Sunday, October 6, 2019
Google Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL Price Leaked Ahead of Launch
Flipkart Big Diwali Sale: What to Expect This Year
Mi Band 5 Global Variant to Launch With NFC Support: Report
Joker Sets October Box Office Record With $234 Million Opening Weekend
Smartphone makers to bring festival deals to stores
ETtech Top 5: India talks tough on WhatsApp traceability, HP India layoffs & more
Two new California laws crack down on deepfakes in politics and porn, with one giving citizens the right to sue if they are placed in porn without their consent (Carrie Mihalcik/CNET)
Two new California laws crack down on deepfakes in politics and porn, with one giving citizens the right to sue if they are placed in porn without their consent — While some deepfakes are silly and fun, others are misleading and even abusive. Two new California laws aim to put a stop to these more nefarious video forgeries.
These are the no.1 smartphone brands in Pakistan, China, US and other top countries
The Surface Pro X, Duo, and Neo, basically running on new forks of Windows 10, look risky and puzzling, and their justification by Satya Nadella is unconvincing (Jean-Louis Gassée/Monday Note)
The Surface Pro X, Duo, and Neo, basically running on new forks of Windows 10, look risky and puzzling, and their justification by Satya Nadella is unconvincing — Microsoft has been on a roll and is back at the top of the tech industry by doing exactly what Satya Nadella said he'd do when he took the reins from Steve Ballmer.
India 'vindicated' on WhatsApp traceability after US, UK, Aus write to Facebook: MeitY
This Week in Apps: censorship, openness and antitrust
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the new Extra Crunch series where we’ll help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps — including everything from the OS’s to the apps that run upon them, as well as the money that flows through it all.
The app industry in 2018 saw 194 billion downloads and over $100 in consumer spending. Beyond that, the business of user acquisition and advertising generates even more money. And all because we’re spending more time on our phones than we do watching TV.
This week, the news was centered on the app stores’ ability to censor, the censorship in apps, and also how the antritrust investigations are forcing companies to open up access more to third parties.
Headlines
Third-party iOS apps will get to tap into Siri
According to Bloomberg and confirmed elsewhere, Apple will allow third-party messaging and phone apps to work better with the Siri digital assistant. That means, if you regularly use WhatsApp to message friends, Siri will launch that app instead of iMessage. Currently, you have to say the name of the app you want to invoke. The update is largely about Apple’s attempt to demonstrate anti-competitive behavior, in light of increased regulatory scrutiny and antitrust claims. But the change will also be a huge win for consumers as their iPhones will become more personalized to them.
Top VCs in Edtech, Dropbox, first mover advantage, India’s Netflix, scooters, and more
Editor’s Note
This week, we hosted 23 panels on all aspects of building startups on the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Thanks to the thousands of attendees who attended those talks, as well as the workshops we held on the Breakout Stage — your enthusiasm was palpable.
We also had hundreds of new EC members join during the conference — to all of you: welcome!
This newsletter covers all of last week, and is a bit abbreviated thanks to Disrupt. Back to normal next week.
Where top VCs are investing in edtech
Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham interviewed almost a dozen leading venture capitalists about the state of edtech, including Jennifer Carolan of Reach Capital, Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, and Charles Birnbaum of Bessemer. There is still a lot of enthusiasm for the space, but the theses for these investors have diverged quite significantly.
Marlon Nichols , Managing Partner at MaC Venture Capital (a new LA-based seed fund with investments in Catalyte, Codeverse, and Wonderschool):
“Many education technology companies target individual teachers, which presents a long path to sizable revenue (requires too many customers) while others usually attempt to navigate the lengthy and bureaucratic sales cycle of selling to school districts. VCs prefer companies that have short sales cycles that can scale revenue quickly so in general, edtech companies are difficult investments for venture capital.
That said, education is a giant opportunity in the US because high quality education is not evenly distributed across communities or social classes. It’s a crisis. Companies that address this at scale are attractive if the revenue model makes sense. That’s why I led the first round into Wonderschool, which delivers high quality education and child care at costs relative to one’s zip code. The schools double as the educator’s home so there isn’t a need for real estate investment.”
Why is Dropbox reinventing itself? A chat with Dropbox VP of Product Adam Nash and CTO Quentin Clark
Dropbox may be known for its singular file storage product, but the company is adapting and changing as it seeks new customers and also learns more about what “file storage” really means to users.
Bill Gurley talks about his drive to persuade more tech startups to choose direct listings, instead of traditional bank-led IPOs, to enter public markets (Ari Levy/CNBC)
Bill Gurley talks about his drive to persuade more tech startups to choose direct listings, instead of traditional bank-led IPOs, to enter public markets — - Gurley said he met with partners from 25 venture firms before his direct listings summit this week and they all signed on with their support.
Building Andromeda: Galaxy ended up with stars orbiting at right angles
Enlarge (credit: Amir H. Abolfath (TWAN)/NASA APOD)
The large galaxies present in the current Universe weren't always so big. Evidence indicates that they were built up over time, largely by collisions with other galaxies. These collisions have left marks that we can still detect: streams of stars that were drawn in from the victims of the collisions, and faint dwarf galaxies that still orbit the larger object that devoured many of their stars. With enough data, it's possible to become a galactic historian and reconstruct the events that brought the modern-day giants to their present form.
Uncovering some of that history was the goal of a large, multinational collaboration, spelled out clearly in its name: the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey. In a paper published on Wednesday in Nature, the team describes uncovering some of our nearest galactic neighbor's violent past. The paper shows that Andromeda was built in part by two major collisions that have left clusters of stars occupying two perpendicular orbits. In the process of writing their paper, the researchers also uncover a bit of a mystery about an unexpected alignment between some of these clusters and Andromeda's satellite galaxies.
Thinking global
The new work focuses on what are called globular clusters, which are large groups of stars held together by gravity. Unlike other stars—which shift position relative to each other as they orbit a galaxy's center—the stars of a globular cluster stick together and orbit as a group. As a result, these gravitationally bound clusters of stars can survive the collisions between galaxies. That means they can be used as markers to retrace those collisions.
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Avataar debuts Velocity, an AI tool that generates product videos based on a product link, and says HP, Victoria's Secret, Lowe's, and others are using the tool (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch : Avataar debuts Velocity, an AI tool that generates product videos based on a product link, and says HP, Victori...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
