Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Maker Faire and Maker Media are getting a second chance after suddenly going bankrupt, but they’ll return in a weakened capacity. Sadly, their flagship crafting festivals remain in jeopardy, and it’s unclear how long the reformed company can survive.

Maker Media suddenly laid off all 22 employees and shut down last month, as first reported by TechCrunch. Now its founder and CEO Dale Dougherty tells me he’s bought back the brands, domains, and content from creditors and rehired 15 of 22 laid off staffers with his own money. Next week, he’ll announce the relaunch of the company with the new name “Make Community“.

Read our story about how Maker Faire fell apart

The company is already working on a new issue of Make Magazine that it will hope to publish quarterly (down from six times per year) and the online archives of its do-it-yourself project guides will remain available. I hopes to keep publishing books. And it will continue to license the Maker Faire name to event organizers who’ve thrown over 200 of the festivals full of science-art and workshops in 40 countries. But Dougherty doesn’t have the funding to commit to producing the company-owned flagship Bay Area and New York Maker Faires any more.

“We’ve succeeded in just getting the transition to happen and getting Community set up” Dougherty tells me. But sounding shaky, he asks “Can I devise a better model to do what we’ve been doing the past 15 years? I don’t know if I have the answer yet.” Print publishing proved tougher and tougher recently. Combined with declining corporate sponsorships of the main events, Maker Media was losing too much money to stay afloat last time.

“On June 3rd, we basically stopped doing business. And, you know, the bank froze our accounts” Dougherty said at a meetup he held in Oakland to take feedback on his plan, according a recording made by attendee Brian Benchoff. Grasping for a way to make the numbers work, he told the small crowd gathered “I’d be happy if someone wanted to take this off my hands.”

For now, Dougherty is financing the revival himself “with the goal that we can get back up to speed as a business, and start generating revenue and a magazine again. This is where the community support needs to come in because I can’t fund it for very long.”

The immediate plan is to announce a new membership model next week at Make.co where hobbyists and craft-lovers can pay a monthly or annual fee to become patrons of Make Community. Dougherty was cagey about what they’ll get in return beyond a sense of keeping alive the organization that’s held the maker community together since 2005. He does hope to get the next Make Magazine issue out by the end of summer or early fall, and existing subscribers should get it in the mail.

The company is still determining whether to move forward as a non-profit or co-op instead of as a venture-backed for-profit as before. “The one thing i don’t like about non-profit is that you end up working for the source you got the money from. You dance to their tune to get their funding” he told the meetup.

Last time, he burned through $10 million in venture funding from Obvious Ventures, Raine Ventures, and Floodgate. That could make VCs weary of putting more cash into a questionable business model. But if enough of the 80,000 remaining Make Magazine subscribers, 1 million YouTube followers, and millions who’ve attended Maker Faire events step up, pehaps the company can find surer footing.

“I hope this is actually an opportunity not just to revive what we do but maybe take it to a new level” Dougherty tells me. After all, plenty of today’s budding inventors and engineers grew up reading Make Magazine and being awestruck by the massive animatronic creations featured at its festivals.

Audibly peturbed, the founder exclaimed at his community meetup “It frustrates the heck out of me thinking that I’m the one backing up Maker Faire when there’s all these billionaires in the valley.”

Autonomous transportation startup May Mobility is doing more than just talking about accessibility when it comes to self-driving transportation tech development. The company recently began developing a wheelchair-accessible prototype version of its autonomous shuttle vehicle, and just concluded an initial round of gathering feedback from the community of people in Columbus, Ohio, who would actually be using the shuttle.

May Mobility’s design includes accommodations for entry and exit, as well as for securing the passenger’s wheelchair once it’s on board during the course of the trip. The company learned from the first round of feedback that its design needs improvement in terms of making the ramp longer to facilitate more gradual onboarding and disembarking, as well as optimizing pick-up and drop-off points.

It still plans to work on implementing some improvements, before deploying its vehicles, but we can expect to see accessible May Mobility shuttles in operation across its pilots in Columbus, Providence and Grand Rapids soon, according to the company.

Ultimately, though, the company says that it feels its solution is perceived as at least on par with existing accessible transit options currently in service in the area.

“For us, our focus is how we can transform cities, making them safer, greener and more accessible for everybody,” said May Mobility co-founder and COO Alisyn Malek on stage at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility. “How can we make transportation easier for everybody? And part of that is we really have to think about ‘everybody.'”

May Mobility’s vehicles are specifically low-speed electric vehicles, for which there aren’t yet clear guidelines or regulations around their design and safety features, so the company thinks it makes sense to work directly with community members to get a head start on accessible design. And one of the constant refrains from autonomous vehicle companies is that their technology will bring access to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to make use of cars, but few have shown concrete steps they’re taking to actually address the practical realities of true accessibility.

Some others in the industry are taking action, however, including Lyft, which is working with its autonomous technology partner Aptiv and the National Federation of the Blind on designing self-driving service that works for blind and low-vision passengers. But May Mobility’s service has the advantage of operating commercially for the public in defined, manageable engagements that provide value for the community now, which means the actions it’s taking toward accessibility will have real benefit where it’s already in service.

Apple has released a silent update for Mac users removing a vulnerable component in Zoom, the popular video conferencing app, which allowed websites to automatically add a user to a video call without their permission.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant told TechCrunch that the update — now released — removes the hidden web server, which Zoom quietly installed on users’ Macs when they installed the app.

Apple said the update does not require any user interaction and is deployed automatically.

The video conferencing giant took flack from users following a public vulnerability disclosure on Monday by Jonathan Leitschuh, in which he described how “any website [could] forcibly join a user to a Zoom call, with their video camera activated, without the user’s permission.” The undocumented web server remained installed even if a user uninstalled Zoom. Leitschuh said this allowed Zoom to reinstall the app without requiring any user interaction.

He also released a proof-of-concept page demonstrating the vulnerability.

Although Zoom released a fixed app version on Tuesday, Apple said its actions will protect users both past and present from the undocumented web server vulnerability without affecting or hindering the functionality of the Zoom app itself.

The update will now prompt users if they want to open the app, whereas before it would open automatically.

Apple often pushes silent signature updates to Macs to thwart known malware — similar to an anti-malware service — but it’s rare for Apple to take action publicly against a known or popular app. The company said it pushed the update to protect users from the risks posed by the exposed web server.

Zoom spokesperson Priscilla McCarthy told TechCrunch: “We’re happy to have worked with Apple on testing this update. We expect the web server issue to be resolved today. We appreciate our users’ patience as we continue to work through addressing their concerns.”

More than four million users across 750,000 companies around the world use Zoom for video conferencing.

Scooter startup Bird is betting on the French market in a significant way. The company plans to open up its biggest European office in Paris. Eventually, Bird wants to hire 1,000 people by mid-2021, which is a meaningful number for a company that has been around for a couple of years.

Paris is an important market for Bird and all scooter startups in general. It’s a relatively small city — when it comes to footprint, Paris is smaller than San Francisco. But it’s also a dense city. And of course, there are a ton of tourists who come to Paris just for a few days.

That’s why 12 different companies launched a scooter-sharing service in Paris (yes, twelve). But Les Échos recently reported that many of them have already left the city. Lime, Bird, Circ, Dott, Jump and B-Mobility are still around.

It’s a capital intensive industry, and Bird has already raised a ton of money to outlive the competition. But money is just one thing.

Opening an office in Paris is also important to show city officials that Bird is serious about this market. Last month, the City of Paris announced that it would limit the number of scooter companies in Paris. They will hand out two or three licenses to operate. And Bird certainly wants to be one of them.

Bird will also use its Paris hub to educate users about safety. The company plans to hand out free helmets if you attend a safety training session.

Richard Branson-backed space startup Virgin Orbit has completed a key step along its path to launching satellites for commercial customers. The company held a successful ‘drop test’ of its LauncherOne rocket, in which the crucial piece of its launch system was released in a free fall from its Boeing 747-based launch aircraft (nicknamed ‘Cosmic Girl’).

LauncherOne was released from a height of 35,000 feet, which is a typical cruising altitude for commercial aeroplanes, which is where it would be during an actual launch. Virgin Orbit’s model flies its rocket to this altitude before engaging the engine, which is a lot more energy and cost-efficient vs. launching the rocket from the ground (which is what SpaceX does, for instance).

During this test, the LauncherOne rocket did not engage its engine (and in fact, it’s a full-scale dummy rocket rather than a real one) once it detached from the wing of the modified 747, which is what it would do if this was an actual launch. Instead, it fell 35,000 feet to the ground, where it impacted in a planned drop zone at Edward’s Air Force Base in the Mojave desert.

All of this was to plan, as the main focus of this drop test was to study the separation of the rocket from the launch aircraft’s wing, and to gather a number of sensor readings about how the rocket behaves when it’s falling freely through the air.

Virgin Orbit, part of Virgin duo of space companies which also includes Virgin Galactic, which announced its intention to become a publicly traded company earlier this week. Orbit’s specific focus is offering an affordable option for smallsat launches, a market where it’ll compete with Rocket Lab, which is using a more traditional ground-based rocket launch model.

As investors continue to move more aggressively into Latin America’s startup scene, there’s one industry that seems to be drawing more attention than any others — financial services.

As wealth across the region continues to rise, access to adequate financial services — specifically debt — has become a pain-point for an upwardly mobile middle class that wants to be more entrepreneurial and have more financial tools than straight cash at their disposal.

That’s what’s driven companies like Nubank, the Brazilian consumer credit card behemoth, to valuations of roughly $4 billion; and it’s also what contributed to Creditas, a provider of secured loans, raking in $231 million in new financing from the SoftBank Vision Fund and SoftBank Group. Previous investors Vostok Emerging Finance, Santander InnoVentures and Amadeus Capital also participated in the round. 

Founded by Sergio Furio in 2012, the company started as an originator of loans to Brazilian customers who were willing to offer up collateral in exchange for lower interest rates on their debt. Back in 2017, the company became more of a fully integrated lender for the entire process.

Thanks to investments from local and international investment firms including Kaszek Ventures, Quona’s Accion Frontier Fund, Redpoint eVentures, QED Investors, Naspers Fintech, International Finance Corporation and Endeavor’s Catalyst fund, the company became one of Brazil’s largest new financial services startups.

Expect the company to use the new cash to expand its product portfolio and try to offer new lines of credit that it would issue itself — perhaps by trying to enter new businesses like unsecured consumer lending and credit cards.

If it does make its way into unsecured side of the lending market, that would put the company squarely in competition with Nubank (which was reportedly in discussions with Creditas’ lead investor, SoftBank, about an investment earlier this year).

“At Creditas we relentlessly focus on creating an amazing experience that provides efficiency and lower prices to democratize the access to low-cost lending in Brazil. With these investments, we plan to accelerate this process and expand our business model in order to improve the lives of the Brazilian population,” said Sergio Furio, Founder and CEO of Creditas, in a statement.

As a result of the investment, representatives from the SoftBank Vision Fund and SoftBank Latin America Fund will join Creditas’ Board of Directors.

Alphabet’s Waymo autonomous driving company announced a new milestone at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility on Wednesday: 10 billion miles driving in simulation. This is a significant achievement for the company, because all those simulated miles on the road for its self-driving software add up to considerable training experience.

Waymo also probably has the most experience when it comes to actual, physical road miles driven – the company is always quick to point out that it’s been doing this far longer than just about anyone else working in autonomous driving, thanks to its head start as Google’s self-driving car moonshot project.

“At Waymo, we’ve driven more than 10 million miles in the real world, and over 10 billion miles in simulation,” Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov told TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec on the Sessions: Mobility stage. “And the amount of driving you do in both of those is really a function of the maturity of your system, and the capability of your system. If you’re just getting started, it doesn’t matter – you’re working on the basics, you can drive a few miles or a few thousand or tens of thousands of miles in the real world, and that’s plenty to tell you and give you information that you need to know to improve your system.”

Dolgov’s point is that the more advanced your autonomous driving system becomes, the more miles you actually need to drive to have impact, because you’ve handled the basics and are moving on to edge cases, advanced navigation and ensuring that the software works in any and every scenario it encounters. Plus, your simulation becomes more sophisticated and more accurate as you accumulate real-world driving miles, which means the results of your virtual testing is more reliable for use back in your cars driving on actual roads.

This is what leads Dolgov to the conclusion that Waymo’s simulation is likely better than a lot of comparable simulation training at other autonomous driving companies.

“I think what makes it a good simulator, and what makes it powerful is two things,” Dolgov said on stage. “One [is] fidelity. And by fidelity, I mean, not how good it looks. It’s how well it behaves, and how representative it is of what you will encounter in the real world. And then second is scale.”

In other words, experience isn’t beneficial in terms of volume – it’s about sophistication, maturity and readiness for commercial deployment.

Zoox CTO and co-founder Jesse Levinson revealed a few more details about the company’s autonomous vehicle hardware today, which it’s designing along with its software stack from the ground up. Levinson told us on stage that Zoox’s vehicle will have fully independent active four-wheel suspension — a design detail that will translate to a much smoother ride for passengers on board.

Levinson took us through the Zoox vehicle design at a high level, including covering some of the information he and the company have disclosed previously. The car will have four seats, with sets of two front and back facing inward towards each other. To help accommodate this unique seating arrangement, airbags used in the car will essentially “envelop” passengers, and the absence of both steering wheel and dashboard will actually mean that it’s one of the safest vehicles on the road, in the company’s opinion, since it prioritizes the safety of all passengers in the car equally, rather than weighting the features for driver or front seat passengers like traditional cars.

Levinson also told us after the on-stage interview that the vehicle will be just a bit taller than a BMW i3, but slightly narrower than that electric compact car. That’s a small footprint for a four-passenger vehicle, but inside there will presumably be considerable space savings from the lack of dash, steering wheel and gas and brake pedals. On the subject of the independent, four-corner active steering, Levinson explained that while it incurs an additional cost, that will ultimately be insignificant on a per-trip basis, and the benefits for consumes will be huge.

“If you think about it, you know, when you drive a car, people like to feel connected to the road and feel the bumps, and it’s exciting,” Levinson said. “But if you’re a passenger in the car, you don’t want any of that. So for robotaxis, it’s sort of self-evident, you’d want it to be as smooth and comfortable as possible. Now, cars generally don’t have active suspension on all four wheels, because that’s kind of expensive. And it’s not even something drivers necessarily want. Whereas for Robotaxis, when you get to amortize the cost of that hardware over people using it and paying for it all day long, all of a sudden, the cost of putting an extra suspension is kind of negligible per ride, but it really improves the customer experience.”

The car will also have drive-by-wire steering for both the front and the rear set of wheels, which means that it’ll be able to angle both sets of wheels at once instead of just one. That will make actions like changing lanes or navigating into on-street parking much more efficient, more direct and potentially safer.

As for its sensor equipment, the Zoox car uses four lidar units on each corner of the vehicle instead of one large unit on the top of the car like many others employ today. The input captured from each lidar is combined via sensor fusion with data from radar and optical cameras positioned around the vehicle, and Levinson says the nice thing about their approach is that it has ample redundancy, so that any one of these lidar sensors can fade and you still get a complete picture of the vehicle’s surroundings.

Zoox is already demonstrating its fully electric vehicle for partners and insiders behind closed doors, but it isn’t yet ready to show off the car to press or the general public. Levinson tells us you shouldn’t have too hard a time imagining what the full product will look like, but details like the four-wheel active suspension definitely help fill in the remaining gaps.

In 2017 — for the first time in over a decade — a computer worm ran rampage across the internet, threatening to disrupt businesses, industries, governments and national infrastructure across several continents.

The WannaCry ransomware attack became the biggest threat to the internet since the Mydoom worm in 2004. On May 12, 2017, the worm infected millions of computers, encrypting their files and holding them hostage to a bitcoin payment.

Train stations, government departments, and Fortune 500 companies were hit by the surprise attack. The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) was one of the biggest organizations hit, forcing doctors to turn patients away and emergency rooms to close.

Earlier this week we reported a deep-dive story into the 2017 cyberattack that’s never been told before.

British security researchers — Marcus Hutchins and Jamie Hankins — registered a domain name found in WannaCry’s code in order to track the infection. It took them three hours to realize they had inadvertently stopped the attack dead in its tracks. That domain became the now-infamous “kill switch” that instantly stopped the spread of the ransomware.

As long as the kill switch remains online, no computer infected with WannaCry would have its files encrypted.

But the attack was far from over.

In the days following, the researchers were attacked from an angry botnet operator pummeling the domain with junk traffic to try to knock it offline and two of their servers were seized by police in France thinking they were contributing to the spread of the ransomware.

Worse, their exhaustion and lack of sleep threatened to derail the operation. The kill switch was later moved to Cloudflare, which has the technical and infrastructure support to keep it alive.

Hankins described it as the “most stressful thing” he’s ever experienced. “The last thing you need is the idea of the entire NHS on fire,” he told TechCrunch.

Although the kill switch is in good hands, the internet is just one domain failure away from another massive WannaCry outbreak. Just last month two Cloudflare failures threatened to bring the kill switch domain offline. Thankfully, it stayed up without a hitch.

CISOs and CSOs take note: here’s what you need to know.

After generally being the butt of the public market’s jokes since its IPO, Snap is having a killer 2019, with its stock price nearly tripling in value. The successes are perhaps giving the company a moment to pause and think more about generating future value.

Part of that equation is certainly the company’s Yellow accelerator that aims to invest in pre-seed startups that bring mobile users to shared experiences.

We covered Yellow’s inaugural batch back in September, now we’ve got the full rundown on Snap’s second class of bets.

Yellow’s latest accelerator class definitely showcases some similarities to their inaugural group, but you’ll notice more online-to-offline startups aiming to bring users into real-world scenarios and communities like a concert subscription service and workout service reviews. This contrasts a bit to the first class which seemed a bit more focused on camera-based startups that centered around selfies, AR and photos.

From an organizational standpoint, things haven’t shifted too much inside Yellow. The broader company has had a standout 2019, building back a healthy chunk of the market cap value it has lost since debuting publicly. One wonders whether this has enabled the company’s accelerator group to push its investment ambitions beyond Snap’s mobile app focus.

Mike Su, Snap’s director of Yellow, tells me that there haven’t been any top-down directives to shift investment strategies for the accelerator and that the prevalence of offline startups in the class is just more representative of the applicants.

“[The class] continues to be an extension of our values and our thesis,” Su tells me. “Snap has always been about people making connections inside and outside the app.”

Here is Yellow’s summer 2019 class of startups.

Active Spaces

ClassPass might toss you in a random workout and say good luck, but Active Spaces is looking to give you more info when searching for your exercising fix. The New York startup is scouring its way through the NYC reviewing gyms and studios one-at-a-time. It’s less about star ratings than it is about giving you a bird’s eye view of what’s there and what’s missing. It’s all really well-done and gives you a ton of info about what you’re in for, and you can book direct from the app.

Cash Live

HQ Trivia might be falling on hard times but Cash Live is looking to take the daily mobile quiz show in a new direction by leaning on the laurels of gaming, some good ole fashioned casino titles. The Vancouver startup is planning to bring a live host to scheduled 15-minute poker, blackjack and bingo tournaments.

Disko

Finding local concerts sucks and it’s a process that hasn’t found its startup solution yet. Disko is building a concert subscription service that helps users discover new events in their city with a flat rate $25 per month subscription service which will let users attend up to four concerts per month. The LA startup is starting off in its hometown but has ambitions to expand elsewhere soon.

Dose of Society

We’re missing a lot of diversity in the voices and perspectives we see in the media we enjoy. Dose of Society is a London media startup looking to share “real stories from real people.” The group’s videos have had more than 18 million views since launching at the end of 2017.

Frame

Snap still has vertical video startups firmly in its purview. Frame is a weekly newsmagazine built for mobile that’s trying to rethink how we get news delivered to us. The NY startup is looking beyond push notifications and is also supporting text updates and calendar updates so that its subscribers can make time to absorb its narrative vertical video  journalism.

Loco Adventures

Pokémon GO brought people into physical spaces with its location-based gaming, but other startups are seeing the potential to even further localize AR experiences. Berlin-based Loco Adventures is building games that guide you through local areas with a chat message narrative style.

Muze

Muze sees the endless wave of comments on the web and wants to make things a bit noisier, the New York team is working on a way to bring audio commentary “to the always-on stream of internet video” and share it across the web.

Quirktastic, Inc.

The startup has the ambitious goal of building a community for “geeks, gamers and nerds” that’s less toxic to minority groups. The Durham, NC company wants to connect these people with each other and the events they want to check out. Quirktastic says they have 15,000 users since they launched in beta in March.

SNKRHUD

The sneaker business is a hefty one, but SNKRHUD is betting that it still isn’t as big as it could be. It’s trying to focus on the dormant sneaker heads who are liking shoes on Instagram and searching through online stores but haven’t delved further into communities. The Brooklyn team wants to be the glue between existing platforms.

Stop, Breathe & Think

There’s a lot in the world to get stressed and anxious about, Stop, Breathe & Think is aiming to build a digital wellness platform to help people feel better. The app lets people check-in with how they’re feeling and then the app is able to recommend short activities like meditation, breathing, yoga, acupressure, guided journaling, and more.