Technology

A few months back we took a look at Cloosiv, a company aiming to provide smaller coffee shops a mobile ordering solution that can compete with those of the mega coffee chains.

Today the Cloosiv team is announcing that they&ve raised a $1M seed round.

Most coffee shops want to be able to offer mobile ordering — but apps are tough to build and maintain, and users don&t want to install an app for a coffee shop they might only visit once or twice.

Instead, Cloosivapproach is to build one big network of coffee shops all under the same app roof. Open up Cloosiv, and up pops a list of nearby, Cloosiv-enabled shops. Tap into any of the shops, and you&ll get a mobile ordering experience not unlike what you&ll find at the huge name competitors — with things like order history, item customization, and tipping all incorporated. Cloosiv charges merchants a percentage off each order, with the percentage decreasing as order volume goes up.

Cloosiv founder Tim Griffin tells me that investors in the round include Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, Roger Dickey (Founder and former CEO of Gigster), Avichal Garg (former Facebook Director of Product Management), Ken Deeter, Brad Powers (CTO of Passport), and John Kim (co-founder of the chat API company SendBird).

Cloosiv currently has around 315 locations using the platform, and they&re expecting to pass 500 by the end of this year.

With mobile ordering making up at least 13% of Starbucks& transactions in the US last year, this space is heating up. A competing platform out of Seattle, Joe Coffee, announced just a few months back that it had raised $750k with plans to expand its network to other major cities.

While Cloosiv merchants currently receive orders through the standalone Cloosiv app, the next step for the company is integrating orders into the point-of-sales apps many merchants are already using — like Clover, Micros, and Square. Griffin tells me a partnership with Square is already in the works, with integration into the Square point-of-sales app &close.&

The FCC repeal of net neutrality rules has been significantly weakened by a federal appeals court, which ruled that the Commission could not preempt state laws like those pending in California. And although the repeal largely survived otherwise, one judge called the logic on which it is based &unhinged from the realities of modern broadband service.&

The outcome of this case is not final, as the issue may rise as far as the Supreme Court, whose past decisions lower courts are bound to follow, yet are increasingly shown to be out of step with the way technology and markets work today. (You can read the full 186-page court opinion here.)

But the threat of preempting state net neutrality rules with a weaker federal rule was a very serious one that promised a proliferation of legal battles when the inevitable state-federal conflicts arose. Fortunately for the states, the court completely shut down the FCCarguments that it had the authority to overrule states, completely declawing the Commissionrules.

Mozilla and several partners filed the lawsuit against the FCC last year, challenging Chairman Ajit Pai&Restoring Internet Freedom& rulemaking on a variety of fronts. Few of these were availing, as the court showed a marked predisposition towards taking the agency at its word on matters of, say, economic effects of previous rules, the competitive landscape of broadband providers, and suggested alternatives for consumer protection.

The biggest miss was the challenge to broadband being reclassified as an information service from a telecommunications service — the distinction at the heart of this decades-long conflict.

The court found that the FCCexplanation that DNS and caching services mean that broadband providers do more than simply move bits from place to place. This is a hugely disingenuous argument, as I have discussed in detail before (involving Brett Kavanaugh, now on the Supreme Court), but the court determined that it was bound by precedent to defer to the agency.

FCC wrong on public safety, Lifeline, and state laws

The court did agree with Mozilla et al. on a few fronts.

First there are the potential threats to public safety of potential blocking and throttling by broadband providers. The case last year of firefighters in California having their Verizon devices throttled in the middle of wildfire control operations showed that there are times when these threats may be matters of life and death. Because the FCC only barely touches on this matter, the court ordered them to revisit the order and do so.

The Commissiondisregard of its duty to analyze the impact of the 2018 Order on public safety renders its decision arbitrary and capricious in that part and warrants a remand with direction to address the issues raised.

Second there is the Lifeline program, which uses federal funds to subsidize mobile and broadband access for people in underserved areas, tribal lands, and so on. The law defining Lifeline terms these things telecommunications services, but the FCC just reclassified broadband as an information service — which basically removes the authority to run the Lifeline program at all. The lawsuit points this out, and the court agrees that ita huge oversight for the FCC not to address it.

The Commission brushed off their concern. That was straightforward legal error which requires remand.

Lastly and most importantly is the question of preemption. As I and others have noted before, the FCC in its repeal of 2015net neutrality rules abdicated its only real authority for interfering with state rules. The Title II powers that govern telecommunications services would allow the FCC to regulate interstate common carriers, but it gave up those powers when it gave up Title II.

Yet it still claimed to be able to stop states from doing their own thing, which the court rightly deemed an attempt to &create preemption authority out of thin air.&

The Commission ignored binding precedent by failing to ground its sweeping Preemption Directive—which goes far beyond conflict preemption—in a lawful source of statutory authority. That failure is fatal.

By reclassifying broadband as an information service, the Commission placed broadband outside of its Title II jurisdiction.

As a matter of both basic agency law and federalism, the power to preempt the States& laws must be conferred by Congress. It cannot be a mere byproduct of self-made agency policy.

Not only is the Commission lacking in its own statutory authority to preempt, but its effort to kick the States out of intrastate broadband regulation also overlooks the Communications Actvision of dual federal-state authority and cooperation in this area specifically.

The entire preemption section of the rulemaking is therefore vacated, the court decided.

That is huge news. If the federal rules, whatever they are, do not have precedence over state rules, then states are free to enact their own and expect companies to abide by them. We&ve seen how this works in some cases like Illinois, where biometric measures like facial recognition are strictly regulated. This necessitated, for instance, Facebook making changes to its photo tagging systems that also affect users outside Illinois.

In a similar vein, state rules focused on net neutrality and user privacy, like California&s, could force companies to adjust policies at a global level. It would make little sense and no little trouble for Comcast to have a special &California edition& of its services.

This effectively makes the FCCnational rules more of a lowest possible baseline than the law of the land. Having such inadequate and poorly justified rules in that role isn&t quite as scary.

Mozilla was optimistic despite much of its complaint being thrown out. &We are encouraged to see the Court free states to enact net neutrality rules that protect consumers,& said the companychief legal officer, Amy Keating. &We are considering our next steps in the litigation around the FCC2018 Order, and are grateful to be a part of a broad community pressing for net neutrality protections in courts, states and in Congress.&

Denouncing the FCC&technological anachronism&

The court repeatedly deferred to previous Supreme Court rulings and to the FCCfreedom as an expert agency to provide &reasonable& interpretation of the law to justify its policies, even if those interpretation is not necessarily the &best.&

But the FCC is testing the utmost limits of the courtfavor in this, warned circuit judge Patricia Millett. She referred specifically to using the existence of DNS and caching as justification for claiming broadband services are more than just telecommunications.

This explanation has been set forth before by no less than Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who subsequently received a sound intellectual pummeling by his colleague, circuit judge Srinivasan.

Although the court was bound to allow it, Judge Millett in an extended concurring opinion that she was &deeply concerned that the result is unhinged from the realities of modern broadband service&:

Brand X [the relevant Supreme Court decision] was decided almost fifteen years ago, during the bygone era of iPods, AOL, and Razr flip phones. The market for broadband access has changed dramatically in the interim.

In 2005, the Commissionclassification decision was &just barely& permissible. Almost fifteen years later, hanging the legal status of Internet broadband services on DNS and caching blinks technological reality.

The question is whether the combination of transmission with DNS and caching alone can justify the information service classification. If we were writing on a clean slate, that question would seem to have only one answer given the current state of technology: No.

By putting singular and dispositive regulatory weight on broadbandincidental offering of DNS and caching, the Commission misses the technological forest for a twig.

(Emphasis mine.) She laments that as a lower court they had no power to consider this, but that the Supreme Court can — and should. Or if it won&t, Congress can act and intervene to expose the FCCthreadbare logic for the sham it is. &Either intervention would avoid trapping Internet regulation in technological anachronism,& she concludes.

In other words, the FCCentire argument rests on an increasingly flimsy legal technicality that only a higher court or Congress can address.

Until that happens the current FCC rules, much weaker than the 2015 ones, will remain in effect — but as noted earlier, states are free to enact better ones and the Commission can&t do a thing about it. Thatan enormous victory for net neutrality advocates.

&When the FCC rolled back net neutrality it was on the wrong side of the American people and the wrong side of history. Todaycourt decision shows that the agency also got it wrong on the law,& said FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who has consistently opposed the new rule, in a statement. &As the FCC revisits its policies in light of the courtdirectives, I hope it has the courage to run an open and fair process.&

NASA has announced the total funding it will distribute to the 14 companies itchosen to work with on developing key, innovative technologies that will be instrumental in helping get the agency to the Moon through the Artemis program, and potentially to Mars and beyond later on.

The U.S. space agency is awarding $43.2 million to the companies, in varying amounts ranging from $1.3 million to as much as $10 million (going to Blue Origin) for the most lucrative contract.

NASA announced in July a similar series of partnerships selected to further its Moon shot program, which also included SpaceX and Blue Origin. This new &Tipping Point& partnership program round includes Blue Origin, as mentioned, as well as SpaceX, OxEon Energy, Skyre, SpaceX, Infinity Fuel Cell and Hydrogen, Paragon Space, TallannQuest, Accion Systems, CU Aerospace, ExoTerra, Blue Canyon Technologies, Astrobotic Technology, Intuitive Machines and Luna Innovations.

It includes projects that range from developing autonomous navigation for satellites, better propulsion systems, rover tech, advanced spacecraft avionics, cryogenic propellant and more.

Blue Origin will be using its $10 million to develop a ground-based demonstration of liquefying hydrogen and oxygen, and storing the resulting liquid. This will demonstrate the viability of producing and storing liquid rocket propellant on the Moon, and will be a key step toward the development of a Moon-based propellant production plant.

Meanwhile, SpaceX will be working with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama to build nozzles that will be used in spacecraft refueling operations. This tech will be crucial to SpaceXStarship, which Elon Musk said on Saturday will need to refuel ship-to-space tanker in orbit in order to load in enough propellant post Earth-based launch to make the rest of the trip to the Moon and Mars. NASA awarded SpaceX $3 million to support this project.

Astrobotic is working with Carnegie Mellon University with a $2 million investment from NASA in order to develop and build small rovers that can carry light payloads and work in tandem with large landers. These would act like advance scouts to work on researching and readying landing and base sites on the Moon. The concept illustration above depicts one of these proposed rover designs.

For the full list of projects, and the amount awarded to each, check out the official NASA announcement of the Tipping Point partnerships.