Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Let’s get the bad out of the way first, shall we?

For starters, that charging case is huge. There’s no way around it. It’s something that’s become more and more apparent as the weather is warmer and I no longer have jacket pockets to carry it around in. If you shell out the money for these, you’ll be thinking about this a lot, too. How long you plan to be out versus the added pocket bulk.

There’s also the issue of cost. A few years ago, $250 might not have seemed crazy for a pair of wireless earbuds. When you’re out-pricing Apple’s primary earbuds, however, it might be time to reconsider.

Those are really the big strikes in what’s been an otherwise wholly enjoyable review process. I’ve been eager to put these through their paces since the day they were announced, and haven’t been disappointed. Given the choice between the AirPods and Powerbeats Pro, I’m leaning toward the latter at the moment.

The Powerbeats Pro are a wholly different take on the category, and that’s precisely where they succeed. Sure, Beats has been operating under the Apple banner for more than a third of its existence, but the company’s fully wireless headphones are probably the best example to date of how to run a sub-brand with minimal interference.

That’s not to say that Apple wasn’t involved. The company’s fingerprints are here, but that’s largely a good thing, honestly. The inclusion of the H1 chip is the clearest example. Using the same silicon found in the latest AirPods, the initial pairing process is as simple as opening up the case. From there, a large window will show the case and two headphones, along with corresponding battery levels.

Assuming, of course, you have an iPhone. You can pair them up to an Android handset and just about anything else with Bluetooth, but you’ve got to go through the more traditional rigmarole. The flip side of all of this is that the Pros only ship with a Lightning port. I’ve expressed my frustration with Apple’s proprietary connector in the past, but honestly, it mostly comes down to the fact that Apple seems to have finally started following the rest of the industry down the USB-C rabbit hole. At this point it feels inevitable.

And, of course, the Pro case isn’t wireless yet. Gotta save something for the second gen, I guess.

As for the clear advantages Beats has over the AirPods, that’s three-fold. First is battery life. The upshot to the massive case is a ton of time on a charge. Beats puts them at nine hours on the earbuds, with a full 24 hours all told, when the case is factored in. I never found myself short on juice, and I’m pretty psyched to take them on the next cross-country plane ride.

That means, in most instances, you’re totally fine to leave home without the case. Though beware that both the case and the buds tend to scuff easily, so I’d use it when possible. The buds’ placement inside the case is also a little tricky. Unlike the AirPods, I found myself repositioning them the first few times.

While the case itself sports a small light that goes either red or white, depending on whether they’re charging, there’s no light on the buds themselves, meaning you’re primarily dependent on iOS to let you know where things stand.

The design of the buds themselves isn’t for everyone — but the same can certainly be said for AirPods. It’s true that the over the ear hooks are probably ideally suited for the gym, but in black these are subtle enough for most people to wear out undetected. More importantly, there are quite comfortable. Apple is still kicking and screaming against silicone tips, and that’s made AirPods particularly divisive. Like many of the company’s headphones before, they simply don’t fit in a lot of ears.

Removable silicone tips offer a more adaptable fit, coupled with a better seal. That, in turn, means less sound leak. The headphones might be tuned a little high for some tastes, but it honestly beats the old days when the company leaned entirely too heavily on bass to make up for other shortcomings. As is, the sound is quite good, so far as fully wireless Bluetooth earbuds go.

I will say that the design wore on one of my ears a bit after a marathon listen while working at my desk, but I was able to wear them for a lot longer than most of the earbuds I’ve tested, with minimal annoyance.

Also impressive is the distance they’ll work. I routinely walked into the other room while leaving my phone charging on the desk with no problem. I did run into the occasional connection problems here and there, where one headphone conked out, but again, that unfortunately is pretty in-line with the current limitations of Bluetooth technology. Putting the earbuds in the case and pulling them back out seemed to address the problem just fine.

The Pros are generally less concerned with appearance than their Apple brethren. A bit ironic, perhaps, for a brand that was seemingly built around image. They’re a pretty good indicator of how far Beats has come as a brand, making for a much more utilitarian product than AirPods — and for a constant companion, that’s a good thing.

Assuming you can stomach the high price and massive case, for a majority of users, the Powerbeats Pro are probably the way to go.

Shares of Luckin Coffee jumped 20 percent in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq stock market.

After opening at $17.00, shares of the Chinese Starbucks competitor climbed as high as $25.96, or more than 50 percent, before settling back down to $20.38 at the market’s close. The company has a market cap north of $5 billion after its first day of trading.

The brick-and-mortar coffee chain has achieved major success in China by offering speedy delivery services to Chineses consumers. The company has nearly 2,400 stores compared to Starbucks’ 3,500 but it has plans to more than double that number by the end of the year as it seeks to become the country’s coffee king.

Luckin’s success doesn’t immediately seem to be thwarting the stock market success of Starbucks, which has had a glowing 2019. The company hit another all-time high Friday closing out the day at $78.91, up more than 35 percent from a year ago, giving the Seattle company a market cap of nearly $96 billion.

Starbucks and Luckin Coffee may seem like mortal enemies but their rivalry is more complicated than one might immediately think. Check out our ExtraCrunch deep dive from earlier this week on the Xiamen-based company’s financials.

Alleged cryptocurrency exchange Goxtrade bills itself as a “trusted platform for trading bitcoins,” but its staff page is filled with photos of people of pulled seemingly at random from the internet.

The alleged exchange, which claimed to debut in 2017 yet its website is only a little more than a week old, used photos taken from social media profiles and other company websites not associated with the company.

Bizarrely, the alleged exchange didn’t bother to change all of the names of the people whose photos it used.

Amber Baldet, co-founder of Clovyr, a prominent figure in the blockchain community, and listed in Fortune’s ’40 Under 40′, was one of the people whose name and photos appeared on the site.

“Fraud alert: I am not a developer at Goxtrade and probably their entire business is a lie,” she tweeted Friday.

Nearly all of the names are accurate but have no connection to the site. (Image: TechCrunch)

Goxtrade claims to be an exchange that lets users “receive, send and trade cryptocurrency.” After we created an account and signed in, it’s not clear if the site even works. But the online chat room has hundreds of messages of users trying to trade their cryptocurrencies. The site’s name appears to associate closely with Mt. Gox, a failed cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed after it was hacked. At its 2014 peak, the exchange handled more than 70 percent of all bitcoin transactions. More than $450 million in bitcoins were stolen in the apparent breach.

Baldet isn’t the only person wrongly associated with the suspect site.

TechCrunch has confirmed the other photos on the site belong to other people seemingly chosen at random — including a claims specialist in Illinois, a lawyer in Germany, and an operations manager in Melbourne.

Another person whose photo was used without permission is Tom Blomfield, chief executive of digital bank Monzo. In a tweet, Blomfield — who was listed on the alleged exchange as “Arnold Blomfield” — said his legal team has filed complaints with the site’s hosts.

But things get weirder than just stolen staff photos.

Hours after the site was first flagged, Cloudflare now warns users that the alleged exchange is a suspected phishing site. (Image: TechCrunch)

GoxTrade lists its registered address as Heron Tower, one of the new skyscrapers in London. We checked the listings and there’s no company listed in the building of the same name. There’s also no mention of Goxtrade in the U.K.’s registry of companies and businesses. When we checked its listed registered number per its terms and conditions page, the listing points to an entirely unrelated clothing company in Birmingham.

Later in the day, networking giant Cloudflare, which provides its service, flagged the site as a phishing site.

We reached out to Goxtrade by email prior to publication but did not hear back. When we checked, Goxtrade’s mail records was pointing to an email address run by Yandex, a Russian internet company.

It’s not the first time a cryptocurrency startup has been called into question for using other people’s photos on their staff pages. After raising more than $830,000, Miroskii was caught listing actor Ryan Gosling as one of its graphic designers. Almost every photo later transpired to have been lifted from another source. The company later claimed it was hacked.

Cryptocurrency-related scams are not rare. Many have taken what they’ve raised and gone dark, never to be seen again. We’ve covered a fair number here on TechCrunch, including a massive $660 million scam from 2018.

A fair warning with Goxtrade: all signs seem to point to yet another scam.

Read more:

• How authorities took down the owners of darknet drug emporium Wall Street Market
• Exit scammers run off with $660 million in ICO earnings
• Pure Bit, a South Korean exchange, pulls a $2.8 million exit scam
• Another day, another $50 million ICO exit scam

Netflix is launching its own take on Project Runway, and it’s bringing in Queer Eye’s Tan France to host. While Project Runway has grown to become one of the most popular fashion-focused reality shows to ever hit TV, the franchise, now on Season 17, is getting a little long in the tooth — and in need of a makeover itself. With Netflix’s new series Next in Fashion, the streamer is targeting a younger demographic with talent like Tan who will co-host along with style icon, designer and model (and popular Instagrammer) Alexa Chung.

The prize?

Not a New York Fashion Week debut, but rather the chance to sell a collection with luxury e-retailer Net-a-Porter. (Oh, and $250,000, too.)

Much like Project Runway, the series will begin with eighteen designers who will face challenges that center on a specific trend or design style. But unlike the Project Runway contestants, who can be virtual unknowns or even hobbyists lacking basic sewing skills, Next in Fashion’s contenders will have worked for major brands and dressed A-List celebrities.

It’s very much the Top Chef of the fashion design reality show world.

The first season will have ten total episodes, and will bring in guest judges like celeb stylist Elizabeth Stewart and Director of fashion partnerships at Instagram, Eva Chen, among others. The series is created and produced by theoldschool and is Executive Produced by Robin Ashbrook and Yasmin Shackleton with co-Executive Producer Adam Cooper, says Netflix.

It’s also the latest to join Netflix’s growing lineup of reality TV. Having already produced hits and pop culture sensations like the new Queer Eye or Marie Kondo’s Tidying Up, the streamer is looking to broaden its reality lineup.

In doing so, it’s taking note of what works on cable television, in order to come up with its own version of just about every top reality TV show out there.

For Million Dollar Listing fans, there’s Selling Sunset on Netflix. Say Yes to the Dress gets a frugal take with Cheapest Weddings. Cupcake Wars becomes Sugar Rush. Top Chef translates to The Final Table. The Bachelor fans can watch Dating Around, and The Real Housewives addicts get to follow the Yummy Mummies. Meanwhile, Fixer Upper fans can take inspiration from Stay Here, Instant Hotel, or Amazing Interiors.

If Netflix could find its own Chip and Joanna Gaines and group of terrible Vanderpump Rules-esque 20-somethings, it would have it made.

Naturally, it was only a matter of time until Netflix turned its TV show formula photocopier to fashion competitions.

While not entirely original in concept, Next in Fashion may be able to capitalize on the star power of its co-hosts — and especially Tan, where there’s potential for cross-promotion with his other Netflix series, Queer Eye.

Now, who’s gonna give the rest of the QE team each their own series, too?

DNA Script has raised $38.5 million in new financing to commercialize a process that it claims is the first big leap forward in manufacturing genetic material.

The revolution in synthetic biology that’s reshaping industries from medicine to agriculture rests on three, equally important pillars.

They include: analytics — the ability to map the genome and understand the function of different genes; synthesis — the ability to manufacture DNA to achieve certain functions; and gene editing — the CRISPR-based technologies that allow for the addition or subtraction of genetic code.

New technologies have already been introduced to transform the analytics and editing of genomes, but little progress has been made over the past 50 years in the ways in which genetic material is manufactured. That’s exactly the problem that DNA Script is trying to solve.

Traditionally, making DNA involved the use of chemical compounds to synthesize (or write) DNA in chains that were limited to around 200 nucleotide bases. Those synthetic pieces of genetic code are then assembled together to make a gene.

DNA Script’s technology holds the promise of making longer chains of nucleotides by mirroring the enzymatic process through which DNA is assembled within cells — with fewer errors and no chemical waste material. The enzymatic process can accelerate commercial applications in healthcare, chemical manufacturing, and agriculture.

“Any technology that can make that faster is going to be very valuable,” says Christopher Voigt, a synthetic biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, told the journal Nature. “There is no Nobel prize that needs to happen,” Leproust says. “It’s just hard engineering.”

DNA Script isn’t the only company in the market that’s looking to make the leap forward in enzymatic DNA production. Nucleara, startup working with Harvard University’s famed geneticist, George Church, and Ansa Bio, a startup affiliated with Jay Keasling’s Berkeley lab at the University of California are also moving forward with the technology.

But the Paris-based company has achieved some milestones that would make its technology potentially the first to come to market with a commercially viable approach.

At least, that’s what investors new investors LSP and Bpifrance, through its Large Venture fund, are hoping. They’re joined by previous investors Illumina Ventures, M. Ventures, Sofinnova Partners, Kurma Partners and Idinvest Partners, in backing the company’s latest funding.

The company said the money would be used to accelerate the development of its first products and establish a presence in the United States.

“As we announced earlier this year at the AGBT General Meeting, DNA Script was the first company to enzymatically synthesize a 200mer oligo de novo with an average coupling efficiency that rivals the best organic chemical processes in use today,”  said Thomas Ybert, chief executive and cofounder of DNA Script. “Our technology is now reliable enough for its first commercial applications, which we believe will deliver the promise of same-day results to researchers everywhere, with DNA synthesis that can be completed in just a few hours.”

In an age of online misinformation and clickbait, how do you know whether a publication is trustworthy?

Startup Credder is trying to solve this problem with reviews from both journalists and regular readers. These reviews are then aggregated into an overall credibility score (or rather, scores, since the journalist and reader ratings are calculated separately). So when you encounter an article from a new publication, you can check their scores on Credder to get a sense of how credible they are.

Co-founder and CEO Chase Palmieri compared the site to movie reviewe aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It makes sense, then, that he’s enlisted former Rotten Tomatoes CEO Patrick Lee to his advisory board, along with journalist Gabriel Snyder and former Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte.

Palmieri plans to open Credder to the general public later this month, and he’s already raised $750,000 in funding from Founder Institute CEO Adeo Ressi, Ira Ehrenpreis, the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, Steve Bennet and others.

Palmieri told me he started working full-time on the project back in 2016, with the goal of “giving news consumers a way to productively hold the news producers accountable,” and to “realign the financial incentives of online media, so it’s not just rewarding clicks and traffic metrics.” In other words, he wanted to create a landscape where publishing empty clickbait or heavily-slanted propaganda might have actual consequences.

If Credder gets much traction, it will likely to attract its share of trolls — it’s easy to imagine that the same kind of person who leaves a negative review of “Captain Marvel” without seeing the movie (this is a real issue that Rotten Tomatoes has had to face), would be just as happy to smear The New York Times or CNN as “fake news.” And even if a reviewer is offering honest, good-faith feedback, the review might be less influenced by the quality of a publication’s journalism and more by their personal baggage or political leanings.

Palmieri acknowledged the risk and pointed to several ways Credder is trying to mitigate it. For one thing, users can’t just write an overall review of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or TechCrunch. Instead, they’re reviewing specific articles, so hopefully they’re engaging with the substance and specifics of the story, rather than just venting their preexisting feelings. The scores assigned to publications and to journalists are only generated when there are enough article ratings to create an aggregated score.

In addition, Palmieri said the reviewers “are also being held accountable,” because users can upvote or downvote their comments. That affects how the reviews get weighted in the overall score, and in turn generates a rating for the reviewers.

“It will take time for the weight of your reviews to be meaningful, and there will be a visible track record,” he said.

While I appreciated Palmieri’s vision, I was also skeptical that a credibility score can actually influence readers’ opinions — maybe it will matter when you encounter a new publication, but everyone already has set ideas about who they trust and don’t trust.

When I brought this up, Palmieri replied, “What we see in today’s media landscape is the left wing media attacks the right wing media, and vice versa. We never get a sense of what our fellow news consumers feel. What’s more likely to change your perspective and make you question yourself? It’s going to a rating page at an article, pointing out a specific problem in that article.”

To be clear, Credder isn’t hosting articles itself, simply crawling the web and creating rating pages for articles, publications and writers. As for making money, Palmieri said he’s considered both a tipping system and an ad system where publications can pay to promote their stories.

TechCrunch readers can check it out early by visiting the Credder website and using the promo code “TCNEWS”.

Sometimes you need scrambled eggs. And with that thought, toady at the Overland Expo in Flagstaff, AZ, Rivian announced a major accessory for its electric pickup: A camp kitchen. The unit slides out from the Rivian R1T’s so-called gear tunnel that lives between the bed and cab. The kitchen includes storage and a stove that’s powered by the R1T’s 180kWh battery pack.

This kitchen unit is the first significant concept Rivian has unveiled for the pickup’s unusual gear tunnel. This space provides another locked storage compartment for the pickup — but why have it all, many asked when it was revealed? And now, with this kitchen unit, Rivian is responding to the questions. It seems Rivian wants to make its vehicles the center of an ecosystem of add-ons. The company already revealed racks, vehicle-mounted tents and even a flashlight that hides in the side of the driver’s door. Expect more camping and outdoor gear as Rivian cements its brand image around adventurers.

Rivian is positioning its products for a particular lifestyle. Think Patagonia-wearing, Range Rover-driving, outdoorsy types or at least those who aspire to have that image. It’s a smart play, and so far, Rivian has stayed true to this image. All of its advertisements, social media posts, and appearances make it clear that Rivian is carefully aligning its brand image.

Trucks and SUVs are generally marketed to workman and families. TV commercials feature dusty men hauling bails of hay and women unloading groceries and closing the rear tailgate with her foot. But not Rivian.

So far Rivian has shown its products in the backwoods, running trails and sitting next to campfires. The people in the commercials are on an adventure, wearing coats by The North Face and sleeping in REI tents. With the kitchen from today’s announcements, they can pull a kitchen out of their pickup and make some coffee.

Rivian tells TechCrunch this is just a concept, but the company intends to bring this unit to production. There are likely to be other units for the gear tunnel. I, for one, would love to have a slide-out dog washing and drying station because there’s nothing worse than putting a muddy dog in a truck.

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Princess Leia’s hologram message to Obi-Wan is getting closer to reality, at least augmented reality.

Magic Leap announced yesterday that they’ve agreed to acquire Belgian startup Mimesys. The team has been working on bringing Star Wars-esque volumetric video calls to the Magic Leap platform, and it seems that the Florida AR startup liked what they were developing. We didn’t get any details on deal terms.

The team is joining Magic Leap but will continue to service their enterprise clients including BNP Paribas and Orange, according to their website. The startup first showed off their video conferencing tech at CES this year, which allows someone in a Magic Leap One headset to visualize a 3D representation of a person during a “video” call.

Volumetric video can be fairly fickle, the solution Mimesys has been going after relied on Intel’s RealSense depth cameras to collect and stitch footage on PCs locally then stream it to a user’s headset. As is the case with almost all volumetric video footage, Mimesys’s early work appeared to suffer from some noisiness, though this acquisition makes one wonders whether Magic Leap will end up creating their own external depth camera hardware to appeal to enterprise customers.

It seems that almost every new platform promises to revolutionize video calls and yet hangups continue because its one of the more high-bandwidth activities we regularly do. This is only going to be more difficult in AR since you’re sending live 3D footage of people through the internet tubes. Like much of what Magic Leap is promising, the feasibility of pulling this off likely relies in no small part to 5G tech proliferating.

From viral TikTok sensation, to music’s number one smash hit, “Old Town Road” has taken the top spot in music’s cultural firmament relying on an incredible Nine Inch Nails sample, some old fashioned controversy (it was barred from country music charts), and a remix with Billy Ray Cyrus.

So it’s only natural that the song that was created virtually and rose to number one through online ubiquity would work its way backward through the traditional music industry’s playbook to finally, after weeks atop the Billboard charts, get its video treatment.

And what a video treatment it is. This video has everything. Horse chases, car races, gunfights, time travel, and bingo.

Joining Lil Nas X is a cornucopia of famous faces from music and film including Billy Ray Cyrus (of course), Chris Rock, Diplo, Vince Staples, and Rico Nasty.

It’s been a long week, so take a break with a trip on the “Old Town Road”. It’s fun.

Eleven aerospace companies will share more than $45 million in funds from NASA to design and test prototypes for the Artemis moon missions, the agency has announced. Among the established names like Northrop Grumman and Sierra Nevada are relative newcomers SpaceX and Blue Origin, looking to make a place for themselves on the agency’s biggest push in decades.

The funds are to enable what NASA calls undefinitized contract actions, in which partners get to work before negotiations on the rest of the contract have concluded. It basically shows that time is of the essence and that NASA is willing to pay up front to someone they may not even contract with later, just to get a jump start on the work that needs doing.

And what’s the work? They’ll be cooking up designs and prototypes for the Human Landing System, which as you might guess will take astronauts (and cosmonauts, and perhaps taikonauts) from a high lunar orbit to a low one, then to the surface, then back again. The three elements are called transfer, descent, and ascent respectively — and there’s a refueling one as well.

Each company will have a specific set of mechanisms or designs it will be expected to produce, but none is expected to put together the whole shebang.

“We’re keen to collect early industry feedback about our human landing system requirements, and the undefinitized contract action will help us do that,” said NASA’s Greg Chavers in a press release. “This new approach doesn’t prescribe a specific design or number of elements for the human landing system. NASA needs the system to get our astronauts on the surface and return them home safely, and we’re leaving a lot of the specifics to our commercial partners.”

In other words, this is still an information-gathering phase for NASA, though the contractors must consider it as potentially the first step in producing a major system for Artemis, so they can’t do anything by halves.

None of the companies was assigned design work on the ascender, which suggests the plans for that part aren’t as far advanced as the rest. SpaceX will be producing a study on the descent element, while Blue Origin is taking on studies for the descent and transfer elements, plus a prototype for the latter.

We probably won’t see these prototypes or studies any time soon — if they’re not chosen for production they may remain trade secrets for future bids or on the off chance NASA changes its mind. Even if they are chosen, they may have to go through several more iterations before they can be shown publicly.

Here’s the full list of companies and their responsibilities under the new funding:

• Aerojet Rocketdyne – Canoga Park, California
  • One transfer vehicle study
• Blue Origin – Kent, Washington
  • One descent element study, one transfer vehicle study, and one transfer vehicle prototype
• Boeing – Houston
  • One descent element study, two descent element prototypes, one transfer vehicle study, one transfer vehicle prototype, one refueling element study, and one refueling element prototype
• Dynetics – Huntsville, Alabama
  • One descent element study and five descent element prototypes
• Lockheed Martin – Littleton, Colorado
  • One descent element study, four descent element prototypes, one transfer vehicle study, and one refueling element study
• Masten Space Systems – Mojave, California
  • One descent element prototype
• Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems – Dulles, Virginia
  • One descent element study, four descent element prototypes, one refueling element study, and one refueling element prototype
• OrbitBeyond – Edison, New Jersey
  • Two refueling element prototypes
• Sierra Nevada Corporation, Louisville, Colorado, and Madison, Wisconsin
  • One descent element study, one descent element prototype, one transfer vehicle study, one transfer vehicle prototype, and one refueling element study
• SpaceX – Hawthorne, California
  • One descent element study
• SSL – Palo Alto, California
  • One refueling element study and one refueling element prototype