Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Smart assistants are sensitive to their wake words but who among us doesn’t trigger the smart speakers in their house with alarming frequency? Add in some heavily detailed privacy mishaps and a general feeling of distrust and there’s plenty of reason you might want to silence your smart speaker, occasionally.

A new device promises to do just that, placing a check on your Amazon Echo’s always-on microphones through ultrasonic jamming. The gadget, dubbed Alexagate, is the latest drop from hype-as-a-service startup MSCHF. Last month, the startup announced a partnership with YouTuber MrBeast and an app where users could win bug bucks as long as they kept their finger on their phone. The contest ended with multiple winners as the competition stretched from hours into days.

Alexagate is a product for the times, encapsulating a lot of public and private fears about big tech. The device, which took over a year of planning to come to life, is a novelty item, but it does work and it required real engineering to build. The device features 7 individual ultrasonic speakers that are arranged to jam the speakers on Echo devices by overwhelming them with sound so that they can’t hear anything else. A flippable plastic interface allows the Alexagate to fit seamlessly to most of the latest Echo devices out there.

The device does exactly what it says, jamming Alexa when it’s turned on. If you do want to use your smart speaker, you can clap and deactivate the Alexagate, allowing “Hey Alexa” to get a response from the Amazon smart speaker.

It was designed specifically for Amazon Echo devices, though Wiesner says they chose Amazon largely because their speakers were the most common. Nevertheless, when you open the box, you’re hit with a product guide featuring the title “BYE BYE BEZOS,” indicating that the device is in some ways meant to stick it to the world’s richest man.

The product’s manifesto sows seeds of doubt around whether big tech is listening into users, “Perhaps you don’t subscribe to the notion that Facebook always listens through your phone’s mic, but ask yourself at least this in all honesty: Do you think the Echo “mute” button really does anything?”

While “So, the guideline that we set for ourselves internally when we’re coming up with physical products ideas is objects that have a point of view.” MSCHF creative director Kevin Wiesner told TechCrunch in an interview. “You’re gonna put this in your living room and, in some ways, it’s almost like a virtue signal to someone who comes into your into your house and sees it on your end table. It’s ostentatious privacy, in that sense because it is kind of like supposed to start a discussion of what it means to have a smart device and what you’re giving up for it for that.”

Smart speakers are far from essential devices, so the argument for users who might “need” something like this is that if they care so much they should just permanently unplug their Echo and live without the mild conveniences it provides. Though it’s a functional device, the Alexagate is more focused on the themes its creation stands behind. In a lot of ways, products from huge tech companies are becoming unavoidable and it’s not wrong for users to like some things about them and wish that they could avoid other elements of the products.

It’s an argument used by decentralization advocates who want the freedom to hack around with a company’s products that they use so that they can tailor them for exactly what they want. In Alexagate’s instance, users might want the convenience of a smart speaker but want the checks and balance of an external company verifying that it can’t hear a thing.

MSCHF’s Alexagate device is available now on their website for $99. It doesn’t appear to be available for purchase on Amazon quite yet.

Analogue has repeatedly proven that it’s the gold standard when it comes to retro gaming, delivering extremely faithful, but modern hardware to play original NES, SNES, Sega cartridges and more. The company revealed its forthcoming Analogue Pocket last October, and now it’s about to kick off pre-orders for the portable classic console, which can play Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games out of the box, and works with even more classic handheld game systems via adapters.

The Analogue Pocket will be available to pre-order for $199.99 on August 3, starting at 8 AM PST (11 AM EST). The actual ship date is quite a while after that, however: Analogue estimates that the hardware should actually start to be delivered to customers in May, 2021. That’s due to “the unfortunate global state of affairs and supply chain challenges outside of our control,” according to the company, and they’re hardly the only indie hardware outfit feeling the pinch of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on tech suppliers.

Image Credits: Analogue

The good news is that so long as you’re patient, the Pocket will almost certainly deliver the goods. Analogue isn’t new to this, having successfully shipped multiple products in the past, including the Nt mini, the Super Nt and the Mega Sg. Each of these more than delivered on their promises, offering fantastic performance in bringing classic games to modern TVs and displays – without relying on emulation.

Analogue Pocket has changed a bit since it was originally introduced last year, with the start and select button relocated to the base of the front of the device, a design change designed for “optimal comfort” according to the company. The Dock that you can use to connect the Pocket to your TV for a big-screen gaming experience also now features a recessed USB-C port to make the connection more stable.

True to form in terms of combining classic gameplay with modern conveniences, Analogue has designed Pocket with a sleep and wake function that’s much more like what you’d expect from today’s smartphones and tablet: Press the power button once and the console enters a low-power suspended state – press it again and it wakes to right where you left off. That’s an awesome perk for games that often lack their own internal save mechanisms.

Image Credits: Analogue

The Analogue Dock ($99.99) can support up to four controllers at once, using either wired, Bluetooth or 2.4ghz wireless connectivity. You can also use separately available multilink cables to connect up to four Pockets for local multiplayer action.

Analogue is also offering a range of other accessories for the Pocket, including a transparent hard case for storage and transportation, a USB-C fast-charging power brick, adapters to provide compatibility with Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color and Atari Lynx games, and MIDI and Analog sync cables for connecting to Mac, PC and music peripherals for use with the company’s Nanoloop music creation software.

Image Credits: Analogue

The company has also revealed some new software features for the Pocket, including ‘Original Display Modes’ which provides faithful representations of the displays (quirks and all) of the original hardware consoles these games where available for. The display itself is made of Gorilla Glass for extra resilience, and offers variable refresh rates and 360-degree custom rotation control.

Analogue Pocket has a 4,300 mAh built-in rechargeable battery that offers between 6 and 10 hours of play time, and over 10 hours of sleep when not in active use.

This definitely looks like Analogue’s most impressive product yet, and one that will be truly amazing for portable console gaming.

Over the weekend, software giant SAP announced that it will take Qualtrics public, with the German software company retaining a majority stake in the Utah-based “experience management” firm after its forthcoming debut.

SAP paid $8 billion in cash for Qualtrics back in 2018, right before the smaller firm was set to go public. Chatting with the CEOs of both companies around the time of the deal, they were pretty pumped about the combination. Since then, SAP has swapped CEOs.

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At the time, the deal not only made waves within the business realm, it also helped put Utah’s startup scene on the map. (An $8 billion deal makes an impact.)

Current commentary on the spin-out idea seems to rotate on the idea of unlocking value, that if SAP can float a good chunk of Qualtrics’ shares, the market may give that equity a good price. And, then, the value of Qualtrics that SAP will retain will gain implicit value, perhaps boosting the value of its own shares. Making the point, CNBC quoted analysts from Bernstein Research, which said it believes “many SAP investors do not fully understand Qualtrics,” and that the spin-out might “help at least as it relates to better understanding its value.”

What is Qualtrics worth? If we can understand that, we’ll know if the current commentary regarding the spin-out makes sense. So this morning, let’s remind ourselves how big Qualtrics was heading into its IPO, what it might have been worth, how much it has have grown since and what that might be worth at today’s super-high software valuations.

Did SAP overpay? Did it get a deal? Let’s find out what Qualtrics might look like in 2020.

2018

Before SAP stole it from the public markets, Qualtrics was looking for $18 to $21 per share on the public markets, valuing the company at around $3.9 billion to $4.5 billion. SAP had to pay up for Qualtrics stock, obviously, to get the deal done given how hot the Utah-based firm was at the time.

Qualtrics had growth and profits, two things that combine to create lots and lots of market value. Here are some key Qualtrics numbers from the time:

From healthcare, to education, to human rights, tech has the potential to drive social impact at scale. In this moment of global pandemic, growing economic insecurity and an uprising against racial injustice, the need for scalable solutions is greater than ever. But there are lessons we’ve seen founders learn the hard way time and again.

In the spirit of reaching impact at scale faster, we rounded up our top five lessons to take to heart if you want to turn your world-changing idea into a tech nonprofit. Distilled from The Tech Nonprofit Playbook, a free guide to starting a social impact startup, we drew from the learnings of tech nonprofits whose work has transformed their sectors.

1. Get to know the problem intimately

You have a big idea. You’ve identified a social problem you can’t help but try to fix, and you think you just might have a world-changing, tech-driven solution. But you can’t solve the issue you’ve identified without a deep understanding of the community you’re serving. Not doing so is a recipe for failure. If you haven’t lived the problem, bring on a co-founder who has. Then, go meet others who have firsthand experience with the problem. Interview these individuals with a user-centered lens to allow insights and opportunities to reveal themselves.

To see this in action, consider Upsolve, the TurboTax for chapter 7 bankruptcy, helping low-income Americans recover from crippling financial crises. During their user research phase, the co-founders asked brick and mortar legal aid organizations for their waitlists, and passed out their cards in legal aid clinics where people were seeking help around debt lawsuits. These strategies enabled Upsolve to consider a broad sample of perspectives and develop a deep understanding of the problem from the users’ point of view. Don’t skimp on this — your user research should inspire and inform your initial product idea.

2. Build a tech for good product, but don’t start from scratch

Now, it’s time to put your product idea to the test by piloting a minimum viable product, or MVP — an early version of a product that surfaces learnings about your users with little effort. Your MVP needn’t be a fully fleshed-out product. In Upsolve’s case, it was a physical space where they helped users file for bankruptcy in real life. Run a small-scale pilot of your MVP to confirm, deny or alter your hypothesis. Once you’ve piloted your MVP for enough time that you’re confident you have a viable solution, it’s time to build a beta product.

To build your beta product, or an almost ready-to-launch product, leverage existing tech solutions to address your new use case — don’t start from scratch. For Upsolve, it was a Typeform, an online plug-and-play form. From less technical products like website and communication tools, to more technical ones like app development tools, databases and APIs, piecing together existing tech building blocks will drive your startup costs down and ultimately make it easier to maintain your product. With your solution out in the world, build user feedback into your product as you continue testing, refining and iterating to more closely serve your mission.

3. Learn the art of nonprofit judo

Being a tech nonprofit comes with a pretty unique set of advantages that, when leveraged, are what we like to call nonprofit judo. A critical nonprofit judo tactic is forging aligned partnerships with other organizations, funders and companies to create mutually beneficial relationships that drive sustainability for your tech nonprofit and increase user acquisition.

Take CareerVillage.org, which crowdsources career advice for millions of underserved youth. For the first few years, recruiting volunteers and fundraising each took a lot of the founding team’s time. But a solution arose when they learned that Fortune 500 companies were looking for easy and scalable volunteering programs for their employees. CareerVillage.org built a sustainable “earned income” revenue model centered around volunteering engagements for corporate employees.

This nonprofit judo has become a major driver of the organization’s rapid growth. Win-win.The Tech Nonprofit Playbook digs into more strategic advantages nonprofits can leverage, and shares real-world examples of nonprofit judo. Rather than going into your tech nonprofit journey imagining an uphill battle, turn the scenario around by tapping into the unique opportunities it presents.

4. Your people will make or break your organization

To achieve your mission, find the people who believe in your cause and can help you get there.

Most importantly, find a complementary co-founder early on who is either technical or an issue expert. Co-founders fill in each other’s gaps, distribute the work and build a strong foundation for the team.

Next, focus on hiring talented, mission-driven people (they exist!) who can help you build and scale. This doesn’t mean hiring as many people as possible once you have the funding for it — something CommonLit, the free reading platform for students, learned the hard way. After winning a $4 million grant, founder Michelle Brown raced to hire 15 people in 40 days. After the fact, Brown realized that you cannot hire people as individuals, you must hire a team. The individuals powering your organization will define what it becomes. Choose wisely.

5. Be intentional about how you measure impact

Impact is a tech nonprofit’s true north. Before you can get down to creating impact, you have to figure out your “who” and your “why,” or distribution ethics. Distribution ethics, the framework shared by Josh Nesbit, founder of Medic Mobile, is the concept that deciding who you are going to help and why they need your help over others is an ethical stance — and will impact everything you do as an organization.

When Nesbit first launched Medic Mobile, the organization was implementing healthcare tools in partnership with on-the-ground organizations. In doing so, he was providing tools to local partners who already had human and financial capital. Nesbit realized this framework wasn’t reflective of his moral stance — he wanted to help those with the least access to medical care. This realization helped him refocus the organization and redefine its product vision to serve those most in need. Since then, Medic Mobile has been building open-source tools that enable a decentralized network of community health workers to deliver effective last-mile healthcare. And it has made a huge impact: Last year, Medic Mobile supported a global network of 27,477 health workers, which provided more than 11 million services for their community.

As you grow, be intentional about how you measure your impact. Impact measurement dictates your organization’s architecture by aligning your work with the value you want to create for the world. It’s a critical practice that not only centers your output around your mission, but helps you raise support for your work through funding and partnerships.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

Here’s what we talked about today:

• Headlines: SAP is spinning out part of Qualtrics, Dave leaked customer data, Asian markets were mixed while US shared opened green. Cryptos and gold are up at the same time, marking the moment as a melt-up.
• The Qualtrics news was the loudest note from the weekend’s jam, coming a few years after SAP bought the Utah-based tech giant. SAP will retain a majority stake even after the debut, but the plan should give Qualtrics more freedom, and SAP a better valuation for the piece of the smaller company that it retains. That’s if the spin-out goes well, of course.
• Dave’s leak looks bad, and will test what happens to more nascent fintech properties when they endure this sort of breach.
• Looking ahead, this is a huge earnings week. We’ll see results from Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, and others.
• And, finally, rounds from StashAway, cargo.one, and Blueheart.

Closing, we’re in exciting territory on the public markets given that high share prices are giving big companies more ammunition than ever. Let’s see what they can get done with it before the window closes.

I’ve been following consumer audio electronics company Nura with great interest for a few years now — the Melbourne-based startup was one of the first companies I met with after starting with TechCrunch. At the time, its first prototype was a big mess of circuits and wires — the sort of thing you could never imagine shrunk down into a reasonably-sized consumer device.

Nura managed, of course. And the final product looked and sounded great; hell, even the box was nice. If I’m lucky, I see a consumer hardware product once or twice a year that seems reasonably capable of disrupting an industry, and Nura’s custom sound profiles fit that bill. But the company was unique for another reason. A graduate of the HAX accelerator, the startup announced NuraNow roughly this time last year.

Hardware as a service (HaaS) has been a popular concept in the IT/enterprise space for some time, but it’s still fairly uncommon in the consumer category. For one thing: a hardware subscription presents a new paradigm for thinking about purchases. And that is a big lift in a country like the U.S., which spent years weaning consumers off contract-based smartphones.

That Nura jumped at the chance shouldn’t be a big surprise. Backers HAX/SOSV have been proponents of the model for some time now. I’ve visited their Shenzhen offices a few times, and the topic of HaaS always seems to come up.

In a recent email exchange, General Partner Duncan Turner described HaaS as “a great way to keep in contact with your customers and up sell them on new features. Most importantly, for start-ups, recurring revenue is critical for scaling a business with venture capital (and will help appeal to a broad set of investors). HaaS often has a low churn (as easier to put onto long-term contracts).”

The largest trial yet for a potential COVID-19 vaccine began on Monday, as drug company Moderna began providing the first of an anticipated 30,000 volunteers with shots of its candidates. This is a blind trial, wherein some participants will get the vaccine and some will get placebos. Each participant will get two does, and researchers will study them to see which group suffers more actual infections as they proceed about their lives as they would normally.

There are more than 70 anticipated trial sites across the U.S. for this study,; and the first to begin vaccinating the volunteer participants is located in Savannah, Georgia. The makeup of the overall group of participants is intended to study not only geographical distribution, covering regions hard-hit by the virus and those with less severe outbreaks, but also to represent a wide sample when it comes to demographics of those participating.

The Moderna trial is begin undertaken in partnership with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and represents one of the fastest development cycles of a vaccine ever. Just around two months after work was begun on the Moderna vaccine, it was already begin tested in humans for the first time, and early data from its Phase 1 tests (which were on a much smaller scale) have shown promising indications that it does indeed provide some infection protection – though large scale tests like this 30,000-person strong one are definitely required before anyone can say anything definitive about its efficacy.

In addition to making sure that the vaccine is actually effective as a vaccine, this large-scale test is intended to prove it’s safe to take. Early results indicated some side effects, but again, it’s impossible to say anything definitively about downsides wither until you test at scale.

Other trials are also making quick progress, including one for a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford. Moderna has previously said that experimental versions of the vaccine might be available on an emergency basis for healthcare workers by this fall, if all goes to plan.

Cloudflare today announced the private beta launch of Workers Unbound, the latest step in its efforts to offer a serverless platform that can compete with the likes of AWS Lambda.

The company first launched its Workers edge computing platform in late 2017. Today it has “hundreds of thousands of developers” who use it and in the last quarter alone, more than 20,000 developers built applications based on the service, according to the company. Cloudflare also uses Workers to power many of its own services, but the first iteration of the platform had quite a few limitations. The idea behind Workers Unbound is to do away with most of those and turn it into a platform that can compete with the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google.

“The original motivation for us building Cloudflare Workers was not to sell it as a product but because we were using it as our own internal platform to build applications,” Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince told me ahead of today’s announcement. “Today, Cloudflare Teams, which is our fastest-growing product line, is all running on top of Cloudflare workers and it’s allowed us to innovate as fast as we have and stay nimble and stay agile and all those things that get harder as you as you become a larger and larger company.”

Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince

Prince noted that Cloudflare aims to expose all of the services it builds for its internal consumption to third-party developers as well. “The fact that we’ve been able to roll out a whole Zscaler competitor in almost no time is because of the fact that we had this platform and we could build on it ourselves,” he said.

The original Workers service will continue to operate (but under the Workers Bundled moniker) and essentially become Cloudflare’s serverless platform for basic workloads that only run for a very short time. Workers Unbound — as the name implies — is meant for more complex and longer-running processes.

When it first launched Workers, the company said that its killer feature was speed. Today, Prince argues that speed obviously remains an important feature — and Cloudflare Workers Unbound promises that it essentially does away with cold start latencies. But developers also adopted the platform because of its ability to scale and its price.

Indeed, Workers Unbound, Cloudflare argues, is now significantly more affordable than similar offerings. “For the same workload, Cloudflare Workers Unbound can be 75 percent less expensive than AWS Lambda, 24 percent less expensive than Microsoft Azure Functions, and 52 percent less expensive than Google Cloud Functions,” the company says in today’s press release.

As it turned out, the fact that Workers was also an edge computing platform was basically a bonus but not necessarily why developers adopted it.

Another feature Prince highlighted is regulatory compliance. “I think the thing we’re realizing as we talk to our largest enterprise customers is that for real companies — not just the individual developer hacking away at home — but for real businesses in financial services or anyone who has to deal with a regulated industry, the only thing that trumps ease of use is regulatory compliance, which is not sexy or interesting or anything else but like if your GC says you can’t use XYZ platform, then you don’t use XYZ platform and that’s the end of the story,” Prince noted.

Speed, though, is of course something developers will always care about. Prince stressed that the team was quite happy with the 5ms cold start times of the original Workers platform. “But we wanted to be better,” he said. “We wanted to be the clearly fastest serverless platform forever — and the only number that we know no one else can beat is zero — unless they invent a time machine.”

The way the team engineered this is by queuing up the process while the two servers are still negotiating their TLS handshake. “We’re excited to be the first cloud computing platform that [offers], for no additional costs, out of the box, zero millisecond cold start times which then also means less variability in the performance.”

Cloudflare also argues that developers can update their code and have it go live globally within 15 seconds.

Another area the team worked on was making it easier to use the service in general. Among the key new features here is support for languages like Python and a new SDK that will allow developers to add support for their favorite languages, too.

Prince credits Cloudflare’s ability to roll out this platform, which is obviously heavy on compute resources — and to keep it affordable — to the fact that it always thought of itself as a security platform first (the team has often said that the CDN functionality was more or less incidental). Because it performed deep packet inspection, for example, the company’s servers always featured relatively high-powered CPUs. “Our network has been optimized for CPU usage from the beginning and as a result, it’s actually made it much more natural for us to extend our network that way,” he explained. “To this day, the same machines that are running our firewall products are the same machines that are running our edge computing platform.”

Looking ahead, Prince noted that while Workers and Workers Unbound feature a distributed key-value store, the team is looking at adding a more robust database infrastructure and distributed storage.

The team is also looking at how to decompose applications to put them closest to where they will be running. “You could imagine that in the future, it might be that you write an application and we say, ‘listen, the parts of the application that are sensitive to the user of the database might run in Portland, where you are — but if the database is in Ashburn, Virginia, then the parts that are sensitive to latency in the database might run there,” he said.

Tire Agent, an Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator-backed startup that is looking to bring the tire industry into the 21st century, has today announced the close of a $5 million funding round led by American Family Ventures, with participation from ERA, Sidekick Fund, NY Angels and HBS Angels.

According to Consumer Reports, the average tire costs about $97. Four new tires costs a little under $400, and that doesn’t include added costs like taxes, fees, or the cost of installation. Tire Agent wants to make tire shopping more convenient and accessible to customers, while also making the process more affordable.

The startup works with tire brands (more than 50, to be exact) to give users a place to browse tires online. Moreover, Tire Agent layers in educational, easy-to-understand content about these tires to help users understand the difference between brands, models, and get the best value. Tire Agent also helps users find an installer near them and shows the cost of installation up front, so there are no surprises.

Plaid founder and CEO Zach Perret recently said on an episode of Extra Crunch Live that every company is a fintech company, and TireAgent seems to agree.

The company has built out a tire financing platform called PayPair that connects customers of any credit score and matches them with a variety of lenders, financing and payment plan companies to give them options on how to cover the cost of new tires.

Tire Agent also has a partnership with AllState to offer warranties to customers, including a warranty on installation, so that their investment is protected.

“The biggest challenge for Tire Agent is getting people to change the habit of going to an old-school tire shop and being so used to people pushing a brand on them,” said Tire Agent founder and CEO Jared Kugel. “On Tire Agent, you can read through the content we’ve generated for each tire, even if you know nothing about a tire, and make an educated decision.”

Tire Agent has a network of 500+ tire distribution warehouses with 50 tire brands and 20 wheel brands offered on the platform, with 15,000 partnered installation centers across the country.

Though the company won’t share concrete numbers, Kugel added that revenue and tires sold grew by nearly 300 percent from the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2020.

This latest round brings Tire Agent’s total funding to $6 million.

Ford is going to employ two of Boston Dynamics’ ‘Spot’ robots, which are four-legged, dog-like walking robots that weigh roughly 70 lbs each, to help them update the original engineering plans for one of the transmission manufacturing plans. The plants, Ford explains, have undergone any number of changes since their original construction, and it’s difficult to know if the plans they have match up with the reality of the plants as they exist today. The Spot robots, with their laser scanning and imaging capabilities, will be able to produce highly-detailed and accurate maps that Ford engineers can then use to modernize and retool the facility.

There are a few benefits that Ford hopes to realize by employing the Spot robots in place of humans to map the facility: First, they should save a considerable amount of time, since they replace a time-intensive process of setting up a tripod with a laser scanner at various points throughout the facility and spending a while at each location manually capturing the environment. The Spot dogs are roving and scanning continuously, providing a reduction of up to 50% in terms of actual time to complete the facility scan.

The robot dogs are also equipped with five cameras as well as laser scanners, and can operate for up to two hours travelling at around 3 mph continuously. The data they collect can then be synthesized for a more complete overall picture, and because of their small size and nimble navigation capabilities, they can map areas of the plant that aren’t necessarily reachable by people attempting to do the same job.

This is a pilot program that Ford is conducting, using two Spot robots leased by Boston Dynamics . But if it works out the way they seem to think it will, you can imagine that the automaker might seek to expand the program to cover other efforts at more of its manufacturing facilities.