Month: December 2019

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2019 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’re here to help! We’ll be rolling out gift guides from now through the end of December. You can find our other guides right here.

There have been holiday gift guides for VR for the past five years or so, and, for most of that time, buying a VR headset was generally a bad call.

There were still fun experiences to be had, but the gear was expensive and the troubleshooting was not for the faint of heart. I’ve played around with most of the gear that’s out there; honestly, most of it isn’t ready for consumers, but if there’s someone in your life dying to get into VR, here are some earnest recommendations.

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The best headset for 99.5% of people

This year, Facebook released the Oculus Quest for $399 and, honestly, it’s the only headset made by Oculus or anyone else that I’ve been able to give a full-throated recommendation. Setup and upkeep are both simple and benefited by its standalone mobile form factor — this one just works by itself, no PC required. There’s a worthy amount of content for something in its price range and it’s overall not a purchase you’ll feel dumb later for making.

Is $399 a little steep for a Christmas present? Obviously that’s understandable, but I would honestly just not go for a VR gift if that’s the case. Most VR gear below this price point is relatively clunky (with the caveat that for PlayStation owners, the PlayStation VR is still a great deal… though I think I’d still recommend the Quest if you’re willing to drop the extra money. It’s just such an easy system to love.)

Price: $399 from Oculus

To help you see better: prescription inserts

All of Oculus’s new headsets have a good amount of space in the headset to accommodate users that wear glasses, but if you’re the main person using the headset, it’s a lot more comfortable to just get prescription inserts made. It’s a little extreme, sure, but comfort is a big deal in VR, so you won’t regret it if you’re already logging some decent mileage on your headset.

Price: $80 from FramesDirect

To help you be less gross: VR Cover

If you’re using your VR device as a device to get you moving and you’re regularly sweating while playing some of the more intense titles, I guarantee that headset is getting pretty nasty. VR Cover has been making masks that cover up the section your face touching the headset, and they’re pretty decent quality and available for most popular headsets. These are great if you’re a bit sweaty or are regularly showing friends your new headset.

Price: $19 on Amazon

To help you get mobile: carrying case

The Quest is a portable console, but that doesn’t mean you just want to toss it into your bag without any cares. It still is rather sensitive, and if you scratch the lenses or tracking cameras, you are probably in for a bad time. The first-party Oculus Quest case is a pretty solid purchase, with room for your headset and controllers, but not much else.

Price: $40 on Amazon

To help you get immersed: some solid wired headphones

If you’re the owner of a new Quest, Go or Rift S, you also will probably want to be the owner of some decent wired headphones. The stereo speakers embedded in the headsets are good in a pinch, but your experience is going to be a lot better with some decent headphones, and the Quest doesn’t allow for Bluetooth headsets, so, sorry, no AirPods.

There are two schools of thought for which headphones are best for VR, ones that cut you off completely or ones that let you hear what’s going on a bit so that you’re at least somewhat aware of your surroundings. But be reasonable, you shouldn’t be basing your headphones purchase on what works for VR, so get some noise-cancelling headphones you’d also want while you’re traveling or some on-ear headphones you’d also use for at-home listening.

I’m a big fan of Grado headphones even though they aren’t all that comfortable for long sessions, but you can’t go wrong with an $80 pair of Grado SR60e headphones. I never miss a chance to recommend them. I’ve always been a Bose user when it comes to noise-cancelling headphones, but I also haven’t owned many pairs, and I know most audiophiles will point you in Sony’s direction, so maybe a classic pair like their WH-1000XM3 will do (though remember, you’ll have to use the included wire with most VR headsets.)

Price: Grado SR60e (Wired), $80 on Amazon | Sony WH-1000XM3 (Wireless), $278 on Amazon

The best headset for die-hards

If the best headset for 99.5% of people is the Oculus Quest, for the rest it’s the Valve Index. The PC headset is about as high-end as you would reasonably want as a consumer, though you are still definitely investing in a more complicated solution than the Quest. No other products on the market have the well-thought-out feature set that the Index does. It’s less approachable, but its feature set screams high-end even if most VR games can’t make the most of what it offers. For PC gamers, there aren’t many good choices out there these days, but if you’re going to take a step beyond the Quest, you should get the Index (though it’s worth noting this is on pretty hefty back-order and won’t ship pre-Christmas.)

Price: $999 from Valve

Source: Tech Crunch

Magic Leap just announced that they’re in the midst of closing a Series E round of funding, but it sounds like they’re going to have to clinch that investment with some pretty troubling sales numbers for their only device on the market.

The Information‘s Alex Heath is reporting that Magic Leap managed to sell just 6,000 units of its $2,300 Magic Leap One headset in its first six months on sale, a figure made worse by CEO Rony Abovitz’s internal claims that he wanted the startup to sell at least one million units of the device in the first year, a goal the report states he was later convinced to rethink — Abovitz later projected the company would sell 100,000 units in the first year.

We reached out to the company for comment.

Given the company’s long much-hyped road to the release of the Magic Leap One, such low early reported sales are anything but encouraging for their ultimate goals of building a pair of augmented reality glasses that can rival the efforts of Apple and Microsoft. There aren’t many sales figures out there being shared for existing AR headsets on the market, but Magic Leap has also raised and spent more than any other startup to release their first device.

The company has now raised around $2.6 billion in venture funding from firms like Google, Alibaba and a slew of other investors. The story also reports that Google — and now Alphabet — CEO Sundar Pichai stepped down from the board and was replaced by another Google executive.

Source: Tech Crunch

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. 300M-user Imgur launches Melee, a gaming meme app

Melee, the company’s first app beyond its flagship product, lets users subscribe to the games from which they love to get memes and gameplay clips. You also can scroll through a popular post’s feed if you’re curious about unfamiliar games.

If you’re worried about the risk that gaming communities might turn toxic, Imgur says Melee has multiple layers of community and staff moderation, will remove obscene content and won’t tolerate bullying.

2. SpaceX nears milestone on key crew launch system test

SpaceX is keeping relatively close to schedule on one of the bold timelines pronounced by its CEO Elon Musk. Specifically, the company notes that it has now completed seven system tests of the latest, upgraded version of the parachutes it plans to use with its Crew Dragon capsule when it launches with astronauts on-board.

3. Flipkart leads $60M investment in logistics startup Shadowfax

Shadowfax operates a business-to-business logistics network in more than 300 cities in India. The startup works with neighborhood stores to use their real estate to store inventory, and with a large network of freelancers for delivery.

4. A Sprint contractor left thousands of US cell phone bills on the internet by mistake

A contractor working for cell giant Sprint stored hundreds of thousands of cell phone bills for AT&T, Verizon (which owns TechCrunch) and T-Mobile subscribers on an unprotected cloud server.

5. How to build or invest in a startup without paying capital gains tax

Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) presents a significant tax savings opportunity for people who create and invest in small businesses. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Volvo invests in autonomous vehicle operating system startup Apex.AI though its VC arm

Apex.AI is working on developing a robotic operating system qualified for use in production automobiles. Its offerings include a set of simple-to-integrate APIs that can give automakers and others access to fully certified autonomous mobility technology.

7. Check out the prizes for TC Hackathon at Disrupt Berlin

One team gets $5,000, but we’ve got additional prizes from a range of sponsors. Also: This is next week!

Source: Tech Crunch

Autonomous robotic road-riding cargo pod startup Einride has signed a new partner for a commercial pilot on Sweden’s roads, which should be a great test of the company’s electric driverless transportation pods. Einride will be providing service for Coca-Cola European Partners, which is the official authorized bottler, distributor, sales and marketing company for Coca-Cola branded products in Sweden.

The partnership will see Einride commercially operating its transportation system between Coca-Cola European Partners’ warehouse in Jordbro outside Stockholm, and retailer Axfood’s own distribution hub, transporting Coca-Cola brand products to the retailer ahead of sending them off to local retail locations in Sweden.

Coca-Cola European Partners is looking to this partnership as part of its goal to continue to reduce emissions, since Einride’s system could potentially cut CO2 output by as much as 90% compared to current in-use solutions. This pilot is set to take place over the next few years, according to the two companies, and Einride says it hopes that it’ll be able to be on the road as early as some time next year, pending approval from the authorities since it’s a trial that will take place on public roads.

Einride announced $25 million in new funding in October, and has been running trials of the Einride Pod electric transport vehicle it created on public roads since May.

Source: Tech Crunch

One month after Airbnb confirmed plans to verify all of its listings, the home-sharing giant has announced additional efforts to protect its hosts and guests.

Airbnb will provide a “clear and actionable enforcement framework” for scenarios, including excessive noise, major cleanliness concerns, as well as unauthorized guests, parking and smoking. The company, expected to go public next year, is also banning all “open-invite” parties and events from locations booked on its platform.

Unauthorized parties have long been banned from Airbnb homes. The new policy seeks to halt certain guests from hosting events not approved by hosts, such as a recent Halloween party hosted at a California Airbnb rental in which five people were killed.

Finally, Airbnb is launching a new hotline for mayors and city officials to discuss Airbnb’s new policies with the company.

“While home sharing is a time-honored tradition in many cultures around the world, the rise of digital platforms like Airbnb has brought it within reach of more people than ever before,” Airbnb’s vice president of trust Margaret Richardson writes in today’s announcement. “In turn, Airbnb has worked to collaborate with cities around the world and with our host and guest communities to ensure we are creating a framework that allows millions of people to trust one another.”

Airbnb, founded in 2008, has long avoided verifying listings and incorporating stricter guest standards, instead looking to its thousands of hosts to devise individual house rules. As the company matures and crafts its pitch to Wall Street, we can expect to see additional updates to its policy to protect hosts, guests and communities.

Early last month, Airbnb said all properties would soon be verified for accuracy of photos, addresses, listing details, cleanliness, safety and basic home amenities. All rentals that meet the company’s new standards will be “clearly labeled” by December 15, 2020, Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky noted in a company-wide email last month. Beginning this month, Airbnb will rebook or refund guests who check into rentals that do not meet the new accuracy standards.

The company last month also outlined plans to launch a 24/7 Neighbor Hotline to give guests access to a real Airbnb employee from any location at any time. The company will fully roll-out the service next year.

Airbnb’s Richardson developed the above changes alongside Charles Ramsey, a retired police commissioner and co-chair of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and Ronald Davis, the former director of the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing’s Services.

Source: Tech Crunch

Here’s a little early Christmas present for you. Apple analyst extraordinaire Ming-Chi Kuo is out with his latest Apple opus. Per usual, it’s got a lot of fascinating nuggets, this time projecting as far as 2021 in its look at iPhones to come.

Let’s skip right to that bit, shall we? It seems that 2021 may be the year Apple finally drops the Lightning cable. That would, of course, be good news, given that the port is…how to put this nicely…pretty objectively terrible. Apple, of course, already swapped it out on the iPad Pro for the far-more-ubiquitous-and-generally-better-in-every-way USB C.

What’s even more interesting here, however, is the suggestion that it won’t be USB C there to pick up the pace. 9to5Mac notes that the report suggests a 2021 iPhone would “provide the completely wireless experience.” The implication here being that the charging port drops altogether on the high-end device (like the iPad, it would be more of a gradual sunsetting across the line, starting with the premium model). 

Meizu, notably, tried something similar this year with the very gimmicky (and pricey) Zero. The handset completely dropped ports, speakers and buttons from the equation, as a sort of logical conclusion of broader smartphone trends. For a majority of users, however, I suspect wireless charging is going to have to get some serious speed gains before they’re ready to ditch wired charging altogether.

Interesting tidbits for 2020 include the arrival of several iPhones, arriving in 5.4, 6.1 (x2) and 6.7-inch varieties. All of the above will reportedly sport 5G, with cameras and size being the primary differentiation. The OLED devices will reportedly adopt a similar form factor as the now-ancient iPhone 4, per the report.

Source: Tech Crunch

Venture capitalists tout themselves as frontier technology investors, but most of us are using the same infrastructure tools we’ve used for the past 20+ years — Excel and recent college grads searching Google .

We’ve seen some modest progress in people upgrading from Excel to Google Sheets, along with the use of CRM and cloud-based storage services, but according to Sebastian Soler, who oversees data science at Lux Capital, less than 5% of American VCs have a full-time team member who’s focused on technology.

“While the arguments for adopting the latest technology are now too compelling to ignore, finding the required budget for specialized tools can often prove to be a major challenge, especially for smaller managers,” said Tim Friedman, founder of PEStack. “Comprehensive market data can cost upwards of $25k for a leading service, portfolio monitoring can be double that, add in front office tools and you’re quickly into six-figure sums. My advice is: there are now more products than ever which focus on quick implementation and offer a lot of functionality at a fraction of the cost of some of the larger legacy providers.

TotemVC* is one example of a high-quality solution that offers a powerful platform with a transparent, affordable monthly rate. One piece of advice would be to use a service like [PEStack’s] free Vendor Profiles platform to identify viable providers and build up a shortlist. We also track sample clients so that our users can see what their peers are using. I would always advise managers to talk to other professionals to get the real inside scoop on which products work well, how painful the implementation was, and how good the ongoing support is.”

Jonathan Balkin, founder of Lionpoint Group, observed that the highest-impact technology initiative for a new PE/VC fund is typically to configure and enforce usage of a CRM system. The next most impactful initiative is usually to create an easy-to-use LP portal.

Source: Tech Crunch