Sunday, September 13, 2020
Redmi 9 Prime, Redmi 9 on Sale at 12 Noon Today via Amazon, Mi.com
Nvidia to Buy Chipmaker Arm From SoftBank in $40 Billion Deal
US Customs seized a shipment of OnePlus Buds thinking they were counterfeit Apple AirPods (Chris Welch/The Verge)
US Customs seized a shipment of OnePlus Buds thinking they were counterfeit Apple AirPods — Well this is awkward — In a truly bizarre situation that I'm still trying to wrap my head around, US Customs and Border Protection tonight tweeted that its officers had “recently seized 2,000 …
Redmi 9 Prime with 4GB RAM to go on sale today via Amazon: Price and offers
Realme 7 Pro to Go on First Sale Today at 12 Noon via Flipkart, Realme.com
The Social Dilemma Succeeds in Making You Rethink Social Media
CBP seized a shipment of OnePlus Buds thinking they were “counterfeit” Apple AirPods
U.S. Customs and Border Protection proudly announced in a press release on Friday a seizure of 2,000 boxes of “counterfeit” Apple AirPods, said to be worth about $400,000, from a shipment at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.
But the photos in the press release appear to show boxes of OnePlus Buds, the wireless earphones made by smartphone maker OnePlus, and not Apple AirPods as CBP had claimed.
Here’s CBP’s photo of the allegedly counterfeit goods:
(Image: Customs and Border Protection)
And this is what a box of OnePlus Buds looks like:
(Image: @yschugh/Twitter)
We reached out to OnePlus and CBP but did not hear back.
According to the press release: “The interception of these counterfeit earbuds is a direct reflection of the vigilance and commitment to mission success by our CBP Officers daily,” said Troy Miller, director of CBP’s New York Field Operations.
If only it was.
Oracle, one of Donald Trump’s favorite companies, wins TikTok deal
Enlarge / Oracle chairman Larry Ellison. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Oracle has apparently won the competition to take over TikTok's US operations. Microsoft disclosed on Sunday that ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese owner, rejected Microsoft's rival bid earlier in the day.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the deal will not be an outright sale. Instead, Oracle will become ByteDance's US "tech partner." The details of the transaction aren't yet public but they will soon be submitted to US regulators for their approval.
It's a victory for Larry Ellison, the chairman of Oracle and one of the few technology tycoons who has been openly supportive of Donald Trump. Ellison held a fundraiser for Trump in February.
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AI-based drug discovery company Recursion raises $239M Series D and partners with pharma giant Bayer to develop new treatments for fibrotic diseases (Leah Rosenbaum/Forbes)
AI-based drug discovery company Recursion raises $239M Series D and partners with pharma giant Bayer to develop new treatments for fibrotic diseases — Startups that want to leverage artificial intelligence in drug discovery are a dime a dozen in today's biotech landscape.
Human Capital announces the winners of its Delta fellowship program
Today, in the first interview of Disrupt 2020, Human Capital’s Baris Akis and investor Michael Ovitz announced the winners of its Delta Fellowship program.
Human Capital launched in 2016 with a mission to become a talent agency for engineers in the same way that CAA, founded by Michael Ovitz, was a talent agency for entertainers.
Human Capital helps engineers find great positions at great companies, and fosters their careers well beyond that, including helping them switch jobs, ask for raises and promotions, and more. Human Capital also has an investment arm that seeds these same entrepreneurs with funding when they’re ready to start on their own project.
The fellowship program is an extension of Human Capital’s commitment to people over metrics, explained Michael Ovitz, who invested in the company earlier this year. Sixteen fellows were selected from more than 1,300 applications across 20 countries and more than 200 universities.
Interestingly, the Delta fellowship application process did not include a request for a business proposal, but rather evaluated the people themselves.
“We’re here to partner with founders,” said Akis. “We get to know the people behind the ideas. We consider ideas in the context of the people driving them.”
Delta Fellows include:
● Abu Qader, a Cornell junior who developed a low-cost mammography tumor detection platform after seeing the challenges of healthcare firsthand in Afghanistan as a teenager
● Katie Mishra, a Stanford junior who published three books by the time she was 16 and started a nonprofit to teach middle schoolers the design, logic, and engineering behind computer science
● Eeshan Tripathii, an MIT sophomore who built a prototype for a low-cost ductless air filtration system and reverse engineered a $20,000 prosthetic glove into a $550 working prototype
Ovitz and Akis walked us through the details of the fellowship program in an interview today, which you can watch from start to finish below.
Disrupt 2020 officially kicks off tomorrow at 9 am PT and there’s still plenty of time to register for a pass. Speakers include Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Kerry Washington, Jennifer Doudna, Roelof Botha and Kevin Hart. See you there!
Oracle boots out Microsoft and wins bid for TikTok, reports say
Enterprise provider Oracle is said to have won the bidding war for the U.S. operations of TikTok, a chase in which Microsoft was booted out earlier today. TikTok and Oracle did not immediately respond to TechCrunch for comment.
The Wall Street Journal writes that Oracle will be announced as TikTok’s “trusted tech partner” in the United States. Additionally, the Journal cites that a person familiar with the matter says the deal is “likely not to be structured as an outright sale.”
Oracle’s alleged purchase of TikTok’s U.S. operations would put an end to the unclear fate of the app within the country. The app’s reported buy comes days before September 20, the day that the Trump administration set for a ban on TikTok’s operations if the company doesn’t reach an agreement with a buyer.
On Sunday, Microsoft said its bid for the U.S. operations of TikTok has been rejected by the app’s parent company, ByteDance.
“We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users, while protecting national security interests,” the statement read, stating that Microsoft would make “significant changes” around security, privacy, online safety, and disinformation.
“We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas,” the statement ended.
Issues and fears around TikTok’s security has been a flagship issue for the app. TikTok was banned in India, along with 58 other apps, due to “national security and defence” issues. India was TikTok’s biggest overseas market. In addition to Microsoft, a number of prominent tech companies have rumored to be in the market for TikTok’s U.S. operations such as Twitter, Google, and Walmart. But, as our Ron Miller pointed out, there’s some reason toward why a company like Oracle would crave an app like TikTok: marketshare.
Oracle has grown out of its database roots and made its way into marketing automation and cloud infrastructure. The company is not just a database maker and provider. It’s a massive operation, that monetizes off of data. Earlier in this pandemic, the enterprise data provider teamed up with Zoom. If Oracle was to bring the same kind of partnership to fruition with TikTok, it would be landed a huge client.
Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, told TechCrunch Oracle’s scoop of TikTok “will add plenty of load to their infrastructure service.”
“That’s what matters to them with viral loads preferred. If Microsoft gets TikTok it could boost their usage by between 2% and 5%, while for Oracle it could be as much 10%,” he said.
Oracle’s reported buy, thus, could be a boost that actually makes sense. But a dramatic one, nonetheless.
Nvidia confirms $40B purchase of Arm, bringing together two chip giants
After weeks of on-and-off speculation, Nvidia this evening confirmed that it intends to buy chip design giant Arm Holdings for a total of up to $40 billion from existing owner SoftBank, which bought the company for $32 billion in 2016. The boards of all three parties have approved the outline of the deal.
The deal has a couple of intricacies. SoftBank will immediately receive $2 billion in cash for signing the deal. From there, it will receive another $10 billion in cash and $21.5 billion of stock in Nvidia at closing. That stake will be likely just a bit shy of 10% of the company. In addition, SoftBank is slated to earn $5 billion in a mix of cash and stock as a performance-based earn-out. Conditions or timing for that earn-out were not disclosed.
That $40 billion purchase price also includes $1.5 billion in equity compensation for existing Arm employees, which currently number more than 6,000 according to the company. All together then, SoftBank is looking at a $38.5 billion payout assuming its earn-out comes through.
Nvidia is buying all of Arm’s product groups except for its Internet of Things division, which was one of several areas where Arm has striven in recent years to expand as it attempts to grow outside of its core mobile chip design business.
Owing to the complex ownership structure and the multiple countries involved, closing is expect to take one and a half years, and will require regulatory and antitrust approvals in the U.S., the United Kingdom where Arm is headquartered, China, and the European Union.
Nvidia’s statement made clear that it intends to double down on the United Kingdom as a core part of its engineering efforts, a positioning that almost certainly is designed to placate concerns emanating from Downing Street about the competitiveness of the British economy in tech services following the country’s departure from the EU as it completes Brexit later this year.
Nvidia said that Arm’s offices in Cambridge will expand, and that the company intends to “[establish] a new global center of excellence in AI research at Arm’s Cambridge campus.”
The deal will provide some immediate cash relief to SoftBank, which has been working hard to clean up its balance sheet after a string of high-profile losses. The heavy Nvidia stock component of the deal will see SoftBank returning as a major investor in the company. The Japanese telco had previously held a 4.9% stake in Nvidia in its Vision Fund, which was disposed of in 2019 for a return of $3.3 billion.
Samsung is holding yet another Unpacked Event on September 23
One thing I’ll say for in-person events: they compelled companies to cram in a lot of news. After all, if you’re going to ask an auditorium full of people to travel from around the country — or world — you want to give them a lot of bang for their buck.
Samsung did manage that with its Galaxy Note event in early August. We got a new phone, new earbuds, new watch, new tablet and a preview of an upcoming foldable. A couple of weeks ago, the company devoted an entire second event to the new Fold. And now here we are, a couple of weeks later, staring down yet another event.
The September 23 event will likely focus on the Galaxy S20 Fan Edition that’s been floating around in leaks for a few months now, the way Samsung devices tend to. I’m not saying there won’t be a bunch of other news at the event as well, but the Fold event lowered my expectations a bit with regard to what the company deems worthy of a standalone event in 2020, versus, say, issuing a press release or something.
Anyway, the so-called “Fan Edition” finds the company picking up a long-abandoned trend of issuing lower-cost alternatives to flagship devices (notably, a refurbished version of the Note 7).
Here it seems to be a lower-priced take on Samsung’s primary flagship, the Galaxy S20. From the sound of it, the device is essentially a rebranding of its “Lite” line — the latest take on an already confusing approach to its budget flagship offerings.
We’ll find out more September 23 at 7 a.m. PT/10 a.m. ET.
Analysis of Nvidia's purchase of Arm, which will impact nearly every chip market segment, with statements from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Arm CEO Simon Segars (Patrick Moorhead/Forbes)
Analysis of Nvidia's purchase of Arm, which will impact nearly every chip market segment, with statements from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Arm CEO Simon Segars — I talked today with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Arm CEO Simon Segars on the largest and what I consider the most important semiconductor acquisition- ever.
Disney, Fox, and WBD say they have agreed to discontinue their Venu Sports streaming joint venture and will focus on existing products and distribution channels (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
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