Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Y Combinator-backed startup Astranis is now set to launch its first commercial telecommunication satellite aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, with a launch timeframe currently set for sometime starting in the fourth quarter of next year. Astranis aims to address the market of people who don’t currently have broadband internet access, which is still a huge number globally, and they hope to do so using low-cost satellites that massively undercut the price of existing global telecommunications hardware, which can be built and launched much faster than existing spacecraft, too.

Astranis satellites are much more cost efficient because they’re smaller and easier to make, which changes the economics of deployment for potential carrier and connectivity provider partners. Its approach has already attracted the partnership of Microcom subsidiary Pacific Dataport, an Anchorage company that was formed to expand satellite broadband access in Alaska. This will be the goal of the company’s first launch with SpaceX, to deliver a single satellite to geostationary orbit that will add more than 7.5 Gbps of capacity to the internet provider’s network in Alaska, tripling capacity and potentially reducing costs by “up to three times,” according to Astranis.

This isn’t the first ever satellite that Astranis has sent up to space – it launched a demonstration satellite in 2018 to show that its tech could work as advertised. Astranis’ approach is distinct from others attempting to offer satellite-based connectivity, including SpaceX’s own Starlink project, because it focuses on building satellites that remain in a fixed orbital position relative to the area on the ground where they’re providing service, as opposed to using a large constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites that offer coverage because one or more are bound to be over the coverage area at any given time as they orbit the Earth, handing off connections from one to the next.

Y Combinator-backed startup Astranis is now set to launch its first commercial telecommunication satellite aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, with a launch timeframe currently set for sometime starting in the fourth quarter of next year. Astranis aims to address the market of people who don’t currently have broadband internet access, which is still a huge number globally, and they hope to do so using low-cost satellites that massively undercut the price of existing global telecommunications hardware, which can be built and launched much faster than existing spacecraft, too.

Astranis satellites are much more cost efficient because they’re smaller and easier to make, which changes the economics of deployment for potential carrier and connectivity provider partners. Its approach has already attracted the partnership of Microcom subsidiary Pacific Dataport, an Anchorage company that was formed to expand satellite broadband access in Alaska. This will be the goal of the company’s first launch with SpaceX, to deliver a single satellite to geostationary orbit that will add more than 7.5 Gbps of capacity to the internet provider’s network in Alaska, tripling capacity and potentially reducing costs by “up to three times,” according to Astranis.

This isn’t the first ever satellite that Astranis has sent up to space – it launched a demonstration satellite in 2018 to show that its tech could work as advertised. Astranis’ approach is distinct from others attempting to offer satellite-based connectivity, including SpaceX’s own Starlink project, because it focuses on building satellites that remain in a fixed orbital position relative to the area on the ground where they’re providing service, as opposed to using a large constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites that offer coverage because one or more are bound to be over the coverage area at any given time as they orbit the Earth, handing off connections from one to the next.

Online education startup Udacity has hired former LendingTree executive Gabriel Dalporto as its new CEO, an appointment that follows months of layoffs and a restructuring directed by the company’s co-founder and executive chairman Sebastian Thrun.

Dalporto comes to Udacity after seven years at LendingTree, where he served in numerous positions, including chief marketing officer and chief financial officer. Dalporto stepped down as CFO in 2017 to join the company’s board and become executive advisor to the CEO. Dalporto left the executive advisor job in 2018, but remains on the board.

Thrun, who stepped in as CEO after Vishal Makhijani left the top post in October 2018, will stay on as executive chairman.

“He’s extremely strategic and pragmatic,” Thrun said in a recent interview, describing Dalporto.

Dalporto is known for his turnaround skills. But the new CEO says his focus at Udacity won’t be slashing costs and other activities often associated with that skill set.

“I was hired as a growth executive; I was not hired to be a turnaround executive,” Dalporto told TechCrunch.

Dalporto isn’t ready to provide details of his plans as CEO. Monday is his first day at the startup. But he will likely focus on growth areas such as the startup’s enterprise and government programs, as well as retaining and recapturing students into the Udacity ecosystem. Udacity’s enterprise clients include AT&T, Airbus, Audi, BMW, Capital One, Cisco and the Royal Bank of Scotland. It also has government relationships with Australia, the MENA region and New Zealand.

Dalporto is coming into a startup that is leaner and more productive, in terms of launching new nanodegrees, than it was a year ago.  It’s also cash-flow positive, according to Thrun, who has spent 2019 revamping the company.

When Thrun took over the CEO post, he found a company that had grown too quickly and was burdened by its own bureaucracy. Udacity, which specializes in “nanodegrees” on a range of technical subjects that include AI, deep learning, digital marketing, VR and computer vision, was struggling because of runaway costs and other inefficiencies. Its nanodegree programs, which had grown in 2017, became sluggish in 2018. 

Staff reductions soon followed as Thrun sought to get a handle on costs. About 130 people were laid off and other open positions were left vacant. Thrun then cut further in April. About 20% of the staff was laid off and operations were restructured in an effort to bring costs in line with revenue without curbing growth. The company streamlined its marketing efforts and downsized and consolidated office space. As of April, the startup employs 300 full-time equivalent employees and about 60 contractors.

Other changes included the launch of a global technical mentoring program, switching its direct-to-student business from fixed to monthly subscription pricing to incentivize individuals to move through courses faster. Lalit Singh, who joined Udacity in February as chief operating officer, has been critical to the turnaround, according to Thrun.

Its productivity has also improved. In first six months of 2019, Udacity launched 12 new nanodegree programs compared to just 8 in all of 2018.

“In the three months since we’ve initiated these changes, the consumer business has grown by more than 60%,” Thrun wrote in a blog post Monday announcing the changes.

Udacity’s enterprise and government programs have also grown, with bookings increasing by more than 100% year over year.

During a new briefing at the Group of 7 summit, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that U.S. President Donald Trump and Macron have agreed on a compromise regarding the controversial tax on tech giants.

France is still going to tax big tech companies. But the French government promises that it’ll scrap the French tax as soon as the OECD finds a way to properly tax tech companies in countries where they operate.

The OECD has been working on a way to properly tax tech companies with a standardized set of rules for a few years. According to recent announcements, this new framework could be released in 2020.

In addition to ending the French tax, as Le Monde outlined, France promises that it’ll pay back companies that overpaid before the OECD framework. For instance, if Facebook pays a lot of taxes in 2019 due to the French tax on tech giants and if they would have paid less under the OECD framework, France will pay back the difference.

“There’s been a lot of anxiety because of misunderstandings on this French digital tax. We talked about it, and I think we have found a very good deal thanks to the work of ministers,” Macron said.

“On a bilateral basis, we have reached an agreement to fix our disagreements between us. We are going to work together to find a solution. When there’s an international taxation model, we will remove the tax — and everything that has been paid will be deducted from this international tax. We have found an agreement that is good for all parties involved. It can solve a lot of really negative issues and improve the international system.”

On July 26, Trump criticized France’s plans in a tweet. “France just put a digital tax on our great American technology companies. If anybody taxes them, it should be their home Country, the USA,” he wrote. “We will announce a substantial reciprocal action on Macron’s foolishness shortly. I’ve always said American wine is better than French wine!”

Right before leaving for the Group of 7 summit, Trump reiterated criticism of the French tax and said the U.S. would be placing tariffs on French wines.

At the Group of 7 summit, Trump didn’t want to confirm that the U.S. and France had reached an agreement. As CNN reported, when a reporter asked a question about France’s tax on tech companies, Trump said: “I can confirm that the first lady loved your French wine. She loved your French wine. So thank you very much. That's fine.”

A couple of months ago, the French parliament voted in favor of a new tax on tech giants. In order to avoid tax optimization schemes, big tech companies that generate significant revenue in France are taxed on their revenue generated in France.

France’s Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire first lobbied other European countries to create that new tax at the European level. It made a ton of sense as the main issue is that big tech companies create complicated European corporate structures in order to lower their effective tax rate.

But Le Maire couldn’t get a unanimous vote and created a tax for France in particular. If you’re running a company that generates more than €750 million in global revenue and €25 million in France, you have to pay 3 percent of your French revenue in taxes.

This tax is specifically designed for tech companies in two categories — marketplace (Amazon’s marketplace, Uber, Airbnb…) and advertising (Facebook, Google, Criteo…). While it isn’t designed to target American companies, the vast majority of big tech companies that operate in France are American.

In four months time, Windows 7 will reach end-of-life and will no longer receive security updates.

That’s going to be a problem for some enterprises which still run the decade-old operating system. Starting January 14, 2020, Windows 7 computers will stop receiving security patches, leaving enterprises vulnerable to malware.

According to latest data, some 37% of all desktop consumer and enterprise computers still run Windows 7, with Windows 10 marginally ahead at 41%.

There will be, however, some reprieve for enterprise customers with active Windows 10 subscriptions.

A little-publicized document published by Microsoft says top-tier customers with Windows E5, Microsoft 365 E5, and Government E5 subscriptions will get extended security updates for a year at no additional charge. After the year expires, Microsoft will charge each enterprise device $50 to receive updates for a second year and $100 per device for a third year.

Qualifying subscriptions must remain active until the end of the year and throughout the extended security updates period to continue to receive security updates, the document said.

But for everyone else on other Windows subscription plans, Microsoft will begin charging from the moment Windows 7 falls out of support in January, with a final cut-off for extended security updates in January 2023.

The software and services giant began warning users in March that they would soon stop receiving critical and necessary security updates. Microsoft recommends users upgrade to Windows 10, or obtain extended security updates as a “last resort.”

News of the security update extension was first reported by Computerworld.

For the longest time, even while scientists were working to make it a reality, quantum computing seemed like science fiction. It’s hard enough to make any sense out of quantum physics to begin with, let alone the practical applications of this less than intuitive theory. But we’ve now arrived at a point where companies like D-Wave, Rigetti, IBM and others actually produce real quantum computers.

They are still in their infancy and nowhere near as powerful as necessary to compute anything but very basic programs, simply because they can’t run long enough before the quantum states decohere, but virtually all experts say that these are solvable problems and that now is the time to prepare for the advent of quantum computing. Indeed, Gartner just launched a Quantum Volume metric, based on IBM’s research, that looks to help CIOs prepare for the impact of quantum computing.

To discuss the state of the industry and why now is the time to get ready, I sat down with IBM’s Jay Gambetta, who will also join us for a panel on Quantum Computing at our TC Sessions: Enterprise event in San Francisco on September 5, together with Microsoft’s Krysta Svore and Intel’s Jim Clark.

The global smart speaker market grew 55.4% in the second quarter to reach 26.1 million shipments, according to a new report from Canalys. Amazon continued to lead the race, accounting for 6.6 million units shipped in the quarter. Google, however, fell to the third spot as China’s Baidu surged ahead. Baidu in Q2 grew a sizable 3,700% to reach 4.5 million units, overtaking Google’s 4.3 million units shipped.

China’s market overall doubled its quarterly shipments to 12.6 million units, or more than twice the U.S.’s 6.1 million total. The latter represents a slight (2.4%) decline since the prior quarter.

Baidu’s growth in the quarter was attributed to aggressive marketing and go-to-market campaigns. It was particularly successful in terms of smart displays, which accounted for 45% of the products it shipped.

“Local network operator’s interests on the [smart display] device category soared recently. This bodes well for Baidu as it faces little competition in the smart display category, allowing the company to dominate in the operator channel,” noted Canalys Research Analyst Cynthia Chen.

Meanwhile, Google was challenged by the Nest rebranding in Q2, the analyst firm said.

The report also suggested that Google should to introduce a revamped smart speaker portfolio to rekindle consumer interest. The Google Home device hasn’t been updated since launch — still sporting the air freshener-style looks it had back in 2016. And the Google Home mini hasn’t received much more than a color change.

Instead, Google’s attention as of late has been on making it easier for device manufacturers to integrate with Google Assistant technology, in addition to its increased focus on smart displays.

Amazon, by comparison, has updated its Echo line of speakers several times while expanding Alexa to devices with screens like the Echo Spot and Show, and to those without like the Echo Plus, Echo Dot, Echo Auto, and others — even clocks and microwaves, as sort of public experiments in voice computing.

That said, both Amazon and Google turned their attention to non-U.S. markets in Q2, the report found. 50% of Amazon’s smart speaker shipments were outside the U.S. in Q2, up from 32% in Q2 last year. And 55% of Google’s shipments were outside the U.S., up from 42% in Q2 2018.

Beyond the top 3 — Amazon, Baidu and now No. 3 Google — the remaining top 5 included Alibaba and Xiaomi, with 4.1 million and 2.8 million units shipped in Q2, respectively.

The rest of the market, which would also include Apple’s HomePod, totaled 3.7 million units.

 

 

Facebook has succeeded in blocking a pioneering order by Germany’s Federal Cartel Office earlier this year that would have banned it from combining data on users across its own suite of social platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — without their consent.

Pioneering because the antitrust regulator had liaised with EU privacy authorities during a long-running investigation of Facebook’s data-gathering activities — leading it to conclude that Facebook’s conduct in the German market where it also deemed it to hold a monopoly position amounted to “exploitative abuse”.

The Bundeskartellamt (FCO) order had been likened to a structural separation of Facebook’s businesses at the data level.

Facebook appealed, delaying application of the order, and today’s ruling by the Dusseldorf court grants a suspension (press release in German) — essentially kicking the matter into very long legal grass.

The FCO has a month to lodge an appeal. A spokeswoman confirmed to TechCrunch is will do so. But with the order suspended pending what could be years of appeals there’s little near-term prospect of any change to how Facebook does business based on this particular regulatory intervention.

It’s undoubtedly a major victory for Facebook — to win at the very first appeals layer — and a major blow for regulatory ‘innovation’ (for what of a better word) which sought to evolve the interpretation of current competition law to respond to the outgrowth and dominance of surveillance-based digital business model via applying privacy-focused conditions to data processing.

Europe’s data protection regulators do have the power to order the suspension of infringing data processing, under the bloc’s updated privacy framework (GDPR).

But so far very such orders are as rare as hen’s teeth — barring a recent threat to Google also by a German privacy regulator. (Just the threat of an order in that case triggered a voluntary suspension of the data processing in question.)

This made the FCO’s order against Facebook all the more notable for boldness and forethought. And means Facebook’s success in cutting it down at the first legal hurdle is a depressing result for those in the EU hoping platform power linked to privacy-hostile surveillance of Internet users might be regulated in a meaningful timeframe via an existing antitrust lens.

The European Commission’s own ‘big tech’ antitrust interventions have so far focused their attention elsewhere, in addition to taking years to conclude.

Commenting on the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court’s decision today in a statement, FCO president Andreas Mundt said: “Data and data handling are decisive factors for competition in the digital economy. The Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf has today responded differently than the Bundeskartellamt to key legal issues. These legal issues are highly significant for the future state of competition in the digital economy. We are convinced that we can act in this area based on the existing antitrust law. For this reason, we are going to appeal on points of law to the Federal Court of Justice to clarify these issues.”

We’ve also reached out to Facebook for comment.

Professor Rupprecht Podszun, a chair for civil law, German and European competition law at Heinrich Heine University, who has been following the FCO’s intervention, dubs the court ruling a “major blow” for the regulator.

“The FCO had accused Facebook of abusing its dominant position by unlawfully gathering and combining user data. Thus it had ordered Facebook to change its Terms & Conditions within a year. The judges from Düsseldorf have stopped enforcement of this decision now. They have serious doubts as to the lawfulness of the decision,” he said via email. “The case is regarded as a landmark case against the digital giants and it had gained worldwide recognition. To fail at the Düsseldorf court, at the very first step, is a bitter result.”

Podszun said the Düsseldorf court did not accept it follows from a possible violation of privacy rules that it is automatically a violation of antitrust rules if a dominant company is acting. That would require the court to see competitive damage — which it did not in this case.

Additionally, the court took the view that users decide autonomously whether they agree with Facebook’s T&Cs when signing up for the service. It also did not agree that consumers are exploited by Facebook’s data collection since they could continue to make the same data available to other companies.

From here on in he believes legal back and forth is likely to take years — hence, even if the FCO were to prevail at a higher court in future the impact on Facebook’s business at that point would likely be long out of date. (Meanwhile, earlier this year it emerged that Facebook is working on merging the back-end infrastructure of its three social networks — seeking to further collapse cross-platform user privacy, even as its scrambles discrete business units in a way that would complicate any regulatory order to break apart its business.)

“The Cartel Office had shown courage in its decision and had explored new paths. The Higher Regional
Court did not follow this reasoning. The FCO took a long shot by integrating a privacy investigation into the competition assessment. I have a lot of sympathy for that, because data has become a crucial competitive factor. Thus, I think that data collection must be a topic for antitrust law,” said Podszun.

“The law is at its limits with the internet giants. It is too slow. A final decision in a few years on the privacy terms of Facebook is too late either way. Before taking the decision, the FCO had investigated the case for three years. The Google Shopping procedure of the European Commission took seven years. You cannot tame these companies with such proceedings and lengthy litigation in court.”

“The decision is a wake-up call to legislators: If you want to regulate Google, Amazon, Facebook & Co., the existing tools are not enough,” he added. “A new version of the Antitrust Act is currently pending in Germany. This is an opportunity to change the legal bases. Also, the authorities for data protection need to step up their efforts – they seem to lack the bravery of the antitrust watchdog.”

Asked how legal bases need to change to enable local antitrust law to respond intelligently to data-mining platform giants, Podszun suggested four areas of focus — telling TechCrunch:

• Competition law needs to get away from traditional market definition. There should be a rule that the authorities can interfere with companies like GAFA [Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon] in cases where they move into new markets where they are not yet dominant but can easily tip the market. Conglomerate effects and digital ecosystems currently are a blind spot in competition law
• There may be room for a new example of what constitutes an abuse in digital markets
• The German Competition Office should have powers in consumer law fields (currently, there is no public enforcement of economic consumer protection issues in Germany). An integrated approach with consumer and competition issues could be helpful (including privacy, possibly). Privacy enforcers are particularly weak in Germany
• Procedures need to be speeded up, e.g. by stricter time limits, less haggling over access to file, more technically savvy staff and more priority-setting by the authorities

“All very difficult – but it’s vital to have some fresh air here,” he added. “Whether this would have helped in the case under debate is a different question.”

With the App Store’s big makeover in fall 2017, Apple attempted to shift consumers’ attention away from the Top Charts and more towards editorial content. But app developers still want to make it to the No. 1 position. According to new research from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower, it’s become easier for non-game apps over the past few years to achieve the top ranking.

Specifically, the firm found that the median number of daily downloads required for non-game applications on the U.S. iPhone App Store to reach No. 1 decreased around 34% from 136,000 to 90,000 in 2018, then increased a little more than 4% to 94,000 this year.

At the same time, the number of non-game installs on the U.S. App Store had increased by 33% between Q1 2016 and Q1 2019.

These findings, Sensor Tower suggests, indicate that the U.S. market for the top social and messaging apps has become saturated, with downloads for top apps like Facebook and Messenger decreasing over time. In addition, no other apps have found the same level of success that Snapchat and Bitmoji did back in 2016 and 2017, the report adds.

For example, Messenger saw 5 million U.S. App Store installs in November 2016 while Bitmoji and Snapchat passed 5 million installs in August 2016 and March 2017, respectively. And no other non-game app has topped 3.5 million installs in a single month since March 2017.

Meanwhile, the decline in downloads needed to reach the No. 1 spot on Google Play was even more significant.

The median daily downloads for the top non-game app decreased by 65% from 209,000 in 2016 to 74,000 so far in 2019.

Similarly, the store saw a decrease in installs among top apps, including Messenger, Facebook, Snapchat, Pandora and Instagram. Messenger, for example, saw its yearly installs fall by 68% from nearly 80 million in 2016 to 26 million in 2018.

Games

With mobile games, however, it’s a different story across both app stores.

On the Apple App Store, it has taken 174,000 downloads for a game to reach the top of the rankings on any given day in 2019 — 85% more the 94,000 installs required for non-game app to reach the top of the charts.

This figure also represents an increase of 47% compared to the 118,000 median daily downloads required to top the charts back in 2016, Sensor Tower said.

In part, this trend is due to the rise of hyper-casual gaming. So far in 2019, 28 games have reached the No. 1 position on the U.S. App Store, with hyper-casual games making up all but 4 of those. And of those four, only Harry Potter: Wizards Unite spent more than one day at the top of the charts. Meanwhile, hyper-casual games like aquapark.io and Colorbump 3D have spent 25 and 30 days at No. 1, respectively.

On Google Play, the median daily installs to reach the No. 1 position increased from 70,000 in 2017 to 116,000 so far in 2019, or 66% growth. Overall game downloads, however, decreased 16% from 646 million in Q1 2017 to 544 million in Q1 2019.

Similarly, 21 out of the 23 games that reached the top spot this year have been hyper-casual titles, like Words Story or Traffic Run.

Breaking the Top 10

While topping the charts has gotten easier for non-game apps over the years, breaking into the top 10 has gotten more difficult. Median U.S. daily installs for the No. 10 free non-game app increased 11% from 44,000 in 2016 to 49,000 in 2019.

On Google Play, meidan daily installs for non-game apps fell nearly 50% from 55,000 median daily installs in 2016 to 31,000 in 2019.

For games, the No. 10 game’s spot on the App Store had 25,000 median daily installs in 2016 to 43,000 so far in 2019, and Google Play saw 26% growth from 27,000 to 34,000 during the same period.

Categories making the Top 10

In terms of breaking into the top 10 by category, Photo & Video apps on the App Store present the most challenge. The category where YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat reside saw a median daily amount of more than 16,000 downloads for the No. 10 app.

This was followed by Shopping (15,300 daily downloads for the No. 10 app), Social Networking (14,500), Entertainment (12,600), and Productivity (12,400).

On Google Play, Entertainment apps — like Hulu, Netflix and Bitmoji — need around 17,100 U.S. installs in a day to reach the top 10. This is followed by Shopping (10,800), Social (9,100), Music (8,200), and Finance (8000).

Beyond the U.S.

Outside the U.S., a non-game app needs approximately 91,000 downloads to reach the top 10 on the App Store in China — higher than the 49,000 installs needed in the U.S. For games, the U.S. is the most difficult to crack the top 10, with a median of 43,000 daily downloads for the No. 10 game.

On Google Play, India required the most downloads to reach the top 10 with apps needing 256,000 downloads in a day and games needing 117,000 downloads.

Of course, the App Store’s ranking algorithms — nor Google Play’s algorithms — rely on downloads alone to determine an app’s ranking. Apple takes into consideration downloads and velocity, among other undocumented factors. Google Play does something similar.

But these days, developers are more concerned with showing up highly ranked in app store searches than they are on top charts, where they’ll need to consider numerous other factors beyond downloads — like keywords, description, user engagement, and even app quality, among other things.