Month: June 2019

Check your calendars, mobility startup fans. It’s only five short weeks until TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 goes down in San Jose. Get ready to dive into the current state of mobility, challenge assumptions, put hyperbole in its place and help shape the future of these rapidly evolving technologies.

And if you want to expose your early-stage mobility startups to mobility’s brightest, most influential founders, technologists and investors, take advantage of this limited-time flash sale. When you buy a demo table at TC Sessions: Mobility you’ll get a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package at Disrupt San Francisco 2019*. And guess what — in addition to a demo space, both events’ startup packages come with three attendee tickets!

This double-demo opportunity comes to a grinding halt on Friday, June 7 at 11:59 pm (PT) and is exclusively for early-stage mobility startups. Don’t miss your chance to showcase your company to thousands of attendees at Disrupt SF — at substantial savings. Seriously, this deal puts the “expo” in exposure.

As a demo table holder, you’ll also get to enjoy all the programming that it offers — we’re talking speakers, panels, workshops and demos that tackle mobility’s inherent challenges and promises. Our jam-packed agenda covers everything from autonomous vehicles and redefining urban mobility to powering electric cars and whether venture capital can drive it all — and then some. Here’s a quick peek at some of the presentations:

• Autonomous Robotaxis vs. Shuttles — Karl Iagnemma, Alisyn Malek and Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli represent some of the top minds trying to bring autonomous vehicle technology to the masses. They’ll debate which approaches makes the most sense and have the best chances for economic viability and which safety and security vulnerabilities and other challenges could throw them off track.
• Rebuilding the Motor City — Ken Washington, Ford’s CTO and vice president of research and advanced engineering, will discuss how the historic automaker is rapidly changing its culture and processes while it prepares for an electric future.
• Will Venture Capital Drive the Future of Mobility?  — Three leading early-stage investors, Michael Granoff, Ted Serbinski and Sarah Smith, will debate the uncertain future of mobility tech and whether VC dollars are enough to push the industry forward.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 takes place on July 10 in San Jose. Buy a demo table before Friday, June 7 at 11:59 pm (PT) to receive a 100% discount on a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package at Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Don’t miss this opportunity to double your exposure to influential movers and shakers. They might just rock your world.

*This is a limited-time offer and expires on June 7, 2019, at 11:59 pm (PT). Offer open only to early-stage, mobility startups with less than $3 million in funding. Offer cannot be combined with other discounts or promotions.

Source: Tech Crunch

Distru, a nearly three-year-old, Oakland-based startup whose platform aims to help track cannabis through its seed-to-sale process, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from Village Global, Global Founders Capital, and numerous notable angel investors, including Elad Gil, Katie Stanton, and Avichal Garg.

The deal is an interesting one for numerous reasons, including that it marks Felicis’s first investment in the cannabis space after many months spent looking at a wide array of related startups, says Niki Pezeshki, a principal with the firm. Indeed, though interest in cannabis-related products and services is growing among traditional venture firms as a growing number of states move to legalize and regulate marijuana, there’s lingering concern about what will happen and when at the federal level.

Distru is also entering into a space that tech investors can grok: it’s a software as a service company, one that just happens to give cannabis operators insight into their inventory and order management, their customer relationship management, and their logistics. Most important, Distru’s software helps them automate compliance with complicated and growing state regulations by integrating with Metrc, which is itself inventory tracing software that’s being used by a growing number of states to record the inventory and movement of cannabis and cannabis products through the commercial supply chain. (We wrote about six-year-old Metrc last year when it raised $50 million in funding, including from Casa Verde Capital and Tiger Global Management.)

Not last, Distru’s team, headed by founder and CEO Blaine Hatab, comes from the tech world, even while most are in the formative stages of their careers. Hatab has spent much of his post-collegiate career as a software developer, as has his cofounder, Blake Gentry, who joined forced with Hatab after leaving a developer role with the startup Opendoor to create his own company, Actualyze, which merged with Distru last fall. A third cofounder, Johnny Li, who further serves as Distru’s chief technical officer, was most recently a JavaScript instructor. Altogether, says Hatab, the team is made up of just nine employees who work remotely, though with its new funding, Distru plans to fill five more roles imminently.

In the meantime, it seems to pick picking up momentum despite its scale. Among its customers are major cannabis producers and distributors Humboldt Farms and CannaCraft. More, though it has competitors, including nine-year-old, Denver-based, venture-backed MJ Freeway, Hatab says it’s growing steadily based solely on word of mouth. Perhaps most compelling to Felicis and its other backers, the company has been operating in the black for some time. Says Hatab, “I think [our investors] were surprised by profitable we were.”

And it has a lot of room to grow, no pun intended. Distru operates in California alone today, but Hatab says it plans to follow Metrc into the other markets where it operates today, including Colorado, Oregon, Alaska, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada and Louisiana.

Source: Tech Crunch

A new deal between the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission will see U.S. regulators divide and conquer as they expand their oversight of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook, according to multiple reports.

New details have emerged of an agreement between the two U.S. regulators that would see the Federal Trade Commission take the reins in antitrust investigations of Amazon and Facebook, while the Department of Justice will oversee investigations of Alphabet’s Google business and Apple.

Shares of Apple’s stock tumbled on news of the Justice Department’s role in overseeing the company, which was first reported by Reuters even as the company was in the middle of its developer conference celebrating all things Apple.

Google has been here before. Eight years ago, the Federal Trade Commission began an investigation into Google for antitrust violations, ultimately determining that the company had not violated any antitrust or anti-competitive statutes in its display of search results.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that the Justice Department was initiating a federal antitrust investigation into Google’s business practices, according to multiple sources.

That report was followed by additional reporting from The Wall Street Journal indicating that Facebook would be investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.

Source: Tech Crunch

YouTube star Kanghua Ren was just handed a 15 month prison sentence and 20,000 euro ($22,300) fine for a January 2017 video.

The video, which generated widespread outrage online, found Ren giving a homeless man in Barcelona repackaged Oreo cookies filled with toothpaste.

“Maybe I’ve gone a bit far, but look at the positive side: This will help him clean his teeth,” the China-born YouTuber (then 19) known as ReSet said in the video. “I think he hasn’t cleaned them since he became poor.”

The 52-year-old man vomited after ingesting the cookies, later telling a paper that he had, “never been treated so poorly while living on the street.”

Ren was given the sentence on Friday, though The New York Times notes that he’ll likely not actually serve any time, given how nonviolent crimes are generally treated in Spanish court. In addition, his YouTube channel and various social media counts were also ordered shut down for five years.

Source: Tech Crunch

Where are all the biotechnology companies raising these days? We crunched some numbers to arrive at an answer.

Using funding rounds data from Crunchbase, we plotted the count of venture capital funding rounds raised by companies in the fairly expansive biotechnology category in Crunchbase. Click the chart below and you can hover over individual data points to see the number of venture rounds raised in a given metro area between the start of 2018 and late May 2019 (as of publication). Although there are biotechnology companies located throughout the world, we focused here on just the U.S.

Unlike in the software-funding business, where New York City (and its surrounding area) ranks second in overall deal volume, the greater Boston metro area outranks the Big Apple in biotech venture deal volume. The SF Bay Area (which includes both San Francisco and the towns in Silicon Valley north and west of San Jose) outranks Boston in biotech deal volume, but, then again, it’s also a much larger geographic area with a higher density of startups overall.

The bio business model breeds big deals

Crunchbase News recently covered a $120 million round raised by immunotherapy upstart AlloVir. In the software business, a raise that large would be notable; however, in the business of biology, not so much.

Just for reference, the average Series B round raised by U.S. enterprise software startups between 2018 and May 2019 was about $22.7 million. The average Series B for biotech companies from that same time period: just about $40 million on the dot.

Spinning up a cluster of cells at a lab bench is costlier, harder to do and the outcomes of experiments are less certain than the results of implementing a new software framework. Add to that the tremendous cost of performing clinical trials and clearing regulatory hurdles — all before costly sales and marketing campaigns to get treatments in front of doctors and end users — and it’s easy to understand why many biotechnology companies need to raise so much money in the early stages of the startup cycle.

Source: Tech Crunch

May was a momentous month, which marked a victory for sanity and pragmatism over irrational paranoia. I’m obviously not talking about politics. I’m talking about Microsoft finally — finally! but credit to them for doing this nonetheless! — removing the password expiration policies from their Windows 10 security baseline.

Many enterprise-scale organizations (including TechCrunch’s owner Verizon) require their users to change their passwords regularly. This is a spectacularly counterproductive policy. To quote Microsoft:

Recent scientific research calls into question the value of many long-standing password-security practices such as password expiration policies, and points instead to better alternatives … If a password is never stolen, there’s no need to expire it. And if you have evidence that a password has been stolen, you would presumably act immediately rather than wait for expiration to fix the problem.

…If an organization has successfully implemented banned-password lists, multi-factor authentication, detection of password-guessing attacks, and detection of anomalous logon attempts, do they need any periodic password expiration? And if they haven’t implemented modern mitigations, how much protection will they really gain from password expiration? …Periodic password expiration is an ancient and obsolete mitigation of very low value

If you have a password at such an organization, I recommend you send that blog post to its system administrators. They will ignore you at first, of course, because that’s what enterprise administrators do, and because information security (like transportation security) is too often an irrational one-way ratchet because our culture of fear incentivizes security theater rather than actual security — but they may grudgingly begin to accept that the world has moved on.

Instead: Use a password manager like LastPass or 1Password. (They have viable free tiers! You really have no excuse.) Use it to eliminate or at least minimize password re-use across sites. Use two-factor authentication wherever possible. Yes, even SMS two-factor authentication, despite number-porting and SS7 attacks, because it’s still better than one-factor authentication.

And please, if you work with code or data repositories, stop checking your passwords and API keys into your repos. I’m the CTO of a consultancy and you would be amazed how many times clients come to us with this unfortunate setup. Repository access is not fine-grained, repos are very easily copied and/or their copies misplaced, and once you’ve checked in credentials they can be annoyingly tricky to truly delete. Using even something as simple as environment variables instead is a huge step up, and also makes your life simpler in many ways when working across multiple environments.

Perfect security doesn’t exist. World-class security is hard. But decent security is generally quite accessible, if you faithfully follow some basic rules. In order to do so, it’s best to keep those rules to a minimum, and get rid of the ones that don’t make sense. Password expiration is one of those. Goodbye to it, and good riddance.

Source: Tech Crunch

Hello, weekend warriors. This is Week-in-Review where I get hopped up on caffeine and scour the hundred of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week and surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.

First, an update on my newsletter last week: I dove into Trump’s Huawei ban and talked about some of the ill effects it could spell for American tech companies caught in the fray. Well, it looks like China is starting to build a list of “unreliable” foreign firms, most likely the partners that are severing ties with Huawei. This might just be a preliminary step, but I’m sure U.S. companies on the list won’t be psyched to be at the frontlines of a massive trade war/ tech cold war…

Onto this week’s topic, which is a new iPod from Apple. There’s really not much to it, it’s an iPod Touch with an A10 chipset, so why do I think this was even vaguely interesting?

Nobody was expecting an update for this device, it hadn’t been updated since 2015 and it remains Apple’s last pocketable mobile device without access to a mobile network. It’s the dumbest device Apple sells — a total anomaly — so why throw it a new refresh? As with every perplexing move that Apple makes lately, it comes down to how the Cupertino giant is acquiring customers and making revenue in 2019.

It doesn’t take much scouring through Apple’s marketing materials to understand who the new iPod Touch is for, the answer hits you in the face, it’s for kids. It’s a starter iPhone.

The company needs to wrench more revenue from high-value users buying their most expensive devices, but that equation doesn’t bode well for the youngest Apple users getting their first device. When the iPod Touch was last refreshed in 2015, the iPhone 6S had just been announced and 2-year carrier contract deals meant you could get your hands on one for $199. That’s not the case anymore.

In 2016, an oft-quoted study declared 10.3-years-old as the average age that kids got their first smartphone, there hasn’t been anything too serious done since then but it’s not unreasonable to suspect that number has gone anywhere but down. Parents are likely already on the fence about taking the plunge on the device that comes even earlier than a smartphone and devices running Android are cheaper and more plentiful. While Apple has maintained the $329 entry price of the iPad, the iPad Mini has jumped in price and the higher-end iPads are more expensive than ever.

The crazy thing is that as Apple and Google’s cloud services are getting more sand-boxed, it’s becoming more and more likely that these first devices could determine what operating system a kid sticks with once they have more of a say in what smartphone they’re getting. Where are their photos stored? What can they play the games they’ve already bought? At a certain point, will higher upfront costs for these entry-level devices hamper iOS growth further down the road?

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It’s all just an interesting head-scratcher, but more fundamentally while Apple is trying to wrench more cash out of its hardware acolytes, it still can’t afford to shy away from low-cost devices that entice people into high-cost services. In this way its torn between two strategies, and left in this strange evolutionary stage where it has to ensure it doesn’t screw itself over down the road.

Something like Apple Arcade could theoretically be a great sell for parents, games can be played offline and there are none of the pesky in-app purchases, but that only works when the parents aren’t buying a bargain Android tablet in the first place.

We’ll see how much Apple continues to support older hardware with its iOS 13 release Monday, but we’ll also see how much they continue to build out features and products to get kids engaged with Apple and iOS earlier and earlier. Likely with the goal of keeping them away from the cheap stuff that their skyrocketing hardware prices might push them towards.

What to expect at Apple’s WWDC 2019

On to the rest of the week’s news…

JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context.

• Your Uber rating is: go order a Lyft
  Every Uber driver has a horror story and there’s a decent chance that for a lot of Uber drivers those horror stories involve some of the same riders. The company announced this week that they’re just straight-up banning some of the lowest-rated users, though it sounds like you’ll get a few warnings to clean up your act before any action takes place. Previously, drivers have faced potential deactivations if they drop below a 4.6 rating, but there’s no specific word on what the threshold is for unruly riders.
• RIP: BBM
  This generation of tech giants has been riding high for the better part of the past decade, but it’s important to remember that everything has a way of crumbling. Case in point, Blackberry Messaging officially shut down on Friday. You can read more about the gradual degradation of the once-ubiquitous platform in our story.
• Google harshes legal weed’s mellow
  Google is chasing after weed smokers and the reefer inclined with its latest announcement that companies can’t sell weed products through their apps if they’re downloaded off the Play Store. The apps will still be able to exist and showcase products, but the apps can’t host a shopping cart for users. The company isn’t leading the way in being a narc, Apple had already banned in-app purchases like these.
• Leap Motion throws up its hands
  After $94 million in funding, missed opportunities and Apple acquisition offers, Leap Motion is packing its hand-tracking tech away and shipping it to London, after being acquired by UK-based UltraHaptics for a reported $30 million. That number might not sound too awful, but considering Leap Motion’s status as the rising star of the consumer tech world not too long ago, it’s hard to see the exit as anything but a disappointing end for the startup.

GAFA Gaffes

How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of awfulness:

1. Amazon punts taking stance on facial recognition
   [Amazon defeated shareholder’s vote on facial recognition by a wide margin]
2. Apple gets defensive after Supreme Court ruling:
   [Apple’s new App Store website takes aim at antitrust anti-competitive claims]

NOAH BERGER/AFP/Getty Images

Extra Crunch

Our premium subscription service had another week of interesting deep dives. TechCrunch’s Kate Clark wrote about Slack’s odd beginnings as a weird little online game studio called Tiny Speck and how some of the young startup’s storied investors weren’t thrilled about its dramatic pivot into enterprise messaging.

The Slack origin story: How a whimsical online game became an enterprise software giant

“With the support of more than $15 million in venture capital funding — all before the game began beta testing — Tiny Speck hired more than 40 employees, wrote hundreds of lines of code and concocted big dreams for its zany, whimsical and absurdist universe.”

Here are some of our other top reads this week for premium subscribers. This week TechCrunch writers talked a bit about SoftBank, and how to get VCs fighting over your startup idea…

• Fundraising 101: How to trigger FOMO among VCs
• Q&A with J Crowley, Head of Product at Airbnb Lux, on what makes a great PM
• The savage genius of SoftBank funding competitors

Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here.

Source: Tech Crunch

We’re trotting out our lousy German to remind you that es ist jetzt oder nie — it’s now or never. This is your last chance to slash €200 off the super early-bird price on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019. If you want to keep those euros in your pocket, you have to sign up for our mailing list before registration officially opens tomorrow, 3 June.

When you join our mailing list, we’ll send you a limited-time discount code to buy your passes. Founders can buy Founder passes for as low as €145 + VAT. Not a founder? Don’t worry, you can buy an Innovator pass for as low as €245 + VAT.

You score solid savings, and you’ll be kept in the loop about all the cool stuff at Disrupt Berlin. We’ll announce world-class speakers and panelists, awesome workshops and demos, Q&A Sessions and all manner of programming taking place across our Disrupt stages — and you’ll be among the first to know.

Every Disrupt has classic elements, and Berlin will not disappoint. Explore Startup Alley, where hundreds of early-stage startups exhibit the latest tech products, platforms and services. Innovation meets opportunity and makes for prime networking. Be sure to take advantage of CrunchMatch, our free business match-making platform. It lets you connect with the right people based on your specific criteria, goals and interests.

While you explore the mysteries of Startup Alley, make sure you check out the TC Top Picks. These early-stage startups, hand-chosen by TechCrunch editors, represent the best in their respective tech categories. Other than competing in Startup Battlefield, there’s no better way to garner global media and investor attention at Disrupt.

Ah yes, Startup Battlefield — the epic pitch-off that never disappoints. You’ll see some of the most fascinating startups compete for $50,000 cash. Last year, Legacy emerged as champion with a way to address reduced sperm motility. Who will win this year’s battle?

Maybe your startup has what it takes to compete in the Startup Battlefield or be selected for the TC Top Picks program. Applications open later this summer, but you can get a jump on things by filling out an application at apply.techcrunch.com.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, but if you want to save an extra €200, sign up for our mailing list before registration opens tomorrow, 3 June. This is your last chance, people — es ist jetzt oder nie — it’s now or never.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Source: Tech Crunch