Monthly Archives: October 2020

News: What to expect from Apple’s ‘Hi Speed’ iPhone event

• October 12, 2020
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For starters, iPhones, of course. That one was easy. The company skipped out on new mobile devices during its recent Apple Watch event, owing to COVID-19-related delays. And, of course, the fact that the events are all pre-taped and virtual now means companies can more easily split them up in ways that were harder to

For starters, iPhones, of course. That one was easy. The company skipped out on new mobile devices during its recent Apple Watch event, owing to COVID-19-related delays. And, of course, the fact that the events are all pre-taped and virtual now means companies can more easily split them up in ways that were harder to justify when people were expected to fly in from all over the world.

That doesn’t mean we won’t be getting more than just a phone (or, more like multiple phones). While Apple’s been more inclined to host more, smaller events, there’s a decent chance this is going to be the last major event the company hosts before the holidays. That means it’s going to want to get a lot of bang for its buck this time out.

The iPhone 12 is expected to be the centerpiece, of course. The headline feature will almost certainly be 5G. Apple’s been a little behind the curve on that front versus its Android competitors (Samsung, for instance, has several devices with next-gen wireless), though another knock-on effect from the pandemic has been a slower than expected adoption of the tech. So in some ways, Apple’s really right on time here. In the U.S., the company is said to offer both the mmWave and sub-6Ghz 5G technologies. Availability may vary depending on the needs of a given market.

Rumors point to a bunch of different models. After all, gone are the days a company like Apple could just offer up a big premium device and be done with it. Sales for high-end devices were already drying up well before the virus came along to bring smartphone sales to a screeching halt there for a bit. People were already tired of paying in excess of $1,000 for new phones when the ones they already had still did the job perfectly fine.

There are supposedly four sizes arriving. There will be higher-end devices at 6.1 and 6.7 inches, and more budget-minded devices at 6.1 and 5.4 inches. It’s a pretty broad price range, from $699 for the “mini” to $1,099 and up for the Pro Max (sandwiched between are the $799 iPhone 12 and $999 Pro). Along with its recently expanded Watch line, Apple’s all about choice this time out.

Reportedly, however, the company will be bringing OLED tech to all of the models, marking a pretty big change from the days of LCD-sporting budget models. The new models are expected to get a welcome redesign, reportedly returning to something more in line with the iPhone 5. The rounded edges are expected to be dropped in favor of a flatter design, akin to what you get on the iPad Pro.

Other interesting potential additions include the return of the company’s dearly departed MagSafe life for a pair of wireless charging pads that will hopefully finally lay to rest any memory of the failed AirPower experiment. Available for one or two devices, the new pads will reportedly leverage magnets built into the phones to snap them in place.

Music has always been a cornerstone for the company, and it’s long overdue for some updates to audio products. This time out, we may finally get the long-awaited AirPods Studio, an over-ear addition to its line of headphones. The models are set to come in two variations, the largest variation being build materials. A smaller version of its smart speaker could be on the way, as well. The HomePod has long been cost-prohibitive for many, so a mini version could finally make it a bit more accessible.

Another long-rumored addition — AirTags — could finally arrive, as well. Apple’s product-tracking Tile competitor has been in the cards for some time now, but has repeatedly been delayed. That may still be the case — and same goes for a refresh to Apple TV. With the company’s subscription service about to celebrate its year anniversary, it could really use some updated hardware. New Macs with Apple-built chips could be on the table, as well, though the company is reportedly planning one more 2020 event for that big launch.

The event kicks off tomorrow at 10AM PT/1PM ET. We’ll be watching along with you, bringing you the news as it breaks.

News: 2020 IPO report card: Are tech’s newest public companies meeting expectations?

• October 12, 2020
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As the American election looms and the IPO cycle slows some, it’s a good time to review how well the public offerings we have seen thus far have performed. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. Welcome to a Monday morning

As the American election looms and the IPO cycle slows some, it’s a good time to review how well the public offerings we have seen thus far have performed.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Welcome to a Monday morning data rundown discussing how well the latest-stage startups that went public this year have performed after their first day. We’ll be awarding letter grades for post-IPO performance as well, because we can.

So, how did Snowflake do compared to Vroom, both stacked next to JFrog and One Medical? Let’s find out.

Ranking 2020’s IPOs

The fine folks at my former publication Crunchbase News have a running list of 2020 IPOs, which will help us not miss any names. Of course, we’re not going to include every possible deal; there have been some marginal debuts that we can leave behind.

But, the majors matter. So let’s get into them now:

• Snowflake: It priced above its raised range. Then it went up sharply. From an IPO price of $120 per share, Snowflake is worth $250 per share today. That’s so expensive, compared to the data-focused Snowflake’s revenue, that I can hardly figure out what the hell its price means. The company’s valuation got so rich that we wrote that all tech companies should go public to take advantage of the rich market. This year’s standout IPO. A+
• Unity: Unity’s IPO was a source of wonder for those curious about the economics of the gaming world. For us finance dorks, it was also a right corker. We were impressed. So were investors. After setting a $34 and $42 per share IPO range, Unity raised it to $44 and $48 per share. Then it went public at $52 per share. Today it’s worth $94.50 per share, or around $25 billion. It was priced at $6 billion, give or take, in its final private round. A huge win of an IPO. A
  

  

News: Calling Lisbon VCs: Be featured in The Great TechCrunch Survey of European VC

• October 12, 2020
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TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities. Our <a href=”https://forms.gle/k4Ji2Ch7zdrn7o2p6”>survey of VCs in Lisbon will capture how the city is faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic. (Please note, if you have filled the survey out already,

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities.

Our <a href=”https://forms.gle/k4Ji2Ch7zdrn7o2p6”>survey of VCs in Lisbon will capture how the city is faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic. (Please note, if you have filled the survey out already, there is no need to do it again).

We’d like to know how Lisbon’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and, generally, how your thinking will evolve from here.

Our survey will only be about investors, and only the contributions of VC investors will be included. More than one partner is welcome to fill out the survey.

The shortlist of questions will require only brief responses, but the more you can add, the better.

You can fill out the survey here.

Obviously, investors who contribute will be featured in the final surveys, with links to their companies and profiles.

What kinds of things do we want to know? Questions include: Which trends are you most excited by? What startup do you wish someone would create? Where are the overlooked opportunities? What are you looking for in your next investment, in general? How is your local ecosystem going? And how has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy?

This survey is part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing to help founders find the right investors.

https://techcrunch.com/extra-crunch/investor-surveys/

For example, here is the recent survey of London.

You are not in Lisbon, but would like to take part? Or you are in another part of the country? That’s fine! Any European VC investor can STILL fill out the survey, as we probably will be putting a call out to your city next anyway! And we will use the data for future surveys on vertical topics.

The survey is covering almost every European country on the continent of Europe (not just EU members, btw), so just look for your country and city on the survey and please participate (if you’re a venture capital investor).

Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com

News: Microsoft and partners aim to shrink the ‘data desert’ limiting accessible AI

• October 12, 2020
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AI-based tools like computer vision and voice interfaces have the potential to be life-changing for people with disabilities, but the truth is those AI models are usually built with very little data sourced from those people. Microsoft is working with several nonprofit partners to help make these tools reflect the needs and everyday realities of

AI-based tools like computer vision and voice interfaces have the potential to be life-changing for people with disabilities, but the truth is those AI models are usually built with very little data sourced from those people. Microsoft is working with several nonprofit partners to help make these tools reflect the needs and everyday realities of people living with conditions like blindness and limited mobility.

Consider for example a computer vision system that recognizes objects and can describe what is, for example, on a table. Chances are that algorithm was trained with data collected by able people, from their point of view — likely standing.

A person in a wheelchair looking to do the same thing might find the system isn’t nearly as effective from that lower angle. Similarly a blind person will not know to hold the camera in the right position for long enough for the algorithm to do its work, so they must do so by trial and error.

Or consider a face recognition algorithm that’s meant to tell when you’re paying attention to the screen for some metric or another. What’s the likelihood that among the faces used to train that system, any significant amount have things like a ventilator, or a puff-and-blow controller, or a headstrap obscuring part of it? These “confounders” can significantly affect accuracy if the system has never seen anything like them.

Facial recognition software that fails on people with dark skin, or has lower accuracy on women, is a common example of this sort of “garbage in, garbage out.” Less commonly discussed but no less important is the visual representation of people with disabilities, or of their point of view.

Microsoft today announced a handful of efforts co-led by advocacy organizations that hope to do something about this “data desert” limiting the inclusivity of AI.

The first is a collaboration with Team Gleason, an organization formed to improve awareness around the neuromotor degenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS (it’s named after former NFL star Steve Gleason, who was diagnosed with the disease some years back).

Their concern is the one above regarding facial recognition. People living with ALS have a huge variety of symptoms and assistive technologies, and those can interfere with algorithms that have never seen them before. That becomes an issue if, for example, a company wanted to ship gaze tracking software that relied on face recognition, as Microsoft would surely like to do.

“Computer vision and machine learning don’t represent the use cases and looks of people with ALS and other conditions,” said Team Gleason’s Blair Casey. “Everybody’s situation is different and the way they use technology is different. People find the most creative ways to be efficient and comfortable.”

Project Insight is the name of a new joint effort with Microsoft that will collect face imagery of volunteer users with ALS as they go about their business. In time that face data will be integrated with Microsoft’s existing cognitive services, but also released freely so others can improve their own algorithms with it.

They aim to have a release in late 2021. If the timeframe seems a little long, Microsoft’s Mary Bellard, from the company’s AI for Accessibility effort, pointed out that they’re basically starting from scratch and getting it right is important.

“Research leads to insights, insights lead to models that engineers bring into products. But we have to have data to make it accurate enough to be in a product in the first place,” she said. “The data will be shared — for sure this is not about making any one product better, it’s about accelerating research around these complex opportunities. And that’s work we don’t want to do alone.”

Another opportunity for improvement is in sourcing images from users who don’t use an app the same way as most. Like the person with impaired vision or in a wheelchair mentioned above, there’s a want of data from their perspective. There are two efforts aiming to address this.

Image Credits: ORBIT

One with City University of London is the expansion and eventual public release of the Object Recognition for Blind Image Training project, which is assembling a dataset for everyday for identifying everyday objects — a can of pop, a keyring — using a smartphone camera. Unlike other datasets, though, this will be sourced entirely from blind users, meaning the algorithm will learn from the start to work with the kind of data it will be given later anyway.

Image Credits: Microsoft

The other is an expansion of VizWiz to better encompass this kind of data. The tool is used by people who need help right away in telling, say, whether a cup of yogurt is expired or if there’s a car in the driveway. Microsoft worked with the app’s creator, Danna Gurari, to improve the app’s existing database of tens of thousands of images with associated questions and captions. They’re also working to alert a user when their image is too dark or blurry to analyze or submit.

Inclusivity is complex because it’s about people and systems that, perhaps without even realizing it, define “normal” and then don’t work outside of those norms. If AI is going to be inclusive, “normal” needs to be redefined and that’s going to take a lot of hard work. Until recently, people weren’t even talking about it. But that’s changing.

“This is stuff the ALS community wanted years ago,” said Casey. “This is technology that exists — it’s sitting on a shelf. Let’s put it to use. When we talk about it, people will do more, and that’s something the community needs as a whole.”

News: Snapdocs raises $60M to manage the mortgage process in the cloud

• October 12, 2020
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The US economy may be in a precarious state right now with a presidential election looming on the horizon and the country still in the grips of the coronavirus pandemic. But partly thanks to lower interest rates, the housing market continues to rise, and today a startup that has built technology to help it run

The US economy may be in a precarious state right now with a presidential election looming on the horizon and the country still in the grips of the coronavirus pandemic. But partly thanks to lower interest rates, the housing market continues to rise, and today a startup that has built technology to help it run more efficiently is announcing a major growth round of funding. 

Snapdocs, which is used by some 130,000 real estate professionals to digitally manage the mortgage process and other paperwork and stages related to buying a home, has raised $60 million in new equity funding on the heels of a few bullish months of business.

In August 2020 — a peak in home sales in the US, reaching their highest level in 14 years — the startup saw 170,000 home sales, totaling some $50 million in transactions, closed on its platform. This accounted for almost 15% of all deals done that month in the US. Snapdocs is now on track to close 1.5 million deals this year, double its 2019 volume.

On top of this, the startup’s platform is being used by more than 70% of settlement agents nationally, with customers including Bell Bank, LeaderOne Financial Corporation, Googain, Georgia United Credit Union among its customers.

The Series C is being led by YC Continuity (Snapdocs was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 cohort), with existing investors Sequoia Capital, F-Prime Capital and Founders Fund, and new backers Lachy Groom (formerly of Stripe and now a prolific investor) and DocuSign, a strategic backer, also participating.

“Like us they are on a mission to defragment an ecosystem,” King said, referring to it as a “perfect complement” to Snapdocs’ own efforts.

Snapdocs is not talking about its valuation. Aaron King, the founder and CEO, said in an interview that he believes disclosing it is nothing more than “grandstanding” — which is interesting considering that the industry he focuses on, real estate, is all about public disclosures of valuation — but he noted that most of the $103 million that the startup has raised to date is still in the bank, which says something about the company’s overall financial health.

And for some further context, according to PitchBook data estimates, Snapdocs was valued at $200 million in its last round, in October 2019.

Snapdocs’ central premise is that buying a house requires not just a lot of paperwork but also a lot of different parties to be on the same page, so to speak, to set the wheels in motion and get a deal done. There is not just the mortgage (with its multiple parties) to settle; you also have real estate brokers and agents, the home sellers, inspectors and appraisers, the insurance company, the title company, and more — some 15 parties in all.

The complexity of all of them working together in a quick and efficient way often means the process of buying and selling a house can be long and costly. And that’s before the pandemic — with the problems associated with social distancing and remote working — hit us.

Snapdocs’ solution has been to build one platform in the cloud that helps to manage the documents needed by all of these different parties, providing access to data and the ability to flag or approve things remotely, to speed the process along. It also has built a number of features, using AI technology and analytics, to also help identify what might be potential issues early on and get them fixed.

King is not your typical tech startup entrepreneur. He began working in mortgages as a notary when he was still in high school — he’s effectively been in the industry for 23 years, he said — and his earliest startup efforts were focused on one aspect of the complexities that he knew first-hand: he saw an opportunity to lean on technology to get notarized signatures sorted out in a legal, orderly, and quicker way.

He then got deeper into identifying the possibilities of how tech could be used to improve the larger process, and that is how Snapdocs came into existence.

Given how big the real estate market is — it’s the largest asset class in the world, by many estimates — and how many other industries tech has “disrupted” over the years, it’s interesting that there have been so few attempting to solve it. One of the reasons, it seems, is that there hasn’t been enough of a crossover between tech experts and mortgage experts, and Snapdocs is a testament to the virtues of building a startup specifically around a hard problem that you happen to know really well.

“Most people have identified this as a tech problem, and a lot of the tech — such as e-signatures — has existed for 20 years, but the fragmentation of real estate is the issue,” he said. “We’re talking about a mass constellation of companies and workflow. But we’re obsessed about the workflow of all of these constituents.”

That’s a position that has both helped Snapdocs build its standing with the industry, as well as with investors.

“I’ve known the Snapdocs team for many years and have always been amazed by their focus and execution toward bringing each stakeholder in the mortgage process online,” said Anu Hariharan, partner at YC Continuity, in a statement. “In 2013, Snapdocs began as a notary marketplace before expanding horizontally to service title companies and, more recently, lenders. By connecting the numerous parties involved in a mortgage on a single platform, Snapdocs is quickly becoming the “operating system” for mortgage closings. Mortgages, much like commerce, will shift online, bringing improved efficiency and a far better customer experience to the outdated home-closing process.” Hariharan has real estate experience herself and is joining the board with this round.

There have been a number of companies taking new, tech-based approaches to the market to find new and faster ways of doing things, and to open up new kinds of value in the market.

Opendoor for example has rethought the whole process of selling and buying houses, taking on a role as a middleman in the process both to take on a lot of the harder work of fixing up a home, and handling all of the difficult stages in the sales process: it’s a role that has recently seen the company catapult to a valuation of $4.8 billion by way of a SPAC-based public listing. An interesting idea, King said, but still only accounting for a small sliver of house sales.

Others like Orchard, Reonomy, and Zumper have all also raised large rounds on the back of a lot of promise of the market continuing to grow and the opportunity to take part in that process through new approaches. It’s a sign that “safe as houses” still has a place in the market, even with all the other unknowns in play.

“Over the next 5 years the real estate industry will be completely digitized so a lot of companies are trying to figure out what their place are, and how to provide value,” King said.

News: Facebook, in a reversal, will now ban Holocaust denial content under its hate speech policy

• October 12, 2020
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Facebook this morning announced a significant change in how it approaches Holocaust denial content on its social network. For years, the company has been criticized for not taking down this extremely offensive form of content in favor of allowing free speech and distancing itself from taking on the responsibilities of a traditional publisher. Today, it’s

Facebook this morning announced a significant change in how it approaches Holocaust denial content on its social network. For years, the company has been criticized for not taking down this extremely offensive form of content in favor of allowing free speech and distancing itself from taking on the responsibilities of a traditional publisher. Today, it’s reversing that position, saying it will now update its hate speech policy to “prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust.”

The company said it made the decision amid a growing number of online hate speech attacks and is a part of Facebook’s newer efforts to fight the spread of hate speech across its platform.

“We have banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations and updated our policies to address militia groups and QAnon,” explained Facebook in an announcement. “We also routinely ban other individuals and organizations globally, and we took down 22.5 million pieces of hate speech from our platform in the second quarter of this year. Following a year of consultation with external experts, we recently banned anti-Semitic stereotypes about the collective power of Jews that often depicts them running the world or its major institutions,” the company said.

Facebook also shared some disturbing statistics representative of how its inaction on this front has impacted the world. It said that according to a recent survey of U.S. adults, ages 18-39, nearly a quarter said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, that it had been exaggerated or that they weren’t sure.

The company noted, too, that institutions focused on Holocaust research and remembrance, such as Yad Vashem have stressed that Holocaust education is a key component in combating anti-Semitism.

As many may recall, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once used Holocaust denial as an example of where he thought Facebook shouldn’t intervene with regard to what’s posted to its platform. In a 2018 Recode interview and related follow-up, he suggested that Holocaust denial was a wrong idea that he personally found “deeply offensive,” but said Facebook shouldn’t take that content down because “there are things that different people get wrong.”

The issue and its controversy, however, was not a new one to Facebook. Holocaust denial content has been a longstanding problem for the company — and one where many employees disagreed with Facebook’s stated position on the matter. Even back in 2009, Facebook had favored the protection of free speech, arguing that it outweighed the negative consequences.

In the years since, Facebook was found to not only allow Holocaust denial on its platform, to but to actively promote it. In a 2020 investigation by U.K.-based counter-extremist organisation Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), Facebook search results would bring up suggestions for denial pages on Facebook. These would also recommend links to publishers who sold revisionist and denial literature, among other things.

This summer, ADL and other civil rights organizations, like the NAACP and Color of Change ran a month-long boycott of Facebook advertising in an effort to get Facebook to step up and do something about hate speech on its platform. The effort gained over 1,000 advertisers and put pressure on the company to make changes.

Facebook then moved to ban anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish people running the world across Facebook and Instagram for the first time, and began to ban QAnon, which has some anti-Semitic elements. But it stopped short of taking action on Holocaust denial.

The company says its new decision on this matter does not mean users see an immediate clearing of this sort of content from the platform.

“Enforcement of these policies cannot happen overnight. There is a range of content that can violate these policies, and it will take some time to train our reviewers and systems on enforcement,” Facebook noted.

News: Facebook EU-US data transfer complaint: Schrems gets a judicial review of the Irish DPC’s procedure

• October 12, 2020
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Another twist in a multi-year complaint saga related to the legality of Facebook’s data transfers: European privacy campaigner, Max Schrems, has today been granted a judicial review of the Irish regulator’s handling of his complaint. He’s expecting the hearing to take place before the end of the year — and is hoping the action will,

Another twist in a multi-year complaint saga related to the legality of Facebook’s data transfers: European privacy campaigner, Max Schrems, has today been granted a judicial review of the Irish regulator’s handling of his complaint.

He’s expecting the hearing to take place before the end of the year — and is hoping the action will, at long last, lead to a suspension of Facebook’s EU-US data transfers.

Schrems says his aim is to “kick start a ‘paused’ complaints procedure’” after Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) chose to open a new case procedure last month — simultaneously pausing its handling of his original complaint, which dates back some seven years at this point.

The vintage complaint had a major injection of attention following a ruling by Europe’s top court this summer which struck down a flagship EU-US data transfer arrangement (called Privacy Shield) — and cast doubt on the legality of alternative transfer mechanisms for taking EU citizens’ data to the US for processing when processors are subject to US surveillance law, as Facebook is.

Yet there’s still no decision on Schrems’ original complaint. Hence he’s returned to court.

“The DPC has already pledged to the Court in 2015 that it will swiftly decide. It seems like we need a clear judgment to force the DPC to do its job,” said Schrems in a statement today on the judicial review being granted.

Facebook has already successfully applied for a judicial review of a preliminary order sent by the DPC last month to suspend its data transfers to the US. The tech giant was granted a stay on that preliminary order so its data transfers continue unabated and uninterrupted — even as the regulatory process is mired in yet more legal wrangling.

The stay also bought Facebook more time to lobby EU lawmakers to ‘fix’ the legal uncertainty now firmly attached to EU-US data transfers — with VP Nick Clegg popping up on a livestreamed debate last month to predict economic doom for the region’s small businesses if Facebook gets forced to suspend transfers. (Clegg further claimed Facebook’s business of “personalized advertising” would be vital to Europe’s coronavirus economic recovery, without pointing out other, less invasive/rights-hostile forms of ad-targeting are available… )

It’s not hard to see why Schrems is so unhappy that his 2013 complaint has been turned into an endless game of regulatory whack-a-mole which leaves Facebook’s free to continue its data-mining business as usual.

In a press release put out by his privacy-focused not-for-profit, noyb, Schrems writes: “Today’s Judicial Review by noyb is in many ways the counterpart to Facebook’s Judicial Review: While Facebook wants to block the second procedure by the DPC, noyb wants to move the original complaints procedure towards a decision.”

“The DPC has opened a second case, just get rid of the complainant from the first case. Now this second case was stalled by a lawsuit from Facebook within weeks. This was complete procedural mismanagement by the Irish regulator. We are now trying to kick start the original procedure from 2013 to finally get a decision by the DPC after seven years and five court judgements that all confirmed our position,” he adds in the statement.

Schrems/noyb is also making a more pointed allegation against the regulator, saying it saw documents last week that suggest Facebook has been using alternative data transfer mechanisms to take EU users’ data to the US — and accusing the regulator of knowing about this since 2016, yet failing to pass the information on to it.

“The documents we received suggest that seven years of procedures and both references to the European Court of Justice were largely irrelevant for the case before the DPC,” writes Schrems, accusing the regulator of hiding  documents from the Courts and his lawyers “despite our right to be provided with all the files of a case”. “We are therefore asking the High Court to clarify that all documents must be put on the table that all parties are properly heard and a quick decision is then made,” he adds.

We reached out to the DPC with questions but the regulator declined to answer specific points at this stage. “As you can see Mr Schrems’ application to the Court this morning was made ex parte, meaning that any comments/arguments put forward were unchallenged. We will outline our position when we make our own submission to the Court,” deputy commissioner, Graham Doyle, told us.

Ireland’s regulator is no stranger to accusations of dragging its feet on enforcing the bloc’s data protection regime against major tech firms and platforms, many of whom have chosen to site their regional base in the country — meaning their data handling typically comes under the supervision of the DPC. (Which in turn means it has a huge backlog of complex, cross-border cases to investigate and issue decisions on.)

More than two years after the GDPR came into application, the DPC has only submitted one draft decision on cross-border cases (related to a Twitter security breach) — which is still pending agreement from the EU’s other data supervisors.

Scores more cases remain open on its desk.

In June, a Commission two-year review of GDPR flagged a lack of uniformly vigorous enforcement — with lawmakers acknowledging: “The best answer [to criticism of GDPR’s failure to regulate big tech] will be a decision from the Irish data protection authority about important cases.”

Separately, Irish parliamentarian, Malcolm Byrne, raised questions in the senate recently over another long-standing complaint that’s sitting on the DPC’s desk — related to Google and the real-time bidding process that’s involved in programmatic advertising — also still an open investigation.

News: Quince launches out of beta with new ‘manufacturer-to-customer’ model

• October 12, 2020
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The retail landscape is shifting rapidly. While D2C brands have changed the way we shop, Quince is looking to change retail even more dramatically. The brand, which raised $8.5 million in seed funding last year (and only revealed as much today), is looking to rethink the supply chain with its own line of 700 items

The retail landscape is shifting rapidly. While D2C brands have changed the way we shop, Quince is looking to change retail even more dramatically.

The brand, which raised $8.5 million in seed funding last year (and only revealed as much today), is looking to rethink the supply chain with its own line of 700 items including men’s and women’s apparel, accessories, jewelry and home goods.

After beta testing for a year as ‘Last Brand,’ Quince is launching with a new model called ‘M2C,’ or manufacturer to consumer.

The idea is that Quince goes directly to factories with designs for essentials — not overly patterned or branded items — with an order that can dynamically adjust each week based on demand. As orders start coming in, Quince can work alongside manufacturers to ensure they aren’t over or under producing on a specific SKU. The factory then ships directly to the customer, rather than shipping to a distribution center or store and then again to the final destination.

You might think that factories wouldn’t be as amenable to this model, as they have little to lose when a brand overestimates demand for a SKU and doesn’t sell it through to the customer. But cofounder and CEO Sid Gupta says that this new model is being presented at a pivotal time in retail. Bigger brands, the ones that place orders for 100,000 units, are struggling during the pandemic and shrinking their SKU portfolio.

This leaves the factories with two options: turning to D2C brands or selling through a marketplace like Amazon.

“D2C demand is really fragmented, and most b2c companies are really sub-scale,” said Gupta. “It’s hard to get the efficiency gains out of it. The issue with selling on a marketplace, like Amazon, is you’ve got to compete with hundreds, if not thousands, of other sellers for the same exact good. If you’re a factory that actually makes high quality goods, and you pay your workers fairly, and you don’t damage the environment, your cost might be 3% or 5%, higher.”

He added that it’s difficult for a factory to have those factors shine through to the customer on Amazon, and more difficult still to learn how to play the advertising game.

This environment has made manufacturers slightly more open to a new way of doing things.

By working directly with factories, Quince says it’s able to bring the cost of luxury items down significantly, selling a cashmere sweater for approximately $50 instead of $150+, as you’ll often find with other brands. Quince works with more than 30 different factories across the world.

Cofounder and CEO Sid Gupta says the company has also thought very deeply about sustainability, setting standards around the materials used (are they organic or recycled?), the manufacturing process (is it ecologically sound?), worker pay, and more. The company is also looking into giveback programs to share in the profits with the factories and the workers.

The funding from last fall has allowed Quince to beta test last year and grow the team to 16, including cofounders Becky Mortimer and Sourabh Mahajan. Thirty-five percent of employees are female, and 65 percent of employees are minorities.

The company’s investors include Founders Fund, 8VC and Basis Set Ventures.

News: Nest launches its $129 thermostat with a new design, swipe and touch interface on the side

• October 12, 2020
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Google’s Nest unit today launched its newest thermostat. At $129, the Nest Thermostat is the company’s most affordable one yet, but it’s also the first to feature a new swipe and tap interface on its side, as well as Google’s Soli radar technology to sense room occupancy and when you are near the device. Soli,

Google’s Nest unit today launched its newest thermostat. At $129, the Nest Thermostat is the company’s most affordable one yet, but it’s also the first to feature a new swipe and tap interface on its side, as well as Google’s Soli radar technology to sense room occupancy and when you are near the device.

Soli, it is worth noting, is not being used for enabling gesture controls. Instead, because the design team wanted a solid mirror finish on the front, Nest decided to use it purely for motion sensing.

The new thermostat, which is made from 49 percent recycled plastic, will come in four colors, Snow, Charcoal, Sand and Fog. The company is also launching a $14.99 trim kit to help you hide any imperfections in your pain when you install the new thermostat.

Image Credits: Nest

“It has this inviting form with this intuitive swipe up and down control, which lets you interact with this product really naturally, instead of pressing these tiny little buttons that most traditional thermostats have,” Nest product lead Ruchi Desai told me.

It’s worth noting that this new version is mostly meant for users in smaller apartments or condos, as it doesn’t support Nest’s remote sensors. To get support for those, you’ll need a Nest Thermostat E (which can occasionally be found for around $139) or the fully-fledged Nest Learning Thermostat .

Talking about learning, among the feature the team is highlighting with this release is the thermostat’s ability to help you schedule your custom temperature settings for different times of the day — and different days. Nest calls this Quick Schedule.

“Unlike the Nest Learning Thermostat, which has the auto-schedule [feature], this one actually offers the ability to create temperature presets, which gives you the ability to set up a schedule based on your lifestyle, based on your preferences,” Desai said. “It will also give you the flexibility of holding temperatures, which means it’ll override the schedule that you have in times when you need the control and flexibility.”

Image Credits: Nest

That sounds a lot like what you’d find in most of today’s smart thermostats from the likes of Ecobee and other Nest competitors, but it’s a first for Nest.

With its Savings Finder feature, the thermostat can also look for small optimizations and suggest minor tweaks that can result in additional energy savings.

Thanks to the new built-in Soli radar chip, the device can automatically lower the temperature when you’re not home. It’s a shame the team isn’t using the chip for any gesture controls, something Google did with its Pixel 4 phone, but the team tells me that it decided not to do this because it didn’t fit the user profile.

“I think that was a very conscious decision we made while designing this product, because for this product we really have the user in mind and we really wanted to focus on the features that were really important to this user. And these are brand new to smart home, they really wanted app control — it seems so basic to us but it’s a massive upgrade for them, right. And all these energy-saving features that come with the thermostat were something that they valued a lot. So we wanted to focus on the features that these users valued for this product,” Desai explained.

Maybe we’ll see Nest do more with this technology in the next iterations of its more expensive thermostats. For now, it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, though in all fairness, Soli in the Pixel 4 mostly felt like a gimmick and at least the Nest team is putting it to practical use here.

Image Credits: Nest

Like before, Nest promises that it will only take about half an hour or so to install the new thermostat. The app walks you through the individual steps, which should make the process pretty straightforward, assuming your heating and cooling system follows modern standards.

To control the thermostat remotely, you’ll use the Google Home app, where you’ll also find all of the smart features to help you save more energy.

The new thermostat is now available in the U.S. (for $129.99) and Canada (for $179.99 CAD). In Canada, the trim kit will retail for $19.99 CAD). As the team noted, between various utility rebates and rewards, a lot of users may be able to get theirs for only a few dollars, depending on where they live.

Image Credits: Nest

News: Equity Monday: Twilio buys Segment, and Airkit raises $28M for its low-code platform

• October 12, 2020
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

• Headlines: The Twilio-Segment deal is real, happening, and is priced about where we expected. Big names in the ex-China Internet want to make encryption worse. And, how the United States government would break up Google is becoming clearer by the week.
• On the Twilio Segment deal, as TechCrunch and Forbes anticipated, the transaction came in around $3.2 billion, forming something of a API monster from their combined form. As we noted on the show, a lot of investors made a mint from the transaction.
• Airkit has raised $28 million while in stealth since 2017. What does it do? Per Forbes, it’s a “low-code platform” that wants to “improve customer engagement.” That’s notably similar to what Segment does.
• Flash Express raised $200 million, as the on-demand and delivery spaces stay hot.
• And Razorpay raised $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion, meaning that we have just witnessed the birth of yet another fintech unicorn.
• And, finally, warm public markets mean that the startup and VC game will stay afoot, even if we see a pre-election dip in IPOs.

We hope that you are well and warm and fully of good spirits. Back soon!