Daily Archives: August 2, 2021

News: Daily Crunch: Zoom will pay $85M to settle lawsuit over ‘Zoombombing,’ user privacy

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Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, August 2, 2021. What a day. Square kicked off this week’s news cycle with a megadeal, Google popped up with new hardware, and there are new VC funds aplenty. It’s busy, but before we get started, there’s a special summer edition of Extra Crunch Live this week that’s 100% pitch-off. It’s on Wednesday, so be there or be square. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Google pursues custom silicon: Alphabet’s Google subsidiary is getting into the custom silicon game, TechCrunch reports. Akin to what Apple did with its A and M chips, Google hopes that its Tensor SoC (system on a chip) “will differentiate itself in a crowded smartphone field,” Brian Heater writes. For more on Google’s new hardware, head here.
• Square buys Afterpay: U.S. fintech giant Square is buying the Australian buy now, pay later company Afterpay for $29 billion in stock. TechCrunch dug into the deal’s numbers, but the gist is that Afterpay brings merchants, global users and a new fintech product to Square. The deal isn’t cheap, but it does make sense.
• Cloud infra spend accelerates: Want to know why investors are so hot and bothered by the tech industry these days? In part because demand just keeps accelerating. TechCrunch covered new data today indicating that the cloud infra market — which underpins so very many services that consumers and corporates depend on alike — saw spending grow 39% in Q2 2021 compared to the year-ago quarter. The total for the second quarter? $42 billion.

Startups/VC

• Reese Witherspoon’s media company sells for $900M: This is not our usual startup fare, but when a media company sells for nearly $1 billion, we have to pay attention. Per TechCrunch, the company, Hello Sunshine, made content for major streaming firms. What’s weird is who bought it. A “yet-unnamed new media firm run by former Disney execs,” TechCrunch writes. Mysterious.
• Afterpay investor bullish on Afterpay: TechCrunch published an op-ed by Dana Stalder, an investor at Matrix Partners and self-described “only institutional venture investor” in Afterpay. Their take? That Square + Afterpay will be greater as a sum than the mere addition of their parts. We’ll see.
• Nektar.ai wants to consolidate B2B sales data: Selling software is no easy game, and there are myriad tools that every SDR and AE is expected to use. Nektar wants to be the central collection point and brain for all that data, and it just raised $6 million to grow its operation. Frankly, the salesops market is big, and I am surprised we don’t hear about even more companies pursuing similar lines of work.
• Investors back startups making B2B payments simpler: Sticking to the B2B world, Yadoo has raised a $20 million round to power business-to-business payments. In short, while Venmoing your friend beer money is as easy as drinking said beer, it’s not the same with corporations. Yadoo is one of the startups looking to take the problem on, in this case from the startup’s Mexico City HQ.

And now, some venture capital news:

• Element Ventures raises $130M: It’s a sign of the times that I am not at all surprised that a B2B-focused fintech venture capital firm just raised nine figures. Of course that’s a big enough problem space to deploy that amount of capital. And of course there are enough startups that fit its parameters to fill its book with deals. Element will invest in 15 companies each year, focusing on deals in Europe, the U.S. and Asia.
• More money for LatAm: Newtopia is a new fund focused on Latin America that just put together a fresh $50 million fund. It will invest in pre-seed companies ($100,000 checks) and larger rounds ($250,000 to $1 million) in startups scaling toward their Series A. Early-stage investing is its own beast, so it’s nice that the burgeoning Latin American market is getting its own dedicated vehicles to tackle the task.
• From the podcast today, if you are into edtech, boy do we have the show for you.

Demand Curve: Questions you need to answer in your paid search ads

At some point, almost every early-stage startup will use paid search ads to connect with customers and throw down the gauntlet with their competitors.

Most of these initial attempts at paid search are unsuccessful. There’s a steep learning curve when it comes to transforming passive searchers into paying customers, and almost no one gets it right the first time.

In a comprehensive guest post, growth marketing expert Stewart Hillhouse identified “14 questions your paid search should answer to ensure you’re only paying for the highest-intent shoppers.”

Question 1? “What’s in it for me?”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Zoombombing costs Zoom $85M: Today’s immaterial technology fine comes via Zoom, the video product that became ubiquitous during the pandemic. It was sued by users claiming that it was “violating users’ privacy by sharing their data with third parties without permission and enabling ‘Zoombombing’ incidents,” per TechCrunch. The settlement is worth a total of 0.07% of the company’s $112 billion market cap. Oh no.
• Amazon will pay you $10 for your palm print: Speaking of sums of money so small that they should not induce any sort of behavioral changes, Amazon wants to give people $10 in credit if they give the company their palm print so that they can better check out at the e-commerce giant’s physical stores. Hard pass on this one.
• Salesforce buys Mulesoft an RPA firm: CRM giant Salesforce is investing in Mulesoft, a company that it bought a ways back, in the form of German RPA company Servicetrace. Servicetrace will link up with Mulesoft, not Salesforce proper.
• I asked TechCrunch reporter and genial human Ron Miller why the deal matters. He said that the deal, “while not on par with the Slack megadeal, is probably the kind of smaller deals the company will make in the next year.” He explained that the Servicetrace acquisition gives SFDC an “entry into the growing RPA market without spending a ton of money.” Ron’s also bullish on the planned Mulesoft integration.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Are you all caught up on last week’s coverage of growth marketing? If not, read it here.

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

News: You can’t afford to make poor decisions about incentive stock options

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When the time is right, employees should actively look for help from a qualified fiduciary financial adviser who can walk these could-be “options millionaires” through various cash-in scenarios.

One of the big reasons you’re giving 110% of your talent and effort to your private company is because you’re hoping to eventually cash in on all those vested incentive stock options (ISOs) that have been sitting in some account, waiting for the day your company goes public.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Who doesn’t dream of reaping an options windfall and using it to retire early, buy a house, pay off their college loans, travel around the world or become a full-time philanthropist?

Unfortunately, when it comes to figuring out how to cash in their stock awards, most employees are on their own.

Their employers can’t always provide the answers they need — especially when the questions relate to personal finances. Most companies admit they need to be better at explaining how ISOs work in general, but they can’t legally work one-on-one with employees to help them exercise and sell shares the right way.

That’s why, when the time is right, many employees actively look for help from a qualified fiduciary financial adviser who can walk these could-be “options millionaires” through various cash-in scenarios.

Here’s a real-life example (using a pseudonym).

Kurt is a 50-year-old VP of product management at a healthcare startup that just went public. Over his three years with the company, Kurt had amassed 350,000 ISOs worth approximately $6 million. Unlike many options millionaires, he didn’t intend to cash in everything and retire early. He planned to stay with the firm but wanted to liquidate enough ISOs to pay for a vacation home and add greater diversification to his investment portfolio. This presented significant tax risks that Kurt wasn’t aware of.

If Kurt exercised his ISOs and sold the shares before a year had passed, his profits would be characterized as short-term capital gains, which are taxed as ordinary income.

To illustrate the potential tax implications of this action, we created a hypothetical scenario that showed if Kurt exercised all of his ISOs and sold the shares immediately, he would incur approximately $6 million in ordinary income, which would push him into the top tax bracket and put him on the hook for almost $3 million in combined federal and state taxes.

News: Twitter partners with AP and Reuters to address misinformation on its platform

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Twitter announced today it’s partnering with news organizations The Associated Press (AP) and Reuters to expand its efforts focused on highlighting reliable news and information on its platform. Through the new agreements, Twitter’s Curation team will be able to leverage the expertise of the partnered organizations to add more context to the news and trends

Twitter announced today it’s partnering with news organizations The Associated Press (AP) and Reuters to expand its efforts focused on highlighting reliable news and information on its platform. Through the new agreements, Twitter’s Curation team will be able to leverage the expertise of the partnered organizations to add more context to the news and trends that circulate across Twitter, as well as aid with the company’s use of public service announcements during high visibility events, misinformation labels, and more.

Currently, the Curation team works to add additional information to content that includes Top Trends and other news on Twitter’s Explore tab. The team is also involved with how certain search results are ranked, to ensure that content from high-quality searches appear at the top of search results when certain keywords or hashtags are search for on Twitter.

The team may also be involved with the prompts that in the Explore tab on Home Timeline related to major events, like public health emergencies (such as the pandemic) or other events, like elections. And they may help with the misinformation labels that appear on tweets that are allowed to remain visible on Twitter, but are labeled with informative context from authoritative sources. These include tweets that violate Twitter’s rules around manipulated media, election integrity, or Covid-19.

However, the team operates separately from Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, which determines when tweets violate Twitter’s guidelines and punitive action, like removal or bans, must be taken, Twitter confirmed that neither the AP nor Reuters will be involved in those sorts of enforcement decisions.

By working more directly with AP and Reuters, who also partner with Facebook on fact-checks, Twitter says it will be able to increase the speed and scale to which it’s able to add this additional information to tweets and elsewhere on its platform. In particular, that means in times where news is breaking and when facts are in dispute as a story emerges, Twitter’s own team will be able to quickly turn to these more trusted sources to improve how contextual information is added to the conversations taking place on Twitter.

This could also be useful in stopping misinformation from going viral, instead of waiting until after the fact to correct misleading tweets.

Twitter’s new crowdsourced fact-checking system Birdwatch will also leverage feedback from AP and Reuters to help determine the quality of information shared by Birdwatch participants.

The work will see the Curation team working with the news organizations not just to add context to stories and conversations, but also to help identify which stories need context added, Twitter told us. This added context could appear in many different places on Twitter, including on tweets, search, in Explore, and in curated selections, called Twitter Moments.

Twitter has often struggled with handling misinformation on its platform due its real-time nature and use by high-profile figures, who attempt to manipulate the truth for their own ends. To date, it has experimented with many features to slow or stop the spread of misinformation from disabling one-click retweets, to adding fact-checks, to banning accounts, and more. Birdwatch is the latest effort to add context to tweets, but the system is a decentralized attempt at handling misinformation — not one that relies on trusted partners.

“AP has a long history of working closely with Twitter, along with other platforms, to expand the reach of factual journalism,” noted Tom Januszewski, Vice President of Global Business Development at AP, in a statement about the new agreement. “This work is core to our mission. We are particularly excited about leveraging AP’s scale and speed to add context to online conversations, which can benefit from easy access to the facts,” he said.

“Trust, accuracy and impartiality are at the heart of what Reuters does every day, providing billions of people with the information they need to make smart decisions,” added Hazel Baker, the Head of UGC Newsgathering at Reuters. “Those values also drive our commitment to stopping the spread of misinformation. We’re excited to partner with Twitter to leverage our deep global and local expertise to serve the public conversation with reliable information,” Baker said.

Initially, the collaborations will focus on English-language content on Twitter, but the company says it expects the work to grow over time to support more languages and timezones. We’re told that, during this initial phase, Twitter will evaluate new opportunities to onboard collaborators that can support additional languages.

News: Novakid’s investors bet $35M that it can teach kids English

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If you’re trying to develop fluency in a non-native tongue, language immersion is a crucial part of the learning process. Surrounding yourself with native speakers helps with pronunciation, context building, and most of all, confidence. But what if you’re an eight-year-old kid in Spain learning English and can’t swing a solo trip to the United

If you’re trying to develop fluency in a non-native tongue, language immersion is a crucial part of the learning process. Surrounding yourself with native speakers helps with pronunciation, context building, and most of all, confidence.

But what if you’re an eight-year-old kid in Spain learning English and can’t swing a solo trip to the United States for the summer?

Novakid, founded by Maxim Azarov, wants to be your next best option. The San Francisco-based edtech startup offers virtual-only, English language immersion for kids between the ages of four through 12, by combining a mix of different services from live tutors to gamification.

After closing its $4.25 million Series A round last December, Novakid announced today that it is back with a $35 million Series B financing, led by Owl Ventures and Goodwater Capital. Existing investors also participated in the round, including PortfoLion, LearnStart, TMT Investments, Xploration Capital, LETA Capital and BonAngels.

The startup is raising capital in response to an active start to its year. The company’s active client base grew 350% year over year, currently at over 50,000 paying students. The money will be used to get more students into its universe of tools, as well as help Novakid expand into international markets with high populations of speakers who want to learn English.

The company’s suite of services are built around two principles: First, that it can immerse early-age learners into the world of English at scale, and second, that it can actually be fun to use.

When a user signs up, they are first connected to one of Novakid’s 2,000 live tutors for their first class. Tutors must be native English speakers with a B.A. degree or higher, as well as an international teaching certificate such as DELTA, CELTA, TESOL or TEFL.

“One of the things that is really important, even psychologically, is to start listening to the language, start interacting with a live person, and remove being afraid of not understanding something,” Azarov said. The company wants to recreate the conditions of how a kid likely learned their first language.

In the class, the tutors only speak English, and users are encouraged to do the same to slowly build and mistake their way into confidence. While the live, video-based classes are a key part of Novakid’s product, Azarov said it was important that his company “was not just giving you access to a teacher” as its main value proposition.

“Most of the competitors are taking teachers and making them available remotely so you don’t have to travel and you have a bigger selection,” he said. But if you look at the industry in the bigger picture, guys like Oxford, Cambridge, Pearson who provide content for the language learning industry, their product basically sucks. It’s really bad.” So, Novakid puts most of its energy into rebuilding a curriculum that works with better design, and includes games.

Gamified content lives both in and out of classes. Within the classroom, a teacher may take a student on a VR-enhanced tour through famous landmarks and museums to practice vocabulary. Self-paced content could look like a multiplayer “battle” between two students answering questions within a certain time period to get a better score. Novakid has an entire team dedicated to game design and development.

Students are clicking in. Novakid users spend two-thirds of their time on the website with tutors, and one-third with self-paced content that the company built in-house. The company wants to switch those concentrations because more students are spending time with the asynchronous content around grammar and vocabulary, and teachers are reserved for more complex information like speaking and conversation.

Part of the difficulty of scaling up a language learning business is that users need to stay motivated. Gamification helps with engagement, but Novakid’s clientele of children could also be fast to churn compared to adult learners, simply due to priorities. Azarov said that he sees how some would view selling exclusively to children as a disadvantage, but he views their focus as differentiation.

“You get better brand equity when you’re more focused,” he said. “The way kids learn language is vastly different from the way adults learn language, and I don’t think the general players who do ‘everything from everybody’ will be able to do [the former] as well as we are.” Duolingo recently launched Duolingo ABC, a free English literacy app with hundreds of short-form exercises. While the now-public company has strong branding, Novakid’s strategy differs by adding in more services around live learning and speaking.

So far, the company has proven that its strategy is sticking. Its revenue in 2020 was $9 million, and in 2021 it is expected to hit between $36 million to $45 million in revenue. It declined to disclose the specifics around diversity of the team, but plans to kick off a quite intensive recruiting spree going forward. Azarov plans to add 200 people to his 300-person company in the next six months.

News: Demand Curve: Questions you need to answer in your paid search ads

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Around 15% of website traffic comes through paid search ads. But to turn passive searchers into active shoppers, your ads should answer their question and entice them to click.

Around 15% of website traffic comes through paid search ads. But to turn passive searchers into active shoppers, your ads should answer their question and entice them to click.

We’ve tested thousands of paid search ads at Demand Curve and through our agency Bell Curve. This post breaks down 14 questions your paid search ads should answer to ensure you’re only paying for the highest-intent shoppers.

Question 1: “What’s in it for me?”

An important distinction between paid search and organic search is that paid ads are an interruption. Users of search engines are simply looking for an answer to their question. The people who see your ads don’t owe you anything. Just because you’re paying to have your ad show up first doesn’t mean they’re going to pay attention to it.

To generate genuine interest in your paid ads, reframe your offer as a favor.

You can do this in two ways:

• Describe the features of your product as the solution to your customers’ problem.
• Emphasize the outcome your customer seeks.

For example, reframing free delivery as an extra convenience makes the offer that much more attractive.

Use ad extensions by listing additional benefits in the description of the page. For example, including “customized plans” in the pricing extension page signals to your customer that they’ll have control over the cost. This will help to attract the curiosity of even the most cost-conscious buyers.

Image Credits: Demand Curve

Question 2: “Why should I buy now?”

Approximately 80% of e-commerce shopping carts are abandoned, mostly because shoppers don’t feel any urgency to complete the transaction. Online shoppers aren’t in any rush, as the internet is open 24/7 and inventory feels unlimited.

To answer the question, “Why should I buy now?”, you’re going to have to create an incentive to get them to take action now.

News: Planted raises another $21M to expand its growing plant-based meat empire (and add schnitzel)

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Swiss alternative protein company Planted has raised its second round of the year, a CHF 19M (about $21M at present) “pre-B” fundraise that will help it continue its growth and debut new products. A U.S. launch is in the cards eventually but for now Planted’s exclusively European customers will be able to give its new

Swiss alternative protein company Planted has raised its second round of the year, a CHF 19M (about $21M at present) “pre-B” fundraise that will help it continue its growth and debut new products. A U.S. launch is in the cards eventually but for now Planted’s exclusively European customers will be able to give its new veggie schnitzel a shot.

Planted appeared in 2019 as a spinoff from Swiss research university ETH Zurich, where the founders developed the original technique of extruding plant proteins and water into fibrous structures similar to real meat’s. Since then the company has diversified its protein sources, adding oat and sunflower to the mix, and developed pulled pork and kebab alternative products as well.

Over time the process has improved as well. “We added fermentation/biotech technologies to enhance taste and texture,” wrote CEO and co-founder Christoph Jenny in an email to TechCrunch. “Meaning 1) we can create structures without form limitation and 2) can add a broader taste profile.”

The latest advance is schnitzel, which is of course a breaded and fried piece of pounded-thin meat style popular around the world, but especially in the company’s core markets of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Jenny noted that Planted’s schnitzel is produced as one piece, not pressed together from smaller bits. “The taste and texture benefit from fermentation approach, that makes the flavor profile mouth watering and the texture super juicy,” he said, though of course we will have to test it to be sure. Expect schnitzel to debut in Q3.

It’s the first of several planned “whole” or “prime” cuts, larger pieces that can be prepared like any other piece of meat — the team says their products require no special preparation or additives and can be dropped in as 1:1 replacements in most recipes. Right now the big cuts are leaving the lab and entering consumer testing for taste tuning and eventually scaling.

The funding round came from “Vorwerk Ventures, Gullspång Re:food, Movendo Capital, Good Seed Ventures, Joyance, ACE & Company (SFG strategy) and Be8 Ventures,” and was described as a follow-on to March’s CHF 17M series A. No doubt the exploding demand for alternative proteins and growing competition in the space has spurred Planted’s investors to opt for more aggressive growth and development strategies.

The company plans to enter several new markets over Q3 and Q4, but the U.S. is still a question mark due to COVID-19 restrictions on travel. Jenny said they are preparing so that they can make that move whenever it becomes possible, but for now Planted is focused on the European market.

(Update: This article originally misstated the new round as also being CHF 17M – entirely my mistake. This has been corrected.)

News: MGA Thermal raises $8M AUD led by Main Sequence for its modular energy storage blocks

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MGA Thermal wants to help utility companies transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources with shoebox-sized thermal energy storage blocks. The company says a stack of 1,000 blocks is about the size of a small car and can store enough energy to power 27 homes for 24 hours. This gives utility providers the ability

MGA Thermal co-founders Erich Kisi and Alex Post. Image Credits: MGA Thermal

MGA Thermal wants to help utility companies transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources with shoebox-sized thermal energy storage blocks. The company says a stack of 1,000 blocks is about the size of a small car and can store enough energy to power 27 homes for 24 hours. This gives utility providers the ability to store large amounts of energy and have it ready to dispatch even when weather conditions aren’t ideal for generating solar or wind power. The modular blocks also make it easier to convert infrastructure, like coal-fired power plants, into grid-scale energy storage.

MGA Thermal announced today it has raised $8 million AUD (about $5.9 million USD), bring its total funding so far to $9 million AUD. The round was led by Main Sequence, a venture firm founded by Australia’s national science agency that recently launched a new $250 million AUD fund. Alberts Impact Capital, New Zealand’s Climate Venture Capital Fund, The Melt and returning investor CP Ventures participated, along with angel investors like Chris Sang, Emlyn Scott and Glenn Butcher.

Based in Newcastle, Australia, MGA Thermal was founded in April 2019 by Erich Kisi and Alexander Post after nearly a decade spent researching and developing miscibility gap alloys technology at the University of Newcastle. When asked to explain MGA tech in layperson’s terms, Kisi used a delicious analogy.

MGA Thermal’s blocks “essentially comprise metal particles that melt when heated embedded in an inert matrix material. Think of a block as being like a choc-chip muffin heated in a microwave. The muffin consists of a cake component, which holds everything in shape when heated, and the choc chips, which melt,” he told TechCrunch.

“The energy that goes into melting the choc chips is stored and can burn your mouth when you bite into the muffin,” he added. “Melting energy is more intense than merely heating something up and that melting energy is concentrated near the melting temperature so energy can be released in a consistent way.”

MGA Thermal’s modular energy storage blocks. Image Credits: MGA Thermal

Energy stored in MGA Thermal’s blocks can be used to heat water to power steam turbines and generators. In this scenario, blocks are designed with internal tubing for pumping and boiling water, or interact with a heat exchanger. Kisi said MGA Thermal’s blocks enable aging thermal power plans to continue running on renewable energy that would usually be switched off in situations like overheating caused by too much sun or high winds.

Other thermal energy solutions include heating low-cost solid materials in blocks or granules to high temperatures in an insulated container. But many of these materials aren’t good at moving thermal energy around and have temperature limitations, Kisi said. This means thermal energy decreases in temperature as it is discharged, making it less effective.

Another method for storing thermal energy involves molten salts that are heated by a renewable energy source and stored in a hot tank. The hot salt is then pumped through a heat exchanger to make steam, while colder (but still molten) salt is returned to a “cold” tank.

“These systems are widely used in concentrating solar thermal energy but have found little use elsewhere,” Kisi said. “That’s mostly because there is a large infrastructure cost for piping pumps and heaters, and a large amount of power is wasted keeping the salt from freezing.”

MGA Thermal is establishing a manufacturing plant in New South Wales to scale to commercial levels production of its blocks, and plans to double its team over the next 12 months so it can make hundreds of thousands of blocks each month. It is also currently working with partners like Swiss company E2S Power ASG and U.S.-based Peregrine Turbine Technologies to deploy its tech in Australia, Europe and North America. For example, E2S Power AG will use MGA Thermal’s tech to repurpose retired and active coal-fired thermal plants in Europe.

While MGA Thermal’s tech has many industrial use cases, like converting power stations, building off-grid storage and supplying power to remote communities and commercial spaces, it can also help consumers consume less fossil fuel. For example, MGA blocks can be used by households to store excess energy generated from rooftop solar panels or small wind turbines. Then that energy can be used to heat homes.

“Around the world an estimated three billion people heat their homes by burning fuel,” said Kisi. “That’s a lot of CO2, especially in very cold climates.”

In a statement, Main Sequence partner Martin Duursma said, “A core focus of our new fund is uncovering the scientific discoveries, and helping to turn them into real, tangible technologies so we can reverse our climate impact. Erich Kisi and Alexander Post’s impressive deep research backgrounds, their expert team and innovative technology are paving the way for grid-scale energy storage and boosting the capability of a renewable energy future globally.”

News: Amazon will pay you $10 in credit for your palm print biometrics

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How much is your palm print worth? If you ask Amazon, it’s about $10 in promotional credit if you enroll your palm prints in its checkout-free stores and link it to your Amazon account. Last year, Amazon introduced its new biometric palm print scanners, Amazon One, so customers can pay for goods in some stores

How much is your palm print worth? If you ask Amazon, it’s about $10 in promotional credit if you enroll your palm prints in its checkout-free stores and link it to your Amazon account.

Last year, Amazon introduced its new biometric palm print scanners, Amazon One, so customers can pay for goods in some stores by waving their palm prints over one of these scanners. By February, the company expanded its palm scanners to other Amazon grocery, book and 4-star stores across Seattle.

Amazon has since expanded its biometric scanning technology to its stores across the U.S., including New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Texas.

The retail and cloud giant says its palm scanning hardware “captures the minute characteristics of your palm — both surface-area details like lines and ridges as well as subcutaneous features such as vein patterns — to create your palm signature,” which is then stored in the cloud and used to confirm your identity when you’re in one of its stores.

Amazon’s latest promotion: $10 promotional credit in exchange for your palm print. (Image: Amazon)

What’s Amazon doing with this data exactly? Your palm print on its own might not do much — though Amazon says it uses an unspecified “subset” of anonymous palm data to improve the technology. But by linking it to your Amazon account, Amazon can use the data it collects, like shopping history, to target ads, offers, and recommendations to you over time.

Amazon also says it stores palm data indefinitely, unless you choose to delete the data once there are no outstanding transactions left, or if you don’t use the feature for two years.

While the idea of contactlessly scanning your palm print to pay for goods during a pandemic might seem like a novel idea, it’s one to be met with caution and skepticism given Amazon’s past efforts in developing biometric technology. Amazon’s controversial facial recognition technology, which it historically sold to police and law enforcement, was the subject of lawsuits that allege the company violated state laws that bar the use of personal biometric data without permission.

“The dystopian future of science fiction is now. It’s horrifying that Amazon is asking people to sell their bodies, but it’s even worse that people are doing it for such a low price,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, in an email to TechCrunch.

“Biometric data is one of the only ways that companies and governments can track us permanently. You can change your name, you can change your Social Security number, but you can’t change your palm print. The more we normalize these tactics, the harder they will be coming to escape. If we don’t try to line in the sand here, I am very fearful what our future will look like,” said Cahn.

When reached, an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.

News: Can your startup support a research-based workflow?

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Most startups and scaleups are used to fast-paced resourcing and R&D cycles designed specifically for product development. However, there is no rushing academic-style research.

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology predicts that U.S. companies will spend upward of $100 billion on AI R&D per year by 2025. Much of this spending today is done by six tech companies — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, Facebook and Apple, according to a recent study from CSET at Georgetown University. But what if you’re a startup whose product relies on AI at its core?

Can early-stage companies support a research-based workflow? At a startup or scaleup, the focus is often more on concrete product development than research. For obvious reasons, companies want to make things that matter to their customers, investors and stakeholders. Ideally, there’s a way to do both.

Before investing in staffing an AI research lab, consider this advice to determine whether you’re ready to get started.

Compile the right research team

Assuming it’s your organization’s priority to do innovative AI research, the first step is to hire one or two researchers. At Unbabel, we did this early by hiring Ph.D.s and getting started quickly with research for a product that hadn’t been developed yet. Some researchers will build from scratch and others will take your data and try to find a pre-existing model that fits your needs.

From there, you’ll need to hire research engineers or machine learning operations professionals. Research is only a small part of using AI in production. Research engineers will then release your research into production, monitor your model’s results and refine the model if it stops predicting well (or otherwise is not operating as planned). Often they’ll use automation to simplify monitoring and deployment procedures as opposed to doing everything manually.

None of this falls within the scope of a research scientist — they’re most used to working with the data sets and models in training. That said, researchers and engineers will need to work together in a continuous feedback loop to refine and retrain models based on actual performance in inference.

Choose the problems you want to solve

The CSET research cited above shows that 85% of AI labs in North America and Europe do some form of basic AI research, and less than 15% focus on development. The rest of the world is different: A majority of labs in other countries, such as India and Israel, focus on development.

News: Google is building its own chip for the Pixel 6

• August 2, 2021
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Google just dumped a whole bunch of news about its upcoming Pixel 6 smartphone. Maybe the company was looking to get out in front of August 11’s big Samsung event — or perhaps it’s just hoping to keep people interested in the months leading up to a big fall announcement (and beat additional leaks to

Google just dumped a whole bunch of news about its upcoming Pixel 6 smartphone. Maybe the company was looking to get out in front of August 11’s big Samsung event — or perhaps it’s just hoping to keep people interested in the months leading up to a big fall announcement (and beat additional leaks to the punch).

In either case, we got the first look at the upcoming Android smartphone, including a fairly massive redesign of the camera system on the rear. The company has traded its square configuration for a big, black bar that appears to indicate an even larger push into upgraded hardware after a couple of generations spent insisting that software/AI are the grounds on which it has chosen to fight.

More interesting, however, is the arrival of Tensor, a new custom SoC (system on a chip) that will debut on the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. It’s an important step from the company, as it looks to differentiate itself in a crowded smartphone field — something the company has admittedly struggled with in the past.

That means moving away from Qualcomm chips on these higher-end systems, following in Apple’s path of creating custom silicon. That said, the chips will be based on the same ARM architecture that Qualcomm uses to create its otherwise ubiquitous Snapdragon chips, and Google will still rely on the San Diego company to supply components for its budget-minded A Series.

Image Credits: Google

The Tensor name is a clear homage to Google’s TensorFlow ML, which has driven a number of its projects. And unsurprisingly, the company sites AI/ML as foundational to the chip’s place in the forthcoming phones. The Pixel team has long pushed software-based solutions, such as computational photography, as a differentiator.

“The team that designed our silicon wanted to make Pixel even more capable. For example, with Tensor we thought about every piece of the chip and customized it to run Google’s computational photography models,” Google writes. “For users, this means entirely new features, plus improvements to existing ones.”

Beyond the upgraded camera system, Tensor will be central to improving things such as speech recognition and language learning. Details are understandably still thin (the full reveal is happening in the fall, mind), but today’s announcement seems geared toward laying out what the future looks like for a revamped Pixel team — and certainly these sorts of focuses play into precisely what Google ought to be doing in the smartphone space: focusing on its smarts in AI and software.

In May of last year, key members of the Pixel team left Google, pointing to what looked to be a transition for the team. Hardware head Rick Osterloh was reported to have had harsh words at the time.

“AI is the future of our innovation work, but the problem is we’ve run into computing limitations that prevented us from fully pursuing our mission,” Osterloh wrote in today’s post. “So we set about building a technology platform built for mobile that enabled us to bring our most innovative AI and machine learning (ML) to our Pixel users.”