The TechCrunch Tel Aviv conference is in June and we’re excited to announce our first speakers for the day-long event. Today, we’re delighted to announce that Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze, and Ben Volkow, CEO and co-founder of Otonomo will be speaking on our stage.
TechCrunch Tel Aviv is focused on mobility and all that it entails, from autonomous vehicles, to sensors, drones, and security. It makes perfect sense then to have the godfather of the modern mobility: Uri Levine .
Levine is a passionate serial entrepreneur and disruptor. He co-founded Waze, the world’s largest traffic and navigation app with more than 250 million drivers around the globe. It was acquired by Google in June 2013 for more than $1.1 billion.
After Waze, he co-founded and joined several startups as chairman or board member. Levine focuses mainly on consumer services that all have one thing in common, “creating a lot of value to a lot of users.” For instance, he believes in services that help you save money and time, that empower you — in other words, doing good and doing well.
We’re equally thrilled to welcome one of the new kids on the block, Ben Volkow of Otonomo . Otonomo’s platform powers the first connected car data marketplace. And when it comes to autonomous vehicles, data is the new oil. Otonomo was founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneurs to disrupt the entire connected and autonomous car industry.
The event will be on June 7, 2018, at the Tel Aviv Convention Center. Israel is one of the world’s fastest growing and most impressive startup ecosystems, and we simply can’t resist coming back. Buy tickets here!
In this modern world, some days it can feel like everything is out of your grasp. So take stock on those things that you can control. Like Messenger, Facebook’s increasingly feature-rich offshoot app, which now sports admin privileges for group chats.
The new feature is rolling out this week, giving users the ability to better keep group chats on lockdown. Admins can do your standard array of adminy-type things: adding and removing members and promoting and demoting users with admin privileges of their own. It’s enough to make Messenger users downright mad with power.
Also new is the addition of joinable links — send them to a new person you want to joinvia email and voila, they’re on board. The new additions should help position Messenger as a more fully formed Telegram competitor, as Facebook increasingly views the app as a standalone offering in its own right.
The company’s been rolling out features to the app at pretty steady clip over the past year, including mentions, reactions, group payments and customizable groups. According to the company, 2.5 million new groups were created on the app every day last year. So a little added power goes a long way.
Walking into my first ever meeting with a structural packaging designer, I started rooting around in my bag before exclaiming, “This is the sort of thing I want!” She leaned forward in her chair, delighted to have a customer with a strong guide, then groaned audibly when she saw what I had placed on the table: the packaging from my new iPhone.
“You can have anything you want,” she countered, “but if you want your packaging to look and feel like Apple’s, you’ll have to increase the unit cost for your packaging by 10x.”
Packaging is just one example — there are dozens — of why Apple is a rank outlier in almost every way. Or, put differently: Using the Cupertino-based company as your template for how to build a startup is not a great idea.Let me tell you why.
Manufacturing constraints be damned!
Apple is unusual in many ways, but nothing sets it apart from your hardware startup quite as much as its cash reserves. The company sits on a quarter-of-a-trillion-dollar pile of cash, about twenty thousand times more money than even the best-funded startup in the world. Having a rainy-day fund the size of a national budget means you’re able to demand certain things. One example: Chipset manufacturers will jump through hoops to make things possible for Apple that they wouldn’t do for anyone else.
At Apple, design is the driving force, with manufacturing and engineering fully dialed in to support that vision. In practice, that means that Apple’s designers make choices nobody else would be able to make.
The amount of custom CNC milling that goes into Apple’s unibody laptops is incredibly hard to scale.
For example, when designing the new unibody Macbook Pro, Apple’s designers had a very specific design in mind. In almost every other company, the design team would have been told by the manufacturing team that what they wanted to do wouldn’t be possible. Here’s what manufacturing would say: “The only way to accomplish what you’ve designed is to use a CNC mill. That doesn’t scale! We would need thousands of the damn things!” At Apple, with its mountain of cash, that turns out not to be a limiting factor. If the designers want something, they’ll have it, even if that means buying 10,000 CNC mills to scale manufacturing or buying the entire output of a laser-drilling manufacturer (and later buying the whole company), because Apple needed the entire world’s supply of that particular type of laser.
No other manufacturer would even think to do that — it is a ludicrously over-engineered solution to a simple problem.
Apple is no stranger to going to ludicrous lengths to build its products. That’s enviable, but it’s not replicable.
Another example is found in the Apple iPhone X. The designers wanted the screen to run all the way to the top and bottom edges of the display. The problem? The display controller needs to connect somewhere. Apple’s engineering team came up with an ingenious solution: Instead of using a rigid OLED panel, they used a flexible display — not because they wanted the display itself to be curved, but as an engineering feature to hide the display controller. No other manufacturer would even think to do that — it is a ludicrously over-engineered solution to a simple problem. But if you’re sitting on infinite cash and no manufacturing constraints, why the hell not?
As a startup, it’s extremely unlikely you have to reinvent the wheel, crown, or cog from scratch. In fact, you probably want to do the opposite. Apple does whatever it damn well pleases , which is great for them. Once you have the world’s largest stack of $20 bills sitting in your bank account, you can do the same. Until then, it’s far cheaper and easier to use off-the-shelf components, with a minimum of custom pieces, to get your product to market as quickly as possible — and then iterate.
Secrecy is not great for teamwork
Secrecy runs deep in Apple’s DNA. Terrified of competitors, the press, or the public discovering something ahead of time, the company operates in deep secrecy.
This cloak-and-dagger approach is astonishing, to the point that an engineer’s line manager might at times not know what her direct reports are working on. If you’re working on the next generation OS, you may never see the hardware on which it runs until the product ships. If you’re working on hardware, the opposite is true: You may be creating a beautiful canvas for software to live on, but chances are, you won’t see the work in progress until you can buy it in a store.
This secrecy works for Apple because it is such a design-driven company. It is permanently locking horns with the fast followers who try to copy its innovations and progress. Total secrecy is a way to ensure that Apple gets the jump on competitors and maintains the upper hand. As such, Apple’s total commitment to furtiveness is a useful weapon in the fight against industrial espionage. There may also be a staff retention element to the strategy: If hiring an Apple engineer is not the way to learn what Apple is doing, perhaps the competitors are less likely to poach its staff.
By keeping products secret until the moment they are revealed to the public, Apple prevents its competitors from “borrowing” its innovations.
Secrecy might sound intriguing, but for a startup, it’s absolutely the wrong way to go. Decoupling everything simply doesn’t work. Collaborative design and a more integrated hardware/software approach is a far more productive way of working. In fact, I’d argue that openness and collaboration are the biggest advantages startups have over larger corporations. Squandering that by trying to be overly secretive is a terrible waste.
It’s worth noting that while internal transparency is great, that doesn’t mean you have to do all your R&D in public or constantly inform your customers and fans about what you’re doing. Staying in stealth externally and keeping your competitors in the dark as long as possible might be wise. Recall the case of the Fidget Cube, for example: The company ran a very successful Kickstarter campaign but was subsequently beaten to market by dozens of copycats.
Next-level logistics
If you’ve ordered a new MacBook from Apple recently, and you selected any customizations, chances are that you’ve seen a shipping notification with an origination address in China, and your parcel will probably arrive in less than a week. Drop-shipping from the factory gives Apple tremendous flexibility in its logistics operation and a fantastic customer experience. The scale at which Apple operates is the dream of startup founders — most of us don’t have the luxury of shipping six million units over a Black Friday weekend, or selling out our entire stock of a $1,000 phone on launch day.
Startups will find it hard to copy Apple’s logistics operation.
Ultimately, it comes down to leverage. Apple’s economy of scale is so enormous that it, in effect, has the logistics companies over a barrel. Any company shipping millions and millions of parcels per month will be able to negotiate with FedEx, DHL, and all the other courier firms. As a startup shipping dozens or scores of items, you have little leverage in negotiations.
Apple has set up its logistics operations to be optimized for shipping to anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat, whether the ordered items are customized or not. That’s mind-boggling, given the nearly infinite number of SKUs with which the company operates.
When your hardware startup changes gears from development mode to operations mode, logistics get complicated quickly. Dealing with distribution warehouses, retail SKUs, box SKUs, and managing returns is hard enough as it is — drop-shipping directly from the factory to your customers is a layer of very expensive pain that is best avoided.
Drop shipping directly from your manufacturer also makes QA issues a challenge. What happens, for example, if there’s a problem with the goods being shipped out? If something does go wrong, you want to be able to deal with the issue when you have 1,000 faulty units sitting on a pallet in a warehouse, not when they’re in 1,000 different locations around the world. If the manufacturer is drop-shipping directly, they may not have an incentive to flag and resolve problems early enough.
Down in the trenches in Startup World, sea freight to relevant regions and local distribution for last-mile delivery is the name of the game.
Apple is a different beast
Design, logistics, packaging — whenever Apple is the example of one way of doing something, try to find two more examples. If you can’t find any, that’s a pretty good indicator that it’s not a hill worth dying on: Apple lives in one world, the rest of us live in another.
By all means, keep an eye on Apple and the way the company pushes the envelope. But bear in mind that, for now, the company is a very different beast than your startup in almost every possible way.
The world is awash in data, and while OpenSignal, a startup based out of London that’s probably best known for its mobile network speed reports — which it compiles by tapping sensors from a network of smartphones from 100 million people — has picked up $8 million in funding to expand its team and products. (Yes, it is hiring.)
The Series B round was led by Octopus Ventures. Previous backers Qualcomm Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Passion Capital also participated. The company is not revealing its valuation — “it was a significant upround over the valuation in our Series A,” Brendan Gill, CEO and co-founder, said when asked. OpenSignal had raised only around $5.3 million prior to this, and was last valued at $15.46 million post-money in its Series A, according to PitchBook.
The funding — an oversubscribed round, according to Gill — comes during a period of strong growth for the startup. Gill said that OpenSignal turned profitable and stayed so through all of the last year. Its network of 100 million people and the resulting trillion data points, meanwhile, is a drastic increase over the few million it had a couple of years ago.
Part of that growth has come as a result of an expansion of OpenSignal’s business model. When the company was founded eight years ago, it was built on the premise of using its own apps to pick up data, first for mobile speeds and later weather (which it no longer tracks, it says). While it still uses these (on iOS and Android), more recently it has started to integrate with a wider group of third-party apps to piggy back on their installations and usage to bring together a wider group of mobile phone users to expand OpenSignal’s data and reach. That is how a startup that might be seen as having a niche appeal has bulked up to being able to reach 100 million in a matter of years.
At a time when all eyes are on data privacy in Europe, and more globally, Facebook and how it and other large platforms have been tapped by third parties both to source data and to distribute content for questionable ends, you might wonder who OpenSignal’s app partners are, and how (and if) consumers are informed when OpenSignal is tapping their sensors for data.
Gill declined to name specific app partners, but said that the list is in the tens, not hundreds, of apps; and that they cover a broad range of areas like gaming, social networking and productivity in order to get “as average as possible” range of mobile uses as possible to find the most accurate, real-world mobile data speeds.
While there will always be people these days like to track how fast their networks work, it seems that this is not the main target audience for OpenSignal. It is carriers looking to improve their speeds especially against competitors (carriers, he says, are never partners on data collection itself, to help keep OpenSignal independent), with telcos in more than 20 countries now using its services to track speeds; regulators who are tracking speeds for rule-making and monitoring purposes; and financial and industry analysts who use the data to help formulate reports on the state of the companies and the industry.
“Our goal is to get brought in as a global standard for network experience or connectivity,” Gill said.
This is no small thing: for years carriers and those whose job it is to stand objectively and check that they work as they are supposed to, have relied on the carriers’ own diagnostics to track speeds, but as anyone who has been saddled with a slow network that claims to be fast knows, the traditional model is a flawed one.
This is also relevant to where OpenSignal wants to develop as a business. Going forward, OpenSignal will continue to provide the services it already does, but, as I see it, the bigger opportunity is for the startup to eventually tap into the wider growth of the Internet of Things.
We now have sensors in millions of objects, and providing the right algorithms to “read” the data from those sensors can help all kinds of systems — especially those that have been tracked in less accurate ways — work more efficiently, be they traffic networks, or a factory running smoothly.
“We now have a lot of data and we see this round as helping us build out more analytics on top of the data,” said Gill. “We are building a team to take that data and interpret it. Real world experience metrics matter.”
On the front of data privacy and user consent on how data is used — two big areas that will very soon become mandatory considerations for all companies that want to do business in Europe — Gill said that OpenSignal is getting this by way of agreements between users and the apps that are OpenSignal’s data partners. Users are able to opt out of apps picking up and sending data when they are not being used, and he said that there is information contained in those app’s terms that will make clear that some of the phone sensor data would be used by the apps’ partners for diagnostics (which is what would cover OpenSignal).
“The good thing for us is that we’ve taken a strong stance on privacy,” said Gill. “Although we could collect more personal data if we wanted, we limit it. We don’t know who our users are, and we don’t share anything with third parties or tracking organizations. We are quite firm about how it’s used.”
Updated to note OpenSignal no longer tracks weather.
Building a GPU-fueled infrastructure service is not a simple matter for a startup to undertake, but that’s precisely what Paperspace has set out to do. Today, it took it to the next level when it announced Gradient, a service platform that eliminates the need to deploy servers for AI and machine learning projects.
Like any serverless architecture, the servers don’t really go away, but the need to deploy them manually does. Gradient provides the means to simply deploy code and Paperspace will take care of all the allocation and management, removing a big piece of the complexity associated with building machine learning models.
Dillon Erb, company co-founder and CEO, says that when they launched the company several years ago, GPUs were not as commonly available as a cloud service as they are today. They initially provided a way to launch GPU instances in virtual machines, something they still do, but they saw a problem around a lack of tooling.
Erb explained that large companies tend to build their own tool sets, but most companies or teams for that matter, don’t have the resources to spend the time to build the underlying plumbing. “Just having raw compute is not sufficient. You need a software stack,” he said.
They spent the last year building Gradient to provide that structure for developers to concentrate on building models and code and collaborating around a project, while leaving the management to Paperspace. It removes the need to have a DevOps team to manage the interactions between the team, the code and the underlying infrastructure.
“Just give us code, a Docker container. You don’t have to schedule a VM because we do it for you. You never have to fire up a machine,” he said.
Paperspace has been trying to solve hard problems around deploying GPUs in the cloud, since it graduated from the Y Combinator Winter 2015 class. It has raised over $11 million in funding since it launched in 2014 including a $4 million seed round in 2016.
Flying cars are more down to earth than ever – at least, in that their physical design is moving closer to something resembling a car. The AeroMobil 5th generation all-electric VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) concept is no exception, with styling that makes it look sort of like a near-future SUV or crossover, with a wide nose but a sleek, low design that suggests sporty performance.
The AeroMobil 5.0 VTOL joins the previously revealed 4.0 STOL (short take-off and landing) vehicle that the company showed off last year. The plan is to put both models into service, with the STOL handling short hops between cities, while this 5.0 vehicle would get people around within metropolitan environments, since they’re more flexible in terms of take-off and landing spots.
Both are capable of both flying and driving, depending on the needs of the situation, and the VTOL has the advantage of being able to use existing infrastructure to begin and end its aerial trips, since it can take off without any runway at all. When it’s time to take to the skies, the wings extend out from the sides of the vehicles, and two larger rotors provide upward propulsion. A rear-mounted propeller at the back of the vehicle then pushes the vehicle through the air.
AeroMobil’s rollout plan is very different, however – it’s hoping to sell the 5.0 VTOL to private owners in a limited series starting in 2020. I guess you’ll own both a 4.0 STOL and a 5.0 VTOL, the former for the country and the latter for the city. Enjoy the skies, you fabulously wealthy people. I’ll be here, on the filthy ground.
Uber is sweetening the pot for its Uber Freight offering aimed at commercial trucking. The company is launchingUber Freight Plus today, a program designed to help alleviate costs around some of the more expensive aspects of owning and operating a transport vehicle, including fuel, tire and maintenance discounts, as well as new purchase bonuses for buying either brand new or used trucks.
The Uber Freight Plus program will provide up to $0.20 per gallon discounts off of the retail price at big, name brand fuel chains across the U.S., and around $0.15 per gallon in rebates at some smaller independent stops in California, Texas and Illinois. Operators will save an average of $130 per tire on replacements, and they can save up to $16,000 (in ‘customer value’) on new trucks, or as much as $4,000 on used vehicles. For maintenance, Uber says members will see savings of between 20 and 50 percent on parts on average. There are monthly discounts available for mobile service, too, including from Sprint and AT&T.
To reap these benefits, different eligibility rules apply. For the Fuel Card, mobile service and maintenance savings, carriers and their drives have to meet Uber’s eligibility requirements, which means having booked and completed just one job on the Uber Freight app. Then, to remain eligible to participate in the program, drivers have to book and complete a single load on the Uber Freight app at least every 30 days. For truck purchase discounts, carriers must have completed at least 10 loads using Uber Freight.
Clearly, Uber’s hoping to spur adoption and incentivize use of its platform. These discounts are attractive carrots, however, especially given the relatively low barrier to entry for most. Uber does say that eligibility conditions are subject to change, so this could just be their way of ensuring they reach as broad an audience as possible early on.
Microsoft announced the spring update to its Power BI and Power Apps platform today with a significant enhancement, a new common data service that enables companies to build data-based applications from a variety of data sources.
This is part of a wider strategy that is designed to remove some of the complexity associated with gathering, processing and incorporating data into applications.
Microsoft is essentially giving customers access to the same set of tools and services it has used internally to build Dynamics 365, its enterprise suite of tools that includes CRM, marketing automation and field service along with enterprise resource planning tools (ERP).
While the company has been allowing third party developers to build application on the platform for about 18 months with its Power Apps tools, they haven’t been able to take advantage of the data under the hood without some heavy lifting. Microsoft aims to change that with the Common Data Service.
Diagram: Microsoft
“What that service means, practically speaking, is that it’s not only a place to store data, but a model (schema) that is stamped out there with everything you would need to build a business app around [elements] such as contacts, events, customers [and so forth], Ryan Cunningham, Microsoft program manager for Power Apps explained. This allows the programmer to take advantage of pre-built relationships and rules and how they should be enforced without having to code them from scratch.
Cunningham points out that they tried to make it fairly simple to build the apps, while still providing a level of customization and the ability to use Microsoft data or data from another source. That’s where the Common Data Store comes in.
He says that developers can take advantage of the 200 connectors that come pre-built out of the box and connect to all that data you’ve been collecting in the Microsoft products, but they aren’t limited to the Microsoft data. “You can still build custom applications on top of the platform, and get the benefit of the platform we’ve built our tools on,” he said.
The Common Data Store is part of a much broader set of announcements around the spring releases of Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Power BI platforms all announced today.
Kozmo.com, the startup that attempted on-demand delivery of anything way back in 1998 but burned through $280 million in capital and failed to make itself profitable, is back.
Instead of delivering anything from videos to games to books and more, the new Kozmo is focused on bulk delivery of groceries. Kozmo will offer next-day delivery, with the goal of delivering on-demand within two hours, for groceries. Kozmo will initially charge a $5.99 delivery fee for orders costing a minimum of $35. With Kozmo, the company says customers can expect to save between 20-50 percent off retail prices.
It’s important to note that this Kozmo is under new leadership. None of the original Kozmo founders or employees are involved in this new venture. Instead, grocery ordering platform Yummy bought the domain and trademark for Kozmo. Kozmo’s products will come from Yummy.com and local retailers.
“Kozmo.com is an iconic brand that millions of people remember,” Kozmo and Yummy CEO Barnaby Montgomery told TechCrunch in an email. “In addition, it’s synonymous with convenience so we felt that keeping the name with our updated offering was the perfect fit.”
Kozmo seems to be going after Costco, Jet and Boxed.com, the site for buying food and household items in bulk that similarly does not charge membership fees.
“When viewed as a combined offer, Kozmo and Yummy.com offer customers the holy grail of online solutions; the opportunity to buy online for less than a trip to the store at Kozmo, and the option to have your groceries delivered in only 30 minutes at Yummy.com, which is faster and more convenient than a trip to the store,” Montgomery said. “The unified view of our 2 solutions is important because we’re able to leverage our owned facilities, inventory, labor and delivery infrastructure to profitably help customers solve more problems, and help them save more money.”
Kozmo is currently only available in Los Angeles, but the company has plans to expand into additional markets this year.
Are you a developer, marketer, or designer living in Europe? Do you have an idea for an app or a hardware product that’s been tickling your brain trying to escape into the real world? Then you need to get yourself and your ideas down to the Expo Porte de Versailles in Paris on May 25-26. Why? To compete in the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech, mais bien sûr! Get your free ticket to hack today!
There you’ll connect with hundreds of other like-minded developers, hackers, tech builders and makers to form ad-hoc teams and use BeMyApp, the official Hackathon platform, to produce something amazing.
Here’s the best part: you’ll do all this in less than 24 candy-, caffeine-, and energy-drink-fueled hours. And right when you think you can’t possibly stay awake another second, it’s time to step on stage and deliver your creation in a 60-second, rapid-fire presentation to the Hackathon judges.
It’s grueling, it’s exhausting, it’s fun. Not only do you get a chance to display your own Ninja-like hacker chops, you’ll be surrounded by other devs at the top of their game. The opportunity to share ideas, learn new skills and network is invaluable. C’est magnifique!
So, other than bragging rights and a desire for a three-day nap, what do you get for all your hard work? The overall Hackathon winner takes home €5,000. And each team that scores a three or higher from the judges will receive five tickets to VivaTech 2019 and two Innovator tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in November.
And of course, it’s just not a Hackathon without top-quality swag, cash prizes and other nifty goodies from our sponsors. We’ll have more details on the contests and prizes coming soon.
The only qualification for participating in TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech is that you must be a resident of one of these European countries. And — get this — tickets are absolutely free. There’s a limited supply, however, and once they’re gone that’s it. Quelle horreur!
, sea freight to relevant regions and local distribution for last-mile delivery is the name of the game.
