Month: March 2021

A proposed witness list filed by Apple for its upcoming trial against game-maker Epic reads like a who’s who of executives from the two companies. The drawn out battle could well prove a watershed moment from mobile app payments.

The two sides came to loggerheads when the Fortnite maker was kicked out of the App Store in August of last year after adding an in-game payment system designed to bypass Apple’s – along with Apple’s cut of the profiles.

Epic has accused Apple of monopolist practices pertaining to mobile payment. Apple, meanwhile, has argued that Epic broke the App Store agreement in order to increase its revenue.

Filed late last night by the hardware giant, the document includes top executives from bot sides. For Apple, the list includes CEO Tim Cook, Software Engineering SVP Craig Federighi and Apple Fellow, Phil Schiller. On team Epic, it’s Tim Sweeney and VP Mark Rein. Executives from Microsoft, Facebook and NVIDIA are also included, for good measure.

In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Apple notes,

Our senior executives look forward to sharing with the court the very positive impact the App Store has had on innovation, economies across the world and the customer experience over the last 12 years. We feel confident the case will prove that Epic purposefully breached its agreement solely to increase its revenues, which is what resulted in their removal from the App Store. By doing that, Epic circumvented the security features of the App Store in a way that would lead to reduced competition and put consumers’ privacy and data security at tremendous risk.

The trial is expected to kick off May 3. We’ve reached out to Epic for additional comment.

Source: Tech Crunch

Facebook develops a new way to interact with AR, Uber’s facial recognition policy faces scrutiny and SpaceX’s Starship rocket booster hits a major milestone. This is your Daily Crunch for March 19, 2021.

The big story: Facebook shows off wrist-based interface

This project comes out of Facebook Reality Labs and is supposed to present an alternative computer interface on your wrist, with electromyography sensors to interpret motor nerve signals.

In a blog post, Facebook said a wrist-based device “could reasonably fit into everyday life and social contexts,” while allowing the company to “bring the rich control capabilities of your hands into AR, enabling intuitive, powerful and satisfying interaction.”

Facebook identifies this as a research prototype, so don’t expect it to turn into a commercial product anytime soon. But it’s still suggestive, particularly given the company’s sometimes-surprising hardware strategy and rumors that it might be working on an Apple Watch competitor.

The tech giants

India asks court to block WhatsApp’s policy update, says new change violates laws — The Indian government alleged on Friday that WhatsApp’s planned privacy update violates local laws on several counts.

Uber under pressure over facial recognition checks for drivers — Uber’s use of facial recognition technology for a driver identity system is being challenged in the U.K.

Instagram and WhatsApp hit by outage — The outage began around 1:40 p.m. ET and lasted for more than half an hour.

Startups, funding and venture capital

SpaceX nears final assembly of its first massive testing rocket booster for Starship — SpaceX has completed what’s known as the “stacking” of its first Super Heavy prototype.

Brazilian startup Tractian gets the Y Combinator seal of approval for its equipment monitoring tech — Throughout their lives, the founders had heard their parents complain about the sorry state of maintenance and heavy equipment in their factories.

Superpedestrian positions itself as the go-to partner for cities with new e-scooter safety upgrades — Superpedestrian is considered an up-and-coming player in the micromobility world because of how it handles safety issues.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

It’s time to abandon business intelligence tools — Organizations spend ungodly amounts of money on business intelligence tools, but adoption rates are still below 30%.

The lightning-fast Series A (that was 3 years in the making) — Sounding Board’s Christine Tao discusses raising her Series A on the How I Raised It podcast.

Survey: Share feedback on Extra Crunch — Tell us what you think about Extra Crunch!

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Cloud infrastructure spending passed on-prem data centers in 2020 — That’s according to new research from Sydney Research Group.

Five trends in the boardrooms of high-growth private companies — Just as countless aspects of corporate life have been reshaped over the course of the last year, boards of directors are undergoing significant and lasting transformation.

Attend Disrupt 2021 for less than $100 — If three jam-packed days of TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 wasn’t enough to get your startup motor running, listen up.

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

Facebook’s hardware strategy often looks pretty opaque from the outside. The company has done fairly well with Oculus sales amid pandemic demand. Even its Echo Show competitor Portal has seen a bump as people have been forced to socially distance. The company’s smartphone partnership with HTC, meanwhile, fell flat eight or so years back.

Earlier this year, reports surfaced that the company was working on its own Apple Watch competitor. The smartwatch was said to have a health focus, running on an open-source version of Android. That, of course, would mark an interesting alternative from Google’s chosen wearOS.

This week, the company highlighted another wrist-based wearable. The specifics of the project don’t line up super closely with earlier reports, which could well mean two separate projects. Facebook is a big company, after all.

This particular project out of Facebook Reality Labs is more focused on providing an alternative computer interface. Specifically, it seems in line with the company’s augmented reality efforts.

Per yesterday’s blog post:

A separate device you could store in your pocket like a phone or a game controller adds a layer of friction between you and your environment. As we explored the possibilities, placing an input device at the wrist became the clear answer. The wrist is a traditional place to wear a watch, meaning it could reasonably fit into everyday life and social contexts. It’s a comfortable location for all-day wear. It’s located right next to the primary instruments you use to interact with the world — your hands. This proximity would allow us to bring the rich control capabilities of your hands into AR, enabling intuitive, powerful and satisfying interaction.

I will say that, based on the information presented, this seems more conceptual. As in, this could be the key to offering more seamless control for some future augmented reality system. And even still, it’s presented as a step on the way to a more deeply integrated human-computer solution. How deeply you want Facebook to integrate with your neurons is apparently a question we’re all going to have to ask ourselves in the not too distant future.

This interface specifically is designed to use electromyography (EMG) sensors to interpret motor nerve signals and interact with the interface accordingly. The subject interestingly came up during a Clubhouse event featuring Mark Zuckerberg last night. After Pebble founder/YC partner Eric Migicovsky discussed experiences dealing with Apple for his own smartwatch startup, the Facebook CEO said the following:

If you’re trying to build a watch, which we’re exploring as we talked about the wrist thing and I don’t want to call it a watch, but it’s the basic neural interfaces work that our Facebook reality labs team demoed some of our research about today. With the neural interface on the wrist, if you want that to integrate with the phone in any way, it’s just so much easier on Android than iOS. My guess is that this is an area where there probably should be a lot more focus. And I do think the private APIs are just something that makes it really difficult to have a healthy ecosystem.

“Exploring” seems like an operative word here. But it’s always cool/fascinating to see these projects in their early stages. Even if the promises might still seem a tad…overzealous.

EMG will eventually progress to richer controls. In AR, you’ll be able to actually touch and move virtual UIs and objects, as you can see in this demo video. You’ll also be able to control virtual objects at a distance. It’s sort of like having a superpower like the Force.

Source: Tech Crunch

The paradox of connected computing is how much information is made available to us in just a few clicks or taps — but also how this ocean of available data can overwhelm and lap over a particular bit of intel the moment we need to lay our fingers back on it.

Fire up a web browser and it’s hard to deny it’s the best of times for knowledge work. Yet working across multiple browser tabs and windows can feel like the friction-filled, frustrating worst.

This is the problem Sidekick Browser is taking aim at by adding a productivity-focused layer atop Chromium that it bills as a “work OS”.

Multiple tab hell? Sidekick’s answer is to let you work from inside apps that live in the browser, rather than scattered across multiple windows and tabs.

Apps like Slack and Skype and WhatsApp can be pinned in the sidebar in a vertical stack where you can easily find and switch between them. It also has support for multiple logins, granular notification controls and the ability to search across all these third-party apps (it offers “hundreds” currently but says users can add custom adds “which would function just like a bookmark”) right from the browser.

And for all those tabs you open up every time you go down an internet browsing rabbit hole, Sidekick offers a Sessions feature that lets you save them as a collective bundle for easy filing away — with ofc the ability to reopen and revisit again at a later click.

The built-in search also spans these Sessions so there’s no need to manually scroll back through the browser’s search history to try to track down where exactly it was you saw that reference to that randomly relevant bit of intel you breezed across one online day.

“Search across all your apps, tabs and workspaces in seconds,” is Sidekick’s alternative fix.

It’s also tackling productivity on the technical side — taking aim at browser-based lag with an “AI based tab suspension” feature that’s designed to improve on how Google’s Chrome browser hogs RAM by predicting which tabs the user is not going to use and dumping them from memory.

“Sidekick is the fastest browser built especially for work,” is its elevator-pitchy promise.

Collaboration is another core focus with features intended to help knowledge working teams be more productive as a unit; offering stuff like team role provisioning and custom workspaces to support different Session, app Sidebar and tabs set-ups, such as for a project or client.

There’s also remote configuration tools for device security; a baked-in password manager for collaborative convenience to support teams needing to share passwords; and an embedded video chat platform so you can do team chats right from the exact same browser-based workspace you’re all using.

Sidekick comes with its own ad blocker and anti-fingerprinting tech too — for a stated privacy purpose but also for an extra speed bump (i.e. via better page load times).

Also on privacy, the startup’s very public promise is “we’ll never sell your data” (and it further specifies this includes “searches, browsing history, or any personal information”).

The business model is SaaS and B2C for now, but Sidekick has designs on B2B — touting a pipeline of business-friendly features coming down the line.

And — yes, before you ask — Chrome extensions are supported.

Sidekick is announcing $2 million in seed funding led by KPCB — along with Remote First Capital and other angel investors.

Founder Dmitry Pushkarev has played and won at the startup game before, in some very different areas — having founded a DNA sequencing company (Moleculo) back in 2011, which was quickly acquired by Illumina.

Then in 2013 he left to found another business, ClusterK — focused on optimizing cloud computing resources across multiple cloud providers — which was acquired by Amazon in 2016, where Pushkarev stayed for a couple of years before getting the founder itch again.

A stint as entrepreneur in residence (EIR) at Kleiner Perkins investigating the future of work was where the germ of the idea for Sidekick was born.

The tool grabbed some early eyeballs a few months ago via Product Hunt — where Chris Messina was among its early fans, lauding the team for shaking up the browser space by combining “so many components that are essential to finding productivity as a modern knowledge worker!”.

Though Pushkarev was careful to course-correct Messina that it’s not building a full-fat browser to challenge Chrome itself (or any other internet browser).

“We do not intend to compete with browsers, they are a great choice for browsing,” he wrote. “Our goal is improve the browsing experience for work and productivity — something that, regretfully, browsers cannot do.”

The San Francisco-based startup says it’s now being used by teams at companies including Microsoft, Dropbox, Slack and Lyft. It has around 30,000 users at this point a few months after its November 2020 launch, per Pushkarev, who says the team is mostly focused on product (“activation, retention, virality”) at this early stage.

“The typical user is a knowledge worker — product managers, engineers, marketers, a fair number of students. Basically, prosumers who don’t just browse online, but do productive work and utilize communication tools,” he tells TechCrunch.

“During my EIR at KPCB, we thought a lot about the future of work, and one striking aspect of it is that today knowledge workers spend most of their time working in Browsers — a tool designed for Browsing,” he goes on, explaining the genesis of the idea for Sidekick.

“There are some important differences between how we browse and how we work, in particular — knowledge workers, spend more time working in web applications, with documents, using communications tools, accessing multiple accounts, and having to navigate a vast array of documents and projects. Unlike browsing — which is mostly search-based consumption of information.

“Clearly, these are very different use cases, but companies who make browsers today have no ability to invest in making browser better for work due to their business model — they are paid by Google or Microsoft for searches, and any complication of the UX would mean that millions of users would turn to simpler browsers and they will lose search revenue.

“We thought that it’s an unprecedented situation, where 200M professionals don’t have access to professional tools, and that the industry is so heavily disincentivized to build those. As a result, we decided to change this and invent a new category of software — Browser for Work, or how we call it internally — a Work OS.”

So what type of work/worker is Sidekick made for? “Online work with Web applications, lots of documents, communication apps, multiple accounts, and different work streams. It’s designer for prosumers and wouldn’t be the best choice for just browsing — something that would be better served by other browsers,” he says.

While the laser focus is work and productivity, Sidekick users can create multiple environments within the software — so could make other spaces more geared toward chilling out/downtime, or other purposes than work too, for use at other times.

While browsers do offer a variety of features like shortcuts and other elements aimed at increasing convenience, Pushkarev argues they simple can’t go as far as Sidekick intends to in honing a great work environment because their business model is too focused on search ads (in the case of Google Chrome) — or just because they need to be a more generalist tool for web browsing. Sidekick is therefore very much a “standalone business,” not just a nice set of enhancements any existing browser could make, in his view.

“Unfortunately, extending other browsers is not a viable path here, one has to go deep inside Chrome codebase and re-think performance, memory optimization, security, support for multiple accounts, and privacy to build a comprehensive solution,” he says.

One example of going above and beyond what a browser could or would do itself is the support it’s built for “hundreds” of third-party apps. “The reason we built this support is for better integrations — being able to display and control badges and notifications, integrate with our search, support multiple accounts and add helpful extensions,” he explains.

He also points to the New Tab Page (shown in the feature image at the top of this post), which is due to launch for all users by the end of the month and which displays “all documents that work with organized according to type, with human-readable titles, and instant search across it”.

“Without deep integration with these apps we wouldn’t be able to provide this experience and display barely usable browser history instead,” he notes.

On the business model front, Pushkarev is confident that SaaS can work — and that Sidekick doesn’t have to monetize like other browsers do (i.e. “through data and searches”) — arguing: “We are making a tool that saves hours to potentially millions of knowledge workers.”

“Another piece of the story is our B2B business, which we are building as we speak, but it’s still in early beta. In B2B, product browsers become a sort of company-provisioned remote workstations, that can be remotely configured and secured according to a role,” he adds.

“This is where the majority of our revenue comes from at the moment, but we are launching our first attempts at B2C monetization in March, by offering a subscription.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Christine Tao runs Sounding Board, a business founded in 2016 that offers executive coaching services to leaders at major companies like Kraft and Heinz. But not long ago, she was the one in need of a coach.

But prior to that, Tao found herself in a new high-powered position at the mobile advertising company Tapjoy. Although she had plenty of sales experience, she was now working in an executive role leading the company’s entire sales staff. It was a tough learning curve. But the company’s board paired her with an executive coach, Lori Mazan, who ultimately helped Tao succeed.

“That really had a profound impact, not just on my professional development, but my personal development as well,” Tao said.

Later on, Tao and Mazan teamed up to launch Sounding Board, a service with a proprietary algorithm that matches participants with coaches. Its capabilities-driven model can even measure the impact of the coaching.

At the beginning, Tao didn’t have many resources. Ultimately, she raised $15 million in a pre-seed and Series A round. An impressive group of investors got in on the action, including Roy Bahat of Bloomberg Beta, Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures and Maha Ibrahim of Canaan.

On an episode of the “How I Raised It” podcast, Tao talked about raising money quickly, honing your strategy and getting back on your feet after all you hear is “no.”

Start out scrappy

From the very beginning, Tao had big ideas.

She wanted to make coaching accessible to all sorts of executive leaders. The service wouldn’t just be for correcting bad behavior, as coaching had been in the past, but about helping executives grow and develop so that they could lead their businesses with their best foot forward. Tao also aimed to make coaching available through remote technology.

The problem was, Tao didn’t quite have the resources to get started. Initially, turning those ideas into a functioning business seemed about as realistic as climbing Mount Everest.

Source: Tech Crunch

Superpedestrian, the startup that makes e-scooters equipped with self-diagnostic software, is upgrading its product as it prepares for a major expansion into 10 new cities within the next two weeks.

Superpedestrian is considered an up-and-coming player in the micromobility world because of how it handles safety issues. The company has developed AI — which is integrated into the vehicle — that monitors and corrects scooter safety issues in real time. The next-generation operating system that will provide those upgrades, codenamed “Briggs,” will be uploaded to its global fleet of LINK e-scooters. It includes improvements to geofencing capabilities and battery life, making Superpedestrian more attractive to cities looking for partners who can provide assurances around safety and reliability.

“The scooter market has shifted in its short lifespan from a B2C to, in a lot of ways, more like a B2G [business-to-government],” said David Zipper, visiting fellow at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy Center. “The trend has been for cities to reduce the number of concessions they grant to scooter operators, which puts more pressure on scooter operators to get one of those declining numbers of contracts available. You can’t really overstate how important it is, which technologies will rise and fall, and how companies position themselves.”

Superpedestrian is one of the underdog e-scooter companies that are in the running for partnerships with cities like New York, which will soon be announcing the specifics of its e-scooter pilot program in the Bronx. Micromobility giants like Bird, Lime and Voi have also placed bids. 

The company currently operates in cities across the U.S., including Seattle, Oakland, San Jose and San Diego, as well as European cities like Madrid and Rome. 

“Cities love our 100% compliance record,” Ross Ringham, Superpedestrian’s EMEA director of communications, told TechCrunch. “We have never been censured, suspended nor expelled from any of our markets. We believe it is critical to work hand-in-hand with regulators to provide a successful service.”

City officials today are most concerned with complaints about scooters cluttering up sidewalks, so being able to clear the sidewalk or diagnose a broken scooter right away and summon someone to come and collect it would be an appealing value proposition for Superpedestrian, said Zipper.

The LINK scooters are powered by a Vehicle Intelligent Safety (VIS) system, which combines AI, 73 sensors and five microprocessors to run 1,000 vehicle health checks every second a ride is taking place. The software is constantly self-monitoring and self-correcting, looking out for things like brake issues, battery cell temperature imbalances, cut internal wires and water penetration. 

“VIS is as big a step-change in scooter safety as the seat belt was for cars, refined over four million miles of testing and service since 2013,” said Ringham. “As a result, we’ve had zero vehicle recalls or manufacturing defects globally.”

The new update also includes 22% faster geofence reaction, three time more capacity for onboard geofences and sevenfold more precision when it comes to geofence accuracy. That means the scooter is able to better recognize a no-ride zone, and improve rider compliance by slowing down speeds and prohibiting riding or parking in certain areas. 

The fact that these computations are done in real time, locally on the scooter itself, accounts for the speed and accuracy of LINK’s system, which reacts in as little as 0.7 seconds, and as few as 4.6 meters away from where a geofence-related issue was first detected. Other scooter companies tend to rely on cloud computing to calculate and enforce geofences, which can be too slow to stop riders from speeding through pedestrian areas or busy traffic. 

“Our competitors typically buy off-the-shelf products and commonly use white label apps,” said Ringham. “We do not outsource safety in this manner, meaning the information flows from our operations team and global fleets are used by our engineering teams to sustain continuous improvement.”

Companies like Bird, Atom and Joyride offer white label operating systems that allow independent operators to launch their own rideshares and manage fleets, but not many players offer the type of safety-focused tech you see with LINK.

Detailed logs are also pulled by engineering teams to enhance performance with each updates, so the scooters get smarter over time, according to founder and CEO Assaf Biderman. The aggregated and anonymized data collected from LINK’s onboard software is also shared with city partners to help them design better infrastructure to support this emerging transport form.

“If a city partner comes to us with a new idea, we can easily add that, thanks to VIS,” Biderman said in a statement. “This makes for constantly-improving vehicles for riders, better protection for pedestrians and more robust safety performance for cities. Cities should demand nothing less for their citizens.”

Source: Tech Crunch

“Your board will never be the same.”

With that prediction, Nigel Travis, board director and former CEO of Dunkin’ and Papa John’s, kicked off a recent discussion about the future of corporate governance with chief executives and current and aspiring board members.

Just as countless aspects of corporate life have been reshaped over the course of the last year, boards of directors are undergoing significant and lasting transformation. Through our conversations with more than 500 business leaders and work on nearly 300 board searches over the last year, as well as findings from our recent board benchmarking study, we’ve identified five trends in the boardrooms of the United States’ high-growth private companies.

1. Board diversity is imperative

Historically, board members have been tapped from the personal networks of those already in the boardroom. This approach optimizes for trust and convenience at the expense of diversity.

As pressure to diversity the boardroom mounts and societal challenges underscore the risks of the all-male board, companies are starting to take a more inclusive approach to board design. They are reaching outside their networks to appoint women and people of color, discovering that it’s not a pipeline problem — it’s a network problem. In one year’s time, the percentage of late-stage private companies with all-male boards declined from 60% to 49%.

While that’s progress, the fact that nearly half of the most heavily funded venture-backed companies lack a single woman on the board underscores the enormous work still to be done. Today, only 11% of high-growth private company board seats are held by women and only 3% by women of color.

However, we expect to see continued improvement when it comes to racial and ethnic diversity in the years ahead. Demand for Him For Her referrals to female board candidates nearly quadrupled in that last quarter of 2020 compared with a year prior, and among the new directors appointed, a quarter identify as Black or African American.

2. Source candidates from across the entire C-suite

When seeking independent directors, boards have traditionally favored CEO experience. Given the gender imbalance among CEOs, preference for that title instantly tips the scales in favor of male candidates.

As boards look to add women, many have discovered the value of taking a more strategic approach to defining criteria for the next director. Instead of relying on the CEO title as a proxy for the desired qualities, boards now conduct a gap analysis, identifying the mix of key competencies that would be most valuable.

The result: a rich pipeline of executive operators who contribute strategic perspective combined with cutting-edge best practices. In addition to CFOs ready to chair an audit committee, we’ve had requests for operators with go-to-market expertise, product leaders known for driving innovation, and people officers who know how to build corporate culture. We’ve even helped companies seeking, for example, business-savvy doctors, nurses and law-enforcement officers to bring the voice of their customers into the boardroom.

3. Independents come earlier

As CEOs look to add diversity and operating expertise to their boards, many are adding independent directors at an earlier stage. How early? “It’s never too early to have an independent director on the board,” according to Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, where the first independent was appointed only a year after the company’s founding.

Over the last year, the percentage of the heavily funded private companies with at least one independent director grew from 71% to 84%, and the percentage of board seats held by independents grew from 20% to 25%, according to the 2020 Study of Gender Diversity on Private Company Boards. Among the board searches we’ve conducted for privately held companies, more than 40% were Series B or earlier.

4. The board Zoom is here to stay

The pandemic drove boards onto screens, but even when health risks are mitigated, many will continue to convene virtually at least some of the time. The last year has caused companies to rethink the role of the physical office, and the importance of the physical boardroom is getting new scrutiny. Though most CEOs and directors will still favor in-person attendance for formal board meetings, we expect a new tolerance for remote participation and an increase in ad-hoc virtual meetings.

Beyond reduced travel and ease of scheduling, there’s a hidden benefit to virtual meetings that leaders would be wise to exploit: the reduced opportunity cost of more attendees. The impact of “another body in the boardroom” has long been an argument against allowing company executives to attend board meetings. We expect that, with a virtual format, CEOs will take advantage of the development opportunity to expose more of their leaders to board discussions.

On the flip side, virtual meetings require a more conscious effort to build relationships. Boards will need to balance the convenience of virtual meetings with the value of in-person interactions in building rapport and fostering collaborative decision-making.

5. Stakeholder capitalism takes root

Propelled by increasing pressure in the public markets and by the growing number of consumers who make value-based purchasing decisions, private company boards will give sustainability more overt consideration in their decision-making. In his annual letter, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink pointed to evidence of a “sustainability premium” for companies that outperform their industry peers on ESG measures. As public companies standardize on metrics and disclosure around ESG performance, that discipline will extend into the boardrooms of companies that aim to compete in the global marketplace.

Private companies drive innovation in nearly every corner of the economy, yet their boardrooms have remained remarkably unchanged over the last several decades. We expect that 2020 will prove to be an inflection point in corporate boardrooms; this period of board transformation will be defined by increased diversity and inclusion and a growing emphasis on sustainable value creation. As these initiatives take root, beneficiaries will include not just the companies and their investors, but employees, customers, suppliers and society at large.

Source: Tech Crunch