Month: November 2020

Cannabis legalization was on five state ballots yesterday and ran the table. Voters in Oregon, where cannabis is already legal, also approved a measure addressing street drugs and another that sought to legalize psychedelic mushrooms’ therapeutic use.

Of the five states that voted on cannabis, four states approved legal recreational marijuana for adults age 21 and older. Mississippi approved medical use, while South Dakota approved both recreational and medical use at one time.

This is a critical time for cannabis startups as they look to new markets. Many companies in this space look at each new state as a gold rush as they seek to win over consumers and businesses alike. But it’s going to take time. Each state has different rules and regulations that cannabis companies need to explore and navigate.

Ten years ago, cannabis was illegal across the United States. That changed in 2012 when voters in Colorado and Washington approved recreational marijuana. While it’s still illegal at a national level, with these new states, one in three Americans will soon be able to buy weed legally.

New Jersey

• New Jersey voters approved legalized recreational cannabis, with the effective date of January 1, 2021. The New Jersey legislature is now tasked with setting up rules and regulations for the consumer marketplace.
• New Jersey becomes the first state in the mid-Atlantic region to pass such a measure.

Montana

• Voters in Montana approved a measure and constitutional amendment to legalize weed and set the adult-use age to 21.
• Montana residents can possess, use and grow marijuana on January 1, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. Happy New Year!
• Recreational sales are to start in January 2022.

South Dakota

• In a nationwide first, voters in South Dakota voted to legalize medical and recreational cannabis at one time. This came from a constitutional amendment and a ballot initiative.
• Cannabis remains illegal until July 1, 2021, when South Dakota residents can start to possess, consume and grow up to three plants.
• Medical use will start sales on July 1, 2021.
• The state has until April 1, 2022 to develop rules and regulations for selling recreational cannabis.

Arizona

• After failing to pass a legalization bill in 2016, Arizona voters approved a proposition that legalizes recreational cannabis.
• It’s unclear when it will become legal to possess cannabis.
• Retail sales could start April 5, 2021 or sooner.

Mississippi

• Voters in Mississippi approved medical marijuana through a ballot initiative.
• The state has until July 1, 2021 to establish rules and regulations.

Oregon

• Oregon became the first state to legalize the regulated medical use of psilocybin, mostly commonly found in so-called magic mushrooms.
• Medical use will come after a two-year development period.
• Voters in Oregon also passed a measure that decriminalizes small amounts of street drugs, making offenses similar to traffic violations.

Source: Tech Crunch

News today that Ant Group’s IPO is suddenly on hold in both Shanghai and Hong Kong caused a sell-off of Alibaba shares. This afternoon, equity in sister-company Alibaba is off around 8% in the wake of the delayed offering and news that Ant had run into regulatory issues with the Chinese government.

Ant was spun out of Alibaba, which owns a one-third stake in the financial technology powerhouse.

Ant’s IPO was on track to be among the largest in history, perhaps raising as much as $34.5 billion in its dual-listing share sale. The company was going to have little trouble filling that book, with retail demand for its shares at IPO reaching nearly $3 trillion in mainland China alone (it’s not uncommon for popular share issues to have massive oversubscription).

That the IPO was called off is financial news on a scale that is hard to comprehend. Ant would have sported a possible market valuation of more than $300 billion at its IPO price. Such a valuation would rank it amongst the most valuable companies in the world.

Alibaba is worth around $772 billion today after the news, off from a value of around $841 billion yesterday. Ant’s delay has cost its former parent company around $60 billion in market capitalization in a single day.

Ant has its roots in Alipay, an online payment service founded in 2004. The company’s Alibaba spin-out came seven years later in 2011, with its former parent company buying 33% of its value in 2018 ahead of its planned IPO. At the time, Ant was valued around $60 billion.

The company’s IPO prospectus details the company’s work in credit, investing, insurance and other fintech-related areas. Ant’s reach has become staggering over time, with Alipay counting over 1 billion annual active users and over 80 million active merchants on the platform.

Ant competes with Tencent’s WePay, amongst other products and services.

As TechCrunch reported this morning, Ant has a history of regulatory issues with the Chinese Communist Party. Precisely what went wrong this time so close to its debut is still not perfectly clear, but news that Alibaba founder and Ant chairman Jack Ma had dinged China’s financial regulation in recent weeks could be part of the issue.

So long as the IPO remains on hold, and a cloud sits atop Mt. Ant, Alibaba shares could remain depressed.

Source: Tech Crunch

When Quibi announced it was shutting its doors recently after raising $1.75 billion, it begged an obvious question: If the original idea didn’t work, why not adjust its model or do something completely different while it still had capital? It wouldn’t have been the first company to decide to shift gears. Perhaps because of the unusually large amount of money it burned through in just six months of public operation, pivoting wasn’t an option for Quibi, but it has been for countless other successful companies over the years. Sometimes an original idea simply doesn’t pan out, a market gets too crowded or a company’s founders stumble onto something they have built that is actually a better business than the original idea.

There are many such examples:

• Perhaps the most famous is Slack, which originally was a multiplayer online game before pivoting to be a communications company.
• Box launched in 2005 as a consumer storage product before deciding to take on content management in the enterprise in 2008.
• YouTube started life as a video dating service and when they didn’t get much traction they began letting people upload whatever videos they liked. Google saw enough potential to buy the company for $1.6 billion just a year after launching.

These examples — and many more — show that when your first approach doesn’t work, pivoting may be the the only logical course, but it takes courage from founders and patience from investors.

We spoke to several founders and VCs who have been through this to find out how pivots happen, and how all the parties involved adjust to shifting priorities.

Sometimes it’s a long and twisting road

A big part of founding a company is having vision. You need to believe in your idea of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right way to go. Sometimes it pays to move on. The king of pivots might be the aptly named Pivotal, which changed direction several times and even swapped owners before it went public and got acquired, all in the span of about 20 years. Ed Sim, co-founder at boldstart ventures was part of Dawntreader Ventures in the late 90s when his firm invested in an early version of the company called Metapa. Sim had a front row seat to every twist and turn in the company’s long and intricate history.

“Greenplum, which was sold to EMC and eventually became Pivotal Software, was initially called Metapa. Metapa was in the Akamai space and as the markets cratered in 2001 for funding infrastructure projects, Scott Yara (the company’s founder) and team bought a small company called Didera and turned it into Greenplum, the first petabyte scale data warehouse built on top of open-source technology,” Sim told TechCrunch. It didn’t end there though as Sim continued, “Once again, years later, Scott recruited his replacement CEO, Bill Cook, and they paired together to sell Greenplum to EMC and eventually spin back out and take the company public as Pivotal Software.”

It’s worth noting that Pivotal eventually ran into financial problems when its stock tanked last year, but fellow Dell/EMC family member VMware saved the day by acquiring it for $2.7 billion.

Sometimes you stumble onto an idea

Segment, the customer-data platform company that was recently sold to Twilio for $3.2 billion was originally a college lecture sentiment platform, according to CEO and co-founder Peter Reinhardt. “Our first idea was a classroom lecture tool, ClassMetric, which gave students a button they could press in class to let professors know, in real-time, that they were confused. I like to think of it like a pulse monitor for class confusion,” Reinhardt told TechCrunch

That idea quickly failed when professors testing it found that inviting students to open their laptops to test their sentiment just led them to start playing Solitaire or checking Facebook. Professors weren’t thrilled and they moved on. The founders, who were MIT students at the time, decided they wanted to build an analytics tool instead, but it turned out that competition from Google Analytics and Mixpanel at the time proved too steep.

“We spent a year on development, but it was a crowded market and we struggled to carve out our own niche. We were rapidly running out of capital and the pressure was on to find something new,” he said. They were actually considering simply packing it in, but they had developed a tiny open-source tool called analytics.js, which they used to get data into their failed analytics product. At that point, desperate for an idea, one of the founders suggested posting the open-source tool on Hacker News.

Source: Tech Crunch

NBC News has updated its iOS app with a new feature that brings election news, data and results directly to your iPhone or iPad home screen. With the app’s new “Decision 2020” iOS 14 widget, you can customize a series of widgets with information related to early voting stats, polls, as well as the current election results, among other things.

Before today, the NBC News app had offered a variety of widgets including small-, medium- and large-sized widgets bringing the latest headlines, a set of widgets showing COVID-19 trends, and even a photo journalism gallery, with its “Week in Pictures” widget set.

But the Decision 2020 widget itself was just made available today.

The added widget is only available as a medium-sized banner, but arrives with a range of customization options. That means you could place several versions of the widget on your home screen, each showing a different set of results.

By default, the widget will auto-rotate through its various modules. But you can also opt to show only one module per widget if you choose by long-pressing on the widget then choosing “Edit Widget” from the menu that appears.

At launch, the available options include Plan Your Vote, National Polling Average, Latest Polls, Early Voting, Election News and Election Results. The latter, of course, is the option most people will be interested in today.

You can also add your location to the widget by selecting your state from a list from the widget configuration screen. This will allow you to keep an eye on your local results, if you choose. Otherwise, you can leave it defaulted to national results.

To access the new widget, install the NBC News app then long-press on your home screen, choose “Edit Home Screen,” and tap the plus (+) button at the top-left and scroll to NBC News in the list.

The NBC News app can also send out push notifications, including geo-targeted alerts for state races for users on any mobile phone or device.

 

Source: Tech Crunch

French cloud hosting company Scaleway originally started with very cheap cloud instances. Over the years, the company has expanded its offering and added more premium services, such as managed Kubernetes, object storage, block storage, managed databases, load balancers and GPU instances. But Scaleway is now launching another cheap cloud instance that costs €0.0025 per hour — around $0.0039 per hour.

Obviously, you’re not getting incredible performance for that price. But it’s a good way to try out new things and build an application just for you. If you’re the only user, those specifications might be enough.

Called Stardust, the virtual compute instance comes with 1 vCPU, 1GB of RAM, an IP address (IPv4), 10GB of local storage and up to 100Mbps of bandwidth. There’s no restriction on bandwidth usage.

Billed by the hour, you end up paying €1.80 per month ($2.10). The company isn’t going to generate a ton of revenue from such a cheap product. That’s why supply is limited. Scaleway will release a limited batch of cloud instances every month — first come, first served.

There are also some limits as you can’t spin up a ton of Stardust and build your own infrastructure. Each account can have up to one Stardust instance in Paris and another one in Amsterdam.

Scaleway lists some potential use cases for its new product, such as an internal wiki, a code repository backup, an always-on instance to set up daemons, triggers and workers, a VPN server, etc. The instance supports Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS and Fedora.

Source: Tech Crunch

I know it will come as a shock to you as a reader of the news, but there is an election this week. Well, tomorrow actually.

It’s the rare election where the logistics of the election itself seem to be increasingly dominating the discussion. Not since the Florida recount of 2000 have pollsters, analysts and party lawyers been so fixated on the mechanics of ballots. What ballots will be counted? Will the Post Office deliver mail in time? How many drop-off boxes are authorized by county? Will the voting machines leave an auditable paper trail?

Voting in America is a complex affair — while presidential elections are national in scope, the actual logistics of ballots and votes are decided locally: not just state by state, but often also county by county. That can create huge variation in the systems at play — but it also means that a small county in rural Mississippi can be a test case for the rest of the nation in how to get voting done right.

That’s at least what VotingWorks is banking on.

VotingWorks is a non-partisan, nonprofit startup that graduated from YC in its winter batch last year with the twin goals of improving the technology that underpins elections through more affordable and secure voting systems as well as using modern statistical science to improve the quality and efficiency of voter audits. The nonprofit scoured the country looking for a testbed, and eventually found Choctaw County in Mississippi, a rural jurisdiction just shy of 10,000 residents who were willing to try VotingWorks’ system out in their election.

Matt Pasternack, who along with Ben Adida co-founded the organization, said that the existing voting machines there were “ancient” and didn’t have a paper audit trail. “We found one county that was so eager to get rid of these ancient machines that they said, ‘Yes, we want to, we want to use this new thing you guys are building,’” Pasternack said.

What VotingWorks built is quite competitive. First, the company used existing hardware like iPads rather than designing custom-built hardware that can be extraordinarily costly given that the machines are rarely used in the U.S., which has quadrennial elections for many offices. Second, the organization’s software is posted as open source on GitHub. That made the machines more open and verifiable than competitors, and also available at a lower price point.

Pasternack and Adida first met while working together at Clever, the API middleware platform that today could be dubbed the “Plaid of education,” designed to help app developers connect to the data stored in hundreds of student information systems. Pasternack noted that he was employee number one, and the two talked about politics and elections over the years and eventually saw an opportunity to enter the market with the 2018 midterms.

The team went through YC in early 2019. With Choctaw County’s push to replace their machines, VotingWorks managed to get its machines in their hands by August for the upcoming November 2019 election, when statewide offices including the governor and attorney general were up for election. The machines were used in 13 precincts.

Adida said that the company moved very fast, but the in-field experience was crucial for improving their machines. He noted that one thing the crew learned is that on election day, poll workers have to setup each machine in the morning before the first rush of voters. The speed of setup is crucial for getting poll places ready, and so VotingWorks optimized how many steps were involved in setting up each ballot machine. “With our machines, you put it on a table, you pop open the case, and you run the checklist. It takes about two-to-three minutes, compared to 30 [minutes] … and so the poll workers were raving about it,” he said.

Pasternack also added that in a rural county like Choctaw, power constraints added their own complexity. Precincts could be remarkably underpowered, and too many voting machines on one electrical circuit could blow out the entire precinct — preventing anyone from voting.

Since then, the organization’s technology has expanded to about 10% of Mississippi counties, partly driven by the need this year for color printing technology. The state is voting on changing its state flag to remove the imprint of the Confederate Flag, and voters have to see the new flags in color on the ballot. Pasternack said that their on-demand printing technology is both efficient and much more affordable per ballot.

Outside of the machines itself, the organization is building up its audit software to make audits more statistically accurate and cheaper to conduct, and also developing systems for processing absentee ballots better. Each of these technologies work independently of one another — Adida stressed that “An important trait of a modern voting system is that it’s modular. You can use our auditing system with any standard tabulator. You absolutely don’t need to be using VotingWorks.” Its tech is now used in several additional states in addition to Mississippi, including crucial swing states Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The non-profit has a critical day tomorrow, but then the future beckons. With so much focus on election logistics this year, the hope is that more counties and states will begin to think through better, more robust systems to operate their elections. “We want a world where the foundation of democracy is publicly owned, so having open source software shepherded by a nonprofit organization — it feels like a better democracy to me,” Adida said.

Source: Tech Crunch