Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Two years ago, dormmates Justin Wenig and Nicholas Diao struggled to get into a popular computer science class at Columbia University . The duo eventually got into that class, but after the initial frustration around class scheduling, they decided “it was an obvious problem for a computer to solve.”

Wenig and Diao are the founders of Coursedog, a software startup that wants to create an operating system for universities to better schedule classes, professors and sections based on demand and interest. “Think of it,” Wenig said, “as a Superhuman for class scheduling systems.”

Today, Coursedog announced it has raised $4.2 million from a crop of investors, including First Round’s Josh Kopelman. The company did not disclose any other investors, and there were no board seats taken on during the financing round. The Y Combinator graduate’s total known venture capital funding is now $5.7 million. Investors in the company include FoundersX Venture, EFund and Jinal Jhaveri, the former CEO of SchoolMint, a school enrollment startup.

The funding will be used to build out Coursedog’s product line on projecting course demand, the correct number of seats a school should offer per course and student success.

“A lot of people think higher [education] is a slow institution, but institutions are really thinking about how to promote student success,” Wenig said in an interview with TechCrunch. But instead of adopting any technology, universities are careful about sharing protected data, he continued.

Competition-wise, Wenig said that Blackboard, a learning management startup, continues to be one of the two “big software tools within universities.” Coursedog sits on top of the other software tool: the student information system, used by administrators that need to plan student schedules.

After Wenig and Diao cold-called hundreds of colleges, Columbia Law School was the first contract signed. Since then, the startup has landed deals with more than 60 colleges and universities of all sizes.

Coursedog’s clientele fits a range. The smallest client, per Wenig, is the Laguna School of Art and Design, which has roughly 600 students. Wenig also noted they cater to a mix of public and private schools, with public schools often “being the most innovative.”

“A lot of states offer incentive-based funding,” Wenig said. “In Utah, the amount of funds you might get from the state as a public institution is directly proportional to how well you’re using your space on campus.” He claims that Coursedog helps improve graduation rates by getting more students into the right classes.

“Today, we are just building apps on top of the Student Information System to help schools with scheduling, curriculum planning and catalog publishing and are slowly eating away functionality that schools would normally be doing with spreadsheets and native to the SIS,” he noted.

Coursedog plans to scale to 100 more universities in the next year, and will use the new funding to help “grow up” its production.

Two years ago, dormmates Justin Wenig and Nicholas Diao struggled to get into a popular computer science class at Columbia University . The duo eventually got into that class, but after the initial frustration around class scheduling, they decided “it was an obvious problem for a computer to solve.”

Wenig and Diao are the founders of Coursedog, a software startup that wants to create an operating system for universities to better schedule classes, professors and sections based on demand and interest. “Think of it,” Wenig said, “as a Superhuman for class scheduling systems.”

Today, Coursedog announced it has raised $4.2 million from a crop of investors, including First Round’s Josh Kopelman. The company did not disclose any other investors, and there were no board seats taken on during the financing round. The Y Combinator graduate’s total known venture capital funding is now $5.7 million. Investors in the company include FoundersX Venture, EFund and Jinal Jhaveri, the former CEO of SchoolMint, a school enrollment startup.

The funding will be used to build out Coursedog’s product line on projecting course demand, the correct number of seats a school should offer per course and student success.

“A lot of people think higher [education] is a slow institution, but institutions are really thinking about how to promote student success,” Wenig said in an interview with TechCrunch. But instead of adopting any technology, universities are careful about sharing protected data, he continued.

Competition-wise, Wenig said that Blackboard, a learning management startup, continues to be one of the two “big software tools within universities.” Coursedog sits on top of the other software tool: the student information system, used by administrators that need to plan student schedules.

After Wenig and Diao cold-called hundreds of colleges, Columbia Law School was the first contract signed. Since then, the startup has landed deals with more than 60 colleges and universities of all sizes.

Coursedog’s clientele fits a range. The smallest client, per Wenig, is the Laguna School of Art and Design, which has roughly 600 students. Wenig also noted they cater to a mix of public and private schools, with public schools often “being the most innovative.”

“A lot of states offer incentive-based funding,” Wenig said. “In Utah, the amount of funds you might get from the state as a public institution is directly proportional to how well you’re using your space on campus.” He claims that Coursedog helps improve graduation rates by getting more students into the right classes.

“Today, we are just building apps on top of the Student Information System to help schools with scheduling, curriculum planning and catalog publishing and are slowly eating away functionality that schools would normally be doing with spreadsheets and native to the SIS,” he noted.

Coursedog plans to scale to 100 more universities in the next year, and will use the new funding to help “grow up” its production.

The Royal Air Force delayed safety warnings about the first transatlantic flight of a new Reaper aircraft in 2018, over fears that they could tip anti-drone protestors to its arrival in the U.K., according to emails seen by TechCrunch.

On July 11, 2018, the General Atomics SkyGuardian, a variant of the U.S. Reaper drone that killed Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani in January, flew from Grand Forks, N.D., to RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. This was the first and only time that a drone had made such a journey through U.K. civilian airspace, and it paved the way for an even more ambitious test due to happen in the U.S. later this month. 

The 5.5-metric ton aircraft was remotely piloted throughout its 24-hour journey using satellite communications to relay video, instrument data and air traffic control instructions to pilots at General Atomics’ airbase in North Dakota. 

The historic flight, which passed directly over Hereford and Gloucester, concluded without incident at RAF Fairford, where the drone went on static display during the Royal International Air Tattoo, a military air show. 

General Atomics chief executive Linden Blue said: “The successful flight of the [SkyGuardian] is the culmination of the hard work and innovation of our dedicated employees, and the strong relationships that we enjoy with the RAF, the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the Royal International Air Tattoo and our U.K. industry partners.”

However, emails obtained under U.K. Freedom of Information legislation, and first reported by The Guardian, show that those relationships were tenuous at best, with the CAA distrusting General Atomics, questioning the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s oversight of the SkyGuardian and facing sustained pressure from the Ministry of Defence to delay safety measures. 

The CAA, the U.K.’s aviation regulator, supplied more than 1,600 pages of emails regarding the flight. All were heavily redacted, including most names and job titles. 

It is unclear who first suggested a high-profile transatlantic Reaper flight to mark the RAF’s centenary and showcase the new drone at the Air Tattoo. But by early February, the CAA was already warning of pressure from the military to allow the flight. 

“We will need to be fully satisfied that the flight can be conducted in a safe manner before we will approve this,” wrote a CAA manager to Mark Swan, then the regulator’s director of Safety. “Note that there is likely to be extensive interest from MoD sources… and hence some higher level pressure focussed on the CAA for this flight to take place.”

That is because the RAF is in the process of procuring 20 next-generation Reaper drones from General Atomics in a deal worth more than £1.1 billion (US$1.4 billion). These drones, which the RAF will call Protector, are a military version of the SkyGuardian that undertook the transatlantic flight. 

The RAF already has 10 Reaper drones, a larger and more heavily armed variant of the Predator. Since 2008, these have been used to carry out hundreds of deadly strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. While these drones are remotely controlled by RAF pilots in Nevada and Lincolnshire, the Reapers are not allowed to share civilian airspace with passenger jets. This means that they have to be based very near to where they operate — an expensive and limiting requirement.

A drone like the SkyGuardian that could fly amid commercial aircraft for many thousands of miles would enable the RAF to attack targets across much of the world from the bases in Britain. “A drone that can fly in a civilian airspace is so much more versatile,” says Arthur Holland Michel, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York.

When the Protector drones enter service in the U.K. in 2024, they will carry two British-made weapons: a GPS- and laser-guided bomb called the Paveway IV; and a semi-autonomous missile called Brimstone. Although the transatlantic drone would be unarmed, the RAF saw it as a potentially lucrative sales demonstration for other countries. 

“The eyes of a number of potential customer nations such as [Australia] and [Canada] will be on the event and the outcome could be significant for UK prosperity,” wrote the RAF’s program manager for Protector in an internal email to the MoD.

The CAA was skeptical from the outset. “The general impression of General Atomics… is that they will try to ‘push the limits’ and over promise in many areas,” wrote a safety official in March. “We need to tread really carefully on this one – the fact that MoD is involved is not a reason for us to roll over and just let this happen.”

The regulator’s concerns were simple. How would the aircraft know where it was? How would pilots thousands of miles away know what was happening around the drone? And how could they ensure they had control of it at all times? 

The CAA has an exhaustive procedure for assessing the safety of aircraft, and another long list of requirements for allowing drones to take to the skies above Britain. There was no way that the SkyGuardian could be properly tested by the U.K. regulator in a few short months before the planned flight in July.

Instead, General Atomics could apply for an overflight exemption — permission for a single flight on a given day. This exemption would rely on another credible organisation attesting to the airworthiness of the aircraft, in this case, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). 

The problem was that the FAA had itself placed severe limits on how and where the SkyGuardian could operate. It usually required the SkyGuardian to have a visual observer spotting for the drone from a nearby chase plane whenever it was below 18,000 feet. The FAA also banned the drone from flying over most densely populated areas. 

“I do not really see how such limitations would… allow the aircraft to commence the first part of its flight out of the United States, let alone over Canada and then into the oceanic system,” wrote a CAA safety official to General Atomics. “The limitation regarding overflight of densely populated areas… will bring in additional problems within the UK (which is already quite densely populated).”

For its part, the FAA insisted that its authority finished at the edge of American airspace. “Whether manned or unmanned, [we] cannot provide any sort of safety statement that would ensure safe operations in UK airspace,” wrote an FAA official to the CAA in March. 

“If General Atomics can’t get the FAA to back up the safety of the aircraft, then why should we be letting it into our airspace?,” wondered one CAA official. 

It seemed as though the same thought had occurred to authorities in Ireland. The shortest route for many transatlantic flights between the U.S. and the U.K. is directly across Ireland. However, a track of the SkyGuardian’s route shows a distinct kink to keep the drone out over the Atlantic and the Irish Sea.

In April, a CAA airspace official reported a phone call with their counterpart at the Irish Aviation Authority: “I explained why the decision was made to route south of Irish landmass… However, due to how the Irish will be segregating the airspace and in addition to the commercial traffic routing across the Atlantic, they have requested that [SkyGuardian] now routes [even] further south.”

In aviation, segregation is when an aircraft does not fly in close proximity to other planes but instead has a corridor carved out for its sole use. Although General Atomics’ ultimate aim is for the SkyGuardian (and the RAF’s Protector) to use advanced sensors to autonomously detect and avoid hazards, the entire transatlantic flight would take place in segregated airspace, at least several miles from other aircraft. 

Even so, the FAA would have had to adjust the SkyGuardian’s domestic certification to allow it to fly over cities, and without a chase plane. “In its current format and limitations there is not a lot the CAA can do with this,” wrote a CAA official. “We need to sit down and discuss this, as there are political forces at play here and [we are] getting a lot of pressure from the MoD.”

Eventually, the FAA relented, relaxing the SkyGuardian’s restrictions for the transatlantic flight. It does not appear that the CAA had any say in setting those conditions, which were redacted in the CAA emails. However, the drone flew directly over the city of Gloucester and did not have a chase plane. 

Following a meeting about the proposed flight in early June, one CAA official reported that the regulator was “simply taking the FAA’s experimental certification and ‘anglicising’ it.”

Now that the flight seemed as if it would actually happen, attention within the RAF and CAA shifted to public relations.

Although the SkyGuardian would be displayed at the Air Tattoo with British bombs and missiles, the RAF wanted the flight and SkyGuardian to sound as innocuous as possible. RAF High Command edited an article intended for the defence publication Jane’s to remove references to the SkyGuardian’s large weapons load and its ability to “greatly [compress] the sensor to shooter kill-chain between detection and an armed response.” 

“I have cut out the weapons bit as this detracts from the article and moves focus from the achievement of the flight to how easily we can kill people,” wrote an RAF officer. The same officer also added a paragraph about how the SkyGuardian could provide humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, coastal surveys, search and rescue and even monitor flood defences.

“This is all part of the narrative that [remote piloted aircraft] are a good thing and I am keen to keep the wind out of the anti-drone lobby sails,” he wrote. 

General Atomics was now excited to announce the upcoming flight as quickly as possible. But on June 11, a CAA official noted that a press release from General Atomics had been blocked by the MoD “due to concerns about the potential for “anti (military) drone” protests hampering the arrival at Fairford if the flight is publicised too early.”

A week later, the MoD suggested that the CAA only announce the 4,300-mile transatlantic crossing just six days before the flight itself.  

“We have significant concerns this is too late,” complained a CAA official to Mark Swan, its head of safety. “[We] endeavour to provide at least 60 days’ notification of large airspace restrictions to notify other airspace users… The longer we leave to notify, the higher the risk of airspace infringements.”

A particular worry was a British Gliding Association competition scheduled to take place just 10 miles from the SkyGuardian’s airspace on the day of its flight. If one of the gliders should stray into the drone’s path, it could risk a catastrophic collision. 

“Sadly, I have had a huge kickback from the RAF regarding going public,” wrote another CAA official. “I have been informed that the RAF [is trying to] delay this as long as possible…. Patience is running thin thanks to the MoD.”

Ultimately, the CAA disregarded the military’s concerns, and issued its airspace warning at the end of June. Only one decision was left to be made: What should the SkyGuardian be called?

One CAA airspace expert suggested calling it nothing at all, with the warning vaguely referencing “a civilian aircraft, certificated and registered through the FAA… to mitigate the risk of anti-drones protests for [the] MoD.”

Another CAA official agreed that the word “drone” should be avoided wherever possible. “[We can] refer to it as either an Unmanned Aircraft or as a Remotely Piloted Aircraft… I believe the terminology of ‘drone’ does not fit this aircraft for a number of reasons.”

RAF High Command concurred, with an RAF officer writing: “It is clear from our teamwork that we are all consistent and clear on each other’s priorities moving forward, particularly with the incorrect use of ‘drone’.”

At last, the CAA and the RAF could agree on something. Whatever flew uncrewed from America to Britain, with its remote pilot, satellite control and ability to carry multiple precision-guided weapons, it certainly wasn’t a drone. 

The flight itself went pretty much to plan. The SkyGuardian took off from Grand Forks just after midday on 10 July, and flew through the night at 27,000 feet over Canada and the North Atlantic on a meticulously charted route. Pilots in North Dakota, controlling the SkyGuardian in shifts, connected with U.S., Canadian, Irish and British air traffic controllers. 

Arriving off the coast of Wales, the SkyGuardian descended into a holding pattern above Cirencester before coming in to land at Fairford, using an automated landing system. There were no anti-drone protestors waiting to greet it. 

After the Tattoo was over, the SkyGuardian was dismantled and flown back to the U.S. as cargo, its mission complete. 

In January 2019, General Atomics announced that defense contractor BAE Systems was developing a plan for regular RAF Protector operations in U.K. civilian airspace. In November, the Australian government announced that it would spend $1.3 billion Australian dollars (£670 million) to acquire a fleet of SkyGuardians as its next unmanned aerial vehicle. Canada and Greece are also reported to be considering purchasing the aircraft. 

But the jewel in the crown for General Atomics is the U.S. market. On March 23, a SkyGuardian equipped with an experimental autonomous detect-and-avoid system and a cutting-edge surveillance radar will take to the skies above Southern California, fully integrated with normal air traffic control for the first time. According to a filing with the FCC, it will fly for over 100 miles, conducting aerial inspection and surveillance of “critical infrastructure owned by commercial and civil entities.”

“This type of commercial mission has never been done with a [drone] anywhere in the United States,” wrote General Atomics. “It is a first of its kind and will serve as a proof of concept for future… missions.”

If the test goes well, military and commercial Reapers and SkyGuardians could soon start flying over U.S. cities, either on their way to foreign war zones, or with their tireless digital eyes gathering data on America itself. 

The Royal Air Force delayed safety warnings about the first transatlantic flight of a new Reaper aircraft in 2018, over fears that they could tip anti-drone protestors to its arrival in the U.K., according to emails seen by TechCrunch.

On July 11, 2018, the General Atomics SkyGuardian, a variant of the U.S. Reaper drone that killed Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani in January, flew from Grand Forks, N.D., to RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. This was the first and only time that a drone had made such a journey through U.K. civilian airspace, and it paved the way for an even more ambitious test due to happen in the U.S. later this month. 

The 5.5-metric ton aircraft was remotely piloted throughout its 24-hour journey using satellite communications to relay video, instrument data and air traffic control instructions to pilots at General Atomics’ airbase in North Dakota. 

The historic flight, which passed directly over Hereford and Gloucester, concluded without incident at RAF Fairford, where the drone went on static display during the Royal International Air Tattoo, a military air show. 

General Atomics chief executive Linden Blue said: “The successful flight of the [SkyGuardian] is the culmination of the hard work and innovation of our dedicated employees, and the strong relationships that we enjoy with the RAF, the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the Royal International Air Tattoo and our U.K. industry partners.”

However, emails obtained under U.K. Freedom of Information legislation, and first reported by The Guardian, show that those relationships were tenuous at best, with the CAA distrusting General Atomics, questioning the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s oversight of the SkyGuardian and facing sustained pressure from the Ministry of Defence to delay safety measures. 

The CAA, the U.K.’s aviation regulator, supplied more than 1,600 pages of emails regarding the flight. All were heavily redacted, including most names and job titles. 

It is unclear who first suggested a high-profile transatlantic Reaper flight to mark the RAF’s centenary and showcase the new drone at the Air Tattoo. But by early February, the CAA was already warning of pressure from the military to allow the flight. 

“We will need to be fully satisfied that the flight can be conducted in a safe manner before we will approve this,” wrote a CAA manager to Mark Swan, then the regulator’s director of Safety. “Note that there is likely to be extensive interest from MoD sources… and hence some higher level pressure focussed on the CAA for this flight to take place.”

That is because the RAF is in the process of procuring 20 next-generation Reaper drones from General Atomics in a deal worth more than £1.1 billion (US$1.4 billion). These drones, which the RAF will call Protector, are a military version of the SkyGuardian that undertook the transatlantic flight. 

The RAF already has 10 Reaper drones, a larger and more heavily armed variant of the Predator. Since 2008, these have been used to carry out hundreds of deadly strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. While these drones are remotely controlled by RAF pilots in Nevada and Lincolnshire, the Reapers are not allowed to share civilian airspace with passenger jets. This means that they have to be based very near to where they operate — an expensive and limiting requirement.

A drone like the SkyGuardian that could fly amid commercial aircraft for many thousands of miles would enable the RAF to attack targets across much of the world from the bases in Britain. “A drone that can fly in a civilian airspace is so much more versatile,” says Arthur Holland Michel, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York.

When the Protector drones enter service in the U.K. in 2024, they will carry two British-made weapons: a GPS- and laser-guided bomb called the Paveway IV; and a semi-autonomous missile called Brimstone. Although the transatlantic drone would be unarmed, the RAF saw it as a potentially lucrative sales demonstration for other countries. 

“The eyes of a number of potential customer nations such as [Australia] and [Canada] will be on the event and the outcome could be significant for UK prosperity,” wrote the RAF’s program manager for Protector in an internal email to the MoD.

The CAA was skeptical from the outset. “The general impression of General Atomics… is that they will try to ‘push the limits’ and over promise in many areas,” wrote a safety official in March. “We need to tread really carefully on this one – the fact that MoD is involved is not a reason for us to roll over and just let this happen.”

The regulator’s concerns were simple. How would the aircraft know where it was? How would pilots thousands of miles away know what was happening around the drone? And how could they ensure they had control of it at all times? 

The CAA has an exhaustive procedure for assessing the safety of aircraft, and another long list of requirements for allowing drones to take to the skies above Britain. There was no way that the SkyGuardian could be properly tested by the U.K. regulator in a few short months before the planned flight in July.

Instead, General Atomics could apply for an overflight exemption — permission for a single flight on a given day. This exemption would rely on another credible organisation attesting to the airworthiness of the aircraft, in this case, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). 

The problem was that the FAA had itself placed severe limits on how and where the SkyGuardian could operate. It usually required the SkyGuardian to have a visual observer spotting for the drone from a nearby chase plane whenever it was below 18,000 feet. The FAA also banned the drone from flying over most densely populated areas. 

“I do not really see how such limitations would… allow the aircraft to commence the first part of its flight out of the United States, let alone over Canada and then into the oceanic system,” wrote a CAA safety official to General Atomics. “The limitation regarding overflight of densely populated areas… will bring in additional problems within the UK (which is already quite densely populated).”

For its part, the FAA insisted that its authority finished at the edge of American airspace. “Whether manned or unmanned, [we] cannot provide any sort of safety statement that would ensure safe operations in UK airspace,” wrote an FAA official to the CAA in March. 

“If General Atomics can’t get the FAA to back up the safety of the aircraft, then why should we be letting it into our airspace?,” wondered one CAA official. 

It seemed as though the same thought had occurred to authorities in Ireland. The shortest route for many transatlantic flights between the U.S. and the U.K. is directly across Ireland. However, a track of the SkyGuardian’s route shows a distinct kink to keep the drone out over the Atlantic and the Irish Sea.

In April, a CAA airspace official reported a phone call with their counterpart at the Irish Aviation Authority: “I explained why the decision was made to route south of Irish landmass… However, due to how the Irish will be segregating the airspace and in addition to the commercial traffic routing across the Atlantic, they have requested that [SkyGuardian] now routes [even] further south.”

In aviation, segregation is when an aircraft does not fly in close proximity to other planes but instead has a corridor carved out for its sole use. Although General Atomics’ ultimate aim is for the SkyGuardian (and the RAF’s Protector) to use advanced sensors to autonomously detect and avoid hazards, the entire transatlantic flight would take place in segregated airspace, at least several miles from other aircraft. 

Even so, the FAA would have had to adjust the SkyGuardian’s domestic certification to allow it to fly over cities, and without a chase plane. “In its current format and limitations there is not a lot the CAA can do with this,” wrote a CAA official. “We need to sit down and discuss this, as there are political forces at play here and [we are] getting a lot of pressure from the MoD.”

Eventually, the FAA relented, relaxing the SkyGuardian’s restrictions for the transatlantic flight. It does not appear that the CAA had any say in setting those conditions, which were redacted in the CAA emails. However, the drone flew directly over the city of Gloucester and did not have a chase plane. 

Following a meeting about the proposed flight in early June, one CAA official reported that the regulator was “simply taking the FAA’s experimental certification and ‘anglicising’ it.”

Now that the flight seemed as if it would actually happen, attention within the RAF and CAA shifted to public relations.

Although the SkyGuardian would be displayed at the Air Tattoo with British bombs and missiles, the RAF wanted the flight and SkyGuardian to sound as innocuous as possible. RAF High Command edited an article intended for the defence publication Jane’s to remove references to the SkyGuardian’s large weapons load and its ability to “greatly [compress] the sensor to shooter kill-chain between detection and an armed response.” 

“I have cut out the weapons bit as this detracts from the article and moves focus from the achievement of the flight to how easily we can kill people,” wrote an RAF officer. The same officer also added a paragraph about how the SkyGuardian could provide humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, coastal surveys, search and rescue and even monitor flood defences.

“This is all part of the narrative that [remote piloted aircraft] are a good thing and I am keen to keep the wind out of the anti-drone lobby sails,” he wrote. 

General Atomics was now excited to announce the upcoming flight as quickly as possible. But on June 11, a CAA official noted that a press release from General Atomics had been blocked by the MoD “due to concerns about the potential for “anti (military) drone” protests hampering the arrival at Fairford if the flight is publicised too early.”

A week later, the MoD suggested that the CAA only announce the 4,300-mile transatlantic crossing just six days before the flight itself.  

“We have significant concerns this is too late,” complained a CAA official to Mark Swan, its head of safety. “[We] endeavour to provide at least 60 days’ notification of large airspace restrictions to notify other airspace users… The longer we leave to notify, the higher the risk of airspace infringements.”

A particular worry was a British Gliding Association competition scheduled to take place just 10 miles from the SkyGuardian’s airspace on the day of its flight. If one of the gliders should stray into the drone’s path, it could risk a catastrophic collision. 

“Sadly, I have had a huge kickback from the RAF regarding going public,” wrote another CAA official. “I have been informed that the RAF [is trying to] delay this as long as possible…. Patience is running thin thanks to the MoD.”

Ultimately, the CAA disregarded the military’s concerns, and issued its airspace warning at the end of June. Only one decision was left to be made: What should the SkyGuardian be called?

One CAA airspace expert suggested calling it nothing at all, with the warning vaguely referencing “a civilian aircraft, certificated and registered through the FAA… to mitigate the risk of anti-drones protests for [the] MoD.”

Another CAA official agreed that the word “drone” should be avoided wherever possible. “[We can] refer to it as either an Unmanned Aircraft or as a Remotely Piloted Aircraft… I believe the terminology of ‘drone’ does not fit this aircraft for a number of reasons.”

RAF High Command concurred, with an RAF officer writing: “It is clear from our teamwork that we are all consistent and clear on each other’s priorities moving forward, particularly with the incorrect use of ‘drone’.”

At last, the CAA and the RAF could agree on something. Whatever flew uncrewed from America to Britain, with its remote pilot, satellite control and ability to carry multiple precision-guided weapons, it certainly wasn’t a drone. 

The flight itself went pretty much to plan. The SkyGuardian took off from Grand Forks just after midday on 10 July, and flew through the night at 27,000 feet over Canada and the North Atlantic on a meticulously charted route. Pilots in North Dakota, controlling the SkyGuardian in shifts, connected with U.S., Canadian, Irish and British air traffic controllers. 

Arriving off the coast of Wales, the SkyGuardian descended into a holding pattern above Cirencester before coming in to land at Fairford, using an automated landing system. There were no anti-drone protestors waiting to greet it. 

After the Tattoo was over, the SkyGuardian was dismantled and flown back to the U.S. as cargo, its mission complete. 

In January 2019, General Atomics announced that defense contractor BAE Systems was developing a plan for regular RAF Protector operations in U.K. civilian airspace. In November, the Australian government announced that it would spend $1.3 billion Australian dollars (£670 million) to acquire a fleet of SkyGuardians as its next unmanned aerial vehicle. Canada and Greece are also reported to be considering purchasing the aircraft. 

But the jewel in the crown for General Atomics is the U.S. market. On March 23, a SkyGuardian equipped with an experimental autonomous detect-and-avoid system and a cutting-edge surveillance radar will take to the skies above Southern California, fully integrated with normal air traffic control for the first time. According to a filing with the FCC, it will fly for over 100 miles, conducting aerial inspection and surveillance of “critical infrastructure owned by commercial and civil entities.”

“This type of commercial mission has never been done with a [drone] anywhere in the United States,” wrote General Atomics. “It is a first of its kind and will serve as a proof of concept for future… missions.”

If the test goes well, military and commercial Reapers and SkyGuardians could soon start flying over U.S. cities, either on their way to foreign war zones, or with their tireless digital eyes gathering data on America itself. 

The disinformation wars are heating up as the U.S. barrels toward the 2020 presidential election, leaving tech companies again uncomfortable in the role of referee.

On Monday, Facebook href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/08/twitter-applies-its-new-manipulated-media-label-to-video-retweeted-by-trump/"> joined Twitter in flagging a video shared by White House Direction of Social Media Dan Scavino, marking it as “partly false” and limiting its ability to spread on the platform. In the video, presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden warns about the potential of reelecting Trump, but the viral clip is edited down to a portion that misleadingly makes it sound as though Biden is endorsing Trump.

“Fact-checkers rated this video as partly false, so we are reducing its distribution and showing warning labels with more context for people who see it, try to share it, or already have,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. “As we announced last year, the same applies if a politician shares the video, if it was otherwise fact checked when shared by others on Facebook.”

Over the weekend, President Trump retweeted the video to his 73.5 million Twitter followers, stating “I agree with Joe!”

On Twitter, Scavino insisted “The video was NOT manipulated,” agreeing with a tweet that argued all clips on Facebook would meet the same criteria.

Flagging the video sets an interesting precedent, particularly given that last month both platforms declined to act on a deceptively edited video depicting Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ripping up President Trump’s state of the union address. While Pelosi did in fact rip up the address, the video misrepresented the order of events, misleadingly showing Pelosi shredding the speech as Trump honored members of the military.

At the time, Facebook Policy Communications lead Andy Stone aggressively defended Facebook’s decision to let the video spread in a testy exchange with Pelosi Deputy Chief of Staff Drew Hammill, who argued that every day Facebook declined to remove the video “is another reminder that they care more about their shareholders’ interests than the public’s interests.” Stone’s response at the time was combative.

TechCrunch has reached out to both platforms to clarify how the Biden video violates their policies while the Pelosi video did not.

As Biden’s campaign ramps after a much-needed shot in the arm from Super Tuesday, the internet is rife with videos of the former Vice President’s many gaffes. While critics leverage Biden’s stumbles as evidence that he is unfit for the presidency, an interview earlier this year revealed that at least some of his occasionally faltering speech is likely a result of a lifelong stutter, a disorder characterized by disruptions to the flow of speech.

According to a report from 9to5mac, Apple could be working on full cursor support for the next major version of iOS and iPadOS. The report is based on code of an early version of iOS 14 and iPadOS 14.

If Apple ships that new feature, it means that you’ll be able to use a Bluetooth mouse or trackpad with your iPad to move a cursor around the screen. It would work pretty much like a mouse on a desktop computer.

Apple has already added basic support for external mouse in the current version of iPadOS. It can be enabled in the Accessibility settings. But it basically mimics a finger on the screen.

With full cursor support, you can expect your cursor to change when you hover over a link for instance. You could right click on some elements as well.

According to this early version of iOS 14, the cursor will disappear after a few seconds if you don’t move the mouse. It reappears when you move the mouse again. On a Mac, the cursor disappears when you start typing text.

There are also multiple signs that seem to indicate that Apple is working on a new Smart Keyboard for the iPad and trackpad shortcuts — tap to click, tap with two fingers to right click, etc. It could mean that the next Smart Keyboard will feature a trackpad below the keyboard.

iOS and iPadOS share the same code base, but I wouldn’t expect cursor support on the iPhone. Cursor support seems to be particularly useful on a bigger screen, such as the iPad. You can also connect the most recent iPad Pro models to an external monitor thanks to its USB-C port.

In 2017, with iOS 11, Apple brought many design metaphors from the Mac to the iPad. The company introduced a Dock at the bottom of the screen as well as a new Files app. iOS still feels like a complete different operating system from macOS. But it is interesting to see that some important desktop features also work quite well on an iPad.

It’s very likely that you don’t know MSCHF. It’s also likely that you’ve come across one of their wild ass projects. From “Jesus Shoes” filled with holy water to a collar that lets your dog finally tell you what it thinks about you to IRL loot crates that dare you not to open them — MSCHF has been launching highly viral stunts for the past year or so.

Hell they even got a vanity piece in the Times while they’re still ascendant. Pure magic given how famous the NYT has been at times for its ability to catch viral trends on the down slope.

The latest stunt officially launches tomorrow (today for early adopter fans that subscribed via text). It’s a “pirate video” station called Allthestreams.fm and it’s live now.

The premise is that MSCHF has picked up subscriptions to Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, HBONow, Prime Video and Showtime and it is broadcasting a continuous stream of one random program from each live to anyone who hits the site. At time of publish over 100,000 people are currently watching one of the ‘channels’.

There’s even a pirate radio-esque commercial interstitial that will surprise you if you watch long enough.

If you’re wondering whether this is legal, well, so did I. “We have a standard check with these types of things. Doesn’t mean it’s legal per se, but it means the risk profile is acceptable to us,” says Daniel Greenberg, one of MSCHF’s founding team.

The goal, Greenberg explained in a chat last week, is not to launch a product or company but instead to build a brand that stands for…something. Even MSCHF isn’t quite sure what that will be, though, by design.

Hell even when asked to provide a succinct summary of what the fuck MSCHF actually is, Greenberg pushes back.

“MSCHF is a multi angled mirror. Whenever we release something, people see different reflections of the same thing.”

I can’t actually argue, because even the latest stunt defies definition. MSCHF doesn’t earn anything from it, it’s a free stream. Though they have made money off of previous goods releases like the shoes or boxes, the goal is decidedly not to make money right now and instead to spend a great deal of it.

Though they’re reluctant to talk about it, MSCHF has raised $11.5M in venture led by Laura Chau at Canaan Partners . Money that they seem intent on burning.

The MSCHF plan of attach is based on a strong ideal: that one of the strongest stances any brand could have is “no matter what”.

No matter what they sell, what road they take you down or how weird it is, you’re in. Even if an offering isn’t for you, you’ll be there when it is.

This thinking isn’t super rare these days, though the anarchist viral experiment framework is a new application.

The thought process behind modern brand building is becoming centered around the idea that the audience should come first, providing a reason for the product.

Influencer culture is probably the shorthand people would use the most, but being known for something and then using that to build out a durable direct-to-consumer brand is becoming vital for small creators and entrepreneurs that know that their conduit to their consumer is as fickle as the platforms they sit on. One too many references to reefer or sex and their livelihood could go poof. Not so much if your audience will follow you wherever you go.

A new cluster of slow food brand builders is carving out their own path to this durability.

Even more so as the ad business becomes a media business. Though MSCHF is very decidedly not yet a merchandise brand, it absolutely has marketed and sold merchandise — extremely effectively too.

But that ability to do so came from not trying to build any real business at all. MSCHF is, by Greenberg’s own admission, just spending money to create attention. No more, no less. What sets it apart from any other marketing effort, in my opinion, is the tone-perfect nature of those experiments.

The average MSCHF stunt (that’s what they are, for sure) is funny, hotly traded in a particular vertical or ideally across several verticals — that have high audience counts and a natural tendency to amplify. The biggest hits of the company so far have traded on  the base powers of the internet like pets and profanity — but every one of them has something super interesting going on.

Each idea comes out of a regular weekly meeting that the team has to throw out potential ideas. They’re then picked out and refined over weeks or months and ‘dropped’ in a manner that resembles limited edition streetwear or collectibles. Every ounce of a MSCHF stunt is viral muscle, no fat. And every one of them goes over like crazy on the net.

Even the ideals that surround each experiment are loosely held. The cleverness evident here is that by defining the goals too clearly you lose the ability for people to attach their own personal vibes and therefore get invested.

“Streaming is a mass common denominator,” Greenberg offers by way of reason for this particular drop. “We all use it. We all have feelings on it. We all hate paying more and more for it. Why not now?”

There are some interesting things about this particular experiment that bear some pondering, outside of the stunt-based brand building apparatus that MSCHF has set up. In poking around at it I found myself watching several of the brands ‘hot’ shows that I never actually got around to seeing.

A random button could actually be a nice advertisement for content (Netflix tested a random shuffle feature last year) for any streaming platform, given the well documented issues people have picking something to watch.

There’s also the side-by-side comparison that you get to draw between the plans of attack of the various entities. Disney is BRAND FIRST, Netflix is new money premium content, Showtime is mostly old with a couple really good ones and HBO the grandaddy trying to stay relevant.

For what it’s worth, there’s also an interesting side point here in how they gather zero data on watching behavior other than pure traffic — and given MSCHF’s repertoire, the side point is probably also a point.

But, as with all of MSCHF’s projects, the takeaways may just be the things I’m bringing to the table.

That interchange of ideas is one of the things that sets MSCHF apart from a lot of brands that have manufactured interest in their products. It generates brand loyalty no matter what is being sold — which in turn results in durability.

One guarantee is that whatever MSCHF drops next, a metric ton of people are going to be interested. No matter what.

Meditation and mindfulness apps are booming. The top 10 apps pulled in $195 million in 2019, up 52% from the year before. Now, top meditation app Headspace’s former head of research, Nick Begley, is launching a new app that goes beyond mindfulness to specifically address the needs of those suffering from anxiety. The app, called Calmer You, offers a combination of activities, including not only guided meditation, but also journaling, cognitive behavioral therapy coursework and other health and wellness material.

The latter includes things like fitness videos, sleep stories and interviews with celebrities and inspirational people on their experiences with anxiety, among other things.

Begley worked for Headspace for two years, where he learned about the power of meditation apps to aid with self-development, he says.

“I realized that it doesn’t have to be limited to just mindfulness,” explains Begley, as to how he got started with Calmer You. “There’s so much good advice out there, but just passively digesting it — watching videos or reading books — which is what most of us do when we want to improve, simply doesn’t deliver the changes that they promise,” Begley says.

The problem isn’t that the advice isn’t good — it typically is. But people struggle with putting the advice into action, Begley says. That’s where Calmer You aims to help.

The app includes a few different components, including a 28-session course that helps guide you step-by-step to better understanding anxiety and helping to learn techniques to manage it. This includes cognitive-behavioral therapy, mindfulness, compassion-focused therapy, analytic techniques and more. In addition, there’s a toolkit with more than 50 quicker practices that are recommended based on how you’re feeling in a given moment or whatever situation you may be in. A journal for tracking how you feel day-by-day is available, as well.

Customers subscribe to the app for $7.99 per month or $47.99 per year.

“We didn’t specifically aim to fill the gaps of Headspace, but this is what users have mentioned,” Begley says. “A lot of people find it hard to regularly meditate, and so we wanted to provide tools and practices — in addition to mindfulness — to help people with anxiety. We wanted to provide a premium quality app experience that provides a more comprehensive approach to specifically helping manage anxiety and the many ways in which it manifests,” he adds.

Calmer You was developed in collaboration with anxiety expert and author Chloe Brotheridge, whose book “The Anxiety Solution: A Quieter Mind, a Calmer You” contributes to the app’s name. The team was familiar with Brotheridge’s book and reached out to her to see if she would be open to building an app based on her actionable advice.

This is a part of Calmer You’s parent company PSYT’s agenda — turning self-help books into apps.

The Calmer You team, via PSYT, also includes psychologists. But the app itself isn’t yet validated through things like randomized control trials, for example. That’s something they’d like to do further down the road, however.

Calmer You is also more geared toward women, as much of Brotheridge’s own work was particularly focused on anxiety’s impact on young women.

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with anxiety and I had to work out what worked best for me,” said Brotheridge. “This is why as a therapist, I teach people many different techniques so they can find what works best for them, not just mindfulness. While it took a lot of work to include multiple approaches in the app, I think it’s essential to help empower people to find the practices that work best for them and their situation,” she says.

Since the app’s launch into beta testing in November 2019, the company has been adding tools to respond to what users said they needed help with, including two new “rebalancing” tools (one for calming social anxiety, another to help communicate confidently), a worry journal for evening use and several more guided meditations and sleep stories.

The app shouldn’t be used instead of visiting a doctor for severe cases of anxiety, but could be slotted into a user’s routine if they’re already using a meditation app, like Headspace, to aid with feelings of anxiety on a regular basis.

Calmer You is a free download on iOS with a subscription business model.

The right candidate to fill your job may not actually be looking for a job right now. HireSweet, which is part of Y Combinator’s current class of startups, is trying to help companies find exactly these candidates that are perfect for a job but not actively looking.

Like so many other recruiting platforms, the HireSweet team started working on an assessment tool but then realized that the problem companies were facing wasn’t really assessment, it was scouring the right candidates.

“So we moved a bit higher on the value chain and we moved to help companies source engineers,” HireSweet co-founder and CEO Robin Choy told me. “And what’s really interesting on the market is that most people are not actively looking for a job. StackOverflow’s figures show that 30% of candidates will move after applying to a position and 60% are open to new opportunities but never actively looking for a job.”

To recruit these candidates, companies first have to identify these passive candidates and then essentially apply to them, the same way a candidate would apply to a job. Traditionally, recruiters have been doing this manually, by looking at LinkedIn and GitHub — or by outsourcing this work to agencies.

What HireSweet is doing is automating this process. Its systems search the web for public profiles of potential job candidates, then send that info to employers. As Choy noted, though, this isn’t just about saving time. “Thanks to that massive [amount] of information, we’re able to detect patterns that a human would miss. So we do know, for instance, when somebody updates their LinkedIn resume or when there is a discrepancy between their LinkedIn resume and their GitHub activity, which proves that they may be interested in changing technologies,” he said.

The company promises significantly better accuracy, compared to competitors. Choy argues that some of its customers are seeing about 80% accuracy, which HireSweet defines as having an 80% contact rate for the candidates it shows. And while some of the company’s tech stack involves machine learning, a lot of it also still involved good-old regular expressions (after all, if a resume says somebody is a “freelancer,” there’s no need to build an algorithm that predicts that this person is indeed a freelancer).

HireSweet also takes a very hands-on approach with onboarding new customers. “We always get people on the phone with a company — Superhuman-style — because we want to really understand what the company is looking for,” Choy explained. “That’s also a very specific learning that we had in the last few years: public job descriptions are very rarely the actual job descriptions of the person they will be hiring. So we spent a lot of time talking to the company.”

Because virtually all companies already offer recruiting tools, HireSweet offers a number of integrations with these, and Choy tells me that team plans to expand on this to allow for more and deeper integrations.

HireSweet started working on this product about three and a half years ago and then raised about $1.5 million two and a half years ago. Today, the Paris -based company has 30 employees, and its customers now include the likes of BlaBlaCar, Dashlane and Nokia. After mostly focusing on the European market, the team is not working on expanding to the U.S. market, where it now has about 100 customers. This also meant adapting the system to the way U.S. companies recruit and how employees move between jobs, which changes quite a bit between countries. Choy noted that the team will likely focus its roadmap on the U.S. going forward and then bring those innovations to Europe over time.

In the world of venture capital, where trust between investors and founders is paramount to the success of both, investing in a company that competes with another startup in a firm’s portfolio is a no-no. Still, in a case that takes this understanding to a brow-raising extreme, Sequoia Capital has, for the first time in its history, revoked a term sheet offered to a company over a purported conflict of interest and, almost more shockingly, handed back over its board seat, its information rights, its shares and its full investment.

It wasn’t a small check. According to sources close to the situation, it just gave up $21 million.

Candidly, we’re still trying to piece together what we might be missing, but what we know so far: This morning, Finix, a payments infrastructure company that was founded four years ago in San Francisco, told its roughly 70 employees that Sequoia — which led the company’s $35 million Series B round in early winter — is parting ways with the startup.

The reason, Finix told employees: Sequoia concluded soon after issuing its check that Finix competes too directly with Stripe, the payments company that represents Sequoia’s biggest private company holding currently and that in turn counts Sequoia as its biggest investor.

As a result of Sequoia allowing Finix to keep its capital (thus materially strengthening Finix’s balance sheet), earlier backers in Finix — led by Inspired Capital of New York and including PSP Growth and others — have invested an additional $10 million in the company, which has now raised $65 million in capital altogether.

As part of the new arrangement, Penny Pritzker, who cofounded Inspired Capital and is the founder and chairman of PSP Partners, has joined the board of Finix.

Pritzker’s Inspired Capital cofounder, Alexa von Tobel, has meanwhile joined as a board observer.

On the one hand, Finix and its stakeholders can’t be happy to be losing Sequoia and the sheen associated with an investment from the firm. At the same time, having a former U.S. Secretary of Commerce join one’s board could go a long way in ensuring its continued momentum.

More obviously, who could complain $21 million in free money?

Well, who other than Sequoia’s investors, perhaps. Though we’d presume the firm won’t lose anyone’s financial support over this apparent flub given the outsize returns it has produced over the years, the entire situation is strange to say the least, and we’d guess that Sequoia’s limited partners — even if they stay silent — can’t be pleased about it.

For starters, it’s difficult to understand how Sequoia could have only realized after making the investment that Finix and Stripe compete on some level — and might do so increasingly over time.

Finix has told TechCrunch before that, unlike Stripe, it doesn’t think of itself as a payments company but rather a payment infrastructure company. Most notably, it likes to note that it doesn’t take a percentage of transaction fees but instead charges customers charges for a monthly software fee, along with a sliding fee associated with the number of payments they process. Yet Stripe has a product, Stripe Connect, that operates much the same way and has since its debut in 2013.

Indeed, while a source close to the situation suggests that Sequoia moved too quickly on this one (Finix was evidently seen as a hot ticket after a conference appearance last fall), all it would have taken was a few conversations with Stripe to conclude that the two companies are chasing after the same customers in some cases.

Asked about its due diligence process, Sequoia — which has never backed out of an announced deal before in its 48-year history —  declined to comment.

The firm instead sent us a statement by Pat Grady, the Sequoia partner behind the deal, that reads: “While we’d previously concluded that Finix was not a direct competitor to any existing portfolio companies, after making the investment we came across a variety of small data points that collectively painted a different picture of the market. This decision had nothing to do with Finix, and everything to do with Sequoia’s desire to honor our commitments. It is incredibly difficult to part ways with Richie, Sean, and their team at Finix. They are exceptional people and leaders, and their future is bright.”

A spokesperson for Stripe who was asked whether Stripe and Sequoia discussed its investment in Finix at any point, also declined to comment.

Beyond this somewhat baffling explanation, of course, is the investment itself. While Sequoia might have wanted to disentangle itself from Finix in the most painless possible way for both outfits, it’s hard to understand why it felt compelled to give away $21 million — money that institutions like Stanford and hospitals give to Sequoia to invest on their behalf.

It isn’t like Sequoia committed a crime. Surely, too, there were other alternatives. For example, it might have converted the capital to debt and enabled Finix to pay it back at a low — even zero — percent interest rate. It could have told Finix to keep a quarter — or even half —  of the capital as a kind of generous break-up fee.

While we’re still puzzling over this one, Finix suggests it has already moved on from the saga — and given its much stronger financial footing, it’s no wonder.

Asked about what went happened exactly, the company sent over a statement from its founder and CEO, Richie Serna, about its excitement about the future and the strengthened involvement of Inspired Capital. As for Sequoia, Serna’s statement says that, “While the changes to our relationship with Sequoia were unexpected, we’ve never been more fired up about the future of Finix and our position in the market. We appreciate Sequoia’s speed in dealing with this situation and respect their commitment to doing what’s right for their portfolio companies. They have been transparent and helpful throughout this process.”