Technology

Facebook has confirmed it has hired the former leader of the UKformer third largest political party — Nick Clegg of the middle ground Liberal Democrats — to head up global policy and comms.

The news was reported earlier by the Financial Times.

Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that Cleggtitlewill be VP, global affairs and communications, and that he starts on Monday — and will be moving with his family to California in the New Year.

Its prior global policy and communications chief,Elliot Schrage, who has been in post for a decade is staying on as an advisor, according to Facebook, and in a post announcing Clegghire COO Sheryl Sandberg thankedSchrage for his &leadership, tenacity, and wise counsel ‑- in good times and bad&.

Facebook also told us that Sandberg and founder Mark Zuckerberg were bothdeeply involved in the hiring process, beginning discussions with Clegg over the summer — as fallout from the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal continued to rain down — and emphasizing they have already spent a lot of time with him.

The company also made a point of noting that Clegg is themost senior European politician to ever take up a senior executive leadership role in Silicon Valley.

The hire certainly looks like big tech waking up to the fact it needs a far better relationship with European lawmakers.

Zuckerberg didn&t make any friends in Europe today

In a post on Facebook announcing his new job, Clegg says as much, writing: &Having spoken at length to Mark and Sheryl over the last few months, I have been struck by their recognition that the company is on a journey which brings new responsibilities not only to the users of Facebookapps but to society at large. I hope I will be able to play a role in helping to navigate that journey.&

&Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Oculus and Instagram are at the heart of so many peopleeveryday lives & but also at the heart of some of the most complex and difficult questions we face as a society: the privacy of the individual; the integrity of our democratic process; the tensions between local cultures and the global internet; the balance between free speech and prohibited content; the power and concerns around artificial intelligence; and the wellbeing of our children,& he adds.

&I believe that Facebook must continue to play a role in finding answers to those questions & not by acting alone in Silicon Valley, but by working with people, organizations, governments and regulators around the world to ensure that technology is a force for good.&

In hernote about Clegghire, Sandberg lauds Clegg as &a thoughtful and gifted leader who… understands deeply the responsibilities we have to people who use our service around the world& — before also discussing the big challenges ahead.

&Our company is on a critical journey. The challenges we face are serious and clear and now more than ever we need new perspectives to help us though this time of change,& she writes. &The opportunities are clear too. Every day people use our apps to connect with family and friends and make a difference in their communities. If we can honor the trust they put in us and live up to our responsibilities, we can help more people use technology to do good.

&Thatwhat motivates our teams and from all my conversations with Nick, itclear that he believes in this as well. His experience and ability to work through complex issues will be invaluable in the years to come.&

One former Facebook policy staffer we spoke to for an insider perspective on Clegghire, couched it as a sign Facebook is finally taking Europe seriously — i.e. as a regulatory force with the ability to bring big tech to rule.

&When I started at fb there were two people in a Regus office doing EU policy,& the person told us, speaking on condition of anonymity. &Now they have an army, and they&re still hiring.&

In Europe, the regionnew data protection framework, GDPR, which came into force at the end of May, has put privacy and security at the top of the tech agenda. And more regulations are coming — with the EUdata protection supervisor warning today that GDPR is not enough.

&The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica revelations are stillunder investigationin Europe and America, but they are only thetip of the iceberg, a sign of a much wider problem and a symptom of many more problems still unnoticed,& writesGiovanni Buttarelli in a blog entitled: The urgent case for a new ePrivacy law.

Reshaping regional rules to account for and rebalance monopolistic platform power is where EU lawmakers are increasingly turning their attention. It looks like Facebook has finally caught on that they&re serious.

&They didn&t take it seriously and they&re catching up now. I think it also just sends a strong signal that they&re not a U.S. centric company,& the former Facebooker added of the companyattitude to EU policy, dating their dawning realization that a new approach was needed to around 2016.

That was also, of course, the year that domestic election interference came home to roost for Zuckerberg, after Kremlin meddling in the US presidential elections. And after his famous failure to judge that detail important.

So no more ‘pretty crazy ideas& from Zuckerberg where politics is concerned — Nick Clegg instead.

For Brits, though, this is actually a pretty crazy idea, given Clegg is the awkwardly familiar face of middle ground, middler performance politics.

And, more importantly, the sacrificial lamb of political compromise, after his party got punished for its turn in coalition government with David Cameron Brexit triggering Conservatives.

Our ex-Facebooker source said they&d heard rumors linking the former Labour MP, David Miliband, and the Conservatives& former chancellor, George Osborne, to the global policy position too.

Whatever the truth of those rumors, in the event Facebook went with Cleggthird way — which of course meshes perfectly with the companydesire to be a platform for all views; be that conservative, liberal and Holocaust denier too.

In Clegg it will have found a true believer that compromise can trump partisan tribalism.

Though Facebookbusiness will probably test the limits of even Cleggfamous powers of accommodation.

The current state of the Lib Dem political animal — a party with now just a handful of MPs left in the UK parliament — does also hold a cautionary message for Facebookmission to be all things to all men.

A target some less machiavellian types might judge ‘mission impossible&.

Add to that, given Facebooknow dire need to win back user trust — i.e. in the wake of a string of data scandals, such as the Cambridge Analytica affair (and indeed ongoing attempts by unknown forces to use its platform for voter manipulation) — Clegg is rather an odd choice of hire, given hethe man who led a political party that fatally burnt the trust of its core supporters and convinced them to punish it with near political oblivion at the ballet box.

Still, at least Clegg knows how to say sorry in a way that be turned into a hip and shareable meme …

Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (92 Comments)

Virtual reality makes food taste better

In another example of VR bleeding into real life, Cornell University food scientists found that cheese eaten in pleasant VR surroundings tasted better than the same cheese eaten in a drab sensory booth.

About 50 panelists who used virtual reality headsets as they ate were given three identical samples of blue cheese. The study participants were virtually placed in a standard sensory booth, a pleasant park bench and the Cornell cow barn to see custom-recorded 360-degree videos.

The panelists were unaware that the cheese samples were identical, and rated the pungency of the blue cheese significantly higher in the cow barn setting than in the sensory booth or the virtual park bench.

Thatright: cheese tastes better on a virtual farm versus inside a blank, empty cyberia.

&When we eat, we perceive not only just the taste and aroma of foods, we get sensory input from our surroundings & our eyes, ears, even our memories about surroundings,& said researcher Robin Dando.

To be clear, this research wasn&t designed to confirm whether VR could make food taste better but whether or not VR could be used as a sort of taste testbed, allowing manufacturers to let people try foods in different places without, say, putting them on an airplane or inside a real cow barn. Because food tastes differently in different surroundings, the ability to simulate those surroundings in VR is very useful.

&This research validates that virtual reality can be used, as it provides an immersive environment for testing,& said Dando. &Visually, virtual reality imparts qualities of the environment itself to the food being consumed & making this kind of testing cost-efficient.&

Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (96 Comments)

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunchventure capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we had the Three Excellent Friends (Connie Loizos, Danny Chrichton, and Alex Wilhelm) on hand to kick things about with Scale Venture Partnerown Rory O&Driscoll.

As I&ve written the last few weeks, what a pile of news we&ve had recently. And like the last few episodes, we had to pick and choose what to drill into. This week: Twilio-Sendgrid, Palantir, Uber, Lyft, and Tencent Music IPOs, Instacart, and Saudi Arabia.

In order, I think First, we tackled the week&sbiggest venture-themed M-A: Twilio buying SendGrid. Keep in mind that they are both recent IPOs; Twilio went out in 2016, and SendGrid in 2017.

The $2 billion-ish all-stock transaction is effectively Twilio using its rich market cap (rich in terms of its revenue and profit multiples) to snag anobvious (though intelligent) extension of API-powered communications toolset.

Next up we dug into the chance that Palantir is worth $41 billion. Spoiler: It isn&t. Then we chatted the two other recently-floated IPO valuations for Uber ($120 billion) and Lyft ($15 billion). They probably make more sense, depending a little on how you add and then divide.

All that and we also touched on the recent delay in the Tencent Music IPO, a profitable company.

Then we riffed through the Instacart round ($600 million more at a $7.6 billion valuation; wow), and re-touched on Silicon Valleycurrently least popular dinner party topic: how much Saudi money has recently gone to work powering tech startups.

A big thanks to you for not only sticking with Equity for so long, but also for making it quite literally as popular as it has ever been. Itsuper fun to have the biggest crew with us every week that we&ve ever had.

You, yesyou, are a delight.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us onApple Podcasts,Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.

Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (93 Comments)

The market for small satellites in low Earth orbit is expanding faster than the gas in a thruster nozzle, and Vector aims to be the go-to launch platform for companies looking to put a bird in the air on short notice. The company just raised a $70 million B round and aims to take its first payload into space early next year.

Smaller launch systems are already helping bring down the cost of going to orbit, but therestill a huge amount of room to improve. Satellites and experiments are still waiting for years, or at least more than a few months, for their chance to get to LEO. Vector is hoping to be the company they come to when they want to launch on the scale of weeks.

Vector Space Systems aims to launch satellites by the hundreds

Of course, that kind of quick turnaround isn&t easy. You have to build hundreds of rockets to be prepared for demand, but thatexactly Vectorplan. Naturally this requires a considerable amount of capital.

After doing a lot of groundwork with Defense Dept. and NASA grants, the company raised a $1M seed round back in 2016, and expanded with a $21M round the next year led by Sequoia. The numbers keep on growing with today$70M round, led this time by Kodem Growth Partners.

&Vector is entering an extremely important phase of our journey, transitioning from a focus on research and development to flight operations and profitability. This Series B financing is a critical element in Vectormission to improve access to space and become a dominant launch provider to the small satellite industry,& said CEO and co-founder Jim Cantrell in a press release.

Vector speeds toward orbital launch capability with $70M in new funding The company has already done sub-orbital proving flights of its launch system, and the first orbital launch is scheduled for December. They&ll be taking off from the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska — date TBD. Once orbital launch capability is established, Vector will be getting a lot of calls, so some of the money will go towards sales and marketing personnel, which should roughly double its presence in Silicon Valley,

But the bulk of the new funds will be dedicated to the establishment of a new rocket manufacturing facility in Tucson. You don&t build hundreds of launch vehicles with some second-hand factory.

The companyoriginal roadmap had orbital launch late last year, but in this business itbetter to be a little late and get things right. That said the vision for the rocket itself hasn&t been adjusted substantially.

&The original design of the Vector-R launch vehicle has largely remained the same since the founding of Vector and the acquisition of Garvey Spacecraft Corporation in 2016 (where the initial design was developed over a 15yr process),& explained co-founder and chief sales and marketing officer Shaun Coleman.

Demand has been sustained for the 50-60kg payload capacities the company is looking to offer, Coleman noted; a heavy configuration that can lift up to 290kg is also underway. (For comparison, a SpaceX Falcon 9 can lift around 25,000kg of payload. These are very small rockets and thatby design.)

We&ll know more about Vectorfirst orbital launch as we approach it. In addition to Kodem, Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Shasta Ventures all contributed to the round.

Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (92 Comments)

WhenTrackR raised $50 million from investors that included Amazon a year ago, the Santa Barbarastartup made a big splash in the growing market for small connected dongles that you could attach to &dumb& objects like keys to keep tabs on their location. But times for the company have been challenging since then. Itweatheredlayoffs; a succession of natural disasters; and its co-founders stepping away from exec roles asCEO and president. Those events took their toll: we discovered that TrackR quietly closed an additional, small amount of funding earlier this year — but on a valuation of $40 million, a 73 percent drop compared to less than a year before.

Now it looks like the startup is about to enter another new phase. TrackR is launching a new brand, Adero, and sources say it is widening its focus to other uses for its tracking technology, taking TrackR beyond the circular Bluetooth fobs that form the core of its service today.

TechCrunch first learned of the brand change from an anonymous tipster, who said he&d noticed a legal name change for the company on Carta, from TrackR to Adero, &to match their new focus on home solutions.& Another source said that TrackR had been talking to retailers to sell what sounds like a larger connected home solution, although the outcome of those discussions is not clear.

We have also noticed that TrackR has been discounting its existing stock, a sign that it could be trying to clear the decks for whatever is coming next. Contacted for this story, a spokespersondid not comment on whether it would continue to sell products like the TrackR Bravo and Pixel — only that it would continue tosupport them.

&TrackR will continue to support all products we&ve sold into the market,& he said. &Both the battery replacement program and the Crowd Locate network are both active.&

Christian Smith, who had been the companypresident but quietly left his executive role at the startup at the end of last year,had once described a bigger vision of targeting enterprises in an IoT play, although italso not clear if this is part of TrackRplan now, or if it ever will be.

Whatever the pivot will entail, it is happening at a critical time. The company quietly raised$10 million in July, at a $40 million valuation according to Pitchbook. It was a clear downround: TrackR was valued at $150 million when it raised $50 million a recently as August 2017. Investors were not disclosed in the most recent funding, but previous backers of the company, in addition to Amazon, include Foundry Group, NTT, and Revolution.

&As our valuation reflects, at the start of this year, we made a conscious decision with the support of our board to build a new future instead of chasing incremental growth,& a spokesperson said of the reduced valuation. &The future we&re building revolves around helping our users proactively manage the chaos of life. We&re excited to reveal the first chapter of our new story in a few weeks.&

TrackR is expected to make an official announcement of its plans towards the end of November, we understand. It declined to comment on the new brand or direction for this article.

But we founda trail of records connecting TrackR to Adero dating from the middle of this year — an indication that the startup has been working on this strategy for at least six months.

Starting in May 2018, Trackr registered three trademarks for Adero. Onefiled in May of this yeardescribes Adero in fairly generic terms: &Telecommunications services, namely, electronic transmission of data, messages, graphics, images, audio, video and information among users relating to locating, managing, organizing, and tracking assets, devices, and objects.&

Another trademark application details &cloud based software fortracking, organizing, and managing assets, objects, and devices; providing an interactive website featuring non-downloadable software that allows for the tracking, organizing, and managing of assets, objects, and devices; providing temporary use of non-downloadable cloud-based software for sharing information about, organizing, and managing networked wireless devices; providing temporary use of online non-downloadable software that shares information and data between electronic devices within a community of users; providing an on-line network environment that features technology for sharing, organizing, and managing data between wireless devices.&

A third describes hardware to manage such a service.

Trackr also registered separate trademarks around the same time is for a brand called &Activefield,& which might be one of the components of the Adero solution. (Its descriptions match those of the Adero trademarks.)

TrackR is rebranding to Adero as it looks beyond small devices to track lost items

In addition to that, aTwitter profile for Adero features a picture of Santa Barbara — the homebase of Trackr.And ownership of the Adero.comdomain, meanwhile, was transferred in May 2018,although the owner is not listed publicly (not unusual with domain applications). (An older Adero that some might remember was a telecoms company that had raised nearly $97 million in the first dot-com wave but then — like so many other startups of the time —shut down.)

IoT or bust

Trackrshift speaks to some of the challenges that have hung over the market for IoT when it comes to consumer services.

There is a lot of exciting potential in having all of the physical things in your world able to &speak& and for you to be able to control them by way of data, but there are also hurdles.

To name just two, the market is full of competition, not just between lookalike dongles, but also between a wide range of products that are all getting connectivity built into them, removing the need for the dongle to begin with. This all makes for difficult margins.

Second, although we have seen a flood of products hit the market, itstill early days when it comes to understanding just how strong demand is for these products, and what it is that consumers ultimately will want to invest in. &Issues around interoperability, security and privacy concerns, and the cost of devices will continue to be leading inhibitors to the marketgrowth,& IDC analyst Adam Wright noted in a recent report.

As it happens, both TrackR and its closest competitor Tile have reportedly had disappointing sales in key periods like the holidays, and tellingly Tile has also seen a series of recent changes.

In September, the company appointed a new CEO, CJ Prober, as it took on a new strategic investment from Comcast that points to its own efforts to widen its business beyond its square trackers. It also moved into subscription services, with thelaunch of a new device with a battery that can be replaced by way of a subscription.

For its part, Tile last month said that it has sold more than15 million of its square devices, accounting for some 95 percent of the market in the US (according to estimates from NPD), while TrackRmost recent update of 5 million shipped dates from 2017. In the wider game of economies of scale that underpins so much of the hardware business, those figures may have been the writing on the wall for TrackR.
Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (99 Comments)

I miss the old MacBook Pro. Remember when the MacBook Pro had a good keyboard Or an SD Card slot Or an escape key I miss the time when the MacBook Pro was 2mm thicker than the current version but had a full-size USB port.

Remember the wonder of MagSafe Or the glory that was using a MacBook Pro outside because of the matte screen

Remember when the power adapter for Apple laptops had little fold-out tabs to hold the cord There was also a time that a random brush of the keyboard wouldn&t trigger Siri.

There was a time when Apple made great laptops and there is now.

Yesterday Apple announced an upcoming event where the company will likely release new laptops and iPads. These are some of the features TechCrunch writers hope return to Applenotebook computers.

Escape Key

The Touch Bar is clever. I like it most of the time. But I like the escape key more. Right now, on Macs equipped with the TouchBar, the escape key is a temporary button on the TouchBar. Itpositioned off-center, too, which forces users to relearn its location.

Itsilly. The escape key has been with PCs for generations and is critical across applications and use cases. Everyone from causal gamers to coders use the escape key on a regular basis.

Keep the TouchBar, but make it a bit smaller and position it between an escape key and a real power button. Just give me my escape key back. And make Siri optional. I&ve had a TouchBar-equipped MacBook Pro for nearly two years and have yet to find a reason to use Siri.

USB Ports

I&m over living the dongle life. From everything from charging a phone to connecting a camera, standard USB ports need to return to the MacBook Pro. Since we&re dreaming here, I would love to have one per side. The PC industry has been slow to jump on USB-C. Even Apple hasn&t gone all-in and thatthe issue here.

Think about it: If a person buys a MacBook Pro and iPhone, that person cannot connect their iPhone to their new MacBook Pro without buying an adapter or cable. Same goes for an iPad. If a person wants to buy a new iPad and new MacBook Pro, the two products cannot connect out of the box.

Apple launched the USB-C equipped MacBook Pro in 2016. It2018. For a company that understands ecosystems, Apple has done a poor job ensuring all of its products are compatible out of the box. The first USB-C Apple Watch cable was released today.

SD Card Slot

The MacBook Pro is billed as a laptop for the mobile professional yet it doesn&t allow some mobile professionals to connect their gear without adapters.

The SD Card is the overwhelming standard of photographers and videographers — a key audience for the MacBook Pro — and yet these folks now have to use adapters to connect their gear. Until the latest MacBook Pro redesign, there was a built-in SD Card reader, and Apple should (but won&t) build one into the next version.

External battery level indicator

A few generations ago, the MacBook and MacBook Pro had tiny button on the side that, when pressed, illuminated little lights to give the user an approximation of the remaining battery life. It was lovely.

You know the drill: You&re running out the door and need to know if you should bring your large power adapter. You don&t need to know exactly how much time until your laptop dies. You need an idea. And thatwhat these lights provided. With just a press of a button, the user would know if the laptop would last 20 minutes or 2 hours.

Clever Power Adapter

For generations, Apple laptop chargers had little tabs that folded out and gave the owner a place to wrap the cable. Ita simple and effective design. Steve Jobs is even listed on the 2001 patent. Those tabs disappeared when Apple went USB-C in 2016.

The latest charger is the same shape as the previous version but lacks the tabs, forcing owners to store the USB-C cable apart from the charging block. Ita little thing but little things was what made Apple products delightful.

MagSafe

The elimination of MagSafe is nearly too painful to talk about. It was magical. Now itdead.

Herehow it worked: The power cable was magnetic. Instead of sticking into the laptop, it connected to the side of it. If someone tripped over the cable, the cable would harmlessly disconnect from the laptop.

When Apple first launched MagSafe, the company loudly proclaimed they did so because customers kept breaking the connectors that plugged into the laptop. You know, like whatin the current MacBook.

A good keyboard

I could forego all of the above if Apple could fix the keyboard in the latest MacBook Pro. Itterrible.

Our Natasha Lomas said it best in her excellent piece called &An ode to Appleawful MacBook keyboard,&

The redesigned mechanism has resulted in keys that not only feel different when pressed vs the prior MacBook keyboard — which was more spongy for sure but that meant keys were at reduced risk of generating accidental strikes vs their barely there trigger-sensitive replacements (which feel like they have a 40% smaller margin for keystrike error) — but have also turned out to be fail prone, asparticles of dust can find their way in between the keys, as dust is wont to do, and mess with the smooth functioning of key presses — requiring an official Apple repair.

Yes, just a bit of dust! Move over ‘the princess and the pea&: Apple and the dust mote is here! ‘Just use it in a vacuum& shouldn&t be an acceptable usability requirement for a very expensive laptop.

Seriously. The keyboard is the worst part of the latest generation of the MacBook.

Alternatives

For the first time in 15 years I&m considering switching back to a Windows laptop. MicrosoftSurface Book is not without flaws, but ita solid machine in my limited experience. I would be willing to try the less-powerful Surface Laptop 2, too. They&re just missing one thing: iMessage.

Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (94 Comments)
  1. Funderbeam CEO to talk about disrupting startup funding at Disrupt Berlin
  2. Can the Google Pixel 3 XL outperform a compact camera... or even a DSLR
  3. BT's best fibre broadband deal now comes with a free Fitbit Charge 3
  4. Preventing data loss in a perilous digital age
  5. Days Gone delayed until April 2019 'for further polish'