Category: TECHNOLOGY
Cyber Bug in Log4j to Persist as ‘Endemic’ Risk for Years to Come, U.S. Board Finds
The flaw in the widely used internet software has so far been less harmful than expected but significant risk remains, the Cyber Safety Review Board says. …read more
Autonomous vehicles startup Nuro winds down operations in Phoenix
Nuro, the autonomous vehicle delivery startup that is valued at more than $8.6 billion, is closing its Phoenix facility as it shifts its commercial strategy away from the desert metropolis and toward the San Francisco Bay Area and Houston.
Nuro told employees that the Phoenix Depot location would be closed by October 1, according to an internal email viewed by TechCrunch. It will continue to operate out of its Tempe, Arizona facility and corporate employees will not be affected. However, several autonomous vehicle operators (AVO) in Phoenix have been laid off as a result.
“Given that Phoenix is no longer on our commercial roadmap for the foreseeable future, we will consolidate our resources to focus on our primary deployment areas in the Bay Area and Houston. We will suspend on-road operations in Phoenix effective immediately and close the depot by October 1,” the internal email said.
A Nuro spokesperson confirmed the Phoenix layoffs, explaining Nuro has adjusted its focus in Arizona from on-road operations to teleoperations. The business strategy “entails winding down our Phoenix Depot and concentrating on tele-operations in Tempe, Arizona,” the spokesperson said in an email, adding that Nuro will still have a presence in Arizona.
Nuro has been operating in Arizona for years, a presence that kicked off in 2018 through a pilot project with Kroger Co., the grocery retailer that owns and operates Kroger, King Soopers, Fry’s and Pick ‘n Save stores. The pilot in Scottsdale, Arizona initially used modified Toyota Prius sedans and transitioned to its first-generation bot, called the R1 vehicle. While Nuro’s partnership with Kroger expanded and continued in Houston, the pilot in Arizona ended.
Nuro introduced the R2 in February 2020, a second-gen bot designed and assembled in the U.S. in partnership with Michigan-based Roush Enterprises that is equipped with lidar, radar and cameras to give the “driver” a 360-degree view of its surroundings.
It’s now on its third-gen robot, simply called Nuro. The “Nuro” (pictured below), which was unveiled in January 2022, will be manufactured in partnership with BYD North America.
Image Credits: Nuro
These vehicles are designed to ferry groceries and other goods, not humans. As Nuro has transitioned away from the Prius to its custom-built vehicle, it has had to beef up its teleoperations system, which allows humans to remotely monitor, communicate and even offer guidance to the bots if needed.
Of the employees impacted in Phoenix, three opted for severance, two are helping close down Nuro’s Phoenix Depot and the rest will be joining the team in Tempe, according to Nuro.
The company has also laid off four employees in Houston and three at its Mountain View, California facility.
“As part of our ongoing strategy to adopt a more focused approach with our operations, unfortunately, we made the difficult decision to let four of our Houston (non-AVO) employees go, and offered them all severance packages. All of the impacted employees were informed in person and individually at work,” a Nuro company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
No other reductions have taken place elsewhere …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/autonomous-vehicles-startup-nuro-winds-down-operations-in-phoenix/
One size doesn’t fit all for Wing’s drone deliveries
For many, drone delivery has understandably felt like a fool’s errand. It’s a category clouded by regulator and logistical concerns, and one that’s often felt — at best — a long ways down the road. Wing has been among the leading lights in a space that’s seen its share of setbacks — including its chief big-name competitor, Amazon.
The firm’s growth has been slow and deliberate. It’s necessary due to the various hurdles that need to be cleared in order to bring such a vision to life, and possible thanks to the vast resources of parent company, Alphabet. Even vertical takeoff drones require a long runway.
In February, Wing promoted CTO Adam Woodworth to CEO after eight years with the GoogleX graduate. A month later, the firm announced that it hit 200,000 commercial deliveries, a big, round figure primarily driven by its expanding presence in Australia.
Wing still has a bit of that X shine on it, and as such hasn’t sought out a ton of press beyond some controlled releases via its blog post. It’s an approach I can appreciate as someone who sees so much early-stage tech get overhyped before it’s fully baked. It’s an easy way to set unrealistic expectations for what will ultimately be a long journey.
Today Woodworth took to the blog to pull the curtain back on some of the thinking that’s gone into Wing’s approach, and how that decision-making will ultimately impact its future — and, perhaps, the future of drone delivery in general. We also caught up with the executive to discuss the company’s progress.
Predictably, Woodworth’s approach to the role is a decidedly technical one. Today’s blog post is a prime example of that. In it, the CEO lays out a “multi-modal” approach to delivery, which finds the firm bucking the sort of one-size-fits-all approach that many of its competitors are taking to drone delivery. It certainly makes a lot of sense on the face of it: different sized cargo warrant different sized delivery mechanisms.
Woodworth writes:
The delivery ecosystem is immense, and our R&D folks are always exploring different ways to serve this space. Transportation has and will continue to be multimodal, and Wing’s design approach aims to address this. We’ve developed a core set of hardware and software components that can be used to create a variety of different vehicles tailored for specific use cases: an aircraft library. While we’ve been accumulating hundreds of thousands of delivery cycles on these core components in our Hummingbird series aircraft, we’ve also been filling the shelves of this library with additional configurations.
During our conversation, Woodworth gestures toward one of the drones sitting on the conference table. It’s the smaller of the two — “Article One” as it’s known internally, a reference to the aforementioned library concept. There’s a piece of the larger plane — “Article Two” — sitting on the table, as well. Though the entire drone — also somewhat ironically known as “Hummingbird” — was just too large to get through the door.
The Hummingbird is the model …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/one-size-doesnt-fit-all-for-wings-drone-deliveries/
Stripe is the latest fintech to falter, taking a 28% internal valuation cut
Stripe is the latest high-profile fintech company to take a massive valuation cut as the market downturn begins to hit the sector especially hard. Last valued at $95 billion, the payments processor has cut the internal value of its shares by 28%, sources told the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal reports that the valuation cut comes from a 409A price change, which means that Stripe hasn’t decreased the value of preferred shares sold in the last round. An internal valuation change is meant to be a more objective pricing, not set by startups or venture investors but chosen by a third party. Despite the 409A valuation remaining separate from Stripe’s latest round price, it is still a relevant cut due to the sheer decrease. In fact, it’s somewhat uncommon for a startup to proactively cut their own valuation, outside of a fundraise, making today’s news all the more interesting.
Stripe declined to comment in response to a TechCrunch inquiry about the matter.
The news comes days after Klarna, the Swedish BNPL company, had its valuation cut by a whopping 85% to $6.7 billion from its last round as it raised $800 million in fresh funding. Unlike Stripe, Klarna’s valuation was cut by its investors — which include Sequoia, Silver Lake, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the UAE’s sovereign fund Mubadala Investment Company and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments).
The valuation haircuts provide two different signals on how fintech is reacting to the market’s downturn: strongly. Fintech companies, which at the beginning of the recent market downturn were seen as an exception of sorts because of their strong 2021 fundraising activity, have seen a reversal of fates over the past month. Rising interest rates and fears that consumer discretionary spending will fall at the onset of a potential economic recession are likely to be especially harsh for consumer-facing fintechs like Stripe.
In March, Fidelity cut its Stripe valuation by 9%, providing another signal on how fund of funds are looking at soon-to-be public fintech companies.
The sector, not including crypto companies, led the tech industry in the number of layoffs it underwent in the first half of 2022, TechCrunch reported.
For its part, Stripe made headlines earlier this year when it announced that it was entering into the identity verification space, putting it in direct competition with one-time partner, Plaid. Its competition with newer startup, Finix, also heated up this year as the latter announced it was becoming a payments facilitator, in addition to enabling other companies to facilitate payments.
Some fintech companies in general have been targeted for trying to do too much in a short amount of time, and hence, losing focus. Corporate spend decacorn Brex being one such case, when it recently announced it would no longer work with SMBs.
Beyond the fintech space, growth-stage businesses that boomed during the pandemic have turned inward to respond to the shifting macroeconomic environment. …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/stripe-fintech-payments-valuation-cut-28/
MetaMask co-founder sees a developer-led future for its crypto wallet
Six years ago, Dan Finlay and Aaron Davis met while working at Apple and conjured an idea around making a web extension backing the layer-1 blockchain Ethereum so developers could play with it.
That project became MetaMask, now the world’s largest non-custodial crypto wallet.
What was supposed to be a short project for Finlay and Davis accelerated into a global product that’s used by about 20 million monthly active users (MAUs), Finlay told TechCrunch.
“So much has changed,” Finlay said. “We thought it was going to be a quick in-and-out thing. Aaron thought we’d be working on it for a few weeks; I thought it would be a few months. It became clear pretty quickly that wasn’t the case.”
No one said this was going to be easy
We’re exactly a week out from TC Sessions: Robotics 2022. I’ve been sitting in on prep calls for the past month, and I feel confident in saying this is going to be the best and widest-ranging single-day robotics event. I’ve been helping plan events for various outlets for close to 15 years at this point, and I also feel comfortable saying this is the strongest lineup I’ve been involved in putting together, full-stop.
Our last robotics event happened at — arguably — the strangest possible time. The show came together well, but March 2020 wasn’t an ideal time to hold an event — that’s only become increasingly apparent in hindsight. It was a strange and uncertain time, and we made sure to have plenty of Purell stations on hand, because it seemed like the best defense at the time.
I had a strange, full circle moment last month at our Climate event. I’ve been doing the stage interview thing for a long time, and there are always butterflies before the adrenaline kicks in and carries you the rest of the way. But standing onstage at UC Berkeley’s beautiful Zellerbach Hall was surreal.
It was our first climate show, first time back at Berkeley since Robotics 2020 and my first time onstage since then, as well. The thing people tend to gloss over when they tell you something is like “riding a bike” is those first few seconds or minutes before your brain and muscle memory kick into gear can be harrowing. By comparison, returning to Robotics next week feels more like seeing an old friend for the first time in two years. Sure we emailed, texted, Zoomed on occasion and wished a Happy Birthday on each others’ Facebook walls, but it wasn’t the same.
I started thinking about the next robotics event the moment I got off stage in March 2020, but, you know, the best laid plans and all that. The upshot of skipping an event for a year due to the pandemic is that you get an extra year of planning. COVID, of course, hasn’t gone away, and as excited as I was about the prospect of returning the show to Boston for the first time since the inaugural event, there’s something to be said for the scope that going all online affords you. And offering the entire thing up for free doesn’t hurt, either.
To help mark the event, we’ve planned a bunch of programming in the lead up, as well. I filled in for Matt on TechCrunch Live this week, as he’s currently teaching a group of campers the magic of the taut-line hitches. It was a great conversation with Attabotics CEO Scott Gravelle and Forerunner Ventures’ Eurie Kim, an early investor in the project. An hour later, I had a great conversation with Ohio State University’s Ayanna Howard and littleBits founder Ayah Bdeir on Twitter Spaces. It’s okay if you missed either one live — they’ll both be online soon.
I’ll also be appearing on the Equity Podcast on …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/no-one-said-this-was-going-to-be-easy/
Pitch Deck Teardown: Forethought’s $65M Series C deck
Forethought has been on our radar for a long time — the company won our 2018 Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt, and just a few weeks ago, CEO Deon Nicholas joined Vanessa Larco from NEA on TechCrunch Live to talk about pitching and pitch decks:
Today, it’s my pleasure to tear down the company’s 23-slide deck that helped it raise a $65 million Series C late last year.
Forethought’s mission is to help humans perform better using AI. “One of the things that we’ve focused on is being a human-centered AI platform. And that’s what has really come through … with our mission, and really our mission is to unlock human potential through artificial intelligence,” Nicholas told TechCrunch’s Ron Miller.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that.
Slides in this deck
In the vast majority of cases, this is a slide that makes my eyes glaze over; Forethought’s slide made me do a double take because it is a rare exception to that rule.
- Cover slide
- Founders slide
- TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield slide — (Yes, really!)
- Traction slide (redacted numbers)
- Customer list slide
- “Forbes 2021 next billion-dollar startups” — mystery slide
- “Think about the last time you were on hold” — problem slide
- “The cost of bad customer service” — problem slide
- “Transform customer experiences with human-centered AI” — solution slide
- “Complete platform” — product slide
- “True AI” — product slide
- “Rapid time-to-value” — product slide
- “Secure and trusted” — product slide
- “Intelligent gap detection” — product slide
- “Trusted by the best” — customer breakdown slide
- “Metrics Summary” (redacted) — traction slide
- Customer testimonials slide
- ARR expansion per cohort (redacted) — customer development slide
- “Forethinkers” team slide
- Advisors and investors slide
- “What’s next” (redacted) — road map slide
- “Where we’re going” (redacted) — revenue growth slide
- “Unlock human potential through AI” — mission slide
Three things to love
There’s a lot to love about this deck, and it’s hard to only pick three things. In the past few pitch deck teardowns, I’ve often focused on the beginning of the narrative — the first few slides.
Ending on mission
[Slide 23] Closing slide. Image Credits: Forethought
I’ve argued before how important it is to have a good final slide. To understand why, remember that in a lot of pitching situations, the first and last slides are on the screen for a longer time. The first because you’re faffing about with getting coffee, waiting for people and getting situated. The last because during the Q&A at the end of a pitch, it’s not uncommon to leave the final slide up — at least until you have to move to another slide in the deck to clarify something. To be fair, this was more true when you were pitching in-person than when you’re pitching virtually, but it’s good practice to make every slide do some heavy lifting.
A lot of the time, the final slide is just a repeat of the company’s …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/sample-series-c-pitch-deck-forethought/
Sony is launching new loyalty program ‘PlayStation Stars’ to reward gamers
Today, Sony introduced a new loyalty program called PlayStation Stars that will give gamers loyalty points and rewards. The program is free to join and launches later this year, the company announced. PlayStation Stars members can redeem points for PSN wallet funds, the payment method for game purchases and select PlayStation Store items.
With the program, PlayStation also unveiled digital collectibles for loyal members to earn. To answer what everyone is thinking — No, it’s not an NFT.
Grace Chen, vice president, Network Advertising, Loyalty & Licensed Merchandise, writes in a PlayStation blog that they are “digital representations of things that PlayStation fans enjoy, including figurines of beloved and iconic characters from games and other forms of entertainment, as well as cherished devices that tap into Sony’s history of innovation.” PlayStation Stars members can collect tons of collectibles, including ultra-rare ones.
To earn rewards, members must complete tasks or “campaigns” where they can win tournaments and specific trophies. Players can even earn rewards if they are the first player to platinum a blockbuster title in their local time zone. There will also be a monthly check-in campaign that requires you to play any game to receive a reward.
This is PlayStation’s first rewards program, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
The introduction of PlayStation Stars comes a month after Sony’s PlayStation Plus subscription launch. PlayStation Plus members enrolled in the loyalty program automatically earn points for PlayStation Store purchases.
The two announcements reflect the growing effort in the gaming industry to delve deeper into subscription offerings and consumer-facing strategies.
PlayStation hopes by introducing this new program and digital collectibles, gamers will be “excited for the future with PlayStation: commemorating the gaming eras we created together, charting new paths to explore, and bringing players together for global celebrations,” Chen added.
The company said that the program is currently being tested and will continue to evolve over time. Later this year, it will launch in “phased regional rollouts” such as Asia, the Americas, Europe and more.
Top Indian tech advocacy group drops crypto over regulatory uncertainty
The leading influential technology lobby group in India is turning its back on advocating for crypto in a major setback for the local ecosystem in the South Asian nation.
Internet and Mobile Association of India, an 18-year-old lobby group, said Thursday it is dissolving the Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council, its four-year endeavor to support and lobby for the nascent technology category.
The association said in a statement that it was forced to take the decision because “a resolution of the regulatory environment for the industry is still very uncertain.”
“The association would like to utilise its limited resources for other emerging digital sectors, which make a more immediate and direct contribution to digital India, notably, deepening financial inclusion and promoting Central Bank issued Digital Currency [CBDC]. Members of the BACC were informed about the decision at a meeting held here today,” it said.
The move is the culmination of years of frustration for the Indian crypto industry, which has felt that the lobby group’s influence and reach have been unable to deliver enough landmark results, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The IAMAI felt that it was risking its reputation by continuing to push for the adoption and support for crypto, two different people familiar with the matter said.
Regardless, the discontinuation of the Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council brings the local industry back to the drawing board at a time when local exchanges and other crypto firms are seeing a sharp decline in trading volume in the wake of India enforcing taxation on the virtual digital assets.
The Indian central bank continues to force the hand of banks from engaging with crypto platforms in India, a move that has made on-ramp a nightmare for the firms, people familiar with the matter said.
Many investors and entrepreneurs in the country have been scrambling for months to find newer, more effective ways including engaging with Niti Aayog, a powerful think tank, to liaison with policymakers, sources with direct knowledge of the matter said. Niti Aayog has largely resisted involvement with the crypto industry, sources said.
Indian lawmakers, on their part, have met several industry faces in the past one year, but so far they are of the view that the fast adoption of crypto trading has hurt most consumers and more safeguards should be put in place, the sources said.
In the wake of the uncertainty, the local ecosystem has seen some talent move outside of the country and a growing number of local entrepreneurs build for the foreign markets and avoid serving customers in India, the world’s second-largest internet market.
“Our stated belief as industry has always been to have sustainable dialogue with regulators and stakeholders and address concerns for progressive regulations. As an industry we will continue to positively engage with all stakeholders and continue to build emerging tech including Web 3.0,” said Ashish Singhal, co-founder and chief executive of CoinSwitch Kuber, and Sumit Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of CoinDCX, in a joint statement. The duo served as chair and co-chair of BACC.
FCC hands down $116M robocall fine, but begs for the power to hammer perps itself
Robocalls and other automated scams are an everyday occurrence for millions of Americans. But while stricter rules are coming and the FCC is about to hit one robocaller’s operation with a $116 million fine, the agency wants to step up its enforcement with the ability to take the scammers to court itself.
“This fine is big,” said Rosenworcel in a statement accompanying the fine’s announcement. “But it also calls attention to the fact that we need new rules of the game.”
The FCC, like the FTC and other agencies, has the power to define and propose fines or other financial damages, it doesn’t actually collect them itself. Instead, it hands all the paperwork over to the Justice Department, which takes it from there. One problem: the ones getting fined sometimes get away with paying only a fraction of the amount.
As we saw a few years ago with another major robocalling penalty, this one referred by the FTC, a $5M payment was reduced to $18,332 and the proceeds from selling the scammer’s car. In 2020, Rosenworcel lamented that the FCC had issued hundreds of millions worth of fines and collected… $6,790. Part of that, she said, was because of a “refusal” by the DOJ to pursue the cases.
The FCC is investigating robocall operations, issuing cease and desist letters, and coordinating a national resource sharing group with 41 State Attorneys General. But ultimately it still has to go through Justice, and that’s something the agency appears to be tiring of.
“We have issued many fines just like this one. But after we do, we have to hand them over to our colleagues at the Department and Justice and hope for further action,” Rosenworcel said in her statement. “I like hope. But instead of wishing for the best, I would like the certainty of this agency being able to go to court directly and collect fines against these bad actors—each and every one of them. This will take a change in the law and we need Congress to fix that. But I think this is robocall change worth fighting for.”
Sadly, Congress is probably too at war with itself right now to pass the kind of executive-empowering legislation that would be needed here. But hopefully the FCC doesn’t have to wait too long before it can start laying down the law itself.