The crypto markets might be red all over, but that isn’t stopping many venture capitalists from investing in the space.

Valuations across the crypto industry are being pulled back and the sector has grown more investor friendly. Many VCs see this period as a great opportunity and are shifting their crypto investment strategies to maximize potential during the bear market. Powering that potential deal-making, a number of large crypto-focused funds launched this week, including Multicoin Capital’s $430 million venture fund, its third and biggest fund to date, and Protagonist’s $100 million fund, focused on early-stage crypto companies.

Like the traditional technology world, crypto works in cycles, Craig Burel, partner at crypto-focused firm Reciprocal Ventures, said to TechCrunch. “During booming times, you get wild experimental applications with new use cases that are out there or fringey, and so many of them break or fall apart and go flat.”

But in bear markets?

“Infrastructure gets built to stand those applications up again but in a successful way. That’s where we tend to focus and lean in during bear markets,” Burel added.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/15/some-venture-investors-are-doubling-down-on-crypto-despite-an-unknown-recovery-timeline/

Spotify’s hip-hop playlist “RapCaviar” will now be a new documentary series on Hulu. The eight-episode docuseries “RapCaviar Presents” aims to address “today’s most provocative issues” through stories of top hip-hop artists like Tyler the Creator, Jack Harlow, Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat, Saweetie and Roddy Ricch, according to Spotify.

The show will premiere on Hulu later this year, but an exact launch date was not offered.

The playlist and its companion podcast are touted for launching the careers of artists such as Migos, Lil Uzi Vert and Kyle. Getting a track featured on “RapCaviar” can result in millions of streams, great for emerging hip-hop artists looking to draw the attention of record labels.

Partnering with the streaming giant Hulu is a strategic move for Spotify as music documentaries have seen a jump in popularity with Hulu’s “Look at Me: XXXTentacion,” which dropped in May, as well as Hulu’s “Machine Gun Kelly’s Life in Pink” and “Untrapped: The Story of Lil Baby” coming to Amazon Prime Video in August.

The podcast-to-streaming-docuseries pipeline has also been proven profitable in the past year with Hulu’s podcast-turned show “The Dropout,” Apple TV+’s “WeCrashed” and NBC’s “The Thing About Pam,” which streams on Hulu and Peacock. 

There’s even a fictionalized series about Spotify coming to Netflix. “The Playlist” will revolve around the music streaming service’s origin story and debuts later this year. Spotify worked with Netflix earlier this month to launch a personalized “Stranger Things” playlist dedicated to season 4 volume 2.

“RapCaviar Presents” will be executive produced by Karam Gill, who will also serve as creative director; Steve Rivo, who will also be the series showrunner; Carl Chery and Liz Gateley, who are overseeing creative on the show for Spotify; and Eli Holzman and Aaron Saidman from The Intellectual Property Corporation (IPC), a part of Sony Pictures Television.

Farah X, Karam Gill, Keith McQuirter, Mandon Lovett and Peter J. Scalettar are the episodic directors. Av Accius and Marcus A. Clarke will serve as co-executive producers.

The RapCaviar playlist was created by Spotify’s global head of Hip Hop Programming, Tuma Basa, and has an audience of more than 14 million people, per the company.

In other Spotify-related news, the company acquired the Wordle-inspired music guessing game Heardle earlier this week.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/15/hulu-is-turning-spotifys-most-popular-playlist-into-a-new-docuseries-rapcaviar-presents/

A proposal put forward by European Union lawmakers in May, to establish a legal framework to make it easier to share electronic health records and other medical data — across borders and care institutions and with researchers and developers of innovative health products — should be revised to ensure citizens’ health data is stored locally, inside the European Economic Area (EEA), to avoid the risk of unlawful access, a joint opinion by two key EU data protection supervisory bodies has recommended.

That looks like wise council — given ongoing legal uncertainty clouding personal data exports to third countries, following major privacy rulings by the bloc’s top court since 2015.

“[Due] to the large quantity of electronic health data that would be processed, their highly sensitive nature, the risk of unlawful access and the necessity to fully ensure effective supervision by independent data protection authorities, [we] call on the European Parliament and on the Council to add to the Proposal a requirement to store the electronic health data in the EEA,” the two supervisors write in a summary of their joint opinion on the Commission’s European Health Data Space (EHDS) proposal.

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), two EU bodies which advise on the interpretation and application of laws, adopted their 32-page joint opinion on the EHDS yesterday.

In it they make a series of other suggestions for tightening the draft regulation and clarifying the interplay with existing data protection laws, warning that the Commission’s first pass falls short on that front in a number of areas.

There is already extensive regulation of health data across Europe, both nationally and at Union level (where processing this type of sensitive data with user consent requires an explicit ask, per purpose). Simplifying the process of sharing this sensitive, ‘special category’ data is thus a key driver for the EHDS — with lawmakers talking up the potential for the continent if fragmentation can be banished and citizens’ health data more easily pooled, processed and reused for purposes such as research into diseases and drug discovery, or for innovative health tech (like AI diagnosis).

Homegrown European health tech startups, like telehealth platform Kry, have also weighed in with some supportive words for the EU’s plan.

But the introduction of a new legal framework that’s geared towards data sharing and reuse could have negative impacts on individual rights like privacy and data access if the legislation is not rigorously drawn.

The EDPB and EDPS opinion highlights a number of areas where the two bodies believe the EHDS risks creating legal inconsistencies; generating confusion for data subjects; and even undermining existing regulations — such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive — warning, for example, that it’s not clear how individual rights, like the GDPR’s right to rectification of personal, would be impacted by the framework (since the EHDS envisages not one data controller but …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/15/european-health-data-space-edpb-edps-opinion/

Can a smartphone still be cool? They were, once upon a time, in those days when they were more luxury than ubiquity. But what happens when everyone has one — and, more to the point, we all pretty much have the same one? Phones aren’t fashion. They’re not clothes or shoes or even cars. Chances are probably roughly equal that you’ve got the same one as the world’s richest billionaire or the person who bags your groceries.

I won’t go so far as to say choice among smartphones is an illusion, but it’s also probably not as great as you think. The last several years have seen a consolidation of the market among a fleetingly small handful of companies, while once mighty brands like LG and HTC have fallen off. Add in geographical and carrier limitations, and it becomes clear how small a pool we’re ultimately swimming in here.

Nothing is a company founded on, among other things, the notion that smartphones can still be cool. That they can be exciting and interesting in an area where they’re more or less all similar touchscreen electronic slabs.

There’s never been a good or easy time to launch a new smartphone company. But in a number of ways, founder Carl Pei may have chosen the worst — or at very least, the most difficult. Along with the aforementioned consolidation comes an overall stagnation and decline in smartphone sales. After a decade of flying high, things came sputtering down to Earth. It’s a regression that pre-dates but was ultimately accelerated by the pandemic.

Smartphone manufacturers painted themselves into a corner in a bid to beat the competition. In the process, devices improved to a point that people felt less compelled to upgrade as often. Differentiation grew more difficult and continued attempts to add features to outdo others drove flagship prices into the quadruple digits. It’s a paradox of sorts — smartphones may have gotten too popular for their own good.

Those factors presaged a massive supply chain crunch. Chips and other components have been increasingly difficult to procure at scale for companies not named Apple or Samsung, while external financial factors, including inflation, have driven up the price of consumer electronics. Anyone with a passing interest in the category will probably agree that the category could use some new life, but how one might go about supplying it is a different question altogether.

“Nothing has been a difficult company to launch,” Pei recently told me. “This industry, in general, has one of the highest barriers of entry. We have huge companies, and it’s consolidating. There are a handful of companies that are active, and huge companies tend to be pretty bureaucratic, slow moving and very analytical. No wonder why all the products are kind of similar these days. In a regular industry or product category, you also have fresh blood that keeps coming in from below. In our industry, there’s no fresh blood because the barrier to entry is so high.”

Other …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/15/nothing-phone-1-review/

We’re fired up and ready to connect with the global robotics and AI community at TC Sessions: Robotics on July 21. The agenda for this online event is packed with presentations, interviews and robot demos, and our speaker lineup features the brightest minds and makers in the business.

If for some reason you haven’t yet reserved your pass to this free conference, simply register here.

Back to those bright minds and makers. That group includes investors and founders, and if you’re interested in raising funds for your startup — and what early-stage startup isn’t — and learning how other founders found their way, don’t miss this breakout session sponsored by SOSV, a global venture capital firm with more than $1 billion in assets under management: Pre-seed to Unicorn: Lessons from HAX Robotics Founders.

As part of SOSV, HAX — the hands-on early stage investor in hard tech — has been making big bets on robotics for 10 years. Today the startup development program is the world’s most active pre-seed investor in robotics.

Tune in to this breakout session for invaluable founder insights across all startup stages and geographies. You’ll hear from HAX partner Garrett Winther and from these HAX founders:

• Chiu Chau, co-founder of prolific unicorn Opentrons, an open source lab automation company
• Pramod Ghadge, co-founder and CEO of Unbox Robotics, a leading supply chain robotics company specializing in fulfillment and distribution technology
• Kate Ma, co-founder and CEO of Neptune Robotics, a company building robots designed to clean biofouling off the hulls of international cargo ships
• Faizan Sheikh, CEO and co-founder of Avidbots, a global maker of autonomous cleaning robots

TC Sessions: Robotics, a free online event, takes place July 21. You can catch all of the sessions and join the robotics community online for speed networking, chats and one-on-one meetings. Simply register here for free.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/15/gain-insight-from-hax-robotics-founders-at-tc-sessions-robotics/

Investors have reason to believe Elliott Management’s involvement should make for an effective wake-up call to a company stuck in the clouds. …read more

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pinterest-investors-should-buy-elliotts-vision-11657912422?mod=rss_Technology

For much of her career, hacker Runa Sandvik has worked to protect journalists and newsrooms from powerful adversaries who want to keep wrongdoing and corruption out of the public eye. Journalists and activists are increasingly targeted by the wealthy and resourceful who seek to keep the truth hidden, from nation-state aligned hackers hacking into journalist’s inboxes to governments deploying mobile spyware to snoop on their most vocal critics.

Few know the threats that journalists face better than Sandvik, a native Norwegian. She defended The New York Times newsroom from hackers and nation-state adversaries, trained reporters to cloak their online activity in anonymity at the Tor Project, and helped organizations like the Freedom of the Press Foundation to build tools that allow journalists, like us at TechCrunch, securely communicate with sources and receive sensitive source documents. Sandvik is also a renowned hacker and security researcher and, as of recently, a founder.

With her new startup, Granitt — with Sandvik as its principal — aims to help at-risk people, like journalists and activists but also politicians, lawyers, refugees and human rights defenders, from threats they face doing their work.

“At any point someone finds themselves in a category where there might be some repercussions for them doing whatever it is they’re doing, that’s something I would consider ‘at risk’ and something that I can help with,” Sandvik told me when we spoke in New York City this week.

Sandvik told me about her work and her new bootstrapped startup, how leaders should prioritize their cybersecurity efforts, and, what piece of security advice she would give that every person should know.

Our chat, which has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, follows.

ZW: You’ve been laying the groundwork for Granitt for the past decade. Tell me how you got here.

RS: If you look at a decade ago when I worked for the Tor Project and they got funding, we set out to teach reporters how to use the Tor Browser. And very quickly realized that it’s not super impactful to just teach someone how to use the Tor Browser if they’re not also familiar with good passwords, two-factor authentication and software updates — things to consider when they’re traveling to conflict zones, for example. And we started building out a curriculum around what you should do to be safe online. I later consulted for the Freedom of the Press Foundation doing somewhat similar work, and also then working on SecureDrop. And my role at The New York Times was building on that type of work as well. And after the Times eliminated my role, I worked with ProPublica, Radio Free Europe, and the Ford Foundation to look at not just security for individuals but also how to help the business side of media organizations to support the newsroom.

<p …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/15/granitt-journalist-security/