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1. Alibaba, Tencent and other major names form $1.45B ride-hailing venture

For the last two years, Didi has been the dominant car-hailing force in China and its success has spawned a handful of competitors. Now another notable challenger has stepped up.

T3, which is short for “top 3,” officially launched after a dozen entities, including three major automakers and China’s largest internet companies, agreed to lay out a total of 9.76 billion yuan ($1.45 billion) for the joint venture.

2. Google has scaled back, moved forward with robotics

The company recently gave The New York Times a look at what it’s been working on in a new Mountain View lab. The results, it seems, are modest by design.

3. The danger of ‘I already pay for Apple News+’

Josh Constine lays out some big issues with Apple’s subscription news initiative.

4. Google makes emails more dynamic with AMP for Email

AMP for Email is Google’s effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences. The hope is that basic messages can become a surface for actually getting things done.

5. Unicorns aren’t profitable, and Wall Street doesn’t care

Lyft, a ride-hailing company expected to go public this week, is not profitable. It posted losses of $911 million in 2018, a statistic that will make it the biggest loser amongst U.S. startups to have gone public.

6. FTC tells ISPs to disclose exactly what information they collect on users and what it’s for

The Federal Trade Commission, in what could be considered a prelude to new regulatory action, has issued an order to several major internet service providers requiring them to share every detail of their data collection practices.

7. Airbnb just checked in its 500 millionth guest

Airbnb says it has just recorded its 500 millionth guest arrival across one of its 6 million homes, yurts, tree houses, boats and more.

How do you know your product is priced too low? One way is when you raise the price between 13 and 18%, you have almost no churn, not many complaints, and your stock price actually goes up!

When Netflix  class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" href="https://medium.com/r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmoney.com%2Fmoney%2F5504301%2Fnetflix-raising-prices-stock%2F" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" data-href="https://medium.com/r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmoney.com%2Fmoney%2F5504301%2Fnetflix-raising-prices-stock%2F">increased their prices a few weeks ago, investors were so confident in the revenue increase that would be delivered that they didn’t even wait to see what customer’s reaction would be.

Netflix spends an astounding amount of money on content rights and content development — supposedly budgeting $15 billion for 2019 — and resulting in $3 billion in negative cash flow, which is heavily funded with debt — at $10.4 billion by the end 2018.

Even at its already large size, the company continues to grow rapidly, so I am not suggesting their cash flow or spending is any cause for concern.

What I am suggesting is that Netflix is too cheap, and could likely be cashflow profitable without reducing investment in content, by implementing some pricing model changes. The fact that customers and investors did not seem to bat an eyelid at the recent price increase gives me some confidence that they are not maximizing profit per customer!

In some scenarios, especially early on, companies decide to focus on customer acquisition at the expense of revenue maximization. Other than the unfathomable madness of some companies that do this while running a negative GROSS margin (a big ‘thank you’ to their investors for subsidizing consumers!), market share ‘land grabs’ in B2C can make sense. It looks like Netflix has been focussed on market share for a long time and continues to focus on maximizing subscriber numbers over profit.

But is it really a linear equation — where an increase in price will result in a decrease in new subscribers or total subscribers? Clearly not in this case. Wouldn’t it be worth at least testing variations on the pricing model in somemarket segments to discover the optimum value price?

Quick definition — the Optimum Value Price is where you can capture the highest number of customers, at the right price for each type of customer.  

Right now — Netflix differentiates price in 2 ways only — number of screens, and HD or Ultra HD. I think Ultra HD is a bit of a red herring as most devices and connections are not capable of getting it, and there’s not much content either. So really — the primary driver of price is number of screens — 1 for $9, 2 for $13 and 4 for $16.

This assumes the only difference between customers is the number of devices they want to watch content on at the same time. This is a misnomer. No one is watching 2 devices simultaneously— one with each eye?! So it’s really the number of users on an account —  1 user for $9, 2 users for $13 (nearly a 30% discount off list) or 4 users for $16 (a 45% discount from a single user account).

Consider some of the likely differences between consumers, and the variables by which they derive value: 

• Number of Hours Watched
• Variety of Content Consumed (number of different shows and movies)
• ‘Binge Watchers’
• Demographics (geographic and individual)
• Devices, Connections and Locations Watched From
• Frequency and Length of Simultaneous Connections

If you wanted to be aggressive, you could think about time of day, early access to new series and movies, premium content, subscriptions to different genres. But lets keep it simple for now — here’s a slightly more value-based pricing plan idea:

The base plan price hasn’t been changed— but that may be doable — so these increases are from what might already be a not optimized starting point.

On the Unlimited Plan — think about how many people have more than 1 user, watch Netflix multiple times a week, don’t ever want to think about usage limits and are not price sensitive to $30 a month for something they use regularly (and that has exclusive content they really want to see —  Netflix has so many ‘must watch’ shows!)? Is it 10% of US subscribers? If so, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that’s likely over $1bn in 100% margin contributing revenue.

The real question is this — if Netflix changed its pricing model to be a little more complex and value-based — what is the level of change that can be sustained without materially reducing subscriber retention and addition? My guess is there’s at least enough leeway to reduce the need for debt to fund content.

At a time when tech giants have come under fire for failing to protect the private data of their users, Twitter took over one of its user’s accounts for fun and then tweeted jokes about reading the account’s private messages. The account, to be clear, was willingly volunteered for this prank by social media consultant Matt Navarra, who’s well-known in some Twitter circles for being among the first to spot new features on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

In fact, TechCrunch itself has credited Navarra on a number of occasions for his tweets about features like Twitter’s new camera, Facebook’s “time spent” dashboard, Facebook’s “Explore” feed, Instagram’s “Do Not Disturb” setting, and more. Several other tech news sites have done the same, which means Navarra’s private messages (direct messages, aka DM’s) probably included a lot of conversations between himself and various reporters.

He’s also regularly tipped off about upcoming features or those in testing on sites like Twitter. One could assume he has regular conversations with his network of tipsters through DM’s, as well.

Initially, we believed the whole “account takeover” was just a joke – perhaps a case of Navarra poking fun at himself and his own obsession with social media. After all, “takeovers” are a common social media stunt these days, particularly on Instagram Stories. But they usually involve an individual tweeting for a brand – not a brand tweeting for an individual.

Navarra had the idea on Monday, and tweeted out a call for someone to run his account for a day.

He tells TechCrunch he had a tragic incident in his family, and offered the chance for someone else to tweet as him for the day so he could take a day away from Twitter. He also thought it could be fun. (Twitter tells us he remained logged in while the company was tweeting from his account, however.)

Navarra says he was surprised that Twitter volunteered for the job, and he agreed to give them control. Most of his followers – fellow social media enthusiasts – were excited and amused about the plan, which they touted as “epic,” “gold,” and a “great idea!”

Navarra on Tuesday tweeted out photos of himself handing over his account key to Twitter in a DM thread.

On Tuesday, Twitter began tweeting as Navarra. This mostly involved some gentle roasting – like tweets about muting people asking for an “edit” button, and other nonsense. Twitter said then it was going to tweet out some of Navarra’s drafts, and posted things like “who has a Google Wave code?” and something about BBM, among other things.

But other jokes were less funny. Twitter said it was reading Navarra’s DMs, for example.

(At the time of posting, these embedded tweets were posted from “Tweet Navarra” as Twitter temporarily changed the account name while it was tweeting as Matt. But it’s been since changed back, so these embeds show the current account name, “Matt Navarra.”)

The company then posted a screenshot of his Direct Message inbox to poke fun at the fact that he had DM’d with an account called “Satan,” in one incident.

Navarra played along, joking from his new account for the day @realmattnavarra for Twitter to “ignore that DM from Zuck.”

While I personally had not DM’d Navarra anything compromising, I can’t speak for everyone who had ever messaged him. Even if Navarra had signed up to have his account taken over, those he messaged with had not volunteered to have their privacy violated. And though my conversations with him were innocuous, it was disconcerting to know that my message history with a private individual was accessible by someone at Twitter.

Reached for comment, Navarra claims his “DMs were all deleted” before Twitter entered his account. Unfortunately, there’s no way to verify this as DM deletion on Twitter is one-sided. That means that even if he deleted the DMs, the person who sent them could still view them in their own inbox.

It also appears from the screenshot Twitter posted (above) that the entire inbox hadn’t been wiped.

At the end of the day, Navarra may have been misguided with this stunt – perhaps he should have first demonstrated that he had cleaned out his inbox by posting a tweet of it being empty – but he is not a public social media company. It’s completely nuts that Twitter thought this was a funny idea.

Whether or not Twitter actually saw private conversations, it’s bad optics for the company to take over a user’s account for a lark then joke about violating users’ privacy at a time when tech giants like Facebook and Google are under threat of increased regulations for not taking care of users’ private data.

Twitter did not provide a comment, but confirmed it logged into Navarra’s account for a few hours for the takeover in the hopes of starting fun conversations with his followers.

Entrepreneur First (EF), the company builder and “talent first” investor, held its eleventh Demo Day in London this afternoon. The event included newly formed startups from EF’s London, Berlin and Paris cohorts, and represented a showcase of the investor’s now pan-European reach.

Once again, the pitches took place in front of a near-overcapacity crowd at King’s Place in London’s King Cross area, and this time around saw a 29 startups pitch their wares to investors, press and other actors in the European tech scene.

EF stands out from the many other demo days that the U.K. capital city hosts because of the way the investor backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” — meaning that the companies pitching only came into existence during the three programmes and perhaps may never have seen the light of day without the founders bashing heads at EF.

The latest demo days also comes shortly after EF announced it has raised a $115 million new fund led by a number of leading (mostly unnamed) institutional investors across the U.S., Europe and Asia, including new anchor LP Trusted Insight. A number of well-known European entrepreneurs also invested including Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of TransferWise), Alex Chesterman (co-founder of Zoopla) and EF alumnus Rob Bishop (who co-founded Magic Pony Technology, which was bought by Twitter for a reported $150 million in 2016).

See also: EF raises $115M new fund, aiming to create another 300-plus startups in the next three years

This new fund — which EF said is one the largest pre-seed funds ever raised — will enable the talent investor to back more than 2,200 individuals who join its various programs over the next three years. EF currently operates in Bangalore, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Singapore and Paris.

Meanwhile, the themes for EF’s eleventh London Demo Day continued to reflect the company builder’s focus on recruiting the best technical and domain expert talent — both recent graduates and also people already working at tech companies. They spanned practically every gamut of tech sector you could think of.

After enduring 29 rounds of ‘pitchlash’ (up from 24 last time), TechCrunch’s picks, chosen by Editor-at-Large Mike Butcher, who attended, are as follows:

FabricNano
Fast Biotechnologies
Blazar
Alcemy
Semblr
Arthronica
SpeakAi
Vine Health
Seyo
Rosecut
CogniScent
Neoplants

Here’s the full list of presenting teams (in their own words) with some informal notes Mike made live at the event:

FabricNano – LONDON

FabricNano designs artificial cells that produce chemicals 100x faster.

TechCrunch comment: Fermentation of things like beer has been around for thousands of years. It’s now powering the global chemicals market. But we still rely on living cells to do the hard work. Improving the living cell by 1% would save the chemical plant millions of dollars a day. This startup makes an artificial living cell which is highly efficient. The cost has come down to do this. The founders have a history in mechanical engineering and DNA. They have chemical companies testing with them, and have filed some patents. They are raising £1.5m to accelerate this whole idea. Strong pitch!

Fast Biotechnologies – BERLIN

Fast Biotechnologies revolutionizes healthcare by enabling accurate diagnosis of life-threatening infections in minutes instead of days.

TechCrunch comment: Scepsis is killing people almost as much as cancer, globally. But detecting it is slow, and people die waiting for results. This startup uses a bacterium to detect it faster, and it’s the direct result of the founder’s PhD work. It’s already being tested in the lab. The founder didn’t say how much they are raising…

Leakmited – PARIS

Leakmited detects water leaks from space.

TechCrunch comment: Sounds cool huh?! Only 6% of water is good for human consumption and we waste a lot of it in leaks. 50 billion euros worth. Fixing leaks is easy, but finding them is tough and the tech hasn’t changed in years. The idea is that leaks change the properties of the ground, which can then be detected from space using pattern recognition, up to an accuracy of 20 meters which is a 1000% improvement. They will pilot this tech in France. Strong team, strong pitch. I’m wondering if this would be relatively easily replicable by a satellite company?

Candu – LONDON

Candu is a learning platform within your app, empowering you to upskill and retain your customers.

TechCrunch comment: Ex-Stanford founder pitches a learning platform that upskills users as they use the product. On the job training for this century. This decreases churn and improves the results. Well-trained customers are more likely to use and renew a Saas product. One of the co-founders helped build Coursera, so they have history in this space.

Blazar – PARIS

Blazar uses machine learning to predict cancer response to immunotherapy.

TechCrunch comment: Treating blood cancer better with ML-based prediction. They have a team which has built previous ML products and the co-founder who presented has been a cancer researcher for the last 14 years. This is sort of weaponizing the immune system against cancer. No mention of the money they want to raise.

Alcemy – BERLIN

Alcemy’s quality prediction AI enables cement and concrete producers to cut costs and carbon emissions.

TechCrunch comment: We make a lot of concrete on this planet. It can be a complex thing. But it’s often made stronger than it needs to be. Until recently it took a month to test the strength of the concrete. So they tend to make it too strong, and this also creates MORE carbon emissions. Instead, this solution test concrete quality in 40 minutes. Not bad, huh. The prototype has been tested with partners. They think they could save all the UK’s carbon emission. Strong pitch and thank god someone is thinking about the environment for a change…

Presscast – LONDON

Presscast is a new kind of advertising that is organic and scalable.

TechCrunch comment: Programmatic ads have ruined online content (don’t we know it)… Media doesn’t scale like tech. Content marketing plus programmatic. They call it “Natural language advertising”. This looks at articles online, and inserts your lines of text into the article. (I hate this already…). Finextra did this. They launched a week ago and have 500 publishers now. I’d love to know this list! Strangely they did not include whether or not the advert is flagged as such, which is worrying. They are raising a seed round.

Arthronica – LONDON

Arthronica is an AI monitoring and rehabilitation platform.

TechCrunch comment: Addressing a costly and chronic condition: Arthritis. Costs healthcare a lot of cash globally. Capturing data for treatment is expensive and has to happen face to face. Their AI architecture uses a smart phone camera to read the person’s muscle movements and then assess the level of treatment needed. I think this is a great idea and a natural use of ML in cameras / smartphones.

Semblr Technologies – LONDON

Semblr automates building construction using small, swarming robots.

TechCrunch comment: Robots! Using a big robot to build a house is inefficient. Use small ones! The first robot automates bricklaying. There is high demand for houses, but the workforce is not there. Previous bricklaying robots, they are WAY too big. A swarm of robots the size of a cat can build it faster. BaaS – Bricklaying as a service. LULZ. Cofounders are an ex-architect and ML expert. They are testing on real sites. Sounds convincing.

Packetai – PARIS

PacketAI uses AI to automate IT Operations.

TechCrunch comment: Resolving IT incidents using ML! Save lots of money! Crucial stuff but hard to make interesting in a pitch…

Nostos Genomics – BERLIN

Nostos Genomics uses CRISPR to unlock genomics-based medicine.

TechCrunch comment: Genetic diseases are more common than you think. But to get a treatment you need assessment and 70 percent of genetic tests fail. Their solution claims to be way more efficient at assessing genetic diagnoses.

Deltablock – PARIS

DeltaBlock adapts traditional capital liquidity services for Digital Assets.

TechCrunch comment: Sounds like a blockchain pitch which doesn’t want to mention the word blockchain… Surprise! Ok they mentioned it once. This is a market-maker for digital assets, like in traditional markets. Aiming at 100 billion Euro market. Starting in Switzerland, of course. They are raising in fiat money… Hard to assess this one.

Reallm – LONDON

Business intelligence for the supply-side of marketplaces.

TechCrunch comment: We understand the demand side of this world but the suppliers often get forgotten. So take Uber or something and they spot where user demand is being missed by lack of supply of drivers. This is a way for drivers or similar to work out where they can work more efficiently.

Panakeia Technologies – LONDON

Panakeia makes cancer diagnosis simpler, faster and cheaper by eliminating the need for multiple tests.

TechCrunch comment: Cancer diagnosis can take a month and is expensive. They do this by running ML over images of biopsies. Already have several test partners. Seems like a strong team.

Speak Ai – LONDON

The world’s most expressive and realistic artificial voices.

TechCrunch comment: This was the spookiest pitch of the day! The idea being that you could use this artificial voice inside video games. Saving enormous amounts of money. 5 paid pilots already. Voice in the video games industry is huge. Makes it as easy to edit voice as videos. “A photoshop for voice.” Impressive stuff.

Vine Health Digital – LONDON

Vine Health’s platform uses behavioral science and AI to increase the survival of cancer patients.

TechCrunch comment: If you make things hard or easier you have big consequences (fake flies in urinals etc). If you nudge a patient into better behavior they have better outcomes. They have trials with partners already. Co-founders are rather well qualified! Great advisory board. 95% of patients on-board. Excellent results from patients. This is a startup to watch.

CirPlus – BERLIN

CirPlus is the global marketplace for recycled materials.

TechCrunch comment: Make it EASY to buy recycled plastics rather than hard. Have had EU funding. Passionate founder.

Nanovery – LONDON

Nanovery is developing nanorobots to diagnose the world’s deadliest diseases.

TechCrunch comment: Detect cancer using a simple blood test? Have we heard this before? No – they are building a search function using nano-robots. Their nano-robots are cheaper, they say. Very hard to assess this, but it sounds good.

Seyo – LONDON

Seyo enables machines to cooperate autonomously in extreme environments without the internet.

TechCrunch comment: Machines don’t have a global clock and one microsecond out can throw a system. So Seyo creates a logical sequence which is not time-based. It means the machines can work off the grid. They can be used in heavy industries like mining, where there are many fatalities.

Rosecut Technologies – LONDON

Rosecut is a digital private bank that offers bespoke, regulated advice in real-time.

TechCrunch comment: Wealth management! Always of interest to VCs… Rosecut wants to help the middle market, just under private equity. Traditional private banks require a lot of money. Rosecut is aiming at these guys. Already have $4.3m worth of assets ready to on-board. Likely to be regulated by the FCA in the next few months. Founder Qiaojia was a former ace asset adviser.

SquareMind – PARIS

SquareMind allows robots to make skin cancer detection more accurate and accessible.

TechCrunch comment: 3D construction software for full body mapping, able to track the growth of moles on the body using off the shelf robots. Prototypes and patents.

Intropic – LONDON

Intropic provides data refineries for investment management firms.

TechCrunch comment: Asset managers are generally shit, lazy and inefficient. Hedge funds are already using Intropic. Because the world needs more efficient hedge funds…

Flowlity – PARIS

Flowlity’s mission is to bring Amazon supply chain efficiency to the rest of the world.

TechCrunch comment: Many industrial players lack the time to do this well, and don’t scale at the level of Amazon. This startup claims to address this. No more overstocks, shortages and lost sales. The team was in this space before.

Omini – PARIS

Omini brings lab testing closer to the patient.

TechCrunch comment: Faster blood testing. (Yes, another one). Biosensing devices for immediate blood tests. Their first product measures infections and inflammations. THANKFULLY they mentioned the huge disaster in this industry and made sure people knew they were different.

Sense Street – LONDON

Sense Street innovates capital market communications.

TechCrunch comment: Freeing the information that’s in chat rooms about capital markets with ML. They can pull sentiment out of the chat rooms and give clients better insight. So that’s nice.

QantEv – PARIS

QantEv optimizes provider networks for health insurers.

TechCrunch comment: Probably sounds great if you’re a health insurer… rather indecipherable to the rest of us.

Morta – LONDON

Morta digitizes and automatically enforces construction rules.

TechCrunch comment: Building documents are in PDF and paper. This is a very old-fashioned industry. Mistakes creep in. Codifying the designs and rules reduces mistakes. Building industry wins!

CogniScent – BERLIN

CogniScent provides AI-guided early detection of neurodegenerative diseases.

TechCrunch comment: The lack of a sense of smell is a key indicator of neurodegenerative diseases. So you take a smell test, fill out a test and the result claims to be a 90% accurate prediction of a neurodegenerative disease.

Neoplants – PARIS

Neoplants use synthetic biology to design plants for the future.

TechCrunch comment: Problem: You spend a lot of time indoors and indoor air pollution is much worse than outdoors, because of VOCs. Air purifiers are bullshit. And green plants have ZERO impact on air quality. So their indoor plant is biologically engineered to capture VCOs and process them. Patents galore. You could also use these to capture carbon outdoors. Where do I buy one?!

Artiphon, the startup behind the electronic instrument that it’s dubbed the Instrument 1, has raised $2 million in seed funding.

We previously described the Instrument 1 as a symphony, rock band and DJ that you can hold in your hand. It’s a device that allows you to create the sounds of a guitar, violin, bass, piano or drum machine without any real training.

Back in 2015, Artiphon raised $1.3 million for the Instrument 1 on Kickstarter, blowing past its goal of $75,000. The new funding is a more traditional investment, led by Warner Music Group — in fact, it’s the first publicly announced investment from WMG Boost, Warner’s seed investment fund for music-related startups.

“As true innovators in music creativity, Artiphon is a strong example of the types of companies and products we seek to support,” said WMG’s head of innovation and emergin technology Jeff Bronikowski in a statement. “They’ve already expanded the concept of the musical instrument as a smart, connected device and we’re excited to help them drive the future of interactive music.”

Artiphon co-founder and CEO Mike Butera told me that his goal for the Instrument 1 is to remove skill as a barrier to entry for creating music. In fact, he recalled receiving responses to the Kickstarter campaign that said, “How dare you let anyone sound good? I worked so hard to sound good, and now you’re making that accessible to anyone.”

Butera’s response? “Welcome to the future.”

To be clear, he isn’t trying to replace traditional instruments — he said he still plays his classical violin. Nor does he think the product is just for beginners. Instead, he says the Instrument 1 can also augment the skills of trained musicians, allowing them to make sounds they never could with a regular instrument.

While I spent more than a decade playing classical piano, it was basically half a lifetime ago — I think it’s fair to say that I fall closer to the beginner side of the spectrum.

So it was a real delight for me to try out the Instrument 1. With just a few pointers from Butera, I quickly found myself noodling around and making different instrument sounds. In some ways, it reminded me of playing Guitar Hero, but with far more expressiveness.

Butera, by the way, fully embraces that comparison. He told me, “We’re interested in making music as fun, or more fun, than playing games.”

While the product is called the Instrument 1, Butera told me the name is meant to emphasize the idea of many instruments in one — it doesn’t mean Artiphon is already working on an Instrument 2. The startup may release more hardware in the future, but he said he wants to move away from “a consumer electronics mindset” where you convince someone to buy a new gadget every year or two, and instead create an instrument “that could last for years.”

“We are committed to the quality of the Instrument 1,” Butera said.

So the next steps for Artiphon include exploring more distribution channels, as well as building more software.

Artiphon has already created its own app for the Instrument 1, and the device is also compatible with a wide range of music software like Garage Band, but he said, “Okay, what can we do to help people actually play a song? It starts with the instrument … This is the foundation, now we’re getting to design experiences for people around the instrument that are in software.”

Wyze, they of the $20 home security camera, announced this morning the launch of comparably priced home sensor system. The $20 Wyze Sense kit ships with a motion sensor, two contact sensors (to be mounted on doors or windows) and a bridge system that connects them to the aforementioned cheap camera.

The sensors are roughly the size of a quarter, according to the company, and send alerts to the connected app when something has moved. They can also be mounted to doors or a refrigerator to let you know when they’ve been left open.

The latest piece of Wyze’s growing budget home security ecosystem comes a couple of months after the Seattle-based company raised a $20 million Series A. In addition to the Cam and Sense, the company also sells a $30 Cam Pan, which is able to cover more ground than its $20 counterpart.

The Sense is up for pre-order now. It starts shipping May 8.

Wyze, they of the $20 home security camera, announced this morning the launch of comparably priced home sensor system. The $20 Wyze Sense kit ships with a motion sensor, two contact sensors (to be mounted on doors or windows) and a bridge system that connects them to the aforementioned cheap camera.

The sensors are roughly the size of a quarter, according to the company, and send alerts to the connected app when something has moved. They can also be mounted to doors or a refrigerator to let you know when they’ve been left open.

The latest piece of Wyze’s growing budget home security ecosystem comes a couple of months after the Seattle-based company raised a $20 million Series A. In addition to the Cam and Sense, the company also sells a $30 Cam Pan, which is able to cover more ground than its $20 counterpart.

The Sense is up for pre-order now. It starts shipping May 8.

We’ve not seen a lot of the Samsung Galaxy Fold. The device didn’t make its way off-stage at the Unpacked event in late February, and a week later, it was trapped behind glass at Mobile World Congress. But Samsung insists that not only is the handset real, it’s actually going on stage pretty soon.

What we have seen, however, are videos. There’s this one from MWC, and today the company dropped another more behind the scenes video, in which the forthcoming foldable is put through Samsung’s in-house stress testing.

The company’s claims of lasting around 200,000 folds and unfolds are pretty standard for these kinds of devices. As noted, that amounts to around 100 folds a day for over five years — longer than most of us hold onto a phone, though for $2,000, who knows?

The new video shows how Samsung and other companies determine that sort of massive number, using mechanical devices. It says the 200,000 number takes around a week for the devices to complete. It’s pretty mesmerizing. Honestly, I would happily watch a livestream, while waiting to get my hands on the device.

Four senior senators have called on the largest U.S. voting machine makers to explain why they continue to sell devices with “known vulnerabilities,” ahead of upcoming critical elections.

The letter, sent Wednesday, calls on election equipment makers ES&S, Dominion Voting, and Hart InterCivic to explain why they continue to sell decades-old machines, which the senators say contain security flaws that could undermine the results of elections if exploited.

“The integrity of our elections is directly tied to the machines we vote on,” said the letter sent by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), Jack Reed (D-RI), and Senator Gary Peters (D-MI), the most senior Democrats on the Rules, Intelligence, Armed Services, and Homeland Security committees. “Despite shouldering such a massive responsibility, there has been a lack of meaningful innovation in the election vendor industry and our democracy is paying the price,” the letter adds.

Their primary concern is that the three companies have more than 90 percent of the U.S. election equipment marketshare but their voting machines lack paper ballots or auditability, making it impossible to know if a vote was accurately counted in the event of a bug.

Yet, these are the same devices tens of millions of voters will use in the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

The senators, including Klobuchar — who is running for president — said the elections remain “under serious threat.”

Security experts have for years sounded the alarm about insecure voting machines. A key concern is that these devices can be easily hacked to meddle with election results. Just months ago during early voting in some Texas counties, voters found problems with Hart’s election machines, with in some cases options removed entirely from the ballot screen. In ES&S’ case, the company sparked anger in the Capitol after saying it would not provide its systems to security researchers. Its announcement came not long after it had a disastrous reception at Def Con’s Voting Village, which saw one of its voting machines hacked.

But the ranking Democrats say paper ballots are “basic necessities” for a reliable voting system, but the companies still produce machines that don’t produce paper results. Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill last year that would make a paper trail mandatory in future elections, but it never passed.

The companies have until April 19 to respond to the senators’ letter.

Spokespeople for ES&S, Dominion Voting, and Hart InterCivic did not immediately return requests for comment.

All new vehicles sold in the European Union must have a wide range of safety features baked in as standard in the coming years, after EU institutions reached provisional agreement on a safety regulation that’s aimed at protecting passengers, pedestrians and cyclists.

Once formally adopted most of the new safety features will become mandatory from 2022.

The Commission says it expects the measures will help save more than 25,000 lives and avoid at least 140,000 serious injuries by 2038.

Among the safety measures set to be baked in is anti-speeding technology that alerts drivers if they’re breaking the speed limit to encourage them to slow down; and breathalyzers that prevent a vehicle from starting until the driver passes a breath test. (Aka ‘intelligent speed assistance’ and ‘alcohol interlock installation facilitation’, in the Commission’s formal parlance.)

Other incoming mandatory safety features include advanced emergency braking; drowsiness and attention detection; distraction recognition (likely targeted at smartphone use by drivers); lane keeping assistance; ‘black box’ accident data recorders; and detector and alert systems on trucks and buses to warn when vulnerable road users such as cyclists are in close proximity.

The full list of soon-to-be mandatory safety features can be downloaded here — accompanied by a diagram in case you didn’t know where to find a seat belt or realize a ‘reversing camera’ is sited on the trunk.

Two features — direct vision for trucks and buses; and enlarged head impact zone on cars and vans — have been excluded from the 2022 deadline, with the Commission saying they will follow later due to “necessary structural design changes”.

The revised General Safety Regulation was agreed after trilogue discussions between the Commission, Council and parliament, which just leaves a formal vote by the latter two to rubberstamp and green light the new rules. 

The Commission proposed making certain vehicle safety measures mandatory back in May 2018.

It argues that the advanced safety features will reduce the number of accidents on the roads, given the vast majority of road accident fatalities and injuries are caused by human error, as well as helping “pave the way towards increasingly connected and automated mobility”.

So, in plainer english, this is also about setting European motorists on the road towards a fully automated, driverless future. (Or, to put it another way, high tech feature creep will slowly overtake human agency.)

“All this should enhance public trust and acceptance of automated cars, supporting the transition towards autonomous driving,” the Commission suggests.

There do also appear to have been compromises made to try to steer around any backlash from motorists — such as not imposing speed limiter technology, but rather applying a softer option of sounding speed warnings when limits are broken. Which means a driver could still choose to manually override the safety feature and break the speed limit anyway.

The Commission adds that it hopes the safety features will boost Europe’s car industry by increasing its competitiveness and global innovation.

A more cynical interpretation might suggest the move aims to carve out a market buffer for homegrown vehicle manufacturers as European carmakers will have no choice but to invest in the necessary technologies — whereas non-European car companies may not share the same focus.

Any failure to invest in a timely fashion could therefore result in vehicles from foreign carmakers’ being locked out of the market or else encourage their makers to procure the necessary tech from European rivals.