Category: UNCATEGORIZED

South Korean giant Samsung, Apple’s contract manufacturing partners Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron, and Indian smartphone vendors Micromax and Lava among others have applied for India’s $6.6 billion incentive program aimed at boosting the local smartphone manufacturing, New Delhi said on Saturday.

The scheme, called Production-Linked Incentive Scheme, will offer a range of incentives to companies including a 6% financial incentives on additional sales of goods produced locally over five years, with 2019-2020 set as the base year, India’s IT Minister R.S. Prasad said in a press conference.

22 companies have applied for the incentive program — that also includes manufacturing of electronics components — and have agreed to export 60% of their locally produced units outside of India, said Prasad. He said the companies estimate they will produce smartphones and components worth $153 billion during the five-year duration.

The Production-Linked Incentive Scheme is aimed at turning India into a global hub of high-quality manufacturing of smartphones and support Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push to make the country self-reliant, said Prasad.

As part of their applications, the companies have also agreed to offer direct and indirect employment to roughly 1.2 million Indians, the Indian minister said.

The interest of Samsung and Apple, two companies that account for more than 50% of the global smartphone sales revenue, in India is a testament of the opportunities they see in the world’s second largest internet market, said Prasad. “Apple and Samsung, India welcomes you with attractive policies. Now expand your presence in the country,” he said.

Missing from the list of companies that the Indian minister revealed today are Chinese smartphone makers Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, and Realme that have not applied for the incentive program.

The Indian government did not prevent companies from any country from participating to the program, Prasad insisted in a call with reporters Saturday noon. Chinese smartphone vendors command roughly 80% of the Indian handset market, according to research firm Canalys.

“We are optimistic and looking forward to building a strong ecosystem across the value chain and integrating with the global value chains, thereby strengthening electronics manufacturing ecosystem in the country,” he said. The deadline for applying to participate in India’s program, which began in April, ended on Friday this week.

The participation of Wistron, Foxconn, and Pegatron is also indicative of Apple’s future plans to produce locally in India. Apple’s contract manufacturing partner, Taiwan-based Wistron, first began assembling older iPhone models in 2017. Last month, Foxconn kickstarted assembly of a small batch of iPhone 11 units. This was the first time any Apple supplier assembled a current-generation iPhone model in the country.

President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he will act as soon as Saturday to ban TikTok from the US, CNBC reported.

The story is updating.

Even the hard-charging world of early-stage startups has its share of procrastinators, lollygaggers, slow-pokes, wafflers and last-minute decision makers. If that’s your demographic, today is your lucky day.

You now have an extra week (courtesy of Saint Expeditus, the patron saint of procrastinators), to score early-bird savings to Disrupt 2020, which takes place September 14-18. Buy your pass before the new and final deadline — August 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) — and save up to $300. Who says prayers (or secular entreaties) go unanswered?

Your pass opens the door to five days of Disrupt — the biggest, longest TechCrunch conference ever. Drawing thousands of attendees and hundreds of innovative early-stage startups from around the world, you won’t find a better time, place or opportunity to accelerate the speed of your business.

Here are four world-class reasons to attend Disrupt 2020.

World-class speakers. Hear and engage with leading voices in tech, business and investment across the Disrupt stages. Folks like Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha, Ureeka’s Melissa Bradley and Slack’s Tamar Yehoshua — to name just a few. Here’s what you can see onstage so far.

World-class startups. Explore hundreds of innovative startups exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley — including the TC Top Picks. This elite cadre made it through our stringent screening process to earn the coveted designation, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more varied and interesting set of startups.

World-class networking. CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, simplifies connecting with founders, potential customers, R&D teams, engineers or investors. Schedule 1:1 video meetings and hold recruitment or extended pitch sessions. CrunchMatch launches weeks before Disrupt to give you more time to scout, vet and schedule.

World-class pitching. Don’t miss Startup Battlefield, the always-epic pitch competition that’s launched more than 900 startups, including big-time names like TripIt, Mint, Dropbox and many others. This year’s crop of startups promises to throw down hard for bragging rights and the $100,000 cash prize.

Need another reason to go? Take a page out of SIMBA Chain founder Joel Neidig’s playbook:

Our primary goal was to make people aware of the SIMBA Chain platform capabilities. Attending Disrupt is great way to get your name out there and build your customer base.

It’s time for all you last-minute lollygaggers to get moving and take advantage of this second, final chance to save up to $300. Buy your pass before August 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

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

Earlier this month, Twitter told investors it’s considering a subscription model as a means of generating additional revenue to support its business. Now we know what sort of value-add features Twitter may be eyeing. In a new survey, the company asks users to evaluate paid features like “undo send” (an alternative to an edit button), as well as other ideas like custom colors, the ability to publish longer and more high-def videos, support for profile badges, auto responses, additional “social listening” analytics, and the ability to run brand surveys about ads.

The survey asks users to select the options they felt were most or least important to them. 

Details of the survey were first published to none other than Twitter itself by Twitter user @WFBrother. The findings were then amplified by eagle-eyed social media consultant, Matt Navarra, who had also seen the survey.

 

A Twitter spokesperson confirmed the questions had come from a survey the company was running to evaluate options for a membership model, as the survey describes.

The company declined to offer any further comment, but noted its Q2 shareholder letter had detailed its plans in this area:

“We are also in the early stages of exploring additional potential revenue product opportunities to compliment our advertising business,” the letter had said. “These may include subscriptions and other approaches, and although our exploration is very early and we do not expect any revenue attributable to these opportunities in 2020, you may see tests or hear us talk more about them as our work progresses,” it noted.

Specifically, the survey asked users about the following options:

• Undo Send: A 30 seconds window for you to recall/withdraw a Tweet before anyone can see it. This has been something Twitter has suggested in the past could be a viable alternative to an “Edit” button — something users have demanded for years. Instead of allowing unlimited edits to tweets, and the significant engineering investment that would entail — users could instead quickly fix a typo they spotted shortly after posting.
• Custom Colors: In addition to “Night Mode,” you could change the fonts and theme color of Twitter on your phone and computer. Background color, links, mentions, hashtags, and icons would appear in whatever color you choose.
• Video Publishing: You could publish videos up to 5x longer than current default, which a much higher maximum resolution (8192×8192)
• Badges: You get a badge(s) on your profile that links to businesses you own or work for (Example: A journalist can have a badge showing the magazines they write for.)
• Auto responses: Able to write and set a menu of auto responses to use in replies. This would likely be more useful to brands who wanted to redirect customer inquiries to official channels.
• Social listening: You can see conversation around your account on Twitter, including total volume, the people and businesses who are talking most often, and what they are saying. This, again, would largely appeal to brands.
• Brand Surveys: You could be able to survey people about the ads you run to better understand if you ad was memorable and if people are likely to buy the products or services featured. Twitter today already runs similar ads, so this feature would be relatively easy for it to implement.

The survey does not represent features Twitter will definitely roll out as part of any future membership model, of course. It’s only the first step to gathering consumer feedback about what people believe is worth paying for.

Not on the survey? A real “edit” button, of course. That one just may never happen!

Three arrests are made following this month’s celebrity Twitter hack, Microsoft may be working to acquire TikTok’s U.S. business and Facebook launches licensed music videos. Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 31, 2020.

The big story: Florida teen arrested in Twitter hack

In a hack earlier this month, high-profile Twitter accounts like Apple, Elon Musk, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were compromised and posted messages promoting a cryptocurrency scheme. Now an investigation by the FBI and Department of Justice has resulted in three arrests: Mason Sheppard of the United Kingdom, Nima Fazeli of Orlando and a 17-year-old Tampa resident.

The Tampa teen was described by the state attorney’s office as the hack’s “mastermind” and is facing 30 felony charges. He allegedly made more than $100,000 in a single day thanks to the hack.

“These crimes were perpetrated using the names of famous people and celebrities, but they’re not the primary victims here,” said Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren in a statement.

The tech giants

Report: Microsoft in talks to buy TikTok’s US business from China’s ByteDance — President Trump has plans to order China’s ByteDance, the owner of hit social video app TikTok, to divest from the company, according to Bloomberg.

Secret documents from US antitrust probe reveal big tech’s plot to control or crush the competition — We’ve collected the nearly 500 pages of evidence made public during the House Judiciary’s marathon hearing, with added context, in a searchable version.

Facebook will launch officially licensed music videos in the US starting this weekend — The U.S. launch is enabled by Facebook’s expanded partnerships with top labels, including Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Merlin, BMG, Kobalt and other independents.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Genomics startup Helix receives $33 million in NIH funding to scale COVID-19 testing — The funding will be used to support Helix’s efforts to scale its COVID-19 testing efforts, with the aim of achieving a rate of 100,000 tests per day by this fall.

Self-driving startup Argo AI hits $7.5 billion valuation — The valuation was confirmed Thursday, nearly two months after VW Group finalized its $2.6 billion investment in Argo AI.

The iron rule of founder compensation is dead — The latest episode of Equity discusses Y Combinator Demo Day going both virtual and live.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Working to understand Affirm’s reported IPO pricing hopes — News broke last night that Affirm, a well-known fintech unicorn, could approach the public markets at a valuation of $5 to $10 billion.

Opportunities (and challenges) in church tech — Investor Will Robbins argues that this might be the perfect time for church tech companies to thrive.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Ford Bronco reservations surpass 150,000 — The reception to Bronco 2021 — Ford’s flagship series of 4×4 vehicles that was revealed earlier this month — surpassed the company’s most optimistic initial projections, Ford’s CEO said in an earnings call.

What does accountability look like in 2020? — Rae Witte discusses what happens after a company gets called out.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

The cloud market is coming into its own during the pandemic as the novel coronavirus forced many companies to accelerate plans to move to the cloud, even while the market was beginning to mature on its own.

This week, the big three cloud infrastructure vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reported their earnings, and while the numbers showed that growth was beginning to slow down, revenue continued to increase at an impressive rate, surpassing $30 billion for a quarter for the first time, according to Synergy Research Group numbers.

Take one glance at Playground Global’s portfolio and a theme emerges: The firm’s investments are forward-looking, longer-term plays, a strategy that runs counter to the fast-return ethos that permeates certain Silicon Valley sectors.

The Palo Alto-based VC firm is banking on the future with investments in capital-intensive and technically complex pursuits, including robotics, autonomous driving, metallic 3D printing and infrastructure. It’s an investment strategy that isn’t for the faint of heart.

So, how does a firm that embraces futurism handle the present-day disruption of COVID-19? It looks ahead, of course.

When co-founder and CTO Peter Barrett joined TechCrunch this week for an Extra Crunch Live panel, the pandemic dominated the conversation. The executive noted that a new and common thread has emerged throughout the many discussions among Playground executives and the startups in which it has invested.

Priorities are shifting toward finding ways to be of service.

Everything feels different these days. Recent months have caused many in Silicon Valley to reconsider their investment priorities, roll up their figurative sleeves and begin the process of helping the world survive and, eventually, recover from the seemingly endless COVID-19 pandemic. Like many others, Playground finds itself at a crossroads — determining how it can be of service, while examining the ways in which a crisis like this can be addressed.

“One thing that underscores this pandemic is a realization that we need to be doing other things if we want to avoid being stuck inside for six months to a year,” Barrett said. “The biggest trend is a recognition that we need to make the investments that give us agency over our biology, and to build the tooling and infrastructure, so the parade of maladies which is behind COVID won’t have the same consequences that COVID-19 has.”

The pandemic has also driven people to reflect on what they want to do with their lives, Barrett said, suggesting that this phenomenon could influence which startups emerge from this period as well as what venture capitalists choose to invest in.

“If you’re an entrepreneur, I think a dating app looks less appealing than contributing in some way,” Barrett said, adding that entrepreneurs are looking at areas that “put us in a position where we really don’t have to be stuck inside because of a certain kilobase virus.”

Playground has a number of startups that are in position to offer some support, though, as is the nature of the firm’s tendency toward long runways. Most, however, appear better positioned to consider how we can prepare ourselves for the inevitability of some future pandemic, rather than the one we’re currently battling. Click through to read the highlights and watch a video with our entire conversation.

Nearer term plays

Playground’s portfolio is a mix of companies that are building things on a longer timescale that have the capital and patience to weather this pandemic, Barrett said.

However, in the near term, there are categories of companies that have an opportunity to be of service and grow their business.

Rocket Lab has received clearance to launch from the FAA following the failure of its Electron rocket on July 4 and the loss of the half-dozen satellites on board. CEO Peter Beck said that it was a “This was a very, very sneaky and tricky issue,” said CEO Peter Beck. “However, the issue is well understood by the team. We’re really looking forward to getting back on the pad.”

The failure, Beck explained on a call with press, was nowhere near as catastrophic as many such incidents are. While the payloads were lost in the vehicle’s uncontrolled descent, the rocket did not explode or break up suddenly as sometimes happens, but rather seems to have calmly shut itself down during the second stage burn due to “a single anomalous electrical connection.”

“We were just cruising on our way to orbit, traveling at about 4 km/s,” explained Beck, when a single part experienced higher than usual resistance, leading to heat buildup, which caused safety systems to step in and shut it down. “The shutdown was entirely automated — naturally we would do everything we could to try to ride it to orbit, and the vehicle made a tremendous amount of corrections to try to do that. But when you pull the plug, you pull the plug.”

This meant that while the launch — ominously, the company’s 13th — failed, the rocket could still send valuable information on what had gone wrong, which no doubt contributed to the quick turnaround by investigators.

“The failure was very graceful, so we were able to pull down huge amounts of data,” Beck said, “Literally 15 minutes after we saw the anomaly the team had started to look into it, and they haven’t stopped.”

Rocket Lab’s own account of what happened is as follows:

On July 4, 2020, the Electron launch vehicle successfully lifted-off from Launch Complex 1 and proceeded through a nominal first stage engine burn, Stage 1-2 separation, Stage 2 ignition, and fairing jettison as planned. Several minutes into the second stage burn, the engine performed a safe shutdown resulting in a failure to reach orbit. Due to the controlled way the engine shut down, Rocket Lab continued to receive telemetry from the vehicle, providing engineers with extensive data to conduct a robust investigation into the issue. After reviewing more than 25,000 channels of data and carrying out extensive testing, Rocket Lab’s AIB was able to confidently narrow the issue down to a single anomalous electrical connection. This connection was intermittently secure through flight, creating increasing resistance that caused heating and thermal expansion in the electrical component. This caused the surrounding potting compounds to liquify, leading to the disconnection of the electrical system and subsequent engine shutdown. The issue evaded pre-flight detection as the electrical connection remained secure during standard environmental acceptance testing including vibration, thermal vacuum, and thermal cycle tests.

Incidentally, letting the vehicle try to “ride it out” with a blown fuse isn’t advisable for safety and other reasons. Precision is paramount and if payloads aren’t delivered correctly there is the risk of collision with another orbital object. And there is little credit in accomplishing a mission by the skin of one’s teeth — as a major launch provider, Rocket Lab needs to show caution and professionalism, and scrubbing a mission when it is no longer nominal is the only real way to do that.

Beck explained that the part failure had evaded rigorous testing, but that future testing will be even more rigorous.

“This was incredibly unusual. We’ve built over 720 of these components and this is the only one that has shown any anomalous behavior,” he said. “We can actually mitigate it very easily through a slight change to production processes, but more importantly, we can screen for it in existing vehicles in stock through more in-depth testing procedures.”

He added that during the month-long investigation process, the team made a number of tweaks that should further improve the vehicle without requiring any major design or manufacturing changes.

“Electron has earned its stripes, and we’ve brought 53 customers to orbit without fail,” Beck said, but admitted “This is the launch industry and these things do happen. The reality is anyone who flies on Electron now will be flying on an even more reliable vehicle than they were before.”

Having presented their findings to the FAA, Rocket Lab is now set to take on its next mission in August if no further delays present themselves. Although the launch failure does mean a financial setback, Beck (though he wouldn’t comment on insurance or customer reimbursement questions) seemed fairly serene about it.

“If you’re going to own a rocket company and launch vehicles, you have to be prepared for this kind of thing,” he said, noting that the company had “a big chunk of capital in the bank for… bad things. it’s nothing we haven’t planned for.”

The plan to open the U.S.-based Launch Complex 2 and reach a monthly launch cadence this year is still on, he said.

Here they are, ranked by how much weight we put behind them:

 

Here they are, ranked by how much weight we put behind them: