Sunday, August 2, 2020
Trump to give TikTok's Chinese owner 45 days to agree sale: Sources
Chinese app firms quizzed on data sharing, political ties
Microsoft confirms talks seeking to buy US arm of TikTok
Sources: behind TikTok's progress toward making a Microsoft deal, with weeks of talks that included US officials, nearly derailed by Trump's public opposition (Wall Street Journal)
Sources: behind TikTok's progress toward making a Microsoft deal, with weeks of talks that included US officials, nearly derailed by Trump's public opposition — Covert talks began weeks ago. After the software giant's CEO and Trump spoke Sunday, Microsoft said an agreement could include …
Google Pixel 4a Set to Launch Today: Expected Price, Specifications
Google debuts a Chrome extension to show how many ads are loaded on a web page, what advertisers are involved, and what user data was used for personalized ads (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
Google debuts a Chrome extension to show how many ads are loaded on a web page, what advertisers are involved, and what user data was used for personalized ads — Google has taken new steps towards its grand master plan to revamp the online advertising ecosystem.
Profile of Twitter hack mastermind Graham Clark, a troubled teen who allegedly went from scamming on Minecraft to joining hacker forum OGUsers and SIM swapping (New York Times)
Profile of Twitter hack mastermind Graham Clark, a troubled teen who allegedly went from scamming on Minecraft to joining hacker forum OGUsers and SIM swapping — The teenage “mastermind” of the recent Twitter breach, who had a difficult family life, poured his energy into video games and cryptocurrency.
It looks like Sequoia has hired a second partner in Europe: Revolut product lead George Robson
Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital recently set up shop in Europe after hiring Luciana Lixandru away from Accel’s London office. Now, according to a tweet by Revolut product lead George Robson, the VC has recruited a second European partner.
Robson, who also previously co-founded Kickstart London, a student-run accelerator programme in the U.K. and has worked at Morgan Stanley as an analyst, announced via Twitter last week that he has joined Sequoia’s burgeoning European operation where he says he’ll be working with the team “to help founders across Europe build the next generation of transformative companies”.
Writes Robson: “After ~3 years at Revolut working with some of the brightest minds building the world’s first truly global financial super-app, it’s time for my next move. I’m excited to share that I will be joining Sequoia as a Partner in Europe in late August”. In a second tweet, he adds that there is “more opportunity and innovation [in Europe] than ever”.
At Revolut, Robson was the product owner for Revolut Premium, the neobank’s paid-for bank account. Describing himself on LinkedIn as the first hire into Revolut’s subscription product team, he says he recruited for and managed multiple functions across product & engineering, product marketing and strategic partnerships.
He is said to also have been responsible for the roadmap delivery for Revolut’s retail plans, including the launch of “Revolut Metal”, and multiple third-party integrations including concierge, smart travel, insurance and gifting features.
Meanwhile, as mentioned, Robson adds to Sequoia’s first European partner recruit. Lixandru was poached from Accel and is best-known for leading the firm’s Series A in UiPath, and also worked with Deliveroo, Miro, and Tessian, amongst other successful upstart companies in Europe.
AI is struggling to adjust to 2020
2020 has made every industry reimagine how to move forward in light of COVID-19: civil rights movements, an election year and countless other big news moments. On a human level, we’ve had to adjust to a new way of living. We’ve started to accept these changes and figure out how to live our lives under these new pandemic rules. While humans settle in, AI is struggling to keep up.
The issue with AI training in 2020 is that, all of a sudden, we’ve changed our social and cultural norms. The truths that we have taught these algorithms are often no longer actually true. With visual AI specifically, we’re asking it to immediately interpret the new way we live with updated context that it doesn’t have yet.
Algorithms are still adjusting to new visual queues and trying to understand how to accurately identify them. As visual AI catches up, we also need a renewed importance on routine updates in the AI training process so inaccurate training datasets and preexisting open-source models can be corrected.
Computer vision models are struggling to appropriately tag depictions of the new scenes or situations we find ourselves in during the COVID-19 era. Categories have shifted. For example, say there’s an image of a father working at home while his son is playing. AI is still categorizing it as “leisure” or “relaxation.” It is not identifying this as ‘”work” or “office,” despite the fact that working with your kids next to you is the very common reality for many families during this time.
Image Credits: Westend61/Getty Images
On a more technical level, we physically have different pixel depictions of our world. At Getty Images, we’ve been training AI to “see.” This means algorithms can identify images and categorize them based on the pixel makeup of that image and decide what it includes. Rapidly changing how we go about our daily lives means that we’re also shifting what a category or tag (such as “cleaning”) entails.
Think of it this way — cleaning may now include wiping down surfaces that already visually appear clean. Algorithms have been previously taught that to depict cleaning, there needs to be a mess. Now, this looks very different. Our systems have to be retrained to account for these redefined category parameters.
This relates on a smaller scale as well. Someone could be grabbing a door knob with a small wipe or cleaning their steering wheel while sitting in their car. What was once a trivial detail now holds importance as people try to stay safe. We need to catch these small nuances so it’s tagged appropriately. Then AI can start to understand our world in 2020 and produce accurate outputs.
Image Credits: Chee Gin Tan/Getty Images
Another issue for AI right now is that machine learning algorithms are still trying to understand how to identify and categorize faces with masks. Faces are being detected as solely the top half of the face, or as two faces — one with the mask and a second of only the eyes. This creates inconsistencies and inhibits accurate usage of face detection models.
One path forward is to retrain algorithms to perform better when given solely the top portion of the face (above the mask). The mask problem is similar to classic face detection challenges such as someone wearing sunglasses or detecting the face of someone in profile. Now masks are commonplace as well.
Image Credits: Rodger Shija/EyeEm/Getty Images
What this shows us is that computer vision models still have a long way to go before truly being able to “see” in our ever-evolving social landscape. The way to counter this is to build robust datasets. Then, we can train computer vision models to account for the myriad different ways a face may be obstructed or covered.
At this point, we’re expanding the parameters of what the algorithm sees as a face — be it a person wearing a mask at a grocery store, a nurse wearing a mask as part of their day-to-day job or a person covering their face for religious reasons.
As we create the content needed to build these robust datasets, we should be aware of potentially increased unintentional bias. While some bias will always exist within AI, we now see imbalanced datasets depicting our new normal. For example, we are seeing more images of white people wearing masks than other ethnicities.
This may be the result of strict stay-at-home orders where photographers have limited access to communities other than their own and are unable to diversify their subjects. It may be due to the ethnicity of the photographers choosing to shoot this subject matter. Or, due to the level of impact COVID-19 has had on different regions. Regardless of the reason, having this imbalance will lead to algorithms being able to more accurately detect a white person wearing a mask than any other race or ethnicity.
Data scientists and those who build products with models have an increased responsibility to check for the accuracy of models in light of shifts in social norms. Routine checks and updates to training data and models are key to ensuring quality and robustness of models — now more than ever. If outputs are inaccurate, data scientists can quickly identify them and course correct.
It’s also worth mentioning that our current way of living is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Because of this, we must be cautious about the open-source datasets we’re leveraging for training purposes. Datasets that can be altered, should. Open-source models that cannot be altered need to have a disclaimer so it’s clear what projects might be negatively impacted from the outdated training data.
Identifying the new context we’re asking the system to understand is the first step toward moving visual AI forward. Then we need more content. More depictions of the world around us — and the diverse perspectives of it. As we’re amassing this new content, take stock of new potential biases and ways to retrain existing open-source datasets. We all have to monitor for inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Persistence and dedication to retraining computer vision models is how we’ll bring AI into 2020.
TechHub, a co-working space that was once the heart of London's start-up scene, filed for administration (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)
TechHub, a co-working space that was once the heart of London's start-up scene, filed for administration — Workspace was the busy centre of the UK's ‘Silicon Roundabout’ — TechHub, which for a decade was home to hundreds of start-ups at the heart of London's “Silicon Roundabout” tech scene, has filed for administration.
Sources: Apple told some landlords of UK stores it wants rent reduction of up to 50% and a rent-free period, offering to extend leases by a few years in return (Sam Chambers/The Sunday Times)
Sources: Apple told some landlords of UK stores it wants rent reduction of up to 50% and a rent-free period, offering to extend leases by a few years in return — Apple is pushing for huge rent reductions across its UK stores despite its sales soaring to new heights during the lockdown.
Future Fields is tackling cultured meat’s biggest problem
One possible solution to cellular agriculture’s biggest problem — how to develop a cheap, humane, growth material for cultured meat — may have come from a conversation in line at a Tim Hortons in Alberta.
The husband and wife duo of Matt and Jalene Anderson-Baron were waiting for Timbits and coffee and talking about the technology behind their startup, Future Fields, when Jalene suggested a possible new growth medium.
Matt Anderson-Baron had hit a wall in his research, and the pair, which represented two-thirds of the founding triumvirate of Future Fields, were out for a snack. Along with co-founder Lejjy Gafour, the three friends had set out to launch a startup from Canada that could do something about the world’s reliance on animals for protein.
They recognized that the attendant problems associated with animal farming were unsustainable at a scale needed to meet global demand for meat. So the three turned their attention to cell-based alternatives to the meat market.
“It was all just our interesting crazy side project that we never thought would turn into a business,” said Jalene Anderson-Baron. “That has evolved into a successful business idea over the last year.”
Future Fields co-founders. Image credit: Future Fields
Initially, the trio had hoped to launch their own cultured meat brand to sell lab grown chicken to the world, but after four months spent experimenting in the lab, Matt Anderson-Baron and the rest of the team, decided to pivot and begin work on a new growth serum. All thanks to Tim Hortons.
“Our MVP was a chicken nugget. It worked out to be about $3,000 per pound… Which is obviously not a lucrative business model. Given that the aims was to produce something price comparable to meat,” said Anderon-Brown. “We shifted to focus on a new medium that would be economically viable. Originally we intended it for something that just we used. We didn’t realize at first the novelty of our product and how beneficial it would be to the industry. About eight months ago we decided to pivot and make that growth medium our product.”
Now, as it gets ready to leave the Y Combinator accelerator program, the company has some paid contracts in place and will be rolling out the first couple of pilot product lines of its cell growth material for shipment within the next month.
The potential demand for the company’s product is huge. Alpha Meats, Shiok Meat, Finless Foods, Memphis Meats, Meatable, Mosa Meat, Aleph Farms, Future Meat Technologies, Lab Farm Foods, and Eaat, are all companies developing lab grown alternatives to meat and fish. All told, these companies have raised well over $200 million. Some of the biggest names in traditional meat production like Tyson Foods are investing in meat alternatives.
Image Credit: Getty Images/VectorMine
“It’s about getting the price at scale. The companies that are using smaller volumes are bringing it down 10 to 100 times cheaper. We can do that. But our superpower is producing the growth medium at scale and doing it 1,000 times cheaper,” said Matt Anderson-Brown. “We’re talking about $2 to $3 per liter at scale.”
Future Fields’ founders didn’t say much about the technology that they’re using, except to say that they’re genetically modifying a specific organism by inserting the genetic code for specific protein production into their unidentified cell line to produce different growth factors.
The University of Alberta isn’t unique in its development of a Health Accelerator Program, but its equity-free approach allows startups and would-be bio-engineering entrepreneurs an opportunity to develop their businesses without fear of dilution.
Future Fields has already raised a small, pre-seed round of $480,000 from a group of undisclosed angel investors and the Grow Agrifood Tech Accelerator out of Singapore.
And company has the capacity to produce a few hundred liters of its growth factor, according to Gafour, and is working on plans to scale up production to hit tens of thousands of liters per month over the next year.
For Gafour and his compatriots, the cellular agriculture industry has already reached an inflection point, and the next steps are less about scientific discovery and radical innovation and more about iteration and commercialization.
“With the inclusion of a growth media solution, the core pieces are in place, and now it’s a matter of understanding the efficiencies in being able to scale it up,” said Gafour.
Still, there are other components that need to be developed for the industry to truly bring down costs to a point where it can compete with traditional meat. Companies still need to develop a scaffolding to support the growth of protein cells into the muscle and fatty tissues that give meat its flavor. Bioreactor design needs to improve as well, according to Matt Anderson-Baron. “It’s the wild west. There’s so many things still to be done.”
And there are many companies working on these technologies as well. Glycosan, Lyopor and Prellis are all working on building tissue scaffolding that can be used for animal organ development.
“The vision oif our company was to accelerate this industry and move the industry along,” said Jalene Anderson-Baron. “At first we didn’t realize the potential of our technology. We thought that everyone would overcome that roadblock around the same time. As we were speaking with other companies and speaking with investors who had been in touch with other companies, we realized this was the key piece to move the industry forward.”
The Station: ADA turns 30, Panasonic’s new battery tech and delivery (data) woes
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox.
Hello and welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B.
Before we get into all the mobility news and analysis of the week I wanted to flag an upcoming event that might be of interest to the budding entrepreneurs out there. TC Disrupt, that BIG annual event we hold each fall, is virtual this year. I can’t tell you everything yet, except we put a lot of effort and tech into making this interactive and exciting. This is not going to some boring webinar.
We’re adding a bunch of new events to Disrupt this year, including something we’re calling Pitch Deck Teardown. Top venture capitalists and entrepreneurs will evaluate and suggest fixes for Disrupt 2020 attendees’ pitch decks. Investors who signed up for the Pitch Deck Teardown, include Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, Charles Hudson with Venture Forward, Niko Bonatsos of General Catalyst, Megan Quinn with Spark Capital, Cyan Banister of Long Journey Ventures, Roelof Botha from Sequoia and Susan Lyne with BBG.
Only pitch decks of registered Disrupt attendees will be selected. Here’s a complete breakdown of the event and how to register.
The Pitch Deck Teardown couldn’t come at a better time either. During our Early Stage event last month, Jake Saper with Emergence Capital talked about how to time your Series A fundraise. September just so happens to be a big month for investors to review pitch decks.
Alrighty then. Vamos.
Friendly reminder that you can reach out and email me anytime 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.
Micromobbin’
This summer is turning out to be a crucial period for scooter companies vying for permits in a handful of markets. Cities learned a thing or two during that first wave of electric scooters that hit the streets a couple of years ago. This time around, city leaders are placing more restrictions on e-scooters and limiting the number of companies allowed to operate in an urban area. That’s an important change, and one that raises the stakes for scooter companies.
First there was Paris, which awarded Dott, Lime and Tier permits to operate in the city. Now, Chicago has issued permits to Bird, Lime and Spin for its second pilot program. Chicago is limiting scooter use to 15 mph between 5 a.m. and 10 p.m. And there are few areas, like the Lakefront Trail, where scooters are prohibited.
Each scooter company is limited to no more than 3,333 devices, 50% of which must be deployed with an equity priority area. New to the second pilot is a requirement that all e-scooters must have locks that require riders to secure the scooter to a fixed object to end their trip.
On a side note, Lyft did not apply for the scooter permit. I asked Lyft, ‘why not?’ The company said it’s focusing on its expansion of Divvy, Chicago’s bike-sharing system. The city made Lyft the exclusive operator of Divvy last year and now starting to expand. The Divvy system will eventually include 16,500 bikes and 800 stations. Here’s what Lyft had to say:
“We have spent the better part of the last year working with communities in Chicago’s South and West Sides to prepare for new stations and ebikes. In order to prioritize our work with CDOT to expand Divvy and provide the highest possible experience for Divvy members, Lyft opted out of submitting an application that mirrored requests of this year’s scooter pilot. We are dedicated to the long-term success of micromobility in Chicago, and we look forward to future opportunities to work with the City to combine the benefits of bikes and scooters into one Divvy membership.”
In other micromobbin’ news …
Bird said Friday it is launching its shared e-scooters in Yonkers, New York as an “exclusive” operator. The word “exclusive” is one of those buzzwords that is tossed around a lot so I asked what this actually means. And Bird says it is the only company that will be issued a permit to operate in Yonkers. So there you have it. The company’s fleet of next-generation Bird Two scooters will be available to rent starting August 10.
Image Credits: Bird
Revel, the shared moped startup, has shut down operations in New York City following two deaths within days of each other. The startup’ blue mopeds had become a common sight in New York City. Revel, founded in March 2018 by Frank Reig and Paul Suhey, started with a pilot program in Brooklyn and later expanded to Queens. Revel has been on a fast-paced growth track, expanding to Austin, Miami and Washington, D.C in its first 18 months of operation. In January, the company launched in Oakland and recently announced plans to expand to San Francisco this August.
The company said in a statement that is reviewing its safety measures and does plan to return to New York.
Deal of the week
Prickly relations between China and the United States, particularly around trade, has not slowed the march of Chinese companies hoping to list on American stock exchanges. Li Auto is just the latest example, Rita Liao reported this week.
Li Auto is aiming for a growing Chinese middle class that aspires to drive cleaner, smarter and larger vehicles. Its first model, sold at a subsidized price of 328,000 yuan, or $46,800, is a six-seat electric SUV that began shipping at the end of last year.
The five-year-old Chinese electric vehicle startup raised $1.1 billion through its debut on Nasdaq. Li Auto priced its IPO north of its targeted range at $11.5 per share, giving it a fully diluted market value of $10 billion. It also raised an additional $380 million in a concurrent private placement of shares to existing investors.
Image credit: Li Auto
Other deals that got my attention this week …
Argo AI is now valued at $7.5 billion, a figure that was confirmed Thursday, nearly two months after VW Group finalized its $2.6 billion investment in the autonomous vehicle technology startup. You might recall that Argo came out of nowhere in 2017 with $1 billion (to be spread over several years) in back from Ford. Last year, VW announced it was going to invest in Argo as well.
Under the deal that was finalized last month, Ford and VW have equal ownership stakes, which will be roughly 40% each over time. The remaining equity sits with Argo’s co-founders as well as employees. Argo’s board is comprised of two VW seats, two Ford seats and three Argo seats. Ford said Thursday it netted $3.5 billion in the second quarter from selling some of its Argo equity to Volkswagen.
AUTO1 Group, the European digital used-car trading platform, raised 255 million euros ($300 million) in the form of convertible notes. The round was led by Farallon Capital Management and the Baupost Group as well as existing investor Softbank Group, the NYT reported.
Cargo.one, a Berlin-based startup that runs a marketplace for booking air freight, closed an $18.6 million Series A round of funding led by Index Ventures. Other participants in the round include Next47 as well as prior backers Creandum, Lufthansa Cargo and Point Nine Capital. A number of angel investors also joined in, including Tom Stafford of DST Global and Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, the COO of GoCardless and former chief product officer of Skyscanner.
LINE MAN, the Thai food delivery platform that is a unit of Japanese chat app LINE Corp, raised $110 million from BRV Capital Management and merged with a local restaurant aggregator. LINE MAN is loading up on capital as it aims to compete with Singapore-based Grab, Indonesia’s Go-Jek and Foodpanda of Germany’s Delivery Hero SE, Reuters reported.
FreightWaves, the freight data and analytics company, raised $37 million in a round led by Kayne Partners Fund. Other investors include 8VC, Fontinalis Partners, Revolution Ventures, Hearst Ventures, Prologis Ventures, Story Ventures and Engage Ventures.
Theeb Rent-a-Car is looking into a potential initial public offering. The Saudi Arabian rental company hired Saudi Fransi Capital to advise on the IPO, Bloomberg reported.
Toyota is taking a 10% stake in BluE Nexus, a company that makes electric drive modules. The investment is part of a deepening collaboration between the two companies.
Xpeng, the Chinese electric vehicle startup and Tesla rival that just announced a $500 million Series C+ round, is reportedly in talks to raise around $300 million ahead of an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States. (back to my earlier point about interest among Chinese companies to list on U.S. stock exchanges)
Delivery and data (breaches)
Image credit: Getty
If you hadn’t noticed, delivery has been cast as one of the big success stories to emerge during the COVID-19 pandemic. I use the term “cast” because it’s not all sunshine, roses and rainbows for the delivery industry or its users.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spike in demand for delivery services. It has also helped propel unprecedented consolidation as companies like Uber seek profitability.
There are challenges though, including an area that perhaps deserves A LOT MORE ATTENTION. I’m talking about data and privacy. Delivery companies, which includes a growing number of autonomous and teleoperated services, collect a ton of personal data from its customers. The kind of valuable data, like home addresses and credit card numbers, that are sold on the dark web.
This week, our cybersecurity editor Zack Whittaker reported on two data breaches involving delivery companies. The first was Drizly, one of the biggest online alcohol delivery services in the U.S. and Canada, raising over $68 million to date. Drizly told customers a hacker “obtained” some customer data. The hacker took customer email addresses, date-of-birth, passwords hashed using the stronger bcrypt algorithm and, in some cases, delivery addresses.
As many as 2.5 million Drizly accounts are believed to have been stolen. Here’s something to take note of, Drizy told TechCrunch that no financial information was compromised. However, a listing on a dark web marketplace from a well-known seller of stolen data claims otherwise. TechCrunch, of course, didn’t link to it. But Whittaker did take and share a screenshot.
Meanwhile, online shopping and delivery service Instacart is blaming customers who reused passwords for a recent spate of account breaches. The data breach compromised 270,000 Instacart customers. The company published a statement late on Thursday saying its investigation showed that Instacart “was not compromised or breached,” but pointed to credential stuffing, where hackers take lists of usernames and passwords stolen from other breached sites and brute-force their way into other accounts.
Customers can’t shoulder all of the responsibility. Instacart, as Whittaker notes, still does not support two-factor authentication, which — if customers had enabled — would have prevented the account hacks to begin with.
Other delivery news …
Flipkart, which is owned by Walmart, launched a hyperlocal service in suburbs of Bangalore, four years after the e-commerce group abruptly concluded its previous foray into this category.
The new service called Flipkart Quick uses the company’s supply chain infrastructure and a new location mapping technology framework to deliver within 90 minutes to customers more than 2,000 products across grocery, perishables, smartphones, electronics accessories and stationary items.
It’s electric
Remember the days when electric vehicle news was relegated to Tesla, the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Bolt? Times have changed and, well, stayed the same. Tesla still dominates the headlines and this week wasn’t any different. (more on them later). But now, there are dozens of other electric vehicle models coming to market. The upshot: charging infrastructure is becoming more important. (Hey, not everyone has a garage).
This week, GM and EVgo announced plans to add more than 2,700 new fast chargers. The rollout, which will take five years, will triple the size of the EVgo network. The first of these new EVgo fast charging stations will be available to customers starting early 2021.
The companies are targeting high-traffic areas like grocery stores, retail outlets, entertainment centers, areas where people typically spend 15 to 30 minutes. The stations, which will be powered by renewable energy, will feature new charging technology with 100 to 350-kilowatt capabilities, the companies said.
The charging partnership follows a numerous announcements from GM around its electric vehicle strategy. Earlier this week, GM said steel construction has started on the nearly 3-million-square-foot factory that will mass produce Ultium battery cells and packs. The Ultium battery, along with a modular propulsion system and electric vehicle platform, is the cornerstone of GM’ strategy to bring 20 electric vehicles to market by 2023.
GM recently released a video of its upcoming GMC Hummer EV and next week plans to reveal the Cadillac LYRIQ.
Image Credits: GM/EVgo
Other electric news this week …
BMW said it will offer the all-electric versions of X1 compact SUV and the 5 Series as part of the German automaker’s plans to have 25 electrified models in its portfolio by 2023.
Electric Brands is working on a VW Bus-inspired EV called the eBussy, via The Drive.
Fisker Inc. revealed in a presentation that was filed with the SEC that a “cornerstone agreement” with Volkswagen has been delayed, the Verge reported. Fisker wants to use Volkswagen’s modular EV platform for its upcoming electric vehicles.
Kandi Technologies Group, the Chinese electric vehicle and parts manufacturer, bringing two EVs to the United States through its subsidiary Kandi America. The two models, which are priced under $30,000 before federal incentives, will be the cheapest EVs in the United States.
Lucid Motors provided new details about its upcoming electric vehicle, the Air. In short, this luxury EV sedan is loaded up with hardware — dozens of sensors, a driver monitoring system and an Ethernet-based architecture — for an advanced driver assistance system that aims to match and even surpass its rivals.
There will be 32 sensors in all, according to Lucid, which has branded its advanced driver assistance system DreamDrive. Lidar, a sensor that gets a lot of attention, will be on the vehicle. But I was struck by the number of radar sensors on the Air. There will be five radars in all, giving the vehicle 360 degrees of radar coverage.
Panasonic revealed to TechCrunch this week that it developed new battery technology for the “2170” lithium-ion cells it produces and supplies to Tesla, a change that improves energy density by 5% and reduces costly cobalt content. The new, higher energy dense 2170 cells will be produced by Panasonic at Tesla’s factory in Sparks, Nevada. Improvements on the battery tech will continue with a 20% improvement in energy density over the next five years and a goal to be cobalt free.
Rivian’s retail strategy is starting to emerge. The company has said it will try and repurpose existing buildings for its stores, when possible. This week, the company said it is pursuing the purchase of the historic Laguna Beach South Coast Cinema. The theater’s present structure, was opened in 1935 and stood as the city’s only cinema until it closed its doors in August 2015.
Tesla’s sales in China are becoming increasingly important to its bottom line. An SEC filing this week shows that revenue in China climbed 102.9% year-over-year to $1.4 billion. That means China now makes up 23.3% of Tesla’s total revenues of $6 billion in the quarter, compared to just about 11% in the same period a year before.
Tesla also revealed in the same SEC filing that it received payroll-related benefits from the government, funds that helped reduce the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on its business, Reuters reported.
Speaking of Tesla … CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter on Tuesday night to say that the automaker would be “open to licensing software and supplying powertrains & batteries” to other automakers. Musk added that that would even include Autopilot, the advanced driver assistance software that Tesla offers to provide intelligent cruise control in a number of different driving scenarios. No word on whether any companies are biting.
ADA and mobility
Image Credits: iStock / Getty Images
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 paved the way for decades of incremental changes to the way buildings, businesses and laws accommodate people with a wide variety of disabilities. As reporter Devin Coldewey notes, the law’s effect on tech has been profound.
There is still a lot of work to do. I’m looking at all of you autonomous vehicle engineers, designers and founders.
Here are a few stories that highlight the impact of ADA.
Start with Coldewey’s overview on ADA and tech. Then move over to Streetsblog, which digs into the role bicycles have played as mobility assistive devices. Finally, check out this story on Fable, a startup that aims to make disability-inclusive design easier by providing testing and development assistance from disabled folks on-demand.
See ya’ll next week.
Watch SpaceX’s Crew Dragon splash down in the Atlantic Ocean live as astronauts return to Earth
SpaceX and NASA are getting ready to complete their most important joint mission to date – Crew Dragon Demo-2, which is the culmination of the partners’ work on their Commercial Crew program designed to certify a SpaceX spacecraft for regular human spaceflight operations. NASA astronauts are already on board Crew Dragon making their way back to Earth during a multi-hour descent, and later on Sunday will be splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.
Behnken and Hurley undocked from the International Space Station on Saturday, August 1 at just after 7:30 PM EDT, with the Crew Dragon capsule handling all of the maneuvers since in a fully automated fashion, just like it’s designed to do. SpaceX built Crew Dragon to be fully automated both during takeoff and the return to Earth and landing portion of any trip to the ISS, and in fact have previously flown a successful unscrewed version of the mission that’s happening now with astronauts on board.
To conclude Demo-2, Behnken and Hurley are currently scheduled to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico at 2:48 PM EDT (11:48 AM PDT), where they’ll be met and recovered by a SpaceX crew. This will be a historic first for a commercial spacecraft, capping a mission of historic first for private human spaceflight that began with the successful launch of Crew Dragon ‘Endeavour’ on May 30.
Once Dragon enters the atmosphere, it’ll deploy its parachutes, which will slow it until it’s traveling at a speed of just around 15 mph before it splashes down. The reason it requires such a long trip from time of departure to when it land is the ocean is that it needs to slow down from a starting speed of around 17,500 mph when it departs the ISS.
NASA and SpaceX will have live coverage on the stream above, and we’ll provide any updates about key developments in the mission as they happen.
Researchers describe how attackers can sidestep security features of chip-based credit and debit cards from certain banks to create counterfeit cards (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)
Researchers describe how attackers can sidestep security features of chip-based credit and debit cards from certain banks to create counterfeit cards — Chip-based credit and debit cards are designed to make it infeasible for skimming devices or malware to clone your card when you pay …
SpaceX launches Starlink in Indonesia to improve internet access in remote parts of the country, starting with three local health centers (Stefanno Sulaiman/Reuters)
Stefanno Sulaiman / Reuters : SpaceX launches Starlink in Indonesia to improve internet access in remote parts of the country, starting w...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Andrew Tarantola / Engadget : An adapted excerpt from the book “Your Computer Is on Fire”, on how voice assistants like Siri and Alexa al...
