October 2020 – Page 81 – Digital Pulse

News: Helsinki rides the Slush wave toward a booming startup future

October 7, 2020
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In September 2020, Helsinki’s City Council approved plans for an expansion of the existing “Maria 01 Campus,” a former downtown hospital complex. Even before it starts spreading its acreage, the facility is already home to 120 startups and 12 venture capital funds. The campus is owned by the biggest startup conference in the Nordics, Slush, the City of Helsinki and Helsinki Enterprise Agency and is slated to become one of the largest, if not — possibly — the largest tech startup campus in Europe, at 70,000 square meters (or 75,3473 square feet) by 2023.

The scale of the project speaks to the confidence and ambition of the Helsinki startup ecosystem, which has grown immeasurably over the last 10-15 years.

The fact that Slush, a conference, is involved is no accident. The event is a nonprofit created by the university. This has enabled it to scale to one of Europe’s largest tech events (pre-COVID) at over 20,000 attendees. Its success has also led to traditionally conservative Finns embracing entrepreneurship. The entire city gets involved, and thousands of university students volunteer for the good of the city and the ecosystem. The collegiate nature of the Slush experience has reflected how Helsinki has grabbed the opportunities of tech with both hands.

Born of Aalto University and its student society for entrepreneurship, AaltoES, Slush originally started as a tech meetup. Indeed, I went to some of the first ones. But with the 2010’s success of local startup Rovio, creator of Angry Birds, as well as Supercell, creator of Clash of Clans, the event took off. It helped that Peter Vesterbacka (previously a pioneer at HP Bazaar Labs) was a tireless promoter of Slush and egged it on from being a meetup into a full-blown conference that could attract the biggest names in tech.

Slush’s ability to attract VCs to a Northern European country in the middle of winter was impressive. The city rolled out the red carpet. That meant inbound VC exploded. According to the Finnish Venture Capital Association (FVCA), VC investment into Finland grew almost five times to €188 million between 2014 and 2018. Finland is now a European leader in terms of venture capital (says the FVCA) as a percentage of GDP, and foreign VC investments grew by 58% between 2017-18.

VC has grown leaps and bounds in the city itself. Crunchbase lists 54 venture funds of various guises in Helsinki. They include Conor Venture Partners, Inventure, VNT Management, Icebreaker.vc, Superhero Capital, Evli Growth Partners, OpenOcean, Loudspring, Norsepower Oy, Tesi, NordicNinja VC and Maki.vc.

Slush has even seen ex-employees go on to found big startups. Food delivery startup Wolt, co-founded by Miki Kuusi an early CEO of Slush, has raised $160 million. Other big startup companies from Helsinki’s ecosystem include Smartly, Singa, Giosg, ZenRobotics and Blok. And let’s not forget it produced MySQL and CRF Health back in the day. In 2018, Small Giant Games, was acquired by Zynga in a deal worth up to $700 million.

Startup Genome marks out Helsinki as one of the top global ecosystems. For 2020, it valued the Helsinki startup ecosystem at $5.8 billion, with total early-stage funding of $511 million, higher than the global average for emerging ecosystems.

Helsinki has around 250 gaming enterprises and 30 of them exceed $1 million in annual sales. In 2017 Finland was the first EU country to publish a national AI strategy and the University of Helsinki created a free AI education program that saw approximately 90,000 people from 80 different countries enroll in the first four months.

Over the whole country, nearly 300,000 Finns work in tech, an enormous amount when you consider the population of Helsinki is 1.3 million.

According to analysts Tracxn top startups include:

Canatu (transparent conductive films and touch sensors using carbon nanomaterial): Raised $74 million.
Kiosked (smart native advertising technology): Raised $64 million.
ICEYE (developer of SAR microsatellite for earth observation applications): Raised $152 million.
Varjo (provider of head-mounted display with resolution matching a human eye): Raised $100 million.

To learn more about Finland’s startup ecosystem, we spoke to these investors:

Pirkka Palomaki, partner, Maki.vc
Jyri Engestrom, founder, Yes VC
Sakari Pihlava, partner, Vendep Capital
Pontus Stråhlman, partner, Voima Ventures
Timo Ahopelto, partner, Lifeline Ventures
Petri Lehmuskoski, partner, Gorilla Capital

Pirkka Palomaki, partner, Maki.vc

What trends are you most excited about investing in, generally?
We are a generalist but are keen on deep tech and brand-driven companies both in B2C and B2B. We have been tracking closely new materials-based innovations, as well as breakthrough innovations in quantum computing. Breakthroughs happen also elsewhere and [we] have invested in B2B SaaS as well as one cloud-native massive multiplayer game company.

What’s your latest, most exciting investment?
One the latest investments is in a Swedish company called Carbon Cloud. They make it easy to discover your climate footprint and show it to the world — they can be found, for example, on the side of Oatly’s packaging. Carbon dioxide impact of consumer goods should be as visible as the nutrition values in food.

Are there startups that you wish you would see in the industry but don’t? What are some overlooked opportunities right now?
Femtech. There’s still quite little competition, but tremendous amount of work to do. Our team is keen to see more solutions on reproductive health, but also going beyond to solutions e.g., in syncing female’s personal cycle with optimal nutrition or training.

What are you looking for in your next investment, in general?
The team is always in the center and we are looking for entrepreneurs that are rewriting the future in global markets.

Which areas are either oversaturated or would be too hard to compete in at this point for a new startup? What other types of products/services are you wary or concerned about?
Free-to-play games is a tough and competitive market. There will likely be new winners, but also even greater number of companies that don’t make it compared to many other industries.

How much are you focused on investing in your local ecosystem versus other startup hubs (or everywhere) in general? More than 50%? Less?
We have a global mandate, but the Nordics is our home and where we have done most of our investments.

Which industries in your city and region seem well-positioned to thrive, or not, long term? What are companies you are excited about (your portfolio or not), which founders?
There are several, but the first on the top of mind is sustainability and new materials. Spinnova is a great example providing the textile industry with the most sustainable fibre in the world, produced with minimal harm to the environment, at a reasonable cost. With the stretch and strength qualities of cotton and the insulation of lamb’s wool, it can suit apparel, footwear, accessories, [and] home textiles to name a few applications. I’m also looking forward to seeing a great ecosystem and several startups being built around quantum computing. There are already a number of promising quantum technology companies, such as the Finnish IQM that builds world-class quantum computers and Bluefors that specialize in cryogen-free dilution refrigerator systems for quantum computing.

How should investors in other cities think about the overall investment climate and opportunities in your city?
There is strong supporting ecosystem in Finland for startups, strong engineering history and great culture of getting things done.

Do you expect to see a surge in more founders coming from geographies outside major cities in the years to come, with startup hubs losing people due to the pandemic and lingering concerns, plus the attraction of remote work?
The beauty of the startup ecosystem is that is built on innovation. We will most likely see more distributed organizations in the future, but I believe the major hubs will maintain their attractiveness in the future as well.

Which industry segments that you invest in look weaker or more exposed to potential shifts in consumer and business behavior because of COVID-19? What are the opportunities startups may be able to tap into during these unprecedented times?
Travel and hospitality has naturally taken a big hit. It will take time for the industry to fully recover and I would expect innovations in the domain in the future, whether it is in virtual travel or creating confidence in worry-free travel in the future.

How has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy? What are the biggest worries of the founders in your portfolio? What is your advice to startups in your portfolio right now?
Extending the runway has been a general rule for many and making the company stronger and more competitive when things start picking up again.

Are you seeing “green shoots” regarding revenue growth, retention or other momentum in your portfolio as they adapt to the pandemic?
Customer support agents have been strained during the pandemic. Our portfolio company Ultimate.ai has been well-positioned to scale the customer support with their virtual agents while maintaining or even improving customer experience. I’ve been super happy to see them grow and expand rapidly.

What is a moment that has given you hope in the last month or so? This can be professional, personal or a mix of the two.

News: India approves Apple partners and Samsung for $143 billion smartphone manufacturing plan

October 7, 2020
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Samsung and three major contract manufacturing partners of Apple are among 16 firms to win $6.65 billion incentives under India’s federal plan to boost domestic smartphone production over the next five years. These companies had applied for the incentive program in August. In a statement Tuesday evening, Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)

In a statement Tuesday evening, Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said these companies will be producing smartphones and other electronics components worth more than $143 billion over the next five years. In return, India will offer them an incentive of 4% to 6% on additional sales of goods produced locally over five years, with 2019-2020 set as the base year.

New Delhi’s move is aimed at significantly improving India’s manufacturing and exporting capacities. Around 60% of the locally produced products will be exported, the Indian ministry said.

The move is also a precursor to how the dynamics among major smartphone makers will change in India, the world’s second largest market, over the next five years. The inclusion of Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron underscores how rapidly Apple plans to expand its local manufacturing capabilities in India. Wistron began assembling a handful of iPhone models in India three years ago, followed by Foxconn. Pegatron has yet to start producing in India.

“Apple and Samsung together account for nearly 60% of global sales revenue of mobile phones and this scheme is expected to increase their manufacturing base manifold in the country,” the ministry said.

“Industry has reposed its faith in India’s stellar progress as a world class manufacturing destination and this resonates strongly with Prime Minister’s clarion call of AtmaNirbhar Bharat – a self-reliant India,” the ministry added.

Indian firms Lava, Bhagwati (Micromax), Padget Electronics, UTL Neolyncs and Optiemus Electronics are also among the firms that have received the approval. But missing from the list are Chinese smartphone makers Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus and Realme that had not applied for the program. Chinese smartphone vendors currently command about 80% of the Indian market.

News: Greycroft has rounded up $678 million in capital across two new funds

October 7, 2020
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Greycroft, the New York and L.A.-based venture firm founded in 2006 by investors Alan Patricof, Dana Settle, and Ian Sigalow, has closed on two new funds totaling $678 million in capital commitments. One of those funds is its sixth flagship early-stage fund and it closed with $310 million dollars. The firm also collected $368 million

The venture fund invests between $500,000 and $10 million in a first check, and Greycroft will invest up to $15 million in a portfolio company over multiple rounds. Checks from its growth fund begin at $10 million and the firm says it will invest up to $50 million in any one company.

Greycroft now counts seven partners altogether across its two offices, including Settle and Sigalow.

Patricof, who early in his career founded the predecessor to Apax Partners, has since launched another new firm called Primetime Partners that announced a $32 million fund in summer that is investing in platforms and products for aging Americans.

The firm invests in both consumer and enterprise startups, with a heavier emphasis on consumer. Among the brands in its portfolio are Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, the consignment business The RealReal (which went public last year), and the dating site Bumble, which is reportedly gearing up for an IPO at an expected valuation of between $6 billion to $8 billion, as reported by Bloomberg.

The firm also recently co-led a $5.5 million Series A round for Sisu Cosmetics, a nearly two-year-old, Ireland-based chain of cosmetic clinics that’s expanding into the U.S.

Across its now ten investment vehicles, the firm has raised $2 billion altogether and has over 200 active investments.

Those investments are located in 23 states and 15 countries, including the Nigeria-based payment service Flutterwave, which closed on $35 million in Series B funding earlier this year, and Yeahka, a mobile payment and SMB lending provider in China that went public in June.

Greycroft’s most recent early-stage fund had closed with $250 million in 2018; its second growth-stage fund closed with $250 million in 2017.

News: Quarantine drives interest in autonomous delivery, but it’s still miles from mainstream

October 6, 2020
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The prospect of truly zero contact delivery seems closer — and more important — than ever with the pandemic changing how we think of last mile logistics. Autonomous delivery executives from FedEx, Postmates, and Refraction AI joined us to talk about the emerging field at TechCrunch Mobility 2020. FedEx VP of Advanced Technology and Innovation

FedEx VP of Advanced Technology and Innovation Rebecca Yeung explained why the logistics giant felt that it was time to double down on its experiments in the area of autonomy.

“COVID brought the term ‘contactless’ — before that not many people are talking about contactless; Now it’s almost a preferred way of us delivering,” she said. “So we see, from government to consumers, open mindedness about, maybe in the future you would have everything delivered to you through autonomous means, and that’s the preferred way.”

“If you looked up Postmates robots on Twitter or Instagram, people are always kind of questioning, what is this? What is it doing? Everything changed overnight with COVID, where people would see the robot and immediately understand, oh, this is for contactless delivery,” said Postmates VP of special projects Ali Kashani. “Everything suddenly made sense.”

Postmates’ self-driving delivery rover will see with Ouster’s lidar

He also explained how the seeming constraints of a robotic platform specific to food delivery made the engineering process, if not easier, at least naturally bounded by the data they’d collected.

“It’s kind of one of the advantages of being so close to the market, we can use data from our platform to drive certain decisions, because you don’t want to over-engineer you also don’t want to under-engineer,” Kashani said. “We actually developed simulations that would put robots in any location in the country on some date in the past. It would tell us, how many deliveries did this robot do? How many hours was it outside? How many miles did it travel? And it would use that information to decide exactly what kind of battery life do we need? Does it need to carry drinks? How many drink holders should it have to cover 99% of deliveries?”

Matthew Johnson-Roberson, co-founder and CTO of Refraction AI, noted that the pandemic has raised interest and demand, but also highlighted where things need to move forward in different ways.

This new autonomous startup has designed its delivery robot to conquer winter

“Obviously no one wants a global pandemic, but it has certainly energized this industry and put more attention on it,” he said. “Everybody is excited, oh, we’re going to have contactless delivery, it’s going to be great. But I think there are some real challenges that need to be addressed as an industry to get there. One of them is social acceptance, the other’s regulation. That’s starting to change because of COVID. I’m hopeful that this is an inflection point, and that we really do see more serious investment in this, but also widespread deployment, so it’s not a tech demo that you get to see once in one place, but it actually begins to take over some sizable bit of the market.”

Yeung also emphasized the need for the infrastructure that supports these autonomous platforms: “Thinking about the future, commercial launch, you need the dynamic routing, you need the dispatch system, you need the user interface, you need a tracking interface. We see great synergy for us to leverage for all sorts of autonomous applications.”

FedEx’s new autonomous delivery bot has iBot wheelchair DNA

In discussing the danger of replacing human workers with robots, Yeung and Kashani were sanguine, suggesting like others in the robotics industry that there would be a shift in labor but it won’t kill any jobs. Johnson-Roberson disagreed.

“I think we are going to be replacing jobs, and we need to face that head on,” he said. “I think it’s important that we reckon with that, that a lot of these decisions, they have a long history of not thinking through what hte human consequences will be. So I’m an advocate for saying, look, we’re replacing jobs. Let’s think as a society: How do we address that? How do we deal with it? I think that we could live in a future with more just, fairer jobs with health insurance, more benefits. But I don’t think it is going to look how it looks today.”

News: Arm CEO Simon Segars discusses AI, data centers, getting acquired by Nvidia and more

October 6, 2020
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Nvidia is in the process of acquiring chip designer Arm for $40 billion. Coincidentally, both companies are also holding their respective developer conferences this week. After he finished his keynote at the Arm DevSummit, I sat down with Arm CEO Simon Segars to talk about the acquisition and what it means for the company. Segars

Segars noted that the two companies started talking in earnest around May 2020, though at first, only a small group of executives was involved. Nvidia, he said, was really the first suitor to make a real play for the company — with the exception of SoftBank, of course, which took Arm private back in 2016 — and combining the two companies, he believes, simply makes a lot of sense at this point in time.

“They’ve had a meteoric rise. They’ve been building up to that,” Segars said. “So it just made a lot of sense with where they are at, where we are at and thinking about the future of AI and how it’s going to go everywhere and how that necessitates much more sophisticated hardware — and a much more sophisticated software environment on which developers can build products. The combination of the two makes a lot of sense in this moment.”

The data center market, where Nvidia, too, is already a major player, is also an area where Arm has heavily focused in recent years. And while it goes up against the likes of Intel, Segars is optimistic. “We’re not in it to be a bit player,” he said. “Our goal is to get a material market share and I think the proof to the pudding is there.”

He also expects that in a few years, we’ll see Arm-powered servers available on all of the major clouds. Right now, AWS is ahead in this game with its custom-built Gravitron processors. Microsoft and Google do not currently offer Arm-based servers.

AWS announces new ARM-based instances with Graviton2 processors

“With each passing day, more and more of the software infrastructure that’s required for the cloud is getting ported over and optimized for Arm. So it becomes a more and more compelling proposition for sure,” he said, and cited both performance and energy efficiency as reasons for cloud providers to use Arm chips.

Another interesting aspect of the deal is that we may just see Arm sell some of Nvidia’s IP as well. That would be a big change — and a first — for Nvidia, but Segars believes it makes a lot of sense to do so.

“It may be that there is something in the portfolio of Nvidia that they currently sell as a chip that we may look at and go, ‘you know, what if we package that up as an IP product, without modifying it? There’s a market for that.’ Or it may be that there’s a thing in here where if we take that and combine it with something else that we were doing, we can make a better product or expand the market for the technology. I think it’s going to be more of the latter than it is the former because we design all our products to be delivered as IP.”

And while he acknowledged that Nvidia and Arm still face some regulatory hurdles, he believes the deal will be pro-competitive in the end — and that the regulators will see it the same way.

He does not believe, by the way, that the company will face any issues with Chinese companies not being able to license Arm’s designs because of export restrictions, something a lot of people were worried about when the deal was first announced.

“Export control of a product is all about where was it designed and who designed it,” he said. “And of course, just because your parent company changes, doesn’t change those fundamental properties of the underlying product. So we analyze all our products and look at how much U.S. content is in there, to what extent are our products subject to U.S. export control, U.K. export control, other export control regimes? It’s a full-time piece of work to make sure we stay on top of that.”

Here are some excerpts from our 30-minute conversation:

TechCrunch: Walk me through how that deal came about? What was the timeline for you?

Simon Segars: I think probably around May, June time was when it really kicked off. We started having some early discussions. And then, as these things progress, you suddenly kind of hit the ‘Okay, now let’s go.’ We signed a sort of first agreement to actually go into due diligence and then it really took off. It went from a few meetings, a bit of negotiation, to suddenly heads down and a broader set of people — but still a relatively small number of people involved, answering questions. We started doing due diligence documents, just the mountain of stuff that you go through and you end up with a document. [Segars shows a print-out of the contract, which is about the size of two phone books.]

Nvidia confirms $40B purchase of Arm, bringing together two chip giants

You must have had suitors before this. What made you decide to go ahead with this deal this time around?

Well, to be honest, in Arm’s history, there’s been a lot of rumors about people wanting to acquire Arm, but really until SoftBank in 2016, nobody ever got serious. I can’t think of a case where somebody actually said, ‘come on, we want to try and negotiate a deal here.’ And so it’s been four years under SoftBank’s ownership and that’s been really good because we’ve been able to do what we said we were going to do around investing much more aggressively in the technology. We’ve had a relationship with Nvidia for a long time. [Rene Haas, Arm’s president of its Intellectual Property Group, who previously worked at Nvidia] has had a relationship with [Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang] for a long time. They’ve had a meteoric rise. They’ve been building up to that. So it just made a lot of sense with where they are at, where we are at and thinking about the future of AI and how it’s going to go everywhere and how that necessitates much more sophisticated hardware — and a much more sophisticated software environment on which developers can build products. The combination of the two makes a lot of sense in this moment.

How does it change the trajectory you were on before for Arm?

News: Daily Crunch: G Suite becomes Google Workspace

October 6, 2020
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Google rebrands G Suite, Apple announces its next event date and John McAfee is arrested. This is your Daily Crunch for October 6, 2020. The big story: G Suite becomes Google Workspace To a large extent, Google Workspace is just a rebranding of G Suite, complete with a new set of (less distinctive) logos for

Google rebrands G Suite, Apple announces its next event date and John McAfee is arrested. This is your Daily Crunch for October 6, 2020.

The big story: G Suite becomes Google Workspace

To a large extent, Google Workspace is just a rebranding of G Suite, complete with a new set of (less distinctive) logos for Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs and Meet. But the company is also launching a number of new features.

For one thing, Google is (as previously announced) integrating Meet, Chat and Rooms across applications, with Gmail as the service where they really come together. Other features coming soon are the ability to collaborate on documents in Chats and a “smart chip” with contact details and suggested actions that appear when you @mention someone in a document.

Pricing remains largely the same, although there’s now an $18 per user per month Business Plus plan with additional security features and compliance tools.

The tech giants

Apple will announce the next iPhone on October 13 — Apple just sent out invites for its upcoming hardware event, all but confirming the arrival of the next iPhone.

Facebook’s Portal adds support for Netflix, Zoom and other features — The company will also introduce easier ways to launch Netflix and other video streaming apps via one-touch buttons on its new remote.

Instagram’s 10th birthday release introduces a Stories Map, custom icons and more — There’s even a selection of custom app icons for those who have recently been inspired to redesign their home screen.

Startups, funding and venture capital

SpaceX awarded contract to help develop US missile-tracking satellite network — The contract covers creation and delivery of “space vehicles” (actual satellites) that will form a constellation offering global coverage of advance missile warning and tracking.

Salesforce Ventures launches $100M Impact Fund to invest in cloud startups with social mission — Focus areas include education and reskilling, climate action, diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as providing tech for nonprofits and foundations.

Ÿnsect, the makers of the world’s most expensive bug farm, raises another $224 million — The team hopes to provide insect protein for things like fish food and fertilizer.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Inside Root’s IPO filing — As insurtech booms, Root looks to take advantage of a warm market and enthusiastic investors.

To fill funding gaps, VCs boost efforts to find India’s standout early-stage startups — Blume Ventures’ Karthik Reddy says, “There’s an artificial skew toward unicorns.”

A quick peek into Opendoor’s financial results — Opendoor’s 2020 results are not stellar.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

John McAfee arrested after DOJ indicts crypto millionaire for tax evasion — The cybersecurity entrepreneur and crypto personality’s wild ride could be coming to an end after he was arrested in Spain and now faces extradition to the U.S.

Trump is already breaking platform rules again with false claim that COVID-19 is ‘far less lethal’ than the flu — Facebook took down Trump’s post, while Twitter hid it behind a warning.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

News: Steps from the House Judiciary Committee are too little, too late when it comes to big tech

October 6, 2020
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The U.S. House Judiciary Committee has finally released its omnibus report on its investigation into the monopoly powers held by Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Facebook and its findings will do nothing to stem the power of big tech. For startups, the most relevant points are the potential solutions the committee proposes for addressing big tech

For startups, the most relevant points are the potential solutions the committee proposes for addressing big tech and they primarily boil down to giving small companies the benefit of the doubt when they claim that bigger rivals are exercising monopolistic advantages — and prevent the kinds of acquisitions in the future that allowed these companies to reach the unassailable positions they currently occupy in their chosen markets.

The Committee asserts that in their core areas of business: search, ecommerce, social networking and mobile development platforms and applications, each of the companies is, indeed, a monopoly. And the committee argues that in the future judicial and legislative bodies should define down their definition of market dominance to give smaller companies more standing in cases where they challenge the actions of these large competitors.

Here’s the relevant passage from the report:

“To address this concern, Subcommittee staff recommends that Congress consider extending the Sherman Act to prohibit abuses of dominance.Furthermore, the Subcommittee should examine the creation of a statutory presumption that a market share of 30% or more constitutes a rebuttable presumption of dominance by a seller, and a market share of 25% or more constitute a rebuttable presumption of dominance by a buyer.”

The other interesting section — and the one that will likely prove most troubling for investors and startup founders who are looking to exit their businesses relates to how regulators should handle future mergers and acquisitions from big technology companies.

Here, the Judiciary Committee suggests that the default view should be to rule against transactions involving startups by established tech companies… which… yikes.

The report says:

“Since startups can be an important source of potential and nascent competition, the antitrust laws should also look unfavorably upon incumbents purchasing innovative startups. One way that Congress could do so is by codifying a presumption against acquisitions of startups by dominant firms, particularly those that serve as direct competitors, as well as those operating in adjacent or related markets.”

For the most part, it seems that the word from regulators is that they should have done more, sooner, to limit the power of big tech, but won’t go so far as to take steps that would actually limit the power of big tech.

Instead, they’re punishing entrepreneurs and pulling up the ladder behind the companies that have already achieved market dominance. And are making it tougher for any company to actually mount a realistic challenge through an M&A strategy of its own.

These regulations seem like they’ll make it harder for Snap to make strategic deals that could put it in more direct competition with Facebook (just a random example).

Furthermore, some of the most strategic acquisitions, which create the opportunities for anti-competitive behavior aren’t obvious. Facebook’s acquisition of Onavo, for instance, likely would never have gone up for review. It’s only thanks to reporting from publications like TechCrunch, that the misuse or abuse of the company’s technology was even revealed.

So, the result of all of the hours of testimony, millions of documents, and every other bit of labor that went into the investigation the results are simply — an exhortation for regulators to #bebetter.

Regulators do, indeed, need to be better. Congress should have done a better job when it would have mattered at all.

News: Facebook says it will ban QAnon across its platforms

October 6, 2020
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Facebook expanded a ban on QAnon-related content on its various social platforms Tuesday, deepening a previous prohibition on QAnon-related groups that had “discussed potential violence,” according to the company. Today’s move by Facebook to not only ban violent QAnon content but “any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon” is an escalation by the

Today’s move by Facebook to not only ban violent QAnon content but “any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon” is an escalation by the social giant to clean its platform ahead of an increasingly contentious election.

QAnon is a sprawling set of interwoven pro-Trump conspiracy theories that has taken root inside swaths of the American electorate. Its more extreme adherents have been charged with terrorism after acting out in violent and dangerous ways, spurred on by their adherence to the unusual and often incoherent belief system. Buzzfeed News recently decided to call QAnon a “collective delusion,” another apt title for the theory’s inane, fatuous, and dangerous beliefs.

Facebook’s effort to rein in QAnon is helpful, but likely too late. Over the course of the last year, QAnon swelled from a fringe conspiracy theory into a shockingly mainstream political belief system — one that even has its own Congressional candidates. That growth was powered by social networks inherently designed to connect like-minded people to one another, a feature that has been found time and time again to spread misinformation and usher users toward increasingly radical beliefs.

Twitter cracks down on QAnon conspiracy theory, banning 7,000 accounts

In July, Twitter took action of its own against QAnon, citing concerns about “offline harm.” The company downranked QAnon content, removing it from trending pages and algorithmic suggestions. Twitter’s policy change, like Facebook’s previous one, stopped short of banning the content outright but did move to contain its spread.

Other companies, like Alphabet’s YouTube product have come under similar censure by external observers. (YouTube says it reworked its algorithm to better filter out the darker shores of its content mix, but the results of that experiment are far from conclusive.)

Trump’s fight with COVID-19 adds fresh fuel to the misinformation fire he started

Social platforms like Facebook and Twitter have also made changes to their rules after being confronted with a willfully mendacious administration ahead of an election, about which the same administration has propagated lies and disinformation about voting security and the virus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans. The pairs’ work to limit those two particularly risky strains of misinformation is worthy, but by taking a reactive posture instead of a proactive one most of those policy choices have also come too late to control the viral spread of dangerous content.

Facebook’s new rule comes into force today, with the company saying in a release that it is now “removing content accordingly,” but that the effort to purge QAnon”will take time.”

What drove the change at Facebook? According to the company, after it yanked violent QAnon material, it saw “other QAnon content tied to different forms of real world harm, including recent claims that the west coast wildfires were started by certain groups.” In Oregon where forest fires recently raged, misinformation on the Facebook platform led to misinformed state residents who believed that antifa — a term applied to those opposed to fascism as an unironic pejorative — were torching the state, set up illegal roadblocks.

How effective Facebook will be at clearing QAnon related content from its various platforms is not clear today, but will be something that will track.

Trump is already breaking platform rules again with false claim that COVID-19 is ‘far less lethal’ than the flu

News: Google’s new logos are bad

October 6, 2020
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Google really whiffed with the new logos for its “reimagination” of G Suite as Google Workspace, replacing icons that are familiar, recognizable, and in Gmail’s case iconic if you will, with little rainbow blobs that everyone will now struggle to tell apart in their tabs. Companies always talk loud and long about their design language

First I should say that I understand Google’s intent here, to unify the visual language of the various apps in its suite. That can be important, especially with a company like Google, which abandons apps, services, design languages, and other things like ballast out of a sinking hot air balloon (a remarkably apt comparison, in fact).

We’ve seen so many Google icon languages over the years that it’s hard to bring oneself to care about new ones. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, if you wait long enough by the river, the bodies of your favorite Google products will float by. Better not to get attached.

But sometimes they do something so senseless that it is incumbent upon anyone who cares at all to throw the company’s justification in its face and tell them they blew it; The last time I cared enough was with Google Reader. Since I and a hundred million other people will have to stare at these ugly new icons all day until they retire them, maybe making a little noise will accelerate that timeline a bit.

God Damn It, Google

Sorry if I let myself prose a bit here, but I consider it an antidote to the endless design stories these almost without exception ill-advised redesigns always come with. I’ll limit discussion of how these icons go wrong to three general ways: color, shape, and brand.

Color

Color is one of the first things you notice about something, and you can recognize colors easily even in your peripheral vision. So having a distinct color is important to type and design in lots of ways. Why do you think companies go so crazy about all those different shades of blue?

That’s part of why the icons of the most popular Google apps are so easily distinguished. Gmail’s red color goes back a decade and more, and Calendar’s blue is pretty old as well. The teal of Meet probably should have just stayed green, like its predecessor Hangouts, but it’s at least somewhat distinct. Likewise Keep (remember Keep?) and a handful of other lesser actors. More importantly, they’re solid — except for a few that were better for their colors, like Maps, before its icon got assassinated.

There are two problems with the colors of the new icons. First is that they don’t really have colors. They all have all the colors, which just right off the bat makes it harder to tell them apart at a glance. Remember, you’re never going to see this big like in the image above. More often they’ll be more this size:

Maybe even smaller. And never that close. I don’t know about you, but I can’t tell them apart when I’m not looking directly at them. What exactly are you looking for? They all have every color, and not even in the same order or direction — you see how some are red, yellow, green, blue and one is red, yellow, blue, green? Three (with Gmail) clockwise and two anti-clockwise, too. Sounds unimportant but your eye picks up on stuff like that, but maybe just enough that you’re more confused. Maybe these would have been better if they all started with red in the top left or something, and cycled through. They don’t randomize the order of the colors in the main Google logo, right? Ultimately these little blobs just resemble toys or crunched up candy wrappers. At best it’s plaid, and that’s Slack territory.

At first I thought the little red triangular tabs were a nice visual indicator, but somehow they messed that up too. Each icon should have the tab in a different corner, but Calendar and Drive both have it on the bottom right. They’re different kinds of triangles, I suppose — that’s a freebie from trigonometry.

You’ll also notice that the icons have a sort of lopsided weight. That’s because against a light background, different colors have different visual salience. Darker colors pop more against a white background than yellow or the tiny bit of red, making the icons seem to have heavy “L” aspects to them, on the left in Gmail and Calendar, bottom left in Drive and Meet, bottom right in Docs. But in an inactive tab, the light color will be more salient, and those L’s will seem to be on the other sides.

Shape

This is a good segue into the shape problems, because the perceived shape of these icons will change depending on the background. The original icons solved this by having a solid shape unique to them, and the background didn’t really leak through. You have to be real careful about transparent parts of your design — positive and negative space and all that. If you surrender any part of your logo to the background, you’re at the whim of whatever UI or theme the user has chosen. Will these logos look good with a hole in the middle looking onto a dark grey inactive tab? Or will the hole be filled in with white, making it positive space when on a dark background and negative when on white?

Anyhow the issue with these icons is that their shapes are bad. They’re all hollow, and four of them are rectangular if you include Gmail’s negative space (and we do — Google taught us to). The general shape of a container is a perfectly good one, but at a glance four of them are basically just angular O’s. Do you want the tallish O, the pointy one, or one of the two square O’s with slightly different color patterns? At a distance, who can tell? They only now resemble the thing they’re supposed do if you look really closely.

Now that I think of it, those shapes really scream Office and Bing too, don’t they? Not great!

While we’re at it, the thin type in the Calendar’s open space is pretty anemic compared with the big thick border, right? Maybe they should have gone with bold.

And last, the overlapping colors make for trouble. For one thing it makes the Drive logo look like a biohazard symbol. But it adds a lot of complexity that’s hard to follow at a small scale. The original Drive logo had three colors, to be sure, and a little drop shadow so you’d see it was a Moebius strip implying infinity and not just a triangle (that’s gone too — so why keep the triangle?) — but the colors set each other off: Blue and yellow make green, two primaries and their secondary.

The new ones have all three primaries, one secondary, and two tertiary (if you count darkness as a color). They don’t help the shapes exist in any identifiable way. Are you looking through them? That doesn’t seem right. They kind of fold, but how? Are the strips these are made of twisting? I don’t think so. The shapes aren’t things — they’re just arrangements, suggestions of the things they once were, removed one step too far.

Brand

Google’s no stranger to throwing value in the trash. But you’d think that sometimes they’d recognize when they have a good thing going. The Gmail logo was a good thing. I have to say I preferred the old angular one when they switched to the rounded icon some years back, but it’s grown on me. The natural “M” shape of a the envelope is emphasized so well, and the red-and-white color is so instantly recognizable and readable — this is the kind of logo you hold onto for a long, long time. Or not!

The problem here is that now Gmail, which has essentially operated as its own, completely invincible brand for more than a decade (which is eons in tech, let alone tech logos), has been put on equal footing with other services that aren’t as trusted or as widely used.

G Suite is now Google Workspace

Now Gmail is just another rainbow shape in a sea of very similar rainbow shapes, which tells the user “this service isn’t special to us. This is not the service that has worked so well for you, for so long. This is just one finger on the hand of an internet giant. And now you can never see one without thinking of the other.”

Same for all the rest of these little color wheels: You’ll never forget that they’re all part of the same apparatus that knows everything you search for, every site you visit, and now, everything you do at work. Oh, they’re very polite about it. But make no mistake, the homogeneous branding (for all its color heterogeneity) is the prelude to a brand crunch in which you are no longer just a Gmail user, you’re in Google’s house, all day, every day.

“This is the moment in which we break free from defining the structure and the role of our offerings in terms that were invented by somebody else in a very different era,” Google VP Javier Soltero told Fast Company.

The message is clear: Out with the old — the things that built your trust; and in with the new — the things that capitalize on your trust.

News: What micromobility is missing

October 6, 2020
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AT TC Sessions: Mobility, we heard from Tortoise co-founder and president Dmitry Shevelenko, Elemental Excelerator director of Innovation, Mobility, Danielle Harris and Superpedestrian VP of Strategy and Policy, Avra van der Zee about the next opportunities in micromobility. “Thinking about how micromobility could expand, and the accessibility of it in terms of getting people on

“Thinking about how micromobility could expand, and the accessibility of it in terms of getting people on board, getting people to opportunities in terms of education and employment, I think there’s still a need to very much think outside of the box of what does this look like, exactly, as we evolve,” Harris said.

The discussion explored how a vast landscape of companies have emerged around micromobility but how there ultimately needs to be more infrastructure and continued steps taken toward enhancing the right of way for alternative modes of transportation.

“When I think about equity and access, I also like to think about it through the lens of designing a vehicle that isn’t just for an able-bodied 32-year-old white man,” van der Zee said. “[…] It’s excellent we are part of a transportation system but we want to build something safe enough to entice a range of users. So there’s questions about the inherent design.”

Those questions center around whether there’s a wide enough baseboard, whether it feels robust, how it feels riding on cobblestone and how you actually build an accessible vehicle, she said. But the biggest thing that is missing from micromobility systems is the further development of fully protected bike lanes.

“For me, that is sort of the linchpin for building out a safe system,” she said, noting how she would not let her kids ride a bike or scooter unless there was a protected bike lane.

“That I think is a problem the industry has yet to tackle…transporting not just yourself but you know, a friend or a kid,” Van der Zee said.

Shevelenko noted the industry got a bit ahead of itself thanks to Bird and Lime. Their massive funding rounds led to this increased focus on two-wheeled scooter form factor “that just happened to be what was available at the time,” Shevelenko said.

“What I’m particularly excited about is different vehicle architectures,” he said. “We’re working with OEMs building three-wheeled scooters, four-wheeled scooters. I think the more balance a vehicle has, the more naturally accessible it is, the easier it is to add things like seats. Thinking of the continuum all the way from an electric wheelchair to a two-wheeled scooter, there’s still a lot of room for products there.”

You can watch the full conversation here.

Monthly Archives: October 2020