Ideaforge

While much of what made 2020 such an absolute nightmare will still be with us on January 1 (sorry!), we will really, truly be leaving Adobe Flash and FarmVille behind as we enter the new year.

The end of Flash has been a long time coming. The plugin, which was first released in 1996 and once supported a broad swath online content, has become increasingly irrelevant in a smartphone-centric world: iPhones never supported Flash, and it’s been just over 10 years since Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs published an open letter outlining the technology’s shortcomings.

Adobe has been planning for the end, announcing in 2017 that it would phase out Flash by the end of this year. Most web browsers have already stopped supporting Flash, and today is the official end date, with Adobe ending support itself — although there’s still one last “death of Flash” milestone on January 12, when the company will begin to block Flash content from playing.

In related news, Zynga announced recently that the end of Flash would also mean the end of FarmVille, since the game relies on the Flash plugin.

Like Flash, FarmVille feels like a remnant of a bygone internet era (a fact that makes me feel incredibly old, since I wrote plenty of words about both of them at the beginning of my career). Launched in 2009, FarmVille’s popularity paved the way for the ascendance of Zynga and of Facebook gaming, but both Zynga and gaming have largely moved on.

The company’s co-founder and former CEO Mark Pincus commemorated the occasion with a series of tweets outlining the game’s early development (spurred by the acquisition of startup MyMiniLife).

“FarmVille demonstrated that a game could be a living, always-on service that could deliver daily surprise and delight, similar to a favorite TV series,” Pincus wrote. “Games could also connect groups of people and bring them closer together.”

And just in case there are any FarmVille fans reading this story, don’t worry: you can still play FarmVille 2: Tropic Escape, FarmVille 2: Country Escape right now, and FarmVille 3 is still coming to mobile. Today is just the final day for the original game.

Source: Tech Crunch

SoftBank Group is reportedly investing $200 million to bail out Katerra, a startup that had hoped to remake the construction industry with a vertically integrated approach, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Katerra’s shareholders reportedly approved the new investment on Wednesday, with the new lifeline from SoftBank coming on top of roughly $2 billion that the Japanese technology conglomerate had already committed to the venture.

Funds for the bailout, which will save Katerra from bankruptcy, will be coming from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1, the Journal quoted Katerra chief executive Paal Kibsgaard as telling company shareholders in a message.

As part of the funding, the SoftBank-financed financial services firm, Greensill Capital, is cancelling around $435 million in debt in exchange for a 5% stake in the company, according to the Journal’s reporting.

This new bailout actually marks the second time that SoftBank has stepped in to dole out $200 million to Katerra this year alone.

In May, when Kibsgaard, the former head of oil services developer Schlumberger, was brought in to fix the company’s finances, SoftBank poured $200 million into the company so Kibsgaard could right the ship there, according to the Journal’s reporting.

Source: Tech Crunch

Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang doesn’t need a crystal ball to see where artificial intelligence will be used in the future. He just looks at his customer list.

The four-year-old startup, which recently hit a valuation of more than $3.5 billion, got its start supplying autonomous vehicle companies with the labeled data needed to train machine learning models to develop and eventually commercialize robotaxis, self-driving trucks and automated bots used in warehouses and on-demand delivery.

In 2020, that changed as e-commerce, enterprise automation, government, insurance, real estate and robotics companies turned to Scale’s visual data labeling platform to develop and apply artificial intelligence to their respective businesses. Now, the company is preparing for the customer list to grow and become more varied.

How 2020 shaped up for AI

Scale AI’s customer list has included an array of autonomous vehicle companies including Alphabet, Voyage, nuTonomy, Embark, Nuro and Zoox. While it began to diversify with additions like Airbnb, DoorDash and Pinterest, there were still sectors that had yet to jump on board. That changed in 2020, Wang said.

Scale began to see incredible use cases of AI within the government as well as enterprise automation, according to Wang. Scale AI began working more closely with government agencies this year and added enterprise automation customers like States Title, a residential real estate company.

Wang also saw an increase in uses around conversational AI, in both consumer and enterprise applications as well as growth in e-commerce as companies sought out ways to use AI to provide personalized recommendations for its customers that were on par with Amazon.

Robotics continued to expand as well in 2020, although it spread to use cases beyond robotaxis, autonomous delivery and self-driving trucks, Wang said.

“A lot of the innovations that have happened within the self-driving industry, we’re starting to see trickle out throughout a lot of other robotics problems,” Wang said. “And so it’s been super exciting to see the breadth of AI continue to broaden and serve our ability to support all these use cases.”

The wider adoption of AI across industries has been a bit of a slow burn over the past several years as company founders and executives begin to understand what the technology could do for their businesses, Wang said, adding that advancements in natural language processing of text, improved offerings from cloud companies like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud and greater access to datasets helped sustain this trend.

“We’re finally getting to the point where we can help with computational AI, which has been this thing that’s been pitched for forever,” he said.

That slow burn heated up with the COVID-19 pandemic, said Wang, noting that interest has been particularly strong within government and enterprise automation as these entities looked for ways to operate more efficiently.

“There was this big reckoning,” Wang said of 2020 and the effect that COVID-19 had on traditional business enterprises.

If the future is mostly remote with consumers buying online instead of in-person, companies started to ask, “How do we start building for that?,” according to Wang.

The push for operational efficiency coupled with the capabilities of the technology is only going to accelerate the use of AI for automating processes like mortgage applications or customer loans at banks, Wang said, who noted that outside of the tech world there are industries that still rely on a lot of paper and manual processes.

Source: Tech Crunch

When Salesforce acquired Quip in 2016 for $750 million, it gained CEO and co-founder Bret Taylor as part of the deal. Taylor has since risen quickly through the ranks of the software giant to become president and COO, second in command behind CEO Marc Benioff. Taylor’s experience shows that startup founders can sometimes play a key role in the companies that acquire them.

Benioff, 56, has been running Salesforce since its founding more than 20 years ago. While he hasn’t given any public hints that he intends to leave anytime soon, if he wanted to step back from the day-to-day running of the company or even job share the role, he has a deep bench of executive talent including many experienced CEOs, who like Taylor came to the company via acquisition.

He and his wife Lynne have been active in charitable giving and in 2016 signed The Giving Pledge, an initiative from the The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to give a majority of their wealth to philanthropy. One could see him wanting to put more time into pursuing these charitable endeavors just as Gates did 20 years ago. As a means of comparison, Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 and stayed for 25 years until he left in 2000 to run his charitable foundation full time.

Even if this remains purely speculative for the moment, there is a group of people behind him with deep industry experience, who could be well-suited to take over should the time ever come.

Resurrecting the co-CEO role

One way to step back from the enormous responsibility of running Salesforce would be by sharing the role. In fact, for more than a year starting in 2018, Benioff actually shared the top job with Keith Block until his departure last year. When they worked together, the arrangement seemed to work out just fine with Block dealing with many larger customers and helping the software giant reach its $20 billion revenue goal.

Before Block became co-CEO, he had a myriad other high-level titles including co-chairman, president and COO — two of which, by the way, Taylor has today. That was a lot of responsibility for one person inside a company the size of Salesforce, but promoting him to co-CEO from COO gave the company a way to reward his hard work and help keep him from jumping ship (he eventually did anyway).

As Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research points out, the co-CEO concept has worked out well at major enterprise companies that have tried it in the past, and it helped with continuity. “Salesforce, SAP and Oracle all didn’t miss a beat really with the co-CEO departures,” he said.

If Benioff wanted to go back to the shared responsibility model and take some work off his plate, making Taylor (or someone else) co-CEO would be one way to achieve that. Certainly, Brent Leary, lead analyst at CRM Essentials sees Taylor gaining increasing responsibility as time goes along, giving credence to the idea.

“Ever since Quip was acquired Taylor seemed to be on the fast track, becoming president and chief product officer less than a year-and-a-half after the acquisition, and then two years later being promoted to chief operating officer,” Leary said.

Who else could be in line?

While Taylor isn’t the only person who could step into Benioff’s shoes, he looks like he has the best shot at the moment, especially in light of the $27.7 billion Slack deal he helped deliver earlier this month.

“Taylor being publicly praised by Benioff for playing a significant role in the Slack acquisition, Salesforce’s largest acquisition to date, shows how much he has solidified his place at the highest levels of influence and decision-making in the organization,” Leary pointed out.

But Mueller posits that his rapid promotions could also show something might be lacking with internal options, especially around product. “Taylor is a great, smart guy, but his rise shows more the product organization bench depth challenges that Salesforce has,” he said.

Source: Tech Crunch

What could go wrong?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. As you can see, this is our yearly predictions episode. Our behind-the-scenes guru Chris Gates joins us on the mic, we take shots at our prior prognostications, and nosh on what we feel is positively persaged.

As always, this episode is in good fun. If you don’t agree with we think is up ahead, that’s fine. You’re probably right. But we’re nothing if not up for a challenge, so we kept the tradition alive this year.

This is the last Equity episode of 2020. While we can’t tell you yet what our plans are for 2021, we can say — nay, project — that there are a lot of fun and big things coming for Equity. We’re planning our busiest year ever, by far.

And with that, we’re out of here. Thanks for several million downloads this year, our biggest annum to date.

Source: Tech Crunch

Samsung Electronics vice chairman Jay Y. Lee faces a nine-year prison term in the bribery case that contributed to the downfall of former president Park Guen-hye. Prosecutors argued that the length of the sentence is warranted because of Samsung’s power as the largest chaebol, or family-owned conglomerate, in South Korea.

“Samsung is a group with such overwhelming power that it is said Korean companies are divided into Samsung and non-Samsung,” they said during a final hearing on Wednesday, reports the Korea Herald. The final ruling is scheduled for January 18.

The bribery case is separate from another trial Lee is involved in, over alleged accounting fraud and stock-price manipulation. Hearings in that case began in October.

The bribery case dates back to 2017, when Lee was convicted of bribing Park and her close associate Choi Soon-sil and sentenced to five years in prison. Prosecutors allege the bribes were meant to secure government backing for Lee’s attempt to inherit control of Samsung from his father Lee Kun-hee, then its chairman. The illegal payments were a major part of the corruption scandal that led to Park’s impeachment, arrest and 25-year prison sentence.

Lee was freed in 2018 after the sentence was reduced and suspended on appeal, and returned to work as Samsung’s de facto head, a position he took after his father had a heart attack in 2014.

In August 2019, however, the Supreme Court overturned the appeals court, ruling that it was too lenient, and ordered that the case be retried in Seoul High Court.

The elder Lee, who was reportedly South Korea’s wealthiest citizen, died in October. He was worth an estimated $20.7 billion and under the country’s tax system, he and his heirs could be liable for estate taxes of about $10 billion, reported Fortune.

TechCrunch has contacted Samsung for comment.

Source: Tech Crunch

SpaceX will try a significantly different approach to landing its future reusable rocket boosters, according to CEO and founder Elon Musk. It will attempt to ‘catch’ the heavy booster, which is currently in development, using the launch tower arm used to stabilize the vehicle during its pre-takeoff preparations. Current Falcon 9 boosters return to Earth and land propulsively on their own built-in legs – but the goal with Super Heavy is for the larger rocket not to have legs at all, says Musk.

The Super Heavy launch process will still involve use of its engines to control the velocity of its descent, but it will involve using the grid fins that are included on its main body to help control its orientation during flight to ‘catch’ the booster – essentially hooking it using the launch tower arm before it touches the ground at all. The main benefits of this method, which will obviously involve a lot of precision maneuvering, is that it means SpaceX can save both cost and weight by omitting landing legs from the Super Heavy design altogether.

Another potential benefit raised by Musk is that it could allow SpaceX to essentially recycle the Super Heavy booster immediately back on the launch mount it returns to – possibly enabling it to be ready to fly again with a new payload and upper stage (consisting of Starship, the other spacecraft SpaceX is currently developing and testing) in “under an hour.”

The goal for Starship and Super Heavy is to create a launch vehicle that’s even more reusable than SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 (and Falcon Heavy) system. Eventually, the goal for Musk is to have Starship making regular and frequent flights – for point-to-point flight on Earth, for orbital missions closer to home, and for long-distance runs to the Moon and Mars. The pace at which he envisions these happening in order to make it possible to colonize Mars with a continuous human population requires the kind of rapid recycling and reflying of Super Heavy he described today with this proposed new landing method.

Starship prototypes are currently being constructed and tested in Boca Chica, Texas, where SpaceX has been flying the pre-production spaceship during the past year. The company is also working on elements of the Super Heavy booster, and Musk said recently that it intends to begin actively flight-testing that component of the launch system in a few months’ time.

Source: Tech Crunch

The Qatar Investment Authority is investing $125 million into energy storage systems integrator and power management tech developer, Fluence, in a deal that will value the company at over $1 billion.

The joint venture between the American independent power producer, AES Corp. and the German industrial conglomerate Siemens, was already worth $900 million prior to the transaction, according to Marek Wolek, the vice president of strategy and partnerships at Fluence.

With the new cash, Fluence will look to develop and acquire software and services that can expand the company’s offerings to its core clients among utilities and independent power project developers, Wolek said.

And it might not be too long before the company seeks additional liquidity from the public markets, Wolek said. He noted that the QIA is already backing the battery company QuantumScape, which was acquired by a special purpose acquisition company in late November and whose shares have been on a meteoric rise ever since.

After the QIA investment, AES and Siemens will remain majority shareholders. Each will hold a 44 percent stake in the company after the investment.

“We believe the global problem of climate change can only be tackled by  leveraging the combined capabilities of technologists and investors from around  the world,” said Manuel Perez Dubuc, Fluence’s Chief Executive Officer, in a statement. “We see  energy storage as the linchpin of a decarbonized grid and adding QIA to our  international shareholder base will allow Fluence to innovate even faster and  address the enormous global market for large-scale battery-based energy  storage.” 

One of six founding members of the One Planet Sovereign Wealth Fund Initiative, QIA is a multi-billion dollar investment vehicle that has significant stores of capital to continue its support of climate tech companies like Fluence.

Fluence has already deployed roughly 5 gigawatts of energy storage and management systems to a wide array of customers, according to Wolek.

And while Wolek said Fluence sees itself and its energy storage business as a key component of the global decarbonization which needs to occur to combat climate change, electric storage isn’t the only technology that’s needed.

It’s difficult looking at the energy market and looking at one technology and saying that one technology is going to solve everything,” said Wolek. 

Rather, the company’s role is to ensure that the battery technology Fluence is deploying can be integrated with the other technologies required to provide industry and society with the power it needs, he said. “We want to absolutely be the experts on battery-based storage,” Wolek said. “At the same time we do invest quite a bit on the digital side to expand our dispatch capabilities beyond storage.”

That could mean teaming up with other energy suppliers (like developers of hydrogen fuel proejcts) in the future, he said.

“We want to master the energy piece on the battery side,” Wolek said of the company’s ultimate goal.

That goal puts the company on something of a collision course with the energy business being built by Elon Musk’s Tesla.

The billion-dollar valuation that Fluence currently enjoys and the $36.6 billion market cap that QuantumScape has goes some way toward explaining why Tesla can be considered to be a company worth over $650 billion.

 

Source: Tech Crunch

How do you make a virtual event accessible for people who are blind or visually impaired?

When I started work on Sight Tech Global back in June this year, I was confident that we would find the answer to that question pretty quickly. With so many virtual event platforms and online ticketing options available to virtual event organizers, we were sure at least one would meet a reasonable standard of accessibility for people who use screen readers or other devices to navigate the Web.

Sadly, I was wrong about that. As I did my due diligence and spoke to CEOs at a variety of platforms, I heard a lot of “we’re studying WCAG [Web Content Accessibility Guidelines] requirements” or “our developers are going to re-write our front-end code when we have time.” In other words, these operations, like many others on the Web, had not taken the trouble to code their sites for accessibility at the start, which is the least costly and fairest approach, not to mention the one compliant with the ADA.

This realization was a major red flag. We had announced our event dates – Dec 2-3, 2020 – and there was no turning back. Dmitry Paperny, our designer, and I did not have much time to figure out a solution. No less important than the dates was the imperative that the event’s virtual experience work well for blind attendees, given that our event was really centered on that community.

We decided to take Occam’s razor to the conventions surrounding virtual event experiences and answer a key question: What was essential? Virtual event platforms tend to be feature heavy, which compounds accessibility problems. We ranked what really mattered, and the list came down to three things:

• live-stream video for the “main stage” events
• a highly navigable, interactive agenda
• interactive video for the breakout sessions.

We also debated adding a social or networking element as well, and decided that was optional unless there was an easy, compelling solution.

The next question was what third-party tools could we use? The very good news was that YouTube and Zoom get great marks for accessibility. People who are blind are familiar with both and many know the keyboard commands to navigate the players. We discovered this largely by word of mouth at first and then discovered ample supporting documentation at YouTube and Zoom. So we chose YouTube for our main stage programming and Zoom for our breakouts. It’s helpful, of course, that it’s very easy to incorporate both YouTube and Zoom in a website, which became our plan.

Where to host the overall experience, was the next question. We wanted to be able to direct attendees to a single URL in order to join the event. Luckily, we had already built an accessible website to market the event. Dmitry had learned a lot in the course of designing and coding that site, including the importance of thinking about both blind and low-vision users. So we decided to add the event experience to our site itself – instead of using a third-party event platform – by adding two elements to the site navigation – Event (no longer live on the site) and Agenda.

The first amounted to a “page” (in WordPress parlance) that contained the YouTube live player embed, and beneath that text descriptions of the current session and the upcoming session, along with prominent links to the full Agenda. Some folks might ask, why place the agenda on a separate page? Doesn’t that make it more complicated? Good question, and the answer was one of many revelations that came from our partner Fable, which specializes in usability testing for people with disabilities. The answer, as we found time and again, was to imagine navigating with a screen reader, not your eyes. If the agenda were beneath the YouTube Player, it would create a cacophonous experience – imagine trying to listen to the programming and at the same time “read” (as in “listen to”) the agenda below. A separate page for the agenda was the right idea.

The Agenda page was our biggest challenge because it contained a lot of information, required filters and also, during the show, had different “states” – as in which agenda items were “playing now” versus upcoming versus already concluded. Dmitry learned a lot about the best approach to drop downs for filters and other details to make the agenda page navigable, and we reviewed it several times with Fable’s experts. We decided nonetheless to take the fairly unprecedented step of inviting our registered, blind event attendees to join us for a “practice event” a few days before the show in order to get more feedback. Nearly 200 people showed up for two sessions. We also invited blind screen reader experts, including Fable’s Sam Proulx and Facebook’s Matt King, to join us to answer questions and sort out the feedback.

It’s worth noting that there are three major screen readers: JAWS, which is used mostly by Windows’ users; VoiceOver, which is on all Apple products; and NVDA, which is open source and works on PCs running Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and later. They don’t all work in the same way, and the people who use them range from experts who know hundreds of keyboard commands to occasional users who have more basic skills. For that reason, it’s really important to have expert interlocutors who can help separate good suggestions from simple frustrations.

The format for our open house (session one and session two) was a Zoom meeting, where we provided a briefing about the event and how the experience worked. Then we provided links to a working Event page (with a YouTube player active) and the Agenda page and asked people to give it a try and return to the Zoom session with feedback. Like so much else in this effort, the result was humbling. We had the basics down well, but we had missed some nuances, such as the best way to order information in an agenda item for someone who can only “hear” it versus “see” it. Fortunately, we had time to tune the agenda page a bit more before the show.

The practice session also reinforced that we had made a good move to offer live customer support during the show as a buffer for attendees who were less sophisticated in the use of screen readers. We partnered with Be My Eyes, a mobile app that connects blind users to sighted helpers who use the blind person’s phone camera to help troubleshoot issues. It’s like having a friend look over your shoulder. We recruited 10 volunteers and trained them to be ready to answer questions about the event, and Be My Eyes put them at the top of the list for any calls related to Sight Tech Global, which was listed under the Be My Eyes “event’ section.  Our event host, the incomparable Will Butler, who happens to be a vice-president at Be My Eyes, regularly reminded attendees to use Be My Eyes if they needed help with the virtual experience.

A month out from the event, we were feeling confident enough that we decided to add a social interaction feature to the show. Word on the street was that Slido’s basic Q&A features worked well with screen readers, and in fact Fable used the service for its projects. So we added Slido to the program. We did not embed a Slido widget beneath the YouTube player, which might have been a good solution for sighted participants, but instead added a link to each agenda session to a standalone Slido page, where attendees could add comments and ask questions without getting tangled in the agenda or the livestream.  The solution ended up working well, and we had more than 750 comments and questions on Slido during the show.

When Dec. 2 finally arrived, we were ready. But the best-laid plans often go awry, we were only minutes into the event when suddenly our live, closed-captioning broke. We decided to halt the show until we could bring that back up live, for the benefit of deaf and hard-of-hearing attendees. After much scrambling, captioning came back. (See more on captioning below).

Otherwise, the production worked well from a programming standpoint as well as accessibility. How did we do? Of the 2400+ registered attendees at the event, 45% said they planned to use screen readers. When we did a survey of those attendees immediately after the show, 95 replied and they gave the experience a 4.6/5 score. As far as the programming, our attendees (this time asked everyone – 157 replies) gave us a score of 4.7/5. Needless to say, we were delighted by those outcomes.

One other note concerned registration. At the outset, we also “heard” that one of the event registration platforms was “as good as it gets” for accessibility. We took that at face value, which was a mistake. We should have tested because comments for people trying to register as well as a low turnout of registration from blind people revealed after a few weeks that the registration site may have been better than the rest but was still really disappointing. It was painful, for example, to learn from one of our speakers that alt tags were missing from images (and there was no way to add them) and that the screen reader users had to tab through mountains of information in order to get to actionable links, such as “register.”

As we did with our approach to the website, we decided that the best course was to simplify. We added a Google Form as an alternative registration option. These are highly accessible. We instantly saw our registrations increase strongly, particularly among blind people. We were chagrined to realize that our first choice for registration had been excluding the very people our event intended to include.

We were able to use the Google Forms option because the event was free. Had we been trying to collect payment of registration fees, Google Form would not have been an option. Why did we make the event free to all attendees? There are several reasons. First, given our ambitions to make the event global and easily available to anyone interested in blindness, it was difficult to arrive at a universally acceptable price point. Second, adding payment as well as a “log-in” feature to access the event itself would create another accessibility headache. With our approach, anyone with the link to the Agenda or Event page could attend without any log-in demand or registration. We knew this would create some leakage in terms of knowing who attended the event – quite a lot in fact because we had 30% more attendees than registrants – but given the nature of the event we thought that losing out on names and emails was an acceptable price to pay considering the accessibility benefit.

If there is an overarching lesson from this exercise, it’s simply this: Event organizers have to roll up their sleeves and really get to the bottom of whether the experience is accessible or not. It’s not enough to trust platform or technology vendors, unless they have standout reputations in the community, as YouTube and Zoom do. It’s as important to ensure that the site or platform is coded appropriately (to WCAG standards, and using a tool like Google’s LightHouse) as it is to do real-world testing to ensure that the actual, observable experience of blind and low-vision users is a good one. At the end of the day, that’s what counts the most.

A final footnote. Although our event focused on accessibility issues for people who are blind or have low vision, we were committed from the start to include captions for people who would benefit. We opted for the best quality outcome, which is still human (versus AI) captioners, and we worked with VITAC to provide captions for the live Zoom and YouTube sessions and 3Play Media for the on-demand versions and the transcripts, which are now part of the permanent record. We also heard requests for “plain text” (no mark-up) versions of the transcripts in an easily downloadable version for people who use Braille-readers. We supplied those, as well. You can see how all those resources came together on pages  like this one, which contain all the information on a given session and are linked from the relevant section of the agenda.

 

Source: Tech Crunch