Month: December 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Tech Crunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Tech Crunch

The U.S. government is appealing the ruling that blocked the Trump administration’s TikTok ban, according to a new court filing. On December 7, 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols in Washington became the second U.S. judge to block the Commerce Department’s attempt to stop the TikTok app from being downloaded from U.S. app stores, citing threats to national security.

The Trump administration had raised concerns over the video-sharing app due to its Chinese ownership by way of parent company ByteDance, and the potential risk of TikTok’s U.S. user data being accessed by the Chinese government. This ultimately resulted in President Trump’s decision to use his executive order power to ban TikTok from the U.S. market.

TikTok, in response, had vowed to fight the order in court while it also entered negotiations with American companies over the potential sell-off of its U.S. operations, in case the order was upheld.

However, prior to the Dec. 7 ruling on the matter, a group of TikTok creators successfully challenged the ban, when U.S. Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Pennsylvania issued an injunction that blocked the restrictions that would have otherwise stopped TikTok from operating in the U.S. The creators said the ban would have caused them to lose their income by way of their brand sponsorships and other opportunities afforded by the platform.

Following that order, Judge Nichols in the separate case led by TikTok ruled that Trump overstepped his authority in trying to ban the app from the U.S., referring to the agency’s action as “arbitrary and capricious.”

The U.S. Commerce Dept. spokesperson said at the time of the ruling it would continue to comply with the injunctions but intended to “vigorously defend the [executive order] and the Secretary’s implementation efforts from legal challenges.”

Today, it has followed through on that statement with its appeal.

Of course, the decision as to whether the U.S. will continue its attempt to ban TikTok will ultimately reside with the incoming Biden administration.

The news of today’s filing was first reported by Reuters.

TikTok declined to comment on the appeal.

A Commerce Dept. spokesperson issued the following statement (12/28/20, 1:14 PM ET):

On December 7, 2020, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted a nationwide preliminary injunction against the enforcement of Executive Order (E.O.) 13942, limited to the Secretary of Commerce’s Identification of Prohibited Transactions with TikTok/ByteDance. The court’s ruling is consistent with the nationwide preliminary injunction granted by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on October 30, 2020. The Department maintains that the E.O. is fully consistent with law and promotes legitimate national security interests. The Government will continue to comply with the injunctions and has taken immediate steps to do so, but intends to vigorously defend the E.O. and the Secretary’s implementation efforts from legal challenges.

US government appeals TikTok injunction by TechCrunch on Scribd

Source: Tech Crunch

When kids today want to learn about a new topic they’re interested in, they’ll often turn to YouTube. But the quality of the educational content on the platform can be hit or miss, depending on what specific videos kids happen to come across. Tappity, a digital educational startup now backed by $1.3 million in seed funding, aims to offer an alternative. Its video library offers entertaining and interactive live-action videos kids enjoy, while also ensuring the content itself is aligned with current educational standards.

The two-year old startup was co-founded by CEO Chad Swenson, his brother and CTO Tanner Swenson, and CPO Lawrence Tran.

Image Credits: Tappity founders

As Chad explains, the idea for Tappity emerged from his interest in designing interactive learning experiences, which resulted in a senior project eight years ago where he created an interactive experience to help students learn about evolution. Over the years that followed, he began to experiment with different concepts in this area, but never planned for anything of venture scale.

However, Chad says he later realized there could be an opportunity to develop content based around the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) — the set of K-12 science content standards that were developed by a consortium of multiple U.S. states — whose adoption across the U.S. is now growing.

“A lot of parents were looking for healthier alternatives to YouTube,” Chad says. “And I really started to believe this is something that could be much bigger.”

He found also that the science-based topics kids are generally interested in are often those that are aligned with what the NGSS aims to teach — like space, dinosaurs, geology and others.

“A big inspiration was just looking at the most popular books on Amazon for kids,” Chad adds, noting that a large number of these books are focused on STEM-related subjects.

Chad met his co-founder Lawrence Tran when consulting for fintech startup Bill.com, and convinced him and his brother Tanner to work on the startup.

Over the course of a couple of years, Tappity has developed tools that make it easier and efficient to produce interactive, educational video content. Today, the library includes over 200 science lessons for kids ages 4 to 10, across thousands of videos.

While the video clips themselves are pre-recorded, they give the kids the feeling of having a one-on-one interaction with the character on the screen. For example, if the teacher is building something and needs a screwdriver, the kids can pass it to her in the app when she asks. But they’ll also have a lot of other fun options they can do instead, like passing her tape or even throwing pizza at her — and she’ll react. The teacher may also engage with kids in other ways, too, like responding to what they drew in the app, among other things.

Image Credits: Tappity

Currently, Tappity’s teacher Haley the Science Gal (Haley McHugh), a childhood entertainment expert with over 10 years of experience, is leading the lessons which span topics like space, life science, earth science and physical science.

In addition to the video lessons, kids are engaged with an in-app points system for completing activities. The app also offers follow-up emails for parents so they can track what kids are learning and further engage them.

Due to the COVID pandemic, and the resulting screen fatigue that comes from virtual schooling, Tappity adapted some lessons to include offline activities — like drawing with paper and pens, for instance. And on Sundays, Tappity offers more involved activities parents and kids can do together — like baking cookies that you turn into Pangea or making a volcano.

Tappity expects to have over 1,000 hours of video content by the end of next year, and over 4,000 hours by the year after, Chad notes.

When the team of three applied to startup accelerator Y Combinator, Tappity was small but profitable, thanks to its in-app subscription tiers that average around $9 per month. Today, the company has over 5,000 paying customers and over 20,000 weekly active users who have collectively completed 30 million lessons to date.

The company has now raised a seed round of $1.3 million from Y Combinator, Mystery Science founder Keith Schacht, Toca Boca founder Björn Jeffery, Brighter Capital (Yun-Fang Juan), former Spotify CTO Andreas Ehn, Fairchild Fund, 18 Ventures, and AltaIR.

In the near-term, Tappity is working to expand its team and bring its lessons — that today are only available on iOS — to the web. Over time, the company’s goal is to create a large library of interactive educational content.

While the COVID pandemic has inspired VCs to invest in more edtech startups, the longevity of some of these businesses in the post-COVID world remains to be seen. Where Tappity is different from many of these remote learning startups or those designed for the classroom, is that its focus is not on selling into the school system.

“Teachers have picked it up organically — we give it away free to schools right now,” Chad explains. “But we’re not dedicating any resources to it because we’re focused on the parents’ and kids’ needs, which are quite a bit different,” he says.

Tappity’s app is available iOS, and includes some free content outside of the subscription.

Source: Tech Crunch

Today we sat on the deck with our daughter Ella and her boyfriend Nick. Knowing of my fascination with all things Beatles, Nick gave me a Japanese 45 of Get Back flipped with Don’t Let Me Down. His gift coincided with a 5 minute cut of material from a newly authorized production of a new version of Get Back, the film. A short history follows.

In the waning days of The Beatles’ partnership, the band decided to return to a more slimmed down production style, minus overdubs and plus a live feel. After original sessions in Twickenham Studios, the group decamped to the basement of their Apple headquarters and a hastily rebuilt studio courtesy of their usual producer, George Martin and loaned equipment from EMI Studios.

In the years since Sgt. Pepper, Beatles records had begun to retreat from their highly produced studio experiments. The most recent double album, The Beatles (commonly known as the White Album) was largely recorded in single takes, driving a wedge between the group and their producer that fostered a two week holiday where Martin turned the production over to his assistant.

The multiple takes also exacerbated growing tensions between the band members, as hundreds of attempts to perfect Paul McCartney songs like Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da drove Lennon further into his heroin experiments with Yoko Ono. Bickering drove Ringo Starr to quit for two weeks before being lured back with flowers draping his drum kit; George Harrison invited Eric Clapton in to a session in a successful attempt to put the rest on their best behavior. This gambit worked again with Billy Preston in the Get Back sessions four months later in January 1969.

It may be hard to understand the context of these tensions in a world beset with a global pandemic and the worst president in the history of the free world, but this was the middle of the Vietnam War and the first term of Richard Nixon. His landslide reelection in 1972 would preclude the voters turning him out of office, and the Watergate scandal that drove him to resign was only just beginning to unfold. Compare the emotional turmoil of four rock musicians to today’s terror at the actions of an unhinged autocrat being removed from office in what seems like an endless thirty days. But it really sucked then as now.

Part of the problem was the disquieting anxiety on the part of the postwar boomer generation that we didn’t really deserve the respect we weren’t getting from straight society. The silent majority of our parents and peers sneered at our experiments of free love and drug-induced “insights.” The counter culture we labeled ourselves was as lonely a place to be as the Deplorables of 2016. We had no power, no real leaders, and nowhere to go but down when Woodstock collapsed into Altamont, assassination, and addiction.

So we didn’t know what we were talking about and yet here we were owning the ceramics we broke. Our heroes in London were on top of the world, and they couldn’t stand each other. What to do? Let’s make a movie of how we really are. On the plus side, there was real alchemy between these four young men. Even though sick of each other, they loved the results of what they found together. Lennon was haughty but funny, McCartney pleasant but coiled like a big cat. Ringo was Everyman, with an actor’s surprise at his luck and proud of his true role of ignition switch.

Harrison is the crucible, where the steel is forged. In interviews after the breakup and narrating during, George seems to be the one who realizes the true value of the partnership even as he explodes it with solo success. The backlog of his material spilled out in his first album, so successful that its chart topping drove McCartney and Lennon to try and keep up for the next 8 years until Lennon’s death.

Yet of all the others, he was the one to recognize the value, the responsibility, of keeping the door open for what they had together. When Lennon recorded his vicious assault on McCartney, How Do You Sleep, George not only played on the record but provided the emotional power with a surging slide guitar lead he’d only developed when the group was done. During the White Album sessions that produced some of Lennon’s best work, he suggested Lennon change the title from Maharishi to Sexy Sadie to lose the personal attack on the guru for what may have turned out to be a jealous setup by another of the group’s coterie.

In the film fragment released for Christmas 2020, Harrison is seen kicking off Get Back, the first time you can really see the role George played in the propulsion of the track. As with many players, you can best understand this when he drops out for a retake or a tempo adjustment led by Paul; the absence of the guitarist shows how central he is to the mix. In the only footage released prior to this new material, Harrison seemed subdued on the roof concert version of the track. He reportedly was opposed to doing a live concert in general, and only agreed to go out on the roof when Lennon finally committed.

It’s this context that is so striking in the new material. The tensions within the group can be seen not only for the inevitability of their collapse but also their courage to be filmed and displayed for all to consume. As a persistent fan of the band and all of its dynamics at the core of the century, the new footage comes across like The Godfather and its sequels. Like Godfather II, the Beatles studio phase once they abandoned live performance in 1966 transcended their initial success in a way that essentially invented the modern Hollywood business of sequels.

The return to live phase that began with the White Album and continued through the Get Back sessions resolved itself with the last Beatles recording of Abbey Road. In this way the Get Back film apparently includes early recordings of material from Abbey Road as well as Harrison and McCartney tracks never finished by the group. Unlike the Let It Be film that emerged as a director’s cut of the breakdown of the group pre-Abbey Road, this new Get Back film will likely serve as a document of the final phase of the group in both defeat and resolution.

The last Beatles recording of all four plus Billy Preston produced I Want You (She’s So Heavy), the long bluesy track that ends side one of Abbey Road. It’s a tantalizing glimpse into the future that never was of the greatest group there ever was. Like Francis Ford Coppola’s reimagining of the the last Godfather sequel, Get Back is a coda to the tragic highs and lows of the time that was the Sixties. At the time, it was impossible to imagine where we could go from there. Today, we share that same feeling of despair, but perhaps, the hope of what the future could bring.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Friday, December 18, 2020.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Source: Tech Crunch

“The Mandalorian” just wrapped up its second season on Disney+, with an action-packed and surprise-filled finale.

In many ways, it feels like a seamless continuation of the first season’s storylines, with the titular bounty hunter searching for a Jedi who can take responsibility for the alien moppet known to the internet as Baby Yoda, while the pair is pursued by the sinister Moff Gideon.

But as we explain on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, where the first season of “The Mandalorian” felt accessible to anyone, regardless of their level of Star Wars fandom, season two deepens its ties to the rest of the fictional universe.

That includes bringing in live action versions of characters from the animated “Clone Wars” series, as well as setting up the many other Star Wars shows that are in the works for Disney+. This approach prompted very different responses from your podcast hosts — Darrell was delighted since he understood all the Ester Eggs, Jordan was exhausted trying to keep up and Anthony was happy to let many of the references go over his head.

At least the show’s other virtues remain intact, with enjoyably grungy and tactile space opera settings, spectacular big budget battles and an adorable baby Jedi.

In addition to reviewing “The Mandalorian,” we also discuss HBO Max’s arrival on Roku (which somehow prompts Anthony to explain his disappointment in the new Christopher Nolan movie “Tenet”), and Darrell and Jordan offer their latest thoughts on “The Bachelorette.”

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
4:14 HBO Max/”Tenet” discussion
13:35 “The Bachelorette” discussion
28:42 “The Mandalorian” Season 2 review
50:40 “The Mandalorian” spoiler discussion

Source: Tech Crunch

“Are you okay?”

I don’t have a good answer to the question. Knowing full well that I’m talking back to an algorithm — even one asking the same question of everyone with a different band mad-libbed in — doesn’t soften the blow. Am I? Are we? Is anyone, really?

In this case, it’s referring to Waxahatchee. I mean, yeah, I totally listened to a lot of Waxahatchee this year. Waxahatchee is good. Saint Cloud was one of my favorite albums of the year. Katie Crutchfield’s music doesn’t exist in the Elliott Smith, Leonard Cohen bin for me. It’s not time to send up the signal flares when you see the band all over my Spotify social feed.

The Spotify roasting AI that’s been making the rounds this week is a fun exercise in music snobbery. It also may be brushing against some larger truth here. Something I think we all considered at least in passing this year when Spotify offered its annual “Wrapped” year in review.

What’s the soundtrack to the worst year, ever? What do we listen to while the world burns? In 2009, a former CNN intern stumbled across a video tape in the archives labeled with the title, “Turner Doomsday Video.” The minute-long video features a band playing, “Nearer My God To Thee,” believed to be the final song played by the band on the Titanic. It carried the explicit instructions, “HFR [Hold for Release] till end of the world confirmed.”

Barring any sort of last-minute surprise, it seems likely we’ll make it through 2020 shy of a full-on apocalypse (in spite of, perhaps, the best efforts of some). But for me, Spotify’s year in review was a testament to hell year, just as my Apple Watch exercise bars saw a zeroing out in late-March and April, as the pandemic bore down on my home of Queens, New York and I dealt with some personal health issues.

What was pitched as a celebratory aggregation of my listening habits over the previous 12 months exited the machine as a testament to the long stretches of time where engaging with music felt like an impossibility. Ambient music and post-rock got me listening again when lyrics seemed like too much to process. And I’m sure I’m not alone in having listened to some comfort tracks with an alarming frequency.

Looking back is a useful reminder of the role music played in what undoubtedly qualifies as the worst year to date for many. It would be an overstatement to suggest that music saved my life in 2020, but it certainly cushioned the blow of one too many emotional gut punches.

“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear,” the late-neurologist, Oliver Sacks wrote. “But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”

Louis Armstrong put it even more succinctly: “music is life itself.”

It’s a cruel irony that, in a year when music has meant so much to so many, most musicians have struggled to make ends meet. The musical field certainly isn’t unique in that respect this year, but their struggles have been pronounced in an era when streaming revenues offer fractions of cents what musicians make in record sales, and touring has become the most important revenue stream for all but the biggest names. For the past 10 months, that all but dried up.

“The pandemic utterly decimated the live-music industry,” Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy noted in a recent interview. “There’s been almost an entire year now of absolutely zero revenue.”

In May, a survey from the Musician’s Union noted that 19% of musicians said they might end up giving up their careers due to the impact of COVID-19. Seven months later, one wonders whether that figure might have been optimistic.

Tweedy adds, “There will be places to play. But the landscape won’t ever look the same. I imagine that a lot of the more intimate music venues will be gone, just like a lot of small businesses and restaurants.”

Bandcamp has been a beacon for many. The service’s “Bandcamp Fridays,” which waive its revenue cut, have raised $40 million to date. The site has promised to continue offering the feature at least through May of next year.

This year’s struggles have served to highlight concerns over streaming royalties. Spotify has understandably been the focal point for this conversation, all while the company has spent hundreds of millions to bolster its podcast programming. CEO Daniel Ek didn’t do himself any favors in July when he noted, “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.”

In October, Justice at Spotify rep (and Galaxie 500 member) Damon Kurkowski told me “[R]esponse from certain corners of the industry has been as cold as we expected: ‘You’re just musicians and don’t understand business,’ is the basic gist of it. To which I would say: The problem we are calling attention to is precisely that musicians have been left out of the conversation! We always come last in payment and in consultation — even though our work is what the streaming business is built on.”

The struggle to survive on music is nothing new, of course. Jazz genius Thelonious Monk famously had a benefactor in Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. But just because we’ve failed musicians in the past doesn’t mean we can’t and shouldn’t do better.

Am I okay? I’m still not sure, but listening to music seems to help.

Source: Tech Crunch

Chinese authorities investigate an e-commerce giant, Google may be tightening its grip on research and VCs weigh in on the year’s biggest surprises. This is your (briefer than usual) Daily Crunch for December 24, 2020.

The big story: Alibaba faces antitrust probe

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation said that it’s investigating the e-commerce giant over a policy that forces merchants to sell exclusively with Alibaba and skip rival platforms JD.com and Pinduoduo.

“Alibaba will actively cooperate with the regulators on the investigation,” the company said in a statement. “Company business operations remain normal.”

Meanwhile, Chinese authorities have already called off the initial public offering of Alibaba affiliate Ant Group, and the company has now received another “meeting notice” from regulators.

Holiday grab bag

Google reportedly tightens grip on research into ‘sensitive topics’ — Reuters, citing researchers at the company and internal documents, reports that Google has implemented new controls in the last year, including an extra round of inspection for papers on certain topics.

Five VCs discuss what surprised them the most in 2020 — The latest episode of Equity reflects on a year that no one could have predicted.

Gift Guide: Last-minute subscriptions to keep the gifts going all year — They’re easy to order at the very last minute, easy to give from afar and they’ll spread the gifting fun out over weeks and months.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

The built environment will be one of tech’s next big platforms — An in-depth look at Sidewalk Labs’ abandoned Toronto waterfront project.

US seed-stage investing flourished during pandemic — According to a TechCrunch analysis of PitchBook data and a survey of venture capitalists, a few trends became clear.

Use Git data to optimize your developers’ annual reviews — Three metrics can help you understand true performance quality.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

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 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Source: Tech Crunch

This was going to be the year of 5G. It was going to be the year the next-generation wireless technology helped reverse some troubling macro trends for the industry — or at the very least helped stem the bleeding some.

But the best laid plans, and all that. With about a week left in the year, I think it’s pretty safe to say that 2020 didn’t wind up the way the vast majority of us had hoped. It’s a list that certainly includes the lion’s share of smartphone makers. Look no further than a recent report published by Gartner to answer the question of just how bad 2020 was for smartphone sales.

It was so bad that a 5.7% global decline year-over-year for the third quarter constituted good news. In a normal year, that wouldn’t qualify as good news for too many industries outside of wax cylinder and asbestos sales. But there are few standards by which 2020 was a normal year, so now we’ll take some respite in the fact that a 5.7% drop was a considerably less pronounced drop than the ~20% we saw in Qs 1 and 2.

Some context before we get into the whys here. A thing that’s important to note up front is that mobile wasn’t one of those industries where everything was smooth sailing before everything got upended by a pandemic. In 2019 I wrote a not insignificant number of stories with headlines like “Smartphone sales expected to drop 2.5% globally this year” and “Smartphone sales declined again in Q2, surprising no one.” And even those stories were a continuation of trends from a year prior.

The reasons for the decline should be pretty familiar by now. For one thing, premium handsets got expensive, routinely topping out over $1,000. Related to that, phones have gotten good. Good news for consumers doesn’t necessarily translate to good news for manufacturers here, as upgrade cycles have slowed significantly from their traditional every two years (also an artifact of the carrier subscription model). Couple that with economic hardships, and you’ve got a recipe for slowed growth.

This March, I wrote an article titled “5G devices were less than 1% of US smartphone purchases in 2019.” There was, perhaps, a certain level of cognitive dissonance there, after many years of 5G hype. There are myriad factors at play here. First, there just weren’t a ton of different 5G models available in the States by year’s end. Second, network rollout was far from complete. And, of course, there was no 5G iPhone.

I concluded that piece by noting:

Of course, it remains to be seen how COVID-19 will impact sales. It seems safe to assume that, like every aspect of our lives, there will be a notable impact on the number of people buying expensive smartphones. Certainly things like smartphone purchases tend to lessen in importance in the face of something like a global pandemic.

In hindsight, the answer is “a lot.” I’ll be the first to admit that when I wrote those words on March 12, I had absolutely no notion of how bad it was about to get and how long it would last (hello month nine of lockdown). In the earliest days, the big issue globally was on the supply side. Asia (China specifically) was the first place to get hit and the epicenter of manufacturing buckled accordingly. Both China and its manufacturing were remarkably fast to get back online.

In the intervening months, demand has taken a massive hit. Once again, there are a number of reasons for this. For starters, people aren’t leaving their homes as much — and for that reason, the money they’ve allotted to electronics purchases has gone toward things like PCs, as they’ve shifted to a remote work set-up. The other big issue here is simple economics. So many people are out of work and so much has become uncertain that smartphones have once again been elevated to a kind of luxury status.

There are, however, reasons to be hopeful. It seems likely that 5G will eventually help right things — though it’s hard to say when. Likely much of that depends on how soon we’re able to return to “normal” in 2021. But for now, there’s some positive to be seen in early iPhone sales. After Apple went all in on 5G this year, the new handset (perhaps unsurprisingly) topped sales for all other 5G handsets for the month of October, according to analysts.

The company will offer a more complete picture (including the ever-important holiday sales) as part of its earnings report next month. For now, at least, it seems that thing are finally heading in the right direction. That trend will, hopefully, continue as the new year sees a number of Android launches.

Perhaps 2021 will be the year of 5G — because 2020 sure wasn’t.

Source: Tech Crunch