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Chinese electric automakers Nio exceeds Q3 delivery target for its ES8 SUV

Nio, the Chinese electric automaker aiming to compete with Tesla, reported that it delivered 3,268 of its new ES8 vehicles in the third quarter, beating its own target by 9%.

The company planned to deliver between 2,900 and 3,000 ES8s in the third quarter, according to Nio CFO Louis T. Hsieh.

Nio began deliveries of the ES8, a 7-seater high performance electric SUV in China on June 28. The company reported that its year-to-date ES8 deliveries, as of September 30, 2018, totaled 3,368 vehicles. The first 100 vehicles were delivered in the last days of the second quarter.

“Growing our monthly deliveries from 381 in July to 1,766 in September demonstrates our steady production ramp, strong demand from users and the initial acceptance of NIO as a premium brand,” William Li, founder, Chairman and CEO of Nio, said in a statement.

The company, which shut down its ES8 production line for 10 days for routine maintenance and to install equipment for its second production line, warned that deliveries in October will be lower.

However, the company said it remains on track to hit its delivery target of 10,000 ES8 vehicles for the second half of 2018.

The company is planning to release the ES6, a 5-seater premium SUV,  in June/July 2019.

Nio, which raised $1 billion when it debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in September, has operations in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, although it only sells its ES8 vehicle in China. The 7-seater ES8 SUV is priced at 448,000 RMB, or around $65,000.

Baillie Gifford  & Co., the second-biggest shareholder of Tesla stock, owns an 11.44 percent stake in Nio, according to a regulatory filing posted October 9.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Pokémon GO maker Niantic is coming to TechCrunch Sessions AR/VR

Niantic is one of the few companies in the augmented reality world making some actual goddamn revenue.

As such, it didn’t feel right not to have the company that built Pokémon GO represented at our one-day Sessions AR/VR event this Thursday in LA. I’ll be sitting down with the company’s AR research lead Ross Finman at the event to talk about why augmented reality is so important to Niantic’s future and why AR tech can actually make tomorrow’s games and apps more engaging.

The game maker struck gold with Pokémon GO, but as it looks for lightning to strike twice with its upcoming Harry Potter title that’s being released later this year, the company has become a lot more vocal about the potential of AR tech to make users feel like the game world and the physical world are aligned.

Finman joined Niantic after the startup he co-founded, Escher Reality, was acquired by the company earlier this year. Prior to founding Escher, Finman spent 7 years at MIT researching 3D perception and mapping. There isn’t much in the augmented reality space he hasn’t directly interacted with.

We’ll chat with Finman about the challenges of scaling to a global user base some of these more experimental technologies, and what learnings Niantic has garnered from all of the success of Pokémon GO.

Final tickets are now on sale — book yours here and you’ll save 35 percent on general admission tickets. Student tickets are $45.

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Source: Tech Crunch

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Winamp returns in 2019 to whip the llama’s ass harder than ever

The charmingly outdated media player Winamp is being reinvented as a platform-agnostic audio mobile app that brings together all your music, podcasts and streaming services to a single location. It’s an ambitious relaunch, but the company behind it says it’s still all about the millions-strong global Winamp community — and as proof, the original desktop app is getting an official update as well.

For those who don’t remember: Winamp was the MP3 player of choice around the turn of the century, but went through a rocky period during Aol ownership (our former parent company) and failed to counter the likes of iTunes and the onslaught of streaming services, and more or less crumbled over the years. The original app, last updated in 2013, still works, but to say it’s long in the tooth would be something of an understatement (the community has worked hard to keep it updated, however). So it’s with pleasure that I can confirm rumors that substantial updates are on the way.

“There will be a completely new version next year, with the legacy of Winamp but a more complete listening experience,” said Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Radionomy, the company that bought Winamp (or what remained of it) in 2014. “You can listen to the MP3s you may have at home, but also to the cloud, to podcasts, to streaming radio stations, to a playlist you perhaps have built.”

“People want one single experience,” he concluded. “I think Winamp is the perfect player to bring that to everybody. And we want people to have it on every device.”

Laugh if you want but I laugh back

Now, I’m a Winamp user myself. And while I’ve been saddened by the drama through which the iconic MP3 player and the team that created it have gone (at the hands of TechCrunch’s former parent company, Aol), I can’t say I’ve been affected by it in any real way. Winamp 2 and 5 have taken me all the way from Windows 98 SE to 10 with nary a hiccup, and the player is docked just to the right of this browser window as I type this. (I use the nucleo_nlog skin.)

And although I bear the burden of my colleagues’ derisive comments for my choice of player, I’m far from alone. Winamp has as many as a hundred million monthly users, most of whom are outside the U.S. This real, engaged user base could be a powerful foot in the door for a new platform — mobile-first, but with plenty of love for the desktop too.

“Winamp users really are everywhere. It’s a huge number,” said Saboundjian. “We have a really strong and important community. But everybody ‘knows’ that Winamp is dead, that we don’t work on it any more. This is not the case.”

This may not come as a shock to Winamp users still plugged into the scene: Following years of rumors, an update to the desktop player leaked last month, bringing it from version 5.666 to 5.8. It was a pleasant surprise to users who had encountered compatibility problems with Windows 10 but had taken the “more coming soon” notice on the website with a massive grain of salt.

This kind of thing happens a lot, after all: an old property or app gets bought, promises are made and after a few years it just sort of fades away. So a free update — in fact, 5.8 eliminates all paid options originally offered in the Pro version — bringing a bucketful of fixes is like Christmas coming early. Or late. At any rate it’s appreciated.

The official non-leaked 5.8 release should come out this week (the 18th, to be precise), and won’t be substantially different from the one we’ve been using for years or the one that leaked. Just bug and compatibility fixes that should keep this relic trucking along for a few years longer.

The update to the desktop app is basically a good faith advance payment to the community: Radionomy showing they aren’t just running away with the property and slapping the brand on some random venture. But the real news is Winamp 6, which Saboundjian says should come out in 2019.

“What I see today is you have to jump from one player to another player or aggregator if you want to listen to a radio station, to a podcast player if you want to listen to a podcast — this, to me, is not the final experience,” he explained. It’s all audio, and it’s all searchable in one fashion or another. So why isn’t it all in one place?

The planned version of Winamp for iOS and Android will be that place, Saboundjian claims. On desktop, “the war is over,” he said, and between the likes of iTunes and web apps, there’s not much room to squeeze in. But mobile audio is fractured and inconvenient.

While Saboundjian declined to get into the specifics of which services would be part of the new Winamp or how the app would plug into, say, your Spotify playlists, your Google Music library, your Podcasts app, Audible and so on, he seemed confident that it would meet the needs he outlined. There are many conversations underway, he said, but licensing and agreements aren’t the main difficulty, and of course release is still quite a ways out. The team has focused on creating a consistent app across every platform you might want encounter mobile audio. A highly improved search will also play a role — as it ought to, when your media is all lumped into one place.

No word on whether it will retain its trademark intro upon installation — “WINAMP. It really whips the llama’s ass.” I certainly hope so.

This lack of specifics is a bit frustrating, of course, but I’m not worried about vaporware. I’m worried that other services will insist on the fragmented experience they’ve created that serves their interests better than ours. But if Radionomy can navigate these tricky waters and deliver a product even a little like what they’ve described, I’ll be thrilled (and my guess is tens of millions more will be, as well). And if not, well, we’ll always have the original.


Source: Tech Crunch

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At what point do we admit that geoengineering is an option?

In 1883, Krakatoa erupted, spewing volcanic ash and gas into the stratosphere, making clouds more reflective and cooling the entire planet by roughly 1° C that year. In 2018, the UN reported that human activity has already raised Earth’s temperature by 1°, and if we don’t do something drastic soon, the results will be catastrophic.

The optimal solution is staring us in the face, of course; reduce carbon emissions. Unfortunately this optimal solution is politically untenable and extremely expensive. A decade ago McKinsey estimated it would cost $1 trillion just to halve the growth of carbon emissions … in India alone. That’s still less than the cost of doing nothing — estimated at $20 trillion by Nature, which doesn’t include its toll on human lives — but it’s a cost which seems to make the necessary political decisions impossible.

The analysts … concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn’t fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix

  • Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

There is another option. The root problem we face is not carbon concentrations but atmospheric temperature. There are other negative side effects of carbon emissions, like ocean acidification, but the temperature is the big one. We already know how to cool the planet without reducing carbon. The solution is so simple it’s almost laughable: just make our clouds a little more reflective, so they reflect more of the sun’s light, and thus reduce our heat. Volcanoes like Krakatoa do it all the time:

When Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia in 1815 and spewed sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, farmers in New England recorded a summer so chilly that their fields frosted over in July. The Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991 cooled global temperatures by about half a degree Celsius for the next few years. A sulfur-aerosol project could produce a Pinatubo of sulfur dioxide every four years. The aerosol plan is also cheap—so cheap that it completely overturns conventional analysis of how to mitigate climate change.

Now, is this a good idea? Probably not. In the case of sulfur dioxide, definitely not; it will come back down as acid rain. But it’s worth noting that this solution is so (relatively) cheap, estimated at less than a billion dollars a year, that an individual nation — or, heck, even an individual; that’s less than Jeff Bezos spends on Blue Origin each year — could make it happen. The classic example is the low-lying, high-population nation of Bangladesh. At some point, it will become cheaper for Bangladesh to singlehandedly cool down the world with sulfur dioxide than to pay for the costs of climate change. Why would they not choose to do so?

There are better geoengineering solutions. Simple seawater could brighten marine clouds with the same effect … for more money. But in general, is geoengineering a good idea? Again, probably not. Proponents of cloud seeding say it will easily cool the earth back down to “normal” levels. Skeptics armed with climate models say it’s much more complicated than that; the atmosphere is a chaotic system, and the results will be localized, regional, and disruptive.

(Using iron fertilisation to generate plankton blooms that siphon carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has also been suggested, but it should go without saying that messing with the global oceanic ecosystem is also likely to have, at best, emergent properties.)

People do generally concede that cloud manipulation is a better idea than doing nothing at all, in that at least it would buy us 25 years or more in which to build (waves hands furiously) some kind of biotech carbon sink — with the caveat that, once we start seeding clouds, we can’t stop, because if we do, all the global warming we’ve been fending off will hit at once, in a huge hurry. Numbers like “a rate of up to 4°C per decade, or 20 times faster than at present” are bandied about. Needless to say this would be beyond catastrophic. If we were to start geoengineering, we couldn’t stop.

And yet. I keep seeing thoughtful, intelligent people talking about it as not so much an option but an inevitability. Matt Ocko. Matt Bruenig. Other people not named Matt. I heartily recommend this excellent Gizmodo column by Dave Levitan for more on the subject:

The latest IPCC report found that the world could reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2030. Keeping it from soaring beyond that level and into the realm of the catastrophic “would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” Does that sound like something humans are remotely planning on doing, given what we have seen to this point? I hate to borrow from a fictional version of Mark Zuckerberg, but if we were going to solve climate change, we would have solved climate change.

He’s right. Doing nothing is not an option, or, at least, for nations like Bangladesh, it’s not going to stay an option for long. Doing the right thing as a species appears not to be an option either. That leaves us with this ugly hack. Sorry. On behalf of engineers everywhere, I apologize. But sometimes our managers leave us with no other choice.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Make your own phone with MakerPhone (some soldering required)

There’s no shortage of interesting electronics kits out there to occupy an idle Sunday, but with this one you get a phone out of the bargain. The MakerPhone is a kit looking for funds on Kickstarter that lets you assemble a working mobile phone from a number of boards and pieces, and the end result looks about as wild as you’d expect.

For about a hundred bucks, you get a mainboard, casing, LCD, wireless module, processor, and all the other pieces you need to make a basic smartphone. You’re not going to be browsing Instagram on this thing, but you can make calls, send texts, and play Snake. Remember when that was enough?

This is purpose-built hardware, of course — you won’t be putting it together cap by cap — but it’s not exactly plug and play, either. You’ll need a soldering iron, snippers, and some Python chops. (Not delicious python meat — Python the programming language.)

The MakerPhone microcontroller is Arduino-compatible, so you can tweak and extend it, too. But the creators (who previously shipped a similarly DIY handheld gaming machine) say you don’t need any experience to do this. It takes you through the absolute basics and there are pledge tiers that get you all the tools you’ll need, too.

I love the chunky UI, too. I like big pixels and I cannot lie.

Sure, this probably won’t be your everyday device (it’s huge) but it’s a fun project and maybe you could make it your weird home messaging machine. I don’t know. Be creative.

The MakerPhone is already well past its $15,000 goal, most of which was people snapping up the early bird $89 deal. But there are plenty available at $94, and it comes with a toolkit at $119.


Source: Tech Crunch

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What to expect from the return of electric scooters in SF

The time has come. Electric scooter sharing services are returning to the streets of San Francisco — this time with explicit permission from the SF Municipal Transportation Agency. On Monday, we’ll see both Skip and Scoot deploy their respective electric scooters throughout the city.

And if you remember what it was like earlier this year, you’ll likely notice that these scooters look different from the ones that were previously scattered throughout the city. In March, a number of electric scooters from Bird, Lime and Spin appeared in San Francisco essentially overnight. That prompted city officials to act quickly, with the SF City Attorney’s office sending cease-and-desist letters, a new city law going into in June restricting electric scooter companies from operating without a permit and, eventually, the SFMTA creating a permitting process.

But the permitting process and the decision that resulted did not sit well with companies like Lime and Lyft, which were not granted permits to operate electric scooter services in San Francisco. Toward the end of this week, Lime made clear its intentions to seek to block the deployment of scooters on Monday. A judge, however, denied Lime’s request for the temporary restraining order. Lyft had also petitioned SF Mayor London Breed, asking her to take a look at the SFMTA’s decision. Despite Lyft and Lime’s efforts, the great electric scooter rollout of 2018 is still happening on Monday.

Ahead of the official launch, TechCrunch chatted with Scoot CEO Michael Keating and Skip CEO Sanjay Dastoor about their respective rollouts of 625 electric scooters.

Scoot CEO Michael Keating at a pre-launch event in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood

Given the number of scooters Scoot is allowed to deploy, the company chose a relatively concentrated area in which to deploy them, Keating told me. Another consideration for location deployment came down to the number of hills in the area since “it’s not really a San Francisco hill-climbing machine,” as well as ensuring it’s serving an area that’s traditionally underserved. And that’s how it landed on the Bayview, where Scoot hosted a media event on Friday.

“Part of the reason we’re here is that we teamed up with this group called the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center,” Keating said.

Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center, which has been around for 33 years, helps entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses.

“The thought is we want to hire from the communities that we operate in,” Keating said. “And so we wanted to basically make some connections down here and let folks here know that if they want to work on electric vehicles and be part of that kind of green economy that we’re hiring.”

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 06: Skip Co-Founder and CEO Sanjay Dastoor speaks onstage during Day 2 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 at Moscone Center on September 6, 2018 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Skip says it’s still finalizing its coverage map with the SFMTA, but that its scooters will cover lots of the Marina, North Beach, Embarcadero through Chinatown, the financial district, South of Market area, as well as the Bayview and Excelsior neighborhoods. Based on demand, Dastoor told me, Skip can adjust some of those deployments.

Over the weekend, Skip is engaging in some community outreach and rider education to ensure people know how to safely ride the scooters. The company is also giving away helmets.

Skip hosts a community event in Cole Valley on Saturday, Oct. 13, 2018

“We’ve seen a very positive response from everyone we’ve spoken to around engaging with the community,” Dastoor said.

San Francisco marks Skip’s third market after first launching in Washington, D.C. and then in Portland. One of Skip’s learnings from D.C., Dastoor said, is that people like to get in touch with the company, whether they’re riders or not.

Scoot, which has operated moped scooters since 2012 in San Francisco, says it started thinking about electric scooters early last year. Given its ongoing relationship with the SFMTA, Keating said he felt pretty confident that his company would be able to operate kick scooters in the city.

“The confidence came from having been the first company to offer shared electric vehicles in this format,” Keating told me.

Even though these kick scooters are different from mopeds, Scoot has experience operating shared, electric vehicles they people walk up to and unlock with their phones.

“And we have been working with the city for a while,” Keating said. “So we kind of know what the city cares about. They care about safety, they care about inclusion, and they care about accountability. And so we, when we wrote our application, we said, ‘Well, we’re bringing all this experience properly maintaining these things,’ which was, frankly, not a strength of the other companies. They’re getting a lot of vehicles on the road, but not keeping them on the road.”

Part of Scoot’s strategy to keep the scooters on the roads entails using swappable batteries. That way, the scooters will remain on the streets instead of needing to rely on 1099 contractors to take them home, charge them overnight and then redeploy them in the morning, Keating said. Skip, however, uses fixed batteries and relies on a mix of its own workers as well as contractors to charge them.

Both Skip and Scoot say they’re working on adding locking systems to their respective scooters. Scoot also says it’s exploring helmet storage on the scooters — similar to what it offers with its mopeds.

Regarding Lime’s efforts to get on the road, Keating said “they’ve been flipping out, is what they’ve been doing.” And pertaining Lime’s rhetoric calling both Skip and Scoot ” less experienced,” Keating said “It’s bullshit,” noting how Scoot has been operating electric vehicles for years. Sure, they’re different, but “we chose something that’s heavier and more expensive and more complicated, but we’re good at it.”

Although Judge Harold E. Kahn rejected Lime’s request for a temporary restraining order, Lime says it was still a win.

“Our goal to file this lawsuit was not about preventing other operators from going forward; it was about exposing the biased and flawed process of the SFMTA,” Lime spokesperson Jack Song told TechCrunch via email. “The Court acknowledged and more hearings to come.”

But even if that changes nothing, there are plenty of other markets up for grabs. Uber, for example, recently launched electric scooters in Santa Monica, Calif. and Lyft launched its own scooters in Denver, Colo. in September. For an overview of all things electric scooters, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s additional coverage below.

Electric scooters are going worldwide


Source: Tech Crunch

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NASA plans ‘on schedule’ Soyuz launch despite failure of Russian rocket

The high-profile failure of a normally reliable Soyuz rocket during a crewed mission to the International Space Station earlier this week spooked the space community in more ways than one, but NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said he expects to launch a new crew in December via Soyuz anyway.

Speaking to reporters at the US embassy in Moscow (as reported by the AFP), Bridenstine observed that “not every mission that fails ends up so successful.” and indeed the malfunctioning rocket very fortunately did not cause any loss of life, as the escape system built into the launch hardware functioned as designed.

Astronauts land safely after Soyuz launch fails at 20 miles up

Astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin landed safely some 250 miles away from the launch site after the capsule detached about 90 seconds into launch and deployed its parachute.

Although it’s too early for investigators to tell what went wrong, Bridenstine is apparently confident enough in the Soyuz system and the team at Roscosmos that he indicated a new crewed capsule could go up before the end of the year.

“I fully anticipate that we will fly again on a Soyuz rocket and I have no reason to believe at this point that it will not be on schedule,” he said.

That mission would be in December, meaning the current 3-person crew aboard the ISS wouldn’t have to extend their stay (as some thought they might), nor would the ISS have to fly empty for any period of time. The latter possibility made many uneasy, as the ISS is designed to be able to fly solo for a while, but it would be risky to have no one there in case of problems, and many experiments could also fail.

The Soyuz launch system is the only one currently available to send humans to space. SpaceX and Boeing are working hard on changing that but their solutions are a long way from ready. If some serious flaw were to be found in the Soyuz system it would essentially maroon humanity on the Earth until a solution is found. Fortunately Soyuz has proven itself many times over and it’s more likely that it will fly again soon.

Bridenstine’s confidence doesn’t launch a rocket on its own of course — the investigation of the rocket failure continues and the two space agencies will have to negotiate how to put a new crew in the station ahead of the original schedule. But for now it sounds like space will remain in our reach.


Source: Tech Crunch

Posted on

A fictional Facebook Portal videochat with Mark Zuckerberg

TechCrunch: Hey Portal, dial Mark

Portal: Do you mean Mark Zuckerberg?

TC: Yes

Portal: Dialling Mark…

TC: Hi Mark! Nice choice of grey t-shirt.

MZ: Uh, new phone who dis? — oh, hi, er, TechCrunch…

TC: Thanks for agreeing to this entirely fictional interview, Mark!

MZ: Sure — anytime. But you don’t mind if I tape over the camera do you? You see I’m a bit concerned about my privacy here at, like, home

TC: We feel you, go ahead.

As you can see, we already took the precaution of wearing this large rubber face mask of, well, of yourself Mark. And covering the contents of our bedroom with these paint-splattered decorator sheets.

MZ: Yeah, I saw that. It’s a bit creepy tbh

TC: Go on and get all taped up. We’ll wait.

[sound of Mark calling Priscilla to bring the tape dispenser]

[Portal’s camera jumps out to assimilate Priscilla Chan into the domestic scene, showing a generous vista of the Zuckerbergs’ living room, complete with kids playing in the corner. Priscilla, clad in an oversized dressing gown and with her hair wrapped in a big fluffy towel, can be seen gesticulating at the camera. She is also coughing]

Priscilla to Mark: I already told you — there’s a camera cover built into into Portal. You don’t need to use tape now

MZ: Oh, right, right!

Okay, going dark! Wow, that feels better already

[sound of knuckles cracking]

TC: So, Mark, let’s talk hardware! What’s your favorite Amazon Echo?

MZ: Uh, well…

TC: We’d guess one with all the bells & whistles, right? There’s definitely something more than a little Echo Show-y about Portal

MZ: Sure, I mean. We think Alexa is a great product

TC: Mhmm. Do you remember when digital photo frames first came out? They were this shiny new thing about, like, a decade ago? One of those gadgets your parents buy you around Thanksgiving, which ends up stuck in a drawer forever?

MZ: Yeah! I think someone gave me one once with a photo of me playing beer pong on it. We had it hanging in the downstairs rest room for the longest time. But then we got an Android tablet with a Wi-Fi connection for in there, so…

TC: Now here we are a decade or so later with Portal advancing the vision of what digital photo frames can be!

MZ: Yeah! I mean, you don’t even have to pick the pictures! It’s pretty awesome. This one here — oh, right you can’t see me but let me describe it for you — this one here is of a Halloween party I went to one year. Someone was dressed as SpongeBob. I think they might have been called Bob, actually… And this is, like, some other Facebook friends doing some other fun stuff. Pretty amazing.

You can also look at album art

TC: But not YouTube, right? But let’s talk about video calling

MZ: It’s an amazing technology

TC: It sure is. Skype, FaceTime… live filters, effects, animoji…

MZ: We’re building on a truly great technology foundation. Portal autozooming means you don’t even have to think about watching the person you’re talking to! You can just be doing stuff in your room and the camera will always be adjusting to capture everything you’re doing! Pretty amazing.

TC: Doing what Mark? Actually, let’s not go there

MZ: Portal will even suggest people for you to call! We think this will be a huge help for our mission to promote Being Well — uh, I mean Time Well Spent because our expert machine learning algorithms will be nudging you to talk to people you should really be talking to

TC: Like my therapist?

MZ: Uh, well, it depends. But our AI can suggest personalized meaningful interactions by suggesting Messenger contacts to call up

TC: It’s not going to suggest I videchat my ex is it?

MZ: Haha! Hopefully not. But maybe your mom? Or your grandma?

TC: Sounds incredibly useful. Well, assuming they didn’t already #deletefacebook.

But let’s talk about kids

MZ: Kids! Yeah we love them. Portal is going to be amazing for kids

TC: You have this storybook thing going on, right? Absent grandparents using Portal to read kids bedtime stories and what not…

MZ: Right! We think kids are going to love it. And grandparents! We’ve got these animal masks if you get bored of looking at your actual family members. It’s good, clean, innovative fun for all the family!

TC: Yeah, although, I mean, nothing beats reading from an actual kid’s book, right?

MZ: Well…

TC: If you do want to involve a device in your kid’s bedtime there are quite a lot of digital ebook apps for that already. Apple has a whole iBooks library of the things with read-aloud narration, for example.

And, maybe you missed this — but quite a few years ago there was a big bunch of indie apps and services all having a good go at selling the same sort of idea of ‘interactive remote reading experiences’ for families with kids. Though not many appear to have gone the distance. Which does sort of suggest there isn’t a huge unmet need for extra stuff beyond, well, actual children’s books and videochat apps like Skype and FaceTime.

Also, I mean, children’s story reading apps and interactive kids’ e-books are pretty much as old as the hills in Internet terms at this point. So, er, you’re not really moving fast and breaking things are you!?

MZ: Actually we’re more focused on stable infrastructure these days

TC: And hardware too, apparently. Which is a pretty radical departure for Facebook. All those years everyone thought you were going to do a Facebook phone but you left it to Amazon to flop into that pit… Who needs hardware when you can put apps and tracker pixels on everything, right?!

But here you are now, kinda working with Amazon for Portal — while also competing with Alexa hardware by selling your own countertop device… Aren’t you at all nervous about screwing this up? Hardware IS hard. And homes have curtains for a reason…

MZ: We’re definitely confident kids aren’t going to try swivelling around on the Portal Plus like it’s a climbing frame, if that’s what you mean. Well, hopefully not anyway

TC: But about you, Facebook Inc, putting an all-seeing-eye-cum-Internet-connected-listening-post into people’s living rooms and kids’ bedrooms…

MZ: What about it?

[MZ speaking to someone else in the room] Does the speaker have an off switch? How do I mute this thing?

TC: Hello? Mark?

[silence]

[sound comes back on briefly and a snatch of conversation can be heard between Mark and Priscilla about the need to buy more diapers. Mark is then heard shouting across the room that his Shake Shack order of a triple cheeseburger and fries plus butterscotch malt is late again]

[silence] 

[crackle and a congested throat clearing sound. A child is heard in the background asking for Legos]

MZ: Not now okay honey. Okay hon-, uh, hello — what were you saying?

TC: Will you be putting a Portal in Max’s room?

MZ: Haha! She’d probably prefer Legos

TC: August?

MZ: She’s only just turned one

TC: Okay, let’s try a more direct question. Do you at all think that you, Facebook Inc,

might have a problem selling a $200+ piece of Internet-connected hardware when your company is known for creeping on people to sell ads?

MZ: Oh no, no! — we’ve, like, totally thought of that!

Let me read you what marketing came up with. Hang on, it’s around here somewhere…

[sound of paper rustling]

Here we go [reading]:

Facebook doesn’t listen to, view, or keep the contents of your Portal video calls. Your Portal conversations stay between you and the people you’re calling. In addition, video calls on Portal are encrypted, so your calls are always secure.

For added security, Smart Camera and Smart Sound use AI technology that runs locally on Portal, not on Facebook servers. Portal’s camera doesn’t use facial recognition and doesn’t identify who you are.

Like other voice-enabled devices, Portal only sends voice commands to Facebook servers after you say, ‘Hey Portal.’ You can delete your Portal’s voice history in your Facebook Activity Log at any time.

Pretty cool, huh!

TC: Just to return to your stable infrastructure point for a second, Mark — did you mean Facebook is focused on security too? Because, well, your company keeps leaking personal data like a sieve holds water…

MZ: We think of infrastructure as a more holistic concept. And, uh, as a word that sounds reassuring

TC: Okay, so of course you can’t 100% guarantee Portal against hacking risks, though you’re taking precautions by encrypting calls. But Portal might also ‘accidentally’ record stuff adults and kids say in the home — i.e. if its ‘Hey Portal’ local listening function gets triggered when it shouldn’t. And it will then be 100% up to a responsible adult to find their way through Facebook’s labyrinthine settings and delete those wiretaps, won’t it?

MZ: You can control all your information, yes

TC: The marketing bumpf also doesn’t spell out what Facebook does with ‘Hey Portal’ voice recordings, or the personal insights your company is able to glean from them, but Facebook is in the business of profiling people for ad targeting purposes so we must assume that any and all voice commands and interactions, with the sole exception of the contents of videocalls, will go into feeding that beast.

So the metadata of who you talk to via Portal, what you listen to and look at (minus any Alexa-related interactions that you’ve agreed to hand off to Amazon for its own product targeting purposes), and potentially much more besides is all there for Facebook’s taking — given the kinds of things that an always-on listening device located in a domestic setting could be accidentally privy to.

Then, as more services get added to Portal, more personal behavioral data will be generated and can be processed by Facebook for selling ads.

MZ: Well, I mean, like I told that Senator we do sell ads

TC: And smart home hardware too now, apparently.

One more thing, Mark: In Europe, Facebook didn’t used to have face recognition technology switched on did it?

MZ: We had it on pause for a while

TC: But you switched it back on earlier this year right?

MZ: Facebook users in Europe can choose to use it, yes

TC: And who’s in charge of framing that choice?

MZ: Uh, well we are obviously

TC: We’d like you to tap on the Portal screen now, Mark. Tap on the face you can see to make the camera zoom right in on this mask of your own visage. Can you do that for us?

MZ: Uh, sure

[sound of a finger thudding against glass]

MZ: Are you seeing this? It really is pretty creepy!

Or — I mean — it would be if it wasn’t so, like, familiar…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a joint hearing of the US Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

[sound of a child crying]

Priscilla to Mark: Eeeew! Turn that thing off!

TC: Thanks Mark. We’ll leave you guys to it.

Enjoy your Shake Shack. Again.

Portal: Thanks for calling Mark, TechCrunch! Did you enjoy your Time Well Spent?


Source: Tech Crunch

Posted on

International growth, primarily in China, fuels the VC market today

The venture capital business model has gone global. VC is still an exclusive club of financiers, but now with worldwide scope and scale.

According to Crunchbase projections Crunchbase News reported in Q3 2018, worldwide VC deal and dollar volume each set new all-time records. In the U.S. and Canada, deal volume declined slightly from Q2 highs but growing deal sizes pushed total dollar volume to new heights.

Much of this global growth comes from markets outside the U.S. and Canada. A recent collaborative study between Startup Revolution and the Center for American Entrepreneurship indicates that Beijing, China was the city that contributed most to global growth in venture capital investment growth.

Here’s the geographic breakdown of projected deal volume over time. Note a somewhat choppy growth pattern in U.S. and Canadian deal volume, and compare that to a more consistent growth pattern in international deal volume. (For more about how and why Crunchbase makes these projections, check out the Methodology section at the end of the global report.)

In rapidly growing startup markets like China, venture deal volume is also at all-time highs, though venture dollar volume is down slightly.1 For the Asia-Pacific region as a whole, venture deal volume is up roughly 85 percent from the same time last year. Reported deal volume in China is up more than fourfold during the same period of time.

The rise of China’s venture market may be best seen from a city-level perspective. Below is a chart displaying the 10 most active startup cities in Q3, ranked by count of venture deals for each city as reported at the end of Q3. (The Methodology section of the global report also explains what “reported” data is and how it’s used.)

Of the top 10 cities displayed above, only three countries are represented. If it weren’t for the rest of Silicon Valley bolstering the Bay Area’s numbers, Beijing would beat out San Francisco in raw deal counts. (But, then again, Beijing is home to three times as many people as the entire Bay Area.)

Using deal and dollar volume as rough metrics for vivacity (if not necessarily health), this spread in VC activity could be seen as a good thing for the market as a whole. A rising tide of global VC activity lifts all startup markets, worldwide. However, much of that growth is still concentrated in just a few big markets.

The worldwide expansion and local reinterpretation of the Silicon Valley venture capital investment model is a phenomenon with which market participants (founders and funders alike) must reckon. Founders are responding by raising lots of money in ever-larger rounds, hoping that big investor checks are enough to buy large chunks of growing markets. Investors, in turn, are raising ever-larger funds to satiate these companies’ seemingly bottomless appetites for capital.

As in most mega-trends, participants who fail to adapt to changing market conditions will end up on the losing end of the market cycle.

  1. It should be noted that dollar volume declined mostly because Q2 numbers were skewed north by a $14 billion Series C round raised by Ant Financial. To this date, it’s the largest VC round ever closed.


Source: Tech Crunch