Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg on the impact of the pandemic on making VR mainstream, AR glasses, and why he doesn't want to “put an Apple Watch on your face” — How Facebook's CEO is thinking about the future of augmented reality, virtual reality, and more — Social networks contain multitudes.
There have been a couple of articles published in the last two days reporting on an impromptu sweep that took place outside of a venue we are using for our TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco this week. We wanted to detail what we know about what happened and the steps that are being taken to make this right.
This week we are hosting a virtual version of our TechCrunch Disrupt conference from a studio in San Francisco. In order to stage the show we rented a venue from a company named Non Plus Ultra.
Yesterday we were informed by Non Plus Ultra that a reporter had reached out to ask about a sweep that had taken place in the early hours of last Thursday morning before our team arrived. This was the first time we had heard about Non Plus Ultra having coordinated an unsanctioned sweep outside of their building.
This was not an action that we asked Non Plus Ultra to perform and is not something that we would ever ask them to do. Upon further investigation, we discovered that belongings and personal effects had been removed or discarded by a private company hired by Non Plus Ultra.
This is absolutely unacceptable, and we’re working to take immediate action. First, we will no longer be working with Non Plus Ultra at any of their venues in San Francisco for any TechCrunch event in the future.
In addition, Non Plus Ultra has committed to working with local partners Community Housing Partnership, and DISH to support the homeless community on 12th Street. They are also committing to set up a system to replace or, where possible, return property to the people who were unfairly targeted by this sweep. TechCrunch will ensure that Non Plus Ultra follows through on these commitments.
The city of San Francisco continues to struggle with a housing crisis and a large houseless population. Our neighbors who are living on the streets are suffering even more as they endure a pandemic and hazardous air quality from the California wildfires.
Everyone deserves to be treated with compassion and humanity, regardless of how or where they live. TechCrunch focuses on technology and the economy that drives it; much of that economy is centered in and around the Bay Area.
Many of us live in San Francisco and in the surrounding areas and we feel it is our basic duty as humans to see that our events benefit the community and do no harm to our neighbors.
To those affected by this situation we are deeply sorry. We will make every effort to see that this is made right.
Thank you.
In a Wednesday filing in federal court, the United States government said that users who use or download WeChat “to convey personal or business information” will not be subject to penalties under President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transactions with the Tencent-owned messaging app.
Trump issued the executive order against WeChat on August 6, the same day he issued a similar one banning transactions with ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, claiming national security concerns. Both orders caused confusion because they are set to go into effect 45 days after being issued, but said that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross will not identify what transactions are covered until then.
With that deadline now looming at the end of this week, WeChat users in America are still uncertain about the app’s future. Though WeChat is the top messaging app by far in China, where it also serves as an essential conduit for payments and other services, the U.S. version of the app has relatively limited features. It is used by Chinese-Americans, and other members of the Chinese disapora in the U.S., to keep in touch with their family and other people in China. With other popular messaging apps, like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, banned in China, WeChat is often the most direct communication channel available to them.
The U.S. government’s filing (embedded below) was made as part of a request for a preliminary injunction against the executive order brought by the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance, a non-profit organization initiated by attorneys who want to preserve access to WeChat for users in the U.S. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
In it, attorneys from the Justice Department said the U.S. Commerce Department is continuing to review transactions and will clarify which ones are affected by Sept. 20, but “we can provide assurances that [Secretary Ross] does not intend to take actions that would target persons or groups whose only connection to WeChat is their use or downloading of the app to convey personal or business information between users, or otherwise define the relevant transaction in such a way that would impose criminal or civil liability on such users.”
But in a response (also embedded below), the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance said that the Department of Justice’s filing instead demonstrates why a preliminary injunction is necessary. “Having first failed to articulate any actual national security concerns, the administration’s latest ‘assurances’ that users can keep using WeChat, and exchange their personal and business information, only further illustrates the hollowness and pre-textual nature of the Defendants’ ‘national security rationales.'”
The U.S. WeChat Users Alliance filed for the injunction on August 21. In an open letter published on its site, it said a complete ban of WeChat “will severely affect the lives and the work of millions of people in the U.S. They will have a difficult time talking to family relatives and friends back in China. Countless people or businesses who use WeChat to develop and contact customers will also suffer significant economic losses.”
The group also believes that the executive order “violates many provisions of the U.S. Constitution,” and the Administrative Procedure Act.
Apple releases Safari 14 as a standalone update for macOS Catalina and macOS Mojave users, with customizable start page, new tab bar design, and more — macOS Big Sur didn't launch alongside iOS 14, iPadOS 14, tvOS 14, and watchOS 7 today, with the update coming later this fall …
Well, it’s finally official. After Microsoft announced the launch date and price of the Xbox Series X and the Series S, it was time for Sony to flex its muscles. And that’s exactly what the Japanese company did. The PlayStation 5 will now officially launch on November 12. The base version of the PS5 will set you back by about $499. The Digital Edition of the console will cost $399, a full $100 less than the base version. Preorders for the consoles will begin today September 17. Also, the console will be releasing in Japan, the US, Mexico, New Zealand and South Korea on November 12 while other countries will be getting the PS5 on November 19.
See you in November! pic.twitter.com/CjrQ65rJ5a
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) September 16, 2020Sony also showed off a bunch of exclusive titles for the system including Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Deathloop, the new Resident Evil game and a brief look at the next chapter in the God of War saga. The PS5 will also come with a decent backwards compatibility mode for a ton of PS4 games. We’re not sure if this applies to PS3 and older consoles. As we earlier reported, the PS5 was thought to cost $449 but that isn’t the case as the company has finally made the $499 tag official. But the report did get the price of the Digital Edition right at $399.
PS5 Global launch schedule: pic.twitter.com/zgwfUX6iVl
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) September 16, 2020In other PS5 news, PlayStation is actually hiring people to play video games but you do need to be proficient in one particular language. You can read more about that here. In fact, we also have a comparison between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X which you can check out, right here.
https://ift.tt/2RBgtvW
This may be counterintuitive. I hope so. I remember the day I first started using Twitter. My friend Gabe Rivera suggested it would be a good idea to sign on to the fledgling network. Basically it was a land grab — claim the real estate of my name. I most likely was aware of the fundamentals of the new service, but wary of actually making some sort of overt splash. Why would I want to, as the frame of the day went, announce what I was having for lunch?
But I knew Gabe was right; I should get in line for the day it became clearer what good this was for. As Professor Irwin Corey would say Adam first said to Eve: stand back, I don’t know how big this is going to get. So I did, and sat back for almost a year. Eventually some thread caught my eye, or my ego encouraged me to think somebody might be interested in what I was having for lunch. That led to a series of discoveries we all made about how this thing might work, if it could just not crash from its unscalable neo-scalable scripting language roots.
One of the most interesting things to do in those early days was to misuse the network for creative purposes. If the logic of posting was to deliver meaningful content that would be of interest to larger audiences, we knew where that was headed. Celebrities, verified accounts, a triple A version of the big leagues of mainstream media.Logical maybe, but not what I was interested in. To the contrary, I relished the exact opposite, an experience where the result was something other than what we already had. One trick I had was to talk conversationally to the tiny audience of those I was pinging with their username.
This may or may not have predated the @mention, but the intent was to send a message to someone who was notified of the attempt by a notification. Alternatively, following a small but targeted series of accounts created a stream of posts from people who shared some implicit common interests. Either way, eventually these @mention clouds became a rich source and object of breaking news, jokes, and a stew of social energy. I enjoyed the occasional response, and would reply in place as though I was having a private chat. The theory went: if this annoyed people, they would unfollow me and be happier for it. Many did, and were.
Skipping ahead to now, I still use Twitter in this way for the most part. I set my notification stream to display a subset of my follows, first around 50, then 100, now upwards of 4 or 500. It is annoyingly disruptive of the top of my screen; reading an ebook book is an intermittent experience at certain hours waiting for the stream to slow down when I’m trying to read the first couple of lines of a page. But what I get is an almost subliminal collage of random stuff from a not-so-random group of what reminds me of a coffee house circle of friends in college days. The major news media breaks through repetitively when someone dies or succeeds, but also there are the mutterings of entrepreneurs and thought leaders, captains of industry who relish the direct channel, politicians of the digital underground, comedians, culture cowboys and cowgirls, right, left, and centrist.
It’s a living breathing thing, and it’s different from everything else. Facebook is what you think of it, but I’m sadly grateful for its function as the glue between family, friends, and a shared personal history. Never mind that it’s impossible to find something once it flits by. I hate it yet appreciate it nonetheless. But Twitter is an imperfect pacemaker in my chest, beating with the pulse of the nation, the notifications starting in Europe, then the East Coast, finally the Valley and Hollywood before I get sidetracked by reality and over the hill to the next day.
As Michael Markman quotes Jerry Seinfeld on this Gillmor Gang episode, “It’s never in the bag, and you’re never out of the running.” Yes, Trump dominates the service, and every other network as we careen toward the election. Twitter fills in some of the pandemic’s gaps in traditional campaigning. Some are good with Twitter; some are not. But when the shouting’s over and the ballots counted, Trump may or may not be left standing. Twitter surely will. Just don’t call it Shirley.
__________________
The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, September 11, 2020.
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang
For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the notification feed here on Telegram.
The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.
Building and growing a startup is hard, but pivoting said startup into something new and then achieving that same growth is even harder. But it’s not impossible.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, founder and CEO of PromisePay, and Jessica Matthews, founder and CEO of Uncharted Power, both have experiences doing this. At TechCrunch Disrupt, they shed some light on their respective, yet somewhat similar, paths.
PromisePay, formerly known as Promise, got its start as a bail reform startup that aimed to reduce the number of people held behind bars simply because they can’t pay bail. Now, it’s focused on helping people make payments for parking and traffic tickets, court fees and child support.
“We actually had this huge existential crisis,” Ellis-Lamkins said. “We at Promise are focused on ending mass incarceration and on decreasing the number of people in jails. So we started to be very successful and we sold very well. And what we realized fundamentally is when we created efficiency, it made the systems more efficient at incarcerating people. It didn’t make them more efficient at what our wrong assumption had been, which is if the system is more efficient, it would decrease the number of people in the system. And so we made a decision that growth was not consistent with who we were as a company. So I went back to our investors, which is hard when you’re making money and said, this is not the path because I don’t think this is a long-term path.”
She told investors there are already people who sell their tech to law enforcement, but what Promise wants to do is liberate people. It became clear to her that she was selling to the wrong people when she was talking to a client who said the difference between them and her was that she cares about people in the criminal justice system and they don’t. Ellis-Lamkins told investors she was going to stop selling to prisons and jails, and offered to give investors their money back.
Instead, she started looking at why people are ending up incarcerated.
“And luckily, that spurred growth, but I’m just not going to be a company that grows on the backs of poor people and Black and brown people, because there is a better way,” she said. “But it was frightening in the moment to abandon a market in which we’re making money.”
Thankfully, she said, not one of her investors had a problem with her decision.
Matthews said she had a relatively similar experience with her company, Uncharted Power, which got its start as Uncharted Play. Her company’s first product was an energy-harnessing soccer ball that could power a lamp after just a few hours of playing with it. She later integrated that tech intro strollers to power cell phones.
But after raising her Series A round for Uncharted Play, Matthews realized that her company needed to go all-in on infrastructure. She thought about the ultimate goal of her company, which is to get people the infrastructure they need in their lives. She just didn’t see a way of doing that with soccer balls.
“So we got good at making these things and pushing them and scaling them out, but when you have this balance of not just profit and impact but impact because you know that you’re a member of the group you’re trying to serve. For me, it was sitting down and saying is this actually solving the problem even if it’s successful.”
Matthews said she realized it wasn’t. So that meant walking away from the products that were bringing in millions and had 64% gross profit margins, Matthews said.
But it all paid off. Last year, Uncharted Power raised additional funding from an investor that validated her thesis for the future of power infrastructure.
“That moment was huge for us,” she said.
Matthews and Ellis-Lamkins also had some other gems worth sharing about imposter syndrome and measuring success. Here are some more highlights from the conversation.
On imposter syndrome and representation
Ellis-Lamkins:
It feels like tech has failed so significantly in investing in people they don’t know and missed out in growing companies because of that. So I think our obligation is to help make sure that we are not the only ones.
Matthews:
It’s not imposter syndrome, it’s representation syndrome because I feel the exact same way. When we raised our Series A, the immediate thing I thought was, ‘Oh, man. I can not lose these people’s money.’ This is huge and if we don’t work, it’s not even about us, it’s about every other person who looks like me.
On measuring success
Ellis-Lamkins:
I think part of what we should measure is how does technology improve our society in general, a measurement of success. I do think that if we measure success, it should not just be, I could make a billion dollars or have a company that valued at a billion dollars if the consequences are greater than the actual benefit and so I think that’s really important.
Matthews:
Let’s get rid of the term “social enterprise.” It’s bullshit. Enterprise is an enterprise. A problem’s a problem. Let’s create a value system based on the problems. There are some problems that are more important than others. And knowing that means we need to back and support the founders who get that more than others, and then beyond that.
JupiterOne, which helps companies manage cybersecurity assets in a single hub, has raised $19M Series A led by Brain Capital Ventures — JupiterOne, a cybersecurity management automation startup whose customers include Reddit, Databricks, and Auth0, today closed a $19 million funding round led by Brain Capital Ventures.
The Trump administration confirmed Tuesday that it plans to nominate senior NTIA advisor Nathan Simington as the next FCC commissioner — WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump, pressing for new social media regulations, plans to nominate a senior administration official to be a member …
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter : Disney, Fox, and WBD say they have agreed to discontinue their Venu Sports streaming joint venture...
