Ideaforge

Amazon just announced that it’s acquiring Wondery, the network behind podcasts including “Dirty John” and “Dr. Death.”

Wondery will become part of Amazon Music, which added support for podcasts (including its own original shows) in September. At the same time, the announcement claims that “nothing will change for listeners” and that the network’s podcasts will continue to be available from “a variety of providers.”

Media companies and streaming audio platforms are all making big bets on podcasting, with Spotify making a series of acquisitions including podcast network Gimlet, SiriusXM acquiring Stitcher and The New York Times acquiring Serial Productions. Amazon is coming relatively late to this market, but it will now have the support of a popular podcast maker as it works to catch up.

“With Amazon Music, Wondery will be able to provide even more high-quality, innovative content and continue their mission of bringing a world of entertainment and knowledge to their audiences, wherever they listen,” Amazon wrote.

Financial terms were not disclosed. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that acquisition talks were in the works, and that those talks valued Wondery at around $300 million.

The startup was founded in 2016 by former Fox executive Hernan Lopez (who’s currently fighting federal corruption charges tied to his time at Fox). Numbers from Podtrac rank it as the fourth largest podcast publisher in November, with an audience in the U.S. of more than 9 million unique listeners.

Wondery has raised a total of $15 million in funding from Advancit Capital, BDMI, Greycroft, Lerer Hippeau and others, according to Crunchbase.

Source: Tech Crunch

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

I’m working in the Bay Area on an H-1B visa and my employer won’t sponsor my green card.

I really want permanent residence, but I never won a Nobel prize; I’m single; and I don’t have a million dollars yet. However, I think I might qualify for an EB-2 NIW green card.

What can you share?

— National in Napa

Dear National:

Wonderful that you’re taking matters into your own hands! This is a complicated process, so the most important advice I can give you is to retain an experienced business immigration attorney to represent you and prepare and file your green card case.

For additional do’s and don’ts in U.S. immigration, please check out the recent podcast that my law firm partner, Anita Koumriqian, and I posted on the commandments of immigration (and especially what to not do when it comes to visas and green cards).

This particular episode focuses on family-based green cards, but these recommendations are timeless and apply to individuals who are self-petitioning for employment-based green cards, such as the EB-2 NIW (National Interest Waiver) for exceptional ability and the EB-1A for extraordinary ability. Our top recommendation in that podcast episode is to avoid DIY immigration, so definitely retain legal counsel!

Filing for an EB-2 NIW or any green card requires more than just filling out the appropriate forms. The process needs to be understood, as the law and legal requirements, and the analysis of whether and how you can best qualify is complicated.

With any immigration matter, one needs to have the resources to fully understand the process, the steps for applying, and the timing and deadlines. We want to always make sure that you always maintain legal status (never falling out of status) so that you can remain in the U.S. (and don’t have to leave).

Source: Tech Crunch

After decades of global expansion and consolidation in the tech sector, antitrust is now a headline issue for the industry across the world.

What has been a slow and sputtering series of disparate actions over the past decade has coalesced in just the past few weeks into a rapid and comprehensive series of actions against the industry, with the United States being a notable laggard worldwide.

Nowhere are these actions more prominent than in China, where the competition authorities have — after many years of a reasonably laissez-faire policy to its internet giants — suddenly decided to take sweeping action against its largest tech companies.

That movement started after Chinese regulators thwarted Ant’s record-shattering IPO in early November. Ant is one of China’s most important tech companies, a fintech company that was looking at a valuation north of $300 billion and that has 1.3 billion active users globally centered on China and the overseas Chinese diaspora.

That regulatory action led to a $60 billion dollar immediate drop in Alibaba’s market cap, given Alibaba’s 33% stake in Ant.

The bad news from Beijing has continued for the tech industry though. Earlier this week, market regulators laid out a “rectification” plan for Ant, including tougher lending standards that are expected to deeply impact the high-flying company’s revenues, margins, and growth. The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that China also specifically intends to “shrink” Jack Ma’s own influence over his business empire, with the government itself potentially acquiring larger ownership stakes in tech companies.

Furthermore, Beijing seems ready to force Alibaba and Tencent to play nicer with each other and create breathing space for startups outside of their two inter-locking corporate webs. Earlier this month, authorities fined Alibaba a nominal amount and also reviewed a Tencent acquisition, actions that were perceived by analysts as the opening shots in a new round of antitrust intervention. More action is expected in 2021.

It’s not just China though that has been bringing tech companies to heel. Almost exactly a year ago, Germany-based Delivery Hero announced a $4 billion takeover of Seoul-based Baedal Minjok, a popular food delivery app. Yesterday, South Korean competition authorities ordered Delivery Hero to divest its existing local delivery assets to get approval for the acquisition — a demand that undermined one of the reasons for acquiring Baedal Minjok in the first place. Delivery Hero has said that it will sell its unit to complete the transaction.

Meanwhile this month, Europe and soon-to-be-Brexited Britain announced a spate of new policies and regulations designed to heighten competition in the tech sector, including increasing legal liabilities for illegal content, broadening transparency around services, and mandating open competition on major platforms. Those policies have been a long-time coming, but now that they are starting to gain traction, they portend huge changes on how the highest-scale tech companies can operate on the Old Continent.

While many of these global policies are designed to undo the consolidation and scale of the industry, in India, regulators are working to prevent such scale in the first place. Local competition authorities there announced in November a framework that would prevent any company from owning more than 30% of local payments volume, and also mandating financial interoperability standards. That policy appears to be designed to avoid the kind of fintech duopoly seen in China between Alipay and WeChat Pay.

With all this global antitrust action bubbling, the laggard has actually been the United States, perhaps since the largest tech giants are all headquartered domestically. While Congress, the president, and dozens of state attorneys general have become increasingly strident on the scope of companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, action remains very early against the giants.

The largest and most notable action so far has been a massive lawsuit by 46 states against Facebook that was filed earlier this month. As we reported then, the lawsuit “alleges that the company bought competitors ‘illegally’ and in a ‘predatory manner’ in order to grow and preserve its market power. The suit cites Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp as prominent examples.”

Of course, as some of us remember from the 1990s with the U.S. government’s case against Microsoft, antitrust lawsuits often take years to full wend their way through the courts — and often don’t even lead to much if any change in the end anyway.

Whether a Biden administration will dramatically change the course of these actions remains unclear, with the transition offering very limited insight as it prepares to take office next month.

Nonetheless, all of these antitrust actions happening simultaneously across the globe within weeks of each other portends huge regulatory fights for tech in 2021.

Source: Tech Crunch

DNA testing technology company 23andMe has raised just shy of $82.5 million in new funding, from an offering of $85 million in total equity shares, according to a new SEC filing. The funding, confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, comes from investors including Sequoia Capital and NewView Capital. It brings the total raised by 23andMe to date to over $850 million.

There’s no specific agenda earmarked for this Series F round, according to a statement from the company to the WSJ, beyond general use to continue to fund and grow the business. 23andMe’s business is based on its distribution of individual home genetic testing kits, which provide customers with insights about their potential health and their family tree based on their DNA.

While the company’s pitch to individuals is improved health, and more knowledge about their ancestry and family tree, the company has also turned its attention to conducting research based on the data it has collected in aggregate, both for its own studies including a recent one that examined how genetic markers could affect a person’s susceptibility to COVID-19, and also for use in supporting the work of third-parties – though it stresses that data is only shared in aggregate, de-identified formats for those purposes.

In January, 23andMe confirmed layoffs affecting roughly 14% of its global workforce. The company’s work this year around COVID-19 has, however, perhaps put the value of its platform in a new light, in the face of this pandemic and the potential of future similar global health issues that may arise.

Source: Tech Crunch

CommonGround, a startup developing technology for what its founders describe as “4D collaboration,” is announcing that it has raised $19 million in funding.

This isn’t the first time Amir Bassan-Eskenazi and Ran Oz have launched a startup together — they also founded video networking company BigBand Networks, which won two technology-related Emmy Awards, went public in 2007 and was acquired by Arris Group in 2011. And before that, they worked together at digital compression company Optibase, which Oz co-founded and where Bassan-Eskenazi served as COO.

Although CommonGround is still in stealth mode and doesn’t plan to fully unveil its first product until next year, Bassan-Eskenazi and Oz outlined their vision for me. They acknowledged that video conferencing has improved significantly, but said it still can’t match face-to-face communication.

“Some things you just cannot achieve through a flat video conferencing-type solution,” Bassan-Eskenazi said. “Those got better over the years, but they never managed to achieve that thing where you walk into a bar … and there’s a group of people talking and you know immediately who is a little taken aback, who is excited, who is kind of ‘eh.’”

CommonGround founders Amir Bassan-Eskenazi and Ran Oz

That, essentially, is what Bassan-Eskenazi, Oz and their team are trying to build — online collaboration software that more fully captures the nuances of in-person communication, and actually improves on face-to-face conversations in some ways (hence the 4D moniker). Asked whether this involves combining video conferencing with other collaboration tools, Oz replied, “Think of it as beyond video,” using technology like computer vision and graphics.

Bassan-Eskenazi added that they’ve been working on CommonGround for more than year, so this isn’t just a response to our current stay-at-home environment. And the opportunity should still be massive as offices reopen next year.

“When we started this, it was a problem we thought some of the workforce would understand,” he said. “Now my mother understands it, because it’s how she reads to the grandkids.”

As for the funding, the round was led by Matrix Partners, with participation from Grove Ventures and StageOne Ventures.

“Amir and Ran have a bold vision to reinvent communications,” said Matrix General Partner Patrick Malatack in a statement. “Their technical expertise, combined with a history of successful exits, made for an easy investment decision.”

Source: Tech Crunch

The space economy in the last few years has been in large part driven by the increasing cadence and reliability of launch services, and while that market will continue to grow, the new economy enabled by those launches is only just beginning to take off. If you thought the launch boom was big, just wait for when it combines with the private satellite boom.

The consensus among experts, company leadership and investors in the space sector is that launch has commanded an outsize share of both money and attention, both because it’s so broadly appealing and because it was a prerequisite to any kind of space-based economy.

But as we’ve seen over the last year, and as is expected to be further demonstrated in 2021, the launch industry is moving from investor-subsidized R&D and testing to a full-fledged service economy.

“To date the launch industry has received 47% of the industry’s venture capital, even though it’s less than 2% of the global space economy,” said Meagan Crawford, managing partner at SpaceFund, at TC Sessions: Space last week. “We feel like that’s a problem that’s been solved, or that’s being solved. What we want to know is what is enabled by launch, right? What are the new things that can happen now, the new business models that close today that didn’t close three years ago when launch was not as frequent, reliable and low cost?”

Within the launch industry this view seems to be shared, even at companies that have yet to take a payload to orbit. Their focus is not just on proving their launch vehicle can do it, but taking their place in a massively supply-constrained (on the launch side) market by differentiating and appealing to new business models. That involves far more than building a working rocket.

“It’s not just about mass to orbit,” said Mandy Vaughn, president of VOX Space. “It’s about all those other elements of, how can we react quickly? How can we design and produce something quickly, as well as deploy that capability, maybe in a unique way from an unexpected location? In terms of the investment landscape, it’s not just about the technology of one rocket, or what’s your ISP [in-space propulsion] compared to another’s. It really is, what is the complete vertical infrastructure and business model beyond just mass to orbit?”

Tim Ellis, founder and CEO of Relativity Space, which will launch its first fully 3D-printed rocket in 2021, concurred in a conversation we had outside the conference.

“The thing we’re watching closest is not, while it’s fun, the different launch providers, but how many new satellite companies are getting to orbit,” he said. “We’re still seeing the market growing faster than the launch vehicle companies have been able to keep up with.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Volkswagen Group has developed a mobile electric vehicle charger that can autonomously navigate parking areas, power up an EV and then make its way back to its outpost without the intervention of humans.

The prototype, which VW Group Components created, aims to showcase how the automaker will expand charging infrastructure over the next few years to meet the expected demand that will arise as it produces and sells more electric vehicles. VW Group has committed to launching dozens of electric models over the next decade. The group’s Volkswagen brand plans to build and sell 1.5 million electric cars by 2025.

“Setting up an efficient charging infrastructure for the future is a central task that challenges the entire sector,” Volkswagen Group Components CEO Thomas Schmall said in a statement. “We are developing solutions to help avoid costly stand-alone measures. The mobile charging robot and our flexible quick-charging station are just two of these solutions.”

VW Group is developing a portfolio of different DC charging products, including a DC wallbox that charges up to 22 kilowatts. The automaker began piloting its DC wallbox earlier this month at some of its production sites in Germany. VW Group is also planning to launch a flexible — yet still more stationary — quick-charging station will be launched onto the market in early 2021.

The mobile charging robot doesn’t have a release date. The company said now that it has reached prototype status it will be “comprehensively further developed.” There is one caveat for the mobile charger. VW said that car-to-X communication, which allows a vehicle to “talk” to infrastructure, will be one prerequisite for the mobile charger to reach market maturity.

The charging robot prototype can be started via an app launched by the vehicle owner or car-to-x communication. Once the communication begins, the mobile charger turns on — two digital eyes open on the display — and it steers towards a vehicle. The mobile charger opens the charging socket flap as well as connects or disconnect the plug. The mobile charger is also able to move and then connect the vehicle to an energy storage unit. Once the charging is complete, the robot collects the mobile energy storage unit and takes it back to a central charging station.

Schmall said the DC charging products will not just focus on customers’ needs and the technical prerequisites of electric vehicles, but will also consider the economical possibilities of possible partners such as operators of parking bays and underground car parks.

You can watch the video of the mobile charging robot in action below.

Source: Tech Crunch

Global investors are running from Chinese tech stocks in the wake of the government’s crackdown on Ant Group and Alibaba, two high-flying businesses founded by Ma Yun (Jack Ma) that were once hailed as paragons of China’s new tech elite.

Shares of major technology companies in the country have fallen sharply in recent days, with Bloomberg calculating that Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com and Meituan have lost around $200 billion in value during a handful of trading sessions.

Already reeling from the last-minute halt of the public debut of Ant Group, a major Chinese fintech player with deep ties to Alibaba, the e-commerce giant came under new fire, as China’s markets watchdog opened a probe into its business practices concerning potentially anticompetitive behavior.

Ant Group was itself summoned by the government on December 26, leading to a plan that will force the company to “rectify” its business practices.

Shares of Alibaba are off around 30% from their recent record highs set in late October. Tech shares are also off in the country more broadly, with one Chinese-technology-focused ETC falling around 8% from recent highs, including a 1.5% drop today.

The American Depositary Receipts used by traders to invest in Alibaba fell from around $256 per share at the close of Wednesday trading on the New York Stock Exchange to around $222 last Thursday. The company is down another half point today. It was worth more than $319 per share earlier in the quarter.

It’s clear that the rising tensions between China’s tech giants and the country’s ruling Communist Party have investors spooked. But Jack Ma’s relationship with the Chinese government has always been a bit more fraught than that of his peers. Ma Huateng (Pony Ma), the founder of Tencent, and Xu Yong (Eric Yong) and Li Yanhong (Robin Li), the co-founders of Baidu, have kept lower profiles than the Alibaba founder.

Bloomberg has a good synopsis of the state of the market right now. The companies that are most directly in the crosshairs appear to be Ma Yun’s, but at different times, Tencent has been the focus of Chinese regulators bent on curbing the company’s influence through gaming.

Specifically for Alibaba things have gone from bad to worse, and a boosted share buyback program was not enough to halt the bleeding.

Whether this new round of regulations is a solitary blip on the radar or the signal of an increasing interest in Beijing tying tech companies closer to national interests remains to be seen. As the tit-for-tat tech conflict between the U.S. and China continues, many companies that had seen their growth as apolitical may become caught in the diplomatic crossfire.

Other tech companies are seeing their fortunes rise, boosted by newfound interest from the central government in Beijing.

This is already apparent in the chip industry, where China’s push for self-reliance has brought new riches and capital for new businesses. It’s true for Liu FengFeng, whose company, Tsinghon, was able to raise $5 million for its attempt at building a new semiconductor manufacturer in the country. Intellifusion, a manufacturer of chipsets focused on machine learning applications, was able to raise another $141 million back in April.

Private investors may be less enthused at the prospect of backing Chinese tech upstarts who could face government censure should the regulatory winds shift. Whether other startup markets in the region — India, Japan, among others — will benefit from the Chinese regulatory barrage will be interesting to track in 2021.

Source: Tech Crunch