Category: UNCATEGORIZED

SpaceX is getting ready for a third try at launching its tenth Starlink mission, after two prior attempts were scrubbed, first in June and then again in July. Meanwhile, SpaceX has accomplished a lot – including another launch of a GPS satellite, and returning astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to Earth from the International Space Station aboard the Crew Dragon.

This Starlink mission attempt is scheduled for Friday, August 7 at 1:12 AM EDT (10:12 PM PDT on August 6) and will take off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There’s also a backup opportunity scheduled for Saturday August 8 at 12:50 AM EDT (Augut 7 at 9:50 PM PDT).

The payload for this mission includes, predictably, Starlink satellites – 57 in total that will join the constellation already in low Earth orbit as SpaceX gets ready to begin its beta test, which it says will kick off this summer. Starlink aims to provide low-latency, high-speed broadband to customers who don’t currently have great access to that kind of connectivity, with a beta set to start in parts of the U.S. and Canada this year. The Starlink satellites on this flight are all equipped with a special extendable solar visor to prevent reflections from their radio surfaces from obscuring the night sky from Earth.

This mission also carries two BlackSky satellites, which is one of SpaceX’s customers through launch services provider Spaceflight. It’s the second time that SpaceX has carried another payload alongside its own Starlink satellites on one of these flights, showing its spacefaring rideshare business model in action.

The live feed for the launch will start at around 15 minutes prior to launch time, so at roughly 12:57 AM EDT (9:57 PM PDT).

The world is changing quickly. It seems to be growing more complicated by the minute.

Throughout the centuries, humans have used storytelling to make sense of the world around them. That is perhaps more true today than it ever was, as we have access to more stories (via the internet) than we ever have in history. But with this proliferation, it’s critical that the very best storytellers — a diverse group of storytellers — have access to the broadest audiences.

Imagine Impact, a content accelerator founded and led by Tyler Mitchell, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, aims to provide storytellers with the tools and access they need to reach as many people as possible. That’s why we’re thrilled to have Mitchell, Grazer and Howard join us at Disrupt 2020 on September 14-18.

Tyler Mitchell is a producer, writer and entrepreneur who has previously held the role of Executive Vice President at Imagine Entertainment, where he oversaw a slate of live action films as well as launching Imagine’s animation division. He has also produced films in his own right, including The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, Lucky Number Slevin, and Maudie. Producer and writer for primetime shows Kidnapped and My Own Worst Enemy, Mitchell also has experience in the world of television.

Brian Grazer is an Academy Award, Golden Globe, Emmy and Grammy Award-winning producer, racking up 43 Oscar nominations and 198 Emmy nominations, winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards for A Beautiful Mind. He’s also a NYT bestselling author twice over and was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” He cofounded Imagine Entertainment alongside Ron Howard in the 80’s, and has now gone on to cofound Imagine Impact alongside Mitchell and Howard.

Ron Howard needs no introduction. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker has been a creative force in some of Hollywood’s most memorable films, including A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, and Splash. Alongside his illustrious film career, Howard has also executive produced a variety of award-winning television shows, including the Emmy-winning series “Arrested Development” and the HBO miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon”.

These three launched Imagine Impact two years ago to bring Silicon Valley-style mentorship, a model cultivated by Y Combinator and various VCs in the tech world, to Hollywood. As Netflix democratizes storytelling through its global platform for talent, Imagine Impact offers a place to vet that talent from the outset and nurture it through to the networks, studios and media platforms.

Netflix and Imagine Impact struck a deal in June to identify and develop film ideas across four genres, through a global submission process, that they will bring to Netflix for production and distribution.

Imagine Impact vets submissions with both experienced readers and a natural language processing system that was developed internally at the accelerator.

Since the first Impact program, the incubator has accepted 65 writers and paired them with industry experts (such as A Beautiful Mind‘s Akiva Goldsman. Thus far, 62 developed projects have come out of the process with 22 being sold or set up with major studios, networks and/or streaming services.

We’re thrilled to have Mitchell, Grazer and Howard join us at Disrupt 2020 to talk about how they’re mixing Silicon Valley tech and mentorship with the traditional Hollywood creative process and what the future of storytelling has in store for us. Get your pass today to hear this fantastic session – you can even save a cool $300 in the process!

Accelerated by the pandemic and its economic fallout, the tale of retail challenger bank models across the world has been diverging. In the Americas, Albo, Chime, and Uoala have all reported record user numbers as consumers adapted to a “no-touch” economy. Aspiration and Varo announced successful equity fund raising rounds. In Europe, by contrast, Revolut had to lay off people, Monzo was forced to accept new funding at a 40% lower valuation and N26 had shut its U.K. operations already. What’s going on?

As always, market environment, business model, industry structure, and economics and regulatory context matter. The U.S. has a big domestic market with large, attractive customer segments: Millennials, for example, who have come of age after the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and rely on the debit card as their primary spending vehicle, unlike older and wealthier consumers, who leverage their credit cards. Or issues-conscious consumers, who want to align their savings and spending decisions with their broader values.

Chime has successfully tapped into the former segment, offering a free checking account with no hidden fees and attractive features such as an immediate crediting of paychecks, forgoing the 2-3 days float that mainstream banks benefit from at the expense of their customers. Aspiration is going after the green customer segment, with features such as planting a tree for any rounded-up debit card purchase or offsetting customer carbon footprint at the gas pump.

Average debit card interchange fees in the U.S. at 1.2% of transaction value are high enough to pay for the tech platform. Both Chime and Aspiration function essentially as bank accounts for the customers at the front-end interface but have been able to structure themselves capital-efficiently. Chime’s actual deposit balances are held by back-end banking partners. Aspiration’s core vehicle is a cash management account under a FINRA brokerage license, also administered by a bank partner at the back-end. Varo in the U.S. has been the exception to these capital-light models by pursuing a federal, deposit-taking bank charter from the get-go, which was approved after three years in early 2020.

Similarly, In Latin America, Albo in Mexico or Neon in Brazil target a younger, lower-income segment that is willing to make the challenger bank cards their primary spending vehicle, and the debit interchange fee is high enough to make the economics work.

This is not the case in Europe. With near-instant retail payment settlement among bank current accounts and under tighter regulatory caps, debit card interchange fees are much lower at 0.2% of transaction value. To pay for their platforms, European challenger banks need other sources of revenue. Many are betting on credit — that’s why a number of them, such as Atom and Tandem, acquired full banking licenses before launching, despite the costly and lengthy process. Others, like Starling Bank and Tide, have set their sights on the more lucrative SME banking segment.

By contrast, Monzo and Revolut started with a prepaid card before obtaining a deposit-taking bank license. Both have focused largely on the younger, affluent, cosmopolitan customer segment, who use them as a secondary service to pay friends, spend abroad (at favorable exchange rates) and set budgets. Only 20% of Monzo’s customers use it exclusively, most of the rest rely on traditional banks for their primary account, which may also be why it is difficult to get customers to pay for premium services. Discretionary spending in this target segment, which constituted a bulk of the transactions on Monzo and Revolut, collapsed during the height of the COVID crisis and shutdown, putting relatively more pressure on these two London-based challenger banks.

Asia, Africa and other emerging markets have not seen yet the emergence of challenger banks at meaningful scale. The Monetary Authority of Singapore is currently narrowing a shortlist of applications for digital banking licenses from a variety of players, including a consortium of logistics platform Grab and Singtel, as well as gaming company Razer. In India, open banking is emerging along the lines of distinctive user segments.

SME neobanking is the most advanced with the likes of Bankopen (Open Technologies). On the consumer side, startups are focusing on segments such as blue-collar workers or rural populations addressing pain points encountered with traditional banking such as small transaction sizes or low account balances and catering to needs such as domestic remittances or goal-based savings. In Africa, the first wave of digital banks, like Carbon and FairMoney are emerging in Nigeria.

These emerging market challenger banks will have to look carefully at the market conditions, possible target segments, a sustainable revenue source, the initial product offerings that could lead to engagement and rapid growth, and the regulatory structure that best supports the desired business model.

The acceleration of the world moving toward a “no-touch” economy has provided a new impetus. However, the economics challenge seems to be closer in nature to the European starting point rather than the American industry context.

Flourish Ventures has investments in Albo, Aspiration, Chime, FairMoney, Neon and Tandem.   

Casa, a Colorado-based provider of bitcoin security services, is launching a managed service allowing customers to buy and hold their own bitcoin, rather than using an external custodian like Coinbase.

“With self-custody using Casa it’s impossible to be hacked and nearly impossible to have your bitcoin stolen,” wrote chief executive Nick Neuman in an email. “Leaving bitcoin on an exchange (e.g. Coinbase or many others) opens it up to theft; there is a long history of bitcoin theft and hacks from exchanges.”

Just last year, the major cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, was hacked and thieves made off with bitcoin that was worth $40 million at the time.

Before the upgrade with the new product offering, bitcoin traders had to buy their bitcoin at an exchange and then move their bitcoin off of the exchange to increase security. They can now be secure by default using Casa, according to Neuman.

Lucia, a six-year old, hides from Zoom calls and has rejected every edtech tool from Seesaw to Khan Academy. She will spend all of first grade in quarantine.

Her mother, Claire Díaz-Ortiz, says her daughter fits squarely into the “distance learning death zone.” The idea is that younger children are too young to do distance learning solo, even with tools meant to make it easier. Here’s one kindergartner’s remote fall class schedule:

“And unfortunately for my daughter, I’m a VC, not a Zoom mom,” Díaz-Ortiz said.

The impact of the distance learning death zone, as Díaz-Ortiz calls it, is one of the reasons why many wealthy families with young children are considering a new solution: learning pods.

Learning pods are small clusters of children within the same age range who are paired with a private instructor. Depending on a parent’s preferences, learning pods could be an in-home or virtual experience and be either a full-time school replacement or supplemental learning.

In recent weeks, the concept has taken off all across the country, from suburbs to cities. There’s a Facebook group for Boulder, Colorado school districts; organizers launched Pandemic Pod San Diego to “connect families looking for in-home, teacher-led learning groups.” Some households are offering teachers a retainer. Among working mom groupchats, pods are taking off as a sanity lifesaver, especially as childcare responsibilities fall disproportionately on women.

Startups are pivoting to keep up with the demand for private teachers. But because of high costs, only affluent families are able to form or join learning pods, which may limit the model’s ability to reach scale while extending the existing digital divide.

I honestly can’t remember when I first started writing about the mobile creep in macOS. It has happened little by little, update after update. My earlier fears that it would fully surrender to the influence of iOS have thus far not come to fruition, but the iPhone’s operating system continues to be the clearest indicator of future desktop updates.

It’s clear, of course, why one of Apple’s OSes would borrow so liberally from another. The iPhone has been top dog at the company for well over a decade now, and continues to monopolize resources and serve as a proving ground for its most cutting-edge experiences. Even as the Mac braces for its most radical update in recent memory with the switch from Intel to custom ARM processors, the shadow of iOS looms large over Big Sur.

There are a million reasons why this year’s WWDC was a strange one. One of the more unsung instances was the surprise reveal that the next version of macOS would be 11.0. The fact was never explicitly mentioned during the keynote, though the number was flashed on screen during a demo. It certainly seems worth mentioning the first primary number upgrade in 20 years, but who can ultimately say why Apple does the things it does?

What we can say for sure is that Big Sur does, indeed, represent a big step forward in macOS’ evolution in a couple of ways. The first and arguably most important is the aforementioned hardware update. Those first systems are set to arrive toward the end of the year, likely in the form of new iMac and MacBooks. The second and arguably more symbolic is one of the more radical design changes in the operating system’s recent memory.

For those less familiar with the operating system, the design changes likely feel subtle. For those of us who basically spend all day, every day staring at the operating system, they’re unavoidable. Big Sir borrows liberally from the iOS design language. The familiar circle icons are gone, making way for the squircle variety you’ll find on the iPhone. As ever, it’s up to third-party developers to decide if they want to join in on the fun. Right now, my app folder is a mix of circles and rounded squares. There are fun little touches throughout, like this address on the Mail icon envelope: 

Another iOS influence comes in the form of the push toward more translucence throughout the UI, most notably in the form of the menu bar, which is a closer match to the drop-down menus themselves. Those are larger, meanwhile, and offer a bit more room to breathe. Spacing in general is a big thing throughout the update.

That includes the new Finder windows, which also adopt more translucent elements and rounded corners. The dock, meanwhile, hovers ever so slightly above the bottom of the screen. Default sound updates might take me the longest to get used to. I only discovered that while taking a screenshot for this review — the familiar camera shutter sound having been swapped out for a bit of a plunk. Not sure how I feel about that one, if I’m being honest.

Perhaps the biggest update to Finder is also the most blatant lift from iOS. Joining other elements like Notification Center and Launchpad is Control Center. As with iOS, it’s a translucent drop-down menu that offers quick access to settings. Here it’s accessible by way of an icon in the menu bar, but every element here screams touchscreen. Seriously, the Display Brightness and Sound sliders beg to be adjusted by hand. A clear hint into plans for future Macs? Apple has long insisted that PCs and touchscreens are like oil and water, but there are some indications that the company’s stance could be softening.

Other control panel options include a Do Not Disturb mode, media playback, WiFi, Bluetooth and Airdrop. The available controls are customizable, and you can also drag an option off the panel and pin it to the menu bar.

Speaking of the Notification Center, there’s an update there as well. It’s free-floating, like other new design elements, and features a lot more information options, including weather, stocks and calendar events, along with upcoming third-party widgets. Like the Control Center, it’s customizable, both in terms of content and widget size. Certain forms of content like emails and new podcasts can also be interacted with directly from the Notification Center.

A number of updates to the Messages app itself are also worth noting here. Conversations can easily be pinned to the top of the list with a drag and drop. Group messaging has been beefed up, with the ability to comment on specific messages in line — a feature that’s simultaneously rolling out in iOS 14, as well. Specific members can be directly mentioned with an “@“ symbol and a photo can be set to designate the group.

Also of note is an improved search. Honestly, search has long been an annoyance on the desktop version of the app. Here it groups together links, photos and other highlights. There are a bunch of new message effects here, à la iOS, with things like balloons, confetti and lasers for celebration. Memojis can now be edited on the desktop, and Apple has also added Memoji stickers for quicker reactions.

Safari always seems to get the most love in the updates. It’s clear that Apple really wants its browser to remain competitive with the likes of Chrome and Firefox. Key updates include the ability to set a background image and customizable start page, manually adjust favorites and support for more extensions.

Tabs have been redesigned and favicon now appear by default, while hovering over a tab will show a preview of the hidden page — a genuinely useful addition. Rending speeds have improved and the company says the browser is overall more power-efficient than earlier versions. Apple’s also found another way to directly take on Google with the addition of a new translate feature that’s currently in beta with seven languages: English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, French, German, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese.

A handful of new maps features warrant mention here. Look Around brings a new Street View-style feature, making it easy to get to where you’re going — or simply live vicariously in this time of immobility. Clicking “Look Inside” on select locations like airports and malls, meanwhile, will show you an overhead view of the indoor map. Cycling directions have been added to a handful of cities (they don’t quite appear to have rolled out for NYC on the beta I’m using), along with an Electric Vehicle direction feature that shows you the route with the most charging station access.

The Big Sur public beta is out today. The final version of the software is set to release this fall.

Ginger, a provider of on demand mental healthcare services, has raised $50 million in a new round of funding.

The new capital comes as interest and investment in mental health and wellness has emerged as the next big area of interest for investors in new technology and healthcare services companies.

Mental health startups saw record deal volumes in the second quarter of 2020 on the heels of rising demand caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, according to the data analysis firm CB Insights. More than 55 companies raised rounds of funding over the quarter, even though deal amounts declined 15% to $491 million. That’s still nearly half a billion dollars invested into mental health in one quarter alone.

What started in 2011 as a research-based company spun out of work from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has become one of the largest providers of mental health services primarily through employer-operated health insurance plans.

Through Ginger’s services, patients have access to a care coordinator that is the first point of entry into the company’s mental health plans. That person is a trained behavioral health coach — typically someone with a master’s degree in psychology with a behavioral health coaching certificate from schools like Duke, UCLA, Michigan or Columbia and 200 hours of training provided by Ginger itself.

These health coaches provide the majority of care that Ginger’s patients receive. For more serious conditions, Ginger will bring in specialists to coordinate care or provide access to medications to alleviate the condition, according to the company’s chief executive officer, Russell Glass.

Ginger began offering its on-demand care services in 2016 and counts tens of thousands of active users on the platform. The company charges companies a fee for access to its services on a per-employee, per-month basis and provides access to mental health services to hundreds of thousands of employees through corporate benefit plans, Glass said.

Over 200 companies, including Delta Air Lines, Sanofi, Chegg, Domino’s, SurveyMonkey, and Sephora, pay  Ginger to cost-efficiently provide employees with high-quality mental healthcare. Ginger members can access virtual therapy and psychiatry sessions as an in-network benefit through the company’s relationships with leading regional and national health plans, including Optum Behavioral Health, Anthem California, and Aetna Resources for Living, according to a statement.

“Our entire mission here is to break the supply/demand imbalance and provide far more care,” said Glass in an interview. “Ultimately we want Ginger to be available to anybody who has a need. Being accessible to anybody, anywhere is an important part of the strategy. that means direct-to-consumer will be a direction we head in.”

For now, the company will use the money to build out its partner ecosystem with companies like Cigna, an investor in the company’s latest $50 million round. Ginger will also look to getting government payers to reach more people. eventually direct-to-consumer could become a larger piece of the business as the company drives down costs of care.

It’s also investing in automation and natural language processing to automate care pathways and personalizing patient care using machine learning.

The company’s $50 million Series D round was co-led by Advance Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, with additional participation from Cigna Ventures and existing investors such as Jeff Weiner, Executive Chairman of LinkedIn, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures. To date, Ginger has raised roughly $120 million. 

 Even as Ginger is working through the existing network of employer benefit plans and stand-alone insurance providers to offer its mental health services, other startups are raising money to offer employer-provided mental health and wellness plans. SonderMind is working to make it easier for independent mental health professionals to bill insurers, AbleTo helps employers screen for undiagnosed mental health conditions, and SilverLight Health partners with organizations to digitally monitor and manage mental health care. 

Meanwhile other startups are going direct-to-consumer with a flood of offerings around mental health. Well-financed, billion dollar-valued companies like Ro and Hims are offering mental health and wellness packages to customers, while Headspace has both a consumer facing and employer benefit offering. And upstart companies like Real are focusing on providing care specifically for women.

With its funding round, Ginger is adding David ibnAle, a founding partner at Advance Venture Partners (AVP), which is the investment firm behind S.I. Newhouse’s family-owned media and technology holding company, Advance; and the digital health investment guru Steve Kraus from Bessemer Venture Partners. 

“AVP invests in companies that are using technology to tackle large-scale, global challenges and transform traditional businesses and business models,” said David ibnAle, Founding Partner of Advance Venture Partners. “Ginger is doing just that. We are excited to partner with an exceptional team to help make high-quality, on-demand mental healthcare a reality for millions of more people around the world.”

With the launch of Android 11 getting closer, Google today launched the third and final beta of its mobile operating system ahead of its general availability. Google had previously delayed the beta program by about a month because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Image Credits: Google

Since Android 11 had already reached platform stability with Beta 2, most of the changes here are fixes and optimizations. As a Google spokesperson noted, “this beta is focused on helping developers put the finishing touches on their apps as they prepare for Android 11, including the official API 30 SDK and build tools for Android Studio.”

The one exception is some updates to the Exposure Notification System contact tracing API, which users can now use without turning on device location settings. Exposure Notification is an exception here, as all other Android apps need to have location settings on (and user permission to access it) to perform the kind of Bluetooth scanning Google is using for this API.

Otherwise, though, there are no surprises here, given that this has already been a pretty lengthy preview cycle. Mostly, Google really wants developers to make sure their apps are ready for the new version, which includes quite a few changes.

If you are brave enough, you can get the latest beta over the air as part of the Android Beta program. It’s available for Pixel 2, 3, 3a, 4 and (soon) 4a users.

Twitter is introducing new labels for accounts and tweets tied to government officials and “state-affiliated media.”

“Twitter provides an unmatched way to connect with, and directly speak to public officials and representatives,” the company wrote in the blog post announcing these changes. “This direct line of communication with leaders and officials has helped to democratize political discourse and increase transparency and accountability.”

However, Twitter suggested that these labels are part of a larger effort “to protect that discourse because we believe political reach should be earned not bought.”

When it comes to labeling government officials, the company said it’s focusing on those who represent “the official voice of the state abroad,” including “foreign ministers, institutional entities, ambassadors, official spokespeople, and key diplomatic leaders.” It’s starting with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, with plans to add other countries in the future.

Twitter said these labels will not apply to “the personal accounts of heads of state,” because “these accounts enjoy widespread name recognition, media attention, and public awareness.” For example: President Donald Trump’s Twitter account has not been labeled, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s account has.

Image Credits: Twitter

As for state-affiliated media, Twitter said that media organizations that maintain editorial independence despite government financing, such as the BBC and NPR, will not labeled.

Instead, the label will be reserved for “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution” — for example, Russia-backed RT. To identify these outlets, the company says it’s consulting outside experts, including members of its Digital and Human Rights Advisory group (part of Twitter’s Trust & Safety Council).

Facebook introduced a similar label in June.

Twitter also said state-affiliated media will no longer receive promotion via the service’s home timeline, notifications and search. (This limitation does not apply to government officials.) The service had already blocked these groups from purchasing advertising after an incident last year in which China’s state news agency bought promoted tweets to portray pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong as violent.

Money makes the world go round, as the saying goes. But how and where we spend it are still very much up for grabs.

One person who has been pondering that question and providing answers very successfully is Max Levchin, and we’re very excited to have him as our special guest today on Extra Crunch Live, where we’ll be interviewing him as well as taking questions from the audience.

Levchin could not be more central to the story of Silicon Valley’s rise, and the rise of fintech, in the last twenty years. As one of the co-founders of PayPal, he’s been at the center of how we use the internet to send and spend money from its earliest days. And as the CEO of Affirm, one of the hottest fintech companies around today, you can safely say he’s still in the game and winning.

But wait! There’s more! All that’s just part of Max’s fintech credentials. He’s also currently the chairman of health tech startup Glow, and his past roles have included chairman of Yelp and member of the board of Yahoo, and much more.

We are living in truly crazy times today, with the global health pandemic impacting every aspect of our lives, no less our tech lives. Max’s track record, and his own story as an immigrant building huge businesses in America, make him a very compelling person to weigh in on all of that. So please join us to watch, and participate in the conversation.

Extra Crunch Live is open exclusively to Extra Crunch subscribers. If you’re not already an Extra Crunch member, you can join here. We have the whole schedule of Extra Crunch Live talks as well.

I’ll be in the interviewer’s chair, and I plan to grill Max on all things fintech and foundery — where financial tech startups are going, how they are faring now, what founders need to be thinking about, and how to avoid big mistakes. I’m also really looking forward to what you, the audience, want to ask Max, too.

See you later for all the fun, Thursday August 6 at 4pm EDT / 1pm PDT / 8pm GMT. The links are below the fold.

We hope to see you there!

(Side Note: You can check out all our past episodes of Extra Crunch Live right here.

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