea to a viable product. Sixteen companies were selected from around the world and will be brought together in San Francisco to participate in programming and accelerate their businesses. The projects are placed into one of three tracks:  Blockchain for-profit projects, open source and social impact. The program will culminate with a demo day for investors on November 17th.

Kavita Gupta (Managing Partner, ConsenSys Ventures) said: “We launched Tachyon with the intention of finding extremely promising early-stage companies and providing them with hands on support from the get-go. Among this inaugural group, I feel confident that we’ve found the next crop of game-changing projects that will drive innovation across the blockchain ecosystem.” 

Joe Lubin (Founder, ConsenSys) commented: “One thing that excites me about this first Tachyon cohort is that it demonstrates the degree to which our Ethereum community remains decentralized, even as it continues to grow. In this first batch, I see companies coming from Israel, China, India, Europe, the South Atlantic and Pacific Northwest all coming together to drive innovation beyond their geographical boundaries.”

Here’s a run-down of each company selected, in their own words:

BULVRD:  BULVRD is Washington DC based map and navigation app that tokenizes and gamifies the community aspect of navigation apps like Waze, rewarding users to report route information in the app making maps more real-time and community driven. 

Decompany: Decompany is a Korea based decentralized and incentivized knowledge trading system coming from Polaris Office (Infraware is publicly traded parent company). Decompany will be using the blockchain to build a global and monetizable version of Slideshare, utilizing network effects and a lone currency for transactions.

Elkrem: Elkrem is a Cairo based company creating hardware that will make it easy for IOT devices to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Using proprietary software, Elkrem’s boards can force devices to interact with the Ethereum stack in an efficient and scalable way.  

Eth Status Codes (Open Source Grant):  A Candian company, ETH Status Codes, also known as the ERC-1066 proposal, outlines a common set of Ethereum status codes in the same vein as HTTP statuses or BEAM tagged tuples. These shared set of signals allow smart contracts to react to situations autonomously and expose localized error messages to users. 

Expercoin:  Out of the Harvard innovation lab, Expercoin is a decentralized AI powered marketplace protocol empowering non-technical individuals to create specialized learning economies with the ability to instantly monetize them. 

FastX:  China based high throughput decentralized exchange protocol built on Plasma. At scale, FastX will combine the security of a DEX with the UX and low fees of a centralized offering, offering a low-latency decentralized platform to serve Web 3.0’s largest use-case to date: the exchange of digital assets.

GlobalXplorer (Non-profit grant, Social impact track): A TED prize recipient,  GlobalXplorer is a crowdsourced archaeology initiative that allows for locals to participate in archaeology and legitimize findings in their region. The GXº Blockchain is a global registry for antiquities and an Ethereum-based marketplace for the sustainable distribution of an antiquity’s cultural heritage data which can be curated and collected. 

Groundhog (Open Source): Out of the Nova Scotia based Blockcrushr labs, The Groundhog Wallet is a multi-blockchain crypto wallet, browser, and hub for decentralized access to Web 3.0 that includes Groundhog Pay, a payment platform that lets merchants world accept all types of crypto currencies including subscription payments over Ethereum. 

MWC Vision: MWC Vision is a Berlin based studio spinning up decentralized, on-chain video games, the first of which is Chainmonsters. ChainMonsters is an Ethereum-based game in which users can catch, collect, and battle with monsters known as ChainMonsters (much like the handheld Pokemon games). Utilizing non-fungible Ethereum tokens, users can fully control and own an in-game avatar and explore  a digital world, catching and training ‘monsters’ represented by tokens which can be sold and used elsewhere.

Net Ninjas:  Net Ninjas is an Israel based protocol for all things decentralized compute and storage, starting with an offering that will use the blockchain to create a decentralized VPN that can be used by enterprises. 

Nuo: Nuo is an India based project facilitating decentralized crypto lending on-chain. Borrowers on the platform can stake tokens as collateral and get ETH as a result. The protocol has already processed $15,000 worth of loans and provides an entirely on-chain lending solution for digital assets.

Pulse: The Pulse protocol allows users to tokenize their ‘intent’ to procure a service that potential sellers can bid on, aiming to become the defacto protocol for service customer acquisition and a simpler way for users to connect directly with service providers. In this decentralized network, relayers and market makers help organize ‘intent’ and any dApp or current publisher can plug directly into the Pulse infrastructure to participate, contribute, and earn tokens. 

Quidli: Quidli is a France based protocol building the technological infrastructure that makes equity based employee compensation possible – with a particular focus on the startup space . Currently a centralized protocol, integrating an Ethereum-based solution will allow for the tokenization of equity – making equity based compensation programs programmable and tradeable.

Stealth Project: A member of our cohort still in stealth mode is a project re-imagining databases by building a P2P network with an open participation model aiming to be a decentralized version of an SQL database, providing a fundamental data storage building block enterprises and future dApps.

TapTrust (Open source): SF based, TapTrust is building a a self sovereign wallet that utilizes a standard username and password login and allows users easy set-up without ever needing to back up a seed phrase. In addition to their wallet offering, TapTrust is incorporating a commercial feature called TrustFund that provides loss protection for smart contract security exploits. The loss protection offered with TrustFund along with the ease of setup for the TapTrust wallet should make it easy for people to get started with using dApps without the major risk factor of losing their crypto.

WalletConnect (Open Source Grant): WalletConnect is a simple solution that bridges communication between browser-based dApps and mobile wallets using a QR code scan to establish the initial connection. It is an open protocol and does not require a dApp user to install a browser extension. The protocol is agnostic to specific mobile wallets a user may want to use and will enable dApp developers to integrate with multiple wallets and reach users through a single implementation.

Elon Musk made an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast hosted by the eponymous comedian, where the pair smoked a blunt and pondered the flat-Earth movement, the future of AI, “inventing shit” and several other of the eccentric billionaire’s favorite topics.

The now-viral interview, which was live-streamed to thousands of viewers, was immediately followed by two high-profile executive departures at Tesla. The company’s stock temporarily dropped 10 percent Friday.

Here are a few highlights.

• Elon Musk probably got high. We weren’t in the room with him, but the Tesla CEO looks to have inhaled what was described as a mixture of marijuana and tobacco. “You probably can’t because of stockholders,” Rogan said to Musk before he took a hit of the blunt. “I mean, it’s legal right?” Musk asked, proceeding to smoke.

• He vented about the negative effects of social media: “Particularly Instagram, people look like they have a much better life than they really do,” Musk told Rogan. “People basically seem like they are way better-looking than they really are and they are way happier-seeming than they really are. If you look at everyone on Instagram, you might think ‘man, there are all these happy, beautiful people and I’m not that good-looking and I’m not happy, so I must suck.'”

• In the words of Rogan, Musk just can’t stop “inventing shit.” But being Musk comes at a high cost. “I don’t think you’d necessarily want to be me,” he said. “I don’t think people would like it that much.” Rogan, in response, suggests meditation and an isolation tank.

• He worries about the future of AI — but not as much as he used to. “The danger is going to be more humans using it against each other, I think, most likely, that’ll be the danger, yeah,” he murmured.

You can watch the full interview here.

Tor Project, the group behind the anonymous Tor browser, has released an alpha version of its own anonymous browser for Android.

Following this release, Orfox, the longstanding Tor Project -approved browsing app for Android, said it will be sunset by 2019. To run both apps, users will need to also download the Tor Project proxy app, Orbot.

Tor Project’s anonymous browser uses a system of decentralized relays that bounce a user’s data to anonymize internet activity. This makes it almost impossible for ads, location trackers and even government surveillance to follow your tracks across the web. While Tor is often associated with illegal drug or weapons sales on the dark web, the browser is also a haven for political dissidents, journalists and just browsers who prefer to maintain their anonymity.

This release comes several days after Tor Project rolled out Tor Browser 8.0, based on Firefox’s 2017 Quantum browser structure. The major updates include a new user landing and on-boarding page, increased language support and improved bridging methods to enable users to access the browser in countries where Tor is banned — like Turkey.

While the service is regarded as the current gold standard of anonymous browsing, there are still vulnerabilities. Federal investigators can gain access and identify users through security flaws in the browser itself. It remains to be seen how secure Firefox Quantum will be for Tor 8.0, but users would be wise to follow Tor’s guidelines on further protecting their anonymity, just in case.

’Tis the season for hardware events. First Apple, then Google and now Microsoft all have big announcements on tap for the next month or so. Details are light on this one. Same can be said for the invite, which is just a Microsoft logo and the words “a moment of your time.”

The event will most likely be focused on Surface hardware. The Surface Go was just announced a couple of weeks back, so we can tick that one off the list. A refresh to some of the existing products certainly seems plausible — the Surface Pro and Studio, among others, could certainly use them.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see some new additions to the line, either. Given that the company’s butting up against Apple and Google events, it’s going to have to put on a big show to cut through noise here. Though the long rumored Surface Phone (including that dual-screen device render that’s been floating around) is most likely not in the cards this time out. 

As for what “a moment of your time” is hinting at, your guess is as good as ours. A Surface Watch? Sure, why not? The Fall event kicks off at 4PM ET  on October 2 in New York City. We’ll be there with Surface Bells on.

Rigetti, a quantum computing startup that is challenging the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Google in this nascent space, today at our TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 event announced the launch of its new hybrid quantum computing platform.

While Rigetti already offered API access to its quantum computing platform, this new service, dubbed Quantum Cloud Services (QCS), offers a combination of a cloud-based classical computer, its Forest development platform and access to Rigetti’s quantum backends. Thanks to this, developers will be able to write and test their algorithms significantly faster than with the company’s previous approach.

In addition to the new platform, which is now in private testing, Rigetti also announced a $1 million prize for the first team that manages to show quantum advantage on this hybrid platform. Quantum advantage, at least according to Rigetti’s definition, is the milestone where a quantum system will be able to solve a real problem that is beyond the reach of classical computers. The company plans to announce more details around this prize at the end of October.

As Rigetti founder and CEO Chad Rigetti told me, the reason the hybrid approach is faster is simply because the two systems are closely integrated — and you will likely always need a classical computer in parallel with a quantum computer for solving virtually any problem. And the company expects that this hybrid approach — and likely the 128-qubit machine that Rigetti plans to launch next year — will allow for running an algorithm that demonstrates quantum advantage. The current API Rigetti makes available to developers features 8-qubit and 19-qubit machines. Those machines are nowhere near powerful enough to show quantum advantage, but they do give developers the ability to start experimenting with using quantum computers.

On the old platform, Rigetti also noted, the kind of loops you need to run to use the quantum machine for machine learning, for example, had a latency on the order of a second or more. “A lot of these algorithms require thousands and tens of thousands of iterations,” Rigetti said. “And now we have reduced this down to the order of milliseconds.”

Rigetti also today announced that it is partnering with a number of leading quantum computing startups (the kind that work on the software, not the hardware side of this ecosystem). These startups, including Entropica Labs, Horizon Quantum Computing, OTI Lumionics, ProteinQure, QC Ware and Riverlane Research, will build and distribute the applications through the Rigetti QCS platform.

Harley Davidson, the American symbol for internal combustion, chrome, and steel is going all in on two-wheeled EVs.

The Milwaukee-based motorcycle manufacturer is going electric and coming to Silicon Valley. Harley announced it will open an R&D space in the Bay Area by the end of 2018 to support its commitment to build electric vehicles.

“The real reason is talent,” Harley Davidson’s Group Chief Engineer Vance Strader told TechCrunch. “We’re after people who really have a passion for and understanding of electric vehicles and the systems that make them great. [That] sort of culture we’re more likely to get in Silicon Valley: the entrepreneurial, agile, nimble culture,” he said.

Strader also offered a preview of some of the features riders can expect from the company’s first electric motorcycle, expected later next year. Specifically around Harley’s world famous engine sound — something it attempted to trademark at one point. Strader said HD’s EV’s would have their own distinct sound, “but there’ll be nothing fake about the sound. It will be entirely generated by the vehicle.”

As we reported earlier this year, the company jolted the motorcycle world by announcing it would create an EV for sale by August 2019—a production version of its Project LiveWire concept moto.

Harley Davidson went further in June when CEO Matthew Levatich announced an expanded lineup of EVs, including lighter motorcycles and the possibility of scooters and bicycles.

To achieve these goals, the facility in Silicon Valley “will initially focus on electric vehicle research and development, including battery, power electronics and e-machine design, development and advanced manufacturing,” according to a company release.

Harley’s Silicon Valley move comes as e-motos could be at a pivotal moment in shifting the motorcycle industry toward electric. Three startups — Alta Motors, Energica and Zero Motorcycles — have revved up promotion, distribution and sales in the U.S. They are betting on pulling more gas riders to the e-moto experience and attracting more young folks and women to buying motorcycles—after years of contraction in the American market.

Shortly after announcing their 2019 electric production target, Harley Davidson took an (undisclosed) equity stake in Alta and entered into a co-development partnership.

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

This week was incredibly fun. We recorded live from the first floor of TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF confab, putting us right in the middle of the action. So it was good that we had a full crew on hand to natter about the news. From TechCrunch, Connie Loizos and Danny Crichton were on deck, along with myself. In addition to us regulars, Garry Tan joined in. He’s a managing partner at Initialized Capital.

So we had the crew, a lovely stage, and four mics. Putting that together we kicked off with some ironically non-Valley news, in particular, Amazon reaching the $1 trillion market cap threshold. The firm has since given back around $50 billion in value, but we wanted to know why it was up, and why it was down.

Segueing with some precision we tucked into the recent “Peak Silicon Valley” conversation, specifically predicated on two recent pieces from the Economist (here and here) that, in effect, ask the question is the Valley no longer what it once was? And the answer, as you can imagine, is a firm kinda.

Next up we riffed on the recent crypto meltdown. Tan was not concerned, noting that you have to have 10 percent down days to have 10 percent up days. I found that hard to stomach, but crypto remains young, per Tan, so perhaps we’ll see things calm down yet.

Next, two IPOs. First up: Elastic, a search company that seems quite young has an impressive set of numbers to show off. It’s not as hot as Snap, perhaps, but the firm is in good shape to make a good debut. And Upwork is going public as well. If Elastic is quick to IPO and quick growing, Upwork is a bit less of each. It’s older and growing more slowly.

The firms are linked by an investor, however, something that Crichton broke down for us here.

We wrapped with Caffeine’s $100 million round, and the changing pace of supergiant capital injections. And then we stopped talking, so we’ll catch you all in seven days. Thanks for being great!

Twitter is launching a new feature that allows users to create audio-only broadcasts directly from Twitter itself, as well as Twitter’s Periscope. The feature, which Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey confirmed in a tweet this morning, is available from the same interface where you would normally launch live video. It’s currently accessible on the Twitter for iOS app, as well as on Periscope.

Now, instead of only having the option to record video after you tap “Live,” there’s a button you can tap to pick audio-only broadcast.

The feature was seen in beta testing in recent weeks, but @Jack’s tweet – along with the mobile app’s update log  – indicates it has now rolled out to all.

Twitter also confirmed to TechCrunch the feature is currently available only on the Twitter app for iOS and on Periscope for the time being. It hasn’t provided a time frame for when it will reach other platforms.

While those users will only be the ones at present who can record audio, all Twitter users across platforms will be able to see the recordings and play them back.

As the update text explains, the feature is valuable for those times when you want viewers to hear you but not see you. This could allow people to share live news on Twitter of an audio-only nature, record sharable mini-podcasts, or post something to their followers that takes longer than 280 characters to explain.

Similar to live video, audio broadcasters will be able to view their stats, like number of live viewers, replay viewers, time watched and other metrics.

The company plans to share the news through an official Twitter Engineering blog post shortly.

Update: Twitter has now tweeted the news on its own account, as well.