Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Today at Tesla’s first Autonomy Day event, Elon Musk took questions from the press but didn’t have time for questions about Lidar. Historically, he’s been vocal about the technology, and this time he put it as clear as he could. 

“LIDAR is a fool’s errand,” Elon Musk said. “Anyone relying on LIDAR is doomed. Doomed! [They are] expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see.”

The topic was brought up by a question about if Tesla’s just-revealed self-driving hardware could handle input from LIDAR. Tesla’s vehicle’s currently uses several sources of data to acquire autonomous driving: radar, GPS, maps, ultrasonic sensors and more. But not LIDAR like some of Tesla’s chief competitors. Elon Musk previously explained that he views LIDAR as a crutch for self-driving vehicles. For Tesla, cameras are the keys to the future and its CEO sees a future when cameras will enable Tesla to see through the most adverse weather situations.

Uber, Waymo, Cruise and several others use the technology in their self-driving technology stack. As proponents of the technology, they point to LIDAR’s ability to see through challenging weather and light conditions better than existing cameras. They’re expensive. And often hungry for power. That’s where Tesla’s solution around cameras comes in.

The company today detailed its current generation self-driving computer that works with all existing Tesla vehicles. Once the software is ready, it will enable all Teslas to drive autonomously with their existing sensor set — at least that’s what the company says — and that sensor set doesn’t include LIDAR. Instead, the sensors inside Tesla vehicles lean on a neural network that’s trained by data collected by all Tesla vehicles.

“Everyone’s training the network all the time,” Musk said. “Whether autopilot is on or off, the network is being trained. Every mile that’s driven for the car that’s hardware 2 or above is training the network.”

The resulting data is kind of scary, Musk mused later in the press conference. But presumably not as scary as relying on LIDAR.

As the internet TV services have matured, their pricing has as well. The majority have raised their price points — some have even done so multiple times. Today, Philo is following suit…but only by a little. The streaming TV service has been one of the cheapest on the market, with an entry-level plan that began at only $16 per month for 45 channels. Now, it’s doing away with this super low-cost plan, and will only offer the existing $20 per month plan instead.

The $20 per month plan has offered 58 channels, as an upgrade from the basic plan with cable TV favorites. The upgrade adds on a few more networks, like MTV Live, BET Her, Nicktoons, Logo, Cooking Channel, Destination America, Discovery Family Channel, Discovery Life Channel, and others. These, arguably, aren’t all “must-haves” — and likely, few of its subscribers chose to the higher priced package.

The company declined to say how many customers it has, or the percentage of customers who had subscribed to its $16 and $20 plans.

With the price changes that go live on May 6, 2019, all new Philo customers will only have the option to sign up for the $20 per month page.

Existing subscribers will be grandfathered into the current pricing, however. They’ll also still be able to move back and forth between the two current plans, even after the May 6 deadline (so long as their subscription doesn’t lapse.)

Company CEO Andrew McCollum explained the move as needed to keep up with the times — and to address the rising operating costs Philo faces — in a statement posted to the company website.

“At Philo, we care deeply about creating the best TV experience possible at an affordable price. …Consolidating into a single $20 package was the best way for us to maintain the same offering we have today without raising prices for everyone, or having to cut back in places we strive to excel, like our customer support,” he said.

The 18-month old company is one of the few that hadn’t yet rolled out a price increase.

Hulu raised prices for its Live TV service in January, and YouTube TV just did so again just a couple of weeks ago. Sling TV, DirecTV Now, and PlayStation Vue have all seen price hikes, too. And in the subscription video on demand market, Netflix has been creeping ever higher, as well.

With new video services from Disney, Apple and WarnerMedia set to arrive this year, some consumers will be looking to shift funds around to afford their new subscriptions. Philo could benefit if subscribers drop higher-priced services in order to save money.

Despite the slight price bump, Philo still remains a low-cost option because it strategically opted to not stream sports. That allowed it to pass along the cost savings along to customers who could watch sports in other ways (or who didn’t care to watch sports at all.)

The company today caters to a younger demographic and has been developing a co-viewing, social feature to differentiate itself further. This feature is now in internal testing, the company said this month.

Over the last five years, almost everything about web development has changed. Oh, the old tech still works, your WordPress and Ruby On Rails sites still function just fine — but they’re increasingly being supplanted by radical new approaches. The contents of your browser are being sliced, diced, rendered, and processed in wholly new ways nowadays, and the state of art is currently in serious flux. What follows is a brief tour of what I like to call the New New Web:

Table of Contents

1. Single-Page Apps
2. Headless CMSes
3. Static Site Generators
4. The JAMStack
5. Hosting and Serverlessness
6. Summary

---

1. Single-Page Apps

These have become so much the norm — our web projects at HappyFunCorp are almost always single-page apps nowadays — that it’s easy to forget how new and radical they were when they first emerged, in the days of jQuery running in pages dynamically built from templates on the server.

Evisort, a document and contract management company, left one of its document databases unsecured, exposing thousands of documents.

The startup, founded by former Harvard and MIT students in 2016, bills itself as an artificial intelligence contract management company, which it says helps to better organize its customers’ legal documents and contracts. Among its claims, the company can evaluate and pull out the most relevant information in a 30-page contract in a matter of seconds. And so far, the investors like the pitch, securing $4.5 million in seed funding led by Village Global and Amity Ventures, with contributions from Accenture and SAP.

According to an anonymous tip sent in to TechCrunch, the company left an Elasticsearch database open without a password, allowing anyone to search the files inside. When reached, Evisort’s chief executive Jerry Ting said the database was “for testing and development purposes only” and an audit was under way.

While some of the documents were marked “dummy” and “test” files, many documents seen by TechCrunch contained customer data.

“These are confidential agreements between many established large famous companies that are hosted on the internet for anyone to see,” said the anonymous tipster, who provided links to several files in the database.

The company lists Stack Overflow and TravelZoo as customers. The database also contained non-disclosure agreements between Evisort and Samsung. A similar agreement with Squarespace found in the database was signed by Ting.

Many of the files included employee contracts, loan agreements (one worth $200 million) and resumes. We reached out to several people whose information was found in the database. One person we spoke to said they had no idea how their resume got into Evisort’s database. Other files appeared to be contracts and agreements submitted by Evisort customers.

Many of the documents we saw had confidential information.

Another file contained details of an agreement by Evisort and a third-party security company, dated February 21, to conduct a penetration test on its network — a way of finding and fixing security vulnerabilities before they are exploited.

Evisort shut down the database within an hour of TechCrunch reaching out.

In a follow-up email, Ting conceded that some customer data was exposed. (Ting declared his email “off the record,” which requires both parties agree to the terms in advance, but we are printing the reply as we were given no opportunity to reject.)

“The database is not part of our production environment, but a part of our internal development environment used by our engineers,” he said.

“Although our investigation is ongoing, the vast majority of information contained in the development database was placeholder or benign information used for testing purposes,” he said in the email. “However, it appears that there may be a small number legitimate documents in this environment.”

“As part of our investigation, we will be reviewing the entire data set in the environment, along with any available logging data, to determine what information may have been affected and we will be communicating directly with any of our customers who could be affected,” he added.

Ting added that the company is “in the process of retaining” an outside forensic firm to assess the impact on customers.

Evisort didn’t say how long the data was exposed. Data search engine Binary Edge first detected the system on March 22.

It’s the latest in a string of sizable data exposures in recent months, including text messages, medical records, a watchlist of high-risk individuals, a robocalling firm, millions of mortgage and loan documents and even a spam operation.

Read more:

• A leaky database of SMS text messages exposed password resets and two-factor codes
• A huge trove of medical records and prescriptions found exposed
• We found a massive spam operation — and sunk its server
• Dow Jones’ watchlist of 2.4 million high-risk individuals has leaked
• Robocaller firm Stratics Networks exposed millions of call recordings
• Massive mortgage and loan data leak gets worse as original documents also exposed

Anthony just returned from Vancouver, where he was covering the TED2019 conference — a much-parodied gathering where VCs, executives and other bigwigs gather to exchange ideas.

This year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey got the biggest headlines, but the questions raised in his onstage interview kept popping up throughout the week: How has social media warped our democracy? How can the big online platforms fight back against abuse and misinformation? And what is the Internet good for, anyway? Wednesday at 11:00 am PT, Anthony will recap the five-day event’s most interesting talks and provocative ideas with Extra Crunch members on a conference call.

Tune in to dig into what happened onstage and off and ask Anthony any and all things media.

To listen to this and all future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.

It’s one of the greatest technology “startup” success stories of the personal computer and smartphone eras. Yet, despite selling 59 million smartphones and netting $27 billion in revenue last quarter in its first-ever public earnings report this morning, a strange and tantalizing question shrouds the world’s number two handset manufacturer behind Samsung.

Who owns Huawei?

To hear the company tell it, it’s 100% employee-owned. In a statement circulated last week, it said that “Huawei is a private company wholly owned by its employees. No government agency or outside organization holds shares in Huawei or has any control over Huawei.”

That’s a simple statement, but oh is it so much more complicated.

As with all things related to Huawei, which outside of its 5G archrival Qualcomm is probably the tech company most entrenched in geopolitics today, the story is never as simple as it appears at first glance.

Sarah Paiji had the idea to launch the eco-friendly refillable cleaning supply retailer Blueland after hearing about the abundance of microplastics in the water she was using to dilute her child’s baby formula.

Paiji wanted to cut back on her plastic consumption, and reduce her contribution to the overabundance of plastic waste in the environment, but felt that as a consumer she didn’t have a choice. So the former venture capital investor from the consumer startup brand studio Launch set out to create one.

The answer she came up with is Blueland, a new line of cleaning products that launches today. Blueland’s cleaners — a bathroom cleaner, glass cleaner, and multi-purpose cleaner —  are sold as tablets that customers add to the cleaning containers the company provides.

“These cleaners are mostly water,” says Paiji. “I’m paying for a plastic bottle that I don’t really need and water which I have at home for free.”

By adding water to the company’s cleaning formulation in refillable containers the company sells, Blueland thinks its customers over time can eliminate the need for 100 billion single-use plastic bottles in the U.S.

To provide the initial marketing push and continue its product development and sales efforts, the company has raised $3 million in a new round of funding from Global Founders Capital, Comcast Ventures, Cross Culture Ventures, BAM Ventures, along with individual investors like Justin Timberlake and the founder of the Los Angeles-based sustainable fast food chain, Sweetgreen, Nicholas Jammet; and sustainable online food retailer, Thrive Market, Nick Green.

After coming up with the idea Paiji had to find a manufacturer, who’d be willing to help reinvent an entire product category for a startup retailer.

Blueland also wasn’t Paiji’s first choice for a new startup idea. That would have been a botox bar that would sell cosmetic treatments to folks who wanted treatments, but didn’t want to pay high prices for them.

After putting the brakes on the botox business, Paiji reached out on LinkedIn to Syed Naqzi, the director of research and development at Method with her pitch for the cleaning product business.

With Naqzi on board, the company began filing patents for its unique process and the products it’s bringing to market, says Paiji. “Everything is proprietary everything is backed by patents,” she says.

While Paiji won’t disclose who the manufacturing partner is for the cleaning supplies, she did note that the company was in an adjacent consumables category to cleaners.

Within a year of reaching out to Naqzi last April, Paiji had a product supplier and the $3 million she needed to go to market.

Joining Paiji and Naqzi in setting up the business was John Moscari, a fellow Harvard Business School classmate of Paiji’s who’d launched a company called Bundle Organics.

The company’s refills cost $2 and the initial cleanup kits clock in at $30. “With the refills it’s unequivocally cheaper than buying a full bottle on the market,” says Paiji.

The refills are 300 times lighter and 200 times smaller than traditional packaging for cleaning supplies and the company has plans to develop new products with similar packaging footprints across adjacent categories each quarter.

“Just from a shipping perspective alone we cut out 90% because one to one we’re that much smaller,” says Paiji. 

Other, far larger, companies are thinking about their waste streams and end of life issues around their products — an issue which is becoming more important since China tightened the regulations around the scrap materials it would collect — and the amount of contamination those pallets of scrap could contain.

Last year, a coalition of major manufacturers of consumer packaged goods and foods formed Loop — an ambitious project to create zero-waste supply chains for their products with consumers who’d opt in.

Taking their cues from the milkman models of years long passed, companies like Procter & Gamble, Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever, worked with the company TerraCycle to develop an updated version of the plan.

Consumers get refillable containers and as they use up the items, they can call a Loop pick up driver to take their containers away to be refilled or send them off at a UPS store.

Paiji argues that Blueland does something different — with lower carbon emissions coming from the process and a greater impact on reuse.

“We’ve completely invented a new form factor for this,” she says. “And we’re providing a more convenient way for people to reuse and refill.”

 

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Samsung reportedly pushes back Galaxy Fold release

Four days out from the Galaxy Fold’s official release date, Samsung is pushing things back a bit, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. There’s no firm time frame for the launch, though the phone is still expected “in the coming weeks.”

TechCrunch’s reviewer Brian Heater says he hasn’t experienced any issues with his device, but a number of others reported malfunctioning displays.

2. Tencent’s latest investment is an app that teaches grannies in China to dance

Called Tangdou, or “sugar beans” in Chinese, the app announced that it has raised a Series C funding round led by Tencent.

3. SiriusXM’s new streaming-only ‘Essential’ plan targets smart speaker owners

The company has launched a new plan called SiriusXM Essential, targeting those who listen in-home and on mobile devices. The streaming-only plan is also more affordable — $8 per month, versus the $15.99 per month (and up) plans for SiriusXM’s satellite radio service for cars.

4. Confirmed: Pax Labs raises $420M at a valuation of $1.7B

That’s right, $420 million for a vape maker. CEO Bharat Vasan said, “This financing round allows us to invest in new products and new markets, including international growth in markets like Canada and exploring opportunities in hemp-based CBD extracts.”

5. Sony launches a taxi-hailing app to rival Uber in Tokyo

The service is a joint venture between Sony, its payment services subsidiary and five licensed taxi companies. Because ride-hailing with civilian cars is illegal in Japan, the service will focus on connecting licensed taxis with passengers.

6. The Exit: an AI startup’s McPivot

An in-depth interview with investor Adam Fisher about the recent McDonald’s acquisition of Dynamic Yield. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

This week’s episode of Equity addresses the aforementioned cannabis vaping round, followed up by an Equity Shot about the Fastly S-1. Meanwhile, on Original Content we reviewed Donald Glover’s “Guava Island” and discussed the new season of “Game of Thrones.”

Samsung has just confirmed that it will delay the release of the Galaxy Fold. Confirming this morning’s report, the company sent TechCrunch a statement noting that the foldable will not make its previously announced Friday ship date.

Once again, no details on availability are forthcoming — which is honestly probably for the best, as the company assesses the situation. The news follows reports of malfunctioning displays from multiple reviewers. They were in the minority — ours is still working just fine — but three or four in such a small sample size is enough to raise concern.

The company says it will “announce the release date in the coming weeks.”

The statement is understandably still a bit defensive, but this time out, Samsung actually has “initial findings” to share from those faulty units. According to the company,

Initial findings from the inspection of reported issues on the display showed that they could be associated with impact on the top and bottom exposed areas of the hinge. There was also an instance where substances found inside the device affected the display performance.

It’s bad news for the device that’s being positioned as the future of both Samsung and the mobile space in general, but the company’s been through worse PR and come out largely unscathed. The Galaxy Note 7 ultimately did little to damage Samsung’s bottomline, thanks to a booming component business. And that product was already shipping — resulting in two separate recalls.

At least here the company was able to delay the device before it started shipping. It’s hard to say precisely how widespread these issues are — and preproduction units are notorious for having issues. But the statement does appear to a cautious admission that there’s more going on here than just reviewers accidentally peeling back the protective layer.

 

JCPenney quietly ditched Apple Pay this month. The decision was announced in response to a customer complaint on Twitter, but without any context or further explanation at the time. JCPenney had first rolled out Apple Pay into testing in 2015, then expanded to all its U.S. stores the following year, and later to its mobile app.

The retailer now claims the move was necessitated by the April 13, 2019 deadline in the U.S. for supporting EMV contactless chip functionality.

As of this date, all terminals at U.S. merchants locations that accept contactless payments must actively support EMV contactless chip functionality, and the legacy MSD (magnetic stripe data) contactless technology must be retired.

JCPenney was not ready to comply, it seems, so it switched off all contactless payment options as a result. However, it hasn’t ruled out re-enabling them later on, it seems.

In a statement provided to TechCrunch, JCPenney explained its decision:

A third-party credit card brand made the requirement for all merchants to actively support EMV contactless functionality effective April 13, retiring the legacy MSD contactless technology in place. Given the resources and lead time associated with meeting the new mandate, JCPenney chose to suspend all contactless payment options until a later date. Customers still have the ability to complete their transactions manually by inserting or swiping their physical credit cards at our point-of-sale terminals in stores, an option employed by the vast majority of JCPenney shoppers.

It’s worth noting, too, is that JCPenney is hinting here at low Apple Pay adoption among its customer base — as the “vast majority” of shoppers pay using a physical card.

That means the retailer’s decision to re-enable Apple Pay at a later date may still be in question — especially as this change allows JCPenney to fully take back ownership of customer purchase data.

Customer data is an important part of JCPenney’s plan to get the business back on its feet. Under new CEO Jill Soltau, who took the job last October, the retailer has been closing underperforming stores, hiring new execs to focus on merchandise selection, and eliminating its low-margin items, noted Bloomberg following the company’s most recent earnings. It’s also reducing inventory and adjusting its buying process to ensure it doesn’t end up with excess inventory going forward.

And, as Soltau explained to investors in February, the retailer is rethinking its pricing and promotions strategies, too.

“I think that’s one of the key initiatives that we’ll be working on here in the coming months because we’re not being as strategic in how we speak to the customer and engage with the customer through our pricing and promotion,” she said. “And I would frankly say it might be a little bit confusing, and you might not know exactly when you can get the best value at JCPenney,” the CEO added.

Customer purchase data allows a retailer to better target its customers with relevant promotions, as stores are able to collect the customer’s name and card number at point of sale, which they can then combine with other demographic data like the customer’s address, phone and email.

Apple Pay, meanwhile, prevents this level of access — something that customers like, but retailers traditionally have not. In fact, the lack of access to customer data was one reason why retailers were hesitant to warm up to Apple Pay in the first place, and spent years developing their rival solution, CurrentC, which ultimately failed.

Today, many major retailers incentivize customers to use their own payments solution instead of Apple Pay — as with Walmart Pay, Sam’s Club’s Scan-and-Go, or like Target does with its store card, which can be combined with Cartwheel discounts in a single barcode scanned at point-of-sale.

Apple Pay is also a more secure method of payment, which today’s consumers prefer — particularly in the case of retailers who have suffered major data breaches, like JCPenney has in the past. Plus, Apple Pay allows shoppers to carry only their phone — not a wallet stuffed with physical cards.

The removal of Apple Pay from JCPenney stores was first reported by MacRumors, following the retailer’s tweet. 9to5Mac also noted Apple Pay was pulled from the JCPenney app.

JCPenney today has over 800 stores in 49 states.

Despite being dropped by JCPenney, Apple Pay remains a top mobile payment solution. In January, it was accepted by 74 of the top 100 U.S. merchants, and 65 percent of all retail locations across the country.