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1. Here’s everything Apple announced at its ‘Show Time’ event

Let’s see if I can get this all into one blurb: There’s the streaming service AppleTV+, the updated TV app with Channels (basically, subscriptions for other services), a $9.99 subscription for Apple News+ (including Extra Crunch) and a gaming subscription service called Apple Arcade.

Oh, and beyond the subscriptions, Apple is working with Goldman Sachs and Mastercard to launch an Apple Card.

2. Uber is paying $3.1BN to pick up Middle East rival Careem

After months and months of rumors it has finally been confirmed that ride-hailing giant Uber is picking up its Middle East rival Careem in an acquisition deal worth $3.1 billion — with $1.7 billion to be paid in convertible notes and $1.4 billion in cash.

3. McDonald’s is acquiring Dynamic Yield to create a more customized drive-thru

McDonald’s said it will use this technology to create a drive-thru menu that can be tailored to things like the weather, current restaurant traffic and trending menu items. Once you’ve started ordering, the display can also recommend additional items based on what you’ve already chosen.

4. European parliament votes for controversial copyright reform (yes, again)

An amendment that would have thrown out the most controversial component of the copyright reform — a.k.a. Article 13, which makes platforms liable for copyright infringements committed by their users — was rejected by just five votes.

5. Spotify acquires true crime studio Parcast to expand its original podcast content

Parcast is known best for true-crime and other factual serials in genres like mystery, science fiction and history.

6. NASA cancels all-female spacewalk because it didn’t have enough spacesuits ready in the right size

On Friday, NASA was planning to conduct its first all-female spacewalk, but realized it doesn’t have enough spacesuits that are the right size for its female astronauts.

7. Huawei announces smart glasses in partnership with Gentle Monster

Huawei is positioning the glasses as a sort of earbuds replacement, a device that lets you talk on the phone without putting anything in your ears. There won’t be a single model, but a collection of glasses with integrated electronics.

Unmanned drone deliveries are making their way inside the UPS network. Thanks to a partnership with drone startup Matternet, UPS will start delivering medical samples via unmanned drones at WakeMed’s hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina.

With the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration and North Carolina’s department of transportation, UPS and Matternet will conduct routine daily flights that transport medical samples. Previously, WakeMed relied on courier cars, which were subject to road delays.

The drone-led deliveries entail a medical professional first loading the drone with a medical sample or specimen, such as a blood sample. From there, the drone will fly along a predetermined mouth to a fixed landing pad at WakeMed’s main hospital and central pathology lab.

UPS and Matternet will then be able to analyze the program and better determine how drones can be more broadly used to improve deliveries at other hospitals throughout the country. UPS previously partnered with Zipline to test medical deliveries via drone in remote communities.

“We believe unmanned aerial systems could better serve customer needs and provide opportunities for network improvements that generate efficiencies and enable us to grow our business,” UPS VP of Advanced Technology Group Bala Ganesh said in a statement.

By deploying drones, the hope is to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Matternet conducted test flights last August as part of the FAA’s unmanned aircraft system integration pilot program (IPP).

This comes about a year after Matternet secured a $16 million round led by Boeing HorizonX Ventures, the aviation company’s venture arm. At the time, the Federal Aviation Administration had recently selected, among others, Matternet for drone logistics operations for U.S. hospitals as part of its Unmanned Aircraft System pilot program. In 2015, Matternet started testing the first drone delivery system in Zurich, Switzerland to transport blood and pathology samples to labs.

Matternet has since expanded its operations in Switzerland and has conducted more than 1,700 flights over densely populated areas to make more than 850 deliveries of patient samples.

“Together with UPS, we aim to shift the status quo for on-demand logistics for healthcare systems in the U.S. through drone delivery networks,” Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos said in a statement. “Our technology allows hospital systems to transport medical items at an unprecedented level of speed and predictability, resulting in improved patient care and operational savings.”

Spotify this morning announced a major change to how its playlists will operate, with the news that some of its previously human-curated playlists will now be personalized based on listeners’ tastes. Before, Spotify offered personalized playlists like Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mixes, among others, to offer users a way to enjoy the music they like and be introduced to new songs and artists that fit their interests. However, these were clearly separated from the curated playlists programmed by Spotify’s editorial team.

Now, Spotify says that will change.

“Some playlists will now be personalized for each listener based on their particular taste. This means that for those specific playlists, no two will be the same,” the company shared in a blog post.

Spotify says it decided to make this change after finding that users listened longer to the personalized playlists, during a trial of the new system. It also notes that the new system will increase the number of artists featured on playlists by 30 percent and the number of songs listened to by 35 percent – metrics that artists will surely like.

In addition, after a listener discovers a song on a personalized playlist, the number of those who then go seek out the track on their own for repeat listens was up by 80 percent, and the average number of time a listener saves a track was up by 66 percent, the company added.

Spotify was seen testing this change last year, where playlists like “Beast Mode,” “Chill Hits,” “Dance Party,” and “Metal Ballads” had become personalized among others focused on genre, decade, mood or activity – like “Happy Hits” or “Song to Sing in the Car,” for example. The company’s most popular playlists like “Today’s Top Hits” and “Rap Caviar” were not affected.

By adding personalization to playlists, Spotify is making a big bet on its algorithms doing a better job at programming. That’s not always the case.

While personalization technology can be great when it works, it can still be thrown off by sessions where you allow someone else to stream music with your account – like a child, your roommates, party attendees or others. (Technically, multiple users with regular access should be on a family plan with their own logins – but not everyone goes this route.) Personalization tech is also not always sophisticated enough to understand to understand the different levels of interest in, say, the music you use to fall asleep to, versus the songs you play because you actually like them.

In other words, if you had any issues with Spotify getting your musical taste wrong before, those will now expand to other areas of its service that were previously algorithm-free.

On the other hand, when the personalization succeeds, it could increase user engagement, loyalty and retention – areas that will help Spotify better compete with Apple Music, Pandora and others.

Because not all users will see the same playlists, Spotify is giving artists access to unique links to those playlists where their music is featured. This allows them to share a specific version of the playlist via Spotify for Artists and Spotify Analytics. Anyone who then clicks that link when posted on the web or social media will be taken to a version where the artist’s track is the first song.

Spotify says artists will be alerted about their additions to playlists through email notifications.

What the artist dashboards aren’t showing, though, are how many users are being presented with the customized version of the playlist with the artists’ music included.

Instead, the dashboard shows how many total followers the playlist has. That means these personalized playlists aren’t just about getting the right music in front of the right listeners – they’re also very much a marketing tool for the artists and their teams to leverage.

Spotify says these playlist changes are in effect as of now.

Google today officially launched AMP for Email, its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences. AMP for Email is coming to Gmail, but other major email providers like Yahoo Mail (which shares its parent company with TechCrunch), Outlook and Mail.ru will also support AMP emails.

It’s been more than a year since Google first announced this initiative. Even by Google standards, that’s a long incubation phase, though there’s also plenty of backend work necessary to make this feature work.

The promise of AMP for Email is that it’ll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done. “Over the past decade, our web experiences have changed enormously—evolving from static flat content to interactive apps—yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task,” Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes. “If you want to take action, you usually have to click on a link, open a new tab, and visit another website.”

With AMP for Email, those messages become interactive. That means you’ll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store’s inventory or respond to a comment — all without leaving your web-based email client.

Some of the companies that already support this new format are Booking.com, Despegar, Doodle, Ecwid, Freshworks, Nexxt, OYO Rooms, Pinterest, and redBus. If you regularly get emails from these companies, then chances are you’ll receive an interactive email from them in the coming weeks.

For developers, supporting this format should be fairly easy, especially if they have prior experience with building AMP pages. The format supports many popular AMP markup features, including carousels, forms and lists. It’s also worth noting that these messages still include standard HTML markup as a fallback for email clients that support AMP.

Since its first announcement, Google has also brought on a number of partners that will support AMP for Email on their platforms. These include email delivery and analytics platform SparkPost, the email design and marketing tool Litmus, Twilio Sendgrid and Amazon’s SES and Pinpoint email and marketing tools.

No everybody is going to like this (including our own Devin Coldewey). AMP itself, after all, remains somewhat controversial given that it creates a new markup and infrastructure that wouldn’t be necessary if people created faster and simpler web sites to begin with. Bringing it to email, which for all its shortcomings remains one of the few formats that reliably work across all vendors and clients, won’t be everybody’s cup of tea either. Marketers, however, are bound to love it and I doubt most users are going to care about the politics here if it allows them to get their work done faster.

There are actually a lot more than five great reasons, but these five should be enough to make just about anyone eager to join TechCrunch’s robotics and AI show April 18 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall.

1. Fireside & Panel Discussions
TechCrunch’s editors will have a busy day with more than 20 riveting sessions — including Marc Raibert and the latest SpotMini; AI and synthetic media experts Hany Farid and Alexei Efros; autonomous-vehicle expert Anthony Levandowski; Kiyonori Inaba, chief at Japan’s robotics giant FANUC; and Affectiva’s Rana el Kaliouby and UC Berkeley’s Anca Dragan on human-robotics interaction. Check out the complete agenda here.

2. Q&A Sessions with Founders & Investors
Who doesn’t have an AI or robotics startup in mind? The Main Stage programming includes panels with prominent VCs and founders in the robotics and AI domains, and for the first time the audience will get a crack at asking their own questions in a separate session devoted to Q&A. Come prepared with questions for Playground Global’s Peter Barrett and FoundersX’s Helen Liang on the investor side and in the founder session Daniela Braga (DefinedCrowd), Daryn Nakhuda (MightyAI) and Melonee Wise (Fetch Robotics).

3. Robotics & Y Combinator
/> Smartwatch pioneer and entrepreneur Eric Migicovsky, who now leads Y Combinator’s robotics category, will conduct a workshop on how to get started in robotics, as well as tips for getting into Y Combinator.

4. Robots! Drones!
Yes, there will be lots of hardware that rolls, walks, flies, thinks and even uses airborne AI to plant seeds to rejuvenate forests wiped out by fire (Dragonseed). There will be robots that help physically handicapped children get around (Trexo), robots that mow lawns (iRobot’s Terra), robots that rule warehouses (Canvas), robots that comfort the lonely (Paro) and mystery robots under wraps (until the show) from intriguingly named companies percolating at UC Berkeley, like KiwiBot and Squishy Robotics. And, of course, Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini.

Still want more?

5. Networking with CrunchMatch
Attendees will have ample time during lunch, breaks and the closing reception to meet the rich mix of engineering students, entrepreneurs, technologists and investors that turn out. To make networking more science and less art, there is also CrunchMatch, our proven app-based service to help attendees find contacts who line up with their interests.

So what are you waiting for? Get to TC Sessions: Robotics & AI on April 18 and have a blast. Tickets are on sale now; book your $349 ticket here. If you’re a student, save big time with a $45 ticket.

Customers across the U.S. reported airline computer issues at a number of airports.

A flood of tweets began to roll in a little after 11am ET (8am PT) about computer or network issues. Passengers on the ground said the issues related to the flight check-in systems and were unable to issue boarding passes.

A spokesperson for American Airlines confirmed the issue was with the Sabre flight reservation and booking system, used by several major airlines — including WestJet, Alaska Airlines and JetBlue, all of which had passengers reporting issues.

The airline spokesperson told TechCrunch that the “brief technical issue” was resolved after 11:40am ET, and apologized to customers. JetBlue later confirmed it was recovering from the outage. A Sabre spokesperson said, echoing a tweet, tweeted, that “recovery is in progress.”

One passenger on the ground at Portland International Airport said there are “no flights taking off.” Several other customers complained of outages and delays across the country.

Sabre is one of a handful of flight reservation systems used by airlines around the world. Sabre, developed by Texas-based Sabre Holdings, provides service to more than 400 airlines and 220,000 hotels.

The company reported a significant data breach in mid-2017 affecting its hotel reservation system after hackers scraped millions of customer credit cards.

Updated with comment from JetBlue and Sabre, and that the outage is resolving. 

Innoviz, the Israel-based startup developing solid-state lidar sensors and perception software for autonomous vehicles, has raised $132 million in a Series C funding round that includes major Chinese financial institutions.

The round, which makes Innoviz one of the better capitalized lidar startups, includes China Merchants Capital (SINO-BLR Industrial Investment Fund, L.P.), Shenzhen Capital Group and New Alliance Capital. Israeli institutional investors Harel Insurance Investments and Financial Services and Phoenix Insurance Company also participated. 

The Series C round will remain open for a second closing to be announced in the coming months, the company said.

Lidar measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. It’s considered by most in the self-driving car industry a key piece of technology required to safely deploy robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles. Innoviz is developing solid-state lidar, which proponents of this technology say is more reliable over time because of the lack of moving parts.

Like so many startups with fresh capital, Innoviz plans to use the funds to scale up the company.

For Innoviz, this means increasing production of its lidar sensors and expanding its manufacturing capacity. Innoviz is focused on expanding in important automotive markets, including the U.S., Europe, Japan and China. Innoviz has been pushing into China over the past year through a partnership with the Chinese automotive supplier HiRain Technologies, a global supplier to some of China’s largest automakers.

That company has half of its business coming from China and has won nine of its supplier agreements with different automakers in the country through its HiRain partnership, according to people with knowledge of the company.

The company’s aim is to enable high-volume delivery of its automotive-grade lidar system called InnovizOne. This product can be produced and sold at a 90 percent lower cost than its first-generation system, according to Innoviz. 

Innoviz said it also plans to expand its research and development efforts by investing in the buildout of next-generation products and software that will feature more cost reductions and improved performance.

Innoviz’s strategy has been to partner with a number of OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers such as Magna, HARMAN, HiRain Technologies and Aptiv and to package perception software with its lidar sensors and offer it as a complete unit for companies developing autonomous vehicle technology.

Innoviz has locked in several key customers, notably BMW. The automaker picked Innoviz’s tech for series production of autonomous vehicles starting in 2021.

In March, Lyft announced a partnership with Magna to help get its self-driving tech into various automakers, as well as implement the ride-hailing service into future autonomous cars. Innoviz raised $65 million in Series B funding in 2017, from strategic partners and leading auto industry suppliers Delphi Automotive and Magna International, along with other investors.

Business customers continue to be a huge target for the travel industry, and today a startup has raised a tidy sum to help it double down on the $1.7 trillion opportunity. Lola.com — a platform for business users to book and manage trips — has raised $37 million to continue building out its technology and hire more talent as it takes on incumbents like SAP targeting the corporate sector.

The Series C is led by General Catalyst and Accel, with participation from CRV, Tenaya Capital and GV. All are previous investors. We are asking about the valuation but it looks like prior to this, the company had raised just under $65 million, and its last post-money valuation, in 2017, was $100 million, according to PitchBook.

There are signs that the valuation will have had a bump in this round. The company said in 2018, its bookings have gone up by 423 percent, with revenues up 786 percent, although it’s not disclosing what the actual figures are for either.

“As business travelers have become increasingly mobile, Lola.com’s mission is to completely transform the landscape of corporate travel management,” said Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com, who took the top role at the company last year. “The continued support of our investors underscores the market potential, which is leading us to expand our partner ecosystem and double our headcount across engineering, sales and marketing. At the core, we continue to invest in building the best, simplest corporate travel management platform in the industry.”

Co-founded by Paul English and Bill O’Donnell — respectively, the former CTO/co-founder and chief architect of the wildly successful consumer travel booking platform Kayak — Lola originally tried to fix the very thing that Kayak and others like it had disrupted: it was designed as a platform for people to connect to live agents to help them organise their travel. That larger cruise ship might have already said, however (so to speak), and so the company later made a pivot to cater to a more specific demographic in the market that often needs and expects the human touch when arranging logistics: the business user.

Its unique selling point has not been just to provide a pain-free “agile” platform to make bookings, but for the platform’s human agents to be proactively pinging business users when there are modifications to a booking (for example because of flight delays), and offering help when needed to sort out the many aspects of modern travel that can be painful and time consuming for busy working people, such as technical issues around a frequent flyer program.

Lola.com is not the only one to spot the opportunity there. To further diversify its business and to move into higher-margin, bigger-ticket offerings, Airbnb has also been slowly building out its own travel platform targeting business customers by adding in hotels and room bookings.

There are others that are either hoping to bypass or complement existing services with their own takes on how to improve business travel such as TravelPerk (most recent raise: $44 million), Travelstop (an Asia-focused spin), and TripActions (most recently valued at $1 billion), to name a few. That speaks to an increasingly crowded market of players that are competing against incumbents like SAP, which owns Concur, Hipmunk and a plethora of other older services.

Lola.com has made some interesting headway in its own approach to the market, by partnering with one of the names most synonymous with corporate spending, American Express, and specifically a JV it is involved in called American Express Global Business Travel.

“Lola.com offers an incredibly simple solution to corporate travel management, which enables American Express Global Business Travel to take our value proposition to even more companies across the middle market,” said Evan Konwiser, VP of Product Strategy and Marketing for American Express GBT, in a statement.

That sad trombone you hear is the sound of NASA’s attempt at a history-making spacewalk falling apart.

On Friday, NASA was planning to conduct its first all-female spacewalk, but realized it doesn’t have enough spacesuits that are the right size for its female astronauts.

After conducting the first spacewalk this week, astronaut Anne McClain noted that the large suit she was wearing did not allow her to move effectively.

Photo courtesy Anne McClain

“McClain learned during her first spacewalk that a medium-size hard upper torso – essentially the shirt of the spacesuit – fits her best,” according to a statement from NASA.

Because only one medium-size torso would be ready by the planned Friday spacewalk, NASA astronaut Christina Koch will use the suit. Koch will work with astronaut Nick Hague to install lithium-ion batteries for one pair of the station’s solar arrays.

The predicament would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. Even when some of the world’s brightest minds work to overcome sexism, their inability to make basic allowances for gender differences get in the way.

Huawei is launching connected glasses in partnership with Gentle Monster, a Korean sunglasses and optical glasses brand. There won’t be a single model, but a collection of glasses with integrated electronics.

Huawei is positioning the glasses as a sort of earbuds replacement, a device that lets you talk on the phone without putting anything in your ears. There’s no button on the device, but you can tap the temple of the glasses to answer a call for instance.

The antenna, charging module, dual microphone, chipset, speaker and battery are all integrated in the eyeglass temple. There are two microphones with beam-forming technology to understand what you’re saying even if the device is sitting on your nose.

There are stereo speakers positioned right above your ears. The company wants you to hear sound without disturbing your neighbors.

Interestingly, there’s no camera on the device. Huawei wants to avoid any privacy debate by skipping the camera altogether. Given that people have no issue with voice assistants and being surrounded by microphones, maybe people won’t be too suspicious.

The glasses come in a leather case with USB-C port at the bottom. It features wireless charging as well. Huawei teased the glasses at the P30 press conference in Paris, but the glasses won’t be available before July 2019.