Google Maps adds street-level details in select cities, more colorful imagery worldwide

Google Maps is getting a significant update that will bring more detail and granularity to its map, with changes that encompass both natural features and city-level details alike. For the former, Google says it’s leveraged computer vision techniques to analyze natural features from satellite imagery, then color-coded those features for easier visual reference. Meanwhile, select cities (including New York, San Francisco and London) will gain more detailed street information, like the location of sidewalks, crosswalks and pedestrian islands, for example.

These additions will help people better navigate their cities on foot or via alternative modes of solo transportation, like bikes and scooters, which some have opted for amid the pandemic. The supported cities will also show the accurate shape and width of a road to scale to offer a better sense of how wide or narrow a street is, in relation to its surroundings.

Image Credits: Google (before: left, after: right)

While the added granularity won’t include more accessibility features, like curb cuts for example, Google says that having the crosswalks detailed on the map will help in that area. The company also notes that Google Maps today displays wheelchair-accessible routes in transit and wheelchair attributes on business pages.

The updated city maps won’t show up immediately in the Google Maps app, we understand. Instead, Google says the new maps will roll out to NY, SF and London in the “coming months.” The vague time frame is due to the staged nature of the release — something that’s often necessary for larger apps. Google Maps reaches over a billion users worldwide, so changes can take time to scale.

The company notes that after the first three cities receive the update, it plans to roll out more detailed city maps to additional markets, including those outside the U.S.

Meanwhile, users both inside and outside big cities around the world will benefit from the changes to how natural features are presented in Google Maps.

Image Credits: Google

Google utilized a color-mapping technique to identify natural features from its satellite imagery, looking specifically at arid, icy, forested and mountainous regions. These features were then assigned a range of colors on the HSV color model. For instance, a dense forest will now appear as a dark green while patchier shrubs may appear as a lighter green. You’ll be able to differentiate between beaches and greenery, see where deserts begin and end, see how much land is covered by ice caps, see where snowcapped mountain peaks appear or view national park borders more easily, among other things.

These changes will reach all 220 countries and territories that Google Maps supports — over 100 million square kilometers of land, from bigger metros to rural areas and small towns.

Image Credits: Google

The update comes at a time when Google’s lead as everyone’s default mapping app is being challenged on iOS and Mac. While Apple Maps started out rough, a 2018 redesign and subsequent updates have made it a more worthy rival. Apple even took on Google’s Street View with its higher-resolution 3D feature, Look Around, which particularly targets big city users. More recently, Apple introduced a clever trick that allows you to raise your phone and scan the skyline to refine your location. And Apple is battling Google Maps’ explore and discovery features through its expanded, curated guides built with the help of partners. These updates have pushed Google to race ahead with improvements of its own in order to maintain its lead in maps.

Google says the new features and updates will roll out across Android, iOS and desktop in the months ahead.

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Daily Crunch: SpaceX raises $1.9 billion

SpaceX raises a huge funding round, Apple launches new radio stations and we review the Samsung Galaxy Note 20. This is your Daily Crunch for August 18, 2020.

The big story: SpaceX raises its biggest round yet

The $1.9 billion round was disclosed in an SEC filing. Bloomberg had previously reported that the round was in the works and would value the Elon Musk-led space launch company at $46 billion.

This comes after SpaceX successfully completed the first-ever private human spaceflight mission to take off from U.S. soil. It’s also in the middle of what’s likely to be a capital-intensive process of deploying its massive Starlink satellite constellation.

The tech giants

Amazon will add 3,500 tech and corporate jobs across six US cities — The list of cities includes Dallas, Detroit, Denver, New York, Phoenix and San Diego, accounting for around 900,000 square feet of office space in all.

Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra review — Brian Heater says it’s excellent hardware with a great camera, at a truly premium price.

Apple launches Apple Music Radio with a rebranded Beats 1, plus two more stations — The change more closely associates the station with the company’s subscription-based streaming music service, Apple Music.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Chamath Palihapitiya’s next big Hustle — The investor tells TechCrunch that he has acquired Hustle, a startup backed by Insight Venture Partners, Google’s GV and Salesforce Ventures.

Attabotics raises a $50M Series C for its warehouse fulfillment robots — The round was led by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, Canada’s largest pension plan.

Movable Ink raises $30M as it expands its personalization technology beyond email marketing — The company said it now works with more than 700 brands, and in the run up to the 2020 election, its customers include the Democratic National Committee.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

The ‘right’ way to downsize — Isaac Roth shares what he’s learned from years of working with startups.

Despite booming consumer demand, VC interest in e-commerce startups falls in 2020 — While Q2 2020 was a bit better than Q1 for e-commerce VC results, it wasn’t much of a comeback.

How to diagnose and treat machine learning models afflicted by COVID-19 — The pandemic’s impact has been particularly significant on many machine learning models that companies use to predict human behavior.

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

Everything else

Pandemic helped drive Walmart e-commerce sales up 97% in second quarter — Walmart’s investments in e-commerce, including online grocery delivery and pickup, are continuing to pay off.

Learn how COVID-19 has disrupted the startup world — Sign up today for an interactive webinar scheduled for August 19th at 1 p.m. Pacific.

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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TikTok launches a new information hub and Twitter account to ‘correct the record,’ it says

TikTok had already offered its statement regarding the Trump administration’s executive order that will ban the app from the U.S. if it’s not sold by Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance by a given deadline. Today, the company has additionally launched its own online informational hub and a new Twitter account designed to give it a dedicated platform for its collected responses, including those where it may need to respond more quickly — perhaps in response to the president’s tweets, for example, or with other breaking news.

On Monday, TikTok launched tiktokus.info, a website that organizes the company’s statements, news coverage, “expert opinions,” FAQs and other resources in a single destination. Oddly titled “The Last Sunny Corner of the Internet,” TikTok makes the case for its app as a place where millions express themselves creatively. It also goes on record to flatly deny that it would ever provide TikTok U.S. user data to the Chinese government. And it spells out its commitments to areas like user safety and security, as well as its commitments to combating election misinformation and interference, among other things.

TikTok also strongly refers to the growing concerns over U.S. user privacy and security as “rumors and misinformation” that are “proliferating in Washington and in the media.”

The app, in the months leading up to the executive order, had become the subject of a national security investigation in the U.S. due to its Chinese ownership. Despite TikTok’s proclamations that it would never share U.S. user data with China’s government, a Chinese law introduced in 2017 requires Chinese companies to do just that, when asked, raising concerns about to what extent TikTok would be able to decline such a request.

Meanwhile, a more recently published investigation by The WSJ found that TikTok had been tracking Android user data, specifically users’ MAC addresses, using a tactic that was in violation of Google’s Play Store policies and obfuscated using “an unusual added layer encryption.” TikTok ended the practice last November after 15 months of data collection, the report said. However, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission considers the MAC address “personally identifiable information” under some privacy laws.

Beyond its round-up of on-the-record statements attributed to both TikTok and its execs, including TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer, the new website highlights any coverage it deems favorable. These links range from pro-TikTok op-eds that come out against the Trump E.O. to mere write-ups about this or that TikTok star’s success, or those that detail how advertisers and brands are using TikTok’s ad technology to reach consumers. These are bundled underneath the website’s “expert opinions” section, which also features statements from civil liberties organizations and others, like the ACLU, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, Internet Governance Project and more.

The website’s FAQ section answers questions like “has TikTok ever shared user data with the Chinese government?” and well, “would it,” if asked? Both questions are answered, not surprisingly, “no.” It also clarifies that TikTok U.S. user data is stored in Virginia, with a back-up in Singapore and strict controls on employee access.

The company also launched “@tiktok_comms” on Twitter to share news and updates from the TikTok Communications Team. While it’s common for companies to have a social media presence to share their news, this account’s launch in particular seems designed with the goal of being able to more quickly react to changes and updates surrounding its U.S. ban, which has already been extended to 90 days after the issuing of the E.O., instead of 45 days, as before.

Creating a dedicated website to tout a company’s official position on a topic has become a more common tactic now that world governments are more actively involving themselves in the tech industry’s business. Apple, for instance, launched a website to defend its App Store against U.S. antitrust complaints. Google today even co-opted its main Search page to lobby against a change to a law in Australia that would force it to share ad revenues with media businesses.

But the new website isn’t the only way TikTok has been fighting back to retain its place in the key U.S. market. The company also reportedly plans to challenge the constitutionality of the ban in a lawsuit. Plus, U.S. TikTok employees are planning their own legal challenge to the ban — all news of which will likely soon hit the new website and Twitter, we’d wager.

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Decrypted: The block clock tick-tocks on TikTok

In less than three months and notwithstanding intervention, TikTok will be effectively banned in the U.S. unless an American company steps in to save it, after the Trump administration declared by executive order this week that the Chinese-built video sharing app is a threat to national security.

How much of a threat TikTok poses exactly remains to be seen. U.S. officials are convinced that the app could be compelled by Beijing to vacuum up reams of Westerners’ data for intelligence. Or is the app, beloved by millions of young American voters, simply a pawn in the Trump administration’s long political standoff with China?

Really, the answer is a bit of both — even if on paper TikTok is no worse than the homegrown threat to privacy posed by the Big Tech behemoths: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google. But the foreign threat from Beijing alone was enough that the Trump administration needed to crack down on the app — and the videos frequently critical of the administration’s actions.

For its part, TikTok says it will fight back against the Trump administration’s action.

This week’s Decrypted looks at TikTok amid its looming ban. We’ll look at why the ban is unlikely, even if privacy and security issues persist.

---

THE BIG PICTURE

Internet watchdog says a TikTok ban is a ‘seed of genuine security concern wrapped in a thick layer of censorship’

The verdict from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is clear: The U.S. can’t ban TikTok without violating the First Amendment. Banning the app would be a huge abridgment of freedom of speech, whether it’s forbidding the app stores from serving it or blocking it at the network level.

But there are still legitimate security and privacy concerns. The big issue for U.S. authorities is that the app’s parent company, ByteDance, has staff in China and is subject to Beijing’s rules.

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Apple launches Apple Music Radio with a rebranded Beats 1, plus two more stations

Apple is revamping its streaming radio service. Starting today, its flagship radio station Beats 1 will be rebranded to Apple Music 1 — a change that more closely associates the station with Apple’s subscription-based streaming music service, Apple Music. In addition, the company is launching two more radio stations: Apple Music Hits, featuring top songs from the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s, and Apple Music Country, focused on country music.

The expansion aims to help differentiate Apple Music from current rivals, like Spotify and Pandora, both known for their personalization efforts with algorithmic-driven playlists tailored to user interests. While Apple Music offers its own, smaller selection of personalized playlists, it also wants to better establish itself in the role of tastemaker and a tool to connect fans with artists. That’s where the streaming radio stations come in.

On Apple Music 1 (previously Beats 1), the company offers artists interviews, global exclusives and premieres, and other breaking music news. The station is led by presenters Zane Lowe, Ebro Darden, Brooke Reese, Dotty, Hanuman Welch, Matt Wilkinson, Nadeska, Rebecca Judd, and Travis Mills, from studios in L.A., New York, Nashville, and London. Its lineup of shows includes those from big names in music, like Action Bronson, Billie Eilish, Elton John, Joe Kay, Lil Wayne, Frank Ocean, Vince Staples, and The Weeknd. New shows from Aitch, Kerwin Frost, HAIM, Lady Gaga, Nile Rodgers, Travis Scott, Young M.A, and others are also available.

More broadly, the idea behind streaming radio is to cater to people who, sometimes, just want to turn on music without having to think about what they want to hear or dig around for a favorite playlist. That was the original promise of terrestrial radio, and Apple believes the formula can still work on modern-day streaming services, as well.

Image Credits: Apple

Meanwhile, the addition of the newer stations began to paint a picture of a radio service that caters to specific tastes and interests. The new naming format of “Apple Music X” also leaves room for Apple to continue to expand its radio lineup over time to include more genres and thematic stations.

Apple says the new “Hits” station will be led by on-air hosts ayde Donovan, Estelle, Lowkey, Jenn Marino, Sabi, Nicole Sky and Natalie Sky, George Stroumboulopoulos (“House of Strombo”), along with special shows from Ari Melber and others. Exclusive shows from artists include those from Backstreet Boys, Ciara, Mark Hoppus, Huey Lewis, Alanis Morissette, Snoop Dogg, Meghan Trainor, Shania Twain, and more.

The country station will have hosts Kelleigh Bannen, Ty Bentli, Bree, Alecia Davis, Ward Guenther, Nada, and Tiera, plus weekly shows from Ashley Eicher and Kelly McCartney. Fans can also enjoy new exclusive shows from artists like Jimmie Allen, Kelsea Ballerini, Dierks Bentley, BRELAND, Luke Bryan, Luke Combs, Morgan Evans, Florida Georgia Line, Pat Green, Willie Jones, Chrissy Metz, Midland, Rissi Palmer, The Shires, Carrie Underwood, and Morgan Wallen, alongside exclusive shows from legendary producers and songwriters like Dave Cobb, Jesse Frasure, and Luke Laird, and journalist Hunter Kelly.

Though Apple Music Radio is a product that helps Apple’s subscription service stand out, it’s not clear to what extent it’s seen by consumers as a huge selling point that has them choosing Apple Music over a competing service, like Spotify. Instead, Apple Music is likely opted for by those who prefer Apple’s design aesthetic, the convenience of a native app that works well with Siri, and those who fully participate in the Apple ecosystem across their devices.

With the expansions and rebranding, music listeners will be able to ask Siri to play “Apple Music 1,” “Apple Music Hits,” or “Apple Music Country,” — a selection that will be easy to remember as it grows over time, thanks to the simplified naming format.

Apple Music Radio is supported across iPhone, iPad, iPod, CarPlay, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Mac, HomePod, and on the web at music.apple.com, the company says.

“For the past five years, if ever there was a meaningful moment in music culture, Beats 1 was there bringing human curation to the forefront and drawing in listeners with exclusive shows from some of the most innovative, respected, and beloved people in music,” said Oliver Schusser, vice president of Apple Music, Beats, and International Content, in a statement. “Now, Apple Music radio provides an unparalleled global platform for artists across all genres to talk about, create, and share music with their fans, and this is just the beginning. We will continue to invest in live radio and create opportunities for listeners around the world to connect with the music they love.”

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Bluetooth SIG works to include wearables in COVID-19 exposure notification systems

Current smartphone-based exposure notification systems (ENS) like the one created jointly by Apple and Google are a clever way of leveraging modern technology to support comprehensive contact tracing efforts by health agencies worldwide. But the COVID-19 pandemic is not what anyone had in mind when the Bluetooth standard was created, so the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is working to create a new specification that would allow wearable devices to work in tandem with smartphones to expand the reach of ENS tech.

That would mean that devices like wristworn smartwatches and activity/health trackers could also participate in systems that track potential exposure and provide notifications about potential COVID-19 contact events. It may seem like a small tweak if you assume that most smartphone users are seldom without those devices, but Bluetooth SIG points out that expanding to wearables could help include groups of people who aren’t typically smartphone users – including young, school-aged children, and older adults in care facilities – in ENS efforts.

You could easily see how that would be useful, once this new spec is completed and incorporated into deployed Bluetooth standards. Schools could potential mandate use of simple, cheap Bluetooth-enabled wearables to track potential exposure as they return to physical classroom education, for instance.

It’s too early to say exactly how and when this will be deployed – the Bluetooth SIG says that it plans to have an initial draft of the new spec available “in the next few months” for its members to review. But the group has powerful members including Apple, Microsoft, Intel and others, and the technology proposed would allow Apple and Google to incorporate wearables into their existing exposure notification platform, while preserving the privacy-protecting aspects of the tech, as illustrated in the infographic below.

View this document on Scribd

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Daily Crunch: Epic Games escalates legal battle with Apple

The battle between Epic Games and Apple continues, Facebook faces criticism in India and Pinterest appoints its first Black board member. This is your Daily Crunch for August 17, 2020.

The big story: Epic Games files injunction against Apple

Epic’s legal and PR fight with Apple and its App Store policies seems to be escalating. The Fortnite-maker has filed an injunction in U.S. District Court, saying it was notified by Apple that all of its developer accounts and access to developer tools will be cut off at the end of next week.

“[Apple] told Epic that by August 28, Apple will cut off Epic’s access to all development tools necessary to create software for Apple’s platforms — including for the Unreal Engine Epic offers to third-party developers, which Apple has never claimed violated any Apple policy,” Epic’s lawyers said in their court filing.

Fortnite was removed from Apple’s App Store (and the Google Play Store) last week after Epic introduced direct payments. Apple said at the time that it would “make every effort to work with Epic to resolve these violations.”

The tech giants

Facebook faces heat in India after report on hate speech posts — The debate was sparked by a Wall Street Journal report claiming that Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India had opposed applying the company’s hate-speech rules to a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party.

Pinterest announces first Black board member — Pinterest has appointed Andrea Wishom, president of real estate company Skywalker Holdings and former Harpo Studios executive, to its board of directors.

Google warns users in Australia free services are at risk if it’s forced to share ad revenue with ‘big media’ — Google has fired a lobbying pot-shot at a looming change to the law in Australia that will force it to share ad revenue with local media businesses.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Deepfake video app Reface is just getting started on shapeshifting selfie culture — Reface (previously Doublicat) is an app that uses AI-powered deepfake technology to let users try on another face/form for size.

DST Global pumps $35 million into Asian e-grocer Weee! — The delightfully named startup delivers groceries, like fresh kimchi and Japanese desserts, to major cities across the U.S.

Amex acquires SoftBank-backed Kabbage after tough 2020 for the SMB lender — Amex’s acquisition will include employees, technology and financial data, but “Kabbage’s pre-existing loan portfolio is not included in the purchase agreement.”

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Founders can raise funding before launching a product — I spoke to Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson about how to pitch VCs before you’ve built a real product.

Robinhood raises $200M more at $11.2B valuation as its revenue scales — Robinhood already raised capital multiple times this year, including an initial $280 million round at an $8.3 billion valuation, and a later $320 million addition that brought its valuation to $8.6 billion.

How tech can build more resilient supply chains — Coatue’s Caryn Marooney recently made the jump into venture capital.

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

Everything else

SpaceX will attempt to break a rocket reusability record with a launch this week — SpaceX is preparing for yet another launch of Starlink satellites on Tuesday.

US Commerce Department updates rules to further limit Huawei’s chip access — The new restrictions follow a similar decree announced in May.

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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