Category: Tech news

hacking,system security,protection against hackers,tech-news,gadgets,gaming

The uncertain future of shared electric scooters

Cities all over the world have seen an influx of two-wheeled, electric kick scooters on the road over the last couple of years. Scooters from the likes of Bird, Lime, Spin, Uber’s JUMP, Lyft and others are all trying to own the first and the last mile. The first mile is often understood as the distance between a transportation hub and someone’s starting point while the last mile is the distance between a transportation hub and someone’s final destination. These companies want both, and some (Uber, Lyft) also want everything in between.

The rise of electric scooters is often compared to the rise of ride-hailing, but there are some key differences at play. For one, cities are in charge of regulation — not the states. And since these are much smaller vehicles, cities can easily pick them up and throw them in the back of a truck if they become a nuisance. Meanwhile, as part of city regulation, data-sharing is not optional — it’s a requirement in order for companies to receive permission to deploy scooters on city streets.

The startup ecosystem had become accustomed to the ethos of begging for forgiveness, rather than asking for permission. But that’s not the case with electric scooters. These companies have found their entire businesses to be contingent on the continued approval from individual cities all over the world. That inherently creates a number of potential conflicts.

It’s also unclear whether the increase in people riding scooters is indicative of people adopting shared services or simply adopting a new mode of transportation. Some industry insiders wonder if it’s just a matter of time between consumers ditch shared scooters in exchange for their own. 

Between city regulators capping the growth of operators, the vast number of companies going after the first and last miles and the threat of the shift from shared to ownership, it’s all going to come down to the survival of the fittest.

At the mercy of cities

Unlike the ride-sharing market, electric scooter operators are entirely dependent upon cities. These cities, rightfully so, have a number of concerns ranging from safety to sidewalk congestion to equal access to transportation.

HyperSciences raises an untraditional $9.6M for its hypersonic drilling vision

We profiled HyperSciences in February, when the team had just successfully completed a launch milestone for a small business grant with NASA. The last time we checked in, the hypersonic drilling company had raised about $5 million as part of an untraditional Reg A offering. By the end of March, HyperSciences rounded out its first major round with $9.6 million from 3,552 individual investors on SeedInvest in the equity crowdfunding platform’s second largest raise to date.

The heart of HyperSciences’ work is its hypersonic propulsion system that can fire a projectile at five times the speed of sound. At its most simplistic, HyperSciences’ hypersonic engine can fire upward to power suborbital space launches (HyperDrone) and point downward to penetrate deep pockets of geothermal energy, for example (HyperDrill).

Rather than going the normal venture capital route, HyperSciences decided to raise from regular people who believed in its vision. The way the company sees it, traditional VC would have likely forced HyperSciences to narrow its mission.

“Reg A lets everyone who cares about our planned hypersonic future vote with their checkbook,” HyperSciences founder and CEO Mark Russell told TechCrunch. “I think that’s important.” Russell comes from a family-run mining business and is no stranger to the challenges of a public company.

“I’ve learned a lot from running ops in the back offices,” Russell said. “Based on our public company experiences, we do like that the SEC Reg A process has a clear path to taking your company to the public markets as the next step in the process.”

With infusions of $125,000 from NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research grant and $1 million from Shell’s Global’s GameChanger program, HyperSciences is happy to bounce between research grants with a boost from the Reg A’s special form of “mini-IPO” in order to maintain its autonomy for the time being.

Russell explained that the Reg A’s intensive SEC process requires a fair level of maturity from a company — and enough capital to jump through all the hoops. “You’re not typically a seller of t-shirts in Reg A crowd financing,” Russell said.

HyperSciences’ next milestone will come in May when the company will demo its drilling tech in a field test for Shell. The company plans to leverage its new funding for additional future field testing, pushing its existing business plan forward and moving toward sustainability.

“Our investors are more like smart ‘crowd VCs.’ They’re generally are pretty savvy and see that we went through a stringent process to get here,” Russell said. “We’ve provided them with enough information to make a great decision.”

Beats’ Powerbeats Pro could beat AirPods at their own game

AirPods are far and away the leader in the world of fully wireless earbuds. New numbers out this week give Apple’s headphones a commanding 60 percent of the market, and a second-gen release is likely to help the company maintain its top position.

But Apple’s got a lot of competition these days, like a solid new offering from Samsung. And its latest competition is coming from inside the house. Apple-owned Beats have been inching toward a fully wireless solution, finally announcing the Powerbeats Pro this week.

At $250, they’re not cheap. That’s $50 more than AirPods 2. They do feature much of the same functionality provided by Apple’s H1 chip, including quick syncing and “Hey Siri” functionality. That’s part of the benefit of working alongside the Apple development team.

The earbuds are decidedly less minimalist than AirPods, with generally more plastic, including over-ear hooks. But if the original AirPods taught us anything, it’s that earbud beauty is most certainly in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.

The buds do score points on several counts, however. Battery life is a biggie. Huge, even. Beats is promising a stellar nine hours of listening time with the buds themselves and a full 24 hours when combined with the admittedly large carrying case.

The headphones also apparently sport better sound and, the biggest point of all, are more comfortable. Personally, I’ve never had an issue with AirPods’ fit, but I recognize that the hard plastic is a lot more unforgiving with various ear sizes than a silicon tip.

The new buds are due out next month through Apple’s usual retail channels. We’ll be sharing our hands-on feedback soon.

Researchers find 540 million Facebook user records on exposed servers

Security researchers have found hundreds of millions of Facebook user records sitting on an inadvertently public storage server.

The two batches of user records were collected and exposed from two third-party companies, according to researchers at security firm UpGuard, who found the data.

In the researchers’ write-up, Mexico-based digital media company Cultura Colectiva left more than 540 million records — including comments, likes, reactions, account names and more — stored on the Amazon S3 storage server without a password, allowing anyone to access the data. Another backup file on a separate storage server by defunct California-based app maker At The Pool contained even more sensitive data, including scraped information on more than 22,000 users, such as a user’s friends lists, interests, photos, group memberships and check-ins.

According to UpGuard, neither company responded to requests to have the data removed. Facebook contacted Amazon to pull the data offline, a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch.

“Facebook’s policies prohibit storing Facebook information in a public database,” said the spokesperson. Facebook said there is no evidence yet to show the data has been misused but that it was investigating.

It’s the latest data lapse involving the social media giant since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, which saw more than 87 million Facebook user records scraped without consent by the U.K.-based political data firm. The company was accused of using the data to help build profiles on voters in an effort to help the presidential campaigns for Ted Cruz and later Donald Trump.

In the wake of the scandal, the social media giant rolled out a bug bounty program to cover third-party apps and services that leaked or exposed Facebook user data.

UpGuard found a batch of scraped Facebook profiles involving 48 million records in 2018 from LocalBlox, a data firm that scrapes data from social media profiles.

Chris Vickery, director of cyber risk research at UpGuard, told TechCrunch: “These finds continue to highlight the problems which plague companies that depend on mass data collection.”

“Storing personal information collected from end users is a liability,” said Vickery. “The more you have, the greater that liability becomes.”

Read more: 

Boeing confirms delay of Starliner’s first test flight

The Commercial Crew program is well on its way to changing the way the world accesses space, but SpaceX may hog the glory this year if rival Boeing keeps putting off the first tests of its complete Starliner system. The first uncrewed test flight, tentatively scheduled for May, has been pushed all the way out to August, Boeing confirmed yesterday.

Reports surfaced late last month that the delay was coming, and the company has only just confirmed them, citing a tight schedule at the launch platform it was looking at using. There was only a two-day launch window in May, and any trouble might have affected the launch of the AEHF 5 military communications satellite.

The company issued a statement explaining its decision:

In order to avoid unnecessary schedule pressure, not interfere with a critical national security payload, and allow appropriate schedule margin to ensure the Boeing, United Launch Alliance and NASA teams are able to perform a successful first launch of Starliner, we made the most responsible decision available to us and will be ready for the next launch pad availability in August, while still allowing for a Crew Flight Test later this year.

This kind of thing is of course extremely common, and it’s the reason new spaceports and launch pads are being built all over the world. More launches need more launchpads — it’s pretty simple. But few have the resources available at Cape Canaveral yet, so for some major programs there’s no real choice.

But as NASA Spaceflight points out, if Boeing was really planning a May launch, the rocket and capsule would have needed to be there well before now. The fact that the necessary parts were never put in place and assembled suggests that it was known this date would be missed long ago, and ULA instructed not to go forward with preparations. So really this announcement only confirms what everyone in the industry already must have suspected.

Success in August would mean a crewed test in November, but that leaves precious little room for delays in a program that is already years behind schedule. And to have an upstart competitor accomplish what they couldn’t would be a real slap in the face for a company already under fire.

If SpaceX’s plan to launch with a crew in July pans out, that would be embarrassing to Boeing for sure, but the simple truth is these things take as long as they have to. Boeing has to get this right, and if it’s at the cost of some reputation, well, the quality of the capsule will help build that reputation back up.

In a separate statement, NASA and Boeing also announced that the mission itself will be extended in order to accommodate some extra research and maintenance operations.

AI-powered booking service Google Duplex rolls out to iOS & Android 5.0+ devices

Google confirmed its Google Assistant feature for booking restaurant reservations via the phone, powered by Duplex’s AI technology, has begun to roll out in English to more Android and iOS devices across the U.S. The expansion sets the stage for potential mainstream adoption — especially as it goes cross-platform for the first time.

During its original demo at last May’s Google I/O developer conference, Duplex’s system mimicked human speech so well that it immediately raised ethical questions about how much an AI bot should sound like a person, and how that should be disclosed to the person on the other end of the line. People also wondered if the demo was fake.

What wasn’t clear at the time was how long it would take Duplex to become a real-world product. As it turned out, that happened quickly.

Only months after its unveiling, Duplex was moved to public testing in major markets like New York and San Francisco. Less than a year later, it went live to Pixel 3 owners in 43 U.S. states. (Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, Indiana, Texas and Nebraska were not included in the launch due to local laws.)

As the technology went from concept to launch, Google added a message at the start of the call that says the call is from Google, and explains why the call is being placed. It also allows businesses to opt out from receiving these automated calls.

However, if the technology is adopted by mainstream consumers, it’s unclear that opting out will be a viable option for those business owners who can’t afford to turn away interested customers.

Google tells TechCrunch its Duplex-powered Google Assistant feature for restaurant booking began its expansion to both iOS and Android 5.0+ devices last week.

The news site 9to5Google spotted the change in Google’s help documentation and wrote about the rollout.

However, we understand the rollout hasn’t reached all devices at this time. When asked, Google couldn’t give us a timeline as to when it expects that rollout to complete.

Though Duplex is capable of making other types of bookings, it’s currently focused on restaurant reservations. For those restaurants that already use an online booking service that partners with Google, the Assistant will work directly with Reserve with Google to confirm the reservation.

Consumers who want to use Assistant for bookings only need the Google Assistant app. The Assistant confirms details like booking time and size of party, then tries to book the appointment through one of the booking providers. This actually covers a lot of inquiries, as Reserve with Google has relationships with dozens of providers. It may place an automated call using Duplex, if needed.

Duplex also can be used to check business information if it hasn’t been updated on Google — like hours of operation. This data will then be used to update the business listing, says Google.

Google says it’s working to bring Duplex to the other remaining U.S. states in the future.

WeWork acquires Managed by Q

Managed by Q, the office management platform based out of New York, has today been acquired by The We Company, formerly known as WeWork.

Financial terms were not disclosed. The WSJ reports that it was a cash and stock deal. Managed by Q, which has 500 employees, will remain as a wholly owned separate entity and CEO Dan Teran will remain following the acquisition to join WeWork leadership.

Upon its latest financing in January, Managed by Q was valued at $249 million, according to PitchBook.

Here’s what Teran had to say in a prepared statement:

We are excited for this incredible opportunity to deepen our commitment to realizing our ambitious vision of building an operating system for the built world. WeWork is uniquely positioned to invest in workplace technology and services, and I look forward to partnering with their team to build more robust products for our clients and create a global platform to help companies push the bounds on our collective potential.

Managed by Q was founded in 2014 with a plan to change the way that offices run. The platform allowed office managers and other decision-makers to handle supply stocking, cleaning, IT support and other non-work related tasks in the office by simply using the Managed by Q dashboard. Managed by Q serves the demand through a combination of in-house operators and third-party vendors and service providers.

Notably, Managed by Q took a different tack than most other logistics companies, employing their operators as W2 workers instead of 1099 contractors. Moreover, Managed by Q offered a stock option plan to operators that gives 5 percent of the company back to those employees.

The company has raised a total of $128.25 million since launch from investors such as GV, RRE and Kapor Capital. Managed by Q currently serves the markets of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Silicon Valley, with plans to aggressively expand following the acquisition, according to the WSJ.

Not only has Managed by Q swiftly matured into a big player in the NY tech scene and Future of Work space, but it has also fostered interesting competition and consolidation within the space. Managed by Q has itself made several acquisitions, including the purchase of NVS (an office space planning and project management service) and Hivy (an internal comms tool to let employees tell office managers what they need).

Hometalk raises $15M to grow its DIY community

Hometalk, a DIY community site with just under 10 million monthly users and more than 21 million monthly visits, today announced that it has raised a $15 million growth round led by NFX, with participation from WeWork founder and CEO Adam Neumann and Altair Capital.

If you’re not familiar with Hometalk, you can think of the site as kind of a DIY-centric Houzz, with a focus on visuals and step-by-step guides for doing projects inside your home. Those user-written guides cover everything from fixing clogged sink drains to repairing drywall, as well as more complex home improvement projects, and can feature text, images and video.

It’s very much a community-driven site and its 17 million registered users have now created more than 140,000 tutorials. In total, these have been viewed more than 2.5 billion times in the last year, the company says.

Until now, the site’s revenue mostly came from advertising. Going forward, though, the company plans to expand its offerings and introduce new revenue streams. Unsurprisingly, that’s what a lot of the new funding will go toward, too. Those new revenue streams include a marketplace, subscription service and branded content — all of which are logical additions for a site that already focuses on helping people improve their homes and who will likely need the right tools to do so.

“We always believed there is a massive, unmet need in the market for people to create the home they love by unlocking their creativity and giving them tools to empower this,” Hometalk founder and CEO Yaron Ben Shaul said. “The growth we have experienced demonstrates not only the product-market fit for Hometalk, but also the large opportunity we have ahead. We are most proud to have such an active, engaged community that trusts and relies on Hometalk as its go-to place for creativity.”

The company was founded in 2011 and currently has 60 employees in offices in New York City and Jerusalem.

Google Drive adds workflow integrations with DocuSign, K2 and Nintex

Google today announced a few new workflow integrations for its Drive file storage service that’ll bring to the service support for some features from DocuSign and process automation platforms K2 and Nintex.

None of these new integrations are all that unusual, but if you use a combination of Drive and the newly supported tools, they will undoubtedly make your daily work a little bit easier.

For DocuSign, the new integration lets you prepare, sign and store your documents right in Google Drive, as well as trigger actions like billing, account activation and payments after an agreement has been signed.

The K2 integration is a bit different and focuses on that company’s machine learning tools. It’ll allow users to train models on a workflow (using Google machine learning tools) and then, for example, determine whether a loan should be automatically approved or denied, with all of the information about those requests and the approval process stored in a Google Sheet. The integration also supports more pedestrian use cases, though, including the ability to make lots of documents in Drive more easily discoverable.

“K2 is committed to simplifying the way in which our customers connect and manage their information, whether it resides on-premise or in the cloud,” said Eyal Inbar, vice president of Global Technology Alliances at K2. “By integrating with Google Drive, we are able to put the next-generation of content management services in the hands of our customers so they can build and implement powerful workflows into their applications.”

Nintex’s solution seems to be a bit more specialized, with a focus on contract management lifecycles for HR, legal and sales use cases. There’s nothing exciting about managing contracts, but that’s probably a good thing, and ideally, adding more automation will help to keep it that way.

Daily Crunch: The lonely death of Google+

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. RIP Google+

This is the end for Google+, Google’s failed social network that once tried to take on Facebook and Twitter. As scheduled, the company has now started deleting user accounts and their data.

If you’re feeling nostalgic, we’ve got a recap of some of our coverage over the years.

2. Andreessen Horowitz isn’t alone in leaving behind VC as we know it — and more company is coming

A story in Forbes suggests that Andreessen Horowitz — whose agency-like model has been widely replicated by other big venture firms — is re-shaping venture capital a second time. It’s doing this by turning itself into a registered investment advisor.

3. iPhones get a price drop in China

Apple has lowered the price on a number of key hardware lines in China, including AirPods, Macs, iPads and, most notably, the iPhone. The move is believed to be the direct result of a 3 percent tax cut that took effect in the country yesterday.

4. DOJ reportedly warns Academy about changing Oscar rules to exclude streaming

The Department of Justice sent the Academy a letter stating that Oscar eligibility changes designed to exclude Netflix and other streaming services “may raise antitrust concerns.”

5. WhatsApp adds a new privacy setting for groups in another effort to clamp down on fake news

Through a new feature, users can control who has permission to add them to groups. The company says this will “help to limit abuse” and keep people’s phone numbers private.

6. Foursnap? Snapchat tries ‘Status’ location check-ins

Snapchat is now testing Status, an option to share to the Snap Map a Bitmoji depicting what you’re up to at a certain place. You could show your avatar playing video games, watching TV, asking friends to hit you up and more.

7. Singapore’s proposed ‘fake news’ law could stifle free speech

The “Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill” had its first reading on Monday and one of the key takeaways is that it will allow the government to force “corrections” to be added to online content that is deemed to be “false.”