Amazon is rolling out a new experience for its Fire TV platform that puts more focus on subscription-free streaming and other live content. The company today announced several new services are being integrated into its suite of Live features, including Xumo and its own IMDb TV and Amazon news app. The company also soon plans to add Plex, it notes.
All four of the services are available for free with ads and don’t require a subscription, Amazon says. These channels and their content will appear in Fire TV’s Live tab in the “On Now” rows, as well as in the Universal Channel Guide on the Fire TV app.
With the additions, Amazon says there are now over 400 live streaming channels from across 20 providers that can be accessed from Fire TV’s live channel guide — including services like YouTube TV, Sling TV, Tubi, Pluto TV, Philo, Prime Video Channels, Prime Video Live Events (like Thursday Night Football), and more.
Amazon also notes that more than 200 of those channels are available for free with ads, and don’t need a subscription to watch.
Free, live streaming content is becoming a battleground for both Amazon and Roku, the top two streaming media platforms in the U.S. But they’re taking different approaches to the format.
Amazon’s section showcasing free, live content has become more of a part of its overall Fire TV interface, instead of a separate channel you have to launch. This speaks to Amazon’s design philosophy with Fire TV, whose interface largely resembles that of a streaming service.
“We’ve always taken a content-forward approach when designing Fire TV. When you turn on your TV, you’re going to see shows, movies, and sports — not just rows of apps,” said VP & GM of Amazon Fire TV, Sandeep Gupta. “This philosophy extends to our approach to live content. We’re continuing to invest heavily in Live TV and so are our content partners. We’re expanding that today with the addition of new integrations, Alexa capabilities, and enhanced content discovery mechanisms,” he added.
Meanwhile, Roku offers its own hub with always-on free movies and TV shows, called The Roku Channel, which helps to serve as a starting point for cord cutters who are looking for something to watch after they’ve ditched traditional pay TV. But unlike Fire TV, Roku’s design is, in fact, “rows of apps.” This makes its interface simple to use and less cluttered — something many people seem to prefer. Here, The Roku Channel is just another app to launch, not a part of the Roku interface.
Roku also makes The Roku Channel available online and as a standalone mobile app, just like other free streaming services. And this week, it integrated most of The Roku Channel’s free content with its main Roku.com website, in order to reach more consumers.
Separately, Fire TV offers its own app, but limits itself to live content, not on-demand, ad-supported shows and movies.
In addition to today’s newly announced live TV integrations, Amazon also says its live TV programs are now Alexa-enabled.
That means you can say things like “Alexa, play Good Morning America” or “Alexa, play the Seahawks game,” to launch a specific live TV program by name. This will work with the Alexa Voice Remote, on the Fire TV Cube, and with Fire TVs paired with an Echo device.
Live TV programs will also appear in the “App Peak” (hover) feature on the newly updated Fire TV interface. This feature will show you what’s on a given channel when you hover over it in the main navigation, and works on Fire TV Stick (3rd gen.) and Fire TV Stick Lite, for the time being.
As a result of its expansions and live TV integrations — not to mention the pandemic that’s kept people at home for entertainment — Amazon says that engagement with live streaming apps on Fire TV has more than doubled in the last 12 months, up by over 130%.
Amazon says the new features are rolling out today to Fire TV devices.
Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
Our startup is planning on registering an international student employee in this year’s H-1B lottery. This will be our first H-1B.
Can you help demystify the H-1B process and provide any tips? We also want to hire an Australian and transfer their E-3. How quickly can this be done?
— Plucky in Pleasanton
Dear Plucky:
Thanks for your timely questions! There’s some great news for Australian citizens currently in the U.S. and looking for job transfers, amendments and extensions. Premium processing is now available for the E-3 working visa category! This means that transfers, changes of status, and extensions of status for Australians in the U.S. seeking an E-3 can now obtain adjudications from USCIS in as little as 15 days, making it much easier to hire an Australian who is currently in the U.S. for a new role. Go for it!
On the topic of H-1Bs, the registration period for this year’s H-1B lottery will open at 9 a.m. PST on March 9 and will close at 9 a.m. on March 25. Startups need to make sure they’re registering anybody they want to sponsor during this window. Take a listen to my recent podcast on H-1B Lottery Planning, Part 1 and Part 2, for a general explanation of how this year’s process will work and how best to prepare.
Planning is key for implementing a successful immigration strategy. As always, I suggest you consult with an experienced immigration attorney ASAP to help get organized for registering your H-1B candidate for the March lottery and doing as much prep work as possible so that you can put together a strong H-1B petition in the event your candidate is selected in the lottery.
An attorney will also be up to date on all the recent changes to immigration policy, such as USCIS rescinding a Trump-era policy that went into effect in 2017 that effectively made computer programming positions ineligible for an H-1B visa. You will also want to discuss backup options for the international student employee if they are not selected in this year’s lottery.
Recently, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced it will delay until next year the plan to shift from a random H-1B lottery to a wage-based one that would have selected registrants who would be paid the highest wage for their position and location. In January, the previous administration had finalized the rule implementing the wage-based lottery. The latest announcement ended weeks of speculation whether USCIS under the Biden administration would retain a wage-based H-1B allocation process, which falls in line with President Biden’s presidential campaign platform.
The random H-1B lottery in March means that H-1B candidates with the same education level who will be paid more will have no greater advantage than those being paid less. However, next year that may not be the case.
Regardless of whether there’s a random or wage-based lottery, individuals with a master’s or higher degree from a U.S. university will continue to have the best chance of being selected in the H-1B lottery. The annual cap on H-1Bs remains at 85,000 and of those, 20,000 H-1Bs are reserved for individuals with a master’s degree or higher from a U.S. university. USCIS randomly selects enough registered candidates from the entire pool of registrants to reach the 65,000 regular H-1B cap first. Then it randomly selects another 20,000 registered candidates holding a U.S. master’s degree or higher, in what is called the advanced-degree cap exemption. Therefore, individuals with a U.S. advanced degree have two chances to be selected. To be eligible, your international student employee must have earned their advanced degree from an eligible and accredited U.S. institution by the time the H-1B petition is filed.
After the online registration period closes on March 25, USCIS will conduct a random computerized selection of registrations and will notify those selected by March 31. A completed H-1B petition must be filed within 90 days of being notified that the H-1B candidate was selected in the lottery, which means the filing deadline will be June 30.
In order to register your candidate for the H-1B lottery, your company will need to set up an online USCIS account if it does not already have one. This can be done at any time between now and the end of the registration period. Your attorney can help you with this and the online registration process.
For the online registration process, your company will have to provide the following information:
Full legal name of the candidate.
Gender.
Date of birth.
Country of birth.
Country of citizenship.
Passport number.
If the candidate is eligible for inclusion in the U.S. advanced-degree cap.
In addition, your company will have to pay the $10 registration fee, which can be submitted by entering a credit card, debit card, checking or savings account directly into the H-1B registration portal.
Tips for preparing
Generally, your startup and your H-1B candidate should start assembling documents you will need to submit. Your startup will need to get its tax identification number verified by the U.S. Department of Labor to prove that your startup is capable of sponsoring an individual for an H-1B. This needs to be done before your company can submit a Labor Condition Application (LCA), which is also sent to the Labor Department. An approved LCA must be submitted with your H-1B petition to USCIS. In addition to your startup’s tax ID, it will need the following:
If your startup formed recently, articles of incorporation, pitch deck, business plan, term sheet, cap tables.
Documentation showing your company can pay the prevailing wage for the H-1B candidate’s position and location: bank statements, tax returns, other financial documents.
Documents to prove your company is operating within the normal course of business, including marketing materials, company reports, screenshots of the company website.
Job offer letter to the H-1B candidate, including job title, detailed duties, benefits, salary and start date.
Minimum requirements for the position.
Your H-1B candidate will need:
An up-to-date resume.
Originals of diplomas, certificates, and transcripts (also scanned copies).
Past immigration documents, such as Form I-20 (certificate of eligibility for F-1 student status) or Form DS-2019 (certificate of eligibility for J-1 status.
Translations of any documents not in English along with a certified translation document.
As of now, premium processing for H-1B petitions remains available. Currently, USCIS is severely backlogged in all case types, so I often suggest using it, depending on the H-1B candidate’s start date and current geographic location. With premium processing, which is an optional service for a $2,500 fee, USCIS guarantees it will make a decision on a case within 15 days. If USCIS approves your H-1B petition, the earliest the international student employee can begin working under the H-1B visa is Oct. 1, 2022, which is the first day of the federal government’s new fiscal year.
Fingers crossed for you in this year’s H-1B lottery
All the best,
Sophie
Have a question for Sophie? Ask it here. We reserve the right to edit your submission for clarity and/or space.
The information provided in “Dear Sophie” is general information and not legal advice. For more information on the limitations of “Dear Sophie,” please view our full disclaimer. You can contact Sophie directly at Alcorn Immigration Law.
Sophie’s podcast, Immigration Law for Tech Startups, is available on all major platforms. If you’d like to be a guest, she’s accepting applications!
TC Early Stage: The premier how-to event for startup entrepreneurs and investors
From April 1-2, some of the most successful founders and VCs will explain how they build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios.
At TC Early Stage, we’ll cover topics like recruiting, sales, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session includes ample time for audience questions and discussion.
As a devoted coffee drinker I was enthused by the idea of Bottomless. The Y Combinator-backed startup sends its users coffee as they run low so that they never run out of the Magic Juice of Life. What could be better?
Because life is somewhat funny, after signing up for its service the company reached out to share that it had raised a Series A. So I got on the phone with Liana Herrera, the company’s co-founder, to chat about the startup, which is part coffee-sourcing engine, part subscription/e-commerce play and part hardware effort.
So before we talk about its Series A, let’s work better to understand what Bottomless is building, and how it works.
What’s Bottomless?
Born from its founders’ issues ordering the right amount of Soylent when they actually needed it, and wondering why there wasn’t a better way to subscribe to goods consumed on a regular basis, Herrera uncovered the idea for Bottomless.
Today the product works by letting users pick the type of coffee they are interested in, be it caffeine level, price and the like. The company then provides customers with a small digital scale that they connect to their home internet. And then as users consume coffee that Bottomless sends them, placing the bag on the hardware in between uses, the scale notes how much is left and orders more before they run out.
A Bottomless scale, via the company as my kitchen lighting is bad.
You can set the sensitivity of the scale, asking it to either be ambitious in keeping you from running out of beans or ground coffee, or more relaxed. As I write to you today, I think that my third bag of decaf has arrived. It’s a neat system.
And from a business perspective, the Bottomless model has plusses. I honestly do not recall the price range of coffee that I picked, and do not know how much I am actually paying Bottomless at the moment. But I do know that having different types of coffee arrive at the house as I run low is pretty damn cool.
To make that happen, however, is not easy. The startup’s business is a little complex. Before and even after Bottomless went through Y Combinator back in 2019, the company hand-built its coffee-weighing scales. Herrera told TechCrunch that the old Silicon Valley saw that hardware is hard is in fact an understatement. After all the soldering she described during an interview, I believe her.
Still, after finishing the accelerator program the company managed to grow in 2019 by what Herrera said was around 10x. That customer expansion allowed the company to order bulk hardware from China in early 2020. After its first production run finished — a few thousand units — COVID-19 shut down that country’s supply chain. Happily for the startup, by the time COVID-19 had taken over America, the Chinese economy opened up and production could begin again.
Per the company, Bottomless scaled another 5-7x in 2020. An October 2020 CNN piece notes that the company had around 750 customers in late 2019, and some 6,000 by the time of publication. Herrera wants to massively expand that number, telling TechCrunch that she’d like to grow by 10x again this year, and that 5x expansion was the lower-end of her expectations.
Powering that growth are a host of coffee companies that Bottomless works with. Those companies handle roasting the beans and sending them to different Bottomless customers. So that no one reaches a zero-coffee state. And dies. Or whatever happens when one actually runs out of coffee.
The startup told TechCrunch that there are some 500 roasters on their wait list, implying that it will have the capacity to take on more customers this year.
Despite all the growth, the company still has some edges to refine. Setting up Wi-Fi on my scale wasn’t super-simple, for example. Herrera did note that her firm has a new scale coming out in the next three months. That could lower the difficulty barrier for new customers. Still, with 6,000 customers last October ordering three to four bags of coffee monthly, per Herrera’s estimate, the company had reached a comfortable seven-figure GMV run-rate before 2021 began.
For coffee roasters who may have seen their customer base slow during the pandemic, and consumers increasingly willing to dive into e-commerce, the company’s model could have long-term legs. Which brings us to the investors making that bet.
The round
Bottomless raised a $4.5 million Series A in January of 2021. It’s a smaller A than we tend to see in recent years, but Herrera said that her company has always been scrappy, which we take to mean that it has a history of being frugal. Patrick OShaughnessy led the round.
TechCrunch asked if the $4.5 million was a lot of money for the startup, as we didn’t have a clear picture at the time of its fundraising history. Herrera said that Bottomless has gotten to where it is today on just $2 million. So, the Series A is more than double all the money that the company as raised to date. It’s a lot of money, in other words.
Besides the new scale design, when asked about what the company intends to do with its funds, Herrera detailed the type of person she’s looking to hire — namely intellectually flexible folks who are informal, scrappy and very hack-y. More staff, in other words.
Let’s see how far Bottomless can get with its new check. Apparently I will be helping its KPIs for the foreseeable future as a customer.
May Habib is co-founder and CEO of Writer.com, an AI writing assistant for teams that helps everyone at a company write with the same style, terminology and brand voice. She graduated with high honors from Harvard, is a member of the World Economic Forum and is a Fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.
You have just 170 seconds. Weeks or even months of working on your pitch deck could come down to the 170 seconds (on average) that investors spend looking at it.
“Investors see a lot of pitches,” VC and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman noted. “In a single year, the classic general partner in a venture firm is exposed to around 5,000 pitches … and ends up doing between zero and two deals.”
With all that pressure to make an impact quickly, founders spend an incredible amount of time on the design of their slides. Less consideration, however, is usually spent on the words on the slide. That’s a mistake, especially when you only have 170 seconds.
When not used intentionally, the words in your deck can be distracting or downright off-putting. We used what we know about language and healthy communication from the millions of documents we’ve processed at Writer to come up with 11 words and phrases to remove from your VC pitch deck:
Negative associations
1. “runway”
Pitching VCs is a balancing act: You want to position your idea in the best light, but also show that you’ve thought things through. However, volunteering certain types of information can have the opposite effect. Don’t write: I’m seeking $X in funding to provide Y months of runway. You certainly need to show how you’re going to use the funding you’re asking for, but you don’t want to frame things in terms of runway in a pitch deck. The word is associated with a looming cash-out date, which can put an investor in a negative state of mind.
This HappySignal slide is a solid example of keeping your messaging positive and using uplifting language.
2. “exit strategy”
Don’t write: Our exit strategy is… Yes, thinking through your business means knowing how you’ll handle worst-case and best-case scenarios. But putting exit strategy in your deck can only get investors thinking about the inherent risks. You want them focused on the opportunity. You need to know what to say when the topic comes up — just don’t volunteer the information on a slide.
Clichés
3. “just X percent”
A pitch deck is a tool to show VCs why your idea merits investment. Using clichés can work against that goal. Don’t write: If we could capture X percent of the market… It’s not only a cliché, it’s wishful thinking — not a plan. Keep the text on your slides grounded in relevant facts and figures. Other clichés to cut include: the Amazon of X, imagine a future, and moving Y to blockchain.
At an online event, Google today announced Flutter 2, the newest version of its open-source UI toolkit for building portable apps. While Flutter started out with a focus on mobile when it first launched two years ago, it spread its wings in recent years and with version 2, Flutter now supports web and desktop apps out of the box. With that, Flutter users can now use the same codebase to build apps for iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux and the web.
“The big thing that justifies the major version number shift is, of course, the availability of web and desktop support,” Flutter product lead Tim Sneath told me. “And that’s just a fairly profound pivot. It’s rare for products that you suddenly have all these additional endpoints.”
Image Credits: Google
He noted that because of Flutter’s open-source nature, web and desktop support had been “cooking in the open” for a while, so the addition of these endpoints isn’t a surprise. A lot of that work in getting these new platforms ready for the 2.0 release involved getting the performance up to par on these new platforms.
It’s worth noting, though, that Flutter desktop support is still behind an early-release flag in Flutter’s stable release channel and Google says developers should think of it as a “beta snapshot.” Web support, however, has transitioned from beta to stable and has become just another target for building apps with Flutter.
Image Credits: Google
On the web platform, specifically, Sneath noted that the team deliberately started out with a very standard, DOM-centric approach. But while that worked fine, it also meant performance was held back by that, especially for more advanced features. Over the course of the last year or so, the team started working on what it calls Canvas Kit. This WebAssembly-based project takes the same Skia graphics engine that powers Android and Chrome itself and makes it available to web apps.
“What that’s meant is that we can now essentially bypass the core HTML — sort of the document-centric parts of the web platform — and really use the app-centric parts of the web platform without leaving [behind] things like auto-complete of text or passwords and all the things that keep the web feeling very unique,” Sneath said.
Image Credits: Google
On the desktop, Google is announcing that Canonical is going all-in on Flutter and making it the default choice of all its future desktop and mobile apps.
Microsoft, too, is expanding its support for Flutter and working with Google on Windows support for Flutter. Given Microsoft’s interest in Android, that’s maybe no huge surprise, and indeed, Microsoft today is releasing contributions to the Flutter engine to help support foldable Android devices.
In total, Google notes, there are now over 15,000 packages for Flutter and Dart from companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, Huawei, Alibaba, eBay and Square.
As always, there are dozen of other smaller updates to Flutter in this update, too.
Looking ahead, Sneath noted that the Flutter team plans to spend more time on Flutter as a framework for embedded devices and other somewhat non-traditional platforms. He also noted that the team is interested in how Flutter can help power ambient computing experiences.
“As we think about the ambient computing worlds where there are these core premises behind the ambient computing aspects — things like: can it be searched easily? Can people make money off of the apps that they build and do it in a responsible way? We’re building support for those kinds of services. Better analytics, better ads frameworks, connectivity into things like Firebase and Google Cloud, so that people can not just take advantage of Flutter but the broader ecosystem services that Google provides,” Sneath explained.
Postscript helps Shopify stores stay in touch with customers via SMS, with a focus on keeping everything opt-in, legally compliant, and spam free. The company raised $4.5M back at the end of 2019; this morning it’s announcing it has raised a $35M Series B.
The company has grown pretty rapidly over the last year. When we last checked in with them in December of 2019, they had 14 employees and around 530 customers; today, they’re at 61 employees with over 3,500 customers.
Their vision for the product has grown a bit over the last year as well. Initially envisioned as more of a one-way broadcasting for Shopify stores to market to existing customers (“Look! We’ve got new shoes in stock!”), they’re now working on expanding into more two-way interactions, enabling customers to do things like re-orders, subscription management, and reviews through SMS.
As before, Postscript is compatible exclusively with Shopify stores. Behind the scenes they’ve been building out an API to allow deeper integrations into other Shopify plugins — but still, they’re all about Shopify merchants for now.
“We’re still focused exclusively there,” Postscript co-founder Alex Beller tells me. “We think it’s kind of our secret sauce, honestly, because we go so deep with the data and the ecosystem. There’s just a lot of tiny accumulating advantages there. It’s also the platform that’s growing the fastest in e-commerce, so it’s been a good place to be.”
While the company’s December 2019 funding was a seed round, co-founder Adam Turner tells me that between the size of the round and the revenue the company is seeing, they’ve skipped the A round and have structured this one as a Series B.
The round was led by Greylock, and backed by YC, 1984vc, Ali Capital, Elephant VC, and Larry Fitzgerald. As part of the deal, Greylock partners Sarah Guo and Mike Duboe will be joining Postscript’s board.
GSV Ventures, co-founded by Deborah Quazzo and Michael Cohn, has raised $180 million in its second fund, exclusively focused on backing edtech startups across the globe. The startup now manages $277 million in cumulative assets, inclusive of its debut fund that was closed in 2016.
The new fund will let GSV invest in 13 core holdings, with an average check size of $15 million. The firm reserves up to $20 million per position for follow-on capital. It will invest in seed, Series A and late growth-stage opportunities.
While edtech was certainly spotlighted by the pandemic’s impact on the adoption of remote education, GSV Ventures is a case study in what happens when you invest in a category before it has generalist eyes on it. The first fund had three of its largest positions in Coursera, which is planning to go public this year; Course Hero, which was valued at $1.1 billion last year; and ClassDojo, which finally hit profitability after spending eight years focusing on customer growth instead of monetization.
The firm was also an early believer in Nearpod, which exited for $650 million in an all-cash deal in February 2021. Quazzo, who contributed her angel portfolio into the fund, says that this gives the firm 10 exits under its belt to date.
GSV Ventures began around the same time as other exclusively-edtech funds launched, such as Reach Capital, Learn Capital and Owl Ventures. These funds have all closed new capital in the wake of the coronavirus, with $165 million, $132 million and $585 million, respectively.
The biggest change between GSV Ventures’ debut fund and Fund II is the opportunity that Quazzo seeds internationally. Fund 1 only had one investment outside the United States, and Fund II already has holdings in Capetown, Croatia, Jordan, as well as, Quazzo confirms, six incoming investments split between Indonesia and India.
“There are very important businesses being built in these markets with missions to democratize and improve the delivery of learning at scale to all people,” Quazzo tells TechCrunch. To date, GSV Ventures’ portfolio has 37% female founders and 43% people of color.
While there was a four-year gap between Fund I and Fund II, GSV’s ability to back edtech startups with an ambitious trajectory hasn’t gone unnoticed. Its third fund, already mid-raise, will have its first close in the next few months.
A little over thirteen years ago, Shai Agassi, a promising software executive who was in line to succeed the chief executive at SAP, then one of the world’s mightiest software companies, left the company he’d devoted the bulk of his professional career to and started a business called Better Place.
That startup promised to revolutionize the nascent electric vehicle market and make range anxiety a thing of the past. The company’s pitch? A network of automated battery swapping stations that would replace spent batteries with freshly charged ones.
Agassi’s company would go on to raise nearly $1 billion (back when that was considered a large sum of money) from some of the world’s top venture capital and growth equity firms. By 2013 it would be bankrupt and one of the many casualties of the first wave of cleantech investing.
Now serial entrepreneurs John de Souza and Khaled Hassounah are reviving the battery swapping business model with a startup called Ample and an approach that they say solves some of the problems that Better Place could never address at a time when the adoption of electric vehicles is creating a far larger addressable market.
In 2013, there were 220,000 vehicles on roads, according to data from Statista, a number which has grown to 4.8 million by 2019.
Ample has actually raised approximately $70 million from investors including Shell Ventures, the Spanish energy company Repsol, and the venture capital arm of the $10 billion money manager, Moore Capital Management. That includes a $34 million investment first reported back in 2018, and a later round from investors including Japan’s energy and metals company, Eneos Holdings that closed recently.
“We had a lot of people that either said, I somehow was involved in that and was suffering from PTSD,” said de Souza, of the similarities between his business and Better Place. “The people who weren’t involved read up about it and then ran away.”
For Ample, the difference is in the modularization of the battery pack and how that changes the relationship with the automakers that would use the technology.
“The approach we’ve taken… is to modularize the battery and then we have an adapter plate that is the structural element of the battery that has the same shape of the battery, same bolt pattern and same software interface. Even though we provide the same battery system.. .it’s same as replacing the tire,” said Hassounah, Ample’s co-founder and chief executive. “Effectively we’re giving them the plate. We don’t modify the car whatsoever. You either put a fixed battery system or an Ample battery plate. We’re able to work with the OEMS where you can make the battery swappable for the use cases where this makes a lot of sense. Without really changing the same vehicle.”
Ample’s currently working with five different OEMs and has validated its approach to battery swapping with nine different car models. One of those OEMs also brings back memories of Better Place.
It’s clear that the company has a deal with Nissan for the Leaf thanks to the other partnership that Ample has announced with Uber. Ample’s founders declined to comment on any OEM relationships.
It’s clear that Ample is working with Nissan because Nissan is the company that inked a deal with Uber earlier this year on zero-emission mobility. And Uber is the first company to use Ample’s robotic charging stations at a few locations in the Bay Area, the company said. This work with Nissan echoes Better Place’s one partnership with Renault, another arm of the automaker, which proved to be the biggest deal for the older, doomed, battery swapping startup.
Ample says it only takes weeks to set up one of its charging pods at a facility and that the company’s charging drivers on energy delivered per mile. “We achieve economics that are 10% to 20% cheaper than gas. We are profitable on day one,” said Hassounah.
Uber is the first step. Ample is focused on fleets first and is in talks with multiple, undisclosed municipalities to get their cars added to the system. So far, Ample has done thousands of swaps, according to Hassounah with just Uber drivers alone.
The cars can also be charged at traditional charging facilities, Hassounah said, and the company’s billing system knows the split between the amount of energy it delivers versus another charging outlet, Hassounah said.
“So far, in the use cases that we have, for ride sharing it’s individual drivers who pay,” said de Souza. With the five fleets that Ample expects to deploy with later this year the company expects to have the fleet managers and owners pay for. charging.
Some of the inspiration for Ample came from Hassounah’s earlier experience working at One laptop per child, where he was forced to rethink assumptions about how the laptops would be used, the founder said.
“Initially i worked on the keyboard display and then quickly realized the challenge was in the field and developed a framework for creating infrastructure,” Hassounah said.
The problem was the initial design of the system did not take into account lack of access to power for laptops at children’s homes. So the initiative developed a charging unit for swapping batteries. Children would use their laptops over the course of the day and take them home, and when they needed a fresh charge, they would swap out the batteries.
“There are fleets that need this exact solution,” said de Souza. But there are advantages for individual car owners as well, he said. “The experience for the owner of a vehicle is after time the battery degrades. With ours as we put new batteries in the car can go further and further over time.”
Right now, OEMs are sending cars without batteries and Ample is just installing their charging system, said Hassounah, but as the number of vehicles using the system rises above 1,000, the company expects to send their plates to manufacturers, who can then have Ample install their own packs.
Currently, Ample only supports level one and level two charging, but won’t offer fast charging options for the car makers it works with — likely because that option would cannibalize the company’s business and potentially obviate the need for its swapping technology.
At issue is the time it takes to charge a car. Fast chargers still take between 20 and 30 minutes to charge up, but advances in technologies should drive that figure down. Even if fast charging ultimately becomes a better option, Ample’s founders say they view their business as an additive step to faster electric vehicle adoption.
“When you’re moving 1 billion cars, you need everything… We have so many cars we need to put on the road,” Hassounah said. “We think we need all solutions to solve the problem. As you think of fleet applications you need a solution that can match gas in charge and not speed. Fast charging is not available in mass. The challenge will not be can the battery be charged in 5 minutes. The cost of building charges that can deliver that amount of power is prohibitive.”
Looking beyond charging, Ample sees opportunities in the grid power market as well, the two founders said.
“Time shift is built into our economics… that’s another way we can help,” said de Souza. “We use that as grid storage… we can do demand charge and now that the federal mandate is there to feed into the grid we can help stabilize the grid by feeding back energy.. We don’t have a lot of stations to make a significant impact. As we scale up this year we will.”
Currently the company is operating at a storage capacity of tens of megawatts per hour, according to Hassounah.
“We can use the side storage to accelerate the development of swapping stations,” de Souza said. “You don’t have to invest an insane amount of money to put them in. We can finance the batteries in multiple ways as well as utilize other sources of financing.”
Ample co-founders John de Souza and Khaled Hassounah. Image Credit: Ample
The sub-category of soft robotics has transformed the way many think about the field. Oft-influenced by natural phenomenon, the technology offers a dramatically different approach than the sort of rigid structures we traditionally think of when we discuss robots.
Soft designs offer a number of benefits, including compliance, which has already seen a number of real-world applications in manufacturing and fulfillment. But like their more rigid cousins, soft robots have their limitations. As such, designers generally choose between one or the other for a given job — or, best-case scenario, design swappable parts.
A team at MIT’s CSAIL lab is exploring a technology that could make choosing less of a trade-off. The project has been in the works since 2017, though it’s still in the somewhat early stages — still largely the realm of computer simulation, though the details have been outlined in a new paper.
“This is the first step in trying to see if we can get the best of both worlds,” CSAIL post-doc James Bern said in a release.
In the project (or the simulated version, at least), the robot is controlled by a series of cables. Pulling on them in the right combination turns the soft structure into a hard one. The team uses the analogy of a series of muscles controlling the human arm — if the right ones are flexed, you can effectively lock a position in place.
The team will present their findings at a conference next month. For the time being, they’re currently working on a prototype to showcase how it operates in a real-world setting. Combining the two fields could go a ways toward building safer collaborative robots for interacting with human workers.
Tesla, Rivian, Lordstown Motors and Lucid Motors — potential rivals in the burgeoning EV market — are working together to pass laws that would allow direct sales in at least eight states with another batch of proposed legislation likely being introduced this year.
Passage of such legislation would clear the way for EV giants like Tesla, along with newcomers Lucid and Rivian, which have yet to bring a vehicle to market, to sell directly to consumers. However, Tesla’s cooperation could also cost the company its monopoly on direct sales in some states.
Tesla and a growing number of new EV companies have a different business model than legacy automakers like GM, Ford and Stellantis. Tesla sells vehicles through their own branded stores — similar to how Apple sells its products — and do not have franchised dealerships. The direct sales model has attracted the ire of auto dealers, who benefit from long-established rules in all 50 states that prevent manufacturers with existing franchisees from opening their own dealerships to compete with them. Tesla and other allies argue that because they don’t have franchise dealers, they should be allowed to sell directly to consumers.
“We support our other EV-only manufacturers and their desires to sell direct-to-consumers, to invest, to create jobs and to do that unfettered as we are allowed,” Thad Kurowski, senior policy manager at Tesla, said while testifying in the state of Washington during the House’s Consumer Protection and Business Committee. Washington is one of many states where such legislation is being considered. Tesla has six retail locations in the state.
Similar legislation is being considered in Connecticut, Nebraska, Georgia, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada. Some of these states ban all EV manufacturers from directly selling to customers; some only permit Tesla, at the exclusion of other companies, but cap the number of retail stores it can open.
It’s a rare moment of cooperation for EV manufacturers, companies that must contend not only with each other but with legacy automakers for market share. Relations between the companies have not always been so copacetic: Tesla last July filed a lawsuit against Rivian alleging theft of trade secrets and talent poaching. Rivian responded that two of the three claims in the case were nothing more than an attempt to smear its reputation.
Tesla is a veteran of battles with state legislatures over direct sales. At least a dozen states, including Arizona, Colorado and Utah have reversed bans that prevented Tesla from selling directly to consumers either through new legislation or via the courts.
Michigan, home to major automakers GM and Ford, has been a longtime battleground.
Former Gov. Rick Snyder signed a bill in 2014 that was initiated and backed by the Michigan Automobile Dealers Association, banning Tesla from selling directly to consumers in the state. Two years later, Tesla sued the state of Michigan when it denied Tesla a dealership license. The Michigan Legislature last December considered a bill that would have banned all direct sales except for Tesla, an arrangement that allowed the automaker to deliver cars to customers, so long as the vehicle sale and title transfer didn’t occur in the state. That special exception for Tesla was removed from the proposed legislation, a move that would have threatened what little progress it had in the state. At the end, though, the legislation died, leaving Tesla’s arrangement intact.
Lucid is leading the charge in some states where direct sales legislation is being considered, according to Daniel Witt, who worked at Tesla before joining the new EV entrant as a public policy lead. Witt emphasized the bills are the result of efforts from the coalition of EV companies, grassroots lobbying from EV owners and EV enthusiasts and consumer groups. The legislation has also found support from environmental and clean energy groups, which argue that consumer choice and ease of access are key to helping people transition away from internal combustion engine cars.
“Any situation where the door got closed behind Tesla was not a matter of trying to gain a market advantage so much as it was just a product of the negotiations in a given legislature,” Witt said. “By and large, whether it’s New York, or Washington or Connecticut, we’re all rowing in the same direction.”
In a statement to TechCrunch, the Washington State Auto Dealers Association said franchised dealers support the transition toward zero-emission vehicles and want to sell them at their locations. But it said the direct sale bill is a “battle of Main Street vs. Wall Street.”
“Electric vehicle manufacturers perpetuate [the] myth of the middleman when the reality is that they would bear the same costs if they built their own stores, but would ship their revenue to their billionaire investors out of state after the sale is made instead of reinvesting in the community,” the group said.
The organization pointed out that Rivian has garnered $500 million in funding from Ford.
“What would stop Ford from abandoning its dealer network, and shifting the profits dealers generate for the company out of Ford and into greater ownership of Rivian? Or GM from spinning off an EV subsidiary?” the group said in its statement.
EV manufacturers have a long legislative road ahead of them. Bills generally must clear legislative committees and receive majority votes from both the House and Senate before being sent to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.
