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Trump, FCC unveil plan to accelerate 5G rollout

In a press conference today in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, the President laid out a number of initiatives focused on helping accelerate the U.S. role in the 5G race.

“This is, to me, the future,” Trump said, opening the press conference flanked by Ajit Pai, Ivanka Trump and a room full of communications representatives in cowboy and hard hats.

“It’s all about 5G now,” Trump told the audience. “We were 4G and everyone was saying we had to get 4G, and then they said before that, ‘we have to get 3G,’ and now we have to get 5G. And 5G’s a big deal and that’s going to be there for a while. And at some point we’ll be talking about number six.”

The apparently off script moment echoed Trump’s recent call on Twitter for the U.S. to get 6G technology “as soon as possible.” There’s something to said for the spirit, perhaps, but it’s probably a little soon to be jumping the gun on a technology that doesn’t really exist just yet.

Trump used the opportunity to downplay earlier rumors that the government might be building its own 5G network, instead promoting a free market method, while taking a shot at the government’s capabilities. “In the United States, our approach is private sector driven and private sector led,” he added. “The government doesn’t have to spend lots of money.”

In recent months, however, both the administration and the FCC have been discussing ways to make America more competitive in the race to the soon-to-be-ubiquitous cellular technology. Earlier today, the FCC announced plans to hold the largest spectrum auction in U.S. history, offering the bands up to wireless carriers. The planned auction is set to kick off on December 10.

“To accelerate and incentivize these investments, my administration is freeing up as much wireless spectrum as needed,” Trump added, echoing Pai’s plans.

Earlier today Pai and the FCC also proposed a $20.4 billion fund design to help connect rural areas. The Chairman said the commission believes the fund could connect as many as four million small businesses and residences over the course of the next decade.

The focus is understandable, of course. 5G’s value will go far beyond faster smartphone, providing connections for a wide range of IoT and smart technologies and potentially helping powering things like robotics and autonomous vehicles. The technology will undeniably be a key economic driver, touching as of yet unseen portions of the U.S. workforce.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Nancy Pelosi warns tech companies that Section 230 is ‘in jeopardy’

In a new interview with Recode, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made some notable comments on what by all accounts is the most important law underpinning the modern internet as we know it.

Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act is as short as it is potent — and it’s worth getting familiar with. It states “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

When asked about Section 230, Pelosi referred to the law as a “gift” to tech companies that have leaned heavily on the law to grow their business. That provision, providing tech platforms legal cover for content created by their users, is what allowed services like Facebook, YouTube and many others to swell into the massive companies they are today.

Pelosi continued:

“It is a gift to them and I don’t think that they are treating it with the respect that they should, and so I think that that could be a question mark and in jeopardy… I do think that for the privilege of 230, there has to be a bigger sense of responsibility on it. And it is not out of the question that that could be removed.”

Expect to hear a lot more about Section 230. In recent months, a handful of Republicans in Congress have taken aim at the law. Section 230 is what’s between the lines in Devin Nunes’ recent lawsuit accusing critics for defaming him on Twitter. It’s also the extremely consequential subtext beneath conservative criticism that Twitter, Facebook and Google do not run “neutral” platforms.

While the idea of stripping away Section 230 is by no means synonymous with broader efforts to regulate big tech, it is the nuclear option. And when tech’s most massive companies behave badly, it’s a reminder to some of them that their very existences hinge on 26 words that Congress giveth and Congress can taketh away.

Whatever the political motivations, imperiling Section 230 is a fearsome cudgel against even tech’s most seemingly untouchable companies. While it’s not clear what some potentially misguided lawmakers would stand to gain by dismantling the law, Pelosi’s comments are a reminder that tech’s biggest companies and users alike have everything to lose.

The consequences of indecency


Source: Tech Crunch

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HQ Trivia replaces Quiz Daddy Scott Rogowsky

Quiz Khalifa aka Host Malone aka Trap Trebek aka HQ Trivia’s Scott Rogowsky has been pushed out of the live mobile gaming startup. The two split due to disagreements about Rogowsky attempting to take a second full-time job hosting sports streaming service DAZN’s baseball show ChangeUp while moving to only hosting HQ on weekends, TMZ first reported. HQ wanted someone committed to their show.

Now HQ co-founder and CEO Rus Yusupov confirms to TechCrunch that Rogowsky will no longer host HQ Trivia. He tells me that the company ran a SurveyMonkey survey of its top players and they voted that former guest host Matt Richards rated higher than Rogowsky. Yusupov says HQ is excited to have Richards as its new prime time host. It’s also putting out offers to more celebrity guests to host for a few shows, a few weeks, or even a whole season of one of its time slots.

HQ Trivia’s new host Matt Richards

The departure could still shake HQ’s brand since Rogowsky had become the defacto face of the company. But he was also prone to talking a lot on the air and promoting himself, sometimes in ways that felt distracting from the game. Rogowsky has also been using HQ’s brand to further his standup comedy career, splashing its logo on advertising for his shows like this one below at a casino where “The centerpiece is a live trivia competition”, he told WPTV5.

TechCrunch had predicted that Rogowsky might depart if he wasn’t properly compensated with equity in HQ Trivia that would only vest and earn him money if he stuck around. The damage to HQ could worsen if he’s scooped up by Facebook, Snapchat, or another tech company to build out their own live video gaming shows.

HQ Trivia provided this statement on Rogowsky’s exit:

“We continue to build an incredible company at HQ Trivia, from drawing hundreds of thousands of players to the platform daily, to increasing the size of the prize, to attracting strong talent. We’ve come a long way since Scott Rogowsky’s first trivia game and we’re grateful for everything he’s done for the platform. This is a team that creates products for talent to really shine—we’re just getting started at HQ Trivia, and as he makes his next move, wanted to take a minute to thank him for being part of our journey.”

Yusupov tells me he’s excited about exploring new hosts, noting that Richards in a person of color who brings more diversity to HQ’s lineup. Richards is a standup comic who has appeared on CBS’ 2 Broke Girls, Nickelodeon’s School of Rock and was a voice-over host for game show Trivial Takedown on FUSE. Yusupov says the team feels jazzed about the new creative opportunities beyond Rogowsky, though the CEO says he appreciates all that its former host contributed.

Richards will have the tall task of trying to revive HQ’s popularity. It climbed the app store charts to become the #3 top game and #6 overall app in January 2018, and peaked at 2.38 million concurrent players in March 2018. But it’s been on a steady decline since, falling to the #585 overall app in August, and it dropped out of the top #1500 last month according to App Annie. HQ Trivia was installed over 160,000 times last month on iOS and Android with approximately $200,000 in in-app purchase revenue, according to Sensor Tower. But that’s just 8% as many downloads as the 1.97 million new installs HQ got in March 2018.

Exhaustion with the game format, so many winners splitting jackpots to just a few dollars per victor, and laggy streams have all driven away players. The introduction of a new Wheel Of Fortune-style HQ Words game in August hasn’t stopped the decline. And the tragic death of HQ co-founder and former CEO Colin Kroll may have impeded efforts to turn things around. There’s a ton of pressure on the company after it raised $23 million, including a $15 million round at a $100 million valuation.

Even if HQ Trivia fades from the zeitgeist, it and Rogowsky will have inspired a new wave of innovation in what it means to play with our phones.


Source: Tech Crunch

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This little translator gadget could be a traveling reporter’s best friend

If you’re lucky enough to get travel abroad, you know it’s getting easier and easier to use our phones and other gadgets to translate for us. So why not do so in a way that makes sense to you? This little gadget seeking funds on Kickstarter looks right up my alley, offering quick transcription and recording — plus music playback, like an iPod Shuffle with superpowers.

The ONE Mini is really not that complex of a device — a couple microphones and a wireless board in tasteful packaging — but that combination allows for a lot of useful stuff to happen both offline and with its companion app.

You activate the device, and it starts recording and both translating and transcribing the audio via a cloud service as it goes (or later, if you choose). That right there is already super useful for a reporter like me — although you can always put your phone on the table during an interview, this is more discreet and of course a short-turnaround translation is useful as well.

Recordings are kept on the phone (no on-board memory, alas) and there’s an option for a cloud service, but that probably won’t be necessary considering the compact size of these audio files. If you’re paranoid about security this probably isn’t your jam, but for everyday stuff it should be just fine.

If you want to translate a conversation with someone whose language you don’t speak, you pick two of the 12 built-in languages in the app and then either pass the gadget back and forth or let it sit between you while you talk. The transcript will show on the phone and the ONE Mini can bleat out the translation in its little robotic voice.

Right now translation online only works, but I asked and offline is in the plans for certain language pairs that have reliable two-way edge models, probably Mandarin-English and Korean-Japanese.

It has a headphone jack, too, which lets it act as a wireless playback device for the recordings or for your music, or to take calls using the nice onboard mics. It’s lightweight and has a little clip, so it’s probably better than connecting directly to your phone in many cases.

There’s also a 24/7 interpreter line that charges two bucks a minute that I probably wouldn’t use. I think I would feel weird about it. But in an emergency it could be pretty helpful to have a panic button that sends you directly to a person who speaks both the languages you’ve selected.

I have to say, normally I wouldn’t highlight a random crowdfunded gadget, but I happen to have met the creator of this one, Wells Tu, at one of our events and trust him and his team to actually deliver. The previous product he worked on was a pair of translating wireless earbuds that worked surprisingly well, so this isn’t their first time shipping a product in this category — that makes a lot of difference for a hardware startup. You can see it in action here:

He pointed out in an email to me that obviously wireless headphones are hot right now, but the translation functions aren’t good and battery life is short. This adds a lot of utility in a small package.

Right now you can score a ONE Mini for $79, which seems reasonable to me. They’ve already passed their goal and are planning on shipping in June, so it shouldn’t be a long wait.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Israel’s Beresheet spacecraft is lost during historic lunar landing attempt

Israel’s SpaceIL almost made history today as its Beresheet spacecraft came within an ace of landing on the surface of the Moon, but suffered a last minute failure during descent. Israel missed out on the chance to be the fourth country to make a controlled lunar landing, but getting 99 percent of the way there is still an extraordinary achievement for private spaceflight.

Beresheet (“Genesis”) launched in February as secondary payload aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and after a month and a half spiraling outward, entered lunar orbit a week ago. Today’s final maneuver was an engine burn meant to bring down its relative velocity to the Moon, then brake to a soft landing in the Mare Serenitatis, or Sea of Serenity.

Everything was working fine up until the final moments, as is often the case in space. The craft, having made it perfectly to its intended point of descent, determined that all systems were ready and the landing process would go ahead as planned.

They lost telemetry for a bit, and had to reset the craft to get the main engine back online… and then communication dropped while only a handful of kilometers from the surface. The “selfie” image above was taken from 22 km above the surface, just a few minutes that. The spacecraft was announced as lost shortly afterwards.

Clearly disappointed but also exhilarated, the team quickly recovered its composure, saying “the achievement of getting to where we got is tremendous and we can be proud,” and of course, “if at first you don’t succeed… try, try again.”

The project began as an attempt to claim the Google Lunar Xprize, announced more than a decade ago, but which proved too difficult for teams to attempt in the timeframe specified. Although the challenge and its prize money lapsed, Israel’s SpaceIL team continued its work, bolstered by the support of Israel Aerospace Industries, the state-owned aviation concern there.

It’s worth noting that Beresheet did enjoy considerable government support in this way, it’s a far cry from any other large-scale government-run mission, and can safely be considered “private” for all intents and purposes. The ~50-person team and $200 million budget are laughably small compared to practically any serious mission, let alone a lunar landing.

I spoke with Xprize’s Founder and CEO, Peter Diamandis and Anousheh Ansari respectively, just before the landing attempt. Both were extremely excited and made it clear that the mission was already considered a huge success.

Historic first private mission to the Moon launches Thursday night

“What I’m seeing here is an incredible who’s who from science, education, and government who have gathered to watch this miracle take place,” Diamandis said. “We launched this competition now 11 years ago to inspire and educate engineers, and despite the fact that it ran out of time it has achieved 100 percent of its goal. Even if it doesn’t make it onto the ground fully intact it has ignited a level of electricity and excitement that reminds me of the Ansari Xprize 15 years ago.”

He’s not the only one. Ansari, who funded the famous spaceflight Xprize that bore her name, and who has herself visited space as one of the first tourist-astronauts above the International Space Station, felt a similar vibe.

“It’s an amazing moment, bringing so many great memories up,” she told me. “It reminds me of when we were all out in the Mojave waiting for the launch of Spaceship One.”

Ansari emphasized the feeling the landing evoked of moving forward as a people.

“Imagine, over the last 50 years only 500 people out of seven billion have been to space — that number will be thousands soon,” she said. “We believe there’s so much more that can be done in this area of technology, a lot of real business opportunities that benefit civilization but also humanity.”

Congratulations to the SpaceIL team for their achievement, and here’s hoping the next attempt makes it all the way down.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Sharp goes clamshell with its folding phone concept

The beauty of the foldable is 2019 is that there’s no consensus yet on the “right” way to do things. We’ve seen a number of different takes on the space as the year has progressed, and no two are exactly the same.

Keep in mind that this device from Sharp is still very much a concept. And even if it does come to market, it’s still going to be tough to get your hands on the product here in the States, as Sharp has a virtually non-existent mobile footprint. Still, it’s nice to see someone going full clamshell.

So far, the Motorola RAZR patent and one of several TCL concepts are the closest we’ve seen. Ultimately the form factor is less about maximizing screen space than it is minimizing pocket real estate, with the unfolded prototype measuring a not-crazy 6.18 inches. There’s also a nice bit of nostalgia baked in for those of us who remember the days before every phone was a smart one.

Sharp certainly knows how to make a display, and while I don’t expect any phone from the company to set the world on fire, there’s probably something in the return of the clamshell, after all.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Walmart acquires ad tech startup Polymorph Labs to scale up its ad business

Amazon has a large and growing advertising business, but rival Walmart’s own ad business is much smaller. It’s now working to change that. Earlier this year, the retailer consolidated ad sales for its stores and websites and said it was ready to start monetizing its shopper data on a grander scale. Today, its efforts continue as Walmart says it has bought the advertising technology company, Polymorph Labs, to help it better compete via online digital ads, targeted using shopper data.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The San Francisco-based startup’s technology and assets will allow Walmart to deliver more relevant ads to online shoppers, the retailer says. Meanwhile, Polymorph’s team will join Walmart’s in-house advertising business, the Walmart Media Group.

Specifically, Polymorph’s technology includes a high-speed ad server, a self-serve interface, and server-side header bidding. This, says Walmart, will make advertising easier for thousands of brands and will deliver more relevant ads to consumers — and quicker than typically possible because of Polymorph’s “much faster” client-side server.

The technology complements Walmart’s existing ad tech investments, including its omni-channel ad targeting and measurement solution, and will allow it to later expand into new areas like real-time auctions across multiple pricing models (cost per click, cost per impression, and cost per conversation).

At Walmart, Polymorph’s technology will allow advertisers to target segments based on shopping behavior.

For example, an advertiser could choose to target a cat food buyer instead of a dog food buyer, then automate ad delivery and measure whether those ads led to sales.

The acquisition comes only months after Walmart brought its ad sales in-house, in an effort to build out a bigger advertising business. The move also allows big suppliers — like P&G, Unilever, and Mondelez — to interact with one ad team instead of different groups within and outside the retailer.

It also allows advertisers to leverage a unique combination of in-store and online shopper data from Walmart’s hundreds of millions of customers, making ad buying more efficient.

The acquisition comes at a time when Amazon has been rapidly growing its ad revenues by allowing merchants to pay for better placement in search ads. In February, research firm eMarketer upped its estimates as to how large Amazon’s ad business had become, in fact. It said that Amazon’s ad revenue had totaled $3.3 billion for 2017, up from an earlier estimate of $1.9 billion. And it said Amazon was on track to increase its ad revenues to $15 billion by 2020.

Walmart, on the other hand, has room to grow.

“We have a tiny ad business,” CEO Doug McMillon told investors last October, according to a report by Bloomberg. “It could be bigger.”

Walmart says 90 percent of U.S. consumers shop at Walmart every year and its stores and websites see nearly 160 million visitors every week. It declines to say how many website visitors it has, but comScore estimates over 100 million monthly actives.

Next month, Walmart says it’s hosting “Fifty-Two Sixty,” an event where CMOs, agency folks, and senior brand marketers will hobnob with Walmart execs to talk about brands should be thinking about their retail strategies.

“Walmart Media Group enables brands to reach more customers at scale and measure advertising effectiveness across the entire shopping journey,” said Stefanie Jay, Vice President and General Manager, Walmart Media Group, in a statement about today’s news. “Simply put, we can help brands understand if someone saw their ad on Walmart’s platform or across the Internet, and then purchased the product in-store or online. No one else can do this at scale like Walmart.”

Polymorph Labs was founded in 2013, and had proven its ad tech over the past five years, Walmart notes. Previously known as AdsNative, Polymorph Labs had raised $10.6 million from Rakuten Ventures, Interwest Partners and Onset Ventures, according to Crunchbase.

The company had under 50 total employees, including full-time employees and contractors. Founders Satish Polisetti (CEO) and Dhawal Mujumdar are both joining, and Walmart is making offers to the full-time team.


Source: Tech Crunch

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MIT’s recycling sorting robot can ‘feel’ the difference between materials

RoCycle is, naturally, short for “recycling robot,” the latest offering out of MIT’s CSAIL lab. The pick and place ‘bot utilizes a unique combination of sensors to help distinguish the material differences of objects, in order to sort them ahead of the recycling process.

Built on top of a Rethink Robotics Baxter, the system utilizes a teflon gripper with built in sensors that are capable of determining an object’s makeup based on size and stiffness. It’s not completely perfect just yet.

The technology works thusly,

The team’s gripper first uses its “strain sensor” to estimate an object’s size, and then uses its two pressure sensors to measure the force needed to grasp an object. These metrics – along with calibration data on the size and stiffnesses of objects of different material types – is what gives the gripper a sense of what material the object is made of. (Since the tactile sensors are also conductive, they can detect metal by how much it changes the electrical signal.)

The school notes that it’s got a pretty good 85 percent accuracy rate when attempting to identify stationary objects.

That number drops a good deal down to 63 percent when objects are moving in a conveyer belt type situation — which is the kind of real world scenario in which such an object would likely be deployed. Much of the inaccuracy stems from products like cans where an outer paper level covers tin or aluminum.

The team is working on it by adding more sensors. It also seems likely that such a technology would be used in tandem with existing system, which use magnets to separate out metals and vision to determine material properties. CSAIL plans to combine the technology with a vision system in its own future experiments.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Tinder becomes the top-grossing, non-game app in Q1 2019, ending Netflix’s reign

For the first time in years, Netflix is no longer the top grossing, non-game mobile app. Instead, that title now goes to dating app Tinder. The change in position is not surprising, given Netflix’s decision in December to stop paying the so-called “Apple tax.” That is, it no longer allows new users to sign up and subscribe to its service through its iOS application.

The change was said to cost Apple hundreds of millions in lost revenue per year, given that Netflix’s app had been the world’s top-earning, non-game app since Q4 2016. Now, instead of giving up its 15 to 30 percent cut of subscription revenue, new users have to sign up through Netflix’s website before they can use the app on mobile devices, including both iOS and Android. (Netflix had dropped in-app subscriptions on Android earlier.)

App store intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimated Netflix had earned $853 million in 2018 on the iOS App Store. A 30 percent cut would have been around $256 million. However, after the first year, subscription apps only have to pay out 15 percent to Apple. But Netflix had a special deal, according to John Gruber — it only had to pay 15 percent from the get-go.

In any event, it’s still a large sum. And one large enough to end Netflix’s reign at the top of the revenue charts.

In Q1 2019, Sensor Tower estimates Netflix pulled in $216.3 million globally, across both the Apple App Store and Google Play, down 15 percent quarter-over-quarter from $255.7 million in Q4 2018.

Meanwhile, Tinder’s revenue has climbed. In the first quarter, it saw revenue grow by 42 percent year-over-year, to reach $260.7 million, up from $183 million in Q1 2018.

That put it at the top, according to both Sensor Tower and App Annie’s estimates.

Beyond Tinder, Line and Line Manga, the rest of the top grossing, non-game apps in Q1 2019 were also focused on streaming, music and video, in Sensor Tower’s analysis. This included Tencent Video (No. 3), iQIYI (No. 4), YouTube (No. 5), Pandora (No. 6), Kwai (No. 7) and Youku (No. 10).

Meanwhile, the top downloaded, non-game apps in the quarter were largely those focused on social media, messaging and video. This included, in order: WhatsApp, Messenger, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, SHAREit, YouTube, LIKE Video, Netflix and Snapchat.

tiktok ios icon

TikTok, notably, has held onto its No. 3 position, having grown its new users 70 percent year-over-year, by adding 188 million in Q1. The growth was driven by India, where 88.6 million new users joined the app, compared with “just” 13.2 million in the U.S. — or 181 percent year-over-year growth.

To date, Sensor Tower has seen the app installed more than 1.1 billion times. (But keep in mind that’s not total users — many people install it on multiple devices. Nor is it monthly active users. On that front, the app has 500 million monthly actives as of the end of its third quarter 2018.)

TikTok also did well on the revenue side thanks to in-app purchases, though not well enough to start ranking in the top charts. User spending was 222 percent higher in Q1 2019 versus Q1 2018, reaching an estimated $18.9 million worldwide.

Overall, Apple’s App Store accounted for 64 percent of revenue in Q1, with consumer spending reaching $12.4 billion compared to Google Play’s $7.1 billion. New app downloads slowed on iOS in Q1, decreasing 4.7 percent year-over-year, to 7.4 billion, while Google Play downloads grew 18.8 percent to 20.7 billion.


Source: Tech Crunch

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The definitive Niantic reading guide

In just a few years, Niantic has evolved from internal side project into an independent industry trailblazer. Having reached tremendous scale in such a short period of time, Niantic acts as a poignant crash course for founders and company builders. As our EC-1 deep-dive into the company shows, lessons from the team’s experience building the Niantic’s product offering remain just as fresh as painful flashbacks to the problems encountered along the way.

As we did for our Patreon EC-1, we’ve poured through every analysis we could find on Niantic and have compiled a supplemental list of resources and readings that are particularly useful for getting up to speed on the company.

Reading time for this article is about 9.5 minutes. It is part of the Extra Crunch EC-1 on Niantic. Feature illustration by Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch.

I. Background: The Story of Niantic

Google-Incubated Niantic, Maker of Ingress, Stepping Out on Its Own | August 2015 | In August of 2015, Niantic announced that it would spin out from Google and become an independent company. As discussed in WSJ’s coverage of the news, Niantic looked at the spin out as a way to accelerate growth and collaborate with the broader entertainment ecosystem.


Source: Tech Crunch