Category: Tech news

Autonomous air mobility company Volocopter has added to the Series C funding round it announced in September 2019. The German electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft maker announced €50 million ($54 million at today’s exchange rate) in funding at the time, and the C round has now grown to €87 million ($94 million) thanks to new lead investor DB Schenker, a German logistics company with operations all over the world.

This round also includes participation by Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group, as well as the venture arm of its parent MS&AD, along with TransLink Capital . Existing investors, including Lukasz Gadowski and btov, also participated in this round extension.

With this new funding, Volocopter brings its total raised to around $132 million, and it says it will use the newly acquired capital to help certify its VoloCity aircraft, its air taxi eVTOL designed to transport people, which is on track to become the company’s first-ever vehicle licensed for commercial operation. Meanwhile, Volocopter will also use the new funds to help continue development of a next-generation iteration of its VoloDrone, which is the cargo-carrying version of its aircraft. It aims to use VoloDrone to expand its market to include logistics, as well as construction, city infrastructure and agriculture.

Already, Volocopter has formed partnerships with companies including John Deere for pilots of its VoloDrone, but it says that a second-generation version of the vehicle will help it commercialize the drone. On the VoloCity side, the company recently flew a demonstration flight in Singapore, and then announced they’d be working with Grab on a feasibility study about air taxi services for potential deployment across Southeast Asia in key cities.

Alongside this round extension, Volocopter adds two advisory board members — Yifan Li from Geely Holding Group, which led the first tranche of this round closed in September, and DB Schenker CEO Jochen Thewes. Both of these are key strategic partners from investors who stand to benefit the company not only in terms of funding, but also in terms of supply-side and commercialization.

A new industry alliance led by Alphabet’s Loon high-altitude balloon technology company and SoftBank’s HAPSMobile stratospheric glider subsidiary aims to work together on standards and tech related to deploying network connectivity using high-altitude delivery mechanisms.

This extends the existing partnership between HAPSMobile and Loon, which began with a strategic alliance between the two announced last April, and which recently resulted in Loon adapting the network hardware it uses on its stratospheric balloons to work with the HAPSMobile stratospheric long-winged drone. Now, the two are welcoming more members, including AeroVironment, Airbus Defence and Space, Bharti Airtel, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Intelsat, Nokia, HAPSMobile parent SoftBank and Telefonica.

The new HAPS Alliance, as it’s being called (HAPS stands for High Altitude Platform Station), will be working together to promote use of the technology, as well as work with regulators in the markets where they operate on enabling its use. They’ll work toward developing a set of common industry standards for network interoperability, and also figure how to essentially carve up or stake out the stratosphere so that participating industry players can work together without stepping on each other’s toes.

This new combined group is no slouch: It includes some of the most powerful network operators in the world, as well as key network infrastructure players and aerospace companies. Which could mean big things for stratospheric networks, which have the advantages of being closer to Earth than satellite-based internet offerings, but also avoid the disadvantages of ground-based cell towers, like having to deal with difficult terrain or more limited range.

Is this the first step toward a future where our connected devices rely on high-flying, autonomous cell towers for connectivity? It’s too early to say how ubiquitous this will get, but this new group of heavyweights definitely lends more credence to the idea.

The coronavirus outbreak could result in at least a 3.3% drop — and as high as a 9% dip — in the volume of PCs that will ship globally this year, research firm Canalys reported Thursday evening in its revised projections to clients.

PC shipments will be down between 10.1% to 20.6% in Q1 2020, the firm estimated. The impact will remain visible in Q2, when the shipments are expected to drop between 8.9% (best-case scenario, per Canalys) and 23.4% (worst-case scenario), it said.

In the best-case scenario, the outbreak would mean 382 million units will ship in 2020, down 3.4% from 396 million last year.

The worst case makes a deeper dent, stating that about 362 million units will ship this year, down 8.5% from last year.

“In the best-case scenario, production levels are expected to revert to full capacity by April 2020, hence the biggest hit will be to sell-in shipments in the first two quarters, with the market recovering in Q3 and Q4,” the firm said.

“Thus, worldwide PC market shipments are expected to decline 3.4% year on year in 2020, with Q1 2020 down by 10% and Q2 2020 by 9%. PC market supply will normalize by Q3 2020. On a yearly basis, Canalys expects the worldwide PC market will slowly begin its recovery starting in 2021.”

The worst-case scenario assumes that production levels will not return to their full capacity by June 2020. “Under the assumptions of this scenario, production and demand levels in China will take even longer to recover and Q2 will suffer a decline on a par with Q1 as a consequence. It will be as late as Q4 2020 until we see a market recovery.”

In either of the scenarios, China, one of the world’s largest PC markets, will be most impacted. In worst-case scenarios, “the Chinese market will suffer heavily in 2020 under this scenario, with a 12% year-on-year decline over 2019, and subsequent stabilization taking even longer, with 2021 forecast shipments lagging 6 million behind the best-case scenario. The expected CAGR between 2021 and 2024 in China is 6.3%,” Canalys stated.

China, the global hub for production and supply chain, moved to contain the impact of coronavirus by first extending the official Lunar New Year holidays, which was followed by stringent travel restrictions to keep citizens safe. “This resulted in a significant drop in offline retail traffic and a dramatic fall in consumer purchases,” Canalys analysts said.

The outbreak has also resulted in supply shortages of components, such as PCBs and memory in China and other markets. “Likewise, channel partners have received notifications from key PC vendors over the last two weeks that their PC shipments and replacement parts can be expected to arrive in up to 14 weeks – over three times the usual delivery time – depending on where partners are located,” the firm said.

“Technology vendors and channel partners in the Asia Pacific region face the unexpected challenge of coping with the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 (coronavirus). The crisis was largely unforeseen, even in mid-January. Most leaders this year were anticipating disruption from political instability and natural disasters, not an epidemic,” wrote Sharon Hiu, an analyst at Canalys in a separate report.

The outbreak has impacted several more industries, including smartphones, automobiles, television, smart speakers and video game consoles.

Foxconn, a key manufacturer for Apple, said on Thursday that its 2020 revenue will be impacted by Wuhan coronavirus. The firm said its factories in India, Vietnam and Mexico are fully loaded and it is planning to expand overseas.

Earlier this month, Apple said it does not expect to meet revenue guidance for March quarter due to constrained iPhone supply and low demand due to the store closures in China.

The U.S. giant is expected to miss its schedule for mass producing a widely rumored affordable iPhone, while inventories for existing models could remain low until April or longer, Nikkei Asian Review reported on Wednesday.

Elon Musk is not one to mince words, but he may have just lost a potential customer because of a cutting tweet.

That customer is renowned big deal Bill Gates, who sat down recently with YouTuber Marques Brownlee, who joined the platform in 2009 and has amassed more than 10 million viewers. Gates and Brownlee have met before, and the idea was to have Gates discuss some of what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has planned for this year, which marks the 20th anniversary of the organization.

Unsurprisingly, the conversation touched on climate change and in pretty short order sustainable transportation, with Brownlee bringing up Tesla and asking if, when “premium” electric cars grow more affordable, they’ll also become more ubiquitous.

Gates didn’t exactly malign Tesla with his answer, telling Brownlee: “The premium today is there, but over the next decade — except that the [mileage] range will still be a little bit less — that premium will come to zero. [When we look at all the sectors addressing climate change] passenger cars is certainly one of the most hopeful, and Tesla, if you had to name one company that’s help drive that, it’s them.”

What Gates did next, however, did not sit well with Musk, apparently. He expressed excitement about his first new electric car, which happens not to be a Tesla.

Said Gates: “Now all the car companies, including some new ones, are moving super fast to do electric cars. The biggest concern is, will the consumers overcome that range anxiety? I jut got a Porsche Taycan, which is an electric car. I have to say, its a premium price car, but it’s very, very cool. That’s my first electric car and I’m enjoying it a lot.”

Musk felt compelled to weigh in with a  tweet after learning about the exchange.

Specifically, a Twitter account associated with an unofficial Tesla newsletter, tweeted “a lot of people are going to watch the interview and they are going to trust Bill’s word for it and not even consider EVs. Why? Because Bill Gates is a really smart guy!”

To which Musk responded, “My conversations with Gates have been underwhelming tbh.”

It’s funny, because they are both billionaire geniuses, and it’s unexpected.

It’s also nasty enough that you might guess that Gates — a car collector who has said that his first first big purchase after founding Microsoft was a Porsche 911 supercar — won’t be buying a Tesla any time soon.

Over the last year or so, much-to-most of the cryptocurrency world has pivoted from the failure of “fat tokens” and ICOs, and the faltering growth of “Layer 2” payments like Lightning and the late Plasma Network, to the new hotness known as “DeFi,” which this week was used to … hack? acquire? steal? It’s pretty ambiguous … a cool million dollars.

DeFi stands for Decentralized Finance. It’s supposed to be an entire alternative financial system. One day, its visionaries say, you will be able to use DeFi to borrow and lend, to buy and sell all kinds of exotic securities, and to acquire insurance and make claims, all via completely decentralized networks and protocols, no banks or brokers or trusted third parties required, just irrevocable and implacable software, “code as law,” with no human beings involved except for you and (maybe) your counterparties, while never having to fill out any paperwork or apply for permissions, and trusting your money to no entity except whoever holds your private key(s). One day.

Many people find this a stirring, inspiring vision. However, DeFi today is very few of those things. Today it allows you to borrow crypto using crypto as collateral; use that lending market to earn interest on your crypto holdings; trade crypto via decentralized exchanges, or DEXes; commit your crypto to liquidity pools, in exchange for a percentage of fees; insure yourself against hacks somewhat; and, well, that’s pretty much it.

Some people also call stablecoins, prediction markets like Augur, and security tokens (aka stocks / real estate On The Blockchain) part of DeFi. The first two seem pretty separate to me, though, with the exception of the Dai stablecoin. Security tokens should be DeFi, but are currently an awkward fit because of their strict regulatory requirements, and anyway haven’t exactly taken the world by storm.

I should know; I spent some weeks eighteen months ago coding a security token. I’ve been writing about cryptocurrencies here for nine years. And I have followed the growth of DeFi with … well … eye-watering boredom, along with some dismay, until this week.

DeFi seems to me more like cosplaying a financial system than an actual viable alternative. I don’t see it crossing that divide any time soon, if ever. It even cosplays the De in its name, too, since very few of today’s DeFi offerings (beyond its base layers) are actually decentralized — as in, beyond the control of some kind of centralized administration — or has any real schedule for becoming so.

Technically it’s all pretty cool, I concede. But what is the point of “borrowing money using money as collateral” for the 99.9% of people who aren’t true-believer HODLers loath to even consider simply selling their crypto? Even if you accept the “floating cryptocurrencies are like gold, stablecoins are like money” analogy, this entire system only really benefits the vanishingly small number of whales who own sizable amounts of cryptocurrency already. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that they who hold that gold have made the new rules, but it’s a bit much to ask that the rest of us genuflect in awe and call them the future.

Similarly, it’s nice that you can earn a little interest on your crypto holdings, but for floating cryptocurrencies, that trickle will be drowned out by the rogue-wave-like price swings in their valuations for the foreseeable future. (For instance, much of the credit for the “more than $1 billion locked into DeFi contracts,” much cited across the industry, should go to the recent rise in valuations rather than increasing participation.) Even for stablecoin collateral, no reasonable analyst would consider the interest rates commensurate with the risk —

— because, as the events of this week point out, that risk is immense. Credit where it’s due: those events were made possible because of a genuinely novel innovation, a “flash loan,” wherein an anonymous party can borrow an arbitrary amount of money — yes, you read that correctly — providing that they ensure it’s all paid back by the end of a single smart-contract transaction. Think of it as an ATM giving you all the money you want, but locking the door until you deposit it all back.

That may seem surreal and pointless, but the thing about DeFi is, a single transaction can include many different steps between the borrow and the payback. This week’s two hacks took advantage of that fact. The first used half the flash loan to short the price of bitcoin, and the other half to borrow a lot of bitcoin, which it sold to temporarily lower its price — then claimed the short profits. It also took advantage of a bug in a smart contract intended to catch such transactions.

The second used some of the loan to borrow a lot of a cryptocurrency, then the rest to bid that up in value, then used that increased value as collateral to borrow even more, then paid back the loan and kept the increased value. It didn’t appear to take advantage of any bugs at all. Combined, they reaped roughly a cool million dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency.

Were these thefts? Were these totally legitimate arbitrage plays, using the system(s) as programmed, and, at least in the second case, apparently as designed? You can at least make a reasonable case either way.

The risks certainly do not stop there. People have even floated compelling-sounding theories suggesting how a hacker could extract the entire reserves of MakerDAO, the system behind the Dai stablecoin, which represents more than half of the combined committed value of all DeFi. In fairness, the responsible people involved will cheerfully tell you that these are bleeding-edge systems with fairly broad attack surfaces, and you probably don’t want to commit money to them that you can’t afford to lose.

But all this cosplay, clever as it is, doesn’t help solve any of the hard problems preventing cryptocurrencies from mattering to most. The oracle problem: if you rely on third parties to tell the blockchain what to do, then why not just rely on third parties to manage your money? (While also offering valuable things like a help number and recourse in the case of erroneous transactions.) The identity problem: how can you implement decentralized identity and reputation, so that you can offer credit based on someone’s history and status, rather than current cryptocurrency holdings?

Working on those problems would actually help to “bank the unbanked,” something that many cryptocurrency people used to pretend to care about. They would actually reduce the power that gargantuan centralized financial establishments hold over ordinary people. They could lead to an actual decentralized financial system which, even if only 1% of the population actually use it, would keep the giants honest simply by providing a viable alternative in case they became too draconian.

Please don’t start talking about Venezuela or Zimbabwe. Unlike you, I actually spent time in Zimbabwe during hyperinflation. If we wanted to use cryptocurrencies to help the masses suffering under profligate governments using increasingly worthless fiat currencies — which I absolutely agree is a noble goal — we wouldn’t be spending our time, effort, and intellectual horsepower on the ability to use cryptocurrency A as collateral for loans denominated in cryptocurrency B. They are completely orthogonal.

Instead of tackling the hard problems, or bringing crypto to people who need it, DeFi today seems to be mostly about creating an alternative financial system which makes life mildly more convenient for those whales who happened to wind up holding a big bag of cryptocurrencies after the first few booms. And as this week’s events show, it may not even be good at that. Please can we get back to the important problems?

YouTube is littered with bot-driven videos promising big in-game riches—that also try to steal your personal information.

Last week, we interviewed Brendan Wallace, a real estate-focused venture capitalist whose portfolio companies include Opendoor, which buys and sell homes, and scooter company Lime, which helps building owners navigate around parking requirements by installing docking stations instead.

We first talked with Wallace almost exactly three years ago when he and partner Brad Greiwe took the wraps off their venture firm Fifth Wall Ventures and its $212 million debut fund. What really stood out to us at the time is that it was backed by a long list of real estate heavyweights. They’re understandably eager to get a peek at up-and-coming technologies and, in some cases, deploy them.

Wallace and Greiwe have been awfully busy since that initial conversation. Last year, they closed a second flagship fund with $503 million in capital commitments. Fifth Wall is also working to close two other funds, including a $200 million retail fund focused on matching online brands with real-world real estate and a reported $500 million carbon impact fund whose capital will enable its limited partners to expressly invest in sustainable technology.

Wallace declined to discuss the last two funds, presumably owing to SEC regulations, but he did talk with us about what he says is the biggest thing to shake up the real estate industry in “the last five decades.” We also chatted about how the coronavirus impacted a recent fundraising trip to Singapore and how WeWork’s public retrenching has affected how investors feel about real estate startups right now (he suggests WeWork’s fall definitely made an impression). Some excerpts from our conversation follow, edited lightly for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: We’d read that you were recently in Singapore meeting with new investors.

Brendan Wallace: Yes, I was in Singapore meeting with our existing investors and it was a pretty unique time to be there. When I went, which was about two weeks ago, the outbreak of coronavirus was fairly contained in China. But then as you probably read, it spread pretty rapidly in Singapore, so at the moment, I’m actually kind of self-quarantining myself in my own house.

We all know the cloud infrastructure market is extremely lucrative; analyst firm Canalys reports that the sector reached $30.2 billion in revenue for Q4 2019.

Cloud numbers are hard to parse because companies often lump cloud revenue into a single bucket regardless of whether it’s generated by infrastructure or software. What’s interesting about Canalys’s numbers is that it attempts to measure the pure infrastructure results themselves without other cloud incomes mixed in:

As an example, Microsoft reported $12.5 billion in total combined cloud revenue for the quarter, but Canalys estimates that just $5.3 billion comes from infrastructure (Azure). Amazon has the purest number with $9.8 billion of a reported $9.95 billion attributed to its infrastructure business. This helps you understand why in spite of the fact that Microsoft reported bigger overall cloud earnings numbers and a higher growth rate, Amazon still has just less than double Microsoft’s market share in terms of IaaS spend.

That’s not to say Microsoft didn’t still have a good quarter — it garnered 17.6% of revenue for the period. That’s up from 14.5% in the same quarter a year ago. What’s more, Amazon lost a bit of ground, according to Canalys, dropping from 33.4% in Q4 2018 to 32.4% in the most recent quarter.

Part of the reason for that is because Microsoft is growing at close to twice the rate as Amazon — 62.3% versus Amazon’s 33.2%.

Meanwhile, number-three vendor Google came in at $1.8 billion for pure infrastructure revenue, good for 6% of the market, up from 4.9% a year ago on growth rate 67.6%. Google reported $2.61 billion in overall cloud revenue, but that included software. Despite the smaller results, it was a good quarter for the Mountain View-based company.

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Alphabet today announced that it is calling it quits on its efforts to build and monetize its Makani wind energy kites. Makani, which was founded in 2006, came into Google/Alphabet seven years ago as a Google X project. Last year, the company spun it out of X and made it a standalone Alphabet unit. Now, Makani’s time at Alphabet as an “Other Bet” is at an end. The company is still hoping to work with Shell, one of its earliest partners, to see how the technology can be used in another way, though.

“After considering many factors, I believe that the road to commercial viability is a much longer and riskier road than we’d hoped and that it no longer makes sense for Makani to be an Alphabet company,” says Astro Teller, captain of Moonshots at X and xhairman of the Makani board, in a statement. Teller, it’s worth noting, does not oversee Alphabet’s Other Bets.

“While it’s tempting to say that all climate-related ideas deserve investment, remaining clear-eyed and directing resources to the opportunities where we think we can have the greatest impact isn’t just good business; it’s essential when it comes to a problem as urgent as the climate crisis,” Teller added.

While at X/Alphabet, the team managed to get a 20kW demonstration project off the ground and expanded this to a unit capable of producing up to 600kW. Still, though, Alphabet clearly didn’t see a path forward to turning Makani into a viable (and profitable) project in the long run.

“Creating an entirely new kind of wind energy technology means facing business challenges as well as engineering challenges,” writes Fort Felker, who became the lead for Makani at X in 2015. “Despite strong technical progress, the road to commercialization is longer and riskier than hoped, so from today Makani’s time at Alphabet is coming to an end.”

Back in the day, when it first acquired Makani, Google probably wouldn’t have worried all that much about whether this project made good business sense. Those freewheeling times at Google are behind us, though, and, at this point, there is an expectation that even these forward-looking Other Bets have to become standalone businesses in the long run.

Meal kit company Blue Apron has long been on the struggle bus — whether it’s been its lackluster debut on the public market, employee lawsuits or layoffs. So, it should come as no surprise that the company is considering selling itself in order to maximize value for shareholders.

In addition to a potential sale, Blue Apron is exploring a merger, raising capital through either the public or private markets, selling off assets or some combination of the above.

“We continue to believe that we have the right strategy to drive our resumption of growth as we work to launch additional new capabilities and test new product offerings,” Blue Apron CEO Linda Findley Kozlowski said in a press release. “Our strategic alternatives process, together with our cost optimization initiatives, is intended to best position the company for the future, including to support our growth strategy. These efforts reflect the commitment of the Board, management and myself to doing what’s in the best interest of the business, Blue Apron’s shareholders and other stakeholders.”

In Q4 2019, Blue Apron reported a net revenue decrease of 33% year-over-year, to $94.3 million. For the full fiscal year of 2019, revenues decreased 32%, to $454.9 million from $667.6 million the year prior. Blue Apron attributes this to a decline in customers.

Is “Twitter Stories” on the way? Or will we just get tools to send prettier tweets? Well now Twitter has the talent for both as it’s just acquired Chroma Labs. Co-founded by Instagram Boomerang inventor John Barnett, Chroma Labs’ Chroma Stories app let you fill in stylish layout templates and frames for posting collages and more to Instagram Stories, Snapchat, and more.

Rather than keeping Chroma Stories around, Twitter will be splitting the Chroma Labs squad up to work on its product, design and engineering teams. The Chroma Stories iPhone app won’t be shut down, but it won’t get more updates and will only work until there’s some breaking change to iOS.

“When we founded Chroma Labs in 2018, we set out to build a company to inspire creativity and help people tell their visual stories. During the past year, we’ve enabled creators and businesses around the world to create millions of stories with the Chroma Stories app” the Chroma Labs team writes on its site. “We’re proud of this work, and look forward to continuing our mission at a larger scale – with one of the most important services in the world.”

We’ve reached out to Twitter for more details on the deal and any price paid. [Update: Twitter confirms this is an acquisition, not just and acquihire of the team as it first appeared, though Chroma Stories is shutting down. It refused to disclose the terms of the acquisition, but said all seven employees of Chroma Labs are coming aboard. The team will be working on the Conversations division at Twitter, and the deal is meant to boost its talent, leadership, and expertise for serving public discussions. A Twitter spokesperson also confirms that Chroma will shut down its .business and future versions of the app will not be available.]

Founded in late 2018, Chroma Labs had raised a seed round in early 2019 and counted Sweet Capital, Index Ventures, and Combine VC as investors. Barnett’s fellow co-founders include CTO Alex Li, who was an engineering manager on Facebook Photos and Instagram Stories; and Joshua Harris was a product design manager on the Oculus Rift and Facebook’s augmented reality filters.

With Chroma Stories, you could choose between retro filters, holiday themed frames, and snazzy collage templates to make your Storie look special amidst the millions posted each day. Sensor Tower estimates Chroma Stories had 37,000 downloads to date. That tepid reception despite the app’s quality might explain why the team is joining Twitter.

By snatching up some of the smartest talent in visual storytelling, Twitter could give its text-focused app some spice. It’s one of the few social apps without a Stories product already, and its creative tools are quite limited. Better ways to lay out photos in tweets could make Twitter more beautiful and less exhausting to sift through. That might make it more appealing to teens and help it boost its user count, which now lags behind Snapchat.

Twitter has become the world’s public record for words. The Chroma Labs talent might make it the real-time gallery for art and design as well.

[Update 3:05pm Pacific: Twitter confirms that this is a full acquisition of the Chroma Labs company, not just an acquisition as we originally printed.]

Newly released documents confirm that the driver experienced a glitch multiple times before the deadly crash, though it’s unclear whether he reported it to Tesla.

Full disclosure one: I’ve hosted a lot of independent podcasts, with varying degrees of success.

Full disclosure two: This story is being hosted on a site owned by a corporate media giant. There’s even some chance that, by the time it’s published, the decision will be made to host it behind a paywall. The fact is, I’ve worked for a lot of big media companies throughout my professional career. It’s honestly the one way I’ve been able to make a consistent living as a professional writer living in New York City.

Independence is precisely what drew me to podcasting in the first place. Years of scraping together a living in editorial, I’d felt far removed from what drew me to writing and interviewing. Struggling in the industry involves a lot of writing things for other people, and those things you do write that you genuinely care about are, at best, heavily edited and often truncated (I’m old enough to remember when column space was still a thing).

I became nostalgic for my college days (as one days) as manager of KZSC, Santa Cruz’s legendary public radio station. I would spend hours hosting shows on weekends and come in late at night to spin records after our daily broadcasting obligations were done.

Toward the end of my time at the station (and college, generally), a fellow host and I were offered the opportunity to intern at a local radio station. A music director gave us a tour of an office space that housed several local stations, segmented into what looked like conference rooms, where hosts would spend a few hours prerecording spots for the week. A conversation around how the station determined its playlists left me with a similar sense of existential dread.

The situation was enough to end my career in radio before it started. Between publishing and radio, I guess I’ve always had a bit of a thing for dying mediums. But this was a bridge too far. I have a very vivid memory of standing in the station’s parking lot and remarking to my friend, “I guess that’s it for our careers in radio.” He nodded and we were on our way.

But podcasting felt hopeful. Like blogging before it, it presented a rare opportunity to embrace a medium in its relative infancy. That brief, hopeful period before the corporate interests utterly decimated the landscape as they inevitably do. I reached out to friend and former KZSC colleague, Jesse Thorn, who’d built his own mini-podcasting empire in the years since college.

I visit his home in Los Angeles, a room of which he’d turned into a podcasting studio (it has since moved to an official Maximum Fun office overlooking MacArthur Park near downtown Los Angeles). He’d also assisted in helping set up a veteran comedian named Marc Maron flirt with the world of podcasting — not sure if that guy’s show ever got off the ground.

My own ambitions — at least from a technological standpoint — were more grounded. When I started my most recent podcast, RiYL, five-plus years ago, I was working as a freelancer. I needed something mobile that I could could take to interview subjects wherever they were. The equipment has been refined somewhat, over the years, but the gear still fits into a laptop sleeve for maximum portability. Spoiler alert: Next week’s interview with New Pornographers frontman Carl Newman was quite literally recorded in a bathroom.

That broad spectrum of experience levels was precisely what made podcasting so appealing to so many. It felt like the promise of the internet fulfilled. You knew it would be hard — some combination of talent and timing and luck — but you could convince yourself that, if the stars aligned correctly, your shoestring show could make it to the top of the charts.

The unfiltered nature of it all was also immensely appealing to someone who grew up obsessed with self-produced punk and self-published zines. Those were always the names I wanted to get on my show and record for posterity. And every interview could be as long or as short as was warranted. Every medium inherits some parameters from its predecessors, but it truly breaks away when it grows beyond that. For that reason, I made a point producing a show made up exclusively of five-minute episodes and another that routinely passed the hour-long mark.

The medium is the message, and all that good stuff.

Late last year, I wrote a piece for TechCrunch titled “2019: the year podcasting broke.” It was, as I explained, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek homage to the documentary “1991: The Year Punk Broke,” which chronicled the mainstreaming of a once explicitly pop-cultural phenomenon. The early ’90s notions of co-opting punk seems fairly quaint in hindsight.

Similarly, 2019 feels like the tip of the spear for corporate investment in podcasting. Spotify’s planned spending of between $400 million and $500 million is jaw-dropping, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to other mediums. Corporations are going to go big on podcasting, easily one of the most intimate mediums with one of the most highly engaged audiences. Listening to a bunch of strangers talk about history or music or sports for an hour-plus gets into your brain in ways it’s hard to explain.

With corporate involvement in podcasting come things like exclusives — company-produced programs that only exist on specific paid services (yes, I’m fully aware that I’m writing this on a site that recently launched a premium content tier, but we all need to monetize in the way we see fit). But the truth is the same with podcasters as it is with creatives in virtually ever medium: The people making the thing generally want as many people to engage with it as possible.

But the lure of a living wage is a powerful one. And making a living doing what you love almost invariably involves compromise at some level. I, for one, know that I’m incredibly lucky to have survived for as long as I have as a professional writer, living in one of the world’s most expensive cities. And yes, it’s a career that has included plenty of compromises — some I feel better about than others.

I also have plenty of friends who haven’t been so lucky — artists, writers, cartoonists and musicians who make wonderful art that I love that they simply can’t survive on. Welcome to capitalism, friends. It’s a real mixed bag.

The answer is the same as ever, though. If you like a thing, support it. And thankfully, doing as such is easier than ever. Whether it’s a network with a public radio-style fund drive like Maximum Fun or a Patreon-backed program like The Best Show. Support could mean buying a boxed mattress using their special coupon code at checkout or, for those fellow artists, just rating and reviewing or telling a friend.

I do believe the spike in podcast popularity will be good for its myriad providers in many ways. The rising tide and all of that good stuff. But I do worry that many of its most unique independent voices will get bulldozed as big companies rush to construct skyscrapers. It’s our job as listeners, fans and podcasters to make sure those voices aren’t drowned out.

Local authorities in India-controlled Kashmir have opened a case against hundreds of people who used virtual private networks (VPNs) to circumvent a social media ban in the disputed Himalayan region in a move that has been denounced by human rights and privacy activists.

Tahir Ashraf, who heads the police cyber division in Srinagar, said on Tuesday that the authority had identified and was probing hundreds of suspected users who he alleged misused social media to promote “unlawful activities and secessionist ideology.”

On Monday, the police said they had also seized “a lot of incriminating material” under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), the nation’s principal counter-terrorism law. Those found guilty could be jailed up to seven years.

“Taking a serious note of misuse of social media, there have been continuous reports of misuse of social media sites by the miscreants to propagate the secessionist ideology and to promote unlawful activities,” the region’s police said in a statement.

The move comes weeks after the Indian government restored access to several hundred websites, including some shopping websites such as Amazon India and Flipkart and select news outlets in the disputed region. Facebook, Twitter and other social media services remain blocked, and mobile data speeds remain capped at 2G speeds.

One analysis found that 126 of 301 websites that had been unblocked were only usable to “some degree.” To bypass the censorship on social media and access news websites, many in the disputed region, home to more than 7 million people, began using VPN services.

India banned internet access in Jammu and Kashmir in early August last year after New Delhi revoked Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status. The Indian government said the move was justified to maintain calm in the region — months later India’s apex court criticized the government for imposing a blanket internet ban for an indefinite period.

“The Government of India has almost total control over what information is coming out of the region,” said Avinash Kumar, executive director of human rights campaign group Amnesty International India.

“While the Government has a duty and responsibility to maintain law and order in the state, filing cases under counter-terrorism laws such as UAPA over vague and generic allegations and blocking social media sites – is not the solution. The Indian government needs to put humanity first and let the people of Kashmir speak,” he urged the government.

Mishi Choudhary, executive director of New Delhi-based Software Law and Freedom Centre, said that the authority did not need to chase people who are using VPNs, and should restore internet access like any other democratic society.

“Any alleged rumors can be addressed by putting out accurate and more information through the same social media platforms. Content-based restrictions on speech can only be allowed within the restrictions established by the Constitution and not in an ad hoc manner,” she said.