TikTok stars got a judge to block Trump’s TikTok ban

TikTok has won another battle in its fight against the Trump administration’s ban of its video-sharing app in the U.S. — or, more accurately in this case, the TikTok community won a battle. On Friday, a federal judge in Pennsylvania has issued an injunction that blocked the restrictions that would have otherwise blocked TikTok from operating in the U.S. on November 12.

This particular lawsuit was not led by TikTok itself, but rather a group of TikTok creators who use the app to engage with their million-plus followers.

According to the court documents, plaintiff Douglas Marland has 2.7 million followers on the app; Alec Chambers has 1.8 million followers; and Cosette Rinab has 2.3 million followers. The creators argued – successfully as it turns out — that they would lose access to their followers in the event of a ban, as well as the “professional opportunities afforded by TikTok.” In other words, they’d lose their brand sponsorships — meaning, their income.

This is not the first time that the U.S. courts have sided with TikTok to block the Trump administration’s proposed ban over the Chinese-owned video sharing app. Last month, a D.C. judge blocked the ban that would have removed the app from being listed in U.S. app stores run by Apple and Google.

That ruling had not, however, stopped the Nov. 12 ban that would have blocked companies from providing internet hosting services that would have allowed TikTok to continue to operate in the U.S.

The Trump administration had moved to block the TikTok app from operating in the U.S. due to its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, claiming it was a national security threat. The core argument from the judge in this ruling was the “Government’s own descriptions of the national security threat posed by the TikTok app are phrased in the hypothetical.”

That hypothetical risk was unable to be stated by the Government, the Judge argued, to be such a risk that it outweighed the public interest. The interest, in this case, was the over 100 million users of TikTok and the creators like Marland, Chambers and Rinab that utilized it to spread “informational materials,” which allowed the Judge to rule that the ban would shut down a platform for expressive activity.

“We are deeply moved by the outpouring of support from our creators, who have worked to protect their rights to expression, their careers, and to help small businesses, particularly during the pandemic,” said Vanessa Pappas, Interim Global Head of TikTok, in a statement. “We stand behind our community as they share their voices, and we are committed to continuing to provide a home for them to do so,” she added.

The TikTok community coming to the rescue on this one aspect of the overall TikTok picture just elevates this whole story. Though the company has been relatively quiet through this whole process, Pappas has thanked the community several times for its outpouring of support. Though there were some initial waves of ‘grief’ on the app with creators frantically recommending people follow them on other platforms, that has morphed over time into more of a ‘let’s band together’ vibe. This activity coalesced around a big swell in voting advocacy on the platform, where many creators are too young to actually participate but view voting messaging as their way to participate.

TikTok has remained active in the product department through the whole mess, shipping elections guides and trying to ban Qanon conspiracy spread. Even as Pakistan banned and then un-banned the app.

Trump administration’s TikTok ban has been delayed

 

 

 

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Apple acknowledges AirPods Pro issues, will replace those that crackle and rattle

Are your AirPods Pro earbuds making weird noises? You’re not imagining it — and you’re not the only one.

Just a few months after Apple started shipping AirPods Pro, some users started noticing that one or both of their earbuds were rattling or crackling. The noises would reportedly get worse whenever the user moved, and would sometimes only develop after months of use.

Apple didn’t say too much about it at first, but would usually replace crackling earbuds if you took the time to hit up support. A few folks here at TechCrunch have had the rattle rear its head on our own AirPods Pro buds… only to have it pop up again in the replacements.

It seems the problem has become widespread enough for an official acknowledgement: today Apple launched an “AirPods Pro Service Program” (as first pointed out by Mark Gurman) specifically for swapping out crackling buds.

A newly published support page outlines the potential symptoms, both of which suggest the issue has to do with the noise cancellation system:

• Crackling or static sounds that increase in loud environments, with exercise or while talking on the phone
• Active Noise Cancellation not working as expected, such as a loss of bass sound, or an increase in background sounds, such as street or airplane noise

Apple notes that only units made before October 2020 are affected, suggesting they’ve fixed the issue in units now coming off the line. The support page repeatedly says faulty units will be “replaced” rather than “repaired” — so for the most part, it sounds like turnaround should be pretty quick.

Apple is bringing spatial audio to AirPods Pro

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iPhones can now tell blind users where and how far away people are

Apple has packed an interesting new accessibility feature into the latest beta of iOS: a system that detects the presence of and distance to people in the view of the iPhone’s camera, so blind users can social distance effectively, among many other things.

The feature emerged from Apple’s ARKit, for which the company developed “people occlusion,” which detects people’s shapes and lets virtual items pass in front of and behind them. The accessibility team realized that this, combined with the accurate distance measurements provided by the lidar units on the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max, could be an extremely useful tool for anyone with a visual impairment.

Of course during the pandemic one immediately thinks of the idea of keeping six feet away from other people. But knowing where others are and how far away is a basic visual task that we use all the time to plan where we walk, which line we get in at the store, whether to cross the street, and so on.

The new feature, which will be part of the Magnifier app, uses the lidar and wide-angle camera of the Pro and Pro Max, giving feedback to the user in a variety of ways.

The lidar in the iPhone 12 Pro shows up in this infrared video. Each dot reports back the precise distance of what it reflects off of.

First, it tells the user whether there are people in view at all. If someone is there, it will then say how far away the closest person is in feet or meters, updating regularly as they approach or move further away. The sound corresponds in stereo to the direction the person is in the camera’s view.

Second, it allows the user to set tones corresponding to certain distances. For example, if they set the distance at six feet, they’ll hear one tone if a person is more than six feet away, another if they’re inside that range. After all, not everyone wants a constant feed of exact distances if all they care about is staying two paces away.

The third feature, perhaps extra useful for folks who have both visual and hearing impairments, is a haptic pulse that goes faster as a person gets closer.

Last is a visual feature for people who need a little help discerning the world around them, an arrow that points to the detected person on the screen. Blindness is a spectrum, after all, and any number of vision problems could make a person want a bit of help in that regard.

As ADA turns 30, tech is just getting started helping people with disabilities

The system requires a decent image on the wide-angle camera, so it won’t work in pitch darkness. And while the restriction of the feature to the high end of the iPhone line reduces the reach somewhat, the constantly increasing utility of such a device as a sort of vision prosthetic likely makes the investment in the hardware more palatable to people who need it.

This is far from the first tool like this — many phones and dedicated devices have features for finding objects and people, but it’s not often that it comes baked in as a standard feature.

People detection should be available to iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max running the iOS 14.2 release candidate that was just made available today. Details will presumably appear soon on Apple’s dedicated iPhone accessibility site.

Microsoft Soundscape helps the visually impaired navigate cities

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/37W232B

iPhones can now tell blind users where and how far away people are

Apple has packed an interesting new accessibility feature into the latest beta of iOS: a system that detects the presence of and distance to people in the view of the iPhone’s camera, so blind users can social distance effectively, among many other things.

The feature emerged from Apple’s ARKit, for which the company developed “people occlusion,” which detects people’s shapes and lets virtual items pass in front of and behind them. The accessibility team realized that this, combined with the accurate distance measurements provided by the lidar units on the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max, could be an extremely useful tool for anyone with a visual impairment.

Of course during the pandemic one immediately thinks of the idea of keeping six feet away from other people. But knowing where others are and how far away is a basic visual task that we use all the time to plan where we walk, which line we get in at the store, whether to cross the street, and so on.

The new feature, which will be part of the Magnifier app, uses the lidar and wide-angle camera of the Pro and Pro Max, giving feedback to the user in a variety of ways.

The lidar in the iPhone 12 Pro shows up in this infrared video. Each dot reports back the precise distance of what it reflects off of.

First, it tells the user whether there are people in view at all. If someone is there, it will then say how far away the closest person is in feet or meters, updating regularly as they approach or move further away. The sound corresponds in stereo to the direction the person is in the camera’s view.

Second, it allows the user to set tones corresponding to certain distances. For example, if they set the distance at six feet, they’ll hear one tone if a person is more than six feet away, another if they’re inside that range. After all, not everyone wants a constant feed of exact distances if all they care about is staying two paces away.

The third feature, perhaps extra useful for folks who have both visual and hearing impairments, is a haptic pulse that goes faster as a person gets closer.

Last is a visual feature for people who need a little help discerning the world around them, an arrow that points to the detected person on the screen. Blindness is a spectrum, after all, and any number of vision problems could make a person want a bit of help in that regard.

As ADA turns 30, tech is just getting started helping people with disabilities

The system requires a decent image on the wide-angle camera, so it won’t work in pitch darkness. And while the restriction of the feature to the high end of the iPhone line reduces the reach somewhat, the constantly increasing utility of such a device as a sort of vision prosthetic likely makes the investment in the hardware more palatable to people who need it.

This is far from the first tool like this — many phones and dedicated devices have features for finding objects and people, but it’s not often that it comes baked in as a standard feature.

People detection should be available to iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max running the iOS 14.2 release candidate that was just made available today. Details will presumably appear soon on Apple’s dedicated iPhone accessibility site.

Microsoft Soundscape helps the visually impaired navigate cities

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Q3 earnings find Apple and Google looking to the future for hardware rebounds

“5G is a once-in-a-decade kind of opportunity,” Tim Cook told the media during the Q&A portion of Apple’s Q3 earnings call. “And we could not be more excited to hit the market exactly when we did.”

The truth of the matter is its timing was a mixed bag. Apple was, by some accounts, late to 5G. By the time the company finally announced that it was adding the technology across its lineup of iPhone 12 variants, much of its competition had already beat the company to the punch. Of course, that’s not a huge surprise. Apple’s strategy is rarely a rush to be first.

5G networks are only really starting to come into their own now. Even today, there are still wide swaths of users who will have to default to an LTE connection the majority of the time they use their handsets. The arrival of 5G on the iPhone was really as much about future proofing this year’s models as anything. Consumers are holding onto phones longer, and in the three or four years before it’s time for another upgrade, the 5G maps will look very different.

Clearly, the new iPhone didn’t hit the market exactly when Apple had hoped; the pandemic saw to that. Manufacturing bottlenecks in Asia delayed the iPhone 12’s launch by a month. That’s going to have an impact on the bottomline of your quarterly earnings. The company saw a 20% drop for the quarter, year-over-year. That’s hugely significant, causing the company’s stock to drop more than 4% in extended trudging.

Why Apple’s Q4 earnings look different this year

Apple’s diverse portfolio helped curb some of those revenue slides. While the pandemic has generally had a profound impact on consumer spending on “non-essentials,” changing where and how we work has helped bolster Mac and iPad sales, which were up 28 and 46% respectively, year-over-year. It wasn’t enough to completely stop the iPhone stumble, but it certainly brings the importance of a diverse hardware portfolio into sharp relief.

China was a big issue for the company this time around — and the lack of a new, 5G-enabled iPhone was a big contributor. In greater China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong), the company saw a 28% drop in sales. There are a number of reasons to be hopeful about iPhone sales in Q4, however.

As I noted this morning, smartphone shipments were down almost across the board in China for Q3, per new figures from Canalys. Much of that can be chalked up to Huawei’s ongoing issues with the U.S. government. Long the dominant manufacturer in mainland China, the company has been hamstrung by, among other things, a ban on access to Android and other U.S.-made technologies. Apple’s numbers remained relatively steady compared to the competition and Huawei’s issues could present a big hole in the market. With 5G on its side, this next quarter could prove a banner year for the company.

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3mDTBcq

Q3 earnings find Apple and Google looking to the future for hardware rebounds

“5G is a once-in-a-decade kind of opportunity,” Tim Cook told the media during the Q&A portion of Apple’s Q3 earnings call. “And we could not be more excited to hit the market exactly when we did.”

The truth of the matter is its timing was a mixed bag. Apple was, by some accounts, late to 5G. By the time the company finally announced that it was adding the technology across its lineup of iPhone 12 variants, much of its competition had already beat the company to the punch. Of course, that’s not a huge surprise. Apple’s strategy is rarely a rush to be first.

5G networks are only really starting to come into their own now. Even today, there are still wide swaths of users who will have to default to an LTE connection the majority of the time they use their handsets. The arrival of 5G on the iPhone was really as much about future proofing this year’s models as anything. Consumers are holding onto phones longer, and in the three or four years before it’s time for another upgrade, the 5G maps will look very different.

Clearly, the new iPhone didn’t hit the market exactly when Apple had hoped; the pandemic saw to that. Manufacturing bottlenecks in Asia delayed the iPhone 12’s launch by a month. That’s going to have an impact on the bottomline of your quarterly earnings. The company saw a 20% drop for the quarter, year-over-year. That’s hugely significant, causing the company’s stock to drop more than 4% in extended trudging.

Why Apple’s Q4 earnings look different this year

Apple’s diverse portfolio helped curb some of those revenue slides. While the pandemic has generally had a profound impact on consumer spending on “non-essentials,” changing where and how we work has helped bolster Mac and iPad sales, which were up 28 and 46% respectively, year-over-year. It wasn’t enough to completely stop the iPhone stumble, but it certainly brings the importance of a diverse hardware portfolio into sharp relief.

China was a big issue for the company this time around — and the lack of a new, 5G-enabled iPhone was a big contributor. In greater China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong), the company saw a 28% drop in sales. There are a number of reasons to be hopeful about iPhone sales in Q4, however.

As I noted this morning, smartphone shipments were down almost across the board in China for Q3, per new figures from Canalys. Much of that can be chalked up to Huawei’s ongoing issues with the U.S. government. Long the dominant manufacturer in mainland China, the company has been hamstrung by, among other things, a ban on access to Android and other U.S.-made technologies. Apple’s numbers remained relatively steady compared to the competition and Huawei’s issues could present a big hole in the market. With 5G on its side, this next quarter could prove a banner year for the company.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3mDTBcq

Under Armour to sell MyFitnessPal for $345 million, after acquiring it in 2015 for $475 million

Global fitness giant Under Armour announced this morning that it will be selling MyFitnessPal to investment firm Francisco Partners for $345 million, five and a half years after acquiring it for $475 million. The company also announced that it will be winding down the Endomondo platform which it also acquired at the same time for $85 million.

In a press release announcing the news, Under Armour said the reason for this decision was to simplify and focus its brand, keeping it aimed at its “target consumer – the Focused Performer” in the interest of building “a singular, cohesive UA ecosystem.” The fact that Under Armour is selling MyFitnessPal at a discount (not even including five years of inflation and stated MyFitnessPal user growth) indicates there’s more to this than just maintaining focus.

Under Armour Snatches Up Health And Fitness Trackers Endomondo And MyFitnessPal

It’s definitely true that both MyFitnessPal (which claimed 80 million users in 2015 at time of acquisition, and has over 200 million users according to today’s press release) and Endomondo were aimed at more casual and entry-level fitness users, who might be working out for the first time, or looking to improve their daily health, but aren’t likely training for endurance sport competitions. Under Armour’s overall brand image is more associated with professional athletics, and with an enthusiast/semi-pro clientele (or those aspiring to that designation).

What’s more likely going on here is that Under Armour sees diminishing value in this segment over the long term, and there a number of possible reasons about why that might be. One is that Apple has been more aggressive about targeting entry-level fitness users, through both its expanded Apple Watch hardware and Apple Health software offerings, and through its forthcoming Apple Fitness+ service, which launches later this year.

Apple launches fitness subscription service for just under $80 a year

While you’d expect the self-guided fitness segment to be a significant growth opportunity in light of the ongoing pandemic and restrictions on shared workout spots including gyms, Apple’s aggressive moves provide a fairly comprehensive default that users essentially get for free, or for a very low cost subscription, with the hardware they’re buying anyways. And the growth of Peloton, through both its dedicated home workout gear and its subscription platform, is also likely sucking up a lot of oxygen in the beginner to casual/habitual fitness user category.

Under Armour did note that it’s going to continue to own and operate the MapMyFitness platform, which includes MapMyRun and MapMyRide. It acquired that company in 2013, and the Under Armour line of connected footwear integrates with those apps for connected tracking of workouts.

Under Armour Buys Mobile Workout Veteran MapMyFitness For $150M As It Looks To Keep Pace In Digital Fitness

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Corsair acquires EpocCam, a webcam app for iPhone

Corsair Gaming today announced that it has acquired EpocCam, the software developer behind the iOS software of the same name. It’s easy to see why the gaming company would be interested in such an acquisition in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has lead to a worldwide spike in remote working — and, as a result, more people are teleconferencing than ever.

The EpocCam app is designed specifically to turn iPads and iPhones into a webcam for both macOS and Windows PCs. The software works across a number of popular teleconferencing applications, including Zoom, Skype, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams — which is more than I can say for the beta webcam software I’m currently running.

The deal brings the EpocCam brand under Corsair’s Elgato umbrella. Corsair purchased the company’s gaming brand back in mid-2018. That deal, in turn, found the rest of Elgato rebranding its Eve System — a company expressly focused on smart home and home automation.

While most laptops and desktops are fairly lacking in the built-in webcam department, iPhones have taken great strides. So it makes sense for users to take advantage of that imaging power. Of course, with the company now owned by a gaming brand, it’s clear that video game live-streaming is going to be a big part of the value play here.

The app has already been relaunched under the Elgato brand, including deeper integration with its existing products. The company promises that further updates are “already in development.”

How to do remote work right, from the teams that know it best

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Apple One services subscription bundles start launching tomorrow

Apple is launching its Apple One services bundle tomorrow, though the company’s workout service Fitness+ isn’t quite ready yet.

On an earnings call today, CEO Tim Cook revealed tomorrow’s rollout and called the service the “easiest way for users to enjoy Apple services.” In a conversation with Bloomberg, Apple CFO Luca Maestri revealed the launch timing for Fitness+ as well. The company also detailed that it has 585 million total paid services subscriptions and expects to reach 600 million before the end of the 2020 calendar year.

The subscription bundle is designed around bringing more users into more Apple Services. It’s a big play to get subscribers to switch from Spotify to Apple Music as that is likely the crown jewel of the offering.

The company’s $14.99 per month individual plan includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade and 50GB of iCloud storage. Apple also sells $19.99 family plans that bump up the storage to 200GB and is planning to debut a “premiere” plan for $29.99 that includes Fitness+ and Apple News+.

Apple’s Services division is growing in importance to the company’s bottom line, with the group reaching an all-time-high in revenue and reaching past half of the quarter’s iPhone revenues. You can read more on their earnings release below.

Why Apple’s Q4 earnings look different this year

Sarah Perez also contributed to this report.

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/31X4GgO

Apple One services subscription bundles start launching tomorrow

Apple is launching its Apple One services bundle tomorrow, though the company’s workout service Fitness+ isn’t quite ready yet.

On an earnings call today, CEO Tim Cook revealed tomorrow’s rollout and called the service the “easiest way for users to enjoy Apple services.” In a conversation with Bloomberg, Apple CFO Luca Maestri revealed the launch timing for Fitness+ as well. The company also detailed that it has 585 million total paid services subscriptions and expects to reach 600 million before the end of the 2020 calendar year.

The subscription bundle is designed around bringing more users into more Apple Services. It’s a big play to get subscribers to switch from Spotify to Apple Music as that is likely the crown jewel of the offering.

The company’s $14.99 per month individual plan includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade and 50GB of iCloud storage. Apple also sells $19.99 family plans that bump up the storage to 200GB and is planning to debut a “premiere” plan for $29.99 that includes Fitness+ and Apple News+.

Apple’s Services division is growing in importance to the company’s bottom line, with the group reaching an all-time-high in revenue and reaching past half of the quarter’s iPhone revenues. You can read more on their earnings release below.

Why Apple’s Q4 earnings look different this year

Sarah Perez also contributed to this report.

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Human Capital: Court ruling could mean trouble for Uber and Lyft as gig workers may finally become employees

Welcome back to Human Capital! As many of you know, Human Capital is a weekly newsletter where I break down the latest in labor, as well as diversity and inclusion in tech. It’s officially available as a newsletter, so if you want this content when it comes in hot Fridays at 1 p.m. PT, subscribe here. 

Because the election is coming up, this edition focuses heavily on California ballot measure Proposition 22. The TL;DR is that gig companies like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash really want to keep classifying their drivers and delivery folks as independent contractors, so they put millions of dollars into this ballot measure. This week, we saw Prop 22-related complaints and lawsuits filed, and an appeals court judge decide Uber and Lyft must reclassify their drivers. We also heard directly from gig workers on both sides about why they do or do not want to be independent contractors.

But we’ll also look at SoftBank’s first investment from its D&I fund, Pinterest’s addition of a new Black board member and more. Let’s jump in. 

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Labor Struggles

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Uber and Lyft must classify drivers as employees, court rules

But. And this is a big but. Uber and Lyft will likely appeal this decision and it’s also possible this decision won’t matter depending on how Prop 22 goes. We’re just a couple of weeks out from Election Day and this decision has a thirty-day hold on it once the remittitur goes into effect. And that remittitur has not yet been issued.

Throughout the case, Uber and Lyft have argued that reclassifying their drivers as employees would cause irreparable harm to the companies. In the ruling today, the judge said neither company would suffer any “grave or irreparable harm by being prohibited from violating the law” and that their respective financial burdens “do not rise to the level of irreparable harm.”

Additionally, there is nothing in the preliminary injunction, according to the judge, that would prevent Uber and Lyft from offering flexibility and independence to their drivers. Lastly, the judge said Uber and Lyft have had plenty of time to transition their drivers from independent contractors to employees, given that the key case in passing AB 5, the gig worker bill that spurred this lawsuit, was decided in 2018.

CA appeals court upholds ruling that Uber and Lyft must classify drivers as employees

Amazon workers protest for time off to vote

Ahead of Election Day, Amazon employees protested at the company’s headquarters in Seattle for paid time off to vote. In a statement to GeekWire, Amazon said employees that don’t have enough time off can request additional, excused time off. 

“The number of hours and pay provided to employees varies by state in line with local laws,” the spokesperson said.

According to GeekWire, Amazon notified managers that they should approve PTO requests for voting. 

Tech companies that are giving employees paid time off for Election Day include Salesforce, Apple (hourly employees get four hours), Facebook, Twitter, Uber and others. 

No on Prop 22 camp files complaint with USPS against Yes on 22

Opponents of California’s Proposition 22  filed a complaint this week with the United States Postal Service. The No on 22 campaign alleges the Yes side is not eligible for a nonprofit postal status and is asking USPS to revoke its permit.

It’s much cheaper to send campaign mailers as a nonprofit organization. For example, sending between 1 – 200,000 small mailers to every door normally costs $0.302 per piece. As a nonprofit, that costs $0.226 per piece, according to USPS. To be clear, the Yes on 22 campaign confirmed it was formed as a nonprofit organization under IRS section 501(c)(4), which pertains to social welfare organizations. But the No on 22 side says USPS erred in approving the Yes on 22 campaign.

In a statement to TC, Yes on 22 spokesperson Geoff Vetter said, “As a 501(c)(4) organization, Yes on 22 is eligible for the appropriate nonprofit postage rates with the USPS, which we applied for and were granted by the U.S. Postmaster.”

Prop 22 opponents say Yes on 22 should not be able to mail flyers as nonprofit

Uber faces class-action lawsuit over Prop 22

Uber is facing a class-action lawsuit over Proposition 22 that alleges the company is illegally coercing its drivers to support the ballot measure that seeks to keep workers classified as independent contractors. The suit was brought forth by two Uber drivers, Benjamin Valdez and Hector Castellanos, as well as two California nonprofit organizations, Worksafe and Chinese Progressive Association.

In the suit, the plaintiffs argue Uber has encouraged its drivers and delivery workers to support Prop 22 via the company’s driver-scheduling app.

“This is an absurd lawsuit, without merit, filed solely for press attention and without regard for the facts,” Uber spokesperson Matt Kallman said in a statement to TechCrunch. “It can’t distract from the truth: that the vast majority of drivers support Prop 22, and have for months, because they know it will improve their lives and protect the way they prefer to work.”

Uber drivers sue company alleging coercive Prop 22 advertising

Shipt workers protest outside Target and Shipt headquarters

Shipt shoppers followed through with their protest plans this week when they staged actions at Target’s headquarters in Minneapolis and Shipt’s headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama. 

Ahead of the protests, Shipt shopper and organizer with Gig Workers Collective Willy Solis told me his goal was to bring attention to the new pay structure Shipt began rolling out and how shoppers “are getting paid less for more effort.”

6 companies, 5 days, 5 states, 6,500+ miles, 3 time zones, 3 direct actions, and 2 podcasts. Gig workers in California, the South, and the Midwest all turned out and turned up to flex that good good worker power. Every cell in my body is steeped in solidarity. pic.twitter.com/zZnrQYaBz9

— Vanessa Bain #BlackLivesMatter #NOonProp22 (@hashtagmolotov) October 20, 2020

Shipt shoppers are organizing a walkout in protest of new pay model

Gig workers speak for and against Prop 22

TC relaunched the Mixtape podcast and as part of that, Henry Pickavet and I chatted with Vanessa Bain, an Instacart shopper who opposes Prop 22 and Doug Mead, a gig worker who supports Prop 22. The whole episode is worth listening to, but here are some key nuggets from them. First up, Bain:

“If all it takes is putting the hiring process and the bossing into an app on your phone to rewrite labor laws, every company on the planet is going to be doing that. There’s so much more, unfortunately, at stake here than just Uber and Lyft and ride share and grocery delivery and how you’re going to get your DoorDash orders. Literally the future of labor is at stake.”

Next up, Mead:

“It’s really the government — their intent to remove a person’s control over how they want to be compensated. And that to me just makes no sense whatsoever,” Mead told us. “I should be in control of how I want to be compensated and by who.”

You can check out the full episode here. 

Mixtape Podcast: Proposition 22 and the labor divide

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Stay Woke

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SoftBank invests in Vitable Health as part of D&I fund

SoftBank’s $100 million Opportunity Fund, which it formed in June to invest in founders of color, made its first bet on Vitable Health. The company focuses on providing health insurance to underserved and low-income communities. 

SoftBank’s $100 million diversity and inclusion fund makes its first bet … in health

SoftBank’s Opportunity Fund led the $1.6 million round, which included participation from Y Combinator, DNA Capital, Commerce Ventures, MSA Capital, Coughdrop Capital and a handful of angel investors. 

Pinterest brings on another Black board member 

Pinterest brought on its second Black female board member, Salaam Coleman Smith. Smith’s appointment comes a couple of months after Pinterest appointed its first Black board member, Andrea Wishom.

Smith is the former EVP of Programming and Strategy at Disney’s ABC Family and Freeform, as well as former president of Comcast NBCUniversal’s Style Media. 

Here’s an updated look at Black board member representation at major tech companies.

Netflix is launching a tech bootcamp for HBCU students 

Netflix announced a virtual HBCU Boot Camp for students from Norfolk State University, a historically black university in Virginia. Specifically, it’s open for current students and alumni from the classes of 2019 and 2020.

In partnership with online education platform 2U, the boot camp will teach 130 students Java engineering, UX/UI design and data science over the course of 16 weeks beginning in January. A bonus is that members of Netflix’s data science, engineering and design teams will serve as mentors to the students. 

Netflix launches a virtual HBCU boot camp with Norfolk State to increase exposure to the tech industry

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Why Apple’s Q4 earnings look different this year

On Thursday, Apple delivered a Q4 earnings beat but the stock slid anyway as wary investors saw worse than expected iPhone revenues. At the time of writing, stock was down around 5% in after-hours trading.

It was a mild beat, with Apple posting $64.7 billion compared to the $63.7 billion Wall Street was expecting and $0.73 earnings per share versus an estimated $0.70. While Apple showcased all-time-highs in Services and Mac divisions, iPhone revenues were down 20 percent year-over-year.

Generally, Apple’s Q4 earnings feature a bit of a bump from the first few days of sales of the new iPhones, but with Apple running a few weeks behind this year, their launches have missed the window to be included on Q4 and will instead all be bundled into the Q1 holiday quarter.

The iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro dropped on September 20 of last year, while this year’s iPhone 12 was released more than a month later on October 23, while the iPhone 12 Pro has still yet to launch but will be available November 13.

The bigger question is how this delay might affect the company’s entire product release schedule. Will the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro see a shorter life cycle than previous models or will October/November be the new launch timeline for the company’s smartphones going forward?

Digging into the other numbers beyond iPhone, Apple showcased $9.03 billion in Mac revenue for Q4, $6.80 billion in iPad, $7.87 in Wearables etc. and $14.55 billion in Services revenue. Interestingly, this is surely the closest Apple’s Services revenues have gotten to iPhone sales to date, with revenues there reaching just over one-half of overall iPhone sales for Q4. In 2019, the ratio was closer to 1:3.

Next quarter is likely to be big revenue-wise, but investors don’t seem to have been wooed with Q4.

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Google tests a helpful app comparison feature on Google Play

Google is testing a new feature that could improve discovery for Android apps on Google Play. The company confirmed it’s experimenting with a “Compare Apps” option that would allow Google Play users to quickly and more easily understand the slight differences between otherwise similar apps by comparing specific features and metrics — like star ratings or total downloads, for example.

The feature was first spotted by Android Police, which found it at the bottom of an individual app listing page for a media player on the Play Store (ver. 22.4.28).

Image Credits: Android Police

Google confirmed the feature is live but only as a small test.

After users scrolled down past the app details and reviews, the page offered a comparison chart that allowed users to compare the VLC Player app with other media players across aspects like “Ease of Use,” support for offline play, and various media player specific features — like visual quality (HD, SD, etc.) and controls (gesture control, playback, scrubber, etc.).

The feature may leverage data Google has sourced from questions it asked app reviewers, though that aspect is not clear at this time. It also pulls in other data it already has on file, like the aggregate star rating and how many downloads the app has seen to date, for instance.

Typically, in place of the comparison chart, Google Play would provide a list of “similar apps” at the bottom of the listings page. This is similar to Apple’s “You Might Also Like” app suggestions and common across app stores. The idea with “similar apps” is to help point users researching apps to others in same genre. But making a determination of which to download often requires reading through the app’s descriptions and user reviews, which can be time-consuming.

With a comparison chart, users could more quickly figure out which app was the better fit for their needs, instead of wasting time researching or downloading multiple apps to install only to find they didn’t offer a particular feature the user had wanted.

Google confirmed to TechCrunch this is a “small experiment” that’s currently running, but says it doesn’t have immediate plans for a broader rollout. That’s a shame!

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Why Apple’s Q4 earnings look different this year

On Thursday, Apple delivered a Q4 earnings beat but the stock slid anyway as wary investors saw worse than expected iPhone revenues. At the time of writing, stock was down around 5% in after-hours trading.

It was a mild beat, with Apple posting $64.7 billion compared to the $63.7 billion Wall Street was expecting and $0.73 earnings per share versus an estimated $0.70. While Apple showcased all-time-highs in Services and Mac divisions, iPhone revenues were down 20 percent year-over-year.

Generally, Apple’s Q4 earnings feature a bit of a bump from the first few days of sales of the new iPhones, but with Apple running a few weeks behind this year, their launches have missed the window to be included on Q4 and will instead all be bundled into the Q1 holiday quarter.

The iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro dropped on September 20 of last year, while this year’s iPhone 12 was released more than a month later on October 23, while the iPhone 12 Pro has still yet to launch but will be available November 13.

The bigger question is how this delay might affect the company’s entire product release schedule. Will the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro see a shorter life cycle than previous models or will October/November be the new launch timeline for the company’s smartphones going forward?

Digging into the other numbers beyond iPhone, Apple showcased $9.03 billion in Mac revenue for Q4, $6.80 billion in iPad, $7.87 in Wearables etc. and $14.55 billion in Services revenue. Interestingly, this is surely the closest Apple’s Services revenues have gotten to iPhone sales to date, with revenues there reaching just over one-half of overall iPhone sales for Q4. In 2019, the ratio was closer to 1:3.

Next quarter is likely to be big revenue-wise, but investors don’t seem to have been wooed with Q4.

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The Level Bolt and Level Touch smart locks are a cut above the competition in design and usability

Level is one of the newer players in the smart lock space, but with a design pedigree that includes a lot of former Apple employees, the company’s already attracting a lot of praise for its industrial design. I tested out both of its current offerings, the Level Bolt and the Level Touch, and found that they’re well-designed, user-friendly smart locks that are a cut above the competition when it comes to aesthetics and feature set.

The basics

Level’s debut product, the $229 Level Bolt, works with existing deadbolts and just replaces the insides with a connected locking mechanism that you can control from your smartphone via the Level app. The newer $329 Level Touch is a full deadbolt replacement, include the faceplates, but unlike most other smart locks on the market it looks like a standard deadbolt from the outside – albeit a very nicely designed one. The Level Touch is available in four different finishes, including satin nickel, satin chrome, and polished brass and matte black (the latter two are listed as ‘coming soon’)

Image Credits: Level

The Bolt is similar in concept to other smart lock products like the August lock, in that you use it with your existing deadbolt, which means no need to replace keys. It also leaves the thumb turn intact, however, meaning from all outward appearance it isn’t at all obvious that you have a smart lock at all. Installing it is relatively simple, and basically amounts to a lock mechanism transplant. Level includes different cam bar adapters that fit the vast majority of available deadlocks, so it should be something most homeowners can do in just a few minutes. The Bolt offers access sharing via the app, auto lock when you depart, Auto Unlock when you arrive, an activity log, temporary passes, and a built-in audio chime. It also works with Apple’s HomeKit for remote control, voice control via Siri, automation and push notifications.

Image Credits: Level

The Level Touch takes everything that’s great about the Bolt, and adds in some super smart additional features like a capacitive external deadbolt housing, which allows an amazing touch-to-lock/touch-to-unlock feature, and NFC that allows you to use programmable NFC cards and stickers to issue revokable passes to unlock your door. On top of all that, it’s probably the most attractive deadbolt I’ve ever owned or used, which is saying a lot in a field of smart locks where most offerings have unsightly large keypads or large battery compartments.

Design and features

The Level Bolt’s design is clever in its ability to be completely invisible when in use. The deadbolt itself is the battery housing, holding one lithium CR123A battery (included in the box, offers over a year’s worth of use). Installing the Bolt was as easy as unscrewing my existing deadbolt, removing the internal deadbolt mechanism, picking out the right adapter for the cam bar, and then inserting it into my door’s deadbolt lock and screwing back together the external face plates. It took under 10 minutes, start to finish.

Setting up the lock was also simple. You just download the app and follow the instructions, and you’ll be able to control your app in just minutes, too. Using the app, you set up a home profile for your lock or locks, and you can also invite others in your household to share access (they’ll have to install the app and get a profile to do so). You can also set up HomeKit if you have an Apple device and a HomeKit hub (this could be an Apple TV, or an iPad) and instantly unlock a lot of features including remote unlocking and locking control when you’re away from home.

Image Credits: Level

Even without HomeKit, you can set up Level to automatically lock once you leave a certain geofenced area around your home, and to automatically unlock once you return within that perimeter. It’s a fantastic convenience feature that works great and offers tons of benefits when it comes to things like coming home with armfuls of groceries, or large packages.

With the Level Touch, you get all of the above, plus a feature I’ve come to find indispensable: touch control. The metal exterior of the Level Touch’s outside cylinder has capacitive touch sensors, which means that like your iPhone’s screen, it can detect when it’s touched by a finger or skin. You can activate a touch-to-lock feature which will allow it to lock whenever people leave and hold their finger to the deadbolt cover, and you can even set it to unlock when it detects a touch combined with immediate proximity of your phone for identity verification purposes.

To me, this is even more useful than auto-lock/auto-unlock, and yet still much more convenient than fumbling with keys or even using the app to manually lock/unlock. It’s one of Level Touch’s unique advantages, and it’s a big one.

As for installation of the Level Touch, it’s also very easy – no more difficult than installing any deadbolt you might buy at the hardware store. Like the Bolt, it uses a single CR123A battery loaded right into the deadbolt itself that should give you enough power for over a year of use.

Bottom line

Smart locks have become a lot more prevalent over the course of the past few years, but they also haven’t really progressed much in terms of functionality or design. Level has upended all that, bringing the best of convenience features and miniaturized hardware technology to smart, modern design that leapfrogs the competition.

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2HPwQ68

The Level Bolt and Level Touch smart locks are a cut above the competition in design and usability

Level is one of the newer players in the smart lock space, but with a design pedigree that includes a lot of former Apple employees, the company’s already attracting a lot of praise for its industrial design. I tested out both of its current offerings, the Level Bolt and the Level Touch, and found that they’re well-designed, user-friendly smart locks that are a cut above the competition when it comes to aesthetics and feature set.

The basics

Level’s debut product, the $229 Level Bolt, works with existing deadbolts and just replaces the insides with a connected locking mechanism that you can control from your smartphone via the Level app. The newer $329 Level Touch is a full deadbolt replacement, include the faceplates, but unlike most other smart locks on the market it looks like a standard deadbolt from the outside – albeit a very nicely designed one. The Level Touch is available in four different finishes, including satin nickel, satin chrome, and polished brass and matte black (the latter two are listed as ‘coming soon’)

Image Credits: Level

The Bolt is similar in concept to other smart lock products like the August lock, in that you use it with your existing deadbolt, which means no need to replace keys. It also leaves the thumb turn intact, however, meaning from all outward appearance it isn’t at all obvious that you have a smart lock at all. Installing it is relatively simple, and basically amounts to a lock mechanism transplant. Level includes different cam bar adapters that fit the vast majority of available deadlocks, so it should be something most homeowners can do in just a few minutes. The Bolt offers access sharing via the app, auto lock when you depart, Auto Unlock when you arrive, an activity log, temporary passes, and a built-in audio chime. It also works with Apple’s HomeKit for remote control, voice control via Siri, automation and push notifications.

Image Credits: Level

The Level Touch takes everything that’s great about the Bolt, and adds in some super smart additional features like a capacitive external deadbolt housing, which allows an amazing touch-to-lock/touch-to-unlock feature, and NFC that allows you to use programmable NFC cards and stickers to issue revokable passes to unlock your door. On top of all that, it’s probably the most attractive deadbolt I’ve ever owned or used, which is saying a lot in a field of smart locks where most offerings have unsightly large keypads or large battery compartments.

Design and features

The Level Bolt’s design is clever in its ability to be completely invisible when in use. The deadbolt itself is the battery housing, holding one lithium CR123A battery (included in the box, offers over a year’s worth of use). Installing the Bolt was as easy as unscrewing my existing deadbolt, removing the internal deadbolt mechanism, picking out the right adapter for the cam bar, and then inserting it into my door’s deadbolt lock and screwing back together the external face plates. It took under 10 minutes, start to finish.

Setting up the lock was also simple. You just download the app and follow the instructions, and you’ll be able to control your app in just minutes, too. Using the app, you set up a home profile for your lock or locks, and you can also invite others in your household to share access (they’ll have to install the app and get a profile to do so). You can also set up HomeKit if you have an Apple device and a HomeKit hub (this could be an Apple TV, or an iPad) and instantly unlock a lot of features including remote unlocking and locking control when you’re away from home.

Image Credits: Level

Even without HomeKit, you can set up Level to automatically lock once you leave a certain geofenced area around your home, and to automatically unlock once you return within that perimeter. It’s a fantastic convenience feature that works great and offers tons of benefits when it comes to things like coming home with armfuls of groceries, or large packages.

With the Level Touch, you get all of the above, plus a feature I’ve come to find indispensable: touch control. The metal exterior of the Level Touch’s outside cylinder has capacitive touch sensors, which means that like your iPhone’s screen, it can detect when it’s touched by a finger or skin. You can activate a touch-to-lock feature which will allow it to lock whenever people leave and hold their finger to the deadbolt cover, and you can even set it to unlock when it detects a touch combined with immediate proximity of your phone for identity verification purposes.

To me, this is even more useful than auto-lock/auto-unlock, and yet still much more convenient than fumbling with keys or even using the app to manually lock/unlock. It’s one of Level Touch’s unique advantages, and it’s a big one.

As for installation of the Level Touch, it’s also very easy – no more difficult than installing any deadbolt you might buy at the hardware store. Like the Bolt, it uses a single CR123A battery loaded right into the deadbolt itself that should give you enough power for over a year of use.

Bottom line

Smart locks have become a lot more prevalent over the course of the past few years, but they also haven’t really progressed much in terms of functionality or design. Level has upended all that, bringing the best of convenience features and miniaturized hardware technology to smart, modern design that leapfrogs the competition.

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Slingshot Aerospace raises $8 million to help it expand to new verticals beyond aerospace and defense

Austin and El Segundo-based Slingshot Aerospace was born out of a realization that while there is a massive amount of information collected by observation technology aboard satellites, airplanes, drones and beyond, the analytics and turnaround of said info into something actionable often took a long time – sometimes crucial insights that would’ve been valuable in the moment for Air Force pilots, for instance, would be processed and returned long after they were actually in the air and on a mission. Slingshot was founded three years ago to help turn Earth and space-based observation data into something useful when it’s needed, and now the startup has raised an $8 million Series A to grow its team and expand its focus to new industries beyond the aerospace and defense customers it currently serves.

I spoke to Slingshot Aerospace co-founders David Godwin and Melanie Stricklan about their new funding, which brings the company’s total raised overall to $17.1 million. The startup is also already generating plenty of revenue, with early contracts from customers including NASA, the U.S. Air Force, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and most recently, the U.S. Space Force for its forthcoming Slingshot Orbital Laboratory simulated training environment.

Godwin, Slingshot’s CEO, explained that initially, the startup has been focused primarily on aerospace and defense customers, which explains the all-star early customer list of companies and public agencies in that field. That has come in part from the experience of Stricklan, the company’s Chief Strategy Officer, and their third co-founder, Thomas Ashman, who both spent many years prior to founding the company in the Air Force.

“In the past, the past two tothree years, we haven’t really had a lack of aerospace and government business,” Godwin explained. “It’s definitely taken a lot of our attention. But over this past year, we’ve started exploring other verticals, what we want to do in those verticals, and identifying opportunities. And honestly, we’ve seen, we’ve seen a lot of opportunity there. One of the tricks is just picking which which direction we’re going to lean the hardest into and focus on – so we’re working on that plan right now.”

There should be no shortage of demand for what Slingshot is trying to accomplish. As mentioned above, the startup is unlocking actionable insight from data that until now, has been essentially unusable without time-consuming round-trips to data centers and plenty of off-site processing. Advancements in technology have meant that you could potentially do more with this data in a timely fashion, but systems haven’t necessarily caught up to the technical leading edge.

“I spent 21 years in the Air Force and I flew on a surveillance aircraft that had a synthetic aperture radar on it,” Stricklan explained. “What that meant is it could see through rain,  could see through clouds and it could see at night, unlike a lot of Earth observation optical data, and it could see very far and wide and so that data set was extremely rich, and it had so much potential at the same time. That aircraft that I flew on called, JSTARS, was a battle management platform. So it was also bringing in different feeds of information from different platforms, whether they be satellites, or intelligence feeds from the ground or other aircraft like AWACS [Airborne Warning and Control System], etc. One thing that really was challenging was getting real time information down to the warfighter, or even making real-time decisions on board the aircraft from a battle management perspective.”

Essentially, Stricklan said that the only real-time insight they could gather during her time on JSTARS was moving target indicators, to show literally that there were targets in motion on the ground. Other, much more valuable information would be revealed by the analysis of the combined info, but that could take hours, days, weeks or even months to arrive. Slingshot leverages Godwin’s more than two decades of experience with data analytics to provide what he calls “the right data, at the right time, all in one place” in order to enable “faster, better informed decision-making.”

That’s obviously of value and interest to entities like the U.S. Space Force, which is trying to map out how to secure an entirely new warfighting domain, but it’s also valuable to private companies and commercial operators. One area of potentially significant growth for Slingshot is in on-orbit commercial satellite operations, where the increased pace of launch from private companies operating satellite constellations means situational awareness is more important than ever.

Slingshot Aerospace is growing the team, having already expanded to nearly 30 people, with plans to hire more engineers in particular as part of the use of these funds. The Series A was led by ATX Venture Partners, as well as Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest Seed fund, Techstars, and Okapi Venture Capital. Angels including the co-founders of Apple-acquired Semetric also participated.

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Daily Crunch: Apple seems pretty interested in search

Apple might be building a Google competitor, Audible adds more podcasts and an ad measurement company raises $350 million. This is your Daily Crunch for October 28, 2020.

The big story: Apple seems pretty interested in search

Apple has a growing interest in search technology and might even be working on a product to compete with Google, according to The Financial Times.

The most visible change is the fact that in iOS 14, Apple is now showing its own results when you type queries in the home screen. In addition, there seems to be an increase in activity from Apple’s web crawler.

There may be more of an opportunity here as the U.S. Justice Department has sued Google over what it claims are anticompetitive behaviors around search. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean Apple and Google will soon be going head-to-head in search — it could just be a sign that Apple’s Siri voice assistant is getting more search queries.

The tech giants

Joe Rogan, Alex Jones and Spotify’s illusion of neutrality — Spotify is facing criticism after Joe Rogan brought Alex Jones of InfoWars onto his show.

Audible further expands into podcasts — Audible is adding approximately 100,000 podcasts.

Apple eyes the TikTok generation with an updated version of Clips — The update brings much-needed support for vertical videos, allowing for sharing to TikTok and the “Stories” feature in other social apps.

Startups, funding and venture capital

DoubleVerify, a specialist in brand safety, ad fraud and ad quality, raises $350M — DoubleVerify’s technology can detect fraud, viewability and brand safety.

Outrider raises $65M to bring its autonomous tech to distribution yards — The startup has built a three-part system that includes an autonomous electric yard truck, software to manage the operations and site infrastructure.

Lunchbox raises $20M to help restaurants build their own ordering experiences — CEO Nabeel Alamgir said that if restaurants can handle more online orders themselves (rather than just relying on delivery apps), they’ll make more money while also maintaining a direct relationship with their most loyal customers.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

As venture capital rebounds, what’s going on with venture debt? — While venture capital is back setting new records, it appears that its lesser-known sibling won’t be able to match the past few years’ results.

Current and upcoming trends in Latin America’s mobile growth — Latin America is home to one of the fastest-growing mobile markets in the world.

Dear Sophie: Any upgrade options for E-2 visa holders interested in changing jobs? — Another edition of Sophie Alcorn’s column answering immigration questions about working at technology companies.

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

Everything else

Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith is buying majority stake in the Utah Jazz for $1.6B — Smith sold Qualtrics to SAP for $8 billion in 2018.

US online holiday sales to reach $189B this year, up 33% from 2019 — That’s according to a new forecast from Adobe Analytics.

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.

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