Month: January 2020

Electric scooter startup Spin was long considered to be a bit of an underdog in the micromobility space. Before selling to Ford, Spin had raised just $8 million, while competitors Lime and Bird had raised hundreds of millions. Today, the former underdog is backed by one of the world’s largest transportation companies and has set its sights on becoming an industry leader that sets standards for both vehicles and labor practices.

“We’ve gone from the scrappy upstart, the guy who was least-funded, the guys who kept to their principles and always deployed working with cities, who realized that there would be a chance for a long-term kind of business here,” Spin co-founder Euwyn Poon told TechCrunch. “Now, through the Ford acquisition, we can take an even longer-term view.”

When Ford bought Spin in a deal worth about $100 million in November 2018, Spin employed just 24 people. Now, the company has a few hundred staffers across 70 markets. Spin’s blueprint for growth is what brought Ford to the table, Poon said.

“The acquisition happened at a time when Bird and Lime had probably raised about $700 million each, so they were scaling out,” Poon said. “When Ford was looking to get into this space, instead of doing it themselves or acquiring a larger company, they found us as a great partner because we had these great principles and a big blueprint for scaling out. The capital injection they provided to us has put us in our path so, with the addition of Ford, we’ve been able to tap on their capital resources and have acquired a lot of expertise in the hardware side and a lot of expertise on the regulatory side as well.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Shares of popular American ride-hailing giant Lyft are off 1.5% today in regular trading after The New York Times reported that the company would cut some staff. TechCrunch confirmed with the company that 90 individuals are expected to be impacted by the changes. The company’s shares dipped as far as 3% before recovering.

In a statement, the company said that it has “carefully evaluated the resources we need to achieve our 2020 business goals, and the restructuring of some of our teams reflects that. We are still growing rapidly and plan to hire more than 1,000 new employees this year.”

Lyft has been under pressure along with industry peer Uber to show a path to profitability after a history of cash burn and unprofitability.

During its most recent earnings report, Q3 2019, Lyft said that it expects “to be profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis in the fourth quarter of 2021,” earlier than previously expected. The company’s shares have traded under its IPO price since its debut; worth $72 per share when it went public, Lyft is worth a little more than $47 per share today.

According to the company, marketing and enterprise sales teams were impacted.

Uber, Lyft’s chief domestic rival, also cut staff in recent months. A host of other so-called “unicorn” companies have also reduced their staffing in recent quarters as investors, both public and private, have changed their mood toward losses — gone are the days when expensive, unprofitable growth was hailed as bold. Today, revenue growth stapled to rapidly shrinking unprofitability or even profits is in vogue.

And Lyft, with promises on the board to reach adjusted profitability inside the next eight quarters, has a clock ticking next to its income statement.

The company has made some progress in reducing its losses. In its most-recent quarter, for example, the company’s adjusted net loss fell from $245.3 million (Q3 2018) to $121.6 million (Q3 2019) as its revenue grew from $585.0 million to $955.6 million over the same period. The company’s losses inclusive of all costs worsened over the year, but its Q3 2019 quarter included a huge share-based compensation expense, and $86.6 million charge. Whether investors view the package of adjusted and GAAP results as improvements is up for debate. But, the company’s operating cash flow did improve over the same period.

The results gisted down to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $128.1 million in the third quarter of 2019, far from zero, but a far slimmer percent-of-revenue result compared to the year-ago quarter (Q3 2018).

Lyft will announce its Q4 2019 results on February 11, in about two weeks. We’ll know more about its profitability quest then.

Source: Tech Crunch

Google’s Nest is testing a new feature that will alert you to potential HVAC issues and even help you book an HVAC professional to fix it, thanks to a partnership with Handy. The company says the HVAC alerts are only available in select cities during the testing period. If you’re in one of the supported markets, the new HVAC alert email will include an additional link to a website where you can make an appointment with a repair professional.

Nest users have already been able to sign up to receive a monthly email, the Nest Home Report, which offers a summary of their home’s energy use, safety events, Nest news and information about other Nest products, among other things.

Users who had signed up for this email will be automatically enrolled to receive the new HVAC alert emails starting today, Google says.

Various events could trigger these HVAC alerts, but largely it’s based on warning signs that your Nest detects — like unusual or unexpected heating and cooling patterns.

For example, if the thermostat finds it’s taking longer to cool your home than usual, that could signal a problem with your AC system. The alerts aren’t meant to replace the need for regular HVAC maintenance or service pro expertise, but instead are meant to serve as a warning about a potential issue.

Nest will also take into account your area’s weather before making a determination about a potential problem, as something like an overnight cold snap could work the thermostat more than usual.

In the HVAC alert email, users will be informed as to what system (heating or cooling) experienced the issue. A link to an optional survey about how you resolved the problem, and what it turned out to be, will also be included. This data may be used to help the system get smarter over time, in terms of diagnosing issues.

Not all Nest alerts will mean there’s a need for a service repair pro to come out, of course. Sometimes the problem is as simple as a household member having left a door open, which allowed hot air in, for example.

However, if you decide a service call is warranted, Nest will also now be able to connect you to a local pro in your area. Of course, you can reach out to your original Nest installer (Settings –> Home info –> Nest Pro Installer), if you choose.

But in the test markets, Nest owners will receive emails that also include a link to a website where you can book a qualified HVAC pro. This is done via Handy, which Nest has partnered with on this new effort. That limits the feature only to select regions that Handy supports.

At launch, the Handy booking option will be made available to Nest users in 20 metro areas, including Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Las Vegas, and San Diego, and others. Over the course of the test, it will expand to more regions. Handy today supports a fairly large number of cities across the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

If you don’t want to receive HVAC alerts, you can opt-out using a link in the email.

While Handy is taking on the service calls from Nest users for the time being, Google could eventually choose to connect Nest users with Google My Business profiles in the future, if it chose, or even turn this into a new advertising destination for qualified HVAC pro’s.

To get started, users will need to first sign up for the Nest Home Report if they haven’t already. They’ll then receive alerts as necessary going forward.

 

Source: Tech Crunch

Mostly when we talk about commercial space, and space startups, the focus is relatively close to home – stretching to orbit, and maybe the Moon. But Seattle-based startup Xplore wants to extend the privatization of space further still, through the development of spacecraft and a platform designed for commercial missions to the Moon, Mars, Venus, extra-orbital asteroids and beyond.

Xplore is building spacecraft capable of carrying small payloads (between roughly 70-150 lbs) to deep space destinations. These could include sensors including optical cameras, tools for measuring temperature and other space weather conditions, hyperspectral imaging tools, or even others, smaller spacecraft on behalf of a range of commercial clients. The company began operations in 2017, co-founded by Lisa Rich and Jeff Rich (who also founded and manage VC firm Hemisphere Ventures) and plans to fly its first spacecraft, destined for the Moon, beginning in 2021.

Nanoracks is a commercial space company with an established history of developing and deploying commercial spacecraft, including small satellites launched from the International Space Station (ISS), with payloads from customers including the European Space Agency, NASA, the German Space Agency and many more. In 2016, Nanoracks opened the first commercial testing platform, installed on the outside of the ISS to allow private companies to run experiments in microgravity and in space-based radiation exposure. More recently, it announced that it would be launching technology to demonstrate in-space structural metal cutting for the first time – tech that could one day open up big opportunities in re-using discarded spacecraft for in-space reuse and manufacturing.

Xplore’s spacecraft can hold multiple payloads, and Nanoracks will be able to use their experience to help prepare and integrate the cargo of Xplore’s clients, making it possible to launch more rapidly and more efficiently with less lead time required.

Xplore also plans to fly Earth orbital missions, focusing on rapid response capabilities and handling everything for customers in terms of mission parameters, spacecraft and operations – everything beyond the payload design, basically. With more launch providers and capacity coming online, there’s definitely a growing need for mission logistics and payload launch services – and extra-orbital destinations make Xplore’s an interesting offering that could pave the way for different kinds of businesses and commercial research.

Source: Tech Crunch

Growing up with blindness or low vision can be difficult for kids, not just because they can’t read the same books or play the same games as their sighted peers; Vision is also a big part of social interaction and conversation. This Microsoft research project uses augmented reality to help kids with vision impairment “see” the people they’re talking with.

The challenge people with vision impairment encounter is, of course, that they can’t see the other people around them. This can prevent them from detecting and using many of the nonverbal cues sighted people use in conversation, especially if those behaviors aren’t learned at an early age.

Project Tokyo is a new effort from Microsoft in which its researchers are looking into how technologies like AI and AR can be useful to all people, including those with disabilities. That’s not always the case, though it must be said that voice-powered virtual assistants are a boon to many who can’t as easily use a touchscreen or mouse and keyboard.

The team, which started as an informal challenge to improve accessibility a few years ago, began by observing people traveling to the Special Olympics, then followed that up with workshops involving the blind and low vision community. Their primary realization was of the subtle context sight gives in nearly all situations.

“We, as humans, have this very, very nuanced and elaborate sense of social understanding of how to interact with people — getting a sense of who is in the room, what are they doing, what is their relationship to me, how do I understand if they are relevant for me or not,” said Microsoft researcher Ed Cutrell. “And for blind people a lot of the cues that we take for granted just go away.”

In children this can be especially pronounced, as having perhaps never learned the relevant cues and behaviors, they can themselves exhibit antisocial tendencies like resting their head on a table while conversing, or not facing a person when speaking to them.

To be clear, these behaviors aren’t “problematic” in themselves, as they are just the person doing what works best for them, but they can inhibit everyday relations with sighted people, and it’s a worthwhile goal to consider how those relations can be made easier and more natural for everyone.

The experimental solution Project Tokyo has been pursuing involves a modified HoloLens — minus the lens, of course. The device is also a highly sophisticated imaging device that can identify objects and people if provided with the right code.

The user wears the device like a high-tech headband, and a custom software stack provides them with a set of contextual cues:

• When a person is detected, say four feet away on the right, the headset will emit a click that sounds like it is coming from that location.
• If the face of the person is known, a second “bump” sound is made and the person’s name announced (again, audible only to the user).
• If the face is not known or can’t be seen well, a “stretching” sound is played that modulates as the user directs their head towards the other person, ending in a click when the face is centered on the camera (which also means the user is facing them directly).
• For those nearby, an LED strip shows a white light in the direction of a person who has been detected, and a green light if they have been identified.

Other tools are being evaluated, but this set is a start, and based on a case study with a game 12-year-old named Theo, they could be extremely helpful.

Microsoft’s post describing the system and the team’s work with Theo and others is worth reading for the details, but essentially Theo began to learn the ins and outs of the system and in turn began to manage social situations using cues mainly used by sighted people. For instance, he learned that he can deliberately direct his attention at someone by turning his head towards them, and developed his own method of scanning the room to keep tabs on those nearby — neither one possible when one’s head is on the table.

That kind of empowerment is a good start, but this is definitely a work in progress. The bulky, expensive hardware isn’t exactly something you’d want to wear all day, and naturally different users will have different needs. What about expressions and gestures? What about signs and menus? Ultimately the future of Project Tokyo will be determined, as before, by the needs of the communities who are seldom consulted when it comes to building AI systems and other modern conveniences.

Source: Tech Crunch

Last year saw global smartphone sales decline for the first time since analysts started tracking such things. In Gartner’s case, that comprises a full 11 years, as figures dropped 2% for 2019. Following on last week’s global device forecast, the firm is drilling down on smartphone figures with some slightly rosier results.

According to the new numbers from the firm, global smartphone rates are expected to reverse course slightly for 2020, with a predicted 3% bump in worldwide sales. It’s a minor success, but after a few years of stagnation and then decline, a small victory is a victory no less.

I won’t dig too far into why numbers have been falling lately (I’d direct you here instead), but 2020 is expected to be the first year the move to 5G will finally see some real, tangible payoff for manufacturers. Apple, of course, is expected to get into the game at the end of the year, with the next iPhone, while a new batch of Qualcomm chips are helping to make cheaper 5G devices a reality.

5G phone sales are expected to have their largest impact in China and the broader Asia/Pacific regions. Those areas are expected to increase at 5.1% and 5.7% in overall sales, year over year, respectively. The Middle East and North Africa region, meanwhile, should get the biggest bump, at 5.9% for the year.

Ultimately, 5G may only be a temporary solution to declining smartphone sales. Without a radical shift in form factor or functionality, it’s hard to imagine smartphone sales seeing a substantial course correction in the coming years.

Source: Tech Crunch

Labor markets, particularly those in the tech industry, are incredibly lopsided against employees. Companies screen, interview, and negotiate with thousands of candidates per year, while employees may only go through recruiting a handful of times in their lives. Inevitably, they can select the wrong positions, pick the wrong managers to work with, and end up with a salary well below market rate.

New York City-based Free Agency wants to become the advocate of choice for this high-priced talent. Taking its cue from Hollywood and the sports world, the growing startup wants to identify great workers and offer them the career counseling, interview guidance, and salary negotiation prowess to let them do their best work — and at the right wage.

The company, which was founded last year by Sherveen Mashayekhi and Alex Rothberg, exclusively told TechCrunch that it has now reached 100 “Free Agents” on its platform, and it also announced that it has netted a combined $5.35 million in seed investments led by Resolute Ventures and Bloomberg Beta last year.

The way Free Agency works is simple. In exchange for the service’s help in finding and negotiating a career change, the startup takes 5-10% of its client’s first-year salary at their new company. As an example, given that median tech salaries at top companies have hovered around $200,000, that would be a fee of $10,000-$20,000.

That may sound exorbitant, but for the founders of Free Agency, it is anything but. They believe that many employees regularly fail to find the most ideal companies to work for and to negotiate the best salaries, which means that a significant amount of money is being left on the table by their potential clients.

“Our business model keeps us incentive-aligned with the candidate, driven by outcomes rather than upfront fees,” Mashayekhi, who is CEO, explained to me. “But it’s also important to note that Free Agency is, philosophically, also aligned with what employers want. Happy candidates who feel fairly paid will remain at their jobs longer and contribute more productivity. We help make happy candidates.”

Free Agency is in many ways a parallel to the rise of income-share agreements (ISAs) in the edtech world, which my colleague Eric Peckham has written about extensively in recent months. In lieu of tuition, some new education startups are using ISAs as a way to guarantee better employment outcomes for students while limiting their debt burden. Their growing popularity has spawned significant investor interest.

Today, Free Agency is barely one year old with just about 11 employees on the payroll. Longer term though, it wants to manage the budding careers of tech workers in much the way that Hollywood agents often do — finding new projects to work on, helping its talent develop their own skills, brands, and thought leadership, and helping them network with key decision-makers so they get called upon when great new opportunities arise.

“Today, we’re focused primarily on the job search inflection point, but Free Agency is really a career-long partner. You’ll see us continue to add ways to help our Free Agents succeed along 5 or 10 years of partnerships through intentional career management,” Mashayekhi said.

Talent agents exist in industries like Hollywood, book publishing, and sports because the talent themselves often don’t want to take on the burdens of managing their own careers. Film directors and baseball pitchers want to practice and hone their craft, not spend hours negotiating with studio execs and club owners. Agents also are more up-to-date on industry salary trends, and also where new opportunities are arising. Plus, they often work with talent managers to optimize all the ancillary revenues that comes from these careers (product endorsements, speaker engagements, etc.)

Furthermore, these industries have extremely strong superstar income patterns, where top talent can easily make tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a career.

While the tech industry has traditionally not had agents, tech talent is increasingly having similar superstar properties. Star engineers, product managers, and designers can make tens of millions of dollars across salary and equity packages, and often have a range of ancillary revenue sources from consulting engagements with VC firms to lecture circuit payments. Even better, new talent is often making six-figures, whereas the early years in an entertainment or sports career is often focused on securing any paying job.

What remains to be see is whether engineers will willingly give up a segment of their income in order to get better career help. Certainly Free Agency is not the first company that has tried to tackle this emerging field. 10x Management is a talent agency that has focused on vetting top freelance developers, and was profiled in The New Yorker a few years ago. Other startups have also entered the space over the past decade.

Free Agency believes it has the timing and service quality to win this market. While it is early days, much like the excitement around ISAs in education, I expect models like Free Agency to increasingly become popular as a way to manage our careers, and this is one startup worth paying attention to in the coming years.

In addition to Resolute and Bloomberg, Ludlow Ventures, Background Capital, Parker Thompson, Will Oberndorf, Amrit Saxena, Jenny Fielding, Greg Schroy, Gordon Wintrob, and Orrick LLP also joined the round as investors.

Source: Tech Crunch

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. All users can now access Facebook’s tool for controlling which apps and sites can share data for ad-targeting

Facebook is making its “Off-Facebook Activity” tool, which allows users to manage and delete the data that third-party websites and apps share with Facebook, available to all users worldwide. The feature was first introduced in 2018 at Facebook’s annual developer conference, but only launched to users in select geographies last year.

As Facebook explains today, other businesses send Facebook information about your activity on their sites and apps, which Facebook then uses to show you relevant ads. With the new Off-Facebook Activity tool, you can see a summary of that information and clear it from your account.

2. ServiceNow acquires conversational AI startup Passage AI

Passage AI helps customers build chatbots in multiple languages, something that should come in handy as ServiceNow continues to modernize its digital service platform.

3. Flipboard expands into local news

The goal with the new offering is to give Flipboard users an easy way to catch up with local news, sports, dining, real estate, transportation and weather from a variety of sources, including local newspapers, local TV stations, radio stations, college news sites and even blogs.

4. Tech valuations versus tech-enabled valuations: 2020 IPO edition

The value of tech-enabled companies is coming into focus as several American unicorns test the public markets, with data showing that some venture-backed companies that are often grouped with technology companies are in fact worth just a fraction of their tech-first cousins. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

5. With Tony Fadell’s help, Advano is building battery components to power an electric future

The technology was innovative enough to earn the Louisiana-based startup a place in Y Combinator’s accelerator. It has now attracted the attention of Mitsui Kinzoku, which is investing in the company as a strategic partner, and Tony Fadell, the famous product designer known as “the father of the iPod” and the founder of the smart thermostat company Nest.

6. Scroll launches its subscription offering ad-free access across 300 partner sites

CEO Tony Haile previously led analytics company Chartbeat, and he said he founded Scroll because of his frustration with the way news sites were becoming dragged down by ads and trackers — and despite those performance-slowing/privacy-defying practices, publications were still struggling to make money.

7. Filmic’s DoubleTake app brings simultaneous camera shooting to the iPhone 11

The most visually compelling use here is Shot/Reverse Shot, which takes video from both the rear-facing and front-facing cameras at once. Obviously there’s going to be a gulf in image quality between the front and back, but the ability to do both simultaneously opens up some pretty fascinating possibilities.

Source: Tech Crunch

If parties came with an alert system, this post would qualify as Def Con 4. Now hear this — we just released the final batch of tickets to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize, which heats up on February 7 in San Francisco. If you want to be there with more than 1,000 of Silicon Valley’s finest, act now with all due haste. Buy your ticket right here.

Hang out with your crowd and enjoy cocktails, craft beer and tempting appetizers. Branch out and meet new people in a relaxed, laid back setting. Startuppers, you work hard, and now it’s time to let loose a little. Bust out your crazy karaoke skills, get ready for other party games, activities and photo ops.

It’s also a chill way to broaden your network, see a handful of exhibiting startups (wow, those demo tables sold out fast) and maybe even meet a future investor, partner or mentor. Startup magic happens at TechCrunch parties. Is this your year for magic?

Wanna know who else will be in the house? Check out some of the companies ready to meet, greet and network in a casual setting.

Here are the party particulars.

• When: Friday, February 7, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
• Where: Galvanize, 44 Tehama St., San Francisco, CA 94105
• Ticket price: $85

It’s just not a TechCrunch party without door prizes, and we will not disappoint. You could win TC swag or win tickets to Disrupt SF, our flagship event coming in September 2020.

Speaking of Disrupt SF 2020, here’s another way to go gratis. It takes a big team to pull off a party of this magnitude. Volunteer to help us throw this party, and you’ll earn a pass to our flagship Disrupt event. Pretty sweet.

Startup fans don’t miss out on one of the great Silicon Valley traditions. Buy your ticket to the 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize, right now before they’re gone for good.

Is your company interested in sponsoring the 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Source: Tech Crunch