Comcast makes xFi Advanced Security, its $5.99/month network security service, free for all 18M customers who lease its new xFi Gateway router/modem device — At CES last year, Comcast announced a feature for its Xfinity internet customers called Advanced Security.
ASUS unveils the 14-inch ROG Zephyrus G14 gaming laptop with an optional LED dot-matrix display in the lid to show GIFs, the time, and more, available in April — Plus, AMD's newest Ryzen 4000 H-series chips — Asus has a new gaming laptop at CES 2020: the 14-inch ROG Zephyrus G14.
Insight Partners to acquire Israeli IoT security company Armis at a valuation of $1.1B; Armis has raised $112M to date — Venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners plans to acquire Armis Security at a valuation of $1.1 billion, the company announced Monday. — Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily
Qualcomm today unveiled a new automotive platform called Snapdragon Ride that’s designed to power all levels of automated driving from today’s active safety systems in passenger cars to the robotaxis that may someday ply city streets.
The scalable platform consists of a Snapdragon Ride system-on-chip, accelerator and autonomous stack.
Qualcomm might be best known for supporting mobile phones, but it also has a family of automotive products, including semiconductors for the telematics systems in cars. Snapdragon Ride is the latest — and perhaps most notable effort to date — to carve out more market share in the already crowded ADAS and automated driving industries. It also puts Qualcomm in competition, once again, with the likes of Nvidia and Intel’s Mobileye subsidiary.
The Snapdragon Ride platform is designed to support the top three industry segments in automated driving, Nakul Duggal, senior vice president of product management at Qualcomm told TechCrunch in a recent interview. It can handle the hardware requirements for the active safety advanced driver assistance systems found in today’s passenger vehicles, including lane keeping, traffic sign recognition and automatic emergency braking. But Duggal says it can also manage the more intensive hardware requirements in so-called Level 2+ systems such as automated highway driving and self-parking as well as Level 4, which is a designation given to autonomous urban driving applications like robotaxis.
The platform is built on modular multi-core CPUs, energy-efficient AI and computer vision engines and a GPU, the company said. It’s also thermally efficient and can offer 30 tera operations per second (TOPS) for the lower level active safety systems up to more than 700 TOPS at 130W for autonomous driving. This means, the platform can operate at these various levels without requiring additional liquid-cooled systems, which helps lower the cost and boost reliability, Duggal said, adding it can be particularly useful in electric vehicles.
Snapdragon Ride is expected to be available for pre-development to automakers and Tier-1 suppliers in the first half of 2020. Snapdragon Ride-enabled vehicles are expected to be in production in 2023.
“Despite a lot of publicity and social media, number of sign-ups were modest,” reads one of the last monthly reports I sent to my VCs before my startup ceased to exist. “After the initial wave, sign-ups have slowed right down to near pre-launch levels. User acquisition is our number-one priority and my biggest headache.”
Like, I suspect, many other early-stage founders, I hated the monthly chore of writing a short report for investors. We used the PPP format (progress, problems and plans) for these regular missives, but progress was almost always slow and most of the time, problems far outstripped plans.
On good months, I was far more motivated to file our monthly report — it is a very human thing to want to deliver good news — and on bad months I had a million other more important things I thought a CEO should be spending their time on.
However, according to a research conducted by Jan Luca Ernst, a masters student at The University of St. Gallen, I may have been misguided. In his thesis, supported by Prof. Dr. Elgar Fleisch (Professor of Technology Management at University of St. Gallen) and Florian Schweitzer (a partner at VC firm btov), he writes “startups that submit regular, high-quality reports are shown by the statistics to be better investments than other startups.”
The research was based on analysis of hundreds of monthly startup reports submitted to btov Partners by portfolio companies out of its first two funds, which ran between 2006 to 2014. Specifically, researchers looked at 64 startups, covering the performance of startups during the first two years after initial investment from the first fund, and the performance during a single year, 2015, for the second fund.
“Hypotheses on the positive effects of monthly startup reports were tested, using several multivariate regressions,” write the paper’s authors. “As a result, several initial assumptions were discarded.”
For example, the punctuality of startup reports did not appear to indicate whether a startup would be more successful. In contrast, the frequency of reporting (at a confidence level of 95%), as well as the quality of the reporting (at a confidence level of 99%), were identified as contributors to success.
“Overall, the findings emphasize the importance of the post-investment phase and the value added by venture capitalists beyond financial support,” say Ernst, Fleisch and Schweitzer. “One main implication of the findings has an impact on subsequent investment rounds. Startups that submit regular, high-quality reports are shown by the statistics to be better investments than other startups. This may be an indicator that justifies further investment, that, in turn, leads to better performance.”
The authors also suggest that, in the future, investors may ask for “full, unfiltered access” to all past reporting of a startup, including evidence on the quality of reports and regularity of submission. “This would increase transparency and therefore eventually lead to better investment decision making,” they write.
With that said, during a call with btov’s Florian Schweitzer, he conceded that correlation doesn’t necessarily mean cause, but argued that there are many softer, and sometimes hidden, positive outcomes from monthly reports — especially when a founder does them honestly and whole heartedly.
Extra Crunch: What should a monthly report contain?
Florian Schweitzer: We always define what we would like or what we think would be sensible, because for each startup, of course, it is different. In general, the idea is that the founders can do the report in half an hour. Usually, it contains something like eight KPIs, and then some bullet points reflecting on what went well, and what are the challenges right now. And those challenges are a superb opportunity to understand where the founder is struggling, and where we can support them. So it can be a very, very productive agenda for a discussion, which we usually have regularity.
I think it is very good that founders sit back and think for half an hour: what happened during the last 30 days? What did I want to achieve? What did I not achieve? And to be honest about the progress and challenges.
Intel is holding its CES press conference today at 4 PM Pacific, 7 PM Eastern. The company will talk about what to expect when it comes to CPU innovation. We could also get an early look at the company’s first standalone GPUs.
We’ll have a team on the ground, so you should also check out our full CES coverage.
Apple recovered in India in 2019 after a sharp decline in 2018, and 2020 could be Apple's strongest year yet in the country due to a stronger device portfolio — - With the first-ever flagship retail store would give Apple a booster in the price-sensitive smartphone market in 2020, say industry experts
Counterpoint Research : Apple led global Q1 smartphone shipments for the first time with a 21% market share in Q1 2026; overall smartphone...
