Month: December 2019

It’s not enough for an autonomous vehicle to see the world around it. These vehicles need to understand in real time what they’re seeing.

That understanding piece is critical, and it requires being able to identify objects in real time and in any environmental condition. It can mean the difference between an autonomous vehicle that appropriately notices and ignores a plastic bag floating by and one that slams on its brakes.

Tel Aviv-based startup Arbe has developed a high-resolution radar chipset that it says is a game changer for the automotive industry. Now, with a fresh injection of $32 million in capital, it’s pushing to bring it into production and into the hands of Tier 1 suppliers.

Arbe said Monday that it has raised $32 million in a Series B funding round from a number of new investors, including BAIC Capital, Catalyst CEL, MissionBlue Capital and AI Alliance, a joint venture fund that includes Hyundai, SK Telecom and Hanwha Asset Management. Existing investors Canaan Partners Israel, iAngels, 360 Capital Partners, O.G. Tech Ventures and OurCrowd also participated.

Arbe will use the capital to hire more employees. But its big focus in the coming year is to bring its radar systems into full production.

“With the funds raised, Arbe will continue to deploy to the market a real breakthrough in radar technology that empowers Tier 1 automakers and OEMs to finally replace their legacy chipsets with one that truly meets the safety requirements of NCAP and ADAS for years ahead,” CEO Kobi Marenko said in a statement.

Arbe already has five Tier 1 customers — two in China and three in Europe, Marenko told TechCrunch. Marenko wouldn’t name the suppliers.

Arbe developed a high-resolution radar chipset designed to help autonomous vehicles, and even passenger vehicles equipped with advanced driver assistance systems, detect and identify objects. The technology can  separate, identify and track hundreds of objects in high horizontal and vertical resolution to a long range in a wide field of view. Arbe says its radar chipset generates an image 100 times more detailed than any other solution on the market today. The system is then able to take those images and simultaneously localize and map the environment.

The high-resolution radar chipset resolves a number of issues found in legacy chipsets, Marenko said, including eliminating false alarms. Arbe’s chipsets also can in real time process massive amounts of information generated by 4D imaging, and mitigate mutual radar interference. A radar system that has high-resolution object separation in azimuth and elevation will theoretically lead to more accurate decision making.

Arbe is so confident in its radar chipset that Marenko says it will enable Level 3 automation in passenger vehicles without requiring lidar, or light detection and ranging radar. Level 3 is a designation by SAE that means conditional automation in which a driver must still be prepared to intervene.

Source: Tech Crunch

Earlier this year, Instagram launched a feature that would flag potentially offensive comments before they’re posted. Now, the social media platform is expanding this preemptive flagging system to Instagram’s captions, as well. The new feature will warn users after they’ve written a caption for a feed post that Instagram’s AI detects as being similar to those that have already been reported for bullying.

It will not, however, block users from publishing their hateful remarks. Instead, Instagram says these little nudges simply give users time to reconsider their words — something it found was helping to cut down on the bullying taking place in the comments section after the launch of the earlier feature.

Once live, when users write a caption that appears to be bullying, a notification will appear that says: “This caption looks similar to others that have been reported.” The notification allows users to edit the text, click a button to learn more or share their post anyway.

In addition to helping reduce online bullying, Instagram hopes the feature will also help to educate users about what sort of things aren’t allowed on Instagram and when accounts could be at risk of being disabled for rule violations.

While the addition doesn’t prevent someone from posting their negative or abusive captions, Instagram has rolled out a number of features to aid those impacted by online bullying. For example, users can turn off comments on individual posts, remove followers, filter comments, mute accounts and more. It also this year began downranking borderline content, giving those whose accounts step close to the line — but not enough to be banned — fewer reasons to post violent or hurtful content in search of Instagram fame.

Unfortunately for Instagram’s more than a billion users, these sorts of remediations have arrived years too late.

Like most of today’s social media platforms, Instagram wasn’t thoughtfully designed by those with an eye toward how its service could be abused by those who want to hurt others. In fact, the idea that tech could actually harm others was a later realization for Instagram and others, who are today still struggling to build workforces where a variety of viewpoints and experiences are considered.

While it’s certainly a welcome addition to flag remarks that appear to be bullying, it’s disappointing that such a feature arrived 10 years after Instagram’s founding. And while AI advances may have made such a tool more powerful and useful as it debuts sometime next year, a simpler form of this feature could have existed ages ago, with improvements added over time.

Instagram says the feature is also rolling out slowly, initially in select markets, then globally in the “coming months” — meaning 2020.

Source: Tech Crunch

The clock is ticking on Verizon’s plans to bring 5G to 30 cities. Short of an actual Christmas miracle, things are looking rough. On the upside, the carrier (and, disclosure, parent of TechCrunch) just brought the next-gen technology to a nineteenth city. And it’s a doozy.

Verizon announced this morning that it has flipped the switch on 5G in Los Angeles. Or parts of it, at least. You get the usual caveat with Verizon’s chosen 5G tech here. It’s fast, coverage is limited. In fact, it’s limited to such a point that the company has to specify the specific neighborhoods covered by its ultra-wide-band tech. 

LA is, of course, quite large. It’s the second most populous city in the U.S. and twelfth largest  by size (Alaska and Montana have a way of skewing those numbers). It’s a lot of ground to cover. The company’s rapidly gentrifying downtown area seems to have gotten most of the love here.

Here’s the per neighborhood breakdown, straight from the carrier’s mouth:

[P]arts of Downtown, Chinatown, Del Rey, and Venice around landmarks such as: Grand Park, Los Angeles Convention Center, Union Station, LA Live, Staples Center, and Venice Beach Boardwalk.

Verizon promises that Charlotte, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Des Moines, Little Rock, Memphis and Salt Lake City will be added to the list before end of year.

Source: Tech Crunch

In addition to its new report on the top apps of 2019, app store intelligence firm App Annie also closed out the year with its Decade in Review analysis, which looks at the most popular apps over the past 10 years. Not surprisingly, Facebook dominated the charts, claiming four of the most-downloaded apps of the decade with Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. Subway Surfers, meanwhile, became the most-downloaded game of the decade, thanks to strong adoption in India.

To be clear, the analysis excludes third-party app stores in China, instead relying on iOS and Google Play data to come up with the list of top apps. But this still provides a way of examining worldwide app trends, despite that exception.

Making a good case for its monopoly status, Facebook didn’t just operate four of the most-downloaded (non-game) apps of the past 10 years — it runs the top four most-downloaded apps. In order, that’s Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram.

Right on Facebook’s heels is Snapchat as the No. 5 most-downloaded app of the 2010s — a big reason why Facebook was ready to spend billions earlier in the decade to bring the app under its roof.

Communication and social media apps were also among the most popular over the past 10 years, claiming seven out of the 10 top spots of the decade’s most-downloaded apps thanks to Skype at No. 6 and Twitter at No. 10.

In terms of consumer spending, video streaming and music apps ruled the charts (outside of games), with top apps including Netflix (No. 1), Pandora Music (No. 3) and Tencent Video (No. 4) also in the top 5.

And though dating app Tinder was the most profitable app this year, Netflix was the No. 1 app by all-time consumer spend over the past decade.

The rest of the list included No. 4 LINE, followed by iQIYI, Spotify, YouTube, HBO NOW and Kwai.

On the gaming side, however, Subway Surfers by Kiloo was the somewhat surprising top game of the decade, in terms of downloads. It can attribute its No. 1 spot to the demand from Indian users, as the country accounted for more than 15% of Subway Surfers’ all-time downloads across iOS and Google Play combined.

No one publisher dominated the charts, as a wide range of major gaming companies were represented.

Following Subway Surfers, the most-downloaded games of the decade included Candy Crush Saga from Activision Blizzard, Temple Run 2 from Imangi, My Talking Tom from Outfit7, Clash of Clans from Supercell, Pou from Zakeh, Hill Climb Racing from Fingersoft, Minion Rus from Vivendi, Fruit Ninja from Halfbrick and 8 Ball Pool from Miniclip.

The top games by consumer spending were almost an entirely different list.

Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga were the only two games to appear on both the top games by downloads and consumer spend lists, App Annie found.

Instead, the top games by consumer spending were led by Supercell’s Clash of Clans, followed by Monster Strike by mixi, then Candy Crush.

The rest of the list was rounded out by Puzzle & Dragons by GungHo Online Entertainment, Fate/Grand Order by Sony, Honour of Kings by Tencent, Fantasy Westward Journey by NetEase, Pokémon GO by Niantic, Game of War – Fire Age by MZ and Clash Royale by Supercell.

Many of the decade’s most-downloaded and most profitable apps and games have also appeared on the top apps list at the end of every year, but some of the apps are growing in popularity while others are waning.

For example, the most profitable game of the decade, Clash of Clans, was ranked No. 8 as opposed No. 1 on 2019’s list of the most profitable games. HBO NOW had a big showing in the 2010s thanks to its hit series, “Game of Thrones,” but didn’t make this year’s list at all now that the show has wrapped. And though Facebook ruled the 2010s, there are now signs that consumers may be ready for something new as short-form video apps TikTok and Likee moved onto 2019’s most-downloaded app list, as No. 4 and No. 7, respectively.

Source: Tech Crunch

We’re in a privacy panic.

It started with GDPR, and CCPA followed with new legislation aimed at giving consumers greater control and transparency into how their data is used. Tech giants took a mighty stand to get ahead of the changes and the oncoming cookie-free movement: Apple’s new Intelligent Tracking Prevention (IPT) in Safari places restrictions on cookies based on how frequently a user interacts with the website, purging cookies entirely after 30 days of disuse.

Without obtaining explicit consent from users, Google Chrome will now prevent cross-site cookies from working across domains. Microsoft announced that settings on its new Edge browser will influence how third parties will be able to track consumers across the web.

It worked: since GDPR became enforceable, the number of third-party cookies used per webpage declined from about 80 in April to about 60 in July, and the number of third-party cookies found on news websites (major advertising publishers) in Europe declined by 22%.

In response, there’s been an onslaught of articles claiming the value of real-time bidding (RTB) and all of programmatic will decline in direct correlation with enforced privacy regulation, browser and cookie depreciation. While yes, the cookie (and associated use of cookies) has been the centerpiece of all digital advertising performance reconciliation in the last 15 years, it is not the only reason RTB is an important component of effective digital marketing.

The question then becomes what is the vehicle that allows advertisers and brands to determine the value of those users or inventory in a less cookie-enabled environment.

Enter contextual targeting, which had been living in the shadow of shiny first-party data. It can stop those RTB pipes from rusting by using them to determine the value of the user and placement in the bidding process based on the information on the page, rather than the user. Understanding that we have enough information about ad space without user information means we can face the (more private) future of the industry with far less fear.

It is the answer to the cookie-free, privacy-forward, power-to-the-consumer movement. So how do you determine the value of a placement using contextual targeting – especially when you’ve never valued it that way before? These are – IMHO – the key tenets of deciding the value of a user in a contextual environment:

Placement Targeting: Placement is the exact spot on a publisher’s website/app where an ad unit will appear. Without the ability to target at the placement level, a contextual campaign will not be as effective as it could be. Two identically-sized placements on a page will vary in performance depending on multiple factors, including position, ad type, surrounding context and viewability.

Source: Tech Crunch

Listen. Spotify’s tired of screwing around here. The company spent a lot of money on podcasts. Like, a lot, a lot. And it really needs you to start listening to things, because it’s almost certainly going to spend even more in the coming years.

I mean, music is good, too, don’t get it wrong, but with between $400 and $500 million spent on the format in 2019 alone, the service is really going to need you to hold up your end of the deal here and just, pretty please start streaming the things. This week, Spotify is introducing a new button to help kickstart the habit.

First noted by The Verge, the feature is coming to users in a number of markets, including the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, limited to those users who have yet to use Spotify to listen to a podcast. I’d imagine that still applies to a broad swath of users. Spotify is still a relatively new entrant in the field, and while podcasting is growing at a rapid rate, many listeners have already settled on a player.

The service has a big lift here, attempting to distinguish itself with premium offerings in a flood of free content. Spotify certainly pushed podcasts big time in its viral year-end wrap ups, prominently featuring them among artists, even if you only listened to an episode or two.

Discovery could be a big part. That’s a puzzle many platforms are still working to crack beyond simply recommendations. The company notes that it will recommend both its own and non-Spotify podcasts with the feature. It will be interesting to see how much it pushes its own offerings, however, given the massive size of its investment.

Source: Tech Crunch

Hey everyone. Thank you for welcoming me into your inboxes yet again.

I’m in Berlin where TechCrunch just pulled off another great Disrupt event, we’ve got a lot of great Europe-focused startup content on the site so get to scrolling if your interest is piqued.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

The big story

Just as Pets.com symbolized the ridiculousness that came to frame the tech industry preceding the Dotcom bubble burst at the start of the century, dog-walking startup Wag might symbolize that SoftBank’s earthquaking investment overexposure may extend far beyond a one-time WeWork mistake.

This week, the WSJ reported that SoftBank had tossed in the towel on Wag, selling off its massive “nearly 50% stake” in the startup. The report states that SoftBank sold its stake back to the startup at a valuation far below its previous $650 million value. SoftBank is walking away from its two board seats in the process.

Wag will be laying off “a significant amount of the remainder of its workforce,” according to the report.

High-ambition startups stumble all of the time, but SoftBank’s money bag-swinging swagger has left a handful of startups with dollar signs in their eyes and the desire to grow at a pace that they never dreamed of. When LA-based Wag closed its $300 million raise from SoftBank at the beginning of 2018, plenty of people wondered why on earth a dog-walking startup needed that kind of money.

Shift forward to the end of 2019, and startups that have relied on connecting contractor labor with phone-wielding consumers haven’t proven to be as capable in shifting into profitability with Wag seeming to be yet another example.

Needless to say Pets.com and Wag really don’t hold much comparison when it comes to the broader impact. Pets.com was well-known largely because of its hilarious marketing overextension, Wag’s stumblings are far more impactful, especially as they relate to the reputation of its Japanese benefactor which has significantly reshaped the venture capital market in Silicon Valley and around the world.

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On to the rest of the week’s news.

Trends of the week

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

• Apple revamps parental controls on iOS
  Apple is giving its parental control tools for iOS new functionality. The new update in iOS 13.3 lets parents set limits over who their kids can talk to and text with during certain hours of the day.
• Away CEO steps down
  One of the weirder sagas of the week was Away CEO Steph Korey’s stepping down from her role at the D2C luggage company. The step-down followed a long investigation in the Verge which basically chronicled how awful life was on Away’s customer service team which painted a pretty ugly portrait of Korey’s leadership style. It was a rough article, but after Korey’s apology acknowledged that she had made some mistakes and would be trying to fix her management style, most people assumed the saga had wrapped. She stepped down this week following what was reported to be board pressure to do so, turns out they had been wanting to replace Korey and the negative press was the excuse they needed.

GAFA Gaffes

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

• An iOS bug is locking up iPhones:
  [An iOS bug in AirDrop lets anyone temporarily lockup nearby iPhones]

Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Extra Crunch

Our premium subscription business had another great week of content. Our good friend Alex Wilhelm (who hired me as an intern four years ago!) is back at TechCrunch and has fired up a new series on Extra Crunch. Here’s his first post on the new hot club to join.

The $100M ARR Club

“…Firms with valuations that their revenues can’t back are in similar straits. In the post-WeWork era, some unicorns are starting to look a bit long in the tooth. I suspect that the companies in most danger are those with slim revenues (compared to their valuations), poor revenue quality (compared to software startups) or both.

That said, there is a club of private companies that are really something, namely private ones that have managed to reach the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold. It’s not a large group, as startups that tend to cross the $100 million ARR mark are well on the path to going public…”

Sign up for more newsletters including my colleague Darrell Etherington’s new space-focused newsletter Max Q here.

Source: Tech Crunch

Seoul and South Korea may well be the secret startup hub that (still) no one talks about.

While often dwarfed by the scale and scope of the Chinese startup market next door, South Korea has proven over the last few years that it can — and will — enter the top-tier of startup hubs.

Case in point: Baedal Minjok (typically shortened to Baemin), one of the country’s leading food delivery apps, announced an acquisition offer by Berlin-based Delivery Hero in a blockbuster $4 billion transaction late this week, representing potentially one of the largest exits yet for the Korean startup world.

The transaction faces antitrust review before closing, since Delivery Hero owns Baemin’s largest competitor Yogiyo, and therefore is conditional on regulatory approval. Delivery Hero bought a majority stake in Yogiyo way back in 2014.

What’s been dazzling though is to have witnessed the growth of this hub over the past decade. As TechCrunch’s former foreign correspondent in Seoul five years ago and a university researcher locally at KAIST eight years ago, I’ve been watching the growth of this hub locally and from afar for years now.

While the country remains dominated by its chaebol tech conglomerates — none more important than Samsung — it’s the country’s startup and culture industries that are driving dynamism in this economy. And with money flooding out of the country’s pension funds into the startup world (both locally and internationally), even more opportunities await entrepreneurs willing to slough off traditional big corporate career paths and take the startup route.

Baemin’s original branding was heavy on the illustrations.

Five years ago, Baemin was just an app for chicken delivery with a cutesy and creative interface facing criticism from restaurant franchise owners over fees. Now, its motorbikes are seen all over Seoul, and the company has installed speakers in many restaurants where a catchy whistle and the company’s name are announced every time there is an online delivery order.

(Last week when I was in Seoul, one restaurant seemingly received an order every 1-3 minutes with a “Baedal Minjok Order!” announcement that made eating a quite distracted experience. Amazing product marketing tactic though that I am surprised more U.S.-based food delivery startups haven’t copied yet).

The strengths of the ecosystem remain the same as they have always been. A huge workforce of smart graduates (Korea has one of the highest education rates in the world), plus a high youth unemployment and underemployment rate have driven more and more potential founders down the startup path rather than holding out for professional positions that may never materialize.

What has changed is venture capital funding. It wasn’t so long ago that Korea struggled to get any funding for its startups. Years ago, the government initiated a program to underwrite the creation of venture capital firms focused on the country’s entrepreneurs, simply because there was just no capital to get a startup underway (it was not uncommon among some deals I heard of at the time for a $100k seed check to buy almost a majority of a startup’s equity).

Now, Korea has become a startup target for many international funds, including Goldman Sachs and Sequoia. It has also been at the center of many of the developments of blockchain in recent years, with the massive funding boom and crash that market sustained. Altogether, the increased funding has led to a number of unicorn startups — a total of seven according to the The Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard.

And the country is just getting started – with a bunch of new startups looking poised to driven toward huge outcomes in the coming years.

Thus, there continues to be a unique opportunity for venture investors who are willing to cross the barriers here and engage. That said, there are challenges to overcome to make the most of the country’s past and future success.

Perhaps the hardest problem is simply getting insight on what is happening locally. While China attracts large contingents of foreign correspondents who cover everything from national security to the country’s startups and economy, Korea’s foreign media coverage basically entails coverage of the funny guy to the North and the occasional odd cultural note. Dedicated startup journalists do exist, but they are unfortunately few and far between and vastly under-resourced compared to the scale of the ecosystem.

Plus, similar to New York City, there are also just a number of different ecosystems that broadly don’t interact with each other. For Korea, it has startups that target the domestic market (which makes up the bulk of its existing unicorns), plus leading companies in industries as diverse as semiconductors, gaming, and music/entertainment. My experience is that these different verticals exist separately from each other not just socially, but also geographically as well, making it hard to combine talent and insights across different industries.

Yet ultimately, as valuations soar in the Valley and other prominent tech hubs, it is the next tier of startup cities that might well offer the best return profiles. For the early investors in Baemin, this was a week to celebrate, perhaps with some fried chicken delivery.

Source: Tech Crunch

Volkswagen Group and Qatar have agreed to develop a public transit system of autonomous shuttles and buses by 2022 for the capital city of Doha.

The agreement signed Saturday by VW Group and the Qatar Investment Authority is an expansive project that will involve four brands under VW Group, including Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Scania, its shared ride service MOIA and Audi subsidiary Autonomous Intelligent Driving, or AID.

The aim is to develop the entire transport system, including the electric autonomous shuttles and buses, legal framework, city infrastructure and ride-hailing software required to deploy a commercial service there. The autonomous vehicles will be integrated into existing public transit.

“For our cities to progress we need a new wave of innovation,” QIA CEO Mansoor Al Mahmoud said in a statement. “AI-enabled, emission-free transportation technologies will help advance urban mobility, while diminishing congestion and improving energy efficiency.

The fleet will include 35 autonomous electric ID. Buzz vehicles from the Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles unit, which will shuttle up to four passengers on semi-fixed routes in a geo-fenced area of Doha. Another 10 Scania buses will be used for larger groups.

Closed testing of the shuttle vehicles and buses is expected to begin in 2020. Trials could start as early as 2021. VW and QIA said the project will go live by the end of 2022.

Source: Tech Crunch

The final installment of the sequel trilogy is getting a lot of creative promotion — even by Star Wars standards. With The Rise of Skywalker out in just under a week, J.J. Abrams (and some spotty server issues) paid a visit to Fortnite. The director showed off an exclusive clip from the upcoming film featuring the familiar trio of Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron.

That and watching a bunch of stormtroopers dance around is all well and good, but the real fun came next. Darth Galactic Empire Lord Palpatine-Sidious kicked off a final segment that found players rushing to grab the latest Fortnite weapon: a lightsaber.

As The Verge notes, there are a bunch of other in-game Star Wars challenges added to the title as part of the promo, but honestly, lightsabers. Just lightsabers. The game now sports a variety of different colors of the iconic kyber crystal-powered weapon, including a crossguard version like the kind sported by Kylo Ren in the new films.

The lead up to the film has seen a slew of different Star Wars add-ons, including skins of Stormtroopers, main characters Rey and Finn and a TIE Interceptor-style glider.

Source: Tech Crunch