Category: UNCATEGORIZED

LightSail 2 may still have at least a few days to go before it begins its primary purpose, by unfurling the solar sail it has on board and finding out more about propelling a spacecraft using only the force of photons, but it’s not wasting any time on its orbital voyage. New photos from the crowdfunded spacecraft, which is operated by The Planetary Society, provide a stunning high-resolution look at the Earth from its unique vantage point.

The spacecraft just got a firmware update that corrected some issues with its orientation control after a test of its solar sailing mode, absent the actual use of the sail itself. The patch was uploaded successfully, according to The Planetary Society, and the spacecraft overall is “healthy and stable” as it stands. The earliest possible date for solar sail deployment is June 21, which is this Sunday, but that’ll depend on the mission team’s confidence in it actually being ready to unfurl and use successfully.

LightSail 2’s development was funded in part via a successful crowdfunding campaign run by the Bill Nye-led Planetary Society, and continues to seek funding for its ongoing operation on Crowdrise. Its goal is to test a spacecraft’s ability to fly powered only by the force of photons from the Sun striking a solar sail constructed of mylar. This method of space-based transportation is extremely slow to get started, but thanks to the inertia-free medium of outer space, it could be an extremely energy-efficient way for research craft to travel long distances.

It launched on June 25 as part of the shared payload of SpaceX’s most recent Falcon Heavy launch.

There is a special chaos that happens when a startup reaches 30 employees. People have a harder time tracking what’s going on, and it’s easy for some to feel left out or ignored.

Right when you want employees focusing on taking the company to the next level, they’re suddenly focused on their own futures. Insecurities and politics can abound, and the work can suffer.

How to stop the madness? In my experience, it all comes down to structure. It might seem early, or scary to a company used to succeeding on grit, but 30 is a key time to begin putting processes into place.

You’re no longer 10 people sitting around a table together, and communication can start to break down. Looking to large companies is no help either. It’s easy to get lost in a sea of frameworks, and you don’t want to overwhelm your team.

What steps can you take to keep things on track and scale effectively? How much is too much?

My company, Bright + Early, works with companies at exactly this stage, helping them grow up without losing the culture that makes them special. For a company just on the verge of scaling, here’s what I recommend.

Values

With commercial launch services expected to reach $7 billion by 2024, there’s increasing demand for an array of new technologies that can offer advantages to companies looking to get communications infrastructure in orbit.

That’s one of the reasons behind the new $25.5 million financing for Momentus, which sells in-space shuttle services to move satellites between orbits.

The company joins other satellite and telecommunications technology vendors like Akash Systems, which raised $14.5 million for its advanced telecommunications chipsets used in satellites, that have raised money from investors who are looking beyond basic launch services.

A motley assortment of venture capital firms, hedge funds family offices and other institutional investors came in to finance the new round of funding for Momentus including:  Y Combinator, the Lerner Family, the University of Wyoming Foundation, Quiet Capital, Mountain Nazca, ACE & Co., Liquid 2 Ventures, and Drake Management. The financing was led by Prime Movers Lab.

With $34 million in funding to date, Momentus said it will use its new cash to continue the development of its two shuttles designed to move payloads between different orbits. As the space in space fills up, the ability to maneuver payloads once they reach low earth orbit will become more important.

“In the past 18 months, Momentus has rapidly matured their water plasma propulsion system to deliver the world’s safest and most affordable in-space transportation services. They recently launched their first demonstration and are on track to radically reshape the landscape of the space economy,” said Dakin Sloss, Founder, and General Partner at Prime Movers Lab, in a statement. “I look forward to Momentus delivering on their massive backlog of contracts and partnerships with NASA, SpaceX and other top players in the space ecosystem.”

A backlog of contracts is impressive, but the down payment on a potential flight is minimal compared to the ability to get on a vehicle, so companies tend to spread the wealth.

The money will also pay for building in house research and development for the company’s technology and additional flight demonstrations throughout 2020, according to Momentus chief executive Mikhail Kokorich. The company expects to generate its first revenue next year as well, Kokorich said.

The company has three flights scheduled for 2020.

In an effort likely aimed at boosting family memberships, Spotify this morning announced a new partnership with Disney on the creation of a Disney Hub on its streaming service. Here, Disney fans in select markets including the U.S. will find a selection of Disney playlists like soundtracks from Disney, Pixar and Marvel movies, Star Wars instrumentals, classics, sing-alongs and more.

The Disney Hub is also live in the U.K., Ireland, South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It can be discovered by doing a search for “Disney” in the Spotify app.

Disney songs in particular appeal to families with children, and Spotify memberships that offer multiple profiles for both parents and kids alike are of more value to the streaming service. For example, Spotify Premium in the U.S. is $9.99 per month, but the Family membership is $14.99 per month. Of course, kids could just listen in under mom or dad’s account, but every parent knows that ruins one of Spotify’s best value propositions — its personalized playlists, like Discover Weekly.

Though Spotify isn’t always thought of as a family service, that’s increasingly changing as kids get their own devices at earlier ages, and music streaming because commonplace in the car and in the home, via smart speakers — often placed in kids’ rooms.

Spotify says Disney songs are popular on its service, with users having streamed over 2 billion minutes of Disney music this year so far. The top song to date is still “Let it Go” from Frozen, but Disney’s new slate of remakes is helping push others up the charts, with “A Whole New World” from the live-action Aladdin now the most-repeated song in the past month.

The Disney Hub will also include the following playlists:

• Disney Hits: Top songs from the biggest Disney and Pixar films.  
• Disney Favorites: Everyone’s favorite current tunes, plus popular classics.
• Disney Classics: A nostalgic playlist that includes songs from the Disney Parks, live-action and animated classic soundtracks, as well as songs from Disney Channel originals.
• Disney Singalongs: Songs to sing along to. 
• Disney Princess: Love ballads as well as the coming-of-age breakaways.
• Marvel Music: All the best songs and scores from Marvel films and shows.
• Best of Star Wars: John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra’s music from Star Wars. 

It’s worth noting, too, that Spotify already has a close partnership with Hulu, which is now majority-owned by Disney. In the past, the companies have offered a Hulu-Spotify bundle at a discounted price to gain more subscribers. In March 2019, for example, the two launched an even more steeply discounted bundle than before, at $9.99 per month for both — or effectively Spotify Premium with Hulu for free.

As for Disney, working with Spotify can help it build interest in its new movies by creating more of a connection with fans. Spotify notes that the Disney Hub will, in fact, continue to be updated with music as more Disney films launch over the course of the summer and the rest of the year.

Fifth Wall Ventures, an investor in Clutter, b8ta, ClassPass, Lime and others, has raised $503 million for its sophomore venture capital fund.

The firm, which closed on $212 million for its debut fund in May 2017, prefers to invest in the burgeoning real estate industry but has made opportunistic investments in other sectors.

The Los Angeles firm counts real estate owners as limited partners, as well as a number of global partners including U.S.-based Cushman & Wakefield, Japan’s Mitsubishi Estate, and the U.K.s’ British Land and SEGRO.

“Fifth Wall sees powerful network effects in our unique fund model as it becomes a centralized platform for the world’s largest real estate companies to share insights and access new technologies to enhance their businesses,” Fifth Wall managing partner Brendan Wallace said. “For our entrepreneurs, Fifth Wall efficiently opens distribution channels for their products to more than 50 corporate strategic investors globally and we have dedicated a team to support the success of those partnerships and integrations.”

FaceApp, the AI-powered selfie-editing app that’s been having another viral moment of late, has now responded to a privacy controversy that we covered earlier here.

We’ve pasted the company’s full statement at the bottom of this post.

The tl;dr here is that concerns had been raised that FaceApp, a Russian startup, uploads users’ photos to the cloud — without making it clear to them that processing is not going on locally on their device.

Another issue raised by FaceApp users was that the iOS app appears to be overriding settings if a user had denied access to their camera roll, after people reported they could still select and upload a photo — i.e. despite the app not having permission to access their photos.

As we reported earlier, the latter is actually allowed behavior in iOS — which gives users the power to choose to block an app from full camera roll access but select individual photos to upload if they so wish.

This isn’t a conspiracy, though Apple could probably come up with a better way of describing the permission, as we suggested earlier.

On the wider matter of cloud processing of what is, after all, facial data, FaceApp confirms that most of the processing needed to power its app’s beautifying/gender-bending/age-accerating/-defying effects are done in the cloud.

Though it claims it only uploads photos users have specifically selected for editing. Security tests have also not found evidence the app uploads a user’s entire camera roll.

FaceApp goes on to specify that it “might” store the photos users have chosen to upload in the cloud for a short period, claiming this is done for “performance and traffic” — such as to make sure that a user doesn’t repeatedly upload the same photo to carry out another edit.

“Most images are deleted from our servers within 48 hours from the upload date,” it adds.

It also claims no user data is “transferred to Russia”, even though its R&D team is based there. So the suggestion is that storage and cloud processing are being performed using infrastructure based outside Russia. (We’ve asked it to confirm where this is done.)

“We don’t sell or share any user data with any third parties,” it adds.

FaceApp also says users can request their data is deleted. Though it doesn’t yet have a very smooth way to do this — instead it asks users to send delete requests via the mobile app using “Settings->Support->Report a bug” with the word “privacy” in the subject line, adding that it’s “working on a better UI for that”.

It also points out that the vast majority of FaceApp users don’t log in — making the point that it’s not able to link photos to identities in most cases.

Here’s its statement in full:

We are receiving a lot of inquiries regarding our privacy policy and therefore, would like to provide a few points that explain the basics:

1. FaceApp performs most of the photo processing in the cloud. We only upload a photo selected by a user for editing. We never transfer any other images from the phone to the cloud.

2. We might store an uploaded photo in the cloud. The main reason for that is performance and traffic: we want to make sure that the user doesn’t upload the photo repeatedly for every edit operation. Most images are deleted from our servers within 48 hours from the upload date.

3. We accept requests from users for removing all their data from our servers. Our support team is currently overloaded, but these requests have our priority. For the fastest processing, we recommend sending the requests from the FaceApp mobile app using “Settings->Support->Report a bug” with the word “privacy” in the subject line. We are working on the better UI for that.

4. All FaceApp features are available without logging in, and you can log in only from the settings screen. As a result, 99% of users don’t log in; therefore, we don’t have access to any data that could identify a person.

5. We don’t sell or share any user data with any third parties.

6. Even though the core R&D team is located in Russia, the user data is not transferred to Russia.

Additionally, we’d like to comment on one of the most common concerns: all pictures from the gallery are uploaded to our servers after a user grants access to the photos (for example, https://twitter.com/joshuanozzi/status/1150961777548701696).  We don’t do that. We upload only a photo selected for editing. You can quickly check this with any of network sniffing tools available on the internet.

The need-to-know takeaways from VidCon 2019

Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham took part in all the craziness that has become VidCon this past week, where 75,000 influencers, YouTubers, advertisers, and more congregate in one place to see how many likes they all can generate (and I guess to discuss business strategy). This year, there were voluminous discussions about the rise of Chinese social media giant ByteDance’s TikTok as well as the future dangers and opportunities of synthetic media — deepfakes and also fictional influencers.

Eric has all the details of what was interesting from the conference in an exclusive conference wrap-up for Extra Crunch.

One of the use cases for synthetic media is the creation of “virtual influencers” — computer-generated characters whose social media accounts engage real people online and gain a large following. This remains a novelty rather than a mainstream trend, but it is on the mind of a number of people I spoke to.

Charlie Buffin co-manages (human) social media stars but is also developing virtual influencers like Cade Harper and Pippa Pei that post content with each other and with real human influencers. He explained to me that the opportunity is to own the original IP of these characters and craft storylines between them, plus for real-life influencers to create virtual representations of themselves that can engage fans in more ways.

What seed-stage dilution tells us about changing investor expectations

Scale Venture Partners operating partner Dale Chang discusses one of the major trends in seed financing: the rising dilution of early-stage rounds of capital. From there, he then investigates how those changes at the seed stage are changing expectations for Series A and B rounds.

Amid worker protests and antitrust investigations, Amazon’s Prime Day sales event carried on as usual — and that means it again set new records for the online retailer. This time, Amazon says Prime Day 2019 was bigger than both Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, as Prime members purchased more than 175 million items during the event.

While last year’s Prime Day 2018 became the biggest sales day in Amazon history, it’s getting harder to directly compare one Prime Day sale with another, because Amazon keeps stretching them out.

Prime Day 2019, for example, was a full 48-hour sale, up from 36 hours last year and 30 hours the year before.

What we are able to tell, however, is that people will continue to shop as long as there are bargains being offered. During Prime Day 2018’s 36-hour sale, Prime members bought 100 million items. During this year’s 48-hour sale, members purchased over 175 million items. (Neither calculation includes Whole Foods sales.)

Amazon has also succeeded in making Prime Day bigger than its Black Friday online sales, thanks to its deep discounts — often at cost or below — on its own hardware devices, like the popular Echo speakers or Fire TV.

This year’s two-day sale was larger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018 sales put together, Amazon says.

The retailer also notes that Prime Day was the biggest sales event for Amazon devices. Again, the top-sellers worldwide continued to be the Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, and the Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote. The Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick were top-selling devices yesterday, and it’s not surprising to see them again win this title as they have for several years in a row.

The Echo Dot, in particular, hit its lowest-ever price point of $22 and was bundled in with some other Alexa device deals, almost as a giveaway.

“We want to thank Prime members all around the world,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, in a statement. “Members purchased millions of Alexa-enabled devices, received tens of millions of dollars in savings by shopping from Whole Foods Market and bought more than $2 billion of products from independent small and medium-sized businesses. Huge thank you to Amazonians everywhere who made this day possible for customers.”

In addition, Amazon claims a record number of U.S. Prime members shopped the site during Prime Day. But given the sale length and the growth in membership — there are now over 100 million worldwide members — this is not the most difficult milestone to achieve.

In the U.S., Prime member bought more than 100,000 lunchboxes, 100,000 laptops, 200,000 TVs, 300,000 headphones, 350,000 luxury beauty products, 400,000 pet products, 650,000 household cleaning supplies, and more than one million toys, says Amazon. They also bought over 200,000 LifeStraw Personal Water Filters and 150,000 Crest 3D White Professional Effects Whitestrips Kits, and saved “tens of millions” by shopping Amazon-owned Whole Foods.

Other top sellers in the U.S. included the Instant Pot DUO60 and 23andMe Health + Ancestry kits.

Amazon also sold millions of smart home devices, including iRobot Roomba 690 Robot Vacuum, MyQ Smart Garage Door Opener Chamberlain MYQ-G0301, and Amazon Smart Plug. It doubled the sales of the Ring and Blink devices, as well as Fire TV Edition TVs, versus last year, when comparing a two-day period. It sold 6x the number of eero devices compared with any other prior sale. And it sold more than ever Fire tablets, Kindle devices, and Alexa with screens (Echo Show and Echo Show 5.)

The largest and most important aspect to Prime Day is not ultimately the sales themselves, but the Prime memberships. This locks in consumers to Amazon’s e-commerce ecosystem for a year, and gives Amazon a chance to win their loyalty when it comes time to resubscribe.

This year, Prime Day’s effect on new subscriptions also improved, with Amazon signing up more new Prime members on July 15 than on any other day ever, and July 16 nearly hit that milestone as well.

In total, Amazon says Prime members worldwide saved over a billion dollars on purchases, and millions of items shipped in one day or faster.

10x Ascend is a new firm that helps software development, cybersecurity and data science professionals negotiate for better deals.

Founders Michael Solomon and Rishon Blumberg started out in talent management for the music industry (their clients still include musicians like Vanessa Carlton), then moved into representing tech freelancers with their firm 10x Management. More recently, they decided that there was an opportunity to provide similar services to full-time employees.

Given the rising demand for tech talent (the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that software development roles will grow by 31 percent through 2026), you might think that developers and engineers can get anything they want when they’re look for a job.

However, Blumberg suggested that many of these prospective hires simply don’t feel comfortable asking for what they want or what they’re worth — whether that’s more money, more equity, more flexibility in working from home, more vacation or anything else that’s important to them. He also pointed out that there’s no one else representing the employee’s interest in these discussions, since the recruiter ultimately works for the employer.

“Even though technologists are data-driven people who work in data-driven environments, they don’t negotiate that much,” Blumberg said.

So 10x Ascend can help, either by getting directly involved in the negotiations, or by advising prospective hires on things like counter-offers. (It’s not doing this in secret — Solomon said that either way, “We want the employer to know that we’re involved.”)

The firm is spinning out of 10x Management, and it’s been testing the model out through a beta program. It says it’s already helped nearly 50 senior tech executives negotiate their job offers, increasing their compensation by an average of 35% — and as much as 100% in some cases.

In exchange, 10x Ascend collects between 6% and 8% of first-year salaries (the percent is lower for high-level jobs), starting with a $3,500 retainer.

Even though the firm is compensated based on salary, Solomon said that was simply the “cleanest” approach, and he emphasized that 10x Ascend isn’t just pushing clients to take the highest paying offer. In fact, it’s created a free lifestyle calculator that helps people identify their priorities, whether that’s salary, job logistics, work-life balance and so on, which then informs the negotiations.

Blumberg also acknowledged that there’s been an “education” process with employers. He suggested that while engineers are sometimes nervous that they’ll blow a job offer by asking for too much, it’s actually helpful to have a third party who can take some of the heat.

“They can say, ‘That was my stupid advisor,'” Blumberg said. “We’re happy to be the bad cop.”

He also said that in some cases, employers are ultimately grateful to have 10x Ascend involved, as it helps them figure out packages that are more likely to attract and retain talent — which may mean offering more money, but could also mean creating more “bespoke” deals that provide flexibility or compensation in other areas. (You can read more about some of the negotiations on the 10x Ascend website.)

Given the name of the firm and the timing of the launch, I had to bring up the recent discussion around “10x engineers,” which led to some delightful social media backlash. Blumberg said he hadn’t been aware of the latest controversy, but he pointed out that this is a longstanding discussion. And inasmuch as “10x engineers” exist, he suggested that they have team skills and emotional intelligence as much as technical skills.

“That doesn’t mean writing 10x lines of code or being 10x as fast,” Solomon added. “But we have definitely seen people who produce 10x results.”

ClassPass has set up yet another revenue stream, signing on partners like Facebook, Glossier, Google, Morgan Stanley, Under Armour, Etsy, Southwest Airlines and Gatorade to a corporate wellness program.

The program will give employees at these companies access to the ClassPass network of more than 22,000 studio partners across 2500 cities around the world, which includes studio brands like Barry’s Bootcamp, Flywheel Sports, and CorePower Yoga. Corporate partners also get access to a ‘large library’ of on-demand audio and video workouts.

This comes after ClassPass retooled the ClassPass Live product, in which it invested the resources to build out a new live broadcast studio, and rebuilt it into a library of on-demand video workouts.

The company launched ClassPass Live in 2018 with the hopes that users could workout from home within the ClassPass ecosystem. CEO Fritz Lanman told TechCrunch in June that the company stopped doing live classes in April 2019 and repackaged the content into free, on-demand video classes.

According to the release, one of the issues with corporate wellness programs is that HR departments have to patch together programs based on the regions in which their companies have offices/employees. ClassPass argues that its scale across the country, and in 17 other countries, gives it an edge with corporations who have global workforces.

Moreover, the ClassPass corporate wellness program only charges employers when employees actually use the service, and allows employers to reward good behaviors (going to a certain number of classes per month) by offering additional credits toward ClassPass experiences.

Here’s what Lanman had to say about it in a prepared statement:

The ClassPass Corporate Program enables employers of all sizes to offer the world’s most extensive, one-stop fitness and wellness program to their employees worldwide. ClassPass is the best fitness program ever created for consumers. With this launch, it’s now also the best fitness program ever created for employers and their employees.