Daily Crunch: Judge dismisses Apple copyright claims against Corellium

Apple faces a major setback in one of its legal fights, VMware sues a former executive and Google tests a new short-form video feature. This is your Daily Crunch for December 29, 2020.

The big story: Judge dismisses Apple copyright claims against Corellium

Apple filed a lawsuit last year against Corellium, a company that allows security researchers to create virtualized iOS devices in the browser in order to discover potential security flaws.

Apple argued that Corellium’s product both infringes its copyright and, by circumventing built-in authentications and security checks, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Today, Judge Rodney Smith dismissed Apple’s copyright claims and wrote that “Corellium has met its burden of establishing fair use.”

Smith did not rule on Apple’s DMCA claims, so this legal battle isn’t over.

The tech giants

VMware files suit against former exec for moving to rival company — The company is claiming that former COO Rajiv Ramaswami had inside knowledge of the key plans at VMware and that he should have told the company that he was interviewing for a job at a rival organization.

Google pilots a search feature that aggregates short-form videos from TikTok and Instagram — This could help Google retain users in search of social video entertainment.

Startups, funding and venture capital

23andMe raises $82.5M in new funding — The company’s work this year around COVID-19 has, perhaps, put the value of its platform in a new light.

CommonGround raises $19M to rethink online communication — The goal is to build online collaboration software that more fully captures the nuances of in-person communication.

Seattle-based Madrona raises $320M for its eighth fund — That’s up slightly from the firm’s past two funds, which were both $300 million vehicles.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

As launch market matures, space opportunities on the ground take off — If you thought the launch boom was big, just wait for to see what happens when it combines with the private satellite boom.

Streaming services face their real test in 2021 — While media/telecom executives and Wall Street investors have been willing to make big investments for a streaming-centric future, they’ll expect to see actual profits soon.

What’s behind this year’s boom in climate tech SPACs? — There’s no denying that 2020 has been the year of the special purpose acquisition company.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here for a holiday deal good through January 3. Read more about the deal here.)

Everything else

From the US to China, Korea, India and Europe, antitrust action against tech is gaining serious momentum — Antitrust is now a headline issue for the tech industry across the world.

Attending CES 2021? TechCrunch wants to meet your startup — Virtually, of course.

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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Apple’s lawsuit against Corellium has been partly thrown out

Back in August of last year Apple filed a lawsuit against the virtualization software company Corellium, arguing that the product infringed its copyright and later adding claims that Corellium’s product violates the DMCA.

While the DMCA claims will still need to be settled in court, a judge in Florida has tossed out Apple’s copyright claims.

So what is Corellium? To over simplify it, Corellium allows security researchers to spin up a virtualized ARM device (including iOS devices) in a browser and take a deep look under the hood to discover potential security bugs. As I wrote last year:

Corellium could allow, for example, a security researcher to quickly fire up a simulated iPhone and hunt for potential bugs. If one is discovered, they can quickly load up prior versions of iOS to see how long this bug has been around. If a bug “bricks” the virtual iOS device and renders it unusable, it’s a matter of just booting up a new one rather than obtaining a whole new phone. Virtualized devices can be paused, giving researchers a detailed look at its precise state at any given moment.

Writes Judge Rodney Smith in a docket filed this morning as first spotted by the Washington Post:

Having reviewed the evidence, the Court does not find a lack of good faith and fair dealing. Further, weighing all the necessary factors, the Court finds that Corellium has met its burden of establishing fair use. Thus, its use of iOS in connection with the Corellium Product is permissible. On these grounds, Corellium’s Motion for Summary Judgment is granted on Apple’s copyright claim.

Smith cites Corellium’s ability to do things like “(1) see and halt running processes; (2) modify the kernel; (3) use CoreTrace, a tool to view system calls; (4) use an app browser and a file browser; and (5) take live snapshots” as proof that the product is “not merely a repackaged version of iOS” and should be considered fair use.

Smith also notes repeatedly that this legal action comes after Apple considered acquiring Corellium.

Between January 2018 and the summer of 2018, the parties engaged in discussions regarding Apple’s potential acquisition of Corellium. During this time, the parties met in-person and telephonically. Corellium explained to Apple the technology behind the Corellium Product and how it works, and discussed Corellium’s business and intention to commercialize the Corellium Product.

And:

If Apple had acquired the Corellium Product, the product would have been used internally for testing and validation (that is, for verifying any system weaknesses and functioning of devices).

While this decision swipes away the copyright claims (potential appeals aside), there was no such swift judgement on the DMCA claims. Apple argues that Corellium is working around built-in authentications and security checks, whereas Corellium argues that such things are implemented at a hardware level and the firmware they’re dealing with (the iOS IPSW files) are “left unencrypted, unprotected, unlocked, and out in the open for the public to access, copy, edit, distribute, perform, and display.”

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Tesla to make India debut ‘early’ next year

Tesla will begin its operations in India “early” 2021, a top Indian minister said on Monday, a day after the tech carmaker said it was confident it would enter the world’s second most populated market next year.

The American car company will begin operations with sales in early 2021 and then “maybe” look at assembling and manufacturing of cars in the country, India’s transport minister Nitin Gadkari told newspaper Indian Express. How early? Definitely not next month, Musk tweeted over the weekend.

Tesla, which broke ground in early 2019 on a $5 billion factory in China — its first outside of the U.S.. — has for years expressed interest in expanding to India. But in a 2018 tweet, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk shared that “some government regulations” in India had emerged as a roadblock.

Like elsewhere in the world, Musk has amassed tens of millions of fans in India. A handful of people paid the token amount of $1,000 to pre-order the Model 3 in 2016. Musk later blamed the local regulations for the delay in bringing the cars to customers in India.

“Maybe I’m misinformed, but I was told that 30% of parts must be locally sourced and the supply doesn’t yet exist in India to support that,” he tweeted in 2017.

Instead of putting down $1000 in reserving the Tesla Model 3 in 2016, I should have invested in $TSLA stock. My money would be worth 10x more today.

And by the looks of it 30x (price of the car) by the time it launches in India. Sigh.

Come on, @elonmusk, give us the car pic.twitter.com/RqMJynOZHm

— Kawaljit Singh Bedi (@kawaljit) September 21, 2020

India has emerged as one of the world’s largest battlegrounds for American, South Korean, and Chinese firms, that are looking at the South Asian market to expand their user and customer bases. Facebook and Google, both of which identify India as their biggest market by users, wrote multi-billion checks to Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms this year, for instance. Apple has ramped up its local production in the country in recent years to secure a larger smartphone market share — more than 70% of which is currently commanded by Chinese smartphone vendors.

New Delhi, which has claimed to abolish more than a 1,000 “archaic laws” in recent years, has previously acknowledged the pain points expressed by Musk. In the past three years, India has proposed billions of dollars in incentive to car companies to switch to electric alternatives and accelerate innovation and manufacturing of batteries in a bid to reduce its spendings on oil and curb air pollution.

India also proposed to ride-hailing firms Uber and Ola to convert 40% of their fleets in the country to electric by April 2026. It stated that the ride-hailing giants must convert 2.5% of their fleet of cars by 2021, 5% by 2022 and 10% by 2023.

Indian ride-hailing firm Ola, acquired Amsterdam-based Etergo earlier this year, said this month that it plans to invest about $327 million to set up “the world’s largest scooter factory” in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which it said will be able to create 10,000 new jobs and have an initial capacity to produce 2 million electric vehicles in a year.

Earlier this year, a proposal drafted by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi-backed think tank Niti Aayog said the country could slash its spendings on oil import by as much as $40 billion in the next 10 years if electric vehicles were to be widely adopted.

Gadkari told the Indian newspaper that he is hopeful that India will emerge as the No. 1 manufacturing hub for auto in five years.

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Not even 5G could rescue smartphone sales in 2020

This was going to be the year of 5G. It was going to be the year the next-generation wireless technology helped reverse some troubling macro trends for the industry — or at the very least helped stem the bleeding some.

But the best laid plans, and all that. With about a week left in the year, I think it’s pretty safe to say that 2020 didn’t wind up the way the vast majority of us had hoped. It’s a list that certainly includes the lion’s share of smartphone makers. Look no further than a recent report published by Gartner to answer the question of just how bad 2020 was for smartphone sales.

Gartner: Q3 smartphone sales down 5.7% to 366M, slicing COVID-19 declines in Q1, Q2

It was so bad that a 5.7% global decline year-over-year for the third quarter constituted good news. In a normal year, that wouldn’t qualify as good news for too many industries outside of wax cylinder and asbestos sales. But there are few standards by which 2020 was a normal year, so now we’ll take some respite in the fact that a 5.7% drop was a considerably less pronounced drop than the ~20% we saw in Qs 1 and 2.

Smartphone sales declined again in Q2, surprising no one

Smartphone sales expected to drop 2.5% globally this year

Some context before we get into the whys here. A thing that’s important to note up front is that mobile wasn’t one of those industries where everything was smooth sailing before everything got upended by a pandemic. In 2019 I wrote a not insignificant number of stories with headlines like “Smartphone sales expected to drop 2.5% globally this year” and “Smartphone sales declined again in Q2, surprising no one.” And even those stories were a continuation of trends from a year prior.

The reasons for the decline should be pretty familiar by now. For one thing, premium handsets got expensive, routinely topping out over $1,000. Related to that, phones have gotten good. Good news for consumers doesn’t necessarily translate to good news for manufacturers here, as upgrade cycles have slowed significantly from their traditional every two years (also an artifact of the carrier subscription model). Couple that with economic hardships, and you’ve got a recipe for slowed growth.

5G devices were less than 1% of US smartphone purchases in 2019

This March, I wrote an article titled “5G devices were less than 1% of US smartphone purchases in 2019.” There was, perhaps, a certain level of cognitive dissonance there, after many years of 5G hype. There are myriad factors at play here. First, there just weren’t a ton of different 5G models available in the States by year’s end. Second, network rollout was far from complete. And, of course, there was no 5G iPhone.

I concluded that piece by noting:

Of course, it remains to be seen how COVID-19 will impact sales. It seems safe to assume that, like every aspect of our lives, there will be a notable impact on the number of people buying expensive smartphones. Certainly things like smartphone purchases tend to lessen in importance in the face of something like a global pandemic.

In hindsight, the answer is “a lot.” I’ll be the first to admit that when I wrote those words on March 12, I had absolutely no notion of how bad it was about to get and how long it would last (hello month nine of lockdown). In the earliest days, the big issue globally was on the supply side. Asia (China specifically) was the first place to get hit and the epicenter of manufacturing buckled accordingly. Both China and its manufacturing were remarkably fast to get back online.

In the intervening months, demand has taken a massive hit. Once again, there are a number of reasons for this. For starters, people aren’t leaving their homes as much — and for that reason, the money they’ve allotted to electronics purchases has gone toward things like PCs, as they’ve shifted to a remote work set-up. The other big issue here is simple economics. So many people are out of work and so much has become uncertain that smartphones have once again been elevated to a kind of luxury status.

There are, however, reasons to be hopeful. It seems likely that 5G will eventually help right things — though it’s hard to say when. Likely much of that depends on how soon we’re able to return to “normal” in 2021. But for now, there’s some positive to be seen in early iPhone sales. After Apple went all in on 5G this year, the new handset (perhaps unsurprisingly) topped sales for all other 5G handsets for the month of October, according to analysts.

The company will offer a more complete picture (including the ever-important holiday sales) as part of its earnings report next month. For now, at least, it seems that thing are finally heading in the right direction. That trend will, hopefully, continue as the new year sees a number of Android launches.

Perhaps 2021 will be the year of 5G — because 2020 sure wasn’t.

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Yayzy app automatically calculates the environmental impact of your spending

Ahead of the turning of the New Year, many people are wishing they could do something about the environment. Now, a UK startup hopes to make our environmental impact more personal.

Yayzy has now launched an iOS app (but Android is coming) which literally links to your bank account to work out the environmental impact of what you buy. It uses payment data via Open Banking standards to automatically calculate the carbon footprint of each purchase a user makes, giving them a picture of their total monthly carbon emissions. This makes the carbon footprint calculated more accurate and bespoke to the individual, allowing them to immediately connect their spending to its impact on the planet.

Yayzy has secured £900,000 in backing from Antler Venture Capital, Seedrs (a crowdfunding round) and the CoreAngels Impact Fund. As the user sees what the carbon footprint is of their purchase, they can choose to offset it right then and there on the app via the carbon offsetter Ecosphere Plus. In the app, users can also find tips to reduce their carbon footprint, eco-friendly retailers near them or insights into lifestyle choices that have the highest environmental impact.

Their competitors are people like CoGo, a real-time Carbon Footprint tracker, and and Doconomy and the soon to launch Tred.

But Yayzy is taking a different approach. It brings together all of a user’s spending and shows them item by item as they spend, what the carbon footprint of that spend is. So far – it claims – its competitors don’t do that.

Yaysy app

This can be done ad hoc, item by item, or by signing up to a monthly subscription to either carbon offsetting projects or the user’s own unique climate portfolio. This portfolio would bundle multiple projects together for a more ‘holistic’ impact. Yayzy says all of these projects have been carefully selected based on strict criteria, and also advance the UN Sustainable development goals.

For its underlying carbon data, Yayzy is using Vital Metrics https://ift.tt/38nP8Fe
as used by Google, Microsoft and both the UK and US governments, among others.

Mankaran Ahluwalia, cofounder and CEO of Yayzy said in a statement: “While emissions have gradually risen as lockdown eases, YAYZY wants to put us all in the driver’s seat to control our own environmental impact… It is clear from a plethora of surveys that the majority of people want to address climate change before it is too late, but that a huge intention/action gap blocks much of it. Our solution with Yayzy is to make environmental impact ‘up close and personal’ and the action to tackle it super easy, all via your phone.”

Ahluwalia, was as a technology analyst with Infosys and built a lending platform for alternate credit. Cofounder Cristian Dan, CTO, previously built a discounts platform and cofounder Pedro Cabrero, CFO was in equity sales and trading for UBS and Citigroup, and co-founded the a leading online pharmacy in Mexico.

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Elon Musk claims he tried selling Tesla to Apple but Tim Cook wasn’t interested

Tesla stock’s miraculously bizarre 2020 might have a gone different way had Apple’s Tim Cook agreed to a meeting in recent years, or so says Elon Musk.

Reacting to Reuters’ recent news that Apple has not abandoned its electric car program and is still pursuing plans to build a physical vehicle, Musk tweeted that in “the darkest days” of scaling Model 3 production, he reached out to Apple CEO Tim Cook and raised the possibility of the Cupertino company acquiring Tesla. Musk says that Cook refused to take the meeting.

TechCrunch has reached out to Apple for comment.

During the darkest days of the Model 3 program, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value). He refused to take the meeting.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2020

Musk’s short tweet did not clarify exactly when this timeline was, though given public information about Tesla’s Model 3 production, it was likely between 2017 and 2019. In regards to Musk’s proposed sales price, 1/10th of Tesla’s current market capitalization is about $60 billion, which isn’t too far from the stock’s public value last year before it reached stratospheric heights in recent months.

Though Tesla is now worth more than $600 billion on the public markets after joining the S&P 500 this week, most Wall Street analysts seem perplexed by the stock’s recent growth which has been owed to young and first-time investors rallying behind Tesla’s products and its CEO.

The ‘Apple car’ chatter is back with new reports pointing to a 2024 launch date

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Google leads $145M investment in India’s Glance; backs DailyHunt in $100M round

Indian startup Glance, which serves news, media content, and games on the lock screen of over 100 million smartphones, has a new investor: Google.

The two-year-old Glance, which is part of advertising giant InMobi Group, said on Tuesday that it has raised $145 million in a new financing round from Google and existing investor Mithril Partners. The new round values Glance at over $1 billion, a person familiar with the matter said, making the startup a unicorn.

Glance uses AI to offer personalized experience to its users. The service replaces the otherwise empty lock screen with locally relevant news, stories, and casual games. Late last year, InMobi acquired Roposo, a Gurgaon-headquartered startup, that has enabled it to introduce short-form videos on the platform. Google is also investing in Roposo, a startup that Glance acquired last year. Roposo is a short video platform with over 33 million monthly active users. These users spend about 20 minutes consuming content across multiple genres in more than 10 languages on the app everyday. 

Glance ships pre-installed on several smartphone models. The subsidiary maintains tie-ups with nearly every top Android smartphone vendor including Xiaomi,  the top player in India, and Samsung. The service has amassed over 115 million daily active users.

“Glance is a great example of innovation solving for mobile-first and mobile-only consumption, serving content across many of India’s local languages,” said Caesar Sengupta, VP, Google, in a statement. “Still too many Indians have trouble finding content to read or services they can use confidently, in their own language. And this significantly limits the value of the internet for them, particularly at a time like this when the internet is the lifeline of so many people. This investment underlines our strong belief in working with India’s innovative startups and work towards the shared goal of building a truly inclusive digital economy that will benefit everyone.” 

Naveen Tewari, founder and chief executive of Glance and InMobi Group, said the investment will pave the way for “deeper partnership between Google and Glance across product development, infrastructure, and global market expansion.” The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand in the U.S.

Investment in DailyHunt

Google said on Tuesday that it is also investing in VerSe Innovation, the parent firm of Indian startup DailyHunt. Across its apps including DailyHunt and short-video platform Josh, DailyHunt claims to serve over 300 million users news and entertainment content in 14 Indian languages. The startup said it has completed a round of over $100 million from Google, Microsoft, and AlphaWave among other investors and this new round values it at over $1 billion, making it a unicorn.

DailyHunt — which is co-run by Umang Bedi, former Facebook India head — plans to deploy the fresh capital to scale Josh app, the augmentation of local language content offerings, the development of content creator ecosystem, innovation in AI and ML and the growth of its truly “made-in-Bharat-for-Bharat short-video platform,” it said.

Josh and Roposo are among over a dozen apps in India that are attempting to fill the void New Delhi created after banning TikTok in late June in the country.

Google is writing both these checks from India Digitization Fund that it unveiled this year. Google has committed to invest $10 billion in India over the course of next few years. Prior to today, the company invested $4.5 billion from this fund in Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms.

More to follow…

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