Category: UNCATEGORIZED

IPO-bound Postmates is under fire right now after making some changes to its payments structure for its delivery workers. Organizers at Working Washington say these changes can reduce pay for typical jobs by up to 30 percent.

Up until this past weekend, Postmates guaranteed its delivery workers at least $4 per job. Postmates has since gotten rid of that minimum job guarantee and changed the base rate per job, as well as changed the per-mile rate in some markets. In San Francisco, the new pay structure entails $1.90 per pickup, $0.50 per dropoff, $0.07 per minute and $1.29 per mile.

Postmates says the new rates “remove the need for a minimum guarantee adjustment so you always know exactly what you’re earning,” the company wrote to workers in an email, obtained by TechCrunch.

“At Postmates, we are dedicated to lowering the barrier to work and providing our Postmates Fleet with the resources they need to supplement their incomes. Technological innovations reduced pick up times, and route efficiencies are increasing the rate and pace of deliveries a Postmates can choose to make in a given hour, increasing payout averages from $17/hour in 2018 to $19/hour in 2019,” a Postmates spokesperson told TechCrunch. “This adjustment reflects those gains. Unlike competitors, Postmates always keep 100% of their customer tips, and those tips never eat into base earnings.”

Postmates is referring to the fact that both Instacart and DoorDash were caught subsidizing its workers pay with tips.

Organizers with Working Washington, however, are asking other gig economy workers to sign a petition asking Postmates CEO Bastian Lehman to pay the company’s workers better. They want the minimum guarantee back and they want a more transparent pay structure.

Sage Wilson, an organizer at Working Washington who also spoke out about Instacart and DoorDash, says nearly 1,000 workers have signed a petition to Postmates CEO Bastian Lehman in about 24 hours.

In California, one delivery worker made just $3.49 for a thirty-minute, three-mile job. That comes out to about $7 per hour, but if you account for mileage expenses and other payroll taxes, Working Washington says that comes out to $5.29 per hour.

“Postmates is worth nearly $2 billion,” Working Washington organizers wrote on their blog. “They can afford to pay workers more than $4 per job — but as they prepare to go public and continue their race to the bottom against companies like DoorDash and UberEats, they’re cutting our pay even as our costs increase. They’re using sneaky language to try to trick workers into thinking these changes are good for us — saying they’re trying to make pay “clear, consistent, and easy to understand”…and that “the new [lower] rates remove the need for a minimum guarantee.”

IPO-bound Postmates is under fire right now after making some changes to its payments structure for its delivery workers. Organizers at Working Washington say these changes can reduce pay for typical jobs by up to 30 percent.

Up until this past weekend, Postmates guaranteed its delivery workers at least $4 per job. Postmates has since gotten rid of that minimum job guarantee and changed the base rate per job, as well as changed the per-mile rate in some markets. In San Francisco, the new pay structure entails $1.90 per pickup, $0.50 per dropoff, $0.07 per minute and $1.29 per mile.

Postmates says the new rates “remove the need for a minimum guarantee adjustment so you always know exactly what you’re earning,” the company wrote to workers in an email, obtained by TechCrunch.

“At Postmates, we are dedicated to lowering the barrier to work and providing our Postmates Fleet with the resources they need to supplement their incomes. Technological innovations reduced pick up times, and route efficiencies are increasing the rate and pace of deliveries a Postmates can choose to make in a given hour, increasing payout averages from $17/hour in 2018 to $19/hour in 2019,” a Postmates spokesperson told TechCrunch. “This adjustment reflects those gains. Unlike competitors, Postmates always keep 100% of their customer tips, and those tips never eat into base earnings.”

Postmates is referring to the fact that both Instacart and DoorDash were caught subsidizing its workers pay with tips.

Organizers with Working Washington, however, are asking other gig economy workers to sign a petition asking Postmates CEO Bastian Lehman to pay the company’s workers better. They want the minimum guarantee back and they want a more transparent pay structure.

Sage Wilson, an organizer at Working Washington who also spoke out about Instacart and DoorDash, says nearly 1,000 workers have signed a petition to Postmates CEO Bastian Lehman in about 24 hours.

In California, one delivery worker made just $3.49 for a thirty-minute, three-mile job. That comes out to about $7 per hour, but if you account for mileage expenses and other payroll taxes, Working Washington says that comes out to $5.29 per hour.

“Postmates is worth nearly $2 billion,” Working Washington organizers wrote on their blog. “They can afford to pay workers more than $4 per job — but as they prepare to go public and continue their race to the bottom against companies like DoorDash and UberEats, they’re cutting our pay even as our costs increase. They’re using sneaky language to try to trick workers into thinking these changes are good for us — saying they’re trying to make pay “clear, consistent, and easy to understand”…and that “the new [lower] rates remove the need for a minimum guarantee.”

GM is scaling back its Maven car-sharing company and will stop service in nearly half of the 17 North American cities it operates in.

A spokesperson who confirmed Maven was shutting down in some cities, without identifying the location or number that will remain, said the company plans to focus on markets that have the strongest demand and growth potential.

The WSJ, which was the first to report the impending shutdown, said Maven will continue to operate in Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Toronto. However, TechCrunch has received information from Maven customers that Washington D.C. was also shutting down.

TechCrunch will update the article with more details about what markets Maven plans to exit.

Maven’s car-sharing service is available in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Orlando, San Francisco and Washington D.C. as well as Toronto, according to its website. Maven Gig, a service it launched in 2017 that rents out vehicles to rideshare and delivery drivers who use apps like Uber, Lyft and UberEATS, operates in Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, NYC and Washington D.C. 

When Maven first launched in 2016 it helped bring (and expand) several of GM’s existing test programs under one brand. The mobility division initially launched as a car-sharing service akin to Zipcar.

At the time of its launch, Maven was essentially three car-sharing services in one that included a city-based service that rented GM vehicles by the hour through an app and another for urban apartment dwellers in Chicago and New York.

A smartphone app, which is central to Maven’s business, is used by customers to search for and reserve a vehicle, unlock the door, and remotely start, cool, or heat the car.

But Maven has had its share of challenges. Demand was lackluster in some markets and the team tweaked, added or removed programs altogether in an effort to figure out what would work.

Maven CEO Julia Steyn left GM in January. TechCrunch has also received tips from users complaining about the service, the platform, even being locked out of the vehicles in areas with limited cellular service.

The company launched in 2017 Maven Reserve in Los Angeles and San Francisco to allow customers to rent its GM-branded vehicles for a month at a time. It also started Maven Gig in hopes of tapping into a growing demand from ride-share and delivery app drivers.

In July, the automaker launched a service in Chicago, Detroit and Ann Arbor, Mich. that let owners rent out their personal GM-branded vehicles through its Maven car-sharing platform. The peer-to-peer car rental service was designed to operate in a similar fashion to how Turo and Getaround work.

The creation of Maven was an important milestone for the automaker. GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra, used a study commissioned in the wake of the ignition switch engineering scandal, to accelerate her plans to transform the culture and operations at the automaker. Dozens of executives participated in transformational leaders programs. And Maven was one of the fruits that spun out of that.

Maven was part of a wave of initiatives and investments announced by GM in early 2016 that illustrated its new interest in unconventional transportation that moved past the traditional core business of producing, selling and financing cars, trucks and SUVs to consumers.

That year, GM invested $500 million into ride-hailing startup Lyft, bought the remaining assets and tech of ride-hailing company Sidecar, and most famously acquired self-driving car startup Cruise.

Maven was notable because unlike the other pursuits, this was its own commercial business.

Snap has another appointment in the apt saga of the its ephemeral CFOs.

Four months after losing its CFO Tim Stone following a reported “personality clash” between Stone and CEO Evan Spiegel, Snap has promoted its VP of Finance Derek Andersen to the role, the company said Monday. Andersen is the company’s third CFO since March of 2017 when it went public.

Lara Sweet, who was serving as the company’s interim CFO as well as the Chief Accounting Officer, will be stepping into a new role as Chief People Officer.

Snap has has a less cataclysmic 2019 in the public markets compared to its two previous calendar years. Snap has nearly doubled its share price since the year’s start though the stock still sits just above where it was one year ago.

Got a few thousand bucks and a good deal of engineering expertise? You’re in luck: Stanford students have created a quadrupedal robot platform called Doggo that you can build with off-the-shelf parts and a considerable amount of elbow grease. That’s better than the alternatives, which generally require a hundred grand and a government-sponsored lab.

Due to be presented (paper on arXiv here) at the IEEE International Conference on Robots and Automation, Doggo is the result of research by the Stanford Robotics Club, specifically the Extreme Mobility team. The idea was to make a modern quadrupedal platform that others could build and test on, but keep costs and custom parts to a minimum.

The result is a cute little bot with rigid-looking but surprisingly compliant polygonal legs that has a jaunty, bouncy little walk and can leap more than three feet in the air. There are no physical springs or shocks involved, but by sampling the forces on the legs 8,000 times per second and responding as quickly, the motors can act like virtual springs.

It’s limited in its autonomy, but that’s because it’s built to move, not to see and understand the world around it. That is, however, something you, dear reader, could work on. Because it’s relatively cheap and doesn’t involve some exotic motor or proprietary parts, it could be a good basis for research at other robotics departments. You can see the designs and parts necessary to build your own Doggo right here.

“We had seen these other quadruped robots used in research, but they weren’t something that you could bring into your own lab and use for your own projects,” said Doggo lead Nathan Kau in a Stanford news post. “We wanted Stanford Doggo to be this open source robot that you could build yourself on a relatively small budget.”

In the meantime the Extreme Mobility team will be both improving on the capabilities of Doggo by collaborating with the university’s Robotic Exploration Lab, and also working on a similar robot but twice the size — Woofer.

Two steps forward, one step back.

The Trump administration has seemingly been trying to calibrate its strategy around its intensifying trade dispute with China. Last week, it effectively banned Huawei from importing U.S. technology, a decision that forced several American companies including Google to partly sever their relationships with the Chinese handset and telecom provider.

Now, in an unpublished draft of a note in the Federal Register, the Department of Commerce and its Bureau of Industry and Security announced that Huawei would receive a “90-day temporary general license” to continue to use U.S. technology that it already has a license to. New technology and mobile phone models requiring new licenses would still need to apply for them — and those licenses are unlikely to be approved according to Reuters.

Reasons for the drawback are unclear. One answer might be the impact on American jobs. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, an industry trade and research group, argued in a new report today that export controls could cost up to $56.3 billion in damage to the U.S. economy and up to 74,000 jobs, depending on their scale. Obviously, the tech industry is mostly opposed to new tariffs or export controls, and the Trump administration has made American jobs a centerpiece of its domestic policy agenda.

The other answer might be that China is now fulminating against the actions and subtly threatening access to rare earth materials. President Xi Jinping toured a rare earths facility this weekend, in what was perceived by political analysts as a subtle reminder of China’s outsized role in rare earths exports, in which it is the world’s largest.

Regardless, the new temporary reprieve won’t do much to change the underlying trade calculus, but it may afford Huawei a little breathing space to figure out what it should next without U.S. technology.

The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut from NPR studios to USB Skype rigs.

We’ve asked some of our favorite podcast hosts and producers to highlight their workflows — the equipment and software they use to get the job done. The list so far includes:

Jeffrey Cranor of Welcome to Night Vale
Jesse Thorn of Bullseye
Ben Lindbergh of Effectively Wild
My own podcast, RiYL

In the crowded world of true-crime podcasts, Criminal has managed to stand out, garnering the critical acclaim of sources ranging from The Atlantic to Entertainment Weekly. Launched in 2014 by Lauren Spohrer, Eric Mennel and host Phoebe Judge, the Chapel Hill-based series takes a deep and complex dive into its subject matter, painting a rich picture of the case files it studies. 

On Valentine’s Day 2018, Spohrer, Judge and fellow Criminal producer Nadia Wilson launched the first season of This Is Love, a series focused on “sacrifice, obsession, and the ways in which we bet everything on each other.” Co-creator and co-producer Spohrer joins us to highlight the rig the team uses to gather recordings on the road. 

We’re just returning home from a whirlwind reporting trip for This Is Love. We were in Italy for 10 days and recorded eight stories, moving quickly by train and car through small towns. It was the most ambitious reporting trip we’ve done, and we were lucky we met such extraordinarily kind people and discovered Pocket Coffee.

We like to prepare for the worst-case scenario, so we brought three recording kits with us and each carried one (me, Phoebe, and Senior Producer Nadia Wilson). We stocked up on AA batteries at Costco before we left.

We recorded the interviews with a Marantz PMD 661 recorder and an Audio Technica AT8035 microphone with a Rode pistol grip and a Rode WS7 Deluxe Wind Shield. We use Sony MDR-7506 headphones both for recording and for mixing. A lot of the interviews were recorded standing up, one in a fish market before the sun came up. Phoebe always records herself and the guest with the same mic. Italy is loud, and we didn’t fight that. We do plenty of interviews in pristinely silent studios. It was a nice change to let the world creep into the sound.

Back when we started Criminal, we recorded Phoebe’s narration with the Audio Technica AT8035 in my bedroom closet with a bunch of blankets draped over her head. These days, we have a partnership with our local NPR affiliate, North Carolina Public Radio, and we use their studio to record Phoebe’s narration for both This Is Love and Criminal. They’ve got a Neumann TLM 103 microphone. We added a mic preamp (Great River ME-1NV) and a Stedman Proscreen PS101. The studio is set up to record into Adobe Audition. We upload those files to Dropbox, and then download them at home to edit and mix in Pro Tools.

When we’re touring, (we’re doing 16 live shows this fall, come see us!), we produce live shows with a program called Soundboard and a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 USB Audio Interface.

Other tools: we pitch story ideas via email and Slack, use a shared Google Calendar to stay organized and transcribe our raw tape with Trint. Scripts are written and fact-checked collaboratively using Google Docs. We mix in Pro Tools, and when we’re happy with a mix, we send sessions to Rob Byers, Michael Rafael and/or Johnny Vince Evans to be mastered.

Quadric.io, a startup founded by some of the folks behind the once-secretive bitcoin mining operation “21E6,” has raised $15 million in a Series A round that will fund the development of a supercomputer designed for autonomous systems.  

The round was led by automotive Tier 1 supplier DENSO and its semiconductor products arm NSITEXE, which will also be one of Quadric.io’s customers for future electronic systems in all levels of autonomous driving solutions. Leawood VC also participated in the Series A round.

The company says it will use the injection of capital to build out its product, hire more people and business development. Quadric’s supercomputer will be assembled by an outsourced company.

Pear, Uncork Capital, SV Angel, Cota Capital, and Trucks VC are seed investors in Quadric.io.

The roots of Quadric.io grew from a seemingly disconnected mission to produce an agricultural robot designed to transform the way vineyards were managed. The company launched in 2016 by CEO Veerbhan Kheterpal, CTO Nigel Drego and CPO Daniel Siru — all co-founders of 21 Inc. The bitcoin startup, once known as 21E6, would later rebrand as Earn.com before being acquired by Coinbase for $100 million.

Quadric’s original plan was stymied by some real-world fundamentals. The power-hungry ag robot was weighed down by batteries that became too unwieldy to move amongst vineyard rows and the processing time to turn loads environmental data into actual actions based on algorithms were too slow.

Quadric was looking for a chip designed for processing on the edge and that supported decision-making in real time — all while crunching data faster and sipping, not slurping power. That need grew into Quadric’s core product today: a supercomputer that the company says hits that sweet spot of increased computational speed and reduced power consumption.

Kheterpal noted in a recent post on Medium that Intel’s CPU’s work “very well for standard computer processing” and Nvidia’s GPU’s have “ushered in astounding new graphics processing for gaming and much more.” But he argued, that Quadric needed something neither of those companies could provide: a chip designed for processing on the edge.

The company created a single unified architecture in the supercomputer that enables high performance computing and artificial intelligence. The supercomputer, which is built around the Quadric Processor, is plug-and-play. This means people can plug in their sensor set and build their entire application to support “near-instantaneous” decision making, Quadric says. The company claims that early testing of Quadric’s system has shown up to 100 times lower latency and a 90 percent reduction in power consumption. 

Quadric argues this underlying technology is a prerequisite for companies developing autonomous systems that will be used in the construction, transportation, agriculture and warehousing industries. The underlying tech that supports autonomous machines used in these industries either lacks the performance or solves only a small part of the full application, according to Quadric.

The startup contends that machines with autonomous functions requires processing speed and responsiveness “on the edge” — meaning at the machine level, not in the cloud.   

Other companies, most recently Tesla, have opted to build their own chips to meet this specific need. But as Kheterpal notes, not all companies have the resources to build the tech from the ground up. 

“ Quadric is a plug and play option that eliminates the need for building heterogeneous systems with significant hardware and software integration costs — thereby taking years off of product development roadmaps,” Kheterpal wrote.

With the Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X currently in limbo for very different reasons, PC makers are apparently jumping at the chance to make their own foldable display ambitions known. It’s been clear, of course, for as long as flexible screens have been a viable technology, that hardware manufacturers would be experimenting with any and all form factors. In just the past week, two key players have talked up their plans for how it might be utilized on the PC front.

Last week, Lenovo showed off a prototype ThinkPad X1. The company’s been no stranger to experimental convertibles, and utilizing a foldable display could further blur the line been tablets and PCs. The technology allows for a large screen in a compact form factor. Here it’s 13.3 inches that can be collapsed into half the size, making it a lot easier to take with you.

It’s a slick prototype, and obviously folding form factors are already the standard in the laptop world. But like Lenovo’s past attempts at dual-screen devices, the on-screen removes the tactile keyboard, one of the biggest pain points in moving consumers away from more traditional laptops. Perhaps that’s something that could be addressed with the sorts of overlays provided by companies like Sensel.

Dell, too, recently told Gizmodo that it’s experimenting with a similar form factor. No surprise on that front, really. One expects that any PC maker worth its weight in netbooks is, at the very least, playing around with the concept as we speak.

All of this is complicated by the fact that the foldable phone category has been plagued with issues — though not necessarily the ones most people predicted. Samsung indefinitely pushed back the launch date of the Galaxy Fold after several reviewers ran into issues with their units.

We’re still waiting for official news on that front. Huawei, meanwhile, had a wrench thrown into its stratospheric ascendancy when the company was blacklisted by the Trump White House, leaving aspects of its future in jeopardy.

Neither of these are direct indictments of the concept — though Samsung’s model certainly failed in real-world testing. For that reason, it’s probably safe to say that the jury’s still out on consumer demand, though many of the major concerns, including pricing, would likely carry over to the PC category.

Maisie Williams’ time on Game of Thrones may have come to an end, but her talent discovery app Daisie is just getting started. Co-founded by film producer Dom Santry, Daisie aims to make it easier for creators to showcase their work, discover projects and collaborate with one another through a social networking-style platform. Only 11 days after Daisie officially launched to the public, the app hit an early milestone of 100,000 members. It also recently closed on $2.5 million in seed funding, the company tells TechCrunch.

The round was led by Founders Fund, which contributed $1.5 million. Other investors included 8VC, Kleiner Perkins, and newer VC firm Shrug Capital, from AngelList’s former head of marketing Niv Dror, who also separately invested. To date — including friends and family money and the founders’ own investment — Daisie has raised roughly $3 million.

It will later move toward raising a larger Series A, Santry says.

On Daisie, creators establish a profile as you would on a social network, find and follow other users, then seek out projects based on location, activity, or other factors.

“Whether it’s film, music, photography, art — everything is optimized around looking for collaborators,” explains Santry. “So the projects that are actively open and looking for people to get involved, are the ones we’re really pushing for people to discover and hopefully get involved with,” he says.

The company’s goal to offer an alternative path to talent discovery is a timely one. Today, the creative industry is waking up — as are many others — to the ramifications of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. As power-hungry abusers lose their jobs, new ways of working, networking and sourcing talent are taking hold.

As Williams said when she first introduced the app last year, Daisie’s focus is on giving the power back to the creator.

“Instead of [creators] having to market themselves to fit someone else’s idea of what their job would be, they can let their art speak for themselves,” she said at the time.

The app was launched into an invite-only beta on iOS last summer, and quickly saw a surge of users. After 37,000 downloads in week one, it crashed.

“We realized that the community was a lot larger than the product we had built, and that scale was something we needed to do properly,” Santry tells TechCrunch.

The team realized there was another problem, too: Once collaborators found each other in Daisie, there wasn’t a clear cut way for them to get in touch with one another as the app had no communication tools or ways to share files built in.

“That journey from concept to production was pretty muddy and quite muddled…so we realized, if we were bringing teams together, we actually wanted to give them a place to work — give them this creative hub…and take their project from concept all the way to production on Daisie,” Santry notes.

With this broader concept in mind, Daisie began fundraising in San Francisco shortly after the beta launch. The round initially closed in October 2018, but was more recently reopened to allow Dror’s investment.

With the additional funding in tow, Daisie has been able to grow its team of five to eighteen, including new hires from Monzo, Deliveroo, BBC, Microsoft, and others — specifically engineers who were familiar with designing apps for scale. Tasked with developing better infrastructure and a more expansive feature set, the team set to work on bringing Daisie to the web.

Nine months later, the new version launched to the public and is stable enough to handle the load. Today, it topped 100,000 users — most of which are in London. However, Daisie is planning to focus on taking its app to other cities including Berlin, New York, and L.A. going forward.

The company has monetization ideas in mind, but the app does not currently generate revenue. However, it’s already fielding inquiries from companies who want Daisie to find them the right talent for their projects.

“We want the best for the creators on the platform, so if that means bringing clients on — and hopefully giving those connectivity opportunities — then we’ll absolutely [go] down those roads,” Santry says.

The app may also serve as a talent pipeline for Maisie Williams’ own Daisy Chain Productions. In fact, Daisie recently ran a campaign called London Creates which connected young, emerging creators with project teams, two of which were headed by Santry’s Daisy Chain Productions co-founders, Williams and Bill Milner.

Now Daisy Chain Productions is going to produce a film from the Daisie collaboration as a result.

While celebs sometimes do little more than lend their name to projects, Williams was hands-on in terms of getting Daisie off the ground, Santry says. During the first quarter of 2019, she worked on Daisie 9-to-5, he notes. But she has since started another film project and plans to continue to work as an actress, which will limit her day-to-day involvement. Her role now and in the future may be more high-level.

“I think her role is going to become one of, culturally, like: where does Daisie stand? What do we stand for? Who do we work with? What do we represent?” he says. “How do we help creators everywhere? That’s mainly want Maisie wants to make sure Daisie does.”