Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Georgia is the only state in the U.S. right now where Facebook allows political ads to run, but after Tuesday’s polls close that’s set to change.

According to Facebook’s site detailing changes to its ad policies and a story from Axios, the company will no longer allow political and social issue ads anywhere in the country, Georgia included, beginning early tomorrow.

Facebook told TechCrunch that the decision to toggle political ads in Georgia off again brings that state in line with its current “nationwide pause” on social issue, election and politics ads. A Facebook spokesperson declined to say when political ads will again be allowed or if permanently blocking them from the platform is under consideration.

The company first hit pause on those ad categories November 4 as a precaution designed to reduce misinformation in the U.S. presidential election. On December 16, the company re-allowed political ads in Georgia, inviting eager campaigns to pay to get their messages in front of Facebook users. It appears that some politicians, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) among them, pounced on Facebook’s Georgia loophole to raise money for themselves in spite of restrictions.

When political ads came flooding back in for Georgians, they edged out mainstream news sources, according to new reporting from The Markup. While that result is fairly intuitive, it does underline the outsized influence of targeting political advertising in Facebook’s information ecosystem.

It’s also worth noting that Facebook’s head of advertising integrity Rob Leathern left the company at the end of December, calling his team’s work on the 2020 U.S. election the “culmination of a huge amount of effort over several years.” Leathern helped sculpt the company’s policies around political advertising — decisions that were often controversial due to the prevalence of paid misinformation sweeping through the platform throughout 2020.

Because they will decide control of the Senate, the unusual pair of runoff races in a state that just flipped blue are high-stakes for both political parties. With a Democratic Senate, the Biden administration’s ambitious plans for things like COVID relief and the climate crisis will have a much better shot at becoming a reality. And for Republicans looking to stymie the president-elect’s policy priorities, extended control of the Senate would put a powerful barrier in Biden’s way.

 

On New Year’s Eve, TechCrunch Japan’s Editor-in-Chief Hirohide Yoshida passed away at age 49. In addition to being a tremendously valuable member of our international team who helped build the site’s presence on the international stage, Hiro-san was a thoughtful, warm and kind colleague who impacted the lives of those of us who had the pleasure to work with him.

I worked alongside Hiro-san at two consecutive TechCrunch Tokyo events. The size and scope of the shows were impressive testaments to the team he led, as well as his own passion for technology. Throughout it all, he was an ideal ambassador for an electric startup community and tech journalism – a passion evident in every aspect of his work and life. He continued that vision as he helped transform the conference into a virtual event amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

He is survived by his wife, two young children and a site and staff that will continue to bear his mark for a long time to come.

TechCrunch Japan published its own reflections on the life and career of Hirohide Yoshida that you can read here. We’ve asked the site’s Editor, Takya Kimura to share additional thoughts below,

He started his career at KADOKAWA / ASCII. He had been writing articles about Apple and tech companies for over 20 years. With his deep knowledge, he became Editor-in-Chief of MacPeople, a magazine for Apple fans, and ASCII Weekly, publications he led for eight years.

In 2018, he became Editor-in-Chief of TechCrunch Japan. He was an incredibly hard worker, with long term vision, who never voiced a complaint about work. As Editor-in-Chief of TCJ, his team ran TechCrunch Tokyo, the biggest startup event in Japan for three consecutive years, including its first online event “TechCrunch Startup Battle Online 2020.”

Until the last moment, he loved his wife, his newborn twins, his cat and TechCrunch Japan. After his long journey, he now rests in peace, wearing his beloved TechCrunch Japan t-shirt.

 

Any teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District who needs a second monitor can request one free of charge from Two Screens for Teachers, the nonprofit that recently extended a similar privilege to Seattle educators. If you’re a teacher in SF, you can sign up here.

Having a second monitor may sound like a power user move or luxury to some, but for teachers, whose days are essentially one giant group call, it’s a huge benefit to be able to put the call on one screen while the lesson and other tools are on another.

Two Screens for Teachers was started in September by Walkscore’s Matt Lerner and Mike Mathieu, and the first effort of simply connecting teachers in need to people who had a hundred bucks to spare quickly grew into something larger.

By tapping local businesses and VCs, they were able to secure enough money that any teacher in Seattle had a monitor available for the asking. Turns out it’s more efficient to do it that way. Lerner and his team have negotiated bulk pricing with Dell and others, which significantly lowers the necessary amounts for a given district.

San Francisco was a natural next location to try to get enough dollars together, and they’ve now collected enough for that city as well as Oakland, Redwood City, and Contra Costa County. (San Jose is still a little short.)

This remarkable map, both hopeful and terrifying, shows the scale of what’s needed versus what’s been accomplished.

Yet even though the idea of hooking up more than 150,000 teachers with monitors seems gargantuan, it must be pointed out that in the few months since its humble beginnings, Two Screens for Teachers has rustled up more than 20,000, for both big cities and tiny towns. One order of magnitude is nothing!

The final cost for equipping teachers across the company with essential equipment is about $23 million. It seems an almost ridiculously low number for a single billionaire, perhaps one of the many whose net worth has grown by ten times that amount in the last year, to provide with a single check. Here’s something with which one could buy genuine cross-country goodwill, cheap at the price.

Here’s the link, guys!

For those of you not in the three (going on four) comma club, it’s still possible to help out in a smaller way either by donating or following the instructions here to ship a monitor to a teacher in need.

Throughout 2019, Microsoft experimented with building a real world, augmented reality Minecraft game designed in the same vein as Pokémon GO. Called Minecraft Earth, they finally opened it up to everyone in November of 2019.

In just a few months, it’ll shut down and all player data will be deleted.

So what happened? Writes the Minecraft Earth team:

Minecraft Earth was designed around free movement and collaborative play – two things that have become near impossible in the current global situation. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to re-allocate our resources to other areas that provide value to the Minecraft community and to end support for Minecraft Earth in June 2021.

In other words: this game just isn’t going to work in a pandemic. Pokémon GO might be doing just fine thanks to a strong foundation of super dedicated players and a steady stream of curious newcomers, but it’d be pretty damned hard to go from zero to sixty with a real world game when everyone is supposed to be staying at home.

What happens next:

• The team is releasing one final patch that removes all in-app purchases and makes all in-game mechanics easier/faster
• On June 30th, the game shuts down. Even if you’ve got it installed already, it’ll stop working.
• On July 1st, they’re deleting all player data.
• Anyone who has spent any money in Minecraft Earth is getting a free copy of Minecraft Bedrock version, and players who have unused Minecraft Earth rubies will get an unspecified amount of Minecoins that’ll work in Minecraft-proper’s marketplace

It’s a disappointing end to what was really a pretty cool concept — but if they’re announcing its shutdown barely a year after launch, the data probably suggest there’s not much else they can do.

Virgin Orbit is wasting no time in 2021 getting back to active flight testing: The company has a window for its next orbital demonstration launch attempt that opens on Sunday, January 10, and that continues throughout the rest of the month. This follows an attempt last year made in May, which ended before the LauncherOne rocket reached orbit – shortly after it detached from the Cosmic Girl carrier aircraft, in fact.

While that mission didn’t go exactly as Virgin Orbit had hoped, it was a significant milestone for the small satellite launch company, and helped gather a significant amount of data about how the vehicle performs in flight. LauncherOne was able to briefly lit its rocket booster before safety systems on board automatically shut it down. The company had been looking to fly this second test before the end of last year, but issues including COVID-19 meant that they only got as far as the wet dress rehearsal (essentially a run-through of everything leading up to the flight with the vehicles fully fueled).

This next mission will once again attempt an orbital launch, and this time, the stakes are somewhat higher because actual customer payloads from NASA are on board. They include a number of small satellite science experiments and demonstrations, and while they’re specifically selected for the mission profile (meaning it’s not a tremendous loss if the launch fails), it still would make everyone happiest to actually get them to their target destination.

The nature of the launch window means that Virgin Orbit will likely wait for conditions to be as good as possible before taking off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, so take that January 10 date as the earliest possible launch time, but not necessarily the most likely. If successful, Virgin Orbit will join a select group of private small launch vehicles that have made it to orbit, so the industry will definitely be watching the next time Cosmic Girl takes off with LauncherOne attached.

Dell’s latest monitors reflect the growing need for simple, solid solutions to video conferencing needs, with a clever pop-up camera and a perhaps too clever by half Teams integration. The new displays integrate a number of advanced features — but they’re still made strictly with offices in mind.

The new Dell 24, 27, and 34 Video Conferencing Monitors are clearly meant to be a turnkey solution to the need at many companies for video-capable setups that don’t cost a fortune.

The most interesting feature is a pop-up camera at the top; this isn’t the first one of these by far (we’ve seen them going back a few years) or even the first by Dell, but it is the first of theirs in a monitor as opposed to an all-in-one system, and it is probably the best one yet.

The five-megapixel camera (which translates to somewhat more than 1080p, likely around 3K) won’t blow any minds, so if you want things like optical background blur and improved lighting, you’ll have to build your own setup. But it should be perfectly fine for work calls, and having it slip away when not in use is reassuring to the privacy-conscious.

An additional, non-obvious reason to like this setup is it means the camera isn’t confined to the bezel of the monitor itself, possibly allowing for a better lens and bigger sensor. I’ve asked Dell for the detailed specs and I don’t expect anything extraordinary, but it’s always better to have space than to pack the camera module into the margins.

At the bottom of these new screens is a pleasantly felted speaker bar, with just enough wattage for calls to sound fine — it won’t work for bangers, though.

But on the left side of that speaker are some interesting, if not entirely practical, new buttons. Most prominent is a dedicated Microsoft Teams button, along with call, volume, and mute buttons.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want one of those. And not just because we don’t use Teams.

Maybe this is just me, but I don’t like the idea of reaching forward and whacking my monitor, which I’ve carefully positioned, every time I want to adjust the volume or answer a call, or mute myself — good luck doing it subtly when the whole view shakes every time. Even if I did, I wouldn’t want a button dedicated specifically to a single brand of video conferencing. Seems limiting when so many video platforms are in play.

I would be far more likely to pay for a puck with those controls on it as well as a mono speaker for voices and mic that’s closer to me. And by the way, it might be better to leave noise cancellation to the software side of things — calling apps often integrate their own, and who knows how built-in noise blocking interacts with those.

No doubt this is a simpler product solution, of course, and also presumably one that Microsoft and Dell worked together on. The pop-up webcam also has an IR camera that works with Windows Hello, the face-recognition login method I didn’t realize existed until very recently.

Obviously this is Dell and Microsoft going after enterprise customers who are already in their ecosystem. But as a Dell monitor lover myself, I wouldn’t mind having a pop-up camera — minus the unnecessary sound bar and Teams button. Where’s the love, Dell?

The new video conferencing monitors will be available next month, starting at $520 for a 24-inch, then going up to $720 for the 27-inch and $1,150 for the (curved) 34-inch.

The U.S. government says hackers “likely Russian in origin” are responsible for breaching the networks of at least 10 U.S. federal agencies and several major tech companies, including FireEye and Microsoft.

In a joint statement published Tuesday, the FBI, the NSA, and Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory unit CISA said that the government was “still working to understand the scope” of the breach, but that the breaches is likely an “intelligence gathering effort.”

The statement didn’t name the breached agencies, but the Treasury, State, and the Department of Energy are among those reported to be affected.

News of the widespread espionage campaign emerged in early December after cybersecurity giant FireEye, normally the first company that cyberattack victims will call, discovered its own network had been breached. Soon after it was reported that several government agencies had also been infiltrated.

All of the victims are customers of U.S. software firm SolarWinds, whose Orion network management tools are used across the U.S. government and Fortune 500 companies. FireEye said that hackers broke into SolarWinds’ network and pushed a tainted software update to its customers, allowing the hackers to easily break in to any one of thousands of companies and agencies that installed the backdoored update.

Some 18,000 customers downloaded the backdoored software update, but the government’s joint statement said that it believes only a “much smaller number have been compromised by follow-on activity on their systems.”

Several news outlets have previously reported that the hacks were carried out by a Russian intelligence group known as APT 29, or Cozy Bear, which has been linked to several espionage-driven attacks, including attempting to steal coronavirus vaccine research.

Tuesday’s joint statement would be the first time the government acknowledged the likely culprit behind the campaign.

Russia had previously denied involvement with the hacks.

Procter & Gamble will not acquire women’s beauty products startup Billie, as previously planned, following action taken by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to stop the deal from proceeding. In December, the FTC sued to block P&G’s acquisition of the New York-based startup Billie, a maker of women’s razors and other beauty products, on the grounds that the merger would eliminate competition in the wet shave razor market.

Today, P&G and Billie issued a joint statement, expressing their regret over the Commission’s decision to attempt to block their merger, which led to the deal’s termination:

“We were disappointed by the FTC’s decision and maintain there was exciting potential in combining Billie with P&G to better serve more consumers around the world. However, after due consideration, we have mutually agreed that it is in both companies’ best interests not to engage in a prolonged legal challenge, but instead to terminate our agreement and refocus our resources on other business priorities.”

Billie had made a name for itself in the women’s razor market by offering to eliminate the so-called “pink tax,” which refers to how women’s products are often marked up at higher price points compared with similar products aimed at men. It later expanded into the broader beauty market with a focus on more natural products that are free of additives and chemicals, including sulfates, parabens, formaldehydes, GMOs, drying alcohols, synthetic dyes, fragrances, cheap foaming agents, unstable silicones and BHT.

The startup was also particularly successful in capturing the interest of a younger, Gen Z to Millennial-aged consumer, who responded to its mission as well as its modern, and often even progressive, marketing across social media and the web. In its advertisements, Billie would show women with body hair — a message that went against the grain of traditional societal expectations, where women are often shown in marketing messages — including razor ads — as already hairless and smooth.

Billie’s message was that women should feel free to do what they want about their body hair –but for those who prefer to shave, it would be happy to sell them an affordably priced razor.

What also made Billie interesting was its business model. The company offers to ship replacement blades on a subscription basis to its customers, which helped it grow revenues and customer loyalty.

Ahead of the P&G acquisition, Billie was planning to expand into physical retail stores, which would have made the brand a more direct competitor to P&G products, the FTC had said.

“As its sales grew, Billie was likely to expand into brick-and-mortar stores, posing a serious threat to P&G,” noted Ian Conner, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, in a statement issued last month. “If P&G can snuff out Billie’s rapid competitive growth, consumers will likely face higher prices,” he added.

As a result of the FTC’s actions, the companies chose to put an end to their plans to merge as opposed to pursuing further legal action.

The FTC praised this decision in a release issued today. Reuters also reported on the companies’ decision to terminate.

“Procter & Gamble’s abandonment of the acquisition of Billie is good news for consumers who value low prices, quality, and innovation,” the FTC statement reads. “Billie is a direct-to-consumer company whose advertising targets customers who are tired of paying more for comparable razors. The FTC voted to challenge this merger because it would have eliminated dynamic competition from Billie.”

The FTC lawsuit was the second antitrust suit the agency filed in 2020 after it previously sued to block Edgewell Personal Care’s (maker of Schick razors) $1.37 billion deal to acquire the razor startup Harry’s, Inc., another direct-to-consumer brand. As a result, that deal fell through, too.

 

 

Coral reefs all over the world are struggling to survive, with millions of people and billions of dollars in business that rely on them at risk — on top of the fundamental tragedy of losing such a crucial ecosystem. Coral Vita aims to modernize both coral restoration techniques and the economy surrounding them, and has raised a $2 million seed round to kick things off in earnest.

I wrote about Coral Vita late in 2019 when I encountered co-founder Gator Halpern on the Sustainable Ocean Alliance’s Accelerator at Sea. At the time, the operation was both smaller and under siege by Hurricane Dorian, which wiped out the team’s coral farm in the Bahamas — and then, of course, the pandemic arrived just in time to spoil the team’s 2020 plans along with everyone else’s.

But despite the general chaos of the last year, Coral Vita managed to start and at last close a $2M round, with the intention to come back bigger and better and demonstrate a new global model for the field.

“We decided rather than just rebuilding our pilot farm to that pilot level, we’d just take the next step forward in our journey. We really believe this is an opportunity to jump start a restoration economy,” said Sam Teicher, co-founder and Chief Reef Officer.

To picture how reef restoration looks today, imagine (Teicher invited me) an underwater garden near the shore, with floating ropes and structures on which grow coral fragments that are occasionally harvested and transported to the area in need of young, healthy corals.

“But when you think about the scale of the problem — half the world’s reef are dead and the other half are predicted to die in the next 30 years — relying on underwater facilities isn’t possible,” he said.

The plan Coral Vita has is to transition away from ocean-based farms to land facilities that allow for much improved yield and survivability, and employ advanced techniques to speed up coral’s growth and increase its survival rate. One such technique is coral fragmenting, developed by the restoration community at large, in which corals are broken up into tiny pieces, which can grow as much as 50 times faster in aggregate. And by doing so on land they can exert much more control over the coral’s attributes.

“We’ve got tanks on land with clean sea water pumping through and the ability, among other things, to control conditions,” he explained. “So if you think of what it’ll be like off the coast of Grand Bahama in 40-50 years, we can essentially simulate that to harden the corals against those conditions. Up front, an ocean-based nursery is much cheaper, but when you start thinking about the need to grow millions or billions of corals around the world, land-based facilities start to look a lot more realistic. The cost goes down with scale, too — ocean-based nurseries go to about $30-40 per coral; we can get it down to $10 as we get up to a hundred or a thousand tanks.”

Not only is the physical scale limited at present, but the income sources are as well: often it’s government money instead of the inexhaustible well of private cash. Coral Vita hopes to be able to change that by increasing and diversifying supply and going directly to those affected.

“We’re trying to transform the space away from grants and aid — we’re selling to customers that depend on the ecosystems of reefs,” Teicher said. “If you’re a hotel that relies on scuba or snorkel tourists, if you’re a coastal property owner or insurer, a government, a development bank, a cruise line, you can hire Coral Vita to restore the reefs that you work on.”

This superficially mercenary business model where commercially important reefs get priority wouldn’t be necessary, of course, if governments and industry hadn’t systematically neglected these reefs to begin with. Not that privately funded projects are somehow fundamentally tainted, but this type of restoration work tends to be seen as the milieu of nonprofits and government agencies. One might consider this approach a direct, if late, tax that cuts out the government middle man.

The fact is this is globally crucial work that needs to start now, not in five or ten years when the correct conservation funds are organized by concerned parties. Every month counts when reefs are actively deteriorating, and private money is the only realistic option to scale up fast and do what needs to be done. Plus, as the process becomes cheaper, it becomes easier to fund projects without commercial backing.

“On top of that is the ability to innovate,” added Teicher. “What we’re trying to do with this round is to make advances to the science and engineering, including 3D printing and robotics in the process. We’re launching R&D projects not just for restoration but protection.”

He cited Tom Chi, co-founder of Google X and an early advisor and investor, as someone who has pushed on the automation side, comparing the industry to agriculture, where robotics is currently having a transformative effect.

Proving out the scalable land-based farms opens up the possibility of a global presence, as well — lowering costs and lead times for corals to be brought to where they’re needed.

“We’re at a point where we need to rethink adaptation and how to fund it,” said Teicher. “The two year plan is to launch more farms in other countries — ultimately we want this to be the biggest coral farm that ever existed.”

Leading the $2M round was the environment-focused Builders Collective, with participation from Apollo Projects’ Max Altman and baseball’s Max and Erica Scherzer. Earlier investors (in a pre-seed or “Seed one” round) include the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, Tom Chi as mentioned, Adam Draper, Yale University, and Sven and Kristen Lindblad.

While gaming giants Sony and Microsoft have made M&A a critical part of their strategic growth plans, Nintendo has always seemed to be more reluctant to bring outside talent into the fold of its video game empire. Today, the company announced that it will be acquiring the developer behind Luigi’s Mansion 3, Canada-based Next Level Games.

Nintendo’s announcement is the first studio acquisition for the company since their 2007 purchase of Xenoblade Chronicles developer Monolith Soft.

Next Level Games has been working on Nintendo-licensed IP exclusively for the better part of the last decade, crafting a number of titles across some of the company’s second tier of intellectual property including the Super Mario Strikers series as well as mobile iterations of Metroid Prime and Luigi’s Mansion.

The Vancouver-based studio’s recent Luigi’s Mansion 3 title for the Nintendo Switch has been a pretty huge success for the company which has had pretty light offerings of first-party IP since the system’s launch. In a recent earnings report, Nintendo shared that Luigi’s Mansion 3 had sold nearly 8 million copies, earning it a spot as one of the system’s top-selling titles.