Author: azeeadmin

Applications for Startup Battlefield are now open! Founders, this past year has been challenging in ways words can’t encompass. But you are persevering and now is the time to show the world what you have been working on. TechCrunch is on the hunt for game-changing and ground breaking startups from around the globe, to feature in Startup Battlefield during TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 this fall. Startups will be competing for a $100,000 equity-free prize, the eyes of investors from around the world and global media coverage on the most famous stage in tech media.

Eligibility & Application. Startup Battlefield highlights early stage companies from all geographies, in any industry. Startups should have an MVP. Founders simply need to apply here. Every application is reviewed by a member of the TechCrunch editorial team. TechCrunch takes ZERO fees – the application and participation/training program for selected companies is free. TC does not take equity any company.

Training. Startups selected to pitch will engage in an intensive training over several weeks with the Startup Battlefield team. Founders will perfect their pitches, finesse their business models and hone their presentation skills. Founders will have access to masterclasses from experts on how to build, market and scale the startups.

Pitch. About 25 startups will be selected to pitch on the main stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. Each founder will present for six minutes, with a live demo, followed by a Q&A with our esteemed panel of judges. Judges like Kristin Green, Aileen Lee, Alfred Lin, Susan Lyne and more. After the first round, the top set of companies will pitch again in the final round in front of a fresh panel of judges. The judges will pick the winner who will receive the Disrupt cup and the $100,000 equity-free prize money.

Disrupt. Startup Battlefield founders are the VIPs of TC Disrupt. Founders get access to private events, complimentary event tickets, exhibition space on the virtual show floor, access to CrunchMatch, and a private Startup Battlefield Reception with members of the Startup Battlefield Alumni community. Battlefield founders will also get access to future TC events and a free subscription to Extra Crunch.

Launch your startup this September. Step into the spotlight. Apply now.

The NFT ecosystem is having an explosive moment and the startups that were ready to run with it are getting lots of cash to continue capturing that momentum.

SuperRare, an NFT art platform that has garnered tens of millions in new sales in recent weeks, has just raised millions from investors. The $9 million Series A round was led by Velvet Sea Ventures and 1confirmation. Other investors participating in the round include Collaborative Fund, Shrug Capital, Third Kind, SamsungNext, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff, Naval Ravikant, and Chamath Palihapitiya, among others.

In an announcement of the raise, the team called the crypto art scene a “global phenomenon.”

SuperRare launched its art platform in 2018, since then it has differentiated by maintaining a closed early access platform that more closely curates the art they sell. Everything on the platform is a single-edition 1/1 sale. The team has said they plan to launch the site widely next year. The company earns a 3% transaction fee on art sales on the platform in addition to a 15% gallery fee for primary sales. One unique facet of the platform is that creators can continue to earn on a piece’s appreciating value following with 10% commissions on secondary sales.

While NFT art sales have taken off in recent weeks, there are still many structural issues facing their mainstream adoption largely due to scalability issues with Ethereum’s mainnet, which SuperRare operates on. Plenty of firms are building layer-two infrastructure that improves speed, and cuts down on energy usage and transaction fees. Today, ConsenSys launched a platform called Palm featuring artists Damien Hirst as the platform’s first artist drop.

After a lengthy crypto winter, blockchain startups are coming back with a vengeance amid a surge in startup investing, a surge in enthusiasm around NFTs and a surge in bitcoin prices. Today, NBA Top Shot maker Dapper Labs announced in had raised $305 million in venture funding.

YouTube announced today it will begin testing what could end up being a significant change to its video platform: it’s going to try hiding the dislike count on videos from public view. The company says it will run a “small experiment” where it will try out a few different designs where dislike counts are no longer shown, however none will see the “dislike” button itself removed entirely.

The company announced the tests on Twitter, but then further explains further in a community forum post that the goal is not to remove the ability for users to signal they disliked a video — creators will still have access to the video’s like and dislike count from YouTube Studio and dislikes will still help power YouTube’s recommendation algorithms.

Instead, YouTube says that the idea to try hiding dislikes is based on creator feedback.

“We’ve heard from creators that the public dislike counts can impact their wellbeing, and may motivate a targeted campaign of dislikes on a creator’s video,” the announcement reads. “So, we’re testing designs that don’t include the visible like or dislike count in an effort to balance improving the creator experience, while still making sure viewer feedback is accounted for and shared with the creator.”

Of course, there can be a sort of mob mentality that accompanies the use of the Like and Dislike buttons on YouTube. But seeing the dislike count can also help to signal to others when videos are clickbait, spam or misleading, which can be helpful.

YouTube showed off one potential design being tested simply shows the same button layout but instead of a number of dislikes, the word “Dislike” appears underneath the thumbs down icon.

There will be no way to opt out of the test if you see the changes appear when you’re logged into YouTube — you’ll only be able to share feedback, the company notes.

To be clear, however, YouTube isn’t yet committed to removing the dislike count for everyone at this time. The feedback from this test will help inform YouTube as to if, when or how it will release designs like this more broadly.

YouTube wouldn’t be the first to experiment with removing metrics from a social app. Instagram has also been testing removing the number of positive engagements (Likes), in order to make the experience feel more authentic and less about chasing clout. And Facebook this year removed the “Like” button from Facebook Pages, in favor of the more accurate “Followers” measurement. However, in the case of removing just the dislike count and not the likes, viewers may misunderstand a video’s true popularity.

The company hasn’t said how long the tests will run before it has enough feedback to make a decision on the feature’s permanence.

This afternoon Substack, a paid-newsletter startup, confirmed that it has raised $65 million, as initially reported by Axios. TechCrunch dug into the math behind the financing here. As anticipated, a16z led the new financing.

What’s in store from the now Series B-backed company? Product work. The company wrote that intends to “rapidly” expand its Substack Pro program, which pays writers for a year to assist them in launching their own mini-publication; Substack takes a larger cut of Pro user earnings during their first year, reverting to its usual split the next.

The Substack Pro model has attracted controversy in recent days, with some writers — both on Substack and not — criticizing the startup for opacity in whom it pays via its Pro program; some have argued that Substack is subsidizing anti-trans writers in particular.

The company is motoring ahead on building out its infrastructure regardless, stating in its note that it intends to spend some of its new capital on creating “increasingly powerful subscription-publishing tools,” and “a support infrastructure for independent writers.” More tooling, and more assistance could prove key to enticing more writers from their current employers — or Substack rivals — to its platform.

The company also wrote that it plans to boost its community-building and local news efforts.

Substack did not provide material new growth metrics, instead saying that it has “more than half a million people” paying for writers on its network; that figure is unchanged from a January figure that Bloomberg reported.

As Facebook and Twitter build out their own newsletter efforts, and rival startups like Pico and Ghost offer related services, the paid-media space is a hot market today. At issue is more than the future homes for a handful of well-known writers with large audiences. The various tech companies competing in the space are each wagering that the long tail for paid writing is long, and that individuals of many profile sizes will be able to attract and hold a paid audience.

After what feels like decades in which online writing was devalued to commodity prices, it’s startling to find ourselves in a world where various well-financed companies are competing for our pens.

Autonomous, electric mobility service provider Optimus Ride announced a partnership with powersports vehicle manufacturer Polaris to bring fully autonomous GEM electric vehicles to market. The two will introduce a new line of Polaris GEM low-speed vehicles that will be engineered to fully integrate Optimus Ride’s autonomous software and hardware suite.

The microtransit vehicles are expected to come to market during the second half of 2023, when they’ll be deployed in geofenced, localized environments, such as corporate and academic campuses and mixed-use developments.

The Polaris GEMs aren’t the only electric autonomous vehicles on the roads. Big companies like Alphabet’s Waymo, Uber, Ford, Motional and GM subsidiary Cruise are all investing in autonomous vehicles to be used for either delivery or ride-hailing services on city streets. But Optimus Ride CEO Sean Harrington sees a market advantage in starting in a localized, geofenced environment, then, once the tech is safe and developed, expand it outward.

Optimus Ride has already deployed about 30 Polaris GEM vehicles, which have been retrofitted with Optimus Ride autonomous technology, for commercial ride-hailing operations in Brooklyn, Boston, California, Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia, or as part of testing. There’s a testing site near its headquarters at the Boston Seaport, and there’s a closed track environment, called Union Point, in South Weymouth, Massachusetts.

In the near future, they’ll be continuing to expand current partnerships, like with real estate giant Brookfield Properties in Washington, D.C., as well as into new markets. Harrington specifically hinted at academic campuses as a next step.

Polaris GEMs are deployed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to transfer workers on a fixed microtransit route. Image Credits: Optimus Ride

The GEMs provide visitors, residents and workers a combination of fixed route and on-demand mobility around the sites and in some cases out to regional transit hubs and neighboring areas.

“In D.C., at our Brookfield campus, we have the Opti Ride app that allows users to schedule rides and reserve a seat on the shuttle,” said Harrington. “Then in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, for example, we run on a fixed schedule and a fixed route.”

The microtransit vehicles, which drive at speeds less than 25 miles per hour, can currently seat four passengers, with a safety operator in the front row. Harrington says once they remove the steering wheel and brake pedals with the next generation of GEMs, the vehicles will accommodate six passengers.

Both the current set of GEMs and the next generation operate at Level 4 autonomy, which means they can operate without the need of a human operator. Despite the constraints of the geofenced environment, Harrington says the vehicles can fully interact with their environments.

“It has a complete perception stack leveraging lidar and computer vision, as well as situational awareness, classifying and tracking objects, full planning and motion control algorithms that allow the vehicle to safely operate within a given environment,” said Harrington. “The benefit of the geofence is that we can develop HD maps for those locations and be deterministic about everything we expect to see from a traffic standpoint. Being constrained in a specific environment means high safety and performance levels quickly, rather than an unbounded vehicle expected to operate in all conditions, anywhere.”

Arm today announced Armv9, the next generation of its chip architecture. Its predecessor, Armv8 launched a decade ago and while it has seen its fair share of changes and updates, the new architecture brings a number of major updates to the platform that warrant a shift in version numbers. Unsurprisingly, Armv9 builds on V8 and is backward compatible, but it specifically introduces new security, AI, signal processing and performance features.

Over the last five years, more than 100 billion Arm-based chips have shipped. But Arm believes that its partners will ship over 300 billion in the next decade. We will see the first ArmV9-based chips in devices later this year.

Ian Smythe, Arm’s VP of Marketing for its client business, told me that he believes this new architecture will change the way we do computing over the next decade. “We’re going to deliver more performance, we will improve the security capabilities […] and we will enhance the workload capabilities because of the shift that we see in compute that’s taking place,” he said. “The reason that we’ve taken these steps is to look at how we provide the best experience out there for handling the explosion of data and the need to process it and the need to move it and the need to protect it.”

That neatly sums up the core philosophy behind these updates. On the security side, ArmV9 will introduce Arm’s confidential compute architecture and the concept of Realms. These Realms enable developers to write applications where the data is shielded from the operating system and other apps on the device. Using Realms, a business application could shield sensitive data and code from the rest of the device, for example.

Image Credits: Arm

“What we’re doing with the Arm Confidential Compute Architecture is worrying about the fact that all of our computing is running on the computing infrastructure of operating systems and hypervisors,” Richard Grisenthwaite, the chief architect at Arm, told me. “That code is quite complex and therefore could be penetrated if things go wrong. And it’s in an incredibly trusted position, so we’re moving some of the workloads so that [they are] running on a vastly smaller piece of code. Only the Realm manager is the thing that’s actually capable of seeing your data while it’s in action. And that would be on the order of about a 10th of the size of a normal hypervisor and much smaller still than an operating system.”

As Grisenthwaite noted, it took Arm a few years to work out the details of this security architecture and ensure that it is robust enough — and during that time Spectre and Meltdown appeared, too, and set back some of Arm’s initial work because some of the solutions it was working on would’ve been vulnerable to similar attacks.

Image Credits: Arm

Unsurprisingly, another area the team focused on was enhancing the CPU’s AI capabilities. AI workloads are now ubiquitous. Arm had already done introduced its Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) a few years ago, but at the time, this was meant for high-performance computing solutions like the Arm-powered Fugaku supercomputer.

Now, Arm is introducing SVE2 to enable more AI and digital signal processing (DSP) capabilities. Those can be used for image processing workloads, as well as other IoT and smart home solutions, for example. There are, of course, dedicated AI chips on the market now, but Arm believes that the entire computing stack needs to be optimized for these workloads and that there are a lot of use cases where the CPU is the right choice for them, especially for smaller workloads.

“We regard machine learning as appearing in just about everything. It’s going to be done in GPUs, it’s going to be done in dedicated processors, neural processors, and also done in our CPUs. And it’s really important that we make all of these different components better at doing machine learning,” Grisenthwaite said.

As for raw performance, Arm believes its new architecture will allow chip manufacturers to gain more than 30% in compute power over the next two chip generations, both for mobile CPUs but also the kind of infrastructure CPUs that large cloud vendors like AWS now offer their users.

“Arm’s next-generation Armv9 architecture offers a substantial improvement in security and machine learning, the two areas that will be further emphasized in tomorrow’s mobile communications devices,” said Min Goo Kim, the executive vice president of SoC development at Samsung Electronics. “As we work together with Arm, we expect to see the new architecture usher in a wider range of innovations to the next generation of Samsung’s Exynos mobile processors.”

Google today announced that it is rolling out Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a crucial part of its Privacy Sandbox project for Chrome, as a developer origin trial.

FLoC is meant to be an alternative to the kind of cookies that advertising technology companies use today to track you across the web. Instead of a personally identifiable cookie, FLoC runs locally and analyzes your browsing behavior to group you into a cohort of like-minded people with similar interests (and doesn’t share your browsing history with Google). That cohort is specific enough to allow advertisers to do their thing and show you relevant ads, but without being so specific as to allow marketers to identify you personally.

This “interest-based advertising,” as Google likes to call it, allows you to hide within the crowd of users with similar interests. All the browser displays is a cohort ID and all your browsing history and other data stay locally.

Image Credits: Google / Getty Images

The trial will start in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and the Philippines. Over time, Google plans to scale it globally. As we learned earlier this month, Google is not running any tests in Europe because of concerns around GDPR and other privacy regulations (in part, because it’s unclear whether FLoC IDs should be considered personal data under these regulations).

Users will be able to opt out from this origin trial, just like they will be able to do so with all other Privacy Sandbox trials.

Unsurprisingly, given how FLoC upends many of the existing online advertising systems in place, not everybody loves this idea. Advertisers obviously love the idea of being able to target individual users, though Google’s preliminary data shows that using these cohorts leads to similar results for them and that advertisers can expect to see “at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising.”

Google notes that its own advertising products will get the same access to FLoC IDs as its competitors in the ads ecosystem.

But it’s not just the advertising industry that is eyeing this project skeptically. Privacy advocates aren’t fully sold on the idea either. The EFF, for example, argues that FLoC will make it easier for marketing companies that want to fingerprint users based on the various FLoC IDs they expose, for example. That’s something Google is addressing with its Privacy Budget proposal, but how well that will work remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, users would probably prefer to just browse the web without seeing ads (no matter what the advertising industry may want us to believe) and without having to worry about their privacy. But online publishers continue to rely on advertising income to fund their sites.

With all of these divergent interests, it was always clear that Google’s initiatives weren’t going to please everyone. That friction was always built into the process. And while other browser vendors can outright block ads and third-party cookies, Google’s role in the advertising ecosystem makes this a bit more complicated.

“When other browsers started blocking third-party cookies by default, we were excited about the direction, but worried about the immediate impact,” Marshall Vale, Google’s product manager for Privacy Sandbox, writes in today’s announcement. “Excited because we absolutely need a more private web, and we know third-party cookies aren’t the long-term answer. Worried because today many publishers rely on cookie-based advertising to support their content efforts, and we had seen that cookie blocking was already spawning privacy-invasive workarounds (such as fingerprinting) that were even worse for user privacy. Overall, we felt that blocking third-party cookies outright without viable alternatives for the ecosystem was irresponsible, and even harmful, to the free and open web we all enjoy.”

It’s worth noting that FLoC, as well as Google’s other privacy sandbox initiatives, are still under development. The company says the idea here is to learn from these initial trials and evolve the project accordingly.

Vote counting begins today in the historic effort to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama fulfillment center. The warehouse — which opened exactly a year ago to meet ramping up demand as COVID-19 bore down on the U.S. — has become ground zero for one of the most import labor efforts in modern American history.

Voting began by mail on February 8, after Amazon repeatedly attempted to delay the vote or force workers to submit ballots in-person, in spite of pandemic restrictions. Things have gotten predictably heated in the days and weeks leading up to yesterday’s official deadline. Though even by the standards of Amazon’s aggressive public relations strategy, thing went surprisingly far.

In particular, the e-commerce giant leveraged Twitter feeds as part of an aggressive anti-union strategy. The company simultaneously sought to bolster its image of existing working conditions while confronting progressive/leftist politicians like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who played a key role in pushing the company toward the $15/hour warehouse minimum wage it now celebrates.

According to reports, the company’s scorched-earth approach against Sanders and fellow New England Senator Elizabeth Warren were spurred on from the top. Founder Jeff Bezos — who will abdicate his CEO position later this year — was said to have encouraged the offensive. Employees at the companies were said to have flagged the offending tweets internally for suspicious activity. Those tickets were reportedly closed.

After antagonist tweets and denying widespread and longstanding reports about Amazon workers peeing in bottles over fears of falling behind on quotas, the Amazon News Twitter reverted to a more positive approach. It has however, continued activity around the vote, including a bid to install video cameras for monitoring boxes carrying ballots — a bid the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has since rejected.

While the vote counting kicks off today, don’t expect immediate results. The process is a methodical and deliberate one. Among other things, there are processes in place for either side to object. It’s clear from Amazon’s recent behavior that the company is well aware that this is far more consequential than the 6,000 or so workers currently employed by the Bessemer location. If the company prevails, it will position the decision as validation of its working conditions. If workers vote to unionize, meanwhile, this could well start a chain reaction across the company.

BIRMINGHAM, AL – MARCH 05: A truck passes as Congressional delegates visit the Amazon Fulfillment Center after meeting with workers and organizers involved in the Amazon BHM1 facility unionization effort, represented by the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union on March 5, 2021 in Birmingham, Alabama. Workers at Amazon facility currently make $15 an hour, however they feel that their requests for less strict work mandates are not being heard by management. (Photo by Megan Varner/Getty Images)

This week, workers at Amazon’s Germany facilities are going on strike for four days, following a similar move in Italy last week.

“It’s not just workers in Alabama, it’s workers everywhere who are saying to Jeff Bezos that enough is enough. No matter what language they speak, Amazon workers around the globe will not stand for the working conditions they’ve been forced to endure for too long,” Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) President Stuart Applebaum said in a statement.

The NLRB oversees the vote counting. If workers vote to unionize, Bessemer workers will join the RWDSU. The organization has also seen its share of pushback from Amazon. As the company told TechCrunch last week:

Stuart Appelbaum, Chief Disinformation Officer of RWDSU, in an attempt to save his long declining union, is taking alternative facts to a whole new level. But our employees are smart and know the truth—starting wages of $15 or more, health care from day one, and a safe and inclusive workplace. We encourage all of our employees to vote.

Ballots have been sent to the NLRB’s Birmingham offices. There are a number of grounds on which either side can contest the results. These include everything from signatures to whether the person who cast a vote is, in fact, an eligible employee of Amazon. Even after votes are counted, things are likely to drag on. Court battles seem a likely outcome, moving forward. From there, things could ultimately stretch on for weeks or months.

The battle is a high stakes one that has made unusual political allies from opposite sides of the aisle. There aren’t too many events that have united politicians ranging from Marco Rubio on one side and Sanders, Warren and Joe Biden on the other. That goes double for something as traditionally divisive as labor unions.

“This campaign has already been a victory in many ways,” Appelbaum said in a statement issued late last week. “Even though we don’t know how the vote will turn out, we believe we have opened the door to more organizing around the country.”

The NFT craze has been an intriguing moment for digital artists who have seen seen great leaps in how tech has allowed them to create their work, but not as much progress in shifting how they profit off of it.

Though crypto’s early adopter artists have seemed to gain the most attention thus far, more institutionally present artists are dipping their feet into the token world. One of the bigger barriers has been the environmental concerns tied to the Ethereum blockchain which required intense energy usage to mint new artwork, tied to incredibly high transaction fees, something that has invited controversy for early artists because of climate change cocerns.

There have been a number of blockchain products to emerge in recent months that promise the benefits of Ethereum with greater speed, lower costs and lower energy usage, most notably Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain which powers their NBA Top Shot product. Today, we saw the debut of a new “layer-two” entrant from ConsenSys, called Palm, which operates as a sidechain on Ethereum’s main network but will be supported via the popular crypto wallet MetaMask.

As part of Palm’s launch, the artist Damien Hirst announced he will be launching an NFT project, his first, called The Currency Project on the platform’s Palm NFT Studio.

Ethereum has already committed to transitioning to a more energy-efficient proof-of-stake consensus structure, but it’s unclear how quickly that’s going to happen. The network currently relies on a proof-of-work system (as does bitcoin), which use an energy-intensive manner of prioritizing where the next block in a chain is mined that gets more intensive as a network sees more traffic. It’s a reason why crypto mining operations have had to consistently invest in the latest hardware to maintain an edge and use more power. Proof-of-work does away with most of that, instead choosing nodes on the network to mine the next block based on reputation or their existing stake. There are some real security tradeoffs which have required workarounds though plenty in the crypto community aren’t quite satisfied with the compromises, though proponents argue that environmental concerns should take precedent.

In a press release, the team behind Palm says the ecosystem is “99% more energy efficiency than proof of work systems.”

Unlike Dapper Labs’ Flow, Palm benefits from its interconnectedness with the community of Ethereum developers, something that was present in today’s announcement which showcased several industry partnerships including Nifty. The news arrived alongside details this morning of Dapper Labs’ monster $305 million fund raise which will give the company backing to build on the momentum of Top Shot which has given the broader NFT space the wave of enthusiasm it’s currently experiencing.

Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, is today releasing its latest project called Stack, an app that will help you digitize your documents, receipts and other papers you have lying around the house, and then automatically save them to Google Drive. The app will also helpfully suggest a name for your scans and the right category — or “stack,” as it’s called.

At launch, Stack can handle scanning a range of differently-sized documents — like bills, shopping receipts, or even IDs — which are then turned into PDFs and organized, while important information from within the file is detailed using A.I. technology.

The idea for Stack comes from Christopher Pedregal, who previously co-founded the edtech startup Socratic which was acquired by Google back in 2018. 

Pedregal notes that, at Socratic, they had taken advantage of Google’s computer vision and language understanding technologies to make learning easier for high school students. While at Google, he began to think about how those same technologies could be put to work for better organizing documents. To experiment with the idea, he teamed up with Matthew Cowan. The two first worked together on DocAI, a team in Google Cloud that was developing A.I. technology that could analyze billions of documents.

They realized that they could also apply DocAI’s enterprise technology to users’ personal documents, which led to the creation of Stack.

With the Stack app, initially available for Android, users can take a photo of a document and the app will automatically name it and “stack” it into the correct category — like Vehicles, Banking, IDs, Receipts, Home, or Bills. Users can also star their most important scans for quicker access.

While the ability to quickly digitize documents by photographing them isn’t new — Microsoft has offered Office Lens for years, for example —  Stack will also be able to identify key information from within the documents, like the “due date” on a bill, the “total amount due” or “account number.” It can then pull that info out to make it easier to find later on.

The app additionally allows users to search through the full text of the documents, not just the title, to find information they need. To keep the items protected, Stack’s documents can be secured by either your fingerprint or face scan, similar to how Google Drive works today. And Drive users can have all their scans automatically synced over to Google Drive.

Google says the app is currently available on Android, as a free download with no in-app purchases.