Technology

Microsoft today announced its plans to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. Unsurprisingly, that sent a few shock waves through the developer community, which still often eyes Microsoft with considerable unease. During a conference call this morning, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, incoming GitHub CEO (and Xamarin founder) Nat Friedman and GitHub co-founder and outgoing CEOChris Wanstrath laid out the plans for GitHubfuture under Microsoft.

The core message everybody on todaycall stressed was that GitHub will continue to operate as an independent company. Thatvery much the approach Microsoft took with its acquisition of LinkedIn, but to some degree, italso an admission that Microsoft is aware of its reputation among many of the developers who call GitHub their home. GitHub will remain an open platform that any developer can plug into and extend, Microsoft promises. It&ll support any cloud and any device.

Unsurprisingly, while the core of GitHub won&t change, Microsoft does planto extend GitHubenterprise services and integrate them with its own sales and partner channels. And Nadella noted that the company will use GitHub to bring Microsoftdeveloper tools and services &to new audiences.&

With Nat Friedman taking over as CEO, GitHub will have a respected technologist at the helm. Microsoftacquisition and integration of Xamarin has, at least from the outside, been a success (and Friedman himself always seems very happy about the outcome when I talk to him), so I think this bodes quite well for GitHub. After joining Microsoft, Friedman ran the developer services team at the company. Wanstrath, who only took over the CEO role again after its last CEO was ousted after harassmentscandal at the company, had long said that he wanted to step down and take a more active product role. And thatwhathappening now that Friedman is taking over. Wanstrath will become a technical fellow and work on &strategic software initiatives& at Microsoft.

Indeed, during an interview after the acquisition was announced, Friedman repeatedly noted that he thinks GitHub is the most important developer company today — and it turns out that he started advocating for a closer relationship between the two companies right after he joined Microsoft two years ago.

During todaypress call, Friedman also stressed Microsoft&scommitmentto keeping GitHub as open as it is today — but he also plans to expand the service and its community. &We want to bring more developers and more capabilities to GitHub, he said. &Because as a network and as a group of people in a community, GitHub is stronger, the bigger it is.&

Friedman echoed that in our interview later in the day and noted that he expected the developer community to be skeptical of the mashup of these two companies. &There is always healthy skepticism in the developer community,& he told me. &I would ask developers to look at the last few years of Microsoft history and really honestly Microsoft&stransformation into an open source company.& He asked developers to judge Microsoft by that and noted that what really matters, of course, is that the company will follow through on the promises it made today.

As for the product itself, Friedman noted that everything GitHub does should be about making a developerlife easier. And to get started, that&ll mean making developing in the cloud easier. &We think broadly about the new and compelling types of ways that we can integrate cloud services into GitHub,& he noted. &And this doesn&t just apply to our cloud. GitHub is an open platform. So we have the ability for anyone to plug their cloud services into GitHub, and make it easier for you to go from code to cloud. And it extends beyond the cloud as well. Code to cloud. code to mobile, code to edge device, code to IoT. Every workflow that a developer wants to pursue, we will support.&

Another area the company will work on is the GitHub Marketplace. Microsoft says that it will offer all of its developer tools and services in the GitHub Marketplace.

And unsurprisingly, VS Code, Microsoftfree and open source code editor, will get deeply integrated GitHub support.

&Ourvision isreally all about empowering developers and creating a home where you can use any language, any operating system, any cloud, any device for every developer, whether your student, a hobbyist, a large company, a startup or anything in between.GitHub is thehome for all developers,& said Friedman. In our interview, he also stressed that his focus will be on making &GitHub better at making GitHub& and that he plans to do so by bringing Microsoftresources and infrastructure to the code hosting service, while at the same time leaving it to operate independently.

Itunclear whether all of these commitments today will easy developers& fears of losing GitHub as a relatively neutral third-party in the ecosystem.

Nadella, who is surely aware of this, addressed this directly today. &We recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement,& he said.&We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos operate independently and remain an open platform.We will always listen to develop a feedback and invest in both fundamentals as well as new capability once the acquisition closes.

In his prepared remarks, Nadella also stressed Microsoftheritage as a developer-centric company and that is it already the most active organization on GitHub. But more importantly, he addressed Microsoftrole in the open source community, too. &We have always loved developers, and we love open source developers,& he said.&We&ve been on a journey ourselves with open source and the open source community.Today, we are all in with open source.We are active in the open source ecosystem.We contribute to open source project and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open-sourced when it comes to our commitment to all source judges, by the actions we have taken in the recent past our actions today and in the future.&

Itbeen a busy year in delivery robot land.

Starship Technologies sounded the starting gun to bring autonomous delivery vehicles to market with a $17.2 million round led by Daimler back in January 2017. Then in January this year the Mountain View, Calif.-based company Nuroraised the curtain on its own vision for robo-delivery with a whopping $92 million in funding. Meanwhile, upstart Robomart has its own notion for delivery vehicles that it unveiled at CES. And not to be outdone, everyonefavorite Chinese retail powerhouse, Alibaba, announced its own self-driving delivery vehicle.

Now there&sBoxbot, the still-stealthy startup developing autonomous delivery somethings, which has picked up new cash as the race to build delivery bots rolls on.

Boxbot is a latecomer in the field. The Oakland-based company boasts impressive pedigrees from its founders — former Tesla engineer Austin Oehlerking and Mark Godwin, an entrepreneur who was working on improving logistics services through machine learning before he was acqui-hired by Uber.

As part of the new $7.5 million round, which was led by Artiman Ventures with participation from Toyota AI Ventures, Boxbotbulking up its executive team. The company poached Steve Sanchez fromAmazon Logistics,where he was working on Amazon Flex,Amazon crowdsourced delivery service.

The investment is also the first in an autonomous delivery company for Toyota AI Ventures, and one of at least five the firm has made since its launch in 2017.

For the last few years, automakers have spent several millions launching investment funds to tap startup expertise around technologies of autonomous vehicles.

In January, Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi launched the $1 billion Alliance Ventures fund to invest in new automotive technologies. The firm has made $50 million in commitments already to the Sinovation Ventures fund in China and the Maniv Mobility investment fund — focused on mobility — in Israel. Volvo has its own Cars Tech Fund, to invest in startups focused on new mobility technology, and BMW is investing $500 million in autonomous vehicles through its iVentures fund.

These commitments are part of a broader acknowledgement from the worldbiggest automakers that their industry is changing faster than their internal research and development teams can address.

The delivery dilemma

Delivery is emerging as a crucial service in the new world of autonomous mobility. From the dream of autonomous long-haul trucking to last mile delivery to personal transportation, companies are scrambling to develop new technology. McKinsey predicts that autonomous vehicles will make up 85 percent of last-mile deliveries by 2025. Thata huge slice of a massive market that Toyota AI Ventures managing director Jim Adler called &a global problem that McKinsey - Company priced at more than $80 billion in 2016.&

With a market that large, thereno wonder itso tantalizing a problem for automakers of all stripes to try and solve.

&Over the next few years, self-driving vehicles will transform the last-mile, making it cheaper to make deliveries and easier to receive them,& said Brian Wilcove, a partner at Artiman Ventures and investor in Boxbot.

And ToyotaAdler sees Boxbot as an extension of the technologies that have solved the problem of autonomy inside warehouses at companies like Amazon.

&Logistics automation within warehouses has made remarkable progress in the last decade due to advances in robotics and automated interfaces that streamline interactions between human and supply chains. An inflection point came in 2012 when Amazon bought Kiva which put them on a path to automate their fulfillment centers,& Adler wrote in a blog post. &The same autonomous technologies (i.e., sensors, perception, prediction, planning) used to pack boxes in the warehouse are now being pressed into the service of delivering those packages that last mile to your door — the most complex and expensive leg of the supply chain.&

As the developer community prepares for Apple to unveil its latest software efforts at the companyWWDC keynote later this morning, there is a younger subset of student developers feverishly roaming about excited to see what they can build next, too.

WWDC is a pretty pricey affair at $1,599 per ticket. Like some other tech companies, Apple has opted to make it a bit easier for students to attend their conference. They&ve done so through a scholarship where younger developers can submit applications and, if selected, get into the event for free, with their lodging paid for as well.

The more than 350 scholarship recipients this year represented 42 countries and 34 languages.This year, those students got another added perk as their regular agenda was interrupted by a trip to Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park campus and a meet-and-greet with CEO Tim Cook. Later, the exectweeted a video of what some of the students were working on, saying, &Nothing inspires us more than fresh ideas.&

Photo: Apple

I had the chance to sit down with a few of these young attendees, the youngest of whom was 16 years old (though students as young as 13 could apply), and chat about some of the things they are building.

&This is my third year at WWDC,& Nathan Flurry, 19, told TechCrunch. &I grew up in a very rural community and I rarely ever left the town, so WWDC was like the first time I got to meet people who cared about the same thing I did.&

As part of the application, students had to build and submit an interactive Swift playground that could be experienced in a few minutes. Flurry built a visual programming language powered by Apple Pencil interactions.

Another student I chatted with,Joseph Lou, 16, submitted a project for the scholarship that was aiming to recreate the system which the late Stephen Hawking used to communicate. &The app that I built for this scholarship was actually my first app and it was also my first time working with Swift,& Lou said.

It was clear that all of these exceedingly bright teens were also working on some pretty big projects of their own. Gabrielle Ecanow, 18, is working on an app called Study Buddy that allows students to coordinate tutoring and studying.Roland Horváth, 17, has built several apps, the latest of which is Try Not to Smile, which plays a bunch of funny videos for users and utilizes the iPhonefront camera to see how long they can make it without cracking a smile.

Harish Yerra, 16, built an app called Greetale that allows users to turn hand-written notes into greeting cards.

&I started programming when I was 12, and I just thought it would be super cool to build an iOS app,& Yerra told TechCrunch. &I&d say WWDC 2016 was a major breaking point because thatwhen I actually met a couple of my best friends and we went on to build an app…&

As the group heads into the conference starting Monday, many of them are focused on using the opportunity to connect with other developers and see what they can build next.

&I come back for the connections,& Flurry said. &The keynote is great, I love being here and itcool to see it, but I really love being around all of the engineers and meeting other developers who share a passion.&