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On July 10, just one short month from now, more than 1,000 of the best and brightest minds in mobility will converge in San Jose, Calif. for TC Sessions: Mobility 2019. This day-long conference is dedicated to exploring the current state of mobile technology and building the future of moving people and things from point A to point B.

But you have only four days left to save $100 on the price of admission. Our early-bird pricing comes to a full stop on Friday, June 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Keep that Benjamin in your pocket where it belongs — buy your ticket right now.

We’ve got a packed agenda of interviews, demos and workshops featuring the likes of Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli, who leads product development and program management for Aurora, the autonomous vehicle company.

Taking a page right out of the Jetsons, Uber wants to launch flying taxis within a few years. We’ll hear from Mark Moore, Uber’s engineering director for Elevate, and one of the people determined to make that happen.

Nils Wollny, of Holoride, wants an interactive VR experience in the backseat of every car. His demo will show what an automotive VR future might look like.

A workshop with Arrive’s CEO, Yona Shtern takes a thought-provoking look at the future of seamless, urban mobility. He’ll discuss what the foundation of a connected city includes and outline the steps needed to get there.

There are plenty more presentations — a veritable embarrassment of mobility riches. Check out the event agenda for more information, because we still have a few surprises coming your way.

Let’s talk networking. TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 draws some of the industry’s most influential founders, investors, technologists and media. Talk about a targeted audience — these are the people you want to notice you and your genius early-stage startup. Buy a demo table and show them what you’ve got. Bring your team too, because your demo package includes three attendee tickets (only two demo tables are left for purchase).

TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 takes place July 10 in San Jose, Calif. Don’t miss this chance to save an easy $100. The saving ends on Friday, June 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Buy your ticket today, and we’ll see you in San Jose.

Amazon this morning announced the launch of Amazon Credit Builder, a new secured credit card offered in partnership with Synchrony Bank. As the name implies, the card is aimed at those who are looking to build their credit history — either to recover from bad credit or to establish new credit. Like other credit products Amazon has launched, the card’s big perk is cash back on Amazon.com purchases — in this case, 5% back on purchases if the cardholder is a Prime member.

The Credit Builder card also has no annual fee, offers special financing on purchases, and includes protection from unauthorized charges. As a secured card, Amazon Credit Builder requires that cardholders submit a refundable security deposit in order to get a line of credit from the bank. This funding isn’t available for purchases made with the card, but rather serves as a way to establish a credit limit.

The deposit can range from $100 to $1,000, says Amazon, and is submitted either by electronic transfer (ACH transfer on Amazon) or via mail.

To pay off purchases, the card is unique in that it allows customers to either choose to make 12 months of equal payments or 6/12/24-month 0% periods for select purchases.

Also a part of the product is the ability for cardholders to track their credit improvement over time as they use the card to make purchases on Amazon.com.

The cardholders receive access to their own personal TransUnion CreditView Dashboard, where they can view their VantageScore credit score for free, use a simulator to understand how different activities will impact that score, get fraud alerts, and access credit education to help them further improve their credit score.

Other financial education provided by Synchrony is also available.

Amazon says that Credit Builder customers may become eligible for an upgrade to the Amazon Store Card after as little as seven months after opening the Credit Builder account, at which time their initial security deposit would be refunded.

Typically, secured credit cards are offered to people looking to improve their credit — but it’s unusual for a retailer to provide their own secured card. For Amazon, however, offering credit to the under-banked or unbanked is another way of expanding its business to a broader market.

Like many online retailers today, Amazon believes that shopping online shouldn’t be a privilege only for the middle class and up. After all, e-commerce sites may often have better deals than brick-and-mortar stores, and the convenience of shopping online can help customers save both gas money and time — the latter a particular issue for those working multiple jobs to make ends meet.

To cater to the under-banked and low credit customers, Amazon already offers a low-cost version of Amazon Prime for those on government assistance programs in the U.S., including including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program (WIC) and, as of last year, Medicaid.

More recently, it and other retailers like Walmart began participation in a USDA trial focused on allowing SNAP recipients to shop for groceries online.

While Amazon’s new card may make sense for those on a path to building better credit, it may be better for those who are looking to upgrade to the Amazon Store Card in the future, rather than simply repair their poor credit history.

The card, consumers should note, carries a high APR of 28.24% — higher than the average median APR for retail cards (25.64%).

“This is a solid option for people who are new to credit or rebuilding their credit after prior missteps, but there are some risks to be aware of,” notes Ted Rossman, Industry Analyst for CreditCards.com.

“It’s always important to pay your credit card bills in full, and that’s especially true with this card. The interest rate is very high – 28.24% – and if you fail to pay a 0% promotional offer in full by the time the term expires, you’ll be charged retroactive interest on the average daily balance going back all the way to the original purchase date,” he says.

However, Rossman concludes that when the card is used properly, the card could be useful in improving credit while receiving the cash back perk.

Customers can visit the Amazon Credit Builder page to sign up for the card.

NASA’s trip to the Moon’s surface in July 1969 was preceded by a lot of preparatory missions – including Apollo 10, which involved a mock mission with everything but the actual landing. Astronauts Thomas Stafford and Eugene Carman flew a lunar module nicknamed ‘Snoopy’ by the agency nearly all the way to the Moon during Apollo 10, and then shot the module off into space once they’d completed their task.

There was never any intent to return Snoopy to Earth – it was sent into an orbit around the sun beyond the Moon after the astronauts completed their maneuvers and returned to the command module, and NASA did not track its trajectory. The effort to discover its location began in 2011, undertaken by a group of amateur UK astronomers led by Nick Howes – the same who now claim they’re “98 percent convinced” they’ve discovered where it ended up, according to Sky News. Howes further speculated that if they confirm its location, someone like Elon Musk could recover it and preserve it as a key cultural artefact.

Apollo 10 was the tenth crewed mission in NASA’s Apollo Program, and it involved flying the lunar module to within 8.5 miles of the Moon’s surface – everything up to the last landing sequence where the module would perform its powered descent. In keeping with the ‘Peanuts’ theme, the command module for the mission was called ‘Charlie Brown.’

Notably, the fuel tanks used in this mission weren’t provided enough fuel to return from the Moon’s surface – an intentional limitation imposed in case the astronauts flying the test run were tempted to jump the queue and become the first people to walk on the lunar surface, ahead of Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin .

This is one of those ‘I’m not surprised but I am slightly terrified’ moments in tech development: Enterprise smart glasses company Vuzix announced Monday that it has developed new “fully autonomous” face recognition software in partnership with software developer NNTC.

The new solution will work with Vuzix’s Blade smart glasses, which debuted at CES earlier this year and are positioned as both an enterprise and a consumer product. t’s called iFalcon Face Control Mobile, which is a mouthful, and it’s billed as an “AI-powered” solution that promises local matching against a database stored on-device on a wearable computer that pairs with headset.

It’s intended to be used with set databases, and is ideal for “law enforcement and security guards on patrol,” according to a press release detailing the news. It can find up to 15 faces per frame in under one second, according to the spec sheet, and can also store a database of up to 1 million faces locally – meaning it can do its tagging without any cloud access or connectivity.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that this means it’s going to be relatively circumscribed and specific in its usage: Basically it works best when you know who you’re looking for, and that means suspects or known offenders, and potentially missing people. It’s not like it’s just constantly monitoring and recording faces all the time and measuring that against a global and growing database to attach a name and identity to everyone it sees.

Right now, it’s installed on only around 50 pairs of Vuzix Blade smart glasses for use in “security operations” in the UAE, but Vuzix is pleased about the speed with which it’s progressed from concept to active use.

Use of facial recognition among security agencies and authorities is a hot-button issue, with San Francisco becoming the first major city to ban its use earlier this year. It’s ramping up specifically for airport use, however, and is likely to cover most passengers on departing flights in the U.S. within the next four years. Meanwhile, Amazon shareholders recently struck down a proposal designed to stop the company from selling its own facial recognition tech to government customers.

Debate continues regarding how effective such efforts even are, but general comfort with the idea is clearly not going to be easily won over.

It takes a lot of trust to allow a company to come in and install a mystery box on their network to monitor for threats. It’s like inviting in a security guard to sit in your living room to make sure nobody breaks in.

Yet that’s exactly what Darktrace does. (The box, not the security guard.)

The Cambridge U.K.-founded company, now with a second headquarters in San Francisco, assumes that any network can be breached. Instead of looking at the perimeter of a network, Darktrace uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to scan and identify security weaknesses and malicious traffic inside a company’s network.

Traditional network monitoring typically uses signature-based threat detection of matching against known malicious files, but can be easily modified to evade detection. Instead, Darktrace builds up a profile of the network to understand what the baseline “normal” looks like so it can spot and identify potential issues, like large amounts of data exfiltration or suspect devices.

But how do you win over those who see a sea of meaningless buzzwords? How can you differentiate between the smoke and mirrors and the real deal?

“No one wants the black box making decisions without them knowing what it’s doing,” said Nicole Eagan, Darktrace’s co-founder and chief executive, in a call with TechCrunch.

“So, let them have visibility,” she said.

Darktrace’s founders have roots in the U.K. and U.S. intelligence, where they took what they knew of the cybersecurity threats to the private sector to where the new battleground opened up. In the past half-decade of its existence, the company has gained major clients on its roster — from telcos to banks, tech giants and car makers — supported by 900 staff in over 40 offices around the world.

About a quarter of its customers are in financial services, said Eagan. But it takes a lot for the heavily regulated companies to trust a mystery device on a company’s network where the data and security, like financial services, is highly regulated.

Last week it was Xbox body spray. Today it’s a Razer energy drink. E3 is officially upon us, and it’s time for all of the shamless product tie-ins. Though before you go passing judgement on Respawn, note that this is “no ordinary beverage.” No, in a world of of entirely too many energy drinks, this one is “for gamers by gamers.”

The company notes, fittingly, that all of this started off as a 2010 April Fool’s Day prank, then known as the less palatable “Project Venom.” This however, is very much a real thing — in fact, Respawn is now a standalone spinoff brand from Razer.

The powdered drink has caffeine, green tea extract and B vitamins, made to be mixed in a the metal branded shaker (sold separately). “Now you are ready to Respawn,” the company writes somewhat troublingly in the official press release. “Effects should be felt soon after consumption.”

At very least, the “Mental performance” isn’t loaded with sugar, unlike the vast majority of energy drinks on the market. In fact, it contains zero grams of the stuff, per Razer. The stuff is apparently specially formulated for gamers and esports athletes for periods of long focus and mental stamina. Though Razer assures us that other people like content creators and video editors can use it, too.

For everyone else, there’s always coffee.

There’s some new consolidation in the mobile event technology space this morning, with news that the meetings, events and hospitality technology provider Cvent has acquired San Francisco-based mobile event app maker DoubleDutch. The deal includes both DoubleDutch’s mobile event app technology as well as the team, the company said in announcing the deal on Monday.

Founded in 2011, DoubleDutch created both mobile and web apps that gave event hosts everything they needed to set up and monitor the success of their events through a white-labeled solution they could customize to their own needs. The overall platform included event registration technology, the event content management system to manage an event’s entire program, and the event app for the attendees.

To date, DoubleDutch had raised nearly $80 million in funding according to CrunchBase, from investors including KKR, Bessemer Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Bullpen Capital, Enspire Capital, Mithril Capital Management, and others.

The company saw some upsets in more recent years as it struggled towards profitability. It laid off 25% of its workforce in 2016, then laid off another 40% of staff the following year, including its CFO, CCO, VP of Customer Success and others. Also in 2017, DoubleDutch replaced CEO Bryan Parker as CEO after only two months on the job after being appointed to the position from his earlier role as COO. DoubleDutch founder Lawrence Coburn took the CEO role instead.

However, in March 2018, DoubleDutch announced it had finally become cash-flow positive. At the same time, it announced new funding from existing investors KKR, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Bullpen Ventures and that it had completed the acquisition of Eventgrid, an events platform used by Adobe, Dropbox, Sony, and others.

According to DoubleDutch, joining Cvent made sense as both “share a passion for delivering innovative technology solutions for event organizers, including world-class mobile event apps.”

“DoubleDutch is an innovator in the mobile event app space and both Cvent and DoubleDutch have a shared mission to unlock the business value of human connection,” said Lawrence Coburn, CEO and founder of DoubleDutch, in a statement. “We are incredibly proud to join the market-leading team at Cvent. With their global reach and scale, we can fuel our passion to change the way people connect, learn, and grow at live events.”

DoubleDutch customers include SAP, Akamai, WPP, CenturyLink, Innovation Roundtable, BlackRock, ASAE Bosch, and others.

Coburn is expected to depart following the acquisition, according to a report from Skift. DoubleDutch’s other co-founder, Pankaj Prasad, had left in November 2017 to join Salesforce.

The company stressed that existing customers would see no disruption in their service or with their upcoming events — likely a big concern for those who relied on the platform, given how complex setting up and managing events can be. Customers were also invited to Cvent’s Connect User Conference in July in Las Vegas where they could learn more about Cvent’s full suite of solutions.

Cvent, meanwhile, sees the addition of DoubleDutch as a further investment in the onsite experience for events.

“We are extremely excited to add DoubleDutch to the Cvent family,” said Cvent founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal, added. “By adding DoubleDutch’s industry expertise to Cvent, we accelerate our investment in mobile event technology. We are also proud to welcome the talented DoubleDutch team to our more than 4,000 Cventers worldwide. Together, we will continue to drive innovation in how attendees engage at events.”

Cvent itself was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2016 for $1.65 billion, and ceased to trade on the NYSE on November 29, 2016. As both it and DoubleDutch are private companies, they declined to comment on the deal terms or price beyond their press releases.

Cvent tells TechCrunch its interest in DoubleDutch was for three main reasons: the product, people and the customers — the factors that drive all its acquisition decisions. Over the years, the company has picked up several other businesses, including Wedding Spot, Alliance Tech, Social Tables, and others. It also merged with Lanyon a few years ago. Cvent owns other event apps including CrowdCompass and QuickMobile, as well.

The company tells us it’s still working through how it will integrate DoubleDutch into its global organization, and can’t comment on specific positions or rolls at this time.

Ever since Google acquired Waze back in 2013, features from each have been slowly making their way back and forth between it and Google Maps – and today Waze gets a big upgrade with Google Assistant integration, which means you can use the smart voice companion within the app.

Google Assistant in Waze will provide access to your usual Assistant features, like playback of music and podcasts, but it’ll also offer access to many Waze-specific abilities, including letting you asking it to report traffic conditions, or specifying that you want to avoid tolls when routing to your destination.

Google has done a good job of rolling out support for Assistant in its own Android Auto in-car software, and even brought it to Google Maps on Apple’s competing CarPlay system earlier this year. The benefits of having Assistant work natively within Waze are many, but the number one might be its potential to reduce distractions while on the road.

Waze remains a top choice among drivers, and anecdotally most Uber and Lyft drivers I encounter still swear by its supremacy over the competition, including Google’s other own-branded Maps solution.

Google Assistant will be available via a roll-out starting today in the U.S., in English only to start and on Android smartphones. Expect that availability to expand over time.

You’ve been meaning to apply to the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2019, right? Whether you need more time due to procrastinating, shillyshallying or your propensity for last-minute decision making (hey, we don’t judge), we’re offering you a reprieve. Yup, we’re extending the application deadline for one week.

The extended application deadline expires on June 25th at 11:59 p.m. (PT). It’s time to procrastinate on your procrastination. Apply to the Startup Battlefield right now!

The application process is simple, free and highly competitive. Toss your proverbial hat into the mix and our seasoned TechCrunch editors (a deeply discerning bunch) will comb through each application to select 15-30 of the best early-stage startups.

All competing teams receive free, extensive pitch coaching from these same Battlefield-tested editors. They’ll advise, instruct and guide you to your best pitch possible. You’ll be ready to walk on to the Main Stage at Disrupt — in front of a live audience numbering in the thousands — to deliver a six-minute pitch and demo to our expert judges. Then get ready to think on your feet as they grill you with questions.

The judges select a group of finalists who go on to round two and pitch again to a new set of judges. And then only one team will emerge victorious, hoist the Disrupt Cup and take home the $100,000 equity-free cash prize.

The Startup Battlefield is one of the best platforms for launching your early-stage startup to the world’s “technorati.” We live stream the entire event on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Plus, it’s available later on-demand.

Need more convincing? Consider these stats and you’ll see it’s not hyperbole, people. In 12 years of Battlefields, 857 companies have competed and form the Startup Battlefield alumni community. Those startups, including the likes of Vurb, Dropbox, Mint, Yammer and more, have collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and generated 109 exits.

Don’t miss out on this reprieve! Apply to the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 before the new deadline expires on June 25th at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

While you’re in application mode, why not apply for our TC Top Picks program, too? TC Top Pick designees receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, VIP treatment and plenty of media and investor exposure.

Here’s an interesting by-product the news today that Salesforce would be acquiring Tableau for $15.7 billion: the company is going to make Seattle, Washington (home of Tableau) the official second headquarters of San Francisco-based Salesforce, putting the company directly in the face of tech giants and Salesforce frenemies Microsoft and Amazon.

“An HQ2, if you will,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff quipped right after he dropped the news during the press and analyst call.

HQ2, of course, is a reference to Amazon and its year-long, massively publicised, often criticised, and ultimately botched search (it eventually cancelled plans to build an HQ in NYC, but kept Arlington) for its own second headquarters, which it also branded “HQ2.”

If real estate sends a message — and if you’ve ever seen Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, you know it does for this company — Salesforce is sending one here. And that message is: Hello, Microsoft and Amazon, we’re coming at you.

As we pointed out earlier today, there is a clear rivalry between Microsoft and Salesforce that first began to simmer in the area of CRM but has over time expanded to a wider array of products and services that cater to the needs of enterprise knowledge workers.

The most well-known of these was the tug-of-war between the two to acquire LinkedIn, a struggle that Microsoft ultimately won. Over the years, as both have continued to diversify their products to bring in a wider swathe of enterprise users, and across a wider range of use cases, that competition has become a little more pointed.

I’d argue that the competitive threat of Amazon is a little more remote. At the moment, in fact, the two work very closely: specifically in September last year, Amazon and Salesforce extended an already years-long deal to integrate AWS and Salesforce products to aid in enterprise “digital transformation” (one of Salesforce’s catch phrases).

Placing Salesforce physically closer to Amazon could even underscore how the two might work even closer together in the future — not least because cloud storage is now a notably missing jewel in Salesforce’s enterprise IT crown as it squares up to Microsoft, which has Azure. (And it’s not just a Seattle thing. Google, which has Google Cloud Platform, acquired Tableau competitor Looker last week.)

On the other hand, you have to wonder about the longer-term trajectory for Salesforce and its ambitions. The Tableau deal takes it firmly into a new area of business that up to now has been more of a side-gig: data and analytics. Coming from two different directions — infrastructure for AWS and customer management for Salesforce — enterprise data has been a remote battleground for both companies for years already, and it will be interesting to see how the two sides approach it.

Notably, this is not Salesforce’s first efforts to lay down roots in the city. It established an engineering office in the city in 2017 and as Benioff pointed out today, putting deeper roots into what he described as a “unique market with tremendous talent” will open up the company to tapping it even more.