Month: August 2020

Between the IPO buzz and a raft of new federal contracts for COVID-19 work, it’s been a year of big moves for Palantir. Now, the company is making a more literal one: decamping from its Palo Alto headquarters to Denver, Colorado.

The decision to relocate its Palo Alto headquarters, first reported by the Denver Business Journal, comes after the company filed SEC paperwork last month to take the company public. The most recent whispers say Palantir is aiming for a direct listing in late September rather than a traditional IPO.

While its chief executive’s vocal complaints about a cultural mismatch played a role in Palantir’s decision to relocate its main office away from the Bay Area, cost of living improvements and a proximity to clients in the center of the country also factored into the decision.

For a company with around 2,500 employees, Palantir maintains a surprising array of office locations, both in the U.S. and internationally. Palantir’s Palo Alto office will likely remain a hub for its developers and software engineers. The company’s New York and London offices currently house a large portion of its product development work.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp announced plans to move the company’s headquarters away from California in an Axios interview back in May.

“We haven’t picked a place yet, but it’s going to be closer to the East Coast than the West Coast,” Karp said, adding that Colorado would be his guess for where the headquarters would land.

In the same interview, Karp railed against what he called Silicon Valley’s “monoculture,” a reference to left-leaning views that generally characterize both Bay Area culture and the company’s vocal critics.

While Silicon Valley is far from monocultural by any traditional measure, Karp cites an “increasing intolerance” in the region — particularly for the company’s own federal defense work. Palantir continued to seek contracts with federal law enforcement agencies, even as some tech companies dropped or declined to pursue them.

Palantir’s work supplying software for ICE’s deportation efforts is a particular nexus of controversy. “… It’s a de minimis part of our work, finding people in our country who are undocumented, but it’s a legitimate, complex issue,” Karp told CNBC in Davos earlier this year.

Google famously declined to renew a Pentagon contract known as Project Maven in 2018 after an internal backlash. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Palantir and one of the Trump administration’s closest allies in tech, slammed Google’s decision as “very problematic.”

All Palantir employees not currently working with customers in the field are working from home with no set plan to return to the office at this time. Karp, a frequent critic of Silicon Valley’s regional myopia, currently runs the company from his home in the libertarian enclave of New Hampshire.

“I’m pretty happy outside the monoculture in New Hampshire and I like living free here,” Karp told Axios, referencing the state’s motto “Live free or die.”

Source: Tech Crunch

A California appeals court judge has granted Uber and Lyft’s emergency stay. This means the preliminary injunction that sought to force companies to reclassify their drivers as employees will not go into effect this Friday. Instead, this emergency stay extends that Friday deadline to at least mid-October, when the court will hear oral arguments.

Companies have until early September to outline their plans about how they will make drivers employees if they lose the appeal and/or Prop 22 doesn’t pass in California.

Earlier today, Lyft penned a blog post saying it will shutdown tonight. Clearly, Lyft jumped the gun on this one. This month, both Uber and Lyft argued in court that they should be able to continue classifying their drivers as independent contractors. A judge disagreed, and granted a preliminary injunction to force both companies to reclassify their drivers as employees beginning Friday. In response, both Uber and Lyft said they would be forced to temporarily pause operations in California.

Yesterday, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on a podcast that the company can’t simply hire all 50,000 of its drivers overnight.

“All of our model, everything that we have built is based on this platform that brings earners and brings people who want transportation or delivery together,” he said on a Vox Media podcast yesterday. “You can’t flip that stuff overnight. It’ll take time, and we will figure out a way to be in California. We want to be in California. But if the court case comes in, then we’ll have to shut down, and we’ve got the best engineers in the world figuring out how we can rebuild this thing. If we do have to go to employment model, what’s going to happen is that we will then have to underwrite driver productivity. There will be far fewer drivers employed, so my guess is 70-80% of users who use Uber for flexibility, they drove 5 to 10 hours, etc., they will not be able to earn. The prices are going to go up. They’re going to go up less in city centers. So I think SF prices will go up by 20%. Smaller cities prices will go way up.”

What Uber is proposing with Prop 22 is essentially a third way of classifying gig workers, but co-founder of Gig Workers Collective Vanessa Bain says a third way “is bullshit,” she said on the same Vox Media podcast yesterday.

“It’s categorically less than what we’re entitled to under current law,” she said.

Below is a timeline of what’s led to this moment.

January 1, 2020: Assembly Bill 5 becomes law. The bill, first introduced in December 2018, codified the ruling established in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v Superior Court of Los Angeles. In that case, the court applied the ABC test and decided Dynamex wrongfully classified its workers as independent contractors. According to the ABC test, in order for a hiring entity to legally classify a worker as an independent contractor, it must prove (A) the worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity, (B) performs work outside the scope of the entity’s business and (C) is regularly engaged in an “independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed.”

May 2020: California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, along with city attorneys from Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, filed a lawsuit asserting Uber and Lyft gain an unfair and unlawful competitive advantage by misclassifying workers as independent contractors.

The suit argues Uber and Lyft are depriving workers the right to minimum wage, overtime, access to paid sick leave, disability insurance and unemployment insurance. The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of San Francisco, seeks $2,500 in penalties for each violation, possibly per driver, under the California Unfair Competition Law, and another $2,500 for violations against senior citizens or people with disabilities.

June 2020: Becerra and others file a motion for a preliminary injunction seeking to force Uber and Lyft to immediately classify their drivers as employees.

August 6, 2020: California Superior Court Judge Ethan P. Schulman hears arguments pertaining to the preliminary injunction. At the hearing, Uber and Lyft maintained that an injunction would require them to restructure their businesses in such a material way that it would prevent them from being able to employ many drivers on either a full-time or part-time basis. Uber and Lyft’s argument, effectively, is that classifying drivers as employees would result in job loss.

“The proposed injunction would cause irreparable injury to Lyft and Uber, and would actually cause massive harm to drivers and harm to riders,” Rohit Singla, counsel for Lyft, said at the hearing.

For example, Lyft estimates it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars simply to process the I-9 forms, which verify employment eligibility. It doesn’t cost anything to file that form, but it would require Uber and Lyft to further invest in their human resources and payroll processes.

August 9, 2020: Judge Schulman grants the preliminary injunction, which goes into effect on August 20, 2020.

“The Court is under no illusion that implementation of its injunction will be costly,” Judge Schulman wrote in the order. “There can be no question that in order for Defendants to comply with A.B. 5, they will have to change the nature of their business practices in significant ways, such as by hiring human resources staff to hire and manage their driver workforces.”

Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft made clear their respective plans to file emergency appeals.

August 12, 2020: Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says Uber will have to temporarily shut down in California if the court doesn’t overturn the preliminary injunction. Lyft says it, too, will be forced to temporarily cease operations in California.

August 13, 2020: Judge Schulman denies Uber and Lyft’s appeal. Uber says it plans to file another appeal, while Lyft says it will seek a further stay from the state’s appellate court.

August 14, 2020: Lyft files a request for an immediate stay in California’s appeals court.

August 17, 2020: Uber files an emergency stay request in California’s appeals court.

August 19, 2020: San Diego and San Jose mayors call for the Court of Appeal to grant Uber and Lyft’s motions and stay the injunction.

Looking ahead

November 2020: Californians will vote on Prop 22, a ballot measure majorly funded by Uber, Lyft and DoorDash. Prop 22 aims to keep gig workers classified as independent contractors. The measure, if passed, would make drivers and delivery workers for said companies exempt from a new state law that classifies them as W-2 employees.

The ballot measure looks to implement an earnings guarantee of at least 120% of minimum wage while on the job, 30 cents per mile for expenses, a healthcare stipend, occupational accident insurance for on-the-job injuries, protection against discrimination and sexual harassment and automobile accident and liability insurance.

Source: Tech Crunch

The U.S. market has no real frontrunner poised to claim TikTok’s throne if the app is banned in the country. According to Trump’s executive order, TikTok’s owner ByteDance has to divest of TikTok’s U.S. operations or the app will be banned from the U.S. market on November 12. A number of companies have considered the TikTok deal, including front-runner Microsoft, Twitter, Google, and even Oracle, for some reason. But if a deal doesn’t get done, it’s unclear what app — if any — will be able to take TikTok’s place.

Instagram, of course, is clearly vying for TikTok users with the launch of its latest short-form video feature called “Reels.” But the addition has so far seen mixed reviews. Though it’s still early days for Reels, The New York Times rushed to call it a “dud” on arrival. Engadget, meanwhile, said the feature was actually a “worthy rival,” but it gets lost in Instagram’s bloat. Instagram also is not a direct TikTok clone. It’s become an all-purpose social network for photo-sharing, viewing Stories, online shopping, live video content, long-form video (IGTV), private messaging, and more.

It’s unclear if TikTok users will truly consider Instagram an alternative in the event that TikTok disappears.

There are a number of other apps that are more direct competitors to TikTok, as they also employ a similar vertical video feed format, focus on short-form video, and offer a combination of editing tools and music that made TikTok so popular. The lineup today includes Likee, Byte, Triller, Dubsmash, and Zynn, among other smaller players. But among these apps, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, there’s no clear leader.

According to data provided by app store intelligence firm App Annie, Singapore-based Likee had the largest number of weekly active users in the U.S. for the week ending August 8. (For context, Trump’s executive order was signed on August 6.)

Likee is very much a TikTok clone, unfortunately with ripped content aplenty, no less. App Annie reports it had 1.9 million weekly active users across iPhone and Android combined in the U.S. during the week of August 2-8, 2020. Likee has also steadily grown its weekly active users numbers and hit a high of No. 71 in overall downloads on iPhone back on May 27.

The next two largest apps were Byte and Triller with 1.1 million weekly active users apiece, during the same time period of Aug. 2-8. Both also briefly flirted with the top of the App Store charts as news of a potential ban made the headlines. This allowed Byte to reach No. 1 in overall downloads on iPhone on July 8. Triller then followed, briefly reaching No. 1 in overall downloads on iPhone on August 1.

Dubsmash trailed, App Annie said, with 800,000 weekly active users during Aug. 2-8. It got as high as No. 10 in overall downloads on iPhone on July 9.

Meanwhile, despite reports of being filled with stolen content, TikTok clone Zynn had a decent showing. The app had 600,000 weekly active users during the week ending Aug. 8. It hit No. 1 in overall downloads on iPhone on May 27, after seeing a bust of downloads and active users in late May.

However, Zynn doesn’t present a solution to the TikTok problem as it, too, is operated by a Chinese tech giant. The app was created by Owlii, owned by a billion-dollar Chinese company Kuaishou, which is the second-most popular video platform in China after Douyin (ByteDance’s name for China’s version of TikTok).

There are a number of lesser-known TikTok alternatives as well, including Lomotif, Funimate, Kwai, Firework, and others. And there are video apps that focus on some aspect of TikTok, such as the live-streaming apps like Live.Me, Twitch, and Caffeine, as well as social video chat apps like Squad, Houseparty, Murge, and others. But none of these could be considered a TikTok competitor.

Snapchat is another big name vying for TikTok’s users, but it doesn’t yet have TikTok-like features launched publicly.

TechCrunch reported in July the app was testing TikTok-style navigation. Earlier this month, Snap announced it would soon test a feature that lets users set their Snaps to music, similar to TikTok, and had music licensing deals lineup up to that effect. Given the overlap with TikTok’s Gen Z user base, Snapchat could do well here but it seems in no rush to get this feature out, unlike Instagram. The company said it would begin the test the feature later this fall.

What could happen, instead, if TikTok were to entirely disappear, would be a fracturing of its user base across a range of competitive apps.

Already, there are signs of this happening. On news of the possible TikTok ban, a community of TikTok users who call themselves “alt TikTok” — a group that includes those known for their absurdist humor as well as gay TikTok, BuzzFeed reported — stormed Byte. The brief app store chart ranking bumps seen by other apps like Triller and Dubsmash also indicate the TikTok community was hedging its bets by setting up shop on competitive apps just in case.

Of course, losing TikTok for good is a worst-case scenario. The hope for many fans of the short-form app is that the company sells the U.S. operations in order remain in this market.

Source: Tech Crunch

Eric Hippeau is the founding partner at Lerer Hippeau Ventures, whose portfolio companies include the likes of Axios, BuzzFeed, Casper, Warby Parker, Allbirds, DocSend, Fundera, Everlane, Giphy, Genius and the recently acquired fitness company Mirror.

It would not be an overstatement to say that Hippeau is well-positioned to discuss startups across a wide spectrum of industries, from media to D2C to telehealth to edtech. We spoke with Hippeau for a full hour on a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live to discuss all of the above and get his tactical advice for early-stage startups looking to catch their break.

Below, you’ll find a video of the entire episode and highlights from our conversation. Enjoy!

Advice for super-early-stage founders

As much as you can, in terms of timing and resources, build something. Don’t just talk about building something. Build it. It’s not gonna be perfect, and it might not work the way you might do, but build it because that will give me, as a VC, an indication of what you’re trying to accomplish. It also tells me a lot about you, and that that this is something that you really care about. You’re going to ask your family, and even ask your friends, and you’re going to get resources any way you can because it’s that important to you. And, the product that you build, while not perfect by any of stretch of the imagination, will go a long way for us to figure out what it is.

On the growth of direct-to-consumer

Source: Tech Crunch

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced Saqib Shaikh on stage at BUILD in 2016, he was obviously moved by the engineer’s “passion and empathy,” which Nadella said, “is going to change the world.”

That assessment was on the mark because Shaikh went on to co-found the mobile app Seeing AI, which is a showcase for the power of AI applied to the needs of people who are blind or visually impaired. Using the camera on a phone, the Seeing AI app can describe a physical scene, identify persons and their demeanor, read documents (including handwritten ones), read currency values and tell colors. The latest version uses haptic technology to help the user discover the position of objects and people in an image. The app has been used 20 million times since launch nearly three years ago, and today it works in eight languages.

It’s exciting to announce that Shaikh will be speaking at Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event that addresses how rapid advances in technology, many of them AI-related, will influence the development of accessibility and assistive technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. The show, which is a project for the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired Silicon Valley, launched recently on TechCrunch. The virtual event is Dec. 2-3 and free to the public. Pre-register here. 

Shaikh lost his vision at the age of 7, and attended a school for blind students, where he was intrigued by computers that could “talk” to students. He went on to study computer science at the U.K.’s University of Sussex. “One of the things I had always dreamt of since university,” he says, “was something that could tell you at any moment who and what’s going on around you.”  That dream turned into his destiny.

After he joined Microsoft in 2006, Shaikh participated in Microsoft’s annual, week-long hackathons in 2014 and 2015 to develop the idea of applying AI in ways that could help people who are blind or visually impaired. Not long after, Seeing AI became an official project and Shaikh’s full-time job at Microsoft. The company’s Cognitive Services APIs have been critical to his work, and he now leads a team of engineers who are leveraging emerging technology to empower people who are blind.

“When it comes to AI,” says Shaikh, “I consider disabled people to be really good early adopters. We can point to history where  blind people have been using talking books for decades and so on, all the way through to OCR text-to-speech, which is early AI. Today, this idea that a computer can look at an image and turn it into a sentence has many use-cases but probably the most compelling is to describe that image to a blind person. For blind people this is incredibly empowering.” Below is a video Microsoft released in 2016 about Shaikh and the Seeing AI project. 

The Seeing AI project is an early example of a tool that taps various AI technologies in ways that produce an almost “intelligent” experience. Seeing AI doesn’t just read the text, for example, it also tells the user how to move the phone so the document is in the viewfinder. It doesn’t just tell you there are people in front of you, it tells you something about them, including who they are (if you have named them in the past) and their general appearance.

At Sight Tech Global, Shaikh will speak about the future of Seeing AI and his views on how accessibility will unfold in a world more richly enabled by cloud compute, low latency networks and ever more sophisticated AI algorithms and data sets. 

To pre-register for a free pass, please visit Sight Tech Global.

Please follow the event on Twitter @Globalsight.

Sponsors are welcome, and there are opportunities available ranging from branding support to content integration. Please email sponsor@sighttechglobal.com for more information.

Source: Tech Crunch

Lucid Motors said Wednesday that its upcoming all-electric Air sedan will have fast-charging capability that will let owners add 300 miles of range to the battery in 20 minutes and a home-charging unit that will allow owners to send energy from their car to their home.

Lucid said it is able to hit this benchmark because the vehicle has a 900-volt electrical architecture that when combined with its lithium-ion cells, battery and thermal management system and powertrain efficiency. Most electric vehicles — with the exception of the Porsche Taycan and future Kia EVs—  have a 400-volt architecture.

There are limitations to this speedy charging; a driver would need to access the correct DC fast charger, which are not exactly abundant at the moment. However, this capability does check an important box for EV owners. While the Lucid Air will have an eye-popping range of more than 500 miles — if its estimates are verified by EPA — the fast charging capability helps remove any lingering range anxiety and make long-distance travel more desirable.

The company revealed a number of other details surrounding charging, including that the Air will use the universal CCS (combined charging system) connector standard, which makes it compatible to public chargers. The vehicle will have a peak charging rate of over 300kW and a 19.2kW AC onboard charger that can support AC charging speeds up to 80 miles per hour.

Lucid also announced a partnership with Electrify America, VW Group’s U.S.-based charging network. Owners of the Air will be given three years of free charging at Electrify America chargers, which includes DC fast charging.

Lucid also has built out a number of home-based charging features, including a partnership with Qmerit on installation of its connected home charging station. But perhaps the most interesting feature is that Lucid has built in “vehicle-to-everything” charging capabilities into the Air and home charging unit. This means that the vehicle will be able to execute bi-directional charging between vehicles and even from the Air back to the owner’s home. Lucid specifically mentioned that it would allow owners to provide a temporary energy reserve for their homes, including “off grid vacation properties,” a weirdly specific detail that must be popular with the luxury EV owner demographic. Lucid told TechCrunch that this capability will become available in mid 2021.

Lucid said it also plans to repurpose older batteries for energy storage. The first prototype is already installed at Lucid’s Silicon Valley headquarters, where a team is working on producing a range of energy storage products.

Source: Tech Crunch

Arizona -based high-altitude balloon startup World View has a new partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to help the latter collect data to help it deepen its study of the Earth’s stratosphere, the second layer of the Earth’s atmosphere that spans between 4.3 and 12 miles above the surface depending on where you are in the world.

NOAA will be sending up miniaturized instrument hardware that can measure atmospheric particles, or aerosols, in the stratosphere. Studying these can help scientists better understand how the atmospheric layer, and the ozone e that it contains, and human impact on both can affect the transmission of ultraviolet radiation and what kind of chemical interactions are incurring that could present a risk to humans on the surface.

World View’s ‘Stratollites’ balloons will be able to host these instruments at altitudes higher than 55,000 feet (over 10 miles) above the Earth, for trips that can span multiple weeks at a time. Traditional NOAA research has relied on sensors carried by weather balloons, and aircraft, which can’t make those kinds of long-duration data-gathering excursions; or on satellites, which operate at a completely different altitude and can’t provide the same quality of data as an an instrument actually located within the stratosphere itself.

To get a sense of what kind of difference NOAA could realize from using World View’s stratollites, consider that the Administration says that while current weather balloon flights provide around 11 days’ worth of data from a full year of flights, while just a single flight of World View’s vehicle could provide 40 days’ worth of data.

The first Wold View and NOAA flights should take place sometime next year, and the data gathered from the excursions will be made available to the public for general research use after a period of six months, as is standard for the agency.

Source: Tech Crunch

Twitter has given its biannual transparency reports a new home with today’s launch of the Twitter Transparency Center, which the company says was designed to make the reporting more easily understood and accessible. The launch was timed alongside the belated release of Twitter’s latest transparency report covering the second half of 2019. The company attributed the delay to the COVID-19 health crisis and its work in getting the new Transparency Center up and running. The report touts Twitter’s increasing efforts in enforcing its policies, including a 95% increase in accounts actioned for violating its abuse policy, a 47% increase in account locks and suspensions, and a 54% increase in accounts actioned for violating hateful conduct policies, among others.

The company claims its ability to “proactively” surface content violations for human review has helped it increase enforcement of its rules, along with more detailed policies, improved reporting tools, and other factors.

As a result, this period saw the largest increase in the number of accounts actioned under Twitter’s abuse policies — a metric that could speak to better technology, as Twitter claims, but also perhaps hints at the devolving nature of online discourse.

Meanwhile, Twitter attributed the increase in actions taken on accounts demonstrating hateful conduct, in part, to its new “dehumanization policy” announced on July 9, 2019.

Twitter increased enforcement of its rules in other areas during this reporting period, including the posting of sensitive media/adult content (enforcement actions were up 39%), suicide & self-harm (enforcement actions up 29%), doxxing (enforcement actions up 41%), and non-consensual nudity (enforcement actions up 109%). The only area to see a decline was violent threats, which saw a 5% decrease in the number of accounts actioned for policy violations.

Twitter also actioned 60,807 accounts for violating policies around regulated goods or services.

Online harassment has been a significant challenge for Twitter as it has grown. The social network now encompasses a wider swath of the general public, compared with its early days when tech enthusiasts knew it as twttr, a sort of public-facing SMS. Today, Twitter’s idealistic goal of being an “online public town square” is bumping up against the limitations of that model, which is also increasingly criticized as a flawed or even delusional sort of analogy for what Twitter has become.

Twitter, like much of social media, can over-amplify fringe beliefs, controversy, and toxic content, to the detriment of conversation health. It can help polarize users’ opinions. And it serves as a breeding ground for cancel culture.

The company itself, as of late, seems to be waking up to the problem of putting the world together in one room to debate ideas, and the ramifications of amplifying misinformation that results in.

It suspended accounts from the fringe conspiracy movement, QAnon, in July. It has also flagged and screened Trump’s tweets and briefly froze his ability to share misinformation. On the product side, Twitter rolled out a tool that let users hide replies that don’t add value to conversations and, just last week, publicly launched a feature that lets users only tweet with friends and followers, instead of with the general public.

Abuse policy enforcement isn’t the only big change that took place in the last half of 2019. Government requests for user data also increased, Twitter found.

Twitter says that the U.S. made up the highest percentage of legal requests for information during the reporting period, accounting for 26% of all global requests. Japan was second, comprising 22% of information requests. Overall, government requests grew 21% in the period July 1 to December 31, 2019, and the aggregate number of accounts specified in the requests grew 63%.

Both metrics were the largest Twitter has seen since it began transparency reporting in 2012, it noted.

Twitter also saw 27,538 legal demands to remove content specifying 98,595 accounts — again, the largest number to date. 86% of these demands came from Japan, Russia, and Turkey.

“Our work to increase transparency efforts across the company is tireless and constant. We will continue to work on increasing awareness and understanding about how our policies work and our practices around content moderation, data disclosures and other critical areas,” the company blog post about the new center explained. “In addition, we will take every opportunity to highlight the actions of law enforcement, governments, and other organizations that impact Twitter and the people who use our service across the world,” it noted.

More metrics, including those focused on spam, terrorism, child exploitation and extremism, are available on the new Twitter Transparency Center.

Source: Tech Crunch

Max Levchin needs little introduction in the world of tech. As an entrepreneur, he’s been the co-founder of PayPal (now public), Slide (acquired by Google) and Affirm (reportedly about to go public), some of the hottest startups to have come out of Silicon Valley. And as an investor, he’s applied his power of observation and execution also towards helping many others build huge technology businesses.

We sat down with Levchin for a recent session of Extra Crunch Live, where he spoke at length about what he sees as some of the big opportunities in fintech. Here’s an edited version of the conversation. You can watch and listen to the whole discussion — which includes stories about Levchin’s coffee and cycling habits, and how many times he’s seen “The Seven Samurai” (hint: more than once) — here, also embedded below, and you can check out the rest of the pretty cool ECL program here.

How e-commerce failed to evolve since his days at PayPal

Even going as far back as PayPal I think the industry has devolved. I think fintech had the promise of really bringing simplicity, honesty and transparency to the customer. Instead, we ended up putting a really nice user interface on products that are not designed with the user’s best interest in mind. I’m a big fan of throwing shade on credit cards, because I think fundamentally, their business model is remarkably similar to that of payday loans. You are allowed to borrow some money and don’t really know exactly what the terms are. It’s all in the fine print, don’t worry about it and then you just make the minimum payments and you stay in debt. Potentially forever.

Source: Tech Crunch

A good brand is hard to kill. Over the past several years, the smartphone space has seen a resurgence of once-mighty mobile brands making a comeback with various degrees of success. HMD’s Nokia phones are probably the best and most successful example, but even Palm had a brief moment in the sun.

And then there’s the case of BlackBerry. TCL surprised the mobile world by bringing the brand raring back with an Android handset that re-embraced the QWERTY keyboard. That, in and of itself, wasn’t enough, of course. But TCL has the chops to deliver quality hardware, and certainly did so with the KeyOne. I know I was surprised the first time I saw one in person behind the scenes at CES a few years back.

Early this year, TCL announced the end of the partnership, noting, “We… regret to share… that as of August 31, 2020, TCL Communication will no longer be selling BlackBerry-branded mobile devices.” From its phrasing, it seemed like a less than amicable end for the deal. But TCL has already moved on to producing devices under its own brand name after years of subsidiaries and branded deals.

All of which brings us to this week’s announcement that a company you’ve never heard of, called OnwardMobility, is bringing the BlackBerry name to hardware for North America and Europe (other branding deals have existed in other markets). It’s a strange deal for starters, due to the fact that OnwardMobility is hardly a household name. It’s based in Austin, Texas, has fewer than 50 employees and was founded in March of last year, perhaps with such a partnership in mind.

After all, while a branding deal is far from a guaranteed recipe for success, it is, at least, a way of getting that first foot through the door. I’m not really sure I would be writing anything about OnwardMobility for TechCrunch dot com at the moment, were it not for the promise of reviving the BlackBerry name yet again. So that’s something. The company’s staff also notably involves some former TCL folk, as well as people involved with the BlackBerry software side of things. Another name that pops up a lot is Sonim Technologies, another Austin-based company that is a subsidiary of a Shenzhen-based brand of the same name. They largely specialize in rugged devices for first responders.

CEO Peter Franklin has both Microsoft and Zynga on his resume, and produced this fairly low-fi YouTube video to explain the company’s mission:

OnwardMobility says it’s a standalone startup. No word yet on investments or investors, though it will certainly be interesting to find out who’s backing this latest push to make the BlackBerry name relevant again. Notably, the company’s not sharing renders yet, either, but says it’s bringing a 5G device to market in 2021, with a physical keyboard and the focus on security that’s long been a key differentiator for the BlackBerry brand.

BlackBerry (the software company) certainly seems to be on board with its new partner here. CEO John Chen had this to say about the deal:

BlackBerry is thrilled OnwardMobility will deliver a BlackBerry 5G smartphone device with physical keyboard leveraging our high standards of trust and security synonymous with our brand. We are excited that customers will experience the enterprise and government level security and mobile productivity the new BlackBerry 5G smartphone will offer.

More or less what you’d anticipate on that front. For now, the news is basically OnwardMobility’s entry onto the scene and announcement of its BlackBerry licensing deal. I’m honestly not sure how much clout the BlackBerry name holds in 2020 — nor do I necessarily believe there’s a critical mass of consumers clamoring to return to the physical keyboard. So OnwardMobility has a lot to prove in an extremely crowded mobile market. I guess we’ll see what it has to offer next year. Stay tuned.

Source: Tech Crunch