Andreessen Horowitz is making the move to San Francisco at long last

One of the last top-tier venture firms to resist coming to San Francisco has apparently decided that it’s time to make the move. According to a source familiar with the thinking of Andreessen Horowitz, the firm is opening a San Francisco office later this year.

The WSJ had reported on Friday that the firm has signed a leasing agreement to move into 180 Townsend Street in the city’s China Basin neighborhood, not far from where the San Francisco Giants play baseball. (The park was known until January as AT&T Park; it has since been renamed Oracle Park.)

Our source says that the firm will not be shuttering its expansive offices on Sand Hill Road, where it set up shop immediately after opening for business in 2009. This person adds that a16z, as the firm is known, doesn’t plan to rent out an entire building. (Worth noting: 180 Townsend features more than 41,000 square feet.)

The move is notable, even amid a years-long trend of Silicon Valley venture capital firms that have opened offices in San Francisco and, in doing so, shifted the industry’s center of gravity 45 minutes north.

True Ventures was among the earliest venture firms to come to the city, originally setting up operations along the city’s waterfront and later moving its office to the popular South Park neighborhood, which is also now home to Kleiner Perkins, Accel, General Catalyst and New Enterprise Associates, among others.

Firms have also turned to the city’s Jackson Square neighborhood, roughly 1.5 miles away, on the other side of San Francisco’s financial district. Among those tenants: Jackson Square Ventures, NextWorld Capital, Catamount Ventures and Sway Ventures.

Andreessen Horowitz has long seemed happy to exclusively operate out of Menlo Park, not opening another regional office, and not entertaining the idea of opening a New York office, even as many of its peers were doing so years ago.

Our source says the firm began thinking more seriously about opening a second space in San Francisco at least a year ago before more recently deciding to pull the trigger. Undoubtedly, it will ease a long commute for some of its 150 employees, many of whom live in the city and will be dividing their time between both offices once its San Francisco location opens.

Clearly, the firm also wants to get closer to the founders it works with — and wants to work with — many of whom also prefer San Francisco to sleepier, if less crowded, parts south.

Leasing commercial space in San Francisco is as pricey as it has ever been. As the WSJ noted, citing data from the real estate group Cushman & Wakefield, office rent in San Francisco reached a record $75.57 per square foot in the fourth quarter of 2018, up 6.4 percent from the same period in 2017.

In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator looks likely to move to San Francisco this year; as we reported last week, the investment firm and accelerator program is currently searching for the right space to set up shop.

Apple sends out invites for March 25 ‘special event’

Apple sent out invites to reporters this afternoon for a March 25 special event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino.

Reports have suggested that the company will focus its keynote on the content side of its business. The invite offers some pretty heavy-handed hints that the video content service will be on full display at the event, mainly a film reel countdown timer that eventually reveals the phrase “It’s show time.”

Here's a gif of the animation pic.twitter.com/YD3QZLi9Kf

— Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) March 11, 2019

Apple has been seeding a ton of TV shows and delivering plenty of announcements about the content that it has in the pipeline, but we’ve strangely heard quite little about the underlying platform or subscription that Apple has planned beyond media reports.

There’s also been some discussion about a subscription business for Apple News being announced here, but given the somewhat overt marketing references to the video service, the news product might either not be quite ready or could be playing second fiddle to the video announcements. Speaking of back burner, hardware announcements feel unlikely, though AirPower and a second-generation AirPods feel long overdue.

4 days left to save on tickets to TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2019

When you love anything and everything related to robots and artificial intelligence, the only thing better than going to TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI is saving $100 on the price of admission. But our $249 early-bird price flies the proverbial coop in just four days, on March 15, so buy your ticket now and keep that Benjamin in your wallet where it belongs.

Our day-long immersive program — which takes place at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on April 18 — includes robot demos, workshops and interviews with the leading founders, investors, researchers and technologists in the field. We expect more than 1,000 attendees, which makes TC Sessions: Robotics + AI an outstanding opportunity to learn, share, network and build community.

What kind of programming can you expect? Excellent question. For starters, Alexei Efros from UC Berkeley and Hany Farid from Dartmouth College will address a crucial issue at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, reality and public trust. Don’t miss their presentation entitled, “This Reality Does Not Exist: Trust in an Age of Synthetic Media.”

If you love drones, you’ll love the conversation with DroneSeed’s Grant Canary, Aria Insights’ Laura Major and DJI’s Arnaud Thiercelin. They’ll discuss how people are using drones to stop poachers, deliver packages and inspect pipelines. They’ll also drone on — pun totally intended — about what’s coming next.

Come prepared for our investor Q&A session with Peter Barrett (Playground Global), Hidetaka Aoki (Global Brain) and Helen Liang (FoundersX Ventures). This is your chance to ask questions of some of the greatest investors in robotics and AI.

We’ve packed a lot of programming into our agenda, and we’ll be announcing special guests and adding a few more names to our schedule over the next few weeks. Be sure to check back for updates.

If you really want to make an impression and place your early-stage startup in front of the top influencers in robotics and AI, why not buy a demo table? Bring your posse, because the price includes three attendee passes.

TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI takes place at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on April 18, 2019. Student tickets cost a mere $45. As for the rest of you, don’t delay. You have only four days left to buy an early-bird ticket and save $100. Go get ‘er done!

Tidal’s high-fidelity ‘Masters’ audio mode lands on iOS apps

Tidal may be a distant competitor to Apple Music and Spotify, but much like Neil Young’s PonoMusic, Tidal is keeping its high-fidelity music service going far past its expected expiration date.

Tidal’s most premium-est audio vision, Tidal Masters, gives your tunes a studio-quality kick (typically 96 kHz / 24 bit), a substantial bump beyond what its HiFi streaming delivers. The “Master Quality” audio first came to the ill-fated Essential Phone, then Tidal rolled out the feature to Android phones this past January, and it’s now available on iOS devices as of today.

Tidal pitches the extra high-end mode for song quality as “exactly as the artist intended it to sound.”

It’s not going to change how you listen to your entire library; in January, the company detailed that about 165,000 of the tracks had support for the high-end bitrate. Tidal says that you also must be a subscriber of Tidal HiFi, which sets you back $19.99 per month.

Bottomless has a solution for lazy coffee addicts

If you’re like me, you let out a heavy sigh every month or so when you reach out and unexpectedly find an empty bag of coffee. Bottomless, one of the 200-plus startups in Y Combinator’s latest batch, has a solution for us caffeine addicts.

For a $36 annual membership fee, a cost which co-founder Michael Mayer says isn’t set in stone, plus $11.29 per order depending on the blend, Bottomless will automatically restock your coffee supply before you run out. How? The startup sends its members an internet-connected scale free of charge, which members place under their bag of coffee grounds. Tracking the weight of the bag, Bottomless’ scales determine when customers are low on grounds and ensure a new bag of previously selected freshly roasted coffee is on their doorstep before they run out.

Voilà, no more coffee-less mornings.

Founded by Seattle-based husband and wife duo Mayer and Liana Herrera in 2016, Bottomless began as a passion project for Mayer, a former developer at Nike.com. Herrera kept working as a systems implementations specialist until Bottomless secured enough customers to justify the pair working on the project full-time. That was in 2018; months later, after their second attempt at applying, they were admitted into the Y Combinator accelerator program.

Bottomless’ smart scale

Bottomless today counts around 400 customers and has inked distribution deals with Four Barrel and Philz Coffee, among other roasters. Including the $150,000 investment YC provides each of its startups, Bottomless previously raised a pre-seed round from San Francisco and Seattle-area angel investors.

Before relocating to San Francisco for YC, the Bottomless founders were working feverishly out of their Seattle home.

“This whole time we’ve been 3D-printing prototypes out of our apartment and soldering them together out of our apartment,” Mayer told TechCrunch. “We kind of turned our place into this new manufacturing facility. There’s dust everywhere and it’s crazy. But we made 150 units ourselves by hand-soldering and lots of burned fingers.”

The long-term goal is to automate the restocking process of several household items, like pet food, soap and shampoo. Their challenge will be getting customers to keep multiple smart scales in their homes as opposed to just asking their digital assistant to order them some coffee or soap on Amazon.

Amazon recently announced it was doing away with its stick-on Dash buttons, IoT devices capable of self-ordering on Amazon. The devices launched in 2015 before Google Homes and Amazon Alexas hit the mainstream.

So why keep a smart scale in your kitchen as opposed to just asking a digital assistant to replenish your supply? Mayer says it’s coffee quality that keeps it competitive.

“Some of our most enthusiastic customers live out in like deep suburbs far away from city centers, but they really love fresh coffee,” Mayer said. “And there’s no way to get fresh coffee if you live 20 or 30 minutes from a city center, right?”

“Or you might think in a city like San Francisco or Seattle, you can get freshly roasted coffee pretty easily because there are restaurants all over the place, right?” He added. “That’s certainly true, but it does take a little bit of extra thought to remember to grab it on the right day when you’re running low.”

Mayer and Herrera don’t consider themselves coffee experts, despite now running what is essentially a direct-to-consumer coffee marketplace out of Seattle, the coffee capital.

“I’m originally from Portland and Portlanders know a lot about coffee,” Mayer said. “I never really considered myself to be a coffee aficionado or a coffee snob in my head, but I guess compared to like the average American from anywhere in the country, I would be just a regular coffee drinker in Portland. All I really knew about coffee going into this was that it’s better fresh. That’s it.”

Bottomless is currently accepting customers in beta. The team will pitch to investors at YC Demo Days next week.

Bitcoin gets slower, smaller and more like Ethereum

Editor’s Note: Our writer Galen Moore (who previously wrote an analysis of STOs) attended the MIT Bitcoin Expo this weekend. These are his field notes on his interviews with a bunch of the leading thinkers in the Bitcoin community, along with links to the full audio if you want to go deeper. ~ Danny Crichton

The MIT Bitcoin Expo is not really about Bitcoin, per se. Many other cryptocurrencies are discussed. Sometimes, warring factions find themselves in the same room.

On the Friday night before the main event, a Boston Ethereum developers group hosted a bitcoiner VC and the CEO of a private-key custody company for “a conversation on Lightning and the future of Bitcoin.”

It was a frank conversation in front of a room full of people who may have been skeptical about the future of Bitcoin. Castle Island Ventures general partner Nic Carter allowed that Bitcoin’s fixed money supply might become a liability. Jeremy Welch, CEO of Casa, acknowledged that Lightning is not going to solve all of Bitcoin’s problems.

For example, Lightning makes sending and receiving bitcoin faster, cheaper and a little more private, but questions remain as to how such Bitcoin payments will be useful.

Developing (and not developing) the future of Bitcoin

James Prestwich of Summa. Photo by Galen Moore

Carter and Welch’s conversation turned to ossification, a proposed drawdown of developer activity on Bitcoin to guard against future attacks. One Ethereum developer leaned back to ask me what ossification means. “Turning into bone,” I said. He looked a little mystified. Misunderstandings remain between followers of the two largest cryptocurrencies. Ethereum developers remain in a kind of “move fast and break things” mindset, while Bitcoin developers treat their codebase like it was software for air traffic control.

There are some who are trying to bridge the gap. James Prestwich’s consulting firm, Summa, helps Ethereum developers that want to use Bitcoin. Beyond reaching a bigger market, this has technical advantages, Prestwich said. We were drinking pineapple-strawberry Lacroix before his presentation about a better way to handle cross-chain transactions.

“Most Ethereum developers work on contracts and not consensus layer,” he said. “Contracts are not as abstracted from consensus as we like to think they are. It’s a very messy, leaky layer. The advantages here are more on the consensus layer, but that’s going to affect how your smart contract works.” The full audio of my interview with Prestwich is here and a recording of all the presentations at MIT Bitcoin Expo 2019 can be found here.

Online platforms need a super regulator and public interest tests for mergers, says UK parliament report

The latest policy recommendations for regulating powerful Internet platforms comes from a U.K. House of Lord committee that’s calling for an overarching digital regulator to be set up to plug gaps in domestic legislation and work through any overlaps of rules.

“The digital world does not merely require more regulation but a different approach to regulation,” the committee writes in a report published on Saturday, saying the government has responded to “growing public concern” in a piecemeal fashion, whereas “a new framework for regulatory action is needed”.

It suggests a new body — which it’s dubbed the Digital Authority — be established to “instruct and coordinate regulators”.

“The Digital Authority would have the remit to continually assess regulation in the digital world and make recommendations on where additional powers are necessary to fill gaps,” the committee writes, saying that it would also “bring together non-statutory organisations with duties in this area” — so presumably bodies such as the recently created Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (which is intended to advise the UK government on how it can harness technologies like AI for the public good).

The committee report sets out ten principles that it says the Digital Authority should use to “shape and frame” all Internet regulation — and develop a “comprehensive and holistic strategy” for regulating digital services.

These principles (listed below) read, rather unfortunately, like a list of big tech failures. Perhaps especially given Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s repeat refusal to testify before another UK parliamentary committee last year. (Leading to another highly critical report.)

• Parity: the same level of protection must be provided online as offline
• Accountability: processes must be in place to ensure individuals and organisations are held to account for their actions and policies
• Transparency: powerful businesses and organisations operating in the digital world must be open to scrutiny
• Openness: the internet must remain open to innovation and competition
• Privacy: to protect the privacy of individuals
• Ethical design: services must act in the interests of users and society
• Recognition of childhood: to protect the most vulnerable users of the internet
• Respect for human rights and equality: to safeguard the freedoms of expression and information online
• Education and awareness-raising: to enable people to navigate the digital world safely
• Democratic accountability, proportionality and evidence-based approach

“Principles should guide the development of online services at every stage,” the committee urges, calling for greater transparency at the point data is collected; greater user choice over which data are taken; and greater transparency around data use — “including the use of algorithms”.

So, in other words, a reversal of the ‘opt-out if you want any privacy’ approach to settings that’s generally favored by tech giants — even as it’s being challenged by complaints filed under Europe’s GDPR.

The UK government is due to put out a policy White Paper on regulating online harms this winter. But the Lords Communications Committee suggests the government’s focus is too narrow, calling also for regulation that can intervene to address how “the digital world has become dominated by a small number of very large companies”.

“These companies enjoy a substantial advantage, operating with an unprecedented knowledge of users and other businesses,” it warns. “Without intervention the largest tech companies are likely to gain more control of technologies which disseminate media content, extract data from the home and individuals or make decisions affecting people’s lives.”

The committee recommends public interest tests should therefore be applied to potential acquisitions when tech giants move in to snap up startups, warning that current competition law is struggling to keep pace with the ‘winner takes all’ dynamic of digital markets and their network effects.

“The largest tech companies can buy start-up companies before they can become competitive,” it writes. “Responses based on competition law struggle to keep pace with digital markets and often take place only once irreversible damage is done. We recommend that the consumer welfare test needs to be broadened and a public interest test should be applied to data-driven mergers.”

Market concentration also means a small number of companies have “great power in society and act as gatekeepers to the internet”, it also warns, suggesting that while greater use of data portability can help, “more interoperability” is required for the measure to make an effective remedy.

The committee also examined online platforms’ current legal liabilities around content, and recommends beefing these up too — saying self-regulation is failing and calling out social media sites’ moderation processes specifically as “unacceptably opaque and slow”.

High level political pressure in the UK recently led to a major Instagram policy change around censoring content that promotes suicide — though the shift was triggered after a public outcry related to the suicide of a young schoolgirl who had been exposed to pro-suicide content on Instagram years before.

Like other UK committees and government advisors, the Lords committee wants online services which host user-generated content to be subject to a statutory duty of care — with a special focus on children and “the vulnerable in society”.

“The duty of care should ensure that providers take account of safety in designing their services to prevent harm. This should include providing appropriate moderation processes to handle complaints about content,” it writes, recommending telecoms regulator Ofcom is given responsibility for enforcement.

“Public opinion is growing increasingly intolerant of the abuses which big tech companies have failed to eliminate,” it adds. “We hope that the industry will welcome our 10 principles and their potential to help restore trust in the services they provide. It is in the industry’s own long-term interest to work constructively with policy-makers. If they fail to do so, they run the risk of further action being taken.”

China's Mobike to pull out of some Asian countries, evaluate other markets

Mobike said it will layoff at least 10 employees as part of its restructuring plan. https://ift.tt/2ST1XxL https://ift.tt/eA8V8J