Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The beauty of the foldable is 2019 is that there’s no consensus yet on the “right” way to do things. We’ve seen a number of different takes on the space as the year has progressed, and no two are exactly the same.

Keep in mind that this device from Sharp is still very much a concept. And even if it does come to market, it’s still going to be tough to get your hands on the product here in the States, as Sharp has a virtually non-existent mobile footprint. Still, it’s nice to see someone going full clamshell.

So far, the Motorola RAZR patent and one of several TCL concepts are the closest we’ve seen. Ultimately the form factor is less about maximizing screen space than it is minimizing pocket real estate, with the unfolded prototype measuring a not-crazy 6.18 inches. There’s also a nice bit of nostalgia baked in for those of us who remember the days before every phone was a smart one.

Sharp certainly knows how to make a display, and while I don’t expect any phone from the company to set the world on fire, there’s probably something in the return of the clamshell, after all.

Amazon has a large and growing advertising business, but rival Walmart’s own ad business is much smaller. It’s now working to change that. Earlier this year, the retailer consolidated ad sales for its stores and websites and said it was ready to start monetizing its shopper data on a grander scale. Today, its efforts continue as Walmart says it has bought the advertising technology company, Polymorph Labs, to help it better compete via online digital ads, targeted using shopper data.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The San Francisco-based startup’s technology and assets will allow Walmart to deliver more relevant ads to online shoppers, the retailer says. Meanwhile, Polymorph’s team will join Walmart’s in-house advertising business, the Walmart Media Group.

Specifically, Polymorph’s technology includes a high-speed ad server, a self-serve interface, and server-side header bidding. This, says Walmart, will make advertising easier for thousands of brands and will deliver more relevant ads to consumers — and quicker than typically possible because of Polymorph’s “much faster” client-side server.

The technology complements Walmart’s existing ad tech investments, including its omni-channel ad targeting and measurement solution, and will allow it to later expand into new areas like real-time auctions across multiple pricing models (cost per click, cost per impression, and cost per conversation).

At Walmart, Polymorph’s technology will allow advertisers to target segments based on shopping behavior.

For example, an advertiser could choose to target a cat food buyer instead of a dog food buyer, then automate ad delivery and measure whether those ads led to sales.

The acquisition comes only months after Walmart brought its ad sales in-house, in an effort to build out a bigger advertising business. The move also allows big suppliers — like P&G, Unilever, and Mondelez — to interact with one ad team instead of different groups within and outside the retailer.

It also allows advertisers to leverage a unique combination of in-store and online shopper data from Walmart’s hundreds of millions of customers, making ad buying more efficient.

The acquisition comes at a time when Amazon has been rapidly growing its ad revenues by allowing merchants to pay for better placement in search ads. In February, research firm eMarketer upped its estimates as to how large Amazon’s ad business had become, in fact. It said that Amazon’s ad revenue had totaled $3.3 billion for 2017, up from an earlier estimate of $1.9 billion. And it said Amazon was on track to increase its ad revenues to $15 billion by 2020.

Walmart, on the other hand, has admitted its ad business is small by comparison.

“We have a tiny ad business,” CEO Doug McMillon told investors last October, according to a report by Bloomberg. “It could be bigger.”

There’s certainly that potential.

Walmart says 90 percent of U.S. consumers shop at Walmart every year and its stores and websites see nearly 160 million visitors every week.

Next month, Walmart says it’s hosting “Fifty-Two Sixty,” an event where CMOs, agency folks, and senior brand marketers will hobnob with Walmart execs to talk about brands should be thinking about their retail strategies.

“Walmart Media Group enables brands to reach more customers at scale and measure advertising effectiveness across the entire shopping journey,” said Stefanie Jay, Vice President and General Manager, Walmart Media Group, in a statement about today’s news. “Simply put, we can help brands understand if someone saw their ad on Walmart’s platform or across the Internet, and then purchased the product in-store or online. No one else can do this at scale like Walmart.”

Polymorph Labs was founded in 2013, and had proven its ad tech over the past five years, Walmart notes. Previously known as AdsNative, Polymorph Labs had raised $10.6 million from Rakuten Ventures, Interwest Partners and Onset Venturesi, according to Crunchbase.

RoCycle is, naturally, short for “recycling robot,” the latest offering out of MIT’s CSAIL lab. The pick and place ‘bot utilizes a unique combination of sensors to help distinguish the material differences of objects, in order to sort them ahead of the recycling process.

Built on top of a Rethink Robotics Baxter, the system utilizes a teflon gripper with built in sensors that are capable of determining an object’s makeup based on size and stiffness. It’s not completely perfect just yet.

The technology works thusly,

The team’s gripper first uses its “strain sensor” to estimate an object’s size, and then uses its two pressure sensors to measure the force needed to grasp an object. These metrics – along with calibration data on the size and stiffnesses of objects of different material types – is what gives the gripper a sense of what material the object is made of. (Since the tactile sensors are also conductive, they can detect metal by how much it changes the electrical signal.)

The school notes that it’s got a pretty good 85 percent accuracy rate when attempting to identify stationary objects.

That number drops a good deal down to 63 percent when objects are moving in a conveyer belt type situation — which is the kind of real world scenario in which such an object would likely be deployed. Much of the inaccuracy stems from products like cans where an outer paper level covers tin or aluminum.

The team is working on it by adding more sensors. It also seems likely that such a technology would be used in tandem with existing system, which use magnets to separate out metals and vision to determine material properties. CSAIL plans to combine the technology with a vision system in its own future experiments.

For the first time in years, Netflix is no longer the top grossing, non-game mobile app. Instead, that title now goes to dating app Tinder. The change in position is not surprising, given Netflix’s decision in December to stop paying the so-called “Apple tax.” That is, it no longer allows new users to sign up and subscribe to its service through its iOS application.

The change was said to cost Apple hundreds of millions in lost revenue per year, given that Netflix’s app had been the world’s top-earning, non-game app since Q4 2016. Now, instead of giving up its 15 to 30 percent cut of subscription revenue, new users have to sign up through Netflix’s website before they can use the app on mobile devices, including both iOS and Android. (Netflix had dropped in-app subscriptions on Android earlier.)

App store intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimated Netflix had earned $853 million in 2018 on the iOS App Store. A 30 percent cut would have been around $256 million. However, after the first year, subscription apps only have to pay out 15 percent to Apple. But Netflix had a special deal, according to John Gruber — it only had to pay 15 percent from the get-go.

In any event, it’s still a large sum. And one large enough to end Netflix’s reign at the top of the revenue charts.

In Q1 2019, Sensor Tower estimates Netflix pulled in $216.3 million globally, across both the Apple App Store and Google Play, down 15 percent quarter-over-quarter from $255.7 million in Q4 2018.

Meanwhile, Tinder’s revenue has climbed. In the first quarter, it saw revenue grow by 42 percent year-over-year, to reach $260.7 million, up from $183 million in Q1 2018.

That put it at the top, according to both Sensor Tower and App Annie’s estimates.

Beyond Tinder, Line, and Line Manga, the rest of the top grossing, non-game apps in Q1 2019 were also focused on streaming, music and video, in Sensor Tower’s analysis. This included Tencent Video (No. 3), iQIYI (No. 4), YouTube (No. 5), Pandora (No. 6), Kwai (No. 7), and Youku (No. 10).

Meanwhile the top downloaded, non-game apps in the quarter were largely those focused on social media, messaging and video. This included, in order: WhatsApp, Messenger, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, SHAREit, YouTube, LIKE Video, Netflix and Snapchat.

TikTok, notably, has held onto its No. 3 position, having grown its new users 70 percent year-over-year, by adding 188 million in Q1. The growth was driven by India, where 88.6 million new users joined the app, compared with “just” 13.2 million in the U.S. — or 181 percent year-over-year growth.

To date, Sensor Tower has seen the app installed over 1.1 billion times. (But keep in mind that’s not total users — many people install it on multiple devices. Nor is it monthly active users. On that front, the app has 500 million monthly actives, as of the end of its third quarter 2018.)

TikTok also did well on the revenue side thanks to in-app purchases, though not well enough to start ranking in the top charts. User spending was 222 percent higher in Q1 2019 versus Q1 2018, reaching an estimated $18.9 million worldwide.

Overall, Apple’s App Store accounted for 64 percent of revenue in Q1, with consumer spending reaching $12.4 billion compared to Google Play’s $7.1 billion. New app downloads slowed on iOS in Q1, decreasing 4.7 percent year-over-year to 7.4 billion, while Google Play downloads grew 18.8 percent to 20.7 billion.

GoFundMe.com has made a name for itself as a wildly successful platform for people to raise awareness virally and collect money for their personal causes, with $5 billion coming from 50 million donors since launching in 2010. More recently, it has been building out a wider presence working with charities.

It is making the latter more official today, with the launch of GoFundMe.org. And alongside this, it’s debuting a new way to donate to larger fundraising efforts by way of GoFundMe.org Causes, which lets people make donations that might go to one of many charities working to support a variety of general causes, initially covering six “evergreen” areas like animal rescue, K-12 classrooms and mental health.

GoFundMe says that the tax-deductible donations that people make on GoFundMe.org will be disbursed to hundreds of verified fundraisers and charities related to the cause.

“Together with GoFundMe, we are expanding the benefits of social fundraising and continuing to support some of the most impactful needs within our community with tax-deductible donations,” said Yoshi Inoue, CEO of GoFundMe.org. Inoue had previously been legal counsel at GoFundMe, and previous to that had worked at The Life You Can Save, another organization that helps recommend charities for those who want to give but are not sure of what steps to take next.

GoFundMe.org is not exactly new: it is the new name for the Direct Impact Fund, which has been working with GoFundMe since 2017 — and before that, it was working with Crowdrise, which GoFundMe acquired that year — to help pool funding for mass events like natural or man-made disasters, where it helped distribute what got raised to charities helping to address individuals’ needs. It’s an independent, registered 501(c)(3) public charity.

YouCaring, another acquisition GoFundMe has made in its consolidation push in the causes and charitable giving space, had also been a leading platform for larger charitable efforts. At one point, it had the distinction of running the largest fundraising campaign of any kind, on any platform, with the JJ Watt’s Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund ($37 million raised). Having one platform for GoFundMe to collect for wider causes like this, which in itself is a charity, is a smart move.

The renaming and launch of the Causes element underscores two areas of development for GoFundMe.

First, it’s creating a more formal way for those who want to donate money to charity, but unaware of the best way to go about doing this, to have a more obvious channel for doing this, distinct from the personal causes that are on GoFundMe.

Second, it’s underscoring GoFundMe’s own hope that people do not associate it just with personal fundraising (sometimes with very questionable ends) but also with a wider spirit of giving, and giving back. That is something it has been working on for a while, for example when it partnered with former First Lady Michelle Obama on the Global Girls Alliance.

This is, therefore, more to the spirit of how people sometimes come to platforms like GoFundMe, even if it’s not always what they find there (since the majority of campaigns will be for individuals). That is something that Facebook had capitalised on with its own launch of fundraising options for non-profits on its platform several years ago.

“We’re dedicated to bringing more people together to support causes they care about,” says Raquel Rozas, GoFundMe chief marketing officer. “By working with our non-profit arm, GoFundMe.org, we’re providing people the opportunity to give to one topic they’re passionate about rather than having to pick just one fundraiser to support.”

The future of mobility can’t happen without cultivating the next generation of creative thinkers and makers. That’s why we’re inviting students with a passion for mobility-related tech to join us at TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 on July 10 in San Jose, Calif. If you’re in high school or college, this is your chance to learn from and network with the top minds and influencers in mobility.

Student tickets cost only $45 — saving you $250 over general admission. Apply here for a student ticket, and once you’re verified you’ll get an email with a ticket.

TechCrunch’s day-long intensive Session focuses on the future of mobility and transportation, two rapidly evolving industries inextricably linked by innovations in AI, robotics, electric battery development, digital platforms and manufacturing. Get ready for a program jam-packed with interviews, demos, panel discussions and workshops with the founders, investors and technologists currently pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

You may have heard that Nuro co-founder and CEO Dave Ferguson will be a featured speaker; Amnon Shashua, co-founder, president and CEO of Mobileye, will also grace the stage. Mobileye, an automotive sensor company acquired by Intel (for a cool $15.3 billion), plays in the emerging world of autonomous vehicle technology. We’ll be announcing even more speakers, panels, workshops and demos in the coming weeks, so check back for updates.

If an internship or a job in mobility is on your to-do list, you won’t find a better networking playground than TC Sessions: Mobility 2019. 1,000+ attendees — technologists, founders, researchers and investors — will be on hand to learn, teach and map out the future of mobility. It’s a great opportunity to rub — and impress — influential elbows.

Want to earn a free ticket? Join our Ambassador Program by downloading the Social Ladder app. Share your unique code with friends, family and colleagues to sell tickets. When you earn enough points, you score a free pass to TC Mobility 2019.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 takes place on July 10 in San Jose, Calif. Reserve your student ticket today, and come connect with mobility’s top names, movers and shakers — a community that creates opportunity. We can’t wait to see you in July!

When it comes to competing for the hearts and minds of creatives pros, some (see: Huawei) attempt to beat Apple at its own game. Others go an entirely different route. Acer’s ConceptD 9 falls firmly in the latter camp.

More so that the rest of the line announced at an event today in Brooklyn, the 9 lives up to the “concept” part of the product name, with a unique swiveling tablet display that works as a sort of easel with Wacom pen support.

With countless hybrid devices having flood the market in recent years, the ConceptD9 is among the more unique, eschewing the kind of Surface form factor most of these companies go in for.

Nabbing marketshare from Apple is a tough ask when it comes to the company’s core of creative pros, but recent design decisions have left the company more vulnerable. Acer’s never been the first name one thinks of in the category, but the product offers some of the same drawing/3D design functionality Microsoft has featured in its much larger Surface Studio all-in-one.

The hybrid launches in June, sporting a hefty $4,999 price tag. It’s a novel approach to the category, but the company may have already priced itself out

Tesla and Panasonic have paused plans to add more battery production lines at Gigafactory 1, its massive factory outside of Reno, Nevada that is a cornerstone to the automaker’s business.

The Nikkei Asian Review initially reported Thursday that Tesla and Panasonic were freezing plans to expand capacity. The partners had planned to increase capacity by 50 percent next year, but financial problems have forced a rethink, Nikkei reported without citing sources. Nikkei also reported that Panasonic was suspending a planned investment in Tesla’s automotive battery and EV plant in Shanghai.

Tesla has never announced Panasonic as an investor or partner in its China plant.

TechCrunch confirmed that Tesla has paused plans to add more battery production lines and will instead focus its efforts on existing equipment.

Tesla stressed that it will continue to make new investments as needed into the plant. However, the automaker noted that attention and investments might be focused on improving existing equipment to increase battery cell output.

Gigafactory 1, which broke ground in June 2014, is a critical ingredient in Tesla’s goal to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy by expanding global battery capacity and reducing the cost of electric vehicles. And Panasonic has been its most important partner as a supplier and partner in that project.

Gigafactory 1 produces Model 3 electric motors and battery packs, in addition to Tesla’s energy storage products, Powerwall and Powerpack. Panasonic makes the cells, which Tesla then uses to make battery packs for its electric vehicles.

The factory is being built in phases and is currently about 30 percent complete. It has has a footprint of more than 1.9 million square feet and house more than 4.9 million square feet of operational space across several floors.

Tesla has said that the factory is expected to reduce the per-kilowatt-hour cost of Tesla lithium-ion battery packs by more than 30 percent, which will in turn drive down the cost for its electric vehicles.

The report from Nikkei suggests that falling demand prompted the change in plans, which lies in contrast to comments previously made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk . In the company’s last earnings call, Musk said demand for battery cells has outpaced supply. According to Tesla that demand hasn’t ebbed despite its recently released first-quarter delivery report that showed a nearly one-third drop from the previous quarter. Tesla has blamed the drop on problems delivering its Model 3 electric car to Europe and China, not demand.

The SoftBank Vision Fund has been screaming from the venture headlines the last few months, driven by eye-popping rounds (and valuations!) into some of the most notable startups around the world. Yet, SoftBank isn’t the only player rapidly buying up the cap tables of top startups. Indeed, another firm, more than a century old, has been fighting for that late-stage equity crown.

Baillie Gifford .

… Who the what?

When our fintech contributor Gregg Schoenberg interviewed Charles Plowden, the firm’s joint senior partner, about the firm’s prodigious investing, we realized that we have never gone in-depth on one of the most influential investors in Silicon Valley. So here goes.

Baillie Gifford is a 110-year-old asset management firm based out of Edinburgh, Scotland, and has long had a penchant for pre-IPO tech companies. The firm was an early investor into some of the world’s most valuable private and public tech companies, boasting a roster of portfolio companies that includes unicorns from nearly all generations in modern tech, including everything from Amazon, Google, and Salesforce to Tesla, Airbnb, Spotify, newly-public Lyft, Palantir, and even Space X.

Baillie Gifford’s reach stretches way beyond the 280/101 corridor. The firm has an extensive history of investing across geographies, with one of its first and most successful investments coming from an early entry into Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba. More recently, Baillie Gifford even held a stake in recently IPO’d Chinese electric autonomous vehicle manufacturer NIO, and one the firm’s largest current holdings is South African internet conglomerate Naspers — who itself is an active investor and developer of emerging market tech infrastructure.

The firm’s low profile belies its aggressive capital deployment strategy. According to data from Pitchbook, Baillie Gifford was involved in roughly 20 deals in 2019 and was involved as a lead or participant in transactions worth over $21 billion in aggregate total deal size — beating out behemoth Tiger Global who tallied roughly $13.25 billion on the same metric.

The firm has about $2 billion focused on private companies, so while it is aggressive in getting into later-stage rounds, it is not nearly operating at the scale of say the Vision Fund or Tiger Global. While the asset manager primarily focuses on public-equity investing, the firm has participated in investment rounds as early as Series A according to Pitchbook and CrunchBase data.

Overall, the firm manages $221 billion in assets under management as of January 2019.

As one of the earliest asset managers to invest in pre-IPO tech companies, Baillie Gifford has sourced investments through its long-standing reputation as an investor. The firm first began really diving into private tech investing in the wake of the dot-com bubble. The firm doubled down on the tech sector at a time when few others were investing and sifted through the blood bath to find cheap entryways into companies that are now amongst the world’s largest.

Today, however, the landscape is undoubtedly much different. Tech companies now make up four of the top five largest companies in the world by market cap, and seven out of the top ten. Now, everyone wants a piece of the pie and there seems to be more checks being thrown at founders than most can even fit in their wallets.

With more capital at their fingertips than ever before, founders are opting to keep their startups private for longer in order to avoid the stress of having to deal with short-term public market investors who are more often than not looking for the first opportunity to cash out. So why, amongst so much choice, do companies continue to partner with Baillie Gifford?

Plowden has some insights on that front in our interview, but the summary is that Baillie Gifford just sees itself as a partner. Unlike its peers and most investment managers, Baillie Gifford has no outside shareholder owners to report to. As a partnership, wholly-owned and run by just 44 partners, the firm doesn’t face the organizational constraints that beset most firms that manage billions and billions in assets.

The result? In short, Baillie Gifford has quietly been making a killing, and probably drinking some good scotch along the way as well.

“It is our contention that the investment industry may be experiencing a peak of its own, in this case the point of the maximum rate at which it extracts value from its clients’ assets. Let’s call it Peak Gravy.” That’s a recent quote from Tom Coutts, who is one of a few dozen partners at Baillie Gifford (See Arman Tabatabai’s profile here). It’s also typical of the provocative sentiments offered by this band of fund managers who are based in Edinburgh, but scour the world looking for opportunities.

In an effort to distinguish its world view, the firm has introduced the somewhat eyebrow-raising tagline, “We’re actual investors.” For many US technology observers, though, Baillie Gifford is known for its investments in unicorns. But as Extra Crunch’s executive editor Danny Crichton and I found out in a recent conversation with Charles Plowden (one of two senior partners and the overseer of the firm’s investment departments), there’s a lot more to the story and motivations behind this unique 110-year-old partnership that’s still going strong.