Category: UNCATEGORIZED

After Elon Musk had left the stage Thursday evening, the crowd — still excited and a little stunned from the Tesla Cybertrunk reveal — converged to the back doors that led outside where a gigantic queue quickly formed.

Media got their own area, the VIPs another, and finally, the other invited guests were in the main, and much longer line. Everyone was waiting for a ride in the Tesla Cybertruck, and TechCrunch was among those who captured the ride.

The ride was short; just a skosh over two minutes overall. But it was long enough to take note of several features. The dash, which looks like sandstone, is actually a kind of compressed paper. A 17-inch screen is mounted in the center.

The pickup bed, called the vault, is lit up and visible. But if the lockable storage was closed, the window would no longer be visible. Instead, the rear mirror provides streaming video to allow the driver to see behind the vehicle.

Check out the video for the whole ride, which included a quick moment of acceleration just past 60 miles per hour.

India’s RazorPay, one of the largest payments processing firms in the country, today announced a range of new services aimed at startups, businesses, merchants and freelancers as the Bangalore-based firm expands the reach of its financial platform in the nation.

The startup, which raised $75 million from Ribbit Capital and others in June this year, today introduced a new kind of corporate credit card and some banking services for startups and SMEs, and a new payment option for individuals to quickly receive money from their clients.

All of these services are solving some major challenges faced by tens of millions of businesses in the country. Even as startups are increasingly getting acceptance in Indian homes, banks in the nation are still wary of offering some financial services to them. Most “unprofitable” startups today can’t get a corporate credit card from a bank in India, for instance.

For its corporate credit card, Razorpay will assess other factors such as the flows and collections to determine who is eligible, the Bangalore-based startup’s founders — Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar — told TechCrunch in an interview.

The new corporate credit card, issued by RBL Bank, will allow businesses to access credit between Rs 50,000 ($700) and Rs 25,00,000 ($34,800). If they are able to pay it back in within 50 days, they will avoid any interest.

Razorpay also announced it is launching current accounts service. “While personal banking ecosystem in India has scaled tremendously in recent years, business banking is still old school,” said Mathur. “Most processes are still manual, and there is no communication among your invoice, payroll, booking systems. People have to deal with spreadsheet files.”

To solve this, Razorpay has built a neo banking platform. “As a business, if you want to create a current account bank with a bank, we take care of it. Everything — your transactions, and payables — happens on Razorpay’s platform and you can manage them through a single dashboard,” he said.

As part of this platform — and also as a standalone offering — Razorpay is offering a payroll management service. “One of the most common challenges in a business is how they handle payrolls. Most of these payrolls work with different systems such as HR and accounting. Again, you have to create spreadsheet files and provide it to the bank which does the processing. What our goal is that we will provide one single platform to manage payments better,” Mathur added.

To work on this service, Razorpay said it has acquired payroll and HR management software firm Opfin for what a person familiar with the matter said “a couple of millions of dollars.” Razorpay founders declined to comment on the amount.

And last, Razorpay has launched a new payment option for unregistered businesses such as mom and pop stores and freelancers. Millions of individuals in India today engage in business with one another, corporate companies, and clients overseas. For them, there exists a very limited set of options to receive payments from others and do it at a real-time pace.

Razorpay may have an answer. The company has launched a service that will allow individuals or businesses to create and send a link through text or email to their clients and receive payment in real-time. When the client clicks on the link, a payment gateway loads up that supports a range of paying options. “We support 100 currencies, so a person can have their money delivered from any country,” Mathur said. Another startup — Bangalore-based Instamojo — offers a similar functionality.

The announcements today illustrate Razorpay’s aggressive expansion into India’s burgeoning financial services market. The startup generates about 70% of its revenue today from its core business of processing payments.

More than 600,000 businesses in India including giants such as airline Indigo, Bombay Stock Exchange, conglomerate Reliance, Sony, ride-hailing service Ola and budget hotel operator Oyo Rooms today use Razorpay’s payments processing service. The two founders said they want RazorPay to be the financial cloud for businesses.

In recent years, the company has launched lending and a range of other services. Together with neo-banking services, Razorpay’s Kumar said he expects to have these generate 40 to 45% of revenue.

Razorpay today competes with a handful of companies including Naspers-owned PayU and legacy firms such as BillDesk. The startup, which focused on payments for the first two and a half years, says that business has grown by 600-700% year-over-year.

“We crossed a billion dollar in payments processing in September 2017. Now we are doing 10 billion,” Mathur said. “Our goal with today’s announcements is to have 20 to 30% of our merchants join and use our current account platform.”

Well, I don’t think that was supposed to happen.

In what was one of the more surreal product launches I’ve seen, Tesla debuted its $39,900 Cybertruck pickup tonight. After running through some specs and hitting the truck’s door with a sledge hammer, Elon asked an on-stage companion to demonstrate the strength of the Tesla “Armor Glass” by throwing a solid metal, baseball-sized ball at the driver side window.

It… did not go well.

While the glass didn’t completely shatter, it did appear to crack from edge to edge. So they tried it again on the rear passenger window… and it cracked too.

Was this a gag? A “Hah hah! Just kidding, here’s a test on the real glass!” sort of thing? Nope. Elon stood in front of the truck, two broken windows and all, and completed the presentation.

While no one would expect most standard windows to stand up to a test like this, even Elon seemed surprised by the results. “We threw wrenches, we threw everything.” he said on stage. “We even literally threw a kitchen sink at the glass, and it didn’t break. For a little weird reason it broke now, I don’t know why.”

“We’ll fix it in post,” he followed up with a laugh. The video went private on Tesla’s YouTube channel about 30 seconds after the live stream was over.

And with that, the undeniable truth that is “live demos never work” lives on.

Elon Musk revealed Thursday evening the Tesla Cybertruck, a futuristic pickup truck made of cold-rolled steel that will start at $39,900 and have between 250 miles and more than 500 miles of range.

Musk has talked about producing an all-electric pickup truck for years now. In December, Musk resurrected the idea, saying that Tesla might have a prototype to unveil in 2019.

Musk mentioned on Twitter the desire to produce a pickup truck in April 2017, before the first Model 3 sedans had been handed over to customers and the CEO had entered production hell. At the time, Musk tweeted that a pickup truck would be unveiled in 18 to 24 months.

The pickup truck is expected to go into production in

If Tesla were to hit that mark it would be bringing its electric truck to market as GM and Rivian also starting delivering their products.

Rivian is expected to begin vehicle production of its electric R1T pickup truck in the second half of 2020. GM CEO Mary Barra said Thursday during an investor conference that the automaker plans to bring an electric pickup truck to market in 2021. Ford also is planning an electric F-150 truck.

It’s unclear how much demand there will be for electric pickup trucks. However, the demand for gas- and diesel-powered trucks is growing. Large trucks account for 14.4% of new vehicle sales through October, compared to 12.6% in 2015, according to Edmunds.

Midsize trucks accounted for 3.7% of new vehicle sales through October, compared to 1.5% in 2014.

Automakers are keen to tap into that growth since trucks and SUVs, which tend to have higher profit margins than sedans. And those margins could continue to increase if automakers can keep costs down.

The average transaction price of a full-size truck (gas and diesel) crossed $50,000 for the first time in September, and continues to climb, according Jessica Caldwell, the executive director of insights at Edmunds. The average transaction price of a full-size truck was $50,496 in October, and a midsize truck was $36,251.

It’s November. We’re eleven years into a bull run. And a protracted trade war with China — not to mention the impeachment proceedings — are causing some nervousness about what next year will hold.

Little wonder that venture firms, which have been writing checks faster than ever in recent years, are also stocking up on dry powder. In the 10 days alone, some of the many firms to announce new funds include Boldstart Ventures, Drive Capital, .406 Ventures, CAVU Venture Partners, Unusual Ventures, Northzone, Kindred Ventures, EQT Ventures, Inspired Capital, and Norwest Venture Partners.

Newly in the same company is Next Coast Ventures, a firm that just closed on $130 million in fresh capital commitments to pursue a thematic approach and focused (for now) on the future of work, the rise of digital natives, the death of traditional retail, and the ways that ubiquitous connectivity is changing marketplaces.

It’s the second fund for the firm, which closed its debut fund with a very respectable $85 million, thanks in large part to its two managing directors: Michael Smerlko previously bought a technology services company called ServiceSource that he ran for 12 years and eventually took public. His cofounder, Thomas Ball, previously spent more than a decade with Austin Ventures.

Interestingly, for many years, Austin Ventures was the only game in town in Austin, but that has changed meaningfully since it announced in 2015 that it wouldn’t be raising more capital. Not only has Next Coast just gathered up more capital, but so have numerous other regional firms this year. In April, for example, we reported on the newest, $105 million, fund raisedLiveOak Ventures. Meanwhile, Silverton Partners, one of the city’s most active investors, is zeroing in on a new $120 million fund just one year after closing a $108 million fund and several other firms — including ATX Ventures and Quake Capital are trying to raise sizable debut funds.

As for Next Coast, some of its many current bets include Everylywell, a company that sells tens of in-home diagnostic tests and that closed on $50 million in funding earlier this year and AlertMedia, a cloud-based mass notification system that aims to streamline notifications across devices and platforms and which raised $25 million in Series C funding back in January.  (You can check out a longer list of its investments here.)

The firm has also seen five companies in its portfolio sell to acquirers (all for undisclosed terms). While one has yet to be announced, the other four are OnRamp, a cloud hosting company that sold last year to a data and IT company called LightEdge; the personal finance startup Clarity Money, which sold to Goldman Sachs last year; the wardrobe tech company Finery, which sold to Stitch Fix in September; was the smart oven maker Brava, which just yesterday disclosed that it’s being acquired by Middleby, an industrial equipment company.

We were in touch with in touch yesterday with Smerlko to learn how Next Coast’s new and bigger fund might differ from its predecessor and the answer seems to be: not much. He said check sizes will increase, from a range of $3 million to $7 million into Series A stage companies to more like $5 million to $10 million at the upper end. He also suggested that NextCoast remains as committed as ever to uncovering and funding talent regionally, something that’s getting easier all the time, evidently.

“Austin’s entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem is absolutely booming,” Smerlko wrote us via email. “It’s never been cheaper to start a company, and places like Austin with a high quality of life, growing available capital and a strong entrepreneurial spirit will continue to be a hotbed for founders and tech talent.”

The highest court in Pennsylvania has ruled that the state’s law enforcement cannot force suspects to turn over their passwords that would unlock their devices.

The state’s Supreme Court said compelling a password from a suspect is a violation of the Fifth Amendment, a constitutional protection that protects suspects from self-incrimination.

It’s not an surprising ruling, given other state and federal courts have almost always come to the same conclusion. The Fifth Amendment grants anyone in the U.S. the right to remain silent, which includes the right to not turn over information that could incriminate them in a crime. These days, those protections extend to the passcodes that only a device owner knows.

But the ruling is not expected to affect the ability by police to force suspects to use their biometrics — like their face or fingerprints — to unlock their phone or computer.

Because your passcode is stored in your head and your biometrics are not, prosecutors have long argued that police can compel a suspect into unlocking a device with their biometrics, which they say are not constitutionally protected. The court also did not address biometrics. In a footnote of the ruling, the court said it “need not address” the issue, blaming the U.S. Supreme Court for creating “the dichotomy between physical and mental communication.”

Peter Goldberger, president of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, who presented the arguments before the court, said it was “fundamental” that suspects have the right to “to avoid self-incrimination.”

Despite the spate of rulings in recent years, law enforcement have still tried to find their way around compelling passwords from suspects. The now-infamous Apple-FBI case saw the federal agency try to force the tech giant to rewrite its iPhone software in an effort to beat the password on the handset of the terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife killed 14 people in his San Bernardino workplace in 2015. Apple said the FBI’s use of the 200-year-old All Writs Act would be “unduly burdensome” by putting potentially every other iPhone at risk if the rewritten software leaked or was stolen.

The FBI eventually dropped the case without Apple’s help after the agency paid hackers to break into the phone.

Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, said the Pennsylvania case ruling sends a message to other courts to follow in its footsteps.

“The court rightly rejects the government’s effort to create a giant, digital-age loophole undermining our time-tested Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination,” he said. “The government has never been permitted to force a person to assist in their own prosecution, and the courts should not start permitting it to do so now simply because encrypted passwords have replaced the combination lock.”

“We applaud the court’s decision and look forward to more courts to follow in the many pending cases to be decided next,” he added.

Two-factor authentication is good! SMS-based two-factor authentication? Not the best option. After countless tales of people having their phone numbers and inbound SMS hijacked by way of SIM swapping, its clear that SMS just isn’t the right solution for sending people secondary login codes.

And yet, for many years, it’s been the mandatory go-to on Twitter . You could switch to another option later (like Google Authenticator, or a physical Yubikey) — but to turn it on in the first place, you were locked into giving Twitter a phone number and using SMS.

Twitter is getting around to fixing this, at long last. The Twitter Safety team announced that you’ll be able to enable two-factor without the need for a phone number, starting sometime today.

This news comes just a few months after Jack Dorsey’s own Twitter account was hacked (seemingly by way of a SIM swap) and a few weeks after Twitter had to admit it was using phone numbers provided during the two-factor setup process for serving targeted ads.

Some users are reporting that the setup process still requests a phone number, so it seems like this change is being rolled out rather than launching for everyone immediately.

Prolific startup accelerator Y Combinator has abandoned plans to establish a branch of the program in China. The company cites a general change in strategy, but a deafening silence on the complexity and controversy of working with China right now suggests there’s more at play.

In a short blog post, YC leadership explained that “as we worked to establish YC China, we had a change in leadership,” viz. the replacement of CEO Sam Altman with Geoff Ralston in May. This apparently led to a complete about-face on YC’s China strategy.

Qi Lu, hired a little more than a year ago to lead the YC China effort, is departing to run his own program, MiraclePlus. And Chinese companies will still be welcome at Y Combinator “— but as part of our U.S. program.”

A Y Combinator representative confirmed that it has no involvement with MiraclePlus or Qi Lu whatsoever, and that the company will no longer have any local presence in China at all.

It’s hard to accept this vague explanation for such a costly, high-profile retreat at face value.

Altman said when announcing Qi’s hiring that he had been trying to recruit him “for years.” As for the program itself, Altman said that “China has been an important missing piece of our puzzle” and that they would be building “a long-term local organization that will combine the best of Silicon Valley and China.”

That there is no mention of the uncertain international politics and US-China relations right now, nor the explosive situation in Hong Kong, or ongoing human rights issues elsewhere in the country, seems a deliberate choice to make this move seem as ordinary as possible. But those things are major questions for anyone looking to do business in China, and it’s hard to believe none had any bearing on the decision to abruptly pack up and leave a major enterprise behind.

It seems like with a company like Y Combinator, it would be easy enough to provide a modicum of transparency and say that there was a mismatch in culture, or the logistics weren’t working out, or they ended up forwarding too many of the companies to the YC prime location anyway.

Perhaps that information was not deemed material for a public statement, but it only leaves inquiring minds to speculate. Was there pressure from this or that quarter? Is the culture at YC changing? Are other Altman-era projects being abandoned? Did the company gain anything at all by this boondoggle?

For such a major endeavor by one of the most prominent tech communities in Silicon Valley, this highly guarded and obviously incomplete account of its total abandonment seems strange and inadequate. We’ll be looking into it further.

OutVoice, a startup that allows editors to pay freelancers with the click of a button, has officially left beta testing and is open to any publication.

The company is also announcing that it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from content monetization startup Coil.

OutVoice was founded by Matt Saincome and Issa Diao (pictured above). When the product was still in beta last year, Saincome told me it was created to solve “a horrible problem for everyone” involved in publishing freelance work: When he was a freelance writer, he’d have to constantly bug editors so that he could get paid, but then as the founder of the satirical sites The Hard Times and Hard Drive, he realized that managing payments was a huge headache.

OutVoice simplifies the whole process by integrating directly into WordPress and other content management systems. When editors load a story into the CMS, they can also identify the contributor and the payment amount. Then once they hit publish, the payment is sent and should arrive in the freelancer’s back account within a few days.

This means freelancers don’t have to worry about payment delays, while publications don’t have to worry about tracking invoices and writing checks (or losing their best writers and photographers if they don’t stay on top of this).

OutVoice also handles the initial on-boarding paperwork that the freelancers need to fill out, and it creates monthly reports for accounting and taxes. Publications can pay for the service on either a per-transaction basis (5% of payments plus $1 per transaction) or through a monthly subscription, which starts at $29 per month.

And by working with Coil, OutVoice says it can take advantage of new payment technologies like Interledger.

“Our goal at Coil is to make it easy and effortless for content creators to get paid,” said Coil CEO Stefan Thomas in a statement. “During their beta, OutVoice has already erased hundreds of years of lag time between freelance content creators and their paycheck. We’re excited to partner with OutVoice to promote more efficient payment solutions and processes, giving creators more time and money to create.”

Alphabet subsidiary X, which is the former Google X and which focuses exclusively on ambitious ‘moonshots,’ or applications of tech you might expect are science fiction, not a real product in development. Like a robot that can sort through office trash.

X does a lot of its work more quietly than other Alphabet companies – until it’s ready to share some of it progress. It’s reached that point with the ‘Everyday Robot Project,’ an ongoing effort that X has been working on for “the past couple of years,” according to project lead Hans Peter Brondmo, who shed some light on what the project is and what it does in a Medium post today.

Brondo compares robotics today to computing in the 1950s and 60s – it’s a working reality, but it’s happening in dedicated spaces and the only people interacting with them on the regular are specially trained computer operators, using them for professional purposes. The challenge, then is to usher in an era of robotics akin to the era of consumer computing – in other words, how do we get to a world where ordinary people live and interact with robots every day?

The challenges are both more mundane and more complex than you might imagine: They have everything to do with stuff we take for granted every day, like other people walking around, trash bins that are out at the curb one day and gone the next, furniture that moves around, different weather conditions and just about anything you can think of that’s a pretty normal part of everyday life but hard to predict exactly day-to-day. Robots work best with specificity and exactness, especially when it comes to programming.

The Everyday Robot Project knew this, and quickly determined that to create robots that are genuinely useful to actual people going about their lives, the key was to ‘teach’ rather than ‘program,’ according to Brondmo. That meant working with the team at Google AI, first in a lab setting, and then out in the world. That’s where it arrived at the robot it’s detailing today: One it successfully taught to sort through garbage at X’s own offices.

The robot, trained via simulation and reinforcement learning, among other techniques, managed to actually reduce the level of waste contamination (putting the wrong garage in the wrong place and causing the whole contents of that bin to go to the landfill instead of being recycled, for instance) from around 20 percent to under 5. If you’ve ever worked in a building that is certified as green by some kind of officially recognized standard, then you might know how impressive this actually in in terms of overall impact.

Aside from actually making a significant dent in the amount of unneeded waste heading to a landfill from a sizeable office, this development helps X prove out some of the feasibility of its ultimate goal of making robots everyday affairs for most people. There’s still a long ways to go before robots are commonplace companions – the smartphones we carry around everywhere, in the general computing analogy – but this is a step in that direction.