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Pioneering private space explorer Anousheh Ansari welcomes ISS commercialization

XPRIZE CEO and Prodea founder Anousheh Ansari dreamt of being an astronaut as a child growing up in Iran, but understandably most people around her were skeptical about her ambitions. Yet in 2006, she made that dream come true when she became the first woman to visit the International Space Station as a privately funded citizen (as well as the first Iranian citizen and the first Muslim woman), traveling aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket as a trained and paying guest of the Russian Space Agency.

At the time, NASA wasn’t thrilled about the idea and definitely did not want Ansari to pay a visit. 13 years later, the U.S. space agency announced earlier this week that the ISS is officially “open for business,” and revealed that pricing for a night’s stay will be around $35,000 per person (that’s just lodging – you still have to figure out your own transportation). At a Creative Destruction Lab event in Toronto this week, I spoke to Ansari about what this milestone announcement means for commercial spaceinterests, and her perspective on the field and opportunity for space-focused startups in general.

“Actually, I wish I had my laptop to I could show a slide from probably six, seven years ago, maybe even longer, which I used that said ‘ISS for rent. It’s coming true! I’m telling you, I can predict the future,” Ansari joked. “But I think it makes so much sense.”

There are a number of reasons the situation has changed regarding how NASA views commercial and private interest in visiting and using the space station. Not least of which is that the station has now aged beyond its original mission parameters, and is definitely nearing its true functional end of life.

The space station is […] already on extended life right now,” Ansari said. “So now they can generate revenue from, make good use of the space station [beyond its intended mission] so they can invest in the next generation.”

Even if its original, official mission is technically ended, there’s a lot of advantage that private companies can still derive from the facility in the interim.

“There’s so much interest in doing research and experimentation on board the space station, I think the cost is incredibly low,” she added, referring to the pricing quoted in NASA’s guidelines for private astronauts. “I mean, there’s still the cost of access, which will mean it’s not affordable for everyone. But the renting space station for $35,000 a night and doing experiments. It’s incredible.”

“I think there will be a lot of companies, a lot of, you know, pharma, medical and health companies will definitely take advantage of that and do experiments,” Ansari continued. “And, and I’m excited. I’m glad it’s happening.”

PLAYA VISTA, CALIFORNIA – MAY 15: (L-R) Anousheh Ansari, CEO, XPRIZE, Peter Diamandis, Founder & Executive Chairman, XPRIZE and Emily Church, Executive Director of the Global Learning, XPRIZE attend the Global Learning XPRIZE Foundation Grand-prize Awards at Google Playa Vista Office on May 15, 2019 in Playa Vista, California. (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Global Learning XPRIZE)

For Ansari, the growth in the commercial space sector has its origins in XPRIZE, the organization she leads as CEO as of last October. The Ansari X Prize, a $10 million prize so-named thanks to a multimillion dollar contribution provided by Ansari and her brother-in-law Amir Ansari, was awarded in 2004, and paved the way for the kind of business SpaceX operates today.

“The first prize was a $10 million prize, to go to space twice within two weeks, because we wanted to show that it can be repeated, which means that it is commercially viable – it’s not a science fiction project, and it can be done at a reasonable cost” Ansari recalled. “We had a requirement, I think it had to be 95%, reusable, outside of the mass of the fuel. We didn’t want someone to build two spaceships, fly this one, and then fly this other one. So it was all designed because we wanted to make sure it can really be a business.”

The key ingredient here was to show, for the first time, that this could be a commercially viable interest at investment levels that were not out of reach for private companies to pursue. And another key ingredient was that the project involved making sure participants actually could launch, and were cleared by relevant agencies to do so.

“We had to work with regulators and the FAA to figure out how people could even launch, because FAA didn’t know how to deal with this,” Ansari said. “They’d never had a private company wanting to launch something to space. So because of our work, and and the work we did with NASA and the regulators, they opened up, they created this division – now it’s called the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation.”

SpaceX’s CRS-11 launch from 2017. SpaceX’s ability to launch privately is due in part to the work XPRIZE did to help establish guidelines for commercial launch operations.

While her work to date has broken a lot of ground and opened up avenues for startups, Ansari had specific requests about new areas of opportunity and consideration for entrepreneurs in attendance at the Creative Destruction Lab event during a keynote talk she gave to kickoff the first day. She noted that there exists plenty of potential for “cloud systems that exist above the clouds,” since data warehouse facilities operating in space would have immediate benefits in terms of energy collection and thermal management.

She also called for startups to focus on making sure they consider knock-on effects of the things they build. Space debris, as one example in the specific – and more generally, a reminder that exponential change naturally engenders a reaction of fear.

“It’s a difficult thing, because as engineers we just like to play with toys and play with technology,” she said. “But it’s up to us in this room to help make sense of this.”


Source: Tech Crunch

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Tesla is bringing the ‘Fallout Shelter’ game to its cars

As part of the gaming option for Tesla’s cars, Todd Howard, the director of Bethesda Games, said that the company’s “Fallout Shelter” game will be coming to Tesla displays.

Elon Musk is a huge fan of the Fallout series, saying in an interview at the E3 gaming conference that he’d explored “every inch” of Fallout 3.

Earlier this year, Tesla announced that it was adding “2048” and “Atari’s Super Breakout” to the list of games that drivers and passengers can play on the company’s dashboard display.

The company added Atari games to its slate of apps and services last August via a software update. At the time, the initial slate of games included “Missile Command”, “Asteroids”, “Lunar Lander” and “Centipede”.

Tesla is rolling out new Atari games as part of its TeslAtari feature


Source: Tech Crunch

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DEEPFAKES Accountability Act would impose unenforceable rules — but it’s a start

The new DEEPFAKES Accountability Act in the House — and yes, that’s an acronym — would take steps to criminalize the synthetic media referred to in its name, but its provisions seem too optimistic in the face of the reality of this threat. On the other hand, it also proposes some changes that will help bring the law up to date with the tech.

The bill, proposed by Representative Yvette Clarke (D-NY), it must be said, has the most ridiculous name I’ve encountered: the Defending Each and Every Person from False Appearances by Keeping Exploitation Subject to Accountability Act. Amazingly, that acronym (backronym, really) actually makes sense.

It’s intended to stem the potential damage of synthetic media purporting to be authentic, which is rare enough now but soon may be commonplace. With just a few minutes (or even a single frame) of video and voice, a fake version of a person, perhaps a public figure or celebrity, can be created that is convincing enough to fool anyone not looking too closely. And the quality is only getting better.

Mona Lisa frown: Machine learning brings old paintings and photos to life

DEEPFAKES would require anyone creating a piece of synthetic media imitating a person to disclose that the video is altered or generated, using “irremovable digital watermarks, as well as textual descriptions.” Failing to do so will be a crime.

The act also establishes a right on the part of victims of synthetic media to sue the creators and/or otherwise “vindicate their reputations” in court.

Many of our readers will have already spotted the enormous loopholes gaping in this proposed legislation.

First, if a creator of a piece of media is willing to put their name to it and document that it is fake, those are almost certainly not the creators or the media we need to worry about. Jordan Peele is the least of our worries (and in fact the subject of many of our hopes). Requiring satirists and YouTubers to document their modified or generated media seems only to assign paperwork to people already acting legally and with no harmful intentions.

Facebook will not remove deepfakes of Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian and others from Instagram

Second, watermark and metadata-based markers are usually trivial to remove. Text can be cropped, logos removed (via more smart algorithms), and even a sophisticated whole-frame watermark might be eliminated simply by being re-encoded for distribution on Instagram or YouTube. Metadata and documentation are often stripped or otherwise made inaccessible. And the inevitable reposters seem to have no responsibility to keep that data intact, either — so as soon as this piece of media leaves the home of its creator, it is out of their control and very soon will no longer be in compliance with the law.

Third, it’s far more likely that truly damaging synthetic media will be created with an eye to anonymity and distributed by secondary methods. The law here is akin to asking bootleggers to mark their barrels with their contact information. No malicious actor will even attempt to mark their work as an “official” fake.

That said, just because these rules are unlikely to prevent people from creating and distributing damaging synthetic media — what the bill calls “advanced technological false personation records” — that doesn’t mean the law serves no purpose here.

One of the problems with the pace of technology is that it frequently is some distance ahead of the law, not just in spirit but in letter. With something like revenge porn or cyberbullying, there’s often literally no legal recourse because these are unprecedented behaviors that may not fit neatly under any specific criminal code. A law like this, flawed as it is, defines the criminal behavior and puts it on the books, so it’s clear what is and isn’t against the law. So while someone faking a Senator’s face may not voluntarily identify themselves, if they are identified, they can be charged.

To that end a later portion of the law is more relevant and realistic: It seeks to place unauthorized digital recreations of people under the umbrella of unlawful impersonation statutes. Just as it’s variously illegal to pretend you’re someone you’re not, to steal someone’s ID, to pretend you’re a cop, and so on, it would be illegal to nefariously misrepresent someone digitally.

That gives police and the court system a handhold when cases concerning synthetic media begin pouring in. They can say “ah, this falls under statute so and so” rather than arguing about jurisdiction or law and wasting everyone’s time — an incredibly common (and costly) occurrence.

The bill puts someone at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in charge of things like revenge porn (“false intimate depictions”) to coordinate prosecution and so on. Again, these issues are so new that it’s often not even clear who you or your lawyer or your local police are supposed to call.

Turing-winning AI researcher warns against secretive research and fake ‘self-regulation’

Lastly the act would create a task force at the Department of Homeland Security that would form the core of government involvement with the practice of creating deep fakes, and any countermeasures created to combat them. The task force would collaborate with private sector companies working on their own to prevent synthetic media from gumming up their gears (Facebook has just had a taste), and report regularly on the state of things.

It’s a start, anyway — rare it is that the government acknowledges something is a problem and attempts to mitigate it before that thing is truly a problem. Such attempts are usually put down as nanny state policies, alas, so we wait for a few people to have their lives ruined then get to work with hindsight. So while the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act would not, I feel, create much in the way of accountability for the malicious actors most likely to cause problems, it does begin to set a legal foundation for victims and law enforcement to fight against those actors.

You can track the progress of the bill (H.R. 3230 in the 116th Congress) here, and read the full text below.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Daily Crunch: Telegram faces new attack in China

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Telegram faces DDoS attack in China… again

The popular encrypted messaging service Telegram is once again being hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in Asia as protestors in Hong Kong take to the streets.

As they look to evade surveillance measures by government officials, Telegram is one of the tools that organizers have turned to. Four years ago, a similar attack struck the company’s service, just as China was initiating a crackdown on human rights lawyers in the country.

2. Bird confirms acquisition of Scoot

This acquisition means Bird may finally get to operate shared electric scooters in San Francisco.

3. LaLiga fined $280K for soccer app’s privacy-violating spy mode

Users of the LaLiga app were outraged to discover the smartphone software does rather more than show minute-by-minute commentary of football matches: It can use the microphone and GPS of fans’ phones to record their surroundings in a bid to identify bars that are unofficially streaming games.

4. Google leaks its own phone

Details of the Pixel 4 have been swirling around this week, so Google decided to just leak the design of its next phone via its official Twitter account, revealing the backplate and new camera module on the smartphone.

5. NFC gets a lot more powerful in iOS 13

This opens up a range of new application possibilities, Apple said, including the ability to create apps that read passports and contactless smart cards and interact with NFC-enabled hardware.

6. Facebook collected device data on 187,000 users using banned snooping app

The social media giant said in a letter to Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s office — which TechCrunch obtained — that it collected data on 31,000 users in the U.S., including 4,300 teenagers. The rest of the collected data came from users in India.

7. Uber’s annual flying taxi summit reveals Uber Air has a ways to go

We talked to Uber Director of Engineering for Energy Storage Systems Celina Mikolajczak at the company’s third annual Elevate Summit in Washington, D.C. this week. (Extra Crunch membership required.)


Source: Tech Crunch

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Tyson Foods launches its take on alternative proteins with new “Raised & Rooted” brand

Earlier today, Tyson Foods announced the launch of its first foray into the meat replacement market with the unveiling of its Raised and Rooted brand.

While the company’s plant-based nuggets present a direct challenge to companies like Beyond Meat, Tyson Foods is playing a different game by introducing consumers to foods that are blended with meat and protein replacements.

So it’s not exactly a direct competitor to Beyond Meat, a former Tyson Foods venture portfolio investment, or Impossible Foods, which are the two current leaders in the growing alterna-beef category.

Rather it seems to be an attempt to up-sell customers on products with less beef for potentially more money? Tyson did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

For Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson Foods, making alternative proteins is less of an optional strategy and more of a necessary response to what could be an existential threat to the traditional meat market in the U.S. and around the world.

By 2040 traditional meat consumption could fall by 33%, according to a recent analysis by the consulting firm A.T. Kearny.

Chart courtesy of AT Kearny

“All in all, cultured meat and new meat replacement products are going to disrupt the $1,000 billion conventional meat industry with all its supplier companies,” the study’s authors write. “This disruption is supported by a general shift toward consumption of non-meat proteins (for example, legumes and nuts) as a consequence of new lifestyle trends, all aimed at a more sustainable and healthier diet, as well as regulatory measures against conventional meat.”

Tyson has launched its new brand with just these pressures in mind. The company is the first large meat producer to confront the changes that are coming to the market at anything approaching the scale of the challenge.

What remains to be seen is whether consumers will respond to the concept of “blended” burger outside of the fast food restaurants where those kinds of products are already served. It’s trying with its premium sausage brand, Aidells, along with the Raised & Rooted patty, which is a blend of beef and vegetable proteins.

“Today’s consumers are seeking more protein options so we’re creating new products for the growing number of people open to flexible diets that include both meat and plant-based protein,” said Noel White, president and CEO of Tyson Foods, in a statement. “For us, this is about ‘and’ – not ‘or.’ We remain firmly committed to our growing traditional meat business and expect to be a market leader in alternative protein, which is experiencing double-digit growth and could someday be a billion-dollar business for our company.”

Tyson’s plant-based nuggets, made from a blend of pea protein isolate and other plant ingredients, will be out on store shelves in the fall, while the blended beef and vegetable burgers will hit store shelves in the fall.

Tyson also has bets on other, novel meat replacements and alternative protein sources. The company has invested in lab-grown meat makers like Memphis Meats and Future Meat Technologies and is also backing Mycotechnology, a mushroom-based protein producer, through its venture capital arm, Tyson Ventures.

Investors in newly public Beyond Meat, seem un-fazed by Tyson’s new offerings. The stock, dipped on the news (and a downgrade from IPO underwriter J.P. Morgan), but it’s still up more than 100% on the year.

 


Source: Tech Crunch

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Creative Destruction Lab’s second Super Session is an intense two-day startup testbed

Canadian startup program Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) escapes succinct description in some ways – it’s an accelerator, to be sure, and an incubator. Startups show up and present to a combined audience of investors, mentors, industry players (some of whom, like former astronaut Chris Hadfield, verge on celebrity status) – but it’s not a demo day, per se, and presentations happen in focused rooms with key, vertically aligned audience members who can provide much more than just funding to the startups who participate.

North founder Stephen Lake on stage at CDL’s Super Session 2019.

Seven years into its existence, CDL really puts on a show for its cornerstone annual event (itself only two years old) clearly shows the extent to which the program has scaled. From an inaugural cohort of just 25 startups with a focus on science, CDL has grown to the point where it’s graduating 150 startups spanning cohorts across six cities associated with multiple academic institutions. It has consistently added new areas of focus, including a space track this year, for which Hadfield is a key mentor, as is Anousheh Ansari, the first female private space tourist to pay her own way to the International Space Station and the co-founder and CEO of Prodea Systems.

The ‘Super’ in Super Session

This is the second so-called ‘Super Session’ after the event’s debut in 2017. It includes roughly 850 attendees, made up of investors, mentors, industry sponsors and the graduating startups themselves. As CDL Fellow Chen Fong put it in his welcoming remarks, CDL’s Super Session is an opportune moment for networking, mentorship and demonstration of the companies the program has helped foster and grow.

A keynote track included talks by Ansari and Hadfield, as well as from Celmatix CEO and founder Piraye Beim, and a fireside chat with North founder and CEO Stephen Lake. Subjects ranged from the importance of the linkage between exploration and technology, to what Beim described as “probably the first CDL talk to include menstrual health, vibrators, incontinence, and menopause, all in the span of 15 minutes.” Lake meanwhile discussed the future of seamless human-computer interfaces, and Ansari discussed her work founding the XPRIZE program and the impetus behind the current moment and interest in private space innovation.

Celmatix CEO and founder Piraye Beim speaking at the 2019 Creative Destruction Lab Super Session in Toronto.

The variety in the keynote speaker mix and topic selection is reflective of the eclectic and comprehensive nature of CDL’s modern program, which scouts globally for prospective startup participants. Its six hubs then enter into a matching process with startups signed on to take part, where each scores the other and that leads to placement.

How CDL works

CDL’s originating thesis is all about supplying the limiting resource in a startup ecosystem; the thing which the program’s organizers think is the missing ingredient that differentiates Silicon Valley from any other innovation hub in the world. Namely, CDL theorizes that this missing ingredient is what CDL Associate Director Kristjan Sigurdson calls “entrepreneurial judgement.”

Sigurdson explains that this basically boils down to the ability to know what are the most important things you need to do as an entrepreneur, and in what order. The missing piece, he says, isn’t ideas, funding availability or a lack of effort – instead it’s the kind of judgement that results from experience. CDL’s model, which emphasizes five sessions held periodically during which a panel of mentors helps startups set three clearly defined objectives they can accomplish within the next eight weeks.

After each of these sessions, some triage occurs – essentially CDL mentors gathered in closed door meetings and are asked if they’d work with any of the startups that presented during the session. If startups don’t receive sponsorship in these closed door meetings, then they’re not asked to participate in the next session, and effectively are out of the program. All told, the program graduates around 40-45 percent of the startups that enter the program, Sigurdson said.

Group session with small group mentoring on site at Creative Destruction Lab’s 2019 Super Session in Toronto.

CDL is also a bit out of the ordinary in that it takes no equity from the startups it works with – it’s fundamentally an academic program, started by the University of Toronto, and its designed to provide real-world business cases for the school’s MBA students to work on. But it’s become so much more – providing mentorship and guidance as described, and also connecting researchers who often enter into formal advisory roles with CDL companies.

Sigurdson also noted that CDL has actually seen “much higher investment levels” vs. the average for more traditional incubation or acceleration programs. “It’s a program that I think allows companies to raise money much more organically even though it’s an artificial program we created,” he said, referencing CDL’s own comparative research.

Lab-grown and forged in fire

True to its name, Creative Destruction Lab in practice feels like a generative cauldron of ideas, shared with peers and industry specialists for debate, discussion and reformation. Sessions are remarkable to witness – where else are you going to see brand new companies get direct feedback from astronauts and representatives of global space agencies, for instance.

Creative Destruction Lab opening keynote for its Super Session 2019 event.

The model is unique, but clearly effective, and able to scale – as evidenced from its growth to what it is today, from its starting point in 2012, when one founder described it as ‘7 people in a room.’ The room featuring presentations from space track companies alone featured around 50 people in attendance for instance – almost all of which were top-flight industry leaders and investors, including Hadfield, Ansari, CDL alumni Mina Mitry of Kepler Communications, and prominent Toronto angel investor Dan Debow. Startups presenting in the space track included Wyvern, a hyperspectral imaging company; Mission Control, a startup that wants to be the software layer for Moon rovers; and Atomos, which is building space tug for extra-atmospheric ‘last-mile’ transportation solutions.

It’s easy to see why this program results in solid investment pipeline, given the profile of the sponsors and mentors involved. And it’s another strong stake in the ground for the claim that Canada’s startup scene, with Toronto as its locus of gravity, is increasingly earning (and outperforming) its reputation as a global center of innovation.


Source: Tech Crunch

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NFC gets a lot more powerful in iOS 13

NFC — the technology that helps to power Apple Pay as well other clever features for iOS apps like Launch Center Pro’s tappable stickers – is getting a big upgrade with the launch of iOS 13, due out this fall. Instead of only allowing iPhone apps to read NFC tags — apps will be able to write directly to blank tags, as well as interact with tags through native protocols. This opens up a range of new application possibilities, Apple told attendees at its Worldwide Developer Conference last week, including the ability to create apps that read passports, contactless smart cards, and interact with NFC-enabled hardware.

We’ve already seen the potential for NFC that goes beyond just an easier way to check out at point-of-sale in a traditional retail environment, as with Apple Pay.

For example, both Apple and Google recently announced support for Apple Pay- and Google Pay-enabled contactless payments for the NYC Subway. Portland offers something similar, as do several other international cities.

With the updates to the core NFC framework, however, the iPhone’s NFC capabilities will get even more powerful.

With iOS 13 (on iPhone 7 and up), users will be able to read a range of contactless smartcards and tags, including NFC-enabled passports and other government IDs.

There are already solutions in the works that will take advantage of this new feature.

For example, both Engadget Japan and Nikkei have reported the Japanese government will add support for NFC tag reading to Japan’s national ID (Individual Number Card) when iOS 13 launches later this year.

The news was confirmed by the Japanese government, via a tweet from an advisor to the government’s CIO:

In addition, the U.K. government’s NFC passport reader app, ReadID, will now work on the iPhone as a result of the iOS 13 updates.

“This announcement means that ReadID will also work on iPhones, using the embedded internal NFC capability,” the company said in a blog post.

“Needless to say we are very excited about this. We’re convinced this will have a major impact on the online use cases such as mobile onboarding for banks, especially for countries with a high iPhone penetration,” the announcement read.

Beyond ID-scanning, iOS apps will be able to write to NFC tags (i.e. NDEF writing), and even lock the tag so it can’t be written to again, if the developer chooses.

And now, the core NFC framework will support tag reading and writing across various formats, including not only NFCNDEFTag (for NDEF tags, as offered today), but also Mifare, FeliCa, ISO 7816 (e.g. for passports), and ISO 15693.

That means NFC will work in more places with more type of tags than what’s available today.

Above Image Credit: Ata Distance, which covers Apple Pay and contactless news 

Apple had unveiled some of its plans around NFC by pre-announcing support for NFC stickers and tags that can trigger Apple Pay payments at the Transact conference in Las Vegas, just ahead of WWDC.

Bird (scooters), Bonobos (retailer), and PayByPhone (parking meters) said they would soon support this feature which enables NFC transactions without a terminal or special app from the vendor.

This is enabled by way of new support for Value Added Service (VAS) tags, which also support loyalty sign-ups with merchants. On this front, Apple said that Dairy Queen, Dave & Buster’s, and Caribou Coffee will later this year use NFC tags that make it easier for their customers to sign up for their loyalty programs.

Panera Bread, Yogurtland, and Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwiches will also pilot instant enrollment.

At Apple’s WWDC, the company demonstrated NFC’s expanded abilities in a real-world scenario.

As an example of NFC in action on an iOS 13 device, the company showed off how a merchant could use NFC tags that displayed a product description after the customer scanned it, as well as how another NFC tag could offer the customer a coupon for their purchase, when scanned.

Launch Center Pro developer, David Barnard who had been selling NFC tags that were pre-encoded and locked so they couldn’t work with other apps beyond his own, is now unloading older inventory in preparation for iOS 13. The developer tweeted that his app will soon be able to write to blank NFC stickers, which you can buy in bulk on Amazon.

In addition, the upgrade to Apple’s Siri Shortcuts app means users could kick off an action or even a multi-step workflow just by scanning an NFC tag.

Developers have wanted more NFC capabilities for some time, and Apple has delivered. Consumers may not understand the underlying technology or know what it’s called. However, they will get the “tap to interact” functionality thanks to broad Apple Pay adoption which taught them the behavior.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Google leaks its own phone

Details of the Pixel 4 have been swirling around this week, so Google decided to just leak the design of its next phone via its official Twitter account, revealing the backplate and new camera module on the smartphone.

“Well, since there seems to be some interest, here you go! Wait ’til you see what it can do. #Pixel4,” the tweet from the company’s verified @MadeByGoogle account read.

Renders of the Pixel 4 had leaked this week via smartphone blog Pricebaba.

The back of the phone makes some big changes. Most noticeable is the now-square camera module with a pair of lenses, a flash module and a couple of other sensor modules. Also noteworthy is the apparent lack of a rear fingerprint reader, in contrast to past models. There’s not much else evident here; they didn’t post renders of the device’s front.

Google’s Pixel 3 release kind of cemented that Google doesn’t stake much of the Pixel line’s strengths on hardware specs, it’s all about what it can leverage machine learning software tricks to do within those bounds.

On that note, it’s worth noting that Google has been pretty late to the two-camera rear-module setup; at past events the company has always justified this by suggesting that because of their software they can do more with one than most can do with two. This was clearly the case given the strengths of their cameras, but there are undoubtedly advantages to having dual cameras with different specs; it seems Google is now ready to take this plunge.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Daily Crunch: Fortnite-maker acquires Houseparty

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Fortnite maker Epic acquires social video app Houseparty

The company behind the Unreal Engine and the ridiculously successful Fortnite phenomenon has just picked up Houseparty . Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2015, Houseparty is a social network that delivers video chat across a number of different platforms, including iOS, Android and macOS. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said, “By teaming up, we can build even more fun, shared experiences than what could be achieved alone.”

2. Facebook will not remove deepfakes of Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian and others from Instagram

The work, featured in a site-specific installation in the U.K. as well as circulating in video online, was the first high-profile test of Facebook’s content review policies since the company’s decision not to remove a manipulated video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

3. Here’s Mary Meeker’s 2019 Internet Trends report

Meeker highlighted slowed growth in e-commerce sales, increased internet ad spending, data growth, as well as the rise of freemium subscription business models, telemedicine, photo-sharing, interactive gaming, the on-demand economy and more.

4. Uber will start testing Eats drone delivery

This comes after the Federal Aviation Administration awarded Uber and San Diego the right to test commercial food delivery via drone.

5. Adjust raises $227M to measure mobile ads and prevent fraud

Adjust says it’s now being used in more than 25,000 mobile apps for customers like NBCUniversal, Zynga, Robinhood, Pinterest and Procter & Gamble.

6. Facebook’s Blood Donations feature arrives in US, will alert donors in times of need

Since 2017, the company has been working with blood donation centers worldwide that have been able to use the platform to reach potential donors and then reach out to them in times of need. Now, Facebook is bringing its Blood Donations feature to the U.S.

7. The future of car ownership: Building an online dealership

Several young companies — like Carvana, Shift, Vroom and Joydrive — are attempting to put the dealership online, allowing customers to buy, trade-in and even test drive vehicles without talking to a salesman in an oversized golf pullover. (Extra Crunch membership required.)


Source: Tech Crunch

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London’s LocalGlobe just closed on two funds totaling $295 million

Seven months ago, TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear reported that LocalGlobe had begun the fundraising process for two separate funds. The London-based seed-stage venture firm was raising yet another seed-stage venture fund, O’Hear said at the time; he also noted that LocalGlobe was also expect to raise its first opportunities fund.

Fast-forward and today, the firm, founded by father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein, says it has closed both, having secured $115 million in capital commitments for its seed fund and $180 million in capital commitments for the second fund, dubbed “Latitude,” which it says it will use to support its “winners” at the Series B and later stages.

As we’d written earlier, it’s no surprise that LocalGlobe decided to institutionalize some of its later-stage investments. It’s become a trend in recent years for early-stage firms to raise separate funds to capture more of the upside when their portfolio companies begin to break away from the pack, rather than watch their stakes get hammered down in subsequent funding rounds.

And LocalGlobe already has a bit of a track record in supporting its growing portfolio companies, writing follow-on checks to companies like the property listings startup Zoopla and the money transfer service TransferWise, for example. (Others of the outfit’s best-known investments include the transportation app Citymapper and the SpatialOS software company Improbable.)

Still, LocalGlobe remains even more active on the pre-seed and seed-stage front, where it has funded hundreds of startups over the years. Among the very newest of these is a bet on Yapily, a two-year-old, London-based maker of an API for connecting enterprises to banks that just raised $5.4 million in seed funding co-led by LocalGlobe and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures.

Another new investment is Soda Says, a two-year-old, U.K.-based e-commerce marketplace for daily tech gadgets, from breast pumps to alarm clocks. It raised $2.5 million from investors, including LocalGlobe, late last month.


Source: Tech Crunch