Austinites, watch out; another tech company is headed into town.

Just days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed during an interview that he has moved to Texas, and less than two weeks after HP Enterprises, a spin-out of one of the iconic Silicon Valley company Hewlett-Packard, announced that it is separately moving to Texas, yet another of the Bay Area’s best-known brands — Oracle —  is pulling up stakes and headed east to Texas, too.

The news was first reported by Bloomberg. The company confirmed the move in a statement sent to TechCrunch, saying that along with a “more flexible employee work location policy,” it has changed its corporate headquarters from Redwood Shores, Ca., to Austin. “We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work.”

A spokeswoman declined to answer more questions related to the move, but Oracle says that “many” of its employees can choose their office location, as well as continue to work from home part time or all the time.

Oracle already had an office in Austin, along with numerous other cities across the U.S., including L.A., Seattle, Denver, Orlando, and Burlington, Vt.

This story is developing. Check back for more updates.

You don’t have to buy into 5G conspiracy theories to think that you could do with a little less radiation in your life. One way of blocking radiation is a Faraday cage, but this is usually a metal mesh of some kind, making everyday use difficult. Researchers at Drexel University have managed to create a Faraday fabric by infusing ordinary cotton with a compound called MXene — meaning your tinfoil hat is about to get a lot comfier.

Faraday cages work because radiation in radio frequencies is blocked by certain metals, but because of its wavelength, the metal doesn’t even have to be solid — it can be a solid cage or flexible mesh. Many facilities are lined with materials like this to prevent outside radiation from interfering with sensitive measurements, but recently companies like Silent Pocket have integrated meshes into bags and cases that totally isolate devices from incoming signals.

Let’s be frank here and say that this is definitely paranoia-adjacent. RF radiation is not harmful in the doses and frequencies we get it, and the FCC makes sure no device exceeds certain thresholds. But there’s also the possibility that your phone or laptop is naively connecting to public Wi-Fi, getting its MAC number skimmed by other devices, and otherwise interacting with the environment in a way you might not like. And honestly… with the amount of devices emitting radiation right now, who wouldn’t mind lowering their dose a little, just to be extra sure?

That may be much easier to do in the near future, as Yury Gogotsi and his team at the Drexel Nanomaterials Institute, of which he is director, have come up with a way to coat ordinary textile fibers in a metallic compound that makes them effective Faraday cages — but also flexible, durable and washable.

The material, which they call MXene and is more of a category than a single compound, is useful in lots of ways, and the subject of dozens of papers by the team — this is just the most recent application.

“We have known for some time that MXene has the ability to block electromagnetic interference better than other materials, but this discovery shows that it can effectively adhere to fabrics and maintain its unique shielding capabilities,” said Gogotsi in a news release. You can see the fabric in action on video here.

Image Credits: Drexel University

MXenes are conductive metal-carbon compounds that can be fabricated into all sorts of forms: solid, liquid, even sprays. In this case it’s a liquid — a solution of tiny MXene flakes that adhere to the fabric quite easily and produce a Faraday effect, blocking 99.9% of RF radiation in tests. After sitting around for a couple years (perhaps forgotten in a lab cupboard) it kept 90% of their effectiveness, and the treated fabric can also be washed and worn safely.

You wouldn’t necessarily want to wear a whole suit of the stuff, but this would make it easier for clothing to include an RF-blocking pocket in a jacket, jeans or laptop bag that doesn’t feel out of place with the other materials. A hat (or underwear) with a layer of this fabric would be a popular item among conspiracy theorists, of course.

It’s still a ways from showing up on the rack, but Gogotsi was optimistic about its prospects for commercialization, noting that Drexel has multiple patents on the material and its uses. Other ways of infusing fabric with MXenes could lead to clothes that generate and store energy as well.

You can read more about this particular application of MXenes in the journal Carbon.

General Catalyst has made early bets on some of the biggest companies in tech today, including Airbnb, Lemonade and Warby Parker.

We sat down with Katherine Boyle and Peter Boyce, who co-lead the firm’s seed-stage investments, to discuss what they look for in founders, which sectors they’re most excited about and how business has changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This conversation is part of our broader Extra Crunch Live series, where we sit down with VCs and founders to discuss startup core competencies and get advice. We’ve spoken to folks like Aileen Lee, Mark Cuban, Roelof Botha, Charles Hudson and many, others. You can browse the full library of episodes here.

Check out our full conversation with Boyce and Boyle in the YouTube video below, or skim the text for the highlights.

Which personality traits are most important in founders

Katherine Boyle: I look for what I would call this obsessive trait, where they are learning more about the regulatory complications, where they are constantly trying to figure out how to solve a problem.

I’d say that the common theme among the founders that I support are that they have this sort of obsessive gene or personality, where they will go deeper and deeper and deeper. When we invest in these companies, it becomes very clear that they often have sort of a contrarian view of the industry. Maybe they are not industry-native. They come at it from a different perspective of problem solving. They’ve had to defend that thesis for a very, very long time in front of a variety of different customers and different people. In some ways, that makes them much stronger in terms of the way they approach problems.

Peter Boyce: I think the first would be being magnetic for talent. It ends up influencing the speed of learning and development. Really incredible founding teams that can be magnetic for talent and learning just kind of spirals out of control in really good ways over time. I really look for the speed and the sources of learning. And can folks be really intentional? Can they get the right set of advisors and teammates around them?

The second would be the personal connection to the problem space. It’s like there’s this kind of deep-seated source of energy and fuel that actually isn’t going to run out. Catherine and I’ve been lucky to work across a number of different particular thematic areas, but the thing they have in common is just this personal connection to how and why their business needs to exist. Because I just think that that fuel doesn’t run out, you know what I mean? Like, that’s renewable.

On fundraising and building trust remotely

Boyle: If you’re someone who’s comfortable presenting on Zoom, making connections on Zoom, or using Signal and using Twitter and being very online, then I 100% think that you can make investments, build community and build connections through digital worlds and digital platforms. If you really like that in-person connectivity, then you might consider staying in a tech hub, or you might consider sort of these distanced walks until things go back to normal.

This holiday season, TechCrunch readers can send an Extra Crunch annual membership as a gift to a friend, family member or co-worker for 25% off. 

The gifting feature can be found here.

Extra Crunch is our membership program that helps you spot technology trends and opportunities, build better startups and stay connected. It features thousands of articles, including weekly investor surveys, daily private market analysis and expert interviews on fundraising, growth, monetization and other work topics. Learn more about the types of articles in Extra Crunch here.

Membership also gets you access to our weekly video Q&A series Extra Crunch Live, exclusive newsletters, and an experience on TechCrunch.com that’s free of banner ads. A 20% discount for any TechCrunch event is also available exclusively for members. More on our 2021 events schedule can be found here.  

The discounted rate will only be available until the end of 2020, so don’t miss out on the savings. For questions about the deal, please contact our customer support team at extracrunch@techcrunch.com.

Give the gift of Extra Crunch here.

Not interested in gifting Extra Crunch? We have A TON of other ideas here in our holiday gift guide.

At the end of 2019, no one would have predicted what an unpredictable and difficult year it has been for both startups and VCs in the fundraising world. Now we are staring down the end of 2020 and looking toward what we all hope is a better, safer 2021. What will this new year bring? With an end-of-year sprint to close deals, the anticipation of a new presidential administration and the hope of a COVID-19 vaccine on the horizon, startups and VCs know that change is on the horizon — but how much of that change will be positive?

As 2020 proved, no one can say for sure what 2021 will bring, but I’d like to put a few predictions on the table based on DocSend’s data and research, including the DocSend Startup Index, as well as some trends I’ve seen and my own experiences. These predictions center around how we’ll fundraise post-pandemic, how the funding divide may widen for some, what fundraising activity could look like into 2021, a few sectors we think will fare well and will incorporate some tips on how to succeed in the new year, no matter what comes our way.

We’ll interact through a mix of the old and the new

The pandemic forced all of us to drastically change how we work and interact with colleagues and clients. When the pandemic subsides and vaccines are widely available, in-person meetings and gathering back at the office will definitely resume, but it’s safe to say the old ways of networking and fundraising won’t shift back 100%. Founders and VCs alike have navigated the ups and downs of remote networking and fundraising interactions and will stick to what works and what doesn’t.

Is traveling to a conference the best way for a founder to have a chance at meeting the VC who is right to support their business? Will a VC want to drive an hour through Bay Area traffic for an in-person status update meeting on their latest investment? Zoom fatigue aside, video conference calls do have some benefits — efficiency, no travel time — although not all meetings are best conducted virtually.

The extent to which businesses go in-person or stick to virtual meetings could depend directly on what round of fundraising they are working toward or have completed. Businesses in the pre-seed round might stick with more Zoom meetings in order to conserve resources.

Founders in the seed round will likely split between video and in-person meetings as they are under pressure to show traction in this round, as we found in our report on seed fundraising, yet will also need to conserve resources and time. For Series A, they might have to meet less in person because they have established relationships with their investors. Series B might see more in-person meetings as their business has reached a level of complexity that is difficult to communicate via a deck or video conference.

The funding divide may widen for those outside Silicon Valley

Benchmark, the storied venture firm, has brought aboard a fifth general partner: 29-year-old Miles Grimshaw, a Yale graduate who joins the outfit from Thrive Capital, where he similarly joined a team of four other partners back in 2013, helping then raise the firm’s fourth and fifth funds (per Forbes).

From his post as a general partner with New York-based Thrive, Grimshaw had sourced deals in some of today’s buzziest startups and served on their boards, including Lattice, Mapbox, Benchling and Airtable, getting to know fellow investors at Benchmark in the process.

He represented Thrive on the board of Benchling — whose software helps lab scientists manage their biotech research — with Eric Vishria, who joined Benchmark as a general partner in 2014.

Grimshaw also represented Thrive on the board of the cloud collaboration software company Airtable with Peter Fenton, who became the longest-serving general partner at Benchmark this year, as famed VC Bill Gurley began transitioning out of an active role at the firm. (Fenton was poached from Accel back in 2006.)

And Grimshaw has been serving on a board with Benchmark’s Sarah Tavel, who was herself poached by the firm in 2017, from Greylock. That company is Supergreat, a two-year-old, New York-based site for beauty enthusiasts that’s building a community of visitors who become reviewers, who then become shoppers

Supergreat is among Benchmark’s newest bets. It was announced earlier this month that Benchmark led the startup’s $6.5 million Series A round.

Before hiring Grimshaw, Benchmark’s newest general partner was Chetan Puttagunta, who joined the firm in 2018 from New Enterprise Associates, where he spent more than seven years.

Benchmark made it known this summer that it was looking to bring aboard a fifth partner, one who likely completes the firm’s roster for now. As Fenton told us in September when he sat down with us at our TechCrunch Disrupt event, Benchmark “can’t scale. When we’ve gotten above six partners, the firm doesn’t work so well.”

Fenton talked at some length about how Benchmark views the composition of its team, in fact. If you’re curious to learn more, you can watch that interview below.

It was an unprecedented year for [insert anything under the sun], and while plenty of tech verticals saw shifts that warped business models and shifted user habits, the gaming industry experienced plenty of new ideas in 2020. However, the loudest trends don’t always take hold as predicted.

This year, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon each leaned hard into new cloud-streaming tech that shifts game processing and computing to cloud-based servers, allowing users to play graphics-intensive content on low-powered systems or play titles without dealing with lengthy downloads.

It was heralded by executives as a tectonic shift for gaming, one that would democratize access to the next generation of titles. But in taking a closer look at the products built around this tech, it’s hard to see a future where any of these subscription services succeed.

Massive year-over-year changes in gaming are rare because even if a historically unique platform launches or is unveiled, it takes time for a critical mass of developers to congregate and adopt something new — and longer for users to coalesce. As a result, even in a year where major console makers launch historically powerful hardware, massive tech giants pump cash into new cloud-streaming tech and gamers log more hours collectively than ever before, it can feel like not much has shifted.

That said, the gaming industry did push boundaries in 2020, though it’s unclear where meaningful ground was gained. The most ambitious drives were toward redesigning marketplaces in the image of video streaming networks, aiming to make a more coordinated move toward driving subscription growth and moving farther away from an industry defined for decades by one-time purchases structured around single-player storylines, one dramatically shaped by internet networking and instantaneous payments infrastructure software.

But shifting gamers farther away from one-off purchases wasn’t even the gaming industry’s most fundamental reconsideration of the year, a space reserved for a coordinated move by the world’s richest companies to upend the console wars with an invisible competitor. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the most full-featured plays in this arena are coming from the cloud services triumvirate, with Google, Microsoft and Amazon each making significant strides in recent months.

The driving force for this change is both the maturation of virtual desktop streaming and continued developer movement toward online cross-play between gaming platforms, a trend long resisted by legacy platform owners intent on maintaining siloed network effects that pushed gamers toward buying the same consoles that their friends owned.

The cross-play trend reached a fever pitch in recent years as entities like Epic Games’ Fortnite developed massive user bases that gave developers exceptional influence over the deals they struck with platform owners.

While a trend toward deeper cross-play planted the seeds for new corporate players in the gaming world, it has been the tech companies with the deepest pockets that have pioneered the most concerted plays to side-load a third-party candidate into the console wars.

It’s already clear to plenty of gamers that even in their nascent stages, cloud-gaming platforms aren’t meeting up to their hype and standalone efforts aren’t technologically stunning enough to make up for the apparent lack of selection in the content libraries.

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2020 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’re here to help! We’ll be rolling out gift guides from now through the end of December. You can find our other guides right here.

For many of us, being home a lot more right now also means being online a lot more. It’s a great time to evaluate how you’re keeping your data safe — and to help others in your life do the same.

Whether it’s teaching them to use things like physical security keys or just convincing them to stop writing their passwords on sticky notes, there are LOTS of little ways to nudge your friends and family in a safer direction. We’ve put together an array of gift ideas that’ll help them keep things locked down without breaking the bank (and, if you’re the one they’d call to help clean up after a security incident, probably save you some time in the end.)

Much of what we wrote for our 2019 guide still holds true. There are some timeless security essentials that you can’t miss out on, and we’ve searched around for the best deals. But we also have a few more fun gift ideas up our sleeves for the holiday season.

This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission.

Timeless security essentials for your friends and family

(Images from top-left clockwise: Yubico, 1Password, Amazon, and Amazon)

A password manager subscription

Password managers are a real lifesaver. One strong, unique password lets you into your entire bank of passwords. They’re great for storing your passwords and other secrets, but also for encouraging you to use better, stronger, unique passwords. And because many are cross-platform, you can bring your passwords with you. Plenty of password managers exist — from LastPass, Lockbox, and Dashlane, to open-source versions like KeePass. Many are free, but a premium subscription often comes with benefits and better features. And if you’re a journalist, 1Password has a free subscription just for you.

Price: Many free, premium offerings start at $36 – $45 annually
Available from: 1Password | LastPass | Dashlane | KeePass

Don’t forget about a physical two-factor key

Your online accounts have everything about you and you’d want to keep them safe. A security key is a physical hardware device that offers far greater protections than a two-factor code going to your phone. A security key plugs into your USB port on your computer (or the charging port on your phone) to “prove” to online services, like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, that you are who you say you are. YubiKeys are by far our favorite and come in all shapes and sizes. The latest YubiKey 5 series has something for everyone, no matter what kind of devices they have. They’re also cheap. Google also has a range of its own branded Titan security keys, one of which also offers Bluetooth connectivity.

Price: From $25 to $55, depending on device type, from Yubico Store or Google Store

A webcam cover to protect your privacy

We’re all living through this pandemic together, and most of us are still working from home. If you, like me, have accidentally joined a video call by mistake, you’ll be more thankful for your webcam cover than you could ever know. Webcam covers slide open when you need to access your camera, and slides to cover the lens when you don’t. It’s that easy. You can buy webcam covers from practically anywhere — just make sure you get a thin cover that supports your device so as to not damage its display when you close the lid. You can support local businesses and non-profits — you can search for unique and interesting webcam covers on Etsy or from your favorite internet rights group.

Price: from $5 – $10.
Available from: Etsy | Electronic Frontier Foundation

A microphone blocker to prevent hot mics (and malware)

Now you have your webcam cover, what about your microphone? Just as hackers can tap into your webcam, they can also pick up on your audio. Microphone blockers contain a semiconductor that tricks your computer or device into thinking that it’s a working microphone, when in fact it’s not able to pick up any audio. Anyone hacking into your device won’t hear a thing. Some modern Macs already come with a new Apple T2 security chip which prevents hackers from snooping on your microphone when your laptop’s lid is shut. But a microphone blocker will work all the time, even when the lid is open.

Price: from $7 to $20 on Amazon

More gifts for the security and privacy minded

A Pi-hole to block pesky ads and online trackers

(Image: Pi-Hole)

Think of a Pi-hole as a “hardware ad-blocker.” A Pi-hole is a modified Raspberry Pi mini-computer that runs ad-blocking technology as a box that sits on your network. It means that everyone on your home network benefits from ad blocking. Online ads generate revenue for websites but are also notorious for tracking users across the web. Until ads can behave properly, a Pi-hole is a great way to capture and sinkhole bad ad traffic. The hardware may be cheap, but the ad-blocking software is free. Donations to the cause are welcome.

Price: from $35.
Available from: Pi-hole | Raspberry Pi

Get your computer or phone a privacy screen

(Image: Amazon)

How often have you seen someone’s private messages or documents as you look over their shoulder, or see them in the next seat over? It’s not as much of an issue when we’re all at home — but we’re also all getting pretty comfortable with having whatever on our screens right now, which might not be the best habit to develop. Privacy screens can help protect you from “visual hacking.” These screens make it near-impossible for anyone other than the device user to snoop at what you’re working on. And, you can get them for all kinds of devices and displays — including phones. But make sure you get the right size!

Price: from about $17 and up, depending on display size
Available from: Amazon

Find a perfect fit with authentic hacker apparel

(Image: Zero Day Clothing)

Ditch the stereotypical hacker hoodie, and get some decent hacker apparel instead. Zero Day Clothing has some excellent t-shirts and other clothing for your hacker or security-minded friends, from celebrating Diffie-Hellman encryption, fearing the botnet, or designing your own — there’s something for everyone. We’re particularly a fan because the company supports a ton of causes, from net neutrality all the way to freedom of speech and LGBTQ+ rights and fair access to knowledge and education.

Available from: Zero Day Clothing

A Raspberry Pi 400 computer for tinkering

(Image: Romain Dillet/TechCrunch)

The micro-computer maker has a new product, the Raspberry Pi 400, a personal computer kit built into a keyboard and mouse. Connect it to a display and you can get started almost immediately. The device is more powerful than a Chromebook, and allows you to build, develop, and tinker to your heart’s content.

Price: $70
Available from: Raspberry Pi

Test your hacker skills with the ‘Backdoors & Breaches’ card game

(Image: Black Hills Infosec)

Backdoors & Breaches is a security-focused card game, developed by Black Hills Infosec, designed to help you conduct incident response exercises while learning about attack tactics, tools, and techniques. It’s a great way to learn more about how to respond after a breach. Don’t worry if you can’t play in person any time soon — you can still play virtually, thanks to an active Discord channel.

Available from: Shopify

Ready to blast off and join thousands of attendees around the world at TC Sessions: Space 2020 on December 16-17? The event, focused on space technology and dedicated to helping early-stage startups succeed in this exciting yet daunting industry, features panel discussions and interviews with the top leaders, visionaries and makers on the planet.

Want to save $50? Buy your pass before Tuesday, December 15 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) to lock in the Late Registration price before they increase.

While you’ll find many of these brilliant experts speaking from the Main Stage, don’t miss the focused programming we have lined up for the Breakout Sessions. That’s where you’ll find our partners sharing their in-depth expertise on a range of topics. Check out these breakouts waiting to drop a galaxy’s worth of knowledge on you.

Wednesday, December 16

(all times in PST)

9:00 – 10:00 a.m.

Fast Money- SMC Space Ventures, AFWERX and Space Force Accelerators

Learn how SMC Space Ventures, AFWERX and Space Force Accelerators work together to connect startups to government organizations and resources in the space industry.

10:00 – 11:00 a.m.

Sponsored by SP8CEVC

Introducing the launch of the World’s First Space Technology and Human Longevity focused Rolling Fund in partnership with AngelList

Fireside chat with the General Partners and team from SP8CEVC covering the verticals of Space Technology and Human Longevity.

11:00 – 11:30 a.m.

Fast Money – Working with the Army to Operationalize Science for Transformational Overmatch

Learn about DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory and the xTech Program of prize competitions that accelerate innovative solutions that can help solve Army challenges.

11:30 – 12:30 p.m.

Pitch Feedback Session

Join us for a pitch feedback session open to all startups exhibiting at TC Sessions: Space 2020 moderated by TechCrunch staff.

1:00 – 1:50 p.m.

Sponsored by The Aerospace Corporation

University Showcase – Boldly Innovating in Space, for Space (Part One)

Technologies to Go Boldly in Space – For the past half century, space exploration and technology has been earth-centric. We’ve studied the earth, orbited the earth and sent images of distant places back to earth. In the coming decade, we’ll embark on a new commitment: We’re going to space to stay. We’re committing to space commerce, space habitation and space exploration in order to not just stay in space, but to extend our human footprint into this solar system. To be successful, we need bold people and new technology to build and deploy the next generation of space capabilities. We need to capture these space opportunities, avoid potential threats and deliver on the promise of a multi-planet human race. This session showcases our partners USC and MIT, as they provide insight into their space programs. They are joined by university partners UCLA, ASU and Caltech, showcasing a range of emerging space technologies. Working with the Aerospace Corporation, these emerging capabilities can be evaluated and integrated into government space-faring missions for communicating, navigating, and exploring in space with NASA, NOAA and the Air Force.

Thursday, December 17

9:00 – 9:30 a.m.

Cislunar Space: Building a Self-Sustaining Lunar Economy

We are standing on the threshold of a post-scarcity human future. Cislunar space, the area between the Earth and the Moon, holds the keys to a tremendous wealth of opportunities.

9:30 – 10:00 a.m.

Fast Money – Advancing Space Technology with NASA SBIR

Learn about the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs powered by NASA.

10:00 – 10:30 a.m.

Fast Money — NAVWAR SBIR/STTR Primer: The SBIR/STTR is a robust program designed to help small businesses address government needs while promoting commercialization. This session is dedicated to providing a primer on the program with tips on getting involved and getting engaged with the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR).

10:30 – 11:00 a.m.

Fast Money — Introduction to In-Q-Tel’s investing activities in the commercial space sector: In-Q-Tel is a strategic investment firm that works with the national security community of the United States. For 20 years, In-Q-Tel has served one mission: to deliver the most sophisticated strategic technical knowledge and capabilities to the U.S. government and its allies through its unique investment model. Over the past decade, In-Q-Tel has been one of the most active investors in the commercial space sector, with a broad investment thesis that touches many aspects of the sector. This session will provide an overview of In-Q-Tel as a whole, as well as a discussion of the firm’s activities in the commercial space sector.

11:00 – 11:30 a.m.

Fast Money – Enabling a dual-use business model with Defense Innovation Unit (DIU)

Learn how you can take a part of DIU’s development of on-demand access to space, persistent satellite capabilities and broadband space data transfer

11:30 – 12:30 p.m.

Starburst x TechCrunch — Pitch Me to the Moon: Starburst Aerospace and TechCrunch are teaming up to launch a pitch competition like no other – Pitch Me to the Moon. Think the Startup Battlefield, but for space. Ten promising early-stage space startups (selected by Starburst) will have an opportunity to present their innovations live to a panel of high-profile judges from across the industry.

1:00 – 1:50 p.m.

Sponsored by The Aerospace Corporation

University Showcase – Boldly Innovating in Space, for Space (Part Two)

Bold Missions  – For the past half century, space exploration and technology has been earth-centric. We’ve studied the earth, orbited the earth and sent images of distant places back to earth. In the coming decade, we’ll embark on a new commitment: We’re going to space to stay. We’re committing to space commerce, space habitation and space exploration in order to not just stay in space, but to extend our human footprint into this solar system. To be successful, we need bold people and new technology to build and deploy the next generation of space capabilities. We need to capture these space opportunities, avoid potential threats and deliver on the promise of a multi-planet human race. This session showcases our partners USC and MIT, as they provide insight into their space programs. They are joined by university partners UCLA, ASU and Caltech, showcasing a range of emerging space technologies. Working with the Aerospace Corporation, these emerging capabilities can be evaluated and integrated into government space-faring missions for communicating, navigating, and exploring in space with NASA, NOAA and the Air Force.

Whew, talk about a great lineup. You might say it’s out-of-this-world — which raises the question: Can you hear a rimshot in space? Don’t forget to peruse the rest of our programming in the event agenda and start planning your schedule now.

Pro Tip: Say goodbye to FOMO. Our virtual platform makes it easy to toggle between the Main Stage and Breakout Sessions. Plus, you’ll have access to video on demand, so you won’t miss a beat (excluding the Expo Ticket).

Remember, late registration savings end on Tuesday, December 15 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). We also offer discount passes for groups, students, and government, military and non-profit employees. Buy the pass that’s right for you today!

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.

Today, Twitter announced that it is acquiring Squad and that the team from the screen-sharing social app will be joining Twitter’s ranks. Squad’s co-founders, CEO Esther Crawford and CTO Ethan Sutin, and the rest of the team will be coming aboard inside Twitter’s design, engineering, and product departments, Twitter tells us. Crawford specifically notes that she will be leading a product in the conversations space.

What isn’t coming aboard is the actual Squad app, which allowed users to share their screens on mobile or desktop and simultaneously video chat, a feature that aimed to find the friend use case in screen-sharing beyond the enterprise use case of presenting. The app will be shutting down tomorrow, Twitter confirms, an unwelcome surprise for its user base largely made up of teen girls.

Twitter declined to share further terms of the deal.

Image via Twitter

The app’s functionality seems like a natural fit for the service, thought the company did not confirm whether any tech was coming aboard as part of the deal. Twitter hasn’t been keen to keep separate apps functioning outside of the core Twitter app. Vine was infamously shut down, upsetting users who likely later rallied behind TikTok, a massive success story and perhaps one of the biggest missed opportunities for American social media companies. Meanwhile, Periscope which has largely bumbled along over the years, is in a particularly fragile place with app code emerging just today that indicated an impending shutdown for the app.

Squad was notably partnered closely with Snap and was an early adopter of many of the company’s Snap Kit developer tools. Building so much of the app using Snap’s developer tools could have made porting the tech to Twitter’s infrastructure a more complicated task, especially when considering how often Snap Kit apps are tied quite closely to the Snapchat user graph.

Squad raised $7.2 million in venture capital from First Round, Y Combinator, betaworks, ex-TechCrunch editor Alexia Bonatsos’s Dream Machine and a host of other investors. Squad was in the right place at the right time in early 2020. When the pandemic first struck, CEO Esther Crawford told TechCrunch that usage of her app spiked 1100%.

Crawford spoke at length about the challenges of scaling a modern social app while avoiding the pitfalls of toxicity that so often seem to come with reaching new heights. In an interview with TechCrunch last year, she told us her team was “trying to learn from the best in what they did but get rid of the shit.”

In a Medium post, Crawford also took the opportunity of her startup’s exit to lobby investors to start backing more diverse founders.

“I hope that our exit will tip the scale a bit more toward convincing investors to put money into diverse teams because each success is another proof point that we, the historically under-capitalized and underestimated founders, are a good bet,” Crawford wrote in a Medium post. “Invest in women and people of color because we will make you money.”