Category: UNCATEGORIZED

HuffPost has a new owner, with its current parent company Verizon Media reaching an agreement to sell the site to BuzzFeed.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news and described this as a stock deal. Verizon Media is also making an investment in BuzzFeed and becoming a minority shareholder in the digital media company.

The deal also includes an agreement to syndicate content between the two companies while collaborating on advertising and creating a joint innovation group to explore other monetization opportunities.

As BuzzFeed’s press release notes, this deal brings HuffPost full circle, since BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti was also one of the founders of what was originally known as The Huffington Post.

“I have vivid memories of growing HuffPost into a major news outlet in its early years, but BuzzFeed is making this acquisition because we believe in the future of HuffPost and the potential it has to continue to define the media landscape for years to come,” Peretti said in a statement. “With the addition of HuffPost, our media network will have more users, spending significantly more time with our content than any of our peers.”

AOL acquired The Huffington Post for $315 million nearly a decade ago, just a few months after it acquired TechCrunch.

The acquisition was seen a major move into the world of journalism and digital media, but there have been a series of corporate changes since then, with AOL subsequently acquired by Verizon, Verizon also acquiring Yahoo then rebranding the combined organization first as Oath and then as Verizon Media (which still owns TechCrunch). Tim Armstrong, the executive behind the acquisition, left the company in 2018.

There have been on-and-of rumors of a HuffPost sale over the years. Last year, Verizon Media Guru Gowrappan said that the company was “not selling HuffPost” because it was “so core to our content.”

BuzzFeed is also searching for a new editor in chief at HuffPost. The position has been empty since Lydia Polgreen departed in March.

Micromobility company Lime says it has moved beyond the financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a milestone that seemed unthinkable earlier this year.

In short, the company is now largely profitable.

Lime said it was both operating cash flow positive and free cash flow positive in the third quarter — a first — and is on pace to be full-year profitable, excluding certain costs (EBIT), in 2021.

During the WSJ Future of Everything event Thursday, Lime CEO Wayne Ting painted a far rosier picture of the company’s future than one might have expected.

There was a time when Bird and Lime, competing domestic scooter rental companies, were raising capital at a torrid pace, fighting for market share, regulatory breathing room and sidewalk real estate. Then, the pandemic hit and the companies had to take shelter.

Lime underwent a round of layoffs in April, taking on capital from Uber the next month in a down-round that brought its valuation under the $1 billion mark. And as it announced in a blog post that TechCrunch reviewed before publication, it paused most of its operations for a month during the early COVID-19 days.

“It was certainly a very, very tough decision for us earlier this year and I know we weren’t the only company during COVID,” Ting said during the event. “I think it’s been in so many ways helpful to us to realize how hard these choices can be. We’re going to be growing headcount again. We’re going to do so in a careful way so that we’re not going have to make hard choices like the ones we made earlier this year.”

Now things are better, Lime says. Much better. Indeed, the company claims that it is the “first new mobility company to reach cash-flow positive for a full quarter.”

Cash flow positivity, in general, is an important threshold for a startup to reach as it implies that the company can largely self-fund from that point forward, limiting its dependency on external cash for survival.

Lime also claims that it “reached EBIT positive at the company level over the summer.” The specifics of the phrase “EBIT positive” are important. Was the company employing strict EBIT on its math and not discounting share-based compensation, or was it measuring using adjusted EBIT as many startups do, removing the cost of share-based compensation that shows up in GAAP results? According to the company the number did exclude share-based compensation, making the news slightly smaller.

Perhaps the most bullish data point from Lime is that it expects to be full-year profitable in 2021. TechCrunch asked for specifics because again how one measures profitability matters. It turns out, Lime is basing this projection on EBIT, as opposed to more traditional net income. For a startup this is not a surprising decision, but before we declare Lime fully ‘profitable,’ we’ll want some more GAAP metrics.

Still, it appears that Lime is not going to die, and is, importantly, putting capital into developing new products. The company provided the first example of that new product pipeline on Thursday with the launch of the Gen4 scooter in Paris. It also teased a so-called “third and fourth mode” in the first quarter of 2021 as well as the addition of a swappable battery.

The scooter company wouldn’t give TechCrunch much information about what these third and fourth modes will be. The first two modes are bikes and scooters, which leaves skateboards, cars, flying cars and boats?

Lime did give TechCrunch a little bit of clarification, stating that “move beyond,” means the company will be operating an additional mode, accessed through the Lime app, in line with its goal to serve any trips under five miles. These modes will build on the Lime Platform play, but this will be operated by Lime rather than a partner.

Lime has long discussed reaching profitability. Perhaps because it and its competitor Bird were infamous for their losses during their early-unicorn period.

By November of 2019, Lime was talking about reaching EBIT positivity in 2020. But the start of 2020 was not kind on the company, with 100 of its staff losing their jobs and 12 markets getting dropped. At the time TechCrunch wrote that “Lime is hoping to achieve profitability this year by laying off about 14% of its workforce and ceasing operations in 12 markets,” with the company itself writing at the time that “financial independence [was its] goal for 2020, and [that it was] confident that Lime will be the first next-generation mobility company to reach profitability.”

Depending on how you measure profitability, that could be true.

Things didn’t get easier for Lime later in the year. Its competitor Bird underwent layoffs, and Lime cut more staff in April. At the time, Lime said that it was focused on coming “back stronger than ever when this is over.”

The company is certainly in better shape than it was in April and May. So, how did Lime come back from the brink? In its own estimation, the company took time during its pause to “drill down on getting the business right, narrowing [its] focus and strengthening [its] fundamentals.” That might sound like corporate babble, but by taking a nearly full stop in its operating business, Lime could probably see a bit more clearly what was working and what was not. And with some cuts to what wasn’t, it could set up a future in which its operations were leaner, and more unit-economically positive.

And, now, here we are asking niggling questions about just what sort of profit Lime is really making. Instead of, you know, who might buy its leftover office furniture. It’s a nice turnaround.

Micromobility company Lime says it has moved beyond the financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a milestone that seemed unthinkable earlier this year.

In short, the company is now largely profitable.

Lime said it was both operating cash flow positive and free cash flow positive in the third quarter — a first — and is on pace to be full-year profitable, excluding certain costs (EBIT), in 2021.

During the WSJ Future of Everything event Thursday, Lime CEO Wayne Ting painted a far rosier picture of the company’s future than one might have expected.

There was a time when Bird and Lime, competing domestic scooter rental companies, were raising capital at a torrid pace, fighting for market share, regulatory breathing room and sidewalk real estate. Then, the pandemic hit and the companies had to take shelter.

Lime underwent a round of layoffs in April, taking on capital from Uber the next month in a down-round that brought its valuation under the $1 billion mark. And as it announced in a blog post that TechCrunch reviewed before publication, it paused most of its operations for a month during the early COVID-19 days.

“It was certainly a very, very tough decision for us earlier this year and I know we weren’t the only company during COVID,” Ting said during the event. “I think it’s been in so many ways helpful to us to realize how hard these choices can be. We’re going to be growing headcount again. We’re going to do so in a careful way so that we’re not going have to make hard choices like the ones we made earlier this year.”

Now things are better, Lime says. Much better. Indeed, the company claims that it is the “first new mobility company to reach cash-flow positive for a full quarter.”

Cash flow positivity, in general, is an important threshold for a startup to reach as it implies that the company can largely self-fund from that point forward, limiting its dependency on external cash for survival.

Lime also claims that it “reached EBIT positive at the company level over the summer.” The specifics of the phrase “EBIT positive” are important. Was the company employing strict EBIT on its math and not discounting share-based compensation, or was it measuring using adjusted EBIT as many startups do, removing the cost of share-based compensation that shows up in GAAP results? According to the company the number did exclude share-based compensation, making the news slightly smaller.

Perhaps the most bullish data point from Lime is that it expects to be full-year profitable in 2021. TechCrunch asked for specifics because again how one measures profitability matters. It turns out, Lime is basing this projection on EBIT, as opposed to more traditional net income. For a startup this is not a surprising decision, but before we declare Lime fully ‘profitable,’ we’ll want some more GAAP metrics.

Still, it appears that Lime is not going to die, and is, importantly, putting capital into developing new products. The company provided the first example of that new product pipeline on Thursday with the launch of the Gen4 scooter in Paris. It also teased a so-called “third and fourth mode” in the first quarter of 2021 as well as the addition of a swappable battery.

The scooter company wouldn’t give TechCrunch much information about what these third and fourth modes will be. The first two modes are bikes and scooters, which leaves skateboards, cars, flying cars and boats?

Lime did give TechCrunch a little bit of clarification, stating that “move beyond,” means the company will be operating an additional mode, accessed through the Lime app, in line with its goal to serve any trips under five miles. These modes will build on the Lime Platform play, but this will be operated by Lime rather than a partner.

Lime has long discussed reaching profitability. Perhaps because it and its competitor Bird were infamous for their losses during their early-unicorn period.

By November of 2019, Lime was talking about reaching EBIT positivity in 2020. But the start of 2020 was not kind on the company, with 100 of its staff losing their jobs and 12 markets getting dropped. At the time TechCrunch wrote that “Lime is hoping to achieve profitability this year by laying off about 14% of its workforce and ceasing operations in 12 markets,” with the company itself writing at the time that “financial independence [was its] goal for 2020, and [that it was] confident that Lime will be the first next-generation mobility company to reach profitability.”

Depending on how you measure profitability, that could be true.

Things didn’t get easier for Lime later in the year. Its competitor Bird underwent layoffs, and Lime cut more staff in April. At the time, Lime said that it was focused on coming “back stronger than ever when this is over.”

The company is certainly in better shape than it was in April and May. So, how did Lime come back from the brink? In its own estimation, the company took time during its pause to “drill down on getting the business right, narrowing [its] focus and strengthening [its] fundamentals.” That might sound like corporate babble, but by taking a nearly full stop in its operating business, Lime could probably see a bit more clearly what was working and what was not. And with some cuts to what wasn’t, it could set up a future in which its operations were leaner, and more unit-economically positive.

And, now, here we are asking niggling questions about just what sort of profit Lime is really making. Instead of, you know, who might buy its leftover office furniture. It’s a nice turnaround.

Facebook’s battle against misinformation will never be over at this rate, but that doesn’t mean the company has given up. On the contrary it is only by dint of constant improvement to its automated systems that it is able to keep itself even remotely free of hate speech and misinformation. CTO Mike Schroepfer touted the latest of those improvements today in a series of posts.

The changes are to the AI-adjacent systems the social network uses to nip the likes of spam, misleading news items, and racial slurs in bud — that is to say before anyone, including Facebook’s own content moderators, sees those items.

One improvement is in the language analysis systems Facebook employs to detect things like hate speech. This is one area, Schroepfer explained, that the company has to be extremely careful. False positives in the ad space (like that something seems scammy) are low-risk, but false positives taking down posts because they’re mistaken for hate speech can be serious issues. So it’s important to be very confident when making that determination.

Unfortunately hate speech and adjacent content can be really subtle. Even something that seems indisputably racist can be inverted or subverted by a single word. Creating machine learning systems that reflect the complexity and variety of language(s) is a task that requires exponentially increasing amounts of computing resources.

Linformer (“linear”+”transformer”) is the new tool Facebook created to manage the ballooning resource cost of scanning billions of posts a day. It approximates the central attention mechanism of transformer-based language models rather than calculating it exactly, but with few trade-offs in performance. (If you understood all that, I congratulate you.)

That translates to better language understanding but only marginally higher computation costs, meaning they don’t have to, say, use a worse model for a first wave and then only run the expensive model on suspicious items.

The company’s researchers are also working on the slightly less well-shaped problem of understanding the interaction of text, images, and text in images. Fake screenshots of TV and websites, memes, and other things often found in posts are amazingly difficult for computers to understand, but are a huge source of information. What’s more, a single changed word can completely invert their meaning while almost all the visual details remain the same.

Facebook is getting better at catching these in their infinite variety, Schroepfer said. It’s still very difficult, he said, but they’ve made huge strides in catching, for instance, COVID-19 misinformation images like fake news reports that masks cause cancer, even when the people posting them manipulate and change their look.

Deploying and maintaining these models is also complex, necessitating a constant dance of offline prototyping, deployment, online testing, and bringing that feedback to a new prototype. The Reinforcement Integrity Optimizer takes a new approach, monitoring the effectiveness of new models on live content, relaying that information to the training system constantly rather than in, say, weekly reports.

Determining whether or not Facebook can be said to be successful is not easy. On one hand, the statistics they publish paint a rosy picture of increasing proportions hate speech and misinformation taken down, with millions more pieces of hate speech, violent images, and child exploitation content removed versus last quarter.

I asked Schoepfer how Facebook can track or express their success or failure more accurately, since numbers increases might be due to either improved mechanisms for removal or simply larger volumes of that content being taken down at the same rate.

“The baseline changes all the time, so you have to look at all these metrics together. Our north star in the long run is prevalence,” he explained, referring to the actual frequency of users encountering a given type of content rather than whether it was preemptively removed or some such. “If I take down a thousand pieces of content that people were never going to see anyway, it doesn’t matter. If I take down the one piece of content that was about to go viral, that’s a massive success.”

Facebook now includes hate speech prevalence in its quarterly “community standards enforcement report,” and it defines it as follows:

Prevalence​ estimates the percentage of times people see violating content on our platform. We calculate hate speech prevalence by selecting a sample of content seen on Facebook and then labeling how much of it violates our hate speech policies. Because hate speech depends on language and cultural context, we send these representative samples to reviewers across different languages and regions.

And for its first measure of this new statistic:

From July 2020 to September 2020 was 0.10% to 0.11%. In other words, out of every 10,000 views of content on Facebook, 10 to 11 of them included hate speech.

If this number is not misleading, it implies that one in a thousand pieces of content online right now on Facebook qualifies as hate speech. That seems rather high. (I’ve asked Facebook for a bit more clarity on this number.)

One must question the completeness of these estimates as well — reports from war-torn areas like Ethiopia suggest that they are rife with hate speech that is inadequately detected, reported, and taken down. And of course the eruption of white supremacist and nationalist militia content and groups on Facebook has been well documented.

Schroepfer emphasized that his role is very squarely in the “implementation” side of things and that questions of policy, staffing, and other important parts of the social network’s vast operations are more or less out of his jurisdiction. Frankly that’s a bit of a disappointing punt by the CTO of one of the most powerful companies in the world, who seems to take these issues seriously. But one also wonders whether, had he and his teams not been so assiduous in pursuing technical remedies like the above, Facebook might have been completely snowed under with hate and fakery rather than being simply unavoidably shot through with it.

Facebook’s battle against misinformation will never be over at this rate, but that doesn’t mean the company has given up. On the contrary it is only by dint of constant improvement to its automated systems that it is able to keep itself even remotely free of hate speech and misinformation. CTO Mike Schroepfer touted the latest of those improvements today in a series of posts.

The changes are to the AI-adjacent systems the social network uses to nip the likes of spam, misleading news items, and racial slurs in bud — that is to say before anyone, including Facebook’s own content moderators, sees those items.

One improvement is in the language analysis systems Facebook employs to detect things like hate speech. This is one area, Schroepfer explained, that the company has to be extremely careful. False positives in the ad space (like that something seems scammy) are low-risk, but false positives taking down posts because they’re mistaken for hate speech can be serious issues. So it’s important to be very confident when making that determination.

Unfortunately hate speech and adjacent content can be really subtle. Even something that seems indisputably racist can be inverted or subverted by a single word. Creating machine learning systems that reflect the complexity and variety of language(s) is a task that requires exponentially increasing amounts of computing resources.

Linformer (“linear”+”transformer”) is the new tool Facebook created to manage the ballooning resource cost of scanning billions of posts a day. It approximates the central attention mechanism of transformer-based language models rather than calculating it exactly, but with few trade-offs in performance. (If you understood all that, I congratulate you.)

That translates to better language understanding but only marginally higher computation costs, meaning they don’t have to, say, use a worse model for a first wave and then only run the expensive model on suspicious items.

The company’s researchers are also working on the slightly less well-shaped problem of understanding the interaction of text, images, and text in images. Fake screenshots of TV and websites, memes, and other things often found in posts are amazingly difficult for computers to understand, but are a huge source of information. What’s more, a single changed word can completely invert their meaning while almost all the visual details remain the same.

Facebook is getting better at catching these in their infinite variety, Schroepfer said. It’s still very difficult, he said, but they’ve made huge strides in catching, for instance, COVID-19 misinformation images like fake news reports that masks cause cancer, even when the people posting them manipulate and change their look.

Deploying and maintaining these models is also complex, necessitating a constant dance of offline prototyping, deployment, online testing, and bringing that feedback to a new prototype. The Reinforcement Integrity Optimizer takes a new approach, monitoring the effectiveness of new models on live content, relaying that information to the training system constantly rather than in, say, weekly reports.

Determining whether or not Facebook can be said to be successful is not easy. On one hand, the statistics they publish paint a rosy picture of increasing proportions hate speech and misinformation taken down, with millions more pieces of hate speech, violent images, and child exploitation content removed versus last quarter.

I asked Schoepfer how Facebook can track or express their success or failure more accurately, since numbers increases might be due to either improved mechanisms for removal or simply larger volumes of that content being taken down at the same rate.

“The baseline changes all the time, so you have to look at all these metrics together. Our north star in the long run is prevalence,” he explained, referring to the actual frequency of users encountering a given type of content rather than whether it was preemptively removed or some such. “If I take down a thousand pieces of content that people were never going to see anyway, it doesn’t matter. If I take down the one piece of content that was about to go viral, that’s a massive success.”

Facebook now includes hate speech prevalence in its quarterly “community standards enforcement report,” and it defines it as follows:

Prevalence​ estimates the percentage of times people see violating content on our platform. We calculate hate speech prevalence by selecting a sample of content seen on Facebook and then labeling how much of it violates our hate speech policies. Because hate speech depends on language and cultural context, we send these representative samples to reviewers across different languages and regions.

And for its first measure of this new statistic:

From July 2020 to September 2020 was 0.10% to 0.11%. In other words, out of every 10,000 views of content on Facebook, 10 to 11 of them included hate speech.

If this number is not misleading, it implies that one in a thousand pieces of content online right now on Facebook qualifies as hate speech. That seems rather high. (I’ve asked Facebook for a bit more clarity on this number.)

One must question the completeness of these estimates as well — reports from war-torn areas like Ethiopia suggest that they are rife with hate speech that is inadequately detected, reported, and taken down. And of course the eruption of white supremacist and nationalist militia content and groups on Facebook has been well documented.

Schroepfer emphasized that his role is very squarely in the “implementation” side of things and that questions of policy, staffing, and other important parts of the social network’s vast operations are more or less out of his jurisdiction. Frankly that’s a bit of a disappointing punt by the CTO of one of the most powerful companies in the world, who seems to take these issues seriously. But one also wonders whether, had he and his teams not been so assiduous in pursuing technical remedies like the above, Facebook might have been completely snowed under with hate and fakery rather than being simply unavoidably shot through with it.

President-elect Joe Biden may have spent eight years in an administration that doted on the tech industry, but that long honeymoon, punctuated by four years of Trump, looks to be over.

Tech is on notice in 2020. The Russian election interference saga of the 2016 election opened the floodgates for social media’s ills. The subsequent years unleashed dangerous torrents of homegrown extremism and misinformation that either disillusioned or radicalized regular people. A cluster of tech’s biggest data brokers further consolidated power, buying up any would-be competitor they stumbled across and steamrolling everything else. Things got so bad that Republicans and Democrats, in uncanny agreement, are both pushing plans to regulate tech.

Suddenly, allowing the world’s information merchants to grow, unmolested, into towering ad-fed behemoths over the last decade looked like a huge mistake. And that’s where we are today.

Biden and big tech

Biden didn’t make attacking tech a cornerstone of his campaign and mostly avoided weighing in on tech issues, even as Elizabeth Warren stirred the big tech backlash into the campaign conversation. His attitude toward the tech industry at large is a bit mysterious, but there are some things we do know.

The president-elect is expected to keep the Trump administration’s antitrust case against Google on track, potentially even opening additional cases into Facebook, Amazon and Apple. But his campaign also leaned on former Google CEO Eric Schmidt for early fundraising, so the relationship to Google looks a bit more complex than the Biden team’s open contempt for a company like Facebook.

As Biden picked up the nomination and the months wore on, it became clear that Mark Zuckerberg’s chumminess with Trump’s White House was unlikely to continue into a Biden administration. By September, the Biden campaign had penned a scathing letter to Mark Zuckerberg denouncing Facebook as the “foremost propagator” of election disinformation, and that frustration doesn’t seem to have dissipated. His deputy communications director recently criticized Facebook for “shredding” the fabric of democracy. It appears that Facebook could come to regret the many decisions it’s made to stay in the Trump administration’s good graces over the last four years.

Still, it’s not doom and gloom for all tech — big tech isn’t everything. There are plenty of potential bright spots, from Biden’s climate plans (lack of Senate control notwithstanding), which could crack open a whole new industry and shower it in federal dollars, to his intention to revitalize the nation’s infrastructure, from telecommunications and transportation to energy-efficient housing. 

And antitrust legislation, usually framed as an existential threat to “tech” broadly, actually stands to benefit the startup scene, where the largest tech companies have walled off many paths to innovation with years of anti-competitive behavior. If Congress, states and/or the Justice Department manages to get anywhere with the antitrust actions percolating now — and there are many things percolating — the result could open up paths for startups that would prefer a more interesting exit than being bought and subsumed (best case) or shuttered (worst case) into one of five or so tech mega-companies.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is another wildcard. Hailing from tech’s backyard, Harris brings a distinctly Bay Area vibe to the office. Most interesting is Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West. West is Uber’s chief legal officer and played a prominent role in pushing for California’s Proposition 22, which absolved gig economy companies like Lyft and Uber from the need to grant their workers benefits afforded to full-time employees. Siding with organized labor, Harris landed on the other side of the issue.

The extent of her relationships in the tech world isn’t totally clear, but she apparently has a friendly relationship with Sheryl Sandberg, who was a frontrunner for a Treasury or Commerce position four years ago in the advent of a Hillary Clinton win. 

The Biden administration will also have all kinds of quiet ties to power players in the tech world, many of whom served in the Obama years and then made a beeline for Silicon Valley. Apple’s Lisa Jackson, formerly of Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, and Jay Carney, a former Obama spokesman who sits comfortably as SVP of global corporate affairs at Amazon, are two examples there.

Transition names from tech

The Biden administration’s transition list is generously peppered with names from the tech industry, though some of them are likely grandfathered in from the Obama era rather than pulled directly for their more recent industry experience. The list named Matt Olsen, Uber’s chief trust and security officer, for his prior experience in the intel community under Obama rather than his ridesharing industry insights, for example.

The list doesn’t include any names fresh from Facebook or Google, but it does include four members from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and one from Eric Schmidt’s philanthropic project Schmidt Futures. The list also suggests a degree of continuity with the Obama era, with the inclusion of Aneesh Chopra, the first U.S. CTO, and Nicole Wong, a former deputy chief technology officer under Obama who previously worked at Twitter and Google. The transition also includes a smattering of names that served in the digital services agency 18F and some from the USDS, which borrows talent from the tech world to solve public problems.

Other names from the tech world include Airbnb’s Divya Kumaraiah and Clare Gallagher, Lyft’s Brandon Belford, Arthur Plews of Stripe, Dell CTO Ann Dunkin and quite a few more. These transition figures will help the administration fill the many open slots in a new government, but they’re less telling than who gets called to the cabinet. 

Tech in the cabinet? Maybe.

Beyond reading the tea leaves of the transition team and Biden’s previous statements here and there, we’re in for a wait. The administration’s picks for its cabinets will say a lot about its priorities, but for now we’re mostly left with the rumor mill. 

What does the rumor mill suggest? Meg Whitman, the former HP and eBay CEO most recently at the helm of failed short-form streaming platform Quibi, keeps coming up as a symbolic across-the-aisle pick for the Commerce Department, though Quibi’s spectacular dive probably doesn’t bode well for her chances.

Eric Schmidt’s name has bubbled up to lead some kind of White House tech task force, but that seems ill-fated considering the federal antitrust case against Google and the broader legislative appetite for doing something about big tech. But Alphabet board member Roger Ferguson, whose name has been floating around for Treasury Secretary, just stepped down from his current position at a finance firm, kicking up more speculation.

Seth Harris, who served in Obama’s Labor Department, made at least one list suggesting he could land a cabinet position. Harris, who is already involved in the Biden transition, also has the controversial distinction of proposing a “new legal category” of worker “for those who occupy the gray area between employees and independent contractors.” Lyft apparently cited his paper specifically after Prop 22 passed. With labor a hot issue in general right now — and Bernie Sanders himself potentially in the running for the same role — Harris would likely ignite a firestorm of controversy among labor activists if appointed to helm the department. 

On the other side of the coin, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra could be considered for a cabinet-level role in the Department of Justice. Becerra isn’t from the tech world, but as California’s AG he’s been stationed there and his department currently has its own antitrust case against Google simmering. In a recent interview with Bloomberg about antitrust issues under the Biden administration, Becerra denounced “behemoths” in the tech industry that stifle innovation, noting that state AGs have “taken the lead” on pressing tech companies on anti-competitive behavior.

“At the end of the day we all want competition, right?” Becerra said. “But here’s the thing, competition is essential if you want innovation.” Becerra, who succeeded Vice President-elect Kamala Harris when she left the Attorney General’s office for Congress, could also again follow in her footsteps, filling the vacant seat she will leave in the Senate come January.

All told, we’re seeing some familiar names in the mix, but 2020 isn’t 2008. Tech companies that emerged as golden children over the last ten years are radioactive now. Regulation looms on the horizon in every direction. Whatever policy priorities emerge out of the Biden administration, Obama’s technocratic gilded age is over and we’re in for something new.

Astra is set to launch it’s next orbital rocket, with a window that opens on December 7 and lasts for 12 days following until December 18, with an 11 AM to 2:30 PM PT block each day during which the launch could occur, depending on weather and conditions on the ground. This is the startup’s Rocket 3.2, a slightly revised and improved version of the Rocket 3.1 launch vehicle it flew in September.

Alameda-based Astra is a startup focused on building a small, relatively cheap-to-build launch vehicle that can carry small payloads to space at a rapid clip, with flexible launch location capabilities. It’s founded by former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, and backed by funding including Mac Benioff, Innovation Endeavors, Airbus Ventures, Canaan Partners and others, and it already has an active rocket assembly factory operating in the East Bay.

The company was originally founded with the goal of winning DARPA’s Launch Challenge, though the deadline for that has since passed. Astra still aims to essentially satisfying the functional requirements of that competition, by creating a launch vehicle that can be launched essentially on-demand when needed by clients looking for more responsive and mobile spaceflight capabilities, including the U.S. Department of Defense.

The goal of this next flight is similar to the goal of Rocket 3.1 in September: Essentially to study the startup’s rocket and boost its efficiencies while building its effectiveness. Actually reaching orbit isn’t a primary goal yet, but is a secondary, nice-to-have aim of this launch, which will take off from Kodiak in Alaska. The company already learned a ton from its first launch, including lessons that led to changes and improvements made to Rocket 3.2. It has always aimed for a three-flight initial orbital launch test series, and will also fly a Rocket 3.3 after this one incorporating additional lessons learned.

General Motors said it will spend $27 billion over the next five years on the development of electric vehicles and automated technology, a 35% percent increase that exceeds the automaker’s investment and gas and diesel and is an effort bring products to market faster.

More than half of GM’s capital spending and product development team will be devoted to electric and electric-autonomous vehicle programs, the company said.

The U.S. automaker is also accelerating its go-to-market timeline and adding more EVs to its portfolio plans. GM laid out Thursday an ambitious plan to bring 30 new electric vehicles to a global market through 2025. The company had previously committed to 20 EVs by 2023. More than two-thirds of those launches will be available in North America and every one of GM’s brands, including Cadillac, GMC, Chevrolet and Buick will be represented, according to the automaker.

The acceleration of GM’s plans, which includes pushing the launch of its Cadillac Lyriq SUV ahead by nine months to the first quarter of 2022, comes amid a flurry of EV activity in the automotive industry. Numerous startups have announced mergers with special purpose acquisition companies to become publicly traded companies — a move aimed at securing the capital needed to scale. Legacy automakers like Ford and VW Group are ramping their own EV plans. Tesla, the established electric automaker in the field, is building a factory in Austin and another Berlin to boost production and add more vehicles to its portfolio. By the end of next year, consumers will have more EV options than ever before, including the Lucid Motors Air, Rivian R1T pickup truck and Ford’s Mustang Mach-E.

“We don’t want to just participate, we want to lead,” said Doug Parks, GM executive vice president of Global Product Development, Purchasing and Supply Chain, during a call with reporters ahead of the announcement. “Tesla’s got a good jump, and they’ve done great things and so they’re formidable competitors. There’s a lot of startups and everyone else invading the space, and we’re not going to secede leadership there.”

GM’s strategy is to condense the typical 50-month development cycle by scrapping traditional methods and adopting a less bureaucratic team-focused approached, Parks said. For instance, the design to market timeline for the electric GMC Hummer will be 26 months, he said. Parks added that the early work on its Ultium battery architecture and drive units — the underlying foundation of its next-generation EV program — is allowing the company to move quickly.

As a result, Parks said GM is moving up three GMC electric vehicles — all of which are using its new Ultium battery — and four Chevrolet EVs, including a pickup and a compact crossover, as well as four Cadillacs. GM said Buick’s lineup will include two Ultium-based EVs.

GM is also on a hiring spree in a bid to keep pace and ultimately surpass its competition. The company said earlier this month it is hiring 3,000 electric system, infotainment software and controls engineers, plus developers for Java, Android, iOS and other platforms.

GM also has a joint venture with LG Chem to develop and supply the battery cells for its modular architecture. This modular architecture, called “Ultium,” (same as the battery) will be capable of 19 different battery and drive unit configurations, 400-volt and 800-volt packs with storage ranging from 50 kWh to 200 kWh, and front, rear and all-wheel drive configurations. At the heart of the new modular architecture will be the large-format pouch battery cells manufactured at this new factory.

The two companies previously committed to invest up to $2.3 billion into the new joint venture, as well as establish a battery cell assembly plant on a greenfield manufacturing site in the Lordstown area of Northeast Ohio that will create more than 1,100 new jobs.

The factory, which is already under construction, will be able produce 30 gigawatts hours of capacity annually. To put that into perspective, Tesla’s factory in Sparks, Nevada, which is part of a partnership with Panasonic, has a 35 GW-hour capacity.

Apple and Verizon today announced a new partnership that will make it easier for their business partners to go all-in on 5G. Fleet Swap, as the program is called, allows businesses to trade in their entire fleet of smartphones — no matter whether they are currently a Verizon customer or not — and move to the iPhone 12 with no upfront cost and either zero cost (for the iPhone 12 mini) or a low monthly cost.

(Disclaimer: Verizon is TechCrunch’s corporate parent. The company has zero input into our editorial decisions.)

In addition, Verizon also today announced its first two major indoor 5G ultra wideband services for its enterprise customers. General Motors and Honeywell are the first customers here, with General Motors enabling the technology at its Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Center, the company’s all-electric vehicle plant. To some degree, this goes to show how carriers are positioning 5G ultra wideband as more of an enterprise feature than the lower-bandwidth versions of 5G.

“I think about how 5G [ultra wide band] is really filling a need for capacity and for capability. It’s built for industrial commercial use cases. It’s built on millimeter wave spectrum and it’s really built for enterprise,” Verizon Business CEO Tami Erwin told me.

It’s important to note that these two projects are not private 5G networks. Verizon is also in that business and plans to launch those more broadly in the future.

“No matter where you are on your digital transformation journey, the ability to put the power of 5G Ultra Wideband in all of your employees’ hands right now with a powerful iPhone 12 model, the best smartphone for business, is not just an investment for growth, it’s what will set a business’s future trajectory as technology continues to advance,” Erwin said in today’s announcement.

As for 5G Fleet Swap, the idea here is obviously to get more businesses on Verizon’s 5G network and, for Apple, to quickly get more iPhone 12s into the enterprise. Apple clearly believes that 5G can provide some benefits to enterprises — and maybe more so than to consumers — thanks to its low latency for AR applications, for example.

“The iPhone 12 lineup is the best for business, with an all-new design, advanced 5G experience, industry-leading security and A14 Bionic, the fastest chip ever in a smartphone,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Markets, Apps and Services. “Paired with Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband going indoors and 5G Fleet Swap, an all-new device offer for enterprise, it’s now easier than ever for businesses to build transformational mobile apps that take advantage of the powerful iPhone 12 lineup and 5G.”

In addition, the company is highlighting the iPhone’s secure enclave as a major security benefit for enterprises. And while other handset manufacturers launch devices that are specifically meant to be rugged, Apple argues that its devices are already rugged enough by design and that there’s a big third-party ecosystem to ruggedize its devices.

Advertising drives the modern digital economy. Whether it’s reading news sites like this one or perusing your social media feeds, advertising is the single most important industry that came out of the development of the web. Yet, for all the tens of billions of dollars poured into online advertising just in the United States alone, how much does that money actually do its job of changing the minds of consumers?

Tim Hwang has a contrarian stance: it doesn’t. In his new book published as a collaboration between Logic Magazine and the famed publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he argues in “Subprime Attention Crisis” that the entire web is staring into an abyss of its own making. Advertising is overvalued due to the opaqueness of the market, and few actors are willing to point out that the advertising emperor has no clothes. Much like the subprime mortgage crisis, once people come to realize the true value of digital ads, the market could crater. I found the book provocative, and I wanted to chat further with Hwang about his thoughts on the market.

Hwang formerly worked at Google on policy and has developed many, many projects across a whole swath of tech-oriented policy issues. He’s currently a research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

TechCrunch: Let’s dive straight into the book. How did you get started on this topic of the “subprime attention economy”?

Tim Hwang: There were two incidents where I was like, something is going on here. I was having conversations with a couple of friends who are product managers at Facebook, and I remember making the argument that that there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that this whole adtech thing is maybe just mostly garbage. The most interesting thing that they said was, “Oh, like, advertising works but we can’t really tell you how.” That’s like talking to someone from the national security establishment and they’re like, “Oh yeah, we can stop terrorists but, like, we can’t tell you exactly how that goes down.”

I think one thing that got me really interested in it was how opaque a lot of these things are. The companies make claims that data-driven programmatic advertising really is as effective as it is but then they’re kind of strangely hesitant to show evidence of that.

Second, I was doing research with a lot of people who I think you’d rightly call sort of tech critics — strong critics of the power that these platforms have. I think one of the most interesting things is that even among the strongest critics of tech, I think a lot of them have just bought this claim that advertising and particularly data-driven advertising is as powerful as industry says it is.

It’s a kind of strange situation. Tech optimists and tech pessimists don’t agree on a whole lot, but they do seem to agree on the idea that this sort of advertising works. That was what I wanted to explore in the book.

Why don’t we talk a bit about the thesis?

The thesis of the book is really quite simple, which is you look around and basically our modern experience of the web is almost entirely shaped by advertising. The way social media is constructed, for example, is largely as a platform for delivering ads. Engagement with content is really good for creating profiles and it’s really good for delivering ads. It really has been the thing that has powered the current generation of companies in the space.

As you sort of look closer though, it really starts to resemble the market bubbles that we know of and have seen in other places. So explicitly, the metaphor of the book is the subprime mortgage crisis. I think the idea though is that you have this market that is highly opaque, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that the value of ads is misidentified, and you have a lot of people interested in boosting it even in spite of all that.

For the book, I wanted to look at that market and then what the internet could look like after all this. Are there other alternative business models that we want to adopt for the web going forward?