Week-in-Review: Auditing a dark age in Apple design

Hello, weekend readers. This is Week-in-Review where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.

Last week, I talked about how YouTube was letting its commenting system turn from a festering wasted opportunity into a liability.

---

The big story

Plenty happened this week, though most of the news signified something larger looming on the horizon, more on that in a bit.

One undoubtedly meaty news item was that Jony Ive, Apple’s most iconic executive persona, announced that he was leaving the company this year.

Ive has undoubtedly been a powerhouse of industrial design who has helped craft some of the most iconic products from one of the most influential tech companies. The issue is perhaps what Apple’s vision of industrial design transformed into in his final years at the helm.

Jony Ive is leaving Apple to launch a new firm

Ive shifted away from managerial roles in 2015, but the Chief Design Officer’s influence has been evident it the past several years of very beautiful devices designed around the occasional flawed hypothesis.

Poor design is more than the oft-memed Apple Pencil jutting out of an iPad lightning port or the Mighty Mouse with a charger piercing its underbelly. The company’s aesthetic choices in how they curve their screens or shape their aluminum have stayed true but you don’t have to look too far to find a pattern of carelessness in a number of Apple’s device which occasionally have prioritized svelte profiles over actually even working.

Ive is design genius, but like all people we elevate with that title, he and his design ethos grew further disassociated with the public over time. All designers miss the mark occasionally, but an obsession with minimalism pushed the company in some troublesome directions that the company is only now coming to reckon with.

Apple’s design degradation is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the ill-fated AirPower. The device, which designed to charge your iPhone, AirPods and Apple Watch simultaneously, was beautiful, but Apple’s aggressive design left physics in the rearview mirror. Ambition is one thing but letting function drive form to the point that you publicly announce a product that wasn’t physically possible showcases where Apple’s marketing showmanship butt heads with actual device capabilities. Apple abruptly cancelled AirPower this year, more than a year after its expected release.

If AirPower was a pithy signifier, the degradation of the company’s Mac line has been Apple’s abasement opus.

The problematic keyboards, the useless TouchBar and the shrinking number of ports on its laptops have defined the past five years of the company’s laptop line. There isn’t much that needs to be said about the anti-consumer design decisions that took Apple’s best generation of the MacBook Pro in the 2011/2012 era and cursed it with an unneeded rethinking.

The about-face that the company took on its Mac Pro line shows just how misguided its thinking was and how Ive and company let innovative design poison the good will it had built up with customers. The company’s 2019 line is a total rejection of the 2013 trash can which showcased some major design hubris.

These missteps don’t fundamentally complicate the legacy of Ive or Apple. The past decade has also seen thoughtful designs take shape from the Apple Watch to the iPhone X to the iPad Pro, but industrial design is a means to an end and the manner in which Apple has determined where the customer fits into its design ethos could perhaps use some rethinking as the company enters a new design era.

Send me feedback
on Twitter @lucasmtny or email
lucas@techcrunch.com

On to the rest of the week’s news.

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context.

• SpaceX preps for a Starship payday
  Elon Musk is still trying to get SpaceX’s Starship off the ground, but the company’s leadership is already planning for the reusable rocket’s commercial heyday. Read more about the aggressive timeline here.
• SF throws Juul the bird
  San Francisco doesn’t always operate on the right side of interacting with new technologies and startups, but the city government took final steps to be the first city to ban sales of electronic cigarettes, taking aim at Juul, which seems to be one of the more morally bankrupt SF startups out there. Read more on the ban here.
• Reddit takes steps to isolate r/The_Donald
  Reddit has had a tough time growing up over the past several years, part of that has been a handful of problem communities on the site. This week, Reddit took the unique step of quarantining r/The_Donald after threats against public officials and members of the police. Read more about the quarantine here.
• Tesla’s cell jealousy
  Tesla electric vehicles are awfully reliant on Panasonic’s battery cells and the company is investigating how it can reduce that dependency, though the company’s significant demands suggest that even if they succeed in the aggressive move, it would take an awful long time to scale to meet their needs. Read more on the report here.

GAFA Gaffes

How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:

1. Facebook’s head of spin makes a push:
   [Facebook makes another push to shape and define its own oversight]
2. FB isn’t sure what to do:
   [Facebook’s content oversight board plan is raising more questions than it answers]

Extra Crunch

Our premium subscription service had another week of interesting deep dives. We had a story that should be interesting to a lot of younger founders that are scaling their entrepreneurial ambitions while they’re still in classes.

How to scale a startup in school

“…Once you have a job in an industry you want to be in, network like your life depends on it. Get to know the talented people around you and try to help them as much as you can…”

Here are some of our other top reads this week for premium subscribers. This week, we talked a bit about the future of marketplaces and you should think about naming your startup.

• The next service marketplace wave: Vertical-market-networks
• What startup names are most effective?

Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2LtFqHR

Huawei can buy from US suppliers again — but things will never be the same

U.S. President Donald Trump has handed Huawei a lifeline after he said that U.S. companies are permitted to sell goods to the embattled Chinese tech firm following more than a month of uncertainty.

It’s been a pretty dismal past month for Huawei since the American government added it and 70 of its affiliates to an “entity list” which forbids U.S. companies from doing business with it. The ramifications of the move were huge across Huawei’s networking and consumer devices businesses. A range of chip companies reportedly forced to sever ties while Google, which provides Android for Huawei devices, also froze its relationship. Speaking this month.

All told, Huawei founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei said recently that the ban would cost the Chinese tech firm — the world’s third-larger seller of smartphones — some $30 billion in lost revenue of the next two years.

Now, however, the Trump administration has provided a reprieve, at least based on the President’s comments following a meeting with Chinese premier Xi Jinping at the G20 summit this weekend.

“US companies can sell their equipment to Huawei. We’re talking about equipment where there’s no great national security problem with it,” the U.S. President said.

Those comments perhaps contradict some in the US administration who saw the Huawei blacklisting as a way to strangle the company and its global ambitions, which are deemed by some analysts to be a threat to America.

President Trump has appeared to soften his tone on Chinese communications giant Huawei, suggesting that he would allow the company to once again purchase US technology https://t.co/4YNJCyKLTg pic.twitter.com/jr45f40ghP

— CNN International (@cnni) June 29, 2019

Despite the good news, any mutual trust has been broken and things are unlikely to be the same again.

America’s almost casual move to blacklist Huawei — the latest in a series of strategies in its ongoing trade battle with China — exemplifies just how dependent the company has become on the U.S. to simply function.

Huawei has taken steps to hedge its reliance on America, including the development of its own operating system to replace Android and its own backup chips, and you can expect that these projects will go into overdrive to ensure that Huawei doesn’t find itself in a similar position again in the future.

Of course, decoupling its supply chain from US partners is no easy task both in terms of software and components. It remains to be seen if Huawei could maintain its current business level — which included 59 million smartphones in the last quarter and total revenue of $107.4 billion in 2018 — with non-US components and software but this episode is a reminder that it must have a solid contingency policy in case it becomes a political chess piece again in the future.

Beyond aiding Huawei, Trump’s move will boost Google and other Huawei partners who invested significant time and resources into developing a relationship with Huawei to boost their own businesses through its business.

Indeed, speaking to press Trump, Trump admitted that US companies sell “a tremendous amount” of products to Huawei. Some “were not exactly happy that they couldn’t sell” to Huawei and it looks like that may have helped tipped this decision. But, then again, never say never — you’d imagine that the Huawei-Trump saga is far from over despite this latest twist.

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Xcj04O
via IFTTT

Google finance head joins Postmates board ahead of anticipated IPO

Google’s vice president of finance, has joined Postmates’ board of directors, the latest sign that the on-demand food delivery startup is prepping to take the company public.

Postmates announced Friday that Kristin Reinke, vice president of Finance at Google, will join the San Francisco startup as an independent director.

Reinke has been with Google since 2005. Prior to Google, Reinke was at Oracle for eight years. Reinke also serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Economic Advisory Council.

Her skill set will come in handy as Postmates creeps towards an IPO.

Earlier this year, the company lined up a $100 million pre-IPO financing that valued the business at $1.85 billion. Postmates is backed by Tiger Global, BlackRock, Spark Capital, Uncork Capital, Founders Fund, Slow Ventures and others. Spark Capital’s Nabeel Hyatt tweeted the news earlier Friday.

Happy to welcome Kristin to the board of @Postmates. Great times ahead. https://t.co/nEqu3A2YkE

— Nabeel Hyatt (@nabeel) June 28, 2019

“Postmates has established itself as the market leader with a focus on innovation and route efficiency in the fast‐growing on‐demand delivery sector. Given their strong execution, accelerating growth, and financial discipline, they are well positioned for continued market growth across the U.S.,” said Reinke. “I’m thrilled to join the board.”

The startup has been beefing up its executive quiver, most recently hiring Apple veteran and author Ken Kocienda as a principal software engineer at Postmates X, the team building the food delivery company’s semi-autonomous sidewalk rover, Serve.

Kocienda, author of “Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s  Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs,” spent 15 years at Apple focused on human interface design, collaborating with engineers to develop the first iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2XDlRTJ

Mozilla previews a redesigned and faster Firefox for Android

Mozilla today announced the first preview of a redesigned version of Firefox for Android that promises to be up to two times faster. The new version also introduces an easier to use and rather minimalist user interface, as well as support for collections, Mozilla’s new take on bookmarks. The new browser also features Firefox’s tracking protection, which is on by default. Over time, this preview will become the default Firefox for Android.

A few years ago, with Quantum, the Firefox team make a number of under-the-hood improvements to the browser’s core backend technologies. Now, it is doing something similar with GeckoView, Mozilla’s browser engine for Android. Implementing the technology the team developed for this in the browser now “paves the way for a complete makeover of the mobile Firefox experience,” the organization writes in today’s announcement.

“While all other major Android browsers today are based on Blink and therefore reflective of Google’s decisions about mobile, Firefox’s GeckoView engine ensures us and our users independence,” says the Firefox team. “Building Firefox for Android on GeckoView also results in greater flexibility in terms of the types of privacy and security features we can offer our mobile users.”

An early version of Firefox with GeckoView is now available for testing on Android under the Firefox Preview moniker. Mozilla notes that the user experience will sill change quite a bit before it is final.

When you first launch it, Preview opens up a new default experience that lets you sign in to a Firefox account, decide on whether you want a light or dark theme (or have the system switch automatically depending on the time of day), turn on privacy features and more.

One feature I really appreciate is that, by default, the preview puts the URL bar at the bottom of the screen, so that it’s within easy reach of your thumb. If you swipe up on the URL bar, you get both a share and bookmark icon, too. That takes some getting used to but quickly becomes second nature.

I haven’t run any formal benchmarks, but the preview definitely feels significantly snappier and smoother than any previews Firefox version on Android, up to the point where I wouldn’t hesitate to make it my default browser on mobile, especially given its built-in privacy features. I haven’t run into any hard crashes so far either, but this is obviously a beta version, so your mileage may vary.

For the rest of the year, the team will focus on optimizing the preview for all Android devices, but for now, it’s already worth a look if you’re looking to play with a new mobile browser on your Android device and not afraid of the occasional bug.

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2YgwcC5
via IFTTT

Apple is reportedly moving Mac Pro assembly to China

Back in 2013, Apple announced that it would it would be assembling its high-end desktop in the U.S. After manufacturing had mostly moved out the country, the company made a point of touting its use of its Texas plant to help produce the Mac Pro.

When the long-awaited followup was announced earlier this month at WWDC, many wondered whether the company would return to Austin. Apple didn’t comment on its plans at the time, but a new report from The Wall Street Journal claims that the desktop will be produced by Quanta Computer Inc. in a plant outside of Shanghai.

Apple hasn’t denied the report, which comes courtesy of “people familiar with its plans.” Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the company highlights the other parts of the production process,

“Like all of our products, the new Mac Pro is designed and engineered in California and includes components from several countries including the United States,” the statement reads. “We’re proud to support manufacturing facilities in 30 US states and last year we spent $60 billion with over 9,000 suppliers across the US. Our investment and innovation supports 2 million American jobs. Final assembly is only one part of the manufacturing process.”

The report comes at a particularly sensitive time for U.S./China relations, as a trade war has been stoked, in particular, by Trump. Apple has long been aware of the potential impact of tariffs on components and international sales. Last year, CEO Tim Cook noted that he had met with the President, telling him that tariffs were “the wrong move.”

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2X84JBh

Shuttl is winning over office workers in India with safer bus commute option

Miles away from the fancy parts of Gurgaon, where a cohort of Uber and Ola cars race all day to dot the surrounding, hundreds of people are working on a different solution to contribute to India’s push for improved mobility.

When Uber entered India six years ago, and its local rival Ola began to expand in the nation, many thought the two cab services will be able to meet the needs of most Indians. To be sure, the heavily discounted cab rides in the early days meant that the two companies were able to quickly scale their businesses to dozens of cities and were clocking about three million rides a day.

But in the years since, it has become clear that Ola and Uber alone can’t serve the masses — a significant portion of which lacks the means to book a cab ride — or magically circumvent through India’s alarmingly congested roads. This has resulted in the emergence of a growing number of electric bike makers such as Yulu — which partnered with Uber last month, Vogo — which is backed by Ola,  Bounce, and Ather Energy that are both showing promising growth and attracting big bucks from investors.

For four years, another startup has been quietly working on expanding its platform. But unlike the bike startups and cab aggressors, it is betting on buses. Shuttl operates over 1,300 buses in more than 300 routes in five cities of India. The platform serves more than 65,000 customers each day.

Shuttl, too, hasn’t had much difficulty in attracting capital. It has raised about $48.5 million to date. TechCrunch recently learned that the startup was in talks with investors to raise an additional $50 million. Amit Singh, cofounder and CEO of Shuttl, declined to comment on the upcoming funding round. But he sat with us to explain his business and the challenges it comes with.

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2IWN8IP
via IFTTT

Daily Crunch: Jony Ive is leaving Apple

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. Jony Ive is leaving Apple to launch a new firm

The man who won over decades of Apple fans with iconic product design and his pronunciation of “aluminum” is out at the company.

The executive will begin transitioning away from Apple at the end of 2019, launching a new project titled LoveFrom next year. In a press release, Apple noted that it will remain a client of his new design firm.

2. Amazon launches Counter in-store pick-up in the US, starting with 100 Rite Aid locations

The longer-term plan for Amazon is to expand the pick-up option to 1,500 stores (including non-Rite Aid partners) by the end of 2019 — a very quick ramp-up in the next six months.

3. Google Maps can now predict how crowded your bus or train will be

This is a new prediction technique Google has been perfecting for over half a year. Starting in October, the company began to ask Google Maps users who traveled between 6am to 10am for details about their journey.

4. Apple’s Sidecar just really gets me, you know?

Darrell has been trying out Sidecar, the feature that lets you use an iPad as an external display for your Mac — and he says it’s just about everything you could ask for.

5. Niantic is throwing a Harry Potter: Wizards Unite fan festival this summer

Niantic has been doing in-person “anomaly” events around the world for their first title, Ingress, for years, and the company has also held dozens of real-world events for Pokémon GO.

6. My six months with $30/month email service Superhuman

A $30-per-month email service capturing the adoration of investors and founders in Silicon Valley is perhaps an unsurprising story in a subscription-obsessed landscape, yet we’re only now hearing how stealth-y startup Superhuman has captured major funding.

7. The rise of the new crypto ‘mafias’

Drawing on the idea of the “PayPal mafia,” this article examines the formation and flow of talent within the crypto landscape today. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2NkYsmg

Apple’s Sidecar just really *gets* me, you know?

With the rollout of Apple’s public beta software previews of macOS and the new iPadOS, I’ve finally been able to experience first-hand Sidecar, the feature that lets you use an iPad as an external display for your Mac. This is something I’ve been looking to make work since the day the iPad was released, and it’s finally here – and just about everything you could ask for.

These are beta software products, and I’ve definitely encountered a few bugs including my main Mac display blanking out and requiring a restart (that’s totally fine – betas by definition aren’t fully baked). But Sidecar is already a game-changer, and one that I will probably have a hard time living without in future – especially on the road.

Falling nicely into the ‘it just works’ Apple ethos, setting up Sidecar is incredibly simple. As long as your Mac is running macOS 10.15 Catalina, and your iPad is nearby, with Bluetooth and Wifi enabled, and running the iPadOS 13 beta, you just click on the AirPlay icon in your Mac’s Menu bar and it should show up as a display option.

Once you select your iPad, Sidecar just quickly displays an extended desktop from your Mac on the iOS device. It’s treated as a true external display in macOS System Preferences, so you can arrange it with other displays, mirror your Mac and more. The one thing you can’t do that you can do with traditional displays is change the resolution – Apple keeps things default here at 1366 x 1024, but it’s your iPad’s extremely useful native resolution (2732 x 2048, plus Retina pixel doubling for the first-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro I’m using for testing), and it means there’s nothing weird going on with pixelated graphics or funky text.

Apple also turns on, by default, both a virtual Touchbar and a new feature called ‘Sidebar’ (yes, it’s a Sidebar for your Sidecar) that provides a number of useful commands including the ability to call up the dock, summon a virtual keyboard, quickly access the command key and more. This is particularly useful if you’re using the iPad on its own without the attached Mac, which can really come in handy when you’re deep in a drawing application and just looking to do quick things like undo, and Apple has a dedicated button in Sidebar for that, too.

The Touchbar is identical to Apple’s hardware Touchbar, which it includes on MacBook Pros, dating back to its introduction in 2016. The Touchbar has always been kind of a ‘meh’ feature, and some critics vocally prefer the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro model that does away with it altogether in favor of an actual hardware Escape key. And on the iPad using Sidecar, you also don’t get what might be its best feature – TouchID. But, if you’re using Sidecar specifically for photo or video editing, it’s amazing to be able to have it called up and sitting there ready to do, as an app-specific dedicated quick action toolbar.

Best of all, Apple made it possible to easily turn off both these features, and to do so quickly right from your Mac’s menu bar. That way, you get the full benefit of your big beautiful iPad display. Sidecar will remember this preference too for next time you connect.

Also new to macOS Catalina is a hover-over menu for the default window controls (those three ‘stoplight’ circular buttons that appear at the top left of any Mac app). Apple now provides options to either go fullscreen, tile your app left or right to take up 50% of your display, or, if you’re using Sidecar, to quickly move the app to Sidecar display or back.

[gallery ids="1850048,1850047"]

This quick shuffle action works great, and also respects your existing windows settings, so you can move an app window that you’ve resized manually to take up a quarter of your Mac’s display, and then when you send it back from the Sidecar iPad, it’ll return to where you had it originally in the same size and position. It’s definitely a nice step up in terms of native support for managing windows across multiple displays.

I’ve been using Sidecar wirelessly, though it also works wired and Apple has said there shouldn’t really be any performance disparity regardless of which way you go. So far, the wireless mode has exceeded all expectations, and any third-party competitors in terms of reliability and quality. It also works with the iPad Pro keyboard case, which makes for a fantastic input alternative if you happen to be closer to that one instead of the keyboard you’re using with your Mac.

Sidecar also really shines for digital artists, because it supports input via Apple Pencil immediately in apps that have already built in support for stylus input on Macs, including Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo. I’ve previously used a Wacom Cintiq 13HD with my Mac for this kind of thing, and I found Apple’s Sidecar to be an amazing alternative, not least of which because it’s wireless and even the 12.9 iPad Pro is such more portable than the Wacom device. Input seems to have very little response lag (like, it’s not even really perceivable), there’s no calibration required to make sure the Pencil lines up with the cursor on the screen, and as I mentioned above, combined with the Sidebar and dedicated ‘Undo’ button, it’s an artistic productivity machine.

The Pencil is the only means of touch input available with Sidecar, and that’s potentially going to be weird for users of other third-party display extender apps, most of which support full touch input for the extended Mac display they provide. Apple has intentionally left out finger-based touch input, because Mac just wasn’t designed for it, and in use that actually tracks with what my brain expects, so it probably won’t be too disorienting for most users.

When Apple introduced the 5K iMac, it left out one thing that had long been a mainstay of that all-in-on desktop – Target Display Mode. It was a sad day for people who like to maximize the life of their older devices. But they’ve more than made up for it with the introduction of Sidecar, which genuinely doubles the utility value of any modern iPad, provided you’re someone for whom additional screen real estate, with or without pressure-sensitive pen input, is something valuable. As someone who often works on the road and out of the office, Sidecar seems like something I personally designed in the room with Apple’s engineering team.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2FEvOX3

Apple Music surpasses 60 million subscribers

Today’s major Apple news may be the departure of its design guru Jony Ive, but the even as the company stomachs the executive loss, their software plows ahead. Today, in an interview with French news site Numerama, Apple honcho Eddy Cue revealed that the number of Apple Music subscribers has now climbed to 60 million.

The company seems to give updates every time it surpasses another additional 10 million subscribers, we last heard that they had crossed the 50 million mark back in April.

Now, the company’s music service is well past the halfway market in its mission to surpass Spotify which currently has 100 million subscribers.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2FBUHm4

Jony Ive is leaving Apple to launch a new firm

The man who won over decades of Apple fans with iconic and his pronunciation of “aluminum” is out at the company. Sir Jonathan Paul “Jony” Ive told The Financial Times today that he’s leaving the company after 27 years. 

Ive led a design team that created an army of consumer electronics’ most iconic devices, including the iPhone, iPod and various Mac products. The executive will begin transitioning away from the company at the end of 2019, launching a new project titled LoveFrom next year.

Apple confirmed the move in a press release, noting that it will remain a client of his new design firm.

“Jony is a singular figure in the design world and his role in Apple’s revival cannot be overstated, from 1998’s groundbreaking iMac to the iPhone and the unprecedented ambition of Apple Park, where recently he has been putting so much of his energy and care,” said Tim Cook said in the release. “Apple will continue to benefit from Jony’s talents by working directly with him on exclusive projects, and through the ongoing work of the brilliant and passionate design team he has built. After so many years working closely together, I’m happy that our relationship continues to evolve and I look forward to working with Jony long into the future.”

Ive echoed the sentiment in the interview, telling the site, “While I will not be an [Apple] employee, I will still be very involved — I hope for many, many years to come. This just seems like a natural and gentle time to make this change.”

No immediate replacement has been named for Ive, who joined the company full time in September 1992. Apple’s Chief Design Officer first made a name for himself at the company with the design of the PowerBook while still at the London-based design firm, Tangerine. In recent years, he had increasingly become one Apple’s most prominent faces, regularly appearing in design videos for the company.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2FCNCBw

The rise of the new crypto “mafias”

Ash Egan Contributor

Ash Egan leads crypto investing at Accomplice. He formerly was a VC at ConsenSys Ventures and Converge.

In the early 2000s, journalists popularized the term “PayPal mafia” to describe the PayPal founders and employees who left to start their own wildly successful tech companies, including Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk. Drawing from that idea, this article seeks to cover the formation and flow of talent within the crypto landscape today.

I'm fascinated by the concept of tech mafias, popularized by Paypal in the early 00s.

Early signs of crypto mafias:

Coinbase @0xProject @dydxprotocol
Ethereum/ConsenSys @Cardano @polkadotnetwork @metamask_io
MIT @EnigmaMPC @Algorand Unit-e
IC3 Avalanche

Others?

— Ash Egan (@AshAEgan) April 3, 2019

The crypto world is in a constant state of flux, with new startups entrants joining the industry every single day. These new startups have the potential either to be superstars within a portfolio company or to start the next Coinbase. Additionally, there are already impressive spin-outs from some of the more established crypto companies.

For ease of framing, I’ve separated these early-forming mafias into four categories: Crypto, Tech, Wall Street, and Academia. Since 2009, there have been 186 spinout companies originating from those four categories (33% from Academia, 28% from Crypto, 24% from Tech, and 15% from Wall Street).

Obvious but important disclaimer: this article does not intend to promote organized crime within crypto.

Criteria

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Nfpz1P

NTWRK moves into live IRL events

NTWRK, is a fascinating experiment in live video shopping for the iPhone set. It’s been described as a blend of QVC and Twitter and Twitch and they just got a new slice of money from investors like Drake and Live Nation to expand into physical events.

There’s been a bunch of attempts at this kind of hybrid event shopping experience, but none of them have quite hit a home run yet. NTWRK was a pretty compelling experience even at launch last year. The core experience is a live show presented only in NTWRK’s app, where guests can talk about products which become available in the app as the show airs.

There was a built in opportunity to offer limited availability streetwear and sneakers, and an audience that founder Aaron Levant knew very well from his time running ComplexCon and Agenda, two big streetwear and marketing shows.

One of the first shows starred Ben Baller and Jeff Staple, and featured a drop of a new colorway of Staple’s iconic Pigeon Dunk from Nike. I tuned in and found the experience to be compelling in its own way. The live show provided context for the product and the interface let you purchase in a couple taps of a button (the shoes sold out immediately and the app inevitably crashed from the rush of hype beasts). The stream and app have gotten more stable since then.

Since the launch, NTWRK has experimented with various product areas and promotions. The latest funding is enabling expansion back into physical events and some new angles on the NTWRK model.

After getting kicked out of high school in 10th grade, Levant (who had a passion for graffiti) went on to work in graphic design, sales and marketing for an LA streetwear brand. That led to trade show attending and eventually to Levant founding his own show, Agenda in 2003. Agenda got bigger over the next 10 years, becoming one of the biggest action sports, streetwear and lifestyle tradeshows in the world. He sold a majority of Agenda to ReeedPOP, which owns Comic Con and stayed on in a development role. Eventually, he developed other shows including ComplexCon, a smash hit culture and sneaker show in partnership with Complex.

Last year, Levant left to found NTWRK.

“That transition really happened through a conversation that I had with Jimmy Iovine in September of 2017,” Levant told me in an interview last year. “I got introduced to him by a friend. He expressed his interest in a new company for him and his son, and we had similar interests and ideas around that. That night that I met him, I went home, stayed up all night to 4:00 in the morning and wrote the entire business plan for NTWRK.”

Iovine ended up as an investor via the MSA Enterprises vehicle, along with Warner Bros. Digital Networks, LeBron James, Maverick Carter and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jimmy’s son Jamie is a co-founder and Head of Fandom at NTWRK.

One of Levant’s big takeaways from his time with ComplexCon and Agenda was that the physical audiences were valuable but a digital audience is built to foster through earned media and user-generated content around these lifestyle events.

“There’s 50,000 people in the room but I think there’s probably a million people online who want to engage with those products and that content,” said Levant. “Maybe I felt a little bit like I was using my skill set and I wasn’t extracting the full value out of it because I wasn’t in the e-com or digital media business in the past. I think that was a key unlock for me, how do I do that better with a phase two of my career?”

The past few months have seen a series of high profile launches and collaborations with sneaker and streetwear people. And now, the Live Nation and Drake tie up will lead to artist-driven collections sold on NTWRK’s app, unique ticket access, promo bundles developed by NTWKR and, yes, a new live event called NTWRK Presents that will launch in Q4.

In recent months, Drake sold some of his tour merch exclusively on NTWRK.

They’ve also been running auctions for rare resell market items like Supreme guitars and sneakers.

The concept of shopping as entertainment is far from new. There’s a reason that the easy buzzphrase people attach to NTWRK is ‘QVC for millennials’. But there has yet to be a platform that has managed to pin together the right culture with the right delivery mechanism at the right time. NTWRK has a chance to do this I believe because Levant has the taste for it, but also because he’s backing into this from a place of understanding when it comes to culture.

Too many times we see the technology of the platform take center stage — a clever delivery mechanism or good design. But, fundamentally, most tech companies are absolutely crap at culture. They’re too homogenic — they do not allow for and encourage the influence of the spaces that they’re catering to.

Black Twitter made Twitter. Creators of color made Vine. Asian and Indian users dominate Whatsapp. But when there is an attempt to engage even niche cultures in commerce or monetization the lack of inclusivity and understanding causes them to just screw up over and over.

Having started with live events that existed primarily as a framework for culture to create its own moments, Levant and NTWRK are in a better position to figure this out. If you’ve ever been to an Agenda or ComplexCon you know what I mean. There’s this pungent melange of culture, music, money, rare goods and ephemeral moment creation happening. The challenge is to make that work in a digital context, of course, and then to sort of ‘re-export’ that back into event formats.

“I think that, as I’ve said countless times, physical events have a huge organic digital ripple, but we needed the digital platform to already be established and scalable before we implemented the physical events, to have an effect on the larger digital platform,” Levant says about moving NTWRK into an IRL context. “In my previous roles, I spent 15 years really focusing on the physical experiential events and towards the end of my career doing that I came to the realization I was doing it backwards.”

I don’t necessarily think that this model’s going to work for everybody. I think Levant and co have a unique skill of bringing people together and I think the celebrity thing is a strong overall angle – right down to the investors.

“Obviously Drake is an icon that has massive influence over all of pop culture and I think there are few people in that category of him that can capture consumer’s imagination,” says Levant. “I couldn’t think of someone better than him to be involved with our company.”

There are other angles too, though, that still have the same thing at the core. NTWRK is creating this engaged audience and they’re giving them value and then offering them a very on-the-face, honest transaction: “Look, here’s this thing. If you buy it, we benefit. Thanks, peace.”

That kind of interaction model is foreign to media because of this idea that advertising is the only gain and the only way to build that monetary relationship. I think people are going to start to get wise to that but they still are very resistant.

“We were out there, talking to every brand and every agency in the world and it’s really interesting to watch who gets it and who’s totally confused,” said Levant when we spoke about the launch. “It’s really fun to have these conversations because people are just like, ‘Wait, what are you doing?’

They have a really hard time grasping it and they don’t know who we should talk to. Should we be talking to the media buying team? Should we be talking to the wholesale team? Should we talk to the PR team? I’m like, ‘No, we’re talking to everybody.””

“Companies tend to divide their business up into these silos, these business units and these internal categories and they usually don’t collaborate and play well together and when you get these big, global organizations, their head’s spinning because they don’t know who we should talk to because no one’s done this one-to-one yet.”

Right now as I write this I’m watching Bobby Hundreds talk live about his memoir This is Not A T-Shirt — while selling a bundle that includes the book and, yes, a t-shirt. Hundreds (Bobby Kim), built a streetwear brand when it was definitely not a thing to build a streetwear brand.

The bundle runs $50. I’m thinking about buying it.

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2YjGYYo

Apple hires leading ARM chip designer

Apple has clearly spent the last several years dreaming of a world where it didn’t have to rely on third-parties to create its components. The hardware giant has already taken a number of steps in that direction with its own in-house chips, and a recent hire points at an even bigger push.

Per his LinkedIn account, former ARM Lead CPU Architect Mike Filippo joined up with Apple last month, following a 10 year stint with the semiconductor company. The move notably follows the exit of Apple chip design lead Gerard Williams III, back in March. Filippo appears perfectly suited for the role, having played a key part in a many of ARM’s virtually ubiquitous designs. He previously spent several years at both Intel and AMD.

ARM confirmed Filippo’s exit in a statement offered to Bloomberg. “Mike was a long-time valuable member of the ARM community,” the company said. “We appreciate all of his efforts and wish him well in his next endeavor.” Apple, on the other hand, has yet to officially confirm the move.

The company has increasingly looked to develop its own components in house. For some time now, it has purportedly been looking to ditch Intel processors for its own on Mac devices. It’s also said to be dabbling with its own chips for a long-rumored AR headset.

Along with the company’s long standing desire to developa complete bottom, up product experience in-house, doing so would greatly lessen its reliance on other companies. Those issues have been highlighted by moves like its recent decision to play nice with Qualcomm as it looks forward to the release of a 5G iPhone.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2NhsQOh

Vertical market networks, effective startup names, Libra, Carbon, and Sidewalk Labs

The next service marketplace wave: Vertical market networks

B2B service marketplaces (think translation as a service) are an extraordinarily lucrative startup category. But despite the incredible potential of these platforms to generate outsized returns, many fail. Why?

Ivan Smolnikov, the CEO and founder of translation service startup Smartcat, investigates why certain marketplaces seem to grow while others stall. His conclusion is that unlocking value for both sides of the marketplace is much more challenging than it appears, and the most successful, next-generation marketplaces are going to come from highly networked, efficient platforms for complex projects targeting specific verticals.

Smolnikov then gives a step-by-step guide to optimizing marketplace growth.

One reason is that several service providers must often work together to complete a single job for a buyer, requiring a complex workflow from end to end. As a result, it’s difficult for marketplaces to not only mediate service delivery but also make it significantly more efficient for buyers and suppliers. If both the buyer and suppliers don’t see a significant efficiency gain other than being initially matched, why would they continue using the marketplace?

What startup names are most effective?

Perhaps the first step in building a company is just figuring out what to call it. Adam Zelcer, who founded Adboy, explores some tactics on how to optimize a startup’s name.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2YfcG9h

TransferWise’s new debit card for the US fires the starting gun on a new war for travelers

International money transfer service TransferWise, has made a significant incursion into the US market today, launching a MasterCard debit card alongside a multicurrency account. Mirroring the card it has already launched in the UK and Europe last year, the card will work in over 40 currencies without balance limits, and conversion fees will be competitive with current exchange rates. A similar card aimed at businesses will follow the consumer launch.

Co-founder Taavet Hinrikus told me that the card effectively makes the average person able to act like a millionaire when they are traveling. “Alternative ‘travel’ cards are four times more expensive for every dollar spent and are only available to the top 10% of people who pass credit checks and also pay hundreds of dollars per year,” he said.

He believes this card will democratize the whole market. That means it’s likely that US tourists in Europe or elsewhere will be hugely attracted to this card because they will be charged as if they were a local person, in the local currencies, without all the normal fees.

Transferwise is also pushing an immigration angle to the launch featuring Tan France (pictured), star of “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy”.

Key features of the account and debit card include international bank details for the UK, the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, meaning account and routing numbers that are unique to the account holder. Additionally, if a holder swipes a card in a currency they don’t have in their account, the card knows to choose the cheapest option from their available balances. The card is also free to get, with now no subscription, no sign-up fees, and no monthly maintenance fee. Holders can also freeze/unfreeze the card from the Transferwise app and receive push notifications every time they spend. It will also sync with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay.

Hinrikus added: “Our goal is to offer bank details for every country in the world through one account — the world’s first global account — and we’re starting with five of the world’s top currencies. The 40-currency debit card completes the package, so we’re excited to be releasing the card in the US.

Earlier this year TransferWise said it was now valued at $3.5 billion after closing a $292 million secondary funding round. In November it reported an annual post-tax net profit of $8 million for the year ending March 2018. At the time it said it had five million users transacting $5 billion across its platform a month.

While Transferwise competes with the smaller Revolut and WorldRemit, as well as incumbents like Western Union and MoneyGram, with the launch of this new card it will also be breathing down the neck of Paypal.

Its investors include Old Mutual, Institutional Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Lead Edge Capital, Lone Pine Capital, Vitruvian Partners, BlackRock, Valar Ventures, Baillie Gifford, PayPal founder Max Levchin, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, among others.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2XfQ38l

Shopify Ping adds support for Apple Business Chat and Apple Pay

Last year Shopify announced Shopify Ping, a free unified messaging platform for merchants to communicate directly with customers in a chat context. Today, it announced it’s adding support for Apple Business Chat to Shopify Ping.

The real benefit to this is that users can not only use Apple’s business chat product to communicate with customers, the customers can pay directly with Apple Pay right inside the chat client, reducing friction, and making it more likely the person will complete his or her purchase.

As the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new integration, this approach is likely to increase sales. “We know that customers who engage in a conversation with a brand are nearly three times as likely to complete a purchase. Live chat also creates a personal connection between a brand and the customer which builds trust and makes them more likely to come back,” the company wrote.

With Shopify Ping, merchants can manage all of the Apple Business Chat interactions together with its other chat traffic in a single place. This means that small merchants have access to the same rich set of customer interaction tools as some of the biggest merchants on the planet, enabling them to provide a more sophisticated level of service, something that has often been out of reach for smaller businesses without deep pockets.

Apple Business Chat was released last year to provide businesses with a way to use iMessage in a business context. The company has been expanding the product over the last year, and today’s announcement puts it in reach of Shopify’s vast user base.

Shopify announces free customer communication and targeting tool

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Lqh8OZ

Tesla reportedly working on its own battery cell manufacturing capability

Automaker Tesla is looking into how it might own another key part of its supply chain, through research being done at a secret lab near its Fremont, CA HQ, CNBC reports. The company currently relies on Panasonic to build the battery pack and cells it uses for its vehicles, which is one of, if not the most significant component in terms of its overall bill of materials.

Tesla is no stranger to owning components of its own supply chain rather than farming them out to vendors as is more common among automakers – it builds its own seats at a facility down the road from its Fremont car factory, for instance, and it recently started building its own chip for its autonomous features, taking over those duties from Nvidia.

Eliminating links in the chain where possible is a move emulated from Tesla CEO Elon Musk inspiration Apple, which under Steve Jobs adopted an aggressive strategy of taking control of key parts of its own supply mix and continues to do so where it can eke out improvements to component cost. Musk has repeatedly pointed out that batteries are a primary constraint when it comes to Tesla’s ability to produce not only is cars, but also its home power products like the Powerwall consumer domestic battery for solar energy systems.

Per the CNBC report, Tesla is doing its battery research at an experimental lab near its factory in Fremont, at a property it maintains on Kato road. Tesla would need lots more time and effort to turn its battery ambitions into production at the scale it requires, however, so don’t expect it to replace Panasonic anytime soon. And in fact, it could add LG as a supplier in addition to Panasonic once its Shanghai factory starts producing Model 3s, per the report.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Xa48nn

Apple News launches a guide to the 2020 Democratic candidates and debates

Apple today is introducing a new section in its Apple News application for iOS, iPad and Mac that’s designed to familiarize voters with the 20 U.S. Democratic presidential candidates ahead of the first Democratic debates hosted on June 26 and June 27 by NBC News, MSNBC, and Telemundo in Miami, Florida. The new guide is meant to provide a single place where readers can learn about a candidate’s biography, experience, and current position on key issues, among other things.

It will also feature photos and videos, along with recent coverage from trusted news sources.

Apple says that it will leverage a diverse set of news sources to provide this information, including ABC News, Axios, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, Politico, The Hill, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TIME, USA Today, Vox and others.

The candidate information is curated and organized by Apple’s team of News editors, and will be found in the Top Stories section of its Apple News app.

As the debates begin, the section will expand from being only a guide to candidates to being a hub for updates from the debates, too. It will then include articles and video highlights from NBC News, as well as fact-checking, reactions, and key onstage moments and takeaways, says Apple in an announcement about the new feature.

The hub will continue to be updated after the debates, as well, with more news throughout the campaign.

In addition, users can personalize their experience by tracking their favorite candidates in Apple News. To do so, they’ll just click the “follow” button for the candidate in the app, then will receive any breaking news around that candidate as well as see ongoing news coverage about the candidate appear in their Apple News Today feed and elsewhere within the News app.

This isn’t the first time Apple has involved itself in helping curate and organize election-related information. Most recently, it launched a real-time news hub for the 2018 Midterms.

Similar to its earlier efforts, the new hub isn’t just text and media. It also includes helpful infographics to better understand key points — like how much money a candidate has raised and how that compares others, for example.

The hub also presents the necessary info in a very readable style, with sections like “You know him/her for:,” “Breakout moment:,” “You’ll love him/here if you…,” “You’ll leave him/her if you…”, and “You probably didn’t know that…”

Apple has taken the opposite approach from Facebook when it comes to providing easy access to news and information to its users. Facebook fired its news editors then turned its “trends” section over to an algorithm, before giving up and killing it altogether. But Apple has instead hired an editorial team of former journalists to organize and curate the news that tens of millions of people read. The News team doesn’t write its own stories, but plays a large role in selecting the stories that people first see when they open the app.

The result is an easy-to-use app designed with Apple’s aesthetic, where journalism gets top billing — not clickbait, viral news, and intentional sources of disinformation.

“The 2020 Democratic field is complex, and we want to offer Apple News readers a trusted place to learn more about candidates they’re familiar with and those they may be hearing about for the first time,” said Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief of Apple News. “The candidate guide in Apple News is a robust and reliable resource, connecting readers to valuable at-a-glance information and to great journalism from our partners.”

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2J9gwKD

Huawei says two-thirds of 5G networks outside China now use its gear

Self-driving startup Drive.ai is closing down

Drive.ai, the autonomous vehicle tech startup once valued at $200 million, is shutting down after four years, according to a state regulatory filing.

The closure was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. The company is not responding to media inquiries, a PR rep told TechCrunch.

The company’s Mountain View headquarters will close down on Friday, according to WARN documents filed with the Employment Development Department of California. A company must file a WARN document ahead of a mass layoff or plant closure.

Rumors have been swirling for weeks that Apple was looking to snap up the startup. Earlier this month, The Information reported that Apple was pursuing an acqui-hire, a term that typically means a smaller, targeted acquisition aimed at bringing on specific talent.

That appears to have panned out for at least some of the company’s 90 employees. At least five employees changed their LinkedIn profiles to show they started employment at Apple’s special projects division this month, according to SF Chronicle and confirmed by TechCrunch’s own review.

Drive.air was founded in 2015 by former graduate students working in Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab run by Andrew Ng, the renowned artificial intelligence expert. Ng is chairman of Drive.ai’s board and is married to co-founder Carol Reiley.

The company, which originally focused on self-driving software systems and intelligent communications systems, received a lot of attention and investment in those first years. It later raised more money as it tweaked its business model with a plan to combine deep learning software with hardware to make self-driving retrofitted kits designed for business and commercial fleets. In all, the company has raised about $77 million, according to Pitchbook data. It was last valued at $200 million in 2017.

The startup ramped up operations in 2017 and 2018. Last year it launched a pilot program in Frisco, Texas to test an on-demand service using self-drivings. But even as it expanded, the executive team appeared to be constantly in flux with several people holding the CEO spot.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2KDZmbs

AI consulting startup Hypergiant brings on Bill Nye as an advisor

Hypergiant, a startup launched last year to address the execution gap in bringing applied AI and machine learning technologies to bear for large companies, has signed on a high-profile new advisor to help out with the new ‘Galactic Systems’ division of its services lineup.

Hypergiant founder CEO Ben Lamm also serves as an Advisory Council Member for The Planetary Society, the nonprofit dedicated to space science and exploration advocacy that’s led by Nye who acts as the Society’s CEO. Nye did some voiceover work for the video at the bottom of this post for Hypergiant through the connection, and then decided to come on in a more formal capacity as an official advisor working with the company. He’ll act as a member of Hypergiant’s Advisory Board.

Nye was specifically interested in helping Hypergiant to work on AI tech that touch on a couple of areas he’s most passionate about.

“Hypergiant has an ambitious mission to address some big problems using artificial intelligence systems,” Nye explained via email. “I’m looking forward to working with Hypergiant to develop artificially intelligent systems in two areas I care about a great deal: climate change and space exploration. We need to think big, and I’m very optimistic about what AI can do to make the world quite a bit better.”

Through its work, Hypergiant has an impact on projects in flight from high-profile customers including Apple, GE, Starbucks and the Department of Homeland Security to name just a few. Earlier this year, Austin-based Hypergiant announced it was launching a dedicated space division through the acquisition of Satellite & Extraterrestrial Operations & Procedures (SEOPS), a Texas company that offered deployment services for small satellites.

Hypergiant founder and CEO Ben Lamm along with members of the Hypergiant team at NASA. Credit: Hypergiant.

Nye’s role will focus on this division, advising on space, but also equally on advising clients as to climate change in order to ensure that Hypergiant can “make the most of AI systems to hep provide a high quality of life for people everywhere,” Nye wrote.

“Climate change is the biggest issue we face, and we need to get serious about new ways to fight it,” he explained in an email, noting that the potential impact his work with Hypergiant will have in this area specifically is a key reason he’s excited to undertake the new role.

A Better World from HYPERGIANT on Vimeo.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Lj5Hs4

Daily Crunch: We preview new Apple operating systems

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. iPadOS preview

Brian Heater checks out the new, forked version of iOS with tablet-specific features like a richer Home Screen, support for multitasking within a single app and giving iPad users more control over their files.

In addition, we’ve got initial impressions on macOS Catalina (with new ways for Apple to serve up content) and iOS 13 (with a gorgeous Dark Mode).

2. Hackers are stealing years of call records from hacked cell networks

According to researchers, the hackers have systematically broken in to more than 10 cell networks around the world over the past seven years to obtain massive amounts of call records — including times and dates of calls, and their cell-based locations — on at least 20 individuals.

3. SpaceX records another first for reusable rocketry by catching Falcon Heavy fairing with a boat

The maneuver saw a SpaceX-owned barge called Ms. Tree rigged with a giant net. It then navigated to a point off the Florida coast to await a falling nosecone from the Falcon Heavy launch.

4. SoftBank-backed Getaround acquires Norwegian car rental startup for $12M

Nabobil, which first launched in 2015, has 180,000 registered users and reached 130,000 bookings in May. For now, the startup will keep its name, and its full team will remain in place in Oslo, Norway.

5. Live like a robber baron for a night with Airbnb Luxe

The price varies from $600 to $1 million per night, and what you get ranges from castles in France to award-winning homes in New Zealand and South Africa.

6. Monzo, the UK challenger bank, raises £113M Series F led by YC’s Continuity fund at a £2B post-money valuation

Monzo’s new funding round should be viewed within the context of not only fast growth and increasingly convincing product-market fit in the U.K., but also recently unveiled plans to launch across the pond.

7. Apple says Spotify exaggerated how much ‘App Store tax’ it pays

Specifically, an Apple filing says that Spotify only pays a 15% “app tax” (revenue share) on just 0.5% of its 100 million premium subscribers.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2XxJYmT