Category: UNCATEGORIZED

“Flying cars” — airborne vehicles designed for urban and other short-distance commutes to replace conventional private automobiles — are (at best) still years away from being a reality, with significant safety, technology and business model hurdles to clear before they ever hit the sky. Now, sources tell us that one of more promising startups in the field, the German startup Lilium, wants to put itself into pole position, by ramping up its financial position.

Lilium has been talking to investors to raise a big round of funding, between $400 million and $500 million, according to those familiar with its plans. “It’s a very large round at a very large valuation,” one VC told TechCrunch.

It’s not clear yet who is investing in this latest round, or what that valuation might be.

Lilium already has some deep-pocketed investors behind it. In addition to WeChat owner and Chinese internet giant Tencent; it counts Atomico, founded by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, as a repeat investor. Obvious Ventures, the early-stage VC fund co-founded by Twitter’s Ev Williams; LGT, the international private banking and asset management group; and e24, a fund from Christian Reber (co-founder of Wunderlist and now Pitch), have also backed it, among others.

In all, Lilium has raised over $100 million in financing to date in previous rounds. But given that its plans involve not only building ground-breaking aircraft but then operating them in fleets, that’s not nearly enough to establish its service and have the impact that founder and chief executive, Daniel Wiegand, hopes he can have.

“It’s not only a benefit in terms of relieving society from transit traffic, but the much, much bigger benefit would be that everyone can use it and that people can get to their destination five times quicker, basically a five times increase of their daily radius of life,” Wiegand said in 2017. “This connectivity is going to be a huge benefit to society but also economic growth.”

Tencent, Atomico and Obvious were among the investors backing Lilium in its most recent $90 million raise. Sources tell us that Tencent is again in this latest round, and the startup has been pitching potential new investors since at least this spring, visiting with firms in Silicon Valley.

It seems this latest, bigger round has yet to close. The target size implies the involvement of big names, with big funds behind them.

“I sincerely hope they get the funds to transform transportation,” one source said.

When (if) the round closes, that would make it the biggest fundraising to date for flying taxis, an area that has lots of potential, but is still far from tested — a fact that one source suggested could contribute to the longer period needed to close the outsized round.

“It’s a known secret how hard it is to raise growth rounds in this space because it’s such a new and untested market,” an executive from another air-taxi startup noted. “Early investments were betting on the market vision and the concept of radically new mobility, but now it’s dawning on investors and others that it’s also a regulation play, and more.” That translates potentially to sustained costs, “and that may be one reason why it’s taking some time.”

Add to that the ambition at hand — designing completely new transportation hardware, then manufacturing the aircraft at scale, and then finally building a transportation, taxi-style service around them — and you can start to see why the round might be very large.

Lilium, Atomico, Tencent and Obvious all declined to comment for this story. We’ll update the post if that changes.

Up, up and away

It’s been a little over two years since Lilium and others in the same space such as Volocopter began publicly discussing their visions for the future of mobility alongside incredibly well-funded industry giants like Uber and established aerospace companies like Airbus, Boeing, and others.

Lilium raised its first round of funding in December 2016 and only a few months later, Uber convened its first Elevate conference, which included discussions on the transportation industry’s flying future.

Since those initial discussions, the companies developing technologies and services to bring those plans to fruition have made significant strides.

Earlier this year Lilium announced the first successful flight for a new five-seat electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicle. Others are readying pilot projects in their first launch cities, with the timeline for first full-launch services currently hovering around the three-year mark from now (note: dates do get pushed back).

For Lilium and its competitors, the development of completely new, air-borne vehicles are a means to solving a specific problem: roads in and between cities are too congested with traffic; and electric, air-based options can be a way to offset that situation in an environmentally-friendly way.

Many companies building these new craft are considering taxi-style services as the first or primary point of market entry because — similar to fully-autonomous cars — the cost per vehicle will likely be too high for most individuals to consider buying for private/sole use, notwithstanding the safety features of being able to manage a full fleet autonomously that would be harder to execute with single users (who would have to be pilots, in the case of flying cars).

Lilium’s new vehicle claims to have a top speed of 300 kilometers per hour and a 300 kilometer range, which would make it capable of covering longer distances than its competitors. Lilium says this is partly because it’s designed it in the form of a small jet aircraft instead of mimicking the mechanics and form factor of drones or helicopters (the latter is the approach that Volocopter, another startup out of Germany backed by the likes of Intel and Daimler, is taking). The fixed-wing design of the plane means that it can rely on lift to stay aloft, cutting down on the power demands on the electric 2,000 horsepower engines when it’s aloft.

“This efficiency, which is comparable to the energy usage of an electric car over the same distance, means the aircraft would not just be capable of connecting suburbs to city centres and airports to main train stations, but would also deliver affordable high-speed connections across entire regions,” Lilium said in a statement at the time.

But physics is just one part of the complex system of moving pieces that would need to come together to get Lilium (or any of its rivals) off the ground.

For one, any system will need to integrate with existing air traffic control infrastructure as well — as local and national regulators grapple with increasingly crowded skies.

Another involves the logistical components to operate a service. The company also established a software engineering base in London to help build out the fleet management software and mobile phone application that will connect customers to the jets for transit, and it has been hiring.

Although we have yet to see any commercial services emerge built on the concept of fleets of providing short/medium-distance, air-based taxi-style transportation, there are a number of hopefuls that have identified the opportunity of both designing aircraft and building services around them.

Companies like Kitty Hawk, eHang, Joby and Uber all hope to play a role in offering short-range flights as an affordable alternative to road-based transportation. (Blade and SkyRyse, two other air taxi services of sorts, are offering more conventional helicopters and other vessels in limited launches for well-heeled travelers willing to spend the money.)

Last week at San Francisco Disrupt 2019, Kitty Hawk announced its latest vehicle, Heaviside. It’s an electric aircraft designed to be a personalised vehicle, less obtrusive than a helicopter, ableto go anywhere and land anywhere fast and quietly, and as easy to operate as “pushing a button,” according to CEO Sebastian Thrun.

In less than two years, Revel has gone from an idea to a shared electric vehicle startup with more than 1,400 mopeds across Washington D.C., and Brooklyn and Queens, New York. Now, it’s ready to grow up — and beyond these three cities — with a fresh injection of $27.6 million in capital raised in a Series A round led by Ibex Investors.

The equity round included newcomer Toyota AI Ventures and further investments from Blue Collective, Launch Capital and Maniv Mobility.

The capital will, as it often does with startups, allow Revel to scale up. CEO and co-founder Frank Reig said this growth will extend to its fleet of scooters within the cities it currently operates as well as expand into new markets. Reig wouldn’t name where the New York-based startup will launch next, although he provided some hints. Large U.S. cities with the right population density and more temperate weather are at the top of the list.

Revel is targeting about 10 cities by mid-2020, Reig added.

How that growth occurs, and who is behind its operations, is what Reig believes differentiates Revel from other shared electric vehicle providers such as scooter startups that have had a record of deploying in cities before getting approval from local authorities.

Many startups in the shared industry, including Revel, talk up their focus on safety and desire to be responsible partners with cities. Revel’s choice of vehicle — along with a few other decisions — helps it stick to those promises.

“These mopeds are motor vehicles,” Reig noted. “This means there’s no regulatory gray area: you have to have a license plate. To get that license plate you have register each vehicle with the Department of Motor Vehicles in each state and show third-party auto liability insurance. And then because it’s a motor vehicle, it’s clear that it rides in the street, so we’re completely off sidewalks.”

Revel caps the speed of its mopeds to 30 miles per hour. The company also provides two helmets — and single-use liners — on every ride and requires users to be licensed drivers aged, 21 or older who pass an initial safe driving history check. About one out of every 12 applicants does not make it past this screening, according to Revel.

Any concerns about users bypassing the protective headgear are largely erased because both New York and Washington D.C. have helmet laws, Reig said.

No giga workers

The company, unlike most on-demand mobility startups, does not have any gig economy workers either. Revel only has full-time employees, said Reig, adding that it’s decision he intends to stick with it even as his company grows.

“We don’t use gig economy in anything we do and I see a ton of value in that,” Reig said. “We need a well-trained workforce that is really committed and cares about the vehicles, because if not it’s something we’re going to be throwing out every 60 days.”

Revel’s shared mopeds have a 3-year asset life, Reig said based on their in-house estimates. To ensure the mopeds last, which has become a key factor in the unit economics of shared mobility businesses, they remain on street.

The mopeds are removed by employees for routine maintenance that occurs every four to six months. Otherwise, the mopeds aren’t loaded into vans by gig economy workers who make money by charging them up — a common practice with the small stand-up scooters that have inundated cities like San Diego and San Francisco. Instead, employees swap out the batteries on the mopeds, which have a range of about 50 miles.

20 months and 1,400 scooters

The idea for Revel was borne out of Reig’s travels to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he witnessed locals on every form of two-wheeled vehicle.

“A sort of light bulb went off my head, and I asked myself, ‘why is it not a thing in the U.S?,” Reig told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “I came back to New York, started studying the market more and saw all these electric moped operators had been popping up in Europe over the last few years and just realized that if I don’t do it, somebody else will.”

The company started with a small pilot of 68 mopeds in a few neighborhoods within Brooklyn. In May, after a nine-month pilot, Revel pulled the original mopeds it used in its limited pilot and has replaced them with 1,000 new models built for two riders and equipped with kickstands for parking. With more mopeds in its fleet, Revel expanded the service to more than 20 neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. In August, Revel launched its service in Washington D.C., where there are now more than 400 mopeds.

Revel rides cost $1 per person to start, followed by $0.25 per minute to ride and $0.10 per minute while parked. Revel says it will cut the cost by 40% for eligible riders — and give them a $25 credit — through its Revel Access program. Riders who use public assistance programs like SNAP or live in NYCHA housing are eligible for the program.

End users tend to get a bad rap in the security business because they are often the weakest security link. They fall for phishing schemes, use weak passwords and often unknowingly are the conduit for malicious actors getting into your company’s systems. Okta wants to change that by giving end users information about suspicious activity involving their login, while letting them share information with the company’s security apparatus when it makes sense.

Okta actually developed a couple of new products under the umbrella SecurityInsights. The end user product is called UserInsights. The other new product, called HealthInsights, is designed for administrators and makes suggestions on how to improve the overall identity posture of a company.

UserInsights lets users know when there is suspicious activity associated with their accounts such as a login from an unrecognized device. If it appears to involve a stolen password, he or she would click the Report button to report the incident to the company’s security apparatus where it would trigger an automated workflow to start an investigation. The person should also obviously change that compromised password.

HealthInsights operates in a similar fashion except for administrators at the system level. It checks the configuration parameters and makes sure the administrator has set up Okta according to industry best practices. When there is a gap between the company’s settings and a best practice, the system alerts the administrator and allows them to fix the problem. This could involve implementing a stricter password policy, creating a block list for known rogue IP addresses or forcing users to use a second factor for certain sensitive operations.

Okta is first and foremost an identity company. Organizations, large and small, can tap into Okta to have a single-sign-on interface where you can access all of your cloud applications in one place. “If you’re a CIO and you have a bunch of SaaS applications, you have a [bunch of] identity systems to deal with. With Okta, you narrow it down to one system,” CEO Todd McKinnon told TechCrunch.

That means, if your system does get spoofed, you can detect anomalous behavior much more easily because you’re dealing with one logon instead of many. The company developed these new products to take advantage of that, and provide these groups of employees with the information they need to help protect the company’s systems.

The SecurityInsights tools are available starting today.

We’re T-minus 48 hours and counting startup fans. You heard right — only 48 short hours stand between you and substantial savings on all passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019, which takes place 11-12 December.

Super early bird prices start at €345 + VAT and, depending on which pass you choose, you can save up to €600. But only if you beat the deadline, which strikes at 11:59 p.m. (CEST) on Friday, 11 October. Keep more euros in your wallet — buy your Disrupt Berlin passes today.

Disrupt Berlin offers awesome opportunities for startuppers of every persuasion — founders, investors, engineers, marketers — if you love tech startups, you’ll love the two program-packed days at Disrupt. It’s the crossroads of innovation and inspiration, and you just never know when you’ll meet the person who can move your business to the next level.

Here’s just a taste of the great speakers who will share their expertise from our various stages. Want to learn more about the European VC landscape? Don’t miss Tom Hulme, general partner for GV, the VC firm formerly known as Google Ventures.

Then there’s Oscar Pierre, the CEO of Glovo, a major player in the on-demand delivery app space. Talk about rapid growth. The service, which goes beyond ordering restaurant food to include groceries, pharmacy items, is live in 124 cities across 21 countries. Oh, and it employs more than 1,000 people and works with tens of thousands of independent delivery partners.

Creating enterprise software that helps automate repetitive tasks isn’t for the faint of heart, but Daniel Dines, founder and CEO of UiPath (currently valued at $7 billion) didn’t let that stop him. Listen in as he talks about his 15-year journey and, no doubt, a unique perspective on automation.

That’s just a sample of the Disrupt Berlin’s deep bench of expert speakers and, of course, there’s plenty of other startup goodness to experience. Don’t miss the always-epic Startup Battlefield pitch competition, explore and network with hundreds of stellar early-stage startups — including or hand-picked TC Top Picks — exhibiting the latest tech in Startup Alley. Check out the Hackathon to see which code-slinging team wins best overall hack.

It’s all waiting for you at Disrupt Berlin 2019, and it all starts with getting the best price possible. You have just 48 hours until the super early bird expires on Friday, 11 October at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Don’t wait another minute. Go buy your pass right now, and we’ll see you in Berlin!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

New Vector, a European startup founded in 2017 by the creators of an open, decentralized communications standard called Matrix to drive adoption and grow an ecosystem around an alternative messaging protocol for instant messaging and VoIP apps, has raised an $8.5 million Series A funding round.

Investors in New Vector’s Series A round include enterprise tech specialists Notion Capital and Dawn Capital, along with European seed fund Firstminute Capital.

The team has been showing what’s possible when you think outside the proprietary silo of the usual (messaging giant) suspects for several years now — launching a Slack rival called Riot.IM back in 2016, which runs on Matrix — to offer an open, customizable and secure alternative. (Secure because unlike Slack Riot does offer end-to-end encryption. Though not yet everywhere — but expanding e2e encryption is part of the plan for the Series A.)

Users of Riot can also choose to run the app on their own server so they’re in full control of data hosting. And the app includes a bridging feature to integrate with mainstream chat app rivals like Slack . So it’s a ‘cake and eat it’ approach to modern messaging tech: Control plus interoperability and transparency.

“Over the last few years it feels like we have gone backwards with communication platforms like Slack and WhatsApp that are walled gardens where users have very understandable concerns over whether their data is secure and how it is being used,” added Notion Capital’s Jos White in another statement. “At last the market has an alternative with the New Vector services that are based off the Matrix protocol offering open standards and delivering complete data ownership and security.”

New Vector’s Series A fast follows $5M it raised last year — when the team took in a strategic investment from an Ethereum-based secure chat and crypto wallet app called Status.

Earlier dev work on the Matrix protocol was funded with support from a large multinational telecoms infrastructure company for whom the founding team had previously built messaging apps. But that funding dried up as of August 2017, which was when they started casting around for alternatives — initially pitching supporters for donations.

Fast forward a couple of years and with growing momentum for their approach — the Matrix network has expanded to more than 11M users and 40,000 deployments this year, growing daily active users 400% since 2018 — they’ve landed a big chunk of VC in the bank.

This isn’t so surprising when you see some of the users they’re able to name check. Such as the US government; the French government (which forked Riot to launch its own messaging app called Tchap earlier this year, and has chosen Matrix to be its official comms platform); Wikimedia; KDE; and RedHat, to name a few. It also says it’s working with the UK’s National Heath Service and with Mozilla.

The plan for the Series A is thus to step on the gas and scale their hosting platform, burnish the product experience and beef up the protocol to be able to support more governments and enterprises seeking digital sovereignty, messaging autonomy and strong encryption to keep their secrets in increasingly volatile geopolitical times.

Just last week officials from the US, UK and Australian governments leaned on Facebook publicly, calling on the company not to expand its use of end-to-end encryption — unless or until it can ensure access to decrypted comms on warranted demand.

WhatsApp’s e2e encryption is highly respected. But it’s also only as strong as Facebook’s implementation of it. Which isn’t exactly reassuring when the company is coming under high level pressure from its own government to backdoor its apps. So there’s both a security and privacy logic to wanting to eschew data centralization — even if it’s robustly encrypted.

Certainly for a certain type of highly security conscious enterprise and public sector user, which is where Matrix is intended to plug in.

If data is centralized it risks becoming a sitting duck for powerful interests to try to get at, as well as generating a wealth of metadata that the controlling commercial entity can absolutely data-mine. So a robust, decentralized messaging standard that doesn’t demand such trade offs will have obvious appeal to those with resources to custom fit and deploy their own apps.

(For the record, Matrix says its e2e encryption is based on the Double Ratchet Algorithm popularised by Signal but which has been extended to support encryption to chat rooms containing thousands of devices. It also says it uses Olm and Megolm cryptographic ratchets, which are specified as an open standard with implementations released under the Apache license, and which have been independently audited by NCC Group.)

New Vector CEO and Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson tells us that growth for Matrix is coming primary from the public sector and adjacent industries (which need to be able to communicate securely with government departments); from open source projects; cryptocurrencies; and activists and NGOs.

“The factors which drive decentralisation here are wanting to be able to have full autonomy and control over your conversations with zero dependencies on a megacorp like Facebook, Google or Slack… without wanting to create an isolated island, but participating in a wider global open Matrix network like the Web itself,” he says. “Also, developers wanting (at last!) an open platform to build communication apps on like the Web, rather than being locked into proprietary communication platforms from a big corp.”

Hodgson points out that governments are “highly decentralized” by nature (i.e. between different departments, ministries, citizens etc) — adding that they “really like end-to-end encryption, especially within a wider open network”.

Or, well, at least the bits of governments that aren’t calling for Facebook to backdoor its apps…

“We are the primary choice for an encrypted yet decentralised communication platform which can span multiple government departments — enforcing different security levels on different servers as needed, with zero vendor lock-in thanks to Matrix,” he continues. “It lets you get the entire public sector — be that academic, healthcare, military, citizens and their adjacent organisations (and adjacent countries!) on the same network, without surrendering control to Facebook, Google, Telegram or anyone else.”

“France and the US Department of Public Safety are already live, and several other countries are in the pipeline,” he adds on public sector deployments. “We expect Matrix to become the backbone for secure intra- and inter-governmental communication in the future.”

In France’s case the government has rolled Matrix out across all 16 ministries — to 5.5M users.

Talking of the future, the plan for the Series A is four-fold. Firstly: Invest in improving the user experience in Riot for the app to be, as Hodgson puts it, “properly mainstream” — aka: “a genuine alternative to WhatsApp and Slack for groups who need secure communication which is entirely within their control, rather than run by Facebook or Slack”.

Second, they’ll be turning on end-to-end encryption by default for all private conversations.

“Decentralised e2e encryption is Hard,” he says with emphasis. “But we are tantalisingly close to having the missing ingredients (cross-signed key verification; E2E-capable full text search; E2E-capable bots) finished — which means we can turn it on across the whole public network by default for private rooms. This is a huge deal, especially given the increasingly obvious risks of centralised end-to-end encryption (a la WhatsApp and Signal).”

Thirdly, the funding will go on building out their flagship Matrix hosting platform (Modular.im) and building it into Riot — “so that groups of users can easily hop onto their own self-sovereign servers”. 

“We already have folks like the Wikimedia Foundation, KDE and GNOME using Modular today (and hopefully Mozilla and NHSX in future), and we’ll be using the funding to get as many people on Modular as possible to help scale Matrix going forwards,” he adds. 

Finally they intend to work on combating abuse. As with any comms platform, there can be a dark side to the stuff people want to share. Throw in e2e encryption and decentralization and the question of how you moderate hateful communications could easily get overlooked. But New Vector is at least thinking about this problem.

“Matrix is a fascinating microcosm of the wider open internet, and the 11M addressable users spans the full spectrum of humanity,” says Hodgson. “We have some really interesting work going on here to empower users to filter out content they don’t want to see (rather than using centralised algorithms to do so), which could be applicable to the wider internet.”

“We’re hoping that the Matrix.org Foundation (the non-profit which control the Matrix protocol) will drive this work but it’s something which is very much on New Vector’s radar too,” he adds.

Asked about Matrix’s security and stability, Hodgson says this was the focus with the big 1.0 release in June — when the protocol exited beta.

“We launched a formal Security Disclosure Policy and hall of fame (https://matrix.org/security-disclosure-policy/) and the protocol has a pretty good security record — other than the drama over the launch of Tchap in France,” he says, referring to the security flaw that was found in the app immediately it launched.

“The researcher who found the flaw made an extremely loud noise about it, but in practice it wasn’t a flaw in the Matrix protocol itself — it was specific to the French deployment’s configuration, and was found prior to launch, and we addressed it within a few hours of being reported,” he adds. “Obviously it should have been spotted before being exposed to the internet, but subsequently France set up a successful bug bounty programme (https://yeswehack.com/programs/tchap) as well as a dedicated audit to avoid problems going forwards.

“Meanwhile we got our E2EE successfully audited by NCC Group back in 2016 (it hasn’t changed substantially since), and together with the E2EE-by-default work mentioned before, we’re continuing to focus on security & stability.”

GoCardless has been around for 8 years. But the company has experienced tremendous growth over the past couple of years. It now has a shot at becoming a global leader when it comes to payments via direct debit. Its co-founder and CEO Hiroki Takeuchi has become a fintech expert, and that’s why I’m excited to announce that Hiroki Takeuchi will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

GoCardless has a pretty self-explanatory name. While many small and big companies still rely on credit cards and sometimes even (gasp) cheques, GoCardless wants to make it easier to switch to direct debit payments. The company’s API lets you get started and accept recurring payments in no time.

The advantages are obvious. First, card payments were never designed for recurring subscriptions. They expire and lead to churn. If you’re running a subscription business with card payments, you’re basically leaving money on the table.

Second, card payments can be expensive. Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents for each transaction in the U.S. for instance. GoCardless costs 1% per transaction.

If you’re a global company, GoCardless has been slowly expanding its footprint with many supported direct debit schemes, such as SEPA in Europe, Bacs direct debit in the U.K., ACH debit in the U.S. and many more.

But GoCardless doesn’t want to stop at consumer subscriptions. The company thinks direct debit payments could represent a big opportunity for B2B use cases. It’s cheaper and provides a lot more visibility than cheques.

While many startups also talk about resilience, Hiroki Takeuchi actually knows what resilience feels like on a personal and professional level. TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear wrote a thoughtful interview with him shortly after a serious road accident that has left him paralyzed below his chest.

A few months ago, the company raised a $75 million Series E round with an impressive list of investors that included Adams Street Partners, GV, Salesforce Ventures, Accel Partners, Balderton Capital, Notion Capital and Passion Capital.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion — and many others. The conference will take place December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

---

Hiroki is co-founder and CEO of GoCardless. Founded in 2011, GoCardless is a global leader in recurring payments. The business is on a mission to take the pain out of getting paid for recurring revenue businesses. More than 40,000 businesses around the world, from multinational corporations to SMBs, transact through GoCardless each month, and the business processes $10bn of payments a year.

Before starting GoCardless, Hiroki studied Mathematics at Oxford University and worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Co.

Less than a day after Apple was criticized by Chinese state media for allowing HKmap in the App Store, the crowdsourced map app said it had been delisted. Its removal comes less than a week after Apple reversed its initial decision to reject the app, which provides information about the location of pro-democracy demonstrations, street closures and police activity (its website is still available).

After Apple allowed HKmap into the App Store, an article in the China Daily, a newspaper owned by the Communist Party of China, criticized the company, claiming that it enabled “rioters in Hong Kong to go on violent acts,” and adding that “Business is business, and politics is politics…Apple has to think about the consequences of its unwise and reckless decision.”

While the Chinese government has labeled protestors as violent, including through coordinated campaigns on social media, human rights groups like Amnesty International have documented multiple instances of police abuse against protestors.

HKmap’s creators tweeted the Apple claimed it endangered law enforcement and residents, and said they disagreed.

1. We disagree @Apple and @hkpoliceforce ‘s claim that HKmap App endanger law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong.#HKmap #HKmaplive #HK #Censorship

— HKmap.live 全港抗爭即時地圖 (@hkmaplive) October 10, 2019

The app’s developers added that “there is 0 evidence to support CSTCB’s [the Hong Kong Police Force’s Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau] accusation that HKmap App has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement.” They also noted that other apps containing crowdsourced information and public postings, including Waze, which is used by commuters to avoid traffic cameras and police, are still allowed on the App Store.

“The quoted Apple’s App Store Review Guideline is vague, does that include user-generated contents? We are sure there are contents ‘solicit, promote, or encourage criminal activity in Facebook, Instagram, Safari, Telegram, Twitter, Waze, Whatsapp, etc. at some point in time,” wrote HKmap’s developers.

Pro-democracy demonstrations began in March to protest a now-withdrawn bill that would have allowed extradition to mainland China, but have grown to encompass additional demands that center on Hong Kong’s ability to safeguard rights, including freedom of press and speech, under the “one country, two systems” policy that has been in place since it was returned from British rule to China in 1997.

This is the latest in several decisions made by Apple that have concerned pro-democracy observers and appear designed to appease the government of China, its third-biggest market by sales. Two years ago, it removed VPN apps from its App Store in China and within the last week has removed the Taiwan flag emoji from the iOS keyboard in Hong Kong and the app version of Quartz from the Hong Kong App Store, reportedly because of its protest coverage.

TechCrunch has contacted Apple for comment.

Tend is among a growing number of new dental brands that are attracting money from venture investors who are still kicking themselves for missing runaway stories. Most notable among these is newly public SmileDirectClub, which sells teeth-straightening products directly to consumers and is beloved by analysts even though its shares have slipped since its September IPO.

Other startups to more recently attract private funding include Swift Health Systems, a five-year-old company that makes invisible braces under the brand INBRACE and just raised $45 million from VCs; Henry the Dentist, a two-year-old, mobile dental clinic that raised $10 million earlier this year; and Quip, the five-year-old maker of electric toothbrushes and oral care products that has garnered roughly $62 million from investors.

Still, Tend is especially notable, and not because it just raised $36 million in seed and Series A funding — which it did, led by Redpoint Ventures.  Instead, Tend sees an opportunity to reinvent the dentist’s office, through “tech and training” that “prioritizes” your comfort, a sleek waiting area that it promises you’ll almost never need to use, and “Netflix in your chair” that you will enjoy while wearing the latest and greatest Bose headphones.

Tend says it will get your favorite show queued up before you arrive for your appointment, which you will breezily book online, and whose prices you can learn in advance, so you don’t suffer sticker shock later. A Fast Company reporter who visited the startup’s newly opened flagship store in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood was even offered a selection of only the finest toothpastes, including that of Marvis, an Italian brand that comes in such distinct flavors as Amarelli licorice, cinnamon, ginger and jasmin — not to mention “classic strong,” “whitening,” and “aquatic.”

It all sounds faintly ridiculous, but also fairly nice, especially contrasted with traditional dentist offices, which tend to be both highly antiseptic and astonishingly vague about pricing.

Certainly, improving on the patient experience has worked out well for One Medical, a venture-backed, tech-driven chain of 70 clinics that has become one of the largest independent groups in the U.S. (It’s also reportedly prepping an IPO.)  Little wonder that one individual participant in Tend’s new funding is Tom Lee, the physician who created One Medical in 2007 and led it as CEO until 2017.

Others individual investors include Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa of Warby Parker; Zach Weinberg of Flatiron Health; and Bradley Tusk of Tusk Ventures.

Tend’s cofounder and CEO is no slouch, either. seemingly. Doug Hudson was the CEO of SmileClubDirect for three-and-a-half years, beginning in 2013. Before that, he founded two medical care companies that were acquired: Hearing Planet and Simplex Healthcare.

Whether that pedigree is enough to get the company going will take some time to know but certainly, it’s chasing after a huge market that can very plainly be made better.  In the U.S. alone, the dental market is now a $137 billion market, according to the research group IBIS World, and as Hudson notes in a new Medium post about his latest startup, dentistry has a Net Promoter Score of 1, which is just two points higher than dreaded cable companies.

Consumers “don’t accept this level of service in any other aspect of our lives. Not when shopping for glasses. Not when exercising at home with a stationary bike,” he writes, and it’s true. If Tend can improve the experience even a little bit and its prices are competitive, we’d guess it has a shot.

If you had to slip a couple AAs into your smartphone every morning to check your email, browse Instagram, and text your friends, chances are the mobile revolution would not have been quite so revolutionary. Fortunately the rechargeable lithium-ion battery was invented — a decades-long task for which three men have just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The prize this year honors M. Stanley Whittingham, John Goodenough, and Akira Yoshino, all of whom contributed to the development of what is today the most common form of portable power. Without them (and of course those they worked with, and those who came before) we would be tied to even more wasteful and/or stationary sources of energy.

Lead-acid batteries had been in use for nearly a century by the time people really got to thinking about taking things to the next level with lithium, a lightweight metal with desirable electrical properties. But lithium is also highly reactive with air and water, making finding suitable substances to pair it with difficult.

Experiments in the ’50s and ’60s laid the groundwork for more targeted investigations, in particular Whittingham’s. He and partner Fred Gamble showed in 1976 that lithium ions, after donating electrons to produce a charge, fit perfectly into a lattice of titanium disulfide — where they sit patiently (in their “van der Waals gaps”) until an electron is provided during recharging. Unfortunately this design also used a lithium anode that could be highly reactive (think fire) if bent or crushed.

John Goodenough and his team soon developed a better cathode material (where the lithium ions rested) with a much higher potential — more power could be drawn, opening new possibilities for applications. This, combined with the fact that the metallic lithium anodes could be highly reactive (think fire) if bent or crushed, led to increased research on making batteries safe as well as useful.

In 1985 research by Akira Yoshino led to the discovery of several materials (whose names won’t mean anything to anyone without domain knowledge) that could perform as well while also being able to be physically damaged and not cause any major trouble.

Many, many improvements have been made since then, but the essentials of the technology were laid out by these teams. And soon after lithium-ion batteries were shown to be safe, capacious, and able to be recharged hundreds of times, they were found in laptops, medical devices, and eventually mobile phones. Today, after three more decades of enhancements, lithium batteries are now taking on gasoline as the energy storage medium of choice for human transportation.

The three scholars whose work most powerfully advanced this technology from theory to commercial reality were awarded equal shares of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, each taking home a third of the million and, more importantly, the distinction of being recognized in historic fashion.

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle business under Alphabet, sent an email to customers of its ride-hailing app that their next trip might not have a human safety driver behind the wheel, according to a copy of the email that was posted on Reddit.

The email entitled “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way” was sent to customers that use its ride-hailing app in the suburbs of Phoenix. It isn’t clear if the email was sent to members of its early rider program or its broader Waymo One service.

Both the early rider program and Waymo One service use self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans to shuttle Phoenix residents in a geofenced area that covers several suburbs including Chandler and Tempe. All of these “self-driving rides” have a human safety driver behind the wheel.

A driverless ride is what it sounds like. No safety driver behind the wheel, although a Waymo employee would likely be present in the vehicle initially.

Waymo could not be reached for comment. TechCrunch will update the article if the company responds. The email is posted below.

Waymo, formerly known as the Google self-driving project, first began testing its technology in 2009 in and around its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. It’s been a slow and steady roll ever since. The company has expanded its test area to other cities, spun out into its own business and iterated the vehicle design and the sensors around it,

 

Waymo opened a testing and operations center in Chandler, Arizona in 2016. Since then, the company has ramped up its testing in Chandler and other Phoenix suburbs, launched an early rider program and slowly crept toward commercial deployment. The early rider program, which required vetted applicants to sign non-disclosure agreements to participate, launched in April 2017.

In December, the company launched Waymo One, a commercial self-driving car service and accompanying app. Waymo One signaled that the company was starting to open up its service. Members of the early rider program were transferred to the Waymo One, which allowed them to bring guests and even talk publicly about their rides. More recently, Waymo opened another technical service center in the Phoenix area in preparation to double its capacity and grow its commercial fleet.

While driverless Waymo vehicles have been spotted periodically, they have never been used to shuttle the general public. The introduction of driverless vehicles would be milestone for the company.

And yet, there remains a number of questions. It’s unclear how many of these driverless rides there will be or the what constraints Waymo will place on them. It’s likely that these will operate in more simple, controlled environments for months before it expands to more complex situations.