Category: Tech news

The $10 million entry fee to join the Facebook-developed cryptocurrency’s Libra Association is merely a minimum. Members who’ll verify transactions can opt to invest more in exchange for more Libra Investment Tokens that will earn them dividends from the interest earned by the Libra Reserve after it pays for infrastructure and operations costs. If regulators allow it to launch after today requesting a halt of development, and the cryptocurrency grows popular with tons of people cashing in local currencies for Libra, the Reserve that holds those assets could grow huge and generate meaningful returns via interest — especially for members willing to sink a ton of money in early.

But therein lies potential disalignment of incentives.

If you’re confused, read our guide to everything about Libra

Each Libra Association member only gets one vote on the council, including Facebook . But if Facebook puts in $500 million and another member like eBay antes up just the $10 million minimum, Facebook has a much bigger incentive to get people cashing into Libra and holding onto the cryptocurrency so the Reserve earns interest on those dollars or other fiat, rather than just getting people to transact with it regardless of whether they hold on to Libra permanently. That could lead Facebook (and its Calibra subsidiary representing it) to push governance decisions that would disproportionately benefit it.

Ahead of the Libra announcement two weeks ago, Facebook’s head of blockchain and now Calibra David Marcus told me, “The reserve earns interest on some of those treasuries. It’s a small amount and it’s variable, but if the reserve becomes big it could become a substantial way to fund the association but also return capital to investors.”

Yet Facebook, for all its talk about transparency with Libra, refused to tell me how much it’s invested into the Libra project as a whole or the Libra Investment Token. That should be a core question raised by Congress when Marcus testifies before the Senate Banking Chair on July 16th and the House Financial Services Committee on July 17th. Facebook did not respond to requests for comment on this article. Congress should also be sure to ask how Libra will avoid a Cambridge Analytica-style crypto disaster given that apps built on the Libra developer platform aren’t subject to review.

The proportion of the total Libra Investment Tokens that Facebook owns in part determines how decentralized Libra really is. If Facebook owns the lion’s share or a majority, that could give it too much financial impetus to bend the rules in its favor even if it only has one vote on the council.

Here’s how. Facebook has led development of Libra to date. In fact, the Libra Association has yet to draw up and ratify a charter or formally admit members. Technically it’s just Facebook’s project right now. “So far we’ve been funding it all,” Marcus told The Information’s Alex Heath. It’s also been coding it all, organizing it all and communicating it all.

As such, for now the project can’t survive without Facebook, and may not be able to for quite a while. That means that if at any time Facebook disagrees so strongly with the Libra Association that it threatens to pull out, it jeopardizes the investment of all the other members. That could coerce them to vote in support of its governance policy suggestions. Facebook thereby wouldn’t need more than one vote to have a much larger influence on the direction of the project.

Today in a Facebook Note (…not a Libra.org blog post), Marcus wrote, “The levels of investments of each of the partners will most likely be public as well when that’s actually live.” But that’s far from a guarantee, and could come too late for regulators to intercede or other members to truly understand the asymmetry.

Meanwhile, Marcus also said that “We’ve been basically lending money to the association that will be at some point repaid back.” That raises another question of how much Facebook has already sunk into the Libra project, how much it expects to be repaid and on what schedule. Members might be more skittish to join if they learn much of their $10 million investment might just go to paying back Facebook. 

That’s not to mention the other ways Facebook will earn money from Libra. Marcus wrote today that “If Libra is successful, Facebook will first benefit from it by enabling more commerce across its family of apps. More commerce means ads will be more effective, and advertisers will buy more of them to grow their businesses. Additionally, if we earn people’s trust with the Calibra wallet over time, we will also be in a position to start offering more financial services, and generate other revenue streams for the company.”

The fact that Facebook oversees development and has a massive head start on building its wallet that will be baked into its billion-plus user Messenger and WhatsApp products sure doesn’t hurt its prospects for offering other financial services. It will be first to market, instantly at scale, with an insider’s role in defining the rule book.

I’m not discounting the potential Libra has to aid the unbanked who can’t pay fees for having too little money in their accounts, or make commerce cheaper for small businesses. But if Facebook stands to earn outsized returns directly and indirectly from Libra, while expecting other members to foot its R&D bill, and these numbers aren’t made public soon, it’s reasonable to question how decentralized and altruistic this project really is.

If you’re driving your car from Portland to Merced, you probably rely on GPS to see where you are. But what if you’re driving your Moon rover from Oceanus Procellarum to the Sea of Tranquility? Actually, GPS should be fine — if this NASA research pans out.

Knowing exactly where you are in space, relative to other bodies anyway, is definitely a non-trivial problem. Fortunately the stars are fixed and by triangulating with them and other known landmarks, a spacecraft can figure out its location quite precisely.

But that’s so much work! Here on Earth we gave that up years ago, and now rely (perhaps too much) on GPS to tell us where we are within a few meters.

By creating our own fixed stars — satellites in geosynchronous orbits — constantly emitting known signals, we made it possible for our devices to quickly sample those signals and immediately locate themselves.

That sure would be handy on the Moon, but a quarter of a million miles makes a lot of difference to a system that relies on ultra-precise timing and signal measurement. Yet there’s nothing theoretically barring GPS signals from being measured out there — and in fact, NASA has already done it at nearly half that distance with the MMS mission a few years ago.

“NASA has been pushing high-altitude GPS technology for years,” said MMS system architect Luke Winternitz in a NASA news release. “GPS around the Moon is the next frontier.”

Astronauts can’t just take their phones up there, of course. Our devices are calibrated for catching and calculating signals from satellites known to be in orbit above us and within a certain range of distances. The time for the signal to reach us from orbit is a fraction of a second, while on or near the Moon it would take perhaps a full second and a half. That may not sound like much, but it fundamentally affects how the receiving and processing systems have to be built.

That’s precisely what the team at NASA Goddard has been working on addressing with a new navigation computer that uses a special high-gain antenna, a super-precise clock and other improvements over the earlier NavCube space GPS system and, of course, the terrestrial ones we all have in our phones.

The idea is to use GPS instead of relying on NASA’s network of ground and satellite measurement systems, which must exchange data to the spacecraft and eat up valuable bandwidth and power. Freeing up those systems could empower them to work on other missions and let more of the GPS-capable satellite’s communications be dedicated to science and other high-priority transmissions.

The team hopes to complete the lunar NavCube hardware by the end of the year and then find a flight to the Moon on which to test it as soon as possible. Fortunately, with Artemis gaining traction, it looks as if there will be no shortage of those.

The legalization of cannabis and hemp for medicinal and recreational use in states across the U.S. and in Canada has opened up a huge vein of green, green cash for startups.

Two entrepreneurs tantalized early on by the smell of dank profits are Pax Labs CEO Bharat Vasan and Eaze and Wayv founder Keith McCarty. They will join us on stage at Disrupt SF to hash out the opportunities for investors and help founders avoid seeing their vision go up in smoke.

Bharat Vasan took over as chief executive at Pax Labs in February 2018. Before that, he served as president and COO at August Home, which sold to Assa Abloy in 2017. Prior to August Home, Vasan was co-founder and COO at Basis Science, which sold to Intel in 2018 for a reported $100 million. Vasan was also at Electronic Arts from 2002 to 2010, where he went from senior manager of Mergers & Acquisitions to serving as CFO and COO.

Pax Labs’ valuation, as of its latest $420 million funding round in April of this year, was at $1.7 billion. The company, which makes cannabis vaporizers, has plans to use the funding for international expansion and new products, but Vasan also hinted at a data play in this new market.

“People know about different kinds of alcohol,” said Vasan, in an interview in April. “They may know that they’re a beer person or a wine person. But none of that exists within cannabis. They see names like ‘Lemon Haze’ and ‘Cherry Fizz’ and they don’t know what that is. These are all really awesome names for a band but not great to let you know what you’re consuming. We want to provide more clarity around what that means.”

How Pax Labs plans to do this is unclear, but we’re hoping to learn more about it in October.

Keith McCarty, founder and CEO of Wayv, has a rich history in the tech space and as an entrepreneur. After spending five years at Yammer, and then Microsoft following the acquisition, McCarty went on to found Eaze, a legal cannabis delivery platform.

And while Eaze has continued to grow alongside the cannabis market itself, it put a new problem on McCarty’s radar. The supply chain logistics of the cannabis industry, combined with the fast-changing regulatory market, presents an opportunity for one startup to solve for this problem. McCarty wants that to be Wayv, a new venture that has raised $5 million in funding.

Wayv wants to be the Eaze of the enterprise, connecting licensed cannabis companies to licensed brands to provide next-day delivery of cannabis products.

These two titans will join us at Disrupt SF in October to discuss the changes in this market and the opportunities appearing before the tech world as a result of those changes.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 – October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.

The concept of a Google Doodle — the little widget that sometimes replaces the Google logo on the company’s main search page — has gotten a lot more complex over the years. The first one (from 1998!) was just a simple static image of the Google logo with a Burning Man logo behind it, meant to indicate that everyone behind the scenes was off in the desert. Nowadays the doodles can be richly animated interactive experiences built by an entire team of engineers, animators and UX designers.

Take today’s July 4th-themed doodle, for example. Though it’ll probably only live on Google’s homepage for a day or two, it’s a full-fledged (and, well, pretty addictive) baseball game, complete with sound, cutesie animated characters and more. Nearly a dozen people worked on it!

Want to give it a spin? You should be able to find it on Google’s homepage — though, as far as I can tell, it’ll only appear there for U.S. visitors. If you’re outside the U.S. (or if you’re reading this after July 4th), you should be able to find it in Google’s Doodle archive here. Just tap the play button on the doodle to get started.

The idea is simple: wait for the pitch, time your swing, get points as your ketchups and burgers and whatnot (all the characters are July 4th BBQ staples) round the bases. Rinse and repeat until you’ve struck out three times.

While it starts out pretty easy, things get tough quickly as the pitcher changes up their strategy. At first, throws will come straight at you; within a few tosses, though, they’ll be curving, spinning wildly and disappearing mid-flight.

Is it earth-shattering? Nah. But it’s fun! And for anyone who has already mentally checked out knowing that tomorrow is a U.S. federal holiday, it’s a good way to burn some time — especially given that Facebook, Instagram and a bunch of the other time-suck sites are all kinds of broken right now.

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 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Apple’s iOS 13 update will make FaceTime eye contact way easier

Apple has added to the latest iOS 13 Developer beta a feature called “FaceTime Attention Correction.” The feature apparently does a terrific job of making it appear like you’re looking directly into the camera, even when you’re looking at the screen during a FaceTime call.

A couple of catches: Your eyes can end up looking kind of dead in the process. And the feature is only available on iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max.

2. Uber Eats invades restaurants with Dine-In option

A new option in some cities lets you order your food ahead of time, go to the restaurant, then sit down inside to eat.

3. Waymo is now allowed to transport passengers in its self-driving vehicles on California roads

The California Public Utilities Commission granted Waymo a permit on Tuesday to participate in the state’s Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service pilot.

4. Apple Sans Ive

Matthew Panzarino has some thoughts on what the departure of Jony Ive means for Apple.

5. KKR confirms it has acquired Canadian software company Corel, reportedly for over $1B

Founded in the 1980s as one of the first big software companies to capitalize on the first wave of personal computer ownership, Corel tried to compete against Microsoft in those early days (unsuccessfully), and has seen a lot of ups and downs.

6. Sony announces a new $185M fund to invest in tech startups

While Sony launched a fund in 2016, this new vehicle has been set up in partnership with other organizations, including Daiwa Capital Holdings.

7. When is the right time to pitch VCs for funding?

Aggregate data from 2016 to 2018 points to three major themes you should consider as you’re raising capital. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Amazon has responded to a letter of inquiry it received from U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) that asks the company to detail what happens to customers’ Alexa voice records and data after they speak to their virtual assistant. The Senator’s letter was prompted by a CNET investigation in May, which found that Amazon keeps voice records unless users manually delete them — and that it may keep text transcripts of those voice recordings indefinitely.

In Amazon’s response, published today on Senator Coons’ website, the company confirmed CNET’s findings, explaining that it does, in fact, store users’ voice recordings up until the point they choose to manually delete them.

In other words, the recordings are not automatically deleted at any point.

However, the original CNET report claimed text transcripts of the voice records were still maintained on Amazon’s servers even after users deleted their recordings, with “no option for you to delete them.” As CNET explained, Amazon would delete the text log from Alexa’s “main system,” but not remaining subsystems.

In Amazon’s response to the Senator’s inquiry, the company detailed what exactly it stores and what it does not.

It clarified that transcripts themselves are deleted when a customer chooses to delete a voice recording using the Alexa Privacy Hub dashboard. But, like CNET had claimed, the transcripts are deleted from Alexa’s “primary storage systems.” Amazon isn’t clear about where else they may still reside, saying only that there’s “an ongoing effort” to ensure the transcripts aren’t saved in any other Alexa storage systems.

Other data may also be retained after voice recordings are deleted, but it’s of less concern.

“We do not store the audio of Alexa’s response,” Amazon also noted. “However, we may still retain other records of the customers’ Alexa interactions, including records of actions Alexa took in response to the customer’s request,” the company said.

These records of actions may be retained by either Amazon or a third-party developer when an Alexa skill (voice app) is involved.

“For example, for many types of Alexa requests — such as when a customer subscribes to Amazon Music Unlimited, places an Amazon Fresh order, requests a car from Uber or Lyft, orders a pizza from Domino’s, or makes an in-skill purchase of premium digital content — Amazon and/or the applicable skill developer obviously need to keep a record of the transaction.”

This seems practical. After all, if you order an Uber or a pizza, or started a subscription, you’d expect there to be a record of that with the company where the order was placed. And no one really asks their pizza place to wipe their pizza ordering history.

Amazon also said that for other types of requests — like setting a recurring alarm, asking Alexa to remind you of something, putting a meeting on your calendar or messaging a friend — customers would not expect deletion of the voice recording or the data, nor would they want that, as it could prevent Alexa from performing the task.

The company explained why it uses transcripts, saying that it helps to train and improve Alexa’s machine learning systems, and to provide a log to customers directly of what they said, what Alexa heard and how the virtual assistant responded.

Additionally, Amazon confirmed the system stops recording as soon as the customer stops speaking — as indicated by the blue light on the Echo device or, optionally, a tone that can be set to play.

The company then goes into more technical detail about the short buffer on the device, which is continuously overwritten, and says that Alexa is designed to record and process as little audio from customers as possible as processing audio not intended for Alexa would be costly and of no value to Amazon.

The original inquiry from the Senator gave Amazon a June 30 deadline, and the response letter was dated June 28.

Coons today applauded the timeliness of the response, but said there were still questions.

When you think of old, giant mainframes that sit in the basement of a giant corporation, still doing the same work they did 30 years ago, chances are you’re thinking about a financial institution. It’s the financial enterprises, though, that are often leading the charge in bringing new technologies and software development practices to their employees and customers. That’s in part because they are in a period of disruption that forces them to become more nimble. Often, this means leaving behind legacy technology and embracing the cloud.

At TC Sessions: Enterprise, which is happening on September 5 in San Francisco, Capital One executive VP in charge of its technology operations, George Brady, will talk about the company’s journey from legacy hardware and software to embracing the cloud and open source, all while working in a highly regulated industry. Indeed, Capital One was among the first companies to embrace the Facebook-led Open Compute project and it’s a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It’s this transformation at Capital One that Brady is leading.

At our event, Brady will join a number of other distinguished panelists to specifically talk about his company’s journey to the cloud. There, Capital One is using serverless compute, for example, to power its Credit Offers API using AWS’s Lambda service, as well as a number of other cloud technologies.

Before joining Capital One as its CTO in 2014, Brady ran Fidelity Investment’s global enterprise infrastructure team from 2009 to 2014 and served as Goldman Sachs’ head of global business applications infrastructure before that.

Currently, he leads cloud application and platform productization for Capital One. Part of that portfolio is Critical Stack, a secure container orchestration platform for the enterprise. Capital One’s goal with this work is to help companies across industries become more compliant, secure and cost-effective operating in the public cloud.

Early-bird tickets are still on sale for $249; grab yours today before we sell out.

Student tickets are just $75 — grab them here.

Boeing has said it will offer $100 million to the families and communities of those who died aboard the two 737 Max passenger jets that crashed earlier this year. This “initial outreach” will likely only be a small part of the company’s penance for the mistakes that led to the deaths of 346 people.

In a statement, the company said it expected the money to “address family and community needs,” and “support education, hardship and living expenses.”

“These lives lost will continue to weigh heavily on our hearts and on our minds for years to come. The families and loved ones of those on board have our deepest sympathies, and we hope this initial outreach can help bring them comfort,” said CEO and president Dennis Muilenburg in the statement.

Although the full reports on these crashes are still pending, Muilenburg earlier this year accepted the blame, acknowledging that “it is apparent that in both flights, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, known as MCAS, activated in response to erroneous angle of attack information.”

Compounding this was a lack of training for pilots on how to handle this sudden takeover of the plane’s controls, though the pilots reportedly did all they could to counteract the effects of the faulty MCAS system. Since the accidents, Boeing has been dogged by allegations that it cut corners on safety, training and regulations. It has been suggested that shoddy code may have been largely responsible for the crashes.

This initial payout is voluntary; it is highly unusual for an airplane maker to pay such a sum to the victims of a crash ahead of any lawsuits. Boeing, Airbus and other companies involved in passenger flight have certainly in the past paid damages, directly or via insurance or some other means, but that was generally after a lawsuit forced them to. Sometimes a company will approach families with ready money to prevent them from filing a lawsuit, but that’s not often publicized.

And lawsuits are certainly underway already, with dozens of families bringing suits for each crash. The amounts these could bring are very difficult to predict, but given the loss of life and that the flaws that led to it can be traced directly to mistakes by Boeing, the company could be on the hook for hundreds of millions more.

The lawsuits and other court cases around these crashes will be closely watched, as it is not often that a tragedy of this scale is caused — even in part — by software.

It’s not just any old anthem—drenched as it is in themes of self-love and optimism—but the anthem.

The firm e.ventures, a 20-year-old, early-stage venture outfit that has historically invested out of dedicated funds in numerous geographies, including the U.S., Russia, Germany, Asia and Brazil, has raised $400 million in fresh capital across two new funds: a $225 million U.S.-focused fund that’s based in San Francisco, and a $175 million fund that’s focused on Europe and based in Berlin.

It says the funds will invest between $1.5 million and $10 million in tech startups, from those at the seed stage to those looking to land Series B funding. The outfit generally looks for consumer, SaaS and fintech startups with global aspirations.

Some of e.ventures’s highest-profile bets to date include FarFetch, The RealReal, Shipt, Groupon and Sonos.

Some of its newest bets include Zippia, a San Mateo, Calif.-based site for job-seekers that raised $8.5 million in Series A funding led by e.ventures; Leapwork, a Denmark-based workplace automation platform startup whose recent $10 million Series A round was co-led by the firm; and Candid, a direct-to-consumer brand in San Francisco that focuses on oral healthcare and which raised $63.4 million in Series B funding a few months ago. (E.ventures was part of a bigger syndicate that included Greycroft, Bessemer, RiverPark Funds and numerous others.)

In fact, just today, a months-old, Copenhagen-based company called Podimo that hopes to become Europe’s “Netflix for podcasts,” said it has raised €6 million in seed funding co-led by e.ventures and Denmark’s Heartcore. TechCrunch has more on that deal here.

Mathias Schilling, an e.ventures co-founder, is the U.S. managing partner of e.ventures. Its full team is here.

 

Editor’s Note: Shortened week

Due to the U.S. Independence Day holiday this week on July 4th, Extra Crunch will not be publishing our normal editorial on Thursday and Friday of this week, nor will we send out this EC Roundup newsletter on Saturday. Normal publishing will resume starting next week on Monday.

Conference Call Today with VC and Coach Jerry Colonna

TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos will be conducting an Extra Crunch exclusive live conference call with noted venture capitalist and long-time executive coach Jerry Colonna today at 2pm EST / 11am PST. Dial-in details have been sent to all subscribers.

For those joining, the two will talk about Colonna’s new book Reboot, his other projects, and of course questions from subscribers.

When is the right time to pitch VCs for funding?

DocSend is among the most popular tools used by founders seeking venture capital to send their pitch decks to VCs, but when do VCs actually read those pitches? DocSend CEO Russ Heddleston works through the data to find the patterns that can help with timing a fundraise.

Interestingly, March comes in third as the best month for decks viewed by investors, with an index value of 89, yet fundraisers don’t seem to send many decks in March, only 67% compared to October.

And while summer is often considered a poor season for fundraising, it’s not as unproductive as you might think. Indeed, in July and August decks are reviewed almost as much as in April, May and June.

In-depth with Freada Kapor Klein

Megan Rose Dickey had the opportunity to sit down with noted diversity and inclusion champion Freada Kapor Klein, who co-founded Kapor Capital and also Project Include. The two talk about a bunch of topics, including the current state of affairs in the tech industry, “the Founders’ Commitment,” and how to approach diversity from a comprehensive angle.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos seems to be really hoping that his streaming service’s forthcoming Lord of the Rings original series can match Game of Thrones in terms of fantasy hype. Now, thanks to Deadline, we know the person who will be in the director’s chair for the first couple of episodes of this Bezos-beloved project: Juan Antonio (J.A.) Bayona.

Bayona’s last directorial credit is Hollywood blockbuster Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom, the most recent attempt to squeeze some more entertainment juice from the dinosaur film franchise. Before that, however, Bayona directed the critically acclaimed Spanish language film The Orphanage, as well as The Impossible and others.

Bayona will direct the first two episodes of the Amazon Studios Lord of the Rings project, which will take place before the events of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book by J.R.R. Tolkien in the trilogy upon which the Peter Jackson feature films were based. Like the movies, Amazon’s show will be shot in New Zealand.

Bayona joins feature film writers JD Payne and Patrick McKay on the list of big-screen talent that will help try to ensure that Amazon’s series feels sufficiently epic.

You’re not so much keeping the “coldness” in, but keeping the heat out. How well a cooler can do this will depend on three key factors: insulation, air, and ice.

Opinion: The once-revolutionary space agency is being upstaged by unapologetic capitalists. Here’s how it can reclaim its relevance.

Don’t lose yourself out there. Download one of these trail mapping apps to make sure you can always find your way, whether you have cell service or not.