Interview with CTO of Pentagon's Joint AI Center Nand Mulchandani about the center's work and its new Silicon Valley-like organizational structure and workflows — It was a busy week for defense-focused AI: DarwinAI signed a partnership with Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor …
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)
“Was that a stinky DD coming from a big giraffe? It’s definitely not coming from our 14 different pooper dooper locations!”
Moments after stand-up comedian Meg Stalter drops this punchline, as part of a routine mocking the Disney Work Orientation process, her crowd of 11,400 viewers is silent. But she’s not bombing. Stalter is streaming her comedy set via Instagram Live, and as soon as the joke drops, her audience members begin furiously tapping their phone screens, thus sending a wave of pink, yellow, and blue diaphanous hearts up from the right-hand side of her own livestreaming interface.
“I’m about to puke this is so funny,” one fan types. It’s not the immediate feedback of a laughing crowd, but for Stalter, she’ll take it.
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Not long ago we lived in a world which kept getting better. Oh, there were tragedies and catastrophes, and there was profound inequality, but still, on a global scale, over the span of years, from before the fall of the Berlin wall until quite recently, most things were getting better for most people.
Reasonable people can disagree about when “quite recently was.” Personally, I put it the turning point at circa 2015, after which refugee counts swelled, talk of the “precariat” grew, xenophobia which often more-than-verged on neo-fascism began to rise around the world, and the growing threat of global warming became inescapable.
Others, more optimistic, would say the world kept getting better until this year. But I think few would dispute that we’re backsliding now, in the face of the pandemic. It’s not just its direct mortality, and its morbidity; it’s the skyrocketing unemployment rates — absolutely necessary lest the mortality multiply many-fold, to be clear — from which we won’t recover as soon as we hope, and the consequent global recession. Worst, it’s the projected massive rise in global extreme poverty.
We live in a world that’s getting worse, at least this year, likely next, and maybe even beyond. That’s awfully hard to get used to when you’re accustomed to justified faith that things are getting better. It’s been a long time — probably not since the mid-70s and early 80s, as I understand it — since we’ve collectively hit a ditch like this.
What changes in a world getting worse? Well, you have to be more careful about consequences, for one. During boom times there’s an unfortunate tendency write off any unpleasant side effects of a company’s success — or failure — as temporary friction, soon resolved, when a rising tide is lifting us all up, and those affected can (at least theoretically) easily find a new job. You can indeed make a case for that doing boom times. But it’s very different during an ebb tide with sharp rocks below, and people should adjust accordingly.
There’s another, more interesting and counterintuitive, lesson to be learned from the mid-70s through early 80s. That’s the era the birthed punk rock and hip-hop, both of which sounded almost indescribably strange by the aesthetic standards of the time. Those were Hollywood golden years, because, famously, “nobody knew anything.” And that was when Apple and Microsoft were formed, when personal computers were a weird curiosity whose very existence was somewhat obscure.
Maybe the lesson here is that this is the time to strive to do something weird — genuinely weird, not path-following, different-version-of-conformist weird. Maybe this is time to found your weird startup; or maybe startups are the mainstream engine of change now, and the truly weird thing is to forge something entirely different from a startup. Maybe it’s time not just to create art, but to invent your own art form. It’s an optimistic take on a worsening world, I know; but even a pandemic needs optimists.
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Hi and welcome back to The Station. Memorial Day is this coming Monday, a holiday meant to honor military personnel who died while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. Over the years, it has evolved for many Americans who use the three-day weekend to fire up the grill, go camping, head to the beach, local amusement park or take a road trip. It’s become the unofficial kickoff to the summer season — even though we still have more than three weeks of spring.
Every year around this time, AAA provides an estimate for travel over the weekend. For the first time in 20 years, AAA said it would not issue a Memorial Day travel forecast, as the accuracy of the economic data used to create the forecast has been undermined by COVID-19.
The travel forecast often reflects the state of the economy or at least certain aspects of it. For instance, Memorial Day 2009 holds the record for the lowest travel volume at nearly 31 million travelers. Last year, 43 million Americans traveled for Memorial Day Weekend, the second-highest travel volume on record since 2000, when the organization began tracking this data.
I will put my prognosticator hat on for a moment knowing I might very well be wrong (I’m sure ya’ll will remind me later). I expect this weekend to be a low travel holiday, but I fully anticipate this summer will mark the return of the road trip. And that’s not just my forecast for the U.S. I expect Europeans will stick closer to home and opt for road and possibly train travel over long haul flights for their summer holidays. That has all kinds of implications, positive and negative. And it’s why I’m going to spend some time in the coming weeks driving a variety of new SUV models in search of road trip worthy vehicles.
This past week I drove the 2020 VW Atlas Cross Sport V6 SEL (premium trim), a more smaller and approachable version of the massive three-row Atlas. I will share a few thoughts about it next week. After that, I will be driving the 2020 Land Cruiser standard trim. Have a vehicle suggestion? Reach out and I’ll try to put it in my queue.
Reach out and email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.
Shall we get down to it? Vamos.
Micromobility had some good action this week so let’s dive on in. Here in San Francisco, Bird’s Scoot redeployed 300 electric kick scooters. By Memorial Day weekend, Scoot will have 500 electric scooters available. Additionally, Scoot expanded its scooter service area to serve more parts of San Francisco.
Over in Atlanta, GoX and Tortoise teamed up to deploy teleoperated electric scooters. In Peachtree Corners, GoX riders can hail a scooter equipped with tech from Tortoise. As Keaks, aka Kirsten Korosec, explained earlier this week, riders can request a scooter to come to them and once they’re done, the scooter will drive itself back to a parking spot.
Meanwhile, in Europe, Tier brought integrated helmets to its electric scooters. The foldable helmets fit inside a box attached to the scooter below the handlebars. This month, Tier plans to deploy 200 scooters equipped with helmets in Paris and Berlin. Over the summer, Tier will deploy an additional 5,000 helmet-equipped scooters. Additionally, given concerns about COVID-19, Tier is experimenting with an antibacterial, self-disinfecting handlebar technology from Protexus. Tier is testing these handlebars in Paris and Bordeaux.
Also, don’t miss my analysis of why micromobility may come back stronger after the pandemic.
Vroom, the online used car marketplace that has raised some $700 million since 2013, filed for an IPO this week. (Yes, IPOs qualify as deals in my book). It plans to trade on the Nasdaq under VRM with Goldman Sachs as lead underwriter.
Vroom is an interesting company that I’ve been writing about for years now. And there have been times that I wondered if it would fold altogether. The company managed to keep raising funds though, most recently $254 million in December 2019 in a Series H round that valued the company at around $1.5 billion.
A look at the S-1 shows modest growth, rising losses and slim gross margins. Eck!
Here’s a quick breakdown:
TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm takes a look under Vroom’s hood and digs into why the company is heading to the public markets during this volatile time. Check it out.
Other deals:
Missfresh, a Chinese grocery delivery company backed by Tencent, is closing in on $500 million in new funding.
Autonomous aviation startup Xwing locked in a $10 million funding round before COVID-19 hit. Now the San Francisco-based startup is using the capital to hire talent and scale the development of its software stack as it aims for commercial operations later this year — pending FAA approvals. The Series A funding round was led by R7 Partners, with participation from early-stage VC Alven, Eniac Ventures and Thales Corporate Ventures.
Fly Now Pay Later, a London-based fintech startup focused on travel, raised £5 million in Series A equity funding and another £30 million in debt funding.
French startup Angell has signed a wide-ranging partnership with SEB, the French industrial company behind All-Clad, Krups, Moulinex, Rowenta, Tefal and others. As part of the deal, SEB will manufacture Angell’s electric bikes in a factory near Dijon, France. SEB’s investment arm, SEB Alliance, is also investing in Angell. The terms of the deal are undisclosed, but Angell says it plans to raise between $7.6 and $21.7 million with a group of investors that include SEB.
Signage is displayed at the Hertz Global Holdings Inc. rental counter at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, May 5, 2020. Photo: Getty Images
Hertz filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday, a move we’ve been anticipating for awhile now. The bankruptcy protection stems from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here’s why.
Once business trips and other travel was halted, Hertz was suddenly sitting on an unused asset — lots and lots of cars. It wasn’t just that the revenue spigot was turned off. Used car prices have dropped, further devaluing its fleet.
The company said that it has more than $1 billion in cash on hand, which it will use to keep the business operating through the bankruptcy process. Hertz also said its principal international operating regions, including Europe, Australia and New Zealand are not included in the U.S. Chapter 11 proceedings, nor are franchised locations.
Other layoffs:
Indian ride-hailing firm Ola has seen revenue drop by 95% in the last two months as India enforced a stay-at-home order for its 1.3 billion citizens in late March. You can guess what has happened as a result. Ola co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said in an internal email the company is cutting 1,400 jobs in India, or 35% of its workforce in the home market.
India’s top food delivery startup Swiggy is cutting 1,100 jobs and scaling down some adjacent businesses as it looks to reduce costs to survive the coronavirus pandemic.
Here’s something on the “new” job front …
There’s been a lot of attention on autonomous delivery robots. These companies will most certainly struggle to become profitable. On-demand delivery is a tricky business. But COVID-19 might have inadvertently expanded the labor pool for these companies.
On-demand delivery startup Postmates has seen an increase in demand for its autonomous delivery robots known as Serve, which operate in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The company uses teleoperators, humans who remotely monitor and guide the autonomous robots. COVID-19 prompted Postmates to set up teleoperations centers within each employee’s home. Postmates sees potential to reach a new group of workers.
Tortoise, which we mentioned earlier in Micromobbin’, sees the same potential, according to its founder and CEO Dmitry Shevelenko.
We hear (and see) things. But we’re not selfish. We share!
For those not familiar with “a little bird,” this is a periodic section that shares insider tips that have been vetted. This week comes out of the super-hyped world of on-demand delivery. It’s a business that might be seeing a lot of demand. But demand doesn’t always square with profitability.
Take Postmates for example. The company has raised about $900 million to date, including a $225 million round announced in October that valued the company at about $2.5 billion. But now it seems that common shares are trading at a 45% discount on the secondary market, according to our sources.
Early investors do take money off the table from time to time. But it can also indicate other troubles worth watching out for. Postmates filed confidential IPO paperwork in February 2019, but those plans have been delayed. The company is also fighting for market share against giants like Doordash. A Uber-Grubhub merger would put it even with DoorDash.
That leaves Postmates in a distant fourth. Dan Primack over at Axios noted “multiple sources” have told him the company is seeking raise around $100 million in new private-market funding.
Here are a few other items that caught my eye …
Amazon is joining India’s online food delivery market just as top local players Swiggy and Zomato reduce their workforce to steer through the coronavirus pandemic and months after Uber Eats’ exit from the nation.
GM has a “big team” working on an advanced version of its hands-free driving assistance system, Super Cruise, that will expand its capability beyond highways and apply it to city streets, the automaker’s vice president of global product development Doug Parks said during a webcasted interview at Citi’s 2020 Car of the Future Symposium.
Cake, the Stockholm-based mobility startup, debuted the Kalk OR, a 150-pound, battery-powered two-wheeler engineered for agile off-road riding and available in a street-legal version.
Nauto has launched a new feature in its driver behavior learning platform that is designed to detect imminent collisions to help reduce rear-end accidents. It works by taking in driver behavior data, vehicle movement, traffic elements, and contextual data to help predict and prevent collisions.
Organizers of the New York International Auto Show, once hoping to hold the rescheduled event in August, have decided to scrap the entire year. The show has been officially canceled for 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers announced Friday. The next show will take place April 2 to April 11, 2021. Press days will be March 31 and April 1.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company is raising the price of its “Full Self-Driving” package of its Autopilot driver assistance package by around $1,000 on July 1. This has happened before and it will, I promise happen again. The Verge has a good breakdown of why. I, of course, care about the financial reasons. Right now, Tesla can only count about half of the revenue it generates from FSD. The other half is deferred revenue — money that Tesla can recognize on its balance sheet at a later date.
Wunder Mobility, the Hamburg-based startup that provides a range of mobility services, from carpooling to electric scooter rentals, announced the launch of Wunder Vehicles and a business-to-business partnership with Chinese EV manufacturer Yadea. Wunder Vehicles is a service that gives customers a toolkit of sorts to launch a fleet-sharing company. The company provides software, a marketing plan, data, financing options and the electric vehicles, which will come from Yadea.
Rad Power Bikes unveiled the newest iteration of its electric cargo bike. The RadWagon 4 has been fully redesigned from the ground up. Trucks VC’s Reilly Brennan recently described this on Twitter as the possible F-150 of micromobility. We hope to test it soon.
Image Credits: Rad Power Bikes
Apple is reportedly planning to launch the long-rumoured over-ear noise cancelling headphone under Apple branding dubbed AirPods Studio.
The high-end headphones were first rumoured in February 2018 by former KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Later, it was estimated that the headphones would launch sometime in the second half of 2020. Still, a new report from Digitimes indicates that the production of the new headphone is already underway and it could be unveiled sooner than expected.
As per Digitimes, Apple is likely to kill its wired earphones production and resume the AirPods 2 production in the second half of the year. The source also claims that production for Apple rumoured AirPods Studio headphones has now begun.
Apple AirPods Studio: What to expect?There has been a lot of confusion around the launch of Apple's premium over-ear headphones. It will be the first Apple-branded over-ear headphones ever. As per YouTuber Jon Prosser, the new headphones will join the AirPods lineup alongside the AirPods 2 and AirPods Pro, and it's supposed to be different from Apple's Beats lineup, which happens to have a wide range of over-ear headphones.
As per the rumours, AirPods Studio will come with Active noise-cancelling, which cuts down unwanted noise to let you focus on the audio. It is likely to come with a transparency mode that reduces the audio volume and let you hear the ambient noise.
Bloomberg reported that Apple had tested at least two versions of the headphones - a high-end premium variant and a fitness-oriented made with lightweight materials. Both the options are said to have magnetically swappable ear cups and headband padding that will let users customise its look by merely switching the padding, similar to Apple Watch bands.
As per a report by 9to5Mac, it is said to have AirPods-like sensor-based ear detection feature that stops the music when the earphones are taken off. In place of ear detection, Apple is working to include sensors that can detect whether the headphones are on your head or neck. It is said to boast of a new sensor that will enable the headphones to recognise left and right ears to route audio channels automatically. Which means, there won't be fixed left or right earcups and can be worn without checking for left and right channel.
The price is rumoured to be USD 350 (approx INR 26,500). If this turns out to be accurate, it will compete against other noise-cancelling headphones from companies like Bose and Sony.
https://ift.tt/3gi4TAK
Enlarge / A lot of literature in this. (credit: Liyao Xie / Getty Images)
Look, we're admittedly biased around the Ars Orbital HQ. Whether the best of times or worst of times, we routinely find comfort in a good book. COVID-19 has changed so much about our day-to-day lives, including some of our entertainment habits around things like gaming or streaming TV and film. But when it comes to precious reading time in between work and busy personal lives, we're continually drawn to the stories that grip us—as grim as some of those may be.
This year's staff summer recommendation/To Be Read list has a few newer releases, plenty of old classics, and a lot of alternate reality/sci-fi. Ars' book tastes remain nothing if not on-brand, meaning we may never get through one of these without Douglas Adams being mentioned. Here's everything, Hitchhiker's Guides and others, we've been escaping to.
The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi (credit: Sparth)
Sci-fi fans who enjoy engaging characters and story driven more by human interaction than technical wharrgarbl will enjoy John Scalzi's latest trilogy, The Interdependency. The third book just released last week, and it ties things up neatly—a first, for Scalzi. The Interdependency is an old-school galaxy-spanning empire, with a twist—habitable planets are almost impossibly difficult to find, and in an effort to curtail war, the Interdependency was designed so that no system can survive without trade with the others.
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The Bureau de Tabac grandstand offers a perfect view of the yachts docked on the Mediterranean Sea and is only a short distance from the Nouvelle Chicane and the exit of the track’s infamous tunnel. [credit: Gregory Leporati ]
For the first time since 1954, the Monaco Grand Prix will not take place this year—and, for some F1 fans, that’s not entirely a bad thing. The iconic race has been maligned in recent years, and for good reason: who wants to watch modern F1 cars drive single file across narrow city streets, with virtually no chance for overtakes, as billionaires look on from enormous yachts? Critics have argued the event is boring, outdated, and downright obnoxious.
For years, I believed that, too. That is, until I actually attended the race in 2019 and witnessed the pomp and circumstance firsthand. From bombastic ceremonies to surprisingly passionate locals, the experience wound up defying my expectations, resulting in a charming weekend that could sway even the most hardened F1 cynic.
So take a trip with me to last year’s race and find out how you, too, can check this Grand Prix off your bucket list—without breaking the bank—and maybe even rekindle your love of F1 in the process.
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Instagram appears to more often flag photos of plus-size bodies, as experts believe its content moderation AI equates more skin with excessive nudity — In 2018, influencer Katana Fatale was in Hawaii in an outdoor shower, and the light was just right. — She set her phone on a chair, set the timer, and took this photo.
The Advanced Gun System, left, is intended to take on the role of the battleship's 16-inch guns, right. Aside from its GPS-guided shell, the digital technology of the AGS's fire control system does exactly what the USS Iowa's Rangekeeper Mark 8 did—just with fewer people and less weight. (credit: US Navy)
We are resurfacing this feature from 2014 for your reading pleasure on this holiday weekend.
The USS Zumwalt, the latest destroyer now undergoing acceptance trials, comes with a new type of naval artillery: the Advanced Gun System (AGS). The automated AGS can fire 10 rocket-assisted, precision-guided projectiles per minute at targets over 100 miles away.
Those projectiles use GPS and inertial guidance to improve the gun’s accuracy to a 50 meter (164 feet) circle of probable error—meaning that half of its GPS-guided shells will fall within that distance from the target. But take away the fancy GPS shells, and the AGS and its digital fire control system are no more accurate than mechanical analog technology that is nearly a century old.
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Enlarge / Future moon bases could be built with 3D printers that mix materials such as Moon regolith, water, and astronauts’ urine. (credit: ESA/Foster and Partners)
Ever since President Donald Trump directed NASA to get boots on the Moon by 2024, the agency and its partners have been hard at work trying to make it happen. Late last month, NASA awarded contracts to three companies to develop a crewed lunar lander, but getting to the Moon is just the start. The agency also plans to build a permanent Moon basebefore the end of the decade and use it as a stepping stone to Mars.
If astronauts are going to spend weeks at a time on the Moon, they’re going to have to figure out how to live off the land—er, regolith. It’s too expensive to ship everything from Earth, which means they’ll have to get creative with the limited resources on the lunar surface. Moon dirt is a great building material and there’s water in the form of ice at the south pole that can be turned into rocket fuel. But the hottest commodity of them all may very well turn out to be an astronaut’s own pee.
Earlier this year, a team of European researchers demonstrated that urea, the second-most common compound in human urine after water, can be mixed with Moon dirt and used for construction. The resulting material is a geopolymer, which has similar properties to concrete and could potentially be used to build landing pads, habitats, and other structures on the Moon.
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Financial Times : Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid weste...
