Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Nintendo never ceases to surprise with a seemingly infinite numbers of ways of transforming its most beloved IP. Hot on the heels of some truly impressive Super Mario Bros. Lego kits comes Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. The new toy is a clever mashup of real-life RC cars the Nintendo Switch.

Image Credits: Nintendo

The hybrid portable gaming system utilizes cameras on-board the Mario and Luigi karts to offer an on-screen augmented reality first-person racing experience. There’s a teaser video out now, highlighting the game just below:

As you can see, it offers a familiar Mario Kart feel overlayed on top of your home. There’s a pretty simple set up process involved, with the user spacing out a series of gates to create a circular course — think of it a like a far more fun version of setting up Roomba boundaries. Right now there are only two characters —Mario and Luigi — available for now, each priced at $100. But up to four players can compete with the in-person mode.

Image Credits:

From the videos, at least, it looks like a pretty rich experience right out of the box, combining real world obstacles with familiar characters and environments like snowy levels and Piranha Plant-filled jungles.

Each kits includes one racer, four gates and two sign boards. They go up for pre-order soon and start shipping October 16.

Nintendo never ceases to surprise with a seemingly infinite numbers of ways of transforming its most beloved IP. Hot on the heels of some truly impressive Super Mario Bros. Lego kits comes Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. The new toy is a clever mashup of real-life RC cars the Nintendo Switch.

Image Credits: Nintendo

The hybrid portable gaming system utilizes cameras on-board the Mario and Luigi karts to offer an on-screen augmented reality first-person racing experience. There’s a teaser video out now, highlighting the game just below:

As you can see, it offers a familiar Mario Kart feel overlayed on top of your home. There’s a pretty simple set up process involved, with the user spacing out a series of gates to create a circular course — think of it a like a far more fun version of setting up Roomba boundaries. Right now there are only two characters —Mario and Luigi — available for now, each priced at $100. But up to four players can compete with the in-person mode.

Image Credits:

From the videos, at least, it looks like a pretty rich experience right out of the box, combining real world obstacles with familiar characters and environments like snowy levels and Piranha Plant-filled jungles.

Each kits includes one racer, four gates and two sign boards. They go up for pre-order soon and start shipping October 16.

Amazon wants to bring Alexa to property managers. The company this morning launched a new service, Alexa for Residential, that aims to make it easier for property managers to set up and maintain Alexa-powered smart home experiences in their buildings, like condos or apartment complexes. At launch, IOTAS, STRATIS, and Sentient Property Services will be among the the first smart home integrators to use the Alexa for Residential service.

The idea is to make Alexa a tool for smart home management, even for those without their own Amazon account. The way the service works, new residents won’t have to purchase their own device or set anything up to get started. Instead, they can just speak to Alexa to control the various smart home features available at their residence and use basic Alexa features. like timers, alarms, or getting information like news and weather.

Property managers can choose to create custom Alexa skills for each unit, allowing the residents to submit maintenance requests, make amenity reservations, or even pay their rent via Alexa.

If the residents do have their own Amazon account, they can go through a few steps to link it to their in-home Echo device. Once linked, the residents would then be able to use Alexa’s full range of features, including the ability to listen to music playlists or call friends and family from the Alexa device, for example.

The property manager would have no access to the customer’s personal data, in this case — it would be as if the customer had set up their own Alexa device. In addition, the resident’s voice recordings are deleted on a daily basis under the new service.

However, when the resident’s lease is up or they move out, the service allows property managers to remotely reset the device to the default settings to be ready for the next resident, without disrupting the device’s existing configurations for smart home management.

The launch sees Amazon further investing in a market which would allow it to expand Alexa’s footprint without having to increase direct sales of Echo devices to consumers.

Amazon has worked on partnerships in this area before, having teamed up in November 2018 with Zego, now a subsidiary of PayLease, to roll out Alexa smart home devices to 30,000 apartments. Also in 2018, RedAwning partnered with Amazon to launch property management tools, enabled by Amazon’s Alexa for Hospitality service, originally aimed at hotels. Vacation rentals have leveraged Alexa in their own properties for similar integrations, too, as have senior living centers. There are also independent smart home technology technology platforms aimed at property managers and Alexa skills designed for this space.

More broadly, Amazon has rolled out other services and announced partnerships that could scale Alexa use in homes through B2B deals, as with its 2018 launch of Alexa for Hospitality or its deal with home builders, like Lennar, to integrate devices in their new construction. The success of these efforts have been hit or miss, as some felt shared devices raise privacy concerns and other deployments have been badly managed. 

Amazon is pitching the idea for this latest service as a way for property managers to increase revenues, however. The company cited National Apartment Association data which said 84% of renters want an apartment with smart home amenities and 61% said they would pay a monthly fee for a voice assistant. That data, of course, may not reflect the current economy where the coronavirus pandemic has led to widespread unemployment and has wreaked havoc on the economy. Alexa devices — and an extra fees for their use — may now be seen as more of a luxury, not a necessity.

Your startup is special and different, and you need to explain that to distracted investors in just a few short slides. The pandemic has added to your challenge, because more investors have been looking through more decks than ever online — and spending less time on each.

To help you create the right fundraising presentation, we’ve put together a panel of expert investors at Disrupt 2020 from September 14-18 who have been backing early-stage companies through good times and bad. We’re also providing daily pitch deck teardown sessions, that this session can serve as a guide for (here’s how to submit your own if you’ve already registered for Disrupt 2020).

Ann Miura-Ko is the cofounder of Floodgate and a leading early-stage investor (and computer security expert) with investments including Lyft, Xamarin, Clover Health, Clever and many more. She’s been one of our most popular guest authors and speakers over the years, covering topics like building a minimum viable company and finding the inflection point.

Lo Toney is a long-time founder and product leader who spent much of this past decade investing with Comcast Ventures’s Catalyst Fund and Google Ventures, before founding Plexo Capital in 2018 (and serving as a mentor at Mucker Capital during this time). His focus includes investing in diverse founders globally, as well as backing other funds with the same mission. Some of his recent investment include PlayVS, Replicated and StyleSeat on the company side, and Precursor, Boldstart, Female Founders Fund and WorkBench on the fund side.

Rajan Anandan is the leader of Surge, Sequoia Capital India’s “rapid scale-up” program for founders in India and Southeast Asia. He previously served as Google’s top business executive in the region for more than 8 years, held executive roles in Microsoft and Dell operations before that, and has invested in dozens of startups in India and around the world.

Join us at this pitchdeck teardown and so much more at Disrupt 2020 happening from September 14-18. Grab your Disrupt Digital Pro pass today and during our Labor Day Flash Sale, you can save an extra $100! Hope to see you there!

A program run by the National Security Agency that collected details on billions of Americans’ phone calls was ruled illegal by a U.S. appeals court on Thursday.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the NSA’s “bulk collection” of call records violated the law, but the judges fell short of ruling the program unconstitutional.

The NSA used new powers in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks — known as Section 215 for its place in the law books — to scoop up billions of phone records every year by compelling U.S. phone giants to turn over daily call logs, which the agency uses to make connections between targets of interest. Those call records include who is calling who and when — but not the contents.

Details of the program were exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

But the call records program, beset with problems, overcollection, and questions about its legality, was shut down last year.

Patrick Toomey, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said the ruling was a “victory” for privacy rights.

“The ruling makes plain that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records violated the Constitution. The decision also recognizes that when the government seeks to prosecute a person, it must give notice of the secret surveillance it used to gather its evidence,” said Toomey. “This protection is a vital one given the proliferation of novel spying tools the government uses today.”

The case at the Ninth Circuit involved Basaaly Moalin and three others, who were found guilty in 2013 for sending money to the militant group, Al-Shabaab. Moalin was convicted in part through call records collected by the NSA, but the role that the data played was so small that it did not undermine their convictions, reports Politico.

The NSA has long claimed that the program was vital for protecting the U.S. homeland stopping terrorist attacks. Past administrations claimed that the program stopped more than 50 attacks. But after congressional scrutiny, that figure was revised down to one identified individual — Moalin.

Although the court did not overturn Moalin’s conviction, the three-judge panel criticized the government’s previous statements and comments about the usefulness and effectiveness of the program, which the court said were “inconsistent with the contents of the classified record.”

Julian Sanchez, a civil liberties expert and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, tweeted: “The upshot of this Ninth Circuit opinion is that the NSA’s bulk phone record collection was illegal and probably unconstitutional, but it doesn’t matter because the program was also worthless.”

When asked if the NSA stood by its earlier statements, spokesperson Mike Dusak declined to comment.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, many U.S. workers will eventually return to their offices.

But when they do, their big-city workplace will not only have a smaller footprint and operational strategy, it might be in a different town altogether, according to a recent TechCrunch survey of top real estate and proptech investors.

TechCrunch surveyed nine investors who are writing checks today for startups in the sector. Optimism still runs high for startup hubs as well as supercities like New York and San Francisco. However, the move towards e-commerce and remote work — a trend that started before COVID-19 upended the way people live, work and play — has accelerated. 

The responses below get into these and other looming matters, such as the role that government support is playing to support the market … for now. Next week, we will publish the second installment of responses focused on the opportunities and risks for startups that these investors are betting on (or not).

• Clelia Warburg Peters, venture Partner at Bain Capital Ventures
• Brad Greiwe and Brendan Wallace, co-founders and managing partners, Fifth Wall
• Zach Aarons, co-founder and general partner, MetaProp
• John Helm, managing director, Real Estate Technology Ventures
• Adam Demuyakor, co-founder and managing director, Wilshire Lane Partners
• Casey Berman, founder and managing director, Camber Creek
• Florian Reichert, partner, Picus Capital
• Stonly Baptiste, co-founder and partner, Urban Us
• Andrew Ackerman, managing director, DreamIt Ventures

For additional context on where top investors believe the market is headed, be sure to check out our real estate and proptech investor survey from late March and the previous ones from late last year (when everyone thought 2020 would be something different).

Clelia Warburg Peters, venture partner at Bain Capital Ventures

Early evidence suggests that there is a reversal of the New Urbanism movement that defined the past several decades in the U.S., with the pandemic combining with existing trends in this direction. How will this migration affect your investment decisions, especially given foundational changes to residential, office and retail? How does this compare with what you may be seeing in other countries?

There is no doubt that in the United States the pandemic is serving as an accelerant in the ‘diffusion’ of the model where economic activity is concentrated in a few primary urban centers. This diffusion was already underway – so-called ‘secondary’ or ‘tertiary’ cities have been growing in population and economic relevance for more than a decade. But I do think this is a period which will likely cement the permanent significance of many of those cities, where people feel like they can live more comfortably and affordably while enjoying many of the benefits of urban living (jobs, culture, restaurants, and walkability). I actually think this in line with the new urbanism movement – which emphasized the need to make cities more walkable, green, and friendly for living and not just working.

I also don’t see the pandemic altering people’s feeling or perception about the appeal of the ‘1950’s suburban ideal’ in which someone (usually a father in a grey suit) commutes daily into a nearby urban center of activity – in fact, I think what the current interest in the suburbs confirms is that people don’t want to commute and that they feel more interested in suburban environments as they imagine them transitioning into ‘mini-urban’ environments where commuting is limited, ideally, there is walkability, and where they have access to restaurants, culture and shopping through a mix of local and digital experiences.

I think technology is going to be a significant part of the transitions in how we live and work in the next few years, and I am bullish about Proptech during this period. There was always the anticipation that, across the industry, tech adoption would be accelerated during a downturn because tech can often drive efficiency and bring down costs. I think the pandemic will serve as an accelerant to this as well, and will also allow more disruptive models in both the residential and office sectors to gain greater market share. (In an environment where business as usual doesn’t exist, I think tenants and consumers are going to be more willing to experiment). On the office side, so far we are seeing an investment bump primarily focused around technologies that support the back to work experience on the office side, but I think we will start to see much more dynamic models evolve.

The U.S. is unique in that we have so many layers of urban models – some of this disruption will not be as great in other countries where the country itself really has only 1 or 2 primary cities or conversely, where the contrast between the economic development of cities and the countryside is really stark. (I don’t think you will see as much discussion of the idea that everyone is going to leave London in the UK – there just isn’t another area which has the same multi-faceted infrastructure. Nor is this ‘flee the cities’ discussion relevant in China or other areas where it would be logistically difficult to work in the same way outside of many urban environments). This may mean that office and retail are less impacted in these places, and this combined with the fact that these countries are emerging from the pandemic more smoothly, may make international expansion a priority for a lot of Proptech start-ups.

More specifically, startup hubs have been synonymous with superstar cities like San Francisco and New York — do you see the centers of innovation spreading out more widely, to smaller cities, college towns, versus the last decade?

I do believe that startup hubs will continue to spread out more widely, but I do also think that venture is a business that is heavily reliant on networks and relationships, so I think these ‘hives’ will not disperse as quickly as roles in many other industries.

If you belong to the global early-stage startup community, you labor your keister off every day. Here in the states, we observe Labor Day every September to celebrate workers — with sales on everything from cars to mattresses (how very American). Not to be outdone, we’re holding a Disrupt 2020 flash sale and — in that Crazy Eddie sort of way — our prices are INSANE!

Well, more like mildly wacky. Starting today you can save $100 off the price of a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass. Don’t drag your feet, folks because this sale won’t last long. Your insane savings disappear on Monday, September 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Disrupt 2020 (September 14-18) is all virtual but the benefits and opportunities awaiting you are 100 percent real. Here’s what you can do with your Digital Pro pass.

Enjoy five days of stellar programming across all the Disrupt stages. That’s two extra days to experience everything Disrupt offers. Some of the biggest names and brightest startup minds will take part in one-on-one interviews, moderated panel discussions and interactive Q&As. They’ll address critical issues of the day, including COVID-19. Here are just two examples, and you can check out the Disrupt agenda here.

Tech, Test and Treat: Healthcare Startups in the COVID-19 Era: Both Carbon Health and Color have shifted significant portions of their business to focus on addressing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We’ll talk to them about the challenges of making that quick turn, and about how healthcare innovation can address our pandemic needs.

How to Invest in Infrastructure to Deliver Experience (Adobe): Gabie Boko, Global VP Digital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise & Adobe VP of Platform Engineering, Anjul Bhambhri discuss digital transformation and experience delivery.

Want to improve your startup skills? Attend one of the many Pitch Deck Teardown sessions where top investors go through your submitted pitches live on stage. They’ll talk through the nuts and bolts of what does — or does not — make a great deck.

You’ll find even more actionable tips and tricks over at the Extra Crunch Stage where the interactive programming focuses on growing your business. Learn how to pivot in the face of a crisis, build a sales team, craft a pitch deck and a whole lot more.

Connect with the right people and expand your empire with CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform that takes the pain and uncertainty out of networking. Register for Disrupt 2020, answer a few quick questions and you can start reaching out to people right now — before Disrupt officially begins.

There’s so much more — hundreds of stellar startups exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley, the epic Startup Battlefield competition — waiting for you at Disrupt 2020. Act now — take advantage of our Crazy-Eddie moment, buy a Digital Pro Pass before Monday, September 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT), and you’ll save $100 off the price of admission.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

It is clear that as the pandemic has taken hold in 2020, in-person meetings have gone by the wayside. Yet sales teams still need a way to demo their products for potential customers, particularly SaaS vendors. Enter Demodesk, an early stage startup and Y Combinator Winter 2019 grad, which is building an online sales demo platform.

Today the company announced an $8 million Series A led by Balderton Capital with participation from Target Global. The company has now raised a total of $10.3 million including its seed round announced last year.

Demodesk has built a platform to deliver online sales demos remotely with a dash of intelligence to help busy sales people set up the meetings in a more automated fashion. Even though the startup wasn’t thinking about raising money until next year, COVID has accelerated the need for a tool like this in the market, says CEO and co-founder Veronika Riederle.

“We originally planned to raise our next round around the beginning of next year, but because COVID happened, we were able to raise earlier and the money basically enables us to grow a little bit faster now and to build the tool faster because there so much demand in the market,” Riederle told TechCrunch.

The demand has increased because during COVID, sales teams still need to meet with customers, and Demodesk provides a way to do that. Riederle says that the product is significantly different from general meeting software like Zoom, WebEx or GoToMeeting.

While these tools generally allow screen sharing, she says DemoDesk does something different that separates it from these offerings. Instead of a live version of your desktop or a recording where the two parties are seeing the same thing, Demodesk provides a virtual desktop in the cloud where the salesperson can see notes and other information that the customer can’t see, while still letting the customer view the presentation or demo.

What’s more, the virtual approach enables companies to capture data about the demo to help sales teams understand what worked well and what didn’t, something that wouldn’t be possible with traditional screen sharing.

In addition, the company added a new scheduling tool to the product this year that lets customers and sales teams share available times. “You can just select a time that works for you, fill out some data and then we automatically send a calendar invite, put it in the sales person’s calendar, send out a reminder, and then of course automatically prepare the meeting because we know who the meeting is with beforehand. So we do everything from scheduling, preparing the meeting, then assisting you during the meeting,” Riederle explained.

When the meeting is over, Demodesk can share the notes from the meeting automatically with Salesforce or other CRM tool.

The company has 22 employees today, but the goal is to get to 50 by the end of next year. As she grows the company, Riederle says that diversity and inclusion is a key consideration. In fact, diversity is part of the company’s five core values. As an international company, she says that makes diversity even more important, but it’s also about not having just one way of thinking.

“If you have a more diverse set of employees on the team, you just typically come up with better ideas because you are more creative. You think in different ways and have more interesting discussions,” she said.

The company, which launched in 2017 has grown to 150 customers. While these are mostly software companies, Riederle reports she is seeing other industries use the platform like a solar panel company, which was going door-to-door prior to the pandemic, and has used the tool to continue doing business when visiting customers isn’t possible.

She sees this trend continuing, even post-COVID because doing online demos is more efficient, less costly and better for the environment because you don’t have to travel to the meeting.

Facebook is sharing some new growth numbers around its video destination — namely, that Facebook Watch is now receiving more than 1.25 billion visitors every month.

The company isn’t saying specifically how those numbers have changed during the pandemic (when video services like Netflix have seen dramatic growth), but product lead Paresh Rajwat said there was “a really big surge” at the beginning of lockdown and social distancing, and that the surge has not subsided as society begins to reopen.

Facebook Watch launched in 2018. Back in June of last year, the company said that 720 million people were watching at least one minute of Watch content every month.

Rajwat noted that while Watch is built on “the social layer of Facebook,” with videos shareable across Facebook’s many products, the views are happening on Watch itself.

“It is super critical for us to have a destination,” he said, keeping videos from popular creators and publishers separate from the core Facebook experience of interacting with friends and family. “The moment we mix them together, it becomes a completely different product for people.”

Rajwat added that the company isn’t just looking at overall audience size. He argued that when you look at “the reactions and comments and shares” you can see that “the content we have is working.” (Advertisers have wondered about the true extent of audience engagement on Facebook Watch.)

Last year, as tech and media companies were all investing heavily to launch their own streaming services, we argued that Facebook’s efforts with unscripted shows and older content seemed pretty lackluster in comparison. But it sounds like the content that’s working on Watch isn’t the kind of thing that you’d find on Netflix or Disney+ — as Rajwat put it, “The angle we’ve taken is to focus more on content that is around social topics to drive conversations.”

Image Credits: Facebook

For example, there’s “Red Table Talk” from Jada Pinkett Smith and family, a talk show that made headlines over the summer for bringing Will Smith and Jada together to discuss their marital issues. Facebook plans to launch another version of Red Table talk in October, “Red Table Talk: The Estefans,” with Gloria Estefan, her niece Lily and her daughter Emily.

As another example of a successful original Facebook Watch show, Rajwat pointed to “Returning the Favor,” an Emmy-winning program where host Mike Rowe showcases everyday heroes.

Rajwat said that live programming has increased significantly during the pandemic. That includes live sports, with 13.7 million people watching the UEFA Champions League final, making it the most popular football broadcast ever on Facebook Watch. And Facebook recently announced that publishers and other businesses will be able to charge for access to live online events, with Facebook taking no fees for the next year.

The site also added licensed music videos over the summer, with Katy Perry premiering her music video for “Smile” exclusively on Facebook Watch, where it was watched by “millions” of fans.

The company highlighted successful publishers on Facebook Watch include organizations like UFC, large publishers like BuzzFeed and individual creators like Benito Skinner and Brandi Guice, a.k.a. Braannxo, who’s making 98% of her revenue from Facebook Stars and fan subscriptions.

Looking forward, Rajat said that a big priority is making “more and more investment in showing people what they really are interested in.” To that end, users have already spotted that Facebook Watch is now allowing users to customize their feed by exploring and subscribing to different topics.

SpaceX has confirmed some details of its Starlink internet service beta test, via SpaceX engineer Kate Tice on today’s launch webcast for its most recent Starlink satellite mission. Tice said that SpaceX’s service has demonstrated latency low enough to allow it to play the “fastest multiplayer” networked online games, and that it has also shown download speeds in excess of 100Mbps, which she added is fast enough to stream multiple HD video streams at once, with additional bandwidth to spare.

Anyone who has spent any time using an existing connection a rural, poorly covered area that relies on either traditional satellite or perhaps limited cellular-based service will know that both these parameters far exceed the capabilities of most existing options. Starlink’s goal is to leapfrog what’s out there already with its low Earth orbit constellation, which has the advantage of transmitting its signal much closer in to Earth than the far-out geostationary satellites that provide legacy networking capabilities.

Tice also said that while performance so far has been impressive during the private beta, the company expects both more features and greater capabilities to be unlocked over time through updates. She also said that SpaceX recently completed it first inter-satellite link between Starlink spacecraft – which can transfer 100s of gigabytes of data between satellites via optical laser, at speeds that will be the fastest available anywhere for inter-satellite communications. This is a core capability for the network, which will rely on handoffs between Starlink satellites to maintain connections as they orbit the Earth.

While the current private beta is essentially limited to SpaceX employees, and designed to help them fine-tune the network as it comes online for the first time, Tice said that the public Starlink beta is still on track to kick off later this year. SpaceX has asked those interested in participating to sign up via its Starlink website, and earlier this year a leak from said website provide a detailed look at how the public beta will operate when live.