&If a problem cannot be solved,& Donald Rumsfeld once wrote, &enlarge it.& I&m not about to praise him for his accomplishments, but he had a pretty good eye for diagnoses. Which takes us to the problem of urban transit. I complained recently that I didn&t care about scooter startups, because I couldn&t imagine cities ever changing in a way which made scooters really work. But lo, the scales have fallen from my eyes.
What may seem to be the problem: scooters are useful and fun for many, but discarded scooters are an unsightly mess. Whatactually the problem: cities are ruled by the iron fist of King Car. Even with maximum scooter distribution and zero regulation, the real estate occupied by scooters (and bicycles) will only ever be a vanishingly tiny fraction of a vanishingly tiny fraction of that occupied by roads and parking spaces.
The solution, obviously, is to allocate some of the latter to the former. No, not bike lanes. I mean, they have their place, but they&re cramped, they&re difficult to pass in, and their space is still only ever an adjunct to that allotted to the all-devouring demands of King Car. If you want a fourth form of transport (after cars, public transit, and good old walking) to really succeed, don&t put in more bike lanes. Do something much simpler. Ban cars from roads.
Hang on now. Don&t get apoplectic on me. I don&t mean all roads, by any means. I&m anything but anti-car. I own a car, drive frequently, and Lyft more than I should. But in the same way downtown plazas and streets are being converted into pedestrian-only zones — consider Times Square and Herald Square in NYC, (soon) Ste.-Catherine Street in Montreal, etc. — high-density cities should begin to convert some entire multi-lane roads to thoroughfares for two-wheeled electric/manual vehicles only.
If optimized correctly, the number of cars you&d get off the road because of reduced demand for Uber and Lyft should vastly outweigh the traffic displacement and reduced number of parking spaces. Cars will still be able to cross, of course, at lights synchronized for the reduced pace of two-wheelers. Bike lanes, instead of being haphazardly strewn about in a random and often disconnected series of routes, will become feeders for these scooter/bicycle superhighways. And of course streets not shared with cars will be vastly safer.
Add a congestion charge, such that people are incentivized to park their scooters/bikes either along these arteries or in designated storage zones scattered along bike lanes, and the pull of economic gravity will pull them away from cluttered sidewalks and towards well-understood, well-contained spaces. Businesses might complain — until they realize they have vastly more traffic than before.
Think big. Think Park and Amsterdam Avenues in Manhattan; Turk and Sutter/Kearny in San Francisco; Church / Davenport / DuPont in Toronto. But realize at the same time that you&re thinking small; just a couple of roads apiece, in cities which have been dominated by cars and trucks for so long that alternatives seem impossible, unthinkable, laughable. But thinking that way is a form of learned helplessness. Change for the better is entirely possible on physical, financial, technical, and/engineering levels. All that cities lack is imagination and public will.
Read more: An immodest proposal: it’s time for scooter superhighways
Write comment (95 Comments)Smartphones have disrupted transportation, payments and communication. But the underlying technology has tangentially changed a completely different sector: satellites.
The advances made in miniaturizing technologies that put a computer in your pocket — cameras, batteries, processors, radio antennas — have also made it easier and cheaper for entrepreneurs to launch matter into space. And investors are taking notice.
The chart below shows worldwide venture and PE investment in satellite technology companies.
Venture investment into satellite companies has been on a rocket-like trajectory since 2012, following a long fallow period. Although it isn&t pictured here, the last &major& satellite boom peaked in 2006, when there were five venture deals closed with satellite companies worldwide, according to our data set.
Lettake a look at some of the major players in the satellite sector. Below you can find a chart showing the most-funded private companies currently operating in the industry. We ranked them by total funding, which includes private equity rounds raised after traditional VC rounds (like seed, Series A, etc.).
In general, these satellite companies are clustered around three different themes: broadband internet delivery, hardware development and satellite-enabled services.
On the broadband front, we find a significant concentration of capital. Itnot just because internet connectivity is such a big market (it is), but it also takes a lot of capital to develop and deploy the satellites needed to build a viable service network. Thatpart of the reason whySoftBankinvested $1 billion ina $1.2 billion private equity roundraised byOneWebback in 2016.
In the world of hardware and sensors, therea race toward miniaturization and efficiency both for spacefaring satellites and their terrestrial endpoints.Kymeta, for example, has developed antenna technology that uses a holograph-like approach to acquire, steer and lock a beam to a satellite. This helps objects which move quickly or make sharp turns maintain communication with a satellite.
As with much of the tech industry though, it looks like a lot of money will be made from the services satellite hardware can facilitate.Planetdevelops and deploys its own array of camera-equipped microsatellites, which regularly capture images of earth. It then sells generalized map and site-specific data feeds to governments, the financial sector, emergency readiness agencies, agriculture companies and others. Planet has some competitors, likeDescartes Labs,Orbital Insight,Astro Digital,OmniEarth and others, competing in the earth-imaging market. But because rich geospatial and imaging data is a relatively new market, there is likely plenty of demand to go around.
In reality, modern satellite applications are more than the story of cheap electronics. Satellites (and the applications enabled by them) sit at the intersection of a number of cutting-edge technologies.
Without machine-taught computer vision systems, it would be impossible to sort and classify the firehose of visual data some satellite networks produce. If there wasn&t such a boom in mobile communications and high-bandwidth applications like live-streaming video, there wouldn&t be as much demand for new satellite technology. Without better and smaller sensors, a constellation of eyes in the sky would be limited to the visible light spectrum. If it weren&t for decades of public investment in rocketry and robotics, these little boxes of circuits and antennas would never leave Earth.
But VCs and entrepreneurs don&t look to the past; instead, they want to know what satellites will do for the future and, eventually, returns.
Based on a slightly cleaned-up set of companies in Crunchbase&ssatellite communications categoryand others, which use related keywords like &cubesat& and &nanosatellite,& we charted worldwide venture capital investment in satellite companies between 2012 and 2017. We included angel, seed, convertible note and equity crowdfunding rounds, plus the standard-variety Series A, Series B and Series C financings, as well.
Read more: Satellite startups turn to reinventing broadband, mapping and other industries
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Just six months after competing fitness tracking company Strava came under fire for revealing the location of US military bases, Finnish wearable company Polar has experienced similar privacy concerns and has suspended its 'Explore' service as a result.
Polar is the manufacturer of such popular running watches as the Polar M200 and M400, as well as
Read more: Polar’s popular fitness app inadvertently revealed military personnel’s addresses
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There can be no argument that DJI produces some of the best consumer drones in the market today. The company began to push the envelope with the 2016 Mavic Pro that offered 4K video in a portable package. And although the Spark didn’t offer 4K footage, it came with smarts that made the drone fun and easy to use. Last year's Mavic Air then combined
Read more: DJI Mavic 2 leak shows off sleeker design and swappable camera gimbal
Write comment (100 Comments)While serverless computing isn&t new, it has reached an interesting place in its development. As developers begin to see the value of serverless architecture, a whole new startup ecosystem could begin to develop around it.
Serverless isn&t exactly serverless at all, but it does enable a developer to set event triggers and leave the infrastructure requirements completely to the cloud provider. The vendor delivers exactly the right amount of compute, storage and memory and the developer doesn&t even have to think about it (or code for it).
That sounds ideal on its face, but as with every new technology, for each solution there is a set of new problems and those issues tend to represent openings for enterprising entrepreneurs. That could mean big opportunities in the coming years for companies building security, tooling, libraries, APIs, monitoring and a whole host of tools serverless will likely require as it evolves.
In the beginning we had physical servers, but there was lots of wasted capacity. That led to the development of virtual machines, which enabled IT to take a single physical server and divide it into multiple virtual ones. While that was a huge breakthrough for its time, helped launch successful companies like VMware and paved the way for cloud computing, it was the only beginning.
Then came containers, which really began to take off with the development of Docker and Kubernetes, two open source platforms. Containers enable the developer to break down a large monolithic program into discrete pieces, which helps it run more efficiently. More recently, we&ve seen the rise of serverless or event-driven computing. In this case, the whole idea of infrastructure itself is being abstracted away.
Photo: shutterjack/Getty Images
While itnot truly serverless, since you need underlying compute, storage and memory to run a program, it is removing the need for developers to worry about servers. Today, so much coding goes into connecting the programcomponents to run on whatever hardware (virtual or otherwise) you have designated. With serverless, the cloud vendor handles all of that for the developer.
All of the major vendors have launched serverless products with AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Microsoft Azure Functions all offering a similar approach. But it has the potential to be more than just another way to code. It could eventually shift the way we think about programming and its relation to the underlying infrastructure altogether.
Itimportant to understand that we aren&t quite there yet, and a lot of work still needs to happen for serverless to really take hold, but it has enormous potential to be a startup feeder system in coming years and itcertainly caught the attention of investors looking for the next big thing.
Tim Wagner, general manager for AWS Lambda, says the primary advantage of serverless computing is that it allows developers to strip away all of the challenges associated with managing servers. &So there is no provisioning, deploying patching or monitoring — all those details at the the server and operating system level go away,& he explained.
He says this allows developers to reduce the entire coding process to the function level. The programmer defines the event or function and the cloud provider figures out the exact amount of underlying infrastructure required to run it. Mind you, this can be as little as a single line of code.
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Sarah Guo, a partner at Greylock Partners, who invests in early stage companies sees serverless computing as offering a way for developers to concentrate on just the code by leaving the infrastructure management to the provider. &If you look at one of the amazing things cloud computing platforms have done, it has just taken a lot of the expertise and cost that you need to build a scalable service and shifted it to [the cloud provider],& she said. Serverless takes that concept and shifts it even further by allowing developers to concentrate solely on the userneeds without having to worry about what it takes to actually run the program.
Cloud computing company Digital Ocean recently surveyed over 4800 IT pros, of which 55 percent identified themselves as developers. When asked about serverless, nearly half of respondents reported they didn&t fully understand the serverless concept. On the other hand, they certainly recognized the importance of learning more about it with 81 percent reporting that they plan to do further research this year.
When asked if they had deployed a serverless application in the last year, not surprisingly about two-thirds reported they hadn&t. This was consistent across regions with India reporting a slightly higher rate of serverless adoption.
Graph: Digital Ocean
Of those using serverless, Digital Ocean found that AWS was by far the most popular service with 58 percent of respondents reporting Lambda was their chosen tool, followed by Google Cloud Functions with 23 percent and Microsoft Azure Functions further back at 10 percent.
Interestingly enough, one of the reasons that respondents reported a reluctance to begin adopting serverless was a lack of tooling. &One of the biggest challenges developers report when it comes to serverless is monitoring and debugging,& the report stated. That lack of visibility, however could also represent an opening for startups.
The thing about abstraction is that it simplifies operations on one level, but it also creates a new set of requirements, some expected and some that might surprise as a new way of programming scales. This lack of tooling could potentially hinder the development, but more often than not when necessity calls, it can stimulate the development of a new set of instrumentation.
This is certainly something that Guo recognizes as an investor. &I think there is a lot of promise as we improve a bunch of things around making it easier for developers to access serverless, while expanding the use cases, and concentrating on issues like visibility and security, which are all [issues] when you give more and more control of [the infrastructure] to someone else,& she said.
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Ping Li, general partner at Accel also sees an opportunity here for investors. &I think the reality is that anytime therea kind of shift from a developer application perspective, therean opportunity to create a new set of tools or products that help you enable those platforms,& he said.
Li says the promise is there, but it won&t happen right away because there needs to be a critical mass of developers using serverless methodologies first. &I would say that we are definitely interested in serverless in that we believe itgoing to be a big part of how applications will be built in the future, but itstill in its early stages,& Ping said.
S. Somasgear, managing director at Madrona Ventures says that even as serverless removes complexity, it creates a new set of issues, which in turn creates openings for startups. &It is complicated because we are trying to create this abstraction layer over the underlying infrastructure and telling the developers that you don&t need to worry about it. But that means, there are a lot of tools that have to exist in place — whether it is development tools, deployment tools, debugging tools or monitoring tools — that enable the developer to know certain things are happening when you&re operating in a serverless environment.
Having that visibility in a serverless world is a real challenge, but it is not the only opening here. There are also opportunities for trigger or function libraries or companies akin to Twilio or Stripe, which offer easy API access to a set of functionality without having a particular expertise like communications or payment gateways There could be similar analogous needs in the serverless world.
Companies are beginning to take advantage of serverless computing to find new ways of solving problems. Over time, we should begin to see more developer momentum toward this approach and more tools develop.
While it is early days, as Guo says, itnot as though developers love running infrastructure. Itjust been a necessity. &I think will be very interesting. I just think we&re still very early in the ecosystem,& she said. Yet certainly the potential is there if the pieces fall into place and programmer momentum builds around this way of developing applications for it to really take off and for a startup ecosystem to follow.
Read more: Serverless computing could unleash a new startup ecosystem
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Google Duplex first wowed us back at the Google IO 2018 developer event back in May, and since then we've been able to test it out for ourselves. The smart bot-calling service isn't available to the public at large yet, but there is one area where it might start to take off first: call centers.
A report this weekend from The Information says Google
Read more: Google Duplex could eventually make its way into call centers
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