Capture lets you grab real 3D models with your iPhone X’s powerful camera

Three-dimensional modeling used to be hard. It used to require something at least as big as the Xbox Kinect to get really high-quality scans, and you needed high-powered laser sensor systems. Now all you need is your phone and Capture.

Capture is a proof-of-concept for a company called Standard Cyborg led by Jeff Huber and Garrett Spiegel. These Y Combinator grads have worked in a number of high-profile vision startups and raised $2.4 million in seed from folks like Scott Banister and Trevor Blackwell.

They launched the app on December 3 and it’s already making 3D waves. The tool, which uses the iPhone X’s front camera and laser scanning system to create a live color point cloud, can create 3D models that you can view inside the app or in an AR setting. You also can export them into a USDZ file for use elsewhere. The app is actually a Trojan horse for the company’s other applications, including a programming framework for 3D scanning.

“We are at the bleeding edge — deploying 3D dense reconstruction and point cloud deep learning on mobile devices,” said Huber. “We package up this core technology for developers, abstracting away all the math and GPU acceleration, and giving them superpowers in just three lines of code.”

I’ve tried the app a few times and the resulting scans are still a little iffy. You have to take special care to slowly scan all facets of an object and if you move, as you see below, you end up with two noses. That said, it’s an amazingly cool use of the iPhone’s powerful front-facing sensors.

I am so lovely pic.twitter.com/s4XtO6pEbd

— John Biggs (@johnbiggs) December 11, 2018

“Standard Cyborg is building the API for the physical world,” said Huber. “We make it easy for developers to build 3D scanning, analysis, and design into their applications. Our Capture app is a showcase of our technology that makes it easy for anyone with a FaceID-enabled iPhone to play with the technology and share scans with their friends. Our scanning SDK is launching in January and is currently in beta with a few enterprise-level sporting goods companies.”

While you won’t be scanning your loved ones into a TRON remake with this thing just yet it’s cool to think about how far we’ve come from flailing around in our living rooms with a clunky Kinect next to our TV.

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Android users can now donate to charities through the Google Play Store

The Google Play Store is receiving an update today that will allow customers to make charitable donations to nonprofits from their Android device. While it may seem odd to to be rallying for support for charities within the same marketplace where users download apps and games, it’s not uncommon. Apple for years has collected donations for the American Red Cross in the wake of natural disaster like the California wildfires hurricanes, for example.

Google’s implementation, however, isn’t a launch tied to a single event. And it’s rolling out support for several charities, not just the Red Cross.

Users in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Taiwan and Indonesia will soon see the option to make a donation to a number of organizations, including also charity:water, Doctors Without Borders USA, Girls Who code, International Rescue Committee, Room to Red, Save the Children, UNICEF, World Food Program USA, and World Wildlife Fund US, in addition to the American Red Cross.

To access the feature Android users canb head to play.google.com/donate to read about the organizations or to make a donation using the payment card they have on file for the Play Store. Google says 100 percent of the contributions users make go directly to the nonprofits – it’s not taking a cut.

To be clear, this is about the Play Store itself collecting charitable donations, not allowing Android app developers to do so.

The feature’s launch has been timed with the holiday season, which often inspires charitable giving. It’s also a sort of belated nod to Giving Week 2018, the movement which encourages people to volunteer, fundraise and donate to worthy causes.  (Giving Week this year wrapped on December 5).

The donations feature may offer a different selection of nonprofits in the future, we understand, though Google is not announcing any planned additions at this time.

Google says the feature will begin to roll out to Android users in the supported markets over the next few days.

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Report: Apple’s news and magazine subscription service to launch in early 2019

Bloomberg today updated its earlier reporting on Apple’s plans for a news and magazine subscription service. Earlier this year, the outlet had said Apple would relaunch the digital newsstand business Texture, which it acquired this spring, as part of the Apple News app. Now, Bloomberg confirms the launch time frame could be “as soon as this spring.” It also detailed some of the industry reaction, which is cautious at best.

Apple is said to be courting paywalled newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to join Texture, and is working on a new design for the magazine content. Instead of trying to mimic what a magazine looks like in print, as it does today, Apple is making the content look more like typical online news articles, Bloomberg said.

The report also noted publishers were proceeding with trepidation, in many cases. Because Apple is offering a lower pricing – $9.99 per month for all-you-can-eat news and magazine content, similar to the Netflix model – publishers are worried Apple’s service will eat into their revenues. This $10 price point, after all, is cheaper than a subscription to a single publication – like The NYT’s digital subscription – in some cases

Instead, publishers prefer a platform that lets them build their own paywalls right into Apple’s app.

But Apple’s counterpoint during negotiations has been that the subscriber growth it could bring would make up for the lost revenues from publishers’ own subscription businesses, the report also said. The company compared its potential to that of Apple Music, which is nearing 60 million users, according to the latest from Billboard.

Texture today offers access to over 200 magazines, including Vanity Fair, EW, GQ, Vogue, Forbes, Time, People, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated, and many others, including Bloomberg Businessweek.

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Duck.com now points to DuckDuckGo, not Google

Non-tracking search engine, DuckDuckGo, is now a little easier to find online after the company acquired the premium generic domain name  duck.com — thereby shaving a few letters off its usual URL.

This means browsing to duck.com now automatically redirects to DuckDuckGo.com.

The twist in this tale is that duck.com’s prior owner was Google. And DDG had accused the search giant of anti-competitive behavior — by pointing duck.com to its own search engine, Google.com, and thus “consistently” confusing DDG users (duck.co having long pointed to the DDG community page.)…

Google also owns https://t.co/ud1YyoqbZ5 and points it directly at Google search, which consistently confuses DuckDuckGo users.

— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) July 18, 2018

The domain name transfer was spotted earlier by namePros which got confirmation from DDG founder Gabriel Weinberg.

“We’re pleased Google has chosen to transfer ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo. Having Duck.com will make it easier for people to use DuckDuckGo,” he told it.

We reached out to DDG and to Google with questions — because, well, we have a few.

Google did not engage with the substance of our questions. Instead it emailed a statement, attributed to a spokesperson, in which it confirmed the transfer of the duck.com domain and rights — writing:

Google has agreed with DuckDuckGo, Inc. to transfer ownership and rights of the duck.com domain to DuckDuckGo.

DDG also would not comment beyond Weinberg’s earlier statement.

But in an interview with the TNW back in 2012, Weinberg said he first enquired about trying to buy duck.com on 11/4/09 — only to be told shortly afterwards that “management” didn’t want to sell.

He also made the point then that while the URL of the company Google had acquired the duck.com domain from (On2) pointed to a Google explanation page about that acquisition, http://duck.com/ pointed “directly to Google search”.

So, well, … 

The timing of the transfer certainly looks interesting, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai only yesterday facing some competition-flavored questions from policymakers in Congress. (Though it’s not clear exactly when the duck.com domain name was transferred.)

In recent years Google has faced some major antitrust scrutiny and enforcement internationally, including in the European Union — where it has had to make changes to how it displays search results for products after a 2017 Commission decision that found it had abused its dominance in general Internet search to give itself an illegal advantage.

This summer the EC also found Google’s Android OS to be in breach of its competition rules, leading to further regional tweaks — in that case to licensing terms.

Google is appealing both antitrust decisions.

But the Commission has another competition probe (into Google AdSense) ongoing, and continues to eye other Google product verticals with concerns.

Meanwhile, calls for antitrust scrutiny of tech giants have been rising in the US. And Google’s dominant position in Internet search and smartphone platforms, along with its pincer grip (along with Facebook) on the online ad market, position it for some special attention on that front.

So the company quietly passing off duck.com now — after using it to redirect to Google.com for close to a decade — to a pro-privacy search rival smacks of concern over competition optics, at the very least.

Additionally, yesterday an even more sustained line of questioning from Congress to Google’s CEO was around privacy, with Pichai fielding questions such as whether Google’s own settings are clear enough for users to understand.

You can imagine some awkward questions could also have been asked by lawmakers about why Google.com was squatting on a domain name containing the word “duck”.

A word that not only means a waterfowl or to crouch down to avoid something but which has been intrinsic to the branding of its non-tracking rival, DuckDuckGo, since that company was founded all the way back in 2008.

So, well, if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck… 

 

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After losing half its value, Nvidia faces reckoning

Nvidia is a company that has reached the highest highs and the lowest lows, all in the span of a couple of weeks.

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Over the past two months, Nvidia’s stock has dropped from a closing price of $289.36 on Oct. 1 to today’s opening of $148.42, a decline of 48.8%.

It takes a lot for a company to lose nearly half its value in such a short period of time, but Nvidia is proving that an otherwise strong technology business can disappear in a blink of an eye. The company faces an almost perfect barrage of headwinds to its core products that is stalling its plans for long-term chip domination.

To step back a bit first though, Nvidia has traditionally made graphical processing units (GPUs) that are excellent at the kinds of parallel computation required for gaming and applications like computer-assisted design (CAD). It’s a durable and repeatable business, and one that Nvidia has a commanding market share in.

Yet, these markets are also fairly narrow, and so Nvidia has endeavored over the past few years to expand its product offerings to encompass new applications like artificial intelligence / machine learning, autonomous automotive, and crypto hashing. These applications all need strong parallelized processing, which Nvidia specializes in.

At least part of that story has worked well. Nvidia’s chips were extremely popular in the crypto run-up over the past few years, causing widespread shortages of the chips (and annoying its core gaming fans in the process).

This was huge for Nvidia. The company had revenues of $1.05 billion for the quarter ending Oct 31, 2013, and $1.31 billion two years later in 2015 — a fairly slow rate of growth as would be expected for a dominant player in a mature market. As the company expanded its horizons though, Nvidia engorged on growth in new applications like crypto, growing to $3.2 billion in revenue in its last reported quarter. As can be expected, the stock soared.

Now, Nvidia’s growth story is being hammered on multiple fronts. First and foremost, the huge sales of its chips into the crypto space have dried up as crypto prices have crashed in recent months. This is a pattern we are seeing with other companies, namely Bitmain, which has made specialized crypto chips a major part of its business but has lost an enormous amount of its momentum in the crypto bust. It announced it was shuttering its Israel office this week.

That bust is obvious in Nvidia’s revenues this year: they are essentially flat for three quarters now, hovering between $3.1 and $3.2 billion. Some have called this Nvidia’s “crypto hangover.” But crypto is just one facet of the challenges that Nvidia faces.

When it comes to owning next-generation application workflows, Nvidia is facing robust competition from startups and established players who want access to this potentially gigantic market. Even its potential customers are competing with it. Facebook is reportedly designing its own chips, Apple has been doing so for years, Google has been in the game a while, and Amazon is getting into the game fast. Nvidia has the know-how to compete, but these companies also understand the nuances of their applications really, really well. It’s a tough market position to be in.

If the challenges around applications weren’t enough, geopolitical tensions are also causing Nvidia serious harm. As Dan Strumpf and Wenxin Fan wrote in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago in a deep dive, the company is emblematic of the challenge Silicon Valley firms face in the US / China trade standoff:

Nvidia executives are watching the trade fight with growing unease over whether it will curb its access to Chinese customers, according to a person familiar with the matter. Almost 20% of Nvidia’s $9.7 billion in revenue last year came from China. Many of its chips are used there for assembly into other products, and it has invested heavily to tap China’s burgeoning AI industries.

The company also is concerned that deteriorating relations between the world’s two biggest economies are causing Beijing to double down on efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. suppliers of key hardware such as chips by nurturing homegrown competitors, eating into Nvidia’s long-term business.

Crypto, customers, and China. That’s how you lose half your company’s value in two months.

Quick Bites

Hạ Long Bay, Vietnam. Photo by Andrea Schaffer via Flickr used under Creative Commons.

Google ‘studying steps’ to open headquarters in Vietnam in accordance with cybersecurity laws Following the testimony yesterday from Sundar Pichai on Capitol Hill, it’s interesting to see Google reportedly attempting to open this office in Vietnam, where it faces many of the same challenges as its expansion into China. Vietnam, like many other nations around the world, has recently passed a data sovereignty law that requires that local data be stored locally, forcing Google’s hand. China may be the bogeyman du jour, but the market access challenges posed by China are hardly unique.

Japan’s top 3 telcos to exclude Huawei, ZTE network equipment, according to Japanese news reports – Huawei’s bad news continues, this time with Japanese telcos supposedly vowing not to use the company’s equipment. This is something of a major development if it pans out — so far, the blocks on Huawei equipment have originated from the group of five nations known as the Five Eyes, who share intelligence information. Japan is not a member of that network, and could set the tone for other nations in Asia.

Baidu among 80 plus companies found faking corporate information – Baidu was censured for erroneous information in its Chinese corporate filings. That’s bad news for Baidu, which has hit rock bottom in its share price in the past few days, declining from a 52-week high of $284.22 to today’s opening of $180.50.

What’s next

Arman and I are still investigating the next-generation silicon space. Some good conversations the past few days with investors and supply-chain folks to learn more about this space. Nvidia’s analysis above is the tip of the iceberg. Have thoughts? Give me a ring: danny@techcrunch.com.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

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Apple could end up manufacturing iPhones in another country due to tariffs

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple is thinking about multiple scenarios when it comes to tariffs and iPhone production. Right now, iPhones are not affected directly by the trade war between China and the U.S.

But if U.S. President Donald Trump decides to raise tariffs on smartphones, it could be a big deal for the company. Apple manufactures most of its iPhones in China right now and works with Foxconn for the final assembly of those devices.

In some countries with high tariffs, Apple has worked with suppliers outside of China. For instance, Taiwanese manufacturer Wistron has built an assembly facility in Bengaluru, India. At first, the plan was to manufacture iPhone SE devices in India.

Similarly, Foxconn opened a facility in Brazil back in 2011. But results have been disappointing as devices were still much more expensive in Brazil than in the U.S.

But the U.S. is such a key market for Apple that tariffs on U.S. imports could have significant consequences. According to Bloomberg, Apple would keep the same supply chain even if the U.S. decides on a 10 percent tariff on smartphones. If might move production away from China with a 25 percent tariff.

It’s unclear if all production would move to another country or just production for the U.S. But nothing is changing for now. It’s just executives playing a little game of “what if.”

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Apple could end up manufacturing iPhones in another country due to tariffs

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple is thinking about multiple scenarios when it comes to tariffs and iPhone production. Right now, iPhones are not affected directly by the trade war between China and the U.S.

But if U.S. President Donald Trump decides to raise tariffs on smartphones, it could be a big deal for the company. Apple manufactures most of its iPhones in China right now and works with Foxconn for the final assembly of those devices.

In some countries with high tariffs, Apple has worked with suppliers outside of China. For instance, Taiwanese manufacturer Wistron has built an assembly facility in Bengaluru, India. At first, the plan was to manufacture iPhone SE devices in India.

Similarly, Foxconn opened a facility in Brazil back in 2011. But results have been disappointing as devices were still much more expensive in Brazil than in the U.S.

But the U.S. is such a key market for Apple that tariffs on U.S. imports could have significant consequences. According to Bloomberg, Apple would keep the same supply chain even if the U.S. decides on a 10 percent tariff on smartphones. If might move production away from China with a 25 percent tariff.

It’s unclear if all production would move to another country or just production for the U.S. But nothing is changing for now. It’s just executives playing a little game of “what if.”

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