Thursday, January 30, 2020
Facebook takes down account of Jamia shooter
Govt to bundle over 4,000 free movies with internet to attract first time users
EA reports Q3 revenues of $1.98B, beating expectations, on growth of its live services to $993M, up 27% YoY; digital net income was $4.13B for 2019, up 15% YoY (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)
EA reports Q3 revenues of $1.98B, beating expectations, on growth of its live services to $993M, up 27% YoY; digital net income was $4.13B for 2019, up 15% YoY — Electronic Arts reported earnings that beat Wall Street's expectations for the third fiscal quarter ended December 31 …
Google shows off far-flung A.I. research projects as calls for regulation mount (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)
Google shows off far-flung A.I. research projects as calls for regulation mount — Google is working on several long-term artificial intelligence projects it hopes to launch widely someday. — Projects in advanced stages include real-time language translation and anemia detection.
Amazon quietly publishes its latest transparency report
Just as Amazon was basking in the news of a massive earnings win, the tech giant quietly published — as it always does — its latest transparency report, revealing a slight dip in the number of government demands for user data.
It’s a rarely seen decline in the number of demands received by a tech company during a year where almost every other tech giant — including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter — all saw an increase in the number of demands they receive. Only Apple reported a decline in the number of demands it received.
Amazon said it received 1,841 subpoenas, 440 search warrants and 114 other court orders for user data — such as its Echo and Fire devices — during the six-month period ending 2019.
That’s about a 4% decline on the first six months of the year.
The company’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, also saw a decline in the number of demands for data stored by customers, down by about 10%.
Amazon also said it received between 0 and 249 national security requests for both its consumer and cloud services (rules set out by the Justice Department only allow tech and telecom companies to report in ranges).
At the time of writing, Amazon has not yet updated its law enforcement requests page to list the latest report.
Amazon’s biannual transparency report is one of the lightest reads of any company’s figures across the tech industry. We previously reported on how Amazon’s transparency reports have purposefully become more vague over the years rather than clearer — bucking the industry trend. At just three pages, the company spends most of it explaining how it responds to each kind of legal demand rather than expanding on the numbers themselves.
The company’s Ring smart camera division, which has faced heavy criticism for its poor security practices and its cozy relationship with law enforcement, still hasn’t released its own data demand figures.
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Source: Apple has terminated AI startup Xnor.ai's involvement in the Pentagon's Project Maven after its recent acquisition of the startup (The Information)
Source: Apple has terminated AI startup Xnor.ai's involvement in the Pentagon's Project Maven after its recent acquisition of the startup — Big technology companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have jockeyed to secure lucrative contracts supplying their products and services to the military.
Realme India CEO Madhav Sheth Snapped Sporting Realme Fitness Band
Samsung Hit by Weakening Demand in Key Products in Q4
Facebook Climbs to 2.5 Billion Monthly Active Users in Q4
KPCB has already blown through much of the $600 million it raised last year
Kleiner Perkins, one of the most storied franchises in venture capital, has already invested much of the $600 million it raised last year and is now going back out to the market to raise its 19th fund, according to multiple sources.
The firm, which underwent a significant restructuring over the last two years, went on an investment tear over the course of 2019 as new partners went out to build up a new portfolio for the firm — almost of a whole cloth.
A spokesperson for KPCB declined to comment on the firm’s fundraising plans citing SEC regulations.
The quick turnaround for KPCB is indicative of a broader industry trend, which has investors pulling the trigger on term sheets for new startups in days rather than weeks.
Speaking onstage at the Upfront Summit, an event at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. organized by the Los Angeles-based venture firm Upfront Ventures as a showcase for technology and investment talent in Southern California, venture investor Josh Kopelman spoke to the heightened pace of dealmaking at his own firm.
The founder of First Round Ventures said that the average time from first contact with a startup to drawing up a term sheet has collapsed from 90 days in 2004 to 9 days today.
“This could also be due to changes in the competitive landscape … and there may be changes with First Round Capital itself,” says one investor. “It may have been once upon a time that they were looking at really early raw stuff… But, today, First Round is not really in the first round anymore. Companies are raising some angel money or Y Combinator money.”
At KPCB, the once-troubled firm has been buoyed by recent exits in companies like Beyond Meat, a deal spearheaded by the firm’s former partner Amol Deshpande (who now serves as the chief executive of Farmers Business Network) and Slack.
And its new partners are clearly angling to make names for themselves.
“KP used to be a small team doing hands-on company building. We’re moving away from being this institution with multiple products and really just focusing on early-stage venture capital,” Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman said when the firm announced its last fund.
Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman
“We went out to market to LPs. We got a lot of interest. We were significantly oversubscribed,” Fushman said of the firm’s raise at the time.
In some ways, it’s likely the kind of rejuvenation that John Doerr was hoping for when he approached Social + Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya about “acquiring” that upstart firm back in 2015.
At the time, as Fortune reported, Palihapitiya and the other Social + Capital partners, Ted Maidenberg and Mamoon Hamid would have become partners in the venture firm under the terms of the proposed deal.
Instead, Social + Capital walked away, the firm eventually imploded and Hamid joined Kleiner Perkins two years later.
The new Kleiner Perkins is a much more streamlined operation. Gone are the sidecar and thematic funds that were a hallmark of earlier strategies and gone too are the superstars brought in by Mary Meeker to manage Kleiner Perkins’ growth equity investments. Meeker absconded with much of that late stage investment team to form Bond — and subsequently raised hundreds of millions of dollars herself.
Those strategies have been replaced by a clutch of young investors and seasoned Kleiner veterans including Ted Schlein who has long been an expert in enterprise software and security.
“Maybe at this point they think they can raise based on the whole story about Mamoon taking over and a few years from now they won’t be able to raise on that story and will have to raise on the results,” says one investor with knowledge of the industry. “Mamoon is a pretty legit, good investor. But the legacy of the firm is going to be tough to overcome.”
All of these changes are not necessarily sitting well with limited partners.
“LPs are not really happy about what’s going on,” says one investor with knowledge of the venture space. “Everybody thinks valuations are too high since 2011 and people are thinking there’s going to be a recession. LPs think funds are coming back to market too fast and they’re being greedy and there’s not enough vintage diversification but LPs … feel almost obligated that they have to do these things… Investing in Sequoia is like that saying that you don’t get fired for buying IBM.”
Retailers, hoteliers may soon run cloud kitchens
Lyft lays off 90 employees on journey to profitability
Fantastical, a popular calendar app for iOS and macOS, switches to a subscription model to unlock new premium features like Calendar Sets and weather forecasts (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)
Fantastical, a popular calendar app for iOS and macOS, switches to a subscription model to unlock new premium features like Calendar Sets and weather forecasts — Admit it, you've lost track of how many years it's been since you paid for Fantastical. The answer could be as long ago as 2013 …
Microsoft's Q2 gaming revenue was down 21% YoY to $3.4B, with hardware revenue down 43% YoY and Xbox content and services revenue down 11% YoY to $2.4B (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)
Microsoft's Q2 gaming revenue was down 21% YoY to $3.4B, with hardware revenue down 43% YoY and Xbox content and services revenue down 11% YoY to $2.4B — Microsoft's Xbox business took a hit in the most recent quarter as the company prepares to debut its new Xbox Series X console this holiday season.
All eyes are on the next liquidity event when it comes to space startups
At the FAA’s 23rd Annual Commercial Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, DC on Wednesday, a panel dedicated to the topic of trends in VC around space startups touched on public vs. private funding, the right kinds of space companies that should even be considering venture funding, and, perhaps most notably, the big L: Liquidity.
Moderator Tess Hatch, Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners, addressed the topic in response to an audience question that noted while we’ve heard a lot about how much money will flow into space-related startups from the VC community, we haven’t actually et seen much in the way of liquidity events that prove out the validity of these investments.
“In 2008, a company called Skybox was created and a handful of years later Google acquired the company for $500 million,” Hatch said. “Every venture capitalist’s ears perked up and they thought ‘Hey, that’s pretty good ROI in a short amount of time – maybe the space thing is an investable area’ and then a ton of venture capital investments flooded into space startups, and all of these venture capitalists made one, or maybe two investments in the area. Since then, there have not been many — if any – liquidity events: Perhaps Virgin Galactic going public via the SPAC (special uprose vehicle) on the New York Stock Exchange late last year would be the second. So we’re still waiting; we’re still waiting for those exits, we are still waiting for companies to pave the path for the 400+ startups in the ecosystem to return our investment.”
Hatch added that she’s looking at a number of companies who have the potential to break this somewhat prolonged exit drought in 2020, including five who are either quite mature in terms of their development, naming SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Planet and Spire as all likely candidates to have some kind of liquidity event in 2020, with the mostly likely being an IPO.
Space as an industry was described to me recently as a ‘maturing’ startup market by Space Angels CEO Chad Anderson, by virtue of the distribution of activity in terms of the overall investment rounds in the sector. There is indeed a lot of activity with early stage companies and seed rounds, but the fact remains that there hasn’t been much in the way of exits, and it’s also worth pointing out that corporate VCs haven’t been as acquisitive in space as some of their consumer and enterprise technology counterparts.
The panel touched on a lot more apart from liquidity, which actually only came up towards the end of the discussion, which included panelists Astranis CEO and co-founder John Gedmark; Capella Space CEO and founder Payam Banazadeh and Rocket Lab VP of Global Commercial Launch Services Shane Fleming. Both Gedmark and Banazadeh addressed aspects of the risks and benefits of seeking VC as a space technology company.
“Not every space business is a venture-backable business,” said Banazadeh earlier in the conversation. “But there are a lot of space businesses that are specifically going after raising venture money, and that’s dangerous for everyone – because at the end of the day venture is looking at high risk, high return. The ‘high return’ comes from being able to get substantial amount of revenue in a market that’s big
enough for those revenues to be coming from. But if your idea is to go build, maybe, some very specific part in a satellite, then you have to make the case of why you’ll be able to make those returns for the investors, and in a lot of cases, that’s just not possible.”
Banazadeh also concedes that doing any kind of space technology development is expensive, and the money has to come from somewhere. Gedmark talked about one popular source, government funding and grants, and why that often isn’t as obviously a positive thing for startups as it might seem.
“Small government grants can be great, and obviously a fantastic source of non dilutive capital,” Gedmark said. “But there is a little bit of a trick there, or something to be aware of: I think people are often surprised how much time is spent in the early days of a startup refining the exact idea and the product, and if you’re not certain that you have the that product market fit […] then, the government grant can be extremely dangerous, because they will fund you to do something that is sort of similar to what to what you’re doing, but it really prevents you changing your approach later; you’re going to end up spending time executing on the specific project of the program manager on the government side and you’re executing on what they want.”
VC funds, on the other hand, come with the built-in expectation that you’re going to refine and potentially even change direction altogether, Gedmark says. Depending on the terms of the public funding you’re seeking, that flexibility may not be part of the arrangement, which ultimately could be more important than a bit of equity dilution.
Experts say ChatGPT, Gemini, and other Western AI models are turbocharging Iran's cyber operations, helping it develop malware and launch phishing attacks (Jacob Judah/Financial Times)
Jacob Judah / Financial Times : Experts say ChatGPT, Gemini, and other Western AI models are turbocharging Iran's cyber operations, h...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
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Noah Smith / Noahpinion : Americans express fear and negativity toward AI, often relying on bad arguments like water usage, a stark contr...
