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Facebook has threatened to stop everyone in Australia from posting or sharing news articles on its platform, reacting to a proposed law demanding it pay local media companies for their work. It seems that if Facebook can't have their content for free, it would rather not have it at all.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Facebook Australia and New Zealand's managing director Will Easton lashed out at draft legislation put forward in July. Developed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the proposed new laws are intended to regulate dealings between tech giants and local news outlets, ensuring negotiating power is more balanced and preventing publishers from being exploited. Read more...

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Cosmose, a platform that tracks foot traffic in brick-and-mortar stores to help companies predict customer behavior, announced today it has raised a $15 million Series A. The round was by Tiga Investments, with participation from returning investors OTB Ventures and TDJ Pitango, who co-led Cosmose’s seed round last year. The company said its valuation is now more than $100 million.

The Series A will be used for product development and geographic expansion, starting with Southeast Asian markets this year, followed by the Middle East and India. Chief executive officer Miron Mironiuk, who founded Cosmose in 2014, said its goal is to break even and generate profit by 2021.

Cosmose has offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York and Warsaw, where is software engineering team is based. Most of the stores its tech is currently use in are in China and Japan, and its clients include companies like Walmart, Marriott, Samsung, and LVMH.

As companies try to recover from the impact of COVID-19, Mironiuk said Cosmose’s platform has helped clients make decisions about when to reopen stores and what kind of inventory to stock, and how to increase revenue. For example, ‘some shops wanted to connect with customers who used to shop in their physical locations and encourage them to buy online,” he said. “Hotels in Japan were focused on promoting their in-house restaurants to local residents to make up for the lost revenue.” The company is also working with Boston Consulting Group on a report called “COVID-19 offline retail recovery traffic in China” for publication next week.

Mironiuk said that a PwC audit of the platform’s accuracy completed in December 2019 confirmed its ability to track customers within 1.6 meters of their location in a store, and that its data ecosystem now comprises of more than one billion smartphones and 360,000 stores. Cosmose’s plan is to grow that to two billion smartphones and 10 million stores by 2022.

The company offers three main products: Cosmose Analytics, which tracks customers’ movements inside brick-and-mortar stores; Cosmose AI, a data analytics and prediction platform to help retailers create marketing campaigns and increase sales; and Cosmose Media, for targeting online ads.

Cosmose does not require hardware installation, which means no regular maintenance is required after Cosmose maps a store, and helps it differentiate from rivals.

There are other companies that also analyze foot traffic in brick-and-mortar stores, including RetailNext and ShopperTrak, but being tracked might alarm customers who are concerned about their privacy. Mironiuk said all of the smartphone data Cosmose AI gathers is anonymized, so the company doesn’t know who shoppers are. The platform uses alphanumeric IDs called OMNIcookies, does not collect personal data like phone MAC addresses, mobile numbers, or email addresses, and follows data privacy laws in each of the countries it operates in. It also allows shoppers to opt-out of tracking.

In a press statement about the investment, Raymond Zage, the CEO and founder of Tiga Investments, said “I was attracted by the strong results Cosmose is already achieving for some of the world’s recognizable brands, while simultaneously ensuring user privacy is protected. Cosmose team is saving stores while enhancing consumer experience.”

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Javed, a middle-aged man, worked as a driver before losing that job earlier this year as coronavirus spread across India, prompting New Delhi to enforce a nationwide lockdown and temporarily curb several business activities.

There are millions of people like Javed in India today who have lost their livelihood in recent months. They are low-skilled workers and are currently struggling to secure another job.

An Apple alum thinks he can help. Through his app startup Apna, Nirmit Parikh is helping India’s workers learn new skills, connect with one another, and find jobs.

Parikh’s app is already changing lives. Javed, who could barely speak a few words in English before, recently posted a video on Apna app where he talked about his new job — processing raisins — in English.

In less than one year of its existence, Apna app — available on Android — has amassed over 1.2 million users.

The startup announced on Tuesday it has raised $8 million in its Series A financing round led by Lightspeed India and Sequoia Capital India. Greenoaks Capital and Rocketship VC also participated in the round.

In an interview with TechCrunch last week, Parikh said that these workers lack an organized community. “They are daily-wage workers. They rely on their friends to find jobs. This makes the prospects of them finding a job very difficult,” he said.

“The most powerful thing for me about Apna is its communities — I’ve seen people help each other start a business, learn a new language or find a gig! Communities harbinger trust and make the model infinitely scalable,” said Vaibhav Agrawal, a Partner at Lightspeed India, in a statement.

The other issue they struggle with is their skillset. “An electrician would end up working decades doing the same job. If only they had access to upskilling courses — and just knew how beneficial it could be to them — they would stand to broaden their scope of work and significantly increase their earnings,” said Parikh.

Apna is addressing this gap in multiple ways. In addition to establishing a community, and rolling out upskilling courses, the startup allows users — most of whom are first time internet users — easily generate a virtual business card. The startup then shares these profiles with prospective employers. (Some of the firms that have hired from Apna app in recent weeks include Amazon, Big Basket, and HDFC Bank.)

In the last one month, Parikh said Apna has facilitated more than 1 million job interviews — up more than 3X month-on-month. During the same period, more than 3 million professional conversations occurred on the platform.

Parikh said he plans to use the fresh capital to expand Apna’s offerings, and help users launch their own businesses. He also plans to expand Apna, currently available in five Indian cities, outside of India in the future.

There are over 250 million blue and grey collar workers in India and providing them meaningful employment opportunities is one of the biggest challenges in our country, said Harshjit Sethi, Principal at Sequoia Capital India, in a statement.

“With internet usage in this demographic growing rapidly, further catalysed by the Jio effect, apps such as Apna can play a meaningful role in democratizing access to employment and skilling. Apna has built a unique product where users quickly come together in professional communities, an unmet need so far,” he added.

A handful of other players are also looking for ways to help. Last month, Google rolled out a feature in its search engine in India that allows users to create their virtual business card. The Android-maker also launched its jobs app Kormo in the country.

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This one is unusual: Laird Superfood, a five-year-old, 100-person, Sisters, Ore.-based startup that was cofounded by famed surfer Laird Hamilton and which makes plant-based packaged beverage products, filed today to raise up to $40 million in an IPO.

We’d reported on this company early last year in large part because it had attracted backing from WeWork, the co-working company that famously made a number of bets that were very afield from its business (including a maker of wave pools) before suffering a major meltdown last fall.

In fact, according to Crunchbase, WeWork Labs provided Laird Superfood with a whopping $32 million — the bulk of the $51 million it has raised altogether, per Crunchbase. (WeWork founder Adam Neumann has said that he surfed with Hamilton in Hawaii.)

At that time, WeWork’s investment was the strangest thing about the business, a largely direct-to-consumer business that makes “superfood” coffee creamers, beverage supplements like “performance mushrooms,” and Peruvian coffee beans, among an assortment of other things like teas and hot chocolate.

This IPO may be even more curious. Founded by Hamilton and another surfer, Paul Hodge, the company is very young to be going public by today’s standards (biotech startups notwithstanding). The company booked $19 million in sales for the 12 months ended June 30, but it lost $9 million over that same period and at the rate it is spending money, including on sales and marketing, it will see a net loss of $10 million this year.

Management says it has $13.1 million in cash on hand and investments. It would have more if it hadn’t spent $7.5 million buying back Series A-1 preferred shares in November 2019 that were purchased for twice that price. (The investor that sold its shares was also relieved of its commitment to fund another $10 million. It’s easy to imagine this was WeWork but we don’t know this.) Because of that outlay, the company actually probably did pretty well last year; it just can’t state it that way.

Still, we’re a little intrigued by this one. The company’s only outside shareholder that owns more than 5% of the company is Danone Manifesto Ventures, the corporate venture arm of the global food and beverage company. It owns 13.4% of the company. Why wouldn’t Danone, which looks to have invested $10 million in the business in April, just buy out Laird Superfood outright?

It could be that there’s much more than meets the eye here (or is reflected in its S-1). We’re certainly not opposed to companies trying to go public much sooner than has been in the case in recent years. We’re just wondering if this food company is completely baked.

Either way, the decision to go public is certainly becoming an increasingly common one, given how hot the market has been despite the pandemic. According to Renaissance Capital, 27 companies joined the IPO pipeline last week alone.

Hamilton owns 13.2% of the startup. Hodge meanwhile owns 6.4%. Canaccord Genuity and Craig-Hallum Capital Group are the joint bookrunners on the deal. No pricing terms were included in the filing.

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Walmart today officially unveiled its new membership service and Amazon Prime rival, which it’s calling “Walmart+.” The $98 per year service will combine free, unlimited same-day delivery on groceries and thousands of other items, with additional benefits, like fuel discounts and access to a new Scan & Go service, similar to Walmart-owned Sam’s Club, that will allow members to check out at Walmart stores without having to wait in line.

The service will be available starting on September 15, 2020 nationwide, reaching over 4,700 Walmart stores, including 2,700 stores that offer delivery. Members can choose to pay the $98 per year after a 15-day free-trial period, or they can pay $12.95 on a month-to-month basis.

At launch, the new program promises more than 160,000 items for same-day delivery with no per-delivery fee on orders totaling $35 or more. This is the same value proposition that Walmart’s existing “Delivery Unlimited” program offers today. With the launch of Walmart+, “Delivery Unlimited” members will be moved to the rebranded and expanded service.

In addition to delivery savings, the new Walmart+ membership will include fuel discounts of up to 5 cents per gallon on any fuel type at nearly 2,000 Walmart, Murphy USA and Murphy Express stations nationwide. Walmart+ members will enable the discounts by using the Walmart mobile app, either by scanning a QR code or entering a PIN at the pump. Further down the road, the program will expand to include Sam’s Club fuel stations as well.

The Scan & Go membership perk, meanwhile, lets Walmart+ members pay without having to wait in checkout lines — a nice perk to have amid a pandemic, where time in store means time exposed to potential carriers of the novel coronavirus. Using the Walmart app, customers scan scan items as they shop, then pay for them using Walmart Pay for a touch-free checkout experience.

Walmart two years ago had tested cashierless Scan & Go technology in its stores, but killed the program due to shopper theft. Arguably, fewer people will use Scan & Go because it’s a paid service, which could help store staff better combat the earlier problems.

As with “Delivery Unlimited,” the Walmart+ orders are picked by in-store staff then handed off to partners like Postmates, DoorDash, Roadie and Point Pickup for delivery. Not owning the end-to-end experience can cause issues for consumers, however — especially because a poor delivery experience can damage Walmart’s reputation, or because customer service issues can’t be always dealt with directly when a middleman is involved. Walmart has also seen partners come and go, as delivery services ended their relationship with Walmart over the costs involved.

Walmart claims its new program is not a Prime rival. But it could encourage some number of Prime members to make a switch.

“We’re not launching Walmart+ with the intent to compete with anything else. We’re launching it with the needs of customers in mind,” explained Walmart Chief Customer Officer Janey Whiteside.

“Of course, I hope that brings in more customers and makes them more loyal, but when you’re as big as Walmart is — and serving as many people as we are — this is about really doubling down with the customers that we have and getting more share of wallet and more share of mind,” Whiteside added.

Prime is a much more expansive program. For comparison, Prime offers tens of millions of products for two-day delivery, over 10 million for one-day delivery and over 3 million for same-day delivery on orders of $35 or more. Walmart+ is focused more specifically on same-day delivery, as Walmart.com already offers free one-day or two-day shipping on orders of $35 or more without requiring a membership fee.

Prime today also offers a huge array of other perks — like access to free music, video, audiobooks, Kindle books and more. Walmart+ does not.

Still, for many customers, the value in Prime is rooted in its promise of speedy delivery. But at the same time, Amazon has tested the limits of its customer loyalty by steadily raising Prime’s subscription price over the years to now $119 when paid annually, or $12.99 per month. Walmart+ undercuts Prime at $98 per year or $12.95 per month while largely catering to the online grocery shopper — a target market that has rapidly grown during the pandemic. Walmart recently reported the pandemic helped drive its own e-commerce sales, fueled  by online grocery, up 97% in the past quarter.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s grocery strategy since its 2017 purchase of Whole Foods has yet to be streamlined. Amazon today continues to offer two different online grocery services, Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods, with a varying array of pickup and delivery options, potentially leading to consumer confusion.

That said, the pandemic has led to massive sales increases for Amazon and Walmart, along with other essential retailers like Target, with all involved reporting stellar earnings in recent quarters.

Walmart’s plans for a new subscription program had previously been reported and a placeholder website has also been live for some time. In August, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon told investors on the company’s earnings call that it was readying the launch a membership program that would be centered around delivery. He noted also at the time how Walmart’s existing “Delivery Unlimited” subscription, launched last year, would serve a “great base of an offer” for the broader program, but didn’t offer a launch time frame.

Earlier reports said the service would include other perks, like access to more grocery time slots, promotional deals and eventually a Walmart+ credit card. The retailer declined to speak to its plans, only saying that Walmart+ benefits would expand over time.

“As is the case with any great membership offering, these benefits are not intended to be static. We will continue to leverage our assets and scale to bring solutions at unprecedented value, all while holding true to the everyday low prices that customers know they can always expect from Walmart,” Whiteside said. “In the future, we will be leveraging our wide-ranging strengths to add additional benefits for members in a range of both services and offerings,” she added.

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Twitter's incredibly handy "Retweets with comments" feature is getting a rebranding, as well as becoming a tiny bit more convenient to use.

Earlier this year, Twitter added the option to see retweets that include a comment without having to use an automated account such as @QuotedReplies. Now the feature has been renamed, ditching the descriptive but clunky "Retweets with comments" for the cleaner "Quote Tweets." 

Quote Tweets also appear between the Retweets and Likes on a tweet now, making the feature slightly less annoying to access. Previously, you had to click to see the Retweets, then click "Retweets with comments" from there. Now, you can just jump straight to the drama. Read more...

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Much was made during the Republican Convention of the lack of a party platform. The media characterized this as a capitulation to the Cult of Trump phenomenon, but the questioned begged was: so what? If you’re running as a candidate to disrupt the status quo…. But beneath the media framing, an important question emerges. What exactly is the platform we need to emerge from the toxic situation we find ourselves in?

For months, if not years, the technology industry has been working on a new platform to succeed the previous one. Mobile would seem to be that fundamental shift from the desktop world of Windows and PCs. The twin dominance of powerful phones by Google and Apple has created a new language of notifications and streaming video perfectly timed for the devastating pandemic. Our devices are now the front lines for managing the struggle to stay alive for our loved ones, the economy, and our future.

Zoom is of course the poster child for all that it enables, and certainly what it doesn’t. The notion of work from home is more likely a question of what is home and what’s the difference with work? The routines of life are congealing around the interactions with phone, watch, iPad, laptop, and TV. When I wake up, the first dive is for the notification stream built up overnight from overseas and then the East Coast. The rhythm varies from day to day: intense on Monday as the weekend cobwebs dissipate, more issue oriented through the middle of the week, and finally a thank-god-it’s Friday feel. Email, text messages, media updates, and work calendar reminders.

And then there’s the outline of the new platform — live streaming notifications from what some call citizen media, or the influencer network, or the loyal opposition. That last one refers to the decline in trust of the mainstream media. Maybe it’s just me, but the cable model of host-driven cyclical repetition of the headlines, talking heads, and medical ads adds up to a trip first to the mute button and eventually the off switch. Which plugs me right back into the notification stream and a new contract with us based on whether we click on the link or even allow the notification in the first place.

And these new voices are networks of one or a few, broadcasting on a global reach pastiche of cloud services that begin with the ubiquity of Zoom and its click and you’re there ease of on boarding. Then there are the key networks of record as it were: Facebook Live, Twitter/Periscope, YouTube, and maybe LinkedIn if you’re Brent Leary and got an early invite. There’s a whole bunch of streaming accelerators like Restream and StreamYard and Just Streams (I made that up) to use software and a dash of hardware to do what it took many thousands of dollars and cables just a few years ago. Right now it’s early days, but soon you’ll be seeing something that looks like the media it’s replacing as the OG buys in.

Don’t believe me? Just look at how streaming has disrupted the television industry. Or the music business. Or the reemergence of podcasting and newsletters. Or how messaging is growing rapidly as a preferred digital commerce and marketing channel. The pandemic has certainly had a devastating effect with the loss of theaters, events, and travel that drive so much of our economy and the emotional underpinning of our lives. But as we learn to respect the power of the virus to force this digital wave of transformation, we fuel the winners that emerge from a new hybrid blend of evolution and adaptation.

Technology has often been seen as impersonal and cold to the touch. But now we should be making friends with robots for touchless shopping, At the beginning of this Gillmor Gang session, Frank Radice seemed stunned by the administration’s takeover of the symbols of our Washington monuments for political purposes. By the end, he seemed more hopeful of a different result. We have more ways now of making our voices heard, broadcasting our own names in fireworks above and beyond the fake news and suppression. Our platform: suppress the virus, not the vote.

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 28, 2020.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the notification feed here on Telegram.

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TikTok is making it easier for creators to turn looped video streams into pure American profit. 

The embattled social media company announced Monday that it had entered into a new partnership with the customized online merch platform Teespring. The integration will allow creators to include links to their Teespring products directly in their videos.

TikTokkers with hearty followings already frequently link to personal merchandise stores in their bios. Selling merch like clothing, as well as digital tutorials or templates, is a popular way for independent creators to earn cash from the people who consume their content for free. The new Teespring integration builds on what creators are already doing themselves with an official and more streamlined tool. Read more...

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Folks who are curious about this whole "5G" thing but don't want to take out a loan to get in on it got some good news from Motorola Monday.

The Illinois-based tech giant just announced that the Motorola One 5G will launch in the United States later this year for less than $500. 

Motorola didn't share an exact price, but promised it would launch below that threshold. The device will be available on AT&T "soon", the company says, and on Verizon in early October.

It's the newest in a nascent, but noteworthy, market for mid-range 5G smartphones, alongside the $600 Samsung Galaxy A71 5G and the $500 Google Pixel 4a 5G, which is set to launch later this year, as well. Read more...

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As the launch date for Ampere approaches, the details on the next-generation platform are firming up and the rumors are theoretically becoming more accurate. The first is a given, with details on Ampere arriving this week from Nvidia, while the second is… look, details on Ampere arrive this week from Nvidia, and I’m tired of talking about salt. Stop eating so much salt. Take your rumors with something healthy, like a giant spoonful of high fructose corn syrup.

If these new, tasty, tasty rumors are accurate, the highest-end Ampere will cram up to 24GB of RAM onboard, while the RTX 3090 and RTX 3070 will feature 10GB and 8GB, respectively. This seems… kind of low, honestly — but it may be that looks are deceiving here.

On the one hand, this would be the third generation in a row in which Nvidia mostly held the line on 8GB cards. While the RTX 3080 would move up to 10GB, the RTX 3070 at 8GB means that effectively, 8GB is going to be the RAM target for high-end hardware. No one is going to build games that require 10-24GB of VRAM if only a few percent of the market can play them.

On the other hand, however, we’re finally seeing games tapping the power of SSDs this generation rather than continuing to rely on ever-large amounts of console RAM, and it’s already been stated that PCs are expected to share in that bounty. Thus, we should be able to expect the same kinds of graphics updates courtesy of leveraging NVMe and solid-state storage on the platform side of things, without the need for larger memory pools.

Here’s what VideoCardz expects as far as speeds and feeds:

Assume, for the sake of argument, that Ampere and Turing offer identical performance-per-clock (they probably don’t, but it makes the math easier). The RTX 3090 is 1.21x wider than the old RTX 2080 Ti, while the new RTX 3080 is the size of the RTX 2080 Ti. Clocks would be modestly higher than what we saw in the last generation, with the RTX 3090 picking up about 1.1x clock compared with the RTX 2080 Ti. The RTX 3080 would be almost 1.5x wider than the old RTX 2080 (non-Super), making it a significant upgrade in the same price bracket and an unknown value until we know more about how Nvidia will price these new cards.

Looking at these cards, the big question is price. If Nvidia holds the RTX 3080 steady at the RTX 2080 Super’s pricing, it would be a tremendous upgrade. If it raises prices — and if I’m being honest, the sharp increase in VRAM and core counts could both point in that direction — then Ampere might offer performance benefits in-line with its architectural improvements but not dramatically exceeding them, in terms of performance-per-dollar. It’s a little harder to predict Nvidia’s pricing here than in the past because the company raised prices last time it launched, then cut them under pressure from AMD once its own RDNA architecture debuted. Nvidia’s overall share of the graphics market has increased to 80 percent of the discrete space, which probably hasn’t signaled to the company that it ought to consider a price cut.

Then again, if Nvidia comes in at markedly higher prices than AMD plans to target, we’ll see costs come down when AMD launches its own RDNA2 GPUs, an event my crystal ball tells me…to expect. This year, if things are still on schedule, but we don’t know more than that.

It’s been a bit of an odd year in gaming. With a number of Xbox Series X and PlayStation launch titles pushed back, there’s been less to talk about, and for every game that’s formally announced a delay, there are more still floating in limbo. One reason it’s hard to predict how Nvidia will price ray tracing with Ampere is that there hasn’t been as much of a high-profile push around next-generation gaming titles.

Assuming VideoCardz specs are accurate, a lot of how the 3090 – 3070 compare against their predecessors is going to come down to price.

Now Read:

• Nvidia Ampere Will Use 12-Pin PCIe Power Connector
• Nvidia Could Bring Ampere to Gamers for Just $5 a Month
• Microsoft Deploys AI ‘Supercomputing’ via Nvidia’s New Ampere A100 GPU

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John Oliver often spends a good chunk of Last Week Tonight's runtime taking a deep dive into a single issue that's making the news, or should be but isn't. On Sunday night, he dove right into a week that was very unusual, even by his standards.

"It's one of the rare times we're actually living up to our show's title, and like, why did you probably be called 28 Minutes On The Corn Tax Or Whatever The Fuck With John Oliver," he said. "And the reason we're doing that is that this has been one hell of a week."

Oliver then drew a line between the rhetoric and outright lies sprayed at serious volume at the Republican National Convention last week and the protests and then violence that erupted in Kenosha, Wisconsin almost simultaneously following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man. Specifically, the fact that the McCloskeys, a couple who went viral after they pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters outside their St Louis home, were invited to speak at the RNC, then used their time to repeat the false, racist dog-whistle line about Democrats wanting to "abolish the suburbs". Read more...

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If you’re a Sprint or T-Mobile subscriber, you may have a lot of questions now that the two wireless carriers have merged. And what's happening with Dish and Boost? We have answers.


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The prankish device is the subject of a new audiobook that pokes serious fun at Silicon Valley’s culture of disruption. We spoke with its inventor.


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Rocket Lab is back to active launch status after encountering an issue with its last mission that resulted in a loss of the payload. In just over a month, Rocket Lab was able to identify what went wrong with the Electron launch vehicle used on that mission and correct the issue. On Sunday, it successfully launched a Sequoia satellite on behalf of client Capella Space from its New Zealand launch facility.

The “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Optical” mission is Rocket Lab’s 14th Electron launch, and it lifted off from the company’s private pad at 11:05 PM EDT (8:05 PM PDT). The Sequoia satellite is the first in startup Capella Space’s constellation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites to be available to general customers. When complete, the constellation will provide hourly high-quality imaging of Earth, using radar rather than optical sensors in order to provide accurate imaging regardless of cloud cover and available light.

This launch seems to have gone off exactly as planned, with the Electron successfully lifting off and delivering the Capella Space satellite to its target orbit. Capella had been intending to launch this spacecraft aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket via a rideshare mission, but after delays to that flight, it changed tack and opted for a dedicated launch with Rocket Lab.

Rocket Lab’s issue with its July 4 launch was a relatively minor one – an electrical system failure that caused the vehicle to simply shut down, as a safety measure. The team’s investigation revealed a component of the system that was not stress-tested as strenuously as it should’ve been, and Rocket Lab immediately instituted a fix for both future and existing in-stock Electron vehicles in order to get back to active flight in as little time as possible.

While Rocket Lab has also been working on a recovery system that will allow it to reuse the booster stage of its Electron for multiple missions, this launch didn’t involve any tests related to that system development. The company still hopes to test recovery of a booster sometime before the end of this year on an upcoming launch.

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SpaceX performed a milestone first polar orbital launch of a satellite from its East Coast launch facility at Cape Canaveral on Sunday. The Falcon 9 mission carried three payloads, including a SAOCOM-1B synthetic aperture radar satellite which was flown on behalf of the Argentine space agency, and two small satellites for clients Tyvack and PlanetiQ.

The launch took place at 7:18 PM EDT from Florida, and used a first stage booster that SpaceX previously flew on two separate commercial resupply missions on behalf of NASA for the international Space Station, as well as one of SpaceX’s recent Starlink internet satellite launches. SpaceX also recovered the booster again with a controlled landing back at their landing site at Cape Canaveral.

This was originally set to be one of two launches that SpaceX was going to perform on Sunday – both from the same launch facility, though at different pads. That would’ve been a historic first, but weather earlier in the day meant that the first mission on the schedule, a Starlink launch, was cancelled and will be rescheduled.

SpaceX would ultimately like to be launching at a cadence that would include multiple launches per day, and this would’ve been a great test of its ability to operationalize that ambition. Considering how aggressive the company has been with its Starlink launches, however, it seems likely we’ll encounter another opportunity for a double launch day at some point in the future.

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Semalytix, a Bielefeld, Germany-based startup that offers pharmaceutical companies an AI-powered data tool to better understand real-world patient experiences, has raised €4.3 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is venture capital firm btov Partners, with participation from existing investor Fly Ventures and several unnamed angels. Semalytix will use the injection of cash to expand its business development with pharma companies and the wider healthcare market.

Founded in 2015 as a spin-out of research group Semantic Computing, Semalytix pitches itself as a data and A.I. analytics startup that wants to bring more real-world evidence to the development of new drugs and treatments. Its flagship product, dubbed “Pharos”, is a patient research tool that pulls in and cleans up various unstructured public data — such as blogs, forums, social media etc. — and then applies algorithms to deliver real-time patient insights into unmet needs, treatment experience and how severely a disease impacts the lives of those who suffer from it.

“Our vision is that we help make patient insights a real Northstar KPI in drug development,” Semalytix co-founder and CEO Janik Jaskolski tells me. “Due to new regulatory initiatives (and public pressure), pharma needs to demonstrate patient-centricity in drug development, [and] include the patient perspective into decision making and produce evidence that their treatments provide value in the real world. For patients, that value usually doesn’t consist of, for example, having their blood sugar lowered by an additional 3%. Instead, they care about improving their quality of life, being able to play longer with their kids or simply having an easier time going about their everyday tasks”.

However, Jaskolski argues that such patient insights and related evidence is difficult to obtain. “If asked, a patient will often tell a different story about how a disease impacts their life and what they need to improve it, compared to what a doctor would say. Which is why we don’t analyse physician or hospital data. Instead, we are looking at already existing public data that patients share online, in their own authentic voice, all around the world”.

Semalytix’s AI claims to be able to identify, read through, and summarise millions of online patient journeys in a highly scalable way. The AI is also able to turn this data into online target populations for different diseases and covers 11 different languages. “It does so by applying WHO, FDA, and EMA inspired algorithmic research instruments to make the analysis transparent and scientifically meaningful for pharma,” adds Jaskolski.

Meanwhile, although electronic health records, patient registries, and similar data sources are already receiving much attention from startups, Jaskolski argues that the largest source of unstructured patient data that exists today is being overlooked and yet holds a lot of potential to “improve patient care, identify new therapeutic opportunities, inform clinical trial development, and even help accelerate development of novel therapies for rare conditions”.

Semalytix’s business model is a tried and tested one. The startup sells enterprise licenses for access to its platform. A company can buy a license for 12 months or more for specific diseases. “Each license enables disease specific sub-group analyses, assess populations and create cohorts based on the severity of different disease burdens, treatment experiences, and quality of life,” adds the Semalytix CEO.

“Over time, we want to include more and more diseases into the platform and provide a unique patient data stream to pharma but also to the payer and regulator side of healthcare”.

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If you remember even basic elementary school geography, you know that Earth’s surface is mostly water. Scientists have disagreed about how all that water ended up on Earth. Was it all here when the planet formed, or was Earth a dry husk until asteroids and comets delivered water? A new analysis of meteorites published in the journal Science points to a watery Earth from the start. 

It’s not unthinkable that a planet could form with water or ice, but Earth formed in a much warmer part of the solar system than chilly planets like Jupiter or the uncountable icy Kuiper Belt objects. The current thinking is that no water ice would have remained frozen amidst the swirling cloud that became Earth, and that would mean Earth accumulated water later on to become the wet world it is today. To know for sure, we’d have to look at the material that formed Earth. That’s not possible 4.5 billion years after the fact, but we have something almost as good. 

The latest clues to Earth’s beginnings came from a rare type of space rock known as an “enstatite chondrite meteorite,” also known as E-type chondrites. Only about two percent of meteorites are in this class, which have chemical compositions that date them to the earliest era of the solar system. Since these objects are essentially the same material that coalesced to form the planets, the amount of hydrogen locked up inside is of great interest to scientists. 

Researchers from the Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques in France took a close look at 13 of these uncommon meteorites. They measured the amount of hydrogen present in the rocks because hydrogen plus oxygen gets you water, and we know Earth had plenty of oxygen at the beginning. 

The team found less hydrogen in the enstatite chondrites than in other types of space rock, but it was still more than enough. According to the study, the hydrogen present in enstatite chondrites could account for several times more water than is currently in Earth’s oceans. That supports the idea Earth formed with most or all of the water we have today. Backing up this claim, the team analyzed the ratios of hydrogen isotopes in the meteorites, finding they are very similar to the Earth’s interior. 

This conclusion is appealing because it’s much simpler than the alternative — that Earth picked up oceans of water from other objects. We probably did accumulate some water from the occasional comet, but this study offers strong evidence Earth has always been a watery planet.

Now read:

• MIT: ‘Snowball Earth’ Came From Huge Drop in Sunlight
• The Formation of the Moon May Have Stretched the Earth Into a Potato
• NASA Data Confirms the Last Decade Was the Hottest on Record

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A leading antitrust scholar says yes. Congress may be listening.


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Speaking at a prestigious crypto conference this month, Seny Kamara called on the field to recognize its blind spots—and fix them.


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Mashable's series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives — and our futures.

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The world in 2020 has been given plenty of reasons to be wary of algorithms. Depending on the result of the U.S. presidential election, it may give us one more. Either way, it's high time we questioned the impact of these high-tech data-driven calculations, which increasingly determine who or what we see (and what we don't) online. 

The impact of algorithms is starting to scale up to a dizzying degree, and literally billions of people are feeling the ripple effects. This is the year the Social Credit System, an ominous Black Mirror-like "behavior score" run by the Chinese government, is set to officially launchIt may not be quite as bad as you've heard, but it will boost or tighten financial credit and other incentives for the entire population. There's another billion unexamined, unimpeachable algorithms hanging over a billion human lives.    Read more...

More about Algorithms, Tech, and Big Tech Companies


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Over the past year, Netflix has attempted to expand its appeal in part by making a title or two free to non-paying users in select markets. Now the American giant is extending this test to users across the globe — with a larger free catalog.

The on-demand video streaming service is currently offering select Netflix Original movies and TV shows including “Stranger Things”, “Murder Mystery”, “Elite”, “Bird Box”, “When They See Us”, “The Two Popes”, “Our Planet”, and Grace and Frankie” to non-paying subscribers across all the nearly 200 nations and territories where it is operational.

“We’re looking at different marketing promotions to attract new members and give them a great Netflix experience,” a Netflix spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement.

Users do not need to create an account to view these free shows or movies, Netflix says. The free viewing, first spotted by blog OnlyTech, is available only through web browsers. On a support page, Netflix says Android users can access this offer through their mobile browser as well — but iOS users can’t.

This isn’t the first time Netflix has tested making a title free to non-paying users. The streaming giant, which had over 151 million subscribers at the end of second quarter this year, has previously made “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” available to users in the U.S.

It also made “Bard of Blood”, a movie it produced in India, free to users in the country. It also made talk show “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj” available to users for free on YouTube. The company had initially planned to make only first two episodes free on YouTube.

But this is the first time Netflix is making so many shows and movies available to non-paying users across the globe. The company has not shared how long it plans to run this experiment.

Speaking of India, the streaming giant has run several experiments in the country. It has made Netflix available for a few cents for the first month for new users, and tested several affordable plans.

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TL;DR: Get enough space for all your files and never worry about losing them with the Degoo Premium: Lifetime 10TB Backup Plan for $149, a 95% savings as of Aug. 31. No monthly fees involved!

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The only thing worse than losing all of your precious photos, videos, and files from over the years is knowing it could've been prevented. If you only store your stuff on your computer or smartphone, you can easily lose it all forever with no way of recovery – whether from a crash, a failed software update, theft, or just a freak accident. In other words: you need a backup. 

You could invest in an external hard drive, but you'll still have to remember to plug it in to back up your documents and photos. And if you drop it, bad things could happen. A more convenient and practically mindless solution is cloud storage. There are a variety of options on the market, like Dropbox, iCloud, or Google Drive, which offer free versions of their basic subscriptions. But these are made for people who only need a small amount of storage — not those who want to back up all those concert videos from over the years and relive them in isolation. For more storage, you'll likely pay a hefty fee month after month. Read more...

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TL;DR: Get a lifetime subscription to the Flat Icons bundle for $29.99, a 99% savings as of Aug. 31. 

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Visual content is just as (if not more) important than written content — especially if you're trying to build a brand. Humans can process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, for instance. So, whether you're creating digital marketing tools or building a website, you need to put some extra emphasis on design.

Of course, outsourcing the design process to get eye-catching assets can be extremely expensive and time-consuming. That's where a subscription to Flat Icons can really come in handy, and lucky for you, a lifetime subscription is on sale for just under $30 for a limited time. Read more...

More about Design, Icons, Mashable Shopping, Tech, and Work Life


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Mumbai-based Eruditus, which works with top universities globally to offer more than 100 executive-level courses to students in over 80 nations, said on Monday it has raised $113 million in a new financing round as it looks to further scale its business to reach more learners.

The Series D financing round for the 10-year-old startup was co-led by Leeds Illuminate and Prosus Ventures. Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and existing investors Sequoia India and Ved Capital also participated in the round, which brings Eruditus’ to-date raise to over $160 million. Eruditus is now valued at over $700 million, a person familiar with the matter said. Avendus Capital was the financial advisor to Eruditus on this transaction.

Eruditus maintains a tie-up with over 30 top-tier universities including MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge, INSEAD, Wharton, UC Berkeley, IIT, IIM, and NUS. The universities and Eruditus work to develop courses that are aimed at offering higher education to students. These courses cost anything between $5,000 to $40,000.

The startup, which has offices in six countries and employs over 650 people, said it has enrolled 50,000 students in the past 12 months.

Eruditus is the second startup that Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has backed in India. Its first investment in the country, Byju’s, also operates in the edtech market. (In fact, it’s grown to become the most valued edtech startup in the world.)

“Eruditus serves as a critical innovation partner for top universities as they expand online course offerings in response to workforce needs and market demand,” said Vivian Wu, Managing Partner, Ventures, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in a statement. “We’re excited to support the growing partnerships between U.S. universities and those in India, China and Latin America that are making truly high-quality education accessible to a broad and diverse range of students.”

Eruditus said it will use the fresh capital to partner with more universities and expand in emerging markets. It said it also wants to invest in developing career-ready courses to help the workforce acquire the skills they need to survive in the post-pandemic world.

“Eruditus’ goals are a great match for ours — democratizing access of quality resources for a much broader audience. The value of the teachings of the great institutions has been rationed to those who can physically and monetarily access their facilities. Eruditus unlocks those assets and enables those institutions to help a whole new cohort of learners around the globe,” said Ashutosh Sharma, Head of Investments for India at Prosus Ventures, which has invested in six edtech startups including Byju’s.

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TechCrunch Disrupt is right around the corner. And this year, we’re trying something different — we’re taking Disrupt virtual. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we used this opportunity to invite a slate of incredible European speakers to join TechCrunch on our virtual stage on September 14-18.

It represents a great opportunity to learn more about the European tech ecosystem. And if you’re already familiar with the area, it’s a good way to discover what everyone’s thinking on the current situation and where we’re heading.

Available at a time that works best for you, catch these sessions Sept 15-18th from 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM CET. Immediately after each interview, join the speakers for a live Q&A. So come with your questions!

Let me introduce briefly all the speakers we’ve lined up for the special European corner of Disrupt.

Sophia Bendz has been in the news lately. A few years ago, the former global director of marketing for Spotify decided to transition from seasoned operator to venture capitalist. She worked with VC firm Atomico for a while but announced this summer that she is joining Berlin’s Cherry Ventures to focus on seed investments. The move shouldn’t surprise anyone given that Bendz has also been a very active angel investor with 44 deals over the past 9 years.

Carolina Brochado has worked with some of the most successful VC firms and is also on the move. She was made a partner at Atomico in 2016 and took everyone by surprise when she left for SoftBank Vision Fund in 2018. The well-respected investor has now decided to join the growth fund team at EQT.

Suranga Chandratillake spent many years in Silicon Valley working on blinkx, an intelligent search engine for video and audio content that went public and achieved a peak market capitalization in excess of $1 billion. He moved back to the his home country to join Balderton as a General Partner in 2014.

Sophie Hill has been busy building Threads Styling. She’s redefining luxury fashion e-commerce with a radical model. The startup uses a strong editorial strategy to send you recommendations through your favorite chat app on your phone. You can talk with human shopping assistants on WeChat, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram and iMessage. And this no-store e-commerce play has been working really well.

Hussein Kanji is a founding partner of London-based VC firm Hoxton Ventures. In just a few years, Hoxton Ventures became a well-known name with deals in Darktrace, Babylon Health and Deliveroo. Prior to Hoxton Ventures, Kanji worked for Accel, Microsoft and several Silicon Valley-based companies.

Tunde Kehinde is the co-founder of Lidya, a startup that uses AI to lend capital to small companies in fast-growing economies. The startup currently operates in Lagos, Warsaw and Prague. He was also the co-founder of Jumia Nigeria, a company that is now publicly listed in the New York Stock Exchange.

Mette Lykke co-founded one of the biggest fitness and training app out there, Endomondo. She led her company all the way to an acquisition by Under Armour. For the past three years, she’s been the CEO of Too Good To Go, an app with a mission of reducing food waste worldwide. Restaurants and supermarkets can sell the surplus food that would otherwise go to waste through the service. And the startup managed to attract more than 23 million users.

Ilkka Paananen is the co-founder and CEO of Supercell, the Helsinki-based mobile gaming studios that have released super hits, such as Clash of Clans, Hay Day, Boom Beach, Clash Royale and Brawl Stars. The company managed to reach 100 million daily players across its games. When Tencent bought a majority stake in the company, it valued Supercell at around $10.2 billion.

Guillaume Pousaz is the founder and CEO of Checkout.com. While Checkout.com has kept a low profile for many years, the company raised $380 million within a year and reached an impressive valuation of $5.5 billion. It wants to build a one-stop shop for all things related to payments, such as accepting transactions, processing them and detecting fraud.

If you want to hear from one, two or maybe all of the speakers above, join us for Disrupt 2020. The conference is scheduled to run from September 14 through September 19. Buy the Disrupt Digital Pro Pass or a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package today and get access to all the interviews on our main stage, workshops over on the Extra Crunch Stage where you can get actionable tips as well as CrunchMatch, our free, AI-powered networking platform. As soon as you register for Disrupt, you will have access to CrunchMatch and can start connecting with people now. Use the tool to schedule one-on-one video calls with potential customers and investors or to recruit and interview prospective employees.

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While Beijing has repeatedly spoken out against Washington’s pressure on Huawei, it has remained relatively quiet amid TikTok’s recent struggles in the U.S. As the red-hot video app approaches a final sale in the U.S., however, the Chinese authority moved unexpectedly to make the deal more complicated to go through.

On late Friday, China’s Ministry of Commerce updated its export control categories to cover artificial intelligence technologies. AI is the anchor of ByteDance products including TikTok, which has thrived on customized content surfaced by machines. The next day, China’s official Xinhua news agency quoted scholar Cui Fan as saying the updated rules could apply to ByteDance. He advised companies with ongoing deals to “halt negotiations and transactions so as to conduct the relevant procedures.”

On late Sunday, TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance issued a statement saying it will “strictly follow” the new technology export rules and handle its “related export businesses.”

Though the new rule is not explicitly targeted at the TikTok deal, its timing is curious, just weeks before ByteDance is due to divest from its largest overseas market. ByteDance could now face hurdles as it advances to sell TikTok, for the regulation restricts the export of personalized recommendation and AI-powered interface technologies, according to Cui, a professor at China’s University of International Business and Economics.

A TikTok sale is already complicated on the technical level even without China’s trade restrictions. As The Information pointed out, ByteDance’s engineers and developers at its headquarters Beijing provide all the software code deployed in its family of apps including TikTok. It’s a strategy known as the “central platform” in the Chinese tech sector, one that also undergirds many businesses of Alibaba and Tencent for its purported advantage of increasing productivity and minimizing redundant resources. As such, breaking TikTok off from its Chinese parent would almost certainly disrupt the app’s operations in the short run.

Many Chinese internet users have chastised ByteDance chief Zhang Yiming for caving in to U.S. pressure, which ordered the TikTok sale over alleged national security threats. Some go as far as labeling the tech boss of the world’s most valuable startup a “traitor“. They compare Zhang to the Huawei boss Ren Zhengfei, whose responses to American sanctions have been thought of as much more aggressive.

It remains to be seen whether Beijing will further step in TikTok’s negotiations with the U.S. Industry observers have noted that the case is distinct from that of Huawei, whose 5G technology is a focal point of China’s race with the U.S., and who directly and indirectly has created many manufacturing jobs in China. Albeit being unprecedented in its penetration into the Western internet, ByteDance develops software that is considered more replaceable and relies on a narrower range of elitist talents.

A damaged TikTok app may cause complaints from marketers who live off the app, but it probably won’t set off the same level of corporate resistance as seen with Trump’s proposed WeChat ban, which reportedly had giants including Apple, Walmart and Disney move to discuss the issue with the White House.

 

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