Over the weekend, the Information Technology Industry Council and 44 other trade associations banded together and published a letter demanding that the Trump administration take “measured” steps to stop China’s unfair trade practices and voiced its opposition to unilateral tariffs that could damage industries as diverse as electronics and agriculture.
As we have been covering on TechCrunch, the Trump administration is readying a comprehensive “all of the above” series of policies to fight China, including tariffs that might reach above $100 billion, visa restrictions on Chinese nationals, and prohibitions on Chinese capital from buying or investing in American companies. The Trump administration is expected to develop a policy here shortly as part of the conclusion of its section 301 trade investigation into China.
The letter warns that tariffs in particular could lead to “a chain reaction of negative consequences for the U.S. economy, provoking retaliation; stifling U.S. agriculture, goods, and services exports; and raising costs for businesses and consumers.”
Interestingly, the letter leaves open the door for tariffs. From the letter:
In particular, it is critically important that the Administration work with like-minded partners to address common concerns with China’s trade and investment policies. Imposition of unilateral tariffs by the Administration would only serve to split the United States from its allies, hinder joint action to effectively address shared challenges, and ensure that foreign companies take the place of markets that American companies, farmers and ranchers must vacate when China retaliates against U.S. tariffs.
Considering the wide variety or organizations that signed onto this letter, it is interesting to note that free trade arguments are not being used here forcefully, but rather that America should only implement trade restrictions with the cooperation of other nations.
Outside ITI, the signatories of the trade association letter included a spate of tech industry-affiliated associations, including Allied for Startups, CompTIA, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, the Consumer Technology Association, the Developers Alliance, the Internet Association, the Software & Information Industry Association, TechNet, and the Telecommunications Industry Association.
British startup Made.com says that “a new tier 1 global institutional investor” has made an important investment commitment in the furniture company. This mysterious investor is willing to lead a new $56 million round (£40 million) with existing investors Partech Ventures, Level Equity and Eight Roads Ventures also participating.
It sounds like the funding round isn’t finished just yet, so Made.com could end up raising more than that.
More interestingly, the company has shared some details about its balance sheet. In 2017, the company has been profitable in the U.K., France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. And if you take into account the entire company in all countries where it operates, Made.com is currently cashflow positive.
In 2017, the company has generated a net revenue of $178 million (£127 million), which represents a 40 percent increase compared to 2016. So it sounds like Made.com is on the right path to profitability.
And that’s why the company also announced that Adrian Evans is joining the company as CFO. He previously worked at Yoox Net-A-Porter. This release sounds like Made.com is now optimizing the company for a potential IPO.
The company sells quality furniture at an affordable price. Made.com wants to disrupt high-end furniture stores by controlling everything from manufacturing to the e-commerce platform. This way, the company doesn’t have to pay as many middle players and can offer cheaper prices.
As e-commerce is also becoming the norm, it fosters competition with furniture giants, such as IKEA. Going to Made.com’s website is as easy as going to IKEA’s website after all.
Earlier this month, two former Google staffers quietly launched a new app that’s designed to help users overcome technology’s uncanny valley and develop a more healthy relationship with the ubiquitous electronic assistant that “lives” in our pockets.
Called Maslo, the new app (and the company behind it), in the words of its founders, to develop a “personified AI technology that interacts with empathy and playfulness.”
At its core, the first iteration of Maslo is a daily check-in tool that encourages and develops mindfulness, according to founders Ross Ingram and Christina Poindexter.
Once downloaded, Maslo is a voice-activated journaling tool with a basic status update feature that encourages users to log an emoji representation of their emotional state a particular moment, and spend a minute talking to the app about what’s going on.
The idea, the founders say, is to have Maslo evolve and personalize as users interact with it. You can see what the company’s blobby AI looks like below.
Ingram, who was a former Sphero employee working on projects like the BB-8 before he joined Google, has thought deeply about how technology intersects with the human psyche and how people create bonds with the technologies they use.
“We started building robots in 2010 and in the 2012 to 2013 timeframe we wondered what this would look like if we added some personality to this — and some kind of relationship,” says Ingram. “Whenever we launched these robots out into the world… people had this desire to connect on a deeper level… people wanted to share aspects of themselves with the robot.”
Meanwhile, his co-founder noticed the same behaviors from people who were interacting with the Google assistants in their early days.
“A lot of these interactions were non-utility queries,” says Poindexter, a Yale-educated sociologist, who worked on Google’s soon-to-be-announced assistants in the Pixel phone and Google Home in 2016 when she and Ingram first met.
“There was this need to go in and help people on a deeper level… I have a background in sociology and I look at it from a users’ perspective of what do people need,” Poindexter says. “A lot of these interactions [with the assistant] were mulling things over and needing a place to express them….and Google can’t deliver on that and from a brand perspective Google didn’t want to.”
That’s perfectly clear from Google’s latest commercial.
By contrast, Maslo wants to be a space where people can more comfortably address the emotional aspects of user’s lives.
“It’s the way we define an assistant vs. a companion… assistants help things get done in the external world and companions are going to help us get things done in our internal world,” says Ingram.
“There are going to be different classes of machines that interact and relate to humans on different levels,” Poindexter adds. “We are seeing thousands of people using machines for assistant based things… we know that where this is going we’re going to start talking more to whatever you want to call them — assistants or companions — and Alexa won’t help you figure out if you need help.”
Ingram left Google in December of 2016 and Poindexter followed in February. The two moved down to Los Angeles and began collaborating on the project that would eventually become Maslo.
Maslo co-founders Ross Ingram and Christina Poindexter
Over the long term, the two founders think of Maslo as a gateway to interacting with other services that a user may need — and one that is completely focused on security. Other tools can help with therapy, self-improvement, education, or entertainment, and Maslo wants to be the funnel that prompts users to take advantage of those services when necessary.
Importantly, in this era of increased privacy protection, the two have built Maslo so that most of the user information that Maslo collects stays on a user’s device rather than on servers that the company hosts. “Privacy and trust is the most critical to us,” says Ingram. “We’ve designed the architecture in a way that does keep a lot of the sensitive information on the phone. We do have to upload some things to the cloud in a secure way to continue to develop Maslow’s back end and machine learning… [But] we don’t have access to the actual voice note… we are able to interpret whatever is shared using our algorithms.”
Meanwhile transformative powers of technology and the ways in which it can provide a positive influence in people’s lives isn’t just rhetorical hyperbole for Ingram — he’s experienced it himself.
At 16 years old, Ingram, who grew up in a small town in rural Colorado, faced three felony charges and expulsion from his high school for stealing a computer. Always interested in technology, Ingram came from a working class family that didn’t have enough money for him to indulge in his favorite pastime.
The brush with the law could have landed him in jail, but Ingram was sent to a diversion program to keep kids out of prison and while there, the young developer decided to pursue a career in computer science. He enrolled in Denver’s Metropolitan Community College and while attending class managed to talk his way into a job with Sphero.
Ingram met the Sphero founders when they were just a collection of Boulder-based Android developers going through the Techstars program. When the company raised its first round, Sphero hired Ingram as its 7th employee and his career was off to the races.
“Going through that experience… helped me develop my sense of identity and figure out where I wanted to go in life,” Ingram says. “That’s very much what we’re focused on with Maslo today. Maslo is a reference to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and developing the tools you need to have that sense of self.”
Several studies (including this one from the University of Iowa) discuss the positive effects of journaling on mental health and addressing trauma. And Poindexter said that’s where Maslo wants to begin.
“In the beginning there needs to be some sort of joy in the exercise,” she says. “We really want to reflect back to people what they’re saying… [Maslo] holds up a mirror… it’s a sounding board and doesn’t necessarily give you the answers but shows you what you might already know.”
Over time, the two co-founders expect that the application will evolve to become more personalized as users develop a relationship with the AI they’re talking to. “The way that Maslo looks and the way Maslo animates and talks will be something that happens down the road,” says Ingram. “Being able to build this sense of companionship between machine and the user so that it is this safe space to access is very important.”
HQ Trivia was removed from the App Store following a controversial ending to a $25K game on Sunday night, according to Business Insider.
HQ has introduced a new high-stakes version of the game where one winner takes home a larger prize. However, on Sunday night, no one won the $25K.
The company posted on its Twitter account that moderators kick players who break the company’s TOS.
HQ moderators kick players that violate HQ’s Terms of Service and Contest Rules. For more information, please refer to our Terms of Service here: https://t.co/septsPVgOm
HQ would not be specific about what rules were broken, but BI reports that Twitter users had suggested it was due to jailbroken iPhones, which could be running software that gives users a leg up in the trivia competition.
For those who missed the game last night, two players remained for the final question. One was removed due to breaking the TOS, and the remaining player missed the last question, resulting in no winner.
Cheating seems to be a growing problem with HQ Trivia. There are countless guidesonline about how to cheat, including obvious methods like using voice dictation and a second device to Google search each question. The time limit makes that more difficult, but not impossible.
But as HQ grows its prize pot — the original prize was $1000 — cheating on the platform, and the methods by which people cheat, is only bound to intensify.
Even more bizarre, the app was seemingly removed from the App Store following the game. It has since re-appeared on the App Store.
HQ says that last night’s game and HQ’s removal from the App Store are unrelated events. A spokesperson from the company confirmed Mashable’s report that the app was removed because of a clerical error. Long story short, someone at HQ forgot to update the expired credit card info in the developer portal of the App Store.
App analytics firm Apptopia confirmed that HQ Trivia was removed from the App Store briefly, and that it has been falling in ranking for the past 30 to 60 days.
We reached out to Apple and haven’t heard back. We will report back as soon as we know more.
The National Transportation Safety Board is opening an investigation into the fatal accident involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars in Tempe, Arizona.
NTSB sending team to investigate Uber crash in Tempe, Arizona. More to come.
Uber’s self-driving car accident that resulted in a woman’s death raises a number of questions about insurance and liability. Although the car was in self-driving mode, there was a safety driver behind the wheel who theoretically should have been able to intervene.
Uber has since halted its self-driving car tests in Arizona, Pittsburgh and California. Last year, the NTSB looked into a 2016 accident involving Tesla’s Autopilot system in Florida. The NTSP partially faulted Tesla for the fatal crash, saying the system operated as intended but that the driver’s inattentiveness, due to over-reliance on the Autopilot system, resulted in the accident.
In an earlier statement to TechCrunch, an Uber spokesperson said, “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident.”
U.S. President Donald Trump has issued an executive order to ban Petro in the U.S. Petro is a cryptocurrency developed by the government of Venezuela.
As of today, U.S. citizens, residents and companies can’t buy or sell Petro. The executive order says that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is trying to avoid U.S. sanctions against Venezuela with this new cryptocurrency. The U.S. Treasury Department already warned U.S. investors back in January.
Maduro first unveiled the country’s cryptocurrency in December. He said that Petro would be backed by oil and mineral reserves. But the issue is that the Venezuelan government unilateraly fixes the price of the Petro. So Maduro can say Petro tokens aren’t worth anything in a year without any consequence.
While the government has published multiple whitepapers, it’s still unclear if Petro is based on the Ethereum blockchain or NEM blockchain. But it didn’t stop them from raising hundreds of millions of dollars during the pre-sale. Venezuela’s National Assembly has also deemed Petro illegal.
Venezuela currently faces an economic collapse combined with hyperinflation. The bolívar fuerte, the country’s currency, is now worth 10,000 times less than its value in August 2012.
So turning to cryptocurrencies could be a smart move when your bank notes aren’t worth anything. But it doesn’t solve the core of the issue.
Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.
The news of a secret research lab fits into a larger narrative about Apple’s deeper and more expensive focus on research and development. Neil Cybart of Above Avalon, a subscription blog focused on Apple, noted that Apple “is on track to spend $14 billion on R&D in FY2018, nearly double the amount spent on R&D just four years ago” and also pointed out that “The $14 billion of R&D expense that Apple will spend in FY2018 will be more than the amount Apple spent on R&D from 1998 to 2011.”
Those are incredible numbers for any company, but the scale of the R&D output even for Apple is exceptional. Even more notably, Apple’s R&D expenses as a percentage of revenue have been steadily increasing over the past few years and are projected to reach a decade high of 5.3% this year despite higher revenues, according to Cybart.
The more interesting observation though is that Apple has traditionally avoided having to do the sorts of expensive R&D work involved in areas like chip design and display manufacturing. Instead, the company’s focus has traditionally been on product development and integration, areas that certainly aren’t cheap, but are less expensive than bringing say a new LCD technology to market.
Apple doesn’t produce wireless modems or power management systems for its phones, instead using components from companies like Qualcomm, as in the iPhone X. Even highly-touted features like the iPhone X’s screen aren’t designed by Apple, but instead are designed and manufactured by others, which in the case of the screen was Samsung Display. Apple’s value-add was integrating the display into the phone (that edgeless screen) as well as writing the software that calibrated the color of the screen and ensured its exceptional quality.
For years, that integration-focused R&D model has been a win-win for Apple. The company can use the best technology available at low prices due to its negotiating leverage. Plus, the R&D costs of those components can be amortized not just against iPhones, but all other devices using the technology as well. That meant Apple put its resources behind high-value product development, and could maintain some of the best margins in the hardware industry by avoiding some of the costlier research areas required for its products.
That R&D model changed after Apple bought P.A. Semi almost exactly a decade ago for $278 million. Apple moved from an R&D strategy focused on product development to increasingly owning the key hardware components of its devices. No where is that more visible than in the processing cores at the center of the iPhone. The A11 Bionic processor in the iPhone X, for instance, is completely custom-designed by Apple, and manufactured by TSMC.
Indeed, the processor is an obvious place to start vertically integrating, since it provides so much of the other functionality of the device and also has a large influence on battery life. The FaceID feature, for instance, is powered by a “neural engine” component of the A11 chip.
There is a direct line between creating differentiated features that consumers recognize and are willing to shell out top dollar for, and building out the sorts of custom components that Apple has shied away from in the past. The display is obviously a critical point of differentiation, and so it shouldn’t be surprising that Apple increasingly wants to bring that technology in-house so it can compete better with Samsung .
Alright, so Apple is spending more on R&D to increase differentiation – sounds great. Indeed, one narrative of these expenses is that Apple is investing from a position of strength. Through its sheer force of will, it has become one of the most valuable companies in the world, and it dominates many of the markets in which it competes, most notably smartphones. It has incredible brand loyalty with a millions of customers, and it sees an opportunity to expand into new device categories like automotive in order to continue growing and owning more markets. In other words, it is expanding R&D to propel growth.
The more negative view is that Apple is struggling to maintain its hold on a shrinking smartphone industry, and the increasing R&D spend is really a defensive maneuver designed to protect its high sale prices (and thus margins) against significantly cheaper competitors who offer nearly equivalent functionality. Apple’s custom hardware powers its exclusive features, and that creates the differentiation needed to sustain revenues going forward.
There is truth in both narratives, but one thing is for certain, the margin pressure on Apple is increasing. While everyone is making educated guesses at iPhone X sales, many analysts believe that sales have been, and will continue to be weaker than expected, driven by the device’s high cost. If that is true, then higher prices will not be able to offset higher research and developments costs, and the combination will put more of a vice grip on Apple’s future smartphone innovation than the company has previously experienced.
It seems obvious that a company with hundreds of billions of dollars on the balance sheet should just be investing more of that into R&D initiatives like microLED. But analysts care not just about top-line revenue, but also the margins of that revenue. Apple’s increasing spend and declining unit sales portend tougher financial questions for the company going forward.
If you’ve ever wondered why your Facebook app looks a little different from your friend’s, you’ve likely learned that Facebook tests features in a very unique, targeted way.
Airship wants to let its customers start testing features the same way that companies like Facebook and Dropbox do without all the added complications and resources. The startup is launching out of Y Combinator’s latest class with a product that integrates directly into customer codebases and that lets engineers easily flag features to roll out to targeted groups of users.
While there is certainly no shortage of A/B testing tools available for developers, most are focused on content tweaks, while Airship’s product flagging framework can ultimately give end users dramatically different feature experiences, which can give smaller startups much deeper insights into how customers interact with product changes.
“Most startups definitely can’t do this,” Airship co-founder Alvin Yap tells TechCrunch. “We aim to make controlled feature rollouts accessible to any company.”
While it may just seem like another way to press ship, rolling out features this way can affect the product direction at companies by letting them see when a feature is received negatively by a small group of users. The startup points to botched redesign rollouts from companies like Snap and Digg, as evidence that feature launches should be carefully orchestrated and delivered in a more targeted capacity.
The company has integrated their product with Segment so that users can use their existing analytics platform to tell them about how their features are being received. As the company moves forward, they’re hoping to continue building out more integrations as well as control mechanisms.
For small teams pricing packages start at $80 per month (or $64 when billed annually) and move up based on how custom features are being tested and how many monthly active users the team has. There’s a 14 day free trial for users interested in taking it for a whirl first.
Desktop Metal has had no issues raising interest (or funding) in the manufacturing world. The metal 3D printing company announced today that it’s score another $65 million in backing, bringing its total to $277 million. This latest round was led by Ford, and also includes addition money from previous backer, Future Fund.
Ford’s interest in company that 3D prints metal is pretty clear, of course, and the automotive giant is taking things a step further by adding its Chief Technology Officer Ken Washington to Desktop Metal’s Board of Directors.
The tech isn’t quite ready to start printing out cars on Ford’s production line just yet, but the companies told CNBC that they’re working toward that seeming inevitability. Desktop Metal already produces a printer built specifically for factory production.
Slated for release in 2019, the company’s Production system is a push to make its technology scalable on the production line. The core of Desktop Metal’s tech binds powders into polymers and cook them in a furnace. The company claims its tech is 100-times faster and 20-times cheaper than existing 3D printing technologies.
Ford joins an already impressive roster of names that have invested in the startup, including Google Ventures (GV), GE Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Lowe’s. BMW iVentures, has also seen the potential in tech — the automotive giant’s VC wing invested in Desktop Metal this time last year, with an eye toward the future, stating that the company “is shaping the way cars will be imagined, designed and manufactured.”
It’s time to welcome another startup to the clear teeth aligner market. Meet ArchForm, a Y Combinator-backed teeth aligner software startup that lets orthodontists create, design and 3D print aligners within their own offices. The idea is to provide orthodontists with a way to better compete against some direct-to-consumer teeth aligner startups and cut down on the cost of Invisalign.
The cost of braces and invisible aligners — those clear, mouthguard-like pieces of plastic — varies, but treatments can range from $4,685 to $6,500 for adolescents, and adult treatments can cost up to $7,135, according to a 2013 American Dental Association survey. Last year, the orthodontics market saw $11 billion in revenue, according to market research company IBISWorld.
ArchForm is trying to tap into the growing accessibility of the 3D printer market to enable orthodontists to 3D print their own clear aligners in-office. Orthodontists currently pay about $1,700 per patient to Invisalign, the company says. So in order to make money, orthodontists sometimes charge patients upwards of $7,000. ArchForm charges orthodontists just $50 per patient.
“I was inspired to start the company because I worked in my father’s orthodontic office,” ArchForm founder Andrew Martz told TechCrunch in an email. “I saw that 3D printers had advanced for enough to make these devices in dental offices, and knew from experience that easy-to-use software to virtually move the teeth was missing piece to allow every orthodontist to 3D print their own aligners.”
In the last couple of years, a number of teeth aligner startups have emerged. The pack includes the likes of SmileDirectClub, Uniform Teeth, Candid and Orthly. None of the startups are exactly the same, but all aim to reduce the cost of clear aligners, as well as the number of visits to the orthodontist — with some even cutting out the in-person orthodontist visit altogether. ArchForm takes a different approach by enabling local orthodontists to simply enhance their existing businesses.
“We believe that orthodontists do a better job of treating most patients when they can physically be there to treat them,” Martz said. “To make clear aligners work, raised buttons/attachments are placed on teeth as a way for the aligner to grip the teeth and make them fully straight. Tele-dentistry companies don’t have these – which are a very fundamental part of orthodontic treatment.”
In ArchForm’s current customer base, 75 percent of orthodontists who sign up to use the software already have 3D printers.
“If they don’t already have one, the rest are looking into buying a 3D printer, because they only cost $3350 and Invisalign costs $1750/patient,” Martz said.
For the orthodontists who would rather not invest in their own 3D printer, they can send the design to orthodontic laboratories that are equipped with 3D printers and powered by ArchForm’s software.
